May 22, 2021

Shane arrives at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at six p.m. sharp. He’s early—the invitation said the ceremony started at seven. He’s wearing clothes his mom handed over yesterday, before Shane got on a plane to New York. The clothes were carefully closed inside a discreet black garment bag that smelled faintly of soap and starch. Inside, he’d found a suit that looked like most of his award ceremony suits. Black jacket. Black pants. White shirt with little pearl buttons and a terribly stiff collar, and a black bow tie to match. She’d also handed him a little box with a Rolex inside, even though he doesn’t particularly care for the feel of things on his wrists. His shoes are black, and the hard soles already hurt his feet. And he looks—well. Ilya would say he looks boring. Shane thinks he looks okay.

It's only May, but it’s fucking hot. Shane starts sweating the second the limo drops him off. He worries, for a second, that the sweat will ruin his hair, but he figures no one will care much. He’s not a guest of honor tonight.

There’s a bit of a red carpet thing close to the road. Shane dutifully makes his way across it. He hits a few awkward poses for the cameras; smiles a smile he doesn’t really mean, and feels guilty that he doesn’t really mean it. When the photographers finally have enough pictures, he steps off the carpet and onto the concrete. A very polite man in a suit gestures further up the path and says this way, sir, and Shane goes where he’s directed.

The gardens are nice. It’s late in the season, but there are some cherry trees still in bloom—they drape overhead like cotton candy clouds and drop stray, half-rotted petals on Shane’s shoulders. The air smells sweet, and it’s just starting to take on a golden, lazy afternoon quality. Shane briefly closes his eyes, and loses himself in the hard sound of his uncomfortable shoes hitting the sidewalk.

He walks past a shallow pool surrounded by roses just starting to bloom, and through a wooded area carpeted by millions of little blue flowers, and finally crests a hill covered in spent daffodils. At the top, the rest of the gardens sprawl in front of him: a wide, open area; a long pool full of water lilies, and beyond that, an enormous glass building that hurts to look at in the afternoon sun. People in fancy dress wander around, champagne glasses in hand. Waiters in immaculately pressed suits flit from guest to guest, taking empty crystal flutes and replacing them with full ones. In the wide open space to Shane’s right, hundreds of delicate silver chairs are lined up in rows, with one big long center aisle between them.

There’s a sign in front of Shane. It says Welcome to Scott Hunter and Kip Grady’s Happily Ever After in a cursive font that makes Shane think of Etsy. Shane’s stomach churns. He briefly squeezes his empty ring finger. He feels, all at once, like he might cry. Instead, he swallows, and breathes, and pastes a smile on his face, and marches his ass down to Scott and Kip’s fucking wedding of the century.

_____

November 30, 2017

Shane woke the same way he had for the past four months—with a smile pressed to his pillow and a hard-on trapped between his belly and the mattress. He rolled on his side, he remembers, and jerked off to memories of Ilya tucked in close behind him, smiling into the back of Shane’s neck and fucking him so long and so slow that, for a while, Shane forgot how to be scared.

After, he’d wiped his hands on a tissue and laid there for a bit, thinking about what-ifs. He thought about taking Ilya home for Christmas. He thought about holding Ilya’s hand in the grocery store. He wondered what would’ve happened if, when his dad came over to the cottage for his fucking phone charger, he’d caught them kissing on the couch instead of dozing between rounds upstairs. But thinking about that made him think about coming out to his dad, which made him think about coming out to his mom, and that made him think about coming out to everyone, and he didn’t like to think about that, so he didn’t linger long.

And, so. Shane did his sunrise yoga way before the sun actually rose. He took a long time getting dressed because he kept stopping to look at the latest text Ilya had sent—maybe I will make it for you next summer. go to sleep, моя любовь, and dream of my mama’s beautiful borscht. And Ilya called Shane at six in the morning, right as he was about to blend his breakfast smoothie. Shane snatched his phone off the counter and leaned against the cabinets, and turned his back to the mess of half-melted ice and empty Greek yogurt containers and stray bits of kale scattered across the countertop.

“Hey,” Shane had said, smiling. He probably sounded besotted, but he couldn’t help it. It had only been four months since Ilya first told Shane he loved him, in those two unbroken weeks at the cottage, and he was still riding the high. He’ll probably be riding it for the rest of his life.

His good mood lasted for all of two seconds. On the other end of the line, Ilya was crying. Little sobs, but Shane recognized the sound—he’d only heard it once, and he’d never fucking forget it.

“Shane, I’m sorry,” Ilya said, broken. “I don’t think I can move to Ottawa anymore.”

The smile dropped off Shane’s face, and his stomach dropped right with it. “What—” Shane stuttered. He bit his lip and tried very hard to keep everything he felt inside. “What do you mean? Did something happen?”

“I lost all my fucking money.” Ilya said, and he started breathing so fucking fast that Shane was struggling to understand what it was he’d said.

“What?” Shane said, at a normal volume. He clutched his phone so tight his knuckles turned white, and sank down, to squat on the floor. Ilya breathed into the phone so fucking loud and so fucking fast. “Ilya, baby, please, you gotta calm down. Come on, breathe with me.” Shane exaggerated a shaky, slow breath, even though, in that moment, he wanted to hyperventilate with Ilya more than anything. He did it again, and again, until Ilya sounded less like a clown making balloon animals and more like a regular person.

“Okay,” Shane had said, from his place on the kitchen floor. “Okay. Tell me what happened.”

It took a while for Ilya to calm down. “My accountant,” Ilya said, shaky, even though he was finally breathing okay. “Years ago, he tells me I have too much money to manage. He tells me to find financial advisor. He recommends a friend’s son, and I trust accountant, so I hire who he said to hire. Financial advisor is younger guy. Has many ideas. Last year he tells me he has, fucking, investment opportunity. New type of money called cryp—crypto—”

“Cryptocurrency?” Shane whispered. Headlines flashed before his eyes, then; Bitcoin Investors Panicking, Bitcoin Value Drops Over 80%, The Great Crypto Crash. “Please don’t tell me it’s cryptocurrency.”

“It is. It was,” Ilya said. “My financial advisor, he said it was ‘the future of banking.’ He tells me that the price of a bitcoin goes up very fast, and would keep going up very fast, so it would be good to buy a lot of these fucking bitcoins or whatever. He tells me I could become billionaire. I say, I am fucking hockey player, not money manager. This is why I pay him to manage money. I tell him do whatever he wants. So, he invested. I did not fucking realize he invested fucking all of my fucking money.”

“Ilya,” Shane said, horrified. “How much do you have left?”

“Six hundred bitcoins I cannot sell. Eighty thousand in savings account somewhere. I am afraid to touch it.”

“Jesus fucking christ,” Shane swore. He put Ilya on speaker and furiously googled bitcoin current valuation, pulled up the calculator app, and did some quick math. 1.8 mil. Barely enough for the average sixty-five-year-old pensioner to comfortably retire. Jesus fucking christ. And he was already sitting, but he still felt like he needed to sit down. He slumped against the cabinets at his back, instead. The pull dug into the space between his shoulders.

“And now you see,” Ilya said, though tears. “I cannot move to Ottawa, because they cannot afford me, and I need money. I have never been poor, Shane. I will die. I will actually fucking die, I think.”

“Just—just hang on a second. Jesus.” Shane bit his lip, peeled a strip of skin off, and swallowed it.  “You’re not gonna die. You know I’ll help you, right?”

“You are volunteering to be sugar daddy?”

Shane laughed, despite himself. “Fuck you, who taught you that? But, sort of? I just want to help.”

“You help.”

“I could help more, maybe. I get that you’re afraid of taking a pay cut if you move to Ottawa. I could, uh, think of ways to deal with that, if you still wanted to move. But if you feel like you need to stay in Boston, I understand,” Shane said. “We can—we’ll figure it out either way.”

“I do,” Ilya said, low. He said it like he was confessing something secret.  “I want to come to Ottawa. I want to be close to you.”

“Okay. I can work with that.” And he stayed on the phone with Ilya for a while after that, talking about nothing in particular. Practice, travel schedules, the Metros v. Raiders game in Boston next Sunday; what meal they’d cook after Shane won; which groceries Ilya needed for the week. Shane was only half listening. He was already sitting at his dining table with a notebook, outlining ideas for a new ten-year plan that, he’d hoped, foolishly, wouldn’t ask either of them to sacrifice anything.

_____

May 22, 2021

Someone hands Shane an itinerary printed on off-white, extraordinarily thick paper. There’s more of that Etsy cursive on the front, and the back lists off a bunch of things Shane has only ever heard of while watching Bridezillas—exchange of vows and reception, cake cutting and first dance. There’s a note at the bottom. Please sign our guest book. We want to have memories of everyone!

Shane snags a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and sips. He makes a face. He never really did like the taste of it. He scans the party before him—quickly filling up with more fancy people whose faces look familiar—and spots a little table set off to the side.

And, so. Shane signs the guest book. He says congratulations! -Shane Hollander, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Behind the little table is a massive wall of enormous glass picture frames. Each frame is taller and wider than Shane, and each one is full of hundreds of pictures. Shane spends a long time looking through them all—Scott and Kip in their multitudes, in Florida and Aruba and Barcelona, in stadiums and quiet bars and holding hands walking down unfamiliar streets. And for a while, he gets stuck on a picture of Scott and Kip surrounded by people wearing ugly Christmas sweaters. A man that looks like an older version of Kip is smiling at the two of them instead of the camera. They’re sitting so close. Scott has his hand on Kip’s knee.

Shane only has six pictures of Ilya. Three of them are dick pics that could belong to anybody. One is a dick pic with his face in it. One was taken from behind, at sunset, when Ilya was sitting alone on the dock at the cottage, and Shane saw the way the light caught his hair and felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to have something, anything, that would freeze the moment forever. And the last one always makes him want to cry whenever he looks at it. It’s blurry, off-center—the cameras had moved too fast. It was a screenshot of the all-stars game in 2016; of the brief second Ilya had pressed a kiss to the side of Shane’s helmet. And Shane didn’t care about his own face, or the surprised expression there. He cared about Ilya; the soft crinkle at the corner of his eye, the line of his jaw, the smug curl at the corner of his mouth. He used to open his phone and look at that picture for hours, thinking about Ilya kissing him there without his helmet in the way, daydreaming about Ilya kissing him like that at Christmas dinner with Shane’s parents sitting just across the table. He’d think about that until he made himself sick.

And the two of them could never fill something like this; their multitudes were always so, so small, and too clandestine to ever be recorded. The thought makes something twist at the back of Shane’s throat. He has a lot of regrets about Ilya; moments where he wishes he said something different, times he knows he should’ve been kinder, or more patient, or better. And it’s not like he needs physical evidence of how much they love each other, but god, he wishes they had it anyway. So that one day, when Shane explains everything to his parents and his friends and his team, and they say him? I don’t believe it, Shane can pull out a pile of photographs and say see? He loved me here, and here, and here. He loves me so much I can hardly bear it.

_____

 December 8, 2017

Shane did a lot of googling, instead of sitting in his apartment, alone, rewatching game tape he’d already seen a hundred times before. Financial advisor bad investment. Financial advisor lost money. He didn’t hit on much—the money was just gone. An unfortunate consequence. So, Shane thought about the other thing. The are-you-volunteering-to-be-my-sugar-daddy thing. And Shane knew he would, even back then. He’d wanted to share everything with Ilya; houses and cars and dinners and beds, 401k accounts and pensions, t-shirts and socks and baseball caps, the Stanley fucking Cup, his insecurities and his hopes and his wildest, most secret dreams. Hell, he wanted to share his goddamn toothbrush, even though that was, objectively, gross. He still wants it. He’s never stopped.

He carried that with him, the next time he and Ilya played against each other. It was in Boston, he remembers, and Ilya had won, and secretly, in a place Shane would never acknowledge, he was sort of glad he did. It felt like goodbye, a little. Like playing someone’s favorite song at their funeral.

After the game, Shane took an uber to Ilya’s house, and Ilya came to the door wearing nothing but his boxers, and he started fucking Shane right there, up against his front door, and then carried Shane to his bed and finished fucking him there. When they were done, Ilya sat back against the headboard and lit up a cigarette. Shane, for once, hadn’t said anything. He figured Ilya had earned it.

Instead, he’d tucked himself into Ilya’s side, and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “I have something for you,” he’d murmured, and pressed another kiss to the same spot before he pulled away. “I’ll be right back.” And he’d stood, then, on shaky legs, and dodged Ilya’s whiny no, come back, and walked, naked, all the way back to Ilya’s front door, to his away bag, which they’d both left on the front step.

The look on Ilya’s face, when he came back clutching his bag, was so open and joyous it made Shane’s chest ache. “What?” Ilya carelessly stubbed out his cigarette in the ash tray on his nightstand. “You got me a gift? Is not my birthday, Shane,” he’d said, shaking his head, but still grinning ear to ear. He looked like an overgrown child at five in the morning on Christmas. Shane had, heartbreakingly, wondered if anyone had ever gotten Ilya a gift outside of special occasions; if anyone had ever given Ilya something just because they thought he’d like it.

“I mean, sort of?” Shane replied, and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of a zippered pocket. It was wide-ruled and had rough edges—Shane had ripped it out of the composition notebook he used for notes when he rewatched game footage.

Ilya stared at him, flat and unimpressed. “Hollander, this is piece of paper.”

“You’re supposed to read it, dumbass,” Shane said, and rolled his eyes, and chewed at his lip. He slipped his boxers on, too—this conversation was vulnerable enough without giving Ilya an eyeful of his soft, spent dick.

Ilya squinted at the paper in front of him. He held it up to the light, like he couldn’t believe what he was looking at. “Shane, what is this?” He said, and there was some small, scared thing hiding behind his confusion.

“It’s a list,” Shane replied, deadpan. He slipped on the first socks he found on the floor—mismatched, of course, because Ilya was a disgusting pig that left his dirty socks everywhere—and slowly, carefully, sat on the bed.

Ilya’s fingers were turning white from how tight he was holding the paper. His eyes were wild, his hair an awful mess. “It says ‘Reasons Why We Should Get Married.’ Is this a joke? Are you joking?”

“No, it’s not a joke. I thought about your problem—”

“Being broke ass bitch?” Ilya interrupted.

“Yeah, and I thought about, like…” Shane trailed off. He turned to Ilya, then, and carefully put his hand on Ilya’s knee. “You know, I don’t think I was being very fair to you, when I came up with the plan for you to move to Ottawa. I was so fucking busy dreaming up a way for us to have it all that I forgot to think about what would happen if we failed.” Ilya’s brows drew together, and Shane carefully rubbed his index finger over the line between them. “Ilya, that plan I came up with was fucking terrible. Like. Keeping this,” Shane gestured between them “a secret until we retire in ten years? That’s insane. It’s gonna be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Hardest thing you’ve ever done too, maybe. And odds are, we’d get caught before then, or we just…”

“Just what?” Ilya croaked, and he looked at Shane like he was fucking crazy.

“You know,” Shane said. He’d looked down, then, at his hand still resting carefully on Ilya’s knee. He rubbed his thumb, back and forth, over the skin there. “Fall apart under the pressure. And what happens to you in either scenario? If we get outed before you’re ready, you could lose your job and get fucking deported. And if we split up, you’ll be stuck in Ottawa, playing for a team that sucks, with no fucking money. At least, if we were married, I could sponsor you for Canadian citizenship if you needed it, and you’d get half my shit if we split up.”

“So,” Ilya said, slowly, “you only want to marry me because I will get half your shit in divorce?”

“You know that’s not true,” Shane said. He swung himself over Ilya, then, and sat right in his fucking lap. He put his hands in Ilya’s beautiful, wild hair, and yanked at Ilya’s curls in the hopes that the little spark of pain would make him fucking pay attention. “You read my list. That didn’t even make the top five.”

“Well,” Ilya said, and his voice caught a little, the way he did when he was overwhelmed and trying not to cry. “I am flattered. But I think you forget an important detail.”

Shane frowned. “I did?”

“Yes.” Ilya’s hands settled, so fucking careful, on his waist. “To get married, you have to tell people.” And then, he’d looked down and said, quiet, “I do not think you are ready for this.”

“Yeah, I’m not,” Shane admitted. Ilya gave him a soft, sad smile, and his eyes were so full and round and wet, and Shane couldn’t fucking stand it. So, he cupped Ilya’s face between his hands, and said “Hey. Hey. Are you?”

Ilya thought about it for a long moment, then shrugged. “Not really.”

Shane breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, so we’re on the same page there, at least.” Ilya nodded, wretchedly. Shane thumbed a bit of wetness away from the corner of his eye. “And I thought about that, believe it or not. I have an idea for how we can get married without, like, publicly announcing it.”

Ilya laughed, wet, and glared up at Shane with an annoyed look that didn’t really reach his eyes. “Oh? You had idea?” Ilya gestured to the rest of the room, expansively. “Please, share this idea with me, I am so curious what else you were thinking of that distracted you so much you lose hockey game.”

But Shane was wise to his ways, by then, and ignored it. “I did some research. Marriage records are public information in Canada, but you don’t have to file a marriage license where you live. You can file it where you get married. And Ilya,” Shane said, and shook him a little. “Who the fuck is going to be looking for a certificate of marriage between Ilya fucking Rozanov and Shane fucking Hollander in some random town in fucking Nunavut?”

Ilya blinked. “Where the fuck is Nunavut?”

“Exactly!” Shane crowed. “It’s up north. Like, way up north. And if we find a small enough town, the only people who will know are you, me, the justice of the peace, and the clerk filing the paperwork. And we can bring an NDA for them to sign, or something,” Shane tacked on. “I haven’t exactly figured that part out yet.”

“My god,” Ilya said, awed. “You really were serious.”

“Yep.”

“You want to marry me.”

Shane pressed a kiss to the side of Ilya’s nose. “Yeah, I really fucking do.”

“You mean it?” Ilya said, and there was the soft, vulnerable thing that lay beneath the surface from the moment the conversation had started. The part of Ilya that was still twelve, and so sad, and scared that nobody in the entire world would ever really love him.

“I do,” Shane said. “I want to, fuck. I want you to leave your dirty socks all over my house. I want your stupid sports cars in my fucking garage. I want to clean your fucking puke off the floor when you have the flu. I want you to teach me how to make your mom’s borscht, and I want to learn Russian, and in sixty years I want to be sitting next to you in a nursing home arguing about hockey. I,” Shane declared. “Want to marry the fuck out of you.”

“Okay,” Ilya whispered. “I will marry you.” And he’d kissed Shane, then, off-center and sloppy and desperate. That kiss had rolled into another, and another, until Ilya pulled away with a smug look on his face, and he snuck his hand between Shane’s legs to cup his half-hard cock, and he said “You are so fucking insistent, how could I refuse?”

Shane laughed into his mouth. “Fuck you.”

“A very tempting offer, Mister Hollander. Or would you be Mister Rozanov?” Ilya got his hand down Shane’s boxers, then, and started stroking him the way he knew Shane liked best.

“We’re both keeping our own last names,” Shane groaned, and rolled his hips into it. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Ilya echoed. “And I assume you have idea for when we get married? Since you have so many of them?”

“Well,” Shane said, inexplicably shy, and hid his face in the crook of Ilya’s neck. “Winter break is in three weeks.”

Ilya’s hand froze, and Shane whined, desperate. “I take back every joke I ever made about you being slow,” Ilya mumbled, so obviously fond that Shane could hardly bear it. “You move so fucking fast, Hollander. You are like lesbian with a new girlfriend.”

“I’ll show you lesbian,” Shane had replied, nonsensically, and then he’d flipped Ilya over, onto his belly, and ate his ass until he cried into the pillows and begged Shane to put a finger in me, please, my beautiful husband, before I die of old age, and Shane wasn’t his husband yet, not really, but the words went straight to his head. He came with his dick between Ilya’s thighs and his mouth pressed to the hard line of Ilya’s shoulderblade and the words my husband echoing, over and over, like gospel, like the endless chant of Holl-and-er, Holl-and-er, Holl-and-er that washed over him before a game, while he was waiting in the tunnel.

May 22, 2021

Shane spends the next twenty minutes wandering around the outskirts of the wedding, desperately avoiding getting dragged into an awkward conversation with MLH officials or players whose names he probably should know but long since forgot. He’s standing next to a tree with curving, droopy branches, wondering how much money Scott spent on the flower-covered archway above the little outdoor altar, when someone comes to stand next to him and carefully clears their throat.

“Boring party,” Ilya says, and hands him a glass of water. Their fingers brush during the handoff. There’s a strange look in his eye Shane can’t quite place. Something in Shane’s chest pings, like he tweaked a rib.

“I dunno, it seems pretty nice to me.” Shane replies. “The venue is great.”

Ilya scoffs. “If you are old and boring, maybe.”

Shane glances over at Ilya, then. He’s wearing the same black pants as Shane, but his are cut tighter and cling to his thighs. His shirt and tie are black to match, and his jacket is some ridiculous thing—crushed red velvet with a black floral pattern and black lapels. His shoes have golden caps on the toes, like he’s a fucking gangster or something. He’s wearing his championship ring on his ring finger, and a little golden hoop in his right ear. He looks ridiculous. Shane wants to peel everything off of him with his teeth.

“Well,” Shane says, and scans over the ever-growing crowd. The cameramen have left the carpet, now, and occasionally the usual murmur of conversation is interrupted by a loud snick and a bright flash. “Scott is old and boring.”

Ilya laughs, bold and bright. A camera flashes in their direction, and catches Ilya with his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth wide open. Ilya makes a frustrated sound, and chugs his champagne like a rusher at a frat party. “Shame he invited press. I have to go, what is word. Schmise?”

“Schmooze,” Shane says, distracted. He’s watching Ilya lick the last traces of champagne off his lips.

“Yes, that. I have to go schmooze. But I will see you later, yes?”

“Yeah.” Shane rasps. Someone breaks off from the crowd and walks towards the two of them. Somebody on the league’s board of directors, Shane thinks. He vaguely remembers talking to the guy twelve years ago, right after he was drafted. He’d talked about how great it was that Shane was Asian, how good it would be for optics.

“We’ve gotta talk about charity stuff.” Shane says to Ilya, instead of did you wear that because it makes you look like Hugh Hefner or what room are you in or please don’t go.

Ilya rakes his eyes over Shane, head to toe, and raises a brow, like he knows what Shane was going to say and is a little sad he hadn’t. He raises his empty glass and saunters off, flags down the nearest waiter and gets another full one, then walks up behind somebody familiar—Bennet, maybe—and slings a careless arm over his shoulder. He says something, but he’s too far away for Shane to catch it. Bennet hits him, light, because whatever Ilya said was annoying and assholish and obnoxious.

“Beautiful venue,” the MLH higher-up says to Shane.

“Yeah,” he says, and sips his water. In front of him, Ilya drinks his champagne, and says something else that makes everyone laugh. And god, he misses Ilya so fucking much. It’s a familiar feeling—these days, he misses Ilya all the goddamn time. He misses him when they’re talking on the phone, when they’re together in Shane’s house, when they’re in the middle of having sex. And he knows what he has to do to fix it. He’s just—he’s scared shitless.

_____

December 25, 2017

As it turned out, getting to Nunavut was really fucking complicated. Shane spent hours—between practice, on flights, stashed away in hotel rooms—looking for a way to get them there. He wanted to drive, because driving meant he didn’t have to worry about being recognized by a fellow passenger or the pilot, but it was impossible to drive to Nunavut. There were no roads.

So, Shane spent even more hours looking into chartering flights. He and Ilya had a series of phone conversations where Shane talked in circles; wondering whether they should fly together or separate, whether they should fly commercial or private, which town to fly into, where to fly out, how long to stay, where to go. Eventually, Ilya got tired of listening to Shane panic and said enough talking, moya lyubov, you are giving me a headache. I will charter plane. You will charter plane. We meet wherever it is you want us to meet. We get married. I charter plane back. You charter plane back. Is very simple. And, well. How could Shane argue with that?

So Shane filled out their forms—his name, Ilya’s name, whether they wanted their copies of the marriage license to be full-sized or fit in their wallets. He mailed it with copies of their birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and a check for ten Canadian dollars made out to the Government of Nunavut. He hyperventilated in a hotel bathroom. He called around. He booked himself a late-night flight from Ottawa to Iqaluit. He told his parents he’d have to duck out of Christmas early for a PT thing. He spent a long time debating whether they should fly out from Iqaluit to somewhere less populated, more remote, but after the fourth hour of crippling indecision, Ilya texted him and told him to hurry up and decide, is not that complicated. So Shane decided Iqaluit was good enough and booked a return flight that departed the day after he landed, and Ilya did the same, and two weeks later Shane was standing on an airfield in Ottawa, watching the ground crew fuel up the tiniest plane he’d ever seen.

The flight was awful. The pilot’s name was Joe, and he smelled like onions and jet fuel. Joe wore aviators and a baseball cap from Bass Pro Shops and a bomber jacket that looked like it was from world war two. Joe kept a shotgun in the plane’s cargo area and a twelve-pack of diet coke within easy reach of the pilot’s seat. Joe had learned to fly on his family’s farm in Nebraska—they’d had so much land that they used planes to take care of it all. Joe was a big hunter, a big outdoorsman; he spent a significant chunk of the flight explaining, in detail, the annual pilgrimage he made to the Yukon to photograph grizzly bears up close during the salmon run, which had been a tradition of his ever since he was a nineteen-year-old dodging the draft by hiding out in Saskatchewan. All of this was shouted at the top of his lungs.

And the plane was so fucking small. It shook for every little thing—by the end, Shane felt like he’d been rattled to pieces, and twice, he’d been convinced he was about to die.

But he didn’t, of course. Joe was a pretty good pilot. And then Shane picked up the rental car, and he was late picking up Ilya from the arrivals part of the airport because the first car’s battery had died overnight, and finding him a second car took forever.

“Fuck, why is it so cold,” Ilya had complained, instead of saying hello, and shoved his bag down into the footwell. He looked cold—Shane could see his nipples through his sweatshirt. 

“It’s winter,” Shane replied, deadpan, and subtly cranked the heat to max. “And you’re the idiot that isn’t wearing a coat.”

Ilya sniffed. “I was told my beautiful husband would pick me up when I landed.”

“Well,” Shane drawled, and flinched when Ilya’s cold, cold hand landed on his thigh and crept up, under the hem of his winter coat. “Your beautiful husband just spent forty minutes arguing with the gate attendant at Budget to get you the car you’re riding in. Be grateful.”

“My hero,” Ilya crooned. “My shining knight, riding to my rescue in a fucking Toyota Highlander.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Shane said. He pulled out of the pickup lane, then, and turned right on Federal Road. He yawned, wide, and rolled his shoulders. Beside him, Ilya kept drifting off and jerking awake, over and over. It was pitch-dark outside, and the sky was so clear Shane could see the long arm of the Milky Way stretching out in front of him. The dashboard clock ticked over to 3:47 a.m.

It was a short drive to the Nunavut Justice Centre. Shane drove slow. The Highlander wasn’t as good in the snow as his Land Rover. By the time he pulled into the parking lot, Ilya was fast asleep. And, so, Shane put the car in park, and stared at the dark, indiscriminate shape of the building in front of them, and he yawned, again and again, but he couldn’t sleep. He was too jittery. He kept wiggling his toes, stuffed inside his winter boots, and clenching his thighs, right then left, right then left.

So, Shane left the car running, and he stepped out, to stretch his legs and look at the stars. He remembered his dad teaching him the constellations when he was a kid, the feel of his stubble on Shane’s soft cheek. He remembered the same feeling, when he’d spent a late night at the cottage teaching the same constellations to Ilya. Shane traced the familiar shapes again—there was the big dipper, and the line from the lip to Polaris, the arc of Polaris to the rest of the little dipper. There were the three stars that made Orion’s belt, and the lopsided W that Casseopeia made, and the long, slender snake that curled around and between it all.

Shane stayed out until his nose went numb, and his toes started to ache. He stayed out until the northern lights started playing up across the whole fucking sky, green and shimmering and ethereal. He all but ran back to the car then, and shook Ilya awake. Ilya had bitched and moaned—fucking what, Hollander, what do you want—and Shane had wordlessly pointed to the sky, and Ilya gasped in a beautiful mix of awe and delight. And they sat there in silence for the next four hours, just watching. Ilya held his hand, and they split a bag of peanuts Ilya had saved from the plane, and Shane loved it, because for a while, he could pretend that the world outside didn’t fucking exist.

_____

May 22, 2021

At 6:45, people in immaculate suits gently usher everyone into the delicate silver seats. Shane ends up next to the aisle, about a dozen rows back. He hates his chair already. The seat is hard, and the white cushion doesn’t really provide much padding. Shane thinks it’s just there to look pretty.

He’s looking for Ilya. Sometimes, it feels like Shane’s spent his entire life looking for Ilya and never quite managed to find him. They probably shouldn’t sit next to each other, he knows, but they’ve spent years rehabilitating their public image. They’re friends. Good friends. And, most important of all, Shane doesn’t know if he can get through whatever sappy shit Scott has planned without him.

But, of course, someone else takes the seat next to Shane. A younger couple, he notes absently. They talk nonstop about the beautiful flowers, the beautiful chairs, the beautiful altar and beautiful glass building behind them; the gorgeous pond with all its gorgeous water lilies and its gorgeous fountain that’s giving old money realness, whatever that means.

Shane stares mournfully down at his glass of champagne—he ran out of water—and wishes he actually liked getting drunk. He pulls out his phone and texts Ilya you were right. this party sucks.

A wadded-up piece of paper hits him in the cheek. It sticks. It’s wet. Shane whips his head around to look, and there Ilya is, sitting right across the aisle, one row down, tucking a straw into his breast pocket. He’s got his phone in his other hand; Shane feels his own phone vibrate—I did not think it was possible, but I have finally found person more boring than you. Ilya scratches the back of his neck and tilts his head towards the person sitting next to him—some higher-up MLH official. Shane had met him once. He thinks his name was Crowell. And then Ilya winks, sly and sure, but his smile wobbles a little, and it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

And all at once, Shane hates everything about this stupid fucking wedding with a viciousness that surprises him. He hates the stupid uncomfortable chairs, and his stupid uncomfortable suit, and the fucking picturesque golden hour-before-sunset-light, and the fucking flowers that smell so strong they’re starting to give him a headache. He hates the stupid glass photo wall, and the stupid guest book, and the delicate white fabric laid down on the center aisle. He hates the fucking champagne. He hates the people sitting next to him. He hates that this whole thing is just Scott Hunter’s fucking victory lap. And, most of all, he hates that he hates any of it.

And then the music starts up with no warning at all; the couple next to him whisper it’s time! to each other and start tapping their feet relentlessly, but Shane doesn’t care. He’s locked eyes with Ilya, and Ilya has locked eyes with him, and they’re both already on the verge of crying, a little bit. Shane’s eyes feel wetter than usual, and Ilya’s mouth has gone tight, the way it always does when he feels something too big to carry inside.

And, so. Shane sits there, listening to the opening notes of some soft, floral number played live by a quartet of violinists. He finally, finally manages to tear his eyes away from Ilya, and bites furiously at his lip. He pinches his empty ring finger until the skin goes white and bloodless, and for a brief moment, he hates Scott Hunter with everything he has.

_____

December 26, 2017

The Nunavut Justice Centre opened at eight-thirty. It was still dark when Shane and Ilya walked into the building, with no sign of the sun on the horizon. The air had a strange, early-morning haze, like nobody was supposed to be there, the same way Shane felt when he lingered in Bell Centre several hours after a game was over. It felt like he was hopelessly lost; like he’d wandered somewhere he didn’t belong. He was wearing sweatpants and a scuffed old pair of winter boots and, beneath his winter coat, a t-shirt he’d stolen from Ilya years ago. Ilya was in sneakers and joggers, and his sweatshirt had a hole in the armpit. They didn’t look like people who were about to get married. They looked like they’d been in the drunk tank all night, and were about to pay their bail.

The Justice of the Peace was a woman with a full head of gray hair. She wore her glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. Her office was small and drab. Her desk was full of clutter—scattered pens, various papers; a half-full coffee mug with a black handle that, inexplicably, said UNT in huge, bold black letters. A brass name plate perched on her desk read JP Gina Keenainak

When they walked in, she somehow managed to look down her nose at them both, from her comfortable spot in her desk chair, and squinted. Shane braced himself for the particular look people got in their eye when they recognized him, but it never came.

“Can I help you with something?”

“We would like to get married,” Ilya said, and sat in one of the two chairs crammed into the space in front of Gina’s desk. Shane squeezed into the other, and nearly knocked Gina’s nameplate to the floor.

Gina raised an eyebrow, and perched her glasses on the tip of her nose. “You have all your paperwork?”

“Yes ma’am,” Shane replied, and held out a plastic folder full of documents—birth certificates, driver’s licenses, Shane’s social insurance number, his grandparents and great-grandparents death certificates, the marriage license he’d gotten in the mail last week. Gina pulled each paper out, one by one, held them at arm’s length, and peered through her glasses.

“You didn’t need to bring all this,” Gina muttered, and started typing on her computer with two fingers.

Ilya had shrugged, then. “He likes to be thorough.”

“I can’t place your accent, love,” Gina said, absently, and double-clicked something. “Are you French?”

Ilya opened his mouth, but Shane beat him to it. “Yes,” Shane said, a little too loud. “Yes, he is.”

“Oui,” Ilya replied, with the worst accent Shane had ever heard, and shot him a withering glare. “Ou est la bibliothèque.”

“That’s nice,” Gina muttered. “Do you have a witness?”

“No.”

“That’s fine.” Gina picked up her phone—a sleek landline with a lot of buttons—and dialed a number by memory. “Avery, can you come down to my office for a few minutes? I need a witness. Yes, now. Thank you.” Gina clicked her mouse again, and a printer Shane hadn’t even seen whirred to life with a loud grinding noise and started spitting out sheets of paper.

A knock sounded at the door, and a younger woman wearing a cardigan poked her head through. “You needed a witness?” she said, and looked towards Ilya and Shane. And Shane braced himself again, for the moment of recognition, but she just looked bored and sleepy and a little annoyed, like she’d been pulled away from her morning coffee.

“I did,” Gina said. “Thank you, Avery.” She turned her gaze back to Ilya and Shane, then, and pushed her glasses up her nose with her middle finger. “Do you have rings?”

“Oh, shit—”

Ilya started laughing. “Of all things to forget, of course you forget fucking ring. Oh, this is the best day of my life. I will chirp you about this until I am dead.”

“Well, it’s not like we can wear them,” Shane had snapped, and the energy between them went cold and still and sad. He pressed their ankles together, a wordless apology, and Ilya shot him a tight, barely-there smile. The new girl—Avery—gave them both a look Shane couldn’t decipher.

Gina gave them a weird look, too, and said “well, you don’t need rings. You don’t even need a ceremony, if you’d rather skip it.”

“No,” Ilya blurted. “I want it.”

“And you, young man?” Gina said, peering down her nose at Shane.

Shane reached for Ilya’s hand. He laced their fingers together and squeezed, tight, for a moment. He thought about everything the two of them were missing; the gorgeous tux and the beautiful venue and the chance to show off for all of their friends, Shane’s chance to get walked down the aisle by both of his parents—hell, even Ilya’s chance to prop a photo of his mother on a chair in the front row, so he could look over at her before he said I do. And there would be no happily ever after, once they went home. It would just be more of the same—catching snatches of each other in their spare time, spending most of the season pretending to hate each other, waiting impatiently for the two decadent weeks in the summer when they had no other responsibilities and could just fall into each other. They wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about this—their marriage—for years. And if they couldn’t say it in front of the people they loved, Shane had thought they deserved to say it to each other here.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “Let’s do it.”

“Right, right,” Gina said. “Turn your chairs so they face each other, and hold hands.”

She waited for a minute, while Ilya and Shane struggled to navigate the tiny, cramped space in front of her desk. Shane almost knocked her name plate to the floor again. Ilya dropped his chair on top of his toe and quietly swore in Russian. But they got situated, eventually; their knees bumping together, Ilya’s clammy, sweaty hands in his. He looked into Ilya’s eyes, and they both smiled, and Shane inexplicably felt like he was about to cry.

“I’ll skip to the good part,” Gina said, and looked at her computer, and cleared her throat. “Do you, Ilya Rozanov, take Shane Hollander to be your lawfully wedded partner from this day forward—to have and to hold, in good times and bad, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health; will you love, honor, and cherish him for as long as you both shall live?”

“I do,” Ilya said. His voice broke on the second syllable, so he whispered most of it.

Gina adjusted her glasses, and scrolled on her computer. “And do you, Shane Hollander, take Ilya Rozanov to be your lawfully wedded partner from this day forward—to have and to hold, in good times and bad, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health; will you love, honor, and cherish him for as long as you both shall live?”

And it was like time froze. In that brief second, Shane saw the rest of his life spread out before him, the way he sometimes saw a play on the ice unfolding before anything had happened. He saw a house, somewhere private, with enough room for a couple of dogs and a couple of kids. He saw a room, there, with Ilya’s trophies on one side and his on the other. He saw them hoisting the Stanley cup together. He saw Ilya’s car in his garage, Ilya’s clothes in his closet, Ilya’s toothbrush left next to his sink. He saw, briefly, a version of Ilya that was old and gray, and still looked at him the same way Ilya was looking at him now—like Shane was breaking his heart, and he was happy to let Shane do it.

He'd lied when he put that list together. Divorce was never in the cards for either of them.

And, so. The wet in Shane’s eyes spilled over, and he briefly let go of Ilya’s hand to swipe at his nose, and he said, “I do.”

“Then repeat after me,” Gina said. And they did. He and Ilya cried and cried, and they promised to love, to honor, to cherish, in good times and bad, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. They promised to keep doing it until they both died. And this, Shane thought, was a promise they would keep.

“Then, with the power vested in me by the government of Nunavut, I pronounce you married.” Gina said. “You can kiss, if you like.”

And they did. It was a great fucking kiss. It felt like Ilya wanted to eat him, or swallow him whole, or something. They were both still crying. Shane missed his parents. He loved Ilya so much it hurt.

Gina cleared her throat. Shane pulled himself away from Ilya with a soft sigh and a wet click. “And now, paperwork,” she said, and walked them through the forms. Sign here, sign there, initial on page three. And then she passed the paperwork to Avery, who signed their marriage certificate up against the door because there was no more room in the office. Gina stuck it in the top of the printer, clicked a few things, and handed them two credit-card-sized copies of their marriage certificate.

“Congratulations,” she said, and pushed her glasses back up her nose. And that was it. They were married now; they’d been dismissed. It popped the warm little bubble he and Ilya had created when they were promising the world to one another. They stuck the cards in their wallets, and they walked out of the building with their heads down and their hands shoved in their pockets.

They fucked in the car, after. Shane drove them back to the airport and parked at the back of the lot at the Budget, and Ilya didn’t even wait for Shane to take his seatbelt off—he shoved Shane’s sweatpants and boxers down his hips, and leaned over the center console, and sucked Shane’s dick with a desperation that scared him, just a little. He swallowed, because Shane had whimpered something about having to pay a cleaning fee, and then kissed Shane with come still on his tongue, and Shane just had to lean over and stick his hand down Ilya’s pants after a kiss like that.

“Where would you go,” he whispered against Ilya’s mouth, “for a honeymoon?”

“Your cottage,” Ilya moaned, and seized Shane’s head between his hands, so he could fuck his tongue into Shane’s mouth. Shane tightened his fist, and Ilya pulled away with a gasp. “And you?” he said, breathy. “Where would you go?”

“Moscow,” Shane said. “I want to see where you grew up.” And then he put his hand in Ilya’s hair and pulled, and that was all it took. Ilya came with a desperate groan, and caught the mess on the inside of his shirt. And Ilya had bitched and moaned, but he wasn’t mad, not really. He was still sporting the same goofy grin he’d had plastered across his face since Gina had pronounced them married. Right before they left the car, Ilya pulled him close and kissed him, one last time, and whispered in his ear: ya tebya lyublyu.

It was still dark when they split up. Shane went into the Budget, and Ilya walked to the airport. Shane talked to Joe, after he thoroughly inspected the car for any mess they’d missed, and he flew out early. He was back at his apartment in Montreal before his parents had finished their supper. He ate alone, at a table meant for two, and the sheer fucking emptiness of his apartment hit harder than it ever had before. And that was how his life went; empty days he did his best to fill with hockey and yoga and family dinners. And he didn’t see Ilya again until they had another Boston v. Montreal game, almost a month later.

_____

May 22, 2021

People start walking down the aisle in pairs; men in tasteful navy suits escorting other men in tasteful navy suits; men in tasteful navy suits escorting women in sleek, sage green dresses. They all walk down the aisle to a song Shane doesn’t know, but thinks he might’ve heard before. He recognizes a few of the groomsmen—Carter Vaughan, some other hockey player—and thinks one of the bridesmaids might be related to Kip. Shane is a little dumbfounded by the sheer number of them. Sixteen in total; four bridesmaids and twelve groomsmen. Shane didn’t know it was even possible to have that many friends.

And then, there’s Scott, headed down the aisle in a suit much nicer than the one Shane is wearing. It’s white, with a blue shirt beneath, and a hint of sage green fabric peeks out of his breast pocket. He looks good, Shane admits. The stylist he’d hired had worked a minor miracle.

The music changes to something slower and sweet, and there’s Kip, in a black suit, flanked by his parents. All three of them are already crying. Kip’s parents hand him off at the altar, and he and Scott stand, facing each other, holding hands, and the golden glow of the setting sun shines through the flower-covered arch behind them, like the heavens themselves have decided to bless their union.

The officiant steps up, then, and says the usual spiel. He welcomes everyone to the wedding, and goes on a long tangent about what marriage is and why it’s important. He talks about love, and commitment, and dedication. And, when he’s done, he invites Scott and Kip to say a few words before the real vows begin.

Someone hands Kip a microphone. Kip taps it. The sound makes Shane flinch. “When I met you,” Kip says, to Scott, “I was this aimless, directionless college grad that had given up on dreaming. I was scared to reach for what I wanted, because I thought it was better to never try than to try for something and fail. You taught me how to reach for things, Scott,” Kip says, tearfully, “you taught me how to dream again. And I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you, dreaming up a future together.”

Scott cries, then, and swipes at his cheek. “I spent most of my life scared,” Scott says, once he has the mic. “And you made me brave, Kip. You make me want to keep being brave every day, for the rest of my life.”

And Shane can’t fucking be here anymore. He can’t stop thinking about standing up there, at that picturesque fucking altar, with the golden light shining through the flowers, and telling Ilya that he made Shane brave like that. Ilya, who deserves to hear it. Ilya, who is so much braver than Shane, and always had been, and who probably would’ve planned their wedding to be just like this one, if he’d been the one to plan it. So, since Shane can’t get up and leave in the middle of the ceremony—because it’s too rude, because of the fucking optics—he slips sideways, instead. He goes to a place where the rest of the words Scott and Kip and the officiant speak are nothing, and mean nothing, and he can’t understand them anymore. He closes his eyes and floats for a long time, until he hears cheering, and opens his eyes just in time to see Scott dip Kip into a dramatic, over-the-top kiss.

The kiss lingers. People on either side of the altar throw a handful of rice in the air. The cheers rise in fever and pitch. The setting sun dips just far enough to be perfectly framed between Scott and Kip’s faces. A photographer creeps up the center aisle to capture it. Everyone holds, for a minute, and then swarms, and soon enough, Scott and Kip are surrounded by people they love; hugging, high-fiving, slapping backs. A shiver creeps down Shane’s spine. He feels cold, even though he’s been sweating into his suit all night. Shane looks at Ilya, but Ilya isn’t looking at him. He’s looking at Scott and Kip, and he’s got tear streaks on his face, and he looks fucking devastated. And Shane whips his head away, like if he moves fast enough, he’ll forget he ever saw it.

_____

January, 2018

The post-wedding bliss wore off after three days. Shane was sitting, alone, in his empty apartment, after practice, when the scope of what he and Ilya had done crashed over him. There were so many ways things could go wrong. What if the Justice of the Peace recognized them? Or the witness? What if someone had seen them in the car together in Iqaluit? What if some dumb twitter account that tracked famous people’s travel plans posted that he and Ilya both went to fucking Nunavut at the same time, and then looked up marriage licenses in Nunavut, and saw that piece of paper with both their names on it? And then there was the rest of it. What would happen if Ilya moved to Ottawa, and hated it, and hated Shane for it, and decided to divorce him? Or the opposite—what if they got caught, years down the line, because they got too used to holding hands or smiling at each other or, fuck, just looking at each other a certain way?

There were too many possibilities, and each one was worse than the last. And the consequences! Oh god, the consequences. Banned from the MLH for life, or slowly iced out, or suspended for an entire season, or sent for some vague, disciplinary action Shane couldn’t quite predict; targeted by half the players in the league, getting checked so much that neither of them ever made it through another season without a major injury again; the names they’d be called behind their backs—fag, cocksucker, Hollander’s slut, Rozanov’s bitch.

The tension ratcheted higher and higher. Shane didn’t know what to do with it. He was fucking up drills he’d perfected when he was fourteen. He couldn’t sleep. He kept forgetting to eat.

And, so. Shane made a spreadsheet. It had two big columns labeled What To Do If We Get Outed and What To Do If We Divorce. It had lists of people to call and steps to take. And it made him feel better, so he kept adding to it; updating contacts for highly recommended marriage counselors and top-notch divorce lawyers, adding a note to call mom before step one: contact a PR firm.

Ilya caught him at it, once, and Shane had worried he would be mad, because here Shane was, with a spreadsheet full of fucking divorce lawyers, but Ilya had just laughed, and kissed his cheek, and said something about being glad he married a planner, because Ilya was terrible at planning things. Our anniversary, you will see, Ilya had said, still laughing, I will forget, just like you forgot rings. And then, he’d asked Shane to send him a copy, and god, Shane loved him. He loved him so much he hadn’t known what to do with it, so he’d kissed him, and got on his knees, and sucked Ilya’s dick. I’ll remember for the both of us, Shane had promised, even though the movies said Shane was supposed to hold it against Ilya instead. And Ilya had looked down at him like he understood; like he felt the exact same way Shane did, and, just like Shane, didn’t quite know how to express it.

_____

May 22, 2021

The reception was held in the big glass building behind the pool full of water lilies. Shane ate cocktail shrimp, and salad with pickled watermelon and radish, and pan-seared halibut with broccolini and parsnip purée, and, inexplicably, a blueberry-banana smoothie that had way too much sugar and not enough leafy greens. He had three different glasses at his seat—a glass for red wine, a glass for white, and a water glass he immediately drained. Everything was arranged beautifully. It would’ve made for a great Instagram post. And the food was probably delicious, but he barely tasted any of it. Dinner was constantly interrupted by silverware beat against wine glasses, which got faster and faster and louder and louder until Scott and Kip, holding court at the head table, leaned in and kissed. At some point, Kip’s best friend stood up and made a bunch of jokes about him marrying his sugar daddy. Kip’s dad talked a lot about welcoming a new son into their family unit. Carter Vaughan delivered a speech that sounded like something from Love, Simon—you get to exhale now, Scott.

After the dinner, everyone got kicked out of the big glass building for half an hour while the sun set, and employees frantically disassembled all the tables and chairs so they could turn the place into one massive dance floor, complete with a DJ blasting music in the corner and strobing lights that made Shane’s head hurt. And he knows that’s where Ilya will be—dancing until dawn, his stupid jacket abandoned and his sleeves rolled up and his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, dripping with spilled-over booze and sweat. It would be a beautiful sight, Shane knows, but right now, Ilya hurts to look at. So, Shane doesn’t even try. He slips outside, empty-handed, and finds an out-of-the-way bench to sit on. He tries to look at the stars, but the bench is under a tree, and the light from the city washes them out. The sky just looks vaguely orange and sickly. Shane tilts his head back, and lets a couple tears drip down his cheeks.

Of course, Ilya finds him eventually. He approaches slow and careful, like he’s trying to coax a stray cat out of a dumpster. Shane can feel Ilya looking at him, but he doesn’t return his gaze. He stays right where he is, and bites at his lip, and closes his eyes.

“Hey.” Ilya says, soft, and sits next to Shane, oh so careful. “You okay?” Shane shakes his head and looks away, but Ilya turns him back with a careful, brief hand on his jaw. He looks worried. His eyes dart over Shane’s face like he’s looking for bruises. “Someone say something to you? I will gladly punch old man Scott on his wedding day, I am serious.”

“No,” Shane replies, numb. “Nobody said anything.”

“Then why are you crying?” Ilya whispers, and rubs at the tear tracks on Shane’s face with his knuckles.

“Because of all this,” Shane gestures around them, at the scattered chairs and leftover wedding decorations. “We never got something like this. And, I don’t know. You deserved to have a big white wedding instead of—” Shane shrugs, and looks down at his shoes. “You know. What we had instead.”

“Funny. I was thinking the same about you.”

Shane nods. He bites at his lip again. He scuffs his shoe against the pavement. “Do you have any regrets?”  

“Oh, yes,” Ilya sighs, and Shane’s stomach drops, so sudden he thinks he might be sick. “I regret letting you score winning goal that knocked us out of playoffs. I regret the socks I wore today. I think I have blister the size of, fucking, what is big fucking coin you Canadians use?”

“A toonie?”

“Yes, that. I regret that I have blister the size of fucking toonie.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I.” Ilya looks up for a moment, then sighs. “I wish your parents were there. Just like I wish my mama was there. Is not something I regret, because you cannot regret something that was impossible to have. Is a,” Ilya pauses. “A sadness, that I carry. And that is okay. Sometimes, life is just sad.”

“I wish it wasn’t,” Shane says, nonsensically.

Ilya knocks their shoulders together. “I know, moya lyubov. Is why I married you.”

And Shane turns to look at him, then; at his sad, sad eyes, and his sad, sad smile, and the tired slump of his broad shoulders. Shane was right—he’d ditched his jacket and unbuttoned the top six buttons on his shirt, and now he’s shivering, a little, in the cold the sun left behind. He looks smaller than he should, slumped like Shane, curled inward like Shane, sad like Shane is sad. And, so. Shane glances around, then turns Ilya towards him with a careful hand on his chin, and presses a chaste, lingering kiss to his lips.

Ilya relaxes into it. He cups his hand around Shane’s elbow.

And then, a flash, so bright that the black behind Shane’s eyelids turns cherry-red. He and Ilya spring apart; Ilya stands, Shane presses a trembling hand to his lips.

“Holy shit,” a distant voice says. Shane blinks, blinks again. He squints at the blurry figure further down the path. The figure takes another picture. The flash is so bright it burns.

“Give me your fucking camera,” Ilya says, low, and stalks towards the figure.

“Fuck no,” they say, and take off running.

“Shit,” Ilya mutters, and sprints after them. And Shane doesn’t do anything. He just sits there, frozen, one hand gripping the bench seat so hard his knuckles turn white, the other still pressed to his bloodless, unfeeling lips.

extremely huge and massive thanks to my very good friend luulapants, who virtually held my hand for THREE HOURS while i spiraled down a research hole trying to figure out how the FUCK two people could get secret gay married in Nunavut in one day. other honorable mentions:

- thank you to the jerry cans, a beautiful band based in Iqaluit that my very extremely good friend luulapants introduced to me years ago. the wedding officiant and witness may or may not be named after a couple of members. sorry, jerry cans. everybody go listen to them right now.
- joe the pilot is not a real person, but i do have a friend that goes to alaska to photograph bears from 30 feet away every year. its tradition. ive seen the pictures. idk how hes still got all his fingers and toes.
- the food served at the reception is a half-remembered dish from hell's kitchen. i am not a gourmand.
- i took french for four years in middle and high school and where is the library is the ONLY thing i remember how to say. sorry madamoiselle. i was a bad student.

January 27, 2018

Shane had never taken Ilya to his apartment in Montreal. At first, he’d booked rooms in whatever hotel Ilya was staying at, and then he’d bought the building that he’d told himself was an investment property, but in hindsight, he’d been lying to himself. And so, a month after they got married, Shane took Ilya home for the first time, after they played Centre Bell.

“Nice place,” Ilya had said, once Shane had finally fumbled his keys into the lock and ushered them both inside. He pointed to the throw pillows on Shane’s couch. “You hired same designer, I see.”

“Fuck you,” Shane said, so soft and warm that it felt like an I love you instead. “She’s good at what she does, and I like pillows.” And then he’d shoved Ilya down onto the couch, which messed up the careful arrangement of all Shane’s throw pillows, and wrestled Ilya’s post-game sweats down his hips, and sucked Ilya’s cock until he forgot all about Shane’s interior designer.

They’d chased each other to the bed, eventually, half-dressed and clumsy, and Ilya pressed his nose to Shane’s sheets and breathed in deep, which made Shane swat his side and tell him he was fucking gross. Ilya had licked Shane’s armpit, then, and the skin below his bellybutton, and his dick, until Shane was throwing an arm over his eyes and crying out and coming into Ilya’s wonderful, terrible mouth.

After, they lay curled into each other; Shane’s leg slung over Ilya’s hip, Ilya’s hand spread, possessive, over the back of his thigh. Shane spent a long time just looking at him, at the fan of his lashes against his cheek, and the new bruise blooming on his shoulder, and the stray curl at his temple that stuck straight up in the air like a little spring.

“I told my agent about Ottawa,” Ilya said into the quiet space between them.

Shane rubbed his thumb over the side of Ilya’s neck. “Yeah?”

“Mm. He has started negotiations. I do not think I can say more, but—“

“But it’s in the works.” Shane pressed a careful kiss to Ilya’s eyebrow. “Thank you. I know you’re giving up a lot for this.”

“Is just hockey, Shane. Just games. Is not the most important thing to me.” Ilya ran the tip of his finger over Shane’s brow, his nose, his bottom lip. “After all, I have beautiful husband who will suck my dick after I lose.” And Shane laughed, because it was true. Ilya had lost their game naught two hours before—a respectable 3-4. “And who knows? I am best hockey player in the league. Maybe in a year or two, I will make Ottawa into winners, and you will be crying big fat tears watching me win the cup.”

“Sure,” Shane said, indulgently, and shifted closer, so their noses touched. “You’d kiss me on the ice after, right? Like Scott did?”

“Psh. I can do better,” Ilya declared. “When we come out, it will make Scott Hunter look like a little baby with no imagination. He will cry with envy.” He’d yawned so wide his jaw made a cracking sound, then, and so did Shane. He’d listened to the sound of Ilya breathing, and let it lull him into a dull, fearless place where he felt like he could say anything, anything at all.

“How would you want to come out?” Shane said, shy, and ducked down to hide his face against Ilya’s chest. “You know, like. In the future. Hypothetically.”

Ilya shrugged against him. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t care, I think.” Ilya’s breathing slowed even further—Shane listened to the sound, and felt his body slow down to match the tempo Ilya had set.

“Leaking sex tape could be hot,” Ilya murmured, into the quiet.

“Jesus fucking christ!” Shane cried, and slapped at Ilya’s sides, his chest, his stupid flexing bicep. “We are not coming out via sex tape, holy shit. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Many things,” Ilya said, laughing, and caught Shane’s wrists, and reeled him back in, so his head rested on Ilya’s chest, exactly where it had been before. “Many, many things. But, most of all, I am a terrible pervert. Is lucky you are even bigger pervert than me.”

“Whatever,” Shane mumbled, and yawned again, his breath hot and damp in the narrow space between them.

Ilya shifted even closer, and hiked Shane’s leg higher, so it draped over the dip in his waist. “Go the fuck to sleep, Shane,” he said, all grumbly and low, and Shane did, because Ilya asked him to. They fell asleep just like that; pressed so close together that Shane briefly woke, in the witching hour, dry-mouthed and covered in sweat. And instead of pulling away, he shoved the sheets down, to their knees, and fell right back into oblivion.

_____

May 22, 2021

Shane stares at nothing. He rocks himself back and forth, absently. His eyes won’t focus, and they just keep leaking a constant, steady stream of salt-water down his face. He leans over and vomits onto the pavement between his shoes. He waits for Ilya to come back in a distant sort of way—he feels like he’s a little balloon, floating away. And he can’t fucking breathe. It’s like his lungs are three sizes too small, and someone has stacked twenty-kilogram plates on his chest.

He vomits again. He stares down at the little pile of half-digested seafood on the ground. Some of it got on his shoes. It clings to the laces. And fuck, how is Shane supposed to take his shoes off now? They’re tied too tight to just slip off, and he can’t touch the laces, and he won’t make Ilya touch the laces either. Do they have latex gloves at the hotel? Probably, he thinks. Housekeepers always have those bright yellow gloves in the movies—Shane can picture them in his mind’s eye; beautiful, like canaries.

Shane stares at a half-chewed bit of cocktail shrimp next to the tip of his shoe. He needs to clean his mess. He needs to clean his mess. He can’t just leave it here, and he can’t walk into an Uber with puke on his shoes—think of the upcharge! Think of the smell! The staff here probably have a pair of those beautiful yellow gloves. They’re probably tucked into one of those charming janitorial carts; the big ones with a mop bucket and a tiered shelf mounted on wheels, with plenty of space to store toilet brushes and Windex and Drain-O. He can picture the gloves, so near he can practically taste them, tucked into the side of a gray plastic cart, draped next to a dingy off-white rag with a blue stripe at the hem. And he needs to go find these gloves, he knows. He needs it more than anything. But he can’t move, and he can’t breathe, and he can’t bring himself to track puke all over what’s left of Scott’s beautiful wedding.

There are footsteps, eventually. A pair of shoes enters Shane’s field of vision, at the edge of the puddle of puke. Black shoes, with golden caps at the toes.

“He got away,” Ilya says, miserably. “Security stopped me.”

“It’s okay.” Shane offers up a wobbly, barely-there smile. “At least we won’t have to worry about coming out anymore,” he says, between too-small breaths, and humiliatingly, begins to cry. And it’s not like before—these are great, heaving sobs, pulled out of him on cruel barbed hooks.

“Hey, hey,” Ilya says, and steps in closer. He just barely avoids stepping in Shane’s puke. Shane leans forward and buries his face in Ilya’s belly, just above his belt. Ilya puts a hand on the back of his neck. “Breathe for me, Hollander,” Ilya says, and Shane just shakes his head and wails, like a child. “Okay,” Ilya says firmly, and whips out his phone. He taps at it, furiously. “We are leaving.”

“I can’t,” Shane hiccups. “My shoes.”

Ilya looks down, then, and clocks the vomit. He gently pushes Shane away, then, and kneels. He plucks at Shane’s disgusting, puke-covered shoelaces with his bare hands. And Shane tries to pull away, but Ilya cups a hand around his ankle and says “stay,” and, so, Shane stays. His breathing evens out, a little, as he watches Ilya struggle with the double knots he’d tied earlier that day.

Ilya unties his shoes, and then he loosens the laces, heedless of the puke he’s getting all over his fingers. He wipes his hands off on the ground, and peels Shane’s shoes off his feet, then tosses them aside. He helps Shane scoot down the bench, away from the puke, and sits back to take his own shoes off. He puts them on Shane’s feet, and ties the laces just how Shane likes. They’re warm, inside, and sweaty.

Shane sniffs, and swipes the back of his hand across his nose. “What about you?”

Ilya shrugs, and stands. “I am Russian, I do not have soft Canadian feet. I will be okay.” He holds out his hand to Shane. “Come on, sweetheart. We have to go find Uber.”

And, so. Shane lets Ilya pull him to his feet, and guide him through the dark garden pathways until they emerge onto Flatbush Ave. Ilya checks his phone, and walks them over to a silver Prius. He opens the door for Shane, and helps him inside, and buckles Shane’s seatbelt.

Up front, the driver glances back at them through the rearview mirror. “Rough night?”

“I will tip double if you do not talk,” Ilya snaps. The driver raises their hands, like okay, okay, Jesus. They cranked the music louder—some thumping club beat Shane doesn’t recognize. Shane curls into Ilya; Ilya scratches his nails through Shane’s hair. And Shane closes his eyes and tries to sink into the moment; the feel of Ilya pressed against his side, Ilya’s nails on his scalp, the smell of the new-car-scent air freshener hanging from the rearview, the sound of the music, and the stop-and-start motion of the car weaving through traffic. It doesn’t really work. He spends the whole ride crying to varying degrees, and thinking I’m sorry, Mom, over and over and over.

_____

February 16, 2018

The first time Ilya met Shane’s mom, he was a nervous wreck. Shane had quickly realized that he didn’t have the time or skillset to just, like, make a charity from scratch, so he’d looped in his mother, and she’d insisted on meeting over coffee to discuss things. So, they’d looked at their schedules, and managed to find a day where Ilya was playing a game in Ottawa and Shane had a home game.

He called Shane the day before, and carried on about what if she hates me and what do I wear. Shane had reassured him as best he could—his mom was slow to change, but she wasn’t immune or anything. She’d like Ilya just fine, so long as he was himself, and cut back on the number of times he insulted Shane.

But Ilya had overcorrected in a way that Shane had never seen from him before—he showed up to a casual meetup over coffee wearing a pressed linen shirt and dress shoes. He was so polite it was unsettling. He walked into Shane’s parents’ house and offered an over-the-top compliment on the décor, he pulled out Mom’s chair for her, he deliberately, purposefully complimented her Metros t-shirt. He was deferential the whole meeting; that is a good idea Mrs. Hollander, you are very good at this Mrs. Hollander; I think you know more about hockey than your boring son. His mom had walked away with the impression that Ilya was mocking her, somehow, and spent half an hour afterwards ranting to Shane about how Rozanov was just the worst, just the absolute worst, why would you ever agree to found a charity with him, and Shane had said something like I don’t know, I think he was just nervous. He’s not, like, a supervillain.

So. The next time they met, Mom was a lot more overtly hostile, and Ilya overcompensated by becoming even more polite, and it was a fucking nightmare. It was a fucking nightmare every goddamn time.

She hates me, Ilya would say, on the phone, before every single planned meeting. She doesn’t, Shane would reply. She’s just. She’s not very good with change. I think you’re too polite. It’s throwing her off.

You want me to be rude to your mama? Ilya had asked, scandalized. I cannot do this. I would rather die. But he stopped showing up so overdressed, and he offered less compliments he didn’t really mean, and he started ribbing Shane again, which was such a relief that Shane couldn’t even bring himself to be mad about Ilya calling him the second-best player in the league. And eventually, over a handful of coffee meetings and a mountain of paperwork, Ilya and his mom found their way to an unsteady sort of tolerance.

Mom never really warmed up, though. She kept asking Shane, over and over, why, on god’s green earth, he’d started a charity with Rozanov of all people. Weren’t there rich philanthropists in Montreal? Why couldn’t he have started something up with one of them? That boy is trouble, she’d say. He’ll drag you down with him.

And Shane understood why she said it. They were the same, he and his mom, in so many ways it was easier to count the differences. And the heart of it lay in a conversation they’d had over a decade before, when Shane was coming up through juniors. She’d pulled him aside, the first time she spotted an MLH scout’s eye following Shane across the ice, and she told him that she had something hard she needed to say, and Shane wasn’t going to like it.

People are going to expect more from you than your teammates, she’d said, when they were both sitting in the stands after practice. It’s not enough for you to be good at hockey. This is a white man’s sport, and when people watch you play, they’ll expect a well-behaved blank slate that little Asian kids can project themselves onto. And if you don’t live up to that expectation, they’ll tear you apart. She’d pointed down at the ice, then, where the Zamboni had finished resetting and little peewee kids were lacing up their skates on the bench. It’s important work, she’d explained. I don’t think I need to tell you why. And she hadn’t. Shane already felt the weight of desperate, awestruck little eyes from the stands whenever he played. He knew how he would’ve felt, if he’d had a Shane Hollander to look up to when he was a peewee. But it’s a lot of responsibility. You need to be sure you can handle it.

And Shane had heard what she was really saying, even back then, when he was sixteen and stupid. Be uncontroversial. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t cause a scandal. And he hadn’t. Shane had been so, so careful. He turned a deaf ear on the ice, and in the locker room, and at MLH networking events. He kept his head down. He played clean. He’d never even gotten a speeding ticket.

And Ilya Rozanov, Rat King of Boston, didn’t fit with that careful public image. Ilya’s reputation was that of an out-of-control egomaniac, who partied hard and played better when the crowd wanted him dead. Ilya had, famously, worn a hot mic exactly once during a match, and chirped another player by yelling his girlfriend’s phone number across the ice in the first five minutes of the game, and then he’d laughed his way to the penalty box, where officials had confiscated his mic and never let him wear one again. He was violent and wild and crass. He was, everyone assumed, one scandal away from being mass-cancelled on the internet. He was the worst possible friend Shane could have if he wanted to maintain his image; perfect, and perfectly behaved, and easy for peewee kids to imagine themselves becoming one day.

Shane had always resented his picture-perfect image. It felt stifling, even though it kept him safe, and he didn’t actually want to go out clubbing until the wee hours of the morning, or crash a sports car into a tree, or spend his summer break on a week-long bender in Ibiza. It was the unfairness that chafed. That unfairness was why it had hurt more than it should’ve, years ago, the first time Ilya called him boring. And it was also part of why he’d liked Ilya so much, back when they’d first started fucking.

She hates me, Ilya would say, on the phone, and privately, Shane didn’t disagree. She already looked so disappointed whenever Shane brought up Ilya, or the charity. He couldn’t imagine how much worse it would be if he told her they were married.

_____

May 22, 2021

Shane floats along, as Ilya tips the Uber driver with cash and helps him out of the car and tugs him through the hotel with their hands clasped together. His palm sweats against Ilya’s. Part of him flinches as Ilya leads him into the lobby, a reflexive people will see, Ilya held inside his mouth, begging to be released.

He swallows it. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Ilya’s hotel room is sleek, and modern, and smells like lemon-scented Pledge and a certain staleness that sets in when Ilya keeps his dirty clothes trapped in his bag for too long. Ilya’s slides are lined up by the door, and his duffel is open and full of unfolded, wrinkly clothes. There’s a dirty pair of boxers on the bed, and the bed is unmade, and beneath the bed, Shane can see a balled-up dirty sock.

Ilya steers Shane towards the couch. Shane goes where Ilya puts him, and sits. Ilya sits across from him, on the unmade bed, and looks him over with a concerned eye.

“Shane,” he says, soft. “Shane,” he tries, again, and leans over to fish Shane’s phone out of his pocket and press it into his hands. “You need to call your mother.”

Shane blinks. “What?”

“Is first step on your spreadsheet, yes?” Shane blinks again. Right. His spreadsheet. He’d forgotten. “Shane, please.” Ilya stands, and grabs Shane’s face with both hands; palms pressed to Shane’s cheeks, fingers curled over the back of his head. “We only have tonight. Tomorrow, pictures will be online. People will see. You want her to find out you are kissing asshole Ilya Rozanov from fucking TMZ?”

“No.”

Ilya shakes him, just a little. “Okay, so, call your fucking mama.” And then, gentler, “You need to tell her. Before somebody tells her for you.”

And isn’t that a lovely fucking thought—Mom sitting at the dinner table in the morning, same as she always does, scrolling twitter to catch highlights from Shane’s last game and seeing some stupid gossip rag’s tweet with a headline like Kissing the Enemy and a photo of Shane crying into Ilya’s mouth blown up across her phone screen.

Shane nods—a little thing, barely there at all. Ilya’s hands soften, then, and stroke through his hair, so careful it makes Shane want to cry again. “I can go,” Ilya says, quiet. “There is a corner store not far from here. I will go get ginger ale and those crackers you like to put in soup. Medication, too, for your stomach.”

“Thank you,” Shane whispers.

Ilya leans down and kisses his forehead. “You are brave. Remember this.” He presses a kiss to Shane’s mouth, then, and his cheek, and the side of his neck. “I will be back in forty minutes. Maybe an hour.”

So Shane watches Ilya strip out of his shirt and slacks. He slips into a ratty sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants. He shoves his feet into his slides. He slips a bic lighter and a pack of cigarettes into his pocket, which Shane pretends he didn’t see. And just like that, he’s gone, and Shane is alone, staring at his phone and wondering what the hell he did to earn a love like that.

_____

July 10, 2018

In a way, Ilya got his honeymoon at Shane’s cottage, later that year. Shane lied, and told his parents he was going on a wellness retreat in Joshua Tree. And the weather outside was terrible—the sky was thick and hazy with smoke, and it was record-breaking hot, and the lake made everything sticky and wet—but that was okay, because it meant he and Ilya spent a lot of time inside. They curled up in bed and didn’t leave for an entire day and night. They stayed up for hours and hours, just talking. They spent a lot of time skinny-dipping in the lake. And Shane loved every second of it. He wished their honey-gold summer would never end.

“Have you ever thought about telling your parents?” Ilya asked, one day, completely out of nowhere. He was manning the grill and carefully arranging marinated chicken breasts to avoid the hot spots. The summer light had bleached his hair, a little, and the oppressive, humid heat had turned it damp at his temples. He was barefoot, and bare-chested, and sleep-eyed, and horrifically sunburnt.

Shane settled behind him, his hands on Ilya’s hips. “Yeah,” he said, and pressed a kiss to Ilya’s red, red shoulder, “of course I have.”

“Why haven’t you?” Ilya asked, and fucked up flipping a chicken breast. It flopped, limply, and almost fell on the ground. “You say they would not be assholes. If it is for me, I do not want this. If you want to tell them,” Ilya gave up with the chicken, and turned, so he was facing Shane, “is okay. Who knows?” he said, with a mischievous look on his face. “Maybe your mother will finally realize I am a better son, and she will be nicer to me.”

“You’re obsessed with her, it’s ridiculous,” Shane replied, and pinched Ilya’s hip. Ilya hissed and flinched away, so Shane kissed his cheek instead of saying sorry. “And, I don’t know. I want to tell them. I just…” Shane trailed off, and looked away, towards the lake. He thought about how that conversation would go—how, even if it went well, his mom would inevitably turn the conversation to how Shane’s sexuality would affect his image and his brand deals and his endorsements. He thought, too, about the simple, heartbreaking truth: that Ilya would never be able to come out to either of his parents.

“Just what?” Ilya turned Shane’s face back towards him with a hand on his chin, and looked Shane in the eye. There was something indecipherable in his gaze; something angry, maybe, or afraid. Like he was bracing for a hit before it ever came.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Shane said, slowly, “if I get to tell my people and you don’t.”

Ilya huffed; an approximation of a laugh. “Shane, my parents are dead.” And then, quieter, “is because of me, yes? Because I am not easy to like.”

“No!” Shane said, vehemently. He didn’t know whether he was lying, but he hoped he wasn’t. And then, softer, “It’s not that. I’m just—” Shane exhaled, loud, and rested his head on Ilya’s shoulder. “I’m not ready.”

“Okay.” Ilya turned back around, then, and there was something tense in the line of his shoulders, but Shane didn’t know how to fix it. “You want me to grill asparagus?”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “You want a beer?” Ilya didn’t reply, but Shane brought him a beer anyways—a dark lager he knew Ilya liked. And Ilya fucked Shane out in front of the fire pit, later that night, like nothing was wrong, because nothing was wrong, not yet. But it was the start of something, Shane thought. The first time that even the sweet, honey-gold days at the cottage couldn’t cover the fact that he and Ilya weren’t walking through life at the same pace anymore, and maybe, they never really had. It was like Shane had been racing and racing behind Ilya this whole time, and he’d finally caught up, but now they were off just a half-step, and the gap would just keep getting wider and wider, no matter how hard he tried.

you know. this fic was not supposed to be about the closet to this extent. originally. and yet here we are.

May 22, 2021

Shane gives himself ten minutes. He watches the time count down on his phone, and he stares at his background photo. It’s a picture of the sunrise, out on the dock at the cottage. The sky is blushing pink and blue. The sun is red, red. The reeds draw stark black lines. And Ilya isn’t in the picture, but Shane has seen him out there enough times to edit him in—feet over the edge of the dock, blanket around his shoulders, a cigarette Shane isn’t supposed to know about perched between his fingertips.

The last minute ticks over, and Shane starts crying before he even opens his phone. Just little tears, like he ate something spicy. His thumb hovers over his contact list—over the little box labeled mom <3. He thinks about what Ilya said, just before he left. Remember you are brave. And Shane doesn’t feel very brave, but he taps the little box, and puts his phone on speaker, and lets it ring and ring.

“Hello?” She says, eventually. She sounds groggy, like Shane woke her up. And that’s all it takes. Shane’s mouth opens, wide, and he cries like he’s two years old again, and just skinned his knee.

“Mom,” Shane sobs. “I fucked up.”

She breathes in, sharp, loud enough that Shane can hear through the phone. “Are you hurt? What happened?” Shane opens his mouth to reply, but the only thing that comes out is a strangled, deeply embarrassing sound that Shane hadn’t previously known he could make. “Shane, honey. You need to calm down. Can you take a deep breath for me?” Shane does. It’s shaky and awful. His yoga instructor would be disappointed. “Good, do that again,” and then, quieter, “David, wake up.” A rustle, on the other end of the line. A groan. A mumble Shane can’t quite hear. “Okay, Shane,” she says, gentle, “you’re doing great. Can you tell me what happened now?”

“I kissed him, Mom,” Shane says, all in a rush. It hurts, coming out. He’s still crying. It feels like he’s never going to stop. “It was dark outside, and it was just the once, but I didn’t see the fucking camera, and now—”

“Shane, please, slow down. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I kissed him,” Shane says. He enunciates it very clearly. “At Scott’s wedding. And someone saw us, and took a picture. And now it’s gonna be all over the internet. Oh my god, I need to call Scott. He’s gonna be so fucking mad—”

“Honey, you need to breathe.” She breathes, loud, into the phone, to show him how to do it.  “Kissed who?”

“Ilya.”

“Rozanov? Ilya Rozanov?” Shane nods, even though she can’t see, and bites at his lip. A fresh flood of wet runs down his cheeks. “Honey, why would you do that?”

“It was—” Shane hiccups, and then tries again. “We couldn’t sit next to each other, and the food was terrible, and Scott’s vows were fucking beautiful, just like, the most beautiful shit I’ve ever heard, and he looked so sad, Mom, and I was so fucking sad, because when we got married it wasn’t like that at all, and it should’ve been. So I kissed him, just for a second, and now I’ve fucking ruined it.”

For a long time, there is nothing. Just the sound of Shane’s hitching breaths, and the hum of the air conditioning. “Shane,” Mom says, slow. “What did you mean by ‘when we got married’?”

“We got married. I married him.”

“Rozanov?”

“Yeah,” Shane breathes, and squeezes his eyes shut, and curls his arms tight around his stomach. “In 2017. We never told anybody.”

“Oh,” she says it small, in a way he’s never heard. “Okay, wow.” Shane’s breathing picks up, wet and messy. He rocks himself, back and forth, back and forth. “Deep breaths, Shane, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m not mad.”

“You should be,” Shane whispers. “I should’ve told you about this a long time ago. Ilya kept trying to tell me I should, and I didn’t fucking listen, and now I fucked it up. I fucked it up, Mom.”

“Shane—”

“You should’ve been there. You and dad. I’m so sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she says, viciously. “I’m sorry. I should’ve done better. It was my job to make sure you knew,” her voice breaks, then, and she sniffs, like she’s crying too, “that you could tell me anything. That it was safe to tell me anything. And I didn’t do that.”

“I do trust you,” Shane whispers. “I just—I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” his mom says, wobbly and damp. “You told us. You are so brave. My brave boy.”

Shane laughs, wet. “Ilya said that, too.”

“Is he there with you?”

“No. He went to go get ginger ale and saltines. I uh,” Shane rubs at the back of his neck. “I threw up. After the camera thing.”

“Oh, Shane.” There’s a louder rustle, on the other end of the line, and the sound of a door closing, and the peel of a zipper. “David, pack us a bag. We’re driving to New York. Yes, now. Right now.” He hears so much more, in rapid succession; his dad’s confused mumble, another door, another zipper, the quiet rustle of clothing folded flat; the cicadas singing at the moon; the specific way his mom always slams the door on her Camry. “Shane, honey, can you text me the address of your hotel? We’re driving down.”

Shane sniffs, and wipes at his eyes. They feel puffy and hot. The touch fucking hurts. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Yes I do. I’m your mother. We’ll be there in,” she pauses, “seven hours. We can talk options when we get there.” A longer pause, then. An uncertain breath. “Tell that boy—” she stutters, and then starts again. “Tell your husband he’d better take good care of you while we’re driving.”

Shane smiles, despite himself. “He will. He does.”

Mom hesitates for a bit. And then, she says it: “I love you, Shane.”

“I love you too, Mom,” he replies, and the line goes dead in his hands.

_____

May 20, 2018

Shane got knocked out of the playoffs early—a string of bad luck, really. Drapeau pulled a muscle, Hayden fucked his wrist, and Shane felt a little off in a way that he hadn’t before. It was like he’d forgotten how to tune things out, and now every time one of his teammates said cocksucker or pussy or fag, it hit like a blow to the chest, and the swoop of disgust and shame and fear lingered, long after the conversation had moved on.

So, the Metros were out. Shane watched Ilya’s last playoff run with the Raiders at his parents’ house. He kept catching himself on the cusp of smiling whenever Ilya scored a goal, and the ache in his chest—the feeling of missing Ilya and the fear that a single smile could give them both away and the sheer fucking resentment that he couldn’t even smile for his fucking husband—killed whatever joy was on his face before it had the chance to begin. And he stayed up later than he should, after, sending texts Ilya couldn’t read because he was still in the locker room shower. He kept watching highlights from the game parked on the couch; a nervous energy playing over his fingers and down into his toes.

And while Shane waited for Ilya to reply, he kept thinking about what it would be like if he was just another wag. If he could be there, at Ilya’s games, screaming until his throat was sore, and be there after, to kiss the sweat off his brow and wash his hair and tuck him into bed. It hurt, like poking at a loose tooth, over and over, until the root came free and his whole mouth tasted like blood.

And then, halfway through a replay of Raiders v. Admirals, game four, Mom went to bed early with a wicked migraine, so for the rest of the night, it was just Shane and his dad. And Dad had turned to him, halfway through third period, from his recliner, and said you know, it’s okay if you’re gay. And Shane hadn’t replied, which was the most damning thing he could’ve done. He just walked out the front door, and got in his car, and didn’t stop driving until he was sitting in the parking lot of a liquor store, which was closed, because it was nearly midnight. And when he went back to his parents’ house the next day, Dad didn’t say anything, and neither did Shane, and it was like nothing had happened. So, Shane convinced himself that it hadn’t been real. Of course it wasn’t. It was just a silly, stupid dream.

_____

May 22, 2021

Ilya comes back to the hotel room exactly forty-nine minutes later. He’s carrying a plastic bag from CVS. His eyes are red-rimmed. He smells like car exhaust and cigarettes. Shane hasn’t moved in the entire time he’s been gone. He’s still sitting on the couch, dressed to the nines, staring at his phone.

“All good?” Ilya calls, and kicks his slides into a haphazard pile in the corner. He takes off his sweatshirt, too, and itches at his scalp, then scratches through the hair on his chest.

“Yeah,” Shane says, in a daze. “She told me she was sorry, and that I was brave, and that she loved me.”

“All correct things. Your mother is a smart woman.” Ilya comes over and sits next to Shane. He starts pulling things out of the bag and passes them over. “Here. Ginger ale. Terrible crackers. They did not have dramamine, so you are stuck with disgusting pink slop.”

Shane cracks open a can of Canada Dry while he watches Ilya struggle with the plastic wrap on a bottle of Pepto Bismol. “How are you not freaking out right now?”

“Oh, I am,” Ilya replies, and hands Shane a little cup full of pink medicine, and presses a kiss to his shoulder. “I am scared shitless. But there is also relief, I think.” Shane thinks for a minute, then nods. Now that he’s looking, he feels a bit of it, too. “And I will be okay,” Ilya whispers into his skin, and watches Shane swallow his pink slop, shudder, and chase it with a sip of ginger ale. “I have you, yes?” Shane nods, again, and presses their thighs together. “Then I already have most important thing in life. So long as I have you, I don’t care about the rest.”

Ilya kisses him, and then leans down and peels off his socks. He grimaces, and brings a knee to his bare chest, so he can rub at the sole. His feet are red and sweaty, and there is, indeed, an enormous blister on the back of his heel. And Shane thinks about Ilya giving him his shoes, and walking almost a mile in nothing but his socks, just because he knew Shane would freak out about the puke. He thinks about Ilya remembering that he takes dramamine whenever he’s out on a boat. He thinks about Ilya wanting to honeymoon in Shane’s cottage. He thinks about Ilya’s desperate, one-sided attempts to get Mom to like him. He thinks about the heartbreaking fact that Ilya hasn’t made the playoffs as anything other than a wildcard since he moved to Ottawa, and he hasn’t complained once.

God, Shane is so tired of crying. “What the fuck did I do to deserve you?” he chokes out, and rubs his tears against Ilya’s bare chest.

“You didn’t do anything,” Ilya replies, soft, and gently scratches the skin behind Shane’s ear. He wrestles a sleeve of saltines open, then pops a cracker in his mouth, and passes one to Shane. “I just love you.”

“I love you, too.” Shane says, and eats what he’s given. His voice sticks and catches on the first couple of syllables. The saltine sticks at the back of his throat. “And it’s the same, for me. I’ve got you, right? The rest is just noise.”

“Just noise,” Ilya repeats. Matter-of-fact; end of discussion. He goads Shane into eating more and more, until the whole sleeve of crackers is gone. He makes Shane drink the whole ginger ale, and then he strips off Shane’s clothes—his stark suit jacket and slacks, his shirt with little pearl buttons, his undershirt and boxers and socks. He folds it all, careful, the way Shane would do it. He wedges Shane into the shower, and lets him borrow his shampoo and conditioner. He lets Shane borrow his toothbrush, too, and his ridiculous strawberry-flavored toothpaste, and his floss, and a pair of boxers and a sleep shirt. And then, he tucks Shane into bed, and spoons up behind him, and somehow, despite himself, Shane falls asleep barely five minutes after the pillow hits his head.

_____

December 26, 2019

The first real anniversary they had was technically their second. Things were so hectic, in 2018, and Ilya was still in Boston, so he didn’t have time to fly out and back in the same day, just to spend a couple hours with Shane. He’d been busy with contract negotiations and packing his things, and texting Shane endlessly; Zillow listing after Zillow listing. And Shane had been busy, too—they both wanted to announce the Irina Foundation during the season, so they could start coaching right away once the season was over, and starting a charity was a lot easier when it was just a one-sentence daydream. Shane had endless paperwork, endless meetings. Sometimes, he went to bed and dreamed of filling out forms.

So, the next year, Shane went a little crazy. Ilya was in Ottawa, then, which meant they could have an entire day. What a luxury, compared to the years before. What wealth. What fucking gluttony. Shane had planned the whole thing out in exacting detail. He had a fucking spreadsheet. He bought too much lube and too many condoms. He bought Ilya flowers, and chocolates, and a teddy bear that was wearing a little Metros jersey. He dug through Ilya’s kitchen cabinets at two in the morning like a madman, months before winter break, until he found a beat-up tin full of recipes he couldn’t read. He took pictures of each one, and translated them line by line, until he finally found Ilya’s mama’s borscht recipe. He bought all the ingredients for it on Christmas Eve, and the lingering, paranoid kick of shame had him so wide awake he felt like he could do anything.

Christmas night, he stayed awake long after his parents went to bed, too keyed up to sleep. He snuck out the window of his childhood bedroom for the first time, and he wondered if this was what being a teenager was supposed to feel like. And he drove to Ilya’s house with the trunk full of chocolates and red roses and full-to-bursting reusable grocery bags.

Ilya was asleep when Shane got to his house—he hadn’t known Shane was coming. He’d wanted it to be a romantic surprise, like in the movies. And it was, it really was. Shane had crawled into his bed, and Ilya had woken up grumbling and scowling, and Shane got to watch as a gap-toothed grin broke over his face like the sun cresting the horizon. They’d fucked, then; sleep-warm and sloppy, grinding against each other, until Ilya came with a soft little gasp and Shane followed right behind him. And, for once, Shane fell asleep with their mess smeared over his belly, and he didn’t even care. He was so in love he felt sick with it.

In the morning, he woke before Ilya, and carefully pried his way out of bed, so he could set up the series of surprises he’d planned. He set the chocolates on the counter. He put the flowers in a pilsner glass, because Ilya didn’t own a vase. He hid the teddy bear in the garage fridge, next to the stash of ginger ale that Ilya kept for Shane and drank, sometimes, when he felt lonely. And he forgot to eat breakfast, because he was too excited and nervous. Instead, he spent the morning dicing potatoes and beets, slicing up the very nice cut of beef, wrestling with a massive head of red cabbage.

At ten in the morning, Shane was a little annoyed that Ilya slept so late. At eleven, he started to worry. At noon, Shane abandoned the mess in the kitchen and crept upstairs, to Ilya’s bedroom. He was awake, but still in bed, on his belly, his arms shoved under his pillow and his unburied eye staring, listlessly, at the wall.

“Hey,” Shane said, soft, and sat at the edge of the bed, and put a careful hand on Ilya’s back. “You feeling okay?”

“Tired,” Ilya replied, and turned his face further into his pillow. “Sorry. I know you had plans. I can…” Ilya trailed off, and his eye slipped closed. “I can get up,” he finished, but he didn’t move, and the inward curl of his shoulders looked so miserable that any thought of prodding Ilya out of bed flew from Shane’s mind like a flock of geese migrating in the fall.

“It’s okay,” Shane whispered, and rubbed his hand up and down Ilya’s back. “I was planning to spend the whole day in bed with you anyways.” Ilya didn’t laugh at the joke, or smile, but something about him uncoiled, just a little. Shane brushed a curl behind Ilya’s ear. “I’m making soup,” Shane continued, and pressed a kiss to the top of Ilya’s ear. “It’ll be done soon. I can bring some up, if you want.”

“Please,” Ilya said, and his voice was very small. So, when the borscht was done, Shane spooned it into two bowls and brought it up to Ilya’s room. They ate there, in Ilya’s bed, and Shane didn’t say anything at all when saltwater tears tracked down Ilya’s face and landed on top of the dollop of sour cream. He put his arm around the back of Ilya’s neck, instead, and thumbed at the mole on his cheek. And they spent the rest of the day in bed—Ilya curled into Shane’s side, Shane scrolling through his phone—until it was nearly midnight, and whatever strange exhaustion that had possessed Ilya in the night faded, just a little, and they shuffled down to the kitchen to warm up more soup.

And Ilya saw, then, the chocolates on the counter, and the wilting red roses, and he mumbled an apology into Shane’s neck.

“What for?” Shane replied. “You’re still surprised. You didn’t ruin anything.”

Ilya watched as Shane mixed horseradish into the sour cream, and diced up the other half of an English cucumber, and stripped needle-like leaves of fresh dill off the stem with his fingers. It lacked a certain intensity that had always been there before—like Ilya was caught between here and there, or here and a memory, or here and something Shane couldn’t guess.

“How did you find fresh dill in middle of Canadian winter?” Ilya asked, a little muffled, a little flat.

Shane smiled, sheepish and unsure. “I uh, I bought a plant. Half off at Home Depot.” It had been the tail end of summer, back then, and he’d already started furiously googling borscht recipes. This was, of course, before he thought to ransack Ilya’s kitchen, and the plant had been half-wilted and floppy. “It’s in this hydroponic pot with a grow light up top, and my housekeeper takes care of it when she comes over. Apparently she has to cut the flowers off before they bloom, or the whole plant will die. We have a whole text thread about it.” Ilya looked at him strange. Shane wasn’t sure what it meant. “I got basil, too. And shiso, and mint. My chicken and rice has never tasted better.” Shane bumped his hip against the cabinets. “You want cucumber in yours?”

Ilya nodded. Shane made up a bowl, and slid it across the counter to him. He added extra cucumber and dill to his own bowl, and skipped the sour cream and horseradish.

Ilya dragged his spoon through his soup. “My mama had herbs,” he said, quiet. “They all died, every winter.” And there was something so complicated there. Something Shane didn’t know how to touch.

So, he left it. And besides, Shane hadn’t known much about Ilya’s mom at the time. He still doesn’t. He’d been eager to add that to the tally; Ilya’s mom was beautiful, Ilya’s mom was sad, Ilya’s mom killed herself with a bottle of pills; Ilya’s mom had, at some point, liked to garden. So, Shane had finished his borscht, and he’d held Ilya as he trembled, and tucked him into bed, and pressed a careful, lingering kiss to his cheek before he left.

Later, when Shane was sitting in his empty, empty Montreal apartment, he stared at the little four-pot hydroponic setup on his kitchen counter, and he thought about that complicated thing inside of Ilya—it was fragile, he knew. The sort of thing that never really healed over.

Before he could overthink too much, he put a three-pot hydroponic planter in his Amazon cart, along with little soil plugs, and seeds for tarragon, and sorrel, and dill. He had it all same-day delivered to Ilya’s house, and the next day, Ilya had barged into his apartment with no warning at all, pressed him up against the wall in the entryway, and kissed Shane like he wanted to cannibalize him. And then he said nobody ever loved me this much, in a broken, wretched stutter, and he’d cried, and he’d sucked on Shane’s ring finger, and he said moy muzh, moy muzh, over and over, as he held Shane up against the wall and fucked him stupid.

_____

May 22, 2021

Shane wakes in the middle of the night. It’s not quite pitch-black, but it’s close enough—the only light in the room is a small strip of yellow streetlamp glow that seeps through a crack in the curtains, and the dull red glow of the digital clock on the nightstand.

Ilya is lying on his back, far away from Shane. In the dull red, Shane can barely make out the gleam of his eyes, staring at the ceiling. It’s too dark for Shane to see whether he’s got tear-tracks running from the corners of his eyes to his temples, but if they’re there, it wouldn’t be the first time Shane has woken up in the middle of the night to find Ilya laying next to him crying.

“Hey,” Shane whispers, and scoots closer, and runs his foot up Ilya’s shin. “What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking about kissel,” Ilya replies, so quiet Shane can barely hear him over the late-night traffic outside. “You ever tried?” He turns to look at Shane, then, and Shane stares at his ear, haloed against the dull red glow. “Is like juice, but thick. Mama used to make it in summer, with potato starch and, and, fuck. Krasnaya smorodina. Little red berries.”

“It sounds good,” Shane whispers, and shuffles even closer, so he can kiss Ilya’s cheek. It’s dry, which, Shane thinks, is probably a good thing. “You should make it for me this summer.”

Ilya makes a noncommittal noise, and shrugs the shoulder close to Shane’s head. He goes back to staring at the ceiling. What little he can see of Ilya’s face is carefully, studiously blank.

Shane rolls on top of him, and gets a hand in his hair. He presses a kiss to the center of Ilya’s chest. “You’re thinking about something else.”

“Is stupid.”

“Tell me anyway?”

“I am thinking,” Ilya pauses, and swallows. Shane can hear it click at the back of his throat. “that I will miss Moscow. I hated it, most of the time,” he whispers, and his eyes go distant, “but you Canadians make vareniki wrong, and American vodka tastes like shit, and they never play Skryptonite in the fucking club, and,” Ilya says, louder and louder. Shane hides his smile against Ilya’s chest. “There was a little shop, by my apartment, that sold best fucking plov. That used to be my favorite part of the night. I would go out, get drunk, get fucked up, go to shop, get big fucking bowl of plov on my way home. And dessert! My god. There is too much maple syrup, Shane. I am tired of maple syrup. And, you know,” Ilya rubs at Shane’s back, and palms his shoulderblades. “Last time I saw my mama’s grave, I was burying Papa next to her. These past years, I kept thinking to myself—maybe next year, I will go visit. Next year, I will go bring my mama flowers. Only now, there are no more years. I thought I’d,” Ilya gestures vaguely, “made peace, with leaving everything behind.”

“It’s okay if you want to go back,” Shane says, hesitant.

“I don’t want to go back,” Ilya replies, without any hesitation at all, and runs his hands through Shane’s hair. And Shane doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. He presses a kiss to Ilya’s neck, then the point of his chin, then the side of his mouth. He kisses Ilya for real, mouths open, chin covered in spit. He feels Ilya’s cock twitch, against his belly, but he ignores it. Instead, he settles, his ear over Ilya’s heart, his arms tucked tight to Ilya’s sides, his legs between Ilya’s hips. He rubs his face against Ilya’s skin, like he’s settling into a pillow. And he hopes that’s enough. That’s all he has to give.

“And,” Ilya whispers when Shane is on the verge of sleep. “I feel—” he pauses, and rubs his hands up and down Shane’s back.  “I didn’t want it to happen like this, exactly, but I thought I was ready. I pushed for it. Only, now that it is here, I am, I don’t know.” The sheets rustle as Ilya shrugs, again. “Scared. Sad. Feels like grieving, a little.” Ilya breathes in, sharp, and leans down, and presses a lopsided kiss to the top of Shane’s head. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Shane replies. And it’s true—Shane is sorry for a lot of things. Maybe, one day, he’ll make another list and give that one to Ilya, too. He starts drafting it in his head, and curls closer, into Ilya, and waits for sleep to come again.

_____

May 7, 2021

There were more days that Ilya could barely get out of bed. More and more, closer and closer together, until Ilya missed the playoffs, in 2020, and didn’t get out of bed for three days after his last game of the season. And Shane tried his best—he cooked big, hearty meals and sweet little treats; he laid in bed next to Ilya and didn’t say anything; he tried to talk to Ilya with words and food and touch and sex, and none of it worked. What did it, in the end, was Ilya’s citizenship ceremony—almost four years later, he was finally, legally, Canadian. He showed up in a tasteful, understated suit, with concealer under his eyes, so no one would see the bags there, and breath mints in his mouth, because he didn’t even have the wherewithal to brush his fucking teeth. It broke Shane’s fucking heart, and he’d cried about it a lot, until Ilya caught him at it one day and said stop fucking crying, Hollander. I am not a problem you can fix. And then, the next week, Ilya called around and scheduled an appointment with a therapist.

So, Ilya had a therapist, who he saw every week. In person, when he could, but mostly over Zoom meetings. He tried an SSRI that had him puking his guts out every day for two weeks. He tried a different SSRI that made his dick go numb and his eye twitch, and Ilya hated it so much that he swore off meds for a while after that. He tried a third SSRI, and a fourth, until he found one that made everything feel just a little bit less, which, Ilya had said, wasn’t ideal, but at least he could still fuck Shane into the mattress.

And the therapy and the meds helped, of course they did, but Ilya still had days, sometimes, where he’d roll out of bed at noon and walk around the house dazed and off-center and quiet. And it had been one of those days, Shane remembers, when everything had fallen apart. Shane had driven over to Ilya’s place in Ottawa, on a Friday, after Ilya’s disappointing start to a playoff run inevitably fizzled out before it had even begun, and he’d noticed right away that Ilya wasn’t quite there all the way—there was something distant in his eye, and he moved like he was a little concussed. But he’d talked to Shane, at least, and he hadn’t said he was tired when Shane asked how he was feeling, so Shane had, foolishly, assumed he was okay.

They’d made stir fry together, and eaten on the couch while watching reruns of Property Brothers, because Shane liked the décor and Ilya thought the property brothers were hotter than the guy from Flip or Flop. Ilya had been quiet, and subdued, and sad. He’d bounced his knee at a frantic pace all throughout dinner.

The silence between had them built and built. On screen, the property brother with the tool belt said something about soffit to a tired-looking woman in a beige cardigan. That’ll be an extra two grand, he said, as the camera panned to a close-up shot of wet attic insulation. We’ll have to scale back the kitchen renovations.

Ilya’s fork stopped scraping at the side of his bowl, and his bowl went on the coffee table. “I’m ready,” Ilya had said, at last, in the middle of an ad for Wayfair.

Shane looked at him funny, and said “for what? A second plate?”

“To come out,” Ilya replied, and looked down at his hands. He looked up, a moment later, and fixed Shane with a piercing almost-glare. “Are you?”

And Shane hadn’t replied. How could he?

“Will you ever be ready?” Ilya pressed. The look in his eye was a real glare, now; accusatory and sharp. His knee kept bouncing, so fast it practically blurred.

“What brought this on?” Shane had said, and set his half-eaten stir fry on the table, next to Ilya’s bowl. His chopsticks fell out and clattered across the tabletop, and a little piece of rice stuck to the glass, but Shane couldn’t bring himself to care.

Ilya looked at his hands again. He nodded to himself. His knee stilled, then, and Shane couldn’t help but read something ominous into it. “Dr. Molchalina asked about my mama,” he said, slow, “and, it made me think. She was not much older than me, when she died. Only thirty-two. And she was so sad, and so fucking lonely. She had no friends. No family to talk to. By the end, she could barely leave the house. All she had was Papa.” Ilya looked up at the ceiling, then, and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “And I look at her life, and I look at mine, and in this way, they are the same.”

It had hit Shane hard—harder than the check from Marleau that put him in the hospital. It hurt because Ilya was right, and Shane knew he was, and had known about it for a long, long time. He’d just, foolishly, believed that he was enough; that the two of them didn’t need anyone else, which was easy for Shane to say. He hadn’t traded to a new team at the height of his career, with a massive secret burning a hole in his chest. He still played on the same team as his best friend. He still had his fucking parents.

“I love you, Shane,” Ilya continued. He was crying openly, now; the strange half-crying thing he did, where the tears just sort of fell down his cheeks. “I love you, maybe the most I have ever loved anyone. But I am so fucking lonely. My family is gone. Sveta hasn’t talked to me in months—she knows I am hiding something, and is angry because of it. I cannot make new friends, good friends, because of this secret we keep. And it kills me, just like it killed her. So. I am asking—no, I am telling. You will have to choose what you want to keep. You can have me, or you can have secret, but you cannot have both, anymore.”

“Are—” Shane sniffed, and swallowed back his tears. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“No,” Ilya replied, but it didn’t sound like he was convinced. “I am saying that I will come out soon. Whether I come out as your husband or divorced bisexual depends on you.” Shane had cried a little, then, and Ilya pointedly didn’t look at him. He just kept staring up at the ceiling, with tears leaking down his face. “You don’t have to decide today, or tomorrow, or even next week, but I—” Ilya’s voice broke, and he finally looked down, and his face twisted into a terrible grimace. “I cannot do this another season. I will need an answer by end of summer.”

For a long time, they sat there, and said nothing. The TV played the next rerun of Property Brothers. Neither of them paid attention.

“I should go,” Ilya whispered, when the intro faded out and an ad for Gorilla Glue faded in. And then he stood, and he walked over, to his own front door. He lifted his keys off the little hook. He slid his tennis shoes on, even though he was barefoot. And then, he left, even though this was Ilya’s house, and Shane was just a stranger, taking up space inside it.

Shane sat through the Gorilla Glue ad, and one for Home depot, and another ad for Wayfair. He felt blank. He felt like his ears were ringing. And then, halfway through the stupid Wayfair jingle, he realized that he was going to lose the person he loved more than anything, more than fucking hockey, if he didn’t get off his ass and fucking do something.

So. Shane nearly tripped on his way out the front door. He ran outside in his socks, which was almost worse than being barefoot. And Ilya was still there, sitting in the only sports car he’d bothered to keep when he moved to Ottawa—a blacked-out Lamborghini. It was parked in the driveway. The driver’s side door was open. Ilya was slumped over the steering wheel, and sobbed so hard his whole body shook.

“Ilya,” Shane croaked. “Ilya, please don’t go.” Ilya startled at the sound of his voice, and frantically jammed the key in the ignition, and slammed the door shut. “Ilya, stop,”  Shane cried, and ran over and pulled the door open before Ilya could drive away. He reached for Ilya’s face, then, and forcibly turned his head, to make him look Shane in the eye. He fought, of course—he curled his hands around Shane’s wrists in an iron grip and tried, desperately, to pull him away. “Of course I’d choose you,” Shane whispered, furiously, and Ilya went so, so still. “Of fucking course I do. Just—“ Shane took a deep breath. Another. He swallowed down the pit in his stomach. “Just let me talk to Scott first, okay? So we know what to expect.”

“Okay,” Ilya said, dull. He let Shane pull him out of the car, and up, to his feet. He didn’t react when Shane leaned in and pulled the car keys out of the ignition, and slammed the car door closed.

“I’ll have it figured out before the end of summer,” Shane said. “I promise.”

“Okay,” Ilya said, again. And Ilya believed him, Shane thinks. He wouldn’t have followed Shane inside if he didn’t. But he did—he followed Shane back up the driveway, through the front door, and once they got inside, Ilya didn’t stop. He trudged straight up the stairs, to their bedroom, and Shane didn’t know if he should follow. So instead, he stayed downstairs. He cleaned up their dinner dishes, and wiped down the kitchen, and picked the spilled grains of rice off the coffee table. He cleaned all the bathrooms, and scrubbed the floors on his hands and knees, and wiped a fine layer of dust off all the windowsills. He checked the lint trap on the dryer. He finished the episode of Property Brothers.

He didn’t go up to their room—Ilya’s room. He didn’t know if he was welcome. He fell asleep on the couch, with the TV still on. And when he woke up in the morning, he was covered in a blanket that he hadn’t been under the night before, and Ilya was making eggs in the kitchen, and when Shane hesitantly wandered in, Ilya handed him a plate full of Shane’s favorite egg-white omelette with a soft smile and an even softer kiss. It was like all was forgiven; like nothing had ever happened, and the night before was some sort of fever-dreamt nightmare. But it had been real, Shane knows. So he sat down, and he ate his eggs, but he didn’t taste any of it. And he could hardly swallow around the lump in his throat, and could barely bring himself to finish because of the sick feeling deep in his stomach.

He’d driven back to Montreal less than an hour later. He lied, and said something about a last-minute team meeting. And god, the way Ilya had looked at him—the exact same way he’d looked at Shane all those years ago, when he’d all but ran away the first time Ilya had called him by his first name. And Shane ran away, just like he had before. He went back to his empty fucking apartment, and just sat there on the couch for a long time, staring at nothing in particular.

once again. huge enormous thank you to my beautiful circle of internet perverts, who talked me through shane's entire convo with yuna when i got so, so stuck in the weeds. i love you all.

May 23, 2021

Shane and Ilya are still in bed when his parents knock on the door to Ilya’s hotel room. They’re both dead asleep—Shane wakes slow and groggy, but something inside him feels settled, somehow. Like a piece of his ribcage had snapped off, years ago, during a hard check, and it had just now slotted back into place. The knocking comes again, louder this time. He looks over at the clock on the nightstand—4:07 a.m. Beside him, Ilya groans, and rolls away, and buries his face into the pillow.

“Tell whoever it is fuck off,” Ilya grumbles.

“It’s probably my parents,” Shane replies. “I’m not telling them to fuck off.”

Ilya stills, for a half-second, then practically leaps out of bed. “Your parents?” he cries, and runs, frantically, to the mirror by the bathroom. He stares at himself—messed-up hair still crusted with gel, bags under his eyes, drool smeared across his cheek. He sniffs his armpit and winces. “Shane, I am disgusting. I smell like shit. I look like shit. Your mama is going to think I am slob.”

“You are a slob,” Shane points out, not unkindly. “And I’m sorry. I should’ve mentioned they were coming.”

“You think?” Ilya says, and digs through his bag like a madman. He struggles into an inside-out Centaurs tee, and swallows a handful of breath mints. He looks over at Shane with a judgmental eye, and throws a ball of wrinkled fabric at him. “Christ, Hollander, put on pants.”

Shane rolls his eyes, and dons what Ilya gave him—black joggers, a little tight in the thigh and loose in the waist. Ilya grabs at Shane’s wrist before he can open the door, and licks his thumb, and tries to smooth down a cowlick above Shane’s ear. He swipes at the corner of Shane’s mouth, too, and plucks at Shane’s shirt, so it settles properly across his shoulders. “Okay,” Ilya says. “Now you can open.”

Shane tucks a curl behind Ilya’s ear, on impulse, and presses a kiss to his temple. Soft, the way Ilya likes it. And then he pulls the heavy, heavy hotel door open.

In the night, Shane hadn’t known what to expect the next time he saw his parents. He’d had a lingering fear that there would be some insurmountable awkwardness where there hadn’t been before, and his parents would feel less like a safe space and more like the kids at school or the teammates he’s had over the years—approachable and nice enough, right up until Shane did something or said something that crossed the line from a little quirky to really fucking weird. And on the scale of social fuckups, secretly marrying Ilya ranks exponentially higher than the time that Susy Cooper had asked him if he thought she was pretty, in sixth grade, and he laughed because he was nervous and didn’t know what to say.

So, Shane braces, and for a single, heart-stopping moment, his parents stand there, awkward and unsure. And then, Mom is inside before the door even swings open all the way, and Dad is right behind her. They squash Shane between them, which they haven’t done since Shane was a kid, and Shane is not going to cry again, so he doesn’t. He lets himself bask in the feeling, for a minute. This, too, settles something deep inside—some part of him that had been convinced his parents would never love him the same if they found out he was gay, even though he has years of evidence otherwise.

Mom pulls away, just a bit. She fusses with Shane’s hair—she tries, in vain, to smooth down the cowlick that Ilya had just tried to fix a moment before. She smiles at him, then, a fragile and watery thing. “I think we need to talk,” she says, and looks over at Ilya.

Ilya is standing by the bed, awkward and alone. His arms hang tight at his sides. He keeps glancing off to the side, at the mirror, or the coat rack, or the bathroom door, like it’s too painful to look at the three of them directly. And then he swallows once, twice, and clenches his jaw, and looks Shane’s parents dead in the eye. “Mr. Hollander,” Ilya says, nervous. “Mrs. Hollander.”

Mom smiles again, but it’s a little more controlled; a little tighter around the eyes. She steps further into the room, and says, “at this point, I think you should probably just call me Yuna.”

Ilya blinks, and looks carefully, quietly pleased. “Okay. Yuna.”

“And David,” Dad says. He carefully extracts himself and goes over to lay a hand on Ilya’s shoulder, and Ilya looks at Shane, a little wild, a little scared. “Please call me David. Mr. Hollander just sounds weird.”

“Okay,” Ilya says, a little smoother. “Yuna and David. You want drinks? We have,” he turns and rummages in the mini fridge, “ginger ale and shitty instant coffee from hotel.”

“Coffee sounds great,” Mom says, and Ilya nods, serious.

Mom and Dad sit on the couch. Shane sits on the bed. And they all watch as Ilya follows the usual procedure—fills the hotel’s tiny little Mr. Coffee machine with water from the tap, sticks a cheap coffee filter up top and pours a packet of pre-ground coffee beans inside it. And then, the pressing of the buttons, the hiss of boiling water, the drip-drip-flood and the smell of coffee just barely on the right side of burnt.

The silence stretches. It gets a little tense. Shane stands, then, and goes to Ilya. He helps pour steaming hot coffee into little paper cups while Ilya pops on disposable plastic lids, and he leans in close, so his lips brush Ilya’s ear, and he whispers “it’s okay. You’re brave too, remember?”

Ilya turns and looks at Shane like he’s dying, a little. Like he’d fuck Shane right here, on the floor, if his parents weren’t sitting on the couch. And then, the coffee-maker beeps, and the moment is over.

“Sorry,” Ilya says, and hands a cup to Mom, then Dad, and Shane, and finally takes one for himself. He takes a sip and grimaces, and dumps four separate sugar packets into his cup. “I hope dark roast is okay. Was that or decaf.”

“Honestly, I’m so tired I’d be fine just eating the beans whole,” Dad replies, with a smile and a wink. The tension in Ilya’s shoulders eases, just a little. He follows Shane over to the bed, and they sit at the foot, facing the couch. They’re so close their knees knock together. Shane wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

“So,” Mom says, and sips her coffee with a perfectly straight face. “What’s the play here?”

He and Ilya look at each other. “We haven’t gotten there yet,” Shane admits, and ducks his head, and scratches at the back of his neck. Ilya presses their shoulders together for a lingering second.

“I am no good at this sort of thing, and Shane needed time,” he explains, and briefly touches the edge of his palm to the back of Shane’s arm, “to breathe. To calm down some.”

Mom raises an eyebrow. “I would’ve thought you knew plenty about handling a scandal,” she mutters, and takes another, more pointed sip of her coffee.

“Mom,” Shane hisses. “What the fuck?”

“Is okay, Shane,” Ilya says, and shrugs, and tips the rest of his coffee down his throat like he’s shotgunning a beer. “I am very good at creating the appearance of scandal,” he explains, and, come to think of it, Shane can’t think of an actual scandal Ilya has ever been involved in. It sends a little curl of guilt through his gut, that he hadn’t noticed until Ilya said it. “Is easy to give people what they expect. I go to club, I get messy drunk, I make sure someone takes picture of me with girl, and everyone assumes things. Was easier to hide, that way. Less expectations. Actual scandal is new territory for me.”

Dad frowns into his coffee. “So the women were…”

“Ah, no. That was real. I am bisexual. And Shane and I, we were not—Shane, what is the word.”

“Exclusive.” Shane supplies. He finally sips his coffee. It is, as Ilya promised, fucking disgusting. He stands, and pours it down the sink. “We, uh. Took a while. To figure things out.”

“And you have? Figured it out?”

“Yeah,” Shane says, and sits back down, next to Ilya, and smiles up at him like a lovestruck idiot. “That’s why I married him.” Ilya smiles back at him; a soft, vulnerable thing. Shane briefly leans into him, and tangles their fingers together.

“So,” Dad says, and god, he’s way too chipper for five in the morning. “How did that,” he gestures between Shane and Ilya, “happen anyways? Was it a citizenship thing?”

“What? No!” Shane shifts and leans forward, so he’s just slightly in front of Ilya. “I married him because I’m in love with him! Why is that so hard to understand?”  

Dad blinks, and sits back, a little, like he wasn’t expecting Shane to get that angry. Mom just looks at him with this—this sad fucking look on her face. Shane can’t tell if she’s sad that he married someone she hates, or is sad he didn’t tell her he’d gotten married, or sad because it is, objectively, pretty fucking sad to have been married for almost four years and still be in the closet.

“Well, it was little bit citizenship thing.” Ilya says, generously, and tilts his head side to side, like he’s weighing whether he wants to order pasta or pizza. He squeezes Shane’s hand, so tight his knuckles go white, and Shane’s finger bones grind together. Be nice, he’s saying. Fucking ironic.  “It was on your list, remember?” Ilya offers; a fat, shiny worm dangling on a hook.

“Yeah, like four lines down,” Shane replies, bitchily, because he’ll take whatever Ilya gives him and happily swallow it whole—the hook, the line, the sinker; the whole goddamn fishing pole. “You remember what I wrote at the top.”

Mom looks between the two of them, increasingly confused.

Ilya sighs expansively. “I do,” he says. He leans towards Mom and Dad, conspiratorially, and loudly whispers. “Your son is a terrible sap. And very naïve. Is lucky I agreed to marry him.”

Mom blinks once, twice. She sits back. She drains the rest her coffee. “We need to focus,” she says, and sets her empty cup on the boxy side table next to the couch. “The two of you need to decide what to do about these photos, and you’ll have to do it fast. The story hasn’t broken yet, but I’m sure it’ll be posted before the morning news cycle. At best, we’ve got,” she checks her watch, “a little under two hours.”

“Fuck.” Shane says, and buries his head in his hands. He rocks, a little; back and forth, back and forth. He’d been doing so well, all this time. He’d been so good at blocking all of it out—the kiss, the taste of tears in his mouth, the flash of the camera; the hollowed-out part of him that was usually so good at spinning out action plans and contingencies, but now lay silent and empty. And that was just it. Shane didn’t know what to do. And he always knew what he was supposed to do. It was one of the best and worst things about him.

“Hey, hey,” Ilya says, low, and cups a careful hand over the back of Shane’s neck. He runs his fingers through the short hair there, and presses at the hollow behind Shane’s ear with his thumb. “Just noise, remember?”

“Yeah,” Shane whispers into his hands. “Yeah, okay,” He says, a little louder, and lets his hands fall to his lap. “Mom, what do you think we should do?”

“Honestly?” Mom shrugs. “Nothing.”

“What, seriously? You drove seven hours to tell us to do nothing?”

“It’s not a bad idea!” Mom says, and crosses her arms. “I’ll do everything I can to squash the pictures—from behind the scenes, of course—but honestly, Shane, what do the pictures even say about the two of you? From what you’ve described, the only thing people will be able to glean is that the two of you kissed, once, at a party. A fairly wild party, if Hunter’s husband’s Instagram is to be believed. And in this day and age? That’s nothing. That’s barely even a rumor. At worst, it’s a punchline on SNL. If you do nothing, if you don’t fuel the speculation, this whole thing will be out of the news within a week.”

Shane stares down at his feet. He’s still wearing Ilya’s dirty socks—one black, one white. “And we’ll just,” he bites at his lip, “stay closeted?”

“Well,” Mom says. Weighty. Loaded. “I suppose I assumed that’s what you want. That is what you want, right?”

Shane looks at Ilya, then. Ilya looks back at him, steady, absolutely nothing on his face. Your call, he’s saying. And Shane could, he thinks, change his mind. He could say yes, get his mom to help him keep this secret for as long as it can be kept, see exactly how far Ilya is willing to go—if that ultimatum he gave had any teeth behind it.

“No, it’s not,” Shane says, and reaches for Ilya’s hand again, and squeezes it. “We were already planning on coming out by the end of the summer.”

Ilya looks down at their clasped hands, balanced on Shane’s knee. “I,” he says, so soft his voice catches. “I would understand,” he continues, “if you changed your mind.”

Shane stares at him for a beat. For two. And Ilya won’t meet his eye—he just stares down at their hands, and there’s his fucking knee, bouncing away, and his bottom lip gone white and bloodless between his teeth. How many times, Shane wonders, will he have to prove to Ilya that he loves him? How many times will he have to tell Ilya he loves him enough to keep him?

Shane yanks his hand out of Ilya’s grasp, and uses that same hand to grab the back of Ilya’s neck. “You stupid asshole,” he says, and shakes him, just a little, then forcibly turns his head, so Shane can look at him. “I’ve been head over heels for you since I was eighteen years old. I talked you into marrying me because I’m fucking obsessed with you. I’m not changing shit.”

“But—you had a plan,” Ilya says, miserably. “Tell your parents, tell team, soft launch, a tasteful profile in GQ—"

Shane softens, then. He tips Ilya’s face up with a careful thumb on his chin. “Yeah, well, you know me.” Shane smiles, and it comes out a little wobbly. “Sometimes, I need a little push.” Ilya’s eyes rove over his face, back and forth, so fast it must be giving him a headache. “And—” Shane breathes, deep, and exhales loud. He runs his knuckle over the line of Ilya’s jaw. “I love you. You make me want to be brave.”

And there’s that wide, sunshine smile. Shane hasn’t seen it in a long, long time. “My brave husband,” Ilya murmurs, and Shane can’t help it. He wraps his arm around Ilya’s shoulders, and gets his other hand splayed across Ilya’s jaw, and reels him in, and kisses him. It’s polite, as far as their kisses go. Shane’s tongue stays firmly in his own mouth, and he doesn’t tug at Ilya’s hair at all. Instead, he presses in, hard, until their noses squish so much it hurts. Ilya cries into it, just a little, and Shane wipes the wetness away with his thumb.

“I love you,” Ilya whispers, after their mouths drift apart. Shane leans in and kisses him again—he can’t fucking help it.

Shane hears a quiet sniffle. He pulls away from Ilya’s lips with a soft, wet click, and turns to look. Mom is—Jesus christ. She’s crying, and she’s got her hands over her mouth, and she looks devastated. Like somebody died or something. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I have to—I need air.” And then, she stands, and practically runs out of the room. The heavy hotel door drifts closed in her wake.

They all stare after her, stunned. And then, Ilya leans over and puts his lips to Shane’s ear. “Go,” he says, and squeezes Shane’s hand once, briefly, before letting go. And, so, Shane goes. He runs out of the room without bothering to slip on a pair of shoes. But by the time he’s out in the hallway, there’s no trace of his mom, or where she might’ve went. She’s just fucking gone, and there’s nothing Shane can do about it.

_____

May 15, 2021

Shane felt unsettled for a long time, after. Everything felt strange and off-kilter. His routine was the same, but it felt so fucking empty. He went back to Montreal, but there was no hockey to play. He’d been knocked out of the playoffs in the very first round—in the fifth fucking game, too, which was just embarrassing. And it was Shane’s fault. He’d been playing like shit, like the robot people called him. He barely remembered a single thing he did during any of the games.

So, instead, he meal-prepped brown rice and steamed broccoli and chicken breasts. He did his sunrise yoga, same as usual, but it didn’t feel centering, and it didn’t get rid of the itchy feeling at the center of his chest. He checked his phone, but Ilya didn’t text. He called his parents—Mom stacked his calendar with photoshoots and modeling gigs, and he didn’t object. He scrubbed the baseboards in his apartment. Hayden tried to talk him into a blind date with a church friend.

None of it felt real. It was like he went to sleep and never really woke up all the way. Shane tried to wake himself up the only way he knew how; he threw himself into what he’d always done best. He went on long, hard, meandering runs until he puked, he benched until his arms went so dead he couldn’t lift them above his chest; he did squat sets until he tipped over backwards and nearly launched the fully-loaded bar across the fucking gym. His usual workout stretched from an hour, to two, to three. None of it helped. He couldn’t get lost in the sensation; the visceral, tangible satisfaction of a job well done. He walked out of the gym every morning and he just felt tired, and lonely, and sad.

He kept thinking about how much clearer things were, now that he was looking back. It was easy to trace the exact path they’d taken to get here—the series of compromises that had torn his marriage apart. He thought, too, about how fucking empty his life was; how he spent most of his time wishing Ilya was there. How, last time he’d been at his parents’ house for dinner, he’d had to excuse himself to the bathroom halfway through because he’d been so overwhelmed by the feeling that he’d been briefly convinced he was about to cry, and then he did shed a tear or two, when he checked his phone and didn’t have any new texts. He thought about the last time he and Ilya had fucked—just after a game where he heard Comeau call someone a cocksucking fag out on the ice, and he’d felt like there were invisible eyes watching him for the rest of the night, hours after the game was over, so he’d asked Ilya to close the curtains, even though Ilya’s bedroom was on the second floor and the window looked out over his very private backyard.

He’d been miserable, Shane realized. He’d been miserable the whole fucking time. He just hadn’t quite realized because he wasn’t like Ilya, who was honest with himself in a way Shane never really managed.

And so it went, for a day, and then a whole fucking week. And then, one morning, Shane woke up, and the buzzing feeling inside him finally spilled over.

He’d had Scott’s email for a while—for years, actually. He’d first gotten it from Hayden, who got it from JJ, who got it from St-Simon, who got it from Vaughan. They’d exchanged a handful of emails since: Shane’s first hesitant email after Scott came out; arranging coaching schedules for the charity; congratulations after Scott shared a photo of himself and Kip silhouetted against the setting sun on some distant white-sand beach, Scott down on one knee, captioned he said yes with a red heart emoji. So it was easy, when Shane snatched his phone off his nightstand and opened the gmail app. Scott’s contact autocompleted after four letters.

Shane typed and retyped. Hi Scott! was too chipper and corporate, Hello Hunter, was way too formal, and just Scott, was too impersonal and curt. He wasn’t sure what to say, and everything he came up with either sounded stupid, was too vague, or was so painfully transparent that it made him blush, furiously, against his cool satin pillowcase.

Hey, Scott! He typed, eventually. Sorry to bother you, he continued, then thought about it, and erased it. If it isn’t too personal, he tried, but it was too personal, and sounded stupid anyways. I was wondering what it was like for you after you came out, he landed on, eventually. And that was better. It was mostly okay. I need advice—no, no, that was too needy, and too obvious. No particular reason, Shane typed, which was less obvious, just thought I’d check in. He signed off with Best, Shane Hollander, because he didn’t really think he and Scott were the kind of friends who were informal enough to email without a signature.

He stared at the empty subject line for half an hour. Eventually, he just put weird question and hit send before he could overthink. And then, he held his phone to his forehead, and he whispered oh fuck, to himself, in the early morning quiet of his empty, empty bedroom. He breathed, too fast and too hard. He got up and did his sunrise yoga routine, but he was worse than usual, and his hands shook through the whole thing. He made a savory smoothie, with artichoke hearts and chickpea and spinach, and thought about the particular cadence Ilya would take on when he inevitably called Shane’s smoothies disgusting. God, he missed Ilya. He got suddenly, incandescently angry, then—at Ilya, for bringing it up, for needing more than Shane thought he could give—and then he got so guilty about getting angry that he couldn’t stomach the rest of the smoothie, and poured most of it in the trash.

He went for a run. A long one. He threw up into a bush outside his building. He pulled out his phone, after, and stared at his contacts. There were still no new texts from Ilya. Shane still didn’t know how to fix it.

The email came back close to midnight. Shane was parked on the couch watching replays of his latest fuckups when his phone buzzed where it lay, face-up on the coffee table. And so, Shane had snatched it up, thinking that maybe it was Ilya, and had nearly cried when the notification was from his fucking gmail.

Sure, Scott had replied. To answer your question, there was some good and some bad. Absolutely worth it though. Wouldn’t change a thing. I’m pretty busy right now, but we can talk after the wedding. Oh, and if my wedding doesn’t make the front page, I’ll break both your kneecaps next time you play New York ;) He’d signed off with Thanks, Scott.

Shane had nearly thrown his phone across the fucking room. Just thanks? Like Shane was some corporate marketing exec? And the rest of it was fucking useless. He hadn’t needed some vague fucking nonsense about it all being worth it in the end, he’d needed specifics—what did the league say? How was management? Did anybody try to force Scott into early retirement? How was the locker room? Who still called him a faggot when they thought he couldn’t hear? Shane needed to put together a fucking plan. He needed intel, not this—this stupid, mushy bullshit.

And there had been a little kernel of hurt there, too, buried deep inside. Shane had expected—well. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, exactly, but it wasn’t Scott telling him to wait. And he had, stupidly, thought Scott would understand, about the waiting. About how painful it was. And, maybe, he’d wanted someone to tell him it was okay. To fucking—to give him permission, or something.

So, Shane did what he did best. He put together a fucking spreadsheet. It had a list of everybody he should probably come out to in person, in order of closeness and importance. It had a tentative timeline for a soft launch of their relationship, which included carefully scripted media appearances and ideas for subtle Instagram posts and a detailed analysis of whether they’d be breaking the rules if they used rainbow-colored tape outside of pride nights. There was a prepared statement, and a list of media outlets that might be willing to do a coming out interview, and a long, long list of which brands Shane thought would drop him, and which ones he thought might keep him on, and some new ones he might ask his mom about, in the meantime. Next to each entry was a tentative date.

It was, by the end, fucking massive. Shane fell into building it the way he’d only ever really fallen into reviewing game tape. By the time he was done, it was almost four in the morning the next day, and he hadn’t eaten anything at all since that savory breakfast smoothie from the day before, and his eyes were so bloodshot and gritty that he could hardly see. He emailed it to Ilya with no context—no subject line, no signoff, no text in the body. And then he just sat there, on his couch, laptop on his lap; too tired to get up and go to bed, too wired to fall asleep.

And, so, Shane sat there, blurry and indistinct, until his phone rang at seven-thirty in the morning. “Shane,” Ilya had said through the phone, still rough, like he’d just rolled out of bed. “What the fuck is this?”

“A game plan,” Shane had replied. His throat was so dry it hurt to speak.

For a long time, the only thing Shane heard was Ilya breathing. “For us?” He said, hesitant, and fragile, and so quiet it was hard for Shane to hear.

“Yeah.”

“Last date in here is August thirty-first.”

“You said end of summer,” Shane said, quiet. “And I need—” Shane swallowed, but it didn’t help the sticking in his throat. “—time. I don’t think I can do it all at once.”

The quiet, again. On the line, Ilya’s breath hitched. “You are sure? You want this? Because if you don’t, you need to say. I can’t—” His voice hitched, again, like he was going to cry, and Shane hated himself, just a little. “I don’t want this to be something you regret.”

“I think I’d regret not doing it more,” Shane said, mindless and exhausted. Ilya didn’t reply, so Shane played the words back to himself, and swore, quietly. “I, uh,” he stuttered. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Is okay,” Ilya had replied. “I think I know what you meant.” He heard a mouse clicking—Ilya, looking at his stupid spreadsheet. “First thing on here is telling your parents. When do we do this, do you think?”

“I dunno,” Shane said, and yawned into the tail end of the word. “There’s a family dinner in two weeks. We could do it then.”

A rustle, on the other end of the line. The slap of bare feet on hardwood, and the fridge opening, and the clink of glass jars knocking together. “Dinner where? What is dress code?”

“At their house, christ. Dress code is, I dunno.” Shane yawned again. “What are you wearing right now?”

“T-shirt I’ve had since Juniors and boxers full of holes. Very sexy, I know.”

Shane huffed, because he was too tired to laugh. He shifted his laptop onto the coffee table, and slumped sideways onto the couch, his phone held tight to his ear. “Okay, well. Maybe just put on pants.”

“Mm. You Canadians are too informal. How are you so polite and still have no fucking manners?” Ilya lit a burner—Shane heard it click. The sound went a little louder, then, because Ilya had probably put the phone on speaker and propped it on the countertop while he cooked. “Don’t answer that. What do your parents like to drink? Wine? Beer?”

“Dad likes vodka—”

“—A shame you didn’t inherit his good taste—” Ilya interjected.

“Shut up!” Shane laughed. He pawed along the top of the couch until he found the blanket he usually kept there—a soft, knit thing—and kicked it over himself. He settled in on his side, too fucking exhausted to even pretend he wanted to haul himself all the way upstairs to his bed. “Mom likes wine.”

“What kind?”

“I dunno, white?”

Ilya sighed, dramatically. He added something to a skillet. It sizzled, loud, and the sound made Shane’s stomach rumble. “You are useless. Hopeless. How am I supposed to convince your parents to like me if you don’t give me, fucking, insider information?”

And Shane was tired. He was so, so tired, and he’d been wondering for a while. “Why are you so scared of them?” He asked, then yawned again. His eyes felt fuzzy. He wanted to sink right through the floor.

For a long time, Ilya was quiet. Shane listened as Ilya cracked eggs into a bowl, and chopped up something crunchy, and whisked it together in a bowl. An omelette, then. With onion and pepper, probably, and cheese, and a shit ton of bacon. Shane drifted into dozing, and the world went soft and syrup-sweet. “You love them,” Ilya said, like it was simple. And maybe, to him, it was. ”I just want things to be easy for you.”

“I don’t want easy,” Shane mumbled. He relaxed by degrees. His phone slipped down his cheek, so the speaker was pressed to his temple. “I want you.”

“Fuck,” Ilya said, so indecent it was practically a moan. It was quieter and tinnier than usual. Shane’s phone slipped a little lower. The bottom corner dug into Shane’s nose. “You kill me. You are killing me. What are you wearing? Can you video?”

“I’m—” Shane yawned so long and so wide that his jaw clicked, then cracked, and it hurt to close his mouth after. “I’m too tired, Ilya. I’m about to fall asleep.”

“Shane,” Ilya said, all concerned and shit. “when was the last time you slept?” But Shane didn’t reply. He was too far gone, sunk deep into the couch cushions, already mostly dreaming. ”Okay, crazy man,” Shane heard Ilya say, in his dreams. “I will call tomorrow.” And Shane drifted off with a hint of a smile on his face—the first time he’d smiled all fucking week.

May 23, 2021

Shane runs down the halls in a blind panic. He checks the little nooks with vending machines, the cramped rooms full of ice machines and coin-operated laundry. He checks the stairwells one at a time, up then down, up then down. And, of course, he finds his mom in the very last one he thinks to check, sat on the landing halfway to the ground floor, crying her fucking eyes out.

And now that he’s here, he doesn’t know what to do. She hasn’t seen him yet—she’s wiping at her eyes with her sleeves. Shane can count on one hand the number of times he’s ever seen her cry; mostly when he was little, always very late at night, on the couch, her only company an empty wine glass and a messy stack of bills and the low, yellow light that shone dim from the only lamp in the room. And when he was little, he’d walk over to her on quiet, bare feet, a blanket over his shoulders like a cape and his thumb in his mouth, and he’d crawl up next to her and put his head on the side of her arm, or her lap, or her stomach. And she’d let him stay, for a minute or two, before she wiped away her tears and said hey, little man, why are you up so late?

So, Shane does what he used to do when he was a kid. He pads down the stairs and sits next to his mom, careful, like she’ll spook if he moves too fast. He’s so much bigger than her—taller, wider—but he slouches down anyways, and carefully lays his head on her shoulder.

“I was gonna tell you next week,” he says, soft. “At dinner. You were first on the list.”

She sniffs, and wipes her nose on the sleeve she just used to wipe her eyes. It’s unlike her. Shane should’ve brought tissues. “I’m sorry,” she says, and slowly lets her cheek rest against the top of Shane’s head. “I just—” she sniffs again, and says, broken, “was it something I did?”

Shane shakes his head. His eyes are, surprisingly, dry. He’s got nothing left to give. “No,” he says, and it’s a little lie, but the past couple of years have taught him that it’s okay to lie, sometimes, when you desperately want the lie to be true. “I never really thought you’d be, like, an asshole about it. I’m just—” Shane takes a shuddering breath, and closes his eyes. “I’m scared,” Shane admits. “All the time. Of everything. Ilya’s therapist told him I probably have anxiety.”

Mom doesn’t say anything, but Shane can feel her tense up, beneath his cheek. “That wasn’t you, either,” Shane says. “I’m just like that, I think.”

“Do you have a therapist?” she asks, tentatively.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Shane shrugs. He doesn’t know what to say. It never really occurred to him that he might need one. And for a long time, either of them say anything at all. Shane’s ass is going numb from the cold concrete, and his back hurts from the awkward position, but he doesn’t dare move. He stays right where he is, as Mom’s crying tapers off into little hitching breaths, and then the hitch eases, and it’s like she was never crying at all.

“Your dad and I,” she says, after Shane’s hip has started to cramp up. “We worried about you. We’ve been worried about you for a while.” She shifts, then, and wraps an arm around Shane’s shoulders. “You seemed lonely. And you never brought anyone home, not once. And we weren’t mad about that, or disappointed in you, but we worried. Life is so hard, sometimes. And it can be harder when you’re alone. We wanted—” She cuts herself off. Shane looks up, and sees her biting at her lip, new tears shining in the corner of her eye. “We just wanted you to have what we did, when we were your age. And you did,” she says, wet. “You did this whole time, and I didn’t know.”

“I did,” Shane agrees, a bittersweet smile faint on his cheeks. He stands, then, and holds his hand out to her. “You wanna come meet him for real?”

She takes it, and Shane hauls her to her feet. “Oh god,” Mom cries, all of a sudden. “I was such an asshole. He hates me, doesn’t he? You know, I wouldn’t blame him. God, the things I said. I told you he was only acting all buddy-buddy with you to steal trade secrets!” And Shane can’t help it—he laughs, and laughs, and laughs. He laughs until he cries. He laughs himself sick. “This isn’t funny, Shane!” Mom cries. “Your husband thinks I’m a—a Just-No-M-I-L!”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Shane replies, still laughing a little, and starts walking back up the stairs. Mom isn’t far behind. “He just wants you to like him. Every time we had a meeting for the charity, he’d call me the day before and ask me what he should wear.”

Mom huffs out a laugh; it’s just a little thing, but the relief it sends through Shane almost has him keeling over right there, in the middle of the staircase. “Really?” she says, sly.

“Really.”

She snorts. “So, you told him to wear—”

“God, no. He did that all on his own.” Shane pulls open the door to their floor, and they walk down the hallway side by side. Before they get to the hotel room, Shane touches her arm, to slow her down, and she turns to look at him with her brow all furrowed and her mouth pressed flat and concerned. “Please don’t tease him about it,” Shane whispers. “Parents are complicated, for him.”

Mom fixes him with a look, then. Shane doesn’t know how to describe it. “You really love him, don’t you.”

“Yeah,” Shane replies. “I really, really do.” And he steps forward, and swipes his room key through the card reader, and swings the door open.

_____

May 21, 2021

Shane’s mom dropped him off at Ottawa International Airport at two in the afternoon. He was early. His flight didn’t leave until five-thirty. She parked at the terminal in her cherry red Toyota Camry, which was, of course, spotless inside, and still smelled like new car, even though she’d had it for almost a decade.

“Don’t forget your cufflinks,” she said, as she pulled to the side of the road, to let Shane out of the car. “And remember to make sure people can see your watch when you walk the carpet.”

“I know, Mom,” Shane replied, long-suffering, already trying to anticipate how long it would take him to get through security—Ilya had bet him fifty dollars that he’d be faster getting through than Shane, and Shane wanted that fifty dollars more than he’d wanted his four-figure goal bonuses last season.

“And steam your suit when you get there,” she continued, and got out of the car to, presumably, help Shane with his bag.

“I will,” Shane replied, and slung his overnight bag across his chest, garment bag in one hand and his phone in the other. “It’s just a wedding. It’ll be fine.”

Mom fixed him with a look. “It’s not just a wedding,” she said, and Shane kissed the air next to her cheek in goodbye. “It’s a statement. It’s a fuck-you to someone high up in the MLH. That’s why he invited the press.”

Shane shrugged. It seemed paranoid to him, but what did Shane know? He had a habit of assuming the best in people that his mom never really understood. “I dunno. Maybe he just invited them so they wouldn’t try to gatecrash.”

She leaned in, then, and hugged him, quick and tight, like he was gonna be gone for three weeks instead of three days. “Just be careful.”

“I will,” Shane said, and threw a saucy little salute. His mom looked at him funny the second he did it. It was, after all, something that belonged more on Ilya than on him. And then Shane turned his back, and disappeared into the buzz of the airport. If she lingered, Shane didn’t bother checking.

Shane won the fifty dollars, of course. The flight was short and uneventful. The uber to his hotel was worse—it was eight in the afternoon on a Friday by the time Shane wrestled his way out of JFK, and traffic was hell. By the time he checked into his hotel, it was later than Shane would like, and he’d missed his usual window to eat dinner, and Ilya wasn’t there to make it better, because Ilya had booked a completely different hotel several blocks away—a habit that neither of them were quite ready to kick.

The room itself was both familiar and unfamiliar; Shane had spent most of his teenage years and adult life in and out of chain hotels just like this. The floor was covered in a busy, striped carpet that desperately wanted to be modern, but screamed we don’t employ enough housekeepers to make sure your floor gets vacuumed every day. The quilt on the bed was white and smelled like industrial-grade bleach. There was a closet area where he could hang the garment bag with his suit inside. There was a little safe he could use to store his cufflinks and Rolex. The TV got HGTV, which was really all that mattered.

So, Shane burnt off the jittery feeling under his skin with a long run on the hotel’s lone treadmill, then a long ride on one of the hotel’s stationary bikes. He looked at the weight rack, then thought better of it. Somehow, the set of plates was missing a few important pieces, and the rack looked even rustier than the ancient thing Shane used to use back when he was in secondary school. After, Shane tested out the water pressure in the shower, which was fine, and he tested the texture of the towels, which was also fine. Shane kind of preferred the towels in cheap hotels anyways. The fluffy ones always left him covered in lint.

After, he turned on HGTV, and in another hotel room in another hotel several blocks away, Ilya did the same, and they both bitched about the godawful design choices in Good Bones over facetime. It was always the fucking wallpaper. Somehow, the one the hosts picked was always the most hideous thing either of them had ever seen. And the bitching had turned to flirting, like it usually did, and the flirting got Shane hard, and before he knew it, Shane was riding his fingers and begging Ilya to please, please let him come for an entire fucking hour before Ilya decided he’d suffered enough. Shane had fallen asleep with the call still open. His last sight was of Ilya’s face, at an awkward angle, smooshed against a flat hotel pillow.

In the morning, Shane very carefully steamed his suit with a travel-sized steamer that perpetually lived at the bottom of his bag. He showered for so long the water went cold. He watched soap suds swirl down the drain and tried very hard not to think of anything at all.

This, of course, was impossible. Everything reminded him of Ilya—washing his hair, toweling off, putting on deodorant, brushing his fucking teeth. He put on his suit for the day; boring black socks, boring black slacks, boring white shirt and boring suit jacket. He wondered what Ilya would think about it. He could picture it in his mind’s eye; Ilya’s keen gaze roving over him, head to toes, his nose in the air, something sly playing around the corner of his mouth. Boring, he’d say. Terribly boring. And then he’d undo the top two buttons on Shane’s starch-stiff dress shirt, and mess up his hair in a way that looked artful instead of stupid, and steal his tie, and nod, once, and slap the side of Shane’s neck like a proud father sending his son off to prom.

And, not for the first time, Shane wondered what they could’ve had, if he’d been braver, and kinder, and a better boyfriend. Would he be wearing a boring suit like this? Would the two of them walk down the aisle in a botanical garden, surrounded by flowers? Or maybe there was some Russian tradition Ilya had wanted, at one point, but never thought to mention because he never thought he could have it. Shane didn’t know. He’d never bothered to ask.

So, Shane ran gel through his hair, and put on cologne he’d spotted in Ilya’s bathroom, years ago, before they’d ever gotten married, and purchased on a whim a couple weeks later. He’d kept the bottle in his underwear drawer, Shane remembers, because he was so embarrassed about it. And sometimes, late at night, he’d pull it out and put his nose to the atomizer when he jerked off, which had always made him come harder than his own inadequate hands ever could.

He got a little lost in the memory. The smell of it made his face flush and his dick twitch. And then he stood, for a while, because sitting would put creases in his pants, and he looked out the window, at the New York summertime traffic, and tried to dream them up a big white wedding, but he couldn’t picture it. All the other weddings he’d been to were straight, and fairly religious, and how would it work, anyway? Would Shane wear a white suit instead of a wedding dress? Ilya wouldn’t, Shane knew. He’d make a joke about the color washing him out, and being too much of a slut to wear it anyways. So, the only thing he saw, in his mind’s eye, when he pictured them getting married, was Ilya with his hair crushed flat on one side and peanut dust on his chin, wearing a ratty sweatshirt with a hole in the armpit and a wide, wobbly smile that hurt to look at.

_____

May 23, 2021

The first thing Shane sees, when him and his mom come back to the hotel room, is Ilya standing by the window with a cigarette between his lips. The shades are drawn back, and the window is cracked, so the cold morning air and sleepy pre-dawn traffic sounds and the lingering smell of cigarette smoke have crept inside, and made the room their home.

Ilya turns to look, the second he hears the door creep open, and stares at Shane and his mom for a heartbeat. For two. Then he whips his head back towards the window and blows a stream of smoke outside, and shoves the window shut with his shoulder. “You are good?” he says, his eyes flickering between Shane and his mom. He rubs at the side of his nose with his thumb, cigarette perched between his first two fingers, and chews at the inside of his lip.

“Yeah,” Shane tells him. “We’re okay.”

“Those things will kill you, you know,” Mom says, a single eyebrow raised. She looks over at Dad, like why didn’t you stop him, and Dad shrugs. He seems fascinated by the whole thing.

“I know,” Ilya replies, and scratches at the back of his neck. He stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill behind him, and flicks the butt into the trash. “Many people tell me this. Is a bad habit,” he continues, and looks at Shane, “but I am terrible at quitting things.” And then he winks. God, he’s terrible. Shane loves him to fucking pieces.

Mom stares at Ilya for a long, uncomfortable moment. He’s not really sure what she’s looking for, or what she thinks she sees. It’s just Ilya, with his fucked-up hair and his inside-out shirt, a little skinny the way everyone is a little skinny at the end of the season.

“I think I owe you an apology,” she says to him, after she’s been looking long enough that Ilya has started to squirm.

Ilya looks around the room, as if to say who, me? “For what?”

“Jesus Christ,” she says, and marches up to him. “Can I give you a hug?” and she barely waits for him to nod before she’s leaning up and yanking Ilya down, so she can wrap her arms around his shoulders. “I always told myself I wasn’t gonna be that kind of mother-in-law,” she says, soft, close to Ilya’s ear. “You know, the kind that people make Reddit threads about.”

“You were not so bad,” Ilya murmurs into her shoulder. “My babushka used to call my mama terrible names and hit her with walking stick. Compared to her, you are an angel.”

“You had it rough for a long time, didn’t you,” she says, but it isn’t really a question. Ilya stiffens, and he shoots Shane a panicked glance. “It’s okay,” Mom says, and pats him on the back. “You don’t have to answer that.” Then, she pulls away, and puts her hands on her hips. “So, you two said something about coming out by the end of the summer?” She turns to Shane, then, and raises an eyebrow. “I assume you came up with a plan.”

“Yeah,” Shane replies. “It’s in a spreadsheet. Lemme email it.” He does—from his phone, because Shane has had the Excel app on his phone since it was first released in 2014. Mom pulls out her laptop from a bag Shane hadn’t even noticed she’d carried inside, and plops down on the couch, and commandeers the coffee table.

“This is good,” she says, scrolling through Shane’s careful timeline, “but it’ll need to be completely reworked. I see why you were upset, Shane. Those pictures really threw a wrench into things.” Her brow furrows when she gets to the bottom of the spreadsheet, where Shane had listed out all his endorsements. “The brands you’ve got here are mostly accurate,” she says with a smile. “I’m impressed! I thought you never paid attention when I tried to talk to you about these things.”

“What—” Shane splutters. He goes over to the fridge, and grabs himself a ginger ale, and takes a long, long swig. “Of course I was paying attention! You told me to!”

She waves a hand, dismissive, already onto the next task. “We’ll need to prepare a statement, of course. And we’ll need to move fast—a prestigious organization will be much more likely to take this story if it hasn’t broken yet.”

Shane looks over at Ilya. Ilya shrugs. “What does that even mean?” Shane says, and pulls Ilya to sit next to him at the foot of the bed. He holds out his ginger ale, and Ilya shrugs, again, and takes a sip.

“It means,” Mom says, slowly, “that I can still get you a profile in GQ if we play our cards right.”

And, all of a sudden, Shane wonders what the fucking point of all this is. It’s more than a little ridiculous, him and Ilya and Mom and Dad running around like headless chickens, trying to fix something that never should’ve been a problem to begin with. And he thinks, then, about what Ilya had said to him the night before. Tell her, before someone else tells her for you. It was good advice, Shane thinks. Solid. Right on the money. Shane really should listen to Ilya more. He was really fucking smart, under all the stupid shit he said.

“Fuck it,” Shane says, and slams the rest of the ginger ale, then pulls out his phone. He opens up Instagram, and starts a new post.

“Shane,” Ilya says, wary, “what are you doing?”

“Being brave,” Shane mumbles, and starts typing. You’re all probably about to see some interesting pictures pop up on TMZ, he types. So, to clear up the rumors before they begin: I’m gay. Ilya and I have been involved since 2010. We got married in 2017. He’s the love of my life. Can’t wait to crush him in the playoffs next season. He adds a little heart emoji at the end. He pulls out his wallet, and snaps a pic of his marriage license, and adds that, too. Before he can overthink, or second-guess, or talk himself out of it, he hits post. And just like that, it’s done. It’s over. Fucking finished.

Ilya wrestles his phone out of his hands, and Shane lets him have it. It’s already posted. There’s no taking it back. Ilya stares at Shane’s phone with his brow furrowed, and then a smile blooms over his face, and he starts to laugh. “You are ridiculous,” he says, and pulls Shane into a headlock, so he can rub his knuckles over the top of Shane’s head.

“What?” Dad says, and Mom says, simultaneously, “what did he do?”

“Apparently,” Ilya drawls, and tosses Shane’s phone over to Dad, “we are coming out via post on fucking Instagram.” Ilya laughs again, and smacks a sloppy, wet kiss to Shane’s temple. “This is a terrible post, Hollander. I can do better.”

Mom’s eyes go wide. “What is he doing. Ilya, what are you doing.”

Ilya just types on his phone, an evil little grin on his face. He pulls a piece of paper out of his wallet, and carefully unfolds it, and sets it, gentle, on the bedside table, to get a picture with better lighting in it. When he’s done, he folds the paper back up so careful, like it’s the most precious thing he has, and slips it back in his wallet, next to the mishmash of Canadian and American bills he keeps on him. He shoves his wallet back in his pocket. And then, he tilts his phone, to show Shane what it was he did.

The rumors are true, Ilya had posted in reply. This is how he proposed. And attached is a picture of the list Shane wrote out, all those years ago. It’s creased and worn, after spending years riding around folded up inside of Ilya’s wallet, but Shane remembers writing it like he’d just put down the pencil an hour ago. Reasons Why We Should Get Married, it says across the top in Shane’s neat block capitals. And below, on each line:

1) I love you. 2) We can combine our incomes, so you’ll never be broke. 3) I can sponsor you for Canadian citizenship, so you won’t ever have to worry about being deported. 4) I can file your taxes for you. 5) You can be my medical proxy, and I can be yours. 6) We can share health insurance. 7) We’d get a really good tax credit. 8) You’ll get half my shit if we ever divorce. 9) We can pool our charitable donations. 10) It’ll be way easier to adopt, if that’s something you want.

And then, at the end, completely separate and centered on the rest of the paper: and also, I love you.

For a long time, Shane stares down at Ilya’s phone. He feels too full inside—like he can’t possibly hold any more love for Ilya than he does right now. His wonderful, beautiful, terribly sentimental husband, that wears his mama’s cross every day even though he hasn’t stepped foot in a church since he was fourteen, and got a tattoo of a fucking loon because it reminded him of Shane, and, apparently, kept a silly piece of paper in his wallet for four fucking years, like some sort of talisman.

“You kept it?” Shane breathes. He turns to look at Ilya, then, and god, it’s like looking straight into the fucking sun. The last time he saw that particular face was months ago, when Ilya had taken him to bed and fucked him for what felt like hours, so slow it barely did anything at all, until they were both in tears. And he’d looked down at Shane like he was some sort of miracle, like he was the only thing in the world that mattered.

“Shane,” Ilya says, and leans in, and pressed their foreheads together. “You are an idiot. Of fucking course I kept it.”

Shane presses closer, flattening their noses together. He takes Ilya’s hands in his, and squeezes so tight his knuckles go white and bloodless. He laughs, wet, and a tear trickles through the crinkles at the corner of his eye. “And I’m supposed to be the sap?” he whispers, so close their lips almost brush. He draws back, when Ilya leans in—teasing, still. Delighting in the simple fact that Ilya is always so fucking desperate for it.

“Well,” Ilya wrestles his hands out of Shane’s grip, so he can get his palms on Shane’s jaw, his thumb pressed to Shane’s chin. He tries for another kiss; Shane tips his head at the last second, so Ilya’s lips smear across his cheek. “You’re Canadian. Your blood has been mostly replaced by maple syrup.”

Shane huffs, and smiles even wider. “That doesn’t even make sense, asshole,” he complains, and plucks at Ilya’s shirt, and gets a hand around one of Ilya’s wrists, so he can thumb at the pulsing vein there.

“Whatever,” Ilya says, and slips one of his hands to the back of Shane’s neck, and the other down, to grope at his chest. “Shut up and gimme kiss, you wretch.” And so, Shane does. It starts off slow and simple, but then Ilya licks at his bottom lip, and Shane opens his mouth, because of course he does, how could he not, and by the time they pull away, there’s a line of spit dribbling down Shane’s chin and more strung between their lips.

“Four years,” Dad whispers. Shane hears it in a distant sort of way—he’s too busy staring into Ilya’s eyes, at his nose, at the mole on his cheek, at the uncomplicated curl of his mouth.

“Four fucking years,” Mom replies, but her voice is warm, and when Shane finally manages to pull back, she’s looking at him and Ilya with wet, shining eyes.

And for a minute or two, they all linger there, happy tears unshed, cheeks dimpled and flushed. Shane tips his head back and laughs at the ceiling. He’s so happy he could die of it.

“This is a nice moment,” Ilya says, “And I do not want to interrupt. But, I think,” he continues, and pokes at Shane’s side until he comes back down to earth and looks at him like he’ll actually fucking listen. “We should probably get out of New York before Hunter wakes up. He will send his Admirals to hunt us down like dogs, once he sees we are trending above his big gay wedding on Instagram.”

Mom laughs. “You are? Already?”

“I didn’t check,” Ilya replies, “but I don’t need to. We are hot and young, and very interesting, and have just announced very interesting secret marriage. Hunter is old and boring, and his wedding was old and boring. Very beautiful,” Ilya admits, “but traditional. Boring. We will beat him, easy.”

“Fuck,” Shane says, and scrubs his hands through his hair. “He’s gonna hate me now, isn’t he.”

Ilya knocks their shoulders together. “Maybe a little, but who cares? He is old and boring.” Ilya takes in Shane’s frown, and taps at Shane’s kneecap. “And he is not asshole,” he says, after an awkward pause. “He will forgive you. Probably. Almost definitely. But we should still go. Just in case.”

And, so. Ilya tosses all his shit into his bag indiscriminately, and zips it closed by putting his foot on the top flap and yanking on the zipper with enough force that Shane is scared he’ll break it. They all stumble down the stairs, one at a time, through the lobby, which is still dark and empty—it’s so early, nobody is even thinking about setting up the breakfast buffet. Everyone piles into Mom’s cherry-red Camry; Mom and Dad in the back, Shane driving, Ilya in the passenger seat.

They pick up Shane’s bag from his hotel, and then they’re off, headed west on I-280. Behind them, the sun creeps up over the horizon, and Shane’s parents drift off in the backseat. They get coffee at a Sunoco sometime after they picked up the I-80, on the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Ilya tries to argue his way into switching, but Shane has seen how he drives, and like hell is he letting Ilya anywhere near the wheel of any car he doesn’t own outright.

They hold hands, whenever Shane isn’t taking a sip of his coffee or fighting his way through a heavy bit of early morning traffic. The sun shines golden at their backs; the rumble of the road smooth and familiar.

“I’m sorry it took me so long,” Shane says, hours after his coffee is gone. He says it soft—his parents are still asleep in the back, toppled together like dominoes.

“Hey, none of that.” Ilya replies, and gently knocks his fist against Shane’s shoulder. “We made it, didn’t we? You are here, I am here. I am happy.” He pauses, and out of the corner of his eye, Shane sees Ilya look at him, a little shy and unsure. “You are happy too, I think.”

“Yeah,” Shane risks a glance over at him, so Ilya can see the soft little smile on his face. “I am.”

Ilya reaches over, and pokes Shane in the cheek, then cups the back of his neck, and scratches through the fine little hairs behind Shane’s ear. “Okay, so there is no problem.” And then, softer, “we did just fine, Hollander. We got there in the end.”

And there’s still a long way to go, Shane knows. People will have a million and one questions, and he and Ilya will have to decide which ones to answer, and how, and when. They’ll probably have to do a couple of joint interviews. Maybe they really will get a profile in GQ. And there’s the league to worry about, and Shane’s asshole teammates, and Montreal management, who’ll probably be pissed about being blindsided. And, despite it all, Shane still hasn’t bought Ilya a wedding ring. But they’re at the top of the mountain now, and Shane can see the rest of the path spread before them in a long and careful descent. It’s a beautiful path, and the destination calls to him like nothing else ever has. Yeah, he thinks, and fumbles for Ilya’s hand, so he can twine their fingers together over the empty paper cups in the center console cupholders. They’ll make it. They’ll do just fine. They’ll get there in the end.  

to conclude. this fic would not exist without my many many friends who hyped me up along the way. thank u everyone. especially luulapants, who did a lot of independent research on my behalf and rightly called me out for being carpilled. thank u thank u and bless. im also kicking around the idea of an epilogue, so like. stay tuned if you want.

what can i say. the circle of internet perverts has struck again. a few points of clarification:

- pretty much the entire thing is written, so i will post the rest like. whenever. in the days to come. i live a very full and beautiful life when im not consumed by worms
- in case it was not clear: shane's parents do NOT know about ilya, and they do not know about shane being gay. those men are so deep in the closet they got married there. future kings of narnia etc etc
- the great bitcoin crash was actually in 2018, not 2017. thank god this is a work of fiction
- bitcoin has since recovered to like quadruple what it was worth pre-2018 crash. future ilya is doing just fine lol
- i have never been to the brooklyn botanical garden but rest assured, this will be my first stop if i am ever in new york