Archive of Our Own

If Harris's career in sports communications had taught him one immutable truth, it was this: professional athletes would do anything for charity and nothing for content.

Or rather: they would agree to do things for charity, and then, when confronted with the reality of doing those things on camera, they would become the most unhelpful human beings on the planet.

Shane Hollander was the current reigning champion of this.

"No," Shane said.

"You haven't heard—"

"No."

They were standing in the Sensplex parking garage, which Harris had chosen for its industrial aesthetic and decent natural light from the open sides. He had a ring light. He had a tripod. He had a phone capable of shooting 4K. He had a watermelon.

Shane was looking at the watermelon.

"It's for Women's Heart Health," Harris said.

"What does a watermelon have to do with women's heart health?"

"Nothing. That's not the point. The point is the challenge goes viral, the link in the bio goes to the donation page, and the comments are full of people who now know that heart disease is the leading cause of premature death for women in Canada. Awareness plus engagement plus—"

"You want me to crush a watermelon?"

"With your thighs, yes."

Shane looked at Harris. Shane looked at the watermelon. Shane looked down at his own thighs, which were, by any professional or amateur standard, more than up to the task. He was wearing athletic shorts with an inseam that could only be described as optimistic. A backwards snapback. A compression shirt that was doing more work than the entire communications department.

"Why me?" Shane asked.

Harris weighed his professional reputation against honesty. Honesty won. "Because you have the thighs for it. It's not even close."

Shane stared at him with an expression so comprehensively blank that Harris wondered if he'd crashed, like a browser loading a page it refused to display.

"It's for charity," Harris said again, because it had never failed him yet.

It did not fail him now.

Shane sat on a parking block.

Harris positioned the camera, framed the shot, checked the ring light. Shane sat with a watermelon clamped between his thighs, his face arranged into the same expression he wore during media training: polite, cooperative, and vacant behind the eyes.

"Whenever you're ready," Harris said.

"I'm not ready."

"Whenever you're willing, then."

Shane looked into the camera. His jaw set.

The parking garage went quiet. No engine noise. No distant chatter from the corridor. Just Shane Hollander, a watermelon, and the low drone of fluorescent lighting.

He didn't make a sound.

His face went red first. Blotchy and uneven, creeping from his neck to his ears. His shoulders locked. His forearms corded. Every visible muscle redirected itself toward the single purpose of destroying a piece of fruit through compressive force, and the rest of Shane, his face, his breathing, his apparent consciousness, went still.

Harris held his breath.

Five seconds. Ten. The watermelon didn't move. Didn't creak. Harris was on the verge of suggesting they try a smaller one when he heard it: a low groan from the rind, followed by a crack, followed by a sound like someone dropping a boulder into a bathtub full of custard.

The watermelon collapsed.

And Shane made a noise.

It was high. It was long. It was, and Harris would struggle to find a better word for this when he described it later, pornographic. It tore through the parking garage and bounced off the concrete walls and the low ceiling and the parked cars and probably the street outside and possibly, Harris thought, the lower atmosphere.

The side door slammed open.

Ilya Rozanov, moving at a speed that suggested genuine alarm, skidded into the parking garage in training shorts and one unlaced shoe. He'd been in the team offices. He had heard that through an open window. He had, by all appearances, run.

He stopped.

His husband was sitting on a parking block in the wreckage of a watermelon. Pulp on the concrete. Juice running down Shane's thighs in thin pink rivulets. And Shane, still red-faced, still wearing the shorts, had picked up a ragged chunk of watermelon and was eating it.

"What the fuck," Ilya said. Not a question.

"Hey," said Shane. He chewed. Swallowed. He squinted at the camera, flat and blank and completely unimpressed with himself. "I nominate Ilya Rozanov for the watermelon crushing challenge." A beat. "Or whatever."

Ilya looked at Harris. Harris, wisely, kept filming.

"You..." Ilya gestured at the watermelon. The thighs. The general crime scene. "This is what you are doing? In parking garage?"

"It's for women's heart health," Shane said, and took another bite.

Harris had not planned for this.

He had planned for one video. One watermelon. Shane Hollander, thighs, charity link in bio, done. He had not planned for Ilya Rozanov to materialise in the parking garage. He had, however, brought a second watermelon in a cooler bag in the back of his car, in case the first one split during transport. That this backup now served an entirely different purpose was the sort of luck Harris felt he deserved.

But Harris had not survived this long in professional sports communications by failing to recognise content when it presented itself. Dripping with fruit. Challenging itself to a competition.

"You want to go?" Harris said, already repositioning the tripod.

Ilya looked at Shane. At the watermelon remains. Back at Harris. His jaw tightened, released, tightened again: the same sequence Harris recognised from post-game interviews when Ilya had already made a decision but wanted the room to believe he was still weighing it up.

"Yes. I go."

Shane wiped his hands on his shorts. "This should be good."

"This will be excellent."

"It took me, like, fifteen seconds."

"I will do in ten."

"You're taller. Longer femur. Worse leverage."

Harris held up a finger. "One second. Don't move."

He jogged across the garage to his car, three rows over, popped the boot, and pulled the second watermelon from the cooler bag. It was cold against his forearms. When he turned around, Ilya and Shane were standing exactly where he'd left them, not speaking, vibrating with the energy of two people who were about to make this a competition whether anyone sanctioned it or not.

Ilya sat on the parking block. Harris placed the watermelon between his thighs. It looked a fraction smaller than Shane's, which Harris prayed neither of them would notice. They would both notice. They would both bring it up. They would bring it up for years.

"Rolling," Harris said.

Ilya cracked his neck. Set his hands on his knees. He gave the camera a look that belonged on a film poster: confident, amused, unbothered.

He squeezed.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.

Nothing.

The watermelon sat between Ilya's thighs with the calm composure of an object that knew it was winning. Ilya's face, unlike Shane's tight-lipped silence, was a live broadcast: effort, surprise, disbelief, and then the dawning, creeping awareness that his husband was watching.

Shane was watching. Shane was still eating watermelon. Shane's expression had not changed, but his eyes had developed a gleam that Harris could only describe as marital satisfaction.

"Need a minute?" Shane asked.

"I do not need a minute."

"Your face is doing a lot right now."

"My face is fine."

"You're at thirty-five seconds."

"I am aware of time, Shane."

Forty seconds. Forty-five. The watermelon creaked, a promising sound, and then settled back into contempt.

"Stop filming," Ilya said.

Harris did not stop filming.

Ilya repositioned. Shifted forward on the block. Adjusted the watermelon. Took a breath. Closed his eyes. His thighs flexed, and this time there was no performance, no posture for the camera. This was an NHL athlete treating a piece of fruit as a personal insult.

At fifty-three seconds, the watermelon gave up.

It didn't crack cleanly like Shane's had. It ruptured. One side buckled first, sending a chunk of rind skittering across the concrete, and then the rest of it burst with a wet, emphatic finality that left Ilya's shorts, thighs, and the parking block drenched in pink.

Ilya looked down at the carnage. He looked up at Shane.

Shane took another bite of his watermelon.

"Fifty-three seconds," Shane said.

"This watermelon was bigger."

"It was not bigger."

"Was different shape."

"It was a sphere. They're all spheres."

"Some spheres are more dense."

Shane's mouth twitched. "That's not how spheres work, Ilya."

"Is how this sphere worked."

Ilya stood. He was dripping. He looked at the camera, then at Shane, then at the camera again.

"I challenge Shane Hollander," he announced, pointing at the lens. Watermelon juice dripped from his shorts onto the concrete. He did not appear to notice. "To rematch."

"That's not how the challenge works," Shane said. "You do it, you nominate someone new."

"I am nominating you. Again."

"You can't renominate someone who's already done it."

Ilya turned to Harris. "Can he be nominated again?"

Harris, who was going to be employee of the month for the rest of his natural life, said, "I'll check the rules."

"There are no rules," Shane said. "It's a watermelon."

"Is charity watermelon. Has rules."

"It doesn't—"

"Part two," Ilya told the camera. "Next week."

"There is no part two."

Ilya smiled. The argument was over. In his opinion, Shane had lost.

Harris cut the footage.

The video went up that evening.

It hit two million views in four hours.

And, forty-seven minutes after the video posted, under the official Ottawa Centaurs post, from the verified account of Ilya Rozanov:

Shane did not reply publicly.

They were on the sofa. Opposite ends, feet overlapping in the middle, Anya curled between their shins. Ilya was drinking a ginger ale, which was Shane's drink, for reasons he had never once explained and Shane had stopped asking about. Both of them were on their phones.

Shane's screen lit up with a notification. @ilyarozanov tagged you in a comment.

He read it.

He looked up.

Ilya was scrolling. Sipping the ginger ale. His mouth was doing nothing unusual. His eyes were fixed on his own screen. He looked, to any outside observer, like a man reading the news.

Shane knew better.

"Arbuzik?"

Ilya's thumb paused on his screen. He did not look up. The corner of his mouth moved a fraction.

"What?" Ilya said. Casual. Innocent. A man with nothing to answer for.

"You called me a little watermelon. In public. Under the team account."

"Is term of endearment."

"It's not a term of endearment."

"Is now."

Ilya was fighting it. Shane could see the effort in his jaw, the strain at the corners of his eyes. He was trying not to laugh and Shane wanted to strangle him with both hands.

He stood up. Anya huffed at the disruption.

Ilya's hand caught his wrist.

Shane stopped. He didn't turn around.

"Noo," Ilya said, low and warm and pulling at him. "Arbuzik."

Shane's pulse kicked against Ilya's fingers. He stood there, caught, jaw tight, furious and flushed and aware of every point of contact between Ilya's grip and his skin.

He did not sit back down.

He did not pull away, either.

Harris's phone buzzed at 11:14 PM. He was in bed, half-asleep, Troy's arm slung heavy across his waist.

His phone buzzed again at 11:16 PM.

Harris stared at both messages. He had not announced a Part 2. He had not considered a Part 2. He had, in fact, specifically avoided using the words "part two" in any official capacity because Ilya had said them on camera without authorisation and the last thing Harris needed was to set a precedent for athlete-directed content scheduling.

He let out a long breath through his nose.

Troy shifted beside him. "Hollanov?"

Harris snorted. Nodded.

Troy's arm tightened around him. "Deal with it tomorrow."

Harris set his phone face down on the nightstand and closed his eyes.

He would figure out what to do with them in the morning.