Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The Particular Violence of Being Loved by Ilya Rozanov

I. My Husband Shane

Ilya Rozanov falls in love like a man developing a highly specific medical condition. It is not subtle. It is not dignified. It is certainly not private.

The problem is that Shane keeps rewarding him for it.

At first it starts small, or small by the standards of a man who has never understood moderation where Shane Hollander is concerned. Interview mentions. Casual touches. A hand settling at the small of Shane’s back when they pass through crowded rooms. A thumb pressed briefly to the inside of Shane’s wrist beneath restaurant tables. The normal amount of obsession one might expect from someone who once crossed continents emotionally constipated over another hockey player and spent years behaving as though repression were a competitive sport.

Then Shane marries him, which apparently unlocks something clinically irreversible in Ilya’s brain.

Because suddenly every sentence begins with:

“My husband Shane—”

Nobody asked.

The equipment manager asks if he wants black tape or white tape and Ilya, fully serious, says, “My husband Shane says black makes me look less ugly on camera, so probably black.”

The trainer asks if his shoulder feels okay.

“My husband Shane massaged it yesterday.”

The reporter asks about defensive structure against Boston.

“You know who is very smart about hockey? My husband Shane.”

At some point the Ottawa media team genuinely starts cutting around it in interviews because otherwise every soundbite becomes an accidental anniversary speech, and the funniest part is that Ilya does not seem to understand this as a problem. He does not smirk afterward, does not perform smugness for the camera, does not glance around to see who has noticed. He simply says it the way a person might say the rink is cold, or the flight was delayed, or the ice was bad in the second period: a fact, obvious and relevant, carried in his mouth with the calm assurance of something long ago proven.

“My husband Shane,” he says, and somewhere nearby Shane either goes pink around the ears or looks briefly murderous, which is the same thing, really, if one has known him long enough.

Farah, who has become increasingly fluent in the specific crisis management required by married hockey players with no social shame, pulls Ilya aside after a postgame media scrum in late February and says, with the clipped tenderness of a woman who has saved him from himself too many times, “You cannot answer every question by mentioning Shane.”

Ilya stares at her.

Farah waits.

“He is relevant,” Ilya says finally.

“To defensive zone coverage?”

“Yes.”

“To your tape colour?”

“Yes.”

“To whether you enjoyed the team lunch?”

“I sat beside him.”

Farah closes her eyes.

Ilya, interpreting this as an invitation to continue, adds, “Also he ordered soup and then said mine looked better, so I gave him mine, because I am good husband.”

“You are a public relations incident with cheekbones,” Farah says.

“Thank you.”

“That was not praise.”

“I choose to receive it as praise.”

And Shane pretends to hate it, which is how everyone knows he loves it desperately. He sighs, he groans, he tells Ilya to stop talking like he has personally invented marriage, but his mouth gives him away every time. It softens at the edges. It twitches when Ilya is not looking. It becomes something young and helpless for half a second before Shane remembers he is supposed to be dignified in public and rearranges his face into annoyance.

“Stop saying ‘my husband Shane’ like he is a Victorian inheritance,” Hayden tells him once.

Ilya blinks. “But he is mine.”

“That is not—”

“My legally wedded husband. From government. With paperwork.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Ilya shrugs and keeps eating his protein bar, completely unmoved by the scandalized silence around him, while Shane presses the heel of his hand to his own forehead and murmurs, “I cannot believe this is my life.”

“You love your life,” Ilya says.

“I tolerate my life.”

“You love me.”

“Barely.”

Ilya smiles without looking at him. “He loves me very much.”

“Ilya.”

“My husband Shane loves me very much.”

“I’m going to divorce you.”

“No,” Ilya says pleasantly, still eating. “You are not.”

And the thing is, Shane is not. Everyone knows it, especially Shane, who has been loved by Ilya long enough to understand that sometimes devotion arrives wearing the clothes of public embarrassment, and sometimes a man who once lived for years on longing alone will become unbearable once he is allowed to speak the truth out loud.

II. Physical Evidence

Then there is the touching.

This becomes an organizational issue.

Ilya cannot sit near Shane without physically attaching himself somehow. Hand on thigh. Arm around waist. Fingers hooked into belt loops. Face pressed into Shane’s shoulder during flights like a large emotionally needy wolf. He likes holding Shane more than almost anything on earth, and not sexually even, half the time, though certainly also sexually, with an intensity that Shane still thinks about sometimes at inconvenient moments and then resents Ilya for the rest of the afternoon. Mostly, though, it is simply physical. Instinctive. Like his body experiences distress when Shane is more than three feet away. Like love, in him, has never remained safely abstract, has never agreed to behave as a feeling when it could be a hand, a mouth, an arm, a body curved around another body in the half-dark.

The boys walk into the lounge one morning to find Shane making coffee while Ilya stands directly behind him with both arms wrapped around his waist and his chin hooked over Shane’s shoulder.

“You know there are chairs,” Troy says.

“I am comfortable.”

“You look like a hostage situation.”

Shane, without even glancing up from the coffee machine, reaches back automatically and scratches his fingers through Ilya’s hair.

Ilya visibly melts.

Actually melts.

Like somebody removed structural support from his skeleton. His shoulders drop. His eyes close. His face turns further into Shane’s neck with a kind of boneless, humiliating pleasure that makes Harris look immediately toward the ceiling as if searching for divine intervention.

“That is revolting,” Harris says flatly.

“You are jealous because nobody loves you enough,” Ilya replies immediately, voice muffled against Shane’s shoulder.

Harris points at Troy. “I literally live with my boyfriend.”

“Yes, but do you feel this?” Ilya squeezes Shane tighter. “This is different.”

“It absolutely is not.”

But it is.

Because Ilya looks at Shane like he discovered religion accidentally, like somebody handed him the physical manifestation of relief, like the universe made one thing specifically for him and he still cannot believe they let him keep it.

There is something almost difficult to watch about it. The team jokes, of course they do, because grown men required to spend half their lives in locker rooms together will convert tenderness into mockery just to survive the discomfort of seeing it plainly. They call Ilya disgusting. They accuse Shane of enabling him. They ask whether the two of them are being paid by the minute to traumatize everyone. But beneath the jokes there is always that pause, that half-second of silence when Ilya touches Shane without thinking and Shane allows it without bracing, and something private moves visibly between them.

It is not new love. New love is frantic and theatrical and hungry for witnesses.

This is worse.

This is love that has survived concealment, injury, pride, distance, time, and the slow violence of wanting someone while pretending not to. This is love that has grown roots in secrecy and then been dragged into sunlight, where it continues to grow too quickly, too openly, too lush and unreasonable to be properly controlled.

Ilya’s hand finds Shane in crowds.

Shane’s body leans back into him before Shane remembers to be annoyed.

It happens at airports, in hotel lobbies, in team lounges, at charity dinners, in grocery shops, in elevators where strangers stare very hard at the numbers rather than acknowledge the large Russian man pressing his face into his husband’s hair like he is suffering from a vitamin deficiency only Shane can treat.

“You are doing it again,” Shane mutters once in the frozen aisle of a supermarket in Ottawa.

Ilya’s hand is beneath the back of Shane’s hoodie, palm warm against his spine.

“Doing what?”

“Touching me like I’m going to evaporate.”

Ilya considers this, expression sober.

“You might.”

“Ilya.”

“I have seen strange things happen.”

“I am buying peas.”

“Yes. Very fragile moment.”

Shane stares at him for three seconds, then turns back to the freezer because smiling would only encourage him.

Unfortunately, Ilya sees anyway.

Ilya always sees.

III. Bite Marks

And God, the biting.

The biting is a problem.

Not hard. Never enough to hurt. Just these deeply affectionate little love-bites whenever Shane is being particularly cute or warm or sleepy or annoying, which, by Ilya’s private and deeply unreasonable standards, is almost constantly.

Shane is reading? Bite shoulder.

Shane laughing? Bite jaw.

Shane walking past in sweatpants? Immediate bite.

The first few times, Shane assumes it is sexual, because with Ilya that is not an outrageous assumption, and because Ilya has always had a terrible, inconvenient relationship with restraint where Shane’s body is concerned. But then Ilya starts doing it when Shane is brushing his teeth, when Shane is making toast, when Shane is standing barefoot in the laundry room trying to match socks, and it becomes clear that this is not seduction so much as a neurological malfunction.

“Ilya,” Shane says one night, scandalized, as Ilya bites his stomach through a t-shirt, “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You are shaped nicely.”

“That is not an answer.”

“I love you.”

“That ALSO is not an answer.”

“It is my answer.”

“It is a terrible answer.”

Ilya kisses the bite immediately after, warm mouth gentle through thin cotton, which unfortunately makes Shane weak to it despite his complaints. This is how most arguments with Ilya end: with Shane intending to be stern and then finding himself trapped under the unbearable weight of Ilya’s sincerity.

Because Ilya does not bite him casually, exactly. He bites him the way someone might press a hand to a treasured object just to confirm it is real. He bites him lightly and then kisses the place after, as if apologizing to the skin for needing proof. He does it with a faint noise in the back of his throat when Shane is warm from sleep, when his hair is messy and his voice rough, when he is laughing so openly that the guarded part of him forgets to close the door.

“You are like a dog,” Shane tells him once.

Ilya looks pleased. “Anya is dog. You love Anya.”

“Anya does not bite my shoulder while I am doing emails.”

“She would if she could.”

“She has better manners than you.”

“She is afraid of you.”

“She is not.”

“She respects you,” Ilya amends.

Shane narrows his eyes. “Are you saying you do not respect me?”

Ilya leans down, kisses the side of his neck, and says, with complete calm, “I respect you very much. I also want to put you in my mouth.”

Shane closes his laptop.

There is no dignified response to that, and Ilya knows it.

IV. The Archive of Shane Hollander

There are photos all over Ilya’s social media too.

Too many photos.

An alarming amount.

Candids of Shane sleeping with Anya curled against him. Videos of Shane cooking while muttering under his breath. Zoomed-in pictures of Shane’s hands holding coffee cups because apparently Ilya thinks his husband’s fingers deserve archival preservation. Shane tying his skates. Shane standing in the kitchen with his hair still damp from the shower. Shane sitting cross-legged on the couch in an old Ottawa sweatshirt, glasses low on his nose, scowling at his phone as though personally offended by technology. Shane walking across a parking lot under ugly fluorescent lights and somehow, through Ilya’s camera, appearing like the central figure of a Renaissance painting about emotional repression and very good thighs.

The captions are worse.

my boy 🤍

my husband beautiful today

look at him

another day being obsessed with Shane Hollander unfortunately

Underneath every post are thousands of comments and at least one teammate begging him to seek psychiatric help.

The first time Shane notices how bad it has become, he is in bed, half asleep, scrolling through his phone while Ilya brushes his teeth in the bathroom. Shane has spent years developing a healthy distance from public commentary about himself, because no professional athlete survives otherwise, but sometimes he looks because he is human and vain in highly controlled doses. He expects game clips. Debate about his speed. Someone comparing his current season to his twenties in a way that will annoy him for thirty-seven seconds and then mean nothing.

Instead he finds a thread titled:

ILYAROZANOV BEING DOWN CATASTROPHICALLY FOR HIS OWN HUSBAND: A NECESSARY DOCUMENTATION THREAD

It has two hundred and eight entries.

Shane sits upright.

“Ilya.”

From the bathroom, through toothpaste, “Yes, baby?”

“Why is there a thread of your Instagram posts about me?”

The brushing stops.

A pause.

Then: “Only one?”

Shane closes his eyes.

When Ilya comes back into the bedroom, hair pushed messily off his forehead, expression far too innocent for a man who has apparently been running an unofficial Shane Hollander museum from his verified account, Shane holds up the phone.

“This is insane.”

Ilya leans closer, squinting. “That is nice photo.”

“It is a photo of my hand.”

“Yes.”

“Just my hand.”

“You have very good hands.”

“Ilya.”

“What? This is true. Many people agree.”

“I do not want many people agreeing about my hands.”

“You should not have such hands then.”

Shane stares at him.

Ilya smiles.

It is not even smug, which makes it worse. It is soft. Pleased. Open. A man delighted by the world because Shane’s hand exists in it.

The edits are worse.

Because Ilya absolutely searches his own name online like a narcissist, but he searches Shane’s more. He claims this is because people say stupid things and someone must monitor them, but Shane knows the truth, which is that Ilya loves seeing other people notice him. Not in a jealous way, not always. Sometimes with a certain ridiculous pride, as if every stranger thirsting over Shane is merely arriving late to a conclusion Ilya reached decades ago.

And when he finds edits – good edits, hot edits, slow-motion compilations with dramatic music and Shane looking broad and beautiful and exhausted after games – he retweets them instantly.

No shame.

None.

Caption:

sorry but this is my husband

or

yes exactly thank you for understanding

or once, disastrously:

i need him biblically

That tweet trends.

Shane calls him in tears laughing.

“You cannot tweet that!”

“Why?”

“You’re forty!”

“And still correct.”

Farah texts Shane thirteen skull emojis and the words, PLEASE CONTROL YOUR MAN.

Shane replies, I have never once controlled him.

Farah replies, THEN START.

Shane looks across the room at Ilya, who is lying on the couch with Anya’s head on his chest, scrolling through his phone with the expression of a man performing important civic duty.

“Ilya.”

“Yes?”

“Did you just like a fan edit of me set to a song called ‘Monster’?”

Ilya does not look up. “It was well made.”

“You replied with three fire emojis.”

“I showed restraint.”

“You also wrote, ‘This is journalism.’”

“It was.”

Shane presses his lips together very hard.

Ilya glances up, sees his face, and smiles slowly.

“You think it is funny.”

“I think you need supervised internet access.”

“You like when I am proud.”

“I like when you are normal.”

“No, you do not.”

Shane hates that he cannot argue with this.

V. Public Record

VI. He Does, Thank You, But He Is Already Married

Then there is the jealousy.

Not toxic jealousy. Just deeply pathetic possessiveness.

A reporter touches Shane’s arm during an interview once and Ilya appears in the background of the clip staring like a Victorian ghost haunting the scene. The actual touch lasts less than a second. It is nothing. It is the kind of absent, professional, barely-there contact people make in crowded spaces when they are trying to get someone’s attention. Shane does not even notice it.

Ilya notices.

Of course Ilya notices.

By the next morning, the freeze-frame is everywhere. His expression is solemn, cold, faintly homicidal, the face of a man watching someone commit a minor social crime at the edge of a ballroom. Someone captions it, when somebody touches your emotional support husband, and the clip reaches a million views before breakfast.

Shane finds Ilya at the kitchen table, calmly eating eggs.

“You looked insane.”

Ilya does not ask what he means. This is how Shane knows he has already seen it.

“I looked normal.”

“You looked like you were about to challenge her to a duel.”

“She touched your arm.”

“She was doing her job.”

“She has microphone. She can use words.”

“She was trying to get my attention.”

“I am always trying to get your attention. I do not touch you at work.”

Shane raises an eyebrow.

Ilya pauses.

“That is different.”

“How?”

“I am allowed.”

Shane has to turn away because he is smiling, and if Ilya sees it the conversation will become impossible.

Someone on Twitter says Shane looked hot in a postgame presser and Ilya responds from his verified account:

A guy flirts with Shane at a charity event and Ilya materializes beside him so fast it genuinely frightens people.

Hand immediately on Shane’s waist.

“Hi,” he says pleasantly. “This is my husband Shane.”

The guy blinks. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Ilya agrees.

And just stands there.

Still smiling.

Still holding Shane.

Like an extremely threatening golden retriever.

Shane nearly chokes trying not to laugh.

The event is one of those polished, expensive, overlit things where everyone smells like champagne and money and florist arrangements, and Shane has already spent two hours shaking hands with donors who all speak as though they personally invented philanthropy. He is wearing a dark suit that Ilya has been mentally undressing him from since they left the house, and he is tired in the particular way social events make him tired now, not because he cannot do them, but because he has spent too much of his life being watched and still has not learned to enjoy it.

The man at the bar is harmless. Younger than them. Handsome in that smooth, anonymous way of people who have never been punched professionally. He tells Shane he used to watch him play when he was a kid, which already makes Shane feel ninety years old, and then he says something about Shane looking better now than he ever did on television.

Before Shane can decide whether to be polite or cutting, Ilya is there.

Of course he is.

He does not interrupt loudly. That would be too easy. Instead he arrives with an expression of such pleasant, immovable certainty that the entire exchange shifts around him. His hand settles at Shane’s waist, thumb pressing once through the fabric of his jacket, and Shane feels the familiar warmth of him immediately, absurdly comforting despite the fact that Ilya is behaving like an idiot.

“This is my husband Shane,” Ilya says.

The man’s eyes flick between them.

“Yes,” he says slowly. “I know.”

“Good,” Ilya says. “Important information.”

Shane coughs into his drink.

“I was just complimenting him,” the man says, laughing a little.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “Many people do.”

There is a silence.

Then Shane says, voice tight with suppressed laughter, “Ilya.”

“What?”

“You are being weird.”

“I am being married.”

“That is not a personality.”

“It is now.”

Later, back home, he says, “You know you do not actually have to defend my honour every second of the day.”

“I know.”

“You act like someone is going to steal me.”

Ilya looks genuinely confused.

“But I like reminding people.”

Shane softens immediately because that is the thing about Ilya – beneath all the insanity is sincerity so enormous it becomes impossible to mock.

He means every word.

Every touch.

Every stupid tweet.

Every “my husband Shane” said with the pride of a man announcing miracles.

VII. Instagram: The Evidence Expands

VIII. The Team Suffers

By March, the team has stopped pretending this is a phase.

There are practical consequences to sharing a locker room with a man who has become emotionally radicalized by marriage. Every mundane task now has Shane attached to it somehow. Ilya forgets his water bottle and says Shane bought him a better one anyway. Ilya tapes his stick and explains that Shane prefers when the knob is less ugly. Ilya eats plain chicken after practice and tells Zane that Shane says protein matters more now because they are both old, and Zane, who has one child, a mortgage, and absolutely no patience left for romantic nonsense before noon, tells him to please eat silently.

“Can you go ten minutes without mentioning him?” Hayden asks one day.

Ilya considers.

“No.”

“At least you are honest.”

“He is in room.”

Shane, sitting twelve feet away and very deliberately looking at his phone, says, “Do not bring me into this.”

“You are already in it,” Ilya says.

“I did not consent.”

“You married me.”

“I consented to taxes and shared property, not whatever this is.”

“This is love.”

“This is harassment.”

“You like being harassed.”

“Ilya.”

Ilya smiles at him across the room, slow and devastatingly pleased, and Shane’s expression changes before he can stop it, the annoyance thinning into something private and warm.

The entire locker room groans.

“See?” Ilya says proudly. “He likes.”

“I hate all of you,” Shane says, but he is smiling now, so nobody believes him.

There are days when Ilya’s obsession turns into something quieter and more careful. It is easy for people to see the comedy because the comedy is loud: the posts, the possessive comments, the ridiculous captions, the way Ilya will say “my husband Shane” in response to questions about airport delays or penalty kills. It is harder to explain the tenderness that lives beneath it, because tenderness is embarrassing when described plainly, and Shane, who has survived most things by refusing to look directly at them, finds himself constantly ambushed by it.

Ilya knows the exact sound of Shane’s bad knee on stairs by the slight alteration in his breathing.

He notices when Shane has not eaten enough and appears silently beside him with toast or cut fruit or a protein shake Shane did not ask for and will complain about before drinking all of it.

He remembers which hotel pillows make Shane’s neck worse.

He warms Shane’s side of the bed when Shane showers.

He buys the brand of pens Shane likes and then pretends it was accidental because Shane becomes awkward when cared for too directly.

He holds the back of Shane’s neck in elevators when Shane goes still in crowded spaces.

He takes photographs constantly, yes, but he also puts the phone down when Shane is too tired to be looked at by anyone other than him.

That is the part no one online sees.

The restraint within the lack of restraint.

The way Ilya can be absurdly public and fiercely private at the same time, broadcasting his adoration to millions and still guarding the softest pieces of Shane like a secret he would break teeth to protect.

IX. Shane, Observed

Sometimes Shane wonders when he became so accustomed to being watched lovingly.

It should bother him more. Once, it would have. Once, he had been a person composed almost entirely of control, of posture, of careful self-containment, of a polished public version of himself standing guard over everything vulnerable and unmanageable beneath. Being observed had meant judgment. Expectation. Risk. Cameras, coaches, fans, fathers, men in suits, boys in locker rooms, everyone wanting something from him and measuring him by what he could provide.

Then Ilya happened.

And Ilya’s looking was different.

Ilya looked at him without asking him to perform.

That was the unbearable part.

He looked at Shane while Shane was annoyed, tired, unshaven, injured, badly dressed, overcaffeinated, quiet, afraid, petty, affectionate, unreasonable. He looked at Shane across years, across countries, across all the versions of himself Shane had been forced to create in order to survive, and somehow seemed to love the whole mess with the same bewildered hunger.

It makes Shane feel absurdly exposed.

It also makes him feel safe.

This contradiction remains inconvenient.

One night, after a long home stand and an ugly loss against Montreal that leaves Shane with a bruise blooming along his hip and a mood dark enough to sour the room, he finds Ilya in the kitchen making tea. The house is mostly quiet. Anya sleeps in her bed near the radiator. Snow presses softly against the windows. Ilya has changed into sweatpants and an old shirt, his hair damp from the shower, his expression thoughtful in the low light.

“You should ice your hip,” Ilya says without turning around.

“I’m fine.”

“Yes. You are always fine. Ice it anyway.”

Shane leans against the counter. “Are you going to post about my hip bruise too?”

Ilya glances back.

There is humor in his face, but also something else, something gentler.

“No,” he says. “That is mine.”

Shane’s breath catches before he can stop it.

Ilya turns fully then, tea forgotten behind him, and steps into Shane’s space with none of the theatrical possessiveness he uses in public. This is different. Quieter. His hands settle at Shane’s waist with care, avoiding the bruise. His mouth presses once to Shane’s forehead, then to his temple, then to the corner of his mouth.

“You played angry,” Ilya says.

“You played badly.”

“I played distracted because you were angry.”

“That is a terrible excuse.”

“It is true.”

“You cannot blame your defensive turnovers on my emotional state.”

“I can. I just did.”

Shane laughs despite himself, a small breath of sound that leaves him unwillingly, and Ilya’s face changes with such immediate pleasure that Shane has to look away.

“You do that,” Shane says quietly.

“What?”

“Act like it’s some accomplishment when I laugh.”

“It is.”

“I laugh all the time.”

“No,” Ilya says softly. “You make sarcastic air from your nose. Different thing.”

Shane should argue. He does not.

Ilya leans down and presses his mouth to the side of Shane’s neck, not a kiss exactly, just contact. Shane closes his eyes.

Outside, the city goes on without them, all traffic and cold and people living ordinary lives behind lit windows. Inside, Ilya holds him in the kitchen with tea cooling behind them and one palm spread wide against Shane’s back, and the whole world seems to narrow to that point of warmth.

“You are staring,” Shane says eventually, though his eyes are still closed.

“Yes.”

“You are always staring.”

“I missed many years,” Ilya says. “I am catching up.”

And that is so unfair, so direct and unarmoured, that Shane cannot even make fun of him.

X. More Public Record

XI. The Biblical Incident

The “biblical” tweet becomes a line in the sand.

Before that, Ottawa can pretend Ilya is merely eccentric online. After that, there are meetings.

Not formal disciplinary meetings, because nobody wants to write “please stop publicly lusting after your husband in a way that generates sponsorship emails” in an official document, but meetings nonetheless. Farah sits with him in a conference room that smells faintly of carpet cleaner and says, with enormous restraint, “You have to remember that you are using a verified account.”

Ilya nods.

“People associate your posts with the organization.”

“Yes.”

“You represent the team.”

“Yes.”

“So when you retweet an edit of Shane covered in blood after a fight and write, ‘I need him biblically,’ that creates certain complications.”

Ilya considers this.

“I could have said worse.”

Farah looks at him.

He looks back.

“What would be worse?” she asks, though her tone suggests she already regrets it.

“I will not say because I respect your job.”

“Wonderful. Growth.”

“But people understood meaning.”

“Yes, Ilya. That is the problem.”

“It was accurate.”

“I do not need accuracy. I need restraint.”

“I showed restraint.”

Farah inhales slowly.

Across the table, Shane sits with one hand over his mouth, eyes wet with suppressed laughter, because he had been called in under the assumption that he might provide a stabilizing influence, a decision everyone involved now recognizes as optimistic to the point of delusion.

“Shane,” Farah says sharply.

He drops his hand. “Sorry.”

“You are not helping.”

“I know.”

“Can you tell your husband to stop?”

Shane turns to Ilya.

Ilya looks back at him with mild interest.

There is a pause.

Shane says, “Stop.”

Ilya says, “No.”

Shane turns back to Farah. “I tried.”

Farah looks like she might put her head through the table.

The thing is, Shane should probably be more embarrassed. He understands that. He is a grown man, a professional athlete, a person with enough media training to know exactly how ridiculous all of this looks. His husband has turned being in love with him into a public performance art piece. His teammates have seen thirst tweets. Fans have made compilations. PR has created language around “maintaining tone boundaries on public-facing platforms,” which is such an ugly phrase Shane almost respects it.

And yet, beneath the embarrassment, something warm and shamefully pleased lives inside him.

Because for so long, being loved by Ilya meant being hidden.

It meant hotel rooms and careful exits and years of public indifference so convincing it sometimes hurt even when Shane understood why it existed. It meant wanting to be claimed by someone who could not claim him yet, and hating himself for wanting that, because wanting public proof felt childish compared to the real risks they were carrying.

Now Ilya says my husband Shane to anyone with a microphone.

Now he posts Shane’s face because he can.

Now he tells strangers to back off not because he doubts Shane, but because being allowed to say mine still tastes like victory in his mouth.

Shane understands that.

Worse, he loves it.

He loves it enough that when Ilya’s phone pings later that afternoon and Ilya laughs quietly at something online, Shane looks over and says, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Show me.”

“It is nothing.”

“If it is another edit—”

Ilya tilts the phone away.

Shane lunges.

They end up wrestling on the couch like idiots, Anya barking in alarm and delight, Ilya laughing as Shane climbs halfway over him to grab the phone.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Ilya.”

“You will be embarrassed.”

“I’m already embarrassed by you constantly.”

“You like.”

“I do not like.”

“You do.”

“Ilya.”

Finally Shane gets the phone, breathless and flushed, and sees the edit.

It is not even particularly scandalous. Just him during warmups, helmet off, laughing at something Hayden said, his face younger somehow in the loose arena light.

Ilya has already typed a reply but not posted it.

this is why I cannot be normal

Shane stares at it.

Then at Ilya.

Ilya’s smile fades a little.

“I did not post,” he says.

Shane studies him for a long moment.

Then he hands the phone back.

“Fix the capitalization first,” he says.

Ilya grins.

XII. Domestic Possession

At home, the obsession has fewer witnesses and therefore fewer limits.

Ilya follows Shane from room to room without seeming aware he is doing it. If Shane goes upstairs to get a sweatshirt, Ilya appears in the doorway thirty seconds later. If Shane stands in the pantry looking for rice, Ilya comes up behind him and rests both hands on his hips. If Shane sits on the floor to stretch after a run, Ilya lowers himself behind him and pulls Shane back against his chest, large hands wrapping around Shane’s knees, chin settling in his hair.

“You are clingy,” Shane says.

“Yes.”

“That was not an invitation to agree.”

“I know myself.”

“You have no shame.”

“I have shame. Just not about you.”

Shane lets that sit between them.

There are sentences Ilya says that do not sound dramatic when they leave his mouth because his tone is so matter-of-fact, but they land somewhere inside Shane and remain there for days. I have shame. Just not about you. As if Shane is the exception to every instinct of secrecy and self-protection Ilya ever developed. As if loving Shane is the one place he refuses to be embarrassed, no matter how ridiculous he becomes.

It should be impossible to live under that much affection without suffocating.

Somehow Shane does not suffocate.

He expands.

Unwillingly at first, then with a kind of private disbelief. There are parts of him that had been held tight for so long they no longer knew how to loosen without pain, and Ilya, with his enormous hands and outrageous mouth and unrelenting certainty, coaxes them open through repetition. Through presence. Through the daily proof of being wanted in every state.

Wanted when he is difficult.

Wanted when he is quiet.

Wanted when he is sharp.

Wanted when his body aches and his mood goes dark and he cannot explain what is wrong because nothing is wrong exactly, nothing except the old familiar pressure of existing as himself.

Ilya wants all of him.

That is the terrifying thing.

Not only the polished, talented, admired version of Shane Hollander, though he wants that too with embarrassing enthusiasm. He wants the tired man in sweatpants muttering about dishwasher tablets. The injured man pretending he is fine. The petty man who gets irritated when people load cutlery incorrectly. The soft man who talks to Anya in a voice he would deny under oath. The anxious man. The vain man. The stubborn man. The man who still sometimes wakes from dreams he will not describe and reaches across the bed before he is fully conscious.

Ilya wants him with the totality of someone who once had to survive on fragments.

So now he hoards.

Photographs. Touches. Jokes. Public claims. Private rituals. The shape of Shane’s sleep-warm body beneath his hands at three in the morning. The way Shane’s mouth looks when he is about to smile but refuses. The little irritated sound he makes when Ilya kisses the back of his neck while he is trying to cook. The smell of his shampoo. The roughness of his playoff beard. The exact weight of him when he finally lets himself be held.

Ilya hoards all of it.

Lovingly.

Shamelessly.

As though the world is full of thieves.

XIII. Lock Him Up

“I think,” Ilya says one evening, lying with his head in Shane’s lap while Shane attempts to read, “I would keep you in house if this was allowed.”

Shane lowers his book slowly.

“I’m sorry?”

“Not in bad way.”

“That clarification did not help.”

“In romantic way.”

“There is no romantic way to imprison someone.”

“I would make very nice prison.”

“Ilya.”

“Good food. Big bed. Anya. Me.”

“You are describing our house.”

“Yes. But you would not leave.”

Shane stares down at him.

Ilya looks genuinely peaceful, as if this fantasy is domestic rather than criminal.

“You understand that is insane, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you are saying it anyway?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Ilya reaches up and touches Shane’s jaw with the backs of his fingers, his expression shifting, humour still there but softened now by something heavier.

“Because sometimes I hate that world gets you too.”

Shane’s mouth closes.

That is unfair. Worse, it is comprehensible.

Ilya continues, eyes steady on his face. “I know you are not thing to keep. I know this. I would never want smaller life for you. But sometimes you walk into room and everyone looks, and I think, yes, of course, look at him, he is impossible. Then I think, stop looking. Then I think, I am hypocrite because I want everyone to know and also nobody to know. I want to post you everywhere and also hide you in my coat.”

Shane is quiet for a long moment.

“That is very psychologically healthy.”

“I know.”

“You should say that to a therapist.”

“I have.”

“And?”

“She said it was good I understand contradiction.”

Shane laughs, startled and helpless.

Ilya smiles up at him, pleased beyond reason by the sound.

“Of course you brought this up in therapy.”

“I am mature.”

“You just said you wanted to keep me in a luxury prison.”

“With Anya.”

“Oh, well, that fixes it.”

“I thought so.”

Shane puts the book aside. He does not know what to do with Ilya sometimes, with the sheer breadth of him, the way he can make Shane laugh and ache in the same breath. He leans down instead, pressing a kiss to Ilya’s mouth, and Ilya rises into it immediately, one hand sliding into Shane’s hair, the other curling around his hip with familiar reverence.

“You cannot lock me up,” Shane murmurs.

“I know.”

“You can hold me.”

Ilya’s hand tightens.

“That is better,” he says.

And then, after a pause:

“Most of time.”

Shane bites his lip hard to keep from laughing.

Ilya looks delighted anyway.

XIV. The Night Post

It happens after an away game in Boston, because of course it happens after Boston, where everything is too loud and too familiar and full of ghosts that are not even theirs but still seem to drift through visiting corridors like cold air.

Shane plays beautifully. Annoyingly beautifully. He is sharp, fast, mean in the corners, all controlled anger and elegant violence, and Ilya spends half the game watching him with a kind of professional admiration that keeps tipping dangerously toward personal worship. Shane scores in the second period and does not celebrate much, just accepts the crash of bodies against him with a brief, hard smile.

Some fan account posts the clip before the game is even over.

By midnight it has been edited into slow motion.

By one in the morning Ilya has seen it.

By one-oh-three he has reposted it.

Shane is already asleep in the hotel bed when his phone begins lighting up violently on the nightstand. Ilya, who is sitting in the chair near the window in sweatpants, bare feet planted on the carpet, knows immediately he has made a mistake, though mistake feels like the wrong word for something he would absolutely do again.

He watches Shane stir.

Then wake.

Then reach for his phone.

The silence that follows is terrifying.

“Ilya.”

“Yes, baby?”

“Did you post ‘that is my husband, everybody else please suffer privately’?”

Ilya pauses.

“It seemed reasonable at time.”

“It was seven minutes ago.”

“Yes.”

Shane rubs a hand over his face.

The hotel room is dim except for the city light bleeding through the curtains and the faint glow of Ilya’s phone. There is something intimate and ridiculous about the scene, both of them older now, married, bodies sore from a brutal game, still somehow conducting the same argument they have been having for years in different forms.

“Farah is going to murder you,” Shane says.

“She is in Ottawa. I am safe until morning.”

“You think distance will protect you from Farah?”

“No.”

“Smart.”

Ilya looks down at the post again. The replies are already chaos. Fans screaming. Teammates mocking. Some normal person asking why hockey players are like this. Three separate accounts asking Shane to blink twice if he needs extraction. One extremely dedicated fan has already made a graphic of Ilya’s most unhinged husband-related posts arranged like a scientific timeline.

“I can delete,” Ilya says, though he does not want to.

Shane looks at him over the glow of his phone.

His hair is sleep-messy. There is a red line from the pillow pressed into his cheek. His mouth is soft with exhaustion. He looks, to Ilya, unbearably beloved.

“You won’t,” Shane says.

“No.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“I am very honest husband.”

“You are a menace.”

Ilya stands, crosses the room, and slides back into bed beside him. Shane allows himself to be gathered immediately, though he complains when Ilya’s feet are cold and elbows him hard in the ribs.

“Do you want me to stop?” Ilya asks after a while.

Shane does not answer immediately.

The question is quiet enough to matter.

Outside, Boston moves in sirens and headlights below them. The room smells faintly of hotel laundry and Ilya’s body wash. Shane can feel Ilya’s heartbeat against his back, steady and strong, one arm locked around his waist as if sleep itself requires a grip.

“No,” Shane says finally. “Just maybe do not imply everyone else should suffer.”

“They should.”

“Ilya.”

“Privately.”

Shane laughs, and Ilya presses his face into the back of Shane’s neck with a satisfied hum.

XV. Instagram Again, Unfortunately

The next morning, Shane wakes to find Ilya already awake, which is always suspicious.

“What did you do?” he asks immediately.

Ilya looks offended. “Why do you assume I did something?”

“Because you’re smiling like a criminal.”

“I am smiling because I love waking beside my husband.”

“You did something.”

“I posted on Instagram.”

Shane closes his eyes.

“Show me.”

Ilya hands over the phone.

It is a carousel from the night before: Shane on the bench, Shane mid-celebration, Shane glaring at a Boston defenseman, Shane sitting in the hotel room afterward with ice on his shoulder and an expression of deep irritation because Ilya had clearly taken the photo without permission.

The caption reads:

many people ask how is married life. it is mostly me trying to behave normally around this man and failing because God tests his strongest soldiers.

Shane is silent.

Ilya waits.

Then Shane scrolls down to the comments, which are already feral.

“You tagged me.”

“Yes.”

“You tagged me in the photo where I look like I want to murder you.”

“You often look like that. It is part of brand.”

“My brand?”

“Our brand.”

“Ilya.”

“You look handsome angry.”

“You need help.”

“I have help. You are here.”

Shane looks at him, and there it is again, that flicker of helpless warmth he can never fully hide.

“Do I at least look good?”

Ilya’s face changes completely.

It softens, brightens, becomes almost unbearably sincere.

“Baby,” he says, careful and clear, “you always look good.”

Shane hates how quickly that still gets to him.

He throws the phone back onto the bed and says, “You are disgusting.”

Ilya grins.

“My husband Shane thinks I am disgusting.”

“Do not make that a caption.”

Ilya pauses.

Shane points at him. “Do not.”

“I am only thinking.”

“Stop thinking.”

“Very controlling husband.”

“I swear to God—”

Ilya is laughing before Shane even gets on top of him, and then they are wrestling in the white hotel sheets, both of them sore and grown and stupid, Ilya catching Shane carefully by the waist to protect the bruise on his hip, Shane trying and failing not to smile as he pins Ilya’s wrists above his head.

“Say you’ll behave,” Shane says.

Ilya looks up at him, eyes bright.

“I will behave.”

Shane narrows his eyes.

“For how long?”

Ilya considers.

“Until lunch.”

“That is not good enough.”

“Until breakfast.”

“That is worse.”

“I am negotiating honestly.”

“You are impossible.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, and lifts his head just enough to kiss him. “But you married me.”

XVI. How Shane Rewards Him

The real tragedy, if anyone asks Ottawa, is that Shane encourages him.

He claims otherwise, and loudly.

He says things like, “I am not responsible for my husband’s internet presence,” and, “Nobody asked him to behave this way,” and, “I have tried nothing and I am all out of ideas,” which Harris points out is probably the most honest thing Shane has ever said. But then Shane does things that make the situation worse.

He leans into Ilya’s touch in public.

He likes the posts occasionally, usually at absurd hours when he thinks nobody will notice, except everyone notices, because the internet is a surveillance state powered by emotionally invested hockey fans.

He comments exactly once.

It is under a photo Ilya posts of Shane asleep on the couch with Anya draped partly across his chest, both of them lit gold by afternoon sun. The caption says:

two most beautiful creatures in house. one sheds more but complains less.

Shane comments:

You are so annoying.

The internet treats this like a royal wedding.

Ilya pins it.

Shane threatens divorce for the third time that month.

Nobody believes him.

The problem is that Shane does reward him. Not always publicly, but in the ways that matter to Ilya more. He reaches for Ilya first in sleep. He lets Ilya crowd him against kitchen counters and kiss the back of his neck. He sends him pictures when they are apart: his coffee, his view from the hotel, Anya sleeping, once just his own face with a tired little half-smile that makes Ilya sit down abruptly in the locker room because his knees behave strangely.

He lets himself be loved.

This, for Shane, is not small.

Ilya knows that. Perhaps better than anyone.

So if he becomes theatrical with the world, if he says my husband Shane too often, if he retweets edits and fights strangers and posts photographs of Shane holding coffee like it is an event worthy of documentation, it is because some private part of him remains astonished that Shane has allowed any of this to be visible.

Allowed himself to be visible.

Allowed them to be visible.

There is a difference.

And maybe Ilya is foolish, but he is not careless with that difference.

XVII. The Fight Online

The first time Ilya fights someone online, it is not even about a thirst post.

It is worse.

Someone makes a comment under an interview clip saying Shane seems cold, that he always looks annoyed, that they do not understand what people see in him beyond hockey. It is not even the cruelest thing anyone has ever said about Shane. Shane himself would probably scroll past it without blinking, because he has read worse since he was a teenager and has developed the emotional callus necessary for survival.

Ilya does not scroll past.

Ilya replies:

He is warm. You just do not know him.

It is simple.

That is what makes it devastating.

Not funny. Not horny. Not possessive in the ridiculous way fans have come to expect from him.

Just protective.

Just true.

The reply spreads faster than any thirst tweet.

Shane sees it in the car after practice. He reads it once, then again, and says nothing for so long that Ilya, driving, glances over.

“You are upset?”

“No.”

“You are quiet.”

“I’m reading.”

“You read it three times.”

Shane locks the phone and looks out the window.

The day outside is grey, wet snow dissolving against the windshield, the city passing in streaks of traffic light and winter dirt. Inside the car there is the soft thrum of heat, the faint scent of Ilya’s cologne, the quiet intimacy of being known too well.

“I would have ignored it,” Shane says.

“I know.”

“You did not have to reply.”

“I know.”

“It makes it worse sometimes.”

“I know.”

Shane turns his head then.

Ilya keeps his eyes on the road, jaw set, one hand steady on the wheel. He looks older in this light, lines at the corners of his eyes visible, mouth serious, silver beginning at his temples. Shane feels something deep in his chest shift painfully.

“Then why did you?” he asks.

Ilya is quiet for a moment.

Then he says, “Because I know you are warm.”

And that is it.

That is the whole answer.

Shane looks away again, but this time because his eyes have done something embarrassing.

That night, when they are in bed, Shane reaches for Ilya first.

Ilya notices.

Of course he notices.

He does not say anything, though.

That is how Shane knows he understands.

XVIII. The Holy Ridiculousness

Sometimes Shane wakes up in the middle of the night and finds Ilya already awake beside him, just looking at him quietly in the dark with one hand spread over Shane’s ribs like he needs physical confirmation he is still there.

“What?” Shane whispers sleepily.

Ilya presses a kiss to his forehead.

“Nothing,” he murmurs. “Still cannot believe I got you.”

And Shane, who understands now that this kind of love is both ridiculous and holy, drags him closer by the front of his shirt and says:

“Shut up and go to sleep, psycho.”

Which makes Ilya grin so happily it almost hurts to look at him.

There are no cameras then. No fans. No posts. No teammates pretending to vomit into protein shakers. No PR crisis waiting to happen. Only the dark room, the warm bed, the ordinary sounds of their house settling around them, Anya sighing in her sleep, Ilya’s body heavy and familiar beside Shane’s.

The public version of Ilya’s love is loud enough to trend.

The private version is worse.

It is the hand that finds Shane’s ribs in the dark. The careful avoidance of bruises. The kiss pressed to each place Ilya has bitten. The blanket tugged over Shane’s shoulder before Ilya is fully awake. The tea made without being requested. The silence when silence is what Shane needs. The refusal to look away from Shane’s uglier moods, his tiredness, his fear, his sharpness, all the things he once believed made him difficult to keep.

Ilya keeps him anyway.

Not locked up, not hidden, not made smaller by being wanted too much.

Kept as in held.

Kept as in chosen daily.

Kept as in seen.

And perhaps that is why Shane lets him be insane.

Why he rolls his eyes but never truly stops him. Why he complains but leans back into his arms. Why he says take it down and then smiles when Ilya refuses. Why he threatens divorce while wearing Ilya’s hoodie and drinking coffee Ilya made exactly the way he likes it.

Because love like Ilya’s is embarrassing, yes.

It is excessive.

It is undignified.

It is inconvenient at press conferences and catastrophic online.

But it is also a kind of shelter, ridiculous and enormous, built around Shane with both hands.

And Ilya, who once spent years loving him quietly enough to survive, now loves him loudly enough to make up for every silence.

So in the morning, when Shane wakes to find another notification storm because Ilya has posted a blurry photograph of their joined hands on the kitchen table with the caption best thing that ever happened to me, even when he is mean before coffee, he sighs for a very long time.

Then he likes it.

Then he comments:

You are impossible.

Ilya replies within seconds:

yes but I am yours.

Shane stares at the screen.

His ears go pink.

Across the kitchen, Ilya watches him over the rim of his mug, smiling already, because he knows. He always knows.

“You are enjoying this,” Shane says.

“Yes.”

“You are the worst person alive.”

“No,” Ilya says, setting down his coffee and reaching for him. “I am your husband.”

Shane allows himself to be pulled in.

Of course he does.

Ilya’s arms close around him, warm and certain, his mouth finding the side of Shane’s head, his hand spreading over Shane’s back with that familiar possessive gentleness that no longer feels like a claim so much as a vow repeated through muscle and touch.

“My husband Shane,” Ilya murmurs, simply because he can.

Shane closes his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, so quietly only Ilya hears it. “I know.”