Archive of Our Own

Shane.

It echoed in his ears. His fingers were numb. The panic choked in his throat.

He found his pile of folded clothes. He pulled off the borrowed ones. It felt like too much to fold them, so even though his brain itched, he left them slumped on the floor.

Shane.

His underwear wasn’t in his pile. He couldn’t remember where he’d taken it off. All he could remember was the mouth on his, the hands pulling him in.

Shane.

He didn’t need underwear. He fumbled gracelessly at his pile, shaking out his pants. Then shirt. Jacket. Shoes. He’d kicked them off before stripping. He hadn’t been the one who’d righted them, setting them neatly together against the wall.

Rush in his ears. Panic pounding in his head. Maybe a minute left.

Shane.

He got down the hall. Shouldn’t have looked. Should’ve kept his eyes on the door.

Rozanov was still on the couch. His pleading hand had relaxed, but still lay outstretched. He met Shane’s eyes. His look burned. He said nothing.

Shane tore his eyes away. His lungs screamed. When did he breathe? The door was there. He pulled it open and spilled through.

Shane.

He ran out of time.

Sank to the ground. Put his head between his knees. Clasped his hands behind his neck.

The panic rolled up in a wave. He went under.

Some minutes later, Shane realized his ass was cold. And his fingers hurt.

He unlaced his fingers and let his arms relax down by his sides, tipping his head back against the side of Rozanov’s house. His knees slid down, his legs splaying out on the ground. He focused on his breathing, listening to it gradually slow.

Shane.

His guts clenched at the echo, the ebb of the panic still curdling his stomach.

It wasn’t even his name that’d been the worst part. If Rozanov had said his name while chirping him about hockey, or calling him boring, or making tuna melts, it would’ve been weird, but just weird. Not really any weirder than this whole day had been.

(It had been like – like Rozanov was trying to be Hayden, like when Hayden had invited Shane over for dinner and been so excited when Shane had agreed. More awkward talk about girls, yes, but then Hayden tried to set Shane up a lot, and frequently sexiled him so he could have phone sex with Jackie, so… not entirely new there either.)

No, the worst part definitely hadn’t been the name.

Shane.

The rough gentle sob, as if Shane had ripped it out of his throat. The hushed urgency, as if it had been hidden behind Rozanov’s blank shiny armor, and Shane had pushed him so hard that the armor had cracked. The burnished edges, as if Rozanov had whispered it countless times alone in the anonymous dark.

It wasn’t just a name.

And Shane couldn’t even focus on the surrealness of his name slipping so tenderly out of Rozanov’s mouth – the same mouth that had told him about his fuckbuddy Svetlana who was Sergei fucking Vetrov’s daughter, the same mouth that had said he liked him but not as a person, the same mouth that had interrogated him about his interest in girls – because it hadn’t ended there.

Because after Rozanov gasped his name against Shane’s mouth, shuddering apart in Shane’s hand –

Ilya.

It should have felt strange, wrapping his tongue around those syllables. Shane had never said it alone, only as part of Ilya’s full name, and even then on only a few occasions. Whatever he may have pictured in the privacy of his bedroom, with the lights off and his fingers curled around his own dick, he knew that name had never been a part of it.

And yet.

There had been one brief moment, before the panic started to rise. Ilya in his arms, Ilya pressing a soft kiss to his mouth, Ilya’s eyes, Ilya’s eyes full of stars –

Shane leaned forward to rest his forehead on his knees, and concentrated on regulating his breathing.

They couldn’t. It was a simple, bedrock fact. Hollander and Rozanov could fuck in private. That was nobody’s business. But they couldn’t be Shane and Ilya. They couldn’t care about each other. There was no room in the hockey universe for the stars in Ilya’s eyes.

Shane swallowed. He reached inside and found the cold detached clarity he drew on in a game when he was carrying an injury that was excruciating but not incapacitating.

It’s just pain. It’s temporary. Focus on controlling the controllable.

He’d been sitting outside Ilya’s door for long enough. Too long. Time to call an Uber.

… His pocket was empty.

Shane picked his head up from his knees and frowned, groping in his pocket again as if that would make his phone suddenly materialize. He tried his left pocket, although he always kept it in the right. Not there either. He tried his jacket pocket. Not there.

What.

He’d definitely had it when he walked up to Ilya’s. He’d used it to check the address two times, just to make sure he was at the right place. And then it had gone back in his pocket. And then he’d taken off his clothes and folded them and left them on Ilya’s dresser, and had a lot of scorchingly-hot sex and confusing conversations and turbulent emotions – and then he’d pulled his clothes out of their neatly-folded pile and shaken them out and pulled them on, with nothing in his brain except the screaming panic waves and the rough whispered caress of his name –

His phone was on Ilya’s bedroom floor, wasn’t it.

Fuck.

Shane strongly considered walking out to the road, finding a random passerby, begging to borrow their phone, and calling Hayden to ask him to send an Uber. He knew Ilya would probably find his phone on the floor and bring it to the game the next day, and even if he didn’t, Shane could always just get a new phone.

Unfortunately, Shane didn’t have Hayden’s number memorized. Or anyone else’s. (He would definitely fix that when he got his phone back.)

And he had his wallet, so he could have the hypothetical helpful passerby call a regular cab, but – This was ridiculous. He just knew there’d end up being pictures posted to Instagram speculating about why Shane Hollander was walking around a random Boston suburb near Ilya Rozanov’s house looking like a total fucked-out zombie mess.

Shane had won two Cups. He could walk back into this house and get his phone.

The door turned out to not even be fully closed. He’d been so out of it, he hadn’t even shut it properly. It was easy to push it open, its oiled hinges swinging silently.

Would Ilya still be on the couch? Shane wasn’t sure how long the panic had lasted.

Not on the couch. No gauntlet to run there. Shane breathed a quiet sigh of relief and headed down the hallway to the bedroom. Maybe – maybe Ilya had gone to work out. Shane was pretty sure his gym was in the basement. (Shane could imagine the urge to turn off his brain.) Or maybe he was in the shower. (Shane had tumbled out of his arms while their cum was still dripping down Ilya’s stomach. He’d left him pleading and filthy, Shane’s name in his mouth.)

Shane didn’t hear the shower running in Ilya’s bathroom as he got closer. He did hear a strange, muffled sound that he couldn’t quite place.

Which meant that Ilya wasn’t in the gym, or in the shower. He was in the bedroom.

Shane almost fled again. He steeled himself. It was just one more awkward conversation. He was used to those. (Even with Ilya. The language of their bodies might have been clear – Ilya had always known what Shane wanted without ever having to be told, and Shane could read the quirk of his mouth, the set of his shoulders, the drawl of his voice, the curl of his tongue and the heat of his breath and the strength of his fingers, all just as easily as anything on the ice – but Shane could also remember those nights in Vegas, when he’d tried to use words and only met Ilya’s walls.)

He expected to see Ilya sitting on the bed, perhaps in a towel, just out of the shower. He half-expected to see Ilya holding his phone, waiting for Shane to come back for it.

He didn’t expect what he saw.

Ilya was kneeling by the bed. His face was hidden in the sheets. One arm was curled protectively around his head, muffling his ears, with his fingers wrapped in his curls. The other arm was flung out, and in his outstretched hand was Shane’s misplaced underwear.

Shane didn’t breathe. He could hear Ilya breathing, could hear the uneven little muffled sounds he had heard from the hall. He could see the way Ilya’s shoulders were moving.

Shane backed up, stepping silently out of view. He didn’t stop until after he was back down the hallway. He didn’t stop until after he had slipped out the door. He didn’t stop until after he had met a nice lady with a cute dog who called him a cab, until after he made it back to the hotel, until after he avoided Hayden’s worried questions and went straight into the shower.

Under the too-hot spray, he leaned his forehead against the wall, and finally let himself stop.

When Shane was twelve, he broke his ankle. Not even in a game; he slipped on an icy stair, landed awkwardly, and ended up with his first internal screws.

It hadn’t hurt that much, oddly enough. And there was a strange clarity to it that was almost freeing, almost a relief. His ankle was broken. He would put in the work to help it heal properly, and he’d be back quickly, but until he was cleared, he wouldn’t be on the ice. Simple as that.

Now Shane felt that clarity running through his veins again.

The thing had happened. It was done. It couldn’t be changed, and there was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. Shane was a realist: he believed in statistics, and the power of repetition, and the insights of game tape. When a thing happened, you learned about it, you adjusted, and you used what you’d learned to make your game better.

For years, Shane had told himself that his meetings with Rozanov were purely about sex. That someday he would meet his future wife. Definitely an athlete, maybe even a hockey player. A girl who’d make him laugh, and sleep curled up in his arms, and build a family with him. A girl who’d be easygoing and calm, who his parents would love and who’d be a great mom. Someday. Probably after retirement. No rush. Hockey took all his time for now, and he didn’t want to start a family while he was playing anyway. Not like Hayden, constantly away from his kids.

Then – his name in Ilya’s mouth. Ilya’s name, sweet on his tongue. Ilya’s eyes, meeting his. Ilya’s smile, so happy, pressing a too-tender kiss to Shane’s lips.

That might not have been enough to erase Shane’s future wife. For all her formlessness, spun on the air, she fit into Shane’s world with the ease and comfort she was designed to. She was picture-perfect, no sharp edges, a future that wrote itself. Her perfection made her durable, hard to shake.

It was what had happened next that had erased her.

It wasn’t Ilya’s uneven breaths. It wasn’t Ilya’s moving shoulders.

It was the terrifying way that Shane’s chest had seized. It was the powerful urge to sink down on his own knees next to that bed and put his arms around the man in front of him. It was the overwhelming flood of want that he’d been reading as desire, but which suddenly seemed like something else entirely.

Shane Hollander was a realist. The thing had already happened. Inalterable. Incontrovertible. Inescapable.

Maybe if he hadn’t gone back inside, he would have kept thinking that he was only in danger of stepping over the line. Maybe he would have fled so far and so fast from that danger, that he would have broken them both. Maybe he would have refused to face reality, willfully choosing the darkness over the light.

Impossible now.

He was in love with Ilya Rozanov. It was done.

His future wife blew away on the wind. There was only Ilya – flying past with the puck, crashing him into the boards, smirking wickedly after a joke, driven to distraction by Shane’s mouth, surprised into laughter, lips parting around a prayerful curse, kissing the Cup, kissing him, thrusting, moaning, falling apart in his arms, drawling Hollander, gasping Shane.

Ilya had asked him if he liked girls. Shane wasn’t sure, which struck him as funny now. It no longer mattered.

He couldn’t remember when he first gave his heart to hockey. It seemed fitting that he didn’t really know when he first gave it to Ilya either.

“What the fuck.”

Until now, Shane hadn’t known what Ilya’s curls looked like in the morning. Now it was 7 AM, and he could see that they were squashed and messy, with a couple of flyaway frizzy wisps. “Good morning,” he said, and offered Ilya the coffee in his hand.

Ilya leaned his head on his doorframe and didn’t move. His scowl was both deep and confused. “What the fuck are you doing here, Hollander.”

Shane smiled at him. He’d expected to be nervous. But instead, it was more like he was playing Toronto, and the crowd was lustily booing, and he’d just noticed that their goalie was trying to hide an injury. “Afternoon game, remember? No morning practice.”

Ilya blinked. His eyelashes were pretty. There was a wrinkle on his cheek, probably from his pillow. “Oh. You left your phone.” He turned, presumably to go get it, and Shane followed him inside before he could close the door.

That made Ilya blink at him again, but he obviously decided to stop trying to get any sense out of Shane for the moment. He headed down the hallway.

Shane kicked off his shoes, then went to the kitchen and set Ilya’s coffee on the counter. He started unpacking the bag he’d brought.

“What,” Ilya said, finding him there. Shane’s phone was in his hand.

Shane grinned at him. “You aren’t a morning person, are you? I brought you coffee and bagels. Is it ok if I make omelets?”

For the first time since they’d met, Shane had the pleasure of seeing Ilya Rozanov genuinely lost for words. He sat down silently at one of the bar stools and pulled the coffee towards him.

Shane found a pan and a carton of eggs. He dug around a little in the fridge. “Do you want mushrooms or peppers?”

“Hollander.”

Shane turned around, holding the egg carton. “Hey,” he said, and met Ilya’s eyes steadily. “Food first, okay?”

Ilya’s eyes had woken up more. A mixture of confusion and guardedness lurked there.

Shane didn’t look away.

“Mushrooms,” Ilya said, after a long moment, and took a bagel.

It felt like a goal buzzer. Shane bit back a smile as he turned to the stove.

After breakfast and cleanup, Shane leaned back against the counter, and met Ilya’s eyes again. “I’m sorry I freaked out,” he said.

Ilya looked away. “Freaked out over nothing,” he said, and scratched his ear.

Shane had spent half the night awake, listening to Hayden snore and planning for this conversation. He could push back, insist that it wasn’t nothing. He could admit that he saw Ilya by the bed. He could try to break down Ilya’s defenses. He could even blurt out his love like a crazy person.

But he didn’t think any of that was the right play. “Yeah,” he said, keeping his voice light. “I do that sometimes. Sorry.”

The pause was careful, but then Ilya looked back at him. “Is ok.”

“Before that, it was nice,” Shane said. “I liked watching the game with you.”

For the first time that morning, the corner of Ilya’s mouth ticked up a little. “Yes.”

Name what you want, Shane. Claim it. “I’d like to do more of that. Be friends who fuck. Like your friend Svetlana.”

Ilya startled at the name, his shoulders hunching, then seemed to consciously relax. “Friends with boring Hollander?”

“Friends with the best player in the League,” Shane said, and winked at him. He stuck out his hand. “Truce?”

Ilya rolled his eyes, but he also came and grabbed Shane’s face and kissed him, so Shane counted that as a win. He tasted like coffee, and when Shane let his fingers dig into his traps hard enough to bruise, he didn’t flinch away.

“I’m worried about you.”

Shane turned his screen off automatically. He could feel the smile on his face, but that was harder to turn off. Ilya’s chirps about the Puffins were lethal, and he was a bad influence. If his mom knew what Shane had been saying in the last five minutes, she’d have been appalled. (Though she’d probably have laughed too. She’d taught him half the shit talk he knew, after all.)

“Sorry, Hayd, what was that?”

Hayden pointed a finger at him. “That. You’re staring at your phone grinning like a crazy person. Again.”

“I’m worried that you think me smiling is worrying.”

He knew that he was lighter since Boston. He could feel it in his shoulders, in his legs, in the way that at the end of a game he wasn’t quite as wrung-out as usual. There was an energy humming in his veins, a fizz just under the surface of his skin, a smile hovering on his mouth. It reminded him of being buzzed. Maybe Shane was drunk on love.

Hayden elbowed him in the side, hard. “Dude. You were a mess in Boston. And then you started acting really weird. Are you, like, Shane Hollander from another universe or something?”

Shane chewed his lip. “We’ve won five Cups, right? And you’re our Vezina-winning goalie?”

Hayden’s face made him crack up again. He brought his phone up and snapped a picture before the look of outrage faded. He’d send it to Ilya later. Said he’d make a good goalie.

But he took pity on him. Hayd had always been a good friend. He never judged when Shane was in his head, and he didn’t tease too much about Shane’s reluctance to go clubbing, and he’d never heard him dropping slurs in the locker room (unlike even JJ). It was a low bar, but it wasn’t nothing. “I’m fine. Just – I worked some things out with Lily.”

Hayden’s face lit up. He’d always been Lily’s biggest fan, but Shane had always refused to discuss her. It might be a disaster to change that now. “Wait. Are you guys official?”

Shane shook his head. He ran his thumb over the corner of his phone. “It’s – it’s complicated. But we’re talking more.” He hesitated. It might be a disaster to discuss Lily, but there was something in his gut that longed to. And surely it would harmless to just say – “Did you know the Puffins’ penalty kill fell to 68% for the season this week? That’s worse than LA in ’80. Lily says we should call them the Putrid Puffins until they get it together.”

Hayden stared at him.

“I said the Pitiful Puffins fit better, but putrid was apparently the word of the day today.”

Hayden kept staring at him.

“Uh,” Shane said. “Did I break you?”

Hayden slowly leveled a finger at him. “Shane Hollander.”

“Yes?”

“Is Boston Lily a hockey nerd?”

Shane grinned.

Hayden thunked his head back against the wall. “Figures. Hockeysexual. You never wanted the hot yoga girls, you wanted the nerd girls arguing about xGF and PDO.” He made a face as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “Oh god. She’s from Boston. Tell me you didn’t meet her on Hockey Reddit, arguing that Rozanov’s better than you based on that one stupid year with the quality-of-competition thing.”

That was a … fairly specific scenario Hayden had just dreamed up. Shane shrugged it off for the moment. “I wouldn’t call Lily a nerd exactly.” Although now that he was thinking about it, Ilya did really like his words of the day, and the casual way he could dissect plays on the fly in real-time when they watched games rivalled any coach Shane had ever played for. Maybe in another life, Ilya was a nerd with sexy glasses and Powerpoint skills and a vocabulary that could drop Shane to his knees.

“Oh yeah? The Puffins’ PK is what you chat with your girl about? I knew it was bad, but not the percentage. Sounds like a nerd to me.”

“Well,” Shane said, smirking. “Maybe Lily just knows more about hockey than you.”

Hayden groaned. “Dude.”

Later, Shane relayed the conversation as a special treat for Ilya, who’d sounded tired after his game. He closed his eyes, listened to Ilya cackle, and let himself smile.

Since Boston, they’d fallen into a friendship that had surprised Shane with its easiness. For so long it had just been sex, with punctuation from Ilya’s infrequent, aggressively flirtatious texts. If they’d been talking like this from the beginning, how different might it have been?

“Hayden Pike, fifteenth-best Metro,” Ilya said, his voice richly satisfied, like a well-scratched cat. “Admitting I am better even when I am mysterious nerd girl.”

Shane’s mouth felt tired from all the smiling. Had he ever smiled this much before? “You’d be hot as a nerd.”

He could hear Ilya’s breathing change. “Maybe I will go on Reddit and explain to nerds why I am best in the league, like Pike says. I will use all the numbers, and send them to you, and make you hard for me.” There were about twenty too many ‘a’s in the word all.

The fucking thing was, Shane could see the vision. Except the stats wouldn’t show that Ilya was better, but that aside, if Ilya did really write up some unhinged stats manifesto about the two of them, Shane couldn’t say that wouldn’t do it for him. “And what happens when you put together all the stats, and it turns out I’m better?”

“That will not happen,” Ilya said, loftily. “As special treat for you, I will use Pike’s numbers too. As example of how much better we are.”

Shane sighed. “Please don’t start a fight on the Internet.”

“But you like it,” Ilya purred. “Me being nerd in glasses for you.”

Fuck. Why was that so hot? One thing Shane knew. If they’d been talking like this all along, there wouldn’t have been any two-year pause before they fucked at Shane’s apartment. “You can borrow mine sometime.”

Seconds later, Shane was laughing and accepting the Facetime request.

“Put them on,” Ilya demanded. There were shadows under his eyes, but he was rumpled and smiling.

Shane’s heart thumped. The affection that curled down his spine wasn’t new anymore. It had settled on his shoulders like pads over the last few weeks, a weight so familiar that it barely registered.

In Boston, and over the weeks immediately afterwards, Ilya’s guard had stayed up. Oh, he’d fucked Shane hard that morning, hard enough that Shane had definitely felt it that afternoon (although Shane had still scored two goals and won the game, chewing on his mouthguard to keep himself from smiling). Fucking had never been their problem. And he’d only flinched a little when Shane occasionally slipped an “Ilya” into their conversations since. But at first he had definitely taken a few steps back. It had been strange to see him unsettled, his confidence a thin veneer over an underlying uncertainty.

It had been hard. Shane had put that uncertainty there when he panicked and fled. It was his fault that the beautiful, shattered openness of Ilya’s eyes on the couch had been locked down, with barbed wire strung up to protect. It was his fault that Ilya hadn’t said his name again, even as he gradually stopped flinching when Shane said his.

But Shane could wait. Shane had learned to read Rozanov over the years: the catch of his breath, the clench of his fingers, the tightening of his lips, the jump of his cock, the flex of his ass, the lightening of his eyes, the flare of his nostrils. Now it was time to learn to read Ilya, and to offer himself in return, as openly and clearly as he could.

He settled his glasses on the bridge of his nose, watched Ilya’s tongue dart out to wet his bottom lip, and smiled.

“Meeting a Swedish princess could be fun, right?”

Shane studied the menu he was holding. I don’t have time for that, he almost said. It would be easy to push his mom off with his usual excuses about training. He loved her, but she would schedule his life to the last hour if given the chance. She wanted everything for him, and made it her personal life’s mission to put it in his hands.

Could he blame her, that she was sometimes wrong about what he wanted? It had always just been simpler to go along. And she was right about so much: he did care about hockey, and she’d been at his side for every step towards the League. He did care about being an encouragement for little Asian-Canadian kids who wanted to play, despite his complex feelings about the hockey world’s relationship with his heritage, and she’d helped him make that a reality. He did care about Montreal real estate and boring investment plans and building his cottage from plans into reality (and about the sponsorships that provided the capital for all of it), and she’d kept all of it humming along like expensive clockwork for all these years.

His mom had only ever done her best. If Shane wanted her to know him better, it had to start with him.

He set the menu down and met her eyes. He could see the worry in them. Maybe she felt the distance between them growing, just as he had. Secrets came between people.

“I don’t want to meet a Swedish princess,” he said, quietly. “There’s someone in my life.”

She breathed in through her nose, startled.

He broke eye contact, ran a finger along the corner of the menu. “I’m not – we’re still figuring things out. I’m not introducing him to you guys yet. But.” He swallowed, hearing the pronoun ring in his ears. He hadn’t meant to let it slip. He hadn’t not meant it. “We’ve been something for a long time. And I – I care about him.”

“Shane,” his mom said. Her voice was thick.

They went back to Shane’s apartment without ordering, stopping at his dad's favorite takeout place. His dad ran in, while his mom cupped the back of Shane’s neck, her fingers touching his hair. Shane closed his eyes.

Later, his parents would eat takeout and Shane would eat his meal-prep, and they would grill him about Lily while trying to pretend they weren’t grilling him at all. Shane would admit that Lily liked hockey and knew a lot about it, that he was very funny and made Shane laugh, that people thought he was a jerk but Shane knew him better. His mom would jokingly ask if Lily was handsome, and Shane would turn colors that answered the question. His dad would ask when they would get to meet him, and Shane would look away and go to get a ginger ale from the fridge, and they would let him dodge the question, because they loved him.

For now, Shane kept his eyes closed as his mom's fingers stroked his hair, and felt his shoulders lighten.

It surprised him, sometimes, that the panic hadn’t arrived yet.

He kept expecting it. Kept feeling like he was suspended in that moment right before being smashed into the boards, when the crowd sucked in its breath and he could see the hit coming in his peripheral vision. One more second, and the impact would strike.

There were no out queer players in the League. Never had been. Shane watched the girlfriends and partners and wives in women’s sports, and shook his head at how vast the gulf was. He listened to JJ shout laughing slurs at Drapeau for stealing his stick tape, to Comeau mixing homophobic and misogynistic insults as he went on a tirade against Vancouver and its fans, and felt ancient and tired. It was his place to speak up, as Captain. What did it mean about him and his team, that he already knew they wouldn’t listen? What did it mean about him, that he kept his mouth shut, too weary and too wary to risk them seeing what he’d spent so long trying to hide?

For years, he’d been avoiding thinking about it, telling himself that Rozanov was just sex. Which meant that although Shane obviously liked both, he’d choose a girl in the end. Which meant that the everyday background homophobia in the locker room was irrelevant, and he could ignore it. Hockey was all that mattered, the ice and the game.

Now that had all changed. He couldn’t ignore it anymore. He heard it all, and there was so much. It was impossible to brace for, because it was so ubiquitous and unpredictable. Like skating on wild ice, never knowing when the next rough patch would happen.

And still the panic didn’t come.

“You know,” he told Ilya one night, tucking his arm behind his head in a way that he knew made his bicep bulge, keeping it in frame. “I was thinking.”

Ilya’s eyes tracked the movement. His mouth twitched. “This is dangerous.”

“When they call you a cocksucker, do you ever feel like, yes. Yes, I’m good at that. Thanks.”

Ilya’s eyebrows shot up. “No,” he said, his voice shivering with laughter. It must have made his hand move, because the picture shook slightly. “No, I have not thought this.”

“Mm,” Shane said. “Imagine Comeau’s face if I just said one day, Yup, I’m the best in the League. They’ll name the award after me some day. The Hart, the Conn Smythe, the Vezina, the Hollander.”

“Not true,” Ilya said, lazily. “Not best in the League. Second-best there too.”

Shane shook his head. “Nope. I’ll argue with you about who’s best at hockey. Not about this. I’m the best cocksucker.”

He watched how his tone made Ilya’s nostrils flare, how his throat bobbed. He knew Ilya liked it when he begged, when he fell apart, but he also knew how Ilya’s eyes went unfocused when Shane shoved him into a wall, when he climbed on top of him and used his dick for his own pleasure, when he lost patience and made Ilya come too hard too fast too good.

He wondered sometimes if Ilya ever trusted anyone else enough to give up control the way he sometimes would for Shane. Something in his bones told him that the answer was no.

Am I the best you’ve ever had?

Did he want to know the answer?

Did he know already?

“We will need a competition,” Ilya said. “Next month in Montreal.”

Shane shrugged. “Or you can just admit I’m the best.”

“And why would I do that?” Ilya murmured, his voice the teasing velvet lilt that made Shane want to fold himself into Ilya’s side, or bite him, or both.

“Maybe because you don’t want me to stop getting on my knees, Ilya.”

“Oh, what a threat,” Ilya murmured, and the call predictably spiraled to a sweaty but satisfying conclusion.

A week later, Shane got a package in his fanmail box, mixed among the various letters and autograph requests. The media team had already opened it, and something about the cracked top made him look. Maybe it was the glitter.

“What the fuck is that?” JJ said.

And Shane was laughing, standing in the middle of his locker room, with a trophy crowned by a glittery disco ball. The plate at the bottom faithfully said THE HOLLANDER, and underneath, 1st ANNUAL.

“Your fans are strange, Capitaine,” JJ said, clapping him on the shoulder.

It was a month since Boston, and the panic still hadn’t arrived.

He could touch the shape of it if he tried. Could bring up the familiar monsters of homophobia, racism, masculinity, ostracism, discrimination. Could imagine his hockey legacy fading next to the colorful scandal of his queerness (whatever flavor it ended up turning out to be, now that love had made that irrelevant). Could feel the boos on his skin, the disgust of his team’s gazes, the whispers of the commentators, the cacophony of the world.

And yet.

Shane held the ridiculous trophy in his hand, and saw the curve of Ilya’s smile, the softness of his eyes. A month since Boston, and the barbed wire was down.

The panic would come at some point. Probably at the worst possible time. It usually did.

But for now, all Shane could feel was the fizziness in his stomach. Something like winning the Cup, except without the crushing exhaustion and the bone-deep relief of avoiding failure and the sneaking edge of this was only what was expected. Like winning the Cup, except so uncomplicated, so pure, just lightness and laughter and warmth.

He took the trophy home and put it on his nightstand.

It wasn’t until Rose Landry leaned in to kiss him that Shane realized what was happening.

He’d gone out with JJ and Mitty, because he hadn’t gone out in a long time, and an appearance every now and then was a necessary evil to convince the team that he was just an introvert and not actually a hockey-robot pod-person. Plus, JJ had mentioned that the cast of the X-Squad was supposed to be there, and Shane watched a lot of movies on airplanes. Meeting Hollywood actors had sounded like fun.

Shane was less convinced of this now, with a Hollywood actress awkwardly mashing her lips against his, and his hands waving in the air with no idea what to do with them.

“Uh,” he said, eloquently.

Rose blinked at him. Then she laughed. “I think I read something wrong there. Sorry.”

“No, no, don’t apologize!” Shane said, gallantly. “I didn’t realize that was on the table. Um.”

They were in Rose’s hotel room. She’d invited him back after the bar to see her outfit for a Tiffany’s gala next week.

Oh. He was pretty dumb, wasn’t he.

Rose was looking at him, her mouth twisted sideways in a funny little grin. “It could still be on the table, but I’m getting the vibe that you’re more interested in my clothes than what’s under them.”

There had been a few drinks at the bar. They’d been having a good conversation, about hockey, and their childhoods, and Rose’s hockey brothers, and getting kidnapped, and what it was like being a teenager when you already had so many adult expectations on your shoulders. Shane hadn’t connected so easily with someone new in a long time.

It was nice, how Rose looked at him. Like she saw him – not Shane Hollander, but just Shane. There were probably only three other people in the world who did that.

That was the reason he’d give himself later for why he opened his mouth and said, “Maybe. I’m not actually sure?”

Rose raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Well,” Shane said, waving a hand speakingly at her. He felt more liquid than usual. “I don’t actually understand clothes. I just wear athletic stuff. But I like pretty clothes on pretty people. I did want to see the Tiffany outfit.”

“Are you calling me pretty, Shane Hollander?”

Her drawl reminded him of Ilya, which made him smile. “And I don’t actually know. Uh. How much I like girls under clothes. I mean. I’ve tried it before. But it doesn’t work that well?”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “How many drinks did you have?”

He thought about it. “Four?”

“Let’s call you an Uber,” Rose said.

She was so nice. Even if she had kissed like a wet fish. (Though that had probably been Shane’s fault. He was a realist.) She even walked him out to the front of the hotel and kissed him on the cheek when she said goodbye. So nice.

The next morning, Shane didn’t wake up with his alarm (which never happened). By the time he did wake up and blinked groggily down at his phone, he had ten missed calls from his mom, the Metros groupchat was filthy in a way that turned his stomach, and there were paparazzi pictures everywhere. From the bar. From the hotel lobby. From the kiss goodbye.

There were no texts from Lily.

Not since shortly after Ilya’s game, when Shane had been on his way out, but had paused to let Ilya know just how hot his goal in the second period had been. Ilya had preened, and told him to have fun meeting Hollywood hotties.

Shane should have called his mom back right away. He should have texted Rose (who’d put herself in his phone earlier in the night, with a laughing request for tickets sometime when she was in town).

He called Ilya.

“This is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.”

“Hey, it’s me. Uh. Call me back?”

He hung up. Braced himself. Called his mom.

Thirty minutes later, Ilya hadn’t called him back.

By the time he left for practice, Ilya hadn’t called him back.

When Shane got out of practice, there was a text.

Hot, Hollander. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Shane hit the call button.

“This is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.”

Coward. What a fucking coward.

Two months since Boston. No more barbed wire. Banter, flirtation, calls and Facetimes. Phone sex and inside jokes and long discussions about hockey strategy that Shane did feel a little guilty about – because should he be sharing insights with a competitor? – but they were really the only two people on their level in the entire world, so it’s not like he was actually telling Ilya anything Ilya couldn’t figure out for himself, it wasn’t like he was giving Ilya, like, a competitive advantage; and also it was exceptionally hot and really did it for Shane, and when everything was said and done, Shane was only a man.

Anyway. There was a blowjob trophy on Shane’s nightstand, and headless body shots on Ilya’s phone that Shane had sent him (to his own surprise as well as Ilya’s). There was a Duolingo streak, and some phrases that Shane had looked up as soon as he could read the Cyrillic letters. There were his parents, who knew there was someone, and Rose, who had probably guessed Shane was something. There was their Montreal game tomorrow night, the first time they’d see each other in person since Boston.

But Ilya still hadn’t said his name again.

And Ilya had sent that text.

Shane wasn’t sure if he was hurt, or mad. He understood. He did understand. It looked a certain way, and Rose was a beautiful, successful woman.

But for all the fucking women he’d had to see on Ilya’s arm over the years! – And it wasn’t like they’d ever said they were! – And Ilya had said he fucked his friend Svetlana sometimes!

His fingers were moving.

Lol, got it. Any tips for eating pussy then? Since you’re the champion.

He’d never said something like that before. He stared at it, appalled. His mouth was dry.

Dots appeared. Vanished. Appeared. Vanished.

Shane had a sudden vision of Rose in a box tomorrow night, wearing his jersey. (She had texted this morning, apologizing for the paparazzi photos. She was charming. He knew she’d come if he asked.) The crowd cheering for the Hollywood actress and the hockey hero, the perfect storybook match. His teammates teasing him, making the crude comments he’d flinched to see in the groupchat. The hockey world thrilled, Shane finally taking the last step to legendary; no longer too asexual, too awkward, too Asian, just the perfect hockey player with the perfect movie star girl on his arm, perfect.

But the vision moved, and Shane was looking up at the faceoff. Ilya’s face, pale under his helmet. Ilya’s eyes, shuttered away.

Shane didn’t wait for the dots.

That was a joke. Please call me. I need to talk to you.

The dots reappeared. Disappeared. Reappeared.

Shane swallowed. One final card.

He swiped the keyboard to Cyrillic, and carefully selected each letter, one by one.

Пожалуйста, Илья.

The dots disappeared, and didn’t reappear.

He waited.

After the longest minute of his life, a call came in.

“Ilya,” Shane said. His voice sounded thick in his mouth. He shut his eyes. “Ilya.”

He could hear Ilya breathing on the other end. Ilya didn’t say anything.

So it was up to Shane, then. He checked on the panic. Not absent, but manageable.

He sat there, on his bed, cross-legged. He breathed in, breathed out.

“I met her last night,” he said. “I thought I was making a friend. She tried to kiss me and I almost hit her in the face by accident because it was such a surprise. This is why I don’t drink during the season.”

Maybe that was enough. He knew Ilya would believe him.

He swallowed. He didn’t stop. “I don’t want anyone else. Just you. I – I like you, Ilya. A little too much. And I know it’s impossible for us to be more than friends who fuck. I know.”

He didn’t know what Ilya’s family was like, although he’d guessed from how Ilya reacted over the years that he didn’t have the support and love that Shane did. But he did know more about Russia now. “I read about what it’s like in Russia. I’m sorry. God, I thought we had it bad just being in the League, but – ”

Ilya probably didn’t want to talk about this. He never did. Shane stuttered to a stop, and changed direction. “Look. I don’t – I don’t know what you want. I hoped – ”

Fuck. His voice was wobbling, and he could barely keep track of his own sentences. Poor Ilya was almost certainly struggling to figure out what Shane was saying, stuck in a second language with someone who couldn’t even string four coherent words together.

Shane tried to breathe.

“Shane,” Ilya said. His voice sounded wrong. He cleared his throat. “You still want me to tell you how to eat pussy?”

Shane laughed. It was either laugh or cry. The laughter sounded wet. “No, asshole.”

“Not eating asshole. That is me. You don’t do that.”

“I would,” Shane said. “If you wanted.”

Shane would do anything Ilya wanted. He would beg on his knees. He would carve out his heart and offer it to Ilya using his helmet as a bowl.

“You kill me, Hollander,” Ilya said. His voice wasn’t even. It sounded like Boston. It sounded like the rush in Shane’s ears.

Shane closed his eyes, and held the phone like it was Ilya’s hand in his. “Tomorrow. The code to the front door is 1919.”

Ilya had said Shane. No Hollywood girlfriend or hockey-culture credibility was worth more.

They met at the faceoff.

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya said, rolling the names almost meditatively in his mouth.

Shane looked at him, and smiled.

Ilya grinned back at him, almost boyish.

The puck dropped.

When Ilya let himself in that night, Shane was sitting on the couch waiting for him, scrolling on his phone.

“Hello, Shane,” Ilya said.

Shane set his phone down and came to meet him, backing him into the door and kissing the little smirk off his face. “I’m so irritated at you,” he said, soft, kissing his jaw and behind his ear. “That last one?”

“Sorry,” Ilya drawled unrepentantly. His hands were on Shane’s waist, his fingers holding on tightly enough to bruise. “Pretty boy smiling at me all night. He inspires me. All his fault.”

Shane nipped him, listening to his breath catch. “Mitty says he and JJ and the guys are at Ciel to drown their sorrows. He said my new girlfriend Rose Landry is there. If you can’t be nice to me, maybe I should go join them.”

One of Ilya’s hands slid up to the back of his neck, holding on tightly enough to make a pleased little wriggle start in the bottom of Shane’s stomach. The other arm wrapped closer around Shane’s waist, pulling him hard against Ilya’s body. “I think,” Ilya said, right in his ear, “that I can suck your cock better than Rose Landry.”

“Yeah?” Shane said, and grabbed two handfuls of his ass, pulling him in even harder.

“And I know,” Ilya said, into his mouth, “that I can fuck you better than she can.”

Shane didn’t wait for Ilya to kiss him. Not this time. He kissed him first, slow and filthy. Two months since that November afternoon, and not a day had gone by that he hadn’t texted or called Ilya. He’d fallen in love with a man in a handful of precious stolen moments over the course of nine years, and learned more about him in the past two months than in the entirety of those long nine years. Every day since Boston, he fell a little more in love. It was intoxicating. It was terrifying.

“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya said, when Shane finally drew back to let him breathe.

Shane kissed him, quick, then put a secret plan into action. He pushed Ilya hard up against the wall again, then got his hands under Ilya’s hamstrings and hoisted him up.

Ilya yelped, then said, “Whoa whoa whoa. Put me down.” His hands were vises on Shane’s shoulders, the insides of his thighs clinging rock-solid around Shane’s waist.

“Let’s see how you like it,” Shane said, and started walking.

“Put me down,” Ilya demanded.

Shane kissed his cheek. “It’s always Shane you’re so pretty, never Shane you’re so strong. I can take you to bed, Rozanov, no sweat.”

“Shane, you’re so strong,” Ilya said immediately.

For all his protests, he could have jumped down in an instant if he truly wanted. Shane carried him to the foot of the stairs, and then let him down. “I could take you up the stairs,” he said, and kissed Ilya again. Every moment their mouths were apart felt like too long. “But I don’t want to worry about what lie to tell if you make me drop you and one of us picks up a random injury.”

Ilya kissed him back, and then slid to his knees right there on the stairs, like he too couldn’t wait one more moment.

Shane wound his fingers into Ilya’s curls and fought to keep his eyes open. His body wanted to succumb to the beckoning pleasure, but his heart wanted to drink in every beautiful moment watching Ilya. He stroked Ilya’s hair, touched his face and his forehead and the curve of his ear, and let Ilya hear every one of the unhinged sounds he was driving out of Shane’s lungs.

I love you, his heart said. Too early to say aloud, with only two months of Ilya instead of Rozanov, with everything still undefined between them. Even though he knew, and he thought Ilya did too. Some things didn’t need to be spoken, not yet. They thrummed in the air between them, in the tap of Ilya’s fingers against his thighs, in the hot wet heaven of Ilya’s mouth, in the careful soft way he’d started saying Shane again at last, in the new toothbrush that waited in Shane’s bathroom and the sleep pants folded on his dresser and the Cokes in his fridge.

Later, Shane would flip Ilya on his stomach amongst the too-many pillows on his bed, get his hands full of that ample ass, and use his mouth to show him that Shane Hollander was not too intimidated to learn a new skill. Ilya would chuckle, his shoulders shaking with mirth, until the focus and competitive fire that made Shane the best in the league drove the chuckles right out of his lungs. Shane would not be smug about this whatsoever.

Later, Ilya would suck a mark in the inside of Shane’s thigh, and Shane would wind his fingers in Ilya’s curls, holding his mouth there when Ilya might have eased up. If bite imprints and finger marks were all he could hold of Ilya in the days between their meetings, then he would be gluttonous for them. Let the room credit Boston Lily, or hell, Rose Landry. Shane wouldn’t confirm anything to them; it wasn’t their business, how Ilya’s face looked in dim light, how his teeth felt on Shane’s skin.

Later, Ilya would push inside in one smooth claiming thrust, and Shane would arch his back, feeling the calming rightness spread through him like wildfire. He would moan, he would gasp, he would scream, giving Ilya all his truth in the shared language of their bodies. Ilya would keep saying his name in the middle of streams of uneven Russian, a broken profane litany that Shane was beginning to know the shape of, even though he couldn’t understand the words.

Later, they would come apart in each other’s arms, and their shattered pieces would fall together, not entirely sure where one ended and the other began.

Much later, Shane would press a kiss to Ilya’s collarbone, in the hallowed dark of his bed. “Stay,” barely voiced.

And Ilya would stay.

Shane would sleep in the curve of Ilya’s arm, with the soft whuffle of Ilya’s snores on the back of his neck; he would wake to the sunshine of Ilya’s smile, and roll over to kiss him slow and sweet, morning breath be damned.

epilogue

It was Labor Day weekend, and Shane Hollander was beginning to seriously doubt his life choices.

Sure, it had sounded like a good idea when Rose suggested coming up to the cottage to visit for the weekend. He still couldn’t quite believe that he was friends with a glamorous movie star now, but she was funny, witty, kind, and could talk hockey with fire in her eyes. In some ways, she reminded him of a female Ilya – which was something he was never going to mention to Ilya, who had only just about decided to magnanimously forgive her for the crime of kissing his boyfriend one time, getting papped by the paparazzi, and giving him a twelve-hour freakout of epic proportions.

And of course his parents would be there. Ilya and his dad were going to grill. They’d come so far in just a couple short months, since Shane sat them down after Scott Hunter blew up the hockey world and awkwardly explained that the man in his life was a fellow player, and that he was going to be visiting at the cottage for two weeks. They’d respected his wishes to wait until he was ready to introduce them, and a week into Ilya’s visit, he and Shane had gone over to his parents’ for dinner. Shane would never forget the look on his mom’s face when she opened the door and Shane said, “Mom, this is my boyfriend Ilya.” (She still worried, because she was Shane’s mom; but she was also busily trying to arrange an ad deal for Ilya with Adidas, which was her love language, just like his dad’s was feeding Ilya all the pasta his gluttonous heart could desire.)

And of course Rose and his parents weren’t enough, because Ilya had got frisky on a telephone call, and later that day Hayden had texted him, “Soooooo… Lily’s visiting you then?”, and somehow Shane’s embarrassed apologies and Hayden’s performative whining about how he had never been invited to the cottage had led to Shane promising that Hayden & Jackie could visit and be introduced to Lily. And since Rose was already due to visit that weekend, and could be a buffer along with Shane’s parents, it had seemed like a good idea at the time to combine the two visits.

Which now meant -- Twenty minutes until chaos. Shane’s parents knew he had a boyfriend and that it was Ilya. Rose knew he had a boyfriend, but not who it was. Hayden & Jackie knew he had a partner, but not that it was a guy and not who it was.

Ilya loved it. He was grinning, humming something under his breath as he gathered the grilling stuff together. His curls were messed up, and there was a hickey under his jaw.

“Please be nice to Hayden,” Shane said, without much hope.

Ilya winked. “He will not want to look like a dick in front of Rose Landry. And I will be hot nerd girl who seduced you with sexy hockey numbers.”

Shane crossed the kitchen and used his full weight to press Ilya into the counter. “Play nice,” he said into the shell of Ilya’s ear, letting his voice scrape, “and I’ll ride you into the mattress tonight.”

The front door opened. “Boys, where do you want the salad?” his mom asked from the doorway.

Shane backed away in a second, putting a chaste distance between them. Ilya laughed at him and waggled his eyebrows, then said, “In here, Yuna, I have spot in fridge for it.”

Shane went out to the driveway.

The panic still hadn’t arrived.

After a while, he’d stopped waiting for it. He’d watched Ilya’s eyes and felt the sureness in his own heart, and even before they’d admitted it out loud to each other, he’d known the score. It was like that on the ice sometimes; he’d see a goal before it happened, see it in the back of the net even before he made the shot. After Boston, even when they were still baby gazelles on skates, gingerly gliding around each other and carrying their beating hearts outside their bodies, Shane had been able to close his eyes and see Ilya kneeling by a bed with his shoulders moving, Shane’s own body aching all over with the need to hold him.

The panic hadn’t stood a chance, once Shane Hollander accepted the fact that he loved Ilya Rozanov, and Ilya Rozanov loved him back.

Getting them to say it out loud and figuring out a plan to be together, well, that had been harder. But they’d got there. Nine long years of them, ten months since Boston, and his boyfriend was inside his cottage laughing with his parents, and Shane was happier than he could ever have imagined.

Arms wrapped around him from behind, and he could feel Ilya press a kiss to his hair. “Ready?” Ilya said.

Shane tangled his fingers together with Ilya’s. “Я тебя люблю.”

“I love you too,” Ilya said, so easy and soft and sure.

Shane turned in his arms and kissed him. The autumn sunshine was golden and warm, and Ilya’s eyes were full of stars.