Chapter Text
August 2017
The coffee was terrible.
It had been terrible every morning at the cottage because Ilya had packed a cheap tin of instant granules instead of actual coffee, and Shane had complained about it on day two, and Ilya had laughed at him and said ty takaya printsessa Hollander — you are such a princess Hollander— and something about hearing his own name in Ilya’s mouth in Russian had made Shane forget entirely what they were arguing about.
He’d been drinking terrible coffee every morning since without complaint.
“You are staring at it like it did something to you,” Ilya said from behind him.
Shane turned. Ilya was leaning in the doorway between the bedroom and the living area, hair wrecked, wearing only the sweatpants he’d pulled on at some point in the night. He looked unreasonably good. He always looked unreasonably good, and Shane had spent years being furious about it from across opposing blue lines, across rinks, award ceremonies and media rooms. Now he got to stand in a cottage kitchen in the middle of nowhere and just look at him.
“It’s still bad coffee,” Shane said.
“Yes.” Ilya crossed to him, unhurried, and took the mug directly out of Shane’s hand and drank from it. Made a face. Handed it back. “Very bad.”
“Why did you buy it.”
“I thought it was regular coffee.” He settled his hands on Shane’s hips from behind, chin coming to rest on Shane’s shoulder, and they both looked out the huge window at the tree line and the grey morning light. “I will buy you very good coffee in Boston. Then Ottawa.” Shane would even hear the wink in Ilya’s voice.
Shane’s chest did something that wasn’t quite painful.
Not yet. Ottawa was next summer — 2018, if everything held, if the plan they’d mapped out on that second night in the cottage when they actually said I love you to each other. Ilya would request the trade. Ottawa was two hours from Montreal by car, close enough for weekends, for last-minute trips, for the particular shape of a life that didn’t have to be entirely conducted in rush. It wasn’t the endgame — the endgame was further out, past retirement, past the part of their lives that required hiding — but it was the next step. A real one, spoken out loud.
Between now and Ottawa was a year. A full season. Boston and Montreal, rival cities, a handful of visits if the schedule was kind and nobody got hurt and they could manage the logistics without anyone noticing. A few days every couple of months, maybe. Shane had done the math.
He was holding onto Ottawa with both hands.
“Soon,” he said, meaning to sound casual.
Ilya’s arms tightened around him. “Soon.”
They’d been at the cottage for eleven days.
Eleven days outside of the normal rules — outside of the rivalry and the secret and the years of wanting things they hadn’t let themselves name out loud. They’d been fucking since 2010. That was the fact underneath everything else — that for nearly seven years they had found their way to each other in hotel rooms and away-game margins and the careful spaces between seasons, and neither of them had ever said what it was. Had never called it anything. Had treated it like a thing that existed only in the present tense, with no past and no future, because naming it would make it real and real things could be lost.
What had changed at the cottage was not the lust. The lust had been there for years, longer than Shane could honestly trace. What had changed was saying it out alout, I love you. Ilya first, and then Shane, and then both of them in front of Shane’s parents like something being made official after years of existing without a name. His mother’s face. His father shaking Ilya’s hand. Ilya saying boyfriend in that easy, certain way, like it was a word he’d been waiting to be allowed to use.
Shane had not understood how much the words would change things. He’d thought the words would just be a formal acknowledgment of something already established. He’d been wrong. The words had changed the shape of everything, and he was still adjusting to the new dimensions, and today was the last day, and tomorrow Ilya got on a plane to Boston.
A year, Shane thought. Then Ottawa, 2 hours away. Then the rest of their career, whatever the rest of it looked like when they finally got there.
He could do a year.
They ate breakfast at the small table by the window — eggs that Ilya made, toast that Shane made, the terrible coffee they were both now too committed to complain about. Shane was quiet. Ilya watched him the way he’d learned to watch him over eleven days and nine years — not intrusively, just steadily, the way he watched everything he was genuinely paying attention to.
“Hey,” Ilya said.
Shane looked up.
“Still today,” Ilya said. “We are still here today.”
Something in Shane’s face shifted. “I know.”
“So stop being somewhere else.”
“I’m not.”
“You are in your head. I can see you.” Ilya tapped his own temple. “Very crowded in Shane Hollander’s head. Come back out.”
Shane laughed — short and genuine, the laugh that loosened everything around his eyes. “Shut up.”
“Come back out,” Ilya said, softer.
Shane looked at him across the small table in the morning light and said, “Okay,” like it was a promise.
They spent the morning doing nothing in particular, which had been one of the revelations of the cottage.
Ilya had expected to know how to be with Shane. They’d been sleeping together for nearly seven years — he’d assumed that constituted knowing someone, at least in the relevant ways. He had not anticipated that he would discover an entirely different person once you removed the hotel rooms and the road trips and the careful time limits, once you just put Shane Hollander in a cottage with nowhere to be and let him exist without an agenda.
Shane was funny, in a dry and slightly unexpected way. Shane had opinions about weather patterns and read actual books and laughed at videos of dogs doing stupid things with his whole face in a way he never would have allowed in public. Shane made toast with the focus of someone defusing something and then was unreasonably pleased when it came out right.
Ilya had been half in love with the rival for years. He found he was completely in love with this person, this quieter and more unguarded version, and the two feelings had merged into something he had no previous reference point for.
He watched a video and then showed Shane — a dog, a refrigerator, an entire rotisserie chicken. Shane watched it twice. His face when he laughed was something Ilya intended to think about for a long time.
“We should walk,” Shane said. “Before it rains.”
Ilya looked at the window. “It is not going to rain.”
“There are clouds to the west.”
“The sky is blue, Hollander.”
“Mostly blue.”
Ilya looked at him for a moment. Put his phone down. Stood up. “Fine. We walk. When it does not rain, you apologize.”
It rained forty minutes in.
Ilya stood in the middle of the path with his arms out and said nothing. Shane made a sound behind him that was losing the battle against laughter. This is not funny, Ilya said, in a tone that made it clear he also thought it was very funny, and Shane laughed properly and Ilya let himself, and they ran back to the cottage soaked and still laughing and it was one of the best forty minutes Ilya could recently remember.
The shower was the cottage’s only one — spacious but slightly temperamental even with all the money Shane poured into the plumbing, reliable if you didn’t push the hot water too hard. They’d learned its limits over eleven days.
Shane got in first and Ilya followed, and the limited space required them close in a way Ilya had never once minded. Shane had his face tipped into the spray, rinsing his hair, eyes closed. Ilya stood behind him and watched the water run down the line of his spine and thought, not for the first time, that he wanted to be allowed to keep this.
He pressed his mouth to Shane’s shoulder.
Shane made a quiet sound and turned.
“Hi,” Shane said.
“Hi,” Ilya said.
What followed was slow — deliberately, specifically slow in a way the first days of the cottage hadn’t been. Those had been years of wanting to break the surface all at once, urgent and slightly overwhelming and wonderful in that particular desperate way. This was different. Eleven days had given them a different kind of knowledge, the kind that came from paying attention, and Ilya used it.
He walked Shane back against the tile and took his time at his throat, his collarbone, his chest — mouth and hands moving with the patience of someone who had learned exactly where Shane’s breathing changed and wanted to find every one of those places again. Shane’s hands moved into his hair. His head fell back.
“Ilya —”
“I have you,” Ilya said against his skin. “Ya tebya imeyu.”
He worked his way back up slowly, cataloguing reactions, and kissed him deep and unhurried while his hands moved over him. Shane kissed back with the focused intensity he brought to everything, one hand gripping the back of Ilya’s neck, and made a low sound against his mouth when Ilya’s hand moved lower.
“Turn around,” Ilya said quietly.
Shane turned without hesitation — that trust still undid him, the ease of it — and Ilya pressed close behind him, one hand braced on the wall, the other moving slowly down Shane’s stomach. Shane inhaled sharply.
“Please,” Shane said.
“Da,” Ilya said. “Pozhaluysta.”
He took his time. Thorough and unhurried, entirely focused on Shane, reading every shift of his breathing, every sound he made, every movement of his hips. The hot water held. The rain was loud on the roof. Shane reached back and gripped Ilya’s hip and said his name broken and quiet in a way that landed in Ilya’s chest every single time without diminishing.
Afterward Shane turned back around and Ilya held him against the wall, both of them breathing in the steam. Shane’s forehead dropped to Ilya’s shoulder.
“Still raining,” Shane said.
“Yes,” Ilya said. “You were right about the rain.”
“You owe me an apology.”
“I owe you many things.” He pressed his mouth to Shane’s temple. “Moy.”
Shane was quiet. “What does that mean?”
“Mine,” Ilya said.
Shane’s arms came around his neck and he held on, and Ilya held him back, and neither of them said anything else for a while.
They lay on top of the sheets afterward, the rain still going, the afternoon grey and soft through the window. Ilya’s breathing slowed toward sleep. Shane looked at the ceiling.
Nearly seven years, he thought. Nearly seven years of finding their way to each other and then leaving, of hotel rooms with checkout times and the particular discipline of not asking for more than what was being offered. Seven years of calling it nothing because nothing was safe and something was terrifying. And the whole time — the whole time — it had been this. He was fairly certain now it had always been this, that the feeling had been there from the beginning and he simply hadn’t had the vocabulary for it yet, or hadn’t let himself use it.
And now they’d said the words, and made the plan, and Ilya had shaken his father’s hand and called Shane his boyfriend with that easy certainty, and Shane had stood there and felt it land in him like something finally coming home.
Ottawa next summer. Two hours from Montreal. A whole season to get through first, but then —
He held onto the image of it. Ilya in Ottawa, close enough for weekends. The long-distance calls with an end date attached to them. The plan they’d made together lying in this bed, talking about the future in the hushed way of people who were afraid to jinx it by speaking too loudly.
And past that, further out — retirement. Whenever that came. The version of their lives where they didn’t have to be a secret anymore.
He believed in it. He did. He just —
His brain, reliably, kept moving.
He thought about the season coming. Boston and Montreal — rival cities with rival schedules, a full season of games and travel with maybe a handful of days overlapping if they were lucky. He thought about what Ilya’s life looked like in that year. The house in Boston that Shane had only been to once, the city that was Ilya’s in a way Montreal was Shane’s — established and comfortable, full of people and routines and a social life that Shane appeared in only as something hidden and set apart.
He thought about Svetlana.
He’d heard about her the way you absorbed facts you hadn’t asked for — old friend, from Russia, she lives in Boston now, said with that easy openness Ilya had about everything, unbothered, uncomplicated. They’d slept together. Occasionally. It wasn’t a thing.
Why would it stop? Shane thought. Why would it stop being whatever it was, with the convenient fact of love and a trade request that hadn’t happened yet and a full year of distance still to go? Ilya had never been with only one person. That wasn’t a judgment — it was simply who Ilya was, had always been, and Shane had known it for the entire seven years they’d been finding their way to each other in the dark. You didn’t ask Ilya Rozanov to change the fundamentals of who he was just because the thing between you had finally gotten a name.
And then there was the other part of it. The part Shane found harder to look at directly.
He thought about his own history. Jessica in high school — kind and patient and pretty in a way Shane had appreciated distantly, and the low confused thought that had felt like a malfunction rather than a preference for the longest time. And Rose, six months ago in Montreal, a restaurant, two disastrous nights, her perceptive and gentle observation that Shane was working something out that had nothing to do with her. She had been right. He’d spent weeks after that sitting privately with the knowledge she’d helped him name, turning it over, and then he’d come to the cottage and Ilya had said I love you and everything had rearranged itself around that fact.
That was the list. That was all of it.
And Ilya had — Shane didn’t let himself finish the count, it didn’t help anything to finish the count — Ilya had been with people in ways Shane didn’t have the reference points to imagine. Men and women, hundreds of encounters probably, an entire vast history of desire expressed and acted on freely and without apology. Ilya knew exactly what he wanted. He’d had enough experience to be certain, to know the difference between wanting someone and wanting this, to say I love you from a place of real knowledge.
Shane was twenty-six years old and had effectively been with two people and had only recently stopped pretending to himself about why.
He was not Ilya’s first anything, at least not sexually. Not his most experienced partner, not his most adventurous, not his most anything. The thought had a shape now that he turned it over — not sharp exactly, more like something slightly too heavy to carry comfortably. He could be loved and still not be sufficient. Those were not mutually exclusive propositions. Ilya could love him and still want other things from people who knew what they were doing, from Svetlana who was already there and already known and already comfortable, and Shane couldn’t ask him not to because they had never defined what this was beyond love and boyfriend and a plan that was still years away.
Shane was going to hold onto the plan. He was going to hold onto the year and then Ottawa and then eventually the rest of their lives. He was going to hold onto I love you and his father shaking Ilya’s hand and the dreamy way Ilya had said mine in the shower like it was simply true.
It was enough. He will make it enough.
Beside him Ilya stirred.
“You are thinking very loudly,” Ilya said, not opening his eyes.
“Sorry.”
“What is it.”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
Ilya opened one eye. Looked at him.
“Shane.”
“I’m fine.” Easily, evenly, the way he’d been saying it his whole life. “I was thinking about the flight tomorrow. And — Ottawa. Next summer.”
Something in Ilya’s expression softened. He shifted, pulled Shane closer, tucked Shane’s head under his chin in a way that was slightly bossy and entirely comfortable.
“Ottawa next summer,” Ilya agreed, quietly. “And then everything after.”
Shane closed his eyes.
He thought about everything after. He thought about it carefully and held it close and let it be bigger than the other thought, the heavier thought, the thought he was not going to say.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
Ilya didn’t go back to sleep.
Shane’s breathing evened out — genuinely, not performed — and Ilya lay in the grey light and looked at the ceiling.
He had been with a lot of people. This was a fact he carried without embarrassment, the way he carried other facts about himself. He had liked it — the variety, the ease of it, the particular uncomplicated pleasure of desire acted on without drama. He had been, he thought, reasonably kind about it. Honest enough. He had no apologies to make for the life he led.
And then something had shifted.
March. Boston playing in Montreal. He remembered it with more precision than he remembered most games — not the hockey, but the moment. Shane going down hard into the boards. The wrong kind of still. The wrong kind of quiet in the arena. Ilya had been on the ice and had felt something in his chest go very cold and not come back to temperature for a long time, even after the word came through that Shane was going to be okay, even after the season ended and Ilya went back to Boston and the summer began.
He hadn’t been with anyone since before that game. That was simply what had happened — not a decision, not a declaration, more like the appetite had quietly realigned itself without asking him first. There had been opportunities, as there always were, and he had found himself uninterested in all of them in a way that was new and slightly puzzling and, he’d eventually concluded, not actually that puzzling at all.
Svetlana had noticed. You seem different, she’d said. Less — and she’d waved her hand in a way that communicated the rest of the sentence. He’d told her he didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d given him the look she’d been giving him since they were teenagers in Moscow — the one that meant she knew exactly what he was talking about and was giving him time to catch up.
He knew what he wanted. That was the thing. He’d had enough experience to understand the difference between wanting someone as a habit or a convenience and whatever this was — this specific, settled, certain thing that had been growing in him for years and had finally been named in a cottage in Ontario with Shane’s parents’ cottage 10 minutes away. He knew. He was sure in a way he hadn’t been sure of many things.
The question that kept him awake was not about himself.
Shane had come to terms with himself six months ago. Maybe, quietly, been working toward it longer — Ilya suspected longer, reading back through years of context with new understanding — but the actual private reckoning had been recent. Shane was twenty-six and had had two relationships and had spent most of those twenty-six years managing the distance between who he was and what he allowed himself to show. And now the distance had collapsed and he was finally, privately, just himself.
What if that self wanted to explore?
Ilya thought about this carefully. Shane was — whatever this was between them, it was real, Ilya didn’t doubt it for a second. But real and only were different things, and Shane had barely had the chance to be himself yet. The world had just opened in a specific direction and maybe Shane deserved to walk around in it for a while before he committed to one door. Maybe asking for exclusivity now, before Shane had enough experience to know what he was agreeing to, was asking Shane to close a door he hadn’t had the chance to walk through.
He didn’t want to be another thing that limited Shane Hollander. There was already enough.
So he didn’t ask.
He pulled Shane a little closer in the grey afternoon and thought about Ottawa next summer, about the plan they’d made together in this bed, about everything after that the plan implied. He thought about Shane saying okay like a promise and the specific quality of trusting that.
The love was enough. He was almost entirely convinced of it.
He pressed his mouth to Shane’s hair and closed his eyes.
They made dinner with what was left in the fridge — a clearing-out meal, slightly absurd, things that didn’t go together. Ilya put on music and sang along to roughly half the words, confidently wrong on the others. Shane stood at the counter and chopped and watched him and tried to memorize the specific warmth of it — the light, the kitchen, this version of Ilya that only existed here, away from everything.
He thought about this time next year. Ilya in Ottawa, two hours away. Weekends. The particular relief of proximity after a year of careful distance.
He held onto it.
He thought about the game in March, Shane going into the boards, and only much later understanding what Ilya’s face had looked like in the moment — had seen it in a clip someone posted online, Ilya on the ice, going still in a way that Ilya almost never went still, and part of Shane’s chest had done something complicated that he’d filed away and not examined.
He thought about Svetlana again.
He set down the knife. Picked it back up.
The thing was that he understood it. He did. Ilya’s life was Ilya’s life — full and social and uncontained in Boston while Shane’s continued in its careful, private way in Montreal. Svetlana was there. She was comfortable and known and present in a way Shane could not be from hundreds of miles away with a secret between them. It made sense. It was not Ilya’s fault and it was not a betrayal of anything they’d defined because they hadn’t defined it, not this specifically, not in so many words.
He was going to hold onto the plan and the love and the word mine said in a shower in the rain and he was going to let the rest of it be what it was.
“You are doing it again,” Ilya said.
Shane looked up.
Ilya was watching him from across the kitchen.
“I’m fine,” Shane said.
Ilya crossed to him and took his face in both hands — that gesture, always that gesture, its directness, its certainty — and looked at him.
“You would tell me,” Ilya said. “If something was wrong.”
Shane held his gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “I would.”
The weight of it settled in his chest alongside everything else he was keeping there.
Ilya’s expression moved — not entirely convinced, choosing to accept it anyway. He kissed Shane’s forehead. Went back to the stove where something was beginning to catch.
“Blyad,” Ilya said, grabbing the pan.
Shane laughed despite himself — genuine, helpless — and Ilya shot him a look of profound dignity that made it worse.
The last evening light came warm and gold through the window. The cottage was warm around them. Shane picked up the knife and kept chopping and holding all of it — the warmth and the ache and Ottawa next summer and the love that was going to have to be enough for a year — and said nothing at all.
Shane had offered to drive Ilya directly to the airport.
It had come out casually, practical-sounding, the way he tended to package things that mattered too much to present directly. I’ll drive you to the airport. Ilya had looked at him for a moment and then said okay, and that had been that.
The morning had been quiet. They’d moved around each other in the small space with the particular efficiency of people who had been sharing it long enough to stop bumping into each other — Shane making coffee he didn’t taste, Ilya carrying his bag to the door, both of them not looking at the way the cottage looked like itself again now that their things were packed. Like it was not the place their lives changed.
Shane backed the Jeep out of the gravel drive and pointed it toward the highway and tried not to think about the fact that two weeks ago he’d been driving the other direction, Ilya in the passenger seat with hands reaching across the central console for his and his sunglasses on and it had been the beginning of something. This was the other end of it. At the end of this part of it, Shane corrected himself. Not the end.
The drive was quiet. Not uncomfortably — silence between them had never been uncomfortable, which was something Shane had noticed years ago and hadn’t known what to do with. The radio was on low. The road was straight and grey and the trees on either side had started thinking about autumn.
Shane watched the road and did not say any of the things he was thinking.
The Jeep was comfortable. Shane drove the way he did most things — focused, unhurried, both hands on the wheel at ten and two in a way that would have been funny if Ilya had been in the mood to find it funny, which he was not quite.
He watched the road and thought about what he wanted to say and how to say it and whether he had the right to say it at all.
It wasn’t about asking for anything. He’d gone back and forth on that — the question of what he wanted, what he might ask for — and had arrived, over the last two days, at a different question entirely. Not what do I want but what does Shane need to hear.
Shane was twenty-six. Shane had spent the better part of his life folded into a shape that wasn’t true, managing the distance between who he was and what he was allowed to show, and had only recently — quietly, privately, but comfortably — been allowed to unfold. Shane had had Jessica, mentioned once in passing years ago. Rose, six months ago, a gentle ending that had apparently been the final piece of something Shane had been putting together for a long time.
That was it. That was all of it.
And now Shane was finally himself. Finally in possession of something he’d been denied for years — not just Ilya, but himself, his own desire, the freedom to want what he actually wanted. And Ilya kept thinking about what it would mean to walk into that new freedom and immediately close a door.
He knew what he wanted. He’d had enough experience to be certain — that was the thing about having been with as many people as he had, it gave you a reference point, a basis for comparison, and the comparison was not close. Shane was not a habit or a convenience or a pleasant way to spend an evening. Shane was the love itself, the real version, and Ilya had known it for long enough that knowledge had worn grooves in him.
But Shane didn’t have that reference point. Shane was only just beginning to know what he was allowed to want. And if Ilya said nothing — if they went back to their separate cities and the question was never raised and Shane assumed, out of love or loyalty or the particular way Shane defaulted to wanting less than he deserved, that exclusivity was simply expected —
Ilya didn’t want to be the reason Shane never found out what else was possible.
He needed to say it. He’d been trying to say it since yesterday and the words kept failing to arrive in any form that didn’t sound like either I don’t care about you or please leave me for someone else, neither of which was what he meant.
What he meant was: I love you completely and I want you to be free and if you need to explore what that means I will survive it, I will find a way to survive it, just don’t close the door because of me.
He looked at the side of Shane’s face. Shane’s jaw was set in the way it got when he was performing fine.
Ilya opened his mouth.
“The drive is longer than I remembered,” he said.
Shane glanced at him. “It’s the same drive.”
“Yes,” Ilya said. “I know.”
He looked back at the road.
One hundred and twenty minutes became sixty. Became thirty.
Shane thought about November. The window they’d identified on day five — four days where the schedules lined up and the geography cooperated, if everything went right, which it probably wouldn’t entirely, but approximately. He’d looked at those four days on his phone more times than he was going to say out loud.
Three months. Shane could do three months. He was good at keeping his head down and his expectations managed and his feelings in the places he’d assigned them. He’d been doing it for years — the cottage was the exception, the controlled life was the rule, and he knew how to live the rule.
He thought about Ilya in Boston and made himself think about it clearly, without flinching. The huge house with floor to ceiling glass walls. The city that was Ilya’s in a way Montreal was Shane’s — easy and established and full of people who found Ilya Rozanov immediately compelling, which was everyone, because that was simply the effect Ilya had on the world.
Svetlana. Already there. Already part of the furniture of Ilya’s life in a way Shane, hidden and cities away, was not and couldn’t be.
He thought about the question he wasn’t asking. Turned it over in the dark of his own head. When you go back to Boston. When I’m not there. When months go by and it’s just calls and texts and the occasional four days if we’re lucky — what happens then? What are we, specifically? What are you, specifically, when I’m not there to be anything to?
Shane couldn’t ask. The question required the answer, and the answer —
He already knew, didn’t he. He’d known Ilya Rozanov for nine years. He knew the history, broad and unambiguous. He knew that Ilya was the kind of person who moved through the world with an openness Shane had always privately envied, that Ilya had never needed the kind of walls Shane had been building his entire life. Love didn’t change a person’s fundamentals. It wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t fair to expect it to.
The love was enough. His decision had to be final. He tightened his hands on the wheel. The airport appeared on the horizon.
Shane took the exit for departures and Ilya felt the remaining time compress into something too small.
Ilya was going to say it. He’d decided.
He turned it over one more time, looking for the right tone of it. Not I don’t mind if you see other people — too casual, made it sound like it didn’t matter when it mattered enormously. Not I want you to be free — too grand, too much like the ending of something. Something simple. Something true.
I know you’re still figuring things out. I know this is all new for you. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t — I don’t want to be the thing that stops you from —
The Jeep slowed as they hit the departures queue. Shane navigated it with both hands on the wheel, patient, reading the traffic ahead. Ilya watched him and felt the ache of someone who loved a person more than was entirely comfortable.
He thought about what it would cost him. If he said it and Shane took him at his word. If the freedom Ilya offered was a freedom Shane actually wanted and used. He thought about knowing that, sitting with that knowledge across cities for a year, and felt something in his chest go tight and cold.
He was going to say it anyway. Because it was the right thing. Because Shane deserved the option, deserved to have it explicitly offered rather than defaulted out of love and assumption. Because Ilya was not going to be another door closing on Shane Hollander.
Shane pulled up to the drop-off and put the Jeep in park. The hazard lights clicked on. Around them the airport moved with its usual indifference — luggage and people and the particular purposeful chaos of departures.
Neither of them moved.
Ilya looked at Shane. Shane was looking straight ahead through the windshield, hands still on the wheel, jaw tightening.
“Shane,” Ilya said.
Shane turned.
And the look on his face — open, in the way it only was when Shane had stopped performing, the tired and real and slightly braced look underneath all the fine — made something in Ilya’s chest shift. Made the sentence he’d been constructing all morning come apart.
Ilya said his name and Shane turned and Ilya was looking at him with an expression Shane couldn’t entirely read — open and careful at the same time, like someone standing at the edge of something.
“What,” Shane said.
Ilya’s mouth opened. Closed.
Shane watched him and thought: say it. Whatever it is, just say it. He thought it so clearly he was briefly afraid he’d said it out loud.
Ilya looked at him for a long moment. Something moved across his face — something that looked almost like it hurt — and then settled.
“November,” Ilya said. “I will see you in November.”
Shane looked at him.
“I know,” Shane said.
“Whatever it takes,” Ilya said. “I see you.”
It wasn’t what he’d been about to say. Shane was almost certain it wasn’t what he’d been about to say. He’d watched the other thing — whatever it was — move through Ilya’s expression and then get set aside, and he didn’t know what it had been and he didn’t ask, because asking meant opening a door he had decided to keep closed.
“Okay,” Shane said. His voice came out quieter than intended. “I know.”
Ilya reached over and took his face in both hands — that gesture, its directness, the way it had always undone him — and kissed him slow and certain in the drop-off lane of Ottawa airport without apparent concern for any of it. Shane gripped the front of his jacket and kissed him back with everything he wasn’t saying, which was considerable.
When they pulled apart Ilya pressed their foreheads together. His hands were still on Shane’s face. They stayed like that for a moment, just breathing, the hazard lights ticking around them.
“Moy,” Ilya said quietly.
Something in Shane’s throat tightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
One more kiss, brief. Then Ilya pulled back and reached into the backseat for his bag and got out of the Jeep. Shane watched in the side mirror as he came around to the curb, bag over his shoulder, and turned back.
He found the Jeep with his eyes. Found Shane through the window.
Two fingers. Shane lifted two fingers back.
Then Ilya turned and walked through the departures doors and was gone.
Shane sat in the drop-off lane with the hazard lights ticking and both hands on the wheel and gave himself thirty seconds — the full unguarded weight of all of it — before he put the Jeep in drive and pulled back into traffic.
November. Ottawa next summer. Everything after that. The love was enough. The plan was still the same. He drove.
September 2017
The season started the way it always started — training camp, then preseason, then the real thing, the calendar filling up with the particular relentless momentum of a hockey season that did not care what else was happening in your life. Shane had always found comfort in that. The structure of it. The way the schedule imposed an order that required nothing from him except to show up and work, which he was good at, which he had always been good at.
He showed up. He worked. He was fine.
Montreal in September was still warm, the kind of warm that felt like borrowed time, the city making the most of the light while it lasted. Shane ran in the mornings along the river before anyone else was up, just him and the water and the particular quiet of a city not yet awake. He got back to his apartment and showered and made good coffee — actual coffee, ground from beans — and sat at his kitchen island and let his mind go where it went.
It went to Ilya. It always went to Ilya.
The calls happened most evenings when the schedules allowed, which was most evenings in September before either of them was traveling at full intensity. Ilya called at odd hours, whenever he had a gap — after practice, late at night, once at eleven-thirty because he’d seen something and wanted to show Shane immediately and hadn’t considered the time until Shane picked up with his hair flat on one side.
It is only eleven-thirty, Ilya had said, unapologetic.
It’s eleven-thirty, Shane had said.
Yes. I just said that.
Shane had looked at him on the phone screen — Ilya in his kitchen, lit warmly, clearly mid-something — and felt the complicated feeling that was becoming familiar. The happiness and the ache of distance.
The calls were good. Genuinely, uncomplicated good. Ilya was easy to talk to in a way that still caught Shane slightly off guard — relaxed and funny, asking questions and actually listening to the answers. Shane found himself saying things he hadn’t planned to say, laughing at things that weren’t objectively that funny, staying on longer than he’d intended every time.
And then the call ended and his apartment was quiet.
He’d lived alone for years and had always liked it — the order, the serenity, the aloneness with his thoughts, the way things stayed where he put them, the peace of a space entirely his own. He had never minded the quiet.
He minded it now, in the aftermath of hanging up, when the warmth of Ilya’s voice was still in the room and then wasn’t. He filed this away and moved on.
October 2017
October arrived and the schedule got serious.
Shane played well. He played the way he always played when he was keeping his head down — focused, precise, channeling everything into the work because the work was available and had defined parameters in a way the rest of his life did not. His linemates noticed. His coach noticed. His numbers through October were among the best of his career.
He ran in the mornings and made good coffee and played good hockey and talked to Ilya on the phone and was, by every available measure, fine.
Ilya’s Boston house had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a forest. Shane had been there once, the previous fall, that day that ended disastrously with himself running away and getting himself a girlfriend. He remembered standing at those windows that morning, the light moving through the trees below, thinking this is where he lives when I’m not around. This is the version of him I don’t see.
He thought about those windows more than was useful.
Ilya’s life in Boston was established and comfortable and full in ways that Shane’s life in Montreal — careful, contained, private — was not. Ilya went out. He’d always gone out, it was part of who he was, the social ease of someone who had never needed to construct careful barriers between himself and other people. Shane scrolled past the occasional tagged photo in his feed and kept scrolling without stopping, which he was getting better at.
The gap between them wasn’t just geography. That was the thing Shane kept arriving at, in the quiet after calls, in the early mornings before his brain had fully engaged its management systems. It wasn’t just Boston and Montreal and a handful of visits per year. It was everything Ilya knew about himself and everything Shane was still learning. Ilya moved through the world with the confidence of someone who had never had to wonder — who had wanted things and acted on them freely and accumulated the kind of self-knowledge that only came from experience. He knew what he liked. He knew what he was good at. He knew, with a certainty Shane couldn’t quite imagine from the inside, exactly what he wanted and who he was.
Shane was still in the early stages of understanding what he was allowed to want at all.
Jessica in high school — kind, patient, pretty in a way Shane had registered distantly, and the low confused wanting that had felt like a malfunction rather than a preference. Rose, six months ago, two lackluster bedroom performances and a gentle observation that had cracked something open in him he was still sorting through. That was the list. That was the complete accounting of Shane Hollander’s experience, set against Ilya’s history like a single candle next to something considerably larger.
He wasn’t Ilya’s first anything. He had made a kind of peace with this — or was constructing a peace with it, or was at least maintaining the appearance of peace, which was close enough for now. What nagged wasn’t the past exactly. The past was the past and Shane had no claim on it. What nagged was the question of what he could actually offer, practically, going forward. Not in hockey — he knew who he was on the ice, had never doubted that version of himself — but here, in this, in the private territory of desire and intimacy that he was only just beginning to map. There was a difference between wanting to be enough and actually being enough, and he felt that difference as a specific quiet inadequacy he carried around like something in his coat pocket that he kept finding with his hand.
A seemingly regular call happened on a Wednesday in mid-October.
Shane was on his couch after a home game, tired in the pleasant way of a well-played win, and Ilya called and they talked for a while about nothing in particular — the game, some team drama Ilya found amusing, a documentary Shane had been watching. Normal. Easy.
And then Ilya said hold on and turned away from the camera, and Shane heard a voice in the background.
A woman’s voice. Low, unhurried, comfortable in the way of someone who knew exactly where they were.
Ilya said something back in Russian — short, casual, laughing slightly — and turned back to the screen. “Sorry. Svetlana stopped by.”
“Oh,” Shane said.
“She says my TV is better than hers.” Another easy eye-roll, fond rather than annoyed. “Which is true, but still.”
“Right,” Shane said. “No, that’s — yeah. Of course.”
Ilya looked at him for a moment with the attentiveness he sometimes had — the look that meant he was actually paying attention rather than just looking — and then something off-screen drew his attention again and he said something else in Russian and laughed.
Shane kept his face neutral and his voice level and they wrapped up the call a few minutes later. Ilya had company. It was fine. Shane said goodnight and Ilya said talk tomorrow and the screen went dark.
The apartment was very quiet.
She stopped by. Not a planned thing, apparently. A casual thing — the kind of casual that meant her stopping by was unremarkable enough not to require prior notice, ordinary enough that Ilya had mentioned it the way you mentioned weather. That kind of casual implied a familiarity Shane didn’t need to spell out to himself. It implied an ease of access to Ilya’s life and space that Shane, cities away, didn’t have and couldn’t have, and probably wouldn’t have even if he lived in the same city given that nobody in Ilya’s life knew Shane was anything other than a rival.
Nobody knew. That was the other thing sitting quietly in the room. Ilya hadn’t told Svetlana about them. They decided they will keep this a secret for the sake of their careers. But it meant that to everyone in Ilya’s actual daily life, Shane Hollander was just the Montreal captain who Ilya had a famous rivalry with. Nothing more. While Svetlana was there, known, woven in, stopping by on a Wednesday because the TV was better. If Ilya’s teammate or friend stopped by when Svetlana was there watching tv, no one would bat an eye.
He was aware he was constructing the worst available interpretation of an ordinary moment. The clinical part of his brain could see himself doing it clearly. It didn’t help.
Shane sat in his quiet apartment and let the images arrange themselves whether he wanted them to or not — the high windows he’d stood at once, the light through the forest, a space that was Ilya’s in all the ways a place could be someone’s. Svetlana in it. The easy Russian back-and-forth of two people who had known each other since they were teenagers, who had history layered over history, who were comfortable in the specific way that didn’t need explaining.
The word occasionally sat in his head and refused to be quiet.
He knew what he was doing. He made himself stop, picked up the remote, turned the television on. Watched it without absorbing anything for a while.
The love was enough. The plan was still their plan — Ottawa next summer, everything after, the future they’d mapped out on that night in the cottage that was still waiting for them intact. He had no right to anything beyond what had been offered. He had no right to ask about things that were none of his business, things that had existed long before he was a relevant factor, things that were the entirely predictable consequence of loving someone from cities away while remaining their secret.
He went to bed and lay in the dark for a while, and eventually the ceiling stopped being interesting, and he slept.
November 2017
November approached.
The four days they’d identified contracted to three when a scheduling change moved one of Shane’s games. Three days was still three days. Montreal to Boston,Ilya’s house, the windows.
Shane packed a bag and got in his Jeep and drove — let himself just sit with how much he’d missed Ilya, the real uncompressed amount. It was more than he’d admitted even to himself. The calls were good and also they were not the same thing and he had been not-thinking about that distinction for two months.
The voice in the background of the October call surfaced briefly and he put it back where it lived.
Ottawa next summer. Everything after. The love was enough.
The Boston city lights appeared around the highways and Shane looked at them and set his jaw and was, going into this, fine.
The thing about being in the same room as Ilya was that it made everything else very difficult to remember. Shane had known this for years — had known it the way you knew things you weren’t supposed to know, filed under a category he hadn’t had a name for until recently. The effect of Ilya’s physical presence on Shane’s ability to think clearly was well-documented in Shane’s private experience and had caused him no small amount of trouble over the years. It had not diminished with legitimacy. If anything it was worse now, now that he was allowed to look.
Ilya opened the door of his house and Shane had approximately half a second to register that he looked beautiful — he always looked beautiful, it was one of his more irritating qualities — before Ilya had pulled him inside by the front of his jacket and the door had closed behind them and they were kissing in the entryway with the focused intensity of two people who had been on the phone for two months and were done with the phone.
Shane dropped his bag somewhere. He didn’t see where.
Ilya had been counting down to this for weeks without letting himself count down to this, which was a distinction that had mattered to him and which Shane’s arrival had immediately rendered irrelevant.
He had Shane in his house. His actual space, not a hotel room or the careful neutral territory they’d been navigating for years — and the reality of it was better than the anticipation, which had already been considerable. Shane moved through the house with the ease of someone who had been here before, who knew where things were, who didn’t need orienting. Something about that — the small ordinary fact of it — sat warmly in Ilya’s chest in a way he didn’t bother analyzing.
Later, the afternoon light through the floor-to-ceiling windows having shifted into the long gold of early evening, they lay tangled on Ilya’s bed. Ilya had his hand in Shane’s hair and was looking at the ceiling with the contentment of someone who had stopped needing to want something because the thing was right here.
“Better than the phone,” Ilya said.
“Marginally,” Shane said.
Ilya tugged his hair. Shane smiled at the ceiling, and Ilya looked at that smile and felt something straightforward and enormous, the way he often did when Shane wasn’t performing anything.
“I missed you,” he said.
Shane turned his head. Something moved through his expression and then settled into something warm. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
Outside the windows the trees were fully turned, orange and gold in the fading light, the forest going on as far as either of them could see. Shane looked at it the way he always looked at it — drawn to it, settled by it. Ilya watched him look and thought about the coming Christmas. They’d talked about it on the phone last week, tentatively — Shane’s parents in Ottawa, the possibility of Ilya being there, the careful negotiation of schedules and explanations and what Ilya’s presence in the Hollander family Christmas could plausibly look like to anyone watching. It was still tentative. Ilya was hoping it became less tentative.
He wanted to meet Shane in real places. Not just here, not just stolen days. He wanted the ordinary versions of things.
“Christmas,” he said. “Still possible?”
Shane turned from the windows. “Still possible,” he said. “Mum’s already planning food.”
Ilya smiled. “Good. Your mother’s food is better than yours.”
“My food is fine.”
“Your food is very fine,” Ilya agreed, and Shane threw a pillow at him.
The second day was quieter.
They went out separately in the morning — still necessary, still careful, the habit of it so ingrained that it barely registered as a loss anymore, though it was one — and met back at the penthouse in the early afternoon. Shane came in with coffee, two cups, handed one to Ilya without being asked. Ilya accepted it and thought about all the small ways you learned a person without meaning to.
Shane went to the windows. He always went to the windows.
Ilya sat on the kitchen counter and watched him stand there in the flat afternoon light with his coffee and his straight back and the stillness he had, and thought: next summer. Ottawa. Two hours from Montreal. The version of things where Shane standing at his windows wasn’t a three-day event but simply a Friday afternoon.
He noticed Shane’s gaze pass briefly over the paperback on the counter — Svetlana’s, left from earlier, she was halfway through it. Shane’s eyes moved on without comment. Ilya opened his mouth and then didn’t say anything, because what was there to say that didn’t require a longer conversation that was worth wasting their precious time together on.
Shane turned from the windows. “You’re staring.”
“Yes,” Ilya said, unashamed.
Shane’s mouth did the almost-smile he deployed when he was trying not to be pleased about something. He came to the counter and stood beside Ilya and they drank their coffee and looked at the forest together and it was easy in the way that reminded Ilya, reliably, why seven years of this had never been enough to make him want to stop.
That evening they ordered food and ate on the couch and Ilya put something on television and was contently aware that Shane was paying more attention to him than to the screen. He had always liked Shane’s attention. Had been the object of it across hockey rinks for years — had felt it like a hand between his shoulder blades, pressure and warmth — and then in other contexts, and it had never stopped mattering.
Halfway through the second episode he said, without particularly thinking about it, “Svetlana asked if I wanted to come to her cousin’s thing this week. I said I had plans.”
Shane made a neutral sound.
“He was a good lay actually,” Ilya said, in the tone of someone relaying mild trivia, “but he tired me out. Very enthusiastic.” He ate something. “Made things slightly awkward afterward. Thought it meant more than it did. Svetlana was annoyed at both of us for about a month.”
A beat of silence.
“Right,” Shane said.
“She got over it.” Ilya glanced at the screen. “The cousin is still annoying though.”
Shane laughed — short, controlled, the laugh he produced when something landed and he didn’t want to react too much to it. Ilya looked at him. Shane was looking at the television with an expression that was fine and steady and revealed nothing.
Ilya had said this fling the way he said most things about his past — easily, without ceremony, because it was just his life and he’d never seen the point of treating it otherwise. But in the moment of Shane’s careful laugh he became aware of it differently. The receiving end of it. Shane had gone still in a way that was subtle enough that most people would miss it entirely and Ilya, who had been studying Shane Hollander across various distances for seven years, did not miss it.
He put his hand on Shane’s knee. Not making anything of it. Just there.
Shane didn’t move away. After a moment the line of his shoulders dropped very slightly, which Ilya counted.
They watched the television. The evening settled.
Shane ate his food and watched the screen and was fine.
He was fine. Ilya’s cousin story was a nothing detail, a footnote, the kind of casual history Ilya carried around in great abundance and distributed without malice because why would he be careful about it, it was just his life. Shane understood this. He respected it, genuinely, the openness of it. He was not going to be the person who flinched every time Ilya’s past came up in conversation. That was not who he was going to be in this.
He thought about his own list. Jessica, who he’d wanted in a muted and confused way that had taken years to understand. Rose, briefly, kindly, her perceptive restaurant observation that had cracked something open. Two people. That was the complete accounting, and it sat against Ilya’s history the way a footnote sat against a novel.
Ilya’s hand was warm on his knee.
He focused on that. The warmth and the weight of it, the ease with which Ilya touched him, as if Shane was something he had the right to reach for without thinking. He did have the right. That was real. The love was real, the plan was real, Christmas in Ottawa was real, and next summer was coming and the shape of things would change.
He ate his food and was fine and let Ilya’s hand be enough, which it was.
Later, in bed, Ilya talked.
It happened sometimes — the house at night loosened things, the dark and the view and the quiet of it. Tonight it was a road trip from a few years back, Anaheim, a hotel bar, a story about a teammate’s failed attempt at charm. Ilya told it well, with timing and enjoyment, and Shane listened and laughed at the right moments and offered dry commentary and was, from the outside, exactly the kind of easy audience the story deserved.
There was a woman in it. She’d been fascinating, Ilya said — funny and beautiful, the kind of person who made a conversation feel like it was going somewhere. He left the implication where it was.
Shane filed it. He had a system by now.
What he couldn’t file was the way Ilya looked when he talked about his past — unguarded, comfortable, at home in his own history in a way Shane could barely imagine from the inside. Ilya had never had to make peace with who he was. He had simply always been it, loudly and without apology, and the ease of that was something Shane had been privately envying for so long it had become background noise.
He lay beside Ilya in the dark and let him talk and laughed when it was funny and felt the gap between them as a quiet and familiar weight, and when Ilya finally wound down and the room went still Shane looked at the ceiling and listened to him breathe and thought about Ottawa and Christmas and next summer and let those things be larger than the other thing, which they were.
Mostly.
Ilya’s arm came around him and pulled him in.
“You went quiet,” Ilya said.
“Tired,” Shane said.
Ilya was still for a moment. His hand moved once, slowly, across Shane’s back. Shane had the sense, not for the first time, that Ilya was about to say something and was deciding whether to say it.
He didn’t say it.
“Sleep,” Ilya said instead.
Shane closed his eyes.
The third day had the weight of all last days.
They didn’t talk about it. They moved through the hours with the unspoken agreement of people who had decided to be present rather than mourn in advance — the slow morning, the good coffee, the hockey on television in the afternoon and the argument that came with it, easy and familiar and entirely without anger, the way they had always argued about hockey, which was to say with total conviction and some enjoyment and the knowledge that neither of them was actually going to lose.
Shane won the argument. Ilya disputed this. Shane let him dispute it because they both knew.
The evening was deliberate in a way neither of them named.
And then Shane’s bag was at the door and the car was downstairs and they were standing in the entryway. Ilya looked at Shane. Shane looked back. They were both performing fine and they both knew it and neither of them said so.
Ilya walked to him and kissed him properly, the car downstairs notwithstanding. Shane held on longer than he’d meant to.
“Christmas,” Ilya said. “And then January.”
Shane pulled back and looked at him. Something in his chest loosened slightly. “Christmas,” he agreed.
Ilya took his face in both hands — that gesture, always that gesture — and looked at him with the open, direct expression that had no performance in it whatsoever. Shane held his gaze and gave him steady and gave him fine and gave him nothing to worry about.
“Moy,” Ilya said quietly.
“Yeah,” Shane said.
He picked up his bag and went.
Ilya stood at the windows after.
The forest was dark now, just shapes, the city lights distant beyond the trees. The house was quiet in a way it hadn’t been for three days.
He stood there with his cold coffee and let the quiet be what it was.
He thought about Shane in his Jeep driving back to Montreal — the composed, contained, perfectly managed version of Shane that existed for public consumption, the version that gave nothing away. He thought about Shane’s shoulder going still when he mentioned the cousin. The careful laugh. The way he’d gone quiet after the Anaheim story and said tired when Ilya asked.
He thought about what he should have said.
Then he set his coffee down and went to bed, and lay in the dark on his side of it, and stared at the ceiling, and let Christmas be something to move toward.