Chapter Text
By the time the wedding night starts winding down the yard looks different.
Shoes kicked off beneath tables. Half-empty glasses glowing under the string lights. Someone’s abandoned jacket hanging off the back of a chair like it belongs there. The music has softened into something slow and nostalgic — background noise more than soundtrack, the kind of song nobody can quite name but everyone knows.
People are hugging goodbye in clumps.
My mom is crying again. My dad has his arm around her and is doing that thing where he stares at a fixed point in the middle distance and blinks a lot, which is as close as David Hollander gets to crying in public.
Hayden is tipsy and sentimental, which means he’s been telling the same story about Shane’s first year in Montreal to anyone who will stand still long enough. Jackie has threatened him with her eyes at least three times. He hasn’t noticed.
Dean finds me somewhere in the middle of all of it, slides his hand into mine without saying anything, and we stand there together and watch the last of the guests filter out through the gate. He smells like whiskey and summer and he’s been dancing in a way that suggests he left his self-consciousness somewhere around the open bar, and I’m glad he’s here, glad he came, glad that this is the person standing next to me tonight.
Eventually it’s just us.
The lights hum softly overhead. Crickets near the treeline. The lake beyond the yard is completely still, black and silver, like it’s been polished.
Ilya drops into a chair with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been performing ease for eight hours and can finally stop. Shane sits on the deck steps beside me, close enough that his knee brushes mine. His tie is long gone. His hair is a disaster from dancing. There’s a grass stain on his sleeve from something I didn’t witness but absolutely want to hear about later.
Dean drops into the chair on my other side, tips his head back, and exhales at the sky.
“Best wedding I’ve ever been to, boys,” he says.
“You owe me three thousand dollars,” Ilya replies, “for the beer and whiskey alone.”
“Shut up, Roz.”
Ilya smiles at the lights.
Shane looks out at the empty yard — the overturned programs, the abandoned centerpieces, the space where there was noise and movement and a hundred people just an hour ago — and goes quiet in that particular way of his where you can tell he’s trying to hold onto something before it slips.
“Everyone’s gone,” he says. Like he’s confirming it to himself.
“They are,” I say.
He nods slowly.
Ilya is looking up at the string lights, one arm draped over the side of the chair, completely still. Then he says, to no one in particular: “I did not think it would feel like this.”
“Like what,” Shane says.
“Peaceful.” A beat. “I thought I would feel sad that it was over. But I just feel—” He pauses, like he’s turning the word over to check it from all sides. “Happy.”
Shane reaches for his hand without looking. No hesitation, no scan of the yard. Just instinct. Their fingers lace together and neither of them says anything about it.
I watch it happen and feel something settle in my chest.
“I kept waiting for it to go wrong,” Shane admits quietly. “The whole day. Like someone would say something, or look at us the wrong way, and it would—” He trails off.
“But they didn’t,” I say.
“No.” He exhales. “They didn’t.”
We sit with that for a moment. The breeze moves through the yard, lifting the edges of the tablecloths, making the lights sway slightly. Somewhere inside the house a door shuts.
“You were beautiful tonight,” Ilya says.
Shane laughs under his breath. “You’re biased.”
“Extremely,” Ilya agrees, without apology.
I rest my head on Shane’s shoulder the way I’ve done a thousand times — on couches, in cars, in hospital waiting rooms, on the floor of his old apartment in Montreal when we were too tired to move. He doesn’t shift or adjust. Just lets me.
“You did it,” I tell him.
He’s quiet for a second. Then: “We did.”
Dean reaches over and squeezes my knee, just briefly. I glance at him and he’s watching Shane and Ilya with an expression that’s open and unguarded in the way he only gets when he thinks nobody’s paying attention to him specifically. He catches me looking and raises his eyebrows like what and I shake my head like nothing and he goes back to staring at the lights.
“When do you leave for Europe?” I ask eventually.
“Next week,” Shane says.
I groan. “What am I supposed to do without you both for a month?”
Dean makes a sound beside me. Not quite a laugh.
“What,” I say.
“You said a month.”
“They’re gone until September.”
“Yeah.” He points between me and the two of them. “I’m saying you won’t go that long without seeing them.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he says, with the careful casualness of someone who has been sitting on something for a while, “that you and I are going to Italy in two weeks.”
I stare at him.
“And then we meet up with these two in Spain a week after that.”
I turn to Shane. Then to Ilya. They both have the same expression — Ilya’s version of a smile, which is mostly just the absence of his usual blankness, and Shane’s version, which is barely contained.
“What,” I say.
“Surprise,” Ilya says.
“I can’t just—” I start. “What about the Foundation? The camps? I have—”
“Mom’s running the Foundation this year,” Shane says. “Jackie’s covering Montreal. Harris has Ottawa. Troy, Hayden, and J.J. have the coaching handled. Scott and Eric are doing a week of camp.”
I open my mouth.
Close it.
“Ilya’s idea,” Shane adds.
I look at Ilya.
He shrugs one shoulder. “We will need a chaperone,” he says. “Otherwise we will never leave the room.”
“So you cannot say no,” Shane says. “It’s already done.”
Dean slings an arm around my shoulders. “Pack sunscreen, Hollander.”
I look at him — really look at him, this person who apparently coordinated a European trip with my brother and his husband without saying a single word — and he’s grinning at me with that slightly smug, slightly sweet expression I have absolutely no defense against.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?” Shane says.
“Okay.” I lean back into Dean’s arm. “But I’m picking the restaurants in Italy.”
“Absolutely not,” Dean says.
“I’m picking the restaurants in Italy.”
“We’ll discuss it.”
“I’m picking them.”
Ilya opens one eye.
“She’s picking them,” he says. To no one in particular.
Shane laughs — really laughs, the kind that’s mostly exhale — and the sound of it carries out across the empty yard and out toward the water.
Dean’s arm is warm around my shoulders. Shane’s knee is still touching mine. Somewhere nearby Ilya is tipping his head back and closing his eyes like a man who has everything he needs and knows it.
I let myself stay right here, in this exact moment, for as long as it will hold us.