Archive of Our Own

The dorms have a strict no-animals policy, but Shane’s always considered Missy more of a roommate than a pet. She’s quiet, clean, and seems to have perfected her own routine, which Shane respects. Hayden says that roommates don’t usually puke on carpets or knock over half-drunk ginger ale cans in the middle of the night, but this is verifiably untrue, because Hayden is his roommate and does all of the above when he’s had one too many beers, so either Missy should be elevated to roommate status, or Hayden should be downgraded to pet status. At least Missy doesn’t get hungover the next morning and raid Shane’s Gatorade stash without bothering to replace any of it.

In conclusion, Missy is a roommate, not a pet. A third roommate, unfortunately, still violates the occupancy terms of their double room.

When Shane enters with a frantically whispered she’s coming, Hayden is instantly up from his desk. There are meows of protest as Hayden gathers Missy up from her high perch upon Shane’s closet, and the tirade continues as she’s deposited into a blanket-padded crate which Shane slides carefully beneath his bed. The speed at which the whole thing goes is impressive, honestly, given the circumstances.

“Nice boot, Hollander,” Svetlana says, when Shane opens the door. Hayden is sprawled out inconspicuously upon Shane’s bed with his laptop blasting at full volume the last song he’d had open on Youtube, which means Svetlana hears only the electronic voice of a pop singer going on about how love is a drug, or something, rather than Missy’s meows of indignity.

Shane moves aside to let her in, and the walking boot on his right foot thumps dully against the carpet. He’d sprained his ankle at practice two days ago after a collision with one of their larger defensemen. The injury was minor, thankfully, even though his mom’s reaction over the phone suggested an injury akin to losing a rib, or hitting his head so hard he’d forgotten how to hold a stick.

Svetlana gives the place a bored once-over. The RA inspections are perfunctory, Shane knows, but he’s unfortunately committed now to this whole having a cat thing, which means he can’t risk being reported to management. From the other side of the room, Hayden puts on a nonchalant smile and does a very bad job of it, from what Shane can tell. And if Shane can tell, then he scarcely believes Svetlana is convinced. At the very least, it holds her confused attention for long enough that Shane can discreetly kick a stray cat toy beneath the laundry hamper and out of sight.

Mercifully, she leaves the room with no comment other than to turn down the music. Shane shuts the door, backs up against it, and breathes out in relief.

“Jesus,” Hayden says.

Shane closes his eyes. The song about love and drugs is winding down now. From beneath the bed, a blanket rustles.

“Mrow,” says Missy.

//

She was wet and limping when Shane first came across her after practice. The headlights of a passing car had cast her shadow large against the back wall of the rink building, and through the grey curtain of rain he could narrowly make out the awkward bent to her front paw.

When she wedged herself underneath the body of a parked car, he spent half an hour knelt on the wet asphalt coaxing her out, then walked a mile to the nearest open veterinary clinic while she shivered in his arms, wrapped in the fabric of his jacket.

“Sorry,” he was saying to her, even though it probably wasn’t audible over the thrum of the rain; and anyway the concept of an apology would likely have eluded her, but he’d read somewhere that most cats had the intelligence of a two-year-old, so there was a chance she might have understood the sentiment; though probably she would have been confused as to what he was apologising for, since he wasn’t the one who’d broken her paw and all. This train of thought lands in Hayden’s voicemail when Shane’s panicked call fails to go through, which helps greatly, because now Shane’s worrying less about the cat and more about clearing Hayden’s inbox before he opens that.

Once she’d been patched up and discharged with her prescription of painkillers and antibiotics, Shane had brought her back to the dorms and set about the task of nursing her back to health.

According to Hayden, it was not common for first-time cat owners to time precisely each one of their cat’s thrice-a-day playtimes to ensure they hit the recommended fifteen minutes, or max out their loan limit at the university library with the likes of Total Cat Mojo: The Ultimate Guide to Life with Your Cat. The single-mindedness with which Shane was approaching this endeavour was apparently unusual, but it was how he did most things in life—the important ones, anyway, like playing hockey, or doing his lecture readings, or calling his parents every week—so it stood to reason that he would spend forty-five minutes in an aisle of Mondou comparing the nutritional value of the wet food with the Persian on the label versus the one with the Siamese.

Two weeks in and she’d been leaping pain-free from the top of Shane’s closet while he exhausted his contact list looking for anyone who wanted their carpets puked on and their ginger ales knocked over.

At this point, Shane had still refrained from giving her a proper name, instead referring to her as the roommate, both within the privacy of his own mind and eventually outside of it. Raincheck for tonight, I’ve got plans with the roommate. Really the plans involved pulling up bird videos on his iPad and letting her scratch at the screen protector, but for Shane this was preferable to most social gatherings, so he didn’t feel too bad about the lie. Probably she’d be given a more permanent name once she’d been adopted out anyway, so there was no reason to accustom her to one before then.

A part of Shane believed this line of reasoning applied to himself as well, but she did not take very well to his attempts at distance. At night he’d coax her from his bed to her sleeping crate, and by the morning she’d be curled up by his head once again.

“You should keep her,” Hayden had told him one day, starfished on his bed while she paced back and forth along the length of it, her black tail sweeping across his face with each round, her eyes fixed on Shane’s opened can of ginger ale. “She’s like, imprinted onto you, or something.”

“That’s a terrible idea.” Shane quietly moved the can away from the edge of his desk, and she regarded him like Caesar might have Brutus.

“We’ve kept her hidden for this long, we could probably keep it up until the end of next semester.” Hayden was scratching behind her ear and making a face like he was holding back a sneeze. The physiology paper Shane had been working on for the past hour was somehow getting shorter.

“I don’t have space in my life for a cat.”

“My dude, you spend more time with her than you do with the team.”

“Isn’t that bad? Aren’t you always trying to get me out more?”

A sneeze. Hayden wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and Shane decided he would stop lending him his nice shirts for first dates. “Yeah, but getting rid of the cat isn’t going to help with that. Getting rid of your hockey books, maybe—but at least the cat is good company.”

“She’s alright.”

As if to prove that her company was more than just alright, she crawled into Shane’s lap and began to knead at his thighs. The tension in his shoulders fell neatly out of his ears. From the bed, Hayden raised a knowing eyebrow. On Shane’s lap, the sentiment was mirrored on her face, which Shane found impressive considering her anatomical lack of eyebrow.

Let it be known that Shane had made a valiant effort. Silently he closed the window with the shrinking physiology paper and pulled up a pharmaceutical website instead.

“You should start thinking of names,” Hayden said, somehow aware that the fight had already been won, while Shane added to his basket a three-month supply of anti-histamines that would keep Hayden from succumbing to death by cat dander until March, at least.

//

Missy starts limping on a Sunday, which is terrible on its own, but terrible even more so when it dawns on Shane that their usual vet is closed for the day, and terrible even more so when Shane’s injury means they have to haul ass there in an Uber, and terrible even more so when they walk in to find that the veterinarian on shift is away for the afternoon on emergency business, which leaves Shane to contend with the Russian vet assistant who’s currently laughing in his face.

“When did she start to do this?” he’d asked Shane earlier, observing as Missy limped from one end of the examination table to the other.

“I don’t know, an hour ago? She was limping when I came back to my dorm.”

“And she has history of injury on this paw, yes?” Settling her in the centre of the table, he’d inspected her paw gently, brows pulled together in concentration.

“From when I found her, yeah.”

At the time of the above conversation, Shane and the vet assistant—Rozanov, according to his name badge, which Shane only registers belatedly because he’s obviously been preoccupied with worry for his injured cat, and there is obviously no sensible reason for Shane to be looking anywhere in the vicinity of Rozanov’s chest for any significant amount of time, except to learn his name, maybe, which is a thing most people do out of respect, which is a thing Shane has now done and can hence move on from—anyway, they’d been operating in a perfectly professional capacity, him and Rozanov, until Shane had stepped out of the consultation room to take a call from his mom.

Stepping back in had felt like entering the nest of two wildly perplexing birds of prey. Bird of prey number one, Rozanov, was indiscernible, regarding Shane intensely as he moved to stand awkwardly by the stainless steel sink. Bird of prey number two, Missy, was tracking Shane’s movements carefully, traversing the table with irregular steps matching Shane’s own limp.

Finally, cutting through the tense, confusing silence: Rozanov had burst into laughter.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Shane says now, reaching desperately for their earlier propriety, while Rozanov steadies himself against a nearby cupboard. The hand over his mouth is doing a very bad job of concealing his laughter. Once he’s composed, or as close to it as he’s going to get, he beckons Shane toward the examination table and demonstrates exactly what it is he finds so hilarious.

“The limp, when she walks, is very obvious. Hard to hide this, even if she tried.”

Shane nods, and Rozanov continues on. “Would not make sense if, when you left room to take call, she could, all of a sudden, walk perfectly across the table, yes koshechka?” Here he dips his head to make eye contact with Missy, who seems far more interested in a spider on the wall.

Rozanov lifts his head and gestures at his walking boot. “Is that injury recent?”

Shane attempts to conjure a connection between this question and the one prior, but comes up blank. “Only a couple days since.”

“Okay,” Rozanov says, grin wild in a way that makes Shane’s ears go hot. “Then here is my suspicion,”—he pokes her nose playfully, and Missy scrunches her face—“I think Missy here has been watching you limp around the house for days. And so in show of solidarity, she has decided that she will be limping with you as well."

As Shane makes sense of Rozanov’s diagnosis, Missy’s interest in the spider on the wall seems to reach a boiling point. She leaps—seemingly uninjured—from the examination table to the sink countertop, and begins to scratch at Rozanov’s walls. “So she’s just—faking it? She’s copying me?”

“Possibly. Old man Hunter will make his diagnosis when he comes back, but I suspect he will come to a similar conclusion.”

The on-shift veterinarian, Dr. Hunter, returns soon enough, and looks barely half a decade older than Rozanov. He observes Missy with Shane in and out of the consultation room, just as Rozanov had done, and then eventually delivers Shane the final verdict: Missy seemed to be a perfectly healthy cat who had simply been partaking in an earnest attempt at camaraderie, out of pity for Shane’s on-ice injury.

While they wait on the bench outside the clinic for their Uber to arrive, Shane addresses Missy in her carrier.

“You’ve embarrassed me today, Missy.”

“Mrow.”

“We can’t both be injured at the same time. That's impractical.”

“Mrow.”

Above him, a throat clears. Rozanov peers down at him with the same wild grin that accompanied when he'd informed Shane that the only pains Missy was suffering from were her soap opera ambitions.

“Do not be too hard on her,” he says, settling down beside Missy. “She was only trying to make you feel better.”

“Well, I appreciate her effort, but I’d also appreciate if I only needed to pay for vet bills which were strictly necessary.”

“Was very necessary. Showed how much she cares for you.”

As if in agreement, Missy gives a lazy flick of her tail.

Rozanov pokes a pointer finger through a gap in her carrier, and Missy begins to lick it. “You mentioned your dorm, earlier. You are student?”

Shane nods. “Yeah. McGill, second year.”

“Ah.” Then, the sentence that makes Shane run cold: “I did not know they allowed pets in dorm?”

Thankfully, the Uber arrives just as Shane begins to stumble through a truly incoherent response, but even as Rozanov wordlessly gathers up Missy’s crate and deposits her in the car, Shane can tell he’s amusedly unconvinced.

“I will see you around,” he says, as Shane gingerly climbs into the backseat.

Shane hopes not, if only for the sake of his sanity and his wallet.

The car door shuts with an easy flick of Rozanov’s wrist, and on his face is a smile Shane can’t quite decipher through the tinted passenger window. Beside him, Missy is directing at Shane the full force of her olive-eyed stare. “Not a word,” he tells her.

She swivels away leisurely to track a bird on a stoplight.

//

When Shane had been younger he’d been invited to a birthday party where he’d been greeted at the door by a very large golden retriever. The girl’s name had been Jessica and the dog’s name had been Sundae. At the door he’d been licked at vigourously by the dog, which left his hands and neck with a residue that lingered even once all the spit and saliva had evaporated.

In the bathroom he’d washed himself with half the soap bottle and still he could not tolerate the phantom feeling of it against his skin. When he emerged Jessica had taken him by the hand and pulled him into the circle of kids in the living room. 

At the time he had not understood why he’d been invited, had only agreed to go really because his parents had said it would be nice for him to get closer to people outside of hockey. The statement was incorrect on two counts. For one, it implied that Shane was already close to people inside hockey, which was only true if ‘close’ meant being cordial with his teammates on the ice and pretending not to hear them make dinner plans without him in the locker room. For another, although Jessica was technically his classmate, she was also on the girl’s junior hockey team. The week before, she’d come up to the boards as Shane was finishing the last of his drills and asked if he wanted to come to her birthday party the Sunday after next. Shane had been under the assumption that, if anything, he’d at least get to talk about hockey.

Here and now there was a distinct lack of hockey talk. Mostly they were laying out opinions on teachers—which ones they liked, which ones they didn’t, which ones they thought were cute, which ones they thought might look cute together. When a girl to his left asked what he thought, he decided to copy whatever answer had last been thrown out, before realising with the same sinking feeling which came when the residue of dog saliva refused to wash away, that he was the only boy in a circle of girls, and that Mr. Anderson was not an acceptable answer to the question of which one of their teachers he found the prettiest.

In the end the dog had saved him by pulling his wallet from his pocket and running off with it. He gave chase with annoyance feigned as best he could and only let himself breathe once they were through the backdoor and in the safety of the yard. There the dog had dropped his wallet to the ground, still wet with spit, and Shane had sat on a lawn chair and waited for it to get dry enough to handle without wanting to rub his fingers raw. The dog had laid at his feet then, and Shane had felt some modicum of emotion toward the creature, though whether the emotion was fondness or relief Shane could not tell.

//

Missy’s ongoing fake limp does not deter her from escape attempts, Shane realises, alarmingly, when he finds her in the communal kitchen napping in a sunny spot on the counter. More alarming, Shane decides, is the hand stroking rhythmically through the dark fur on her back, which is connected to a well-defined arm, and then to a well-defined chest hidden poorly behind a fitted tank top, which Shane recognises on account of the fact that he’d previously spent a significant amount of time trying to keep it out of his line of sight.

“Hollander, your Missy seems to have taken over the kitchen.”

The fact that Rozanov is talking to him directly now makes it less likely that he is a visual hallucination, which is even more alarming, so Shane latches on to the only thing in the sentence he feels qualified to address, which is, “How do you know my name?”

“You have medical records with us, yes? Unless you have already forgotten coming in on Sunday for us to diagnose your cat with flair for dramatics.”

Why are you in my building is very nearly the second question out of Shane’s mouth, but Rozanov reads him quick, “I did not misuse the residential information you gave us, if that is what you are thinking. My friend lives here. I am waiting for her to return from class.”

“Who’s your friend?” Shane asks, mentally calculating the odds that it might be one of the few people on the floor he actually knows, and then mentally calculating the odds that they might walk into the kitchen at any moment to find a cat where there should be no cat.

Speaking of, Shane walks up to the elephant (cat) in the room. “You know you’re not supposed to be here,” he says, nudging at her cheek. “Anyone could see you.” She swats at him half-heartedly.

Rozanov takes a moment to reply, deciding to be vague about it. “She is a friend from class. Maybe I will introduce you some time.”

Shane pauses his nudging. “You go here?”

“I am in second year, finishing up my pre-vet studies. I just assist the old man when I can.” Rozanov continues combing his fingers through Missy’s fur, and Shane’s wires decide to cross in new and novel ways, because suddenly he’s imagining how Rozanov’s fingers might feel running through his own hair and scratching against his own scalp. When he is done with the thought he drops it like a puck on the ice and shoots it very, very far away.

“Now I know she is definitely not supposed to be in this dorm,” Rozanov says, “But don’t worry, I will keep your secret. If only because she is very cute and I could not bear to see her go.”

The rope of tension in Shane’s spine cuts a little looser. On the counter, Missy stretches out of her nap with a yawn. Shane carries her back into the safety of their room with a half-hearted chastisement, then bids Rozanov goodbye as he leaves for practice. He’s not technically required to be there on account of his injury, but he’s been sitting in every week if only to scratch the itch of routine.

The itch of routine later proves karmic when, distracted rinkside by the disgustingly domestic image of Rozanov petting Missy in the kitchen sunlight, he falls victim to a violent spray of ice, courtesy of Boiziau.

From then on, Shane’s communal kitchen sees Rozanov show up like clockwork every Thursday. The arrangement is odd but not unenjoyable, he decides. Every week before practice, Shane’s questions about Rozanov’s alleged friend are expertly rebuffed, and Rozanov’s requests to see Missy are invariably declined. I can’t risk having her in the kitchen, Shane's gotten into the habit of saying, which is really only half the story, since the other half goes something like I can’t let you into my room because I might jump you if I do. This part of the sentence never does make it out of his mouth, but Shane suspects that Rozanov knows anyway, because he has a talent for reading Shane like a book, and a compulsion to voice his findings aloud.

The other day, for example, he’d called Shane out for being unable to keep his eyes off Rozanov’s mouth.

They’d been talking about hockey, as was usually the case whenever the subject of conversation wasn’t focused on Missy’s wellbeing, or cryptic hints as to the identity of Rozanov’s friend. There’d been a cut on Rozanov’s chin—an animal scratch from the day before—which Shane had been trying to gauge the severity of. It just so happened that Rozanov’s chin shared proximity to his mouth, and the mouth in question had continued its movement even as Shane’s gaze remained unmoving, and only now were Rozanov’s words beginning to enter the realm of coherency, sounding suspiciously like, “My eyes are up here, Hollander.”

There exists no response to this which dignifies him, and so Shane stays silent, which only makes Rozanov’s smile go wider. If Shane hadn’t been utterly fixated on a countertop stain, he might have done something drastic. 

“I should be going now,” Shane decides to say.

“Ah, yes. Have fun warming bench, Hollander.”

“They need me there. I take notes.”

“Very important, I’m sure.”

Shane reaches for his gearbag and contemplates his reply. A fuck off, Rozanov, would do well, or maybe even a suck my dick, Rozanov, which is a sentiment he’s been using with increasing frequency and finds himself meaning with increasing sincerity.

Horrifyingly, neither of these relatively safe conversational farewells decide to make their way out of Shane’s mouth. Instead, Shane decides to say, inexplicably, “Could you come in and check on Missy for me?”

If Rozanov had been at all surprised by the request, he hadn’t shown it.

“She is doing okay?” he’d asked, but Shane was already down the corridor and unlocking his door with disconcerting speed. The sooner they were in his room, Shane reasoned, the sooner Rozanov would be preoccupied with Missy, and the sooner he would forget Shane had said anything at all, because really there was nothing wrong with Missy. As expected, her faux-limp had disappeared once Shane’s walking boot had been removed. Shane was the one in need of medical intervention, really.

Rozanov was now in his room, and Shane was suffering the consequences.

“You are prettier by the day, koshechka.”

Missy purrs from her perch upon the closet as Rozanov rubs at her chin with his fingers. Everything about the situation, from Rozanov’s words, to his fond expression, to the blue evening pouring through the window, seems lab-designed to kill Shane in particular.

When Missy’s had enough of Rozanov’s touch, (which Shane observes like a man starved might observe a banquet), she shakes off his hand and lowers herself into a distinctive crouch. Before Shane can give Rozanov any word of warning, she ejects herself from the ledge and vaults onto his shoulder. Terribly, he seems to welcome the weight of her with ease, which really calls to the forefront of Shane's mind the question of exactly how much weight Rozanov can take, and whether the number might be anywhere close to two hundred pounds.

“She is like torpedo.”

“Those are underwater. Missiles are airborne,” Shane says, unthinking.

For a while the gears in Rozanov’s head seem to whir in a complex series of connections. Then, he says, “That is what ‘Missy’ is short for? You have named your cat ‘Missile’ because she launches herself onto people?”

In the mirror by Hayden’s bed, Shane watches himself go red. “Shut up.”

“No, no. I like it. Very on the nose.”

Shane fights a smile. “Fuck off.”

“I cannot fuck off yet, Hollander. You have invited me in for very important reason.” Rozanov’s making himself comfortable on Shane’s bed now, and Missy has abandoned his shoulder to settle in his lap.

“Right.” As if operating his body via joystick, Shane crosses the room stiffly and sits beside Rozanov in a manner which can only be described as decidedly uncasual. Missy has been flipped onto her back, and Rozanov is making a show of flicking at the joint of a hindleg, as if to test for reflexes. Her leg twitches, and Rozanov earns a nip to the finger for his efforts.

“Well, she seems fine to me. Is there reason for concern?” Something in Rozanov’s tone suggests to Shane that Rozanov does not, in fact, believe he was invited in on the basis of any reason for concern.

Traitorously Shane’s brain decides to fixate on Rozanov’s cupid’s bow instead of coming up with any remotely believable excuse.

“Hm,” Rozanov says, as Shane attempts to recall when exactly his and Rozanov’s faces had inched so close together, and who exactly had done the inching, and where exactly the wire connecting the joystick to his body was located, so that it could possibly be yanked out, and whatever happened next would be deemed entirely out of Shane's hands.

“Should I be going then, since she is alright?” With the proximity, Rozanov’s syllables scrape quietly out of his throat and knock ginger ale cans off the shelves of Shane’s sanity. When Shane looks down, he finds that Missy has abandoned Rozanov’s lap and instead made herself scarce in some other corner of the room. Before he can make any comment on this, Rozanov wraps fingers and thumb around the curve of his jaw, and pulls him into a kiss.

For the first time in two years, Shane doesn’t make it to practice on time.

//

A couple weeks after Shane had decided to keep her, he’d made the two hour drive back to Ottawa for winter break with a trunk full of cat essentials and a backseat full of Missy.

“Shane, honey,” his mom had said, frowning into the boot of his car, which had been filled with various cans of cat food, a ten kilogram bag of Missy’s preferred cat litter, a stack of food and water bowls, and a backpack full of cat toys. “What’s all this for?”

Only when he’d watched his dad open the rear door and cycle rapidly through the five stages of grief did Shane realise his mistake. From the backseat his father retrieved, instead of Shane’s usual duffel bag, a pet carrier with ten pounds of tuxedo cat. In Shane’s defence, there really hadn’t been a good time to break the news. The conclusion that Missy would now be a permanent fixture in Shane’s life had only been reached about three weeks prior, and since then his weekly phone calls home had been put on hold in favour of exam season.

Thankfully, watching Missy paw at a cardboard box on the living room couch had endeared her to his father. Though his mother on the other hand had been less than ecstatic that Shane’s answer to the question, and what does dorm management have to say about her?, was in fact, dorm management doesn’t know about her.

Shane had her food and water bowls set up in one corner of the kitchen, and her litterbox by the backdoor. In the yard she sniffed curiously at puddles of rainwater and knocked over a single unwitting flower pot.

Later that evening he’d been curled in bed with Missy in his arms when his mom had come into the room. Like jigsaw pieces they’d slot themselves together on the bed, his mom’s legs atop his, his face turned into her shoulder, Missy on his chest. Although by dinnertime his mom had softened enough to feed Missy a sauceless piece of her spaghetti, she’d yet to be fully sold on the idea of Shane keeping her.

“I could ask around,” she’d said, “see if any of the neighbours could take her in.”

“Mom.”

“I never knew you were a cat person. A dog person, maybe. Not so much cats.”

Shane didn’t think he’d ever expressed much of an inclination towards dogs, but in the moment he couldn’t be certain. In the darkness his mother had been looking at Missy, and Missy had been looking out the window.

“Hayden’s allergic,” he’d told her, adjusting himself to face the ceiling and extracting an arm from beneath his head to rub at Missy’s back. At this point Missy had gone still on his chest, and the steady rhythm of her breathing was pulling Shane’s in time with her own.

“Well, all the more reason you shouldn’t keep her, sweetie.”

“I know,” Shane had said, eyes closing, “but I already bought him the pills,” which was his way of telling her that there was nothing much else to do about it now—Hayden’s anti-histamines had been delivered and Missy had become Shane’s and Shane had become Missy’s—and that was the way it had gone and the way it was going to be.

//

It was bound to happen eventually, no matter how zealously Shane checked the calendar, how innocuously he inquired about plans for the day, how faithfully he updated the spreadsheet which tracked his comings and goings: Hayden, in the doorway of their sacred room, with a box of protein bars in his preferred flavour (peanut butter) and another in Shane’s (vanilla), watching as Shane extracted himself from Rozanov’s thighs and moved as far as physically possible toward the other end of the bed. Still propped against Shane’s headboard, Rozanov was damp with sweat, and his curls remained in the shape which earlier had best accomodated Shane’s fingers. Nothing in him moved except the eyes, which were scanning Hayden as if assessing the threat of an untamed animal. At least Hayden hadn’t dropped the protein bars. Shane didn’t like them crumbly.

According to Rozanov, his apartment downtown was not conducive for sex on account of the fact that he shared an apartment with several other Russian students, who studied things like business and law, whose fathers went way back with Rozanov’s own, and would cover for each other’s DUI offenses but not for transgressions like bringing home men to fuck. 

Shane was less than ecstatic at the idea of fooling around in a bedroom which could be unlocked with more than one key, but Hayden was at Jackie’s place more often than not, which meant that Shane usually had the place to himself a couple of nights a week.

The spreadsheet had been a fairly accurate gauge of whether or not Hayden would be back in the dorms on any given night, based on factors such as number of hours since Hayden & Jackie’s last phone call and does Jackie have pilates class today? (if yes, Hayden would not be back until the morning), which was all very real data that Shane kept careful track of just so he could have Rozanov in the room with the faintest peace of mind. Obviously the spreadsheet did not account for outlier events such as Jackie having a girl’s night out on what was usually a pilates day, which Shane would have known if he’d seen the messages Hayden had sent thirty minutes earlier.

“Who the fuck are you?” Hayden asks, which is not the right thing to say, because it means Rozanov cataloges him as a high-risk animal. The muscles in Rozanov’s shoulder tense, but he looks to Shane instead of making any sudden movement.

“Hayden, this is…” The realisation that he doesn’t even know Rozanov’s first name would make him laugh if only laughter were a thing he was capable of at the moment. As it is Shane does not think himself capable of amusement ever again. Nothing is funny. Rozanov is looking at him now, breaking into a subdued sort of smile, probably at the idea that Shane has only known him on a last name basis for all the weeks they’ve been fucking, but Shane is still convinced that nothing will be funny ever again, and so finishes his sentence with all the grim sobriety of a man in funeral procession. “...Rozanov.”

It takes two minutes to relay to Hayden the condensed version of how they’d met, and another twenty minutes to get Rozanov and Hayden away from each other’s throats.

“So he’s the asshole that laughed at you at the clinic?”

“More like the asshole who successfully diagnosed your cat.”

“Man, you should report this guy for unprofessionalism.”

“And you should be arrested for cockblocking, I think.” Rozanov gets a smack to the arm from Shane for that, which he accepts with nothing more than a pout in Shane’s direction.

“Jesus, I don’t wanna know how long you two have been doing this.”

“Not long,” Shane answers, at the same time Rozanov goes, “Many, many weeks,” which is categorically untrue, because it’s only been three, which is one of the smallest numbers, Shane could argue.

Shane does not argue. He leads Rozanov to the door and bids him goodbye.

“See you around, Hollander. You too, koshechka.” Missy meows her farewell from her perch upon the closet. Pointedly, Rozanov does not offer Hayden any parting words, though as the door shuts he does stick his tongue out, which elicits a motherfucker from Hayden and a long-suffering sigh from Shane.

//

Very early on Shane had gotten into the habit of organising himself into pieces. As a player he glided like a sailfish and checked like a muskox and scored like a show horse. As a captain he took chirps good-naturedly and kept his mouth shut when his forwards joked that captains were supposed to be liked. As a student he did the algebra homework and refrained from sleeping in class even when he’d been up late watching the playoffs. As a son he cleared the table after dinner and wore matching sweaters with his parents on Christmas even though he’d found the tradition mortifying ever since he turned twelve.

As a boyfriend he took Jessica to ice cream parlours and kissed her goodbye at her doorstep when she asked nicely. Despite the social faux pas committed at her birthday, she must have decided he was alright enough, because she’d ambushed him at practice the week after and asked him out on a date. Shane had agreed if only not to embarrass her in front of his team, and in the locker room a senior had slapped him on the back in a gesture of familiarity usually only reserved for post-practice dinner invitees.

Jessica was straightforward in a way that Shane appreciated. Candidly she would tell him what she wanted—for him to sit with her at lunch, to carry her books, to wait by her locker after class—and accordingly Shane would oblige to the best of his ability, which essentially translated to a willingness to compromise on everything except hockey. He’d thought she’d understand him on the matter given that she was a player herself, but it was evident that he’d misjudged her dedication to the sport when she’d proposed skipping practice for a day to go to the movies instead. Shane had refused and consequently been broken up with, probably because he’d been rude about it, and probably because it’d been Valentines Day. 

Aside from the abrupt conclusion of the relationship, Shane didn’t think he’d been too terrible of a boyfriend. This he took pride in, as he did with most segments of his life, even though he did not think the sum of the parts resulted in any great whole. In fact if any effort was made to cohere together his various facets, there would inevitably appear some block in the road which encouraged him to pursue an alternate lane of thought. Preferably one which did not involve a rumination on why, when he’d been broken up with, the primary reaction had not been one of emotional devastation, but rather the brief and distasteful thought that he might end up missing the dog more than he would miss her.

//

The first mistake of the day had been for Hayden to look up into the stands and say, “Hey buddy, how serious is this thing with Rozanov?”

Following the all-clear from their medical team, Shane had been slated to make his comeback at their upcoming game against the Ravens. As with the news of his ankle injury, his mother had reacted with a frenetic sort of energy, and by the end of the day the tickets had been purchased and the car had been refuelled for the two-hour drive his parents would be making to Montreal that weekend.

The second mistake of the day had been for Shane to follow Hayden’s line of sight, because there in the audience, as promised, were his parents, and beside them, as not-promised, was Rozanov. Quickly his parents began to wave and call his name, and through the rink shields Shane watched as Rozanov went rigid in his seat, the warm smile which had come upon his face when Shane had first looked at him now schooled into careful neutrality.

“Fuck,” Shane had muttered, and then gone on to miss four scoring chances over the course of the game. In the end the Ravens had edged out a win, and Shane had a pinch in his neck from the way he’d been holding his head decidedly away from the stands.

The third mistake of the day had been responding to Shane, honey, what happened out there? with I can't do this right now, Mom, Jesus, and spending the ride back to the dorms disassociating out the window. Upon reaching the building, he'd gotten out of his dad's car, told his parents to get home safe, then climbed ten flights to the fifth floor and collapsed on the rug by his bed.

“Hollander,” a voice came from the door, “I know you’re in there. Open up.”

The fourth mistake had been letting Rozanov into the room.

“Very rude of you,” he says, while Shane rearranges the ginger ale cans by his desk in an attempt to occupy his shaking hands. “You invite me to hockey game and you don’t even come up afterwards to say hi.”

The invitation had been extended under duress, really. Rozanov had been doing his lecture readings in Shane’s room the night before, because that was a thing he did now after sex—took up space on the bed while Shane worked on assignments at his desk, usually under some guise or another. The excuse for the day was that Rozanov had needed Missy to serve as his anatomical model. With a patience that seemed reserved solely for Rozanov, she allowed him to poke and prod at various parts of her body as he recalled the corresponding musculature.

Distracted by the display, Shane had only regained clarity somewhere between Missy’s posterior trapezius and her latissimus dorsi. Only then did he realise that it was nearing midnight, and he still hadn’t finished the biomechanics quiz which had to be completed today, because it wasn’t going to be completed tomorrow, because tomorrow he would be too busy scoring a hat trick against the Ravens. He’d told Rozanov as much, and Rozanov had ignored the bit about the biomechanics quiz and instead asked suggestively if Shane was as good on the ice as he was at other things. To this, Shane had replied honestly: No. I’m better, actually.

“Hot,” he’d replied, before stipulating that he would only vacate the room without taking Missy hostage—you interrupted our study, Hollander—if Shane promised to get him a ticket to tomorrow’s game. At the time Shane had been concerned with the safety of his cat and had not considered the off-chance that his fuckbuddy and his family might come into close proximity with each other in an arena with capacity for sixteen hundred people. Rozanov had left his room that night with a kiss for good luck.

Shane bins the ginger ale cans now with more force than necessary, and the noise of it sends Missy into her padded crate. Rozanov frowns, then moves to soothe her, but she doesn’t lean into his touch, curls further into herself instead.

“What did the ginger ale ever do to you?”

“I’m really not in the mood for this, Rozanov.”

“I did not say anything to your parents, if that is what you are worried about.”

The worst part is that Shane hadn’t been worried about that at all. Rozanov was perceptive, and when it came down to it, he didn’t lack tact. Nothing had been at risk of being revealed, there was no tangible danger on which he could blame his frayed state of mind. Rather it was the sight of two diametrically opposed facets of his life placed together that threw him entirely off his game. Some vital pillar which separated the part of him that was his parents’ son and the part of him that enjoyed fucking men had been abruptly demolished.

For a few hours, they had been next to each other. Maybe his mom had made small talk with Rozanov during intermission. Maybe, making his way down the aisle, his dad had stepped on Rozanov’s shoe. Maybe he’d apologised, and Rozanov had smiled and nodded in that easy way of his. All of it happening while down on the ice, Shane was losing the puck for the third time in the period, because there was a fracture in his psyche, and the focus that always came so easily during a game simply would not come. 

Beneath the nausea was a convoluted satisfaction. The important people in his life knowing each other.

Rozanov was important now, and he couldn’t be.

“I’m sorry. This…I can’t do this anymore,” Shane tells him.

Against Missy’s fur, Rozanov’s fingers still, and he meets Shane’s eyes. “Hollander.”

“You should go.”

“Hollander,” Rozanov’s standing now, moving toward him, but Shane steps back, keeps the distance. Behind Rozanov, on Hayden’s desk, a pack of anti-histamines has gone empty. In her crate, Missy stays silent as Rozanov sets his jaw, as Shane unlocks the door, as he says I’m sorry, Rozanov, voice low. 

“It’s Ilya,” he tells Shane, before disappearing down the hall.

//

Missy stages a hunger strike a week after their game against the Ravens.

That morning Shane had run his usual route twice over, because the easy vacancy of mind which typically came with exercise had not surfaced by the time he’d completed his first lap, and so in a fuck you to his own body he’d gone for a second. The restlessness of his thoughts, he believed, had emerged as a result of his loss on the ice, and not from any Russian-shaped absence in his life. When he’d arrived back in the dorms to tend to Missy’s food bowl, she’d sniffed offhandedly at her breakfast, offered nothing more than a meow of dissatisfaction, and retreated back into her padded crate.

The strike had lasted a total of six hours and decidedly came to an end the moment he’d ripped open a pack of freeze-dried tuna cubes and Missy’s pupils had dilated to the size of Saturn. With the hunger strike wiped from her arsenal, her next move was to retire from launching off closets and commence hiding in them instead. Soon she’d made a second bed of the grey McGill hoodie in Shane’s closet, which did not belong to Shane and certainly could not be returned to its owner on account of the fact that Shane had essentially told him to fuck off a week ago.

Like a father of two children in distress Hayden had begun to stock their bedroom with various types of cat treats (even though Missy really only ate tuna) and various flavours of ginger ale (even though Shane really only drank Classic). As a peace offering Shane had cracked open a ginger ale in a flavour he had no intention of consuming and set it down by Missy’s padded crate, but stubbornly she had refrained from pawing it horizontal. In the end Shane had been forced to down a vanilla bean ginger ale with no satisfaction as Missy kneaded at the fabric of the hoodie she’d hauled at some point from Shane’s closet to her crate.

Thankfully, in a gesture of benevolence, the psychological warfare went into ceasefire during the nights, and Missy continued to be a warm presence in his bed, where he’d lay for hours waiting for sleep to take him. Always she’d be looking out the window as if in search of someone, and always he’d look with her—at the street, at the cars, at the snow—though he knew neither of them would find who they were looking for.

//

As a result of frequently buying more ginger ale twelve-packs in a single trip than he can reasonably carry at once, Hayden has become somewhat of a serial door-knocker; although knock is a generous word considering that what Hayden does is more of a bang on the wood with his foot type of thing. Either way, with every serial door-knocker there must be a serial door-opener, and Shane, as the only roommate with opposable thumbs, must assume the role.

“Coming, Hayds,” he yells, while Missy vibrates out of her fur pawing at virtual fish on Shane’s scratched up iPad screen. Shane walks to the door and reaches for the handle. “You know, we’re gonna run out of space if you keep buying—”

Shane stops talking when he realises the person he’s just pulled the door open for is not in fact Hayden. For a single, suspended moment, Missy looks at Shane and Shane looks at Svetlana and Svetlana looks at Missy, who eventually gets bored of looking at Shane and meows at Svetlana instead, before going back to pawing at her virtual fish.

Svetlana, in a first for Shane, does not open the conversation with any smart remark. The way her eyebrows have shot up her face is reminiscent of the one person Shane does not want to reminisce on, and the slight gape of her mouth suggests that she might have, at one point, had something to say, before she’d seen the cat on Shane’s bed, and then been meowed at for good measure, in case it wasn’t obvious enough before.

“Oh,” she says, regaining her words, “You are the one Ilya refused to tell me about. The one with the secret cat.” This statement pries many nails from the train track of his rational thought but confirms at the very least that Shane isn’t making up in his head the way every expression of Svetlana’s reminds him acutely of Rozanov—Ilya.

Instead of pleading on Missy’s behalf as he’d always pictured himself having to do if she was ever found out—although in all the imagined scenarios it’d always been Hayden who’d been clumsy enough to leave the door open, or some force majeure which resulted in Shane having to evacuate the building with her in his arms—Shane asks the more pressing question at hand, which is, “You know Rozanov?”

Svetlana glances down both ends of the corridor, and Shane steps aside to let her in.

“We are good friends, yes. He visits me sometimes. Though he has not been around much lately.” At the sight of Svetlana and Missy in such close proximity Shane’s pulse goes involuntarily rapid, and he does his best not to fidget with his hands. “Once or twice now I have caught him in the elevator, but he never tells me who he’s come to fuck. Only tells me that he met them at work, which is strange, because the building does not allow pets.”

Svetlana kneels beside Missy and offers a hand for her to sniff at. “Of course, then he’d tell me that was why it was secret. Did not want to give information which conflicted with my RA duties. Although to tell you the truth I think he knows I do not care enough to rat anyone out to management.”

Slowly the thing pulled taut in Shane’s chest goes loose in relief. Missy seems to have lost interest in the iPad and is now making content noises under the motion of Svetlana’s practised scratches.

“She is cute. What is her name?”

“Missy. I wasn’t planning on keeping her, I swear. But…”

“Mm. Sometimes they come into our lives when we least expect them.” She’s looking up at Shane now with a certain intensity. “But then we get attached, yes?” Oddly enough Shane feels like the conversation at hand is no longer entirely about Missy.

“I have known Ilya for a long time. Often he is gentler with the animals than he is with people, but it is not some kind of exception he makes for the cats and dogs. Inside he is always sweet. It is just easier for him to be sweet with the animals, because they cannot hurt him the way people do.”

At some point Shane had given up on the whole not fidgeting with his hands thing, and he looks down now to find his cuticles stripped to a brutal red. He’d been privy to the side of Ilya that was gentle, and he’d gone ahead and hurt him anyway.

“Your Missy. What made you decide to keep her?”

Shane regards Missy now, sprawled out on the floor, blue eyes blinking at him slowly. Anti-histamines ordered and cars packed with cat food and puke scraped out of carpets—all of it for the warmth of her beside him, the joy of her company. “I always wanted her around. Even when it was hard, she was worth it.”

Svetlana has a look on her face like she knows she’s struck something foundational—which, she has, but if she’s anything like Ilya, Shane doesn’t need her to know it. The only thing he needs is for her to be out of the room as soon as possible, so that he can also be out of the room as soon as possible, for reasons unrelated to her precise, epiphanic musings.

“Well then,” she tells him, getting to her feet, meeting his eye, like it’s all been figured out. “I hope you find that there are other things worth keeping, too.”

//

For lack of better option, Shane opens the conversation with: “Could you please check her. Like, right now. It’s important.”

“Your cat is urgently sick?”

Settled on the registration desk between them, Missy meows, as if to say, yes, me, I am the cat and I am urgently sick, even though the waiting room is empty, and she is very obviously not urgently sick. From a door down the hall, Dr. Hunter pokes his head out of what seems to be an ongoing consultation and asks, “Alright out there, Rozanov?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, which is the most Shane’s heard from him in weeks. For a moment Ilya studies him, and Shane hopes that even a fraction of his sincerity is projecting itself out of his body. Eventually he must deem Shane acceptable in some measure, because he steps out from behind the desk and gestures for Shane to follow. “Bring her into room two.”

One time, back when Ilya had still been frequenting his bedroom with some intensity, he had come in with a hard set to the shoulders and an uncharacteristic economy of words. After Shane had remedied both ailments with clever use of hands and mouth, Ilya had turned to him, cheek folded against the pillow, and asked Shane about his father.

You like him? he'd said, and Shane had responded in the affirmative, before asking Ilya the same. A moment later Ilya’s phone had begun to ring, and without looking at the screen he’d silenced the call, put his face in the crook of Shane’s neck, and left the question unanswered. At the time Shane had felt oddly protective, though what it was exactly that Ilya needed protecting from Shane hadn’t known at the time.

Inside the consultation room now, Ilya evaluates Missy without looking over at Shane once. When he’s done, he puts his back to the wall and his hands in the pockets of his scrubs, posture casual except for the shoulders, which are rigid in a way that’s all too familiar: Ilya’s bracing for a hit on the ice, and Shane’s closing him to the boards.

“She’s fine, Hollander.”

“Look, I’m sorry I freaked out.”

“I’ve seen her. You can leave now.”

“Ilya, please.”

Missy launches herself off the examination table and kneads politely at the tip of Ilya’s shoe. Ilya lowers himself onto the floor, and she claims the space between his crossed legs as her own. Shane settles with his knees pulled up beside him, directs his gaze to a scratch on the leg of the stainless steel table that shelters them from view of the door, and begins to gather his thoughts.

“Did I ever tell you? About when I first found her," Shane says, kneading one of Missy's paws between his thumb and forefinger.

“She was injured, yes? Hiding under a car.”

“Yeah. It was pretty scary,” he says to the stainless steel scratch. “She was so wet and cold. And quiet.”

Gently, Missy begins to nose at his peeling cuticles.

“And when I brought her home,” Shane continues, “I wouldn’t let her sleep in my bed. I thought she’d get too attached, which would’ve been bad, obviously, because I wasn’t keeping her.”

At that, Ilya laughs. “What, you never saw yourself as a cat person?”

The scratch charts a trajectory around the edge of the table leg, Shane notices. From the left it comes in horizontal and steady, and at the corner it dips upwards to intersect with another mark in the metal. Shane shakes his head. “I was too busy being a hockey player. And a college student. And a son.”

From the corner of his vision Ilya is nodding, slowly. “Is not your fault. That there is no place for certain things.”

“No,” Shane’s saying too quickly now, meeting Ilya head on so that he’s no longer a just blur on the edge of Shane’s vision, so that he can study in entirety the tender fold of Ilya’s eyebrows, the cotton softness in his eyes. “I mean, I made a place for her anyway. I did it. It’s possible.”

Ilya’s cheek dents like he’s biting on it from the inside. “Shane,” he says, voice low.

“And I can make a place for you too.” It takes an absurd amount of effort not to speak the words faster than he should, because he needs Ilya to know that he means them. “I already have. If you still want it.”

Since Shane’s already concluded that he’d prefer to look at Ilya over most things, he does, and the decision pays itself off almost immediately. Even when Ilya turns away, Shane keeps watching, and ends up rewarded with the sight of the barest twitch of Ilya’s cheek.

Really all this means is that by the time Ilya finishes up his own inspection of the scratches in the steel, Shane’s already smiling and ready for when Ilya pulls him in close by the jaw, puts their foreheads together, and then does the same with their mouths.

//

From down the hallway comes Hayden’s shout—she’s coming—and like a Pavlovian reflex Shane switches gear into locating the nearest cat-sized hiding spot. The packing tape he’d been sealing the last of his moving boxes with rolls over to the open doorway and stops at Svetlana’s feet.

Sprawled out on Shane’s bare mattress, Ilya raises his head, then raises Missy’s paw in greeting. “Hi, Sveta,” he says. “You are here to confiscate illegal cat?”

“Yes. Not because of dorm rules, though. I am concerned for her welfare under your care.”

“I am most qualified person in this room. In the building, even.”

Shane retrieves two sets of keys from a hook on the wall and tosses them over to Svetlana. “So arrogant for someone who has not yet been accepted into an official vet program,” she says.

“Not to worry. This time next week I will be charming the admissions interviewers over at Montreal, yes, koshechka?” Gently, Ilya nudges Missy’s chin up and down in a facsimile of a nod, and Shane fights a smile as he uncaps a marker and writes her name onto the label of a box.

Through the window Shane sees Hayden emerge like an ant from the building’s first floor entrance, and deposit Shane’s belongings into the car alongside Ilya’s things. All of it bound for an apartment equidistant from both McGill and the University of Montreal, with a bedroom decent-sized enough for two above-average men and a ceiling tall enough for an above-average cat tower.

Once Svetlana’s left to collect the keys from the next room over, Ilya rises to gather the few boxes remaining. From behind he approaches to rest his head on Shane’s shoulder and press a kiss to his jaw. “Come to the car when you are ready, moya raketa.” My missile.

Then Ilya’s gone, and the room feels blindingly naked, save for the late afternoon sun that dances on the walls. Across the scuffed vinyl plank floor Missy dashes out a lap or two, then climbs expertly into her hoodie-padded crate, which goes expertly into Shane’s arms.

At the threshold of the space she pushes her soft face against the stubble on Shane’s chin, and again, the anti-histamines are reaffirmed to Shane as a decidedly worthwhile purchase.