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Shane has experienced a lot of embarrassment in his life, and he enjoys it as much as the next person, which is to say not at all.
He was embarrassed as a child when he fumbled passes on his first ever hockey team, when he was still so new to the sport he would come to love that he’d yet to settle into the groove of the game.
He was embarrassed when he had to give a presentation in class on a subject he didn’t care much about and subsequently didn’t study much for because he was honed in on hockey instead of studying for his classes.
He was embarrassed when he lost to Russia at the International Prospect Cup. He was embarrassed when he met Ilya Rozanov and stupidly offered to shake his hand twice and made awkward conversation. His embarrassment lessened when Rozanov didn’t just shake his hand a second time but also answered back, when he teased him, but in a way Shane could tell wasn’t cruel.
A lot of his feelings of embarrassment were also accompanied by feelings of shame.
The shame was there with the embarrassment when the kids on his youth team made comments about his mom and it was brushed off by coaches as ‘chirping’.
The shame was there with the embarrassment when his classmates asked him when he’d lighten up about a sport he’d never make into, because he was supposed to be better at math than sports, wasn’t he?
The shame was definitely there with the embarrassment when he covertly bought his first sex toy and thought about being fucked by another man, another man he absolutely should not be thinking about outside the context of hockey in any way at all.
The shame and the embarrassment were there a lot, for a long time, when it came to Rozanov. It wasn’t Rozanov’s fault; even though Shane often wished he could push all of the blame for his feelings onto him, Shane knew that continuing this thing that was happening between them was his own fault as well.
It took a very long time for those feelings about Rozanov to go away, and if Shane was honest with himself, some part of them still lingered in the back of his mind, especially when he thought about hockey and the frightening possibility of the public finding out about them.
But then Rozanov became Ilya. And that frightened him enough that he almost ruined everything but after, when they talked, really talked, the embarrassment and shame truly started to fade away.
Then when Ilya finally, finally came to the cottage, when they became ShaneandIlya, those horrible emotions really, truly began to fade.
At his cottage there was no embarrassment; between the two of them, there was no shame.
There were just two people who loved each other exactly the same.