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merino wool crisis

Ilya's moment of crisis comes while he is purchasing a merino wool base layer at a specialist cycling shop in downtown Toronto.

There is, improbably, a gift wrapping option, which Ilya goes along with because why the hell not. Left to his own devices, he'd probably just leave it in the paper bag it came in.

"Great," says the shop assistant, whose name is Matt and who has been very good about pretending he doesn't recognise Ilya, even with his colleagues avidly gawking from behind the bicycle maintenance stands. "And this is for…"

Lover, Ilya's mind supplies, unbidden.

"Situationship," he says instead, using the word one of the girls in the kids hockey team had said when the gang of them had prised the tale of Beautiful Freckles out of Ilya.

He realises his mistake in giving any sort of reply when Matt, who had earlier patiently waited while Ilya did an internet search of 'daily temperature winter in ottawa', gives Ilya a sympathetic look.

"Long distance, huh," Matt says. "That's rough."

"It's not long distance," says Ilya, more sharply than is polite. "And I don't need gift wrapping."

"Oh, sorry," says Matt, and puts away the wrapping paper with bicycles on it.

Given the choices of paper available behind the counter, Ilya isn't sure why Matt even bothered to ask. If Ilya had said lover, would Matt have selected the teal paper with the line art of canals in Amsterdam? The whole thing is preposterous.

The problem is that Ilya has never had a situationship — or lover, for that matter — that has simultaneously involved both the kind of toe curling sex he still gets flashbacks to at inopportune moments throughout the day, as well as driving seventy kilometres to collect bike panniers purchased after a week of negotiations on Facebook Marketplace.

Ilya could just as easily have bought the very same thing off the internet in five minutes, but Shane had maintained that the panniers were good as new. He'd know, because he'd insisted that the seller take photographs from multiple angles under indoor and outdoor lighting, and because experiencing the constant compulsion to ensure Best Value is as much an occupational hazard for him as concussions had been for Ilya.

"Is it still value for money if it involves a two hour round trip on a Sunday?" Ilya had asked.

"Yes," Shane had said, without an ounce of hesitation, and so Ilya had driven them out in the snow while Shane took over the car's audio system to put on a podcast that Ilya understood only very little of on account of it being in French and also about something terribly boring like the history of the Montreal subway system. Shane is working towards something he'd described as his 'CBC language profile', which Ilya understands to be some kind of federal government career progression thing.

Shane had fallen asleep on the ride back after all the excitement about the panniers. Ilya had glanced over at him while stopped at a traffic light and experienced a strange, tender feeling, like pressing on the edge of a bruise, only the bruise was inside his chest.

Ilya had dismissed the feeling out of hand, except he has now just spent half an hour in the bicycle shop considering the difference between 190 gsm and 250 gsm merino wool and which would best keep Shane warm while wicking sweat during his morning commutes.

This is yet another thing Ilya has never done before. The only person whose sweat he has ever contemplated the wicking of has been himself.

coffee shop sequence

"Why did they offer you a job when they can't even give you a desk?" asked Svetlana over the phone a year and a half ago, while Ilya was camped out at the Second Cup down the road from the drab downtown office building that housed, among other things, the Access Sport Ontario office.

Years ago, around the time Ilya had just been traded to Vancouver, she had taken to calling Ilya once a week, and had never quite kicked the habit.

"It is a battle royal for hotdesks," Ilya replied. "I am only there sometimes for meetings, why do I need one?"

What he didn't mention to Svetlana is that there had also been an unexplained flooding incident in one of the corridors, which health and safety had only cordoned off three days after it had first happened.

"I don't understand," said Svetlana, not for the first time. "You could have gone into ultramarathons, or opened a distillery —"

"Ah, Sveta," said Ilya, "did you forget that I stopped drinking. Or my busted knees, or the temperamental ankle, or —"

"That's beside the point," replied Svetlana. "You can do whatever you want. Whatever suits you. Not… this. Fighting over desks, typing away on your little computer."

The story of how Ilya ended up working for a newly-constituted provincial authority on a part-time consultant basis was a dull and deeply stupid one that everybody nonetheless seemed unduly interested in. The short version was that the charity that he'd worked with pre-retirement to promote access to hockey for children had undergone one too many governance scandals, and when the province had decided to take over its functions, Ilya had been asked if he'd wanted to continue. Freshly retired and directionless, he'd signed a contract and now had an Access Sport Ontario .ca email address and a nebulous title that made no sense.

What this really meant was that he continued coaching the teams he'd committed to coach when the charity had still been a charity, except he also had a slew of bewildering meetings clogging the Outlook calendar on a computer he hadn't asked for.

"— real estate!" Svetlana was saying.

Ilya checked his watch. It was 8.39am.

"I have to hang up now," he said.

"What?"

"I'll call you back."

"No, you won't —"

"Goodbye!"

There was one silver lining to the many meetings, no desk situation: if Ilya arrived early to the cafe and sat by the large glass window, he could at least cast an appreciative eye over the guy who always came cycling over to the bicycle rack at exactly 8.40am, who could be relied on to spend five minutes fastidiously locking his bicycle while Ilya admired the curve of his ass under his shorts as he bent over to do so.

It was the small joys in life, really.

This morning, he watched as the bike guy tipped his head back to drink from his water bottle, exposing the line of his neck; throat bobbing as he swallowed. Then Ilya pretended not to look as the bike guy turned and entered the cafe, travel mug in hand.

Ilya returned to his clunker of a laptop, where the latest Shane Hollander procurement flowchart sat open.

If Ilya was to have someone close to a nemesis in the Ontario Public Service, it would be Shane Hollander, whom Ilya had never met but had been the originator of much of the apparatus set up seemingly just to torment Ilya.

The day Patrice had broken the news that Access Sport Ontario would not in fact be running what had previously been the charity's annual hockey tournament, it had been in the context of the team having to fill out some kind of excel spreadsheet with their projected procurement needs for the financial year.

"What do you mean, we are not doing the tournament?" Ilya had said, wheeling across and taking over the mouse from the co-op, Dany (short for Daenerys), so that he could click futilely through the tabs of the multi-sheet monstrosity projected onto the screen.

Patrice had said something about procurement lead times, and no longer being able to hire the old vendor who had coordinated everything for the charity. This explanation had been incomprehensible to Ilya, much in the same way that the — unnecessary, in Ilya's opinion — Sharepoint-to-EDRMS tutorial Dany had given him when he had first joined had been incomprehensible.

"Surely there is a way," Ilya had said, only to be met with resigned stares all around the table.

But Ilya had not left Russia and played seventeen years of professional hockey to give up in the first instance.

"I will take care of this," Ilya had said, to more baffled glances around the room. To be fair, he had only come in for the meeting that morning because someone from the communications team had wanted to discuss some kind of sports access social media campaign Ilya was to feature in; nobody, least of all Ilya, had expected him to do any actual work.

"I don't really know if this can be 'taken care of'," Patrice had said doubtfully, but he also hadn't said no.

"Send this to me," Ilya had told Dany. "I will get to the bottom of it."

Ilya had once played twenty-two minutes of a playoff game with one knee held together mostly by tape and a prayer, against Boston, in front of a Montreal home crowd that still hadn't quite decided if they wanted him there. All of which was to say, he was not a stranger to pain. Even then, nothing in his life had prepared him for the unique agony of navigating the OPS's public procurement framework.

In the weeks that followed, Ilya had found himself stymied at every turn — from the Procure Ontario handbook with the colour-coded projected timeline infographics for every type of procurement (prepared by one "Shane Hollander") to the email to the team about how they could not use a directed contract (which copied "Shane Hollander"), to the flowchart of different competitive and non-competitive procurement methods (created by "Shane Hollander").

At the height of his despair he'd gone back and opened the email Dany had forwarded him that fateful afternoon. Sure enough, it had been sent by Shane Hollander, Supply Chain Project Lead at Procure Ontario.

It was that morning, when Ilya was puzzling through yet another Shane Hollander document (about which shared services provider to use) that he glanced up and saw someone trying to steal bike guy's bike.

There was really only one thing an upstanding Canadian citizen such as Ilya could do, which was to pound on the glass and yell, "Someone's stealing that bike!"

The thief looked up for a second at Ilya gesticulating wildly in the window, which was enough time for bike guy to hurry out and chase him off.

The thief ran away, leaving the bike behind. Bike guy had spilled half his travel mug of coffee onto himself, and was now looking down at his cycling jacket with some consternation. He seemed to come to some sort of decision, and put his travel mug into its cup-holder on his bike before unzipping his jacket and shrugging it off.

At the sight of bike guy's bare arms and the outlines of his broad chest under his clingingly thin technical top, Ilya was visited by the sudden and overwhelming urge to leap to his feet and applaud.

It was for the best that he didn't, because bike guy glanced over at Ilya standing behind the glass, and then walked over.

Thank you, he mouthed, gesturing towards his bike.

Ilya was so used to observing bike guy from behind the safety of the glass that it was unnerving to have him looking back at Ilya like this.

He had beautiful freckles.

"No problem," Ilya replied, a beat late. He held up a napkin and pointed to it. "Need this?"

Bike guy, seemingly reminded of his coffee spill once again, frowned. Then his smartwatch lit up with a phone call.

Bike guy waved, mouthed thanks again, climbed onto his bike, and cycled off.

Later that day, after a meeting in which Patrice had asked questions about the tournament procurement situation that Ilya had fended off with the same studied casualness as he'd had the press about various unspecified lower body injuries over the years, Ilya took a moment to vividly flash back to the gorgeous lines of bike guy's arms as he'd pulled the bike from the rack. The unconscious little hop that he'd done as he swung his leg over the seat.

Then he looked back at his screen, where the Shane Hollander flowchart still sat open, with its arrows spilling over multiple pages and some diamonds filled with text so tiny Ilya had to squint to read it, only to find that the tiny text had fucking footnotes of their own.

This contrast between the sublime and the abominable was so great that Ilya felt, for a moment, physically unwell.

He did ten angry seconds of breathing exercises. Then, when the exercises did not work, he said, "Fuck this shit," and opened Outlook to compose an email to Shane Hollander, the bane of his existence.

Dear Mr Hollander,

I am staring into an unknowable void as I fill in this Procurement Rationale Report Form. Unknowable because I understand nothing. What is the threshold of $121,200 Canadian dollars? What is the meaning of "VOR arrangement"? Is this form even the correct form?

I tried to apply the flowchart but the font is very small.

Sorry to be emailing you like this. I hope you can help.

Yours sincerely,

Ilya Rozanov

He got a reply several hours later, which made him let out a primal yell of frustration, startling the three guys who had come to adjust the sign outside the flooded corridor.

Dear Mr Rozanov,

Thanks for your email. That is most certainly the wrong form.

Assuming you are procuring for Access Sport Ontario, you may wish to refer to this microsite for OPS buyers. In particular, the following mini-guides may be of relevance…

Ilya clicked through each of the mini guides, which he had in fact attempted to read before, but now was compelled to study in detail so that he could fire back another reply to Shane Hollander.

It was tough going. There were cross-references to other mini guides, and sprawling tables that summarised nothing. Sometimes there would be a term that would be capitalised, except that Ilya had long since lost the mini-guide glossary amidst the sea of tabs in his browser.

His only succour was that the next morning, Ilya caught bike guy's gaze through the glass and winked, and got to see the flustered little way he fumbled with his bicycle lock.

Dear Mr Hollander,

You say "micro" and "mini" as if making the information smaller will help my problem, but in truth I cannot make sense of any of it. Maybe this is a "me problem" as they say, but I cannot imagine I am the only one who feels this way, going round and round like a dog chasing its tail —

On Wednesday, he didn't pretend not to look as bike guy came into the coffee shop, and was treated to the experience of bike guy making intermittent flustered eye contact with Ilya while he stood in line, a steady flush creeping down the back of his neck.

Dear Mr Rozanov,

I have personally reviewed each of those mini-guides over the past six months, both for accuracy and readability. If you have any feedback on portions that are unclear, please let me know.

Be that as it may, here are my answers to your questions...

Ilya paused and had to stare off into the distance for a moment. Shane Hollander had put every single one of Ilya's questions into the leftmost column of a table, with answers on the middle column and a third column with links to the dreaded microsite.

…Please refer any other queries you may have to the Procure Ontario business partners for Access Sport Ontario, who are listed on this INFO-GO page.

Dear Mr Hollander,

Thank you for your answers to my questions. But my real question is this: why can I not just book the rinks 12 separate times?

He did not receive a reply that day. The next morning, bike guy rode up to the cafe at great speed, left his bike leaning against the rack without locking it, and came striding through the door and straight towards Ilya.

"Somebody is going to steal your bike," said Ilya, as bike guy bore down on him, eyes bright, cheeks high with colour, a helmeted vision in moisture-wicking technical fabric.

Then bike guy opened his mouth and said: "You can't book the rinks twelve separate times, because that would be contract splitting."

For a full five seconds Ilya just stared at him, vaguely aware that his own mouth had fallen open.

"You're Ilya Rozanov, aren't you?" said bike guy, sticking out his hand. "Shane Hollander."

"From Procure Ontario," said Ilya faintly, barely managing to take bike guy's hand and shake it.

"You can't just unnecessarily divide a procurement requirement into smaller contracts," bike guy who turned out to also be Shane Hollander continued. "As you would know if you'd read the mini-guide on the Treasury Board's Contracting Policy."

procurement conference

Send me naughty selfies, Ilya texts Shane. It's the first day of Shane's four-day procurement conference; he's probably still eating breakfast at the hotel.

"Where is Fredericton? Can I find it on a map?" Ilya had asked, when Shane had told Ilya where the conference was going to be held.

"Fuck off," Shane had said, "It's the capital city of New Brunswick."

"Do they even have a hockey team?" Ilya had asked.

Shane had frowned at Ilya. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"I just want to know if the capital city of New Brunswick has a hockey team."

"The UNB Reds are very good," Shane had said, and when Ilya had stared at him uncomprehendingly, he'd added, "They're the university hockey team."

"Okay," Ilya had said, "this is another McGill all over again."

In the old days, by which Ilya really means the Boston days, because the season in Vancouver had been a blur of adjusting his medication and trying really fucking hard not to kill himself, and his four years in Montreal had been a high-pressure mindfuck of trying to 'restore the franchise to its former glory' while the fans tried to decide whether they loved him now or still wanted to kill him and, well.

The point is, in the old days, he'd land in a city and pull out his phone before the seatbelt sign had been switched off; send a text to one of his regular hookups and that would be his night sorted. And then he'd go months before texting that person again.

Four days is nothing, is the point.

Over the course of the morning, Shane sends Ilya: eight slightly blurry photographs of presentation slides he's deemed notable, one picture of a fat naked cherub statue hugging a fish, and an assortment of sundry thoughts such as:

It's 2026, why are they still talking about agile contracting like they've just discovered fire?

This plenary on attracting Gen Zs to the procurement community is pure fluff.

He goes silent for the rest of the afternoon, which Ilya surmises means that the programme has gotten good and Shane no longer needs to distract himself.

Shane does send Ilya one more photograph in the evening — a selfie in which he's wearing his glasses, conference lanyard ribbon still visible around his neck, which. What does it say about Ilya, that the glasses selfie does more for him at this point than a dick pic might?

Sexy, Ilya replies, and then follows up with the red faced sweating man emoji.

This has happened often enough that Shane doesn't even respond to Ilya's message; just follows up with, I'm grabbing dinner with some old PCPS colleagues.

Boring, Ilya replies, imagining Shane at a table of procurement nerds.

They have a more or less regular schedule for hook-ups; that is to say — at least one day midweek unless Ilya is travelling for coaching, and a standing arrangement on Saturday night which usually stretches into an errand-filled Sunday and Ilya gently bullying Shane into letting Ilya drive him to various places, such as Costco. They do not do Friday nights because that is when Shane attends a French language exchange cafe that is so impossibly nerdy that there are assigned readings for every session.

It is Tuesday, which is just as likely as not to be a Shane day. Ilya picks at some leftovers from his fridge; fitfully smokes half a cigarette out on the balcony even though nobody is there to make pointed remarks about the smell. Flips through channels on the television and lands on nothing good, but leaves it on while he forces himself to write in his stupid little gratitude journal.

Find a rhythm, his therapist had told him, when he'd first broached the topic of retirement. Well, Doctor Galina, Ilya thinks now, a rhythm is dangerous because what if it changes, huh. Then you wind up back alone at home with nothing to do except write in your gratitude journal.

He writes: 1. Shane selfie with glasses; he looks at the basketball players running across his television and writes, 2. Not worrying about playing with busted knee. And then he is stuck for a while on a third thing before he gives up.

There was a bad thing he used to do when he found himself at loose ends, which was to go on YouTube and watch compilation videos of himself. Whether it was 'ILYA ROZANOV 10 BEST GOALS' or 'Most Disappointing Ilya Rozanov Moments' didn't matter — the effect would still be the same, like tonguing a cut in his mouth or pressing onto a fractured finger: a compulsive pain, indulgent and self-flagellating. Ilya Rozanov, young and fearless, whipping the puck into the goal like an afterthought. Ilya Rozanov, an old wounded dog, snarling and desperate and favouring one leg, passes not connecting, missing and missing and missing.

Ilya picks up his remote and switches to YouTube with the idle thought of doing it now, with nobody around, especially not Svetlana who will tell him he is just masturbating with no discernible payoff.

Except in place of all the hockey-related thumbnails Ilya had once had easy access to, Ilya's home screen is now filled with a mix of bear sanctuary videos and twenty minute-long commuter bike gear reviews.

He hadn't thought Shane has spent that much time over at Ilya's place watching YouTube of all things, but here is the evidence of every odd evening in which Shane has paused and said, "Do you mind if I put this on, a new video just came out —" and they end up watching some rescued bear playing in the snow or whatever, or clips from that Rose Landry-narrated documentary, the one that Shane had gotten so invested in that he'd actually rebuffed — rebuffed! — Ilya's wandering hands one night.

"Hang on a second," Shane had said, catching Ilya's wrist and firmly removing it from underneath his shorts. "I need to see if this bear's gonna be okay."

Ilya had sulked a little, and then put his feet in Shane's lap, which Shane had petted absently while watching the vet on TV talk about Margot the bear's chances of surviving her upcoming surgery.

You have fucked up my youtube, Ilya texts Shane now, even though Shane is probably still in the middle of dinner. All my videos are bears.

??? Shane sends back. Just search for what you want?

Even though he's feeling out of sorts, he's not quite morose enough to actually type in the words 'ilya rozanov compilation'. He puts on another bear video instead, and falls asleep to the sounds of Nicholas the bear making a bed and taking a nap in the forest.

coffee shop part 2

"Were you doing it just to fuck with me?" Shane Hollander asked. He looked genuinely angry. Also, he'd wrenched his helmet off and the headband he wore under it, and his hair was slightly damp and sticking up messily. It was very distracting.

"Doing what?" asked Ilya, a beat too late.

Shane Hollander was beginning to blush; Ilya watched, fascinated, as it crept down his throat.

"All of… that. You know."

"I don't know," said Ilya.

Shane Hollander's flush deepened. "Like — sending me all these terrible emails about how you don't understand procurement," he gritted out, "while making aggressive eye contact with me in the coffee line —"

"Aggressive —" Ilya couldn't help the laugh that escaped out of him, and then had to clap a hand over his mouth when Shane Hollander's frown only deepened.

"I didn't know it was you," said Ilya. "I thought it was two separate people: Shane Hollander, architect of my suffering; and pretty cyclist from the coffee shop who should maybe really lock his bike."

"Shit, fuck —" said Shane Hollander, suddenly reminded of the bike that he had recklessly left unsecured in favour of marching in to upbraid Ilya about contract splitting. When he ducked outside, Ilya followed him.

The entire time Ilya had been corresponding with Shane Hollander, he'd imagined some mouselike middle-aged man in thick glasses, maybe with a little pencil moustache like in a cartoon.

He hadn't expected Shane Hollander of the multi-page flowcharts to be very uncomfortably Ilya's type. And yet he was, thought Ilya, as he stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching Shane Hollander lock his bike.

Up close, there was much to appreciate, such as the broad line of Shane Hollander's shoulders under his windproof cycling jacket and the way his lats dipped into a tight waist. It didn't even bother Ilya now, how someone could take so fucking long to secure one fucking bicycle to a metal rack, not while Ilya was enjoying the view.

"How did you recognise me?" asked Ilya, when Shane Hollander was triple-checking the lock. "You watch hockey?"

"No, I don't," said Shane Hollander, straightening up. "But I don't live under a rock, either. Your name looked familiar, so I googled it." As he said this, he blinked several times and glanced away in a manner that Ilya would, months later, be able to recognise as a tell that he was attempting to lie.

But for now, Ilya was none the wiser, and so he just nodded.

Shane Hollander folded his arms across his chest. "If you weren't doing it to fuck with me, what exactly do you want?"

And in the same way Ilya might have spotted a scoring lane opening during a game, he seized his opportunity where it arose.

"Mr Hollander, the children need to play hockey," said Ilya, as his opening salvo. "The hockey tournament is cancelled this year because of the rule against directed contract. But tweens do not care about charity governance scandals, or transparency and fair competition. There was a tournament last year, and this year there is not, and now they are crushed."

"Have you spoken with your Procure Ontario business partners?" asked Shane Hollander. "The Access Sport Ontario finance desk?"

"Business partners pass me around like a puck, always telling me, email this other guy, he is in charge of buying donkey's ass; I am only in charge of tail. Finance desk tells me it can't be done, and sends me all these documents and flowcharts, and all of them I realise are written by Shane Hollander. So I go to the source."

Shane Hollander pinched the bridge of his nose in seeming consternation.

"I read all the microsites and mini guides, which are top notch pieces of writing," Ilya continued, laying it on thick, all but rubbing his hands together pleadingly, "but I think the problem is me, one too many concussions, nothing to do with perfectly drafted Shane Hollander documents —"

"Okay, I get it, please stop," said Shane Hollander. "Look, I'll talk to Mildred about this, even though — I'm sorry, but how exactly —" he paused, like he was unsure if he should continue, and then forged on anyway. "Not to be rude, but why are you working for the provincial government?"

"Oh, it is a very boring story," said Ilya, waving a hand. "You are retiring, Ilya, they tell me, do something meaningful to stave off the existential void. Okay, so I sign a contract with the charity, help children play hockey. Ilya, the charity had a governance scandal, now the province wants to take over. Okay, so I move over together with the photocopiers and office chairs. Ilya, now you are on part time contract with provincial agency, you must not buy, you must procure, and follow all the little rules, or Shane Hollander from Procure Ontario will write you little scolding emails."

"I think I've been nothing but facilitative, all things considered," said Shane Hollander, sounding entirely serious but for the way the corners of his mouth twitched.

"So facilitative Shane Hollander will help?" asked Ilya. "I don't need to show you photographs of sad hockey children?"

"Oh god, please, no," said Shane Hollander. "I'll look into it. You have my email, so you know where to find me."

"I also know where you park your bike," said Ilya, unhelpfully.

"Is that a threat," said Shane Hollander. His voice was flat but his eyes were bright and crinkling at the corners, and Ilya wanted nothing better than to never stop looking at him.

Shane Hollander did in fact wear glasses, Ilya discovered two weeks later with a thrill of inchoate delight, while attending a Teams meeting that Shane Hollander had orchestrated, involving (amongst others) donkey's ass, donkey's tail and someone from legal.

Nice glasses, typed Ilya — into a separate, private chat with Shane Hollander, because he was not entirely feral. He also added a winking face.

While the discussion about compressed timelines raged on in the main meeting window, Ilya watched as the words, Shane Hollander is typing… appeared and disappeared in the private chat. When Ilya looked over in the other window, Shane Hollander was chewing his bottom lip like he was genuinely thinking of an appropriate response.

Finally, to put Shane Hollander out of his misery, Ilya added, thank you for setting this up. Hockey children will be grateful.

You're welcome, replied Shane Hollander, looking visibly relieved.

tween team

Ilya is not supposed to have a favourite among the teams he coaches, but if threatened at knifepoint, he might admit that he kind of does.

This is the first team he'd coached when he'd first started volunteering during the off-season for the now-defunct, scandalously-governed charity. They hadn't been a team at first, just a group of eleven-year-old girls who'd tried out a six-week summer programme and mutually bonded over their love for torturing Ilya. They had made the transition from scary tweens to terrifying teens while Ilya had been on the last legs of his professional hockey career, unsure which of the following would take him out of the action for the very last time: his fucked up knee or temperamental ankle or uncooperative shoulder. Or none of the above, just the shitty Toronto management and the crushing weight of two successive franchises gambling on Ilya's generational talent, for what it had been worth.

But all that time these kids hadn't given a fuck when he saw them each summer; just interrogated him relentlessly about why didn't he have a nice girlfriend or boyfriend, wasn't thirty-something a little too old to just be an f-boy, we can say f-boy Coach Rozanov, everyone says it in school, and why was his Instagram so cringe and had he ever heard of Snapchat but anyway the fact that you were on it would make it cringe; have you watched Phineas and Ferb, Coach, it's a really old series just like you —

It is only natural, his soft spot for them.

"How's Beautiful Freckles," asks Yasmin P now, skating over to him at the end of practice, all animosity over the suicide sprints they'd just done forgotten at the prospect of cross-examining Ilya.

"I wasn't supposed to tell you about Beautiful Freckles, so don't ask me about him," says Ilya.

"You weren't supposed to let us name our team Chungus Maximus, either, but you did," points out Tall Maddie.

"That is not your team name," says Ilya, who has suffered through enough breathlessly hysterical explanations that he has wilfully erased the words from his mind.

"Are we talking about Beautiful Freckles?" asks Mina, skating over backwards.

"No we are not," said Ilya. "We are talking about nothing."

"Well I think if you're meant to be a role model to us," says Maddy with a Y, "we should be allowed to learn from your mistakes in love."

"I do not make mistakes in —" Ilya begins, and then hears how it sounds, and stops. "You should only learn from my hockey," he declares instead. "Or maybe you should all become journalists, since you love asking questions."

"So how is he anyway?" asks Yasmin P, ever persistent.

Ilya sighs. It is, as always, a losing battle. "He is at a conference in Fredericton."

"Where is that even," says Tall Maddie impertinently, while the rest of the team skates over like sharks at the smell of blood.

"That's the capital of New Brunswick you're talking about," says Ilya. "They have a very good university hockey team, I am told."

"Sure, whatever," says Yasmin P in the casually devastating way of a fourteen-year-old.

"So is he or is he not moving back to Ottawa, and are you or are you not going to continue seeing him?" asks Yasmin H.

"It's not like that," Ilya says, "we don't talk about long-term plans."

"Situationships," interjects Mina knowingly.

"But do you want to talk about long-term plans?" asks Maddy with a Y.

"What I want to talk about is your line changes," says Ilya, to groans all around.

Once, Shane had dropped Ilya off at practice because the Toronto bike thieves had finally got the better of him and he'd had to borrow Ilya's car to go pick up the new one he'd found on Facebook Marketplace.

The girls had made a meal of the glimpse of Shane they had gotten from across the car park.

"He's so dreamy," one of the Maddies had said, while Yasmin H had rested her chin in her hands.

"He's very boring," Ilya had replied, ignoring the strange surge of smug pleasure in his chest.

propositioning

"I'm doing a bike ride," said Shane Hollander, coming over to Ilya's corner of the coffee shop one morning weeks later — notably, after all the loose ends for the tournament procurement had been tied up. "It's for charity."

It was the first time Shane Hollander had actually spoken to Ilya after weeks of them exchanging collegial waves through the window. In that time, donkey's tail — whose name was actually Frank — had fully taken over the task of guiding Ilya's team through the ordeal of navigating the shared services platform and justifying the directed contract, although Shane Hollander had been copied in every email.

"Is this the naked cycling through downtown Toronto?" asked Ilya. He had, in his opinion, been very good about not making aggressive eye contact with Shane Hollander while Shane Hollander had been helping him lubricate the gears of government bureaucracy, and thought now that he deserved to make at least one inappropriate remark.

"What — no!" said Shane Hollander, in a strangled half-shout that was very gratifying to Ilya. "That sounds really uncomfortable."

Ilya shrugged. "Many people are doing it, I figure they are finding it fun."

Shane Hollander made a face that suggested that he felt quite the opposite. "No, it's a fifteen kilometre ride ending at Christie Pits. Fully clothed."

"Sounds like another excuse to cycle around," said Ilya, leaning back in his chair. "Do you not already do enough cycling?"

"I was going to say that you could come," said Shane Hollander, and, when Ilya's eyebrows shot up because he was a puerile 10-year-old at heart, Shane Hollander added, "Come cycle, I mean. Or watch, if you prefer. There'll be a picnic at the end of it."

"Wow. There is nothing I love more than standing outdoors waiting for a string of men in shorts to cycle past," Ilya deadpanned.

Shane Hollander frowned. "Okay, that's fine. Sorry I asked."

"I have a counterproposal. How about this," said Ilya, leaning forward and putting both elbows on the table. "I have bought a trunk mount rack that allows me to attach bicycles to my car. So after work you can tie your little bicycle to the back of my very sensible Mercedes G-Wagon and I can drive us back to my place, and we can — what is the expression? Ah yes. Get profoundly nasty."

Shane Hollander stared at Ilya. He was steadily turning pink. "Profoundly, eh. Big word."

"I read the New Yorker for many years."

"Really?"

"No, of course not," said Ilya. "The New Yorker is profoundly boring."

Shane Hollander laughed, seemingly despite himself. "You seem very confident that I'll say yes."

"I am confident at least the price of the trunk mount bike rack," said Ilya.

"I have half a mind to refuse on principle," Shane Hollander said, looking very stern but for the way the corners of his mouth were curving upwards.

"No, no, Shane Hollander, please do not say no," said Ilya, rubbing his hands together. "I lied earlier, I would watch you race past me in little shorts any day."

"I think if you're propositioning me," said Shane Hollander, his eyes bright even as he continued not-quite-smiling, "you should probably call me Shane."

Ilya lounged back again; spread his knees a little wider. "Big word, propositioning," he said, looking up at Shane Hollander. "What does this mean?"

"Whatever it is you're doing," said Shane Hollander, not really hiding his obvious interest now as he looked Ilya up and down.

"Okay," said Ilya. "So I will see you this evening after successful propositioning."

Later, much later, after Shane Hollander-now-just-Shane had met Ilya in the terrible 777 Bay Street parking garage and they'd figured out how to actually put Shane's bike on the trunk mount; after Ilya had driven them back to his place while Shane told him it was unconscionable that he was driving when his luxury condo was only seven bus stops away from the Access Sport Ontario office; after they had heatedly debated the reliability of the Toronto public transport system in Ilya's cavernous living room and only stopped when Ilya had started backing Shane towards the bedroom while aggressively removing his own clothes —

After all of that, and everything else that had followed, Ilya emerged from the shower to find Shane still naked in Ilya's bed, sitting upright in the sheets and frowning at something on his phone.

"What is it?" asked Ilya.

Shane looked up at Ilya. "You paid four hundred dollars for that trunk rack?"

would you still love me if I were a primordial fish

Ilya hadn't specifically set out to hook up with Shane on a semi-regular basis — he was, historically, perfectly capable of loving them and leaving them. But the return to office directive and Shane's unrelenting all-weather bike-and-coffee morning routine meant that he remained top of mind for Ilya. That, and the fact that every now and again Ilya would remember that one particular sound he'd made as Ilya had sunk into him, a delicious groan-slash-whimper that had activated some heretofore dormant part of Ilya's brain, and Ilya would find himself overcome with the same powerful lizard horniness that had undoubtedly compelled the first primordial fish to crawl onto land.

"I don't think that's correct," said Shane, when Ilya had, on their third hookup — only their third! — tried in a fit of post-sex poeticism to express this idea to Shane.

"Actually, I'm very sure it's not correct — there are so many things wrong with that statement," Shane said, sitting up from the mass of tangled sheets (and Ilya's embrace) to grope around for his phone.

For a moment he fell silent while he typed on his phone, no doubt searching something like 'fish crawling on land real', while Ilya, bemused, tried to tug Shane back into his arms.

"Did you really think that millions of years of natural selection was just the result of one horny fish wanting to get laid?" asked Shane, frowning down at Ilya.

"Is this not the same as the salmon swimming upstream?" asked Ilya, waving a hand. "All of them wanting to fuck?"

Shane scrunched up his nose. "The salmon are not —"

"It is for sex, yes?" said Ilya.

"What — I mean, reproduction, sure, but it's not —"

Shane looked so distressed that Ilya began to laugh.

"Putting aside the salmon," said Shane, who was still frowning. "Why would the fish need to go on land to fuck if there were already other fish in the water?"

"I am not a scientist," said Ilya reasonably. "I am just seeing the picture diagram of the fish growing legs and crawling out of the water."

Shane was looking at Ilya — not like Ilya was an idiot, remarkably, even though Ilya undoubtedly was, especially when it came to matters of fish sex.

Shane was looking at Ilya with a very particular expression on his face, the same bright-eyed sort-of-smile he'd had when he'd inspected the trunk mount bike rack on Ilya's car, or when Ilya had pulled out his brand-new Presto card and announced that he'd ridden the 97C that morning. It made Ilya feel very warm. It made Ilya beam back like a lunatic.

Then Shane put his hand on Ilya's chest and asked, seriously: "Do you also think the March of Progress was one monkey that slowly stood up straighter as it walked and grew taller and turned into a man? Like a. Like a fucking Animorphs cover."

Ilya took Shane's hand and held it. "I do not know what Animorphs is," he said solemnly. "But if I was that monkey and saw an ass like yours I would straighten right up."

"You would evolve into a whole other species," said Shane, and there it was again, that not-quite-smile, slowly widening into a grin.

"Yes, that," Ilya replied, and watched, delighted, as Shane turned and buried his face in the pillows, shoulders shaking with laughter.

Ilya did in fact go for the charity bike ride, which turned out to be a fundraiser for road safety.

It was awful, as expected, apart from Shane's shorts, which were excellent.

Yuna likes Ilya better than Maxim probably

After practice, in the car, he takes a photograph of the merino wool base layer and sends it to Yuna Hollander.

Christmas present for Shane, he writes.

Nice!!, she replies, with a thumbs up. Is that 250 gsm?

Is it weird to be exchanging notes on clothing purchases with your situationship's mother, Ilya wonders. But it is purely a matter of practicality, to avoid duplicate buys.

When Ilya had first met Yuna Hollander, she had stared at him with a starstruck expression for exactly five seconds before she'd said, "Conference Final of 2022 — was it your bad knee or your ankle?"

"Mom," Shane had said, sounding annoyed and embarrassed.

"The knee," Ilya had replied. "How did you know?"

"She's a witch," David Hollander had said.

This had all been happening at the top of the stairs leading down into Shane's basement apartment, after Ilya had answered the door in boxer shorts and Shane's University of Toronto hoodie.

Are you not at all concerned that your son and I are fucking, Ilya had thought, but what he'd said instead had been, "Excuse me, I will get out of your way —"

"No, no, join us for lunch," Yuna had said, with the very same gleam in her eye that Shane got when he'd spotted a listing for a brand new Specialized bike on Facebook Marketplace.

Ilya had turned to Shane, who had been standing at the bottom of the stairs looking very dishevelled and mortified in a t-shirt that he'd put on inside out, and raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

Shane had shrugged, slightly helplessly.

And so Ilya had changed into something that wasn't Shane's U of T hoodie and they'd headed out, the four of them, to a nice restaurant where Yuna and David had split two mains between them and Ilya had reflected, over his cacio e pepe, on the fact that he and Shane had never gone out for a meal together in the three months they'd been hooking up.

"I came out to them in freshman year," Shane had said later, after his parents had left to do some gift-shopping, and he and Ilya had been walking back to Shane's apartment.

Ilya had glanced over at him. "And?"

"They were really cool about it," Shane had said. "I think Mom was way more upset when we found out I wouldn't be able to play hockey professionally."

"Okay," Ilya had said, getting snagged on the dark little thread of resignation that sometimes flashed through when Shane talked about hockey — which wasn't often, if Shane could help it. They'd probably talked more about hockey in the span of that one lunch with Yuna and David than the rest of the time they'd spent together.

"Mom didn't like Maxim," Shane had continued, in a seeming non-sequitur. "My ex, I mean."

Shane had never talked about his ex in so many words, not before this. But the first time Ilya had visited Shane's basement apartment, Shane had felt compelled to explain that he'd been house hunting in a hurry — thought I'd be moving in with — well, plans changed, and the rent is really competitive for the Junction. Another evening, sometime around their fourth or fifth hookup, Ilya had come inside after smoking on the balcony and Shane had said, all in one breath, you're good if we keep this casual, right, because I'm not really looking for anything else right now — like he'd rehearsed the words while waiting for Ilya to be done with his cigarette; like it had been important to Shane to have been the first to say this. Then there had also been the fancy-looking chef's knife in the back of Shane's kitchen drawer that Shane never seemed to use.

"Is this the ex you moved to Toronto for?" Ilya had asked.

"Yeah, him," Shane had said. He'd looked like he had been going to say something more, but hadn't.

"Lucky for me, then, that your mother is the world's biggest Metros fan," Ilya had said, and Shane had laughed, even though Ilya hadn't really meant it as a joke.

Two days later, Ilya had gotten the fright of his life when Yuna had let herself into Shane's apartment while Shane had been at work. It had been a Monday morning and a day off for Ilya, who had slept over the night before. This had been another one of the rhythms they had fallen into: Shane's apartment if they were meeting on a weekend; Ilya's condo if it was a work night, because Shane couldn't resist the lure of a much shorter commute.

"Well this is awkward," Yuna had said. "Sorry, I just came by to uh — drop these off."

She had held up a paper bag of what looked like clothes.

"I can take them," Ilya had said, ignoring the sudden inexplicable urge to explain to Yuna why he'd been lounging in her son's living room instead of being at work like everyone else.

"Oh, I uh —" Yuna began. She paused, and then continued, slightly sheepishly, "This is going to sound crazy, but I kind of have to… put them into his wardrobe. So they actually go into his weekly rotation. The last time I gave them directly to him, he left them in a drawer for a year."

"Why?"

Yuna had shrugged. "I think he likes the shirts that he has," she had said. "Anyway — do you mind…?"

"Not my house, not my wardrobe," Ilya had said, making an ushering gesture towards the bedroom — which, thankfully, did not look or smell like a sex den on account of Ilya having done some cursory tidying up.

For lack of anything better to do, Ilya had idly followed Yuna, and had stood leaning against the doorframe as she had inserted two new office shirts and a navy blue polo shirt — identical in all ways to at least three that Shane already owned — into his wardrobe with the care and precision of a farmer grafting new stems onto an avocado plant.

Foolish of Shane, Ilya had thought, to think he was free of his mother sneaking new shirts into his weekly rotation just because he'd moved four and a half hours away.

"Socks?" Ilya had said, unable to hide his amusement, when Yuna had pulled three pairs from her paper bag.

"These are technical cycling socks," she had begun to explain, when she'd caught sight of Ilya's expression and seemed to recognise the absurdity of the situation.

"He probably thinks these are from Costco, doesn't he," Yuna had said, then started to laugh.

Ilya had laughed along with her, and helped to square-fold the socks and insert them into Shane's drawer. Had asked her follow-up questions about the merino blend. Had carefully not thought about his own mother.

Now, Yuna sends Ilya another thumbs up when he tells her that the base layer is indeed 250 gsm.

Good call, she writes. He's going to need it if he's still insisting on cycling to and from Gatineau come February. Ottawa winters are no joke!

Then she adds: Would you like something similar for yourself?

Ilya knows the Hollanders go to their family cottage over Christmas, so she probably means to send something to him by post. Yuna probably doesn't mean it that way, but he cannot help but linger on the implication that Yuna assumes Ilya will have reason to be anywhere near Ottawa in February. Like he is another pair of square-folded socks Shane can easily carry back with him.

He pauses for a moment, considering his reply. Then he types: You forget that I was big time hockey player and have big time hockey player money, because he knows it will amuse Yuna.

Sorry, of course, Yuna replies, with the cry-laughing emoji. Scented candle it is, then!

in another life (we are the plot of a Canadian government-funded yaoi show)

Shane didn't watch hockey. It was a thing, from after he'd had to stop playing. He had decided this while sitting in the waiting room of the therapist that Yuna had suggested he see after everything had happened.

He told Ilya all of this one night, while they were curled together in Ilya's bed. They had been talking about the complicated interpersonal drama developing between Tall Maddie and Yasmin H, and the girls' prospects for the tournament, and Shane had said, "These kids, they're what — thirteen, fourteen?"

"Yeah," Ilya had said.

"Sometimes I think I'd give anything to be fourteen again and on the ice."

He'd pushed down the covers to show Ilya the faded scars on his legs from the surgeries he'd had — first, from after a nasty foot-first collision with the boards when he was fifteen, and then the subsequent ones when, after two years of rehab, he'd gone back on the ice only to dislocate his knee and tear his MPFL.

Ilya had some matching scars of his own — ACL surgery in the off-season after his first year with the Metros; his MCL the next year. The whole drama in Toronto over his ankle — about whether to see Kobe Bryant's miracle surgeon in Munich or gamble on some hyperbaric chamber bullshit. So he wasn't a stranger to the panic-fear cycle of being of recovery, to no longer being able to trust his leg to take his weight, to the split-second gamble every time he prepared to move it.

But all that had been transient for Ilya, in the grand scheme of things. What it must have been like to lose it all in one explosive moment, to crawl through the dark hopeful tunnel of rehab only to lose it all again — that was impossible for Ilya to imagine.

"It was — when it happened I was so sure, at first, that there would be some way to knuckle down and push through," Shane said now, while Ilya stroked his palm over Shane's knee. "Like if I did the rehab correctly, put in a hundred and ten percent, there would be a way to fix things. But it took me six months just to walk, and then another year to get anywhere near to skating half as well as I used to."

He paused, and then lay back down again, head pillowed on Ilya's arm. When he spoke again his voice was quiet.

"Before I really knew anything I knew hockey, and then I couldn't have it, not the way I wanted it, anyway. I thought about playing at university but by then I think the fear had really set in, you know? Like I never used to feel bad on the ice, it always felt like — like, the best thing, like nothing else would ever matter as much. So to now be so… I don't know, so fucking afraid to get out there — that was worse, somehow, than not playing at all."

When Ilya had been younger he would have found this self-disclosure terrifying, like watching someone walk a tightrope and wondering, are you not afraid? are you just going to do that?

Yet Shane was doing it, and he was doing it while lying in the circle of Ilya's arms. The memory floated to mind, unbidden, of Ilya being six or seven, sitting at the foot of his mother's bed watching her tidy her jewellery and being allowed to hold his grandmother's necklace: gold spilling over his fingers, the jewelled pendant a heavy weight in his palm.

"We could've played together," said Ilya, purposefully glib, around the lump in his throat. "We'd have met that way. We would've been rivals."

Shane let out a quiet little laugh.

"You were very good," said Ilya. "I have seen this."

Yuna had once, over brunch while Shane had been in the bathroom, shown Ilya a video of Shane during his first year in Juniors.

"I've been digitalising the tapes," Yuna had said, her voice light even as she held her phone out to Ilya her phone like she was handing him something precious.

For half a minute Ilya had watched tiny Shane cutting across the ice, faster than any other player, his line struggling to keep up, before Shane had returned to the table and said, "Mom, it's unbelievably embarrassing that you're showing him that —"

Ilya had searched, that night, for all the scraps he could find of Shane online: the Kingston Whig-Standard articles about the 'catastrophic injury'; the ones from before, about young Shane Hollander granted exceptional status to play in the OHL; the local news clips. They hadn't met at World Juniors, but for a time the spectre of Shane had been invoked as another means of applying pressure on Ilya — don't be lazy, Ilya, the fast Canadian is nipping at your heels. Don't cut corners, the Canadian boy won't. And then — nothing.

Now, Shane was silent, turning his face further into Ilya's shoulder. His eyelashes brushed against Ilya's skin as he blinked.

"If we were rivals, I would seduce you still," said Ilya, just to hear Shane's surprised little laugh. "Maybe ask to be in the same commercial as you, then proposition you in the locker room showers. We would have a torrid affair."

Shane chuckled softly. "Torrid, eh."

"Yes, torrid and for many years," said Ilya. "Very scandalous, but I am irresistible to you, you see."

"Unlikely," said Shane. "I'd have been very far inside the closet if I'd kept playing."

"I was in the closet for years even after Jurassic World fossil Scott Hunter kissed his boyfriend on the ice." Ilya shrugged. "Didn't stop me from hooking up with men."

"Ah, of course not," said Shane, his tone darkening, possibly at the suggestion of Ilya's past conquests.

Just to be sure, Ilya changed the topic. "But if you had continued playing, you wouldn't have discovered passionate love for public procurement."

"I don't —" Shane began to say, then shut his mouth, seemingly unable to deny his love for public procurement. "I like it, but I wouldn't exactly call it a passionate love."

"Okay," said Ilya. "Passionate like, then."

Shane had once talked uninterrupted for ten minutes straight about the importance of the WTO-GPA and Ilya had let him, indulgently, content to stroke his thumb against the slope of Shane's anklebone while Shane went on about the Incheon airport case. He edited the newsletter of an inter-agency community of practice for innovations in IT procurement that, as far as Ilya could gather, was entirely voluntary. Last year, when Dany had discovered a typographical error in their tender documents that might crucially alter the meaning of one of the schedules, Frank's boss's boss had paused in the middle of their panicked Teams call and said, "Has anyone asked Shane what he thinks about this?", never mind that Shane hadn't even been part of Frank's department.

But Ilya was certain of this: long before Shane had taken it upon himself to revise all the provincial material on public procurement and distil three separate flow charts into a single, slightly more readable but still diabolical multi-page one; before he'd become the guy that Frank's boss's boss spirited into crisis meetings he wasn't even meant to be present at, Shane must have channelled that same single-minded energy into his hockey.

He had been a revelation, in the grainy video Yuna had shown Ilya. Ilya was visited now with the very sudden and visceral desire to have played against him at least once.

"I didn't want it to define me, if you know what I mean," said Shane. "I didn't want to just — just be this tragic figure, like, there goes Shane Hollander, he was really good at hockey but he lost it all, what a fucking shame."

"It is a fucking shame," said Ilya, feeling the loss like a hit to the teeth. "But you are not a tragic figure to me."

"You once called me the architect of your suffering," Shane pointed out.

"That makes me tragic, not you," said Ilya. "You are a very attractive figure, I was admiring this even while being psychologically depleted by Canadian procurement rules."

Shane laughed, disbelievingly. "Psychologically depleted," he repeated. "What big words you have, Mr Rozanov."

"Not the only thing that's big," Ilya said. Not his best work, but he still grinned like a shark at Shane's answering groan.

They lapsed for a moment into silence, just breathing together.

"I think you have been very brave," said Ilya after a pause; murmured it into the top of Shane's head. "I would have loved to play against you."

Shane stilled, then tilted his face up to kiss Ilya.

The other thing was this: in Ilya's weaker moments, when he became prone to flights of romance in his advanced age, he liked to think that if they'd met as hockey players, as rivals, they'd still have fallen into place with each other.

Marleau had a real situationship, Ilya

"You were seeing that app developer, yes?" says Ilya with no preamble as he enters Marleau's restaurant.

It is a restaurant concept only a hockey player traumatised by performance diets could come up with.

"What do you mean everything is poached?" Ilya had asked, when Marleau had invited him to what had turned out to be a friends and family tasting pitch four years ago. He'd ended up putting down a hundred grand on the original Montreal location with the full expectation of never seeing that money again. Only, the people of Montreal had apparently liked eating food that had never undergone the Maillard reaction nor been heated above the temperature of 80 degrees Celsius, to the extent that they had formed snaking queues down the sidewalk for the privilege. So what did Ilya know, really, except to put down another hundred grand when Marleau had opened the Toronto branch.

"Sorry, who?" asks Marleau now, as they are led to their usual corner booth under a framed photograph, old timey diner-style, of Marleau pretending to flambé something. The photograph is ridiculous for a variety of reasons, including the fact that nothing on the menu of this establishment will ever encounter fire, and also Marleau is no longer allowed in the restaurant kitchen except on special occasions, on account of him upsetting an ice bath of poached lobsters on opening night.

"Your Boston regular," says Ilya impatiently. "The one who made that hypnosis app for babies."

"Oh, Rachel with an A," says Marleau, getting a far off look at the memory of her.

"Isn't Rachel always spelled with an A," says Ilya.

"Obviously I meant that she had an extra one," replies Marleau, and when Ilya stares at him he adds, "it went before the 'e'."

They fall into the same stupid back and forth whenever they meet. It's infuriating. Ilya misses it.

"I think I actively lose brain cells each time I see you," he tells Marleau.

"Fuck you Rozy, you're the one who can't spell Rachael," says Marleau, taking pains to enunciate the extra A.

They are interrupted by the arrival of the food, which, mysteriously, includes a plate of sliders.

"Chef made this just for you," says their server, with a wink. "He was very excited to get out the blowtorch."

"You're a treasure, Simon," says Marleau, while Ilya winks back.

"Wow, Marly," says Ilya, "I did not know that you are allowing open flames in your kitchen now."

Marly gives Ilya an incredulous look. "Explain to me how you think they're cooking anything back there without fire."

"I don't know," says Ilya honestly. Shane had told him once that he had 'intellectual humility', which had kind of sounded like Shane had been calling him dumb, except Shane had explained that it was more like he thought Ilya was very willing to acknowledge if he didn't know enough about something. "I was imagining rows and rows of water baths like the pods from the Matrix."

"Poaching is different from sous vide, you dick," says Marleau. "You watched two seasons of The Mind of a Chef just to get on my case about the Maillard reaction but you don't know this?"

Ilya shrugs, and pops a whole slider into his mouth.

"And it wasn't a hypnosis app, by the way, it was mindful bedtime stories for children."

"It made them sleep, yes? Then it is hypnosis," says Ilya with his mouth full.

"Yeah, whatever," Marleau replies. "Anyway, why were you asking about Rachael?"

"You were seeing her for a while, yes?" Ilya asks, even as a part of him vaguely wonders why he has chosen to pursue this line of inquiry. "Like regular hookups?"

Marleau nods. "Yeah, she was a good lay. The app was nice too."

"How long would you say you were seeing her?"

"Like I didn't keep track or anything, but —" Marleau pauses, and starts to count on his fingers. "If it started before we won the Cup and ended around the time you got traded, I guess it was four to five years?"

"But not exclusive," says Ilya.

Marleau gives Ilya a look. "I was forward for the best fucking hockey team in the Eastern Conference," he said. "Obviously I kept my options open."

"Obviously," Ilya repeats, wondering at which point the notion of having options had become so remote and unpalatable to him. Unfortunately this also means his voice comes out kind of dubious and judgemental.

Marleau pauses in the middle of taking a bite out of his own slider to swear. "Tabarnak, Roz, why are you being so fucking weird?"

"I am not being weird, just making conversation," Ilya says, annoyed that Marleau is calling him out on this. "Will you let me make some fucking conversation?"

"Seems more like a fucking cross examination but sure, go on," says Marleau, waving one hand. "Converse."

"Fuck you," Ilya grumbles, grabbing another slider. They're really good; maybe Marleau should have opened a burger joint.

"Did you fight over stuff?" he asks when he's done chewing and swallowing.

"Like what kind of stuff," says Marleau.

"I don't know, stupid shit, like — like how it doesn't make sense to take the train between two cities if you could just drive."

Marleau narrows his eyes. "I don't know," he says slowly. "That seems really specific, and also doesn't it depend on which cities you're talking about?"

"Okay, bad example," says Ilya. "But you know what I mean. Little arguments. Or. Did you talk about things."

"Like what kinds of things?"

"Like, family, and growing up," says Ilya.

Marleau is giving Ilya a funny look. "Well, no, I guess? We didn't really hang out after sex." He pauses. "Oh wait, no. One time she made pasta and played me a new bedtime story she had just recorded. Santa's mindful workshop or something. But that was just the one time. Most of the time I just bounced."

"Ah," says Ilya. "Okay."

"Hey, Roz," says Marleau, in what Ilya recognises, horrifyingly, to be the capital E Empathy tone he used to deploy with troubled rookies. "Is this about —"

"This is not about anybody," Ilya says quickly.

He's a fucking idiot to have even brought it up. Marleau has met Shane, for fuck's sake, twice: the first time when he'd swung by Ilya's unannounced to deliver a roasted heritage chicken and Shane had been working remotely from Ilya's dining room; the second, at the opening of Marleau's Toronto restaurant. They'd had a whole conversation, that first time, about Chantecler chickens, because Shane had learned all about them on one of his French podcasts and Marleau is, at heart, a fucking weirdo who somehow knows about chickens. Shane hadn't even gone to the restaurant opening as Ilya's plus one; he'd received an invitation of his own addressed to 'my chicken buddy'.

Of course Marleau is going to assume Ilya is talking about Shane.

"So it's what, still a casual thing?" says Marleau now, cautious.

"He's moving back to Ottawa in February," says Ilya, "so."

"So," says Marleau.

"So I guess it doesn't really fucking matter."

"I don't know, Rozy," says Marleau. "Sounds like it kind of fucking does."

Ilya self-disclosure

Ilya hadn't really wanted to watch the clip, but somehow Yuna had come across it and sent it to Shane, who had played it on his phone while lying in bed waiting for Ilya to finish brushing his teeth. It was the news spot about the children's hockey tournament that Ilya had been trotted out for at the behest of the Access Sport Ontario communications team. Boring stuff, really; just soundbites about the positive impact of sport on young people, accompanied by footage of Ilya coaching one of the under-11 teams.

When Ilya returned to bed Shane was playing the video again, scrubbing through the reporter's closing remarks to the part where she talked about how hockey star Rozanov had joined the charity just months before the governance scandal had broken — over several clips of Ilya rapidly cut together: in the Toronto jersey, at what would turn out to be the final game of his career; some indeterminate footage of him in Montreal, and then of him, impossibly young, lifting the Cup with the Raiders.

Shane put away his phone and lay on his side. Looked at Ilya for several long moments. Ilya lay on his side as well and looked back at Shane.

"You were the best," said Shane. "A generational talent."

"Yes," said Ilya, cautiously.

"But you became erratic, unreliable," Shane continued. "At least that's what they said."

Ilya didn't flinch, but just barely. "They said a lot of things about me."

Shane put his hand on Ilya's skin, right over Ilya's ribs. Ilya shut his eyes at the weight of Shane's touch. Opened them again to see Shane still watching him, curious, warm.

"What happened?"

Ilya rolled onto his back. Looked up at the ceiling, which was directly under Shane's landlord's living room. In the mornings one could often hear the small child who lived upstairs hurtling around like a herd of wildebeests. Now it was quiet, so quiet Ilya could hear clearly the sound of his own lips parting as he opened his mouth to speak.

"I had a…" Ilya began. "What do they call it? Black dog."

"You were depressed?" asked Shane.

Ilya nodded.

"My mother I think had it, and then I had it. I got very close to — going, the way she did."

There was some rustling as Shane shifted along the bed to be closer to Ilya. Ilya let Shane put his arms around him, let him wind their limbs together, so easy and tender that it made his chest ache.

"It was the worst after my father died," said Ilya.

"I'm sorry," said Shane.

"Don't be sorry, he was an asshole," said Ilya.

"Then I'm sorry it got so bad."

"I think it was always going to get bad," said Ilya. "Just a question of when. And when my father died… I told my brother that was the last time he would be seeing me. I left him my apartment, left a trust for his daughter, and then I left Russia. And I had thought about doing this, many times, before that. But I didn't feel how I thought I would feel when I did it."

"How did it feel?" asked Shane.

Ilya shrugged against the comforting weight of Shane's embrace. "I didn't feel anything. No — that's not correct. I felt very alone, and very empty. And the empty feeling didn't go away, it just got worse and worse."

"Did you have anybody —" Shane began. "Did anyone know you were feeling like that?"

"Svetlana suspected," said Ilya, "but I was on the road a lot. Marleau knew, even though I hid it very well. And then he found me, trying to do something stupid."

In the cocoon of Shane's bed it became easy to say these things. The only other time he had talked about this had been in Doctor Galina's office, where every moment had felt like a fight.

"Was that when —"

"When I got traded to Vancouver?" asked Ilya.

Shane nodded.

"Yes, it was too expensive to keep around head case. Vancouver was nowhere near their cap."

"I don't know if you should call yourself a head case," said Shane.

"I can call myself whatever I want," said Ilya. "You didn't know me then. I don't think you would have liked me."

Shane made an unhappy sound like he thought very much otherwise, but didn't say more.

"The first year was not good," said Ilya. "I was seeing new Canadian doctor, adjusting the medication. There were … expectations."

It was one thing, the pressure of being first draft pick starting with the Raiders. Quite another to be Ilya Rozanov, former captain of the Raiders, who had won a Stanley Cup, coming into a team at what had been meant to be his prime.

"Vancouver was not a good fit, code for Rozanov is still a head case, and then —"

"And then Montreal," said Shane.

"And then Montreal," said Ilya wryly. "Shock, horror. Uproar."

"When they announced the trade my Mom called the family chat while I was at work, it was that insane," said Shane. "Wasn't there — wasn't there that interview you did in French?"

"Generous to call it an interview," said Ilya. "Metros PR people hired a tutor who drilled me in French sentences like a naughty schoolboy."

Shane laughed. "Did it work?"

Ilya shrugged. "Marly said I sounded like I was in a hostage video."

"But you got points for trying," said Shane. "And you got the Metros into the playoffs for the first time in many years."

"But not the Cup," replied Ilya. "So after all the controversy, after 'the Metros' biggest gamble', after I learned all that fucking French — change in strategy, they said, three years in. Star centre alone will not bring back Montreal's former glory. Now they wanted to rebuild from the ground up. Ilya Rozanov is too old and too expensive for this. Off to Toronto I go."

At some point while they had been talking, Shane had found Ilya's hand and had taken it in his own. Absently he rubbed his thumb over Ilya's knuckles, over and over in a rhythm that was strangely comforting. Ilya turned his face into the hollow of Shane's neck and breathed him in.

"You could've taken a break before diving into the next thing," said Shane. "When you retired."

"Ah, you see, a break is dangerous," said Ilya. "Start to stare into black abyss, think about purpose of existence: who is Ilya Rozanov, beyond greatest hockey player of all time —"

Shane snorted.

"You do not agree?" Ilya asked, purposefully droll.

"Well, Scott Hunter is right there," said Shane.

"Scott Hunter?" Ilya repeated, pulling back a little to study Shane's face for any sign that he was joking. "Scott Hunter??"

Shane, horrifyingly, was doing an admirable job of keeping a straight face. "Well I have a strict rule about not watching hockey, so. Technically, this is all hearsay."

Ilya sat up suddenly. "Does Yuna think Scott Hunter is better than me?"

"Okay, calm down — "

Later, when Ilya had subsided after being somewhat assured that Yuna did not in fact think Scott Hunter was a better player (just different, she had said via text, it's like asking me which child I love the most, even though she only had the one, namely, Shane), Shane turned to Ilya and said, "Were you scared to retire?"

What kind of question was that, thought Ilya. But what he said was: "I couldn't see what happened next. So I just dived into the first thing that came by."

"It's meaningful work," said Shane.

"Reading and rereading a document edited by fifteen different people is not meaningful work," said Ilya.

"I meant the coaching," said Shane.

"Yes, that is the part that I like," said Ilya. "The rest of it, not so much. Too many Shane Hollander documents, too many little rules about what to buy and how to buy it, tender must be open for one hundred days —"

"Fuck off," said Shane, "you know the minimum solicitation periods."

Ilya gestured to his head, "You know me, I forget, too many bumps to the head —"

"You quoted the mini-guide table to Frank," said Shane. "I was on that call."

"What call?" asked Ilya, knowingly infuriating. "Were you wearing your glasses on that call? If so I will not have remembered anything from it because of, what is the expression? Fugue state of horniness."

"'Fugue state of horniness' is not an idiomatic expression," said Shane.

"It is for me, when you are wearing your glasses," replied Ilya, watching as Shane rolled his eyes, and tried not to smile, and failed.

"I'm glad you came out the other side," said Shane, after a moment. "I'm glad you're here."

he's just a restaurant dirtbag, baby

Ilya's entire career as he knew it had ended at the age of thirty-four. Shane, on the other hand, once explained to Ilya his potential paths in the purchasing and supply group, which also came with conveniently-numbered levels, three of which he had passed through in quick succession on account of having gotten into some intern officer development programme right out of university.

The fact that he was even in Toronto was a detour, Ilya knew.

"So to take a break from your stressful life doing procurement in Ottawa you took a sabbatical, to do more procurement in Toronto," said Ilya.

They were in Shane's kitchen, where Shane was methodically breaking down his Costco haul for storage and meal prep. Ilya, who had let go of his personal chef in a fit of post-retirement frugality but still retained a meal service, found this a novel enough exercise to spectate while Shane cut up a tube of ground turkey to be individually frozen. Sometimes, Ilya was called upon to help shred the rotisserie chickens.

"It's not a sabbatical, it's called Interchange," said Shane.

"What, like a highway junction for civil servants?"

"It's like a secondment," said Shane. "Anyway it made sense at the time — Maxim was moving to Toronto and I thought it was a good opportunity to see if a move would work for me."

"It was serious, then," said Ilya, ignoring the irrationally sour feeling in his chest at the mention of Maxim.

"I thought it was," said Shane. "But by the time all the arrangements had been made and I actually got here, we'd broken up." He ran his fingers along the opening of a zip-lock bag to seal it shut. "So not that serious after all."

For a long time, Ilya had wondered what kind of man this Maxim had been, to have made Shane willingly undergo the bureaucratic and logistical nightmare of moving jobs and cities. Then he hadn't had to wonder, because they'd run into Maxim at the opening of Marleau's restaurant.

He had turned out to be what Svetlana might have described as a very particular kind of restaurant dirtbag, the kind who name-dropped the French Laundry, made over-engineered grilled cheese sandwiches, and thrived only in the controlled dysfunction of the high end kitchen and nowhere else. Ilya knew the type mostly against his will, as a result of Marleau's, and subsequently JJ Boiziau's, fondness for chef circles — back in the day, Ilya had on more than one occasion found himself in the raucous purgatory of a post-dinner service rager.

Sure enough, Maxim had mentioned having worked at Noma within a minute of Shane stiffly introducing them. He'd come bearing down on Shane like the curly-haired, handsome weasel that he'd been, with seemingly no remorse for having induced his ex-boyfriend to move to Toronto before promptly breaking up with him.

But Ilya had done his best to be civil and had made conversation about how Maxim had turned down being CDC at Alo to work on his new restaurant concept. Only, as Maxim had talked, Ilya's gaze had kept returning to the tattoo on Maxim's forearm: a large diagram of beef cuts, labelled in Korean.

While Maxim had been going on about developing a bagna cauda foam inspired by his travels to Piedmont, Ilya's mind had steadily filled with questions, starting with: what the fuck. No, why the fuck. What was the purpose of this tattoo? Was the man intending to cheat at an international butchery examination? Was he afraid that he would one day wake up with no memory of what a cow looked like, but urgently need to purchase cuts of meat for a Korean barbeque?

And, most importantly, had Shane, beautiful Shane — who only ate beef once a year because of the carbon footprint, whose foremost considerations when contemplating food were: texture first, macro-nutrients second, and flavour not at all — had Shane looked at this entirely ludicrous, very permanent line drawing of a cow on this man's arm, with its shank and brisket and who the fuck knew what else meticulously labelled in a language that this man, by his own admission, did not fucking speak — had Shane looked at it and thought: Excellent! Now I would like to fuck this man?

All evidence suggested that the answer had been yes, multiple times. It had boggled the mind.

To his credit, Shane, standing on the periphery of this car crash of a conversation, had been wearing a look on his face that had suggested that he, too, might have been seriously reconsidering his past life choices.

And it had been stupid and unnecessary but Ilya hadn't been able to help leaning into the Ilya Rozanov of it all — the outsize version of himself that existed exclusively on the ice and in the next morning's headlines. Conjuring him up like an old friend, like a mirror reflecting light — that dagger-sharp other self who had once been capable of magnetising a locker room, a club, an entire fucking arena.

It had been subtle, the shift in Maxim's tone, as he'd started, unconsciously, to want Ilya to be impressed by him. And Maxim might not have been aware of this happening but Shane had clocked Ilya almost immediately, even having escaped across the room to talk to Marleau, ginger ale in hand. For a moment Shane had fixed Ilya with a gaze so dark and unyielding that Ilya had felt a shiver run through his body.

Later, after they'd eaten various poached hors d'oeuvres, after Ilya had taken the obligatory photo with Marleau for the restaurant's social media, Ilya had taken Shane back to his beautiful big luxury penthouse bought with his extravagant hockey money and ravished Shane on the ridiculous nineteen-seat sectional Ilya had inherited from the Toronto Raptor who'd owned the house before him.

"That pretentious dirtbag didn't know what he had," Ilya had ground out, the strain of the night and the vodka that he hadn't been able to resist making him say out loud the nonsense he usually kept behind his teeth.

Pressed into the couch below him, Shane had groaned — a delicious sound.

"Dicking around with foam — when he could've held on to you," Ilya had continued. "You could — fuck — do so much better —"

Later, Shane had sat Ilya on the large ottoman under the wall-to-wall built-in display shelf at the far end of Ilya's living room. Stood across from him for several long moments, saying nothing, just surveying Ilya while eating a tuna melt that Ilya had made because the poached hors d'oeuvres hadn't been enough. Ilya had lounged back on his elbows under the gleam of his trophies and the heat of Shane's hungry regard, watching Shane watch him.

Then Shane had laughed, seemingly to himself.

"I could do so much better, eh."

It had been this, rather than anything else, that had made Ilya's face warm.

"Heat of the moment, I say things," Ilya had said. "Ignore me."

"He wasn't so bad," Shane had said, after a pause. "A little pretentious, maybe, but he did really work at Noma. I wouldn't have moved cities for just anyone." But he had frowned as he'd said this.

"You talk to me about other men while eating sandwiches in my house?" Ilya had said, without any heat, because he knew it would amuse Shane.

Sure enough, Shane had grinned. "I'll say whatever I want, good sir," he had replied, and ducked away when Ilya had leaped up to tackle him.

"Did you? Have anyone serious?" Shane asked now, while his dozen eggs continued to simmer.

Ilya considered this. "Svetlana, maybe," he said. "For many years I thought I would marry her. Not for love, just for a green card."

"Oh," said Shane, carefully casual.

"Then she met a big movie star and fell madly in love," Ilya added. "And I moved to Canada."

"Oh," said Shane again, lighter this time.

He'd had regular arrangements, of course, some he'd been more than a little fond of. There had been Leonora, the bachata instructor who had gotten Ilya into acupuncture and fire cupping; and Simone, the Instagram model who had pivoted to selling natural fibre swimsuits, and then abruptly went and got married to a DJ. For a couple of years he'd had a casual thing going with Miles, the actor from the X-Squad movies.

But nobody he would have moved cities for. Not even Svetlana.

panic call to Svetlana

He would not describe it as calling Svetlana in a panic except that he does in fact call Svetlana in a panic.

He sits listening to the phone ringing out in his parked car — not the sensible one with the trunk mount rack but one of the last sports cars from his Boston fleet, the bright orange Lamborghini that Shane always looks askance at.

When Ilya had called Svetlana slightly more than a year ago to ask whether she thought putting a SeaSucker vacuum mount rack on the roof of the Lamborghini would damage the paint job, she had laughed very loudly over the phone.

"Are you having a midlife crisis?" she had asked, when Ilya had made clear that he was being serious.

"No, I am trying to get laid," Ilya had replied, which had set off another round of laughter.

But when she'd finished cackling she'd also said, "For coupe roof mounts, you will need to remove the front wheel of the bike," because apparently there was a subsection of the Lamborghini-buying populace of Boston that routinely asked about mounting bikes on the roofs of their sports cars.

"Not very sexy, fiddling about with bicycle wheels," Svetlana had continued. "You should use the Mercedes instead, with a trunk mount rack."

This, of course, had turned out to be excellent advice.

It is par for the course for Svetlana, giving good advice. It may or may not be why Ilya is calling her now.

When she finally answers, there is a slight note of alarm in her voice. This, unfortunately, Ilya is familiar with.

He ignores it in favour of saying, by way of greeting, "Too rich and famous to take my calls now that you are married to Rose Landry?"

"Hello to you too, Ilyusha," says Svetlana. "You sound just like my mother."

"Heaven forbid," says Ilya. "How is your glamorous life with your beautiful movie star wife?"

"Very glamorous and beautiful, thanks," Svetlana replies, then cuts to the chase: "Why are you calling me at eleven pm?"

"Booty call," says Ilya impertinently. "Phone sex."

"Fuck right off," Svetlana laughs. "You are too boring now for such things."

"Boring?" Ilya asks, stumbling a little on the word.

"'Oh, Sveta, I am very busy driving to Costco, running my quotidian errands in domestic bliss'," says Svetlana, in a decidedly not Oscar-winning impression of Ilya. "'Sorry, can't talk, will be dicking down bicycle mouse and then sleeping at nine, probably'."

"You are a very rude woman," says Ilya.

"Yes, but I am also very astute," replies Svetlana. "So if you are calling me now at eleven on a Thursday night, it is only natural for me to ask why."

When Ilya had been at his worst, Svetlana had flown to back to Boston from Moscow to empty the contents of his medicine cabinet into the toilet and to spirit away every sharp object in his house. There had been a very fancy letter opener the Ministry of Sports had presented to Ilya which he had never seen again.

Compared to all of that, Ilya tells himself now, this is nothing.

"Here is the thing," Ilya says. "Bicycle mouse is moving back to Ottawa in February."

"I take it the sex is good," says Svetlana.

"Of course," says Ilya.

"Toronto is not so far from Ottawa."

"No," says Ilya, "it is not."

The night before Shane had left for his conference, they'd had a circuitous, silly conversation about how just because Ilya had never taken the VIA Rail before didn't mean it wasn't as viable an option as driving.

"Taking the distance between Ottawa and Toronto as an example," Shane had said, "there are hardly any time savings, and that's before accounting for delays because of bad weather or shitty traffic —"

"Your parents just drove over last month," Ilya had countered.

"That's neither here nor there," Shane had said.

"What do you mean, neither here nor there," Ilya had replied. "They were there in Ottawa and then they were here in Toronto and they did it by getting into their car and driving."

"I think you're missing the point," Shane had said.

It had been familiar, this back and forth, with all the contours of their usual conversations, except Shane didn't usually pause in the middle to jerkily rub his hands over his face, and Ilya didn't usually have a hot uncomfortable feeling in his chest.

"Let's just not talk about this," Shane had said eventually, looking all pinched and unhappy. "It's not as if — it's all hypothetical, anyway."

"Yes, hypothetical," Ilya had agreed, skirting around what they had been really talking about. Like a coward, like a — a fucking idiot who'd never been able to hold on to a good thing.

"You've flown further for a good fuck, what's the problem?" asks Svetlana now.

"The problem? The problem is that I am buying a two-fifty gsm merino wool base layer for him for Christmas," says Ilya. "I am talking to the sales assistant about his thread count needs while he cycles in the Ottawa winter, and de-conflicting this purchase with his mother who has bought him most of the clothes he owns."

Once he has started, he finds he cannot stop. The words continue to pour out of him in a rush.

"Sometimes, Sveta, I cycle. Me! On two wheels, pedalling like an idiot through some terrible beautiful woods, for recreation! Letting him feed me little energy gels like I am a sea lion doing tricks at the New England Aquarium. And sometimes we fuck and it is sublime and I think to myself surely it cannot be so every time, and then we do it again and I feel like my atoms vibrate out into the universe and are slammed back together. And sometimes we don't fuck, and instead we do things like watch another terrible Rose Landry movie in which she is kidnapped, or lie in bed and talk —"

He pauses, and drags in a ragged breath. His eyes are, ridiculously, wet with tears.

"And what is the problem, Ilyusha?" asks Svetlana, her voice quiet over the speakers.

"The problem," Ilya says, "is that I am happy doing that." It is as much a revelation to himself as it is an admission to Svetlana. "I am happy doing all of that. As happy as I can ever remember being. Maybe only short of winning the Stanley Cup."

"Oh," says Svetlana, after a long moment, with horrible compassion. "Oh, Ilyusha."

"It's bad, isn't it," says Ilya.

"You are very, very fucked," says Svetlana.

Ilya did you really watch Interstellar

Two weeks ago, Ilya had caught a rotten cold from his hockey kids and had been languishing quite unsexily in his living room, sprawled out across four out of the nineteen available seats on the sectional, his entire face hurting from sinusitis.

Shane had let himself into the apartment, in a white surgical mask and —

"Are those gloves?" Ilya had croaked from under the duvet he had dragged over from the bedroom an unspecified epoch ago. "Why are you wearing a visor like… like you are going to space?"

"It's a face shield," Shane had said. "I'm travelling for my conference in less than two weeks, I can't afford to catch anything."

He had brought Ilya a thermos of something he had called 'everything porridge', which had turned out to be a rice porridge with egg, mushrooms, tofu, chicken and some vegetables thrown in.

"Mom used to make it when I was sick," he'd said, with a little shrug. "Without the shiitake, though — I didn't like the texture."

He had watched Ilya eat it, while hovering in the entryway in his ridiculous gear — gloves, mask, face shield — in a manner that had been, to Ilya's delirious mind, reminiscent of Anne Hathaway in Interstellar, a movie Ilya had watched on a plane once because Hayden Pike had mentioned it and Ilya had still been halfheartedly trying to ingratiate himself to the Metros at the time.

Admittedly, Ilya does not really know the actual plot of Interstellar given that he'd nodded off near the start and had woken up in time to see Matt Damon burst out of a sous vide bag like a slumbering chicken breast, only to fall asleep again shortly after. But he thinks now that if Anne Hathaway in Interstellar had been Shane, Ilya sure as hell wouldn't have let him go off alone to repopulate some planet. He'd have gone with Shane, the fate of humanity be damned, except — no, stupid Shane would have probably made Ilya go into that black hole anyway because of mission protocol or whatever. And Ilya would have gone, because Shane had said so, and he'd have done the stupid message through time thing in that quantum bookshelf vortex.

And then he would have made the aliens or whoever take him back to Shane and the potatoes he was farming, and if they couldn't, he'd have done it himself, he wouldn't have let time or space or the fifth fucking dimension stop him, even if it meant that by the time he arrived on Shane's planet he'd become nothing but a collection of space particles shivering over Shane's crops, over his space water and the walking talking automatic teller machine from the ship. And maybe this isn't at all how atoms or space work, and Shane would probably tell him he is deeply, deeply wrong, but Ilya's atoms would land on Shane's atoms and he would rest there forever.

Because that is what the movie is about, isn't it — at least according to Hayden fucking Pike, who had rambled incoherently about it at a club during a road trip. The physics and the space and the Matt Damon in the sous vide bag are all just a sideshow. Really, the movie Interstellar is about the power of love.

bonjour

After careening round the corner to stop in front of the pub in which Shane's French language cafe is taking place; after standing like a maniac in the glass looking for Shane among the clusters of people speaking in French; after Shane spots Ilya and picks his way out through the tables and chairs and appears at the door of the pub, looking slightly stunned, and they kiss for several long, drugging moments —

After all of that, the first thing Ilya says when he can bring himself to pull away from Shane for a second is: "I have been thinking about the fifth dimension."

"What," says Shane, confused, still trying to chase Ilya's lips, "the other four aren't enough for you?"

Ilya indulges him; slants their mouths together so they kiss for a little while longer, slow and languid like they have all the time in the world.

Then Ilya pulls away again. "Wait. Shane. This is important."

"Okay," says Shane, breathlessly, "the fifth dimension." He pauses, then seems to notice, for the first time, the Bike Share Toronto bicycle Ilya has left lying haphazardly below the window of the pub. "Did you cycle here?"

"You were not at your apartment," says Ilya. He'd rushed over earlier, after practice with the under-11 girls' team, and had made it all the way to the bottom of Shane's staircase only to find the place still empty.

??, Shane had replied, when Ilya had texted him to ask where he was. I went straight from the airport to my language cafe? It's Friday.

"But why did you cycle here?" Shane is still asking. And because he apparently cannot help himself, he extricates himself from Ilya's embrace so he can pick up the bicycle and set it upright.

"I did the Shane Hollander math," says Ilya, while Shane is fiddling with the kickstand. "It would take forty-five minutes to drive here in Friday night traffic, but cycling would be twenty-five minutes. So I cycled."

"That's just regular math," says Shane, but he's looking back at Ilya with that bright-eyed not-quite-grin again. "That's just part of the normal decision-making matrix, for people who consider alternative forms of transportation besides cars. Now do you admit that maybe, sometimes, driving may not be the best option?"

"That is neither here nor there," Ilya replies, with an agitated wave. "I did not come here to talk about our public transportation argument, I came here to tell you what I have been thinking."

"Okay," says Shane, putting his hands into his coat pockets. "Go on."

Under the full, serious weight of Shane's attention, the thread of Ilya's thoughts begins to fray.

"I am thinking," he begins, after taking a shaky breath, "I am thinking that Ottawa and Toronto are in the same country, the same province, even."

"Yes… that's accurate," says Shane, looking a little uncertain but nodding along nonetheless.

"I am thinking," Ilya continues, even though some part of him — his brain, and probably his heart — feels like it's still being rattled about on a hell-for-leather bike ride across Downtown Toronto, "that if we went to space on a mission to save humanity from having to eat only corn forever, and you sent me into a black hole —"

Shane does a double take. "Wait — what —"

"I am getting to the point," Ilya tells him. "I would go into the black hole for mission success, yes, but the black hole would not stop me —"

"Sorry, did you watch Interstellar while I was away?" Shane interrupts. "Why would I be sending you into a black hole —"

"What I am saying is this: the black hole, the fifth dimension, the fucking pipe organ player in the cosmos who keeps pressing every key and pedal at the same time, none of that — none of that! — would stop me from finding my way back to you."

Shane opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it again.

"Even if it means that by the time I cross space and time to reach you I am nothing but a collection of quantum particles," Ilya says, ignoring the way his voice cracks, the way his hands are trembling despite being clenched into fists. "So I am thinking: Ottawa, Toronto? That is nothing. I am thinking that car, plane, VIA Rail, none of that fucking matters."

"Ilya."

"I would follow you anywhere if you would let me."

"Ilya," Shane says again. His voice is very quiet. He hasn't taken his hands out of his coat pockets, hasn't moved an inch, but there is something about the way he is standing now that makes Ilya think he might levitate right off the ground. "I think quantum particles is another movie altogether."

Ilya attempts to shrug, but it manifests in his body as a violent jerk. "I don't care," he says, "I wasn't even awake for most of Interstellar."

"I can tell," says Shane. "I mean, I don't remember anyone being 'sent into' a black hole in Interstellar, but." He pauses; looks at Ilya in utter seriousness. "If it were me, I think I'd try to find you too."

"Okay," says Ilya, relief blooming in his chest. "So we will both be finding each other."

"And I guess this means you do want to keep doing this? Seeing each other, I mean. Even after I move back to Ottawa." Shane pauses, clears his throat. "Because I would like that. I would like that very much. I wouldn't even make you take the VIA Rail if you didn't want to. And, wait —"

"Why would I need to take the VIA Rail —" Ilya begins to say, but Shane is pulling out his phone, too distracted with opening something on it to really hear Ilya.

He holds his phone out to Ilya with a sheepish expression on his face. "I didn't want to be presumptuous. I know I can get kind of intense. But I was working on something."

Ilya looks down at Shane's phone and sees a spreadsheet named 'Ottawa'. The first tab is Shane's annual leave and a list of public holidays in the coming year, a calendar highlighting all the long weekends Shane can maximise.

The next tab — realtor.ca listings, organised: two bedrooms; three bedrooms; four bedrooms. A fourth column labelled 'Ridiculously out of price range'. More details for each listing, such as, 'Number of parking spaces', and 'Price per lot for additional spaces (if available)', and 'Penthouse (?)'.

"I don't know if any of these come with a nineteen-seat sectional," Shane says tentatively, glancing at Ilya. "But I thought it might be a good alternative to travelling back and forth. If you also had a place to stay in Ottawa."

"When were you going to show me this?" Ilya asks, something rapidly expanding in his chest.

"I don't know, maybe never? It felt a little intense," says Shane. "I mean, we agreed this was a casual thing and Cliff said you didn't really do commitment, so. I didn't want to scare you off or anything."

"You listened to Cliff Marleau?" asks Ilya, taking Shane's phone so he can scroll through the spreadsheet. His vision blurs as he looks at the screen.

"Are you —" Shane begins

"Sorry, I, uh," Ilya says, eloquently. He hands the phone back to Shane and walks off to stand by a trash can. When he scrubs a hand over his face, it comes away wet.

He takes a deep breath, then another, then wipes his face again furiously and walks back to Shane, who is still standing there with his phone, watching Ilya with palpable concern.

"Delete the two-bedroom listings," says Ilya, leaning into Shane's space so he can scroll through the spreadsheet again. "I need one room just for trophies. The Toronto Raptor's sectional doesn't need to come with me. And you're missing one column."

"Am I?"

"Do these places have private bicycle storage," says Ilya.

Shane turns to look at Ilya. "Excuse me?"

"Somewhere safe you can put your bicycle," Ilya says. "Maybe Ottawa bicycle thieves are not like Toronto bicycle thieves, but it's good to be sure. You will be living in this apartment as well, yes?"

Shane is silent for a long moment.

"Do you want me to live in this apartment?" he asks finally.

"It would be very strange if I didn't," says Ilya, "seeing as I am moving to Ottawa because of you."

Shane stares at Ilya. "You're moving to Ottawa?"

Now it is Ilya's turn to boggle at Shane. "Were you not listening to anything I was saying earlier?" Ilya asks. "Obviously I am moving to Ottawa."

"I thought you meant you were willing to give long distance a shot," says Shane.

"What?"

"I mean, there were a lot of metaphors. You kept talking about crossing space and time and passing through black holes," says Shane, "so I thought maybe you were thinking about all the commuting?" He pauses, then frowns. "Is Ottawa meant to be the black hole? But wouldn't that mean I would also be in it with you —"

"Shane," says Ilya, gathering Shane into his arms, bringing his hands up to cradle Shane's face. "Shane. It doesn't matter."

"I think it kind of does," Shane murmurs, winding his arms around Ilya's waist and looking back at Ilya with a gaze so soft and so fond that Ilya feels for a moment like he's staring straight into the sun.

Ilya blinks once, twice; steadies himself against the buttress of Shane's embrace. Says: "I would like to move to Ottawa and live there with you."

"You should really have led with that," says Shane. His voice is flat but his eyes are shining, and he is smiling, smiling so hard it makes Ilya's cheeks hurt in sympathy.

His own heart is thudding violently in his chest, like a salmon throwing itself frantically up a waterfall. For sex, of course, but also maybe for love.

"And yes," says Shane, "I would like that too."

Epilogue

ONTD Original: Where Are They Now? MLH edition

Hi folks, since you liked my last post so much, I'm back with another retired MLH player, who also happens to be a personal favourite of mine: Ilya Rozanov.

Who is Ilya Rozanov? For hockey fans, he was the very successful captain of the Boston Raiders for the better part of the 2010s, before being subjected to a series of trades so baffling it has spawned multiple conspiracy theories and at least one fistfight in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot (that we know of. There may have been others but this is the only one where the cause of the altercation was officially reported as 'Ilya Rozanov's trade to the Metros'). He was also embroiled in a hot mic incident in which he was overheard telling convicted rapist D*ll*s K*nt "you are the most repulsive person I have ever met", a statement of fact that Rozanov was nonetheless fined for.

For everyone else, you may know him for such pop cultural moments as the racy Canadian Tire commercial controversy, this gif from when he gave an interview in French (he does not speak French), and the confusing two weeks in the summer of 2019 when we thought he was dating Rihanna.

Rozanov retired ten years ago in 2025 citing an ankle injury and long-running issues with both knees.

Where is he now?

Part 1: the Toronto years

For a hot minute immediately after his retirement, Rozanov was a bona fide provincial employee of the Ontario Public Service (here's a screenshot of his name on the INFO-GO directory for posterity). Wild. I know it was probably just some kind of fluff consulting gig, but it's still very funny to me, okay. He worked for a short-lived provincial authority called Access Sport Ontario that was set up by the premier of Ontario at the time, mostly as a vanity project to show that they were "rescuing" a major kids sports charity that turned out to have some huge governance issues.

ANYWAY, we don't really know how long Rozanov was there for, but he did coach a couple of kids in the programme who ended up going pro — see this really cute Instagram post from the PWHL's Yasmin Pirzada when Rozanov went to watch a Goldeneyes game last year.

Then at some point he decided to up sticks and leave Toronto, which we know about only because he gave a tour of his luxury penthouse in this Architectural Digest video and then listed it for sale (as one does). The house was generic rich person bullshit but the video was significant because Rozanov mentioned his partner, and referred to said partner as "him". This generated some speculation that ultimately didn't go anywhere, but the bisexual!Rozanov truthers from back in the days of the Miles Allen and Ilya Rozanov "platonic" beach photographs were very smugly vindicated.

Part 2: Ottawa cryptid

I say "cryptid" in a very loose sense, but I just find it so interesting that erstwhile infamous party guy Rozanov (a) moved to Ottawa of all places, and (b) has kept such a low profile that I have ended up having to trawl hockey subreddits and forum posts like someone looking for Bigfoot sightings.

Anyway. Officially, he continued coaching for Access Sports Ontario until it was dissolved — possibly freelance, because I think he also got involved in the Youth Skate Canada inclusive summer camps that Ryan Price and some other former MLH players set up together. He participates annually in a 35km charity bike ride that raises funds for mental health causes, and co-owns a couple of restaurants with fellow former Raider Cliff Marleau.

But also… he has popped up at the randomest of things, including:

• Appearing on the dog-walking app Rover as a dog walker / sitter. This has happened several times.

• Playing in a beer league for (mostly) federal government workers.

• Doing this series of ads for VIA Rail.

• Supporting a bear sanctuary in northwest British Columbia. Keeps it low key but the sanctuary posted him on their social media.

It's all very nice and wholesome, which is something the fossils among us (such as myself) who lived through the 2010s tabloid coverage of Rozanov would probably never have expected. But you know, people change in unexpected ways, and sometimes they might even end up appearing on Uber for dog-walkers, so.

Anyway, that's the post! If you made it all the way to the end, here's a treat for you:

Canadian_Tire1.gif

Canadian_Tire2.gif

SOURCES: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Tags: 2010s celebrities, ilya rozanov, mlh / hockey, sports, where are they now

COMMENTS

fellytone

You need to put those gifs under a nsfw cut!!

To this day I still wonder what the Canadian Tire people were smoking when they approved that ad, but i will say that 2022 me was LIVING.

svendjustsvend

THANK YOU for mentioning but not deep diving into the whole Rozanov-Miles Allen thing, and also all the theories after the AD video. It's so crazy that people were speculating about his sexuality on the internet when there were very serious consequences if he'd actually been outed at the time.

— — vertigo

— — I agree, although I will point out that I think the whole Mexico beach thing happened after he got Canadian citizenship, for what it's worth.

yexu

As someone who also remembers the Rozanov tabloid coverage (and even then I'd forgotten about the Rihanna thing, what a fucking fever dream), I am deeply curious to know who exactly it was who locked him down so good that he's gone full Ottawa cryptid.

To be fair, I think he did start to tone things down after he left Boston, so maybe it's been a gradual mellowing out over time.

— — speakslow

— — This is very my friend who has a bike, but I do actually have a friend of a friend whose dad installed the solar panels in Rozanov's and his partner's cottage. Apparently it's a beautiful property. They are both very private, so there's not very much more I can say, but Rozanov's partner apparently kept insisting that the friend's dad try the water from their well (it was good water).

— — — yexu

— — — Well I guess we know now that the guy likes water!