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The day Shane was drafted, Yuna set up a Google alert on her phone.
There was a nice press release from the Voyageurs and a few of the local Montreal blogs.
There was a nice article from the Ottawa Citizen, their local paper. She’d spoken to this particular reporter and supplied her with a few basic biographical facts and photos of Shane from his junior days.
Of course, Shane had to share the spotlight in most of the articles with Rozanov. The same picture seemed to be used over and over again, Shane, Rozanov, and Lemaire holding up their jerseys. She tried not to let it irritate her.
It was mostly the same thing over and over.
“Hollander leads Voyageurs Streaking past the Guardians in a 4-1 Victory” and Reddit posts like “Incredible goal from Hollander (MTL)”
She doesn’t click on them usually.
One day, she sees an unfamiliar link from an unfamiliar format.
SHAYDEN-CONFIRMED it says. She clicks. It’s a rough copy-paste of an ESPN article praising Shane and Hayden’s line coordination. Well deserved, considering Shane had more goals than any other player in the league and Hayden was his most frequent linemate.
She copy-pasted Shayden into Google without thinking about it.
Another new website appeared. The first link was password protected, but the second was not. It was—well actually what was it? A story? An article?
Well, it was something, and it was about Shane and Hayden as princes in a magical kingdom.
She scanned the first few paragraphs, her brow furrowed.
Oh Jesus, this was a romance story. Nothing had happened, not in the first few paragraphs anyway, but she knew where a story was going when narrators started describing long flowing hair and chiseled chins. What the hell did Hayden and Shane have to do with any of this? Why would someone write about her son’s “long flowing hair in his form-fitting suit of armor?” And while this didn’t seem the most important point, she didn’t think suits of armor could be form-fitting.
This seemed like a corner of the internet she didn’t want to know about, and she closed her laptop.
But Yuna Hollander had never been very good at not knowing about things. That night, David snoring beside her, she did a little more googling. Shayden (again). Fanfiction. Shipping. RPF. Alternate Universe.
The Googling made her feel simultaneously better and worse. First, it seemed as though Shane was not the only player to have RPF about him. There were thousands of others and Shane only had about 12, even if most of them seemed to involve Hayden. But also people, not just the writer of “form-fitting suit of armor” but a dozen or so other people, were writing what very much appeared to be porn about her son.
She could not help noticing that nearly every “Hockey RPF” seemed to involve men. Which perhaps made sense, there being exactly 0 female players in the NHL, but it made her nervous anyway.
Yuna wasn’t homophobic. She really wasn’t. Their neighbors were gay. One of David’s coworkers too, probably.
But seeing Shane’s name there with Hayden’s made her stomach twist. Shane had girlfriends in school. He never talked about women now. She knew that women approached Shane — he was a professional athlete and in her highly biased opinion but also the opinion of several other blogs she’d seen in the past, among the better looking athletes in the league. But Shane never mentioned girls. His room had been plastered with hockey players, without a hint of swimsuit models. When Emily, his very first girlfriend, had dumped him, he had looked, there was no other word for it, relieved. When his team had won the CCHL championship at sixteen, his girlfriend, Jenna or maybe Jessica, had giggled and pressed her body into him, showing him off like a trophy, and Shane had kept his hands in his pockets.
But then again, Hayden wasn’t gay. She assumed. He had a wife and a pair of newborn twins. Yuna had met them.
She tried not to think about Shayden again.
“I have to tell you something,” she told David five months later.
They were in bed. David looked up from his copy of Freakonomics. “What?”
“I was monitoring Shane’s online presence and there’s this…thing people do. Shipping.”
“They’re sending Shane things?”
“No,” she said impatiently. She had always been the more technically literate of the two of them. David could barely get into his own Facebook. “It’s like…these people online pretend like two people are in a relationship.”
David’s brows drew together. He was paying attention now. “Pretend how?”
“They write things. They’re writing about Shane. And Hayden.”
“What?” said David again.
It seemed easier to show him, so she pulled up the website on her iPad. The count seemed to grow by the day. She didn’t like that now, when she tapped on “Hockey RPF,” there were two Shane/Hayden stories on the first page. One was another story that seemed to use her son as a paper doll - he was a superhero and Hayden his sidekick. But the other was called Rookies and professed to be the secret story of Shane’s rookie year romance with Hayden Pike. It promised “Slow Burn Romance” and “Evil Jackie Pike.”
David looked up from her phone, his glasses sinking on his nose. “That’s quite a rabbit hole,” he said. His tone was almost admiring.
“It’s only—do you think he knows?”
She had never given Shane a full report of everything mentioning his name on the internet. Did not pass on bitter blog posts about how he was overrated or that unfavorably compared him to Rozanov. She didn’t pass on most of the good ones either, other than in broad strokes or if something was particularly glowing, like a sweet Reddit post from a father whose daughter Shane had given a puck to. Shane was busy.
But did he know about this?
Shane was twenty-three now, about to start his fourth season as a Voyageur. The 2013-2014 season had brought the Voyageurs closer to the cup than they’d been in a decade, and Shane was convinced that the 2015 Stanley Cup had Montreal’s name on it.
He had spent half of the summer training, and the other half flitting back and forth between their house and the worksite for the new cottage he was building for himself 10 minutes down the road.
And there were still no girlfriends to be seen.
“Do you think he needs to know?” said David carefully. “Why tell him about weirdos on the internet?”
“It’s just…there might be some truth to it.”
“Honey, our son is not having a secret affair with Hayden Pike. I don’t think he’s a hockey-playing werewolf in love either. Is Edward Cullen another hockey player?”
Yuna waved this aside. “I know that,” she said, because she did. “But he might be…”
“What?”
“He might be gay, David.”
David hummed. “He might be. He never seemed interested in Jessica. Would it matter to you, if he was?”
“Of course not!” she said defensively. “You know it wouldn’t matter to me! It wouldn’t matter to you, right?”
“Not a bit,” said David.
There was a pause. One of them was going to have to say it. “But it would matter to the league,” said David carefully. “And his teammates, some of them anyway.”
“Yes. And I don’t think he wants that. He’s not—he’s not that type—I mean—” she was stumbling over her words, even though Yuna Hollander rarely stumbled over her words. “I don’t mean it like that, just that I don’t think he wants to be the face of anything. More than he already is.”
David nodded. “He’ll make that decision. If he is gay, of course. Which he might not be. He never seemed interested in any of that when he was a kid. I never found dirty magazines under his mattress. Men or women.”
“Asexual,” Yuna breathed. “That’s what it’s called now.”
“Sure.”
Yuna knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would love her son. She had carried him in her heart for twenty-three years. Twenty-four, really.
Being the parent of a professional athlete was odd, in more ways than one.
Shane was a head taller and 50 pounds heavier than her, and yet she wanted to throw herself in between him and the world, protect this grown man that did not need her protecting. Though he did, some of the time. Or maybe he just let her believe he did. She could not protect him everywhere though. Could not drop gloves for him on the ice when someone dared stick an elbow in her son’s ribs. Could not fight his teammates in the locker room. Could not stop the bloggers and the journalists and the internet shippers from saying what they wanted about her son, as though he was a paper doll or a robot for their entertainment.
“Do you ever wish Shane had gone to McGill?” she said to David. “That he had been an accountant like you or an engineer? Remember how good he was in science class? Remember how he used to do experiments with that microscope your sister got him, and write the results of it in that little notebook?”
“I remember,” said David fondly. “We had to order refills of the slide preparation liquid from a medical supply company. But no, I don’t.”
This surprised her slightly. She had always been the pushier hockey parent of the two of them. “Never?”
“No. He wanted to play hockey. If he wanted to be a scientist, he’d be a scientist.” David shifted so he could put his arm around her, and she sank into his chest.
“I don’t want things to be harder for him,” she said.
“Neither do I. But Shane has always done things his own way, at his own pace. He’ll figure out what he wants, and we’ll be there for him whatever, right?”
“Right,” she said. She meant it too. Yuna had spent almost a decade repressing (most of the time anyway) the urge to scream at bad referees and dirty players and nasty reporters and asshole coaches. She was on Shane’s side. Whatever uniform he was wearing. Whatever he did on the ice. Whatever he did off the ice. She would never claim to be unbiased, but that was her right.
“I just don’t want him to think we wouldn’t, you know, approve.”
“Of his illicit affair with Hayden Pike?”
“Very funny,” she said.
“Maybe we can, you know, let him know that. Subtly. We don’t want to scare him off.”
Yuna acknowledged this with a murmur. “It’s too bad the pride month was last month. I could have put something on Facebook.”
“Sure, hon. I’m going to bed. Try not to think too hard, eh?”
The next morning, when Shane came back from a rigorous session with his trainer in Ottawa, she offered to make him lunch.
“I saw Laura and Shelly at the bookstore the other day,” Yuna said casually. Well, it had been five months ago, but Shane didn’t need to know that.
“Who?” said Shane, picking at what was left of his lunch.
“Laura and Shelly. Remember? Our old neighbors.” The lesbians. “Such a cute couple. They have another little boy now, you know.”
“That’s great, Mom,” said Shane, sounding bored.
She tried a few more times over the course of the summer. Subtly of course. She reshared old Ottawa Pride posts on her personal Facebook and shoehorned said posts into the dinner table conversation. Shane had looked down at his phone. A few nights later, she brought up Laura and her wife again.
She googled “gay rights news” and found a way to mention her disapproval of some recent crackdown in Russia. Shane had gone to the Olympics in Russia six months ago, so it felt relevant at least. David played along this time, expressing concern and interest. This did get a reaction, but the reaction was Shane abruptly shoving his chair back and offering to clear the table.
This wasn’t going well.
Jackie Pike was pregnant again, so that was good. She saw Jackie at Montreal games and only thought about Evil Jackie Pike once or twice.
But more importantly, Shane was well on his way to his first Stanley Cup.
Winning the Stanley Cup made it worse. She should have expected that. She had promised herself she wouldn’t check that horrible site anymore, but it seemed to be infecting other parts of the internet. Not long after the joyous video of her only son achieving his lifelong dream circulated the internet, a small article appeared on a trashy hockey gossip blog: “Shayden, Jogers, MichLeux, and the secret world of hockey shipping”
For once, she wished Shane wasn’t first.
There was a new name. Hollanov. It made her laugh, despite herself.
The picture on the blog post was Shane and Ilya Rozanov from when they presented at the NHL Awards the previous year. Rozanov was grinning, Shane looked like he wanted to leap out of his skin.
She remembered that night. Shane had returned from backstage looking flushed and irritable, and had remained on edge for most of the night. He clapped when everyone clapped but mostly he picked at his food and spoke only when directly addressed. Rozanov had been sitting halfway across the room, but Yuna had caught him smirking unkindly at Shane’s back several times.
Shane had schooled his face into a gracious smile when Rozanov was announced as the MVP winner. Truthfully they’d expected it, his team having won the cup. But Rozanov, the ungracious prick, had thanked the other nominees for their “support” and winked at the audience knowingly, just to make sure that everyone in the room understood that he was being an asshole. The audience had laughed at his charmingly oversize ego, but Shane had flushed with irritation and Yuna had burned with anger on her son’s behalf.
Well, if there was one thing Yuna Hollander knew about her son, it was that he definitely wasn’t having a torrid affair with Ilya Rozanov.
The first comment, an innocuous #shaydenforever, on a Rolex post, appeared on June 1st, 2016. Yuna sent a quick email to Shane’s management team, who controlled his socials so they could add it to the auto-moderated comment list. No muss, no fuss.
Shane still didn’t have a girlfriend, but she’d decided to let things lie. She made small positive comments occasionally, nothing too showy. She’d put a tiny pride flag in her office where he would see it. David was right. Shane would move at his own pace, as he always did.
“Mom, what’s Holl-en-ov?”
“What?”
They were sitting at the kitchen table in Ottawa.
Shane was playing the Centaurs tomorrow before continuing onto Toronto, and had arrived early to spend the day with his parents. Yesterday's game had been adequate but not one of Shane’s career highlights, and quite a few people had been impolite enough to say so, even though this was still pre-season and none of this even mattered, the whole point of these games was giving everyone a chance to shake the rust off their skates. He'd be in top form by the time they played Boston next week, she was sure of it.
“It’s on my blocked comments list.”
Shane never posted on Instagram, but she knew he used it. Mostly for hockey, of course.
“What are you even looking at that list for?”
Shane shrugged. She could see him scrolling and she didn’t like it. The blocked term list was essentially a curated list of horrible words people on Instagram occasionally used about Shane Hollander, from loser to much much worse.
If anything, the shipping names were among the lighter topics. Maybe it was this that made her say, “Oh, it’s just internet weirdos,” she said. “That one is you and Rozanov, isn’t that silly?”
Shane stopped scrolling. “Me and Rozanov what?”
“People who are convinced you and Rozanov are in a secret relationship,” she said, smiling. It actually wasn’t hard to smile. Shayden felt like a hovering threat, but Hollanov really did feel like a silly joke.
Shane blinked. “There are people that think that?” he said warily.
“Weirdos on the internet,” she shrugged. “Can’t listen to them, right?”
Shane laughed awkwardly. “Nope. Why would they think that?”
Shane was taking this well, she thought approvingly. She needn’t have been so worried. Though she supposed the idea of being involved with Rozanov was funnier than being involved with his actual friend.
“Oh you know,” she said, “it’s the romance novel enemies-to-lovers thing. People like it.”
“That’s—a thing?”
“Sure. Like Romeo and Juliet.”
Shane looked down at his phone as though it was some kind of mysterious foreign object. “Oh,” he said finally. “Okay.”
“It’s not serious, Shane. Actually—” she couldn’t not tell him. Now that the topic had been broached, it felt dishonest to not disclose the more serious concern. “There are more people—though still a tiny tiny number of people don’t worry about it—that think you’re in a relationship with Hayden.”
Shane let out a loud, genuine guffaw. He pressed his fist to his mouth, his shoulders actually shaking with the effort to repress further laughter. But after a moment, he gave up and doubled over with a very un-Shane-like giggling. There was still a nervous energy to the laughter, and he didn't seem able to look at Yuna properly, but overall he was taking this very well.
She smiled. She really didn’t know why she had been so worried about this.
“Internet weirdos,” she repeated.
“Right,” he said, recovering himself. Then he frowned suddenly. “Should I…um…not hang out with Hayden anymore or something?”
“No,” said Yuna firmly. “There’s no evidence behind any of this, it’s just a silly fantasy. Don’t think about it at all sweetie, and stop looking at your blocked terms.”
Shane agreed to this readily enough, though a little while later he left to take a nap in his bedroom. She made him promise not to look at Instagram too much.
It was only after Shane had retreated to his room that she realized he hadn’t actually denied anything between him and Hayden. But he didn’t need to, right? He had laughed, hadn’t he? That was enough. Probably.
Rose Landry was a surprise. Annoyingly, Shane didn’t actually tell them, they heard the same way as everyone else, on the news. Or rather, through Yuna’s Google Alerts.
“It’s just casual,” said Shane over the phone. “We’re not like…labeling it yet. We met at J.J.'s friend's Haitian restaurant in Mile End and then we went to dinner last night downtown and there was a photographer when we left. It's really not a big deal.”
Yuna was thrilled. Well, sort of thrilled. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Shane trying to date someone with a career nearly as intense and demanding as his own. It was a wonder they found any time together, but evidently they did.
They wanted to meet her of course. Shane gently declined, citing Rose’s schedule and the aforementioned casual nature of the relationship, and Yuna temporarily let the matter drop.
The next time Shane called, he did refer to her as his girlfriend. Twice. Which was something.
It was nice to see Shane’s love life looking up.
“When does Rose wrap her shoot in Montreal?” Yuna asked a few weeks after Christmas. “I thought maybe we could stop by after one of your home games, nothing serious, just a quick hello.”
“Mom—” Shane groaned.
“Just a quick hello. She came to your home game last week, we’ll be there anyway.”
Shane sighed. “Look, Rose and I broke up, okay? You know, schedules, and all that.”
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. We’re still, like, friends. Really. I'm fine with it.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, sweetie.”
2017 was going exceedingly well. They had a wonderful time in Puerto Vallarta and the museums of Mexico City were an absolute treat. A well-deserved respite from the Canadian winter.
Shane had recovered from his first celebrity breakup remarkably well. If anything, he was in a better mood than this time a few months ago.
Two years of winning the cup hadn’t dulled his ambition at all. He wanted the dynasty, as he should. Yuna wanted that for him too. More than anything. The regular season was nearly over. A run of home games — Columbus, Boston, St. Louis, Calgary — were the only things standing between the Montreal Voyageurs and playoff season. And in any case, they could lose all four games (not that they would) and still qualify for the playoffs.
The Voyageurs were fifth in the league standings at the moment, thanks in no small part to Shane Hollander. Privately, Yuna thought that the back-to-back wins had made the Voyageurs complacent. Shane was zipping through defenders, scoring gorgeous goals, and had numbers even more impressive than last year. But the rest of them had become too reliant on those hat tricks and miracles. The team just didn’t want it enough. But in the meantime, Shane was having his best season yet.
After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Shane could watch the playoffs as long as he promised to leave the room to rest his eyes during intermissions. They could hardly stop him, but it was nice that he at least pretended as though they could.
She tried not to fuss. David was really more that person anyway, he was the caretaker of the family. Yuna was the doer. David held the vomit bowl, Yuna called the doctor, that’s how it had been.
Hayden Pike stopped by for a visit, but he was the only Voyageur who did, though she supposed they were busy with playoffs. The visit was friendly, bro-like, and brief. Yuna didn’t read too much into it.
Shane was miserable and crabby, but not quite as miserable and crabby as she expected. He seemed to have made peace with the early end to his season. And though no one dared to say it out loud, it was obvious the Voyageurs were not going to make it to the Eastern Conference final without him. Maybe that was a bit of an ego boost to him. It made Yuna feel a little better. She liked the Voyageurs and would have rooted for them anyway, but she wasn’t sure she wanted them to win a Stanley Cup without Shane. As much as their house was plastered with branded Voyageurs merch, before Shane had been drafted, she had always been a bit more partial to the Cens. But in any case, it didn’t matter. The Cens hadn’t made it to the playoffs, and the Voyageurs were not going to make it much further.
Rose had sent Shane a box of fancy spa and skincare products, along with, for some reason, a pair of men’s Prada sunglasses. It was kind of her, and Shane obviously agreed, because the next morning he walked down to the dock and chatted with her on the phone for nearly an hour. She saw him taking a selfie of himself in the sunglasses. She didn’t know whether he’d gone down to the dock because he didn’t want to be overheard or because he didn’t want them to try to take his phone away.
David had casually suggested that Rose come for a visit, since Shane’s calendar was (by his standards anyway) wide open for the rest of the summer. Shane hadn’t rejected the idea and had said over dinner that Rose might, might, be free some time in July. Though he went out of his way to pointedly refer to Rose as a friend.
Yuna did not expect anything to happen between Shane and Rose, Shane had made that perfectly clear, and after all, it had only been a few months. But she liked the idea of Shane having a friend visit. She would have liked that anyway, it wasn't as though Shane had ever had an abundance of friends over at the house, even as a child. But especially right now.
He had spent the last two weeks in a sling doing next to nothing, precisely as his doctors had instructed. He hadn’t decided if he was going to the NHL awards. He had agreed to various brand and team commitments in August, but his June and July stretched in front of him, unstructured. It wasn’t Yuna’s place to comment on it and it was perfectly reasonable for Shane to want some time off after an injury. But it was unusual. And she was slightly worried that six weeks of unscheduled time would drive Shane to the brink of insanity. It would have driven her to the brink of insanity. But it was his life, after all.
Rozanov glided across the television screen. Even with a helmet and gear, the smugness practically radiated off of him. Though no, that wasn’t very kind.
Rozanov had visited Shane at the hospital, after all. She hadn’t actually seen him visit but she knew from one of the nurses that he had.
She’d asked Shane about the visit, mildly concerned that Rozanov would have mocked him.
Shane had blinked very slowly up at her. “Captain’s visit,” he said in an oddly deep voice. The sound seemed to amuse him and he begun babbling his own full name in the same voice, putting on an geographically unidentifiable comedy accent as he did so. But he didn’t seem upset at least. Maybe Rozanov had been cruel and Shane was just too loopy to remember it, but Yuna doubted it somehow. She had seen the footage of Shane’s hit. She had sat in the front passenger seat while the car crawled through Thursday evening traffic toward Montreal General and she’d watched the video over and over again, scanning for eyelash flutters and toe movement. Rozanov had flown into frame before Shane had hit the ground and remained there until Shane was led into the tunnel. Hovering, watching, speaking maybe too. Eventually someone had nudged him aside. He had played terribly after that, stumbling and missing passes.
In the privacy of the empty kitchen, she googled Hollanov again.
A series of video thumbnails appeared first, then a blog article. She clicked tentatively on the blog article.. It was long, incredibly so, a point-by-point analysis of everything Shane and Rozanov had ever said about each other in media interviews. She could tell from a quick scan of the text that it was nothing. Nothing was an overstatement. According to the author, every time Rozanov had ever mentioned the numbers 2, 4, or 6 in his interviews, that was a coded reference to Shane’s jersey number. There seemed to be quite a lot of math involved in this theory.
Some of it was illogical — Shane being seen speaking to Rozanov during a warmup meant they were dating. Shane and Rozanov avoiding each other during a warmup the following week meant they were dating.
The author’s lynchpin piece of evidence (heavily bolded and italicized) was that Shane had once, years ago, been seen leaving a hotel in Montreal where the Bears had been staying. There were of course no photos of this.
But the treatise was interspersed with other pictures and screenshots. Most of the pictures had garish red circles.
Rozanov showily kissing Shane’s helmet at All Stars.
Shane’s foot accidentally touching Rozanov’s under a table during a press interview.
Rozanov and Shane standing on opposite sides of a group press photo, with a dozen other Eastern Conference players between them.
Shane, years ago, at some black-tie event she hadn’t attended, looking across the room at Rozanov.
Yuna slammed the laptop shut.
Oh.
Oh.
Well, Shane had always done things at his own pace.
She was still surprised.
But perhaps not as surprised as she might have been.
After they left, she added another Google Alert.