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Shane rolls over in bed, still groggy and half asleep until he realizes his husband’s side of the bed is empty and cold.
He glances down at the foot of the bed, where Anya usually sleeps. She’s not there, either.
The clock on his bedside table tells Shane it’s three-fifteen in the morning. Ilya had teased him for years over his insistence on needing a clock in the bedroom, telling him it was one of the Shane-est, most neurotic things a person could do. He’d insisted that a phone was the only timekeeping device anyone needed.
Now, though, Shane likes to remind his husband that if it hadn’t been for the alarm he’d set that morning three weeks ago on this very same alarm clock, they might have missed the landline call that changed their lives forever.
Ilya doesn’t tease him about the clock much anymore.
Shane gets out of bed and pulls on his robe before toeing into his slippers. It’s cold at the cabin this time of year, even for someone with his Canadian blood. If Ilya is where Shane thinks he is he’ll want his arms to be as warm as possible.
When he walks into the main room and sees Ilya on the couch, holding their swaddled infant daughter in his arms and gazing down at her like she hung all the stars in the sky, it’s just like the first time Shane walked in on this tableau. Will he ever get used to so much heart stopping joy? It feels impossible that he gets to have all this-- Ilya, his husband, whispering sweet Russian words to their Katya; and Anya lying at Ilya’s feet as though standing sentinel over their new little family.
It feels like Shane’s heart stops and then starts up all over again, all the air punched right out of his lungs before he can properly breathe again, every single time.
Shane tiptoes into the room and gingerly sits on the couch beside Ilya so as not to wake their daughter.
“She looks like me,” Ilya says in a low, matter-of-fact voice.
Shane snorts. They’ve been over this. “She doesn’t look like either of us. We adopted her.”
“Does not matter.” Ilya traces a fingertip gently along their sleeping daughter’s cheek. Katya is, according to her pediatrician, a little small for her age. In Ilya’s large hands she looks no larger than a doll. Her little bow mouth works a little but she doesn’t wake up. Shane wonders what she’s dreaming about. “In Russia, daughters look like their fathers always.”
“You made that up.”
“I did not.”
Shane is grinning now. “I’m her father too, you know,” he reminds him. “Do you think she looks like me too?”
Ilya makes a show of looking closely at their daughter, then back at him. He shrugs a shoulder. “No.”
Shane feigns outrage. “No?”
“It is okay,” Ilya says, eyes back on the sleeping bundle in his arms. “You are not Russian.”
Shane wraps an arm around his husband and rests his cheek on his shoulder. “She’s so beautiful,” he breathes.
“She is.” Ilya has dropped the act now and sounds just as awestruck as Shane. “I still…” Ilya trails off. Closes his eyes. They’ve talked about this often, how overcome they are with emotion now that Katya is in their lives. How every day it feels like their hearts are full to bursting. “I still cannot believe she is ours. That we were chosen to raise her.”
Then he yawns so widely that Shane wonders just how long he’s been out here instead of sleeping.
Shane pokes his side with a finger. “Get some sleep. I’ll take the next shift.”
Shane expects a fight about this—Ilya never hands their daughter over to anyone without grumbling about it, not even to him—but this time Ilya simply nods. Maybe he hasn’t gone to bed yet at all.
He hands over the bundle into Shane’s waiting arms, and—god. This is another thing he will never get used to.
Shane’s arms are athlete’s arms, useful for lifting weights and taking shots on goal. They exist to grip, and lift, and strike. When he found Ilya, holding him gave Shane’s arms another purpose for the first time. Now, incredibly, they have another purpose still.
Katya moves a thumb to her mouth and begins to suck on it in her sleep. Shane watches her, transfixed. He has no idea how fingers that small can have two entire grown hockey players wrapped so tightly around them, but somehow, Katya has found a way.
“Do not make plans for her future hockey career while I am sleeping,” Ilya warns.
Shane chuckles. Another frequent topic of discussion. They joke about how they need to get her started in hockey as soon as she's able to walk, but the truth is they both want a childhood that's less pressured for Katya than the ones they themselves had.
Certainly they can wait until she's, say -- three years old--before getting her her first skates.
“No,” he agrees. “That’s something the two of us will do together.”