Work Text:
Crochet - 2010 to 2011
The first time anyone on the Montreal Voyageurs discovered the crochet, it was entirely Shane Hollander's fault—though in his mind, he'd simply executed his perfectly calibrated pregame ritual.
It went like this. He'd arrive forty-five minutes before the pre-game debrief, slide past the first wave of guys filtering in half asleep and already chirping, the air thick with the mineral bite of ice shavings, the rubbery tang of tape, and the nervous, caffeinated sweat of pro athletes, and head straight to his stall. He'd unstrap his bag, check his laces, tap a knuckle on the locker door three times. Then, from the bottom of his gear bag, the slim canvas pouch. Hook, loop, pull, count, repeat. The world shrank down to the tension of wool between his fingers. By the time he started taping his stick, he usually felt like a person again.
For six weeks straight, this system ran without a hitch. The first time he did it, last season, he hid it behind a tangle of stick tape and a spare helmet visor. But after the team’s sixth straight win with this pregame addition, he’d grown superstitious enough to let it peek out, the green yarn visible if you cared to look. Nobody cared to look, not really. Not until this morning.
In those precious minutes before the energy in the room truly ramped up, he’d set to work. The hook would loop and pull, loop and pull, until the world shrank down to the measured tension of wool stretched between his fingers. The repetitive motion soothed the twitchy anxiety that shadowed him, organizing his thoughts into single file. In the rising chaos of the room, the rhythm of crocheting was meditative; by the time he began to tape his stick, he usually felt like a person again. He never thought of it as remarkable. It was simply his way of making order from noise.
Today, the morning of the first playoff game, he let himself get comfortable. He'd started a sequence of granny-square motifs—test patches for a blanket he wanted to finish by the Cup Final. The squares were lined neatly on the bench beside him. Maybe he was thinking ahead. Maybe he was tempting fate. Either way, the squares were lined neatly on the bench beside him, their colors bright against the institutional gray of the locker room. Shameful, almost, but in a way that made him feel both more and less exposed.
Hayden Pike found them.
Hayden was a rookie, new to the team just like Shane, but not new to chaos. He had a gift for filling every inch of available air with noise, whether from his own voice or the clatter of gear, or the constant, aggressive popping of bubblegum. He was the kind of guy who could make a single Gatorade bottle into a projectile, a percussion instrument, and a status symbol in five minutes. Shane had learned to survive him by maintaining a careful perimeter, a foot of bench space, a moat of stacked towels, a passive-aggressive glare when Hayden's shin pads crept too close.
Today the perimeter failed. Shane was absorbed in the work—hook, loop, pull, count—and missed the warning signs entirely. The Gatorade bottle careened off the far wall and struck his equipment bag with surgical precision. The canvas pouch, unzipped, detonated. The entire granny-square collection burst onto the linoleum like a felled bouquet. The crochet hook clattered with a sound uncomfortably similar to a dropped stick in a silent rink.
It would have been mildly embarrassing if not for Hayden Pike going completely silent.
The effect was contagious. Conversation stalled, stuttered, evaporated. Not total silence, never not in a room full of pro hockey players—but close enough that even the pregame playlist, some heady EDM remixes picked out by the back up goalie, seemed to fade to background.
Shane crouched and picked up the squares, his palms brushing the rough threads. He breathed in—the mixed aroma of sweat, vinyl, and wet wool.
"That's mine," he said, because what else was there to say.
"Is that—" Hayden started.
Stopped. Swallowed.
"Is that knitting?"
"It's crochet." Shane collected the yarn. The fibers would be crawling with locker-room germs. He'd wash it later.
"Knitting uses two needles. Crochet uses one hook."
From the other end of the room, Mathieu Bouchard called out, voice thick with the kind of delighted incredulity you only got when a rookie did something objectively hilarious or mortifying, “Oh, well, that’s completely different, then!”
He lifted a tape roll in salute, like Shane had just declared himself a champion of some new and bewildering sport. The room, momentarily stunned into silence by the spectacle of a grown man crocheting in public, now snapped back to life, everyone’s attention ricocheting between the wool on the floor and Shane’s face.
Shane tried to keep his expression blank, but his ears burned. He checked the scarf in his hand, searching the stitches with deliberate care, as if it might hold the secret to vanishing on the spot.
"They are different crafts," Shane said flatly.
Bouchard grinned, gap-toothed, and knelt to scoop up a runaway granny square with surprising gentleness.
"This for your girlfriend or your grandma?"
"Neither. It's for me."
The words came out harder than he meant, but there was something calming in the act of saying them out loud. He reached for the fallen squares, gathering them up with careful fingers, then turned to Hayden, who was still frozen mid-chirp.
"Montreal winters are cold," Shane said as if this explained everything. Which, to him, it did, when Hayden continued to stare.
"I like being warm. Blankets and scarves help."
He stashed the yarn and brushed invisible lint from his hands.
Hayden nodded slowly. Like he was learning something new about the universe.
"You're twenty, a first-rounder, and you spend your off-hours making blankets."
"And scarves. It helps with hand-eye coordination," Shane said, lacing his skates.
Bouchard immediately pantomimed a slap shot with the crochet hook, narrowly missing J.J. Boiziau, who was watching with serene amusement.
"My mémère crochets," J.J. said.
"She made me a hat when I was little. With little bear ears."
The memory seemed to genuinely please him.
"Do you make hats, Hollander?"
"No."
"Not even a toque? Every Québécois boy needs a toque."
"No."
"A scarf and a toque," J.J. mused. "For the warm."
Shane finished tying his skates and forced himself to look up, meet the gaze of the guys crowding around his stall. He was used to being the focus, but not like this. Usually, it was for goals or assists, not for his crafts.
"I don't take requests," he said, and started taping his stick.
Gino, the backup-backup goalie, had been watching from two stalls down with the laser intensity of a man who made a living off reflexes.
"You should crochet a cover for your stick," he said.
"Stealth advantage. Like camo."
Shane considered, briefly, what that might look like. A neon green stick cozy unraveling mid-slapshot. He snorted.
"Maybe for playoffs."
Hayden's hand landed on his shoulder.
"You know, if this makes you snipe harder, I'm all for it."
He paused.
"But if you start making doilies for the cup, I'm gonna ask for a transfer."
The boys burst out laughing, the sound bouncing off the cinderblock walls and carrying into the hallway where a trainer poked his head in, did a double take at the tangle of yarn on the floor, and wisely retreated.
"What's with the arts and crafts hour?" Landreau shouted from the showers. "We got a game to win!"
"Shane's making us all scarves," Bouchard replied, not missing a beat.
Shane pulled the granny squares into his lap and started a new row. Loop, pull, loop, pull. The anxiety in his chest—tight, ready to spiral—bled out into the rhythm of his hands. He could do this all day and never get bored. Pattern and predictability and quiet. Everything hockey, for all its beauty, never quite managed to provide.
"I'm serious, though," Hayden said, reappearing around the corner.
"You should make a mascot. Like a woolly little Voyageur."
Shane didn't respond. He finished his row, ran a thumb along the seam, checked the clock. Fifteen minutes to warmup. The boys had already moved on—bets on faceoff stats, ribbing the backup goalie for his fantasy team, Bouchard threatening to eat a jalapeño if he scored on the power play—but Shane could hear the current underneath it, his name surfacing every so often in a tone that was good-humored and not entirely without respect.
He packed the crochet hook away and closed the bag with a purposeful zip, then leaned back in his stall, breathing out. He’d survived worse than locker room teasing. He could live with being the team’s designated fiber artist, if it meant he got to keep the ritual. If it meant that maybe, just maybe, he’d play a fraction better because of it.
The captain, Roux, strolled in last, still buttoning his shirt, and took in the scene with a single arched eyebrow.
"What'd I miss?"
Hayden grinned.
"Just Hollander being a trendsetter."
Roux nodded.
"Good. As long as he sets trends on the ice."
Shane followed the guys out for warmup, his mind sharper, his shoulders lower than they'd been an hour ago.
That night, he scored two goals and tallied an assist. On the bus home, Hayden dropped into the seat beside him.
"Hey. About the crochet—didn't mean to be an ass."
Shane looked out the window at the dark streets.
"I know. You're loud, but it's not on purpose."
Hayden shrugged.
"It's just—my grandma does it. Not you."
He waved a hand at Shane's general height.
"You're five-ten, slapshot at ninety-eight, you cross-checked a guy into the boards, then you crochet?"
"I don't see the contradiction."
Hayden stared at him. Then cracked up.
"Nope. Guess you wouldn't." He grinned. "Can you actually make J.J. that penguin? He won't stop pestering."
Shane shook his head.
Later, he relented. The result was lopsided and only vaguely penguin-shaped, one wing smaller than the other, wearing a tiny Montreal sweater. J.J. placed it proudly in his stall.
The Voyageurs won six of their next seven games. No one teased Shane about crochet again.
Bread Making - 2012 to 2013
Shane has always liked bread.
Not just eating it—though fresh bread was one of life's rare, uncomplicated pleasures—but making it. He likes the sound of a finished crust when you thump it. He likes the flour-dust, the quiet violence of kneading, the meditative counting of folds and proofing intervals.
Baking bread is chemistry and patience, a science of transformation, and Shane has always been good at both chemistry and patience, though almost nobody would guess it from the way he talks, or skates, or generally exists in the world.
He came to bread young. Partly because junior hockey players are always starving, and partly because his billet family kept a kitchen stocked with the cheapest grocery-store carbs known to man. He started with banana bread. Something simple, safe, impossible to ruin, then he got bored. There was only so much banana bread a person could eat, and Shane, even at sixteen, needed escalation. He got his billet mom to buy yeast. Then higher-protein flour. Then a set of measuring spoons in metric.
When she came home late after her shift and found him elbow-deep in dough, flour on every surface including his face, she just blinked.
"There's a bakery down the street, you know."
He ignored her. The point was not to eat the bread (though he did, and often, usually with half a jar of peanut butter in a sitting). The point was to work the dough, to see if he could get it perfect, to watch it rise in the proofing bowl and crest over the rim like a victorious wave. He liked the variables: the ambient temperature, the hydration, the timing of the bulk ferment. It was a controlled system, and it produced moderately predictable results, unlike hockey, which was by nature chaos and improvisation and luck. Even the best systems broke down on the ice; in bread, the system worked if you followed it.
By the time he was drafted, Shane had a sourdough starter that was older than most of his gear. He'd spent hours reading about wild yeast and bacterial colonies before getting one going. The first several attempts failed. Eventually it took.
He named it Gerald. He would take this to his grave.
Gerald went everywhere: billet house, apartment, road trips in a carefully cooled lunchbox. When they moved him to Montreal, Gerald rode shotgun in his battered Corolla. In Montreal, Gerald lived in a mason jar in the back of Shane's fridge, fed on a strict twelve-hour schedule, because an active starter made better bread, and it comforted Shane to know that in a world full of variables, Gerald would do his job if Shane did his.
His nutritionist was the only one who knew, because she had to approve every calorie. She was surprisingly supportive, provided he used the flour she recommended.
"You need carbs anyway," she said. "Might as well get them from something you like."
She looked at him slightly too long after that, the way she sometimes did. He didn't say anything, and she dropped it.
Baking was the rare part of Shane’s life that felt totally private. His roommate, Landreau, spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s place, and when he was home, he was unimpressed by carbs in any form. (“Bread’s fine, but have you tried poutine?”) Thankfully he would be moving out to live with his girlfriend after their second season on the Voyageurs together.
For two whole seasons, Shane kept his secret. Landreau, his roommate, moved out and the apartment became Shane's in the way it had never quite been when someone else was in it. He brought loaves into the locker room sometimes—left them warm on the kitchen counter, wrapped in a towel—and the boys descended on them in seconds and devoured them to the last crumb, and no one asked if he'd baked them. It didn't occur to anyone that he had the patience. Or the desire.
That suited Shane fine. He didn't want to be known as the bread guy. He wanted to score goals and win games and maybe someday be the kind of captain people remembered.
Bread was just for him, a thing that made the days before games bearable, a ritual that kept his hands busy when his head was too loud. On off-days he’d wake up early, mix the dough, let it rise while he stretched and watched game film, then knead and shape it before heading to practice. The bread would rest, then bake, then cool, and by the time he got home the apartment would smell like a Paris bakery and all the anxiety in his body would have melted into the air like steam from a fresh baguette.
On game days, the ritual was even stricter. He made the dough at 7:00 a.m. sharp, let it bulk ferment for exactly four hours, then put it in the fridge for a slow proof while he napped, just like the internet said to do. As the game approached, he’d think about the dough in the fridge, about how it was transforming even while he sat in video review or team meetings. He liked that, the idea that you could set something in motion, then walk away, and trust that it would do what it was meant to do.
He never brought bread to the rink on game days. That was a superstition, and even if no one else knew about it, Shane stuck to it. The only one who noticed was Landreau, who once opened the fridge and found a nearly-finished boule cooling on the wire rack.
“You make this?” he’d said, tearing off a chunk and chewing it thoughtfully. “Not bad.”
Then, “Why don’t you bring it to the boys?”
Shane shrugged, too embarrassed to answer. He didn’t want to explain that bread baking was something he needed to himself. It was private. It was control. It was the only thing in his life that didn’t talk back, or hit back, or talk shit about his stats on Twitter.
Landreau never pressed. He ate the bread, left the crumbs, and said nothing about it again.
For two whole seasons, Shane kept his secret. Gerald grew stronger, his loaves got better, and though the team fell short in the playoffs, Shane made it through the off-season with something like hope. He went home, brought Gerald with him, and spent June baking for his parents and trying out new recipes in their kitchen, which was much bigger and cleaner than his own. His mother pretended not to notice that he was up at dawn every morning; his father, who had never baked a thing in his life, ate everything put in front of him and declared it “not as good as the Italian place downtown, but close.”
When Shane came back to Montreal for training camp, he brought with him a fresh jar of Gerald, two new bread pans, and a determination to start the season stronger than last year. He didn’t intend for anyone to find out about the bread. He just wanted to keep doing his thing, stay in his routine, and maybe someday, when he retired, open a bakery somewhere quiet and live out his days in peace. That was the dream. Not the NHL, not the Cup. Bread.
Then the team started winning. Really winning. Cameras everywhere, interviews, a documentary crew that management had somehow let into the building.
Suddenly there were cameras everywhere, and Shane was getting asked for interviews, and the team’s social media guy wanted more “human interest” content. Shane hated the attention, but he did what he had to. Smiled for the pictures, gave the same canned quotes, let the marketing department film him tying his skates or taping his stick or answering questions about pregame routines.
Shane did not realize the kitchen camera was on until it was too late.
He was in his new apartment—marble countertops, chosen specifically for rolling dough—wearing ratty Voyageurs sweats, hair everywhere, elbow-deep in flour and water, when the doorbell rang.
The documentary crew had somehow convinced management to follow players home. His neighbor let them in. The cameraman, Dave, appeared in his kitchen doorway with a lens already pointed at him. Shane froze mid-knead, hands coated in sticky dough.
Shane froze mid-knead.
"Don't mind us," said the cameraman. "Just be yourself."
Shane didn't know how to do that, so he just kept working the dough against the marble. They filmed him for almost half an hour in his half-furnished sanctuary, asking questions about bread and then, eventually, about hockey.
("Is this about the carbs?" Shane asked, desperate for a way out. "It's about you!" Dave replied, panning to capture the row of proofing baskets Shane had carefully arranged on his new open shelving.)
Later, Shane tried to get the footage pulled, but the PR director loved it, and the next thing he knew, his teammates were all calling him "the Carb King" and demanding post-game baguettes.
The bread-making became a problem—or, more accurately, became public knowledge—during the Voyageurs' Stanley Cup run, when a camera crew from Sportsnet was granted locker room access.
Shane is used to being ignored by management, but he’s not used to being ignored by management on national television.
Shane protects his locker room time with routines. Left skate before right. Third stall from the end. Towel over his head for the full sixty seconds of intermission. He had carved a small, precise hollow in the chaos for himself and he intended to keep it.
The documentary crew—three guys, a producer, a woman named Lex with a clipboard—set up camp by the showers. They had been there for three days, which was approximately three times longer than Shane's tolerance could withstand. He couldn't eat lunch without a boom mic overhead. He couldn't stretch without someone looking for a candid angle. He resolved to get in and out with minimal contact.
Today, Shane has resolved to get in and out of the locker room with minimal contact. He has a plan: he will run his off-day lifts, collect his protein shake, and return to his apartment without speaking to a single soul. That is the plan. He is halfway to the weight room when he sees the film crew huddled around the communal fridge.
The fridge is nothing special. It’s three years old, the white plastic pocked with dried energy drink, the seal broken in two places. But to Shane, and to anyone who has ever lost a day-old container of chicken breast to a hungry linemate, it is sacred ground. Shane keeps his shelf pristine. Meals in glass containers, bottles labeled with the days of the week, a rotation of kombucha that he’s pretty sure no one else touches. Everything else in the fridge is a disaster, but his shelf is a shrine.
So when Shane sees the producer pulling out his mason jar, the one with the blue lid and the Post-It marked “Starter—Do Not Eat,” he nearly drops his gym bag.
"What the hell is that?" she asked, holding it up for the camera. The starter was at peak bloom, bubbling at the surface like it was trying to escape.
"It's my sourdough starter," Shane said.
"Your… sourdough starter."
"Yes. I use it for bread."
"Why does it look like it's alive?"
"It is alive. It's a colony of yeast and bacteria."
Lex looked delighted and slightly repulsed.
"So you're raising it? Like a pet?"
"You have to feed it."
"What's his name?" she said, as a joke.
Shane felt himself go red from collar to cheekbones.
"Gerald."
Silence. Then the cameraman snorted. Lex grinned.
"That is the best thing I've heard all week," she said, and she meant it.
Shane wanted to disappear into his own cooling rack. He grabbed the jar, tucked it behind his bag, and escaped to the weight room. He put his headphones on and listened to a podcast about the history of leavening agents until his heart rate returned to normal.
He was convinced it was over.
It was not over.
Ten days later the documentary aired. Within an hour, his phone was a war zone. The team group chat was full of bread photos. Someone posted a screencap of Shane looking like an orphaned Victorian chimney sweep. One of the rookies changed his name in the group chat to Yeast Daddy.
The PR team posted a highlight reel on team Twitter. It went viral. #BreadBoy and #GeraldNation trended locally for two days. Someone made a Vine edit of Shane and his starter set to a romantic ballad.
Shane considered deleting his accounts. It was already too late.
The worst part wasn't the chirping. He could handle that—it was basically affection, just louder and more public than he preferred. The worst part was that people seemed to actually care. Fans DMed him bread tips. An old woman in Vancouver mailed a handwritten recipe for Montreal rye. The bakery down the street offered a collaboration partnership, which Shane had to Google before declining.
Gerald, for his part, thrives under the attention. Shane has never seen the starter so active. Every time he feeds it, it erupts with bubbles and crests
Shane tells himself it’s fine. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. But then, one evening, as he’s about to turn off his phone for the night, it buzzes. The screen lights up with a message from Ilya Rozanov.
Lily: you named your bread??? Lol
They didn't text often. They weren't supposed to text at all, really—they were rivals, they were playing each other in the second round, whatever was between them was complicated and unresolved and Shane didn't have a label for it yet, which bothered him more than almost anything.
Jane: It's not bread. It's a sourdough starter. It's a colony of wild yeast and bacteria.
Lily: you named your bacteria Gerald
Jane: That's correct.
Lily: Shane
Lily: you are most ridiculous man I ever meet
Jane: *met
Lily: 😐
Shane put his phone down. Then picked it back up.
Jane: Gerald is four years old. He's outlived most of my houseplants.
Lily: you kill plants too??
Jane: I don't kill them. They just don't thrive. The light in my apartment isn't ideal.
Lily: you are like little old babushka
Lily: baking bread, killing plants, crocheting
Jane: How do you know about the crochet?
Lily: Hollander
Lily: everyone in NHL knows about the crochet
Shane put his phone down. He should not be texting Ilya Rozanov. They had a game in two days. Ilya was the enemy.
He picked it back up.
Jane: My bread is very good.
Lily: I'm sure
Jane: My nutritionist said it was the best homemade bread she'd ever tested for macronutrient balance.
Lily: sexy
Jane: I have to go. I need to feed Gerald.
Lily: give Gerald my love
Jane: That doesn't make sense. He's yeast.
Lily: goodnight babushka 😘
Shane fed Gerald. Did his stretches. Laid out tomorrow's clothes. Did not think about Ilya Rozanov calling him babushka or the kissing emoji or the word sexy sitting there in the text thread like a problem he was choosing not to look at directly.
He thought about it a little. Just enough.
He went to bed.
(The Voyageurs won the Cup that year. In the celebration photos, if you looked closely at Shane's stall in the background—behind the champagne bottles and the sweat-soaked jerseys—there was a mason jar with a blue lid. Gerald, undefeated.)
Bird Watching - 2016 into 2017
Rose Landry was, by all reasonable metrics, the greatest girlfriend Shane Hollander had ever had. Not that the bar was especially high—his previous relationships had largely consisted of girls who tolerated his presence at the periphery of their social circles, girls who liked that he was clean and polite and never forgot their birthdays, girls who quickly realized that Shane was, despite rumors to the contrary, an absolute weirdo.
Rose was different. Rose was a real-life celebrity. She'd been on magazine covers, hosted SNL, played three separate women named Savannah on television. She was beautiful in a way that was both intimidating and oddly comforting— the kind of blonde that made Midwestern grandmothers call her “angelic,” with high cheekbones and big blue eyes and a laugh that made strangers turn in restaurants. She was, by any objective measure, completely out of Shane’s league.
This was a fact he reminded himself of constantly, as though repetition could transform disbelief into gratitude. Rose Landry was his girlfriend. Rose Landry, who had been on billboards, wanted to FaceTime with him at one in the morning while she was filming in New Zealand. Rose Landry knew how to pronounce the names of all the fancy cheeses at Whole Foods and could pack for a month-long trip in under an hour. Rose Landry had introduced Shane to the concept of “brunch,” which he still didn’t entirely understand but which he respected for its organizational efficiency.
His mother adored Rose. His teammates loved her—though they’d never admit it, believing girlfriends should exist exclusively as punchlines or Instagram trophies. Even the front office, who generally regarded Shane’s personal life as an unfortunate distraction, seemed to approve. Rose was a safe bet, a good influence, someone who could turn up to the charity galas and look fantastic in photographs while not embarrassing the team by screaming at officials or throwing drinks at other WAGs.
So why, Shane wondered, was he currently sweating through his practice tee while Rose sat across from him at the kitchen table with an expression somewhere between confusion and genuine concern?
He'd started with a logical train of thought. Somehow he'd ended up in a conversational ditch about the migratory patterns of Canadian geese.
"It's more interesting than it sounds," he said, which only made her eyebrows climb higher.
She set her mug down with a measured clink.
"You want to go... bird watching," she said.
"Yes." He'd already packed his bag. Binoculars, field guide, water bottle, granola bars, a small notebook. "There's a warbler migration happening this week. The window's pretty narrow."
"Bird watching."
"You said that already."
Rose tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She did that when she was deciding how to phrase something carefully.
"I thought maybe we could do something together today. Go to brunch? Or shopping?"
"We could go bird watching together," Shane offered. He thought this was a reasonable compromise.
"Shane. Honey." She put her hand over his on the table. "I love that you have hobbies. I do. The baking, and the crochet thing—"
"Fiber arts."
"—the fiber arts, yes. Those are great. But bird watching is—doesn't it get boring? You're just standing in the woods looking at trees?"
"You're looking at birds. That's why it's called bird watching and not tree watching."
Rose's mouth did something complicated. "Right."
"Also, it's not boring. Last week I saw a cerulean warbler. They're declining across most of their range due to habitat fragmentation. It was probably the highlight of my month."
"The highlight of your month," Rose repeated. "A bird."
"A cerulean warbler."
He could picture it even now, perched on a trembling branch in the morning light, its feathers bluer than the sky above, a shade so improbable it looked Photoshopped against the pale green shimmer of new leaves. Its breast, clean white, set off by the necklace of black streaks. He remembers the bird’s nervy, efficient movements—how it flicked its wings before hopping, how its tiny feet gripped the branch as it turned its head, as though aware of being watched but too busy for anything but survival. Shane had watched it for nine minutes and eighteen seconds, according to his notes, and had written the details down before his memory could edit itself into something shinier or simpler or less granular.
He wanted to tell her that it wasn't just a bird—it was a record, proof that something rare had survived another season. That sometimes, alone in the woods with only the sound of leaves and his own heartbeat, he felt less like he was faking something. But Shane didn't know how to say any of that without sounding like an idiot, and Rose's silence had the particular quality of someone waiting for a punchline that would make everything make sense.
But Shane doesn't say any of this because he doesn’t know how to say it out loud without sounding like an idiot, or worse, a crazy person. He can read the tone of Rose’s silence perfectly, the way her eyes search his face for a hint of irony or for the punchline that will make this all make sense, the way she braces for the moment he drops the pretense of caring and becomes, for a second, a normal boyfriend who knows how to laugh at himself. Shane tries to want that, to be that, but all he wants right now is to talk about the warbler again.
He looked at her hand on his. Her long, perfect fingers. She was so good at being a person in the world—good at brunch, at small talk, at smiling with her whole face. Good at him, too, except when he asked more of her than she could give, which was exactly when he needed it most.
"Do you want to come?" he offered again. "You don't have to do anything. Bring your book."
Rose looks at him for a long moment, and he recognizes the micro-twitch of her left eyebrow, the way her jaw sets when she’s about to be gentle and disappointing at once.
"I think I'll pass, hon. But thank you for inviting me."
"You don't have to be good at it," he said, and immediately heard the defensive tilt in his own voice.
She laughed, relieved to be back on familiar ground.
"I'd be terrible. I'd scare the birds away and you'd never let me live it down."
"They have brains the size of sunflower seeds. They don't care about you." He paused. "I mean, they do. Just in an evolutionary way."
"See?" Rose said, smiling. "You're already better at it than me."
He feels her hand squeeze his. She is trying. She always tries, even when he gives her so little to work with. He knows this is the part where he’s supposed to say something nice back, something to close the circuit of their affection, but all his conversational energy is spent. He finds himself looking past her, out the kitchen window, where a sparrow is perched on the edge of the patio furniture. It’s not a rare sparrow. He watched it anyway.
Rose reached for her phone.
"I'll call Marie. She'll want to get brunch."
"Okay," Shane said, relieved. "I'll be back by two."
She was already scrolling.
"Have fun with the birds, babe."
"I will," he said, and it was almost easy.
He parked at Îles de la Paix forty minutes later. Locked the car, checked the straps on his backpack. The trail was muddy and the air smelled like loam and water and something in bloom, and he walked with deliberate steps, scanning branches, listening for the three-note call.
Within minutes, he’s swallowed by the canopy. The air smells like loam and water and the distant, sugary tang of something in bloom. He walks with careful, deliberate steps, scanning the branches for any flicker of movement, listening for the three-note call of the warbler. It is quieter out here than anywhere else in his life. No one expects anything from him, not even the birds, who are perfectly indifferent to his presence unless he makes himself known.
He sees the warbler again. It lands on a low branch not twenty feet from him, the blue so brilliant it almost hurts. He lifts his binoculars, steady hands finding the focus instantly. He watches the bird tilt its head, dart its tongue at a gnat, then flit upward and vanish into the thicket. He checks the time, seven minutes and four seconds. He writes it down. He underlines the entry. He does not think about Rose, or hockey, or the way he always manages to say the wrong thing right when it matters most.
He found a pair of red-tailed hawks circling a clearing and watched them for nearly half an hour, their spirals lazy and hypnotic. He ate a granola bar on a bench and recorded his sightings on the small grid he'd drawn for the purpose.
In a marshy patch by the pond he waited for the woodpecker he'd been told nested here but never seen for himself. He sat very still, barely breathing, tracking every rustle.
When the woodpecker arrives, it is almost silent, just a flicker of black and white against the bark. He watches it work the tree for bugs, the precise, methodical way it hammers, then pauses, then hammers again. He times the gaps. He doesn’t know why, he just does. He feels something in his chest unlock, some internal knot loosening. For these few minutes, he isn’t a disappointment or a mystery or a project for someone to fix. He’s just a person watching a bird, doing exactly what he set out to do.
He did have fun with the birds. He saw the warbler again, and a pair of red-tailed hawks circling over the mountain, and a woodpecker species he'd been hoping to add to his life list for three years. He sat on a fallen log for forty-five minutes without moving, barely breathing, watching a great blue heron hunt in a marsh, and his brain went quiet in the way it so rarely did—no hockey analysis cycling in the background, no social scripts queued up, no awareness of the way his body took up space in rooms full of people who expected things from him.
Just the heron. Just the water. Just the exact, specific silence of being alone in a place where nothing was required of him.
He stays for forty-five minutes, unmoving, until his legs go numb. He doesn’t want to leave, but he’s promised Rose he’ll be home by two, and he is nothing if not dutiful.
His phone buzzed. He checked it expecting Rose.
Lily: what you doing today
Shane hesitated. He and Ilya weren't... they weren't anything. Not since Boston, when Ilya had whispered "Shane" against his collarbone and Shane had made the mistake of responding with "Ilya" instead of "Rozanov." Not since he'd fled the beautiful home Ilya had built, heart hammering so hard he thought it might crack his ribs. Not since he'd called Rose the next day and asked her to dinner.
They hooked up sometimes—or they used to—but they didn't text about their days. They didn't do this. Not anymore.
But his fingers moved before his brain could intervene.
Jane: Bird watching.
Three dots. Gone. Back again.
Lily: of course you are
Jane: What does that mean?
Lily: it means of COURSE Shane Hollander is watching birds on a beautiful Saturday
Lily: what kind of birds
Shane blinked. No one ever asked what kind.
Jane: I saw a cerulean warbler. They're a declining species. Bright blue, about 12 centimeters. The males have a white breast with a dark band across it.
He sent the photo he'd managed—blurry, but you could make out the blue.
Lily: is beautiful
Lily: tiny little thing
Jane: They migrate thousands of kilometers. From South America to here. Every year.
Lily: like me
Jane: You fly on a chartered plane with leather seats.
Lily: 😂
Lily: still. long way from home
Something turned over in Shane's chest. He stared at the phone screen, at Ilya's words, at the small bright rectangle in his hands in the middle of the quiet woods. The heron had moved on. The marsh was still.
Jane: I should go. Rose is expecting me back.
The typing indicator pulsed. Stopped.
Lily: ok. enjoy your birds babushka
Shane slid his phone into his pocket, the weight of it against his thigh suddenly heavier than before. The marsh spread before him—cattails swaying in the breeze, water rippling in concentric circles where unseen creatures disturbed the surface. Dragonflies hovered, their iridescent wings catching sunlight. He watched for another ten minutes, pen hovering over his notebook, but recorded nothing, not even when a red-winged blackbird landed nearby, its scarlet shoulder patches bright as warning flags.
When he got home, Rose glanced up from the kitchen island. Her blonde hair was twisted into a messy bun, tendrils escaping around her face.
"How'd it go?"
"Good," Shane said, setting his backpack down. "I saw some good birds."
"That's nice, babe," Rose said, already looking back at her screen.
Shane went to shower. Later, alone in the bathroom with the mirror fogged over, he opened his text thread with Ilya and reread is beautiful twice. Then he closed the app and went to bed next to Rose and stared at the ceiling until the shadows blurred into nothing.
Quilting - 2017
The Tampa All-Star Game changed things.
Not all at once—Shane is still Shane, still a champion over-thinker with the emotional metabolism of a sea turtle, still capable of burying anything under enough routine to kill a horse—but something happened in Tampa that will not go away, no matter how many times he cycles it through his internal compactor.
Tampa is flat and hot and smells like salt and weed killer. The All-Star break is three days of being forced into a costume version of himself: all grins and media answers and hugs from guys who would sooner take a slapshot to the teeth than say what they actually mean. Shane manages it the way he manages everything, with obsessive prep and a fixed smile and a silent countdown until he can get back to his own schedule and his own bed. He expects this. He plans for it. He has a color-coded spreadsheet for it.
He does not plan for Ilya Rozanov.
On the ice, Ilya is all swagger and calculated cruelty, his game a sledgehammer disguised as a dance. Off it, he's smarter than people think and better at reading rooms than anyone gives him credit for. Shane has always known this. He has filed it, carefully, under Opponent: Notable, and tried not to look at it too often.
At All-Star, everyone is pretending to be just friends, which means they're thrown together for endless photo ops and charity events and mandatory mixers at themed restaurants with too-loud music. Shane keeps his distance and tries not to let his eyes track Ilya across every room.
He manages this imperfectly.
The first night, Shane is so tired he's vibrating, but the league wants the stars at a pop-up nightclub for "informal meet-and-greet." He's halfway through a ginger ale when Ilya appears at his elbow, close enough that Shane can smell the cologne he bought him last Christmas.
"You still wearing your media face, Hollander?"
"Seven more hours until I can take it off," Shane replies. Their code from Vancouver, still intact. Ilya's fingers brush his wrist under the bar and Shane's pulse jumps like it's their first time.
They end up in a corner booth, knees touching, talking about nothing that matters while Shane catalogs the new lines around Ilya's eyes. When the club empties they're still there, Ilya's hand resting openly on his thigh.
"Is crazy," Ilya says. "This media shit. You don't like it. I don't like it. But they pay us so much, we pretend."
Shane catches his own reflection in the mirrored bar. He's been living the double life since 2010—hockey and slipping away to Ilya's room—until a few weeks ago when he finally broke things off with Rose and admitted he's gay and in love with Ilya. It's startling to discover, looking at his own reflection, that maybe he can believe it.
That night in his hotel room, he can’t sleep. His skin feels like it’s been stretched over a heart that’s finally beating too fast to ignore. He tries to burn off the tension by scrolling through his season stats, but every time he lands on Ilya’s name, his brain fries. He ends up in the empty gym, sprinting until his lungs threaten mutiny.
The next day Ilya finds him in the players' lounge and shoves a deck of cards at him.
"Loser buys dinner."
Shane has never played poker for money. Ilya figures this out in five minutes and doesn't press the advantage. Instead he teaches him—drills him on keeping a straight face.
"You already have a good face," Ilya says, and Shane feels something loosen inside him that he doesn't have a name for yet.
That evening they find a steakhouse away from the main strip. The lighting catches the amber in Ilya's eyes when he orders for both of them. Their knees touch under the white tablecloth and don't move apart.
When the waiter brings the wine, Ilya's fingers brush Shane's as he passes him a glass, lingering a half-second too long. Shane feels warm all over, not from the alcohol. Between bites of perfectly cooked steak, Ilya leans in close enough that Shane can smell his cologne, can almost taste it on the back of his tongue. Walking back to the hotel, their shoulders bump together under the streetlights, and Ilya's hand finds the small of Shane's back, just for a moment.
"You're not so bad, Hollander," Ilya murmurs. "One day you come to Moscow, I show you everything."
Shane makes a noncommittal sound and tucks the offer away. In his room he lies flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, tracing the echo of Ilya’s hand on his shoulder—warm and heavy, everything he never let himself admit he needed.
Day three is the game. No defense, goals everywhere, pure display. Ilya gets two and feeds Shane on both. When Shane taps in the winner Ilya is the first across the ice, grinning like it hurts.
"Krasava!" Ilya roars, lifting Shane in a bear hug that presses their bodies together in that familiar way that still makes Shane's breath catch. When Ilya's lips brush against his temple—lingering just a half-second longer than teammates should—Shane's skin burns with the memory of those same lips tracing paths across his collarbone in darkened hotel rooms.
In the locker room afterward, their eyes meet across the benches as they towel off. Shane can't help but track a droplet of water sliding down Ilya's chest, following the path his fingers have memorized over seven years of stolen nights.
At the afterparty Ilya's thumb strokes once against his spine—their code since juniors.
"Last night in Tampa," he murmurs. "You want to see real view?" He leads Shane to the locked roof and the city spreads below them, familiar and irrelevant.
They stand quiet until Ilya says, "You ever want to just—" and gestures like tossing something off the edge. Shane knows exactly what he means.
When Ilya leans in, Shane meets him halfway. But something's different—this kiss holds a question. Shane pulls back too quickly and bumps Ilya's chin.
"Sorry," he blurts. Ilya laughs, fingers tracing Shane's jawline.
"After all these years," he says, "and still you tremble. Is okay. I have time."
They don't speak on the flight home. Shane's phone buzzes the moment they clear the runway.
Lily: krasava
He stares at it. Doesn't reply.
The next weeks blur into routine—hockey, press conferences, reheated dinners—but Ilya won't leave his head. His skating goes uneven at the edges. He looks up krasava online and finds only loose definitions. A Canadian ex-KHL guy shrugs and says it's "beauty, but more—legend? Or stud?" Shane writes it down, deletes it, writes it again in tiny letters.
He tries to expel Ilya from his system. Hours on the stationary bike. Fridge alphabetized. He eats oatmeal until his skin rebels. Nothing works.
He tells himself it’s just the All-Star haze, that everyone crashes back to reality eventually. But when Ilya’s next text arrives—a photo of a stray cat captioned “found your cousin”—Shane’s chest tightens. He drafts a reply, deletes, drafts again, then finally sends a thumbs-up emoji. Forty minutes later he’s still wondering if it came across as sarcastic.
Three days after running into Ilya in the handshake line and spending the entire day trying to lip-read their exchange on TV, Shane finds himself in a fabric store. He's buying cotton for the crochet blanket he's been using to keep his hands busy on the long nights of not-calling Ilya, and he drifts into the quilting section without meaning to, and reaches for a bolt of color, and smiles. Some things are worth sewing together.
It was the patterns that got him. Quilting was geometry—triangles and squares and hexagons arranged in precise mathematical relationships, each with its own name: log cabin, flying geese, bear's paw, drunkard's path. Rules about seam allowances and grain lines and pressing directions. A beautiful, logical system that turned flat pieces of fabric into something layered and warm and whole.
Shane bought a rotary cutter, a self-healing mat, a quilting ruler, and four bolts of fabric. He watched eleven YouTube tutorials in one sitting. He cut his first pieces at two in the morning on his living room floor in his boxers and felt something unclench behind his ribs.
For three peaceful months, the quilting stayed private. Shane's apartment was his own space and no one was going to knock over a Gatorade onto his quilt blocks.
Then Hayden came over for dinner.
Hayden came over for dinner sometimes. This had happened to Shane rather than being chosen by him, like weather. Hayden would text dinner at yours? and Shane would say fine and make enough food for two and Hayden would show up with beer and talk at Shane for two hours while Shane nodded at appropriate intervals.
On this particular evening, Hayden used the bathroom and made a detour past the spare bedroom, which Shane had failed to close the door to, and which now contained a quilt frame, a cutting table, a design wall pinned with fabric squares in a half-finished pattern, and approximately forty small bins organized by color and fiber content.
"HOLLANDER."
Shane closed his eyes. He had been plating the salmon. He'd been having a nice time plating the salmon.
"SHANE HOLLANDER, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?"
"Please stop shouting in my house."
Hayden appeared in the kitchen doorway. His eyes were very wide.
"You have a quilting room."
"It's a spare bedroom that I use for quilting. It's not a quilting room." Shane went back to the salmon.
"There's a wall of fabric. Like a wall."
"It's called a design wall. You pin the blocks up so you can see the overall pattern before you sew them together."
"Shane."
"What."
Hayden sat down heavily at the kitchen island. "I need you to understand something. I need you to hear me."
"I'm listening." Shane put the plate in front of him.
"You are a twenty-five-year-old man who just won the Stanley Cup. You have a quilting room. You have a design wall. You have—" He gestured. "—bins. Little bins. With labels."
"Organization is important. The bins are sorted by color family and then by fiber content within each—"
"Stop. Please."
Shane sat down with his own plate.
"Is there a problem?"
"The problem is that I'm going to have to live with this knowledge for the rest of my life." Hayden picked up his fork. Put it down. "Does anyone know?"
"You know."
"Before you?"
"My mother. She thinks it's a waste of time."
"Of course she does." Hayden rubbed his face. "What's the pattern?"
"Tumbling Blocks. It creates a three-dimensional optical illusion using three different fabric values—light, medium, dark. The effect is that the flat quilt appears to have depth." Shane paused. "It's essentially applied mathematics."
Hayden stared at him.
"You know what? Fine. That actually tracks completely. Shane Hollander does math quilts." He picked up his fork. "Can you make me one?"
"No."
"Just a small one. For Amber. She's the only one of my kids who doesn't have something you've made."
"The others don't have quilts either."
"But they have the crocheted hats. And Arthur sleeps with that shark blanket every night. Poor Amber's going to develop a complex."
"No."
Hayden ate another bite. "This salmon is incredible, by the way. Where'd you learn to—actually, you know what, I don't want to know."
"The quilt's really pretty, though," he said, more quietly. "The math thing. It's cool."
"Thank you," Shane said, and meant it.
Later, after Hayden left and the dishes were done and every fabric bin was properly closed with its color-coded snap lid, Shane stood in the spare bedroom in front of the design wall. The pins caught the light from the track lighting he'd installed himself.
The quilt wasn't for anyone. He'd told himself that when he started it—a learning project, something to do with his hands while his brain sorted through Tampa and Ilya and whatever they were and weren't.
But he'd chosen the colors without thinking, and now he could see what he'd done. The light fabric was a warm cream that caught the light like morning sun on hotel sheets. The medium was a deep forest green. The dark was a blue so dark it was almost black—the exact shade of a Voyageurs jersey, or a clear sky just before the stars came out, or Ilya Rozanov's eyes in a dim hotel room with his pupils wide and fixed on Shane's face.
"Fuck," Shane said, very quietly, to no one.
He turned off the light and went to bed.
Embroidery - 2018
Shane Hollander came out on his own terms, in his own time, in his own extremely Shane way: with a prepared statement, a press conference, and a binder of research on LGBTQ+ athletes that he offered to share with any journalist who wanted to write a responsible article about it.
The press conference was fine. The public reaction was mostly fine—better than fine, even, because Shane was the best hockey player in the world and people were willing to overlook a lot for that. The chirping from opposing fans and players was predictable and boring and Shane tuned it out the way he tuned out everything that didn't directly contribute to winning hockey games.
What changed was the way people paid attention to him. Every interview was a chance for someone to ask about his personal life. Every public appearance scrutinized. Shane, who had spent his entire life building systems to manage the gap between how his brain worked and how the world expected him to operate, found all his systems being examined under a microscope.
Including, inevitably, the hobbies.
The embroidery had started as an extension of the quilting, which was an extension of the crochet, which was—if Shane was being honest with himself, and he always tried to be—an extension of the fact that he needed to do things with his hands or his brain would eat itself alive. He'd tried meditation. Meditation was just sitting still while his thoughts screamed. He'd tried journaling. Journaling required knowing what he was feeling, which was a separate and unresolved problem. Fiber arts gave his hands something to do and his brain something to count, and the counting was the closest thing to peace he'd ever reliably found.
The embroidery was different from the other crafts in one important way: it was art. Not math, not chemistry, not geometry. Art. You could embroider anything—flowers, landscapes, words, abstract patterns. Shane, who had never considered himself an artistic person, found that when he sat down with a hoop and a needle, something happened that he couldn't entirely explain. The world got very small and very precise, and his hands knew what to do even when his brain wasn't sure, and when he pulled the thread through the fabric it was like writing in a language he hadn't known he spoke.
He posted a photo on Instagram without thinking about it too hard.
This was unusual for Shane, who thought about everything too hard. But it was a Tuesday evening, and he'd just finished a piece he was genuinely proud of—a small hoop with a botanical illustration of a cerulean warbler, worked in satin stitch and French knots, with every feather individually rendered in slightly different shades of blue—and he wanted someone to see it, and the person he most wanted to see it was several time zones away and Shane couldn't text him because they'd agreed to keep their communication careful, but Instagram was public and if Ilya happened to see it then that wasn't Shane breaking any rules.
He posted it with the caption: Cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulea). Embroidery on linen.
The internet lost its mind.
Not in a bad way, mostly. The photo went viral in the particular way things go viral when they're unexpected—hockey blogs, then lifestyle blogs, then the embroidery community on social media, which was apparently vast and extremely enthusiastic about having an NHL player in their ranks. Shane gained two hundred thousand Instagram followers in forty-eight hours, most of whom appeared to be middle-aged women who wanted to discuss thread brands.
Shane discussed thread brands with them. He didn't see why he wouldn't. They had good recommendations.
The hockey world's reaction was more predictable.
"Okay, I have to ask," said the Sportsnet interviewer, three days later, during what was supposed to be a segment about the upcoming season.
"The embroidery. It's everywhere. Where does this come from?"
Shane looked at the man. Small stain on his tie, near the knot.
"I like making things," Shane said.
"But embroidery specifically? That's not exactly a typical hockey player hobby."
The interviewer chuckled.
"What's a typical hockey player hobby? Golf?" Shane paused, face neutral. "I tried golf once. I organized all the tees by color and height while my group was on the third hole."
"Fair enough! Is it true you also crochet, bake bread, do quilting—"
"Yes."
"—and bird watching?"
"Yes."
"Your teammates must give you a hard time."
"Yesterday Keller asked if I could embroider him a jockstrap," Shane said. "I told him I'd need his exact measurements. He hasn't brought it up since."
The interviewer's laugh came out as a startled bark. Shane waited for the next question.
After the interview, back in his car, his phone buzzed.
Lily: saw interview
Lily: keller is stupid
Lily: 😂😂😂
Jane: I was being serious.
Lily: I know. That is why is funny.
Then, a minute later:
Lily: the bird is beautiful Shane
Lily: you are very talented
Shane sat in the parking garage for a while. Engine off. Light gray and flat.
Jane: Thank you.
Lily: you make me something sometime?
Jane: What would you want?
Lily: I don't know. Something you choose.
Lily: something that makes you think of me
Lily: or make me jockstrap. you know my measurements
Jane: Fuck off
Jane: Okay.
Lily: okay?
Jane: I'll make you something.
Shane closed his eyes. Everything made him think of Ilya. That was the whole problem. The cerulean that caught the light like Ilya's eyes when he laughed. The indigo that reminded him of bruises blooming across Ilya's ribs after a particularly vicious game. The arctic terns that flew from pole to pole each year, twenty thousand miles of impossible longing. The sourdough starter that sat on his counter, demanding daily attention, bubbling with stubborn life even when neglected—that needed his hands, his warmth, his patience to transform into something worth keeping.
He started it that night. A small hoop, six inches across, linen drum-tight. Two birds perched on a slender branch—one midnight-feathered, one snow-white—heads turned toward each other, beaks angled with millimeter precision. Not touching. Close enough that the air between them seemed to vibrate.
He worked on it for three weeks, hunched under his desk lamp until his neck ached, picking out stitches and redoing them, fingers calloused and pricked. The raven's eye gleamed with a single French knot of obsidian thread. He layered colors—twenty-seven shades of gold for the dove's wing, charcoal gradients for every shadow, deep greens that made the branch seem alive under their talons. When it was finished he wrapped it in cream tissue paper, nestled it in a box lined with midnight-blue velvet, and buried it in his closet behind his winter sweaters.
He sent it four months later, after a game in Boston where Ilya scored the winner with a backhand that shouldn't have been possible and looked at Shane across sixty feet of ice with an expression so nakedly triumphant and tender that Shane's carefully organized interior life collapsed like a house of cards.
He mailed it with no note. None was needed.
Ilya texted three days later—a photo of the hoop hanging on the wall above his bed, the white dove catching morning light from the window, the dark bird watching over Ilya's pillow.
Lily: is most beautiful thing anyone ever give me
Lily: спасибо, my Shane
Shane stared at his phone. My Shane. His thumb pressed into the screen hard enough to whiten the nail bed. His hands were shaking, which was a problem for the embroidery project waiting on his desk.
He put the phone down. Picked it back up. Put it on the couch.
Got up and retrieved it.
Jane: You're welcome, Ilya.
+1. Ottawa, 2019
The trade to Ottawa was supposed to be a disaster.
That's what the analysts said. Shane Hollander, perennial MVP candidate, franchise cornerstone, traded to the Ottawa Centaurs—a team that hadn't made the playoffs in three years, a team in a rebuild, a team that most hockey experts regarded as the place where careers went to politely decompose.
Shane did not experience it as a disaster. Shane experienced it as the first time in years he could breathe.
In Ottawa he had a house instead of an apartment. A yard with trees, where birds came to the feeder he'd installed on the first day. A kitchen big enough for real bread-making, with counter space for kneading and a proofing drawer he'd had custom-built. A spare bedroom that was, openly and without apology, his craft room—quilt frame, design wall, organized bins, and a new embroidery desk positioned under the window where the light was best.
And it had Ilya.
Not every day, not yet—Ilya was still in Boston, and the commute required the particular logistical precision of two professional athletes in a public relationship—but the house was theirs in a way nowhere else had ever been. Ilya's clothes were in the closet. His terrible Russian snacks were in the pantry. His protein powder sat on the counter next to Gerald's mason jar, and Shane had not even considered asking him to move it. That was probably the most significant emotional development of his adult life.
The Centaurs were young. Average roster age twenty-three, which made Shane, at thirty, feel approximately ancient. They were also extremely enthusiastic about him, in the way puppies were enthusiastic about whoever was holding a tennis ball. Shane was not holding a tennis ball. Shane was holding a Hart Trophy and two Stanley Cup rings, and the puppies didn't know the difference.
"Holy shit," said Wyatt Hayes on the first day, staring at the crochet bag tucked neatly behind Shane's equipment bag, right where it had always been.
Shane didn't look up from his row. He was working on a sweater—cabled, charcoal merino wool, which would look extremely good on Ilya and which Shane was absolutely not going to admit was for Ilya because Ilya already had a big enough ego.
"Is that…" Wyatt tilted his head.
"Crochet," Shane said. "Uses a hook, not needles. Helps me focus before games."
From across the room, Luc Thibodeau didn't look up from his stick. "Don't bother, Hazy. Hollywood's been crocheting since day one. Google it."
Ten minutes later the locker room had unearthed: the crochet patterns, the sourdough starter, the birdwatching, the quilting, the embroidery, the Instagram hoop, Gerald's two-hundred-thousand-follower Twitter account, and BuzzFeed's "21 Times Shane Hollander Was the Internet's Favorite Hockey Grandma."
"Oh my God," Wyatt breathed.
"Welcome to life with Shane Hollander," Luc said, tightening his tape.
Shane kept crocheting, unfazed. In Ottawa—where nobody rioted because you showed up to practice wanting yarn instead of pucks—he'd learned to treat these reactions like background noise. You let them have their fun, you supplied a dry retort if you felt like it, then you got back to your stitch count.
"Okay," Wyatt said, hauling his chair over like he'd found buried treasure. "What are you making? It's huge."
"A sweater."
"A whole sweater? By hand? For who?"
Shane hesitated.
"Ilya," he said.
Hayes' eyebrows performed gymnastics.
"You're making Ilya Rozanov a sweater. By hand."
"It's a cable pattern requiring uniform tension across four stitches," Shane said. "It's medieval torture. But yes."
"That's actually really cute."
"It's not cute."
"It's super cute."
"It's crochet," Shane said. "And it's not cute."
From behind his goalie mask, Jansen piped up, "My girlfriend knits. She says cable's a nightmare."
"It is," Shane confirmed. "I have it under control."
"Hey, Hollander." Luca Haas, the shy forward on Shane's line, spoke up for the first time.
"Is it true you have a sourdough starter named Gerald?"
"Yes."
"How old is he?"
"Twelve years."
Silence.
"That's next-level commitment," Luca said.
"Gerald's low-maintenance. Feed him every twelve hours during the season, twenty-four in the off-season." Shane slipped another loop through. "I don't miss feedings."
This was said with enough finality that even Wyatt let it go. Shane finished his row, tucked the sweater away, and started getting ready.
It was a big game. Not in the standings—Ottawa was fighting for a wild card spot, already more than anyone had expected—but in the way that mattered to Shane, which was that they were playing Boston.
They were playing Ilya.
Shane had been playing against Ilya Rozanov for twelve years. He had hated him, wanted him, feared the wanting, denied the wanting, and finally, agonizingly, stopped denying it. He had come out for Ilya. He had rearranged his entire life for Ilya. On the ice, they were still rivals. That never changed. That was the engine of the thing—the fact that they were both willing to tear each other apart for sixty minutes and then hold each other afterward. Shane didn't understand people who thought love and competition were opposites. They were the same drug.
The game started like a bomb going off. Boston came out hunting—clawing for a division title—and Ilya was playing like the version of himself that had haunted Shane's dreams since he was eighteen: savage flash and calculated violence, a blur of speed, the kind of player who made your chest ache with how beautiful destruction could be.
Shane watched him during warmups, blood pounding. The familiar contradiction hit him the same way it always did: desire and determination, tenderness and the bone-deep need to beat him. Ilya caught his eye across the center line and winked. Shane didn't wink back. He held Ilya's gaze until the air crackled.
The first period was warfare disguised as chess. Shane carved two perfect scoring chances that his linemates squandered. Ilya drew blood with a penalty and scored on the power play—a vicious wrist shot from the circle that beat Ottawa's goalie clean. Ilya celebrated with his arms flung wide, wolf's grin splitting his face, and skated past the Ottawa bench spitting something in Russian that Shane knew was filthy.
Shane answered three minutes later. A one-timer from the slot that Boodram—who apparently had hands after all—served up like an execution. Shane didn't celebrate. He skated back to the bench and drank some water.
"You just scored on Ilya Rozanov's team," Luca said, "and you look like you're waiting for a bus."
"I'm thinking about the next shift."
"You're always thinking about the next shift."
"That's correct."
The second period was war. Ilya's elbow caught Luca's jaw—a calculated penalty, blood on the ice. The two of them blazed across the rink while everyone else seemed frozen—predators in their own ecosystem, each reading the other's body like a book memorized cover to cover.
Boston went up 3-2. The arena deflated.
Shane sat rigid in his stall during intermission, sweat burning his eyes, crochet bag untouched. He closed his eyes and ran the game behind them in high definition—Boston's defensive box, the seam opening high, Ilya's tendency to cheat toward the boards on the backcheck. The patterns burned white-hot and clear as cable stitches.
"Hollander." Coach Williams stood in front of him. "You good?"
"I'm good."
"I need you to be Shane Hollander right now."
"I'm always Shane Hollander."
"You know what I mean."
Shane did. He meant: be the thing you are. The thing no one else is.
"I know," Shane said.
The third period started.
Later, the highlights would be replayed hundreds of thousands of times. Sportsnet would run a segment called "The Shane Hollander Show." The analysts would call it one of the greatest individual periods in recent NHL history.
Shane didn't experience it as a show. He experienced it the way he always experienced hockey at its highest level: total clarity. Every piece of information collapsing into a single unified understanding of the ice. Where to be. When to move. Which gap would open in which fraction of a second.
He scored at 2:14. A wrister from the high slot through a forest of legs and sticks—not a pretty goal, just a smart one, the window open for maybe half a second. The red light bathed the ice in crimson.
He assisted on the go-ahead at 7:38. A stretch pass from his own zone that bisected two defenders and landed flat on Boodram's tape as he hit full stride—the kind of pass that required knowing not where your teammate was but where he was going to be.
And then, at 14:22, with the score 4-3 Ottawa and Boston pressing for the tie, Ilya Rozanov came barreling down the left wing with locomotive speed and clear intention. Shane read it before it happened—twelve years of rivalry or something else entirely, but his body knew what Ilya's body was going to do before Ilya did it. He stepped into the lane and stripped the puck with a move so clean it looked choreographed, and then he was going the other way, alone, just him and the goalie and ninety feet of ice.
He scored. Top corner, crossbar and post, a metallic ping that cut through the roar.
5-3. His teammates mobbed him. Wyatt was screaming directly into his ear, which was unpleasant but understandable. Somewhere behind him, Shane knew without looking, Ilya was skating back to his bench with that expression—nine-tenths frustration and one-tenth something else, something that looked, if you knew how to read Ilya Rozanov's face the way Shane did, a lot like pride.
Shane skated back to the bench and drank his water.
"How did you do that?" Luca asked, still vibrating.
Shane thought about it. How did he do anything? He paid attention. He noticed patterns. He practiced until his hands knew what to do without being told. He organized the world into systems he could understand—angles, trajectories, probabilities—and then executed within them with a precision other people called genius and Shane just called paying attention.
The same way he crocheted, counting each stitch. The same way he baked bread, knowing exactly how the dough should feel at each stage. The same way he watched birds. Quilted. Embroidered tiny perfect feathers, each thread laid with surgical exactitude.
"Practice," Shane said.
Luca looked at him like this was the most insufficient answer in the history of language. It probably was.
After the game, in the hallway between the locker rooms, Ilya found him. He always found him after games. Ilya was in his suit, tie already loosened, hair damp from the shower. He looked tired and annoyed and beautiful.
"That steal," Ilya said.
"Yes."
"You know what I'm going to do before I do it."
"Usually."
"Is annoying."
"I know."
Ilya shook his head, but he was smiling now—the real one, not the camera smile. The one that softened everything about his face.
"My babushka," Ilya said, and there was so much in it that the old joke became something else.
"My little old grandma who is also best hockey player in the world."
"I don't think those things are contradictory."
"No," Ilya agreed. He reached out and straightened Shane's tie, fingers resting a moment on his chest.
"No, I don't think they are."
They stood in the fluorescent hallway with arena staff moving around them and two locker rooms' worth of noise bleeding through the walls. Shane wanted to kiss him. He couldn't, not here, but not because they were hiding—just because some things were still theirs.
"Come home with me tonight," Shane said.
"Of course."
"I'm making bread tomorrow. I don't want to hear complaints about the alarm."
"I never complain."
"You complained for forty-five minutes last time."
"Was very early, Shane."
"Gerald needs to be fed."
Ilya laughed—the real laugh, the big one. "Okay. I come home. You feed Gerald. I complain. Is perfect."
It was.
They walked out into the cold Ottawa night together, and Shane thought about all the things his hands knew how to do. Crochet and bread and birds and quilts and embroidery and hockey. Every part of it a different kind of attention, a different way of saying I am here and I am paying attention and I need to make things or I will fall apart.
And the best thing his hands had ever learned was how to reach for Ilya's, in the dark and the cold, and hold on.