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Jackie Pike loves her husband. She loves their kids. She loves her life, and knows she is beyond blessed.
She's twenty years old when her sister drags her to a club because she heard some Metros were going to be there. Jackie grew up a lukewarm Guardians fan in the suburbs of Toronto, but she's in college in Montreal now and prepared to change allegiance.
So she follows her sister to a club and ends up actually meeting a Metro – Hayden Pike, who makes her laugh so hard she snorts and has the most gorgeous green eyes. They end up making out on the dance floor, and Jackie feels grown up and exciting and sexy. She never expected that to lead to marrying the guy, but he calls the next day and asks her on a real date and it turns out he can make her laugh until she snorts all the time, and damn, she just loves him. WAG life chooses her, and for all the stresses that come with marrying a man with a very public persona who travels that much and is at frequent risk of head injury, she wouldn't want anything else.
Still. Jackie is aware that her husband – the father of her children, the love of her life – is sometimes a moron.
Like. When, at the beginning of a new hockey season, a decade into knowing each other, Shane Hollander comes out to his fellow Metros, Hayden is shocked. Shocked. Knock him over with a feather.
+ + +
"Babe, I first asked you if you thought Shane might be gay at least eight years ago," Jackie points out when he tells her that. Hayden had texted her from practice that afternoon: oh my god Jackie you won't believe what happened today, this is fucking wild, I'll tell you all about it tonight and Jackie had panicked a little that he was getting traded or something, but no, he was telling her his best friend was gay.
Which... yeah? Of course?
"What? You never said that," Hayden insists.
"I've mentioned it at least five times, and every time you insist he's not and then mindwipe your own memory of the conversation."
Look, Jackie's not a supermodel or anything, but she's an attractive woman. She can tell when a man notices that. Lots of men notice but consciously put it to the side, because she's married/they're married/it's not the time and place/whatever. The teammates Hayden brings around are almost always the kind who put it aside pretty easily, but Shane isn't putting anything to the side. He's not registering Jackie as a woman, not from the day they met.
For a while she thought he was straight but just so single-minded about hockey that he wasn't having any kind of relationship, that maybe his sexuality didn't weigh as heavy on him as his need to make the playoffs did.
She's seen Shane get hit on, both so subtly he definitely missed it and so directly she could tell he didn't, by some very attractive women, at fundraisers and restaurants and team charity events and once on the sidewalk in their neighborhood, pushing her daughter's stroller. If Shane wanted no strings, no complications sex, he wouldn't even have to work for it. Shane is deeply awkward, sure, but he's Shane Hollander and everyone in Montreal knows that, and he looks like... that. If he wants to sleep with women but isn't sure how to start it, it wouldn't matter, they'll find him. But she's never seen him respond to a come on with anything but semi-well disguised panic.
(Hayden tells her that on very rare occasions when he goes out with the boys, he'll go home with a woman. Not often, and he doesn't appear to see any of them more than once. Hayden is not helpful at identifying any commonalities among these women that might point to Shane's type. Jackie won't admit it but she's very curious what that process for Shane looks like.)
When Hayden tells her about "Boston Lily," she thinks, oh, maybe this kind of infrequent long distance thing works for him, lets him keep most of his energy on the game. But she notices him staring at his phone sometimes, and she can't help but see (because she walks closely by and leans into his personal space) that he's often looking at his text thread with Lily, and she knows that whatever this thing with Boston Lily is, it's not creating fewer distractions for him.
(Jackie's not nosy. She doesn't pry. She is a curious woman who is engaged with the world, and she is good at observing patterns. Honestly. Just because she read her sister's diary when she was twelve and used to open bathroom cabinets at other people's houses as a teenager! Who doesn't do that, really.)
So yeah, she's observed some patterns in Shane Hollander's behavior. She's had plenty of opportunity over the years; he eats dinner at her house at least once a week during the season. He's been one of the first people to hold each of her babies. He texts her if Hayden swears too much around the kids. When Hayden is out with a fractured collarbone and the twins both have the flu, Shane is the one who comes over with enough food to get her through the next four days, cleans her bathroom, and does like three loads of laundry.
And at some point, maybe a year into knowing him, she first wonders if the pattern she's observing doesn't lead to Shane being attracted to women. She doesn't mention it to Hayden for a while – for one thing, she has newborn twins and is just trying to keep her head above water, and for another, she doesn't want to make things weird for Shane. If she's right, that's bound to be complicated for him. And it wouldn't change anything about his role in their family.
That's true for Hayden too, she knows – she damn well didn't marry a bigot – but she also knows her husband will have to go through a whole cycle of How Didn't I Know This and Why Didn't He Tell Me Before and Do I Know My Best Friend At All Really. Hayden can roll with a lot of things (that's something she loves about him), but she knows this one will be one of things he doesn't roll with (other things he doesn't roll with: her parents, getting a cold, rookie left wings he's worried are coming for his spot, scary movies). Hayden and Shane are friends, good friends, but they're also hockey bros who rarely talk about anything meaningful in any way. Hayden would follow Shane into literal battle, but he didn't know his birthday until Jackie asked Shane herself.
The other complicating factor is that Shane is Hayden's captain, and Hayden approaches that like it's the military. Shane is an authority figure to Hayden, which is complicated by the fact that off the ice Hayden feels a little protective of him ("he's a monster on skates but in the regular world he's like a deranged awkward baby," Hayden once told her, and he wasn't totally wrong). Jackie has relied on Shane's investment advice more than once, very successfully, and she's also helped him order at a restaurant if he gets too flustered. Shane Hollander is many things, and for Jackie his sexuality fits in with the rest, but for Hayden it will feel more like an outlier. And Hayden, the love of her life, her favorite person on earth, is absolutely terrible at asking the kinds of followup questions that would have elucidated this info at any point in the last eight years. He'll tell Shane he loves him at the end of any phone call, but he does not want to ask the man about his feelings.
So yes, now her husband definitively knows Shane is gay, something Jackie figured out years ago, and they are doing twelve rounds on How Didn't I Know This and Why Didn't He Tell Me Before and Do I Know My Best Friend At All Really. Jackie's goal is to be the place Hayden can bring this so he doesn't dump it on Shane. She's a little surprised and a lot impressed Shane's come out to the whole team; she knows it wouldn't be easy for anybody, and she has some guesses about how his coaches and management are handling it, but it especially wouldn't be easy for Shane, who likes attention less than any other hockey player she's ever met. He wants to be the best in the world, but sometimes it seems like he'd almost rather nobody looked at him while he did it.
+ + +
About two weeks after Shane comes out to him, Hayden appears to have worked through all his feelings about not being a good enough friend to Shane, to Jackie's relief. For one thing, this means she can start speculating, something she's had to resist until she thought her husband was ready.
"Hey babe, so knowing what we now know," and that's Jackie using an extremely gracious we, because she is a loving and supportive partner, "what do you think the deal is with Boston Lily?"
"Ohhhhh," Hayden says, eyes lighting up, and man, one of Jackie's favorite things about her husband is that he loves gossip almost as much as she does. He's not nearly as good at it, but he joins her in enjoying vicarious drama. (Jackie will never ask Shane the direct questions she thinks of herself; they have a friendship independent of Hayden at this point, but it's not the kind of friendship where he'll tell her things like this, and straight up asking will damage what they do have, she knows.)
"I mean Boston Lily must be a guy, right?" Hayden says. "Boston... Lyle?"
Jackie wonders if Boston Lyle is out himself, and if so, how he feels about Shane's need for secrecy. Jackie rejects out of hand the idea that Boston Lyle is married, Shane would never. She wonders if he's religious, but that doesn't feel like the answer. How did they even meet? Is he American? Maybe he's got a prominent job himself?
The Metros' first game of the season is an away game, in Boston. Jackie demands Hayden report to her about everything that happens with Boston Lyle ("only please don't slip up and call him that in front of Shane, babe, that might hurt his feelings"), and she's very surprised when Hayden texts to say Shane doesn't meet up with him at all.
Hayden: he's just chilling at the hotel tonight, he went to dinner with the team and ordered one of his weird salads, but now he's watching ESPN, he is texting a bunch though
Jackie: Did you ask him about Boston Lyle? Did you ask who's texting? Does he seem sad at all?
Hayden: no, we won the game
At home in Montreal, Jackie rolls her eyes at her phone.
+ + +
When the team gets back, they have three days in a row without a game, and Jackie asks Hayden when Shane's coming to dinner.
"Oh, he's going to Ottawa to visit his parents," Hayden tells her.
"Ottawa? To see Yuna and David? He just saw them all summer."
"Yeah well, you know Shane, I have never met a mama's boy like that guy."
"Sure, but he's never really gone to Ottawa during the season to see them, has he? They come to Montreal much more often than he goes there."
"I guess, yeah. What are we having for dinner, babe?"
Shane goes to Ottawa again a week later, with only one day off between games. And again a few days after that.
"Do you think he's dating someone in Ottawa?" Jackie asks.
"Oh, maybe," Hayden says, thinking about it. "He could meet someone there."
"Yeah but who? Where's he meeting guys? Guys who can accept his need to stay closeted? Did Yuna set him up with somebody?"
Jackie's sitting next to Hayden on the couch; they're both folding laundry and half watching a recap of the day's games. Jackie pauses midway through folding a towel as she hears the announcer talk about the Ottawa game, mentioning Ilya Rozanov's hat trick that still wasn't enough to get the win over Vegas.
"Still can't understand why Rozanov moved to Ottawa," Hayden says, stacking another pair of kid pajamas on the pile next to him. "What an insane move. I hate the guy but I thought he liked to win, you know?"
Ilya Rozanov played for Boston. Now Ilya Rozanov plays for Ottawa. Shane used to have a secret boyfriend in Boston. Now Shane drives to Ottawa all the time.
Jackie has long observed that the Hollander-Rozanov rivalry doesn't seem to inspire much animus from Shane, at least off the ice. If asked about Rozanov, he tends to get flustered, and say he's a good competitor. He never seems mad about the guy. The other Metros viscerally hate him on Shane's behalf, including Hayden, who, bless, will carry a grudge on behalf of a loved one to hell and back. (Jackie had a roommate when they first met who was always late with her share of the rent, and Hayden will take his loathing of her to his grave. Jackie finds it very sweet.)
On the ice, it's clear Shane plays harder against Boston. Well, it's clear if you know hockey very well (and at this point Jackie does, even though she grew up less hockey obsessed than your average Canadian) and know Shane Hollander very well. Shane gives 110% all the time, he doesn't have a "relaxed hockey" setting, but when he's playing the Raiders it's more like 115%. He's just that tiny bit sharper, and Jackie has always thought he liked that more than he didn't.
So, huh. Ilya Rozanov lives in Ottawa now. Ilya Rozanov used to live in Boston. Ilya Rozanov would understand Shane's need for secrecy. Is it a coincidence that Rozanov switches teams the same time Shane comes out to his team?
Jackie rolls it around in her head for a full day before she mentions it to Hayden. She's never met Rozanov, just knows his public image – ladies man, asshole. He likes fast cars and parties, he gets under other players' skins. That kind of chirping, where it's personal and specific to the guy across from him, suggests a man who pays a lot of attention and is smarter than he lets on, especially considering he's doing it in his second language. And as far as she's ever heard, he's not a bigot about it, just a really precise hater. Jackie respects that, honestly.
What would Shane Hollander's type be, in guys? He'd need someone competent, he couldn't respect anything else. And if the guy didn't care about hockey, literally what would they talk about. (Maybe if he really cared about real estate investing.) Shane is also, to Jackie's utter delight, secretly bitchier than he likes to let on. Would someone like Ilya Rozanov, who seems so different from Shane but shares some fundamentals, work for him? (Would Shane work for Ilya Rozanov? Jackie will never tell Hayden how much time she's spent wondering what Shane's like in bed, what happens when he loosens the hell up, if he ever does. She's not attracted to him, but she's not blind, either. She's done yoga with the man, his chaturanga demonstrates a frankly obscene level of flexibility.)
She thinks about the game a couple seasons ago where Shane got injured; before that, at the first face off of the game, Shane up against Rozanov, they were grinning at each other and messing with their sticks before the puck dropped. It was like little boys goofing off, not professional athletes, and Jackie remembers thinking it seemed funny and out of character for these supposed rivals. She thinks about the All-Star game a few weeks before that, and how much Hayden complained about Shane having to play on a line with Rozanov, but when they watched the game, Shane looked like he was having the time of his life. After Shane scored, with an assist from Rozanov, Rozanov kissed him on the helmet, and Jackie remembers that Shane did not look angry.
"You know what's weird?" Jackie says the next day. They're standing next to each other at the double sinks in their bathroom, Hayden carefully taking out his contacts while Jackie uses a jade roller on her face. They don't get the chance often, between Hayden's schedule and four kids, but they're doing a skincare night tonight: they'll put on matching sheet masks and watch reality television in bed (and probably fall asleep before sex, which isn't ideal but is somewhat common at this point in their parenting career).
"What's weird, babe?"
"I was just thinking about how Shane is going to Ottawa more often this season? And it seems like he didn't see Boston Lyle when you were there for the game?"
"Yeah?"
"What if he's dating a man who lives in Ottawa now?"
"I mean that would make sense," Hayden says, looking at Jackie in the mirror. "I wonder why he wouldn't tell me, though."
"Well, what if the guy he's dating has some of the same need for privacy Shane has? What if he's in hockey too?"
Jackie catches Hayden's eye in the mirror and waits silently as he puts it together. It takes to "five Mississippi" before Hayden's eyes (the gorgeous green eyes all her kids have inherited, the ones she fell in love with) go wide with shock in the mirror.
"Jacqueline Marie Pike, what are you saying?"
Jackie grins at him. "I mean, think about it."
They still do sheet masks, but rather than watch reality television, they go a couple rounds on how dare Jackie even suggest Shane would fraternize with the enemy versus well the timeline makes sense versus Rozanov isn't gay though right versus but then did Rozanov move teams for Shane versus I mean, Shane wouldn't do that... would he?
+ + +
The team's leaving on a road trip in two days, and Jackie coaches Hayden on how to ask Shane about it. Ease into it, while you're both comfortable and safe in the hotel room, reassure him you're his friend and you love him and you support him.
Hayden waits until the very end of the trip to ask, literally as they're heading back to their cars after the plane lands, which is not what Jackie advised.
When Hayden comes through their front door, he drops his bags right inside, walks purposely towards Jackie, grabs her by the waist, and kisses the hell out of her. It's a pretty excellent greeting.
"You were right," Hayden says when they come up for air. "I can't believe it? But you were right, it's goddamn Rozanov."
Jackie can't help grinning. She doesn't have a strong opinion about Shane dating Ilya Rozanov specifically (other than her heart hurting because the path towards Shane getting to come out is significantly more complicated now she's been proven right), but she does have a strong opinion about how she's a genius for figuring this out.
"We're having dinner with them next week."
"We are?"
"Yeah," Hayden says, sighing dramatically like he's being sent to the gallows. "If Ilya Rozanov is dating my best friend, we have to meet him and see if he's good enough for him."
"Babe," Jackie says gently, "I definitely want to have dinner with them, but I don't think that's our call."
The dinner is, predictably, somewhat of a disaster. Despite her repeated reminders leading up to it that Hayden needs to behave like a grownup, he flies off the handle at Ilya (who, to be fair, doesn't exactly cover himself in glory behaving maturely either).
Hayden walks away from that dinner feeling, if anything, more confused. It's clear Shane and Ilya have put significant thought into their relationship, and have what Jackie thinks is a solid plan, and if nothing else the foundation they're starting sounds like a genuinely great idea. But all Hayden sees is the same asshole he's hated for years, now chirping him at his friend's house and not just on the ice.
He doesn't see what Jackie sees, and that's two men who are wildly into each other. When they made eye contact, Jackie felt both like she should leave the room and like she should get popcorn to stay and watch. She's not wondering if Shane can loosen up during sex anymore, that's for sure; whatever specifics those guys are up to, it's clearly hot as hell. Jackie loves her husband and they have incredible sex – she didn't get pregnant three times in four years lying back and thinking of Canada – but they've never had the kind of drama Shane and Ilya have. (Which she doesn't even want, it seems exhausting. Wouldn't mind trying it out for a day or two, but not as a long term component of a relationship.)
Honestly, she had a great time at dinner. She got to see a beloved friend being adored by a man he's clearly happy with, she got a delicious meal she didn't have to cook, and she got to learn about their incredible foundation plans, which she really admires. (Also, Ilya really did make her laugh pointing out Hayden won't eat his mushrooms, but obviously she can't tell her husband that.)
Someday, she thinks, her kids will call him Uncle Ilya, the way they call Shane Uncle Shane, and that's a warm feeling in her chest.
+ + +
Jackie and Hayden attend the press conference. Jackie's not embarrassed that she starts crying when Ilya shares about his mother. She had no idea, of course. It creates a permanent tender spot in her heart for him, and the way he and Shane look at each other when Ilya tells the room about his mother: this is real, however strange it is, and what they have is worth fighting for.
After the press conference, Jackie talks to Yuna. Yuna Hollander is both an inspiration and a little bit of a warning to Jackie. In a lot of ways, she's who Jackie wants to be when she grows up: she hopes to someday have half the same air of maternal but take-no-shit competency, to be that warm and that scary at the same time. And Yuna raised a good, good man. Jackie pays attention to how Yuna talks to Shane, and she has straight up asked her for parenting tips.
But Jackie will take kids who aren't nearly as good at hockey if they're also a little more well-rounded; Shane's hockey greatness comes at a cost she's not sure she wants her own babies to pay. Yuna also appears to have few hobbies that aren't centered around her son – she genuinely enjoys wheeling and dealing on his behalf, but Jackie, as much as she loves being a mother, doesn't want all her time or attention to involve her kids forever. She wants to talk shit with her sister, really master crow pose, read dumb sci fi books, and she wants to someday, once again, be fully caught up on every single Real Housewives franchise, please and thank you.
Yuna is telling Jackie about her role as director and treasurer, and what she's already done to get the Irina Foundation started. She's also wearing an incredible blazer and looking chic as fuck. Jackie is almost completely sure she doesn't have any crumbs on this dress.
Hayden walks up to her and runs his hand down her back as he smiles at Yuna, says how proud she must be. He catches her hand in his and interlaces their fingers, squeezing her hand gently to the rhythm of Shave and a Haircut, an old joke between them. They have to leave soon, take Ruby and Emma to a birthday party, and then Hayden has to catch a flight to Chicago with the team later that night.
Out of the corner of her eye, she notices Ilya making his way towards the elevators, and she definitely sees that he's headed up, which is weird – nothing upstairs besides hotel rooms. And then, a minute later, she sees Shane doing the same. Jackie smiles to herself, thinking about patterns.