Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau

Additional Tags:

Drunken Confessions, Drunken Kissing, One Night Stands, Hockey, Toronto, Alternate Universe, Inspired by Heated Rivalry (TV), Non-Consensual Drug Use

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-18 Completed: 2026-03-24 Words: 44,048 Chapters: 6/6

Not How It Happened

Summary

Ilya Rozanov has a plan: the girl, the hotel, the clean exit. The plan does not survive first contact with Shane Hollander sitting alone in a corner booth looking spaced out and possibly drugged

Chapter 1: My Hero

The club was called something stupid. They were all called something stupid — one word, no vowels, the kind of name that only made sense if you were already drunk or European, and Rozanov was one of those things and working on the other.

He wasn't supposed to be here. Curfew was midnight and it was quarter past and Coach LeClaire had a particular way of looking at you when you broke curfew that made you feel like you'd personally shit on his desk, which — Rozanov wasn't afraid of LeClaire. He wasn't afraid of anyone. He was twenty years old and he'd been drafted first overall and he had thirty-one goals and a face that got him into places that checked ID, and if LeClaire wanted to bench him for being at a club on a game night minus one then LeClaire could explain to ownership why their thirty-one-goal center was scratched because he had a vodka soda at eleven forty-five.

Two vodka sodas. But who was counting.

The club was on King West, which Rozanov knew because the cabbie had said "King West" like it was supposed to mean something, and Rozanov had nodded like it did. Toronto was fine. Toronto was a city that thought it was New York and wasn't, which made it either charming or sad depending on how much you'd had to drink. 

The music was terrible — the thumping kind that lived in your molars — and the floor was sticky and the lights were the color of a bruise and Rozanov was here because Cliff had wanted to go out and Rozanov never said no to going out because saying no to going out meant sitting in a hotel room watching ESPN and thinking about things he did not want to think about.

Things like Shane Hollander.

Who he was not thinking about.

Who he had not thought about in seven months, not since July, not since the CCM shoot in the studio on Queen Street where they'd been told to stand close and look competitive and Hollander had smelled like hotel soap and had a mouth that —

He was not thinking about it.

Marlow was at the bar talking to a woman who was taller than him in her heels, which was not unusual because Cliff Marlow talked to every woman in every room he entered with the confidence of a man who had never been told no by anyone except NHL goalies, and even that he took as a personal challenge. Cliff had found his girl within ten minutes of walking in; Rozanov had found his in fifteen. It was what they did.

It was what Rozanov did — the clubs, the girls, the simple math of attraction and availability and the particular loneliness of being twenty and famous and unable to want the thing he actually wanted. So he wanted the next best thing, and the next best thing was always blonde and always willing and always, always, not Shane Hollander.

Rozanov had a girl. Her name was something — Megan, maybe, or Meghan, the spelling didn't matter because he was not going to need to write it down. She was tall and blonde and had a laugh that started low and went high and she'd put her hand on his arm when she'd heard his accent and said "oh my God, where are you from" and Rozanov had said "Moscow" and she had said "that is so cool" and he had known, with the certainty of a man who had done this forty times in three countries, that she would come back to his hotel room if he asked.

She was in the bathroom now, touching up whatever women touched up in club bathrooms, and she'd said "don't go anywhere" with a look that made the rest of the sentence unnecessary, and Rozanov had said "I am not going anywhere" and meant it.

He was leaning against a pillar with his vodka soda, waiting for Megan-or-Meghan to come back so they could leave, and watching the room because watching the room was what Rozanov did. You learned things about people when you watched them. His father had taught him that, which was the last useful thing his father had taught him.

The room was mostly what he expected. Expensively dressed twenty-somethings spending money they did or did not have. A bachelorette party near the DJ booth — the bride was wearing a sash and a tiara and was already crying, which meant either it was very early or very late in the evening's emotional trajectory. Two guys in suits who looked like finance. A group by the back wall who might have been Guardians— Rozanov recognized the haircuts, every Toronto player had the same barber and the same lack of playoff success and Rozanov was not going to feel bad about that observation.

And then, near the bar, in a corner booth that was not quite visible from the main floor but was visible from Rozanov's pillar, he saw Hollander.

Hollander.

Fuck.

The plan — Megan-or-Meghan, the hotel, the simple animal transaction of two bodies and no conversation and certainly no feelings — evaporated. Just gone. Like it had never been solid to begin with. Which it hadn't. It was never solid. It was what Rozanov did instead of the thing he actually wanted, and the thing he actually wanted was sitting in a corner booth looking at his friends and not looking at Rozanov because Hollander didn't know he was here.

His stomach did something he was going to ignore.

Hollander was with three guys Rozanov didn't recognize — not hockey, or if hockey then not NHL, something about the way they sat. Old friends maybe. School friends. The kind of guys Hollander would have been friends with before the draft — clean, probably Canadian, probably had opinions about craft beer. Hollander was in a dark t-shirt and jeans and his black hair was pushed back and he looked —

Different. Hollander looked different. Not bad-different. Older-different. A season and a half in the NHL had taken the softness off him — his jaw was sharper, his shoulders were wider, and he held himself like someone who'd learned that people were watching and hadn't decided how to feel about it. Even from across the room, in bruise-colored light, Rozanov knew the shape of him. The black hair pushed back. The way he sat — contained, compact, like he was always conserving energy for something. He was drinking something clear. He was laughing at something one of the guys said.

Rozanov watched for four seconds, then stopped watching because watching Hollander in a club in Toronto was a thing that a person who was over it would not do.

He went to the bar. Got another vodka soda. Came back to the pillar. Checked his phone. Cliff had texted him a photo of his drink, which Rozanov did not respond to because Rozanov was not Marlow's Instagram audience. He looked at the time. Twelve twenty-two. Megan-or-Meghan would be back from the bathroom any minute and they would leave and he would take her back to the Ritz-Carlton and do the thing that bodies did when you pointed them at each other, and in the morning she would leave and he would not feel anything and that was the plan and the plan was good.

He looked back at the booth.

Hollander's friends were standing up. Coats on. The universal body language of "we're getting the check." Hollander was still sitting. Not standing up. Hollander was leaning back in the booth with his head at an angle that was wrong — not drunk-wrong, not tired-wrong. Rozanov had seen drunk. Rozanov had been drunk in four countries and he knew what drunk looked like and this was not it.

This was something else. Hollander's eyes were open but they were aimed at the middle distance and his hand was on the table and it was not moving and his friends were putting on their coats and one of them was saying something to Hollander and Hollander was nodding but the nod was delayed — like the signal had to travel a long way to get there.

Rozanov set down his drink.

Megan-or-Meghan was coming back from the bathroom. He could see her across the floor — blonde, smiling, already walking toward him with the body language of a woman who expected the next part of the evening to begin. She was pretty. She was willing. She was the plan.

One of the friends leaned in. Said something in Hollander's ear. Hollander smiled. The smile was wrong too — too slow, too wide, and it stayed on his face after the friend pulled away, like it had been left there and Hollander had forgotten to take it off.

The friends were leaving. One of them clapped Hollander on the shoulder. They were leaving and Hollander was sitting in the booth and Hollander's eyes were glassy and Hollander was alone.

Rozanov's brain said: Not your problem. Megan is right there. Go fuck her and forget about it.

His body was already moving.

He passed Megan-or-Meghan without stopping. "Sorry," he said, and he didn't look at her face because looking at her face would mean seeing the confusion and then the anger and he didn't have time for either because Hollander was alone in a booth with wrong eyes and wrong smile and Rozanov was crossing the floor.

He crossed the floor. The music was in his teeth. He got to the booth and Hollander looked up at him and the look on Hollander's face was — it took a moment. Like Hollander's brain was a computer loading a webpage on bad hotel Wi-Fi. Buffering. Then:

"Rozanov," Hollander said. And grinned. The grin was sloppy and wide and nothing like the precise, tight-mouthed Hollander smile that Rozanov had seen in pressers and post-game scrums. "Holy shit. Rozanov."

"Hollander."

"What are you — why are you in Toronto?"

"We play Guardians tomorrow." Rozanov looked at him. Hollander's pupils were wrong. Too big for the light in here. "What did you drink."

"What?"

"What did you drink tonight."

Hollander blinked. The blink took too long. "Vodka... tonic? And a beer. Two beers. Matt bought shots."

Three drinks. Maybe four. Hollander was five-ten and a hundred seventy-five pounds of professional athlete and three drinks did not make a person look like this. Three drinks did not make your pupils blow and your reaction time go to shit and your smile stick to your face like someone had glued it there.

"Who is Matt," Rozanov said.

"My friend. From high school."

"Your friend Matt left."

"He had to..." Hollander frowned. The frown was also slow. "He had to go. Early thing. Morning thing."

"Where are you staying."

"Hotel. The — it's on..." Hollander's hand made a vague gesture that contained no geographical information whatsoever. "It's close."

"Name, Hollander."

"It starts with a... F? No. H. Maybe R."

Rozanov looked at the table. Hollander's glass was empty. There was another glass — a different shape, not Hollander's — pushed toward the back of the table. Someone had bought Hollander a drink that Hollander had not ordered, and Hollander had finished it, and now Hollander was sitting in a booth in a club on King West with pupils the size of dimes and no way to get himself home and his friends had left.

"Get up," Rozanov said.

"What?"

"Get up. We are leaving."

"I don't want to leave. I'm fine."

"You are not fine. Get up."

Hollander laughed. The laugh was loose and strange. "You're so bossy. You were bossy in July too. You were bossy when you — you pulled me up off my knees. Remember? You pulled me up and moved us to the bed."

"Hollander. Get up."

Something in the tone did it. Hollander stopped laughing. Looked at Rozanov. For a second, through whatever was in his system, something in Hollander's face was present — actually there, actually seeing him, not the blurred version.

"Okay," Hollander said.

Getting Hollander out of the booth was a project. His legs worked but they worked the way legs work when you're not fully in charge of them — he stood, swayed, grabbed the table edge, overcompensated. Rozanov got a hand under his arm. Hollander was warm. Hollander had always been warm — Rozanov remembered this from July, the heat of Hollander's skin in room 1410, the way his body ran hot like a furnace in a small room, and Rozanov was not going to think about July right now because right now he was extracting a potentially drugged man from a nightclub and this was not the time for sense memory.

"My coat," Hollander said.

"Where."

"Check. Coat check."

There was no coat check. Rozanov looked. There was a rack near the door with nothing on it. "You did not bring coat."

"I brought a coat. It's October."

It was March.

"It is March," Rozanov said.

Hollander considered this. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, Hollander. I am sure it is March."

They got to the door. The bouncer looked at them — at Rozanov, six-three and steady, and Hollander, five-ten and listing like a boat in a current — and Rozanov gave the bouncer the look. The look said: I am handling this.The look said: Ask me a question and I will make you regret it. The bouncer looked away.

Outside. King West. The air was cold — actual March cold, the Toronto kind that had grit in it — and Hollander gasped like he'd been underwater.

"Okay," Hollander said. "Okay. That's. Cold."

Rozanov was already hailing a cab. His hand in the air, the other hand holding Hollander's arm because Hollander was leaning against the building and the building was not going to hold him forever. A cab pulled up. Rozanov opened the door. Put Hollander in. Got in after him.

"Where," the cabbie said.

Rozanov looked at Hollander. "What hotel."

"The..." Hollander's hand did the thing again. The geography-free gesture. "The one with the lobby."

"They all have lobby."

"The nice one."

Rozanov gave the cabbie the name of his own hotel. The Ritz-Carlton. Because it was the only hotel he knew in Toronto and because he was not going to drive around the city at one in the morning with a drugged Hollander trying to identify his hotel by the quality of its lobby.

In the cab, Hollander's head went to Rozanov's shoulder. Just dropped there, like gravity had made a decision Hollander's neck couldn't override. His hair was against Rozanov's jaw. It smelled like the club — smoke and sweat and something sweet from whatever had been in that drink — and underneath that, under everything, like soap and skin and warmth, it smelled like him. It smelled like July.

"You never called me," Hollander said. His voice was muffled against Rozanov's jacket.

Rozanov's chest did a thing. He ignored it.

"You never called me either," Rozanov said.

"I don't have your number."

The cab was quiet. The city moved past the windows — lights, construction, a streetcar, the architecture of a Tuesday night in Toronto. Rozanov stared at the headrest in front of him.

Hollander didn't have his number.

Hollander didn't have his number because Rozanov had never given it to him. Because in July, after the shoot, after Rozanov had gone to Hollander's room — 1410, he still remembered the number on the door — after they'd kissed against the wall and Hollander had dropped to his knees right there on the carpet and Rozanov had pulled him up and moved them to the bed because he wanted Hollander on his back, and after they'd gotten each other off and talked about more and Hollander had said he wasn't ready and Rozanov had said okay and meant it, and then Rozanov had pulled his clothes on while Hollander was still breathing hard and walked out without looking back — because after all of that, neither of them had said hey, what's your number. Because they were twenty years old and stupid and closeted and proud and whatever had happened in that hotel room was supposed to be a one-time thing, a fluke, an aberration that could be filed under "things that happen at photo shoots in Toronto and never get mentioned again."

Six months. He had spent six months being angry at a man who did not have his phone number.

"Huh," Rozanov said.

"Yeah," Hollander said. "Huh."

---

The hotel room was a king suite because the Bears' travel coordinator liked Rozanov, or feared Rozanov, or both, and the result was the same either way — big rooms, high floors, good pillows.

He got Hollander through the door with Hollander's arm over his shoulder and Hollander's feet doing approximately fifty percent of the work required. The hallway had been a negotiation. The elevator had been worse — Hollander had leaned against the mirrored wall and looked at Rozanov with glassy, blown-pupil eyes and said "you have really nice arms" and then put his hand on Rozanov's bicep and squeezed, slow and appraising, like he was buying a horse, and Rozanov had stared at the floor numbers and recited penalty kill percentages in his head.

He got Hollander to the bed. Hollander sat on the edge. Looked up at Rozanov.

Whatever had been in Hollander's drink was doing something complicated now — his eyes were still wrong but there was more of him in there, surfacing in waves, and what was surfacing was not the careful, composed, press-conference Hollander that the league knew. What was surfacing was something underneath. Something that looked at Rozanov like he was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"I thought about you," Hollander said. "After July. I thought about you a lot."

"You are drugged."

"I thought about the wall. I thought about your hands when you pulled me up."

"Hollander —"

"I thought about how you laid me on the bed and I couldn't —" Hollander's breath caught. Not from the drugs. From the memory. "I couldn't stop thinking about your mouth."

Rozanov was standing three feet from the bed. He should be farther. He should be across the room. He should be in the hallway, in the elevator, in the lobby, in a cab going in the opposite direction of this conversation because nothing good was going to come from standing three feet from a bed where Hollander was sitting with his lips parted and his dark eyes aimed at Rozanov's mouth and his body giving off heat like a goddamn radiator.

"You need water," Rozanov said. His voice was not as steady as he wanted it to be.

"I don't need water."

"You need water and you need to sleep."

"I need you to come here."

"No."

Hollander stood up. The standing was not graceful — he swayed, caught himself on the nightstand — but once he was up he was right there. Right there. Close enough that Rozanov could feel the heat coming off him. Could smell the club on his skin and the something-sweet from the drink and underneath it all the scent that had lived in the back of Rozanov's brain for six months, the one he'd been pretending wasn't there.

Hollander put his hand on Rozanov's chest. Flat. Over the cross. Over his mother's cross. His palm was hot through the fabric and his fingers were spread and he was looking up at Rozanov with those wrecked, blown-pupil eyes and his mouth was right there — right there — and Rozanov could feel Hollander's breath on his jaw.

"I looked for your number," Hollander said. Quiet. Almost sober-sounding except for the slight delay between the words, the small gaps where his brain was catching up to his mouth. "I asked the CCM people for the contact list from the shoot and they said it was confidential and I couldn't — I didn't know how to ask without explaining why I wanted the phone number of the guy I was supposed to hate."

Rozanov's hand was on Hollander's hip. He didn't remember putting it there. His thumb was on the strip of skin between Hollander's t-shirt and his jeans and Hollander's skin was as hot as the rest of him and Rozanov's thumb moved — a half-inch, involuntary, tracing the bone — and Hollander made a sound. Small. In the back of his throat. The sound went through Rozanov like voltage.

Hollander leaned up and kissed him.

It was not a careful kiss. Hollander's mouth was open and warm and desperate. Rozanov kissed him back — harder, longer, long enough that his hand slid from Hollander's hip around to the small of his back and pulled him in and Hollander gasped against his mouth and arched into it, his hands coming up to Rozanov's jaw, holding his face there, kissing him like he'd been saving it. Like six months of not knowing Rozanov's phone number had been six months of storing this up and now the dam was open and everything was flooding out at once.

Rozanov bit Hollander's lower lip. Lightly. Hollander made a sound that Rozanov felt in his spine.

"You taste like cigarettes," Hollander murmured against his mouth. Not a complaint. An observation. The way you'd note the weather or the score. Something factual that Hollander was filing away, the way Hollander filed everything.

"I barely even smoke anymore."

"I didn't say stop."

Rozanov kissed him again. His other hand came up to the back of Hollander's neck, tilting his head, deepening the angle, and Hollander opened for him — just opened, no resistance, all surrender, the sound he made so wrecked and wanting that Rozanov's hips moved against his without permission and Hollander pushed back and they were grinding against each other now, Hollander's back arching, his hands fisting in Rozanov's shirt, and Rozanov was hard — had been hard since the elevator, if he was being honest — and Hollander was hard against his thigh and every rational thought in Rozanov's head was being drowned out by the sound Hollander made when Rozanov's hand slid down to grip his ass and pull their hips flush.

This was the problem. This had always been the problem. Hollander made Rozanov stupid. Hollander made Rozanov forget every rule he had about clean exits and no feelings and never wanting anything more than once. In July, Rozanov had walked into room 1410 planning to get off and leave and instead Hollander had dropped to his knees and looked up at him and Rozanov had pulled him up — pulled him up off the floor and onto the bed— because something about Hollander on his knees had made Rozanov want to see his face, and wanting to see someone's face was a different thing entirely from wanting to get off, and that different thing was the thing Rozanov had been running from for six months.

And now Hollander was in his arms again and Hollander's mouth was on his neck — open, wet, teeth grazing the tendon — and Hollander's hand was working his belt, fingers clumsy but determined, and Rozanov let him. He let Hollander get the buckle open. Let him pop the button of his jeans. Let Hollander's hand slide inside, over his boxers, fingers wrapping around him through the cotton, and the noise Rozanov made was not voluntary and was not dignified and was the exact sound of a man whose willpower was down to its last three percent.

Hollander stroked him through the fabric. Slow. His thumb found the head and pressed and Rozanov's vision whited out for a full second.

"I know you want me," Hollander said against his throat. His hand tightened. "I can feel how much you want me."

"What I want —" Rozanov's voice cracked. He started again. "What I want is not important."

Hollander pulled back enough to look at his face. His pupils were blown so wide the dark eyes were almost all black. His mouth was swollen and red and his hand was still in Rozanov's jeans and he squeezed, once, slow, and watched Rozanov's face while he did it.

"This says it's very important."

"You are drugged, Hollander."

"I'm drunk."

"You are both."

"I know exactly what I'm doing." Another stroke. Slow. The heel of his palm grinding against the shaft. "I've been thinking about doing this for six months."

"You do not know what month it is."

Hollander paused. His hand stilled but didn't leave. Then: "March."

"You said October five minutes ago."

"I've updated my information."

Rozanov nearly laughed. Hollander's hand was still in his jeans. Hollander's mouth was still right there. The laugh would have been the last wall and Rozanov knew it.

He reached down and took Hollander's wrist. Slowly. Pulled his hand out. Held it between them. Hollander resisted — just for a second, his fingers trying to close again, to hold on — and Rozanov held firm. 

His hand was shaking. He could feel it. Hollander could see it.

"You are not going to remember this," Rozanov said.

"I'll remember."

"You will not."

"You don't know that."

"I know that whatever someone put in your drink is still working and I know that your eyes are wrong and I know that in the morning you will wake up and not know where you are." He was still holding Hollander's wrist. He could feel the pulse. Fast. "If the last thing you remember is me then I want it to be something you chose. Not something that happened to you."

He said it and meant it and it was the hardest thing he had ever done. Harder than leaving room 1410 in July. Harder than running five miles in the freezing Boston morning.

Because his body was screaming at him — every nerve, every synapse, every cell that had spent six months remembering the sounds Hollander made and the heat of his skin and the way his mouth had looked afterward — and Rozanov was saying no. Rozanov, who said yes to everything, who took every girl and every drink and every bad decision that glittered — Rozanov was saying no.

Because this was Hollander. And Hollander deserved to choose.

Something happened to Hollander's face. Not a flicker, not a shift, something structural. Something behind his eyes gave way, and for a second he looked young. He looked nineteen. He looked like a kid who'd gone out with his friends in a city where he didn't live and someone had put something in his drink and the person who'd found him was a man he'd slept with once and ached about ever since. A man whose jeans Hollander's hand had been inside thirty seconds ago. A man who was saying no — not because he didn't want to, but because he did.

"If you can look at me in the morning and say my name and know what month it is and choose this with your whole brain and not just your body. Then."

"When," Hollander said. Barely a whisper.

"What?"

"You said if. It's when."

Hollander's hand went slack in Rozanov's grip. But his eyes didn't leave Rozanov's face. Something in them was recording. Filing this away. Holding it.

Rozanov did up his own belt. The buckle sound was very loud in the room.

"I'm going to be sick," Hollander said.

"Bathroom is —"

He didn't make it to the bathroom. He made it to the trash can by the desk, which Rozanov grabbed and shoved in front of him just in time — months of living with hockey players had given him a sixth sense for the pre-vomit window — and Hollander threw up into the Ritz-Carlton's brushed-steel waste bin with the kind of full-body commitment that was, in its way, very Hollander. When Hollander did something, he did it all the way.

Rozanov got a washcloth. Wet it with cold water. Came back. Hollander was on the floor now, his back against the bed, the trash can between his knees. He looked terrible. He looked young. He looked like someone Rozanov wanted to take care of, and that thought was more frightening than anything that had happened in the last hour.

He handed Hollander the washcloth. Hollander pressed it against his face.

"Thanks," Hollander said, through the washcloth.

"Don't thank me."

"You could have left me there."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you."

Rozanov sat on the floor across from him. Back against the wall. Legs out. The hotel carpet was very soft, which was one advantage of the Ritz-Carlton — if you were going to sit on the floor with a vomiting Canadian at one in the morning, the carpet should at least be nice.

"Because," Rozanov said. "You were — you looked... not right and a little pathetic. And I am not the person who leaves a sad little puppy in club where others can eat him."

"That's really nice."

"I am not nice."

"You're being nice right now."

"I am being practical. If you got trafficked to Slovakia, it would be in the news, and reporters would find out we were in same club, and then I would have to answer questions."

Hollander lowered the washcloth. "Slovakia?"

"Could happen."

"I don't think I was going to be trafficked to Slovakia."

"You don't know that. You cannot even tell me what hotel you are staying at."

"It starts with an H."

"You said F, then H, then R."

"I'm narrowing it down."

A pause. Then Hollander smiled. A real one — small, tired, the corners of his mouth doing the thing that Rozanov had catalogued in July. The one that cost something. The one he spent anyway.

"Rozanov."

"Hollander."

"Why did you leave like that in July? You didn't even — you just got dressed and walked out. You didn't say anything."

Rozanov looked at the ceiling. White. Expensive. Unhelpful.

"Because if I stayed," Rozanov said, "I would have wanted to stay longer."

The sentence hung in the room. Rozanov could hear the air conditioning. The distant thump of the city outside. Hollander's breathing, still ragged, still wrong.

"That's the dumbest reason I've ever heard," Hollander said.

"Probably."

"You left because you wanted to stay."

"Yes."

"You got dressed while I was still — I was right there, and you just —"

"I know."

"That is objectively the dumbest —"

"I know."

Hollander was quiet. Then he leaned his head back against the bed and closed his eyes and said, very quietly, "Ilya."

The name went through Rozanov like a fist.

Nobody called him that. Not here, not in North America, not in this language. His teammates called him Roz or Rozanov. The press called him Rozanov. The women he slept with called him whatever he told them to call him, which was never that. His mother had called him that. His brother called him that when he wanted money.

And now Hollander — Shane fucking Hollander — was saying it on a hotel room floor with vomit on his breath and his eyes closed and the syllables shaped by a mouth that had been against Rozanov's twenty minutes ago, and it sounded nothing like how anyone else had ever said it. It sounded like it belonged to Hollander. Like Hollander had found a door in the name that nobody else knew was there and had walked through it.

Rozanov pressed his thumb against his mother's cross. Hard.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I am going to get you your own room."

"What?"

"I am going to go to front desk and get you room. You are going to stay here, drink this water —" He stood, filled a glass from the bathroom, set it on the nightstand. "— and you are not going to move until I come back."

"You're getting me a room."

"Yes."

"Not... staying."

"If I stay in room with you tonight, I am going to do something I will not forgive myself for. So I am getting you room. Down the hall. Close enough that I can check on you. Far enough that I do not have to listen to you say my name like that."

Hollander opened his eyes. Looked at him. Even now, even sick and drugged and sitting on a floor, the look in his eyes was the thing Rozanov had been running from since July. It was clear and steady and it said: I see you. I see what this is costing you.

"Drink the water," Rozanov said. "I will be back."

---

The front desk was calm and discreet in the way that the Ritz-Carlton was always calm and discreet when a young man with a Russian accent and an NHL travel card requested a second room at one-thirty in the morning. The concierge did not ask questions. Rozanov appreciated this. He was not in the mood for questions.

Room 1614. Four doors down from 1618. King bed. Rozanov took both key cards.

When he got back, Hollander had drunk the water. He was still on the floor but the color was better and his eyes, while still wrong, were closer to right. The vomiting had cleared something. He looked like a person who was processing, slowly, what had happened to him tonight — the club, the drink, the gap in his control, the Russian center who'd carried him out of it.

"Come on," Rozanov said. "Your room is down the hall."

He got Hollander up. Hollander was steadier now — maybe seventy percent of his legs were participating. They walked the hallway. Rozanov's hand on Hollander's arm. Not holding. Guiding. The carpet was quiet under their feet.

Room 1614. Rozanov opened the door. The room was clean and dark and the bed was made and the curtains were open and Toronto was outside the window, lit up and indifferent.

He sat Hollander on the bed. Filled another glass of water. Set it on the nightstand. Found the extra pillow and the waste bin and put the bin beside the bed, close enough.

"If you feel sick again, the bin is there," Rozanov said. "Sleep on your side. Not your back."

"I know how to sleep."

"You do not know what month it is. I am giving you instructions."

Hollander was looking at him from the bed. The look was different now — less heat, more something else. Something Rozanov didn't want to identify because identifying it would mean acknowledging that this night had meant something, and acknowledging that meant he'd have to decide what to do about it, and he was not ready for that decision.

"Rozanov."

"What."

"Give me your phone."

Rozanov hesitated. Then he pulled out his phone and handed it to Hollander.

Hollander's fingers were clumsy — still whatever was in his system — but he typed his number in and hit save. Then he paused. Backspaced. Typed something else. Handed the phone back.

On the screen: Jane.

Rozanov looked at it. "Jane."

"If someone goes through your phone," Hollander said. His voice was tired but the logic was clear — even drugged, even wrecked, the careful part of Hollander's brain was still running. Still protecting them. "It can't say Hollander. It can't say Shane."

Jane. He'd picked Jane. Which rhymed with Shane. Which was the least subtle fake name in the history of fake names. Hollander was either a genius or terrible at this.

Rozanov typed his own number into Hollander's phone. Hollander watched him, one eye half-closed. Rozanov backspaced the R he'd started and typed something else. Handed it back.

Hollander looked at the screen. His mouth did the thing — the small, tired, expensive smile.

Lily.

"Lily," Hollander said. Then: "Lily. That's terrible. That doesn't even — that's just your name with different letters."

"Jane rhymes with Shane, Hollander."

Hollander paused. "No it doesn't."

"Jane. Shane. You do not hear this?"

"That's — it's not a rhyme, it's a —" Hollander stopped. Considered. "Okay. It's a rhyme."

"We are both terrible at this."

"At least Jane is a real name people have."

"Lily is real name."

"Lily is not a common name for a six-three Russian hockey player."

"No one will look that hard."

"You don't know that."

Ilya sighed.  Even drugged, the man was argumentative. "Lie down."

"You're very bossy."

"We have established this. Lie down."

Hollander lay down. Rozanov pulled the covers over him. Hollander kicked one leg out immediately because Hollander apparently ran hot even when drugged. Rozanov left the leg.

He should go. He should go back to his room, four doors down, and get four hours of sleep before morning skate and forget this happened.

But Hollander was looking at him from the pillow with one eye open, his black hair against the white cotton, and his mouth — the mouth Rozanov could still taste, cigarettes and all — curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"Hey, Rozanov."

"What."

"I said when. Not if."

"Go to sleep, Hollander."

"When. That means there's going to be a when."

"There is going to be a when if you survive the night, which you are more likely to do if you sleep."

"When."

"Sleep."

Hollander closed his eye. The almost-smile stayed.

Rozanov stood in the doorway. He watched Hollander breathe — in, out, in, the rhythm steadying, the body surrendering to whatever combination of exhaustion and chemistry was pulling him under. Hollander's hand was on the pillow beside his face, the fingers curled loose, and the light from the window caught the edge of his jaw and the freckles that Rozanov had traced with his tongue in July and the dark hair that Rozanov had pulled and the mouth that had whispered his name — his real name, the one nobody used — like it was a word Hollander had been saving.

He let the door close behind him. Locked. He had both key cards in his back pocket. No one else was getting in.  Hollander was safe. 

Back in 1618, Rozanov sat on his own bed. The trash can smelled like puke. He moved it out of his suite and left it in the hallway. Washed his hands. Looked at himself in the mirror — twenty years old, messy curls, the tired eyes of a man who'd spent an evening not sleeping with someone he wanted to sleep with, which was arguably more exhausting than just doing it.

He pressed his thumb against the cross. Hard enough to feel the shape of it against his sternum.

Then he pulled out his phone. Opened the contact. Jane.

He typed: Room 1410. You were on your knees before I got the door closed.

It wasn't exactly true. It had started against the wall — Rozanov had kissed him first, or Hollander had kissed Rozanov first, or they'd both moved at the same time, and then Hollander's back was against the wall and Rozanov's hands were in his hair and then Hollander had gone to his knees. But Rozanov wasn't texting for accuracy. He was texting a detail from a hotel room in July that only two people in the world knew about — Shane's room number, and the thing Shane had done, and the way Rozanov had pulled him up off the carpet and moved them to the bed because he wanted Hollander under him. 

If Hollander remembered tonight, he'd know who Lily was.

If he didn't, it would look like a wrong number.

He went back to 1614. Hollander was asleep — on his side, good, one leg still out, breathing steady. Rozanov set two Advil on the nightstand beside the water glass. Stood there for a moment. Watched the breathing.

Then he left. Let the door click shut behind him. 

In the morning, Hollander would wake up in a hotel room he didn't recognize with a headache and a glass of water and two Advil and a text from someone called Lily that mentioned room 1410 and something only two people in the world would understand.

And Hollander would either remember or he wouldn't. And if he remembered, he'd have a choice — the same choice Rozanov had made on a dance floor in a club called something stupid, when he'd seen a man with wrong eyes and a stuck smile and had crossed the room anyway.

Jane would call Lily, or she wouldn't.

Rozanov already knew which one it would be.

He was almost asleep when his phone buzzed.

That's not how it happened, Lily.

Rozanov stared at the ceiling. The cross was warm against his chest. The phone glowed in the dark.

That's not how it happened. Because it wasn't. Because first there had been the wall, and the kissing, and Hollander's back against the door — and then the knees. Hollander remembered the order. Hollander remembered everything. Which meant Hollander remembered tonight, and knew exactly who Lily was, and was awake four doors down correcting Rozanov's version of events like they were reviewing game tape.

When, Hollander had said. Not if.

Rozanov closed his eyes. He was smiling.

Chapter 2: Morning After

Chapter Summary

Shane shows up at six a.m. with clear eyes and a gift-shop shirt. He chooses Ilya with his whole brain. What happens in room 1618 is better than anything Ilya has ever had — and worse, because now he knows. Now there's a standard. Now there's no going back.

Chapter Notes

Some folks asked for a continuation, so I thought I'd add some chapters.

Rozanov slept for three hours. This was not unusual. Three hours was what his body had decided was enough when he was twenty, and his body had not yet been informed that medical science disagreed.

He woke at four-forty-seven. The room was dark. Toronto was still happening outside the window — quieter now, the Tuesday night crowd having surrendered to Wednesday morning, but the streetcars were already running because Toronto was the kind of city that started its public transit before dawn like this was a personality trait.

He lay there for eleven seconds. Then he picked up his phone.

The text thread with Jane was still open. Two messages. His: Room 1410. You were on your knees before I got the door closed. Hollander's: That's not how it happened, Lily.

Nothing after that. Hollander had corrected the record and then, presumably, passed out, which was the correct medical outcome for a person who'd been drugged four hours ago and the incorrect emotional outcome for Rozanov, who had spent those four hours staring at the ceiling and composing responses he did not send.

Responses like: How did it happen then.

And: Tell me the order.

And: I remember your back against the door and your mouth on my neck and the sound you made when I got my hand in your hair and I have thought about that sound every day for seven months and I would very much like to hear it again but you threw up in my trash can so the timing is not ideal.

He had not sent any of these. He had sent nothing. He was not going to be the person who double-texted a drugged man at two in the morning. He had standards. The standards were new and specific to Hollander and he did not enjoy having them.

He got up. Splashed water on his face. Looked at himself in the bathroom mirror — same face, same mess of dark curls, same shadows under his eyes that his teammates attributed to partying and that were actually attributable to a chronic inability to stop thinking at night, which was its own kind of addiction and less fun than the kind people assumed.

He put on joggers and a t-shirt and his room key and went to 1614.

The hallway was empty. Hotel hallways at five in the morning had a specific quality — the lighting was the same as at any other hour but the silence made it feel like the lights were lying, like the building was pretending to be awake when really it was holding its breath. Rozanov knocked. Quietly. Then less quietly.

Nothing.

He used the second key card. The door opened. The room was dark except for the bathroom light, which Hollander had left on — either deliberately, because he was in a strange room and wanted a reference point, or accidentally, because he'd been too drugged to find the switch. Both options made something in Rozanov's chest do the thing. He was getting tired of the thing. The thing needed to develop a wider vocabulary.

Hollander was asleep. On his side — good, Rozanov had told him to sleep on his side and Hollander had listened, which was surprising because Hollander did not strike Rozanov as a person who listened to instructions from Russian centers at one-thirty in the morning, but perhaps the vomiting had made him pliable. One leg was still out of the covers. The water glass was empty. The Advil was gone. Hollander's phone was on the pillow next to his face, screen down, like he'd fallen asleep holding it.

Rozanov stood in the doorway and watched him breathe.

This was a problem. Not the breathing — the breathing was the correct thing for a person to do while sleeping and Rozanov was in favor of it continuing. The problem was that Rozanov was standing in a doorway at five in the morning watching a man breathe and feeling things about it. Specific things. The kind of things that did not fit into the categories Rozanov had built for his life, which were: hockey, women, vodka, and not thinking about Shane Hollander.

Three of those categories were functioning. The fourth had been a disaster since July.

He refilled the water glass. Set it on the nightstand. Hollander did not move. His face in sleep was different from his face awake — the careful architecture of it relaxed, the jaw softer, the mouth slightly open. He looked like someone who did not have to perform anything for anyone. He looked like the version of himself that existed before the draft and the press conferences and the careful, contained way he held his body in public. He looked like a person, and Rozanov was furious about it, because a person was harder to stop wanting than an idea.

He left. Let the door click shut. Went back to 1618.

Morning skate was at ten. The Bears' bus left at nine-fifteen from the hotel lobby. Rozanov had four hours and he was not going back to sleep.

He did what he always did when he couldn't sleep. He pulled up game tape on his laptop. Guardians power play. Their top unit was running a 1-3-1 and the weak side D-man cheated toward the net on the bumper pass, which left the half-wall open, which meant Rozanov could —

His phone buzzed.

Jane: Are you awake

It was five-twelve in the morning. Hollander was awake at five-twelve in the morning, which meant either the drugs had worn off or Hollander was one of those people who woke up before dawn on purpose, and Rozanov did not know which option was worse.

Lily: Yes.

Jane: I just threw up again

Lily: Good. Your body is getting rid of it.

Jane: That's a very optimistic interpretation of vomiting

Jane: Where am I

Lily: Room 1614. Ritz-Carlton. Toronto. The month is March. The year is 2007. The president of United States is a man you would not invite to dinner.

Jane: I know what year it is

Lily: Last night you did not know what month it was. I am being thorough.

A pause. The typing indicator appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Rozanov watched it. The typing indicator was the twenty-first century equivalent of watching someone's mouth move before sound came out, and it was making his chest do the thing.

Jane: Did I say anything last night

Rozanov looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was white and expensive and continued to offer no guidance.

Hollander had said a lot of things last night. Hollander had said you have really nice arms in an elevator. Hollander had said I thought about your mouth on the edge of a bed. Hollander had said I know exactly what I'm doing with his hand in Rozanov's jeans. Hollander had said Ilya on a hotel room floor and the name had gone through Rozanov like a fist and was still there, lodged somewhere between his ribs, refusing to dissolve.

But Hollander had also been drugged. And the question — did I say anything — was the question of a person who suspected he had said too much and was trying to determine the scope of the damage. It was the question of a person who was still, at five in the morning in a strange hotel room, trying to control the narrative. Which was very Hollander.

Rozanov could lie. Could say no, nothing, you were mostly unconscious. Could give Hollander the exit. Let him have the version where he was rescued and deposited and nothing complicated happened in between.

Or he could tell the truth.

Lily: You said some things.

Jane: What things

Lily: Things you meant.

Another pause. Longer.

Jane: I need you to be more specific

Lily: You told me you thought about me after July. You told me you looked for my number. You tried to put your hand in my pants. You called me by my first name while sitting on the floor next to a trash can. You told me it was October when it was March. You said when, not if.

The typing indicator appeared and stayed for a very long time.

Jane: Oh

Lily: Yes.

Jane: All of that happened?

Lily: All of that happened.

Jane: In that order?

Lily: More or less.

Jane: And you

Jane: You stopped it

Lily: Yes.

Jane: Even though I

Lily: Yes.

Rozanov put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again. The game tape was still paused on his laptop — the Guardians' power play frozen mid-cycle, the weak side D-man caught between decisions. Rozanov understood the feeling.

Jane: Thank you

He stared at the words. Thank you. Two words that contained the entire architecture of what had happened — the club, the drink, the wrong eyes, the booth, the cab, the hotel room, the kiss, the stopping. Hollander was thanking him for stopping. Hollander was thanking him for the hardest thing he had ever done, and Hollander was doing it over text at five in the morning with the casual efficiency of a person confirming a dinner reservation.

Lily: You do not have to thank me for that. That is baseline. That is the floor.

Jane: I know. But you also could have just left me there.

Lily: We have discussed this. Slovakia.

Jane: Right. The trafficking concern.

Lily: Very real threat.

Jane: To a professional hockey player in a Toronto nightclub.

Lily: You did not even know what city you were in. You were prime Slovakia material.

Jane: I'm going to shower. I feel like something died inside me and is now haunting my body out of spite.

Lily: Poetic.

Jane:  I read a lot. The metaphors are a reflex.

The shower would take ten minutes. Fifteen if Hollander was as thorough about showering as he was about everything else, which — Rozanov was not going to think about Hollander in the shower. He was going to think about the Guardians' power play.

The Guardians' power play had not changed in the six minutes he'd been texting.

His phone buzzed again.

Jane: I remember everything.

Three words. Rozanov read them twice. Three times. His thumb was on the cross.

Jane: I remember you crossing the floor. I remember the cab. I remember your shoulder. I remember all of it. The wall thing. The stopping. The name thing.

Jane: I wasn't saying it because of whatever was in my drink. I was saying it because I've been wanting to say it since July and I couldn't because I didn't have your number because neither of us was smart enough to ask.

Jane: And I know what month it is and I know where I am and I know exactly what I'm choosing.

Jane:  When.

Rozanov sat on the edge of his bed. The game tape was still frozen. The sun was starting to do something outside the window — not rising yet, but threatening, the way Toronto mornings threatened before they committed. The room was quiet. His heart was doing the thing it did in overtime, the specific acceleration that happened when the game was close and the moment was coming and every decision mattered.

He typed. Deleted. Typed again. Deleted.

Then:

Lily: Morning skate is at 10. Bus leaves at 9:15. I have to be in the lobby by 9.

Jane: Okay.

Lily: If you can walk. If your body has decided to stop punishing you. Room 1618. Before 9.

Jane:  That's four hours from now.

Lily: Yes.

Jane: What happens in room 1618.

Rozanov closed his eyes. Opened them.

Lily: Whatever you choose. With your whole brain.

The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.

Jane: I'll be there at 6.

---

At five-fifty-eight, Rozanov did something he had not done since he was twelve and his mother was still alive and the apartment in Moscow still smelled like her perfume and her cooking and the particular warmth of a home that had a person in it who loved you. He cleaned.

Not aggressively. Not well. But he moved the laptop off the bed and straightened the pillows and checked that the new trash can — the front desk had sent one up, bless the Ritz-Carlton and its policy of not asking questions — was empty and clean. He brushed his teeth. He considered changing his shirt and then didn't because changing his shirt would mean he cared about which shirt he was wearing and caring about which shirt he was wearing was a level of emotional investment he was not prepared to examine.

He was wearing the gray one. The gray one was fine.

He opened his toiletry bag. Condoms. He had condoms because he was Rozanov and Rozanov always had condoms in the same way Rozanov always had his passport and his cross — essentials, non-negotiable, the infrastructure of a life lived in transit. He also had — he checked — a travel-size bottle of something a woman in New York had left in his hotel room three months ago, unscented, the kind you bought at a drugstore, and he'd kept it because it was useful and he was practical and if a small voice in the back of his head had said you might need this for something that is not a woman he had not listened to that voice at the time and was not going to examine its foresight now.

He put both on the nightstand. Then moved them to the bathroom counter. Then moved them back to the nightstand because hiding them in the bathroom was a thing a person who was ashamed would do and Rozanov was not ashamed. He was terrified. These were different things.

At six-oh-two there was a knock on the door. Not tentative. Not aggressive. The knock of a person who had made a decision and was implementing it, which was the most Hollander knock possible.

Rozanov opened the door.

Hollander looked like shit. This was the objective assessment. His skin was pale — not his usual pale, which was the pale of a person who trained indoors and lived in Montreal, but the pale of a person whose body had recently processed a foreign substance and was filing a formal complaint. His eyes were bloodshot. His hair was wet from the shower and pushed back and there were shadows under his eyes that matched Rozanov's.

He was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt that was not his — it was hotel gift shop, Rozanov could tell by the tag sticking up at the collar, which meant Hollander had walked down to the lobby in whatever he'd been wearing last night and bought a new shirt from the gift shop rather than put the old one back on, which was the most fastidious thing Rozanov had ever heard of and somehow made him want Hollander more.

"Hi," Hollander said.

"Hi."

"I look terrible."

"Yes."

"You're supposed to say no."

"I do not lie to you. This is a policy I am trying out."

Hollander almost smiled. The almost-smile was better than the drugged smile and worse than the real one and Rozanov catalogued all three because apparently he was building an archive.

"Can I come in."

Rozanov stepped back. Hollander walked in. The room was bright now — the sun had committed to the morning and was coming through the window like it had somewhere to be. Hollander looked around. Looked at the bed. Looked at the nightstand.

The condoms. The bottle. Sitting there in the morning light with the matter-of-fact visibility of items that had been placed and not hidden.

Hollander looked at the nightstand for three seconds longer than he looked at anything else. Then he looked at Rozanov. Something in his expression shifted — not surprise, not exactly. Recognition. The recognition of a person who had come to a hotel room at six in the morning knowing what he wanted and was now seeing evidence that the other person had wanted it too.

"You cleaned," Hollander said.

"I moved some things."

"You cleaned for me. And you put — those are on the nightstand."

"Yes."

"In case."

"In case."

"Okay." Hollander's voice was steady. His ears were red. The steadiness and the redness existed simultaneously and Rozanov found this devastating. "Okay."

He turned to face Rozanov. They were standing four feet apart. The same four feet from last night, except now the light was different and Hollander's pupils were the right size and his eyes were clear — bloodshot and tired, but clear. Present. The full Hollander brain behind them, running at capacity, making decisions with all the information.

"So," Hollander said.

"So."

"I know what month it is."

"What month is it."

"March."

"Good."

"I know where I am."

"Where are you."

"Room 1618. Ritz-Carlton. Toronto. Standing in front of a man who put condoms on his nightstand for me because he is the most presumptuous person I have ever met."

"Presumptuous is big word. I prefer 'prepared.'"

"You're also the person who carried me out of a nightclub last night and slept on the floor with me while I threw up and then got me my own room because you didn't trust yourself to—" Hollander stopped. His jaw worked. "Because you wanted me to choose."

"Yes."

"I'm choosing."

"I see that."

"Come here."

Rozanov crossed the four feet. His hand went to the back of Hollander's neck — the same place, the same grip, because apparently this was where his hand lived now — and Hollander's chin tilted up and the height difference was five inches and in this light, this close, with Hollander's breath coming faster and his dark eyes aimed at Rozanov's mouth, the five inches felt like a question Rozanov had been asking since July.

Hollander kissed him.

---

It was different from every version that had come before — different from July, which had been a collision, and different from last night, which had been desperate and chemical and wrong. This was slow. Hollander's mouth was careful against his, almost tentative, his hand on Rozanov's chest like an anchor, and the care in it — the deliberateness — did something to Rozanov that desperation never had.

Rozanov kissed him back. His hand tightened on the back of Hollander's neck and Hollander made the sound — the small one, in the back of his throat, the one Rozanov had been carrying around for seven months like a song he couldn't stop humming. Rozanov swallowed it. Wanted more of it.

He pulled Hollander closer by the neck and deepened the angle and Hollander opened for him — mouth, body, all of it — and Rozanov's other hand found the hem of Hollander's gift-shop shirt and slid under, palm flat against the warm skin of his stomach, and Hollander's abs contracted under his hand and Hollander gasped against his mouth.

"Off," Rozanov said, tugging the shirt. Hollander's arms went up immediately — automatic, no hesitation — and Rozanov pulled it over his head and dropped it.

In July it had been dark. The curtains closed. Everything fast — wall, knees, bed, hands, mouths, the frantic efficiency of two people who were afraid that if they slowed down they'd have to think about what they were doing. Rozanov had not looked. Not properly.

He was looking now.

Hollander was lean and built the way forwards were built — compact muscle, defined shoulders, the particular V of a body that skated thirty minutes a game. Freckles across his collarbones. A scar under his left rib that looked like a skate blade. His chest rising and falling too fast. His skin already flushed.

Rozanov pulled his own shirt off. Hollander's eyes dropped — to his chest, the cross, the line of muscle at his hips — and the look on Hollander's face was not subtle. Hungry and nervous and bright, the look of a person seeing something he'd imagined and finding the reality better.

Hollander reached out and touched the cross. One finger. Gentle. Then his hand went flat on Rozanov's chest beside it.

"Your mother's," Hollander said. Not a question.

"Yes."

Hollander's hand slid down. Over the cross. Over Rozanov's sternum. Down the midline of his stomach, tracking the muscle, and Rozanov's breath hitched because Hollander's hand was moving with intention now — not tentative, not careful, but focused. The way Hollander did everything.

His fingers reached the waistband of Rozanov's joggers. Stopped. Looked up.

"I want to try something I didn't get to do in July," Hollander said. "You pulled me up before I could—"

"What do you want."

Hollander's jaw set. The jaw-set was pure Hollander — the same expression he wore on faceoffs, the compressed determination of a person who had decided what he was going to do and was not interested in being talked out of it.

"Everything," Hollander said. "I want everything."

The word landed in the room like a puck dropped on ice. Specific. Final. Rozanov's entire body responded before his brain caught up.

"Everything," Rozanov repeated.

"I saw what you put on the nightstand." Hollander's voice was steady. His ears were crimson. "I know what that's for. And I want it."

"You have never—"

"No."

"With anyone."

"No. I've never — I've barely done anything. July was —" Hollander exhaled. A laugh that was not a laugh. "July was the first time I'd ever been with a guy. At all. You were my first and I didn't even have your phone number."

Rozanov's hand was still on the back of Hollander's neck. He could feel the pulse hammering under his fingers. Hollander was standing in front of him, bare-chested in the morning light, telling Rozanov he was his first. That July — the wall, the floor, the bed, the frantic twenty minutes that Rozanov had spent seven months replaying — had been Hollander's first time with a man. And Rozanov had walked out without looking back. Had walked out without leaving a number.

Something in his chest broke. Not the thing. Worse than the thing. The thing underneath the thing.

"I did not know that," Rozanov said.

"I know you didn't."

"I would have — if I had known—"

"You would have what. Stayed?" Hollander's mouth did the thing. The small, expensive smile. "You left because you wanted to stay. That's what you said last night. You're not exactly the person I'd expect to handle emotional nuance well."

"This is fair."

"I'm handling the emotional nuance right now. I'm telling you what I want. I want you. I want this. I want — I've been thinking about it for seven months and I want to know what it feels like." His hand was on Rozanov's stomach still, the fingers tracing the line of hair below his navel, and his voice dropped. "I want to know what it feels like with you inside me."

Rozanov's vision narrowed. His hand tightened on Hollander's neck. His cock, which had been half-hard since the kiss, was now fully and urgently committed.

"Okay," Rozanov said. His voice did not sound like his voice. "Okay. But we go slow. And you tell me if—"

"I'll tell you."

"I am serious, Hollander. You tell me to stop and I stop. Immediately. No questions."

"I know. You proved that last night."

The sentence sat between them. Simple. True. Rozanov had proved it last night — had stopped with Hollander's hand in his jeans and Hollander's mouth on his neck and every cell in his body screaming yes. Had stopped because Hollander deserved to choose. And now Hollander was choosing, with clear eyes and a steady voice and his hand on Rozanov's stomach.

Rozanov kissed him. Hard. Walked them both backward toward the bed. Hollander's knees hit the mattress and he sat and Rozanov followed — knees on either side of Hollander's hips, pushing him back, and then they were horizontal, chest to chest, the cross pressed between them.

The rest of the clothes came off fast. Hollander's jeans, his boxers — Rozanov pulled them down together, impatient, and Hollander lifted his hips and kicked free and was naked underneath him. Rozanov looked. Hollander's cock was hard, flushed, curving slightly left, and Rozanov wrapped his hand around it just to hear the sound Hollander made, which was everything he'd wanted it to be — sharp and stuttered and wrecked.

He stroked him. Slow. Watching Hollander's face — the way his eyes went half-closed and his lips parted and his hips moved into Rozanov's hand like they couldn't not. Rozanov catalogued every microexpression, every shift. This was data. This was the beginning of a file he was going to maintain for the rest of his life.

He let go. Hollander made a sound of protest. Rozanov stood long enough to strip his own joggers and boxers and Hollander's eyes went wide — actually wide, the involuntary kind that you could not fake — and then traveled down and stayed.

"Oh," Hollander said.

"What."

"You're—" Hollander swallowed. "That's — I mean, I saw it in July, but I didn't — in this light—"

"Hollander."

"You're big."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment. That was a logistical observation."

Rozanov laughed. The laugh was real and loose and surprised out of him and Hollander grinned — the grin was nervous and brilliant and so young that something in Rozanov's chest shifted tectonically.

He got on the bed. Between Hollander's legs this time. Hollander's thighs fell open — not gracefully, not casually, but with the specific determination of a person who had made a decision about the position of his legs and was committed to it. Rozanov ran his hands up Hollander's thighs. The muscle was dense, the skin hot, and Hollander's cock jumped when Rozanov's thumbs reached the crease where his legs met his hips.

"I'm going to—" Rozanov reached for the nightstand. The bottle. The condom. Set them on the bed beside Hollander's hip. "I am going to use my fingers first. To make sure you are—"

"I know how it works."

"You told me thirty seconds ago that you have never done this."

"I know how it works. Theoretically. I've — I looked things up." Hollander's ears were so red they were nearly purple. "After July. I did research."

"Research."

"Yes."

"You researched anal sex."

"I research everything. I researched faceoff technique when I was fifteen. I researched forecheck systems before my first training camp. This is what I do."

Rozanov pressed his forehead against Hollander's inner thigh. Closed his eyes. This man — this meticulous, serious, compulsively prepared man — had gone home after July and researched how to have sex with another man. Had sat at his computer, probably in his apartment in Montreal, and read about things he'd never done with the same focus he brought to game tape. And then he'd come here. To this room. At six in the morning.

"You are going to destroy me," Rozanov said against Hollander's thigh. He did not entirely mean it as a compliment. He meant it as a forecast.

He opened the bottle. Slicked his fingers. They were warm — he'd cupped them in his palm first, because the woman in New York had done this and Rozanov had noted it and retained the information because Rozanov retained everything, including and especially the things he pretended not to.

"Breathe," Rozanov said. His hand was between Hollander's legs. "And tell me—"

"I'll tell you."

One finger. Slow. Just the tip, just circling, and Hollander's breath came out shaky but his hips didn't tense — they relaxed, incrementally, the way a person relaxes when they've thought about this, prepared for it, wanted it long enough that the body has already done some of the work.

Rozanov pressed in. Hollander made a sound — not pain, not pleasure, somewhere in the middle, the sound of new sensation being categorized — and his hand found Rozanov's forearm and gripped.

"Okay?" Rozanov said.

"Yeah. Yeah, I just — keep going."

Rozanov kept going. Deeper. Slow. He watched Hollander's face the way he watched video — reading the microexpressions, the shifts, the exact moment when the sound Hollander made changed from new to good. It changed when Rozanov curled his finger. Hollander's eyes flew open. His hips jerked.

"There," Hollander said. His voice cracked on the word.

Rozanov did it again. Hollander's back arched off the bed and his hand tightened on Rozanov's forearm hard enough to bruise and the sound he made was — Rozanov was going to hear it in his sleep. He was going to hear it during games, during practice, during every quiet moment for the rest of his career. The sound was ruinous. The sound was the end of something Rozanov had been pretending was temporary.

He added a second finger. Hollander took it — wincing, then relaxing, then pushing back against Rozanov's hand with a focused, determined roll of his hips that was so purely Hollander — working the problem, finding the angle, optimizing — that Rozanov felt something between a laugh and a groan build in his chest.

"You are—" Rozanov shook his head. "You are approaching this like a forecheck drill."

"Shut up. I'm — oh." Rozanov had scissored his fingers and Hollander's sentence died and was replaced by a sound that was not a word in any language. "Do that again."

He did it again. Hollander's thighs were shaking now. His cock was leaking against his stomach, untouched, a wet line from the head to his navel, and Rozanov leaned down and licked it — one flat stroke from base to tip — and Hollander made a sound like he'd been hit.

"Fuck— Ilya—"

The name. The door in the name. Rozanov pressed his fingers deeper, curled them, and took Hollander into his mouth at the same time and Hollander's hips came off the bed and his hand went to Rozanov's hair and pulled and Rozanov groaned around him. He sucked him slow, working him with his mouth and his fingers simultaneously, and Hollander was falling apart — his thighs trembling, his stomach clenching, his voice a continuous broken thing that started as words and ended as sounds.

Rozanov pulled off before Hollander could tip over. Hollander made a noise of protest that was almost a snarl.

"Not yet," Rozanov said. His own voice was wrecked. His cock was aching — he hadn't touched himself, hadn't let himself, because he was twenty years old and if he touched himself right now while Hollander was laid out like this, flushed and open and making those sounds, it would be over before it started.

He reached for the condom. Hollander watched him put it on — watched with the focused, bright-eyed attention of a person who was filing this away, adding it to the research — and then Rozanov slicked himself, generous, careful, and positioned himself between Hollander's legs.

Hollander's thighs were on either side of his hips. Rozanov's cock was pressed against him — not in, not yet, just there, the blunt pressure of it — and Hollander was looking up at him with clear dark eyes and his chest rising and falling fast and his hands on Rozanov's arms.

"Tell me," Rozanov said.

"I want this."

"Tell me to stop if—"

"I will. I promise. Please."

The please undid him. Rozanov pressed forward.

Slow. The head of his cock pushing in, the tight heat of Hollander's body giving way, incremental, and Hollander's breath stopped. Not held — stopped. His grip on Rozanov's arms went white-knuckle. His eyes were wide and his jaw was clenched and Rozanov froze.

"Hollander—"

"Don't stop." Through his teeth. "Don't — I need a second. Don't stop."

Rozanov held still. Every muscle in his body was screaming at him to move — to push, to take, to bury himself in the tight, devastating heat that was already making his vision blur — and he held still. He watched Hollander's face. Watched the jaw unclench. Watched the breath start again — shallow, deliberate, the controlled breathing of an athlete managing sensation.

"More," Hollander said.

Rozanov gave him more. Another inch. Hollander's head went back. His throat was exposed, the tendons standing out, and Rozanov pressed his mouth to the hollow between them and felt Hollander's pulse hammering against his lips.

Another inch. Another. And then Rozanov was all the way in and the world stopped.

He had done this before. He had done this — not this, not with a man, but the other version, the version the world expected — more times than he could count, in more cities than he could name, and it had been fine. Good, even. Bodies fitting together the way bodies did, the reliable mathematics of friction and pressure and release. He knew what sex felt like. He knew the mechanics. He knew the script.

This was not that.

This was — the heat of Hollander around him was different. Tighter, denser, a grip that ran the full length of him and did not let up. But that wasn't it. Rozanov had been with tight. Rozanov had been with hot. What was different was that Hollander was looking at him. Not the ceiling, not the wall, not the middle distance — at him. And what was in Hollander's eyes was not the performance of pleasure or the practiced expression of someone who knew what their face was supposed to do. It was raw and scared and wondering and real, and Rozanov felt it in his spine and in his chest and in the cross pressed between their bodies and in a place behind his ribs that he had not known existed until this moment.

"Oh," Rozanov said. Quietly. Because he understood something he had not understood before, which was that every time he had done this — every girl, every city, every clean exit — he had been doing it wrong. Not the mechanics. The mechanics were fine. He had been doing the wrong thing. He had been having sex when what existed was this, and this was not sex — this was Shane Hollander's body around him and Shane Hollander's eyes on his face and the sound Shane Hollander made when Rozanov pulled back slowly and pushed in again, deeper, and Hollander arched into it and whispered his name.

"Ilya." The name again. The door. "Keep going. Please — don't stop."

Rozanov moved. Slow at first — a careful withdrawal, almost all the way out, then back in, and Hollander gasped and his hips rose to meet the thrust, finding the rhythm, falling into it. Rozanov braced himself on one arm and cupped Hollander's hip with the other hand, angling him up, changing the angle until —

Hollander cried out. Full voice, no filter. His back arched clean off the bed and his hands scrabbled at Rozanov's shoulders and his legs wrapped around Rozanov's waist and locked. Rozanov hit the same spot again. Hollander's entire body shuddered.

"There — right there — fuck, don't stop, don't—"

Rozanov did not stop. He thrust into Hollander with a building rhythm — not fast, not rough, but deep and steady and aimed, and every thrust drew a sound out of Hollander that was louder and more broken than the one before and Rozanov was losing his mind. He was inside Shane Hollander and Shane Hollander was wrapped around him and making sounds that Rozanov was going to carry in his body like shrapnel and nothing in Rozanov's twenty years of living — not the draft, not his first NHL goal, not the first time a girl told him she loved him in a language he understood — nothing had felt like this.

Nothing had come close.

The realization hit him mid-thrust, like a puck to the chest: I can't give this up. It was not a thought. It was not a decision. It was a fact, the way gravity was a fact — fundamental, nonnegotiable, structural. He could not give this up. He could not go back to the Megans-or-Meghans and the clean exits and the nothing-after. He could not go back to a life where this didn't exist. The knowledge lodged in him like the name had — somewhere between his ribs, immovable, load-bearing.

He was inside Hollander and Hollander was saying his name and Rozanov could not let go.

"Harder," Hollander said. His heels dug into Rozanov's lower back. His hands were in Rozanov's hair, pulling, and the pull sent sparks down Rozanov's spine. "I can take it. Harder."

Rozanov gave him harder. Shifted his weight, drove in deeper, and the sound of their bodies was obscene and perfect — the slap of skin, the slick noise of the lube, the creak of a Ritz-Carlton bed frame that had presumably not been stress-tested for this specific scenario. Hollander took everything — every thrust, every inch, his body opening, adjusting, wanting, his hips moving in counterpoint with the focused precision of an athlete who had found the rhythm and was committed to it.

"I'm close," Hollander gasped. "I'm — Ilya, I'm going to—"

"Touch yourself."

Hollander's hand shot between them. Wrapped around his own cock. Two strokes — that was all, two strokes with Rozanov buried deep and hitting the spot — and Hollander came. His body clamped down around Rozanov so tight that Rozanov's vision whited out. Hollander's back bowed off the bed and his mouth opened in a silent scream that became a sound, raw and shattered, and he was coming on his own hand and his stomach and Rozanov could feel every pulse of it, every contraction, and the tightness was unbearable and the look on Hollander's face was unbearable and Rozanov couldn't —

He came. He came so hard his arms gave out and he collapsed against Hollander, his face pressed into Hollander's neck, his hips jerking, his body emptying into Hollander in waves that went on longer than they should have, each one pulling a sound out of him that he would have been embarrassed by if he'd been capable of embarrassment, which he wasn't, because he was somewhere beyond embarrassment, beyond thought, beyond the careful architecture of the person he'd built himself into. He was just — there. In it. With Hollander. And it was better than anything he had ever felt in his life and the better was the problem because the better meant he couldn't go back. 

The better meant this was the standard now. Everything before was the rough draft and this was the real thing and Rozanov was twenty years old and pinned to a man in a hotel room in Toronto and completely, structurally fucked.

Not the sex. The sex had been — the sex was the thing that had changed the molecular composition of his brain. But it was not the sex that had ruined him. It was the after. It was right now. It was Hollander's hand in his hair, slow, gentle, the way you'd touch something you were afraid of breaking. It was Hollander's heartbeat under his ear — fast, slowing, a metronome coming down from the ledge. It was the fact that Rozanov did not want to move. He wanted to stay inside Hollander, softening, useless, for the rest of the morning and possibly the rest of his life, and this was a problem of a magnitude he was not equipped to solve.

He had slept with — he tried to count. The number was large and imprecise and involved several countries. Women. Many women. And it had been fine. Good, sometimes. The release was real, the pleasure was real, the warmth of another body was real. But it had always been something his body did while his mind stayed separate. A transaction. Reliable. Clean. 

This had not been clean. This had been the opposite of clean. This had been his face in Hollander's neck and his eyes wet for the second time because Shane Hollander had come with Rozanov's name in his mouth and his body gripping Rozanov like he was trying to hold him there and the sounds he'd made — the sounds were going to live in Rozanov's nervous system forever, he understood this now with the calm clarity of a man surveying wreckage.

"Hey," Hollander said. His voice was destroyed. Barely there. His hand was still in Rozanov's hair. "You okay?"

"Yes."

"You're shaking."

He was shaking. He had not noticed. His body was doing things without consulting him — shaking, breathing too fast, pressing closer to Hollander like proximity could solve the problem of having to eventually be not-proximate.

"I am fine."

"You're a terrible liar."

"I am an excellent liar. I lie professionally. My entire public life is a lie."

Hollander's hand paused in his hair. Then resumed. "What is it."

Rozanov should have moved. Should have pulled out, dealt with the condom, gotten the washcloth, begun the process of converting what had just happened into something manageable. Something that could be filed. Something with edges.

This had no edges.

"I do not know," Rozanov said slowly, "how I am supposed to get on a bus in two hours and play hockey tonight and go back to Boston and pretend that this did not change everything."

The sentence was too honest. He heard it leave his mouth and wanted to grab it back, stuff it into the part of himself where things were kept unsaid, but it was out. In the room. In the bright, post-sex, sweat-smelling, come-stained air of room 1618, the sentence was out and Hollander had heard it and Rozanov could feel Hollander's breathing change against his temple.

"Everything," Hollander said. Carefully.

"Yes."

"You mean—"

"I mean I have had sex before. I have had a lot of sex. I am not — this is not a thing I say lightly. And what just happened was —" He stopped. His English was failing him, which happened when the feelings were too big for his second language. "I do not have the word."

"In English or Russian?"

"Either."

Hollander was quiet for a long time. Rozanov could hear the air conditioning. The city outside. His own heartbeat, which was taking its time returning to normal, which was the heart of a man who had just understood that normal was no longer an available setting.

Then Hollander said: "I think the word is 'mine.'"

Rozanov lifted his head. Looked at Hollander. Hollander was looking at the ceiling. His jaw was tight. His eyes were bright — wet, maybe, or just the light — and his hand was still in Rozanov's hair and the expression on his face was the expression of a person who had just said something they couldn't take back and was choosing not to take it back.

"I think," Hollander said again, still looking at the ceiling, "the word you're looking for is that I'm yours and you're mine and neither of us knows how to do this and we're going to have to figure it out because I am not — I can't go back to before. Before July. Before last night. Before this." He swallowed. "I can't go back to not knowing what this is."

Rozanov kissed him. Not hard. Not desperate. The kind of kiss that a person gives when they have run out of words and the only language left is the one that happens between mouths.

Then he got up, because they had two hours and because the condom situation required attention and because if he stayed in that bed with Hollander's body against his for one more minute he was going to miss the bus and not care.

---

They cleaned up. Room service. Omelette, pancakes, coffee, orange juice, extra toast because Hollander had vomited several times in the last eight hours and needed carbohydrates. They ate on the bed. Shoulders touching. Not talking about what this meant or how it would work or the fact that they lived in different cities and played for rival teams and existed in a sport that would not allow them to be what they were.

"I should—" Hollander gestured at his jeans on the floor. "Get dressed. Your bus is—"

"One hour."

Hollander put his jeans on. His gift-shop shirt. The tag was sticking up again. Rozanov reached over and tucked it in and his fingers stayed on the back of Hollander's neck and Hollander leaned into the touch, just barely, like a plant turning toward light, and Rozanov's chest did the thing except this time the thing had a name and the name was the word Hollander had given him.

Mine.

"Give me your phone," Hollander said.

Rozanov handed it over. Hollander opened the contact. Jane. Didn't change the name — because the world was what it was and they were who they were and the name on the screen could not be the name that mattered. But he scrolled down to the notes field. Typed one word. Handed it back.

When.

"I left a key card to 1614 on the nightstand," Rozanov said. "The room is paid through tomorrow."

"I found my hotel. It's the Hilton."

"There are four Hiltons in Toronto."

"I'll figure out which one."

"You will not figure out which one. You will stay at the Ritz-Carlton."

"Is this what you're like? In a... whatever this is?"

"Yes."

"Bossy. Logistically overbearing. Russian."

"These are features, not bugs."

Hollander almost smiled. Then the almost-smile became real and the real one was the expensive one — the one that cost something — except this time it didn't look like it cost anything at all.

He walked to the door. Stopped. Turned back. Crossed the room in three steps and kissed Rozanov — hard, fast, his hand on Rozanov's jaw, a kiss that was not a beginning and not an ending but a statement, a thesis, the first sentence of something that was going to be very long and very complicated and that neither of them could put down now.

"Good luck tonight," Hollander said.

"You are going to watch?"

"I'm in Toronto and you're playing the Guardians. Of course I'm going to watch."

"From where."

"My hotel room, probably. With room service. Like a normal person who is not playing tonight and has nowhere to be."

"You could come to the game."

Hollander looked at him. "You want me to come watch you play."

"I want you to see me score four goals on the Guardians and know that I was thinking about you during every single one."

Hollander's ears went red again. "You're insufferable."

"This is also a feature."

Hollander left. The door clicked shut. The room smelled like him. The room smelled like sex and hotel soap and pancakes and the particular specific scent that was the two of them together, which Rozanov was going to carry in his body the way he carried the cross — always, everywhere, invisible to everyone except the person who'd put it there.

---

The bus left at nine-fifteen. Rozanov was in the lobby at nine-twelve.

Cliff Marlow was already there, looking exactly like a man who had not slept and was proud of it. "Roz. You look like shit."

"Thank you."

"You didn't come back to the club last night."

"I was tired."

"Since when are you tired."

"Since always. I am a human being who requires sleep. This should not be breaking news."

Cliff gave him a look. The look lingered on the mark on Rozanov's neck. Rozanov put his collar up. Cliff's eyebrows went higher.

"Her name's Megan," Rozanov said. Because it was the closest available lie and because Megan-or-Meghan deserved at least this — to be the alibi, the cover story, the blonde excuse that made the world make sense. "Or Meghan. The spelling did not come up."

Cliff nodded. The look went away. The world was simple again — Rozanov had met a girl, the girl had given him a hickey, the hickey was on brand and the narrative was intact. Cliff clapped him on the shoulder and got on the bus.

Rozanov sat in his usual seat. Window. Second row. He pulled out his phone. The thread with Jane.

Jane: Good luck tonight.

Already sent. From before. The text from when Hollander was still in his room, still close enough to touch, still warm and wrecked and smelling like Rozanov's sheets.

Rozanov stared at the message. At the name. Jane. At the single word in the notes field underneath that no one would ever scroll down to find.

He thought about the bus ride to the arena. The morning skate. The game tonight — Hollander somewhere in Toronto, in a hotel room or a bar seat, watching on a screen. Watching Rozanov skate and hit and shoot and perform the public version of himself for twenty thousand people who did not know that the man on their television had, five hours ago, been inside Shane Hollander in a king suite four doors down from a room that smelled like vomit. And Hollander would watch, and Hollander would know. And underneath all of it — underneath the ice and the lights and the broadcast and the distance — underneath all of it would be this morning. This room. The sound Hollander made. The word mine.

Lily: I have a game-day problem.

Jane: What

Lily: My pregame routine involves thinking about the game. Specifically, thinking about the opposing team's weaknesses and how to exploit them.

Jane: Okay

Lily: I cannot think about the game. I can only think about you. This is a competitive disadvantage and I am holding you personally responsible.

Jane: So your official position is that having sex with me is going to make you play worse tonight?

Lily: My official position is that having sex with you has made it impossible to think about anything else and I have to play a professional hockey game in nine hours and I am going to be useless.

Jane: Sounds like a you problem.

Lily: It is a you problem. You are the problem. You have been the problem since July. You are the most distracting person I have ever met and now I know what you sound like when you come and this information is going to live in my head during the national anthem and I need you to take responsibility for that.

A long pause. Then:

Jane: For the record, I'm sitting in the lobby of your hotel reading this and I just turned very red and the concierge is looking at me.

Lily: Good.

Jane: I hope you play terribly tonight.

Lily: I will not play terribly. I am going to score four goals and you are going to watch from your hotel room and think about this morning.

Jane: I don't need four goals to think about this morning.

Jane: I'm going to think about this morning for the rest of my life.

Rozanov pressed his thumb against the cross. Not hard. Not desperate. Just a touch.

The rest of my life.

The bus pulled away from the hotel. Toronto slid past the windows. Cliff was snoring. The coaches were talking about the Guardians' power play. Rozanov's body was on the bus and his mind was in room 1618 and his phone was in his pocket with a contact called Jane and a word called when and a man called Shane who tasted like hotel soap and kissed like the end of the world and whose body had fit around Rozanov's like it had been designed for it.

He closed his eyes. He could still feel it — the heat, the grip, the sound. Hollander under him. Hollander around him. The way Hollander's face had looked when he'd said mine — not claiming, not possessive, but naming. Identifying. The way you'd point at the sun and say that. That is what everything orbits.

Rozanov was twenty years old. He had thirty-one goals. He had a face that got him into places that checked ID and a name that sportswriters used as shorthand for talent and trouble. He had a bus seat and a game tonight and a life that made sense from the outside and had never made sense from the inside, not once, not ever.

And he had Shane Hollander's phone number saved under Jane and the feeling of Shane Hollander's body and the knowledge, new and permanent and terrifying, that he could not let go.

Could not. Would not. The distinction was academic. The result was the same.

His phone buzzed one last time.

Jane: Hey Lily.

Lily: What.

Jane: When.

When.

Rozanov put the phone away. Pressed the cross. Watched Toronto disappear behind him like a city that didn't know what it had witnessed.

He had a game to play. He had a life to get back to — the public one, the one with the girls and the vodka sodas and the smile he kept on hand for reporters. He had a rivalry to maintain.

But underneath it all, like a heartbeat, like a current, like the one thing that was true when everything else was performance:

Mine. When. Yours.

 

Chapter 3: Hospital

Chapter Summary

Shane Hollander does the responsible thing. He goes to the ER, gets tested, and starts piecing together what happened at that club. But the heart rate monitor doesn't lie — and when a man in a Bears tracksuit bursts through the curtain, the monitor tells Shane's best friend everything.

The walk-in clinic on Dundas didn't open until eight, which Shane knew because he'd Googled it while sitting on the edge of the Ritz-Carlton bed in his hotel gift-shop shirt and his jeans from last night and the specific, full-body awareness of a person who had, in the last twelve hours, been drugged, rescued, kissed, fucked, and fed pancakes by his rival, and who now needed to do something about at least one of those things in a medically responsible way.

The ER at Toronto Western opened at all times because that was how ERs worked.

Shane took a cab. He sat in the back seat and looked out the window at Toronto doing its Wednesday morning thing — commuters, construction, a woman walking a dog that was wearing a sweater, which was either a Toronto thing or a Wednesday thing — and he did not think about Ilya Rozanov.

He did not think about Ilya Rozanov's hands.

He did not think about the sound Ilya Rozanov had made when Shane had —

He was not thinking about it.

He was thinking about the fact that someone had put something in his drink last night and his heart was still doing something it shouldn't be doing — faster than his resting rate, which Shane knew because Shane knew his resting heart rate the way he knew his faceoff percentage and his shooting accuracy and his mother's phone number: precisely, automatically, as a fixed point in the architecture of his life. His resting heart rate was fifty-two beats per minute. It had been fifty-two beats per minute since he was seventeen and the Voyageurs' team doctor had said that's excellent, son, that's an athlete's heart and Shane had filed it away the way he filed everything.

It was not fifty-two right now. It had not been fifty-two since he'd woken up on the floor of room 1614 at five in the morning with a mouth that tasted like bile and a phone full of texts from someone named Lily. It was closer to eighty. Maybe eighty-five. And while part of that was — attributable to — while some of that might have been the result of what had happened in room 1618 between six and eight a.m. — the rest of it was chemical. The rest of it was whatever someone had put in his drink at a club on King West while he'd been at the bar waiting for Matt to come back with another round.

So. The ER.

The triage nurse was a woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain and the particular affect of a person who had seen everything and was not interested in being surprised. Shane told her he'd been at a club the night before. That he'd had three drinks — vodka tonic, two beers — and that his reaction had been disproportionate to what he'd consumed. Pupil dilation. Impaired motor function. Disorientation. Memory — he paused on this one. His memory was mostly intact, which was either good news or bad news depending on what you wanted to remember.

"Someone might have put something in one of my drinks," Shane said.

The nurse looked at him over her reading glasses. "When was this."

"Sometime between eleven and midnight. Last night."

"And you're coming in now."

"I — I wasn't — I had someone with me. A friend. He made sure I was safe." The word friend did something complicated in his mouth. "But my heart rate's been high since I woke up and I wanted to get tested. To know what it was."

The nurse wrote something on her clipboard. Did not ask follow-up questions about the friend. Shane appreciated this.

They put him in a curtained-off area. A doctor came — young, maybe thirty, the kind of tired that meant he was at the end of a shift, not the beginning. He listened to Shane's heart. Took his blood pressure. Looked at his pupils with a penlight and said "some residual dilation, nothing dangerous" and ordered bloodwork and a urine test.

"We'll run a tox screen," the doctor said. "Common date-rape drugs — GHB, ketamine, rohypnol, benzodiazepines. If it's been more than twelve hours, some of them may have metabolized, but we'll see what we can pick up."

"How long for results."

"Couple hours. We're going to start you on fluids in the meantime. Your heart rate's elevated — ninety-two — which is consistent with what you're describing, but your vitals are otherwise stable. You're in good shape." The doctor looked at his chart. "You're — are you an athlete?"

"Yes."

"What sport?"

"Hockey."

The doctor nodded the way people in Toronto nodded when you said hockey — the nod of a city that believed professional hockey was a public utility, like water or the TTC. "Your baseline fitness is probably why this didn't hit you harder. Someone your size, in your condition — you metabolized whatever it was faster than they expected."

They put the IV in his left arm. The saline was cold going in and then not cold and then nothing — just a tube and a bag and the quiet drip of fluids into a body that was, the doctor had assured him, no worse for wear.

No worse for wear. Shane looked at the ceiling tiles. The ceiling tiles were the kind of off-white that existed only in hospitals and government buildings, the color of infrastructure that nobody had chosen and nobody would change. He counted them. Fourteen tiles from the curtain to the wall. Seven across. Ninety-eight total. This was what Shane did when he needed to not think about something — he counted things. He had counted the bolts in the boards at his first NHL game. He had counted the ceiling tiles in his Montreal apartment the night after the draft, lying awake in a city he didn't know yet, seventeen years old and alone for the first time in his life.

He was counting now because if he stopped counting he would think about Ilya Rozanov's mouth on his neck and the weight of Ilya Rozanov's body and the sound Ilya Rozanov had made when he'd come and the way Ilya Rozanov had said I do not know how I am supposed to get on a bus in two hours and play hockey tonight and go back to Boston and pretend that this did not change everything and Shane could not — he could not process that right now. He could not process that in a hospital bed with an IV in his arm and a tox screen pending and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like the world's least helpful soundtrack.

So he counted tiles. And then he stopped counting tiles and picked up his phone.

He should have been on the 401 by now. The plan — the original plan, the plan from before someone had put something in his drink and Ilya Rozanov had carried him out of a nightclub and the entire structural integrity of Shane's life had shifted on its foundations — had been simple. Drive to Toronto on Monday. Steve's birthday dinner Tuesday night. A couple drinks, because Shane didn't usually drink but it was Steve's twenty-first and Steve had been Shane's best friend since the seventh grade and you didn't not drink on your best friend's twenty-first birthday. Then back to the hotel. Early checkout Wednesday morning. Five-hour drive to Montreal. Thursday afternoon flight to Tampa. Game against the Lightning Friday night.

Simple. Clean. The kind of plan Shane liked — every hour accounted for, every variable managed, the controlled predictability of a person who did not like surprises because surprises meant things were outside his control and things outside his control meant things could go wrong and things going wrong meant —

Things had gone wrong.

He opened his messages. The group chat — the one from high school, the one Steve had named Boys Night with the kind of unselfconscious enthusiasm that only Steve could manage — had seven unread messages.

Steve: yo shane did you get home ok?? you were looking rough lol

Steve: shaaaaane

Matt: I think Rozanov was at that club

Matt: swear to god I saw him at the bar. Boston's in town for the Guardians game

Steve: no way lol

Matt: dead serious. 6'3, curly hair, russian looking

Kevin: matt you think every tall guy is a hockey player

Matt: I KNOW WHAT ROZANOV LOOKS LIKE KEV

Shane stared at the screen. Matt had seen Rozanov. Matt had seen Rozanov at the bar and had texted the group chat about it and Shane had not seen these messages because Shane had been in Rozanov's hotel room having the most significant sexual experience of his life while his high school friends debated whether the tall Russian at the bar was actually the tall Russian who had, at that moment, been holding Shane's wrist and saying if you can look at me in the morning and say my name and know what month it is and choose this with your whole brain and not just your body.

He closed the group chat. Opened a direct message to Steve.

Shane: Hey. I'm fine. Got back to my hotel okay last night.

Steve: good!! dude you were so out of it when we left lol. lightweight

Shane: Yeah, about that. I need to talk to you about something. I think someone put something in my drink last night.

The typing indicator appeared immediately.

Steve: What

Steve: What do you mean

Shane: I mean I had three drinks and I could barely stand up. My pupils were blown. I didn't know what month it was.

Steve: Holy shit

Steve: Shane are you serious

Steve: We left you there. We just left and you were sitting in the booth and we thought you were just drunk

Shane: I'm at Toronto Western. They're running a tox screen.

Steve: I'm coming right now

Shane: You don't have to

Steve: We LEFT you there Shane. I'm coming. Don't move.

Shane: I'm on an IV. I literally can't move.

Shane put the phone down. Picked it up. The reflex — the phone-checking, the screen-refreshing, the compulsive monitoring of a device that connected him to the outside world — was worse today. Because today the phone also contained a contact called Lily, and the contact called Lily had texted him things this morning that Shane could not look at in a hospital bed without his heart rate doing something the monitors would pick up.

He did not look at the contact called Lily. He looked at the IV bag. Counted the drips. One per second. Sixty per minute. Three thousand six hundred per hour.

He thought about the night. Not the Ilya parts — the other parts. The before parts. The sequence of events that had led to someone putting something in his drink.

They'd gone to dinner first. Steve, Matt, Kevin, and Shane. Italian place on College Street that Steve had picked because Steve picked every restaurant based on whether they had garlic bread, and this one had garlic bread. They'd eaten. They'd talked.

Matt was finishing his engineering degree at Queen's and was stressed about his capstone project. Kevin was working at his dad's insurance brokerage and pretending to enjoy it. Steve was — Steve was Steve. Loud, warm, the kind of person who made every room feel smaller and better. Steve had known Shane since they were twelve. Steve had driven Shane to his billet family's house the first time Shane left for junior hockey.

Steve did not know Shane was gay. Nobody knew Shane was gay. Shane barely knew Shane was gay, or had barely known, until July, until room 1410, until a Russian with dark curls and a cross around his neck had kissed him against a wall and Shane had understood, with the blinding clarity of a person who had been looking at the wrong map, that this was where he'd been trying to go.

After dinner they'd gone to the club. This had been Steve's idea — Steve wanted to go out, Steve always wanted to go out, Steve's birthday wish was to get drunk at a club on King West and Steve's birthday wish was law. Shane had not wanted to go. Shane never wanted to go to clubs.

Clubs were loud and sticky and full of women who looked at him with the particular expectation that came with being six feet tall and having a jaw that photographed well, and Shane had to perform the version of himself that responded to that expectation, which was exhausting, which was the thing he'd been doing his entire life — performing the version that was expected, the straight version, the version that looked at women and did not look at men and did not think about the shape of Ilya Rozanov's mouth during a CCM photoshoot.

But it was Steve's birthday. So he went.

At the club, Matt had gone to the bar. Steve and Kevin were at the booth. Shane was at the booth. Matt came back with drinks — a vodka tonic for Shane, a beer for himself, beers for Steve and Kevin. They drank. They talked. The music was loud and terrible and Shane's jaw hurt from clenching it against the bass. Matt went back to the bar. Shane's drink was empty. Matt brought another round.

Then — and this was where Shane's memory had a seam, a place where the fabric of the evening didn't quite line up — then there was a drink Shane hadn't ordered. On the table. Near his hand. He'd assumed Matt had gotten him another vodka tonic. He'd drunk it. It had tasted slightly different — sweeter, maybe, or flatter, the tonic less sharp — but he hadn't thought about it because who thought about the specific flavor profile of a vodka tonic at midnight in a club where the music was in your teeth.

And then the floor had tilted.

And then Rozanov had been standing in front of him saying what did you drink with a voice like a closing door.

Shane picked up his phone. Opened the group chat.

Shane: Question for everyone. After Matt's second bar run, did anyone else bring drinks to the table?

Steve: What do you mean

Shane: I had a drink I didn't order. It was on the table. I assumed it was from Matt but I need to know if someone else brought it.

Matt: I only did two runs. Vodka tonic and a beer for you, beers for me and Kev, Steve had the whiskey sours

Shane: So the third drink on the table wasn't from any of you.

Kevin: what third drink

Shane: There was another glass. Different shape. I thought Matt got me a refill.

Matt: I didn't.

Steve: Shane what the fuck

Shane: Someone bought me a drink I didn't order and I drank it and whatever was in it is the reason I'm in a hospital right now.

Steve: I'm in an Uber I'll be there in 10 minutes

Shane: Did any of you see anyone near our table? Anyone who came over, talked to us, anything?

Matt: there was that group by the back wall. Kev thought they were Guardians players

Kevin: I said they MIGHT have been. They had the haircuts.

Shane: Did any of them come near our booth?

Kevin: I don't remember man. It was loud and I was pretty hammered by then

Matt: wait

Matt: there was a guy. Not from the group by the wall. Shorter guy, dark hair, came over and asked if we were having a good time. I thought he was just being friendly. He was near the table for like a minute.

Shane: When.

Matt: After my second bar run. Maybe 11:30? 11:45?

Shane: Did he have a drink with him.

Matt: I... yeah. I think so. He was holding something.

Shane's hand tightened on the phone. A guy. Dark hair. Near the table for a minute. Holding a drink. The timeline fit — Matt's second run would have been around eleven-thirty, and by midnight Shane was already slipping, already feeling the floor tilt and his pupils blow and his thoughts go soft at the edges.

Someone had walked up to their table. Had talked to them — to Steve, probably, because Steve talked to everyone, because Steve's birthday energy was a gravitational field that pulled strangers in. And while they were talking, while the music was loud and the lights were bruise-colored and nobody was watching, the guy had set a drink down. Or switched one out. Or added something to the glass Shane had left on the table while he'd been laughing at something Kevin said.

And then the guy had left. And Shane had drunk it. And the rest of the night had happened.

Shane: Can you describe him. Anything else. What he was wearing.

Matt: Shane I was three beers in at that point. He was average. Normal looking. Dark hair. Maybe late 20s? I wasn't really paying attention. I'm sorry.

Shane: Don't apologize. I'm not mad at you.

Matt: I should have been paying more attention. I should have noticed the drink.

Shane: None of you should have had to notice. That's not how this is supposed to work.

Shane put the phone down. His hand was shaking. Not from the drugs — the drugs were mostly out of his system, the doctor had said, the IV was just precautionary — but from the knowledge. The specific, clarifying, terrible knowledge that a stranger had walked up to his table on his best friend's birthday and put something in his drink with the intention of — what. What had the plan been. Where would Shane have ended up if Rozanov hadn't been leaning against a pillar across the room with his vodka soda and his watchful eyes and his inconvenient, structural, load-bearing need to cross a dance floor for a man he'd been pretending not to think about for seven months.

Slovakia, Rozanov had said.

Shane almost laughed. It came out wrong — more air than sound, the kind of laugh that lived next door to something else.

The curtain pulled back. Steve.

Steve looked exactly like a person who had been celebrating his twenty-first birthday twelve hours ago and had just taken a panicked Uber to a hospital — rumpled, hungover, wearing the same shirt from last night with a jacket thrown over it and his hair doing something architectural. His face, when he saw Shane in the bed with the IV and the monitors, did a thing that Shane had only seen once before — at thirteen, when Steve's dog had been hit by a car and Steve had knelt on the sidewalk and his face had collapsed inward like a building losing its frame.

"Shane," Steve said. Just his name. Like it was a complete sentence.

"I'm fine."

"You're in a hospital bed."

"I'm in a hospital bed getting fluids. It's precautionary. The doctor said my vitals are stable."

Steve sat in the chair next to the bed. The chair was plastic and blue and designed for maximum discomfort, which was a design choice hospitals made deliberately, Shane suspected, to discourage visitors from staying too long. Steve sat in it like he planned to stay forever.

"Tell me everything," Steve said.

Shane told him. Not everything — not the Rozanov parts, not the room, not the kiss against the wall or the hand in his jeans or the morning, none of that — but the everything that Steve was allowed to know. The drink. The symptoms. The club. The fact that someone he didn't recognize had walked up to their table and left a drink that Shane had consumed because he'd assumed it was from Matt.

"And then what," Steve said. "You left?"

"Someone — a guy at the club saw I was messed up and helped me get out. Got me a cab. Got me to a hotel." The sentences were careful. Edited. The version Shane could say out loud without his voice doing something the monitors would catch.

"What guy."

"Just — someone. From the club. He recognized the signs."

Steve looked at him. Steve had known Shane since they were twelve. Steve had been there when Shane had broken his wrist in bantam and hadn't cried, not once, not in front of anyone. Steve knew what Shane looked like when he was telling the truth and what he looked like when he was telling a version of the truth and Steve was looking at him now with the expression of a person who knew which one this was.

"Someone from the club," Steve said.

"Yeah."

Steve didn't push. This was the thing about Steve — he was loud and warm and filled every room, but he knew when not to push. He'd known since they were kids. He'd known when Shane's silences meant I'm fine and when they meant I'm not fine and I can't tell you why. Steve couldn't know why. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But Steve sat in the blue plastic chair and put his hand on the bed rail and said, "Okay. Someone from the club. I'm glad he was there."

"Yeah," Shane said. "Me too."

The tox screen came back at ten forty-five. The doctor pulled the curtain closed and told Shane in the measured, gentle tone of a person delivering information they'd delivered before that the test had detected traces of gamma-hydroxybutyrate — GHB — in his system. The drug had largely metabolized, which was consistent with the timeline. At the dosage they estimated, based on residual levels, the effects would have included euphoria, reduced inhibitions, motor impairment, and — at higher concentrations — confusion and memory disruption.

"You're lucky," the doctor said. "In someone with less muscle mass, less cardiovascular fitness, or someone who'd had more to drink — the outcome could have been significantly worse."

"Can I go?" Shane said.

"We'd like to finish the IV bag. Another hour. Your heart rate's come down to seventy-eight — still above what I'd expect for someone in your condition, but within normal range. Are you experiencing any other symptoms? Nausea, dizziness, confusion?"

"No."

"Any memory gaps from last night?"

Shane thought about Ilya Rozanov pulling him up from a booth with a hand under his arm. About the cab. About his head on Rozanov's shoulder and the smell of cigarettes and leather. About if you can look at me in the morning and say my name.

"No," Shane said. "I remember everything."

The doctor left. Steve was still in the chair. He'd been texting — Matt and Kevin, Shane assumed, updating them, the group chat probably exploding with the particular male combination of anger and helplessness that happened when something terrible happened to someone you cared about and there was nothing to punch.

"GHB," Steve said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

"I'm going to kill him."

"You don't know who he is."

"I'm going to find out and then I'm going to kill him."

"Steve."

"Someone roofied you at my birthday party. At my — I invited you out. I picked the club. I —" Steve's voice cracked. It was a small crack, barely audible, but Shane heard it because Shane heard everything about Steve, the way Steve heard everything about Shane, minus the one enormous thing Shane could not say. "This is my fault."

"This is not your fault."

"I should have been watching. I should have —"

"You were celebrating your birthday. You were having fun. That's what you were supposed to be doing. The person who did this is the person whose fault it is. Not yours."

Steve looked at the floor. Then at Shane. His eyes were red — not crying, not Steve, but the red of a person who was holding something back by force.

"I'm calling the police," Steve said.

"I'll file a report. But Steve — I'm a professional hockey player. If this gets out —"

"Fuck hockey."

"I can't fuck hockey. Hockey is my job."

"Someone drugged you."

"I know. And I'm going to handle it. But I need to be careful about how." Shane looked at the IV bag. Counted the drips. Eighty-seven left, at one per second, which meant eighty-seven more seconds until the bag was empty, which meant — math, numbers, the clean certainty of things that could be counted. "I have a game in Tampa on Friday. I'm supposed to be driving back to Montreal right now."

"You're not driving anywhere today."

"I know. I'll fly. There's a five o'clock flight."

"Shane, you were just drugged."

"I was drugged twelve hours ago. The doctor said I'm fine. The IV is precautionary." He looked at Steve. "I'm fine."

He was fine. He was fine in the way that he was always fine — functionally, externally, the visible architecture intact. The invisible architecture was a different matter. The invisible architecture had been rearranged this morning by a man with dark curls and a gold cross and hands that had shaken when he'd pulled Shane's wrist out of his jeans, and Shane could not think about that right now because right now he was in a hospital bed and his best friend was sitting next to him and the word mine was living in his chest like a second heartbeat and if he thought about it — if he let himself think about it — the monitors were going to pick it up.

He picked up his phone. Counted the drips.

Shane: The club from last night. Do they have security cameras?

He sent it to Matt, because Matt was the practical one, the engineer, the person who would know how to find out.

Matt: Probably. Most clubs on King West do. Why?

Shane: If I file a police report, they might be able to pull the footage. The guy who came to our table. If we can get a face, a timestamp.

Matt: I'll call the club. I know a guy who promotes there, he might be able to get us the manager's info.

Shane: Thanks Matt.

Matt: Shane I'm really sorry. I keep thinking about how we all just left. We left and you were sitting there and none of us —

Shane: You didn't know. I didn't even know. The person who got me out almost didn't catch it either.

He put the phone down. Eighty-seven drips had become forty-two. The fluorescent light buzzed. Steve was texting with his jaw set and his leg bouncing, which was Steve's version of sitting still, which was not actually still at all.

Shane should have been on the highway. Five hours to Montreal. Pack. Thursday flight to Tampa. Game-day skate Friday morning. The controlled, predictable, hour-by-hour life he'd built for himself — the life that made sense, the life that held still when he needed it to.

That life was supposed to be happening right now, on the 401, with a coffee from Tim Hortons and a podcast about hockey analytics and the particular solitude of a long drive that Shane had always preferred to company because company meant performing and performing meant pretending and pretending was exhausting.

Instead he was in a hospital. And the plan was broken. And in the wreckage of the plan, underneath the IV and the tox screen and the group chat and Steve's cracked voice, underneath all of it, was the thing Shane was not thinking about.

Rozanov's face when he'd come. The way his arms had given out. The way his eyes had been wet — not crying, something else, something structural — and he'd pressed his face into Shane's neck and shaken. The way he'd said I do not know how I am supposed to pretend that this did not change everything. In his second language. Because his first language didn't have the word either.

Shane was not thinking about it. He was counting drips. Thirty-one.

His phone buzzed. Not the group chat. Not Steve.

Lily.

Lily: Morning skate was fine. Guardians defense is bad. I will score many goals. How is your drive.

Shane looked at the message. The message was normal. Light. The kind of text a person sent when they were trying to be normal about something that was not normal, and the effort was so transparent and so endearing that Shane's chest did something the monitors almost caught.

He should lie. He should say drive's good, boring, listening to a podcast. He should maintain the fiction that everything was fine and he was on the highway and the morning had been a contained event that would not bleed into the rest of their lives.

He could not lie to Rozanov. He had tried, last night, to control the narrative — I'm fine, I don't want to leave — and Rozanov had looked through every version and seen the real one underneath. Shane could not lie to a person who saw through him. It was structurally impossible. It was like trying to hide something from a room with no walls.

Jane: I'm not driving.

Lily: Why not.

Jane: I'm at Toronto Western.

Lily: What is Toronto Western.

Jane: The hospital.

Nothing. No typing indicator. No dots. Just the blank, terrible silence of a phone screen that was not showing a response, and Shane could feel the silence like a physical thing — could feel Rozanov on the other end reading the word hospital and the silence was the sound of a person whose brain had stopped producing language.

Then, all at once:

Lily: What happened

Lily: Are you okay

Lily: What floor

Lily: I am coming

Jane: You have a game in four hours.

Lily: What floor, Hollander.

Jane: You can't come to the hospital. If someone sees you.

Lily: WHAT FLOOR.

Jane: Third. But Ilya —

Lily: Do not move.

Shane stared at the phone. His heart rate, on the monitor beside the bed, ticked from seventy-eight to eighty-four. Steve looked at the monitor. Looked at Shane.

"You okay?"

"Fine."

"Your heart rate just went up."

"I'm fine. It's — I just remembered something I have to deal with."

Steve looked at him the way Steve had been looking at him all morning — the I know you're not telling me everything and I'm choosing not to push look, the look that was kindness and patience and the particular heartbreak of loving someone who wouldn't let you all the way in.

Shane turned the phone face-down on the bed.

The IV bag was almost empty. Twenty drips. Nineteen. He counted them because if he didn't count them he would think about the fact that Ilya Rozanov — who had a game against the Toronto Guardians in four hours, who had a morning skate and a pregame routine and a bus to catch and a coaching staff who would notice his absence — was coming to a hospital. For Shane. Because Shane had texted the word hospital and Rozanov had responded with what floor three times and I am coming and had not, at any point, mentioned the game.

The game that mattered. The game that was the reason Rozanov was in Toronto in the first place. The game that, four hours from now, would put Rozanov on a sheet of ice in front of twenty thousand people who believed that what they were watching was the most important thing happening to Ilya Rozanov that day, and who would be wrong.

Twelve drips. Eleven.

Shane closed his eyes. The monitors beeped. Steve's leg bounced. The fluorescent lights buzzed.

Seven. Six. Five.

The curtain moved.

Rozanov was wearing a Bears tracksuit. The tracksuit was black and gold and had the Bears logo on the chest and he was wearing it with the wild-eyed, barely contained energy of a person who had dressed in whatever was closest and moved very fast. His hair was damp — from the post-skate shower, Shane realized, which meant he'd come straight from the rink. His eyes found Shane immediately, bypassing Steve, bypassing the monitors, bypassing the room, going directly to Shane in the bed with the IV in his arm like a missile finding its target.

Something in Rozanov's face — the face Shane had memorized in a different kind of light, under different circumstances, four hours ago — broke open. Not collapsed. Broke open. The way a door broke open when someone hit it too hard from the other side, and what was on the other side was not controlled or managed or performed. What was on the other side was fear.

"Hollander," Rozanov said. Then — catching himself, editing, the public name reasserting itself — "What happened."

Steve stood up. Steve was five-ten and Rozanov was six-three and Steve looked at Rozanov the way a person looks at a stranger who has just burst through a hospital curtain like he owns the building, which was to say: confused, protective, and trying very hard to process the Bears tracksuit.

"Who are you?" Steve said.

Shane opened his mouth. Nothing came out. His brain — his meticulous, orderly, filing-cabinet brain — was trying to produce a sentence that explained why Ilya Rozanov, center for the Boston Bears, rival, enemy, the person whose name sportswriters used in the same sentence as Shane's as shorthand for competition, was standing in his hospital room with a face like the world was ending, and his brain could not produce that sentence because no version of it was compatible with the life Steve knew about.

"I am—" Rozanov started.

"He's the one from last night," Shane said. Quickly. Before Rozanov could say something that could not be unsaid. "The guy from the club. The one who helped me."

Steve looked at Rozanov. Looked at the tracksuit. Looked at the Bears logo. His mouth opened. Closed. Shane watched the recognition travel across Steve's face — not recognition in the sense of understanding what Rozanov was to Shane, but recognition of who Rozanov was to hockey. To the world.

"You're Ilya Rozanov," Steve said.

"Yes."

"You — you were the one who—"

"I saw him in the booth. His friends were leaving. He was not — his eyes were wrong." Rozanov's voice was steady in the way a bridge was steady when there was too much weight on it — holding, barely, through engineering rather than ease. His eyes had not left Shane. "I took him to my hotel. I got him a room."

Steve looked at Shane. Shane looked at the IV bag, which was empty. Zero drips.

"The doctor said it was GHB," Shane said. To Rozanov. Because Rozanov was looking at him with those eyes — the ones from this morning, the ones that said mine without saying it — and Shane needed to give him information because information was what you gave a person who was scared when you couldn't give them the thing they actually wanted, which was to touch you, which Rozanov could not do because Steve was standing right there and the world was the world and they were who they were.

"GHB," Rozanov repeated. His jaw tightened. His hand went to his chest — to the cross, Shane knew, even through the tracksuit — and pressed.

"Traces. Mostly metabolized. My heart rate's been elevated but the doctor said—"

"I am going to find who did this."

"You can't—"

"I am going to find who did this and I am going to—" Rozanov stopped. He was looking at Shane and his face was doing the thing from this morning — the breaking open, the walls coming down, the raw structure underneath — except this time it was not in the privacy of room 1618. It was in a hospital curtain-area with Steve standing three feet away and the monitors beeping and the fluorescent lights buzzing and Rozanov's eyes were bright and his hand was on his cross and he looked like a man who had just been told that the thing he'd found — the thing he'd said he couldn't let go of — had almost been taken from him before he'd finished finding it.

"I'm fine," Shane said. Softly. The softly was a mistake. The softly was the voice from this morning — the voice that said I'm choosing this and I've got you and mine — and the softly did not belong in a hospital room with Steve standing right there, but Shane said it anyway because Rozanov's face needed it. Because Rozanov's face was the face of a person who was holding a door closed with his body and the thing behind the door was going to break through.

Rozanov took a breath. Nodded. The nod was tight and controlled and cost him something visible.

"Good," Rozanov said. "Good. That is — good."

Steve was looking between them. Back and forth. Shane. Rozanov. Shane. The way a person watches a tennis match when they're not sure which player to root for. Shane could feel Steve's gaze and he knew — with the cold clarity of a person who was very good at knowing when he was being seen — that Steve was reading something. Not the full text. Not the story. But the footnotes. The tone. The way Rozanov had said Hollander when he'd walked in and the way it had sounded nothing like how rivals said each other's names.

"Thank you," Steve said to Rozanov. His voice was different now. The anger was still there — Steve's anger ran hot and close to the surface, always had — but underneath it was something else. Gratitude. The specific gratitude of a person who was imagining the alternative. "For getting him out. For — whatever you did. Thank you."

Rozanov nodded. His eyes were still on Shane. "I should — I have to go. The game."

"You came here before your game," Steve said. Not a question. An observation. The observation of a person who was putting things together slowly and who would, Shane knew, continue putting them together long after Rozanov left this room.

"He texted me that he was in a hospital," Rozanov said. Simply. Like this explained it. Like this was the only information a person needed — the word hospital and the name of the person in it — and everything else was self-evident.

Shane's heart rate, on the monitor, was ninety-one.

"Rozanov," Shane said. "Go play your game."

Rozanov looked at him. The look lasted three seconds. In three seconds, the look contained: the nightclub, the cab, his shoulder, the floor, the stopping, the morning, the bed, the cross between them, the word mine, the knowledge that Shane was in a hospital because someone had tried to take him and had failed because Rozanov had been there, and the other knowledge — the worse knowledge, the knowledge that was going to keep Rozanov awake tonight and tomorrow night and every night — that if Rozanov had not been at that club, if Rozanov had not been leaning against that pillar, if Rozanov had taken Megan-or-Meghan back to the Ritz-Carlton and done the expected thing with the expected person, Shane would have been alone. In a booth. With GHB in his system. And his friends would have left. And the man with the dark hair would have come back.

Three seconds. All of that.

"I will call you after the game," Rozanov said. 

"Okay."

"Drink water."

"I'm on an IV. I'm literally being given water intravenously."

"Drink more water."

"Go."

Rozanov went. The curtain fell closed behind him. His footsteps — fast, heavy, the footsteps of a six-three athlete who did not know how to move slowly when the person he'd just left was in a hospital bed — echoed down the hallway and then were gone.

The room was quiet. The monitors beeped. The IV bag was empty and the nurse would come soon to remove it. Steve was sitting in the blue plastic chair. Steve was looking at the curtain Rozanov had disappeared through with an expression that Shane could not read, which was unusual because Shane could always read Steve, had been reading Steve since they were twelve.

"Shane," Steve said.

"Yeah."

"That was Ilya Rozanov."

"Yes."

"Ilya Rozanov, who you are supposedly rivals with."

"We are rivals."

"He just left morning skate before a game to come to your hospital room because you texted him."

"Yes."

Steve was quiet. Then: "When you said 'someone from the club' helped you last night. You meant Ilya Rozanov carried you out of a nightclub and took care of you and got you your own hotel room and you have his cell phone number and he has yours and he just walked in here looking at you like—"

Steve stopped. Shane's heart rate was ninety-six. The monitor beeped faster. Steve looked at the monitor. Looked at Shane.

"Like what," Shane said. His voice was very controlled. Very even. The voice he used in post-game pressers when reporters asked questions he didn't want to answer. The voice that gave nothing away. Except his heart rate was on the monitor and the monitor was giving everything away and Shane could not control his own heartbeat, which was the first thing in his life he had been unable to control, and it had started this morning in room 1618 when Ilya Rozanov had said everything and meant it.

Steve looked at the monitor. Then at Shane. Then at the curtain.

"Nothing," Steve said. Gently. The way you'd set something fragile down on a table. "Like nothing. Forget I said anything."

Shane counted the ceiling tiles. Ninety-eight. His heart rate, on the monitor, was ninety-four. Ninety-two. Slowing. Returning to something closer to normal, which was a word that did not mean what it used to mean.

His phone buzzed.

Lily: You are going to be okay.

Not a question. A statement. A fact Rozanov was declaring into existence the way Rozanov declared everything — by deciding it was true and then making the world agree.

Jane: I know.

Lily: I cannot think about what would have happened if I was not there. I have tried to think about it and my brain will not allow it. This is the first time my brain has ever protected me from something and I do not like it.

Jane: Don't think about it.

Lily: I am going to play hockey now. I am going to score goals and hit people and do my job. And the entire time I am going to be thinking about you in that bed with that tube in your arm and how if I had not been at that stupid club with the stupid name you would have been alone and someone would have —

Lily: I cannot finish that sentence.

Jane: Then don't.

Lily: Mine.

One word. No context. No explanation. Sitting on the screen like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples went all the way to the edges and kept going.

Shane looked at the word. At the ceiling tiles. At Steve, who was looking at his own phone with the careful focus of a person who was giving Shane privacy without leaving the room.

He typed one word back.

Jane: Yours.

He put the phone face-down on the bed. Closed his eyes. Let the monitor beep. Let the fluorescent lights buzz. Let Steve sit in the blue plastic chair and not ask the question he was clearly, gently, patiently not asking.

Ninety-eight ceiling tiles. One empty IV bag. One tox screen positive for GHB. One text that said mine. One that said yours.

Shane Hollander was twenty years old. He had forty-one points and a game in Tampa on Friday and a secret that was shaped like a man with dark curls and a gold cross and who said I am coming three times before asking a single other question.

He was fine. He was going to be fine. He was going to fly to Montreal and then to Tampa and play his game and do his job and be the version of himself the world expected.

But underneath — underneath all of it, like a current, like a pulse, like the one true thing:

Yours.

 

Chapter 4: Fourteen-Ten

Chapter Summary

Ilya Rozanov plays the angriest hockey game of his life. Five goals. Every one of them for Shane. Then he calls his coach, lies about a family emergency, and boards a midnight flight to Montreal — because the buzzer code is 1410 and some things can't wait until morning.

The pregame routine was supposed to go like this: nap, meal, stretch, tape, skate. In that order. The order mattered. The order was the architecture of a game day and Rozanov did not deviate from the architecture because the architecture was the thing that kept the rest of his brain quiet — the part that thought too much, felt too much, wanted things it could not have. The architecture was the cage. The routine was the lock.

The lock was broken.

He could not nap. He lay on the hotel bed with his eyes closed and his body horizontal and his brain running a loop that went: Shane in a hospital bed. IV in his arm. GHB. Someone put GHB in Shane's drink. Someone walked up to a table where Shane was sitting with his friends on his best friend's birthday and put something in his glass with the intention of — what. Taking him. Hurting him. Using him. Taking the person who six hours ago had been underneath Rozanov saying his name and —

He opened his eyes. Stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was the same ceiling he'd been staring at all night and all morning and it had not improved.

The fury was new. Not the emotion — Rozanov had been angry before, had been angry frequently, had been angry at his father and at hockey and at the specific cruelty of being a person who wanted things the world said he couldn't want. But this was different. This was not the hot, spitting, temporary anger of a bad call or a cheap shot. This was structural. This was the cold, load-bearing anger of a person who had found something precious and learned, within hours of finding it, that someone had tried to take it.

Not from him. He didn't own Shane. Shane was not a thing that could be taken from a person. But the fury didn't care about philosophical nuance. The fury said: someone tried to hurt him. The fury said: if you had left with Megan-or-Meghan. The fury said: if you had not been at that pillar, if you had not been watching the room, if you had been two minutes later or ten feet farther away.

The fury said: you were angry at him for seven months because he didn't call you and you didn't give him your number, you spectacular idiot, you self-sabotaging child, you spent seven months being angry at a man who didn't have the digits required to reach you because you were too proud and too scared to write them on a napkin or say them out loud or do any of the simple, human, non-cowardly things that a person does when they want to be found.

Seven months. He had spent seven months punishing Shane in his head for a silence that Rozanov had engineered. And during those seven months, Shane had been — what. Looking for his number. Asking CCM for the contact list. Wanting to call and not being able to because Rozanov had walked out of room 1410 without leaving a trail.

If Rozanov had given Shane his number in July, Shane would have called. Shane would have called and they would have talked and they would have — something. Been something. And last night, Shane would not have been at a club on King West because Shane would have been texting Rozanov, or calling Rozanov, or maybe — in some version of the timeline where Rozanov was braver and smarter and less committed to being a disaster — Shane would have been with Rozanov. Not at a club. Not in a booth. Not alone with wrong eyes and a stuck smile and a drink he didn't order.

The fury said: this is your fault too.

The fury was correct.

Rozanov got out of bed. Did not nap. Ate the pregame meal without tasting it — chicken, rice, vegetables, the universal fuel of professional athletes, the food that existed not to be enjoyed but to be converted into glycogen and deployed. He taped his sticks in the visiting locker room at Scotiabank Arena with hands that were steady because his hands were always steady, even when the rest of him was not.

Cliff Marlow sat beside him. Cliff was eating a banana with the enthusiasm of a man who had never met a banana he didn't like.

"You good, Roz?"

"Fine."

"You seem intense."

"I am always intense."

"More intense. The coaches are making eye contact with each other about you."

"The coaches can make eye contact about whatever they want. I am going to play hockey."

Rozanov looked at his hands. He had taped the blade so tightly the tape was compressed into a smooth, dense shell that would crack on the first shot. He unwound it. Started over. Slower.

The fury was in his hands. In his shoulders. In the set of his jaw and the coil in his legs and the place behind his eyes where the game lived — the place that was usually calm, analytical, the quiet room where Rozanov's hockey brain did its work. That room was not quiet. That room was full of Shane Hollander in a hospital bed and the word GHB and the specific, violent fantasy of finding the man with dark hair who had walked up to a table on King West and —

He was going to play hockey. He was going to use the fury because the fury was fuel and fuel was what Rozanov ran on when everything else was on fire.

---

The game started at seven-thirty. The Scotiabank Arena was full because Toronto filled arenas the way Toronto did everything — with passionate optimism that bore no relationship to the quality of the product on the ice. The Guardians were bad. Rozanov had known this from the tape. Their defense was soft — the top pair cheated toward the net, the third pair couldn't skate, and the gap between their D-zone coverage and their transition game was the size of a barn door.

Rozanov intended to drive a truck through it.

First shift. Rozanov won the opening faceoff — clean, quick, pulling the puck back to his defenseman and then exploding up ice with the kind of acceleration that made people lean forward in their seats. He crossed the blue line, pulled up, surveyed the ice. The weak side D-man was where the tape said he'd be — cheating, overcommitting to the bumper lane. Rozanov faked the pass, walked the puck to the slot, and fired.

Top corner. Glove side. The goalie didn't move. The red light went on. The arena, which had been loud with Toronto optimism, went briefly quiet and then loud again with the specific noise of a crowd that had paid good money and was getting what they'd paid for, even if what they'd paid for was their own team getting embarrassed.

Rozanov did not celebrate. He skated back to the bench. Sat down. Stared at the ice.

The fury said: more.

Second period. Power play. The Guardians' penalty kill was even worse than their even-strength defense, which was an achievement in the same way that falling down a flight of stairs was an achievement — technically impressive, structurally a disaster. Rozanov quarterbacked the top unit from the left circle. Saw the lane. One-timer. Bar down. Two-nothing.

He scored again at 11:42 of the second. Wrist shot from the hash marks. The goalie got a piece of it but the puck had eyes and found the space between his pad and the post and Rozanov had a hat trick and the Toronto crowd was throwing hats onto the ice — for a visiting player, which was the ultimate indignity, the hockey equivalent of your city throwing a parade for the invading army.

Three goals. He'd told Shane he was going to score four. He had not been joking.

The Guardians scored twice in the third — garbage goals, the kind that happened when the winning team relaxed and the losing team got desperate — and the game tightened to 3-2. Then Rozanov took a hit behind the net, kept his feet, found Cliff trailing the play, and Cliff buried it. 4-2. Then, with four minutes left, Rozanov stripped the puck from the Guardians' top center at the red line — stripped it clean, the kind of takeaway that happened when your legs were fresh and your brain was fast and your fury had been converted into jet fuel — and went in alone on the goalie.

Backhand. Five-hole. 5-2.

The arena lost its mind. Not for the Guardians — for him. The performance transcending loyalty, which happened once or twice a season if you were lucky and which had happened tonight because Rozanov was not lucky. Rozanov was furious. And fury, properly channeled, was indistinguishable from brilliance.

The Guardians scored once more with two minutes left. 5-3 final. Nobody cared.

In the locker room, Cliff was yelling. "FIVE GOALS. FIVE FUCKING GOALS. ROZ, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT."

"Hockey," Rozanov said.

"That was not hockey. That was violence with a scoring touch."

The media was worse. The media was always worse after a five-goal game because a five-goal game was a story and stories needed quotes.

"Ilya, five goals tonight — what was working for you out there?"

"Their defense was not very good and I was feeling strong tonight."

"Was there anything different about your preparation today?"

I had sex with my rival this morning and then found out he'd been drugged at a nightclub and then went to a hospital and saw him in a bed with an IV in his arm and the fury of that experience converted directly into goals.

"No," Rozanov said. "Normal preparation."

He smiled the smile he kept on hand for reporters — charming, practiced, empty. The smile was a curtain and behind the curtain was a man who wanted to be done with this so he could pick up his phone and call a contact named Jane.

---

He called Coach LeClaire from the hallway outside the visiting locker room.

"Rozanov. Hell of a game."

"Thank you, Coach. I need to ask for tomorrow off."

A pause. The LeClaire pause — the one that contained an entire evaluation of the situation, the player, the schedule, and the relative costs of saying yes versus no.

"Tomorrow's a travel day."

"I know. I will fly to Boston on Friday morning. The next game is not until Saturday."

"What's the reason."

"Family emergency."

"What kind of family emergency."

"The kind I do not want to discuss in detail." Rozanov made his voice do the thing — not hard, not defensive, but closed. A door shutting quietly. LeClaire would hear the door.

Another pause. "You scored five goals tonight."

"Yes."

"I'm not going to say that buys you anything."

"You do not have to say it."

"But you'll be at practice Friday afternoon."

"I will be at practice Friday afternoon."

"Fine. Take your day."

He hung up. Pulled up the contact. Jane. Pressed call.

It rang twice.

"Hey." Shane's voice. Tired. Raw. Road noise underneath — engine, tires, the muffled hum of a highway at night. Shane was in a car.

"You are driving," Rozanov said.

"Yeah. They discharged me at three. I'm on the 401. About three hours in."

"You are driving five hours after being in a hospital."

"I'm fine. The IV helped. My heart rate's back to normal." A pause. "Mostly normal."

"What does mostly mean."

"It means it's normal when I'm not talking to you."

Rozanov pressed the cross. The hallway smelled like Zamboni exhaust and sweat. He was holding his phone against his ear and listening to the sound of Shane Hollander's voice and the 401 and the distance between Toronto and Montreal, which was five hours by car and one hour by plane and zero hours if you could be in a room with a person just by wanting it.

"I scored five goals," Rozanov said.

"I know. I listened to the whole game."

Rozanov's chest did the thing. "You listened."

"On the radio. AM 640. The Toronto broadcast. I was on the highway and I wanted to hear it. The play-by-play guy lost his mind on the fifth one. He called it the best individual performance he'd seen in Toronto in a decade."

"He was correct."

Shane laughed. The laugh was tired and real and traveled through the phone and landed in Rozanov's chest like a warm hand.

"The announcer said you were playing angry," Shane said. "He said it looked personal."

"It was personal."

"Personal how."

"Personal as in someone tried to hurt you and I could not find them so I found the Toronto Guardians instead and I am sorry for the Guardians but they were available and I was not in a forgiving mood."

Shane was quiet. The 401 hummed. Then, softly: "You scored five goals because of me."

"You were the primary contributing factor."

"Ilya."

The name. Through the phone. Five hundred kilometers away. In a car on a highway in the dark. And it still did the thing — the fist between his ribs, the door only Shane knew about.

"I am coming to Montreal," Rozanov said.

A beat. "What?"

"I asked LeClaire for tomorrow off. Family emergency. There is a midnight flight. Air Canada."

"Tonight? It's almost ten."

"Yes."

"Ilya, you don't have to — I'm fine. The doctor said —"

"I am not coming because the doctor said. I am coming because I spent three hours on the ice thinking about you in a hospital bed and then I scored five goals and took a shower and called my coach and now I am standing in a hallway that smells like a Zamboni and I do not want to be in a hallway that smells like a Zamboni. I want to be where you are."

Shane was quiet for a long time. Rozanov checked the phone to make sure the call was still connected. It was. Shane was breathing. Shane was driving on a highway in the dark and the silence was the silence of a person deciding something.

"My address," Shane said. He gave it to him. Street. Building. Unit number. Buzzer code. "Buzzer is 1-4-1-0. Like the suite. From July."

Rozanov's hand stopped moving on the phone screen. "You made your buzzer code our suite number."

"I moved in after July. I got to pick a code. I picked 1410." A pause. "It was the number I was thinking about."

Rozanov pressed the cross hard enough to feel the edges. This man. This meticulous, serious man had moved into a new apartment and chosen a buzzer code and the code he'd chosen was the number of a hotel suite where Rozanov had kissed him against a wall eight months ago. Shane Hollander had encoded their history into the infrastructure of his home without telling anyone, without telling Rozanov, and had lived with it every day — typing it into the panel, hearing the buzz, the number a small, private monument to a night nobody else knew about.

"I will be there by two," Rozanov said.

"Okay," Shane said. And hung up. Rozanov booked the flight. Texted Cliff he was taking a personal day. Got his bag. Got a cab to Pearson. Got on a plane.

The flight was fifty-five minutes. Rozanov spent forty of them staring out the window at the darkness over Ontario and pressing the cross and thinking about the buzzer code. 1-4-1-0. A four-digit memorial. The smallest, most private act of remembering he had ever encountered, and it was the thing that broke him — not the sex, not the hospital, not the five goals, but the buzzer code. Because the buzzer code meant Shane had been carrying July the same way Rozanov had. Quietly. Structurally. Built into the walls.

---

The cab from Trudeau airport took twenty-two minutes. Montreal at two in the morning was different from Toronto at two in the morning — quieter, older, the cold sharper, the kind of cold that had an accent.

The building was a mid-rise. Brick. Newer. The kind of building a twenty-year-old first-overall pick lived in when he was making good money but not yet great money and was too practical to overspend. Rozanov stood at the buzzer panel with his duffel over his shoulder and his Bears tracksuit still on and typed 1-4-1-0.

The buzzer sounded. The door clicked. He took the elevator. Found the unit. The door opened before he knocked.

Shane was in sweatpants and a Voyageurs practice shirt — the gray one, soft from washing. His hair was damp. His face was tired — not hospital-tired, not drugged-tired, but the deep, settled tired of a person who had been through a lot in twenty-four hours and was still standing. The mark on his neck — the one Rozanov had put there that morning, a lifetime ago, in a different city — was visible above the collar. Fading, but there.

Shane opened the door and Rozanov walked through it and pulled him into a hug.

Not a kiss. Not a grab. A hug. Both arms around Shane's shoulders, pulling him in, and Shane's arms went around Rozanov's waist and his face went into Rozanov's neck — the same place, always the same place, the hollow between the neck and the shoulder where Shane fit — and Rozanov held him. Held him the way he'd wanted to hold him in the hospital, in front of Steve, when the monitors were beeping and Shane's heart rate was ninety-six and Rozanov hadn't been able to touch him because the world was watching and the world could not know.

The world was not watching now. The door was closed. The apartment was dark except for a light in the kitchen. And Rozanov held Shane Hollander in the doorway and felt the full weight of him — not heavy, not weak, just present, the dense, warm, alive reality of a person who was here and not in a hospital and not in a booth with wrong eyes — and something that had been clenched in Rozanov's chest since the word hospital finally released.

Shane's fingers curled into the back of Rozanov's tracksuit. Tight. The grip of a person who was holding on to something they were afraid of losing.

They stood there for a long time.

"Hi," Shane said. Into his neck.

"Hi."

"You smell like airplane."

"You smell like shower."

"I sat on my couch for two hours watching the door. My heart rate was doing the thing again."

Rozanov's arms tightened. Shane pulled back enough to look at his face — studying it the way Shane studied everything, with that focused, cataloguing attention that missed nothing.

"You look different," Shane said.

"I have not slept in thirty-six hours."

"Not that. You look—" Shane's hand came up. Touched the side of Rozanov's face. His thumb traced the line under Rozanov's eye, the shadow there. "You look like you were scared."

"I was scared."

Shane's jaw tightened. He nodded once. Then: "Come inside. You're letting cold air in."

Rozanov stepped inside. Shane closed the door.

The apartment was bigger than Rozanov's place in Boston, which was not hard because Rozanov's apartment in Boston was a one-bedroom he treated less like a home and more like a storage facility for his body between games. Shane's place had space. Two bedrooms — Rozanov could see down the hallway, two doors. A living room with a couch and a television and bookshelves that were actually full of books. Shane read. The shelves were organized in a way that was so specifically Shane — some system, probably alphabetical — and there were worn paperbacks and hardcovers and a small stack on the side table that looked like a current reading pile.

The kitchen was clean. Not tidy — clean. The kitchen of a person who controlled his environment because controlling his environment was how he survived.

Framed photos on the wall. Shane with his parents — a woman with dark hair and Shane's jawline, a man slightly shorter than Shane who smiled the same way. Shane in a Voyageurs jersey holding a junior trophy. Shane with three guys in graduation caps and gowns — Steve, Matt, Kevin. The friends from last night. The friends who had left him in a booth.

Rozanov dropped his bag by the door. Looked at Shane. Shane was leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed and his ankles crossed and the practice shirt pulling across his shoulders and he looked — he looked like someone who lived here. Who belonged here. The version of Shane that existed inside these walls, with the books and the photos and the clean counters, was a version Rozanov had not seen before. Not the press-conference Shane. Not the on-ice Shane. Not the hotel-room Shane, who was always slightly displaced, slightly aware that the space was temporary. This was home-Shane. This was the one who read books and framed photos of his parents and wiped his counters and chose his buzzer code carefully.

This was the one Rozanov wanted.

"You're staring," Shane said.

"Yes."

"You look like you haven't slept."

"I have not."

"Do you want to sleep?"

"No."

The word came out fast. Hard. Shane's arms uncrossed. His eyes sharpened — the bright, present eyes from this morning. The eyes that said I'm choosing this.

"No?" Shane said.

"I did not fly to Montreal at midnight to sleep."

Shane pushed off the counter. Crossed the kitchen to where Rozanov was standing. Put his hand on Rozanov's chest — flat, over the cross — and looked up at him.

"You told me on the phone that every goal was for me," Shane said. His voice had dropped. "I need you to know — I pulled over after you said that. I pulled onto the shoulder of the 401 and sat there for two minutes because I couldn't see the road."

Rozanov's hand went to the back of Shane's neck.

"I am furious," Rozanov said. "I am furious at the person who did this to you. I am furious at myself for seven months of being too stupid and too proud to give you my number. And I love you and I am going to say that exactly once and we are not going to discuss it because I have not slept and I have not eaten since a pregame chicken breast and if you make me elaborate I will—"

Shane kissed him. Hard enough to push Rozanov backward — leverage, the kind professional hockey players knew how to use — and they were both moving toward the hallway. Shane's hand found Rozanov's in the dark — reached back, fingers lacing together, pulling him forward — and the hand-holding was such a small, human, devastating thing that Rozanov's throat closed. He had never held a man's hand. Had never held anyone's hand since his mother. The gesture was so simple and so ordinary and so completely outside the architecture of Rozanov's adult life that it broke something open. Something softer than the fury. Something that lived where the cross rested and where the buzzer code lived and where the word mine was growing into something larger than he'd anticipated.

Shane's bedroom. King bed, white sheets, gray duvet. Nightstand with a lamp and a phone charger and a book — spine cracked, two-thirds read. The window faced east, curtains open, the city dark outside.

"You said it," Shane said. His mouth on Rozanov's jaw, his throat, the collarbone. His hands pulling at the tracksuit jacket. "You said you love me."

"I said we were not going to discuss it."

"We're not discussing it. I'm confirming I heard it." Shane pulled back. Looked at him. In the low light, his eyes were dark and full and certain. "I heard it."

"Good."

"I'm not going to say it back right now."

"I did not ask you to."

"I'm not going to say it back because if I say it in this bed, after this day, after the hospital and the radio and the five goals and you flying here — it's going to sound like a reaction. And it's not. It's been since July. Since before July. Since the draft. Since I saw you across the room at the combine and my brain did something it had never done before and I've spent two years trying to figure out what that was and I know now. And when I say it I want it to be morning. I want to wake up next to you and have it be the first thing I say."

Rozanov looked at him. At this precise, careful, beautiful man who was going to make him wait for the words because the words deserved to be said right. The order mattered. The timing mattered. And Rozanov — who had never cared about timing, who said things when he felt them and dealt with consequences later — could wait. For Shane, he could wait.

"Morning," Rozanov said.

"Morning."

"I will be here in the morning."

"That's the point." Shane's hand was on his chest. Over the cross.

Then Shane's hand slid lower. Over his stomach. Down the line of hair below his navel. His fingers slipped under the waistband of Rozanov's tracksuit pants — not pulling, not stripping, just sliding inside, his knuckles dragging against the skin below Rozanov's hip bone. Testing. Shane's palm pressed flat against him through the thin fabric of his boxers and Rozanov's breath left his body.

"You're hard," Shane said. Not a question. His hand tightened. "You've been hard since the kitchen."

"Since the buzzer code."

Shane's eyes darkened. His hand moved — one slow stroke through the fabric, base to tip, his thumb finding the head and pressing — and Rozanov's hips jerked forward into his grip.

"Good," Shane said. Quiet. Certain. And took his hand away.

Rozanov got his hands under Shane's practice shirt and pulled it over his head — Shane's arms went up, automatic — and the shirt was gone and Shane was bare-chested in the low light of his own bedroom. Not a hotel room. Not the neutral territory of the Ritz-Carlton. His bedroom. His walls. His books on the shelf. The framed photos down the hallway. And Rozanov was here, in the private center of Shane's life, being allowed in.

He put his mouth on Shane's collarbone. The freckles. The ones he'd seen this morning and wanted to taste and hadn't had time to — not properly, not the way he wanted to, which was slowly and individually. He kissed across the collarbone, found the hollow at the base of Shane's throat, pressed his tongue there. Shane's hand went to the back of his head. Holding him there. His pulse hammered against Rozanov's lips.

Shane's hands went to Rozanov's tracksuit pants — elastic, no belt, easier — and pushed them down. Rozanov stepped out of them. Shane pulled his own sweatpants off. No ceremony. The practicality of a person who knew where this was going and was done with the parts that came before.

They were both in boxers. Shane looked at him — at his chest, the cross, the line of his hips — and then Shane did something Rozanov had not expected.

Shane dropped to his knees.

Not the way he had in July — that had been instinctive, immediate, a reflex that had happened before either of them could think. This was deliberate. This was Shane, in his own apartment, on his own floor, making a choice. He looked up at Rozanov from his knees and the look on his face was calm and steady and completely devastating.

"You pulled me up last time," Shane said. "You pulled me up because you wanted to see my face."

"Yes."

"This time I want to finish."

Rozanov's vision went narrow. His hand went to Shane's hair — the dark, damp hair that smelled like shampoo and not like the club, not like smoke, not like anything except Shane in his own home — and his fingers tightened and Shane's eyes went half-closed and his mouth opened.

Shane pulled Rozanov's boxers down. Rozanov's cock was hard — had been hard since the kitchen, since the doorway, since the buzzer code — and Shane looked at it with the focused, assessing attention he brought to everything. Then he looked up at Rozanov.

"I thought about this," Shane said. His voice was low. Rough. "On the highway. While you were scoring five goals I was thinking about what I'd do when you got here."

"What did you decide."

"This." Shane leaned forward and licked a slow stripe from base to tip. Rozanov's hand went to his hair and his fingers tightened and Shane made a sound against his cock — pleased, greedy — and then took him in. All the way. His mouth hot and wet, his tongue flat and working the underside with a deliberateness that suggested research. Practice. Intention.

"Fuck," Rozanov said. The English came without thinking. "Shane. Your mouth—"

Shane pulled off long enough to say, "Tell me." Then took him deep again, his cheeks hollowing, his hand wrapped around what his mouth couldn't reach, and the rhythm was slow — agonizingly slow — a long pull from base to tip that was not shy, was not tentative, was the blowjob of a person who had decided to be good at this and had followed through.

"You are — you have no idea what you look like right now." Rozanov's voice was wrecked. "On your knees. On your own floor. Looking at me like that. You are the most—" His hips wanted to move. He held them still because Shane was setting the pace. "I am not going to survive you."

Shane hummed around him. The vibration traveled the full length of Rozanov's spine and his hand spasmed in Shane's hair and his legs were shaking. The cross was swinging with his breathing, which had become something closer to panting, and Shane was watching him fall apart with the quiet satisfaction of a person who was very, very good at something he'd only recently learned.

Rozanov pulled him off. Gently. By the hair. Shane made a sound of protest.

"If you keep doing that," Rozanov said, "this will be over in approximately forty-five seconds and I would like it to not be over."

Shane stood up. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The gesture was blunt and unselfconscious and obscenely hot and Rozanov kissed him — tasting himself on Shane's tongue — and walked them both backward to the bed.

They fell onto it. Shane on his back, Rozanov over him, and then Shane — with the leverage and the core strength of a person who spent his professional life on skates — flipped them. One motion. Hip bridge, rotation, and Rozanov was on his back and Shane was straddling him, knees on either side of his hips, looking down at him with an expression Rozanov had never seen before. Not the careful, composed Hollander. Not the nervous, first-time Hollander from this morning. This was something new. This was the Hollander who had driven five hours alone and listened to five goals on the radio and pulled over on the 401 because he couldn't see through what he was feeling, and who had come out the other side of all of it with a clarity that looked, from below, like command.

"I want to—" Shane said. Stopped. Not the old stopping, the measuring and composing. This stop was physical — he was reaching for the nightstand, opening the top drawer. Condoms. Lube. He held them up. "I want to do it like this."

"Like this."

"I want to be on top. I want to — I want to see your face."

The words went through Rozanov like a blade. I want to see your face. His own words. The reason he'd given for pulling Shane up off his knees in July. The reason he'd given this morning — I wanted to see your face when I— And now Shane was giving it back to him. Reversed. Shane on top, looking down, and Rozanov underneath with nowhere to hide.

"Okay," Rozanov said. His voice did not sound like his voice.

Shane slicked his own fingers. Rozanov watched — watched Shane reach behind himself, watched his face change as he pressed a finger inside himself, watched the focus and the concentration and the slight wince that became a different expression, something open and inward, his eyes going half-closed and his lips parting, and Rozanov realized he was watching Shane Hollander open himself up and the intimacy of it — more intimate than being inside him, more intimate than the sounds he made — the intimacy of watching Shane do this to himself, preparing his own body, taking responsibility for his own pleasure with the same methodical attention he brought to everything — Rozanov pressed the cross into his own sternum hard enough to hurt.

Shane added a second finger. His hips rocked, slight, involuntary. His cock was hard against his stomach, bobbing with the motion, and Rozanov reached up and wrapped his hand around it — just held it, loose, not stroking, a point of contact — and Shane made a sound like he'd been hit. His free hand shot to Rozanov's wrist. Not to pull him away. To hold him there.

"Ready," Shane said. Breathless. He pulled his fingers out. Tore the condom open with his teeth — the teeth thing was new, the teeth thing was aggressive in a way that Rozanov felt in the base of his spine — and rolled it onto Rozanov with steady hands. Slicked him. Generous. His hand stroking Rozanov twice, slow, watching his face while he did it.

"I want you to feel every inch of this," Shane said. His voice was barely a voice. "I want you to feel it tomorrow in Boston when you're skating and I'm in Tampa and we're a thousand miles apart. I want you to feel where I was."

Rozanov could not breathe. "Shane—"

"Tell me you want it."

"I want it. I want you. I want—"

Shane rose up on his knees. Positioned himself. One hand on Rozanov's cock, guiding, the other flat on Rozanov's chest, over the cross. He looked down at Rozanov.

"I want to see your face," Shane said again. Quieter. The command softened into something rawer. Something that cost him. "I want to see what you look like when I—"

He sank down.

Slow. The head of Rozanov's cock pressing in, the tight ring of muscle yielding, and Shane's breath stuttered but his eyes stayed open — fixed on Rozanov's face, watching, cataloguing every flicker and flinch the way he catalogued everything. Rozanov's hands went to Shane's hips — gripping, steadying, his fingers pressing into the bone — and the heat and the pressure of Shane's body taking him in, inch by slow inch, was so intense that Rozanov's head went back against the pillow and his mouth opened and the sound he made was — he heard it from outside himself. It was raw. It was wrecked. It was the sound of a man who was being undone from below.

Shane took all of him. Settled. The weight of Shane's body on his hips, the depth of the angle, the way gravity made everything tighter, deeper — Rozanov's hands were shaking on Shane's hips and he could not make them stop.

"Oh," Shane said. Barely a word. His hands were braced on Rozanov's chest. The cross was under his left palm. His head was dropped forward, his dark hair hanging, and his body was adjusting — micro-movements, small shifts of his hips, finding the angle, and when he found it his whole body went taut and his head snapped up and his eyes found Rozanov's.

"There," Shane said. His voice broke on the word. "Right there. God, Ilya, you're so—" He didn't finish. He moved. Rolled his hips. A slow, grinding rise and fall, and the drag of Rozanov's cock inside him pulled sounds from both of them.

"Tell me," Shane said. His voice was raw. "Tell me what it feels like."

"Tight. Hot. You are — you feel like you were made to—" Rozanov's hands tightened on Shane's hips hard enough to bruise and Shane didn't flinch. "I can feel you everywhere. I can feel every part of you and I want—"

"What do you want."

"More. Harder. I want you to use me."

Shane's eyes went black. He moved faster. The rhythm building, his thighs flexing, his abs contracting, and he was riding Rozanov with the same focused, relentless intensity he brought to everything — to hockey, to preparation, to choosing his buzzer code, to every deliberate act in his carefully constructed life — except this was the opposite of careful. This was Shane letting the careful thing go. This was Shane using his body the way he used it on the ice — all power, all commitment, every muscle engaged in the single act of taking Rozanov apart.

And Rozanov was coming apart. He could feel it happening — the loss of control, the dissolution of every wall he'd ever built. He was underneath Shane in Shane's bed and Shane was above him, moving, and the cross was pressed under Shane's hand and Rozanov could not perform. Could not joke. Could not deflect. Could not narrate his way around what was happening, which was that he was being seen — Shane's eyes on his face, Shane's gaze steady and unwavering even as his own body was shaking with the effort of what he was doing — and Rozanov had nowhere to go. No exit. No clean getaway. Just this. Just Shane, above him, looking down, seeing everything.

"You're shaking," Shane said. His voice was strained. His hips didn't stop. "You were shaking this morning too. After."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because I have never — because no one has ever—" The words wouldn't form. His second language failing him again. The feelings too big for the borrowed words. "Because you are looking at me and I cannot hide from you and I do not want to."

"Don't hide." Shane's hips rolled — a deep, grinding circle that hit something inside both of them, and Rozanov's hands spasmed on Shane's hips and Shane's breath caught. Shane leaned closer. His mouth against Rozanov's ear. "You said every goal was for me. So this is for you. Every time I move, that's for you. You feel that?" Another roll, slower, devastating. "That's mine. You're mine. Say it."

"Yours." The word came out shattered. "I am yours."

"Again."

"Yours. Shane. I am—"

"I know." Shane kissed his jaw. His teeth grazed the tendon in Rozanov's neck. "I know you are. That's the point."

I wanted to see your face. Rozanov had said it in July. Had said it this morning. Had meant it — had meant that he wanted to see Shane's face because Shane's face during sex was the truest version of Shane he'd ever encountered. But he had not anticipated this. He had not anticipated what it would feel like to have the lens turned around. To be the face being watched. To be the one exposed, unguarded, with nowhere to go except deeper into the thing he was feeling, which was love — the word he'd said in the kitchen and meant — and the love was visible on his face and Shane was seeing it and not looking away.

Shane reached behind himself. Took Rozanov's hand off his hip and laced their fingers together and pressed Rozanov's hand back into the mattress beside his head, pinned. The hand-holding from the hallway, except now it was a hold-down, a claim. Shane's other hand stayed on the cross. His hips moved faster, harder, and the sounds filling the room were the creak of the bed and the slap of skin and Shane's breathing and Rozanov's breathing and the wet sound of their bodies together, and Rozanov was close — so close — the coil tightening, his hips pushing up to meet every downstroke —

"Shane — I'm —"

"I know." Shane leaned down. Kissed him. Still moving, his hips working in a tight, devastating circle, and Rozanov was kissing him and inside him and holding his hand and the cross was warm between them and he was going to come — he was going to come while Shane looked at his face and the looking was the thing that did it, the looking was the thing that tipped him over, because being seen by Shane Hollander was the most terrifying and the most necessary thing that had ever happened to Rozanov and he surrendered to both.

He came. Shane's name in his mouth, his hips driving up, his hand crushing Shane's, his whole body arching off the mattress. The orgasm tore through him — longer than this morning, deeper, the kind that came from somewhere structural, somewhere behind the ribs, somewhere near the cross — and Shane rode him through it, hips still moving, drawing it out, and Rozanov was making sounds he'd never made before. Sounds that had no precedent in his body's history. He was loud and he was shaking and his eyes were wet again and Shane was watching all of it, every second, his face fierce and tender and certain.

Rozanov was still trembling when Shane took himself in hand. Three strokes — that was all, three strokes with Rozanov still inside him and his other hand still pinning Rozanov's to the mattress — and Shane came. His spine bowed, his chin lifted, and the sound he made was Rozanov's name, full volume, echoing off the walls of his own bedroom. He came on Rozanov's stomach, on the cross, and his body clenched around Rozanov and the aftershock of it made Rozanov gasp.

Shane collapsed forward. Chest to chest. Breathing hard. His forehead against Rozanov's forehead. The cross between them, sticky now, which was — Rozanov would clean it later. His mother would understand.

They lay there. Shane still on top of him, still around him. Neither of them moved to separate.

"You saw my face," Rozanov said. His voice was gone. Wrecked. Barely there.

"Yeah."

"What did it look like."

Shane lifted his head. Looked at him. The look was the look from this morning — clear, dark, full — except now it had something else in it. Something that had been forged in the last twelve hours, in the hospital and the highway and the five goals and the buzzer code. Something that had a name.

"Like you were loving it," Shane said. Quiet. Not teasing. The observation of a person who had watched Rozanov's face through every second and was telling him what he'd seen.

Shane's hand found the cross. Held it.

"I have a flight to Tampa at two tomorrow," Shane said. His voice was barely functional.

"I know."

"It's almost three in the morning."

"I know."

Neither of them moved.

Shane's thumb traced the edge of the cross. "Ilya."

"Shane."

"The thing you said. Before. The thing I said I'd say in the morning." Shane's hand stilled on the cross. "I'm not going to be able to sleep with it sitting in my chest for five more hours. It's too heavy. It's been too heavy for seven months and I need to put it down."

Rozanov's heart did the overtime thing. He lifted his head from Shane's shoulder. Looked at him. Shane was looking at the ceiling — the way Rozanov looked at ceilings when he was about to say something true.

Then Shane turned his head. Looked at Rozanov. In the dark, in his own bed, with the cross between them and Rozanov still inside him and the city asleep outside.

"I love you," Shane said. "I have loved you since July. I have loved you since you pulled me up off the floor and put me on the bed because you wanted to see my face. I have loved you since you walked out without giving me your number and I spent seven months being furious about it while setting my buzzer code to the number of the hotel room. I loved you when you found me in that club. I loved you when you said no. I loved you this morning and I loved you in the hospital when you walked in wearing a tracksuit and looking at me like the world was ending and I couldn't touch you because Steve was right there. And I love you now. In my bed. In my apartment. In the place where I actually live, which is the first time I've had you in a place that's mine, and I want it to — I want you to be here. Not just tonight. I want there to be a when."

The last word. The word that had started on a nightclub floor and traveled through texts and hotel rooms and hospital monitors and five goals and a midnight flight.

When.

Rozanov kissed him. Soft. The cross warm between them.

"When," Rozanov said.

"When."

They fell asleep tangled together. Shane's head on Rozanov's chest. Rozanov's hand in Shane's hair. The cross between them. The buzzer code downstairs. The books on the shelves. The photos on the wall. The apartment that was Shane's and that now, for this night, was also Rozanov's — because Shane had given him the code and opened the door and let him into the place where all the private things were kept.

In the morning, there would be a flight to Tampa and a flight to Boston and the distance and the rivalry and the world that did not know.

But tonight, in Shane's bed, in Shane's apartment, in the dark of a Montreal night:

Mine. Yours. When.

Rozanov pressed the cross. Gently. Good night to his mother. Good night to the boy he'd been before this week — the one who said yes to everything and meant nothing. That boy was gone. What replaced him was the man in Shane Hollander's bed with Shane Hollander's heart beating against his ribs, and this man said yes to one thing and meant everything.

Shane's breathing slowed. Evened. The rhythm of a person who was safe in his own bed with a person who would not let anything happen to him.

Rozanov closed his eyes.

When.

Chapter 5: Date Night

Chapter Summary

Two months in, they have a routine. Shane has a key. Ilya owns towels now. The Voyageurs beat the Bears 4-3, and afterward there's clam chowder and a teammate who notices too much and a couch and ginger ale and the quiet discovery that this — just this — is the center.

The thing about Boston was that Rozanov had been wrong about it.

He'd been wrong for two years — two years of treating the city like a rest stop, a place to sleep between games, a geographic inconvenience between the things that mattered. His apartment had been a storage unit. His relationship with the city had been, in his own words, adversarial. Boston was cold and the streets made no sense and the accent was an assault on the English language and Rozanov had lived there the way a cat lived in a carrier — temporarily, resentfully, with one eye on the exit.

Then Shane had started visiting.

The condo was on Beacon Street. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen that was nicer than anything Rozanov would have chosen for himself because Rozanov had not chosen it — his agent, Dmitri, had said buy property, it's a good investment, you're twenty and you're making money and money that sits in a checking account is money that is not working, and Rozanov had said fine the way he said fine to most of Dmitri's suggestions, which was without enthusiasm but with the understanding that Dmitri was usually right about things that involved numbers. Dmitri had found the condo. A decorator whose name Rozanov could not remember had furnished it. The result was a space that looked like it belonged to a person with taste, which was generous, because the person who lived there had eaten cereal for dinner three times that week and owned one towel.

He owned four towels now. He'd bought three more in April because Shane was coming for the weekend and Shane was a person who believed in towels — who believed that a bathroom should contain more than one towel the way a kitchen should contain more than a coffee maker and a jar of peanut butter. Shane had not said this. Shane had not needed to say it. Rozanov had walked through his own bathroom two days before Shane's visit and seen it through Shane's eyes — the single towel, the bar of soap that was also the shampoo, the toothbrush standing alone in a cup like a soldier who'd lost his unit — and had gone to Target and bought towels. Three of them. And a hand towel, which was apparently a separate category of towel, which Rozanov had not known was a thing until he saw them on the shelf and thought Shane would notice if there wasn't one.

He'd also bought ginger ale. This was not a thing Rozanov drank. Rozanov drank water, coffee, vodka, and protein shakes, in that order. Ginger ale was Shane's drink — the drink Shane ordered on planes and at restaurants when he wasn't drinking alcohol, which was most of the time, because Shane didn't drink much. Shane drank ginger ale the way other people drank beer — socially, casually, a can on the couch while watching television, the quiet ritual of a person who didn't need alcohol to unwind because Shane unwound by being still and being still was something Shane could do for hours, which was one of the many things about Shane that amazed Rozanov, who could not be still for ten consecutive seconds.

There were four cans of Canada Dry in the refrigerator. Next to Rozanov's protein shakes and a block of cheddar cheese and the canned tuna that Rozanov used to make tuna melts, which was the one thing Rozanov could cook — cook being a generous term for a process that involved bread, cheese, tuna from a can, and a panini press that the decorator had installed in the kitchen and that Rozanov suspected was meant to be decorative but had been repurposed for the only culinary application Rozanov was capable of. The tuna melts were good. Shane said they were good. Shane had eaten two of them on his last visit and then looked at the panini press and said this is a twelve-hundred-dollar Breville and Rozanov had said it makes a good sandwich and Shane had closed his eyes in a way that was either pain or affection.

The game was at seven. Voyageurs at Bears. Shane had flown in that morning — early, before the team charter, on a commercial flight that landed at Logan at nine a.m. because Shane wanted the extra hours at Rozanov's condo before he had to report to the visitors' locker room. This was the routine they'd developed over two months — the careful, logistically complex routine of two people who lived in different cities and played for rival teams and wanted to be in the same room whenever the schedule allowed. Shane would fly in early. He'd take a cab to Beacon Street. He had a key — Rozanov had given him a key in April, which was a thing Rozanov had done by putting the key on the counter and saying this is yours and not elaborating because elaborating would mean saying I want you to be able to get into my apartment when I am not here because the idea of you waiting outside my door is intolerable to me and Rozanov was not yet at the stage of saying things like that out loud, though he was thinking them with increasing frequency.

Shane had been there when Rozanov left for morning skate. In Rozanov's kitchen. Drinking ginger ale from a can and reading a book at the counter — a paperback, something with a dark cover, the kind of book Shane read, which was the kind of book that had sentences in it and not just pictures, which already put it outside Rozanov's literary range. Shane had looked up from the book when Rozanov walked through the kitchen in his practice gear. Had smiled. The real one.

"Good luck tonight," Shane had said.

Rozanov had kissed him. Quick. On the mouth. In his own kitchen, where no one could see. The normalcy of it — the domestic, unremarkable normalcy of kissing a person in your kitchen on a game day morning — had stayed with Rozanov through the entire morning skate, warm and persistent, like a hand on his back.

---

The Voyageurs won 4-3.

Shane scored twice. The first was a redirect on the power play — a tip so clean, so precise, so perfectly angled that the Bears' goalie didn't move and the puck was in the net before anyone in the building except Shane knew where it was going. The second was a wrister from the left circle in the third period that broke a 3-3 tie with four minutes left and sent the Voyageurs bench into a controlled, professional celebration that Shane participated in with a single fist pump and a nod, because Shane celebrated goals the way he did everything — efficiently, without excess.

Rozanov scored once. Assist on another. He played well but not five-goals well, and the loss stung in the specific way that losses always stung — the taste of copper, the tightness in his jaw, the particular silence of a locker room that had come up short. Cliff Marlow threw his gloves into his stall with the force of a man who took every loss personally and needed an inanimate object to absorb the impact.

Rozanov showered. Changed. Did the media — short answers, controlled tone, the quotes that reporters expected from a player whose team had lost and who was not going to say anything interesting about it. Then he texted Shane.

Lily: Where are you.

Jane: Visitors locker room. Showering. 20 minutes.

Lily: Meet me at the car. Underground lot. Level 2. Black Audi.

Jane: You drive an Audi?

Lily: Dmitri said it was practical.

Jane: Your agent picks your car too?

Lily: Dmitri picks everything. I am very good at hockey and very bad at decisions that are not hockey.

Jane: I know.

Twenty-two minutes later Shane was in the passenger seat of Rozanov's Audi in the underground parking garage of TD Garden, wearing jeans and a navy pullover and the Voyageurs travel bag slung over his shoulder, and his hair was wet from the shower and he smelled like the visitors' soap, which was inferior to the home team's soap, which was one of the many small indignities of being the away team.

"You played well," Rozanov said. Backing out of the space.

"I scored the game-winner on your team."

"You played well. This is a fact. I am capable of acknowledging facts that do not benefit me."

Shane looked at him. The look was the one Shane gave when he was deciding whether to say something or keep it filed. He kept it filed. Put his hand on Rozanov's thigh instead — just rested it there, warm through the denim, while Rozanov drove.

"Where are we going," Shane said.

"You are going to eat the best clam chowder in Boston."

"I've had clam chowder."

"You have had clam chowder elsewhere. You have not had clam chowder at Neptune. These are different experiences. One of them involves bread bowls."

The restaurant was in the North End — a fifteen-minute drive from the Garden, longer with traffic, but the traffic was clearing because Boston traffic cleared after Bruins and Bears games the way water drained from a bathtub, slowly and with the accumulated grime of ten thousand vehicles that had all tried to use the same three roads simultaneously. Rozanov parked on a side street. They walked.

The North End at night was Rozanov's favorite part of Boston, which was a thing he would not have said two years ago because two years ago he did not have a favorite part of Boston. But the North End was narrow streets and old brick and restaurants that had been there since before Rozanov's parents were born and the smell of bread and garlic and the particular energy of a neighborhood that knew what it was and wasn't trying to be anything else. Rozanov respected this.

Rozanov had spent most of his life in places that were trying to be something else — Moscow trying to be modern, Boston trying to be important, Toronto trying to be New York. The North End was just the North End.

Neptune was small, loud, and crowded in the way that good restaurants in Boston were always crowded — not because of marketing or Instagram but because the food was good and people who lived here knew it. They got a booth in the back.

Rozanov ordered the chowder and a lobster roll. Shane ordered the chowder and a lobster roll because Shane was in Boston and Rozanov had told him to eat the chowder and the lobster roll and Shane, despite being a person who generally resisted being told what to do, trusted Rozanov about food in the same way Rozanov trusted Shane about books and towels.

The chowder came. Shane ate a spoonful. His eyes closed. Not dramatically — Shane did not do things dramatically — but the way a person's eyes closed when they encountered something that required their full attention.

"Okay," Shane said.

"Okay what."

"Okay, this is the best clam chowder I've ever had."

"I told you."

"You told me." Shane ate another spoonful. "How did you find this place?"

"Cliff brought me here after my first game. He said every new Bear has to eat at Neptune. It is one of his only good opinions."

They ate. The noise of the restaurant was a kind of privacy — the clatter of plates and the hum of conversation and the kitchen sounds creating a wall of sound that made their small booth feel contained, separate, a pocket of quiet inside the noise. Shane's knee was against Rozanov's under the table. They did not hold hands. They did not touch visibly.

They were two men eating lobster rolls in a booth in the North End and if anyone looked at them they would see colleagues, maybe, or acquaintances — two athletes in a city full of athletes, having dinner.

Rozanov's phone buzzed. He ignored it. It buzzed again.

"Your phone," Shane said.

Rozanov looked. Group text. Cliff, and two other Bears — Jamie Kowalski, the backup goalie, and Derek Hanes, a defenseman who had been scratched tonight and who was, judging by the text, already at a bar.

Cliff: Roz where are you. We're at Sidebar. Come drink your feelings about the L.

Rozanov put the phone away. "Cliff wants me to go to a bar."

"Go if you want."

"I do not want."

"Your teammates are going to wonder why you're not out."

"My teammates can wonder."

Shane looked at him across the table. The lobster roll was half-eaten. There was a spot of butter on Shane's chin. Rozanov reached across the table and wiped it off with his thumb, which was a thing he did without thinking and which was, he realized a half-second later, not a thing two male colleagues did in a restaurant in the North End. He pulled his hand back. Shane's ears went red.

"Don't do that in public," Shane said. Quietly. Not angry. Careful.

"I know. I was not thinking."

"I know you weren't."

They finished eating. Rozanov paid because Rozanov always paid, not because Shane couldn't afford it but because paying was one of the ways Rozanov took care of things and Rozanov needed to take care of things, specifically things that involved Shane, specifically always.

They were standing at the door, putting on coats, when the door opened and Cliff Marlow walked in.

Behind Cliff was Kowalski and Hanes and a fourth guy Rozanov didn't recognize — friend of a friend, probably, the kind of hanger-on that attached to professional athletes in bars and restaurants like a remora to a shark. Cliff was wearing a jacket that was too thin for Boston in May and his expression, when he saw Rozanov, went from surprised to interested to very interested in the span of about two seconds.

"Roz." Cliff looked at him. Then at Shane. Then back at Rozanov. "You said you weren't coming out."

"I am not coming out. I am leaving. These are different activities."

"Is that—" Cliff's eyes narrowed. He was looking at Shane. Shane, who was standing beside Rozanov in a navy pullover with his hands in his pockets and his face carefully neutral, was recognizable to anyone who watched hockey. Cliff watched hockey. Cliff watched a lot of hockey. "Is that Hollander?"

"This is my friend Shane," Rozanov said. "He is visiting from out of town."

"Your friend Shane is Shane Hollander."

"Yes."

Kowalski was looking at Shane with the polite confusion of a man who had not expected to see the opposing team's star center at a clam bar with his teammate at eleven o'clock on a Friday night. Hanes wasn't looking at anything because Hanes was on his phone. The remora was looking at the menu.

"I didn't know you two were friends," Cliff said.

"Now you know," Rozanov said.

The sentence landed the way Rozanov intended it to — flat, closed, a door shutting. Not rude. Not defensive. Just finished. The way you ended a conversation about something that was not a conversation.

Cliff looked at him for another second. Cliff was not stupid. Cliff had seen the hickey in Toronto. Cliff had seen Rozanov request a personal day after the five-goal game. Cliff had been Rozanov's linemate for two years and knew the rhythms of Rozanov's life the way you knew the rhythms of anyone you spent that much time with — the exits, the patterns, the things that were there and the things that were conspicuously absent.

And what was conspicuously absent from Rozanov's life, for the last two months, was the parade of women that had previously been its most reliable feature.

But Cliff was also a person who knew when a door was closed. And this door was closed.

"Cool," Cliff said. "Hollander. Good game tonight."

"Thanks," Shane said. His voice was the press-conference voice — polite, controlled, giving nothing.

"That redirect on the power play was sick."

"Appreciate it."

"Roz, you coming to practice tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"Cool. See you there." Cliff clapped Rozanov on the shoulder. Nodded at Shane. Went inside with Kowalski and Hanes and the remora. The door closed behind them.

Rozanov and Shane stood on the sidewalk. The North End was quiet now — the dinner crowds gone, the streets emptying, the particular hush of a neighborhood settling into its late-night version. The air was cold. Not March cold — May cold. The softer kind. The kind that promised it would be warm eventually but wasn't ready to commit.

"That was close," Shane said.

"That was Cliff."

"Cliff who saw us together at a restaurant at eleven at night after a game where I scored the winner against his team."

"Cliff who knows when to stop asking questions."

"How sure are you about that."

"Very."

Shane looked at him. The press-conference face was gone. The face underneath was tired and wary and young. Twenty years old and hiding in plain sight in a city that was not his, with a man he could not be seen with, in a sport that would not allow them to exist.

"Let's go home," Rozanov said.

The word — home — came out without premeditation. He had meant let's go to the condo or let's go back or any of the neutral, non-loaded ways a person referred to a place where they lived. He had said home. And the word, once said, was correct in a way that surprised him.

The condo on Beacon Street, with its decorator furniture and its four new towels and its ginger ale in the refrigerator and its twelve-hundred-dollar panini press — the condo was not home. Rozanov did not have a home. Had not had a home since his mother died and the apartment in Moscow stopped smelling like her cooking.

But the condo with Shane in it was closer to home than anything Rozanov had experienced since, and the word had come out because his mouth knew something his brain was still processing.

Shane's hand brushed against his. In the dark, on the sidewalk, where no one could see. Just a brush. Knuckles against knuckles. There and gone.

"Yeah," Shane said. "Let's go home."

---

The condo was warm. Rozanov turned the heat up before games because the condo got cold when no one was in it and he wanted it to be warm when they got back, which was a thing he'd started doing in April and which was, he understood, another manifestation of the towel problem — the problem being that Rozanov's entire domestic life was now organized around the question of what Shane would want when he walked through the door.

Shane took off his shoes. Put them by the door — lined up, parallel, the laces tucked in. Rozanov's shoes were wherever Rozanov's shoes had landed when he'd kicked them off, which was a system Rozanov preferred and which Shane tolerated the way Shane tolerated most of Rozanov's domestic failures, which was silently and with the occasional meaningful look at the shoe pile.

Shane went to the refrigerator. Opened it. Took out a ginger ale.

He stood there for a moment. Holding the can. Looking at it. Then he looked at Rozanov.

"You stock these for me," Shane said.

"They were on sale."

"They're always on sale. They're ginger ale. Nobody buys ginger ale at full price."

"Then it was a good financial decision."

Shane opened the can. Drank. Looked at Rozanov over the top of it. The look was the one that made Rozanov's chest do the thing — not the overtime thing, not the fury thing. The softer one. The one that had been growing for two months, taking up more and more space, crowding out the other things, and that Rozanov had stopped trying to name because the name was too simple for something this large. The name was just love and the word was four letters and the feeling was the size of a building.

They ended up on the couch. This was the routine — the post-game, post-dinner, post-everything routine that they'd developed over visits. Couch. Television. Shane on one end, Rozanov on the other, and then, gradually, the distance closing — Shane's feet on Rozanov's lap, or Rozanov's arm along the back of the couch behind Shane's shoulders, or Shane leaning sideways until his head was on Rozanov's chest. The progression was always the same and always felt new, the slow collapse of two bodies into each other, like gravity was a thing that happened between people and not just between planets.

Rozanov turned on the television. Flipped channels. Landed on a rerun of something — a show, not hockey, because neither of them wanted to watch hockey after playing hockey, the same way a chef didn't want to cook after cooking. The show had people in it who were talking about something that did not matter. The volume was low. The apartment was warm. The ginger ale can was on the coffee table, half-empty, and Shane was beside him on the couch.

"Marlow's going to figure it out," Shane said. He was looking at the television but not watching it. His voice had the quality it got when he'd been thinking about something for a while and was ready to say it — measured, careful, the words pre-selected.

"Marlow already knows something."

"He doesn't know what."

"He knows enough to stop asking."

"For now."

"For now is all we have." Rozanov's arm was behind Shane's shoulders. His fingers found the hair at the back of Shane's neck — the place, his place. "For now is fine."

Shane was quiet. Then he leaned into Rozanov. Shoulder against shoulder. Head tilting. The slow collapse.

"I don't want to think about it tonight," Shane said.

"Then don't."

"I want to sit on this couch and watch this terrible show and drink my ginger ale and not think about Cliff Marlow or the NHL or what happens if someone figures it out."

"Then do that."

Shane's head settled on Rozanov's chest. The weight of it — familiar now, the specific weight of Shane's head on his sternum, the pressure of his skull against Rozanov's ribs — was the closest thing Rozanov had to peace. The television murmured. The heat clicked on and off. The city was outside the windows — Boston, the city Rozanov had been wrong about, the city that contained Neptune and Beacon Street and this couch and this man and the four cans of ginger ale in the refrigerator.

Three cans now. Shane had finished the first one.

Rozanov pressed the cross. Gently.

Shane's breathing changed. Slowed. The even, deep rhythm of a person falling asleep. His hand, which had been on Rozanov's leg, went slack. His body got heavier — the incremental weight gain of a person surrendering consciousness, the muscles releasing, the careful architecture of Shane Hollander powering down for the night.

He was asleep. On Rozanov's couch. In Rozanov's apartment. In Boston, a city where Shane did not live but where Shane had a key and a designated shelf in the bathroom and ginger ale in the refrigerator and a space on this couch that was his whether he was in it or not.

Rozanov did not move. Did not reach for the remote. Did not shift or stretch or do any of the things a person did when they were pinned to a couch by the sleeping weight of another person and their arm was falling asleep and the television was still on and it was past midnight and there was a practice in the morning.

He sat there. Shane's head on his chest. The cross warm. The apartment warm. The ginger ale on the table. The terrible show doing its terrible thing on the screen that neither of them was watching.

This was it. This was the thing Rozanov had not known he was looking for — not the sex, not the fury, not the five goals or the midnight flights or the bruises on each other's necks. Those things were real and those things mattered but they were not the center. The center was this. A couch. A sleeping man. The quiet after everything else.

Shane mumbled something. In his sleep. Rozanov couldn't make it out — a word, maybe, or a piece of one, the consonants soft and the vowels absent, the way words sounded when they came from the dreaming part of a person's brain and not the waking part.

Rozanov leaned down. Pressed his mouth to Shane's hair.

"I know," he said. To the sleeping man. To the apartment. To the ginger ale. To Boston.

The television murmured. The heat clicked. Shane slept.

Rozanov held him.

Chapter 6: Epilogue

Chapter Summary

Three years of July. The cottage Shane built on his grandparents' land has a reading room with east-facing windows and a ridiculous fake bear rug that was supposed to be a joke. Ten minutes through the trees, his parents spend every summer not knowing what's at the other end of the trail. Ilya brings Russian cake. Shane makes chrysanthemum tea. The trail is about to go both ways.

Three years later...

 

 ILYA

The lake had a name Ilya could not pronounce. This was true of most things in this part of Ontario — the county roads, the bait shops, the way the woman at the gas station outside Smiths Falls had given him directions using landmarks instead of street names, as though he was supposed to know which barn she meant. Rural Ontario was its own language. Ilya spoke it poorly.

He'd been coming here for three years. Every July. Four weeks. The only month that belonged entirely to them — no games, no practice, no bus rides, no arenas. July was the offseason and the offseason was the cottage and the cottage was Shane's, which meant the cottage was theirs, which meant that for four weeks every summer Ilya got to live inside the life they were building instead of next to it.

The cottage was not a cottage. Shane called it a cottage because Shane was Canadian and Canadians called everything near a lake a cottage regardless of its actual size or construction, but it was a house. Shane had built it — had it built, on the plot his grandparents had left him, on the eastern shore of the lake. Shane had designed it with the meticulous attention he brought to everything. Three bedrooms. An open kitchen. A porch that faced the water. A dock. The walls were double-pane — Shane had insisted, had researched insulation values and thermal bridging with the same focus he brought to forecheck systems. The windows were large because Shane liked natural light.

The second bedroom was Ilya's reading room — east-facing windows, a chair Shane had picked out, and shelves that were filling, summer by summer, with Russian novels. Tolstoy. Bulgakov. Dostoevsky. The books Ilya read in his first language because reading in Russian was the one place his brain went quiet. The kitchen was functional because Shane cooked. The living room had a stone fireplace and a rug — a fake bear rug, enormous, ridiculous, the kind of thing Ilya had bought as a joke and Shane had refused to remove because it was, Shane admitted under duress, actually comfortable.

The porch had two chairs because there were two of them and Shane had planned for that — had drawn the plans and hired the contractor and chosen the wood and built this place with the specific, quiet intention of having somewhere that was theirs.

Ten minutes' walk through the trees, along a trail that smelled like pine and lake water and the particular green smell of a Canadian summer, was the Hollander cottage. The real one. The one Shane had grown up in — the one where David and Yuna spent their summers. Where Shane had learned to swim and fish and shoot pucks against a plywood board his father had nailed to the shed.

Three summers. Ilya had spent three summers ten minutes from Shane's parents and had never met them. This was not an accident. This was architecture. Shane's architecture — the careful design of a life where the private thing and the family thing existed in parallel, close enough to touch, never touching.

Until today.

Ilya was on the dock. It was six in the morning. The lake was still — not calm, still, the aggressive stillness of water that had not yet been disturbed by wind or boats. The dock was warm from yesterday's sun, the wood holding heat the way wood did. His feet were in the water. The water was cold in the way that Canadian lake water was always cold — the temperature of a country that considered hypothermia a recreational risk.

He pressed the cross. His mother's cross. The gold was warm from his skin. Three years of pressing it — in hotel rooms and on bus rides and in Shane's bed and on this dock — and the metal had memorized his thumb.

His mother had been dead for eleven years. She had killed herself when Ilya was twelve. He had found her. In the apartment in Moscow. On the kitchen floor. The details lived in him like shrapnel — the angle of her arm, the color of her lips, the way the light from the window had fallen across her hair as though the sun had not been informed. He did not talk about it. He wore the cross. He pressed it when the feelings were too large for language. The cross was the last thing she'd touched before she decided to leave, and it was the first thing Ilya touched every morning, and the connection between those two facts was the architecture of his grief.

Three years together. He was twenty-three now. He had a Stanley Cup — the Bears, finally, his second year. Conn Smythe winner. He'd held the Cup over his head in the Boston arena and the crowd had screamed and his phone had buzzed afterward with a text from Jane: You deserved that. I'm proud of you. He'd sat in the stall with champagne in his hair and read it four times.

Shane had a Cup too. Montreal, the following season. Shane had scored the overtime winner in Game Six. The city had rioted in the joyful, car-flipping way that Montreal rioted. Ilya had watched on television in Boston with his hand on the cross and his eyes wet. He'd texted: I am going to marry you and I need you to know that this decision was made during the second period and is non-negotiable. Shane had texted back: Ask me when you're not emotional. Ilya had texted back: I am always emotional. This is a permanent condition. You should adjust your expectations.

The rivalry was still the curtain. The league loved it — the promos, the billboards, the thirty-second ESPN spots where they stared at each other across a faceoff dot. Saturday nights. The marketing department's favorite story. Rozanov vs. Hollander. The rivalry continues. Nobody looked behind the curtain. Nobody asked why Rozanov's parade of women had stopped, or why Hollander never dated publicly, or why both of them disappeared for all of July.

Rozanov vs. Hollander. That was the public version. The jersey version. The version the world got.

But Ilya was not Rozanov on this dock. Had not been Rozanov here for three summers. Rozanov was the man who scored goals and gave interviews and kept the curtain closed. Ilya was the man who sat on a dock at six in the morning with his feet in cold water and waited for Shane to bring him coffee. Ilya was the name Shane had found — had found a door in it that nobody else knew was there and had walked through it, that first night on the hotel room floor. And Ilya had been Ilya ever since. Not always. Not to the world. But here. At the cottage. In the four weeks of July. In the only life that was true.

July was the cottage. The cottage was the truth. And the truth was this dock and this lake and the sound of Shane's footsteps on the porch behind him, which Ilya could identify from fifty feet. He had memorized the rhythm — the weight, the cadence of a man who walked like he was saving energy for something.

"You're up early," Shane said. He was carrying two mugs. One coffee. One chrysanthemum tea — pale gold, the dried flowers still floating. Shane drank chrysanthemum tea the way other people drank coffee. Yuna had raised him on it. The smell was Shane's morning smell — floral and warm and clean — and Ilya had never tasted the stuff but he associated it with the first hour of every day they spent together.

"I do not sleep well before big things," Ilya said. He took the coffee. Shane sat beside him on the dock. Their feet in the water. Shoulders touching.

"It's going to be fine," Shane said.

"You keep saying this."

"Because it's true."

"You do not know that. You are projecting confidence because you are nervous. Confidence is your anxiety response."

Shane looked at him. The look was the one from the beginning — the clear, steady, filing-cabinet look. The one that said I see exactly what you're doing and I'm going to let you do it.

"I told them last night," Shane said. "On the phone. Everything."

Ilya's mug stopped halfway to his mouth. "You told them."

"I told them I'm gay. I told them I've been with someone for three years. I told them it's you."

"On the phone."

"My mother deserved to hear it from my voice. Not to have you walk through the door and figure it out from context."

"What did she say."

Shane drank his tea. The mug had a loon on it. The loon was faded from three summers of dishwashing. "She was quiet. For about four seconds. Four seconds is a long time for my mother."

"And then."

"And then she said she thought we hated each other."

Ilya almost laughed. The sound caught in his throat. "She thought we hated each other."

"She's watched every game I've ever played. She's watched you slash me in the crease. She's watched us shove each other after whistles. She has called you — and I am quoting — 'that dirty Russian who plays like he's allergic to rules.' So yes. She thought we hated each other."

"I do play like I am allergic to rules."

"Not the point."

"What happened after she said this."

"She was quiet again. Longer. And then she asked me if I was happy."

"What did you say."

Shane looked at the lake. The stillness was breaking — a loon, somewhere, calling across the water. The sound was high and lonesome and strange.

"I told her I was the happiest I'd ever been in my life," Shane said. "And then she was quiet for the longest time. And then she said she wanted to meet you. Today."

"Today."

"She's making pasta. She told my father to go to the store for bread."

"Bread."

"When my mother sends my father for bread, it means something important is happening. Bread is the Hollander family crisis protocol."

Ilya pressed the cross. The morning was warm. The dock was warm. Shane was beside him, warm, drinking chrysanthemum tea from a loon mug. The lake was waking up and in six hours Ilya was going to walk through the trees and meet the woman who had booed him from her living room and the man who did the crossword in pen.

"What did your father say," Ilya said.

Shane was quiet for a moment. "He asked if you were the one from Toronto. The club."

Shane had told his parents about the drugging three years ago. He'd told them someone had helped — a friend. He had not said the name.

"I told him yes," Shane said. "That you were the one who found me. Who carried me out. Who got me the room and stayed up all night."

"What did he say."

"He said, 'Then I already owe him.'"

Something in Ilya's chest shifted. Not the thing — by now the thing had a name and the name was just love and the love was structural, load-bearing, the foundation everything else was built on. What shifted was something older. Something about fathers. What fathers owed. What fathers gave. What it meant when a man you had never met said I already owe him because you did the minimum decent thing for his son.

Ilya's father had never owed anyone anything. Grigori Rozanov had taken and taken and the taking was the only verb he knew. Ilya had not spoken to his father in four years. The silence was permanent and correct.

But David Hollander. David Hollander was a man who sent bread signals and owed debts to strangers who kept his son safe.

"I am going to like your father," Ilya said.

"You don't know that yet."

"I know it. I have decided."

Shane leaned against him. Shoulder to shoulder on the dock. The loon called again. The water lapped at the pilings. The coffee was getting cold.

"I found a house," Shane said.

Ilya looked at him.

"In Ottawa. In the Glebe. Four bedrooms. A yard."

"How big is the yard."

"Big enough for ten dogs."

Ilya set the coffee down. "You said five was the maximum for a functional household. You have said this fourteen times. I have counted."

"I'm revising my position."

"To ten?"

"To negotiable. My mother says we should get a Shiba Inu. Apparently my grandmother had one."

"Your mother is already involved in the dog negotiation and I have not met her yet."

"My mother has been involved in every negotiation I've ever had. This is a fixed property of the Hollander family."

"I accept this. Eight dogs. One must be very large."

"Seven. And the Shiba Inu."

"That is eight."

"The Shiba Inu is my mother's. It doesn't count toward the total."

"This is creative accounting."

"This is how negotiations work."

Ilya laughed. The real one — the one that started behind the cross and came out unguarded. The laugh Shane had been collecting for three years. The laugh that only happened here, at the cottage, on the dock, in the four weeks of July that belonged to them.

Shane put his hand on the back of Ilya's neck. The place. His place. Three years and the hand still went there like it was the only possible destination.

"Hey, Ilya."

"What."

"It's going to be fine."

Ilya covered Shane's hand with his own. Held it there.

"I know," he said. "I have decided this also."

---

SHANE

The trail between the cottages was ten minutes if you walked and seven if you were Ilya, whose legs were long enough that his walking pace qualified as a jog for anyone under five-eleven. Shane had worn the trail into a visible path over three summers — back and forth, every day. The daily commute between the life he shared with Ilya and the life he shared with his family. Two separate territories. Two separate selves. The trees between them serving as a border crossing that Shane had been managing alone.

Not anymore.

They walked the trail at eleven-thirty. Ilya was carrying a box — ptichye moloko, bird's milk cake, from Babushka Anya's on Rue Rachel.

Babushka Anya's was a small Russian bakery four blocks from Shane's apartment in Montreal. Ilya had found it his second time visiting — had walked the neighborhood alone while Shane was at practice, looking for coffee, and had instead found a storefront with Cyrillic lettering and a woman behind the counter who had taken one look at him and said, in Russian, you look like you haven't been fed properly in years. The woman was Anya. Her husband Gennady ran the ovens. They had come from Saint Petersburg in the nineties. They had no idea who Ilya was — did not watch hockey, did not care about hockey, cared about whether the boy who kept coming back on game-day mornings was eating enough.

They had adopted him. Not officially. The Russian way — the way that involved being fed without asking and scolded for not visiting enough and called vnuchek even though he was six-three and twenty-three years old and could bench-press Gennady. Ilya had been their number one customer for three years. He bought the ptichye moloko every time he was in Montreal. He bought it when Shane's team was playing at home and Ilya was in the city for the game. He bought it when he flew in for a weekend. He bought it in July, before driving to the cottage, because the cake traveled well and because Anya wrapped it in wax paper and then foil and then a bag and then told him to drive carefully as though the cake were a child.

Ilya had changed his shirt. Twice. The first replacement had been vetoed by Shane — too casual — and the second by Ilya — too formal. The result was a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up and dark jeans. Trying to look like he hadn't tried.

"You look good," Shane said.

"I look like a man who changed shirts twice."

"You look good."

"I look like a man who is about to meet his boyfriend's mother while carrying Russian cake through a forest in Ontario."

"All of those things are true and you still look good."

The Hollander cottage was white clapboard with green trim. A porch that faced the lake. A shed where Shane had shot pucks against plywood until the plywood gave up. A kitchen window where Yuna's curtains — the same ones since Shane was twelve — moved in the breeze.

Shane stopped at the edge of the tree line. Ilya stopped beside him. The cottage was fifty feet away. Inside, Yuna was cooking. Shane could smell it — garlic and olive oil and something with tomatoes.

"Okay," Shane said.

"Okay."

"My mother is going to hug you. She's a hugger. Do not resist."

"I was not planning to resist."

"My father is going to shake your hand and not say much. This is not coldness. That's just David Hollander."

"I understand fathers who do not say much."

"My mother is going to ask you questions. Many questions. Answer honestly. She can tell when people are performing."

"I will not perform."

"Good." Shane looked at him. At the profile against the trees. The dark curls. The cross. The man who had crossed a dance floor three years ago because Shane's eyes were wrong and leaving was not possible. "Ready?"

Ilya pressed the cross. One thumb. The old gesture. The one that connected him to his mother and to the version of himself that existed before the draft and the women and the clean exits.

"Ready," Ilya said.

They walked out of the trees.

---

ILYA

Yuna Hollander was small. Five-three. Black hair to her shoulders, just starting to thread with gray. She was standing on the porch when they came out of the trees — standing there like she'd been watching. Because she had been watching. Yuna Hollander was a woman who watched things with the same focus her son brought to game tape.

She saw them. She saw Shane first, then Ilya. Her eyes did the thing Shane's eyes did — the sweep, the assessment, the filing. Then she came down the porch steps and crossed the grass. She was moving fast for someone with short legs. Ilya had approximately four seconds to prepare.

She looked up at him. Way up. The height difference was twelve inches. She did not appear to find this relevant.

"You're taller in person," Yuna said.

"Most people say this."

"Most people are right." She looked at the box. "What is that."

"Ptichye moloko. Bird's milk cake. From a Russian bakery in Montreal."

"You brought cake."

"I do not arrive at a mother's house with empty hands."

Something in Yuna's face moved. She heard the word mother's and the respect in it and she filed it the way her son filed everything.

"Come inside," Yuna said. Then she stepped forward and hugged him. Shane had warned him. The warning was insufficient. The hug was decisive and warm and five-three's worth of structural integrity. She held on for three seconds. Ilya's arms went around her. She smelled like cooking and perfume and the accumulated warmth of a kitchen that had been feeding people for decades.

When she pulled back, her eyes were bright.

"I booed you," she said. "Game Four. Last April. You scored in overtime and I stood in this living room and booed. I called you a dirty player. On multiple occasions. I thought you two hated each other."

"On the ice we are not gentle with each other."

"You slashed my son in the crease in February."

"He was screening my goalie. This is what happens."

"I stood up and called you a word I won't repeat in front of David."

"I probably deserved it."

"You definitely deserved it." She took the box from his hands. Her eyes were sharp and dark and the same shape as Shane's. "And now you're telling me that the whole time — the slashing, the shoving, the trash talk — the whole time, you were—"

"In love with him," Ilya said. "Yes. The whole time."

Yuna looked at him. Looked at Shane. Looked back at Ilya.

"Inside," she said. "The pasta's almost ready."

The cottage was small and full. Full of things — books on shelves, photos on walls. Shane at five in a hockey jersey. Shane at twelve with missing teeth. Shane at eighteen in a draft-day suit. A life on the walls. Ilya looked at the photos the way he used to look at game tape — studying, cataloguing — except this was not the opponent's weakness. This was the thing he loved, traced backward through time.

David was in the kitchen doorway. Taller than Yuna, shorter than Shane. Graying hair. Reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. A newspaper folded under his arm. He looked at Ilya with the steady expression of a man who measured things before he spoke about them.

"Mr. Hollander," Ilya said.

"David." He extended his hand. "You brought cake?"

"From a bakery in Montreal. The owners are Russian. They have been feeding me for three years."

"Yuna's been cooking since five-thirty. The kitchen looks like a crime scene." David paused. "A happy crime scene."

David's grip was firm and brief. He looked at Ilya for three seconds. Then David nodded — the small, decided nod of a man who had completed his assessment.

"Sit down," David said. "She made enough pasta for twelve people."

---

Dinner was at the table in the kitchen. The table was old — oak, scratched, the kind that had hosted decades of meals and card games and homework. Ilya sat in a chair that had a wobble. The wobble was familiar to Shane — he could tell by the way Shane didn't react to it. This chair had been wobbling since Shane was a kid. Nobody had fixed it. The wobble was part of the chair and the chair was part of the cottage and the cottage was part of the family.

The pasta was extraordinary. Yuna had made cacio e pepe with handmade noodles and a bolognese that had been simmering since dawn and a garlic bread situation that involved three heads of garlic and no apology.

Ilya reached for the parmesan. Grated it over his cacio e pepe. Kept grating. The pile grew from generous to architectural to geological. Shane watched this happen with the expression of a man witnessing a crime.

"That's enough," Shane said.

"It is not enough."

"You can't taste the pasta under that."

"The pasta is a vehicle for the cheese. This is its purpose."

"Mom, are you seeing this?"

Yuna was watching. "Let him eat," she said. "He's an honored guest."

"He's burying your food under a pound of parmesan."

"I am honoring her food," Ilya said. "With cheese."

He ate two plates. Then a third. Yuna watched him eat with satisfaction. She had received intelligence about a target's weakness and had exploited it with maximum force.

"You like pasta," Yuna said.

"I love pasta. All other food is trying to be pasta. All other food is failing."

"Shane told me. That's why I made it."

"If I had known this is how your family cooks, I would have insisted to meet you three years ago."

Yuna set her fork down. The setting-down was precise. Ilya recognized the gesture. Shane did the same thing when he was about to say something that mattered — put down whatever was in his hands so they could be free.

"Three years," Yuna said. "Tell me how this started."

Shane looked at Ilya. Ilya looked at Shane. The silent negotiation.

"We got together during our rookie season," Shane said. "In Toronto. There was a—"

"The summer before," Ilya said.

Shane looked at him.

"The summer before rookie season," Ilya said. "July. Photo shoot in Toronto. CCM. They tell us to stand close, look competitive." He looked at Shane. "We did not end up looking competitive."

"So what happened," Yuna said.

"There was a hotel room," Ilya said. "And—"

"Oh my God." Shane's hand went over his face. "Ilya. Do not talk about that."

"I am giving your mother the timeline. She asked."

"You can give the timeline without the hotel room."

"The hotel room is the timeline."

Yuna looked between them. Her mouth pressed together. Not disapproval. Calculation. "Was this a hookup situation?"

Shane's hand dropped. His face was scarlet. "Mom. Do not — please don't ask questions like that."

"I am asking questions like that because my son has been hiding a relationship for three years and I am filling in the blanks. Was it a hookup."

"No," Ilya said. Quiet. The humor gone from his voice. "No. I had been in love with him for a long time before that room. Since the draft. Maybe before. I walked into that room knowing it was not casual. Not for me."

The table was quiet.

"But then I left," Ilya said. "Without giving him my number. Because I was twenty and stupid and scared. And we did not speak for seven months."

"You didn't exchange phone numbers," David said. From behind his wine glass.

"I walked out. Did not look back. Did not leave a way for him to reach me." He looked at Shane. "This was the worst thing I have done."

"I was scared,  too," Shane said. His voice was tight. "I understand."

"But I--"

"Ilya, it's okay."

"Boys," Yuna said. The word stopped them both. Not loud. Not sharp. The word of a mother who had been stopping arguments for twenty-three years. "Continue. The seven months."

"The seven months were bad," Shane said. "I didn't have his number. I tried to get it through CCM. They said the contact list was confidential."

"And then Toronto," Ilya said. "The March after. Shane was at a club with friends. I was at the same club. I saw him and he was not — not right. Someone had put something in his drink."

Yuna's hand went to David's on the table. A wife reaching for her husband while the ground shifted.

"That's the night," David said. "The night you told us about."

"That's the night," Shane said.

"And Ilya was the one who—"

"He carried me out. Got me a cab. Got me a hotel room and stayed up all night. He left Advil on the nightstand."

The table was quiet. The pasta was cooling. David was looking at Ilya with the expression of a man who had known, for three years, that a stranger had saved his son. Who was now sitting across from that stranger at his wife's table and understanding, for the first time, the full shape of the debt.

"Thank you," David said. Two words. Quiet.

"You do not have to thank me for that," Ilya said. "That is baseline. That is the floor."

Shane's hand found Ilya's under the table. Ilya could feel the pulse. Fast. Shane's heart rate was doing what it had been doing since that hospital bed three years ago. Never fully settled.

"I really thought you hated each other," Yuna said again. She said it differently this time. Not the surprise from the porch. Something softer. The bewilderment of a woman who had watched every game, tracked every slash, stood in her living room and booed this man. Who was now seeing the game tape from the other side.

"We were very loud about hating each other," Ilya said. "So nobody would hear the quiet part."

Yuna's eyes went bright. Her jaw did something — Shane's jaw, the same jaw. The genetic architecture of a family visible in a single expression.

"Three years," Yuna said. "And you've been here. Every July. Ten minutes through those trees."

"Yes."

"I could hear the music sometimes. From your cottage. In the evenings."

Ilya looked at Shane. Shane was looking at his plate. The plate was very interesting to Shane at this moment.

"Shane plays the guitar sometimes," Ilya said. "In the evenings. On the porch."

"Shane doesn't play the guitar," Yuna said.

"He does now. He taught himself. Two summers ago. He is not very good."

Shane's ears went red. "I'm adequate."

"You are enthusiastic. This is different from good."

"He played guitar at your cottage," Yuna said. She was looking at the table. At the space between the bread and the wine. "He was ten minutes away playing guitar and I didn't know you were there."

"Mom," Shane said. Quietly.

Yuna looked up. Her eyes were bright. Not crying. Yuna Hollander did not cry at tables. But bright.

"I'm not upset," Yuna said. "I'm recalculating three summers. Every time Shane said he was going for a walk. Every time he said he wanted to read on the dock. Every time he left after dinner and came back in the morning and said he'd fallen asleep at his place."

"That was mostly true," Shane said. "I did fall asleep at my place. I just wasn't alone."

David set down his wine glass. Looked at Ilya.

"The cottage Shane built," David said. "The design. Three bedrooms."

"Yes."

"But you share one."

"Two are in use. Shane and I share the main bedroom. The second is my reading room."

"He designed it for you." Not a question.

Ilya looked at Shane. Shane was looking at his father with an expression Ilya had not seen before — open, exposed, the face of a boy sitting at his family's table wanting his father to understand.

"He did," Ilya said. "He put windows on the east side of my reading room because I like morning light. The porch faces the water because I like to sit outside after dinner. The kitchen is big enough for two people because he wanted us to cook together, even though I cannot cook."

"You make tuna melts," Shane said.

"On a twelve-hundred-dollar panini press. This is not cooking. This is operating equipment."

David's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close.

"And after," David said. "When you both retire. You've discussed this."

"We've found a house," Shane said. "In Ottawa. In the Glebe. Four bedrooms. A yard."

Yuna's hand tightened on David's. "Ottawa."

"Close to you," Shane said. "Close to home."

"And dogs," Ilya said. "We are going to have dogs."

"How many dogs," David said.

"We are negotiating. Shane says seven. I say ten. Your wife has already inserted herself into the negotiation by recommending a Shiba Inu."

Yuna looked at him. "I recommended that this morning. On the phone. With Shane."

"Shane tells me everything."

Yuna looked at her son. Then at Ilya. "He's learning," she said. "Slowly."

"You are right," Ilya said. "And I am sorry it took this long. Shane was trying to protect everyone. Your family. Our — what we have. He was carrying this alone. Three years. I wish he did not have to."

Yuna looked at him for a long time. She was reading him the way she read hockey — every shift, every tell, the things the player showed and the things he tried to hide.

Then Yuna stood up. Came around the table. Put her hand on Ilya's shoulder.

"Your mother," Yuna said. "Shane told me. On the phone. What happened."

"She took her own life. When I was twelve. I was the one who found her."

Yuna's hand tightened on his shoulder. The kitchen was very quiet. The kind of quiet that a room makes when it is holding something too heavy for sound.

"What was her name," Yuna said.

"Irina."

"Irina." Yuna said the name carefully. Giving it weight. "She must have loved you very much."

Ilya's thumb found the cross. Pressed.

"She did," he said. His voice was not steady. "She loved me. Very much. But she could not stay."

Yuna's hand moved from his shoulder to his face. One hand. Cupping his jaw. A mother's gesture. Extended to a boy who had not been touched like this since he was twelve.

"You have a family now," Yuna said. "You had one before today. You just didn't know it."

Ilya could not speak. His hand was on the cross. Shane's hand was on his under the table. Yuna's hand was on his face. Three points of contact. Three anchors.

He nodded.

Yuna went back to her chair. Picked up her fork. "Eat," she said. "The pasta's getting cold and I didn't cook for six hours to have it go to waste."

Ilya ate. The pasta was not cold. It was warm and perfect and the best thing he had tasted since the last time he'd been at Babushka Anya's counter and Anya had handed him a plate of pelmeni and told him he looked thin.

---

SHANE

After dinner, Ilya washed the dishes. Yuna protested. Ilya washed them anyway. David dried. They stood side by side at the sink — David five-nine, Ilya six-three — and Shane watched from the table.

David said something quiet. Shane didn't catch it. Ilya laughed — the real laugh, the one that started behind the cross. David's mouth nearly followed. The two of them stood at the sink drying plates. Shane's heart rate was fifty-eight. Below resting. The lowest it had been in three years.

Yuna sat beside Shane at the table. She was watching them too. Her hand found Shane's.

"He washes dishes like he's being evaluated," Yuna said.

"He's nervous."

"I know." She squeezed his hand. "He doesn't need to be."

"Tell him that."

"I'm going to. I'm going to tell him many things. I have three years of material." She paused. Looked at Shane. Her black hair catching the kitchen light. The gray threads at her temples. "The summer before your rookie season. July. You were eighteen."

"Yes."

"And you've been carrying this since then."

"Yes."

Yuna's hand tightened. "That's a long time to carry something alone."

"I wasn't alone. I had him."

"You had him in secret. That's not the same."

Shane looked at the sink. At Ilya, who was listening to David explain the proper technique for drying crystal and nodding with focused attention. Ilya understood that drying techniques were not the point. The point was standing next to Shane's father in Shane's mother's kitchen and being allowed to stay.

"Is it down now?" Yuna said. "The weight. Is it down?"

Shane looked at his mother. At the woman who had raised him and watched every game and counted every stat and known, without being told, that her son was carrying something.

"It's down," Shane said.

Yuna kissed his temple. Quick. The way she'd done when he was small.

"Good," she said. "Now go tell that man to use the towel on the left. The one on the right is for hands."

---

They walked back to Shane's cottage at ten. The trail through the trees. The July dark, which was not really dark — the sky a deep residual blue, the stars out, the lake visible through the branches. Yuna had sent them home with leftovers. Pasta. Bread. Two slices of the Russian cake wrapped in foil with the precision of an origami master. At the door, she had hugged Ilya again. Longer.

"Next time," Yuna had said, pulling back, "bring more cake. And bring some of those pelmeni Shane says you get from the bakery woman."

"Anya would be honored."

"I want to meet her. Any woman who's been feeding you for three years is someone I should know."

"Your mother," Ilya had said, looking at Shane, "is going to manage our entire life."

"This is a fixed property of the universe," Shane had said.

David had shaken Ilya's hand at the door. Held it.

"You're welcome here," David had said. "Anytime. Both cottages. This is your family now."

Six words at the end that were David's entire capacity for emotional speech, deployed at the screen door with the lake behind him. And they were enough. More than enough. Ilya's hand had gone to the cross and stayed there. Shane had seen the press — hard, sustained — and understood what it meant. Ilya was telling his mother about the family he'd found.

Now they were on the trail. The pine smell. The dark. The sound of their footsteps on the path Shane had worn into the earth. Ilya's hand found Shane's. In the dark. Between the trees. Fingers laced.

"Your mother obseved my fork technique," Ilya said.

"She observes everything. It's genetic."

"She asked me fourteen questions."

"That's low for her. She was being restrained."

"She asked me if I floss."

"She asks everyone if they floss. It's her screening question. She was happy to hear you say yes."

"I said yes because I do floss. I am a person who flosses."

"She definitely approved. She's big on dental hygiene."

Ilya was quiet. The trail narrowed. Their shoulders brushed a branch. Shane ducked; Ilya didn't need to.

"I keep thinking about the trail," Ilya said. "Three years. You walked it every day. Between me and them."

"Yes."

"And now the trail goes both ways."

"It always went both ways. They just didn't know what was at the other end."

"Now they know."

"Now they know."

---

 ILYA

The cottage was dark when they got back. Shane turned on the kitchen light. Put the leftovers in the fridge. Ilya stood in the doorway and watched him — the economy of motion, the precise way Shane dealt with containers and foil. Shane's hands. Ilya had been watching Shane's hands for years. The charge had not faded.

Shane closed the fridge. Turned around. Leaned against the counter.

They looked at each other across the kitchen. The double-glass walls held the night out and the warmth in. The light was low — just the one over the stove. Shane's dark hair. His jaw. The freckles at his collarbones where his shirt had slipped.

"Hi," Shane said.

"Hi."

"Today was—"

"Yes."

"My mother likes you."

"Your mother made me pasta."

"That's how you know."

Six feet apart. Neither of them moved. The whole day had been proximity without contact — sitting beside each other at Yuna's table, walking the trail shoulder to shoulder, being careful. Being good. Being the version of themselves that could sit across from parents and answer questions and not reach for each other.

They were done being good.

"Come here," Shane said.

Ilya crossed the kitchen. His hand went to the back of Shane's neck and Shane's chin tilted up and the five inches between them felt like the last five inches in the world. Shane kissed him. Not soft. Not belonging. The other kind — the kind that started in the mouth and ended in the spine. Shane's hands fisted in Ilya's shirt and pulled. The button-down came untucked and Shane's palms were on his stomach, his ribs, sliding up.

"Every minute at that table," Shane said against his mouth. "Every question she asked. I was sitting there deciding what I was going to do to you."

"What did you decide."

Shane bit his lower lip. Hard enough that Ilya felt it everywhere.

"Come to the living room," Shane said.

The fireplace was already going. Low flames — Shane had lit it as as soon as it got dark, the way he always did on July evenings when the sun went down and the lake air came in cool through the screens. The living room was warm. The light was amber and shifting. And the rug was there.

The rug. The enormous, ridiculous, fake bear rug that Ilya had bought as a joke two summers ago from a roadside shop outside Perth, Ontario. He had carried it into the cottage and spread it in front of the fireplace and Shane had said absolutely not and then had lain down on it that same night and said okay, it's actually really comfortable and the rug had stayed. It had become theirs the way everything in this cottage became theirs — through proximity and repetition and the slow accumulation of use.

Shane pulled Ilya toward the fireplace. Both hands in his shirt. Walking backward. The amber light was on Shane's face and the heat was behind him and he looked — Ilya's breath caught. Shane in firelight was a different animal than Shane in daylight. Sharper. The shadows cut the angles of his face and the freckles across his collarbones disappeared into warm gold and his eyes were dark and steady and aimed at Ilya's mouth.

Shane stopped at the edge of the rug. Unbuttoned Ilya's shirt. Slow. One button at a time. His fingers were deliberate. Patient. The patience was its own provocation — Shane undressing him with the same focus he used for everything, each button a small, precise act while Ilya stood there and burned.

The shirt came open. Shane pushed it off his shoulders. The cross swung. Shane caught it — held it in his palm for a second, the way he always did. Then he leaned in and pressed his mouth to Ilya's sternum. Right below the cross. A kiss on the breastbone. Ilya's hands went to Shane's hair.

"I have been wanting to do this since the porch," Shane said against his skin. He bit the spot where the cross rested. Gentle. Then not gentle. Ilya hissed.

"You bit me."

"I marked you." Shane looked up at him. "Take off the rest."

Ilya undid his own belt. Shane watched. His arms crossed, his weight on one hip, the posture of a man who was enjoying the show. Ilya dropped the belt. Pushed his jeans down. Kicked them off. Stood in his boxers in the firelight with the cross on his chest and the heat on his back and Shane's eyes on him.

Shane's gaze dropped. Lingered. His tongue touched his lower lip — fast, involuntary — and Ilya saw it. Shane saw that Ilya saw it.

"Your turn," Ilya said.

Shane pulled his shirt over his head. The firelight turned his skin amber. The freckles across his shoulders were dark points in the gold. The scar under his left rib. The line of muscle at his stomach. Lean and hard and his. Three years of his. Shane unzipped his jeans and let them fall and stepped out of them and stood in his boxers and the firelight caught the bulge — already hard, already straining against the fabric.

Ilya closed the distance. One step. His hand on Shane's jaw, tilting his face up. He kissed him — deep, slow, his tongue finding Shane's and taking its time. His other hand slid down Shane's spine to the small of his back and pressed. Their hips met. Shane gasped into the kiss.

"Down," Shane said. He pushed Ilya's chest. Ilya went down — onto the rug, onto his back, and the fake fur was soft against his bare skin and the heat of the fireplace was on his right side and Shane was above him.

Shane straddled him. Knees on either side of Ilya's hips. He sat back. Looked down. The firelight was behind him now. His face was in shadow but his body was lit — the line of his shoulders, the flat stomach, the hard outline of his cock pressing against the front of his boxers. He rolled his hips. Once. Slow. Grinding down against Ilya's cock through two layers of cotton.

Ilya's hands shot to Shane's thighs. Gripped.

"Fuck," Ilya said.

"Not yet." Shane rolled again. A slow, filthy grind. The friction was maddening — enough to feel, not enough to finish, and Shane knew it. Shane's face said he knew it. Shane's face said this was the plan.

He ground down a third time and Ilya's hips came up off the rug to meet him and the sound that came out of Ilya was not dignified. Shane leaned forward. His palms on Ilya's chest. His thumbs on Ilya's nipples. He circled them — slow, deliberate — while he rolled his hips, and the dual sensation made Ilya's vision blur.

"You are — you are doing this on purpose," Ilya managed.

"Obviously."

"I am going to lose my mind."

"That's the idea."

Shane bent down. Put his mouth on Ilya's neck. The spot below his ear. Tongue, then teeth, then the slow suction that meant a bruise. Ilya's back arched off the rug and his hand went to the back of Shane's head and held him there. Shane bit harder. Ilya groaned. The sound echoed off the high ceiling.

"I want these off," Ilya said. Hooking his fingers in Shane's waistband. He pulled Shane's boxers down. Shane lifted his hips to help. His cock sprang free — flushed dark, curving up — and Ilya wrapped his hand around it immediately. No preamble. Shane's whole body jolted.

"I have been thinking about this all day," Ilya said. His hand moved. Slow. A long stroke from base to tip. His thumb smearing the wet at the head. "At your mother's table. Eating her pasta. Being polite. I was thinking about your cock in my hand."

"Jesus, Ilya—"

"I was thinking about what you sound like." Another stroke. Tighter. "What your face looks like." Another. Shane's hips jerked into his fist. "I was very polite at dinner. I should be rewarded."

Shane yanked Ilya's boxers down. Got them past his hips. Ilya kicked them off. They were both naked now on the fake bear rug with the fire at their side and the amber light turning everything gold and bronze.

Shane pushed himself up. Off of Ilya. Stood for two seconds — long enough to cross to the bookshelf, open a box that was definitely not a book, and come back with a condom and lube. He tossed them on the rug beside Ilya's hip.

"You keep supplies in the bookshelf," Ilya said.

"In a hollowed-out copy of Anna Karenina."

"You hollowed out Tolstoy to hide condoms."

"It seemed appropriate."

"This is the most — this is the most you thing you have ever done."

"Shut up and put your hands on me."

Ilya sat up. Pulled Shane down onto the rug beside him. Shane landed on his back on the fur and Ilya was over him — between his legs, hands braced on either side of his head. The firelight was in Shane's eyes. His pupils were blown. His mouth was swollen from the kissing. His cock was hard against his stomach.

Ilya kissed down his body. Sternum. Stomach. The line of hair below his navel. The crease of his hip — he bit it, hard, and Shane's thigh jumped and his hand grabbed Ilya's hair. Ilya licked the bite. Then lower. His mouth on Shane's cock. He took him in — slow, deep — and Shane's head went back against the rug and the sound he made was loud enough to fill the room.

Ilya sucked him slow. Savoring it. His tongue working the underside, his hand gripping the base, his other hand on Shane's hip to hold him down because Shane's hips were trying to move. Shane's hand was in Ilya's hair, pulling. Not guiding. Holding on. Like the hair was the only thing keeping him attached to the earth.

Ilya pulled off. Shane made a sound of protest. Ilya reached for the lube. Slicked his fingers. Shane's legs fell open — wider, an invitation that was not shy, not coy, the legs of a man who knew what was coming and wanted it.

One finger. Slow. Shane's eyes closed and his breath shuddered but his body opened. Easy. Practiced. Three years of knowing what this was and wanting it. The firelight played across his stomach. His cock twitched when Ilya curled his finger.

"More," Shane said.

Two fingers. Ilya worked them slow. In and out. Curling on the inward stroke. Shane's breath was getting ragged. His hand found the rug and gripped — the fake fur bunching in his fist.

"There," Shane breathed. "Right — yes — there."

"I know where," Ilya said. "I always know where."

He scissored his fingers. Stretched him. Took his time. Shane was pushing back against his hand now — small, involuntary rocks of his hips, his body chasing the sensation. His cock was leaking a line of wet down the shaft. Untouched. Neglected. Gorgeous.

Ilya added a third finger and leaned down and took Shane's cock back in his mouth at the same time. Shane's spine came off the rug. Both hands went to Ilya's head. He was making sounds that were not words — broken syllables and Ilya's name and profanity and the specific helpless noise of a man who was being worked from both ends and losing his ability to form sentences.

Ilya pulled off. Pulled his fingers out. Shane made a wrecked, empty sound. His eyes were glazed. His mouth was open. His body was flushed from throat to navel.

"Don't stop — why did you—"

"Because I want to be inside you. And if I keep going, you will finish before I get there."

Shane watched him roll the condom on. His eyes tracked every motion. Ilya slicked himself — generous, the way he always was, because prep mattered and Shane mattered more than urgency. He positioned himself between Shane's legs. The fake fur was soft under his knees. The fireplace crackled. The light moved across their skin.

Shane's hand came up and found the cross. Held it. Gold in his palm. His fingers closed around it.

"I want to see your face," Shane said.

The old words. But Shane's now. The reversal that had been happening for three years — the thing Ilya had said first, in a hotel room, the first time. I want to see your face. And now Shane said it. Claimed it. Made it his.

Ilya pushed in.

Not fast. Not tentative. The pace of something inevitable. The head of his cock breaching Shane's body, the tight heat giving way, and Shane's mouth fell open and his hand tightened on the cross and his eyes stayed on Ilya's face. Open. Recording. Filing this away the way Shane filed everything — except this was the raw material. The unedited footage. Shane's face with no walls and no performance and nothing between them.

Ilya pressed deeper. Inch by inch. Watching Shane's face change — the wince that softened into acceptance that deepened into something else. Something hungry. Shane's free hand found Ilya's hip and pulled. Urging him forward. Wanting more.

Ilya gave him more. Seated himself fully. Held still. Let Shane's body adjust around him. The heat was staggering — the fire beside them and Shane's body around him and the sweat starting on both of their skins.

"More," Shane said. His voice was wrecked. "Please."

Ilya moved. Long strokes. Deep. The pace building from slow to steady. Shane's legs came up around his waist and his heels dug into Ilya's lower back and he was meeting every thrust — his hips lifting, his body opening, his back sliding against the fake fur. The rug was bunching under them. Neither of them cared.

Ilya shifted his angle. Shane's breath caught. Ilya shifted again — a fraction, a degree — and Shane's eyes blew wide.

"There — fuck — right there—"

Ilya held the angle. Drove into it. Shane's voice came apart. Not words anymore. Just sound — raw, rising, bouncing off the walls and the ceiling and the double-glass windows. Shane was loud. Shane was always loud. The loudness was not performance. It was the sound of someone who controlled everything letting one thing go.

The pace built. Ilya was braced on both arms. Sweat running down his chest. The cross swinging between them with each thrust. Shane had both hands on his back now — nails raking down, long scratches from shoulder to hip, the kind that would be raised and red in the morning.

"Harder," Shane gasped. "Oh fuck, make me feel it."

Ilya gave him harder. The rug was sliding on the floor. The fire was popping. Shane's body was gripping him so tight on every withdrawal that the drag was making Ilya's vision white out at the edges. He dropped down — forearms, closer, his mouth finding Shane's ear.

"You feel — Shane, you feel —" English failing him. The feelings too large for his second language. He said something in Russian. Shane didn't understand the words. Shane understood everything.

Shane turned his head. Caught Ilya's mouth. Kissed him mid-thrust. Sloppy. Wet. All teeth and tongue. His hand found Ilya's ass and gripped and pulled him in deeper and Ilya groaned into his mouth and his rhythm faltered because Shane's body had clenched around him and the tightness was —

"I'm going to come," Shane said. "From this. Just this. Just you."

Shane's hand went between them. Not to his cock. To his own nipple. He pinched. Hard. And the combination — Ilya's cock inside him, his own hand on his chest, the burn and the fullness — cracked him open. Shane came untouched. His back arched clean off the rug. His mouth opened in a silent scream that became a roar. His cock pulsed between them — on his stomach, his chest, the cross. His body seized around Ilya in rhythmic contractions and each one was a fist and each fist pulled Ilya closer.

Ilya lasted three more strokes. He drove in deep. Held. The orgasm didn't crest — it detonated. From the base of his spine through his whole body. He shook with it. Graceless. Full-body. Shane's name in his mouth — the English one and the Russian endearment he'd never said out loud, the one that lived behind the cross. Shane held him through it. Both arms. Tight. The cross between their chests. The fire beside them. The fake fur under them.

The aftermath was quiet. Breathing. Heartbeats. The crackle of the fireplace and the small wet sounds of two bodies separating.

Ilya did not separate. Shane's hand was in his hair.

"Stay," Shane said.

"I am not going anywhere, moye serdtse."

"I mean — not yet. Stay."

Ilya stayed. Softening inside him. The firelight on their skin. The rug was bunched and half off the floor and there was come on both of them and the room smelled like sex and woodsmoke and sweat and the chrysanthemum tea Shane had left on the counter that morning.

Shane's fingers traced the cross. The chain. The back of Ilya's neck.

"I love you," Shane said. Quiet. Not desperate. "I love you and my parents know. That's new. That's the first time I can say both of those things in the same sentence."

"Yes," Ilya said. Into his neck. "It is new."

"It's good."

"It is good."

They lay there. The fire burned low. Shane's breathing evened. His body relaxed under Ilya's weight. His hand stayed in Ilya's hair.

"We ruined the rug," Shane said.

"This is why it is a fake rug."

"Fair point."

"I will buy another one. From the same shop in Perth."

"The shop is closed. It was seasonal."

"Then this rug is irreplaceable and we have ruined it and this is a beautiful thing."

Shane laughed. The laugh vibrated through both of them — still connected, still unwilling to separate — and the vibration of Shane's laughter inside his body was something Ilya would carry for the rest of his life.

He lifted his head. Looked at Shane. The firelight. The dark hair against the fake fur. The freckles. The eyes that had been filing him away since they were eighteen.

"When," Ilya said.

Shane pulled him down. Kissed him. Soft. The kind of kiss that belonged on a ruined rug at the end of a day when the secret stopped being a secret and became a life.

"Now," Shane said.

---

They fell asleep on the rug. This was not unusual. They fell asleep on the rug often in July — the fake fur soft, the fire warm, their bodies tangled together. Shane's head on Ilya's chest. Ilya's hand in Shane's hair. The cross between them.

In the morning, Shane would call the realtor about the house in the Glebe. Ilya would drive to Ottawa for groceries. Yuna would call with a list of dog breeds she had researched overnight, because Yuna Hollander did not sleep when there was a project and the project now was the rest of her son's life. David would do the crossword. In pen.

But tonight, on the rug, in front of the fire:

The trail through the trees went both ways now.

The secret was not a secret anymore. It was a life. Ordinary and extraordinary. Dogs and pasta and Russian cake and a house in the Glebe and a mother who was five-two and terrifying and a father who said this is your family now and meant it. And a bakery on Rue Rachel where Anya would hear about all of it and demand to meet the parents and bring pelmeni and opinions and the forceful love of a woman who had decided, three years ago, that the tall boy with the sad eyes and the gold cross was hers to feed.

Mine. Yours. Now.

The fire crackled. Then went quiet. Then everything was quiet.

They slept.