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Yuna Hollander could admit that maybe she wasn’t the calmest or most relaxed person. She got too way to into games of Yahztee, was obsessive about hockey in a way that most people didn’t understand, and was generally an intense person about most things in her life. She never did anything by halves. That was why David was so good for her. He was the calmest, quiet balance to her obsessive, intense nature.
So, when she heard the car pull up into the drive, the door slam, and running footsteps storming into the house, she was more than a little alarmed.
“David, what-“
He burst into the room, panting for breath. His eyes were wide and shocked.
Immediately, terrible thoughts flooded her brain of Shane injured; seeing her usually calm husband in such a state had her worst fears coming to the surface. And it hadn't been all that long ago since Shane had been in hospital; she was still a little on edge.
When he didn't respond, she pressed him. “David, what is it?”
He opened his mouth, flushed bright red and then closed it again.
“David, please, you’re kind of worrying me,”
David saw her panic and pulled her towards him. “No, no, it’s nothing bad. Shane is fine-“
Relief flooded through her and she shoved him lightly. “God, don’t scare me like that!”
“Sorry, Yuna,”
She pushed away from him, returning to the sofa where she’d been watching the pundits break down a Voyagers game from last season. “Well, what is it, then?”
She couldn’t imagine what on earth had the usually unshakeable man so flustered.
Suddenly, she shot up as a thought occurred to her. He’d gone to Shane’s to get washer tablets. The blushing. “Did Shane have someone at the cottage?”
David went tomato red. “You could say that.”
Yuna gasped. It had been so long since Shane had dated anyone. Rose had been almost a year ago. She’d not heard of anyone since, and both her and David had discussed the chances of Shane being gay because of his lack of said love life.
“Okay, tell me more!”
“Um. I don’t know how to say this really, but it was- um. It was that Ilya Rozanov. Um-“
She shot up off the sofa. “What?”
“I know, Jesus-“ David collapsed into the nearest chair and put his hands in his face. “What has Shane gotten himself into?”
“What?” All she could do was repeat herself.
“Look, I don’t know any more than you now. I just went in to get the washer tablets but I couldn’t find him so I went out back, you know, I thought he might be doing yoga or something-“
“And?”
“And, well - he wasn’t alone. He was with that hockey player, Rozanov. Kissing.”
“ ‘That hockey player?’ ” She repeated the words back to him. “You mean the boy our son has been competing with for almost a decade? That he’s supposedly hated for a decade? Hell, I’ve hated that boy for a decade! I mean, what the-“
Her tirade was interrupted by the sound of another car pulling into the drive.
“Shit! Do you think that’s Shane?” She ran to the window frantically. She spotted Shane’s car immediately, and could see Shane sat in the drivers seat next to fucking Rozanov. “Oh my God, Rozanov’s with him.”
“Yuna, calm down. Come, sit down. We have to be supportive,”
“Do not tell me to calm down when Shane’s been doing God knows what with Rozanov-“ The name was like dirt in her mouth.
A moment later, the door opened and a voice rang out. “Hello? It’s me…Shane.”
A second later and their son walked into the room like he was about to face the firing squad. Yuna’s heart wrenched at the plain fear on her son’s face.
Then, a second later and Ilya Rozanov followed behind her son and came into the room.
“Shane?”
Ilya Rozanov was in her living room. It was surreal.
Shane cleared his throat, his eyes flickering nervously between the two of them. “Mom. Dad. I- I think we should talk.”
A snarky comment about how that was possibly the understatement of the year rose in her throat but she bit it back.
“We forgot to buy dishwasher tablets. I just wanted to know if I could borrow some. I didn’t know you had… company.” At the last word, David’s eyes shifted to Rozanov, as if he too could also not believe this man was in their house. With Shane.
“Dad, it’s okay. I’m sorry. You… shouldn’t have found out that way.”
“Found out what, exactly?” Yuna was almost asking Rozanov, not Shane. She wanted to see what this man had to say for himself.
But it was Shane who responded. “Well, I… I’m gay. Which I was going to tell you. Soon. I just… sorry. I wish I’d told you.”
Neither of them responded. Yuna felt like the shock of it all had knocked her breath from her chest. She wanted to say something supportive, or that they’d kind of guessed, but she couldn’t get her lips to do anything than give a shaky smile. Her focus was still on Rozanov.
“Um, and this is,” Shane gestured to the man stood next to him. “Ilya.” Yuna’s eyes almost popped out her head at hearing her son call Rozanov, Ilya. “Rozanov. You probably know that.”
Yuna suppressed a frantic giggle at her son's awkwardness. Oh, Shane.
“Hi,” Rozanov said.
“And he’s been…visiting. He’s- we’re…um-“
“Lovers,” Rozanov interjected and Yuna almost chocked on her own tongue. She’d kind of known, from what David had said. But still. There was hearing it, and hearing it straight from Ilya Rozanov’s mouth.
Shane flushed bright red and cringed.
Yuna didn’t know what to say. She felt a sudden strange feeling as if she didn’t know her own son.
All from that very first day when Shane had met Rozanov for the first time, gotten in the car and called the other boy ‘a bit of a prick’, Yuna had disliked the Russian boy. And then the years of animosity had gone by, and Yuna had watched Rozanov taunt her son on and off the ice. She’d seen him body check him into the glass and skate off like nothing had happened. She’d watched Shane glare at Rozanov across the room when he was at events.
“But… you hate him!”
“No, I… I don’t. I mean. Sometimes I do, kind of. But mostly I… I love him. Actually.”
Okay, pump the breaks.
Yuna had been decently prepared for the fact that Shane was gay. She could even take the fact that maybe Shane and Rozanov were some kind of… something. But love?
Her head was spinning.
“You…what?”
“Can we just...sit, maybe? I’m sorry. I know this is a lot at once. I didn’t want this to be how I told you. At all.”
Yuna didn’t move. Luckily, David seemed to take over and gestured for the two boys to take a seat on the two chairs opposite them.
Yuna had been so sure that they were a family who really, truly knew each other.
Obviously, she knew she didn’t know everything about her son’s life. He was twenty-five, for god’s sake. And there were some things a mother didn’t need to know about her son.
But this. She thought she’d know if her own son was in love.
“Shane...” Yuna began slowly. “I think we both...suspected...that you might be...gay.”
“You did?” Shane seemed surprised.
“Yes, well. We didn’t know for certain, obviously. We just thought it might be a possibility.”
“Geez. I had no idea you thought that.”
“We know you pretty well,” She almost laughed after she’d spoken the words. Clearly, not as well as she’d thought.
“What we did not suspect, was that you were...friendly...with Mr. Rozanov here.” David said.
“Ilya,”
David nodded. “Ilya, then.”
Yuna was not prepared to call this boy anything but Rozanov.
“It’s...a long story. And it doesn’t even make sense to us,” Shane said.
“None,” Ilya agreed.
“When did this happen?” Yuna burst out, suddenly. The last decade was flashing through her head, and she was trying to pick out a moment - anything at all - that could have hinted at the possibility of what had been going on. “Wait, was it the All-Star Game? You were on the same team—”
“No,” Shane said. “It was...already going on then.”
Surely not.
David huffed. “You sure fooled us. And...everyone else.”
Did anyone else know about this?
“So, when?”
“Since, um, our rookie year,” Shane mumbled and Yuna almost thought she’d misheard. But no. Since their rookie year. That was almost the entire time they’d known each other.
Ten years.
“You can’t have been...since your rookie season?”
Ten fucking years.
“No,” Ilya said. “That’s not right. Was before that.”
God, she was going to have a heart attack. She was sure of it.
Before their rookie year. Jesus.
“Before that?”
“A little before,” Ilya clarified. “Summer before.”
Nothing made any sense. That far back. But Shane had truly seemed to hate Rozanov as much as Yuna did. She remembered them both calling him an asshole, and it had truly seemed like he’d meant it. And she’d seen over the years how Shane had scowled and rolled his eyes at anything to do with Rozanov.
“You’ve been...in love this whole time?”
“No!” Shane said.
“God, no,” Ilya said at the same time.
“But then...oh- I see.”
Oh.
She was sure her face was in flames, and, looking at Shane, he wasn’t faring much better.
“Anyway, the point is, we’re...together. Sort of. Or we’d like to be. If it wasn’t basically impossible.”
Oh, Shane. Her heart lurched in her chest. She couldn’t bear to think about the amount of hiding and lying her own son had done for over a decade. It must have been lonely.
Especially with fucking Rozanov as the only other person who knew. She narrowed her eyes as she watched the stoic expression on the Russian’s face.
“I just don’t understand. How could this have even happened between you? Weren’t there any nice men in Montreal, Shane?”
No, her son had to go and choose the notorious womaniser, party-hard, asshole that was Ilya Rozanov. From everything she’d seen, that boy was nothing but trouble.
“Probably,” Shane muttered.
“Do your teammates know about...this?” David interjected suddenly, as if it had suddenly occurred to him.
“No! No, no one does. No one. This is top secret, all right?”
Well, that was hardly surprising.
Yuna was still too shell-shocked to say anything further. David clearly was ahead of her in terms of computing this situation as he huffed out a laugh and stood.
“Would anyone like a beer? I could use a beer.”
“Yes,”
“Definitely,”
Alcohol seemed like a good idea. “Is that the strongest thing we have?”
She leant back into the sofa and shook her head, her gaze shifting back from one to the other. Shane was smiling a little now, clearly relieved that they were taking this okay. Yuna couldn’t read the expression on Rozanov’s face. He seemed as inscrutable as usual.
“I just... I just can’t believe any of this is real.”
They looked as they normally did. If she hadn’t heard the word ‘love’ from Shane’s own lips, and heard what David had witnessed, she’d never guess just by looking at the two of them that there was any kind of romance going on.
She narrowed her eyes at Rozanov. He was famous for being a womanizer and she’d seen numerous articles over the years of his conquests that never seemed to last more than a night. And Shane was in love with him. But she’d not heard any sort of reciprocation from Rozanov.
“I know,” Shane said.
David returned with the drinks for everyone, and sat himself back down next to Yuna. “All this time. You’ve been holding this secret inside. The whole time.”
Yuna knew David well enough that she could tell he was trying to hold in his emotions at thinking about their son having to hide for so long
She felt the same way, but she couldn’t quite process anything other than shock just yet.
A sudden terrifying thought occurred to her.
“You didn’t ever... you didn’t ever let him win, did you, Shane?”
Apparently this was a funny thing to say because Rozanov started laughing and David huffed a laugh, shaking his head. She didn’t understand why they found this so amusing! It was important information. This was Shane’s career they were talking about.
“Yuna!” David put his head in his hands, as if he couldn’t believe she’d asked.
“God, Mom! No!” Shane looked insulted.
Well, that was good.
She didn’t know if she’d be able to forgive for willingly throwing a game for Rozanov, even if he was in love with the man.
“He does not need to let me win.” Rozanov said, as cocky as ever.
“I would never,” Shane said quickly. “The team comes first. Always. And besides, I like beating him.”
She wasn’t sure what her face was saying but Shane continued so it clearly wasn’t a convinced expression. “When you and Dad play Yahtzee, do you let him win?”
“Never,”
Then she smiled. Things were coming into focus a little. She was pleased that Shane wasn’t so over his head that he would jeopardise his career. And Shane comparing himself and Rozanov to Yuna and David… clearly this was even more serious than ‘I love you’.
“Is your plan to just keep doing this? Keeping this a secret? Until you retire? Forever?” David asked.
Ah, she loved him. Ever practical David.
“Maybe. I mean, yes. Probably.”
“Oh, Shane. Honestly? I don’t see another way. I wish I did.”
Her lips pulled down into a sad smile that was mirrored by her son. She wished this wasn’t the case, but it was the NHL. Her and David had discussed this before, when they’d talked about Shane potentially being gay. The reality was that it just wasn’t done. Sure, Scott Hunter had done it, but this was different. They’d had years being pitted against each other as notorious rivals. People would question them the way Yuna herself had questioned them. Hunter’s relationship was outside of hockey, this relationship was so intertwined with their careers that it would be almost impossible to separate it.
“I know. We know. It’s not something we can announce.”
“I have to say,” David said, turning the focus to Rozanov. “I’m surprised about you, Ilya. You’ve always had such a reputation as a, you know, a ladies’ man.”
That was exactly what Yuna had been thinking. She was happy David had voiced those thoughts. She wanted to know exactly what Rozanov’s intentions were with her son.
“Is not untrue,” Ilya said.
“Ilya likes both,” Shane said.
“Oh,” She briefly looked at David, checking if this new was as alarming to him as they were to him. She didn’t know the exact ins and outs of this relationship, but she knew Shane wasn’t the type of man to be okay with an open relationship.
She felt a glare forming on the face at the thought.
If this boy cheated on her son she would hunt him down and beat him with his own hockey stick.
Then, Rozanov spoke up. “I have been with lots of women. That was not...fake. But...” He looked at Shane, and all of a sudden it was clear. His expression had changed. She saw it - Rozanov was in love with her son. “I have only been in love with one person.”
Oh.
“Me too. Just one.”
Tears pricked at the back of her eyes and she cleared her throat.
God, what were they going to do? She couldn’t bear the thought of her son carrying on like this. It wasn’t sustainable, surely.
“All right, so what’s the plan?” Yuna said, sitting up and clasping her hands together. “We’ve got a problem, let’s solve it.”
The baffled look on Rozanov’s face was extremely amusing.
“First of all, have you talked to Scott Hunter?”
“I have,” Ilya said. “But not about...us.”
“I emailed him,” Shane added. “I just, y’know, said I appreciated his bravery, or whatever. I didn’t tell him about me. Or about Ilya.”
“Hmm. Well, he probably couldn’t help. Not with this situation.”
“He would probably be very confused about us,” Ilya said.
“Confused is a word for it,” David said, amusement twinkling in his eyes.
“I will say that, what Scott did, when he, um, kissed his boyfriend? That changed something inside me. It was...huge. It made me...want to try. Made me want to be braver, and to let myself try to be happy.”
Yuna watched as her son looked at Rozanov, disgustingly sappy. Rozanov responded with an even softer look. God, how on earth had she never noticed this before? Now her eyes had been opened to it all, she couldn’t stop noticing all these little clues. The way they looked at each other. The way Rozanov was constantly reaching out to touch Shane, looking at him, encouraging him.
“Yes,” Ilya said. “Me too.”
“We have one idea. We’ve discussed the idea of the two of us setting up a charity in honour of Ilya’s mum and helping young kids to play hockey. That would give us a reason to be seen together, and we can kind of broach the idea of the two of us being friends rather than rivals. And Ilya is going to leave Boston. To move to Ottowa. So we can be together.”
For probably the sixth time tonight, her son had utterly knocked the wind out of her. The first part of the plan, fine. It seemed sensible, and made sense long term. And it was a great idea to start a charity. But Rozanov was leaving Boston? He was just giving up his career? Abandoning his own team?
“That,” Dad said, considering, “isn’t bad.”
“You would leave Boston?” She asked, stunned. “For Shane?”
“Yes.”
Yuna frowned.
“Oh my god!” Shane exclaimed. “You’re actually conflicted, aren’t you, Mom?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re bothered by his lack of loyalty to his team!”
“Well!”
“My mom, by the way, cares about hockey a little too much.”
She frowned. She didn’t think that was true. It was a valid concern! Loyalty was an important attribute in a potential partner.
“Now I know where you get it.”
Yuna was barely listening anymore. Ilya Rozanov was willing to leave the famed Boston Bears for Shane, and for Ottawa of all teams. Ottawa!
Yuna had a nostalgic kind of love for Ottawa. It was the team she’d grown up supporting, and being from Ottawa she would always have a soft spot for them. But even she could admit that they were not a good team. Not for someone like Rozanov, anyway, who - as painful as it was to say - was an incredible player. This would halt his career considerably. Playing for Boston, Rozanov would be almost guaranteed great money, intense fans and constant fame, and at least a few more chances at the Stanley Cup.
What was he guaranteed at Ottawa? Half empty stadiums and more losses than wins. His career would never be the same.
But he was willing to sacrifice this for her son.
“Shane?” The concern in Rozanov’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts. She’d never heard the Russian’s voice so soft, nor so worried. “Are you okay?”
She looked up, and saw Shane was shaking slightly. His head was in between his knees and his breathing was rapid. She moved, as if to go towards him, but Rozanov was already there.
He crouched by her son, a hand on his knee and another lifting his face gently to bring his eyes up to meet his own.
“Shane?”
“I’m okay,” Shane said weakly. “I’m just...freaking out. Don’t worry about me.”
“We are good here, yes? Your family is here. And your boyfriend. And we are okay here.”
Shane raised his head slightly. “Boyfriend?”
“I think, yes?”
“Yes.”
Rozanov was still crouched by her son, rubbing Shane’s hands with his thumbs in a soft, calming gesture. They were looking into each other’s eyes as if she and David weren’t even there.
God, it was so intimate. She suddenly could believe everything that had been said. That Shane and Rozanov had been in a long-term relationship, that they loved each other, and that Rozanov would actually leave the Boston Bears when it came to it. It truly wasn’t just an empty promise.
She knew this now. Just from the familiarity of such a gentle, caring touch.
What a rollercoaster of emotions; she’d gone from heart-attack inducing shock, to suspicion, to annoyance, and now to heart bursting happiness that her son had found someone who was so clearly right for him.
And this had been going on for so long.
“Since their rookie season, I can’t believe it.”
Looking at them now, I kind of can,” David responded.
And, actually, he was right.
She could believe it.