Rating:

Mature

Archive Warnings:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander, Yuna Hollander, Original Male Character(s), Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Past Domestic Violence, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Shane Hollander, Supportive David Hollander and Yuna Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Gets A Hug, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Victim Blaming, Implied/Referenced Suicidal Thoughts

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of Across the Lake

Collections:

My anon fics

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-14 Completed: 2026-08-16 Words: 38,678 Chapters: 7/7

The Cabin, the Kitchen Floor, and the Couch

Summary

Three years after Ilya stumbled upon Shane’s cottage, he and Shane are enjoying their new life as a public couple, soon to be playing on the same team. They’re spending their summer looking forward to their future, rather than dwelling on the past, until their peace is shattered by a phone call requesting Ilya’s testimony at Cameron Pollard’s domestic violence trial.

Chapter 1: Prologue

Chapter Notes

Well here we go! This prologue is more multimedia, but dw the rest of the fic will still be prose like Across the Lake was (with I think some more multimedia type stuff mixed in which should be fun). I just thought this would be a fun way to establish the timeline between Across the Lake and here, and give a taste of what's to come.
See you soon with the first chapter! I think these will be longer, less frequent updates than Across the Lake, but the first chapter is mostly already written.

Raiders Re-sign Ilya Rozanov on 2 Year Contract

July 2018

The Boston Raiders announced today that they signed center Ilya Rozanov to a two-year contract extension through the 2020 season with a salary at the NHL cap. Boston drafted Rozanov as their first round pick in 2009, and he has played for them since his 2010-2011 rookie season, leading them to a Stanley Cup in 2014.

Hollander Traded to Centaurs in Surprising Move by the Metros

February 2019

The Montreal Metros announced today that center Shane Hollander has been traded to the Ottawa Centaurs in exchange for future considerations. Many are surprised by the move, as Hollander led the Metros to back-to-back Stanley Cup wins only a few years ago.

The trade comes on the back of decreased play time by Hollander throughout the season, the reasons for which have been unclear to analysts. Notably, Hollander has not played in any games against Boston or New York for the entire 2018-2019 season.

A Metros representative declined to comment on the trade.

“I’m excited to represent my hometown,” said Hollander, whose next free agency will be in 2021.

The trade seems unbalanced to analyst Ken Kim: “It makes sense why Ottawa would take him. They need a star center, and they’re nowhere near their market cap. What doesn’t make sense is why Montreal would give Hollander up that easy. I think we’ll see standings shaken up quite a bit by this in the coming seasons.”

Boston’s Rozanov and Ottawa’s Hollander Announce Relationship in Instagram Post

August 2019

Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander announced today that they have been in a romantic relationship for “a few years” and stated that they look forward to “another season of playing as competitively against each other as we always have.”

Rozanov and Hollander have a long history of professional rivalry since they were were 2009’s #1 and #2 draft picks, respectively.

Hollander was traded from Montreal to Ottawa midway through the 2018-2019 season and finished the year with a solid showing, despite the team not reaching playoffs. In an interview at the final game of the season, he said, “I look forward to leading this team as far as possible next year.”

The announcement comes as a surprise to most, but rumors have circulated in the past after the rival captains were photographed together in July 2017 , February 2018, and August 2018.

Rozanov and Hollander, as well as representatives of their respective teams, have not responded to requests for comment, though Boston’s Cliff Marlow tweeted, “Hollanov 4eva 🏳️‍🌈” a few hours after the announcement, suggesting that Boston’s locker room has been supportive.

This Week’s Highlights: Hunter scores hat trick in first season game, Rozanov and Hollander face off for first time as public couple

September 2019

• Scott Hunter seems to be starting off another strong season. The New York center scored a hat trick in the first game of the season against Detroit

• Ottawa and Boston faced off this week, putting partners Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander against each other for the first time this season. The game went into overtime at 1-1, with Hollander scoring the winning goal. When asked how it felt to face off against his partner, Rozanov said, “It was exciting game as always, no?”

Bills’ Pollard Arrested and Facing Multiple Domestic Violence Charges

April 2020

Buffalo Bills tight end Cameron Pollard was arrested over the weekend following a domestic disturbance in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Charges include aggravated assault and sexual assault. Per New Jersey state law, the victim’s identity has not been released.

Pollard was released on bail on Monday and has denied the allegations through his attorneys.

Ilya Rozanov signs with Ottawa Centaurs

July 2020

The Ottawa Centaurs announced today that they have signed Ilya Rozanov on a four-year contract.

Where Rozanov would choose to sign during his free agency this summer has been the subject of much speculation. His long-term partner Shane Hollander is Ottawa’s current captain, leading many to believe Rozanov would make a move to Canada.

The star center took a significant pay cut for the move as Rozanov’s current individual salary of $11,200,000 is more than double what remained in Ottawa's cap. Many are also wondering how Rozanov and Hollander will shake out on the same team, as both are currently first line centers and captains. The pair have previously played on the same line with Rozanov taking a winger position.

In an unrelated interview this morning, Wyatt Hayes commented on the announcement, “I am very glad to be Ottawa’s goalie right now. I think, otherwise, my career would be flashing before my eyes.”

Chapter 2: Pretrial

Chapter Notes

Heed the warnings for basically the rest of the story. This got ridiculously long, enjoy!

“Top up, Ilya?”

Ilya looks up from staring at his ringing phone to see David hovering over him, vodka bottle already halfway tilted. 

“No. Thank you,” Ilya responds. He smiles politely and flips his phone face down. He recognizes the forced conversation topic for what it is. “This is very nice though. Where is it from?”

David returns to his seat and starts a story about the dingy corner market he found in town that had the largest Russian vodka collection he’s ever seen. Ilya nods along and laughs appropriately when David says, “I’ll bring you next time. Maybe you can get them to bring the really good stuff out of the back.”

Yuna rolls her eyes goodnaturedly in Shane’s direction before rising out of her seat. She reaches for Ilya’s empty plate. He springs up. “I will help,” he insists, snatching it up and grabbing Shane’s as well. Yuna’s smile is tight, but she allows him to follow her into the kitchen with dishes piled high in his hands. 

While Ilya soaps up the sponge and Yuna ladles pasta into tupperwares, she asks, “How are you feeling about joining Ottawa?”

“Very excited,” Ilya says. “It will be nice to be on same team as Shane.”

The team change still doesn’t feel quite real to Ilya. In a few weeks, he’ll pack up his house in Boston and move into Shane’s house in Ottawa, but for now, everything still feels the same: a summer trip to the cottage, with a few awkward meals with Shane’s parents interspersed throughout. Nothing has really forced his brain to process yet that he won’t be returning to Boston’s locker room in a few months. 

“I’m sure you’ll miss Boston, though,” Yuna says. It’s the same tone of voice she said, ‘You’re going to leave Boston? The team that drafted you?” when Shane told her. 

“Of course,” Ilya says, both because it’s true and because he knows that’s the answer she’s looking for. “But less than I miss Shane when we are apart.”

Yuna smiles tightly at him, her eyes roving over him appraisingly the same way her son’s often do. The posture of her shoulders softens, and she sets a warm hand on Ilya’s shoulder. “I’m happy for you boys.”

Ilya ducks his head and focuses on rinsing a pan. “Thank you.”

He knows she’s working hard to be happy for them. He knows that the handful of dinners they’ve had together for Shane’s birthday and during the summers haven’t been enough time for him to prove that he will be a good partner for their son. He also knows that the name Ilya Rozanov still lights a longstanding hatred in Yuna’s blood that will not disappear quickly. He wonders if she feels like there’s an intruder in her house while he scrubs dishes. 

Shane pops his head into the kitchen. “Hey, sorry, can I steal Ilya? I told Hayden I’d call to wish Amber a happy birthday when we got back, and I just realized how late it’s getting.”

Yuna waves a hand. “Of course.”

Ilya turns off the sink and retreats to his boyfriend’s side. 

In the car, after Shane has finished waving to his parents the whole way down the drive, he says, “Thanks for coming. I know they’re kind of awkward sometimes.”

Ilya watches the sun disappearing behind the trees. “I don’t think they like me very much. Your mother, at least.” David definitely still feels awkward around Ilya, but he makes the genuine effort of clinging to their one shared interest at least, which Ilya doesn’t take for granted. 

Shane sighs. “They do. They just don’t know you that well. Once you move to Ottawa, you’ll see them more, and they’ll get more comfortable.”

Ilya’s not sure if he believes that the Hollanders will like him more when they’ve gotten to know him better, but he smiles and nods for Shane’s benefit. 

At home, Shane steps into the backyard to call Hayden while Ilya goes into the kitchen to put away the leftovers Yuna shoved into his hands before they left.

He checks his phone before setting it on the counter, expecting the missed call notification from earlier. The same American phone number has called at the same time every day for three days, and Ilya has let it go unanswered every time, assuming the voice on the other end will be a robot, scammer, or both. Today, though, they’ve left a message for the first time.

Ilya presses play on the voicemail, tucks the phone under his ear, and opens the fridge to start putting things away. Outside, Shane is pacing the patio with his own phone to his face, laughing at something. 

The man on the voicemail clears his throat awkwardly. “Hello, my name is Bill West. I’m calling for Ilya Rozanov, and I do hope you get this message.” 

Ilya suddenly remembers the outgoing message he set in his early twenties: This is Ilya. I will never listen to your message. He has to change that, he realizes with a touch of embarrassment.

“I’m an attorney with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey,” the message continues, and Ilya’s stomach turns. He tries to think if he ever did anything technically illegal while partying after a Devils game, and he comes up blank. Irresponsible and childish? Yes, he probably did something like that. Underage drinking? Okay, yeah, there is that. Something that warranted a call from the prosecutor’s office? Almost certainly not. He swallows nervously, shutting the fridge without pulling anything out, and holds the phone properly again. 

“I’m calling to see if we can set up some time to speak—either by phone or video call—to discuss some character witness testimony that I believe you’d be able to provide. I’m currently prosecuting a domestic violence assault trial against a Cameron Pollard, and it was suggested to me that you might have some information that could be valuable to our case. You have no legal obligation to speak with me at this time, but I do think it could be very helpful to our case to speak with you. So give me a call or text back at—”

Ilya doesn’t listen to the rest of the message. He slowly removes the phone from his ear and sets it down with a shaking hand. His breaths feel absent of oxygen as he stares down at his own hands gripping white knuckled onto the counter edge. 

He’s going to throw up. No, he’s going to pass out. Or—maybe he’s going to cry. He is crying, actually. A single tear hits the back of his hand, startling him. 

The backdoor shuts. Ilya looks up, surprising himself by being surprised to see Shane. Shane is smiling at him, already striding toward the kitchen. “I had to promise the kids we would come babysit soon so maybe this we—” He stops abruptly. His smile drips off his face. “What’s wrong?”

Ilya opens his mouth to try to explain, but his throat is too tight to force out any sound, much less comprehensible words. He tries to clear it, but it’s useless. He hasn’t felt tightness like this since—

A sob gasps out of him before he even knows it’s coming. He slaps a hand over his mouth, still keeping himself propped up on the counter with the other. He thinks he might collapse if he lets go. 

Shane moves toward him slowly. His hands are out and still, unthreatening—the way he sometimes had to approach Ilya during their first year or so of seeing each other. He must recognize something in Ilya’s face, something that has been absent for a long time but has suddenly found its way home. 

Ilya feels a little sick. 

“Did something happen?” Shane asks. His tone says I promise I’m not mad, do you need a minute to yourself, breathe Ilya it’s just me I think you had a nightmare no you can breathe I promise you just have to slow down a little bit.

Ilya reaches out to his phone, puts it on speakerphone, and starts the message over. He slides down to sit on the floor, back against the cabinets, and watches Shane listen. His face scrunches in concern as the lawyer introduces himself, and then it loses all color at the mention of Cameron’s name. After the message ends—“So give me a call or text back at this number, so we can chat. Thanks. Bye.”—they sit in silence for a long pause. 

Eventually, Shane joins Ilya on the floor, pressing their legs against each other. He wraps his arm around Ilya’s shoulders and pulls him into his chest. “He said you don’t have to,” he says eventually. 

Ilya lets himself be held and closes his eyes until he’s gotten a handle on the tears that demand to be shed. When he feels like he can speak without his voice trembling, he replies, “How do they know?” 

He thinks suspiciously of the therapist he saw in Boston for a while, during the season after the last time he saw Cameron and before Shane’s transfer to Ottawa. Shane insisted he should talk to someone—“someone who isn’t me, Ilya. You know what I mean”—and it did help to tell an unflappable professional about some of the things that had happened to him, including the things he doesn’t think he can ever tell Shane about. And she swore that she couldn’t tell anyone anything, even if she wanted to—“which I don’t.”

“Maybe Cameron told them,” Shane speculates. “Or he told the, uh, victim, and they told the prosecutor.”

The victim. 

Ilya pictures someone else—a humanoid, blurry-faced shape—in his place at the cabin, the floor of Cameron’s kitchen, on Ilya’s couch, running for their life in the woods. The victim. 

Is that what he was—the victim? Or did Cameron get worse? Ilya always knew that what Cameron did to him was wrong—in the sense that Ilya would never, ever do any of that to someone else—but he never thought of it as criminal. He remembers Shane, and then Svetlana, wanting to go to the police to get a restraining order, and he remembers dismissing them, baffled by the thought. Still, he’s not sure, even if they did go to the police, if any of that would have been prosecuted. 

Fuck—what if Cameron killed somebody? Ilya’s hand finds his neck subconsciously. What if, this time and with this person, he didn’t let go? No, because then the lawyer would have called it a murder trial. 

He’s being stupid. He’s overreacting. 

“Why?” he asks. 

Shane looks down at him worriedly. “Well, he said he was the prosecutor, so I think it’s probably the latter, which means they probably want to show, like, a pattern of behavior. It’s called  character evidence. I don’t really know how it works in America, but we have that here.”

Ilya nods against Shane’s chest. “So I… I just talk to the lawyer? I do not have to talk at the trial?”

He can’t talk at the trial. He can’t. He’s seen crime dramas on TV, and he knows the consequences: public record transcripts, news articles, the defendant staring the witness down from a metal table six feet away. Ilya can count on one hand the number of people who know he even dated Cameron, much less what Cameron did to him, and Ilya always planned to keep it that way until the end of time. 

“I don’t know, honestly,” Shane replies. 

“I think I will need to think about it,” Ilya says quietly.

“Of course,” Shane replies. “Whatever you choose to do, I’ll support you. You don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”

Ilya’s pretty sure this is something he’ll never be ready for. 

Ilya gives up on sleeping at three in the morning. He slips out of bed quietly, and shuffles out to the living room. He settles into the couch, facing the backyard, to stare out at the trees.

It was around this time of the summer, three years ago, when he burst out of the cabin across the lake and ran for God-knows-how-long until he couldn’t anymore. He spent the rest of the night wide awake, curled up on the forest floor, waiting for the sun to come up so he could find his way to town. The thing he remembers most about the hours he spent alone out there is the cool smoothness of his mother’s cross in his clenched fist and the burn of the chafed skin on his neck. 

He remembers now too how hopeless he felt then—not because he was scared of being lost, but because he hadn’t really processed that he wouldn’t be going back to Cameron afterward. The deep pit in his stomach came from the He is never going to forgive me for this that Ilya didn’t let himself consciously think. It was ultimately true, even though he broke things off afterward, that Cameron never forgave him. That much is tangible in the way the fingers of Ilya’s left hand still ache in the cold rink air. 

He wonders if he would have to tell the lawyer about that. Would it be a simple statement of fact: He stepped on my hand, and it broke two of my fingers. Or would he be expected to give a little more detail and maybe show a little emotion for impact: He shoved me into my fireplace and bruised my ribs, and while I was on the floor trying to breathe through the pain, he stepped on my hand and broke two fingers, and I screamed and cried like a bitch. And that’s just after we broke up. Does it even count if they were broken up? Or would he have to talk about all the stuff before that? The cabin and the kitchen floor and the couch?

Ilya goes outside. The cool night air feels like a balm on his sweaty skin. 

He pulls his phone out of his sweatpants pocket and googles Cameron Pollard. The NFL, it seems, has done a pretty good job keeping a lid on the scandal. There’s only a few articles, most of which say Cameron was arrested for vague “domestic violence charges” and released on bail. 

None of them specify who the victim was or their gender. Maybe it was a woman this time. Maybe that’s why it’s gotten this far. But no, Cameron is gay—completely gay. If this actually goes to trial and all the details become public record, Cameron will get outed—assuming that the information isn’t already out there, waiting for someone nosy enough to find it.

How bad must it have been for this to be going to trial if it was another man? 

Ilya feels a wave of guilt for even considering leaving this nameless, faceless man to do this on his own. He doesn’t want to—God, he doesn’t want to at all—but he owes this to the man that didn’t know what was coming when he encountered the monster that Ilya sent back out into the world. 

He has to do it. 

He finds the lawyer’s phone number again and sends him a text: This is Ilya Rozanov. I am available for a call anytime on Wednesday. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Ilya holes up in the small downstairs bedroom that Shane calls an office just because there’s a large, oak desk in it. He stares at the time in the corner of his MacBook screen until it hits 3:00 PM, and then he joins the Skype call. 

Bill West joins half a minute later. He looks to be in his forties, with slick black hair and crow’s feet. His blurred background looks like it might be a home office, but he’s wearing a suit. He smiles warmly at Ilya. “Hello, Mr. Rozanov,” he says. “Thank you for making the time to speak with me.”

Ilya nods jerkily, forcing his shoulders not to curl in as he tries to fit his body into the frame. “Sure.”

Bill waits to see if he’s going to say anything else before he continues. “I’ll start by just telling you a little bit about the case and why I reached out to you.” 

“Okay,” Ilya says, because it seems like Bill wants him to respond. 

“So like I said on the phone, I’m a prosecutor. I’m currently working on a trial for Cameron Pollard, who’s being tried for two counts of assault and one count of sexual assault, and these are considered domestic violence charges because the victim was Mr. Pollard’s romantic partner. Does that make sense?”

Ilya nods. He finds himself unable to meet Bill’s eyes, which is stupid, because he’s on the other side of a screen, in a different country. He suddenly wishes he let Shane sit in here with him when he offered earlier. 

“In these kinds of trials,” Bill continues, “New Jersey is unlike a lot of states—sorry, you live in America, right?”

“I am a Russian citizen, but I have been living in Boston for about ten years. I’m moving to Canada soon.”

Bill looks wary for a second. “Okay. Anyway—uh—what was I saying… In New Jersey, we can submit something called ‘previous acts’ as evidence in a domestic violence trial, which means that it will help our case if we can show that this is not out of the norm for Mr. Pollard’s behavior.”

Just like Shane said, Ilya thinks absently. His smart Shane, who is probably hovering down the hall or on the staircase, trying to be present without overwhelming Ilya with the knowledge that he’s there.

“The victim shared with me that Mr. Pollard told them he was, at one point, in a relationship with you—which is why I called you.” Bill pauses, looking uneasy. He studies Ilya through the screen. “I’m sure you understand what I’m working up to, Mr. Rozanov,” he says gently. 

Ilya stares down at the desk. He stuffs his hands under his thighs and forces himself to take at least one steady breath before he responds. “I did not, ah, ever report anything. There is no”—how does Shane put it—“paper trail.”

Bill lights up as he shakes his head. “That’s fine. There doesn’t need to be. All we would need is your testimony at trial.”

Ilya feels like he accidentally agreed already. The panic must show on his face, because Bill quickly says, “I would talk you through everything. We would plan ahead of time what I would ask you about. It may even turn out that, after talking with you a little more, we decide we don’t actually need your testimony at all.”

“How… how much would it help? If I did do it?” Ilya asks.

Bill thinks carefully before he answers. “There is physical evidence in the case, which can be more valuable than witness testimony in most cases.” He pauses, his eyes angled up to the ceiling. “However, Mr. Pollard has hired a defense team that I am very familiar with, and they can be… aggressive—and effective. I suspect that their defense strategy will involve undermining the victim’s credibility. I think having your testimony would help with that.”

“Who is the, uh, victim?” Ilya can’t help but ask. 

“There are laws that prevent me from sharing the identity of domestic violence victims at this point, but… would it help you make your decision if you were able to speak with him?

Him. Ilya nods, even though he’s not sure that it’s true. He thinks he really has no choice. He’s already decided that he owes this unidentified man.

“With your permission then, I can share your contact information with him and give him the option to reach out to you,” Bill says, and Ilya nods. “I’ll need a decision from you relatively quickly. The trial is in a month, and we’ll need to spend some time preparing. Do you have anymore questions for me?”

Ilya has a million questions, but none of them will make a difference. He shakes his head.

Ilya and Shane fly to New Jersey on Sunday, a morning flight that gets them there early, with a return trip planned for the evening. 

Shane guides Ilya through the airport. He handles their passports, keeps track of their bags and finds their gate. Ilya lets himself be led around like a child, too caught in his own head to focus on the world around him. 

What will Riley be like? Is he also an athlete? Does he know who Ilya is, outside of Cameron’s ex? Is he resentful of Ilya for not being the one to press charges and put a stop to this?

On the plane, Shane puts a hand on Ilya’s knee, rubbing his thumb along the cartilage of the joint. When the stewardess comes, he asks her for a Coke and a ginger ale, and he pours the Coke over the cup of ice she brings and sets it on Ilya’s tray table. “There you go,” he says. Ilya drinks it dutifully and looks out the window.

“You don’t have to do this,” Shane reminds him quietly, as they’re preparing to land. “If you’re… not ready for this. If you’ve changed your mind, we can go home.”

Ilya shakes his head. “No. I want to meet him. I have to.”

“You’re being really brave,” Shane says, and Ilya scoffs. “I’m serious. I’m really proud of you.”

“I haven’t even said that I’m going to do it,” Ilya points out. 

Shane gathers Ilya’s trash and hands it to the stewardess. “I know you pretty well, Ilya.”

Their Uber drops them off in front of a small, brick house in a suburban cul-de-sac. The yard is well maintained, but there’s no frills to it. The car in the driveway is a years old Subaru. It’s not the kind of place an overpaid athlete lives.

Shane squeezes Ilya’s hand once, and he realizes they’ve been standing on the sidewalk for so long that their Uber is no longer in sight. He leads Shane up the steps to the door and rings the doorbell. 

The man who answers the door isn’t as tall as Shane or Ilya, but he’s tall. He has blond, trimmed hair with a texture that looks like it could be curly if allowed to grow out. He has on a New York Jets t-shirt, and Ilya can see lean, toned muscles on his arms, tanned from the summer sun. 

“Hey, I’m Riley,” he says shyly. He opens the door wider and steps aside so Ilya and Shane can come in. “So—uh—take a seat. I’ll make coffee.” He gestures toward a mustard couch in the living room and then disappears into the kitchen. 

Shane and Ilya sit, and Ilya looks around. The living space is—if he’s being honest—gay. Gay in the way that Shane’s cottage is: It’s well designed and clean, with tasteful art scattered throughout. The rich colors of the decor are balanced carefully. Ilya has been in enough bachelor teammates’ homes to know that straight men’s living rooms don’t look like this, even when they hire someone to set it up for them. 

“It’s, uh, nice to meet you,” Riley says when he returns, carrying a tray with three mugs and a plate of cookies. It looks heavy, and Ilya stands on instinct to help him balance it. “Oh, no, I got it. Sit. Sit.”

Ilya sits back down. He suspects that Riley already knows who they are, but he realizes he should be polite anyway. “Thank you. Ah—I’m Ilya. This is my boyfriend, Shane.” Shane raises his hand in a halfhearted wave.

Riley sinks down into a round, white chair across from them. He takes one of the coffee mugs. “So—uh…” His strained smile finally cracks. “This is awkward, right?”

Ilya laughs in relief. “Yes, very.”

“Um… Okay—so I’m Riley, like I said. I’m from here in Jersey. I’m a sports writer; I do beat reporting for the Jets.” He sucks in a sharp breath, staring down at the mug in his hands. “Yeah, that’s kind of it.”

Ilya doesn’t respond right away, and Shane seems to activate. He takes a coffee, leaving it black. “Thank you for hosting us, Riley. I don’t know how much you know about us…”

“Oh, you’re both Googleable,” Riley says with a little laugh. 

“Right,” Shane replies. 

“So, um, Bill said he talked to you?” Riley asks, turning to look at Ilya. “I wasn’t sure if… Well, Cameron told me he dated you, but I didn’t know if that was even really true, or for how long, or if…” His eyes dart up and down Ilya. 

Ilya clears his throat, straightening in his seat. It’s hard with how soft the couch is. “Yes, I was with Cameron for three years.” He realizes suddenly he’s been broken up from Cameron now for as long as he was with him. 

He finds it hard not to stare at Riley’s posture. He’s folded in on himself in a way that makes him look much smaller than he is. His face is tight like Shane’s gets when he thinks too hard about a problem. His foot is bouncing on the carpet. 

Two counts of assault. One count of sexual assault. God. Ilya thinks he might be sick, truly processing it for the first time since Bill said it to him. It must have happened here, since it’s not being tried in New York. 

“And, yes, he hit me.”

Shane’s foot taps Ilya’s. Ilya reminds himself to take a breath. 

Riley looks almost relieved. “And Bill—he told you what he wants you to do?”

“Yes, sort of. He did not tell me very much, but I think I understand.”

“Was there anything you wanted to ask me before you decide?” 

Riley looks so nervous, and Ilya realizes he has no idea what he’s doing here. He’s going to do it. Even though he hasn’t said it out loud, he knows it in the back of his mind—the part that Shane can read apparently. All he’s really doing here is torturing them both. 

But he had to see. He needed to lay eyes on potentially the only other man who could understand what it was like. Cameron hadn’t really dated anyone before Ilya, so it’s possible his only two boyfriends—victims—ever are in this room, staring awkwardly at each other.

And a self-flagellating part of Ilya wanted to know if he would take one look at him and think, You look like you could fight back, like he always imagined other people would to him. He’s a little relieved to find that he did have that thought. Riley looks strong, not in the way a career athlete is—definitely not in the way Cameron and Ilya are—but he clearly works out. The tone of his biceps is only achievable from long, hard hours in the gym.  

If there’s one thing Ilya has learned today, it’s that Cameron has a type.

“No,” Ilya responds. “Sorry. I don’t know why I… I will do it.” Shane’s thigh touches his, and Ilya remembers to breathe. “I just hope I do not mess things up for you. It’s very brave of you to be, ah, doing this.”

Riley shakes his head as he cuts off a sip of his coffee. “I didn’t really have a choice, honestly.” Ilya and Shane both tilt their heads questioningly at the same time. “Um—my neighbor called the cops, and I was in pretty bad shape. And I… was honest with them about what happened, and the next thing I know, Cameron’s in jail and the state is pressing charges. It’s not up to me, apparently.”

Shane’s face does that That’s not right expression Ilya recognizes from when he’s about to contest a ref’s call. Then he smooths it out and says, “I’m so sorry. This must be so difficult when it’s not even what you wanted.”

Riley gives a what-can-you-do shrug. “My friend is a lawyer, and he said I could probably get them to drop it if I was uncooperative enough, but I mean… I’m a sports journalist. I know how often athletes get away with these things, so maybe this could be… a turning point. If Bill pulls it off, of course.” His face says that he doesn’t have a lot of confidence that it will turn out the way he hopes. 

Ilya’s throat feels tight. Riley says it like he expects attention. Articles. Commentary. A turning point. Ilya’s testimony in black and white, easily accessible by a Google search. Jackoffs on podcasts turning it over and dissecting it and laughing about it like they do when he dares make a single mistake in a game.

But he has to. He has to. He has to. Riley doesn’t get the choice, and Ilya can’t leave him to the wolves. 

Two counts of assault and one count of sexual assault. 

Riley’s shoulders curled into his chest. His foot tapping anxiously on the floor. 

Once they’ve boarded their flight home, Ilya texts Bill: I’ll do it. 

He stares out the window at the tarmac as he mumbles, “Is that what I was like?”

Shane hums, shoving his backpack under the seat in front of him. “What do you mean?”

“All…?” Ilya folds his shoulders in and ducks his head.

“Oh.” Shane grimaces. “Yeah, a little bit. I remember thinking you were so subdued. It was like… you were so scared of doing the wrong thing that you were trying not to do anything at all.”

Ilya tries not to react to that, and then he realizes that maybe he’s still doing it now.

A week later, Ilya is back in Riley’s house in New Jersey, sitting on the same couch, facing Bill West. 

Bill hums mindlessly, arranging a notepad and pen in front of himself on the coffee table. In person, his affable and confident air is broken by the way his fingers dance across his thigh in empty moments. Ilya thinks Bill might be younger than he initially thought. 

“Ah, thank you, Riley,” Bill says cheerfully, taking the mug of coffee Riley hands him. 

Ilya smiles at Riley and takes his own cup of tea from him. Then Riley runs his hands nervously down his sides and says, “Okay, I’m gonna go run some errands so you guys can have privacy.” He clumsily gathers his keys and pulls on his shoes, and then he’s gone, leaving Ilya and Bill staring at each other, alone. 

“Thank you again, Ilya, for making the trip down here,” Bill says warmly. 

Ilya nods and sips his tea. “Of course. I don’t work during the summers, so is no problem.”

“That’s right. You’re a hockey player?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if all goes well, I expect the trial to take about a week, once it’s started, so hopefully this will be all wrapped up before you have to get back to entertaining the masses.” 

Bill picks up his mug and then puts it back down without drinking any of it. He instead grabs his pad of paper and rests it on his crossed legs. “Okay, so in the future, we may meet in my office or virtually, but I thought this initial conversation might be easier if it was in a more comfortable environment.”

Ilya inspects his thumbnail, resisting the urge to gnaw on it. He knows Shane will notice when he gets home if his nails are bitten. Shane offered to come, almost begged to, but Ilya couldn’t bear the thought of Shane stiffening beside him at every reminder of the things Cameron did. 

“We don’t have to get through everything today, but overall, I’ll need to ask about your experiences with Mr. Pollard, so we can figure out what’s relevant for the trial and prepare for what might get brought up in cross. I’ll also prep you with general strategies for testifying and navigating the courtroom. Make sense?” 

Ilya nods. 

“If you need to take a break at any point, just let me know, okay? I know this isn’t easy.”

Ilya’s starting to feel like a windup doll. He nods again. “Okay,” he adds since he feels like he’s been too quiet.

Bill studies him for a few seconds, smiling mildly, before he taps his pen against his notepad once like a puck drop and says, “Okay, so when were you in a romantic relationship with Cameron Pollard?”

“Um. From the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2017.”

“So for about three years?”

“Yes.”

Ilya stares down into his tea, listening to Bill’s pen scratch across paper. 

“And during those three years, was Mr. Pollard ever physically violent toward you?”

Ilya laughs without meaning to. “Yes,” he chuckles. It seems like such a vast understatement that it almost doesn’t feel true.

If Bill is caught off guard by Ilya’s cavalierness, he doesn’t show it. “And you said there wouldn’t be any police reports or restraining orders related to any of these incidents?”

Ilya shakes his head. “Sorry. Is that bad?”

“It’s not helpful, but we make do. Any hospital visits where you would have had documented injuries, anything like that? It’s okay if not.”

“I went to an urgent care one time. That was after we broke up, but he bruised my ribs and broke a few fingers.” Ilya cracks his knuckles. “And, probably, my team’s—my old team’s—doctor has some records of other things. I always told her I got into a barfight or did something stupid, but she helped me out a few times.”

Bill writes something down without much reaction. “Okay. If we decide to try to get those records, there will be some paperwork involved.” He looks back up. “Are you able to put a number to how many times Mr. Pollard physically assaulted you? Or an estimated frequency?”

Ilya runs a thumb along the rim of his coffee as he considers it. “It is hard to say. It depended.”

“On average.”

“Maybe… once or twice a month?”

“Okay.” Bill writes it down. “So sometimes more frequently than that and sometimes less?”

“Yes. At the beginning, it was not so much. By the end… it was more.” Ilya thinks back to the final vacation he took with Cameron. The whole week nearly passed without incident, and it had Ilya on edge the whole time. By that point, more than a few days alone together without Cameron lashing out seemed impossible.

“Okay. I’m going to ask you a little about the nature of these incidents now. You good to keep going?”

Ilya nods. He doesn’t hate this as much as he thought he would. Unlike the open ended, evocative questions his therapist used to ask, Bill’s approach is pragmatic: simple questions, mostly yes or no, that allow Ilya to focus on facts without lingering on any one thought for too long. 

Ilya is starting to think he can do this, if this is how the trial will go. 

“Okay. Did Mr. Pollard ever hit you with a closed fist?”

Ilya nods. 

Bill writes something down. “How about with an object, or he threw something at you?”

Ilya nods again. 

“Okay. Did he ever choke or strangle you?”

Ilya rubs his nose and stares down at his lap. “Uh, yes. One time.”

It’s clear that this is what Bill’s been hoping to hear from him. He nods enthusiastically. “Can you tell me more about that?”

“Like… what?”

“ What led up to it?”

“Oh. We were arguing.” Ilya tries to recall what led up to Cameron strangling him. The whole night is a little blurry now, after years of forcing himself not to think about it. “He wanted me to move closer to him, and I didn’t want to.” Bill writes something hastily. “And I think… I think he shoved me up against a wall, and he hit me, and then—I don’t remember how—but then I was on the ground and, yeah, he was over me, and he strangled me. I had to kick him off.”

Bill makes a sympathetic face. “I’m so sorry to hear that happened, Ilya.”

Based on how many notes Bill writes about the story, Ilya thinks he’s probably actually quite happy to hear it. He shrugs. “Okay. That’s probably something it would be helpful for you to discuss at the trial. Doing okay?” Bill asks when he looks back up from his notepad. Ilya nods. 

Bill’s face tightens just a hair as he continues, “Okay. So—you know one of the crimes being tried is a sexual assault, correct?”

Ilya’s chest locks up. He forces himself to dip his chin in a mockery of a nod. 

“Over the course of your three years with Mr. Pollard—or after—did he ever sexually assault you?” Bill asks with his voice dropped to a low volume. 

Ilya knows that the long silence he lets fester is an answer in itself—but Bill still waits patiently, his eyes just to Ilya’s side so that he’s not staring at him but it’s still clear his attention is on Ilya for whenever he chooses to speak. 

Ilya is tempted to say no. He can picture how Bill’s face will fall as his star witness turns out to be useless, but Ilya will have protected himself at least. He won’t have to admit that the lies he’s kept himself propped up on all these years—it wasn’t like that it was sex with my boyfriend we all do things we don’t want to to make the people we love happy—collapse under the lightest weight of scrutiny. He won’t have to explain the contents of the nightmares that he won’t even verbalize to Shane. He won’t have to feel weak, confused, disgusting. 

But he has to. He has to. He has to. 

The front door opens, and Ilya jumps. Riley appears looking sheepish. “Sorry—I got halfway to the store and realized I left my wallet. I’ll be fast.”

Ilya hops up, the coward in him unable to pass up the escape route. “Actually, I have to go.” He looks down at Bill. “We will talk more later, yes?”

Bill’s smile twitches, but he nods sympathetically. “Sure, Ilya. I’ll reach out to you to schedule a call.”

“Ilya, wake up. Ilya.”

Ilya wakes to a pressure on his shoulder. He gasps for air and pulls away from the touch. He doesn’t even realize he’s already on the edge of the bed until he’s toppling onto the floor. 

“Ilya!” Shane comes scrambling after him and crouches on the floor next to him. “Are you okay? Did you hit your head?”

Ilya’s heart feels like a hummingbird in his chest. He’s sweating, and it’s getting into his eyes, and he feels so cold somehow. He fights for air, leaning against the bed and tilting his head back. 

Shane is awake enough now to remember how he’s dealt with these things before. He stops talking and pushes himself a few feet back. He sits with his legs crossed and his hands on his knees. 

Ilya focuses on the rhythm of his breathing, trying not to think, until he can feel all his fingers and toes individually again. 

“Nightmare?” Shane asks quietly. He must have judged that Ilya’s body has relaxed enough to talk again. 

Ilya nods. 

Sitting like this, sweaty and across from each other on the floor, he’s reminded suddenly of that night in the gym. Just teenagers, curious. 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I don’t know why you’re always such a bitch about this. You’re fucking made for it, Babe. 

Ilya shakes his head.

“Do you want to be touched?”

Cam, please—can you just slow d—nngh—fuck! You’re hurting me.

Ilya shakes his head again, and Shane asks, “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

That’s your own fault for making this so fucking difficult.

“Can we go sit outside?” Ilya chokes out. He needs fresh air. He needs to feel like he can breathe. 

Shane nods fervently. He retrieves a blanket from the closet and puts Ilya’s slides next to his feet. Then he slides his own shoes on and leads Ilya out to the back patio. 

Even with the blanket around his shoulders, Ilya shivers when he sits on the patio couch. “I’ll start a fire,” Shane says. Not How long do you expect me to sit out here with you. Not Why didn’t you bring a jacket. Not Can we just go back to sleep. None of the things that would be reasonable and fair to ask. 

Ilya doesn’t try to stop the tears that roll down his face as he watches Shane kneel at the firepit. When the flames are roaring, Shane turns back toward him. His face falls when he sees the teartracks on Ilya’s face. “Oh, honey,” he says. He steps toward Ilya before stopping himself. 

Oh—Ilya told him not to touch him earlier. He reaches a hand out toward Shane to signal that he’s changed his mind. Shane climbs into his lap, settles Ilya’s head onto his chest, and holds him.

Ilya didn’t start having nightmares until after he stopped hearing from Cameron. He woke up from the first one in a cold sweat, shoving away a half-asleep Shane, with a cut off yell on his lips. It was the middle of the following season, and he couldn’t sleep, and he mainly gave in to Shane’s suggestion that he see a therapist because the exhaustion was starting to impact his game. 

“This is very common,” the therapist told him at his first appointment when he told her what needed to be fixed. “Sometimes our nervous systems wait until we’re safe to really process things. It’s hard to think too much about a trauma while it’s happening. Do you feel comfortable telling me a little bit more about these nightmares?” He shook his head, and she let him talk about something else. In his few subsequent sessions with her, he tried to be honest about everything else, but he never let the conversation land back on the contents of his nightmares.

He doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to solidify it into words. And a part of him is terrified that when someone other than he and Cameron does know, they will roll their eyes and say, “so?”, and he will realize he’s been torturing himself over nothing. 

He has to though. He has to tell Bill, and he has to tell a courtroom full of people who will probably tell the world, and he knows that he can’t start with those people.

“I have to tell you something,” Ilya says.

Shane climbs off of his lap to sit beside him, staying connected by a hand on Ilya’s knee. “Okay.”

Ilya stares into the crackling firepit as he speaks. “It just… I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s going to come up at the trial, and I do not want you to find out there.” 

Ilya can’t look at Shane. He knows exactly what he’s going to find on his face: concern, poorly hidden in what Shane thinks is a neutral expression but actually looks pained. 

After a beat, Shane repeats, “Okay.” His thumb on Ilya’s knee moves back and forth slowly. “You can tell me anything. I won’t get upset.”

“Yes, you will,” Ilya says. Shane opens his mouth, but Ilya continues, “Not at me. But you will be upset, I think.”

Ilya takes a slow, deep breath. “Last year, when you asked if I ever wanted you to top…” Ilya clears his throat. “And I said that we could, if you wanted to—that I didn’t prefer it, but that I did it a few times with my coach’s son and Cameron. You remember this?”

Shane nods slowly. 

When Ilya said yes to the hypothetical of bottoming for Shane, he did so because of how it went with Sasha—how neither of them had been particularly interested in it, but it seemed like something they should try while they were exploring; how the whole thing felt robotic and Sasha said, “We are not doing that again, yes?” afterward, and they both burst into fits of laughter more satisfying than the sex itself had been. Ilya imagined, when Shane asked, that it would go similarly to that, and so he said yes. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little relieved when Shane ultimately decided against it. 

“The times that I did it with Cameron. I…” He searches for words that don’t feel too grave. “Hm. I did not want to, but it happened anyway.” 

Shane’s hand stills. Ilya chances a look over at him to find the pained expression he was expecting. There’s a lack of surprise in Shane’s face though that makes Ilya want to crawl into a hole. He looks back down at his lap. 

“I’m so sorry, baby,” Shane says quietly. He reaches up for Ilya’s cheek and holds it softly. “I know you said you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I don’t.”

“If you ever change your mind, I’m here, okay? I love you.”

Ilya clears his throat and sniffs. “I love you too,” he whispers. “Can we just sit out here for a while?”

“Of course.” Shane settles into Ilya’s side and takes one of his hands. He doesn’t say anything else, which Ilya is grateful for. 

As Ilya watches the fire, focusing on the feeling of Shane’s body softening against his own, he wonders: if it was that hard to say out loud to his boyfriend, what it will feel like to say it to a room full of people?

Chapter 3: The Prosecution

Chapter Notes

tell me how I only realized as I was proofreading this chapter that I gave one of the main characters the same name as Cameron's football team??? like girl do you only know 4 names???

Ilya moves to Ottawa, as planned, a week before the trial. It feels a little strange to do while in the middle of the whirlpool of his past, but the movers were already booked and paid for before Bill called him, and it would feel like a concession in some way to change his plans now.

He tries to be excited. He forces a smile when Shane beams at how perfectly their toiletries fit next to each other in the medicine cabinet. He nods along as Shane explains the organizational system of his kitchen and then his bookshelf—even teasing, “Hollander, all of your books are about hockey” when Shane explains the Dewey Decimal System to him. He thanks Shane multiple times for switching the bedsheets to a cooler material because he knows how hot Ilya runs.

And, honestly, Ilya is excited. Moving in with Shane is the culmination of years of longing for more time together, but he just wishes they weren’t doing it with a cloud over their heads. He wishes his eyes weren’t heavy from shouting himself awake last night. He wishes he didn’t have to leave his unpacked suitcase out since he’ll need to load it up again in just a few days to spend next week in New Jersey. Most of all, he wishes Cameron wasn’t on his mind at all, much less at the forefront of it.

Ilya leaves most of his things in the Boston house—since he’s keeping it as a landing pad for visiting Marlow and Svetlana, and Shane already has a fully furnished home—so it ends up taking them less than a day to unpack everything and meld Ilya’s entire life with Shane’s. After all these years of constant travel, Ilya is used to molding his life into preexisting systems. Finding a place for his clothes in Shane’s closet and slotting his awards into Shane’s trophy cases is trivial compared to living out of a suitcase in hotel rooms for weeks at a time.

They’re just finishing up in the evening, hanging the last of Ilya’s shirts in the bedroom’s walk-in closet, when the doorbell rings. Shane frowns and leaves to answer the door.

“Mom? Dad?” Ilya hears Shane say. “Did you text me?”

“No,” Yuna responds. Her voice is getting closer. “We just figured we’d see how the move was going. We brought dinner. It just needs to heat up a little in the oven.”

“Sorry, bud, we probably should have checked first,” David says.

“No, it’s fine. We’re just finishing up. Let me get Ilya.”

Shane appears in the closet doorway. “Hey, sorry. I can tell them to go,” he says. He looks tired from the day, and maybe also a little bit annoyed about the turn of events.

Ilya looks down at the shirt he was in the middle of putting on a hanger. He wants to say that yes, please, he would love for Shane to tell his parents to leave—but he knows how much Shane loves them and how much he wants Ilya to bond with them, so he shakes his head. “Is okay. Let me finish with this? I will be out in a few minutes.”

Shane gives him a small smile, which reassures Ilya that he chose correctly, but he still looks faintly peeved about the whole thing. “Okay. I think they’re just super excited you’re here.” Ilya doubts that. “It looks like my dad made some kind of chicken bake thing.” He pecks Ilya on the cheek before heading back out to his parents.

Ilya slowly hangs the remainder of his shirts and, when he’s finished, stalls a little more by checking his phone.

Ilya leaves the closet and sinks down onto the edge of the bed. He sets his phone down and rests his elbows on his knees, holding his face in his hands. He closes his eyes, listening intently to the sound of his own breathing.

Ilya knows Bill is doing his job—and that he’s done his best to handle Ilya as gently as he reasonably can—but Ilya feels so wrung out that a part of him wants to tell Bill to fuck off. Ilya came clean in their last meeting, and it went fine—really—and he knows that it’s good he did it, but his nerves are still rubbed raw even without the reminder of how he’s going to have to do it all again soon.

His eyes prickle. He takes a shaky breath. He needs to get it together and go have a nice dinner with his boyfriend’s family so they don’t start to think he’s a reclusive, abrasive weirdo that their son puts up with despite being able to do much better.

“Ilya?” Ilya snaps his head up. Yuna is standing in the doorway now, one hand propped stiffly on the doorframe. She’s watching him with her eyebrows pressed into concern. “Are you okay?”

Ilya swallows and nods as he forces himself to sit up straight. He hopes his eyes aren’t red enough for her to notice. “Yes. Sorry. I’ll be out in a moment.”

Yuna tilts her head. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I’m sure leaving Boston must be hard.”

Ilya could take the easy way out and agree, but she looks so genuine and so motherly in her concern that Ilya’s chest cracks wide open. “No, is not that,” he mumbles. “I just… I am stressed about… things.” He waves a hand dismissively. “Sorry, I’m coming.”

“Well, wait. Is there something I can help with? I handle most of Shane’s administrative stuff. I might as well start doing some of that for you too.”

“No, is nothing like that.” Maybe it’s because she looks so maternal, or maybe it’s because it’s been so long since someone offered to just handle something for him, but Ilya finds himself telling the truth. “I have to do something next week. And… I know it is the right thing to do, but it will be very hard.”

She smiles sensitively. She’s still studying him as she always does, but it feels more watchful than appraising. “The right thing usually is,” she says, and Ilya hums in agreement. “Well—if I can help, or David can, just let Shane know, and we’ll be here, okay?”

Maybe you’ll fucking appreciate me next time, for putting up with all your ungrateful bullshit. Maybe I won’t even take you back, and you’ll be left all alone.

Ilya thinks he might sob into this woman’s chest if she continues being so nice. Suddenly he’s not sure if Yuna is this kind by default, or she’s doing this because she loves Shane, or she likes Ilya more than he’s thought all this time.

“Thank you,” he chokes out.

Yuna meets his eyes, searching for just a beat, before she drops her hand from the doorframe and nods stiffly. “Okay, well, take your time. Shane’s still warming up dinner.” Then she backs into the hallway and disappears toward the bathroom.

When Ilya finally shows face in the kitchen almost ten minutes later, Shane is alone, peering through the oven window. “Hey,” he says without looking up.

“Hey,” Ilya responds. He snakes his arms around Shane’s stomach and holds him close for a few heartbeats before letting go. “Can I help with anything?”

“There’s not a single vegetable in the thing my dad brought,” Shane answers. “Could you cut up a cucumber or something? We’ll just put that out with vinegar. My mom likes that.”

Ilya nods and gets to work while Shane starts pulling dinnerware from the cabinets. Shane is setting things down much more forcefully than he normally would, and Ilya notices, pausing mid-slice. He turns to watch Shane for a few moments before he chances, “Everything okay?”

“Just a long day,” Shane responds tiredly. He yanks forks out of the drawer and smacks them down.

Ilya turns back to his chopping. He works slowly, avoiding clacking the knife too loudly against the cutting board and drawing attention to himself. For a while, the only noise in the kitchen is the swish swish of the blade moving through the cucumber—until a timer shrills, startling Ilya. The knife slips in his hand and catches his finger.

He inhales jaggedly, barely containing a curse, and spins toward the sink. His legs are heavy under him as he races to get his finger under running water. It’s only once he has the faucet on that he realizes his vision is narrowing to a pinprick and his breaths are shallow. His head is filled with radio static.

The sight of his own blood running pink down the drain becomes all Ilya can focus on as he drops his weight heavily into his forearms on the edge of the sink. He’s never been scared of blood—he can’t be in his career—so he has no idea why this is happening to him.

A hand suddenly rests on his shoulder, and he flinches so hard that he splashes water halfway across the room. His body feels cold as he backs up to the sink.

Shane blinks at him, confused, wiping water from his face. Ilya watches his hand move across his cheek and back down to his side. “Ilya? Did you hurt yourself?”

Ilya tries to explain what happened, but he can’t get enough air to form words. His mouth hangs open uselessly as he holds up his bleeding hand.

“Shit.” Shane disappears from Ilya’s narrow plane of vision for just a moment and then reappears with a towel. He reaches urgently for Ilya’s injured hand. Ilya lets him take it, but he finds himself holding his breath nervously as he watches Shane wrap up the finger and hold it firmly. Blood doesn’t immediately soak through the fabric, which is a good sign.

“I’m sorry,” Ilya finally manages to choke out. His brain has caught up enough to feel embarrassed by his own reaction to a small cut, but his breathing won’t slow down no matter how hard he tries. The sharp pain of his finger being compressed becomes the only thing he can focus on.

Shane looks between Ilya’s hand and face a few times before he responds. “Hey, uh, you’re breathing really fast, Ilya. I’m worried you’re gonna hyperventilate.”

Ilya nods. He uses his free hand to grip the sink’s edge behind him. “I know. I can’t stop.” His voice comes out in a whine.

“Okay. Okay. Let’s sit. Come on.” Shane slowly lowers himself to the ground, still holding Ilya’s hand, and Ilya mirrors him until he’s leaning up against the cabinets.

“I’m sorry. I’m okay,” Ilya pants out. “I just need a minute. I will be okay for dinner. Just give me a minute.”

Shane sweeps his eyes over Ilya’s tense, huddled form. Then he gives Ilya his own hand back and says, “Here. Hold it tight. I’ll be right back.” He stands and leaves the kitchen.

Ilya clutches his bleeding finger as instructed, pulling it up to his chest. He lets his head drop back against the cabinet. I’m freaking out, he registers distantly. I’m freaking out, and I need to stop. It’s certainly not the first time he’s done something like this, but it is the first in a while, and the terror feels new every time.

Shane returns and plops back down on the kitchen floor. “My parents left,” he informs Ilya.

Ilya’s panic crests. The Hollanders are being so kind and welcoming, and he’s ruining it by being clumsy and fragile. Shane will be mad. Yuna will be disappointed. “What? No. I am okay. I promise. I just need—” Ilya’s chest catches on his anxiety, and he has to suck in a loud breath before he can continue. “I just need a minute. Please. Is okay. Just—”

“Ilya.” Shane moves slowly along the floor until he’s sitting next to Ilya. He rests his cheek on Ilya’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I was annoyed with them anyway for showing up unannounced. I told them we’re too tired from unpacking, and they understood. It’s fine. No one’s upset.”

Shane slowly reaches his hand up, broadcasting his movements, and sets it on the back of Ilya’s head. He runs his hands through Ilya’s hair soothingly.

Ilya squeezes his eyes shut and focuses on counting out his breaths. He doesn’t know how long it takes him, but eventually his vision widens and his breaths feel more complete. The warmth of Shane’s body against his hits him all at once.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak out.”

Shane shakes his hand. “It’s okay. It’s understandable.”

Ilya scoffs. “No, it is not. It has been way too long for me to be freaking out like that. And what? Because I was clumsy and startled myself?”

Shane frowns at him, continuing to play with his hair. “No—because you’ve been revisiting the worst things that have ever happened to you lately, and because I was slamming around the kitchen acting annoyed, which I should’ve known better than to do. And because you got startled by the timer, and then by the pain, and then again by me.”

Well. When Shane puts it like that—all facts and reason, as Shane is wont to—it sounds less pathetic. Ilya doesn’t have the energy to argue against it, at least. His eyes feel heavy as the panic leaves him and takes the last of his day’s energy with it.

“Hey, can I bandage up your finger before you get too tired?”

“‘m not tired,” Ilya protests. He can’t be tired. They have dinner to eat, and they need to call Shane’s parents back so as to not be rude, and Ilya needs to respond to Bill, and—

“Of course you are. You just had a panic attack. Trust me—I know how exhausting that is. Let me clean up your finger, and then we can take a nap, and then we’ll eat dinner. Okay?”

Ilya can’t get himself to do anything but nod. He listens as Shane moves around the kitchen, turning off the oven and pulling out the first aid kit. Then he lets Shane lead him to the bedroom and tape up his finger and nudge him into bed. He falls asleep quickly, his head on Shane’s chest.

NFL’s Cameron Pollard’s Domestic Violence Charges Proceed to Trial, MLH’s Ilya Rozanov to Testify as Character Witness

August 2020

Following his arrest earlier this year in New Jersey, Bills player Cameron Pollard will stand trial this week for serious domestic violence charges. Charges include second degree assault, third degree assault, and sexual assault. Maximum sentences for all charges add up to 35 years, but even if Pollard is convicted on all counts, experts predict an actual maximum prison time of closer to 10 years.

The trial is already drawing significant attention given the high rates of domestic violence arrests of NFL players in the league’s history , as well as the extremely low rates of disciplinary action for the players and even lower rates of completed trials and convictions.

The witness list was finalized yesterday and includes MLH star Ilya Rozanov, who is indicated to be testifying as a character witness. Rozanov and Pollard spent several years as collaborators on The Mitchell Foundation, a camp aimed at providing a safe and fun introduction to sports for victims of child abuse. Rozanov has not publically commented on the April incident.

The first testimony on Thursday will be from the alleged victim, named in the public list as Riley Smith, though more identifying contact information has been redacted.

🏑 BostonBabeee: v disappointed to see Roz being a character witness for an abuser :(

💥 throaway9909093: He’s on the prosecutor’s list babe

🏑 BostonBabeee: ?

💥 throaway9909093: Whatever he’s going to say is against Pollard. Since he’s a character witness, my bet is he saw stuff not being tried but can attest to Pollard being generally abusive to the woman

🏑 BostonBabeee: oh ok yay! King Rozanov 👑

🚺 Johnui: any more info about the victim?

🫥 poppssss: Just their name but there’s like 100+ Riley Smiths in the tri-state alone so we’re just gonna have to wait for the trial. One of the bills WAGs said on insta that she didn’t even know Pollard had a gf before everything so 🤷

While Shane is checking them into their hotel in New Jersey the night before the trial, Ilya looks absently around the lobby. It’s a more luxurious place than they would normally stay, the kind of hotel with a doorman at the back entrance who recognizes faces.

A concierge spots them and promises to have a bottle of champagne sent up to their room unprompted. Ilya smiles and thanks her politely, pulling a twenty out of his wallet with clumsy hands. He suspects that Shane chose this hotel not for the eager service but for the earpieced and sunglassed security standing outside, leaning casually against the valet stand.

The elevator opens, and a family tumbles out. “Guys!” the father hisses at his three children. “Inside voices, inside feet. Jesus Christ.” He looks over his shoulder desperately at a woman who could be either his very young wife or his nanny. One of the sons, a blond boy probably around the same age as Pike’s eldest, stops in his tracks, mouth open, a few yards from Ilya.

“Dad! It’s Ilya Rozanov!” he whisper-shouts, his hand over his mouth like that will keep Ilya from hearing.

The kid’s dad makes eye contact with Ilya and raises his eyebrows. After Ilya nods once, he says, “Say hi, kiddo. Be polite.”

The boy spins back toward Ilya and, voice well out of the range that Ilya would consider inside voice, says, “Hi, are you Ilya Rozanov? I’m Cody. I’m Boston’s biggest fan. I’m gonna be an MLH player someday, and I’m captain of my team right now. I’m gonna be just like you.” He speaks so fast that he’s out of breath by the time he finishes.

Shane looks over his shoulder bemusedly as he takes his ID back from the receptionist.

Ilya’s mouth quirks into a smile. He doesn’t mention that he doesn’t play for Boston anymore, or that he’s no longer a captain. Instead, he says, “That is very cool. Would you like me to sign something?”

Cody’s eyes widen in panic as he whirls toward the woman. “Alma! What can he sign?”

The young woman, Alma, smiles at him warmly before digging into her backpack and retrieving a white compression shirt and a sharpie. She passes it off to Ilya, who presses it across the front desk as he signs his name. He hands the shirt straight to the boy, but gives the sharpie back to Alma. She smiles again when she takes it from him and says, “We’re all big Boston fans. I just want to say, I heard why you’re in town, and I think it’s really great that you’re helping that woman get justice.”

Ilya’s mouth tastes bitter. He forces his lips to stay in something like a smile as he replies, “Ah. Yes. I cannot really talk about it.” It’s true—Bill told him not to talk to anyone ahead of time. Ilya’s not sure if it was a requirement or a suggestion, but he’s been unquestioningly doing what he’s told as far as the trial goes.

Alma backs away sheepishly. “Of course. Of course. Well—thank you for…” She motions toward Cody, who’s staring at his signed shirt with awe, before beckoning the family out onto the street.

Ilya watches them go. Cody jumps along next to his father, holding up his shirt first to him and then to his siblings. Ilya feels his mouth turn into a grimace while he imagines the news of his testimony dropping in a few days. He hopes Alma won’t let the boy read too much about the gritty details that the press is sure to report.

Most of all, he hopes the boy was wrong about turning out just like him.

“He didn’t even acknowledge me,” Shane huffs as he steps to Ilya’s side.

Ilya bumps against him playfully. “Not all that outside of Canada, are you, Hollander?” Shane rolls his eyes and leads him to the elevator.

As they ascend to one of the highest floors, Shane frowns at his phone. “Svetlana is calling me? Has she tried to call you?”

“Many times.” Ilya turns over the plastic keycard Shane gave him in his hand.

“I bet she saw the news. She’s probably worried,” Shane says like an admonishment.

“So tell her I am fine,” Ilya bites out. Everyone has been trying to call him since the witness list was made public yesterday. His agent. His publicist. Svetlana. Marlow. Ilya decided to simply not turn his phone back on after their flight landed earlier.

After a long silence, Ilya looks over to see that Shane’s face has gone sour. He takes a careful breath. “Okay. I’ll call her when we get up there. I should call my parents too; They saw the news.”

“Yes, call everyone, Hollander. Tell them Ilya Rozanov will be spending rest of the night having panic attack in a fancy, high security hotel room, since he is too defenseless to deal with a few reporters.” He doesn’t know why he’s being nasty. Even as he speaks, it feels like his mouth is moving without instructions from his brain. “Maybe we should go back downstairs and tell that little boy what a loser his hero is.”

Shane just stares at him until the elevator stutters to a halt and opens. He shakes his head before leading Ilya out and directly into the living room of the penthouse. “You know that’s not what…” He trails off and shakes his head again. “I’m gonna make some calls. You settle in.”

While Shane disappears into another room, Ilya hauls their suitcases into the bedroom. Then he digs a pack of cigarettes out of his carryon and retreats out onto the balcony.

It’s humid outside. The moisture that clings to Ilya’s skin feels familiar. He spends a few minutes staring out at the low skyline, forcing himself not to think about anything, before he finally lights a cigarette.

He gets through that one and has already lit another by the time Shane comes outside. “Thought I’d find you out here,” Shane says as he slides the balcony door open. His nose scrunches.

Ilya exhales smoke. “It’s just one,” he lies.

Shane leans his forearms on the railing beside Ilya. “Guess I’ll let you have this one,” he responds, looking out at Bergen county below them.

“Oh, you’ll let me,” Ilya scoffs. He brings the cigarette back to his mouth but just rests it between his teeth without inhaling.

Shane’s face falls. “You know that’s not what I meant,” he says quietly. He turns his body toward Ilya, keeping one hand on the railing. He puts the other on the door handle like he might just retreat back inside.

Ilya crumples at the defeated look in Shane’s eyes. He looks away and pulls smoke into his mouth. He barely lets it cool before drawing it into his lungs, relishing the burn until it forces a cough out of him.

“You okay?” Shane asks.

“Fine,” Ilya chokes out.

Shane doesn’t say anything for a few moments. He studies Ilya, frowning. “I’m going to order room service for dinner,” he grinds out finally. “What do you want? I can see if they have chicken tenders or something like that.”

Ilya nods once. He avoids looking at his boyfriend.

Shane lingers like he wants to say something else. Ilya waits. Eventually, Shane quietly says, “Svetlana asked me to tell you that she’s proud of you. And that she loves you.”

Ilya groans and drops his forehead onto his arms on the railing. “Proud,” he mumbles derisively.

“Yeah. Is that so hard to believe?”

“No one is going to be proud of what I let Cameron do to me. It is easy to be proud when people think I’m standing up for poor, defenseless woman, but after I testify…” Ilya shoves away from the railing, shaking his head and chuckling darkly. He thinks about the little boy in the lobby.

“Svetlana doesn’t think that though.”

“Svetlana… She loves me too much. And even she doesn’t know it all.” Ilya hesitates. “Neither do you, still. I mean—you know most, but… I’m sure there are things that will come up that you have never heard before. It could be… embarrassing.”

“Ilya, nothing I hear in a few days is going to change how I see you,” Shane says, sounding baffled. His hand is somehow still on the door handle, and he finally drops it.

“You can’t promise that.”

“Yes, I can. Ilya…” Shane looks around desperately like the right words will present themselves to him from the city lights below. Ilya waits for him to collect his scatter of thoughts. “I think you think that I—and Svetlana and Marlow—love you despite everything that Cameron did to you, but that’s not true. I…” Shane falters and searches again. “And I don’t love you because of it, but I love you for being brave in spite of it.”

“Brave?” Ilya spits. “Is that what people are going to think? That I was brave?”

“Yes! You were brave enough to survive that, and you were brave enough to get yourself out, and you were brave enough to move on with your life, and now you’re brave enough to be here right now!” Words tumble out of Shane now, no longer carefully chosen. “And, yeah, I’m sure there will be people who think it makes you weak, but let’s be honest Ilya—those kind of people kind of already hate us for being gay. So… There!

“When you wake up the morning after you testify, the world won’t have crumbled down. There’s gonna be some mean articles online—but I’ll still be here, hockey will still be here, your friends will still be here. That little boy in the lobby is still gonna idolize the captain who ended Boston’s Stanley Cup drought. The world is going to keep turning.”

Ilya absorbs Shane’s words, staring down at his cold cigarette. “Oh,” he whispers. “You are very difficult to argue with sometimes.”

“Did that help or did I just make you more upset?” Shane asks. His shoulders slump tiredly.

Ilya nods and tosses the cigarette into the ashtray. “It helped. Thank you.” He still feels like there’s an anvil on his chest, and the dread that’s been building in his gut for weeks is still there, but the desperate, terrified animal in his brain settles for now, mollified by reason.

“Okay. Do you want dinner?” Shane asks gently. He says it in the same tone he says I love you.

He puts out a hand toward Ilya, and Ilya grasps it without even thinking, his palm finding Shane’s like a magnet. He nods and lets himself be led inside.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Judge in Pollard’s trial has not granted media communication exemptions. I will have to provide updates during breaks and at the end of the day.

🏳️‍🌈 OttawaOtter: any Rozanov sightings?

📰 ElliPoeReporter: no he’s scheduled to testify tomorrow, so probably not allowed to observe until after that.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Holy shit I had to leave the courtroom for this but the victim Riley Smith is Jets X-Factor reporter Riley Smith

🚺 Johnui: Riley Smith is a woman? Feeling unwoke rn for always assuming they were a man.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Riley Smith IS a man. An openly gay one. Have to go back to courtroom. Will update at first break.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: ok court has broken for lunch. Smith spent most of the first half of the day on the stand. Here’s my summary.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Smith testified to 2 days of essentially continuous violence at his home in New Jersey following an argument about Smith’s contact with an ex. Neighbor called 911 twice over the 2 days. Smith was hospitalized after the second call, which is when Pollard was arrested.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Smith described being beaten, strangled, and raped during this 2 day period. He also described an escalating pattern of violence over the entire 1.5 year relationship. Honestly was very hard to listen to some of the testimony.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Lots of emotion on the jury as well, but the composition does skew stoic and male. Would be interesting to see how many women the defense struck.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Will describe the cross later. It was… something. Being called back in.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Nurse and responding officer will testify after lunch.

🧅 TheOnion: Sophie’s Choice - NFL Forced to Choose Between Life Passions of Blacklisting Queer Players and Protecting Abusers

Ilya doesn’t sleep at all and arrives at the courthouse feeling drained before the day has even begun. He and Shane wait silently on an unforgiving, wooden bench until Riley also arrives and greets them timidly. He’s in a well-tailored suit with tightly groomed hair, and he looks surprisingly animated for a man in his position, but Ilya doesn’t miss that his hands are shaking at his sides.

“We can go into the courtroom,” Riley says, eyeing the reporters ogling as they make their way through the security line. In the courtroom, he beelines to a bench toward the back and slides all the way down to where it meets the wall. Ilya and Shane follow him.

The judge is already at her bench. She looks up with only her eyes when they sit, but she otherwise doesn’t acknowledge them.

A few silent moments later, the doors open, and Ilya turns stiffly to look. He senses Riley and Shane do the same on either side of him. Cameron walks in. Ilya watches as he and another man, presumably his lawyer, march to a table on the other side of the room. They’re speaking to each other so quietly that Ilya can’t make out the words even in the echoey room.

Riley is tense beside Ilya. Ilya looks over to see that he’s staring down at his own feet, his shaking hands clasping his knees.

“Are you okay?” Ilya asks quietly, as if his own mind isn’t starting to dissolve into anxious sludge. More people are coming in now, and he can feel the weight of their gazes passing over him. He’s sure Riley feels it too.

“Fine. Yeah.” Riley looks up and forces a smile just as Bill enters the room.

Bill slides into the bench. He leans over Shane’s lap to talk to Ilya. “How are you feeling, Ilya?” he asks. “Ready?” His hand is bouncing on his thigh like it sometimes did during awkward moments in their prep meetings.

Ilya is not ready. He’ll never be ready. He nods anyway.

Over Bill’s shoulder, Ilya can see Cameron finish his conversation with his lawyer and sit back in his seat. He looks frustrated, Ilya notes as a reflex. Then he turns, his eyes landing on Ilya, and he doesn’t look away.

Ilya’s throat closes up. He tries to be the one to break the eye contact, but his body won’t respond to his brain’s commands.

Bill opens his mouth to say something else, but he falters and follows Ilya’s line of sight. He jumps to his feet. “Your Honor!” he says with a hand gesturing exasperatedly in Cameron’s direction. There’s a petulance to his tone that makes Ilya think this is a conversation carried over from yesterday.

The judge, who’s been flipping through a stack of papers on her bench, looks up. She looks from Bill to Cameron and sighs. “Mr. Pollard. I’m not playing this game today.”

“Apologies, Your Honor,” Cameron says genially. He smiles at her like he smiles at the parents at camp. “I was spaced out.” The judge rolls her eyes and returns to her reading after shooting him one more warning look.

Bill steps into the line of sight between Ilya and Cameron. “Ignore him,” he grumbles. “He’s been mostly well behaved. Just try not to look at him when you’re testifying.”

“I know,” Ilya responds, because Bill has already given him this rundown before.

“If it’s any consolation, I think it’s turning the jury off.” Bill’s phone buzzes, and he trails off as he pulls it from his suit pocket.

“Hey,” Shane says softly, drawing Ilya’s attention to him with a gentle tug at his knee. “You got this. In a few hours, it’ll be over.”

A few hours. Ilya can get through a few hours. A shocking amount of his life has been composed of resolving to get through the next few hours. Through a game. Through a stuffy gala with his father. Through whatever stormy mood swept over Cameron.

He listens absently to the rote motions of the beginning of the court day, and before he’s ready—as if he’ll ever be ready—Bill is calling him to the stand. He walks robotically up to the bench, where he’s directed to sit. As he does, he allows himself to look briefly around the room—at Shane and Riley, and the smattering of reporters, and Cameron.

Cameron is staring at him again—though Ilya supposes it’s more defensible now, with Ilya as the main attraction of the room—and his expression seems inappropriately relaxed, almost amused. He has his legs and arms both crossed. He’s wearing a suit Ilya doesn’t recognize and shoes that he does. They’re the shoes that he was wearing the night that he broke Ilya’s fingers.

When Ilya tears his eyes up from Cameron’s feet to his face, he sees that Cameron’s mouth isn’t smiling, but his eyes are. “Oh,” Ilya thinks distantly, “he did this on purpose.” The thought hits Ilya like a brick wall to the face.

He sweeps his eyes across the gallery to land on Riley, who’s watching him anxiously with his thumbnail in his mouth. Shane is next to him, eyes narrowed with concern as he tries to read Ilya’s mind. Ilya realizes he must look like a deer caught in headlights.

Two counts of assault and one count of sexual assault.

You were so scared of doing the wrong thing that you were trying not to do anything at all.

That’s your own fault for making this so fucking difficult.

Ilya wonders if puking on the stand will undermine his credibility.

Cameron stood in front of his closet this morning and thought about what he should wear to see Ilya, and he chose the shoes that he buffed Ilya’s blood from—and then he waited for Ilya to notice so he could feel satisfied with himself for making Ilya feel small without even touching him.

‘He’s doing it on purpose,’ Ilya realizes. ‘He’s always been doing it on purpose.’

The first time Cameron fucked him, Ilya didn’t even really say no. When Cameron unexpectedly turned away from the show they were watching and started kissing Ilya’s neck, Ilya was relieved. They’d been snapping at each other all day, and he knew an explosion was coming. He thought that working out their frustration through sex would at least temper it when it came, so he let himself be stripped and pressed down onto the chaise. When he realized what Cameron was positioning himself for, Ilya said only, “Wait, Cam, you know I don’t like—”, and Cameron shushed him before pressing in.

Ilya tried to like it. He really did, because Cameron wasn’t rough that time and he nibbled at Ilya’s earlobe and he whispered “I love you” when he finished—like he didn’t realize that Ilya spent the entire time staring at the wall and swallowing down a revulsion he couldn’t quite explain and having every touch and sound and smell imprinted on his brain to be relived in his nightmares, even more so than the times that Cameron held his face down into the pillow and left him bruised and said things that made Ilya’s guts wrench.

Ilya always thought Cameron didn’t even realize how much he fucked with Ilya’s head that first time. He couldn’t imagine Cameron loving him and telling him that, and simultaneously intentionally making Ilya feel like a guest in his own body, which, until that day, had always felt like his only true home.

But Ilya realizes now that the only reason he can’t imagine it is because he’s not a bad person—and Cameron is. He has to be, Ilya thinks with his heart speeding up, because if Ilya ever saw Shane panting in pain and curled up on the floor because of something Ilya did, Ilya would promptly do the world a favor and find the bottom a pill bottle. And if Shane ever said so much as, “Wait,” Ilya would be off of him in a second.

Cameron can blame his short fuse and cruel father and violent sport, but Ilya has all those things too, and he never hurt Cameron except in desperate attempts at self-defense.

Cameron knew he was fucking with Ilya all those times, and he did it on purpose—and he knows that he’s fucking with him now.

Cameron is a bad person, and that’s all it ever was.

A weight lifts from Ilya’s chest. He hardly has time to process the relief of it before the court clerk is approaching him with a Bible.

Chapter End Notes

Added 6/28: it may be a bit before the next chapter gets updated. If you read the notes in Across the Lake, you know I had some health issues going on and I’m bouncing back well but I’m… so… tired. Like I finally understand what brain fog is. I’ll continue to work on the remaining chapters of this but I don’t want to rush to get it out as quickly as I normally do so just be aware I may be a bit and 1) please be patient and 2) I’m not dead lol

Chapter 4: The Defense

Chapter Notes

Hey guys thanks for your patience while I took a little break. Surely nothing crazy happened while I was gone, right?

Cameron’s lawyer, Preston, approaches the stand slowly, his gaze lingering on his page of notes on the table for a few seconds as he rounds it. Then he adjusts his suit cuffs and turns his attention fully to Ilya with a polite smile. “Hello, Mr. Rozanov.”

“Hello,” Ilya responds. He searches Preston’s face, trying to discern his thoughts so he can prepare for the questions that are coming.

Ilya suddenly wishes he had asked more questions about what Bill meant when he said the defense was aggressive with Riley. Preston doesn’t have the look of someone about to get aggressive—at least, not in the way that lets Ilya know he’s about to be slammed into boards or punched in the face. Preston looks a bit like Ilya’s father preparing to tell him he needs a haircut. 

“You testified earlier that you were in a relationship with my client, Mr. Pollard, for three years. Correct?” Preston asks. 

“Yes.” The microphone that Ilya’s been directed to speak into is just low enough that, with his height, he has to lean down every time he speaks. 

“And there was no… common knowledge of this relationship?”

“No. Like I said before, Cameron and I kept our relationship a secret. We were both in closet at the time.” Ilya does his best to maintain eye contact like Bill told him to, and Preston holds his gaze levelly.

“So no one else knew about the abuse you claim happened in this relationship or even the relationship itself while it was happening?” Preston is still sporting a thin smile that doesn’t move his nose or hit his eyes.

“Yes.” 

“Okay. Mr. Rozanov, what do you do for work?”

“I am a professional hockey player.”

“So you must be pretty strong,” Preston says. Ilya doesn’t hear a question mark, and Bill told him to keep quiet in that case, so he does. After a moment, Preston adds, “Hockey’s a pretty violent sport, right?”

Ilya shrugs. “Yeah.”

“I have to admit—I have watched you play before. You get in your fair share of fights. You finish a lot of them too.”

Bill sighs and says, “Objection. Is there a question in there anywhere?”

“Sustained. Ask a question or move on, Mr. Preston.”

“Of course. You’ve testified that Mr. Pollard was physically violent to you during your relationship. A big guy like you, with fighting as part of your job, you never… defended yourself?” Preston still won’t stop fucking smiling. Ilya clenches his fists in his lap.

Ilya clears his throat before leaning toward the microphone. “Not never, but… I loved him. I did not want to hurt him, so I avoided it.”

Preston makes a hm sound. “So you did, then, hurt Mr. Pollard at some point in your relationship?”

“A few times, I hit him back or shoved him off of me, to defend myself,” Ilya answers, a response he practiced already with Bill. “But again—I never wanted to. It was always because I was scared.”

“You? Were scared?” Preston raises his eyebrow.

“Yes,” Ilya says curtly. He sneaks a glance at Bill and gets an encouraging nod in response. 

Preston lets the response hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Okay. I assume, during the three years you dated Mr. Pollard, you and he engaged in consensual sex on a semi-regular basis?”

“Yes.” In any other situation, Ilya would have found a joke to make about the frequency of their sex. Maybe he would have gotten creative with the word semi. Instead, he sticks to one word answers as much as possible, like Bill told him to, and he tries not to acknowledge the twisty, defiant feeling that Preston’s bemused half-smile is stirring up in him. 

“So what was different about those five times that you say Mr. Pollard sexually assaulted you?” 

The intentional use of the phrase “you say” does not escape Ilya, but he grinds his teeth together instead of snapping about it. 

“Those times…” Ilya reminds himself that Bill prepared him for this question. “Cameron wanted to do an activity that he knew I did not enjoy, and I told him I did not want to, and he forced it.”

“So this… activity—you never performed consensually with Mr. Pollard in the entirety of your relationship?”

Ilya considers the question before answering, “There were times when I did not try to stop it, yes.” Times when he really tried to like it. Times when it was just easier to go with it. Times when he knew how it would end either way and didn’t have the energy to put up a fight just for the sake of his own pride. 

Preston nods a few times, scanning his eyes along the floor between them as he thinks. “How many times would you say?”

Ilya looks down at his lap as he catalogs years of sex. “A few dozen?”

“So—more times than you say Mr. Pollard assaulted you?”

“Yes.”

“So—this particular sexual activity that you say you didn’t like—and claim Mr. Pollard was assaulting you by initiating—you say yourself you did consensually more times than otherwise. How was Mr. Pollard supposed to know, on these instances that you categorize as assault, that you were not consenting?”

Ilya lets himself fantasize for a moment about encountering Preston on the ice and pounding his face into the glass. Then he meets his eyes and deadpans, “Probably the words ‘no’ and ‘stop’ were signs.” 

Someone in the gallery snorts. Ilya and Preston both turn at the same time to see a female reporter covering her mouth. She winces and puts up an apologetic hand toward the judge. 

Before Ilya can return his attention to Preston, his eyes are drawn reflexively toward Shane, who’s making his familiar scrunched up face of concern. Ilya swallows and looks away, feeling an oozing creep of shame at the reminder that he and Preston are not the only people in the room.

“I see,” Preston says after a long pause. “And did you and Mr. Pollard ever engage in a kink called consensual non-consent or rape play?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Okay,” Preston says in a tone like he thinks Ilya is lying—or he wants the jury to think that he thinks Ilya is lying. He turns away and returns to his table, where he scans over his page of notes again. 

Ilya has been doing a pretty admirable job of not looking at Cameron, but as he tracks Preston back to their table, he can’t help a short glance. Cameron is sitting up straight, his hands folded in front of him, and his eyes are boring into Ilya. Ilya winces and fixes his gaze on a random tile on the floor.

Preston spins back toward Ilya. “Mr. Rozanov, how many sexual partners have you had?”

Before Ilya can react, Bill pipes up. “Objection. Relevance?” His jaw has tightened hard enough for Ilya to see from the other side of the room. 

“I’m just trying to paint a picture of the dynamics of Mr. Rozanov and Mr. Pollard’s sex life,” Preston responds innocently. “Which you brought into evidence by calling Mr. Rozanov.”

“Are you asking if I’m a slut?” Ilya blurts out. He can hear a few people in the gaggle of reporters whispering to each other. The same woman who laughed earlier is gaping at him.

Bill widens his eyes at him in warning before turning back to the judge. “Mr. Rozanov’s sexual history before and after his relationship with Mr. Pollard has nothing to do with his testimony as it pertains to Mr. Pollard’s character.”

“Sustained,” the judge says, a little more loudly than she’s been speaking so far. “Mr. Rozanov, don’t acknowledge the question any further.” She doesn’t look particularly happy with any of them.

Preston stares wordlessly at Ilya for just a beat too long before asking a new question. “How about this? How many sexual partners did you have while in a relationship with Mr. Pollard?”

Ilya’s stomach swoops. He looks to Bill, who’s already objecting. 

Again, Preston defends the question. “I think the dynamics of Misters Rozanov and Pollard’s relationship are important for understanding Mr. Rozanov’s motives for testifying today. It speaks to the credibility of the witness.”

“My motives for—”

“Mr. Rozanov,” the judge snaps. “No more of that before I consider it contempt of court. Overruled. Answer the question.”

Shane has his eyes and mouth open wide now, looking between Preston and Ilya with disbelief. Ilya finds he can’t look away from him. 

Preston repeats his question. Ilya tears his eyes back to the lawyer. He can feel the weight of everyone’s gazes on him. “Cameron and one other. On one instance, the day before Cameron and I ended the relationship, I… hooked up with someone else.”

“Another man?”

Ilya gives Bill a hopeful second to object, but he doesn’t. “Yes.”

“And is that why your relationship with Mr. Pollard ended? Because of this other man?”

“No. I broke up with Cameron because he strangled me, and I was afraid he would kill me if it happened again.” Ilya can feel his own shaking voice rising in volume, and he senses the judge tense. He forces himself to lower his shoulders a little and sit back an inch. He’s not enthusiastic about seeing the inside of the court jail. 

“I see. And did you report that assault to any authorities?”

“No.”

“So there’s no proof that it happened? Or that it’s why you ended the relationship with Mr. Pollard?”

“No,” Ilya grinds out. 

“Did you maintain any contact with Mr. Pollard after ending your relationship?”

“We did occasionally text for a while afterward.”

Preston makes a face at the jury like they’re old friends sharing a joke. “You occasionally texted with a man you were scared would kill you given the chance?”

Ilya takes a breath before responding to contain the snarky remarks that spring to mind. “Yes.”

“Did you continue a sexual relationship with the other man after ending your relationship with Mr. Pollard?”

“Objection! Relevance?” Bill is glaring at Preston now.

“Again—just trying to get a full picture of the relationship dynamics here.” Preston smiles unflappably back at Bill. 

“Overruled, but get there, Mr. Preston.”

“Actually, I’ll rephrase: Are you still in a relationship with this other man?”

In the corner of Ilya’s field of vision, he sees reporters turning their heads in unison toward Shane, who freezes, his eyes narrowing as he looks between Preston and Ilya.

“Yes,” Ilya answers. He hears a dozen pens hit paper. 

“And how did he feel about you occasionally texting your ex-boyfriend while with him?”

“He…” Ilya runs his hands along his thighs. He can see where he’s being led already and stops himself from saying, ‘He didn’t like it.’ “It worried him.”

“He wanted you to stop talking to Mr. Pollard?”

“He thought that it was safer for me to not talk to Cameron. He was right.”

Preston tilts his head as he listens to Ilya’s answer. “So—just to make sure I understand correctly,” he responds, “you cheated on Mr. Pollard, ended the mutually combative relationship to be with this other man who stole you—who did not like you having contact with Mr. Pollard and who you are still dating—and now you’ve conveniently taken the opportunity to further hurt Mr. Pollard by testifying to things of which you have no proof, at a trial for charges that you have no connection to?”

“Nobody stole me. I—”

Bill stands. “Objection—prejudicial,” he says tiredly. 

“—already knew I would break up with him. And if you think this is convenient—”

“Sustained. Mr. Rozanov. Stop. Talking.”

Ilya snaps his mouth shut so hard his teeth vibrate. He realizes he’s leaned menacingly far forward, and he forcibly sets his shoulders against the hard back of his chair. 

“No more questions, Your Honor,” Preston says cheerily before he returns to his seat without another look at Ilya. 

Shane keeps both of their phones off even after they leave the courtroom and make it back to the hotel penthouse. Ilya slumps into a chair in the sitting area as soon as his shoes are off, and Shane crouches in front of him, resting a hand on Ilya’s knee. 

His brown eyes search Ilya’s face for what he needs. “I need vodka,” Ilya answers.

Shane nods and stands. “I can do that.” The fact that he doesn’t even attempt to nudge Ilya toward a healthier coping mechanism confirms that he thinks the day was just as brutal as Ilya feels it was. 

Shane opens the bar cabinet and tsks. “Grey Goose.”

“Bleh.”

“I know, I know—French stuff,” Shane says mechanically. He picks up the handset phone by the door and asks for a bottle of something Russian to be sent up. “In an ice bucket, please,” he adds before hanging up. 

Once Ilya finally has a cold glass of good vodka in his hand and has taken a long swig of it, he asks, “That was… not good?”

Shane sits across from him, his shoulders slumping in exhaustedly. He holds his own full rocks glass, mostly out of solidarity. “I don’t know. Bill didn’t seem that surprised by it,” he says, massaging his temple. “Maybe… maybe that’s what it’s always like.” 

Ilya rubs his eyes, angling his face up to the ceiling. “How does it feel to be with vengeful, cheating, combative slut?” he spits. He closes his eyes and tries not to picture Preston’s smiling face as he dismissed Ilya from the stand, satisfied that he had dragged out all the unsavory details of Ilya’s imperfect victimhood. 

“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” Shane says sadly. He takes in a shaky breath and lets it out slowly. 

“I mean—it is all true, no? I answered every question honestly. Took oath and everything.”

“No, Ilya. And no one with a brain will believe it. Defense lawyers… They have to grasp at straws like that. It’s their job to come up with something. It doesn’t make it true.” Shane says it like he’s trying to convince himself too. 

“How did the jury seem?” Ilya asks.

“Hard to tell. A few of them seemed kind of grossed out by Preston, but mostly… mostly, I don’t know.”

Ilya opens his eyes. Shane is watching him but flicks his gaze away when Ilya catches him.

“Do you still want to go home in the morning?” Shane asks. “Or do you want to just chill out here for the weekend instead of going back and forth?” Ilya knows Shane well enough to understand that he’s actually asking if Ilya wants to brave the airport and all the people that will be there—and that he phrased it like that because Shane knows Ilya well enough to not incidentally imply cowardice.  

Just getting out of the courthouse earlier was a mob scene, with reporters desperate to get a comment from Shane or Ilya. They’ve smelled blood in the water now—a secret relationship, abuse accusations, infidelity—and Ilya knows a certain subset of them won’t stop until they have a quotable soundbite. At least, Ilya thinks, maybe this will take some of the heat off of Riley, who spent all of yesterday shrouded in the victim spotlight with little complaint. 

“I don’t know.” Ilya downs the rest of his vodka in a few large sips. His eyes are unbearably heavy. “I will decide in morning.” He sets the sweating glass down on the coffee table and sheds his outer clothing layers. It’s barely eight in the evening, but he trudges to the bedroom, climbs onto the bed, and pulls the tangled covers over himself clumsily. 

After hesitating for a beat, Shane follows him. He turns off the lights and draws the blinds, and then he slides into the bed behind Ilya, wrapping an arm around to pull him into his chest. “I’m proud of you,” he says into Ilya’s shoulder. “It’s over now. You did what you had to do.”

Ilya clutches Shane’s hand in his own. “Did I just make everything worse?” he asks.

It takes Shane a second to respond. He presses a kiss onto Ilya’s back and says, “You did the right thing.” 

Ilya doesn’t point out that he didn’t answer the question.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Well. In another shocking twist to this trial, Ilya Rozanov testified today to a secret 3 year relationship with Pollard from 2014 to 2017.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Roz says he was physically and sexually abused by Pollard throughout the relationship, and that he ended it after Pollard strangled him.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: The prosecution rested at the end of today. Court has broken for the weekend, and the defense will start up on Monday, presumably with Pollard taking the stand.

🌜 MarkiMark: Isn’t bro like 200 pounds of pure muscle. How does that even happen lmfao

💎 BostonFan818181: Ok and? Pollard’s a tight end so he’s probably like 250. Also tell me you know nothing about domestic abuse without telling me.

🌜 MarkiMark: Male professional athletes do not get domestically abused lmfao. He’s probably just mad at his ex and getting back at him.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Ironically, you have recreated the exact narrative Pollard’s defense tried to craft in cross. I’ll let you decide how that makes you feel about yourself.

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Roz also said his current public relationship with fellow MLH star Hollander began before his relationship with Pollard officially ended. Overall crazy testimony to absorb in real time

🏳️‍🌈 OttawaOtter: HE WHAT WAIT THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE DO YOU ALL REMEMBER THAT PICTURE IN 2017 OF ROZANOV AND HOLLANDER AT THE STORE AND ROZ WAS ALL BEAT UP

🏒 HockeyNewsDaily: Breaking News - Ilya Rozanov testifies at NFL’s Pollard’s domestic violence trial that he was in a 3 year abusive relationship with Pollard

🥴 youpler: are you fucking kidding me 🙄 I’m getting sick of hearing about this guy’s gay relationships

🥸 ghaurth: seriously I’m starting to think he’s fucked every athlete lol

🥸 ghaurth: also bro we’ve all seen your right hook? How are you gonna cry abuse. grow up.

🥴 youpler: seriously like is he gonna cry and say he has PTSD next time he gets checked

The next morning, the decision of where they’ll spend the weekend is made for them—first, by a call from the front desk warning them that reporters have set up camp on the public sidewalks outside, and then, a call from Yuna, who has the same to report about their house in Ottawa. Ilya listens to Shane take the calls and pretends to continue to sleep. 

Shane scrubs at his forehead while he talks to his mother. He’s sitting next to Ilya in bed, propped up against the headboard. “Okay. Okay. Yeah, we’ll just stay in the room then. They’ll lose interest by Monday. No, the room service is good. No, you don’t—”

Shane sighs and slips out of bed to shuffle to the sitting room. He lowers his voice, but not enough to keep it from getting back to Ilya. “It wasn’t my place to tell you, Mom.” He pauses. “Yes, of course I knew. I know. It was pretty brutal. I know it’s his job, but—God—that guy went for the throat. Yeah, you’re right. What are… what are people saying?”

There’s a long silence while Shane listens to his mother’s response. Ilya tenses, curling his hands around the sheets. 

“Jesus,” Shane says finally. “I guess I’m not surprised but…”

So not a fairytale-like rallying of support around Ilya. 

So you’re a slut and a liar. 

A wave of nausea has Ilya jolting out of bed and to the bathroom. He didn’t eat dinner last night, and he barely picked at his lunch, so all that comes up is burning, yellow, vodka-scented bile.

“Shit. Mom, I gotta go. I’ll check with him, okay?” Shane races into the bathroom and drops to his knees beside Ilya. “Are you okay?”

Ilya wants to nod and say, “I just need to eat” or something equally constructive, but when he opens his mouth, a sob falls out instead. 

He’s reminded of the morning after Cameron fucked him for the first time on the couch—after Ilya spent all night laying awake and trying to understand why he felt so gross—when he finally couldn’t keep the rotted feeling inside anymore, and he puked as soon as he tried to get up for morning skate. Cameron woke up to the sound and sat beside him, rubbing his back, assuring him that it wasn’t lazy to miss a single practice if he was sick. Cameron spent all day tending to Ilya after that—soup, tea, cuddles in bed. He asked over and over if Ilya needed anything else in a nurturing, quiet voice.

They’d been together a little less than a year at that point. Cameron had only actually hit him once before then. That version of Ilya, only twenty-three and so hopeful, seems like a stranger to himself now. He looks, in hindsight, like an idiot, walking straight into a glue trap with the bait of a few kind words. 

God—he’s so stupid. He’s so fucking stupid for ever believing anything Cameron ever said to him, for thinking he could help Riley, for not realizing how everyone else would see right through him immediately. How much more of his life is he going to spend on bathroom and kitchen floors trying to shove all of his pieces back together after putting himself in one bad situation after another?

Shane doesn’t press for a response. He stands and retrieves a glass of water. 

Ilya takes it from him, rinses his mouth, and spits into the toilet. He presses himself back onto his feet. Shane leads him to the bed. 

Once Ilya is back under the covers, Shane sits beside him and says, “I think we should stay here for the weekend to avoid reporters.”

“Okay,” Ilya agrees.

“And, uh, my mom wants to come out and work up a PR plan. Maybe put out a statement.”

Of course. Ilya has exposed Shane as a homewrecker now. Canada’s Golden Boy, boy-next-door, the most well behaved man in hockey—a paramour. Yuna will be scrambling to contain the damage as they speak. 

“Okay,” Ilya says again. 

Shane looks confused by his lack of stubborn pushback. “You sure that’s okay with you? I can tell her no.”

“No. Is okay.” 

After a silent beat, Shane says, “Okay. I’ll get her and my dad their own room. Do you want to try to eat some breakfast?”

When Yuna and David arrive that afternoon, Ilya has barely moved. 

The breakfast that Shane tried to coax into him still sits on the nightstand, next to the lunch he took a single bite from. Everything just tastes like bile. 

Amid the pleasantries of Shane welcoming his parents in, Ilya can hear Yuna ask, “Where’s Ilya?” Ilya peels himself off of the bed and pulls on clothes. By the time he emerges into the sitting room, she’s already seated in the cushiony chair he collapsed into last night, her laptop in her lap and a drink carrier full of cold brews on the coffee table in front of her. He can’t conjure up the polite smile he normally offers her, but he gives her a small wave before his hands find each other in front of him. 

She studies him with her mouth twisted up in a thoughtful look that reminds him of Shane. She huffs then sets her laptop aside and approaches Ilya. He isn’t sure what he’s expecting her to do—it’s not like he thinks Yuna would hit him—but he’s caught off guard by her wrapping her arms around him and pressing his head down into the crook of her neck. She’s so much shorter than him that it makes for an awkward position for both of them. 

He realizes the last time a mother held him like this would have been his own, many years and a few growth spurts ago. 

“I…” Ilya starts, with no plan for what he actually wants to say. He should assure her that he never meant to embarrass her son like that. He should apologize for not warning her and leaving her to scramble to contain the damage today. He should beg her not to believe everything she must be reading about him—unless, of course, it’s all true. He doesn’t actually know what people are saying, since Shane still hasn’t given him his phone back and Ilya hasn’t asked. 

“I’m so sorry, honey,” Yuna says before Ilya can plead his case, and he freezes. 

He scoffs into her collarbone. “For what?”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Yuna says quietly, and Ilya feels like his legs might give out. She believes him, and she doesn’t seem angry at him or rightfully frustrated that he’s dragged her son into his mess. “And I’m proud of you.”

He pulls away before he can cry on her.

She reaches up to run her thumb along his cheek before setting a hand on each of his biceps. She wipes the concern from her face with a head shake and replaces it with determination. “I’m going to work up a statement, okay? Do you want to help or do you just want to read it when it’s done and suggest edits?”

“I, uh… I will read it at end. I’m sure what you write will be better than I could come up with.”

Yuna nods, dropping her hands from him. “Yes, probably. Drink a coffee. Shane, come with me.” She sweeps out of the room, taking two coffees with her and catching Shane in her tide as she passes through the doorway to the office space they haven’t used yet. 

Ilya is left alone with David, who watches his wife and son’s backs disappear into the other room before turning to Ilya. “You doing okay, kid?” 

Ilya shrugs. 

David digs into his coat pocket. “I was saving these for a special occasion or something, but I think you could probably use them now. Got ‘em on a business trip last month.” He pulls out a familiar black carton that Ilya hasn’t seen in years. “I don’t know if they’re actually all that special, but this guy I work with… Well, he’s Russian, and he seemed really excited to find them, so… I bought a few packs for ya.”

Ilya does cry now, just enough sharp tears in the corners of his eyes that he can’t stop himself from noticeably wiping them away. “Yeah, they’re—uh—they’re very good. And you cannot buy them here.”

“What do you say we get some fresh air while our better halves work?”

The cigarettes David brought are nicer than what Ilya normally got his hands on as a teenager, but they still taste like home. Unlike his usual, crappier Russian smokes—minimally filtered ones that smell like sweat and pressure and shaking hands—the brand that David somehow got his hands on are the kind that Ilya would bum off of Svetlana outside of clubs. When he lights one up on the penthouse balcony, it tastes like her body against his and music in his chest and fog cooling his face on the walk home. He resolves to call her as soon as he’s brave enough to look at his phone again. 

David sucks in smoke halfheartedly beside him and exhales it before it’s probably even settled. Ilya waits for him to say something, but, as always, David seems content to sit in silence. He looks out at the muted New Jersey skyline like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. Ilya is so grateful he could cry. 

Eventually, once Ilya has reached the butt of his cigarette and is too embarrassed to light up another one straight away, he speaks first. “What are people saying?”

David’s cigarette has burned down with neglect. He frowns at it before ashing it into the tray between them. “There’s a lot of surprise—obviously—since no one knew you dated him. We didn’t even know you dated him.”

Ilya looks down at his hands. “I am sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. It wasn’t our business. Wasn’t anyone’s business.”

“It is everyone’s business now.”

“Just…” David waves his cigarette lazily. He’s still looking out at the lackluster view, not forcing eye contact out of Ilya. “Try not to worry too much about what people are saying. Worry about taking care of yourself. The rest of the world will move on from you, but you can’t.”

The glass door slides open, and Shane pops his head out. It occurs to Ilya that Shane looks like he barely slept last night, and Ilya is suddenly very aware of the fact that Shane has had to worry about taking care of Ilya enough for the both of them.

“Can you come take a look at the statement my mom drafted?” Shane asks. Even through his exhaustion, he manages to craft a soft smile for Ilya. 

Ilya makes sure to plant a kiss on Shane’s cheek as he passes him. It’s all he has to offer for now. 

Shane and Ilya go into the office and sit across from Yuna, who slides her laptop across the desk. “It’s simple. Just an acknowledgement so people know you aren’t hiding, but not enough for anyone to try to tell a story with.”

Statement: Ilya Rozanov Court Testimony, August 2020

Yesterday, I provided sworn testimony in a criminal domestic violence trial in New Jersey. My testimony was requested by the DA as character evidence. I was not party to, nor did I directly witness, the crimes being charged.

Given the sensitive subject matter surrounding the trial and my testimony, my family and I request privacy and respect at this time.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please reach out to one of the following hotlines for resources and support.

“My family?” Ilya asks skeptically once he’s finished reading. Otherwise, there’s not much for him to take issue with in the concise statement. 

Shane frowns at him. “What’s wrong?”

“‘My family and I’? What—Alexei?”

Yuna looks at him over the rims of her glasses. “That’s us, Ilya, honey.” She motions around the room like she’s worried he’ll still find a way to misunderstand. 

“Oh,” Ilya mutters. He realizes belatedly that there’s no direct mention of Shane or his honor in the statement. Contrary to Ilya’s original assumption, Yuna came out here and wrote this entirely for him. His throat feels tight. “Okay. It looks good then. We can release it.” He avoids their gazes. 

“Do you want to release it through your social media?” Yuna asks. “Or should we see if the Centaurs will post it?”

Oh God—the Centaurs. 

Ilya pushes Yuna’s laptop back toward her and rubs his eyes. The fucking Centaurs, who are probably deeply regretting taking him on right now. They’ve only just begun to recover from being the laughing stock of the league thanks to two long years with Shane as their captain. They were already taking a huge risk by becoming the gay team with Shane and Ilya both on their roster. What will people think now?

Ilya drops his face to the desk next to Yuna’s laptop.

He wonders if they would drop him for this. Players have certainly been traded for less. 

He pictures his first day as a Centaur—how everyone will see some defenseless, weak version of him when he enters the locker room for the first time. Will they picture in their heads what he let Cameron do to him? He wonders if what they can conjure up with their imaginations will be more or less embarrassing than the reality. 

Fuck.

Shane slides out of his chair and crouches next to Ilya. “Hey, Ilya. Ilya.”

Ilya can feel the Hollanders staring at him. It’s only a fraction of the number of people who will be watching him when he shows up for his first practice—a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of people who will be scrutinizing when he glides out for the first game of the season. They’ll all know, and they’ll all be looking at him through that lense. 

“Ilya. What’s wrong?” Shane wraps his hand around Ilya’s elbow. His calluses feel warm on Ilya’s goosebumped skin. 

“They all know,” Ilya says, muffled by the hardwood grain of the table.

Shane shifts uncomfortably. “Can you guys…” Yuna and David’s chairs shift, and they shuffle out of the room. Shane sits back on his heels. “Hey—Weibe, the new coach, has called me twice this morning. All he cares about is how you’re doing. The Centaurs are behind you completely. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Ilya doesn’t believe that for a second. Maybe to their captain’s face, they are being supportive—but in the back of their minds, and when they’re confronted with Ilya himself, they won’t be as concerned with his wellbeing as they will be with the shame leaking in with him.  

“I’ll post it,” Ilya mumbles. 

He can’t get himself to look up at Shane. He’s so tired. He’s so fucking tired. 

Shane pushes himself up from the floor, apparently satisfied that Ilya isn’t having a panic attack. “Okay. Here.” He pulls Ilya’s phone from his pocket and hands it to him. 

Ilya is unsurprised to have a nearly endless stream of notifications when he powers his phone on. He swipes away Instagram and Twitter alerts without reading them, but he thumbs through the calls and texts. They’re mostly from the expected people—Svetlana, Marlow, his agent, Coach Weibe. There’s a smattering from old teammates. One from Collin, the director of the Mitchell Foundation. 

A phone number Ilya doesn’t have saved has called him a few times and sent him a text. He opens it. 

Chapter 5: Delay of Trial

Ilya forces dinner down that night, motivated by the way Yuna’s sharp eyes track his fork on the plate of room service pasta like they follow her son across the ice. By now, most of Ilya’s testimony has been quoted by one reporter or another, and she has been scrolling through it all without much comment, except for an occasional scoff. Until—“I’m worried about your lawyer. There’s no proof? He didn’t submit anything to evidence to support your testimony?”

Ilya finishes chewing carefully and swallows before he responds. “He is not my lawyer… Is not really the point.” He’s starting to think people have lost sight of what the trial is actually about.

“Mom.” Shane abandons his fork with lettuce already skewered onto it. “That’s really common. People like Cameron… They…” He squints, searching for the right phrase to quote from the stack of books about understanding intimate partner violence and healing from trauma that he doesn’t know Ilya knows are in the back of his closet. He’s probably sorting through words like isolate and manipulate and.. what’s the other -ate one Ilya learned recently? Obfuscate. 

“I hid it very well for him,” Ilya says, pushing away his half-eaten food. “Whole time we dated, I usually blamed injuries on hockey. A few of my friends suspected, but no one ever actually saw him hit me. I lied much more than I have told the truth. I have made things… complicated.” He looks apologetically at Shane. “Shane saw one time. He took me to urgent care after, but Bill decided not to use the records.”

“Why?” Yuna asks. 

“Well…” Ilya studies Shane’s face for any sign that he wants him to shut up. 

Shane mistakes it as a plea for help. “Ilya told them he was in a bar fight, but they didn’t believe him. The doctor’s notes say that they were worried about a domestic incident and noted that his partner, me, wouldn’t leave him alone in the room.”

“I did not want him to,” Ilya clarifies, as if anyone in this room would think otherwise.

“And… to be fair to them, my knuckles were bruised.” Shane rubs his left hand’s fingers over his right knuckles, as if revisiting the—to him—unfamiliar feeling of sore tendons there. “They wrote that down too. Bill said he’d have to be an idiot to submit it. And, yeah, after Preston trying to imply yesterday that I was controlling or possessive or something… yeah.”

“Why were your knuckles bruised?” Yuna asks. 

Shane turns pink all the way to his ears. The most well behaved man in hockey, Ilya thinks fondly, watching Shane’s freckles disappearing into the blush and remembering the animal that Shane morphed into with Cameron under his fists. Shane emerged from that fight sheet white and shaking with rage, but Ilya still has the vivid memory of the way that Shane unfurled in an instant when he turned to Ilya, suddenly all earnest concern and tender care like he was incapable of anything else with Ilya in his sight. The thought of it makes Ilya simultaneously want to curl up in Shane’s arms and fuck him into the mattress. Maybe if he plays his cards right, he can do both after the Hollanders go back to their own room tonight. 

“Cameron did not bother me anymore after that,” Ilya says when enough time has passed that it’s clear Shane isn’t sure how to tell his mother that there is a whole savage side of him that she has never met before. 

Yuna blinks hard a few times, before inspecting her son like it’s the first time she’s seeing him. David blows a thin, flat whistle through his teeth. 

Ashley Benson is tiny. When she stands to greet Ilya, she barely reaches his chest. The hand that she puts out for him to shake is almost entirely engulfed by his own. Still, she doesn’t seem intimidated by him in the least. 

“Please.” She motions to the empty seat across from her as she sits back down. “I took the liberty of ordering a few things. I hope you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine,” Ilya says. He eyes the coffee and basket of pastries in front of him. 

“How are you doing, Mr. Rozanov? I’m sure this trial hasn’t been easy.” She sounds sincere. 

“I’m fine,” Ilya responds cautiously. He splits open a packet of sugar over his coffee before taking a sip.

“I’m glad.” She smiles before reaching down into the handbag at her feet. “And I want you to know that the NFL is behind you sharing your story one hundred percent,” she says as she pulls out a stack of paper held together with a binder clip and holds it out to Ilya. 

As he reaches for it, he reads the main heading: Exclusivity Agreement.

He remembers her warning last night about not saying anything about Cameron. “I never signed an NDA,” he says. He knows some athletes who do ask everyone they date to sign one, but getting a lawyer involved would have made for even less secrecy than Cameron and Ilya defaulted to. 

Ashley nods. “No, I know. I’m asking you to sign this now. And it’s not an NDA. It’s just an agreement that allows the NFL, in partnership with ESPN, to be the first ones to publicize your story. We can guarantee that we’ll handle it sensitively, while other outlets may not. And, in return, you agree to hold off on discussing anything to do with Cameron until we’ve broken the story.”

Ilya scoffs and tries to hand it back to her. “You’re a little late.”

“To be honest, we were not expecting the amount of attention that would be drawn to Mr. Pollard’s trial,” she admits. “And, of course, we didn’t know about—” She gestures toward him. 

She doesn’t take the contract, so Ilya is left holding it out mid-air.

“He didn’t warn you about what I would say?” Ilya laughs and shakes his head.

He wonders if Cameron truly didn’t believe that Ilya would be honest on the stand. It’s possible, he realizes, that Cameron didn’t understand the impact that Ilya’s testimony would have. He always did seem to live in his own little world, where the things he did were entirely explainable or not even worth discussing. 

Maybe if you didn’t fucking start a fight about everything, Ilya. 

Oh, please, I barely touched you. Don’t be a baby. 

Christ, Ilya, you’re making me feel like a fucking rapist. We were both drunk last night. Sorry for wanting to have sex with my boyfriend, I guess. Sometimes you make me wonder if you’re even actually gay. 

Ilya takes a sip of his coffee, letting the sharp taste drag him back to earth. “Did he warn you that Riley is a man?”

“We were not expecting the attention,” Ashley repeats. “It doesn’t apply to court, of course—just prevents any discussion of the matter outside of legal proceedings, to keep things as respectful as possible while we work on using your input to craft a more… tasteful narrative than what is out there right now. We’ll make it worth your while, obviously.”

“Ah.” Ilya smacks the contract down in front of himself. “So—how much are you allowed to offer me?”

“How much would feel like fair compensation to you?”

Ashley takes a sip of what looks like tea. Her hands are carefully manicured, but the pinky nail that sticks out looks chewed on. Lipstick clings to the rim of her cup. 

Ilya flicks through the pages of the contract. Despite Ashley’s friendly demeanor, he suspects there’s something here she’s hoping he won’t notice. She doesn’t know that Ilya didn't have a real manager when he first started playing in North America—that he read his initial MLH contract in his hotel room, using Google Translate for the words he didn’t know, all while his father occasionally interrupted to berate him for his conduct at the reception—and that he’s at least heavily skimmed every single contract his manager has approved on his behalf in the years since then. 

He can’t find any expiration date for the exclusivity, so the NFL could leave the contract to rot forever if they wanted to. It’s essentially the longest NDA he’s ever seen, in a sheer trenchcoat. He scoffs. She thinks he’s fucking stupid. 

Then he sees the section headed Confidentiality and skims it. No sharing any new information about the trial or Cameron with anyone. An extra warning about talking with any journalists about it, on- or off-record, ‘regardless of personal relationship.’

That’s when Ilya realizes what’s happening. 

“Did you ask Riley to sign one?” he asks. “How much did you offer him?”

“Mr. Smith was made an offer, yes.”

“With this same contract?”

“He was made an offer.”

Riley is a journalist. A beat reporter for a football team, sure, but a degreed, credentialed journalist nonetheless. Ilya’s seen the press badge hanging on his keyhook.

Riley is a journalist with intimate knowledge of the football world and firsthand knowledge of Cameron’s abuse. One who insists on attending every minute of the trial, despite Bill telling them both that they were under no obligation to do so. 

“Did he take it?” Ilya asks. 

“I’m not as liberty to discuss that,” Ashley responds tightly. 

So no.

For a moment, Ilya is tempted to just sign it and walk away. It’s not like he actually intends to talk about Cameron publically. Even if Riley is planning something, Ilya’s not sure he wants any part of that. It would be an easy out to be able to shrug and point apologetically to this agreement. 

Then he remembers the simple statement Yuna wrote up last night and has been waiting for him to post. Would that alone be considered a breach of the contract? He thinks about the sentence at the end encouraging victims to reach out for resources, and he gets a bitter taste in his mouth. He has no intention of becoming the domestic violence poster boy, but… 

His fingers find his necklace. He rubs the crucifix anxiously. 

He’s spent so long avoiding talking about Cameron of his own accord, but the idea of never being allowed to again makes him queasy. It makes him feel like he’s back under Cameron’s thumb. 

“No.” Ilya crosses his arms and sits back in his chair. 

Ashley seems unsurprised. “I understand that financial compensation may not be what you’re looking for. Is there some other way we can make this worth your while? In the interim before we break the story, we could reach out to contacts with ESPN and… call in some favors. Encourage some positive news cycles for you and your partner.”

Something starts to burn in Ilya’s stomach. They want to try to bribe him? Control him? Oh, he’s never going to shut up about Cameron now. He’s going to get social media accounts on websites he doesn’t even know exist yet, just so he can spread the word—just to spite them. He’ll tell everyone that Cameron snores like a chainsaw, and that he cries when dogs die in movies, and that he once snatched a cigarette out of Ilya’s mouth during an argument and ashed it onto his hand.

“No. You have nothing to offer me. We both know I am not poor, early career journalist you can pay off or threaten. Shane and I do not need your help getting positive news cycles.” Ilya picks the contract back up and reaches rudely across the table to set it in front of Ashley. “We’re the best fucking hockey players in the MLH. I’m Ilya Rozanov. My own league cannot keep a muzzle on me, and you think you will?”

For the first time in several days, watching Ashley clamber for a response, Ilya feels like himself. He chuckles and shoves his seat back to stand. “Nice try, though,” he assures her and storms out of the restaurant. 

On the phone, Riley sounds like he’s keeping his voice down so as not to be overheard by someone in the other room. “I haven’t said anything to literally anyone. Definitely not the NFL. I don’t even know if… I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but someone’s gonna write the story,” he says. “They must know that.”

Ilya tucks his phone between his shoulder and face as he lights a cigarette. “I am not sure I want to be a part of that.”

“I know. I figured. But… I’m not sure it’s even really about us anymore.” Riley’s foot is bouncing, making a swishing noise with his loose jeans that Ilya has become familiar with and can hear even over the phone. 

“What do you mean?”

“This all stays between us. Completely. I’m serious. I have to move quietly on this.”

“Okay. Yes. I tell no one,” Ilya says. Then he adds dryly, “I think we can agree I am very good at keeping a secret.”

“Okay. When I got home from testifying last week, there was some guy waiting for me at my door. He tried to pay me off to recant my testimony. Said he’d make sure I didn’t get it in any trouble and make it worth my while.”

“That cannot be legal.” Ilya realizes he’s forgotten about the cigarette between his fingers without taking a single drag. He ashes it. 

“It’s super illegal, but I panicked. I didn’t get his name or anything. And he never said he was from the NFL. Plus, he took no for an answer, and I didn’t want any more trouble, so I dropped it. But just think about how many people they got to before they testified. Think of how many people have probably said yes.”

Ilya knows the number is depressingly high, and he knows from locker room rumors that it’s not isolated to the NFL. 

Riley continues, sounding more energized as he talks. “But listen. Two years ago, one of my first stories was this, like, hundred word blurb about a Jets player whose girlfriend was trying to get a restraining order. I reached out to her for comment, but I didn’t hear back. I wasn’t expecting to; it’s more a formality than anything—but she eventually dropped it, and it all just went away. On Friday, she called me. She told me that she had been paid to drop it, and that she could put me in contact with a dozen other women who have the exact same story about other players. She said some of them would probably talk to me, if I want.”

“But… why now?”

“Why do you think?” Riley takes a deep breath that sends static over the line when he releases it. “I don’t know if the NFL caught wind that someone talked to me, or if they’re just trying to cover all their bases, but… Yeah—they tried to get me to sign an exclusivity agreement this morning too. They offered me a check with multiple commas. They’re panicking because they know there’s something here. There’s a story. A big one. And… I might be the only one who can tell it. I’m… I’m doing it, Ilya. You don’t have to be a part of it, but I… I think I’m doing it. I think I have to.”

On Monday, when Ilya and Shane join Riley in the gallery, Ilya doesn’t mention yesterday’s phone call. Instead, they chat shallowly about their weekends until Bill arrives and bids them each a good morning.  

Ilya checks his watch. “I’m going to use the restroom before too many people get here.” 

Ilya is, luckily, the only person in the bathroom when he gets there. He quickly uses the urinal before any reporters can come in and try to talk to him with his dick out. 

He’s washing his hands when the door opens, and he freezes. He knows the footsteps that enter the bathroom like he knows his own heartbeat. He glances over his shoulder just long enough to confirm that it’s Cameron and then looks back to his hands under the running water. 

He reminds himself that Cameron is out on bail and just as free to walk around the courthouse, and the world, as Ilya is. Ilya takes Bill’s advice and doesn't acknowledge Cameron, expecting Cameron to do the same in return. 

Instead, Cameron approaches him. He leans against the wall by the sinks and watches wordlessly while Ilya rinses off his hands. He crosses his arms across his chest, a mildly annoyed look on his face. 

“What do you want, Cam?” Ilya mumbles, yanking a paper towel from the dispenser. 

“I heard you wouldn’t sign the contract.”

Cameron isn’t between Ilya and the door. Ilya spins his body slowly toward the exit. 

“Surprised? You know I never know when to shut up.”

Cameron shoves off the wall and moves in front of Ilya to crowd him against the sink. 

Ilya swallows and forces himself to meet Cameron’s eyes. He wonders how mad the judge will be if he goes for one last good punch. Preston would have a fucking field day.

“Haven’t you done enough to get back at me?” Cameron asks. He’s breathing fast, powered by anger. This is normally the point where he’d reach for Ilya’s chin or bicep, or grab the sink to box Ilya in between his arms—but he keeps his hands to himself. “You got your revenge. You went up there and made me look like some fucking rapist boogeyman to the entire world. Please, just… I’m benched until this is over and the contracts are signed. You’re gonna ruin my life even more than you already have if you don’t sign it.”

He’s so close that Ilya can feel his warm breath on his cheek. Revulsion curls in Ilya’s stomach.

Cameron’s hot breath on his face. On the back of his neck. 

Riley’s shoulders curled into his chest. His foot tapping anxiously on the floor. 

He hates Cameron. He hates him. He hates him. 

Ilya scoffs. “I did not realize they let you play football when you’re serving five to thirty,” he says. 

Cameron does put one hand on the sink now, half-trapping Ilya. He leans forward to speak quietly into Ilya’s ear. “Oh, please—after your sad little show, we both know I’m gonna walk. And when I do… if you haven’t signed it, I’ll pay you a visit.”

“Bring a housewarming gift,” Ilya deadpans. 

The door creaks open. Ilya looks past Cameron’s head, relief crashing over him as Shane appears and freezes in the doorframe. “Pollard,” Shane says stiffly. 

Cameron spins slowly, dropping his hand from the sink. Ilya watches from behind as his shoulders tense. “Hollander.”

“How’s the nose?” Shane asks. His right hand leaves his pant pocket and curls into a tight, anxious fist. 

“Fuck you.” Cameron storms the door, and Shane steps aside to let him leave.

Shane watches down the hallway for a few moments before rushing to Ilya. “What happened?” he demands, his eyes cataloging Ilya’s face, neck, wrists. “Are you okay?”

Ilya shakily throws away the paper towel still crumpled on his hand. “I am fine. He didn’t touch me.”

Shane nods. “Okay. What did he say?”

Ilya recounts the conversation to him, and Shane grimaces. “We should tell Bill.”

Ilya sighs. This wasn’t supposed to be another day of getting jerked around and questioned. He was supposed to just sit and observe today, in solidarity with Riley. He doesn’t know if he has it in him to make this into a thing. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

Shane chews on his bottom lip. “It kind of feels like it is, though?”

Shane’s right, of course. When they get back to the courtroom, Shane passes on what happened to Bill, who listens intently, nodding. 

Ilya waits for him to start looking angry or vaguely annoyed like he did at any reminder of Cameron’s existence on Friday—but by the time Shane finishes, Bill looks like he’s just been told they’re forgoing the trial today to celebrate his birthday instead. He closes his eyes, taking a deep breath with a serene smile like he’s trying to commit this moment to memory, then says, “That stupid motherfucker.”

Then he scrambles over Shane and marches to the bailiff. They have a short, hushed conversation before the bailiff leads Bill up to the judge. After another brief exchange, the three of them disappear through a door behind the stand. 

“He seemed… inappropriately excited, right?” Riley says, staring at the door that closed behind him. 

Bill pops his head back out. “Ilya,” he calls. “Come here please.” 

Ilya drags his feet into the judge’s chambers, where Bill points at a chair and says, “Tell the judge what happened.”

Ilya does. The judge’s reaction is much less gleeful than Bill’s. She removes her glasses and sets them on her desk, rubbing her eyes.

Bill leans forward in his seat, setting a hand enthusiastically on her desk. “Your Honor, I’d like to request a continuance—just a day—so I can put together a witness tampering charge. And I’ll need to reopen tomorrow of course, with Mr. Rozanov again.”

“Wait—what?” Ilya blurts out. No one acknowledges him with a response. 

“Let’s get Mr. Preston in here,” the judge says. “Thank you, Mr. Rozanov. You can step out.”

Ilya starts to stand automatically, feeling like he’s only half in control of his own body, but Bill puts out an arm in front of him. Ilya plops back down. “I’m not sending my witness out there while Mr. Pollard is free to roam around. This clearly calls for bail revocation, Your Honor. It’s only a matter of time before he attempts to intimidate Mr. Smith or otherwise escalates.”

The judge sits back. Her roller chair gives her a lot more slack than the wooden ones Ilya and Bill are in. “You’re right. Can you get Mr. Preston in here please?”

Bill opens the door again to call Preston in. Preston enters with his notepad in his hand and his eyes narrowed. He studies Ilya much less shrewdly than he did on Friday. “Problem?”

“Your client threatened my witness in the bathroom this morning, Drew,” Bill gloats. 

Preston—Drew, apparently—sighs, dropping his head. Oh, Ilya realizes, it’s a really big deal. 

“Bill asked for a continuance until tomorrow. Any argument?” the judge asks, and Preston waves his hand in agreement. 

There’s no seats left, so he leans against the wall.  Seeing the defense attorney with a door between him and the courtroom feels a little like watching an actor walk off set. 

It strikes Ilya suddenly that he’s watching people do their day job. He’s always found it a little funny that hockey is his job, and he has a hard time explaining how the things that seem sprinkled in starlight to the average person have become mundane to him—the roar of the crowd, his name on the big screen, reporter’s microphones in his face, a rivalry with his coworker. He wonders if Bill and Drew ever feel that way. 

“You’ll call him again in the morning, I assume?” Preston asks, pointing at Ilya. 

“Yeah, and then you can proceed as planned. Or not.” Based on the sparkle in Bill’s eyes, this might be better than his birthday. 

“Great,” Preston says sarcastically before sweeping out of the room again. 

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Never a dull day at The State vs Pollard. Judge announced a continuance to tomorrow just as I arrived this morning AND Pollard was taken into custody

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Assuming something happened with Pollard’s conduct over the weekend that warrants revoking his bail but probably won’t know more until tomorrow

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Ok new info this afternoon. Pollard had witness tampering (5-10yrs) added to his charges and Rozanov will be back on the stand in the morning 👀

📰 ElliPoeReporter: ime juries do NOT like the look of tampering charges. It completely obliterates credibility. Been told by past jurors they see it as admission of guilt on the other charges.

💎 BostonFan818181: so what does that mean happened?

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Not comfortable speculating exactly what happened yet. Worth noting that while Smith has an active temp protective order against Pollard, Rozanov does not.

Shane takes advantage of their unexpectedly free day to get a workout in. Ilya is also buzzing out of his skin to get in a run or slam some weights around, but they agree he’s better off pressing push-ups on the penthouse floor than risking being spotted and hounded. 

Shane returns from the hotel gym breathless, his sweaty shirt clinging to his muscles. Ilya, stretched out on the couch, looks up from his texts with Svetlana and swallows hard at the sight. 

“That kid from the other day was down at the pool,” Shane says as he reaches into the minibar for a water bottle. “He recognized me this time.”

“Ah, your ego is saved.”

“He asked if I would tell you ‘hi’ and told me I’m lucky to be your boyfriend.”

Ilya barks out a laugh, throwing his head back as Shane scowls playfully. “I believe the saying is ‘from the mouths of babes’?” Ilya says, reaching out a hand toward his boyfriend. 

Shane reluctantly drifts toward it, letting Ilya pull him into his lap and a smooth kiss. Ilya relishes in the taste of salt on Shane’s lips. 

“He’s right,” Shane mutters when he pulls away to breathe. “I am so lucky.”

Ilya can’t help the sharp breath he sucks in. The fact that Shane can still say that is a wonder he can’t wrap his head around. 

“Mm, is me that is lucky. Look at you.” Ilya slips his hand under Shane’s damp shirt and runs it over his workout-pumped ab muscles. Shane’s breathing picks up again. He presses closer to Ilya, dropping his head into the crook of Ilya’s neck. “I want you,” Ilya says into his hair. 

They haven’t had sex since even before the trial started. Ilya has been too tired  and wrung out to initiate, and Shane has been uncharacteristically hands off. 

Ilya grabs Shane’s shirt and starts to pull it up, but Shane’s hands stop him. When Ilya looks up at his face, Shane is staring worriedly at him. They’re both frozen for a few moments before Ilya says, “What’s happening?” 

Shane sighs and removes himself from Ilya’s lap to sit on the coffee table across from him. “I didn’t want to have this conversation until everything with the trial was done.”

Ilya’s entire world crumbles before his eyes. 

He’ll see eventually that you’re just a lazy, stupid asshole. And he’ll move on to something better.

He knew it. He fucking knew it. He knew there was no way Shane was walking away from this with him, still wanting to be Ilya’s boyfriend. Not after what he’s heard and seen—and the damage to his reputation. 

Ilya reminds himself that he always knew this was coming—from the very first day that Shane touched him. He just wishes Shane hadn’t let it go this long. Hadn’t made Ilya feel safe and loved and given him a family just to rip it all out from underneath him. 

Ilya arranges his face carefully so Shane won’t see how devastated he is. 

Shane puts a hand out toward Ilya, and Ilya grabs it without thinking. 

So stupid. So easy. 

“I love you so, so much, and all I ever want is to take care of you,” Shane says.

Ilya nods. He knows Shane has tried so hard. Anyone would have gotten tired of Ilya’s shit eventually. The fact Shane has lasted this long is admirable. The fact that he tried to wait until after the trial to throw in the towel is nearly saint-like. 

“And, I think, before we have sex again, we need to have a serious conversation about, like… boundaries?” Shane sounds unsure. Ilya’s brain lags. “We don’t really talk about those things. I ordered a book that has some questionnaires we can do together. Like exactly what we can and can’t do. Limits, I guess. And, like, a safe word? Right now, we just… do stuff.”

Ilya laughs, mostly from relief as he realizes Shane isn’t breaking up with him. “Shane—we don’t have that kind of sex. I like… just doing stuff with you.” Ilya tugs a little on Shane’s hand, but Shane doesn’t move any closer. “Shane, what—”

“Just—I keep thinking about how you told me how I could top you if I wanted.” Shane stares at their clasped hands. He looks like he might cry. “And I don’t understand why.”

Ilya is desperate for more contact, but he settles for squeezing Shane’s hand. “Because… I trust you, and I like trying new things with you. I knew it would not be like it was with Cameron. When I did it with the boy in Russia, was not like that either. You are always good to me.”

Ilya’s expecting that to soothe Shane, but if anything, it seems to upset him more. His eyes fill with tears. “Fuck—Ilya.” He yanks his hand back and drops his face into his palms. “But you don’t like it. It doesn’t matter if I’m nice about it. Fuck.”

Ilya suddenly feels very small. He wraps his arms around himself and admits, “I don’t understand why you are angry with me about this.”

Shane crumples, dropping his hands. His eyes are red. “I’m not upset with you. I’m… scared. I don’t know what else you would—or have—just let me do because… I don’t know why. Because I don’t beat you?”

“No, because—” Ilya can feel himself getting angry, but even he can tell it’s not righteous. It’s a childish frustration with not having the right words to explain himself—not even in Russian. “Fuck. You have never asked for something I didn’t want, Hollander, and if you did, I would tell you.”

“How do I know that, though? You said yourself that a few dozen times, you didn’t say no to Cameron. How do I know you’re not doing that to me?”

“Because I can say no to you!” Ilya’s voice comes out much louder than he meant, and Shane rears back a little.

Guilt makes Ilya take a moment to breathe. He leans forward just enough to rest his elbows against his thighs. He drops his head and stares at his own feet as he mumbles, “Okay…” and tries to decide how to explain something that even he struggles to find the words for. “Some of those… times were during summer before the one we broke up. Cam always planned our trips, and this one… He chartered a yacht for just the two of us. Our first night there, he kept talking about how private it was. How… the staff had crazy NDAs, and the route was planned to not cross paths with other ships… And then he says, ‘You could kill somewhere out here, and no one would ever know.’ And I think he is making joke—but he doesn’t laugh.”

Ilya chances a glance up at Shane, who looks like he’s in pain. He thinks that, maybe, he should leave it there—that he’s already overshared—but now that he’s started, he finds he can’t stop. 

He tells Shane about those two weeks: The moment when he stood at the edge of the bow and looked out at the waves and imagined himself disappearing into them, thrashing for survival or already dead weight, with Cameron looking down at him. The brief thought he had—barely a flash of a feeling—‘not if I do it first, asshole.’ How he retreated inside his own head for the next few weeks, leaving behind someone he didn’t recognize—agreeable, pliant, coy, a survivalist. How he nearly cried when his feet finally touched solid ground.  

By the time Ilya is done talking, Shane has sunken to his knees and is clinging to Ilya’s lap like it’s the only thing keeping him anchored to Earth. “I should have killed him when I had the chance,” he says into Ilya’s sweatpants. His hands grapple at the fabric. 

“But you see, yes—how this is different?” Ilya rests a hand on Shane’s cheek. He can feel Shane’s nod into his palm. 

“I understand. I still… I still think we should try doing some of the questionnaires, but… I see what you’re saying.”

“Okay.” Ilya leans forward and presses a kiss into Shane’s hair. He runs his fingers through the strands. “Maybe in meantime we do things that you know I like? Like…” He runs his hand down Shane’s neck into his shirt. “Maybe my favorite thing?”

Shane smiles into Ilya’s leg. “I’ll warm up the shower.”

Chapter 6: Verdict

Chapter Notes

sorry for disappearing for a bit and then coming back with half of what was supposed to be the final chapter. I’m just gonna play this… *slides Cancer Card across the table*. Anyway, I’m working on the actual final chapter now, enjoy this for now and see the end note for me outing myself as an academic by citing my sources.

Ilya wakes the next day earlier than he meant to, his eyes snapping open and chest pounding from the stress of a dream that he’s already forgotten. Shane is still fast asleep with his mouth hanging open and eyes fluttering, so Ilya moves quietly as he peels his face from the pillow and creeps into the bathroom to wash sweat from his face and brush his teeth with shaking hands. 

The clock on the bedside table says that it’s a little before five in the morning, which means Shane will be up sometime in the next hour, but the rest of the hotel is probably still a ghost town. If there’s ever going to be a time Ilya might be able to get away with showing his face in the hotel gym, it’s now—and he can’t tolerate the anxious buzzing in his body anymore, so he takes his chance. Luckily, there’s only a single couple working out together when he gets downstairs, both entirely uninterested in looking away from their routine or each other long enough to recognize Ilya. 

He claims a treadmill in the far corner of the gym and skips a warmup to jump straight to a body-punishing pace that he hopes will chase away the terror still lingering in his chest. He might have been running in his dream, he thinks, as the breathlessness starts to feel imminently familiar. Probably a cabin nightmare then. Those have been happening a lot lately. 

He increases the treadmill speed, swallowing past phantom pain in his throat. 

He woke up with the salt of dried tears on his face, though, and he didn’t cry at the cabin, so maybe it was something else. Or maybe it was one of those disorientating dreams where the events actually happened, but the details are all wrong. Like when he’s on the yacht but he’s the naive, twenty-three-year-old version of himself that just met Cameron—or he’s the age he is now and desperately searching the cramped hallways for Shane. Or he’s running through the woods, but in the completely wrong direction, so he ends up at the cabin and looks across the lake to see Shane’s cottage illuminated. 

After half an hour, the treadmill determines he’s been running too long and automatically switches into a cooldown routine. Ilya’s legs wobble as he adjusts to the slower speed. 

Panting, he realizes he didn’t bring any water with him. Just as he’s starting to look around for a vending machine, an arm reaches over from the treadmill beside him, offering a water bottle. He follows the line of the arm up to Yuna’s face. She’s walking at a brisk pace, barely facing him, her phone propped up in front of her and open to a formal-looking document. She has her reading glasses on and her hair scooped back into a ponytail. The timer on her treadmill indicates she’s only been there for a few minutes. 

“Good morning,” she says, shaking the water bottle. 

Ilya takes it from her. “Thank you.” He chugs half of it before stepping backward onto the floor. “I will go refill.” He finds a water fountain in the hallway and refills the bottle. When he goes back to the gym, the couple are exiting, leaving him alone with Yuna. 

He steps back onto the idle treadmill beside her as he returns her bottle. “I have a question for you,” he says before he can chicken out. 

Yuna raises one eyebrow. She pulls a wireless earbud from the ear closest to him and sets it on the tray in front of her. 

“Hockey manager question,” he adds, and her other eyebrow shoots up. 

“Go for it,” she says curiously.

“There are two ways this trial can go,” he says. “Either Cameron is convicted, or he is not. Even if he is, he is not convicted of…” Ilya sighs, avoiding Yuna’s eyes to stare instead at her hands resting weightlessly on the safety rails. “Me.”

Yuna nods her understanding. 

“If I—theoretically—talked about what he did, outside of court, he could sue me, no?”

Yuna studies him. Ilya knows that she’s looking for all the things he left unsaid, and trying to determine how theoretical his theoretically actually is. Her walking pace never slows. “He could,” she says thoughtfully. “You’re probably the best person to try to predict if he would.”

Ilya honestly isn’t sure. His first thought is that Cameron would be averse to dragging out their business in public like that—but, with every passing day, Ilya feels less and less like he knows Cameron as well as he thought he did. It’s partly because of Cameron’s behavior during the trial, which has been so overtly aggressive and plainly mean that even Ilya is surprised. It’s mostly the fact that Ilya keeps picturing him terrorizing Riley. 

Riley—who is so unlike Cameron and Ilya. He’s gentle. He’s smart and patient. He doesn’t snarl or snap at people who get too close to caring about him. In fact, he seems to welcome any opportunity for human connection, no matter how small or silly. Ilya has a hard time imagining him starting a fight just to feel something or digging at Cameron’s insecurities out of spite like Ilya started to in the later years of their relationship. Ilya is trying to believe that he didn’t deserve everything Cameron did to him—mainly because it seems to break Shane’s heart whenever he says otherwise—but he knows Riley didn’t deserve it. Everything about Cameron that Ilya thought redeemed him has faded and soured under Riley’s anxious foot-tapping. 

“I don’t know,” Ilya responds, shaking his head. “He might, just to… win.”

Yuna’s lips tighten just enough for Ilya to notice. She locks her phone. “Is this something you’re considering?”

Ilya doesn’t tell her about Riley’s plans. “Maybe. Probably not, but… I was just wondering.”

She nods and looks forward at her treadmill display for a few seconds before turning back to Ilya. “We would probably want to talk to a lawyer ahead of time and figure out how to be prepared if he does sue you. And we’ll make sure you’re insured out the nose, so I doubt you’d ever actually owe him anything, but… the civil trial could be… the worst part.”

“Yes.” Ilya takes a shuddering breath. He looks away again. “So I am learning.”

“Ilya,” Yuna says, drawing his attention back to her. “If Cameron isn’t convicted, and he just… goes back out into the world after this, will you be safe?”

“I won’t let anything happen to Shane,” he answers automatically, because the same thoughts have been sprinting through his head since Cameron stormed out of the bathroom yesterday. “I promise.”

Yuna pauses her treadmill. Once she’s stationary, she says quietly, “That’s not what I asked. Do you think he would actually come after you—for testifying or for not signing an NDA?”

Ilya almost says no automatically, but then he thinks about this new image of Cameron he’s formed in his head over the course of the trial. He hadn’t thought Cameron would show up at his house months after breaking up to attack him either. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I think, yes, maybe he would.”

A few hours later, Ilya sits in the witness stand again as a television set is rolled into court, and the jury is shown the security footage of the hallway outside of the courthouse’s bathroom. In the video, Ilya strides down the hall, alternating tensely between stretching his neck and stuffing his hands into his pockets. He presses open the bathroom door, looks inside, and enters when he sees that it’s empty. 

Bill pauses the video and turns to Ilya. He’s sobered from his outrageously good mood of yesterday and returned to his professional air of procedure. “Mr. Rozanov, can you confirm that this man entering the bathroom in the video is yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know this man?” Bill uses a pointer to call attention to the opposite corner of the screen, where Cameron is standing with Preston and another man that Ilya vaguely recognizes as a member of Cameron’s legal team.

“Yes.”

“Is he in the courtroom today?”

“Yes.”

“Can you identify him?”

“That’s Cameron.” Ilya points at where Cameron is seated in his usual spot with a radiatingly sour expression. He doesn’t look at or acknowledge Ilya in any way, instead opting to glare at his own hands. Ilya wonders if Preston warned him off of so much as breathing in Ilya’s direction after yesterday. 

“Let the record show that the witness identified the defendant.” Bill presses play and turns back to the screen, crossing his arms. 

Preston’s image is gesturing intently with his hands as he talks, but there’s no sound to reveal what he’s saying. Video Cameron’s attention is drawn away, over Preston’s shoulder, toward where Ilya has gone into the bathroom. He says something, pointing toward the bathroom door, before following Ilya. 

A few moments pass. People walk back and forth across the frame. 

Then, after less time than the moment felt like yesterday, Shane comes down the hallway and opens the bathroom door. He stops in the doorway, his back to the camera. His shoulders rise like a cat’s. 

Bill stops the video again. “Who is that, Mr. Rozanov?”

“That’s my boyfriend, Shane Hollander.”

“Thank you.”

The video starts again, but nothing happens for a few beats. Then Cameron storms out of the bathroom, glowering, and Shane disappears into it. When he and Ilya emerge together, Ilya is—to his current embarrassment—visibly shaken, and Shane is anxiously chewing on his own lip. Seconds later, they’re gone too. 

Bill stops the video and turns to Ilya. “Mr. Rozanov, did Mr. Pollard speak to you or otherwise engage with you while you were in the bathroom at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“Can you describe that interaction, please.”

Ilya gives the summary of events that he practiced with Bill on the phone the night before. He details how Cameron approached him, makes sure to mention Cameron’s physical intimidation and unveiled threat, and explains that Cameron only left after being walked in on by Shane.

“When Mr. Pollard suggested that he would ‘pay you a visit’, what do you interpret that to mean?” Bill asks.

Preston puts a hand up. “Objection. Calls for speculation.”

“Sustained.”

Bill nods. “Fair enough. Since your relationship with Mr. Pollard ended, has he ever visited you at home before?”

“Yes, once, about seven months after we broke up.”

“Did you invite him over?”

“No. I did not realize it was him until I opened the door, and I tried not to let him in, but he forced his way inside.” Ilya stares at the now blank television screen so he won’t look at Cameron and revisit the crushing feeling of his body between Cameron’s and the kitchen counter. 

“And what happened once he was inside? Was it… a friendly catch-up?”

Ilya shakes his head. He looks at Shane once for encouragement before he answers. “He attacked me.” 

He describes the struggle—the fireplace against his ribs and the shoe grinding his fingers into the floor and the punches that felt like they’d never end. He knows now from the security app timestamps of his door opening that the whole thing lasted less than ten minutes, but at the time it felt like an eternity. 

He wonders how the two days that Cameron spent rampaging against Riley felt. Did Riley emerge feeling like he’d lived a million lives in that time? Or did he spend the whole time locked so deeply in his own head that it felt like barely an instant?

Ilya will never know—just like he’ll never know most of the details about those two days, or Riley and Cameron’s relationship in general, because he’s been actively avoiding any information about Riley’s testimony. He’ll never ask either. He and Riley have settled into an unspoken agreement that they both have been subject to enough interrogation without asking each other more painful questions. That will end, Ilya realizes, if Ilya does lose his head for long enough to agree to an interview. 

“Thank you, Mr. Rozanov,” Bill says kindly once Ilya has finished talking. 

When he looks to the judge and says, “I tender the witness, Your Honor,” Ilya sucks in an anxious breath and looks to Preston, preparing for another half hour of being accused of everything Preston can make stick—but Preston doesn’t even stand. 

“No questions for Mr. Rozanov, Your Honor,” he says. He’s remarkably blank as he says it. The contrast to his usual charisma is jarring. 

The judge nods like this doesn’t surprise her and dismisses Ilya from the stand. He moves back to Shane’s side in the gallery on shaking legs, amped up for a fight that never came. “What next?” Ilya whispers to Shane while there’s enough transitional paper shuffling that he won’t be disruptive. 

Shane ducks his head and speaks quietly. “Should be the defense’s turn, so Cameron probably,” he responds just as Bill announces that the prosecution rests. 

“Alright. The defense may call their first witness,” the judge says. 

Ilya feels Shane’s familiar fingers find his knee and squeeze supportively. Riley’s leg starts bouncing. 

Cameron doesn’t move. He stares expressionless at the table in front of him. 

Preston stands, keeping his fingers steepled against the tabletop. “Your honor, the defense rests.”

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Jury is out for The State vs Pollard. Defense chose not to call Pollard in his own defense.

🐙 Octopuz: I thought he was going to testify?

📰 ElliPoeReporter: Guessing his team didn’t want to expose him to cross or give him a chance to make a bad impression on the jury. Pretty common, esp after tampering charges ime.

💎 BostonFan818181: how long will the jury take?

📰 ElliPoeReporter: hard to say. My money is on a verdict sometime this afternoon though.

🏑 BostonBabeee:: God I hope they nail that guy. He sounds like a piece of trash

🏈Billzzzz:: pls no the Bills were finally getting kind of good 💀

🏑 BostonBabeee:: that cannot possibly be more important to you than an abuser getting punished

🏈Billzzzz:: 🤷🏻‍♀️ sorry I don’t care about grown ass dudes getting beat on

While the jury is deliberating, Ilya, Shane, and Riley sit on a bench in the hallway and pick at the sandwiches that David had room service package for them that morning. They’re mostly quiet, aside from the few times a reporter tries to approach them and Shane grumbles, “We’re not answering questions right now,” sounding all his mother’s son. 

At one point, Riley sets his food down in his lap, turns to Ilya, and starts to say, “Do you think…” before shaking his head and turning away again. He takes a bite of his sandwich to end the unstarted conversation. Ilya doesn’t push it. 

Ilya tries to picture what’s happening in the room that the jury was ushered into. Since he’s not an American citizen, he’s never been on a jury, but he’s heard his teammates and rink staff grumbling about the inconvenient summons that occasionally call them to serve. He wonders if the twelve people who watched him and Riley spill their guts feel annoyed at having to be there in the first place. Did they do everything they could to try to get dismissed so they wouldn’t have to waste their week here? Are they actually sitting there talking through the facts of the case, or will they just make whatever choice will get them out of here the fastest? 

For not the first time since the trial started—or even the first time today—Ilya lets himself consider what will happen if Cameron walks out of the courthouse a free man today. Last night, he caught a glimpse of Shane’s phone screen while he researched an Ottawan concierge security company, so Ilya suspects that will become a fixture of their life whether he likes it or not. How long is he supposed to have a babysitter and keep his head on a swivel? More than six months, he knows. A year? Two? The rest of his goddamn life?

They’ll need to set something up for Riley, Ilya realizes, who probably can’t afford something like that. Would that be a bad look—like some kind of bribery or undue influence—if Ilya does decide to participate in Riley’s article? Not that it will matter, since Ilya’s not going to do it.

And what about every other man that dates Cameron? What is Ilya supposed to do about them? He pictures the recurring charges for endless security details appearing on his bank statements, alongside the monthly transfer that still goes to his brother in Russia, despite the fact that they haven’t exchanged words in close to five years. 

Has Alexei heard about any of this? Ilya would guess that most mainstream news about him has been censored in Russia since he came out. It’s unlikely that this is any different—but surely the whispers have gotten around; Someone must have gotten it into Alexei’s ear by now. Ilya can picture his brother’s sneer vividly. The shame he’d spit at Ilya given the chance. The pedik son of a colonel, beaten like an unruly wife. “zhalkiy,  postydnyy,” Alexei would say—pathetic, shameful.

“Hey,” Shane’s voice says quietly, his knee bumping up against Ilya’s. He doesn’t say anything else, but his eyes tell Ilya that he must have looked as much in a spiral as he felt. 

“Sorry.” Ilya forces a bite of his sandwich and swallows it. He feels queasy. All he can picture is the rest of his life with the weight of the entire world’s judgemental gazes on him, and Cameron walking around, free, angry at him. 

Fuck. Why did he do this?

Ilya is debating if he’ll be able to keep down just one more bite of his food when a court clerk passes by them to speak to Bill, who’s seated at a bench a few feet away and hasn’t looked up from his phone once in the nearly full hour they’ve been out here. They speak briefly before the clerk shuffles away. 

Bill rises. He catches Riley’s gaze and gestures with his head toward the courtroom. He looks the most somber Ilya has seen him yet. “Jury’s back.”

Riley scrambles to his feet and follows Bill back into the courtroom. Ilya and Shane trail after them, hands clasped. Ilya fights down the feeling that he’s being led to the gallows. 

They sit together in their usual corner, and they wait restlessly while reporters file back in.  

Preston and Cameron are already seated. Cameron stares down at his hands. Preston studies the jury. 

The judge slowly thumbs through a stack of papers. Eventually, she looks satisfied and sets it aside. She turns to the jury. “Will the foreperson please rise?”

A middle-aged man in slacks and a polo shirt stands. He’s holding a slip of paper that gives away a slight shake in his hands. 

“Please read the verdict.”

The foreperson holds up his paper to his face and stares resolutely at it as he reads, “On Count One, second-degree assault—we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.”

Ilya freezes. He can’t have heard that right—but Shane’s hand latches onto his knee, squeezing excitedly, confirming that Ilya didn’t hallucinate the guilty. 

Cameron listens to the verdict stoically. If not for the deep breath he takes after the first charge is read off, Ilya would think he isn’t even really listening. 

“On Count Two, third-degree assault—we find the defendant guilty.”

Bill turns his body just enough to look at them. He doesn’t smile, but satisfaction pulls at the lines around his eyes. 

Ilya turns to Riley, smiling and reaching out to clap him on the back, but he pauses when he sees that Riley doesn’t look anything close to celebratory. He looks devastated. He’s watching Cameron with concern, and it almost looks like he might be fighting back tears. 

“Hey,” Ilya says quietly, and Riley drags his eyes away from Cameron to meet Ilya’s. “This is good, yes?”

Riley nods rapidly. He dabs quickly at his eyes with the sides of his hands. “Yeah, of course. Just…” 

He trails off, looking at Cameron again. As the foreperson reads, “On Count Three, sexual assault, we find the defendant guilty,” Cameron drops his head and closes his eyes. 

Ilya can’t feel anything but contempt for Cameron now—and some satisfaction as defeat settles into Cameron’s broad shoulders—but then he remembers what he was like at only a matter of months out from dating Cameron—still texting him, sobbing and flinching away from friends in club bathrooms, unable to say the words, “I hate him,” and making excuses for him at every opportunity. 

Years removed now, Ilya is watching someone he hates be served justice—but Riley is still watching the man he loves go to prison. Ilya wonders if his nervous system has even caught up enough to start having nightmares yet. 

Ilya tries to look sympathetic and holds Riley’s gaze as he says, “It will get easier eventually. Just… time. I promise.”

Riley gulps and nods again, looking like he’s desperately trying to believe Ilya. “How much time?” he whispers back, huffing out a bitter laugh. 

“On Count Four, witness tampering, we find the defendant guilty.”

Ilya watches the judge thank and dismiss the jury, considering his answer carefully. “I’m not entirely sure,” he admits. “I will let you know when I get there.”

Chapter End Notes

Below are some resources and other fics I drew inspiration from or directly referenced while writing this series. I was going to include these in the final end note, but I foresee that getting long enough with me being sappy & discussing what potentially comes next, so I’m dropping them here:

Why Does He Do That? (Lundy Bancroft, 2002)
(https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/LundyWhyDoesHeDoThat/Lundy_Why-does-he-do-that.pdf) : This book is a very thoughtful exploration of the minds of abusive men written by a counselor who spent decades working with them. I encourage anyone who dates anyone to at least skim through it. I read it myself many years ago, and it had a big impact on me. The book focuses on men who abuse women, but ultimately, as the author touches on, an abusive person of any sexuality will exhibit essentially the same patterns of behavior in their relationships.

These fics are ones I’ve read and been influenced by that center around physical and sexual abuse in queer relationships. Several of them also have some interesting explorations of the abusive family to abusive relationship pipeline. All very heavy of course, so heed their tags if you decide to take a look.
- ticket to anywhere (https://archiveofourown.org/series/2739838) [Supernatural]
- gave me no compasses, gave me no signs (https://archiveofourown.org/works/53923555) [Avatar]
- Grace Had Mate (https://archiveofourown.org/works/81874236) [Project Hail Mary] <- currently a WIP and so, so good
- No Appointment Necessary (https://archiveofourown.org/works/47510221/chapters/119732110) [Harry Potter]

This fic influenced my portrayal of social media narratives concerning ‘unconventional’ abuse survivors: The Same Story (https://archiveofourown.org/works/41420565) [Ted Lasso] <- maybe someday I’ll go back and try to recreate some of their insaaaaane coding

I didn’t get to explore Shane’s character as much as he deserves with this series’ plot lines, but I headcanon this fic very heavily in my interpretation of him as a character and the pressures he hauls around with him: Under Review (https://archiveofourown.org/works/80089206)

HTML references:
- How to Make iOS Text Messages on AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434845)
- A Complete Guide to ‘Limited HTML’ on AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/5191202)

Chapter 7: Consequences

Chapter Notes

📰 ElliPoeReporter:Cameron Pollard was convicted on all 4 counts this afternoon. Sentencing is scheduled for next month.

📰 ElliPoeReporter:assuming he serves his charges concurrently, his actual prison time will probably hinge on the sentence for the sexual assault charge, which carries a max of 30 years

📰 ElliPoeReporter:Neither Smith or Rozanov (or the DA) stopped to respond to press as they left the courthouse today. Have to imagine they’re feeling quite relieved though.

🏈Billzzzz: FUCK

🏑 BostonBabeee: thank god. Nice to see an abuser get justice for once

🏑 🏳️‍🌈 OttawaOtter:seriously. Everything that’s come out of the testimonies sounds like that guy should not be walking around the world too Jesus Christ

🏈Billzzzz: oh my goddd you guys act like he’s a serial rapist hiding in a dark alley. Can’t believe his career and life are gonna get ruined over this

It’s Ilya, this time, who brings up that maybe he should talk to someone. He mumbles it defeatedly a few weeks after the trial ends, while hunched over the breakfast table with heavy eyes. He hasn’t really been having nightmares anymore—but that’s only because he hasn’t been sleeping. 

Shane stands in the kitchen, pouring coffee from the French press. He nods, his face tight with concern, and mumbles, “That seems like a good idea. You didn’t sleep at all last night?” He sets a mug in front of Ilya.

“A little.” Last night went the same way most nights have been going recently: Ilya spent the first few hours staring up at their bedroom ceiling, his body vibrating with anxiety of no clear source. Eventually, once he couldn’t stay still anymore, and his tossing and turning was starting to disturb Shane’s sleep, he got out of bed and searched the house for something to keep his mind occupied, trying not to remind himself of his mother wandering the hallways aimlessly during the silent nights of his childhood. Eventually, he settled down on the couch, where he dozed on and off for a few hours in the early morning.

Shane slides into the seat across from Ilya. “Have you thought about a, um, sleep aid prescription?” he asks. 

“No,” Ilya responds tersely, and Shane is nodding before he’s even finished the word, apology written across his face, eyebrows drawn together. 

Ilya tries not to squirm under guilt at the worry in Shane’s expression. Shane already has enough on his plate without Ilya being too anxious to sleep and too fucking traumatized to own a bottle of pills that would solve that. The Centaurs rookies started training camp earlier this week, and Shane’s been making appearances there, amid his own heap of pre-season work, to get them into the team’s rhythm before the vets joins in a few days. He’s been leaving the house early and getting home late, seeming cautiously optimistic about the season but thoroughly exhausted. 

The season hasn’t even started yet, and Shane is already stretching himself thin to show up as a good captain and a good star player and a good boyfriend—and Ilya can tell that it’s wearing him down. He’s worried about how they’ll both cope when the normal schedule does finally start in a few weeks. He keeps trying to do something to lighten Shane’s load—offers to take the couch so his restlessness doesn’t keep Shane up, tries to prepare breakfast for them both since he’s up already, jumps up to entertain the Hollanders who come over with more energy than Shane seems able to match—but Shane just smiles calmly and refuses to allow it. As grateful as he is for the seemingly unending well of Shane’s fortitude, it’s driving Ilya insane. He’s never felt so useless before in his life.  

They’ve both done their best over these past few weeks to return their life to the way it was a month ago, but it’s proving difficult with the way that the rest of the world clings to the story of Cameron’s trial with stubborn fingertips. Every day there’s a new thinkpiece on Twitter about Cameron or an old photo circulating of Ilya with a bruise on his jaw that he doesn’t even remember having, much less if it was from Cameron or some other hockey player or a clumsy, drunken accident. Ilya misses the days when neither of them really remembered that Cameron even existed, much less that he’s alive in New Jersey State Prison, in Ilya’s stiff fingers, and in Shane’s worried wrinkles. Ilya hates those worried wrinkles, and he hates, hates, hates that he continues to be the cause of them—and he can’t think of a way to stop except for getting some fucking sleep, so he’ll talk to someone and hope to god that it helps. 

By that afternoon, a printout of Dr. Galina Molchachina’s practice summary appears on the kitchen counter, the pages stapled together neatly. Shane doesn’t say anything directly to Ilya about it, but he’s highlighted some key phrases like “queer friendly”, “trauma informed”, and “fluent in Russian.”

Ilya tries not to think about how much work Shane must have put into the research to find her—and how he could have possibly found the time for it. Ilya reminds himself that this is how Shane says I love you. 

Ilya makes the appointment to say I love you too. 

In his introductory call with Galina, she tells him that she knows who he is and has seen him in the news recently. She offers to refer him to someone else if that bothers him, but, if anything, Ilya is a little relieved. There will be so many difficult words he doesn’t have to say about how he got here if she’s already seen his business splashed across headlines. 

Still, when he’s seated across from her for the first time, shifting uncomfortably on the couch in her office, she asks him in their native tongue, “So, Ilya, what brings you in?”

He shrugs. “You said you have seen me in the news. Take a wild guess.”

There’s a shallow, placid smile on her face that doesn’t waver. She nods. “Yes, from an outsider’s perspective, I already know that you’re a survivor of intimate partner violence, and that you recently revisited that trauma by testifying in a criminal trial, which must have been very difficult. I could, based on my experience, make some guesses about how therapy could benefit someone in your position—but I’d like to know what exactly caused you to decide to seek out therapy, and what you are hoping to get out of being here.”

“I am not sure where to start,” Ilya admits, studying her. She’s more direct than his last therapist was; she reminds him of Bill a little bit. 

“The beginning is usually a good place.”

The beginning. What even is the beginning of the series of events that led Ilya here? The voicemail from Bill on Ilya’s phone? The cabin? The day he hit the dirty, linoleum floor in Cameron’s kitchen or the day Cameron’s palm hit his face for the first time? The humid summer afternoon when he met Cameron or the night a few weeks after that they whispered I love you in Ilya’s Porsche? 

Maybe it started before then. He was already more than a little fucked up when he met Cameron—with the sex and coke too young, with his mother’s cold-eyed death, with his stunned realization during primary school that Svetlana’s mother, though she clearly loathed her husband, was not terrified of him. Maybe he could blame this all on whatever conditions led his mother to marry his father. Maybe this is actually Mikhail Gorbachev’s fault, he thinks sarcastically, and the thought makes him chuckle without meaning to. 

Galina tilts her head curiously, asking what’s so funny with her eyebrows. 

Ilya shakes his head. “I was just thinking—maybe I am here because of the fall of the Soviet Union.”

“Aren’t we all,” she replies dryly. Ilya chuckles again, his shoulders relaxing minutely. Then she adds, more seriously, “Sometimes the end is an even better place to start. What happened on the day you decided to make this appointment?”

He sits back in the couch a little. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

“This started recently?”

Ilya nods, pauses, and then shrugs. “It has been like this since the trial. I used to have nightmares that would keep me up, but now… I just don’t sleep.”

“Do you find yourself anticipating nightmares when you lay down to sleep?”

“Mm, yes, probably.” He considers it. “I am not always thinking about anything though. I am just anxious in my body? If that makes sense. But, yes, I think, a little bit, I am worried that when I fall asleep, I’ll have a nightmare. And I know that when I do, it disturbs Shane—my boyfriend.” 

He pauses, remembering that surely she already knows that Shane Hollander is his boyfriend. She already knows so much about Ilya, just like the rest of the world knows who he is and who he’s dated and what they’ve done to him. He looks down at his lap and swallows the flash of a sick feeling.

Galina nods thoughtfully like his rambling all made perfect sense. “Could you describe any common themes or events in your nightmares?”

Ilya tells her about the usual hits—running, always, through trees or cramped yacht hallways or Cameron’s Colonial in his silent corner of Orchard Park. She takes notes. 

Eventually, Galina glances at the clock behind Ilya’s head. She uncrosses and recrosses her legs and says, “We have about ten minutes left. I’d like to talk about something from your intake form.” Ilya has a feeling he knows what that something is. He nods for her to continue. “For the question that asked if you have ever thought about or attempted suicide—you put ‘kind of’. Can you tell me more about that?”

Ilya looks down at his hands in his lap. “I have never wanted to,” he assures her automatically. “I think it is more like… an escape hatch. I have always known that, if things got bad enough, I could.” He’s known this since he was twelve years old and has kept the knowledge tucked away like Shane stores his childhood comfort blanket in the top, back shelf of his closet.

Galina tilts her head. “Have you ever had a plan?”

He nods, already sighing because he knows that’s the wrong answer. “It was stupid. I just… I woke up one morning, and I thought, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this.’ I had no friends left. I barely cared about hockey anymore. All day, every day, all I thought about was Cameron. I was so tired.” Galina nods, her face sympathetic “So I…”

Ilya fills with shame thinking about it, but he presses on. “I am an athlete, yes? I get hurt a lot. I am given a lot of painkillers, and I never finish the prescriptions, so I just gathered them all up.” He remembers the daze he walked around his house in that morning, digging up orange pill bottles from kitchen drawers, bathroom cabinets, and abandoned duffel bags, never fully admitting to himself why he was doing it. They filled up two bottles by the end of it, and he stashed them in his bedside table before Cameron could see. 

“But you didn’t take them?” Galina asks. 

Ilya shakes his head. “I don’t think I ever actually would have.” He hesitates and then adds, “That’s how my mother killed herself. Pills.”

Galina freezes. She was looking down at her notepad, scribbling something, but she looks up at him slowly now. “I’m so sorry, Ilya. How old were you when that happened?”

“Twelve.” Ilya always thought that explaining his mother’s death would get easier with practice, but he’s told Cameron and Shane now, and this still feels impossible. “I found her. I think that’s why I… I couldn’t decide if it was worse to make Cameron or my house cleaner be the one to find me, after.” He laughs bitterly. “Those were the only people left who would have.”

The skin around Galina’s eyes tightens, and she looks genuinely sad for a moment.

“Cameron found the pills a few weeks after that anyway. He flushed them.” 

What the fuck is this, Ilya? I’m serious. What the fuck. This isn’t funny, Ilya. Look at me! Why do you have these?

Galina nods. Her face has relaxed a bit. “And since then…?”

“I have not thought about it in a very, very long time.”

“Okay. Based on what you’ve told me, I don’t think you’re a danger to yourself,” she says, and Ilya nods in agreement, like it matters what he thinks. “I do think we can do some work together that should improve the sleep disturbances you’ve been having. I’d like to start by seeing you weekly.”

Ilya sets up a standing appointment on Tuesday mornings with the receptionist before he leaves, and when he gets home, he kisses Shane on the cheek and tells him that it went well. He writes out his appointment times on their fridge calendar for the rest of the month. I love you. I love you. I love you. 

Ex-Bill’s Player Cameron Pollard Sentenced to Fifteen Years for New Jersey Domestic Violence Charges

September 2020

Following his conviction on charges of sexual assault, assault, and witness tampering last month, Cameron Pollard faced sentencing yesterday. He was given the following sentences:

• Sexual assault: 15 years
• Second degree assault: 8 years
• Third degree assault: 3 years
• Witness tampering: 5 years

Each sentence will be served concurrently, resulting in a total of fifteen years in New Jersey State Prison. He will be eligible for parole in 2032 when he has served 85% of his sentence for his sexual assault conviction.

The case was prosecuted for the state by Bergen County District Attorney Bill West. After the sentencing, West said, “I am very pleased to see justice carried out in this case. I commend the victim and witnesses who bravely came to Court and testified to ensure that Mr. Pollard faced consequences for his horrific actions.”

Pollard was released from his contract with the Buffalo Bills last month following his conviction. Representatives from the Bills and the NFL have not responded to requests for comment.

🥴 youpler: fuuuuck. Sucks to see a promising early career cut short like that #CameronPollard

💥 throaway9909093: he beat and raped at least two people

🥴 youpler: allegedly. He was only convicted of one of those

💥 throaway9909093: DO YOU THINK THAT MAKES IT ANY BETTER

Ilya isn’t entirely sure what he’s expecting from his first day as a Centaur. He’s had plenty of flavors of first skates of the season by now—as a rookie, as a vet, and as a captain—and he stopped getting first day jitters a long time ago—but he can’t shake the feeling, as he and Shane drive to the rink together for the first time, that today will bring disaster. 

Shane, on the other hand, is beaming. “I think one of the rookies, Haas, has a crush on you or something,” he chatters happily as he drives. He has one hand lazily on the steering wheel and the other on Ilya’s thigh. The morning light illuminates his freckles in a way that still manages to take Ilya’s breath away just like it did that first time at the cottage. “He’s asked me like three times if you’re coming today. And I keep being like, ‘Yeah. It’s training camp. He kind of has to come, Haas,’ but it’s like he can’t believe he’s going to get to breathe the same air as you.”

Shane looks over at Ilya with an elated expression like he’s the one who can’t believe he’s sharing space with Ilya, like having Ilya in his passenger seat has only happened in his wildest dreams. It hits Ilya that this moment is the culmination of some of their wildest dreams—driving from their shared home to play on the same team—and Ilya’s just too goddamned tired and tense to appreciate it fully. 

Fuck. 

Ilya makes a physical effort to match his boyfriend’s excitement—drops his shoulders and unclenches the hands fisted in his lap—but nervous nausea continues to itch at his guts. He lifts Shane’s hand on his thigh to his lips. 

Then he forces a laugh. “Jealous?” he teases. 

Shane shakes his head, scoffing, as he pulls the car into the practice rink’s parking lot. “I’m excited for you to meet the team. They're nice. They’re all gonna love you,” he says as he parks.

Ilya realizes he’s chewing nervously on his necklace and drops it from his mouth. 

As he and Shane get out of the car and gather up their gear from the trunk, he reminds himself that he’s Ilya Rozanov. He’s the—very close second—best player in the league, #1 draft pick, and the captain who ended Boston’s Cup drought. Of course the Ottawa Centaurs are excited to have him on the team. Of course they won’t take one look at him and think ‘This is the guy who thought we’d take him seriously after he let his boyfriend beat the shit out of him?’—or, at least, if they do, they’ll probably have the good sense to keep it to themselves. 

Shane reaches for Ilya’s hand. "Ready?"

Ilya squeezes Shane’s fingers. "Yes, I am ready." He lets himself be led inside.

“How has your week been?” Galina asks on Tuesday morning. 

Ilya fiddles with the Jolly Rancher he took from the candy bowl in her waiting room. He intended to eat it when he picked it up, but then she called him in, and it feels rude to suck on it and talk to Galina at the same time. She watches his hands twist the plastic, so he stuffs the candy into his pocket.

“Fine. Preseason started,” he replies. 

“How’s your sleep been?”

“Okay. With practice, I am more tired, so that helps.” 

“Does the start of the season bring any new anxieties?”

“Yes,” Ilya says. He catches himself toying with his hair and drops his hand. “I was worried that the team would look at me differently, knowing everything that I said at the trial.”

“And did that turn out to be true?” Galina asks without missing a beat. 

“I don’t know. No one has said anything.” In fact, all of the Centaurs have been overwhelmingly kind and welcoming. Haas is, as Shane promised, starstruck by him. Bood, Shane’s alternate captain, has already invited them over for dinner. The goalie Hayes has told Ilya three times to let him know if there’s anything he needs help with to settle into Ottawa. No one has even mentioned the trial once. “I don’t know. Maybe Shane said something to them before, though, so they would be nice.”

“Why are you assuming they wouldn’t be nice of their own accord? Is it possible that they genuinely don’t think less of you for having been abused?”

“They’re hockey players.”

“You’re a hockey player. Your boyfriend is a hockey player.” 

Ilya can’t think of a quick response for that, and Galina forges ahead in his silence. “I think you’re assigning hurtful thoughts and attitudes from your own insecurities to people who seem to have given you no reason to think they feel that way. What do their actions toward you so far tell you about how they feel? That they think badly of you?”

“No,” Ilya admits. “They act like they like me.” He’s not sure why it feels like a lie to say, when it’s objectively the truth. 

Galina nods, looking satisfied. “I know it’s easier to go into things expecting to be hurt rather than set yourself up for disappointment—but give people the chance to show you how they really feel, and I think you’ll find that most people won’t be nearly as hard on you as you are on yourself.” 

The news cycle moves on eventually. They’re in the locker room, leaving their final practice before the first season game, when the new scandal breaks. 

“Hey, Holmberg, you played for Oshawa in Juniors, didn’t you?” Dykstra asks, leaning against his locker and scrolling on his phone. Most of the team is gone by now, so he turns off his music to be heard. 

Holmberg, one of the younger players on the team, looks up from cramming gear into a duffel bag. “Sure did,” he responds. “Why?”

“Did you see this?” Dykstra holds out his phone, and Holmberg leans forward to squint at the screen. 

Ilya, between them, looks up too out of absent curiosity. Dykstra has Twitter open, and the post at the top of his screen links to a news article titled, “Oshawa Generals assistant coach resigns following ‘credible’ grooming accusations by anonymous player, says league.” 

“Oh, shit.” Holmberg’s hand darts out to take the phone, and he clicks on the article. Ilya watches as Holmberg’s eyes trace the screen back and forth urgently. As he reads, his face tightens. “Fuck, dude, this is while I was there. I…” He looks up. His widening eyes meet Ilya’s for a fraction of a second before he looks away, darting his gaze to the ground. 

Beside Ilya, Shane takes a cautious step away from his cubby. As he pulls his shirt over his head, he narrows his eyes, watching Holmberg like he’s debating if the conversation requires his intervention or not. He looks quickly at Bood’s empty cubby, confirming that he’s already gone and won’t be able to save the day for him.

Holmberg passes Dykstra his phone back, his face suddenly controlled and blank. “That’s crazy,” he says flatly. He spins back toward his things and resumes packing silently. 

Dykstra looks between the phone in his hand and Holmberg. He frowns, confusion etched into the lines around his eyes. He looks to Ilya and Shane as if to say, ‘Are you guys handling this one or should I?’

Ilya nods once at Dykstra and then again at Shane, who lets out a held breath and nods back. Ilya might not be the captain here, but he’ll always be a captain, and this won’t be the first time that a difficult conversation with a young player has fallen to him, so he’s more than willing to keep this one thing from landing on top of everything else already occupying Shane’s mind. He waits until Holmberg leaves to swing his bag over his shoulder and trail out after him. In the parking lot, he skips to catch up and says, “Hey, Holmberg.”

Holmberg slows to a stop just outside of his truck, his car keys already lifted halfway. He’s grimacing when he turns to look at Ilya. 

“You okay?” Ilya asks. 

He can sense Shane coming out into the parking lot but veering away from them and toward his car, letting Ilya approach the conversation however he sees fit. Ilya finds himself straightening his posture confidently at being trusted to handle something rather than being coddled and therapized and watched with worried eyes.

Holmberg sighs and runs a hand through his shaggy hair. “I’m not… involved, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says. Ilya would be lying if he said the thought didn’t occur to him when Holmberg’s face went grey in the locker room. “But I think I know who it is,” Holmberg continues, breathing it out like a confession. Then he adds, “I’m not telling you,” and his petulant tone reminds Ilya how young the sophomore player is. 

“I would not ask you to,” Ilya assures him. “Is it… a friend?”

Holmberg winces. He shakes his head. “No—uh…” His gaze swivels around the parking lot, avoiding Ilya’s. “Fuck. We, uh…” He looks down at his feet. “Like—it was really obvious that he was that coach’s… favorite,” he says, grimacing. “And we all called him, like, a suckup and brown-noser and shit. Worse shit. Fuck. We were so mean to him.” He puts a hand over his eyes. Shame presses his shoulders down.

“You didn’t know,” Ilya says quietly. 

“I still shouldn’t have…”

“No, you shouldn’t—but you were a kid.”

Holmberg rolls his eyes. “It was like two years ago.”

“Yes, you are still a kid, believe it or not,” Ilya replies, and Holmberg huffs, crossing his arms across his chest as if that doesn’t make him look even more like a moody teenager. 

“What do I… Should I… do something?”

Ilya shrugs. “If you are very sure it’s him… It can be good, in things like this, to let him know that he’s not alone. That you believe him.” Holmberg stiffens and looks at Ilya guiltily, and they both realize at the same time that Ilya pulled that answer from personal experience. Ilya swallows a sick wave of feeling and decides there’s no point in playing at anything else. He continues, “He may not respond. He is probably overwhelmed—but, still, it can mean a lot.”

“Right. Okay.” Holmberg turns halfway back toward his car and pauses. “Thanks, Rozanov.” He forces a polite smile, so Ilya does the same before heading to Shane’s car. 

When Ilya slides into the passenger seat, Shane asks, “Everything okay?”

“It’s not him.”

Shane drops his head back onto the headrest. “Oh, thank God.” Ilya sees the tension of yet another thing to worry about leave his back muscles. 

“He thinks he knows who it was though. I told him he should reach out and let whoever it is know he has people on his side. I think he already wanted to anyway. He just needed permission.”

Shane nods as he starts the car and puts it in reverse. “That’s good. Thanks for handling that,” he says, pausing the car long enough to shoot Ilya a grateful look before he resumes pulling out of the parking space. “It’s so nice having someone like you around.”

“Someone devilishly handsome with huge dick? I’m sure.” Ilya reaches out to meddle with the radio, and Shane rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, you’d know,” Shane quips back. “No, I mean like… Someone who can take the lead. Who I can trust to take care of the team with me. I would’ve had to handle that, and I’m… not always super delicate about that stuff, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Ilya responds. Shane blushes, so Ilya reaches out and rubs a thumb along his reddening cheek. I love you. “You’re still very good at it, but I am glad I could help.”

Shane tilts his head to catch his lips against Ilya’s fingers. I love you. 

Ilya leans across the center console to kiss him properly. I love you too. 

That night, Ilya sleeps. 

Ilya is not surprised when the season opener against Toronto gets tense before it’s even begun. 

He and Shane are warming up on the ice, chatting lazily with Bood, when Kent and Barrett skate out. Kent spots Shane and nods an—almost—polite greeting—but when his eyes land on Ilya, he makes an expression that is somehow even slimier than his usual smirk. It’s the kind of look Ilya’s been waiting for, knowing it was coming from someone eventually. Ilya scowls back at him, and Kent rolls his eyes, turning to say something to Barrett, who just shrugs. 

“I fucking hate that guy,” Bood grumbles, inspecting the tape on his stick.

“Everyone does,” Ilya replies, glancing up at him from where he’s stretching his hips on the ground. 

Shane, beside Ilya, shakes his head. “Bood extra hates him. They played together on Juniors.”

“Yeah—he was a little psychopath, even back then.” Bood shoots a disdainful look over his shoulder.

Wiebe whistles from the bench and motions Shane and Bood over to him. As they skate away, Ilya leans down into his stretch, trying not to focus on how strange it is to be preparing for a game as just another player rather than a captain.

“Hey, Rozanov.” Kent glides just close enough to Ilya that they can talk to each other at a normal volume. 

Ilya plasters on the most bored expression he can manage. “Kent.”

“Ya know, I kind of always thought you gave it to that homo Hollander,” Kent says thoughtfully. 

Ilya forces himself not to react. It’s far from the first time someone has speculated about the sexual dynamics of their relationship. Usually, people have the decency to do it in whispers or online behind aliases, rather than directly to Shane or Ilya’s face, but that’s probably too much to expect of Dallas Kent. 

“How much time do you spend thinking about that, exactly?” Ilya responds, pushing himself up onto his skates. He reaches over the boards for his water bottle. 

Kent scoffs. “Gross. I’m just saying—I never pegged you as a guy that had to get roughed up a little to get off.”

Don’t hit him. Don’t hit him. Don’t hit him. 

Ilya knows he can’t make a scene—not today, their first game of the season, where everyone is waiting to see if he’s gone off the deep end. Instigating a fight over a chirp before the game has even begun would certainly give that impression. If he’s going to give Kent the beating that he’s asking for, Ilya is going to have to wait for a bad check to do it. 

“If I hit you too hard, are you gonna get turned on?” Kent adds.

On the other side of the rink, Shane is talking to the score keepers, but his head is half turned toward Kent and Ilya. Worry tugs at his features. 

“No, that only happens for attractive people,” Ilya says dryly. 

Kent scowls and opens his mouth, but Ilya propels himself away before he can respond. Ilya doesn’t even want to think about what Shane’s face will do if he comes back and hears Kent’s vapid jabs. 

He finds his spot on the bench, beside Haas, as the first line players take their places on the ice. Shane and Kent face each other in the center. Ilya watches nervously as the ref whistles once and they get into position, but Kent’s mouth doesn’t move to make any gross remarks to Shane. 

It’s a difficult game, but it’s the best the Centaurs have done against Toronto in Ilya’s memory. He focuses on his play as much as he can, but waits patiently for the opportunity to toss his gloves down with Kent. It has to be good, Ilya knows; If he loses his shit over anything other than a truly offensive move, there will be Twitter discourse about the nervous breakdown he’s obviously having before he’s even out of the penalty box. When there’s less than half of the third period remaining—when they’re tied 1:1 and Kent is getting increasingly agitated about it—Ilya has a feeling that his chance is probably coming soon.

He’s surprised to find that, when all hell finally breaks loose, he isn’t even on the ice for it. He’s especially shocked that it’s not Shane who cracks first; It’s Bood. 

It starts with a beautiful play. Shane presses Kent up against the boards and slides the puck out from under him in one swift motion. He tears down the ice and scores on a breakaway while Kent races uselessly after him. When the horn sounds, and the score board shows Ottawa up one, Kent tosses his stick down angrily and swears. 

Shane grins devilishly while he glides past Kent, his mouth moving in a brief chirp, and Kent says something to him in response that Ilya can’t hear but makes Shane’s face lock down in an instant. Shane’s pace doesn’t falter though, and he continues to move away from Kent even as his jaw twitches. 

Ilya is so caught up trying to translate Kent’s remark from Shane’s microexpressions that he doesn’t even notice gloves hitting the ice at first. The roar of the riled up crowd eventually pulls his attention, and he catches the final split second of Bood slamming Kent savagely up against the boards. 

The other players flock to them instantly, shedding glove and helmet debris behind them. Barrett reaches Bood and Kent first, but Shane grabs onto him before he can come to Kent’s aid. Shane looks ready to throw a punch if he has to, but Barrett doesn’t even put up a fight as he’s jerked away from them, and he and Shane end up sliding away slowly as other players dogpile onto Kent and Bood. It takes Shane a few seconds to process that Barrett isn’t fighting back, but once he does, he shoves the younger player away and returns to the fray, where he yanks Kent away from his attempt to throw a punch at Bood. 

When the refs finally break it up minutes later, Kent’s mouth is dripping blood, Bood gets a ten-minute misconduct, and Shane rolls his eyes as he also gets sent to the penalty box for five minutes. Wiebe runs a stressed hand down his face and sends Ilya in to hold their lead for the short remaining time left in the game.

Shane and Ilya don’t talk about the fight until they get home. Ilya steers Shane straight to the couch and prods at his lip, which was split and swollen by the time he was finally pulled off of Kent. Shane winces, pulling away. “It’s fine,” he insists, but just speaking the words tugs the split open again, and blood beads up on his pout. His tongue darts out to clear it. 

Ilya tsks. “I will clean,” he says and retrieves a wash cloth from the bathroom. Shane reaches for it, but Ilya pulls it out of his reach. “Let me take care of you,” he chides—or begs, maybe. 

Shane frowns up at him. “Okay. Sorry.”

Ilya crouches in front of Shane and dabs the blood away carefully. There’s not much else he can do for the split, so he settles for wiping Shane’s face clean to feel like he’s done something, sarcastically mumbling, “Shane Hollander, fighting. I never thought I’d see the day.” When he’s done, he sets the cloth aside and stretches his neck to kiss Shane’s jaw. 

Shane’s body unclenches. Ilya scrapes his teeth against Shane’s skin, and Shane’s breathing speeds up in response. 

“You know I find it sexy when you defend my honor,” Ilya says quietly, thinking back to the sight of his boyfriend roughly shoving Dallas Kent and pulling back a fist. He sets his hands on either side of Shane’s hips.

Shane tilts his head back to give Ilya access to his neck, gasping in a short breath. “Technically, I was defending Bood’s honor,” he whispers, his eyes falling shut. 

Ilya pauses with his face tucked into the hollow of Shane’s collarbone. He frowns. “I know he said something to you.” Shane doesn’t respond. “What did he say?”

Shane shakes his head. His hand finds Ilya’s hair, holding him close. “It doesn’t matter.”

Ilya fights down the instinct to torture himself by pressing the issue. He can always ask Bood later if the curiosity gets to be too much. 

He instead reaches for Shane’s knees and gently pushes them apart, slotting his body between them. He looks up coyly before dropping his face down to Shane’s inner thigh. He’s not sure if it’s the residual turn on of seeing Shane’s aggressive side or a Pavlovian response built up from years of slotting in hookups after their games, but he knows if he doesn’t get his boyfriend naked in the next few minutes, he’s going to lose his fucking mind. 

Shane, to Ilya’s great satisfaction, melts immediately. “Ilya…” he says breathily. “Please.” 

Ilya doesn’t even have the kind of restraint left in him to tease ‘please, what, baby?’ like he normally would. The pure relief of Shane begging for him, of the normalcy of it, of being wanted and of service all send him over the brink of self-control. He stands, pulling Shane up with him, and tugs him toward the bedroom.

Ilya kisses Shane as he stretches him slowly, folded into each other like puzzle pieces on the bed. Shane shivers, his breath catching and his eyes rolling back for a moment. Ilya pulls away just long enough to position himself, and Shane mindlessly chases him, his mouth open desperately, seeking Ilya’s kiss, so needy and debased that Ilya almost feels guilty for putting that look on his face.

When he pushes partway into Shane, Shane tosses his head back, momentary abandonment forgotten, and breathes in a moan. “Oh, fuck. I love you,” he says to the ceiling. He presses his hips toward Ilya to ask without words for more.

Ilya fucks Shane the way he’s begging for and deserves—the way that takes them both apart and makes Ilya feel like he’s on the top of the world. I love you. I love you. I love you. 

Saturday finds them in New York, where Scott Hunter shakes Ilya’s and Shane’s hands on the ice during warmups.

“I heard you got married this summer,” Ilya says, leaning against the boards by the bench. “Congratulations. About time you settled down, at your age.” Shane snorts, shaking his head at Ilya, and squirts water into his mouth.

Hunter rolls his eyes. “I’m going to choose to believe there was a genuine congrats in there. Thank you. Uh—how are you, man? I saw you had kind of a rough summer.”

Ilya resists the urge to say ‘I’ve had rougher’ just to get a reaction out of Scott. He chastises himself for the instinct to punish someone for caring. Galina would probably love to hear about that. 

“I am okay,” he replies, looking at a random group of Admirals players lazily tossing a puck back and forth so he doesn’t have to look directly at Hunter. “Was rough, yes, but I’m glad I did it.”

Shane bumps his arm against Ilya’s. 

Hunter clears his throat awkwardly. “Good. Well—Price and I opened the Kingfisher back up this summer. If you guys are hanging around tonight, you should come by.”

Ilya knows Shane has made a few appearances at the gay bar before. He looks to his boyfriend to decide, but Shane is looking to him for the same already. They are spending the night in New York. 

“Okay,” Ilya agrees. It would be nice to see Price, who retired last season. It would be nice, too, to go out in public for something other than hockey and therapy for the first time since the trial. 

So, after beating New York one-nothing, Shane and Ilya clean up and head out for the Kingfisher. Hunter is already at the bar when they get there, holding a beer in one hand and his husband’s thigh in the other. The bartender is nodding along mindlessly as Hunter says, “—should be against a bylaw or something to let those two on the same team.” His husband hums sympathetically. 

Ilya grins and slides into the seat next to him. “Talking about me?” he asks. 

Hunter scoffs, waving a hand dismissively like Ilya is an unexpected annoyance rather than an invited guest.

“You could always retire,” Ilya says while Shane sits beside him and orders two beers from the bartender. “You would not have to worry anymore about how you’ll keep losing to us.”

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” 

“Yes, I care quite a bit about senior citizen welfare.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Shane nudges Ilya’s shoulder and motions with his chin toward the door. Ilya turns to see Holmberg walking in. He’s with another young man, who Ilya recognizes from tonight as an Admirals player, but whom he’s never actually met. 

“Is Holmberg gay?” Shane whispers.

Ilya considers it. “I don’t think so,” he lands on. He still doesn’t know the young player that well, but he practically reeks of awkward heterosexuality. Ilya once saw him blush at a photograph of Megan Fox. “Maybe his friend is.”

“Maybe they just know a fucking good bar when they see it,” Hunter interjects.

Shane shrugs and waves casually at Holmberg, who acknowledges them with a nod before sitting down in a booth with his friend. 

The bartender sets two beers in front of Shane and Ilya. “Thanks, Kyle,” Shane says before he turns to Hunter, leaning over the bar to see him around Ilya. “How was the wedding?” he asks politely. 

They continue to chat for a while, until Hunter is called away to help with some kegs, and his husband follows him to ‘supervise’. Shane takes the moment to excuse himself to the bathroom.

Left alone, Ilya checks his phone and snorts at a text from Marlow. 

“Hey,” a voice says beside Ilya, and he looks up to see that the player Holmberg came in with has approached and is hovering nervously by Shane’s empty chair. He swallows when Ilya’s eyes settle on him. “Uh—Rozanov, right? I’m Joe. Warner.”

Ilya nods and puts out a hand to shake. It’s becoming increasingly common for starstruck young players to approach Ilya and Shane to tell them how much they admired them while they were in Juniors. It makes Ilya feel old and jaded, but he can never bring himself to be anything but kind to them. “Nice to meet you, Joe,” he says. “Good job tonight.”

Joe looks taken aback by the compliment—maybe because he saw only a few minutes on the ice or maybe because he was expecting a much more performatively vicious version of Ilya. “Oh—thanks. Uh.” He glances back at where Holmberg is still sitting in their booth and conspicuously studying his beer instead of watching them. 

“You can sit,” Ilya says, and Joe clumsily pulls himself up into the barstool. He sets his pint glass in front of him but keeps his eyes on Ilya. 

“Sorry. I don’t mean to bother you,” he says, too quickly for Ilya to interject and say he isn’t. “I just wanted to say that I thought it was really awesome that you spoke at that trial this summer.”

Of all the things Ilya expects to hear from young players, that was not in the running. He falters a little bit, sips from his beer to buy time, and then says lamely, “Ah, thank you.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Joe pulls his own beer down into his lap and runs his thumb anxiously around the rim. His shoulders curl in. A stone drops into Ilya’s stomach. “I, um… I don’t know if you saw about the, uh, Juniors coach that had to quit recently.”

Fuck. This is not the kind of conversation Ilya prepared for. He pushes his glass away and turns fully toward Joe. “Yeah, I saw that,” he chokes out. 

Joe nods sullenly. “Yeah, uh, I’m the player.” Before Ilya can come up with a response, he continues, “I’m not, like, telling people—but I just wanted to say thanks. ‘Cause I don’t think I ever would have told anyone if you hadn’t… like, talked about your shit.”

Ilya can’t find the air to say anything. He knows he must look a little dumb with the stunned look on his face, but he just listens uselessly as Joe rambles. 

Joe wraps one of his arms around himself in a mindless self-soothing motion. “I was really embarrassed. I’m still super embarrassed—but you’re Ilya Rozanov, ya know. So I thought… maybe it’s not that crazy that it happened to me.” He winces. “Sorry—I’m probably not really making any sense.”

Ilya swallows and pulls himself together as quickly as he can. “No, I think I understand. That’s… that’s good. I’m glad you decided to tell someone.” A new sensation pokes at his stomach—a feeling that’s not necessarily bad, but a little intimidating, a knowledge that this moment is a sharp turn for Ilya. “People are… people who know are being okay?”

Joe nods. “Yeah, actually. I mean—more people are being nice and supportive than are making it harder. So that’s nice.” He sighs and looks down at his lap. The conversation seems to have taken all the energy out of him. He starts to slide off of the barstool. “Anyway—that’s it. I just wanted to say thanks.”

Ilya nods. The corners of his eyes burn. “If there’s anything I can do. If you just need to… talk—let me know, okay?” 

“Alright. I appreciate that. Thanks.” Joe hovers for just another moment before ducking his head and retreating back to his booth, where Holmberg greets him with an encouraging smile. 

The feeling in Ilya’s stomach makes itself more known once he’s left alone with his thoughts. It’s not new, he realizes now. He remembers this feeling from when he sat outside the cottage and texted Bill for the first time. It’s the tugging sensation of I have to I have to I have to. 

Riley’s house has changed—not in any big ways, and not in a way that most people would notice, but Ilya does. 

The rug by the door is different. It was a busy-patterned shag thing the first time Ilya was here, and it’s been replaced with a low-pile, forest green one. The mugs Riley brings coffee out in are a peach colored set with a floral pattern, rather than the eclectic mix of brown-stained ones Ilya used during his first few times here. There’s a pile of shoes in the entryway where there used to be a shoe rack. 

Ilya tries not to let himself wonder for too long about the things that Riley is trying to erase. 

Riley is different too. It’s only been a matter of weeks, less than two months, since the trial, but he looks more well-rested and relaxed than Ilya has ever seen him before. 

Some things haven’t changed though. Riley sets a cup of coffee and plate of cookies in front of Ilya without asking. Ilya smiles and thanks him. 

As Riley plops down in the chair across from him, he sets a recorder down on the table. He doesn’t turn it on yet. “How have you been?” he asks. “And Shane.”

Ilya takes a sip of his coffee. “Good, actually. The season has been going okay. How are you?”

“I’m doing okay.” Riley shifts uncomfortably. Some of the tension Ilya is used to seeing in him returns. He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like I don’t know what to do with myself without my life revolving around Cameron. It’s stupid.”

Ilya shakes his head fervently. “No—trust me—I get it. It’s unsettling, yes? Feels a little like the floor is about to fall out?”

Relief widens Riley’s eyes. “Exactly, yeah. Like—I thought I’d be more relaxed—but I feel like I’m waiting for something.”

“That will go away eventually,” Ilya assures him, as casually as if he was telling a rookie that his backhand will get better with practice. It feels a little strange, but it’s also nice to talk about this with someone who doesn’t look like they’ll cry if Ilya goes into too much detail. 

“Well—I look forward to that.” Riley sets down his mug. “Have people been… okay? Other hockey players, and all that?”

“Yes, actually. Well—for the most part. A few guys have made it pretty clear what they think, but I have been pleasantly surprised, overall. What about you? Since your job is related to football.”

“Oh, I got fired,” Riley says with a wave of his hand.

“What? Is that legal? That seems like…”

“Retaliation?” Riley laughs bitterly, but he shrugs. “They claimed it was performance related—but the timing is definitely interesting, right?”

“Are you suing?” Ilya mentally starts drafting a list of good lawyers. He’ll pay for the best, if it means getting back at someone for fucking Riley over. 

“No, I just couldn’t do it. The thought of more of all that… Besides, I got a different job. Local paper—not a big deal. But it gives me more time to work on this anyway.” He jerks his chin toward the recorder sitting unassumingly between them. “And I’m making a lot of progress, so it worked out.”

“Oh. I guess that’s good then.”

They’re both silent for a moment. Then Riley asks, “So—what made you change your mind?”

“I never said I wasn’t doing it,” Ilya protests, but Riley raises one eyebrow. “You were right. I realized this part isn’t about me. It feels easier, maybe, now that I see that.”

“I think this is going to do something,” Riley says, like he’s agreeing. 

Ilya nods, because he believes Riley, and he knows that if anyone can make something big happen, it’s Riley. The fact that Cameron is in prison right now is evidence of that. 

He doesn’t bother to try to explain that that’s not what he meant. He’s not sure he can handle speaking out loud the wave that hit his heart when Joe thanked him—how he laid awake all night after that, wondering if someone else before him had said, ‘this happened to me, and it shouldn’t have’, if he would’ve stayed with Cameron for so long or stayed silent for so long afterward. Maybe he still would have. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything—but it’s worth it, Ilya thinks, to take a shot at maybe—hopefully—changing someone else’s path. 

“Well,” Riley says with purpose. “Are you ready?”

Ilya takes a deep breath. “Yes, I am ready,” and it feels like he keeps saying that lately, but this time he actually means it. 

Riley turns on the recorder. 

Chapter End Notes

Well. Here we are. I am honestly kind of overwhelmed and astounded by the amount of love this fic has gotten. Your heartfelt, kind, and funny comments have all touched me so much. This was very cathartic and meant a lot to me to be able to write, so thank you to everyone for reading and making sharing this story such a positive experience. (and an extra special huge thank you to the people who were around when I thought Across the Lake was gonna be a standalone with 4 chapters. What was I thinking??)

I’m leaving this series marked as unfinished for now. I have A LOT of scenes I wrote, particularly a lot of past events and Shane-centric stuff, that never made it into the actual story, so I’m considering cleaning those up and publishing them as a sort of short anthology/prequel/??? at some point—so if that sounds interesting to you, I’d stay subscribed to the series for now. I’ll maybe make a post on threads when I post it since I know some people keep track of stories that way but idk promoting myself on social media weirds me out soooo.

Anyway, thanks again! Hope you enjoyed <3 And for the readers who so bravely stuck around while I slandered their favorite team: Go Bills.