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Marleau was already apologizing to someone. Not to Ilya, Marleau had no reason to apologize to Ilya. He was talking about how it was a clean hit, how he hadn't meant to catch him that high. Preparing for reporters.
Ilya said yeah, clean hit, tough break, and clapped him on the shoulder, because that was the correct response and he knew all the correct responses.
The visitor locker room in Montreal smelled like every visitor locker room in the NHL: tape and sweat and someone's body spray applied like it was dosed in square meters. Ilya moved away from Marleau and sat down in front of his stall, keeping his face neutral. Around him, the room was doing what rooms usually did after a win on the road, which was get loud fast. Someone had already pulled up a playlist. Beaumont was talking about a bar he'd been to last time, about a dark-haired waitress who recognized him and mentioned a friend. Some were still dissecting the Hollander hit.
Ilya cursed a bit at his skates, his fingers shaking as he loosened the boot. Finally off, he set them aside and looked at his hands. Stop.
Clean hit. Tough break. It had been a clean hit. There would be replays and reviews and Ilya knew they would find nothing to blame Marleau for. There was nothing. It was hockey and people got hurt, but Cliff Marleau had done his job and done it well within the rules. There was nothing to see there.
The thing to see was the moment before the hit.
That moment before the hit was what Ilya's brain was recreating over and over, like a coach reviewing film, frame by frame. And in that slow-motion replay, Ilya could only see one thing: Shane had been looking at him.
Shane had certainly not been looking at Marleau. Not at the puck, or the ice, or the rest of the team or anything else that should have been his focus in a high-stakes packed-house game against a rival.
He'd been looking back, looking at Ilya across the ice the way he sometimes looked at him in hotel rooms. His face held that certain quality of attentiveness and joy and promise that Ilya had never been able to ignore, had stopped wanting to ignore, had started to cherish. It was a look that had a name that he had admitted only once, and that was in Russian, into a phone, to a man who hadn't understood a word. He was not going to say it again tonight.
And then Marleau — fucking Marleau — had come in hard from the left and Shane had gone down in a sickening heap and the crowd had made that sound that stops every player on the ice. That single heart-beat where you check your guys, then theirs, then find whoever isn't moving. Ilya hadn't done any of that, though. He'd already been watching Shane instead of the play, the same way Shane had been watching him, and he'd seen it coming and hadn't been able to stop it. He'd known exactly who was down before the crowd had even finished making the sound. That was its own problem.
"Roz!" Beaumont from across the room. "Hey! You coming out or what?"
Ilya looked up, still nearly fully in game gear. The rest of the room was in various states of transition with a handful of guys already suited up and in coats. Beaumont, half undressed and still sweaty, had his head cocked sidewise, eyebrows up. "Well?"
"Maybe," Ilya said, shrugging and looking back to his skates. "Go ahead. I will talk to Coach."
He finished changing without looking at anyone. As he slid on his jacket he looked once more at his phone — still nothing. Shane was clearly either too hurt or too busy to be texting Ilya. Ilya could have texted first, of course. He'd composed it three times in his head already. Short enough to be nothing, if someone else saw it. The problem was that nothing he actually wanted to say was short enough to be nothing. Ilya slid the phone into his pocket. Coach would be just across the hall. Ilya picked up his bag and walked over.
"Good game," Coach said without even looking up.
"Thanks."
Ilya paused and took a breath, casual.
"Hollander — you hear anything? How bad?
Coach looked up now, his expression neutral, just delivering facts. "Concussion. Collarbone." He kept his eyes on Ilya. Ilya kept his hands still, his eyes level.
"He will be out long?"
"That's Montreal's decision." A pause. Ilya shifted his jaw.
"He will stay all night in the hospital?"
"Probably. I don't know. Why?"
Ilya lifted a shoulder. Casual. "I can go to the hospital. Tomorrow morning. A visit. Captain thing."
He kept his tone businesslike. Routine sportsmanship and league optics. Boring responsibilities and nothing more. "Marleau. He feels bad." Ilya shrugged again, as if the whole thing seemed unnecessary to him. "It is good if someone from the team goes. I am Captain."
Coach looked at him a beat longer, then gave a quick nod. "Sure. That’s good, a captain doing that." He glanced back at his clipboard. "I'll check in with Theriault in the morning and text you. But keep it short. We fly out at ten. "
"Of course," Ilya said, already turning, making a face like he'd really rather not go at all.
He crossed back toward the locker room, pausing in the dim hallway. The playlist was audible through the door. Laughter. He shook out his hands and pushed the door open.
The room was thinning out — a few guys were heading for the bus, a few were heading for the bar and whatever the night offered. Normal. Everyone doing exactly what you did in Montreal after a win when you had no worries to nurse and no one waiting up at home.
Beaumont was still there, taking his time adjusting the band of his watch. He looked up when Ilya came back in.
"All good with Coach?"
"Gave me homework," Ilya hit the note between a sigh and a scoff. "Hospital visit tomorrow. Hollander."
Beaumont made a sympathetic face. "Better you than me." He adjusted his sleeves. "Sure you won't come out? One drink. You look like you need it."
Ilya thought about sitting at a bar surrounded by noise and managing his face for another three hours.
"Not tonight," he said.
Beaumont looked at him for a moment more. "You good?"
"Tired," Ilya said, which was the correct response, simple and sufficient and not entirely false.
Beaumont nodded and went.
The room was nearly empty now. One of the trainers was stacking equipment in the far corner without paying attention to anyone. Ilya stood there another moment, his bag at his feet, and slid the phone out of his pocket again. Nothing.
Ilya got on the bus and found a seat by the window and put his headphones in without turning anything on. His fingers drummed against his thighs as the city moved past the glass. His shoulders dropped and he leaned back into the seat, chin down. He focused on breathing. His jaw ached. He hadn't known he'd been clenching it.
Ilya’s hand hit the hotel room lightswitch like he lived there. The room was a room. The same square footage, the same beige, the same window overlooking a parking garage or courtyard or highway. Ilya knew he had stayed in this hotel before. He briefly wondered if he'd stayed in this very room.
He dropped his bag and sat on the edge of the bed without taking his coat off.
His phone said 11:07. He opened his texts from "Jane." Shane had sent an address two days ago and then a second message a minute later: real one. Ilya had read it twice, saved it, and sent some explicit emojis. There were no newer messages.
He reached for the remote.
He told himself it was background noise. Something to fill the room. He told himself this as he changed out of his suit and into track pants and a hoodie, and he told himself he wasn't listening, told himself he didn't need the anchor's version of events, told himself this right up until the moment the sports desk anchor said and in Montreal tonight, a scary moment in that highly anticipated game against Boston — and there it was. The replay. From the network's camera, shot from an angle Ilya hadn't had on the ice.
He watched it.
He watched it again when they ran it back, leaning closer, jaw tight.
From up here, from this angle, you could see the whole inevitable choreography of it, like a Russian ballet. You could see Marleau picking up speed and angling toward Shane's left side, all of it visible, all of it preventable if you were watching the right part of the ice. But while the camera had been watching the play, Ilya had been watching Shane's face.
On screen, Shane went down. The crowd sound came through the hotel television. It was no longer the sound of thousands of hearts stopping at once. It was manageable, made broadcastable, made into content. The anchor was already talking over it: Hollander down, taken off on a stretcher, we'll have more on this as it develops —
Ilya turned it off.
He sat in the sudden quiet. He checked his phone. Nothing.
His memories from just after the hit started coming back to him as ice cold plunges. Shane had mumbled his name. On the ice, on the stretcher, Ilya had heard it. He wasn't certain anyone else had. The medical team had been focused on assessment and movements, and the crowd noise had covered most of it. But Ilya had been close, had been following the stretcher until someone had gently pushed him back. “Ilya…”.
He lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
The replay ran again. Not the broadcast version this time. His version, from ice level, from the place where he'd been standing. No overhead angle, no tragic ballet. Just Shane's face turning toward him, and then Marleau, and then the crowd sound. His brain ran it the way it had been running it all night, the same loop, except now it added the overhead version, too. The camera above it all like an angel over the ice, seeing everything with the terrible clarity of something that doesn't have a stake in what it's watching. It had seen exactly what he should have been doing. It had seen exactly what he'd been doing instead. Face. Marleau. Sound.
His mind also replayed the hazy moments after the hit now, too. The network broadcast opening memories that unfolded like a lightning storm over a dark sheet of ice — each flash sudden and clear, each image sharp and cold. Each one dangerous.
He closed his eyes-- Nope. That was worse.
He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a long time. He ran his hands through his hair, twisting it in his fingers until it stung.
He thought about turning the TV back on. He thought about the drink he hadn't gotten with the team. He thought about the cigarettes he hadn't smoked since Moscow and his father's funeral.
His phone said 1:47.
He didn't sleep. He lay there in the dark and the silence settled around him and he watched the numbers on his phone change.
The collision and the aftermath looped on replay: Face, Marleau, Sound and then Shane limp & silent on the ice. Then somehow worse, Shane mumbling Ilya's name. Ilya frozen behind the medical team, unable to react the way his body and soul needed to react knowing the whole stadium and all the cameras were watching. He felt that aching need to be close to Shane the same way he’d felt it in Moscow. Not the kind of desire and want that he knew so well. Something deeper and lonelier. The need to be near enough to Shane to share that special kind of quiet that Shane, inexplicably, impossibly, made in him, and to rest there.
1919. The door code to Shane's front door. The Real one.
Ilya was already standing, already pulling on his coat and opening the Uber app before he'd thought about what's next. It was 2am and he was in Montreal and Shane… Shane was somewhere in this same city, maybe awake, maybe not, maybe staring into the dark and thinking about the same collision. Maybe wishing Ilya was nearby. Maybe still mumbling his name.
Or maybe Shane was on painkillers and dreamless and didn't need Ilya hovering in a doorway like an idiot.
Ilya sat back down on the edge of the bed. He saw Shane again the way he'd been on the ice: limp, collapsed. Flashes of his mother's arm, her gently curled fingers, her empty face, hovered just outside of his memory. He knew this ache. The ache of things left unsaid. The ghostly shape of a conversation cut short before it could begin. He had been carrying it for two months like a stone in the center of his chest.
He stood back up. He didn't sit down again.
The Uber was four minutes away and Ilya was outside on the curb before he could talk himself out of it, collar up against the cold night, hands shoved in his pockets. He watched the little car icon move on his screen.
Shane's street was quiet. Of course it was quiet, it was 2am. Ilya stood on the sidewalk across from the apartment building, observing. It was a nice place. Boring, of course, but in a reliable way. Two stories, its own front door. Until today, they had always met at Shane's fake murder-alley building, but after that phone call from Russia they had agreed that this time they'd meet at Shane's real apartment. This was supposed to be their night. Fucking Marleau.
Ilya watched the windows. There was one light on — upstairs, the bedroom maybe, or the hallway — and he stared at it like it was going to tell him something. What if his parents were here? Shane had told him last season that his parents were fully convinced of the asshole lady's man reputation he'd built for himself. Like everyone else, they loved to hate him.
So what if Ilya punched in that code and the door swung open and there was Shane's mom? There was no version of this that didn't look insane. There was no version of this that wasn't insane.
He was a man standing on a dark street at 2am staring at a light in a window. Waiting for it to move. Waiting for a shadow. Waiting for something that told him he was allowed to walk across the street.
A rustle in the bush next to him startled him and he huffed out a shaky блять as some kind of raccoon or overweight rat scurried out and disappeared around the nearest corner.
He checked his phone again. His hands were cold. He should have grabbed gloves. No — what he should have done was stayed in his hotel. He watched the window and thought about the last time he'd stood outside a door not knowing what he would find inside, the weight of that dread, the way it lived in the sternum.
He'd now stood here for eleven minutes. Nothing was moving inside.
He pictured Shane's mother looking up as he let himself in — and yes, okay, it would be bad, it would be awkward, it would be a conversation that had no good ending — but it would not be the worst thing. The worst thing was standing on this sidewalk in the cold until morning.
The worst thing was the ache of things left unsaid, which he knew the exact weight of now. He had been carrying it since Moscow like a stone in the center of his chest.
1-9-1-9.
He crossed the street. He found himself at the door before he'd fully decided to be there.
He stood on the step and sucked in the cold night air, blowing it out slow like the cigarette he was trying not to think about craving. This was what a stalker did. A stalker stood on a step at this hour with his pulse in his throat. A stalker didn't call ahead. A stalker justified it to himself the whole ride over and then justified it again on the walk up and then stood here, justifying.
A thought pushed in suddenly and he nearly retreated to the sidewalk: What if Shane had another alarm inside, with a different code? What if Ilya opened this door and the goddamn alarm set off the whole neighborhood, triggering an awkward and very public conversation with the police about why Ilya Rozanov was visiting Shane Hollander's probably empty apartment at 2:30 in the morning.
No. Shane had told him just today, at the beginning of the game, that the code was 1919. If there was another code, another alarm, he would have mentioned it. Shane would have given him a whole boring speech about it, probably.
He blew out another slow breath. Dumb. What was he hoping for? That Shane's injuries were so mild that he'd been sent home from the hospital and that Shane's parents had not dropped everything to be there with him? Which was stupid. They were two hours away, and if they had not already been in town for the game, they were definitely in Montreal now.
So if Shane was here, then his parents were here. They were like that. Always taking Shane to lunch before games, showing up at the NHL awards, cheering him on, and making his already perfect life even more perfect. And if Shane was still in the hospital, his parents were probably there, too. And then why the hell was Ilya here?
The security camera caught his eye.
Small. Black. Mounted just above the frame, angled slightly down like it was disappointed in him. He pictured Shane's cute little scowl.
The small LED beside it glowed and he stared into it. For a moment he thought he could just say it. All of it. Stand here on this step and speak to the lens and let whatever recording or cloud server or archived file swallow the whole embarrassing truth of why he came. No face to watch change. No silence to misread. No Perfect Hollander parents asking a million questions.
He was still thinking about it when his hand found the doorknob. He didn't remember reaching for it, but there it was — cold, solid, real — and his fingers were already curled around it, and he thought of his father's hand holding a glass of vodka, and Shane's hand brushing against his face, and the gently curled fingers of his mother that hovered just outside of his memory.
Ilya took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.
1-9-1-9.
The door swung open without a sound. No alarm. No shriek of intrusion, no lights flooding on. Just the quiet dark of an apartment that had been waiting patiently for someone to come home.
Ilya stepped inside, pulled the door shut behind him, and stood very still in the entryway, listening. The hum of the refrigerator from deeper in the apartment. The purr of the heating fighting against the Montreal cold. The neutral silence of a place that had been empty for hours and had settled into waiting.
He reached for the light switch, fumbling against the wall in the dim glow of the streetlights through the windows. He closed his eyes as the light filled the room, and then opened them slowly.
It was so Shane.
The murder-alley building was hotel-room perfect. No personality, nothing of real Shane. But this place was Shane-perfect. The real Shane.
The shoes lined up beside the door, toes forward, sorted by some logic only Shane could explain. A jacket hanging on one of the hooks at exactly the right height, not shoved, not draped. A bowl for keys on the narrow table beside the door, a perfectly predictable home for the keys. Everything orderly, precise, neat. But not sterile. There was an order and an intention to every angle and every placement that reflected Shane's thoughts and patterns. Photos of his parents along one wall — more than a few of them, which tracked, because Shane Hollander was exactly the kind of man who framed photos of his parents and hung them where he would see them every day, and felt no ambivalence about this whatsoever. It was all so entirely him, so unselfconscious and loved in a way that made Ilya look away after a moment.
Ilya took another step into the apartment, wanting to see more of it, of him. Shane had left for the game today expecting Ilya might arrive before him, but not like this. Not in the dark, not without warning, not with this hollow ache sitting in his chest like a hunger he had no right to be nursing. He shook his head slowly. What was he doing here?
He opened his phone. He could call an Uber, be back at the hotel in twenty minutes. He would visit Hollander in the hospital tomorrow, before the team's flight to Boston — show up as the visiting Captain, offer some brief and manageable version of concern. A normal courtesy. Greet any medical staff or — oh, God, Shane's parents — with a casualness that only he would know was a fraud. He could frame it that way. He had been framing things that way for years.
A car rolled slowly past outside, and for a moment its headlights swept through the room to his left — a long pale wash climbing the wall, the shapes of furniture rising briefly into being — and then it was gone. Ilya stood in the dark that followed and looked at where the light had been.
Curiosity moved him. He slipped his phone back into his pocket and stepped through the doorway, finding a light switch. He stood in the middle of it and just looked, taking in the evidence of Shane.
The whole place looked like a photograph. Not staged, but prepared. And it smelled like him. A lingering smell of sea salt and cedar and something that was just him. Like Shane had moved through here this morning the way he must always move through here: unhurried, adjusting something half an inch because he could see it was off, setting it right.
The murder-alley building had never felt like anything. This felt like being handed something he wasn't sure he deserved to hold. Every angle considered, every object in its place, and beneath all of it, the quiet accumulation of things Shane had chosen to give him: a real address sent days ago, a door code shared before the game, a phone call from a cold alley on a dark night — Ilya speaking and Shane unable to understand a word of it, which had made it possible to say everything. The only way Ilya would ever be able to tell the truth. No reactions to predict, no follow-up questions, no consequences — good or bad.
It was not, he thought, a particularly brave way to love someone. He tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling for a moment, which was not the same as crying.
Again his mind showed him Shane limp on the ice, Shane mumbling Ilya's name, and something sharp and hard pulled tight behind his sternum. Where was Shane right now? Was he okay? Was he awake? And how was Ilya supposed to walk back out of this apartment and this city and this thing between them?
Ilya stood in the middle of it, his coat still on, and did not move.
He didn't actually decide to go further into the apartment. He just did.
The kitchen was Shane too — clean counters and a blender for smoothies, a fruit bowl with exactly the kind of fruit someone bought when they were boring and responsible. He stood in the doorway for a moment and then moved on.
He didn't decide to go upstairs either.
The light he'd seen from the street was a lamp in the hallway, left on low for Ilya, maybe, in case he arrived first. Shane leaving a light on, a door open, a path to his real life. The thought sat in his chest like a bruise he'd just found. He stood at the top of the stairs and breathed.
The bedroom door was open.
He should not go in. He should go back to the hotel.
He went in.
It was, of course, immaculate. The bed was made with the kind of precision that suggested Shane had never once left the house with it unmade. The nightstand had a bottle of water, a book, his reading glasses, and a phone charger coiled neatly beside it. The pillows — not as many as the murder-alley building — were orderly, cozy, and inviting. His eyes went back to the glasses. He didn't touch them.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Just for a moment, he told himself.
He lay down.
His hand found the pillow beside him — warm, solid, real — and his fingers grazed it slowly, the same gentle way they moved across Shane's freckles. Shane's pillow. Shane's smell — cedar and something warmer, something that was just him, close now in a way it hadn't been downstairs. Ilya stared at the ceiling and let it happen, the wanting, which he had been managing so carefully for so long that he had almost convinced himself it was manageable. Here, in the dark, in the quiet, in the warm pull of this bed, it was not manageable. It was the size of the room. It was larger than the room. It was crushing him.
He had been good at wanting things he could not have. He had had practice. He knew the shape of it, the weight of it, how to carry it without letting it show. He knew how to live without affection. Without approval. Without ever once being someone's first thought or concern. He had never before wanted to simply stay.
Tomorrow he would go to the hospital. He would walk in as the Boston captain — steady, easy, a normal courtesy — and he would look at Shane in a hospital bed and he would begin, quietly and without ceremony, the work of wanting this less. Of creating the necessary distance. Of being the person he was supposed to be instead of the person lying here in the dark in Shane's bed at nearly 3am, coat finally off, staring at a ceiling he had no right to be staring at.
He would do that tomorrow. He had no idea how.
He closed his eyes and the room breathed around him and somewhere down the hall the little lamp was still on, still waiting, still lit for someone who wasn't coming home tonight.