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Marc Fleury had been in the NHL for three years, which was long enough to know how these things went.
You signed somewhere new, you kept your head down, observed the hierarchy and adjusted yourself accordingly. You figured out which of the “veterans” were approachable and which ones wanted you to earn it first. You learned the rhythms of a new room - who was loud, who was quiet, who would bury you alive if you stepped out of line and who you could have a laugh with.
He'd signed with the Centaurs in July, which was a bigger deal than he'd let himself acknowledge out loud. The once-renowned failure of a team was currently anchored by two of the most celebrated and adored players in the sport, and was the team that everyone in the league was now quietly terrified of.
The two players who were also, famously, married to each other.
Fleury didn't have a problem with that. He genuinely didn't. He'd grown up in a household where nobody would have cared, had teammates in juniors who were gay, had never given it much thought one way or another. He came to Ottawa, met Rozanov and Hollander both in the same week, shook their hands, and thought only: these are two of the best players I will ever share a locker room with and I am not going to embarrass myself.
That was his honest position.
Theo Lessard's position, he had come to understand, was somewhat different.
Lessard was also new. He was twenty-two, a defensive prospect the Centaurs had brought up from the AHL after an injury to their third-line. He was talented. He was also, Fleury had concluded after about three weeks, spectacularly stupid in the way that only young men who'd grown up never being corrected could manage.
It was a Tuesday practice in late October, the season six weeks old, the team still calibrating. Fleury had been running drills when he heard it - not loudly, but the rink had a particular acoustics problem that carried sound in unpredictable directions, and he caught the tail end of a comment Lessard made to Luca Haas.
He didn't catch all of it but he caught enough.
Haas' jaw tightened. He didn't say anything. He wasn’t a quiet guy usually but in certain situations could be the kind of quiet that came not from having nothing to say but from having learned, somewhere, that saying it wasn't safe.
Fleury's stomach turned. He looked around automatically for Rozanov, but Rozanov was at the far end of the ice, deep in some technical conversation with Bood, gesturing broadly with his stick in the way he did when he was being pedagogical about something.
He hadn't heard.
Lessard, emboldened by the lack of response, said something else. Quieter this time, directed only at Haas, but the shape of it was clear enough. Haas looked at the ice.
And then Hollander skated over.
Fleury hadn't even seen him coming. That was the thing about Hollander that took some getting used to - he moved like he belonged everywhere on the ice, no announcement, no fanfare, and then suddenly he was simply there and you couldn't imagine the space without him.
He stopped between Lessard and Haas. He wasn't doing anything dramatic. He had his stick resting across his shoulders in that idle way, arms hanging over it, the way players did when they were just chatting. He looked at Lessard with an expression Fleury couldn't entirely read from this distance; it was something soft and almost curious.
"Hey," Hollander said, lightly. His voice carried easily. "I know what it's like in other teams, but we don't use that kind of language around here."
Lessard blinked. He looked, for a second, like he might laugh. Like he was trying to figure out if this was a joke, some kind of hazing ritual, just the veterans messing with him.
"Oh- yeah, I was just-"
"Ok," Hollander said pleasantly. "Just letting you know." And he turned to skate away.
Lessard, apparently deciding that the brief discomfort had passed and they were already moving on, said something again. Not loudly, but an audible snide mutter directed at Haas, that had a laugh in it.
Hollander stopped.
He didn't turn immediately. There was a pause, maybe two seconds, maybe three, that felt significantly longer, and in that pause Fleury watched every other player within earshot subtly stop what they were doing.
Then he turned around.
He skated back, slowly. Not aggressive in any way. Just back, in that same even way, until he was close enough that this was a conversation and not a broadcast, and he looked at Lessard with an expression that had changed in some way that Fleury found difficult to articulate. It wasn't anger, exactly. It was more like a complete removal of warmth. Like a window being closed.
"I'm going to say this once," Hollander said. His voice was the same volume. It was the tone that had shifted - something in it had become very flat and very direct, all sense of cordiality completely gone.
"I already told you we don't do that here. I gave you the chance to move on. You didn't. So now I'm telling you clearly: you do not speak to your teammates that way. Not in this rink, not in the locker room, not in a bar after a game, not ever. Do you understand me?"
Lessard stared at him.
The rink was quiet. Not silent, but the immediate pocket of it was very still. Haas was looking at Hollander with an expression Fleury couldn't see fully from the angle he was at, but he could see the set of the kid's shoulders change. Something in them dropped. He let out a breath.
"I-" Lessard started.
"Do you understand me," Hollander repeated. It was not a question the second time.
"Yes," Lessard said. And there was something in his voice that had not been there before, a roughness, like he was swallowing something. "Yes. Sorry."
Hollander held his gaze for one more moment, just long enough. Then he nodded, once, and skated away.
Back to his drill. Back to the practice. Back to being the player running the line, crisp and efficient, calling out something to Hayes about a positioning issue.
Like nothing had happened.
Fleury realised he'd stopped moving entirely. He started again. Around him, the others did the same, the practice resuming its normal rhythm as if someone had pressed play.
He skated past Haas a few minutes later and caught a glimpse of the kid's face. He was focused on the drill, expression neutral, but there was a quality to his focus that had changed from before. It was something much steadier and settled.
Fleury thought about that. He, like everyone else in the room, assumed that Rozanov was the one you watched. He was the captain, infamous for being a loud brilliant force of nature. He wasn't wrong. Rozanov was all of those things.
But Hollander was the one who noticed. Hollander was the one who had been watching Haas from across the ice while simultaneously running a drill. Hollander was the one who had clocked it before Rozanov had, and handled it in the time it took to skate from one end of the rink to the other, and returned to work without ceremony.
In the locker room after practice, Lessard sat down next to Fleury and said, very quietly, without prompting: "I didn't realise he was like that."
Fleury towelled off his hair and thought about this.
"Yeah," he said finally. "I don't think a lot of people do."
David Hollander had learned, over the course of his son's life, to read the rooms his son was in.
It had been a necessary skill.
Shane had never been loud. Shane had never been the kind of child who announced his interior state or made his displeasure known through volume. He processed things internally and thoroughly and came out the other side having reached conclusions that were often fully formed and difficult to argue with.
You had to pay attention to him in a different way than you paid attention to most people, to the specific quality of his silences and to the small muscle shifts around his eyes.
David had forty years of his wife to draw on as well, which helped.
He watched Shane set down his fork now and thought: here we are, then.
They were at Shane and Ilya's house. The house in Ottawa had taken the better part of a year to finish and was quietly, beautifully decorated in a way that somehow managed to reflect both of them at once, which David had thought impossible until he saw it.
Ilya had cooked, as he usually did when they visited, which was an experience David had come to look forward to in a way that had surprised him. His son-in-law had opinions about food that were extensive and extremely specific, and watching him cook was genuinely joyful.
The meal had been good. The conversation had been good. They'd talked about the season, about David's current woodworking project in the garage, about the planned renovation of the back garden. Ilya had told a story about a road trip incident involving Barrett and a hotel vending machine that had made David laugh until his eyes watered.
And then Yuna had said what she said.
David loved his wife as much as it was possible to love another human being. She was a woman who had managed her son's career for fifteen years with extraordinary skill and considerable sacrifice, but the line between Yuna as mother and Yuna as manager had always been permeable in ways she didn't fully recognise in herself.
She had been talking about the sponsorship renewal, one of the larger deals in Shane's portfolio, a sports equipment company that had been with him for nearly a decade. And there had been a meeting, apparently, that hadn't gone the way she'd anticipated. There was some pushback from the brand's new marketing team about the direction they wanted to take. Yuna had a view on this that was clear and not without merit.
She'd been outlining it for perhaps four minutes, which was exactly two minutes longer than a dinner conversation warranted.
Shane had been listening quietly. He was good at that. He could listen to things for a long time before he responded, and Yuna had perhaps mistaken the quiet for agreement.
She said: "I think the best approach is to just give them what they're asking for on the creative side and hold the line on the rate. They want the association with you more than they want to fight about tone. You just need to let me handle the framing."
A beat.
She added: "It's not worth making it complicated."
Shane looked at her.
"I've actually already talked to them," he said.
She paused. "What?"
"Two days ago. I called Marcus directly."
Marcus was the marketing director. The new one. The one causing the pushback.
"Shane, I'm your manager, that's—"
"He's actually reasonable," Shane said. "The issue isn't the creative direction, it's that the previous deal had some terms that don't reflect what either of us want anymore. I think if we restructure the base terms, then the creative conversation gets a lot simpler. I've put together some notes on what I think is fair."
Silence.
David, with the practised subtlety of four decades of marriage, became very interested in the remaining food on his plate.
He was aware, peripherally, of Ilya also becoming very interested in his food, though Ilya's version of this was much less subtle. He had picked up his glass of water and was looking at it in a way that made it very clear how hard he was trying not to smile.
"I wish you'd told me you were doing that," Yuna said. Her voice had taken on a tone that he didn't hear from her very often. It wasn't quite hurt but not quite professional, either - something caught between them.
"I should have," Shane said. "That's fair. But I also knew you'd want to steer it in a specific direction and I wanted to go into the conversation without a predetermined position. I needed to hear what he actually said."
"That's what I'm there for. That's literally—"
"Mom."
The word was not sharp. It was not unkind. It was said with the same quietness as everything else he said. But it landed.
Yuna stopped.
"I know what you're there for," Shane said. "I also know my own career. These are the same thing most of the time. When they're not, I need you to trust me. I'm not twenty-two anymore."
His mother looked at him for a moment. Her expression moved through several things at once - a flicker of something defensive, something hurt, something that took longer to identify.
Then it settled.
"You're right," she said. Quietly. "You're right, I'm sorry."
"Don't apologise. Just let me show you the notes after dinner."
"Okay."
"Okay."
And that was it. Shane picked up his fork and asked Ilya if there was more of the roasted peppers, and the dinner continued.
David looked at his son across the table and thought, not for the first time, about the distance between the child you raised and the man he became. The child he'd raised had been quieter than this, if that was possible — quieter in a way that had occasionally worried him, a stillness that made him wonder if it was withholding or simply the way Shane was made. He knew now it was the latter. Shane didn't need to be loud. Shane had never needed to be loud.
He thought about the conversation, later, when they were washing up together while Ilya and Yuna sat in the other room going through the notes on Shane's laptop.
He said: "That was the right call."
Shane looked at him sidelong. "The sponsorship thing?"
"All of it."
Shane was quiet for a moment. Then: "She's good at her job."
"She's excellent at her job."
"I know." A beat. “But so am I."
David nodded once. Handed him a bowl to dry.
"Yes," he said. "You are."
Harris Drover been in sports communications for nine years, which meant he had developed a very specific set of skills. Chief among them: the ability to recognise, in real time, when a press conference was about to go sideways.
It was a gift and a burden. The gift was that he could intervene before disaster. The burden was that he had to watch it coming and couldn't always stop it.
He'd been with the Centaurs for three years. He'd managed enough press scrums and post-game interviews to have a fairly comprehensive read on every player on the roster. He knew which ones talked too much and which ones stonewalled. He knew which ones he needed to prep extensively and which ones he could hand to a journalist and trust to navigate it themselves.
Shane Hollander, he had learned, was one of the latter. He was good at press. Professionally good.
He understood what the machine needed, gave it just enough, and maintained a pleasant surface that journalists couldn't find purchase on. He was never rude. He was never dishonest. He also never said anything he didn't intend to say, which made him efficient to manage.
He'd never seen him get genuinely angry in a press situation.
But he saw it today.
It was mid-November, six games into a strong stretch of form, and the press, so far had been routine, boring even. Good moods, good results, the team running hot. The questions had been standard - about the power play, about the rookie defenceman's development, about the upcoming games.
And then Frédéric Gauvreau, who was a beat reporter from a Montreal outlet that Harris had a complicated relationship with, asked his question.
It was constructed carefully. Gauvreau was not stupid.
The question technically concerned Shane's performance numbers over the back half of last season - not exceptional by his standards, a dip that had coincided with the period just before he left Montreal, with everything that had happened.
The question used all the right words. It invoked nothing explicitly. But the framing was precisely shaped to imply that the real reason for the dip was the relationship, specifically, the implied instability of a relationship with someone like Rozanov.
Harris heard it and felt the familiar low-level dread start in his sternum.
He looked at Shane.
He hadn't moved. He was still holding his water bottle in one hand, elbow on the table, the exact same posture he'd had for the last twenty minutes. His expression had not visibly changed.
He looked at Gauvreau for a moment with that particular attentive quality he had, the one that made you feel like he was reading you quite carefully.
Then he said: "I want to make sure I understand the question. Are you suggesting my relationship affected my performance?”
His voice was pleasant. Conversational. A little curious.
Gauvreau, perhaps emboldened, said: "Well, there were reports at the time that there was some tension around-"
"There was tension," Shane said. "You're right. There were people in my workplace who had a problem with who I was in a relationship with and made that problem loud. That was genuinely difficult to perform through, and I'm proud that I performed as well as I did during that time."
He paused. Picked up his water bottle. Set it down.
"If that's the angle you're pursuing, I'd be careful with how you frame it. The tension wasn't about my relationship. The tension was about how some people chose to respond to my relationship. Those are different things, and I think your readers are smart enough to know the difference if you explain it accurately."
Silence.
Gauvreau opened his mouth. Closed it.
"I'm happy to talk about my numbers," Shane said, pleasantly, to the room in general. "Anything else?"
Three other reporters asked questions. None of them were Gauvreau.
In the hallway after, Harris fell into step beside Shane and said nothing for a moment.
He glanced at her. "Too much?"
He considered it professionally. "It'll get clipped. It'll run everywhere."
"Mm."
"You said nothing inaccurate and nothing actionable."
"I know."
He paused, grinning. “And Ilya's going to love it."
Something shifted in Shane's face - not much, just a fraction, the corner of his mouth. "Don't tell him until after tomorrow's game. I don't want him going out there with his ego any larger than it currently is."
Harris walked away, hiding a smile so large it was basically structural.
Svetlana had known Ilya her whole life, which meant she had known him through every version of himself he'd been permitted to be and every version he had kept hidden.
She'd known him as a child when he was all sunshine, smiles, and soft touch. She'd known him after the death of his mother, when he turned into a terrified, angry shell of himself who just desired comfort above all else.
She'd known him through the years in Boston where she'd watched him disappear into a version of himself she didn't fully recognise - harder and more brittle, the performances bigger and the person underneath smaller.
She'd seen how his family situation sat on him, the weight of the relationship with his father and brother, the complicated geography of love and grief and hate that the Rozanov family had never been particularly good at mapping.
She had not known Shane Hollander her whole life. She'd only known him for four years. And she'd had to recalibrate her read on him several times, because her initial impression had been wrong in ways she found very instructive.
Her initial impression was that he was gentle, quiet, contained and high-strung. He was the counterweight to Ilya's intensity and chaos.
Her revised impression was more complicated and considerably more interesting.
The charity function was an annual one - one of the larger NHL events, which meant a hotel ballroom in Toronto, a lot of people in expensive clothes, and a disorganised energy that came hand in hand with a full of professional athletes trying to remember how to be social in a formal context. It was, in her opinion, always slightly too loud and slightly too warm, and the canapés were never as good as they should have been at the ticket price.
She'd been talking to one of the Centaurs' assistant coaches near the bar when she noticed Ilya across the room.
He was with a group she half-recognised - two players from his Boston years, a defenseman she thought played for Vancouver, and a man she didn't know at all but who had the bearing of someone's agent or a league official. Shane was elsewhere, visible in the middle distance, talking to a group nearer the window.
Svetlana watched Ilya for a moment. He was smiling in that way he did when he was performing. Not fake, just different to his more natural smile that only the people that really knew him got to see. He laughed at something.
She watched more carefully.
Ilya talked with his hands constantly. It was one of the most consistent things about him. His hands narrated alongside his words, filling in punctuation and making points. When he was actually relaxed, his hands were expressive in a loose and generous way.
They were barely moving.
She set down her drink and started across the room.
She was close enough to catch the shape of it before she was close enough to hear all the words. One of the Boston players, Rourke she thought his name was, was telling a story. He had the unfortunate loose energy of a man who had been drinking since before dinner.
The story was about Ilya. About something from the Boston years. She caught enough of it to understand the shape - some incident, the kind of anecdote that was funny if you were on the outside of it and not funny at all if you were the subject of it and if the subject sitting right there in front of you had a particular history that everyone in the sport knew about, that was literally the name of a foundation that had been on the back of Ilya's jersey for three years.
The story was not about his mother directly. But it touched the edges of it. Rourke wasn't doing it with malice, she didn't think, he was doing it because he was drunk and because he'd started and the room had laughed and he'd kept going. The other Boston player laughed, and she saw in his face that he knew - he knew this was wrong, he knew the rule, everyone knew the rule - and he laughed anyway because nobody had stopped it and stopping it now felt harder than going along with it.
Ilya laughed along. His hands completely still.
Svetlana was ten feet away and moving and she was already composing the sentence that would end this cleanly-
And then Shane was there.
She hadn't seen him coming. She had been watching Ilya and he had simply arrived. He came up alongside Ilya and his hand found the small of Ilya's back briefly as he arrived and she watched Ilya's shoulders drop slightly.
Shane looked around the group with an expression that was pleasant and attentive and completely, utterly level. He had a glass of water in one hand. He looked, to anyone who didn't know what they were looking at, like a man who had just joined a conversation he was happy to be part of.
"Hey," he said warmly. "What did I miss?"
Rourke, completely unaware of what he was walking into, started to recap it. Shane listened. His expression didn't change. He nodded once or twice.
When Rourke finished, Shane was quiet for a moment. Just a beat.
"That's a good story," he said. His voice was thoughtful. Conversational. And then, with exactly the same tone and not a degree colder: "I always find it interesting, the things that become funny with a bit of distance. Some things translate, and some things really don't, depending on who's in the room."
A pause. Not long. Just long enough.
He looked at Rourke with an expression that was still pleasant and had something underneath it that Svetlana recognised - not a threat, nothing so blunt.
"I'm sure you know the foundation is named after Ilya's mother." A beat. "So I know you're not going there. Not making jokes about that kind of thing? I just wanted to say it out loud so everyone's on the same page."
The sentence landed like something dropped from a significant height.
Rourke stared at him. The easy looseness went out of his face and his face morphed into another expression entirely. One of a man who had just understood, very clearly and rather late, that he had been making a mistake for the last several minutes in front of an audience that was not going to forget it.
"I didn't- yeah, no, of course-"
"Of course," Shane said warmly. He smiled. "Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to come say hi."
And he turned to the Vancouver defenseman and said something about a game last week and the defenseman laughed with visible relief and within four minutes the conversation had moved entirely elsewhere, pleasant and ordinary, and nothing had technically happened.
Svetlana stopped where she was.
She stood at the edge of the group for a moment and watched Shane talk easily to the Vancouver defenseman, his hand back at Ilya's back, Ilya beside him with his hands moving again, the performance softening into something realer, and she thought about the sentence she had been composing on the way across the room and how it compared to what she had just witnessed.
She would have been angrier. She knew that about herself. She would have been precise and she would have been effective but she would have had less control of it and the anger would have shown and it would have made Ilya feel, in some small way, that the situation required anger, that it was that serious, that he needed protecting.
Shane had made it nothing. He had made it a minor social correction, a small recalibration, something that was over before it had the weight of being a scene. And Ilya was standing there with his hands moving and the real smile appearing at something the Vancouver defenseman had said, and nobody was looking at him with pity or concern, and the evening had simply continued.
She drifted to Shane's side a few minutes later, when the group had reshuffled and Ilya had been pulled into a conversation with someone from the league office.
She said, quietly: "You saw it from across the room."
Shane glanced at her. There was something in his expression - not quite a smile but something more private than that, a small dry quality that she was realising was characteristic. "He goes quiet. He thinks I don't notice."
Svetlana looked at him. She thought about the thirty-two years she had spent knowing what to look for, of knowing how to love someone who had learned very young that needing things was not always safe. She thought about how long it had taken her to learn that and how most people never learned it at all.
"He is lucky," she said. "To have you."
Shane looked briefly, genuinely uncomfortable with this - she filed that away too, that he didn't receive it easily, that he deflected from it.
"We're lucky. I'm lucky," he said, which was not a deflection exactly but a redistribution. Then, with the dry quality again: "Don't tell him I said that. His ego can't take it."
Svetlana laughed. A real one.
Across the room, Ilya turned at the sound of it, found them both standing together, his oldest friend and his husband, and his face did something complicated and warm and entirely unguarded.
Shane raised his glass at him slightly.
Ilya shook his head and turned back to his conversation, but not before she saw it - the smile, the real one, the one she had been waiting a lifetime to see on his face with any regularity.
She stood next to Shane Hollander in the warm noise of the ballroom and revised, quietly and completely, the picture she had been carrying of him.
Not wrong, exactly. Just - incomplete.
Shane woke at six-fifteen and the other side of the bed was empty.
He lay still for a moment, listening. He could tell the house was empty already.
He found him outside.
The back garden in November was bare and cold, the sky not yet light, and Ilya was sitting on the steps of the deck in nothing but his pyjamas with a cigarette between his fingers. He was looking at nothing in particular. He didn't turn when the door opened.
Shane stood in the doorway for a moment. He looked at the cigarette. Ilya had quit years ago but he knew he kept a stash in a drawer in the kitchen. Shane had never touched them and never mentioned them; he knew Ilya only kept them for emergencies, and he didn't need to explain that.
He went back inside. He came back with a mug of coffee and sat down next to Ilya on the step and handed it to him.
Ilya took it. His fingers were cold.
They sat.
Shane didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that Ilya didn't already know, and the day had only just started, and what Ilya needed at six-fifteen in the morning with a cigarette he almost never smoked anymore was not words.
He put his shoulder against Ilya's and stayed there.
He finished the cigarette. He held the mug with both hands. Above them the sky shifted, incrementally, from dark to a flat pale grey.
"Twenty years," Ilya said. Not to Shane, really. Just said it, out into the cold air.
Shane nodded once.
“It is stupid that it is harder,” Ilya said. “Not easier. It should be easier. Twenty years is-" He stopped. His jaw worked. “Is long time.”
"It doesn't work like that," Shane said.
Ilya made a short sound that was not quite agreement and not quite dismissal. He looked at his coffee.
Shane didn't push. He let it sit where it was — in the cold air between them, in the silence that the morning had the grace to hold. He had learned a long time ago that with Ilya you didn't need to fill the silence. You just sat in it with him. You let him know by your presence that there was no performance required, no resolution needed, no emotional destination he was supposed to be arriving at.
After a while Ilya said: "Practice at nine."
"I know."
"I am fine."
"I know," Shane said, and didn't mean it, and they both understood that, and that was also fine.
Ilya didn't eat breakfast, he didn't think he would but Shane made it anyway. He set it on the counter and said nothing when Ilya took only the coffee and stood at the kitchen window looking out at the garden where he'd sat an hour ago. Shane ate his own breakfast. He washed up. He moved around the kitchen doing ordinary things and didn't watch Ilya but didn't not watch him either and tried to find the balance of presence that he knew the day was going to require.
He understood the logic of the thing Ilya was doing, even if it was not sustainable. The logic was: if I stop moving, if I let myself sit with it, I will not be able to get up again. So you keep moving. You keep the structure of the day. You give yourself the practice session and the routine and the thousand small ordinaries that add up to a day passing, and you trust that the day will pass, and you do not look directly at the thing that is underneath all of it.
Shane understood this because he had done it himself, in a million different ways, for different reasons. He also understood that it worked up to a point and then it stopped working, and the point at which it stopped working was not something you could predict in advance.
He pulled on his jacket, picked up his keys and said, "Ready when you are."
Ilya nodded and picked up his bag.
The drive to the rink was quiet. Their usual quiet was easy but again, Shane didn't attempt to fill it. Shane kept his eyes on the road and his hand resting on the gear shift, close enough. At a red light, Ilya's hand came and covered his. Just for a moment. Then the light changed and it was gone.
The team knew what day it was.
Not how long - Shane didn't think most of them had tracked that specifically. But they knew the date. Nobody was louder than they needed to be. The chirping was present but careful, aimed at other targets. When Ilya came in and greeted the room with the version of himself he was performing today. He was still warm, still present, but quieter, the brightness slightly turned down and nobody pressed on it.
Shane got changed and watched.
He watched Ilya work through the routine and he watched the quality of it. Not what Ilya was doing but how. Whether the movements had their usual ease or whether something in them was effortful. Whether the focus was the real kind or the performed kind.
It was the performed kind. He could tell.
He laced his skates and didn't say anything.
On the ice, Ilya was—
Wrong.
That was the only word Shane kept arriving at. Wrong in a way that was invisible if you weren't looking for it. He was still Ilya Rozanov. He was still, technically, one of the best players on the ice. But Shane had played alongside this man for years and he knew what he looked like when he was fully present and he knew what it looked like when the thing running the body was not actually Ilya but some automated version of him that knew all the steps.
The mistakes were small at first. A pass that wasn't quite right. A read that was a half-second slow. Things you'd let go on another day, things that always happened in practice and didn't mean anything.
Then he took a hit he didn't need to take.
Shane saw it develop - saw Ilya position himself in a way that was unnecessary, that a player of his calibre avoided automatically without thinking about it. He took the hit and went into the boards harder than he needed to and bounced out of it and kept moving and Shane watched his hands, the way they came back to his stick.
They were shaking slightly.
Shane kept skating. Kept his face neutral. But something in his chest had gone very quiet and very focused.
Two minutes later, Ilya did it again. This time he didn't entirely bounce back - there was a moment, a brief moment, where he absorbed the impact and steadied himself and his face did something that he then immediately closed down.
Across the ice, Bood caught Shane's eye without quite meaning to. A silent conversation passed between them. Then he looked away and found something else to focus on.
The third time, Shane stopped.
He skated over to where Ilya was setting up for a drill at the far end of the ice, away from the main cluster of the practice session. He didn't hurry. He came up beside him and said, low and even:
"You're going to hurt someone."
Ilya turned to look at him. His expression was doing several things at once - the performance still there but wearing thin. "I am fine-"
"Not you. Someone else. You're not reading the plays. You're going to take yourself into someone and they're not going to see it coming."
That landed. He saw it land. Ilya's eyes shifted. He knew he had just been handed an argument he couldn't dismiss. Shane knew this - knew that he would dismiss concern for himself, but would never dismiss concern for his team.
His jaw tightened. He looked away.
"Hey."
Nothing.
"Ilya."
Shane stepped in front of him. Not aggressive, not demanding - just in front of him, in the way that required Ilya to either look at him or make a choice to keep looking away, and they both knew which of those was actually available.
Ilya glanced at him briefly before looking away again.
And Shane used The Voice.
Not loudly. That wasn't how it worked. It worked precisely because it wasn't loud. The Voice carried under it the complete and total absence of any room for negotiation, it said: I have decided, and now we are implementing what I have decided, and the only question is whether you make this easy or difficult.
"Ilya, look at me."
Ilya did.
"Listen to me."
Something shifted in Ilya's face. Something that had been braced went fractionally less braced, a door not opening but unlocking.
"We're done. Get off the ice."
The first instinct was there - Shane saw it flicker across his eyes, the automatic resistance of a man who had solved all his problems his entire life by simply pushing through them and pretending they weren't there. His mouth started to form the shape of an argument.
"Don't."
For a long moment Ilya just looked at him, and Shane held the eye contact and didn't move and didn't offer anything softer because softer was not what this was or what he needed and Ilya knew this. He'd always known the difference. That was the thing about this, about the way they worked - Ilya knew Shane's looks the way Shane knew his, had learned them just as carefully, and he knew which one this was.
This one meant: I've got you. Give it to me.
The tension in Ilya's jaw shifted. His shoulders dropped, almost imperceptibly.
He skated toward the boards.
Shane turned to the ice. Hayes was closest and had clearly witnessed the exchange from a distance, just close enough to catch the shape of it, but not close enough to hear. He met Shane's eyes briefly. Shane tilted his head, just slightly, toward the drill at the other end. Hayes nodded and turned and called something to Haas and the practice continued, absorbed Ilya's absence without ceremony, the room doing what it did.
Shane followed his husband off the ice.
The locker room was empty.
Ilya stood in the middle of it and didn't quite seem to know what to do next, which was new.
Shane steered him to the bench by his stall. Sat him down.
He started with the helmet - unclipped it, set it aside. Then the gloves. He moved through it methodically and gently and without asking, because asking would require Ilya to make choices and Ilya didn't have the space for choices right now. Shane had the space. Shane had enough space for both of them.
"I can do it," Ilya said.
"I know."
He kept going. Ilya let him.
The shoulder pads. The chest protector. Shane worked through it in order and Ilya sat with his hands loose in his lap and the thing he'd been holding all morning very visibly pressing against the inside of his chest, looking for a way out.
"Shane-"
"Not yet," Shane said, quietly. "Almost done."
He didn't mean the gear. Ilya understood he didn't mean the gear.
When it was done Shane sat beside him for a moment. Close enough that their arms were pressed together from shoulder to elbow. He could feel the tension radiating from Ilya's body.
"Shower and then we're going home," Shane said. "I'm driving."
Ilya nodded.
He showered and changed and Shane waited, and when he came out Shane handed him his coat and picked up both their bags and opened the door. Ilya walked through it. Shane followed him out.
In the corridor, Coach Weibe was coming the other way. He saw them, took in the shape of the situation in about half a second, and said "see you tomorrow" to Ilya with a hand briefly on his shoulder, and kept walking. That was all.
Ilya watched him go and something in his throat moved.
Shane opened the car door for him. Ilya got in.
They talked on the drive home. About nothing in particular, just filling up the space in the easy way they usually did.
Once they were home, Shane took both coats. Hung them up. Said, "Sit down."
Ilya sat at the kitchen table.
Shane made soup — Ilya's favourite, his grandmother's recipe that had been passed down to his mother, then to him and eventually to Shane. Ilya had taught him in their second year together on a rainy afternoon when he'd been homesick in a way that had no geographic explanation. Shane had learned it properly, had made him correct it twice, had written it down in his own handwriting on the inside cover of a notebook in the kitchen drawer.
Ilya was quiet at the table.
Shane set the bowl in front of him and sat across from him and said: "Eat."
Ilya picked up the spoon.
He ate a few spoonfuls. His jaw was still set in the way it had been all morning - the controlled way, the way that took effort. Shane ate his own soup and didn't watch him.
The tears, when they came, were quiet. That was the thing about Ilya's grief - it was always quiet, which was somehow worse than if it had been loud, because quiet grief was the kind that had been held for a long time in a very small space and had nowhere left to go.
He made no move to stop it or hide it. He seemed, if anything, barely aware of it. Ilya wasn't moving, was still sitting upright, still holding the spoon, as if the body had decided to do this thing independently of the will that had been refusing it all day.
Shane set down his own spoon. He didn't say anything. He didn't move to him immediately - he gave it a moment.
Then Ilya's spoon went down. His elbows went to the table and his face went into his hands and he watched as Ilya's entire body finally finally let go.
And Shane was up and around the table and pulling a chair close in one movement, and then his hand was on Ilya's back and he said nothing because there was nothing to say that wasn't already said. Nothing that wasn't already communicated through the hand on his back and the fact that they were here, in this kitchen, with the soup Ilya's grandmother had taught his mother who had taught him who had taught Shane, and twenty years was a long time and also no time at all, and grief didn't work the way you thought it would and Shane had known that before today and had prepared for it and had been here every moment of the day doing exactly what was needed without being asked.
Ilya cried and Shane stayed.
He kept his hand moving, slow and steady, on Ilya's back. He didn't speak. He didn't try to make it better. He just kept the hand moving and let the thing that had been pressing against the inside of Ilya's chest all day, for twenty years, have the space it needed.
After a long time, Ilya lifted his head. His face was a wreck and he made a rough sound that was part laugh and part wail and pressed the back of his hand to his eyes.
"Sorry-"
"No." Shane said.
"I am- this is-"
"Ilya."
Ilya looked at him. His eyes were red and his face was open in the way it only ever was here, in private, with Shane - the performing version of him completely absent.
"You're okay," Shane said. Quietly. "You're okay."
"I miss her," Ilya said. His voice was rough. "I still- every time I- I still want to call her. After something good happens, I still-" He stopped.
"God. I wish she could have known you. I dream about it." Ilya choked out, one hand rubbing his eyes, the other absent-mindedly touching the cross at his chest.
"I know."
"Twenty years." Ilya breathed out.
"Twenty years." Shane echoed. He didn't need to say anything else.
Ilya let out a breath that had the whole day in it. His head dropped forward and Shane put his arm around him properly, held him, and Ilya let himself be held in the way he could only let himself be held here.
Shane pressed his mouth against his temple. Stayed there.
The kitchen was warm. The soup was going cold and neither of them moved to do anything about it.
"Thank you," Ilya said, very quietly. "For today. For the — all of it."
Shane pulled back just enough to look at him.
"Eat your soup."
Ilya laughed. A real one, small and rough and real, the kind that only came from down in his chest when something hit the exact right note.
"This is your romance?"
"Eat your soup, Ilya."
He reached out and picked up his spoon.
He ate his soup.
Shane sat beside him with his hand resting on his back, warm and still, and the afternoon light came through the kitchen window at a low angle and outside the November garden was bare and quiet, and the day was passing, the way days did, the way they always did.
+1
The Irina Foundation was, in many ways, Shane and Ilya’s baby. The foundation worked with kids of all abilities but more often than not it was with with kids in difficult situations. Kids in the care system, who were low-income, disabled or living with family instability and gave them access to hockey. Access to the sport and to the community around it and, in the way these things sometimes worked when the conditions were right, to something they could build an identity around.
Today was the third annual Irina Foundation all-star skate, which meant twelve kids aged six to twelve, a rink in Ottawa, and an obscene amount of professional hockey talent assembled in one place to run drills and have an enormous amount of fun doing it.
In the stands were the people allowed to just watch. None of the parents or guardians of the kids were in attendance, they had found from experience that all the kids were more relaxed when there wasn't someone watching over them. But the families of all the stars on the ice loved coming along to watch. Yuna and David sat in the third row, as they nearly always did. And the partners of each player were scattered around them. They'd come for the chaos and because, as Kip had put it, watching professional hockey players try to teach small children to skate was one of the great pleasures available to a human being.
They were not wrong.
The kids arrived at ten in a state of buzzing barely-contained energy and excitement that you could feel from the corridor before they even got on the ice. They ranged from one small girl who had apparently skated twice before and had the cautious determination of someone attempting a moon landing, to a boy named Théo who had clearly been skating his whole life and immediately began lapping the others before Ilya said something to him in a low voice that made him grin and dial it back.
That, in retrospect, was the first indication.
Scott was in the stands waiting for the session to start when Kip leaned over and said, "Is Rozanov always like that? I thought you hated him?"
Scott looked at the ice. Ilya was crouched down in front of the small girl - Maya, her name was, they'd all been given the kids' names in a briefing - and was apparently having an extremely serious conversation with her about something. He was at eye level with her, completely relaxed, giving her his full attention.
Maya said something. Ilya's face broke into a grin so unguarded it looked like a different man.
"Yeah," Scott said. "When the cameras aren't on. And I don't hate him. Not anymore."
Kip watched him for another moment. "I thought he was supposed to be terrifying."
"On the ice, he is. But..." Scott shrugged, at a slight loss for how to put it. "He's different. Off it."
The session began. They'd divided into groups - Ilya, Wyatt and Ryan with the younger four, Hayden, Shane and Max with the middle group, Leah, Bood, Scott and Troy with the oldest kids who were looking at the professional players with the reverence of hockey-obsessed children confronted with actual hockey players, which was a specific and extremely endearing energy.
In the stands, the partners and parents found their own rhythms.
"Oh," said Fabian, Ryan's partner, about twenty minutes in.
Nobody had asked him to elaborate but the way he said it made everyone look at the ice.
Ilya was with a boy - he was one of the youngest of the group, was currently sitting on the ice having apparently fallen and then decided that sitting was acceptable. He was not crying but he had the distinct look of a child who might, who was working hard at not.
Ilya had sat down next to him. On the ice. In his full gear, crossed legs, like this was something people did all the time, and was talking to the kid in a low easy voice, nothing urgent about it, entirely relaxed, like they had unlimited time and nowhere to be.
The boy said something. Ilya responded. Made a gesture with his hands. The boy considered this, whatever it was.
The boy - Mateo, they learned later, six years old, in foster care since he was three - eventually got up. It took about three minutes of the conversation on the ice. He got up with a different energy than he'd sat down with, like something had quietly shifted in him. Ilya got up too, without commentary, and they did the drill again. Mateo made it across the ice without falling. Ilya did not celebrate this in a way that made it a big thing. He just nodded, like: yes, that's what I thought you could do.
In the stands, everyone had stopped talking and were just watching.
Twenty minutes later, a different situation developed.
One of the older kids, a ten-year-old named Caden who had been showing off since minute one, skilled but not particularly focused on anything except demonstrating that skill, had drifted toward the younger group and said something to Mateo that no one in the stands could hear but that everyone on the ice, from their expressions, had clearly heard.
Ilya was halfway across the rink. He turned. He started toward them but Shane was closer.
He stepped in front of Caden before Ilya got there.
He didn't crouch down. He didn't match the child's eyeline, which was interesting, which everyone noticed. He just stood there, looking at the kid, and said something that the stands couldn't catch.
Caden stared at him.
Shane said something else. Still quiet, still the same register, but with something in the posture - not threatening, nothing like that, but immovable.
Caden's expression went through several things and eventually landed on something close to embarrassment.
Shane waited. Then he tilted his head, very slightly, toward Mateo.
Caden said something to Mateo. It was clearly an apology. Mateo accepted it with the particular grace of a kid who'd had to develop social navigation skills early.
Shane nodded once. Said one more thing to Caden, they caught just enough to know it was something about the drill they were supposed to be running. Caden nodded and skated off toward it.
And then Shane looked up at Ilya, who had arrived at his shoulder and was standing there watching him with an expression that was somewhat famous, privately, among people who knew them well. One that occurred when Ilya was looking at Shane and had temporarily forgotten to be subtle about it. Open and warm and slightly undone.
Shane looked back at him with a similar expression, one that also only showed up when Shane forgot to hide it. One of fondness and exasperation in equal measure.
Ilya's face broke into the biggest grin.
"Hollander-“
"Don't," Shane said.
"You were so-"
"We are at a children's event."
"-scary. Terrifying. My fearsome little-"
"I will leave," Shane said, completely evenly, "and you will have to explain to all these children why I am not here."
Ilya put his arm around Shane's shoulders, enormous and emphatic, and Shane did not remove it though he gave Ilya a look that conveyed volumes.
In the stands, Kip turned to Fabian and said: "They had it backwards the whole time."
Fabian tilted his head.
"Everyone thinks Rozanov is the-" he gestured at the ice. "The one. And Hollander is the-" another gesture. "But it's not."
"It's both," Jackie Pike interjected from behind them in surprise.
David Hollander, one row in front of them, said nothing. He was watching both his son's with the expression he'd had for most of the morning because he had not been surprised by Shane Hollander or Ilya Rozanov in a very long time.
The Centaurs' dressing room forty minutes before game time had its own atmosphere, the team slowly finding their separate ways into the mental space required. Some players were loud right up until puck drop. Some had been quiet since the morning skate. The room accommodated all of it.
Ilya was standing at his stall in various states of gear, stick in hand, moving through the room and threading between his teammates with a word here and a hand on a shoulder there.
He stopped at Shane's stall.
Shane was lacing his skates. He looked up. Shane didn't think he would ever get tired of looking into those eyes, especially as they were right now, so confident and sparkling with excitement.
"Centaurs are going to win tonight," Ilya said.
"I know," Shane said.
"Obviously. Because I am on team."
"And yet we have a positive points differential even in the games you miss."
Ilya pressed a hand to his chest as if wounded. "Devastating. I raise you from nothing and this is what I receive."
"You didn't raise me from anything. I was already-"
"From nothing." Ilya said decisively. He crouched down so they were at eye level, elbows on knees, stick balanced across them. His voice dropped. "How are you feeling?"
Shane looked at him. The game face was on, mostly but underneath it, visible to Ilya and only, was a storm of emotions. Triggered, he knew, by their opponents. This would be the first time they were playing against Montreal since Shane transferred.
"Fine," Shane said.
"Shane."
"I'm fine. I want to play well. I want us to win."
"Okay."
"I'm not thinking about-"
"Okay." A pause. "They're not your team anymore. This is your team. And this team has your back. Always."
Shane looked at him. The something shifted slightly. Settled.
"I know."
"Good." Ilya stood. He was quiet for a moment, and then, with that brightness that never seemed far below the surface, announced: "I am also giving very inspiring speech tonight. Very good one. Maybe best of career."
"You said that last week."
"Last week was also very good. This week better."
Shane returned to his skate laces. The corner of his mouth moved.
"Let's hear it then."
"No, no. Need audience. Need energy."
"I'm your audience."
"You are my husband. Is different. You have seen me in many situations. You do not-" he searched for the word "-worship." He smirked.
"Oh, I think we both know how much I worship you, Rozanov," Shane replied looking up at him through his lashes.
Ilya's jaw dropped. "You little-"
"But you are correct, I don't worship you here."
"This is why speech is not for you. Speech is for men who still have hope."
"Go give your speech," Shane said.
"Yes. Watch and learn."
"Go."
He did. Shane finished his skates.
The speech, for the record, was genuinely very good.
The stands held everyone who mattered.
Shane's parents were in the family section with the other partners and wives and the cluster of people who had come together around these two men over the years. You could watch the interplay between them and the way they moved as if the ice between them was a conversation they'd been having for years.
The game was good. The Centaurs were better - not by a blowout margin, but they were pressing in ways the Voyageurs were working hard to answer and not quite reaching. Shane was sharp in a way that had an edge to it tonight. An edge that came with being in front of his home crowd, playing against the group of people who he had given half his life to, who he'd once considered his closest friends and who had betrayed him in a way he still wasn't ready to unpack.
The Voyageurs had not, visibly, had an easy time rebuilding from what had happened. Some of the players who'd been most vocal about Shane's relationship had moved on. Some were still here. You could tell which ones, from the body language at the faceoff - the players who avoided Shane's eyeline, and the ones who sought it with something in their expression that wasn't quite sportsmanship.
Late in the second period, the Centaurs were up by one.
Comeau had been a problem since the first period.
Not in ways that the referees had called — he was too experienced for that. But in a lot of small ongoing pressures: late hits that landed just inside the line, the positioning that crowded without obviously interfering, the borderline cruel chirps that Shane clearly wasn't reacting to in the expected way, which seemed to be making Comeau work harder.
Comeau had been in Montreal for six years. He had been vocal, in the period before Shane left, he was not the only one but he had been one of the loudest, and Shane had known that before the game and tried very very hard not to give him anything.
He hadn't. For thirty-eight minutes of hockey, Shane Hollander had given Comeau absolutely nothing, and it was clearly driving him insane.
The hit came at thirty-nine minutes.
Shane went into the boards hard - too hard for a standard check. Shane went down and came back up immediately, because he was fine and he knew he was fine and he was not giving Comeau this either.
Ilya, on the other hand...
Ilya had seen it from across the ice and covered the distance in what felt to everyone watching like roughly the amount of time it took to blink, because Ilya Rozanov with a fury behind him moved like something that had been coiled and released.
He had Comeau by the jersey before Comeau had entirely registered his arrival.
The crowd surged. The family section braced. Svetlana, who had been given seats with the partners, gripped the armrest of her seat.
Comeau, to his credit or his stupidity, did not back down. He had Ilya's jersey too and they were in the standard dance of it - gloves off, referees moving in but not there yet, the brief terrible pause before things escalated.
And then Shane was there.
He skated in between them and he put a hand on Ilya's chest and one on his arm.
"Hey. I've got it."
Ilya was vibrating. He looked at Shane with an untamed rage behind his eyes that told Shane just how close he was to making sure Comeau would never play hockey again.
"He's not worth the penalty," Shane said, level, low, not to the room. "Save it for the period. We're up by one."
Ilya held his gaze for a moment, eyes darting between Shane's, before cooling slightly.
He let go of Comeau's jersey.
Comeau, in the small moment that opened up as Ilya stepped back, with Shane half-turned toward his husband and the referees arriving and the noise of the crowd overhead —
Comeau said it.
In French. Quiet enough that only the people immediately around him caught it. He said it to Shane, specifically, with a kind of precise cruelty: a comment about whether Shane always needed his husband to protect him, deployed with the word that was not ambiguous, that could not be retroactively softened. The word aimed at Ilya, at them, at the thing they were to each other. The particular violence of a slur delivered by someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had chosen the moment they thought was safest.
Ilya's French was functional at best. He hadn't caught it.
But he caught the look on Shane's face.
It changed. Not explosively. That was the thing that every person watching would later find it difficult to describe. Shane's face simply went very still in a way that was different from its usual stillness but seemed the air around him contract.
The referees hadn't reached them yet. There were about four seconds in which nothing happened.
Shane turned back toward Comeau.
He hit him once, hard. A clean, measured, deliberate choice, that landed exactly where he'd intended it to land. He'd thrown his helmet off during the fight with Ilya so there was no protection.
Comeau went down.
The noise of the crowd was deafening.
Shane was on him before the referees got there. Not on top of him but standing over him with a quality of presence that was deeply unambiguous. When Comeau started to rise Shane put a hand on his collar and he did not grip it particularly hard and he didn't need to, because something in how he was standing communicated exactly what would happen if Comeau made this a longer conversation.
In all the noise, Shane's voice was quiet.
"Apologise to my husband."
Comeau stared at him.
"I'm not-"
"I didn't ask if you wanted to," Shane said, his voice ice cold. "I told you apologise to my husband. You're going to do it now, in front of this building full of people, and then we're going to finish this game, and if I hear you say something like that again, to either of us, or to anyone else in this league, the next conversation we have will not be as easy as this one."
Silence.
The referees were right there. The crowd was still going.
Comeau looked at Ilya, with the blood that Shane had put there, dripping from his clearly broken nose onto the ice.
"Sorry."
It was not warm. It was not sufficient, really, for what it was apologising for. But it was said, in front of seventeen thousand people and the entire bench of the Ottawa Centaurs and the Montreal Voyageurs, and Shane Hollander had extracted it from him, and it would be in the broadcast, and everyone had seen what preceded it.
Shane stepped back.
The referees were already moving in, the assessments unavoidable - five minutes for Shane, a roughing minor for Ilya, both of them directed toward the boxes on opposite sides of the ice. The crowd noise was enormous and continuous overhead, and Shane skated to his box with the exact same posture he'd had all evening, upright and focused, and sat down and looked at the ice.
Across the rink, Ilya was settling into his own box.
He was already looking at Shane.
Shane felt his gaze before he met it, which he had been able to identify across crowded rooms and full arenas for years now. He looked up.
Ilya's face was doing several things at once. The raw adoration was there - undisguised, the way he sometimes forgot to disguise it when something had knocked the performance clean out of him. Underneath it, the worry, the question: are you okay, are you hurt, what just happened, what do I do with all of this.
Shane held his gaze. He let a breath out, slow and visible. Shook his head once — I'm fine. Tilted his chin up slightly — we're fine.
Ilya stared at him for another moment. His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing the thing they did when he was feeling something large and had not yet decided what to do with it.
Then something in his face shifted. Settled. He nodded, once, the smallest possible movement.
Later, Shane's expression said.
Later, Ilya's answered.
He turned back to the ice. Shane turned back to the ice.
The Centaurs killed the penalty. They won the game, 3-1, Shane assisting on the third goal from the shift immediately after he came out of the box, because that was who he was.
After the game, in the crush of the post-game, someone got a microphone near Ilya in the hall outside the room. He had clearly been planning a diplomatic non-comment. He started to give one.
And then he stopped.
He looked at the reporter for a moment.
"My husband," he said, in English, slowly, "is most impressive person I know. Not because of what he did tonight. Because of who he is every day. Everything else-" He made a gesture, a sharp dismissal. "Everything else is just people learning what I already know."
He walked into the room. The door closed behind him.
Shane was at his stall when Ilya found him. Most of the room was still in various states of undress and noise and post-game adrenaline, and Ilya came and stood beside him and didn't say anything for a moment.
Shane looked up at him.
"You didn't need to do that," Ilya said. Quietly. Not the volume he used for rooms.
"I know."
"I could have handled -"
"I know you could have. You didn't need to."
Ilya looked at him.
"Nobody says that to you," Shane said. Not with heat. With a simplicity that was somehow more final. "Not while I'm standing there. Not ever."
Ilya sat down next to him on the bench. Their shoulders touched. Around them the room continued its noise, the way it always did, and they sat in it together the way they sat in everything together — not needing it to be quieter or to perform anything for it, just present.
"You know the speech I give before game?" Ilya said, after a moment.
"The inspiring one."
"The best one. Possibly greatest speech in history of sport."
"Yes. I remember."
"I think tonight you have given better one."
Shane was quiet for a moment. "I didn't say anything inspiring. I just told him to apologise to my husband."
"Yes," Ilya said. He was looking at the wall opposite, something in his expression that was complicated and warm and entirely undefended.
"That is the inspiring part."
Shane thought about this. He picked up his towel.
"Go shower. I'm hungry."
"Ilya."
"Yes, yes. I go."
He went. Shane sat for a moment in the room that was his room, on the team that was his team, and didn't think about Montreal and didn't think about Comeau and didn't think about anything except the game they'd won and the man who was currently arguing with Bood about something in the direction of the showers, already louder, already bouncing back in that way he had.
He thought: this.
This is what it's supposed to look like.
He got up and went to shower.