Chapter Text
San Francisco, June 2016
“I’m sorry, Mr Hollander, but we have no booking in your name.”
The woman at the check-in desk is the politest shade of rude Ilya has ever seen. A quality many airline employees seem to share, in his experience. He wonders vaguely if they train for it or if the profession just attracts people with the knack.
To be fair, it is late on a Sunday night and Ilya himself isn’t in the best of moods. He and Shane have just come from a charity gala where they shook many hands and smiled with visible teeth and answered tiresome questions about how they could be such fierce competitors on the ice while remaining friends off it. No one ever seems to understand that the competitiveness is what they like best about each other.
Well. Competitiveness is one of the things he likes about Shane. There are others.
The airport is busy despite the late hour, churning with loud and tired people. The lights are stark and glaring and there’s a headache brewing behind Ilya’s eyes.
Beside him, Shane seethes in Canadian. Ilya can see the strain beneath his politeness, the sort that usually only comes out when reporters ask him ham-fisted questions about representation. There’s none of that here, though. Shane’s just pissed.
“I booked the seats three weeks ago,” he says, tightly. You incompetent fucking moron, he does not say, though his tone heavily implies it. Ilya is impressed. “I have the booking confirmation number. I have a boarding pass. What is the problem?
“The problem, sir, is that neither your name nor Mr Rozanov’s are listed on the manifest for this flight. In fact, I have—” She pauses, frowning. “I have… oh. Um. One moment, please.” She picks up a telephone from next to her monitor and begins to mutter into it. Ilya stops listening. He leans on the check-in desk and looks at Shane.
He looks like shit. For him, that is. Which means that he looks fucking devastating, beautiful in the way that still lights Ilya up inside, even now, more than seven years after they first met. Still ignites that itch beneath his skin and in his fingers that long to touch, especially when Shane is this tense and this tired. Ilya wants to soothe him. His shoulders are high and tight, his eyes red-rimmed; they’re here in the San Francisco airport to catch a red-eye to Vegas but—
“Hey,” Ilya says. He gives in to the urges of his itchy fingers and swipes a gentle thumb across Shane’s cheekbone, over the freckles that can still, if he lets them, take him back to a frigid Saskatchewan parking lot and a pretty Canadian boy who turned his world on its head just by shaking his hand. “Flight is called red-eye but you are not supposed to take this literally, yes?”
“Fuck off,” Shane mutters, but there’s no heat behind it. “I’m fucking tired is all. Tonight was exhausting. I’ll sleep on the plane.”
Ilya isn’t so sure about that. If the frantic nature of the check-in woman’s whispering is anything to go by, nobody will be getting on any planes anytime soon. He lets his fingers trail down Shane’s cheek as he moves his hand away, a small touch to ease the ever-present hunger within him.
It doesn’t ease. It never does.
On a hunch, he takes out his phone, finds an airport hotel with vacancies and books a room for each of them. Ilya is a creature of intuition. He trusts his gut, on-ice and off, and right now his gut is telling him something is very not right at this airport. If he’s wrong he’ll eat the cost of the rooms, no big deal.
He slips his phone back in his pocket just as the check-in woman hangs up hers and looks at them with the classic airline-employee rude-as-fuck polite smile. “I’m so sorry,” she lies, “there seems to have been a glitch in our system. Just let me—” Her fingers hover over her keyboard and then the whole airport goes dark.
Not just dark but dark. Dark as in all the screens blink off, all the lights go out. Dark and silent, as the ambient buzz of electricity audible only in its absence, vanishes. Then people start to yell.
The check-in woman’s desk phone rings. A grounded landline, Ilya thinks, a good thing to have in an emergency. The woman answers, voice tight, then listens for a minute. By now, people are crowding in around them, pushing and shouting. Shane looks ready to combust. Ilya angles his body to keep the worst of the crowd off him but short of actually wrapping Shane in his arms—if fucking only—there’s not much he can do.
The woman hangs up the phone then holds up her hands. “Everyone, please,” she says, “please listen. Please. Everyone—”
“Everyone quiet!” Ilya bellows, in the voice he only uses when one of his teammates does something grievously stupid. “Stop talking and listen.”
A brief, shocked silence falls, during which the woman manages to say, “There’s been a catastrophic failure of the airport’s computer system. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
The crowd erupts in fury. Ilya grabs Shane by the arm and pulls him away, out of the mass of people and towards the exit for the taxi queue. “We should get a taxi now,” he says, “before everyone else realises they are not going anywhere tonight.”
Shane is plainly too tired to argue. “Where are we going?” he asks.
“Airport Hyatt. I have booked us rooms.”
“Already?”
“I had a hunch.”
Shane says nothing more. He trusts Ilya’s hunches.
They are silent in the cab and then at the hotel check-in, which goes much more smoothly than its airport counterpart. Hard to go less smoothly of course, but they actually get checked in this time and soon are standing in front of their rooms, across the hallway from each other.
“Get some sleep,” Ilya tells Shane as he hands him his key. “In the morning we will figure out what to do.”
“Thanks, Ilya,” Shane says, with that smile that wrecks him, every fucking time. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Ilya watches him unlock his door and go inside. Watches the door close behind him, hears the click of its latch.
Thinks, You will never have to find out.
Toronto, June 2010
“When they tell you you do commercial with me and not just alone?”
Ilya kept his face carefully neutral but his eyes on Hollander were intent.
“I don’t know, like, uh, two days ago.” Hollander didn’t look at him. Not fully. He looked in glances, quick and covert. Not like earlier, fake facing off with him and laughing. Not like the surprise, the flare of something in his eyes when Ilya had called him pretty.
Not like the hotel gym on draft night. The intensity of Hollander’s gaze on him as they’d sat sweating at each other still lived in Ilya’s chest. He wanted to feel that intensity again. He wanted to fucking taste it.
“Why,” Hollander continued. “When did they tell you?”
Ilya produced his best casual nonchalance, his finest careless shrug. “No, they tell me nothing,” he said, watching Hollander closely. “Was my idea.”
There was the intensity. Hollander looked up sharply, his pretty eyes wide and his pretty mouth open, a faint flush beneath his pretty, pretty freckles. Ilya’s heartbeat sped up. That was interest there, he was sure of it.
“Shane!” the director called, before Ilya could say anything more, and Hollander skated away.
Half an hour later, his eager, hopeful anticipation was gone, replaced by an antsy frustration. Hollander had left the ice twenty minutes ago and Ilya itched to follow him. He wanted to get back to the locker room while Hollander was still there. Ideally, he wanted to catch Hollander in the showers and just—push him a little. See if the interest Ilya was now all but certain Hollander shared could be fanned into something more. Then maybe the itch that had sat under Ilya’s skin for a year and a half now could finally be scratched.
“Okay, Ilya, let’s try that one more time,” the director said.
Ilya gritted his teeth.
When at last he was released, he hurried to the locker room as fast as he was able. He shed his gear in record time, grabbed a towel then opened the door that led to the showers—and nearly collided with Hollander on the other side. He had a towel wrapped around his hips but his hair was still wet and so was his skin, little droplets clinging to the muscular curves of his chest and shoulders. Ilya’s breath caught.
“Oh, hey.” Hollander smiled a bit awkwardly and eased himself around Ilya. He went over to his locker and opened it. “You all finished?”
“Yes,” Ilya said.
“Cool.” Hollander unhooked the towel from his waist and rubbed his hair with it, then ran it down his body. Ilya watched helplessly. “So this was fun,” Hollander said. “Thanks for arranging it.”
“Sure.”
Hollander tossed the towel aside and pulled on a pair of boxers. Ilya caught sight of his dick, just a glimpse before it was covered up again, and he mourned.
“You here with your parents?” Hollander asked him, as he reached for a pair of pants.
What? “No.”
“Oh, really? You’re by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Oh wow, um. Okay. I didn’t—huh.” Ilya waited. He assumed a point was coming eventually. “Listen.” Hollander seemed to be concentrating very hard on his clothes. “If you were, I don’t know. Looking for some company tonight, my parents and I are having dinner in the hotel later. You could join us if you want.”
Ilya stared at him. This was so unexpected he almost forgot Hollander was still shirtless. Almost. “You are asking me to dinner with your parents?”
“Kind of? I guess?” Hollander shrugged, then pulled on a shirt. “Only if you don’t have plans.”
“What plans would I have?”
“I don’t know, dude. That’s why I asked.”
He’d had plans, or hopes for plans at least, but that was fucked now that Hollander was fully clothed. Ilya’s plans at present were to go back to his room and hope something good was on TV, and that his father or Alexei wouldn’t call him. Both long shots, if he was honest.
“Okay,” he said. Fuck it. More time with Hollander meant there might still be an opportunity to make something happen with him. “Why the fuck not.”
“Cool.” Hollander smiled at him, bright and genuine. Ilya’s knees went weak. “Meet us at the restaurant at seven.”
Ilya arrived at the entrance to the hotel restaurant at the appointed time, to find Hollander and the Hollander Parents awaiting him. He approached them with caution and a quick, careful assessment of their demeanour. Hollander himself was looking mildly exasperated, his mother wary. His father however smiled warmly at Ilya and Ilya, in relief, smiled back.
“Hello,” he said. “I, um.” He held out a bouquet of flowers. They weren’t much, just from a little shop down the street, but at least he wasn’t empty-handed. “Please,” he said.
Hollander’s mother blinked at him. “You brought us flowers?”
Chrysanthemums, so Ilya’s Russian-English dictionary informed him. Similar to the Russian word but different enough that he had no intention of attempting to pronounce it.
“Brought for you, yes,” he told Hollander’s mother. “Is polite. But they came only in six and twelve. In Russia these numbers are for funerals. So—” He plucked one of the flowers from the bouquet, a deep orange one, and offered it to Hollander’s father. “One for you.”
“Oh!” Hollander Father looked surprised, then pleased. “Thank you.”
“Yes, um. Thank you,” said Hollander Mother as she accepted the bunch of eleven chrysanthemums. “That’s very kind.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever given me a flower before,” Hollander Father remarked.
“Father’s Day 1991,” Hollander Mother said drily, and he laughed.
“Of course. But Shane was what, a month old then? That time was a bit of a blur. I’m surprised you remember.”
“I gave them to you!” she retorted, just as the restaurant’s host called their name.
“Of course, but—”
“Your table is ready,” the host said, and the Hollander Parents’ voices faded as they followed him into the restaurant. Ilya looked at Hollander, who shrugged.
“They’re like that,” he said. “Come on, we’d better sit.”
When they arrived at the table, Hollander Mother had moved past the topic of Father’s Day flowers.
“So,” she said, eyes narrowing on Ilya as he sat down. “Tell me, um. Ilya? Is it?”
“Ilya,” Ilya pronounced.
“Ill-ya,” she repeated carefully. “Right. Well, Ilya, are you looking forward to Boston?”
Something about the question, the way she asked it, felt like a test. Of what, Ilya did not know. “Yes, I think,” he said, which was the truth. “Hollander says is nice place.”
Hollander Mother smiled. Almost involuntarily, Ilya thought. “You should really call him Shane, at least at dinner,” she said. “We’re all Hollanders here. I’m Yuna.”
“Oh,” said Ilya. “Um.” He wasn’t sure he was ready for first names with Hollander’s mother.
“And I’m David,” said Hollander Father.
“Okay,” Ilya said. They were obviously trying, the least he could do was try too. “Um, Shane said that Boston is nice place. So yes. Looking forward.”
“Shane’s so excited about Montreal, aren’t you, Shane? They’ve been his favourite team since he was little, and—”
“No, they’re your favourite team,” Holl-Shane interrupted, a bit sharply. Ilya looked over at him in surprise. “Mine is Ottawa.”
“Ottawa, Shane, really.” Yuna looked at Ilya like she expected him to share her disbelief. “They’ve never won anything.”
Shane’s expression was stubborn and a bit sullen. “They don’t invest enough in their coaching,” he said, “and—”
“Montreal is Original Six.” Yuna interrupted in her turn. Her voice was firm. Ilya got the sense that this was a well-trodden argument. “They’re a storied franchise. You’ll do amazing there, sweetie.”
“Of course.” Shane glared at the menu. “I’d do amazing anywhere.”
Flat silence met this declaration, as no one seemed to know how to respond to it. Ilya wasn’t sure why. It was the simple truth. Shane was fast, smart, an intricate playmaker. Poetry in motion on the ice. The best player Ilya had ever seen, besides himself. They were both going to do amazingly.
“I think I will score fifty goals this season,” he declared loudly, to break the stretching tension.
It broke. All three Hollanders turned to stare at him. Ilya treated them to his most obnoxious grin.
“Well!” Yuna declared. “That’s, ah. A lot.”
“Yes,” Ilya agreed. “You think I cannot do it?”
“Well, as a rookie, Ilya—”
Ilya waved this away. “Boston is old team with old players, yes? Some maybe original from Original Six.”
David choked on his water and from the corner of his eye, Ilya could see Shane grin.
“So I will have plenty of ice time, I think. Plenty of time to score many goals. Fifty. At least.”
“Oh, at least,” said Yuna.
“Yes.” Ilya leaned in closer, holding her gaze. “How many you think Shane will score?”
“Sixty,” Yuna shot back. “At least.”
“Mom!”
“What? You think you can’t?”
“I—that’s not—stop making promises I have to keep!”
“I will make you bet,” Ilya said, to draw attention back to himself and away from any further argument between Shane and his mother. “All of you. I score fifty goals this season, I buy you all dinner. I score more than Shane even if not fifty, I buy you all dinner. Shane scores more than me then he buys everyone dinner and goes on television to say I am best rookie league has ever seen and he only won scoring race by luck.”
“Oh fuck you, Rozanov!”
“Ah, ah!” Ilya held up a finger. “Ilya.”
Shane was flushed again. His freckles stood out like little stars across his cheeks. “Fine,” he said. “Fuck you, Ilya.”
Oh, how Ilya wished he would.
“If you score fifty, or more than Shane, you buy dinner,” Yuna counter-offered. “But if Shane beats you by even one goal, I will buy dinner and you go on television to say he is the best rookie the league has ever seen and you never stood a chance of beating him.”
Ilya grinned at her. “Deal.”
“Shane,” said Yuna, eyes lit with the same competitive fever Ilya had already grown so fond of in her son, “you had better not lose.”
“Mom, no, don’t shake his—hand,” Shane finished with a sigh as his mother did just that.
“A deal it is,” Yuna said. Her handshake was firm, her hand slender but strong. “I look forward to dinner at your expense.”
“So do I,” Ilya returned. “At yours.”
Yuna held his hand for a beat, watching him closely. Then she laughed. “Where’s that waiter?” she demanded. “I’m hungry.”
And Ilya knew that, somehow, Shane Hollander’s mother had just become his friend.
“That was a cute trick, giving my dad the flower,” Shane said later in the hotel bar, after dinner was over and his parents had gone to their room. He had hung back, claiming he wasn’t tired yet, and so, of course, had Ilya. “Mom really liked it.”
“What can I say, Shane?” Ilya was really enjoying saying his name. “I know what women like.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
Something in his tone Ilya couldn’t quite interpret. It sounded—wry? Almost a little bit scornful? For a minute he hesitated, wondering if he really had read Shane’s interest correctly. There wasn’t any trace now of what he thought he’d seen before. But they were alone-ish at last and wouldn’t be for much longer, and images of Shane bare and dripping were still fresh in his mind, so Ilya pushed any nagging doubts aside and plunged ahead.
A little bit too quickly.
“What is your room number?” he asked.
Shane blinked at him. “Fourteen ten.” He frowned. “Why? What’s yours?”
Ilya could almost hear the screech in his brain as he pivoted from trying to come up with the right words to get both of them up to fourteen ten and scrambled for some that would sound clever in response to this unexpected volley. He failed. “Eleven nineteen,” he heard himself say, then cursed his idiocy.
“I think Mom and Dad are on twelve.” Shane seemed to see nothing odd in this random exchange of room numbers. Ilya groped for a way to try again, to make his intentions clearer, as Shane looked at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I have an early flight tomorrow.”
“Me too. But—”
“We should get some sleep then.” Shane finished the last of his drink—ginger ale—and got to his feet. “Come on, let’s grab the elevator.”
In the elevator, Shane pressed the button for fourteen and for eleven, and Ilya’s hopes for the evening sank down deep into the pit of his stomach. He watched from the corner of his eye as Shane leaned back against the wall, eyes drifting shut, and stifled a sigh. He was so fucking pretty, in makeup or without it. Ilya wanted to stroke his cheek. More than his cheek. Fuck, he just wanted to touch him.
He wanted that far too much to give up on it now.
“We should go out,” he said.
Shane opened his eyes. “What?”
“When Montreal plays Boston. In November. We should go out, after the game.”
“Oh. Okay. Um. Sure. But like, we’ll be playing on different teams.”
Ilya rolled his eyes. “Oh thank you for explaining this, Hollander, I did not understand how hockey works. Give me your phone.”
“What?”
“You have phone?”
“Yeah.”
Ilya held out his hand. “Give.”
Shane reached into his pocket and produced his phone. Ilya took it, entered his number into the contacts. Then he sent himself a text.
“Now you have my number,” he said. “When we play in November I will text you. We will go out. Get drunk, maybe.”
“I don’t really drink.”
Ilya reached up and patted his cheek, just as the elevator arrived on floor eleven. “We will see,” he said. He let his thumb brush over Shane’s freckles, just lightly, as he took his hand away.
“See you in November.”
San Francisco, June 2016
The next morning brings the news that San Francisco International Airport will be out of commission for at least the next three days. Catastrophic system failure, just as the rude-polite check-in woman said. Flights are being re-routed to and from Oakland, but that’s way more volume than the smaller airport is equipped to handle so delays are piling up and travellers advised not to fly if they can avoid it.
Ilya can avoid it.
“You should see about a flight,” he tells Shane as they have breakfast in the hotel restaurant. “Maybe you can charter one?”
“For such a short flight, seems like a waste,” Shane says. “Besides, I doubt there are any charter planes in Oakland. We’ll just have to—wait. What do you mean ‘you’?”
“What?”
“You said just now, ‘you’ should see about a flight. Meaning me, not us. What are you going to do?”
Ilya shrugs. “I thought I might drive.”
“Drive? Drive what?”
“I can rent a car. Or better, buy one. California coastal road is supposed to be one of the best in the world. I will buy a car, drive down it. Then to Vegas.”
“Won’t that take a long time?”
“Two days, probably. But I do not have to be in Vegas until the awards. I have time.”
“Don’t you want to be in Vegas before the awards?” Shane inquires of the rubbery pile of eggs on his plate. He doesn’t look at Ilya. “You usually do.”
Usually, Ilya parties it up in Vegas before the awards, one final hurrah before he has to go spend his summer in Moscow. Lately, though, a lot of the bloom has gone off that particular rose. Ilya’s tired, not in his body so much but in his soul. Tired of the clubs and the parties and the meaningless hookups that have defined his life outside hockey up until now. Tired of chasing highs that take longer to reach and fade away quicker, leaving him feeling hollow, nothing inside him but the hopeless yearning that lives in his chest and has for years.
“This year I don’t,” he says. “This year I want to drive down California then through the desert. In a convertible, I think. Mustang, traditional American car. I will be sad cliche of Kerouac-reading college boy, as Sveta called her last boyfriend.”
Shane frowns. “Wasn’t her last boyfriend a hedge-fund manager?”
“That was one before last. Last one was cold brew and rock climbing enthusiast who read her poetry in bed. His own.”
“Oof.” Shane winces. “And you want to be like this guy?”
“Only in that I want to drive along western American roads in Mustang convertible.”
Shane considers this for a minute, then he says, “Can I come?”
Ilya looks at him with a surprise that manages to mask the way his heart leaps then races, like it’s trying to escape the prison of his ribs. “Don’t you have an ad to shoot in Vegas?” He knows Shane does, it was the reason for the red-eye.
Shane executes quite a convincing approximation of Ilya’s careless Slavic shrug. “That’s fucked now, obviously,” he says. “It was supposed to start this morning but even if I caught the first available flight I wouldn’t make it there till late afternoon. And that’s at the earliest. I’ll just ask Mom to reschedule. Which means I don’t have to be in Vegas until the awards either.”
Ilya and his racing heart grapple for a minute with the notion of days in a car just him and Shane, the sun on their faces and the wind in their hair, gorgeous vistas of surging seas and rocky coasts spread out before them. It’s the worst idea ever, latest in the very long line of terrible, Shane-centric ideas that have been making Ilya suffer for years now. Just like always, he wants it far too badly to care. “Yes,” he says. “Of course you can come. If you want.”
Shane hesitates for a beat, prodding at his beleaguered rubber eggs. Then he nods. “I want.”
Nashville, All-Stars 2011
Ilya left the press conference feeling frustrated.
He’d been working so fucking hard on his English and he knew it had gotten better, much better now than even a few months ago. But there were so many things he still struggled with, like unfamiliar accents or situations when he couldn’t see the speaker’s mouth. Or questions like whatever the fuck that one had been.
He didn’t like that he’d needed Shane to rescue him. He loved that Shane had done it. But he hated that he’d had to.
“Hey.” Ilya heard the voice behind him and turned to find Shane frowning and concerned. “You okay?”
No, not really. “Yes,” Ilya said.
“Those were some dumb fucking questions.” Shane actually looked angry.
“You answered them.” In English and in French. Ilya scowled at the memory.
“Dude, you know how much media training my mom makes me do.” He hesitated and Ilya braced himself. He knew what was coming. “You also know she’d arrange some for you if you wanted.”
“I do not want.”
Shane threw up his hands. “Then what are you bitching about?”
“Nothing. Fuck.”
Shane sighed. Ilya sulked. They stared at each other for a bit, then Shane said, “Look, why don’t you come to my room after the team dinners tonight? We can watch a movie or something, catch up.”
Catch up made it sound like they hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Which they hadn’t. But that didn’t mean there had been no contact. Long gone were the days immediately following the CCM shoot, when Ilya had stared at Shane’s number in his phone and wondered if it would be weird to text him before the season even started. These days they texted regularly, even talked on the phone sometimes. And after both their games this season, they’d hung out together. It was pretty well established now that they were friends.
Friends who hadn’t actually been alone with each other since Toronto, more than six months earlier.
“Yes.” Ilya said. He tried to sound coolly detached but knew he didn’t. He also knew that Shane would not notice. “Okay. Sounds good.”
“Cool.” Shane smiled that fucking smile of his that sent Ilya’s heartbeat into overdrive. “Thirteen fifty two. Nine o’clock?”
Ilya nodded.
By ten past nine, Ilya was stretched out on the bed in Shane’s room. His feet were bare, close enough to Shane’s white-socked ones to see that they were the same size. Perfectly matched, like nearly every other thing about them. Ilya both loved and hated thinking about that.
Shane was fiddling with the TV remote. “Svetlana get settled into her new place okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, good. She says you must come over when you are in Boston next.” He glanced over with a little smile. “She will throw you a party.”
“No, no more parties,” Shane said immediately. “The one you threw was bad enough.”
Ilya feigned deep offence. “Was not bad,” he protested.
“Me, Hayden, Svetlana, half of the Raiders and like three hundred models plus a shit ton of vodka and no food does not equal good, Ilya.”
“This is matter of opinion.”
“Hayd puked three times on the way back to the hotel.”
Ilya grinned at him. “Party definitely was a success, then.”
Shane sighed and rolled his eyes. “I would like to see Sveta’s new place, though. Is it nice?”
“That you will have to tell me, Mr Real Estate.”
Shane smirked. “Can’t be worse than yours.”
“There is nothing wrong with my apartment.”
“You’ve got a funny definition of the word ‘nothing’,” retorted Shane. “Maybe look that one up again.”
From anyone else, a remark like that would drag Ilya deep into his own head, right down into the dark well of his insecurities. But he knew Shane didn’t mean it the way it sounded. “Picking on my English is dirty fucking move, Hollander.”
Shane turned to him, genuinely contrite. “Sorry. You’re right, that was so shitty of me.”
“Is okay.” Ilya bumped their shoulders together, to reassure him. “And you are right about my apartment. Team chose it for me. I am looking for a better one.”
“Maybe put Sveta on the case.”
“Maybe.” Ilya was silent as the question he wanted to ask pressed insistently on his mind. He tried not to ask it. He failed.
“How is what’s-her-name?”
“Who?” Shane set the remote aside. Ilya glanced at the screen to see a movie playing. An old one, it looked like. He didn’t recognise it.
“Your girlfriend,” he clarified.
Shane blinked at the emphasis he put on the word. “Um, she’s fine, probably. I don’t know. We broke up.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, a few weeks ago.” He shrugged. “Just didn’t work out.”
That was fast, Ilya thought. Shane had been spotted out with this woman a few times, had reluctantly admitted when pressed that they’d met at a photo shoot. That had been December. It was now February.
The news that Shane was single now made him feel feather-light, almost fizzy. “What is there to work out? You like someone you fuck them, you don’t you don’t.” Emphasis on like, he willed Shane to understand. The way I like you. Emphasis on someone. Gender-neutral. “You make things so complicated, Shane.”
Shane elbowed him. “I’m not like you, asshole. I respect women.”
“I respect them too.” Ilya caught his eye and grinned. “I respect them very, very much.”
Shane looked away.
"Also very often."
“All right, okay.”
“With my dick, Hollander. I respect them with my dick.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
They watched the movie in silence for a while, then Shane said, “You ever think about respecting anyone on a more permanent basis?”
You flashed through Ilya’s mind, but he shook that thought away immediately. “No. Why would I?”
“No reason.” That odd note had crept into his voice again, the one last heard in the hotel bar in Toronto. “I suppose when you’re nineteen years old and drowning in pussy there’s no reason to limit yourself.”
Exactly, Ilya thought. He didn’t limit himself at all. Aloud, he said, “So are you looking for another girlfriend?”
“No. I don’t like the distraction.” Shane frowned, his gaze turned inward. When he spoke again his voice was low, like a confession. “Sometimes I wish I could be more like you, but. I don’t think that’s for me. Just, picking up girls, you know. I don’t really like it.”
“Different people are different,” said Ilya softly. “You do not have to be like me. Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing you need to change.”
I like you so much, exactly as you are. This he did not say. He barely registered thinking it.
“I think you’re the only one who’d say that,” Shane said wryly. “The guys definitely don’t understand.”
“Fuck them.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so. They’re not really my type.”
What is your type? Ilya wished he could ask. Women? Men? People dressed as animals? Or maybe Shane didn’t have a type at all. Maybe he would marry hockey one day and they would be very happy together.
He couldn’t ask this, though, so Ilya laughed at Shane’s joke and let the subject drop.
Shane settled back against the pillows, close enough to Ilya that they were pressed together from shoulder to elbow. Ilya was half-hard, his heart pounding, the itch beneath his skin near intolerable. He didn’t move away.
“This is nice,” Shane said. “When it’s quiet and just us. I know you like parties and going out, but—”
“I like staying in too. Sometimes.” With you.
Shane smiled.
They watched the movie, though Ilya paid very little attention. He thought there were cops of some sort involved, and also surfing. It looked kind of cool actually but less than halfway through Shane fell asleep. His head dropped down to rest on Ilya’s shoulder and from that point on, Ilya had no thoughts remaining for anything else.
Carefully, he shuffled down and turned his body, shifted them both so Shane could rest more fully against him. Then, half-holding his breath, he laid his cheek on Shane’s head, against the softness of his hair.
Which was a bad idea. A terrible idea. One of the worst ideas he’d ever had.
He didn’t care.
San Francisco, June 2016
Buying a car would normally take longer than one morning, but Ilya has cash money he’s not afraid to spend and contacts in the sports car world and so by noon he’s the proud new owner of quite an old car. A ’67 Mustang convertible which the previous owner is happy to drive up from Palo Alto to deliver, for an extra 5k above his asking price. It’s gunmetal grey rather than the red Ilya was hoping for, but he hasn’t really got time to shop around and more than that, Shane loves it. Ilya can see it in his eyes as the car pulls up in front of the hotel.
“Wow,” he says. “I thought it’d be more orange.”
“These do not come in orange,” Ilya tells him loftily.
“Thank goodness.”
Ilya transfers the cash and signs the title then he and Shane load their suitcases in the trunk and settle in. Shane runs his hands over the car’s tan leather interior with that happy smile he gets when something feels good to his touch. “This is nice,” he says. “I really like it.”
He will never, ever sell this car, Ilya thinks. This car is a part of him now.
He fiddles with his phone for a bit, takes his time working out a route as Shane hums and strokes the leather. Finally, he sets the phone aside and puts on his sunglasses.
“Ready?” he asks, and Shane nods.
“Ready.”
Shane is wearing sunglasses of his own, and a t-shirt in a shade of dark green that recalls the beanie he was wearing on the day they met. It clings to his shoulders and arms more tightly than Shane’s t-shirts tend to. He’s been dressing better since he started seeing her, Ilya thinks. Nothing too out there, nothing that would make him uncomfortable. Just better fits and more stylish cuts and colours that suit him. At least, Ilya thinks grimly, she understands that Shane, gorgeous as he is, will never be a fashion plate. At least the clothes she chooses for him are ones he feels comfortable wearing. At least she knows him well enough for that.
It’s not much as consolation goes, but Ilya will take it.
Shane settles back into the soft leather seat. On his thigh, his fingers tap out the rhythm of whatever is going through his head. Ilya turns away before the rhythm distracts him and focuses his attention on the road.
“Will the radio bother you?” he asks.
Shane shakes his head. “Nope.”
Ilya fiddles with the dials until he finds some classic rock. Not his favourite genre but it seems appropriate to the car and their journey, and Shane hates it less than the rap and EDM that Ilya prefers. It reminds him of his dad. David is strictly a 60s to 80s music guy and that’s what Shane grew up with. He’s more familiar with the Rolling Stones than anything recorded in this century, which is far more adorable than it has any right to be. Particularly when Shane, who has less than zero interest in music, randomly knows lyrics or facts about bands from decades ago and doesn’t really understand when no one else knows them too.
Of course, everything Shane does is adorable to Ilya, but that is neither here nor there.
“Proud Mary” starts to play and Ilya lets himself drift on the music for a bit. Tina Turner at least he can get into. Shane says nothing, just reclines and taps as they cruise along the freeway. Ilya has decided to go north on the 280 nearly as far as Daly City then from there get onto California Highway 1, heading south.
Once they’re on the state highway and out of the heavy San Francisco traffic, Shane relaxes. Ilya can almost see the tension drain from him, the tiredness and frustration still clinging to him from the night before dissolve away. He stops tapping on his thigh and sinks deeper into his seat, face tilted up to the sun. Soft golden rays highlight the sharp lines of his nose and jaw and cheekbones and Ilya just yearns.
Shane is so fucking beautiful. He always has been, even as a tightly-wound teenager in a frosty parking lot. Ilya remembers that day well, or parts of it at least. Remembers Shane’s smile and his freckles, the warmth of his hand, the delight in his eyes when Ilya chirped him. He’s only grown more beautiful since and never more so than when he’s relaxed like he is now. An evil voice in Ilya’s mind whispers that he would look much like this in bed, after he came. More flushed, probably. Sweaty, breathing hard. Soft—his eyes, his smile. His voice, moaning Ilya’s name.
“Fuck.”
Ilya drags his mind away from thoughts of soft and sated Shane and back to the car, which helps only a little. Shane turns his head and looks over with a little smile.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing,” Ilya replies. “Mind was wandering.”
“Don’t get in a crash and kill us.”
“I am a good driver.”
“You’re reckless.”
Sometimes, Ilya concedes. Sometimes he gets urges, to drive as fast as his fast cars will go, see how much speed he can handle before he loses control. He’d never actually push it too far—he wouldn’t, it’s not like that—but the urge is there.
It’s not there now, though. Not with Shane in the car. Ilya is sometimes careless with himself but never, never with Shane.
“Look, I am below speed limit.” He gestures at the speedometer. “Boring driving to keep boring passenger off my fucking back.”
Shane just shakes his head. The wind catches in his hair as he does and blows it across his face. It’s longer now than it used to be—before her—long enough to brush past the collar of his shirt and sweep across his forehead, thick and dark and so fucking soft. How many times has Ilya rested his cheek against it when Shane fell asleep on his shoulder? Too many to count. He knows the feel of that hair.
Shane runs his fingers through it now to brush it back, tucks it behind his ear. Ilya grips the steering wheel hard, to numb the itch in his own fingers. His fingers always want to touch Shane, to sink into his hair and stroke down his cheekbone, trace the contours of his muscles as they clench beneath his skin.
Ilya bites back the curse word this time, swallows it down deep into the place where he locks away all his feelings for Shane, the best he can. His best it seems is not very good today. It’s rare that they have more than a few hours together and almost never completely alone; already Ilya feels strung out and threadbare and their road trip has barely begun.
He needs, he tells himself firmly, to get a fucking grip.
Las Vegas, MLH Awards 2011
“There you are.”
Ilya turned to see Shane coming up the steps to stand beside him on the balcony.
“Here I am,” he agreed. Shane stumbled on the last step and collapsed against the railing. Despite his grim mood, Ilya had to smile.
“You are drunk,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“I have seen you drunk before, Hollander, I know what it looks like. Looks like this.”
Shane contemplated visibly for a moment, then seemed to accept the justice in this statement. “I did shots with Scott Hunter,” he said.
“Oh? Was this before or after his nightly fibre pills and cup of cocoa?”
“You’re such a dick,” Shane said. “He’s not that old.”
Ilya shrugged and took a drag from his cigarette.
“Hunter wanted to buy you drinks too,” Shane informed him. “But we couldn’t find you.” He paused, then, “Are you okay?”
“I go home in three days.” Which wasn’t an answer to the question, but also was.
“Oh.” Ilya watched from the corner of his eye as Shane processed this. “Do you have to?”
“What?”
“Do you have to go to Russia? Can’t you just stay here? Or like, not here here but in Boston?”
“My father expects me home.”
The look on Shane’s face said he knew he was navigating dangerous waters. “Because he wants to see you or because he wants to control you?”
That was both infuriatingly perceptive and really fucking rich coming from him, Ilya thought. As fond as he was of Yuna—who had bought them all dinner the night before, despite himself and Shane finishing the season with an exactly equal number of goals—she was as controlling in her way as Grigori was in his. But he didn’t want to fight about this. He didn’t want to fight with Shane at all.
“Does not matter,” he said. “I will go. Flight is booked. Sveta will come with.” He attempted a smile. “Will be fine, Shane. I will see you next season, yes?”
“What if you saw me before that?”
Ilya turned to look at him. “How?” For a moment he feared Shane might offer to come to Moscow too.
“What if you came to Canada instead?” Shane asked, and briefly Ilya felt relieved. Then he yearned. “Come stay with my parents and me. At our cottage on the lake. I know they’d love to have you and—and I would too. We could hang out all summer. It’d be fun.”
Fuck, but Ilya wanted to. He wanted to say yes so badly he had to grind his teeth together to hold the word in. “Cannot,” he gritted out instead. “Impossible.”
Shane was exasperated now. “Your father doesn’t own you, Ilya.”
He certainly didn’t now that Ilya had money, an American visa, and a long contract with a venerated hockey team. No, Ilya was his own man, even if he had only just turned twenty. But he would rather have Shane believe he was being forced home by his father than know the truth. Which was that he would never survive a summer hanging out together at a terrible boring wonderful Canadian lake cottage. No way would he get through that without saying something he shouldn’t, or revealing things he needed to keep hidden. Like how badly he still wanted Shane, though he understood now that whatever interest he thought he’d detected last year had been an illusion. Wishful thinking on his part.
He blamed the freckles.
“I am grateful,” he said. “For invitation. But is impossible.” He inhaled the last of his cigarette, then stubbed the butt out on the railing. “Maybe next year.”
“Sure.” Shane turned away from him to stare out at the glittering Vegas skyline. “Next year.”
Monterey, June 2016
At Monterey, they temporarily abandon the 1 in favour of the series of roads that trace its coastline. From Ocean View Boulevard to Sunset Drive, then 17 Mile Drive down to Carmel. The roads hug the peninsula’s edge and Ilya enjoys navigating the car around their sinuous curves. A vista point called The Restless Sea catches his attention and he pulls the car over.
It’s one of many similar outlooks along this stretch of coastline: rugged piles of grey rock and surging azure sea beyond, white froth where earth and water meet. One of the most turbulent sections of coastline, the sign for it informs them, and this Ilya can well believe. There’s a wild energy here that makes his blood hum and feeds his reckless urges.
One of those urges grips him now, tugs him towards the ocean as far as he can go. He’s over the low wooden fence and out onto the rocks before Shane has a chance to finish saying, “Ilya, what the fuck are you doing?”
What Ilya’s doing is clambering out to the brink of the land and staring at the sea as it froths and seethes far below his feet. The wind is fierce here, exhilarating, the ocean wild and vast, calling to its counterpart in Ilya’s restless soul.
Shane comes to stand beside him at the rocky edge. He stands close, body tilted slightly towards Ilya, gazing off into the same distance he is. Does it call to him, too? Ilya wonders. Almost certainly not. Shane is a creature of routine and discipline; even coming on this drive with him is out of character. If Ilya dove into the sea, Shane would not follow him.
Good, he thinks.
“I have to tell you something,” Shane says, close enough to Ilya’s ear that even this wind can’t whip his words away. “Something I learned from Rose. I’m—”
Rose fucking Landry. “I do not want to talk about Rose,” Ilya snaps, interrupting.
“It’s not about her, it’s what she—”
“No.” These words are too revealing, they feel like a confession. He can’t stop himself from saying them. “No girlfriends on this trip. Just us, okay?”
“Okay, but Rose isn’t—”
“Shane.” Ilya interrupts again, glares at him before he can say once more how Rose isn’t like his other girlfriends. She knows hockey and swears like a sailor. So the fuck what? Ilya has known many women just like this, Rose Landry isn’t special. It’s only that Shane has limited experience. “No. Not here.”
“Okay,” Shane says. “But later. Please. It’s important and I want you to know first.”
He’s engaged, is all Ilya can think. He’s fucking engaged and he’s going to be married and he wants Ilya to be his best man. Ilya will have to stand there and smile and watch the love of his life promise to love someone else for the rest of his life, and not scream or cry or fucking die about it. He’ll do it, of course. He’ll fucking do it because it’s Shane and there’s nothing Ilya won’t do for him. But he doesn’t want to think about it now. Not here.
He closes his eyes and breathes in deep, fills his lungs with salty sea air. He exhales slowly. “Let’s get back on the road,” he says. “I want to get to San Luis Obispo by tonight.”
They make a pit stop in Carmel-by-the-Sea, though, at a cafe where they get lunch to go and eat it on a small beach further down the road, at the foot of a scrubby tree that looks like driftwood already, tangled roots exposed and clinging in the sand.
Shane takes off his shoes and socks and like the tree, sinks his feet into that silky sand. It’s bleached-white and fine as dust and Shane hums as he wiggles his toes in it. Such a strange intimacy there can be to bare feet, Ilya thinks. He’s known Shane now for more than seven years, they’ve hung out in hotel rooms and fallen asleep together but this is the first time he’s seen Shane’s feet bare. He always wears socks.
Ilya rarely does.
He wonders if a metaphor might lurk in there somewhere.
“I want to swim,” Shane says.
“What?”
“In the ocean,” he clarifies, as though Ilya may have concluded he’d like to swim in some other local body of water. “I’ve never been in the Pacific.”
“You don’t have trunks,” Ilya says stupidly.
“I have boxers.”
“They’ll arrest you for indecency.”
“Who will?” Shane looks around them at the empty beach. “Come on, Ilya. Have you ever been in the Pacific?”
He hasn’t. He wants to go, but fuck. Like this? Desire wars with self-preservation as Shane stands up and strips off his shirt, exposing the skin Ilya wants to lick and kiss and bite, the lean muscle he longs to feel flexing beneath him. Shane wet and all but naked would kill him if he had a year to prepare for it, as it is he has to close his eyes and dig his fingernails into his thigh to get himself under something almost like control.
By the time he opens his eyes again, Shane’s jeans and t-shirt are neatly folded and draped over a branch of the driftwood tree; the man himself is heading for the water’s edge dressed only in a pair of navy boxer briefs. His ass is—fuck. Ilya drags his eyes away and scrambles to his feet, cursing under his breath. He throws his own clothes off as fast as he can and takes off at a run after Shane. He hopes to fuck the Pacific is cold.
It is. Not Russian-lake cold like he remembers from his childhood but cold enough to keep his dick down, even when Shane dives into the surf then emerges with a happy whoop. Water runs down his body in rivulets, over the dips and bulges of his chest and abs to the waistband of his boxers which, thankfully, is all the farther Ilya can see.
He tries not to look at all but his eyes won’t obey. Greedily, they follow the drops that fall from the heavy strands of Shane’s longer hair and those that cling to his smooth skin like prisms catching on the warm afternoon light. He can’t look away. When it comes to Shane, he’s so fucking weak.
What if, he wonders sometimes, he hadn’t volunteered Shane’s name to CCM all those years ago? If he’d been stronger then, less desperate to see Shane again, maybe now things would be different. Maybe they would only have been rivals on the ice and known nothing of each other off it. Maybe.
Probably not. Ilya can’t imagine a world in which he caught even a glimpse of Shane Hollander’s fucking freckles and didn’t lose his mind about them.
He’s so, so fucking weak.
A wave of water crashes over him and he splutters as his mouth and nose and eyes fill up with salty, stinging brine. He hears Shane’s laughter and glowers in its direction.
“Hollander, the fuck?”
Shane tries to splash him again, but Ilya dives clear of it. He recovers quickly and sends a wave of his own surging back at Shane, who lets its momentum carry him backwards and down under the water. He doesn’t surface immediately and Ilya frowns, rubs his eyes and blinks hard, searching for a glimpse of him.
That’s when Ilya’s legs go out from under him. Are yanked out from under him, by a pair of muscular arms powered by a level of evil of which Ilya would not have thought Shane capable. He goes under hard then surfaces awkwardly, spluttering again, wipes the water from his eyes and blinks them open to see Shane standing with his arms crossed, looking smug.
“You’re a lot better with water when it’s frozen,” he observes.
Ilya is outraged. “You ambushed me!” he protests.
“I outplayed you.”
“I did not know there was a game!”
“There’s always a game, Rozanov. This one is Canada Lake Rules.”
Ilya pouts. “You just made that up.”
“Nope. It’s a long-standing tradition. Every summer of my life I’ve spent on a lake.”
Ilya is of course fully aware of this. Every single year every single Hollander tries to get him to stay with them on this lake of theirs and every year Ilya refuses. He has to go back to Russia, he says, which is still only sort of true. His father and Alexei would be angry if he didn’t go home, but they are angry when he does as well so it hardly matters. Ilya is aware there’s nothing he can do to make his father or brother happy with him but he can’t stop trying. And he definitely can’t spend a whole summer with Shane, no more now than he could have five years ago. He’d break within a week and tell Shane everything, beg him for what Ilya knows he can’t give. And then he would lose his best friend.
No. It’s safe to say that Ilya will never spend a summer on a Canadian lake.
He launches himself at Shane now, catches him around the waist and takes them both under. He’s ready for it this time, takes a deep breath before he’s submerged, lets it out slowly as they wrestle beneath the waves. Shane gets him in a headlock and hooks a leg around his to keep him unbalanced. Ilya retaliates with an elbow to his ribs that shows no mercy or any consideration of the fact that he’s just come off a six-game Cup championship final against a hard-playing LA team that pushed him to his limits. A healed and rested Shane would barely even feel that elbow, this June-weary one grunts and releases Ilya as he surfaces and heaves in a breath.
“Dirty,” he says.
Ilya shrugs. “Russian rules.”
“Figures,” Shane snorts.
Ilya knows Shane’s opinion of Russia is coloured by Sochi and by his disdain for Ilya’s father and brother. His own feelings about the country of his birth are complicated at best, but it still hurts every time Shane is scornful or dismissive of it. He says nothing, though. Just dives under the water and takes Shane out at the knees.
They roughhouse like this a bit longer, then they swim, out as far as they dare then back again. Halfway between the beach and the horizon they float on their backs with their heads close together, toes pointing in opposite directions.
“So,” Ilya says. “How does it feel to be a dynasty?”
“Shut up,” Shane scoffs mildly.
“No, I am serious. Two Cups in a row is huge. You will not make it to three of course, but—”
“We’ll fucking see about that.”
They float in silence for a minute, then Shane says, “It feels fucking great. Better than the first one.”
“You worked your ass off for it.”
“Fuck yeah, I did. Carried all those fuckers the last half of the season.”
The last two-thirds, more like. The Metros really would be nothing without Shane. It infuriates Ilya every time he hears Shane make one of his perfectly crafted, media-trained statements that credit his team for things they absolutely did not fucking do. He knows Shane has to give those answers, that deep down he hates them too. But Ilya loves, he fucking loves being the one person Shane can be honest with. Shane trusts him with the arrogant asshole side of himself because he knows Ilya won’t spill his secret. Knows that Ilya likes him all the more because he has this side to him.
“When Drapeau let that goal in late in the second I thought you would murder him.”
“I still might. That asshole is too weak on his left side to run his mouth as much as he does. You can talk shit only as long as you don’t play like it.”
Ilya grins, wide and fond because Shane can’t see. “Tell me more.”
Shane does.