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Yuna Hollander loves her son, and she knows that he is different. There’s the obvious, of course - the fact that he’s the only Asian kid on his hockey team, for example, and has been since he was twelve. Also the fact that he’s the best. You’d have to be blind to miss that one.
Then there are more subtle things a mother sees. How his hyper-organized room is the complete opposite of his peers’. His earnest shyness; how often he misses jokes and innuendo; how hard he pushes himself to succeed. She would not change a hair on Shane’s head, but sometimes she can’t help but be terrified for him. It’s hard enough to make it to the MLH. It’s hard enough to be mixed race. Add them together, and top it off not only with his perfectionism but with how he tends to gravitate towards being alone?
“David,” she murmurs, watching Shane force a miserable smile as he holds up two fingers for his draft pick. “Our baby, he’s going to be happy, right?” He’s a top three pick and signed to Montreal, which is amazing, but Yuna knows her son will take today as a failure rather than the incredible accomplishment it is. She can’t help but hate Rozanov; he’s so smug, with none of Shane’s humility or respect for the sport. Him, really?
David puts his arm around her shoulders and squeezes, but he doesn’t make any promises. They both understand happiness is not something you can ensure. Though God knows Yuna has done her utmost with every waking breath to get Shane the best coaching, the best shoes, the best deals, the best of everything.
She just hopes that it’s enough.
“A Swedish princess?” David chides her, so gently.
Yuna sighs. “I don’t know!”
It’s just that she still wants the best for Shane. She had been happy that he didn’t get distracted with dating, at first. He’d gone steady with one girl for a while, but so half-heartedly nobody was surprised when they amicably broke up after graduation. Of course he’d prioritize hockey over chasing skirts, at least until he landed where he belonged in the MLH, Yuna thought. He was so driven, her perfect boy.
But somehow, romance never clicked for him in the years after the draft, either.
It’s not as if he’s sleeping around. His only free time to do so would be in the lull after away games, and she has it on good intelligence that he skips the bar every time. She’s proud of him for not collecting puck bunnies the way womanizers like Rozanov do; Cheap sex isn’t anything to prioritize. But shouldn’t there be at last one interesting, attractive woman who could become a part of Shane’s life?
Yuna tries to help set him up with friends of friends’ daughters. Shane brushes her off. Or if she pushes, then he’ll go on exactly three dates before it peters out. I’m too busy, he says. You can make time, she encourages, and she means it. He can prioritize his happiness at this point, surely? She has all the compromises he could make with training and promo on the tip of her tongue if he only gives her the go-ahead.
Instead he shrugs and points out that he’s got to keep focus or he might lose to Rozanov in the scoring race (fucking Rozanov!), and that’s the end of it.
It’s one more difference. One more thing she can’t help but worry about. David makes her so happy. Who will do that for Shane?
Yuna knows, before she admits she knows. A few years before the humiliating princess incident, her friend Amelia asks her, “So, what happened between Shane and Beth? I guess she’s seeing another resident, now. Did he say anything?”
“Oh,” Yuna says, and takes a drink of her americano to buy time. Shane had not mentioned that he’d stopped seeing Amelia’s daughter to Yuna. It feels completely expected, at the same time. “I don’t know, the only thing he can commit to is hockey.” She forces a rueful laugh. And then, because Amelia is her friend and she can’t hold it in, “It seems like with him it’s always three dates and then bam, no thank you.”
Amelia gives a sympathetic hum and drinks her own coffee. Then, carefully, “well, third date… maybe it’s, you know, a compatibility thing. Chemistry?”
Yuna swallows. She remembers how, in Shane’s perfectly organized room, she had snooped just a little and found only hockey magazines, nothing racier than the body issue. How there had never been an errant tab left open on a shared computer, never a poster of any movie star taped on his wall. She’d never had to ask him to keep his door open when his high school girlfriend came over, even. Each time Shane guilelessly set them up in the living room.
Years later, when Rose Landry, sex symbol movie star, gets the same exact three-date treatment, Yuna finally names it.
Her son, Shane Hollander, is asexual.
Yuna acclimates to this, over long months. Shane will not have the life she imagined for him, the traditional one with a supportive partner and a wedding and grandchildren. The supposed inevitability of that future had blinded her to the facts.
Now that she knows, it’s no longer a mystery the way he doesn’t even seem to notice when a gorgeous woman flutters her lashes and says she’s a big fan. It’s expected when he squirms and redirects at the mere suggestion of sex. That’s not something he wants for himself, ever.
At first it scares her to think that he’ll never have the head-over-heels romance she and his father did. But, well, it’s good for him to have a life that suits him. In a way, she thinks with forced cheer, it’s nice she’ll never have to share him, isn’t it? Never have to pretend to like a girl she actually finds annoying? Even if it’s one more difference, even if it seems like it would be so lonely.
Yuna goes into planning mode, which has always been her comfort zone. She reads books, blogs, wonders how to let him know it’s okay to come out to her. Maybe he can find a partner with similar needs, or lack thereof. Romance isn’t the same as sex, right?
In any case he’ll need friends. More than he has now, and more intimate ones to be his extended family. Maybe she can host some holiday barbecues, help him build up more of a community? He goes over to Hayden’s all the time, she could start there. As soon as David gets back from the cottage with his charger, she’ll ask his opinion.
But when David gets back, he looks like he’s seen a ghost.
Yuna is primed to worry. That “silent retreat” idea had seemed a bit off from the start.
“What happened? Is Shane okay?”
When he just stares shell-shocked into the middle distance, Yuna grabs his elbow. At this he shakes his head as if waking up. “Ah, yeah. I mean, nothing. He’s good. Fine. He’ll tell us when he’s ready.” David nods.
“Tell us what?” Yuna demands, eyes narrowed. She does not like missing information.
David won’t be pressured into admitting whatever he saw, but that barely delays the inevitable. Shane comes to tell them himself not half an hour later.
“I’m gay,” her son says, and, as if she didn’t know: “This is Ilya Rozanov.”
The conversation goes well, actually. There are fits and starts and a few surprises (their rookie season?!) but Rozan- Ilya is unexpectedly sweet. She kind of gets what Shane sees in him. Mostly.
She congratulates herself when they leave that she never let her frantic excuses bubble up: But I asked you, don’t you remember? It’s not like it didn’t cross my mind. I said or maybe a guy…? five full years ago when we were talking about setting you up with someone. And you said, oh my God mom, no. I am not… and you couldn’t even say the word. And I believed you, how is that my fault?
But it’s her fault because she was relieved. Because she’d said maybe a guy like she would have said, maybe it’s sprained? While Shane was five years into his situationship with a man Yuna publicly shat on as the enemy. He couldn’t tell Yuna, even when she tried to ask outright, because of how impossible she made it to be any more different than he already was.
It’s only because I love you so much, she does not say. It’s only because I wanted things to be easier for you. She’s seeing now that it was not that, it was not loving to decide that Shane was satisfied without sex rather than admitting the obvious. It was not easier for him to hide what he felt for Ro- Ilya.
But he forgives her, and they plan to have dinner together at the cottage, and it will be okay.
And it almost is okay. But then at dinner Yuna slips up and does something very stupid.
The way it happens is this: Yuna gets a bit too wine-drunk and admits, “you know, Shane, I actually thought you might be asexual when…”
And then Ilya snorts with such automatic and confident derision that Yuna has war flashbacks of numerous very specific details she’d refused to internalize the day before.
Lovers.
Obviously it wasn’t on purpose. Yuna can see that the second their eyes meet. Ilya, poor thing, looks as awkward as he had when she met him in the elevators the summer before, when she’d been going down to dinner and he’d been going up to (she does the math without meaning to) fuck her son. Lovers.
Shane hisses, “Ilya!” Not in the way that you do when someone’s made a bad joke, but in the way you do when they’ve revealed something very, very true.
“Sorry, I did not…” Ilya mutters. Both of them are beet red. Hell, Yuna probably is too.
“No, no,” Yuna says brightly. “I shouldn’t have… Brought it up.” Because no mother really wants to think about her son’s apparently voracious sexual appetite, especially a mother who’s spent the last few years safely convinced that he was celibate. Even now, she’d tacitly assumed that he preferred polite missionary with the lights down, as is a mother’s right.
But now this mother was unwilling thinking quite a bit about Shane’s sex life. Since the summer before rookie season, he’s been fucking around with Rozanov, who was admittedly the league’s biggest slut. And it had not been because of feelings, both of the boys were clear on that. Just… lovers.
Lovers of the type that, despite all the hot puck bunny sex Rozanov was unarguably getting, kept risking their entire careers to have rare interludes of logistically challenging, rushed hotel sex. Sex that, it followed, must still have been very enticing for Rozanov, whose bar for good sex was certainly higher than most. Interesting, intense, pent up hotel sex. Lovers.
And somehow that sex was good enough that, despite their rivalry, they connected to the point of falling in love. Not just falling in love, but fully committing to one another, and then proceeding to plan a full two week sexcation. One that Shane proactively pretended would be spent silently meditating, a lie calculated to ensure they would not be interrupted because, in actuality, they would be too busy fucking. Please text, they had stressed. We will lose track of time, and if you come over you will definitely see us going at it like rabbits. Because we are lovers.
“David,” Yuna croaks at 1am that night, into the dark where she knows David is awake because of her tossing and turning. “David, what did you see at Shane’s cottage? Were they…?”
“No,” he says, "Thank God. But Yuna… if I had come in fourty five seconds later…”
She moans, and puts both hands over her face. Lovers.
She will not be able to look at any flat surface in the cottage the same way, ever again. She may not be able to look at her son the same way. Why hadn’t she been more accepting, earlier? She would take a thousand safe sex lectures over this cursed knowledge. This is her just punishment from the universe.
“Lovers,” she sighs, letting her arms flop down onto the duvet.
“Lovers,” David agrees in the same exact tone of horrified, wry acceptance.
Yuna just hopes she’s getting grandchildren out of it.