Chapter Text
The smoothie was wrong. That was Ilya’s first thought as he came home from his walk with Anya. Ilya had learned Shane’s habits over the years the way you learn around a city, slowly at first, then all at once, until you couldn’t remember not knowing them. He knew how Shane liked coffee, how he taped his stick and how he went quiet before games in a specific way that was different from how he went quiet when he was angry. He knew how Shane ate before games because Shane had strong opinions about it, had explained them to Ilya once at length a couple of years ago back when he was still in Montreal with the focused intensity of someone who had polished the plan over and over.
Some carbohydrates, some protein, limited fats. Not this, this pale thin thing in the blender that Shane was making with his back to the kitchen, shoulders tense, like he was bracing for a hit.
“There is pasta.” Ilya said as he was taking off his boots. He made it deliberately this morning, with grilled chicken, and left it in the fridge in the container where Shane would see it. This was as close as he knew how to get right now to saying the thing he actually wanted to say.
“I see it.” Shane poured the smoothie into a glass.
“So?” Ilya tried to keep the frustration out of his voice.
“I am having this.” Shane refused to budge
Ilya walked to the kitchen and leaned against the counter, watching Shane not turn around. Outside the window, Ottawa was its typical grey February afternoon, grey sky, grey river, the kind of cold that grows with you but still seeps into the bone every year.
“You had almost nothing at lunch.” Ilya said, accusingly.
“I had plenty at lunch.”
“I was at lunch!” Ilya snapped.
Shane turned around then. He had the glass in one hand and the expression Ilya had been seeing for weeks, patient on the surface, something pressurized underneath. He’d seen that expression in Monreal too, across a faceoff dot, across a rink after a loss. He’d thought he knew what it meant because he thought he knew Shane. He was less sure now.
“I knew my body.” Shane said, “I’ve been doing this a long time Ilya.”
“Yes, I know.” Ilya struggled to keep his voice even. “I am not saying you don’t know your body. I’m saying…” He stopped. There was no version of the end of that sentence that didn’t land wrong, that seemed to be the theme nowadays. You look different. You look tired. You look like someone who is lost. Did marrying me make you this way?
“I’m fine,” Shane said, “I’m just managing my nutrition, the high performance diet.”
Managing seems to be all he could do nowadays. Shane had done the calculation before Ilya got home. That was the thing about it, it felt like common sense. It felt like the only thing he could control when the points weren’t coming and the line ups are not working. Coach Wiebe looked at him during video sessions that was always patient but also concerning. He wasn’t refusing to eat. He wasn’t doing anything dramatic. He was just being precise, just having control.
He had been captain in Montreal for many years. In terms of hockey, he had been great at Montreal. He had Stanley cups to prove it, had built something there over a decade, had known his role and his ice time and where he stood. Shane never want to go back to Montreal, not after the way they treated him when he was horribly outed last year. They discarded him like trash, traded him at the first opportunity and even when he had single handedly brought them 3 cups.
Marrying Ilya, living together, playing on the same team, despite a much worse team, had been a dream come true. But now Shane stood in their kitchen in his hometown with only four goals in fifty-one games, a stat that was even worse than his rookie year. He needed something to be in his control.
The smoothie was in his control.
“There is pasta.” Ilya said again, in the tone that wasn’t quite asking.
“I heard you the first time.”
“Shane.” Ilya sighed.
“Don’t.” He kept his voice level. He was good at level.
“Don’t what?” Ilya looks exasperated now.
“Don’t try to convince me. We have a game in 3 hours. I don’t need a lecture right now.”
Ilya was quiet for a moment. Shane could feel him looking, that particular Ilya look that had once made him insane across a faceoff dot and now made him feel simultaneously loved and exhausted.
“You are down eight pounds from September.” Ilya said.
Shane went still.
“I am not secretly weighing you.” Ilya added quickly, “but I can see it Shane, I live with you.”
The kitchen felt very small suddenly. Shane looked at the smoothie in his hand and thought about putting it down and thought about the calculation he’d done twice this morning and thought about the way Wiebe had scratched him from the power play unit last week with obvious reasons.
“I’m managing,” He said again. It sounded thinner the second time.
“You keep saying this word.”
“Because I am.” Shane replied stubbornly.
“Managing is not…” Ilya stopped. Pressed his mouth together. He did that when he was looking for the English word that was precise enough, and usually Shane found it endearing, and right now he just felt like the language is failing him. “The first couple of years in Ottawa, when I was… when things were bad. I was away from you. I was also managing. This is what managing looks like, sometimes. It looks very controlled from outside but I was breaking on the inside.”
Shane put the glass down on the counter.
“That’s not what this is.”
“Okay.”
“Ilya. That is not what this is.”
“Okay.” Ilya said again, the same tone. Not arguing, not agreeing either. Patient and immovable, that Shane finds ridiculously frustrating tonight.
“I’m going to get changed.” Shane said.
Ilya stood in the kitchen after Shane left the room and looked at the smoothie on the counter, only half finished. He thought about pouring it out and decided that would be a statement he hadn’t earned the right to make. He put the pasta back in the fridge. He got his keys from the bowl by the door and checked his phone, then looked out the window for a moment. This city that was his now in a way that had taken time. Four years, a slow accumulation of knowing which roads iced first and where to get coffee before a morning skate and how the fans here were different from Boston fans. But furthermore, this is Shane’s hometown.
But Shane left here when he was nineteen, more than a decade ago. This time, Shane only had 6 months in a new team that he hasn’t really fit in yet. Ilya understood this, he had gone through it. He knew it would be not be easy, to make Ottawa a team worthy of Shane Hollander’s talents. He felt like he had done everything a captain and a husband could, but yet still feels helpless.
Shane came back in his gameday suit, the navy one. He looked handsome but tired. He picked up his bag and didn’t look at the counter where the smoothie was.
“Ready.” Shane said.
“Yes.” Ilya sighed.
The drive was quiet. Ilya’s SUV was cold in the way all Ottawa car were cold in February, a deep cold that took the whole drive to the arena to fix. Shane looked out the window at the streets, streets that were familiar from childhood but yet strange at the same time. Some neighborhoods never changed yet some are unrecognizable. He felt Ilya’s silence beside him, Shane thought of Montreal. He thought about the ice there, which he’d known by feel, every bad edge and soft spot. He thought about being twenty and getting his first real shift and the city opening up around him like it had been waiting.
He was so tired.
The arena came up on the left, lit against the dark, and Shane felt something in him settle the way it always did, the ice was still ice, wherever he was, whatever else was wrong. He could still skate.
Ilya pulled in. Killed the engine.
“Have a good game.” Ilya said. The ritual of it, same as always.
Shane looked at him for a second, his golden hair, the lines around his eyes and mouth. His handsome husband, the C on his chest that Shane used to wear, looking straight ahead through the windshield.
“Yeah.” Shane replied. “You too.”
They got out of the car and headed towards the arena. Ilya glanced at his husband walking slightly in front of him, no kiss, no peck on the cheek, not even squeeze in the hands. No, touch is a valuable commodity recently and Ilya had no idea how they came to this point when 6 months ago they had their honeymoon. He had even less idea on how to fix the situation.