Chapter Text
August 2017 - The cottage
His mother had shown up with two trays of baked pasta wrapped in several layers of foil. She must have just made them, since there was condensation on top of both containers. His father followed her with two bags in hand, who knew what other treats inside. Shane watched them come up the path to the cottage's entrance with a tightness in his chest: there they were, his parents, arriving at the cottage for the first time for a dinner with Shane and his boyfriend.
His boyfriend. The butterflies in his stomach kept beating their wings nonstop whenever Shane stopped to actually let that sink in.
Ilya Rozanov is my boyfriend. I love him. He loves me.
In the kitchen, Ilya was cutting bread with exaggerated precision, as if the outcome of this first dinner with the in-laws depended on how even the slices were.
Yuna and David, with Shane, joined Ilya in the kitchen and said hello.
“Hi,” Ilya said, before going back to his task.
Shane stared at him for a second, trying to smother a smile threatening to break across his face: who knew when he'd get used to seeing Ilya, Yuna, and David in the same room. It's gonna be amazing, he thought.
“You think you need a ruler for that bread, Ilya?”
“Mom,” Shane scolded her.
“I'm just saying what I see.”
“I wanted to make bruschetta. Shane likes them all the same size, so they cook evenly,” Ilya said calmly.
Yuna smiled at him.
They ate outside, in the yard, the table loaded with food. Not just Yuna's pasta, but also a completely unnecessary amount of appetizers Ilya had prepared.
“So,” David said, pouring Ilya some wine. “Where are you from, exactly?”
“I was born in Moscow,” Ilya answered, “but I've lived in Boston for the last ten years.”
“What's Moscow like? Colder than here?”
“Is different cold. Winters are same, here like Moscow. But summer here... I did not expect hotter than in Russia.”
“Do you go home often?”
Ilya took a sip of wine. “You mean to Moscow?”
“Yes, Moscow.”
“No. I do not like going back. Is dangerous, you know, for people like us.”
“Of course, that's true. Is your family still there?”
Ilya wiped his lips with a napkin. Under the table, Shane gave his dad a small kick.
“My brother is there. With his wife. They have a daughter.”
“This pasta is incredible, mom, what's the secret?” Shane tried to change the subject and caught Ilya's eye. Ilya gave him a tiny wink.
“The sauce needs to cook long. Even five hours.”
“There you go. So good.”
“I made another tray. So you can freeze it. Or Ilya, if you want some more...”
“Yuna cooked for an army. I told her it's only four of us,” David pointed out.
“Four people, two of them professional hockey players. They need to eat.”
Until then, Ilya had been sitting stiff and straight, hands folded like a kid called into the principal's office. Now he smiled. “I always eat a lot. Thank you.”
“So,” Yuna said, setting down her fork with the precision of someone about to call a meeting to order. “I need to ask you something, Ilya, and I want an honest answer.”
“Mom,” Shane said, his ears already red.
“A little trust, for god's sake!” Then she turned back to Ilya. “What are your intentions toward my son?”
“Intentions?”
“What do you want to do? Have you two thought about a plan to come out? Is that something you'd even want?”
“Is not up to me, or Shane. Staying hidden is safer. The League is not ready for us.”
“Scott Hunter came out and there don't seem to have been any consequences. The League even organized a Pride night.”
“Money from Pride went to the league, not to queer organizations. League shows it is... how to say... on our side, but truth is, it is not.”
“Aren't there other gay players?”
“I know a couple, but they retired. Only one still playing is Hunter. If we come out now, is only him and us. And he is a million years old, he'll retire soon.”
Ilya said this without lifting his eyes from his napkin.
David leaned back in his chair. “You have a reputation, Ilya. On the ice. Not the best kind.”
“I know.”
“So explain it to me.” David went on with a smile. “Because the man I see sitting here, who cooked all this delicious food for us, and who seems so polite and kind, doesn't really match what I read in the sports pages.”
Ilya shrugged. “On the ice, I am someone who has to be mean to win. I do not like that they know me like that. Hockey is work, for me. Off the ice...” He stopped, searched for Shane's hand under the table, as if he needed to hold it to finish the sentence. “Off the ice, I am just someone who has loved your son longer than I would like to admit out loud. I do not need to be mean, with him. I do not want to be, ever.”
“God, Ilya, you really are head over heels.”
Ilya, the man the sports press described as pure ice, blushed, and Shane had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from getting choked up.
“Yes,” Ilya said. “Probably is true.”
His mother kept asking questions all through dinner, the exact same questions she would have asked anyone else sitting in that chair, any girl Shane had ever brought home, if Shane had ever brought any home.
What he liked to do when he wasn't playing. Whether he ate well, slept well, whether Shane was a bad loser (he's a crybaby, Ilya said, and Shane could have killed him right there, at the table, in front of his parents).
It was a small, stupid thing, Shane thought as he watched Ilya politely answer his mother, that no one in the world, except for the two people sitting at that table, would ever get to ask Ilya those kinds of questions about him. Never a reporter. Never a teammate. His parents were genuinely interested in getting to know all of Ilya, the guy, not the hockey star.
After dinner, his mother hugged Shane at the door longer than usual, and said in his ear, “I like him. He's serious about this. You can tell he treats you well.”
“I know.”
“Thank you for coming. And thank you for pasta,” Ilya said, holding out a hand to Yuna.
The woman waved off his hand and rose up on her toes, trying to hug the big guy. Ilya let himself be pulled in and gently wrapped his arms around Shane's mother.
Then David came over too, and the same little scene played out again. David opened his arms and Ilya got his first fatherly hug in years.
***
Shane had to get Ilya to the airport by six. The flight to Moscow, where he'd spend his last few days before coming back to sign officially with Ottawa, left early, and the road was quiet at that hour, fairly clear.
Ilya was staring out the window. His eyes were hidden behind Ray-Bans, a silly precaution that wasn't going to do much good anyway: if some driver coming the other way happened to be a hockey fan, they'd recognize him instantly, the same way they'd recognize Shane, but Ilya was also wearing them for another reason; he was pretty sure that, pretty soon, he was going to start crying.
Those weeks at the cottage had been the best of the last several years. Ilya was scared to even think they might have been the best of his whole life, because he knew better than to tempt fate. He had a boyfriend. He had a new family. He'd been welcomed and wanted exactly as he was. He'd made love every single day with the sweetest, most exciting man in the world. It was too much to process.
A few minutes from the airport, Shane pulled over.
“What are you doing?”
Shane turned off the engine, turned to face Ilya, and kissed him, one hand on his jaw, the other in his ash-blond curls. Ilya felt Shane's fingers stroke his face and his hair, give his neck a little massage, pull him close.
“Shane. Wow.” It was the only thing he managed to say.
Shane's freckles stood out dark against the flush creeping over his cheeks. He gave him one more peck before saying, “Picture this is the kiss I'm giving you at the airport.”
Ilya smiled and kissed him back. “Okay.”
When they pulled apart, Ilya's eyes were glassy and he had a smile spread so wide across his face it looked like it had to hurt.
***
It was raining in Montreal.
He showed up at his front door soaked through, his gym bag dragging on his back.
He came in, kicked off his shoes and shrugged off his raincoat right away, then went to the laundry room to throw everything in the wash.
The house was quiet in a way that felt new, even though he'd lived there for years. Ilya was in Moscow. He was in Montreal. Ilya was going to sign with Ottawa and at least geography would be a little kinder, but for now there was just this, the couch, the rain against the window, and a sadness that had settled into his chest ever since he'd watched Ilya's plane lift off the runway from the airport parking lot.
His phone buzzed.
Lily: Signed. Ottawa's official
Jane: Finally.
Lily: That team still sucks though
Jane: Don't blame the team. I'll be on top of you in the standings all year.
Lily: I like it when you're on top
Shane stared at the screen for a second, then let out a small laugh into the empty living room. He missed Ilya's laugh, light and carefree. He sighed. Ottawa wasn't Montreal, but it was close. It would all be easier now, he told himself. It had to be.
***
Practice started badly and ended worse.
Shane noticed it already during warmups, a dull nausea settling in behind his sternum and refusing to budge. He was sluggish on passes and a couple of times his head spun hard. He stopped for a moment and braced his hands on his knees.
Theriault barked, “Hollander, quit being a girl!”
Stupid asshole, Shane thought.
He held on for forty minutes. Then, during an easy skate around the rink, his stomach turned over and Shane threw up a hand, said something to the nearest trainer, he couldn't even remember what, and bolted for the locker room with his heart pounding in his throat.
He made it to the bathroom by a hair.
He threw up so violently it brought tears to his eyes, hands gripping the edges of the toilet, and when he thought he was done he threw up again, even though there was nothing left to throw up. He sat down on the cold floor, back against the stall wall, and breathed, long shaky breaths that never seemed to be enough.
His forehead was sweaty. His hands were shaking slightly, and when he looked down at them he couldn't tell if it was from the effort or from something else.
There was a soft knock.
“Shane?” It was Hayden, his voice muffled through the door. “You good in there?”
“Yeah,” Shane said, and the word came out weaker than he wanted it to. “Coming.”
He washed his face with ice-cold water from the sink, looked at himself in the mirror for a second, and he was dead pale.
The coach didn't take it well. He muttered something about how typical it was for someone to get sick right before the season started, like Shane had done it on purpose, and Shane apologized, said he must have picked something up somewhere, and headed home.
***
He took a scalding hot shower, standing under the water until the bathroom filled with steam and he couldn't see the far wall. He pressed one hand flat against the tiles and breathed slowly. When he turned off the water and stepped out, the nausea was still there, patient and unimpressed, exactly where he'd left it.
He pulled on sweatpants and an old hoodie and shuffled to the kitchen. He filled the kettle, then stood there while it heated up, not quite doing anything. He made the tea, took it to the couch, sat down carefully. He pulled the blanket over his legs and turned on the TV.
He watched nothing in particular. A cooking show, then half of a documentary, then a hockey recap he turned off after forty seconds because it felt like homework. He tried to read something on his phone and gave up. He answered his mother's text about how practice had gone, typed out a reply, deleted it, typed another, and finally just sent: ok.
Hayden had sent a thumbs up. Shane appreciated that. Hayden knew how to check in without making it into a thing.
There was also a text from Ilya, sent about an hour ago. A photo of a plate of food with a caption in Russian that Shane couldn't read. He stared at it for a long moment. Something about the food, probably. He typed looks good.
He texted Ilya a quick goodnight, then he put the phone face-down on the cushion.
It was a virus, or something he'd eaten, or just the body staging its annual protest at the start of a brutal season. Half the locker room got sick in September, it was practically a tradition. By tomorrow he'd be fine, or close enough to fine that the difference wouldn't matter. There was no reason to worry Ilya about it from another country over something that was going to sort itself out overnight.
He got up to make rice.
The rice had no smell worth speaking of, which made it almost funny that his stomach turned anyway while it was cooking. He stood by the stove and breathed through his nose and told himself it was fine, it was plain white rice, there was nothing to react to. His stomach didn't seem interested in the argument. He turned the heat down and waited, watching the water disappear into the rice.
He carried the bowl to the couch, but stopped before sitting down to fold a dish towel into a neat square and set it on the coffee table first, then placed the bowl on top of it, then went back for a napkin. Only then did he sit down, pull the blanket over his legs, and pick up his chopsticks. He ate a couple of bites, then slowed down. After a few more he stopped. The rice was fine. His stomach had simply decided it was done for the day, and that was that.
He put the bowl back on the folded towel, precisely in the center of it, and lay down on his side, pulling the blanket up to his chin. He picked up his phone again, not for any particular reason, and scrolled absently through Instagram. Ilya had posted a story, just a short video of his Lamborghini or whatever.
Shane watched it twice and then tapped the heart.
His phone buzzed. Ilya.
Lily: why is your instagram activity at 11pm
Shane smiled despite himself and typed back:
Jane: Can't a guy scroll in peace!
Lily: you went to bed last time I checked
Jane: I'm on the couch.
Lily: why
Jane: Just tired. Long day.
Jane: There was a pause, then:
Lily: eat something
Jane: I ate.
Lily: what
Jane: Rice.
Another pause, longer this time. Shane could picture him, somewhere in Moscow, staring at the word rice with the particular expression he made when Shane said something he found genuinely baffling.
Lily: rice is not food, Shane
Jane: Goodnight, Ilya.
Lily: eat proper food. love u
Shane put the phone on the coffee table and closed his eyes. The nausea was still there, slow and stubborn, settled somewhere under his ribs like it had decided to stay the night. He'd feel better in the morning. He was going to feel better in the morning.
He fell asleep before midnight, still on the couch, still with the TV on, still with that dull burn sitting quietly in his stomach.