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Shane woke up alone in the hotel room, which was, of course, the pinnacle of good decisions.
The other half of the bed looked like it had been vacated with purpose. The sheets were a tangled mess, but the man himself was conspicuously absent - there was no possessive limb thrown across Shane’s torso. Shane stared at the ceiling for a bit longer than his morning routine typically allowed. The feeling in his chest was more like a persistent stupidity - comparable to the hollow annoyance of realizing you've left your charger in another room.
He took a deep breath and then stopped breathing altogether.
Because the air was still full of Ilya.
Shane had a mental filing cabinet of things he disapproved of. Cigarette smoke was wedged in there firmly between skipping warm-ups and eating dessert for breakfast. It was a gross, clingy, invasive smell. It seeped into everything and never had the decency to ask first.
But this wasn't just smoke. This was smoke that had been taken for a long walk in the cold night air. It was mixed with the absurdly expensive and sharp scent of Ilya’s cologne, and something that smelled like city rooftops and quiet conversations. It smelled like the space between two in the morning and dawn, when the world was silent and so was Ilya.
This is not a healthy association to make, he thought. This is emotional attachment via olfactory sabotage. This is -
Right. Enough. Time to be a normal person with a normal morning. He would stretch, he would hydrate, and he would not dwell on the fact he’d secretly hooked up with his professional rival and was now weirdly bummed about eating breakfast solo.
He pushed himself up to sit - and that’s when his eyes landed on the hoodie.
It was slung over the chair by the window like it had made a break for freedom and then gotten tired. Black, with the Boston Bears logo screaming across the chest. Shane remembered how Ilya had shown up wearing it last night, looking as if popping into a rival player's hotel room was no bigger a deal than picking up a newspaper.
It must have been discarded somewhere between the door clicking shut and things becoming significantly less about… vertical conversation.
Shane got up and approached it cautiously, as if it might bite. Up close, it looked even bigger. It smelled, obviously and overwhelmingly, of Ilya.
Shane hesitated.
He was not a thief. He was a returner of things. He gave back extra change. He had once mailed a single sock back to a laundry service with a note.
However, Ilya had not worn this here by accident. Wearing a Boston hoodie in a Montreal-centric hotel was practically issuing a press release with glitter glue. He’d probably left it behind on purpose, for deniability.
Shane picked it up.
Just to relocate it, he reasoned.
The fabric was soft, well-worn, and still held the room's warmth. Then, in a move his conscious mind didn't entirely authorize, he pulled it over his head.
The bottom hem brushed his thighs. The sleeves extended past his fingertips. The whole thing settled around him like a cozy blanket.
The scent was everywhere now, a personal atmosphere of smoke and safety. It felt like a low laugh in a dark room, like a secret told without sarcasm.
Oh, for god’s sake, he thought, dismayed.
He glanced at the door, almost expecting Ilya to waltz back in, take one look at him, and deliver a line like, “Are you trying to become a souvenir?”
Shane swallowed.
If this hoodie were to, hypothetically, have a temporary layover in his possession, he would need a cover story. Airtight.
Option one: Accidental swap. Nonsense. That would imply Shane owned comparable Boston merch, which he did not.
Option two: Hotel laundry error. Laughable. Shane would rather fight a bear than outsource his laundry.
Option three: Ilya left it. Shane is holding it for safe return. This was technically true. The timeline for "return" was just… flexible.
He fiddled with the cuffs, rolling them up just enough to free his hands, and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. There he was: Shane Hollander, famously focused captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, a man known for his intense personal discipline. Currently swimming in his rival’s hoodie, looking like a kitten that stole a sweater.
I will return it, he resolved, firmly. After a wear. Or perhaps two. It was for… equilibrium purposes. Yes.
He walked back and sat on the edge of the bed, the huge hoodie puddling around him. The sheets still smelled like Ilya, but this was better.
~
Of course, Shane would later mark this as the official start of his kleptomania era.
It began simply, after bad games.
The first real slip was two weeks later, following a loss that stuck in his ribs long after the media had gotten their soundbites. He’d done everything right in the interview room: nodded solemnly, used “we” instead of “I,” and shouldered the blame like a good captain. But his bones still hummed with the echo of the missed open net, that fatal half-second of hesitation, the crushing weight of I should have been better.
He went through the motions. Followed the routine to the letter.
Then, without letting himself think about it too much, he reached into the dark recesses of his closet and pulled out one of Ilya’s jackets.
He told himself it was just fabric. He told himself it didn't mean a thing.
He wore it while doing his floor stretches, counting breaths. He wore it while attempting to meditate, eyes squeezed shut, his frantic thoughts slowing to a less-panicked swirl. He wore it while lying stiffly in bed, glaring at the hotel ceiling as if it were responsible for the scoreboard.
A pattern was born.
Bad game? Jacket.
Heartbreaker overtime loss? Hoodie.
Playoff pressure squeezing his lungs like a vice? The big coat. Always the coat.
Shane did not enjoy observing patterns in his own behavior. He observed this one anyway.
By midseason, the assortment had… expanded.
He refused to call it a collection. He preferred “temporary redistribution of assets.”
Ilya’s belongings began appearing in his space the way stray cats adopt a person. Jackets draped over his desk chair. Hoodies folded a little too perfectly on his shelf. A scarf once, which Shane had zero memory of acquiring and which made him feel peculiarly criminal.
And then there were the pockets.
The first discovery was a lighter shaped like a tiny hockey stick, the red plastic worn smooth from use. Shane turned it over in his palms for a full minute, baffled both by its existence and by how completely it summed up Ilya’s entire personality.
The second was receipts, in three different languages. One was for a coffee purchased, Shane was fairly sure, at four in the morning. Another was for an item Shane couldn't identify but strongly suspected was either very strong or very silly.
The third was a softly crumpled funeral program.
Shane sat on the edge of his bed with it carefully unfolded in his hands, the paper worn soft at the creases from repeated handling. He refolded it with excessive care and placed it back exactly where he’d found it.
After that, he avoided pocket-checking for a respectable period.
Until his curiosity betrayed him again.
The Polaroid fluttered out one evening as he fumbled for the zipper on a coat he definitely had not meant to take.
It was the two of them bundled in ridiculous winter gear, squinting at the camera with identical expressions of exaggerated solemnity. Russia. That absurd tourist booth. They’d taken it as a joke - a piece of evidence to prove they’d survived the trip without murdering each other.
Shane had always assumed Ilya had lost it.
Apparently, he’d been wrong.
Shane stayed on the floor for a long time, the coat pooling around him. He did not return it to the pocket.
Instead, he opened his nightstand drawer and slid it inside, choosing very deliberately not to examine what that action meant.
Ilya, of course, noticed.
Ilya noticed everything; he just enjoyed pretending he was oblivious. The first complaint was almost an afterthought.
“Where’s my black hoodie? The one that’s actually comfortable?”
Shane didn’t glance up from his phone. “Laundry mix-up,” he said smoothly. “Might have ended up in my bag.”
Ilya snorted. “You separate your laundry by fiber content and season.”
Shane had no rebuttal for that.
The second time, it was a jacket. Again.
“You’re pilfering my wardrobe, Mr. Real Estate.”
“I am not,” Shane said, sounding appropriately offended. “You leave them lying around.”
“In my own room.”
“You bring them into my room,” Shane countered, which was, on occasion, technically true.
The third time, Ilya just looked him up and down slowly. “You do realize you’re wearing my coat right now, yes?”
Shane glanced down at the sleeves covering his knuckles, then back up, his heartbeat perfectly steady because he had rehearsed for this moment. “Oh. Huh. Must have grabbed it by mistake. We have similar… builds.”
Ilya laughed so hard he had to sit on the bed to recover.
After that, it evolved into an ongoing game.
Ilya would issue a half-hearted grievance. Shane would deploy a meticulously crafted excuse. Left it at the practice rink. Accidentally packed after that trip. Needed an extra layer on the bus. Borrowing it for climatic reasons. Borrowing it for unspecified but legitimate purposes.
Ilya never pressed too hard.
Sometimes he’d just watch Shane with that unreadable look, his eyes lingering when Shane pushed up sleeves that were obviously several inches too long.
Sometimes he’d say nothing at all, and a few days later, another sweater would appear draped over the back of Shane’s couch like a peace offering.
Shane told himself it was a passing phase. He told himself he had everything under perfect control.
~
Rose found out entirely by accident, which was, in retrospect, Shane’s first critical error. His second was assuming that "accident" meant she wouldn’t immediately launch a full-scale investigation.
They were on one of their regular video calls - Rose leaning against her headboard with a mug of tea, Shane perched on the very edge of his hotel bed, maintaining picture-perfect posture even in sweatpants. The conversation was standard: upcoming charity events, her week, his sleep (adequate), his diet (sufficient), his general state of being (completely fine).
At one point, Shane stood to fetch his charger from the dresser.
It didn’t occur to him to check his background. It escaped him that Rose had a PhD in Shane Hollander Behavior and could spot a discrepancy from three time zones away.
The silence on her end became suddenly very loud.
Shane turned back, charger in hand, and felt the shift immediately.
“…Shane,” she said, her voice deliberately slow.
He froze mid-step. “Yes?”
“Why,” she continued, “do you have what looks like seven jackets that are distinctly not your style hanging in your open closet?”
Shane glanced over his shoulder.
The camera’s view had captured it all. The parade of dark, oversized shapes. The slouchy hoodies. The Boston Bears logo, visible on at least two items, smirking at him from the shadows.
“They aren’t - ” he began, then stopped. Rose was already smiling. It was a perceptive, terrifying, I-know-what-you-ate-for-breakfast-last-Tuesday smile.
“Are you… curating a collection?” she asked.
“No.”
“That was a very defensive ‘no.’”
“They’re not a collection. They’re in temporary storage.”
Rose took a long sip of tea. “Whose temporary storage are they in?”
Shane considered a lie. Then he remembered he was speaking to the human equivalent of a polygraph test.
“Ilya’s,” he said, the word barely above a murmur.
Rose blinked. “Oh.”
Somehow, her understanding was infinitely worse than outright judgment.
They attempted to change the subject. But for the rest of the call, Shane was hyper-aware of the closet behind him, half-expecting the jackets to stage a coup and announce his crimes themselves. The moment they hung up, he lunged for the closet door and slid it shut, his heart pounding like he’d just smuggled a penguin through customs.
He had just finished desperately reorganizing the jackets - pushing them to one side, trying to make them look less like a shrine - when his phone buzzed.
Three links followed.
Shane stared at the screen. The preview snippets alone seemed to accuse him: compulsive behavior, emotional attachment objects, stress response rituals. It was unfair, as he hadn’t even clicked them yet.
He typed back.
Shane closed his eyes.
“That was one time!” Shane muttered to his empty room, his face heating.
With a sense of grim duty, Shane opened the first article.
Stress-induced attachment. Comfort-seeking through objects associated with safety. Avoidance of direct emotional vulnerability. Substitution behaviors in high-performance individuals.
Shane huffed a weak laugh.
Maybe he should tell him.
~
Shane decided to deliver his confession as if it were a top-level security breach.
This meant he rehearsed two separate monologues in his head, scrapped both for being either too clinical or too deranged, and finally ambushed Ilya in the least conducive setting possible: Ilya's own hotel room, with the curtains half-closed and Ilya lounging on the bed.
Shane stood just inside the doorway, rigid as a flagpole, hands clasped tightly behind his back like a general about to deliver very bad news from the front.
Ilya glanced up from his phone, his eyes drifting over Shane’s tense form (draped with Ilay’s jacket). “You look like you’re here to tell me you’ve accidentally sold my soul on the internet.”
“I need to speak with you,” Shane announced, his voice strangely formal.
Ilya’s eyebrow arched. “That never sounds fun.”
Shane took a sharp breath. Then launched.
“Alright. This concerns personal boundaries, and behavioral habits, and stress-related coping mechanisms. I want to state for the record that I have the utmost respect for personal property and individual autonomy. This is not a typical behavior for me, except it has, statistically, become a pattern. But not a criminal pattern. More of a… a neurological glitch.”
Ilya slowly set his phone aside.
Shane’s words began to accelerate, his hands finally breaking free to flutter in the air as if conducting his own panic. “The postseason pressure has been significant, and my tolerance for loss is suboptimal, and there’s this concept called sensory regulation that I’ve only recently researched, and while it’s not physically detrimental, emotionally it might be problematic, and I want to be clear that cessation was always the intended goal - ”
He cut himself off abruptly, chest rising and falling as if he’d just sprinted here. He stared at Ilya, wide-eyed, like he’d just admitted to poisoning the team Gatorade.
With flawless deadpan delivery, Ilya said, “You know theft is generally frowned upon, right?”
“It was a temporary relocation!” Shane sputtered, horrified. “With full intent to return!”
Ilya tilted his head. “You even folded them. And washed them. My hoodie smells like your obnoxiously expensive cedarwood detergent.”
“There were… olfactory considerations.”
“Should I be touched or terrified?” Ilya asked, his tone dangerously mild.
Shane swallowed. “Possibly both?”
Something in Ilya’s expression shifted, as if he’d just noticed a fascinating, flustered species of bird in his room. He leaned back, crossing his arms.
“You are nesting in my clothes.”
Shane blinked. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means,” Ilya said, looking unbearably smug, “you are a catastrophe.”
Shane drew himself up, summoning every ounce of his captain’s dignity. “You can have everything back. Today. I’ve already reorganized my closet to eliminate the… the temptations.”
Ilya hummed, nodding thoughtfully as if weighing the terms of a treaty.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Then I will just give them to you.”
“No,” Shane said quickly. “That defeats the entire purpose. Then it would be intentional.”
Ilya smiled.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You have stumbled into intimacy.”
Shane stared at him. “That is a mischaracterization. This is not - ”
Ilya stood, closing the distance between them without a hint of hesitation. He reached out and pinched the sleeve of the jacket Shane was wearing - the very jacket Shane hadn’t even consciously registered putting on that morning.
“You look better in them anyway,” Ilya remarked. “It’s a good look for you.”
Shane groaned, dropping his forehead toward Ilya’s shoulder.
“And,” Ilya continued, his amusement warming his voice, “I will forgive you. It will be very easy.”
Shane lifted his head, eyeing him with suspicion. “That feels like the setup for an unfair negotiation.”
“It is.”
Ilya leaned in before Shane could protest further. The kiss was warm and unhurried, like Ilya had decided exactly how much of it Shane could handle and was enjoying giving him just that. His mouth was soft, familiar now in a way that still startled Shane, the kind of closeness that made his breath catch even as his hands curled reflexively in the fabric of Ilya’s sleeve.
It wasn’t demanding. It lingered just long enough to leave Shane acutely aware of the space between them when Ilya pulled back, foreheads nearly touching.
Ilya stayed there, close enough that Shane could feel his breath, smell the faint trace of smoke and cologne that had started this whole mess. He murmured the words right against Shane’s mouth, voice low and infuriatingly pleased.
“Wear my jersey to the next game.”
Shane pulled back just enough to see Ilya’s face. “That’s publicly visible.”
“Yes.”
“That would be intentional,” Shane repeated, the word now sounding entirely different.
Ilya’s eyes gleamed with open triumph. “Exactly.”
Shane shook his head, reaching for deflection like it was a life raft. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. From a media standpoint. Jerseys have significance. You don’t just - ”
Ilya stepped closer. “You’re overthinking.”
“I am thinking the correct amount,” Shane insisted. “This is a rivalry game. People zoom in.”
“They already zoom in,” Ilya said easily. “You just don’t notice.”
Shane tried again. “What if it becomes a thing?”
Ilya smiled. “It already is.”
Shane exhaled through his nose. “This is manipulation.”
“Affection,” Ilya corrected. “With incentives.”
Shane looked away, jaw tight, brain scrambling for a rational objection. Something about professionalism. Or luck. Or the sanctity of team colors. Anything that didn’t sound like I don’t want people to see how much I like you.
Nothing came.
Instead, unhelpfully, his mind supplied the image: the weight of the jersey on his shoulders. The familiar smell. Ilya’s name across his back. The way Ilya would look at him from the ice, knowing Shane had agreed.
Shane wasn’t… entirely opposed to it. He guessed.
He glanced back at Ilya, who was watching him with infuriating patience, like he already knew how this ended.
“I reserve the right to regret this,” Shane said finally.
Ilya’s grin softened, just a little. “You reserve a lot of rights you never use.”
Shane’s ears burned.
“Fine,” he said. “But if we lose, I’m blaming you.”
Ilya’s eyes lit up like he’d won something important.
“Deal,” he said. “But when you play out of your mind, I’m taking credit.”
Shane shook his head, heart racing, already resigned to the fact that he was going to do it. He was almost looking forward to it.