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, Brandon Wiebe, Hayden Pike, Original Background Characters

Additional Tags:

Future Fic, Post-Canon, Hockey Coach Shane Hollander, Character Study, Angst with a Happy Ending, Disordered Eating, past suicidal ideation, Homophobia, Past Mental Health Issues, Married Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Language:

English

Collections:

Hollanov Big Bang 2026

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-14 Words: 27,824 Chapters: 3/3

Taller than the Rafters

Summary

There is something from an Ottawa Centaurs email, titled 'conversation.'

For a moment, he strongly considers deleting it. Shane no longer owes a single part of the MLH a damn thing, nor does he expect anything from it. His exit from the league is -- well. People aren't motivated to bring it up.

The sender is listed as Wiebe, B.

Shane clicks on the message.

Ten years ago Shane lost everything but Ilya. He has to decide what, if anything, he wants back.

Notes

My thanks to ScreechyLady, Bones, and Lugarn for feedback, betaing, spitballing, enthusiasm and hand-holding.

Absolutely gorgeous art by miplup.

St. Rowan's University is not real; several of the details of the women's team were cribbed and/or adapted from the University of Ottawa.

I can be found on tumblr at technicallyverycowboy. If you have any questions about the mental health issues, my inbox is open and I'm happy to answer. <3

Chapter 1

Did you really think you could just put it in a safe
behind a painting, lock it up, and leave?
Start a War by The National

Shane almost misses the email.

He's spent most of his afternoon doing tape review with LeDoux, a junior he's got on an internal shortlist for next season's captain. She's a very good hockey player and an exceptional hockey strategist. Shane thinks she could thrive in the position, if she can keep her doubts about her own abilities off the ice. Still, everyone is shaking off the winter recess dust and the meeting goes long.

"I think you've got a handle on it," Shane says. "We'll see how practice goes tomorrow and if it's still feeling awkward, we can keep working. But I really think it'll be fine."

"I know. I just want it to be perfect."

"I don't need or expect perfect, just your best," Shane says. It always feels just a little bit hypocritical trying to stave off perfectionism in his players, given who Shane himself is as a person, but he does mean it. God knows his own perfectionism was only an asset until it was a wall he slammed up against.

"Thanks, Coach," LeDoux says. She stands and hikes her backpack over one shoulder. "See you at practice."

"6:30 sharp."

She laughs. "It always is."

LeDoux closes his office door behind her. Shane leans back in his rickety office chair and exhales deeply. Two weeks into the winter term and his to-do list is littered with zombie tasks he didn't get wrapped up before break and already multiplying with brand new tasks, both for the team and at home. They're halfway through the fifth St. Rowan’s University women's hockey season and people still want his personal sign off on things that don't need it.

(In his head he hears Ilya say, "You are architect of your own misery, Hollander, if you did not care so much, everyone else would not care so much." Which is probably true and isn't really something Shane would change. He likes that people care as intensely as they do about such a new organization.)

There's plenty that Shane could find to do before he heads out for the day, and part of him is tempted to do exactly that. They've got two tough away games on Friday and Saturday, though, and Shane wants to eat dinner at home more.

He opens his email one last time purely to see if Marshall, left wing of their first line, has sent him confirmation that she's scheduled meetings with a writing center tutor to help her through the Canadian literature class she's avoided for two and a half years. Shane doesn't necessarily disagree with Marshall's assessment that the class is pointless, but academic eligibility policies are out of his hands and he doesn't want to bench her over two six page papers.

There's nothing from Marshall in his inbox.

But there is something from an Ottawa Centaurs email, titled conversation.

Shane's stomach yaws unpleasantly.

In eight years of university coaching, he's gotten used to seeing official communication from MLH teams in his inbox, even if it's just the newsletters and promos that any fan would get. College hockey feeds into professional hockey and that's just the way it goes. His first season at St. Rowan he'd unsubscribed from every single thing that came through for months, even though it never for a moment stopped.

It was the principle of the thing and also a completely fruitless exercise.

Shane has relaxed since then. Made peace with it, sort of. College hockey and the MLH are part of a shared universe. It is what it is.

Conversation, Shane reads again. "Conversation about what?" he murmurs.

For a moment, he strongly considers deleting it. There's wisdom in that, right? Over the years, dozens of people have strongly urged him not to engage when he doesn't have to and, at this point, Shane no longer owes a single part of the MLH a damn thing, nor does he expect anything from it. His exit from the league is -- well. People aren't motivated to bring it up.

The sender is listed as Wiebe, B.

Shane clicks on the message. It's short.

Hi Shane,

It's been a long time since we spoke. I hope you're doing well. I'm hoping to set up a time to speak to you, if you've got room in your schedule in the next couple weeks.

Sincerely,

Brandon Wiebe
Head Coach

Shane reads it twice, then shuts down his computer and heads out. For the first time in eight years, he forgets to lock his office door.

'Ten years' is the thought that bangs around Shane's skull as he makes the drive home.

Ten years. One decade. A lifetime. A career, or half of one. Enough time to put yourself back together, to make peace with the past or at least not be haunted by it every waking moment. Time does its own work over that many years, blunting some memories, letting go of others entirely. Put the ghosts to bed. Close the door. End the chapter. The cliches circle around the years in Shane's mind.

The echoes of old emotions toll in his chest as clearly as the memories themselves. They’re not as overwhelming as they were when new, when Shane’s carefully constructed life slowly disintegrated and his dreams slipped through his fingers like cupped water. The years he spent struggling through therapy have at least earned him that.

But they are still — real, maybe. There are some parts of Shane’s past that feel like stories. He watches those events play out like it’s a movie starring an uncanny doppelganger. But not those days. Never those days.

Even with distance, Shane doesn’t know how to describe what happened when people ask. Which, largely, they don’t ask at all. The whole thing was — ugly. Embarrassing for the league. Embarrassing for the Metros. Embarrassing for Shane, for a long time. Even from the outside, it’s hard for people to reconcile everything Shane did up to those fifteen seconds of video with the consequences that followed.

Shane’s the first one home, though he pays barely more attention to those domestic routines than he did the drive. His St. Rowan backpack goes in his office. He lets Anya out. He washes the handful of breakfast dishes in the sink. He starts dinner.

He thinks about the candy bar he ate the day it all got dragged into the light and how incredibly, unreasonably good it tasted.

Shane doesn’t like thinking about that day. Not because it was the worst of them, it wasn’t. It’s the hope he’d felt, or the memory of it. Thirty fucking years old and he’d sincerely believed that he hadn’t done anything wrong, so it would be okay. He’d trusted in his generational talent.

But that’s the thing about generations. There’s always another one coming.

He chops tomatoes and an onion and tosses it all into a big pan to cook. He sets a pot of water to boil and searches through the fridge for fresh pasta noodles.

He thinks about Ilya eating his father’s spaghetti in a Boston Raiders tee shirt. Beneath the fear and the shame and the excruciating vulnerability, even then Shane had looked at Ilya sitting at his parents’ kitchen table and thought he looked like he belonged there.

He thinks about his mother’s plan, and that hurts, too. That world sounded like a good one. Still does, which is something Shane keeps to himself.

Shane braces himself on the edge of a kitchen counter and drops his head. He forces himself to take a deep breath, then a second, then a third. Runs through his senses: he can hear the burble of boiling water and the pop of simmering sauce, smell the garlic and onion, feel the butcher block, rough against his palms.

Why does Brandon Wiebe want to talk to him now?

**

Shane's lost enough in thought he doesn't realize Ilya is home until the front door opens and Anya starts barking in delight. His stomach tightens, which is odd, and he stills standing at the counter. He hears the muffled lilt of Ilya's voice as he greets the dog, low enough that Shane can't make out individual words. Shane drums his fingers on the counter; the tap-tap-tap-tap of it goes up into his wrist.

He doesn't know how to bring up the email to Ilya.

Ilya played just the one season with Wiebe and Shane doesn't remember him saying much about him one way or the other. But a lot happened that year, and Shane was so wrapped up in his own head he missed more than he realized. And they've long since dealt with it, apologies made and accepted.

But Ilya doesn't like talking about that summer and the season that followed, the last of his career, any more than Shane does. The one good year playing for Ottawa folds into the awful one that followed and Shane gets it, he really does. The question of who got the rawer deal is one that people still talk about, sometimes, mainly during the summer months when they’re starved for hockey, little though it matters to either of them.

"That smells good," Ilya says, coming into the kitchen with Anya at his heels. He comes up behind Shane, wraps his arms around Shane's waist and sets his chin on Shane's shoulder. "Not even a little burned."

"It's been three years since the last time," Shane says. He is surprised by how normal he sounds in his own ears.

"True, but you did almost burn down kitchen, so. I get to bring it up for at least five more years."

"You're such an asshole, I did not almost burn down the kitchen," Shane argues.

"That is lie, you know that is lie. There were flames."

"Prove it."

"Is burned in my memory, moy pomidor."

The reality of Ilya's presence eases some of the wound up tension coiled in Shane's mind. They've had a version of this conversation a hundred times because the back and forth is the shared language of their domesticity. He lost a lot and some of it are things he still thinks about with a sharp pang of longing. But not everything.

Shane dishes out the pasta while Ilya fills Anya's bowl. They sit at the kitchen island to eat and Shane mostly listens while Ilya talks about the perennial problems that pop up at the Foundation the closer they get to summer.

"Either we make more room in current camps or add more," Ilya says, rolling his eyes. "I do not think it has to be so fucking complicated, but somehow it always is."

Shane nods. "Good thing you love it."

Ilya scrubs a hand through his hair. "I think I am just sucker. Neely corners me with stories about how much kids want to come and suddenly I am doing ten thousand things."

It's Ilya's night to do dishes so Shane settles on the couch and starts flicking through channels. He catches a glimpse of what looks like an Anaheim and maybe Detroit game and his stomach tightens again; he goes past it. Eventually he finds a rerun of some home renovation show and decides that's good enough for background noise.

Eventually Ilya joins him, now changed into sweats and an old St. Rowan hoodie with frayed cuffs and a couple holes. He sprawls out over the rest of the couch and shoves his bare feet under Shane's thigh. Shane absently wraps a hand around his ankle and sweeps his thumb over the bony ridge. The couple renovating their home get bad news about their foundation. Shane thinks about going to Centaurs games when he was a kid and how badly he wanted to jump the boards and join them on the ice.

Ilya nudges Shane's thigh. "How long until you tell me what you are thinking about?"

Shane flinches. "What do you mean?" Ilya raises an eyebrow and doesn't have to say anything. Shane sighs. "It's not a big deal, okay?"

"Yeah, okay, absolutely. The way you said that really made it sound like not a big deal."

"I got an email." It comes out as one rushed word, Igotanemail, and Shane winces.

Ilya extends his hand. "And?"

"It was from Brandon Wiebe. He's back with the Centaurs."

Ilya goes very still and his expression ices over into a flat nothing that doesn't feel neutral in the slightest. "Yeah, I know. So what?"

"He wants to meet?" Shane doesn't mean for it to trail upward into a question, but it does nonetheless. He doesn't -- love that, doesn't love the part of him that's still primed to seek permission when it comes to the MLH. His eyes want to skip off Ilya and look anywhere other than the stony set of his face and he has to force himself to stop.

"You told him to fuck off, yes?" Ilya's voice is clipped.

"I haven't told him anything yet," Shane says and as he does, realizes that he wants to. He wants to hear whatever it is Brandon Wiebe has to say to him. "But I think I'm going to say yes."

"Fucking why would you do that?"

Heat prickles on Shane's face and the tension in his gut twists a little. "Because I want to know what he has to say."

Ilya snorts. "What the fuck could he have to say?"

"I don't fucking know," Shane snaps. "That's why I'm going to fucking meet with him and I know you don't like that and you don't have to."

"Okay. Fine."

Ilya rolls onto his side and fixes his gaze on the TV. They watch the rest of the episode in tense silence, then Ilya says he's taking Anya on a last walk. Shane goes upstairs to bed and lays awake until he hears Ilya come back. He falls asleep alone.

**

Shane wakes up with Ilya’s hand curled loosely around his bicep, and a quiet relief eases through his chest.

The mid-January sun hasn’t risen yet and their room is cocooned in darkness. It would be so easy to roll into Ilya’s side and sink back into sleep, and it’s tempting. Ilya is beautiful sketched out in dim light. Shane allows himself a lingering moment because Ilya is one of Shane’s favorite things to look at.

The way Ilya looked asleep in Shane’s bed at the cottage that first summer filters up; memories are closer to the surface than they usually are, which Shane supposes isn’t surprising. It hits Shane, for the thousandth time, how unlikely their life is. That they both keep choosing to stay.

He still hasn’t responded to Wiebe.

Shane slips out of bed.

Routine carries him through his morning: thirty minute jog with Anya, their breath puffing out in extravagant clouds in the cold, shower, coffee from the fancy machine his parents got them for Christmas, eggs and toast for breakfast at the kitchen island as he scrolls through last night’s hockey scores.

Anaheim won the game he flicked past. Ottawa eked out a win in overtime. Montreal lost and one of their centers took a puck to the knee and didn’t make it back on the ice. Shane should sympathize and he doesn’t and doesn’t feel bad about it. Ilya has broadcast his feelings, but Shane’s grudges are no weaker for being a little quieter.

He arrives at the university’s sports complex half an hour before practice and Juliet, his assistant coach, is already in her office.

“How did tape review with LeDoux go?” she asks, not looking up from her screen.

She’s a St. Rowan alum with the blonde hair and pretty face of the head cheerleader in a movie. People expect her to be exactly that until she checks someone into the boards so hard they spit out teeth. When asked why she wanted the job, she’d looked Shane in the eye and said, “Because I should have fucking been able to play myself, but that ship has sailed.”

“Good,” Shane says. “She’s her own worst enemy when she gets in her head.”

“And that’s why she’s your favorite.”

“I don’t have a favorite.”

Juliet snorts. “Don’t lie to me, Hollander.”

She looks him up and down and a prickle of unease crawls up Shane’s spine. “What?” he asks.

She closes her laptop and leans forward, elbows braced on the scarred surface of her ancient desk. The university doesn’t throw money at women’s hockey in quite the same way they do any single one of the men’s teams and Shane’s priority is always his players over facilities renovations. It takes a little effort for Shane to pull his eyes away from three decades of pen marks to meet Juliet’s eyes.

“There’s something on your mind,” she says. “You’ve got about ten minutes to decide if you’re going to tell me what it is before twenty elite collegiate hockey players start rolling in.”

Shane blows out a hard breath. “I used to be a great liar.”

“No, you didn’t,” Juliet says. “Your secrets just used to be so insane they were impossible for people to guess. Now you’re just some guy with just some guy secrets.”

Shane steps fully into her office and closes the door behind him. Juliet straightens and her face settles into the focused neutrality she gets when a game has been a shit show from the first puck drop and she doesn’t let herself start yelling.

Shane drops into the chair where players usually sit and it’s a slightly odd feeling. Echoes of the dozens of different coaches Shane faced as a player bubble up in the back of his mind.

“I got an email from Brandon Wiebe,” Shane says. “He wants to meet with me.”

Juliet’s eyes widen in momentary surprise, then she slowly nods. “We’re talking about head coach of the Ottawa Centaurs Brandon Wiebe, yes?”

”Is there another?”

“We had three Vanessas on the team our second season and two of their last names started with an S,” she says. “You never know.”

Shane huffs out a laugh. “Yes, that Brandon Wiebe.”

“Why does he want to meet?”

Shane shrugs. “He didn’t say.”

“Ah.” Juliet leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. “I can only think of a couple obvious reasons.”

So can Shane. He looks down at his hands and runs his thumb over his wedding ring. There’s a permanent groove of pale skin around the finger after so many years of wearing it. He thinks about Ilya’s shuttered expression on the couch and his stomach twists, again.

“Maybe he just wants to catch up,” Shane says.

“Maybe.” Juliet raises an eyebrow. “Or maybe he wants to offer an olive branch to you and Rozy.”

”He’ll have better luck inventing time travel to get a do-over.”

“Or, maybe, he’s been making a lot of coaching staff changes over the last year and talking a very big game about building a team culture after eight years of a head coach screaming in player faces and repeatedly getting fined for inappropriate conduct. And wouldn’t you know, you’re the legendary Shane Hollander and happen to have a decade of coaching experience.”

“Fuck,” Shane groans.

“Poor Coach Hollander,” Juliet teases. “Cursed to be the best at everything he does.”

“You know that’s not even close to being the issue,” he says, a little harder than he meant to.

“I know,” Juliet says.

She’s one of the only people Shane has told the full truth of what happened when he left the MLH. It was after the final game of their first season and they’d both been a little drunk at the time. She listened to the whole jumbled mess of it, slowly sipping a beer. When he’d finished, she’d said, “That’s fucked. I’m sorry.” Shane made it home before he cried about it sitting on the foyer floor as Ilya rocked him.

“What do I do?” Shane asks. “I already have one vote for ‘fuck off.’”

She barks out a sharp laugh. “Are you saying my vote has equal weight with Rozy’s? I’m moving up in the world.”

“You have—“ Shane flips his hand in an unhelpful gesture. “Perspective. Distance.”

“Well, I do want your job,” she says. “Don’t worry, I’m not in a rush for it, but I would take it in a heartbeat. I think the real question is whether you want to go back into that particular meat grinder. And I’m ninety-five percent sure I know the answer.”

Shane says nothing, but he doesn't have to.

“I know.” Juliet cocks a half-smile at him. “So, I guess I vote for email the man back and see what he has to say. Rozy will come around.”

“Will he?”

Someone bangs on the door and they both jump. “University rules say that if the coach and assistant coach are more than ten minutes late to the ice we’re all allowed to go home with no penalty,” Franson, their freshman backup goalie says.

“That’s not a real thing,” Shane yells.

“We’re not mad you’re late, Coach Hollander, we’re just disappointed,” Franson yells back. A couple other voices chime in their agreement.

“The circus beckons,” Juliet says. “Come on.”

**

After practice, Shane closes the door to his office and pulls up Wiebe’s email. He reads it again. He replies with: It’s good to hear from you, Coach. When are you free?

**

Ilya is leaning against the wall between the foyer and the kitchen when Shane comes through the front door. He’s still partially dressed for work at the Foundation, in jeans that cling to his thighs and a green sweater Shane likes.

Shane understands it as the start of an apology and a frisson of guilt trickles down his spine. “You’re home early,” he says lightly.

Ilya shrugs. It’s a very casual gesture that doesn’t fool Shane. “I was not getting anything done all day. I was—“ his mouth opens as he searches for the right word. Shane hangs up his winter coat. “— distracted.”

Shane doesn’t want or need or deserve an apology and the idea of trying to explain why is a boulder in the pit of his stomach. What does it matter? What is one tense conversation against a decade of marriage and the life they’ve built together? If Shane deserves his quiet longing, then Ilya deserves his anger. They didn’t inflict those wounds on each other.

Shane goes to Ilya and curls into the comfort of his broad chest. Ilya’s arms come up and wrap around him; Shane tucks his face into the hollow of Ilya’s throat and inhales the gathered scent, cologne and soap and skin. Ilya hums a softly comforting noise that Shane feels rumble in Ilya’s neck.

”I am sorry,” Ilya murmurs. “I was—”

“I know,” Shane says. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”

**

Dinner is quiet.

At one point in his life, that would have sent Shane’s anxiety into a tailspin of catastrophizing and imagined failures. Instead, Shane stacks their bowls, tells Ilya, “Stay,” and takes them to the sink. He doesn’t stop to wash, accepting that he’ll probably have to scrub them later.

He sits back down and reaches across the kitchen island and puts his hand on Ilya’s forearm. He pushes his thumb into the muscle just below Ilya’s elbow; tension gives slightly against the pressure and Ilya makes a soft, barely vocalized sound. Ilya's worries are rigid in his body, braced against bad news his brain insists is coming.

Shane stands, and positions himself behind Ilya's chair, curls his hands over Ilya’s shoulders. Ilya tips his head back. Shane skims his palms up Ilya’s neck to the base of his skull, then down the line of his spine to the middle of his back. He knows the difference between the firmness of Ilya’s strong body and hard knots of tension.

“You didn’t sleep very well,” Shane says.

Ilya laughs. “No, lyubimyy, I did not sleep well. You did?”

”No, I slept like shit.” Shane walks his thumbs up either side of Ilya’s spine, tracing out a pattern of overlapping circles. When he gets to Ilya’s neck, he draws out parallel lines steadily upward and Ilya grunts. His weight shifts back into the touch.

”Why did you not sleep?” Ilya asks. His voice has dropped down into a slightly lower register than normal and a little pulse of pleasure blossoms in Shane’s chest. He doesn’t yet know what to say about the thing that’s sitting between them, but his hands can do something.

“Memories.” Shane shrugs, though Ilya can’t see it. “I guess. I was thinking. Why didn’t you sleep?”

“Are you still thinking?” Ilya asks.

“I’m always thinking.” Shane moves his hands to either side of Ilya’s head and kneads into the muscles at the hinge of his jaw. He dislocated it midway through his last season and it healed, but it’s been prone to aching ever since. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Ilya grunts. “It is rude of you to notice that.”

“You didn’t marry me for my manners.”

“No, mostly for your mouth.”

Shane returns his palms to Ilya’s shoulders and pushes the heels of his hands into the broad planes of Ilya’s back. A lower groan grinds out from deep in Ilya’s chest. “What were you thinking about?” Shane asks.

“Bad dreams.” Ilya swallows. “Boring.”

“What kind of nightmares?”

Ilya flinches. “Not important.”

“It’s important to me.” Shane drags two of his knuckles around the perimeter of Ilya’s shoulder blade.

“Just about right after everything,” Ilya says at last, the words strung awkwardly together. Shane kisses the crown of his head, reward and encouragement, and continues to work his hands. “We were waiting for phone call with offer for you and I could hear ringing, but I could not find phone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is not your fault.”

“It kind of is.”

Ilya twists in his chair to look at Shane over his shoulder. Shane stills his hands splayed on Ilya’s back, ignoring the urge to pull away.

“Shane,” Ilya says. “It is none of your fault, okay?”

It’s kind, but not true, not really.

And Shane wants to be the kind of person that would tell Wiebe to fuck off or that the MLH had their chance and lost it or even just that Shane long ago closed that chapter of his life and he has neither the interest nor inclination to return. But he’s not. He’s not and he thinks Ilya knows that he’s not. Hockey is different for Shane.

“I agreed to meet with Wiebe,” Shane says.

Ilya flinches, but there’s no real surprise in his expression. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” Ilya shakes his head. “If you don't, you will always wonder, I know this.”

“You’re okay with that, really?”

“What else can I be?”

It’s fair and it still stings, a little. Something passes over Shane’s face that makes Ilya cock a tired, lopsided smile. He stands and curls a hand around the back of Shane’s neck; the weight of it is steadying in a way nothing else has ever been.

”You will be careful,” Ilya says. “Promise me this.”

“I promise,” Shane says. “I’m not — nineteen was a long time ago. I’m not much like that kid anymore.”

Ilya pulls him in and kisses his forehead. “Lyubimyy, you really are.”

**

That night, Ilya puts Shane flat on his belly in their bed and ranges along his back. Ilya’s weight bears down on him and Shane’s mind empties of everything but the physical sensation.

Ilya fucks him slow and steady, mouth sucking deep bruises into Shane’s shoulder and neck. He lays his hands overtop Shane’s and laces their fingers together as he plows in deep. It feels like Ilya reasserting his claim. Shane’s body belongs to himself and Ilya both and there is no room for any other.

Shane humps his hips into the mattress and comes long before Ilya’s finished and he’s glad for that. The dizzying spiral of over-sensitive pleasure is scouring, it leaves no room for the cobwebs of old memories and long made choices to linger. Shane’s mind contracts down to electric pleasure slicing up his spine.

When Ilya at last does come, he buries his teeth in the meat of Shane’s shoulder and drives in as deep as he possibly can. Shane feels Ilya's cock pulse inside him, where he belongs.

They don’t move for a long time. Ilya murmurs Russian into Shane’s skin that Shane only half understands: I always love you, I want to be nowhere else, I am only home with you. This ya tebya lyublyu whispered in cold winter folded over to the first time it was ever said in warm summer.

**

When Shane checks his phone for the last time right before bed, he has another email from Brandon Wiebe inviting him to lunch on Monday. The last line says, I was glad to hear back from you. Not getting the chance to coach a team with you on it is a deep professional regret for me, among other things.

“Among other things,” Shane murmurs. “Among other fucking things.”

**

Friday and Saturday are away games for the team and Shane's glad for the distraction, even if it means long hours on a bus with twenty rowdy hockey players.

Both games go well, which helps. Friday is a nailbiter against Ontario Tech, won with fifteen seconds left on the third period clock by a blistering shot from LeDoux that rockets over the opposing goalie's shoulder. The rest of the team pile on top of her, screaming with joy, and Juliet punches Shane's shoulder.

"When she gets out of her head," Juliet sing-songs to the groans of disappointed Ontarian fans.

"She's pretty fucking good," Shane agrees. He gifts her the winning puck in the dressing room after and her face glows with pride. Shane moves her a few spots up his mental list of potential team captains for next season and ignores the little voice in the back of his mind that says he might not be around to make that decision.

He calls Ilya from his hotel bed that night and Ilya answers the phone with, "She is so fucking talented, Hollander, she's going to be the first kid you coached to win a gold fucking medal."

Shane laughs. "I'm going to tell her you said that."

"Good, that is what I wanted."

Saturday is even better, a 4-0 shutout against a Nipissing team that doesn't really manage to get their shit together at any point. LeDoux holds herself back a little, focusing on assisting her linemates rather than her own goals, which Shane notes. Marshall scores once and Bradley twice and Parnel rounds them out.

The celebration is a little more subdued, though that's less from any lack of excitement over the win than because hometown fans are thin on the ground and the Nipissing team are so dejected even Shane feels a little bad for them. He gets a text from Ilya: that was fucking shitshow. Shane stifles a laugh.

He's still glad to get on the bus pointing toward Ottawa on Sunday morning. He gives a very short congrats and good job speech to a half-asleep team, then settles in his seat with noise canceling headphones in. He listens to the audiobook of a biography he's been meaning to check out and dozes a little. It's a four hour ride back to campus and Shane doesn't go inside the athletic building before heading home.

**

As soon as Shane is through the front door, Ilya crowds him up against a wall and slides a thigh between his legs. "Missed you," Ilya murmurs, mouthing at the sensitive skin behind Shane's ear. "Did you miss me?"

Shane's bag slides off his shoulder and hits the floor with a thud; he shoves his hands into Ilya's curls and pulls. It's not hard enough to hurt, just enough to make Ilya hiss between his teeth and drop one arm so he can grab a handful of Shane's ass. Shane kisses Ilya open-mouthed and dirty, curling their tongues together. Shane wants to crawl inside Ilya and stay there.

"I missed you," Shane says when they break apart. "Take me to bed."

Ten years ago Ilya would have carried him, at least to the stairs, but they're forty and theoretically wiser than that. They race instead, jockeying against each other as they go up side by side and Shane laughs at the memory of his Montreal condo's freezing stairwell. How quickly he forgot to be indignant about the sexts.

In their room Ilya pushes Shane down onto their bed. He kneels to pull off Shane's sneakers and socks and he kisses the top of each of Shane's feet. It tickles a little and Shane tries to yank them away, but Ilya refuses to let go. "That's weird," Shane groans.

"It's you," Ilya says and Shane's heart seizes up for a second.

Ilya reaches up to hook his fingers in Shane's waistband and Shane lifts his hips to allow his sweats and underwear to be yanked down. He's half hard already and his cock glistens at the tip with pre-come. He's never stopped being messy for Ilya and Ilya still gets that greedy, lust-drunk look in his eyes for it. Shane reaches up for a pillow and stuffs it beneath his head.

All Shane can see is the top half of Ilya's head, disarrayed curls and dark blue eyes. He kisses Shane's shins and knees, then the inside of his thighs, back and forth as he moves up. Shane's dick twitches against his stomach and it takes control to keep his hips down and not hump up into the air like a teenager.

Ilya hikes Shane's right leg over his shoulder to widen his access and laves his tongue over Shane's balls. Shane grunts at the ridiculous, overwhelming heat of it, says, "Fuck," in a wrecked voice that makes Ilya laugh. The vibration goes right up into Shane's dick and he cries out.

"You like that?" Ilya asks. His voice is rough around the edges. Shane flexes the leg that's over his shoulder in response and Ilya laughs, even as he almost loses his balance. He drops more hot, fleeting kisses to Shane's thighs and hips, punctuated by little nips of his teeth. Shane squirms, he can't help it.

"You like that?" Ilya repeats, amusement thick in his voice. "Come on, Hollander."

"Fuck you, Rozanov," Shane grunts. "Yes! Yes, I fucking like it. Jesus."

"Good."

Ilya wraps his hand around Shane's cock and swallows him down.

After twenty years, give or take, Shane thinks it would almost be weirder if Ilya wasn't good at sucking cock, but Shane is still never prepared for how irrationally good at it Ilya is. Shane can feel Ilya relax his throat so he can slide down that extra couple millimeters. His cheeks hollow as he sucks, tongue pressing against the slit. Shane arches up off the mattress like that slut he has been for Ilya since he was nineteen.

Ilya is determined so it doesn't take long. Shane gasps, "I'm--" and can't finish the sentence before he comes. Ilya swallows and swallows; when he said he didn't mind in that first hotel room, Shane has learned he meant that he liked it, loved it, lives to know that something that was inside Shane is now inside himself.

Shane falls back on the bed, limp, and reaches out with an uncoordinated hand. Ilya stands with a small grunt as both his knees pop because they're getting fucking old, and flops down. His sweats and underwear are shoved down just far enough to free his softening cock.

"What was that for?" Shane asks. Tiredness is hitting him hard now.

The corner of Ilya's mouth twitches up in a smile. "I missed you. I felt like it."

There's something in the way he says it that snags at the back of Shane's mind, but Ilya kisses him and he loses the thought. For a while they lay there exchanging lazy kisses in the afterglow. Eventually Shane yawns and Ilya laughs. "Take a nap," he says. "I will wake you up."

"I have work things, and everyone is coming over for dinner," Shane mumbles, but he's fighting a losing battle.

"Yes, yes, very important. Close your eyes for just one minute, first."

"Cheater," Shane says, closing his eyes.

**

Shane wakes to late afternoon sunlight slanting across the bedroom in long pools of fading light. Anya’s asleep on the other side of the bed, her head and front paws on Ilya’s pillow.

He rolls out of bed, into a shower cranked up as hot as he can stand. It’s stupid that he used to be able to take teeth-rattling hits into the boards and shake it off and now too many hours on a bus has him reaching for Tylenol. Shane has done his best to make peace with forty. Some days are easier than others.

The good scent of whatever Ilya’s cooking for dinner has wafted all the way up the stairs and Shane’s stomach growls. His cooking has improved a lot since the days of macrobiotic diets and avoiding anything that tasted good, but there’s a reason Ilya always cooks when they’re having people over. Ilya enjoys cooking in a way Shane doesn’t.

Shane heads to the kitchen to ask what Ilya’s making, but strangely finds it empty. The stove has an hour left on the timer and there are some vegetables in a colander in the sink, but no Ilya.

He checks the living room, which is equally empty. The TV is on, though, playing one of the terrible fast cars and guns action movies that Ilya loves so much and there’s a glass of half melted ice cubes on the coffee table. It’s on a coaster, which makes Shane smile in fondness despite himself.

He sticks his head into the office, not expecting to or actually finding Ilya. It’s technically a shared space, but Shane is the one who uses it 90% of the time. His St. Rowan backpack has been set in its usual place next to the desk. Shane’s pretty sure he dropped in the foyer because Ilya’s tongue was in his mouth, so Ilya must have moved it.

Then he hears a soft thump from further down the hall.

Shane jerks his head toward the sound.

At the far end of the hallway he can see a patch of light on the floorboards, coming through a door tucked into a back corner. It’s cracked open just a few inches, but it is a door that they, by unspoken agreement, keep closed. Shane’s stomach clenches.

Shane doesn’t want to get closer, but his feet carry him along regardless, until he’s close enough to look inside. Ilya’s sitting on the end of the spare bed that no one has ever slept in, staring at the trophies of their combined careers. Shane sucks in a sharp breath.

The spare bedroom — and they always call it the spare bedroom, because people don’t ask uncomfortable questions about something that boring — is a strange blank space in their home. It’s tucked away in the farthest corner of the house, though Shane couldn’t say with confidence if that was a conscious choice or just something that happened during the chaos of Shane’s abrupt move to Ottawa after — when he left Montreal.

The intention was never to hide it all away, not even in the immediate aftermath of everything that happened. Standing in the rubble of their lives, the tangible proof of everything they’d done was, very briefly, something Shane clung to with all his might. That lasted as long as his hope that he’d be signed somewhere else did.

It changed as Shane realized that no one was going to take it back. There was no savior waiting for the right moment to swoop in and right the injustice of it all. He’d spent a lifetime doing everything he was supposed to and it wasn’t enough. It didn’t matter. The collected monuments of his life were as meaningless as paperweights.

The metallic gold and silver gleam of plaques and trophies and rings felt garish, fake. He felt taunted by the mementos of his amputated career. The absence of the things he should have done was louder than what he had.

He’d tried to find the version of himself that looked at all of it while Ilya fucked him and called him a king and came up empty. He hadn’t felt like a king. He’d felt like mold being scrubbed off the sport that he loved. That first year was — a bad year.

It was easier to close the door.

Shane stares at the slice of Ilya framed in the gap.

He’s leaning forward with his elbows braced on his knees, holding something small in his right hand that he’s absently toying with. It’s almost definitely his championship ring from Boston. The only one Ilya has. He took the Centaurs to the playoffs his first season. His second he rode the bench through the long slog of another dismal fucking year.

He deserved better than that. A lot better.

Which is the kind of thought Shane doesn’t let himself have, because it being true doesn’t change anything. Fairness was never a consideration in what happened and Shane can — and did, for a while — drive himself into a black pit of despair ruminating on what should have happened, what could have happened.

On the wall behind Ilya, Shane can see slivers of two of his Stanley Cup jerseys.

He turns on his heel and strides back to the living room, then calls out, “Ilya? Where are you?” like he just came down the stairs, like a coward.

**

Ilya seems completely normal at dinner. He jokes with David and commiserates with Yuna about a pain in the ass donor that keeps emailing one of the program admins twenty times a day. He flirts with Jackie and needles Hayden that eight years into retirement the campers increasingly don’t have any idea who Hayden Pike is.

Shane is — distracted.

No one calls him on it during the first half of the meal. The people gathered around their table know Shane better than anyone else in the world; they’re used to Shane’s sometimes silence. Shane pushes his food around his plate and turns down a glass of wine.

There’s a knot of unease sitting in his chest that he can’t see the shape of. He spent a lot of time resentfully in therapy in those early years when he had nothing in his life but time and fury and overwhelming grief. It doesn’t haunt him, not anymore. It took awhile — it took a long time, in truth — to accept that his choices were to stew in the past and sacrifice his present or throw himself into the rest of his life and stumble toward a future.

Those fucking jerseys, though. Ilya’s ring.

“Shane?”

His name cuts through his jumbled thoughts.

Shane blinks at the rest of the table. Everyone is looking at him. “Yes?” He clears his throat. “Sorry. What?”

A chuckle goes around the table and it’s kind, but a trickle of embarrassment slides down his spine regardless. He shifts in his chair and reaches for the glass of ginger ale he doesn’t remember being handed.

“I said that LeDoux is doing a much better job of convincing Ruby and Jade to stay in Ottawa for university than you being coach does,” Jackie says.

“Well, he’s not Shane Hollander to them,” David says. “He’s just Uncle Shane. What’s that compared to moving across the country?”

Hayden groans. “We’re not even considering that as a possibility. Nope. Not my little girls. They’re still six years old.”

Yuna laughs. “Good luck with that one. I tried to do the same with Shane and it didn’t work.”

Shane huffs out a noise that’s not quite a laugh and looks up and unexpectedly meets Ilya’s eye. The hairs on the back of Shane’s neck rise absurdly. Ilya raises an eyebrow in unspoken question: are you okay?

God, who knows? Shane nods anyway. Ilya holds his gaze for several more very long seconds, then quirks the corner of his mouth in a brief flicker of a smile.

When everyone is finished eating, Ilya and Jackie and Shane’s parents migrate to the living room with the end of a bottle. Shane starts taking the leftovers back to the kitchen and Hayden starts stacking plates and glasses.

“I can clear the table by myself,” Shane says, aiming for a joke.

Hayden snorts. “Like Jackie would let me sit down without helping.”

Shane laughs at that, really laughs. Between the two of them they make quick work of it. Hayden puts food into Tupperware and remembers to stick labels on the lids and to include the date. Shane loads the dishwasher. It’s a funny inverse of all the nights Shane ate at Hayden and Jackie’s place in his early twenties, also unable to not help clean up.

Hayden closes the fridge and leans against the counter as Shane starts the dishwasher cycle.

“So,” Hayden says. “You okay?”

Shane opens his mouth and there are no words immediately waiting for him. “I—“

“I’m not trying to pry,” Hayden adds. “I mean, obviously I’m always going to pry into what’s going on in that pretty head. You just seem a little weird.”

Shane leans back against a counter, too, and shoves his hands into his pockets.

He could tell Hayden. Hayden would even understand, at least a little.

His contract in Montreal ran out the season after Shane’s and they didn’t offer to re-sign him. Hayden did his best to spin it as having nothing at all to do with his unwavering defense of Shane (and Ilya, a very little bit, by extension) but it was a polite fiction that they both chose not to question.

The only offer he got was from Utah and the Pike family spent two miserable years there. When that contract expired, they did offer to re-sign him, but Hayden turned them down and called it a day.

“I’m just tired,” Shane says. “Getting old is a con.”

Hayden laughs. “An absolute fucking con.”

**

When the house is empty again, Shane sprawls on the couch. Ilya leans against the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.

"You did not tell them," Ilya says.

"There's nothing to tell,” Shane says.

The pause that follows is -- excruciating.

"Okay," Ilya says.

**

Shane wakes up early and antsy Monday morning and doesn’t even try to fall back asleep. He takes Anya out for a long jog instead.

It takes him longer than he likes to find his pace. He starts out going too fast, churning through distance until he’s sweating beneath his toque and thermal jacket. The frigid January air he sucks into his lungs is so cold it burns.

He forces himself to slow it down, back to the rhythm he can keep up for a good distance. He’s not in as good of shape as he was when he played hockey, when he had a team of personal trainers and physical therapists and nutritionists calibrating his body to peak physical condition, but he’s done okay. And given he’s not nineteen anymore, that’s not nothing.

He tries to sink into the meditative mental space that goes along with the physical rhythm of running. His sneakers strike the sidewalk with the even cadence of a drumbeat, left-right-left-right. Anya’s nails click a faster complimentary rhythm.

In six hours he has a meeting with Head Coach of the Ottawa Centaurs, Brandon Wiebe.

There is — much as Shane hates to admit it — no small amount of fear churning in his gut.

And he can logic that emotion into oblivion. It’s a fear born of reengaging with a traumatic part of his past. His body is reacting to that fear with a reflexive jolt of fight or flight in an effort to protect him from additional pain. Not knowing exactly what Wiebe wants to talk about introduces an element of uncertainty that Shane does not cope with particularly well.

Shane went to therapy. He paid attention.

He can tell himself that it’s one lunch, it’s not committing to a single thing. He always has the option of standing up and walking away. He doesn’t owe the MLH, the Centaurs organization, or Brandon Wiebe as an individual anything. The machine of professional hockey no longer holds his life in its impersonal hands.

All true. None of which makes a damn bit of difference. He feels like a live wire.

When they get home, he unclips Anya’s leash and wipes her paws down so the salt from the pavement doesn’t hurt them. She licks his hand and Shane scratches beneath her chin.

“Am I doing something stupid?” Shane asks her. “You’re the smartest person in the house, you know. You’re at least in the top two.”

Anya licks his hand again and takes off toward the kitchen and her food bowl.

Ilya is still dead to the world when Shane goes back upstairs and he stays that way through Shane showering and dressing. Shane folds a pair of chinos and a nice sweater into his bag to change into before he meets Wiebe. It’s a sweater Ilya likes, as though that somehow confers Ilya’s approval onto the meeting as a whole.

It’s cheating, but whatever. Shane shakes his head and zips his bag closed and when Ilya’s gravely voice says, “C’mere,” Shane jumps in a way that is outsized to the surprise. Ilya snorts laughter.

“Shut up,” Shane says, coming around to Ilya’s side of the bed and kneeling down beside it. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Is normal time to be asleep,” Ilya says. “You are just hideous morning person.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but also reaches up to brush a stray curl off Ilya’s face. Half asleep, with his eyes hazy and only barely open, Ilya is unimaginably beautiful to Shane. The light spray of crows feet that come off his eyes, the lines that bracket his mouth, the moles, it’s all beautiful. Shane leans in and kisses him.

Ilya hums a pleased noise and kisses back.

When they break apart, Ilya looks a little more awake and he studies Shane for a moment, then says, “If you want I can go to meeting with you,” voice soft.

He tries very hard to keep his voice even, but doesn’t quite succeed. Shane knows him very well, and he sees the flicker of distaste that passes over Ilya’s features. The last thing he wants to do is go to this meeting. The offer is a species of olive branch wrapped hand in hand with protective instincts.

“I’m a big kid,” Shane says. “I can handle it. But thank you.”

Ilya nods. “Good luck. I think. Maybe is not right.”

“I’ll take it.” Shane kisses his forehead once more and stands. “I’ll see you tonight. Go back to sleep.”

Ilya makes a noise of assent, but Shane wonders as he heads for the garage if he’ll actually manage to.

**

Shane is distracted as hell during practice, to the point that the team and Juliet and their goalie coach, Sabine, all start cracking jokes.

“I didn’t know that you turned forty and just went off a fucking cliff,” Franson says. “I assumed it was, like, a slow decline, damn.”

“I think it might be time to brush off your resume, coach,” Parnel says to Juliet, who smirks like a goddamn traitor.

“You’re all very funny,” Shane says. “Bag skates.”

There’s a chorus of groans, but they all get to it. Juliet joins him, clipboard held to her chest. She looks at Shane sideways, with an eyebrow raised. Shane refuses to look at her and refuses to look at her and five minutes later, has to concede that she is as stubborn as him.

“I have a lunch meeting today,” Shane says. He keeps his eyes on the team.

Juliet nods. “Yeah, no shit, coach, I assumed so. Are you nervous?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Juliet snorts and whacks his arm lightly with her clipboard. “Don’t bullshit me, Hollander.”

“I’m nervous,” Shane says. “I’m very nervous. Happy?”

“Little bit, yeah. Just remember,” she says, her tone going slightly more serious. “Whatever it is, they want something from you.”

Shane nods. It does help, a little.

At 11:30, Shane leaves his office in his nice chinos and sweater and a knot of players in Juliet’s office across the hall all swivel around to look. They start cheering and clapping and Shane feels his face go bright fucking red. One of them wolf whistles. Juliet cackles.

“You look so fancy, Coach, do you have a date with Mrs. Coach Hollander?” Marshall asks.

The first time Shane heard that nickname, he shut it down, and then two weeks later someone said it to Ilya’s face and he was delighted and insisted that all the players use it. They’d had an argument about Ilya undermining Shane’s authority as a coach, but somewhere in the middle Ilya shoved into his personal space, nipped Shane’s earlobe and said, “But I’m such a good wife to you, yes?”

They never did end up finishing the argument.

Shane waves them all off and doesn’t smile until he’s past Juliet’s door and none of them can see.

**

Shane gets caught in a small bit of traffic on his way to the restaurant and compulsively drums his fingers on the steering wheel every moment that he’s not moving. Parking is another ordeal and by the time Shane finds a spot a couple blocks down, he’s eaten through most of his time buffer.

So he has to hurry down the sidewalk, only resisting the urge to break into a jog because there are still icy patches on the pavement. It’s a near thing, but rolling in five minutes late is better than being on time with the ass of his pants soaked through with filthy snow.

He pushes through the front door three minutes before noon and the guy at the host stand says, “The other member of your party hasn’t arrived yet, but I can take you to your table.”

Shane feels both a little foolish and like the drama queen Ilya says he can be. He straightens his shoulders as he follows the host. The last impression he wants to give is that of a chastened puppy. He hasn’t found the confidence he used to have on the ice in the ten years it’s been since his last game, but no one needs to know that.

The table is toward the back of the restaurant, away from the big windows that dominate two of the walls, which Shane appreciates. He doesn’t get recognized a fraction as often as he used to during the halcyon Montreal days, but one of the downsides of being as good as he was is that he hasn’t been forgotten, either.

Obscurity is the privilege of the unremarkable and scandal-free.

Ten minutes after he’s sat, the host brings Brandon Wiebe to the table.

Shane stands and extends his hand; years of practicing how to comport himself around sponsors and donors apparently embedded deeper than he thought. Wiebe smiles and takes it in a firm, but not crushing, grip. “It’s a pleasure, Shane, thanks so much for taking the time.”

The last decade has treated him okay, Shane thinks. Ilya would know better, given he actually spent a year under his leadership, but Shane watched just about every Ottawa game that season and he spent some of that time studying the coach Ilya liked so much. The room culture Ilya described had sounded so — improbable to Shane. He’d been curious.

The Brandon Wiebe that sits down across from Shane is dressed in navy slacks and a Centaurs branded fleece jacket overtop a button down shirt. His hair is liberally sprinkled with gray, which makes it look like a much sandier brown than it used to. The lines of his face are deeper, but his overall impression is still calm competency.

Shane’s not a great judge of this kind of thing, but he thinks Wiebe looks a little happier than he used to.

Their waiter shows up before they can get past hellos. Wiebe orders something without even opening the menu and Shane orders a salmon dish because it’s the first thing his eyes land on. They both opt for water, which Shane is privately grateful for. He never became much of a drinker.

”So,” Wiebe says. “Thank you for meeting with me, which I’ve already said.”

”It’s my pleasure,” Shane says in his eating-canapés-at-a-standing-table-with-a-major-university-donor voice.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach this conversation,” Wiebe says. “And I’ve landed on being completely straightforward and going from there.”

“Yes.” Shane’s voice comes out tense and pitched a little high. He clears his throat and takes a long drink of water and Wiebe’s expression doesn’t change. “I’ve been thinking about it, what you wanted to talk to me about, that is. A lot.”

Wiebe smiles kindly and nods. “I won’t lie, Shane, I thought there was at best a five percent chance that you’d respond, so I assumed it wasn’t worth getting into the details. My apologies for that.”

“It’s okay. It’s fine.”

“So,” Wiebe says, leaning forward in his chair. “As you know, this season has been my first back with the Centaurs as head coach. Part of that has been taking a broad look at the organization. Coach Leclerc fostered a culture that was very—“

“Shitty?” Shane suggests.

Wiebe chuckles. “I was going to say ‘specific,’ but you’re certainly not wrong. We’ve made changes at all levels, from the team roster to administrative staff, public relations and such, and, particularly, to the coaching staff.”

Shane’s heart starts to beat so hard he can feel it juddering his ribs. “I haven’t been — I don’t pay very close attention to the MLH — I mean, I focus on the college women’s league, my league. But I’ve heard a little about it."

“You’ve done phenomenal work with the St. Rowan’s team.” Wiebe says. “As a fellow coach, I’ve been very genuinely impressed.”

The praise coming from someone that’s part of the league hits Shane squarely in the chest and feels so fucking good. A crawling shame pours in behind, furious and affronted. Ten goddamn years and a pat on the head from a mediocre player turned coach lights him up? It’s embarrassing. It’s pathetic.

“Thank you,” Shane says.

“Of course. So, long story short. I’ve got an opening for an assistant coach for next season and I wanted to see if you were interested.”

Shane realizes, in a moment of strange, distant clarity, that there was actually nothing he could have done to prepare himself for this.

He's been retired from professional hockey for almost exactly as long as he played, and he spent so much of that intervening time trying to excise his self-worth from his former success. He's found other reasons to get up in the morning and carved out stability, even contentment. He can name his treatment by the machine as unfair and not be shredded by aggrieved rage or laid low by a heartbroken inability to really understand why his actions were so unforgivable.

Something deep inside him still cracks open.

"Why?" he asks. His voice is very calm.

"Because you're an excellent coach," Wiebe says frankly. "And one of the best to ever play the game. You have the skills and experience I'm looking for. It's an obvious choice, Shane. At least to me."

**

Shane leaves the restaurant and he can't go home and he can't go to the university, so he goes to his parents' house and parks on their empty driveway. They're both at work, but that's fine -- that's good, actually, because Shane doesn't want to talk to them. Can't talk to them, in fact, because Shane can't speak at all.

He walks around the house and keeps going, past the technical edge of their property to the small pond that is the hub of the neighborhood wheel. There are a couple battered lawn chairs scattered around that have been there for as long as Shane can remember. He sits in one to switch out his nice, professional boots for his skates.

Soothing is not the right word for what doing up the laces feels like. Shane does not feel soothed; he feels like there's a blurring film between himself and the rest of the world. Maybe it's just the relief of repetition. Shane has done this so many times he doesn't have to think about it while the rest of his brain grinds on

He steps onto the ice and starts skating laps around the edge.

Around and around and around the familiar circuit. It’s silent except for the harsh pant of his breath and the scratching of his skates.

His parents taught him to skate on the pond when he was a toddler, standing between them with his small hands held safely in theirs. Family lore holds that the very first day, little Shane Hollander looked at his parents and said, very seriously, that he was going to play hockey when he was a grown up. Shane doesn't remember that. His memories are of the sharp, clear cold on his face and a sudden -- understanding. Skating was easy in a brand new way.

Sometimes Shane wonders what would have happened if he'd been born to parents who didn't take a three year old's declaration that he wanted to play hockey seriously.

Is that regret? Shane doesn't know.

But that's the thing about a life, isn't it? It's impossible to untangle one choice from the rest of it. If Yuna and David Hollander hadn't taken hockey seriously, then maybe Shane wouldn't have been at the Prospect Cup to shake hands with a Russian boy in the parking lot, then they wouldn't have been drafted the same year, then there wouldn't have been a commercial, then --

Then suddenly Shane Hollander at forty is working for the Canadian government, going to Ottawa games with his parents when he can afford the tickets, never knowing all the things he missed.

That's a fucking tragedy, Shane thinks.

He shouldn't have agreed to meet with Wiebe.

But that would be another fucking tragedy, wouldn't it? He'd turn forty-one in May and never know that anyone in the hockey machine actually regretted what happened. Or that he was wanted for more than on ice skills he used to have. There's a terrible, terrifyingly buoyant madcap joy lodged in his ribs that finally, finally someone understands that he did everything he was supposed to and has come to set old mistakes to right.

Shane stops in the middle of the pond. The world is cold and quiet.

"You don't have to do this," he says out loud.

But he is going to. He already knows he's going to.

Chapter 2

Shane doesn’t leave the pond until his thighs are burning and his breath has a bit of rasp to it and even then, he has to force himself.

When he gets home, he’s too restless to sit still. He starts out tidying the kitchen, then cleans it, then deep cleans it because he needs something to do with his hands. The first floor of the house smells faintly like pine and chemicals.

There’s still some light in the sky when he hears Ilya pull into the driveway. Shane’s stomach clenches hard; for a split-second, he really thinks he might puke. He doesn’t, but it still leaves a sour note in the back of his mouth.

He tries to remind himself that this is Ilya, who has loved and stood by Shane through highs and lows. It doesn’t work. If it was anyone else in the world, Shane wouldn’t be as worried because it wouldn’t be as uniquely personal.

Five minutes later, Ilya comes to the kitchen with Anya at his heels and a decidedly neutral look on his face. “Hey, lyubimyy.”

“Hi,” Shane says, wiping his palms on his jeans. “How was work?”

Ilya lifts an eyebrow. “How much small talk do you want to do before you tell me how meeting went?”

“None, I guess.”

Ilya flashes a tight smile and sits on one of the island stools. Shane joins him. “So, how did meeting go?” Ilya asks.

It’s very difficult for Shane to meet Ilya’s considering gaze.

“It was—“ Shane shakes his head. Words feel clunky in his mouth. “It was okay.”

Ilya nods. “Okay? And? What did he want?”

There’s a sharp edge to the way Ilya spits out the questions, like he’s spoiling for a fight. And suddenly all of Shane’s restless plans about easing him into it become pointless theater. There is no arrangement of words that will sidestep the reaction Shane knows Ilya is going to have.

“He wants me to coach the Centaurs next season,” Shane says. His voice sounds odd in his own ears, like they’re filtering in from another room. Shane is inside his body and floating six inches outside of it. He thinks, this is not going to help make the case that you can do this without losing your shit.

“And?” Ilya asks.

“And?”

“And what did you say?” Impatient irritation flares across Ilya’s face; Shane flinches.

“I said I had to think about it.”

Ilya expression twists into something like pain. Shane reaches out on instinct, but Ilya jerks his arm back. Shane’s hand hovers there between them for too long of a moment. He drops it splayed out on the island and stares at the ridges of his knuckles instead of Ilya’s face.

“You don’t seem surprised,” Shane says.

“I’m not.” The words are clipped, harsh.

“Why not?” Shane asks.

Ilya snorts. “Why the fuck else would the head coach of the Centaurs want to talk to you, Hollander?” There’s a sneering quality to the words that hit harder than yelling would. Shane has finally reached the outer limits of Ilya’s patience with him after twenty years.

"I don't know," Shane says. "You didn't -- why didn't you say anything, then?"

Ilya flinches. "Would it have made a difference?"

Shane opens his mouth to say maybe, but the word fetches up in his throat like a lie. It is a lie. Shane knows it's a lie and that knowledge burns with self-recrimination. "You still could have said something," he says instead, which feels like a mealy-mouthed deflection, whining in his own ears.

"Because you like being fucking told what to do so much," Ilya snaps.

"I listen to what you have to say," Shane insists.

"Do you?"

"Do I fucking not, Ilya?"

Ilya throws up his hands. "What the fuck do you want me to say, Hollander?"

"Anything!" The crack of Shane's voice echoes in the kitchen. "Literally anything, Rozanov!"

Ilya's expression hardens. "Okay. Why the fuck did you pretend that you had no idea what they could possibly want to talk to you about? You are not fucking stupid, you have an idea and you said fucking nothing to me."

The accusation lands like a blow and the threads of Shane's white-knuckle control snap. Two weeks of anxiety bubbling in his chest mutate into the simpler scorch of anger. "You would have tried to talk me out of it!"

"Fucking of course I would have!" Ilya yells back. "It's a terrible fucking idea, Hollander!"

"Why?" Shane presses. "What's so fucking terrible about it?"

Ilya scoffs. "You are fucking serious? Why? You ask me why?"

"Yes, I want to know why!"

"Because fuck the league!" Ilya bangs a fist on the kitchen island. "Fuck the league and the fuck the Centaurs, fuck them all. You are not doing this."

"I'm not doing this?" Shane repeats. "That's not a decision you get to make."

"I won't fucking let you," Ilya yells, ragged. "No fucking way. I do not allow it."

“I don’t need your fucking permission,” Shane snarls. His anger becomes righteous. “You don’t get to make decisions for me!”

“Fucking someone has to when you are making the stupidest possible fucking decisions!”

“Fuck you!”

”Fuck you, Hollander!”

**

Shane lays awake in their dark bedroom, staring at a slice of moonlight on the ceiling as it slowly tracks across the room.

Twice Anya comes up the stairs and sticks her head through the cracked-open door, whining in quiet distress. Shane pats Ilya’s empty side of the mattress in absent invitation. Both times she goes back down the stairs to, presumably, sit by the front door and wait for her papa.

Shane’s thoughts scattershot in disjointed fragments across his mind. A cigarette hanging from Ilya’s teenage lower lip. “But I am lazy, so.” Standing on a stage with a hand pressed to the small of his back. “Why are you telling me this?” “Who else am I gonna tell?” His skate catching on the ice while the crowd screamed. Ya tebya lyublyu. Pink lights and throbbing music. Ilya’s face lit by hundreds of little candles and the thick rug beneath Shane’s knee. “I might answer.” “I might knock.”

In truth, Shane doesn’t really know if he remembers much about those really dark days between August and January of that bad year or if he’s just internalized the stories as told by Ilya and his parents. And it’s not that people don’t ask. Even the most respectful journalists will, at some point, allude to the difficult time in his life.

It’s always that phrase, too. The “difficult time in his life,” as though everything that has ever hurt in the expanse of Shane’s life was compressed down to five months in 2021. And it all went away after one imagined dark night of the soul, during which Shane found forgiveness and peace and new purpose.

It’s a better story than Shane, thirty pounds lighter from not eating and hollowed eyed from weeks of barely sleeping, smoking cigarettes for the first time in his life curled up in a chair beneath an open bedroom window. Ilya watching him from bed, neither of them speaking because if they did, they’d have to talk about it.

It wasn’t a night, it was weeks of Shane’s ambivalence about his existence pushing against the bulwark of Ilya’s refusal to look away. Shane resented him for that, which is an ugly truth that’s a bad tonal fit amongst the inspirational second act Shane has created for himself. Shane has found that the acceptability of anger has an expiration date.

The night wears on, and so does memory. The sugar burst of a Snickers bar. The Boston GM saying Ilya’s name first. A soft kiss from a beautiful boy in a cold stairwell. “Not everything is about you, Hollander!” Waking up with Ilya pressed against his back the day he agreed to stay. "Hollander," as Shane ran away. The best day of Shane’s life and the worst. The window shades going back up. Fucking in the sun.

Shane lays awake until he hears the door to the garage close and the muffled cadence of Ilya’s voice saying something to Anya. The TV turns on and the volume drops until Shane can’t hear it at all. He waits for Ilya to come up the stairs though they won’t talk about it yet.

When the slice of moon finally fades into the gray light of dawn, Shane hasn’t slept and Ilya hasn’t come to bed.

**

Before practice, Juliet knocks on the door of his office and pauses on the threshold.

"How did it go?" she asks.

Shane looks up expressionlessly from his laptop screen, but apparently his face is less blank than he feels. Juliet winces. "I'm sorry," she says. "Do you want--"

"No." Shane turns back to his laptop.

She stands there a few moments longer, then steps back into the hallway and gently closes his door.

**

That evening, Shane gets an email.

Shane,

It was good to speak with you. Take as much time as you need to think it over and let me know if you have any questions. Hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,
Brandon Wiebe

**

The silence between him and Ilya calcifies.

Shane does not know what to do about it.

On Tuesday, Shane comes home to a dark and empty house and gets a text as he’s picking at lukewarm leftovers that Ilya is staying late at the Foundation and not to stay up. Shane stays up and it’s déjà vu: laying in the dark, hearing the garage door and Ilya’s voice, the bed still empty at daybreak.

Shane gets home late on Wednesday to the door of the spare bedroom — the real spare room where guests actually sleep — firmly closed with lamplight seeping from beneath it. Shane puts his hand on the doorknob and touches his forehead to the smooth, cool wood. He wants to beg and doesn’t know how, so he says nothing. There’s a plate of leftovers for him wrapped in the fridge.

Thursday morning Shane comes down the stairs to Ilya at the front door with his coat on. Shane stops on the last step. His hand tenses around the banister. Shane has watched Ilya walk through a door and leave so fucking many times since they were seventeen, but he rarely wanted to go.

“Ilya?” Shane says.

Ilya looks over his shoulder and Shane goes down the last step with a hand outstretched, because he looks awful. His eyes are shot through with red and weighed down by smears of bruised shadows.

”I—“ Ilya cuts himself off. “Shane.”

The floor is very cold beneath Shane’s bare feet as he takes a few more steps toward Ilya. “Please talk to me. Please. Yell if you want to. We can fight. Just please talk to me.”

Ilya’s shoulders sag. “I don’t want to yell at you, Shane.”

“I would understand if you did.” Shane stops an arms length away from Ilya. It’s been years, nearly decades, since the distance between them last felt so unbridgeable.

Ilya turns, reluctantly, and for several long moments they face each other in a silence that cuts. Shane watches Ilya wrestle with his words. Shane’s Russian is conversational, but Ilya’s English is better and so that is the language of their important conversations. It is one of the small unfairnesses where their life asks more of Ilya than Shane.

“I am not angry at you,” Ilya says at last. “I mean, I am kind of angry at you. But I am mostly scared for you, Hollander. I—“ His voice catches. “I don’t know what to do.”

”I don’t either,” Shane says. “You’re the person I talk to when I don’t know what to do.”

Ilya barks out a rusty laugh. “And you are who I fucking talk to, Shane. Fuck.”

Ilya’s phone starts to ring and the cheerful jangle of his ringtone is overloud; they both jump and Ilya mutters something annoyed in Russian that Shane doesn’t quite catch. Ilya sees the caller and rejects it, but the fragile mood between them has broken into awkwardness.

“I have to go,” Ilya says. “For real, I mean. I will be late to meeting with stupid donor.”

“It’s okay. Go.” Shane flashes a smile that sits uncomfortably on his face and folds his arms across his chest.

Indecision passes over Ilya’s face, then he takes the single step required to close the distance between them and kisses between Shane’s brows, then his mouth. “Tonight we talk. I love you.”

He goes before Shane can respond.

**

Shane calls Juliet still standing in the foyer. "I'm not going to be at practice today. I'm fine."

"Fine seems like a strong word, but whatever you say, coach. I'll claim a little food poisoning or something." Her tone is a little strange in a way Shane can't quite parse; he assumes concern, like everyone else he's spoken to in the last three days. He resents it a little -- maybe a lot -- but he also can't argue the point.

"Thank you," Shane says instead of any of that.

"Of course," Juliet says. "Let me know if you need anything else, okay?"

"I will," Shane says. He won't.

He calls Hayden next.

"Buddy, it is ass o' clock in the morning," Hayden grouses, voice thick with sleep. "Hold on." In the background Shane hears the lilt of Jackie's voice and Hayden's muffled response telling her nothing is wrong and to go back to sleep.

Shane goes to the kitchen and starts the coffeemaker with his phone between his ear and shoulder. He notes, in a detached sort of way, that his hands are shaking slightly. Some part of him wishes he'd thrown himself between Ilya and the door and not let him leave until they talked, which Shane recognizes is irrational. He feels divorced from rationality in a way he hasn't since everything fell apart.

It occurs to him that things might be falling apart again, and this time it will be entirely his fault.

"Okay," Hayden says. "I'm here. What's wrong?"

"Are you busy?" Shane asks.

"Like, in general or right now?"

"Right now, ideally. If not, at some point today."

There is a too-long beat of silence where Hayden says nothing and Shane says nothing. Shane can't say anything, because if he starts he won't be able to stop. Hayden exhales heavily enough that Shane can hear the low rasp of it. He can picture Hayden shoving his hand through his hair.

"I need to know if this is you just really need to talk about something or--" Hayden mutters something under his breath. "Fuck. Or if this is a cry for help kind of thing?"

It's funny, in a way that isn't funny at all, that once you have demonstrated the capacity to plunge down so deep in darkness you can't get back to the surface on your own, everyone that loves you will, in some small way, expect it to happen again. And it doesn't matter that the circumstances of that dark time happened during the nexus of specific and uniquely awful moments. The possibility will always exist.

"I need to talk to you," Shane says.

"Okay, what about?" Hayden asks.

It's hard, for some reason, to say it out loud.

"I had a meeting with Brandon Wiebe on Monday and he offered me a job as an assistant coach for the Centaurs starting next season."

Hayden makes a choked noise of shock. "Are you fucking serious, Shane?"

"Would I joke about this, Hayd?"

"No," Hayden says. "Fuck no, you would never. Okay. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

Shane goes back upstairs, showers quickly, and dresses in jeans and a St. Rowan men's hockey crewneck the head coach gave him his first year on staff. It's a favorite of Ilya's to steal when they need to do laundry, so there are worn thin spots on the cuffs where his thumbs rest when he pulls the sleeves down over his hands. Shane worries the soft cotton between his fingers as he heads back down to the main floor.

He checks his phone to make sure Hayden hasn't already arrived, then sits on the couch to wait. Anya pads over and sits at his knee, whining softly. Shane strokes the top of her head. She noses at the side of his thigh, scooting over an extra millimeter.

"It's okay," Shane tells her. "Don't worry."

Five minutes later the doorbell rings and Shane opens the front door to Hayden in gray sweatpants with the name of the twins' school down one leg and a Metros hoodie under his winter coat, which strikes Shane as funny for no reason he can explain. It reminds him of Ilya in that fucking Raiders tee shirt standing in his parents' cottage. The inescapability of hockey, or something like that. The machine that is so much larger than a physical arena and the twenty players on a team.

It occurs to Shane that he might be freaking out.

"Tell me what's going on," Hayden says, pushing past Shane into the house. He hangs his coat on a hook and heads for the kitchen without taking his shoes off. Shane follows after him.

The coffee is ready and Hayden's already taking two mugs out of the cabinet. One is a messily painted 35th birthday gift from Amber, the other is plain and white, from the dish set Shane's parents bought for him when he moved into his first apartment in Montreal. Shane is almost certain that it's the only one left out of the original six, which is an irrelevant thought to have, given the situation at hand.

Shane sits down at the island while Hayden pours.

He thinks of Hayden in the Metros locker room before that last playoff game, angrily telling the rest of the team that they would have to live with how they treated their captain. Their betrayal had cut Shane so deeply. He'd been naive, yes, but he'd really thought that when the chips were down he'd done enough in ten years to earn a little grace.

"Here." Hayden sets the painted mug in front of Shane and sits. "Talk, man."

Shane wraps his hands around the mug. The warmth is nice.

"Last week I got an email from Brandon Wiebe asking me to meet," Shane says. He can hear the rote, flat quality to his speech.

"What for?"

"Didn't say." Shane taps his thumb against the mug. "Juliet thought there were only a couple logical reasons."

"Yeah, I bet." Hayden nods. "So you had an idea."

Shane wants to argue against that point more than he expected. He didn't know; that isn't a lie. He doesn't like how the implication of culpability feels, but. It's fair. He knows it's fair.

"Yes," Shane says. "I had an idea."

"So, you went?"

"Yes." Shane sips his coffee. "I met him for lunch on Monday, after practice. He -- I don't know. I didn't know what to expect from him."

"Right. I mean, I think everyone was a little surprised that he came back to Ottawa."

"I was," Shane says. "Ilya didn't say anything, so I think he was, too."

"What exactly did he offer?" Hayden asks.

Shane inhales deeply and forces himself to exhale slowly, counting out one-two-three-four-five in his head. "He said he was impressed by what I'd done with the team and that he'd spent a lot of this season making changes to the Centaurs on every level."

"Which he fucking should have."

Shane smiles thinly. "Yes. And then he said he had an assistant coach spot opening for next season and asked me if I wanted it."

Hayden blows out a hard breath. "Well, fuck."

"Yeah."

"You want to take it, don't you?" Hayden says.

Shane stills. This part -- this part he hasn't said out loud yet, not even to Ilya. The fight devolved too quickly into Ilya saying Shane couldn't take it, was not allowed to take it and Shane arguing that Ilya did not get to make that choice unilaterally, no matter how fucking strongly he felt about it. They skipped over Shane's desire; maybe because there was no question in either of their minds.

(A small voice in the back of his mind asks if he’s sure that’s what Ilya said. If there’s any possibility that in Shane playing the fight over and over again he’s begun to distort.)

"I shouldn't," Shane says.

Hayden frowns. "Oh, fuck that, Hollander. 'I shouldn't.' Look me in the eye and tell me you don't want to."

Shane flinches. "It would be so much easier if I didn't."

"Yeah, probably. But?"

"I do," Shane says. "I do. Of course I do. I want it so fucking bad, Hayd. I. And I'm so stupid for wanting it this much. I'm supposed to be -- past this. After everything, I should want to tell Wiebe to fuck off--"

Shane can hear his words picking up speed as he goes, tumbling into one another at a faster and faster clip, disgorging old yearning that he thought he purged a long time ago.

"Shane." Hayden reaches across the island and claps his hand on Shane's forearm, cutting him off. "Cut yourself the smallest amount of slack. Please."

Shane closes his mouth hard enough that his teeth click.

Hayden flashes a thin-lipped smile and squeezes Shane’s forearm.

Shane nods, acknowledgement and assent, and Hayden settles back on his stool. They lapse into a slightly fraught silence, both of them sipping at their coffee to have something to do with their hands.

Hayden’s eyes skim across Shane and land elsewhere a couple times in an odd circle of unwilling observation. Shane’s shoulders tense and rise, braced against — something? Which is nonsensical, because it’s Hayden who both loves Shane and understands him, in a way vanishingly few other people do.

It clicks for Shane that Hayden’s hesitating.

“What do you think?” Shane asks.

Hayden winces and sags a little, bracing his elbows on the island. “What does Ilya think?”

Shane blinks at him. “What does Ilya think? You are asking me what Ilya thinks?”

Hayden shrugs.

Shane stares at him, searching through the unfamiliar expression on Hayden’s familiar face. They’ve been friends for more than twenty years, ten of that as linemates, eight of that as captain and alternate. Hayden has seen Shane in moments no one else has, knows parts of Shane better than anyone else.

The rhythm of their friendship has almost always been Hayden holding out a hand to pull Shane along. When there is a gap between what Shane thinks he can do and what he wants to do, Hayden makes himself the bridge.

Except he isn’t and Shane knows that means something.

“Ilya thinks it’s a terrible idea and I’m crazy for even considering it,” Shane says.

Hayden nods. “Okay.”

“What does that mean?” Shane asks, frustration and unease sharpening the words more than he intended.

“I don’t know!” It’s not quite a shout, but it’s close.

In the living room Anya barks and they both jump. She trots into the kitchen as quickly as her stiff gait allows and starts nosing at Shane’s legs in concern. Shane leans over to soothe his hand from the top of her head down her spine, murmuring that everything’s okay. She whines softly.

“Sorry, girl,” Hayden says, then, “Sorry,” again, directed at Shane.

“It’s fine.”

Hayden sighs. “Look, I just think that maybe he’s got a point.”

“It’s not like I’m coming out of retirement to try and play again,” Shane argues.

“Yeah, but you would though,” Hayden counters, straightening up and meeting Shane’s eyes. “If that was an option, you absolutely would.”

“It’s not an option.”

Hayden scoffs. “That is not the point here, Shane.”

”What is the point?” Shane snaps. “It’s a job—”

“Oh, fuck that.” Hayden cuts him off. “Shane, I love you, but fuck that. It’s not just a job. It’s a job with a Major League Hockey team that you should have been able to play for. That’s heavy and you know it. Don’t bullshit me and don’t bullshit yourself.”

Shane bristles. “You both think I’m so fucking fragile.”

“Wow.” Hayden barks a laugh. “That’s exactly right, bud. Rozanov and I agree about exactly one thing and it’s that you’re fragile. Couldn’t possibly be because neither of us want you to ever go through something like that ever again.”

Shane flinches and presses the palms of his hands to the top of his thighs. He never argues with Hayden and he doesn’t understand why they are arguing at the same time that some mean streak in him wants to keep fucking going, even though Hayden hasn’t done anything besides show up because Shane called him.

“I—“ Something in Shane’s mind clicks. “I don’t. I’m not mad at you.”

He’s mad at Ilya, which makes his stomach clench.

“Good, you shouldn’t be.” Hayden’s tone is sarcastic, but his body untenses a little. “I feel like I can assume you and Rozanov didn’t have a meaningful and productive conversation about this?”

Shane shakes his head. “No, we fought about it Monday after I had lunch with Wiebe and we haven’t actually spoken to each other in two days. Until this morning, as he was leaving for the Foundation.”

Hayden whistles. “Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

The silence is a little more comfortable the second time around. Shane deliberately relaxes the muscles in his shoulders, then arms, then hands until he can pick up his mug and take a drink without shaking. Hayden fiddles with a stray bottlecap that somehow got left on the island as he thinks.

“So, let me tell you what this sounds like if you’re me,” Hayden says. “Imagine that your best friend in the world was the most talented player hockey had ever seen in the history of the game, right? Three cups in ten years. Insane. The kind of dynasty coaches have wet dreams about. With me?”

Shane nods. “Yes, I get it.”

“No, no, I’m not done yet,” Hayden says. “Now imagine that all of that accomplishment, all the wins and the trophies and the blood and sweat and tears — all of it — meant nothing. And you watched the thing he loved spit in his face and kick him down the stairs. The kindest thing they called him was a disgusting traitor.”

”Hayden.”

“Imagine this broke your own love of the sport,” Hayden continues. “Burned that love to ash and mud. Not the most important part, but one of the casualties. For two months, you watched your friend disappear. Not rage or fucking sob, just — fade. Like without fucking hockey to hold him together he started to dissolve into nothing. And in the middle of that, you had to move to another country to play for a team you didn’t want to be on and couldn’t do anything.”

Shane shudders. “I get it.”

Hayden scrubs the heel of his hand across his eyes. “Yeah. So. Fragile isn’t the word I’d use.”

“That was—“ Shane sighs. “That was a long time ago, Hayden.”

“Yeah, well.” Hayden shrugs. “I worried you were gonna die that summer, a lot. So.”

“Die?” Shane repeats.

It's not a new idea, exactly. Ilya has said as much, so have Shane's parents. But they know because they were there, making the phone calls and driving Shane to appointments, putting pills and water to swallow them in his hands. Hayden wasn't.

Hayden looks at him for a long moment, then nods. “I don’t know if you know this or not, but when you stopped talking to me, Ilya started. I was in fucking Utah, with my miserable family, surrounded by hordes of incredibly intense blonde Americans with no coffee. And every time my phone vibrated, for a split second I knew it was the worst news.”

“I never wanted to die,” Shane says, quietly.

“Maybe not,” Hayden says. “But you stopped eating and you stopped sleeping, so.”

”I got help.” Shane looks at his hands.

“I know.” Hayden flashes a half-smile. “I am still fucking proud of you for that, for the record.”

“Thanks.”

Shane doesn’t say that he hadn’t wanted to get help when Ilya asked him to. He’d deflected and ignored and stonewalled, curling tighter and tighter into himself to try and keep the rest of the world out. Until Ilya finally broke and went to his mother for help. Shane had been furious, but Ilya had correctly identified Yuna as the one person Shane would not feel allowed to say no to.

“I get why you want to, though,” Hayden says.

Shane looks up. The light in the kitchen has steadily warmed as the sun has risen. There are pools of warm yellow on the sink and counters beneath the window.

“You do?” Shane asks, hesitant.

Hayden huffs a laugh. “Of course. You still love it.”

Shane makes a noise he has never made before in his life and his chest hitches. Hayden slides off his stool, comes around the island, and pulls Shane into his arms.

**

"So, what do I do?" Shane asks, an hour later.

Hayden is sprawled across most of the couch with Anya curled up against him. The remnants of the diner breakfast Shane didn't complain about paying to get delivered are scattered across the coffee table. They're both a little red-eyed and snotty. It's fine.

"Are you seriously considering turning Wiebe down?" Hayden asks.

Shane makes himself really think about it. "I will, if I have to," he says. "But I don't want to."

Hayden nods. "Then the person you gotta convince isn't me, buddy."

"I know," Shane groans. "I don't even know where to start."

"Just spitballing -- and God knows I never want to make Rozanov's life easier -- but maybe try admitting you understand where he's coming from? At least a little bit?"

It sounds so simple coming out of someone else's mouth.

**

A little after three, Ilya calls to say he's not going to be home until very late.

"There was fire at the rink for Regina camp," he explains, sounding more exhausted than he did that morning. "No one was hurt, but the damage is very bad and will probably not be fixed for summer, so we have to either find new arena or cancel the camp and try to get campers to another location. It is a mess."

"Shit. Is there anything I can do?"

Shane's pulse ticked up when he saw Ilya's name on the caller ID, but he mostly manages to keep his voice even, though he doubts Ilya is in a frame of mind to analyze Shane's tone.

"No, I do not think so," Ilya says. Then, after a beat of silence, "I wanted to say that I am not trying to keep from coming home, yes?"

"I didn't think that," Shane says. "I promise. I didn't."

"Okay." There's a tinge of relief in Ilya's voice that makes Shane's chest tighten. "I am sorry. I know we need to talk."

"Don't worry about it. I understand," Shane assures him. "I love you."

Ilya hums a soft sound Shane can just barely hear. "I love you, too, Shane."

Shane sets his phone down on the couch cushion and looks back to his laptop. He'd been in the middle of checking his university email for anything truly time sensitive when Ilya called. Both Friday and Saturday are home games, which significantly lessens the chance that something will come up, but you never know. He refreshes the page.

The idea of another evening at home alone is -- it doesn't sound great, to Shane. He considers asking Hayden and Jackie if they'd mind having him over for dinner, but Jackie absolutely will pick up on something being weird. Shane doesn't have it in him to repeat that conversation just yet. Jackie has sat through more than her fair share of dinners with Shane being distant and distracted.

He knows the Centaurs have a home game at 7:00.

The wiser thing to do, Shane thinks, would be to close his laptop and go run a couple miles on the treadmill or do one of the stationary bike workouts with a lot of pretend hills for resistance. He could call Juliet and go over practice or take another look at last week's games. The discomfort of a quiet house won't kill him and it's no less than Shane probably deserves.

He clicks into the address bar and starts typing. The ticket hub pops up as a frequently visited suggestion after just a couple letters.

There are plenty of seats available. The Centaurs have had a demonstrably worse decade than Shane or Wiebe, for that matter, and their hometown popularity reflects that. It's not as dire as it was last season before they announced the head coach replacement, but still. Shane clicks around the options, looking for a section that strikes the correct balance between not being so empty he'll draw notice but not being so full he'll have people next to him.

He finds a couple and picks one at random. He pays with the reloadable gift card he keeps in his wallet, so his name isn't associated with the purchase. It's paranoid, which Shane has long since accepted. Sometimes life is just a matter of getting through the goddamn day. Two minutes later his purchase pops up in his second email account.

"Why are you like this?" he asks aloud, staring at his inbox. The Centaurs are playing Washington and they're probably going to get their asses handed to them and none of it is Shane's problem.

But it could be.

**

He walks into the arena a little after seven with a toque pulled down over his ears and tinted glasses on; sunglasses are too ridiculous outside of summer and, Shane has learned over the years, there's a point where inconspicuous circles back around to conspicuous.

He makes his way to his seat with his hands in his pocket and his head down. The nice thing about winter is having the bulk of his coat to hunch into without looking like he's trying to hide his face. The caution can be exhausting, but he's been recognized enough times that it feels necessary.

Five minutes after he sits, the first puck drops.

A calm that Shane finds nowhere else on earth eases through him.

The first game he went to after his career ended was the night Hayden told him there wasn't going to be a second contract with Utah because there wasn't going to be another contract at all. Shane had made the right noises, told Hayden he supported him no matter what he decided to do and that he'd be thrilled to have his best friend back in the same country. None of it lies, exactly.

Call it misrepresentation, then. In truth, Shane had been so fucking angry that he almost threw his phone across the kitchen. He'd choked on the ludicrous unfairness of it all, that the fucking league was punishing another stellar career with amputation. Hayden deserved so much more than to be Shane and Ilya's collateral damage.

Ilya had been at some donor thing that Shane had begged off of, so he was alone in the house and a self destructive impulse propelled him toward hockey for reasons he could not and still cannot articulate. He watched the game with his arms folded across his chest and his jaw aching from clenched teeth, radiating anger so baldly a couple on his left moved down a few extra seats.

But when the final bell sounded, he was fine.

He felt better than he had in a long time, actually.

Paradoxically, the calm had rebounded back as anger again that first time. He'd felt pathetic, like a little kid pitching a tantrum until until given his favorite stuffed animal. For the first time in his life, hockey being different for Shane cut like an insult. Ilya had given it up and only looked back long enough to spit; his grudges against the league were steady, focused. Pure, in a way.

Shane dragged the league like a gangrenous limb he couldn't find the guts to cut off.

He'd promised himself driving home from the first game that he would never do it again. And then he'd done it again. And again. And again. Seven years later, he's still going.

Six minutes into the first period, Washington scores between the Ottawa goalie's legs. A muted chorus of groans go up around the arena. On the jumbotron, the goalie shakes his head and mutters under his breath. He rolls his shoulders. Shaking it off, as best he can; Shane knows that routine.

The game continues on, but Shane keeps his focus on the goalie. He's a recent trade and young besides, coming off a rough rookie season with Toronto. Shane doesn't seek out gossip, but he's picked up a couple things from Juliet and the team. Something about a bad culture fit, which is so broad as to almost be meaningless. That being said, Shane's experience of Toronto was that they always had about twice as many straight up assholes as anyone else, so not fitting in there isn't inherently a bad thing.

The score remains the same through the rest of the first period and the goalie makes some very nice saves. There's raw talent there, Shane thinks, it just hasn't been fully tapped yet. The kid has a tendency to anticipate shots a fraction too early, moving to block a puck that isn't there yet. It leaves him scrambling to meet the actual shot.

Patience can be taught, Shane thinks. Most players are prone to jumping the gun their first year or two. Shane wasn't, but doing things too quickly has never been one of Shane's particular problems.

The puck drops for the second period and Shane, belatedly, realizes he's thinking like a coach.

He has tried, over the last couple weeks, to keep himself from thinking too much about what it would be like to walk into the arena as someone who belonged there. The line between daydreaming and being sucked back down into the hole of what could have been is too thin for Shane to feel sure he can straddle it, with hockey. The question had to stay if he was going to do it, not how he would.

The Centaurs score, tying it up 1-1. A wave of cheering goes around the arena that Shane claps along with.

Would it be so different, watching the game from behind the bench? How much would it really matter if he could just lean down and tell the players what he's already thinking now from the bleachers? Half of coaching is just -- translation, really. You look at the entirety of a game, your team and the opposing team, and find the places where friction is clogging up the rhythm and figure out how to fix it.

A coach Shane had in juniors once told him, "You're very coachable, Hollander, you just don't need a lot of coaching." Shane hadn't known how to take that at the time, but he thinks he understands it better now.

He remembers commentators going on and on about hockey IQ before the draft, which he'd found vaguely embarrassing at seventeen. He'd interpreted IQ as 'understands hockey,' and it felt like one of the backhanded compliments he'd put up with for years. Hollander has way more muscle than you'd expect from someone like him! Hollander can actually throw a punch on the ice, who would have thought? Hollander understands hockey, isn't that nuts?

It took him a long time to realize that no, not every player understands the game on an instinctual level. Not even every very good player. That instinct isn't what makes Shane a good coach. It's being able to translate his instinct for his players that makes him a good coach.

Washington and Ottawa both score in the second period. Ottawa's goal comes from Haas, a neat and deadly precise shot over Washington's shoulder. Ten years have turned him into a truly excellent player despite having a mediocre asshole of a coach who tended to take promising players and turn them into jaded failures to launch. Shane has wondered, over the years, why he never made the jump to a better team, but call it luck to Ottawa. Under Wiebe, Haas is being used far more effectively and he's putting up the numbers he was always capable of.

Shane wants to be part of it.

It's that simple, in the end. He loves hockey and he misses this kind of hockey and he wants to be part of it again.

The second period ends. Shane stands and files out to the concourse, then slips out of the arena and heads home. He watches the rest of the game curled up on his couch with Anya in his lap. Haas scores again in the third and Ottawa wins 3-2.

**

A little before midnight, Shane jerks out of a doze to the front door slamming shut. Anya jumps down and heads that way; Shane hears Ilya greet her in soft Russian, broken up by a yawn.

Shane stands, arching his back against a twinge of stiffness, then follows after Anya. He finds Ilya leaning against the wall as he pulls off his boots, fumbling at the laces with fingers that aren't quite cooperating. There are dark circles smeared beneath his eyes.

He's afraid for you, Shane thinks. The morning feels ten years in the past.

"Lyubimyy," Ilya says. "You did not have to wait up for me."

"I wanted to."

A small smile, but a smile nonetheless, passes across Ilya's face. "It was long day," he says, finally freeing his foot. "I missed you."

Shane opens his arms. "Come here."

Ilya pads down the short hallway and half-collapses against Shane's chest, shoving his face into the curve of Shane's neck. Shane strokes a hand along the column of his spine, up and down over the familiar undulation of bone. Ilya sighs from his gut.

**

They play Laurier on Friday. Shane is distracted and Ilya doesn’t come.

Shane tries. He does. He tries to focus and be present, to leave the swamp of his personal shit outside the door. It’s the minimum he owes to the women that play for him and the rest of the coaching staff and all the way down. It takes a lot of people for a team to function.

But his head is too full of the past and the future, of Hayden’s advice and Ilya’s quietly unhappy concessions, of what his parents will think and why he’s found every reason under the sun to say nothing to them, of the fucking league and Brandon Wiebe, of the teammates that never spoke to Shane again after that last playoff game and the hole in his life that sometimes aches from their absence.

Worse, Shane can tell that the team is worried in how they dial themselves back from the rowdy group they are at heart. They ask Shane carefully considered questions and keep the jokes studiously inoffensive to the point that it’s barely chirping.

No one asks why Ilya, who comes to every single home game, isn’t there.

They lose 3-2. Shane looks around at the sea of dejected faces in the dressing room after and can’t find anything to say. So he says, “I think we all know we can do better,” and leaves it at that.

When he gets home, Shane initially thinks the house is empty and his stomach yaws with the fear that Ilya’s gone again and gone for good. But he sees Anya sitting by the sliding glass doors onto the patio, waiting patiently, and then Ilya’s back. He has a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Shane pulls his coat back on and slips outside, too.

Ilya looks over his shoulder at the sound of the door opening. “That is not a happy face,” he says. “Game did not go great?”

There’s a looseness around consonants as he speaks, rounding out the English such that it sounds half-Russian. Vodka in the glass, then, which is no more than Shane expected. Ilya’s ruminating always has a particular aesthetic to it, like tasting the possibility of oblivion keeps the rest of it at bay.

“3-2,” Shane says. “Honestly, it was mostly me. I was distracted.”

“It happens to the best of us,” Ilya says.

Shane spots the vodka bottle on a deck chair and it’s still about two thirds full. “Can I have some of that?”

Ilya arches an eyebrow and clicks his tongue. “On a game night, Coach Hollander? So wild and reckless,” he says. Shane rolls his eyes and Ilya chuckles. “There is no second glass, so do you want this glass or straight from bottle?”

”Bottle.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” Ilya asks, but he also sets the cigarette in the shallow dish he’s using as an ash tray and passes the bottle to Shane.

Shane unscrews the top and takes a swig while Ilya watches him, expression somewhere between indulgent amusement and a distant, lonely sadness. The vodka is the good Russian shit and it burns all the way down, settling warm in Shane’s stomach. It occurs to him he hasn’t eaten since before the game. He takes another swig.

“You want cigarette, too?” Ilya asks, deadpan.

Shane huffs a laugh. “What would you do if I said yes?”

Ilya shrugs. “Probably give you one and then call your mother or a priest.”

“A priest?”

“For exorcism.”

That startles a more real laugh out of Shane, which in turn softens Ilya’s expression into an easier, fonder smile. He lifts his arm in invitation and Shane steps into the empty space. Ilya’s arm around his shoulders is heavy, anchoring in a way that cuts through Shane’s spiraling thoughts.

“What are you thinking about?” Shane asks. Ilya’s coat is unzipped, so Shane slides his hand into the pocket of Ilya’s sweatshirt.

”Futility,” Ilya says.

“Just the idea of futility or?”

Ilya shrugs again. “Two vodkas ago, sure. Now I am mostly singing in my head two lines from a song I cannot remember the rest of.”

Shane drops his head onto Ilya’s shoulder. “What are the lines?”

“The repetition kills you,” Ilya sings, probably out of tune. “The repetition kills you, kills you.”

“What song is that?”

“Probably The Repetition Kills You, but that is assumption.”

Shane laughs into his shoulder, then Ilya laughs, too. And standing there curled into each other, laughing at a stupid joke, everything is briefly normal. There have been a lot of post-game Friday nights in the eight years Shane has coached and a lot of them have ended with Shane tipsy and handsy, crawling into Ilya’s lap and settling.

“Are you still mad at me?” Shane asks.

Ilya is vodka-loose enough to not tense up at the question. “Yeah, little bit. Not so much as I was. Are you still mad at me?”

“A little bit,” Shane says. He’s not drunk, but he’s warm enough from the two shots into an empty stomach that pretending is easy.

“Do you remember after our first MLH awards?” Ilya asks.

“When I won Rookie of the Year?”

”Yes, when you won fucking Rookie of the Year.” Ilya jostles him, but doesn’t pull away. “Afterward on the roof.”

Shane snorts. “When you kissed me in front of God and the entire city of Las Vegas. Yes, I remember.”

“I don’t think God cared. And I don’t think any of Las Vegas was watching,” Ilya says. “You were so fucking mad at me for that kiss. Even though your hands were in my hair. You tasted like vodka and that was very fucking sexy at nineteen.”

“You can thank Scott Hunter for that, I guess.”

Ilya laughs. “We should have asked him for threesome before he found Kip and got married and had babies.”

”Alas.”

“Yes.” Ilya inhales deeply and exhales slowly. “But you were so mad, right? So fucking mad. And I thought maybe that was the last time I would ever kiss you.”

”I was mad at how much I wanted it,” Shane says. “I was scared, more than anything.”

“Yeah, I know.” Ilya drops his head to rest against Shane’s. “I liked it, a little bit, that you were mad. I think because it was proof that you cared enough to be mad, maybe? That I was also under your skin, the way you were under mine.”

”You were. Are.”

Ilya’s arm tightens around Shane’s shoulders in an almost-hug. “My point is that you matter enough to get angry over. I just want you to know that I am not looking for how to run away from you.”

“I’m sorry I’m difficult,” Shane says, softer than he means to.

“Is okay,” Ilya says. “I have always known you are difficult. I like it.”

**

They play Waterloo on Saturday. Shane is slightly hungover and Ilya does come.

They win 3-2.

Shane drives home afterward with Ilya’s warm hand on his thigh. They’re both tired, wrung out by nights of too little bad sleep, but buoyed by the win. It’s like chugging coffee to counteract jetlag; you can run forever until you slam into a wall.

When they get inside the house, Ilya crowds Shane against the wall, one hand braced next to his head, the other skimming up Shane’s side. Ilya leans in and noses up Shane’s jaw to the hinge, tongue darting out to lick at the sensitive skin behind his ear. Shane shudders, breath escaping in an ‘ah’ that wavers in the quiet.

”You did good, coach,” Ilya murmurs. “So fucking talented.”

The ‘coach’ pours heat down Shane’s spine, which he’ll be embarrassed about in the morning. He always is; this isn’t a new thing. In the dim gloom of their dark home, with Ilya’s breath hot on his skin and Ilya’s voice low in his ear, Shane throbs with it. Coach, king — what’s the fucking difference, in the end?

Shane splays his hands on Ilya’s chest and pushes him back just far enough for Shane to slip sideways out of the cage of his arms. He walks backward towards the stairs. He’s risking tripping over the dog or a stray shoe and falling on his ass, but the look in Ilya’s eye as he follows is worth it.

Shane’s heel hits the bottom stair as Ilya reaches him; they both almost sprawl backward, but Ilya plants one hand on the banister and circles the other arm around Shane’s waist. It’s like being dipped into a kiss and Shane huffs a breathless laugh. He slides his fingers into Ilya’s hair and kisses him hard.

Shane keeps stumbling up the stairs and Ilya follows. It’s the slowest possible way to go to their bedroom, but Shane doesn’t care. He wants this to last, wants to stretch it out into the early hours of the morning, wake up late and sore and spend the day with a hitch in his step. He tugs on Ilya’s hair and pushes his tongue into Ilya’s mouth.

At the top of the stairs, Shane breaks the kiss so he can turn and pull Ilya into their bedroom. They fumble through undressing together, hands pulling at buttons and zippers, tugging and yanking and shoving. Ilya’s hoodie falls to the floor and Shane’s trousers shimmy down and both are kicked away. Shane’s button down flaps open and Ilya’s jeans take too fucking long. They suck hot kisses on newly bare skin.

When they’re both finally naked, Shane pushes Ilya down onto the bed. Ilya crawls backward and Shane follows on his hands and knees then down onto his belly between Ilya’s legs. Shane shoves his face into Ilya’s bush and inhales the musk of it, salt and animal desire. Ilya’s dick twitches; Shane opens his mouth and licks a messy stripe along the fat underside vein.

Ilya groans, “Fuck, Hollander," and Shane hums an unvoiced acknowlegement that’s reduced down to vibration since his mouth is full of Ilya’s cock. Ilya grunts out filthy Russian and curls a hand in Shane’s hair, forcing Shane down deeper on his cock. Shane humps his hips into the mattress.

When Ilya is fully hard, Shane pops off his dick with a short gasp and shifts back up onto his hands and knees to crawl the rest of the way up the bed. Ilya looks at him with dark, lust-drunk eyes, mouth open. His tongue darts out to lick his lips and Shane leans to flick his tongue against Ilya’s. They curl together and Shane whimpers a little.

He leans past Ilya to grope between the mattress and the headboard for lube, letting out a triumphant, ”Ha,” when he finds it. Ilya pushes his face into the curve of Shane’s shoulder and stifles laughter into it. God, Shane has missed him, loves him, wants him. In twenty years, the depth of Shane’s want for Ilya has never lessened.

Shane throws a leg over Ilya’s lap and settles there straddled. He pops the lid of the lube and pours it into his palm, then reaches behind to circle Ilya’s cock and slick him up. Ilya grunts and wraps his arms around Shane’s middle, digging his nails into the meat of Shane’s back.

“I’ve got you,” Shane says. “I’m gonna take care of you.”

He positions the head of Ilya’s cock against his hole and sinks down onto it.

It’s a little too everything, too much, too fast, too hard, but Shane is chasing the scouring oblivion of being pushed past what feels simply good. Heat licks up his spine and flares outward along every nerve he has in a blitz of electric pleasure. Shane cries out, sharp and reedy and tips forward into Ilya’s chest, looping his arms around Ilya’s neck.

“I love you,” Shane gasps. “I love you so much.”

They rock like that together, Shane rolling his hips down onto Ilya’s cock while Ilya plants his feet on the mattress and pulses up into Shane. The head of his cock nails Shane’s prostrate so steadily tears start to leak down Shane’s cheeks from the overwhelm of it. Ilya kisses them away.

Shane, cock trapped between their bellies, comes first with a raw, drawn out sound, clenching down so hard on Ilya he swears in Russian and English and French, babbling out praise and encouragement and begging. Shane fists his hand in Ilya’s hair and kisses him.

It doesn’t take Ilya long to follow. Shane holds himself upright purely by his arms around Ilya’s neck as Ilya hammers into him, each thrust juddering scorching, too-much pleasure into oversensitive Shane. It’s so good. It’s perfect. It’s right. Shane babbles this to Ilya in a low, shattered slur of words.

Ilya’s teeth sink into Shane’s shoulder when he comes and Shane is forty, he can’t come again that fast, but his cock twitches hard and he wails and that’s as close as he can expect. He feels Ilya’s cock jerk inside him as he empties and Shane rolls his hips through it, until Ilya slumps back into the pillows.

They lay there together, panting and maybe both crying a little. Ilya’s clumsy hands soothe up and down Shane’s sides from flank to ribs. Shane pets Ilya’s curls, face pressed into Ilya’s throat so he can feel his adam’s apple bob when he swallows.

When Shane thinks he can stand without falling over, he lifts up enough to fully pull off Ilya’s softened cock. Ilya makes a soft, desolate noise that Shane bends down to swallow with a sloppy kiss. He can feel come drip down the backs of his thighs and desolation momentarily pulses in his chest, too.

“I’ll be right back,” Shane promises.

“Hurry,” Ilya mumbles. “Miss you.”

Shane stumbles to the bathroom and mops himself up, then soaks another washcloth and carries it back to the bed. He wipes up Ilya and tosses the cloth toward the laundry. Ilya is too boneless to even try to cajole under the blankets, so Shane gropes for the duvet they keep folded across the foot of the bed and tosses it over them both.

Ilya rolls into Shane's side, throwing a leg across Shane's thighs and an arm across his stomach. His breath ghosts over Shane's collarbones, warm and faintly tickling. Shane winds his fingers in Ilya's curls with his eyes closed. Their breath slowly synchronizes.

"Shane?" Ilya murmurs.

"Mm?"

"Do you know what you are going to tell Wiebe?"

The answer Ilya wants is one given without hesitation, and in that way, Shane's silence says more than enough.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Shane wakes up on Monday morning and the routine he has followed for five years is no longer a comfortable thing.

Run, shower, dress, Anya, coffee, car, work in sequence and the motions of it all are still rote. It’s muscle memory in the same way he can still fire off a goal that flies past his goalies.

But there’s a third period feel to it all, however much that would make sense to anyone else. It’s the point in the game where the clock starts running down faster and Shane’s choices matter more because the window to fix mistakes is shrinking

The athletic building is quiet when Shane arrives, his motion activates some of the hall lights as he walks to his office. He canceled morning practice for the team as an apology for his distraction and uselessness on Saturday and he hopes they’re all getting some rest. Still, it’s important to Shane that he still makes himself available if any of them do need something.

He settles in at his desk and checks his email first. He deletes most of the campus-wide stuff without opening it, deletes the newsletters and promotions. Franson forwarded him an email from her Canadian Lit tutor that says her first draft was very solid. Shane responds with: Good work. I’m proud of you.

It’s funny, Shane thinks, that when the head coach of the men’s team first offered him a job as an assistant coach, Shane had almost told him to fuck off. Damien Reilly played hockey with David Hollander at McGill and it had felt like the worst combination of nepotism and pity. Poor Shane Hollander, shambling through his life with money and time and nothing to do.

Ilya had told him to get down off his high fucking horse and hear the man out. When Shane bluntly asked Reilly if this was some kind of favor for an older friend, he’d pinned Shane down with a hard look. “A favor to your father would be a bullshit desk job shuffling paperwork. The success of my team is not a favor I dole out.”

So Shane took the job, expected nothing, and ended up loving it. Three years in, when Reilly finally convinced the university to start a women’s hockey program, he’d come to Shane and said, “Putting together a program is a hell of a lot harder than coaching a team, but it’s yours if you want it.”

Shane wanted it.

And he’s proud of it. Proud of his current players and the ones that have graduated, the women who took a chance on a brand new program five years ago, the men before that. Proud of his assistant coaches. Proud of the wins and even proud of the fucking losses.

His phone rings. Shane looks down at the screen and is momentarily startled to see Brandon Wiebe’s name. He’d forgotten, in the face of the offer, that they exchanged numbers at the end of lunch.

“Hello, coach,” Shane says.

“Good morning. I debated if eight was too early, but you strike me as a morning person,” Wiebe says.

“I am, yes.” Shane could wait for Wiebe to say out loud what Shane already knows he’s going to ask. Maybe that would be politer or at least less desperate. But it doesn’t feel like that matters, really.

“So—“

“I have been thinking about your offer,” Shane says, inadvertently cutting Wiebe off. “I’ll be honest, Ilya thinks I should turn you down. Actually, he thinks I should tell you to go fuck yourself.”

“I see.” Wiebe’s tone stays calm, which Shane notes. “I can certainly understand where he’s coming from.”

“The Centaurs are more personal, for him.”

“I can imagine.” Which, coming from Wiebe, isn’t a platitude, Shane thinks. “Is that your answer, too?”

It would be so easy to say yes. It would be so fucking easy.

“The thing is,” Shane says. “I can’t — the things that happened in Ottawa, to Ilya, I can’t speak to them. I wasn’t here.”

“I see,” Wiebe says. “Do you think you could convince him to come to a meeting for the three of us? Wednesday afternoon, maybe?”

Shane closes his eyes. “Yes, I think I can do that.”

**

“Coach?”

LeDoux’s voice jolts Shane out of his dozenth mental rehash of his conversation with Wiebe. He pastes on an automatic smile, something he has had to carefully cultivate over the years so that freshman players weren’t afraid to talk to him.

“Yes,” Shane says, an affirmative to a question that has not been asked. “What’s up?”

“I had something I wanted to ask you about?” It begins as a statement and trails up into a question at the end.

Shane hasn’t seen this hesitant version of LeDoux for two years, at least. She’d been so nervous her first semester that Shane could barely see the high school center he’d been so excited to add to the roster. It took a dozen excellent goals for her to resettle into her skills. Of all the decisions Shane has ever made as a coach, sticking with LeDoux until she came into her own might be the one he is most proud of.

“Of course. Come on in.”

LeDoux steps into his office and closes the door behind her, then sits on the edge of the same worn chair she always sits in. She doesn’t unshoulder her backpack.

Shane shoves his own bullshit to the side. He’s still the head coach for St. Rowan women’s team; he’s not going to shirk that responsibility for as long as it’s his.

“What’s up?” he asks again.

LeDoux absently fiddles with a broken buckle on her backpack. For as fast and sharp as she is on the ice, she tends to take her time gathering her thoughts off it. Shane recognizes the same habit in himself and he’s never been impatient with it. Other coaches have been less generous, Shane knows.

Shane remembers her walking into her first practice as a member of the team, wide-eyed and a couple inches shorter than most of her teammates, hovering at the edges like she wasn't sure there'd be room if she jumped in. But Shane's eye had kept going back to her. Intuition said there was more to her than her life had taught her to show; Shane knew that feeling.

The thought of not seeing her through her last year is -- a loss. A regret, a real one.

”I know this is probably none of my business,” she says at last. “And I promise I’m not trying to pry or anything like that. But there’s a rumor —“ She flinches slightly at the word. Shane makes his opinions about rumors very clear every season. It doesn’t stop the gossip, but it tempers the worst of it.

“About?” Shane asks.

“You and the Centaurs,” LeDoux says hesitantly. “There was a post on the Centaurs subreddit that you had lunch with their head coach.”

“Of course there was.” Shane scrubs a hand across his face.

LeDoux has the grace to look a little embarrassed, but she doesn’t try to backtrack. Which Shane can respect in the abstract.

He doesn’t know what to tell her. Yes, but whether or not he’s going to take the job feels both inevitable and catastrophically undecided? That his marriage feels uncertain for the first time in ten years? That everyone who cares about him isn’t actually afraid that the job won’t work out, they’re afraid that he’ll kill himself if it doesn’t?

She’s so fucking young, Shane thinks, looking at LeDoux sitting there in her team sweatshirt, dark hair escaping from her hair tie. Shane was younger than her for his rookie season. Which seems impossible and a little irresponsible in retrospect.

Putting the weight of an entire league’s expectations and a career defining rivalry on the backs of two teenagers? It was unfair.

“I did have lunch with Brandon Wiebe,” Shane says. “For now, that’s all.”

LeDoux nods. “Got it. Thank you.”

“If that changes, you all will be among the first to know.”

“Thanks, coach.” She cocks a half-smile at him. “Can I say something for the record?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll miss you. And they’ll be really lucky to have you,” she says, and before Shane can scrape together a response to that, she stands and darts for the door, calling out, “Bye, Coach. See you later,” over her shoulder.

**

Juliet's office door is open, so Shane comes in without knocking and closes it behind him. She closes her laptop and gestures toward the rickety chairs pulled up to her desk and Shane sits, grateful for the thousandth time that there's so much between them that doesn't need to be said. It's a kind of understanding that can't be bought.

"Can I ask you something?" Shane says.

"Can I guess what you want to ask?"

"Sure."

Juliet folds her hands on her desk and leans forward. "Do I think you're making a mistake?"

Shane huffs a laugh. "Do you?"

Juliet shrugs. "I think you're in one of those really fun situations where any choice you make is going to be a little bit of a mistake. You won't know for sure until it all shakes out and that shit is gonna take time."

"Helpful."

"I'm a hockey coach, not an oracle."

Shane laughs again and Juliet smiles at him. "I do have a suggestion for what you should be asking me."

"What should I be asking you?"

"If I cross my heart and hope to die promise that I'll give this team my all when you're gone," Juliet says. "If I'll seriously consider LeDoux for captain, which we both know is only phrased as a question because you would never tell another coach how to handle their team."

Shane nods. "Do you? Promise those things?"

"I promise," Juliet says. "Cross my heart and hope to die."

"Good." Shane exhales hard. "If it all goes south, will you be angry when I ask for my job back?"

"Come on, coach. You won't be getting your job back, but I will consider you for an assistant position."

**

Shane: I spoke to Wiebe this morning.

Ilya: good for you

Shane: Would you be willing to come with me to meet with him this week?

Ilya: shooting the shit with him is not going to change my mind

Shane: Please.

Ilya: i said i would never fucking go back there

Ilya: fuck

Ilya: fine. okay.

Shane: Thank you.

Ilya: don’t thank me, shane. just please don’t.

**

That night, Ilya tells Shane he’ll be home late and Shane doesn’t push. He curls up on the couch with a book and Anya and ends up reading out loud to her so he can focus on the words. “You’re a good listener,” Shane tells her and she licks his hand.

It’s after eleven when Ilya gets home. Shane waits on the couch, wanting to ask if Ilya is okay and if he’s angry and where he was. The hardest part of Shane’s anxiety is that it never shuts up.

Ilya comes out of the foyer and sees Shane, cocks his mouth into an odd, crooked little smile and walks to the couch. He bends over the back of it to kiss Shane, soft and lingering. Shane sighs into it and lets Ilya’s tongue slip in.

“I got dinner with Bood and Hazy,” Ilya says when they break apart, still draped over the back of the couch. “You know what they both said?”

”What?”

“They said to hear the man out.” Ilya flashes another tight, tired smile. “I am outvoted. I will hear the man out.”

**

They both take Wednesday off independently of each other.

The morning and early afternoon are — quiet. Shane doesn’t entirely know how to describe the strange fraughtness of it. The usual ease with which they navigate each other turns clunky. They run into each other, reach for things at the same time, get in each other’s way, murmuring distracted apologies.

They make their own lunches, but eat them together at the kitchen island. Ilya takes a couple calls from the Foundation and Shane checks his university email. It’s nearness and distance simultaneously, better and worse than Shane expected, better and worse than Shane feared.

But interspersed with that is Ilya’s hands lingering. Shane brushes his teeth with Ilya’s hand in the small of his back. He pours coffee with Ilya’s forehead pressed to the back of his neck. He slips on his shoes and Ilya kneels to tie them.

Shane almost says he’s not going to disappear.

He lets Ilya drive to the sports complex, listening to the Spanish rap he loves so much with the volume down low. Shane’s leg bounces; he can’t stop it. Ilya doesn’t say anything, but he reaches across the console to squeeze Shane’s knee.

When they get there, Ilya parks and cuts the engine.

He stares at the sprawl of it all with an expression Shane can’t read. The anger hasn't gone, of course. Shane never expected it would. But there's a -- a heaviness, too. Sadness, or maybe regret. Shane knows that Ilya sometimes hides harder things behind anger.

“Ilya?”

"There is a lot of memory here, lyubimyy,” he says. “For me."

"I know."

Ilya manages a lopsided smile. "I know you know."

"I know you know I know," Shane says.

Ilya inhales deeply. “Okay. I am ready. Let’s go.”

They go.

**

A woman at a reception area greets them when they walk in; Ilya recognizes her, remembers her name, and she flushes pink at that and says it’s good to see him again.

And Ilya relaxes a little, but it can’t last, because she leads them down hallways, away from the public areas. Shane sees signs to the communications offices and the finance offices, to facilities and dressing rooms and training.

“It hasn’t changed much,” the woman from reception says.

“No,” Ilya agrees, voice distant, “it has not.”

And then they’re approaching an open door with a plaque next to it emblazoned with Wiebe’s name. She knocks on the open frame and says, “Your VIPs are here.” Wiebe appears a moment later and thanks her. She tells Ilya it’s nice to see him and goes.

“Welcome,” Wiebe says. “And welcome back. Thank you for taking the time. Come on in.”

Ilya sets his face into a mask of stony neutrality, takes Shane’s hand without looking at him, and together they go in.

“Take a seat,” Wiebe says as he closes his office door. “It’s good to see you again, Rozanov.”

Ilya’s response is a noncommittal noise. They all sit.

Wiebe’s office is lived-in, a little messy, a little shabby. There’s a crammed full bookshelf and team photos hung on the wall in slightly uneven rows. Some of the older ones are blurred out and faded; Shane finds 2018 and Ilya smiling broadly in the front. He was thirty and he still looks so young.

Shane can imagine being comfortable in this room, sitting in the same spot to talk lines and tactics and schedules and prospects and trades. All of it. There’s space for him to belong here, no bullshit or secrets. No hiding. The whole of who Shane is seen and understood, in a way he never got as a player.

“So,” Wiebe says. “Tell me if I’m off. I don’t think Shane is the one who needs to be convinced.”

Ilya folds his arms across his chest. “No, he does not.”

Wiebe looks at Shane. “Is this okay with you?”

Ilya looks slightly taken aback, but Shane appreciates Wiebe checking first. There are a lot of things Shane has no problem handing off to Ilya. This is not one of them.

“Ilya is worried about — history repeating itself,” Shane says, reaching over to lay a hand on Ilya’s shoulder.

”I think it is fair concern,” Ilya says stiffly.

“I agree,” Wiebe says. “My wife had the same concern when the Centaurs approached me the second time.”

The admission catches Shane a little by surprise, though it really shouldn’t. He knows Wiebe didn’t quit back then, he was axed for reasons that were really fucking vague, even for a less than amicable departure between a team and a coach. He was excommunicated as much as Shane and Ilya were.

“Why did you come back?” Shane asks.

Wiebe leans back in his chair. “Because the guy who owned the team back then died and his kid inherited. She’s a lesbian and everything that happened never sat well with her. She flew out to Minneapolis to make the offer and she apologized, said that she tried to talk her dad out of firing me, but wasn’t successful.”

“How nice of her,” Ilya says flatly.

Wiebe shrugs. “It was meaningful to me. She also promised me full autonomy in replacing staff that — let’s say weren’t interested in the new team direction. That helped, too.”

“What happens if she changes her mind?” Ilya asks.

“Ilya.” Shane squeezes his arm.

“No, I get it. I have thought about that,” Wiebe says.

“What about the rest of the fucking league?”

“I’ve thought about that, too.”

Shane swallows hard. “I don’t know if you know this, but back then, Crowell summoned me to New York.”

Wiebe winces. “How’d that go?”

“He threatened me. He told me if I wanted to keep playing hockey, if Ilya wanted to keep playing, we had to pass the video off as a prank. Take it all back, you know? Keep the gay shit private, where it belonged. And if we didn’t, we were done.” Shane's voice is more bitter in his own ears than expected.

“That sounds like Crowell.” Wiebe says, grimacing.

“It was not a threat,” Ilya cuts in. “It was a promise and he kept it.”

“I know.”

“What stops that from happening again?”

“Well,” Wiebe says, consideringly. “For one, Crowell’s dead. And it might be a little ghoulish, but I was fucking thrilled when I heard that news.”

That gets a thin, razor edged smile from Ilya and a sharp snort of something too hard to really be a laugh. The day Roger fucking Crowell dropped dead of a heart attack, Hayden and Jackie came over and the four of them got roaringly drunk off the best vodka from Ilya’s personal stash and ended up sprawled across the living room floor imagining all the shit that was happening to him in hell.

Shane has never hated anyone else with the same visceral loathing he has for Crowell.

"And everyone else other than Crowell?" Ilya asks.

"Ilya, please," Shane murmurs.

Ilya flinches, but doesn't back down.

"I can't promise anything," Wiebe suddenly says. He spreads his upturned hands. "That's the reality. There are people who are going to have a problem with you, Shane, and they will try and make it your problem. Some of them will be loud about it. You're going to be held to a higher standard."

"Fuck that--" Ilya begins.

"That's nothing new," Shane cuts in, jerking his head to look at Ilya. "That has been the case my entire life."

Ilya shakes his head violently. "It is different--"

"No, Ilya. It's not. It is not different."

Ilya's eyes bore into Shane and it would be so much easier to look away first. Shane hates the terror he sees in Ilya, the collected fears and failings of an entire lifetime compressed into this moment, turning his protection into the iron bars of a cage for Shane. You can't keep score in a marriage and yet they've both been tallying up the points of sacrifice, the give and take of twenty years.

How much is any one moment worth? Does Ilya moving to another country for Shane tip the scales enough to override the loss of Shane's entire career? How does Shane look at two decades with Ilya and understand exactly why he feels the way he does and do it anyway?

"Lyubimyy," Ilya says at last.

"I know what's going to happen," Shane says, then looks back to Wiebe. "People are going to make insinuations and question my abilities. They're going to go over my entire career and question every choice I ever made as a player. They're going to believe that I threw games because the MLH as good as said that's what happened. I get it. I'm prepared for it."

Wiebe nods. Ilya looks away.

"I need a couple days to think," Shane says. "I'll get back to you soon."

**

The sun has started to fall when they leave and they drive home in silence.

Some part of Shane, perhaps irrationally, wishes that it had gone worse; doubt would be so much easier than the quiet certainty feels. It’s a childish feeling, almost, wanting the right thing to be the easy thing. Wishing for the far simpler burn of anger and the satisfaction of a hard no.

It is harder to know what he wants to do, when knowing means that he is going to hurt Ilya. To know that Shane is not the better man and husband that could walk away and never regret it.

When they get home, Ilya goes to let Anya out and Shane goes to the kitchen. He opens the fridge intending to grab beers, but takes out a Coke and ginger ale instead, thinking about an afternoon sitting at a different island, holding a cold can that proved Ilya paid more attention to Shane than Shane ever thought possible.

Ten minutes later, Ilya stands at the threshold of the kitchen, one hand braced on the wall. Shane is momentarily struck, as ever, by how fucking beautiful the long lines of his body are, the planes of his face, the scatter of moles. Shane has never been able to figure out if he was drawn to Ilya because he likes big men or if he likes big men because Ilya is the foundation of Shane’s desire.

Shane pushes the Coke across the island. Ilya reluctantly pushes off the wall and joins him. They both crack the tabs and take long drinks, like carbonation and caffeine can make this conversation any easier.

“So,” Shane says.

“So,” Ilya repeats.

“What do you think?”

Ilya shrugs, but it’s a tight, stiff gesture. “I think it is bad idea and you should not do it. My mind is not changed. Like I said.” He pauses, then asks, “What do you think?”

Shane looks down at his hands, curled around a green can that’s starting to bead with condensation. “If I don’t do this, I will regret it for the rest of my life.”

He looks up — he forces himself to look up — and watches Ilya’s expression collapse.

“How do I convince you not to do this?” Ilya begs. “Please, Shane. Tell me what I have to do or what I have to say or what it will take for this to not happen. Please. Please, Shane.”

Guilt is acidic in Shane’s throat and sour in his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be fucking sorry,” Ilya says, voice climbing up. “Just don’t fucking do it. I get why they want you, of course they fucking want you, they’ve always wanted you, but you don’t have to give yourself to them.”

”I know,” Shane says. “Ilya, I know that.”

”How much more will you give to them, Shane? How many more pieces will you let them bite off? Your talent was not enough? Your dreams were not enough? Now you have to give them the rest, too?”

“That’s not it.”

Ilya hands are white-knuckled fists vibrating against the island’s butcherblock. “How can you even think about going back without at least demanding what you are fucking owed?”

“What the fuck am I owed, Ilya?” Shane’s hands are shaking, too.

“A career, Hollander!” Ilya shouts. “A thousand fucking goals and a thousand fucking wins and cups and championships and rings and respect—“

“We’re both owed that!”

”I don’t fucking care about me, I care about you!”

”I care about you.”

“How can you fucking forgive them?”

“I’m not forgiving anyone! This isn’t the fucking Metros!”

Ilya grinds out a noise between a groan and a cry. “So fucking what! Any team in the entire rest of the fucking league could have fucking signed you and none of them did and I watched you realize no fucking offers were coming.”

Blood is roaring in Shane’s ears, throbbing in tempo with his heart’s pounding beat. His ribs are splintering from the unbearable weight of it.

He is seventeen, listening to his name be called second in the draft; he is twenty-six, skin crawling as he fucks a beautiful actress and thinks about a man; he is thirty-one, surrounded by teammates who believe he threw a playoff game; he is forty, looking his husband in the face and lying to him again.

“I had offers!”

Ilya goes silent like someone has cut his throat.

Shane sucks in a breath that burns into his lungs. His hands are clenched into white-knuckle fists at his side. Something wet slides down both of his cheeks; he must be crying.

The fury on Ilya’s face mutates into a rictus of profound horror.

Take it back, Shane thinks, with a cold clarity that feels like someone else’s thought. Lie. Take it back. He was never supposed to know that.

”What do you mean you had offers?” Ilya’s voice is a harsh rasp. “What the fuck does that mean, Shane?”

Shane closes his eyes against the battering weight of memory. So many days from that summer are lost to him, but never this one, and God knows he has tried to forget.

“After Ottawa fell through,” Shane says, “Farah got offers from Nashville and Utah and Florida. Tampa Bay, I think.”

“I don’t understand.” Ilya shakes his head. "You never said."

"I know."

"Why?" The word sounds like it has been ripped out of Ilya.

Because the closest offer was a six hour plane ride from Ottawa. Because it was another country. Because they had a plan. Because Wiebe's firing felt like a casualty of Shane's secrets. Because he'd done everything he was supposed to do.

"Because it was a choice between you and hockey," Shane says. "I picked you."

Ilya makes a noise like he's been punched in the gut. "I never wanted that."

"I know." Shane digs his fingers into his thighs. "I knew you'd blame yourself even though it was my choice and I didn't want you to. They weren't--" He struggles for a way to explain what that moment felt like, feeling the only life he'd ever wanted slip through his fingers. "There was no world where I'd accept being that far away from you, Ilya. They weren't -- they weren't real choices."

"Shane." His name tears out of Ilya's chest like a convulsion. "Shane."

"I don't regret it," Shane says. His chest hitches and he chokes back a sob. "I'd do it again. It was worth it."

"No." Ilya shakes his head hard. "No. No."

"Yes." Shane gasps. "It was."

Ilya turns around and leaves Shane standing alone in the kitchen. The door slams. A car engine starts and fades away.

**

The worst part about that day — worse than Shane’s team accusing him of throwing a playoff game, worse than Crowell’s oily, insinuated threats — was that it took Shane that fucking long to understand what was happening.

He can still hear Farah saying, “I’m so sorry, Ottawa pulled the offer. I’m so sorry,” and how she sounded like she was about to cry.

Ilya’s anger was a burning thing, righteous and furious, pouring out of him in shouted Russian that could have rattled the windows. Shane can see him pacing and the constant motion of his hands shoving through his hair, tight around his mother’s necklace, curled into fists. His rage filled up the room, filled up the house.

But Shane — he’d been cold. The devastation of his dream was a numb nothing in his chest, bitter and empty. Before that day, he hadn’t understood that two sentences can raze a life so thoroughly to the ground that there's nothing left but desolation.

All that was left was a small voice in Shane’s head, worn down by decades of having to be the best to get a chance at all, whispering that he always knew eventually people would figure out that he never deserved any of it. The jig was up. Shane Hollander always wanted more than he deserved.

Then Farah had asked to speak to Shane alone for a minute and Ilya had gone and Shane knew before she spoke.

The fine details of what she said that afternoon to Shane and Shane alone he’s lost to the passage of time, but he remembers the way she sounded listing them off. “Utah, Tampa Bay, and Nashville have expressed interest.”

‘Expressed interest.’ That phrase still bangs around Shane’s head a decade later.

It was the one time in Shane’s life he knew he understood the subtext.

They weren’t offers. They were punishment.

They were the mechanism by which Shane would repent for his choices. Move to another country, to an unfamiliar city thousands of miles away from everything he cared about, and sit on a fucking bench. Leave Ilya behind. Give up his dignity. Grovel on his belly. And maybe, maybe, the league would decide Shane Hollander had humiliated himself enough to earn a second chance.

The worst part about that day was finally understanding exactly what was happening. That it wasn’t about one shitty team or Shane’s shitty teammates or even the fucking commissioner. It was about the entire lumbering apparatus of the hockey machine grinding an irritant down to nothing.

Nothing that happened to Shane, or Ilya, was an accident. It was the system working as intended.

The worst part was that some of Shane still wanted to take it. The cost didn’t matter because Shane didn’t exist without hockey. Back to the wall, backed into a corner, enough of him was willing to bargain that it took him a minute to answer. If part of the price hadn’t been Ilya, maybe the whole thing would have gone down very differently.

But Ilya wasn’t optional. And if Shane didn’t see in himself what Ilya did, an echo of that faith was enough to tip the scales. So he said, “No,” to Farah. Said, “If it’s not Ottawa, then I’m done.” Shane remembers her soft, unsurprised, “I understand.”

The only thing Ilya has ever asked for is that Shane pick him over hockey. Standing alone in his kitchen ten years later, Shane asks himself that question again. Hockey or Ilya?

It’s still Ilya.

**

It's almost three when Shane hears the front door open and slam shut. He goes very still in the darkness of their bedroom, listening for the creak of footsteps on the stairs. It doesn't come. So Shane pushes back the blankets and gets out of bed and goes down to the still dark first floor. He doesn't hear anything, but when he turns to the hallway he sees a patch of light smeared across the floor.

The door to the spare room is open again, and Shane thinks he should have been able to predict it.

He walks down the hallway feeling like he’s been split in half or maybe doubled. One version of him is struggling in the undertow of his own mind, all the choices he’s made between 2021 and now dragging him down. The other is five feet above his head, wrapped in the strange insulation of clear, cold nothing and none of it is real.

When he reaches the open door, it’s for the first time in almost ten years.

“Ilya?” Shane says.

Ilya’s sitting on the end of the bed that no one has ever slept in, elbows braced on his knees and head bowed. The only light comes from recessed within the display shelves themselves. A choice made when Ilya still confidently knew that he had at least another six or seven years left in the game.

They cast harsh, elongated shadows over the plaques and trophies and pucks. The dusty artifacts of the lives they’d lived parallel to each other. Monuments to men who used to be important.

Shane crosses the threshold with a soft, sharp inhalation of breath. Nothing happens. He doesn’t fall apart. It’s just a room.

He sits down on the bed next to Ilya.

Ilya turns his head, but doesn’t raise it, and looks at Shane. The anger Shane expects isn’t really there, but neither is the broken-hearted grief of a man who has reached the limits of how far he can bend for someone he loves. He just looks tired.

Shane slowly curls his hand around the back of Ilya’s neck. Ilya sighs in deep relief at the touch.

“I am sorry I left,” Ilya says.

“It’s okay. I understand.”

Ilya hums a noise. “I guess we are even now.”

”I ran because I was scared,” Shane says. “I think you have a better reason.”

Ilya shakes his head. “No, not really. It is same reason.”

Shane swallows hard. “We both came back, too.”

The faintest smile flickers across Ilya’s face. “I also ran into the arms of a woman.”

“Who?”

“Your mom.” Ilya straightens up; Shane keeps his hand on Ilya’s neck. “I went to talk to her.”

“Why my mom?” Shane asks.

Ilya raises an eyebrow. “Mine was not available.”

That startles a soft, sharp laugh out of Shane, which makes one corner of Ilya’s mouth tick up into a small, lopsided smile. He sets one hand on Shane’s knee and starts sweeping his thumb along the edge of his kneecap. His palm is comforting, and warm.

“What did my mom have to say?”

Ilya’s mouth flattens into a thoughtful line; he looks away from Shane’s face to his knee as his thumb keeps moving. Shane wants to say something, but can’t and knows that he doesn’t need to. There is nothing more to be fought about. It’s all been said. It comes down, now, to what they can both live with. Or can’t.

”I was driving and did not have a place to go,” Ilya says. There’s a compulsive, rhythmic quality to the words, less storytelling than a recitation. “And then I thought that if anyone would understand how I am feeling, it would be Yuna. I drive to their house and bang on the door like insane person. Probably the neighbors think they are being robbed.’

“David answers the door and tells me to come inside. I tell him I need to talk to Yuna. He did not ask me why, actually. Probably it was obvious. He got Yuna and she looked at me with that way she does, where it is like she is reading words on your bones, you know?”

“I know,” Shane murmurs.

Ilya shakes his head. “Anyway. We sit on the couch, the two of us. And I tell her everything, even things she knows. I tell her about email from Wiebe and lunch and job and going to meeting. I tell her how fucking bad an idea I think it is and that you are not fucking listening to me. I am so fucking scared that if it goes bad again, you will not recover from rejection a second time.’

“And I think she will understand me. She saw the worst days, back then. When I could not make you eat or sleep or move or be a person, she could. She will see the same danger I do and then we together can finally fucking convince you of what is so obvious to me.”

“What did she say?” Shane asks. There’s a low roaring in his ears.

Ilya looks up, meets Shane’s eyes. “She says that of course you are going to take the job. If you were the kind of person who did not take it, you would not be our Shane. You would be some other stranger.”

“Oh.” It’s less a word than an exhalation of breath.

“And I know she is right.” Ilya drags a hand over his face. “And I don’t know how to be okay with that.”

His voice breaks at the end.

In the twenty years they have been together, Shane has seen Ilya cry twice. Once in a hotel room in Tampa, telling Shane that the father he hated and loved in an inextricable tangle was dying of dementia. And once standing behind Shane’s mother as she knelt next to their bed and told Shane that he either accepted help or the choice would be taken from him. The people that loved him were not willing to stand there and watch him die.

You go into marriage knowing that there will be bad days and worse days and fights and moments when you really wonder if this is the life you want to wake up to tomorrow. You know that it will be hard and you’ll have to apologize and forgive. But you don’t know that sometimes you will break the heart that loves you and you won’t be able to take it back.

Shane says, “I’m sorry,” and it’s so completely inadequate, so much less than Ilya deserves.

“It almost killed you, Shane,” Ilya says. “You say it will be different and that you are prepared and I — my mind — all I can think of are memories and I can’t — I can’t do it again. I can’t watch you lose everything again.”

“Ilya.”

“Do you remember, Shane?” Ilya asks.

Shane shakes his head. “Not. Not a lot of it.”

“I do.” Ilya looks at Shane like he’s seeing past him to who he was. “You were so fucking angry first and me too. I knew that anger could not last forever and I knew that after anger there would be — devastation. And I think I can hold you through that — that mourning.’

“But when the anger ran out you just — stopped. And I fucking thought it was a good thing, at first. You did not cry or act sad, you know? Maybe you find peace somehow. But then you are — you are nothing. Not sad, not angry, not anything.’

“I wake up in the night and you are staring into the dark. I take your plate to wash and you moved the food around but ate nothing. You talk to nobody. I am putting sheets on the bed one day and I find your phone between the mattress and the frame and it is dead and I realize I can’t remember the last time I saw you look at it. You let it die. Your friends are trying to love you and it is going into nothing.”

“I didn’t know how to be a person,” Shane murmurs. “Nothing — it didn’t feel real.”

“I know.” Ilya scrubs the heels of his hands across his eyes. “I try to talk and you say nothing and I try to fucking fight and you say nothing and I beg and you say nothing. I watch your body turn from muscle to bone and — and every time I sleep I am so afraid I will wake up and you will be gone. And then the fucking seasons starts and I have to leave you. And playing was — it was so bad.”

“You never told me much about it,” Shane says.

“No.” Ilya swallows hard. “No. I — there was nothing to fix it. It was just fucked.”

”You still shouldn’t have had to deal with it alone.”

Ilya shakes his head. “The first fucking roadtrip of season we were in fucking New York playing the fucking Admirals and Duplass — Duplass was an asshole all the time. Leclerc traded Bood for him. Every fucking time Scott Hunter was near Duplass called him a faggot. All fucking game.’

”And after a dozen times I lose my fucking temper and I yell at him to shut the fuck up and play hockey and I — I don’t even remember what all he said, just that he called me a faggot too and I fucking swung at him. It was bad fight and Scott fucking Hunter tried to shove Duplass back.’

”Leclerc was pissed and I fucking yelled that if Duplass was gonna keep yelling these things I would keep punching him. And he told me that if I was gonna keep being a faggot I was gonna keep being called one.”

“You never told me,” Shane whispers.

“I called you that night,” Ilya says. “I was so — I don’t know. Angry and fucking — fucking heartbroken.”

”Did I answer?”

”Yeah.” Ilya exhales heavily. “But I looked at you and you were so hollow and I couldn’t make it worse for you. I couldn’t.”

He’s right, Shane knows. He couldn’t have held Ilya up. Shane will live the rest of his life knowing that.

“You deserved better.”

“We both fucking deserved better.” Ilya looks at him again, still crying a little, red-eyed and exhausted. “That is what the MLH did, Shane. That is what they let happen to you and to me. They took our fucking lives and ten fucking years later still don’t even admit it. And you want to go back.”

”They didn’t take my life,” Shane says.

”It fucking felt like it.”

“It’s not — I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Try,” Ilya says.

“They took the person I thought I was,” Shane says, fumbling his way through the words. “They took the only future I thought would ever make me happy. They took the only person I knew how to be. And that’s a lot. I’m not saying it isn’t a lot.”

“But?”

“I still got what I wanted, Ilya.” Shane swallows hard. “I wanted hockey and I wanted you. And I got hockey and you. It just didn’t look like I thought it would and it took me a long time to realize that. The league is just the league. Hockey doesn’t belong to them any more than I belonged to them.”

“You deserved your dreams,” Ilya says.

”I got more of my dreams than most people ever do, Ilya. I got to play hockey, I got to win cups, I got to be the best. How many people have that dream? What makes me different than them?”

“I love you.” Ilya manages the barest trace of a smile. “And I don’t give a fuck about them.”

“That, right there, you loving me — that’s my life, Ilya. Hockey is a game. You are my life.”

“Then why go back? What do they have that you don’t?”

“I know there’s never going to be an apology,” Shane says. “Ilya, I know that no one is ever going to apologize. Not Crowell, not Montreal. I’m never going to get that. We are never going to get that.’

”But it’s not about forgiveness. I’ll never forgive Crowell or the Metros. But Ottawa was always supposed to be a chance to stop being this person I never really was. I’m — I’m giving the league a chance to prove that it’s better.”

Ilya’s expression cracks, then, ten years of anger giving way for the broken heart that he’s buried beneath. The existential threat of his homeland enacted in another country on the other side of the world. Men like Ilya live stolen lives, reaping rewards they are told they are not owed.

Ilya already knew, then, in a way that Shane didn’t, that the thing you love can be taken from you. But for one year, Ottawa made him forget that lesson and the slip meant he wasn’t braced against the full brunt of everything they lost. Shane couldn’t be a person and Ilya tried to be two.

“What if it all happens again, Shane?” Ilya asks. His breath hitches. “What if it is not different? What if it is just new people doing the same shit?”

”Then I walk away, on my terms,” Shane says. “I don’t — I don’t need hockey to tell me who I am anymore, Ilya. That’s the difference. I love hockey, I can’t not love it. But I know, now, that being with you is better. Every time. And if I give the league a chance and they’re not worth it? I still come home to you. The sun keeps rising. Life goes on.”

”I don’t know that I can always be there,” Ilya says. “At every game and all the things I do now —“

”That’s okay.” Shane cups Ilya’s jaw in his hand. “I get it. Ottawa is different for you. That’s okay. I still come home to you.”

Ilya nods. “Okay.”

“Okay. Come here.”

Ilya leans and Shane pulls and they fall back onto the bed. Ilya shoves his face in the curve of Shane’s neck, hands fisted in Shane’s shirt. Shane pushes his fingers into Ilya’s hair and kisses the crown of his head.

**

**

On a Thursday in October, Shane walks down the tunnel to the rink for his first home opener in ten years.

It’s been a long summer, hard in ways he expected and some he didn't at all. He’s fetched up against sore parts of himself he didn’t know existed and had to exhume parts of his past that weren’t as buried as he thought. He’s still finding his footing. It’s not perfect.

The cameras find him and the crowd roars. He looks up at his own face on the jumbotron and smiles. It’s a packed house, more packed than Shane has seen in years. Harris, their Director of Communications, says that’s in no small part because of Shane. Haas agrees.

Shane knows that his people have come. He can’t pick them all out of the crowd, but he knows they’re there. Head coach Juliet Heron and newly minted Captain Trinh LeDoux. Hayden and Jackie and all four of their kids, because the twins made the drive home. His parents, wearing Centaurs sweatshirts from the long ago days when they brought their eight year old son to watch his favorite team.

And Ilya, a prodigal son come home for at least this one night, surrounded by the teammates he should have gotten to play with for much longer than one season. Quieter casualties, in their own way. People will say they came because the same women that apologized to Brandon Wiebe apologized to them, too. Shane knows they came for each other.

And it’s different to wear a suit and stand behind the bench. Some small part of Shane will never stop wondering what could have been, in a world that was fair. He’s been asked about regret a lot as he finally speaks about what happened in carefully chosen interviews. Shane wouldn’t change a single decision he’s made.

The crowd roars louder as Wiebe sends Haas to center ice. Shane looks around the arena and his eyes land on a sign held up by a teenager and a kid and a parent: WELCOME HOME, HOLLANDER.

The ref drops the puck. Haas wins the face off.

Chapter End Notes

For the full cinematic experience, I imagine Welcome Home, Son by Radical Face playing as Shane walks into the arena.

Thanks for reading <3