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The hit’s not even that bad.

It's a fully legal check into the boards. Shane had his head up, before it happened, and he had seen it coming. He just hadn’t been able to move in time. The puck left his stick a split second before the Detroit defender was crashing into him, and even as Ilya sees Shane’s neck whip as he hits the boards, even as he sees the way Shane crumples, he thinks that Shane will get up.

Shane doesn't.

By the time Ilya realizes he isn’t moving, the medics are already flooding the rink. Ilya catapults over the bench to get to Shane’s side. Shane, lying on his back, completely unmoving, face as white as the ice beneath him.

“What’s happening?” Ilya demands. “Is he going to be okay?”

“—steady pulse and breathing, likely a severe concussion—“ One of the paramedics is saying, not to him.

“Hello? Someone tell me what’s going on!”

One of the medics eventually looks up at him, a young woman with dark hair and even darker eyes. “Come with us,” she says.

Onto a stretcher, out of the stadium, into an ambulance. Halfway to the hospital, Shane finally starts to stir. Eyes still closed, grumbling incoherently: he can’t answer any questions from the ambulance crew. He can’t even say a normal word. 

But when Ilya squeezes Shane’s hand, Shane squeezes back.

Out of the ambulance, into the hospital, shuttled into an emergency bay, where a drill sergeant of a doctor diagnoses him with severe concussion and subdural hematoma. A kind nurse explains to Ilya that means bleeding in the brain. Treatment is observation. 

“You’re just going to watch?” Ilya demands. “You’re going to watch him bleed into his brain.”

The nurse reminds Ilya of the secretary at the hockey rink where he used to skate. Bustling from place to place, never standing still. “Most of these injuries resolve on their own,” she says, fiddling with one of the monitors around Shane. “No use opening up his head if you don’t have to.”

Out of the emergency room, into an observation unit, into a hospital gown. There’s a chair next to the bed for Ilya, and half a dozen tubes attached to Shane, and lots of people. Bruises staining the skin around Shane’s perfect freckles.

Yuna and David are on vacation. She had seen the hit and texted Ilya, should we come home?

Ilya had avoided answering until he knew the diagnosis. Now Ilya texts her: yes, come home.

It’s about an hour later that Shane starts to stir again. This time, he actually opens his eyes, though he squints even in the darkness of his room. “Wha’ happened?” he mumbles.

Ilya presses the call button for the nurse. “You took a bad hit during the game. We are at hospital.”

Shane frowns. “What game?” he asks, and then, “Who are you?”

Ilya blinks back the panic rising in his throat. “Shane, what the fuck? Is me. Ilya.”

Shane is still frowning. “Rozanov?” he asks, and suddenly, like he’s had a premonition, Ilya knows what Shane is going to say next. Knows from the furrow between his brows and the hunch in his shoulders and the hands that are very conspicuously not reaching for him.

Please, Ilya thinks desperately, get me the fuck out of here.

But the world doesn’t disappear in a burst of light. Ilya does not suddenly wake up in his bed, or at the rink, or even his childhood home back in Moscow. He stays right here, with the silent blinking machines and Shane’s crumpled face.

“Rozanov,” Shane says again. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Ah, Ilya thinks. So this is what it feels like for your heart to break.

—

Amnesia. Temporary, almost certainly. “It’s not uncommon, with hematomas,” the doctor assures Ilya. What’s her name? Ilya has no idea. He’s barely listened to a word they’ve said. He’s in the hallway, now, because Shane doesn’t know him. The fluorescent lights are blinding after the darkness of the head trauma ward.

“Often, the memory loss resolves quickly,” she says. “We’ll keep checking in with him.”

But one hour passes, and then another, and then it’s noon and Yuna and David are showing up, bleary-eyed and bedraggled, all their luggage left behind in Puerto Rico, and Shane still doesn’t know Ilya, but he melts when he sees his parents.

“Mom,” he says, choked up and teary, and Ilya has to go sit outside the hospital room for a moment, or he’s going to cry.

Eventually, David emerges, his eyes red, and sits down on the floor next to Ilya. “Hey, buddy,” he says.

“How much has he lost?” Ilya asks, because they hadn’t been able to get this out of Shane before. He was too confused, too on-guard.

“It looks like about twelve years,” David says grimly. Ilya’s heart drops. Twelve years. That’s 2011. Ilya and Shane barely knew each other, then. They barely liked each other. How many times had they hooked up? Twice? Ilya wonders whether Shane’s memory ends before or after the NHL awards, before or after their rooftop kiss.

“Son,” David says, clapping his hand on Ilya’s shoulder, and Ilya, rehearsedly, does not flinch. “Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.”

Ilya lets his eyes close. He’s so fucking tired. “I don’t want to leave him,” he says.

“We’ll be with him,” David promises. “And—“

He cuts himself off, but Ilya hears what he doesn’t want to say. And he doesn’t remember you anyway. And you’re of no use to anyone here. And he doesn’t want to see you, to talk to you, to remember you exist.

“Okay,” Ilya agrees. “I’ll go home.”

—

Ilya sleeps six hours and wakes up after the sun has already set. He texts David and asks if anything has changed. No update, David replies.

Left with nothing else to do, Ilya dedicates himself with anxious fervor to cleaning the house to Shane’s usual exacting standards. He scrubs the baseboards; he sends drain cleaner down every sink. 

Then, while he’s trying to remember where the oven cleaner is, he realizes that Shane, when he gets home, won’t be able to find anything. He busts out a pack of sticky notes. Cups, he writes on one, then plasters it on a cupboard door; plates, bowls, pots, pot lids, random shit for the kitchen. He takes the sticky note into their bedroom and labels the drawers of Shane’s dresser. Then the bathroom drawers. Then he labels their respective closets, which side of the bed belongs to whom. 

He sends text messages to all their close friends, telling them what has happened and refusing their inevitable offers of assistance. He tries to go for a run and spends the whole time thinking about the look on Shane’s face as he’d said Rozanov? He eschews every piece of advice his psychiatrist has ever given him and downs three sleeping pills before bed, so he doesn’t even have to try to fall asleep unaided.

Two days after Ilya was booted from the hospital, he gets a text from Yuna. It says, They’re releasing him. We should be home some time this afternoon.

Ilya feels, stupidly, like he’s showing his bedroom to a boy for the first time. Of course, in a way, he is—Shane has never seen their shared bedroom, or at least he doesn’t remember it. He doesn’t remember any of their house. No memory of the pothos hanging over the kitchen sink that they bought together at a farmer’s market near the cottage. No memory of the picture of the two of them on the mantle, taken at last year’s hockey camp, surrounded by a crew of pint-sized hockey players. No memory of the lube that’s hidden in the ottoman, the spare chapstick in the key bowl, the half-written grocery list pinned to the fridge.

David helps Shane into the house with an arm around his waist, even though Ilya can hear Shane complaining from the driveway that he doesn’t need any help. Yuna carries in the paper bags filled with pill bottles and the packet of doctor instructions, thick as an old phone book.

“Uh, hey,” Shane says, when he sees Ilya hovering in the foyer, not sure what to do with himself.

Ilya tries to smile back at him, but it comes out more like a grimace. Figures.

Yuna hugs him, tightly. “How’s my favorite son?” she asks, and she’s facing away from Shane so she doesn’t see it, the way his shoulder’s tighten, the incredulous look on his face as he glances back over his shoulder. Ilya does.

David props Shane up on the couch in the living room, two pillows behind him, a blanket tucked over his lap. Ilya had already set out a cold ginger ale and a plate of crackers on the coffee table, where he’s sure they’ll soon be joined by the parade of medications, glasses of half-drunk water, empty bowls of soup.

“I’m going to run to the bathroom real quick,” David says, and, with a significant look at Ilya, disappears. Yuna is clanging around somewhere in the kitchen. Normally, Ilya and Shane would laugh together at his parents’ lack of subtlety; instead Shane clears his throat, awkward, as Ilya twists his fingers together behind his back.

“It’s a nice house,” Shane says. “Do you know who the architect was?”

No, but you do, Ilya wants to say. Instead he says, “Someone you liked. You helped pick the house.”

“Right. Right, yeah—of course.”

Shane picks at the weave of his blanket. “This is awkward, right?” he blurts finally. “I mean, we barely know each other.”

Ilya knows every inch of Shane, every quirk of his daily routine, enough so that he can usually tell when Shane is getting sick before Shane can.

“Right,” Ilya agrees.

“And the last time I saw you we were—well.” Shane clears his throat. “I had just won the Calder.”

Ilya nods. “I remember that night.”

“I mean, we aren’t even friends,” Shane says. “Weren’t friends.”

“Sure,” Ilya says, chest burning.

“And now we’re—“ Shane waves a hand like he doesn’t know the right worried.

“Married,” Ilya says, because he can’t help himself. Shane flinches; wrong thing to say. Of course it was the wrong thing to say; Ilya never knew how to interact with this version of Shane. He was always stepping around him, wrong-footed.

“Yeah,” Shane says now. “That.”

There’s a long beat of silence. Ilya twists his fingers together, picking at the skin of his cuticles even though he knows it’s a habit Shane hates. He’s made good process on bloodying his thumb when Shane coughs and says, in a small voice, “So everyone knows, then?”

Ilya blinks at him. “That you’re injured?”

“That we’re—“

God, he’s so fucking young. Ilya hasn’t seen this look at his face in years, such raw, unvarnished terror. “Yes,” he says. “It was very public, when we came out. Two famous hockey players, so.”

Shane’s eyes fall closed. “Right.”

After that, Shane doesn’t seem to have anything to say to Ilya, and Ilya doesn’t press him. Eventually, David comes back into the room, glancing hopefully between them like he thinks they’ll have reaffirmed their commitment to each other in the ten minutes he was gone. His face falls, a bit, when he sees the way they’re sitting, Ilya at the far end of the couch, Shane hunched over on himself like he’s expecting to ceiling to fall at any moment. Ilya can’t deal with more disappointment right now: he looks away.

“Shane,” David says. “Why don’t you go in and see if your mom needs any help in the kitchen?”

Shane has barely left the room when David is sitting on the couch next to Ilya, his hand falling to Ilya’s shoulder. “Hang in there,” David says. “Remember, it’s just temporary.”

But Ilya can hear low voices from the kitchen, hushed like someone doesn’t want to be overheard, and when the kitchen door swings open a few minutes later, it’s Yuna in the doorway instead of Shane.

“Honey,” she says, looking at Ilya, and Ilya knows.

“It’s fine,” he says, before Yuna can say anything. “It’s fine, I get it.”

Her expression is pinched. “Do you?”

“He wants me to go,” Ilya says. It’s easier to say it than to hear her say it. “Right?”

“He just needs some space,” Yuna says. “This is very overwhelming for him. You can imagine.”

“Of course,” Ilya says woodenly. “Whatever he’s comfortable with.”

Yuna sighs. Ilya doesn’t resist when she steps forward to cup his face in one hand, but he doesn’t lean into the touch either. “This is temporary,” she tells him. “We’re going to get through this, and everything will go back to normal. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ilya agrees and does his best to smile, even as his heart twists like wet laundry in his chest.

—

His first thought is to try to find a hotel, but he dismisses that idea pretty quickly: anywhere he ends up, he’d get papped more or less immediately, and then there would be a whole headache of new problems to deal with, think pieces about whether his marriage with Shane is on the outs, whether he’s leaving the Centaurs, whether someone (Ilya) cheated and that’s what had Shane distracted enough during a game to get laid out on the ice.

Instead, Ilya swallows his pride and calls Wyatt. “Fuck yeah,” he says, gratifyingly quickly. “I’ve got a great guest bedroom that, like, nobody has ever used.”

Anya stays with Shane, of course. It’d be too much to bring her to a friend’s house, not least because Ilya has no idea how long this will last. 

“Hey, sweet girl,” Ilya says, bending to press half a dozen kisses to her fluffy head. “I’ll see you soon, okay? You be good for Shane.”

She whines like she knows something’s wrong, but what can Ilya tell her? Something is wrong. 

Wyatt lives downtown, in a nice little historic penthouse that manages to feel homey despite the sweeping views of the city. The crown moldings are thick with white paint, the green velvet couch frayed on the edges, but there’s a big wooden spice rack on the kitchen counter, a hand-painted bowl in the middle of the island filled with apples.

The guest bedroom is no less homey. Warm yellow walls, a quilt thrown over the foot of the bed, a bay window that overlooks a street filled with leafy green trees. The bed is a queen, but of course, Ilya doesn’t need anything bigger, not when it’s just him.

“Mi casa es su casa,” Wyatt says, as Ilya tosses his duffel onto the mattress. “We usually eat dinner around seven, unless that doesn’t work for you?”

“Is fine,” Ilya says. He sits down, bouncing on the mattress. Firm. Shane liked a firm mattress.

“So, uh…” Wyatt drums his fingers on the doorway.

“What?”

“How is he?” Wyatt asks hesitantly. “Hollander.”

Ilya shrugs, turning to look out the window so he doesn’t have to look at Wyatt’s face. “Could be worse,” he says. “You know, he seems almost normal. Except he thinks he’s nineteen.”

Wyatt sighs. “Shit,” he says. “I mean, I know you said it was amnesia, but I didn’t realize—“

“Yeah,” Ilya says shortly. “But, you know.” He shrugs. “Could be worse.”

Could be worse, could be worse, could be worse: this is what Ilya tries to tell himself. Shane could have severe brain damage, something that affected his ability to walk or talk or move. He could have damaged his spinal cord. He could have broken a few ribs and punctured a lung. Fuck, he could be dead. There have been hockey players who have died on the ice before. Few and far between, but then people of Shane’s talent were few and far between, too. Ilya didn’t like to gamble on probabilities, not when it came to him.

Wyatt clears his throat. “Right,” he says. “Well. Uh, I was making chili tonight. Is that okay?”

Ilya nods, still watching the trees swaying in the wind, many stories below him. “Sounds good,” he says.

“Okay, cool. Well, I’ll just—“

Wyatt raps on the doorframe, twice, before he leaves. Ilya knows he should probably get up and close the door, give him some privacy in his own home, but he can’t quite make himself move. He sits exactly where he is for a very long time, watching the world march on outside.

—

The team is nice about it. Of course the team is nice about it: they’re Ilya’s team. They’re the best fucking guys in the league. Bood and Barrett make loud complaints in the locker room about how Ilya chose Wyatt’s friendship over theirs and start a competition over who has the best home for guests. It nets Ilya a dozen invites to various spare bedrooms, and a private chat with Bood, who pulls him over to the corner of the room as the other boys shuffle out to the ice.

“Seriously,” Bood says, “If you need anything, you call me, yeah? We would love to have you.”

Ilya raises an eyebrow. “Are you trying to poach me, Boodram?”

Bood shrugs. “I’m just saying, it’d be pretty nice to have a live-in babysitter.”

It’s a nice thought. So is the deliberate way that the rest of the Centaurs avoid bringing up Shane, although it gets clunky at times. Dykstra walks through the play of a previous game with Ilya and stumbles over a mention of an assist from Shane. Young keeps asking Ilya questions in the plural, forgetting he’s no longer speaking as part of a unit. One day, during a discussion about Gatorade flavors, Haas actually says, “Well, Shane was telling me—“ and is so embarrassed by the slip up that he cuts himself off and walks out of the locker room before anyone can figure out what he wanted to say.

The worst is Wiebe, who Ilya swears is watching him with the attentiveness of a private eye. It has Ilya on edge, constantly waiting to be called out on the ice, or, more likely, pulled aside and chatted to privately with sincere commiseration and tears. The thought makes Ilya shudder, and he focuses on his game more than ever, needling every one of his movements so they’re beyond reproach.

In the end, it’s a week before Wiebe finally clears his throat halfway through practice and calls out, “Roz.” He beckons with one finger, and Ilya skates over trepidatiously as, behind him, the rest of the Centaurs continue with their shooting drill.

“Yes, coach?”

“You’re playing good,” Wiebe says bluntly. “I expected you to be playing like shit, but you’re not.”

“Thanks?”

“If you were playing like shit, I’d bench you,” Wiebe continues. “But you don’t have to be playing like shit to take a break. If you wanted to take some time off—“

“If I wanted to take some time off, I would not be here,” Ilya interrupts, then adds, belatedly, “Coach.”

Wiebe claps his shoulder. “That’s what I thought. But I want it to be clear. If anything changes, you tell me, you have time. No questions asked.”

Time. Time to do what? Sit in Hazy’s guest bedroom and stare at the ceiling, the way his mother used to, when Ilya was a child? Time to drive himself crazy trying to understand medical journals about amnesia, concussions, CTE? Time to contact lawyers and agents and medical proxies; time to plan out a life without Shane?

“Thank you, Coach,” Ilya says. “Can I get back on the ice now?”

Wiebe sighs. “You boys,” he says, but he waves him off.

—

Ilya takes a moment, after practice, to collect a few things Shane had left in his locker before the game—his spare credit card, a sweatshirt he likes to wear often, a bottle of prescription face wash. He brings them to the house in one of the reusable grocery bags that Shane forces him to keep in the car.

David’s the one who answers the door.

“Thanks, buddy, he'll appreciate this,” David says, peering into the sack, but there’s a false note in it, like he sees this for the excuse it is.

“Um, I didn’t want to bother you,” Ilya says. “But is he—“

David shakes his head, quickly, before Ilya can get his hopes up. “Same as before,” he says. “It’s—he just needs some space. It’s a big change for him, you know. I’m sure he’ll come around.”

Ilya nods. There’s a stone in his throat. “Right,” he says. “Of course.”

On the way home, he thinks that he should have kept that sweatshirt. Shane wore it before the game; it was dirty, and it smelled like him. Who knows when Ilya will next get a chance to smell him? If he ever will again?

—

Three days after Shane returns home from the hospital, Ottawa has a game at home.

Ilya had sat out their last game—a road trip to New York, the day after Shane’s accident; the plane had lifted off before Shane’s parents had even arrived at the hospital, before they even knew the extent of the damage—so this is his first time back on the ice since the injury. The crowd roars in satisfaction when they see him, and Ilya knows they must be relieved, to see him here. The Centaurs haven’t announced much about Shane’s injury, other than that he got a concussed and is out of play indefinitely, but it’s well-known that Ilya wouldn’t play if his husband was in critical condition. Seeing Ilya on the ice is probably the best signal yet that Shane is going to be fine.

If only it were that simple.

Ilya takes the opening face off. They’re playing the New Jersey Stingers, who are generally pretty nice and considerate guys, which really makes the whole thing worse. Ilya would love an excuse to deck someone. Dallas Kent, maybe.

Instead, it’s Patrick Stevenson, dipping his head respectfully at Ilya as they line up in front of each other. “Heard about Hollander,” he says, as the referee readies for play. “Is he doing okay?”

Sincere and everything. The fucker. “He will be back on the ice out-skating us soon enough,” Ilya says, and hopes that passes for an answer. He should come up with an insult to throw at Stevenson, something to get him off his game, but the ref is already raising the puck in the air.

Stevenson wins the face-off, but Hazy blocks the shot he makes at goal and then the puck is back in the cradle of Ilya’s stick as he races up the ice. He doesn’t make a goal on his first shift, but he assists Bood on the next one, then cinches his own not long after that. He gets another goal in second; he earns a hat trick eight minutes into third. Ottawa wins the game, 5-2, and afterwards, in the locker room, Ilya scrolls through Twitter.

Rozy is on fire, one girl has tweeted, alongside a string of tongue wagging emojis; clearly nothing can keep down the Russian love machine, says someone else. The Centaurs’ beat reporter has a more professional break-down of the game, but by the end, even her tweets have devolved to essentially damn, Rozanov is at it again! 

He keeps scrolling. Gifs of his goals, Bood pressing a kiss to the side of Ilya’s helmet after his assist, a shot of Luca looking at Roz out of the corner of his eye as they sit together on the bench. Wiebe frowning down at an iPad. A cluster of teenage girls wearing Hollander jerseys and waving at the Jumbotron. 

A tweet that says, wow, it’s like rozy doesn’t even notice his husband is gone. A reply to that tweet that says yeah fr man like hollander is fucking hurt and roz is playing one of the best games ever, idk if I should be impressed or feel bad for hollzy lol

The tweets each have dozens of likes. Which means nothing, of course. There are tweets about Hayden and Shane fucking that have tens of thousands of likes. There are conspiracy theories on Twitter about aardvark-human hybrids with millions. People like crazy things.

Ilya reads the tweets over several times before someone calls his name and he finally puts his phone away.

—

One of the first things Yuna had said to Ilya, after she and David showed up at the hospital—sunburned, still wearing Hawaiian shirts, their luggage in tow—was maybe you should make an appointment with your therapist.

It would probably be a smart idea. If Shane was being himself, it’d be the first thing he suggested to Ilya, too. Even if he hadn’t had all his memories knocked out of him, injuries like this tended to get to Ilya. Seeing Shane splayed out cold on the ice; seeing Shane bleary and unable to respond to Ilya’s begging. It brought Ilya back to places he’d prefer not to be. Which, in turn, brought him to Galina.

But it’s been a few months, since Ilya has seen her. Things have been going good, lately; their visits tapered, from once a week to every other week to once a month. Then they agreed to pause them, for the time being. I’ll be here when you need me, she had told him.

He could make an appointment with her now. He should, really. He knows he should. But he imagines sitting down with her, the conversation they would have—how is Shane? She would ask, and he would have to explain. He would have to say things like he doesn’t remember me, and the doctor's don’t know when—if—

And it makes him feel sick. Just the idea of it.

He’ll do it afterwards, he tells himself. Once Shane remembers. Ilya will go then, and he’ll figure this out. He just has to hang on until then.

—

Ten days after Shane comes home from the hospital, he’s moved to more permanent IR.

Ilya doesn’t know what goes on behind the scenes—they would have all seen this outcome coming, with Shane's lingering concussion symptoms, but that doesn't mean it would have gone well. Ilya can imagine what Wiebe would have said; minimizing risk, keeping Shane healthy, following doctors' orders. And Shane? What would Shane have said?

It's hard for Ilya to know precisely, when Shane is occupied by the mind of his younger self. He would have been pissed, definitely. There’s nothing Shane loves more in the world than playing hockey; he’s surely itching to get back on the ice.

Still, the ice he remembers is a hundred miles away and twelve years ago, and surely Shane knows that. He was so nervous, when he signed with Ottawa. He spent an hour the night before the first practice ironing his hockey jersey. He didn’t eat before practice because his stomach was tied up in knots. Ilya kissed him three times in the car before he would walk inside. And that was knowing the guys on the team; knowing that Ilya was the captain; knowing he would be safe there.

Wiebe announces it to the team before practice, all of them ringed around the ice. “Look, I know this isn’t ideal,” he says. “We’re going to be hurting without him, and I’m sure we all know he’s going to be hurting without us. But his health is our first priority, just like your health is our first priority. So we’re going to be very grateful that he’s not dealing with something worse, and we’re going to keep him in our thoughts and prayers, and we’re going to play the best hockey we can, so that when he comes back, he can be proud of us. Yeah?”

There’s a round of lackluster cheers. Ilya feels the weight of his teammates’ eyes on him like a physical hand on his shoulder. He attacks practice with extra vigor. He makes three goals during the scrimmage. He’s the last man standing during the endurance drills. During shooting practice, he hits the puck right into Hazy’s thigh, leaving a nasty purple bruise.

“Jesus, Roz,” Hazy says in the locker room, twisting his leg to show off his war wound. “Who the fuck taught you a slapshot like that?”

Shane, Ilya thinks. When they were still young, teenagers, Ilya had seen a video of Shane’s slapshot at Junior’s and gotten jealous. He’d spent the next six months practicing his own, until nobody could deny he had the superior shot.

“Your mother,” he says instead, and Hazy laughs, sounding a little too relieved.

—

Ilya knows that Yuna or David would call him the moment something changed. He still can’t stop himself from texting them for updates. They’re carefully-phrased missives, deliberately casual: Hey, how are you guys? Or Hope you’re staying warm in the cold weather. The sort of professionalism he learned from Shane, which he had previously only trotted out when Shane demanded it, for interviews with elite journalists or PR-machine-approved Instagram statements.

Ilya’s not sure if Yuna and David can tell the difference in his texts. They certainly don’t call him out on it. We’re doing well here, they say. Managing through the weather! Shane’s concussion is getting better. The doctors are very optimistic. Hematoma decreasing in size. No memories yet, but hopefully soon.

There’s a Hollander family group chat that Ilya has been a part of for years, since a few weeks after he met Yuna and David for the first time, officially, back in 2017. Normally, someone sends something in that chat at least once a day. Now, the Hollanders must have moved back to a three-person conversation, because this group chat is frozen. The last message is from Yuna, sent an hour before Shane’s last game. Go get ‘em, boys! she had written. You’re going to kill it.

—

“I am going to get a hotel,” Ilya says, when days have turned into weeks and there’s no sign of Shane’s memory coming back. “Or a rental. Something.”

“There’s no need for that,” Wyatt says. “You haven’t even tried Lisa’s lasagna, yet.”

Ilya shakes his head. “I should get—what is the English phrase? Get out of your hair?”

Wyatt snorts. “Our hair loves having you, man,” he says. “It’s been really fun. Lisa has always wanted to billet and, well, obviously this is different, but it’s better different, I think.” He nudges Ilya with his elbow. “Come on. Stay, or Lisa is going to think it’s my fault and she’ll ice me out of the bedroom.”

And Ilya is selfish, so he stays.

—

They get a three day break, the sort of thing that Ilya and Shane would normally use to go to the cottage for a few days, and because Ilya doesn’t want to sit around getting frowned at, or, worse, hear Wyatt and Lisa fuck through the walls, he goes to Boston.

Svetlana takes one look at him, the exhausted lines on his face and his borrowed carry-on suitcase, and says, “Oh, we are getting fucking drunk.”

At least she has good vodka. Not just Russian but small-batch, Ilya’s favorite brand, from the tiny little distillery on the outskirts of Moscow that Sveta’s father loves.

“Oh my god,” Ilya moans into his first glass.

“This is what I want for my birthday,” he says into his second. “As many bottles of this as you can fit in a suitcase.”

“Okay, please just get it over with,” he demands after he’s polished off his third glass and Svetlana’s uncapping the bottle for a refill. “This whole being sensitive thing, it doesn’t suit you.”

She rolls her eyes, shoving the glass his way. “I’ve alway been sensitive,” she says. “I’ve very sympathetically dragged your ass through two funerals, you know.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “Yeah, and you did it by telling me to get it together when I started crying,” he says. “Come on. Out with it.”

Svetlana shrugs, lounging back into the cushions. She has a very deliberate way she poses herself, the result of careful years of practice. Ilya remembers her when she was twelve and awkward, thirteen and just starting to practice faces in the mirror to see what made her look the most alluring in photos. Now she slinks around the world like a model expecting a camera around every corner.

“You’re the now who wanted to come here,” she says. “Not the other way around. What do you have to say to me?”

Ilya sucks a tooth, staring down into his glass. His tolerance isn’t what it used to be. Four drinks in and he’s already starting to feel a little woozy around the edges. It used to take twice as much vodka to get him to this point, or at the very least a bit of ecstasy slipped under his tongue.

“He’s going to divorce me,” he says.

It’s not what he meant to say, but once it comes out of his mouth, he realizes it’s true. Shane is going to divorce him. Who wouldn’t, if put in his position? Waking up with no memory of your husband—only made worse by the fact that said husband is your notoriously annoying rival. Ilya can hardly blame him. Even now, Ilya still has a hard time feeling like he’s earned the happiness he shares with Shane. The version of him from twelve years ago certainly didn’t deserve it.

“He loves you,” Svetlana says. “He might not remember it, but that doesn’t just go away.”

Ilya shakes his head. “No," he says, his voice frustratingly thick. He clears his throat. “No, it’s—it does, though. It does go away. If you saw him, you would understand. He doesn’t—it’s gone.”

This is one of the things Ilya appreciates about Svetlana: she doesn’t argue with him too much. Not about things like this. Unlike Galina, unlike Shane, she trusts Ilya to know the interiority of his situation better than she does. So instead of telling him he's wrong, she unfolds her legs, leans forward over the coffee table like a salesperson conducting a business meeting, and says, “Do you think you could earn it back? Make him love you again.”

This is the question Ilya has been asking himself, every day since this happened. It’s not impossible, to think that whatever Ilya did to make Shane love him in the first place could be replicated. If he knew—if there was a script. A path he could follow.

But in truth, Ilya still doesn’t really understand why Shane loved him in the first place. He knows Shane did love him, but the mechanics of it never made sense. If he had been the fourth-best player in their draft year instead of the first, would Shane have still loved him then? If Ilya had been a little less brash, a little less willing to prod at Shane until he opened up?

The truth is, it has never stopped feeling like a miracle, a lucky trick of fate that made something in Shane’s brain saw Ilya, hopeless Ilya, arrogant Ilya, mean Ilya, lonely Ilya, and said yes, I want that one, that’s the man for me, I will take no other. It was improbable enough that Shane fell for Ilya once. But twice?

“What do you think the odds are that Boston will take me back?” Ilya asks, instead of trying to say any of this.

Svetlana sighs. She indulges him, because she is who she is. “Very high,” she says. “Their new rookie is underperforming.”

“Yeah?” 

She nods. “It’s an open secret. His numbers aren’t going up the way they should. It’s like he peaked as a junior, somehow, which shouldn’t be possible with all the resources the Raiders are throwing at him, but—“

Ilya tips his head back again the soft velvet of her couch and lets her tell him about hockey. He tries very hard not to think of Shane. Very hard.

—

It’s not that Ilya doesn’t hear from Shane at all. He sends Ilya texts, sometimes. Usually it’s pictures of Anya. Other times it’s house stuff. A image of the circuit breaker and a which one of these is for the kitchen? A question about how often the plants in the sunroom need to be watered.

Once or twice, offers to send another bag for Ilya if he needs anything from the house. I know you didn’t have much time to get your stuff together, Shane writes, as if all it would have taken is another hour and Ilya could have packed his life up and cleared out for good.

Out come the trophies from the trophy room, out come the books scattered through Shane’s bookshelves, out come the Russian snacks from the cupboard and the rug that Svetlana bought Ilya for the living room and the dirty old sneakers in the back of the hall closet that Ilya keeps for lawn work. Put it in a box, clap your hands together, and everything is done.

I have everything I need, thanks, Ilya writes back. Lie, lie, lie, but then this Shane doesn’t know him, so who is he to call Ilya on it?

Ilya’s right. Shane doesn’t even respond.

—

Ilya spent ten years in the NHL before he ever got to play with Shane, and even once they were on the same team, they usually weren’t on the same line. It should be easy, for Ilya to adjust to his absence.

But even weeks on, when Ilya gets on the ice, it’s all he can think about.

He gets a pass from Haas, and he thinks Hollander will use a backhand spin-out to get around Yvon before he remembers that it’s Barrett on his left waiting for the puck. Wiebe taps Ilya’s shoulder to send him into the game and he automatically scans the ice for Shane before he remembers he’s replacing someone else. On the power play, it’s even worse: Ilya had known where Shane was so easily, effortlessly, and now that Bood is there instead, Ilya finds himself constantly surprised by the lay out of their team, a stomach-dropping feeling like reaching for a step and finding it’s not there.

At practice, things are no better. Every day, once drills are finished, Ilya subjects the worst performers to a bag skate, and lately, he has always been in the group. Everyone skates until they fall over, which for Ilya takes longer than most, and so more and more he finds himself alone in the showers at the end of the day, standing under the spitting spray with nothing to entertain himself but his thoughts.

He hates these showers. Bad water pressure, shitty soap. He used to like the soap, but then Shane had wrinkled his face at it once and admitted he didn't like the smell, and now Ilya hates it. He hates the tile of the showers, too. It’s too much like the tile from another shower where his life changed, a long time ago.

Sometimes he wonders if things might not have been easier if his life never changed. If he never stepped foot in that shower. If he never rolled that stupid fucking die.

Ilya braces his hands against the wall and lets the spray beat against the back of his neck. He closes his eyes.

He’s not sure how much later it is when someone coughs from the doorway. It’s Haas, dressed to go home, a duffel slung over his shoulder. “You alright, Captain?” he asks. His brow is furrowed and he looks about one second off from biting his lip, a tic Ilya swears he picked up from Shane.

“Never better,” Ilya says, and turns off the water.

—

“I can’t get over it,” Hayden says, as they watch Ruby and Jade wrestle on the gymnastics mat.

It’s the first time Ilya has ever visited the Pikes without Shane present, but they had missed last month’s dinner because of an away game, and the little Pikes have apparently been chomping at the bit to see their uncles. Of course, Shane can’t come: he barely knows Pike, has never met Jackie, doesn’t recall any of the many hours he’d spent entertaining the kids. Ilya doesn’t particularly want to be here either either, but Jackie had mailed him a construction paper card Arthur made for Ilya during some school craft, and the guilt won out.

“Yes, I don’t understand it either,” Ilya agrees. “You are like lost little squirrel in a fight, and they are like lions. They must get it from Jackie.” 

Hayden rolls his eyes. “Asshole,” he says. “I meant—Shane.”

“Ah.”

Ilya fixes his gaze more firmly on the mat. Ruby is trying to dislocate Jade’s shoulder from behind. 

“I mean, ten fucking years, Jesus,” Hayden continues. “I keep trying to text him. Like, I took a photo of Amber last night with spaghetti sauce all over her head, where she looked like a fucking enforcer that just beat up a guy for hitting the rookie. It was so perfect. And I thought, Shane will find this so funny, and then I realized Shane won’t find it funny, because he doesn’t know who Amber is. Shit, he barely remembers me.”

Jade is kicking furiously at Ruby’s left knee, trying to destabilize her. Probably, someone should get involved before they seriously damage each other, but Hayden isn’t moving, so Ilya doesn’t, either.

“I think you should send it to him,” Ilya says.

Hayden darts a glance at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ilya says. “He doesn’t remember everything, but he knows you. At least as his teammate. He doesn’t have anyone else like that right now. All his other friends are strangers. All he has is his parents.”

“Shit. I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

Ruby and Jade have devolved into a tickle fight. “Anyway, Amber is adorable. Even if Shane doesn’t know her, he should appreciate her.”

“Yes! I don’t know what I was thinking. Okay, I’m texting now.”

Later, on the front doorstep, Jackie gives Ilya an extra-long hug, lingering like she’s reluctant to let him go. “Stay strong, yeah?” she tells him, and he nods, smiles.

“Of course,” he says. “You know me. Strong Russian bear.”

She smiles back at him, sadly, one hand still resting on the side of his neck.

—

Ilya thinks about them all the time: the lasts he didn’t know were lasts. The last time he blew Shane (in the shower, the morning before the game, Shane’s hands knotted in Ilya’s soapy hair, his groan echoing off the tiles); the last time he kissed Shane (before they got out of their SUV at the arena, a there-and-gone brush of lips over the center console for luck); their last goal together on the ice (three minutes before collision, a slick feint from Shane led to a solid pass to Ilya and a goal netted neatly in the top right corner of the opposition goal).

The last that messes him up the most, though, is the last time Shane told Ilya he loved him, because Ilya doesn’t remember it. Was it the night before, when they were drifting off to sleep? The morning of, a quick thank-you for a disgusting smoothie, competently made while Shane was still getting dressed? Or something else entirely—something more meaningful, or less meaningful, or absent, or deliberate, but something that Ilya took for granted, something he didn’t bother to remember, something he thought he would hear a thousand more times and so something he dismissed?

Ilya doesn’t remember the last time his mother said she loved him, either. Which is a completely different situation, of course. But he can’t stop thinking about it.

—

David sends Ilya a text of Anya curled up in the loveseat with an afghan half-thrown over her, with the caption Your baby misses you, and it’s a patent ploy but Ilya falls for it anyway. Half an hour later, Ilya’s in his and Shane’s kitchen petting Anya’s soft belly as she wriggles on the floor like a caterpillar, happy yips slipping out between her teeth when Ilya gets a really good spot.

“Perfect girl,” he coos. “You’re just so good, aren’t you, so beautiful.”

Eventually, David comes over with two mugs of tea, and Ilya makes himself take a seat at the kitchen table, throwing a tennis ball down the hallway for Anya, which she fetches and returns, fetches and returns.

“Shane and Yuna are at an appointment,” David tells Ilya, as he inhales the steam from his tea. Black tea with cherry jam, probably the good stuff from the farmer’s market. Lord knows Shane wouldn’t have touched the open jar in their fridge.

“Ah, so you wanted to get me alone?”

It’s meant as a tease but it comes off rather flat. David, instead of trying to resuscitate the joke, just sighs, circling his thumb around the rim of his own mug.

“Well, I’ll be honest, buddy,” David says. “I have been wanting to talk to you.”

So Ilya was brought here under false pretenses. Of course he was; it seems silly, suddenly, to have even considered that this might just have been a social visit. What would David need with Ilya, right now?

“A few days ago, Shane had a check-in with his neurologist,” David says. “They did some pretty comprehensive imaging, and from what they can tell, the hematoma has resolved itself.”

It takes Ilya a moment to parse the med speak. “But that’s—that’s good, right?” he asks cautiously.

David nods, looking down at his mug. “In a matter of speaking,” he says. “It’s definitely a step forward in healing, and it means Shane is less at risk if he were to fall or hit his head again. But it’s also—well. Dr. Chandry said that she would have expected to see some progress right now. In terms of his memory coming back. If—“

“If it was going to come back,” Ilya fills in, his voice flat. “Right?”

David presses his lips together and nods.

“It doesn’t mean there’s no chance,” he says, “But it does mean the odds of a full recovery—of a recovery—they go down considerably.”

Ilya breathes very slowly through his nose. This will hurt very much, if he lets it, so he is not going to let it. “And hockey?” he asks finally. “Will he be able to play again?”

It’s only in recent years that Shane has accepted there is anything in the world more important than hockey. At nineteen—at nineteen, it was his whole life.

“They’re not sure yet,” he says. “But for now, they’re treating the missing memory as evidence of persistent damage. They’re not letting him play until it’s healed.”

“And if it’s never healed?”

David sighs. “You two are so alike,” he says, but what would normally sound fond comes out terribly sad. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Normally, Ilya likes that idiom. It’s a good one to use to calm Shane down when he tries to march a few too many miles ahead with his plans. Now, it sounds horribly stupid.

“How’s Shane taking it?” Ilya asks. “I mean, I can imagine, but—“

David snorts. “You know him,” he says.

Ilya closes his eyes. “Yeah,” he agrees, though he isn’t sure he does. Not anymore.

He finishes his tea, spends a few more minutes petting Anya, and is sure to clear out of the house before Shane gets home.

—

Ilya had thought a lot about what would happen if he got Alzheimer’s. Less about what would happen if Shane did. In those few imagined futures, Ilya had pictured Shane’s memories seeping away from him slowly, like an ebbing tide. Ilya would have time to make the house safe for Shane, to write post-it note reminders of everything in their life. Not that Shane would need reminding about everything. Even in the worst of his imaginings, Ilya couldn’t ever quite picture Shane forgetting him completely. Maybe he wouldn’t remember precisely who Ilya was to him, or how they met, or how Ilya drank his coffee, but he would surely remember he was safe with Ilya. That they loved each other.

Of course, in these imaginings, Shane was also always old and grey, and he and Ilya had already lived a long and beautiful life together. Never had Ilya anticipated everything being taken away so swiftly. Never had Ilya anticipated reality.

—

The phone call wakes Ilya up.

Really, he should already be awake: it’s well past eight in the morning and Ilya was supposed to get up an hour ago to go for a run before practice.

But when he woke up to the sound of the alarm, even the idea of getting out of bed made Ilya feel like he’d run a marathon, and in the end he just stopped his alarm and curled back into his blankets, burying his head under his pillow to muffle the sounds of Wyatt sneaking around the apartment, sliding on his own tennis shoes.

Now, half-asleep again, it takes Ilya a moment to read the name on the phone screen. When he does, he scrambles to pick up the phone so fast that he almost accidentally rejects the call.

“Hello?” he demands, heart pounding in his throat.

It’s the first time Shane has called him. One of the only times Shane has even reached out to him at all. Surely it couldn’t be that Shane remembers. Surely Ilya wouldn’t be that lucky. But—maybe?

“Hey,” Shane says. “Hey, it’s, uh. Me. Shane. Hollander.”

Ilya’s heart sinks. “Yes, I know who you are, Hollander,” he says, and hopes it comes across annoyed. He slumps back into his pillows. “What do you want? Is early.”

“Uh, yeah. Sorry, sorry, I uh—well, I was just in the gym this morning, working out, and I got a notification on my phone. Um, from a calendar, I guess I had set it up a while ago. Back before—you know.”

Ilya presses a hand over his eyes. “And what was on this calendar that made you call me?” Maybe there’s some event they’re supposed to go to that Ilya needs to cancel. Maybe there’s a reminder to do some yearly household task and Shane needs Ilya’s help to figure out how to do it.

“Um, it’s—it says it’s your mother’s birthday today,” Shane says. “And it says it make sure you’re okay. And I guess—I don’t know, maybe it’s dumb, you don’t really know me, but I guess I just wanted to do that. Make sure. You’re okay, I mean.”

Ilya takes several long, slow deep breaths, and tells himself he’s not going to cry. There’s no use for it. It wont’t change anything. It’ll just make him feel shitty and ugly and weak. There was a reason that he went ten years without crying. It was better that way. With Shane, it was different, but Shane was gone now, wasn’t he? Ilya needed to go back to the way things were.

But that was so hard to achieve when Shane was here, kind of, on the other end of the phone, his voice soft and careful and just as considerate as always, his kindness overflowing the shaky boundaries between them. Of course Shane didn’t owe Ilya anything; of course he had something to offer anyway. He was just like that. So lovable that he was impossible to escape.

I love you, Ilya wants to tell him, now. He hadn’t said it enough before. Now it was too late.

“Thank you,” Ilya says, after he has been silent on the line for far too long. His voice comes out wet, and he coughs, wiping at his face with one hand. “I’m okay.”

Ilya’s Shane would have called him out on the lie. This Shane just says, “Okay, good. I hope—you have a game tomorrow, right? Good luck.”

Ilya’s eyes fall closed. “Thanks,” he says. “Have a good day.”

The line clicks off, and Ilya lays in bed for several long moments, contemplating whether he can go back to sleep. He’d like to sleep this whole day off, take a few pills and lay in bed and wake up some other day, some other time, when he doesn’t have to deal with all this.

But it’s almost eight thirty now, and he has to be at practice in an hour. Wyatt is shuffling around in the kitchen, back from his run, and somewhere, far away, Ilya’s mother is turning fifty-four. It’s not a very good way to celebrate, rotting in bed.

Ilya pushes himself to his feet and forces himself to get dressed, the whole time thinking of Shane’s voice in his ear, the warm way he’d said good luck.

—

The thing is, Ilya knows he shouldn’t live for Shane. It’s a shitty way to live. Too much pressure on one person, and too fragile. Galina had warned him about that. That he needed to make sure he wasn’t depending on Shane to make him happy, that he was finding ways to be happy by himself.

It made sense to him, of course, and he nodded and told her he’d think about it and then he’d go home and find Shane in their kitchen broiling flavorless chicken breasts, or lounging across their couch re-reading Wayne Gretzky’s biography, and any resolve he had to find hobbies and loves of his own had flown out the window.

He was just so fucking happy already. Shane in his life, Shane in his house, Shane by his side—how could he ask for more than this? It felt greedy. It felt stupid, to waste any time that he could spend with Shane.

Anyway, it was their honeymoon period, and Ilya told himself he deserved to enjoy it. He would work more on living for himself later. When the glow wore off, when Shane’s five-step laundry routine started irritating Ilya instead of charming him.

Of course, before that could happen, Shane hit his head on the ice and didn’t get back up and now his sunshine is gone from Ilya’s life. Oh, it still exists, and Ilya is grateful for that, so fucking grateful that Shane gets to keep existing, even if not by Ilya’s side. But. The truth is he wasn’t really prepared for this. This whole thing has taken him rather by surprise.

—

The Centaurs play Toronto, and Ilya doesn’t even wait five minutes before he’s decking Dallas Kent across his smug, shitty face.

The fight gets dirty quickly—Kent’s right wing is only a few feet away and he barrels into Ilya immediately, so eager to defend the rapist. Barrett is further away, and in the few seconds it takes him to join in the fight, they both get a few good shots in at Ilya. Ilya manages his own, though, and when the refs finally bust the whole thing up, both Kent and his buddy are dripping blood onto the ice.

Ilya is whisked away by medics as soon as he gets off the ice, where he’s pronounced free of permanent injury and permitted to return to the ice. Wiebe doesn’t even scold Ilya, even though the power play off Ilya’s fight had netted Toronto a goal and tied up the game. 

Maybe he should have scolded Ilya, because Ilya makes it through all of three more shifts before he’s starting another fight, this one against some bland defenseman named West. He doesn't even say anything to Ilya, but he looks at him with this glint in his eye, the one that Ilya knows means he’s thinking something terrible. Probably something about Shane. Ilya, on hair trigger, doesn’t even try to pull an insult out of him to justify the fight; he just hits.

This time, the damage is worse, because Ilya’s helmet gets knocked off right away. He can tell from the way his skin is pulling across his cheekbones that he’s going to have at least one black eye, and there’s a steady trickle of blood dripping from a cut across his forehead. He can’t feel his nose at all, which means it’s probably broken. On his left side, his ribs hurt like a motherfucker.

It’s the most alive he’s felt in a long time.

He can’t even bring himself to care when Terry, the team doctor, chews him out in the medical room. Wiebe comes in next, and delivers a half-hearted lecture that ends with, “I’m really worried about you, Roz.”

It’s a nice thought, it really is. But if there is anything Ilya has learned, it’s that worry does nothing. Did any of his worrying ever help anything with Shane? Did he manage to prevent any of the terrible things that have happened to them—coming out, and Shane’s team turning on him, and that stupid fucking trip? And on the other side of it, all the things that Ilya didn’t bother to worry about, that came for them anyway. Amnesia, for one.

“Can I go now, coach?” Ilya asks, eventually, and Wiebe lets him go.

He takes an Uber back to Hazy’s, because they had carpooled but he doesn’t really want to talk to anyone right now. Tough luck: he opens the door and there’s Lisa, sitting on the couch with an empty popcorn bowl next to her, ESPN up on the TV.

“You look like you got in a fight with a garbage disposal,” she tells him.

Ilya grunts. He just wants to sleep. He doesn’t even want to shower, even though he skipped it, at the rink. He just wants to lay down in bed and look out the windows at the trees and sleep for a very, very long time.

“Here,” Lisa says. “Here, come here.” She’s fetched ice packs out of the freezer and she holds one to his face, one to his ribs. “Ice for at least a half hour,” she says, ever the physician. “If the pain gets worse in the middle of the night, come wake me.”

Ilya intends to go to sleep immediately, but once he gets into bed, he finds he can’t drift off. The ice on his skin is too foreign, and he keeps thinking about what Shane would see, if he saw Ilya like this, dirtying the bed with his sweaty self.

“Do they know what this is doing to him?” Ilya hears Lisa murmur to Wyatt, later, the two of them hovering in a hallway outside his bedroom like two parents checking their teenager hasn't snuck out the window.

Ilya doesn’t hear what Wyatt says back, but he hears Lisa’s returning hiss of, “Shane wouldn’t want this. He’d be sick over it.”

Of course, that’s the problem, Ilya thinks. Shane isn’t here.

—

He’s expecting the call he gets from Yuna, the next morning “Honey, we miss you,” she says, which Ilya supposes might be true, for a given definition of we.

“Are you doing okay?” she asks, and Ilya tells her he’s fine.

“When will we see you again?” she asks, and Ilya says something about a busy schedule, poor sleep, then pretends Wyatt is calling his name so he can hang up the phone.

—

A long time ago, Ilya made a plan. He never actually thought he’d go through with it, but it helped him sleep at night, knowing there was a way out. His father laughing drunkenly in the next room, the sound of explosions on the TV, and Ilya in bed, aching from long hours of hockey. His life felt endless, then, every moment endless, time jumbled around him like a cage.

He looked it up: you need to fall seven stories to effectively ensure you’ll die. There was an apartment building down the street that was nine. Technically, the roof wasn’t supposed to be open, but Ilya had snuck up there plenty of times with Svetlana or Sasha to smoke and look at the stars, what few of them you could see in Moscow, anyway.

It was a good spot. Quiet. Easy to access. Nobody had ever stopped him from going up there before. A good place to catch a breath, before the end. He regretted that someone would have to find him, afterwards, but maybe it would be good for them. Make them realize the brevity of life and spur them to confess their secret love or pursue their dream career or something else stupid like that. Isn’t that the kind of thing that always happened in movies?

Of course, Ilya had never done it, but it had been nice, to have the backup plan. To remind himself there was a backup.

Wyatt’s apartment is six stories tall, but that makes the roof the seventh. The door is alarmed, but Ilya doesn’t need to be alone on the roof long. Just long enough to walk to the edge and step off. A few seconds, really. He could easily manage it.

Now, as he lays awake in Wyatt’s spare bedroom, he turns the plan over in his mind like a loose tooth.

—

A week after the game against Toronto, Ilya is lying in bed, trying to muster the will to get up and do something with himself, when his phone rings.

He’s tempted to leave it, but he’s already useless enough, out for at least the next two weeks while his ribs feel, that answering the phone feels like kind of the least he can do. He rolls over and yanks the phone from the nightstand.

Jane <3 the display reads.

It’s probably cruel of Ilya, but he doesn’t answer.

There’s no good reason for Shane to be calling him, is the thing. Best case scenario, Shane has found another depressing reminder on his calendar about the life he and Ilya used to share, the life they won’t be sharing any more, and it’ll just send Ilya deeper into his spiral.

Worst case scenario, Shane has finally decided it’s time to get Ilya’s shit out of his bedroom. Maybe he wants to talk about how to start detangling the web of their finances. Maybe he wants to discuss transferring ownership of the deed to their house, who’s going to keep living there, who needs to start looking for an apartment to rent.

Knowing Shane, he’ll probably offer to be the one who goes house-hunting. Just to take something off of Ilya’s plate. It was your house first, he’ll probably say, even though he doesn’t remember it being Ilya’s house first. It’s just another narrative he can parrot, like it’s not your fault what happened, and I want you to take care of yourself and this must be very hard for you. 

Ilya will do the house-hunting, in the end. He won’t let Shane give up the house, both because he likes the idea of Shane still living in the place where Ilya last left him, and also because if Ilya has to step inside their old bedroom and see their closet emptied of Shane’s clothes, he thinks he’ll be sick.

The phone stops ringing, but Shane just immediately calls again, so Ilya turns off the phone. For good measure, he shoves it under his pillow so he doesn’t have to look at it. He buries himself in the blankets on his bed and pulls up a Youtube video on his laptop. Some Russian YouTuber reviewing different brands of hockey tape. Ilya can barely pay attention.

In the end, it’s Wyatt who comes to find him, barging into Ilya’s room without so much as a knock. “What the fuck, Hazy, I could have been jerking off,” Ilya says, swiping furiously at his face.

Wyatt is breathing hard, like he’s been running. “Hazy?” Ilya asks, the dread surging in his stomach like an ocean wave. “Is it—“

“It’s Shane,” Wyatt says breathlessly. “Dude, where is your fucking phone? He said he called you like a million times.”

“What is it?” Ilya demands, suddenly panicked. Stupid, stupid, why had he turned off his phone? Is Shane dying in a hospital right now? Has Ilya missed his chance to say goodbye by being a fucking coward? “Is he okay?”

Wyatt grins so widely he looks slightly manic. Still, Ilya isn’t prepared at all when he says, “Better than okay. Rozy, he remembers.”

— 

Hazy drives him over. Ilya had said he was fine to drive, and Hazy had raised an eyebrow and said, “Dude, you’re shaking like a chihuahua,” and Ilya had looked down at himself and realized it was true. He really was trembling all over. So he had given in and let Hazy drive him back to Shane’s—Ilya’s—their—

Back to the house. Hazy took him back to the house.

Yuna is outside, waiting for them, when they get there. “Oh, goodness,” she says, wrapping Ilya up into a hug. “I’m so happy to see you, honey. We’ve missed you.”

Ilya hugs her distractedly. “Yes, hi, good to see you, where is Shane?”

She purses her lips at him, vaguely chiding, but she’s smiling. “He’s inside. On a call with his neurologist, but I’m sure he can call her back, if you—“

Ilya is already halfway up the stairs.

He finds Shane in the kitchen, bent over the island. He’s got his phone to one ear and he’s saying something about headaches and when he sees Ilya he goes still. “Hey, I’m going to have to call you back,” he says, and hangs up the phone seemingly without waiting for a response.

“Ilya,” he says.

Ilya has no idea what to do with himself. “Hollander,” he says, with a nod that feels vaguely formal. “I heard—Hazy said you got your memories back.”

Shane nods quickly. “Yeah, they’re—they’re all here.” He taps his temple. 

Ilya nods again. God, they’re just two fucking nodding dolls, aren’t they. He feels like an idiot. “That’s good. That’s—a surprise, right? Last I heard, they didn’t think—“

“Ilya,” Shane interrupts, and Ilya suddenly can’t look at him anymore, so he goes to the corner and pulls out a glass and fills it up at the sink. He drinks slowly, thinking that it’s lucky that Shane hadn’t rearranged the kitchen while Ilya was gone. It’s good that he remembers where the glasses are. Shane likes to reorganize, when he’s stressed. Or maybe that was just a habit he picked up in his twenties?

Shane’s tentative voice: “Are you—okay?”

“I am fine, Hollander,” Ilya says. He can’t look at Shane or he’ll do something embarrassing like fall to his knees and beg him never to leave again. Instead, he stares resolutely out the window over the sink. The garden, carefully landscaped by hired hands. “I am glad you are, ah, feeling better.”

“Ilya,” Shane says. “Look at me.”

Ilya keeps staring at the plant out the window. Basil, he thinks it is, but right now it’s just a blurry mass of green. He blinks hard, but it doesn’t do much to improve the situation. “I am fine,” he says again.

“Ilya,” Shane says again, and then his hands are on Ilya’s neck, one sliding up to cup his cheek, the other knotting in his hair, and fuck, Ilya has missed that. The way that Shane holds him. The unbearable tenderness as Ilya—yes—finally turns and meets Shane’s eyes. “Sweetheart,” Shane says, and Ilya can’t help it: he bursts into tears.

“Shh, shh,” Shane comforts, pulling Ilya tighter into his strong, warm grip. “It’s okay, now. You’re okay.”

In the background, Ilya can vaguely making out Wyatt muttering excuses to Yuna, the shuffling footsteps of people escaping the room. He shoves his face into Shane’s shoulder and tries to block it all out—block out anything that isn’t Shane, the minty smell of him and the soft flannel of his shirt against Ilya’s face and the heat of his jaw where it presses against Ilya’s cheek. His hands on Ilya’s back, rubbing in circles just like the ones Ilya’s mother would rub onto his back, when he was a small child and woke up from a nightmare and couldn’t go back to sleep.

“I missed you,” Shane is saying into Ilya’s hair. “Fuck, Ilya, I missed you so much.”

Ilya sniffles, pulling his face out of Shane’s neck so he can press their foreheads together and kiss him. That beautiful mouth slots against his own easily, effortlessly, like he had never left.

“You didn’t remember me,” Ilya says, when they break apart.

Shane nods. “And I missed you,” he says, like an agreement.

Ilya’s face crumples. “Shane.”

Shane kisses him again. His lips, his teeth, the taste of his tongue. His fingers digging into Ilya’s scalp the way they always do, because he’s obsessed with Ilya’s curls and running his fingers through them, even when it hopelessly tangles Ilya’s hair. Just brush it out, Shane always says, because his own hair is so pin straight he can’t fathom the idea that brushing your hair might actually just make it look worse.

Ilya loves him, he loves him, he loves him.

“I missed you,” Ilya says. “I love you. I don’t—I don't know how else to say it. I just missed you so fucking much."

Shane knocks their foreheads together. His breath gusting over Ilya’s lips. The hot line of his cock against Ilya’s thigh, because they haven’t fucked in months and their bodies are used to no more than twenty-four hours between rounds. Ilya has a crazy urge to stick his hands down Shane’s pants and cup his cock, just to refamiliarize himself with it, but the door’s not locked and Shane’s parents are in the other room. He behaves.

Shane is less chaste. Kissing Ilya’s chin, under his chin, the line of Ilya’s throat. “You are my favorite person,” Shane says, settling in around Ilya’s collarbone.

“You did not want to talk to me,” Ilya says. “You did not want to even see me.“

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you,” Shane says. “I just didn’t know what to do. I was a stupid little nineteen year old again who thought the worst thing in the world was being obviously gay, and then I looked at you and I felt like my heart was melting and I just knew there was no way I could hide it if you were always around.”

“Hollander,” Ilya says, biting his lip as Shane bites at his Adam’s apple. “We’re married.”

“I know,” Shane says. “Thank fucking god.”

Ilya’s hips buck, involuntary. “Are you trying to give everyone a show? I did not take you for an exhibitionist, Hollander.”

Shane pulls back and smiles at him. “There you are,” he says.

Ilya rubs a thumb over Shane’s face and thinks the same thing. There you are, there you are, there you are, his heart thrumming with love.

—

It’s only mid-day and someone orders lunch. They eat at the kitchen table and Shane pulls his chair up to Ilya’s so he can press their thighs together. Hazy devours like four chicken schwarma pitas before making his excuses and ducking out, telling Ilya that he can come over whenever to get his shit. Yuna and David linger a little longer, managing conference calls with Shane’s doctors, but once they’ve got appointments on the books for the coming week, they make their way out the doors too.

“Make good choices!” Yuna calls as the front door swings shut behind them. Shane is bright red, but he’s laughing, and Ilya doesn’t wait any longer to drag him to bed.

Shane, Shane, Shane. Ilya feels drunk on him, the feel of his skin, his gasping sighs. Maybe there’s a drug in his saliva, or something. Maybe Ilya has a secret pressure point that makes him go insane and Shane is the only one who knows just where it is, how to press it right.

“Ilya,” Shane moans into the pillows. “Ilya, please, please.”

“I’ll give you what you need,” Ilya promises him, rocking forward hard and sending Shane’s face rubbing across the pillowcase. “I always give you what I need, don’t I?”

“Always,” Shane agrees. “Always, always, oh fuck—“

For a while, Ilya doesn’t think.

—

“I’m scared,” Ilya confesses afterwards, in the dark of their bedroom, his lips pressed to Shane’s neck.

Shane kisses Ilya’s forehead. “I know,” he says. “But you’re also brave.”

—

They order pizza for dinner, and Shane only wrinkles his nose slightly before giving in. Ilya gets himself double-pepperoni, orders Shane some stupidly healthy vegetarian thing. They eat on the couch, feet tangled together.

“I should say,” Shane says, around a mouthful of crust. “Not all my memories came back.”

Ilya stills. “No?”

“No,” Shane admits. “I’m still missing the month before the concussion. When I talked to Dr. Chandry on the phone this morning, she said it probably won’t come back.”

A month. It’s a long time. Thirty walks with Anya, thirty dinners, a handful of hockey games, a handful of goals. 

Very little, in the grand scheme of a life.

Ilya swallows hard. “Well,” he says. “I guess I will just have to tell you about it. We made some important decisions, then, Hollander.”

Shane raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Ilya nods. “Yes,” he says. “For example, we decided that we would eat pizza at least one night a week. Also, that I would never do any chores, ever, and that we would get three more dogs, and—hey!”

Shane has grabbed Ilya by the foot and yanked him halfway across the cushion so he’s leaning his weight on Shane to stay balanced. Shane grabs Ilya’s chin in one hand and squeezes. “You’re so full of shit,” he says. “I will negotiate you down to one pizza night a month.”

A slow smile spreads over Ilya’s face. “Once every two weeks,” he bargains. “And you never forget me ever again.”

Shane holds out a hand. “Deal.” 

They shake on it. Eventually, they've been shaking hands for so long it stops being a handshake and just turns into them holding hands. Ilya squeezes Shanes palm hard, and Shane squeezes back even harder, always trying to one-up him. His grip is so tight that Ilya thinks the grooves of their fingerprints must be nestled together. It's so tight that Ilya can feel Shane’s heartbeat, steady and slow, fluttering like a bird in Ilya's palm.