Archive of Our Own

i.  

January 2016

Hayden goes back and forth on making the sign. 

On the one hand, it’d probably be funny enough to pull at least a little laugh out of Shane, he thinks. On the other hand, the last thing he wants to do is overwhelm the guy after an eight hour flight and the drag that is pushing through customs at Montreal-Trudeau, and also there’s a non-zero chance that announcing to the airport that he’s waiting for Shane Hollander’s re-arrival in the motherland will cause a stampede.

It’s been four months without Shane in Montreal. Longer, technically, if you count the summer he’d spent back in Ottawa, which Hayden doesn’t usually have to. Like, sure, he was in the country at least, but that was the off-season. Everyone’s used to not seeing Shane during the off-season. 

It was not seeing him in September, when the lockout began and he’d fucked off to fucking Switzerland of all fucking places, that the city had started to feel weird. It was like one of those agreed-upon rules of the universe: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the Boston Raiders fucking suck, one should never run through a yellow light with Jackie in the car unless one wants to hear about it for the next week straight, and Shane Hollander belongs in Montreal the moment the leaves start shifting colors. 

Which all just means that for the past four months, Hayden’s been feeling like everything’s out of whack and disjointed, like he woke up in some sort of parallel universe where all magnets point south and moss grows willy-nilly all over every side of the tree, like he’s been training to run a marathon and showed up to find out it was actually a three-legged race and his partner is an eight-tentacled, Swiss-German speaking octopus or something. 

After a bit of deliberation, he settles on a nice middle ground regarding the sign dilemma. Ruby and Jade are happy to be recruited for their artistic skills after nap time. 

It turns out looking like a tornado’s smashed a few crayons to bits across the length of the white piece of poster board Hayden’s picked up, but it’s not like he expected anything else. One day, his daughters are going to be poet laureates or English teachers or those monks from the Middle Ages whose job it was to copy out epic poems and bible verses on fancy paper, but right now, they’re two years old and they can’t even write their own names yet, let alone Shane Hollander.

It looks good though, the poster. It looks even better when Hayden sneaks the bottle of glitter out of the arts and crafts room and lets Jade put on the finishing touches right before bath time. Jackie’s all frowny eyebrows and crossed arms about it, tosses a rag at him and tells him he’s on the couch until her dining table is glitter-free, but it’s worth it when he’s parked the car—he’s fucking paid for parking for Shane’s ass, he’s getting so many good-friend points for this shit—and walked into the arrivals lounge and sees the way the white and silver shimmers in the fluorescence of the baggage claim section overhead lights.

It looks sort of like it’s got some kind of alien, magic fairy kind of glow, which makes it all kinds of perfect. Hayden moves Artist up on his mental list of likely careers for Jade to want to be when she grows up. It dethrones firefighter (Jade has so far been worryingly fascinated with open flames but incredibly resistant to the concept of water, especially in regards to bath time), but not hockey player (for which Jade has shown no aptitude for outside of a willingness to body her sister into the wall at the slightest provocation, but Hayden’s an optimist and that is, admittedly, about half of what hockey is).

Hayden’s knocked from his thoughts by a sudden burst of people from the upper levels of the airport, trickling down the stairs and the escalator towards the baggage claim. He stands at attention, peering up at them as they come closer. None of them particularly look Swiss-German, but outside of maybe dressing in the Swiss flag, he’s not exactly sure what that looks like if he’s being honest. 

None of them is Shane though, that’s pretty obvious fairly quickly, and Hayden looks around to find a pillar to lean against or an empty seat he can commandeer while he waits. 

He’s got all of Shane’s flight information loaded up on his phone, knows the number of the plane and the carousel where his checked bags will be spit out. He doesn’t even bombard Shane with that many texts once the monitors have told him that the plane from Zürich has landed. Shane’d sent him the email of his flight details when he’d told him he could come pick him up, and Hayden knows he was only able to get Basic Economy on such short notice, so it’s gonna be ages, probably, before Shane even gets off the plane. 

Then he’s gotta go through customs, too, answer a bunch of questions about how much less cool and awesome Switzerland was than the homeland, maybe sing a rendition of “O Canada” for the border agent. So Hayden’s going to be nice and polite about waiting for Shane to show up at the top of the escalator, because Hayden’s a good fucking friend and also he thinks Shane’s probably going to be jet-lagged and travel-exhausted to hell and back once he does finally get through security. 

And Hayden’s been Shane’s roadie roommate since they were rookies together; he knows, probably better than anyone else in the entire world, what Shane’s like when his sleep schedule’s disrupted, and Hayden’s not looking to have his head chewed off by his best buddy in the baggage claim of YUL if he can avoid it.

An indeterminable amount of time later, another trickle of people start to descend the escalator. Hayden squints at them, looking down to check the time on his phone for a second before he looks back up and finds him. 

Shane’s there on the escalator, right in the middle of the pack, leaning against the bannister like it’s the only thing keeping him standing. The hood of his sweatshirt is pulled up over his hair and he’s frowning out at nothing, mouth pulled down into something even worse than the expression he wears in the locker room after a loss when media’s done and the cameras are gone. 

But it’s been four months and Hayden’s fucking missed the guy more than he’d ever actually admit out loud, so he’s not shy in pushing forward through the crowd of people to get to him.

He greets Shane at the bottom of the escalator, barely remembering to hold out the sign before he’s sweeping him up into a two-armed hug that’s definitely getting traces of glitter all over the back of his hoodie. 

It’s a nice hoodie too, something Shane must have gotten in Switzerland because it’s nothing like anything he’s ever seen him wear before. It’s definitely expensive, soft material in that trendy shade of red-wine-purple-brown-whatever, all fucking distressed along the edges and on the chest in that way that means it probably cost, like, at least a thousand bucks.

Smells weird, too. Like cedar and airplane.

The glitter makes it better actually, Hayden decides as he pulls away from Shane, clapping him twice on the shoulder before he lets him go.

“Look at you, buddy,” he crows. He sort of wants to go in for another hug, but he doesn’t want to overwhelm him. Shane already looks a little overwhelmed, blinking at Hayden and then blinking down at himself like that was a fucking instruction or something. 

God, Hayden’s missed him.

He waits for Shane’s brain to get with the program. He looks tired. Exhausted, really, like run over with it, and it makes Hayden wince a bit. Jet lag’s the worst. 

(Like, probably at least.

Hayden’s a good Canadian boy, born and raised in Calgary. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s left North America—unlike Shane, who got his passport at nine years old and not even to, like, visit somewhere specific but because he’d told his folks he’d need it for the fucking Olympics and then his parents had agreed. 

Like that was a normal thing to say. Like it was an eventuality that would need to be prepared for, like in ten years it was a given that Shane would be chosen to play at the Olympics for Canada because of course he would be. 

And of course he was, the fucker.)

Hayden’s not saying he’s an expert on the physical effects of long-distance travel or anything, but that’s got to be what this is, right? This has gotta be what jetlag looks like, up close and personal. 

It’s gotta make you look like you’re sick, because under the shit lighting of the arrivals floor, Shane sort of looks like he’s dying. His freckles are darker than how Hayden remembers them, probably because his face looks so pale, washed out, except for the skin under his eyes which is tight and red. The bits of his hair sticking out from the hood are piecey, stuck to his forehead.

Hayden’s seen him after a double-shift on the ice against the Silver Crusaders, after a knock out of the playoffs, the morning after Montreal’s Cup parade when they were both so fucking hungover neither of them could handle the overhead light or the distance sounds of their teammates still going wild out in the hotel hallway. Hayden’s seen him looking rough, is the point. But this is—

Hayden thinks this is worse. 

“Hey,” Shane tells him finally, on a thirty-second delay that would probably make Jackie coo and try to bundle him up into a blanket on the couch. Hayden’s kind enough not to mention it. “Hayds, hey, thanks for picking me up.” 

He reaches out and grasps Hayden’s shoulder, a mirror of the hold Hayden’s still got on him, except it doesn’t feel like a friendly bro-touch. More like Shane’s just lost his balance and he’s gotta lean on something for the support. Like he’s still trying to find something to hold him up, reaching for the bannister of the escalator and making do with Hayden instead.

Which, yeah. Of course he can. That’s what Hayden’s here for, obviously, that’s why Hayden’s Shane’s A, on the ice and off it. He shuffles a bit closer and adjusts his grip on him, wraps his arm around his shoulders and grabs at the wheeled carry-on at Shane’s feet.

To be clear, Hayden would donate a fucking kidney to Shane Hollander if he asked. If he needed one. Like, Hayden’s there. Ready and willing and whatever. Blood, plasma, a kidney, half his liver, whatever he needs. It’s his. 

But at least at the moment, when all of Shane’s organs seem to be in full working order, the only thing Hayden can really do for him is pick him up at the airport and hope the guy understands everything he’s not saying when he passes over the twins’ sign and says, “Here, take this. How many bags am I looking out for?”

“Uh, two,” Shane says and he’s squinting down at the sign in confusion, like he’s worried if maybe he’s forgotten how to read English between leaving and coming back.

“Says Welcome Back Shane, You Dirty Traitor,” Hayden tells him helpfully, jostling him against his side as they walk to the carousel 6.

“Wow, bud,” Shane says, like an asshole, and Hayden’s missed him so much it’s embarrassing, one of those things he’ll take to his grave and try to keep the truth of even from God Himself. “Did you make this all by yourself?” 

“Blood, sweat, and tears, baby,” Hayden replies and then has to untangle himself when he sees one of Shane’s suitcases thump its way onto the conveyor belt. It’s pretty easy to spot. Shane’s used the same set of luggage since he was eighteen years old, and it’s a bit comforting to see it now, on its side and overpacked with scuffed stickers dotting its shell, after what’s basically like half a year of everything being mostly the best ever but different, too.

“Fuck, Hollzy,” he complains gamely, lugging the suitcase back and dropping it at Shane’s feet. “Did you pack half of the country with you when you left? Gotta be a few of the mountains in here.”

He’s sort of angling to get Shane to scowl at him, maybe punch him in the shoulder and rag on him about strength training and letting himself go during the lockout—not that Hayden has, alright, he’s in the sort of peak, off-season shape his body’s never been at by January—maybe start lecturing him about the importance of dryland versus on-ice off season training. It’s actually—sort of surprising, how much he wants that to happen.

Because then he’ll be able to show Shane just how ready he is for the season ahead of them. Tell him, see, look, I’m good to go, I’m ready to have hockey back even if I didn’t chase it to the end of the fucking world first.

See, a very small part of him has been aching to say, you didn’t have to leave. You could have stayed here. Hockey was always going to come back, you fucking idiot. 

“That’s my gear bag,” Shane mumbles instead of doing anything Hayden wants him to do, which in a way is also Shane Hollander in a nutshell. Perfect timing. Right when he was starting to worry Switzerland had changed him.

Hayden goes to grab the gear bag too, because he’s a good fucking friend. “Alright, seriously,” he says once he’s slung the bag over his shoulder and grabbed the smaller carry-on suitcase. “The fuck did you put in here? Heavy as shit.” 

Shane’s eyes flick down, to the suitcase, to the gear bag, to the carry-on. He doesn’t look up again. “I don’t know,” he says quietly, but not like the way he does when he just wants a reporter to stop asking stupid questions in the post-game scrum. Like the way he says it when that’s his genuine answer. I don’t know, he says, and it’s sort of lost and a little bit confused. He pairs it with this disjointed shrug too, one shoulder going up and falling down while his free hand shoves its way deeper into the pocket of his joggers. 

And Hayden—doesn’t know what to do with that. With any of it.

But he does know where he’s parked, at least, which feels like something. So he says, “Hey, man, you gotta listen to what Jackie said when I told the girls that you can get edible glitter at the store,” and he nudges at Shane’s shoulder until the guy gets with the program enough to start moving in tandem with him, like they’re on the ice together again.

And if Shane’s lagging behind a little bit, needs Hayden to slow his pace and bump their shoulders together every few steps, then that’s fine. He’s tired. He’s just gotten off a long-haul flight after four months living in a foreign country. He’s probably been busy as hell since Hayden called him a day and a half ago. He’s probably gonna sleep through the night like a little baby as soon as Hayden gets him back to his house.

People get sort of confused, sometimes, about the relationship between captains and their alternates. See, captains, on the ice, are the ones that get to argue with the refs. They’re the ones elbowing their way into scrums and pulling out their guys, relaying coaches’ orders and pulling the team together—and the alternate trails behind, does whatever the captain needs him to do to keep up the forward momentum.

Sure, fine. Hayden’s happy to do it. Except sometimes the C’s an idiot and a traitor, flying out of the airport in Ottawa under the cover of night with only a couple of days’ notice, and coming back to Montreal looking like death warmed over four months later. So sometimes the MLH playbook gets tossed to the side and captains and alternates obey the alphabet rules instead: A goes first and C follows its lead.

“Alright,” Hayden says when Shane’s got his seatbelt fastened and the car’s in motion going five under the speed limit, mid-day traffic flying past them. He keeps stealing looks at Shane from the corner of his eyes, which is something he’s perfected in the two years since becoming a father. 

Not that Shane seems to notice. He’s got his head up against the glass of the car window, hands tucked neatly between his knees. He didn’t even bitch about not driving, and Hayden would put money on Shane Hollander having weighed the pros and cons of asking to drive the fucking team bus at least once in his life. 

“Alright,” Hayden says, and he’d clap his hands together the way he does when he needs the rookies’ attention, except he’s gotta keep them on the wheel and he thinks Shane’s so zoned out that he’s pretty sure he could lean over and clap right in front of his ear and it wouldn’t get him very far.

He reaches out and turns down the radio instead, Adele singing low enough that he can hear the whirr of the car’s heating. 

Shane’s an easy guy, once you figure him out, and Hayden’s always had a real knack for puzzles. He knows there’s a handful of things that Shane’s always ready to talk about, that he’s always got opinions on and those opinions are sharply honed, incredibly well-researched and just dying to be shared with someone else.

Hockey is the obvious one, except Hayden doesn’t really want to talk shop right now after just getting Shane back. They’ll have time for that later, in a couple of days when they’re back on the ice for practice with the whole team. They’ll arrange some sort of leadership core meeting beforehand, too, probably. Start getting their ducks in a row tomorrow. 

So hockey’s out, but there’s another low-hanging piece of fruit Hayden can reach for here. “Cause I’m such a good friend,” he says, casting another sideways glance at Shane and then away just as quickly, “I’m gonna give you fifteen whole minutes to complain about all things Ilya Rozanov. And I’m not even going to tell you I told you so once.”

It’s a good offer, limited time too. If Shane’s little holiday in Zürich has taught Hayden one thing, it’s that Shane enjoys bitching about Ilya Rozanov almost as much as he does about biased refs abusing the fuck out of goaltender interference calls. He fucking loves the topic. Every time they’d talked on the phone, Rozanov’s name came up like a bad penny. Every fucking time. 

Hayden wanted to know about the Zürich team? Well, has Shane told him yet about how Rozanov tied Metternik’s skates together during practice while Shane discussed the power play with him?

Hayden told him about the trials and tribulations of trying to cook Jackie’s favorite meal for their anniversary? Has Shane mentioned that Rozanov never remembers to compost his orange peels and so now the whole house smells like citrus?

Hayden recounted to Shane the horrors of bath time with a hydrophobic toddler? What a coincidence, Shane’s been so annoyed with Rozanov for leaving his wet towels on the bedroom floor.

(The bedroom, Shane had said, verbatim. Like there was only one. 

Hayden has always had a million different reasons to dislike Ilya Rozanov, but that was at least ten of them right there. Dangerous. Rozanov was so fucking dangerous; Shane’s never played a game he hasn’t put his whole fucking heart into, every inch of his skin.)

But heaven fucking forbid if Hayden commiserated too readily or eagerly with Shane about how much Ilya Rozanov fucking sucks. The moment he did, it was like conversation over. Like Shane was the only one allowed to complain about Rozanov—Ilya—and he was offended that Hayden was even trying.

He’d only made the mistake of telling Shane that he shouldn’t have gone to Zürich the one time, cutting through some rambling complaint about Rozanov’s inability to share their house to point out that none of this would have happened if he’d just stayed in Montreal like everyone expected him to.

It’d taken three whole days before Shane picked up the phone again after that, and when he did, it’d been with that damned media smile Hayden could see from a mile away. It’d taken another week before Shane was back to normal, bitching about Ilya Rozanov’s inability to properly peel a potato, like that was something Hayden had the bandwidth or interest to care about.

(Hayden didn't say anything. Not when Shane started talking exclusively in we’s; not when he spent half a call with his head tilted away from the camera, alternately listening to Hayden and whatever Rozanov was saying just out of earshot of the phone; not when Shane called him from a snowy mountain lodge in early December and said something about going home in a few days, just in time for the team’s game against Bern. Home, like it was Zürich. Like that rink was home ice, something to return to. A place where he could unpack, settle in, settle down. Like a fucking home. 

He didn’t say anything at all because he’s a good fucking friend. Fucking—good at puzzles, at predicting patterns and outcomes. It’s what makes him a good friend, a good hockey player, a good A: he’s always got his eyes fixed on the ice fifty feet ahead of him. Makes it harder to catch him off guard. 

Shane’s never been like that though. Not really. He’s had the breath knocked out of him more times than Hayden can count, and he’s still never learned. Too focused on the puck, on the player who has it in their possession—not nearly focused enough on the player down the ice from him, coming his way at full-speed.

So Hayden didn’t say anything, not during any of their phone calls, not when Rozanov became Ilya. Not when Ilya became an unescapable presence in Shane’s fucking—basic conceptualization of Switzerland as a place. 

If he said something, he’d startle Shane away, skittish fucking horse. And then who was going to pick up the pieces once Switzerland dissolved into nothing? Who was going to pick him up from the airport in Montreal if not Hayden?)

Hayden glances at Shane from the corner of his eyes and then back to the road again.

If anything, Shane looks more tense than before, shoulders curled in towards himself. Like he’s braced for a blow that’s already struck him, maybe like he’s waiting for a repeat performance.

“I don’t want to talk about Ilya Rozanov,” Shane says very quietly, like if he’s whispering the words then maybe Hayden won’t hear them at all.

(Hayden thinks, maybe. Shit. Maybe he should have said something.)

“Alright, bud,” he says, because he’s a good friend, and sometimes that means knowing when to push and knowing when pushing would mean breaking something already cracked and fragile. 

Shane’s probably exhausted. Shane might be getting sick. An illness sounds like a pretty appropriate parting gift for Zürich to have left him with. 

But it’s over now. The lockout and Shane’s holiday and the—

(The whatever with Rozanov he’d struck up over there in their dinky little house, something like Stockholm syndrome, maybe, except let’s call it Zürich syndrome: where you go temporarily insane in a new and unfamiliar environment so you start cozying up to the only bit of familiarity you have, even though that familiarity is a fucking Boston Raider. Like would it have been that fucking hard to learn Swiss-German and make a friend outside of Ilya fucking Rozanov? That’s what Hayden would have done. Or, no–Hayden wouldn’t have fucking left in the first place, so—)

The lockout is over now. The jet lag, the sickness, whatever’s got Shane wound up so tight against Hayden’s car door—it’ll pass. A fever you just gotta sweat out. A back-to-back home-and-away you just gotta get through. Clock’s run out on the penalty, they’re allowed back on the ice soon, and when they are, it’s just going to be flying til the final buzzer.

Hayden turns the radio back up to fill the silence of the car because it’s the kindest thing he knows how to do if he can’t talk about hockey and he can’t let Shane complain about Rozanov and he can’t ask about Zürich, which feels like skirting the edge of a landmine when Switzerland is hockey and Rozanov and disappearing rapidly in the rearview mirror.

Adele’s still singing her apologies. Hayden takes the off-ramp towards Shane’s place on muscle memory alone.

It’s a good thing, he thinks, that he’d convinced Yuna and David to let him pick Shane up from the airport. He’d lied something awful, cited team business that couldn’t wait the night because he’d been so excited to see Shane, get his hands on the guy and shake him a little for leaving, get his hands on him and hug the fuck outta him for coming back.

It’d been, like, selfish probably. Lying like that. Except it’s a good thing now, he thinks. Shane’s parents wouldn’t let the quiet stand. They wouldn’t have turned the radio up. They would have wanted answers. They would have asked about Zürich. 

Hayden’s not better than them for being able to swallow back his questions or anything. He gets that. He gets that it’s a parent thing. Hell, he’s the same way. Ruby or Jade starts crying, he’s down on his knees beside them trying to figure out what happened, what’s hurting, how he can make it better. And they’re two. The things that break their hearts are broccoli with dinner and bath time and being too far away from their mom or dad or their security blankets.

He can’t imagine this’ll change as they grow up and the heartbreaks get worse. Can’t imagine what he’ll do when they learn how to cry so quietly Hayden might not be able to hear them at all. Thinks, probably, if he ever picked one of his daughters up from the airport, in a bajillion years where they’re old enough to leave the country without their dad, and they come down the escalator looking as sick and wrung out and rubbed raw as Shane had, he’d start asking questions too. He’d start, like, waging a one-man war against the entire world if he had to.

But he’s not a father here. He’s Shane’s friend. A good fucking friend, and so he doesn’t ask the questions that Yuna and David would. He just lets the radio play and waits for the fever to pass.

“Hey,” he says, when he’s parked outside Shane’s place. Shane’s got his stuff out of the car already, gearbag slung over his shoulder and suitcases in his hands. Hayden’d offered to help carry the load up to the apartment, but Shane’d been quick to shoot him down.

Now, he rolls down the window on the passenger side and leans forward over the wheel until he can see Shane’s face. Shane blinks at him, slow. Dazed and fucking confused, like maybe they went through turbulence on the flight and he got a concussion sitting back there in Basic Economy. 

“Hey, man, I’m glad you’re back,” Hayden says, because he can’t help himself and because it’s the truth and because I love you, I missed you’s can only be said in different tones, when they’re wearing different uniforms, when they’re standing under arena lights and there are other people around them. 

So instead Hayden picks Shane up from the airport and he doesn’t press against bruises, doesn’t ask questions, lets the radio play them out, lets Shane drag his luggage up to his apartment himself, and says instead, “I’m glad you’re back,” like maybe Shane’ll understand everything else, too if he just hears that. I love you, I missed you. When you’re ready, I’m here.

Shane blinks and then he smiles. It’s like the smile he gives the media, but not. He smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes, but it changes the lines of his face, makes them crack open like a dinner plate breaking against the edge of the sink. 

“Yeah, bud,” he says, and that sounds like shattering too in its own way. “I’m so excited to be back in Montreal. Can’t wait to get going, get back on the ice.”

Hayden nods, because he’s a good fucking friend and he can see how much Shane wants him to nod. So he does. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s gonna be a good season.” 

“You bet,” Shane says. Stiff and robotic. A smoke screen with nothing behind it at all. “Gonna get a nap in,” he adds, tilting his head to the apartment building behind him. “But text the core tonight so we can plan tomorrow, alright?”

“Alright, bud,” Hayden says because he’d give Shane Hollander fucking—anything he needs. Kidney, blood, plasma, the works. Least he can do is play along too. “Go sleep off the jet lag,” he says, tapping his fingers against the wheel and watching as Shane nods and smiles for the camera, hands white-knuckle tight around his suitcase handles and eyes so fucking blank.

Hayden stays parked there on the street right up until Shane gets his keys in the door and turns the locks. The motion sensors of the front hallway lights must glitch, because when he opens the door, they lag and forget to flicker on. 

Just for a moment, Shane’s standing on the stoop of the building and the only thing that’s there to welcome him home is the lonely darkness of a house just waking up from hibernation.

ii. 

January 2016

The Captain of the Boston Raiders has been standing in front of the wall of color samples for the last forty-eight minutes, and Ruth isn’t quite sure what she should do in this scenario. 

Usually, of course, she’d go up to the customer and ask if they need any assistance, if they have something in mind that Ruth can help them actualize. Usually, she’d be able to coax a fully-realized project out of a person’s vague New Year’s resolution to re-do their living room, their kitchen, their third child’s bedroom. You don’t get twenty years beneath your belt at a home improvement store without recognizing the kind of people who come here with a checklist and an actionable plan, and the kind of people who come here with a desire for their life to be different without quite knowing what that looks like.

And, look, Ruth’s not a miracle worker. She probably knows better than most that a fresh coat of paint in the master bedroom isn’t going to bring back the honeymoon phase of a relationship that’s already mostly dead and buried. But she’s damn good at her job. She’ll give you the best shot possible at it when she’s stationed behind the Paint Desk.

But, well. This is the first time a celebrity has walked into the store before. And maybe Ruth’s never cared a whit about hockey before, but Richie’s had Ilya Rozanov’s poster up on his wall for the last two years now; she sees it every time she goes into his room to pick up his laundry. 

So even she can recognize the Captain of the Boston Raiders despite knowing as little about hockey as she can get away with in a city like this one. And despite the fact that Captain Rozanov seems to be trying his very best to be as unrecognizable as possible, what with the beanie pulled down over his ears and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

It’d probably work, too, except there’s no hiding that jawline or the moles dotting his face. Bad luck, being so handsome and well-known. Can’t even renovate his home without someone knowing he’s doing it.

She’d go over and ask if he needs any help, the way she’d do with any customer who’s spent this long staring at the warm color palette swatches on the far side of the Paint Wall. Except there’s something about the stiff line of Ilya Rozanov’s shoulders that makes her keep her distance even as the clock behind the counter ticks closer and closer to closing time without the man moving. 

If Do Not Disturb was a person, she thinks it’d probably look about like Rozanov does in her paint aisle.

So instead of seeing what she can do for him, she tugs out her crossword book and starts looking at the place she left off. The rest of the store’s deserted this time of day. No one’s thinking about changing their lives and their lifestyles at three o’clock on a Wednesday in January. In Ruth’s experience, most people are just looking to get through to Thursday. The fixer-uppers and the New-Years-Do-Betters will arrive on the weekend, early in the day, like if they buy all the things they need to redesign their lives before ten in the morning, they’ll have a better chance of doing it before supper.

Thank the Lord Ruth’s taken Saturday off, cited Violet’s clarinet recital, even though Violet’s out in Oregon for college and she hasn’t played clarinet since she was twelve years old. But you don’t get twenty years under your belt at a store like this without learning what you can get away with it.

And right now, what Ruth can get away with is avoiding the future’s Saturday masses and the present’s Ilya Rozanov, Captain of the Boston Raiders. Not forever, of course. Just until he decides to buy something or leaves. 

She gets two clues into the damned crossword before her phone buzzes with a text message. 

It’s Violet, because of course it is. What that girl is doing so far out there, Ruth doesn’t know. It’d taken everything she’d had to bite her tongue and let her little girl go, even though the only thing she could tell Ruth about Portland, Oregon when she’d asked why was Mom, you don’t understand, the trees out there are just gorgeous—

As if there aren’t trees in Boston!

Trees—and what is it that she’s decided to study out there? English fucking Literature, so Ruth just has no idea why the trees are important if the only ones she’s going to be looking at are the ones already turned into books anyway.

The trees. Fuck the Oregon trees.

I got a bad (red) stain on my nice white sweater, Violet has texted. How can I get it out ASAP? Need for dinner.

Idiot girl, who Ruth loves to death and back again. Every week it’s a different version of this same question. Easier just to text again instead of scroll back up through the old conversation to find the answer. Easier just to text Mom than it is to ask Google. Why wouldn’t it be? Hasn’t Ruth been dealing with grass stains and skinned knees and broken hearts half her life now? The questions haven’t changed so much that she doesn’t have an answer, not when her job is having an answer.

How can I get this stain out of my jeans, Mom? Mom, what’s the recipe you make for that vegetable dish that I like? Can I substitute vegetable oil for lard, Mom? Mom, what’s lard? Mom, when do I need to get my flu shot? Mom, if I forgot to get my flu shot in October, can I get it now or should I wait until next October? Mom, can you hold my hand? Mom, how do I live this life without you? Mom, have I told you yet about the trees in these parts? They’re beautiful out here, Mom. When are you visiting?

“Excuse me,” a quiet voice says, and Ruth only startles a little bit before she puts her phone down and looks up to see Ilya Rozanov standing in front of her counter, a paint swatch clutched into his hands. “I would like this one, please,” he tells her, sliding over the rectangle of colors and pointing to a dark mustard color labeled as Deep Sunflower.

“Of course,” Ruth says, taking the paint chip from him. It’s her personal policy to double-check with the client before she starts messing around with the mixing machine. So she asks, “This one is what you want?” and she taps her finger against the yellow square and glances back up at the hockey player.

Ilya Rozanov shrugs, mouth ticking up and then falling down, like he wants to smile but has just realized how muh effort that would be. “No,” he says. “But is close enough.”

The answer’s just unexpected enough to make Ruth pause and consider him.

She isn’t sure she likes what she sees, when she actually stops and looks.

Ilya Rozanov looks…exhausted. There are thick, dark shadows under eyes that are too guarded to fit with how young he looks under the fluorescent lights of the store. The bits of his hair sticking out of the beanie look unkempt, greasy. His lips are chapped and his cheeks look pale, and he just looks—nothing like the poster hanging on Richie’s closet door. Nothing like an ice hockey captain, a man in his prime who’s brought the Raiders back to their former glory or whatever the sports pundits are saying these days.

He looks tired and sort of sick and like no one’s tucked him into bed in ages, and the part of Ruth who loves everyone in the world through the lens of being a mother looks at him and thinks: who is feeding this boy? I’d like to have words with them.

“Well,” she says out loud, taking the swatch of paint away from him and putting it carefully down on her side of the counter. “Unfortunately, Mr. Rozanov, we don’t do close enough in these parts.”

Ilya Rozanov blinks at her. “Okay,” he says, glancing down at the paint chip again. “But you do Deep Sunflower, yes?”

“For people who want it, I do,” Ruth nods and folds her hands over the paint swatch and her crossword puzzle book. “But if there’s something else you’d like more, Mr. Rozanov, we’ll just need to see it and we can mix it up for you here.”

Rozanov blinks again, slow, eyebrows furrowed. Too many pucks to the head, Ruth thinks. This is why she’d campaigned for Richie to take up swimming. Low contact, low laundry sport. Best of both worlds. “You can mix up other colors?” he repeats. “That are not on your wall?”

“If you’ve got a picture of it or a sample, we can try our best,” Ruth tells him. It’s the company line. They can match pretty much anything, but it’s never truly perfect. But in her experience, no one who looks at shades of yellow for forty-five minutes only to choose one he thinks isn’t exactly right is going to be satisfied with close enough. 

And, look. Ruth knows a thing or two about the kind of customers that come into the store after so many years working here. She can’t guarantee whatever home improvement project that they’re envisioning in their heads will actually make a difference with whatever dissatisfaction’s cropped up in their lives. But she can try her best to give them what might make them happy. Ease the way a little bit. Ease the weight of it all.

And Ilya Rozanov looks like he’s got a whole lot of weight on his shoulders that no one’s bothered to help him carry for ages. 

He looks nothing like Richie in the shit store lighting, too tall by half, too white, too blond, too broad. But he could be Richie, one of these days. Or, more like—Richie could be him. Someone like him.

God, Ruth’s never cared about how old these hockey players are, and she still doesn’t. Except now she knows how old this hockey player is. If not the exact number, then at least the way he wears his age. 

And this one, well. He’s just a boy. 

“Do you have a particular color in mind?” she prompts when Ilya Rozanov just looks at her. The sudden brightness in his eyes make the shadows underneath them more pronounced. 

“I—yes,” he says, and he digs his phone out of his pocket. “Is a picture,” he adds. “This is okay?”

“We can figure it out from a picture,” Ruth assures him, holding out her hand for the phone when Rozanov hesitates. “Anything clear with good lighting will do,” she adds. “Some shadows are alright, but the brighter the better for mixing.” 

Rozanov looks down at his phone screen for a moment, lips tightening with some sort of emotion Ruth can’t even begin to name, and then he passes her the phone. “The cabinet color, please,” is all he says.

A photo of a kitchen takes up the whole of the screen. Automatically, Ruth appraises it with the eyes of a store employee. It’s well-lit and clear enough that Ruth thinks trying to make a match without an actual sample won’t be too difficult. The color Rozanov wants is obvious too. Hard to miss. Impossible to miss, honestly. It’s a fucking eyesore, splashed out across the cabinets and backdrop of the picture. Mustard yellow, but with so much green mixed in it looks like someone tried to paint it one color and then decided to do a second coat in something totally different. 

Ruth can feel her eyebrows raise up as she examines the cabinets in the picture. A part of her wants to triple-check with Rozanov about Deep Sunflower now that she knows what the other options are.

Another part of her, the employee part, wants to get the mix of this mucus-mustard-olive-marigold color perfect for the customer so he can take it home and put it up on whatever part of his house he wants and then come back in for a totally different color in a few weeks when he realizes exactly how ugly this one is. 

Another part of her, the mother part, knows sometimes you gotta let people make their own mistakes. Especially once they’ve dug their heels in and settled into their trenches. And maybe that’s not what Rozanov’s done yet, but he had this photo ready pretty fast after spending so long looking at the yellows on the Paint Wall before.

And then she shifts her attention away from the cabinets to look at the photo as a whole, and it’s—well. 

It’s of two people, two boys. One of them is Rozanov, for all he barely looks like the Rozanov in front of her today. The one in the picture has no shadows under his eyes; he has laughter lines instead, a dimple cutting through the swell of his cheek. He’s frozen in a smile, head turned away from the camera lens to look at the boy standing next to him, body leaning back against the counter behind him but tilted into the other boy’s space, shoulder disappearing behind them both.

The other boy isn’t looking at the camera either. He’s looking back at Rozanov, face slightly flushed and dark hair swept back from his forehead with the band of a cone-shaped party hat. He’s leaning back into Rozanov, smile small in contrast to Rozanov’s toothy-looking grin. He’s holding something out towards Rozanov, but Ruth can’t tell what it is without zooming into the photo. A fruit, maybe. A citrus or an apple or a vegetable of some sort.

There’s a few other people in the frame, along the left-hand side of it, two men wearing identical party hats and looking at the person behind the camera with the same camera-ready smile and long-suffering expression. Like someone has called for a group photo, maybe, but the two boys haven’t heard the instructions. They’re still caught up in their own little world. Neither of them seem to have noticed the camera yet. Their smiles are just for each other, and Ruth—

Ruth doesn’t think this is the sort of photo she should be seeing. Not without signing something first, like an NDA.

“I have others, I think,” Rozanov says after her silence must stretch on for too long. “Here, let me—”

“No, no,” Ruth says quickly, tapping on the screen to zoom into the paint color on the cabinets. “No, I think this will work, honey,” she tells him. The affectionate slips out without her conscious approval. It’s just—

The picture. If Rozanov’s in it, someone else must have taken it, obviously. With a different phone, with an actual camera, maybe. So he’d have to have looked for it to save it onto his phone, to have a copy of it so easy to find. It has to mean something, she thinks. If not the photo, then the way his fingers tangle together on the counter as he watches her examine it.

That has to mean something, the hope that cracks his face open when she tells him I think this will work. 

It makes her heart hurt a little. It makes her think, again, uselessly, all instinct and no common sense: who is feeding this boy? Who is making sure he is getting enough sleep?

“Give me a second,” she tells him instead. “I’ll mix up a sample.”

It takes, in total, four different samples of vomit-yellow-mucus-green before Rozanov says, “Yes, that one. That is closest.”

“Are you sure,” Ruth asks, because—it really is just an incredibly horrific color. The final result, when she looks into the small cup, is more yellow than green, a little lighter than the mustard on the paint chip, but somehow…fungal looking. 

But the truth is, you reach a point with customers and children and strangers, where you just have to let them make their own choices which means letting them make their own mistakes half the time, whether that’s painting their house dog-shit yellow or quitting the swim team in favor of the ice hockey one or moving across the country for college because of a few pine trees.

She doesn’t even pretend to wait for him to nod again before she’s setting the machine up to mix two cans worth of the paint. “Do you have primer?” she asks over the sound of the machine whirring. “Sandpaper?”

Sometimes customers come in and they know exactly what they want. Sometimes they come in with vague ideas, hopes and dreams that they need Ruth to turn into something actionable. Rozanov seems to be a mixture of everyone who’s come before him: someone who knows exactly what he wants but has no idea if getting there is even possible.

“I will need sandpaper?” he asks, blinking at her.

It reminds her so immediately and viscerally of the text conversation open on her phone—Mom, how can I get this red stain out of my white sweater?—that it makes her heart hurt a little bit and her hand spasm towards him, pure instinct. 

He looks so tired, is the problem. He looks sort of like someone Richie or Violet could grow up to be. Someone who needs his mom to hold his hand through whatever’s keeping him up at night. 

How do you get red wine out of a white sweater, Mom? Baby, sometimes you don’t. You just gotta learn to love the stain or throw the whole thing out and start fresh.

Ruth sees two dozen people a week at her counter with paint swatches in their hands that they think are going to change their lives in some way or another. New leaves turn over in the paint department store faster than they grow outside during the spring.

It’s rarer to get someone like Ilya Rozanov in here, but Ruth’s been doing this for years and years now. She recognizes his type, few and far between as they are. She saw the photograph. 

Once in a blue moon, someone comes in here trying to hold onto something they don’t have anymore, something that got lost along the way. A woman wants a gallon of pale blue so she can paint her windowsills the same color she remembers from her grandmother’s house. A family’s moving houses, moving cities, wants to repaint their place the same soft yellow they’d always called home before. An elderly man, mind going fast and body going faster, can’t remember his wife’s favorite color anymore, but he remembers the red of her front door after walking up to it for five years, knocking on it and asking to take her out on the town.

A hockey player, who looks so tired a single breeze could probably knock him over, walks in and shows her a picture of a kitchen she’d put money on him not having anymore, of a night that’s been over for who-knows-how-long. No fucking idea about sandpaper, about primer, drip clothes, rollers, probably planning to throw on one of his thousand dollar hoodies and crack open one of the paint cans. Unconcerned about stains and streaks and drips.

“Alright,” Ruth tells Ilya Rozanov, who is apparently a boy who is very good at hockey and very bad at taking care of himself. “So there’s a few things you should know before you start painting. If you want this color to last wherever you put it,” she adds because—well, sometimes you gotta let them make their own mistakes but you can at least try to tell them you think they’re making a fucking mistake. 

“I do,” Ilya Rozanov says quietly, fingers tapping along his darkened phone screen and eyes fixed on the small sample paint cup. He opens his mouth, like there’s something else he wants to say, but maybe she’s not who he wants to tell it to, because he shuts it without saying anything else.

“Well alright then,” Ruth says. “You’re going to want to write this down, Mr. Rozanov. It’s quite a list.”

iii. 

March 2016

“Alright,” Jonas says, standing up from his stall. His body groans, knees tired and strained enough to rebel against even the simplest of tasks. The years have been piling up; their knocking has gone from persistent to insistent to downright unkind. 

He is on the precipice of too old for this, but the edge is not the limit. Every hockey player who knows the game knows this as well. He is skirting the cliff’s line; he’ll keep pushing until he sends his body into free fall.

It’s gratifying, at least, that when he stands and puts his hands together, the locker room around him quiets down almost immediately. Respect like that is hard won—when it is given, it is so sweet and so worth it.

Most of the team is here already, practice set to begin within the hour and the upcoming game against Bern looming large on the horizon. Everyone is eager to get out onto the ice, but Jonas would have to be blind and stupid and, importantly, unable to access Twitter to think that they stop chattering amongst themselves and give him their full attention because they expect to hear a speech from him that has anything at all to do with ice hockey.

“So,” he says. “I’m sure we’ve all seen the Video.”

The Video. For fuck’s sake. Jonas is too old for this nonsense. Too old to wake up after a lousy night’s sleep with an aching body and a phone buzzing against his nightstand with a flood of notifications because he’d been the sort of sentimental old fool that set up alerts for Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander and Boston Raiders and Montreal Metros when Rozanov and Hollander went back to their North American teams in January.

Jonas watched it, because of course he did. He watched the Video twice actually, once half-awake in his own bed, eyes squinting against the bright light of his phone screen as he listened to Ilya Rozanov mumble through his own heartbreak, torn up and clawed open right there for everyone to see. 

Then he’d watched it again in the media team’s office, flanked on either side by the Lions’ communications officer and the general manager. It’s funny; he has been captain for going on twelve years now, but he has never had so many meetings with management as he’s had since the North American hockey lockout began and Zürich first decided to sign both Rozanov and Hollander.

“I’m sure we all have our own thoughts,” he adds quickly when Emil, compression shirt only half-on, opens his mouth. He sets his face into a stern look, trying to convey how little interest he has in hearing other people’s thoughts on the matter. 

But Emil is as young as Jonas is old, in people years and dog years and hockey player years, and he has so much left to learn about—well, everything. Respect and party lines and the importance of holding one’s tongue. “I thought—”

“There is a non-zero chance that our own media will ask about this,” Jonas says smoothly, putting his hands on his hips and then immediately regretting the action when it makes him feel like a mother lecturing her gaggle of small children.

“If it is a slow news day, maybe,” Gunter mutters without looking away from taping his stick. “Very slow.”

“There is a non-zero chance,” Jonas repeats because—yes, it is a bit unlikely, maybe, for a North American scandal as small and inconsequential as a hockey player talking to a camera when he shouldn’t to be reported on across the ocean here. But it has taken him by surprise before, the fervor and fixation that American media has on their favorite hockey stars. And every tabloid will ask and print and pressure whatever and whoever they can to get what they want: money, attention. Blood.

“I think if they’re smart, they’ll use it as a tourism advertisement,” Metternik calls from his stall at the far end of the locker room. “What do you miss about Switzerland? All of it, and then they pan over the mountains, yes? Perfect advert.”

Jonas gives him his most unimpressed look, but the damage is already done. The seal is broken. Suddenly, Emil’s asking Gunter about Ilya Rozanov’s secret girlfriend, Metternik is wondering out loud if the Lions’ media team can make a video of their own using the audio, Manzy is rubbing at his forehead and telling Emil that no, Rozanov did not have a secret girlfriend, does Emil have fucking eyes?, Kaube is listening to Metternik with a furrowed brow and pinched lips, on and on.

A video like that, everyone has opinions. Everyone in America, obviously, what with how many tweets and views the post has already racked up. 

But everyone here, too. These men who played with Rozanov and Hollander, who spent time with them off the ice, who gave them recommendations for restaurants, who brought them food and gifts and gave them Christmas cards and got Christmas cards from them in return, all signed XO Ilya and then, lower, in different ink, + Shane. 

Nimar, A prominently displayed on his practice jersey, stands from his own stall with a forceful, “Listen up,” that at least shuts everyone up for a few seconds. It’s instinct after so many years to nod at him in thanks before turning back to address the problem.

He thinks he should have taken a paracetamol before practice. He should have realized exactly how much of a headache Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander can be, even from thousands of kilometers away.

“The front office has decided that our line is no comment,” Jonas tells the team. He holds up a hand quickly, before anyone else can open their mouths. “And I agree. No comment. No matter the question. Okay?"

“Is that not suspicious?” Mazy asks, tugging his arms through his practice jersey and then crossing them over his chest. “That looks like there is something to hide.”

“There is something to hide, isn’t there?” Gunter points out, tearing at the end of his tape and pressing it carefully down flat against the blade of his stick.

“No comment,” Metternik says, and a few of the men laugh. Most of them just look back at Jonas, like they’re waiting for him to weigh in.

It’s—it has never been any of his business, and Jonas has become very good at knowing what is his business and what is not. The friendship between Rozanov and Hollander—on the ice, this is a concern for Jonas as the team captain. Off the ice, whatever their relationship was with the other, whatever it became and whatever it couldn’t manage to survive—it is simply not Jonas’ business. 

Not when they lingered in the practice rink after everyone was already in the showers, passing pucks back and forth and skating circles around each other like they were caught up in their own private world. Not when they took a weekend-long break from the city and fled to a ski resort in the south that Jonas knew for a fact was known for its romantic atmosphere. Not when Jonas looked around in the first few minutes of the new year and could not for the life of him find either of them in the crowd of teammates and familiar faces around his house. 

It was never his business because neither of them had ever asked or sought him out to make it his business, and he respects that. The lines drawn in the sand. What Ilya and Shane wanted from him. 

“No comment,” Jonas tells them. “It isn’t our business.”

“Of course we shouldn’t say anything,” Kaube says from near the doors. “We don’t know anything. It is just a video, it—”

“He does not look happy,” Henrik says quietly, moving his stick from one hand to another. He looks troubled, dark eyebrows furrowed over dark eyes that flick from Jonas to Nimar and then away. “Surely that is our business, we played with the both of them. We know them.”

“Well, yeah,” Oli pipes up, “but Jonas is just talking about press, right? He doesn’t mean that we can’t talk to them about it.”

Jonas clears his throat. “Actually,” he says, and he feels a bit guilty when Emil turns to him with a betrayed expression.

“What?” 

“I think it would be wiser to leave this alone,” Jonas tells the locker room. “Kaube is right; we do not know anything.”

“Henrik’s right,” Emil argues, oddly strident for someone who apparently thought up until a few minutes ago that there was any chance in hell that Ilya Rozanov had a girlfriend in Zürich. “We know he did not look happy and we’re his friends. We would be terrible friends if we did not say anything. To either of them.”

Nimar glances at Jonas and then back to Emil. “Obviously we cannot tell you what to do within your own personal friendships,” Nimar says, because he is a good Alternate, who has always been willing to shoulder half of Jonas’ burden even if he does not quite understand his reasoning nor his choices. 

“Has Shane seen it?” Metternik asks loudly. “I cannot imagine that he has.”

“How could he have missed it?” Gunter replies. “My Katya showed me this morning, and she is fifteen.”

“If he saw Ilya like that, he would not—”

“Maybe they are fighting—”

“They were always fighting, Oli—”

“That was not fighting and you know it, Ka—”

And on and on. The headache blooming between Jonas’ eyes feels like it is about to go supernova in the den of noise that the locker room has become. 

Watching the video was difficult. Talking about it, thinking about it, that is proving almost worse.

Alone this morning, it’d been hard to hear the way Ilya sounded in the recording, the way his voice broke over his own words, like even admitting to it—to missing, to wanting, to all of it—was physically painful for him. Of course Henrik is right. Ilya had looked unhappy. But he’d looked worse than that, too. He’d looked like half himself in the video, almost unrecognizable. It’d been hard to watch, a part of Jonas instinctively trying to shy away from the sight of his friend looking so broken open. 

He’d looked so young, in the video. Alone in a way he’d never been in Zürich, because Shane Hollander had never once stopped orbiting him, not since their very first practice with the Lions. Even in the beginning, even when they’d been stiff and tense with each other, a fight brewing between them with every other word they’d spoken. Even then, they hadn’t quite managed to ever leave each other alone. Jonas hadn’t really believed they were capable of it until he’d seen the video.

The problem is that this is a young team. So many of the men here are really boys who have forgotten just that after a lifetime spent on the ice. They don’t know yet the cost of interference. They want to talk to Shane, call Ilya, offer them advice, lock them in a room until they figure out their shit because of course they do.

Of course they want to get their hands dirty with these problems that are not theirs; they are too young to understand that if you stick your hands into other people’s problems, you cannot control what they come out covered in. Dirt or blood, it is almost always better just to leave well enough alone.

“Let them figure this out themselves,” Jonas tells the team to immediate protests. “Whatever it is they need to sort. If they need something, they will ask us.”

“But what if—”

“What if you make it worse?” Nimar cuts Emil off with a quelling sort of look they’d both learned from the captain who came before Jonas. “What if you say the wrong thing or they take it the wrong way or your advice is shit?”

Emil puffs his chest out at this, offended probably down to his core because eighteen year olds know everything there is to know about everything in the entire world and so their advice is sound, every time. 

“No comment,” Jonas says, and he stares at Emil until the boy sinks back into his stall, cowed at least temporarily. 

Slowly, carefully, the locker room simmers back down to manageable chaos around him. They have opinions, of course they do. They met Shane and Ilya, watched Shane and Ilya meet in Zürich, had front row seats to the ways their relationship shifted and changed and transformed into something no one could risk putting a name to. Friendship became too paltry a word to describe it. Everything else was too dangerous to even think. 

Jonas glances around his locker room before nodding once and turning back to his equipment. It’s not the end of the discussion, of course. He’s not stupid enough to think anything involving Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander could ever be so simple. But it’s at least something. He’s given them all the party line. Drawn it out in the sand, passed along his expectations if not his reasons. 

It’s really all he can do. The rest of it—what they choose to do, what happens or does not happen between Ilya and Shane—that’s none of his business.

“You know,” Nimar mutters, leaning closer to him and dropping his voice so Gunter can’t overhear. “When you texted to say you’d had another meeting with management about Rozanov and Hollander, I thought for sure they’d tell you that they’d signed to come back.”

Jonas blinks at him sideways. Rozanov and Hollander? Come back? “I think I would retire on the spot,” he says, and he is only partially kidding.

Nimar shrugs. “They were a good addition to the team,” he says. “It was nice having them on the ice with us.”

“Yes,” Jonas admits, because it is easy to admit. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are generational talents, so adept at hockey that they elevate everyone else’s game just by playing next to them. “But once was enough for me, thank you. I am a very old man. Far too old for this shit.”

Nimar laughs and opens his mouth to say something that’s probably offensive and scathing, but the sound of Jonas’s phone ringing out in his bag cuts him off.

“Phone on ring, that’s a fine, Captain,” Mazy calls eagerly. Probably mostly just happy that for once he’s not the one drawing a fine, but Jonas knows the rules as well as the rest of his team does. And he’s not a hypocrite; he’ll pay the damned fine.

Jonas waves him off and digs through his clothes until he can find his phone. He pulls it out of his bag and then almost immediately frowns down at the screen. 

Shane Hollander calling.

“I should take this,” he murmurs, mostly to himself. Mostly to convince himself that, yes, he should take this phone call. That it is probably important. That is almost definitely very, very important in one way or another. This is probably his business.

Nimar peers over his shoulder curiously and then nudges at his side with his elbow, sly smirk sliding into place on his face. “What happened to no comment, Cap?” he mutters, quiet enough that no one else can hear.

Jonas sighs and shrugs. Okay. So maybe he is a little bit of a hypocrite sometimes. “No comment,” he says, clapping Nimar on the shoulder before making his way out of the locker room to answer the call.

iv. 

June 2016

Crawford’s freaking the fuck out. His head hurts, his vision’s blurry, his mouth is dry, the sun’s too fucking hot, and when he swallows, he can still taste Lachlan’s spit like a fucking brand on his tongue.

Freaking. The fuck. Out.

“This it?” the driver asks as he rolls to a stop in front of a building that looks like every other building in this part of Montreal. But this one is special because this brick and mortar and chrome and whatever-the-fuck building is where Shane Hollander lives and Crawford needs—Shane said anything you need, Rookie, just let me know.

And maybe the morning after winning the Cup isn’t exactly the time to test his captain’s commitment to an open-door policy, not when he’s probably just as hungover as Crawford is, maybe got as little sleep last night too. 

But it’s not like Crawford’s got anywhere else he can go with this. It’s not like he can go to his dad, not like his dad would understand any of it, not like his dad would consider the whole thing anything other than a fuck-up with the potential to ruin his entire future. And, yeah—sure, maybe that’s exactly what this is, but if that’s true then Crawford wants to hear it from the captain of an MLH team and not the guy who gets drunk at eleven in the morning every Thanksgiving and says it looks faggy when a politician’s tie’s anything but red.

Fuck. Crawford’s too hungover for this. Which probably means, really, if you think about it, he was too drunk for it last night, but that hadn’t fucking stopped him. Or Lachlan, who was just as wasted if memory fucking serves.

“Kid?” The Uber driver prompts, and Crawford lurches back into his body even though it’s a shit place to be right about now.

“Yes, this is great, thank you,” he tells him before he gets out of the car. “Drive safe now,” he says as he shuts the door because his mama raised him right.

Sure, his mama also apparently raised him to drunkenly hook up with his best friend and teammate in the early fucking hours of the morning after winning the Stanley Cup, but, like. Apart from that. She raised him right.

Oh fuck, Crawford slept with Lachlan. It’s like the words are sitting at the top of his brain and every so often they slip another few inches into his mind. He fucked Bagsy. Bagsy. On-a-break-with-his-girlfriend Bagsy. Straightest-guy-you’ve-ever-met Bagsy. Backwards-ballcap-hunting-and-fishing-and-golfing-after-Church-on-Sunday Bagsy.

Worse than that, he fucked Lachlan. Lachlan. The guy with the kind of honey brown eyes that should come with a warning and the uneven dimples that now Crawford’s licked, the guy with the freckles that only came in in the spring, the guy with the silky fucking mitts, the secretly, shamefully romantic guy who’d chosen #22 as his number cause that was how old his parents were when they met. The guy who calls him H late at night or after a good game even though no one in his life calls him by his first name except for his grandmama. The guy who fucking—says a little prayer over his food every time he eats, no matter if it’s a sit-down meal with the GM he’s billeting with or a hot dog at the stadium. 

Crawford slept with Lachlan. Fucking—Lachlan. 

And now there’s a non-zero chance he’s going to be sick in the hallway outside of Shane Hollander’s condo, so there’s a real sense of urgency to it when he braces his hands on his knees after knocking and stares down at the ground until it stops swimming in front of his eyes.

Lachlan’s never going to want to take him golfing again, and now what is he going to do with all those days in mid-January? If you asked him a year ago, he’d have said he could think of a million things he’d rather do over freezing his nuts off on a golf course with a buddy from the team. But he didn’t know then. And now he knows and now he’s had it and now—he’s lost it. Right? He’s probably lost it.

He sort of feels like he’s losing it.

What does he do with all the free time he’ll have now, when Lachlan won’t want to spend it with him? They slept together. No way are they going to be able to just ignore that. Something’s going to change because something’s already given out and maybe they can salvage bits and pieces and maybe everyone makes dumb mistakes after Cup wins and maybe they’re going to take the summer, get over it, get girlfriends, come back in August best bros again, but—

The door in front of him opens, fucking finally, and Crawford’s saying, “I slept with Bagsy,” before he’s even fully straightened up. He doesn’t mean to. The words just sort of come out. Word fucking vomit, but it’s like, economical or some shit to just cut right to the chase here. No use beating around the bush. He slept with Bagsy. He thinks he can still taste his spit in his mouth.

And then he looks up and it’s not Shane Hollander in the doorway. It’s not even, like, Shane Hollander’s terrifying mom or anything, which would be mortifying but at least sort of expected. 

It’s Ilya fucking Rozanov which is terrifying and mortifying and completely, totally, 100% unexpected. 

“You’re not Cap,” he says.

Rozanov blinks. “You are not DoorDash,” he says. Then he blinks again. He looks tired, but not the kind of tired that comes from hockey play-offs or travel or too much stimulation. He looks early-morning tired and soft with it. Crawford didn’t know there was a soft version of Ilya Rozanov. His hair’s a mess, there’s a pillow crease on his cheek, and his t-shirt looks—

Crawford stares. 

His navy blue t-shirt says Montreal Metros on the front pocket.

“Uh,” he says.

Rozanov raises his eyes to the ceiling, like he’s praying, and Crawford would have thoughts about that except there’s an oblong red spot on Rozanov’s neck that’s pulled into view by the movement and all of his words sort of die in his mouth.

“Uh,” he says again. “Shane?” which he means to make sound more like a prompting kind of question but sounds a bit like an accusation once it’s out in the open like that.

“Mne nuzhen kofe,” Rozanov tells the ceiling, or God, before he turns around and takes a few steps back into the apartment’s hallway. “Take off your shoes,” he orders, which—that’s not, like. Something a guest would say to another guest, Crawford thinks. That’s what someone tells someone else when they have, like, a vested interest in making sure the hardwood floors don’t get scuffed up and the carpet stays clean.

Right?

Or is Crawford, like. Thinking too much about it? He’s been known to do that, read a fucking book’s worth of information out of a single sentence. His grandmama always says he could make a whole forest from a bit of tree bark. Lachlan’s always telling him to stop thinking so much and make a play for the puck, but Lachy got his teeth knocked out four times by the time he was fifteen from pucks and sticks and other people’s fists, so pinch of fucking salt when it comes to Lachlan’s advice on Crawford’s—well. Pinch of fucking salt when it comes to Lachlan Pucey’s advice. 

Fuck, Crawford slept with Lachlan. And fuck, now Ilya Rozanov knows that. How the fuck is Crawford supposed to live in a world where both of these things are true?

At least Rozanov isn’t going into some sort of homophobic rage or anything, which is like. Small blessings are still blessings, that’s what everyone always said. Crawford’s pretty sure his mama’s got that on a piece of wood somewhere in the house now that he thinks about it.

Crawford peeks up at Rozanov as he unties his other shoe and puts it next to the first at the base of the coat hanger. It’s not like this is the first time he’s been over to Shane Hollander’s house. It’s—well, it’s like the third time, sure, but he hasn’t needed adult supervision to take his shoes off since he was, like, seven years old.

But Rozanov’s leaning up against the wall of the hallway with his arms crossed, watching him with an unreadble expression on his face. 

Crawford thinks there should be a limit to the number of crises one has to deal with when one is ragingly hungover. 

Even when all one’s crises are decidedly self-made. 

“That the pancakes?” Shane asks the moment Rozanov rounds the corner, Crawford on his heels. He’s got his head in the fridge, a carton of oat milk in one hand and a protein shake in the other. “Thank Christ,” he’s saying as he turns around, little smile on his face even though he looks pretty fucking rough in Crawford’s expert opinion.

“No pancakes,” Rozanov reports, sticking his thumb back at Crawford who waves when Shane’s eyes snap to him. “Was your circus. Your monkeys need you.”

Shane blinks between the two of them before he carefully sets the oat milk down onto the counter. His eyes dart back to Rozanov, who must be giving him some kind of face, because Shane goes through a few different expressions before he lands on something very blank and perfectly captainly. His hair looks a little bit like someone’s been dragging their hands through it and he’s wearing a rumpled looking shirt that Crawford’d bet his remaining ELC money on coming straight from the floor, but it’s not like he expected Shane to look put-together. He just captained the Metros to a Stanley Cup victory against the Dallas Drivers, he’s allowed to be just as hungover as the rest of them are this morning. 

Hell, it’s early enough he’s pretty sure a few of the guys are probably still out partying. The celebrations had still been going strong at a club downtown when Crawford had—left. 

“Crawdad,” Shane says, friendly enough. He glances at Rozanov again and then away when Rozanov moves to make himself comfortable on a barstool at the kitchen island. “How are you doing? How’s the shoulder?”

Crawford hesitates at the edge of the room. He’d come here, obviously, specifically wanted this and sought it out, but now he doesn’t know how to move forward.

It’s not like Shane’s taken any of the rookies under his wing or anything, least of all Crawford. He’s been attentive to their performances on the ice, like any captain would. Been worried about the injuries they sustained in the play-off push, but Crawford’s always sort of gotten the feeling that Shane Hollander’s mostly concerned with them as positions on the ice and less with them as, like, guys. 

But he just—like. He really needs someone else’s perspective here. He needs a big brother who isn’t his own, deployed somewhere overseas and so in love with the service he probably bleeds don’t ask, don’t tell.

And who else is Crawford supposed to go to with something like this? Pike? He thought about it, if he’s being honest. Thought about the way Pike’s eyes would go sort of wide and he’d look at Crawford like a deer trapped in the headlights of a car the moment Crawford said I fucked your rookie, my buddy. You know the one. Bagsy.

Crawford’s thought process had been, like. At least Shane Hollander probably won’t make his reaction Crawford’s problem. He’s good at compartmentalizing, Crawford’s always thought so. Watched his media over the years enough times to know Shane’s got a pretty good poker face going on. And sure, Shane’s never shown any sort of interest in their personal lives, but he had this sort of ability to look at other people’s problems with very clear, unflinching eyes, which is exactly what Crawford needs at the moment. And Shane did say anything you need. If he hadn’t been alright with someone calling him on that, then he probably shouldn’t have said it in the first place.

He just hadn’t expected Ilya Rozanov. Like, if he’d known Rozanov would be here, in Shane Hollander’s house, he probably would have reconsidered running to Hayden Pike and risking a sit-down breakfast with his twelve kids and perfect wife.

Live and learn.

“Shoulder’s good, thanks,” Crawford says, rubbing the back of his neck and adjusting his cap over his hair, just for something to do. “Bit sore still.”

A Driver had slammed him up against the boards in Game 3, and he’s been nursing it ever since, same way Lachlan’s been nursing the black eye he’d gotten from throwing down his gloves trying to tackle the guy into the net afterwards, despite the fifty pound and four inch height difference between them.

Stupid as hell, which is Lachlan summed up, probably. Crawford had wanted to kiss him stupid in the locker room during the second intermission. 

Which is Crawford, summed up. Probably. 

“Looking forward to a summer off,” he adds and Shane nods before he quirks his eyebrow, lips going thin for a second. “Until pre-season training starts, I mean,” he says, and Shane nods again, satisfied now. 

“You played well, Rook,” Shane tells him, and Crawford has to bite at the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t start grinning like an idiot. His captain thinks he played well. Shane Hollander thinks he played well. 

“Thanks, Cap,” he says, hopefully appropriately gruff and no-nonsense.

Shane nods again and then looks at Rozanov, who looks back at him and shrugs. “Uh,” Shane says, rolling the protein shake in between his hands. “So what can I do for you?”

It’s probably the politest why the fuck are you in my house Crawford’s ever been on the receiving end of, which just goes to show that some Canadian stereotypes are right on the money.

“Right,” he says, clearing his throat and glancing over at Ilya Rozanov. “Well.”

The words aren’t there anymore. Or, if they are, Crawford can’t find them under the weight of Shane and Rozanov’s combined attention.

“I, uh,” he says. Rozanov leans over the island to snag the mug of coffee in front of Shane and pull it back to his seat. And Shane lets him. Not only that, he just—he pushes the oat milk carton towards him too, cap already off. All without looking away from Crawford, like that’s just something normal that happens, that’s to be expected and planned for too, because Shane’s already got another mug at his elbow. 

The shock of that—of watching Shane Hollander let Ilya Rozanov take his coffee from him when he’d once almost stabbed Hayden with a fork over the guy trying to sneak his bread roll off of his plate—unsticks Crawford’s tongue. For better or worse. “I slept with Bagsy.”

“What,” Shane says, coffee cup raised halfway to his mouth and frozen there. 

“I, uh,” Crawford says. He rubs at the back of his neck, looks askance at Rozanov and then away, down to the floor beneath his socked feet. “Like, it was sort of an accident?”

“You fucked Bagsy,” Shane repeats in this unreadable tone that Crawford doesn’t know what to do with. “But it was an accident.”

“No, well,” Crawford hesitates. “We didn’t, I mean—” 

They would have, obviously, probably. If they were a little less drunk. If the morning had come a little slower, if the need to come had been a bit easier to manage. They hadn’t fucked like fucked. But they’d—you know. “We sorta, you know,” Crawford tells his captain. And Ilya Rozanov. He can feel his face heating up bright red as he tries to fill in the blanks with a hand gesture that makes Rozanov’s eyebrows raise.

“No, sorry,” Rozanov says, taking a small sip from his coffee mug. “I do not know what this means. What did you and Bagsy do?”

“Ilya,” Shane mutters, setting down his own cup hard enough that it clinks against the marble of the kitchen counter.

Rozanov blinks at Crawford, looking innocent. It sort of makes Crawford feel like he’s a very small prey animal who’s been cornered by a wolf. A very sadistic wolf, who enjoys psychologically tormenting his dinner before he eats it, maybe.

“Like, you know, we—” Crawford hasn’t been this embarrassed talking about sex since he was thirteen years old and his parents cornered him at the breakfast table to talk about the birds and the bees. 

He makes another vague sort of hand gesture that with any luck means he blew me and then I fingered him til he cried and then he came in my mouth and said Jesus Christ, H, we gotta do that again and then he passed out on my chest.

“Hm, no,” Rozanov says, tilting his head in consideration. “I don’t think I know this one. What does this mean?” He moves his hand through the air.

“Ilya,” Shane snaps. He’s closed his eyes, like maybe all his problems will go away if he doesn’t look at them. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Crawford’s already tried that one and it hadn’t worked.

“What?” Rozanov says with a smarmy sort of shrug that makes Crawford want to be the kind of man who’s capable of incredible violence. “Maybe is different for gay sex. I am trying to get a clear picture of this topic, Shane. Which I know nothing about.”

“Jesus Christ,” Shane says. 

Crawford crosses his arms over his chest. He feels scraped over and raw and defensive. Wrong-footed and out of his mind and sort of halfway feral at the thought of Ilya Rozanov knowing about—about it, about Bagsy, about Crawford and Lachlan—and not–not treating it the way that sort of information deserves. Like, fuck, what is Crawford even doing here, what is—

“He’s not homophobic, he’s just being an asshole,” Shane informs him, shooting a dark look over at Rozanov who shrugs in response and grins back.

The smile tempers itself slightly when he glances over at Crawford, like he forgot he was there or something. Rozanov’s eyes are dark, considering for a moment, before he takes another sip of coffee and tells him, easily except for the weight of the words, “I am bisexual.”

Crawford bites at the inside of his lip just to make sure his mouth doesn’t fall open or embarrass him in some other way. Ilya Rozanov is bisexual. Okay, sure. That—why not. Sure, that might as well be something else Crawford finds out today. 

“But even I do not understand what you did with your teammate,” Rozanov adds, repeating whatever amalgamation of hand gestures Crawford’s given. “This is new. Was it good? Should I add it to my repertoire?”

“Ilya, I swear to fucking—”

“It was the best,” Crawford hears himself say. Too honest, too quiet, the very crux of everything, eye of the hurricane swirling around his head. It was the fucking best thing he’s ever experienced. Five hours after winning the Stanley Cup, and then fucking Lachlan Lee Pucey has to blow that out of the water by kissing him up against the sticky wall of a club and taking him home after.

At least the honesty makes Rozanov shut the fuck up for a second. Small blessings are still blessings, etcetera, etcetera.

“Alright,” Shane says in his no-nonsense captain voice. It makes Crawford’s shoulders straighten to attention. Muscle memory’s a damned thing. “So. You, uh. Slept with Bagsy. Last night, I guess?”

Crawford nods. Last night, early this morning, same thing. Same difference. Splitting hairs to try and pinpoint exactly where they were and what they were doing when the clock’s hand tilted over to 12:01. He says, “We were both really drunk,” like that’s the reason behind it and the end of it and the entire problem he’s come here to confess. Like it was—a drunken mistake. Something to be embarrassed about. Not something to keep wanting. Something to do again and again and again and again.

“Which one is Bagsy?” Rozanov asks, reaching out and snagging a phone off the counter. He unlocks it easily, a few swipes of his thumb. And Crawford wouldn’t even fucking notice it except Shane’s had a neon green phone case since the team’s belated Secret Santa gift exchange they’d done on St Patrick’s Day this year thanks to the lockout. 

And so that’s definitely Shane’s phone Rozanov’s using to google the Metros roster, which is just—Crawford doesn’t know. What to make of it. Of Rozanov in Shane’s kitchen. Rozanov on Shane’s phone, drinking Shane’s coffee, Metros shirt on his chest. They lived together for a few months in Switzerland, obviously, Crawford knows that. Everyone knows that. It’s just different—weird—to see, with his own eyes. The ways that they’re something to each other, off the ice and outside of Switzerland.

“Don’t look up the bench, ugh,” Shane is saying, reaching out to swipe his phone away from Rozanov’s hands. He looks and sounds exasperated, but it’s different than how he looks and sounds exasperated when talking with some of the guys on the team. 

Maybe this is how Shane Hollander is, in the off-season. Maybe this is just how he is around his friends. Crawford doesn’t know. Crawford—well. Crawford has his own things to deal with right about now.

“I just want to get an accurate picture of the situation!” Rozanov is arguing back, hand on Shane’s wrist and body turned away from him to shield the phone. “For imagining purposes.”

This makes Shane splutter, which is good because Crawford’s mouth feels too dry for that but he’s got the same sentiment.

“Stop imagining it,” Shane snaps, and Rozanov lets out a small bark of laughter before saying something in Russian that sounds sweet, maybe, if not also totally incomprehensible. Shane looks like he doesn’t know what he’s saying either, at least, which is sort of nice. 

Even though it kind of feels like Shane and Rozanov have forgotten about him completely, despite him standing here, in the middle of a crisis. Like, at least they’re not also speaking another language to each other that Crawford doesn’t know and can’t understand. 

These blessings, he thinks, are getting really fucking tiny.

“It’s, uh,” he says, “Lachlan? Lachlan Pucey. He’s a rookie. With me. He’s—”

My best friend, he doesn’t say, doesn’t know if he has the right to, so he cuts himself off with a quick and jerky shrug. Are they still best friends? After last night? What will Lachlan allow him after he was too greedy, took more than his fair share? What kind of territory is he going to have to cede to survive the coming ceasefire? What’s going to be left? 

“I, uh,” Shane says as he yanks his phone back from Rozanov and deposits it on the counter behind him. He purses his lips for a moment, looking hesitant. “I thought he had a girlfriend.” 

Oh. That was Shane trying to be delicate then. Good to know.

Lachlan wouldn’t be the first MLH player to cheat on his girlfriend, obviously. Probably not even the first to cheat on his girlfriend with a buddy in the wake of a Stanley Cup win, if you wanna get specific about it. But that’s not—Crawford hates that Shane might think that about Lachlan. Think that he could be that kind of guy. The kind of guy that would do his girl dirty like that. He wants an August wedding, he wants to tell them both. He already knows what song he wants his first dance to be set to.

But—like, it’s bad enough, having told his captain that he slept with Lachlan without Lachlan knowing Shane knows. And Rozanov. That was a necessary evil that Crawford’s probably gonna feel even worse about later when he can think straight again. When he can swallow without feeling Lachlan’s tongue in his throat or whatever.

Anyway, it just—it feels worse and wrong to tell them about how much of a romantic Bagsy is. Like it’s private. None of their business if they don’t already know. 

It’s not important. It’s just—of course Lachlan wouldn’t cheat on his girlfriend. Crawford’s known that about him since day fucking one. But then, of course: “They’re on a break,” he says. “Cause, like, you told him to?”

Rozanov’s head snaps around to stare at Shane. “You told your rookie to break up with his girlfriend?” he asks, sounding incredulous.

“No, what,” Shane splutters. “I didn’t! Crawford, what?”

“You said no distractions during the playoffs,” Crawford says. He crosses his arms over his chest again. “So they’re, like. On a break.”

“I didn’t mean for anyone to end their fucking relationships,” Shane says, wide-eyed and utterly aghast apparently. Which, huh. Crawford had told Lachlan he was probably being dramatic when he’d brought him up on the no-girlfriend-for-the-playoffs situation. It’s nice to be right.

Rozanov is laughing. Like, head down on his arms, shoulders shaking kind of laughter. Shane’s biting his lip, looking at him with his arms crossed, cheeks flushed. 

“Oh, this is so good,” Rozanov announces, and Shane grimaces back at him. Crawford isn’t fucking laughing. “Shane, solnyshko. Your circus is so fun. These monkeys…wow.” 

“Fuck off,” Crawford says, same time as Shane, which, like. It’s nice that they’re in agreement on this.

Rozanov shakes his head, grin making his eyes bright and his face boyishly pleased and incredibly punchable from where Crawford’s standing. Before he can say anything else though, a buzzer goes off in the apartment.

“That’s probably the food,” Shane says pointedly, and Rozanov stands with his hands up so at least the guy knows his cues or whatever.

“I hope it is the other one,” he says cheerfully over his shoulder as he goes out into the hallway.

Shane closes his eyes for a second, line of his mouth tight but turned up like he can’t help but smile even as he’s trying his best not to. 

“He’s visiting,” Shane says when he blinks and sees Crawford standing there, still, and staring at him. “Moral support. For the Cup game.”

Crawford didn’t ask. He thinks, like, personally, he probably wouldn’t have chosen Ilya Rozanov as his moral support in any sort of world, for any sort of event. But then, he didn’t live with Ilya Rozano as a roommate for, like, half a year or whatever. Maybe this is like stockholm syndrome. Maybe he should tell Shane to blink twice if needs rescuing.

“It was just DoorDash,” Rozanov reports before Crawford can do that or say something else, like, that’s cool, bro, but can we focus on my thing again? He sets the bag of honestly wonderfully smelling diner food on the countertop next to Shane’s elbow, but neither of them starts to unpack it, which is sort of considerate. “What did I miss?” Rozanov adds, which is less considerate. “Did you tell your rookie is okay to like sleeping with men and also playing hockey?”

Which is—Crawford shifts on the spot, tightening his arms against his chest, until it probably looks more like he’s holding himself together. Which is sort of embarrassing, so he makes himself put his hands in his pockets instead.

The gay thing—it’s not a thing. It’s more like…a tendency. An inclination that can be avoided and opted out of. Thoughts that can be contained and actions that he’s in full control of.

Until the Bagsy Thing happened. The Bagsy Thing, of course, encompassing everything from last night and backward, over the last several months. The Bagsy Thing meaning the way it’d felt to kiss the sparse and soft hairs on his inner thighs and the way it’d felt to shake his hand that first time in the tunnel on the very edge of the ice right before their first practice.

“I was about to,” Shane mutters, which is news to Crawford. And nice, too, but not really what he needs. Right now. Not what he came here for. Not something he imagined Shane Hollander giving him.

He didn’t want—maybe that’s the truth of it. Maybe that’s why he’s here, why he came to Shane Hollander’s door with this. Maybe he doesn’t want advice, he doesn’t want platitudes. He wants punishment. He knows he’s done something wrong. Broken something irreplaceable, unrepairable, and he wants someone to tell him what he can do to make it better. And he wasn’t about to walk into a church’s confessional smelling like five types of alcohol and sweat and spit, so without a priest to confess to, he’d come here instead. To Shane Hollander.

And, apparently, Ilya Rozanov. 

“Well, go on,” Rozanov prompts, stepping behind Shane with a hand moving up against his back to keep him in place as he stretches around him to reach the coffeepot. “Is okay being gay…”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, but he doesn’t move out from Rozanov’s touch, like he’s used to having this guy in his space. Like it’s just as expected and endured as having Rozanov steal his coffee and sit at his kitchen island. “I don’t need a coach.” 

Crawford should probably say something. Like, let me get out of your hair, actually. Or, never mind, please forget about this right now immediately. Or, great pass to Pike on the ice, Cap, see you for the parade and then in August.

But he can’t make his mouth move or the words to come out. He just—he’s watching Shane and Rozanov in Shane’s kitchen that looks in the soft morning light somehow like their kitchen, and he’s just…he’s not going to have that. With Lachlan. That sort of familiarity that comes with living with someone, with knowing their body in relation to yours, learning all the configurations of your bodies together in one shared space. Shane and Rozanov got four months together in Switzerland, and they came out friends like this.

Crawford and Lachlan got six months as teammates, friends, just long enough for Crawford to develop a taste for him, a hunger, but they’re probably not going to get anything else because Crawford went and fucked it up. Let his tendencies take the wheel. Knows the way shape of Lachlan’s back-teeth now, the stretch and give of his entrance around his fingers. All their tentatively hopeful plans about living together after the summer break, that’s probably all over now.

“Crawford,” Shane says, hands on the counter and eyes very wide and serious. “Hank,” he adds, which just sounds so weird and wrong that Crawford’s wrinkling his nose before he can stop himself. Like, no thanks.

“We really don’t have to,” he starts to say, but then Shane’s got a hand up in the air, all Captain Considerately Concerned Canadian or whatever, and Crawford’s falling quiet on instinct. 

“Thank you for telling me this,” Shane says even though Crawford’s not done anything but tell him about his recent sexual history and Shane’s not done anything but bitch at Rozanov and blink at him like he’s processing shit at glacial paces. But then that’s probably Crawford’s fault for coming over so early in the morning after a Cup win. 

Rozanov’s leaning up next to him now, back up against the door of the fridge. Behind his shoulder is a postcard of some cityscape or another, river cutting through some old buildings that look vaguely European, probably. A little Swiss flag magnet’s holding it up and Crawford wouldn’t even notice it except for the fact that he’s super dedicated to the idea of not looking at Shane Hollander right now and so the Swiss flag has never been more fascinating. 

He was supposed to tell Hollander and then—like. Get yelled at. Or something. Get an earful about team dynamics and unity and the pitfalls of getting on your knees for your buddy. Maybe even like, get a brutal workout assigned to do, something that will make him ache and feel like shit but will mean everything’s better in the end.

He wasn’t supposed to be kind. Crawford doesn’t know how to take it on his chin, Shane Hollander’s kindness. 

“It’s alright,” Shane says, which just goes to show that maybe he doesn’t know all that much about having tendencies in the MLH. If he thinks anything about this situation is alright. Crawford would sort of love to see if he’d still think it’s alright if he’d gotten drunk and slept with Hayden Pike. 

Or Ilya Rozanov, for that matter.

“Okay,” Crawford says once he realizes Shane’s not gonna say anything else until he does. “Sure, Cap.”

Shane makes a noise of frustration and turns to look at Rozanov beside him, who doesn’t do anything more helpful than shrug and cross his arms. 

“Look,” Shane says, attention back on Crawford. “I mean—it was, like. Consensual, right? Sleeping with, uh, Lachlan?”

Crawford straightens up again, uncomfortable now. There’s a whole other world of nightmares he hasn’t even considered hidden away in Shane’s question.  But—yeah, it was, wasn’t it? They’d been drunk, but Lachlan had started it. Had wanted it. Had known it was Crawford he had under his hands. Had called him H. The H was consensual. Had to be. Had to be.

“Yeah,” he says gruffly, teeth hurting from the pressure of clenching his jaw. “Yeah, no. It was.”

“Then—look, it could…maybe it’ll be awkward—and you’ll have to talk about it with him, probably, which—yeah, that’ll suck. But it’s not—it’ll be alright. He’s not gonna say anything to anyone, and neither are we, obviously, and….” Shane trails off and glances over at Rozanov again, eyes wide. 

Rozanov rolls his eyes, but there’s something incredibly soft there when he looks at Shane. Crawford sort of wants to give them space. The whole-ass room, maybe. “What he means is who hasn’t had ill-advised drunk sex after winning the Stanley Cup?” Rozanov says, and Crawford gets to watch in real time as the lines of Shane’s face shift and harden into a scowl. 

“Who the fuck did you—”

“And,” Rozanov adds quickly, tearing his eyes away from Shane, back to Crawford. “If you are good friends, it will be okay. One time thing, yes? ”

Crawford can feel the way his lips pinch together. He ducks his head and shrugs. That’s the fucking problem, isn’t? One of fucking many.

“I mean,” he says, and it’s embarrassing and it’s stupid, but it’s suddenly easier to be honest than it has been so far with Shane and Rozanov on one side of the kitchen island, Crawford on the other. “Yeah, I think…like. Once will be enough. Yeah?”

He looks up, catches Rozanov’s eyes mostly by accident. Tell me that’s true, he wants to say. Tell me that’s how it works. I’ve kissed him now, I can stop thinking about it. I know how it feels. I’ve conquered the fucking unknown. So that’s it, all done. Checked off the list. Tell me that’s how it works. 

Rozanov’s lips twitch down and something cracks open across his face. Crawford doesn’t know how to name it. What to do with it, how to look at it straight on. Beside him, Shane glances between the two of them, eyebrows scrunched down and lips pursed up in confusion. 

“Sometimes,” Rozanov says, and it’s weird because it’s so fucking—gentle. When he says it. Like it’s bad news he’s breaking. Like it’s the I’m sorry, the cancer’s come back sort of bad news. That I’m sorry, there’s nothing else we could do kind of bad news. Devastating and life-ruining and the cruelest thing you could ever possibly tell someone. “But sometimes is not. It depends, I think.”

Crawford swallows around the sudden and unexpected lump that wells up in his throat. “Depends on what?”

That’s definitely sympathy in Rozanov’s eyes. Which—that’s just not something Crawford can deal with right now. Rozanov shakes his head lightly, gives him some sort of half-hearted smirk that says Oh, kid. “How hungry you are.”

And that’s—Crawford inhales and stuffs his hands as far down into his pockets as they can go. He swallows past the taste of Lachlan on his tongue. “I don’t think it’s gonna matter much,” he mutters. “I think—I don’t think this is something we’re gonna….” survive.

Lachlan’s going to freak out. And he’s not going to be able to look Crawford in the eye ever again and it’s not going to matter what Crawford wants. This is going to be his punishment, maybe, until one or both of them gets traded somewhere else so they stop tanking team chemmy or whatever. 

“You have to talk to him, bud,” Shane says, back to being Captain Confident apparently. “Even if it sucks and he doesn’t want to. Go find him, talk it out. Before it can, like, fester. It’ll get worse if you just leave it, I promise.” 

Crawford bites his lip. It sucks doesn’t feel like strong enough language to convey exactly how shitty of a conversation it’ll be.

“I’m guessing, you don’t know where he is?” Shane prompts, crossing his arms and leaning back against the counter, right next to Rozanov, so close their shoulders overlap and stick together. 

“I mean, you know how he is, Cap,” Crawford mutters without thinking, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Hates mornings so much he’s probably still in bed.”

“What,” Shane says, same time as Rozanov. They even have the same expression on their faces, which is all kinds of weird. 

“What?”

“Lachlan’s still—you mean, he didn’t leave…after?” Shane clarifies, looking slightly pained the way he’s been looking everytime the gay sex has been brought up. Crawford would laugh except for all the reasons he doesn’t feel like laughing right now.

“No,” he says, blinking back at them. “Like, we went to his place, so he couldn’t really leave, right? Where would he even go?”

Shane closes his eyes. “You fucked Bagsy in the house of the Metros GM,” he says. “Right, yeah, okay. Why not.”

“Nice,” Rozanov says approvingly, and when Crawford looks at him, his face is back to normal. Just as smarmy and cocky as it normally is on the ice. None of that weird soft shit left over.

“That’s not important,” Crawford says, and Shane nods in agreement, but he looks up to the ceiling for a moment before he looks back at Crawford.

“Right, so. Just to be clear,” Shane says carefully. “You slept with Lachlan last night. At the GM’s house. And then this morning, you leave the GM’s house—with Lachlan still potentially asleep—to come here. To freak out. Because you think he’s going to freak out. Even though he hasn’t yet. Because as far as you know, he’s still asleep.”

“At the GM’s house,” Rozanov says. 

“Yes, of course. Right. Good point, Ilya, thank you. At the GM’s house.”

“He’s going to,” Crawford says. “Look, you don’t know Lachlan like I do, alright, there’s no universe where he doesn’t freak the fuck out over this—”

“And how much do you think he’s going to freak out when he wakes up and realizes you’ve left?” Shane asks, raising his eyebrows. “Scale of one to ten.”

“Did you leave note at least?” Rozanov asks, at least a little kinder, which is appreciated. 

Even if Crawford didn’t leave a note. 

This must be splashed across his face because Shane and Rozanov exchange a look that Crawford can’t read but knows instinctively he doesn’t appreciate.

“Okay,” Shane says. “So you’re going back there immediately. And you’re going to talk to him. And it’s going to be okay.”

He says it in such a stridently confident way that Crawford’s nodding along with him almost immediately. Right, it’ll be okay. Yeah. He’s going to talk about this with Lachlan and it’s going to be okay. Shane Hollander says so.

“Take the food,” Rozanov interjects, gesturing at the still-unopened bag of diner food on the counter.

“What,” Crawford says in tandem with Shane. 

“Ilya, no way,” Shane adds, arms crossed and face set in an expression Crawford at least recognizes. That’s the Don’t-even-try-taking-my-dinner-roll-Hayden-Pike-or-so-help-YOU-God expression.  

Rozanov shrugs, scratching at his chin. “If he is awake, you come back and tell him you left to get food for both of you. If he is still asleep, you wake him up and show him food you have gotten for both of you. Is good conversation setting either way.”

“He could just go pick up coffee,” Shane points out, reluctant, and Rozanov—Ilya? Should Crawford start calling him Ilya if he’s stealing his hangover breakfast from him?—rolls his eyes.

“Solnyshko, I will make you pancakes. Let the rookie go.”

“Your pancakes suck,” Shane replies in what would sound more like a protest if it weren’t for the fact that he’s smiling slightly, eyes crinkled up and teeth flashing.

“Lachlan can’t have gluten,” Crawford says automatically. 

Rozanov—Ilya—raises an eyebrow at him. “He can have my omelet.”

“Oh,” Crawford says. He feels sort of struck dumb, running on leftover adrenaline and the remnants of the red bull he’d downed with a shot of vodka seven hours ago. “But I don’t like sweet things for breakfast.”

Ilya looks up at the ceiling like he’s praying again. “I am starting to get very offended that your monkeys beat mine on the ice this year,” he tells either Shane or God. “It is unfair. They are very stupid.”

“Hey now,” Shane says, but he moves closer, bumps their shoulders together. “I don’t come to your circus and start throwing insults around, eh?”

“This is because my monkeys would never do this,” Ilya says blandly. He reaches around Shane’s hip easily, like he knows the exact width of him without having to think about it, and picks up his coffee mug. 

He takes a sip before he addresses Crawford, which is good timing because Crawford was fixing to think he’d been forgotten about. “Rookie,” Ilya says, no-nonsense. “Take the food. Eat the pancakes. Talk to your friend.”

“But what if—”

“But what if it is okay,” Ilya interrupts, expression so serious and focused that Crawford almost misses the gentle sympathy of earlier. “What if it is all okay and you will feel very stupid later for all these big emotions?”

Shane elbows him in his side. “He means,” Shane says, like he’s the de facto Ilya Rozanov translator or something, “that you won’t know one way or another about what happens next if you don’t talk to him first, Hank.”

Crawford wrinkles his nose automatically.

“Crawford,” Shane amends, because he’s observant and a good Captain like that. “Look,” he adds, nudging Ilya’s arm until the guy apparently wises up, leans forward to grab Shane’s coffee mug off the counter in front of them, and passes it over. “You know my door’s always open, bud. Demonstrably,” which makes Ilya smile into his coffee for reasons Crawford doesn’t even want to begin to unravel. “But there was probably someone you wanted to talk to about this more than me, yeah?”

Crawford blinks, shrugs. Truth is, though, he’s already thought the same thing. From the very moment he woke up this morning, Lachlan’s bony fucking knee digging into his kidney and the hangover from hell licking at his temples. Only one guy he’d wanted to talk to about all this shit. He’d still been asleep though. And Crawford hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of being kicked out. Once he’d woken up. That’d felt worse than leaving, even if the result was the same.

It’s just now Lachlan’s gonna be the one who wakes up and realizes he’s alone, and—and maybe he’ll want someone to talk to. Maybe he’ll want to talk to Crawford, but maybe he won’t believe that he’s an option. Why would he? Crawford left him. 

“Oh shit,” he says. “I gotta go.”

Shane nods in approval and probably, like, dismissal or something. “Take the fucking pancakes,” he says, which is definitely a sign that either Crawford is his favorite rookie or he seriously thinks he’s sending him off to his death.

Either way, Crawford takes the fucking pancakes.

He’s in the hallway, struggling to put his feet into his shoes with the bag of takeout food next to him on the floor when he hears Shane and Ilya start to talk. It’s quiet, private, but eavesdropping is probably pretty low on the list of sins Crawford’s committed in the last twenty-four hours, so he doesn’t feel that bad about not exactly tuning the conversation out.

“Stop pouting, solnyshko,” Ilya is saying. It’s almost drowned out by the clattering of pots and pans being disturbed in some cabinet or another. “Look, I am making you pancakes. Do you want the little chocolate chips in them?”

“Mon chou, I just won the fucking Stanley Cup,” Shane retorts. “Of course I want the little chocolate chips.”

“Okay,” Ilya replies. Easy and immediate. Then, “I will give you pancakes now and then later we will go online and find book on accepting your gay children.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says. “I did fine.” There’s a pause. “Right?”

“You were very good,” Ilya says, and Crawford makes a face at the wall in front of him. “I think for a second you tell him it does not matter who he fucks so long as his point production stays level, but you keep that as an inside thought. Very smart, very good Captain.”

There’s a burst of laughter that Crawford only vaguely recognizes as belonging to Shane. He doesn’t laugh a lot, except for in the past few months. At the beginning of the season though, when Crawford first met him in January, he thought maybe Shane was one of those guys who didn’t know how to smile except in front of the media. It’s been different for a while now, but it’s still not exactly a common noise in the locker room: Shane Hollander, laughing. And Crawford's pretty sure he's never heard him giggle like this before.

“Hey,” Shane says, “do you think….”

“Shane Hollander, no. Stop. Ya tebya lyublyu, but I will report you to the Player’s Association myself if you tell your players to break up with their girlfriends during the playoffs next season."

“I wouldn’t!” Shane says, indignant. He pauses. “But, like. We did win the Cup this year….And Lachlan’s points per game average was….”

“Shane,” Ilya says, and he sounds so fucking fond and sweet and strange that Crawford thinks maybe lingering here in the hallway, listening to these two guys talk to each other when they think no one else is around, might just be a worse sin than all the other ones combined. 

So he tucks his laces into the side of his shoe and stands up, grabbing the bag of takeout off the floor as he goes. The last thing he notices as he closes the door carefully behind him is that someone’s framed the New Yorker poster hanging up in the hallway.

It looks nice like that. Grown-up and shit. Permanent.

v. 

July 2017

Usually, it’s David that remembers to get her a glass of water from the kitchen tap before bed. They’ve been doing this long enough, know each other and their routines and their blindspots so well that Yuna never even thinks about it anymore. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, mouth dry, she never has to go farther than her bedside table to find the glass of water that David’s already left out for her.

It’s sweet and it’s routine, thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness somehow existing in the same action. It’s habit and attention, which is basically eighty percent of any lasting marriage. It’s something Yuna’s so used to that she’s surprised, every time she sleeps alone, when she wakes up and there’s no water glass beside her. And every time she has to get out of bed and walk to the kitchen to retrieve her own water or lie there looking at the ceiling with a dry throat until she falls back to sleep, she promises herself that next time, she’ll remember to do this for herself. 

But then she never does, because that’s David’s responsibility these days. Or, it’s not, really, because it’s just water and it’s just for her. But it is, because that’s what love is, the responsibility of care. Giving parts of yourself over to another’s protection. Trusting them to have you and keep you and care for you in big and small and medium ways. David gets her a glass of water before bed every night; Yuna wakes up first in the morning and grinds his favorite roast before making the coffee because he says he can taste the difference between freshly ground and pre-ground, even though Yuna never realized he’d gotten a degree in coffee-tasting alongside accounting and ice hockey.

Tonight, when Yuna wakes up with a desert-dry throat, there’s no water on the bedside table. Par for the course; David’s away for a work conference in Toronto, and so Yuna’s staying alone in Shane’s cottage while workers renovate part of their house in Ottawa.

Alone, as in without David. Not alone as in alone, of course. Shane is here as of two days ago, nursing that bitter end-of-season anger that comes from a first-round playoff exit after winning the Stanley Cup two years in a row.

And Ilya Rozanov is here.

Which—was a shock to the system when Shane first told her that part of his summer plans involved Ilya Rozanov staying with him in his cottage for a while, I don’t know, Mom, maybe a week or two but it depends, I think his visa lets him stay through the whole off-season, but I don’t know if that’s just in America or in Canada too—I mean, not that he will stay here with me the whole off-season or anything, anyway! Just like a week or maybe two or, I don’t know, it depends.

They’re friends, Yuna knows. They lived together in Switzerland during the MLH lockout, when contract negotiations with the Association and MLH leadership stalled out into nothing and Shane left for any other hockey league that would let him play. 

They’re friends. Of course they are. They lived together for four months, and her boy is easy to love. Easy to love and he loves so steadfastly too, when he does. It is not much of a surprise that he has held onto Ilya Rozanov’s friendship despite the fact that it’s been almost two years now since they lived together in the first place. 

So she is not alone in the cottage, because Shane is somewhere in the house, probably trying to fall asleep, and somewhere else in the house Ilya Rozanov is resting, too. But Yuna is alone in that David is not here and so no one remembered to get her a glass of water befored bed.

After a few minutes tossing and turning, trying to determine if the dryness in her mouth is going to miraculously become ignorable on its own, she gives up the fight and slides out of bed. 

Tomorrow night, she tells herself as she walks out of her room as quietly as possible, she will remember the damned water glass. She’s almost sixty years old, for Christ’s sake. She can provide for herself.

The guest room that they use whenever they’re staying with Shane is on the second floor of the cottage, halfway across the house from the kitchen. This is good in the mornings when Shane gets up with the dawn, goes on his run, and comes back to make a breakfast smoothie with the loudest blender in the history of humankind. It is less good on nights like these, when Yuna has to carefully and quietly pick her way down the stairs and through two hallways before she can get her glass of water. 

At least one of the boys, Rozanov or Shane, has accidentally left a few of the lights on in the house, so she doesn’t have to worry about tripping on the stairs and breaking her neck. She thinks about lecturing the both of them as she gets to the bottom of the steps only to realize that the living room light has also been left on despite the late hour. Yes, Shane is a millionaire who can afford a high energy bill. But it is the principle of the thing. How many times has Yuna tried to tell him? 

She has her hand on the light switch by the front door before she hears them. Their voices are clear and low and a surprise. Yuna is surprised. It’s late, after midnight, and Shane is awake. Awake and out of his room, awake and talking.

Quieter now, she tiptoes down the hall leading towards the living room and the kitchen area. She shouldn’t, probably. There is probably no universe where she should pause here, at the edge of the hallway, stand in the shadows and listen in on her son and his friend. 

But there is this universe, where she does anyway.

It’s just—she is surprised. To hear Shane’s voice at this hour, to hear the way it sounds. Maybe that is the truth of the matter. Maybe if Shane was talking to Rozanov in the same deadpan monotone he uses with his teammates, Yuna would not hesitate here, just out of sight. 

But he sounds—like he’s laughing, like he’s smiling. Rozanov makes some sort of noise of agreement, and then there’s a burst of sound. A video game, Yuna thinks. There’s a wave of recorded cheers and a faint goalhorn. 

They must be up late, playing a game on his console. Sometimes, Yuna thinks her boy has grown so much into a man she wouldn’t be able to recognize him at all anymore if she loved him less. And then sometimes he stays up into the early hours of the morning, playing video games with his friend when he should be sleeping, and it’s like nothing’s changed at all.

“So,” Shane says when the cheers have died away. Music begins to play in the background, something simple. A loading screen, maybe. A save point, Yuna doesn’t know. Shane clears his throat. “You, uh. You know how I told you Bagsy’s been weird lately?”

Rozanov hums, and then shifts on the couch. Yuna can hear the way the leather creaks beneath him. 

“He, uh—got me alone after Game Five,” Shane says in the sort of tone he uses when he’s trying to sound more casual than he feels. “Accused me of being homophobic.”

“What?” Rozanov asks with the same kind of confusion that Yuna feels at the confession. Shane, homophobic? No. Yuna raised him better than that. He’d never—

“He wasn’t wrong,” Shane says, voice small and unsteady, and Yuna frowns at the wall in front of her. If Shane truly believes that, if he’s somehow been nurturing that sort of–of hatred without Yuna or David realizing, then that’s something that’s going to fucking change as soon as she—

“Shane, solnyshko,” Rozanov says in a tone that Yuna can’t read. It almost sounds like he is smiling, but she doesn’t quite know what’s funny. “You are many things, but you are not homophobic. I think I would know this about you, kotenok.” 

Yuna would think the same, but Shane hadn’t sounded like he was lying. And what sort of reason would he have to lie in the first place when—

“He said I’ve been—like, avoiding him and Crawford. Off the ice. That I’m not being a good captain to them, and that it started in September and the only thing that’s changed is that I know they’re together, and that I must not be able to—like, stand it. Or something.”

“Shane….”

“And he’s right,” Shane says, bulldozing over Rozanov, which is not surprising. What is surprising, Yuna thinks, is that Rozanov lets him. “I haven’t been the same. I haven’t been a good captain, not to either of them. I—I’m fucking hate seeing them together. After practice, when they’re walking to their car to grab lunch or, or after a game when Crawford’s fucking—tying his shoes for the fifth time cause he’s waiting for Lachlan to finish getting changed so they can leave together. I fucking hate it, Ilya.”

There’s a pause in the living room, save for the sound of one of them shifting on the sofa and the video game music looping on the television. Yuna, for her part, doesn’t know what to say either. Doesn’t know where to begin. The cold, hard knot of disappointment in her son threatens to rise up in her lungs and choke her.

She’d raised him to be better than this. Hearing that he’s not—it’s devastating in the way that it rocks her to her core and changes the landscape of her very understanding of herself and her family and her son and what he is capable of.

“Shane,” Rozanov says carefully, “I don’t think—”

“I’m so fucking jealous,” Shane admits, and his voice breaks over the last word. 

Yuna blinks at the wall.

“They get—every fucking day, Ilya, they get to play the thing they love and they get to do it with the guy they love more than anyone else in the world, and—and come home to him. Come home with him, and what do I get?”

More shifting. Yuna puts her hand out against the wood paneling of the wall, trying to get her bearings. Trying to blink through the sudden sharp sting of pain that lances through her heart at the agony in her boy’s voice. 

“Shane,” Rozanov says, sounding much the same as Yuna feels. “Come here, kotenok, what are you talking about? Where is this coming from? I am here, see? I am right here.”

The words throw her off balance again. I am here. What does that mean? In the context of the conversation, in response to what Shane has said, what else can I am here mean except for the obvious? 

How can it though? It’s like trying to fit two separate puzzle pieces together except they belong in different boxes; it’s like trying to play chess and all she keeps finding in her hands are checkers. It just—how can it though? How can I am here mean what it sounds like it means, when it’s Ilya Rozanov saying it to her son, like this?

“Yeah, for two fucking weeks,” Shane spits, far too loud in the soft stillness of the late hour. “And then next season, we’re—and I’m—it’s not fair. That they get to be together and in love and have hockey, have two fucking Cups, and I…I’d give it up, to have that. I really—no, Ilya, I’m serious, I think I would, I really—if I could come home to you, fuck the Stanley Cup. I miss you. I love you. It’s still killing me. I didn’t think it was going to hurt like this still, but it does. All the fucking time.”

Rozanov says something, Yuna is sure he says something. But she can’t for the life of her hear him over the ringing in her ears. She feels dizzy. She feels—she doesn’t even know. Maybe this is what a concussion feels like. She will have to ask David. She will have to ask Shane. 

Shane.

Shane and Ilya Rozanov. 

Shane, in love. With Ilya Rozanov.

Ilya Rozanov, #81 for the Boston Raiders, drafted first overall in 2009, finished out the season with 134 points, shoots right, last year’s fan favorite for the Hart. Ilya, In love with Shane. Her Shane. 

I am here. Has anyone ever said these words and not meant them as a declaration of love? No. Of course not.

“I don’t think I can keep doing this,” Shane is saying when Yuna blinks back into focus, pressing her fingernails hard against the wood to ground herself in the moment. Rozanov makes a noise, something so raw and wounded that it sounds more animal than human.

A pause, a shallow imitation of a breath. “Okay,” Rozanov says except his voice is thin and strange and nothing more than a wisp of smoke the morning after a house fire. “If you don’t want, we can—I can—go.” The last word is so faint that Yuna almost misses it entirely.

What is impossible to miss is the way her son reacts to the suggestion. “What, no,” Shane says, fierce and vehement. The sort of conviction he’s only ever used when talking about hockey, when saying things like, let me stay a little bit longer, Mom, I can get this shot. I just need to try again. Let me try again. I know I can get it this time.

“What the fuck, Ilya, no,” Shane is saying now. “I never want that.”

“Then what do you want, solnyshko? What can I—” Rozanov cuts himself off with a noise of frustration. There’s more shifting on the couch. A part of Yuna wonders about how they’re positioned. If her son is holding Rozanov in his arms, if he’s being held. 

Shane ran out of patience with being held early on, far sooner than Yuna had grown tired of holding him. She wonders now what sort of allowances Shane gives Ilya Rozanov. What Shane is like when he is in love. Yuna has never met this version of her son. She doesn’t know what to make of him. What to expect.

“I don’t want to hate hockey,” Shane says, so quietly suddenly that Yuna has to strain her ears to hear him. Maybe this is a sign that she shouldn’t. That this is a conversation not meant for her. But this is her son. This is her little boy; she doesn’t have it in her to turn away. “But if I have to keep—leaving you, keep watching your games and knowing I can’t do anything about it if you get hit, if you’re hurt—knowing I wouldn’t even be told if you were in the hospital, like maybe I could just keep on living for a few hours without knowing, until the story broke—I would, I mean. I think—I will. I’ll start hating it. I already have.”

Rozanov sounds lost when he says, like an offering, “I can…make you my emergency contact next season. If that would be—I can do that if you want. Just—you have to tell me, solnyshko. Anything you want, anything I can give, I will, you know this. You have to know this.”

“I want to play with you again,” Shane tells him. Concise. Strong and steady and simple, like this sentence, this desire, is one he has been swallowing down fully-formed for ages. 

Maybe he has. He sounds as if he has.

“What,” Rozanov says blankly, which is once again the only thing Yuna can think.

“I don’t want to be on separate teams anymore. I’m—I’m done with that. I can’t do it again. I can’t keep doing it. I want—it feels like I’ve lost you, and I know I haven’t, okay, I know it’s stupid, but I just—I keep thinking about Zürich. About living with you. Loving you. Giving you shit about the way you made the bed and taking your shit when I made the coffee too strong.”

“It tasted like battery acid, Shane,” Rozanov interrupts, but he is not arguing. Or if he is, it’s ineffective, unable to survive the fondness in his tone. “Of course I give you shit.”

“It was fine, fuck off,” Shane snaps, but Yuna thinks—oh. Oh, that is how her boy sounds when he is in love. She hadn’t known. “That’s not important, I just meant—maybe if I’d never had that, I’d be, like. Okay with this. We could keep making it work like this and seeing you after games and during the off-seaon would be enough, but it can’t be anymore, Ilya, it isn’t. It feels—it’s not enough. I want all of you. On the ice. In my house. In my bed. All the time.”

Rozanov is quiet. Yuna doesn’t know if either of them is even breathing. The video game music has looped again. Maybe more than once, she isn’t sure. Finally, Rozanov exhales long and low. “Who taught you to be this greedy, solnyshko?”  he asks. “Was it me? Did I ruin you like this?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. Quick and easy and honest. “Yeah, I think you probably did, asshole. So, like, take responsibility.”

Rozanov makes another noise, a tut that sounds playful and light, halfway to laughter, automatic like he can’t help but be amused by Shane. Like he can’t help but give him his smiles. 

Seconds pass in silence. Weighted silence, heavy with consideration. Knowing him, Shane probably already has a plan drawn up. He would not have brought this up to Rozanov—Ilya?—otherwise. 

Knowing her son, he has already contacted their Zürich team and drafted longterm contracts for the both of them that just need their signatures to go into effect. Shane has always been the kind of person to go after what he wants; Yuna cannot see this changing just because what he wants sounds so impossible.

But what does that mean for everyone else in Shane’s life? What does that mean for the Metros, for the fans? For Yuna, for David? If what Shane wants is to play in Zürich again, then he’ll find a way to make it happen. That’s how they raised him. That’s how she raised him. 

She’s never once in her life regretted it either, but now—it’s just—it was hard, in 2015. When Shane told them he’d worked with the Metros front office to find a club in Europe where he could play during the lockout. That he was flying there for however long the lockout lasted, that there was no reason for either of them to accompany him there, that the Zürich Lions’ front office had promised to figure out his housing, everything he could possibly need. 

No reason to go with him, as if he were not reason enough. 

It was hard, too, in 2016 when he returned. It’d felt like parts of him hadn’t. And she’d never understood that, never been able to put her finger on the difference, but maybe this is the answer, maybe this is what happened. Maybe Ilya Rozanov happened. And he wants to go back? He would give up—his captaincy, the MLH, his team, the fans, the endorsements, all of it—to go back? To Zürich? For Ilya Rozanov?

In the living room, Rozanov sighs and then, sounding serious but still so soft, still so fond, he says, “We cannot go back to Zürich, Shane.”

“Why not?” Shane challenges immediately, which is perhaps the part of this night that surprises Yuna the least. “They could make the space on the roster, they could—”

“You do not want to go back to Zürich,” Ilya says, cutting off whatever argument he’s already plotted out at the knees.

Shane’s silent for a beat, for two. “Fuck off,” he says. “I fucking do.”

“No, solnyshko, you don’t. Is okay you don’t—but you don’t.”

“But—”

Rozanov hums. “What happens when you are in Zürich and Hayden Pike and his better half have another child? And they want you to be the godparent. You will do this from across the ocean? When you will not be able to change their diapers or let them paint your toenails or cheer for them from the stands when they are put in peewee league?” 

Shane splutters, starts to say something and doesn’t get very far.

“And when your rookies have too much to drink and get married in Las Vegas after the MLH awards, you will help them file for divorce from Switzerland?”

“I wouldn’t—”

“And okay, yes, say we go. Say, okay. We go. For some reason, Zürich Lions front office wants us to play for them again, until we are very old and gray and falling apart like Jonas. You play for fifteen years there, let’s say. How old is your father when the Lions will not renew your contract again? How many of his birthdays have you missed? How many memories has he made where your absence is the only part of you present? Solnyshko, if you are in Zürich, what will you do if he starts eating full-fat greek yogurt? You will be in distant country. No one will be here to slap the spoon out of his hand.”

“I’m not going to base my life around what might happen with other people, Ilya,” Shane snaps, and Yuna feels her shoulders tense when she registers the thread of real, rocky anger undercutting his words. “And people leave home all the fucking time, it’s not like—I wouldn’t be the fucking first!”

“People do,” Ilya agrees. Yuna thinks—she should probably call him Ilya if he is the one person standing in the way of her baby running off to Zürich and dragging his--his Russian along with him. “Kotenok, I know this, you think I do not know this? People leave homes and countries and find new ones and it is good, and I think—you would make it good. You have made it good. For me. And we could make it good, there. For each other.”

“We could,” Shane says, and even to Yuna’s ears, it sounds like a plea. “Ilya, we did it once. Don’t you miss it? The way I do?”

“I miss it very much,” Ilya says immediately. Easily. Soft and in love, the way he’d said I am here. Maybe that’s all he’s been saying, this whole time. I am here, I am here, I am here. “But we cannot go back, solnyshko. Is not how you love. You want to be here. Is okay, that you want this. Is okay that you want for Hayden Pike’s children to know you and for your stupid rookies to call you when they fuck up and for your father to text pictures of his doctor approved grocery list before he goes to the store. 

“Other people, they can love despite distance, is okay for them. You—you could, I think, but it would be hard. And I love you; I want only easy things for you. I do not want to find you on balcony in Zürich house, sad because you are thousands of miles away from people you want to see every day. I love you. I do not want you to be sad.”

“My parents and I don’t even live in the same city,” Shane mutters, but the words are so muffled Yuna can’t understand them at first. He must have—she doesn’t know. Put his head up against Ilya’s chest, maybe. Put it on his arms, pulled the blanket up and over himself the way he does when he’s feeling fit to burst from his emotions. “I’m not, like, dependent on them. I have my own life.”

“Shane,” Ilya says. And that’s all he says. Maybe he’s run out of words.

“I miss you,” Shane whispers, like he is petering out too in the face of something that must feel immovable. “I want to play with you again. I can’t—Ilya. Ilya, I can’t.”

There’s a note of helplessness in his tone that sounds so raw that a part of Yuna flinches away from it at the same time that a part of her aches to reach out to him and hold him to her chest. Keep him tucked away and safe from all the problems in the world. It used to be so simple, solving Shane’s problems. It used to be as easy as staying at the rink for another thirty minutes, til he’d sent the puck bouncing from the bar of the net down over the line. It used to be as easy as being there on the sidelines for him to spot when he turned around looking for her with his hands already raised in the air.

The problems were easier to solve then; the happiness was easier to come by.

But maybe it still is for Shane, just in different ways that he hasn’t yet been able to find the words to tell her or David. Maybe Ilya Rozanov makes him happy. He must, for him to love him more than anything else. He must, for Shane to decide to throw his life into disarray just to play hockey with him again. To live with him again.

“Okay,” Ilya says. “Okay, let’s play together. Here. Somewhere. Solnyshko, you do not have to convince me, of course I want that too. Always. Of course. But let’s look here, okay? In this league. There has to be a team that has the cap space for both of us—or that wants us enough to make room.”

“You think?” Shane asks, sounding hesitant now. Like he wants to be hopeful, but he doesn’t quite know how. It breaks Yuna’s heart a little bit. The way he’s argued for this and still can’t quite seem to believe it when he hears the way Ilya Rozanov caves for him. 

“Well,” Ilya says, “I am very beautiful and am very good hockey player, so I think, of course, anyone would want me, yes? I do not know about you, kotenok. Second pick overall, eh. Maybe Florida will offer you contract. Is where we send all the draft busts and retirees, yes? You and Scott Hunter can light it up in Sunrise, if you—”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you over my two cups,” Shane says cheerfully, and there’s shifting—a thump of a pillow against skin. “And Rookie of the Year trophy. Asshole.”

Another thump. Who hit who, Yuna can’t tell. Both are laughing now, and maybe that’s all that matters.

This is what Shane sounds like when he’s in love: like a little kid again. Like her boy, when he was just a boy, when he was just learning to skate and he told her everything felt like flying. When it was all easy. The problems and the choices and the happiness.

Oh, baby. Oh, my baby.

As quietly as humanly possible, Yuna backs away from the wall and turns back towards the stairs. She creeps up them like a burglar escaping the scene of a heist. She feels like a burglar, too, as she quietly closes the door to the guest room again and sits on the very edge of the bed. She feels like she has just stolen something precious that she had no right to take. 

Her throat still feels dry; when she reaches up to touch her face, her fingers come away wet.

vi.

January 2022

One more bad hair day and Chelsea swears: she’s going to shave off the whole damn thing. It’s not worth the effort. It’s not worth the expensive products. It’s not worth the video tutorials of fancy up-do’s she only ever half-pays attention to and only ever gets a quarter of the way right.

And It’s definitely not worth the judgmental look her boss throws her when he walks past her in the kitchen, leaning up against the employee computer just out of sight of the Green Dining Room with a hair tie fighting for its life against the volume and obstinacy of her curls. 

It’s a slow night though, and she’d raked in two good reviews from two separate tables of sympathetic Americans last night—poor kid from the Florida sticks, living in a foreign country, unable to speak the language, lost and adrift and can’t even afford to go to the fancy ski lodges, of course we can leave a glowing review of your subpar service, sweetheart, it’s the least we can do, now how do you spell Zureech? Zurik? Zurich?—that he doesn’t say anything to her. He looks like he has a million things he wants to say to her, but at least in this moment, for this very small second, he bites his tongue. He’ll be back though, and Chel will still be here, so it’s really only a matter of time.

Working in a restaurant, Chelsea’s learned, is like experiencing a constant microcosm of the effects of climate change; you’re always on thin fucking ice. 

“There you are,” Anna says so suddenly that Chelsea’s almost startled out of her skin by her sudden appearance. Maybe it’s a hostess thing, to move silently through a restaurant. Maybe it’s just an Anna thing. Either way, Chelsea really fucking hates it, and she’s— “You’ve got an anniversary just come in. Table 64.”

“Sure,” Chelsea says, even when she sort of wants to strangle Anna for sitting a couple in the 60’s after she’s been trying to close out that area for the better part of two hours. “That’s great. Thanks for letting me know, any allergies?”

“Personal space, from what I can tell,” Anna replies, because she thinks she’s a hoot and a fucking half. “Actually, about that.”

“About Table 64’s allergies?”

“No, about their anniversary. Hannah doesn’t think they’re together, but I think they have to be. Find out and let us know, yes?”

Chelsea narrows her eyes and sweeps them over Anna. “How much money’s in it for me?”

“A quarter,” Anna says, which is typical hostess behavior.

“Half,” Chelsea counters, and Anna rolls her eyes, probably thinking typical table server behavior.

But all she is says is, “Fine,” and then they shake on it. “Your hair looks cute like that by the way.”

Chelsea snorts. “Try it on the chef, babe,” she says as she walks towards the 60's, like she wouldn’t sleep with Anna in a heartbeat if the girl ever flirted with her in all sincerity.

Table 64 is a four-top that sits at the back of the restaurant right against the windows overlooking the city. Schrödinger’s couple is sharing one side of it, which is a heavy point in Anna’s favor. The two men are already deep in conversation with each other, leather-bound menus untouched in front of them. One of them, blond and curly-haired and vaguely familiar in a way she can't place, has his arm spread out along the back of his companion’s chair, fingers hooked over the back slat and brushing against the back of the other's jacket. 

His boyfriend or husband or partner or close, personal friend is leaning towards him, but not like it’s purposeful. Like it’s just habit. Before she can even approach the table, the blond reaches out and brushes a piece of dark hair away from the other man’s face. It falls right back a second later, and the other man—Asian, covered in freckles, wearing a navy blue turtleneck that Chelsea’s pretty sure has to be covering at least a few hickies—smiles, slow and sweet. 

Yeah, Hannah’s case isn’t looking very strong. 

If Chelsea had to guess, she’d say it’s likely that Hannah just desperately wanted either one or both of these very muscular, very tall men to take her home after the end of her shift. Too horny to think straight, and the poor sucker put money on it. Anna’s ruthless, apparently, which is at least something Chelsea can respect.

“Hi, welcome,” she tells them the minute she gets to the edge of their table, appropriately-sized smile pinned to her face. “My name is Chelsea, I’ll be taking care of you tonight. Is it your first time here?”

The blond man smiles back at her, but he looks at his partner first. It softens the lines on his face, looking at the other man. “In this restaurant, yes,” he says with a heavy accent. Eastern European, she thinks. Russian, maybe. Somewhere over that way at least. “In this city, no. We used to live here actually.”

“Oh,” Chelsea says, and she keeps on smiling even though her first thought is, of course, that she didn’t care and also she didn’t ask. “That’s so cool, welcome back!” 

“Thanks,” the dark-haired man says. He touches the menu in front of him like he’s just now realizing it’s there, like he’s surprised to find himself in a restaurant in the first place. “Uh, can we get some water to start?”

“Sparkling,” the blond says, and his smile turns into some kind of smirk when his partner-husband-close friend scowls.

“Still,” the boyfriend-brother-in-arms-lover corrects, blinking up at Chelsea with a very fixed smile, and like. Jesus Christ. Which is she supposed to bring them? Still or sparkling?

“Both, actually,” the blond tells her, and Chelsea can do both, so she nods and pretends to write the order down on her pad even though there’s no way she’s going to forget to bring them two bottles of water. 

“Alright, I’ll give you a few minutes with our menu,” she tells them, slipping the pad into her apron pocket. “I’ll be back shortly with the waters and to explain the fondue tasting courses, if you’d like.”

“Thank you,” the dark-haired man says, and his significant other-platonic life partner echoes him with another smile in her direction.

And, usually she wouldn’t press like this, but the sooner she knows, the sooner she can sidle up to the hostess stand and relay the information to Anna and Hannah, which is the sooner she gets a nice little tip to take home. So she leans over the table to grab their unused wine glasses, and asks, faux-casually, “Now I was told tonight is a special occasion for you two. What are we celebrating?”

The blond perks up immediately, knocking his shoulders against his lover’s and flashing her a smile so bright that Chelsea, a lesbian, almost gets where Hannah's coming from. “It is an anniversary,” he says, and his partner groans with the attitude of someone who is absolutely married to the biggest annoyance of their life. Somehow, the blond’s smile widens.

“Oh yeah?” Chelsea prompts, and the blond nods.

“On this day, thirteen years ago, Russia beat Canada in International Prospect Cup,” he informs her, like this is one of the most significant events of the twenty-first century. 

“It’s a hockey tournament,” his companion-husband-Canadian rival (?) elaborates, probably when her face betrays her absolute confusion on the subject. 

“Oh,” Chelsea says, sort of at a loss for words. Her scalp itches. She really will shave it off this time. Last straw. This is it. “I, uh, don’t think we give you the free chocolate cake for hockey tournament anniversaries….”

The dark-haired man’s lips curl up, like he’s laughing at something he’s decided not to tell her about. The blond has no such reservations; his laughter is loud and bright, and he raises his arm to wrap it more fully around his—whatever’s shoulder, dragging his thumb up along the back of his neck.

“Oh, that is okay,” he says. “I have already gotten gold medal to wear on my neck and best hockey player in the world to marry me. I do not need to, hm. Have my cake and eat it too. Even I am not this greedy, I think.”

“Ilya,” the dark-haired one says, somehow managing to convey how long-suffering and incredibly pleased he is in the two syllables of his partner’s name. 

“I’ll give you a few minutes with the menu,” Chelsea says quickly before they can keep talking. 

Anna perks up the moment she sees her leave her section, but Chelsea waves her off, shelving the wine glasses first and creating a ticket in the computer system for the table before she forgets about their damned fancy waters. 

Honestly, she thinks, she wants a fucking smoke break. Probably, she wants a smoke break more than she wants whatever money Anna’s gonna fork over after Chelsea tells her that the two guys are definitely married, for better or fucking worse.

A smoke break, a haircut. What else?

A good night’s sleep. A plane ticket somewhere warm. A new city, a new job. Simple fucking wishlist.  

And hey, if Table 64 doesn’t want their slice of complimentary chocolate cake, Chelsea wants that too. She'll box it up and take it home herself. The chocolate cake here’s practically world-famous. It’s one of the things this place is known for around the city. She honestly can’t believe Table 64 lived here in Zürich and never made it in.

No accounting for taste, she supposes.