Work Text:
2024
When the news breaks, Ilya is in the shower. Thank god for that, because if he had been in public, he might have fallen to his knees in the grocery store and then the next day he would be waking up to a fucking Reddit post saying something like Ex- NHL Captain Ilya Rozanov spotted in Trader Joe’s crying at phone in pasta aisle.
He is coming out of the bathroom when he sees his phone buzzing incessantly on his bed like it’s about to sprout wings and take off. There are two missed calls and several texts from Cliff flooding the screen when he picks it up.
Marly
Bro turn on ESPN NOW
Pick up where the hell are you
Seriously
Fucking turn on your TV now
Ilya turns on the television mounted on the wall opposite his bed and quickly flicks the channel to ESPN. His heart drops to his stomach when Shane’s face fills the screen. After all these years later, and just one look at Shane fucking Hollander’s face is all it takes for his body to betray him.
Shane in his thirties looks older, but still as gorgeous as ever. Still hockey’s golden boy, still the player with the most endorsement deals in the league. He looks slightly apprehensive but calm as he sits at a press table with a throng of microphones in his face. Ilya stands in the middle of his bedroom, the TV remote dangling uselessly in his hand as Shane speaks, reading from a piece of paper.
“Today I am announcing my retirement from professional hockey. This current season will be my last one. I would like to thank Montreal, my teammates, and all the fans who have supported me. It has been an honour to be the Captain of the Voyageurs, and to play my entire career in the city that I have come to call home.”
“On a more personal note, I would like to share with you all that I am gay. This is unrelated to my retirement, and who I love has nothing to do with how well I can hit a puck. But I am sharing this in the hopes that anyone else in this sport, or any other sport, who may right now be scared and confused like I once was, can hear this and know that it’s okay. It will be okay. You are not alone. I no longer wish to hide who I am. For over twenty years, I have given hockey my life. I have loved every moment of playing this game but it is now time for me to live life for myself. Thank you for your time.”
Ilya sinks down slowly, his back against the edge of his bed, until he comes to the floor. His heart is pounding so hard he can hear it echo in his head. His phone is going off again- someone is calling- but he barely registers it. Something wet lands on his chest, and he brings a hand up to his face and realises he’s crying.
It has been sixteen years since they met as teenagers in that cold, grey parking lot. It has been eight years since they last kissed, and since Shane walked out of his house. It has been four years since his phone last buzzed with a message notification from Jane.
Ilya is 33 years old, he has only been in love once, with the man who is currently on his television screen, and he still has no idea how to be fucking normal when it comes to Shane Hollander.
--
November 2016, Boston
Ilya knows once he invites Shane over to his house for the first time, there would be some invisible boundary they would be crossing. They didn’t do this. They did clandestine hook-ups in anonymous hotel rooms, or the occasional fuck in Shane’s secret Montreal condo. This time will be different, Shane here in his house, amongst his things, in his bed, on his sheets.
Ilya plans the afternoon down to the last detail, asking Shane to stay over when he’d been soft and sated in his bed post-fuck, knowing they had no obligations the next morning. They fall asleep together, or rather, Shane naps while Ilya lies awake behind him, holding him close and barely breathing, terrified that with one wrong move Shane will wake up and run away like a spooked horse. Ilya tucks his nose in the crook of Shane’s neck and it feels so right. He wonders what it would be like to wake up like this every morning, and the hope that blooms in his chest feels dangerous.
Ilya makes them tuna melts after Shane wakes up, hoping Shane doesn’t notice all the ingredients already portioned out in neat containers. Hopes Shane doesn’t ask why he happens to have ginger ale in his fridge when Ilya has never drunk a can of it in his fucking life.
After eating, they have sex on the sofa, slow, deep and lazy, Shane writhing on his lap and Ilya staring up at him like he’s seeing God. They spend the rest of the afternoon lying around watching hockey and gossiping about other players, Shane half-sprawled over Ilya’s chest and Ilya lazily running his hand through Shane’s hair.
When night falls, Ilya suggests he cooks dinner and Shane watches from his seat at the counter with a small smile as Ilya makes pasta, which they have with a bottle of wine. After dinner, they are back on the sofa with some movie playing in the background, but they are too busy making out to pay it any attention.
Before they go to bed, Ilya gives Shane a brand new toothbrush still in its package. They brush their teeth side by side in the bathroom and Ilya aches with the domesticity of it all. Shane meets his eyes in the bathroom mirror and Ilya wiggles his eyebrows childishly and Shane starts laughing around his toothbrush, spraying foamy toothpaste everywhere.
When it’s time to go to sleep, Shane hovers by the bed, giving Ilya a tentative look until Ilya reaches out and makes grabby hands at him.
"Come here, I want to be spoons.”
Shane’s face breaks into a grin and Ilya’s breath is taken away by how beautiful the man is. He pulls Shane close, slotting their bodies together, Shane’s back to his chest.
“Today was fun,” Shane says softly in the dark.
Ilya hums and presses a kiss to the back of his neck. “Yes, it was.”
I wish every time could be like this, he thinks but doesn’t say out loud.
Ilya doesn’t want to fall asleep. He doesn’t want the night to ever end. When the sun rises, Shane is going to go back to his hotel and Ilya will be alone again in his stupid, big, empty house. It hits him right in the chest at that moment, Shane warm and dead to the world in his arms. He’s in love with him. With Shane fucking Hollander. Maybe he has been for a while, but this is the first time he’s admitted it out loud to himself.
Ilya wants it more than anything. Wants the day they just had, everyday, for the rest of his life. If someone were to ask him right at this moment if he would give up hockey, give up everything and retire now so he could have this, he would say yes. It shocks him when he realises how easily he would say yes. He finally drifts asleep, lulled by Shane’s quiet, deep breathing and his heart beating steady under Ilya’s palm.
The next morning, Ilya wakes up to find Shane already awake and peering at him, their heads on the same pillow, so close their noses are almost touching.
"Mmm…morning,” Ilya rumbles, still half-asleep and his voice gravelly.
“Morning,” Shane replies, and leans in to kiss Ilya. His breath is minty fresh and Ilya is endeared by the thought of Shane waking up first to brush his teeth and then crawling back under the covers into Ilya’s arms.
Ilya knows his own breath is probably disgusting, but Shane doesn’t seem to care as he deepens the kiss, rolling to drape himself on top of Ilya. Ilya’s hands are roaming all over Shane’s back and his perfect ass. They have underwear on, but Ilya can feel them both half-hard. He throws a thigh over the back of Shane’s legs, pulling him closer still.
“Shane,” Ilya breathes, feeling intoxicated with it, barely awake, the air in the room thick and syrupy in the watery, early morning light.
He vaguely registers Shane freezing in his arms, before the other man pulls away and rolls back to the other side of the bed.
“What is wrong?” Ilya asks. He reaches over and squeezes Shane’s thigh.
“Um, I…I have to go,” Shane says. “The team, they’ll be wondering where I am.” Shane practically launches himself out of the bed.
“Shane.” Ilya pulls himself up onto one elbow, and watches helplessly as Shane frantically looks around the bedroom floor, trying to locate his clothes. “Hollander.”
He’s fully awake now, and suddenly it hits him. He had said Shane’s name. Ilya had never once called Shane by his first name, they’ve always been Hollander and Rozanov, on the ice or mid-fuck, it’s always been last names, never first.
Ilya feels sick. The previous day and night had gone perfectly. He had planned it, done everything right, Shane had not spooked and now at the very last second, Ilya has gone and fucked up with one fucking word and crossed that invisible line that they had both refused to acknowledge for the last seven years.
Shane is now fully dressed and he stands by the bedroom door, his brown eyes wide and helpless and cutting Ilya’s heart cleanly in half.
“I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.” He shakes his head, and whispers “Sorry,” again before walking out of the bedroom.
Ilya is still frozen in bed when he hears his front door close, and the echo of it seems very loud and final in his empty house.
--
The rest of 2016
Ilya is not proud of his behaviour in the weeks that follow. The first game he’d played against the Voyageurs after Shane left him had been so horrible he’d blocked out the memory of it from his mind. He couldn’t even say who had won that night. All he remembers was playing so terribly Coach had yelled at him for fifteen full minutes in the locker room after the game.
He dreads every game with Montreal after that, counting down to each one like it’s his execution. The first time he has to meet Shane in a face-off, he keeps his eyes down on the ice, willing himself not to throw up, and doesn’t look up even when he can feel the other man’s gaze on him. The first time they have to shake hands on the ice, Ilya unfortunately catches Shane’s eyes completely by accident. Shane freezes like a deer in headlights, opens his mouth slightly like he’s going to something, but by then Ilya’s already looking away. From then on, whenever they are forced to meet face to face during a game, Ilya focuses his gaze on whatever happens to be behind Shane’s left shoulder. After that, Shane doesn’t attempt to say a word to him again.
Ilya loses his temper more often than not, takes it out on the ice and spends more time than ever in the penalty box. The rookies barely look him in the eye at practice and the rest of his team give him a wide berth in the gym. Cliff is the only one that tries to talk to him anymore. He doesn’t dare ask what’s wrong, of course, but he still sends him approximately twenty stupid memes and videos a day, which Ilya knows is his own way of trying to cheer him up.
Svetlana comes over for dinner one night, and Ilya is in such a sullen, foul mood that she ends up yelling at him to stop acting like a child. They have a screaming match in deafening Russian for all of two minutes before he ends up telling her everything, the whole fucking sad saga, and then breaks down with his head pillowed in her lap for the rest of the night. She strokes his hair and lets him soak her expensive silk trousers with tears, and he feels a small weight lift off his chest now that someone else finally knows. That it’s real, and that he’s not crazy and hadn’t made up the whole thing with Shane in his head.
When he sees the news that Shane is dating Rose Landry, he thinks this might be what it feels like to take a gunshot wound to the chest. Cliff shows him the post on some stupid Instagram gossip account, and Ilya takes one look at the accompanying photo - Shane laughing and handsome, hand in hand with the gorgeous actress - and feels like vomiting. The golden boy of hockey and the golden girl of Hollywood. The best PR person in the business couldn’t have dreamed up a better couple.
Ilya responds by deleting all social media apps off his phone, and asks Svetlana to change his passwords so he can’t log back in. Avoiding is better than confronting, he tells himself, even when Svetlana gives him a look, but she still does what he asks.
Ilya goes out with the team several nights a week, whether they’re at home or on away games. He knows what he looks like and isn’t shy about it and it doesn’t take long into the night before he’s got his tongue deep in the mouth of some faceless girl on the dance floor.
Svetlana calls it his revenge fuck tour. Ilya doesn’t call it anything because he doesn’t feel anything anymore. He’s numb, and despite how many people he takes into his bed, none of them comes anywhere close to feeling like Shane did.
--
2017
There is an All-Stars game in Tampa in January and when Ilya finds out Shane is captaining the team, he does the one thing he told himself he’d never do, which is to use his father as an excuse to get out of a hockey game. It’s unfortunately not even a lie, his father’s condition is worsening day by day, according to the updates from Andrei. He tells them he needs to fly back to Moscow for a few days and they let him off. The thought of being around Shane and having to put on some bullshit act for a whole weekend of festive hockey fun makes Ilya want to scream.
A few weeks later, his father dies on a Tuesday. Ilya doesn’t really process it until after the funeral, which was horrible in a very quiet, repressed way and filled with hateful looks from his brother. His phone is flooded with condolence messages from his team and some other players in the league (he isn’t even surprised how they know, hockey is nothing but a sport filled with gossipy little fuckers).
There is a relief knowing his father is finally gone, to know he’s no longer suffering; withering away like a ticking time bomb while Ilya waits for the dreaded call to tell him the news. But now the call has happened, the funeral has happened and Ilya has paid and arranged for everything, because of course he has. All the necessary paperwork and his father’s finances are settled - all done through a lawyer, because Ilya and Andrei can’t be in the same room for more than five minutes without resulting in an argument.
But now, what’s next? Ilya hangs around Moscow for another week because he feels it’s the right thing to do, even though every atom of him is screaming to get home to Boston. It doesn’t go unnoticed that he now thinks of Boston, and not Moscow, as home.
When the text message comes in the middle of the night, it surprises him how much it hurts. It tears a hole in his chest, and then immediately makes him feel guilty, because he’s just buried his father and didn’t even cry but no, it’s one text message containing 14 words from fucking Hollander that’s reduced him to tears.
Jane
I heard about your father, I’m so sorry. I hope you are doing alright.
Because Ilya apparently likes to self-sabotage, he lets himself imagine what it would have been like if Shane had been here, as his partner. If he had been standing next to Ilya at the funeral, holding his hand tightly, and saying all the polite, right things to the guests, instead of just giving everyone a silent, curt nod like what Ilya had actually done.
If Shane had been there to give him a hug and let him cry into his shoulder afterward at the reception, like what he’d wanted to do instead of making small talk with distant relatives and his father’s colleagues whose names he didn’t even know. But apparently Russians don’t fucking hug.
The funeral had been hideous, but he thinks it would have been a lot less hideous if Shane was there. Ilya imagines and imagines, and finally falls into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning, his phone clutched tightly in his hand and the screen still open on Shane’s message.
-
Ilya has no idea why he goes back to Russia the summer after his father dies. The rest of the season had been hazy, he’d turned up and played and scored goals and did what he needed to do, but it felt like driving on autopilot. There were some days where he had only come back into his head post-game, sitting in the locker room with the team loud and chaotic around him in sudden technicolour, and felt like the last few hours were just a vague, muted dream.
He books the flight because that’s what he always does, and it isn’t until he reaches his Moscow apartment that he suddenly realises there is nothing for him in this city anymore. He hangs around like a ghost for two weeks, takes his niece to the park a couple of times when his sister-in-law lets him. When he’s not moping around Moscow or parked on his sofa, he aggressively works out in the gym and listens to rap music so loud it drowns out the thoughts in his head.
Svetlana barges in one afternoon in a haze of expensive perfume. She takes one look at his disheveled apartment, the kitchen littered with takeout containers, the red wine stain on the sofa that he didn’t manage to scrub out completely and the television droning on in the background.
“Pack your bag, I’m taking you to Bali,” she says, throwing a clean towel at his face. “And take a fucking shower, you stink.”
Ilya follows her because he doesn’t know what else to do. There is a comfort in someone else bossing him around and making the plans for once. Svetlana has always been good like that, since they were kids. She books them into a stunning resort in the central foothills of Ubud, surrounded by dense jungle and lush, green rice fields. It looks like something Ilya has only seen in travel magazines. They wake up to the sound of exotic birds and a million crickets, and the cloying heat makes the days feel like they drag on endlessly.
Svetlana drags him to sunrise yoga, and Ilya curses her out for waking him up at 6am but he goes along anyway. When the session is over and they are lying in shavasana and he’s aching but in a good way, he feels something other than hopelessness for once.
One lazy, indeterminate afternoon when he is lying around and Svetlana is getting a massage, Ilya scrolls mindlessly through his phone reading old messages because he’s bored and there’s no WiFi connection out at the jungle-side infinity pool. Mid-scroll, he freezes, coming to the text thread with Jane.
The last message was the one Shane had sent several months ago just after his father’s funeral. Ilya hadn’t replied. The previous message sits just above, dated November 2016. Shane had sent it just before coming over to his house in Boston, that last, fateful afternoon. It reads, Leaving the hotel now, be at yours in 15 minutes.
Ilya had heart-reacted it at the time. The stupid, fucking, tiny red heart now mocks him silently on his phone screen.
Ilya clicks onto Jane’s contact page, his thumb trembling and hovering over the red ‘Block number’ button. He should do it. Cut off all contact, isn’t that what Shane had decided, that day he walked out of Ilya’s house?
Ilya can’t bring himself to do it. He clicks his phone off instead and tosses it down in frustration, scrubs a tired hand over his face. The humid, afternoon air suddenly feels suffocating.
--
2018
One day Svetlana is over at his house and they’re lazing on the sofa not really doing anything. Ilya is almost drifting off, watching some sitcom on TV with his eyes half-closed when she says something without even looking up from her phone.
“You know I went to see a therapist?”
”What?” Ilya asks. “Why? Is something wrong?”
”Nothing wrong, but I thought sometimes it’s nice to speak to someone…outside. Her name is Galina, she’s Russian too. You would like her.”
Ilya scoffs. “I don’t need therapy.”
Svetlana doesn’t reply to that, but the weighted silence that follows says enough.
Ilya thinks about what he’s done in the last two years and wonders if maybe some of those things were not the normal behaviour of a well-adjusted person. And his poor best friend had witnessed it all.
Asking Svetlana to lock him out of his social media so he wouldn’t have to see any updates on Shane. His coping mechanism of sleeping with anything that moved in the months after that day. How sometimes when he has a day off and she comes over to find him still huddled under the covers at two in the afternoon, his bedroom air stale and heavy. She’ll open the windows to let in fresh air and nudge him in the direction of the shower and then order in something healthy for dinner, blatantly ignoring Ilya’s request for McDonalds. Maybe she’s even seen the game schedule tacked up on the wall in his study, where Ilya has underlined in heavy black Sharpie each game against Montreal, counting down to each one with dread in his stomach.
Ilya has a sneaking suspicion Svetlana has never gone to a therapy appointment a day in her life, actually. She sends Ilya a text with Dr Galina’s contact details later that day. He saves it.
He regrets his decision three weeks later, sitting on the grey sofa in Dr Galina’s office.
"Have you ever thought you may be depressed?” she asks in soft Russian.
”No,” Ilya replies. “I’m fine. Just tired sometimes. I travel a lot, I play hockey. It’s normal to be tired. I am not sitting around every day crying.”
”Depression doesn’t always look like that.”
“I’m not depressed.”
Dr Galina looks at him over her glasses and pivots. “You mentioned earlier some things happened in the last couple of years that have been hard to deal with.”
Ilya leans back until his head hits the back of the couch and he stares up at the ceiling as he answers. “I was…seeing someone for a long time. Kind of. And then he ended things very suddenly.”
“Why did he end things?”
”I don’t know. He walked out one day. We never spoke again. Maybe things were too complicated and he got…scared.”
“So you’re still looking for answers then.”
Ilya huffs out a laugh and gives Dr Galina a crooked smile. “Maybe you can save me some money and just give me the answers now, Doc. Your sessions are very expensive.”
Dr Galina shoots him a stern look, but he can see a spark of exasperated amusement in her eyes. “That’s not how it works, but you coming in today is a good first step.”
Before he leaves Dr Galina’s office, the receptionist asks if he’d like to book in for a next session. He says yes.
--
2019
As time passes, a little, niggling thought in Ilya’s brain that he might retire soon is always there. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable, like when he’s on the ice and sinking a flawless goal into the net, or when his team piles on top of him after a win, screaming and sweaty and ecstatic.
But most of the time it’s there- when he enters another non-descript hotel room -which are all starting to look the same; ordering another room service meal- which are all starting to taste the same; boarding another flight; boarding another bus, staring out the window at yet another highway, which are all starting to blur into one endless, grey indeterminate city.
The relief each time he gets home after another exhausting road trip feels bigger and bigger, until one day he suddenly realises he maybe doesn’t want to do this anymore. He loves hockey, but to him, it’s always felt like an escape. A way to spend time out of the house when he was growing up and needed to not be around his family after his mother’s death, a way out of Russia. He wonders what he’s trying to run from now. In fact, the only thing he wants to escape is playing hockey against a certain Canadian captain. Ilya would laugh at the irony if it wasn’t so depressing.
One night, after just obliterating Pittsburgh in a play-off game, Ilya is summoned to the owner’s suite at the arena. He is introduced to Steve, the Director of Athletics at Boston University, who apparently went to college with Jonas, one of the Bears’ owners.
"Hell of a game, Mr Rozanov,” Steve says, shaking his hand. He has grey hair and kind green eyes, and Ilya likes him immediately.
“Thank you, sir. It’s Ilya, please.”
After some small talk, Jonas wanders off in the direction of the buffet table and Steve smiles at him. Something in his gaze is knowing and Ilya feels strangely exposed.
“I know you still have many years of playing left in you, but have you ever thought about coaching, Ilya?”
Ilya raises his eyebrows. “Coaching?”
“Boston has one of the best collegiate ice hockey teams in North America. If you are ever considering what’s next for you post-NHL, well, we would be honoured to have you. Something to think about.”
Steve slips him his business card with a wink before shaking his hand in farewell. He can feel the card burning a hole in his pocket the whole journey home. Ilya doesn’t really believe in signs from the universe like Svetlana likes to talk about sometimes, but this feels like a really big fucking one. That little, niggling thought in his brain grows bigger.
--
2021
Ilya puts plans into place over the next two years. He has meetings with his financial advisor and immigration lawyer. He has many conversations with Svetlana that last long into the early hours of the morning. He keeps up his fortnightly appointments with Dr Galina where they discuss the possibility of life post-hockey and surprisingly, Ilya doesn’t feel like throwing up when they talk about it.
Ilya announces his retirement after the end of the 2021 season. He doesn’t hold a press conference, he doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He simply uploads a post on Instagram - a photo of his Bears jersey hanging in his stall in the locker room, ‘ROZANOV’ and the number 81 white and stark against the dark background.
The caption reads: ‘I have played this game since I was 6, and it is now time for me to hang up my skates. This season has been my last one. Thank you to the Bears, thank you Boston. It was my greatest honour to be your Captain.’
He turns his phone off immediately after hitting ‘Post’ and hides it away in a drawer.
The only people who knew are the Bears’ management and coach, the team, his agent and Svetlana. He’s contacted his realtor and put his house on the market, and sets a date to move into the downtown Boston apartment he’d bought a couple of years ago as an investment.
The next day, Ilya signs his employment contract as Head Coach of the men’s ice hockey team with Boston University. He’s negotiated a good package and the university has offered to take over sponsorship of his work visa. In a couple of years, he can apply for permanent residence. Steve shakes his hand and claps him on the shoulder warmly and says “Welcome to the team.”
When Ilya walks out of the building, it’s a sunny day and the sky is clear. The city flows busily around him. For the first time in a long time, something feels right.
That night, Svetlana comes over and they celebrate by ordering takeout from a fancy Italian place and opening a very expensive bottle of champagne. They put on a terrible action movie and curl up on the couch under a fluffy blanket and barely pay attention to the film, instead talking about nothing and everything until three in the morning.
After Svetlana passes out in the guest room, Ilya finally digs his phone out of his bedside drawer and turns it on. The notifications are endless, thousands of messages, missed calls, emails and articles. He flicks through them mindlessly, until one text message catches his eye.
Jane
Congratulations on one incredible career. It won’t be the same on the ice without you.
It’s the first text Shane has sent him in four years. Ilya sits on the edge of his mattress and stares at the little blue message bubble until his eyes burn and the screen blurs. It suddenly hits him that he won’t see Shane on the ice anymore and will never play against him again. Ilya thought that was what he wanted, but he didn’t realise how much it would hurt.
--
2022
The first thing that Ilya notices about his new team is how young they are. He feels older than his 30 years, feels like he’s been through a war, when he meets the Boston University Terriers for the first time. They’re fucking children, half of them not even old enough to legally order a beer at the bar.
Half of the boys on the team look at him like he’s their favourite childhood action figure come to life, calls him Mr Rozanov until Ilya has to tell them to stop because it makes him feel like his father. He meets his assistant coach, a twenty-something named Jamal who played college hockey at Penn State on a full scholarship and also graduated with a degree in English literature, of all things. He has a very dry and dark sense of humour. Ilya likes it.
The first few weeks of his coaching career starts a little shakily, but Ilya has years of experience captaining a fucking NHL team, who to be honest, aren’t much better than children themselves. He quickly picks up on each boy’s strengths and weaknesses, watching them with a sharp eye during practices. He spends evenings watching tapes of their games, and draws up plays and strategies on a whiteboard he bought on Amazon and hangs up in his study.
He starts getting to know the boys’ personalities, learns what each of them are studying. Nico is their centre, fast as a bullet with a wicked backhand, and he’s studying microbiology and has a pet chinchilla. Their goalie, Lachlan, grew up in Sydney but his family moved to Boston when he was twelve. He’s studying Economics, speaks with a hilarious half-Australian, half-Bostonian accent and swears even more than Ilya does.
For once in his life, Ilya has a somewhat normal work schedule, and he gets to come home every night and cook in his own kitchen and sleep in his own bed. He goes to brunch with Svetlana on the weekends. He keeps in touch with Marlow and Connors and St Simon and meets them for dinner regularly and he still watches almost every Bears game on TV when they play. If he skips watching their games against Montreal, no one needs to know that. Cliff still sends him stupid memes everyday and Ilya even laughs at some of them, the funnier ones. It feels good.
Ilya still joins them on the occasional night out at the club, whenever Cliff or St Simon texts him and he’s at home alone and feels like he wants to be around people and loud music. He still gets recognised when he’s out and about, but he’s no longer the Captain of the Bears, and in a year he knows he’ll just be another retired hockey player that everyone will eventually forget about.
He doesn’t feel the need to publicly come out. Instead, he stops caring about whether the person he picks up at the club is a man or a woman. One night, he catches the eye of a handsome, brunette man with olive skin and Ilya spends several songs dancing and making out with him on the floor.
Cliff definitely witnesses this but when Ilya returns to the bar, he doesn’t acknowledge anything, and instead smiles widely, slaps him affectionately on the back, and says, “Next drink’s on me, bro.” It feels good.
Ilya turns thirty-one in June, and Svetlana takes him out to dinner at a stupidly expensive Michelin star restaurant. The tasting menu consists of tiny dishes on giant plates and after dinner they’re still hungry enough to buy McDonalds on the way home. They eat cheeseburgers and McFlurries standing up barefoot at the island in Ilya’s kitchen, laughing about it so hard they have tears in their eyes. It feels good.
The Terriers reach the final of the NCAA tournament. They don’t win, but they come in second overall in the final rankings, and it still feels like a win. Ilya and Jamal take the whole team to Olive Garden for dinner after the game. The boys are on a high and the mood is jubilant. They’re so loud the waitress has to come over and tell them to keep it down twice. They eat enough pasta to feed an army. Jamal tells off Lachlan for talking with his mouth full and spraying spaghetti sauce all over him. It’s messy and it’s kind of perfect.
Ilya stands up at the head of the table and gives a speech about how proud he is of them, using probably way too many swear words for the university’s liking. The waitress comes over a third time and tells him to lower his volume, sir. The boys shout and holler and yell out, “Fuck yeah, Coach!”
It feels pretty fucking good.
--
2023
Ilya starts off his third year of coaching at Boston University by breaking up with his girlfriend. He and Olivia had dated for the last ten months. She’s from Finland and is at the university teaching Mechanical Engineering as an Adjunct Professor. They’d met at one of the social functions thrown by the college and had bonded over their love of fast cars and both being from cold, Northern European countries.
The relationship is comfortable, she’s smart and beautiful and the sex is good and Ilya enjoys being around her and having a go-to person around to talk to or take out. There’s however, a part of him, deep inside that he tries to ignore. A part that he’ll never, ever tell anyone about, that sometimes appears late at night when Olivia is asleep next to him, and he’s staring up at the ceiling thinking, but it doesn’t feel like it did with Shane.
Three weeks before semester starts, she tells him over dinner that she’s been offered a permanent position as an Associate Professor in London and accepted. It doesn’t occur to either of them that maybe it was something she might have discussed with Ilya first. Neither of them are particularly upset, and the break-up is so smooth, it’s over by the time their mains even arrive. They even order a dessert to share.
Ilya sends Olivia to the airport for her flight to London, and is genuinely excited for her. He gives her a long hug before she heads into Departures and she stands up on her tip-toes to kiss his cheek. “Be happy, Ilya,” she says.
-
The current captain of the Boston Terriers is Ben, a twenty-one year old Psychology senior with a buzz cut that he dyes a different, lurid colour every other month. Ben’s boyfriend is called Rowan, a Fine Art major whose shirts are perpetually covered in streaks of oil paint. Rowan comes to almost all their games and always brings a handmade, glittery sign of support for the team. No one bats an eye or makes a mean or teasing comment about this. In fact, a lot of the other boys on the team also seem to be good friends with Rowan.
One day, Ilya overhears some of the boys in the locker room discussing the previous night’s episode of RuPaul’s drag race, dissecting the lip sync battle as seriously as they discuss game plays. He thinks of Shane, wonders what Shane would think if he could witness all this, wonders how things could have been different for them if they had a chance to start their careers all over again, ten years later.
After they win a game, Ilya watches Ben gesture Rowan down from the stands to meet him by the ice, watches the way he pulls Rowan over the boards with his glittery ‘Go Terriers! Woof!’ sign crushed between them, to kiss him without a care in the world.
Ilya thinks the next generation of hockey players might turn out to be okay, after all. He thinks Shane might agree with him too.
-
The Montreal Voyageurs are playing the last game of the Stanley Cup finals against the Philadelphia Flyers. Ilya strategically waits until what he knows will be the final five minutes of the game before turning on his television to ESPN, and he watches from his living room as Shane wins his fifth Stanley Cup.
He watches Shane, ecstatic and beautiful, his dark hair shining with sweat, lift the silver cup for the fifth time. It aches still to this day, to look at him. Less than it would have hurt five or six years ago, but the ache is still there. At this stage Ilya accepts the ache as a small comfort because what would happen if he woke up one day and it was no longer there? He wouldn’t know what to do in a world where he doesn’t love Shane.
The broadcast then shows some footage of the Voyageurs’ families joining them to celebrate on the ice. Hayden Pike is there with his horde of children and his wife, the other players all have their partners and kids with them. Shane is celebrating with his parents, hugging his mom tightly as his dad looks on proudly.
Ilya thinks maybe in an alternate timeline, he’s there too, wearing a Hollander jersey and running out onto the ice to kiss Shane in front of everyone and tell him how proud he is. To show the world Shane is his, and not just some distant memories of late night hotel room hook-ups in his head.
But Shane isn’t his. All Ilya has of him is a text thread that he sometimes reads in bed late at night, and a hidden folder containing six photos labelled ‘Boring’ that he has transferred to each new phone for the last eight years and can’t bring himself to delete.
--
Present
Two hours after watching Shane’s press conference, Ilya finally peels himself off his bedroom floor. He’s still only wearing the towel he had wrapped around his waist after his shower. His phone has 54 message notifications and about ten missed calls from Svetlana.
He picks up his phone, ignoring all the notifications, and scrolls through his text threads until he reaches Jane. He has to scroll down for a while before he finds it, which makes him feel some way he doesn’t feel like analysing too closely. Ilya has not messaged this number in eight years. He hopes it hasn’t changed. He hopes he hasn’t been blocked. He types out a short message but it takes him a while before he can actually hit send.
Fucking brave, Hollander. Congratulations.
The next few days after the press conference is torture. Ilya sees Shane’s face everywhere. It doesn’t help that he still follows most of the sports news outlets on his social media, and Shane is dominating the headlines on every one of them. Ilya spends one night devouring every article he comes across, then forces himself to turn off his phone and shove it deep into his sock drawer. He lasts approximately 45 minutes before he’s digging it out and turning it back on. There’s still no reply from Jane.
It’s not until he sees the GQ article that he stops, mid-scroll. Shane is featured in the latest issue - the timing doesn’t surprise Ilya one bit, if he knows anything, it’s that Shane is a planner down to the last second. Shane looks good on the cover of the article, in a well-tailored black suit. In fact, he looks better than good, he looks breathtaking.
He reads through the article with his heart in his throat- it’s basically a transcript of a one-on-one interview the journalist had with Shane, but it dives deeper and more personal than any other article that he’s read in the last few days, which had mostly been repetitive summaries of Shane’s press conference.
When he gets to the last paragraph of the article, Ilya stops breathing.
Tom: Now that you’re publicly out, what’s next for you? Are you seeing anyone? Are you open to dating? I imagine there is a very long line of men who would be dying for the opportunity.
Shane: (Laughs) I’m not seeing anyone at the moment, and I’m open to dating. I’m relieved that I no longer have to keep this part of myself hidden. That I could take a date out to a restaurant and not care who sees. That I can be in love openly.
Tom: And have you ever been in love?
Shane: Yes. Once. It was many years ago. Neither of us were out back then and it was complicated. But yes, I was in love with him.
Tom: I find it hard to believe you’ve only been in love once!
Shane: Well, it’s true.
Tom: Is there perhaps a chance of re-connecting with that person?
Shane: (Smiles) I think I’ll leave that one without a comment.
When he finishes reading the article, Ilya can barely see his phone screen through a haze of tears in his eyes.
I was in love with him. Shane had said him. Not her, not Rose, him. And unless Shane had some other passionate affair with another man many years ago, he’s referring to Ilya.
The spark of hope that flares deep inside him feels foreign. He hasn’t felt anything like that in a very long time. Eight years, to be exact.
His hands are shaking as he copies the link to the article and forwards it to Svetlana, followed by a message containing a single question mark. She understands, of course, and her reply comes less than ten minutes later.
Svetlana
Obviously he’s talking about you, idiot. Go and get him.
-
It’s easier said than done.
What is Ilya going to do, call up Shane on a number that he saved in his phone over a decade ago, under a code name, and never found the courage to block?
Turn up in front of his fake Montreal condo that Ilya has memorised the address of and never forgotten, even if Shane probably doesn’t even own it anymore after all this time?
Send Shane a text asking “Hey, I read that article and I think maybe you were talking about me when you said you had only been in love once and by the way, I’ve loved you for eight fucking years and I never stopped?”
He doesn’t even have time to spiral about it, because a few days later Ilya has to take the team to New York for an away game against Cornell. On any given day, he already feels like he has a well-paid job herding cats, but when it involves navigating a flight, airports and 22 teenage boys, he thinks it’s time to ask for a pay raise.
They spill into the hotel lobby messy and loud, and Ilya and Jamal pile the boys and their luggage and equipment into a corner of the lobby, and Ilya tells them to shut the fuck up while they handle the registration and keys. By the time they hand out room assignments and threaten the team with castration if they don’t keep to their strict 9pm curfew, Ilya feels like drinking an entire bottle of vodka.
Jamal goes to his room, saying something about putting on the Do Not Disturb sign, ordering room service and not to wake him unless the hotel is on fire. Ilya goes to his own room long enough to drop his suitcase on the floor, then immediately heads back down to the hotel bar.
He pointedly ignores three of the boys still huddled in the lobby, loudly discussing buying tickets to The Book of Mormon, which Ilya is certain finishes after 9pm. He makes a mental note whose room to knock on first when doing curfew checks later.
At the bar he nurses a vodka soda and stares at his phone. Before he can stop himself, he clicks open the text thread with Jane again. There’s still no reply, but a tiny ‘Read’ has now appeared under Ilya’s message.
-
The next night, they win the game 4-3, the winning goal only coming seconds before the buzzer. Ilya meets the team as they come off the ice, giving a congratulatory helmet pat to each boy and leaves them to shower and pack up while he slips out a service entrance for a cigarette.
He smokes less these days, but tonight his nerves are shot, the close game and everything that’s happened in the last week finally catching up to him. He feels exhausted as he leans a foot against the filthy wall of the arena, facing the parking lot, and flicks his lighter.
“Those things will kill you one day, you know.”
Ilya knows that voice. He hasn’t heard that voice in person in years, but there was a time when he heard that voice during stolen moments in hotel rooms, gasping and moaning in his ear. In a bed in Montreal, murmuring his name against his chest.
He turns, his hand dropping limply to his side and the cigarette still dangling from his lips, unlit.
Shane. Standing in front of him, windswept and beautiful, bundled in a dark coat and pale blue scarf. His freckles stand out on his cheeks, which are flushed from the cold. Ilya notices them immediately, just like he noticed them in another grey parking lot on another cold day, a lifetime ago.
“Hollander,” Ilya says. His voice is hoarse but he barely notices it. He’s not a hundred percent sure he’s not dreaming, or having some kind of anxiety-induced hallucination.
"Congratulations on the win.” Shane says with a small smile. He looks a little nervous, but more than that, he looks more at peace than Ilya has ever seen him. Older, but still as handsome as ever. Well-rested. Settled.
"You watched the game?” Ilya asks slowly, overwhelmed with about a thousand different feelings.
Shane found him. Here in New York, at some random college hockey game. Shane had kept tabs on him, found out what Ilya was doing post-retirement, checked the team’s game schedule and somehow tracked him down to this dirty service entrance behind the arena.
Shane nods. “Yeah. You were great. The team’s really talented. So much energy.” He huffs out a soft, rueful laugh, and Ilya’s breath is knocked out of him with how stunning Shane is. “Oh, to be young and eighteen again.”
”Eighteen,” Ilya echoes, his chest tight. “Was a long time ago.”
Shane meets his eyes, and Ilya knows they are both thinking of the day they had first met as teenagers, terrifyingly young and clueless with stars in their eyes and their whole careers ahead of them.
“Ilya,” Shane says softly, and with just that one word from him, Ilya immediately feels his eyes burning. He shakes his head and looks down at the pavement, pressing his lips so tightly together it hurts, because if he says anything right now he will most definitely burst into tears.
Shane notices, of course he does, and he steps closer, reaching out to gently grip Ilya’s wrist. He’s wearing a jacket, but he can still feel Shane’s touch like a hot brand through the layers.
“Ilya,” he says again, pleading quietly for Ilya to look at him. He does, after several long minutes and a few deep breaths. The sight of Shane’s face up close in person, all these years later, is devastating.
“I owe you an apology. I’m so sorry. For walking out on you that day and ending it like that. For taking so long to get my shit together and to stop being such a fucking coward.”
Ilya shakes his head. “You are not coward, Hollander. I saw your press conference. That was brave.”
“I should have been brave eight years ago,” Shane replies, and the regret in his voice breaks Ilya’s heart.
Shane releases his wrist and takes Ilya’s hand in his, his palm warm and dry. “Since then, I told myself. One day if I could ask you if you wanted to be together, I would only do it if you could have all of me. It’s the least you deserve. No code names, no secret condos, no hiding. No more of any of that shit.”
“You want that?” Ilya manages to say, his voice hoarse and trembling. He can’t even bring himself to feel embarrassed about it. “You still want us to be together?”
Shane nods, his brown eyes shining wetly. “So much. I wanted it eight years ago too, I was just so fucking scared and stupid then. I still want it. If…if you’ll have me.” His voice breaks on the last word.
“Shane,” Ilya breathes. He brings his hands up to cradle Shane’s face, and the tears finally spill over Shane’s lashes and run down his cheeks. Ilya wipes them away gently, caressing his cheekbones. “You have no fucking idea…I have always been yours.”
Shane lets out a sound that sounds a lot like a sob, and it cuts right into the core of Ilya. He crashes into Ilya, pressing their lips together and kissing him frantically. All this time later, but he still knows the shape of Shane’s mouth like the back of his own hand. Shane’s nose is cold against his, and Ilya thinks this is it, this is what he waited eight years for, and this is all he wants for the rest of his stupid, little life.
“Fuck, I love you,” Shane gasps softly in between kisses, barely taking his lips off Ilya’s. “I missed you so much.”
“I love you too,” Ilya murmurs back, and the relief is staggering, to say those words out loud finally, after years of keeping them locked in his chest. He had thought it would hurt, the pain of thinking of all the years they lost, all the time and moments they could have had together. But it all fades away into nothing. The only thing that matters now is Shane, here and real in his arms again. Shane, who fucking loves him back, who has always loved him.
When they finally pull apart, Ilya is not sure if minutes, or days, have passed. The world could have ended around them and he wouldn’t have noticed. Ilya’s cheeks are wet and they're tangled tightly together, Shane’s hands still clutching the front of his jacket.
“Ya tebya lyublyu,” Ilya repeats quietly in Russian, just because he can. Shane doesn’t know what it means, probably, but it’s okay. Ilya will teach him later. They have time.
“I’m so sorry,” Shane breathes against Ilya’s lips, his voice wrecked. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I wasted so much time.”
”No, moya lyubov,” Ilya whispers, bringing his forehead to rest against Shane’s.
He feels Shane’s breath warm against his cheek, smells his familiar cologne, still the same one, after all these years. It smells like home. Ilya rubs a gentle thumb against the spray of freckles on his cheek- his precious freckles - his other hand cupped tightly around the back of Shane’s neck. He’s never letting go, ever again.
“We have time, sweetheart. We have the rest of our fucking lives.”
--