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It started with Hollander being boring.
Well, it actually started with Ilya not turning his TV off because he needed background noise to stop his brain from working overtime. It just so happened to be a recap of one of Hollander’s interviews that finally lulled him to sleep. The last words he remembered were “the conditions are certainly in our favor for the next game” in that monotone cadence that Ilya was starting to know all too well.
He woke up better rested than he had any other night in the past two months.
A few weeks later, it happened again. He was in New York after a frustrating game and his hookup from the club had just left. It was close to 2am but Ilya was still reeling, his entire body still restless and you would think the league could afford better accomodations, but the TV of his shitty hotel room was not working. On a whim, he opened the live stream of the still ongoing Montreal–Los Angeles game on his phone.
He propped his phone up on the pillow next to him and chuckled at Hollander, who, of course, shook off a check against the boards like it was nothing and stole the puck back from his opponent mere moments later. He passed to Pike, then positioned himself close to the crease and when the puck got shot back to him, he one-timed it over the goalie’s left shoulder. Ilya felt the itch beneath his skin ease away as he watched Hollander celebrate the goal with unbridled glee and he closed his eyes, listening to the commentators wax poetics about Hollander’s form.
A few days later, at 1 am, his father woke him up with a call, confused, asking him why he’d missed breakfast, and in the middle of Ilya trying to calm him down, started scolding him about his 2009 World Juniors loss. The call lasted 30 minutes and after, even though Ilya’s body was leeched of energy, his brain kept working through his father’s entire mental decline again and again. Ilya stared at his ceiling uselessly until 3 am, when he finally admitted defeat and pulled up YouTube. A 15 minute long “Shane Hollander Being Canada's Golden Boy Compilation” was at the top of his recommended.
Good thing it wasn't a chirping compilation—that wouldn't have made for a long video, Ilya thought mockingly as his thumb clicked on the video.
“You’re so fucking boring,” Ilya slurred as he felt his breath even out automatically at Hollander’s voice. His heart was pulsing less and less in his ears with each word; he was out in mere minutes.
For the 2016 playoffs, the Bears and the Voyageurs were matched against each other in the second round. For the games in Montreal, Ilya had ended up with two roommates: Connors and Connors’ obnoxiously loud snoring. Ilya was more mad at the noise than the fact that he was in fucking Montreal and not fucking Shane Hollander, clearly.
He ripped his headphones from his luggage with much more force than necessary, sourly hoping it would rouse Connors into silence. It didn’t work, but Hollander’s voice from the two (relatively short) chirping compilations he found did—hearing Hollander scream at Hunter to ice his knees almost made Ilya stop cursing out the playoffs rules they had established years ago and it most definitely let him slip into unconsciousness.
He hadn’t known his summers in Russia could get any worse, but each passing year proved him wrong. It didn't help that Ilya was more and more longing for something he didn't even know (he knew exactly what it was) and the urge to book a flight back to Boston was getting harder and harder to suppress each day. It didn’t take long until, even in Moscow, Hollander’s voice became a calming constancy.
When the ESPN cottage segment dropped, Ilya knew he had struck gold. It was like it was engineered to be fallen asleep to—serene shots, calming music, nature noises, Hollander talking about living close to his parents and yoga like it was exciting stuff.
(The first few times Ilya watched it, he didn’t fall asleep to it, though. Even when he watched it specifically for that reason, his eyes were tracing the shots too intensely, greedily committing Shane Hollander’s ‘favorite place on earth’ to memory.)
It became his go-to sleep video almost immediately. He found a version that cut out all of the ESPN narrator bits and knew Shane’s cadence of each of the words before preseason had even wrapped up.
When Shane was taking a nap in his arms in his Boston home, Ilya didn’t fall asleep. He was too transfixed by the chest calmly rising and falling right under where he rested his hand. All the tension had left Shane's body, something Ilya was usually only privy to for a few precious moments and definitely always for less than five minutes, after sex.
It was only after Hollander walked out on him a few hours later that Ilya realized he had a huge fucking problem. He laid in bed wide awake for an entirely different reason than he had planned for this night, refusing to put on anything with Hollander in it. The next day’s game rolled around without him having slept a wink.
In the following months, he tried to swap one unhealthy habit for another—a safer, familiar one. But smoking seemed to have gained a stimulating effect.
Most nights, the urge to listen to Shane was too overpowering and he ended up surrendering to it. Sometimes it happened immediately, others in the middle of the night, when he still hadn’t fallen asleep even though a headache had already started to lodge itself behind his eyebrows. He stayed away from recent videos—they all seemed to include Rose Landry in some way—and usually defaulted back to the ESPN segment.
When he was on the phone with Shane two days after his father’s funeral, still in Russia, he felt entirely boneless when he murmured, “Tell me more about your boring day.”
“What time is it in Moscow? You should really go to sleep, Ilya.” Ilya. He couldn’t imagine ever getting tired of hearing his name from him.
“Yes, Shane.” Ilya leaned his phone against his bedside lamp so he could still see him. Shane was also in his bed, in Montreal, even though it was barely evening there. They’d had phone sex again, the second time now this week, and Ilya would very much like that to become a new regular thing in his life. “I will sleep. Tell me about your day.”
The next morning, he woke up to his phone battery drained. The first thing that greeted him after plugging it in was a ‘sleep well’ text from Shane, sent what seemed like not very long after Ilya's request. There was a heart accompanying the words and Ilya was so entirely fucked.
Their time at the cottage was ripe with discoveries about each other. Their second night there, Ilya got to learn that, when deep in sleep, sometimes, Shane’s breathing was accompanied by an almost inaudible sound. It wasn’t a snore, more of a small whoosh while air was pushed out of his mouth through lips that were barely opened. Ilya nosed at the back of Shane’s head as he pressed closer to him and let that sound readily become something new to soothe his mind with.