Work Text:
1.
Boston Lily sends Shane a text the night after he flees from Ilya Rozanov’s home in Boston. Shane doesn’t open it, but he can still see the first three words of the message (you’re being dramatic …) if he presses the little dropdown arrow on the notification banner. He reads these three words over and over and over until he hears them in his sleep or when his mind drifts away from him, always delivered in a familiar Russian cadence.
A part of him wonders what the rest of the message says. Why does Lily think he is dramatic? Is he angry? Is he begging Shane to get over himself so they can go back to the way that things have always been between them, fucking and never talking and fucking again? Does he call Shane Jane to try and restore some of the equilibrium that was upset by the too intimate way that he had pulled Shane close and called him by his name? If Shane reads the message, will it fix this?
Shane doesn’t read the message. He’s too much of a coward for that. He goes to the three dots beside Lily’s contact name, seeing the options to block him and to delete their conversation history. If he’s not going to reply, this is the other course of action. But he’s too much of a coward for that as well.
He doesn’t delete the conversation. He swipes the notification away, unread. His phone, with Lily neatly stored inside, burns a hole in his pocket. If he lets himself, it’s all that he thinks about. The roots of it curl into his brain. The petals bloom and obscure everything else, and Shane is lost in a cloying cloud of florals and pollen.
2.
The thing is that Rose Landry is nice and funny and pretty. She makes Shane laugh. When he talks to her, she looks him in the eyes and does not seem off-put by the fact that Shane is not and has never been good at this sort of thing. She’s the sort of woman that Shane could tell his parents about and know that they’ll be happy for him. He thinks they might be friends, or becoming something like it. He thinks that it’s probably the best foundation for something more that he could ask for.
So, what if she doesn’t make the blood roar in his head, or his stomach clench in anticipation, or send his head reeling into the intoxicating burn of flames that he has gotten far too used to over the years? He likes her. He likes thinking about her, and the shine of her eyes, and the curve of her smile, and the way that her hair falls over her shoulder. Thinking about her is warm and it is gentle and it has to be enough, otherwise Shane doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.
He takes her on a date and acts like a gentleman. Holds open doors. Crosses to the passenger side of the car to help her out, even though she’s as sure-footed as a cat in her heels. He pays for everything. He pulls her chair out. He compliments her dress and her make-up and all the things that must have taken her so long to get ready.
The restaurant that he chooses is a nice, upscale one. He gets his mom to make the booking, and she uses the combined celebrity status of Shane Hollander and Rose Landry to open up a table that would have been otherwise unavailable.
Shane knows that he’s chosen well when Rose coos over the intimate faux-candle-lit interior, and the colour of the carpet, and the fabric of the table clothes. The food is good, in an artful way that means the portions are tiny but artfully arranged, and served in a dozen courses that are carefully spaced so that Rose and Shane have room for conversation but don’t go so long between plates to be a drag.
Shane feels sick through all of it. In the middle of the table, in a green glass vase with a delicate, long neck, is a single, white lily, its bloom curved towards him. He thinks that it’s mocking him. He can’t stop looking at it.
After the meal, Shane pays the bill, angling the cheque away so that Rose cannot spy the cost, and leaves a generous tip. He pulls her chair out so that she can stand, and lets her tuck her arm into the crook of his elbow.
“Well,” she says. She smiles teasingly up at him. “It was no garlic fries.”
There’s a fast food truck across the road. Unwittingly, Shane’s stomach growls; there had been nowhere near enough food for the sort of intake he’s used to as an athlete.
Rose drags him towards it. “My treat,” she says, and Shane lets himself be tugged along.
If he turns back, he can still see the lily through the restaurant window. He doesn’t want to look.
3.
“Make the most of your peace and quiet,” Jackie warns him, passing Shane a mug of coffee over as she joins him on the Pikes’ couch. “Hayden’s on his way back with the kids and you know that he’s not going to shut up about your celebrity dinner.”
Shane takes a sip of coffee, wincing as it burns all the way down. “I’m surprised that you’re not asking about it,” he says, eyeing her up and down.
Jackie’s smile is angelically and falsely innocent. “I know that my husband’s going to interrogate you,” she explains, with a wave of her hand, “and I’ll get answers then whilst staying in your good graces.” She huffs and adds, “however, I’ve been setting you up with my friends for years and I have to find out about your date from the tabloids. And then! Then you don’t say anything about it for a week! Hopeless, honestly.”
“Sorry,” Shane says, not sorry at all.
It’s clear that Jackie knows this, exaggeratedly rolling her eyes at him.
The front door swings open and the sound of the kids hits them in an immediate wall of noise. Shane opens his arms just in time to receive an armful of twins. Ruby pokes him in the eye with one her podgy little toddler fingers, so Shane shifts her and Jade around so that he can have a better, safer grasp on them. That established, he resigns himself to his fate and new role as a piece of climbing apparatus.
Hayden comes trooping in after the twins with little Arthur secured to his chest in a cotton sling. “No running indoors!” he tells the twins, futilely.
Jackie snickers at his plight. Arthur smacks him in the face, and moves to repeat the motion. Hayden drops the plastic carrier bag in one of his hands to the floor so that he can redirect the motion, grabbing Arthur’s tiny little wrist and moving the palm of his hand to blow a raspberry against it. Arthur shrieks with laughter.
“What have you got there, babe?” Jackie asks.
From behind his back, with a flourish, Hayden withdraws the spoils of his grocery run. “Flowers for my beautiful wife!” he announces, and Shane’s stomach drops like a stone because, in his hand, Hayden’s holding a bouquet of fucking lilies.
“They’re beautiful!” Jackie exclaims, and carries them towards the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I’m going to find a vase to put them in!”
Hayden catches Shane looking at them. He winks, badly. “Take note, Romeo,” he tells Shane very seriously. “Always buy the flowers. It’ll serve you well in life.”
“Not roses!” Jackie calls the kitchen. “That’s so gimmicky.”
“Not roses,” Shane repeats. Jade knees him in the chest. That’s the only reason that all the air in his lungs is driven out. It has to be.
4.
The lights are pulsing in rhythm with the flight of Shane’s heartbeat.
Quick, disorientating, overwhelming. He can’t see much, and the faces around him meld into one, over-coloured mess. He had thought that there would be a freedom to this anonymity - because if Shane cannot see the individuals making up this crowd, then they cannot see him. And if Shane is not being perceived, he can pretend that he doesn’t really exist. And the thought of not existing, of not thinking and not feeling, is an enviable one right now.
But there’s no freedom, because there are no lights disorientating enough to stop Shane from recognising him.
Ilya Rozanov is stood just across the dance floor from him and it’s almost as though no time has passed at all. Shane knows him - knows the strong line of his nose and the dip of his lips, the fall of his curls slicked to his sloping forehead by sweat, the shine of his eyes amplified by the club lighting. Rozanov’s got a tight tank top stretched over the contours of his body, and Shane can feel what it is like to run his hands across it all. It’s a familiar sensation underneath his fingers, effortless and natural, and Shane almost finds it unbearable to know that he’ll never feel it again except for in memory.
He meets Rozanov’s eyes. Rozanov, like always, seems to find him without thought, without effort. It’s like they’re on the ice together again, and Shane wants.
He wants and he cannot have. He cannot ever have again.
As he watches, Rozanov’s hands run down the body of the woman he is dancing with, his body curving sinuously around hers as if they could almost become one, moving, weaving figure. His lips brush the column of her neck, running up the line of her throat. His teeth catch at her ear. He whispers something to her, low and undoubtedly filthy.
Shane turns away. Tries to stumble somewhere he will not have to look at Rozanov and his stupid, handsome face. His shoulder catches against a woman, also trying to work her way through the crowd. When he turns to apologise to her, his eyes catch sight of the lily-shaped broach that pins the folds of her gauzy white dress together.
5.
Shane knows that it’s no different in the morning, seeing Rose naked and exposed to the cool morning air of his Montréal apartment, than it had been to see her naked last night, tangled in his sheets and underneath him, but it feels different. Shane, still lying in bed, finds that he’s sneaking looks at her as she moves around, like he’s been struck by a sudden shyness, but if Rose is aware of this, she makes no move to comment on it.
He watches as she brushes out her hair, plaiting it with deft fingers to keep it out of her face, and as she pulls her clothes on, each item falling into place like a piece of armour. Underwear, bra, jeans, a clean blouse.
Dressed again, she catches his watching gaze and smiles, a little slyly. She crawls across the bed to reach him and presses a kiss to his lips, her own soft and plush. For a moment, Shane forgets what it is like to kiss, and has to manually remind himself - hand there, on her cheek, lean up, tilt in, lips parted just enough.
“I could get used to waking up like this,” Rose murmurs, but she pulls back, brows furrowed.
Shane presses his lips to the inside of her wrist, head bowed. This has the added benefit of hiding his face from her as he takes a moment to gather himself. “Same,” he replies.
Rose nods. A wispy strand of hair falls into her face, so Shane reaches up to tuck it behind her ear. “I have an early start,” she informs him, “which means you have the pleasure of watching my morning make-up routine.”
“You don't want me to make breakfast?” he asks her.
Rose laughs. “Not if I’m about to go through the trouble of lining my lips and all that nonsense.”
She wanders into the ensuite and returns with her make-up bag, much larger and fuller than Shane would have expected. It’s clearly well-loved though, with splotches of make-up and discoloured marks covering the sides of it. She sets it on the floor in front of Shane’s standing mirror, and lowers herself to sit criss-cross applesauce beside it.
Shane’s hands shake, so he shoves them underneath the covers. Rose opens the bag and rifles through it, and then begins a routine so intricate that Shane has no hope of understanding it. He doesn’t deserve to understand it. He looks at the bag, and he sees that the outside of it is covered in tiny, stylised lilies, and he cannot help but see them as an accusation.
Because Rose had let Shane hold her last night, and kiss her and undress her, and all Shane had been able to think about was him, and his hands, and his body, and the way that he had said Shane’s name the very last time they had touched.
Shane had hoped he’d be over it by now. He’s not over it.
6.
The lilies follow him everywhere. Now that he’s noticed them, he can’t un-notice them. They’re constant, and he doesn’t know how to get rid of them, how to reach into the twisted mess of his brain and yank them out, stem and root and bulb, never to return and bother him again. But he can’t. He can’t stop thinking about them and him, and he sees them everywhere, in strange places and ordinary ones alike.
Case in point:
Shane is sat at his local coffeeshop. He comes hear at least once every week. Brings his laptop with all the emails that his mom has forwarded for his attention, and sets about responding to them. The ambient noise helps keep him focused. He pushes his glass further up his nose, cracks his knuckles, and moves to get started.
But then he notices, across the street and out the window, that the new florists that has had its opening soon! signs up for months now has finally opened. The windows gleam with a tidal swell of flowers banked up behind them. Another display spills across the storefront and on the pavement, half a dozen whicker baskets overflowing with the shop’s produce. One of the them, the barrel furthest from Shane, is choked full of lilies, all different colours. White and pink and orange; they’re vivid enough to sting Shane’s eye, and vivid enough that he can’t look away.
Shane slams his laptop closed with more force than it deserves. He practically sprints from the coffeeshop. On the street, he can smell the putrid scent of them, and that follows him all the way home.
7.
People give Shane shit. That’s just what happens when he finds himself in the company of a hockey fan or to. IIn Canada especially, where he’s never escaped that label of a home town hero. A regular boy next door.
That is to say that he doesn’t think of it when two girls, maybe fifteen, maybe sixteen, wave at him as they approach, walking in the opposite direction to him and Rose. Shane draws Rose to a halt, because his arm is around her waist, and tries to smile in a way that isn’t a grimace. The girls look nervous enough as it is. Shane has always been told that he makes stuff like that worse, but he’s trying - really.
“Sorry,” one of them says, looking between him and Rose, “”but are you Shane Hollander?”
“I am,” he says, making sure to flick his tone up at the end. Not a question, but not unwelcoming, which is the important thing for him to nail.
“I’m a really big fan,” she tells him. “Could you sign my cap?”
She’s wearing a Montréal Voyageurs cap and is carrying a sharpie, which she tells him is for her high school art project. Shane takes it and dutifully signs the peak of it.
“What’s your name?” he asks her.
“Esther,” she replies, and then gestures at her friend. “This is Morgan. She’s also a fan.”
Morgan isn’t looking at him. Her face is bright red. Shane knows how she feels.
“Would you like me to sign something?” he asks her. “Or a picture?”
Morgan squeaks, which Shane takes as an affirmative. He sidles up to stand beside her, with maybe an inch between them, and Esther dutifully moves to take a picture of the two of them on Morgan’s phone, before flipping the camera to include herself in a selfie. Then, she asks if Rose would like to get in, which she does, pressing herself against Shane’s side.
“It was lovely meeting you,” Shane tells them both, once everything has been signed and he’s made sure that Esther has the pictures that she and Morgan were after.
“Thank you,” Esther says brightly.
Morgan still can’t look at him, but she hesitates when Esther begins to move away. She thrusts something out at Shane, which he takes on autopilot before he can stop himself, and is gone before he can say anything or even realises what it is. He looks down, dumbly, at his hands, and his fingers tighten compulsively around the regal green stem of the pink lily that Morgan had given him.
He turns to look after her, but she’s already been swallowed by the bustle of the street.
“Pretty,” Rose comments, so he passes it over to her, letting her tuck it into her purse with a quiet, genuine thank you and an appreciative hum.
He’s beginning to feel a little bit like he’s going insane.
8.
His parents plan a dinner for all their old friend every three months. Four dinners a year, where they gather all the people that they’ve stayed in touch with over the last couple of decade, and each of them become an event in themselves. Shane’s dad says it’s an excuse to break out the fancy crockery that hardly ever gets used except on Christmas and Thanksgiving, whilst Shane’s mom insists that it’s just fun to have an excuse to dress up.
By consequence of being close to his parents, Shane’s swept up in planning every time. He never attends, but he knows, through proximity, what they’re like and the sort of vibe that his parents are trying to create, and he is therefore considered to be an acceptable choice for consulting on all the little details of organising it. Shane’s the one that his mom turns to when she and his dad can’t decide on what tablecloths to buy, or whether or not they should play music, or after dinner card games.
This time his mom wants Shane’s opinions on the centre pieces for the middle of her table, and Shane - on edge, an anxious wreck, seeing things wherever he turns - know what she going to suggest before she even says it.
“Your dad suggested lilies,” she informs him, rolling her eyes. “He says that they’re classy and elegant, and I said to, David, we bring those into our home, we’re never getting rid of them. I know you can cut the stamen, but they stain everything and the smell is just unbearable.”
Shane swallows. Struggles to put anything into words. He picks at the cuff of his hoodie, brow furrowed, and admits, “they’re pretty.”
Yuna looks at him strangely. She brings up a hand and presses it against his forehead. “You’re looking a little peaky,” she informs him crisply. “Are you coming down with something?”
9.
Cassie the Social Media Intern is arranging Shane to her liking in front of the character, nudging his curmudgeonly limbs into something that looks appropriately human for her liking and sweeping an errant strand of hair out of his face with a scowl. Having worked with the Voyageurs for a season and a bit now, Cassie is eternally long suffering, and Shane - with his awkward, antisocial tendencies - doesn’t make her job any easier. Probably he makes her job the hardest; at least the other guys, no matter their personalities, can muster a nice smile for the camera.
Social media events are torture for both of them; this time is somewhat of a reprieve. Shane sits on a chair and introduces himself, which he was done every day of his life and is therefore well-versed in. Cassie sits opposite him, off-camera, and holds up a stack of question cards, which she dutifully reads out for Shane. The questions are those submitted by fans online, and most of them are ordinary, mindless questions about what breakfast cereal Shane has the most (none) and whether or not he has a pre-game routine (yes).
Eventually, Cassie gets board of his even, monotonous answers and shuffles through for something more juicy. She asks him what his most embarrassing memory is (calling one of his high school teachers mom) and who his least favourite teammate is (laughing, Hayden Pike). She asks him what Rose Landry’s drink of choice is (double vodka and coke) and what his favourite sport is outside of hockey (cycling).
Another white card held triumphantly in hand, she asks, “what’s your favourite flower?”
Shane stops. Thinks. Breathes through the nausea and the panic and the self-recrimation. “Lilies,” he says.
The internet tears him apart for that one. He and Rose aren’t dating any more (what a conversation that had been) but the general public don’t know that yet. Shane’s answer is taken as a dig at his girlfriend. Then, someone points out that they haven’t been photographed together in a while (two weeks). The rumours snowball from there.
Shane only sees them because he switches his phone on to re-read his text thread with Lily, something cavernous and strange growing in his throat to swallow him whole. He’d thought it would scare him more, to be so perceived by the public, but it doesn’t change what he’s feeling at all. He finds that it means surprisingly little, in the grand scheme of things, as they stand at three in the morning in the darkness of his room.
10.
Shane finds him without needing to look for him. Blond curls, broad shoulders. An eyesore Hawaiian shirt that would have drawn Shane’s attention to him if all else failed.
Lily - Ilya Rozanov - is sat at a bar, in a hotel in Tampa Bay. His fingers fold loosely around the condensation-wet neck of a bottle. Shane can’t stop looking at him. Shane doesn’t think he’s ever stopped looking for him - not since he had walked out in Boston.
He takes a deep breath. Courage, like a flower, blooms in his mind.