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“Let’s go! Get the stretcher, Hollander’s down and unmoving.” Dave yelled at them. “Philips and Tariana, get him on the stretcher, Kawalski, get the ambulance ready outside. Shelly, go out on the ice and check on Hollander. Make sure there’s no internal bleeding, everything’s stabilized, broken bones, and the heart is steady.”
Juliana and Vicky nod at each other, grabbing the stretcher and making their way out on the ice. After years of being nurses in the NHL, these injuries were not uncommon. Their team physician, Waverly, was already kneeling down next to Hollander and checking his breathing, pulse, etc.
“Can we get him on the stretcher?” Juliana asks her. Hollander is usually very careful on the ice, which is why it was so shocking to the entire team that he actually got a hit today. Though she supposed every player would get injured at least once in their career, and today seemed to be Hollander’s unlucky day.
“Yes, but we need a neck brace since he has a fractured collarbone. He’s also got bruised ribs and a concussion.” Wave replies.
“Holy shit,” Vicky breathes, spreading out the stretcher next to Hollander, “Marlow really got him.”
“Hollander? Hollander!”
“Mr. Rozanov, please step away. The team will be taking him to the hospital.”
“No no no. I need to know if he’s okay.”
Juliana turns and probably sees the most surprising scene in her life. Ilya Rozanov of all people looked extremely concerned for Hollander. Though she thinks that it’s actually pretty reasonable since the two’s lives have been very much entangled for their entire careers.
As Wave eases the neck brace on Hollander’s neck, Juliana and Vicky position themselves to get him on the stretcher, one by his head and one by his feet.
“Ready, Jules?” Vicky asks her and she nods. “Three, two, one. Up!” They get him on the stretcher and he groans, muttering something incoherent under his breath. As they make their way back off the ice, Mike runs up to them.
“I’ve got the ambulance ready. We’re going to the Mackenzie Hospital.”
All the three women nod, and carry the stretcher to where Dave was waiting for them with the gurney. He goes to get in the ambulance to talk to Daniel, leaving Juliana, Victoria, Waverly, and Michael with Hollander. The latter mutters something none of them could hear.
“Hey Shane?” Waverly asks gently, “What did you say?”
“Mmm…” he says, eyes still closed, “Tell…my parents.” His words were slurred but they understood anyway.
“Dave’s going to call them okay? They’ll know.” Juliana assures him.
“Tell’em not to worry,” he mumbles. “He’ll get scared.”
The four of them exchanged glances. Vicky tells him, “Yeah, Shane, your parents will know you’re okay.”
“No, no. You need to tell’em.”
“Who?” Mike asks. “We’ll tell your buddy Pike you’re okay.”
“No, not Pike.” Hollander’s words were getting fainter m, but they were getting closer to the ambulance with each step.
Wave frowns, “Then who?”
“Lilia.”
Mike’s eyebrows shoot up. “You got a secret girlfriend, Hollander?”
“Mmm, you need to tell’em. Tell Lilia.”
Juliana nods, then realizes Hollander’s eyes are still closed so he can’t see her. “We’ll let her know too. Shane, hon, we need you to stay with us.”
“Gonna ask ‘em to come to the cottage w’me this summer.” His words were so stringed together that Juliana could barely make out what he said. But as long as he was still talking, that was fine.
“Oh yeah?” Vicky asks, playing along. “How long have you guys been together?”
“Ummm,” Hollander’s brows furrow. “Not sure.”
Now it was Juliana’s turn to frown. “What do you mean you're not sure?”
“We’ve been on an’ off.” He replies.
“Ah.” Mike says, nodding sympathetically. “Hey Shane, you still with us?”
Shane doesn’t reply, and the four of them scramble to get the gurney into the ambulance. Good thing they’ve had plenty of practice with giant ass hockey players.
A few hours later, at Waverly’s house.
Juliana, Waverly, Victoria, and Michael were all sprawled on Waverly’s couch, watching the reply of tonight’s game, Hollander’s fall, and then going to the rescue.
“Look at us guys,” Michael says, pointing at themselves, “We’re heroes for saving Hollander. The ladies are going to love me now.”
Juliana scoffs, “We always save famous hockey players. It’s literally our job.” Vicky and Wave nod in agreement.
“Guys,” Vicky says, looking at her phone with a furrow in her brows, “I’ve been trying to look for any mention of Shane Hollander having a potential girlfriend and there’s literally nothing. He hasn’t been seen out with anyone, doesn’t seem to be sneaking around, and always stays at his cottage in the summer.”
Juliana just shrugs. Hollander wasn’t the type of guy who would blast his private life to everyone on social media. He’s an extremely private person and besides, it wasn’t really any of their business.
“The players of the teams are going back to their benches, with the exception of Rozanov, it seems,” the commentator on the TV drones on. “In fact, the refs had to pull him back away from Hollander, and he looks kind of pale.”
Juliana looks up. The commenters were right. In fact, Rozanov looked down right nauseous.
“Aren’t they rivals?” Vicky says, “Don’t they hate each other?”
Mike just stares at her. “Dude. If I were Rozanov, even I would feel bad for Hollander. Rivalry or not, the man didn’t deserve to get hit like that on the ice, and I would feel bad.”
“And,” Waverly adds, “Rozanov and Hollander have known each other their entire careers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are actually friends. The media loves to make stuff up for the viewers’ entertainment.”
Juliana thinks back to the conversation they had with Hollander when they were getting him to the ambulance.
“You need to tell’em. Tell Lilia.”
Wouldn’t “‘em” be the wrong pronoun for a woman? Shouldn’t he mean “her”?
Lilia
Lilia
Ilya
“You need to tell him. Tell Ilya I’m fine.”
Holy shit.
In fact, the refs had to pull him back away from Hollander, and he looks kind of pale.
What if, Shane Hollander was seeing Ilya Rozanov? Juliana gasps out loud, and everyone looks at her.
“Jules you okay?” Waverly asks, concern written all over her face.
“This is a very important question that I need you guys to answer as accurately as possible.” She knew she sounded super ominous and they were all looking at her with varying degrees of intensity, curiosity, and concern. Juliana takes a deep breath. “When we were getting Hollander to the ambulance, did he say ‘Lilia’ or ‘Ilya’?”
Wave, Vicky, and Mike all inhale sharply, but Michael was first to break the tension and the silence.
“I think he said Lila.”
Wave immediately objects. “No, now that I think about it, his speech was very slurred, so there’s a great possibility that he could’ve said Ilya.”
Vicky shakes her head. “Y’all are going insane. He definitely said Lilia. Besides, wouldn’t it be impossible for them to even be together?”
Juliana watches the chaos she created unfold, as her friends argue with each other for a solid 15 minutes. Eventually, they all agree that it would be impossible to know for sure what exactly Hollander said, since he has a concussion and couldn’t speak clearly, and that they may never know if there was a secret girlfriend called Lilia or if he was with Rozanov.
About four years later.
A few days after Hollander’s injury, the four friends’ theories have been pushed to the back of their minds. As the days went on, full of injured hockey players (some serious, a lot of them weren’t), the revelation wasn’t totally forgotten, just subdued. In the years to follow, Michael transferred to become an official ambulance driver for the Mackenzie Hospital. Victoria left to become a nurse scientist, moving to Chicago. Juliana and Waverly are the only two left after four years, still working together on and off the ice, still the best duo in the NHL’s medical staff.
It was one of those rare days once a year where they all got to get together at a nice restaurant and catch up, when Vicky suddenly screams at something on her phone and immediately slams it down on the table.
“What the fuck, Vick?” Mike asks. “Someone send you a dick pic or something?”
Vicky’s eyes are wide. “You guys won’t fucking believe this,” she tells them. Okay, now Juliana is really scared. And based on the faces of Mike and Wave, they were scared too.
“So,” Vicky says, “apparently, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are together, and they accidentally got outed in a Fanmail video created by Hollander’s best friend, Hayden Pike. The video features Pike wishing someone happy birthday, and Hollander and Rozanov caught having a, quote on quote, ‘passionate kiss’ in the background.”
“What?” Mike says, eyes bugging wide, while Juliana and Waverly were screaming “I fucking told you so! We tried to tell you Hollander said ‘Ilya’ all those years ago, and not ‘Lilia’!”
“Oh my fucking god.” Mike rubs his face with both hands. “I mean, like not in a bad way, obviously. I don’t give a fuck if they’re gay or together. But like, getting outed by accident by your fucking best friend? And then someone leaking it to the whole fucking world? Damn that’s gotta suck.”
Juliana nods, humming to herself. She can’t imagine what Hollander and Rozanov must be going through right now. The thing with Scott Hunter a few years back had already created a lot of controversy in hockey, tensions rising high in those locker rooms. But when the public finds out you’ve been with your rival for god knows how long? They’d be lucky if they still had a career by the end of the day.
Waverly was looking at Mike and Vicky with a smug smile on her face while the other two looked at her with equal parts shock, amusement, and resignation, likely because they knew they were probably never going to live it down.
“I fucking called it.”