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“He looks like he’s having fun.” Shane turns his phone toward Rose, showing her the video of his fiancé at the club with his friends. It was nothing to clutch pearls about, even if Shane was spending his “last night as a bachelor” at home with his best friend, just looking through photo albums of his life. The video is of Cameron and his friend, Jamie, using a beer bottle as a microphone as they try—in their drunken stupor, if the beer is anything to go by—to keep up with the lyrics of the song.
Rose, as usual when being subjected to Cameron, rolls her eyes, and pushes Shane’s phone away from her. “Nevermind him! Look!” she replies, “Look at your chubby little cheeks!” smiling widely, and turning the photo album so he can look at the picture. Indeed, photographed is a toddler Shane, wrapped up in winter clothing and knitted scarf and beanie, with chubby pink cheeks. When he doesn’t react, she taps her finger aggressively on the page, “You have a little hockey stick! And a puck that is probably bigger than you! Shane!” Shane rolls his eyes fondly, then looking down to reply to Cameron’s message. She groans, “Boo, tell him he’s a slut.”
He flips her off as he keeps texting with one hand, and hears her laughing, and loudly flipping to the next page.
She’s silent for a few minutes then, “Oh my god,” she mumbles. Shane looks up, and he feels his skin crawl as soon as his eyes land on the pastel yellow album that was now in her lap. “This is the sweetest thing I have ever seen, Shane,” she whispers as she turns the album to him, pointing a one of the pictures.
Ilya Rozanov’s dazzling smile is the first thing his eyes fixate on, mouth dripping with toothpaste. He’s using the end of his toothbrush to poke Shane’s cheekbone. Shane’s scowl completely rendered useless with a fondness in his eyes that is embarrassingly obvious even through a Polaroid picture.
“I didn’t know you had these.”
The truth was that Shane had wanted to forget they existed so he pretended that they didn’t. And plus, they felt like opening up his chest for an autopsy, and letting people inspect every bit of his vulnerability. Every picture—only a handful of them in total—small vignettes of the little lifetime he’d lived with Ilya. The emotions that had lived between them, ones that belonged to no one else.
Shane feels his sternum cracking open. A bitter part of his brain tells him that the fondness he was seeing in himself stayed with Rozanov. That he never looked at Cameron like that. That he’d never look at anyone like that ever again. A bitter part of his brain wants him to point out everything about Cameron that makes him feel less than, and all the ways that Rozanov wouldn’t do that—even if it was him coping with his currently kind of shitty reality the best he could.
He takes the album from Rose. His eyes moving up to look at the picture above it. From the same day, Rozanov sleeping. The morning sun on his face, an annoyed furrow in his brows.
You’ll never see that again.
The chasm open in his chest feels even more vast than before.
You’ll never see that again.
He looks up at Rose. He doesn’t know what he wants to say, he doesn’t even know what the feeling that’s suddenly taken over every part of his body means. He knows that it’s something. And it turns out that he doesn’t even have to say anything, because Rose is already frowning at him. Shane fights the tears burning behind his eyes.
“Shane,” Rose whispers.
He shakes his head. “I know.”
“I’m with Rose now,” Shane says, rather bitchily.
“Shane,” Ilya’s accent thicker with his annoyance. They’d been going back and forth for a good long while. Shane didn’t even know why he had agreed to meet with Ilya. They had nothing to meet about anymore. There was something cosmically funny, maybe, that for the first time in their entire careers they were on the same team for All Stars is right after they end their relationship, and don’t even necessarily want to see each other.
Relationship, being the word that’s closest and yet farthest to properly explaining what the two men had ever been to one another. Simultaneously feeling like too big of a word, and too small of a concept to properly encapsulate everything that had transpired in the nine years they’d been doing this song and fucking dance.
Shane rolls his eyes, at his own thoughts, and at Rozanov, “I don’t know what the fuck changed here, Ilya.”
“What changed is—” he stops himself. Closing his eyes with a deep breath. Shane briefly and unfortunately wonders what did change. “You can’t believe that you actually want that,” he says instead.
Shane stares at him for a long while. Long enough that he’s sure that Ilya knows what he’s expecting. An explanation. Clarification. Most of all, him to take it back because, well, it’s none of his business anymore. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he exclaims when Ilya doesn’t say anything to that. He only keeps looking at Shane. “I’m leaving,” Shane announces, not being able to handle the scrutiny of his gaze any longer.
Ilya sighs softly, taking a seat on the edge of the bed and watching silently as Shane makes his way to the doorway. He doesn’t say anything until he’s about to open the door and walk out, “It won’t—” Shane, stupidly, pauses when he speaks. “Whatever you think you are doing. It won’t work.”
He drops his hand, “And what am I doing?”
He shrugs. “Doing what other people want you to do.”
“Fuck off, Rozanov.”
Ilya tilts his head, like he’s only amused that those words were getting a reaction out of Shane. “Whenever it is that you realize that this—” he pauses, rolls his eyes, “Rose is not what you want, you can make whatever shit up to make you feel better,” he stands up, “But we’ll both know.”
Shane’s jaw drops, and just as he’s gearing up to cuss him out, Ilya puts his hand up and says, “Good night, Hollander.”
Two months later, Shane breaks no-contact between them and sends condolences to Ilya regarding the death of his father.
Ilya doesn’t respond to the message.
Shane’s hand falls over his pocket again, checking, feeling the shape in there.
The wedding planner had just left his room, telling him that they had ten minutes until first looks. Jackie, Hayden, and his mom were by the vanity, putting on makeup on and painting the nails of all four of Hayden’s kids—as they’d requested. Rose was standing by the window, looking down at the yard where Shane and Cameron were going to be in ten minutes time. Shane was sitting across from his dad on the couch, his leg was bouncing as he was playing with his fingers. He knew that his dad was looking at him, he was—pointedly—not looking back.
He wondered what Cameron was doing. If his friends were there with him, what picture of his late parents he had picked to display in a frame so they could feel like they were there with him, if Jamie and Ben’s kids also asked for makeup and painted nails.
“Thanks,” he mumbles when his dad pushes a glass of water in his general direction. He takes it and drinks the entire thing in one swig.
When he looks up, Rose is already looking at him. She was the only one in the room who knew about the pastel yellow album, and the pictures that were housed inside it. She was the only one who knew that it took Shane almost two hours last night to not do something drastic—and even then. She raises her eyebrows once, and looks back out the window. He appreciated her staying out of it, not remotely implying what she thinks he should be doing, but at the same time, he needed the slightest bit of direction here.
Shane’s hand falls over his pocket again, checking, feeling the shape in there.
He pushes off the couch and walks over to where Rose is, wordlessly, she makes space for him to look out the window with her. He catches her glancing at him, but doesn’t say anything.
Not until Shane does, “I’m crazy. Right?” he says, in a hushed tone that only she could hear.
“Be more specific,” she says, not looking at him still.
“Rose,” he whispers, glancing at the room to make sure no one was paying attention. “…Y’know,” he motions with his hands. She finally looks at him. “Rose,” he says again, this one comes out more desperate than he means it to.
“It’s a little crazy. But not for the reason you think.” He furrows his brows. “You need to make your mind up.”
Shane looks away from her and down at the yard where him and Cameron are supposed to do their first looks in six minutes.
Rose claps her hands and addresses the room, “Beautiful people, would you mind giving Shane and I the room? Just some details we have to discuss that may or may not be a surprise!” Shane can hear that she’s smiling brightly at them, even if he’s not looking. “There’s a maid of honor’s sort of room that I’ve been using that you can keep hanging out in, and we can meet downstairs at the first looks? It’s down the hall, second door on the right.”
A few moments later, the door is closing and Shane and her are alone. He rests his back on the window and looks at her. She has a stern look on his face. “I mean it, Shane. You have to make up your mind. It’s five minutes until the first looks, and well, I’m sure we would all like—”
“I know, Rose. God. This sucks for me more than it does for you.”
They stay in silence for a bit.
“Do you think it’ll help if you say it out loud?” she says. He meets her eyes. She shrugs, “it’s worth a shot. Say it.”
He bites his lip. Pushes himself off the wall and walks up to her, standing only a couple steps away from her. Taking a deep breath, he lets the words materialize on his tongue, “I think I want to stop the wedding.”
As soon as the words are out of Shane’s mouth, he feels a weird sense of relief. He doesn’t think that it means that he does want to stop the wedding, and it’s not just him getting cold feet. It hadn’t taken two hours to calm him down after that damn pastel yellow album. No. It hadn’t stopped all night, all morning. His hand falls on the outline in his pocket.
It’s not until he meets Rose’s eyes, and sees that they’re full of tears, that he knows he has to do this. “Isn’t this where you try to convince me to stay?” he can’t help but exclaim, maybe in an attempt to maintain any sort of rationality.
Rose sputters out a laugh, “In another life, maybe!” she relents, wiping at her tears, “But…”
“Fuck me, Landry, you’ve never really liked Cameron, have you?”
“First off,” she starts, “I will not fuck you, we tried that, you hated it,” he rolls his eyes, blowing a laugh through his lips. “Second, he’s fine. He’s a good guy, and he loves you, and you love him...”
The way she stops her sentence makes him think that she’s going to continue, but she lets it trail off. She drops her chin. Shane realizes that she doesn’t have to say it. There’s no use. He has to face this.
Or, well.
He has to run away from it.
“How do I do this? I mean, where would I even start?”
Rose puts her hands on his shoulders, “First. Tell me. For sure. You’re doing this?”
He takes a breath, “Yeah. Yes. I’m doing this.”
He doesn’t realize how scared the words make him until he feels himself relax at the sight of her smile. “Wonderful.” Then, she pulls the front of her dress, and sticks her hand down her breasts. A moment later, she pulls out a set of car keys.
Shane’s jaw drops, “Did you have those in there the entire day?”
“I was dealing with a very skittish little deer last night,” she waves her hand in his direction, “I needed to be prepared. And was it not the right choice!” she jingles the keys at him.
He stares at her for a moment, then takes the keys, “God, I love you.”
“Love you too.” She leans up and kisses his cheek. She must see hesitation in his face, she grabs the sides of his head, “If your heart is telling you to run, then you need to fucking book it. Got it?” Another deep breath, another nod. “I’ll deal with everything here, you just go. I’ll call you when everything here is over and done with and we can figure out what we do next?”
Shane is anchored by her use of we instead of you. He doesn’t know what he’d do without her.
He nods. And he’s off before he can think a second longer.
About an hour into his drive, he’s approaching the border to the United States.
It’s only then that he realizes where he was going. If he had been a little more emotional that day—his wedding day, he really should’ve started seeing the signs earlier—he would wax poetic. He’s following his heart. He’s going to the last place where he felt whole. Where he felt safe, and like himself, even in moments where he really shouldn’t have.
He closes his eyes for just a second.
He had nothing left to lose, he supposed.
When his phone rings another hour later, he thinks it’s Rose. He feels himself panic just slightly when his eyes glance over to the caller ID, and see the name Cameron on the screen.
“You fucking asshole,” are his fiancé’s—ex-fiancé’s first words to him. He didn’t expect him to have taken it well by any margin. There’s probably no one in the world who would. Shane knew that answering the call would result in some sort of anger from his ex-fiancé, but he also figured he owed him that much. “You didn’t even have the fucking decency to say it to me! You just fucking left, you coward!”
“Cameron,” Shane mumbles, he can practically feel him seething on the other end of the line. “I… I couldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t have had the bravery to leave otherwise, and it wouldn’t have been fair to either of us.”
“Did you not fucking even love me at all?!” he shouts. Shane’s heart twists, even if he knows that he’s only saying it in anger. “Could you not have realized earlier?! People flew in! We spent so much fucking money!”
“I know, Cameron, god, it fucking sucks. Don’t fucking think it doesn’t suck for me, too.” When Cam speaks next, it comes through robotic and in fragments. “I’m so sorry,” he adds, for good measure.
“You’re breaking up—” he hears Cameron reply, robotically. Then a second later, the wave of unstable connection is gone. And Shane knows this because he hears Cameron’s groan of annoyance loud and clear. “Where are you?”
“Well—” he starts, awkwardly. He has to bite his tongue to stop himself from answering with a bitchy none of your business anymore.
“You’re going to fucking Boston,” he states, then adds, “Aren’t you?” Shane uses the moment of traffic where he’s at a standstill to drop his head into his heads and sigh. On the other end of the line, he hears Cameron laugh. Shane leans forward, resting his forehead on the steering wheel. “Okay, sure. Whatever. That weirdly makes me feel a little better.”
“What?” he says, muffled.
“Sure, you left me at the altar, but at least it was for him.”
Shane shakes his hair out of his face when he looks back up, “I’m sorry.”
“You said that already,” Cameron replies, with all the bitterness that Shane expected from him. He hears Cameron take a breath, and he can almost imagine the way he’s pacing the room, and running his hand through the hair at the base of his neck, like he usually did in frustration. For half a second, he feels he made the wrong choice. “God, Shane,” he continues, and Shane can hear the million unspoken complaints in the tone of his voice as he says his name. “Who’s going to deal with the wedding gifts? Because we got those, y’know, before you—”
“Ran out, yes, I’m aware,” he finishes, hearing a bite to Cameron’s tone that he had long disliked. “Rose and Mom can probably deal with it.”
The line crackles for a second, Shane wonders if the connection was getting worse again as he got even closer to the border. But then Cameron says, “Fuck you.” and the line goes dead.
Shane takes another deep breath, his thousandth of the day.
At least he knows that it was the right choice. Even if this trip to Boston is a Hail Mary doomed to fail.
Out of habit, Shane buttons his suit jacket when he gets out of the car. A second later, feeling suffocated and constrained by the movement, he unbuttons it immediately. He looks up at the house, and only then, after so many hours of driving, does it occur to him.
Ilya might not even fucking live here anymore.
But, it had been five hours. And running away from his own damn wedding. So, he might as well.
He walks up to the door, and knocks. A few moments later, a stranger opens the door. She furrows her brows at Shane, “Hello,” she says, resting her shoulder on the doorframe. She had beautiful blonde hair, dark green eyes, and was wearing a pink dress that Shane could swear Rose also owned—but he wasn’t that well versed in clothes so who’s to say?
“Um,” Shane rocks back on his feet, “Hi,” he replies. “I’m Shane,” he says, reaching his hand out for a handshake. He’s partially unarmed when the person smiles softly at him.
She shakes his hand, “Irina.”
He nods, bites his lip, and says, “I don’t suppose Ilya Rozanov still lives here?”
Irina is shaking her head before she’s answering with, “No, I’m sorry. We moved in here a couple years ago.”
Shane nods. He knew it was a long shot. It had been almost five years. “That’s— That’s alright. Sorry for bothering you,” Shane smiles, politely, and starts stepping backwards before turning around.
He’s aware that he doesn’t hear the door closing behind him but he doesn’t make anything of it until Irina speaks again, “I do have his new address.” Shane stops, and turns around. Irina’s fully smiling now, she clears her throat and the smile is gone. “You see, he didn’t change his mailing address for like six months,”
Shane can’t help but laugh. “That sounds like something Rozanov would do,” he says, walking closer again. She smiles softly again, tilting her head at him. “You’re just going to give his new address to a stranger?”
She smiles, walks a few steps away to grab a piece of paper from a notebook and writes down Rozanov’s new address on it without looking at any reference of what it was. “We really had to send him so much mail,” she says as she hands him the piece of paper. Shane laughs again.
“Baby, who’s at the door?” someone says from the inside.
Irina looks behind herself as the other person walks up, “Shane Hollander, this is my wife, Samira.”
Shane smiles, wide and earnest, as he looks at Samira, “Nice to meet you.”
She rests her hip on her wife’s hip, folds her arms in front of herself. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting married today?” Irina immediately bumps her shoulder. “What!”
“She’s right, but I kind of… ran away…” The wives share a look, then look back at Shane, smiles splitting their faces. “I’d love to stay and chat but—” he raises his hand with the address. Irina shoos him away, “It was lovely meeting you.”
“You too, Shane.”
Shane feels like he’s going to pass out when he knocks on the door.
The truth was that him and Ilya had been playing against each other as usual for the past four—almost five—years. So it’s not like they hadn’t seen each other, they hadn’t really had conversations, but they were mostly… fine at interacting with each other. Snipped small talk right before the game, or chirping before the puck drops, but nothing of substance.
It had been six hours since he’d left the wedding now. Rose had called him right after Cameron did and discerned within a minute that he was going to go find Ilya. She wished him luck and had been texting for updates since then.
Ilya had texted Shane when he came out, congratulating him, and he had been publicly supportive as well. Their public rivalry had weirdly died down when they’d broken up. It didn’t feel exciting to keep up the facade anymore. Ilya hadn’t come out himself, but Shane was deeply aware of the noticeable decrease in the amount of articles about Ilya and his sexual escapades. Which could mean nothing, really, but he needed a bit of confidence as he waited for Ilya to open the door—if he was even home. The Bears were in the playoffs, the Voyageurs hadn’t quite made it so Shane and Cameron decided to get married in the meanwhile and use the summer as an extended honeymoon.
Shane curses to himself as he realizes that they would need to cancel the honeymoon trips as well, on top of returning all the wedding gifts.
The door opens.
Shane stops breathing.
Suddenly realizes that he’s still wearing his wedding suit.
Ilya is highly unaware of all of this as he talks animatedly on the phone, “I am leaving right now, fuck. I’ll be on time!” He looks up from the floor and meets Shane’s eyes. He stops his rambling and his lips part. “I will call you later,” he says, and immediately ending the call. “Hollander.”
Shane feels his heart splinter. “Ilya.”
For half a second, Shane sees real emotion on Ilya’s features, right before he masks them and puts on a face that Shane had come to known very well in all the years of them hooking up and pretending that it was nothing between them, when—if running away from his wedding and driving six hours to find him today was anything to go off of—was actually everything.
“If this is because my wedding invite got lost in the mail,” he starts, “there is less dramatic ways to do this.”
Shane feels his cheeks heat up as he practically giggles. He shakes his head and looks back at him, “The wedding is off. I think.”
“You think?” Ilya says incredulously.
Shane bites his lip, “I don’t think they can do a wedding without one of the grooms, no.”
Ilya stares at him, then drops the jacket in his hand on the floor. He shakes his head at Shane, “I don’t—” he hides his face behind his hand, taking a moment to gather himself as best he can, “What is this about, Shane? You ended it—this. Whatever it was. You ran out on us, then you come out to everyone and started dating someone, and got engaged, and—you’re the one about to get fucking married.”
“Not anymore,” Shane can’t help but mumble, defiantly.
Ilya breathes out in frustration. “I know I am the one who did not reply to your texts, Hollander, but what did you expect from me? I can’t—I could not keep talking to you,” he seemed to be barely holding it together, “What are you doing here?”
Shane holds his breath and reaches into his pocket. Finally pulling out the picture that he’d been carrying around all day, that in another timeline he was carrying as he got married to Cameron, and he holds it up. Ilya visibly stops breathing when his eyes land on their figures. “Do you remember that day?” he says as Ilya takes it from him and looks at it attentively. “It was the first time you stayed over, because it ended up being better than returning to the hotel after curfew,” he wraps his arms around himself, “I woke up before you, then woke you up…” he motions with his hand, “And we brushed our teeth together,” he motions again, toward the picture of them this time, knowing that that’s what it portrayed. “It was so… domestic. It felt like we were boyfriends.”
Ilya’s eyes snap up to meet with his in that exact moment.
But Shane—Shane is undeterred. He tightens his arms around himself, and says, “I think that was the day that I fell in love with you.” Ilya’s shoulders droop. “I don’t think I ever stopped, I think.” He shakes his head, “I don’t think. I know,” he amends.
He watches Ilya’s eyes fill with tears. “You left your fiancé. For me.”
“Yes.”
“You stopped your wedding, and drove all the way here, and—How did you find me?”
Shane bites his lip, “I went to your old place. Irina gave me this address.”
His face drops, “You met Irina?” Shane nods, smiling softly. “Fuck, Shane. You stopped your wedding for me. Because you…”
“Yes, Ilya. Because I love you,” he finishes, “I guess it felt dirty to marry someone else? When I realized I still love you. We were looking at photos last night with Rose—who says hello, by the way—and she found the album with the pictures of us, and I kept staring at that one all night, and turning it over and over in my head and then I started thinking. Am I with Cameron because I want to be or because I’m trying to prove to myself I can exist without you? Which is so silly because I’ve been with him for two years. But the more I thought about it, the more—” he’s cut off when Ilya rushes forward and basically crashes his lips onto Shane’s, capturing his lips in frantic kisses. He feels and hears Ilya mumbling Russian against him, incoherent solely because he doesn’t understand it.
But still, he revels in it, moving his body closer into Ilya’s. “Someone’s going to see us,” Shane mumbles against Ilya, remembering they’re on the doorstep of his Boston mansion.
“I do not care.” he replies. Shane hums when Ilya wraps one of his arms around Shane waist and pulls him flush against himself. When he pulls away a minute later, Ilya’s face is wet with tears. “I love you.”
Shane reaches up, awkwardly but reverent nonetheless, and wipes away the tears.
“Good,” Ilya’s eyebrows raise in a challenge. Shane, for the first time in years—four to be exact. Almost five—feels his body light up in excitement, in anticipation for what that look could possibly mean. He feels his face heat as he realizes that he wants Ilya to fuck him in his wedding suit to someone else.
He snaps back into the present when Ilya’s arm around his waist, pinches him once. Shane takes a deep breath, meets his eyes again and says, “I love you, too. Can I come in?”