Archive of Our Own

It was mostly Shane’s fault, the way it all went down. He’d never been the best liar. He’d managed to keep quiet about being a gay hockey player for the first twenty seven years of his life by being totally unaware of his sexuality for the first eighteen years, and then deep in denial for another eight or nine. And because it was just so unthinkable, the idea of a gay hockey player. A really gay one, for real, not just whatever guys got up to in juniors, when they were were half out of their minds on teenage hormones and the freedom of their first ever roadies and not yet good or old enough to get attention from puck bunnies.

Shane had never participated in any of that. He’d always had a girlfriend, sort of. There’d always been girls around him, at the least. Shane had liked most of them, and he’d always tried to be diligent about calling and texting, because that was what you were supposed to do. The other guys liked to call him whipped, which had always seemed off to Shane, because none of the girls ever lasted longer than a few months. It didn’t matter, though, because it wasn’t like Shane had ever been invited to whatever secret alcohol-fueled jerk off circles there might have been, anyway.

That was probably most of the reason. That Shane was always apart. No one figured him out because no one ever got close enough to.

Shane Hollander had been marked as a talent young. Maybe too young. He had memories of sitting in the backseat his family’s beat-up Toyota, rain beating down against the window hard enough to leak through the aging weather strips. The kind of car they’d always had before the NHL and endorsement deal money had started rolling in. Not that they’d been poor, or anything, but his parents were frugal by nature, and Shane’s budding hockey career had been expensive. He’d been more than happy to get each of his parents a nice car with his first paycheck, even though they’d insisted fervently that it was his money.

The memory was this: Shane curled in the backseat, streetlights distorted by rain, his parents arguing. It had scared him because his parents never argued, for his whole childhood, until they started arguing about one thing. Shane. Whether he should move up, if he’d be okay, being that young in bantams. Because he’d always been on the smaller side, and he was fast, but he might get injured, and then all this would be for nothing. And could he really handle the traveling? When he was so sensitive, so shy, so particular about certain things?

The arguing stopped around fourteen, when Shane grew tall enough and big enough to look his parents in the eye and tell them firmly that all he wanted to do was play hockey, to go as far as he possibly could, and he didn’t care about anything else. His mom had been thrilled, his dad had obliged but still tried to get him to be social, to diversify his interests. Shane had tried, because it made his dad happy, but he hadn’t really cared. In his head it had always just been hockey, hockey, hockey, with small carve outs for other things that had to be done.

College exams, because there was always the risk of catastrophic injury, and Shane didn’t want to be bagging Timbits for the rest of his life. Dating, because that was what you were supposed to. Awkward after-school dates and school dances. Sneaking around, pushing boundaries, testing out what alcohol was, what sex was, what life was supposed to be. Shane went to movies with his friends and pretended to care about some rock star he’d never heard of playing a role as a pirate. And then he went home and poured over the roster of every junior team, looking for other potential 2009 first round picks, and wondered who was going to compete with him. If anyone was going to compete with him.

Which was all to say, Shane had always been weird. He knew that, dimly, and tried not to think about it. When his talent became impossible to ignore it all got subsumed into jealousy, anyway, and that was easier to deal with. That could be quantified in statistics and worked out on the ice.

Shane lived alone from the first moment he could, getting his first apartment in Brossard at barely nineteen. His parents had understood, even though he knew that when he’d gotten drafted by Montreal there had been a part of them that had maybe hoped he’d live at home for a while. At least part time. But Shane had wanted his own space. He preferred it. They could call him particular if they wanted, but he liked things a certain way, and he especially liked knowing that when he came home from practice everything would always be exactly as he’d left it. And god, the silence. There was not much quiet to be had when your career was hockey, and Shane craved it like a drug.

The Voyageurs really had ended up being a spectacular fit for him. Much better than the Bears would have been, not that he’d ever admit anything like positive feelings about being drafted second to Ilya Rozanov. The culture his new Coach Theriault wanted to foster was all serious, technical, precision hockey. A focus on smart play and reading the ice, footwork and positioning. The kind of hockey that Shane excelled at, and Theriault knew it. He’d pushed for Shane as the anchor of the team, built their entire trade strategy around him. It’d been a gamble, but not a particularly risky one, and Shane pushed Montreal into the playoffs for the first time in ages on his very first year on the team. It took them a few more, and a lot of roster juggling, to cinch the cup. But he’d done it, the year after Ilya. And then he went back to back, just to twist the knife.

The Voyageurs dressing room wasn’t touchy, and it wasn’t loud, relative to how Shane knew a hockey team could be. Shane’s influence meant that roster slowly filled with other players that matched his energy. Mostly serious guys.

It wasn’t perfect. There was Gilbert Comeau, the unofficial leader of the snippy Francophone squad that alternated between chirping at Shane for being a pansy and a hard ass, and the enforcer Connor Roy, who protected Shane from getting hit on the ice but always clapped him on the shoulder a little too hard in the dressing room.

But there was also Sorren Miitka, who would always offer a goalie’s perspective when Shane reviewed his plays, and J.J. Boiziau, who was his line of defense against the French squad, and Hayden Pike, who liked him a lot for some reason, was utterly unflappable, and always chattering on about something. Even just standing next to Hayden, half listening to his complaints about other dads at daycare, or whatever else, was useful. It all bored most of the other guys, and they’d move on quickly.

Above all, Shane fit in because the Voyageurs focused on the hockey above all else, above social bonding and team rituals. They believed in Theriault when he told them their biggest asset was their attention on the ice. Keeping it locked in, keeping their minds on the game. Thinking ahead, staying smart.

So Shane wasn’t exactly beloved in his dressing room, not the way Ilya was rumored to be. The Boston press talked about him like he walked on the fucking Charles river, like he had all the famously chirpy and aggressive Bears wrapped around his little finger like cubs. And Shane thought that was probably true, based on what he saw from the Bears on the bench and what he saw from Ilya in private. Ilya was almost preternaturally charming, magnetic even—especially—when he was being a total asshole. He worked both media scrums and on ice scrums with an ease Shane couldn’t.

Sometimes it made Shane envious. He tried not to think about it. His awkwardness, his stiffness, became a part of his brand. It apparently held some of its own charm, at least according to his brand liaisons. They liked that he’d sometimes pause for too long in interviews, obviously thinking over his answer, or that he’d occasionally totally miss a soft ball or answer a question too literally, wide eyed and baffled when the room broke out in laughter. It was cute, apparently. Shane Hollander’s infamous one track mind, focused only on hockey.

Which had been mostly true. Hockey. And exactly when, where, and how Ilya Rozanov would fuck him next.

And the lengths Shane went to to keep that second thing private had been—well, maybe a little over the top. Maybe fucking psychotic, as Hayden had shrieked at him, after he’d wheedled the story about the condo out of Shane in a Tim Horton’s parking lot, shoveling utterly disgusting donuts in their mouths during the summer after their third cup win, drunk and hungover from a party that had flowed seamlessly into an after party and then a morning after.

It had just been easier. Keeping Ilya and that part of his life as contained and separate as possible. Neat and tidy, the same way he made the boys keep their stalls.

It started to blur as early as fall 2016. Shane couldn’t admit that until years later, but it was true. Two cups in his pocket and a ridiculous pile of awards that meant he had pulled ahead of Ilya Rozanov, irrefutably, at least for the time being. Ilya Rozanov who had moved their hook ups to his actual home. Ilya Rozanov who had started calling him pet names during sex. Ilya Rozanov who texted him sometimes even when they weren’t planning a hook up, just to make some stupid joke about a game he knew Shane was watching. Shane had—lost it, maybe.

The Voyageurs had been absolutely thrilled with Shane dating Rose Landry, wolf whistling every time he smiled down at his phone, joking about her finally deflowering Shane with barely concealed relief. The energy around the topic of Shane’s sex life had always weird, something unavoidable in chirps and yet—charged, somehow. The other guys got shat on for their oral sex skills or lack thereof, bragged about threesomes or whatever outrageous sex acts they thought they could get the room to believe they’d talked a girl into.

Shane was pretty sure some of the guys on the team thought he was totally celibate, even though he made a deliberate effort to be seen taking a woman home every so often. As he got older and the newbies got younger it became less a source of mockery and more a source of awe, like he was some kind of hockey playing monk whose skill derived directly from the repression of his sexual energy. His perpetual singleness was a particular fixation of J.J. and Hayden’s, who shoved women at him constantly, convinced he was lonely and miserable and wound too tight.

So Rose had been like releasing a pressure valve, letting out all this pent up curiosity and speculation about what his deal was, about why the Shane Hollander hadn’t locked anyone down. Holding out for a movie star, went the joke, and at first Shane had privately agreed, because he’d still—insanely, in retrospect—been under the impression that he was attracted to women. Rose disabused him of that idea, and his world tilted on its axis.

Shane had been too distracted—by Ilya’s trip to Moscow, by his season-ending injury, by he and Ilya’s revelatory visit to the cottage—to notice that the way things ended with Rose had caused a lot of chatter. Obviously it’d been in the tabloid news, for about a month at least. And then Rose had been spotted on a date with a co-star and most people outside of the world of hockey forgot that Shane Hollander existed again. But it’d been big news for much longer in his own dressing room, with the guys utterly unable to fathom how he could have fumbled Rose fucking Landry.

“Bro,” J.J. had said, his eyes wide. He held up his phone and showed Shane some article about his supposedly acrimonious split from Rose after they hadn’t been spotted together once during the All-Star break. “Say it isn’t so.”

“Ah yeah,” Shane had said, distracted because he was waiting on a text from Ilya. They were shit talking the Admirals, again, because New York was in danger of pulling ahead in the standings and both Shane and Ilya were kind of pissed about it. “We didn’t work out.”

“Bro,” J.J. had said again, mournfully, shaking Shane dramatically.

That was probably when it started in earnest. The jokes and chirps with a little more edge. That rumor that maybe Shane Hollander had fumbled Rose Landry because he swung in a different direction entirely. Pansy, pussy, girl, fairy, sissy, princess—Shane had been getting those his entire career. He was a smaller guy, had never been a fighter. Being Asian probably didn’t help. All the half naked modeling definitely didn’t.

Shane never slept with another women again after Rose, and didn’t even bother to pretend he wanted to after his stay with Ilya at the cottage. The guys must have picked up on something, some energy shift, because the chirps started trending more towards the homo, cocksucker, fag, pédé. Not from his own team, Shane wouldn’t have tolerated it. But it came from other teams. Roy did his job on the ice, but he didn’t say anything about the chirps. Smirked at them, if anything. No one said anything at all but Hayden and J.J., a few times, until Shane tiredly told them to drop it because they were making it worse. Shane didn’t know what some of the Voyageurs said when he wasn’t in the room, but he could guess.

It sucked. But Shane couldn’t get too worked up about it. This was hockey. He’d learned a long time how to switch his brain off when it came to difficult social stuff, and whatever else was up with the way his brain worked, he was good at that. The team was fighting hard for the playoffs that year, trying to get their chemistry back after Shane’s injury the season before. And Shane was too distracted to care about chirps from thrice-concussed half-retired fourth liners anyway, sick as he’d been from how stupid in love he was with Ilya.

Shane hated that Ilya was still in Boston that season, had been wildly anxious about their plan to move him up to Ottawa. Shane had paid more attention to the Centaurs that year than was explicable, given the team’s position at the bottom of the standings. He’d chattered nervously about Ottawa trade rumors to Hayden, who looked at him like he’d lost his damn mind.

The Voyageurs just missed the playoffs, maybe because Shane’s head had been in the clouds, hopefully not. Shane vanished instantly, down to Boston to be with Ilya until they were knocked out in the second round. And then they’d come back up to Montreal, and the news broke that Ilya had signed with Ottawa, and Hayden had texted Shane about ten billion questions and profanities and hahahaha you won so fucking hard man and, once, an overtly suspicious SHANE you kept talking about ottawa trades did you know something??????

Ilya and Shane couldn’t train together the way Ilya wanted to that summer, because Hayden would have gotten suspicious, and besides Ilya had stuff to do in Ottawa anyway, house hunting and settling in with his new team and the like. So Shane had done his regular routine with Hayden, trying not to vibrate constantly from the knowledge that this year Ilya was only two hours away, that they were practically in the same neighborhood, that Shane could sneak away for the night whenever he wanted, if he wanted.

Hayden had pushed girls on him really, really hard that summer, for some reason. Maybe he sensed that Shane was distracted, that he was thinking about sex near-constantly like a goddamn teenager, or maybe he’d just hit some internal limit on how long was acceptable post-Rose for Shane to not be pursuing anyone. Maybe he’d connected their mediocre performance during the season to Shane’s supposed celibacy.

Whatever the reason was, it grew and grew in intensity until Shane finally snapped, “Hayden, would you quit it already, I’m fucking gay, okay?” at Hayden as he shoved a picture of an extremely bendy and beautiful rock climbing goddess Jackie had apparently met at the gym towards him.

Hayden had taken it well, all things considered. He’d blinked, kind of rebooted, and then gingerly taken the phone back.

“So, not her, then,” Hayden had said, and Shane had laughed, and they mostly went back to normal.

Hayden been a lot less magnanimous when he’d figured out that Shane was dating Ilya, and that had been a whole other thing. But still, it’d mostly been okay. They looped J.J. in a few weeks later, about the gay thing but not the Ilya thing. J.J. had made an exaggerated ooooh sound like Shane had finally unlocked the key to the greatest mystery of the universe.

“Ouais, you know, this makes sense, mon ami,” he’d said, and Shane had refrained from asking why, because he was extremely sure he didn’t want to know.

The press conference with Ilya about their friendship and the Irina Foundation set even more tongues wagging. Not about the two of them, exactly, although some people speculated. But most people were too convinced that Ilya was one hundred percent straight to take it any further than wink wink nudge nudge jokes.

Plenty of people thought there was something on Shane’s side, though, especially thanks to the way he’d touched Ilya’s arm during the conference. Shane vacillated on whether he regretted that moment, afterwards. He’d wanted to comfort Ilya, was glad he had, because that was what Ilya had needed in that moment. But the second time Shane was accused of gagging for Rozanov’s cock on the ice he’d wished, sharply, that he hadn’t done it. Not in front of the cameras.

That season, Ilya’s first in Ottawa, Shane could admit he wasn’t at his best. Not playing badly, he never played badly. But he slacked on his social duties as captain, even worse than he had the year before. With Ilya in Ottawa Shane just saw no reason whatsoever to be apart from him at any moment he didn’t strictly have to be. Shane spent more of his life driving that season than he’d spent during any other year of his life, and it wasn’t like he lived a life light on travel. After a game the minute his press duties were done he’d be out of the Bell Centre like a shot, usually not even stopping at his apartment on his way south. He’d pre-pack his weekend bag and have it ready to go in the car so to waste as little time as possible. Ilya admitted to him one night, both of them sex-drunk and giddy, that he did the same thing when it was his turn to come to Montreal.

The team definitely noticed that Shane was never around anymore. They noticed a few other things, too. Ilya usually was pretty good about not leaving marks on Shane. But they were both a little out of their minds that first year, drunk on the sheer availability of sex, delirious from the freedom to express their feelings openly to each other, and so Ilya didn’t always succeed in curbing his impulses. Shane showed up to at least a few games with bite marks, suspiciously large, and hickeys purpled onto his neck, his collarbone, his hips, around his nipple. Hayden had made kind of a choking noise at that one.

The guys had been—intrigued, maybe was the word for it. Less obviously elated than they had been about Rose. A little tentative in assuming it was a girl at all, Shane noticed. Hayden and J.J. were carefully gender neutral when they teased him about the sex he was getting, which was sort of sweet but also fueled the flames. Shane thought about telling them to pretend it was a girl, at least in the dressing room, but it didn’t want to rope his best friends into lying for him, so Shane just tried to let it go.

“Just tell me,” Shane demanded of Hayden, a few weeks into the 2018-2019 season. “What percentage of the team—of the league—knows I’m gay?”

“No one knows anything, man,” Hayden had assured him, but when Shane had clicked his tongue impatiently he’d admitted that, yes, he’d heard the rumor. More than a few times. And Shane was pretty sure that guys were less likely to make those comments in front of Hayden than anyone else, since everyone knew they were tight. Which meant it was probably pretty widespread.

Shane was being sloppy. He tripped over pronouns, contradicted himself about where he’d been and when. The more time he got with Ilya, especially around his family, who didn’t blink at their causal affection, the harder it was to turn off his attraction to men at other times.

There’d been one memorable incident, during an away game in New York. Shane had been needled into going out with the team and J.J., in a fit of obliviousness or stupidity or bizarrely misplaced kindness, proposed the team go out to a gay bar owned by a retired NHLer who’d come out a few years back.

“To support Hunter,” J.J. had said, quickly, defensively, when a few heads in the dressing room swiveled towards Shane. “He said we should come,” J.J. said, dangling his phone in front of the boys as though this were any explanation. Shane had no idea how J.J. had Scott Hunter’s number, except that J.J. seemed to have everyone’s number, somehow.

“Besides, he will need some cheering up,” J.J. had concluded with a wicked smirk, and he’d been right, because the Voyageurs won the game 3-2.

Half of the team refused to go outright, but the other half of the guys had been game, although they mostly treated it as some kind of zoo outing. Shane sullenly drank beers at the bar all evening, watching his rookies go all flustered and apologetic when they were hit on by New York gays in tight jeans and glittery eyeliner. J.J. had a grand old time, drinking three or four of the sex-and-hockey themed cocktails. He declared loudly that his favorite had been the Rim Play, and Shane thought he maybe blacked out for a minute when he heard J.J. call it the best rim he’d ever tasted with an egregious wink to the bartender.

Scott Hunter had picked up on Shane’s mood, probably, and left him alone most of the night after a few terse words of congratulations on the game. But late into their evening someone had slid into the seat next to Shane, an older man with an impossible to place European accent. He was handsome in that almost annoying way, sharp cheekbones and grey-streaked hair, dressed in a dark blue sweater. He was wearing absolutely no glitter at all.

“You are Shane Hollander, yes?” he’d asked, and Shane had shook his hand, and asked him if he was a hockey fan, because that was Shane’s go to.

“A bit, but I know you from the ads in the subway. You’re in bed with our competition, you know?” And the man had slid up his sleeve to reveal Swiss Omega watch, just shy of ostentatious. And then slid it up a bit further to reveal a very well-toned forearm. Shane had paused, and then raised an eyebrow.

“Am I being headhunted right now?” Shane had asked, smiling into his beer. “I’m very happy with Rolex, thanks.”

The man had laughed, a deep and rumbling sound, and shook his head. He’d looked Shane up and down, obviously, and then ducked in close and said in a low voice, “I thought perhaps you might someone be who would play for both teams?”

The man’s look had been something dark and dangerous. Alarm bells went off in Shane’s head, probably a little later than they should have, but he’d been drinking. Shane had drawn back, dropping his beer back on the counter so hard it spilled a little, and muttered something about being taken, or busy, or the man being mistaken, Shane honestly couldn’t remember. And he’d been too cowardly to look for any of his teammates as he rushed out of that bar other than Hayden, who was staring at him, mouth open, and J.J., who’d flashed him a thumbs up he probably thought was surreptitious.

The next incident was worse, somehow, though it still wasn’t as bad as it could have been. They’d had a whole four day break in December around Christmas and Shane had planned to go back to Ottawa, but his car was in the shop. So his mother had been generous enough to drive to the practice center in Brossard to pick him up, which already resulted in no end of teasing about being a momma’s boy. But when Yuna had shown up, Ilya had been in the backseat.

Only a few of the guys happened to be in the parking lot at the same time as Shane anyway, and the windows were so heavily tinted there was no telling who it was, and Ilya was wearing his baseball cap and sunglasses “disguise.” So no one knew. But no one was going to accept that it was his dad, and Shane didn’t have a brother. So there was just some guy, roughly their age, in the back seat of his mother’s car.

No one said anything, no one asked. Shane thought wildly about lying and saying his parents were billeting a junior, tried to calculate if a lie of that magnitude might make it worse or better. In the end he said nothing at all and just rushed off, barely wishing the guys a happy holidays. Shane sat in the front seat, and Ilya whined about it until Yuna pulled over ten minutes later and let him move to the back.

Shane couldn’t say, honestly, how long he would have let things drag out like that. Probably for far too long. But after they came back from Christmas Coach Theriault called him into his office.

“There are rumors,” as coach said, as if Shane would ask what they were about, or somehow offer to solve this problem without either of them having to get into any specifics. Shane just waited. “The rumor is you’re gay,” Theriault said, bluntly.

And Shane was tired, so tired. So he nodded.

“It's true,” Shane said. Theriault had looked at him with something like disappointment. Shane felt it, the way he’d let down the man who’d seen what he could be as an eighteen year old, who had built an entire NHL team around him.

“Right,” Theriault said, unsurprised. “Well. I don’t give a shit about what or who you do in your free time. But right now this is a distraction. It’s screwing up the team dynamic. Handle it.”

“Yes, coach,” Shane said, with no idea how to do that.

Shane walked out into the dressing room to twenty-odd pairs of eyes staring back at him, not even bothering to hide their open curiosity. They were supposed to be deep into the mid-season grind, locking in their place in the standings and focusing on staying healthy for the playoffs, and instead, everyone was thinking about Shane and who or what he might be fucking in his off-time. Shane abruptly got angry. Theriault was right, this was a distraction. He stalked over to his stall, grabbed his helmet for no reason he could think of, realized that, shoved it back in his stall with a loud clatter. He turned around. The team was still staring at him.

“Alright. Team announcement. Some of you know this already, but I’m gay,” Shane said.

There was no surprise on any of his teammates’ faces. Which was a bit embarrassing, but Shane wasn’t sure why he would have expected anything different. He hadn’t been working very hard to keep things under wraps lately. Hayden seemed frozen at his sudden declaration, but found his footing quickly and transitioned into an encouraging smile. Most of the guys looked wary. A few frowned. Comeau snorted in amusement. He and his buddy Patrice Drapeau shared a triumphant, knowing, ugly look. Shane sighed.

“I’ve been gay my whole life,” Shane said, “including when I helped this team get two Stanley Cups. And I trust that this team can be adults and respect my privacy. I’m not trying to be Scott Hunter, or whatever, okay? So I’d appreciate it if you all kept this to yourselves. I just wanted to make all this—gossip, or whatever—stop so we can play some fucking hockey. But if you have a problem, if you think this will impact your play—”

“Our play?” Comeau interjected.

“—then take it up with coach, or management,” Shane said, speaking loudly over him. “I’m focused on taking us to the cup again this year. You can either stick with me and get another fucking ring, or get ready to start driving out to Laval.”

Not that Shane had any power to send guys down to the minors, but he said it like he did, and some of the younger guys on the team glanced at each other in what looked like real fear.

“No need for that, capitaine,” J.J. drawled. “We know you are the best in the league, non? Gay or not. You have proved it many times.”

“Thanks, J.J.,” Shane said dryly.

“There’s not going to be any fucking problems,” Hayden said, glaring at Comeau, who just smirked.

And Shane suddenly felt exhausted, and more than willing to let Hayden and J.J. fight his battles. He turned to his stall and started pulling out his pads. Behind him, the dressing room chatter slowly started back up, and he wasn’t sure if he heard or imagined snippets of whispered questions. What about the showers? Should he even be in there?

“I came out to the team,” Shane told Ilya, over FaceTime that evening. The Centaurs had lost to Buffalo, badly, and so Ilya had his own reasons to be depressed. But Shane’s problems blew bad hockey right out of the water, and Ilya’s eyes widened.

“You did?”

“Sorry. I know we hadn’t talked about it.”

“No, of course is okay,” Ilya said quickly, and Shane wondered about that. “Is—mm, your choice, right?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of.”

“What does that mean?”

Shane sat up and adjusted his glasses. “They—coach—well. I think they all knew already. I haven’t been the most discrete,” Shane said. Ilya was silent for a moment, and Shane realized how that sounded. “They don’t know about you, of course, I wouldn’t tell them that.”

“No,” Ilya said, sounding lost in thought.

“But, I don’t know. I don’t know how they knew. Maybe it was a lot of things.”

“Probably,” Ilya said. “You were brave to tell them.”

“I’m sorry,” Shane said again, miserably. He wanted to be with Ilya, for Ilya to hold him, but Ilya was in upstate New York, getting buried under a foot of lake effect snow.

The team adjusted. Mostly. The Francophone portion of the team split loyalty between J.J. and Comeau, with Drapeau as second lieutenant of Comeau’s little sharp tongued little club. They gossiped about him freely in French, as if Shane couldn’t understand, as if he wasn’t just as much a native speaker as they were. That pissed him off, but it mostly it just amazed Shane, actually, that he’d had hit on something that could break up the Quebecois brotherhood. The Canadian anglophones in the team seemed more blown away by that than the fact that he was gay.

A few guys went out of their way to tell Shane they were cool with it. Tell him about a gay relative, or a friend, usually. Most of the team ignored it, which was a blessing and a curse. Shane adjusted his schedule, dressed first, showered last, and within a few weeks no one mentioned it again. The playoffs were barreling towards them, and they needed to focus on the hockey.

They didn’t manage to win the cup that year. Shane somehow felt like he’d broken a promise to his team. But they got to the finals, propelled by Shane putting up some of the best numbers of his career, even as the rumor about his confirmation of his sexuality rippled throughout the league. The Centaurs finished the season in the bottom third of the table, and so Ilya pretty much moved in with him in Montreal as soon as regulation ended. And that made it easier, to come home from the awkward looks and meaningful silences and fall right into Ilya’s arms.

During the finals the Voyageurs fell to Vegas in five games, on home ice, which was devastating. Ilya attended all the playoff games in Montreal, even though it made Shane nervous. He didn’t sit with Shane’s parents. Ilya usually dragged along some of the other guys on the Cens, and Svetlana came up from Boston for the finals.

Whoever ran the Jumbotron at the Bell Centre loved to feature Ilya, and when Ilya picked up on that he started fake scowling and flashing theatrical thumbs downs any time Shane scored. It never failed to make Shane shake his head and grin, and the crowd ate it up.

“We were so close,” Shane said, afterward, curled into Ilya’s side on the couch. He’d recounted every play, every call for the last two hours, and he knew Ilya had to be tired of listening to it. But Ilya was just running his hands through his hair soothingly and letting him grieve his dream of a third cup.

“I know, sweetheart,” Ilya said.

“We should have—everything was right. I played well.”

“You always play well. You played perfectly.”

Shane laughed, hollowly. “Obviously not.”

“Shane.”

“Tell me more about how well I played,” Shane whined, rubbing his cheek along Ilya’s collarbone.

“Mm. Even for you, Hollander, this is weird—”

“Shut up.”

“Your wrist shot in the second period, it was perfect,” Ilya said.

“Yeah?”

“Like a machine,” Ilya said, rolling Shane over to press him into the couch cushions, kissing along his temple. “Something they show idiot rookies to make them understand how to play hockey.”

Shane hummed his approval, and Ilya laughed at him. “And the footwork, before your second goal.”

“Yes?”

“You looked like a dancer. So sexy.”

“Only you would find that sexy.”

Ilya growled. “Whole arena did. They wanted you so bad. Like I wanted you. Right on the ice.”

Shane gazed up at Ilya. Ilya was nearly glaring, like he was almost mad that Shane had played so well, angry that Shane had made him this dizzy with competitive jealousy and admiration and lust, and Shane’s body shook with how much he loved him. He dragged Ilya down into a kiss.

“Keep going,” Shane said.

Shane had wanted the Stanley Cup that year so badly, even more keenly than he always did. Maybe he had thought it would have proved something, to Comeau and Drapeau, and to the players on other teams who kept chirping him about shit they barely understood. Maybe it would prove something, the next time he hoisted it over his head. Because there would be a next time.

“Next year,” Ilya said.

“Next year,” Shane promised.