Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Drunk Ilya Rozanov, Anxious Shane Hollander, Mistaken Identity, Gender Disguise, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Rivals to Lovers, Happy Ending, Oblivious Ilya Rozanov, Bisexual Ilya Rozanov, Gay Shane Hollander, Angst with a Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, Getting Together, Texting, Coming Out, Closeted Character, fake/pretend Fued, Secret Relationship, Mutual Pining, Secret Identity, they're both so stupid your honor, supportive family, Humor, Identity Porn, No Smut, sorry horny fuckers

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-05 Completed: 2026-06-18 Words: 70,965 Chapters: 9/9

Offsides, or How Shane Hollander Ruined His Own Life at a Party in LA

Summary

Shane Hollander is nineteen and trying to get through one Hollywood party without being noticed. He gets noticed anyway, by the worst possible person. His last-minute Halloween costume is working too well. Ilya Rozanov, the rival he's never met but supposed to hate, takes one look and thinks Shane is a girl.
Shane doesn't correct him. He doesn't stop him from kissing Shane. And he accidentally gives him his real phone number. Oops.

Notes

Hi! Long time lurker of this fandom, first time writing in it. Be gentle with me.

So I've been wanting to write a Hollander/Rozanov fic for a while and this idea grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go, so here we are.

I'm playing in the Heated Rivalry sandbox here, so a few housekeeping notes before we get started:

The main divergence from canon is in this universe both Ilya and Shane were first overall draft picks, a year apart. Ilya first, Shane the year after. At the point where we're entering the story they've not yet played each other ever and the league has been very loudly building their rivalry in the press, but they have never actually been in the same room together on or off the ice. Never spoken. Shane knows Ilya's game inside and out from tape. Ilya presumably knows the same. They are strangers who are somehow already enemies, which felt like the most interesting place to start.

That's all for now. Be kind, kudos if you like it, comments feed me.

Chapter 1

The party was the kind Shane had learned to stand inside without actually being in — too loud to think, too crowded to move without touching someone, the bass coming up through the floor and into his back teeth. He had a drink and a wall and a decent sightline to the door, which was about as good as it got at these things.  

Shane Hollander was not having fun. He was, however, drinking, which was at least something. 

He was on his second drink of the night, which for Shane was unusual enough that he was already feeling it at the edges. He wasn't looking for another drink. He was looking for Thomas. 

He found him coming through the crowd with the expression of a man who had just seen God. 

"Shane." Thomas grabbed his arm with both hands. "Shane. I just saw McKinley." 

Shane stared at him. 

"From The Compound," Thomas said, like this explained everything. 

Shane had a vague memory of being made to watch something over Christmas. "Is that her real name?" 

Thomas opened his mouth. Closed it. "It's her character's name." 

"So you don't know her actual name." 

"That's not — that's not the point, Shane, she's here, at this party, like twenty feet away from us and she looked at me." Thomas' grip on his arm tightened. "She looked directly at me." 

"Okay." 

"I'm going back over there." 

"Okay," Shane said, and then Thomas was gone, swallowed back into the crowd with the singular focus of a man on a mission. Shane watched him go and felt something warm settle in his chest. He was happy that his friend was happy. 

His agent had mentioned the party offhand — some industry thing, you're in LA anyway, take it or leave it — and Shane's first instinct had been to leave it. He didn't love parties. He didn't love LA particularly. But Thomas was doing his Bachelor's at USC and they hadn't seen each other since the summer before last, and Shane had thought about Thomas' face when he told him, yeah there's this party, celebrity thing, I got an invite, and he'd known before he finished the sentence that they were going. Thomas had lost his mind a little. 

The costume had been last minute. They'd gone to the nearest Halloween shop two hours before the party because Shane had forgotten, and the pickings had been grim. Costumes were a requirement on the invitation. Shane had stood in the gutted aisle and taken stock: a rastafari costume that he'd put back immediately, a sexy female nurse, and a Mulan costume — long black wig still in its net. 

He'd stood there for a moment. 

He wasn't Chinese. Or a girl-- But his mother was Japanese, his father white, and he was used to the ambiguity, and the costume was at least something. It was either this or the nurse. Besides, guys dressed as girls for Halloween all the time. It was funny. It was a costume. Nobody was actually going to look at Shane Hollander, who was five foot ten and played professional hockey, and think he was a woman. That wasn't a thing that was going to happen. 

He'd bought the Mulan costume. 

Thomas reappeared at his elbow. His eyes were bright. 

"Where's your sword?" he asked. 

Shane considered this, looking around himself. "I don't... know." 

Thomas looked him over. The long wig fell past Shane's shoulders, straight and dark. The costume, without the sword, with just Shane's actual face — was apparently landing differently than intended, because Thomas tilted his head the way he did when he was trying to figure out how to say something. 

"You look," Thomas started. 

"Don't." 

"I'm just saying —" 

"I know what you're saying. Don't." 

Thomas held up both hands, fighting a smile. "With the wig you look a little —" 

"I will leave you here," Shane said. "I will get in an Uber right now and you will never forgive yourself." 

Thomas closed his mouth. Then: "She just waved at me. I have to go. Don't lose the wig." 

And then he was gone again. 

Shane turned back to the party, drink in hand, alone. 

Okay, maybe the costume was reading a little more convincingly than he'd anticipated. That was fine. That was the wig mostly, and the costume, and possibly the fact that Shane had a baby-face. A beard would have helped. He could not grow a beard. These were the facts of his life and he had made his peace with them. 

Mostly. 

He took a slow drink and looked out at the party properly. 

The house was somewhere in the hills, all glass and sharp angles, the kind of architecture that looked more like a statement than a home. Every surface that could be lit was lit — warm amber inside, the pool outside throwing blue light up the walls. The Halloween decorations looked expensive, black and gold, nothing that looked like it came from a drugstore. The crowd was dressed accordingly. Shane had seen two people he was fairly sure were actually famous and several more who carried themselves like they expected to be recognized. The music was good. The drinks were good. Objectively it was a great party. 

Shane was glad Thomas was having a good time. 

He found a quieter stretch of wall near the back of the main room and settled into it, watching the crowd move. This was more or less how he handled parties — find a wall, hold a drink, wait for something to happen or for it to be late enough to leave without being rude.  

He was 19 years old, eight weeks into his rookie season with Montreal, and still getting used to what his life had become. Not in a bad way. He'd wanted this since he was six years old and he had it now, which was everything. Hockey was the one thing that had never felt complicated. On the ice he knew exactly who he was and what he was supposed to do and how to do it. Off the ice was the part he was still figuring out. 

The schedule didn't leave much room for anything else. That was the thing nobody really told you. He thought the hockey would be the hard part, he'd trained for years for the hard part. But the true hard part was how everything outside of the actual hockey feels thin and far away.  

He was admittedly, kind of lonely. He was friendly with his teammates. He liked most of them. But friendly wasn't the same as close, and close took time he didn't really have yet, and so most nights he went home to his apartment and ate whatever was in the fridge and watched tape or slept. It was fine. It was what the job looked like right now. 

He made an effort to continue to visit some old friends of his, like Thomas. Thomas had known him since he was thirteen and awkward and bad at algebra, before any of this, and that meant a lot to Shane. There was nobody he had to explain himself to less. When Thomas had picked up the phone two weeks ago Shane had felt something in his shoulders drop that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. 

He was glad he'd come to visit him. He'd do it again. It was nice to be with something who knew him before he was famous.  

The fame was the part he could genuinely do without. He hadn't expected to mind it — he'd been a highly recruited prospect, he understood that people recognized his name now. The autograph requests he didn't mind. The stories were fine, people wanting to talk hockey, he could talk hockey. It was the other stuff. The girls especially. He didn't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful, so he mostly didn't try, but there was something exhausting about being looked at like you were a thing someone wanted to acquire. You could feel it. The way a conversation was going somewhere before it started. He didn't like it. 

He took another drink and watched Thomas materialize briefly on the other side of the room, craning his neck toward something Shane couldn't see, then disappear again. 

Shane almost smiled at his friends antics. 

He heard them before he saw them. 

A burst of Russian from somewhere across the room, loud enough to cut through the music, followed by laughter that had the particular quality of people who were already well into their night. Shane glanced over out of habit. 

And there was Ilya Rozanov. 

Shane's first thought was you have got to be kidding me. 

He'd never actually spoken to the guy. That was the strange thing about the rivalry — it had been constructed almost entirely by other people. The league had been laying the groundwork since Shane’s draft, two first-round picks a year apart, both of them young and fast and respectively drafted to teams with a long history of hating each other. Shane had seen the articles. The Next Great Rivalry. He'd rolled his eyes at every one of them. 

He watched him from across the room. 

Rozanov was tall — Shane knew that from film, knew his numbers, his reach, his skating stride, the particular way he positioned his body in the crease that made him a nightmare to score against. He was a genuinely difficult player to watch tape on because he was good in ways that were hard to anticipate. Shane respected it in the abstract, impersonal way you respected a problem you had to solve. That was all it was. 

Rozanov was also, very clearly, having the time of his life. He was holding a drink and saying something to the group around him and they were losing it, whoever they were, all of them orbiting him like he was generating his own gravity. He looked exactly like what Shane had heard — a guy who had taken to the NHL lifestyle like he'd been waiting for it his whole life. The parties, the crowd, the easy way he moved through a room full of people who wanted to be near him. 

He was dressed as a vampire, because of course he was — cape and all, white shirt open at the throat, fake blood at the corner of his mouth that he'd probably applied with complete sincerity. He looked ridiculous.  

Shane had heard he was a ladies man too. Looking at him now that was not difficult to believe. 

Lumbering asshole, Shane thought, even though Rozanov was not lumbering, was in fact moving with the relaxed ease of someone who had never been uncomfortable in a room in his life. 

He turned back to his drink. 

Of all the parties in all of LA, Rozanov had to be at this one. Neither of them lived here. Neither of them had any obvious reason to be in this specific house in these specific hills on this particular night. The universe, Shane thought, had a mean sense of humor. 

He was not going to talk to him. That was fine, easy even, the party was big enough and Shane was good at making himself scarce when he wanted to be. He would find Thomas, or he would find another wall, and he would stay on his side of the room and Rozanov would stay on his and that would be that. 

Simple. 

He finished his drink and went to find another one, keeping his back to the far side of the room. 

An hour later Shane and Thomas were lounging on the couches. 

"You should come visit more," Thomas said. "Montreal's not that far." 

"It's pretty far." 

"It's not that far. I looked it up once." 

"When did you look it up." 

"I don't know, once." Thomas pointed at him. "The point is you should come." 

"You could come to Montreal." 

Thomas considered this with the gravity of a man working through a complex problem. "I could," he said finally. "I really could." 

Shane smiled. "You won't." 

"I probably won't," Thomas agreed, and they both laughed. 

Shane went to find the bathroom, leaving Thomas happily installed at the drinks table with a new conversation and no apparent intention of moving. The main floor bathroom had a line so he went looking for another one, following the hallway that ran off the back of the main room. It was darker here, the party noise dropping behind him, just a thin strip of light under a door at the end. 

He did his business quickly and came back out into the hall and walked directly into a wall. A warm wall. A very solid, very tall wall that smelled like expensive cologne and whiskey and had a white shirt open at the throat, dark chest hair visible where the buttons gave up their job. 

Shane stood there for a half second longer than was strictly necessary. 

Then he looked up and got a face full of Rozanov. 

He was close, Rozanov was inches away from Shane, leaning against the frame of the door. He was close enough that Shane could see he was very drunk, eyes bright and a little unfocused, standing in the doorway, blocking Shane from leaving. 

Up close the vampire costume was even more committed than it had looked across the room. The cape was real fabric, not the cheap nylon kind. Of course it was. 

The annoyance was instant and automatic. 

"Watch it, Rozanov," Shane said, and shouldered past him. 

There was a pause. 

"Hey." Rozanov's voice came from just behind him, accented and unhurried. "Hey, where you go." 

Shane kept walking. 

"You know my name." Footsteps, unsteady, following him. "Pretty girl knows my name. How you know my name." 

Shane stopped. 

He turned around slowly. 

Rozanov was looking at him with the open, uncomplicated appreciation of someone who had lost the part of his brain that suggested restraint. He was, Shane registered distantly, extremely drunk. He was also looking at Shane the way Shane was not used to being looked at, taking him in from the wig to the costume to his face with an expression that was not complicated at all. 

Pretty girl? Fuck -- this costume was a bad choice.  

"Everyone knows your name," Shane said, before he could stop himself. 

Rozanov smiled. It was an easy, unhurried smile, the smile of a man who had heard this before and did not mind hearing it again. He pushed off the wall with his shoulder and took a step closer, not crowding, just — closer. 

"Yes," he said simply. "This is true." He tilted his head. "What is your name." 

Shane opened his mouth. 

And something happened in the space between the question and the answer — some small, stupid, instinctive thing. Rozanov was drunk and looking at him like he was actually a pretty girl and had no idea, not the faintest idea, that he was actually standing in front of his rival and — 

Well. 

It was a little funny, was the thing. 

"Jane," Shane said. 

Rozanov smiled like the name pleased him personally. "Jane," he repeated, trying it out in his accent. It came out softer. Zhayne. "I like this name." 

"Good for you." 

Rozanov laughed. He seemed to find Shane's tone charming rather than discouraging, which was irritating. "You are not happy to meet me, Jane." 

"I've met better." 

"Better than me?" Rozanov put a hand to his chest like he'd been wounded. "Who is better than me at this party?" 

"Plenty of people," Shane said. He was waiting for it — the flicker of recognition, the double take, something. He was standing right in front of him. He looked like himself. He had a wig on, but he still looked like himself, and Rozanov was just standing there smiling at him like Shane Hollander wasn't the person he was supposed to be building a career-long rivalry with. 

Nothing. 

Not even a flicker. 

Shane felt a fresh pulse of irritation move through him. 

"Shane Hollander, for example." 

Rozanov's eyebrows went up. "You know Shane Hollander?" 

"Yeah." Shane gestured at his own face. "Can't you see the resemblance?" 

Rozanov looked at him. Really looked, for a long, considering moment. Shane held very still. This was it — this was the moment, it was right there — 

"Ah," Rozanov said finally, nodding with the confidence of a man who had figured something out. "So you are related to Shane Hollander." He smiled. "Very pretty. Much prettier than Hollander." 

Shane stared at him. 

"Thanks," he said flatly. 

"Hollander," Rozanov said, and waved his hand dismissively. "He is okay." 

Shane stared at him. 

He is okay. 

"He is okay?" Shane repeated. 

"Good player," Rozanov said charitably, like he was doing Shane Hollander a favor. "Not so good as me, but good. Your family must be proud." He smiled again, warm and unconcerned. "But forget Hollander. We are talking about you." 

Shane made a decision in that moment. It was not a carefully considered decision. It was the decision of someone who had just been told they were okay by a man who was looking right at them without recognizing them, and who felt that this required some kind of consequence. 

He lifted his chin. He adjusted something in his voice, just slightly — higher, softer around the edges. A little... girlier. 

"Fair enough," Shane said. "Tell me about yourself." 

This was, he thought, going to be extremely funny when he revealed himself. Rozanov was going to be so embarrassed. Shane was going to enjoy every second of it. 

Rozanov needed no further invitation. He talked — about himself, about the season, about a game the night before with the easy looseness of someone who had been drinking for several hours and found himself very interesting. 

"Last night," he said, "I score two goals. Maybe three." He held up fingers that did not match the number he'd said. "Very good game." 

Shane looked at him. 

"You scored one goal," Shane said. "And two assists. Bergstrom set you up on the goal from the left circle, and your assists were both on the power play — Keller and then Morrison finished them." 

Rozanov stopped. 

He stared at Shane. Something shifted in his expression — the easy flirtation still there, but sharpened now, more focused, reassessing. 

"You know this," he said slowly. 

"I told you," Shane said. "I'm close with Hollander. Hockey comes up." 

"Hollander," Rozanov said, waving his hand, "is too busy with watch commercial and being boring. But you — you watch my game, Jane." 

"Don't flatter yourself." 

"You watch my game," he said again, delighted. "You know my stats." 

"I know everyone's stats," Shane said, which was true and which he probably should not have said, but Rozanov was looking at him like he'd just gotten considerably more interesting and Shane found that he didn't particularly want to walk it back. 

"Okay," Rozanov said, settling against the wall with the air of someone who had decided he was going to be here for a while. "Now I am very interested in you, Jane." 

Shane opened his mouth to say something — something cutting, something that would move this toward the punchline, toward the part where he said actually I'm Shane Hollander, your supposed rival, and you couldn't recognize me in a wig, how does that feel — 

Rozanov reached out and tucked a strand of the wig behind Shane's ear, very gently, watching his face while he did it. 

Shane closed his mouth. 

He'd get to the punchline in a minute. 

"So," Rozanov said, his hand dropping back to his side like he hadn't just done that, like Shane's brain hadn't just briefly gone offline. "You are in LA for long?" 

"Just the weekend," Shane said. He was back on track. He was fine. "You?" 

"Same." Rozanov shrugged. "Friend has party. I come." He looked around the room with the easy satisfaction of someone who found everything he saw acceptable. "Good party." 

"Sure." 

"You are not having good time, Jane." It wasn't a question. He was watching Shane's face with that same reassessing attention from before, like he'd filed away the hockey knowledge and was now working on the rest of him. 

"I'm having a fine time." 

"Fine time," Rozanov repeated, like the word offended him. "Fine time is not good time. Why you are not having good time." 

"I'm here with a friend," Shane said. "He's currently stalking someone from a TV show whose actual name he doesn't know." 

Rozanov laughed. It was a real laugh, sudden and unguarded, and Shane felt something shift slightly against his will. He'd seen Rozanov in press. He'd watched hours of his tape. He'd never heard him laugh like that. 

"Your friend sounds like good time," Rozanov said. 

"My friend is a disaster," Shane said. "But yeah." 

Rozanov was smiling at him, quieter now, and the hallway felt smaller than it had a few minutes ago. The party noise was still there, distant and bass-heavy, but it wasn't reaching them back here. Shane became aware that they had been standing in this hallway for longer than made sense for two people who had bumped into each other by accident. 

He should wrap this up. He should say something, land the punchline, watch Rozanov's face go through the stages of realizing he'd been flirting with Shane Hollander in a wig for the last few minutes. It would be a great story. He'd probably never tell it to anyone but it would be a great story. 

"You want to go outside?" Rozanov asked. "Is loud in there. We can talk." 

Shane looked at him. 

The punchline, he thought, would actually be funnier outside. More space to really let it land. Better lighting maybe. 

"Sure," Shane said. 

The backyard was something. Shane had caught glimpses of it through the glass walls earlier but standing in it was different — the pool lit up that deep chemical blue, the hills dark beyond the property line, the sky doing that thing it did in LA where it wasn't quite dark because the city kept pushing light up into it. The noise from inside dropped to something manageable out here. A few people had been scattered around the yard earlier but it had cleared out, the cold of the hills at night doing what it tended to do. They were effectively alone out here, just the two of them and the pool and the distant bass from inside. 

Rozanov found them a spot near the far end of the pool. Shane followed him and told himself he was just finishing the bit. 

"Better," Rozanov said, looking out at the view. 

"It's a nice house," Shane said, because it was. 

"You like nice things, Jane?" 

"Doesn't everyone." 

"No," Rozanov said simply. "Some people like easy things. Is different." He glanced at Shane sideways. "I think you are not easy things person." 

Shane looked at him. "What makes you say that." 

Rozanov shrugged, that loose easy shrug that seemed to be his default. "You correct my stats. You do not smile when I am charming. You have —" he gestured vaguely at Shane's general presence, "— this." 

"This." 

"Like you are deciding something about me," Rozanov said. "Always. Since the hallway. You are looking at me like I have not passed the test yet." 

Shane didn't say anything for a moment. 

That was uncomfortably accurate. He filed it away and didn't look at it directly. 

"Maybe you haven't," he said. 

Rozanov smiled, slow and unbothered. "Okay," he said. "Then I keep trying." 

They stood there for a moment, side by side, looking out at the view. It was strange, Shane thought distantly. He'd spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about Rozanov in the abstract — on tape, in press, as a problem to be solved on the ice — and the abstract version had been easier to deal with. The abstract version didn't say uncomfortably perceptive things in broken English or stand next to you in the quiet dark and make the air feel different. 

He needed to wrap this up. 

Rozanov turned toward him. The pool light caught the side of his face, blue and still, and he lifted one hand and very gently ran his thumb across Shane's cheekbone. Tracing something. Shane went very still. 

"You have freckles," Rozanov said softly, like he'd found something that pleased him. His thumb moved again, slow and careful. "Many freckles." 

Shane didn't breathe. 

Rozanov looked at him the way he had in the hallway, that open unhurried attention, except there was nothing of the party in it now. No performance. Just Rozanov, very close, looking at Shane's face in the pool light like he had all the time in the world. 

Then he kissed him. 

It was not a dramatic kiss. That was the thing Shane would think about later, lying in the dark of his hotel room staring at the ceiling. It wasn't pushy or aggressive, it wasn't the sloppy kiss of a drunk. It was soft and certain, Rozanov's hand sliding from his cheek to his jaw, and Shane — 

Shane kissed him back. 

He didn't think about it. That was the honest truth of it and he would spend a long time afterward being honest with himself about it. There was no decision, no moment where he considered anything. Rozanov kissed him and Shane kissed him back and for some number of seconds his brain produced nothing at all, just warmth and the solid reality of Rozanov's hand against his face and something that felt horribly, undeniably like oh. 

Then his brain came back online. 

He pulled back. Rozanov let him, reluctantly, his hand dropping slowly from Shane's jaw. 

They looked at each other. 

And Shane understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that the punchline was gone. It had been available thirty seconds ago and now it was just gone. Because the joke had been Rozanov was so drunk he flirted with me at a party while I was wearing a wig, which was funny, which was a story, which ended with Rozanov's embarrassed face and Shane walking away the winner. That story was over. The story now was me and Rozanov made out at a party and he thought I was a girl and that story had no version where Shane came out ahead. That story got told in a locker room and Shane got called things he didn't want to think about. That story got told to Rozanov sober and Rozanov — 

Rozanov might actually kill him. 

He needed to leave. Right now. Immediately. 

Okay. Okay. He needed to think. He could not lower his voice, not even slightly, not even by accident — Ilya was drunk but he wasn't deaf and one wrong syllable and this whole thing collapsed. He could not panic visibly. He could not say anything that sounded like Shane Hollander, which meant no hockey opinions, no French, nothing that could be traced back to a specific person with a Wikipedia page and a Montreal area code. He needed to get back inside without Ilya Rozanov's hands on him long enough to think straight. Simple.  

Rozanov must've seen something inviting on Shane’s face because he dove in to attack Shane’s neck with sloppy open-mouth kisses. 

Oh god, Shane thought, his eyes briefly closing in contentedness. Not simple. 

He could feel himself getting hard. He shifted the way we was sitting, hoping the loose fabric of the costume was hiding everything.  

"I have to go," Shane said, trying to pull himself away from Rozanov’s sticky hands on his back. 

Rozanov made a low sound that was not agreement, his hands finding Shane's waist, warm and unhurried. He pulled Shane tight to himself. 

Shane went rigid. 

This was bad. This was extremely bad. Shane was not a small person — he was five foot ten and one hundred and eighty pounds of professional athlete and Rozanov's hands were right there on his waist and there was nothing soft about Shane's waist, there had never been anything soft about Shane's waist, his body fat percentage was a matter of public record and it was not the body fat percentage of a girl named Jane. And that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst of it was lower, and Shane was acutely, horribly aware of it in a way he absolutely could not afford to be right now because awareness was not helping the situation. 

He needed to get out of these hands immediately. 

"Rozanov," Shane said, very carefully, in Jane's voice, keeping every muscle in his body as still as possible. "Let go." 

Rozanov nuzzled into his neck instead. 

Shane stared at the pool and thought about hockey statistics. 

" котёнок," he murmured. "Wait. Don't go yet." 

"I really need to —" 

"You are so pretty, Jane." He said it simply, not like a line, like a fact he was reporting. His mouth found Shane's jaw, his neck, unhurried and very warm, and Shane's entire nervous system staged a brief revolt. " Веснушки, похожие на созвездия." 

Shane had absolutely no idea what that meant and this was probably for the best. A vampire. The man had dressed as a vampire. Shane was being slowly dismantled by a man in a cape and he needed to think about what that said about his life. 

"Rozanov." Shane's hands came up to his chest, not quite pushing. "Hey. Stop." 

Rozanov pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were dark and very sincere in the way that extremely drunk people were sincere. "Ilya," he said. "You call me Ilya, yes?" 

"I'm not calling you —" 

"Ilya," he said again, like it was just a matter of Shane getting used to the sound of it. He tucked his face against Shane's neck and Shane felt him smile there. "You smell very good." 

"Thank you," Shane said, through his teeth, to the empty backyard, to no one. "I need to go find my friend." 

"Your friend is fine." Ilya's arms tightened fractionally. "Five more minutes." 

"We already did five minutes." 

"Five more." 

"I have to go now," Shane said really starting to panic, and felt Ilya laugh against his neck, warm breath and all, which was not helpful. 

He planted both hands on Ilya's chest and pushed. He tried not to use as much pressure as a man could. Ilya straightened, blinking at him, looking slightly wounded in the guileless way of someone whose blood alcohol content was doing most of his emotional processing. 

"I'm going inside," Shane said. 

"Give me your number," Ilya said immediately. 

"I don't think —" 

"Please." He said it the same way he had before, plain and direct, no performance in it. " Красотка, I want to talk to you again, Jane. When I am more —" he gestured at himself, "— working correctly." 

Ilya pulled his phone out, opened contacts, typed Jane with his tongue between his teeth like it required concentration, and shoved it in Shane's hand. 

Ilya immediately went back to his neck. 

Oh fuck. 

Shane typed in his number in approximately four seconds, trying to finish before Ilya did something else with his mouth that made his hands stop working. He shoved the phone back. 

"There," Shane said, pulling away. "Now I'm going." 

Ilya looked at Shane like a lost puppy. Then he caught Shane's hand before he could pull it away and pressed his mouth to the back of it, very briefly, like something out of a different century. 

"Thank you, Jane," he said, smiling at him. 

Shane looked at the top of his head. Trying to will his erection to go away. 

"Drink some water," Shane said again, because it was the only thing he could think of, and then he pulled his hand back and walked inside. 

He found Thomas where he'd left him. Shane came to a stop beside him and stood very still while the party moved around him, looking at nothing in particular. 

Thomas glanced over. "You okay? You look weird." 

"I'm fine," Shane said. 

He stood there. The bass moved through the floor. Somewhere across the room there were loud Russians and Shane kept his back to all of it. 

It occurred to him, arriving slowly and then all at once, what he'd just typed into his phone. His actual number. When Rozanov was too drunk to check. When any ten digits would have worked. When there had been no reason, none, not one single reason on this earth to give him the real one. 

He stood very still. 

"I need another drink," he said. 

"Table's right there," Thomas said, already looking away. 

Shane didn't move. 

Through the glass behind him, the pool sat lit up and empty. He didn't turn around to look at it. 

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

hey everyone! still figuring out where this one is going but i'm having a lot of fun with it which hopefully comes through. no update schedule, just posting when i have something worth posting. thanks for reading, it means a lot 🖤

The locker room after practice was loud in the usual ways. Equipment hitting the floor, somebody's music leaking out of a shitty speaker, three conversations at once. Shane found his cubby and started stripping gear, shoulder pads first. 

"—you see that dive Kowalski took in the third? Fuckin'—" 

"Bro he's been doing that all season." 

"Guy skates like that and you're telling me he's straight?" 

Laughter from a few cubby's down. 

"Kowalski's a fag, everyone knows it." 

More laughter. Someone else chiming in now, building on it the way locker room stuff did, one voice becoming three. 

Shane pulled his jersey over his head and looked at the crack in the top left corner of his cubby shelf. He'd noticed it six weeks ago. It hadn't gotten bigger. 

He reached for his skate laces and started working them loose. 

They weren't talking about him. Obviously they weren't talking about him. They were talking about Kowalski, who Shane had never met, who had taken a dive in the third period of a game Shane hadn't even watched. This had nothing to do with Shane. Shane had not kissed anyone at a Halloween party. Shane had not given anyone his real number to a man at 2am. Shane was fine. Shane was sitting in his cubby working on his laces like a normal person who had nothing to think about. 

He was definitely not gay. 

He'd had girlfriends. Two real ones. He liked women, he knew what it felt like to like women, this was not new information about himself. What had happened in LA was — it had been dark, and he'd been drinking, and Rozanov had been right there, and it was a weird moment, a specific weird moment that said nothing about Shane as a person or what Shane was or wasn't. Lots of people had weird moments. That was a thing that happened to normal people all the time. 

Kowalski's a fag, everyone knows it. 

If anyone here ever found out — if someone had seen them at that party, if Rozanov figures it out, if somehow any version of that night got back to this locker room — they would say it the same way. Same voice. Same laugh under it. Hollander’s a fag.  

He pulled the lace too hard and it snapped. 

He stared at it. 

He dug a spare lace out of his bag. 

Skates off. Shin guards. Socks. He moved through it methodically, the same order he always did, and kept his eyes on his own hands and his mind carefully blank the way he'd gotten good at on the ice when things got loud. 

His phone was in his jacket pocket. 

He wasn't going to check it. 

He pulled his practice jersey over his head. Reached for his shower kit on the upper shelf, fingers finding the strap, and then somewhere between the shelf and his lap his hand made a different decision entirely. It went into his jacket pocket. It came out with his phone. Shane looked at it like it belonged to someone else. 

He hadn't told it to do that. 

On the screen read: One new message from Lily. 

He glanced over his shoulder once. Hayden was across the room talking to Trembleur about something, both of them facing the other way. Nobody was looking at him. Nobody was ever looking at him. He turned and sat back into his cubby anyway, shoulders angled in toward the wall, phone pulled close to his chest like he was protecting it from something. He could feel the edge of the shelf against his upper back. He was essentially inside the cubby. He was a professional hockey player sitting inside his own cubby like a child hiding under a table and he knew that, he was aware of that, and he stayed exactly where he was until he was satisfied that nobody within eyeline could see so much as a corner of his screen. 

Then he opened it and scrolled up to read all nine texts Rozanov had sent him this week. 

jane 

jane. 

JANE 

okay i see how it is 

this is fine i am completely fine 

i am not checking my phone 

i am not checking my phone again 

i lied i am checking 

are you alive. please confirm 

Shane stared at the name at the top of the screen. 

Lily. 

It had been late, the night of the party. Thomas was in the next bed snoring, dead to the world — Shane had physically steered him out of the house, which Thomas had complained about for the entire Uber ride before passing out face-down on his hotel bed still in his costume. Shane had lain in the dark staring at the ceiling when the first text came in. 

Just his number. And the text: 

i am thinking about you, jane 

Shane's heart had done something he was categorizing as anxiety. 

He couldn't save it as Ilya Rozanov. Obviously. If Thomas rolled over and grabbed the wrong phone, if a teammate saw the screen, if anyone at all glanced over at the wrong moment and saw Shane Hollander had Ilya Rozanov's name in his contacts — and then the texts, whatever these texts were going to be — he couldn't have that. He couldn't leave it as a number either. A Boston area code. People could do reverse searches on numbers, couldn't they? Someone could see it, google it, figure out that Shane had — what exactly? Kissed Ilya Rozanov at a Halloween party and given him his real number and then lain in the dark feeling his own pulse? 

He knew he was being paranoid. He knew it even then, thumb hovering over the contact field at 2am while Thomas snored six feet away. Nobody was going to reverse search a phone number on Shane's unlocked screen. That wasn't a thing that was going to happen. 

He'd typed Lily anyway. First name that came to him. Hit save and put the phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling for another hour. 

He wondered, sometimes, where Rozanov was when he sent these nine texts over the course of this week. 

Was Rozanov in his own locker room right now? Or on his way off the ice or sitting in some film session? 

What was he doing while he was texting a girl he'd met at a Halloween party who wouldn't text him back? 

Shane didn't understand Rozanov’s persistence. He'd been ignoring him for a week. A full week of nothing, not a single response, and Rozanov just kept going like the lack of reply was a challenge he'd decided to take personally. Nine texts. Who sent nine texts to someone who wasn't responding? What was he getting out of it? 

Shane tried not to think about what happened to himself when he got those texts. Tried not to think about how every time Shane's phone buzzed something happened in his stomach. That was just — that was a physiological response, that was stress, that was the anxiety of the situation landing in his body the way anxiety did. It wasn't anything else. It was certainly not a rush of blood somewhere south of his stomach that he'd been ignoring all week with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. 

He didn't want the texts to stop. 

No — that wasn't — he wanted them to stop. Obviously he wanted them to stop. The texts stopping would mean this whole thing quietly ceased to exist, which was what Shane wanted, which was the correct and normal thing to want. A man had kissed him at a party while thinking he was a girl and Shane had kissed him back and given him his real number and that was a mistake, a weird specific mistake, and the cleanest version of moving on from it was Rozanov eventually getting bored and the texts stopping and Shane never thinking about it again. 

That was what he wanted. 

What Shane also really wanted was a good night of sleep. He hadn’t been sleeping well. He lay down at night and his brain wouldn't stop, which wasn't new exactly, his brain had never been great at stopping, but it used to run tape, play sequences, work through systems. Now it just kept going back to LA. The pool light. The way Rozanov had looked at him. The specific pressure of his thumb on Shane's cheekbone, unhurried, like— 

"Yo, Hollander." 

Shane's phone hit the bench face-down. 

Hayden Pike dropped beside him with his gear half off, one pad on and one missing, which meant he'd stopped to talk to someone en route and forgotten what he was doing. He was like that. 

"You good?" Hayden asked. 

"Fine." 

"You've been in your head all practice." 

"I was thinking." 

"Yeah, about what." 

"Hockey," Shane said. He thought he could feel his ears turning red. 

Hayden gave him a look but let it go, reaching for his laces. Shane had known him eight weeks. He was starting to get a read on him — loud, easy, genuinely liked people in a way Shane found baffling, but not pushy about it. He didn't push. 

"Your edge work on that third drill was disgusting," Hayden said. 

"Thanks." 

"Not a compliment. Made me feel bad about myself." 

Shane almost smiled. 

He reached back down for his phone. Kept it angled away. Hayden was working on his shin guard, not looking over. 

are you alive. please confirm 

He locked the screen. 

Across the room the conversation had picked back up, different voice, same laugh under it. Shane looked at his cubby. He wasn't gay. He'd been drinking, he'd been lonely, Rozanov had been standing there doing whatever Rozanov did, and it had been a moment. A weird specific moment. It didn't mean anything. 

He was not gay. 

"Hey," Hayden said. 

Shane looked over. 

"Nothing." Hayden shook his head, already back on his laces. He'd forgotten whatever it was before he got to it. 

Shane put his phone in his jacket pocket and reached for his shower kit. 

A few days later Shane was home after another day of practice. He made pasta, ate it standing over the sink, and took his hockey book to the couch. 

It was a good book. He'd been on the same page for forty minutes. 

His phone was on the cushion beside him face up. He was reading. The book was about defensive zone systems in the early nineties and it was genuinely interesting and he had read the same paragraph four times. 

His phone buzzed. 

He ignored it for a full minute and a half before he picked it up. 

jane i have been thinking 

i think you are mad at me 

are you mad at me 

what did i do 

Shane put the phone back down and looked at his book. 

He was half hard. 

It was — it was seven pm. That happened. That was a time of day thing, that was just his body doing what bodies did in the evenings when a person was relaxed and horizontal on a couch, it had nothing to do with anything. It had absolutely nothing to do with thinking about Rozanov's mouth, which Shane was not doing. He was reading about defensive zone systems. 

His phone buzzed again. He watched the texts roll in on the locked screen. 

okay i think i know what i did 

i was a lot at the party 

but jane you have to understand i am not usually like this 

i am usually very cool 

Shane stared at the ceiling. His phone buzzed again. He looked down. 

you can ask anyone 

He was not smiling. There was nothing happening in the corner of Shane’s mouth. 

He put the book face down on the coffee table and picked up the phone properly and scrolled back through the week and a half of texts he hadn't answered. The volume of them was genuinely insane. Rozanov had constructed an entire one-sided conversation over seven days, argued with himself twice, apologized for something Shane hadn't responded to, and at one point sent three texts in a row that were just increasingly large question marks. 

His phone buzzed again. Shane looked down. 

also 

i probably should not send this 

but i think you will find it interesting, jane. since you are close with hollander 

Shane went still. 

we have been watching his tape 

hollander has a tell. when he is about to pass left shoulder turns toward the receiver. always. we are going to use this in the boston montreal game 

Shane read it once. 

Then again. 

His heart was doing something strange and fast. He sat up. 

Rozanov knew. He'd figured it out somehow, the wig hadn't been enough, he'd put it together and now he was — no. No, that didn't make sense, if Rozanov knew he was Shane he wouldn't be texting Jane about Shane's tell, he'd — unless this was a trap, unless he was messing with him, unless Boston somehow thought that Jane was feeding information back to Shane and they were deliberately— 

He made himself breathe. 

Rozanov didn't know. Rozanov was drunk at a Halloween party and hit on a girl in a wig and had been texting her for a week because he was apparently incapable of taking a hint. He did not know. This was not a trap. This was a man who wanted a girl to text him back and had just decided to use Shane Hollander as leverage. 

Shane's thumbs moved before he'd fully decided to. 

why would you send me that 

The response came in eleven seconds. 

you are alive!! 

jane 

JANE 

okay, Shane typed, why did you send that. about hollander. 

i thought it would make you respond. you are close with him yes? i thought it would be interesting to you 

Shane stared at the screen. 

that's incredibly stupid, he typed. i'm just going to tell him. you just gave away your advantage. 

no you will not 

Why not? 

because, Rozanov typed, and Shane could hear the confidence in it, the complete unbothered certainty, 

i do not think a pretty girl who watches all my games and knows all my stats would do that to me. 

Shane read that three times. 

yeah, he typed finally. sure. 

worth it, Rozanov sent back immediately. you texted me. this is all i wanted. 

Shane put his phone down on his chest and looked at the ceiling. 

He thought about the tell. His shoulder lining up with the receiver. He ran back through his own game tape in his head, pulling sequences, looking for it, and there — yes. He could see it now that he knew to look for it. A small reposition of his upper body, just before he passes, just enough. He hadn't even known he was doing it. Hadn't known it was readable from the outside. 

The Boston Montreal game was in a week. 

He had a week to work on it in practice. Run it until it was gone, until there was nothing there to read, until he could pass without giving a single thing away. His coaches hadn't caught it. The Montreal staff hadn't caught it. Ilya Rozanov, apparently, had caught it. 

He picked his phone back up. 

thank you, he typed, and then quickly deleted it and left the message field blank. 

He was not going to thank Ilya Rozanov. He was going to use this information and say nothing and skate against him in seven days and beat Boston. 

His phone buzzed. 

so, Rozanov sent. now we are talking, yes? tell me about yourself jane 

Shane looked at the message for a long moment. 

He picked up his hockey book. Put the phone down. 

The anthem started and Shane stared at the back of Rozanov's jersey. 

81 ROZANOV. White letters on black, Boston's third kit, the one Shane had watched on tape approximately ten thousand times. He knew the number the way he knew all numbers. He had never had a problem with the number before. 

He was having a problem with the number now. 

Rozanov was two rows up in the lineup, shoulders relaxed, helmet off, hand over his heart. Shane could see the back of his neck. He had a very specific memory of that neck that he was not thinking about right now. 

The soprano was on the high part. Shane fixed his eyes on the middle distance and ran through his plan for the third time since warmups. 

The plan was: don't let Rozanov see his face. Which was a plan with some structural issues given that they were about to spend sixty minutes on the same two hundred foot sheet of ice, but Shane had worked with worse. Keep his head down in scrums. Draw his visor low. Don't engage beyond what the game required. If Rozanov comes at him to do his signature chirping, skate away. Simple. Clean. Manageable. 

The anthem ended. The crowd came up loud. 

Shane put his helmet on and pulled the visor down and told himself this was fine. 

It was not fine. He knew it was not fine. He'd known it was not fine approximately thirty seconds into warmups when Rozanov had done a lap past the Montreal end and Shane had turned to face the boards. Lemaire had asked him if he was okay. Shane had said yes. Lemaire had looked at him for a moment and then gone back to his drill. 

Shane was on the bench for the opening faceoff. That was normal — Lemaire was the starter, he took the first draw. Shane sat with his stick across his knees and watched the play develop and kept his eyes moving the way you were supposed to, tracking puck and bodies, and did not look at number 81. 

He got his first shift about four minutes in. A coach tapped his shoulder and he hopped the boards and was on the ice and it was fine, it was just hockey, he'd been playing hockey since he was six years old. He knew what to do. He found the puck and he went to work and for about ninety seconds his brain behaved exactly the way it was supposed to. 

Then Rozanov came over the boards on a line change. 

In hockey the two teams weren't always on the ice at the same time — five skaters each, and the benches rotated in shifts, so a pair of two opposing players could go whole stretches of a period without being out there together. Had been hoping that their shifts just wouldn't overlap much, that the game would stay neatly separated, that he could do his job on his side of the ice and Rozanov could do his job on his side and they would not have to be in the same place at the same time. 

After Rozanov came over the boards, he was immediately everywhere. 

Shane knew his game from tape. Knew the way he moved, the way he set people up without looking at them, the way he seemed to always be exactly where the puck was going before it got there. He'd watched hours of it. He'd respected it the way you respected a problem you had to solve. 

He had not accounted for knowing it like this. For being on the same ice and having his brain run two tracks at once — the hockey track, position and puck and where his linemates were, and underneath it the other track, the one he couldn't turn off. The hands. The pool light. The way Rozanov had gone very still when he found Shane's freckles. 

Shane took a hit from the left he should have seen coming and lost the puck. 

He skated back to the bench. 

Focus, he told himself, with feeling. 

The first period ended and both teams went to their benches for the break and that was when the jumbotron did it. 

Shane had known they would run something. The league had been hyping this matchup for weeks — two number one draft picks, a year apart, both of them young and fast and attached to franchises with a long history of hating each other. Of course they were going to put something on the screen. He'd prepared himself for it. 

He had not quite prepared himself for the specific experience of sitting on the bench in front of twelve thousand people and watching Rozanov’s and his own face appear on a screen the size of a building. 

The music was dramatic. Of course it was dramatic. There were the draft photos — Shane at eighteen looking like he wasn't sure what to do with his hands, Rozanov a year earlier looking like he'd been waiting for this his whole life. Side by side. THE NEXT GREAT RIVALRY in block letters underneath. 

Shane stared at his water bottle. 

From the Boston bench, maybe thirty feet away, he heard Rozanov laugh. Genuine, unguarded, the same laugh from the hallway at the party. Shane kept his eyes forward. 

The crowd loved it. Twelve thousand people who had come specifically to watch them happen at each other, and the building was telling them exactly what they'd paid for. 

Shane thought briefly about whether it was too early to retire. 

It was too early to retire. He was nineteen. He took a drink of water and waited for the second period to start. 

There was an icing call midway through the second and the play stopped, both teams resetting, nobody in a hurry. Shane coasted to a stop near the boards and took the moment to breathe. 

He heard the skates before he registered what was happening. 

Rozanov pulled up beside him. Not across from him, not in front of him — beside him, like they were two people watching the same thing, easy and unhurried, like he just happened to end up there. Shane felt him the way you felt a door open in a warm room. He kept his eyes forward and his chin down and watched the referee sort out the faceoff dot situation with tremendous focus. 

"Hollander," Rozanov said. 

Shane said nothing. 

"You are avoiding me." Still that easy tone, not a question, just a thing he was noting out loud. "All game. Very obvious." 

Shane watched the referee. 

"First time we play each other and you will not even look at me." Rozanov made a sound that might have been disappointment. "I am hurt, Hollander. Truly." 

The referee pointed at the faceoff dot. Shane pushed off toward it. 

"Very boring," Rozanov said, behind him, cheerfully. "Very very boring." 

The crowd groaned, disappointed. They wanted a show. They wanted Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov to square up and perform for them, the rivalry they'd been promised, the thing the league had been building toward for a year. The cameras wanted it. The commentators wanted it. Every single person in this building wanted it except Shane, who wanted to keep his face pointed at literally anything else for the rest of the evening. 

The faceoff was at center ice which was the worst possible location for Shane to be right now because center ice meant directly across from Rozanov, nowhere to look except forward, the referee standing over them with the puck and twelve thousand people watching and cameras that would be tight on both their faces right now for the broadcast. 

Shane got into his stance and looked at the dot. 

Just the dot. The dot was fine. The dot was a small painted circle on the ice and it had never kissed anyone at a Halloween party and Shane could look at it without his brain doing anything complicated. 

Rozanov settled across from him. Shane could see his skates in his peripheral vision. That was enough. That was all he needed to see. 

The referee held up the puck. 

"I heard from a pretty friend of yours," Rozanov said quietly, just conversational, just two guys at a faceoff. "Jane. You know her yes?" 

Shane's eyes came up without his permission. 

Rozanov was looking right at him, and he was smiling, a shit eating grin plastered on his stupid face. 

The puck dropped. 

Shane was half a second late and lost it clean. 

Third period. Montreal up one. Rozanov was everywhere. He was fast. He was so fast. Shane knew he was fast and it was different knowing it from the ice, different tracking him in real time. 

Shane had the puck at the left circle, Hayden open on the far side, and he felt his shoulder start to turn. His tell.  

He let it. 

Rozanov's defender was already moving before Shane's stick touched the pass. Cut the lane off clean, intercepted it at the blue line, and Boston was going the other way. 

Shane watched it happen. 

He was back on the bench thirty seconds later and he sat down and stared at the ice and tried to figure out what had just happened. 

He'd run that correction a hundred times this week. It wasn't hard. It wasn't even uncomfortable, it was just a small thing, and he'd had it locked since Tuesday. Thériault had watched him run it clean over and over and nodded and moved on. It was done. It was fixed. 

And then he'd been out there with the puck and Hayden open and he'd felt his shoulder start to turn and he'd just — let it go. Hadn't even tried to stop it. Like his body had made a decision his brain hadn't caught up to yet. 

He replayed it. Looking for the logic. There had to be logic, Shane didn't do things without logic, he was not a person who did things without logic. 

Rozanov had been right there. That was the only variable that was different from practice. Rozanov, who had been the one to find the tell in the first place, who had watched enough of Shane's tape to find something Shane's own coaches hadn't found, who had then handed it to Jane like it was nothing, like it was just a thing he was willing to give away— 

Shane stared at the ice. 

He hadn't stopped it because some part of him hadn't wanted to. 

He didn't look at that directly. He put it in a box and moved on. 

Late in the third the puck went into the corner and Shane and Rozanov both went after it. 

Shane got there first and felt Rozanov arrive a half second later, two hundred pounds of him coming in from behind, pinning Shane against the boards with his full weight. Shane's cheek hit the glass. Rozanov's arm came across his chest, not bothering with the puck anymore, and his mouth was right there, right at Shane's ear, his breath warm through the helmet gap. 

"I have you, Hollander," he said, low and almost gentle, and whether he meant the play or something else Shane's brain did not stop to figure out because it had just gone completely offline. 

Every single thought Shane Hollander had ever had left his body. 

He was aware of exactly three things. The glass against his cheek. The solid immovable reality of Rozanov pressed against his back. And something happening in his shorts that was going to require him to think very carefully about his next movement. 

The referee's whistle blew. 

Rozanov peeled off him, easy, already moving toward the faceoff dot like nothing had happened, like he hadn't just — like Shane wasn't standing against the boards needing a second. 

Shane pushed off the glass. 

He needed to think about something else immediately. He thought about Thériault's face. He thought about the crack in his cubby shelf. He thought about defensive zone coverage in 1987. 

It helped. Marginally. 

The crowd erupted. 

There it is, the announcer said, voice climbing. The Hollander and Rozanov rivaly, and the building is on its feet— 

Montreal held on. Final score 3-2. 

Thériault was waiting for him at the gate. 

"What happened out there." 

"I know," Shane said. 

"We worked on that all week. All week, Hollander. You ran it clean every single time and then you just—" Thériault stopped. Looked at him. "You were distracted. The whole third period." 

"I'll fix it." 

"You almost lost us this game." 

"I know," Shane said. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again." 

Thériault held his gaze for another second then stepped aside. 

Shane was almost to the tunnel when he heard it. 

"Hollander." 

He kept walking. 

"Hollander." Rozanov's voice, carrying easy over the post game noise, unhurried. "Good game. Very exciting finish, yes? Very dramatic." A pause. "You are very boring player usually but tonight, almost interesting." 

Laughter from somewhere in the Boston side. 

Shane's jaw tightened. 

He was also, mortifyingly, still a little bit hard. 

He walked into the tunnel without turning around and did not think about that. 

He sat in front of his cubby for a long time after most of the room had cleared out and unlaced his skates slowly. 

He needed a reason he used his tell tonight. Not an excuse — a reason. There was a difference and Shane was particular about the difference. 

He'd read about Turing last month. Wikipedia spiral at two in the morning that turned into buying an actual book. The Enigma codebreaker, and the specific problem it created — the Allies had cracked German codes but couldn't act on everything they knew, because if they saved every convoy the Germans would figure out the code was broken and change it and then it was all gone. So they let ships go down. On purpose. To protect the larger operation. 

Shane had used the tell. 

It was the same principle. You didn't burn your asset for one game in November. You let the enemy think they still had the advantage so they kept talking, kept trusting, kept sending information to a pretty girl they'd met at a Halloween party who had no obvious reason to pass any of it along. That was tradecraft. That was sound operational logic. 

It had nothing to do with Shane not wanting the texts to stop. 

He put his skates aside and reached for his phone. 

Three new messages from Lily. 

i know you didn't tell him Rozanov had sent, forty minutes ago, he must have sent it as soon as he got to his locker room. 

about the tell. hollander used it. i was waiting and he used it anyway 

so either you did not tell him 

Shane stared at the screen. 

or you told him and he forgot, which means he is even more boring than i thought 

Then, ten minutes later: 

i think you did not tell him, jane 

i think you like me 

Shane read it twice. His thumb hovered. 

He'd been going back and forth on this all week. Every time he'd decided to block Rozanov he came up with a reason not to, and every reason had been slightly flimsier than the last, and the spy logic was the best one he'd had so far and so he was keeping it. He was a spy. Rozanov trusted Jane now in a way he'd just demonstrated with actual on-ice evidence. That was an asset Shane had built and could continue to use. 

He started typing. 

don't push it 

Rozanov's response was immediate. 

but you didn't tell him :) 

Shane looked at the smiley face for a moment. 

no he typed. i didn't tell him. 

why 

Shane looked at that for a long time. 

i don't know yet he typed finally. 

i will take this Rozanov sent back. this is enough for now. hello again jane. i have missed you 

Shane sat in the empty locker room with his skates off and his phone in his hand and the distant sound of the arena shutting down around him. 

hello he typed. I’ve missed you too. 

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

thank you so much to everyone reading and leaving comments and kudos on this fic, it genuinely means a lot. this one is getting longer than i originally expected and i'm having a real time keeping all the details straight in my head — especially because i'm consuming a lot of heated rivalry fics at the same time as writing this one, so occasionally things get fuzzy. sorry if any lore slips through the cracks.
i still don't entirely know where this is going, which is maybe obvious, but i'm enjoying writing it and i promise it will end happily. these two idiots will be okay.
thanks for coming along for it.
Xoar

The faceoff dot thing had been rattling around in his head since the Boston game. I heard from a pretty friend of yours. Jane. You know her yes? Shane had lost the draw. He never lost draws. 

This incident highlighted the first of Shane's problems with Jane. 

Shane's first problem was that he could not remember exactly what he'd told Rozanov at the party in LA. 

He'd been drinking that night — not Rozanov-drunk, not cape-wearing, freckle-memorizing drunk, but enough that the specifics had gone soft over the last month. He could picture Ilya in his stupid vampire costume with perfect clarity. He could remember the pool light and the exact weight of a hand against his face. What he couldn't reconstruct with any confidence was the precise words he'd used. He'd said something about resemblance, hadn't he? Something that had landed as relation. But then Rozanov had used close in the texts and friend on the ice and now Shane wasn't sure what he'd actually said in person. 

The other details that Shane could remember about that night was that Jane watched hockey and knew stats and had a friend at the party chasing some actress whose name Thomas probably still didn't know. That was the inventory. That was everything he had to build on. 

It wasn't much. 

Shane was a detailed person. He noticed things and retained them and could pull them back when needed, it was half of what made him good at hockey, reading the ice, cataloguing positions and patterns in real time. His recall was generally reliable. And it was bothering him that he was struggling to remember any useful details.  

He needed to know what he'd said before Rozanov asked him something that contradicted it. 

He thought about it for two days. 

On the third day, a Wednesday, Rozanov texted: jane. tell me about yourself. 

Shane stared at this in the back of a team bus for thirty seconds. 

what do you want to know, he typed back. 

anything. how old. 

Okay. Age. That was a question with a correct answer and Shane needed to pick one and commit to it. 

He'd watched something once — 48 Hours, or maybe it was a documentary, something his mom had put on over Christmas that Shane had half-ignored while on his phone and then found himself actually watching. A segment on con artists. The guy being interviewed had been calm about it, almost boring, explaining it like a math problem: the best lies came from the truth. You took what was real and moved it sideways just enough. The further you got from what you actually knew, the more you had to track, and the more you had to track the more places it could fall apart. 

Shane was nineteen. Jane could be nineteen. There was no reason she couldn't be nineteen. A nineteen-year-old who'd grown up around hockey and knew her stats wasn't a stretch. 

nineteen, he typed. 

what you do. 

What did Jane do? Jane needed a job. Something that explained the hockey knowledge without making her a player or a coach or a journalist — a journalist was the worst possible answer, a journalist would have a paper trail — literally. Not a journalist. Not a WHL player, it would be too easy to disprove. Something adjacent. Something that — 

Studying sports management, he typed. still in school. 

It was probably what Shane would be doing right now if he hadn't been drafted. Hopefully it was vague enough to cover her knowledge of hockey and boring enough that Rozanov wouldn't pull the thread. 

where, Rozanov sent back. 

Shane looked out the window of the bus. Ontario outside, flat and grey. He typed toronto, then deleted it. 

He didn't know Toronto. Not really — he'd played there, he knew the rink and the hotel the team used and one good place to eat near the arena because Hayden had taken him there in October. That was it. If Rozanov asked him anything about actually living there, anything specific, a neighbourhood, a street, a bar, something that a nineteen-year-old girl who'd grown up in the city would know — he'd have nothing. He'd be building on a shaky foundation. 

He needed somewhere he actually knew. 

ottawa, he typed. 

He'd grown up there. He knew every part of it — the streets, the river in winter, which bars carded and which didn't, the shortcut behind the Rideau Centre that saved you seven minutes if you knew about it. He could talk about Ottawa without thinking. Jane could be from Ottawa and Shane could keep her there indefinitely without breaking a sweat. 

The con artist on the documentary would have approved of this one too. 

ottawa, Rozanov sent back. nice city. very cold. 

yes, Shane typed. very cold. 

Shane was eating dinner with his parents in his apartment in Montreal when his phone buzzed on the table. 

so hollander. 

That was it. That was the whole text. Shane inhaled a piece of chicken. 

He was coughing as he registered what he'd read, eyes watering, one hand braced on the table. His mother looked up. His father put his fork down. Shane barely noticed either of them because he was staring at the text. 

He got the coughing under control. Drank the water his mother pushed at him without looking at her. 

so hollander. That was it. That was the whole text. No follow-up yet, just those two words sitting there, and Shane's brain was already running at full speed through every possible version of what they meant. Rozanov knew. He'd figured it out. It had finally clicked and now he was sitting somewhere with Shane's number in his phone typed under a girl's name and he — 

"Shane." His mother's voice. 

He looked up. Both his parents were watching him. His father with a fork halfway to his mouth, stopped mid-motion. His mother with her head tilted the way she did when she was deciding something. 

"You okay?" she asked. 

"I'm fine." 

"You don't look fine." 

"I'm fine," he said. "The chicken went down wrong." 

His father looked at him for a moment and then went back to his food. His mother kept looking at him for two seconds longer than that, which was her way, and then she also went back to her food. 

Shane turned the phone over in his lap under the table. 

He watched the three dots appear. 

Disappear. 

Appear again. 

He put a piece of chicken in his mouth and chewed it and did not taste it. Across the table his mother was saying something to his father about the neighbours. His father was nodding. Normal dinner. Normal Thursday. Shane watched the three dots and kept his fork moving and breathed through his nose. 

The dots disappeared. 

He waited. 

They came back. 

His father asked him something about the road trip schedule and Shane answered it, he had no idea what he said, some version of the right answer because his father nodded and went back to his food and Shane's eyes dropped back to the screen. 

The dots disappeared again. 

He was going to have a heart attack at his parents' dinner table at nineteen years old. That was how this was going to end. 

Then: you are close yes? 

Shane sat very still for a moment. 

That was it. That was the whole follow-up. Not I know who you are. Not nice try, Hollander. Just Rozanov, somewhere, taking two full minutes to type four words. 

The air came back into the room. Rozanov hadn't figured anything out yet. 

Shane set his phone face-down on his thigh and picked up his water glass and drank half of it. 

"You sure you're okay?" his mother said, not looking up from her plate. 

"Yeah," Shane said. "I'm good now." 

yeah, he typed. 

how close, Rozanov sent back. 

what do you mean how close, Shane typed. 

you said you were hollander relation at party. like. cousin? or more close. 

Shane had to decide right now whether Jane was Hollander's cousin or something else, and he had to pick the answer that was going to cause the fewest problems downstream. Cousin could be vague. There were all types of cousins, right? 

something like that, he typed. 

cousin? 

close enough. 

He watched the screen. Rozanov typing. Stopping. Typing again. 

hm, Rozanov sent. Then: he know you talk to me? 

Shane looked at that for a long moment. 

no, he typed. 

He slipped his phone into his pocket before his parents could see anything and pushed his chair back. 

"Bathroom," he said, to no one in particular. 

His mother nodded without looking up. His father was refilling his water glass. 

Shane walked down the hall at a normal pace. Not fast. There was no reason to walk fast. He closed the bathroom door behind him and stood at the sink and looked at himself in the mirror for a second, then looked at his phone. 

tried to talk to hollander when we played, Rozanov had sent. he was very uninterested in me. very rude actually. 

sounds like him, Shane typed. 

ha.yes.you are related. 

Then: you did not tell him about us making out at the party? i think maybe this is why he avoid me. does not want to picture ilya rozanov with his tongue down his pretty cousins throat. 

Shane stared at the screen, mouth agape. Was it starting to get hot in here? 

we did not make out, he typed. it was nothing. 

jane. we kissed. it was not nothing. it was very something. it was hot jane. 

Shane's ears went hot. The rest of him was getting there too which was embarrassing and unhelpful and he was alone in his bathroom so at least nobody could see it but still. He put the phone down on the counter and took a breath. 

He was annoyed about that. Specifically annoyed that Ilya could do this to him through a screen, through text. What was going to happen when they were actually in the same rink? He was going to hear Rozanov's voice through his helmet and his whole face was going to give him away, and that was assuming he could even concentrate on the game, which right now felt like a generous assumption. 

If Rozanov got to him at a faceoff dot — and he would, they were both centers — and asked something about Jane directly, Shane would have maybe half a second before his face did something. He was a terrible liar in person. His mother had known every time since he was six, his coaches knew, Hayden had figured it out in about three weeks. The blush came up fast and stayed and a visor only covered so much. Rozanov was already known for getting in people's heads on the ice. Shane had seen it firsthand. 

Lying in texts he could manage. A screen meant five seconds before every response and nobody saw what those five seconds looked like. He'd gotten decent at it. 

In person was a different problem entirely. 

He needed Ilya on the other side of the ice and staying there. 

hollander doesn't know about us and he won't, he typed. 

no? will he beat me up? hit me? 

no probably not. i don't know. just don't tell him anything. 

might be too late, Rozanov sent back. i asked him about pretty friend jane last month. 

just don't say anything else. please. 

okay. i will not tell hollander where i want to touch his pretty cousin. 

Shane put the phone face down on the counter and stood there. He looked down at his problem enlarging in his pants. He wondered how long he could reasonably stay in the bathroom before his mother came to check on him. 

Not long enough, probably. 

Rozanov texted him the first week in December. 

This was a text he was actually expecting. He'd put Jane in Ottawa and Boston was playing the Centaurs this week in Boston and of course Rozanov texted Jane about it. 

we play ottawa soon, he sent. your team yes. 

Shane stared at this. The Ottawa Centaurs. He knew enough about them to have an opinion, which was that the opinion wasn't good. They were rebuilding, had been rebuilding for what felt like several years, their goaltending was a persistent problem for them, and Shane had beaten them twice already this season without breaking much of a sweat. Jane was supposed to live in Ottawa. Jane was supposed to care about this team. Shane couldn't bring himself to care about them. 

i don't really have a team, he typed. 

how. you are from ottawa. 

i follow players not teams. 

hm, Rozanov sent. smart. ottawa not worth following right now. 

Shane nodded at his phone a little despite himself. Correct. Rozanov was correct. 

their goalie is not fun to play against, Shane typed. lets everything through. 

He hit send and picked up his coffee and then put it down again. 

Fuck.  

He looked at the screen. 

A girl from Ottawa did not have opinions about what goalies were or were not fun to play against. Fans said things like he's terrible or they need to replace him or I can't watch this anymore. They did have personal experience playing against those athletes.  

He typed fast: i mean like. not fun to watch. it's pathetic when the other team scores. just looks too easy. 

He sent it and put the phone face down on the table and pressed both hands flat against the surface and stared at the wall. 

He needed to be more careful. 

He needed to be considerably more careful. 

He picked his phone back up, maybe he could bury his blunder. 

more of a voyageurs fan anyway, he added. 

It seemed to work, because Rozanov responded fast, the goalie thing dropped. 

because of hollander? 

Shane was relieved that Rozanov had let his blunder go. 

no, Shane typed. best team in the league. going to win the cup. 

He meant it. He couldn't not mean it. 

ha, Rozanov sent back. Then: HA. jane. you are funny. 

i'm serious. 

i know. this is why it's funny. 

Shane's jaw tightened. 

we'll see, he typed. 

yes. we will see. i look forward to this jane. very much. 

The photo came in on a Tuesday morning, seven forty-three am, while Shane was standing in his kitchen waiting for the coffee to finish. 

He looked at it for a second before his brain caught up to what he was looking at. 

It was Rozanov. Bear's locker room, no shirt, hair still damp from the shower or sweat, holding his phone out at arm's length with the expression of a man who had done this before and knew it worked. 

Below the photo: morning skate. i survive. you think of me yes? 

Shane put the phone face down on the counter. Poured his coffee. Drank half of it standing there looking at the wall. 

He picked the phone back up. 

The thing about the photo — the thing that was a problem — was that it worked. Shane WAS thinking about him. 

Rozanov was built the way hockey players were built, and Shane knew what it took to look like that because he looked like that himself, more or less. He knew the work behind it. It shouldn't have done anything to him. 

It did something to him. 

He typed back: gold star. 

Sent it before he could think about it. Put the phone in his bag and went to practice. 

He thought about the photo at practice. Not constantly. Just. It kept surfacing. 

He ran a passing drill and thought about it. He ran it again. 

Thériault told him to get his head right. 

Shane got his head right. 

He dealt with it the way he dealt with most problems — directly, efficiently, with the intention of moving on and not revisiting. 

He was in bed. Phone on the pillow, the photo open on the screen. He'd been staring at the ceiling for forty minutes already and his brain wasn't going to quiet down on its own, he knew that by now, and this was the practical solution to a practical problem. That was all it was. 

He'd done this before. He knew how it worked. You dealt with it and then you slept and in the morning the thoughts were gone. 

He tried to think about someone else. He ran through the usual inventory, but his brain kept sliding off and going somewhere else, and the somewhere else had curly hair and spoke with an accent and had looked at Shane like he was the only person at a very loud party. 

He stopped redirecting it. 

He let it go where it was going to go. 

What it went to wasn't even the photo in the end. It was the pool light. The weight of a hand against his face. Shane kept his breathing even and let the memories of their kiss run and didn't fight any of it and afterward he lay in the dark for a long time with his eyes open and the phone on the ground where it had tumbled off the bed. 

He felt clear-headed in the way you felt clear-headed after something was handled. 

He also felt something else that he wasn't going to look at right now. 

He put it in the box. Closed the lid. The box was getting full and structurally he understood that was a problem for eventually, but eventually wasn't tonight. Tonight it held. He closed his eyes and for the first time in about two weeks he fell asleep hard and fast. 

The texts came at different hours. That was one of the things Shane hadn't expected — the randomness of them, the way they arrived with no pattern he could map. Early morning, two pm, middle of the night. Like Rozanov pulled his phone out whenever he thought of something and just sent it, no filter, no strategy. 

Wednesday. Ten-seventeen am. Shane in the film room, phone under the table. 

jane. you watch hockey yes. 

of course, Shane typed. 

good. who is best player in league right now. 

Shane looked at this. He knew what the right answer was, the easy answer, the answer that would make Rozanov happy and keep the conversation moving. He typed it and deleted it and typed something else. 

depends what you mean by best. 

what you mean depends, Rozanov sent back. 

there's best in terms of points. best in terms of impact on team. best in terms of two-way game. best in terms of playoff performance. 

A long pause. 

okay. you are fun jane. but in terms of. all of these. who. 

lemieux, Shane typed. Because it was true. 

okay yes. but active. 

Shane thought about it for real. 

sakic right now. but ask me again next year. 

next year why. 

Comeau had brought it up after practice, one of those Tuesdays where nobody was in a hurry to leave. He'd been in a good mood, loose, the way he got after a solid skate. Started talking about Sakic out of nowhere — they'd played together in Colorado for three seasons before the trade and Comeau still talked about him like they'd had beers last week. Great centreman. Good guy. Annoying to line change against, which Comeau said like a compliment. 

Then he'd gotten a little more direct. Said Sakic had told him over the summer he was thinking about hanging it up. The road was getting old. His kids were at an age where they'd started counting the days he was gone, and that changes things, Comeau had said. When they're old enough to know. 

Comeau said shit like that a lot. Liked to make sure the younger guys knew what they were getting into. The Sakic thing had been one of those moments — just Comeau passing along some advice. Then he'd slapped Shane on the shoulder and gone to find his keys. 

Jane didn't have this. Couldn't have this. 

just a feeling, Shane typed. 

jane. you watch a lot of hockey for girl. 

Shane's jaw tightened. Just slightly. 

girls can watch hockey. 

yes yes i know this. i only mean. you have lots of good knowledge. where you learn. 

grew up around it. 

ah, Rozanov sent. Then, a few seconds later: this makes sense. you have good eye jane. is what i notice first. at the party. before the freckles. 

Shane stared at that. 

send me photo, Rozanov added. 

Shane decided to ignore that. 

why do you even like them, he typed. they're just freckles. 

jane. they are like. small constellation. very pretty. 

Shane made a face at nothing. 

that's a weird thing to say. 

maybe. still true. just send photo. 

no.

why. 

Shane stared at the screen. He couldn't say the real reason, which was that a photo of Jane's freckles was a photo of Shane's freckles, and Shane's freckles were on Shane's face, and Shane's face was on the internet attached to his name and his Wikipedia page and his Montreal Voyageurs roster photo. 

i just don't do that. 

okay. i remember them anyway. 

you should forget them. 

i don't think i will. but you are pretty jane. i remember this very clearly. even your cousin cannot argue. 

Shane put the phone face down on his knee and looked at nothing for a long time. 

he'd probably argue, he typed finally. 

ha.yes.probably. 

Monday. Six-forty pm. Shane on the couch eating rice out of the pot because he hadn't done dishes in two days. 

jane i have question, Rozanov sent. did you know. group of flamingo is called flamboyance. 

Shane read this and set down his fork. 

why are you looking that up, he typed. 

was bored on bus. one thing go to other thing. owl group is parliament. jane. PARLIAMENT. 

Shane was smiling before he'd registered he was doing it. Then he looked around his apartment like someone might have seen. 

a group of crows is called a murder, Shane typed. 

WHAT. MURDER. who decide this. i want to meet this person. 

Then: group of cats is clowder. clowder. CLOWDER jane. i say this now. beautiful clowder. look at this clowder. magnificent clowder. 

Something he'd come to know about his rival: Rozanov was unexpectedly funny. Whatever was in his head just spooled out. Shane hadn't expected the serious, sometimes scary presence on the ice to be this goofy. 

group of hockey players is called an embarrassment, Shane typed. 

rude. also true. little bit true yes. But you do not think i am embarrassment? 

No i think youre a really good player. 

As good as your cousin? Hollander? i watch his tape a lot you know. very good player your cousin. Okay. Well. Not as good as me i think. 

you think you're better than hollander? Shane typed. 

yes. obviously. why you ask. 

Shane stared at that for a long moment. 

he wins more faceoffs than you. 

faceoff not everything. 

it's something. 

jane. are you defending hollander to me. 

i'm stating facts. 

not fact, opinion. 

Im changing my answer from before. shane hollander is the best player in the league. 

Shane felt something mean and satisfied move through him. 

There was a longer pause than usual. 

hm, Rozanov sent finally. okay jane. Not true but i accept opinion of very smart hockey girl. 

Shane looked at his phone. He was smiling again. He hated that he was smiling. 

He picked the pot back up and finished his rice. 

The bar was Hayden's idea, which meant it had been nobody's idea and had simply become a plan through a collective locker room full of guys who'd said yeah sure without thinking about it too hard. Shane had said yeah sure. He was regretting it by nine pm. 

I guess it wasn’t that bad. It was fine. The bar was loud and the beer was cold and Hayden was across the table telling a story about his cousin that was getting more elaborate every time Shane heard it. Trembleur had laughed so hard he'd knocked over his glass. The night had that easy quality of a group of people who spent long periods of time with each other. 

The girl had found them about an hour in. 

She was pretty — that registered, it was an objective fact, she had good hair and a nice smile and she'd started talking to Lemaire and then she'd talked to Hayden and then she'd talked to Shane, and the shift in attention had been gradual enough that Shane almost hadn't noticed it happening. She was sitting beside him now. Close. She smelled like something sweet and her arm kept brushing his arm and every time it did she didn't move away. 

His teammates had noticed. Of course they had. Hayden caught Shane's eye across the table and did absolutely nothing to hide what he was thinking. Trembleur had refilled Shane's glass without being asked. Hayden caught Shane's eye across the table and nudged Trembleur, who looked over and grinned. Lemaire said nothing but his mouth was doing something. 

Shane smiled at the right moments. He asked her a question, she answered, he responded to the answer. The machinery of conversation was working fine. She laughed at something he said and her hand landed on his forearm and stayed there, light, and Shane thought: okay. This is the part where something happens or it doesn't. 

He waited to want it. 

He waited for a little while. 

The bartender came over to collect glasses from their end of the table and Shane glanced up out of habit. 

He was maybe twenty-five, dark-haired, wearing a black t-shirt rolled at the sleeves. He moved down the table without looking at anyone in particular and when he straightened up to go he glanced over and caught Shane looking and didn't make anything of it, just went back to the bar. He was handsome.  

Shane looked back at the girl beside him. 

She was still there, still smiling, still warm in the way she'd been warm all night. She was saying something about where she was from and Shane tracked it and answered and the whole time there was a separate part of his brain very quietly noting something, turning something over, comparing the feeling of looking at her to the feeling of looking at the bartender for that three-second moment, and then putting the comparison somewhere he wasn't going to look at tonight. 

Not tonight. 

They stayed another hour. When they settled up the girl wrote her number on a receipt and put it in Shane's jacket pocket herself, which was confident enough that Hayden actually applauded, and Shane merely grimaced and walked out into the cold with his teammates. 

In the cab Hayden said, "she was into you." 

"Yeah," Shane said. 

"You gonna text her?" 

Shane looked out the window. 

"Maybe," he said. 

Hayden let it alone. That was the thing about Hayden — he had a sense for when not to push. Shane appreciated it. 

Saturday. Two-eighteen am. Shane had woken up at two and couldn't get back down, which had been happening more often than he liked. 

His phone lit up on the nightstand. 

jane. you awake? 

 Sorry is early morning for you. 

 i stop now. 

Shane looked at the time. Two-eighteen am. He did the math. Boston was out west right now — he was pretty sure they were playing one of the California teams, LA or Anaheim, though that might have been yesterday. Either way they were on the coast, which meant it was barely eleven for Rozanov. 

Yeah im awake, he typed. 

JANE. good. i find something. group of porcupine. is called prickle. 

Shane's mouth twitched at the corners. He already had one lined up. 

group of ferrets is called a business, he typed. 

JANE. that is the best thing. BUSINESS. those small guys. doing their business. very serious. what else you know. 

about what. 

anything. 

Shane thought about it. It was two in the morning and he was lying in the dark texting Ilya Rozanov about nothing and it was the most awake he'd felt at two in the morning in probably months. 

you know why it's called the corsi stat? he typed. 

no.

Guy that invented it needed a name. went through buffalo staff photos. saw jim corsi. liked his mustache. 

sorry. what. 

The corsi stat was named after a guy just because he had a nice mustache 

this is real. 

yes. 

i respect this so much. 

i also have good mustache potential. just so you know. 

Shane was about to turn over, and try to get some sleep, when his phone buzzed again. 

your corsi is good, Rozanov sent. Then: *your cousin corsi is good.* i look at this. his puck possession is very good. for a rookie. 

Shane looked at the ceiling. Breathed out. Rozanov scared him for a second there.  

you spend a lot of time on his stats for someone who thinks he's okay, he typed. 

i study my competition jane. 

this is different. 

if you say so. 

i say so. 

jane. can i ask you something. 

Shane's hand tightened a little on the phone. 

sure, he typed. 

do you think he knows. about the tell. that i found it. 

Shane breathed out through his nose. 

i think he might have figured it out. 

you tell him? 

no.

A long pause. Shane watched the screen. 

hm, Rozanov sent. okay. so he just figure out himself. 

Yeah. I guess so. 

good. this is more interesting. 

Shane read that and then read it again. 

you're rooting for him? he typed. 

I am rooting for good game. is different thing. 

Shane put his phone down on the pillow. Picked it up again. 

group of ravens is called an unkindness, he typed. 

unkindness. jane that is very dark. 

i know. 

i like it. we play ottawa again in two weeks. you should come. to the game. we can meet after. 

Shane sat with that for a moment. The ask was simple. Normal. The kind of thing you said to someone you'd been talking to for weeks, when you were going to be in their city. It made complete sense. 

i don't think i can, he typed. 

why. 

i'll be busy. 

jane. i just want to meet you. for coffee. one hour. 

Shane stared at the ceiling. 

maybe another time, he typed. 

Another pause. Longer. 

okay, Rozanov sent. Then: okay jane. 

That was it. No argument. Just okay, twice, the way you said it when you weren't okay and weren't going to push. 

He put the phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling and stayed there for a while. 

The spy logic had made sense in October. He'd built it carefully and it had held and it had even been useful, the tell, the information flowing one direction while Rozanov thought it was flowing another. That had been the point. 

Except it was December now and he hadn't thought about the tell in two weeks. Hadn't thought about Boston's systems or their power play or anything he was supposed to be extracting. What he'd been doing instead was texting Ilya Rozanov about Ottawa winters and collective nouns and Joe Sakic's retirement past two in the morning because he wasn't ready for the conversation to end. 

That wasn't tradecraft. He didn't know what it was but it wasn't that. 

And now Ilya was going to be in Ottawa — Shane's Ottawa, the streets he grew up with, the river, the shortcut behind the Rideau Centre — and he wanted to meet Jane for coffee. 

Shane thought about the box. How full it was getting. How the lid didn't sit flush anymore. 

He opened it. Just a crack. Just enough to look at what was actually in there. 

It wasn't pretty. 

Because the thing in the box — the thing he'd been putting in there since the party, since the pool light, since he'd typed his real number into a drunk man's phone at two in the morning for no logical reason — was that he might be gay. Was probably gay. Had maybe always been a little gay and had been very busy not knowing that about himself for nineteen years. 

That was the first thing in the box. 

The second thing was that Ilya Rozanov, who was a menace on the ice and a legitimate problem for Shane's career and someone Shane was supposed to spend the next decade dismantling shift by shift, was also apparently a genuinely decent person. Funny in a way that snuck up on you. Weirdly earnest. The kind of guy who texted about flamingos at eleven pm and remembered your freckles and said okay twice when you let him down and didn't push. 

Shane had not been prepared for that. He didn't know what to do with that. 

The third thing, the worst thing, the thing sitting right on top: Ilya really liked Jane. That much was obvious. He'd been texting her for weeks without getting much back and he'd kept going, not because he was pushy but because he was — interested. Actually interested. In someone who didn't exist. 

He felt, without any ambiguity, like a terrible person. 

Jane needed to end it. That was the only clean move left. Not tonight — he didn't have the stomach for it tonight, not after that okay that had landed the way it had. But soon. Maybe before the Ottawa game. Before Ilya got on a plane thinking there might be someone waiting. 

He picked the phone back up. 

goodnight ilya, he typed. 

goodnight jane, Rozanov sent back, almost immediately, like he'd been waiting. 

Shane turned the screen off. 

He lay there in the dark and felt like the foulest creature in the world. 

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

Warning: lots of angst

Buckle up b*tches 😎

The last text Shane sent Ilya was goodnight ilya on a Tuesday in December and after that, he stopped. 

Yet the texts kept coming. 

Lily: 

jane 

you are doing the thing again 

Shane read it from his couch after practice and put the phone face down on the cushion. 

Lily: 

jane. 

JANE 

okay 

i will tell you something interesting and you will respond 

group of jellyfish 

is called a smack 

SMACK jane 

you cannot ignore smack 

He didn't respond to smack. 

Lily: 

okay fine 

hollander had good game last night 

very good actually 

i am not saying this 

but his positioning in the offensive zone is getting better 

you did not hear this from me 

Shane read that one three times and put his phone in his jacket pocket and made dinner. 

They had a thing — had had a thing — where they pulled other players apart. Not maliciously, just the way two people who watched a lot of hockey talked about hockey. Jane would say something about a winger's edge work and Ilya would come back with what it looked like from the ice, the inside view, and they'd go back and forth until it was late. Shane had told him once, in careful Jane terms, that his defensive transitions were half a second slow on his weak side and Ilya had gone quiet for a moment and then said yes. i know this. i am working on it. Like he was relieved someone had said it out loud. 

Shane made pasta and ate it standing at the counter and watched the texts roll in on his lockscreen. 

Lily: 

kovalenko 

you watch him yes 

what do you think 

Lily: 

jane 

Lily: 

okay i will tell you what i think 

i think he is good player who does not trust himself 

you can see it. he has the skill but when it matters he looks for someone else 

i think maybe someone tell him a long time ago he is not the guy 

and now he believe it 

what do you think 

Shane didn't answer it. 

He thought about Kovalenko, who he'd played against twice and who Ilya was completely right about. He thought about what he'd say if he were going to say something. He didn't say it. 

Lily: 

jane 

A while later. Shane had almost been asleep. 

Lily: 

can i ask you something 

Shane watched the screen. 

Lily: 

you know when you are with big group 

and there is so many people 

and they are all. you know. they like you. they are happy you are there 

Lily: 

does it ever feel 

Lily: 

i don't know how to say 

Shane sat up a little. 

Lily: 

okay 

do you ever feel very lonely 

when there is so many people who adore you 

i think maybe i cannot say this to anyone here 

they will not understand 

but you are not here so 

Shane stared at the screen. 

He thought about his parents' dinner table. His mother tilting her head at him. Thomas who had known him since he was thirteen and still didn't know, would probably be the last to know because Shane couldn't stand the thought of Thomas looking at him differently even for a second. He thought about the locker room, Hayden beside him in the cubby talking about nothing, and how much Shane liked him, and how little Hayden actually knew about the person sitting next to him. 

He started typing. 

every fucking day 

He looked at it. 

Three words on a screen at eleven forty pm. His own words. True words. 

He deleted it. 

Put the phone on the nightstand. Lay back down. Tried to close his eyes. 

His heart was going too fast. He did the things he usually did, slowed his breathing, counted, the same way he reset between shifts. It didn't work. His heart kept going and the ceiling kept being too close and the apartment felt like it had gotten smaller while he was lying there. 

He got up. 

Movement helped sometimes. He went to the kitchen, drank some water, stood at the counter in the dark. His hands weren't steady. He looked at them like they belonged to someone else. 

He walked to the living room and back. Stood in the hallway. The walls were doing something — not moving, he knew they weren't moving, but they were now present in a way walls weren't usually present, they felt like they were closing in. 

He couldn't get a full breath. 

He tried again. Got most of one. His vision was doing something at the edges, and his heart was so loud he could feel it in his jaw and he thought, very clearly, I'm going to die in my hallway at nineteen. Shane knew that wasn't true but right now he couldn't make himself believe it wasn't true. 

He put his fist through the drywall. 

It wasn't a decision. His arm just did it. The sound was dull and not as satisfying as it should have been and his knuckles lit up immediately, bright specific pain, and he stood there with his hand in the wall for a second before he pulled it out. 

He looked at his hand. 

His hand. 

His right hand. His passing hand. His faceoff hand. The hand his contract was built around, the hand that — 

He slid down the wall and sat on the floor. 

The panic was still there but the pain had punched a hole in it somehow, given it somewhere to go. He sat on the floor of his hallway with his back against the drywall and his right hand cradled against his chest and breathed. In. Out. The apartment was quiet. His hand throbbed with his pulse. 

He didn't mean to cry. It came up the same way the panic had, just pressure building until it found somewhere to go. It wasn't loud. He sat on the floor of his hallway at midnight and cried quietly and when it was done he sat there a while longer because he didn't have anywhere else to be. 

His hand hurt. 

He got up eventually. Went to the kitchen, ran it under cold water, flexed each finger slowly. Nothing broken. Probably. It was swelling a little at the middle knuckle and he stood there with it under the tap and thought about Thériault asking him tomorrow why his hand looked like that, and his teammates, and the team doctor, and the inevitable conversation that he had absolutely no answer for. 

He turned the tap off. 

He went back to bed and lay there in the dark and didn't pick up his phone. 

Lily: 

goodnight jane 

i hope you are okay 

wherever you are 

Shane read it. Turned the screen off. 

He looked at the ceiling until it got light outside. 

He'd scrapped before. Junior hockey made you eventually — be the best player on the ice long enough and someone would make it personal. He knew how to handle himself. But in the MLH as a rookie he hadn't fought yet. Hadn't needed to. Hadn't wanted to give anyone the satisfaction. 

Yet here he was showing up to practice with bruised knuckles and no black eye on an opposing player to show for it. 

He'd shown up to practice three days ago and Thériault had looked at his right hand for a long moment before Shane said he'd caught them on something at home, which was technically true, and Thériault had held the look one beat longer than comfortable and then moved on. The swelling had gone down enough to wrap and get a glove over. It pulled when he gripped his stick hard. He gripped his stick hard constantly. It hurt, but it was manageable. 

The Bell Centre was already loud and they weren't even on the ice yet. Twelve thousand people who had come to watch Montreal beat Boston and would not be quiet about wanting that. Shane had loved this sound since his first home game. 

He stood in the tunnel and thought about Ilya. The texts he hadn't answered. The one he'd typed and deleted. He caught himself before he started thinking too hard and pressed his wrapped knuckles hard against the butt end of his stick. The pain came up sharp and immediate and his brain snapped back, nothing in it but the sting and the noise of the crowd above him and the cold coming off the ice. 

Good. He needed that. 

Thériault was talking about the power play. Shane tracked it and nodded at the right moments and kept his knuckles against the stick. 

During warmups, Shane stayed in the Montreal end and ran his routine — edges, shots, the figure eight he'd been doing since peewee — head down, running his pre-game litany in his head. 

He only looked once. 

Rozanov was doing a lap, easy, unhurried. Shane pressed his knuckles against the butt end of his stick until his eyes watered and looked at the net and thought about his angles. 

The opening faceoff put them across from each other and Shane got into his stance and looked at the dot. The crowd was giving Rozanov everything they had. That was Montreal, that was this building — loud and mean with a long memory for enemies. Shane had watched it work on other guys, players who came into the Bell Centre and spent sixty minutes trying to prove something to people who'd already decided. It usually got in. You could see it happen, the crowd finding the frequency and the player starting to play against the crowd instead of against the Voyageurs. 

Rozanov wasn't doing that. He looked distracted. 

He was just standing there. Not feeding off it, not performing against it. His eyes moved to the lower bowl, the WAGs section behind the glass, and swept left to right, slow and automatic, like he wasn't aware he was doing it. 

Shane pressed his fingers into the butt end of his stick. ouch 

The lineman held up the puck. 

Shane won the draw. 

The first period was the kind of hockey that asked everything of you. Boston was forechecking hard and Montreal was matching it and Shane was in it completely — reading the ice, moving before he'd decided to move, his body doing what it had been trained to do since he was six years old. A board battle in the corner with a Boston winger, both of them fighting for position, Shane getting his hip in and coming out with the puck. A shot from the left circle that rang iron. A defensive breakdown he got back to cover and cleared. 

When they were battling for the puck it was easier. The world fell away and there was nothing left in his head, no unanswered texts, no deleted messages, no box sitting in the back of his chest with a label on it he was pretty sure he could read from here. Just ice and bodies and where the puck was going next. Like falling into a deep sleep. The only thing that felt like actual relief. 

The stoppages were harder. 

An icing call midway through the second and play stopped and Shane coasted to a halt near the boards with nothing to do for thirty seconds except stand on the same sheet of ice as Rozanov. 

He kept his visor down and his chin angled toward the Montreal bench. His freckles were there, they were always there, he couldn't do anything about them, but the visor helped  

Rozanov was looking at the crowd again. He'd been off all game, distracted in a way Shane hadn't seen from him on tape or on the ice before. Was he sick? Shane pressed his knuckles against his stick. Not his problem. He wasn't involving himself with Rozanov anymore, that was done, that was the whole point. But he kept looking. Was he okay? 

Shane pressed harder on his knuckles and watched the referee sort out the dot. 

But the Montreal faithful were screaming at Rozanov and he wasn't hearing them. His eyes were moving across the lower bowl, that same quiet left to right sweep, and Shane watched him do it and felt something cold move through him. 

He was looking for Jane. 

That was — that was what this was. Shane stood there and watched it happen and felt the realization land with the particular weight of something you should have understood sooner. Ilya knew Jane was a Voyageurs fan. Knew she was cousins with Hollander. It would make sense, wouldn't it, that she might show up to some of her cousin's games. He didn't know she'd be here tonight. He was just looking. Just in case. 

Shane pressed his knuckles hard against his stick and looked at the referee and felt like the lowest creature on earth. 

She wasn't here. She wasn't anywhere. 

He felt terrible. He thought about pressing his knuckles into the boards until something gave. He thought about how badly he wanted one of his teammates to start something tonight, a real brawl, the kind that emptied both benches, so he could get in it and hit something and have a reason. So it would make sense to everyone watching. Canada's good boy. The prince of hockey. Yeah. Sure. Let them all see it. Let the whole building know Shane Hollander wasn't a good person, had never been a good person, was standing twenty feet away from a man who was quietly scanning a crowd for someone who didn't exist and it was all Shane’s doing. 

Play resumed and he went back to work. 

Third period, Montreal up two, another faceoff at center, and Rozanov did it again. Waiting for the linesman, not looking at Shane, his eyes going to the WAGs section. The same sweep. The same slight pause when it came up empty. 

It hit him differently this time. Not the cold sick guilt from before, just — sadness. Clean and simple and right in the chest. Ilya out here doing his job in front of twelve thousand people who hated him, scanning the same section of crowd for the fourth time tonight on the off chance.  

The puck dropped. 

Shane loses that faceoff. 

Montreal held on. Four two final. The building came all the way up, twelve thousand people on their feet, and Shane came off the ice with his teammates and let the noise wash over him without quite letting it in. Hayden was whooping beside him, gloves raised, Trembleur had grabbed Lemaire around the shoulders. Shane tapped sticks with whoever was closest and kept moving toward the tunnel. 

He was drenched. He could feel his jersey stuck to his back, his hair plastered flat under the helmet. He pulled the helmet off as soon as he hit the tunnel and tucked it under his arm and kept walking. The crowd was leaning over the boards on both sides, hands reaching down, and Shane moved through it on autopilot, fist bumping what was offered, eyes down. 

Something dropped in front of him. A hat, a kid's hat, bright red, landed on the ice right at his skates. He stopped and picked it up and straightened and held it back up toward the boards and a kid maybe eight years old grabbed it from him with both hands, thrilled, and Shane almost smiled at that. 

He was facing the ice. 

The crowd was thinning, people pulling on coats, kids being lifted over seats. Rozanov was still out near center saying something to a teammate, and behind him the WAGs section was almost empty now, the last few people filing out. 

Shane stood there and thought about Rozanov's eyes going to that section all night. Looking for someone who wasn't there. Who was never going to be there. 

He pulled his right glove off. Flexed his knuckles once, carefully. The sting was dull. 

He turned around and went inside. 

The Ottawa house smelled the same. His mother's cooking already in the walls when he walked in, the particular creak of the third stair, the draft that came under the back door that his father had been meaning to fix since Shane was twelve. He stood in the entrance with his bag and just breathed it for a second. 

"You're thin," his mother said, appearing from the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder, looking him over the way she did, quick and thorough. 

"I'm not thin." 

"You're not eating enough on the road." 

"Mom." 

She took his face in both hands and looked at it and then kissed his cheek and went back to the kitchen. "Dinner in an hour. Go put your things upstairs." 

His childhood bedroom smelled the way rooms got when nobody had been in them for a while. He turned the baseboard heater on and sat on the bed while it ticked to life and looked at the room. 

The Scott Hunter poster above the desk. The shelf of trophies he'd stopped adding to at fifteen when they got too numerous, a whole childhood of them lined up, some of them dusty now. The window that looked out at the backyard where he'd shot pucks against the garage door from age seven to sixteen, every night until his father came out and told him it was nine o'clock. 

On the wall above the desk, tacked up beside the Hunter poster, was Shane's drawing. 

His art teacher, Mr. Beaumont, had walked them through it — take a photograph, grid it out, transfer it line by line. Shane had thought he couldn't draw, had never tried particularly, and then he'd sat there for three classes and done the thing Beaumont told him to do and at the end of it there was a drawing of his own hands on the paper in front of him and it wasn't bad. It genuinely wasn't bad. The shading on the knuckles, the way the fingers curved. He'd looked at it for a long time before he brought it home. 

His mother had framed it. Of course she had. 

He looked at it now from the bed. His hands, age sixteen, before the MLH bought them for a million dollars a year. He flexed his right hand in his lap, felt the pull across the wrapped knuckles. 

His phone had three unread texts from Ilya. He didn't open them. 

The frequency had dropped off this past week. Not gone — Ilya wasn't built for gone — but less. A few times this week instead of repeated texts daily, like he was giving Jane space without quite being able to leave it alone. Shane didn't know if that was better or worse for his sense of guilt.  

Every text made him feel terrible. They kept arriving, Ilya still there, still sending things into the silence, and Shane on the other end of it with no way to explain himself. 

He wanted to go downstairs and tell his mother. That was the stupid thing, the childish thing — he was sitting in his childhood bedroom at nineteen years old and he wanted to go downstairs and tell his mom that he'd made a mess and have her tell him how to fix it. She would know what to do. She always knew what to do.  

He couldn't tell her this one. 

He left his phone face down under the Hunter poster and went downstairs to help with dinner. 

The house was full by seven. His mother moved through the crowd with ease. She had been hosting these same people for twenty years, every Christmas Eve. Right now she was laughing at something near the kitchen, redirecting a conversation across the room with the particular skill of a woman who effortlessly managed everything. She was wearing the earrings his father had gotten her for their anniversary and she looked happy and the house looked like Christmas and Shane stood with a drink and watched her and felt something press against the inside of his chest. 

She'd grown up in Montreal loving the Voyageurs. Had raised Shane on them, on the history of the franchise, on what it meant to wear that jersey. When he'd been drafted she'd cried in a way she clearly hadn't meant to, and then composed herself in about four seconds and started talking logistics. She was the one who'd fielded the first brand calls, who'd sat across from the Rolex people and the Reebok people and made sure Shane understood what he was agreeing to and what he wasn't. She cared about what he represented. To the franchise, to the country, to every Japanese Canadian kid watching him on a Saturday night and seeing something of themselves on the ice. 

Shane understood the weight of that. He'd always understood it. He carried it carefully because she'd asked him to and because she was right that it mattered. 

He thought about what she'd do with the rest of it. The parts she didn't know about. 

He smiled at his father's colleague and answered a question about the season. 

He was surrounded by neighbours, family friends, and other people who had known him since he was small. They were proud of him in the warm proprietary way of people who felt they'd had a hand in something good happening. He moved through the party and accepted their pride and gave it back. He was good at that, practiced, and had been practicing it for years. The room was loud and warm and full of food and his mother kept catching his eye from across it and smiling. 

He thought about Ilya's text. Do you ever feel so lonely surrounded by so many people who adore you. 

He thought about it for most of the night actually, moving from conversation to conversation with his drink in his hand, the house warm and bright around him and everyone he'd grown up with telling him how proud they were. 

By eleven the last few stragglers were putting on coats and his father was finding car keys and his mother was at the door saying goodbye to the neighbours. Shane kissed her cheek and said goodnight and went upstairs. 

His bedroom was warm now, the baseboard heater having done its job. He sat on the bed in the dark and didn't turn the light on. The drawing was just a pale rectangle above the desk. The Hunter poster a darker shape beside it. 

Scott Hunter, captain of the New York Admirals, who had probably never felt like this his rookie year, Shane thought. 

Shane sat there for a while. 

He picked up his phone without deciding to. Opened the messages. Three new ones from Ilya. The same random jumble of thoughts Ilya usually sent him. 

His thumb moved. 

merry christmas 

He sent it and turned his volume off and put the phone face down on the nightstand and lay back on his childhood bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling. 

Downstairs he could hear his mother and father moving around, the sounds of the house settling back into itself after the party. The familiar creak of the kitchen floor. His father's voice, low, saying something. His mother laughing at it. 

He looked at the ceiling for a long time. 

His phone lit up at eleven twenty-three pm on New Year's Eve and Shane looked at it from the couch and felt his stomach drop. 

Lily calling. 

He watched it ring. It stopped. He sat there. 

It rang again. 

He picked up his water bottle and put it down and watched it ring and thought about every possible reason Ilya Rozanov would be calling Jane at eleven twenty-three on New Year's Eve. The list was not long. Either he was drunk and feeling sentimental, which was manageable, or he'd figured something out, which was not manageable at all, which was the kind of thing Shane's brain immediately started building a case for while the phone rang and rang on the cushion beside him. 

It stopped again. 

It dinged now with repeated texts.  

jane 

JANE 

pick up phone 

i need you to pick up phone 

Shane stared at the screen. His heart was going fast in a way that had nothing to do with exercise. 

The phone rang again. 

Shane sat there through four rings with his knuckles between his teeth. 

It rang again. 

And again. 

And again. 

Shane was standing up. He didn't remember standing up. He was in the kitchen now, water bottle in hand, and his phone was on the counter and it was ringing and every time it stopped and started again something tightened further in his chest, winding up, and he was thinking did he figure it out did he figure it out on a loop that the ringing kept resetting and — 

He'd picked up. 

He didn't know how that had happened. The phone was just at his ear and he was standing in his kitchen and on the other end there was noise, loud Russian music, something breaking, laughter, Ilya's voice somewhere in it talking to someone else, not to Shane, not yet, he didn't know Shane was there. 

Shane stood completely still and said nothing. 

"—да нет, она настоящая, я тебе говорю—" 

"Jane?" Ilya's voice, suddenly close. "Are you there?" 

Fuck fuck fuck. What to do, what to do? He could hang up. He should hang up. But then Ilya would just keep calling, he'd been calling for twenty minutes already, he wasn't going to stop, and Shane standing in his kitchen having a quiet crisis wasn't going to change that. He could just — he was Jane. He could do this. He just wouldn't talk. Barely. As little as possible. 

Shane made a sound. High, small, affirmative. A mmhm that came from somewhere above his normal register. 

A beat of silence. 

Then Ilya, away from the phone, to the room, loud and triumphant: 

"ВОТ. Я ЖЕ ГОВОРИЛ. JANE. НАСТОЯЩАЯ. СКАЗАЛ ВАМ." 

The room erupted. 

"HA." Not to Shane. To the room. "Вот. Я говорил вам." Then, to Shane, switching to English: "Jane. Jane you are there." 

Fuck. Mmhms weren't going to cut it, he couldn't just breathe into the phone for the entire call, Ilya would know something was wrong. Maybe if he just — whispered. Kept it low and soft and didn't give him anything to work with. Maybe that would be enough. 

"I'm here," Shane whispered. "Why are you calling me at midnight." 

"Is not midnight yet. Is — " a pause, he was apparently checking, "— eleven forty seven. I have thirteen minutes." Another pause. "My friends say you are not real." 

Ilya hadn't said anything about the whispering. Hadn't paused, hadn't asked why Jane sounded like that, hadn't clocked anything at all. Shane stood in his kitchen and felt something loosen very slightly in his chest. It was good enough. It was going to be good enough. 

In the background Shane could hear someone saying something in Russian, tone unmistakably skeptical. 

"I’m real," Shane whispered. 

"You see? She is real." This to his audience again. Then back to Shane: "Say something. They need to hear." 

"I'm not performing for your friends Ilya," Shane hissed, still whispering but with an edge to it now. The panic was seeping out, turning into something else, a hot pressure behind his eyes that he really didn't need right now. He pressed his free hand flat against the kitchen counter and breathed through his nose. 

"See?" Ilya said, to the room, delighted. "You see how she is? This is Jane. This is exactly Jane." The background Russian got louder, argumentative, and Ilya fired something back at them that Shane couldn't follow, fast and sharp. Then, to Shane: "They say you sound like you are whispering." 

"I am whispering." 

"Why." 

"Roommates," Shane whispered. "They're asleep." 

"Ah." A beat. "You are not secretly married?" 

Shane's voice cracked on the inhale and then the whisper just — left. "What?" Loud, normal, completely his own voice, bouncing off the kitchen walls. 

He cringed so hard his eyes closed. Fuck fuck fuck. 

Ilya kept going. 

"Married," he said again, patient, like this was a reasonable question. "You whisper, you never meet, you disappear for weeks. My friends say maybe you are married woman." 

Shane exhaled slowly through his nose. Okay. Okay he hadn't noticed. It was fine. Everything was fine. 

"I'm not married," Shane whispered. 

"Okay." He seemed satisfied. "This is the other thing they said. I tell them no." 

In the background someone made a noise that was clearly unconvinced. Ilya said something back to them, longer this time, and whatever it was made the room react, a few of them laughing and one of them loudly disagreeing. Shane sat in his quiet apartment and listened to the distant chaos of a New Year's party in a language he didn't speak and waited. 

"Sorry," Ilya said. "My friends are idiots." 

"It's okay." 

"No it's —" he said something to someone, covering the phone partially, then came back. "One second jane." 

The background noise shifted, footsteps, a door, and then it got quieter. Not silent — Shane could still hear the party behind something, a wall maybe, muffled bass and voices — but quieter. Just Ilya breathing and the distant sound of other people having a better New Year's than Shane. 

"Okay," Ilya said. Different now. The performance gone out of his voice. 

Shane waited. 

"I wanted to hear your voice," Ilya said. Just that, straight out, the way he said everything. "I know this is — I know you don't want. But I wanted to hear it." 

Shane sat very still on his couch in the dark. 

"Okay," he whispered. 

"You are okay? You have good Christmas?" 

"Yeah," Shane said. "It was good. You?" 

"Yes. Russian Christmas is in January so." A pause. "Tonight is just party with friends." 

"Sounds loud." 

"Very loud." He could hear the smile in it. "I don't mind loud usually. Tonight I am a little bit." He stopped. Started again. "I don't know. Tired of it maybe." 

Shane didn't say anything. 

"Jane," Ilya said. "Can I ask you something." 

"Yeah." 

"Why you don't talk to me anymore." 

Shane closed his eyes. 

"I've been busy," he whispered. 

"You are always busy." Not accusatory. Just, pleading. "Before you were busy you still talk to me. We talk about hockey and about other things. And then you just." A pause. "Stop." 

"I know." 

"Did I do something." 

"No," Shane said. "You didn't do anything." 

His eyes were burning. He blinked and looked at the ceiling and blinked again. He was not going to do this. He was absolutely not going to cry on the phone with Ilya Rozanov on New Year's Eve while pretending to be a girl named Jane. He was not. 

He was doing it a little bit. 

"Then why."  

He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. Ilya hadn't done anything. That was the whole problem. Ilya had done everything right, had been nothing but exactly himself the entire time, and Shane had stood across from him at a Halloween party in a wig and made a series of decisions that had led directly to this moment, this phone call, this conversation he had no clean way out of. He couldn't tell him the truth. He couldn't say I'm not Jane, I've never been Jane, I'm the person you're supposed to hate and I've been lying to you for three months and I think about you constantly and I don't know what to do with any of it. He couldn't say any of that. All he could do was let Ilya down as gently as possible and feel like a monster about it. 

He looked at the ceiling. Through the window the city was doing what it did on New Year's Eve, noise and light, someone's fireworks going off a few streets over, pink and brief against the sky. 

"I don't know how to explain it," he whispered. 

Ilya was quiet for a moment. 

"I like you jane," he said. Just like that. "I know you know this. I know maybe this is. I know it is strange situation. But I think about you. I think about you a lot and I know you don't want to meet and I know you don't always want to talk and I just." He stopped. "I just wanted to say it to you. Out loud. One time." 

Shane's throat was doing something complicated. 

"Ilya," he whispered. 

"You don't have to say anything back," Ilya said quickly. "I know. I just." A short exhale. Almost a laugh, but not quite. "I am a little drunk jane." 

"I know." Shane's voice came out steady. He didn't know how. The tears were running down his face and dripping off his jaw and he was standing in his dark kitchen on New Year's Eve crying silently into his phone and his voice came out steady. 

"I miss you," he said. "Even though I have not. Even though we never." He stopped. Tried again. "I miss talking to you." 

Shane scrubbed his wet face with the corner of the t-shirt he was wearing. 

He thought about a Halloween party in October. A pool lit up blue. A man in a vampire costume who had looked at him like he was the only person there and had remembered his freckles three months later and had texted him about jellyfish and collective nouns and Joe Sakic and had scanned a crowd four times in sixty minutes looking for someone who didn't exist. 

"I'm sorry," Shane whispered. "I'm really sorry Ilya." 

"Don't be sorry," Ilya said. "Just. Talk to me sometimes. That is all I want." 

Shane sat there. 

Neither of them said anything. A second. Maybe longer. Shane didn't know. He sat in the silence and thought about every text he'd ever sent as Jane, every collective noun, every hockey argument, every late night when he hadn't wanted to put the phone down, and felt the weight of all of it sitting on his chest at once. He couldn't say yes. He couldn't say no. He couldn't say I don't exist, I never existed, every single thing I've ever sent you was a betrayal and I've known that for months and I kept doing it anyway because I couldn't stop. 

There was nothing to say. 

"He found out didn't he," Ilya said. "Hollander. He found out about us." 

Shane's brain moved fast. He could correct it. He could say no, that's not it, and then what — then he had nothing, no explanation, no way to end this that didn't hurt Ilya worse. Or he could just... Not correct it. Let it sit there. Let Ilya build the explanation himself because Ilya's explanation was cleaner than the truth and kinder than the truth and Shane was a coward and a liar and apparently this was who he was now. 

The window closed. 

Shane said nothing. 

Ilya was quiet for a moment. 

"And he told you to stop," he said. 

Shane said nothing. 

Another silence. Longer. 

"Okay," Ilya said. Very quiet. "Okay jane." 

"Ilya —" 

"What?" Ilya said. Sharp, sharper than Shane had ever heard his tone before. "Hollander, your cousin. He tell you who you can talk to?" 

"It's not like —" 

"He tell you this and you just. Okay. Fine. Stop talking to Ilya." The drunk looseness was gone from his voice. "Just like that." 

"Ilya —" 

"No I just —" He stopped. Shane could hear him breathing. "I don't understand this Jane. I text you for weeks. Weeks. You don't answer. And now you tell me it is because of him. Because Shane Hollander does not want his cousin to talk to me." 

"It's complicated." 

"It is not complicated," Ilya said. "He is your cousin. Not your father. Not your —" another pause, something in Russian under his breath. "You are grown woman jane. He does not get to decide this." 

"I know —" 

"Do you?" Not cruel. Just direct, the way he was always direct when he was texting Jane. "Because from where I am it looks like you just let him. You just disappear and I don't get to know why and now I know why and it is —" he exhaled hard. "It is very stupid reason jane." 

Shane opened his mouth. 

Closed it. 

"He's not — it's not that simple," Shane managed. "He's important to me and he has opinions about —" 

"About me," Ilya finished Shane’s sentence. "He has opinions about me." 

Shane was so tired. He was so tired and so sad and his face was wet and all he had left in him was one word at a time. 

"Yes." 

A pause. Like Ilya had needed a second for that one. 

"Because I play for Boston." 

"Yes." 

Another pause. Longer. Shane could hear him breathing on the other end, just breathing, and said nothing and let each yes land where it landed and hated himself completely. 

"This is —" Ilya said something short and sharp in Russian. "This is hockey jane. This is job. What does this have to do with you and me." 

Shane had nothing. He stood in his kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear and the city going off outside and had absolutely nothing to say because Ilya was right and wrong at the same time in a way Shane couldn't begin to explain. 

"I'm sorry," Shane said. 

"I don't want sorry." His voice had gone quieter. Still angry but underneath it was something that was worse than angry. “Were you ever going to meet me, Jane?" 

Shane pressed his fingers against his mouth. They were shaking. 

"I don't know," he whispered, unable to give that final no, Ilya heard it anyway. 

A long silence. 

"Okay," Ilya said. Very quiet. "Okay." 

"Ilya —" 

"No it's... I understand." The anger had gone somewhere else, somewhere flat and tired. "I just wanted to know." 

Shane stood in his dark kitchen and felt like the worst person alive. 

"Happy new year Ilya," he whispered. It came out wrecked and he couldn't fix it. 

A pause. 

"Happy new year Jane," Ilya said. "Wherever you are." 

The call ended. 

Shane stood there with the phone at his side and the city outside making all the noise it had and somewhere across it, midnight arrived without him. 

Chapter End Notes

I know, I know. This one was a lot. I promise you we are going to get there, these two idiots are going to figure it out, the happy ending is real and it is coming and it is going to be worth it. Shane and Ilya have some things to work through first. Several things. Many things. Bear with me.
Thank you so much for every comment and every kudos, genuinely — I read all of them and they mean more than I know how to say. If you're enjoying this fic please share it around, it really does help more than you know and this story deserves to find the people who will love it.
As for updates — I am writing faster on this fic than I have written anything maybe ever. Shane and Ilya are just kind of channeling through me at this point and I am along for the ride same as you. I'll get the next chapter out as soon as I can, I'm having the time of my life writing this and I don't want to stop.

Til' next time - XOAR

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

hello and welcome to something a little different. if you're familiar with this fandom at all you'll know that shane and ilya are not usually written like this. the hatred is real in this one, or at least it looks like hatred, and i know that might be an adjustment. i promise i know what i'm doing. probably.

that said if you do decide to stick around i would absolutely love to hear from you. kudos, bookmarks, comments, all of it genuinely keeps me going and i read every single one. if you have thoughts, feelings, complaints, or just want to scream at me in the comments please do. i am very normal about feedback.

as always i have absolutely no idea where this is going. i am writing this the way you eat a meal in the dark, one bite at a time, hoping for the best. if you see inconsistencies, i tried, i really did, but this is unbeta'd and i am only human. we move forward together.

thanks for being here. hope you enjoy the chaos.

The team had been good about the All-Star thing. Shane was voted in by the fans to go to the All-Star game this year, which felt surreal. Hayden had clapped him on the shoulder in the locker room when the results were announced and said obviously in a tone that was complimentary, which was very Hayden. Trembleur had said something in rapid French that Shane caught maybe sixty percent of but gathered was congratulatory. Even Lemaire, who would be going as the Voyageurs’ official team representative for another year, had nodded at him politely.

He was friendly with most of them now. That had happened gradually over the season, the way it did — you spent enough hours on a bus and in a locker room with people and the edges wore off and you found out who was funny and who was not and who you could eat dinner with without getting into politics. He knew all their names, knew their habits, knew that Trembleur hid candy bars in his spare skates and that Owens will play country music if given the aux.

Hayden was the closest thing he had to a real friend on the team. They'd fallen into an easy rhythm — a few times Shane had gone over to Hayden's place after team skate, ordered food, played whatever Hayden had on the Xbox without much conversation about it. It wasn't deep. But it was comfortable in a way that Shane didn't take for granted.

He was aware that this was what being nineteen and a professional athlete looked like socially. Everyone was busy and everyone was tired and real friendship took time. The other rookies seemed to manage it with more ease than Shane did — Beaumont especially had this effortless way of moving between groups, always in the middle of something, always with somewhere to be. Shane watched him sometimes and couldn't figure out how he did it.

He didn't know how to explain what was actually going on in his life to any of them. That was probably the root of the awkwardness, the ceiling he kept hitting. He'd spent nineteen years being a certain kind of person — focused, driven, uncomplicated to the people around him — and somewhere around October that had stopped feeling true.

 He was supposed to know who he was. He was Shane Hollander. He had a Wikipedia page. But he'd sit next to Hayden in the locker room or across from Trembleur at dinner and feel like a fraud, like he was performing a version of himself that had maybe never been true and was becoming less true every month.

It made him closed off. Hayden was easy and open and Shane liked him genuinely and still couldn't quite close the gap, couldn't quite let it be simple, because simple required knowing what you actually were and Shane was still working on that part.

The least like a fraud he'd felt all season was when he was talking to a man who thought he was a girl. He wasn't going to think about the irony of that.

He was revisiting their text thread before he could stop himself, somewhere over Kentucky, thirty thousand feet up with nothing else to do. Past the New Years’s call. Earlier. He scrolled back past the silence, past the unanswered texts, back to December when things had still been — something. When he'd still been texting back.

There was one from a late Thursday night.

Ilya: jane. question.

Jane: okay

Ilya: you watch a lot of games, yes? what do you think of defensive zone coverage this season, league wide. is it getting worse or am i imagining

Jane: its getting worse. teams are cheating higher for the transition and leaving themselves exposed. its been a trend building for three seasons.

Ilya: YES. thank you. i say this to people and they look at me like i am insane.

Jane: who did you say it to

Ilya: teammates. coaches. guy at starbucks.

Jane: what did the guy at starbucks say

Ilya: he said have a nice day ilya which i think means he agreed.

Jane: your teammates didn't agree?

Ilya: they dont see it. they think ilya is crazy

Jane: no one believes me when I say it either

Ilya: you have this problem also?

Jane: yeah. no one really wants to talk hockey with me outside of class.

Ilya: but you are in sports management program. is not this all everyone talk about?

Jane: you would think. in class everyone has opinions, everyone wants to discuss. but outside of that they just. switch off. and i don't really know how to talk about much else. doesn't help that most of my classmates are older than me.

Ilya: older? how much older

Jane: im a freshman. first year. everyone else is further along.

Ilya: ah. da. this makes sense. same for me last year, first year in league. everyone very nice, everyone happy i am there. but after practice they go somewhere and i am not quite. i don't know the word.

Jane: included?

Ilya: not excluded either. just. adjacent. you know this word.

Jane: yeah. i know that word.

Jane: does it get better

Ilya: little bit. you find one or two people. this is enough i think. trying to find this with everyone is maybe not realistic.

Jane: thank you

Ilya: goodnight jane

Jane: goodnight ilya

Shane locked the screen and put the phone back in his bag.

He felt that familiar pit in his stomach when he realized he missed texting Ilya, who was funny and earnest and smarter about hockey than the press ever gave him credit for.

Shane had read enough coverage of Rozanov to know how he got written — the lifestyle pieces, the party photos, the ladies man stuff, occasionally a grudging acknowledgment that he could skate. The hockey IQ thing never came up. Shane wondered sometimes if it would look different if Ilya did his interviews in Russian. If what the press was actually measuring wasn't his hockey sense at all but the way his sentences came out, the gaps where he searched for a word, the accent sitting over it all.

Shane had read those same journalists go long on players who were mediocre and articulate. Ilya was neither and they'd decided what that meant and written it down and called it analysis. It bothered Shane more than it probably should have.  

The fasten seatbelt sign came on. Nashville was now below them, pale winter light, the city coming up fast through the clouds.

His first All-Star game.

He knew since he was six years old this was what he wanted. All-Stars, the recognition —what it meant, what it measured. He'd wanted to be the kind of player who got here. Now, here he was.

His mother had called him the night before he flew out. Enjoy it Shane, this is an honor, you worked for this. Then, after a pause: and socialize. Please. Talk to people. It's for fun, not a tournament. She hadn't said anything else and she hadn't needed to. She wasn't going to tell him outright that she worried about him rattling around in that Montreal apartment alone with nobody to call.

The format this year was Europe vs North America. Shane had read enough of the preview coverage to know exactly why that was the format this year. His name and Rozanov's name in every other sentence.

Since New Year's the name Ilya Rozanov had been everywhere and Shane couldn't get away from it.

Rozanov had been playing unhinged hockey for a month straight — picking fights, running guys, the kind of aggressive that went past competitive into something else entirely. He'd knocked out two teeth on a Capitals winger in the second week of January. Hayden had brought it up after practice the day after.

"Rozanov’s lost his mind," Hayden had said, not looking up. "Like actually lost it. You see the hit on Petersen?"

Shane had seen the hit on Petersen. "Yeah."

"Dick move. Full dick move." Hayden had put his phone down. "You're going to All-Stars with that guy."

Shane had said nothing and found the raw patch on the side of his thumbnail without meaning to. It had started as a habit right after New Year’s, Rozanov's name in the air and Shane's teeth finding that same small strip of skin before he'd registered doing it. He'd chewed it bloody twice already. He was going to do it a third time if this weekend went the way he thought it was going to go.

The two best young centers in the league, rival franchises. The league had been building this narrative since Shane's draft and All-Star weekend was where it paid out. The Next Great Rivalry, in the flesh, for a full weekend, in a format that put them on opposite sides.

Shane had found the whole thing faintly absurd. Two people made into enemies by a marketing department.

Well, maybe that’s how it started, but Shane wasn’t sure what it was now.

He'd been turning over the question of how mad Ilya was actually going to be at Shane Hollander specifically. It was possible, he supposed, that four weeks was enough time for Ilya to move on. Maybe Ilya found a new Jane. One that was actually a girl. He wasn't exactly known for being short of options. Maybe Jane had already been filed away, one of many, and Shane was going to walk into that arena and find nothing waiting for him except the regular professional hostility of a competitor. Maybe the whole thing had already dissolved into the noise of Ilya's life.

The thought should have been a comforting one. It was not.

The more honest probability was that Ilya was still angry. The call hadn't sounded like a man who was willing to let go of anything. And if he was still angry, if he came into this week carrying what Shane thought he was carrying, then the league was finally going to get what it had been building toward all season. A real rivalry. Actual bad blood. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov genuinely not being able to stand each other in the same room.

They'd be so happy, Shane thought. Everyone would be so happy except him.

The wheels came down.

Shane picked up his bag from the overhead and followed the line of passengers off the plane.

He saw Ilya before Ilya saw him.

That was the only advantage Shane would get all weekend and it lasted approximately four seconds.

The All-Star arrival event was the kind of thing Shane's agent had called him about twice in the week leading up to it. It's not a red carpet exactly but treat it like one. No athletic wear. No team gear. Dress like you know what you're doing. Shane had stood in his closet in Montreal and looked at his options and gone with the charcoal suit, the one he wore on game days, white t-shirt underneath instead of a dress shirt because he'd drawn a line somewhere. It was fine. It was classic. It was not going to make any best dressed lists and he'd made his peace with that on the flight down.

Ilya was ahead of him in the line of arriving players, maybe thirty feet away. He was wearing something dark and fitted that Shane couldn't have named the designer of but which looked expensive in the way that was hard to fake. He moved like the red carpet was made for him—cool, sharp, and every bit the star. Shane looked like he was attending a funeral for someone he didn't know very well.

He had about thirty seconds of watching Ilya work the line — easy smile, handshakes, a journalist laughing at something he said — before Ilya turned and their eyes met.

The smile stopped. Just cut off, like something had been switched. His jaw tightened and he looked at Shane for a moment that went on long enough that the journalist he'd been talking to noticed and glanced over to see what had killed the conversation. Then Ilya said something brief to the journalist, shook his hand once, and walked off the carpet entirely. Not to another cluster of people, not to another camera. Just gone, through a side door, done.

Shane kept walking, summoning the version of himself he'd learned for cameras and interviews—the media persona, the easy smile and steady gaze. He didn’t let his thumb drift to his mouth, didn't give into the nervous habits. Instead, he focused on the charcoal suit, thinking of how he needed to project confidence for the photographers lining the carpet. He tried to keep whatever worry he felt from showing in his eyes, holding himself together for the flashes and the crowd.

The league had set up individual interview spots in a conference room off the main hall, a backdrop with sponsor logos, two chairs facing each other, and a small camera crew. His slot was eleven am. He'd been told it was for the All-Star week content package, the kind of thing that ran online and on the broadcast in the lead up to the game.

The interviewer was a woman named Carol who had warm eyes and a clipboard and who put Shane at ease in about thirty seconds without appearing to try. He'd done enough media by now to know the difference between someone who was good at their job and someone who was just going through motions, and Carol was good at her job.

She asked him about the week, about being a rookie at his first All-Star, about the Europe vs North America format. Shane gave her good answers, real answers. He was comfortable enough in interviews when the questions were about hockey.

Then she asked about Rozanov.

"The rivalry's been a big part of the narrative this season," she said. "What's your read on him as a player?"

Shane kept his shoulders level.

Shane felt a sudden flush rise to his cheeks as Carol brought up Rozanov, the unexpected awkwardness catching him off guard. He cleared his throat, trying to steady himself before answering. "He's exceptional," Shane said, his voice a shade tighter than before. "His hockey sense is — he sees the ice in a way that doesn't show up in the numbers. You have to watch him live to really get it. I have a lot of respect for what he does."

Carol smiled and made a note, but Shane was still aware of the warmth lingering in his face. "And off the ice? You guys had any chance to connect this week?"

Shane glanced away for a moment, fiddling with the edge of his jacket, before answering. "Not really," he said, the words a little rushed. "It's a busy week."

She nodded and moved on, and Shane managed to answer the rest of it cleanly, still feeling the faint embarrassment as he shook her hand after and that was that.

He was in the hallway outside the conference room looking at his phone when one of the production guys caught up with him. Young, maybe mid-twenties, headset around his neck, the slightly harried energy of someone managing seventeen things.

"Hey, Hollander. You got a minute? We pulled Rozanov's interview, we're doing a quick review before it goes to edit. Thought you might want to see it."

Shane looked at him.

"Why would I want to see it."

The guy's expression did something careful. "Just — might be relevant to you. Your call."

Shane followed him back into the conference room.

They pulled it up on the large monitors, Carol off camera, Rozanov in the chair Shane had been sitting in two minutes earlier. He looked relaxed. Of course he looked relaxed, he always looked relaxed, it was one of the more infuriating things about him. He answered the first few questions with the easy charm he deployed in every public setting, laughing once at something Carol said, leaning forward when he talked about the format.

Then Carol asked about Shane.

Ilya's face changed. It didn't go through stages, didn't shift gradually. It just went hard, like a door closing.

"Hollander? His hockey is fine," Ilya said, voice even and almost bored. "He follows the system. Does what he's supposed to on the ice. That's all."

Carol tilted her head. "The rivalry's been pretty heavily promoted this season. Is it real? Do you guys actually dislike each other?"

A pause. Ilya looked at the middle distance for a moment.

"I think," he said, "Shane Hollander is not as nice as the NHL wants everyone to think he is."

Carol blinked. "That's — can you say more about that?"

"No," Ilya said simply. And smiled, and the smile didn't reach anything.

The production guy reached over and paused the laptop. He looked at Shane.

"So," he said. "What did you do to that guy?"

Shane was looking at the frozen frame. Ilya's face mid-smile, eyes flat.

He'd just finished telling a camera that Ilya Rozanov had exceptional hockey sense. That he respected what he did. That he saw the ice in a way that didn't show up in the numbers. Shane felt a flush of embarrassment creep up his neck. Even if it was all true, Rozanov’s statement next to his own made Shane sound like a pansy or a try-hard, the kind of guy who was overly eager to please. He could just picture his mom’s reaction—she’d probably beam and tell him that brands love a player who’s polite and respectful, even when the competition isn’t. But standing there, Shane couldn’t shake the feeling that he'd handed over too much, and that somewhere, Ilya was listening and smirking.

"Nothing," Shane said.

The production guy regarded Shane with a look that made it clear he wasn’t buying a word of it.

"Okay," he said. "Sure."

The crowd at the skills competition was enthusiastic but not vicious, a crowd that had come to enjoy themselves rather than to watch anyone get hurt. Shane came out of the tunnel with the North America group and found his bench and sat down and did not look to his right.

He looked to his right.

Ilya was already there, on the Europe bench, stick across his knees, talking to nobody. Ilya wasn’t putting on a show for the crowd or getting up to any of his usual pre-game shenanigans—no jokes, no playful ribbing, no animated banter with his teammates. Instead, he sat quietly on the bench, stick laid across his knees, eyes moving over the ice with a jaw set and expression flat: a far cry from the lively, social presence he often was before games began. He had never seen Ilya Rozanov look like that before. Not in press. Not on tape.

He felt it from across the rink.

No helmets at the skills competition. Shane had known that, had filed it away as a minor inconvenience, had told himself it was fine because as long as they stayed on their respective benches. He just had to sit here and wait his turn and keep his face pointed at something neutral.

They'd both been signed up for the shot accuracy competition before the week started, back when All-Star logistics were being sorted. Four targets, one in each corner of the net, fastest to take all four down wins. Simple enough on paper. Shane had done versions of this drill since he was eight years old.

Ilya went first.

Shane watched him skate out to the setup and thought he'd seen Ilya shoot on tape a hundred times and thought he knew what to expect and was wrong. The anger was in it. He shot clean and hard and absolutely precise, every shot ringing out like bullets fired from a gun. The crowd came up loud after the third one. Louder after the fourth. He set a new record.

Shane sat on his bench and gawked. He was supposed to beat that?

Then Ilya was done and the crowd was going and he skated back toward his bench. Without looking around, his eyes found Shane’s as if drawn by a magnet—like he always knew exactly where Shane was in a rink. There was a clear challenge in them. Shane held it for a second and then looked at his stick.

Shane’s own run was clean. Not Ilya clean, not that angry precise thing, but clean and fast and he heard the crowd react politely—  he was good, genuinely good, just not whatever Ilya had just done. He finished the last target and let himself glance over once.

Ilya was watching him from the bench. Arms crossed, expression flat. He didn’t even seem remotely pleased to have set a new record. He was fully locked in on Shane. Shane’s gaze darted away from Rozanov, cheeks puffing as he blew out a breath and tried to shake off some of the stress lingering in his chest.

Shane kept his face pointed at the ice as he skated past the European bench and heard Ilya's voice cut across at him, low and mean.

"Maybe if you were as good at hockey as you are at controlling women you would have beaten me."

Shane’s cheeks blushed bright red but he kept skating. Ahead of him, at his own bench, Shane saw Scott Hunter swiftly stand up and lean over the boards, looking past Shane and at the European’s bench.

"Hey." Hunter's voice was sharp and immediate. "Shut the fuck up Rozanov."

Shane didn’t look back to see Rozanov’s expression at being told off.

Hunter was holding the gate open for Shane when he reached the bench, still leaning forward over the boards, looking at him with something between curiosity and concern.

"What's that about," Hunter said, quiet enough that it was just for Shane.

Shane could feel the heat in his face. He shook his head. "I don't know."

Hunter gave him a quick, skeptical glance, but let it go.

"Guy's a fucking asshole," he said. Then: "Good shooting, rook." Shane politely nodded at him and sat down.

He could still feel Ilya's eyes on him from the opposing bench.

The table had two chairs.

Shane stood at the back of the conference room and looked at the two chairs and the two microphones and the two nameplates and thought about whether it was too late to develop a sudden illness. It was not too late. People got sick all the time. He could be sick right now. He felt a little sick right now actually, that wasn't even a lie.

The room was filling up with press — cameras being positioned, reporters finding seats. Shane counted maybe forty journalists. Forty journalists and however many cameras and Ilya's nameplate six inches from his own nameplate and no visor, no helmet, nothing between his face and where Ilya’s would be in a matter of minutes.

The organizer found him by the back wall. She was efficient and warm in the way of someone who had been managing athletes for a long time, clipboard in hand, headset around her neck.

"We're ready for you whenever," she said. "Rozanov's just coming up from the locker room."

"Is there any chance," Shane said, "that someone else could do this?"

She blinked. "Sorry?"

"The press conference. Is there another — could you get someone else to sit up there? Hunter maybe? He's good with press, people like him —"

"You're the centerpiece of the whole week," she said, with the gentle tone of someone talking a child off a ledge. "You and Rozanov. That's the whole —"

"I know what it is," Shane said.

She put her hand briefly on his arm. "You're going to be great. I've watched your media all season, you're a natural. Just answer the questions, look at the cameras, you'll be done in twenty minutes."

Shane looked at the two chairs.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

She smiled and went back to her clipboard and Shane stayed where he was and watched the door and waited for Ilya to walk through it.

He had twelve minutes.

He looked at the two chairs. He looked at his own nameplate. He thought about sitting in that chair for twenty minutes next to Ilya Rozanov with no helmet and no visor and his freckles just out there on his face under conference room lighting and forty journalists looking for something to write about.

He was already moving before he'd decided to move.

He found the makeup station down the hall, a small room off the main corridor that had been set up for broadcast touch-ups. The artist was a woman maybe thirty, and already packing up some of her kit.

"I need you to cover my freckles," Shane said.

She looked at him. "Your freckles."

"All of them. On my face. Can you do that."

"I mean — technically yes, but —"

"Please," Shane said. "I know it's a weird ask. I just really need them covered."

She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who had seen a lot of strange requests from athletes and was adding this to the list. Then she pulled a chair out and pointed at it.

"Sit down."

It took eight minutes. She worked quickly and without much comment, which Shane appreciated. When she gave him a handheld mirror, he looked at himself and felt something loosen very slightly in his chest. Still his face. Still recognizably him. But the freckles were gone, smoothed out, he looked — different enough. He hoped.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't touch your face!" she called after him as he rushed back to the conference room.

Ilya was already at the table.

Of course he was already at the table. He was seated and composed and talking to his Russian handler in a low voice, and when Shane came through the door he glanced over and his eyes moved across Shane's face. Obviously seeing something he didn’t like, he rolled his eyes, slow and deliberate, and turned back to his handler.

Shane pulled out his chair and sat down. Was the room vibrating or was that just Shane?

The moderator was doing final checks with the camera crew. Reporters were settling. Shane reached for the pitcher of water and poured himself a glass and watched his hands shake doing it.

He drank the whole glass and poured another one.

Shane could feel Ilya's presence beside him, sharp and electric, like a live wire humming under the table, impossible to ignore.

Ilya was six inches away from him. Six inches. Shane had kissed this man. Had texted this man for months. Had cried on the phone with this man on New Year's Eve. Had broken up with him, or something close enough to it that the difference didn't matter. Oh my god, I jerked off to this man. Shane thought to himself. And now he was six inches away and there were twenty cameras pointed at both of them.

He put the pitcher down carefully. He felt like he might be struggling to breathe.

Ilya said something to his handler that made the handler laugh.

Shane looked at his full glass of water and thought about defensive zone coverage and tried to will his hands steady.

The moderator pointed at a reporter in the front row.

"Shane, first question for you — you're the only rookie at this year's All-Star game. What's that like? What does it mean to you to be here?"

Shane leaned toward his microphone and felt something in him settle. This one he knew how to answer because it was true.

"It means a lot," he said. "I grew up watching this game. Watching the guys who sat at tables like this one. To be here at nineteen is — it's not something I take lightly. There are a lot of kids watching this week who are where I was ten years ago and I'm aware of that. I want to make it mean something for them."

The room was warm on that one. A few cameras shifted toward him. Shane sat up a little straighter and felt the media mode lock in properly for the first time since he'd sat down.

The same reporter turned to Ilya. "Ilya, this format puts you on a team of all Europeans for the first time. How are you finding that?"

Shane could sense Ilya lean back slightly in his chair next to him. He didn’t dare look at him.

"Is very natural," he said. "Europeans, we understand each other. Same instincts, same style. Put us together and — is like we have played together forever. North America is very good. Very hardworking." A pause. "Europeans are better."

Laughter from the room. A few groans from the North American contingent in the back.

The reporter looked at Shane. "Shane, same question — what do you make of the format?"

"I think the format brings everyone together in a unique way," Shane said. "Usually, you’re representing your city or your club, but here, you’re grouped by something bigger—where you’re from. It gives us a shared identity for the weekend, and I think that motivates the players to step up and compete harder. It’s exciting to see how that changes the energy on the ice."

The moderator moved to the next hand.

"Shot accuracy yesterday — Rozanov fastest, Hollander second. Preview of tonight?"

Shane reached for his water and took a breath through his nose to steady himself before answering.

The cologne hit him like a door opening.

The pool. The dark. A hand against his jaw moving slowly like there was no reason to hurry.

He put the glass down.

"All-Star weekend isn't really about winning or losing," Shane said. His voice came out even. He genuinely did not know how. "It's about the game, about giving the fans something to enjoy. Tonight’s about having fun."

Ilya leaned in close to his microphone.

"Says loser," he said.

The room erupted. Shane looked at the camera in front of him and smiled the smile he used when something was not funny and he needed it to look like it was. Like he was in on the joke.

But his jaw tightened just a fraction, and the smile flickered at the edges. He glanced sideways at Ilya, catching the faint smirk on his rival’s face. The back-and-forth was supposed to be playful, but there was something sharper in Ilya’s tone tonight—a little more bite than usual. Shane felt the heat rise in his chest, annoyance blooming beneath the skin. He gripped the edge of the table a bit harder, working to keep his expression neutral for the cameras, but his eyes betrayed a flash of irritation.

He wanted to fire back, to show he wasn’t just a punchline, but the press conference wasn’t the place. Instead, he forced another smile, hoping no one would notice the tension mounting between them.

A reporter near the middle raised her hand and the moderator pointed at her.

"This one's for both of you. The rivalry between you two has been probably the biggest story in the league this season. The league's been pushing it hard, the media's been pushing it hard. But this week it seems like there might be something more personal going on between you two. Is the rivalry real? Do you actually have a problem with each other?"

The room went very quiet.

Shane felt Ilya go still beside him.

Shane leaned toward his microphone first.

"I think any rivalry worth watching has to be real on some level," he said. "Ilya's the best player in the Eastern Conference not playing for Montreal. That's not personal, that's just the situation. When we're on the ice together I want to beat him. I think that comes through."

A beat.

"He did call me a loser just now in front of forty journalists so. Yeah. I think it's real."

Laughter from the room. Genuine this time. Shane sat back.

Ilya paused for a long moment. The room waited.

"Hollander is good player," he said. "Talented. Very smart. But I think —" he paused, "— I think some people, they are very different person than what they show. On camera, very nice. Very professional. Good Canadian boy." Another pause from Ilya. "I think people who know Hollander in real life, away from cameras, away from the league — they see different person. I think maybe they do not always like what they see."

The room went very still.

A few reporters looked up from their notebooks. Someone's camera shifted toward Shane.

Shane looked at the moderator and kept his face completely neutral and felt every word of it land exactly where Ilya had aimed them.

"That's a pretty serious thing to say," the moderator said carefully. "Do you want to elaborate on that?"

"No," Ilya said pleasantly. "I think it is enough."

A few reporters wrote things down. Shane did not look at anyone.

A reporter near the back didn't wait to be called on.

"Shane." She leaned forward. "After all that — do you still have anything nice to say about Rozanov?"

Laughter rippled through the press. The moderator made a token effort to restore order.

Shane felt the heat rise up his neck and into his face so quickly he couldn’t stop it. He was acutely aware of the forty journalists, twenty cameras, and the question lingering in the air.

 Shane’s face betrayed him, He was scarlet. He knew he was scarlet. There was nothing to do about it. He flushed not just from the pressure of the moment, but because inside, he was wrestling with everything he wanted to say about Rozanov. He had plenty of good things to share—genuine things he liked from his months of texting the guy. But frustration tangled with embarrassment as he realized Ilya’s pointed comments were directed at him, a consequence of the complicated problems Shane had brought on himself. His mind spun with all the words he couldn’t say, and his face always gave him away when he was caught off balance, somewhere he shouldn’t be.

"I respect him," Shane said.

Ilya said nothing beside him.

The moderator moved them along.

He found the bathroom off the main conference hall, the single occupancy one down the side corridor that nobody used, and stood at the sink and ran cold water over his wrists and looked at himself in the mirror. The makeup was still holding. His face looked smooth and blank, and he stood there for a minute just breathing until his pulse came down to something manageable.

He heard the door open behind him.

He knew before he turned around.

The groan came out before he could stop it. Audible, involuntary, the sound of a man who had used up every resource he had and had just been asked for more.

"Yes," Ilya said flatly, from the doorway. "Very nice to see you also."

Shane turned the tap off. Dried his hands. Did not turn around.

"Can you just —" he stopped. Started again. "Can we be professional about this. For one weekend. That's all I'm asking."

"Professional." Ilya let the word sit there. "You want me to be professional."

"Yes." Shane turned around. "Whatever your problem is with me, we are at the All-Star game, there are cameras everywhere and kids watching and I am asking you to be a professional."

Ilya looked at him for a long moment.

"My problem," he said quietly, "is that you think you can decide things for other people. Who they talk to. Who they see. What they are allowed to have." His jaw was tight. "You think because you are Shane Hollander this is okay."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"No?" Ilya took a step forward. "I know exactly what I am talking about."

Something snapped in Shane's chest. Clean and sudden, like a lace pulled too hard.

"You know what," Shane said, "it's a good thing she's not talking to you anymore. You're an asshole."

The words hovered between them, thick and weighty, pressing down on the space as if the air itself had turned leaden. Neither Shane nor Ilya spoke; instead, the heavy tension lingered, making the silence feel almost deafening.

Ilya stared at him, his jaw setting into a cool grimace.

He shoulder checked Ilya on the way out. Hard. Not a hockey hit, just a man walking through a doorway that another man was standing too close to. Ilya didn't move, took it solidly, and Shane felt him not moving as he pushed through the door and into the corridor and kept walking.

He didn't look back.

Nobody had told Rozanov.

That was the only conclusion Shane could reach by the midpoint of the second period, dripping sweat, his legs burning in a way legs were not supposed to burn at an exhibition game in February. All-Star hockey was supposed to be fast and loose and high scoring and fun, a showcase, everyone's best moves with none of the grinding ugliness of a regular season game. Shane had been looking forward to that. Shane had been looking forward to sixty minutes of hockey that didn't cost anything.

Ilya had not gotten the memo.

He was everywhere. That was the thing about him when he was locked in, truly locked in, he compressed the ice somehow, made the rink feel smaller than two hundred feet. Shane's defense had been scrambling all game, caught repeatedly by reads they hadn't seen coming, Ilya finding angles that shouldn't have been there and exploiting them before anyone had finished identifying them. He'd set up three goals already. Three. In an All-Star game that was supposed to be glorified shinny.

And he kept coming at Shane specifically.

Every shift they were both on the ice Ilya found him. Shane was losing board battles he used to win just by positioning, and passes he thought were invisible were somehow getting intercepted anyway. Ilya not talking, not chirping, not performing — just working, relentless and focused and completely humorless.

Shane won a puck behind the net and felt Ilya arrive a half second later and they went into the boards together and Shane got his hip in and came out with it and heard Ilya breathing hard right behind him.

Good, Shane thought. At least he was making him work too.

He pushed the puck up and skated hard and tried to remember this was supposed to be fun.

Later, in the second period, the puck came to him at the left circle with nobody between him and the net and his body just did what it had been trained to do since he was six years old. Weight transfer, release, the specific snap of a shot that felt right the second it left his stick.

Top corner. Glove side. The lamp went on.

The crowd came up and Shane's linemates were on him immediately, gloves and helmets tapping Shane’s own, and for one second — one stupid unguarded second — he let himself feel it. Raised his fist. The most humble celly in the history of the MLH.

He turned around.

Ilya was already coming, hitting Shane like a freight train.

No wind up, no warning, just two hundred pounds of him arriving at full speed and Shane went down hard, the ice coming up fast, his linemates scattering. The crowd noise changed immediately, confusion moving through it, nobody having quite processed what they were watching yet because this was the All-Star game and this didn't happen at the All-Star game.

Shane got his bearings back in about two seconds and looked up and Ilya was standing over him and his gloves were on the ice.

Shane got up. Dropping his gloves on instinct. Oh fuck.

He didn't think about it, just got his feet under him and straightened and found Ilya right there, close, chest heaving, and the look on his face was nothing like the cold controlled thing it had been all week. This was something rawer than that. Both his hands came up and grabbed Shane's jersey and Shane got his own hands up and they were grabbing at each other, turning, the linesmen already moving in from the edges but not there yet.

"You think this is funny," Ilya said, low and hard, right in Shane's face. "You think this is joke to you."

"Get off me—"

Ilya's fist caught him on the shoulder, then the side of his head, and Shane's helmet went sideways and he got his arms up and covered his face and took it. Didn't swing back. Just covered up and took it while the crowd went insane around them and the linesmen finally arrived and got their arms in.

Ilya was still trying to get through them.

"You think you can just—" something in Russian, fast and hard, and then back to English— "you think this is nothing, what you do—"

Two linesmen had him now. Shane stood there with his arms still up around his face breathing hard and felt his helmet come fully off in the chaos and the cold arena air hit his face and he dropped his arms and—

Ilya's words were cut off abruptly, silenced mid-sentence.

The linesmen were still moving, the crowd was still roaring. All of it was happening and none of it was reaching Shane because Ilya had gone still in a way that had nothing to do with the linesmen holding him.

He was looking at Shane's face.

Not at Shane. At his face. Specifically. His chest was still heaving and his jaw was still tight but his eyes had gone somewhere else entirely, moving across Shane's face with an expression Shane couldn't read and didn't have time to read because a linesman got between them and another one had Shane by the arm and was moving him backward.

His heart was going so fast he could feel it in his throat. He let the linesman guide him away, his mind drifting to the makeup artist’s eight careful minutes—wondering if it had survived the fight, the sweat, the elbow to his head, if the freckles were still there, or if they were gone, and if Ilya had seen enough in those two seconds to know—

The referee's whistle cut through everything.

Shane got to the bench and sat down and put his helmet back on and pulled the visor all the way down and stared at the ice.

Hunter sat down next to him.

"You good?"

"Yeah," Shane said.

Hunter looked at him for a moment.

"You didn't throw a single punch," Hunter said.

"I know," Shane said.

He heard the sound of the fight clip playing on someone's phone — the crowd noise, the thud of impact, the commentators losing their minds over it — coming from the corner of the locker room where Beaumont and Trembleur had their heads together over a screen. Shane came in from the showers in his towel and stopped in front of them.

"Come on," he said, exasperated. "It's been a week."

Beaumont looked up. He looked slightly embarrassed to had been caught but was not sorry. "It got attached to the suspension announcement. We had to watch it again, for old-times sake!"

"You did not have to watch it."

"Rozanov got three games," Trembleur said, holding up his phone like this was justification. "It was right there."

Shane opened his cubby and reached for his shirt.

"The hit though," Beaumont said, to nobody in particular, still watching. "Like I'm sorry Shane but—"

"Then don't say sorry."

"It's like you got hit by a car. A car going sixty-five down the highway.” Beaumont tilted the phone toward Trembleur who made a noise of genuine appreciation.

"You just went down," Trembleur said. "Like a—"

"I was there," Shane said. "I remember what happened."

"You covered your face," Hayden said from across the room. He wasn't watching the clip, was just sitting there with his own phone, but like the rest of his team, he'd watched it on repeat this weak. "Like, fully. Both arms up. You just—" he demonstrated, putting both forearms in front of his face.

"I know what I did Hayden."

"I'm not judging. I'm just saying it's a look."

Shane pulled his shirt over his head.

"Three games, huh?" Shane said. "Good. Can we move on?"

Beaumont put his phone down. Then immediately picked it back up. "Okay but why though. Like what did you actually do to this guy. Rozanov doesn't — he doesn't do this. He chirps, he hits hard, but he doesn't— this was personal. This was extremely personal."

Shane said nothing. Just kept getting himself dressed.

"Did you sleep with his girlfriend?" Trembleur asked.

"No."

"His sister?"

"No."

"Did you—"

Shane threw his arms up in frustration. "I didn't do anything!" he said.

The locker room was quiet for a moment in the way locker rooms got quiet when nobody believed what they'd just been told.

Hayden looked up from his phone. Something had shifted in his expression.

"Huh," he said.

"What."

Hayden turned his phone around.

It was Ilya's Twitter. Shane's eyes moved across the screen fast, picking out words, and he felt the blood leave his face in a way he hoped wasn't visible.

"Rozanov's been tweeting," Hayden said. "Since last night. Says the fight was over a girl."

The locker room reacted immediately. Beaumont sat up straight. Trembleur made a sound. Someone down the row said something in French that Shane's brain didn't catch.

"A girl," Beaumont repeated, looking at Shane with an entirely new expression—a mix of utter disbelief and barely contained delight. His eyebrows shot up, mouth falling open in surprise, but there was a spark of excitement in his eyes, as if he'd just witnessed something completely unexpected and was thrilled by the revelation. "Hollander."

"It's not—"

"A girl," Trembleur said. "You. A girl."

"Shane." Hayden was still looking at his phone, scrolling, the corner of his mouth doing something. "Buddy. This woman must be absolutely something else."

Shane sat down on the bench. He needed to sit down.

"It's complicated," he said.

"Rozanov," Beaumont said slowly, like he was working through a math problem. "Ilya Rozanov. Who has dated like. Everyone. Is suspended for three games over a girl connected to you." He pointed at Shane. "You. Who I have never once seen talk to a woman for longer than it takes to say thank you for the drink."

"I talk to women."

"Shane."

"I do."

"Who is she," Trembleur said.

"Nobody."

"She's not nobody if Rozanov's—"

"Can I see that," Shane said to Hayden, reaching for the phone.

Hayden handed it over.

Shane read it.

The tweets were timestamped through the night.

It had started with someone else entirely. A fan account, maybe fifteen thousand followers, who had tweeted at Ilya sometime around midnight:

@hockeybro_: rozanov did hollander steal your girl lmaooo

@rozanov81: yes. this exactly.

The replies had exploded from there. Shane kept scrolling.

@user4471: WAIT WHAT

@hockeybro_: BRO I WAS JOKING

@rozanov81: you were not joking.

@user9823: so hollander actually stole your girl??? the rivalry just got so much more interesting

@rozanov81: hollander thinks he can decide things for other people. this is all i will say.

@hockeybro_: ROZANOV WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

@user4471: he's not going to explain it he's just going to say cryptic things and leave

@rozanov81: correct.

@user4471: was she a puck bunny or like an actual person

@rozanov81: she knows more about hockey than you.

@user9823: okay but who is she. do we know her

@rozanov81: no.

@user4471: bro. you're ilya rozanov just show up at her door she'll come around

@rozanov81: i would. i do not know where to find her.

@hockeybro_: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DONT KNOW WHERE TO FIND HER

@rozanov81: we talk on phone mostly. her name is jane. she lives in ottawa. this is all i have.

@user4471: OTTAWA IS A WHOLE CITY

@user9823: okay so where did you even meet her

@rozanov81: halloween party. la hills.

@hockeybro_: wait so we have. jane. from ottawa. met at a halloween party in la. that's what we're working with

@user4471: someone in this thread has to know her

@user9823: rozanov what party was it specifically

@rozanov81: i think — brendan walsh his house. very good pool.

@user4471: the brendan walsh halloween party?? that party was massive

@user9823: okay if you were at the brendan walsh halloween party in october and you know a jane from ottawa who knows a lot about hockey please for the love of god speak up

Shane just kept scrolling.

More replies, more chaos, someone had already made a fan account called find rozanovs girl. A journalist had screenshotted the thread and written three sentences about it. The whole thing had a kind of runaway energy to it.

And then near the bottom, posted forty minutes ago, a comment from an account Shane recognized before he'd consciously registered why he recognized it. The profile picture. The username.

@thomasc43: wait i think i was at that party. what costume was she wearing

Shane's thumb went cold on the screen. Thomas.

He scrolled down one more inch.

Ilya's reply. Just now.

@rozanov81: mulan

Shane sat completely still in the middle of his locker room with twelve teammates around him and read that word and felt the walls come in from every direction at once.

Thomas had been there. Thomas had stood in the gutted Halloween shop aisle and watched Shane pick up that costume. Had seen him walk out with it under his arm. Had seen him at that party in that wig before everything went wrong.

Thomas knew exactly what Mulan meant.

Shane pressed Hayden’s phone back into his teammate’s palm, barely aware of the startled look Hayden gave him. He spun around, almost tripping over someone’s gym bag, and reached up into his cubby for his own phone.

The screen lit up with a notification: Missed call—Thomas.

As soon as Shane noticed the missed call from Thomas, his phone suddenly sprang to life, vibrating intensely—Incoming call: Thomas.

Chapter End Notes

the mcdonald's on the corner of your street is not safe. neither is shane hollander. thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

oh boy. here we are. chapter six.

first things first — thank you. genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading this story. when i started writing shane hollander at a halloween party in a mulan costume i did not expect anyone to care this much and yet here you all are and here i am, still writing, so clearly this is your fault.

if you're enjoying the fic, please consider leaving a kudos, dropping a comment, or sharing it with someone who might like it. comments especially keep me alive. i read every single one.

a quick note on where we are: the full title of this fic is how shane hollander ruined his own life at a halloween party in LA and i want to remind you of that title right now specifically. there IS a happy ending coming. i promise you there is a happy ending. i would not do shane and ilya dirty like that.

i think there are maybe two chapters left in me after this one, possibly three, i genuinely don't know, shane keeps doing things i don't expect.

anyway.

this is the one where shane hollander plans his own funeral. buckle up.

Shane's thumb hit accept before he'd decided to.

"Don't say anything to him online." The words came out fast and too loud and Beaumont looked over from across the room. Shane turned toward his cubby and spoke a little quieter. "Don't reply, don't comment, don't like anything, just leave it alone."

There was a pause.

"Hi," Thomas said. "To you too."

"Thomas."

"I wasn't going to." A beat. "Shane. Are you seeing what I'm seeing on Twitter right now?"

Shane opened his mouth. Nothing came out. The locker room was loud around him, stalls lining every wall, red and white and blue everywhere, jerseys hung up and gear strewn across benches, the floor wet from skates, someone's music bleeding out of a phone speaker in the corner. The fluorescent lights ran the full length of the ceiling and they were doing something unpleasant to the back of Shane's eyes. His chest felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with the practice they just finished.

"Shane."

"I'm thinking."

"You're thinking?"

"Just—" He pressed his fingers against his forehead. "Give me a second."

Hayden was watching him from across the room, gear half off, one skate still on for no reason Shane could identify. His hair was plastered flat on one side and he had his water bottle in one hand. He nudged Trembleur with his elbow.

"That her?" Hayden shouted at Shane.

Shane held up a finger.

"It's her," Trembleur said, to the room.

Shane spun around. "It's not—" He caught himself, looked down at the phone in his hand, realized he'd pulled it away from his ear to argue with his teammates. He put it back. "Sorry. That wasn't for you."

"Who is that," Thomas said.

"Teammates. They think—" Shane turned back toward his cubby. "It's nothing."

"Ooooh." Beaumont appeared at his elbow from nowhere, red practice jersey still on, shin guards apparently forgotten entirely. "He's going red. He is actually turning red right now."

Shane turned away from him. "I'm not—"

"You are," Hayden said, now situated at his other side, very cheerfully.

Shane turned toward Hayden. "I'm not—"

"Guys." Trembleur, now feet away. "Look at his ears."

Shane turned toward Trembleur. His face was on fire. He was a swivel chair. He was a man with no fixed point, turning toward whatever voice came at him next, phone pressed to his ear, the whole locker room closing in from every direction at once.

"Shane," Thomas said in his ear. "What is going on?"

Shane pressed his free hand flat against the top shelf of his cubby and stared at the crack he'd been looking at since October. His face was hot. His brain was producing nothing useful. Somewhere behind him Hayden said something in French to Trembleur and Trembleur laughed and Shane had absolutely no idea what his next sentence was supposed to be.

"I'll explain," Shane said into the phone. "I just need you to not say anything online. Okay? Can you do that?"

A pause.

"Yeah," Thomas said. Something in his voice had shifted, quieter now, the teasing gone out of it. "Okay Shane."

"Give me a second," Shane said. He pushed past his snickering teammates and moved toward the exit to the locker room.

Shane pushed through the door and went down the hall far enough that the locker room noise dropped behind him to something muffled and indistinct. He pressed his back against the cinderblock wall and stood under the fluorescent lights, long and white and relentless, and tried to take a slow breath. It came out shaky.

"Okay," he said. "I'm here."

"Okay," Thomas said. "So. I'm going to tell you what happened from my end and you're going to tell me where I'm wrong."

Shane said nothing. That was not a good opening.

"I see online that my good friend Shane Hollander got into a fight at the All Star game. Which, first of all, what the hell, but fine. So I go look at this Rozanov guy's Twitter because I want to see what he's saying about it."

Shane tried another breath. Also shaky.

"And he's talking about some girl. And you. And I'm thinking, that's weird, that doesn't sound like my good friend Shane Hollander. Shane Hollander who dated Emma Reeves for eight months in tenth grade and was so decent about the breakup she still asks about him at Christmas."

Shane said nothing. His legs were doing something he didn't love. He let himself slide down the wall a few inches, then a few more, until he was most of the way to the floor with his back against the cinderblock and his knees bent in front of him. The floor was cold through his athletic pants.

"And then," Thomas said, continuing right over him, "he starts talking about a Halloween party. In LA. And I'm thinking, that's a coincidence, because I went to a Halloween party in LA with my friend Shane Hollander. And surely it's not the same one."

It was the same one.

"But it IS the same one. And I'm trying to remember, okay, maybe Shane was talking to some girl at that party, maybe that's what this whole insane situation is about. So I ask this Ilya Rozanov what costume she was wearing." A pause. "He says Mulan, Shane."

Shane hadn't fully decided to be on the floor but here he was, back against the cinderblock, the fluorescent light directly above him buzzing faintly in a way he hadn't noticed standing up. He took another breath and it came out in pieces.

"There was one person at that party in a Mulan costume," Thomas said. "I watched you buy it."

Silence.

"Shane," Thomas said. "What the hell is going on."

Shane stared at the ceiling.

"I wasn't—" He stopped. Started again. "I didn't plan any of it."

"Shane." Thomas's voice was even. "Just tell me what happened."

There was no moment of reflection, no deciding where to start. Thomas knew enough and not everything and Shane needed him to understand how it got here so he just opened his mouth.

"I ran into him in the hallway," Shane said. "Coming out of the bathroom. He was drunk. He didn't — he looked at me and he just. He didn't know who I was."

"Because of the costume."

"Because of the costume. And the wig. And he was pretty far gone." Shane's free hand was flat on the floor beside him, cold tile under his palm. "He started talking to me. And I knew who he was and he thought I was a girl and it was — I don't know. It was funny. I thought it was funny."

"Okay."

"So I didn't tell him who I was. I said my name was Jane."

Thomas said nothing.

"He asked me to go outside," Shane said. "To talk. And I went. I was going to tell him, I kept thinking I was about to tell him, and then he—" Shane stopped. The scuff mark on the cinderblock across from him. He looked at it. "He kissed me."

"He kissed you."

"Yes."

"While he thought you were a girl."

"Yes."

"And you—"

"I kissed him back."

He'd said it. Out loud. To another person. Shane sat with that for a second, the memory that lived only inside his own head for four months suddenly existing outside of it. It was terrifying. It was also, somewhere underneath the terror, something closer to relief, small and cautious, like a window cracking open in a room that had been sealed too long.

Shane could picture Thomas's face right now. Eyes wide, mouth open, jaw gone completely slack. The same face he'd made when Kayla Morrison showed up to prom with Mr. Henderson's son.

"I know," Shane said. "I know."

Thomas let that sit. Shane pulled his knees up closer to his chest. The hallway was quiet except for the muffled thud of someone's music through the shut locker room door.

"And then what," Thomas eventually said.

"And then I panicked and tried to leave. But he asked for my number first and I gave it to him." Shane pressed his fingers against his eyes. "And then he texted me. That night. And I didn't text back for a week and he just kept going. He texted about hockey, about random stuff, flamingos, just — things.—”

He thought about Ilya texting him, ‘Do you ever feel very lonely when there is so many people who adore you’. Shane had stared at that one for a long time.

"—And I didn't answer and he kept sending them and then I answered and then suddenly we were just. Texting each other. Every day for months."

"And he thinks you're a girl," Thomas said.

"He thinks I'm a girl," Shane said. "Yes."

"Okay," Thomas said slowly. "And then?"

"And then I stopped. Around Christmas. I tried to end it, I just — I stopped texting back. And then he called on New Year's Eve and he was upset and he told me he really liked me. And he asked if I had found out about them and I didn't correct him and—"

"Shane." Thomas's voice was firm. "Stop. Slow down. I'm losing you."

Shane stopped.

"You've been texting this guy," Thomas said. "For months."

"Yes."

"Another hockey player."

"Yes."

"And he thinks you're a girl."

"Yes."

"Named Jane."

"Yes."

"And you were flirting."

Shane opened his mouth to deny it. Closed it. "Yes."

"Okay," Thomas said. "Now what's this about finding out about them. Who found out about who."

Shane pressed his fingers against his eyes. "Okay. So. Jane told him she was close with Hollander. With me. He assumed she was my cousin and I didn't correct him. So when Jane went silent he assumed that I — that Shane Hollander — had found out that his cousin was texting his rival and told her to stop."

A pause.

"So he thinks," Thomas said slowly, "that you found out your own cousin was talking to your rival. Except the cousin is also you."

"Yes."

"Shane."

"I know."

"That's—"

"I know, Thomas."

“So at the all-stars—,”

"Yes. He thinks I’m some sort of controlling asshole, which is why he went—"

The locker room door opened.

Shane stopped talking. He maybe stopped breathing as well. For a second he just sat there, blinking, like he'd forgotten entirely that he was in a hallway, that there was a building around him, that other people existed in the world outside of this phone call.

It was half the team, coming out in a loose parade, bags over shoulders, jackets half zipped, conversations already going about dinner or the drive home or nothing in particular. They went right, toward the exit, most of them not even clocking Shane sitting down the hall that led back to the ice.

Hayden noticed him.

He saw Shane sitting against the wall, phone pressed to his ear, shoulders up around his ears, and his whole face lit up. He grabbed Trembleur by the sleeve and pointed. Trembleur looked. Beaumont, a few steps ahead, turned around to see what they'd stopped for.

Hayden pointed at Shane, then at his own phone, then made a gesture that was not appropriate for a professional workplace. Trembleur put both hands over his heart. Beaumont mouthed something Shane was glad he couldn't hear and mimed wiping a tear from his eye.

Shane pointed past them, toward the exit. Go. Now. Please. His pointed finger was trembling slightly. Shane hoped they couldn’t see that from down the hall.

Hayden blew him a kiss and turned back toward the exit. Trembleur patted his own heart one more time. Beaumont gave him a thumbs up. The parade kept moving, around the corner, footsteps fading.

Shane waited until the last of it was gone.

"Shane." Thomas's voice came through the phone. "You still there?"

"Yeah," Shane said. "Sorry. Teammates."

"What's going on."

"They think I'm talking to a girl." Shane was already moving, his footsteps loud on the concrete floor, echoing off the walls. "The girl. Rozanov's girl."

"They think you're talking to yourself?"

"Thomas."

"I can hear you walking," Thomas said. "Where are you going."

Shane was already moving, further away from the locker room, down the hall. The equipment room was twenty feet ahead, a door he'd walked past a hundred times without a reason to open. He had one now. He pushed through it and pulled it shut behind him and stood in the dark between racks of spare gear and stacks of pucks and let out a slow breath.

"Equipment room," Shane said.

"Very romantic," Thomas said.

"Thomas."

"I'm just saying. You're hiding in a closet."

Neither of them said anything for a second.

The closet. Shane's brain caught on it and wouldn't let go. The closet. He was literally in a closet right now having this conversation, the coming out conversation, in an actual physical closet. The closet was full of the smell of rubber and cold metal, racks of gear and stacks of pucks and Shane Hollander, gay hockey player. The universe had a genuinely terrible sense of humor.

"Thomas," Shane said.

"I didn't mean—"

"I know."

"That was an accident."

"I know, Thomas."

A pause. Shane pressed his free hand flat against the shelf behind him and waited for whatever was coming.

"Are you into him?" Thomas said. Quietly. Like he'd been working up to it.

Shane's stomach dropped.

"It was a weird night," Shane said. "I'd been drinking and he was just—"

"That's not what I asked."

"It's more complicated than—"

"Shane."

Shane pressed the back of his head against the shelf behind him. The equipment room was dark except for a thin line of light under the door. He could hear his own breathing.

"It doesn't matter," Shane said. "Whether I am or not it doesn't change anything about the—"

"It matters to me," Thomas said. "Are you into him?"

Shane closed his eyes.

He was so tired. Tired since Nashville, tired since New Year's, tired since October. Thomas had known him since he was thirteen and bad at algebra and had never once in six years let him get away with not answering a direct question. Shane was standing in a dark equipment room in Montreal at the end of the worst week of his rookie season and he had nothing left.

"Yeah," Shane said. Very quietly. "Yeah I am."

Thomas didn't say anything immediately.

Shane waited for it. The shift in tone, the careful distance, all the things he'd lain awake dreading. His heart was going fast and his hands weren't steady and he'd just admitted that he liked a man for the first time in his life to another human being and now he waited.

"Shane," Thomas said. His voice had gone tight, rigid.

There it was. Shane had known this was coming, had been waiting for it since the locker room conversation with Kowalski's a fag everyone knows it still ringing in his ears. Thomas was his oldest friend and it didn't matter, it was still happening, the tone shift, the tightness, because that was what happened when you told people.

"I know," Shane said quickly. "I know, I just — I didn't choose it, I'm not — I don't know what I am exactly, I just know that he—"

"No... Shane." Thomas's voice lost its edge all at once, like he'd just realized how Shane was misinterpreting it. "Stop. I don't — Shane, everyone in LA is gay. My roommate is gay. I love you, that part doesn't change anything, okay? I need you to hear that." A beat, even quieter now, the frustration gone and something more careful in its place. "I'm frustrated because you—" He stopped.

Shane said nothing. His chest was doing something strange, some pressure releasing that he hadn't known was there, leaving something raw in its place. Shane being gay was fine. That wasn't it.

"Then why," Shane said. Very small.

"Because you like him," Thomas said. "You actually like him. And you've been lying to him for months, Shane. He got suspended. He's on Twitter asking strangers to find a girl who doesn't exist. And you're standing in a closet in Montreal and you won't even—" He stopped again. "That's why I'm upset. That’s not okay, Shane."

Shane stood in the dark and said nothing.

"I don't know what to do," Shane said. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "I tried to stop. I did stop, for weeks, and he just — he kept texting. Every day. About nothing, about hockey, just— I thought eventually he'd get bored, but he didn't, and now he's on Twitter, Thomas. He's asking strangers. He put her name out there and where she's from and what costume she was wearing and he's just—" Shane pressed the back of his head against the shelf. "He really likes her. He really likes Jane and Jane doesn't exist and I don't know what to do."

Thomas was quiet for a second.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. You love a plan right? Remember when you made that spreadsheet for our road trip to Quebec City in grade ten? Color coded by—"

Shane laughed once, short and wet. He was crying a little. He hadn't noticed when that had started.

"Yeah," he said.

"So we make a plan. You still have his number?"

"Yes."

"So you text him."

Shane said nothing.

"Just text him," Thomas said. "Ask to meet. That's it."

"He's going to kill me," Shane said. "He's going to break every bone in my body and then tell everyone I'm gay and I'm never going to play hockey again."

"You don't know that."

"Thomas he attacked me at the All Star game in front of twelve thousand people because he thought my cousin wouldn't talk to him anymore. What do you think he's going to do when he finds out there is no cousin?"

"You said he really liked you though."

"He likes Jane."

"He likes you, Shane. You said it yourself. You guys talked for months." A pause. "That's not nothing."

"He thinks I'm a girl," Shane said. "Pretty sure he couldn’t like me as much as I—" He stopped.

Thomas let that hang there for exactly one second.

"As much as you like him," Thomas said.

Shane pressed his fingers against his eyes. "Yeah."

"You don't know what he is," Thomas said. "Maybe Rozanov likes men too."

Shane made a noise. "Not likely. He's known for hooking up with every woman in Boston. Possibly every woman in the greater New England area."

"Still. You don't know."

Shane leaned his head back against the shelf. The dark of the equipment room pressed in around him, cold and close.

"What if Jane just," Shane started. "What if there was like. A public funeral. She was sick, it was very sad, she—"

"Shane."

"Just hear me out—"

"Shane. That is genuinely the most insane thing you've ever said to me and you once tried to convince me that the Ottawa Centaurs were a good hockey team."

"They had a good run in—"

"You would have to rope your entire family into faking a death. Your mother, Shane. And then when Rozanov finds out — he's going to be even more furious that you kept Jane from her boyfriend before her tragic passing."

"He is NOT her—my— boyfriend Thomas, it's not — it wasn't like that."

"Shane."

"It wasn't."

"Shane."

A long silence.

"Okay," Shane said. "It was a little like that."

"You need to meet him," Thomas said. "In person. Just the two of you. And you need to tell him."

Shane blew out a long breath. It shook on the way out.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah okay. You're right. I just — yeah."

"Text him now," Thomas said. "While I'm on the phone with you."

"Now?"

"Now. Before you talk yourself out of it."

Shane looked at the thin line of light under the door. His phone felt very heavy in his hand.

"What do I say."

"We need to meet," Thomas said. "Just that. For starters."

Shane switched to his messages. Rozanov's contact. Lily. He stared at it for a long moment, thumb hovering, and then typed before he could think about it.

Jane: we need to meet

He hit send.

The silence after it was enormous.

"Okay," Shane said. "Okay I did it."

"Good," Thomas said.

Shane waited for the relief. It didn't come. What came instead was a cold wave starting somewhere in his chest and moving outward, fast, his heart suddenly going at a pace that had nothing to do with exercise, his hands not steady, the equipment room tilting very slightly on its axis.

"Thomas," Shane said.

"Yeah."

"I think I'm going to—" He put his hand on the shelf next to him. The metal was cold under his palm. "I think I'm having a panic attack."

"Okay," Thomas said immediately, no hesitation. "Okay Shane. Sit down first, can you sit down?"

Shane slid down the shelf until he hit the floor. Cold concrete under him again, same as the hallway, except now it was dark and close and the walls were right there.

"I'm down," Shane said. His voice sounded far away.

"Good. Okay. I want you to breathe with me. In for four counts, you ready? One. Two. Three. Four."

Shane tried. The breath came in ragged and caught halfway.

"Again," Thomas said. "In. One. Two. Three. Four. Hold it. Now out. One. Two. Three. Four."

Shane breathed out. It shook the whole way.

"Again," Thomas said. Steady, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world. "In. One. Two…"

Shane had been on the balcony for an hour, maybe? Might have been longer. The city moved far below him, headlights sliding through the dark, red lights pooling at intersections and releasing, the same rhythm over and over. He wasn't really watching it. His eyes just needed somewhere to be.

Montreal in February was a cold that got into your clothes and stayed there. He'd been outside long enough that he couldn't feel his ears anymore and hadn't gone in to get a jacket. The wind came off the river in gusts that snapped at his face.

He had his phone in his hand.

He read the texts again.

Jane: we need to meet.

One word back. Lily: when.

He'd stared at that word for a long time on the floor of the equipment room with Thomas counting him down through the speaker. One word and his heart had done something embarrassing with it.

Jane: soon. after the season. i'll meet you when the season ends.

He turned that over now in the cold. The honest version of why he'd given that timeline was somewhere in the middle of several things. The season was important — both their teams were in playoff contention, genuinely in it, and potentially damaging either playoff run over this felt wrong. That part was true.

The other part was that Shane needed time. Not forever. Just a few months. Time to figure out what he was going to say to a man he’d been catfishing, who had gotten himself suspended over someone that didn’t exist.

Lily: okay jane.

The same okay from New Year's.

Jane: but you have to promise me something.

Lily: what

Jane: don't do anything reckless. don't say anything else online. and don't go after Shane again.

Then the pause. Longer than the others.

Lily: why not

Shane had stared at that for a long time before he answered.

Jane: it's not his fault. he didn't tell me to stop talking to you.

The dots had come and gone three times after that. Shane had watched them on the floor of his kitchen, back against the cabinets, still in his practice gear.

Lily: then why

Jane: i'll tell you everything. i promise. after the season. but i need you to promise me first.

Another long wait. The dots appearing and disappearing. Shane had counted his own heartbeats.

Lily: fine. i promise jane.

Then:

Lily: don't make me wait too long.

Shane looked up from the phone at the city below. A cab moved through the intersection, brake lights flaring and gone. He'd been out here long enough that the cold had stopped feeling like cold and started feeling like nothing, which he understood was not a good sign and still didn't move.

He read don't make me wait too long again.

Jane: i won't

He'd typed back.

He locked the screen. Unlocked it. Read it again from the top.

March became April the way months did during a playoff push — fast and brutal and without much room for anything else. Shane played every game like it was being taken from him. He took hits he had angles to avoid. He fought for pucks in the corner with both elbows and came off the ice with his lip split twice and didn't mind either time. Thériault pulled him aside after a game in late March and asked him what was going on and Shane said nothing, just competing, and Thériault looked at him for a long moment and let it go.

He signed three ad contracts he would have said no to in January. A watch company. A sports drink. A bank. His agent called him after the third one and said she was glad Shane was finally taking the commercial side seriously and Shane said yeah and got off the phone.

He put the money somewhere safe.

He cried twice. Once after a win in Pittsburgh, sitting on the floor of the hotel shower with the water going cold, not entirely sure what had started it. Once in the car outside his apartment building at one in the morning after a road trip, just sitting in the parking garage with the engine off until it passed. He didn't think of himself as someone who cried. He was revising that.

The Ilya texts came every ten days or so. Sometimes longer. Never more than a line.

i am thinking of you.

i hope you are okay jane.

we won tonight. thought you would want to know.

Shane read them immediately every time. He never responded. He put the phone face down and picked it back up and read them again and put it face down again.

Boston and Montreal played twice more in the regular season.

The first time was while Ilya was serving his suspension. Without him Boston was just another team in the league, the same as all the others. Bland. Shane played well.

The second time, with Ilya back on the ice, was harder. Ilya kept his promise.

He didn't look at Shane, didn't chirp him, didn't give the building or the cameras or the commentators any of what they'd been waiting for since Nashville. Every time their shifts overlapped Ilya just played hockey, clean and focused and completely elsewhere, like Shane was any other center on any other team. The crowd wanted blood and got nothing and Shane played the worst game he'd played all season. Thériault didn't say anything afterward which was worse than if he had.

Shane watched Ilya's numbers the rest of the regular season. Forty seven goals. Ninety one points. He would have been a Hart Trophy contender if he hadn't gotten suspended. Three games, gone, because of Shane. Ilya's fault, yes, but Shane's fault really. He definitely wouldn't win the trophy now.

Karma was coming for Shane at the end of this season. His life as he knew it, the hockey and the apartment and the routine and all of it, was going to come apart in June and there was nothing he could do about it except keep showing up to practice in the meantime and wait for it to happen.

Boston made the playoffs. Montreal made the playoffs. They were on opposite sides of the bracket, Boston drawing Pittsburgh in the first round, Montreal drawing Washington. If they both won they'd meet in the second round.

Montreal swept Washington in four games. Shane played well, scored twice in game three, and watched Boston's series from his couch every night they played. Pittsburgh was pushing them hard. It was going to six, maybe seven.

He called his mother and said he was coming home to Ottawa for a few days before the second round started.

She said good. She'd make dinner.

Shane sat with the phone in his hand after he hung up and thought about what he was going to say when he got there and then stopped thinking about it because thinking about it wasn't helping.

He booked the drive for Thursday.

The drive to Ottawa was three hours with the normal traffic. Shane did it in two and a half without meaning to, the highway flat and grey and mostly empty on a Thursday afternoon in April, the last of the snow sitting dirty at the edges of the road.

He had a lot of time to think.

The way Shane understood his situation, which he had been turning over for weeks now, was this: at the end of the hockey season he was going to meet Ilya Rozanov somewhere and tell him the truth. All of it. The party, the wig, Jane, the months of texts, the tell, the New Year's call, the makeup at the All Star press conference, all of it. And when that happened one of several things would follow, none of which Shane had full control over.

Ilya might go to the press. Shane Hollander, golden boy of the Montreal Voyageurs, had spent four months catfishing his rival while pretending to be a woman. That was a story. That was an enormous story. Shane had read enough about conduct clauses and league standards to know it was also potentially a career ending one.

Ilya might go to the league directly. The tell alone — Ilya had given Jane competitive intelligence that Shane had used in a regular season game. If Boston's legal team wanted to make something of that they probably could.

Or Ilya might just tell people. Not the press, not the league, just. People. The way things got out. And the full version of the story — the part where Shane had kissed him back, had texted him for months, had cried on the phone with him on New Year's Eve — that version of the story had a word attached to it that Shane wasn't ready for the world to have yet.

So. He was planning his funeral. Not a real one. A hockey funeral. Gone too soon, Shane Hollander, number twenty four, beloved son and Voyageur, taken in the prime of his career by a series of decisions made at a Halloween party in October that he would spend the rest of his life being unable to fully explain.

The ad contracts were practical. If he had eighteen months of income left he was going to make them count. The watch company and the sports drink and the bank weren't things he particularly wanted his name on but they paid well and Shane was nineteen years old and did not know what his life looked like after hockey because he had never seriously considered a version of his life that didn't have hockey in it.

The crying was less practical. He cried after wins especially, kept thinking that it might be the last one. Last win as a Voyageur. Last win as a hockey player. Last time the lamp went on and it meant something to him personally and not just professionally. He hadn't figured out what to do about the crying except wait for it to stop, which it did eventually, and then start again later, which it also did.

And now he was driving to Ottawa to come out to his parents. Not because the timing was right or because he'd planned it this way. Because his career was probably ending in June and they deserved to know who he was before that happened. And because if some version of this story ended up on a sports desk somewhere, if a journalist got hold of it before Shane could get in front of it, his parents finding out that way would be unforgivable. He needed to tell them himself.

The Ottawa exits came up and Shane took the right one on autopilot, the roads getting familiar under him, the darkening city doing what it always did when he came back to it, everything slightly smaller than memory and still exactly right. He turned onto his parents' street and pulled into the driveway and sat in the car for a moment.

The front porch light was on. His mother had put it on for him.

Shane picked up his bag from the backseat and went inside.

The house smelled like his mother's cooking before he got the door fully open. Miso and something else underneath it, the combination that meant she'd been in the kitchen for a while. Shane stood in the entrance with his bag and let it hit him for a second.

"Shane." His mother appeared from the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel and she was already smiling before she'd fully seen him. She took his face in both hands and looked at him the way she always did, wide smile never leaving her face, then kissed his cheek. "You're skinny."

"Mom."

"You're skinny, Shane. You can see it in your face." She was already turning back toward the kitchen. "Come sit down."

His father came in from the living room and clapped him on the shoulder, firm and warm. "There he is. Four and oh." He shook his head like he still couldn't quite believe it. "A sweep, Shane. Your first playoffs and you sweep Washington."

"We swept Washington," Shane said.

"I know what I said." His father smiled at him, the quiet kind, and went to sit at the table.

Shane dropped his bag by the stairs and followed them into the kitchen. His mother had made katsu curry, his favorite since he was eight years old, and the smell of it was so familiar it made him want to cry. Would he ever taste his mother’s cooking again after tonight?

 He sat down at the table he'd done homework at, eaten a thousand meals at, and looked at the familiar grain of the wood.

"We tried to catch the last game," his mother said, setting a bowl in front of him, "but the feed cut out in the third period and your father nearly put his foot through the television."

"I didn't nearly—"

"He nearly put his foot through the television," his mother said, to Shane.

Shane almost smiled.

"It was a good game," Shane said.

"We saw the highlights." His mother sat down across from him and looked at him again, the same wide grin on her face. "Eat."

Shane ate. His mother watched him get through the first bowl and put a second one in front of him before he could agree to it. He didn't argue. He was hungrier than he'd realized, he had lost some weight over the past couple of weeks.

His father asked about the series, about Washington's defense, about the power play unit, and Shane answered all of it and let the conversation carry him through the meal. His mother refilled his water glass twice. The kitchen was warm and the food was good and Shane sat in the middle of all of it and felt far away from it at the same time.

It was near the end of the meal, his third bowl pushed aside, when his mother looked at him in that way she does sometimes.

Not a new look. The same one she'd been giving him since he was small, the one that meant she'd been watching him all evening and had finished deciding something.

"What's going on," she said.

Not unkindly. Just directly.

Shane put his water glass down.

His father looked up from his plate.

Shane had thought about how to start this approximately four hundred times on the drive down and had not landed on anything that felt right and was not going to land on anything now so he just said it.

"I'm gay," Shane said. "Or — I think I am. I'm still figuring out the edges of it but that's — yeah. That's what I am."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Shane looked at the table. The grain of the wood. The small burn mark near the edge from when he was twelve and left a hot pan there and his mother had sighed and decided it gave the table character. He knew every inch of this table.

His parents were good people. He knew that. They were not the kind of people who would say the wrong thing or look at him differently or make him feel like something had shifted between them. He knew that too. He had known it on the drive down, had told himself it was the reason he was doing this now, had used it as the logic that got him through the door and through dinner and to this moment.

And yet.

He was nineteen years old and he had just said the word out loud to two people who were not Thomas, who were not a phone call at a distance, who were sitting three feet away from him at a kitchen table, and his whole nervous system was behaving like he had just stepped off something very high. His ears were ringing a little. He became aware that he was holding his breath.

He thought about every time he had sat at this table. Every ordinary dinner, every Christmas Eve, every breakfast before a game when his mother would put food in front of him and his father would read the paper and it was all so completely normal. He thought about how none of those meals had included this version of him and all of them had, because this was not new information about Shane, this had always been true, he had just been the last to say it out loud.

He thought about his mother at the Bell Centre the night of his first home game, the way she'd stood in the corridor after and taken his face in both hands and not said anything for a moment, just looked at him.

He thought about his father at every rink Shane had ever played in, standing in the same spot in the stands, quiet, watching.

He thought: they are going to be fine. I know they are going to be fine.

But really, he begged to a higher power: please be fine.

His father's fork was down. His mother was very still across the table.

Shane looked up.

His mother reached across the table and put her hand over his.

"Okay," she said. Quietly. Like it was simple. Like it was the easiest word in the world.

Shane looked at her hand over his. He didn't trust himself to say anything.

"Shane." His mother squeezed his hand once. "Thank you for telling us."

His father cleared his throat. Shane looked over at him. His father was looking at the table, working through something, and then he looked up and met Shane's eyes and said "You're my son" in a voice that didn't leave any room for anything else. Then he looked over at Yuna. Something passed between them, quick and private, the kind of look that belonged to two people who had been talking to each other without words for twenty five years.

His mother turned back to Shane.

"Can we tell you something," she said.

Shane nodded.

"We didn't know," she said. "I want to be clear about that. We're not going to sit here and tell you we always knew, because we didn't. But." She paused. "We thought about it sometimes, that it might be a possibility that you were gay. We left the door open. Both of us." She glanced at his father once, quick. "Just in case." She tilted her head slightly. "Does that make sense."

It did. Shane didn't know why it made him want to cry but it did.

"Yeah," he said.

"Good." She patted his hand once and sat back. "Are you seeing anyone."

Shane almost laughed. The whiplash of it, his mother moving from that to this in four seconds, was so completely her that something loosened in his chest.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"No. I can't." He picked up his water glass. "If I was seeing someone and anyone found out — a teammate, a journalist, anyone — it would be everywhere. I can't keep a secret like that in this league. Not right now."

His mother looked at him. "Not right now meaning...?"

"Meaning it's 2011 and the league isn't ready for it." Shane set the glass down. "I'm not going to be the first openly gay player in the NHL at nineteen years old. That's not — that's not the career I want. I don't want every story written about me to be about that. Not yet."

"But eventually," his father said. Not a question.

"Maybe the 2020s," Shane said. "I don't know. Things will be different by then hopefully. But right now—" He shook his head. "Right now I just need to play hockey."

His mother was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," she said finally. "I understand that." A pause. "I don't love it but I understand it."

"Yuna," his father said mildly.

"I said I understand it. It’s just really sad, Shane." She looked forlornly at Shane. "You'll tell us if something changes?"

"Yes."

"And you'll eat something other than protein bars on the road?"

"Mom."

"I'm serious Shane, you came in here looking like a—"

"I'm fine."

"You're thin." She stood up and started clearing plates with the particular energy of a woman who had said what she needed to say and was now moving on. "There's dessert to celebrate."

Shane sat at the table while his mother moved around the kitchen. His father pushed his plate aside and folded his hands on the table and looked at Shane with an expression that was doing several things at once, fond and a little watery around the edges and trying not to show it.

"Come here," his father said.

Shane looked at him.

"Come here," his father said again.

Shane got up and his father stood up and hugged him, properly, both arms, the way he had when Shane was small and had bad dreams and padded down the hall to find him. Shane stood in it for a second and then hugged him back.

"I love you," his father said, into the top of his head. "Always buddy."

Now Shane was out. He said he was gay out loud to his parents at the kitchen table and his father had said you're my son and his mother had left the door open just in case and there was apparently dessert.

He sat there.

He was out and he was still completely alone with all of it. His parents knew half of it and Thomas knew all of it and Ilya thought he was a girl named Jane and his teammates thought there was a mystery woman and the rest of the world didn't know anything and tomorrow he was going to sit on his parent’s couch and watch Boston play game seven against Pittsburgh and none of the people in this house would know the real reason he was nervous about who Montreal was playing in the next round.

But tonight, he was out of the closet.

He picked up his fork for dessert.

Pittsburgh scored their fourth goal with four minutes left in the third and that was that.

Shane sat on the couch between his parents and watched it happen. Boston pulled their goalie with two minutes left and Ilya was everywhere in those last two minutes, winning pucks he had no business winning, setting up chances that almost went, almost, almost, and then the horn sounded and Pittsburgh was celebrating at center ice and it was over.

Final score 4-2. Boston eliminated.

His father said something about a hard fought series. His mother made a noise of agreement. Shane said nothing and watched the Boston players make their way down the line for the handshakes, watched them do the thing you had to do at the end, the thing Shane had done in juniors and would do again probably in a couple of weeks, the bitter acceptance of defeat.

Ilya was easy to find. He always was. Shane tracked him through the handshake line, watched him say whatever he said to each Pittsburgh player, unhurried, head up. Boston's two goals had both been his. He'd been the best player on the ice by a distance that wasn't close and it hadn't been enough because that was hockey sometimes, because you couldn't be the whole team no matter how good you were, and Shane knew that, understood it completely, and still felt something sit heavy in his chest watching him.

His mother reached over and patted his knee. She thought he was nervous about playing Pittsburgh next week.

She wasn't wrong exactly.

Shane looked at his phone in his hand. He'd been holding it for the last period without thinking about it, thumb moving over the edge of the case. He looked at Ilya on the screen, already heading toward the tunnel, and before he'd decided to he opened his messages and typed.

Jane: you were incredible tonight. i watched the whole thing. i'm sorry it wasn't enough.

He looked at it for a second.

Jane: i'll be in vegas at the end of june. for the awards. i'll be there with my family. we can meet there.

He read it back once. Then:

Jane: i promise ilya.

He hit send and put the phone face down on his thigh and looked at the television where the Pittsburgh celebration was in full swing and the Boston locker room was somewhere behind it all, Ilya somewhere in there, not going to look at his phone for a while yet. Post game meetings, showers, the long specific misery of a season ending in someone else's building. He had very little time left.

His father got up to make tea.

His mother was watching the broadcast, the post game analysis, someone with a microphone talking about Pittsburgh's defensive structure. Shane sat on the couch in his childhood living room with his phone face down on his thigh and felt his hockey funeral tick one series closer.

Chapter End Notes

June is coming.

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

heyyyyyy, so this is a very long chapter, something tells me none of you will complain about that. I don't usually do this but I wanted to make sure it was clear —

CONTENT WARNING: depiction of domestic violence, depiction of depression.

i think this chapter might be my magnum opus. i present: Ilya Rozanov.

The light was a problem.

Ilya became aware of this before he became aware of anything else — LA sun peeking through hotel curtains that were doing their best to torment him. He lay still for a moment and took stock. Head: bad. Mouth: worse. The rest of him: present, horizontal, accounted for.

He'd had more to drink than he'd intended. Which, he was coming to learn, was not unusual for Brendan Walsh's parties.

He got up.

This was a mistake. The blood pounded through his skull the second he was vertical. He stood beside the bed for a moment with both hands on the nightstand and his eyes closed and said something in Russian that would have made his grandmother cross herself. He made it to the minibar in three careful steps, cracked a water open and drank half of it standing there and then made the return journey back to the bed to get horizontal again as fast as he could manage.

He lay very still and waited for his head to forgive him.

He tried to piece last night back together in whatever order it felt like coming back to him. He didn't rush it. He'd learned not to rush it. The pieces arrived.

Halloween was one of the things Ilya had decided he loved about America. In Russia you didn't dress up in silly costumes and go to a party. Here you could spend two hundred dollars on a vampire cape — real fabric, heavy, with a proper lining — and show up somewhere in the hills and nobody thought you were insane. They thought you were committed. Ilya was committed.

His first October in the league someone had put Mean Girls on during a bus ride and Ilya had watched the whole thing with his headphones in pretending to listen to music and by the time they pulled into the arena he had a complete working theory of the holiday. You dressed sexy. That was the entire point. The costume was a vehicle for the sexy, the scary was optional, the candy was for children. He had gone home that night and started planning.

Walsh had thrown a party last year too — Walsh threw a party every Halloween, apparently. The great thing about spending Halloween in LA was that it was not just one night of raucous fun. It was a full week of parties stacked on parties. You could live in a costume from the twenty-eighth through to the first if you wanted to and Ilya had wanted to.

This year he had leveled up his costume. The vampire was the right call — classic, sexy, commitment visible from across a room.

He'd flown in with nobody, which was fine, because Walsh's parties had a way of solving that problem. Within an hour he'd found them — the contingent that always materialized at these things, the Russian speakers, pulled toward each other across a crowded room by some instinct that had nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with the relief of a language that didn't require effort. A singer from Tbilisi. Two actors Ilya recognized vaguely from some cold-war drama he'd half-watched on a flight. A woman from Kyiv whose husband was some kind of executive and who had opinions about everything.

The pieces of Ilya’s memory of the night were starting to slot into their rightful places. He could see a hallway. A bathroom. Someone coming out of it.

A girl.

He let that one sit for a moment. Something about her made him smile, small and immediate, before he'd even remembered why — just the fact of her arriving in his head produced that.

He looked at the water bottle in his hand. The plastic was sweating, condensation running down the sides, pooling where his fingers were wrapped around it. The room was too warm. The curtains were still losing. He made himself drink the rest of it in slow deliberate swallows and then held the empty bottle and looked at the ceiling and tried to remember why she made him smile.

He was pretty sure she'd been in a Mulan costume, which he'd recognized because he'd watched the movie twice in the past month. His coach had told him his conversational English was already pretty good and his reading English was fine but his idioms were wrong and had recommended Ilya watch more children’s movies. His teammates would probably have something to say about that if they knew, but they didn't know, and Ilya was going to keep it that way.

Lately, he was watching them alone in his apartment with the subtitles on and he was secretly enjoying doing it.

The point was he knew the costume.

She was Asian, or half — he wasn't sure, details were a bit fuzzy there. He remembered she had long dark hair, and freckles, a lot of them, all across her nose and cheeks, and no makeup over them. He remembered thinking there was something almost aggressive about that, in a good way — the freckles as a statement of fact about her face, take it or leave it. He'd found the detail charming before he'd consciously registered finding her pretty, which was a new order of operations for him.

She'd known his name. That part he remembered clearly. And she'd known hockey.

One of his teammates had once used the phrase puck bunny last April and Ilya had needed the term explained to him, and now that he had a working definition, he was confident this girl was not one. He could usually tell inside the first two minutes. She hadn't had that energy — hadn't looked at him like he was something she wanted to acquire.

He remembered that she'd corrected his stats. His actual stats, from the actual game the night before. He'd been showing off and she'd told him he was wrong and moved on. He should have been embarrassed— he was used to fudging the numbers, making himself look a little better just for the story. But instead, the fact that she caught him and called him out was what really made him interested in her.

The pool he was starting to be able to remember. The night sky and the blue light and the city below them. Her freckles catching the light. He'd kissed her and she'd kissed him back. Warm and insistent, her mouth soft and then not soft, and he could still feel it somehow, the pressure of it, the way she'd leaned into him.

He was hard.

He looked down at the strain in his shorts, reached down and adjusted himself because the angle was uncomfortable, and then lay back and looked at the ceiling.

Great, now he was horny and hungover.

They had kissed. That was all that had happened, as far as he could reconstruct it — they had kissed and she had left the party and apparently the memory of that was enough to get himself worked up now. He couldn't remember the last time that had happened.

He lay there and thought about her mouth and felt no urgency to do anything about any of it. His head was too bad for urgency. Later. He'd deal with it later.

What else did he remember about her? He was fairly certain she knew someone in hockey—someone close to her, someone he might know himself? That part of their conversation was a little blurry now.

She had left before anything happened beyond the kissing. He remembered trying to persuade her to stay. What else had happened? Ah, right!

He’d handed her his phone and she’d typed in her number. He picked up his phone now and checked his messages.

He was now pretty sure he’d texted her… There it was! Just her first name and number. Jane. No last name.

He considered that—Jane. It was a simple name, unmistakably English. He liked it.

He’d worried a bit about what he might have texted her last night, but apparently, drunk-Ilya had kept it together. Reading it back now, it was fine. He’d told her he was thinking about her, and that was it. She still hadn’t written back.

He checked the time. Two in the afternoon. She was probably asleep. She must be if she still hadn’t messaged him back.

He put the phone down and lay back and tried to reconstruct her face more clearly. The freckles came through. The rest was soft at the edges still. He'd remember more later. Sometimes it worked like that.

He lay back down. His head was still killing him and the city outside was doing whatever LA did on Sunday afternoons, indifferent and bright.

She would text him back. He was Ilya Rozanov and she'd kissed him like a wildcat and she'd text him back.

He was certain.

She didn't text him back.

So he sent her one more text, just her name, any more and he’d come across wrong. He put his phone down and went to get dinner-slash-breakfast.

She didn't text him back that night either.

He sent her name again the next day. Just that, same as before. The first one had probably not gone through — that happened, networks were unreliable — surely that was what had happened. He sent it and put his phone down and felt better about the situation.

She didn't respond to that one either.

By the third day he was considering the possibility that she'd mistyped her number. Not a fake number — no woman had ever given him a fake number — but a mistype. One wrong digit in the dark at a party after several drinks, it happened, it was the only explanation that made sense. He sent another text just in case it was the networks acting up again. He sent it and immediately felt insane for having sent it.

She still didn't text back.

By the end of the week he'd stopped being cool about it and stopped pretending otherwise, at least to himself. He was sending more texts than he was going to count right now. She had his number. She'd typed it in herself, he'd watched her do it, and either she'd mistyped her own number — possible, unlikely — or she was just not texting him back. He turned that over.

He was Ilya Rozanov. He knew what he looked like. There was no way a woman was intentionally standing him up.

One more. Just in case.

By the second week of silence, he started wondering what he'd done wrong.

This was new territory. He rewound the night and went through it looking for the moment — had he been too much? He'd been drunk, he knew that, but sloppy? He didn't think he'd been sloppy. He'd been charming. He was good at being charming even drunk, possibly better drunk, the edges came off and he stopped editing himself and women generally found that appealing. He'd been charming and he'd been interested and he'd kissed her and she'd kissed him back and then she'd left and now she wasn't texting him and somewhere in that sequence something had gone wrong and he needed to find it.

He sent:

jane i have been thinking

i think you are mad at me

are you mad at me

what did i do

He looked at that last one for a second after he sent it. What did i do. He had never in his life sent a text that said what did i do. He sent it anyway because the question was burning a hole in him and he was past performing about it.

During that time, he went to practice. Ate well. Slept the right number of hours. Got a hat trick against Tampa and tried not to obsessively check his phone until after the post-game.

The next day, after some reflection:

okay i think i know what i did

i was a lot at the party

but jane you have to understand i am not usually like this

i am usually very cool

you can ask anyone

This was partially true. He rewound the night again. He had been a lot. He'd followed her down the hall. He'd kissed her and then held on when she tried to leave, which in retrospect — he pressed his fingers against his eyes — in retrospect was maybe not his finest sequence of moves. Usually he didn't have to try this hard. Usually trying this hard wasn't something that came up because the whole thing resolved itself long before it got to a second week of unanswered texts.

He was Ilya Rozanov and this girl would text him back, she had to.

He was in the film room with the coaching staff, watching Montreal tape, and Number 24 came up the ice and Ilya's eyes went straight to his shoulders.

He sat up.

He rewound it. Watched it again. There — just before the pass, Hollander's left shoulder turned a fraction toward the receiver. Small. Readable. Once Ilya caught it, they found more film of Hollander and it was there every time, the same fraction of a turn, consistent enough that you could set your defenseman to it before Hollander had touched the puck. He sat back and felt the particular satisfaction of finding the secret, solving the riddle.

And then, chasing that feeling, something else surfaced.

Jane. The party. She'd said something about Hollander — he was almost certain she'd said something about Hollander, that she knew him somehow, was close with him somehow. Related maybe? He thought she'd said related. It was a fuzzy detail from a fuzzy night but it was there. Both of them ambiguously Asian. It stood to reason that Hollander could be the player she mentioned knowing. Right?

He turned this over for a moment. He was fairly sure. He was not completely sure. And if he texted her assuming they were cousins and he was wrong — if she was just a friend or Ilya was mistaken about Jane knowing Hollander — and she was already ignoring him, already annoyed at him for whatever he'd done wrong at the party, then texting her a wrong assumption based on her ethnicity was going to make everything considerably worse.

He pulled his phone back out from under the table.

He could use the tell. That was the move. Lead with the tell, not with the cousin thing, give her something interesting and let her respond and figure out the rest from there.

He sent it.

He put his phone face down on his knee and felt the blood leave his face. He sat very still and stared at the screen where Hollander was still moving up the ice, completely unaware that Ilya had just handed his shoulder tell to someone who in all likelihood knew him personally and could pick up a phone right now and pass every word of it along. Along with Boston's defensive scheme for the upcoming game. Along with whatever else Jane decided was worth sharing.

The coaching staff kept talking. Someone was drawing lines on the whiteboard. Ilya sat in his chair and thought about what he had just done and why he had just done it, which was that a girl had not texted him back in two weeks and he had been sitting in a film room getting desperate and the idea had arrived and he had sent it before the part of his brain responsible for consequences had caught up.

He was Ilya Rozanov. He had just handed competitive intelligence to the enemy because he had a crush.

He pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth and said nothing.

Stupid.

His phone buzzed.

He looked at it.

She'd written back.

The relief that moved through him was enormous and immediate and he felt his face do something he had absolutely no control over, warmth coming up fast, and he was smiling before he'd read a single word, actually smiling, sitting in the Boston coaching staff's film room like an idiot with his phone under the table—

"You blushing, Roz?"

Marlow. Whispering right beside him. Ilya had forgotten Marlow was right beside him.

"I am not blushing," Ilya whispered back, eyes not leaving his phone as he texted Jane back. "Russians do not do this."

Ilya could feel Marlow look at him for a long moment and then look back at the screen.

"Rozanov." The coach's voice from the front of the room, "Phone away."

Ilya put his phone in his pocket. He did not stop smiling for several minutes.

Jane texted him back.

It was their first game against Montreal, Ilya's first time on the ice against the number one draft pick, Shane Hollander, and for most of the game all Ilya could see was the back of his jersey and a moving blur. Hollander was everywhere and nowhere, always just ahead of him, always already gone by the time Ilya arrived.

Every chirp he sent at that jersey had landed on nothing. No reaction, no eye contact, not even the small involuntary tells most players couldn't stop themselves from giving. The closest Ilya got was the faceoff dot — he'd said Jane's name, low, just loud enough, and watched Hollander's eyes come up for half a second before he lost the puck. That was it. That was everything he got.

He barely got a look at his face the entire game.

The one time he did — boards, briefly, a scramble for the puck — something moved through Ilya that he hadn't been expecting. Just a flash of it, quick and inconvenient. He didn't get much, barely a second, but even that was enough to clock that Hollander was good looking in a way that landed even through the chaos of a board battle. The particular low pull of attraction showed up uninvited and Ilya shoved it aside immediately because he needed to be focused and winning, not distracted by his rival's face. He thought, involuntarily, that good looks apparently ran in Jane's family, which was interesting and also not helpful right now.

He decided not to look directly at Hollander's face again for the rest of the game. The back of the jersey was fine. The shapeless blur of him moving up the ice was fine, was actually excellent hockey that Ilya could appreciate from a safe and focused distance. The face was a distraction and Ilya was going to have to manage that accordingly.

This was a great injustice, really. Ilya had been looking forward to this all season — a real rival, someone worth the effort, someone he could full-throttle pester. It was his favorite game and he'd been completely shut out of it. He'd also been hoping that if he could get Hollander talking, get under his skin enough, maybe he'd learn something about Jane. What made her tick.

And then Hollander had used the tell.

Ilya had been watching for it all game and there it was, third period, the shoulder turning a fraction before the pass, exactly as he'd seen it on tape. His defenseman was already moving. The lane closed. Hollander had skated into the game today with the same flaw he'd always had.

Hollander was too good a player to use a tell he knew about. That was just fact. If Jane had said anything, even a word, he'd have been in practice the next morning running it until it was gone. He hadn't. She'd had real, useful intelligence about Shane Hollander and she'd kept it.

Ilya thought about that on the flight home. Then in the car. Then lying in his apartment in the dark when he should have been sleeping.

She hadn't told Hollander.

He’d joked with Jane about her having feelings for him, but deep down, he couldn’t be sure what it meant that she’d kept quiet—he just hoped it meant something good.

They texted properly after that. Whatever hold up she had in texting him before, she didn’t seem to have anymore.

He was learning the shape of her — where she lived, what she was studying, the texture of her opinions, which were mostly correct and occasionally wrong in ways he found entertaining. She was Hollander's cousin, which she’d now confirmed.

He knew she knew hockey, but he did not expect how much she knew the game inside and out.

She described a play once, all angles and positioning and timing, the kind of language that had four moving parts, and he understood it immediately. He tried to explain the same thing to St. Simon the next day, almost word for word, and St. Simon nodded and moved on in the way that meant he hadn't followed it at all. Ilya stared at the back of his head. He'd used her words exactly. How was that possible. St. Simon was just stupider than Jane, probably. This was the most likely explanation.

The flirting was a disaster.

He tried once, steering the conversation somewhere warmer. They'd been talking about nothing in particular and he'd let it drift, typed:

jane. i have been thinking about you.

what kind of thinking, she sent back, and he felt encouraged by that, that was something, that was her engaging with it, so he typed:

the kind that keeps me up at night

A pause. Long enough that he thought maybe it had landed, maybe she was composing something, maybe—

how many grams of protein do you eat per day? i've been reading about performance nutrition and the ranges vary a lot by position.

He stared at the screen.

He read it again.

She had not taken it anywhere he'd intended. She had not taken it anywhere at all. She had gone directly from sexy talk to performance diet without any apparent awareness that a transition had occurred. He typed back an answer about protein because what else was he going to do? Of course, she immediately asked a follow-up question about whether he cycled his carbohydrates around game days.

He lay on his hotel room floor and looked at the ceiling.

He tried again from a different angle a few days later. She responded with a save percentage statistic. He put his phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling again, which was becoming a habit, and felt completely undone in a way he couldn't explain and found unbearable in the best possible way. He kept setting her up anyway. She never quite landed one back. He enjoyed this more than he could justify.

Everyone wanted something from Ilya. His teammates wanted him to carry them. Management wanted production and a face that photographed well. His father wanted a version of him that had stayed in Russia. There were Russian guys he knew that wanted dinner paid for and a name to drop. Women wanted whoever they'd decided he was before he'd said a word.

Jane seemed faintly inconvenienced by his existence and talked to him like a person and wanted nothing back. She wasn't playing hard to get — he knew what that looked like, the studied delay, the manufactured scarcity. This wasn't that. She just had somewhere else to be and was choosing to talk to him anyway, on her own schedule, in her own time.

He was working for it. Not performing — actually working, trying to be interesting, trying to earn the next response. He wasn't sure he'd ever done that before.

He was on the team bus, headphones in, vocabulary app open, trying to look unapproachable so nobody would ask about it.

Ilya was maybe a little… insecure about his English skill. A conversation would move past him and he'd catch up three exchanges too late, laughing at the wrong moment to a joke, or respond completely wrong to what should’ve been an easy question. It was easier to practice alone, on a bus, with headphones in.

He hit the collective nouns section.

A flamboyance of flamingos.

He stopped scrolling. He read it again. A flamboyance. Whoever had decided that a group of flamingos was called a flamboyance was a person Ilya wanted to meet, wanted to shake the hand of, wanted to buy a drink for. This was the best thing he had learned in English so far and he had learned a lot of things. He was already opening Jane's thread before he'd finished thinking about it, the impulse immediate and unexamined, because this was exactly the kind of thing she would have a response to and he wanted to see what it was.

He texted her. She came back with a murder of crows. He sat on the bus with the vocabulary app now mostly forgotten and felt something in his chest ease that he hadn't realized was tight.

Jane never made him feel slow. He didn't know if she knew she was doing it.

Boston lost a game they should have won. The bad kind of loss, the kind that got into you. He was in his hotel room and he opened her thread without deciding to and typed before he'd thought about it, and she wrote back at two in the morning with something dry and warm underneath the dryness, and he read it several times and fell asleep with the phone still in his hand.

He knew what this was. He hadn't said it to anyone, not even in Russian. But he knew.

He tested the theory his next free night.

He went out. A club, loud, the kind of place that was good for this kind of experiment because there were a lot of people and the lighting was bad and everyone was looking at everyone. He got a drink and stood somewhere with a sightline and looked at the women. Really looked, the way he usually looked, waiting for the thing that usually happened.

Nothing happened.

He tried harder. There was a woman near the bar who was objectively beautiful and he looked at her and felt nothing particular and looked away. Another one caught his eye and smiled and he smiled back and felt nothing follow it.

He tried harder. There was a woman near the bar and he looked at her and his brain immediately went: wrong hair. He looked at another one across the room: right height maybe, but her face was doing nothing for him and he couldn't find Jane in it anywhere. Another one caught his eye and smiled and he smiled back and looked at her freckle-free face and felt nothing follow it. He stood there with his drink and went through every woman he could see and kept finding the same problem, which was that none of them were right, none of them had the right combination of details, and he was standing in a club comparing strangers to a girl he'd kissed once at a Halloween party weeks ago and couldn't fully remember.

He switched tactics.

There was a man near the back, tall, good jaw. Ilya looked at him with the same deliberate attention and waited. There was something there — not nothing, not the complete blankness of the women tonight, more like the distant acknowledgment of a fact. Good looking man. Yes. Fine. And underneath it, faint but present, the specific thrill of the thing that would be bad for him, the career-ending quality of it, which Ilya had always found perversely interesting about himself, that danger had a taste and it was good-looking men. He looked at the man and felt the outline of that and not much else.

Not Jane.

He finished his drink. He went home. He lay in the dark and thought about a pool lit blue and a mouth that had been warm and insistent against his and took care of his problem, which was becoming a habit. He already knew what it meant and wasn't ready to say it out loud yet.

Blyad, he thought at the ceiling afterward.

He picked up his phone. Opened her thread. Put it back down.

He knew what this was.

She wouldn't send him a photo.

He asked. She deflected. He asked again and she changed the subject entirely. It nagged at him, just a low persistent thing. She was real — he had kissed her, he had the physical memory of it, she was absolutely a real person. Maybe she was just shy.

He'd ask again later.

He asked her to meet him instead. Boston was playing in Ottawa and he'd be in her city and it seemed obvious, it seemed like the natural next thing, and he pushed a little because he was horny and wanted to see her and he was used to pushing being something that worked. She said she didn't think she could. He pushed a little more. She went quiet.

Blyad. He'd done it again — moved too fast, wanted too much, spooked her. Jane was not like other girls he'd known, was not going to be maneuvered or charmed into something she hadn't decided she wanted yet. He understood this about her and had pushed anyway and now she was gone again and it was his fault this time, completely his fault, and he knew it.

She went quiet for good again.

The first silence was a challenge. This one just felt like heartbreak.

He sent collective nouns. He mentioned Hollander — it had worked before, worth trying again. He talked hockey, sent observations she would have had opinions about, left the conversation open in every direction he could think of.

At some point, late on a Tuesday, he typed something vulnerable. He'd been lying in the dark thinking about the Ottawa game, about scanning the crowd, desperately hoping for the chance of spotting a glimpse of freckles. He told her that that he got lonely in a way he couldn't explain to the people around him. That sometimes a room full of people who wanted to be near him was the worst possible place to be.

He sent it before he could think about it too hard. If he opened up a little, if he laid himself bare for her, maybe she wouldn't feel so far away. Maybe it would give her something to meet him with. He watched the screen. For just a second he thought he saw the typing indicator, the three dots, and then it was gone.

He stared at the screen for a long time.

He decided he'd imagined it.

He went out with the Russian guys.

Dmitri had texted him at nine and Ilya had said yes because his apartment was too quiet and the Tuesday text was sitting in his sent messages unanswered and he needed to be somewhere loud. They went to a place in the Back Bay that was loud enough. Ilya bought the first round because he always bought the first round and sat down and let the noise of the club wash over him.

He lasted about an hour before it came out.

He didn't know how it came up. One minute they were arguing about something — a footballer, a trade, something Ilya wasn't following closely enough to have an opinion on — and the next minute he was talking about Jane. Not everything. Just the basics.

"There is a girl," he said, in Russian.

The table went a little quieter. Dmitri leaned forward.

"From a party," Ilya said. "In October. We talked. We kissed. Now she doesn't respond to me."

A beat of silence.

Then Pavel started laughing.

"She's married," Pavel said.

"She's not married."

"She's married," Dmitri said, like this settled it. He raised his glass. The others raised theirs.

"She is not married," Ilya said. "I am telling you she is not married."

"Then why doesn't she respond?" Pavel asked, with the air of a man who had just proven his point.

Ilya opened his mouth. Closed it. "She's shy," he said, which sounded worse out loud than it had in his head.

The table lost it. Not cruelly — they weren't cruel, they were idiots, there was a difference — just with the complete delight of men who had found something funny and were going to be finding it funny for the rest of the evening. Ilya let them. He drank his drink and let them have it and laughed when it was appropriate to laugh and said she was not married several more times and was not listened to.

In the cab home he thought about it anyway.

Married. He turned it over. Could she — no. He thought about her at the party, the way she'd kissed him back. No. She wasn't married.

The thought lodged anyway

Mostly he was just worried about her.

He'd learned to worry like this a long time ago. He thought of his mama who stayed in bed for three days and didn't answer when you knocked. Who ate when you put food in front of her and didn't eat when you didn't. Who looked at you sometimes like she was seeing you from very far away, like there was glass between her and everything, and you'd learned not to knock too hard because sometimes the knocking made it worse and sometimes it didn't matter either way. You just waited. You found reasons it was going to be okay. You told yourself she'd be up tomorrow.

Sometimes she was up tomorrow.

He texted into the void.

i hope you are okay jane.

He didn't let himself finish that thought. He just worried, and texted, and waited.

Boston played in Montreal and between shifts he found himself scanning the crowd again.

He'd done it in Ottawa too, every stoppage, eyes moving across the lower bowl looking for a face he couldn't fully reconstruct from memory. Ottawa made sense — she lived there, she'd said so, it was her city. Montreal made less sense and he was doing it anyway, because she was a Montreal fan and she was Hollander's cousin and the Bell Centre was loud and full and somewhere in the back of his chest there was a feeling he couldn't name exactly, something that said she's here, she could be here, look. Like she was close. Like if he just found the right section he'd see her sitting there.

He looked through four stoppages. He didn't find her.

He didn't know what he would have done if he had. Skated over, probably. Done something inadvisable in front of twelve thousand people. He was already doing the inadvisable thing—  distracting himself by scanning a crowd for a girl during an NHL game. He looked one more time anyway, in the last stoppage of the third, and came up empty, and went back to playing hockey, which was what he was supposed to be doing.

She sent him a Christmas text. One line.

merry christmas ilya.

He read it four times. She was okay. She was there somewhere, she existed, she had picked up her phone and typed his name and sent it. He held onto that. He kept texting after Christmas break, collective nouns and hockey observations and things he would have told her anyway, and they went into the void, and he didn't stop.

My Jane, he thought at some point, and then noticed he'd thought it, and couldn't locate when it had started feeling true.

It was Dmitri's apartment, or Pavel's — Ilya could never remember whose it actually was. They all looked the same. Same bad furniture, same bottles on the counter, same loud opinions about everything that only brats with moderate trust funds had. Someone had made Ilya buy the good vodka. He always ended up buying the good vodka. This was the tax he paid for having friends who spoke Russian.

They'd been on the subject of Jane for an hour.

"Call her," Dmitri said. He'd been saying this for forty minutes.

"No."

"She won't pick up," Pavel said — it was Pavel's apartment, Ilya was fairly sure it was Pavel's — "She is with her husband." Someone laughed.

"She is not married," Ilya said.

"Then call her."

"I am not going to call her."

"Because she won't pick up."

"Because it is—" Ilya stopped. Because it was New Year's Eve and something was going on with Jane and he didn't want to be the thing that pushed her even further away when she was already so far. He knew this. "Because it is not the right time."

"Married," Pavel said, simply, and drank.

Ilya looked at his phone. Fourteen texts since Christmas. Fourteen into the void and nothing back, and the city outside was getting ready to make all its noise, and his friends thought she was married, and it was New Year's Eve.

Then, from nowhere, a different thought entirely. A stupid thought. An irrational thought that he knew was irrational even as it arrived and couldn't dislodge anyway — what if something had happened to her. What if she wasn't ignoring him. What if she was gone, actually gone, and he was sitting here in Pavel's apartment being laughed at by idiots while somewhere Jane was —

The Christmas text. One line. merry christmas ilya. He'd read it four times and held onto it, she was okay, she was there. But what if it wasn't that? What if it was a goodbye? The kind of text you sent when you were tying things off, when you wanted to leave something kind behind. He'd read it as proof of life. What if he'd read it wrong?

The panic sat in his chest, small and cold and refusing to move.

He knew this was insane. He knew it. She was ignoring him, Jane ignored texts, there was an obvious explanation and it had nothing to do with —

He called.

It rang out. He called again. He called again after that. He was aware on some level that this was not his finest hour — Ilya Rozanov, spam calling a girl who wasn't texting him back while his drunk Russian friends watched from the couch — and he called again anyway because the ringing meant something. The ringing meant her phone wasn’t disconnected.

He called again.

Twenty three times. He counted later, scrolling back through the call log with a shame he didn't particularly enjoy. Twenty three calls and several texts and his friends had stopped laughing somewhere around call eight and were now just watching him with something akin to a crowd watching a trainwreck.

She picked up.

Her voice. Actually her, whispering, but there. He felt something move through him at the sound of it that he was not going to examine right now. She sounded tired and far away and she'd picked up anyway, and he moved away from the noise of the apartment, found a bedroom, shut the door behind him. The words came because he was drunk and she was there and he'd been waiting months to hear her voice and the waiting was over.

He told her he liked her. He told her he'd missed her. He asked her if she was ever going to meet him and heard the no underneath her answer before she'd finished giving it.

And then she told him about Shane.

It came out sideways, in pieces. Her cousin had found out. Shane didn't want her talking to Ilya. So she'd stopped. Just like that. Because Shane Hollander had decided this was his to manage and Jane had let him manage it.

Ilya went very quiet.

He said happy new year. She whispered it back and her voice was wrecked in a way that told him everything he needed to know. She didn't want this. He could hear it clearly — this was not the voice of someone who had made a clean decision. This was the voice of someone being made to do something by someone they couldn't say no to.

He hung up.

The apartment was quiet when he walked back into the living room. Someone had turned the music down without him noticing.

He picked up the bottle of good vodka — the expensive one, the one that had cost more than it should because Dmitri had opinions about labels — and threw it at the wall. It hit and shattered and the smell of it filled the room immediately, sharp and clean, and nobody said anything.

Ilya stood there with his hand still in the throwing position.

He was seven years old standing in the hallway of their Moscow apartment. He was standing in his socks on the cold floor listening to his father's voice through the wall, calm and certain, explaining to whoever was on the other end of the phone — a neighbor, a doctor, it changed — she's not well, she needs managing, she doesn't always know what's good for her. Said the way his father said everything, with the complete certainty of a man who had decided that love and control were the same thing and had never once found a reason to question this.

He thought of the balcony door of that Moscow apartment, the kind that locked from the inside.

When she got bad enough — when she stopped getting out of bed, when she stopped eating, when she went somewhere behind her eyes for too long — his father would decide she needed air. He would open the door and pull her out to the balcony in whatever she was wearing, sometimes her nightgown, sometimes less, and lock the door behind her. January in Moscow. The balcony was not large. He said it was the only thing that worked, that the cold shocked her back into herself, that she'd thank him for it later.

Ilya had been seven the first time he saw it. He'd stood in the hallway in his socks and watched his father turn the key and walk away toward the kitchen for a drink, and Ilya hadn't moved, hadn't made a sound. Not because he didn't want to. Because his father was between him and the door and his father was large and scary in the way that made the air in a room change when he entered it, and Ilya had stood there in his socks with his heart going very fast, terrified for his mother on the other side of the door and terrified of the man who had put her there, and he had not said anything and he had not moved and he had looked at the Balcony door and listened for her and heard nothing.

She stayed out there until she promised. The right words, in the right order — I'm better now, I'm fine, I'll eat something, I'll get dressed — and then his father would unlock the door and let her back in and make her tea and tell whoever called that she was doing much better, she just needed managing sometimes, you knew how she was.

Shane Hollander told his cousin who she was allowed to talk to.

Ilya knew these were not the same thing. He was not an idiot. His father was his father. Shane Hollander was a twenty year old hockey player with a rivalry and bad judgment and a cousin he apparently felt entitled to manage. Ilya knew the difference. He did.

He just couldn't find the part of himself right now that felt it.

The anger sat in his chest, hot and familiar, and underneath it was the older thing, the thing that had no clean name in Russian or English, the thing he'd been carrying around since he was small enough to stand in front of a locked door and not understand why his mama had to be on the other side of it.

"Ilya," Dmitri said. Carefully.

"I'm fine," Ilya said, in Russian.

He got his coat. He walked home because he needed the air and because he needed to be somewhere that wasn't this apartment with these people who had seen all of that. The city was doing its midnight thing around him, noise and light and strangers, and he walked through it with his hands in his pockets and let the cold do what cold did.

Somewhere behind him the new year had started.

He walked.

The plan was simple. He was not going to be in the same room as Shane Hollander.

The event was large, the schedule was manageable, and Ilya was very good at not being places he didn't want to be. He'd been doing it his whole life. You identified the exits, you stayed moving, you made yourself unavailable before the question came up. He could do that here. The only place he couldn't avoid Hollander was the ice, but the ice was different — the ice was where Ilya went when everything else got complicated, the place where his brain stopped running in six directions at once and narrowed down to one thing. He could be on the ice with Shane Hollander. He could go to that place in his head and stay there and it would be fine.

Play hockey. Don't look at him. Go home.

Simple.

The skills competition he won for himself, for Jane.

There was the white hot thing that settled over him the second he got on the ice and saw Hollander on the other bench. Clean and immediate, like a switch. Ilya looked at him across the ice and felt nothing except fury, which was almost funny, that he had once clocked this man as good looking through the fog of a board battle and now could barely stand to be in the same building as him.

He hadn't been able to get a good look at him — hadn't let himself, had kept his eyes on the ice, on the targets, on anything that wasn't Hollander's face — but he didn't need a good look. He knew he was there. He could feel exactly where he was in the rink. He skated out for the shot accuracy and aimed at the targets and put every single one of them through with the kind of precision that only came from rage-induced concentration.

He set the record. He skated back toward the bench and let his eyes find Hollander because he'd earned that much, he'd just set a record, he could look at him for two seconds. Hollander was already looking. Maybe fifteen feet between them, no helmet, no visor, nothing between Ilya and his face, and for the first time all weekend Ilya actually looked at him properly and felt — something. Quick and unwelcome.

He hadn't felt that for anyone in months, not since Jane, not since the club where he'd stood and cycled through every woman in the room and come up empty, and now here it was showing up for the first time and it was for Shane Hollander, a man Ilya actively hated, He held their gaze for a second and Hollander held it back and then looked at his stick like the stick had said something interesting.

Ilya looked at the ice.

That was not useful. He was moving on.

He watched Hollander's run from the bench. Arms crossed. His time was not even close to what Ilya had done. He watched him finish the last target and felt nothing that resembled the satisfaction of winning, just the same white hot thing sitting in his chest with nowhere left to go.

Hollander skated past the European bench on his way back and Ilya heard himself say it before he'd decided to say it. So much for not engaging. So much for the plan, the ice being simple, keeping his eyes down and playing hockey. Hollander was right there and Ilya had lasted approximately forty minutes before breaking his own rule and he couldn't even be surprised at himself.

"Maybe if you were as good at hockey as you are at controlling women you would have beaten me."

Low. Mean. Hollander's neck went red and he kept skating without turning around, which was the smart move, which made Ilya angrier for a second and that anger had nowhere to go so he sat back down and glared.

On the opposing bench, Scott Hunter was on his feet leaning over the boards staring at Ilya with an expression that was not friendly. Ilya held his gaze. Hunter shouted something Ilya couldn't hear over the crowd noise and then sat back down.

Ilya looked at the ice and rolled his eyes.

Dinosaur Scott Hunter would probably not defend sweet little handsome Canadian golden boy if he knew the truth.

Then they put him next to Hollander at a table with twenty cameras pointed at both of them and Ilya had no choice. So much for ignoring him. He'd made the promise twice now and broken it twice and here was the third time, inevitable, the league having decided that what everyone needed was Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander six inches apart. He pulled out his chair and sat down and added this to the list of things that were not his fault.

He'd gotten there first and was talking to his handler when Hollander came through the door. Ilya glanced over. His eyes moved across Hollander's face — smooth, clear, not a freckle anywhere, which he noted — and felt the same small inconvenient flash he'd felt at the skills competition, the one he kept trying to put somewhere and couldn't. Hollander was, unfortunately, exactly as good looking as the people on Twitter said he was, which Ilya could acknowledge as a simple fact of the universe in the same way he acknowledged that Dmitri always ordered too much food. True things he had no use for.

He rolled his eyes and turned back to his handler because he was not going to enjoy spending the next twenty minutes sitting next to a man he found attractive and hated in equal measure.

Hollander sat down. Ilya could feel him next to him like he was a live wire. Ilya said something to his handler that made the handler laugh and tried not to look at Hollander again and the cameras started rolling.

Ilya snuck a glance at him briefly when the questions started. Hollander was looking at a middle distance he'd apparently decided was safe, eyes finding everything in the room except Ilya, jaw set, hands steady on the table. Ilya couldn’t get a read on Hollander on the ice. Couldn't chirp him, couldn't crack him, couldn't locate the lever. Up close he still couldn't find it. Something closed and careful about his face, something that gave nothing away.

The questions came. Hockey questions first, easy, both of them answering. Then the rivalry question, and Hollander said something generous about Ilya's hockey sense, said he respected what he did, said it with complete composure, and the room responded warmly and Ilya sat there and felt the white hot thing move through him again because Hollander was sitting there being gracious and composed and good Canadian boy, exactly what he always was for cameras, exactly what he'd been for Jane when he'd decided Jane needed managing.

He leaned into his microphone.

He said what he said. Not everything — just enough. Some people are very different from what they show. He watched the room go still and felt the words do what he'd aimed them to do and looked at the moderator pleasantly when the moderator asked if he wanted to elaborate.

"No," he said. "I think it is enough."

A reporter asked Hollander if he had anything nice to say about Rozanov after all that. The room laughed. Ilya watched Hollander's neck go scarlet — fast, uncontrollable— and felt something twist in his chest that wasn't satisfaction. Hollander was red in a way that wasn't just embarrassment.

"I respect him," Hollander said.

Ilya looked at his water glass.

He'd aimed those words carefully and Hollander had absorbed them and come back with I respect him in a voice that sounded like he meant it. Ilya sat with that. He'd been waiting all season for something to crack in Hollander, for the surface to slip, for someone somewhere to tell him something that confirmed what he already believed — that the good Canadian boy thing was a performance, that underneath it was the person who had decided Jane wasn't allowed to talk to Ilya anymore. And instead he was sitting here getting I respect him from twenty cameras in a voice that gave nothing away.

He did not know what to do with that.

The press conference ended and Ilya watched Hollander get up from the table and move toward the door. Fast. Not running but close, shoulders up, jaw tight, not looking at anyone, straight line to the exit like the room was on fire and he was the only one who could smell the smoke.

Ilya followed him.

He didn't decide to follow him. He just found himself in the corridor, and Hollander was ahead of him — when Ilya noticed him suddenly veer off toward the side corridor, find the single occupancy bathroom, and shove himself through the door like the door had personally offended him.

Ilya stood in the corridor for a second.

Why was he following him? He didn't have a clean answer for that. To apologize, maybe? To get Hollander alone for the first time, finally, away from cameras and handlers and forty journalists, and find out what he was actually like? To ask him directly, face to face, what exactly he'd said to Jane and why?

And then, from somewhere he didn't want to examine, a different thought arrived entirely. Hollander was good looking. Ilya had established this and kept trying to put it somewhere useful and failing. And Jane was good looking, Ilya knew that, he had the physical memory of it. And they were cousins. And something about standing in a corridor watching a bathroom door close was very familiar, was pulling at something, a Halloween party in LA, a hallway, a girl in a Mulan costume coming out of a bathroom and Ilya waiting for her—

He put his hand on the door before it closed.

They were going to need more privacy than a corridor could allow for this conversation. Whatever this conversation turned out to be.

Hollander was at the sink when Ilya pushed through the door. He didn't turn around. Just stood there with the tap running, hands under the water, looking at himself in the mirror.

"Can we be professional about this," Hollander said, to his own reflection. "For one weekend. That's all I'm asking."

"Professional," Ilya said. He let it sit. "You want me to be professional."

"Yes. Whatever your problem is with me — there are cameras everywhere, there are kids watching, I am asking you to act like a professional."

Ilya looked at the back of his head. At the set of his shoulders. At the careful controlled way he was holding himself together at the sink like if he just kept his hands under the water long enough none of this would be happening.

"My problem," Ilya said quietly, "is that you think you can decide things for other people. Who they talk to. Who they see. What they are allowed to have." He felt his jaw tighten. "You think because you are Shane Hollander this is okay."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"No?" Ilya took a step forward. "I know exactly what I am talking about."

Hollander turned around then. And there it was finally — the crack Ilya had been looking for all season, and it startled him, the suddenness of it. All that forced composure gone and now something raw and complicated sitting right on his face, right there in his eyes, more than Ilya had been expecting and more than Hollander probably knew he was showing. He looked, Ilya thought, almost desperate. It was a striking face to begin with — Ilya had established this— and with all that sitting on it, unguarded, it was almost too much to look at directly.

"You know what," Hollander snarled. "It's a good thing she's not talking to you anymore. You're an asshole."

Ilya just stood there and heard it and thought about New Year's Eve. The way Jane's voice had sounded on the phone, wrecked and small, not the voice of someone who had made a clean decision and was at peace with it. He had held onto that. He had been holding onto that for weeks, the proof of it, that somewhere out there was a girl who had sounded that sad about ending a something with Ilya — a friendship, a whatever it was, he had never had a clean word for it and didn't need one — and this man was standing in a bathroom telling him it was a good thing.

A good thing.

The lid came off.

Not all the way. He didn't move, didn't touch him, just stood there and felt the heat of it move through him from his chest outward and looked at Hollander's face and said nothing because there was too much to say and none of it was going to come out right in English and none of it was going to matter anyway because Hollander had already made his decision and here they both were.

Hollander shoulder checked him on the way out. Hard. Ilya took it without moving and listened to his footsteps go down the corridor and stood in the empty bathroom and breathed.

He was going to do something on the ice. He already knew he was going to do something on the ice. He just didn't know yet what it was going to look like.

Then the goal.

He watched it go in and watched Hollander raise his fist and something behind Ilya's eyes went completely white and the valve flew off and then he was moving and he couldn't have stopped it, wasn't trying to stop it. The next second he had Hollander by the jersey with the crowd going insane around them and was saying something, several things, not all of it in English.

Hollander got his arms up and covered his face and took it. Didn't swing back. Just covered up and took it and something about that made Ilya angrier for a second and then the linesmen were there and it didn't matter.

Except.

In the middle of it — Hollander's face close, Ilya's hands still in his jersey — his helmet came off. The arena air hit his face and Ilya saw freckles.

Just for a second. A scatter of them across his nose and cheeks, catching the light, unhidden, and something about them made Ilya's hands slow without deciding to. Half a second where he wasn't in the arena at all. A pool lit blue. A Halloween party in the hills. A face he'd been trying to reconstruct from memory for four months and kept losing the edges of, the freckles always the clearest part, the freckles always coming through—

Then a linesman got between them and the moment was gone.

Ilya stood there breathing hard while the crowd roared around him and let the linesmen do what they were doing and told himself, very clearly and immediately, that his moment of hesitation was guilt. He had mapped Jane's face onto Hollander's because he felt guilty —she cared about this boy for reasons Ilya didn’t truly understand. Sure he got the concept of being loyal to family, but he couldn’t imagine doing something like that for Andrei. But not everyone had the same fucked up relationship to their family, Ilya must’ve understood that and his brain had served up her face at that moment as some kind of punishment to Ilya. That was all. That was the only explanation.

Also because Hollander didn't have freckles. Couldn’t have freckles. Ilya had looked at him at the press conference, in the bathroom. His face was completely clear. Ilya had been in a fight, moving fast, adrenaline doing what adrenaline did. He'd imagined anything different than that.

He had to have imagined it.

This girl is making me insane, Ilya thought, being walked toward the penalty box. This girl who broke up with me, who I never even fucked.

He had a headache. He was going to be suspended. He sat in the locker room afterward and looked at his hands and thought about hockey and tried very hard not to think about anything else.

Three games.

Ilya sat with the number. Three games for fighting Shane Hollander, which was fine. Three games he could do. He'd served worse for less and come back and played better hockey after, which was the thing about suspensions that management never quite believed until it happened — sometimes a man would sit down for a few days only to come back angrier.

He was alone in his apartment after his sentencing and he was in his feelings and he opened Twitter, which a smarter man would not have done.

His fans deserved to know he wasn't sorry. They'd been loud and loyal all season and they deserved to know that Ilya Rozanov didn't put people through the boards without reason. He couldn't tell them the real reason — Shane Hollander told his cousin not to talk to me was not a press release he was prepared to issue — but he could tell the outline of the truth, maybe. He could be himself. He could let them know he was fine and the three games were fine and if Hollander didn't want to be laid out on the ice, then he shouldn't have done the celly.

He tweeted. His fans responded. This was the one place where being Ilya Rozanov worked simply and without friction — they loved him here, loudly, in a language he could read at his own pace, and the back and forth of it was easy in a way that most things weren't. He tweeted more. Someone asked him about Jane. He tweeted about Jane.

He didn't fully think this through.

The thread took on a life of its own fast. He watched it happen with a kind of detached interest — people claiming to know her, people claiming to be her, someone making a fan account, a journalist writing three sentences, the whole thing compounding and accelerating in the way of things on the internet that had found a current to run on. He gave them what he had. Her name. Ottawa. The Halloween party in the hills. Brendan Walsh's house, the pool. He couldn't describe her face to a sketch artist but he'd know it if he saw it. He was certain of that.

His phone buzzed.

He looked at it.

Jane.

He stared at her name on the screen and felt his stomach drop in a way he hadn't been expecting. She was going to be furious — she wouldn’t even send Ilya a photo of herself and now her name was on Twitter and half the internet was looking for her.

Ilya would have maybe a few furious, precious texts to savor from her before she went quiet again and, like always, it would be entirely his fault.

He looked at it.

we need to meet.

He read it again. He'd been bracing for fury —He'd had the whole thing mapped out in his head, Jane's anger, the silence that would follow it, the damage he'd done.

She wanted to meet him.

He turned it over. She'd said no to Ottawa. She'd made it clear that they were never going to meet in the way she made things clear, which was not unkindly but completely, no room left to push. He'd accepted that. He'd made his peace with the possibility that Jane would exist only in texts and one phone call and a Halloween party that was starting to feel like it had happened to someone else.

Now she wanted to meet him.

Then: it wasn't hollander's fault we weren't talking.

He read that one several times.

She was covering for Shane. That was the obvious read— she loved her cousin and she was smoothing things over, making it easier for him, because that was what you did when you loved someone. You made excuses for them. You absorbed the damage so they didn't have to. Ilya had watched people do this his whole life and knew exactly what it looked like.

But if she was telling the truth — if it, genuinely, hadn't been Hollander’s fault — then Ilya had put Canada's golden boy through the boards in front of twelve thousand people over something that wasn't his fault.

Whoops.

He still couldn't locate a different, reasonable, explanation for why Jane had gone quiet. He just couldn't.

They agreed to meet. After the season — she said after the season and Ilya wanted sooner. He wanted a date and a city and something concrete he could put in his calendar and look at when things got bad, but after the season was what she was offering and he took it. She was offering to explain everything. That was something. That was real.

He sat in his apartment with his phone in his hand and felt two things at once — something that was almost giddy moving through him, the meeting, she wanted to meet, after all of it she wanted to meet — and underneath it something cautious, something that had learned to be cautious, tapping at the back of his skull.

He focused on hockey.

He was good at this when he needed to be, and he needed to be now. Boston needed him and the playoffs were close and hockey was the thing that never went sideways on him. It made sense in a way almost nothing else in his life currently did. He put everything into it and it mostly worked and his three-game suspension went by fast, and he came back and played the way he'd promised management he would.

Except sometimes, late — after a hard practice or a bad loss or just for no reason at all, which was the worst kind— he picked up his phone and opened her thread and typed something. A collective noun. A hockey observation. Nothing that needed a response. He sent it and put the phone down and didn't wait because he knew what he was and wasn't going to get, and he'd made his peace with that.

Mostly he'd made his peace with that.

It was a bad habit. He couldn't stop. Sue me.

Pittsburgh scored their fourth goal and despite the building gap, Ilya kept playing like the game was tighter than it was.

The game wasn't over until the horn and Ilya always played it that way — winning pucks in the corner he had no business winning, setting up two chances that almost went in, almost, the post ringing on the second one and the crowd making the noise crowds made when something almost happened and then didn't. He heard it distantly. He was already looking for the next puck.

The horn sounded. Game over. Boston out of the playoffs.

He did the handshake line with his head up. He said what was normally said with a casual indifference. He looked at each Pittsburgh player when he said it because that was the respectful thing, you looked at them, you didn't look at the ice or somewhere past their shoulder, you looked at them and you meant every good game even when it hurt.

He went to the locker room and sat in front of his cubby and looked at his hands for a while.

His phone buzzed.

His first thought was Jane, which was ludicrous. Jane was not going to text him tonight of all nights, the night Boston got knocked out in game seven in someone else's building. Not when Ilya needed her the most.

He looked at his phone anyway.

Jane.

He stared at her name on the screen. He'd known. Somehow between the buzz and picking it up he'd known, which made no sense, which didn't matter right now because Jane had texted him and he was sitting in a locker room at the end of the worst night of his hockey year and Jane had texted him first.

you were incredible tonight. i watched the whole thing. i'm sorry it wasn't enough.

He read it twice. Then:

i'll be in vegas at the end of june. for the awards. i'll be there with my family. we can meet there.

Then:

i promise ilya.

He sat in the locker room with his playoff run over and his team moving quietly around him and read those three texts several times. She'd watched the whole game. She'd texted him first. She'd said his name. She'd said i promise.

He clutched his phone to his chest, right over his heart. His hands were shaking.

Four months of texts going one direction and she'd picked tonight. The worst night of his hockey year, maybe his worst night in the league so far, Pittsburgh celebrating somewhere above him and the season just — done, over, the door closed on it — and she'd picked this moment to come back.

She got it. She got what it was to lose like this, got what the last two minutes of a season ending in someone else's building actually felt like, played out or not. He didn't know how she got it. He'd stopped trying to work out how a long time ago.

He was going to see her in June. After the lowest of moments in his young hockey career, he now had something to look forward to.

He read the texts one more time, all three, in order. Then he put his phone in his bag and got up and went to find his teammates because that was also what you did, you found your teammates, you comforted each other.

Ilya would be okay after tonight.

June.

He'd walked in still in his playoff exit clothes, bag over his shoulder, the short flight from Pittsburgh landed two hours ago, and the salesman had taken one look at his suit and his stupid expensive watch and led him to the newest, flashiest model they had.

He was buying himself a car. This he decided on the flight back to Boston. He'd made the playoffs, he'd played well, he'd lost in game seven to a team that had no business beating them and he was buying himself an extremely expensive car because he deserved it and also because he needed somewhere to put his energy and a car dealership was better than the alternatives.

He was looking at something low and red and completely impractical when he heard it.

"They robbed you."

Russian. From somewhere behind his left shoulder. He turned around.

A woman near the window, leaning against the glass with her ankles crossed, looking straight at him. Blond. Very blond. The kind of put-together that looked effortless and wasn't.

"Game seven," she said, still in Russian. "That call in the third was criminal."

Ilya looked at her. "You watch hockey."

She smiled like this was the funniest thing she'd heard all week. "My father played for Boston for eleven years," she said. "I was at every home game from age four." She said her father's name then.

Ilya knew the name. Everyone knew the name. It was in the Hall of Fame. His own father had said it with reverence, in the same breath as Tretiak and Fetisov, on more than one occasion.

"Svetlana," she said, and held out her hand.

They talked. It was easy in the way that Russian was always easy, no searching for words, no watching her face for the polite nod that meant she'd lost the thread. She had opinions about the Pittsburgh series and they were good opinions.

Six months ago this was exactly the kind of woman Ilya would have turned the full force of his attention toward. Smart, beautiful, spoke Russian, knew hockey, had a laugh that carried across a room. He was aware of this and set it aside. He was going to Vegas in June. He was going to meet Jane in Vegas in June and find out what was actually happening and until then he wasn't interested in starting anything that would complicate that. He liked Svetlana. He hoped she had good friends. He allowed her to sell him a car.

Later, when Ilya was signing the dotted line, another associate appeared with a folder of paperwork and set it on the low table beside him and Svetlana. Financing options. Ilya glanced down at it and went still.

Hollander's face looked up at him from a bank advertisement on the from page. That composed expression he'd had at every game and press conference all season, giving nothing away.

Ilya made a sound.

"Ah," Svetlana said, glancing down. "The rivalry. You do not enjoy looking at him."

"Does anyone enjoy looking at him all the time?" Ilya lied. "He is everywhere. Very annoying."

Svetlana tilted her head at the pamphlet. "I don't mind looking at him." A pause. "He's cute. The freckles especially."

Ilya looked at her.

"What freckles?"

She looked back at him. "You did not notice?"

"He does not have freckles."

Svetlana picked up the pamphlet and held it out. Ilya took it. He looked at Hollander's face on the advertisement, really looked, and there they were. Clear across his nose and cheeks, right there, unhidden, a scatter of them that his brain had somehow filed as absent in his memories.

He stared at the pamphlet.

"See?" Svetlana said. "Cute."

Ilya said nothing. He looked at the freckles on the pamphlet and felt something move through him that had no business showing up in a car dealership over a bank advertisement. It wasn't even a good photo. Hollander was in a suit, looking composed and boring and professional, and it was doing something to Ilya anyway, which he was going to chalk up to the freckles specifically because he had a history with freckles and leave it at that.

He thought about the press conference. Six inches away, the conference room lights, Hollander's face smooth and clear. He had looked at that face. He had been sitting right next to it for twenty minutes. How had he not seen them?

Maybe Hollander had spent time in the sun between the All Stars and whenever this bank advertisement was shot. Maybe that was all it was. Then, of course, he thought about Jane. How strange it was that Jane looked more like her cousin than he initially thought.

He put the pamphlet face down on the table.

Anyway. He was here to buy a car. He was not here to look at Shane Hollander's face on a financing pamphlet and think about freckles. Shane Hollander, who Ilya was still not entirely convinced had nothing to do with Jane going quiet, regardless of what Jane said, because Jane loved her cousin and people who loved their family made excuses for them but Ilya had not forgotten the New Year's call, had not forgotten the sound of her voice, had not forgotten any of it.

He looked back up at Svetlana.

"The delivery. How long?"

He had too much free time now after they were knocked out of the playoffs and Ilya went where he always went whenever he had a free hour or two.

The Twitter thread he'd never deleted. Jane had asked him not to post anything new and he hadn't, but she hadn't said anything about deleting what was already up, and people still occasionally surfaced accounts theorizing them to be her. He checked those. They were always wrong. He knew immediately, every time, in a way he couldn't have explained to anyone — just wrong, off, nothing like her — and he'd close the tab and move on.

He opened the thread now. He scrolled.

He'd been thinking about Jane constantly since the Pittsburgh loss, since her texts, since the promise of Vegas. He'd also been thinking about Shane Hollander more than he wanted to, which was annoying.

Hollander's face on the bank ad at the dealership. Hollander's face at the press conference. Hollander not looking at him all season, and Ilya trying to find the lever, find the right chirps to make him react, and never finding it.

The thing that was really bothering him — and he'd been sitting with this for a few weeks now, turning it over — was that at some recent point, without deciding to, his mental image of Jane had started looking like Shane Hollander in a wig.

This was deeply irritating. Hollander was objectively good-looking in the way that some people just were — fine, Ilya could acknowledge a fact — but he was also possibly the reason Jane hadn't talked to Ilya for months, and his face had no business appearing in Ilya's reconstruction of Jane's face. Ilya had no explanation for why it kept happening and no patience for it and it kept happening anyway.

What made it worse was that every time Hollander's face surfaced where Jane's should have been, Jane got a little harder to find. The real memory of her, the actual her — the freckles in the pool light, the mouth, the level expression in the hallway — it was still there but it was getting thinner, like something being written over, and Ilya did not like that. He did not like that at all. He had so little of her to begin with.

He scrolled to the top of the thread.

One specific tweet was still there. wait i think i was at that party. what costume was she wearing?

And then Ilya's reply: mulan.

And then nothing. No follow-up. You asked what costume, you got the answer, and you went silent?

Ilya looked at this for a moment.

He clicked on the account.

He scrolled down to October. There was a tweet about a Halloween party in the hills — following an actress around all night, losing his friend in the crowd.

Something moved in Ilya's chest.

Jane had a friend at that party. He was almost certain she'd mentioned it — a friend chasing someone, an actress, he couldn't remember the exact words but the shape of it was there, the same shape as this tweet. Two things that had been separated, suddenly in the same place.

He went to their followers. He was looking for Jane. He typed her name into the search bar.

j

ja

jan

jane

Nothing came up. He stared at the empty results. He scrolled through the entire list of followers starting with “J”, reading each name carefully in case one of them dinged Ilya’s radar. But none of them looked right, no profile pictures looked like her, no account felt like the person he'd been texting for months. He sat there with the empty results and felt the balloon of hope sadly deflate inside of him.

He sat with that for a moment.

His hands moved again before he'd decided to let them.

s

sh

sha

shane

He stopped typing.

He looked at what he'd typed.

He didn't know why he'd typed that. His thumbs had just gone there, some instinct he hadn't cleared with the rest of himself, and now the word was sitting in the search bar and he was looking at it and not hitting search and not deleting it either.

He hit search.

shanehollander24 follows thomassc.

Ilya stared at the screen.

shanehollander24 follows thomassc.

Ilya stared some more. He felt his jaw start to go rigid. His throat felt tight.

Hollander's helmet coming off. The arena light hitting his face and Ilya's hands going slow in the middle of a fight. The bank ad. The freckles on the bank ad, clear across his nose and cheeks, unhidden, the same freckles Ilya had been trying to reconstruct from memory for months and kept losing the edges of. The All Stars press conference, Hollander sitting six inches away and his face completely smooth and clear. The makeup artist down the hall, Ilya had walked past that room twice. Jane's voice on New Year's, wrecked, whispering, saying happy new year ilya. Only whispering, the entire phone call. Jane texting him It wasn't hollander's fault. Hollander not looking at him on the ice all season, not once, something closed and careful that Ilya had been trying to crack for months. Dark hair. A Mulan costume. He'd been watching that movie for the English, it was about a girl that pretends she’s a man—

shanehollander24 follows thomassc.

Oh fuck.

Chapter End Notes

woah, how about that, huh? crazy. Anyway I still don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where the characters are going. you might think I'm smart and I have a plan. I don't. I'm just sort of along for the ride my brain takes me on.

if you're enjoying the journey, please leave me a kudos or a comment! if you're not enjoying the journey, please be my beta reader. I'm kind of a perfectionist and I try to put out the best work possible but I struggle with lore keeping and continuity sometimes! it's really hard to write something that's hours long to read and go back and check if every little detail matches the established timeline. if you'd like to help, please reach out!

5/28/26: i posted a new fic!! it's a ranger/extreme skier AU where shane gets stuck in a one room mountain hut in alaska with ilya rozanov for a week and they absolutely hate each other (at first). go check out Summit Position if that sounds like your kind of thing. and i swear i am working on the next chapter of this one, endings are just really hard okay

thanks for reading!

xoar

Chapter 8

Chapter Notes

ok first of all THANK YOU to everyone who read this. so many of you found this in like a single day and i need to know how?? if you came from a tiktok or something pls comment because i have to know who did this
im so sorry this one took forever. every chapter before it came so fast and easy and then this one. this one gave me serious writers block. turns out im great at building up TO the climax but actually nailing the emotional peak of a story? thats a different thing entirely lol. also i had a vacation, a bunch of surprise shifts at work, an annoying finger injury, all this to say sorry for the wait and i hope the length makes up for it
ALSO. during the writers block i started another fic. do you like outdoorsy boys? boys snowed into a one room cabin for who knows how long, boys that maybe hate each other a little but cant resist each other? well boy do i have the fic for you. its called Summit Position, same favorites (ilya and shane), same author (me!!). if you liked this one go check it out
anyway bitches. i present to you. vegas

The breathing exercise was four counts in, hold for four, out for four.

Shane had laughed the first time Kathleen had walked him through it, not meanly, just because it felt like something you'd see on a poster in a middle school counselor's office. Kathleen had let him laugh and then said try it anyway and he had and it had done something, not fixed anything, but seemed to help a little, which was more than Shane had been prepared for.

He breathed in now over the soft engine hum of the plane. Four counts. Held. Out for four.

The seat next to him was empty. He booked the whole row for himself. He needed the two feet of empty space. He needed to be able to look at the cloud cover over the Midwest without someone's elbow in his ribs.

Four in. Hold. Four out.

Kathleen had been his parents' idea, technically. He'd come home after the playoff loss and told them he needed to talk to someone and his mother had looked at his father and his father had pulled out his laptop right there at the kitchen table and looked up therapists and that had been that. He'd told them it was the hockey. The season ending the way it had. He needed help processing the loss of his first playoffs and they'd understood it, accepted it, because it was a reasonable thing to need.

He hadn't told them the other part, the Jane part. Not yet.

Kathleen had not made him say anything he wasn't ready to say. She had a particular way of sitting very still and waiting, not pressuring, not prompting, just giving him room to arrive at things himself. He'd seen her five times in four weeks, which he understood was a lot and didn't care. By the fifth he'd told her everything. All of it. The Halloween party and the wig and the months of texts and the New Year's call and the All-Star game and what Ilya's face had done in that bathroom before Shane had said something mean and left.

Kathleen had not reacted. Not visibly. She'd listened with her hands in her lap and her expression professionally neutral and when he finished she'd asked one or two careful questions and moved on, and Shane had found himself thinking, with something between admiration and dark humor, that for all he knew she had a dozen professional athletes in her caseload who'd done exactly the same thing. She probably had a whole section of her notes for it. Catfishing — rival — male — see also.

And they worked through the other part. Not the Ilya part. The part underneath it, the part Shane had been building walls around since he was fourteen and had finally, in session three, started to dismantle carefully in front of a stranger. What it meant. What it had always meant. What it was going to mean for his career, for his contract, for the dressing room, for the version of Shane Hollander that existed in the public's mind and that Shane had spent his entire life constructing.

Shane was gay.

Kathleen had not reacted to that either.

She understood the way Shane catastrophized things, the way a setback could become in a hockey player's mind the end of everything: career over, reputation gone, legacy decided before it had a chance to form. She'd walked him through it carefully. The actual worst case. The realistic case. And the best case for good measure.

You don't know what he's going to do, she'd said. You're spending energy managing an outcome you can't see yet. What would it feel like to just go and find out?

Shane had not had a good answer for that. He'd spent a lot of time since then trying to find one.

Four in. Hold. Four out.

The flight attendant came through with the beverage cart and Shane asked for water and sat with it and watched the clouds and thought, not for the first time, about the room waiting at the end of the flight. The room where he would confess to Rozanov the rotten horrible thing he’d done to him. He'd been walking toward it since Halloween.

It all ended in Vegas, with Shane saying it out loud. And then whatever happened, happened.

Kathleen had said she believed him when he said he was ready.

He was trying to believe that himself.

Four in. Hold. Four out.

The seatbelt sign clicked off. Someone in the row ahead of him started up a movie, the tinny leak of sound through inadequate headphones. Shane leaned his head against the window and looked at the clouds below, white and flat and endless over the middle of the country, and thought about nothing in particular until thinking about nothing slipped, without his permission, into thinking about Ilya.

He let it happen. Kathleen had said to let it happen instead of pushing it away, that pushing used more energy than it saved.

He thought about Ilya reading the text in a Pittsburgh locker room. He thought about i promise ilya sitting on a screen in Ilya's hands on the worst night of his hockey year. He thought about what Ilya's face might do when Shane walked into whatever room they'd agreed on in Vegas and Ilya understood, fully, completely, who he was actually looking at.

He reached for the count, Four in. Hold. Four out.

Kathleen had told him in their last session, “You’ve been carrying this long enough.”

The clouds moved under the plane. Shane pressed his temple to the cool of the window and closed his eyes and thought: Yeah. Yeah, I really have.

Kathleen had gently suggested, more than once, that telling his parents might help. They knew the therapy. They knew he was working through some things. But they did not know what things. They did not know about Ilya, could not know about Ilya.

Shane understood why she'd said it. He'd felt, in the weeks since he started seeing her, the relief of putting things down. He openly admitted it to her. The Ilya thing, the Jane thing, the gay thing. Each one he'd laid out on the table in that office had stopped feeling as heavy as it had before. Not gone. Just redistributed somehow. He'd walked out of each session feeling lighter and lighter. Secrets were heavy and he'd been carrying a lot of them for a long time.

So yes. He could see the argument for telling his parents.

The problem was that this wasn't only his story to tell.

Thomas knew, yes, but Thomas guessing was different from Shane outright telling his parents. Thomas had figured it out on his own, and it hadn't felt like a betrayal to confirm things to him. Without Ilya being in the know, it felt like Shane hadn't earned the right to share the story with his parents yet.

The therapist didn't count of course-- she's a medical professional.

Yet, Ilya didn't know any of this was being discussed. Ilya didn't know Shane had a therapist, or that Shane had told that therapist everything, or that Shane's best friend had quietly worked it out. That wasn't fair to Ilya who was still in the dark.

Shane was going to tell him everything in Vegas and whatever came after that, came after that. But until then, this was Ilya's secret as much as it was Shane's, and it wasn't Shane's to keep distributing, even to the people he trusted, even when the pull to do it was strong. Even when he now knew, with the clarity that five sessions in four weeks had given him, exactly how good it felt to release.

He'd told Kathleen that. The wanting to tell his parents, the reason he couldn't yet. She'd nodded in understanding.

Then that's not keeping a secret, she'd said. That's just telling the truth in the right order.

Four in. Hold. Four out.

His parents were waiting in the lobby, but it was big enough that he didn't see them right away, which gave him thirty seconds.

He pulled out his phone and opened the thread. He'd read it enough times in the last few weeks to have it close to memorized, which hadn't stopped him yet.

The texts after Ilya’s loss. One a day for about a week. thinking of you. hope you're alright. Then, a few days in, i cant believe colorado is going to win this whole thing, which Jane had agreed was a travesty. Little things. None of them needing an answer, all of them sent like Ilya just wanted Jane to know he was around.

And then the last one, nothing significant or abnormal, and after that nothing at all. Weeks of it.

Shane couldn’t figure out what it meant. He stood in the lobby and stared at the dead thread like it would give the answer up if he looked hard enough.

The obvious read was that Ilya had figured it out. That somewhere in there he'd worked out who Jane was and gone dark over it. Shane circled that one and rejected it every time, and the reason was solid: Ilya didn't do quiet. This was a man who'd dropped his gloves over Shane sticking his nose into his cousin's love life, who'd come across the ice at him with both hands and made it personal in front of nineteen thousand people. If Ilya knew, Shane would know he knew. There would be nothing subtle about it.

So not that.

What was left was thinner. That Ilya was finally giving Jane the space she'd spent months asking for. That he'd gone shy about meeting her. That he was working himself up to ghosting her and sparing them both whatever Vegas was meant to be.

None of them sat right. All of them were better than the one he'd ruled out.

His mother crossed the lobby while he was still looking at the phone. He almost didn't see her coming. She got both hands on his face and kissed his cheek and then hugged him properly, both arms and real pressure.

"You look tired," she said into his shoulder.

"I'm fine."

"You look tired," she said again.

His father pulled him in for a hug next, one arm around Shane's shoulders, and said something quietly about being proud of him. His father said things like that often and meant them every time.

"The season you had," his father said, pulling back to look at him. "Really, Shane."

"Dad..."

"No, Shane!" his father objected. "Let me be proud of my superstar son."

Shane's mother was already reaching for one of his bags. He let her take it because it was easier than the alternative of telling Yuna Hollander 'no'. They moved toward the elevators together, his mother talking about the hotel, the awards show logistics, a restaurant reservation she'd made for tonight that she was very pleased with herself about.

Shane half-listened and looked around the lobby.

It was the kind of Vegas hotel that committed fully to the bit: tall ceilings, a lot of light, every surface screaming money. It was the same hotel the awards would be hosted at tomorrow. There were MLH Awards banners hung from the upper level, player photos blown up to gigantic proportions.

He found Ilya's on the far wall.

A poster. Action shot, probably from early in the season, Ilya mid-stride with the puck, the Boston crest clear on his chest. Shane's mother was saying something about the restaurant's menu and his father was nodding and Shane stood in the lobby and looked at the poster and felt something other than what he'd braced for.

He'd expected the All-Star feeling. The tightening, the anxiety that had dogged him all of January, the sense of a situation about to go sideways. He'd walked into the all-stars arrival event with his shoulders up around his ears. He'd spent the whole flight down rehearsing neutral faces.

This was different.

He was just glad to see him. Even like this, thirty feet away and printed on a banner, just glad. It caught him off guard enough that he almost smiled, and then he did smile, a small one, at himself mostly.

Kathleen had walked him through what she called best case visualization, which Shane had also initially laughed at, and which had also worked despite that. Not imagining the best case as a certainty. She'd been careful about that, careful to say it wasn't about false optimism. But practicing the genuine possibility of it. Making room for it to exist alongside all the other outcomes he'd been cataloguing and dreading. What does it look like if this goes well, Shane. What does that actually feel like. Let yourself see it.

He'd seen it. He'd been imagining it for weeks, in pieces. Ilya's face when Shane finished talking. Not the rage he'd seen in the bathroom at All-Stars. Something else. Something he was probably projecting. He knew he was probably projecting.

He still couldn't quite stop hoping.

He looked at the poster for another second. Ilya mid-stride, completely in his element, the puck on his stick and the ice wide open in front of him, and Shane stodd in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas with the ceremony twenty-four hours away, smiling at it like an idiot. He let himself do it. That was new, the letting. Four months ago he would have clocked the feeling and buried it under his fear and guilt. Now he just stood there and let himself feel glad to see him.

The honest truth, the one he'd said out loud to Kathleen and felt embarrassed about and then accepted, was that he missed him. Shane, the twenty year old hockey player, missed someone he'd gotten close to over text, someone who was funny in a way that had surprised him and earnest in a way that had surprised him more. He missed the texts. He missed the hockey arguments. He missed the strange feeling of being understood by someone who wasn't supposed to know him at all.

Friends, was the thing he hoped for most. He was aware it was a lot to hope for. He was hoping for it anyway.

His mother touched his arm. "Shane."

He turned. They were at the elevators just ahead of him. The doors were open and his parents were inside, his dad was keeping the doors from closing with an arm extended, looking at Shane expectantly.

"Sorry," he said. "Zoned out."

The Italian restaurant they went to that night existed inside a casino with full sincerity, low lighting and cloth napkins and a wine list that went on for several pages, pretending very hard that it was not forty feet from a row of slot machines. Shane appreciated the commitment.

His mother opened the menu and almost immediately said, "Oh, Shane, the salmon."

Shane looked at it. Looked past it. Found the alfredo three items down.

"I'm getting the pasta," he said.

His mother looked up. Something in her face did a small, careful thing that she covered quickly. "The alfredo?"

"Yeah."

"Okay," she said, in the tone of someone exercising significant restraint in trying not to smile. She always did tell Shane he should eat more, but never pressed him when he insisted on eating his perfectly formulated performance diet. She’d be happy that he’s eating the three thousand calorie, fat-filled glob of pasta.

His father leaned over from behind his own menu. "I was going to get that."

"Dad."

"Swiped it right out from under me." He shook his head mournfully. "My own son."

"Get the carbonara," his mother said to his father, before he could talk Shane out of it.

"It's not the same."

His father turned back to his menu with the air of a man who had been gravely wronged. The twitch at the corner of his mouth gave away his true feelings. His mother caught Shane's eye across the table and shook her head, smiling at her husband's usual antics, and Shane smiled back.

They ordered. Wine for his parents, water for Shane. Bread came and his father took most of it without comment and his mother talked about the awards show schedule and asked Shane twice whether he'd spoken to his agent about seat assignments.

When the food arrived, Shane ate his pasta and let the conversation move around him. The alfredo was very good. Across the table his father made steady, mournful progress through the carbonara, glancing now and then at Shane's plate, and his mother talked, and Shane sat in the low light and ate all of it.

Shane lay in bed at eleven-fifteen with the lights off and his hands on his stomach and felt absolutely terrible. Not emotionally. Physically.

The alfredo, which had tasted like the right decision all the way through dinner and for approximately forty minutes afterward, had since made its case for the other side. He lay very still and thought about how he'd given himself a stomach ache the night before the most important night of his life.

Kathleen would find something meaningful in that. He could hear it already. She'd told him once about the difference between discipline and control, how discipline was useful and control was its anxious cousin, how the two looked identical from the outside but the inside of control was fear, the inside was if I let go of this one thing the whole structure comes down. The one time he finally, slightly, loosened his grip, the structure had retaliated with fettuccine. There was a lesson in there if he wanted one.

He didn't, particularly. But lying in the dark with nothing to do but wait for his body to forgive him, he turned it over anyway.

The thing was, the grip of control he had over everything had only gotten him in more trouble. That was the part he kept arriving at. He'd controlled everything he could get his hands on: the diet, the image, the rivalry, the secret, Jane, the texts, the silence. Held all of it as tight as he could for as long as he could. And he'd still ended up here, in a Las Vegas hotel the night before his own hockey funeral, about to confess to a man with every reason to be furious with him. The control hadn't protected anything. It had just gotten him into this mess. It would be his downfall, the reason why he ruined his life in a party in LA.

So. Maybe he wasn't going to turn into someone else overnight because he'd eaten pasta. But maybe he was working towards being someone looser than this, someone that left room for outcomes they hadn't pre-approved. Tomorrow was going to go the way it went. He could white-knuckle through it the way he'd white-knuckled through everything, or he could treat the alfredo as a head start on whoever he was going to be after.

He was still going to be someone after. Kathleen had assured him of that.

He breathed slowly. The room was dark except for the glow coming under the curtains from the Strip. He lay there with his hands on his stomach and willed his body to forgive him.

Shane sat in the third row with his mother on his left and an empty seat on his right where his father had been before he went to find the bathroom twelve minutes ago and had not yet returned, which was very on brand.

His mother was reading the program. Shane was watching the stage.

"Your father's going to miss the opening," she said, without looking up.

"He's fine."

"He always does this. Every event." She turned a page. "I don't know what takes him so long."

The lights hadn't gone down yet. The seats were filling up around them: players, agents, league personnel, a section of media to the left. Shane could see his teammate Beaumont three rows ahead, laughing at something, relaxed in the way Beaumont always was. Shane had dressed carefully tonight. The suit fit. He'd checked the mirror four times.

"Oh, look," his mother said, holding the program out to him. "They've listed the presenters."

Shane's leg was doing the thing it did usually before a game, the small involuntary bounce, the one Comeau had once called "Fucking annoying". He stilled it consciously. Then it started again.

He couldn't read right now. His whole nervous system was already handling too many things at once — the suit, the room, the fact that somewhere in this building Ilya Rozanov was also dressed up and probably waiting for Jane’s text, and also, separately, not insignificantly, the possibility that in approximately forty minutes someone would name Shane Hollander rookie of the year.

"I'm good," he said, and waved the program away. He kept his face as still as he could.

His mother lowered the program and looked at him, at whatever was getting through anyway, and her expression softened.

"Don't worry, baby, win or lose, it doesn't matter," she said, and patted Shane's knee.

The lights went down. His father materialized from nowhere and dropped into the empty seat just as the host took the stage.

The show moved on. Awards for coaching, for officiating, for things that happened off the ice. A video package. Some remarks from the commissioner that Shane processed at approximately thirty percent retention. He sat with his hands in his lap and his shoulders level and watched the stage and tried to broadcast whatever the appropriate feeling was for this evening.

He thought about the Calder Trophy. His name had been in the conversation since January. He'd tracked the numbers more closely than he'd admit to anyone, done the comparison quietly in his own head. Most goals by a rookie this season. Most points. He knew what it looked like on paper.

He really wanted to win. To have something concrete and real in hand before the rest of it, whatever would happen later tonight with Ilya. He'd wanted to win something before his life might come apart at the seams, had thought about his legacy in the bleak way he sometimes did at two in the morning. The Calder was not a Cup. But it was something. It was physical proof that Shane had made it, and Shane would take that. He would absolutely take that.

But now he wasn't sure that was still the whole of it. The funeral planning had loosened somewhere in the last few weeks. And now Shane wanting to win was just wanting. Straightforward, uncomplicated wanting, the kind he'd had at six years old watching hockey on a too-small television. He wanted to win the Calder Trophy because he'd worked for it and he deserved it and it would be good, and he was allowing himself to deserve good things.

His mother leaned over. "They're showing the clips."

The screen behind the stage lit up.

The Calder segment opened with a title card and then a montage: ice level footage, goal replays, the typical award show production. Shane had known it was coming. He hadn't known it was going to be two minutes per nominee, hadn't known it was going to be this, and he became aware as the screen filled with footage of various rookies across different teams.

Each rookie's segment was pretty standard and went like this: Glamour shots of their highlights throughout the season interspersed with warm interviews. Their captain, their coach, a couple of opposing players saying the things opposing players said.

Then his own name on the screen.

He'd seen himself on tape hundreds of times. It was different here, in this room, with this many people watching the same thing he was watching. The footage was from December, he thought, or maybe early January. The Montreal series where he'd put up six points in three games and the hockey media had started writing pieces with words like generational in them, which Shane had read once each and then not read again.

Then the interviews started, and Shane sat in the dark watching people talk about him.

His coach. Expected.

Hayden. Shane hadn't known they'd filmed Hayden. He was grinning in the way Hayden grinned when he was let off the leash and had too much caffeine. "He's a beast," Hayden said, simply. "On the ice, off the ice, doesn't matter. He just works. I've played with a lot of guys and I haven't played with anyone who is working as hard as he is, all the time, every day. It's annoying actually." The audience laughed. Hayden's mouth did something that was almost a smile. "I mean that as a compliment."

Then a face he hadn't expected. Patterson, Washington's captain, ten year veteran, a man Shane had played against exactly three times this season and exchanged approximately four words with total.

"You watch him and you think he's smart," Patterson said. "Like, okay, smart player, good vision. But then you're on the ice against him and you realize — no, this is different. This isn't just smart. He's already three plays ahead. You think you've got him contained and then the puck's somewhere else and you're standing there and you have no idea how he saw that." He shook his head. "He's nineteen. Crazy he's already doing that."

Shane had not known Patterson knew who he was. He understood intellectually that Patterson knew who he was. Sitting in this room watching a ten-year NHL veteran describe his game in those terms while approximately two thousand people watched was… surreal.

There was a clip from a Boston media scrum. Shane recognized Calloway, Boston's captain. "He’s a tough opponent for sure," Calloway said. "He's got this — I don't know what to call it. Adaptability, maybe. We adjusted our plays to try to stop him from scoring and every time we think we know what he’s about to do, he changes everything about how he plays.”

Then the clip changed. Shane's eyes hit the face first, and the rest of him caught up half a second later.

Ilya.

Ilya was in a jacket, no tie, looking like he'd agreed to the interview at a moment’s notice.

What do you make of Hollander as a candidate for the Calder?

Ilya's mouth did a small thing before he answered. It flattened. His nose flared. He looked quite annoyed to be asked about Shane.

"He is the correct choice," Ilya said. "The numbers are obvious.”

What kind of player is he?

He paused. Thinking clearly about his next words, probably trying to find the right English translation. Shane knows how fastidious Ilya is in learning English, how badly he wants to come across as the intelligent player Shane knows he is. "He is the kind of player who makes everyone around him nervous. Not because he is physical — he is not especially physical. He is hard to… predict." Another pause. "He is," He seemed to look for the word. "More than he appears to be on first look.”

The screen moved on. The next nominee.

More than he appears to be on first look.

Shane turned the sentence over.

It was about hockey. Ilya had been talking about hockey. About Shane’s play style. Right? But now that sentence seemed to arrive somewhere that had nothing to do with hockey and was sitting there refusing to be moved.

When was that filmed? It had to be after playoffs — after Boston was out, after Jane had texted it wasn't hollander's fault and Ilya had whatever time he'd needed to sit with that. There was no version of Ilya saying something nice about him from before that. Not after all-stars. Not after everything. Shane had stood six inches away from him and said it's a good thing she's not talking to you anymore and meant it to land, and it had landed, and somewhere on the other side of that building and several months later Ilya had sat in a chair in front of a camera and said nice things about him and Shane had no idea what to do with the distance between those two things.

He became aware that his mother was looking at him.

He pointedly looked at the stage.

The last nominee's section was finishing. The lights shifted. A man Shane recognized as one of the senior presenters was taking the stage to give the speech that preceded the award: the history of the Calder, its meaning, the names engraved on it. Shane tried to listen.

"That was nice," his mother said, quietly, close to his ear.

Shane said nothing.

"What Rozanov said."

"Mm."

"Did you two make up after All-Stars? I didn't realize."

Shane turned to look at her. He was aware that his expression was doing something he couldn't fully control, the kind of face Thomas had described once, not unkindly, as Shane's constipated face. He attempted to arrange it into something more neutral. Based on his mother's expression, the attempt was not entirely successful.

He managed a shrug. The kind that tried to say I have no idea what that was about without any of the words that would require him to actually explain anything.

"You don't need to be nervous Shane, you're a shoo-in," Yuna said.

"I might not win, Zenner's save percentage was really good," Shane said.

His mother turned and looked at him with the expression of a woman who had very limited patience for this particular variety of deflection.

"Shane," she said. "You nearly hit the record for most points put up by a rookie. You even beat Rozanov's points total from last year. There's no way you don't win it."

Shane looked at the stage.

"It might be close," he said.

His mother said nothing. She didn't need to.

Then she glanced at the program in her lap. Back to the stage. Something shifted in her expression.

The lights shifted on stage. His mother straightened in her seat and consulted the program one more time, then set it down.

"I think he's presenting the Calder," she said.

Shane looked over. "What?"

"Rozanov. He's listed as a presenter." She tilted her head. "Are you two going to be alright?"

The senior presenter was wrapping up, turning toward the wings, saying the presenter's name in the warm, rehearsed cadence they all used. Please welcome.

Of course he was presenting the award. Shane was so stupid. The previous year's winner always handed off the Calder. It was a tradition as old as the Calder itself. And Rozanov had won it last year.

He looked at his hands in his lap. Then at the stage. Then, briefly, at the exit.

His father, on his other side, leaned over with genuine interest and said, "Oh, isn't that the Rozanov fellow."

"Yes," said Shane.

"Huh," said his father, and settled back in his seat to watch.

Ilya shook Crowell's hand at the podium, the two of them exchanging the brief pleasantries of men who had met at enough of these things to have a rhythm for it. Crowell stepped back. Ilya picked up the envelope.

He didn't open it immediately. He looked out at the room for a moment, scanning the crowd. Was he looking for Jane? The house lights were down and the stage lights were up but Ilya was scanning all the same.

Then he opened the envelope.

He looked at it. A beat longer than the card needed. The corner of his mouth tightened and then went even again.

"Shane Hollander," Ilya said.

Shane went blank.

Shane knew this moment. He'd been here before.

In the visualization it was always a different room — sometimes a corridor, sometimes a restaurant, once inexplicably a parking garage — but it always started the same way. Shane coming through a door. Ilya already there, already looking toward the entrance, something easy in his posture, a half-smile on his face from whatever he'd been thinking about before Shane walked in. The smile of someone expecting a person he was glad to see.

Then Shane Hollander walks through the door instead of Jane.

The smile doesn't disappear. It just — pauses. Ilya's head tilts, a fraction. His brow draws in, slow, the way it did when something wasn't adding up. And then his mouth shapes the name, more question than announcement, the confusion and the beginning of understanding arriving at the same time —

Shane Hollander?

Ilya's eyes came off the card and found him in the third row with laser-like precision. Not confused. Not questioning. Just looking at him, steady and direct.

Shane didn't move.

His mother's hand closed around his arm and the sound came back all at once — the room enormous around him, everyone on their feet, the applause already running, his father standing, people nearby turning to look at the man still in his seat.

Shane stood up.

He moved toward the aisle on autopilot and then he was in the aisle and the room was very large around him and very loud and he could hear it distantly, the applause, the way it swelled and kept going, and he was walking toward the stage on legs that were performing the task without his full participation.

He was staring back at Ilya. All season he’s avoided looking at Ilya in person, being seen by him. But now with his name said, it was like a spell had been cast, a dam broken. Shane couldn’t look away.

Ilya was going to extend his hand. That was what you did when you presented someone with an award, you shook their hand, it was a transaction, it was nothing, except that the last time Shane and Ilya had been in the same room they had been in a bathroom at All-Star weekend and Shane had said something mean and shouldered past him on the way out.

Would he still be angry? Was the clip he just saw on the screen the current version of Ilya or a different one? More than he appears to be on first look. Shane had no way of knowing what Ilya was feeling towards Shane right now, standing on that stage holding the trophy and watching Shane walk toward him.

Shane was now somewhere around the bottom of the stage steps and as he climbed, Ilya's eyes never strayed from Shane's the whole way, not unfriendly, but not warm. Just there, steady, watching him come. He wondered what his own face was doing at that moment. Probably something unflattering. Shane reached the top of the steps.

They were face to face. Less than three feet apart.

The last time they'd been this close Shane had been wearing a wig and a costume, and now they were on a stage in front of two thousand people and Shane was himself. Completely, entirely himself. No wig, no makeup, no Jane, just Shane Hollander with his hands at his sides and nowhere to hide and Ilya Rozanov looking at him.

Ilya extended his hand.

Shane took it.

The handshake lasted longer than a handshake needed to. Not by much. A second, maybe two. But enough that Shane felt it, the reality of Ilya's hand in his, the contact that had been so many things in the past year and was now this, a handshake on a stage, in front of cameras, and neither of them said anything. Their eyes were still connected. The applause was still happening somewhere beyond the lights.

Shane broke eye contact first. He didn't mean to. His eyes dropped and then came back up and when they did Ilya was looking at him differently. The press-conference flatness was gone. His gaze had gone steady and open and warm in a way it never was on the ice, and it stayed on him.

"Congratulations," Ilya said. Low enough that it was just for Shane.

He held out the trophy.

Shane took it. The weight of it was real and solid in his hands and he stood there with it and didn't move.

A beat. Two.

Ilya's free hand found his back, the briefest pressure between his shoulder blades, a small and almost imperceptible push forward. The gentlest possible reminder that there was a podium six feet away and a room full of people waiting.

Shane moved. The hand fell away the instant he did, but the place it had been stayed warm through the jacket and the shirt, a single point his whole body seemed to have arranged itself around. Five fingers and a palm, gone now, still legible against his spine. He carried it to the podium. He could have laid his own hand over the spot and matched it exactly. It was nothing. A hand on a back, the most ordinary contact in the world, the kind that passed between teammates a hundred times a game. He had no business still feeling it by the time he reached the microphone.

The podium. The microphone. His own face on the screens flanking the stage, slightly too large, looking stricken. He looked at the room instead and set the trophy on the podium's edge and felt something click back into place: the part of him that knew how to be in front of people, that had been doing this since he was seventeen and giving interviews in minor league arenas, that understood stages and microphones and what was required of him here.

He reached into his jacket pocket.

The notecard was there. He'd written it out three times. Once too long, once too sparse, the third time was perfect. He set it on the podium but didn't look at it. Reading was too difficult behind his rapidly blurring eyes. It was like the world had decided to go fuzzy suddenly.

"I've been thinking about what I wanted to say tonight," Shane said, "since about January, when I started to understand that this might actually happen. And I had a very good speech." A small pause. "I'm going to try to remember it."

The room laughed. Shane felt his shoulders drop a half inch. He could do this.

He glanced at the notecard once. Looked back up.

"I want to start with my teammates," he said. "Because I didn't score those goals by myself and I didn't get those points by myself and everyone in this room probably already understands that, but I want to say it out loud anyway. Every person who was on that ice with me this season. This is yours as much as it is mine."

He talked about his parents. But only briefly at the behest of his mother who was going to be emotional enough without him going on at length, and also because everything he felt about the two of them didn't fit into words he could say on a stage without his voice doing something he didn't want it to do in front of camera.

He thanked his coaches. His agent. The city of Montreal, which had taken him in and given him something to play for.

Then he looked at the trophy on the podium edge.

"I've wanted this for a long time," he said. "I've wanted — all of it. The career, the recognition, the chance to be the best player I could be for as long as I could be it. I still want all of that." He stopped for a moment. "I've been playing hockey my whole life trying to earn something like this," he said. "And I — " He stopped. Started again. "I just hope I get to keep earning it."

He picked up the trophy.

"Thank you," he said.

The room came up around him, the applause rising again, and Shane stood at the podium with the Calder Trophy in his hands and the lights in his eyes and somewhere in the third row his father was on his feet and his mother was probably crying, and somewhere else was Ilya Rozanov, and Shane looked out at all of it and let himself have the moment, completely, without keeping his fist tight around it.

The wings were dark and close and the noise of the room dropped to a muffled roar the moment he cleared the curtain. Shane stopped walking. Stood there. Let out a breath that had apparently been waiting since his name was called.

The trophy was heavy in his hands. He looked down at it, the engraving, the weight of it, and thought: wow.

His name was on it. Would always be on it. Whatever happened after tonight, whatever happened in that conversation with Ilya tonight, this existed. Shane Hollander, Calder Trophy, 2011. Permanent. Inarguable. He had been here, he had been good, and there was now a physical object that said so and would keep saying so long after anyone had stopped caring either way. He let himself feel that for a second. Just that, just the weight of it in his hands, proof of something he'd worked for his whole life.

It was enough. If it had to be, it was enough.

A stagehand materialized from somewhere and said something about following the corridor back to the seating area. Shane nodded and started walking.

He was about 20 feet down the long corridor when he heard a door behind him open and a hand closed around his arm.

He swallowed the startle. Then he was being steered, two seconds, back towards that door he'd half-registered having just opened, and then fluorescent light and the door clicked behind him and his abductor.

A bathroom. Single occupancy. Shane blinked at the sudden brightness of it.

Ilya let go of his arm.

Ilya Rozanov looking completely unbothered, like he hadn't just forcefully pulled Shane into the bathroom with him, like this was a normal place for both of them to be.

Shane looked at him. Looked at the bathroom. Looked at him again.

"We have to stop meeting like this," he said. He hadn't planned to.

The corner of Ilya's mouth moved, like the joke had almost found purchase, and then he set it aside and his face went serious.

For a second neither of them said anything. The ceremony came through the wall, muffled. A name. Applause. Ilya leaned back against the counter and crossed his ankles, but the ease stopped at his shoulders. His jaw was set. He kept his eyes somewhere around Shane's collar instead of his face, and when he finally brought his gaze up, the apology was already there in it, plain, ahead of the words.

"All-Stars," Ilya said. "When I — I hit you. I didn't —" He stopped. His jaw moved. "If I had known —"

"Rozanov —"

"I would not have. I want you to know this."

Not here not here not here. His grip tightened on the trophy. This was not happening now. Shane had a plan and the plan had a location and the location was not a single-occupancy bathroom with the awards ceremony still audible through the wall and two thousand people forty feet away. He had a speech. He'd been building it since playoffs ended. He had contingencies. Kathleen had helped him with contingencies. None of the contingencies were backstage bathroom, immediately post-trophy, before Shane had even found his parents.

And Ilya didn't know yet. Ilya thought he was apologizing to Shane Hollander about a hockey hit. He didn't know he was also in a room with Jane. Shane was the only person in this bathroom who understood the full geometry of what was happening, and he needed to keep it that way until this stupid televised pony show and stupid boring afterparty were over.

"Rozanov." Shane said it more firmly. "Not here."

Ilya stopped.

"We can't do this here," Shane said. "We're in an awards show bathroom and there are cameras everywhere in this building and I just won the Calder and I can't —" He heard himself, heard the edge in it, took a breath. "Not here. We can talk later — somewhere that isn't here."

A beat. Ilya looked at him, understanding on his face, then nodded once. "Okay. Where."

"Main tower," Shane said. "Rooftop balcony. Floor twenty-eight, there's an access door off the elevator bank, it's not locked." He'd found it last night, trying to walk off the fettucine when lying down was too uncomfortable. "Eleven o'clock. Can you get there?"

"Yes," Ilya said. He didn't hesitate, but he watched Shane the whole time he said it, eyes moving over his face like he was checking it against something. Like Shane was a play still developing and Ilya was already three reads ahead, the thing Patterson had described on the screen an hour ago. Whatever he found, he kept. His face stayed level. Only his attention gave him away, fixed and total. He'd decided something, and he was waiting for the room to catch up.

Ilya's hand moved to the door. He pulled it open an inch, and then he paused.

He looked back at Shane. He paused for a second, unsure.

"Will Jane be there?"

The question dropped into the room and sat there.

He looked at Ilya's face. Ilya's face gave him nothing: neutral, patient, waiting, the same face he'd worn at every press conference and across every faceoff dot, giving away exactly what he chose to give away and nothing else.

Shane focused on the trophy in his hands. Felt the weight of it. Let it ground him and his racing heart.

"Yes," he said. "Jane will be there."

The corner of Ilya's mouth went up on one side, and his eyes creased with it, just for a second, before he reined it back flat. He nodded once.

Then he was gone. The door clicked shut. The corridor noise disappeared again.

Shane stood alone in the bathroom.

He looked at himself in the mirror. The suit. The trophy in his hands, Calder engraved on the base.

He took a breath. It came out steady, which surprised him slightly.

Okay, he thought. Okay.

He gave himself ten seconds. Then he straightened his jacket, tucked the trophy under his arm, and went back out to find his parents.

His parents were in a corner of the room, finally extracted from three hours of industry small talk: other franchise families they half-knew, parents of players his mother had catalogued somewhere in her mental database, the rotating cast of people who had put two and two together at the Calder presentation and come over to shake hands. It wasn't hard to find them in a room. They were the only Asian-white couple who could plausibly have produced Shane, and after his name had come up on that screen people had known exactly where to look.

Shane had been looking too. All night, across every handshake and every glass of water he'd accepted to have something to hold, his eyes had kept finding their way back to the room. It wasn't a conscious decision. It was the same thing that happened on the ice, the same pull toward where Ilya was or might be, magnetic and involuntary and not particularly useful. He'd catch himself mid-conversation scanning the perimeter and have to drag his attention back to whoever was talking.

He'd thought about it from Ilya's side too. Jane had told him she'd be in Vegas with her family. This was exactly the kind of event she might plausibly attend: award ceremony in part celebrating her cousin. Ilya should be looking for her. He was probably somewhere in this room right now doing the same thing Shane was doing, eyes moving, not finding.

Shane checked his phone. Still nothing. The thread was where it had been for weeks: Ilya's last message at the bottom, nothing under it. No see you soon, no working out where she'd be or when or how he'd find her.

Shane checked his watch. Twenty minutes. He'd told Ilya she'd be on the roof, and Ilya hadn't argued it, hadn't asked for a single detail. A man sure of a thing didn't confirm it twice.

He'd given up expecting another text tonight and kept opening the thread anyway. The quiet had to mean something. He just couldn't say what.

His parents were near the edge of the room, his mother with her phone already out and his father already against a wall, weight settled, deep in conversation with his wife. Shane walked toward them.

His mother saw him first. She came forward and took his face in both hands and didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at him. Then she pulled him in properly, that tight motherly hug that could cure all ailments, and Shane held on.

"I'm proud of you," she said, into his shoulder. "I want you to remember this feeling. Exactly this."

"I know," Shane said.

"I mean it." She pulled back and looked at him again. Her eyes were wet. He'd seen it from the stage when he mentioned his parents, had looked away fast. "Whatever happens." She motioned to the trophy in Shane's hand. "This is yours."

Shane looked at the trophy for a moment. Then he held it out to her.

She blinked.

"Hold onto it tonight," Shane said. "I'll get it in the morning."

His mother looked down at the Calder in her hands. Then back at him, with the steady look she got when she'd decided to wait him out.

"You'll tell us tomorrow," she said. "About Jane?"

Shane looked at her.

His mind blanked. Did she know? What did she know about Jane? His first thought was everything: the party, the wig, the months of texts, all of it, because this was his mother and his mother had a way of knowing things she had no business knowing, and might’ve been holding onto that knowledge through the playoffs and the therapy visits and every dinner she'd made him come home for.

She must’ve seen the apprehensive look on his face because she explained.

"I saw the Twitter," she said. "The Rozanov thing. I didn't bring it up because you had playoffs and then you were clearly working through something, and I didn't want to —" She stopped. "I don't know the whole story. I only know what was public. Her name is Jane. She's from Ottawa. She was at a Halloween party in October." A pause. "I thought it might've been a girlfriend." She paused. "But then… we know that's not really the case, right?"

Shane breathed out very slowly.

"I'll explain after--" he said. "Tomorrow."

His mother looked at him with the expression of a woman who had learned when to push and when not to. Then she nodded once and let it go.

His father shook his hand and pulled him in once. "We'll see you at breakfast." Then, stepping back, quietly: "Go have fun, party, it's a big night for you."

Shane nodded, and went.

The access door was where he'd left it last night. He pushed through and the desert heat arrived immediately, dry and flat, nothing like Montreal or Ottawa. Shane let the door settle behind him.

Ilya was at the railing.

There was a small scatter of cigarette butts near his feet. Ilya had been wanting to meet Jane since before Ottawa, since before the tweets, since he'd first asked and she'd kept saying no. He'd been out here a while, doing what he apparently did when he was waiting for something he actually cared about. Maybe nervous. If Shane was meeting the girl he really liked for the first time in nine months, he'd probably be nervous too. If he liked girls, that is.

Ilya was leaning forward with both hands on the metal, looking at the city, another cigarette burning between two fingers. The Strip ran its light in both directions below them, everything moving and nothing stopping, and he didn't turn around.

"Took your time," he said without looking around.

"I had to say goodnight to my parents."

Ilya made a small sound. Shane walked forward until he was at the railing too, a few feet of space between them, and looked out at the city. The towers and the noise and all that light going nowhere useful.

Ilya held the cigarette out without turning around.

Shane looked at it. He didn't smoke. He had never smoked. His lungs were managed assets and he had understood this since he was seven years old.

He took it.

He put it to his mouth and inhaled and his airway immediately objected. The coughing was brief and humiliating. Ilya turned towards him then and watched him with an expression that was not going out of its way to be kind.

"Give it back," Ilya said.

Shane gave it back, still coughing.

"Why did you take it?" Ilya asked, a smirk on his lips.

"I don't know," Shane said between hacks. Which was untrue. He knew exactly why. Same reason he'd ordered the alfredo. Some part of him had started saying yes to things the rest of him would have refused on sight, just to find out what happened. Maybe he'd be a cigarette guy now. People liked cigarettes. There was supposed to be a reason for that.

Ilya looked at him for a moment. Then turned back to the city and took a drag himself, unhurried, and Shane watched the smoke leave his mouth and disappear into the hot air.

They stood there.

It was almost comfortable. That was the part Shane hadn't expected, the almost, coming up from somewhere unearned. He'd spent nine months dreading this and now he was standing at a railing in the dark and it was almost comfortable, and he had an opening sentence assembled, had been carrying it a while, and he was about to find it when Ilya turned his full body toward him.

"We are alone?"

Shane nodded, slow, and felt the speech line up behind his teeth. This was it, then. He'd start with Jane — with the fact that there was no Jane to wait for, that there never had been. He drew a breath to begin.

Ilya stamped out his cigarette against the top of the railing and let the butt drop. He looked at Shane head-on, none of the press-conference distance in it.

"Then we are not pretending anymore," he said.

"Pretending?" The word came out smaller than Shane wanted.

"That you are not Jane."

And there it went.

Nine months of it, out of his hands and into the desert air, and not the way he'd built it. He'd built it calm. Rational. In sections, with Kathleen, a thing he could walk through one piece at a time, in order, on his schedule. He didn't have any of that now. Ilya had reached over and taken the whole thing off him in two sentences, and it was just out here, on a roof, on Ilya's terms, and Shane had no idea what came after it.

This was the hockey funeral, then. Kathleen had made him rehearse a best case too, the version where this went fine, but the best case had always depended on Shane running the room: the moment, the words, the order, all of it his. That was gone now. Ilya had taken it. So scratch the best case. This was the funeral, the one he'd been quietly planning, and he'd thought he'd at least get to give the eulogy.

Had he tipped it in the bathroom? He'd been off his script down there, rattled, talking too fast. Maybe something had shown. Maybe the apology itself had been the test — a way to lean on Shane and watch what cracked. He didn't know how Rozanov would have done it, but Rozanov was smart. He'd know how.

Because that was the thing nobody told you about Rozanov until you'd played him. On the ice you didn't grab a man's sweater to hold him. You grabbed it to pull him in close, plant your feet, get your weight set, and put the whole of yourself behind the punch. The closeness wasn't kindness. The closeness was leverage. It was how you made it land. And Ilya had gotten Shane close now. They were alone on this roof. All night Ilya had been warm, easy, patient, reeling him in by the front of his jersey.

Was he about to get hit? Or thrown off this balcony? He’d probably be buried in the Las Vegas desert by morning.

Fuck. He was catastrophizing again. He knew the shape of it by now, Kathleen had named it for him often enough, and the naming did nothing to slow it down. His breathing had stopped behaving. He went for the count, the one Kathleen drilled into him, four in, four out. No. The hold. He'd dropped the hold. He started over and the number came apart in his hands again, and the Strip below him went distant and unreal, all that light a long way down, and the rail under his palm was the only thing in the world still where he'd left it. He held onto it.

He'd spent nine months managing himself so this exact thing would never get out of him, and here it was getting out of him anyway, on a rooftop, in front of the person he'd been most afraid of and attracted to in the world, and there was nowhere to put it and no way to take it back.

"Hey."

Ilya's voice had changed. The needle was gone out of it.

"Hey. Hollander."

He'd come closer. Shane hadn't clocked him move. A hand arrived on his shoulder, open, settling, no grab in it at all.

"It's okay. Look at me." Ilya ducked a little, found his eyes. "It is okay. You understand? You are safe. Breathe with me."

Shane breathed.

It took a few. Four in. The hold, this time. Four out. The Strip came back. The rail was a rail.

"You know," Shane said, when he had the air for it.

"Yes."

"You're not going to hit me." It wasn't a question.

The corner of Ilya's mouth went up. "No, Hollander."

And of course he wasn't. Shane could see it now, on the clean side of the panic. If Ilya had wanted to hurt him he'd have done it the second Shane cleared the door, gotten the jump before Shane knew to brace. Shane wasn't a fighter, but he was two hundred pounds of professional athlete, and handing him a warning, time to set his feet and maybe do some damage back, was the last thing a man with Ilya's face and Ilya's contract would ever choose. The math didn't work. The violence had never been coming. And somewhere under that, quieter, Shane wondered how long Ilya had been planning tonight too. Whether he'd had his own speech planned out.

"When did you find out?"

"Three, maybe four weeks ago."

Three, four weeks. The arithmetic was immediate. "That's when the texts stopped," Shane said. "That was you, finding out."

"Yes." Ilya didn't look away from him. "I needed to think."

"And you're not angry?"

"I was angry." Ilya's mouth moved. "I broke my coffee table."

"But you're not angry anymore."

It came out less like a question. Ilya made a sound, low and unsteady, not quite a laugh. "No. I am not angry anymore."

"Why."

Ilya looked at him for a moment. "Because I realized. We are the same, you and I. Same secrets, sort of. I understand — keeping part of yourself hidden. If your secret came out. With hockey, with your family, this would be bad for you, no?"

"I mean — hockey yes. But my family knows."

Ilya stared at him. A little furrow in his brow. He was not expecting that. "They know?"

"Yeah. I told them during playoffs. They're really supportive."

"They are supportive." Ilya said it slowly, like he was translating in real time. "That you are really Jane?"

Shane opened his mouth.

"Well," he said. "I haven't told them that part."

Ilya frowned. "But you said — you did not tell them that you want to be a woman?"

Shane went very still. The tips of his ears had gone hot. The question came out with no thought at all for treading lightly. "Ilya. Do you think I'm transgender?"

"Hey." Ilya held up a hand, careful, earnest. "It is okay. I am ally. We are in same club, you and I — I am B, you are T —"

"Ilya, I'm not transgender. What the fuck. I mean — not that there'd be anything wrong with it, if I were, that would be completely fine, you'd be a great ally about it, clearly — I'm just not. That's not the secret. The secret is way dumber than that."

Ilya dropped his hand. His eyebrows went up and his mouth opened slightly and the careful patience he'd come in with fell off his face. "You are not?"

"No."

"But — I thought — this was the big secret. The Jane. All of it." He looked at Shane. "What is going on?"

"I can explain."

"Yes, Hollander." His voice had gone flat. "Maybe you should explain. Because I do not know what the fuck is going on."

"I had a speech prepared."

"Yes, Hollander, I know. Everyone heard speech after award. What are you talking about."

"Not that one. A different speech. For you. Like an explanation."

"I do not want long boring speech." Ilya pinched the bridge of his nose. "So short version. You are not a woman. You do not want to be a woman."

"No."

"But you are a man, and you pretended to be a woman. To me. For nine months."

"…Yes."

"Why." A beat. "Go ahead, Jane."

Rozanov was holding something down now, jaw tight, the easy thing gone out of his shoulders, and Shane could have kicked himself. Why had he led with the denial. Of course Ilya had gone to trans — every piece pointed there, and it was the version that made Shane someone to be gentle with instead of someone who'd lied for sport. He'd thrown it away in four words.

But.

The wheel was back in his hands. He could feel it turning. The conversation was bending toward the thing he'd actually practiced, the explanation he'd run in sections every night for a month. Shane shows up alone. Check. Rozanov furious, feeling played. Check. And now the speech, his one shot at turning a hockey funeral into something he might walk away from. Check, check, check.

Shane took a breath.

"When we met at that Halloween party," he said, "I thought it was really funny that you didn't recognize me. In the wig."

"Okay." Ilya's face had gone still and attentive, the look he got on the bench watching a play he hadn't seen before, reading it, waiting for the rest of it to show.

"And we got talking, and it was going to be this really funny reveal when you figured out you were flirting with me, and then suddenly we were kissing and you were drunk and I didn't — I didn't want you to hit me, for tricking you. So I didn't tell you."

Ilya's brow came together slightly. "But you said your name was Jane. You were wearing —"

"That was a funny set of circumstances actually. I forgot to bring a costume to LA and the shop didn't have anything else."

Silence.

Neither of them laughed.

"Okay," Ilya said. "And then what."

"And then we were texting. You were texting me. Like, a lot. And I kind of —" Shane stopped. "I liked it. I don't know. I hated it. Both, maybe. But I kept texting you back because I really liked talking to you and then it had gone on too long and I was scared to tell you the truth."

He could hear himself starting to unspool.

"You're not just some guy. You're my rival, we have the same career, and I didn't know what telling you would mean for me. Hockey means everything to me. So I used another lie to cover up the first one and then another one after that and it just —" He stopped. "It got away from me."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "Your cousin," he said, "telling you not to talk to me anymore?"

"Yeah."

"I see." He nodded slowly. "This makes sense now." A pause. "Not very good lie, Hollander."

"I know that. Technically you came up with it. I just let you think it. I didn't know how else to —" Shane exhaled. "Every time I tried to end it you kept —"

"Pursuing," Ilya said.

"Yeah."

Ilya made a small sound. He lifted a hand and pressed it over his eyes for a moment, dragging it slowly down his face. When he looked back up his mouth was twisted, somewhere between a wince and a laugh at himself. "I could not take hint," he said.

"Little bit, yeah."

Ilya muttered something in Russian under his breath and turned back to the skyline. He stood there with both hands on the rail, and Shane watched him work through it — really work, the way he reworked a system that had quit holding. Because Ilya had built something over the last three weeks. He'd taken the worst thing, a person he cared about lying to him for months, and found a frame that let him forgive it: a woman, trapped, hiding, scared. He'd made his peace with that. He'd come up here at peace with that. And Shane had just walked in and pulled the frame out from under him, and now Ilya was standing in the wreckage of it with nothing rebuilt yet, holding a truth that didn't fit any of the shapes he'd left room for.

A long moment passed.

Shane couldn't stand in the quiet of it. He reached for something with edges he could hold.

"How did you even find out," he said. "That I was Jane."

Ilya huffed a small laugh. "Twitter. Your friend Thomas."

"He told you?"

"He did not need to. He almost replied to a tweet about the party. I looked at his profile. Saw he was friends with you."

Shane stared at him. "That was all it took."

"Mmm." He tipped his head. "No. I also saw your stupid bank ad."

Shane closed his eyes. "Oh god."

"My Jane had very beautiful freckles. Very recognizable."

"I knew I shouldn't have done that ad."

"You might have gotten away with it. Except for that." Ilya considered him. "How did you make alibi for them at All-Stars. I looked, I swear you did not have them there."

"Makeup. There was a lady down the hall, I got her to cover them as soon as I realized I'd be doing the press conference with you."

"Ah." Ilya nodded slowly. He looked away for a moment, his jaw working. "Later. On the ice —"

"It must have rubbed off."

"Yes." A pause. "I am sorry about that. I tried to say, earlier, downstairs —"

"No." Shane shook his head. "That was my fault. I deserved those hits and a thousand others."

"Mm." Ilya considered this. "The hitting. Between us, it is not really my preference. I prefer other things."

His eyes stayed on Shane a beat past where the joke ended, the look holding, waiting on something.

Shane laughed at that. He was relieved Ilya was making jokes. That had to mean something, right? Whatever Ilya had been watching for, nothing came back, and his face went even again. He turned to the railing. Shane chalked it up to one more thing about Rozanov that ran a half-step ahead of him.

And then another thought came to him.

"If you knew for the last few weeks," Shane said, "why didn't you say anything?"

"Like I said. I would not have told anyone. I thought you were a woman, scared of what people would —"

"No." Shane shook his head. "Not the press. Me. Why didn't you text me. Tell me you knew?"

"Ah." Ilya watched him now. "Because I know you are very skittish. If I say something, maybe you play chicken."

"Chicken out?"

"Yes, this is exactly what I said."

"You thought I wouldn't come and explain."

"No." Ilya paused. "I thought maybe you would do something very dramatic if you knew that I knew. Even if —" he paused, mouth moving, "even if now I know it was wrong secret I was thinking of." He looked at Shane. "I thought maybe in person I could make you understand better. That I am good guy. Very good at keeping secrets."

Shane let out a breath. Long and slow and shaking slightly at the end.

"I thought as soon as I told you, you'd go to the press," he said. "Or the league. I've been planning on my career ending tonight."

And maybe Ilya still would, now. That was the part Shane didn't say. Now that Ilya had the real version — not a frightened woman anyone would pity, just a man who'd made one stupid choice and a hundred worse ones to bury it. There was no mercy built into that story. Nothing in it that asked to be forgiven.

He reached out and gripped the guardrail.

The shaking started in his hands first. Not dramatic, not visible from a distance, just the fine tremor of a body that had been running on adrenaline and catastrophic anticipation for weeks and had just been told it could stop. He'd been holding this for nine months. He'd carried it through a full NHL season, through playoffs, through therapy sessions and sleepless nights and a Calder Trophy ceremony and a bathroom with bad fluorescent lighting, and now it was out and Ilya knew and Ilya was still standing here and the stress was so enormous it had nowhere to go except through him all at once, turning his legs unreliable and his eyes dangerously hot in a way he was not going to let become anything.

He focused on his breathing. Kathleen's voice in the back of his head. In for four.

Ilya's hand came to his back. Whatever had been hardening in him since the trans thing fell apart went quiet the second Shane started to come undone, and his hand started moving in slow circles.

"Hey." His voice had dropped, the banter gone out of it entirely. "Hey. Everything is okay, Shane. I would not have gone to the league. I would not have gone to the press." A pause. "What would I have told them? That I kissed Shane Hollander and then made him text me for nine months? That I was chasing him like —" He stopped. "They would think I was crazy. I would not do that."

"But I was lying to you for months. Jane wasn't even real. Why are you being so nice to me."

"I do not think that is full truth."

"What do you mean. I’m not a woman, Ilya."

"No, no." Ilya considered it. "I think — maybe the whole time, the conversations. The hockey. The other things. That was you. It was not all lies. Right?"

Shane looked at him. "No. That — that was me."

"Then it was not all lies."

He'd started, and now he couldn't stop, and he didn't want to. That was the part that scared him. Every true thing he handed over made the next one lighter, easier to give, and he understood now why he'd told Kathleen everything in five sessions, why the wanting to be known had always run deeper than the fear of it. He wanted Ilya to have all of it.

"I really liked talking to you," Shane said. "Some of those months I was lonely, and talking to you was the part that didn't feel like a performance. Like I could just be whatever I actually was instead of what I was supposed to be." He paused. "I know how that sounds. Given what I was doing."

"It was the same for me," Ilya said.

Shane looked at him.

Something passed between them, quiet, and held.

"Your defensive transitions are still slow," Shane said.

"They are improving."

"Barely."

"This is what you want to say to me right now?"

"No."

"Joke is on me," Ilya said, mostly to the city. "Finally I really like a girl." He laughed once, short and humorless. "And she turns out to be a boy, which would be fine, except she —" He stopped. Corrected himself. "He. Is playing practical joke on Ilya."

Shane looked at him.

"Would be fine," he said slowly. "Ilya. Are you bisexual?"

Ilya turned and looked at him. "Yes. I say this already. Two minutes ago. 'Same club, I am B.'" He spread his hands. "You were standing right here."

"I had a lot going on."

"Mm." Ilya looked at him flatly. "You want cookie?" He turned back to the city, clearly annoyed.

Shane stood staring, mouth probably open.

"Ilya," he said. "I'm gay."

He let it sit there.

"That's what I told my parents. I'm gay." He held Ilya's gaze. "And I like you too. That's why I couldn't keep going with the Jane thing. I liked you and I felt — I felt really fucking guilty. Every day. The longer it went on the worse it got and I didn't know how to stop it without losing —" He stopped. "I didn't know how to stop it."

"You're gay," Ilya said. "You, Shane Hollander, are —"

"Gay, yeah." Shane looked at him. "Isn't it obvious? You kissed me at that Halloween party and I kissed you back." A beat, and his face did something complicated. "And I like you— you know that surely. It’s why you went after me at All-Stars? You were mad on my behalf, so you were mad at me, defending me, from me." He pressed the heel of his hand to one eye. "Fuck-- I'm going to need a diagram."

Ilya didn't reach for him. "You are sure," he said. "Is not just curiosity? Because if you are still working it out, I am not going to be experiment."

"I'm sure. I'm gay, Ilya. I've known for a while."

Ilya nodded slowly. Then, with great delicacy: "And you are not transitioning? You would tell me. I ask one more time only. To be correct."

"I'm not transitioning."

"Okay." A breath, and his shoulders came down. "Okay. Now I believe it."

The corner of his mouth moved.

"You like me," he said.

"Yes." Shane's voice came out slightly raw. "I like you. I've said it thrice now."

"Say it again."

"Ilya."

And there it was — Ilya was taking the piss now, the corner of his mouth tugging, fully prepared to make Shane say it a fourth time and a fifth, to needle him about the crush like they were thirteen. This was the Ilya from the other side of the faceoff dot, the menace, the one who chirped you for forty minutes and then buried one top-shelf to end the period. Apparently the man couldn't hold kind and serious for longer than a minute at a stretch.

Ilya was smiling. Not the press smile, not the one Shane had catalogued from a hundred postgame scrums. Something larger than that and much harder to look at directly.

And then, like gravity, Ilya kissed him.

Nothing like the pool. The pool had been dark and half-formed, Ilya following an instinct that hadn't resolved yet. This was the opposite of that. His hand came up to Shane's jaw and he kissed him properly, unhurried. It tasted like cigarettes and something underneath that Shane's brain didn't have the processing power to name, because Ilya was kissing him and Shane's hands had found the lapels of that expensive suit and he was kissing him back, and for once he wasn't managing a single thing about it.

He'd built a version of this fantasy a hundred times over nine months and gotten it wrong every time, because he'd always built it as something that happened to him — a verdict, a thing to be survived. This was nothing like that. Ilya kissed him like he had all night and meant to spend it, like Shane wasn't a problem to solve but a thing he'd decided he was going to have, and Shane felt the difference everywhere at once: the dry heat off the desert, the rail at the small of his back, the rough catch of stubble, the small sound Ilya made low in his throat when Shane's grip tightened in his lapels. Nine months. He'd been so busy bracing for the worst version of tonight that he'd never once let himself imagine it could be the best.

When they parted they didn't go far. Their mouths kept finding each other in soft pecks, neither of them willing to manage even a second apart, until those finally subsided and Ilya's thumb came to rest against Shane's jaw and Shane's hands settled at his waist. Up close Ilya's mouth was red and his eyes were dark. Both of them staring, making sure the thing was real.

"Holy shit," Shane said, to no one, to the city, to the half inch of air between them.

"I missed you," Ilya said, close, the words almost against Shane's mouth. "When you stopped. The hockey arguments. The two in the morning texts." A pause. "I miss knowing you. Not Jane. You." His thumb moved on Shane's jaw. "I want to know you more. If you want that."

"Yeah," Shane said. "I want."

"Okay," Ilya said.

"Okay."

Neither of them said anything for a while. They hadn't let go of each other. Shane's hands still at Ilya's waist, Ilya's still framing his jaw, the two of them holding on like the roof might tilt. The city ran its light and noise below them and the desert held its heat and the silence had earned itself.

"What do we do," Shane said eventually. "After tonight."

"Tonight? We go inside. I am sweating in this suit."

"I meant —"

"I know what you meant." Ilya glanced over. "It is 2011. You are Shane Hollander, I am Ilya Rozanov, our teams hate each other." He shrugged. "Not simple."

"No. It's not."

"So we figure it out." He straightened, finally, his hand sliding from Shane's jaw. "Inside. Now."

Shane laughed.

"Your room or mine?"

Ilya folded Shane's hand into his own and pulled him toward the door.

"Mine," he said. And then, low: "I’ve missed you, my Jane."

Chapter End Notes

quick note: if you came here for smut, im sorry, its not here. im not very practiced at it and honestly the sexual stuff just didnt feel like it fit this fic or added anything to the story i was trying to tell. im working towards it though! over in summit position, so. stay tuned for that
anyway. just an epilogue to go and i think itll be relatively short. if theres anything you want to see in it PLEASE comment, genuinely most of the best ideas in this whole fic came from comments yall left, you evil geniuses. and especially tell me if i left any threads hanging. i dont have a beta reader so congrats, the job is all of yours now. deal?

love you all - Xoar

Chapter 9

Chapter Notes

so. here we are. the epilogue. thank you for staying the whole way.

huge thank you to my beta Vahosi. if you liked this chapter it's probably because of them. go check them out on ao3 here.

this one's at the cottage during the cup final, 2017. it's soft. nobody gets hurt. you've earned it and so have they.
okay. operation jane and lily is a go.

 June - 2017

The cottage at this hour was all gold and dust, the light coming sideways through the window and across the foot of the bed, across Shane, who was face down and breathing slow. Not asleep, just gone somewhere good.

Ilya loved the cottage. He'd decided that the first summer and never revised it. The Boston condo was glass and gray and a doorman who called him sir. The cottage had a screen door that stuck, a kettle that whistled flat, a dock that needed two new boards, and Yuna's handwriting on the labels of the jars in the pantry. It was the first place in North America, maybe the first place anywhere, that Ilya had walked into and could feel his shoulders lower fully.

He looked at his own thigh. A mark high on the inside, purpling already, and below it a smaller one, the print of teeth. He'd be thinking about the length of his shorts at the lake tomorrow. He looked at the back of Shane's thigh, where there was a matching set, his own. Good work.

"You're looking at them," Shane said into the pillow.

"I am admiring."

"You're admiring your own marks on my body."

"Yes." Ilya reached over and pressed his thumb to one of them, slow, and watched Shane not flinch. "Is fewer than you deserve."

"For what."

"For six years ago. When you stand in front of me in a wig and let me call you pretty girl and you say nothing."

Shane rolled onto his side, grinning. "It’s your own fault you couldn't tell it was me."

"You were in costume."

"Barely. And we were standing under a light."

"I was drunk."

"You were shitfaced and in love with a cartoon. You’ve seen Mulan like a million times now."

"For the English."

"For the English," Shane said, delighted, and there it was. Ilya never got tired of seeing Shane like this, fucked out of his head and blissed out.

There'd been a time this story would shut Shane down completely. He could still picture the first night Thomas and Ilya ever met, the two of them a few drinks deep and trading the story across the table. Thomas doing the part about how Shane had ended up at that party in that costume. Ilya laughing at himself, at the version of him too drunk to recognize a man in a wig.

Shane had sat between them and not been able to find it funny. He smiled when he was supposed to. In the car afterward he'd apologized to Ilya again, for the deception, for the months of it, for things that had stopped needing an apology a long time ago, and Ilya had taken his hand off the gearshift and said, "Is only you still upset about it. Everybody else is laughing. You can too."

Now he told the jokes himself.

Ilya's phone buzzed on the nightstand. He looked at it. A reminder he'd set himself.

"It's the fifteenth," he said, giddily.

Shane groaned into the mattress. "Already?"

"It’s my turn, Shane. We agreed."

"I know what we agreed."

Ilya opened the app and pulled the image he created a few weeks ago. He held the phone up over both of them so Shane could see it.

It was a photograph of a car driving through the front of the Bell Centre. Or it was supposed to be. The car, a McLaren 720S, proportions completely wrong with the building behind it, its shadow pointing the wrong direction, a burst of orange flame pasted over the hood at an angle that matched nothing. The arena behind it was an old grainy stock photo. The resolution gave out halfway up the wall. The whole thing looked like it had taken someone four minutes, which it had, because that was the point. Ilya had stopped trying to make them convincing years ago. The worse it looked, the faster everyone understood the rules.

"What's the caption," Shane asked, resting his chin on Ilya’s shoulder.

Ilya typed it as it came. hollander. for the thing in march. now we are even.

"Wait, what thing in March? Did we have internet beef in March?"

"There is no thing in March." He posted it. "Let them find the thing in March."

They lay there and watched the internet do what it always did anytime one of them posted.

Shane was laughing now, the real one, falling back so his face mashed sideways into the pillow. Ilya set the phone face down on the mattress between them. He would make sure to like all of the good comments later.

This had all been Yuna Hollander's idea.

The summer Jane became Shane, when the truth was out between the two of them, they decided to tell Shane’s parents. It had ended up saving both their asses because there'd still been the other problem, the one the whole league was chewing on. A girl named Jane, from Ottawa, who did not exist, who Rozanov had wanted and Hollander had supposedly taken, broadcast to the entire internet by Rozanov himself, who had wanted her badly enough to beg strangers for help finding her and could not take a word of it back. There were screenshots. You could not unsay it.

Yuna, the genius she was, had sat them down at the kitchen table with a legal pad and laid it out like a media plan, because that was what it was. "You can't kill it," she'd said. "So you make it the least interesting thing about you two."

The hardest piece to overcome was the fight.

Everyone had seen the fight. Twelve thousand people in the building, a national broadcast, a clip that would outlive them both: Rozanov crossing half the ice with his gloves already coming off, and Hollander going down and covering up and staying down. It was the one real thing on the tape. Ilya had not been acting that night. He'd been out of his mind over a girl who wasn't real and a rival who would not look at him, and he had swung first and meant every inch of it.

So it was the lie they had to sell the hardest.

A bet, they told reporters. A dare between two guys who secretly found each other hilarious. Hollander had turtled because he was laughing too hard to get up, and the terms were that he had to lie there and look like a coward on national television, and Rozanov had taken the suspension without one word of complaint because that was the bet, and the bet had a rule. First one to admit it was all a joke before the start of the next season, lost.

Neither of them was ever going to lose. Everyone already knew how the two of them were about winning. It was half the reason the fight read as real in the first place; no one could picture either man choosing to lose at anything, a brawl included.

When they copped to the prank at the start of the next season, the internet came apart. Reddit would not let it go, thread after thread swearing there was no way that fight was staged. Most people took the story anyway, especially watching the two of them turn, over the following months, into the closest thing the league had to a comedy act.

The Bears management was less charmed. Ilya sat three games for a bet, and there might have been a real price for it if the Bears hadn't made the playoffs that spring. The Voyageurs weren't thrilled either. Their first-overall pick had curled up and taken a beating on national television without a single punch back. It was not the look they wanted for the face of their franchise. In the end both teams settled for the same promise from both men: that they would never do anything that stupid again.

They couldn't resist.

It turned into a thing of its own. When a scrum broke out, the way it did in nearly every Voyageurs–Bears game, and bodies started pairing off, the two of them found each other every time. And then, instead of throwing a single punch, they put on a show. Rozanov pulling an invisible sword off his back and Hollander turning his stick sideways to block it. Hollander roping him in with a lasso that wasn't there and Rozanov letting himself be hauled in hand over hand, gloves and helmets scattered around them, the linesmen circling with no idea what to do with it.

The coaches lost their minds for a full season, fines and benchings and a closed-door meeting in Montreal that changed nothing. Then it was quietly allowed, because both their coaches could do the math: in any brawl, their best forwards had one guaranteed opponent who wouldn’t try to end the other’s career. It was a win-win for both teams, really. It didn’t hurt jersey sales, either.

And then came the rest of the pranks, one stupid thing at a time. The next one, Ilya announced he’d bought the Voyageurs, with a bill of sale photoshopped over the logo and his signature the size of a child's. Then came the fake security-camera still of Hollander letting the air out of Rozanov's tires, timestamped to a night Shane wasn’t even on the same coast. There was the custody battle over a golden retriever neither of them owned, a dog named Cup, which ran three weeks and ended in a forged mediation report. The diss track. The wanted poster. The forty pounds of unrefrigerated Boston clam chowder shipped to the Voyageurs' locker room and the shipment of live loons Hollander mailed back in response.

A never-ending prank war, fresh and creative catastrophes, each one dumber than the last, each one taken apart within the hour by anyone who bothered, which was the entire design. You were not meant to believe it. You were meant to enjoy not believing it.

Somewhere in there, between Shane’s pitch-perfect imitation of Ilya’s accent for an entire press conference and Ilya’s livestreamed theft of Shane’s Olympic medal, they became a package deal. You did not book Ilya Rozanov in an ad without that agency pitching Shane Hollander in the same breath. The bank, the airline, the car company, the razor brand, the luxury watch company Shane already endorsed and pulled Ilya into. Two rivals who could not stand each other and could not stay out of frame together, which sold merch, it turned out, better than almost anything either of them did on the ice.

And under all of it, in plain sight, the real thing. They sat together at any dinner in any city. They were seen leaving the same hotel and it became content. They were photographed surfing in Hawaii last Christmas — or rather, Shane was sitting on his surfboard, dunking Ilya underwater —and someone captioned it the beef continues and scrolled on. Five years of the two most watched men in the sport going exactly where they pleased, together, and the prank war wrote their cover for free.

Yuna Hollander should have run a country.

Shane's phone buzzed. He looked at it.

"My mom."

"What does she say."

"'Puck drop.'"

Despite the cup finals waiting, neither of them had moved. They were still a tangle of limbs and wrecked sheets, neither of them wanting to be the first to turn back into a person with somewhere to be. But eventually they clamored their way to the shower, which they got into to clean up and stayed in for reasons that had nothing to do with getting clean. By the time Ilya was dry and dressed the first period had surely come and gone.

Shane's phone rang. His whole face changed.

"It's Thomas." He had it on speaker before Ilya could say anything.

Thomas seemingly arrived mid-sentence, the way he always did, as if the call had cut into a story already running.

"— so I'm at this thing in Los Feliz, and I am not exaggerating to you, she is standing six feet from me, in the flesh, and I get one good look before her publicist boxes me out like it's the Secret Service —"

Ilya sat on the edge of the bed to do his shoes and listened. He'd met Thomas twice and heard him through Shane's phone many more times than that. Enough to know that the man was always excitable about seeing celebrities in the wild and liked to call Shane every time he did.

Thomas wound down eventually and remembered that Shane was not a diary. "Anyway. How are my favorite felons. Is the Russian there?"

"I am here," Ilya said.

"Ilya! Congratulations on the car, by the way. The Bell Centre one. The photoshop was so bad it healed something in me."

"Thank you. I work very hard to make them bad."

Shane sat back on his heels with one sandal on. "Hey. Are you single right now?"

The line went quiet. "Why are you saying it like that."

"Like what."

"You have a voice for this. You have a setup voice."

"We might know someone," Shane said.

"A nice girl," Ilya said, from the bed.

"A friend of ours. She's looking. Sort of."

"Looking for what."

"Someone normal. To date."

"What does she do," Thomas said, because Thomas always asked what they did.

"She acts a little."

"Here and there," Ilya said.

Rose did not act a little. Rose Landry had been in two of the three biggest films of the past year and had her face on the sides of buildings in nearly every city Ilya had played in. Shane had met her at the opening of JJ's friend's restaurant in Montreal, gotten seated next to her by accident, and the two of them had texted nearly every day since, mostly screenshots and complaints, a friendship built almost entirely out of a love for hockey and being tired of the same things.

"Acts a little," Thomas said, suspicious. "Would I have seen her in anything?"

"Maybe," Shane said, grinning. "Hard to say."

"What's the catch? And don’t tell me there’s no catch. Last time you set me up, the woman was technically still married."

"They were separated —"

"Shane."

"There's no catch. She has one rule, is all."

"HA! Here it comes..."

"She wants someone not gay." Shane found the second sandal under the bed. “This time."

A pause came down the line. "This time?"

"Her last guy came out three weeks after they ended it," Ilya said.

"The one before that too," said Shane.

"So her last two boyfriends came out," Thomas said slowly, "and the person setting her up is you. Shane Hollander. Who is—"

"A happily taken man."

"—Who is dating Ilya Rozanov."

"Which is why we’re setting her up with you— you're the straightest man I know, Thomas. Well, except that one time you cried at a Subaru commercial."

"That ad was devastating and I will not be shamed for it."

"I'll text you her contact info," Shane said, grinning. Thomas might go into a coma when he realizes who Rose was. "I have to go, the game's basically over."

"Alright man. Have fun!"

The phone went dark. Shane looked at it, pleased with himself, then at the clock on the wall, and stopped being pleased.

"Okay. We're going. Where are my keys."

And there he went. He checked the bowl by the door, the shorts he'd just taken off, two other pairs of shorts, the bathroom counter, the bed, under the bed, the kitchen table, the hook the keys were supposed to hang on and never did.

Ilya took his dirty shorts off the chair and moved the box from the old pocket to his new one.

He'd been doing this for two months. Pocket to pocket, pants to pants, the box against his hip wherever he went.

He'd bought it in April. He had walked into a store in Boston on an ordinary Tuesday and walked back out with it, and the buying had not been the strange part. The strange part had been understanding that there was nothing standing in the way of his happiness anymore.

His father was three months in the ground. His brother had a family and his own opinions and a life that didn’t need Ilya in it anymore. The apartment in Moscow was sold. The flights home every summer were done now, and the smaller and more careful version of himself he packed for them, the things his father would have said and the things his father would have done, none of it waited at the end of any runway now. There was no Russia to go back to. There was a country he came from, which could say whatever it liked about a man who lived in Boston and loved who he loved, and could do nothing.

So he'd bought the ring. He'd had the jewelers set two words inside the band, where only the person wearing it would ever find them. Lily & Jane. Then he'd started carrying it and kept carrying it, because having it and giving it were two different things, and the second one had a condition they'd agreed on years ago, in the dark, in hotel rooms in cities that belonged to neither of them.

"They're not anywhere," Shane said from the kitchen, a little wild now.

"They are somewhere."

"That is not helpful, Ilya."

Shane's phone lit up again, face up on the bed. No words from his mother this time. A photo of the television, the score in the corner, the period beside it.

“Third period now!” Ilya called out to his boyfriend, bringing him his phone.

"Third?" Shane said, really exasperated now. "How is it the third already?"

They went out. Halfway across the gravel Shane stopped at the car, looked in the window, and went still. His keys were in the cupholder, where he'd left them the afternoon before.

Shane said a few nasty things that made Ilya’s heart swoon with endearment.

Ilya loved angry Shane. He was like a little pissed-off kitten, all adorable and red faced and puffed up.

Ilya drove. The light had shifted from gold to the long blue end of a June evening, a hockey game three-quarters done somewhere ahead of them. Shane sat in the passenger seat glaring at the keys dangling in the ignition, the keys that had been in the cupholder the entire time he'd torn the cottage apart looking for them.

They could hear the broadcast through the Hollanders' screen door as they pulled up.

The door hadn't finished closing behind them before Yuna came out of the kitchen, popcorn bowl against her hip.

"You're late," she said. "Third period started."

"This is Shane's fault," Ilya said with a hint of glee. "He could not find his —"

"It was in the car," Shane cut him off. "The whole time. It was in the car."

"Yes. The whole time. He—"

"That's not my fault, they must've grown legs or something."

He'd handed Ilya a week of material and Ilya knew it. Fine. There'd been a Shane, and not all that long ago, who would rather have died than be the idiot who lost his own keys in his own car. That Shane had spent a tremendous amount of energy never once being the idiot. This one knew better than to react in front of Ilya and did it anyway, which only ever handed the menace more ammunition than the embarrassing thing itself.

Yuna, used to all of it, pushed the popcorn into Ilya's hands, took Shane's face in both of hers, kissed his cheek, and was already turning back toward the living room. "Your father has been eating chips since the first intermission," she said. "Someone take them from him."

"I heard that," David said, from the couch.

A temporary truce, then. They went through to the living room. Ilya carried the popcorn to the far end of the couch and dropped down, arm along the back of it. Shane's dad looked over and put a hand out, and Ilya took it.

Shane had watched this handshake change. The first one, five years ago, in this same living room, had been careful, formal, a man meeting the first person his son had ever brought home and not yet knowing what kind of person he was, only that he mattered. Now his father shook Ilya's hand like it was the funniest inside joke ever. Maybe it was. Shane didn't really understand it, though.

What he did know was that he'd been nineteen once and certain this was the one thing he would never get to have. But now it was his. He still hadn't entirely talked himself into believing it was all real. He looked at the empty space where their hands had met a second longer than he needed to, then looked at the TV.

"Who scored?" he asked.

"Hunter, mostly," David said. "Admirals have held the lead since the second."

Shane dropped down between them and took a handful of chips. In season he wouldn't have. In June, on his parents' couch, he ate them without thinking about how much cardio he would need to do to make up for it, which Kathleen would have called progress and which Shane had decided to just call his new normal.

On screen, the Admirals were smothering their competition with the patient airless defense their whole playoff run had been built on. At center ice, stick down, waiting, was number twenty-one. Scott Hunter.

"I bet he cries," Shane said. "When it happens."

"He is old man," Ilya said. "Of course he cries."

"Don't call him an old man."

"But he is old man. We already have three cups in this room." Ilya tipped his head at the four of them. "It is Scott Hunter's first. He has been waiting since the dawn of time. He is dinosaur."

"He's a nice guy."

"Yes. Very nice dinosaur."

Shane's mom laughed before she could stop herself. Ilya looked deeply pleased with himself. Getting Yuna to laugh was a sport to him, second only to getting Shane annoyed, and he was undefeated at both.

Shane had only met Hunter a few times. Each time the man had been kind to him for no reason Shane could find, which was rarer than it should have been.

"He's going to win the Cup," Shane said. "Show some respect."

"I have respect." Ilya ate a piece of popcorn from the bowl in his lap. "Respect for old man who works very hard, very long time, to hold big trophy one time before he dies."

Shane opened his mouth for a rebuttal. The final horn went first.

The noise of victory crashed through the television speakers all at once. The Admirals were over the boards, gloves in the air, mobbing each other at center ice.

Then the camera found Hunter's face. He wasn't crying.

Damn it. Shane had called it like a sure thing two minutes ago, and now the man was bone dry, and Ilya was probably going to needle him about it later.

They watched in relative quiet over the next ten minutes of celebration as the Cup came down the ice on its white-gloved stand, the commissioner there, handing it across to the captain, and then it was up over Hunter's head.

Shane knew exactly what that felt like. Thirty-five pounds of polished metal going up over his head yet feeling weightless, the whole city and the whole team and every version of himself that had ever doubted it would happen folded into the lift. He wondered whether Ilya was remembering his own, or chewing on this season's loss instead. Probably both. Shane knew how badly he wanted to even the score between them. They were nothing if not competitive meatheads.

Hunter skated his customary half-lap with the cup. Slowed. Stopped.

He handed the Cup to a linemate. He turned toward the boards and looked up into the lower bowl, and the camera went where he was looking and found a young man already coming down through the crowd, dark-haired, twenty-five maybe, moving fast.

Hunter reached up.

The young man reached down.

Hunter got both hands on him and pulled him clean over the boards onto the ice, and the man caught a fistful of Hunter's jersey and didn't go down, because Hunter had him. The crowd noise bent, confused.

Then Hunter kissed him. Center ice. In front of the thousands in the building and the millions at home, the largest audience hockey had ever made for anyone.

Shane sat very still with both hands flat on his knees and watched a man do the exact thing he'd been afraid of since he was a teenager, and watched the building not turn on him for it. The building was coming apart for him. Nobody was leaving. Nobody was reaching for a phone to do damage control. Hunter just stood there at center ice holding on to the person he'd picked, and thirty thousand people made the loudest sound Shane had ever heard a building make.

He was fourteen the first time he understood he'd have to keep a part of himself in a drawer for the rest of his life if he wanted the only thing he was good at. He'd believed it through the draft and his first season and a Halloween party and a wig and a girl named Jane he'd invented to talk to a boy he was sure could never want the real him. He'd been wrong about that last part for five years now, and still wasn't used to it all the way.

The drawer might be cracked right now, but it was far from being flung open for the world to see.

The cottage went quiet. A full minute, maybe more, before anyone spoke.

"Is it time?" Yuna said.

She wasn't watching the television. She was watching Shane. His dad had set the chip bag down and was watching him too.

Shane looked at Ilya.

Ilya was already looking at him.

They'd made the deal years ago, in the dark, in hotel rooms in cities that belonged to neither of them. Whoever in the league was brave enough to go first, the two of them would follow the same night, immediately, publicly, no waiting for the noise to settle. Ilya had been ready to come out since, basically, forever. Russian politics be damned. It was Shane who'd needed the deal. Shane who'd needed it to be somebody else's nerve on the line first. The whole room was looking at him still, waiting for his reply.

"Yeah," he said, his breath coming out shaky. "It's time."

His words came out level. After all this time he still didn't know how he did that.

He stood up, nervous energy needing movement, another room, anything. He turned to the kitchen and could feel Ilya follow him. Yuna and David stayed where they were to give them privacy.

Away from the television, away from his parents' faces, it caught up with him all at once. His hands weren't steady. He put them flat on the counter. Tonight, there would be no version of him left that the world didn't know about, no taking it back, not ever, and some animal part of him that had run his life since he was fourteen stood up and started looking for the door.

Ilya saw it. Of course he did. He'd been reading Shane for five years and could find the second Shane started to go under. He set his phone on the counter, stepped in, took Shane's face in both hands the way Yuna had at the door, and put his forehead against Shane's.

"Hey," he said. "Breathe. You know the thing. We do the thing."

So Shane did the thing, the four counts Kathleen had walked him through in an office in Montreal years ago, the one he'd laughed at the first time and used a thousand times since. In for four. Ilya breathed it with him, shoulders going up and down, exaggerated, ridiculous. Hold for four. Out for four.

"You are not nineteen," Ilya said, low, just for him. "You are Shane Hollander, second-best hockey player in the world. You are here. I am here. Your mother will make dessert."

“Hey!” Shane laughed, short and wet, he ignored the snipe. "She makes you dessert every time we come over."

"Yes. Is different this time, special."

The kitchen came back in pieces. The counter under his hands, the hum of the old refrigerator, the tv celebration still going through the wall. He was okay. He'd been practicing being okay for five years, and it turned out he was better at it than he'd given himself credit for.

Then they called Farah. She picked up on the second ring.

"Shane —"

"Farah —"

"Is Ilya there? Is it time? I just watched it, I've had my phone in my hand for thirty seconds, is it —"

"Ilya's here," Shane said. "Operation Jane and Lily is a go."

Five years ago he'd built Jane to keep from being seen by anyone. Now her name was the all-clear for being seen by everyone.

A pause. Then a sound Farah was trying to keep out of her voice and couldn't. "Roger that." She steadied. "I need two hours."

"Two hours."

"Phones off. Both of you. Stay off the news for a while too."

"Got it."

"Boys," she said. "I'm so happy for you."

Shane hung up. Ilya already had his own phone out, turning it off.

In two hours, on both their pages, the true version of them. Gay. Bisexual. Together since 2012. Rivals still, real ones, nothing about that part softened; they had never once stopped trying to put each other into the boards. But also five summers in the cottage down the road from his parents. Every All-Star weekend. Every time they played each other and went back to each other’s beds and argued about the game until three.

"Ready?" Shane asked, turning his phone off.

Ilya looked at him a moment before he answered.

"More than ready."

Shane loved him so much.

From the living room Yuna called, "I'll make dessert, we're celebrating," in the voice of a woman who needed her hands doing something, and through the wall the television was still going, thirty thousand people somewhere still making all that noise.

Shane got a fist in the front of Ilya's shirt and pulled him in. Ilya came easy, both hands cradling Shane's jaw, and kissed him slow, in no hurry at all, like they had all the time in the world. Pressed that close, Shane felt something in Ilya's pocket, small and square and hard against his hip. He meant to ask about it later and lost the thought the second Ilya's thumb moved along his jaw.

He'd spent years picturing this exact hour, and in every version in his head, he was terrified, sweating through his shirt, scanning for exits. There were no exits in his mother's kitchen and he wasn't looking for any. The hiding was just over, the way a game was over when the horn went, a signal that it was time to finally stop fighting.

When they parted, he looked at Ilya, who was watching him with nothing worried left in his face. Just waiting.

He'd spent his whole rookie year sure he was the only lonely one, the only one desperate enough to keep texting back as a girl who didn't exist because he couldn't make himself quit. He needed Ilya. It took him an embarrassingly long time to work out that the reason Ilya kept texting a girl— who wouldn't send a photo or meet for coffee or do any of the normal things that should have made a man give up— was that Ilya had been just as lonely. That Ilya needed Shane too.

Two kids. Same league, both of them faking fine for everybody but a stranger on a phone.

Five years later the stranger lived in his cottage every summer and stole his side of the bed every night and still, to this day, could not take a hint. The phone was the only thing that had gone away. The person who'd been on the other end of it was standing in front of him now, waiting on Shane the way he'd once waited on Jane, patient past all reason.

Whatever came next, they'd take it the way they took everything now. Together. Out loud. On the record. Staring up at Ilya, his sure, confident loving gaze back to him, he felt something new.

He'd spent five years bracing to be terrified of this exact moment.

He wasn't. All he could feel in this moment was pure, utter, joyful, relief.

Chapter End Notes

we did it!

thanks for coming on this ride with me. if you liked this one, good news, there's more.

i just posted the first chapter of summit position: professional skier ilya rozanov and park ranger shane hollander, one room, one cabin, top of a mountain, no way down. i'm trying my hand at a little more spice in that one, so consider yourself warned. or invited.

please comment, leave kudos, share this around. your interactions make my day. seriously.

toodles. - Xoar