Chapter Text
“Two assists!” someone yelled in his direction and Shane tilted his still-full tonic towards them.
He’d had fourteen assists in the last fourteen games, but his scoring average was down from where it had been in Montreal. The Boston coaches didn’t seem worried, but Shane couldn’t help but calculate it after every game.
“No, but seriously,” Taz said, leaning over the sticky table, eyes wide. “That thing you did in the second. You passed it through the guy. I thought it hit his skate.”
“Taz, how are you drunk already?” Marleau asked from Shane’s left and the table guffawed, as this was the best chirp they’d heard in years.
Columbus was cold in February but the sports bar they’d found themselves in by default was nice enough. They were in some booths at the back and so far no-one had even looked their way.
Shane checked his phone. He’d sent Hayden and JJ and congratulations texts: they’d won their game against Minneapolis in overtime. Boston was playing Montreal next week and Shane was excited to see them both but dreading the game itself.
Montreal had picked up a second-pair defenceman from the West who was doing okay, but he kept stepping up too early at the line, getting caught flat-footed when plays turned over. Shane could see it even without watching the games closely: the gaps were wrong, the timing half a beat off. He’d do better if he just held the lane and trusted his partner instead of trying to force the play. Shane was still avoiding Twitter, but from what his mom had said fans were desperate for someone tangible to be angry at, and this poor guy was bearing the brunt of it.
“Where’s Roz?” Willis asked.
Shane turned in his seat, leaning to one side far enough that he could just about see the bar.
Ilya was talking to a woman there. He was laughing, in fact, his hands moving as he spoke. She was tall with long brown hair, dressed all in black and she looked like the models he worked with on ads sometimes. Ilya spoke and she searched in her purse for something. Her phone? Were they exchanging numbers?
She looked away from her purse and put a hand on Ilya’s arm, smiling. Shane stood up.
“Hey, you okay?” Marleau asked.
Shane looked down into his concerned expression.
“I don’t feel great,” he replied, which was the absolute truth. “I’m going to go back to the hotel.”
Marleau, maybe Taz, said something after that, but Shane kept walking, past the bar and out into the cold night. He’d left his jacket on the back of his chair. Someone would pick it up.
He hailed a cab and gave the driver the name of the hotel they were staying at. It was a good job that he and Rozanov were at an away game: their rooms were on different floors. In Ilya’s house the bedrooms were all on the same floor, so maybe Shane would have had to sleep down in the den to give him some privacy.
Shoving some bills at the cab driver, he got out and went up to his room, shivering slightly. It was dim inside, the white bed almost glowing in the lamp light. Shane took off his shoes, stared at the bed for a moment, then walked into the bathroom where he threw up into the toilet, coughing against the acid burn. When he was done he sat on the floor, using some toilet roll to wipe his eyes and his mouth.
He was having a panic attack. He hadn’t vomited with anxiety since school.
Shaking hard, he got up and flushed the toilet, running his hands under the hot tap and concentrating on the sensation, the sound of the rushing water. He felt well enough after a few minutes to brush his teeth, though he had to fight against his still-unsteady hands.
He got into bed when he was done, still in his slacks and shirt, wrapping the comforter around him.
Was Rozanov back already? Was he in his room, even now, kissing that woman with his hands in her hair. He bent forward on the bed, his breathing coming fast again. This was the most pathetic he’d ever been. He shouldn’t be having a meltdown over Rozanov—famous womanizer—taking a woman back to his hotel room to fuck. He conjured some images: Rozanov with his hands on her ass, kissing her. Holding her down while he fucked her, his cock pumping in and out of her pussy.
Gasping now, Shane fought to slow his breathing, counting to four over and over until he felt less like he was going to faint.
I love you, Ilya told him after every game, but he didn’t mean it. He didn’t mean it and he wasn’t ever going to and Shane shouldn’t care anyway. He didn’t fucking care because he wasn’t—
A knock sounded at the door.
Shane ignored it. It was probably Marleau, making sure his star teammate wasn’t dead in a ditch or anything.
“Shane!” Ilya’s voice. “Open the fucking door!”
Shane wiped at his eyes and got up, unlatching the door and standing back as Ilya barged in, his jacket in one hand.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Shane shrugged. “I just didn’t feel great.”
“So you just took off,” Ilya said, flatly. “Without your jacket.”
“Thanks for bringing it back.”
Ilya dropped the jacket over the back of a chair and took a step forward. Shane took a step back, staying out of his personal space.
“What are we doing? Are we dancing?”
It could have been a joke, but there was an edge of annoyance to Ilya’s voice.
“Don’t you have—I mean, what about that woman?”
“What woman?”
“At the bar. I thought—” Shane looked up at the shadowed ceiling, folding his arms over his chest. “Did you—” he swallowed hard, then tried again. “Did you kiss her?”
Ilya looked at him like he’d grown another head, before puzzlement shaded to anger. “You really do think I’m an asshole? Think that I would pick up the first pretty girl that smiles at me.”
“Well, you could. You could do that, if you wanted to.”
Again, he seemed to have made Ilya speechless. “What are you talking about?” he asked, finally. “You think I would do that to you?”
“Do what?”
“Fuck this.” Ilya turned and took a step towards the door, then wheeled back around. “What do you think we are doing? Hmm? We live together, sleep in the same bed!”
“I don’t know.” Shane shook his head, and collapsed on the nearest chair, his breath coming short again. “You never said and I didn’t even fucking know I could be jealous of you. Shit. This is so fucked.”
A hand, cool and firm, settled on the back of Shane’s neck. “Hey, come on. Everything is okay. We are fine: first fight, eh?”
“Fuck,” Shane swore, unsteady. “We’re together, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Ilya kissed the top of his ear. “I think so.”
Pretty much everyone had slept on the way home, wiped out after six days on the road. Shane was jittery, desperate to touch Ilya but now more aware than ever of the dangers of even then most casual intimacy. They’d collapsed into Ilya’s bed when they’d got home and had fucked slowly that morning, unbearably tender.
Ilya had somehow managed to dodge PR for the whole day but Shane wasn’t so lucky, speaking to Sports 104 at midday and then taking some Instagram pictures for Underarmour.
He should probably take a quick shower and get a snack, but he was putting off calling Hayden. It was a shitty feeling, not wanting to call his best friend, but they’d both been too busy to chat and he really didn’t know what to expect.
It was late afternoon. He really did have to call Hayden: he had a day off as well but he was taking the kids out later.
He hit video call and waited. Hayden appeared, pink-cheeked and smiling, wearing a Metro’s branded hoodie that looked like it had yogurt on one shoulder.
“Shane! How are you, buddy?”
“I’m good. How are you and the kids? And Jackie?”
“We’re all good. Ruby snuck three extra cookies somehow and was up until 2am with an upset stomach.” A voice called out in the background. “Hayden! He doesn’t want to hear about that!”
“Hi Jackie,” Shane added.
“Hi Shane!”
“How’s things? Is that your apartment? Looks nice!”
“Ah, no. I’m staying with Il—Rozanov,” Shane caught himself just in time. “I thought you knew?”
“Yeah,” Hayden agreed, surprised. “I just thought, you’ve been there a month, right?”
“It’s a big house.”
“For sure. Listen, I’m glad if you’re getting along with your teammates, you know? Everyone was worried about you.”
“They’re just hockey players.”
“Well, good.”
“How is everyone?”
Hayden’s smile dipped a bit. “Man, I have no idea how you did this captain sh—” he looked off screen for a second. “Stuff. Captain stuff for so long. The meetings! So many meetings, man. I just want to be on the ice.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot, you’ll get the hang of it,” Shane reassured him. “Is JJ okay?”
Shane had sent a couple of dumb animal videos to him but hadn’t gotten any reply.
Hayden winced. “Yeah. I think he’s just spent a bit too much time on Twitter, you know?”
“No? I haven’t really been on much.”
“Well, there’s a lot of videos of you and Rozanov being buddy-buddy and I know it’s just PR shi—. Just PR, but that with the way you are on the ice. I don’t know, he’s just gone down a bit of a rabbit hole. He’ll come round.”
Shane didn’t even know where to start with that. What the fuck did buddy-buddy mean? What kind of rabbit hole?
“How are we on the ice?” That seemed like the safest question to ask.
“Well, you know-” Hayden made a sweeping gesture with one arm. “You keep doing impossible shit that you didn’t do here. I mean, you didn’t do so much of here. And you seem to have a lot of friends on the team already. Some people—” he stopped and there sounded like there was a whispered conversation going on. “He’s going to find out at some point,” Hayden said to Jackie, before turning back to the camera. “Look, some idiots are saying you asked for the trade.”
“I—” Shane didn’t even know what to say to that.
“I know it’s not true, okay? I spoke to you that night: you were devastated.”
He’d almost forgotten about that, about not being able to even form words, Ilya coming in and speaking to Hayden. He wanted to be upstairs with Ilya now, to be lying on the sofa with his head on his shoulder, dozing while Ilya scrolled Instagram or Reddit or watched Russian TV with the sound low.
“And JJ thinks it’s true?”
“You just need to talk to him, okay? Maybe we can hang out after the game next week?”
“Sure,” Shane agreed, despite his misgivings. He had a horrible feeling Boston was going to trounce Montreal, which wouldn’t endear him to JJ.
“Not going to be past your bedtime?” Hayden joked.
Shane just rolled his eyes at him. “Tell me about the kids,” he requested, and Hayden’s eyes lit up.
He could hear the sound of some kind of racing game as he came up from the den, revving engines filling the living room. Voices too, and he stood on the top stair until he was sure it was only Marleau up there with Ilya. Laine would have been fine too, but any of the rookies would have been a little too much. They were endlessly starstruck by Ilya and just a little too interested in his personal life. Marleau and Laine just came over to play video games or watch Daredevil.
“Hey,” Shane said, sitting down a respectable distance from Ilya.
“Hey Holly,” Marleau greeted him and Shane rolled his eyes.
Thankfully only Marleau called him that. “Are you losing again?”
“Only—” Marleau gritted his teeth and turned his whole body with the controller. “Because Roz is cheating.”
“Is Mario Cart!” Ilya replied, jumping to his feet and leaning towards the TV. “How can anyone cheat at Mario Cart?”
“You kept speculating about Coach’s sex life during the first lap!”
“Big word,” Ilya replied, throwing a bomb behind him on the screen. “Too difficult.”
Marleau opened his mouth to reply but Ilya’s turtle passed over the finish line, confetti raining down on the screen.
Ilya collapsed back on the sofa, turning so he was lying down with his head in Shane’s lap. Shane lifted his hand to run it through Ilya’s hair, but abruptly remembered they had company and put it down again.
Thankfully, Ilya was pretty tactile with everyone so Marleau didn't blink, instead slapping Ilya’s ankle so he could sit down. Ilya promptly shoved his socked feet under Marleau’s thigh.
“You guys coming to Will’s BBQ next week?”
“Sure,” Ilya agreed. “But Shane will only go if Joanne is there.”
Joanne Laine was Shane’s favourite WAG. She was from Yorkshire originally, which seemed to be a place where half the words were optional, so Shane only caught every second thing she said but she had a kind smile that always put him at ease. She also treated Ilya like he was the same age as her kids, which was alternately sweet and hilarious.
“I’m sure Lainy can be convinced to bring his wife.”
The conversation turned to the TV show Marleau and Ilya watched together on flights sometimes and Shane lent back, letting his eyes half-close. It was nice, sitting here with one teammate and one teammate who was also his—. His something. Extremely strange and something he was trying not to think about too much, but nice.
Marleau got up to go, searching for his jacket while Ilya tried to get Shane to be the one to walk Marleau to the door.
“It’s your house.”
“You live here,” Ilya whined, his head still in Shane’s lap.
“I know my way out,” Marleau told them, his eyes creased with amusement.
“It’s rude!” Shane told Ilya, who sighed expansively and stood up.
“Mr Marleau, please follow me,” he said to Marleau, with what he probably thought was a fancy accent, but just made him sound more Russian.
Marleau held out his fist and Shane bumped it with his own. “See you at skate tomorrow.”
“See you, good luck with this dude,” Marleau replied, in French.
“Thanks, I’ll need it.”
When he came back into the living room, Ilya climbed into Shane’s lap. “What did you say about me in French?”
“Marley said you smelled bad and I told him you never brush your teeth.”
“Never brush your teeth,” Ilya repeated, shaking his head. “Such terrible chirps, like a small child.”
Shane knew he was grinning but couldn’t hide it. “You need a haircut,” he said, running a hand through Ilya’s unruly curls.
“I need a kiss.”
“Do you?” Shane asked, his eyes flicking to Ilya’s lips.
Ilya hummed, and leaned down.