Archive of Our Own

She’d go to her grave before she ever admitted it to Ilya, but the honest truth was that Svetlana was just as shocked that Jane was Shane Hollander as everyone else on Earth ended up being when they found out a couple years after her. She knew that Ilya had someone – knew that Jane existed, and knew that Jane was a man, and that the second fact was the primary reason Ilya had hidden Jane from her for so long. She also knew about Ilya’s horrendously poorly hidden crush on Shane Hollander. It was obvious – watching the man’s boring ESPN documentary late at night was one thing, but she also caught Ilya’s eyes drifting to TVs in sports bars whenever Hollander was on screen, and had seen, more than once, an alert on Ilya’s phone that implied he was keeping tabs on Hollander’s season perhaps more closely than a mere rival ought to. He faked dismissiveness and casualness well – well enough to fool basically anyone on Earth who wasn’t her – but she’d been with him when he’d fallen out of a tree and broken his arm as a child. Back then, he’d tried to claim it barely hurt despite the tears pooling down his cheeks. In that way, Ilya had never really changed – he didn’t want people to see the tender insides of him, and always tried to hide them away. He just wasn’t very good at hiding them from her.

But if you’d asked her before the start of the 2017-2018 hockey season if those two things were related, she would have said no, of course not. With the benefit of hindsight, she felt quite stupid – Jane and Shane, really? – but she didn’t know Shane Hollander, not back then. She had no reason to believe that his relationship with Rose Landry wasn’t genuine, that he was hiding a secret affinity for men behind his bland, media-ready smiles. She had no reason to believe he didn’t actually hate Ilya, like all the hockey blogs claimed he did. The way she figured it was that Ilya, who had always been attracted to men – something she’d suspected even before she’d accidentally walked in on him blowing Sasha at some party back when they were teenagers, before the MLH draft – could simply have a work crush and a boyfriend at the same time. There was nothing wrong with admitting that you found a coworker attractive, after all, so long as you didn't cheat or anything. Or, at least Svetlana assumed – she’d never really been one for long-term romantic relationships, herself, and as much as she loved her job nearly all of her coworkers were married, awful, or both – not exactly crushworthy. 

Given all the facts she did know, she probably should have pieced it together, but Ilya had left her slightly in the lurch with his abrupt change of summer plans. Not that she blamed him – Scott Hunter’s grand romantic gesture had obviously realigned whatever he thought could be true about his future, and she did not begrudge his need to see if he could make something really happen with his Jane. He’d come back from the other room after his phone call, while the reporters on TV were still going over Scott Hunter’s kiss and what it meant for MLH (“a historic moment, to be sure”), attempting a blank face he couldn’t quite manage – there was a slight tug to his lips, almost a smile peeking through, that he couldn’t sneak past her.

“I am not going to Russia,” he’d said. “I need you to take Zhenya her gifts for me, yes?”

“Ilya,” she’d said back. “What the fuck.”

This had, classically, devolved into an argument, both of them talking over each other loudly. Ilya was unpacking his suitcase and repacking a much smaller bag, ignoring Svetlana while she called him an asshole for leaving her to deal with fucking Alexei all by herself and not bothering to even tell her where he was going.

“Seriously, Ilya, you are what? Going to run through the airport for your Jane?”

“I am going to his house,” Ilya had said, primly. “For a week. Maybe two. Just to see. . .” He trailed off, but Svetlana understood the end of the sentence. Just to see if we could be something.

Let it be known that Svetlana Vetrova hated romantic comedies. She hated their obnoxious pop music soundtracks and formulaic cheesiness. She hated the neurotic leading women who were deemed unlovable for such mundane things as wanting a sandwich a specific way, or liking their jobs too much, or not wanting children right away, or maybe ever, or maybe too much. She hated the bland, cardboard leading men, who never had anything going for them beyond a sharp jawline and who sometimes lacked even that (seriously, why must women always be beautiful while men could scrape by with mediocrity and barely present charm?). She hated the grand confessions in the rain, and the way no one ever talked to each other properly before the big third act breakup, which she hated more than anything else – like all it took to make something work was six weeks of separation, and the on the other side of it all your problems would vanish into thin air. She hated that one apology was all anyone ever needed to get a happily ever after, that the characters never truly grew or changed, when in real life relationships took work and time and effort.

Hell, look at her relationship with Ilya! They might not have ever been in love, and they never would be, but even a platonic relationship – a friendship like they had – had required patience and work from both of them over the years. She had been forced to pull him out of his shell when he tried to vanish on her, to deal with his sullen moods and long periods of silence; he’d been forced to deal with her complaining and bluntness, the way she could cut sharply at him if he poked at something that hurt her. 

She hated romcoms. But she couldn’t bring herself to hate Ilya and his own grand romantic gesture. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted him to be happy more than she cared about pointing out that he was, in essence, a walking, talking cliche, doing something impulsive and wild without fear of consequence. 

So she sighed, and went, “alright, alright, let me help you pack – you cannot only bring two t-shirts for two weeks, Ilyusha.”

And forgive her, if in the haze of packing and repacking – Ilya uncharacteristically nervous about what to bring, like there would be a dress code at this guy’s house – forgive her if she didn’t ask the follow up questions she should have asked, the ones that would have made her realize that Jane was Ilya’s embarrassing work crush Shane after all. The number one question that would have gotten her there, of course, was where the fuck are you even going? Because the moment the word Ottawa or Canada or cottage fell from Ilya’s lips, she would have thought about Shane Hollander doing yoga on his deck while Ilya watched with very barely concealed lust in his eyes before going to a club and proceeding to grind on the first girl he could find who had brown eyes and dark hair and freckles and she probably would have managed to make two and two equal four just fine. 

But she didn’t ask, so she didn’t get to make the connection herself. Instead, she learned months later, when Ilya invited her over for dinner in Boston on an off-night for him and she walked into his apartment to find Shane Hollander sitting awkwardly at the kitchen counter, looking like he was facing a firing squad and not an incredibly beautiful woman coming over for what she thought was a casual catch-up dinner after a summer apart from her best friend.

Ilya had blown her off most of the summer. She expected the radio silence from his two weeks with Jane – if she was going on a sex vacation, she wouldn’t have stopped to text him after all – but when she still hadn’t heard back well after the two weeks were meant to be up, she finally gave up and texted him first, only marginally worried he’d been murdered and dumped in a gutter somewhere.

How is Jane?

His response came three hours later. 

Good. I am still with her. 

And then, before she could process that:

We will talk when we are both back in Boston, okay?

It hadn’t been so easy to nail him down when he was back in Boston, though – he had team commitments and preseason scheduling to go through, and he had a couple brand shoots he’d pushed off during the summer. He texted her sometimes, but whenever she brought up Jane he got cagey. I want to tell you in person.

She should have figured he was trying to schedule an actual meeting with Jane, instead of just a dinner between the two of them, but – well. Ilya had been reluctant to even admit that Jane existed, before. She figured it would take awhile to get to the point where he was okay introducing them. She was not expecting to get ambushed on a random Thursday night two weeks into the hockey season by Shane Fucking Hollander.

“Oh my god,” she said.

Shane looked a little bit like he wanted to die. “Hello,” he said, very politely. 

“You are way out of his league, you know.” This wasn't necessarily true – she loved Ilya, after all, and she could admit he was incredibly good looking – but it was the exact type of thing that would make Ilya hiss like a cat, which he promptly did, making an annoyed scoffing noise next to her while he crossed his arms. 

Shane looked at her like she was insane. “No I’m not. I mean – you’ve seen him, right?” Next to her, Ilya preened like a moron. 

Oh fuck. She was going to love this man. She could tell immediately. She had never in her life believed in love at first sight, but she considered herself a good judge of character, and she had strong opinions on basically everything. Very rarely was her first impression wrong, and her first impression of Shane Hollander told her that he was going to be very, very important to her in the not-so-distant future. 

She turned to Ilya. “This is why you changed your door code? So I could be surprised when you walked me in here yourself? Like I didn’t know about the crush you had on Hollander? It was visible from outer space, Ilya.”

Ilya spluttered with indignation; Shane turned bright red. “You did not – there is no way you knew Jane was Shane Hollander, Svetlana,” Ilya said. 

Which was true – she hadn’t. But, again: that was a secret she’d take to her grave. So she shrugged coyly instead, not admitting anything. 

Shane, meanwhile, had developed a little frown. “Wait. You changed your door code?”

Ilya had the decency to look sheepish. “Ah, yes. I have a new code. So, uh, now only you have it.”

In his seat, Shane furrowed his brow, concerned. “You didn’t have to do that. I know she and you – I know it’s–” he stopped and let out a frustrated breath. “It’s okay for her to come and go, if she wants.”

The look on his face, however, implied it was much more complicated than okay for her to come and go. 

Fascinating. Shane Hollander was jealous of her. If that wasn’t an ego boost she didn’t know what was. A man with two MLH Championship Cups looking awkward and shy because of little Svetlana Vetrova? If only that bitch Anastasia from secondary school could see her now. Rub that in her face, stuck up cow.  

“Do not worry Shane,” she cut in, cooly, before Ilya could open his mouth and say something deeply dumb. “I do not need his door code. Walking into this apartment with its depressing art and his disgusting socks lying around has never held too much appeal anyway. It is much more appealing with you here, my dear.” She leaned across the counter and took one of Shane’s hands in both of hers – she felt him flinch, just slightly, at the touch, before he obviously forced himself to relax. “I have so many things to say to you about the Metros penalty kill, and this asshole has never once let me say them to him. I am so excited you are here.”

She was couching her genuine excitement – I am so happy Ilya has someone. I am so happy that you are are his someone, because you measure up to him in every way; you are someone who can challenge him and excite him. I hope you are someone who plans to stick around for him, because so few people ever have before – in a bit of a joke. She wasn’t entirely sure Shane understood her – he always seemed so literal on the Metros social channels and in interviews – but he smiled either way, a little chagrined. 

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve been bitching about it for weeks.”

“Comeau on the PK makes no goddamn sense!” She let go of his hand to throw her own up in indignation. “You do not need another second line winger, you need two defensemen helping you and Boizaiu out. It is common sense!”

Next to her, Ilya groaned loudly. “I have made a massive mistake. I never should have introduced you two. I will never get to talk about anything other than hockey for the rest of my life.”

She scoffed, rolled her eyes, and moved to sidle up next to Shane, taking his arm gently in hers and pulling him off his stool and towards the living room. “Hush now, Ilya. Get us some wine – me and your boyfriend have important hockey business to discuss.”

She tossed Ilya a look over her shoulder as she led Shane away. He was audibly grumbling, but his face had a stupid, pleased little grin on it he couldn’t be bothered to hide. She winked at him, and then turned and winked at Shane for good measure. For the first time, Shane’s facade crumbled away – he laughed, just once, a sharp little bark that seemed to escape him against his will, at least given the way he went red after.

“Fine, fine,” Ilya said, as they walked away. “But do not eat him alive, Svetlana. I like him!” 

She told him to fuck off in Russian, which just made Shane laugh again. 

The evening went, genuinely, quite well. Shane had a glass of wine; Svetlana had about three, and Ilya had two vodkas. By the end of the night they were all looser, and Shane’s guard was nearly completely down – the hockey talk had helped, although by the second hour Ilya had begged them to change the subject. Shane had used the opportunity to ply embarrassing childhood stories about Ilya from Svetlana, because he was, apparently, a little bit evil. 

It just made her like him more, really. 

She’d also gotten most of the story from the two of them, told in bursts throughout the night – the years of casual hooking up that had gradually lent itself to real feelings; the way Scott Hunter’s kiss had changed things for both of them (a part she knew, because she’d been there when it had happened, but she didn’t bring that up). If she’d gotten a little teary eyed once or twice, well who could blame her? She didn’t like romantic comedies, but that was only because they always seemed to put the comedy before the romance – she could appreciate a good romance like any girl, really. 

She could tell the evening was winding down around hour three of them hanging out – they’d already eaten, some delivery from a fancy Boston place that Ilya had certainly paid too much for, and Ilya had decamped for a cigarette. Shane made a face but let him go. Svetlana gave Ilya three months before he quit, although who knew how long it would take for it to stick. Certainly by the time these two had kids cigarettes would be a long dead habit. 

And how insane was that? One night in Shane Hollander’s company – one night of knowing he was Ilya’s boyfriend – and she had already decided they’d be married and have children. She wondered how it felt for the two of them, if she felt this much as an outsider to the whole thing.

Normally she would have followed Ilya and bummed a cigarette herself, let Shane recharge for a minute – she thought he might be the type of person who couldn’t quite sustain social energy like her and Ilya could – but she chose to stay on the couch with Shane instead. Ilya gave her a bit of a scowl, almost a threat, and she waved him away. She knew he was thinking she’d do some horrifically American thing, like threaten to break Shane’s body if he broke Ilya’s heart, but she saw no need to do that. Shane had no plans to break Ilya’s heart – she could tell that from just this one evening. If he ever did break Ilya’s heart, it would be by accident, and he’d almost certainly be desperate to fix it. They were gone on each other, way gone. If they’d made seven years of hooking up against the backdrop of one of the most homophobic jobs in the world work, then they could make anything work. She had confidence. 

No, she had another reason to stay behind.

She waited until the patio door slid closed and turned to Shane, raising one eyebrow as she did so. “Shane Hollander. If I ask you something, will you be honest with me?”

“Is this a shovel talk?” Shane seemed amused by the concept.

She huffed. So alike, these boys. (Her boys, she thought, and it felt nice and right in her head.) “No. It is. . . maybe more self-centered than that.” She suddenly felt a little awkward. There was no smooth way to poke at what she wanted to poke at, after all. “Are you jealous? Of me and Ilya. That we have slept together.”

To his credit, Shane didn’t answer right away. He considered her for a long moment, eyes darting around her face, never quite meeting her own. She didn’t take it personally – he didn’t seem to make a ton of eye contact, but he’d been engaged in the conversation all night. She liked that he was thinking about his answer. She liked that he, obviously, wanted to tell her the truth, even if it was awkward for him. 

“I think,” he said, finally, “that I was, at first. When I first – when he first mentioned you, to me. I think I. . .” he paused and frowned, considering. “I guess maybe I’d hoped I was the only one on his, uh – the guys on the team call it a roster?” 

She couldn’t help the laugh that burst from her, but luckily Shane smiled shyly at it, which felt like a win. 

“I knew that he slept around,” Shane continued, “but I sort of wanted to think maybe I was the only person he kept coming back to, you know? So learning about you. . . yeah, I think at first I was jealous of that.”

She nudged her toes into his ankle, gently – a little prod to get him to keep going. But he didn’t take the bait, instead flushing red again. “At first you were jealous of that?” she asked, when it became clear he wasn’t going to continue on his own. “Like, then you stopped being jealous? Or like then you became jealous of something else?”

Shane’s face screwed up in discomfort. She waited a beat, then two, and then opened her mouth to say forget it – Jesus, the wine must have gone to her head, why was she grilling Ilya’s boyfriend about this now, it was way too early in their relationship for her to be demanding this of him – but Shane spoke before she could. 

“I think – I know Ilya has a lot of sex, right? Or, like, had a lot of sex, whatever. And I know it’s – I know those people don’t matter to him. Like, he said that to me. That I’m the only person he’s ever loved. So no, I’m not jealous that you and him used to sleep together because I trust him, when he says that. I know there’s no, like, lingering potential with the two of you, or whatever. But I guess. . .” he trailed off, but finally looked up and made proper eye contact with her. His eyes were very deep, and very brown. She understood what Ilya saw in him – beyond the perfection of his hockey stats and the ad-friendly beauty he presented on billboards and in magazines, there was something sad and lovely and interesting in his eyes. The type of face that made you want to know more – that made you want to introduce yourself. “I guess I’m jealous of your friendship, maybe? Like, you can go to his games and wear his jersey, and you can go out in bars with him and to nightclubs, and he can post you on his Instagram and it’s all – it’s all okay, because you’re friends. Because you can be friends. And if you were together, it would be . . . I don’t know, it’d be easy. No one would question it. He wouldn’t be in danger. I guess I was jealous of that. Maybe still am jealous of that, I don’t know.” He sighed, breaking eye contact to card a hand through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t even know if that makes sense.”

“It makes sense,” she said, very softly. 

“Did you know his mother?”

It was, maybe, a bit of an abrupt question, but she could trace the thought process Shane had just gone through quite well. If he was jealous of how long Svetlana had known Ilya – how long she’d had access – it made sense that the core of that, maybe, was about Irina. About the person Ilya had been before all the tragedy. “Not really,” she admitted. It was the truth, but it didn’t make it less painful. “I was a child. How well did you know your friends' parents, when you were a child?”

Shane gave a rueful little smile at that. “Yeah, I figured. I guess I just – I don’t know. There’s a stupid part of me, like a really childish part, that wishes I could have been there for him, then. Like it would have. . . I don’t know. Like it would have changed things. Even though I wasn’t exactly, like, an emotionally mature twelve year old.” He huffed a self deprecating laugh. “I probably would have just asked him if he ever met Federov instead of helping him.”

She laughed, because it was a pretty funny joke, but she also leaned forward to lay a gentle hand on Shane’s arm. She considered it a win that he wasn’t flinching when she touched him, anymore – that he’d grown to welcome it, over the course of the night. “Firstly, he has met Federov, but only as an adult – I, however, knew him as a child, thanks to my Papa.” Shane grinned at this, looking younger than he had all night. “Secondly,” she continued, “I think this is probably a very normal thing to feel about someone you love. That you wish you could be there for all the bad times. But I want you to know that you being here for Ilya now is just as important. You did not miss anything because you weren’t there and I was. I was also a child and I was also useless – all we can do is try to be there for him the best we know how now, yes?” Shane nodded. She paused, just briefly, and decided to lay her cards bare. “He spoke to you, then? About Irina? He told you?”

“Yes,” Shane said. He seemed a bit confused by the question. 

“He never speaks of her to me,” she admitted. It, maybe, hurt a little to say out loud. In the same way Shane had been jealous of her access to Ilya, perhaps now she was jealous back. Here was this person who had somehow managed to break down all the walls her best friend had put up over the years. Where had he succeeded where she failed? Was there something she could have said or done better to make Ilya open up to her? She knew the answer was no. She knew that what made Shane different was simply that he was Shane – that he was Ilya’s person. 

She hated romantic comedies. She did not believe in soulmates.

Maybe, just for once, in this instance, she really, really wanted to believe. 

“I did not know the truth of her accident for many years,” she continued. She had learned it in an awful way, too. Alexei and Ilya and their father had always kept shut about it, always saying the same thing – a terrible accident, she was confused, disoriented. She’d believed that, because she had been a child herself, and perhaps naive to the ways of the world, to the euphemisms adults used. It had been Sasha, drunk and being cruel – apparently slighted by Ilya in some way she’d never truly caught and that his and Ilya’s friendship had never truly recovered from – who had told her, weeks after Ilya had moved to Boston please, no one swallows a bottle of pills on accident. When she’d gone to her own mother to confirm, her mother had been shocked that Svetlana still believed the original story – darling, I’m sorry, I thought you knew. How dumb she had felt then, nineteen and suddenly aware that the person she considered her best friend hadn’t even trusted her enough to let this single, solitary secret spill. When she’d tried to ply the truth out of Ilya after, he had stiffened and then snapped at her – had told her there was nothing to talk about, and he was uninterested in talking further. 

And yet, he had told Shane. It had to be a good thing that he had told Shane. Even if she was a little bit jealous, it meant that Ilya wasn’t truly alone in the world – that there was someone he trusted to hold his baggage, someone he loved enough to let into the solid locked fortress of his heart. 

Shane looked dumbstruck by her admission. “He never – I thought–” he cut himself off, frowning down at his feet. 

“Shane,” she said, when it became obvious Hollander was too lost in his own head to speak again. “I am not telling this to make you feel bad. I only want you to know that you have nothing to be jealous of, okay? I do not care that Ilya has changed his door code. I will not miss the sex we used to have – which, by the way, we have not had in quite awhile, okay?” Shane flushed a little at her honesty, but she refused to let his embarrassment deter her. “Ilya loves you. It is so obvious to me. You are special to him. And I want–” she was suddenly flushing herself. She blamed the wine. “I would like you to be special to me, too. I would like for us to be friends, yes? Not just because you are very pretty and you know a lot about hockey, although both of those are of course very nice features–” Shane laughed, a little wetly, tears brimming in his eyes here – “but because you will be in Ilya’s life for a long time. You understand?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, softly. “Yeah. I’d like for us to be friends too. Because – for the same reasons. Because you matter to him.” He ran the back of his hand against his eye, harsh, the way a child would bat away an errant tear. 

“Okay,” she said, and squeezed his arm once before leaning to press a soft kiss into his cheek. “That is enough feelings talk for now, then. I have a reputation as an ice cold bitch to maintain, you know, I cannot have you ruin that for me, Hollander.”

Shane laughed more fully then. “You know,” he said, after a pause, “another thing I was jealous of was – well, I guess I just didn’t see how you could know Ilya so well and not be in love with him. Like he’s so . . he’s so impossible not to love, you know?”

She did. But also, in a way, she didn’t, and she never would. “I do love him, of course – he is my greatest and oldest friend. But it is. . . we are not two halves of a whole, I suppose. He gives me so much joy in my life, but he is not the last piece of the puzzle that completes me, or whatever stupid romcoms say. Besides,” she added, to bring a little levity back, “I simply could never marry someone who has athlete’s foot that often. It is fucking horrifying.”

Shane laughed heartily again, then, from his chest. It was a really lovely sound. “There’s a reason I’ve kept my socks on all night,” he said, almost conspiratorial. “I really can’t throw stones from glass houses, here.”

“Ugh, hockey players,” she cursed, and the two of them devolved into hysterics, which they were still in when Ilya swept back into the living room a moment later, glancing between them with suspicion.

“I have created a horrible monster, here,” Ilya said. “I should never have agreed to introduce you two.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up Ilya,” Svetlana said in Russian, and that made Shane laugh harder, and pretty soon they were all laughing, like stupid, giddy children.

— 

If she thought that things were going to dramatically change now that she knew the truth about Jane, she was wrong. In fact, from a day to day perspective, nearly everything remained as it had been – Ilya bugged off from bars and clubs more often, but the last few times they’d gone out before she knew the truth he’d been either glued to his phone or utterly morose, so she wasn’t exactly expecting his company there anyway. They continued to hang out one on one, and while a few years ago those evenings would have likely involved at least one round of sex, it had been, as she’d told Shane, a while since either of them had even attempted anything more intimate than a hug and a kiss on the cheek. 

The two biggest changes, overall, were Ilya’s attitude – he’d shaken off the sullen silences that he’d been prone to since the end of 2016 and was now smiling more, engaging again in conversation – and his honesty. He stopped putting his phone face down on the table around her and pretending he was just texting Marleau. It seemed to heal something in him, to be able to say oh, Shane told me a funny story instead of having to hide a smile behind his hand and pretend he’d just seen some sort of meme that was making him grin. 

Well, okay, there was a third change, too – she was texting Shane Hollander now. Like, just texts between the two of them. 

Ilya had made a group chat with all three of them (she had suggested “Ilya’s Girls” as a joke, but the boys had pointed out that Shane couldn’t have explained that group chat name to his team if they saw his phone – they went with the much more innocuous “Hockey Sluts,” which Shane had rolled his eyes at but reluctantly allowed). None of them used it a ton – Svetlana would send a hockey story she thought both of them would want to read to it, sometimes, and Ilya would send pictures of dogs he saw, or Shane would send a lightly bitchy observation about another team he knew would make both Svetlana and Ilya laugh, but that was about it. 

Sometimes, though, she’d just text Shane. Random thoughts about Montreal’s hockey, mostly – I miss your man Miity, Drapeau lacks his finesse, to which Shane had replied He’ll get there I think. If he stops being a dickhead at practice, at least. She texted him increasingly gross health food recipes she found, just to see the eyeroll emoji he inevitably sent back. She texted him about dates she went on, sometimes – stuff she never really texted Ilya about. Not because Ilya wouldn’t care, but because he tended to get a weird big brother instinct when it came to her love life and was rarely actually helpful when she wanted advice. 

Shane fucking Hollander, multi-time Cup winner and League MVP was saved in her phone as Jane with a hockey stick emoji and a blue heart, and Svetlana was texting him for girl talk. It was ridiculous, even she could admit that. But it was also nice. She wanted to be friends with him – distance made that tough, a bit, but she had plans.

The plans mostly involved inviting herself over to dinner at Ilya’s when Shane was in town.

She understood that this was, perhaps, a bit annoying of her, but she knew that Shane’s parents often swung by when Ilya was in Montreal, and she felt she’d earned the same right. Family rules – Shane now had to deal with her, sometimes.

Not that he ever objected. No, no – it was Ilya who was always rolling his eyes and complaining about time lost with his precious boyfriend. Shane was game to have her over for dinner and meet her for a drink, even if he rarely ever touched alcohol. It was her own best friend who was betraying her. 

She sort of understood it, though. Ilya had always been greedy.

No, wait. Greedy had too negative a connotation. It wasn’t greed, it was – something else.

Ilya had always wanted more, maybe. 

For the first ten years of Svetlana’s life, she had lived the hockey season out in Boston and spent summers in Moscow. Those summers were her first memories of Ilya, the boy with golden hair who lived next door. They were young enough, then, to be unburdened by gender – to play as equals, climbing trees and building pillow forts and having fake swordfights. She had liked him immediately, the way he stuck his jaw out and pouted petulantly when she refused to let him have his way, the way he would listen to what she wanted to do and fight her on it if he thought she was wrong. She liked that he seemed to be free all day, every day in the summer – that no one ever expected him to be anywhere else, so he could always run around and play with her when she wanted, like a toy that never lost battery. 

It wasn’t until her father retired and they moved to Moscow full time that she began to understand the real limits of Ilya’s home life. What she had seen as freedom – a full day with no nagging mother to check on you and insist you do a chore – had, in its own way, been a prison. Ilya’s father, consumed with his work, uncaring of what his son got up to by himself; Ilya’s mother, often unable to leave the house or her own bed, struck down by a vague illness that Svetlana had never been aware enough to see was of the mind and not the body. 

At first Alexei hadn’t been so bad – older enough than Ilya that he was obviously uninterested in their childish games, but willing to take them places, to the park or the movies, as part of the usual routine of being a big brother. Yes he complained, but he still did it. Svetlana, who had no siblings of her own, had assumed this was simply the social contract of the relationship. You bitched and you moaned and you called each other brat and asshole and baby and jerk, and then you sucked it up and you hung out together anyway. It maybe hadn’t been ideal, but it hadn't been bad with Alexei, not at first.

When Ilya turned out to be very, very good at hockey? That’s when it got bad. Alexei had never been much for smiling, but his face went truly sour then, and he was no longer willing to entertain them at all. 

Ilya’s father had become more present, though. It was like he realized Ilya had something to offer now, something to invest in, and that investment made him worth the time the way a simple, normal child wouldn’t have been. Svetlana’s parents weren’t perfect – her mother was quick to anger, and probably drank too much, and her father was often stoic and silent, retreating into his study to be alone after dinner – but they did love her. They viewed her as worthy of their affection, even before she’d proven some actual material worth. Gregori Rozanov wasn’t like that. He viewed Alexei with the stern-eyed expectations of an eldest son, trained from birth to follow in his father’s footsteps – to become police, to carry on the good Rozanov name. When Ilya turned out to be a hockey prodigy, that attention shifted. Alexei fell out of the sunlight of his father’s attention – only ever attention, never affection – and Ilya entered the spotlight more fully. 

As a child, she’d been stupid. Too stupid to see, to understand. Too stupid to know what it meant that Irina Rozanova spent most of her days bedbound in a dirty nightgown; too stupid to know that it was not normal, the way Gregori pushed Ilya to be the best. She only realized as an adult, when she looked at children the age they had been and saw for the first time how young they were. Who could do that, to a child? Who could demand hours of practice a day from him, skating drills until he puked, withholding dinner until he perfected the shot? Who could force him to drop out of school, and then in the same sentence chastise him for being stupid, blame the child for his own lack of education?

At least Irina, sad as she was, loved Ilya. Love Alexei too, probably, although he was never home when Svetlana went to the Rozanov house those days, always out somewhere, doing something – probably drugs. Irina had been kind to her, kind to Ilya; had, sometimes, made them snacks and cakes, when she was up to it, or read them books and did funny voices if she lacked the energy to stand.

It was worse, after Irina died. Svetlana stopped going to the Rozanov house, upset by the thick silence that laid over the place. When she saw Ilya it was at her own house, or out. When he introduced her to Sasha, his new friend from the team (which, like, sort of, she supposed) the three of them immediately joined at the hip, the Three Musketeers of the Moscow teenage club scene. Sasha had his own demons – was still, in many ways, fighting them, sleeping with married men in Moscow on his trips back even as it got riskier and riskier, even as she begged him to stay in Paris and not bother with returning home – and between the two of them and Svetlana’s own voracious appetite for a good time, they got into drinking, and dancing, and doing drugs, from time to time. Nothing all that crazy – the same devil-may-care party kid rebellion teenagers all over the world did, really. But it had tasted like freedom, to her, fun and exciting. It had made her feel like an adult. 

She thought, looking back, that it hadn’t quite been that, for Ilya. That the people he started sleeping with – her, even, and Sasha, too – that the drugs and the drinking hadn’t been some rebellious streak, some fuck you to the demands of his father. That they’d been, instead, a blanket he covered his shoulders with, a protection from the bitter cold of his family life. 

If you look like you are always having fun, no one ever bothers to wonder if maybe you’re really very sad, deep inside. 

What was that? It wasn’t greed. It was more like – like his whole life, Ilya had been searching for a place he belonged. For a room in a house that was warm and filled with love, where he wouldn’t be judged, or expected of, or found wanting, the way he’d been at his childhood home. And he’d found that, with Shane. And she was so happy for him, really, she was, but she could see him wanting to retreat into that room permanently. To build the pillow forts of their childhood and lock Shane away in one, so he could have him forever.

It would be different, she thought, if they could be public about it. If they could steal more than a few hours together every couple of months. If they could go out to dinner and hold hands in public. Ilya was so bursting with love for Shane, so incapable of hiding it, and the only place he could have it was a room where no one else was. Shane’s parents knew, and Svetlana knew, but every moment they ceded to dinner with the Hollanders or drinks with her was another moment where the two of them could not simply be together, the way they never were allowed. 

Not greed. Something else. Hard to name, but she did understand it. 

And it wasn’t like Shane didn’t love Ilya the same way – that same obvious hunger. When they were together they were touching almost constantly. Not even in a sexy way – although they were, of course, both very, very sexy, and that neither of them would ever share the other with her was maybe a bit disappointing, she could admit – but just reassuring. A hand on a shoulder as Shane passed behind Ilya, fingers grazing as Ilya handed Shane a beer, hips checking together as they stood next to each other at the stove and cooked. If she thought for even a minute that Shane was not as obsessed with Ilya as he was with Shane, she would have thrown a fit. It wasn’t that Shane didn’t want to be alone in the room with Ilya. It was just that Shane was so fucking Canadian. He’d grown up on those stupid romcoms and teen dramas. (She hated the romcoms still, but she had some fondness for the teen dramas. She’d once gotten very sick with the flu and watched three and a half seasons of Degrassi in about six days. The episode where Manny got an abortion was still, in her mind, essentially perfect TV.) Shane was the type of guy who thought that now that you were in a serious relationship, you did the serious relationship things. You met each other’s parents, for instance, and had polite dinners. Hence: the Hollanders, driving from Ottawa every few weekends.

Hence: Svetlana, the closest thing Ilya had to family now, outside of Shane, invited to Ilya’s apartment in Boston the day after a game despite Ilya’s groaning protests that she is not even that interesting, Hollander, which she could hear through the speaker on Shane’s phone. 

“Don’t be a fucking asshole, Ilya,” she snapped in Russian.

Ilya just groaned again. 

Truthfully, she didn’t really care what Ilya wanted. She wanted to be Shane’s friend. And she knew it was a good plan – that Ilya would eventually be thankful that she had intruded so much on their quiet time together when they were more settled into their relationship, and he wasn’t quite so obsessed with making the most of every single second with his boyfriend. Right now the two of them were in the honeymoon stage, still, so it made sense for them to be so clingy, but eventually they’d emerge back into the real world and be glad they hadn’t accidentally cut off every single person they knew in the name of their relationship.

That said, she also knew that stage would last longer because of their distance. She wondered, sometimes, how they planned to do that – to keep that distance for so long.

She learned at dinner, that night. It was right before the holiday break – Boston had won, in the end, in overtime, but both teams were having good seasons, and hockey commentators couldn’t get enough of how both Shane and Ilya seemed to be better than ever. 

Did love make you better at hockey? Might be a worthwhile study to fund. 

The two of them were telling her about their holiday plans. Ilya was going to Ottawa to have dinner with the Hollanders for the handful of days they got off. (She was, privately, grateful that the MLH Player’s Association had never budged on allowing Christmas games. Sometimes, when she saw the American football players on TV, playing on the holidays, she just felt kind of depressed.) Montreal was playing in the Winter Classic on New Years Eve, however, and Boston had a home game two days later, so it wasn’t exactly a long, relaxing vacation. Still, she could hear the giddiness in Ilya’s voice as he told her about it – a holiday spent with his boyfriend and his parents – and she even thought that the smile he gave her when Shane invited her to come too was genuine, like he did actually want her to be there. Sad, though, because–

“Ugh, I have to work this year,” she groused. “I am, how do you say it? на побегушках?”

Shane’s brow wrinkled. It was very, very cute. “Duolingo hasn’t taught me that one yet,” he admitted.

“Ah, like – a flunky? Low man on the totem poll,” Ilya offered. 

“Is that racist?” Shane asked, tilting his head to the side.

“Only when Ilya says it,” Svetlana decided. He groaned, but Shane leaned across the table to high five her, so: win. 

“I hate you both,” Ilya muttered, but it was undercut by the way he had his hand on the back of Shane’s neck, proprietary. She rolled her eyes. 

"It sucks that you have to play on New Year's Eve," Svetlana said to Shane.

Shane shrugged. "It's a bit annoying, but I always find the Winter Classic fun. And too many days under the same roof as my parents causes me to regress to being fourteen years old again, which isn't fun for any of us, so maybe it's for the best." He turned to Ilya. “You should stay in Ottawa a few extra days though,” Shane said. “Could be a good chance to scope out some neighborhoods, see some houses.”

Across the table, Ilya blanched. 

“Houses?” Svetlana asked. She felt like she’d missed a step in the conversation somewhere. Why the fuck would Ilya care about Ottawa real estate? 

Shane turned to her, brow creased in confusion. “Well, yeah – I mean, I guess the team might put him up in an apartment at first, but–” he cut himself off as he looked at Svetlana’s face, her obvious confusion, before suddenly turning to Ilya. “You didn’t tell her?”

Ilya looked like he was wishing the floor would open up and swallow him whole. “I–”

“Tell me what?” Svetlana demanded. She knew, realistically, that there would be things she’d be on the outside of here, given Shane and Ilya were now a joint unit, but she didn’t like the feeling. She certainly didn’t like the idea that she was being lied to, which was maybe what was happening here. 

Ilya looked placatingly at Shane, but Shane looked as angry as Svetlana had ever seen him, face red in indignation. Ilya sighed heavily and turned to Sveta. “I am. . . I am not re-signing with Boston. On July 1st, when I become a free agent, I am going to have my agent – Shane and my agent–” he cut himself off with a harsh exhale. “I am going to Ottawa. To play for the Centaurs.”

For two long beats the room was dead silent. 

Then:

“The fucking Centaurs?” She had, without thinking, lapsed into Russian, but she really couldn’t be bothered – so what if Shane couldn’t understand, this language was more natural to her anyway. “Tell me you are kidding Ilya. Tell me you don’t – they are the worst team in the fucking league!”

“I will make them better,” Ilya said, also in Russian. She could see his fingers flex, squeezing Shane’s neck in reassurance, but strangely that just pissed her off more.

“He has asked this of you? He has asked you to move?”

Abruptly, she hated Shane. She couldn’t help it. She was like her mother – quick to anger. How could he demand this of Ilya? Demand Ilya give up Boston, give up her, in the name of a relationship that they weren’t even sure would last?

Even as she thought it, though, she felt herself deflating. Because this would last. She knew that. She was just – taken by surprise, that was all. Shane wouldn’t have demanded this of Ilya. Suggested, maybe, but not demanded. He would have taken no for an answer. This was just – they were trying to be closer together. They were trying to make this work for real. She felt like an asshole. She’d over reacted. 

“I’m sorry,” she said in English. “I–”

But Shane was already standing up, pulling himself away from Ilya’s embrace. “I can’t believe – why didn’t you tell her? So, what? So you could still back out? Change your mind?” He paused, just slightly. “Do you not want to go?” She could see the tears in his eyes. He was holding himself defensively – like he could stop the blow of hurt if only he prepared for it, the way he might prepare for a check against the boards.

“No,” Ilya said, standing too, hands out like he was trying to calm a stray dog. “No, Shane, that’s not – I am not backing out. I promise, I want to go, I just. . .” He trailed off, at a loss for words. He looked to her pleadingly, but she couldn’t help him here. She had no idea why he didn’t tell her.

Shane took his silence to mean something. She watched him square his shoulders, tighten his jaw. “Okay. I need – I need a minute.”

“Shane,” Ilya said, almost begging. 

“Just a minute. By myself. Okay? You two . . . I don’t know, have another glass of wine.” He was already turning and heading for Ilya’s bedroom at the end of the second sentence, eyes glassy with unshed tears.

She looked at Ilya. Ilya was looking at the space Shane had just left, despondent. 

“Fuck,” he said. Then, louder, “fuck!” He pinched his brow. “I need a fucking cigarette.” Without another word he stormed off, snagging a hoodie off the back of a couch and slinking out his back door to the yard.

Alone in Ilya’s dining room, she let the silence wash over her. Now that she had calmed down and was capable of rational thought again, she could admit that the plan – Ilya’s transfer to the Centaurs – made sense. Ottawa was only a two hour drive from Montreal, as opposed to the nearly five hour drive (or shorter but more logistically annoying plane ride) separating them now. The Centaurs were desperate for talent and would likely pay Ilya more money than he’d know what to do with. And Boston – well. Ilya had liked Boston, she knew that, but he hadn’t loved it, not the way she did. 

For her, Boston had always been home. She’d been born here, after all, had grown up here, for a while anyway. When she moved back as an adult it had felt like a homecoming – had settled something in her bones. She did not really feel like an American, even though she knew she was one, at least on paper. Her accent always set her out as other, even if she told people she’d been raised in Boston. But not feeling like an American had never stopped her from feeling like a Bostonian. She loved Boston the same way she loved Moscow – the way anyone loved home.

Ilya, she knew, did not love Moscow that way. Or maybe just couldn’t love Moscow that way, not anymore, even if he had, once, when his mother was still alive. And he’d never loved Boston that way. He liked it – he liked the Raiders and he liked his house; he liked the fans and he liked his teammates. But outside of work, he had never truly built a life here. This was just a place where he worked. Shane was his home. And Ottawa was much closer to Shane than Boston ever would be. 

What had shocked her, really, was the hockey. That he was giving up a shot at the Cup to languish on a terrible team, while his boyfriend got to keep the glory of the Metros and their legacy. But she knew that wasn’t fair. There was a reason it was this way. Many reasons, really – there were contracts that came up at different times, for one. There were Shane’s parents, tucked up in Canada. There was a passport to consider – did Ilya want to be an American? Unlikely, considering he could have been one already if he really wanted it. There was a life to be lived, someday, years from now, when neither of them played hockey anymore. It made sense for that life to be in Canada. 

It had hurt her feelings in the irrational way things hurt her as a child – the way she’d been hurt when she learned Sasha and Ilya had slept together, jealous even though she hadn’t ever really wanted him that way, as more than something casual, more than a friend she fucked from time to time. She was jealous because she had been an option, and he had picked someone else – and even if she didn’t really want to be picked, it still hurt, sometimes, not to be. He had picked Shane. He had picked Canada. Those were the right things to pick, obviously. But that kneejerk hurt – she hadn’t been able to stop it.

And, okay. She was still a little pissed he’d lied, yeah. 

She truly didn’t know what to do. She was aware she had fucked it up – that her overreaction had toppled a very unstable dominio and caused a chain reaction. She hadn’t meant to do it, but she felt sick. Like she’d screwed this up for Ilya – his shot at happiness, crushed in her clumsy hands.

After a moment she stood up, snagged her jacket from the front hall, and followed her best friend outside. 

Ilya was leaning against his house, the cigarette in his mouth still unlit. 

“I am sorry,” she said in Russian, closing the door softly behind her. “You just took me by surprise. I overreacted.”

Ilya looked at her from the corner of his eye and let out an annoyed sounding laugh. “You think?” He chewed on the cigarette for a beat, and then sighed, took it out of his mouth, and handed it to her instead. “Shane hates the smell,” he said, by way of explanation. “Fuck, he is so mad at me.”

“He’ll forgive you,” she said, because he very plainly would. He just needed a minute, really. 

“He keeps,” Ilya started, then stopped and sighed. “He keeps saying I don’t have to go. That I can resign with Boston and he would understand. It was his idea, the plan – going to Ottawa, stopping the rivalry, being able to be seen together in public. And it is a good plan, but I think he feels . . . I don’t know. Guilty, that it is me moving, and not him, maybe?”

“His contract is not up yet,” Svetlana pointed out – something she herself had just thought in the living room. “If it was, things would maybe be different.”

“Maybe,” Ilya allowed. “Or not. Shane’s connection to the Metros is different from mine and the Raiders. It’s hard to explain. Besides, hockey is Shane’s life. I am okay coming second.”

She scoffed. “Since when?” As if Ilya had ever in his life settled for second place. That he hadn't was the entire basis of his relationship, she was fairly sure. Besides, in this case, he was wrong. “And I really do not think he loves hockey more than you, Ilya. You are first in his heart.” It was hard to imagine Shane Hollander not on the ice, but she thought he’d give it up, if he had to, for Ilya. There was no real way to be certain, but it was something in her gut. People didn’t come together like this just to abandon one another for a career. 

“No, you’re right. I’m being,” he paused here and waved a hand around his head to convey the mood physically. “Just. . . I think maybe he is scared that I am going to move to Ottawa and hate it and resent him. But this year – it has been so hard, Svetlana. Easy, because I love him, and I can love him openly now. Easy because I can text him and call him every day and not be worried I am coming off like an insane person. I can send him pictures of dogs I see on walks and stupid things Marly says and not just,” he let out a harsh breath, mostly through his teeth, “hotel room numbers and fucking pick up lines. But harder because we are so far away.” He turned to look at her, very earnest. “This summer felt like I dreamed it. Like it wasn’t real. It was so good. Waking up with him and having coffee with him. Just being together. Without all of this. . .” he waved his hand again. “All of this fucking bullshit.”

This fucking bullshit is your life, Ilya, she thought, but it didn’t feel particularly helpful to say. Besides, she knew how he would counter. He is my life, now. 

“Will you be happy in Ottawa?” she asked.

The edges of his lips tugged up a bit, almost a smile. “I will be very bored, probably. But it is a good thing – turns out I like boring.”

The boring in question, in fact, made himself known. Shane opened the back door and stuck his head out, frowning at the two of them as he did so. Svetlana noticed the way Ilya lit up at the sight of him – like he was worried Shane would retreat for the rest of the night, too angry to come back and finish dinner with them, and was deeply relieved by Shane’s return. “Jesus, it’s fucking cold as hell out here,” Shane said. “Are you two smoking? Get back inside before you freeze to death.”

“I didn’t smoke,” Ilya said, holding his hands up and following his boyfriend's commands immediately. 

Svetlana held the unlit cigarette up as evidence. “Neither of us did. Just held it in our mouths, you know? A metaphor.” Shane looked utterly lost. She laughed, deeply fond. “Oh my god, Hollander, you have got to see that movie. You will cry for days, it’s amazing.” 

She followed the two of them inside. Ilya kept his hoodie on, but she deposited her coat on the back of a chair. Ilya moved to Shane immediately, hands on hips, drawing him close and muttering something she couldn’t hear.

“I’m fine,” Shane said. “I’m sorry I – I just–” he cut himself off with a frustrated sigh, like he, too, lacked the words. After a pause, he spoke again. “Why didn’t you tell her? If it’s not nerves, or wanting to back out, I just . . . I don’t understand.”

She thought maybe she did, but she let Ilya speak for himself – learning how to communicate this stuff was probably a pretty pivotal building block in a relationship, after all. 

She realized that so much of her and Ilya’s relationship was unspoken. Her making assumptions about his motivations and reasoning; him letting her. Even with Jane, she had let him obfuscate for so long – had only admitted she knew it was a he so he would feel safe. How long would Ilya have gone simply not telling her, had she not forced his hand? Would she have even met Shane, before their retirement? 

Maybe she should have been better at forcing him to talk. At not allowing him to retreat into his moods and silences. But it had been so long that their relationship had worked like this. She had no idea how to change it now. 

Despite the fact that Shane had asked the question, Ilya directed his answer to her. “You love Boston,” he said, like it was the obvious answer. “This is your home. The Raiders are your team. You were so happy when I signed here, so excited to have a friend, an excuse to move back. . .” he shrugged, loosely. “I didn’t want to disappoint you. I knew you would be disappointed. For your Raiders. And. . . and for me to play for a bad team.”

She thought about what Gregori Rozanov would have said about Ilya signing up for the Ottawa Centaurs. When Boston had signed him, they’d been crap – you don’t get first draft pick unless you’re crap, after all. But they were a shit team with a storied history. As much as Gregori had preferred the KLH, he knew that Boston had prestige – that Ilya putting in his years with a team like the Raiders was good for his image, and his career. There were always things to be disappointed with Ilya about, for Gregori – the failed Olympics, and the missed playoffs. But he’d never truly suggested Boston was a bad place to go. It was as good a place as any; there were other ways he could decide Ilya hadn’t measured up.

The Centaurs, though? They were a bad team with no history – an expansion franchise in a boring Canadian government town with a stupid logo and nothing to show for themselves. If anyone could make them winners, it was Ilya. But this was very plainly the type of decision Ilya would never have let himself make while his father was alive. If Gregori was alive, that knowledge of his disappointment would have forced Ilya to swallow down whatever his desires were and stick it out with Boston, out of the sheer pointless hope that one day it’d be enough.

God. If Gregori hadn’t died, would Ilya and Shane even be together at all? Or would this be another happiness Ilya denied himself, in the name of pleasing a man who could not be pleased?

She felt vaguely sick that even for a minute he felt the same about her – that her disappointment in him would outweigh her desire for him to be happy. “Ilya,” she said, very gently. She moved across the room to place a hand on his arm – his hands were still holding onto Shane, and she was aware they probably made a very strange, touchy tableau. “You are my best friend. I want you to be happy more than I want the Raiders to win another Cup. You know that, yes?”

She needed him to know it. Needed him to know that he could retire tomorrow and she would still love him and be proud of him, hockey, and Boston, and the Raiders be damned.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “I know. I just. . . I don’t know. My head. . .” he frowned. “Sometimes it tells me things that are not true.” He turned to Shane, leaning forward to press a kiss to his forward. “I am sorry I ruined dinner.”

“You didn’t ruin anything,” Shane said, firmly. “It was just – a miscommunication, or whatever. It happens. We’re all figuring this out, right?” He shot Svetlana a grateful little smile – like thank you for accepting this.

“I suppose,” she said, with a dramatic sigh, “that I will have to find a hotel I like in Ottawa, if I am going to be visiting you.”

Ilya grinned at her, wide and boyish. “Oh, no, Svetlana. You are standing in front of the premiere expert in Canadian real estate. Shane Hollander would not let me buy a house without enough guest rooms to accommodate you, his parents, and possibly half of the Boston Raiders roster.”

“Guest rooms are practical,” Shane shot back. “And you are a millionaire, you should live somewhere nice!” 

The two of them devolved into bickering, after that, playful and easy. Ilya poured her another glass of wine, and they migrated to the couch in the living room, the conversation flowing like they’d never been interrupted at all.

Svetlana sat there and basked in her friend's happiness, and tried very very hard not to think about how much she’d miss him when he was gone.

— 

If you were to ask Svetlana later about how Ilya’s first two seasons in Ottawa went, she’d probably say normal. Which was, she could admit, vague. What was normal? It was different for everyone, she supposed, which made it the truth even when it sometimes felt like it wasn’t totally a comprehensive truth. 

For instance: what was normal for Svetlana was that she went to bars and clubs and had sex and partied and went to work and did her job very well, and in this way she occupied most of those years the same as she always had. She flew back to Moscow in the summer for a few weeks, as was also normal. She’d arranged to bring gifts for Ilya’s niece each time she went back – things he mailed her from Canada, and things he asked her to pick up but that he paid for – but eventually Alexei had stopped showing up to those rendezvous, and she’d dealt instead with his flighty, ditzy wife. Flighty and ditzy were better than Alexei’s penchant for being either a fucking asshole, drugged out of his mind, or both, but she didn’t love the meetings.

Alexei had come to those meetings primarily to grill her about Ilya. At their first meeting, the summer of 2017, it seemed Alexei was still convinced his brother was bluffing – that Ilya’s harsh words to him at the funeral were merely a blip, and his refusal to come back to Moscow was simply stubbornness, both of which would eventually be worn down by time, like waves eroding a cliff. Svetlana knew better, but she also knew it would be impossible to convince Alexei that she knew better. He still viewed her as some slut who clung to Ilya, likely to take his money (ironic, considering which of the two of them had the more frequent penchant of demanding cash from Ilya). She never felt like explaining that men and women were capable of being friends, or that her father still probably had more money than Ilya had, and anyway she made her own money, so she had no need of Ilya’s, and in fact liked him for other reasons entirely. Alexei would think what he would think, and it didn’t really matter to her one way or another if his estimation of her was high. Her estimation of him was rock bottom, after all.

Still, eventually Alexei got the hint. 

The first summer – when she knew Ilya was at the cottage, but not with who; when she knew Ilya wanted it to be serious, but was not yet entirely sure it would be – she’d mostly evaded Alexei’s questioning with stony silence and shrugs. The second summer – after she’d met Shane, yes, but more pivotally after Ilya’s move to Ottawa had been announced and the hockey world had exploded with the news – Alexei had, finally, seemed to understand that Ilya had, perhaps, meant what he’d said about never seeing his brother again.

“What the fuck is he thinking,” Alexei had demanded. Like he cared about hockey, or MLH, or Boston at all – he only cared about Ilya’s payday, really, which meant he should have been pleased, considering what a good number it was. 

(He was, officially, the highest paid man in MLH, which had of course led to numerous articles about what that meant for the Hollander/Rozanov rivalry, and particularly what it might mean for the Metros’ salary cap once Shane’s own contract came up in 2021.)

But she knew what Alexei was really asking – what is his plan? Is he truly never coming back to Russia?

“He is getting Canadian citizenship, I think,” she said, coolly. Like she didn’t know and didn’t particularly care. 

Alexei had scoffed. “Abandoning his family. For fucking what? Canada.”

She’d never fully decided if she thought Alexei knew about Ilya’s bisexuality. He dropped gay slurs constantly, but with the air of casualness that bigots around his age tended to have. They didn’t feel pointed, exactly, not accusatory – not I know who you are and what you do and who you do it with. Instead, they were more used to emphasize his particular strand of dislike for Ilya. They were used because he knew Ilya flinched at them, even if he maybe didn’t know why. 

For years, she figured Alexei didn’t know, only because he’d never found a way to use that information to his advantage. But, then again, Ilya had never needed to be blackmailed. For all Alexei and Gregori claimed Ilya had abandoned his family, he’d bankrolled them for years without much pressure at all. Alexei wouldn’t have needed to threaten Ilya with revealing a dark secret to get a payday; he’d just have to call four or five times in a row, toss out a few bitchy, pointed sentences, and Ilya would fold, beholden to his own bullshit ideas of what it meant to provide and who deserved his loyalty. 

That summer, looking at Alexei while he looked at his daughter, swinging happily on a swingset with another child, she wondered if Alexei did know. If, when he said for Canada, he was thinking something else, thinking that there was perhaps some other reason for Ilya’s big move. She wondered if he, like Svetlana, had noticed Ilya’s increasing dedication to looking at his phone, the way his smiles got softer sometimes when he did so, private little things he obviously meant for no one else to see. She wondered if he understood that Ilya had sacrificed his old family – family by blood only – for a new one, one that was filled with unconditional love and would demand nothing of him. 

She couldn’t be sure. And she supposed it didn’t matter; whatever that conversation had meant to Alexei, at the very least it seemed to solidify to him that Ilya was serious about never returning to Moscow. The next year, she met with his wife, instead, and she didn’t ask any questions about Ilya at all. 

So that was normal, now, for Svetlana.

Normal for Shane Hollander and the Montreal Metros meant another Cup win – Shane’s third, making him officially the most decorated active Captain in MLH, and making him and several other Metros the most decorated active players in the league. (“Hollander has officially won the rivalry,” an article on SportsNet declared. Many agreed – between the Metros third win and the Centaurs’ continued losing streak, it seemed that people had decided Hollander had officially come out on top. If only they knew.)

She saw Shane with something approaching regularity now – for two years, after she came back from Moscow, she found herself in Canada for at least a handful of days, at Shane and Ilya’s cottage, spending time with the two of them and the Hollander parents, who accepted her readily and with no questions about her intentions, or her past relationship with Ilya. 

She’d been expecting that, maybe. While she doubted either Shane or Ilya had openly told Yuna and David that she and Ilya had slept together casually throughout their friendship, she knew that information was findable. There were photos in tabloids of her and Ilya together at clubs making out, after all. She’d been called his on-again-off-again girlfriend by TMZ more than once. It would make sense for the parents of his boyfriend to wonder why she was still in his life, but Yuna and David didn’t question it at all. Either they never looked the information up themselves, perhaps because they had firsthand understanding of the bullshit that was published by those types of gossip blogs, or they just didn’t care. As far as they were concerned, she was Ilya’s family, and Ilya was their family now, so it was all one big joint package. She was invited to Christmas, again, although she usually demurred the invite – work needed somebody on, and she never particularly cared about Christmas, so she didn’t mind it being her. But the invite was nice. The genuine smiles on Yuna, David, and Shane’s faces when they saw her was nice. 

The groupchat Shane put her in called Hockey Experts, which featured the Hollanders, Ilya, and her? Very nice. Yuna knew a lot about hockey, and Svetlana suspected that the two of them could probably put half the analysts in the league to shame if given the chance. 

Normal for the Boston Raiders was an admittedly tricky initial rebuild season where they struggled mightily to fill the gap Ilya had left in their roster. They had made playoffs his last season – there’d been a moment where she really, truly thought Ilya would lift the Cup again, one last time with Boston – but ultimately they fell out just before the finals to the Presidents, in a brutal Game 7 where Ilya was clearly playing on a wonky ankle. That playoff run meant they didn’t have a great draft pull, so they were hobbling together a new dynamic from guys in their AHL affiliate, prospect pool, and whoever they could get from other teams. By Ilya’s second season in Ottawa, though, they’d essentially rebounded. Their new star center was, in Svetlana’s opinion, much less of a star than Ilya, both in personality and hockey skill, but they’d made up for it with some savvy trades that gave them more well-rounded backlines, and were back in essentially fighting shape. They weren’t likely to win a Cup anytime soon, but it certainly wasn’t an all-out disaster, and they seemed likely to be back in playoff contention before long. 

Normal for the Ottawa Centaurs had always been losing. Some expansion franchises got lucky with particularly smart GM’s, or by poaching coaches with a lot of loyalty, who players wanted to work with. Some simply had the joy of being in places where people wanted to live – America tended to fend better than Canada here, especially as the US built up its youth hockey system. Cities like Las Vegas, Seattle, and Los Angeles had more appeal than Winnipeg or Calgary did, at least to young men who wanted to party as much as humanly possible on their newfound multi-million dollar salaries. Ottawa was not bad by any stretch, she thought – the handful of times she’d visited it had been perfectly lovely – but it was, as Ilya liked to say, boring. For that reason, the team had always been slightly shit out of luck when it came to getting good, fresh blood that would actually give them a shot at contention. They’d also, for years, languished under shitty owners, who cared less about the hockey team they owned than simply owning one – a rich person brag, like a nice wine cellar, without any of the care put in. The GM wasn’t bad – there were good guys on the Centaurs roster, she thought, who could be someone with a little pressure, the right coaching, smarter trainers. Boodram had a lot of potential, in particular, but no one seemed too interested in actually nurturing that potential, which pissed her off to no end. As it stood now, he was the type of player who’d do his time with the team who drafted him and then flit off to a better team to play on a deep line and hopefully find some glory, if Ottawa wasn’t smart enough to find some way to keep him around. 

Frankly put, the things Ottawa needed to win hadn’t materialized yet. They’d finally spent their money on a star center, but their coach was old and clearly disillusioned, more waiting out his contract for retirement than anything. The fans showed up, because it was hockey in Canada, but none of them really seemed to believe the team had a shot. She wanted to believe that someone in the system – the same person who was smart enough to leap at Ilya when given the chance, maybe – was aware of what they needed and working towards it. But until they put all the pieces together, the Ottawa Centaurs remained at their normal and continued to lose.

Which meant that Ilya’s normal was now losing. Which was, of course, not normal at all. 

In some ways, Boston had been different after Ilya had left, but if she was being truly honest in a lot of ways it was the same. Ilya leaving didn’t affect her job whatsoever, for instance. And sometimes on free nights she’d wish he was around so she could go to his apartment and bug him into watching a game with her, but their schedules had never perfectly aligned to begin with – there’d always been nights when she wanted to hang out with him and he was busy or out of town for work. The biggest difference had been the Boston hockey fans, who’d turned on him with a rabid ferocity that, while expected, still hurt her a bit to see. A radio DJ hosted a jersey swap, and threw tons of Rozanov 81 Raiders gear into the dumpster out of spite. As Ottawa continued to lose, despite Ilya’s best efforts, the hockey commentators grew louder and louder in their wondering – what had he been thinking? 

“Sure,” some asshole, probably named Mike, said on ESPN one night, “he’s getting more money in Ottawa, fine. But is money everything? Does Rozanov really have no sense of loyalty?”

Svetlana wanted to call in and swear at him. Ilya had loyalty – he had more loyalty than anyone she’d ever met, had spent years remaining loyal to a family who couldn’t bother to pay him the same courtesy. He’d just found something bigger than Boston to have loyalty too, that was all. 

But no one could know that, of course. That information was kept to a very tiny list – Ilya and Shane, herself and Shane’s parents, and Hayden Pike, who’d apparently pieced it together all by himself and had been let into the circle of trust because Shane couldn’t lie to the guy. 

(His wife was also in the circle of trust, by nature, but Ilya hadn’t seemed worried about that. “Jackie is much smarter than her husband,” he’d said dismissively. “I’d trust her to keep a secret more than him.”)

So, yes: ultimately things were normal. Or they settled into a new normal, anyway. Instead of catching up with Ilya as they pregamed a club in Boston, she Facetimed him every other month or so. Instead of seeing him in Moscow, she went alone, now. 

And that was fine. Doing things alone. Really.

It would just be more fine if she could say with 100% certainty that Ilya was fine. 

His last season in Boston had been rough, she knew that. The distance between him and Shane had been agonizing; after she learned their secret, Ilya was more open with her about missing Shane. She understood it – before, what had been agonizing was the not knowing, the lingering in-between space they found themselves in. Does he want me like I want him? Does he want me at all? She knew this was better than that – Ilya at the end of 2016 had been the darkest version of him she’d seen since his mother had died, and most of that had sloughed off – but she could imagine the separate but new agony of being aware that your feelings were mutual but being unable to simply be together. 

A few years ago, when she was still new at her job, she’d befriended a coworker – a cheerful woman named Melody who was probably ten or so years older than her. Melody had, at the time, been the only other woman on the team with even a passing interest in sports, although she preferred baseball and basketball to hockey. She’d organized a team outing to a WNBA game and had walked Svetlana through a brewing relationship drama that was happening between the teams – two of the women, one on Boston’s team and one on the other team, had used to date, but had apparently broken up so the Boston player could date a teammate. It was lightly scandalous, but in a fun way – no one actually wondered if the basketball would suffer, or if someone would throw a game or do something dirty. “It just adds stakes, you know?” Melody had said.

Svetlana thought about that a lot. If men’s sports were less homophobic – more like women’s sports, where many of the players were queer in one way or another and dating each other was, well not common, certainly not unseen – maybe things would be different for Shane and Ilya. Maybe Ilya could have stuck around Boston, with the knowledge that it would be easier to be seen getting on a plane, crossing the border – that it wouldn’t raise questions. That he could talk openly about Shane to his team, to the press. Could answer questions about Hollander with a wink and a cheeky isn’t my boyfriend a great player? Almost as good as me. 

Instead, he’d spent that last season in Boston shrugging robotically when asked about Hollander, answering as he always did – like he didn’t care about Shane beyond their rivalry; like their rivalry was massive as ever. She knew that took something out of him. She knew that part of Ottawa was about the distance, of course, making sure they were closer together, and about getting Ilya into Canada for citizenship, but that another part of it was about burying this idea that he and Shane needed to have public animosity. It would be easier for them if being seen together in public would not cause some bizarre international hockey incident – if, instead, it would be boring news, the same way it was when guys went to each other’s weddings or bars or whatever. 

So she had expected Ilya’s mood to improve in Ottawa, one way or another. And for the first two years it mostly had. When they spoke he was often glowing – either just returning from or just about to leave for a visit with Shane. The two of them saw each other more often. The announcement of their foundation had been met with great praise from both inside and outside of the hockey world, and she knew they both felt like they were making real change. She knew how much it mattered to Ilya, that his mother’s name would live on forever, now, through this legacy. 

But by the time the 2020 hockey season kicked off, something had shifted with Ilya. It was impossible for her to pinpoint what, exactly, it was. On paper his behavior was basically the same – he was still texting her and Facetiming her, still playing hockey as well as he always had. There was nothing to point to as some sort of overwhelming evidence for her theory, some obvious tell that something was wrong. It was just a hunch she had, really. Her years of experience at dealing with Ilya Rozanov meant she could read his moods fairly well, and the mood he was in now felt more like how he’d been in 2016 than how he’d been over the summer. She would see him smile and would be certain it wasn’t quite meeting his eyes; she’d see the camera cut to him during Centaurs games and would feel that his stoic, game-focused look was more blank than it usually was.

She asked Shane about it, on the phone. She’d called him sort of randomly. It was a beautiful day in Boston, just after Halloween – the air had a lovely, crisp breeze to it that she knew would last maybe only a few more days, before it was overtaken by the grey desolation of Boston’s winters. The weather had convinced her to bug off from the second half of her work day and take a stroll through the Commons – it wouldn’t be long before going outside felt more like a punishment than a gift. As she walked, she saw two men – boys, more likely, college kids – laying on the grass, one’s head in the other’s lap, and that, of all things, spurred her into the call.

Shane answered on the third ring, slightly out of breath – she probably caught him in the middle of a run. “Svetlana, hey,” he said, easily. “What’s up?”

The first few times she’d called him without warning he’d answered in nearly a panic. Granted, Ilya had still lived in Boston then, and she only realized later how that must have looked to him – her, still Ilya’s emergency contact, calling Shane for no good reason. She got the feeling Shane wasn’t a guy who had a lot of friends who called just to gossip – Hayden Pike, probably, and maybe his wife and maybe J.J. Boizau, but that was likely it.

(Rose Landry was famous enough that she assumed all of their calls were likely scheduled in advance. When she said this to Ilya once, he scowled and confirmed that Rose sent calendar invites for them. Which, unfortunately, just endeared Rose Landry to Svetlana, which Ilya still claimed made Svetlana a traitor of the highest order.)

Now, though, Shane had gotten used to having Svetlana in his life – to Svetlana being his friend. He understood that she had a tendency to call on a whim; that she preferred talking over texting, and that she liked to be on the phone during long walks because audiobooks and podcasts bored her, and music made her feel too aimless. 

This was the first time she’d ever called Shane to actually discuss something serious, she realized, and she had no strategy for how to have the conversation. They were friends, she thought – real friends, with their own inside jokes and way of hanging out together – but Ilya was still their primary connecting point. She’d never dared to speak about him behind his back to Shane before, assuming Shane would choose his loyalty to Ilya over any loyalty he might have had to her. 

Still, this was a conversation she wanted to have for Ilya’s sake, not as his expense. Perhaps Shane would understand. Perhaps he saw it too, right?

She decided to just rip the bandaid off. Shane was serious, direct – he hated beating around the bush or being spoken to in euphemisms. He appreciated a direct approach. 

“Is Ilya okay?” she asked.

On the other end, Shane was quiet for a moment. There was no background noise – he must have been running on the treadmill in his home gym, instead of outside. It was almost certainly colder in Montreal, after all, winter nearly at the door. “Are you asking if he’s injured?” he said, finally. There was a tone to his voice she couldn’t quite nail down – almost like he was hedging a bet, trying to get her to say what she meant more plainly before he accidentally revealed a secret. 

“I don’t mean physically.”

Shane sighed, like a balloon deflating. “You noticed too, then.” 

“Something is wrong,” she agreed.

“I don’t know what.” She could picture the twist to Shane’s mouth, here, the discomfort of being wrong-footed and not quite knowing what the next best move was. “I drove to Ottawa for Halloween–”

“You did?” This was news to her, but she realized she hadn't actually spoken to Ilya this week. She opened her messages quickly and saw that her last text to him, from two days before, had gone unresponded to. It hadn’t been all that interesting, to be fair, just her bitching about fucking Sven from work again, but still. Usually he responded. Usually when Shane did something stupidly romantic, like drive two hours to surprise Ilya at this house, she got a long voice memo in Russian about how horrible it was to be in love with the greatest man to ever exist and how Ilya would surely die of love in the next few days. 

It was concerning, that he hadn’t told her. The first piece of evidence that something was wrong beyond her just catching a vibe. 

“He didn’t tell you.” Shane didn’t sound surprised. “It was – I mean, he was having that party, and I thought I’d surprise him–”

“You wanted to get laid,” she said, aware the smirk on her face was likely audible. 

“I don’t have to answer that without my attorney present,” Shane snarked back. “Anyway, I drove to see him, and he was – I don’t know. Happy to see me, obviously, but also . . . sad? I can’t put my finger on it, there’s just something about him lately that feels off.” He sighed again. “He’s been sad, maybe. Or withdrawn, anyway. I told him I thought he should maybe see a therapist.”

Well that surprised her. Shane himself was such a jock, and in her experience jocks tended to view therapy as a waste of time, something for truly crazy people. Still, he did run a mental health charity.

And, well. There was the Irina of it all, to consider. 

“You think he is like his mother,” she said. It wasn’t really a question. It was the same thing she was thinking, after all – a thought she’d had before. Ilya, with his mood swings. Ilya, with his weeks of bad moods, days spent going to work and home and doing little in between. Ilya, with his history, and his trauma, and all the things he carried on his back. 

“I don’t know,” Shane said, softly. “But, I mean – it can be genetic, right? And even if he isn’t depressed, it’s – a lot has changed for him recently. He’s living in a new country. He’s given so much up. . .”

A part of Shane still thought that Ilya missed Moscow. She could see it, sometimes, hear it underneath the things he said. There was a part of him, irrational but occasionally loud, that worried that Ilya would regret all the things he sacrificed to be with Shane. That Ilya would wake up one day and wonder why he’d picked the hardest path possible – being with a man, a famous man, a man he was famously meant to hate, instead of choosing an easy life with a woman, where he could still go back to his hometown, even though there was nothing there for him anymore, besides a small stone grave in a massive cemetery. She knew it was ridiculous, and she thought Shane, truly, also knew it was ridiculous – like Ilya Rozanov ever chose the easy path – but she supposed it was one of those things that was hard to shake. Irrational insecurity, fear. The same way Ilya had expressed his own fears to her, before, that Shane might wake up one day and decide none of this was worth it.

The first season Ilya had been in Ottawa, he’d gotten dinner with her at the single game he played in Boston that year and admitted that he and Shane had gotten into a massive fight because he’d offered to let Shane sleep with other people. She’d been shocked into total silence.

“Why the fuck would you say that?”

“Because I’m a fucking idiot, Sveta!” He’d thrown his hands in the air in exasperation. “Because I – he has not been with many men, besides me. And when he was with those men he still thought he might maybe be bisexual, and not just gay, and that one day he’d find the right woman, or some bullshit. And so I thought. . .” he’d groaned, slumping his head back against the edge of the couch despondently. “I thought maybe he would want this. To try with other men, to see. . . I don’t know. To see if it could be better, than it is with me. Or different.” 

She’d let that hang between them for a moment before moving to sit next to him, tucking her legs underneath her. “Jesus,” she said. “You really are a fucking idiot.”

Now she wondered if she should have been less flippant. If she should have pressed him harder for more information, should have made him explain. She wondered if Ilya’s insecurities were symptomatic of something else – some evil demon that lived in his brain, perched on his shoulder, saying you are not worth it. You are nobody. You are nothing. Something that could not be fixed simply – something that all the love in the world could not totally erase. 

“Maybe I shouldn’t have–” Shane started, but she cut him off before he could fall down that rabbit hole.

“He wanted to move, Shane. He loves you. The past two years of his life have been much better than the year you were together while he was still in Boston. Trust me.”

“I know,” Shane said. “I just. . . I know he hates losing.”

She didn’t have a good counterargument there. It wasn’t the only thing, obviously, but the depressing slump that was the Ottawa Centaurs surely weren’t helping any nasty thoughts Ilya might have been having about himself. Still, she had hope in her heart that there was a fresh corner for the Centaurs to turn, soon. She liked their new coach, Wiebe, and their rookie Luca Haas was teeming with potential. Wyatt Hayes, too, had proven to be more than the benchwarmer Toronto had assumed him to be. If they could trade for someone good and get more scoring strength, so Ilya wasn’t carrying so much of the offense on his back and could rely on someone other than Tanner Dillon for support, she thought they might actually have a chance at cobbling together some sort of cohesion. Probably not in time for playoffs this year, but maybe the year after. 

“Did he laugh in your face? When you suggested therapy?” 

“No,” Shane said. “I mean, he blew me off, but – he just said he was fine.”

“You believed him?”

She could hear Shane considering this on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know. I want to believe him. I want to think that if something was really wrong he’d know, and he’d tell me. But. . .”

But Ilya was also a jock, and therefore inherently therapy averse. He was also culturally repressed, and raised by an asshole father. She could practically hear the voice of Gregori Rozanov in her mind saying real men do not need therapy. He was stubborn, and headstrong, and perhaps unwilling to do things even when they would help him because he thought they made him weak.

“Will you talk to him?” Shane asked. “Just – you don’t have to ask him to see a therapist, or anything, but. . . if he knew you were worried, too, maybe he’d take it more seriously?”

She had to hold in the derisive snort that almost burst from her. She loved Ilya, and she knew Ilya loved her. But if Shane couldn’t convince him to see a therapist, no one else could. Tossing her hat into the ring would just make him feel cornered, maybe – would make him more defensive. Still, she did not want to dismiss Shane outright. “I’ll see what I can do.”

They chatted a bit longer – more aimless and casual, the serious stuff out of the way – and she hung up after almost an hour. She opened her text messages with Ilya again, looking at the last one she sent. 

She considered it for a moment, wondering what to say. For the first time in her friendship with Ilya, she drew a strange, horrifying blank. All she could think about was that he would react poorly. That he would not like being pressured from her, after Shane had pushed him too. 

Perhaps she could wait – wait for him to reach out and say something that would give her a more obvious opening. It had been what she’d done with Jane, really. She’d poked and prodded only when the opening presented itself; it wasn’t until his father’s funeral that she felt the need to play her hand fully. She could apply the same strategy here. Give Ilya some time, let him work through things in his own head. Then, when he presented her with an opening, she’d be gentle with it – say how have you been lately, or something like that.

It wasn’t a good plan, she knew that. But despite all of their years of friendship, she still felt hard pressed to discuss feelings with Ilya. They’d never truly talked about his mother’s death; he’d never told her about Jane, not really – she’d put the pieces together herself and then admitted to him that she knew them, to give him the freedom to pursue what he wanted so desperately. They did not speak about Alexei anymore; Ilya asked about his niece, and that was it. So much in their lives went unspoken. Had she gotten too comfortable? Had she allowed him too much room to wallow by himself? Had she failed to be a shoulder to cry on?

No. He had Shane. Surely he was having these conversations with Shane, that was all. And he could continue to do that. He would open up to his boyfriend, and he would listen to his boyfriend, and he’d figure his mind out for himself, as he always had done. She was right – pressing him to go to therapy would only cause him to lash out, to accuse her of colluding with Shane behind his back. Ilya could be quick to anger, and hard to reason with. She didn’t want to undo the process Shane had done.

So she closed the messages, and tried to ignore the feeling in her gut that told her that was the real mistake. 

— 

Svetlana learned about the Centaurs near-miss plane crash the same way everyone else did: on the fucking news. 

An ESPN breaking news alert, to be specific, which flashed on her phone in the middle of a sale and shook her so badly that she’d fled the sales floor, leaving a hefty comission in fucking Sven’s hands, most likely.

Her first, more irrational feeling, had been anger. Anger that Ilya had not called her before ESPN had broken the news. But she realized, reading the story in the bathroom, chewing absently on a thumbnail, that he hadn’t had time. ESPN had run the story just as the plane had made it’s emergency landing – for all she knew, Ilya was still on the fucking tarmac. 

No injuries, ESPN reassured her, but she did not feel reassured.

Her second realization was that even when Ilya did have a moment to call, she would not be the first person he called. She would never again in his life be the first person he called. He would call Shane first, for the rest of his life. She was still his emergency contact on paper – the person they’d call if he went to the hospital during a game – but that was just a formality. Ilya would expect her to call Shane, in that situation. He’d expect her to defer to Shane. She might end up being his medical proxy, but that was just to protect their privacy. 

Gone forever were the days of Svetlana-and-Ilya, partners in crime, a duo unto themselves. They’d been that way as children; then briefly they’d been a trio with Sasha; then just the two of them again. And now, instead, it was Shane-and-Ilya forever. The glory days were gone. They’d been gone. And she knew that, was smart enough to know that from the moment she first saw Shane Hollander in Ilya’s kitchen, all those years ago, radiating nervous energy because he knew she was the closest he’d ever get to meeting Ilya’s family, but somehow it wasn't until a real emergency happened that she felt it. 

She felt abruptly, stupidly lonely. She knew it wasn’t true. Her parents were alive, after all, and loved her dearly. She had many friends in Boston. She did not crave a lover, not really – she’d once seen Whoopi Goldberg declare I don’t want a man in my house and that had basically summed up her own feelings, too. She had plenty of people to call, more than Ilya had ever had. But he had for years been her first call, and he still was. If she’d almost been in a plane accident, given the time zones, she would have touched base with him first, unwilling to wake her parents up for a false alarm. 

Ilya would call Shane. He would always call Shane. And she was happy for him, really. He deserved that. He deserved somebody who loved him with no conditions, which she knew Shane did. Shane loved him on a winning team and on a losing team; loved him when his mind was sharp and funny and when it was weird and sad. Shane worried about his health, physical and mental, and his safety – he’d called her once, in the middle of the night, to ask for more detail about the Russian laws on homosexuality, terrified he was somehow putting Ilya in danger. Shane had opened his life up for Ilya – had taken so many big, terrifying steps just so they could both be happy. She couldn’t begrudge Ilya that, and she wouldn’t begrudge Ilya that. But right now, in the gross bathroom at her job, she felt a deep sadness. Her life as she had always known it was different now. It had been different for years – but she was only really feeling it, now. 

Melody stuck her head in to check on her. “I’m fine,” Svetlana said, batting her own tears away. “I just–”

Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Shane, in the Hockey Experts group chat. It read: Ilya is okay. Everyone on the plane is fine. He and I are on the phone, and he’ll call when he can. He’s got a lot of messages right now.

Then a second text. He loves you all and I love you all. Everyone is safe.

Her stupid loneliness faded away. Hockey Experts. It was only called that because it couldn’t be called what it really was – the family group chat. Yes, Ilya would call Shane first. But he would call her after. And Shane would update her when Ilya couldn’t call. Things were different, but they weren’t worse. They were better.

“I’m fine,” she said to Melody again, more firmly. “Just – a friend of mine had a close call on a plane.”

“Girl,” Melody said, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds like take the rest of the day off territory to me.”

Svetlana couldn’t agree more. She booked it out of there and headed home. Right as she was walking in the door, her phone rang.

“You fucking asshole,” she said as she picked up. “How could you almost die on me?”

On the other end, Ilya laughed wetly. “I know,” he said. “It was not my plan, trust me.”

“Shane says you are okay. I assume he’s not lying to me like you would.”

“You spoke to Shane?”

She rolled her eyes. “He sent a text in the family group chat, you moron.” 

Ilya laughed again. “Sveta, I have so many text messages right now. I don’t even know how to start going through them.” He paused. “Family group chat, huh?”

She sniffed primly, feeling a little called out for her own sappiness. “Yes. I gave Yuna adoption papers for Christmas. She is the best of any of you, after all.”

“Ugh, gross, you and Shane cannot be siblings, that’s weird,” Ilya said, although she could hear the amusement in his voice as he did. “Too many hockey nerds in one family.”

“You love it, dickhead,” she said.

“I do,” Ilya said back. His voice was very serious, the gravity of the situation laced through it. “I really do.”

She sighed, collapsing onto her couch in a heap. “You’re okay Ilyusha, yes? Shane said, but–”

“Yes, I’m okay. No injuries.”

“And. . . emotionally?”

There was a long pause. She wondered what Ilya was doing right now. He was, she had to assume, alone in his hotel room in Tampa Bay. She wished he could at least be home. Home would be easier; if he was in Ottawa, maybe Yuna and David would come over. Or, better – if he was in Ottawa, Shane would be on the way, hell or high water. He’d probably do something he’d never done before, like skip practice, just to get his hands on Ilya. But they’d been going to Tampa Bay, so instead Ilya was sequestered miles away from anyone who wasn’t his team, all alone.

“I’m okay,” he said, finally. “I sent some messages to Shane, when I thought–” he cut himself off.

When I thought I was going to die.

She felt sick to her stomach again.

“I think I scared him,” Ilya finished.

“Yes, well,” she said. “You scared all of us. It’s not your fault.”

“No,” he agreed. “But I still feel bad. He wanted to drive here from Washington. Looked it up and everything. I told him it was ridiculous, of course.”

She sniffed, suddenly irritated at his blaseness. “You should have let him. If his experience is anything like mine this is the worst day of his life so far.”

That hung in the air between them for a long time. It was too cruel to say, she knew. Ilya hadn't deserved it. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have–”

“No, it’s okay,” Ilya said, gently. “Like you said. I scared you.” 

She needed to say something. She knew she needed to say something. She just had no idea what. “Ilya,” she said, but he interrupted her before she could even figure out how her own sentence was supposed to finish.

“When I’m back in Ottawa, okay? I will call you and we’ll talk. I know I have been. . . things have been tough, lately. I know you’ve been worried.” 

She had been worried, of course, but she also felt responsible for how much they hadn’t talked. She had blown off Shane’s suggestion back in November. The past months they’d mostly shot the shit about the Troy Barrett trade and the team dog; she’d avoided any real confrontation. She didn’t even really have a good excuse. She’d known Shane was right – that Ilya needed help, and probably had to be pressed into it. She’d just. . . hadn’t done it.

“I’m seeing a therapist,” he said.

She couldn’t stop the shocked noise that escaped her. “Really? Does Shane know?”

A part of her thought if he did he would have told her, but she realized that he might have viewed that as a massive breach of Ilya’s privacy. 

Or, honestly, that he probably just assumed Ilya had told her. Shane still thought Ilya told her everything. He didn’t know how impersonal their texts had gotten, over the months – Ilya holding back and her unwilling to press him for more, like the coward she was. 

“Yes,” Ilya said, softly. “We had an awful fight on Boxing Day – stupid, really. But I told him afterwards. I have been seeing her for a long time, though.”

“And you didn’t tell Shane?”

“No. Not for months.”

Why? She wanted to ask. Why won’t you talk to us? We love you. We just want you to be okay. You scare us, Ilya. You scare us so much sometimes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, like he could read her thoughts. 

“It’s okay,” she said back, even though it really wasn’t. 

“No, it’s not.” Ilya sighed heavily, and she could hear him shifting, like he was moving to lay down. “Shane and you – I know you both care. I know. It is just. . . my brain is fucked up, Sveta. And it was already so hard telling him these things–”

“And you love him,” she finished.

“I love you too.”

“Not like that,” she huffed. 

“No,” Ilya allowed, on a small breath of a laugh, “not like that. But you have been there for me for many years. For my mother and my father. And I. . . I shut you out. Galina – she is my therapist – she says that I am afraid to ask for help. That I think you and Shane love me conditionally. That you will leave if I show too much.”

“You know I won’t, Ilya,” she said. “You know Shane won’t.”

“I know,” he reassured her. “But my brain. . .” He paused for a long moment. “I am like my mother, Svetlana. I have depression.” He almost spat the word, like a curse. “Galina has me on pills, like she was.”

“That’s good,” she said. “The pills will help.”

“They did not help my mother.”

She sighed. This conversation was weighty, for the phone – she wished they were having it in person, but she also wondered if Ilya would ever have had it with her in person. It was easier for him to deflect with humor, to shrug off true feeling, when he had control of the room. Maybe the phone gave him more space to be vulnerable. “You are not your mother, Ilya. She had no one. You have many people. You have me, and you have your team, and you have Yuna and David, and you have Shane. You don’t have to tell me everything, okay? I’m okay with not knowing everything. But. . . but you have to tell Shane, yes? Promise me you will. He needs to know these things so he can take care of you.”

Ilya let out another small, breathy laugh. “Now you sound like my therapist. She says these same things. You must communicate, Ilya. It is not fair of you to expect him to read your mind, Ilya.”

“Well it isn’t,” she said, sternly. “He loves you. He’s terrified for you.”

“I know,” Ilya said back, very softly. “I know. I love him too.”

“Obviously.” She rolled her eyes. “You are not so subtle. I don’t get how people haven’t figured it out yet.”

There was silence on the other end. She realized only after she said it that she’d fucked something up, although she wasn’t quite sure what. She waited for Ilya to tell her.

“I don’t know how much longer I can hide this, Svetlana,” he said, finally. “I love him so much. I want. . . I want people to know. That he is mine. That I am his.”

“You’ve told him this?”

“Yes.” Ilya let out a shuddery breath. “He knows.”

“Then you will figure it out together.” She felt firmly about this. It was an unspoken truth of the universe, like gravity, or the fact that it only ever rained when you left your umbrella at home. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov loved each other, and one way or another they’d figure it out together. “Shane does not want you to be miserable. He loves you too much. He doesn’t want to hide it either.” It was more complicated than that for Shane, she knew. He had different, stranger pressures on him. He still had the legacy franchise on his shoulders. He still had the weight of being one of a handful of Asian players on him. It had, per his and Ilya’s own retelling, taken him years to even come to terms with being gay – it made sense to her that it might take him a bit longer to get comfortable with being fully out. But he’d get there.

If she let herself admit it, she’d never really thought they’d last until retirement. Mostly because they were so completely, horrifically gone on each other. She’d respected the plan, even understood it – Ilya was a few years off from getting a new passport, after all – but she’d always assumed it wasn’t set in stone. That one or both of them would wake up one day and think what the fuck am I waiting for?

I maybe shouldn’t have surprised her that it was Ilya. He’d been so lonely for so long. Now that he had happiness in his grasp, why would he wait? She knew that hockey was a means to an end for him. He loved it, of course – he’d be miserable to give it up – but he would, if it meant he could be happy. 

“Will you come to Ottawa?” Ilya asked. “When you can. I owe you dinner, I think. And a conversation. A long one.”

“Of course,” she said, and she meant it. 

— 

It did not shock her when, a few days after the near-miss on the plane, Ilya and Shane called her jointly to tell her of their engagement. Shane Hollander was nothing if not a man of action, after all. Of course he would take a near death experience to heart and realize what it meant for their timelines. 

“We’re thinking this summer,” Shane said, over Facetime. Both of their eyes were still red-rimmed from the tears they must have shed at the actual engagement, but the crying part had likely been hours ago at this point, and they were all smiles now. 

(The way she figured it, the order of operation was: they got engaged, they fucked, they called Yuna and David, they probably fucked again, and then they called her. She could live with that order. At least she got the call before Hayden Pike.)

“I will clear my calendar,” she said.

“You have to,” Ilya said back. “I need a best man if Hollander is going to put Pike up here.”

Shane slapped his arm, lightly, and she tried to stop herself from smiling too stupidly at the immediate assumption on Ilya’s part that she’d be his best man.

During the call they made plans for her to come to Ottawa sooner than July, too – Ilya was insistent that he owed her a dinner to talk about all they hadn’t talked about for months, and, well, she was never one to deny herself a free meal.

The Centaurs went on a spectacular win streak. The playoffs seemed in reach for them. Her friends were engaged and happy. It was all going so well.

So, of course, the other shoe had to drop.

She learned of the FanMail leak from, of all people, Cliff Marleau. How he had her phone number she wasn't even entirely sure – it must have been exchanged back when Ilya was still on Boston, but the details of why it had happened had long escaped her. She and Cliff weren’t friends – she’d only ever hung out with the Raiders a few times, because they were largely obnoxious meathead jocks and she could only handle so many jokes about her being Roz’s favorite puck bunny before she went to jail for murdering one of them. Which wasn’t to say she disliked Cliff. He was probably the best of any of them, at least in terms of tolerability, which is probably why he was the one who ended up with the privilege of having their number, presumably to use in case Ilya had some sort of emergency. 

It was early, and she’d had a day off work, so she was still asleep. The phone buzzing on her nightstand woke her up. She assumed it was work – that someone else had called out and now she was expected to go in – which is why she answered the way she did.

“It’s my day off, you cannot make me come to work.”

“Svetlana?” Cliff said on the other end. Transparently, she didn’t recognize his voice – she had to pull the phone away from her ear and look at the contact info (Cliff Marleau Raiders, past her had saved him as, because she was smart enough to know she might not always recall the name) to see who he was.

“Cliff Marleau from the Boston Raiders,” she said back. “Why the fuck are you calling me at 9am?”

“I’m guessing you just woke up. There’s, uh – there’s a video of Roz on the internet.” She blinked, briefly wondering if Ilya was stupid enough to have made a sex tape with one of his anonymous hookups, back in his slut era. “Of him and, uh. . . Shane Hollander? Kissing?”

Fuck.

Fuck.

“Fuck. Hold on.” She put Cliff on hold and navigated over to Twitter. She didn’t even need to search either Shane or Ilya’s names – it was the first tweet on her timeline. Hayden Fucking Pike wishing someone named Brad happy birthday in a frankly not very organized manner and – right in the background, for all to see – Shane and Ilya were locked in an, honestly, incredible kiss. Later, when all of this was over, she’d make fun of them for how passionate their kisses were, even in the Pike’s driveway. Right now was probably not the time for that though.

She went to her messages. Sasha had texted her a few times – that would have to be for later. He’d been weird about Ilya for years; she couldn't deal with it right now. There were no texts in Hockey Experts, but she figured Yuna and David had probably reached out more directly. She did, too – a text to Ilya, and then a second text to Shane, both of them basically identical, except she wrote Ilya’s in cyrillic. 

I’m so fucking sorry. Call me when you can. Love you.

She unmuted the phone and put it back to her ear. “Fuck,” she said, a second time.

“Did you know?” Cliff Marleau asked.

She frowned. What kind of question was that? Did it matter if she knew? And, in fact, why the fuck had Cliff Marleau called her? Was this some sort of fact finding mission or something? “Why are you asking? You want a story to sell to TMZ?”

“No,” Cliff said, sharply, like he found the idea of that personally offensive. “Fuck no, just – Rozy isn’t picking up his phone, which is probably because he’s slammed with shit right now, and I just. . . I wanted to make sure he’s not alone, I guess. And you’re his best friend, so.”

She sighed. She felt, maybe, a little guilty for jumping to the worst possible scenario here. But her job right now was to protect Shane and Ilya as much as she could. “He’s not alone. He’s with Shane,” she said.

“So it’s true?”

“You saw the video. You think it is, what, a deep fake?” 

“No,” Cliff said. “It looked pretty real. And, uh, it being from Pike kinda made it seem more real, actually. I don’t think any software can fake how bad that guy is at FanMail.”

“Блядь,” she said. She couldn’t believe this – the bad luck of it all, the shitiness of the timing. Here, without their consent or preparation, their big secret was out there. Shane and Ilya were only months away from telling the world themselves, on their own terms, in a way where they could have controlled the narrative and come out as unscathed as possible. They had been so close to having it all figured out. And it had to go and get fucked up by, what? A stupid FanMail message for some asshole Metros fan? It seemed horrifically unfair. She pulled her phone away from her face to check her messages again. Still no texts from Shane and Ilya.

“It’s real,” she said, when she put the phone back to her ear. “You are probably getting a wedding invite in the mail soon.”

“Christ,” Cliff said. “Roz really doesn’t do things by halves, huh?”

“Well, neither does Shane.”

Cliff chuckled agreeably. “True, true. Hollander’s a killer. Should have figured a guy who loves hockey that much wouldn’t settle for anyone less than Roz, really.” He cleared his throat, a bit awkwardly. “Look, sorry for waking you up. I just couldn’t get a hold of Roz and I guess I wanted to make sure someone was with him and he wasn’t, you know. Doing this shit all by himself.”

“I didn’t know you two still spoke,” she admitted. Ilya never mentioned the guys from the Raiders, except in old stories or in passing. Several of them had taken the news of his move quite poorly, feeling personally slighted by the Captain who’d rebuilt their franchise and carried them to a Cup. But even for the ones he did like – the guys like Marleau – she’d never gotten the feeling that there was a particular closeness there. Granted, back then – in the era Svetlana considered pre-Shane, even though she was deeply aware Shane was, in fact, around the whole time – Ilya had spent so much of his energy not being truly seen. The list of people who he let in closer than arms length was exactly two – herself and Shane. She’d only made the list because of a long shared history; Shane had only been let in after seven years, and mostly by accident at that, Ilya falling in love against his will, almost. All to say, for all Ilya had always spoken kindly of Cliff, she’d assumed their relationship was more firmly old coworkers and not so much friends.

“We don’t, not really,” Cliff said. “I mean, on the ice sometimes, and sometimes I send him memes on Instagram or whatever. But, you know. Once your Captain, always your Captain.”

“He will be glad you reached out, Cliff,” she said. “I think he and Shane are going to need a lot of support right now.”

“Oh don’t worry, I’m starting a fucking list. Allies in the MLH. And I don’t mean just guys who don’t say anything, I mean, you know, the vocal guys. The Carter Vaughn’s and shit. But, uh, Svetlana – you have to know this isn’t gonna go over in the Metros locker room, right?”

There had already been a pit in her stomach; that it had the capacity to get even bigger was an unpleasant surprise. She wondered if Cliff had a point. She knew that the Metros were old-school; Theriualt had a noted public reputation as the type of coach who acted like a fucking asshole and got away with it on the merit of his resume, the ability for people to say hey, it gets results. Still, Ilya had told her Shane was already out to the team, and while it hadn’t exactly been a celebratory conversation, no one had lashed out or anything. Maybe Cliff was wrong.

She really hoped Cliff was wrong. 

“Well, they already know Shane is gay–”

“Not that. Or, I mean, maybe also that, but – those guys hate Roz. Like fucking hate him. And honestly, I’ve heard some shit on the ice this year. . . I’m not sure they’re all that crazy about Hollzy coming out either. Like, he’s their Captain, and he gets results, so they know not to say shit to him. But that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking it, or saying it to other people. You know?”

She did not know. She’d spent months worrying about Ilya – about his moods, his sullen silences, about all the things he didn’t say. It hadn’t occurred to her that Shane might also be in trouble. 

She wondered, for the first time, if part of Shane’s reluctance at coming out had been his own understanding of how it would go over in the room. He’d tried to undo the rivalry with the Foundation, with their public friendship. But had it worked? Was he going to work every day and hearing his own teammates shit talk his boyfriend? Knowing that if he said too much, they’d turn it against him? Oh, you got a crush on Rozanov huh? His own sexuality weaponized against him, in a way that no one in the organization would care enough to protect him from?

“Cliff, I have to go,” she said, even though she knew it would likely be hours before either Shane or Ilya called her. She needed to be available, she felt. Just in case. 

“No worries,” he said. “Tell Rozy to call me when he can, okay?”

She promised she would, and then hung up the phone and waited.

—

Ilya called her hours later – well into the night – but she answered on the first ring. She’d been waiting, really, wasting away the day with the television on – some bad reality TV show about people who worked in a restaurant in LA, because the two minutes of ESPN coverage she’d watched had made her dry heave into the sink. 

“Ilya, I am so fucking sorry,” she said as she picked up.

“Why? Did something happen?” 

“Now’s not the time for jokes, asshole,” she said, but she was smiling despite herself. It was a relief, a bit, to know he wasn’t totally in shambles. That he still had the capacity to be a little shit about this. “How are you? How’s Shane?”

“I’m okay,” Ilya said. “Shane is. . . “ he sighed, deeply. “Less okay. But he will be okay, I think.”

“Cliff Marleau called me.”

“What? Why?” She could hear his shock – he, too, knew that she hadn’t been on calling basis with any of the Raiders besides him, after all. 

“To see if anyone was looking after you. I told him yes. But he also . . .he said the Metros locker room is bad, Ilya. Bad about you. Maybe bad about Shane being gay.”

She could hear Ilya sniff on the other end, almost contemplatively – his thinking sniff. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think they are. I assume you have not been reading the news too carefully, but – we’ve been benched until further notice.”

“What?” She was aghast. “Is that even allowed? There’s nothing in the rules – can they do that?”

“Farah says for now, but not for long. Wiebe came to my house a little after Shane left for Montreal. Said he was sorry. He supports me – us. He wants me on the ice. He is happy for me.” He sighed. “Shane said Theirault is pissed. And fucking Boizaiu is pissed, his whole team is–” he cut himself off with an agitated noise, deep in the back of his throat. “They are calling him a liar Svetlana. Like somehow he has betrayed the organization by daring to be in love with me.” He paused. “He ate a Snickers.”

“Oh my god, he’s dying,” she said, and was horrified to find it was only, like, half a joke. 

Ilya laughed anyway, although it was strained. “That’s what I said.” Then, softer, “I am going to Montreal tomorrow. No reason for us to be apart while we both can’t play. And Farrah is working on a statement. We will not deny it.”

She scoffed. “Like denying it was ever on the table.”

Ilya made a non-committal hum. “If Shane wanted–”

“Don’t be stupid, Ilya. He asked you to marry him. He does not want to hide you any more than you want to hide him.”

This time, the humming noise Ilya made was much more pleased. 

“Are you going to kill Hayden Pike?” she asked. Because it, frankly, had to be asked. 

“No,” Ilya said, although he sounded a little reluctant about it, to her ears. “He has been a good friend to Shane. To both of us. We asked him to keep a big secret and he kept it. This is my fault more than his. I got careless. Shane was right – we needed to be more buttoned up, less obvious.”

“You were kissing on private property, Ilya,” she pointed out. “It’s not your fault the Pike’s are insanely obsessed with having mirrors in every room of their house.”

“Yes, you’re right. This was. . . we couldn’t have known. But I have kissed him in public. At the Game Changers camps. Fucking Ryan Price walked in on us.” She held back the laugh that almost escaped at the metal image that provided very valiantly. “I have stood too close to him at events – at a concert, last year, he put his hand on my back in public. We. . .” he sighed again. “I did not stop to think about why Shane was scared. I was so convinced he was ashamed of me. That he’d be less scared to come out if I was someone else. Someone easier. But now. . .” 

“Theriualt was that much of a dick, huh?” 

“Yes,” Ilya said. 

He left it at that, but she found she couldn’t. She had a thought – a thought she knew Ilya had had, by now – and she felt the need to say it out loud so at least one of them had. “His contract is up at the end of the season. He has not re-signed yet.”

“Don’t say it,” Ilya snapped. “Don’t even think it. I cannot – I will not ask him to leave the Metros for me, Svetlana.”

“He’d be leaving for him, I think,” she said, gently, but she let it go. 

She had wondered, after the engagement, if Shane’s plans had changed at all. They’d be out once they were married, but he still seemed prepared to retire on the Metros. A part of her thought that he was being, perhaps, a bit short sighted. Shane had gotten so good at compartmentalizing the parts of his life – separating his hockey career from the home he planned to build with Ilya – that she thought it was likely he hadn’t stopped to think about how it would feel to be married to Ilya but living separately from him for most of the year. The two of them were barely managing the distance now. How could they expect to manage it after marriage? 

It didn’t surprise her that neither of her sweet, emotionally stunted boys had considered this possibility – or articulated it, if they had considered it. But if Wiebe was supportive and Theirault was not – if the Centaurs were supportive and the Metros were not–

“I told you to stop thinking it,” Ilya grumbled. 

“Sorry, sorry.” she said, not really meaning it. “I will leave well enough alone. And I will let you get some sleep, if you are driving tomorrow. Tell Shane I love him, yes? And call me whenever – either of you.”

“Thank you, Svetlana,” Ilya said. “You are a very good friend.”

“Don’t I know it,” she said back glibly, and hung up before either of them could get too sappy.

— 

It was, as expected, an utter fucking shitshow.

Ilya had texted her the morning after to say that Crowell had arranged a meeting with him and Shane. After the meeting, he’d called her again – this time mostly to brag about Shane taking him on a date for chicken parmesan, weirdly. 

“You’re engaged, Ilya,” she reminded him. But she supposed she understood his excitement – eleven years together, in one way or another, and they’d never had a real date. How fucked was that?

Of course, the date chat was mostly just a smokescreen for the bad news – Crowell demanding they cover the relationship up, telling them they couldn’t get married. But Shane had, as she had told Ilya he would, rejected that outright. Within a week, they had posted an official statement confirming their relationship, which she had reposted with a red heart emoji and a simple added caption of my boys.

Shane had called her that night. “Will you get in trouble?”

“With who?” she asked, pouring herself a glass of red wine. “Crowell is not my boss.”

He laughed. “I mean, you know. With Russia.”

Ah.

She supposed she might. She was, technically, promoting a homosexual relationship, which was a big no no. But she was also an American citizen. And, truthfully, she couldn’t really bring herself to give a fuck.

“I can’t ask you both to give up Russia for me,” Shane said, softly, like he was afraid of being overheard. She knew he was alone in Montreal, but she understood the instinct – like talking about it too loudly made it too real; like this was still all some big secret to be kept under wraps. 

“I don’t think Russia cares that much about me, Shane Hollander,” she said, breezily. “And even if they do – you have asked me to do nothing. This is a choice I’m making. It’s a choice Ilya made. We picked you. You understand?”

“Thank you,” Shane said. “For being his friend. For being my friend. I think – I think he would have been much lonelier without you, this past year.”

“And you would have been lonelier without me too, no?”

She was joking, but when Shane responded it was with total earnestness. “Of course,” was all he said, and they sat on the phone in companionable silence for a while, each of them moving through their house, doing boring things – Shane cooking something, her tidying up her bedroom – separate, but together. 

She knew Shane was hoping the situation in the Metros locker room would eventually resolve itself – that once the team got over the shock, they’d let him back in as their Captain. But as the playoff series against the Centaurs started, she could very plainly see it wasn’t happening. Shane was being iced out. Outside of Pike and Boiziau, he wasn’t getting passed to; his defenders were leaving him open. He was by himself on the ice. 

The Centaurs, meanwhile, were doing exceptionally well. The Metros managed to win the first game anyway, but it was closer than she would have thought only months ago, and Ilya and his boys played like hell. Shane played like hell largely alone. 

There was something ironic about all of this, and not in a fun way. Shane had been so worried about his career, and the outing had actually made it worse for him, at least on the ice; Ilya had been willing to give hockey up, and was now playing better than he had all season. She had no plans to bring this up to either of them – she was fairly sure they could both see it too, after all. Ilya had asked her to keep her mouth shut, so she had – she did not bring up that the Metros were obviously fucking Shane over, and she did not reply to the many, many internet posts she saw claiming Shane had lost his touch “now that he was gay,” like he hadn’t been gay the whole damn time, and like his team hadn’t won the fucking game. 

She kept her mouth shut. Her plan was to continue keeping her mouth shut. 

Up until The Trip, anyway. 

Look: Svetlana knew hockey. She knew hockey better than almost anyone else on the planet.  That wasn’t even bragging; it was just true. There were days when she was pretty sure she knew it better than Ilya, and he played the fucking game professionally. She, and every other hockey fan on Earth, knew that these things happened. You caught an edge; you missed a shot; the puck bounced weird. It was a fast paced, high-octane game, played on ice, on skates. There were things you couldn’t control.

So it made no sense to her that apparently half of the world forgot how hockey worked overnight. She logged on to see Metros fans  and professional journalists alike claiming Shane had thrown the game – that he’d somehow tripped on purpose, to give his partner a shot at the Cup. There were so many posts – tweets and Reddit threads and fucking op-eds in newspapers – claiming that not only had Shane thrown this game, but that he must have always been throwing games for Ilya, like Shane’s personal record against Ilya wasn’t nearly dead even (and like the Metros recent record against the Centaurs wasn’t heavily skewed towards the Metros). She knew Ilya had asked her to shut up, but she had fucking limits, alright. So when some “journalist” posted “We need to seriously look at Hollander’s entire career differently now. Has he been throwing for Rozanov this entire time?” she felt it was her sworn duty to reply with “no, you stupid fucking asshole. hope this helps. ♥️”

The post got a lot of traction. She expected Shane or Ilya to be mad at her – neither of them had said anything publicly so far, and Ilya was already moving on to deal with New York in the next round – but instead a few hours later Shane texted her a simple Thank you, Svetlana.

Then, twenty five seconds after that, Wanna come to a playoff game with me?

Which is how she ended up in Ilya’s family seats with Yuna, David, and Shane, watching the Centaurs take on Scott Hunter’s Admirals. She was wearing a Rozanov jersey – Raiders, still, because she had loyalty and also not even she could make the Centaurs logo look good. Shane’s parents were in normal clothes, and Shane himself was in a black-and-white Adidas shirt that she knew was Ilya’s – the closest he could get to showing support without doing something that would launch a thousand thinkpieces. If the world already thought Shane had thrown the game for Ilya, showing up in the man’s jersey to the next round would be a nightmare waiting to happen.

Still, a part of her was impressed with Shane. That he’d come to the game at all was likely to get him flak from those corners of the internet. There were Metros fans who expected him to crawl into a hole and not emerge again until the next hockey season, as some sort of repentance for doing something he didn’t even actually do. It wasn’t like the world wouldn’t notice Shane was here, either – right after the end of the first period, the jumbotron cut to him, and he’d been forced to wave and smile.

The crowd had gone crazy for him, though. Good crazy – a deafening roar of support. Ottawa loved their Captain, and Ilya loved Shane. But Shane was also from Ottawa – he was a hometown boy, and he was getting their support. She felt warm all throughout her body. Shane deserved this. He deserved this all of the time.

Would he ever get it again in Montreal? 

“Hockey twitter is going to go crazy, you know,” she said, once the camera had cut away from them. Shane’s parents had gone to fetch some snacks and drinks, so it was just the two of them.

“Of course,” he said. “I’d expect nothing less.”

“Nice that your hometown still loves you,” she said. She was sure he knew, but a part of her wanted to make sure he knew. She wasn’t sure if he and Ilya had talked about the aftermath of the Trip – if they’d talked about Shane’s contract and Ilya’s secret dream of them on the same team together. Leave it to Ilya to be so afraid of rejection from his literal fiancé that he wouldn’t ask for what he wanted – she needed to make sure at least someone as advocating for a future where the two of them could be happy. God knows they tended to both be too stupid for it, sometimes. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Shane said, abruptly, “and I’d like your opinion on something. As the second biggest hockey expert I know.”

“I assume Yuna is the first, and not yourself?”

He grinned at her. “Naturally. But she’s a little biased. I wanted your opinion first.”

“Okay,” she said. “Although if we are talking about you, I am biased too, you know.”

“Sure, but not as much as my mother,” he said. “And she’s biased for other reasons here anyway.”

Other reasons? Like what? 

“The Centaurs,” he started.

She cut him off. “I’m not going to tell if you I think they’ll win or lose to the Admirals. That’s bad luck, Hollander, and you know that.”

He laughed again. “No, no, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m wondering about how you feel about their depth at center.”

She stared at him for a long moment. Yuna Hollander was his mother, but she was also a lifelong Metros fan. She was biased in other ways about the teams Shane played on. Did that mean – was he asking–? 

No. No way. 

Unless?

“I think it could be better,” she answered, slowly. “The first line is strong, now – Bood and Barrett play well with Ilya. But Tanner Dillion should be third or fourth line, probably, and Haas and LaPointe are both green. They need some time before they can truly anchor a line by themselves.” She considered her words carefully. There was a thrill of excitement in her stomach – it was sort of like a cute boy was flirting with her. Except the cute boy was her friend's fiancé, and instead of asking her on a date or buying her a drink he was instead talking to her about hockey lines. Which was better than flirting, really, in Svetlana’s estimation. “They could use a real veteran, I think. Someone who really knows the sport. Someone who can take some of the burden off of Ilya, you know?”

Shane nodded. He was looking down at the ice – Ilya had re-appeared, the period nearly over, and was looking up at Shane, too. Ilya waved, a dopey, lovesick look on his face. Shane shot him a wink, and Ilya’s grin got even wider. 

“And what about the Metros?” Shane asked. “How do you feel about them next year?”

Them. Not us.

“The Metros have one star player, but have always lacked depth beyond that. Not that the backlines are bad, just – no one scores the way you do, and no one creates plays the way you do. They have built a system around you. I imagine that’s a lot of pressure.” Shane tilted his head to the side, a small acknowledgement. “At the end of the season – it seems like they forgot all you do for them. They left you on the ice alone. And still you almost brought them to the next round of playoffs. If they can remember you are Shane fucking Hollander, then maybe they will come together again.” She wasn’t sure they could remember that, but she didn’t want to hurt Shane by saying it out loud. She had a feeling he knew, anyway. He’d lived it, after all. 

He turned to meet her eye – Ilya had been called over by Wiebe and was, reluctantly, tearing himself away from ogling Shane to go do his actual job. “So – the Centaurs need depth at center. You think they have a shot at the Cup if they get that?”

“Of course,” she said. “I mean, they have a shot at the Cup now,” she quickly corrected. She’d never admit it to Shane or Ilya, but she doubted the Centaurs would be able to get past the superior defense of the Admirals, largely in part due to that lack of depth. Still, it was bad luck to say out loud. Also: kind of mean to her best friend. “But they have a much better shot at the Cup with the right person on the second line.”

“Any suggestions?” Shane said, with a faux casualness. 

“Only one,” she said. Then she leaned forward and dropped her town to a fake whisper. “But I have this friend, you see him there?” She pointed at Ilya, on the ice, already looking back at the both of them, the lovesick little idiot. “He’s got this big, massive, embarrassing crush on the person I think is best for the job. So I would hate to say that person, and get my friend’s hopes up, and be wrong, you know?”

“Well your friend is on the ice,” Shane said, smiling like the cat who got the damn canary. “So maybe you can tell me. Just between us?”

“His name is Shane fucking Hollander,” she said.”And the Montreal Metros don’t deserve another second of his ice time.”

“They’re not getting it. I called Farah – obviously nothing is going to happen until free agency opens in July, but–”

She cut him off with a whoop, throwing her arms around him in elation. “Oh thank God. I don’t think I can take another year of Ilya being so mopey about your long distance. He’s such a drama queen.” If she was crying a little bit, well – that was her business, alright?

Shane hugged her back, tightly. “Glad to have your support, Svetlana.”

“Support? Are you kidding me?” She pulled back to make serious eye contact with him. “Shane, you are my friend now, too. And I want what is best for you. And those stupid fucks are not what’s best for you. All Theriault had to do was fake a smile and send you a fucking Edible Arrangement as a wedding gift, and he couldn’t even manage that. He deserves to have everything blow up in his face. And also to get divorced and go broke and die alone, but that part is possibly out of our control.”

Shane laughed, hard, but the noise was drowned up by the horn going, the period starting up again. Yuna and David reappeared, handing Svetlana a beer and Shane a water, and both of them a popcorn to share. She dropped her head onto Shane’s shoulder, feeling fuzzy and warm with love for him. After a moment, his head came to rest on top of hers, too.

“I’m really glad we’re friends, Svetlana,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the noise.

Ilya skated towards center ice for the face off. Once again, he looked up to find them. When he saw them together, curled up, the smile that split his face was the best one she’d ever seen on him – one she hadn’t seen on his face since they were children playing together, before his mother died. Perfect, unfiltered, raw happiness – right out in public, for the entire world to see.

“I’m glad too, Shane,” she said. “So, so glad.”