Chapter Text
When sixteen-year-old Patty Whitman makes eye contact with Ilya Rozanov as he gets out of some clunky Range Rover at Ottawa International Airport, she realizes she listens to too many true crime podcasts, because her first thought is, oh no, I’m gonna die.
He looks so mad.
She doesn’t understand why until he leans back into the vehicle to get his bag, and she sees him waving goodbye to… is that Shane Hollander?
Patty isn’t super into sports, but everyone knows who those two are. What she doesn’t know is why Shane is dropping Ilya off at the Ottawa airport. Somehow, she doesn’t think the Montreal Metros’ Enemy Number One is being dropped off to spend a weekend with his dad in New York City, the way she, child of divorce, is. It’s an odd thing that 1) he’s there and 2) with the man everyone knows is his Mortal Hockey Nemesis.
Backing out of the car, Ilya’s eyes meet Patty’s again, and they are no friendlier. He is a fairly large, powerful looking man with a scowl on his face. Patty shudders and kisses her mom goodbye without a word. Then she heads straight in to drop her bag for her flight and over to the nearest Timmy’s counter.
She feels eyes on her as she’s picking out her morning donuts, and it’s him. Clutching a tiny red paper cup in his stupidly big hand. He is watching her very closely as she pays for her stuff.
Then he makes his approach as she’s stirring cinnamon into her coffee. "Hello," he says, looming over her.
"Eep," she squeaks back.
His brow furrows in a frown. “You are afraid?”
“No, Captain Perceptive, I’m totally cool with this totally normal situation,” Patty snaps, clutching the bag with her two vanilla dip donuts close to her chest.
He frowns more, and then his face clears up. “Oh, is sarcasm.” A nod. “Come sit. Please.”
This is Canada, and he is a celebrity, so people are definitely looking at them, but in that very Canadian way that heavily utilizes peripheral vision. They are not bothered as they make their way to one of the tiny tables and sit down.
The entire situation is wholly bizarre to Patty, who had begun her day with a mild sense of dread about going to stay with her dad and his new wife and her three small step-siblings, whom she would undoubtedly spend the next six weeks babysitting as she had over March Break. Now the dread is not mild in the slightest, and she is sitting across from Boston’s top hockey player, who for some weird reason was dropped off at the Ottawa airport by Montreal’s top hockey player. Whom he was supposed to hate.
It wasn’t adding up. This is weird.
***
Ilya knows within ten seconds of sitting down with this scrawny, stubborn teenage girl that she has no idea what she just saw between himself and Shane.
He’s a hockey player. Plus, he grew up with the father and brother that he did. Reading people is a deeply engrained survival skill for him. The girl is defensive and wary in a way that makes his heart hurt a little bit to see. But she’s not sneering knowingly at him, not leaning across the table to tell him she's figured out his secret.
She’s just a kid glaring at him from under a mop of ginger curls, with some donuts in a bag and a coffee cooling off in front of her. “Please,” Ilya says. “Have breakfast.”
He has to figure out how to salvage this situation, and quickly. Clearly he’s overreacted to being seen getting out of Shane’s weird not-Jeep, and now this girl was, to borrow a phrase from his shiny new boyfriend, freaking out. He feels bad about it.
Slowly, her fingers with their bitten down, purple glitter-coated nails loosen from around the paper bag in her hand and she puts it down on the table. Her eyes don’t leave Ilya as she pulls out a slightly squashed sprinkle-coated donut and starts to eat it. “So,” she says, blue eyes narrowed, “what is… this…” she waves her free hand between the two of them, “all about?”
Twenty minutes ago, Ilya was in a bubble of bliss after his weeks at Shane’s cottage. A little down about not being able to kiss Shane goodbye already, Ilya’s mood changed entirely when he made eye contact with a mop-topped, freckle-faced kid in a ratty gray University of Ottawa hoodie. A kid he had just stalked to an airport Tim Horton’s and scared to death. He can just see Shane putting his head in his hands and mumbling, damn it, Ilya.
So, okay. He decides that now is as good a time as any to start building up the cover story he and Shane had begun working on during their time away. “I think you have questions about why I am here,” he begins.
“Mostly I want to know why you just followed a teenage girl through the airport looking like a hitman,” she shot back.
She is definitely not even a little curious in the bad way about seeing him and Shane together. That’s good. Unfortunately, he can’t answer the question she does have, mostly because he hasn’t thought of an answer yet. He’s great at thinking at his feet on the ice, but none of that skill applies here. He can’t just hip-check a teenager into the nearest wall in the real world.
The girl blows out a sigh that makes her curly red bangs bounce. “Okay, fine. Why are you here? In Ottawa? Is that easier?”
It was. And would buy him time to figure out an answer to her other question if she came back to it. “You cannot tell anyone this,” he says, sipping his coffee and smiling in what he hopes is a comforting way, “but Shane Hollander and I are starting a charity. I came to Ottawa to discuss.”
The girl blinks. “A charity?”
“Yes.” He nods. “To benefit mental health programs.”
She doesn’t look at all less wary. “Just a charity? You stalked me to Tim Horton’s because you’re starting a charity?”
“It’s a secret,” Ilya says, feeling himself get flustered in that way he always hates. “No one is supposed to know, yet.”
“I squashed my vanilla dips because you freaked me out,” she says, her cheeks turning an angry shade of pink. “Over a charity!”
“I will buy you new ones,” he offers, pushing his chair back and standing up. “And new coffee. Your coffee is cold now, I think.”
“Sit down,” she orders, and not knowing what else to do, but very accustomed to obeying the women in his life, Ilya does.
They stare at each other for a minute before the girl finally shakes her head and sighs again. “Look, can you just like, say you’re sorry for scaring me?”
“I am sorry for scaring you,” Ilya says, very sincerely. “I forget sometimes that I can be…”
“A lot?” She snorts. “Yeah. You can be a lot.”
He decides they need to start over. “Hi. I am Ilya Rozanov. I play hockey. I'm starting a charity with Shane Hollander. I’m flying home to Boston.” Ilya extends a hand across the table.
She looks at him skeptically for a moment before reaching out and accepting it with a firm shake that he likes. “Patty Whitman. I’m in high school. I’m flying to New York to visit my dad and his new wife. And to babysit her kids.”
Four sentences, very simple, presented very directly. But they tell a whole story that Ilya Rozanov reads loud and clear, and suddenly, he knows that he would ride into battle and smack a bitch for Patty Whitman.