Archive of Our Own

Holmberg had been hovering near Shane's stall for two full minutes, pretending to look for something in the bag at his feet.

Shane knew the hovering. He'd been the subject of it for years, people working themselves up to ask him about Ilya, about being out, about what it was like. The questions had tapered off after the first season, once the team had absorbed the reality of their captain and their star centre being married and it had become, blessedly, unremarkable. But every now and then, someone new worked up the nerve.

"Holmberg," Shane said, without looking up from his skates. "Whatever it is, just ask."

Holmberg dropped into the stall beside him. The air was thick with post-practice humidity, the chemical bite of equipment sanitiser cutting through the deeper smell of sweat and rubber. He was twenty-two, fresh off a call-up from the farm team that had stuck, still too new to the roster to have shed the deference that younger players carried around veterans. He rubbed the back of his neck.

"It's, uh. It's kind of personal."

Shane pulled his left skate off and set it on the rubber mat. Across the room, Dykstra's Bluetooth speaker was playing something with a banjo in it that nobody had asked for. "Okay."

"So, like—" Holmberg lowered his voice. "I've been seeing this girl."

Shane waited.

"And she's, you know, she's great. She's amazing. But she, like, travels a lot for work and she has these... She has other guys. In other cities. And I don't, like, love that? But I also don't know if I'm allowed to say anything, because we never said we were exclusive."

"Have you tried talking to her about it?"

Holmberg looked at Shane as if he'd suggested skydiving without a parachute. "That's... no. No. I was kind of hoping you could, like, give me some pointers? On how you got Roz to, you know. Commit. Be exclusive. Whatever."

Shane blinked. "How I got him to..."

"Yeah. Because, like, no offence, but Cap's reputation before you guys were together was pretty, uh..." Holmberg trailed off, clearly realising he was about to describe Shane's husband's sexual history to Shane's face. "You know."

"I know."

Shane was not sure he knew. Or understood, for that matter.

"So. How did you do it? What did you say to him?"

Shane pulled off his other skate. He lined them up neatly beneath the bench, toe caps touching the wall, and considered the question. The honest answer was so unhelpful it bordered on parody.

"I didn't."

Holmberg stared at him. "W—what?"

"I didn't say anything to him. I didn't ask him to stop sleeping with other people. I didn't give him an ultimatum." Shane shrugged. "He just stopped."

"He just... stopped?"

"Yeah."

"On his own?"

"On his own. I didn't even find out until a few months later. He mentioned it and I realised it had already happened."

Holmberg's expression cycled through several stages, confusion, disbelief, wounded suspicion, before arriving nowhere useful. "But you're, like, so possessive."

Shane's head turned. "Excuse me?"

"No! Not in a bad way! I just mean, I've seen you when people flirt with him. At charity things and stuff. You get this look."

"I don't get a look."

"You get a look."

Shane felt his ears warm. "That's not possessive. That's just my face."

Holmberg raised both hands in surrender but did not look convinced. "Okay, so. Your advice is... wait?"

"I don't have advice. That's what I'm telling you."

"Right. Cool." Holmberg stood, looking exactly as lost as he had when he'd sat down. "Thanks, Hollzy."

"Sorry."

"No, it's... yeah." Holmberg trudged back toward his own stall, and Shane watched him go with a vague, useless sympathy.

The truth was, Shane had thought about this before. Not about giving advice, because he'd long accepted he had none to offer, but about the fact itself. The quiet, enormous fact that Ilya had made a choice, unprompted, to stop sleeping with other people, and hadn't told Shane for months. He hadn't made it a negotiation or a grand gesture. He had just rearranged his life around Shane without asking permission or expecting credit.

It had been one of those realisations that arrived sideways, long after the moment had passed. Shane hadn't thanked him for it, because by the time he'd truly understood the magnitude of what Ilya had done, it was already old news. It was already just how they were.

Shane pulled his jersey over his head and dropped it in the laundry bin. Dykstra's speaker had moved on to something worse.

He didn't have advice. But he had that.

The second time it happened, Shane wasn't the one being asked.

He was walking back from the physio room two weeks later, ice wrap on his left shoulder and a green smoothie in his free hand, when he heard Ilya's voice around the corner from the weight room. The corridor was narrow and fluorescent, the walls painted the Centaurs' dismal shade of institutional red that nobody had bothered to update since the nineties.

Shane stopped.

"...and I think she's into me? But I can't tell if it's, like, serious or if she's just being friendly. And you're... you're good at this stuff, Cap. Everyone says so."

LaPointe. Twenty-three years old, from Gatineau, earnest to a fault. Shane pressed his shoulder into the wall and took a quiet sip of his smoothie.

"I am very good at this stuff," Ilya agreed, with the generous warmth he could produce on command. The voice of a captain who cared. "You should trust me."

"So how did you know? With Shane? How did you know he was the one?"

A pause. Shane stopped breathing.

"How did I know—" Ilya repeated.

"Yeah. Like, was it a moment? Something he said? Because you guys were, like, enemies for a really long time, right? So there must have been a thing that changed."

Enemies. Shane shifted against the wall. Had he and Ilya ever been enemies? The league had spent a decade selling that narrative, and they'd both played along. But Shane had never hated Ilya. He'd spent years pretending to, which was not the same thing.

Ilya still hadn't answered LaPointe's question. Shane could picture Ilya's face: the careful, focused expression he wore when he was giving real consideration to a question. The furrow between his eyebrows. The tilt of his head.

"Ну, блядь," Ilya muttered, low enough that it was meant for himself. "Откуда я знаю? Он просто... он Шейн." Well, fuck. How would I know? He's just... he's Shane.

Shane bit the inside of his cheek. Hard.

"Sorry, what?" LaPointe said.

Ilya cleared his throat. "I was remembering. In Russian we have an expression. Когда сердце знает, голова уже не спорит. It means: when the heart knows, the head stops arguing."

Shane shoved his entire fist against his mouth and pressed his forehead into the wall. His eyes were watering.

"Wow," LaPointe said. "That's beautiful."

"Yes. Very old saying. Very famous in Russia."

"So it was just, like, a feeling?"

"Exactly. One day I looked at him and my heart knew. And my head said, okay, fine, you win."

Shane was going to die in this corridor. He was going to asphyxiate on a mouthful of green smoothie ten feet from the weight room, and they would find his body and nobody would understand why he'd died laughing.

He pushed off the wall and walked away before he made a sound, his shoes squeaking against the rubber flooring. Behind him, he heard Ilya say, "You should tell this girl how you feel, LaPointe. Be honest. Be brave," and Shane had to walk faster because Ilya sounded so encouraging, so warm, so captain-like, and his actual advice was just his own panic translated into a fake proverb.

Shane loved him so much it was stupid.

That evening, they were on the sofa.

ESPN was on mute. A basketball game Shane didn't care about played in silence, the screen casting a shifting blue-white glow across the living room. Ilya was at one end with his legs stretched out along the cushions, and Shane was tucked against him, his back to Ilya's chest, Ilya's left arm draped across him. Anya was curled at the far end of the sofa by their feet, her chin on Ilya's ankle, one ear flicked back toward the kitchen as if she were monitoring for intruders, or, and this was more likely, the sound of the automated kibble feeder.

Shane closed his eyes. Ilya's thumb traced a slow, absent arc across his collarbone, back and forth, a rhythm he probably wasn't aware of. The fridge hummed from the kitchen. The house ticked and settled around them. He could have fallen asleep like this, and on most nights he did.

Ilya's phone buzzed in the narrow gap between Shane's hip and the edge of the cushion. Then again. Then three times in quick succession.

Shane reached for it and tilted the screen toward them both.

Shane huffed a breath through his nose. "I didn't say 'just wait'."

"What did you say?" Ilya's voice was a low rumble against Shane's back.

"I said I didn't have advice. Which is different."

Shane scowled at the screen. "Idiots."

"You are talking to the phone," Ilya said.

"Wyatt's being judgemental."

"He is goalie. They notice everything. He told me this."

Ilya peered over Shane's shoulder. "I meant it."

"You didn't."

"I meant it a little."

"You panicked and said the first thing that sounded wise."

Ilya was quiet for a beat. "...Yes."

Shane bit his lip. He could feel Ilya reading over his shoulder, very still.

"Is a good proverb," Ilya said carefully.

"I heard you say it." Shane kept his voice even. "I was in the corridor outside the weight room."

Ilya's thumb stopped on his collarbone. "You were there?"

"I heard the whole thing." Shane tilted his head back to look up at Ilya. "Including the part before the proverb. The Russian part."

Ilya's face went through several rapid adjustments. "...Ah."

"'Well, fuck. How would I know? He's just Shane.'" Shane said it flat, in English, quoting. "That was your actual answer. Before you invented a proverb to cover for it."

Ilya's ears had gone pink. "Was not invented. Was... creative translation."

"Wyatt googled it. Zero results."

"Wyatt should mind his business."

Shane grinned up at him. "For what it's worth, I liked your real answer better."

Ilya's arm tightened around him. He said nothing. His thumb started moving again, tracing the same slow arc across Shane's collarbone.

Shane was grinning. Ilya was grinning too, his chest shaking with laughter that Shane could feel against his spine.

"Give me the phone," Ilya said.

"Wait." Shane shifted so he could see Ilya's face. The TV light caught the edge of his jaw, the curve of his mouth. His eyes were warm and creased at the corners. "Let me."

Ilya raised an eyebrow.

Shane thought for a moment. Then he smiled.

"Okay," he said. "Type this."

Shane handed the phone over and dictated. Ilya typed with his usual disregard for capitalisation, punctuation, and the English language in general, then handed it back.

Shane looked at the screen.

"You spelled 'successfully' wrong."

"Is fine. They will understand."

"It is not fine." Shane was already editing, adding full stops and commas and capital letters with precise, single-fingered taps. He put a semicolon between wants and apparently, because the sentence needed one, and changed succesfully to successfully, and made sure Ilya Rozanov was properly capitalised, because if his name was going to be attached to this, it was going to be correct.

Ilya watched this process with patient resignation. He had seen it before. "You are fixing punctuation in a group chat."

"Yes."

"My husband."

Shane held the phone up so Ilya could read the final version.

"OK?" Shane said.

Ilya's mouth twitched. "Yes. Send it."

Shane sent it.

The phone erupted.

Shane's face ached from grinning. Ilya's chest was shaking against his back, a low, helpless laugh that kept catching and restarting. Anya had lifted her head at the buzzing and was watching them both with the alert, mildly disapproving expression she reserved for when the household was being too loud after nine.

Shane locked the screen and tucked the phone face-down between his hip and the cushion edge.

The basketball game played on in silence. The wind picked up outside, moving through the trees along their driveway.

"Is true, though," Ilya said. Quiet now. "What you said."

Shane tipped his head back against Ilya's shoulder and looked up at him. "Which part?"

"That you have never convinced me of anything."

Shane smiled. "Shut up."

"What I wanted was you." Flat. Final. "This is correct."

"I know."

Shane reached up and curled his hand around the back of Ilya's neck, pulling him down. Ilya came easily, and kissed him. Slow, unhurried, smiling a little bit. Shane's fingers slid into his hair and Ilya made a low sound against his mouth and kissed him deeper, one broad hand pressing warm and steady against Shane's ribs.

When they broke apart, Ilya's forehead rested against Shane's. His breath was warm. His eyes were closed.

"Your made-up-proverb was terrible, by the way," Shane murmured.

Ilya huffed a laugh, his nose brushing Shane's. "You liked it."

"I liked hearing you panic in Russian and then lie to a rookie."

"Was not a lie. Was... creative translation."

Shane kissed him again, brief and soft. Ilya's thumb traced a slow line along his ribs.

Somewhere between Shane's hip and the cushion edge, the phone kept going.

The phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, and neither of them picked it up.