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Jackie is a fucking saint, Hayden thinks.
He’s thought it before, probably about forty times a minute every time he’s home for a stretch and she takes a well-deserved day to herself to get hair done, maybe a pedicure, sit alone in a dark room for give fucking minutes, he bets. He doesn’t need to know what she gets up to. He knows it’s very possible she’s sitting in the car in the garage eating sushi and absolutely not having five screaming, sticky monsters put all ten of their hands directly on her person at once.
The point is, she’s not in the house and he is, and so is their starter baseball team of children - god help him, Ilya Rozanov might be fucking right, and there is absolutely no way he can ever confess to having had that thought.
But the real point is, Hayden and his five children are in the house, and so is Shane. Which is such a fucking windfall, Hayden could cry. His best friend lives in another fucking province now, but he’s here in Montreal - home of the team that turned on a dime from worshipping him to running him out of the city - hanging out with Hayden in his McDonald’s ball pit of a house while Jackie is probably at HomeSense doing scream therapy under the guise of testing out throw pillows or something.
It’s incredible, having Shane back here again. There was a time Hayden thought he may never drag Shane’s talented, betrayed ass into Montreal’s city limits ever again, so he’s not going to blow it today.
He grabs a can of Canada Dry from the fridge - carefully, thoughtfully cradled in a foam koozie for maximum chill retention - and reenters the active warzone that is his living room to watch Pearl sneeze directly into Shane’s open eyeballs.
“Oh,” Shane says, and he doesn’t puke but Hayden knows that face he’s making. Shane is fewer than seven seconds from spraying rubbing alcohol directly into his own face and eyeballs and Hayden should probably retrieve his toddler before Shane deposits her in the trash bin in the garage.
“Hey, baby girl,” Hayden says in his best let’s-leave-Uncle-Shane-alone-to-cleanse-his-face-with-fire voice as he picks Pearl up and bounces her on his hip. Shane stands and bolts for the bathroom in a move so expected and immediate that Hayden can only be grateful Pearl was not simply released into the air like Shane is a recently-returned-to-earth astronaut used to simply letting go of things he’s done with.
He flops into Shane’s vacated spot and lets Pearl stomp all over his legs and grab fistfuls of his shirt that include barely enough flesh to hurt. Fuck, her tiny fingers are strong. His fucking nipple feels like it’s halfway ripped off, but she’s grinning and drooling at him with giant blue eyes and a fully vertical tuft of sandy blonde hair and she’s the last baby, he thinks. He knows. Jackie has been eating birth control like Tic Tacs for eighteen months now and he knows it’s time to make an appointment and get his fucking dick chopped off or whatever, because his wife is hot and very busy and will cut it off for him if he knocks her up again because she forgets to take her pill one day.
Anyway, the deal is this: his nipple is probably bleeding but his baby girl is so fucking cute that he doesn’t even really care.
She gives up on stomping on him and sags against his chest to snuggle in for a hug and, fuck, he’s gonna cry and Shane is going to come back and he will absolutely take a picture of it and text it to everyone Hayden knows, the dick. How anyone has ever met Shane and thought he’s a sweet, well-mannered good boy is beyond Hayden, receiver of most of Shane’s diabolical and extremely under the radar assholery.
In fact.
Yes.
Shane’s such a little punk and Hayden is a saint by association to Jackie, who would be carrying his balls around in her purse if she caught wind of him being a dick to Shane in return. It’s not his fault that Shane has fooled her with his big, innocent eyes and earnest sweetness and thoughtful hostess gifts so that her usually impeccable eye for bullshit is blinded when Shane loudly tells Hayden he’s glad to hear his weird (nonexistent) rash has finally cleared up in front of a bunch of the guys, the asshole. It’s not his fault, but he is the one who suffers.
So Shane’s phone is still on the arm of the couch and it’s face up, so Hayden can see four messages on his screen as another comes in and lights it up. Hayden is a genius, because he knows his best friend, and he knows Shane likes order and alignment more than he likes security, so there’s a very fucking solid chance that Shane’s phone passcode is the same as his door passcode and wouldn’t you know it, Hayden has the code from that time Marleau absolutely dummied Shane on the ice and Hayden got sent to collect some stuff to make Shane’s hospital stay less hospital-y.
He types 1410 into the passcode screen and - would you look at that - Shane’s phone immediately opens up to his text thread with Rozanov. Fucking success. Hayden is the actual master and now - well, now he needs to figure out what he’s going to do with the phone now that he has it. There’s a ticking clock on Shane’s face transplant in the bathroom so he needs to think fast.
Except.
Weird.
Looking at the text thread, it kind of feels like Shane and Rozanov barely even speak. It’s just emojis back and forth for fucking ever with a few messages here and there. He scrolls, because why the fuck are they just sending the same fucking emoji back and forth fifty times a day?
6:01 am
Shane: 😘
Ilya: 😘
Ilya: good morning, I miss you
Shane: I miss you too. I can’t wait to see you tonight.
Ilya: me too
7:13 am
Ilya: 😘
Shane: 😘
8:57 am
Shane: 😘
Ilya: 😘
11:03 am
Shane: 😘
Ilya: 😘
11:43 am
Ilya: 😘
Shane: 😘
Ilya: how are baby pikes?
Ilya: very cute and cool because they do not take after their father?
Shane: Ilya.
Shane: But yes. I can’t believe they are getting so big so fast. I remember them all as babies and now the twins are going into third grade.
Ilya: has gotten you thinking, maybe?
Shane: Maybe. Thinking ‘not yet, but soon’, maybe?
Ilya: come home and we can practice 😈
Shane: 🙄
Shane: Tonight.
12:54 pm
Ilya: 😘
Shane: 😘
2:05 pm
Shane: 😘
Ilya: 😘
3:23 pm
Ilya: 😘
3:56 pm
Ilya: 😘
4:34 pm
Ilya: 😘
5:12 pm
Ilya: 😘
Okay, kind of a lot of emojis for Shane, Hayden thinks. He’s not an emoji guy at all. Hayden didn’t even know Shane knew you can get emojis on your phone. Although, he’s pretty sure he remembers Shane saying once that he didn’t feel the need to buy another keyboard to add to his phone just for tiny pictures and the guys absolutely ragging on him for not knowing they come free, so maybe that’s how he knows? Not that Hayden ever expected Shane would actually use them, though.
And also, what the fuck? It is new information entirely and also kind of insane, also, that Shane is talking about having actual kids and it’s with Ilya fucking Rozanov? Like okay. Okay, they got married last year, Hayden was there, he was Shane’s best man, so it’s not like he hasn’t been aware that kids are a possibility. Except that Shane has never once mentioned wanting to be a dad at all and actually looked a little green at the mention of it when Hayden used to try setting him up with Jackie’s friends and always tried to use down-to-earth-easygoing-good-girl-to-start-a-family-with as a selling point and -
Ah, okay, right. It feels possible and also likely that Shane was more green around the gills about having to fuck a woman to get a kid than about the actual kid. Got it, lesson learned, and only several years too late.
Jesus, though. Fuck. Shane was maybe gonna be a dad someday. Like soonish someday.
With Rozanov.
And alright, fine, it’s not like Hayden’s ever going to be petitioning to join the fucking fan club, but even he can admit under extreme duress after several years of knowing Rozanov as Shane’s partner and not as the slavic demon that haunts his nightmares that Rozanov is actually pretty good with kids. He’s a fun guy and he melts like cotton candy in the rain around kids, and Shane’s a rule-follower and lovely calming presence, and they will probably make a great parenting team.
Ugh. Hayden’s spent too long today thinking nice thoughts about Ilya Rozanov. Where the fuck is Shane, anyway? How long can it realistically take to scour the skin off his face and get a double eye transplant?
Right on cue, Shane comes trudging back from the bathroom and heads to the kitchen by way of the living room coffee table to scoop up his now half-warm can of unopened ginger ale and replace it with a new one from the fridge. The koozie transfers to the new can and Hayden feels a prideful sense of vindication at having thought of using it in the first place. New Hollander Appreciation Tactic unlocked. Nice.
“Face okay?”
“Ugh,” Shane groans and he flops onto the couch next to Hayden with no respect at all for the structural integrity of Hayden’s couch that he definitely picked out and did not come home to after a road trip in January and find himself gaslit into believing it was the same couch as always. He saw a huge fucking box in the garage around that time, he’s almost positive.
He swears the old couch was blue, and this one is definitely tan. Except maybe the old couch was also tan and he’s just unobservant and - fuck, who cares, really? The couch is comfy and his wife is happy and - wait a minute, isn’t there a blue couch in the kid’s rec room downstairs now?
Fuck, he needs to pay attention to what’s going on in this house.
Shane, unaware or uninterested in Hayden’s couch spiral, picks up his phone from where Hayden threw it in a panic when he heard Shane’s footsteps in the hall while he was still snooping. Except he just opens it up and holds it low in his lap where he’s slumped against the back of the couch exactly like Hayden is so they’re both able to stare openly at the screen like Shane doesn’t have a thing to hide in his phone.
He supposes Shane doesn’t, now - Shane’s out and he’s married to Rozanov and everybody knows, so Shane is about a thousand times less fucking weird about his phone than he was five years ago in the Boston Lily era or even two years ago in the gay-but-definitely-not-dating-a-fellow-hockey-player era. Now he just whips his phone out and texts with a dumbass grin on his face whenever and wherever he damn well pleases, and it’s kind of nice to see Shane be a normal dork in love, Hayden thinks.
“What’s with the emoji farm?” he asks, because he is a snoop and a nosy bitch and Jackie has given him five children in no small part because he relays epic tea to her on a regular basis, he is almost positive. And Shane is a dear friend, yes, but he’s also exhibiting a new behaviour and Jackie will want to Know About That.
Shane just shrugs, though, and says, “Oh, it’s just a habit.”
Bro. Come on, Hayden is zero percent getting laid with this level of detail, fucking cough it up.
“A habit? For what?” he asks, because he is also a saint like his beautiful couch-conspiring wife and can be willing to handhold Shane through providing relevant details on the story that will probably be Hayden’s cherry on top of the full-day-alone sundae his wife is currently enjoying.
“Something we started up to help with the distance,” Shane tells him, and that makes no fucking sense at all. Fucking expound, Hollander. He raises his eyebrows at Shane, like fucking tell the story, man. “Okay, okay. It was tough being apart most of the time and not being able to see each other or talk to each other whenever we wanted. So…”
“So?”
“So we started sending the, like, kissy face emoji. Whenever we were thinking of the other. So we would feel closer and not like we were only a couple when we were in the same city.”
Well, fuck. That’s so fucking cute, Hayden is definitely crying later when Shane has left and Jackie is home and there’s no one in the house who will take a picture and send it to the team group chat with the caption ‘the rash is back’. Fucking Shane Hollander and his dickish heart of gold containing a multitude of multitudes, or whatever.
“What the fuck.”
“Hey!” Shane says with a scrunchy little glare. “It’s fucking cute.”
“Yes, it’s fucking cute, what the fuck, Shane,” Hayden complains. This is excellent tea to share but it’s also going to put him in the position of not being half as cute with his own wife and that is going to put a serious fucking damper on his ability to graciously leverage this excellent tea into excellence sex with his bombshell of a wife. “How am I supposed to tell Jackie about this?”
“Uh, don’t? I don’t care, man.”
“Fuck you, Hollander, some of us require planetary alignment to get laid without a creepy child silhouette appearing at the foot of the bed due to a poorly-timed nightmare, okay? It is your duty as my best friend to gift me with worthy gossip to seal the deal on a bedroom door lock.”
“Wow,” Shane laughs - laughs! - in his face and shakes his head. Hayden has never felt this betrayed in his life. “Must suck. Ilya and I had phone sex in your bathroom this morning at like 6am.”
“Bro.”
“What, bro? Jealous?”
Hayden stares at him, jaw hanging in absolute shock that Shane Hollander is somehow getting laid with more ease and frequency in Hayden’s own house than he was.
Pearl makes a funny little gurgle in his lap and he stares down at her. She’s got a weird look on her face and it’s familiar as hell. It’s gonna be messy, he can see it coming a fucking mile out. A goddamn gallon of mashed carrots followed by baby yogurt and a bouncy-stomp session on Hayden’s lap; it is inevitable.
“I liked you better when you were in the closet,” he whines, and Pearl dry-heaves in his lap while Shane cackles beside him.
“Yeah, I liked you better when I was in the closet, too,” Shane tells him - and that is such a bitchy fucking thing to say, and Hayden has moved so far on from being endeared by Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov being adorable lovebugs over text and thinking about each other all day and sending sweet little reminders of their love, because Shane is the dickheadiest dickhead to have ever lived and -
He dumps Pearl in Shane’s lap half a second before she upchucks her whole dinner onto his lap.
Vengeance.