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The sun may have dipped behind the trees, but its warmth lingered. There were things to do, cups and plates to tidy away, but, instead, Shane allowed himself a few more minutes of languor under the blanket of summer air.
Shane thought the day had gone well. Ilya seemed to have enjoyed it; every time Shane had looked over Ilya’s eyes had been alight, face stretched into his unguarded grin. The one that still shifted the earth underneath Shane. That he could now gorge himself on if he wanted, if he let himself.
Even a season into playing alongside his husband—no longer just careering into and away from each other but their lives now being tightly backstitched together—Shane still wasn’t used to seeing that grin around other people. What had once been a tightly controlled substance was now dispensed widely. He liked it, though. Seeing Ilya more open to the world.
There was a light thud beside him and Shane opened his eyes to see Ilya sitting cross-legged on the grass by his reclined chair, spattering of gifts laid out before him.
“Sveta’s calling her new guy but she said I should open stuff without her,” Ilya said, rubbing his thumb against Shane’s ankle before turning his attention to the haul.
“Okay. Let’s do it inside and I’ll get a bag for the paper,” said Shane, not even bothering to move, knowing Ilya’s response.
“No, it is my birthday and I will get dirt on my new stuff if I want to.” Shane smiled as Ilya resolutely ripped into his present from the Pike Brood: Encanto Top Trumps with a card drawn by Amber.
(Ilya beamed and regaled Shane with details of his heated game and tragic loss to Jade last time they visited Montreal. Shane remembered. He’d watched from the sofa at the time, only half listening to Hayden’s laments about his new linemate’s weak backhand.)
Soon there was a pile: Ilya’s favourite vodka and the headband he kept trying to steal from Sveta; an Anya-covered phone case from Harris and Troy; a framed copy of the New Yorker cover the week he was born from Yuna and David.
Just a small thing from the team left. Ilya tore it open and let out a delighted laugh. His eyes found Shane’s and he was grinning again. A different, impish, dangerous grin. Ilya pulled the present from its wrapping—a shirt, Shane realised—and held it up for him to see. It was black, about two sizes too big for Ilya, and in bright red comic sans: ‘If Found Return to Owner’.
“Like a dog!” Ilya exclaimed, then turned it to reveal Shane’s face under a bright red ‘Owner’ label, “your dog!”
“It’ll match the leash and bark collar I got you,” joked Shane, tone light but brow furrowing slightly.
Ilya snorted, “Collar would not work on me. I would talk through the pain to spite you. Leave big red mark round my neck, show I am owned even without the shirt.” He wiggled his eyebrows.
Shane thought his responding smile was convincing enough, but the look Ilya gave him said otherwise. Ilya studied him for a second. “You don’t like the shirt?”
“No, no, it’s great. It’s just—” Shane’s brain was racing to parse why his body was squirming, “I don’t know. I guess I don’t love the whole ball and chain thing.”
He continued quickly, seeing Ilya’s mouth reaching for the low hanging fruit, “Not a sex thing, shut up. I mean, like, man and his nagging wife stuff. Like, I don’t own you.”
Ilya looked at him like Shane was missing something self-evident. “Yes, you do. You are literally beautiful, sometimes grumpy wife and I am whipped husband.”
“I couldn’t stop you doing anything even if I wanted to. If I could, you wouldn’t still be trying to convince me drunk cigarettes don’t count! And also you talk all the time about retiring early and becoming a full time WAG. How am I the wife?”
Ilya tutted, “We are obviously both wife.”
“Okay, but seriously. I don’t get— Is that how they see us?” Shane’s voice was a little more urgent now. He felt as if they had been swimming underwater and just hit the glass; realised that they were not, in fact, in the sea, but instead in an aquarium where the fascinated eyes of his teammates followed their movements. “I don’t like that— I don’t know. That they think that’s all we are.”
“No, we are more. Many things. But they will never see all of it,” said Ilya, as if it were that simple. As if they weren’t constantly being refracted through a prescriptive lens. As if they weren’t just a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot to people, eventually so grainy it could look like anything to anyone.
Ilya continued, gesturing to the shirt, “For me, this is close enough for them to know.”
Shane nodded slowly, brain still whirring as it tried to compact these feelings into something more solid.
“Okay, enough now. You are boring me on my birthday. Very rude. Sveta must see my new favourite shirt.” Ilya pushed himself to his feet and gave Shane a soft kiss on his forehead. “I wanted for a long time that people know I am yours. They don’t need to know it all. But I am glad they know that.”
Shane watched as his husband strode into the house, Anya close on his heels and the pile of presents left on the grass. Ilya knew that Shane would bring them in for him. Like an owner picking up his dog’s shit, Shane supposed. Or like an apostle that serves his church.
He closed his eyes again, giving himself a couple more minutes to sit with the lingering uneasiness until he would tell himself to get the fuck over it for the rest of the evening.
He was not a stranger to dissecting how people saw him, fidgeting in the discomfort of never being able to close the gap between what he wanted them to and what they did see. Never even being able to know what they did see. It was his life’s project to master; sadly one that was proving much more difficult than hat tricks or Stanley Cup wins. Basically, he’d expected it. He’d expected that there would be analyses of their relationship. That they'd assume they knew them. He just hadn’t expected how revealing every moment in their shared life would be, that there would be too much to control.
Shane sighed. For today at least, he could focus on Ilya’s open joy at being seen, whether wholly accurate or not. Besides, when it came down to it, on any given day they were both just the NHL’s best hockey player and the husband who is obsessed with him.
Shane went to join his husband and their friend inside.