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The dog thing starts on a Sunday morning. (Well, the first dog thing does anyway. The second dog thing is still a few months away although, technically, this is when that started too. There’s also a third dog thing, but that’s not going to happen for years, and it actually started ages ago in a parking lot when he was seventeen, and is not at all relevant right now.)
The first dog thing starts on a Sunday morning, when Shane’s phone vibrates where he’d placed it next to his mug on the coffee table. He sees the name ‘Lily’, so he starts counting to ten in his head before he reaches for it. He’d noticed last year that he’d gotten a bit snatchy when it came to picking up his phone when he saw that name, which made perfect sense when he was in public and far less sense when he was at home on his own, so he’d instituted the ten-second delay. For decorum, and dignity.
Today he makes it to eight before his hand is moving which is pretty good, actually. Better than he usually manages, if he’s being entirely honest. Four was a real low point.
Unlocking his phone, his thumbs freeze above the screen.
Huh.
Ilya has sent him a picture. Of a dog.
It’s a good-looking dog, to be fair. Medium-sized, glossy, bright-eyed. It’s not a bad picture to be sent, he’s just… not quite sure what to do with it.
Then, a moment later, the caption arrives. This is Boris. I think I only go home with people who have dogs now.
Ah. Right. Excellent. This is not, in fact, a picture of a dog. This is an announcement from Ilya that he got laid.
Shane sighs. Wonderful. On the bright side, he’s back in familiar territory, and is saved from having to figure out what the hell he’s supposed to say about the dog.
Developing criteria, huh? He replied. That’s something new for you.
Oh, he thinks he is funny. Ilya’s reply was fast, and Shane briefly wondered if he was still there, still with the dog, still with the human it belongs to, texting Shane. His stomach doesn’t particularly like that idea. His stomach doesn’t particularly like most of the thoughts he has about what Ilya might be doing when they’re not together.
Well, I’m not getting a dog, so nice knowing you I guess. His stomach doesn’t feel good about that, either. What if Ilya takes him seriously? What if Ilya really meant it, about the dog thing? Shane can’t get a dog. Can he? He really doesn’t want a dog, but- What the actual fuck, Hollander. Pull yourself together.
Ah, sorry, I said wrong. Only go home with people who have dogs or Stanley cups
Shane definitely does not smile at his phone like a lovesick idiot. He does not. And if he does, it was just because he was thinking about something else. He really liked the picture of the dog, that's all.
Three weeks later, his phone lights up again with a message from Lily.
This dog is objectively less cute; which Shane would feel awkward about navigating, if the dog was the point. Both fortunately and deeply unfortunately, it isn't the point at all. Apparently, this dog’s name is Moxie, which feels a bit… much.
Three weeks? he messages. Quite the dry spell for you.
Had to relax rule, apparently not enough dog people in Boston, Ilya replies. Helped me choose between two last night, though ;)
This is good, Shane tells himself. It’s an important reminder that one should never ask questions that they do not want the answers to. Life is full of lessons, and for that he is grateful.
Shane does not alter his running route to go through the off-leash park so that he can send Ilya a picture of a dog.
He does alter his route, and he does go through the off-leash park, and he does send Ilya a picture of a dog, but it’s probably, you know, correlation and not causation, or something. Whatever. The dog’s name is Bruno.
And who does Bruno belong to comes the almost immediate reply.
Shane stares at his phone, momentarily thrown by this departure from his mental script for how this conversation would unfold. He had, fortunately, learned the man’s name, although he hadn’t exactly meant to. He’d asked the dog’s name, and the man had said “I’m Art, and this is Bruno.” At the time he’d barely registered the additional information, but now he’s pleased to have it available. Ilya doesn’t reply when he provides it, but that’s okay.
He is somewhat surprised to receive a picture of another dog the next day. Texting two days in a row is almost unheard of, and he’s smiling before he even opens the message. He fumbles with his phone a bit when he does open it, because this time Ilya’s bare torso is also in the picture, the dog’s face almost perfectly centred between his nipples. Shane doesn’t think he’d like to have a dog against his naked skin, but Ilya seems to really, really like dogs.
Say hello to Spot, reads the caption. The dog is black, with no spots. Hilarious.
Shane considers replying with ‘and who does spot belong to?’, then recalls his previous lesson in asking questions with potentially psychologically damaging answers, and replies Hello, Spot instead.
They see each other in person the next weekend, after a game. It’s in Montreal, and the Metros win, and Shane is very pleased about that, and also that he won’t be getting a picture of a dog in the morning.
“Better than art,” Ilya pants, as he slams into Shane from behind. Shane would roll his eyes, if he wasn’t quite so beside himself with pleasure. Ilya always says the most ridiculous things when they’re fucking. He might need some new material, though. He’s told Shane that his ass is a work of art at least twice over the past few years.
He considers telling him this, but he accidentally moans “oh, Rozanov, fuck” instead. Ah, well. It’s not the worst thing in the world to be called a work of art on an annual basis.
Shane sends three more dog pictures. Ilya continues to request the names of their owners, so Shane makes sure to remember them when people tell him. He never has to ask.
The third time, he’s relieved to see Bruno again when he enters the dog park. He’s actually a bit tired of approaching strange men and asking to take pictures of their dogs. Women might be easier, but he’s not about to start going up to random women and trying to talk to them when they’re minding their business in the park. He definitely doesn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.
Art definitely doesn’t seem to mind allowing Shane to take another picture.
Remember Bruno? he types.
Repeat customer huh
Say hi to Art from me
Shane frowns at his phone. He’d waited until after he got home from his run to send the picture, so he can’t say anything to Art right now. He’ll say hi to Art from Ilya if he sees him again, he supposes, although it feels like a very odd thing to do. Perhaps he’ll just lie to Ilya and say he did.
He gets dog pictures from Ilya the next morning (Saturday, Tess), and again on Sunday morning (Jasper), and then again on Wednesday morning. He’s never heard from Ilya so much in his life. He checks the Raider’s schedule when he gets the Wednesday one, and sees that apparently Ilya is in Tampa. He can’t tell that by looking at the dog, whose name is Luna.
He wonders if he’d be able to tell from looking at Luna’s owner, and then very quickly tries to un-wonder that.
The next time he is in the dog park, a woman approaches him.
“I saw on Twitter about the thing you’re doing, taking pictures of dogs,” she informs him.
Shane is quite certain that she hasn’t heard about the actual reason he’s been taking pictures of dogs on Twitter, or he’d already have heard about it from his mother, and his team’s press manager, and his coach, and every hockey-following homophobe in North America.
“I like dogs,” he tells her, which perhaps isn’t as much of a lie as it used to be, but still isn’t quite true.
She seems to want to talk to him, but he’s actually trying to go for a run. Perhaps the dog park thing is over. He sighs.
This is Muffin, he informs Ilya, then adds who belongs to Katie because he knows Ilya is going to ask anyway.
Katie??? What the fuck????? comes the extremely confusing reply, and then Trying something new?
Shane stares at his phone, bewildered. Trying something new? He supposes he hasn’t sent a poodle before. Weird that llya noticed.
I probably won’t be sending any new dog pictures for a while, he remembers to warn Ilya. He’s not sure where he’s going to find a steady stream of dogs to photograph now that the park is ruined.
Oh
Right
Okay
Bye then, Hollander
Shane’s stomach drops to somewhere around his knees. He knew that Ilya liked the dog pictures, but he didn’t expect him to stop talking to him entirely if he wasn’t going to send any more. He must really, really like dogs. More than he likes Shane, it seems, because Ilya stops sending him anything at all after that.
He manages to wait until 11pm, pacing his hotel room in Boston after the game, before he texts.
Are we not meeting tonight, then? He knows they haven’t spoken for weeks, but sometimes they do that, go longer than that even, months, and they still always meet. Sure, Ilya had been strange on the ice today, barely looking at him, but that wasn’t exactly unheard of either.
What abuot
katie
Fuck
Nebermind
Yes
Coem to my house
Will show you what your missnjig
Shane stares at the messages, appalled. Ilya is obviously very, very drunk. So drunk he possibly thinks Shane is somebody called Katie? He hopes Ilya doesn’t track down the real Katie tonight, because it doesn’t sound like he’s in a fit state to be showing anyone anything.
Drink some water, Rozanov he replies, and turns off his phone.
The dog shelter reaching out is an unexpected twist of the knife.
“Shane,” his mother sounds both confused and mildly concerned. “Have you been doing a thing with… dogs?”
“No,” he replies automatically, and then thinks about it, and realises she wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t already know he had. “Well, kind of. I was. Why?”
He can hear her bewildered expression down the phone. “You don’t even like dogs.”
“Dogs are fine,” he sighs, wishing that he was a dog. Nobody asks dogs about weird things they were doing that they definitely didn’t want to be talking about, especially to their mothers, especially when they weren’t even doing them anymore, especially when not doing them anymore meant they weren’t doing a lot of other things anymore, either.
“A dog rescue charity emailed me about you,” she informs him, clearly never having expected to put those words together in a sentence. “They want you to come in, take some shots for social media, raise awareness. I said no, because you don’t like dogs, Shane, but they sent back links to about a hundred twitter pictures of you patting dogs in Percy-Walters Park.”
“Oh,” replies Shane, and then, “I suppose I probably should.”
“What?” His mother sounds genuinely baffled. “Why?”
“Well, otherwise I was just kind of using them, wasn’t I?” God, Shane is so tired.
“What? Using who, Shane? What are you talking about? You can’t possibly want to do this, honey. You’ll be there all day, and I don’t think they’re going to…”
His mother is still talking, but Shane isn’t listening. Man, it would be so fucking good to be a dog.
Ilya might like him again then, too.
I bet dogs don’t think embarrassing things like that.
His phone was ringing, and he wondered what would happen if he just stopped answering it altogether. Someone would come around eventually, presumably. His mother, maybe, or Hayden. They’d probably be very annoyed at him about the hassle.
He sighed, picked it up, and almost dropped it again.
Lily.
Lily, who hadn’t texted him in months.
Lily, who had never called him before, not in all the years they’d been meeting up.
Lily, who didn’t want to fuck him anymore, because a few fans had caught on about the dog park.
Lily, who, when he accepted the call, was going to sound an awful lot like Ilya Rozanov.
“Hollander,” Ilya Rozanov’s voice said, before Shane could even offer a greeting of his own. He was pleased about that, actually, because he hadn’t decided on one before he’d answered. “What the fuck am I reading?”
Shane wondered how on earth he was supposed to know that. “I don’t know,” he replied.
“What is this dog thing?”
“Which dog thing?” Shane asked, because there were two. There was the first dog thing, the one that he and Ilya had been doing, and now there was the new dog thing, with the pictures in the shelter. He supposed, upon reflection, that Ilya already knew all about the first dog thing, so he was probably asking about the second. The second was fairly self-explanatory, though, so he couldn’t really be sure. (Neither of them knew about the third dog thing, yet.)
The sigh that came down the phone told Shane that he was supposed to have guessed which ‘dog thing’ Ilya meant. “I am reading story about how much you love dogs.”
“Oh,” Shane replied. He hadn’t read the posts himself, he’d only seen the pictures. His mother had approved the copy. “I haven’t read it, sorry.”
“It says,” Ilya informed him slowly, “that you were photographed at a dog park. Taking pictures. Of the dogs.”
Shane bristled. That made him sound very weird. He wasn’t, like, a dog creep. “I always asked first.”
“Hollander,” replied Ilya, firmly ignoring him. “The pictures, of the dogs, that you send me. You take these pictures in the park?”
“Yes?” Shane didn’t mean for it to be a question, but despite knowing the answer, he wasn’t feeling particularly confident. He felt like he had gotten something terribly wrong, somewhere, and that he was about to fall into a conversational hole disguised as a pile of leaves. “Was I not supposed to?”
Ilya let out a sharp, bright laugh. Not his mean laugh, a happy one. Shane liked it, a lot. “You didn’t… you were not… not at their houses?”
Shane had quite possibly never been so confused by a question in his life. “Their houses? What the fuck would I be doing at their houses, Rozanov?”
“Oh my god,” muttered Ilya. It sounded like he was talking to himself, not Shane, so Shane waited. He didn’t really know what to say to that, anyway. “Oh, my god. Hollander. I thought… fuck, I thought you were…”
There was such a long pause that Shane thought it must be his turn to say something. The problem was, he wasn’t entirely sure what was happening. “I’m… sorry?” he offered tentatively.
Another very, very good laugh, longer and lighter than the last one. “No, Hollander. Not sorry. I am the sorry one. I have been very stupid.”
Shane didn’t disagree with this assessment, so he hummed noncommittally. Then, “I missed you,” he said, to his own great surprise and utter horror.
He wasn’t sure what the hell he expected Ilya to say to that, but it certainly wasn’t “Fuck, Shane, I’ve missed you so much,” which was, incredibly, what he did say and which was probably, in Shane’s estimation, the best thing that anybody had ever said to anyone.
(The third dog thing’s name is Anya, and she is a very good girl.)