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Ilya was watching the little genius person tap at his phone and make a confused face for the fifth time when he finally let himself think that maybe Shane was right, and it was better to have people do this for him. Shane never would have been caught dead standing at a tiny table in a glass box in the middle of a mall in Minnesota. But Ilya had said it would be fine, he’d be in and out, back to the hotel before Shane even noticed he was gone.
The Apple Store guy put down Ilya’s phone. It buzzed with a text on the table. Shane had for sure noticed Ilya was gone.
“Um, sir? I’m really sorry, some of the data won’t transfer. You’re going to have to do it manually, and not from the cloud.” He started to explain how the hell Ilya was supposed to do that. Ilya wanted to listen, he really did, but there were a bunch of technical words and acronyms for cords he didn’t understand, and then there was a group of younger men eyeing him from over by the laptop displays who were seconds from deciding that he really was a famous hockey player worth pulling out their phones and taking pictures of.
Ilya snatched his phone off the table and said “Yes, yes, fine. I will set it up at home. Can I pay?”
He signed what he needed to sign and tapped his card and got the hell out of there, called Shane from the parking lot to tell him he’d be back soon. “I have to do manual transfer,” he said, and shook his head when Shane asked what the hell that meant. “Something was wrong with my phone, they could not move my stuff over.”
“My mom can help with that, if it can wait until we’re home.” Shane’s voice came out of the car speakers a little muffled, which meant he’d thrown the phone on the bed so he could get ready for dinner. Which, of course, Ilya was going to be late for. “She’s weirdly good with tech stuff.”
Ilya didn’t think it was weird; Yuna was good at most things. But he said, “Yes, it can wait. Can you?”
Shane sighed. “I don’t want to, but I can.”
“You hate to not be on time, I know,” Ilya said, and pressed a little harder on the gas.
But of course Shane heard the rev of the engine through the phone and said, automatic, “Slow down.”
“I am not going that fast.”
“Don’t lie to me, Ilya.”
“Fast is relative,” Ilya said, which was something Svetlana said all the time when she was trying to sell cars. Still, he slowed down.
And Shane, because he could read Ilya like a fucking book, even though the phone, said “Thank you. We’re getting Thai, by the way. Someone Wyatt used to play with knows a place.”
Ilya got back to the hotel, changed as fast as he could, and then they went out with the rest of the team. He had a truly spectacular green curry and didn’t think about moving over his stupid data until a few days later when his SIM card glitched out again. He was back in Ottawa trying to scroll through Instagram when the error message popped up. He groaned and tossed his phone against the couch cushions. Turning it off and then back on again only sometimes worked, but he tried it anyways as he wandered through the house in search of his suitcase.
He was pretty sure that was where his phone was. If Shane were home he would’ve been horrified—losing a brand-new thousand dollar phone still in the box kind of went against the way he was raised—but he wasn’t, he was on a run with Anya, and so Ilya checked several closets and finally found it under the bed in the guest room, where Ilya shoved things when he wasn’t sure where else to put them. There were a lot of suitcases and empty boxes and a huge stuffed animal he didn’t remember getting but knew had been kicking around the house for a few years.
The phone was wrapped up in his favorite sweatshirt, an old black Nike hoodie he and Shane started passing back and forth since before they were really together. Ilya clutched both in his hands—two good finds for the price of one—and headed towards the office. Shane used the office only for work purposes because he’d read somewhere that it was good to designate rooms for either work or relaxation, while Ilya used it for anything that felt too annoying to do at the kitchen table. Phones and cords and whatever the hell the cloud was certainly fit that definition, but sometimes so did eating a big salad or folding the laundry, so Ilya’s desk was far messier than Shane’s.
The beginning of the process was fairly easy. He turned on the new phone and followed the directions to start the transfer, but it stalled out at the same step as it had for the genius person. Ilya spent some time scrolling through Reddit and checking if it was his photos, or maybe his contacts, until he saw a post from BigPapi27: my problem was with my voicemail lolll never checked it and it was full as hell. had to clear it out and then everything was fine.
Well. That was probably it. Ilya didn’t think he’d checked his voicemail since he’d played for Boston. He wasn’t even sure where it lived on the phone, so he googled that too, and found out that not all the notifications on the phone call app were from missed calls. A lot of them were, but just as many were voicemails he hadn’t known were taking up all this space, causing him problems.
And, he realized as he scrolled, so many of them were from Shane. Most of them, in fact. It stood to reason that any normal person, someone who didn’t love him, would’ve stopped leaving messages years ago once they realized he’d never listen to them. But not Shane. Never Shane, who’d probably picked up the habit years ago, judging by the sheer volume of messages, and then doggedly kept it up because that’s how he was, the person Ilya had fallen in love with over and over again.
He picked one at random to listen to, put it on speaker and let Shane’s voice fill the office: “Hi, Ilya. It’s Tuesday. You’re at the grocery store and I texted you to bring home some more quinoa but I think maybe you won’t see it, because lately you’ve been leaving your phone in the car when you go places. I don’t know why. It would never occur to me to leave- anyways. I was thinking that, uh, I was trying to be mad at you for it, because I need it for dinner tonight, but I can’t manage it. I keep thinking about it and knowing I should be annoyed but I just love you, so. We’ll eat something else.”
Ilya’s eyes were hot. He’d started holding his breath somewhere around the word quinoa, and his throat was tight as he blew it out. The message was from four months ago. There were so many more of them, and if he was following BigPapi27’s advice, he should be deleting most of them. Not this one, Ilya decided, and then scrolled down to the beginning. There were a few from telemarketers and one or two from the Boston coaching staff that he deleted without listening to, but the first one from Shane was from September 9th, 2017. Ilya clicked play and then closed his eyes.
“Um, hi, sorry,” Shane said. Ilya knew, logically, that Shane’s voice wasn’t actually any different now than it had been six years ago. That didn’t keep it from sounding so fucking young that Ilya’s breath caught in his throat. “I know you said you’ll never listen to this, but I just- you’re on a plane back to Boston. I miss you so much already. I thought I knew how much this was going to suck, or that I’d prepared myself for it, but I didn’t- fuck, I miss you, and I’ve only been home for an hour. Call me back when you land, please. I, ah… I love you. So much. Bye.”
It would’ve been too much even if Ilya hadn’t remembered how hollow he’d felt on that flight, like someone had scooped out his insides so he was one giant, aching cavity that just wanted to put his head in Shane’s lap and be held. He’d had to leave the cottage, leave Shane so many times since then, and he always compared it to that very first time, on a plane next to a stranger whose sheer presence reminded him that every beautiful thing he’d discovered that summer was a secret. No better than a dream.
He let his head fall onto the desk, pressing his forehead into the wood, trying to collect himself. Then, he’d landed and called Shane from his Uber, spoken softly into the phone because Shane had insisted, had been worried they’d tip off the driver. It didn’t matter that Ilya explained the driver hadn’t said one word to him and was definitely listening to a podcast in his AirPods, Shane was nervous. And Ilya had loved him, awake, asleep, every way, and so he had whispered.
This Ilya, now, didn’t delete it. He clicked play on the next one.
They were all like that, he realized quickly. When Shane missed Ilya, he called and left a voicemail. Shane kept repeating that he knew Ilya was never going to listen to them, that he just had to say it, he had so much love he didn’t know what to do with it all. He called from the car a lot, just as often from his bed in Montreal with a voice hoarse from sleep. Every now and then he’d called from a public place, a store or a park, with chatter or birdsong in the background. There was one from that first year when Ilya had still been in Boston that Shane had called from the Metros locker room, murmured “I know you’re busy so you didn’t see it”—busy was code, busy meant Ilya had been playing in his own hockey game a thousand miles away—“but I scored off a perfect backhand. I can’t wait to know what you say about it. I keep imagining things, but somehow you’re always better than what I come up with in my head. I have no fucking idea how you do it.”
After a while, Ilya gave up wiping the tears off his face, just let them roll down his cheeks and drip off his chin. His face was tight with the feeling of saltwater drying when Shane announced his presence with a soft knock on the doorframe. Anya, in the kitchen, drank water so noisily Ilya could hear it when he paused the voicemail he’d been listening to, stopping Shane from describing how hard it was to sleep in a bed Ilya wasn’t in next to him.
This Shane, now Shane, who slept in a bed next to Ilya every night, frowned at the sight of Ilya’s face and took a concerned step forward. “What’s going on?”
There were so many cords on the desk in front of Ilya, all of them plugged into things they didn’t need to be plugged into, and his new phone face-up and shiny, ready to be used, and then there was his old phone in his hand, voicemail open, a hundred versions of Shane all waiting to tell Ilya how much he was loved, and in what ways, and why. Shane told him he was kind, Shane told him he was funny and smart and an asshole, Shane told him he was beloved. And every now and then there was a voicemail from a telemarketer or the cable company, just to keep things honest.
Ilya knuckled a tear out of the corner of his eye and asked, “How was your walk?”
Shane let out a quick laugh, more of a huff of air, really, to show that the question was ridiculous. “Ilya. You’re crying. In the office, too, why are you in the office?”
“I had to switch my phone over,” Ilya explained, although it was the smallest explanation in the face of years of things Shane had given him.
“My mom was supposed to help you with that,” Shane said, frowning at the cords like they were the things that had made Ilya cry. “Do you want me to call her? I think she’s free.”
Ilya couldn’t look at Shane on the phone, not right then. He thought it might kill him. He said, voice thick with tears, “It was the voicemails.”
It was always hard to understand how much Shane was in motion until he froze. When Ilya said the word voicemail, Shane stopped rocking on the balls of his feet, stopped fiddling with the string of his hoodie. His eyes flitted from Ilya to his phone and back again, wide, and he said, “The, uh, what?”
“You left me voicemails,” Ilya said. Everything was becoming blurry again. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “There are so many of them the data won’t transfer. At least, that’s what they said on the internet.”
Shane took a second to himself, signaled by a hand over his eyes and the deep breath that he heaved in, held for a few seconds. Ilya averted his eyes to give Shane as much privacy as he could, which was something Shane had mentioned loving in a voicemail from 2019, left at two in the morning, one item among a list that came through the phone speaker muffled by pillows and blankets. He was still looking politely at the wood grain of his desk when Shane walked over and crouched down next to Ilya’s desk chair.
As Shane spoke, he dropped his forehead onto Ilya’s thigh by his knee. “I love you,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to ever hear those.”
Ilya laughed wetly. “You left them for me.”
Shane picked his head up, shot Ilya a little glare. “Do you remember what your outgoing message is?”
“Outgoing- what is that?”
Shane didn’t respond, just fished his own phone out of his pocket and called Ilya. “Don’t pick up,” he instructed as Ilya’s phone buzzed on the table. Shane’s contact image sprung up, him on the couch with Anya in his lap, nose scrunched up and flipping Ilya off because he didn’t want his picture taken. Shane hadn’t set contact images for anyone in his phone, always said he didn’t need them—“If I can’t remember what they look like, they should be going through my manager,” he always said—and so Ilya stared at his own initials on Shane’s phone until the call rung out.
Then he heard himself say, voice gruff and accent thicker than it had been in years, “This is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.”
Shane gave it a second to prove that was all of the outgoing message. Then he hung up the phone and raised his eyebrows, like, see? “I don’t remember setting that up,” Ilya admitted. It was a weak defense, he knew, but Shane didn’t seem to be trying to catch him out in anything. Zadumchivyy was the closest way Ilya could describe his expression, which he always translated as wistful but really included shades of thoughtfulness and reflection that no English word could quite capture. He asked, “Why did you leave them, if you thought I’d never listen?”
“I remember loving you so much it scared the shit out of me,” Shane admitted. “And I didn’t want to tell you how much I missed you because I felt like if I started talking about it I’d never stop, and it would hurt too much, and then I’d just… I don’t know. I’m not explaining it right.”
But Ilya got a hand in Shane’s hair, scratching gently, and he said, “I know what you mean,” and Shane looked up at him like he was remembering in that moment that yes, Ilya was the only other person in the world who actually did know what he meant. Or just like Shane loved him, which Ilya thought was probably just the same thing.
“Now it’s just habit, I think,” Shane said. He tipped his head back into Ilya’s palm and shifted on his heels. “Can we get out of the office? This feels like too emotional a conversation to have in here.”
“Yes, yes,” Ilya said, heaving Shane up with a hand under each elbow and chasing him into the living room. They crashed into the couch, Shane on his back with Ilya draped over top of him. Shane was sighing into Ilya’s mouth when Anya trotted over and licked the side of his leg once, to remind them she was there. Ilya could feel the way Shane’s nose wrinkled against his cheekbone, that was how closely they were pressed together. He turned his head ever so slightly to the side and said into the corner of Shane’s mouth, “Anyechka, ležat.”
Anya did not lie down. Shane curled his finger’s in Ilya’s hair and said, “She still has her harness on.”
“You didn’t take it off?” Ilya asked. He reached over and unclipped the buckle, watched Anya step daintily out of the harness and trot over to her bed.
“I got home and I couldn’t find you,” Shane said, and Ilya wasn’t sure how he was supposed to keep living like this, with his heart so full it felt like an animal inside his chest. It had to be some kind of dangerous medical condition. Maybe there was a pill he could take. And then he realized, oh, that was what the voicemails were for, all the times that the thought of Ilya had made Shane feel like this, like he was so in love it was pouring out of him.
Ilya started crying again. He buried his face in Shane’s neck and Shane held him there even though he was probably making Shane disgusting, getting tears and snot all over his skin. “I love you,” he said when he had the breath. “You gave me a thousand perfect gifts. How can I-? I don’t know what to do.”
There was a pause, and then Shane shifted underneath Ilya. Ilya tried to pick up his head and see what was going on but Shane held him close with one hand, searching around for something with the other. Ilya realized what it was when his phone started buzzing in the other room, and then his voice came tinny out of the phone speaker: “This is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.”
“I love you too,” Shane said, and somewhere in the other room this message was recording on Ilya’s phone, preserved forever. “You don’t owe me anything. I love you just for existing like this. And for- mmm, yes,” he hummed as Ilya started leaving kisses down the column of his throat, “Okay, yes, I love when you- I have to go.”
The phone landed on the floor. Ilya got his hand under the waistband of Shane’s sweatpants and he moaned again, the sweetest sound in the world.
Later, Ilya found a way to transfer the voicemails to his laptop as mp3 files, thanks to a very thorough explanation on Reddit. He transferred all his data to his new phone, put all the useless cords away in a drawer he never intended on opening, and then, finally, he changed his outgoing message: “This is Ilya. Unless you are my Shane, I will never listen to your voicemail. Goodbye.”