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Shane Hollander approached the All Stars Game with a lot more confidence than he thought was deserved. He also approached the All Stars Game with a plan, though that plan was not nearly as intricate and long-winded as his plans usually were. It had been, when he had first come up with it, but Rose had told him that he was overthinking it, and Shane had figured - in matters such as these - it was probably worthwhile listening to her.
The drawback of this was that Shane’s plan had been pruned down until it was not really a plan at all any more. Rose called it Operation Get Shane’s Man!, which was an apt title because that seemed to be the only step that actually remained in the plan. Shane thought that he would probably have felt better about the plans chances of success if he had actually known how he was supposed to go about this, but Rose had said that it would come to him - and hopefully it will not be the only thing coming, if you catch my drift. Shane had thought that this was rubbish advice, innuendo notwithstanding, and told her as much. Rose had rolled her eyes and said think of it like a hockey play. You don’t know what the other team is doing until it’s unfolding in front of you, and you gotta improvise to respond and score - pun intended.
Shane understood hockey plays, and accepted this explanation. He’d liked it less when Rose had told him that she was going to cross her fingers for luck!, and had tried to explain that Shane never relied on luck to win him a hockey game. Rose had scowled, repeated herself, and Shane had had to accept that his ‘plan’ was actually just the name of a plan, some vague notion of Rose’s well wishes being on his side, and a confidence that he couldn’t justify to himself in light of everything that he actually had going for him.
So, stood in the lobby of a hotel in Tampa Bay, Florida, with a gaggle of hockey players thronged behind him with their suitcases and airplane neck pillows, Shane was surprised to see that maybe Rose had been right. Luck, it seemed, was on his side.
“I’m so very sorry about this,” the receptionist apologised profusely, his fingers flying across the keyboard of his computer. A light sweat had broken out across his brow, and he was flickering a panicked gaze between his PC screen and the hockey players in front of him, as if he thought they might jump him at any moment. “There’s been a mix up with the rooms. I’m going to sort this out for you guys though, don’t worry.”
“Take your time, man,” Scott Hunter said, with the genial, boy-next-door smile that he liked to throw around in interviews. The dark circles under his eyes suggested that he was not one hundred percent genuine in this request.
But the receptionist seemed to take the reassurance like a challenge, hunching over his computer with a renewed vigour. “We’ve double-booked one of the rooms,” he explained, stress fraying his voice. “Everything’s full up. I can try and free up something though.”
“Don’t bother,” Shane said, stepping forward. “Two of us can bunk up together.”
This had been the luck that Rose was talking about.
Shane continued, smiling as guilelessly as he could manage, even with his heart doing somersaults in his chest, “I’m happy to share my room. Captain’s duties. And” - Shane turned, scanning the crowd of hockey players behind him like he already hadn’t fixated on a plan - “Rozanov, you’re with me.”
Someone began to choke.
“Dude,” said Carter Vaughn, a strange look on his face that Shane was trying not to read into, “you sure?”
Shane shrugged. “We’re teammates. Me and Rozanov can handle sharing a room.”
“Are you sure?” Vaughn pressed, and, when Shane nodded, whispered in a voice too loud to really be a whisper, “this is like seeing Papa Montague and Papa Capulet climbing into bed together.”
The receptionist clapped his hands together. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Yes, that would be quite an easy solution. Is that alright with you, Mister Rozanov?”
“Perfect,” Ilya Rozanov said, through gritted teeth. Shane smiled benignly over at him and tried to pretend that he didn’t see the death glare that Rozanov was sending this way.
This was all going to work out, he decided. He owed Rose a gift card or something.
Rozanov did not speak to him at all in lift on the way up to the rooms. Shane shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying not to feel out of place, clinging to the confidence that he had felt in the lobby - but all of it had begun to pale under the tense, silent weight of Rozanov’s fury, a crackling tension that was palpable on the air around them. Shane couldn’t help but feel that the other hockey players, key cards now in hand, had been sensible to wait for the next lift to take them to their own rooms. Even Shane wasn’t sure that he wanted to be here anymore, and this was his plan.
Rozanov kept his silence when the lift doors opened to their floor, and he kept his silence when Shane led him down the corridor, and he kept his silence when Shane slotted the keycard into the door lock, and he kept his silence when Shane swung open the door at the signal of the electronic buzz, and he kept his silence, and -
“Fuck,” Shane whispered.
There was only one fucking bed.
He stepped into the lavish room, taking in the plush carpet and the heavy fabric of the drapes, the modern appliances that littered the desk, the minibar, and the sliding glass doors that opened out onto a spacious balcony. But all his attention was diverted by the grand double bed that was the centre piece of the entire room, wide with a mountain of plush pillows and thin, silk sheets. It was fucking humungous - and Shane supposed that was because it did not have to share the room with another bed.
Rozanov, upholding his seemingly new vow of silence, moved past Shane. His eyes snagged on the bed for a long, frozen moment, and then wrested themselves away. He moved across to the door to the ensuite, wrenching it open and cursed lowly under his breath. Shane, peering over his shoulder, saw only a vanity with a double sink, a toilet, and a standing shower. He frowned, unsure what had vexed Rozanov about it, but Rozanov was moving on already, beelining for the closet.
From the top shelf of the closet, he reached up and withdrew a clear storage bag, dumping it on the floor. Out of it came three pillows and a folded up duvet, which Rozanov - picking an egg chair out of the way - began arranging up against the wall, as far from the bed as he could feasibly manage.
“What are you doing?” Shane asked, dropping his suitcase at the foot of the bed
“You take bed, I take floor,” Rozanov replied, squatting to the floor to adjust his make-shift nest. “Simple.”
“It’s big enough to share,” Shane objected. A strange feeling of panic constricted his chest like a vice. Improvising had been going so well. It couldn’t let him down now.
“Uh huh, da. And how does Rose Landry feel about that idea?”
“Rose?” Shane asked, bewildered.
Rozanov’s tone was scathing. “Is what I thought. I am going to shower now,” he added, storming across the room to the en suite.
Shane reached out to him, half thinking that he could draw Rozanov up against his side and fix it that way, with the easy chemistry that existed between them and seemed to make everything feel a little bit simpler, quieter in Shane’s head. But Rozanov shook away his touch before it could land, shouldering past him.
The bathroom door slammed shut behind him. There was the definitive sound of a lock being flicked. Shane, feel wrong-footed and nauseous, staggered back a few steps to flop, boneless and hopeless and pathetic, on the bed. He would maybe hold off on Rose’s gift card for a little while yet.
Considering that they were sharing a single hotel room together, it was impressive at how well Rozanov was able to avoid Shane. Shane woke up to find that Rozanov had already left, no matter how early he set his alarm for, and returned at some indeterminable time at night, when Shane had already settled down for the night. Shane would wake up in the bed, roll to one side, and see Rozanov slumbering in his pile of pillows as though he had been there all along.
Shane decided to treat it like a game. He swapped around his iron-clad routines, though it made him feel itchy and restless to do so. He found Rozanov in the gym of the hotel restaurant, never quite managing to initiate conversation but hoping that Rozanov would, if only to demand what Shane was up to. The first morning, with Rozanov absent from the room, Shane had tossed his bedding into a pile for the housekeepers, hoping that it would not be replaced and thus forcing Rozanov to have to endure Shane’s company. Instead, he had come back to find that they had been replaced - what was more, was that the very helpful housekeeper had arranged them for Rozanov, straightened up and an improvement on the hasty job that Rozanov had done himself.
All of it was sending Shane more than a little insane.
He was jumping at ghosts. Sleeping poorly. The messages that he sent intermittently to Rose were long and rambling and nonsensical. If something didn’t give soon, Shane thought he would snap for real. Something needed to give.
And then it did.
Rozanov, hunched over his suitcase, was clearly just as surprised to see Shane ducking into the hotel room as Shane was to see Rozanov already inside. He shot up straight, scowling, as if Shane having the nerve to walk into his own hotel room was a problem. Shane tamped down on his own scowl, already feeling infuriated in that special way that only Rozanov managed to excite in him.
“Forgot my phone,” Shane explained, limply.
Rozanov tried to push past him, angling for the door. And - fuck, no. Shane had spent hours conniving some way to get Rozanov to stay in the same room with him for even just five minutes. He kicked the door shut. He moved to stand in front of the handle, arms folded over his chest. Rozanov paused, assessing the situation and still refusing eye contact with Shane, and made a single, wordless noise of frustration.
“What the fuck is your problem?” Shane demanded.
“My problem?” Ilya scoffed. “My problem? What is your problem, Hollander? Let me past.”
“Not until we talk about this.”
Shoving ineffectually at Shane’s shoulder, Rozanov said, “there’s nothing to talk about.”
“Fuck’s sake, will you at least look at me? Rozanov!”
But Rozanov would not look at him. His eyes were fixated on an area of door above Shane’s shoulder, wide and unblinking. Not for the first time, Shane wondered why he was even bothering with his not-an-actual-plan when Rozanov was such a fucking dick. But it mattered to him, in some way he couldn’t quite put name to. And, at last, Shane had Rozanov in front of him. It was all the opportunity that he needed and he wasn’t going to let this one slip through his fingers. Not this time.
Softly, he said, “it felt different last time - between us. It felt good. You can’t tell me that you didn’t feel it as well.”
At last, Rozanov looked up at him. Shane didn’t have the words to describe the expression on his face - the spiralling hurt, the disbelief, and the anger that smouldered underneath it all. Rozanov started to laugh and the sound of it was venomous and abrasive.
“You fucking left, Hollander,” he ground out. “You left, and you are telling me is because it felt good. Good! How does your fucking girlfriend feel when you tell her this? Or are you keeping this from her as well?”
“Girlfriend?” Shane asked bewildered.
Rozanov gesticulated wildly, slashing through the air with a hand had shot far too close to Shane’s face to be comforting. “Rose fucking Landry!”
Oh shit, Shane thought. And then, I can fix this, at least.
“Me and Rose aren’t seeing each other anymore.”
Rozanov froze. He looked unsure now, staring at Shane as if he was trying to glean the depth of his earnestness off it. Shane didn’t think that he’d ever seen Rozanov look unsure about anything, ever. It made him look younger. It made Shane wonder how guarded Rozanov had actually kept himself throughout all the years that they had known each other, for the sight of his walls fracturing to be so obviously visible before Shane’s very eyes.
“What?” he said. His voice was thin and hoarse.
“Yeah. We broke up. We weren’t compatible.”
“Compatible? What does this mean?”
“Just, you know, we didn’t work together.”
“No, I don’t know. You do not work?”
“I’m gay,” said Shane. “Like, I don’t like girls. At all.”
He hated how difficult it was to say that. Hated that he had to force out the words, despite the fact that he and Rozanov were the only ones in the room and despite the fact that Rozanov already knew, to an extent, that Shane liked men in the way that he was supposed to like women. But the words remained difficult, tangled and snarled in his throat, and he felt almost as though he had spat them at Rozanov’s feet, like the admission was something ugly. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. Shane pressed his hands flat against his thighs, hoping to steady the shake of them.
Rozanov’s expression was faintly incredulous. “Oh, yeah? Mm. What gives you that idea.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Shane snapped, scowling.
But Rozanov continued. “So, you are too gay for Rose Landry now.”
The now implying, Shane felt, that Rozanov was drawing attention to the fact that he felt Shane had not been too gay for Rose Landry before.
“Yeah,” he said, mustering his courage as best he could. “Besides, I told her that there was someone else.”
Rozanov froze. His face spasmed into a compulsive expression of surprise before smoothing back into an irritating placidity, a studious blankness that made Shane want to grab Rozanov by the shoulders and shake it away.
“Someone else?” Rozanov asked.
Shane nodded. “Yeah. But he’s a fucking asshole, so I’m maybe second guessing that.”
“An asshole,” Rozanov repeated.
Humming affirmatively, Shane replied, “he’s always giving me shit, you know? He’s brash and arrogant and so fucking annoying, but when he says my name, it kind of makes me want to die ‘cause no one has ever said it the way that he does.”
Rozanov’s expression fractured into a dozen different, competing emotions. “Hollander -” he tried to interrupt.
But Shane continued. “It scares me so fucking much. And I try to forget him, but he’s always there in my mind, no matter what I’m thinking about -”
“Shane!” Rozanov yelled. “We can’t!”
Shane tried to hide the way that his heart flipped at the sound of his name - his name - on Rozanov’s tongue again.
“Can’t?” he demanded. “Why? Can’t, because you’re scared? Because -”
“Because Russia! I could not back to Russia. I could not go home.”
Rozanov was trembling in front of him, a small tremor that ran throughout his whole body. Shane had never seen him like this - open, vulnerable. His eyes glittered, and Shane realised with a start that Rozanov was on the verge of tears as he stared over at Shane.
“Ilya…” he breathed.
"It's impossible,” Ilya said thickly. “We can’t be anything. My father, he is sick.”
“Sick like cancer?”
“Like dementia.”
Shane couldn’t help himself. He reached out for Ilya, and the other man let Shane take him by the hand, let himself be led across the hotel room and lowered down to sit on the edge of the bed. Shane sat down beside him. They were close enough that their knees touched, close enough that Shane could see the tears where they glittered and clung to the swoop of Ilya’s eyelashes.
“Fuck, Ilya, I’m sorry.”
Ilya dragged in a fluttering breath at the sound of his name on Shane’s lips, and shuddered “Say it again,” he demanded, words fast and trippingly rapid, as though he had not intended to say anything at all.
“Ilya,” Shane repeated. “Ilya. Tell me you don’t want this, Ilya.”
“We can’t,” Ilya said brokenly.
Shane reached forward. He cupped Ilya’s face in his hands, dragging his thumb over the high bones of Ilya’s cheeks. There was a strange and wild tenderness welling up in his chest, and it felt as though it was tearing him apart, with claws that hooked under his ribcage and threatened to wrench him apart entirely. Force him open. Make him exposed and vulnerable and completely undone for the perusal of the man in front of him. Ilya could reach into Shane’s chest if he wanted, and lift Shane’s still-beating heart out, bloody and red and for him alone.
Shane thought that this was maybe what it felt like to be in love with someone. He thought that maybe he had been feeling this way for longing than he had known he had been. Proximity, the awful stress of having Ilya so near in their shared hotel room and yet so far - it put everything into perspective for him.
“Ilya,” he said again. “Tell me you don’t want this.”
“We can’t.”
“Tell me you don’t want this. Please.”
“I cannot do that either.”
Shane nodded, mostly to himself. The thundering beat of his heart was caught in his throat.
He didn’t know who moved in first, but Ilya’s lips were warm where they pressed against this and his hands trembled as he moved to cradle Shane’s face. He steadied them against it as he reeled Shane in. And all of this was familiar, the way that they came together and the way that they moved. Shane’s fingers slid back and into Ilya’s hair, tangling with his curls. His lips parted, and Ilya responded in an instant. Shane kissed him harder, deeper, and it tasted like salt. Ilya’s tears pooled against Shane’s skin in the infinitesimal space that still managed to exist between them.
“Shane,” Ilya managed to choke out, and buried his face in the crook of Shane’s neck just as the sobs overtook him completely.
Shane could do nothing but hold him tighter, running a hand down the curve of Ilya’s spine as soothingly as he could manage, scritching comfortingly at his scalp. Ilya bowed into completely, giving in, and the sounds that he made were terrible and heart-wrenching. Together, they fell back into the bed. Ilya clung to Shane like he thought it would kill him to let go.
“Can I stay?” he begged. “Please, please, Shanya - let me stay, just for a bit.”
Shane swept the tears from his cheeks and kissed the inside of his wrist, where the blues veins stood out underneath the skin. “Stay,” he said, his voice no louder than the quietest murmur of agreement. “Stay as long as you need. Stay as long as you want. Stay, please.”
If Shane left a note for the housekeeper, he wondered if they would conveniently forget to replace the sheets that they were replacing. He’d leave a tip, of course, for the help.
Stay, he thought, aching with the fullness of his emotion.
He would ask Rose what gift card she wanted, he decided, as he smothered his helpless grin against the crown of Ilya’s head, just to be on the safe side. But he had a feeling - a strange, instinctive feeling - that everything was going to work out for the better now.