Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Rose Landry, Hayden Pike, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Svetlana Vetrova, Jackie Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Grigori Rozanov, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Vincent Lemaire

Additional Tags:

Reality TV, Rookie Year, Secret Relationship, Sneaking Around, Sneaking Out, Non-Penetrative Sex, Penetrative Sex, Blow Jobs, First Time Blow Jobs, Consensual Sex, Anal Sex, Top Ilya Rozanov, Bottom Shane Hollander, POV Third Person Limited, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Pre-Relationship, Rivals to Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Video Cameras, Sex Tapes, Masturbation, Sexting, Dirty Talk, POV Alternating, Slow Burn, Complicated Relationships, Flirting, Ilya Rozanov is a Menace, Smut, Yearning, Texting, Mutual Pining, Porn with Plot, Work In Progress, Mixed Media

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-26 Updated: 2026-06-14 Words: 32,296 Chapters: 16/?

The First Shift

Summary

Three rookies. One season. Cameras everywhere. The First Shift is a reality show following the NHL’s hottest rookies from Draft Day through their first year — on the ice, off it, and everywhere in between. Which is a problem for Shane and Ilya almost immediately.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

June 2009 — Los Angeles

Shane’s name is supposed to be called tomorrow. First, his mother keeps saying — his agent, technically — like it’s already decided, like all Shane has to do is show up and let it happen. 

The NHL Draft, a day his whole life in the making.

He’s been on this track since he could skate, the pressure really picking up since he was sixteen — watched, measured, ranked. Talked about like the future before he’s had the chance to grow old enough to really have a past. The last two days in LA have just been more of the same: interviews, media hits, stepping in front of cameras and then away again, able to breathe once they turn off. His social battery, charged and then depleted, over and over.

He barely has anything left as he cuts through the lobby toward the elevators and looks up to see a full setup already waiting, lights on, cameras fixed, a space cleared out like it belongs to them now — and realizes, with a slow drop in his stomach, that these are the cameras that won’t be turning off.

“Ready?” Yuna asks, a hand on his elbow.

“I kind of have to be, don’t I?” he says, smiling without looking at her.

The commitment spans more than a year, embedded media tracking him from Draft Day through his rookie season — including whether he even makes the roster, or burns out before the show ever airs. The First Shift won’t premiere until after the start of the 2009–2010 season — slated for primetime on a premium network in both the States and Canada, A-list narration, press tour, the whole thing. There are options, depending on how he performs — whether his team makes the Cup, wins it.

But first, he has to get drafted.

And he’s only one of three players they’ll follow.

He didn’t ask who the others were.

So when he finds Ilya Rozanov standing at the center of the film crew, mouth curling into a wry smile at something a cameraman has said, he’s both surprised and not.

Ilya Rozanov — Russia’s number one export, and, if things go the way they’re supposed to, the player drafted right after him. Of course he’d be at the top of their list alongside Shane — their budding rivalry already a recurring theme in every interview he’s done today.

“Hollander,” he says, low, as Shane approaches. Not a greeting exactly, but more than Rozanov gave him back in Regina when Shane introduced himself the first time.

“Rozanov,” Shane returns, just as even. He can feel the shift as a camera — and everyone around them — locks in on the space between them, on the moment their hands meet. A firm shake. Once. No more. “Good to see you again.”

“Will not be when I am drafted first and you are crying into jersey of a team no one wants to play for.”

Shane can feel his mother angling toward them, can hear the sharp click of her heel. Heat climbs up his neck, up to the tips of his ears. This is his battle to fight, and before she can step in, he says, “We’ll see about that,” and turns to go.

Except it’s not as easy as just walking away. 

The crew splits. Half of them peel off to follow him through the lobby and out into the courtyard. The rest keep a camera trained on Rozanov, whose easy laugh follows Shane through the automatic doors.

Outside, he shrugs off his jacket. LA is warmer than he expected, the ocean too far to matter downtown. Or maybe it’s just Rozanov under his skin. Either way, he pops the button at his collar and savors the small rush of air it gives him.

“He’s a real piece of work,” his father, David, says, pulling up beside him, one hand settling on Shane’s shoulder. “We’ll have to work on your chirping if you’re going toe-to-toe with that one.”

“I’d rather focus on the game.”

“This is the game, son.” David laughs, and Shane can practically see the tape starting to roll in his father’s mind — the good old days at McGill. “You have to score goals and talk shit. I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“That’s not me, Dad.”

Shane squints into the middle distance, somewhere over David’s shoulder, toward the steady hum of traffic on the freeway to the west. For a moment, he gets lost in the noise, forgets the semi-circle of people gathered around them. The cameras are silent, and he wonders how long it will take before he stops noticing them at all — the people fading into the background, the same as lamps and chairs. For the sake of his game, he hopes it happens fast.

He scratches at the back of his neck before turning toward them. 

“Sorry — can I just ask something?”

A couple of them nod. One of them — copper hair, headset, late thirties, maybe early forties — steps forward.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Are you the team that’s going to be with me for the duration?”

“We’ll rotate in and out across teams, but I’ll be your constant.” She shifts the clipboard under her arm and extends a hand. “Claire Landry — producer.”

Shane shakes her hand. “That’s great. And what’s the schedule like — are there days off, weekends? Do you only film certain things, like the big days?”

“This was all in the contract, sweetie,” Yuna says, leaning in at his shoulder.

“No, I know.” He doesn’t look at her. Keeps his eyes on Claire, lifts a hand slightly between them — I’ve got this. “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

Claire nods once, unfazed. “Well, we film as much as we can, as much as you’re comfortable. The day-to-day, the big moments, the betweens.” She taps the edge of the clipboard with her thumb, like she’s said this before. “It’s such an unpredictable time in your life — we wouldn’t want to miss something important because we took a day off.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I get that.” Shane rakes a hand over his face, exhales through his nose. “But I’ll have some privacy, like when I go home at night?”

There’s a flicker of movement behind her — one of the camera operators adjusts position, lens angling slightly closer.

“There will be cameras in your home when we’re filming,” Claire says. “We’ll coordinate around your schedule. And we’ll give you something for video diaries — you can use it as much or as little as you want.”

Shane nods. 

“Great, thanks. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

“Same. And for what it’s worth,” Claire adds, “I’ve got you going first.”

“Well, I like her already,” David cuts in, clapping Shane on the back, pulling his attention back into the moment and away from the cameras capturing it. “Now how about we go get changed for that dinner?”

***

Ilya sits at the bar with his father, a nearly empty glass of vodka set between them, clear and sharp under the low light. The bartender pours another without asking, sets it down, moves on — Grigori’s third in an hour. 

Around them, the crew holds a loose circle — bodies and equipment arranged just far enough back to suggest privacy, not enough to give it. It creates the shape of something contained, something almost intimate, if you don’t look too closely.

Grigori does. His gaze drifts over his shoulder, lingering at the edges of where the illusion starts to break. 

Ilya reaches in for the glass while his father is looks outward and takes a small sip, nothing more than a taste, before setting it back exactly where it was, the rim aligned, the level barely changed. By the time Grigori’s attention returns, the glass is waiting for him like it hasn’t been touched at all.

They don’t look at each other when they speak. Not directly.

“How much are they paying you for this,” Grigori asks in Russian, quiet enough that it could pass for nothing, but Ilya knows the cameras will catch it — that it will come through in subtitles on screens across the country someday.

Grigori’s gaze slips outward again, toward the lenses and microphones. It’s all the invitation Ilya needs. Another small sip, just as measured as the first, as Grigori exhales through his nose, unimpressed.

“You let them watch everything.”

The words hang there, heavier than the tone they’re delivered in. Grigori doesn’t look back this time.

“Everyone will watch me soon enough,” Ilya says, the weight of tomorrow sitting comfortably at the back of his mind. Not pressure, just anticipation.

“This is true,” Grigori nods around a swallow of vodka. “Do your best not to embarrass the family.”

Ilya’s attention shifts toward the lobby, the crew moving ahead of Hollander and his parents, other guests swerving out of the way the way cars do for emergency vehicles. Ilya rubs his earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, watching — as everyone else does — as Hollander moves through the crowd, every set of eyes on him.

He thinks of the dichotomy. The way they’ll be portrayed on screen, already taking shape in moments like this. Hollander gliding across the lobby with a parent at each shoulder, warm, bright smiles falling easily into place. While Ilya sits beside his withering father, talking of embarrassments.

“I will do my best,” Ilya tells him absently.

“Do better than your best, Ilya.”

He nods, already half looking away, and watches as Grigori stands.

“I have dinner,” Grigori says — no excuse or apology in it, just fact. “Friends.”

Ilya nods again. He doesn’t ask who.

Grigori leaves the glass where it is, still half-full, and turns away, disappearing into the same crowd that parted for Hollander minutes earlier.

Ilya stays where he is, watching him go for a moment longer than necessary. Then he reaches for the glass and finishes it in one swallow, no pretense now, just the burn of it going down.

He sets it back on the bar and lifts a hand slightly.

The bartender brings the check without comment.

Ilya glances at it, reaches for his wallet, and settles it without hesitation. His father’s tab. On borrowed money. Paid out with familiar disgust.

The crew says nothing, but he looks at them as if they do. It’s a silence he’ll have to get used to.

***

Shane is spent by the time he makes his way to his hotel room around ten o’clock — a tour of the Staples Center and dinner at The Palm, courtesy of an agent more interested in coming for Yuna’s job than anything else, and more than willing to foot the bill.

Despite their constant presence throughout the evening, the camera crew doesn’t follow him past the threshold of his room. He lingers by the door, eye to the peephole, until they finally move down the hall — just to be sure they’re really, truly gone.

He knows what he signed up for, in theory. Being watched, scrutinized, televised. It’s something he’ll adjust to in time — three periods a game, three or four nights a week, nine months out of the year, if he’s lucky. But the exhaustion clings to him. He’s always been an overthinker, deliberate, but this — he’s been jumping through hoops in his head for hours, cataloguing every move before he makes it. It wears him thin.

He collapses into bed and tries not to think about how Ilya Rozanov is probably completely unbothered by all of it.

For half a second, he thinks he wants to go find him and ask.

Instead, he turns on the television and sinks back into the pillows, flipping channels until he lands on SportsCenter. Highlights from the MLB flash across the screen, and Shane wonders briefly how miserable it must be to play a sport outdoors. Heat creeps up his neck at the thought, and he’s back in the courtyard, Rozanov’s laugh trailing him.

He pulls at his collar and shakes his head.

When he looks up, there he is — staring back at him from the television. The same laugh, now in real time, wrapped around a cocky statement about going first in the draft being the only option.

“Yeah, right, Rozanov,” Shane says to no one.

On the screen, Rozanov winks into the camera. Shane reaches for the remote and shuts it off.

He still sees it when he closes his eyes.

Chapter End Notes

Well. I told myself I wasn’t going to start something new, and then I stayed up all night outlining this fun little thing and writing the first chapter on my lunch break and into the afternoon (don’t tell my boss, yeah?). As of now, I’m just going to be updating in real time as I write — no beta — because I have no restraint, so please excuse any typos, plot holes, or general idiocy. That also means tags will likely be updated in real time too, so be sure to check them every now and then. And as always, if you feel so moved as to leave a kind comment (we don’t do the other kind around here), it would mean the world to me.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

June 2009 — Los Angeles

It’s still dark when Ilya wakes on Draft Day, the blackout curtains doing nothing to convince his body it isn’t already mid-afternoon back in Moscow, where his bed would be empty by now. He lies there for a minute, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling as the light from the television, left on like a bedtime story, makes shapes overhead.

ESPN is a recycled loop from the day before, both too early and too late for new coverage — Barry Melrose’s voice cutting in and out between highlight packages, pre-taped draft coverage, the interview he did the morning before.

All things Ilya’s already heard, but he listens anyway.

Not just to what they’re saying, but how they say it. The way sentences run together, the way certain words are softened or stretched, how quickly the commentators move from one thought to the next without pausing to translate themselves. He follows most of it easily now without thinking too hard about it, the same way he’s trained everything else — repetition, correction, again, until it sticks — but knowing he will be filmed, broadcast makes him want to be exact. Every so often, he repeats a phrase under his breath, testing the weight of it, adjusting until it feels natural, and files it away.

Hollander’s voice cuts through the television.

Ilya pushes up onto his elbows, eyes on the screen now, watching the way his mouth shapes the words.

“I mean, at the end of the day, it’s out of your hands, but yeah, you wanna be the guy, you wanna go first. I’m ready for that.”

“You wanna go first,” Ilya repeats to no one, fingers drumming lightly against his ribs. The television cuts to commercial. He lets it sit for a second, then adds, quieter this time, “It’s out of your hands.”

He drops back for a moment, then shifts upright, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

His suit bag hangs from the closet door, shoes laid out in front of it, careful while looking casual. Near the wall, propped against a chair, there’s a stick still wrapped in thin plastic with a puck tucked in alongside it, sponsor logos printed down the shaft, part of the welcome he barely registered when he got in two nights before.

He reaches for it now, working the plastic loose and sliding it free, turning it once in his hands before setting the puck against the carpet at his feet.

He draws it in with the blade and starts moving it without thinking too much about it, small, controlled touches that settle into something steady and familiar, the puck staying close as he keeps it quiet against the floor.

“I am honored,” he says under his breath, the words coming first in Russian, already there before he has to think about them.

He shifts it over, feeling for the shape of it in English. 

“I am honored to be picked first.”

The sentence comes out too formal, too careful, and he adjusts it as he keeps the puck moving, letting the phrasing change the same way his hands do.

“I’m honored to be picked first.”

“I’m honored to be selected first.”

“I’m honored to have been selected first overall.”

He repeats it under his breath as the puck moves back and forth, the sentence smoothing out with each pass until it stops catching, until it comes out the same way every time, something he won’t have to think about when someone is standing in front of him with a microphone.

By the time Hollander’s segment loops back onto the screen, it’s comfortable on the tip of his tongue.

“I’m honored to have been selected first overall,” he says evenly, then, after a beat, “over Shane Hollander.”

***

“Closer, guys — just tighten it up a little.”

Shane leans in, shoulder brushing Rozanov’s as the photographer adjusts them by degrees, pulling the three of them into a shape that’ll read polished on a broadcast, in print. Sullivan shifts on Rozanov’s other side, broad and easy, his grin wide and unburdened by expectations. He’d told Shane earlier he expected to go in the third round, not the first, let alone third overall, and it stung in a way Shane couldn’t quite explain.

“Good. Hold that.”

Shane fixes his expression where it should be, aware of the cameras, the angles, the way this will look later. He’s practiced at this — turn, smile, repeat. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rozanov lift a hand — one finger, held up with ease.

Shane doesn’t look at him directly when he does it. Just lifts his own hand a second later, two fingers, as if it doesn’t cost him something to only keep three folded against his palm instead of four.

“Perfect. Stay right there.”

The flashes keep coming. Shane holds it for a beat, then drops his hand, but the smile never falters.

It’s not until after, with cameras of a different kind following in his wake, that he lets his face take its natural shape — eyes and mouth softening at the corners for a moment, as long as they can. Then they round a corner and the crew swings back in front of him, and he resets, the straight line of his mouth curving at the edges. 

His mother finds his elbow, pinching it lightly between her thumb and forefinger through his jacket, and he shakes her off.

“First we have interviews — national first, then local media out of Montreal, remotely,” she says as they walk in quickstep through the belly of the Staples Center. “Then you’ll meet with the GM one-on-one before the draft party, and after that it’s a late team dinner with the other draftees. Flight is early tomorrow, so it’s off to bed after that, yeah?”

“Great,” Shane says automatically, but his head swims.

It doesn’t stop for hours.

Not just the events, but the constant presence of the camera, always somewhere behind him, in front of him, catching him at angles he can’t control. He keeps moving through it, the same practiced rhythm, but something in him never quite settles, the awareness of it staying with him from one room to the next.

He tells himself for what feels like the thousandth time that it’s good practice — arenas of thousands, national interviews, awards shows someday if he does it all correctly — but the day stretches, event to event, and it starts to feel like he’s moving too fast, like he should’ve started with a walk instead of a full sprint.

By the time he’s sealed in the quiet of his hotel room, his legs itch to run off the rest of it.

He changes out of his suit, packs his bag, leaving out just enough to get him into bed and onto the plane the next day, and checks the hall once, then again, before heading for the stairs.

He hesitates, then goes back for the handheld camera, grabbing it from where it sits on the desk and turning it over once in his hand. If someone catches him out, at least it’ll look like he’s supposed to be there.

*** 

The day was everything Ilya had worked for, and it wasn’t what he’d expected. His father made sure of that, undercutting him in front of Boston’s GM, calling him lazy to his face.

It sat oddly with Ilya to be both a meal ticket and a disgrace, but he’d seen how his mother had been treated. It tracked.

By the time he gets back to the hotel, he’s alone, and he doesn’t stop moving once he’s inside — jacket off, shoes set in line, his hands already finding something to do as he changes, something to hold onto while the rest of it keeps turning over. America. The interviews. The cameras. The way he’ll sound when he answers, what they’ll make of him, what he’ll give them to work with.

He doesn’t sit.

He takes the stairs back down instead of waiting on the elevator, the movement quick and steady, and keeps going until the doors to the gym are in front of him. He pushes through without slowing, clocking Hollander already there — the only other person. He steps onto the treadmill beside him, setting the pace before he’s even fully warmed up and pushing it higher almost immediately, like it’s a race he’s already behind in.

Hollander matches his pace, then hits the button again, taking it just a bit further.

Without looking over, Ilya does it again.

Then once more.

Hollander holds, feet pounding the treadmill at a tenth of a mile per hour slower. 

As he pushes toward top speed, it occurs to him how much fun it’s going to be to do this regularly — measure himself against Hollander, outpace him, set the bar and keep it just out of reach.

He thinks of Hollander then — how earnest he’d been when he stuck his hand out in Canada last year, eyes soft, smile easy. Like they could be friends. As if Ilya wasn’t going to beat him down over and over for the rest of their careers.

It’s almost funny to him, the moment Hollander breaks — “Fuck” falling from his mouth as his hand slaps the emergency stop, legs braced on either side of the belt. Ilya runs a minute more just because he can, then steps off and joins him on the floor without a word — both of them spent, dripping, panting.

He lets himself stare. This time, there’s no television static to dull the shape of Hollander’s mouth, and he likes the way his lower lip hangs slack with the effort of the last twenty minutes.

He could say something to minimize it all — he thinks he should. “What a fucking day, huh?” sits against the backside of his teeth. But he just watches instead, eyes catching on the same place again, the movement of his mouth as he breathes.

He thinks of how that mouth will fill thousands of televisions across North America.

How it will never be this red and glistening for them.

He wants to bite it.

“How are you finding the filming?” Shane asks, and Ilya sees the words form before he processes them, his eyes flicking up only after, like he’s been caught.

“Is simple,” Ilya shrugs, casual. He’s not going to tell Hollander it’s anything but, how this is the way he can carve his path out from under his father, his mother, his motherland. A pretty mouth doesn’t earn that kind of honesty. “I just live — the rest is out of my hands.”

“Out of your hands?”

“Is that not the right term?”

“No — it is. But I just—” Ilya takes a long drag from his water bottle and the way it stops Hollander midsentence, his gaze lingering a second longer than it needs to, lights something low in his belly. “Uh — I just figured you were more controlled than that.”

Ilya thinks how Hollander and his mouth know nothing about just how controlled he can be. But he only says, “I don’t need to be controlled when I am the best,” and squirts another swallow of water against his tongue. 

“And also so,” Hollander pauses as his throat works around a swallow, then, “humble.”

Ilya lifts a shoulder, an easy grin playing at his mouth in a way he’s practiced more than once.

Seconds stretch and neither of them speaks or moves, their legs splayed between them — one ankle not quite grazing a shin, the tip of one shoe nudging the heel of another. Ilya catches the camera at the edge of his vision, trained on them through the window in the door.

“We have company,” Ilya murmurs against the mouth of his bottle, just loud enough for him to hear.

Hollander doesn’t look over his shoulder, only lets his head drop. “Of course.” 

Ilya watches him, eyes flicking briefly to the crew — his, not Hollander’s — before settling back. Hollander’s mouth, so open and unguarded a moment ago, tightens, his jaw working at the hinge.

Getting under Hollander’s skin is easier than he expected. 

Something like a smile tugs at his mouth, gone by the time he pushes himself up, brushing his hands against his shorts.

“If it gets to be too much,” he says evenly, like it’s nothing, “you can call me.” 

Hollander looks up at that. 

Ilya holds his gaze, long enough to count seventeen freckles across one cheek under the fluorescents.

“You have phone?” 

Hollander hesitates, then pulls it from his shorts and hands it up into Ilya’s waiting palm.

Ilya takes it without looking at him, thumbs moving quick, practiced at the keys — trying not to focus on the heat of Hollander’s thigh still clinging to it, on the shape of his mouth, inches from his hip.

As he passes it back, he leans in, just a fraction — a press on a bruise, testing for a flinch. Hollander doesn’t. 

He licks his lips instead. Swallows. Doe-eyes tipped up at Ilya’s face.

He leaves him there on the floor, a casual, “Next time, run faster,” over his shoulder as he pushes through the door and the cameras roll.

When he gets back to his room, there’s a text waiting for him — sent from Hollander’s phone to his own, exactly as he’d typed it.

You are the better hockey player, Ilya.

Ilya looks at it for a moment, then smiles, wider than he means to, as he types back.

How nice of you, Hollander. Have a good night.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled while writing this chapter: time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles, who was on ESPN for hockey coverage in 2009, what actually happens on draft day aside from the draft, and whether people will hate me if I don’t let Ilya say “more” and shove a water bottle at Shane in a gym.

So, do you hate me? If not, drop a comment.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

June 2009 — Los Angeles

Shane waits until he’s completely certain that Rozanov and the camera crew are gone. Then he waits a little longer.

Not because he doesn’t want to be filmed — he doesn’t — but not only because of that.

He knows how unacceptable it would be if the first episode of The First Shift ended up centered around him getting half-hard from nothing more than the faint, lingering current of electricity between Rozanov’s ankle and his shin. Not even contact, not really. Just proximity. Just the thought of him, the awareness of him there.

He has to stop thinking about it, or he’ll never be able to stand.

So he does what he always does; he runs the tape.

Not of a game, of the day. The meeting with the GM, every answer he gave, every word he chose. The interview with the Montreal Gazette, the way he phrased things, whether it sounded right out loud or if it landed flat. The timing of his smile. Where he looked. What he should’ve said instead.

Anything but this.

When the coast is clear, he stands — rolling his shoulders back, stretching one leg and then the other. And that’s when his gaze lands on it: the camcorder he set on the weight bench at the far end of the room, a faint red light still staring back at him.

He crosses the room in quick strides, snatches it up, thumb fumbling for the power button before he’s even fully thinking. The red light blinks out, a breath leaving him sharp and sudden.

He doesn’t check the footage.

He just heads for the door, moving faster than he needs to, the weight of the camera solid in his hand.

In his room, he sets the camera on the desk where it had been before he thought to grab it. The idea was to give them something to be proud of — proof that he’d still train, even on the day all of it culminated in the NHL saying, you’ve done enough to get here. Something disciplined and intentional. Not the truth.

Instead, there’s nearly an hour of him and Rozanov held on the memory card.

He should delete the footage, knowing what that hour awakened in his blood.

He wants to watch it for the same reason.

He just stands there, staring, like the camera can make the decision for him.

Then he moves — shorts shoved down, the screen snapped open and turned toward him, thumb already hitting rewind. The footage skips, catches them mid-run, and he doesn’t wait for it to go any further. He grips his cock as his vision narrows on what the frame gives him — Rozanov half-obscured by his own body in the foreground. A view from behind, broken up by motion and grain: the line of his shoulders, broad and steady even in miniature, the fabric of his shirt pulled dark along the center of his back. Legs driving underneath him, the stride long and controlled.

Shane’s focus tightens with it — locked into the cadence on the screen, pumping his fist at nearly the same pace. 

When he comes, it’s to the moment his hand hits the emergency stop — his body breaking first — and the curve of Rozanov’s mouth when it does.

“Fuck you, Rozanov,” he says to no one, and throws the camera down before heading for the shower, like it might wash away the fact that he just ended Draft Day getting off to Ilya Rozanov.

***

June 2009 — Moscow

The trip is twenty-three hours, and Ilya makes it alone — his father having booked a separate route through Frankfurt instead of Paris, something he’s quietly thankful for. He passes the time sleeping, staring at his unanswered text to Hollander, and filming B-roll for the crew, as they asked, the trouble of visas not worth it for the stretch between the draft and development camp.

Until then, it’s the usual.

Ice when he can get it — mornings with the juniors still in the city, afternoons with the VHL group when they’ll have him, faster, heavier even without the games. Conditioning in the heat in between. And when that’s done, more of it — working the rink for cash and ice time, sharpening skates, running drills for kids who can’t keep up, cleaning up after people who don’t think to look twice at him.

He takes his hours late, when the place is empty, the ice his for as long as he can stand — films himself through it.

Between that and his advance from the show, it’s enough to cover the apartment. Enough to stay out of his father’s house for a few months — until he makes the roster. 

The night before he leaves, it’s dinner with his father and brother, then a club with ocean-colored lights and hands-free vodka shots with the friends he’ll miss. Svetlana grinding against his waist, like she isn’t practically family. The press of his former coach’s son, Sasha, at his back — something that used to be enough — and he sways into it anyway, thinking of a Canadian mouth.

In the morning, he packs what’s left of his life into one last box, grabs his bag, and doesn’t look back.

***

July 2009 — Montreal

Have a good camp.

Shane is surprised to hear from Rozanov as he walks up toward the Bell Sports Complex in Brossard, but not at all — it feels calculated, like he knows exactly how to get under his skin.

Still, he wants to come across sportsmanlike on camera. He lifts his phone, angling the screen toward the lens with a small shrug. “Rozanov wants me to have a good camp.”

Behind the cameraman, Claire smirks at him.

“I’m sure that’s totally sincere.”

Shane narrates his reply as he types it out, fingers moving steadily over the keys. “Already worried they made the wrong pick?”

He pockets his phone and heads inside. There’s no sneaking in, quiet and unassuming like he might be if this were anything else. The cameras make that impossible.

So he turns it on. Owns it — lights, camera, action — grinning wide as he approaches check-in, a wake of whispers following behind him.

They hand him a badge and point him down the hall.

The locker room is nicer than most he’s been in over the years — closer to World Juniors than anything else, pro ice and everything that comes with it — and laid out exactly how he imagined it. A stall of his own, his name marked in tape above it, a jersey hanging from the bar, team swag, an itinerary.

There’s no camera with him here — a line they won’t cross — and he lets himself take a moment, just long enough to file it away.

Then it’s a breakneck pace of medical clearance, a meeting with the nutritionist, equipment fitting, one-on-ones with coaches, drills, paperwork. Height, weight, body fat, macros, grip strength, speed, all of it recorded — on camera, in his file.

It passes in a blur, and by the time he’s done, the sky turning purple over the parking lot, he almost forgets the crew is there at all.

“You did great today,” Claire says over his shoulder. “How’d it feel?”

The rest of the crew is breaking down, packing away their gear a few yards away. He knows it’s an earnest question, not one meant for public consumption. Still, the words won’t come. 

Shane just scrubs at the back of his neck, looking up at her through his lashes, the corners of his eyes crinkling with the stretch of his mouth.

“That good, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says, almost a sigh. “It’s kind of a dream.”

“No.” She claps a hand on his shoulder in the same way his father does. He can’t wait to tell them all about it over dinner. “I’m sure it’s better.”

She waves as she walks back over to the crew, and Shane watches them go, the last of the equipment cases loaded into the trunk. The engine turns over, headlights cutting across the lot before the car pulls away.

He stays where he is, watching until the taillights round the corner and disappear, the red glow swallowed up as the streetlamps flick on overhead, casting everything in a dull wash of yellow.

Somewhere off to the left, a minibus idles, waiting to shuttle him back to the hotel with the other prospects. As he heads toward it, he pulls his phone from his pocket, thumb hovering over Rozanov’s name. He wants to say something, just isn’t sure what.

The ride is short and does nothing to help him find the words. He ends up beside a couple of guys who’d orbited him all day — one from Michigan, another from Ottawa, like him. It’s easy enough, the conversation — where they played, who they know, what they’ve already done, what comes next — the kind of talk that fills the space without asking too much of it.

His parents are waiting for him in the lobby when the team pulls in — David’s eyes already wet, Yuna’s mouth curved warm at the corners.

“Okay, don’t embarrass me,” Shane laughs as they pull him into a hug between them.

“We’re just so proud of you.”

“It’s just development camp,” he says into her hair, the words catching a little on the way out.

“Don’t you ‘it’s just development camp’ me,” his dad says. “I never got that far. Be proud of it.”

They end up at Pacini, his dad insisting on something that feels just a little like a celebration. Despite the conversation he had with the team doctor earlier that day, Shane lets his wine glass be filled, sipping the red through a smile as his parents begin to ask questions.

He refuses a refill, not wanting to go into day two with any kind of a hangover — or look like someone who isn’t taking this seriously. He’s buzzing either way by the time their entrees come. It’s everything he wanted to feel that day in LA but couldn’t under the noise, the lights, the questions.

And it hits him then — what he wants to say to Rozanov.

He pulls his phone out under the table and types without breaking the conversation.

Sends it, quick, before he can second-guess it, and tucks the phone away.

***

July 2009 — Boston

Ilya’s in a hotel room in Burlington, the team putting them up somewhere off the highway. It’s not the America of his dreams, but it’s better than anything he could have hoped for — worn thin and charged in equal measure by the day.

He’s sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, room service spread out in front of him, the television on low, easier than trying to make sense of what his Finnish roommate is telling him with his hands.

His phone vibrates hard against the carpet. He grabs it, the burger suspended halfway to his mouth, then forgotten on the plate when he sees the name.

This feels better than Draft Day.

Ilya sits with it for a moment, replies running through his head and onto the screen. 

That’s because you were drafted second. 

Delete.

Only nerds like the first day of school. 

Delete.

I don’t believe that. I am not there. 

He lands on the last one.

A reply doesn’t come right away, and as the minutes pass, he begins to picture Hollander pacing a hole into the carpet of his hotel room, trying to make sense of what to say back.

He’s shit at chirping. Getting flirted with will short-circuit him. It’s just a matter of whether Hollander realizes what this is — something Ilya can admit now, the thought sharpening low in his middle.

His phone buzzes.

You wish.

Ilya sniffs once, his mouth twisting to one side, his brow settling low.

There are two ways this can go. Either he says he does — leans into it, lets him know exactly what he’d do with him — or he lets it lie. Lets Hollander sit with it. Wonder if he got it wrong. If Ilya wasn’t flirting with him at all.

He takes a shower and weighs his options, letting his mind and his hand drift with the thought of how he’d spell it out for him. He comes into the spray, one hand braced beneath the showerhead, thinking of Hollander bent over a cheap hotel bedspread somewhere in Canada.

When he steps out, he gropes for his phone on the bathroom counter before he even thinks to reach for a towel.

What would you do if I was?

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled this chapter: newspapers in Montreal in 2009 (not tabloids), what year the Sony Cybershot was first a thing, how long a flight from LA to Moscow is, the difference between development camp and actual NHL training camp, restaurants in Brossard open in 2009, macros for a glass of red wine.

Don’t make me search “is it okay to cry if no one says nice things about my fic?”

Drop a comment if you see where this is going. ;)

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

This fic uses a work skin to format iOS messages. Something rendering odd or prefer plain text? You can turn it off by hitting the "Hide Creator's Style" button at the top of the page.

July 2009 — Montreal

Shane scrubs a hand over his face and cuts a glance at the door, like the film crew might burst in at any moment and reveal this is a prank show, not documentary-style reality television. Nothing happens.

He stares at the thread of messages on his screen, reading them over, his gaze lingering on the last longer than the rest.

Do you want me to be flirting with you?

It’s a simple question. It shouldn’t be hard to answer, and that’s what gives him pause — that it is. That he can feel himself trying to get it right, trying to understand what Rozanov means by it, what he’s supposed to say and mean in return.

His thumb hovers over the keyboard.

He could say no. He could shut it down, tell him to fuck off.

But he doesn’t want to.

The realization is there, burning somewhere in his chest — the same as it was back in Los Angeles at the almost-pressure of Rozanov’s leg against his.

He types, stops, deletes it, tries again, until he exhales and sends the closest thing he has to the truth.

“Holy shit,” Shane says under his breath.

Mutually assured destruction — something he learned back in high school — pulses somewhere in the back of his mind now. The words, plain on the screen, could ruin him. They could ruin Rozanov too.

Shane stares at the screen a second longer, like the words might shift if he gives them enough time.

They don’t.

The phone drops onto the bed, screen still lit. He’s up and moving before it settles, pacing once, twice, the words following him across the length of the room.

Then, all at once, he’s desperate to pull his clothes from his body and hear what Rozanov has to say. The sweatpants first, then the crisp, new Montreal hoodie, the tank top underneath — socks still on. He folds it all, the routine of it grounding him.

Then his gaze lands on his phone, and he can’t grab it fast enough.

His eyes fall shut and he pulls in a long breath as his hand finds his cock. The words play behind his eyelids, and he can’t help but hear them in Rozanov’s voice, low at the back of his neck, a deep rattle in his bones.

He knows he has to say something back if he wants more — and he does — but all he can manage is a quiet whisper of his name.

Reading that in Rozanov’s voice makes his cock twitch in his hand. His grip tightens as he moves his hand slowly down, then back up again, turning it over in his mind — Rozanov’s mouth, hot and wet and entirely too far away.

His orgasm hits him like a slap shot to the chest, cracking him open. He comes against his stomach, panting Rozanov’s name as the next message buzzes against his other palm.

Before he falls asleep, Shane reads through the messages one more time, comes again to the same words. Then he deletes the whole thread and hopes Rozanov does the same.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled this chapter: how to make an iOS work skin for AO3 (still not entirely sure about this one), what year was iMessage introduced, how wide is an iPhone screen in pixels, and why do I suddenly need a cold shower?

Bit of a shorter chapter just given the nature of the dialogue. Hopefully it was still worth reading. 😉

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

This fic uses a work skin to format iOS messages. Something rendering odd or prefer plain text? You can turn it off by hitting the "Hide Creator's Style" button at the top of the page.

July 2009 — Boston

“Ready to get started?”

Ilya takes a sip of tea, eyes moving over the setup in front of him, then past it — out the windows of the hotel conference room beyond the crew, where the sky to the east is just starting to lighten. The glass still reflects more of the room than the highway beyond it, and he watches himself nod into the rim of the paper cup as the sun breaks from behind a cloud.

“Great.” The producer — Mike or Mark, a common American name Ilya keeps mixing up, to his mounting embarrassment — taps his clipboard lightly against Ilya’s knee before stepping back behind the camera. “Let’s do it.”

There’s a soft click as the lens adjusts. Someone coughs at the back of the room. Ilya drags a hand through his hair and sets the cup down beside him.

“Alright, bud. Same as yesterday — just look at me, not the camera.”

“Got it.”

“Quiet on set. Ilya Rozanov, day two — mark.” 

Mike, Ilya tells himself — he’s Mike. 

“We’re rolling.” Mike points in his direction and nods. “Tell me about your first day of development camp. What stood out for you?”

Ilya’s hand brushes over his thigh and comes to rest over his phone in his pocket. He lets the question sit for half a second, then looks up and smiles, easy and measured.

“It was,” he makes a small noise like he’s reaching for the word — even though he’s not — then, “unexpected.” 

“Can you give me a little more than that?”

Ilya lets the silence stretch a fraction, like he’s considering it. Lets himself think of Hollander for just a moment — somewhere in Canada, getting off to the things Ilya had said — then locks back in.

“It was everything I wanted and worked for, but nothing I expected.” The words he shaped in bed in the dark hours earlier. “In a good way. I thought they would find something to fix — something in my stride, or my speed to critique — but they didn’t. They just said it was good. That I was doing it right.”

He lifts one shoulder, cocks his head, a wry smile playing at his mouth. 

“But I guess this is why I was picked first. I am the best.”

Then, despite the direction, he cuts his gaze to the camera and winks.

***

July 2009 — Montreal

“Hey — I only have about fifteen minutes,” Shane says before he’s even halfway through the door. The crew has set up for the week in an out-of-the-way meeting room on the second floor of the complex, and he ducks in between a 3-on-3 and a video session, still catching his breath. 

He stops short when he sees Rozanov on the screen, footage playing back through Claire’s laptop.

“This guy — he’s so cocky,” she says, pulling one side of her headphones off as she glances over her shoulder at Shane. “You want to listen to this before we get started?”

Shane’s throat stutters around a swallow as he tries to say yes. He just reaches for the spare headset instead.

He watches it back and knows — Rozanov expected him to see it.

It stays with him as the crew fits him with a microphone, fingers quick and practiced at his collar, then points him toward a chair in the corner. The room settles around him — quiet on set, and then they’re rolling.

“So, Shane, tell me about your first day and try to not be so cocky about it.”

His stomach tightens, the memory of last night flashing behind his eyes — the words on the screen, the buzz of them in his blood, his hand moving the way Rozanov’s mouth might.

Claire snaps her fingers.

“Earth to Shane.”

“Sorry, I was just—” He clears his throat and straightens his posture — he wears the mask well, it doesn’t slip like this. “I’m ready. I’m sorry.”

“Alright, let’s go again on two.” Shane swallows hard as Claire holds out five fingers, then four, three. On two, she says, “Tell me about day one.”

“I was telling someone last night—” He clears his throat. “—how this, being at the start of something that feels big and important in my life, was better than Draft Day. I’d built Draft Day up as the pinnacle for so long. But Draft Day was only about getting the chance. Development camp is where I start to prove I deserve it.”

His palms flatten, fingers pressing briefly into his knees, grounding him.

“Being here, being measured against the greats like I could be the next one — I’m excited for camp in September. To really put in the work and show that I can be one of them. I may not have gone first in the draft — but that’s okay.”

He lifts his chin a fraction, eyes steady on the lens.

“Because by the time I retire, no one will even think twice about who was picked ahead of me.”

***

July 2009 — Boston

Ilya hangs back after the team dinner while the rest of the prospects take the shuttle over to the hotel. A few of the guys plan to play Super Smash Bros. on a Wii the Minnesota prospect brought from home. He tells them he’ll catch up later, but it doesn’t sound convincing — even to him.

He knows what he wants to do instead — and that he shouldn’t. Still, he burns through nearly a whole cigarette thinking about Hollander, trying to work out how he’ll talk about anything else once the camera is pointed at him.

When Mike finds him, he’s grinding out a second cigarette — this one smoked through to the filter, not just dangling absently from his lip — and he knows it’s time to try.

He follows him into where the crew has encircled a stool at center ice, a wall of windows behind it.

“Trying to set the scene, yes?” Ilya laughs as he pulls the door in the boards open and steps onto the rink. “Cold like home?”

Mike grins, walking backward ahead of him. “It’ll play nicely on camera — you out here on the ice. Show how far you’ve come.”

Ilya sniffs once, glancing past him toward the setup. “From what?”

“From Russia. Moscow.”

“Ah, but you see, I’m not far from it — I go back next week.”

Ilya can see his frustration mounting in the way Mike’s chest colors red beneath his open collar. It’s been a fun game for him to play over the last two days — to push and press and learn his limits. Not because he doesn’t like him, but because he does. He wants to find the line — how far he can go — and not cross it unless he needs to.

“Do you want to do this segment, or not?”

“I am just fucking with you, Mike.” Ilya claps a hand on his shoulder, leaning in to nudge the stool just left of the red line. “I’m good to do this.”

“Great,” Mike says tightly, then signals for the crew to move into place. 

A hush falls over the space, but every scrape of a shoe, the creak of the stool echoes against the ice. Ilya sits as still as he can, rigid almost, bracing for what he knows is coming — Mike told him midway through the day. 

“Alright, quiet everyone. Ilya Rozanov, day two — mark.” 

Ilya clears his throat and waits for the first question. 

“So, should we start with your family?”

Ilya gives them as much as he can over the next twenty minutes, and by the end of it he’s worn thinner than the day of edge work, puck control drills, and scrimmages has left him. Six years on, it doesn’t get any easier to say that his mother is gone. It doesn’t get easier to lie about how she left, how he found her — how his father and brother treated him after, why he practically lived at the rink, how it shaped him.

The answers are practiced and controlled, but he does all he can to keep them honest. 

“My mother died when I was young — twelve.”

“Yes, it was hard. Of course it was.”

“My father did his best. I’m very grateful.”

“Hockey was a constant for me during that time — something to pour myself into. And it poured back.”

He takes a cab back to the hotel, not wanting to make small talk with the crew, despite their offer of a ride. When he unlocks his hotel room door, he’s grateful for the quiet — his roommate still shouting at a television somewhere down the hall with everyone else. 

When he sets his things on the bedside table, his hand hovers at his phone.

A distraction would be welcome, but texting Hollander would be stupid.

Once, he could explain it away — “Oh, yes, Hollander, I was just fucking with you. Ha ha, very funny, yes? Got you.” — but twice is a choice. One he’s not ready to make. Not like this.

He turns his phone off, rakes a hand through his hair, and goes to shower, instead.

***

July 2009 — Montreal

Shane’s phone is as dead as his legs by the time he spills into the locker room with the other prospects at half past six. Still, he checks the screen the moment he’s at his stall, not even bothering to pull off his gloves first. For what, he doesn’t want to admit, but he feels it — low in his belly, heat creeping up through his cheeks.

The feeling lingers through the team dinner, and he stares into the distance more than he makes conversation, despite knowing how it might make him look. They’re all tired, though — worked hard as a baseline and all of them pushing beyond it just to prove they can. He’s not the only one in a daze.

He’s just the only one thinking about Ilya Rozanov.

By the time he’s back at the hotel and gets his phone on the charger, all he’s worked out to say is, “Why are you such an asshole?”

He doesn’t know if it’s because of what Rozanov made him feel last night — since Los Angeles — or the way he’d been so antagonistic in the footage Shane had been replaying in his mind for most of the day, but it’s the question that remains, and so he asks it.

He showers quickly, barely feeling the water, and falls into bed still damp, turning onto his side toward the outlet. The phone sits there on the nightstand, screen dark, cable wound neatly between them. He watches it longer than he means to.

It lights once — his mother — and he lets the screen fade without answering.

At some point, he falls asleep.

In the morning, he wakes to the ping of his phone, the vibration against the nightstand — once, then again, and again. He’s sitting up, reaching for it before he’s fully awake.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled while writing this chapter: top boy names of 1970, video games and consoles that were popular in 2009, what does the Boston Bruins practice arena look like, what year did Uber launch in Boston, can you take the T out to Burlington, and will they still love me if not every chapter is smutty text messages.

If you’re enjoying this, please feel free to drop a comment or tell a friend. I can’t prove it to be universally true, but I’ve heard that the more you praise writers, the faster they write. ;)

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

July 2009 — Boston

“What’s her name?” 

Mike’s voice wipes the smile from Ilya’s face. He ducks his head, takes a long drag from the cigarette between his fingers, adjusts his mouth around the filter until it settles into a straight line.

“Your mother.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re eighteen, but you always manage to remind me.”

He flicks his cigarette butt at Mike’s shoes. Mike cuts him a look, grinding it out under his heel.

“Was a dog on Facebook.” Ilya pockets his phone with a shrug. “On the subway. Sitting like a person.”

Mike huffs a quiet laugh. “That’s it?”

“Was funny.” 

They stand side by side under the overhang in front of the hotel. It’s hotter than it should be this early, and Ilya wants to get on the ice — get out of his head. He hopes it’s a long day. Scrimmages, conditioning, reps until there’s nothing left to think about — no one.

He bumps an elbow against Mike’s.

“What do we have today?”

“You’ve got a lot of skating. I’ve got a day of shooting it. No interviews. But feel free to self-tape if you want to tell more ‘your mom’ jokes.”

Ilya smiles.

“Now that it’s locked, unless something major comes up, we’ll do more interviews when we’re in New York at the end of the week.”

“New York?”

“So you check Facebook but not your email.” 

One shoulder comes up, but Ilya’s pulse is anything but casual, kicking hard against his neck. He wants to shake the rest of it out of him.

“We’re doing a photo shoot with you, Hollander, and the other kid, and taping some in-studio interviews for the webisodes.”

Ilya’s breath catches on Hollander’s name, but he doesn’t let himself linger — turning webisodes over in his mind before he forgets it, something he’ll need to Google later. 

“The network wants buzz between now and the start of the season. Get those stars rising before this thing actually premieres.” Mike laughs once, and Ilya catches how it sounds like something deflating, tilts his head in question. “Yeah, I think they want to build momentum with all three of you.”

“So no ten episode arc of me sharpening skates alone back in Mother Russia?” Ilya asks, his mouth curling up on one side. The crew presses through the door before he can make another joke about moms just for Mike, and he claps him on the back as he fishes for his phone in his pocket. “Excuse me.”

He steps out of the way, thumb already moving over the screen.

Prospects and the television crew mingle off to the left, and he can hear one of them shamelessly asking if they need an inside scoop on what Ilya is like, as if they’re not watching and filming his every move, a camera pointed at him even now.

He turns fully toward it, leans back against a post, gives them something to look at — sleight of hand to keep his phone out of frame.

Ilya stares at his phone until the van pulls up, and by the time they turn into the arena twenty-five minutes later and he has enough privacy to look again, there’s still no response from Hollander.

He can almost picture him — staring at the screen, brow furrowed and mouth pulled tight like it’s a problem to solve.

Ilya locks his phone and doesn’t check it again.

He takes the ice as soon as they’ll let him — stepping over the boards before half the group has finished tying their skates. He pushes hard from the first stride, skating faster than the drill calls for, stopping sharp at the lines, turning quick and going again before the whistle resets him.

“Easy,” a coach calls from the bench.

Ilya nods once, then doesn’t slow down.

***

July 2009 — Montreal

There’s a drag in Shane’s stride, noticeable enough that he can already hear how it’ll be framed on screen — a moment of speculation, narrated over a clip of him looking dazed along the blue line.

He doesn’t need this right now.

But even with his phone turned off in his stall, the message follows him — unshakable down the tunnel, over the boards, from one end of the ice to the other — a question without being one, something open and waiting.

I think that depends on what you want.

His body only knows forward motion. Skate hard, score more, go. But this — it’s a line he can cross or hold, and all he can do is stand on it.

“Hollander, get your head in the game,” someone shouts from across the ice.

He pulls his mouth guard in, settles it against his teeth, and skates after the puck. This is a thing he can control. A question he knows the answer to. But he gets it wrong — by the end of the 3-on-3, he’s got zero goals to his name, and it gets the better of him. He kicks the boards, slams the bench door on his way off the ice.

He’s barely seated before one of the coaches is ordering him to his office.

“Okay. What is this, Hollander?” he’s asked once they're alone — or almost, the crew just outside.

Shane hears it as: No wonder you didn’t go first in the draft, and he’s furious with himself for letting Rozanov get to him like this — in front of these people he’s only ever wanted to impress, and in front of the cameras, where all of North America, and Rozanov, will eventually see.

He can feel one zero in on him now through the crack in the door, and his stomach turns.

“I think it was something I ate last night,” Shane says, as if he hadn’t had the same standard-issue meal as the rest of the prospects. “Just a step behind today. It won’t happen again.”

The coach studies him for a second, then gives a short nod.

“You’re lucky you’re already about forty steps ahead of everyone, then.”

Shane dips his head. “Yes, sir. I appreciate you saying that.”

“Go see medical and we’ll hit it again tomorrow.”

He nods once. “I’ll be ready.”

When he presses through the door, it’s into the jaws of the waiting crew and his head swims. 

He locks eyes with Claire behind one of the boom operators, and her eyes are soft in a way that tells him she heard him, and she believes him.

She lets them film a second longer as he moves past them and down the hall, and then calls for them to cut.

“Hey—”

Her voice comes after him, quick, and he slows just enough for her to catch up.

“You doing alright?” she asks, quieter now, once the cameras are set down behind her, the crew already starting to break.

The softness of it — the way it lands like it’s meant to be answered honestly, not asked for the cameras — makes him wonder if she has kids of her own. He doesn’t ask. Instead, he stares over her shoulder at the placard that reads Training Room and says, “Just an off day.”

“Is the Rozanov stuff getting to you?”

Shane’s pulse stutters high in his throat. He closes his hand into a fist at his side, counts it out — one, two, three, four — and lets it go before he ventures, as evenly as he can, “The Rozanov stuff?”

“The shot list in the email this morning — for New York?” she asks. Shane just blinks at her. “No?”

“I didn’t see that.”

Claire exhales lightly, like that answers something for her.

“They’re really leaning into it,” she says. “Pitting you against each other.”

Shane’s brow pulls in, just slightly.

“There’s a whole concept built around it,” she adds. “‘The Rivals.’”

He lets that sit. Nods like it makes sense. The Rivals. If they only knew. Heat creeps up the back of his neck, and he fixes his gaze on the edge of the sign, on the clean line of the lettering, anything to keep the corner of his mouth from moving in a way he knows it shouldn’t.

“The Rivals,” he repeats, testing it on his tongue — flat, even, like it belongs there.

“Yeah. They’re not even really interested in Lemaire now.”

He glances back at her, a beat behind. “Sorry — Lemaire?”

“Yeah.” A small huff of a laugh. “Exactly.”

Shane nods once, like he gets what she means, even though he hasn’t — the name rings no bells.

“Well, I should probably get to medical,” he says, gesturing beyond her.

Claire watches him, something like approval flickering across her face. “Yeah. You should.”

“I’ll catch up with you after,” he adds, already stepping away.

“You don’t have to, if you’re not feeling up to it.”

The words catch him mid-step.

“Take the night if you need to,” she says, softer now.

It takes a lot for Shane to make eye contact, so it’s brief, but it’s there — his eyes searching Claire’s for half a second, like he’s waiting for the rest of it. Nothing comes. She just holds his gaze, wide-eyed and patient, until he looks away.

“Can I really have that?” he asks, quieter than he intends, like he didn’t know he needed it until she said it out loud.

“You can have anything,” she says. “You’re Shane Hollander.”

The words land wrong, or maybe too right, and all he can do is nod like that’s what being Shane Hollander is for.

Then he turns and moves down the hall — measured at first, controlled — and then faster, the length of his stride opening up until he’s nearly running.

The locker room is quiet when he gets there. He pulls off his skates too quickly, hands working ahead of him, shoving them into his stall before reaching for his phone.

No new messages, but he almost expected that. Rozanov doesn’t seem like the type to ask twice.

He sits there with his phone in his hand, thumb hovering over the screen, typing a word and deleting it, then another. Nothing seems right.

On the ice, there’s always a right answer — a play, a pattern, something he can read and adjust to. Even the cameras, he can manage. Say the right thing. Give them what they’re looking for.

This isn’t like that. There’s no version of this he’s practiced. No way to get it right before he does it, unless he does it.

He stares at Rozanov’s name at the top of the screen, at the last message sitting there, waiting.

When he finally types something out, it’s the closest he can get to the truth.

He sends it.

The room tilts, just slightly. His stomach drops hard enough that he has to press the heel of his hand into it, like that might steady him. He pushes himself up off the bench and heads down the hall toward medical, thinking he might actually be sick.

***

July 2009 — Boston

Ilya’s brows lift when he sees the response and he’s half-hard right there in the locker room reading it. Hollander’s confidence is not like his, not like this — it’s quiet. It’s him pressing the up arrow on the treadmill, making it known he won’t back down. 

And it does something to him.

Something that makes him wonder what it cost Hollander to send it — to run straight at something he knows he can’t possibly understand.

Because Ilya doesn’t.

He is not supposed to want Hollander like this. 

He is supposed to want to bring him to his knees — knock him to the ice, hold a skate to his throat, and raise the Cup above him as he weeps. And all he can think about is how he wants to bring him to his knees in another way — mouth soft and open, asking for it.

He can’t do this now, not here. He pockets his phone, adjusting himself in his jeans, and heads for the van, eager to get back to where he can.

When they get back, Ilya turns left while everyone else turns right — a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger like an answer to a question no one asked. He cuts through to the back of the property, across the parking lot to the picnic bench he’d spotted from his room the day before. He climbs up onto it, feet braced on the seat, and works through his reply in his head.

It’s another press of the button — the speed climbing, pushing toward something that’s dangerous for even him.

Hollander can either match his pace — or just run.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled while writing this chapter: what year Dogspotting started on Facebook, “webisodes were a thing in 2009, right?”, and Vincent Lemaire. (Fun fact: even Google was like lol who at the last one.)

Also, hi — quick reminder that this is a canon-divergent AU for a reason. It’s canon-compliant in some ways, and I’ll hit a lot of familiar character traits, lines, and moments, but I’m also going to take liberties where I want to. Ilya’s English being more polished. Shane raising the stakes and being a more active participant earlier on. Them jorking it together over text almost immediately. The timeline shifting to put them in the same place sooner. All of that is intentional. They’re meant to be the same characters, just painted in a slightly different shade.

If that’s not for you, I get it — just not something I am asking for feedback on.

The rest of you? See you in New York. ;)

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

July 2009 — New York

Shane turns his phone off and it sits like a bomb — on his nightstand, in his pocket, in his stall — for the next three days. He moves it from place to place, unwilling to let it out of his sight, but fully aware it’s too dangerous to mess with. Still, he brushes a thumb over the screen, turns it over in his hands, in awe of its power — and a little terrified of it.

Every time he thinks of Rozanov’s message sitting there beyond the blank screen, something in him starts to detonate.

He forces it down each time — drags his attention back to the ice, the drills, everything he worked for.

But it’s still there. And now New York spreads out thirty-thousand feet below him — a city full of millions, and somewhere in it, Rozanov.

His mom shifts in the seat next to him, reaching across to lift the window shade, as the plane tilts toward the city, its glow unmistakable on the horizon.

“So, what do you think — pizza for dinner? Just get right into the New York experience?” she asks. 

“I don’t know,” he says, letting his head fall back against the seat. “I’m pretty tired. I might just order in, if that’s okay.”

He doesn’t add that he’d prefer something Russian tonight, but the corner of his mouth nearest the window lifts at the thought. 

“Makes sense, sweetie.” Yuna squeezes his knee once. “It’s been a long week — lots of good stuff, but a lot.”

“Yeah. Let’s do breakfast in the morning?”

“I’ll find the best bagels in the city.”

“You know I can’t do bagels, Mom.”

“Oh, I don’t mean for you,” she laughs. “You can eat your sad egg whites and watch me and your father eat our bagels. No one is photographing us tomorrow.”

Shane rolls his eyes, and turns to watch as the buildings grow bigger with each fraction of their descent. Then the wheels are against the ground and he pulls his phone out. But he waits a little longer, the danger of giving in — in a seat beside his parents, in front of Claire, a camera trained on him almost the second the seatbelt sign turns off — too much.

The drive into the city passes in a blur of taillights and traffic, his mom still talking about dinner, his dad sharing facts like he’s a New Yorker, not an Ottawan. Once they cross the bridge into Manhattan — the Queensboro, his dad tells him — Shane presses the button on the side of his phone in his pocket, palm resting over it as it vibrates to life unseen. 

He doesn’t take it out.

By the time the SUV pulls to the curb, his hand is sweating through his jeans, pressed tight over the shape of his phone. He flexes his fingers around it once, then pops the handle on the door.

The crew is there immediately — Claire halfway up the sidewalk, one hand lifted in greeting, the rest of them fanning out behind her like they’ve been waiting.

“Welcome to New York,” she says, smiling, like they didn’t get off the same plane an hour before.

Shane smiles back anyway, giving the cameras what they’re looking for.

“Good to be here.”

They move as a unit through the doors and into the lobby — the New Yorkers don’t look, but everyone else turns at the crew as they pass. Shane can feel the camera at his shoulder, just behind his line of sight, close enough to catch everything without getting in the way. He keeps his posture straight, his expression where it should be, nodding along as Claire talks them through the schedule — call times, shoot windows, where they’ll meet in the morning.

He doesn’t hear most of it.

The elevator dings and they step inside, the doors sliding shut on the noise of the lobby. For a second, it’s quiet — just the soft lurch of the car on its cables — but then Claire says, “We’re all on thirty-two,” and his pulse kicks in his ears.

All.

He sighs without meaning to.

“Long day?” Claire asks, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah,” he says, glancing at his reflection in the mirrored wall, making sure his mouth is even. “But good.”

“Try to get some rest tonight,” she says. “We’ll start early tomorrow.”

The doors open onto their floor. The hallway stretches out in both directions, carpet muffling their steps as they step off and split — his parents peeling off to one side of the elevators, Shane, Claire, and the crew heading down the other.

“'Night,” Shane says, glancing over his shoulder.

“Goodnight,” his mom calls back. “Call me when you’re up?”

“Will do.”

He lifts a hand without turning fully around and keeps walking. 

“Alright, this is you,” Claire says, easing to a stop in front of 3221, where his suitcase and garment bag already wait outside. He grabs them as she hands him a key card. “I’m in 3228 if you need anything. But we’ll leave you here. Cameras are down for the night — unless you want to use the handheld.”

“I think I’m good,” Shane laughs. 

She nods, like she expected that.

“Okay. See you in the morning.”

The crew lingers until he presses his key card into the slot. The door opens with a click, and then they turn, the shape of them folding back down the hallway until it’s just Shane and the open door. He drags his bags inside and leans back against the door, shoulders dropping as he exhales.

Inside, the room is dim, the curtains half-drawn against the lights and sounds of the city hundreds of feet below. The view is probably spectacular from the thirty-second floor, but the only thing he wants to see is in his pocket — or somewhere in this city, maybe even this building.

He drops onto the foot of the bed, toeing off his shoes as he reaches for his phone. Notifications stack endlessly, but he taps into Messages and finds the name he’s looking for right at the top.

Shane’s gaze moves to the time at the top of the screen — the message sent minutes ago. He hears someone cough in the hall and wonders how thin the walls might be.

If that’s how he knew. If he’s on the same floor.

Shane checks the time once more — the numbers barreling toward ten — then drops his phone on the bed and heads for the bathroom, peeling his clothes off on the way. He twists a knob and doesn’t even wait for the water to warm before he’s inside, scrubbing hard at the day where it clings to him — recycled air, crumbs from the flight before, the press of people too close for too long.

He stays in just long enough to feel clean, not long enough to convince himself it’s for any other reason.

Back in the room, towel slung low at his hips, he crosses to his suitcase, unzips it, and flips it open with his foot, already reaching in. Everything comes out in quick handfuls — shirts, pants, socks — dropped onto the bed, then picked up again, folded, refolded, smoothed flat.

He glances at the time — there isn’t much left.

The garment bag hangs where he left it by the door, and he goes to it without thinking too hard about why, pulling the suit free and shrugging into it piece by piece — shirt, buttons, tie, jacket. By the time he looks up and sees the sharp lines of himself in the mirror, he’s already pulling it off.

He tugs at the collar, loosens the tie, the jacket coming off after, dropped across the back of the chair. The shirt sticks for a second at his shoulders, still damp from the shower, before he drags it off too, turning back to the bed, to the half-unpacked mess he’s made there.

His hand lands on a t-shirt, and he pulls it out, already halfway into it before he really looks at it.

The logo sits across his chest — The NHL Draft, Los Angeles, 2009 — the very place where Rozanov took his number and everything tipped just slightly out of place.

He stills for a second, fingers catching in the hem, words like obvious and desperate surfacing at the back of his mind.

“Fuck,” he mutters, catching the clock on the bedside table, how it reads 9:59.

Then, there’s a knock.

He pauses, head turning toward the door as it comes again, softer this time. Closer.

His eyes shift, landing on the one set into the wall beside the nightstand on the far side of the bed — the one he hadn’t really paid much mind to when he came in apart from glancing at the bolt there.

The connecting door.

“One second,” he calls, scrambling to fit as much of his clothing back into his suitcase with one hand while the other pulls on a pair of socks and some track pants. He kicks his bag into the corner, not bothering with the zipper, and runs a hand through his still-damp hair as he crosses the room in a few short strides, hand already reaching for the knob.

He pulls it open, but it doesn’t give — the chain still in place, allowing only an inch or two before it catches.

Rozanov stands on the other side in a t-shirt and sweats, one hand braced flat against the frame.

Shane doesn’t open the door any wider.

Rozanov’s mouth curves slightly at one corner.

“You said you might open. This is where you decide.”

“Right,” he says, the word thick on his tongue. “Hold on.”

He closes the door and takes a steadying breath, hand going to the chain, sliding it free, fingers shaking in a way they never have on the ice. He doesn’t know how to stop them. For a fraction of a second, he thinks they won’t stop until they’re in Rozanov’s hair, against his skin — until they know this is real.

The only way to find out is to open the door.

When he pulls it open again, Rozanov doesn’t wait for an invitation. He crosses the threshold, crowding Shane in a way that makes him want to move back and hold his ground at the same time. Shane thinks, briefly, that he’ll walk right through him — and then he’s moving, socks sliding against the carpet as he gives ground a half-step at a time, until he’s against the built-in desk on the wall opposite the door, the heat of Rozanov already there against his legs as he folds onto it.

Something in Shane’s chest stutters — Rozanov is everywhere, and he can’t escape the glint of his eyes any more than he can help looking at his mouth, his shoulder, the way his hair curls against his temple.

If there was any question about what this was, it’s answered in the way Rozanov’s body angles toward his, the way his hips wedge just so between his knees, spreading them wider before him, in how Shane shifts to accommodate his frame.

“Do you still want to know what you can have?” he asks, close enough that Shane can feel the shape of the consonants and vowels against his cheek.

He swallows, gives the smallest nod — it’s all he can manage with him this close, the tremble in his hands spreading through him one molecule at a time.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Yes,” he says, threadbare — there’s no sense in hiding it with Rozanov pressed between his legs and feeling just how badly he wants to know.

“Okay,” he says evenly, as if it’s that simple — and Shane thinks that, for him, it might be. “Then I will show you.”

Rozanov’s hand comes up, dragging once across Shane’s jaw before his palm settles at the side of his neck, firm and warm. He leans in, slow and deliberate, stopping just short — challenging, questioning.

He stays there for one breath, then another — until Shane can make his hands work. He brings them up slowly, trying to find control in them before he has to explain why they’re like this — before he has to admit why. But Rozanov doesn’t ask; he just lets them fist in his shirt.

And then Shane pulls him the rest of the way in, until there’s nothing between them but a gasp.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled this chapter: average number of floors in NYC hotels, which bridge someone would take into Manhattan from JFK, number of carbs in a bagel, and no, really, who is Vincent Lemaire.

The next chapter should be fun. See you then. :)

Chapter 8

Chapter Notes

This fic uses a work skin to format iOS messages. Something rendering odd or prefer plain text? You can turn it off by hitting the "Hide Creator's Style" button at the top of the page.

July 2009 — New York

It starts with just the idea of a kiss, one mouth held against another — soft and unmoving — and it’s sweeter than anything Ilya has had in his life. Sweeter than anyone he’s tasted, woman or man. Sweeter than even the blini his mother would make at the weekends, piled high with jam or honey.

And all he can think is more.

Then Hollander pulls him in, and Ilya swallows the sound he makes when their tongues slide together — a moan that goes straight to his dick. He opens wider, pushes his tongue deeper, chasing the next one out of him, and Hollander bends to him, whimpering into his mouth.

The sound hits Ilya’s tongue, and it feels like victory — better than. No goal, no trophy, has ever made him this hard.

He slides his tongue along Hollander’s again, fingers flexing against his jaw, demanding another moan.

When he gets it, he has to pull back and look at him — dark lashes, pink lips, breath coming in short, uneven pulls.

“What did I—”

“No,” Ilya says. “I just want to look at you like this.”

He notices how Hollander’s eyes don’t meet his for long, dropping instead to his mouth — and it lets him look. Just look. His gaze turns greedy, moving from one cheek to the other, tracing the freckles scattered across them. His thumb follows, sliding up and over one cheek, and Hollander leans into the touch, eyes closing.

His eyes drop to Hollander’s swollen bottom lip, and he thinks of the texts he’s read countless times over the last few days — what he said he’d do, what Hollander said he wanted — and how close he is to it now, with his mouth still open, still panting.

Ilya watches him for half a second longer — then leans in again, lips finding the line of his jaw, then his neck.

The sound is different this time — low, breathless — and Ilya doesn’t know if that means he wants it more or less. He thinks that by the time he’s done with him, he’ll be fluent in a new language — his third: Russian, English, and Hollander. He’s eager to learn.

“Do you like this?” he asks against his skin, teeth trailing the words just above his collar.

“Fuck you,” he says above him. Then, softer — like he’s remembering he’s allowed to want this — “You know I do.”

Ilya sucks at the hollow of his throat, and Hollander makes a sound like he’s pulling air through his back teeth. He sucks again, harder, wanting to get the translation just right.

“What else do you like?”

“I— I don’t know.”

Ilya pulls back again, not liking the hesitation in his voice — and there it is again, the way Hollander won’t meet his gaze. He hooks two fingers under his chin, a gentle tilt upward. Hollander looks at him once, then away, past him.

“Hollander — you are shy? Why?”

“I’m not shy.” Hollander’s hands loosen at his hips and Ilya glances down at where they land in his lap between them. “I don’t know.”

“Just more brave over text?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

Ilya leans in and kisses him then, and despite the hunger in him, he lets it be soft — slow, measured. He doesn’t press his tongue between Hollander’s lips, doesn’t try to test him. He just lets the weight of their mouths linger for a moment before he pulls back and says, “I have an idea.”

He leaves Hollander against the desk and crosses the room to the floor-to-ceiling windows, where a wingback chair sits in the corner.

“What are you doing?” Hollander asks, brow furrowing as he leans back against the wall and watches.

Ilya turns the chair so it faces the bed, then sits, pulling his phone from his pocket. He lifts it slightly in Hollander’s direction, lifts his chin the same way. 

Hollander hesitates, then pushes off the wall and crosses the room to grab his own phone where it sits on the nightstand by the connecting door.

Ilya pulls up the thread with Hollander and starts to type.

Ilya watches him as he reads it and expects him to glare at him over his shoulder, or ask again what he’s doing — but he just stares at the screen for a beat and moves to sit on the bed.

Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second before Hollander’s gaze drops, raking over him — how he’s splayed out in the chair, the effect he’s had on him on full display beneath his sweatpants. The way Hollander’s tongue runs across his bottom lip makes his cock twitch in his pants, and he palms it over the fabric, shameless, as his other hand returns to his phone.

He presses the heel of his hand against the head of his cock, craving pressure, friction — what he had when he was pressed between Hollander’s thighs. He slides his hand down the length, then back up again, watching as Hollander tracks his every move.

He takes his time, makes a show of it, enjoying the way Hollander’s hands grip the bed on either side of him with each drag of his palm, like he’s trying to feel it himself — or stop himself from reaching for it. When he leans back and slides a hand under the waistband of his sweats, he can see the shape of fuck leaving Hollander’s mouth, but he’s too far away to hear it. 

He watches as Hollander lifts his phone, eyes barely cutting away as he types.

He drops his phone on his chest, one hand sliding down to cup his balls while the other tucks the waistband of his pants under them. For a moment, he does nothing but let Hollander stare — then wraps his fingers loosely around the base, his other hand finding his phone again. He strokes himself lazily while he types, eyes half on the keys, half on Hollander.

He watches as Hollander types something, deletes it, types again, deletes it. Then he meets Ilya’s gaze for just a moment, before he shifts on the bed and drags his track pants down over his hips. He kicks them off, then bends to grab them — folds them once, then again — before he leans back just enough to let Ilya take him in.

His mouth waters, and his hand tightens.

Hollander nods slowly, eyes still on Ilya’s hand. Slowly, he brings his own up, fisting his cock and immediately matching Ilya’s pace.

“Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya says, unable to bring himself to type it out instead.

His hand moves faster now, and Hollander meets it. That moment in Los Angeles flashes in Ilya’s mind — the breakneck speed of Hollander on the treadmill beside him — and he pushes himself further, one hand coming up to tug at his balls while the other pumps faster.

The moan that breaks from Hollander is pure filth, and Ilya shivers at it, eyes closing.

His phone vibrates against his collarbone, pulling him back.

“Please,” Ilya says, too fast, too eager — but it’s nothing compared to how quickly Hollander is crossing the room to him.

Hollander’s mouth is on him before he’s even finished kneeling in front of him — a mess of lips and tongue and moans. All Ilya can do is stare at the way Hollander’s lashes flutter against his cheeks each time his cock disappears between those plush pink lips — each pass bringing him closer and closer to the edge.

When he’s right there, right against it, ready to tip over, he hauls Hollander up by his arms until he’s standing in front of him, panting.

“Did I do something wrong?”

Ilya doesn’t answer. He just leans forward and takes Hollander into his mouth. He goes deep immediately, the head of his cock pushing against the back of his throat and then further, and he doesn’t need to be fluent in Hollander to know what the whimper above him means.

He’s never had something like this before, and there’s greed in the way Hollander tries to rock into his mouth to have it again.

Ilya’s hands come up and grip his hips, stilling him, as he looks up at him while he moves back far enough for the tip to almost leave his lips. The way Hollander stares down at him, seeing him in a way he somehow couldn’t bear to before, makes him want to do this forever. So he takes his time — tip to base, then back again, a slow drag of his tongue, mouth loose and soft. 

Hollander’s hands go into his hair and stay there, flexing each time he reaches the back of Ilya’s throat.

As Ilya quickens the pace, his fingers dig, thumbs nearly bruising at his temples. He loosens his hold on Hollander’s hips just enough for him to chase the rhythm he needs, and it’s just a few frantic thrusts before Hollander is spitting out a hurried, “Holy shit, Rozanov, you better— I won’t be able to stop.”

Ilya presses his hands flat against the curve of Hollander’s ass and pulls him in deeper as he tries to pull away. There’s barely a second before Hollander’s whole body shudders and he spills down his throat — so deep he can barely taste it, licking greedily at the slit for something to savor as he pulls off. 

Above him, Hollander’s chest heaves in a breath, releases it as a sigh, and Ilya turns to press his mouth to his thigh. 

“I need to sit down,” Hollander murmurs. 

Ilya can’t help but gesture at his lap and grin, to which Hollander says, “Fuck off,” but it’s weak at best, laced with what almost sounds to Ilya like curiosity. When he folds down in front of him, chin level with his leaking cock, he’s almost certain that’s exactly it — the thing that fills his eyes, what makes his mouth fall open. 

“Do you want me to?”

“Do you want to?” Ilya echoes. 

His cock bobs between them at the thought, at the proximity of his mouth. Now that he knows the feel of it, he needs it even more. 

“I don’t know if I could, you know—“

“Finish?”

“What does it taste like?”

Ilya slides his tongue over his lower lip and curls a finger at Hollander. 

“Come here.”

Without so much as a why, Hollander gets to his knees, hands braced on Ilya’s thighs, and Ilya leans down. There’s still the lingering taste of salt on his tongue and he slides it past Hollander’s lips into his mouth as he’s met with a groan. It’s almost enough to make him come — Hollander tasting himself on his tongue and making that noise about it. He kisses him until the taste is gone, replaced with only the soft, minty flavor of Hollander’s mouth. 

“I think I want to try,” he says, breathless, the words landing hot against Ilya’s lips before he shifts back onto his heels once more. 

“Is not hockey. No one is watching. Is okay if you are bad at this. But is impossible to be bad at this,” Ilya says, measuring how far gone he is by how his English slips. 

Words fail him entirely when Hollander wraps a hand around his cock, follows it with his lips, and groans around it. 

It doesn’t take much before he’s back on the edge, gripping the armrests instead of Hollander’s head to give him an escape route. When he’s nearly there, heat building low in his belly, he grabs Hollander by the hair and pulls him off — makes quick work of his fist on his cock as he comes hard into his hand with his eyes fixed on Hollander’s wet lips. 

“You didn’t want to — you know — in my mouth?” he asks after, quiet in a way that makes Ilya think he’s disappointed. 

“And not give you something to look forward to?”

Hollander gets to his feet, reaches for some tissues on the nightstand, and throws them at Ilya with a, “Fuck you, Rozanov.” 

“Yes. You can maybe look forward to that, too.”

Ilya wipes himself down as best he can, then stands, the tissues discarded in the wastebasket beneath the desk where this all started. He reaches for Hollander, presses him up against it once more, their mouths finding each other easily. 

“I should go,” Ilya says after a while when he starts to feel Hollander sag against him. 

He leaves him there, leaning against the desk — no goodbye, no goodnight coming from either. But when he’s on the other side of the door, Hollander’s name lights up on his phone screen. 

Ilya collapses onto the bed in his room, head resting back against the wall that separates them, and swears he can feel Hollander through it.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled this chapter: absolutely nothing, because this was just pure smut and ya girl knows that well.

And, as always, please drop a comment or tell a friend, if you’re digging this. Writing fic may be for fun, but everyone likes to know they don’t suck at the thing they spent hours on. 😅

Chapter 9

Chapter Notes

July 2009 — New York

The fabric of Rozanov’s shirt bunches in Shane’s fist. His hand shakes, but not as badly as the night before, and he thinks of those early days on skates — letting go of the boards for a second before his feet slipped and he grabbed on again. He skates like no other now, and the thought tightens his fist as he pulls him close — so close that he can smell cigarette smoke lingering on his breath, feel the heat of it brush against his bottom lip, steady with each exhale.

A camera flashes.

Shane fixes his grip again, resets his jaw, and tries not to look at his mouth. His gaze drops anyway, catching on the shape of it, how it changes under his stare from a line to a curve, higher on one side. The last time he did this, he learned what the inside of that mouth felt like — and he wants to find out if he remembers it right after twelve hours of thinking about nearly nothing else.

Another flash.

Rozanov licks his lower lip and Shane’s mouth floods with a phantom taste, salty and deep — his own cum on that tongue. Something aches in him then, and he curls his fingers deeper against the fabric, knuckles burning like they can’t decide whether to push him away or pull him in. 

“Okay, now, Ilya, grab his arm, like you’re about to shove him off.”

Shane tracks the motion at the edge of his vision as Rozanov’s hand lifts, fingers sliding under the sleeve of his jersey to wrap around his wrist, thumb pressing clean against his pulse point. He tries not to lean into it, to force his blood to slow, but there’s no stopping it — not the thrum in his veins, not the thought of that same hand wrapped elsewhere the night before.

Touch me, touch me, touch me, beats under his skin, and when Rozanov shifts his thumb just so — back and forth against the underside of his wrist — Shane’s knuckles go white against his jersey. 

He pulls him just a fraction closer. 

“You too, yes?” Rozanov says, so low Shane almost misses it beneath the rush of blood in his ears. 

Shane doesn’t even allow himself the time to process what he means. He just says, “Not here.”

Too, though — that word sticks.

“Great, I think we have what we need,” the photographer says. “Shane, hang on. We’ll swap Vincent in. Ilya, take five — we’ll shoot you and Vincent after, and then we can go into solo shots.”

Rozanov squeezes his wrist once, the corner of a nail biting into the skin there, as Shane’s fingers unfurl. Then, with a nod, he’s gone.

Lemaire steps in and Shane feels his blood cool, slow, as he runs through the same poses, his head not swimming in the same way. No pull to look at his mouth, to taste it, and he can’t stop the way his stomach twists at the thought.

He’s tried not to think of it, to not name the feeling — since California, over the last week, as he tossed and turned until sunrise, eyes on the desk, the chair, the door. But he knows it doesn’t feel the same with Lemaire standing in front of him now, easy and uncomplicated. It doesn’t feel like anything at all.

“Alright,” the photographer calls, and Shane’s grip loosens at Lemaire’s chest before the word is even out of his mouth. “Shane, you’re good for five. Mind sending Ilya back in?”

“Uh, yeah,” he says absently. “Sure.”

His legs move heavy and slow as he heads down the hall toward wardrobe, the cameras at his back, filming him from every angle. There’s measure in each step, control in each movement, right until he opens the door labeled TALENT, the handle creaking, and leaves them on the other side.

The door closes with a soft click.

Shane has craved this for hours — to be alone with him. From the moment Rozanov looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup when Shane walked in, heat creeping up his neck as their eyes met. Then during the first set of photos — just the two of them, The Rivals, chests bare, a blade in Rozanov’s hand, a stick in Shane’s — when he gripped his hip a little too low, his thumb pressing so close to where his mouth had been. Then again just now — his fist caught in Rozanov’s shirt like the night before, the same pull in his arm, the same distance closing between them — except this time he held it there, in the shape of an almost, of before. Shane had been half-hard for hours, praying it wasn’t on film.

But he didn’t want it like this.

The room is small, windowless, and dim — the lights around the mirror buzzing faintly, the air heavy with hairspray that hangs there, sticky, clinging to his skin, the back of his throat. It makes him itch.

Rozanov is sprawled in the makeup chair facing the door, body spilling across it — the lines of the ghost Shane watched instead of sleeping.

When Shane’s eyes land on him, he makes a show of it — dipping his head, lifting the phone in his palm, his thumb tapping once against the screen. A quiet do you remember? in the motion of his body.

Shane’s phone vibrates on the counter beyond him, the glow catching in the mirror, and he crosses the room to get to it — past Rozanov, close enough that his hip brushes his elbow as he goes, Rozanov turning in the chair to follow him.

The word too echoes in the back of his mind as he turns to face him, lets himself look — Rozanov watching his every move like he would on the ice. He expects him to skate hard to the right — unlock his phone, take the bait. He fakes left instead, sets it back down.

“They need you out there,” he says, his voice coming out even, easy. 

“They can wait.” 

Rozanov’s thumbs slide over his screen. Shane’s phone buzzes beside him, the vibration carrying through the counter, grounding out against the back of his thigh. He doesn’t move.

“I don’t think they can.”

“They will.”

He can feel his eyes on him, the way they move between his face and his phone. He swallows thickly, then grabs at it, unlocking it while he stares at Rozanov’s hands and how they work across the screen.

Reading the words, being so close to his mouth — Shane’s cock throbs. He swallows hard, tries to regain control of himself as he types what he knows he should say — not what he wants to say.

Rozanov pulls him toward him, and Shane’s hands catch at his shoulders as he folds into him, one knee sliding over his thigh, then the other. He settles in his lap as their mouths meet — hard, messy, urgent. 

Shane pushes his tongue greedily into Rozanov’s mouth, immediately caught on the feel of it — how it’s the same, better even. The taste is different, but it doesn’t matter. He gets lost in it, in Rozanov’s hands in his hair, the way his hips shift and tilt under him.

He presses back greedily, rolling his hips as much as he can in the confines of the makeup chair, the angle wrong, the movement cramped.

It’s not enough — and he pushes up off Rozanov, bracing against him as he drags them both to their feet.

The handle of the door creaks.

Shane jerks back, breath catching, and he knows exactly what this has to look like — he takes a clean shot to Rozanov’s jaw that snaps his head to the side as the door swings open.

“Fuck off,” he spits, loud, and Rozanov’s eyes gleam at him as Lemaire hauls Shane off and shouts for help.

The room fills in seconds, the film crew pressing in. It’s a ruse, and they sell it — Shane struggling against Lemaire’s grip, Rozanov reaching around Claire and a few others who cage him in as best they can. Rozanov’s teeth flash as he laughs, blood from his split lip mixing with the spit Shane left behind.

“Is your lucky day, Shane Hollander. I would have destroyed you,” Rozanov taunts, his voice low. To anyone else, it sounds menacing — the threat they’ve been waiting for all day. To Shane, it sounds like a promise.

“I’d like to see you try, Rozanov.”

Then Rozanov, in clear view of the cameras, blows a kiss in his direction and turns, cutting through the crowd as it parts for him on the way out. 

“Hey, man, you okay?” Lemaire asks at his shoulder while Claire turns toward him with, “What was that?”

He just shrugs and brushes his knuckles against his mouth. “We’re rivals, right?”

***

There’s deliberate space set between them for the rest of the day — not enough to stop Ilya from chirping at him, but enough to ensure it doesn’t come to blows. Or, if it does, enough space for others to see it coming, get between them.

Closed sets for solo shots, radios crackling between PAs when they’re in motion, separate cars from the photo studio to the gleaming building on West 28th. Mike at his side as Ilya sneaks a smoke before they head inside. Controlled, careful — curated for the cameras.

The division, the focus on the tension, makes it easy — they’re so busy looking for a spark, a fight, they don’t see much else. He can smile, cocky, type easily with the phone in his hand, like he’s telling his friends about his day, about what a pussy Hollander is.

The reality reads differently.

The camera doesn’t zoom in on their phones as Ilya enters the screening room and their eyes meet — the frame fixed sharp on the tension in Hollander’s face, not his hands working unseen to text back.

Hollander’s camp is on one side, Lemaire a few rows back with his crew, the whole other side left open for Ilya. Before he takes his seat, before the lights dim, he taps out one more message and pockets his phone. His eyes cut left — Hollander’s face washed in a dim glow as he reads it.

A man in a suit takes to the front of the room, introducing the first webisode — going on about weekly releases, what they’ve filmed so far, what is coming next. How if all of this gains traction, there’s an opportunity to build this into something bigger, a springboard for their personal brands, a focus on who they are off the ice as much as their first season.

Hollander, every week. Maybe more.

“This is a rough cut — three separate narratives we’ll eventually edit to overlap. Just enough to tease the premiere, but you’ll get the idea,” the man says. “First up, Shane Hollander.”

The room fills with applause, the screen flickering on.

Like this, he’s allowed to stare. He leans forward onto his knees the way he does while watching tape, cataloguing the way Hollander’s eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles on Draft Day, the sharp lines of his shoulders in his suit, the curve of his biceps in the gym — the way his eyes cut over to Ilya on the treadmill next to him. His word choices. The way his mouth moves around them. The smattering of freckles that make his thumb twitch against his leg, the memory of them held there.

He shifts in his seat as Hollander says, “Because by the time I retire, no one will even think twice about who was picked ahead of me,” and the frame fades to black.

A low murmur meets the darkness before the room settles again, Ilya’s face filling the screen.

He glances over and sees Hollander’s chin tilt up, his eyes narrowing. He watches him out of the corner of his eye as past versions of himself down a swallow of vodka beside his father at a hotel bar, grip a Boston jersey and smile wide as cameras flash on Draft Day, skate fast and hard across the screen — shirtless just because he could. 

His voice comes overhead — sound bytes from California and Moscow, the interview he gave on day one in Boston.

Then he watches himself fold onto the stool at center ice, closes his eyes to it.

“My mother died when I was young — twelve.”

He knows what’s coming next. Wishes, briefly, that he had said more, pressed harder. Wishes, too, they cut it entirely.

“She was young, too. Died young. Not enough life for her. So I will give her this — my life made legacy. I will win it all for her. No one will stop me.”

They left in a few more lines — the one where he said he poured himself into hockey and it poured back. Something about his father, said in passing to avoid a heated phone call. A mention of the coach who helped him navigate the paperwork before the Draft.

When Lemaire’s segment is introduced, his phone vibrates against his thigh. The cameras are down, the crew watching their handiwork, and he pulls it from his pocket.

He types quickly, while the pity is likely still working its way through Hollander’s gut.

The lights come up and everyone stands, chairs scraping, voices rising all at once as Ilya shoves his phone back into his pocket.

They break quickly after — Hollander and his team moving first, ushered out through a side door, the space between them kept intact without anyone saying why. Ilya doesn’t look at him directly, but he tracks the movement anyway.

The cameras stay behind, crew lingering in the aisles, talking over what they just watched, someone laughing too loud near the back. The screen at the front flickers once, then goes dark.

Ilya hangs back with Mike as he runs through the rest of the weekend’s filming — sit-downs tomorrow morning, a private skate at a local rink for the opening sequence, background through the streets of New York — nodding where he needs to, not really listening, letting the room thin out around him.

His phone buzzes again somewhere in the noise.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled this chapter: film studios in Manhattan, synonyms for shape and fist, how to not make jokes about Vincent Lemaire.

Sorry this update took a while. I spent a lot of last week working on a one shot (In Twenty Years, if you haven’t read it yet) that put me in a bit of a shit headspace, and I needed a little time to get back into this. Appreciate you hanging in there. Next update will likely be next week, as I am also headed to New York (where Ilya is not waiting for me, sadly). But I hear that if you drop comments and say nice things, it makes it easier to write smut in airports. Could be true. Maybe give it a try.

Chapter 10

Chapter Notes

July 2009 — New York

The unforgiving halogen bulbs in the hotel bathroom make it look worse than it is — the corner of Ilya’s mouth gone purple where the blood has pooled beneath the skin. He knots the towel at his waist and tongues at it from the inside, the reflection of his cheek bowing outward with the pressure. Once, as a test. Then deeper, until the sting hits as a throb that pulls lower the longer he presses his tongue against it and thinks of how it got there. 

Pain has never been of particular interest to him, though he’s never stopped a hand at his throat or nails in his back if that’s what was wanted. On the ice, pain is just procedure — a puck off the ankle, a stick to the ribs, a shoulder driven into glass. But there’s a part of him that would like another shot to the jaw, or worse, if it meant feeling Hollander’s mouth on his like that again — rushed and reckless, with ruin waiting just outside the door.

A pipe creaks to his right, within the wall that sits between rooms 3221 and 3223, and the throb low in his body becomes harder to ignore as he listens to water run through the pipes and into the shower next door — over Hollander’s skin. One hand finds the wall and hovers there while the other reaches for his phone.

He snaps a few quick photos in the mirror — a thumb tugging the edge of his towel lower, chin tipped forward to make sure the proof is in clear view. He swipes through them, takes another, jaw lifted higher so the edge of it sharpens just so, before he lands on the one that does what he wants and sends it through.

He can hear the vibration of Hollander’s phone through the wall — or thinks he can. Then comes a faint “Fuck” from the other side, and he can’t help himself from leaning in, closer to the wall, to him. 

Ilya lowers the toilet seat and sits on the lid, a hand pulling through his damp hair while he stares at the screen, wondering if Hollander mirrors him — his position, his hesitation — on the other side. Ilya has enough experience to know what inexperience looks like. He remembers the shape of it in his own body — fear and want braided so tightly he couldn’t tell one from the other. He wants to push. Of course he wants to push. But not past the point where Hollander can still choose to come closer.

He tips his head back as the thought pulses through him, the crown knocking against the wall harder than he means to. If Hollander is still on the other side, he’s likely heard it. He wonders if his hand fits over the spot where the thud echoes, if he stares at it. He leaves it there, just in case Hollander does.

***

When Rozanov pulls open the door between their rooms five minutes later, Shane is surprised to find him fully clothed, like he meant it — not for that. But his smile is bare, left uncovered where the rest of him isn’t, stretching the bruise up at the corner of his mouth in a way Shane thinks has to be painful. Before he can stop himself, he reaches for it, the pad of one thumb hesitating at its edge and hovering there.

“Does it hurt?”

“This? No,” Rozanov laughs — the cocky one Shane’s heard through televisions and camera playback — and the breath of it lands against his knuckles. “This is nothing. No more apologies for this.”

Rozanov moves out of the doorframe, stepping wide in a way Shane knows means he’s supposed to cross the threshold — into Rozanov’s space, not the one behind him still holding the shape of what happened the night before.

“It’s like mine, but reversed,” he says absently as he walks in, eyes landing on the headboard of the bed where it backs up to his own. “Like how we’re supposed to be.”

“Opposite?” Rozanov says, closing the door behind him. “If we are opposites, this means you are boring?”

The way he says it, flat at the edges instead of sharp like he would on camera, makes something churn in Shane’s stomach — the same way he felt back in Grade 9, when his girlfriend would tease him, and when her brother would too. With her, he’d known what the heat in his face was supposed to mean. With him, he’d tried not to think about it.

The same heat climbs up the back of his neck now, and he turns before Rozanov can see it — only to be met with his stare, the same one from the dressing room, like he wants something from Shane. Like he might take it.

“I’m not boring,” he says, eyes dropping to Rozanov’s mouth. 

“No?”

Shane closes the distance in response, letting his mouth answer for him. He loses himself in it — the heat of Rozanov’s mouth, the way his still-wet curls stick between Shane’s fingers, the pressure of the hand that lands on Shane’s hip, how Rozanov’s fingers dent there. Rozanov opens to him with a low sound, and Shane takes what he’s given, tongue sliding in, his grip tightening in damp hair.

Then there’s a hand in the center of his chest, and Rozanov’s mouth moves from his to his cheek, across his jaw, before it’s gone.

“Have you heard of the texts from last night?”

Shane blinks.

“What?”

“Texts From Last Night.”

“Last — last night?”

“Oh, no no no.” Rozanov laughs. “Not our texts. Is a website. Messages from strangers on the internet.”

Rozanov crosses the room, grabs his phone from the foot of the bed, and sits, patting the spot beside him.

There are only so many places to sit, but Shane still looks to the chair in the corner for half a beat before last night flashes through him — Rozanov splayed before him, his own knees on the carpet. He moves to the bed instead, balancing on the edge, leaving enough space between their thighs to feel casual.

Rozanov shifts closer, closing the space as his thumb works over the screen, wrist hovering just above Shane’s thigh. Shane stares at the shape of Rozanov’s hand around the phone — how close it is to being what he wants, how close to touching him.

He swallows thickly as Rozanov says, “Look,” a finger from his other hand jabbing at the screen.

“What’s a more ladylike way to say ‘fuck me on your lunch break’?” Shane reads out from the screen before he can even process what he’s really looking at, but a laugh cracks out of Rozanov beside him, and Shane scrolls until he finds another he thinks will let him hear that again.

“At what point did I decide it would be a good idea to fill my contact case with vodka.” The end of it lands like a question, followed by an actual one. “What is wrong with these people?”

Rozanov is too busy laughing to answer, and Shane has to look down at the screen to keep from grinning at the sound. He pulls the phone from Rozanov’s hand and scrolls further.

“Oh, this is good,” he says as he pre-reads one, then shares it aloud. “I wish they made sweatshirts for legs, and then the reply says, you mean pants?”

The absurdity of it hits him harder the second time, and he folds into laughter in a way he wouldn’t dare let himself in front of the crew.

“Let me do one.” Rozanov’s hand brushes his, and Shane’s laugh catches on it, breath hitching into something embarrassingly close to a hiccup.

“Everyone just saw your hickey on TV and on the jumbotron at the hockey game.” 

Rozanov lets the end hang there, his voice going almost serious in a way that makes Shane’s laugh sound twice as loud. Shane swallows it down and looks at the phone when Rozanov tosses it between them — easier than looking at him — then at the hand that lands just above his knee. 

“Hollander. Was this you?”

Shane swallows thickly, before Rozanov unleashes a howl. 

“Fuck off,” Shane spits out, grabbing the phone and nudging Rozanov’s hand away, despite wanting to cover it with his own.

They read a dozen or so more until they’re both breaking with laughter too often to keep going, and Rozanov falls back on the bed, legs still hanging over the side. Shane feels it when Rozanov’s hand finds his back, light and hesitant, like he’s asking for something without asking, without saying anything. His hand twitches on his own thigh before moving over to Rozanov’s, thumb sweeping just above his knee in answer.

“When do you go home?”

Shane tries not to measure the thickness of the words, how they sound heavy at the back of Rozanov’s throat, but they sink in him like a stone dropped into water. 

He wants to ask why it matters. What it changes. Whether Rozanov is asking because he cares or because it ends when Shane leaves. But all he says is, “Tomorrow night.”

Rozanov’s thumb pauses, and Shane feels the way his fingers tighten against the back of his shirt. Then he pulls — not by much, but enough that Shane can pretend he’s only following it as he falls back beside him. Rozanov’s hand flattens against his spine before pressing firm, drawing him in closer against the line of his body. 

For a second, he’s back against the desk with Rozanov between his thighs, caught in the breath before everything went from maybe to memory. Shane’s mouth waters as he shifts against his side, eyes landing on Rozanov’s mouth, the way it parts when he bends toward him. 

“Okay,” Rozanov says an inch or less from his mouth. “Then we have now.”

The questions ricochet around in Shane’s head with each fraction Rozanov moves toward him. 

Now? Only now? Never again?

Shane closes the last of the distance before any of them can make it out of his mouth.

It isn’t like the kiss at the door, or the one in the dressing room. Nothing like how their mouths met in the room next door. It’s quieter than that, slow, and worse for it — Rozanov’s mouth soft under his, his hand still firm at Shane’s back, holding him there like he’s allowed to stay.

It makes Shane’s chest ache in a way the urgency hadn’t.

He kisses him again anyway.

Rozanov lets him. That’s the thing Shane can’t stop noticing — not the hand at his back, not the soft sound he makes when Shane’s mouth shifts over his, but the fact that he lets Shane kiss him like this, slow and uncertain and nothing like a dare.

It gets messy eventually — Shane’s hand finding the curls at the nape of Rozanov’s neck again, and the flat of Rozanov’s palm against his jaw, pulling him in until there’s nowhere for the heat in Shane’s body to go but into his mouth.

But it doesn’t become anything else.

No hands under clothes. No teeth at his throat. No sharp edge of a desk digging into the backs of his thighs. Just the length of their bodies, side by side. Rozanov’s mouth, again and again, until Shane stops trying to make sense of what it means and lets himself have it.

At some point, the kisses slow. Shane doesn’t know when. Only that his mouth is warm and swollen, his body heavy in a way that feels different from exhaustion, and Rozanov’s hand is still at his back. 

He means to say something. Maybe that he should go. Maybe don’t move. Maybe one of the questions still circling the edges of his mind.

Instead, he closes his eyes.

***

Ilya wakes to a knock that isn’t on his door.

It comes thin through the wall at first, far enough away that he almost folds it into the sounds around them — the heavy slide of the elevator doors, city noise, someone’s suitcase thudding down the hall. Then it comes again, sharper this time, followed by a muffled voice calling, “Shane?”

Ilya goes still.

Hollander is warm against him, one hand tucked beneath his own cheek, hair mussed from sleep and from Ilya’s fingers. For half a second, Ilya lets himself look. Then the knock comes again, louder.

“Hollander,” he says, low and urgent, hand closing around his shoulder. “Wake up.”

He only shifts closer.

“Shane.”

His eyes open at that — slow, confused, then wide as the sound comes again from his room.

“Shit,” Shane breathes.

“Yes,” Ilya says, already pushing him upright. “Go.”

“I’m sorry I—”

“Just go.”

Ilya watches him disappear through the connecting doors, closing them in his wake. Listens as he pulls open the door in his room, the muted conversation with whoever was there. When the room goes quiet again and the sheets beside him turn cold, he rolls over and tries not to think about how quickly he could get used to this. How long it will be before he has it again. If he does.

He stays there longer than he should, one hand tucked under the pillow where Hollander’s shoulder had been.

His phone buzzes against the nightstand.

Ilya stares at the screen, ready to make a joke about Claire, or producers, or Hollander sneaking out of his bed, but the apology stops him. His eyes cut to the empty space beside him, to the creases still left in the sheets.

Ilya presses the phone lightly against his mouth, careful of the bruise. It pangs anyway.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled while writing this chapter: types of light bulbs in hotel bathrooms in 2009, the July 2009 calendar, when Texts From Last Night was popular, and whether this chapter is too sweet for two 18 year olds.

Also, Texts From Last Night is somehow still up and functioning, which feels like discovering a perfectly preserved fossil from the internet’s messiest era. Type in July 10, 2009 if you want to read the ones our boys were laughing at.

Anyway. If you enjoyed emotionally complicated hotel room tenderness, finding out that sweatshirts for legs do exist, or Ilya Rozanov discovering the erotic potential of consequences, I would love to hear about it in the comments. Please, I beg.

Chapter 11

Chapter Notes

This fic uses a work skin to format iOS messages. Something rendering odd or prefer plain text? You can turn it off by hitting the "Hide Creator's Style" button at the top of the page.

July 2009 — New York

The air is unforgiving in a way Ilya might almost admire — the way he admires a particular brand of in-game violence — if he weren’t choking on it as he skates hard from one end of the rink to the other. On ice, he could do this all day. On an open-air roller rink with barely a breeze coming off the East River, he is discovering limits he has no intention of admitting to the cameras, his costars, or whatever supreme being saw the divine comedy of putting hockey players on roller skates.

It makes him want to push harder, which is how he ends up taking the next run too fast under the burn of the afternoon sun.

Halfway through, Ilya hooks his fingers into the hem of the jersey they put him in — the show’s title embroidered and sitting heavy at the center of his chest — and drags it over his head while he’s still moving. It catches for a second on his chin before coming free, leaving him in the thin black tank beneath it, sweat making it cling like skin. He grabs that next, peeling it off his body as the director calls, “Cut!”

He tells himself it has nothing to do with the cameras, but he can’t help winking toward them anyway — toward Hollander, standing near the crew at the far end of the rink — as he uses the balled up fabric to wipe at the sweat on his chest.

“That’s the right move, Rozanov,” the director shouts, and Ilya gulps down air as he turns and skates over to reset. “Everybody lose the jerseys. The girls are going to love this.”

He catches Hollander’s eye as he approaches, eyebrows raised in challenge as he leans casually back against the boards like he doesn’t need them to stop.

“Yes,” Ilya says, a hum at the tail end of the word. “The girls will love this.”

Lemaire laughs off to the side as Ilya watches Hollander’s gaze fall to his mouth and stay there, tracing the shape of it as the corner lifts — the side still tender from his fist, his lips. Hollander looks until he pulls his jersey over his head and turns to hand it to the crew, sun falling across his back in a way that makes Ilya burn.

He has touched Hollander in the dark already, learned the heat of him by feel, but the sun does something cruel to him now — puts him bare in the light where Ilya can look and look and look, but not touch.

A whistle blows, taking him out of it, and the three of them move to skate loose circles near the cameras, waiting for the signal. The director sends them to the far end and back again, shouting things like, “Check him,” and “Catch up, Lemaire,” like this is something that can be choreographed into looking natural.

It can’t.

There hasn’t been a single take where all three of them stay upright on their skates, so as they careen toward the far net, it’s easy enough for Ilya to push too hard and collide with Hollander, one hand fitting over his chest as he catches himself.

Ilya is aware of the crew in the distance, leaning in as they crash together, hoping things escalate despite the talking-to they got before the cameras clicked on — a sportsmanlike afternoon, the director had said, as if he believed in such things. But they’re far enough away, positioned just wrong enough, that Ilya can be bold. He leans in, limbs selling it as a struggle to get his balance, and presses his mouth beneath Hollander’s ear, the salt of his skin stinging the cut at the corner of Ilya’s mouth.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Hollander says low, but he doesn’t push off. 

“Giving them what they want,” Ilya says, shifting like he’s posturing, like he’s trying to intimidate him. But it’s only one forehead leaning against another, sweat making their skin stick, Hollander leaning in instead of away. “They like when we fight, yes?”

“I’m not going to hit you again.”

“Because you want to kiss me?”

“Fuck off,” Hollander scoffs.

“Do it,” Ilya counters, mouth pulling just enough that Hollander will know which he means and everyone else will read it wrong. Then his hands are at Hollander’s chest and shoving as his voice rises. “Do it, Hollander. They’d love it.”

“They won’t keep falling for this,” Hollander mumbles into the space between them, before he says louder, “Fuck off, Rozanov,” and he pushes Ilya back.

It should make space. On ice, it would. But Hollander’s wheels catch wrong beneath him, his balance going out all at once. He grabs for the first thing he can reach — Ilya — and takes him down with him. They hit the rink hard, tangled, Ilya’s shoulder grinding into the pavement, Hollander landing half on top of him with a grunt.

For one breath, it’s nothing but heat and bare skin and Hollander’s mouth too close to his.

Then Ilya gets his hand at Hollander’s shoulder and shoves. Hard enough to sell it.

“Get off,” he snaps, loud enough for the cameras.

Hollander’s eyes flash with recognition before he looks away. He shoves back, palm slipping against sweat-slick skin. “You grabbed me.”

“You fell.”

“Because you checked me.”

Ilya gets a hand around his wrist and twists them sideways, just enough for their bodies to roll, just enough for it to look ugly from the far end of the rink. Hollander moves with him, cursing, knee pressing between Ilya’s thighs, one hand braced near his head. 

It is almost too easy to make it look like violence when only he hears the moan against his temple.

“Boys!” someone shouts.

Ilya bares his teeth like a grin, like a threat, and shoves again as wheels scrape toward them, feet pounding the pavement just as fast.

“Get the fuck off me, Hollander.”

Hands reach in and he lets himself be pulled up to his feet, over to one side of the rink while Hollander is ushered to the other. The director calls for five, and they keep to their corners the way fighters would — aware of the energy, how it can spill over, and how it has to be contained.

“He just can’t get enough of you, huh?” Mike laughs, handing him a bottle of water and a towel. 

He drinks nearly the whole thing in a few short swallows, the rest of it poured over his face and neck before he says, panting, “Is fun, yeah?”

“It won’t be for him when you lay him out.”

Someone prods at his shoulder, pulling a piece of gravel from the skin there, and Ilya doesn’t so much as flinch. He’s too busy wondering if it’ll scar. If someday this will be a funny story about the time he took Hollander down on roller skates in New York, or if it will mean more than that. He can feel the slant of his mouth soften at the thought, and he looks across the space between them, wondering what it would cost to close it. How much it’ll widen after today.

“Hey, whoa, Ilya,” Mike laughs tensely, snapping his fingers in front of Ilya’s face. “Don’t lay him out, okay? Focus on me.”

Hollander’s eyes meet his for half a second before someone moves between them, and Ilya hikes his shoulder into a shrug, the scrape burning a bit as he does.

“What, you want us to be lovers, instead?”

***

The ride back to the hotel is tense for a lot of reasons, Rozanov’s thigh pressed along his in the back of the van among them, their knees knocking with every pothole beneath the tires across lower Manhattan. Shane makes a point to look anywhere but down — at the place where their skin sticks, at the edge of Rozanov’s pinky resting a degree shy of Shane’s leg. Mostly, he looks at the faces that keep glancing back at him, at them, like if the van moves wrong, they’ll explode.

He wonders if they pushed it too far. If they oversold it.

But then he remembers Rozanov’s mouth beneath his ear, the press of it disguised for every eye and lens pointed at them, and he shifts in his seat, his shoe tapping against the side of Rozanov’s over the floorboards.

He knows this might be it — for now, for a while, or for good, he’s not sure. When they get back to the hotel, there won’t be a shared door, Rozanov’s fingers curling against his jaw, the taste of his mouth. There will only be a car that will take him to a plane that will take him to another country, to another team, another life. 

The more he thinks of it, the more it aches — the hollow place in him where he knows he’ll have to bury this wanting alongside the shame, confusion, and fear that have been growing there since LA.

Rozanov’s foot presses into the side of his again and stays there.

“So, when does episode one hit again?” Lemaire asks from the other side of Rozanov as they roll to a stop at a crosswalk that’s, by Shane’s best guess, five blocks from their destination.

“This coming week, Friday,” the man Shane has learned is Rozanov’s version of Claire says over his shoulder. “Ready for your close-up, bud?”

“Maybe if these two stop stealing the spotlight.”

Lemaire bumps Rozanov’s shoulder just enough that his hand spills across Shane’s thigh. He grips there like he’s only using Shane for leverage to turn and get in Lemaire’s face, and for one brief second, Shane lets his palm settle over it before shoving it aside.

The van lurches forward as Rozanov settles back into his seat, against him, again, and the hum of the city around them swallows the small talk at the front of the van. He wonders if he’s close enough to whisper — if Lemaire is too close to hear. 

Then there’s four blocks and he’s swallowing his words, three and he’s trying to spit them back out. Two blocks away, he thinks it would sound like, “I might miss you.” One block and he thinks he feels the press of Rozanov’s thigh into his own say the same. 

When the door slides open, they’re the last to get out, forced to duck and shuffle toward it.

“Have a good summer” spills out of Shane while he still has the chance.

He hates it, but it does what he needs it to. Rozanov stills in the opening, one hand against the frame, the other at the back of the bench seat, caging Shane at the back of the van.

“Is this all you want to say?” Rozanov asks quietly over his shoulder.

There’s no one else in the van, no cameras, no hot mics, but the way he says, “I can’t,” leaves him feeling more exposed than he has in front of them.

I can’t say what this is. I can’t make it real and then leave. I can’t.

Rozanov nods once and gives a low, “Okay,” before stepping out onto the street, close enough that Shane’s shoulder bumps his as he follows. He lingers there for a moment, their hands almost touching, knowing even that is too long with everyone close enough to understand the version of them being built for TV.

Then he sees his parents near the hotel entrance, his mother already moving toward him to intervene, and he’s already stepping away before he decides to.

He can feel Rozanov watching him as he goes, the weight of his eyes settling in Shane’s middle beside everything he can’t say.

***

The whole of New York feels empty with someone else on the other side of the door. Ilya checks the latch in a way he hasn’t felt compelled to in days. Checks his phone just as often. Both are quiet, still, and it unsettles him, wanting it the other way.

He tells himself Hollander is probably already folding back into the shape of his own life. Whatever comes next for him when Ilya is not there to press a hand to his thigh, to his chest, to the center of whatever he keeps trying to hold closed.

It should be easy to let him go. They’ve known each other for days, not years. They are not teammates. Not friends. Not anything he hasn’t been to anyone else countless times before.

But Ilya keeps hearing him in the back of the van, voice low and stripped thin.

I can’t.

He had said it like an answer. Like a door closing. But Ilya knows the sound of no. He knows don’t. Stop. Leave.

Hollander hadn’t said any of those.

Ilya turns his phone over once, then again, thumb sliding over the screen, down the edge, over the corners. He should let him have it — the space, the silence, the clean exit. He almost does.

Then he thinks of Hollander’s mouth around that terrible goodbye, the way he looked like it cost him something to say nothing.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: is it harder to skate on roller blades or roller skates, average temperature in July in NYC, roller rinks in Manhattan in 2009 (shockingly few), how many rows of seats are in a passenger van, and “another word for feeling naked, but not in a naked way, in a feelings way.”

Apologies for this taking a bit. I’ve been in a real shit place mentally the last week or so and writing has been hard. I appreciate your patience, your love for these boys, and your comments always. Thank you for being here.

Chapter 12

Chapter Notes

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled this chapter: a 2009 calendar and the time difference between Ottawa and Moscow.

As always, feel free to drop a comment, if you’re feeling kind. And just another reminder that this is an AU and I went into this with a “what if these two dudes used their words” mindset, so please don’t tell me they’re “not Shane and Ilya.” Because I am nottt approving those comments. 🙃

Chapter 13

Chapter Notes

August 2009

The first few webisodes are released to underwhelming reviews, when anyone bothers to review them at all. Claire tells Shane it’s expected — the network is still figuring out how to build an audience around this kind of format, and most people aren’t exactly refreshing a website every Friday for fifteen minutes of prospect footage — but then the first Friday in August hits, episode four drops, and the game changes.

Shane wakes up at his parents’ place in Ottawa that Saturday morning to five texts from Rozanov. That in itself isn’t unusual anymore. They talk nearly every day now, even if it’s only one of them sending a post from Texts from Last Night, a link to PostSecret, or a screenshot from Dogspotting, which Rozanov has a clear soft spot for and no apparent shame about. Sometimes it’s more than that — often in recent days. Photos no one else should see, words they probably shouldn’t say. 

But when Shane opens the thread, his heart sinks.

They’re links from TMZ, Perez Hilton, Oh No They Didn’t, and other blogs Shane has never heard of but immediately hates, all saying some version of the same thing.

Hockey’s newest rivalry comes with abs, attitude, and two very pretty faces.

Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are hockey’s answer to Team Edward vs. Team Jacob.

The NHL wanted a rivalry. The internet found two heartthrobs.

No one is focusing on the fact that Shane’s trained his whole life only to go second in the Draft. That would’ve burned him to read, but he thinks he would prefer it to this — to being turned into a storyline for his face, his body, whatever version of him fits best on a bedroom wall.

Shane stares at the message until the screen dims in his hand. He knows Rozanov is teasing him. Knows, in some terrible little part of himself, that he likes it when Rozanov says things like that. It just doesn’t make him feel any less like a product.

By Monday, he’s doubled down — two-a-days turning into three-a-days, whole afternoons disappearing at the local rink until home starts to feel like a place he only goes to sleep. He’s on the ice before breakfast, in the gym until his shirt is soaked through, then back at the rink after dinner because stopping feels worse than being tired.

He self-tapes through all of it, setting the camera against the glass, on the bench, at the blue line, anywhere it can catch him moving. If people are going to watch him, then they can watch this: the work, the sweat, the same drill until he gets it right and then a dozen more times after that. They can watch him become impossible to reduce to anything but a future they’ll have to take seriously.

His phone lights up throughout the week. Rozanov, mostly. Memes, jokes, the occasional pointed question Shane reads too quickly from the lock screen before turning it over and going back to work. He tells himself he’ll answer later, when he’s less tired, less annoyed, less whatever this is.

Later keeps moving.

It’s Thursday before Rozanov gets a response out of him, and only because he sends something Shane can’t ignore.

He opens it in the kitchen while his mother sorts through paperwork at the island, her back turned but close enough that he still tilts the screen away on instinct, and nearly drops his phone into his bowl of Greek yogurt and protein powder.

For one stunned second, all he can process is Rozanov’s fist around his cock, the head wet with precum.

Shane excuses himself and goes to his room, then keeps going, shutting himself in the en suite bathroom like one door isn’t enough. He sits on the closed lid of the toilet seat and lets himself fume for just a moment before he unlocks his phone and looks.

Just looks.

He means to be angry. He is angry. At Rozanov, at himself, at the fact that his body reacts before the rest of him can decide what to do with it. But underneath that, something else twists — the same sick little feeling that’s been sitting in him since the articles came out. His face, his body, his mouth, his wanting. All of it packaged into something for other people to consume. 

And now this.

***

Ilya’s had enough casual hookups and almosts to understand what the words between the words mean. What is this? looks the same in Russian or English — in a hand drawing softer across his skin in the after or on a screen dressed up as a nothing that’s anything but.

He’s asked himself the same question no less than a dozen times since he left the States, even more since Hollander texted him, No one can know.

Was there something to know? What was it, if so?

He tells himself over and over that it’s simple. So simple. He repeats it until it starts to sound like something he could believe, but that doesn’t mean it’s something he wants to convince Hollander of — a hollow belief, like the way he says goddamn but never prays. 

He could answer. He should answer. Something easy at first — No, Hollander. You are not only that. Something careful enough not to scare him, honest enough not to be another joke. A hand reaching, not pulling away.

Instead, he decides Hollander needs space — needs room to decide what he wants without Ilya pressing himself into every quiet place he finds. He needs not to be chased, not to be cornered, not to have every silence filled with the shape of Ilya’s wanting.

But Ilya knows, even as he settles on it, that space is not only for Hollander.

Space means Ilya does not have to ask himself why a few days of silence had made him feel empty. Space means he does not have to think about why he sent the photo in the first place, why wanting Hollander to look at him felt so urgent it had carved out the part of his brain where sense should have been. Space means he does not have to put a name to the thing in him that does not end at Hollander’s body, even if his body is the safest place to put it.

So he gives Hollander what he can. Not everything. Not yet. But enough that he won’t leave him sitting alone with the worst version of the question.

He waits until the message sends, then leaves his phone faceup on the coffee table. For a second, he just stands there, staring at the small dark screen, at the room around it gone gold with late-afternoon light. Moscow is loud beyond his windows — traffic slogging through the street below, someone shouting from a balcony at kids in the courtyard, the whole city carrying on like nothing in him has shifted out of place.

He grabs his gear and heads for the rink.

By the time he gets there, the day is thinning at the edges, heat lifting off the pavement in waves. A U18 practice is finishing up, teenagers spilling through the doors with damp hair and unlaced skates, their voices echoing down the hall. Ilya slips past them with his bag on his shoulder and the small, stupid ache of his phone left behind sitting under his ribs.

He skates until he feels nothing.

Simple.

***

Shane stares at the screen until the words stop looking like words.

He should feel better. He thinks that is what an apology is supposed to do — take the sharpest edge off the thing that hurt, sand it down, make it easier to hold. But all it does is sit there in his hand, too serious to turn into a joke, too careful to be dismissed.

Rozanov had taken him seriously, and somehow, that feels worse.

Shane cards a hand through his hair and shakes out his legs, having sat behind two closed doors long enough for his feet to go numb against the cool tile floor. Feeling prickles back into them, sharp and unpleasant, then fades again as he sits there with his phone in his hand and the cursor blinking at him.

A reply is probably required. He knows that much, which is unhelpful because knowing a reply is required is not the same thing as knowing what the reply should be. There are categories. There are always categories. Accept the apology. Reject the apology. Ask a clarifying question. Change the subject. Pretend the entire conversation never happened and hope Rozanov gets bored enough to move on, which history suggests he will not.

He types, It’s fine, and deletes it.

It isn’t.

He types, I know, and deletes that too, because he doesn’t know. Not really. He knows Rozanov probably didn’t mean to make him feel cheap. He knows Rozanov wanted his attention and got it. He knows he opened the photo again after the first time, even after saying he was going to delete it.

He knows too much and not enough.

The screen dims again. Shane taps it awake with his thumb, staring at Rozanov’s name at the top of the thread. The apology sits there without a follow-up, the expectation of the empty space beneath it somehow worse than if Rozanov had filled it with anything else.

Shane wanted him to take it seriously. He just didn’t expect him to actually do it, and now that he has, there’s nowhere to hide.

He looks down at the apology again. Then at the empty text box beneath it.

There are a dozen things he could say that would make it smaller. Easier. Something mean, something dirty, something that would pull them back onto safer ground. He could call Rozanov an asshole. He could send back that video of the kid after the dentist, the one they’d gotten into the habit of sending each other out of the blue before all the silence. He could ask if Rozanov is still hard and let that become the only thing they have to talk about.

Instead, Shane types the only thing that feels true enough to survive being sent.

He stares at it for a long time after it’s delivered. Then, before he can take it back, before he can overexplain that he means the show and the press and Rozanov and himself most of all, he locks his phone and sets it facedown on the bathroom counter.

It’s still early enough for a run, the worst of the heat still hours off.

Shane changes quickly, leaving his phone where it is. He laces his shoes by the front door before he can talk himself out of it. Outside, the air is thick, the pavement already warm through his shoes, but Shane runs anyway — down the street, past the houses he knows too well, farther than he planned. Like distance is something he can make with his body. Like the miles between Ottawa and Moscow haven’t already tried.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: popular gossip blogs in 2009 — I lived on LiveJournal back then, so ONTD was an absolute no-brainer — what year Twilight was a thing, popular memes and viral videos from 2009, which led me to rediscover David After Dentist, youth hockey age divisions in Russia, and synonyms for hollow.

Did you think that just because they’re using their words, they wouldn’t make things complicated? Also, “My mother is ten feet away” is totally the new “Scott Hunter is right next door” in my head.

PS: I’ve heard AO3 is being iffy with letting people leave comments right now. I’ve also heard using an incognito tab works. In case you’re trying. Please try. 😂

Chapter 14

Chapter Notes

August 2009

“Yes, Mike, I am self-taping,” Ilya says instead of hello when his phone rings late enough that Friday night technically tips into Saturday morning. “I promise I will send you tomorrow.”

He’s on the curb outside a club that was impossible to get into unless you were rich, beautiful, or knew the right person at the door. Svetlana had managed two out of three. Ilya had managed the other — recognized from the sudden noise around the webisodes before he had to use his father’s name like a key, which was new. Usually, if a door like this opened for him, it was because everyone knew what kind of money used to move through the place, and which police officers had looked away long enough to let it keep moving. But tonight, the doorman had clapped him on the back and called him “Boston” before unhooking the velvet rope. Now, many hours and drinks later, he’s passing a cigarette back and forth with Svetlana and debating the merits of finding one more bar under the blue wash of the sign while the bass rattles through the wall behind them.

“Not why I’m calling, and hello to you too,” Mike huffs across the line. “You got a second? Sorry, I know it’s late. I was going to leave a voicemail.”

“Yes, one moment.” Ilya lifts two fingers toward Svetlana, then pushes to his feet and steps off the curb, crossing the street less for privacy than for quiet. He walks until the bass no longer pounds in his teeth before he says, “Okay. Talk.”

“The network wants you in the States as soon as possible,” Mike says. “The webisodes are getting traction, as I’m sure you’ve heard, and someone pitched a Real World-style pre-camp house — you, Hollander, Lemaire, cameras rolling while you train before camp. The execs ate it up.”

For a second, all Ilya hears is Hollander — the same country, the same house. Then the silence on the line, Mike waiting for him to fill in a blank, check a box.

“Okay,” he says slowly. “And? You are this someone, and this is apology?”

“No, not me. Just — before I pull in immigration counsel, I wanted to tell you. Ask you. This isn’t nothing, Ilya. We’d have to see if they can amend your petition, move your visa start date up, all of that.”

Ilya thinks about what it’ll be like to see Hollander, face puffy with sleep, pouring coffee in the kitchen. If there will be hidden corners he can find to pull him into, walls he can push him against. If Hollander will look at him across a room full of cameras like he’s trying not to want him — what will happen if he can’t. 

He sways, the vodka heavy in his heels throwing the heat in his middle off balance.

“You trust me and Hollander in same house?”

“No,” Mike says flatly. “But that’s kind of the point.”

There’s a tap on his shoulder — Svetlana, heels in one hand while the other fishes into his front pocket for his pack of cigarettes. He holds up one finger. She rolls her eyes, lights one anyway, and drifts a few steps away on a pointed exhale. He knows the look — let’s go, Ilya, I’m bored.

“What did Hollander say?”

“He’s in. Lemaire too, not that you asked.”

“How long?” Ilya asks, clipped just before the rest of what he really wants to ask comes spilling out of him. 

“For what?”

“For lawyers to push papers. Stamp things,” he says, bored as he can make it. “Get America to want me sooner.”

“Two weeks.”

“See you in two weeks then.”

He ends the call before Mike can say anything else, then stalks over to where Svetlana is leaning against a stone wall and keeps going in the direction of the Metro while they can still catch it. Behind him, she curses, shoves her feet back into her heels, and follows.

***

Shane has read Claire’s email three times, but the words keep rearranging themselves into the same impossible shape: two weeks outside Boston before training camp, additional filming because the webisodes have started getting attention, all three of them staying in the same house while the cameras follow whatever the network thinks happens when teenage hockey players have too much time and not enough supervision.

He’d said yes for all the obvious reasons. Because it was part of the show. Because the extra exposure mattered. Because his mother thought it was smart, and Shane had no real argument against that.

None of that was untrue.

It just wasn’t the thing he kept coming back to.

Without this, the teams would divide them — him and Rozanov. Montreal and Boston. Separate camps, separate cities, separate schedules. Unless they made their teams, they might not even see each other at all. And if they did, it would be across the ice in front of twenty thousand people, with nothing between them but sticks and gloves and every reason to pretend New York had never happened.

The show had made him feel like something to be watched, packaged, sold back to himself in pieces.

It also gave them a reason to be in the same room before then.

That was why he’d said yes.

He is standing in front of the open refrigerator when his phone lights in his hand, still shirtless from his workout, cold air spilling over his ribs. It’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but he’d come down looking for something he could count as training fuel anyway — protein, carbs, whatever combination might satisfy the nutritionist currently living somewhere in the back of his head and keep his body from catching up to how hard he’s been pushing it.

The shelves blur into nothing the second Rozanov’s name appears on the screen. He closes the door too quickly, the jars rattling hard as it slams shut, before settling his back against the island. They’ve found a rhythm again since the yesterday — jokes, random photos, easy, safe — but Shane knows before he opens the thread that this isn’t that. Rozanov will have heard by now, and texting Shane in the middle of his night already says too much, whatever the message actually says.

It should be nothing. A joke about time zones, maybe, another way for Rozanov to make himself impossible. But Shane feels it in his body the same as if Rozanov were in the room, and heat crawls up his neck as he pushes off the island and crosses the house too quickly. In his room, he shuts the door with his heel and looks back down, but nothing has changed — just the cursor blinking back at him.

***

The next two weeks are not waiting, because Ilya refuses to call them that.

Waiting is passive. Waiting is hope. Waiting is leaving too much to chance. Ilya trains instead.

He skates until his legs shake, lifts until his shoulders burn, runs stairs in the heat until sweat drips from his jaw and splatters the concrete between his feet. He shifts into Eastern time, rising before Moscow has any reason to be awake and making himself sleep while the city is still loud outside his window. He turns down Svetlana every time she tries to drag him out and ignores his father and brother when they bother to call. If Hollander is going to see him again in Boston — if that’s even the smallest part of why he’s there — Ilya intends to make it difficult for him to look away.

By the time his visa clears, he feels sharpened down to the nerve. He flies to Boston with a duffel over his shoulder, his body stiff from the plane and too awake beneath his skin, weeks of restraint sitting mean and hot in him.

He nearly comes apart when he catches Hollander’s profile a few paces ahead in the terminal, turning out of a gate with the rest of the 9:30 flight from Ottawa. One hand on his bag, mouth set in that careful line, eyes moving over the crowd like he’s already preparing himself to be looked at.

He hasn’t seen Ilya yet, so Ilya lets himself have the second before he does — Hollander serious and beautiful and already setting himself into the shape he’s expected to be.

Then Hollander looks up.

A smile breaks over his face — unrestrained and bright and only for him. Ilya can’t stop himself from returning it as he closes the distance between them a bit too fast to be casual.

The terminal is a crush of people, and he’d be a fool to think none of them know him, know Hollander. Not here in the city that claimed him. Not after the headlines from the latest webisodes, the endless comment-section arguments about who’d win if they were ever really allowed to come to blows. It’s exactly the kind of thing that lets Ilya believe no one would trust their own eyes if they saw him fall into step beside Hollander at Logan on a Saturday night in late August.

So he does.

“Hollander,” he says, letting their bags bump into each other as they fall into step.

“Rozanov.”

The time between I can’t and now should not feel like this. A month or thereabouts is nothing. Ilya has waited longer for his father to finish speaking, for practices to end, for bruises to heal. But Hollander’s voice lands in him like something he’s been thirsty for, and his body floods with heat at the sound.

Ilya steps closer as they find a stride, close enough to tap his pinky finger against Hollander’s in the space that’s barely there. Hollander’s hand twitches, but not away, and Ilya has to look forward before he does something stupid with that in the middle of the terminal.

Ahead, past the pull of families and rolling suitcases and people stopping in the walkway to check their phones, a family restroom sits tucked beside a bank of vending machines. The sign catches Ilya’s eye, and his pulse moves low and fast as he glances at Hollander, then back toward the door — just enough to make Hollander follow the look.

“How long before they come looking for you?” he asks, barely moving his mouth.

Hollander’s shoulder shifts beside his, a breath caught somewhere in it. “Rozanov.”

“How long?”

“A few minutes. Maybe. Claire knows I landed.”

Ilya lets his hand brush Hollander’s again, just enough to feel the answer in the way Hollander doesn’t pull away. “Then come with me.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, already angling them out of the stream of people. “You can say no.”

Hollander doesn’t.

He follows close enough that Ilya can hear the uneven edge of his breathing by the time they reach the door, and when Ilya pulls it open, he finally looks back. Hollander is flushed, eyes dark and fixed on him, one hand still tight around the strap of his bag like it’s the only thing keeping him from reaching for him.

It is almost enough to make Ilya kiss him right there in the doorway.

Instead, he steps inside and holds the door open just long enough for Hollander to cross the threshold after him. Then he locks it.

For half a second, neither of them moves.

This isn’t how he pictured it — the room too small, the light too harsh — but Hollander is still there with his back to the door, bag hooked over one shoulder, chest rising too fast beneath his shirt.

Then Hollander’s eyes drop to Ilya’s mouth.

Ilya crosses the space between them and gets one hand to Hollander’s jaw, the other into his hair, before either of them can pretend there was ever another reason to be in here. Their mouths meet hard enough to catch the breath between them, their bags slipping from their shoulders to the floor.

Hollander’s hands fist in his shirt, and some dark, pleased part of Ilya recognizes it as exactly what he trained for — this loss of control, this proof that Hollander sees him and wants him and can’t quite make his body behave the way he’s convinced himself it should. All that ice, all those stairs, all the careful hours spent shaping himself into something Hollander would have to look at, and here he is: moaning into Ilya’s mouth like he’s been holding his breath since New York.

Then Hollander’s tongue slides against his, and the thing Ilya hadn’t trained for cuts sharp through him: the way having this only makes him want more. Not one stolen moment already running out, but time — time for the sound Hollander makes against his mouth, for the slide of his fingers beneath Ilya’s shirt, for a hundred more moments exactly like it and still not enough.

But there is no time.

All he has is this.

And when Hollander makes the sound again, small and wrecked against his mouth, Ilya kisses him harder and lets himself believe, for as long as he can, they won’t have to stop.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: where an 18-year-old bisexual menace would party in Moscow in 2009, what hours the Moscow Metro runs, when The Real World ended, P-1 visas, USCIS petition timelines, and average NHL arena capacity.

Oh, to have these two in the same room again.

But did someone see them go into the bathroom? Is there security footage? Does it leak? Have our boys already been caught?

Drop your theories in the comments. Or on Threads, if AO3 is still being a little jerk about comments. ;)

Chapter 15

Chapter Notes

August 2009 — Boston

There’s a rational part of Shane’s brain that works overtime. When paired with his natural physical ability and relentless determination, it’s a force to be reckoned with — it’s why he’s captained so many winning teams since he first laced up his skates on a U7 roster. It’s also something that abandons him completely as Rozanov’s tongue slides into his mouth.

He lets himself get lost in it in a way he would never let go with his training, his diet, his game. Every other all-consuming thing in his life has come with rules attached — metrics to hit, goals to chase, standards to meet. This is the first thing he’s ever wanted and had simply because he wants it, and the realization hits hard enough to make his chest ache: if this is what passion is supposed to feel like, he’s not sure he’s ever experienced it before.

He clings to the feeling while he can, licking into Rozanov’s mouth like he can keep himself there by taste alone, hips rolling before he can stop them against the solid press of Rozanov’s thigh between his legs. 

But then his phone vibrates in his back pocket, dulled beneath want and relief and the heel of Rozanov’s hand, and Shane pulls away, breathless.

“We should go,” Rozanov says before Shane’s mouth can even think to form the words, too busy trying to work out how much saliva is his own and how much is Rozanov's — how long it’ll linger, whether he’ll get to kiss him again before it’s gone.

“Yeah, go,” Shane says absently, trying to do the math. 

He swallows thickly when he feels Rozanov hook a finger under his chin with just enough pressure that Shane knows he should look him in the eye. But his eyes are still closed, stuck in the moment. When his lashes flutter open, Rozanov looks softer than he should in this light, and suddenly doing anything except kissing him again feels unbearable.

He leans in before he can stop himself, and Rozanov lets him, and it’s nothing like it was before. Just lips held on lips, like the first time Shane gave in to what he wanted, what Rozanov let him have, and the sigh that breaks out of him at the feel would embarrass him if Rozanov didn’t immediately swipe a thumb across his cheek and say, “I know.”

Then Rozanov draws him into his chest like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and holds him until Shane’s phone starts vibrating again. Once. Twice. A third time, insistent in his back pocket.

Rozanov goes first — an, “I will see you at home,” trailing out the door behind him. 

Then he’s gone, and Shane spends the next five minutes alone with the taste of Rozanov still lingering in his mouth and the word home turning quietly over in his head.

***

Hollander beats him to the house — a hulking, beige, uniquely American thing on the other side of Boston — despite the head start Ilya gave himself. The cigarette outside of Arrivals is what did him in, lingering at the curb while Mike checked his watch with increasing frequency. When Ilya pointed out he’d just spent the better part of a day getting from Moscow to Boston without as much as the thought of a smoke — not even during his layover at JFK — Mike swore under his breath, waved the cab on, and let him win the round.

When they pull up, it’s directly behind Lemaire, his producer nowhere in sight, and he’s quick to fall into step beside Ilya as they walk up to the house from the street. He thinks about waiting for Mike or pulling out another smoke, but he can see Hollander through the front windows, and his legs make the choice for him. 

It bothers him, the loss of control. 

Mike spent the ride over explaining the setup — cameras in every common area, every bedroom, blind spots that weren't really blind spots at all. A few months ago, Ilya would've listened for weaknesses in the system — ways around it, ways through — that he could exploit for a thrill. He used to like that. Would get off on the danger of it, even. But this isn’t his coach’s son and a lashing from his father if he gets caught. 

The consequences are real, and he can list the obvious ones easily enough: headlines, a homeland he can’t go back to, a career gone before it starts. He doesn’t let himself name anything beyond those. As if they aren't already enough.

Lemaire bumps an elbow against his forearm halfway up the drive, and Ilya remembers to look away from Hollander before anyone sees.

“Looking forward to hanging with you, man,” Lemaire tells him. “Makes it a little less weird having you guys here too.”

He adjusts his bag higher on his shoulder and gives him a curt, “Okay.”

“Hollander and I text sometimes.” 

Ilya’s toe catches against the pavers, just enough to break his stride before he fixes it.

“Oh?” he asks coolly. 

“Yeah, he’s nice.” Ilya has to uncurl his fingers from where they've dug into his palm. “You should get to know him. I think you guys would get along.”

He expects Lemaire to laugh like it’s a joke. Instead, when they come to a stop at the bottom of the front steps, he claps Ilya on the back and says, “I mean it. Maybe try while we’re all under the same roof”

“I don’t think they want that,” Ilya says with a nod toward where the crew is setting up camp in the open mouth of the three-car garage. 

Lemaire shrugs, easy. “Fuck what they want. Let them figure it out.”

***

The three of them are sat at the wide kitchen island, Rozanov and Lemaire flanking Shane, while Claire and Mike go through the details: where the cameras will and won’t be, what the itinerary looks like, when they’ll get their phones back, how the crew will be in the house at all times.

Mike says that last part with a pointed look between Shane and Rozanov, his fists lifting into a half-hearted shadowbox. Claire looks on with zero amusement, and Shane feels a sudden debt of gratitude toward her as she does.

Under the island, Rozanov’s shoe nudges Shane’s once — quick, deliberate — before pulling away. Shane keeps his eyes on Claire, but the contact lands hot anyway, a private punctuation mark beneath Mike’s warning.

“So, tomorrow the trainers will be here, and the nutritionist, chefs — this isn’t a party house. It’s the camp before the camp, after the other camp,” Mike goes on. “But you’re going to compete against each other too.”

“Like on the ice?” Shane asks.

“No.”

“Like in the gym?” he tries again.

“Like competition segments. Fun stuff. For the audience.”

Claire sets a hand on Mike’s shoulder and steps in. “Just a few light things. A scavenger hunt, a race, a cooking challenge. We’d lose people pretty quickly if it was just three rooks — as lovable as you are — doing pushups for two weeks.”

“So, like, bonding?” Lemaire offers.

Claire smiles over at him. “Exactly. Which brings me to competition number one — room assignments.”

Claire’s idea of a competition turns out to be three oversized gold keys hidden somewhere in the house, each corresponding to one of the bedrooms upstairs despite not unlocking anything at all. Lemaire finds two before Shane finds any, emerging from the primary suite looking so pleased with himself that all Shane can do is roll his eyes.

The room is absurd. Shane says as much while Lemaire drops onto the bed and immediately declares himself king of it. Shane can’t even argue. Going ninth overall should come with at least one perk.

“Here.” Lemaire presses the second key into his hand and nods toward the hall. “This one’s right across from me, but we can trade if it's too weird.”

Shane turns the key over in his palm.

“Why would it be weird?”

Lemaire just laughs and trails after him as he wanders out of the room and toward the door marked with a symbol that matches the key.

The room itself isn’t remarkable — an oversized bedroom in an oversized house, with a bed too big for one person and windows looking out over a stretch of lawn someone probably pays too much money to keep that green. Shane sets the key down on the dresser and moves through the space, brushing a hand over the television, pressing his palm into the mattress, pulling open the bathroom door. It’s as he expects — tiled and bright and spacious, not all that different from the en suite at his parents’ house — until he notices the door on the far side, already open to another bedroom almost identical to his. Shane stops in the doorway, one hand still on the frame.

Movement flickers in the room beyond, and Rozanov steps into view carrying his bag.

A breath stutters out of Shane as Lemaire claps him on the back.

“If you’re going to fight like siblings, you can share a bathroom like siblings,” he says behind him before stepping back. “Or maybe you’ll be friends. Two weeks will tell.”

As the door to Lemaire’s room thuds shut, Shane stares at Rozanov and thinks of New York.

Rozanov stares back like he’s thinking of it too.

***

Somewhere late into the night, the light under the door between their rooms flicks on, and Ilya nearly bolts upright before he remembers the camera in the corner, its little green ring signaling the night vision is on. He turns his face into the pillow instead. Mike had said the bedrooms were video only, no audio, but Ilya still keeps his mouth barely open against the fabric.

“Hollander?”

There’s a muffled sound on the other side of the door, before it pulls open a crack and a sliver of golden light washes against the carpet. Ilya turns toward it with a start.

“Off,” he says quickly, an arm slung over his face for cover. “They will see that.”

“Right,” Hollander says from the bathroom, too awake for whatever hour it’s become, and the light cuts out.

“You too, yes?” 

“Me too, what?”

“Can’t sleep?”

“Can’t sleep.”

The way it comes out of him, low and soft, makes Ilya want impossible things. He wants to feel the weight of Hollander settling against him, warm and real, until sleep takes them both.

“How do we do this?” Hollander asks, as if he’s feeling it too, and an ache opens deep in Ilya’s middle.

“Are you asking me if we can…”

“No, not logistics.” Hollander grits out the word like he doesn't trust that no one is listening. Ilya’s eyes drift to the camera in the corner and back again. The door creaks wider, and for one ridiculous second Ilya thinks Hollander might walk through it. He just stands there in the palest wash of moonlight, head hanging in a way Ilya thinks he’d never get to see if the lights were on. Then Hollander’s eyes find the approximation of him in the dark. “I mean, this is hard. Is it not for you?”

Relief and wanting tangle together somewhere beneath his ribs.

“Is hard for me too,” he says against the back of his forearm, desperate to put his mouth on Hollander’s instead.

“Do you think it’ll get easier?”

“Probably not. But we did not get here, this place, because we like easy.” 

“But it’s worth it?”

“The hockey?”

“Sure.”

“Yes.” Ilya swallows and shifts onto his side, looking at Hollander cleanly. “But this too.”

Hollander doesn’t say anything back. He just stays where he is, outlined in moonlight, close enough to reach for and still impossible to touch, until Ilya’s eyes won’t stay open anymore.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: what year they banned smoking at JFK airport, reality show house camera setups in the late 2000s, Jack-and-Jill bathrooms, synonyms for 'says' because I got very in my head, and how people will react to Lemaire not just being the butt of a joke.

Anyone else ever experienced the particular horror of realizing the person you want is close enough to touch and still not safe to reach for? No? Just them? Cool. Strap in.

Also, yes, I know we did a shared door in New York. The bathroom serves a purpose and isn't just laziness, before anyone comes for me (and not in the good way). Any idea what it might be? Drop a comment or come yap at me on Threads @slowyearn.

Chapter 16

Chapter Notes

August 2009 — Boston

Light streams in through the windows in the same shape it does at his parents’ house — slanting in from the east, early and unforgiving — and it takes Shane a moment, scrubbing at his eyes, to realize that’s not the only familiar thing in this space. There’s also Rozanov, visible through two open doors, thirty feet away.

When Shane climbed into bed the night before, he’d tried not to stare, but with the bathroom doors and his pillows angled just right, he could see most of him — the soft rise and fall of his middle as he slept, the jut of his hip below the sheet, the hook of his ankle around the side of it. Now, hours later, the sheet has slipped enough that there’s even more to see, and Shane lets himself look greedily at the diagonal cut of it across Rozanov’s torso, covering only a scrap of stomach before tenting over the bulge below. He immediately thinks of the cameras as he shifts onto his side, hard in a way that has less to do with just waking and more to do with the fact that Rozanov is too.

He keeps his breathing slow after that, face tipped into the pillow like he’s fallen back asleep, eyes open only enough to watch Rozanov through the narrow blur of his lashes. His hands stay exactly where they are, because with the camera in the corner, there’s nowhere else for them to go. All Shane can do is lie there and ache until pretending to sleep becomes the real thing, his breathing evening out for real and the want in him growing quiet.

When he stirs again, Rozanov is standing in the bathroom doorway, hair mussed from sleep and basketball shorts hanging low on his hips, just far enough back that the cameras can’t catch him, watching Shane like he has been waiting for him to wake. When their eyes meet, Rozanov tips his chin, two fingers curling in a silent beckon, and despite the want that moves through Shane all at once, he can’t bring himself to move.

Except — why wouldn’t they be able to brush their teeth at the same time in a shared bathroom? There are two sinks, two mirrors, two places to stand. Like the room was built with the expectation that two people might end up in it at once.

There’s nothing suspicious about doing what’s expected of them, Shane tells himself, which is exactly the kind of thought that makes him feel suspicious as he pushes the sheets off his legs and reaches for his toiletry bag where he left it the night before on the bench at the foot of the bed.

Rozanov’s mouth curls at the corners when Shane finally crosses the room, and he has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling back right there in the open.

He barely makes it fully into the bathroom before Rozanov is on him, one hand catching at his waist, sleep-warm mouth already finding his. Shane freezes for half a breath, eyes cutting past him to the open doors on either side — and the cameras they’ve left with nothing to see — but Rozanov doesn’t close either one.

Closing them would mean there’s something to hide.

“Thank fuck for this bathroom,” Shane says hungrily into his mouth as it dawns on him, his own voice nearly unrecognizable beneath the need.

Rozanov doesn’t say anything back. He only lifts Shane onto the vanity between the sinks and swallows the sound Shane makes when his hand winds into Shane’s hair and pulls him in.

In Shane’s head, he knows how long a proper oral care routine takes — two minutes for brushing, thirty seconds for scraping his tongue, another minute for flossing — and he’s already adding it up as he licks into Rozanov’s mouth. Three and a half minutes. Maybe four. Five at most.

Rozanov pulls back just enough to look at him, eyes dark and amused like he can hear the numbers ticking through Shane’s head.

“How fast can you come?” he asks.

“I don’t—” Shane starts, but Rozanov’s hand slides between them, beneath the waistband of his sweats, and the rest of the sentence leaves him in a thin, broken breath as Rozanov fists his cock.

“Is this okay?” Rozanov asks as his thumb drags slowly over the head.

Shane nods, teeth sinking into his bottom lip around every sound he’s desperate to make and can’t. The cameras may not hear them, but there is still a hallway beyond the bedroom doors, still rooms beyond that, still people close enough to hear something they shouldn’t.

Rozanov kisses him again like he knows exactly what Shane is trying not to let out, taking the sound into his own mouth as his hand starts to move.

He’s halfway to coming, lost in the speed of Rozanov’s grip and the heat of Rozanov’s mouth, before he even thinks to return the favor.

Shane gets one hand to Rozanov’s waistband, clumsy with it, desperate to make this less uneven, but Rozanov catches his wrist and presses it against the vanity.

“No,” he says against Shane’s lips. “Just you.”

Shane makes a helpless sound at that, his wrist shifting under Rozanov’s grip until their fingers tangle together. There’s something almost unbearable about it — the way Rozanov’s fingers curl against his and hold on, while his other hand moves fast between them — and then Shane is coming against Rozanov’s fist.

For a second, Shane can’t move. He sits on the vanity with his breath punching hard against Rozanov’s shoulder, nearly slumped against him. Rozanov stays between his knees, close enough that Shane can feel the soft rise and fall of his chest in the way he’d wanted for most of the night.

Then Shane turns into him, tender in a way he doesn’t want to question, and presses a kiss to Rozanov’s forehead.

It should be nothing compared to what they have just done, but the way Rozanov goes still under his mouth wedges itself into Shane’s throat. The stillness lasts only a second, and it might have passed for nothing if Shane hadn’t been close enough to feel the catch of it through every place their bodies still touch.

Then, Rozanov’s fingers flex once against the back of Shane’s hand, tight and sudden, before he shifts just enough to reach for the tap without truly stepping away.

Shane watches as Rozanov makes quick work of washing the cum from his fingers, eyes fixed on the water running over his knuckles.

“You should brush your teeth,” he says, voice low and rough, like nothing has happened.

But Shane is sure something has.

***

Ilya makes it halfway down the stairs before he lets himself touch his forehead.

It’s nothing — a kiss pressed there after a rushed handjob in a bathroom and Hollander biting his lip halfway-bloody to keep quiet. It should not be the thing that follows him out of the room, down the hall, past the cameras fixed high in the corners of the house. But it does.

His skin still feels warm where Hollander’s mouth had been, and Ilya hates that he can feel it at all.

By the time he reaches the kitchen, he has his face under control, or something closer to it. The cameras are already waiting there too, dark eyes tucked into corners, red lights small and steady, and he gives them nothing more interesting than a yawn as he crosses to the counter and starts opening cabinets.

Coffee — he can make coffee. This is normal, what people do in the morning when they are living in a house together and have not just had Shane Hollander coming apart under their hand fifteen feet from a camera.

The machine is too shiny, too modern, knobs where there should be buttons and a hollow space where a carafe should sit. Ilya finds the filters on the third try, the coffee on the fourth, and makes more noise than he needs to as he scoops grounds into place, and guesses about the rest.

“You making enough for all of us?” Lemaire asks, stepping in through the French doors off the kitchen with a towel around his neck and his hair damp from a run.

Ilya shrugs at the machine. “I don’t even know if this will make enough for me.”

“I’ve got it,” Hollander says as he comes down the stairs. “My folks have one like this.”

Then Hollander is beside him, close enough that reaching for the machine means reaching past Ilya too, his arm crossing in front of him like there is no reason it shouldn’t. Ilya shifts because he should, because there are cameras and Lemaire at the door and a whole open kitchen around them, but he does not shift nearly enough. Hollander’s shoulder brushes his chest, and Ilya can still smell himself on Hollander’s neck, warm and stale from sleep and what they’d done before either of them brushed their teeth.

Hollander turns one of the knobs, then another, and the machine answers with a low, expensive-sounding hum.

“Fancy,” Lemaire says.

“Stupid,” Ilya counters.

Coffee starts spilling into the mug below in a thin, dark stream. The moment it finishes, Ilya takes the cup and holds it out to Lemaire.

Lemaire blinks at him. “For me?”

“For you,” Ilya says with a smile.

“That’s nice.”

“No,” Ilya laughs. “Is because you smell, and I want you to smell somewhere else. Go shower.”

Lemaire sips at his mug and leaves slowly, but he leaves, and the moment he’s gone — the moment it’s just Hollander and his freckles in the morning sun and the taste of him still caught somewhere behind Ilya’s teeth — Ilya almost calls him back.

They move around each other in the kitchen, not touching, but not not touching either — Ilya handing Hollander the sugar-free sweetener from the cabinet where he found the coffee, Hollander pressing a freshly filled mug into Ilya’s hand. It feels easy, domestic, and Ilya finds himself pressing his fingertips to the middle of his forehead as he rounds the island and sits beside Hollander, their shoulders just barely apart, knees less careful.

They stay like that until the coffee in their mugs cools and the door to the garage opens.

Claire steps in first, Mike behind her, both of them empty-handed. No clipboards. No headsets. No one else following with a camera. Ilya bristles when he notices it — that this isn’t just them passing through.

“Morning,” Claire says, soft enough that Ilya knows he’s right. Her eyes move from Hollander to Ilya, then to the mugs cooling in front of them. “Can we talk to you both for a minute?”

Hollander’s knee shifts away from his. Ilya hates that he notices, hates more that he misses it.

“Together?” Hollander asks.

“Separately,” Mike says.

Ilya takes another drink of coffee. It is cold now, bitter and overdone, but it gives him something to do with his mouth.

Claire nods toward the backyard. “Shane, come with me?”

Hollander looks at Ilya for less than a second before he stands. Too quick to mean anything to anyone else, but long enough that Ilya feels it under his ribs.

Mike waits until they are gone before he leans back against the island, arms crossed loosely over his middle.

Ilya stares into his mug. “Am I in trouble?”

“No,” Mike says. “Should you be?”

The answer should be easy, but it isn’t. Ilya lets his mouth pull into something smug instead. “Probably always.”

Mike doesn’t smile back.

“We noticed you come downstairs this morning,” Mike says evenly.

“I am allowed downstairs, yes?”

“You looked rattled.”

Ilya’s fingers tighten around the mug.

“I am tired. Long flight. You know this.”

Mike exhales through his nose and takes a step forward. For a second, Ilya sees the concerned father figure from television — the kind who notices when someone is shaken and knows what to do with it.

“Can I ask what happened in the bathroom?”

“Nothing happened in the bathroom,” Ilya says flatly. “I brushed my teeth, took a piss. Do I need to self-tape this too? No privacy?”

Mike’s eyes hold on his face for a second too long.

“There are cameras in the bedrooms,” he continues. “And when both rooms are empty, and you both go into the bathroom, and then you come downstairs looking like that—”

“Like what?”

“Ilya.”

He hates the sound of his name in Mike’s mouth just then. Not angry, not even disappointed — worried, maybe, which is worse. No one has worried about him for quite some time, and the thought drags something clear through the middle of him.

“You know we want to push the rivals thing, but not at the expense of your safety or his.” Mike lowers his voice. “Do you want to change rooms?”

Ilya almost laughs. Of all the things he expected — a warning, a lecture, a reminder of contracts and cameras and reputations — he had not expected an exit.

“No,” he says evenly. “No, I do not want to change rooms. I can take Hollander.”

“That’s not what I— if the shared bathroom is a problem—”

“It is not.”

Mike looks toward the backyard, where Claire and Hollander are making the shapes of the same conversation — Hollander with his back straight and hands folded, shaking his head like Ilya had.

Ilya looks back into his coffee.

“Room is fine,” he says. “I will tell you if this changes.”

Mike is quiet for a beat, as if deciding whether or not to press further. He just nods once and says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya echoes. 

It should feel like winning, but it doesn’t. Because even if they aren’t being watched outright, they are being noticed, and Ilya does not know which one is worse.

He waits until Mike leaves through the garage before he moves.

Upstairs, the hall is empty and quiet. Ilya keeps his pace unhurried anyway, face blank for the camera at the top of the stairs, like he is only going back to his room to get ready for the day — and he is.

In his room, he opens his bag and digs through it, shifting shirts, socks, a roll of tape, until his fingers close around the clothes he needs, then the pen and small notepad he kept from the hotel during development camp.

He moves toward the bathroom with practiced ease, everything balled in his fist, his grip tightening around it.

He closes both doors and turns on the shower, letting the rush of water fill the space while he strips and washes quickly. When he’s dressed again, hair still damp and towel dragging over the back of his neck, he leans over the vanity with the notepad flattened beneath one hand, pen in the other.

12:21

The numbers sit alone on the page, random enough to feel safe, too small for everything he means. He wants to write more. He wants to fill the empty space beneath them until there is no room left for Hollander to get it wrong.

Instead, he folds the note once and tucks it beneath Hollander’s toothbrush, then leaves through his side of the room, closing the door behind him.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: morning wood, 2000s coffee makers, synonyms for fist, and whether handjob is one word or two.

See you all at 12:21. Metaphorically, obviously. You’re all over the world, and I’m not updating in the middle of the night.

Until then, if you’re digging this, I’d love it if you’d be kind enough to drop a comment or tell a friend. Validation is better than handjobs — one word — in a shared bathroom.

I think.

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Cover for The First Shift by wipwip