Chapter Text
Shane looked from Ilya to Kaya and back at Ilya. The hulking retired hockey player was silent—no, despondent. He looked powerless in the face of their screaming three-year-old. Shane didn’t know what to do either. “Where’d my parents go?”
Ilya helplessly waved around.
“Maybe we should just go home,” Shane said, “The kids are probably tired.”
Ilya nodded in resignation. Shane quickly made his excuses, and no one seemed upset by their decision to leave before having dessert.
Once on the road, Kaya and June were finally lulled to sleep by the Land Rover’s engine. Shane turned down the kids’ boppy Quebecois song “Les Couleurs” that had been stuck in his head for a year.
“Well… that sucked.” Shane said, stating the obvious. Ilya didn’t respond, his gaze focused out the passenger’s side window. “Want me to drive around a bit? I don’t really want to wake them up yet.”
“I just want to go home,” Ilya said.
“You sure? They’re so peaceful right now.”
“I’m sure,” Ilya hissed.
Shane flinched at his tone. “Is something wrong?”
“What do you think?” Ilya’s loaded question caught Shane off guard, and Shane said nothing. “Can you please just take us home. I can’t… not with…” Ilya motioned to the back seat.
Shane snuck a glance at Ilya, noticing a tightness in his jaw that hadn’t been there earlier. Shane tensed his grip on the steering wheel and signaled the exit for home. He thought back on the dinner… his mom’s comments, the kids’ tantrums…. Even though it had sucked, it still seemed within the realm of normal.
Ilya reached for the glove compartment and grabbed a piece of nicotine gum. The rancid scent wafted over Shane, tainting his memories of the dinner. “Don’t you have a different kind? That one stinks.” Ilya only returned a glare.
Great. Now he’d escaped his mother’s scrutiny and his father’s disastrous cooking, only to be stuck in the car with Ilya, who was clearly angry with him for some reason too serious to bring up in the presence of their nearly unconscious toddlers.
Shane’s frustration escalated with every turn, and when he finally pulled into the driveway, his brow was furrowed, his mouth was stuck in a hard line, and his pulse was pounding in his ears.
They each carried a kid inside, and Ilya briefly let Anya out to relieve herself. They brought the kids upstairs without uttering a word to each other.
Shane hoped the girls didn’t notice the chill between them as he helped Kaya into her pajamas and brushed her teeth. He tucked her in and mindlessly grabbed a book from the shelf to read to her. The words barely even registered. He only made it a few pages in before she was fast asleep.
Part of him was tempted to stay put in Kaya’s room and finish reading the book–maybe even the entire series–before heading to bed himself where he’d be forced to see Ilya again. But he figured he’d have to leave her room to pee at some point… Could he maybe just pee out the window? He’d probably be arrested. He could already imagine the headlines…
He finally got up and padded toward the door, only to be met face to face with Ilya, emerging from June’s room and looking about as happy to see him as Anya did when he brought out the nail clippers.
“I need a drink,” Ilya said, turning toward the stairs. Shane reluctantly followed his heavy strides to the kitchen.
Instead of a beer, Ilya fetched some vodka from the freezer and poured it into a tumbler.
“Do you think that’s going to help?” Shane’s thinly-veiled frustration was breaking through already.
Ilya glared at him and knocked back the vodka as if it was a challenge. Then he immediately refilled his glass.
“Just tell me what’s going on, Ilya.”
“I am so fucking tired,” Ilya started. His words came out quickly through his gritted teeth. “You won’t even acknowledge that you will have to retire someday.”
“I don’t want to talk about it when I come home. It’s the only place I'm not harassed about it.” Ilya scoffed at the accuracy of that statement and Shane’s obliviousness to how effortfully Ilya worked to maintain the illusion of peace.
Provoked already by Ilya’s nonverbal response, Shane’s voice rose again. “You seriously think I’m not thinking about it? I’m literally asked about it every fucking day!”
“Maybe I make things too easy for you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“God forbid being a parent interrupts your hockey career, Shane,” Ilya sneered, swigging his vodka. “You just pretend like nothing has changed. And every fucking day, I have to pretend with you. But I will not be pretending anymore. I gave up all of it so that you wouldn’t have to. And now you never have to do anything for them that would take you away from hockey.”
Shane flinched. He tried to find a single falsity in those words, but he couldn’t. Still, Ilya saying this felt so unfair. He had no idea Ilya resented him for continuing to play. He seemed to encourage it most of the time! They had an agreement, didn’t they?
“You chose that, Ilya! If you wanted me to retire too, you should’ve just said so!”
“I wanted you to get to choose, too!”
“Oh, yeah? Or did you just want me to make the same choice you did?”
“You are not listening to me.” His voice laced with warning. “I want you to make up your own mind, but you are not facing real life!”
“The fuck are you even talking about?”
“You are getting old, and now you are injured, and you are not taking that seriously. I will not hide your injuries for you. Not from your parents. That is not fair to me!”
“I didn’t ask you to do that! I didn’t ask you to do anything!”
“Maybe not, but you have never actually told me what you want me to do! And that is the fucking problem! Blyat!”
Ilya slammed down his glass on the stone countertop, spilling the last dregs of vodka. The crash reverberated through the air, shocking them both into a stunned trance. A moment passed before either of them realized the glass had cracked and collapsed into shards in Ilya’s hand. A crimson rivulet streamed down Ilya’s palm.
Shane moved first, wordlessly pulling Ilya’s bleeding hand under the faucet. They stood there watching the pink-tinged water swirl down the drain, both out of breath, Shane still clutching Ilya’s hand. It was several minutes before Ilya broke the silence.
“I yelled at Kaya today,” his voice was small, and if Shane hadn’t been standing right next to him, he wouldn’t have heard him over the water.
“What?” Shane racked his brain wondering what he missed. “When?”
“At dinner. At your parents’ house.” Ilya’s gaze was fixed on the streaming water.
“I don’t remember that.”
“You weren’t there. You were with June.”
“Tell me what happened.”
Ilya sighed. “I yelled, and she just started screaming and crying….”
“No, what happened before that? What made you yell?”
“I don’t know. I was feeling so angry, and she was throwing her food and…, it just came out.”
“What did you say to her?”
Ilya recoiled at the memory. He didn’t want to recount the moment, still haunted by the terror he’d provoked on Kaya’s face, but he eventually relented. Shane deserved to know. “Perestan' plakat' i yesh' ovoshchi,” Ilya muttered.
Shane quickly translated in his head, daring to glance up at him. He tried to quell the smile threatening to undercut the gravity of Ilya’s confession. “You told her to ‘eat her vegetables’?”
“You weren’t there Shane, it was not my words, I just… I was so harsh. And the look on her face… she was so scared…. I was scared, too.”
The water from his cut was running clear now. Shane’s hands traveled up to Ilya’s wrist. He traced the raised ligaments leading to his palm with his fingertips. There were no other wounds of note.
“I’m going to get the first aid kit, okay?” Ilya nodded.
Shane went to the pantry where they kept the stash of bandages and disinfectant. With two active toddlers in the home, it was frequently pilfered, and the various boxes of cartoon bandages were all mostly empty. Shane grabbed what remained of a few different sizes. When he returned, Ilya was seated on the tile floor, legs splayed, his back leaning against the cabinets, in the spot where Kaya often ended up while he and Shane worked on dinner.
“Careful of the glass.”
“It’s all on the counter, I think,” Ilya shrugged.
Shane knelt next him. “Let me see.”
Ilya held out his right hand. The shard had left a neat gash where a thin line of blood was seeping up again.
Shane spritzed it with antiseptic and waited until it was dry. Ilya watched him, his hand pliable in Shane’s grasp.
“Is Snoopy okay?” Shane asked, sizing up a bandage. Ilya nodded. Shane carefully covered the wound, the bright blue bandage dotted with the cartoon dog’s face. He massaged the edges to press the adhesive into place. The motions jostled Ilya’s wedding ring, and Shane couldn’t resist giving it an affectionate wiggle. It was firmly stuck beneath his knuckle.
He glanced up at Ilya again, who still looked inconsolable. “It happens, Ilya.” Shane said, still cradling his hand. “We all say things we regret. Kaya has probably forgotten about it already.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Well, can you try to explain it?”
“I sounded like….” Ilya gulped. “I sounded like my father.”
“Ilya, you’re not like him….” Shane stroked his curls in assurance.
Tears were welling in Ilya’s eyes, and he shook his head. “How do you know that? I am not so sure.”
“I see you with them every day. I see how patient you are, how supportive you are… Just because you snapped one time doesn’t negate those things. I’m pretty sure all parents yell sometimes… even the best ones. Kaya loves you so much. You’re her favorite person in the whole world.”
“You’re being sappy. And I still feel terrible.”
“It’s true! I’m sorry you feel terrible. Did you apologize?”
“I froze. And then you came back.”
“Maybe you could apologize to her tomorrow?”
Ilya sniffed and nodded.
“You’re an amazing father, Ilya. I mean that. Remember how you caught June today when she got pushed off the playground? That was hot as fuck! And like, a superhero dad move, too.”
That prompted a weak smile. “But I’m not like you, Shane. You never yell.”
“Oh, stop. I yelled five minutes ago! At you! And I don’t feel like a good father, either… like, a lot of the time,” Shane admitted.
“Why not?”
“I know I’m away a lot, but it’s not even that….” Shane’s voice hardened as if to state a fact on someone else’s behalf, “I just feel like… if I didn’t play hockey, I wouldn’t have anything else to give them. Playing hockey makes me think that maybe they have a reason to be proud that I’m their dad.”
“Shane, listen to yourself. You are Shane. Fucking. Hollander. And when–or,” Ilya rolled his eyes, “if–you retire, you will still be Shane Fucking Hollander… their dad who reads them boring books, and puts bandages on their ouchies, and wipes their pee off the slide with a napkin.”
“It was all I had in my pocket!”
“I still think you should have left it.”
“And let the other kids slide down? Gross!”
“Yes. Like a … what’s that called? Like a pee slip-and-slide.”
Shane laughed, amused and disgusted by the mental picture. Finally, he brought the conversation back to the issue at hand.
“You know, I will retire soon. For real.”
“Are you ever going to tell me when, or will you just stop going to practice one day?” Ilya asked, sarcasm creeping back in.
Shane rolled his eyes. “I want to win one more cup.” He looked away sheepishly. “...As captain.”
Ilya nodded. If anyone in the world could understand that drive, it was him. “So if you win this year, will you retire?”
“Yes.”
“And if you don’t win this year?”
“Then I’ll win next year, and I’ll retire,” Shane answered simply.
“And what if you don’t win next year?”
Shane gulped. “Then one more season and that’s it. Everything hurts all the time already. I don’t want to play into my forties.” He paused looking at Ilya for a reaction. He looked a bit weary, but Shane wasn’t sure if it was about Shane’s plans to keep playing, or their argument, or his lingering guilt over snapping at Kaya. “Look, this is the most important team I’m on.” Shane motioned between the two of them. “I won’t play anymore if that’s what you want.”
Ilya appraised him in silence. “That’s not what I want. What I don’t want to do is lie to your parents.” he said finally. “I think they would be better about it if you would tell them your plan.”
“You’re probably right.”
“‘Probably?’”
“You’re definitely right?”
“Da. You know I’m right.”
“I’m sorry I put you in that position. I’ll talk to them and let them know… if the plan is okay with you….”
Hearing Shane say that—that he would give it up if Ilya asked him to—only reminded Ilya that he didn’t actually want him to do that. He had promised Shane that he could make that choice for himself, and he intended to keep that promise. It was what Shane deserved. After all, he was Shane Fucking Hollander—the hockey king—the first version of Shane that Ilya had fallen for all those years ago. “Yes, it’s okay. I want you to win.”
“I won't be able to do it without you. Will you help me win, Rozanov?” Shane asked, assuming his captain tone—or, a slightly seductive version of his captain tone—one Ilya sometimes lamented that he never heard on the ice, but being on its receiving end at home never got old.
“Yes, and you will do it. You will win it for both of us.”
“For all of us.” Shane rested his forehead on Ilya’s. “I love you. And I’m sorry.”
“Come here.” Shane moved to straddle Ilya’s lap. Ilya raised his chin, and Shane wet his lips as he closed the distance between them. Ilya’s breath was laden with vodka, but Shane found himself liking the switch up, different from most other evening’s beer or minty toothpaste flavors. Tonight, vodka tasted more honest.
“I’m sorry, too,” Ilya said when they parted. “And I’m sorry for yelling.”
“I forgive you. And Kaya will forgive you, too.”
Ilya reached for Shane’s mouth again. He prodded Shane’s lips open with his tongue, and Shane eagerly deepened the kiss. Ilya gripped Shane’s ass, pulling him closer. He could feel Shane getting hard against his jeans as he dragged his lips over Ilya’s stubble.
“Kind of a bummer that both our hands are fucked up…” Shane said breathlessly, as Ilya shifted to scrape his teeth along Shane’s neck.
“Your mouth still works, though, yes?”
“Yeah, but my knees hurt already.”
“Hm…” Ilya’s brow furrowed. He pulled back and gripped Shane’s thighs, pressing his fingers on them as if performing a medical assessment. “I’m afraid I have some bad news…,” he said gravely. “This looks like a case of blow job knee.”
Shane snorted. “Oh no…. Is it serious, Dr. Rozanov?”
“Very. You might have to go on injured reserve.”
“Is there a cure for it? Wait–fuck, I know what you’re going to say…” Shane said, already giggling.
“Yes, Shane. And you’re very lucky, because—”
“Oh my God, don’t say it!”
“—the cure is hockey dick. And I happen to have one available, but we have to get you in bed before this gets any worse.” Ilya peeled Shane off of him, easier now that Shane was caught up in laughter. Ilya grunted as he rose to his feet. “Here, I’ll carry you. A special service for my most critical patients.”
“No! What if you hurt your back?”
“Are you calling me old, Shane?”
“Yes, but you’re hot, so… take me to bed, Dr. Rozanov,” Shane said, reaching for Ilya’s hand.