Chapter Text
The thing about loving someone in secret is that you get very good at performing a version of yourself that doesn't.
Ilya Rozanov had been doing it for eight months. Eight months of carefully calibrated phone calls after midnight, of hotel rooms in neutral cities, of Shane's hand on the back of his neck in a way that no one would ever see — because this was what they had agreed upon. Not forever. Shane had made that clear, had said it with those stupid earnest eyes that made Ilya want to commit crimes. But for now. For now, while Ilya was still in Boston. For now, while the timing was wrong and the world was what it was.
Eight months. Ilya had gotten very good at it.
He was less good at it by the third hour of Victor St-Simon's bachelor party.
🏒🏒🏒
The venue was a private room above a bar in the Seaport — the kind of place with leather booths and no windows and a tab that wouldn't be discussed in the morning. St-Simon was the Raiders' right defenseman, twenty-nine years old, marrying his girlfriend of four years in five weeks, and he had made the mistake of letting Cliff Marleau plan the party. Which meant the evening had already featured a mechanical bull, a bracket tournament called Victor's Most Catastrophic Moments on the Ice, and an open bar with what appeared to be no closing time.
Ilya was on his fourth drink.
This was, he would tell himself later, the only real explanation for what happened.
There were twelve of them crowded around a long table strewn with bottles and shot glasses and the ruins of a charcuterie board nobody had taken seriously. Ilya sat between Marleau and Connors, which in retrospect was a tactically poor decision — both of them were loud in direct proportion to their blood alcohol content, and both of them were currently extremely loud. Across the table, St-Simon had a paper crown on his head that someone had constructed from a cocktail napkin, and he was grinning the specific grin of a man who had accepted the evening was going to be a disaster and decided to lean into it.
Ryan Carmichael, their second-line centre, had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and was holding court about something at the far end of the table. Brad Hammersmith, their enforcer, was apparently trying to explain the offside rule to the bartender who had not asked. Johansson was asleep in his chair but would deny this if confronted.
Ilya liked these men. He liked most of his teammates, in the imprecise way you liked people you had bled with and won with and shared a dressing room with for years. Boston had been his city for nine seasons. These were his people.
He was also leaving in four months when his contract expired, and he had not yet told any of them he wasn't planning to re-sign. But that was a problem for future Ilya, and future Ilya sounded miserable and could deal with it.
"Okay, okay, okay," Marleau was saying — standing, despite the fact that chairs existed, waving his gin and tonic with the authority of a man who had been waiting all night to do this. He had his phone out, the screen glowing in the low light. "I downloaded this app. It's a party question thing. Everyone yells the first answer that comes into their head. No thinking. Just yelling."
"This is how men end up in therapy," said Connors, from the stool he'd dragged to the end of the table because he refused, on principle, to sit on a booth bench.
"Connors, you are in therapy," Marleau said.
"I know. That's how I recognize the warning signs."
There was laughter. There was always laughter. Ilya smiled and drank and felt the comfortable looseness of being somewhere familiar — somewhere that asked nothing complicated of him — and tried not to think about the text he'd gotten from Shane three hours ago.
Have fun tonight. Call me after if you're not dead.
He had not responded yet. He would. He just needed to figure out how to say I am at a party thinking about you the way I always think about you which is to say constantly and with a specificity that would horrify everyone in this roomwithout saying any of that.
"First question," Marleau announced. "Favourite position."
The room erupted.
"Wing," said three people simultaneously, then laughed at each other.
"Defense," said St-Simon, because it was his party and he could be obvious if he wanted.
"Goalie," said Varkov, their backup, and was booed.
"He means sex position, obviously—"
"Oh, obviously, thank you, Carmichael—"
"Missionary," said Hammersmith, somewhere in the vicinity of the bartender, and was booed from two directions at once.
The answers started overlapping, becoming indistinct — names of things that Ilya catalogued distantly while he drank and watched St-Simon laugh so hard he nearly lost his paper crown. It was fine. This was normal. This was the specific texture of being a man in a room full of men who trusted each other — messy and loud and fundamentally uncomplicated.
Everyone except Ilya.
Marleau was scrolling.
"Age you lost your virginity."
More chaos. Numbers ranging from fifteen to twenty-two were hurled across the table, each greeted with either admiration or mockery depending on the direction. Carmichael said seventeen and was told this was extremely believable. St-Simon said nineteen and the table made sympathetic sounds until he pointed out it was by choice, which no one believed. Connors refused to answer on principle and was harassed until Marleau moved on.
Ilya said sixteen. No one commented. The conversation moved around him like water.
He was good at this, he reminded himself — this particular practiced way of being present without being fully present. It was a survival mechanism. He'd had it since he was eighteen years old and understanding things about himself that didn't fit neatly into the shape of his life, and then later, into the shape of this specific life — captain, Russian player, public figure, face of the rivalry.
Shane had called it hiding in plain sight once, not cruelly but accurately. He'd said it while they were lying in a hotel room in Calgary, three months in, and Ilya had looked at him and thought: you are the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me.
What he'd said out loud was: “go to sleep, Hollander.”
Shane had smiled and gone to sleep and Ilya had stared at the ceiling for an hour and then, eventually, put his arm around him, which was an objectively treasonous act he chose not to examine.
"Okay, okay—" Marleau was building to something. Ilya could tell from the specific gleam in his eye — the same one he got right before he did something that would make Coach LeClair's veins visible through his forehead. "Last question. Best one. Ready?"
"Just ask it," St-Simon said.
Marleau looked around the table with the satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for this moment since he downloaded the app.
"Which player — active league, any team — would you go gay for."
The table went quiet for exactly one second.
Then everyone started talking at once.
"Does it have to be current roster—"
"Obviously current, Carmichael—"
"I'm just clarifying the parameters—"
"Rodriguez from Minnesota," someone offered, and there was a ripple of genuine consideration.
"Okay, yeah, he's — I mean — conventionally—"
"MacTavish," said Johansson, apparently not asleep after all, and the table turned to stare at him. He shrugged. "He has a good jawline."
"Johansson—"
"I'm answering the question. This is what you asked me to do."
More names were offered. Some Ilya recognized, some he didn't. It was all good-natured in the way these conversations always were — the performance of heterosexuality so comfortable it could play at its own edges without any real risk, because everyone in this room knew exactly what they were.
Everyone except Ilya.
He was smiling. He was certain he was smiling. His face knew how to do that on autopilot.
"Come on, come on," Marleau said, hosting, collecting answers the way he played the boards — with his whole body. "Everyone at once. Three, two, one—"
And the room answered.
Ilya heard it before his brain had finished processing it — heard it the way you hear something that arrives as pure sensation before meaning catches up.
Twelve men.
One name.
"Shane Hollander. "
Stunned silence.
Not because anyone was embarrassed. Because they were all staring at each other in collective, dawning, genuinely delighted recognition that they had all said the same name simultaneously — and the name was very specifically Shane Hollander, and this was apparently universal, and the silence lasted approximately three seconds before the room absolutely lost its mind.
" Wait — everyone?"
"I thought it was just me—"
"He's just so—"
"—objectively, objectively —"
"Don't tell me you wouldn't—"
"I'm not saying I would , I'm saying under the right hypothetical—"
Marleau, who was laughing so hard his gin and tonic was at a dangerous angle, managed: "It's the face. It's completely the face."
"It's not just the face," said Carmichael, with the seriousness of a man committing to an argument he had thought about before. "It's the — there's a whole thing . You see him at the All-Star game, right, and you just think—"
"He's built, " Connors said, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone filing a report. "I'm just saying. Objectively built."
"And he plays like—" St-Simon paused, wrestled with something. "I mean, I hate him. I want to be clear that I hate him. But you can respect an enemy."
"That's very philosophical, Victor."
"I'm saying his skating is beautiful and I hate him for it."
"We should send him a card," Carmichael said.
"What would it even say," said Connors.
"'Congratulations on being universally—'"
"Don't finish that."
Ilya sat very still.
He was aware, distantly, of his hands. Of the glass between them. Of the sound in the room, which his brain was now processing from a significant remove — the way you hear music through a wall. Present. Identifiable. Not quite real.
He was aware of Marleau directly to his left, tears streaming down his face from laughing, saying something about how they needed to make it a jersey patch. He was aware of Connors beside him, nodding along with the pleased expression of a man whose opinion has been validated by popular vote.
He was aware of the low-frequency sound inside his own chest, which was not a sound exactly — more the sensation of something being compressed past its structural tolerance.
Shane Hollander.
Shane, whose number Ilya would watch retired by whatever team kept him, wherever they both ended up. Shane, whose face appeared on a billboard in Montreal that Ilya had driven past three more times than was necessary during their last road trip. Shane, who sent him terrible hockey takes at 2 a.m. and expected real engagement, who fell asleep on the couch when Ilya wasn't there to make him go to bed, who had looked at Ilya eight months ago in a hotel room in Tampa and said, quietly, like it wasn't the most terrifying sentence Ilya had ever been handed: I think this might be the realest thing I've ever had.
Shane, who was apparently the universal answer to a question about desire, in a room full of hockey players who had no idea.
No idea that the man they were currently, cheerfully, drunkenly discussing — in terms Ilya was not going to catalogue in detail because it would genuinely end him — was someone Ilya had called this morning. Had fallen asleep next to two weeks ago in Ottawa. Had argued with yesterday about a film Shane had watched without him, which was a ridiculous thing to be hurt by and Ilya had not been hurt, he had simply expressed a preference for being consulted.
Shane had laughed and said, "You're such a drama queen," and Ilya had said, "I am an artist," and Shane had said, "Yeah, yeah, go to practice," and hung up, still laughing.
Ilya had stared at his phone for a full minute after.
"—Rozanov."
He surfaced.
Marleau was looking at him. The whole table was looking at him, with the particular attention of people who had just noticed that one person in the room hadn't contributed to the chaos. Ilya knew this look. He had been navigating it for years.
"What?" he said. His voice came out fine. Steady.
"Hollander," Marleau said, grinning at him with the specific delight of someone who has been waiting for this. "You're the dissenting vote? You're the one man in this room who—"
"I didn't say anything."
"That's the dissenting vote. Everyone said his name, Roz. Everyone . Even Johansson, who we thought was asleep—"
"I was not asleep," said Johansson.
"—and you said nothing. Which means either you don't find Hollander attractive, in which case you're lying, or you find him so attractive you short-circuited."
There were hoots. Someone threw a cocktail napkin. Carmichael pointed at Ilya with the enthusiasm of a man who had been gifted the perfect setup.
"It's the rivalry," Connors said sagely, beside him. "He can't separate the hockey from the — you know."
"This is exactly it," Marleau agreed. "If you could set aside the fact that he makes you want to retire every time you play him—"
"He does not make me want to retire." Ilya picked up his drink. "He makes me want to win , which I do."
"You split the season series," said Carmichael.
"I said what I said."
"But aesthetically —"
There was a particular art to this. Ilya had been doing it for eight months but the truth was he'd been doing a version of it for much longer — the performance of discussing Shane Hollander as though Shane Hollander were a stranger, a rival, a name in the league and nothing more.
"Hollander," Ilya said, with the measured flatness of a man delivering a considered verdict, "has a face that someone drew by committee. He is my enemy on the ice. These things cannot be separated."
The table erupted in objections.
"The rivalry is clouding you—"
"You're the only person in this room who sees him and thinks enemy instead of—"
"Because I am the only person in this room who actually has to play him—"
"That's not—"
"Name one person here," Ilya said, with complete authority, "who has blocked a Hollander shot at point-blank range in the third period of a playoff game."
Silence.
"I have done this," Ilya said. "You have not. Your opinions are therefore theoretical. Mine are informed."
This earned him a round of booing and several more thrown napkins, and Marleau put his head down on the table and made sounds that were either laughter or weeping. Ilya sat and received the booing with the dignified composure of a man who had been receiving booing professionally for nine years, and kept his face in the arrangement that meant good-natured exasperation, and thought: “I need to get out of this room.”
🏒🏒🏒
He lasted another forty-five minutes.
It required, he felt, a level of professional discipline that was not being sufficiently recognized. The conversation moved on — St-Simon was roasted extensively for a wrong-turn exit off the 93 that had made them twenty minutes late to a game in 2016, Carmichael attempted a toast that derailed into an argument about the rules of toasting, and Marleau produced a second wind and suggested they go find a karaoke bar, which was vetoed eight to four.
Ilya answered questions on autopilot while the back of his mind ran its own separate, awful calculation.
Twelve men.
Shane Hollander.
All at once.
He was jealous. The acknowledgment wasn't a surprise — he'd known it somewhere around the third second of the silence — but saying it explicitly was worse, because jealousy required an object, and the object here was twelve of his closest professional colleagues admiring his secret boyfriend with the cheerful, unguarded openness that Ilya could not extend to anyone in this room. Not here. Not now. Maybe not ever.
It wasn't that he begrudged them. Shane was — Ilya was fully aware of what Shane was, empirically. Had been aware of it since 2008, when he was eighteen years old and Shane Hollander introduced himself outside a rink in Regina and Ilya had shaken his hand and thought, with the clarity of a verdict, this is going to be a problem. He'd watched the room reorganize around Shane for six years of rivalry before any of it was his to know. He knew it now with a specificity he'd never been able to share with anyone.
But knowing it was different from sitting in a booth in the Seaport listening to Cliff Marleau, his closest friend on this team, his road trip companion for nine years, describe Shane's arms with the kind of genuine appreciation Ilya would only permit himself after midnight, alone, phone in hand.
He excused himself at quarter past one. St-Simon was deep in a story involving a metaphor that had three separate hockey references. No one looked up except Marleau, who raised an eyebrow.
"Fresh air," Ilya said.
Marleau accepted this with a nod that meant “I know you, and I'm letting this go.”
🏒🏒🏒
There was a fire escape at the end of a hallway — a metal landing three floors up with a view of the harbor in the dark. The air was cold, October doing what October did in Boston, the sky a flat city-grey that never went fully dark. Ilya leaned against the railing and breathed and tried to locate the functioning version of himself.
He had his phone out before he'd consciously decided to use it.
Shane picked up on the second ring.
"Hey." Low. Slightly underwater. He'd probably been on the couch. He always fell asleep on the couch when Ilya wasn't there to make him go to bed — information Ilya had filed away with the care of someone who knew he wasn't supposed to have it. "I thought you were at a party."
"I am at a party," Ilya said. "I am outside the party."
A pause. Then, a little more awake: "You sound weird. What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Ilya."
"I said nothing—"
"I know what you said. I also know your nothing-happened voice, which sounds like right now."
The harbor was very dark. A taxi moved through the street below and was gone. Ilya watched it.
"My team," he said, "is made up of very annoying men."
"I — yes? Generally I agree with you. Specifically, though—"
"We were playing a question game."
"Okay."
"There was a question." Ilya turned so his back was to the railing, looking at the brick wall of the building. "About which player you would — find attractive. If you were not what you are."
Silence on the other end of the line.
"And?" Shane said, carefully.
"The entire room said the same name."
More silence. Then, very quietly: "Ilya—"
"Your name," Ilya said. He knew Shane had already understood. He could hear it in the quiet. But he needed it to be external, real, outside his own head. "All twelve of them. Marley. Connors. Carmichael. St-Simon. All at the same time."
Shane was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had done the thing it did sometimes — gone softer, more deliberate, the voice Ilya associated with Shane trying very hard not to hurt him and not entirely succeeding anyway. "It doesn't mean anything—"
"I know it doesn't mean anything."
"They don't know—"
"I know they don't know." Ilya pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. The cold was specific and grounding. "This is not news to me, Shane. I am fully aware that they don't know. I am the person living inside this situation every single day."
He hadn't meant for that to come out — or he had, probably, eventually. Eight months of carefully not saying certain things had to produce pressure. Had to find somewhere to go.
"I know," Shane said. Very quiet now. "I know you do."
"It is a specific experience." Ilya stopped. Tried again. "To sit in that room and listen to people discuss you. And be unable to say anything."
The fire escape was very still. Somewhere several streets over, a siren rose and fell and disappeared.
"Come to Montreal," Shane said.
"I have practice Monday—"
"Come after practice. Monday night. We have a home game Tuesday. You can sit in the stands and I'll play terribly because having you in the building makes me play terribly—"
"It does not—"
"It does, I checked the analytics, I am statistically worse when you're watching—"
"Because you are showing off and then you overcorrect—"
"I know why it happens—"
"And yet it keeps happening."
"Can you come?"
Ilya closed his eyes.
The thing about Shane was — the thing about Shane, specifically, that had been a problem since 2008 — was that he kept doing this. Kept extending these small ordinary invitations as though they weren't extraordinary. As though asking Ilya to cross an international border on a Tuesday night were the kind of thing people simply did. As though the distance between them was a problem that could be solved by a flight, a hockey game, a hotel room with a view of the St. Lawrence.
The distance was not the problem.
The problem was Ilya standing on a fire escape in Boston at one in the morning, and inside the building behind him, twelve men who had known him for years had just said Shane Hollander's name with the uncomplicated honesty of people who had nothing to hide. And Ilya could not do the same in any room with any people. Not here. Not now. Possibly not in the next forty-eight years. He didn't know. He had deliberately not thought about it too carefully, because thinking about it too carefully produced an answer he wasn't ready for.
"Maybe," he said.
Shane, who knew him, heard this as the yes it was. "Okay," he said quietly. "Okay."
"Tell me about your day," Ilya said.
"My day?"
"Yes. Your day. Tell me something that isn't this."
A pause, and then Shane made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh — something adjacent to it — and started talking. Practice. A new play the coaching staff was running that made no geometric sense. JJ Boiziau getting into an argument with the video coach about a replay. The extremely mediocre pasta he'd made for dinner because he'd gone grocery shopping while hungry, again, which Ilya had told him approximately four hundred times not to do.
"You cannot shop hungry," Ilya said. "This is basic knowledge."
"I have excellent general knowledge. I just lose my mind near cheese."
"These things are incompatible."
"Respectfully disagree."
"I don't disagree with nutritional science—"
"Nutrition science and I have a complicated relationship." A pause. "Are you going back inside? You sound cold."
He was cold. October had made its way through his jacket roughly fifteen minutes ago. He could hear, faintly, the sounds of the party below — Marleau's voice, laughter, the sound of men having a night that would become a story.
He thought about Shane's face when he scored — the way it broke open before he remembered to be professional about it.
He thought about St-Simon's paper crown and Connors filing his opinion on Shane's physique with the seriousness of an official report, and Marleau with his head on the table, and how in four months Ilya would be gone from Boston, from this team, from this particular constellation of people who knew him the way only your teammates could — through proximity and ice time and shared failure and shared triumph.
Not the deeper knowing. But a real one.
He thought about a hotel room in Ottawa and Shane's breathing slowing and Ilya's own arm making a decision before his brain had ratified it.
"Yes," he said. "I'm going back inside."
"Good. Go enjoy it. It's Victor's night."
"You know St-Simon?"
"I know all your teammates, Ilya. I've played against them for nine years."
"You know what I mean."
"I do." A beat. "Go have fun. You're allowed."
"Shane."
"Mm."
"I will come Monday. After practice."
A pause. Then, warm: "Yeah?"
"Yes." He watched a light change on the street below. "I want to watch you play terribly."
"I play fine when you watch. I just play differently—"
"You play like you're auditioning."
"That is — not entirely inaccurate." He could hear the smile in it. "Okay. Monday. I'll tell Kolya to leave the rink access pass at the gate."
"Don't tell Kolya it's for me. He'll text Marleau."
"...yeah, fair point. I'll figure it out."
"Good night, Shane."
"Night, Ilya." A half-breath pause — the specific pause Shane left when he was deciding whether to say the real thing. He usually decided against it, for Ilya's sake. Ilya was aware of this and found it both considerate and quietly devastating. Tonight he just said: "Get some sleep after."
"You also," Ilya said.
“I love you”
“Я тоже тебя люблю”
He stayed on the fire escape for another minute after he hung up. The harbor was dark. The city never went quiet, not fully. He let himself want things, standing there — let himself want them without immediately cataloguing why he couldn't have them, which was a practice he'd been developing slowly, the way you develop a muscle: carefully, with appropriate rest, and not all at once.
Then he pushed off the railing and went back inside.
🏒🏒🏒
The party ran until two.
Ilya stayed for all of it.
He bought St-Simon a drink and let Carmichael beat him at a trivia question about Boston history that he knew the answer to, and when Marleau inevitably climbed on a barstool to give a toast — because Marleau had never in his life passed up an opportunity to be the tallest person in a room — Ilya stood up and delivered his own toast in his most heavily accented, grammatically maximalist English, which made St-Simon laugh so hard he had to put down his drink. Which was the intended effect.
Marleau caught him on the way out, jacket half on, on the landing by the stairs.
"Hey." He wasn't sloppy — just easy, the good kind of drunk. He clapped Ilya on the shoulder in the way that meant something without being specific. "Good night."
"Good night," Ilya said.
"You disappeared for a bit."
"Fresh air."
Marleau looked at him for a moment, with the particular expression he reserved for when he thought something was happening and had decided not to ask about it. Ilya had seen this expression a number of times over the years, always in situations that required it to be ignored.
"Next year's going to be weird without you," Marleau said.
Ilya looked at him.
"I haven't—"
"Roz." Marleau's face was simply his face — affectionate, exasperated, and fully known to Ilya after nine years in the same dressing room. "Come on. We're not idiots. You're going." He paused. "Where?"
"I don't know yet," Ilya said.
This was technically true. He had three offers, and he was going to take the one that put him in the closest city to Shane, and he was going to say it was about the contract structure, and everyone would politely accept this for as long as he needed them to. Unless.
Unless was something he'd started leaving space for. A small unlabeled room at the back of his mind where certain possibilities lived without yet being examined. He didn't know what was inside it. He wasn't ready.
"Somewhere further north, maybe," he said.
Marleau snorted. "Rich coming from the Russian."
"I've been in Boston nine years. I've earned opinions about weather."
"Fair." Marleau dropped his hand from Ilya's shoulder and stepped back. "Take care of yourself, yeah?"
"Always," Ilya said.
He stepped out into the cold.
🏒🏒🏒
He called Shane from the cab.
"I thought you were sleeping," Shane said. Not quite awake, not quite asleep.
"I was in a cab. It seemed like a long time to not be talking."
A pause. "Those are two separate statements that don't connect."
"They connect."
"How?"
Ilya watched the city move past — the lit windows, the late-October streets, the particular beauty of Boston at night that he'd never admitted to anyone, including himself, was something he'd miss. "The cab was quiet," he said. "I don't like quiet."
"You love quiet."
"I love certain quiet."
This was true. He loved the quiet of empty ice and early mornings and the specific quiet of a room that Shane was also in, which was entirely different and not something he was going to say from the back of a cab at two in the morning.
"How was the rest of it?" Shane asked.
"Good. Victor was happy. This is the important thing."
"Yeah." A sleepy pause. "Did Cliff behave himself?"
Ilya thought about Marleau with his head on the table. "Define behave."
"Did he end up on the bar at any point."
"The stool. Not the bar."
"Progress."
"Small progress." Ilya watched a traffic light change. Green to amber to red. "Shane."
"Mm."
"I will come Monday. After practice."
A pause. Then, warmly: "Yeah?"
"Yes. I want to watch you play—"
"Well—"
"—I want to watch you play however you play, and then I want to tell you about it in detail."
"Oh god." He could hear the smile through the exhaustion. "You're going to critique me, aren't you."
"I am going to provide observations."
"That's the same thing."
"Go to sleep, Shane."
"You called me—"
"And now I am telling you to sleep. Both things can be true."
Shane laughed — low and genuine, the laugh Ilya had memorized without meaning to, the one that didn't perform anything. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Good night, Ilya."
"Good night," Ilya said.
He sat in the cab for a moment after they'd both hung up, not moving. The driver didn't say anything. The meter ran.
He was jealous. He was in love. He was leaving Boston in four months for somewhere Shane was, and he was going to keep performing the version of himself that wasn't, for as long as that remained the shape of his life.
Unless.
He paid the driver and stepped out onto the pavement. The night air was cold and specific and real. Somewhere eleven hundred kilometers north, Shane Hollander had fallen back asleep. Ilya stood in front of his building and let himself want things — quietly, without immediate cataloguing, in the dark where nobody could see.
Then he went inside.