Chapter Text
Ilya Rozanov notices Shane Hollander because he is wearing the wrong jersey.
That is the first offence.
The second is that he is beautiful.
The third, and most unforgivable, is that the name stretched across his back belongs to Eric Lowell, Boston’s smug golden boy, Ilya’s most irritating rival, a man who has spent three seasons trying and failing to get under Ilya’s skin.
And there, sitting three rows behind the visitors’ bench in Boston, wrapped in Lowell’s jersey like a public declaration, is the prettiest person Ilya has ever seen in his life.
For a moment, Ilya does not understand what he is looking at. He understands the jersey first, because the jersey is an insult, because Lowell’s name has been an irritation in his peripheral vision for years: across scoreboards, across sports headlines, across the back of a man who chirps too much for someone with such ordinary hands. Lowell is handsome in the way men become handsome when too many people tell them they are, polished by attention until they mistake shine for substance, and Ilya has disliked him easily, lazily, without effort. There has never been depth to it. Lowell annoys him, Ilya scores on him, Lowell gets angry, Ilya enjoys himself; it is a small, dependable pleasure in a long season full of travel and bruises and interviews where reporters pretend not to be asking the same question fourteen different ways.
Then the person inside Lowell’s jersey looks up, and Ilya’s irritation changes shape so quickly it almost becomes something else before he can name it.
The boy is sitting with both hands half-swallowed by the sleeves, the fabric too large over narrow wrists, his shoulders drawn in with the careful containment of someone trying not to take up too much room in a place designed to make everyone feel visible. The arena lights catch the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks; not many, just enough to make his face look unbearably particular, like something a person might remember by accident for the rest of his life. His mouth is soft and anxious, pressed gently together until he glances toward the ice and sees Ilya watching him. Then it parts. Just slightly. Enough.
Ilya has been watched by thousands of people at once and has learned, over the years, to divide attention into categories. There is the hungry look, the angry one, the stunned one, the calculating one. There is the look people give him when they want him to notice them noticing him, and the one opponents give him when they are already imagining how good it would feel to hurt him. This look is stranger. It is unguarded for half a second, startled and almost unwilling, as if the boy’s body has reacted before his conscience could arrive to reprimand it. His eyes widen, colour rises sharply beneath his freckles, and then he looks away so fast that even from the ice Ilya can feel the panic of it.
That should be the end of it. A pretty boy in an ugly jersey, embarrassed by being caught looking. A small amusement. A thing to use against Lowell for one shift and then forget.
But Lowell follows Ilya’s gaze.
The change in Lowell’s face is slight, a tightening around the mouth, the hardening of possession beneath the easy pre-game smirk, and it tells Ilya more than Lowell would ever mean to reveal. The boy is not only wearing Lowell’s name. Lowell expects the name to mean something. To warn other men away, perhaps. To turn the person inside the jersey into territory.
Ilya’s mood improves immediately.
Across the glass, Shane looks down at his hands and rubs the seam of the sleeve between his thumb and forefinger, once, twice, again, a small private motion with the rhythm of a habit. He does it as the lights flash over the rink, as the crowd begins to thicken into pre-game noise, as Lowell glances up once more with that same twitch of ownership in his expression. Ilya watches the movement for longer than he means to. There is something about it that bothers him before he knows why. The boy is beautiful, yes, and embarrassed, and loyal in the terrified way of someone who thinks loyalty is proven by how much of himself he can swallow, but there is something else too, something Ilya does not have language for yet: a carefulness so ingrained it looks like personality from a distance.
The problem, Shane thinks later, is that he has heard of Ilya Rozanov.
Everyone has heard of Ilya Rozanov.
Even people who do not care about hockey know him in the vague, cultural way people know weather disasters, Oscar winners, royal scandals, and men whose faces appear on billboards large enough to cause traffic incidents. Shane has seen him on magazine covers in airport shops. He has seen edits of him on social media, all slow-motion sweat and dark eyes and obscene jawline, set to music that made Rose say, with scholarly seriousness, “That man is a public health concern.” He has heard commentators talk about him as if he is less a player than an event: the best in the league, the most hated, the most watched, the most fined, the most quoted, the most handsome in a way that seems frankly unnecessary for someone already that good at hockey.
Another fact is that Ilya Rozanov is loud. That is the thing people always say. Loud with his skating, his celebrations, his interviews, his smile at booing crowds, his maddening ability to make hostility look like applause arriving in the wrong language. He lounges through post-game scrums as though microphones have gathered to be blessed. He flirts with reporters, opponents, cameras, and, according to Rose, “possibly the concept of attention itself.” He is obnoxious in a way that feels almost architecturally deliberate, as if he was built to occupy space and then decided to enjoy the inconvenience he caused everyone else by doing so.
Shane has always tried to be kind, sometimes to the point of foolishness.
Eric had liked that about him.
He had said so often, usually with his chin hooked over Shane’s shoulder while Shane pretended to read.
“You’re sweet,” Eric would murmur, dragging the word out like it amused him. “Ridiculously sweet. It’s disgusting.”
“I’m not disgusting.”
“No. You’re cute-disgusting.”
“I don’t think that’s a legitimate category.”
“It is now.”
And Shane, despite himself, would laugh, because Eric could make teasing feel like affection so easily that Shane forgot to examine it for anything sharper. He had a way of making Shane feel seen without making him feel exposed, as if all the softest parts of him were not liabilities but private discoveries Eric was delighted to have made first.
Rose once told him he was “emotionally financing men with terrible credit,” which had made him laugh and then, privately, made him think for three days. He does not like making hard conclusions about people. He prefers explanations, context, softened edges, the possibility that someone’s worst public self might be a performance or a defence. But even Shane, with all his anxious goodwill and his exhausting little instinct to be fair, cannot look at Ilya Rozanov and arrive at any conclusion except that the man is unbearable.
He is also, devastatingly, the hottest person Shane has ever seen in real life.
This is information Shane does not want. It arrives without permission the first time Ilya skates past the glass during warmups: golden brown hair damp at the ends peaking out, mouth curved like he already knows the punchline to a joke everyone else is still trying to understand, shoulders broad beneath his pads, body loose and certain and almost insulting in its ease. There is something indecent about watching someone move through the world with that much confidence. Shane feels it as a physical fact, a heat beneath his skin, an awareness so immediate it humiliates him before he has even done anything wrong.
He looks for half a second too long.
Ilya sees him.
Their eyes meet, and Shane looks away so violently his neck clicks. The sound vanishes under skates and pucks and crowd noise, but shame has excellent acoustics; Shane hears it perfectly, feels it travel down his spine, feels the awful childish wish to become invisible rise in him with such force that he grips Lowell’s sleeves harder just to keep his hands still. Somewhere in the spiritual distance, Rose would be calling this evidence. Shane calls it survival, because survival often looks ridiculous from the outside.
Down on the ice, Ilya slows just enough for Troy to nearly skate into his back.
“Rozanov,” Troy says, annoyed and amused in equal measure. “You see a ghost?”
Ilya does not answer immediately. His eyes have shifted away by a fraction, enough to make the whole thing deniable, but he is still aware of the boy in the stands in the way he is aware of a defender’s weak side, a goalie’s overcommitment, a crowd turning before a fight breaks out. He is aware of Lowell noticing too, and of the small possessive correction that passes through Lowell’s face.
The anthem passes. The crowd settles into the first-period roar. Lowell keeps checking the same place whenever Ilya does, not with confidence, not with ease, but with the irritated vigilance of a man who has suddenly remembered that locks can fail. Shane sits through it all with the jersey hanging off him, his fingers still worrying at the seam, his expression too careful whenever the noise swells. He watches Ilya in quick, reluctant fragments, each glance disappearing almost before it exists, but each one leaves something behind: colour in his cheeks, tension around his mouth, a pull in Ilya’s stomach that feels less like desire than the beginning of a bad decision.
By the time Ottawa gets its first power play eight minutes into the period, Ilya wants to make him look again.
That is all he lets himself know.
Lowell lines up across from him with his mouth already moving, because Lowell has never learned the sacred value of silence around men better than him. “Enjoying the view?”
Ilya looks over Lowell’s shoulder. Shane sees the movement and drops his eyes at once.
“Very much.”
Lowell’s jaw tightens. “Careful.”
Ilya lowers his voice, letting amusement gather thickly around the words because Lowell hates being treated like a small inconvenience.
“You put your name on pretty boy and bring him to my game. This is not careful.”
Lowell’s smile sharpens.
“You got a problem with that?”
Ilya glances briefly toward the stands.
The boy is still there.
Lowell’s jersey hanging from narrow shoulders. Hands tucked into sleeves. Looking increasingly uncomfortable with the attention.
Then Ilya looks back.
“Yes.”
Lowell leans in, smile thin enough to show the anger beneath it. “You jealous?”
Ilya glances up again. Shane has one hand near his mouth now, worrying lightly at the side of his thumb, his eyes lowered as though he can feel himself being discussed without hearing a word. The jersey looks worse every time Ilya notices it. Too large. Too claiming. Lowell’s name stretched across shoulders that seem to tense beneath the weight of being looked at.
“No,” Ilya says, smiling. “Jealous is when man has something worth keeping and knows how to keep it.”
Lowell’s face closes.
The puck drops, and twenty-seven seconds later it is in Boston’s net.
The goal is obscene in its simplicity. Ilya collects the puck near the blue line, lets it rest on his stick just long enough for Lowell to think he can close the distance, and then moves around him with a cruelty so casual the crowd’s anger stutters before it remembers itself. Lowell reaches. Ilya has already gone. A defender shifts. Ilya has already decided the play of the next three seconds. The goalie drops. Ilya waits, because waiting is part of the insult, then lifts the puck top shelf with a clean flick of his wrists.
The red light flashes.
The arena erupts.
Lowell slams his stick against the ice.
Ilya is already turning.
He skates straight toward Shane.
The building is screaming, his teammates are coming for him, Boston fans are banging the glass with the fury of people who have paid money to witness exactly the kind of brilliance they claim to despise, and Ilya lets all of it fall away from him with the ease of long practice. Three rows up, Shane is standing without seeming to know he has stood. His hands are curled around the ends of Lowell’s sleeves. His mouth is parted. His eyes are wide and stunned, almost offended, as if the goal has violated some private agreement he had with reality.
Ilya glides beneath his section, taps two fingers against his own chest, then points at the jersey.
Wrong one.
He does not say it aloud. He doesn’t need to.
Shane understands.
The blush is immediate, disastrous, beautiful. It floods high across his cheekbones and catches on the freckles there, making him look so much younger for a breath, more startled, almost luminous under the cold arena light. For one bright second, something like pleasure escapes him before he can stop it, and Ilya feels the dangerous satisfaction of having drawn a real reaction out of him.
Then Shane looks guilty.
The pleasure folds inward. The almost-smile disappears before it can become visible. His gaze drops toward the ice, toward Lowell, toward the man whose name is still written across his back. He sits down with his mouth pressed into a worried line, and the wrongness of it lands inside Ilya more sharply than the blush did. Desire he understands. Embarrassment too. But guilt he doesn’t know how to work with.
By the first intermission, the clip has already started moving online.
@puckprophet
ROZANOV SCORES THEN IMMEDIATELY FLIRTS WITH LOWELL’S BOYFRIEND????
@centaursupdates
Ilya Rozanov goal celebration: points at his own crest, then points at Lowell jersey on guy in crowd. Translation: wrong man, beloved.
@hockeyhater27
this is the most violent thing rozanov has ever done and he once scored five on montreal
@softsportsboy
Lowell fighting for his LIFE and his boyfriend is blushing in 4K.
@rinkromantic
The boy looked guilty after blushing. Oh no. He’s loyal. This just got deliciously awful.
In the locker room, Troy checks his phone because Troy has no survival instinct and because, in his own words, “if the building is on fire, someone should at least know which exit is trending.” He drops onto the bench beside Ilya, still sweaty, still breathing hard, grin spreading across his face with the particular delight of a man who has discovered that someone else is making terrible choices in public.
“Apparently you’ve started a diplomatic incident.”
Ilya drinks from his bottle. “Good.”
“He has a boyfriend.”
“Yes, Mr. Obvious.”
“The boyfriend is currently trying to murder you every shift, and your rival according to media.”
“He is bad at both of these things also.”
Troy studies him, eyes narrowing. “Do you even know the kid’s name?”
Ilya pauses, “No.”
Troy stares at him, then laughs so loudly Zane looks over from across the room. “That’s insane, even for you.”
“I know his jersey is wrong.”
“That’s not a name.”
“Is problem enough.”
Troy opens his mouth, closes it, then points at him with the authority of a man who knows he is about to be ignored. “Don’t start a scandal over a man whose name you don’t even know.”
Ilya wipes water from his mouth with the back of his hand. “I did not start scandal.”
“You pointed at him after scoring.”
“I pointed at jersey.”
“His jersey.”
“Ugly jersey.”
Troy rubs both hands down his face. “You’re going to get us all dragged into this.”
Ilya smiles, and Troy groans as though he has just seen the rest of the season unfold before him with terrible clarity. “Oh no. You want that.”
In the second period, Ilya decides Shane should see that he is not merely a goal scorer.
Goals are obvious. Goals get replays and headlines and children screaming your name from behind glass. Goals are blunt-force romance, and Ilya, despite what many people have suggested in comment sections, is not a blunt instrument. An assist requires patience, vision, intelligence. It says he can see the whole ice, can create something and let another man receive the applause, can open the world where it had been closed a second before.
So he creates one.
He draws two Boston defenders toward him near the right circle, Lowell included, because Lowell cannot resist him, because Lowell is too angry to be disciplined and too proud to be clever. Ilya slows just enough to make them believe they have trapped him, waits for the passing lane to appear like a secret, then threads the puck through a gap so narrow it should embarrass the laws of probability. Zane receives it cleanly and scores. Ottawa takes the lead. The bench erupts, Zane shouts, Troy bangs his stick against the boards hard enough to be annoying, and Ilya allows exactly three seconds of celebration before turning because the important part is three rows up and currently trying to look as if he is not deeply, visibly impressed.
Shane is trying not to smile.
He fails.
Barely, but he fails, the smallest curve of his mouth slipping free before he can discipline it back into place. Ilya sees it anyway. Then Shane looks guilty again, glancing toward Lowell, hands disappearing deeper into the sleeves, shoulders curling inward as if he is trying to return the smile before anyone can accuse him of taking it. Ilya watches that more carefully than he watches the replay.
Lowell catches him near the boards on the next shift, breath hot and irritated through his mouthguard. “You done?”
“With you?” Ilya glances past him, toward the stands. “Long time ago.”
“Stop looking at him.”
“You want me looking at you instead?”
Lowell’s lip curls.
“You will have to do something interesting,” Ilya adds.
“You’re a creep.”
“No. I am artist. You bring ugly jersey, I fix.”
Lowell shoves him. Ilya does not move as much as Lowell probably wants him to.
“Big feelings,” Ilya observes. “Small impact.”
Lowell’s face goes red, and when he tells Ilya to say one more thing, Ilya leans closer with the deep satisfaction of a man handed a gift. “One more thing.”
“You play hockey like you kiss.”
Lowell’s eyes narrow. “What?”
“Too much effort,” Ilya says. “Very little skill.”
Lowell nearly takes another penalty before the whistle even blows.
On the power play, Ilya scores.
The one-timer comes from the circle, hard enough that the goalie reacts after the puck is already behind him. The sound cracks through the arena like something breaking cleanly in half. Ottawa’s bench loses its mind. Boston’s fans throw their hands up in disgust. Somewhere above the glass, Shane’s mouth falls open again.
Ilya skates toward him.
The boos rain down. Ilya lifts one gloved hand to his ear, inviting the crowd to get louder because he is insufferable and aware of it, because he knows they hate him most when they are enjoying him, because Boston despises nothing more than the fact that Ilya Rozanov gives them exactly the villain they paid to see.
Then he looks directly at Shane.
This time Shane does not look away immediately.
The moment lasts perhaps a second, but it is long enough for Ilya to see the struggle in him: curiosity, reluctant pull, the shy confusion of someone who cannot make the obvious thing fit inside the story he has told himself about loyalty. It is long enough for Shane to understand that Ilya is smiling only at him.
The game ends 4–2.
Ilya has two goals and one assist. Lowell has one penalty, a broken stick, and a face like someone has stolen his house and left a forwarding address.
In the post-game scrum, a reporter asks about the first celebration.
“Were you trying to send a message?”
Farah closes her eyes at the back of the room with the slow despair of a woman who has looked into the future and seen paperwork.
Ilya leans toward the microphone.
“Yes.”
The reporters wait.
Ilya shrugs, winks at the camera then, “Boston jerseys are ugly.”
A laugh moves through the room, hungry and delighted. Farah does not laugh. Farah appears to be mentally drafting an apology to six departments and God.
The clip goes viral before midnight.
It spreads with the peculiar speed reserved for public humiliations people enjoy pretending are love stories. By the time Ottawa’s plane leaves Boston, there are already edits circulating online: slowed-down footage of Ilya pointing toward Lowell’s jersey while orchestral music swells beneath it, commentators talking over one another about mind games, TikToks zooming in on the exact second Shane’s face goes pink, and screenshots dissected with arrows and circles as though the internet has uncovered evidence of state corruption rather than one hockey player behaving like a menace because a pretty boy wore the wrong name.
There are threads analysing Shane’s body language. There are accounts insisting he looked uncomfortable, accounts insisting he looked flattered, accounts insisting the entire thing is clearly a manufactured PR stunt by a league desperate for ratings, which Troy finds so funny he nearly chokes on his drink when he reads it aloud from his seat across the aisle.
“Apparently you’re part of a league-wide marketing strategy,” Troy says.
Ilya does not look up from his phone. “Good. League should pay me more.”
“You are scrolling very intensely for a man who claims not to care.”
“I am reading criticism of my goal celebration.”
“You’re looking for him.”
“I am reading broadly.”
“You searched ‘Lowell boyfriend blush.’”
“Broad topic.”
Troy leans across the aisle, face creased with delighted horror. “You’re going to get yourself banned from the internet.”
Ilya ignores him, because Troy is frequently loud during moments that require focus, and because the thread he has just opened contains a photograph of Shane standing beside Lowell outside a restaurant with soft yellow lighting and snow collected in the dark hair at his temples.
Lowell has one arm around Shane’s shoulders. The pose is casual in the way possession often pretends to be casual, his fingers hooked loosely near Shane’s collarbone, his body angled toward the camera as though the picture belongs primarily to him and Shane is an attractive detail added to improve composition. Shane is smiling, technically. Anyone glancing quickly would call it a smile and move on. Ilya does not move on. He looks at the slight tension at the corners of Shane’s mouth, the way his eyes seem half a second behind the expression, the careful, practised softness of somebody who has learned that photographs end faster when you give people what they expect.
The caption reads:
mine.
Ilya stares at the word until the screen dims.
In the photograph, Shane is laughing.
That is the thing the caption almost hides if a person looks too quickly. Lowell’s arm is around him, yes, his grin angled toward the camera with practiced ease, but Shane’s face has opened in genuine amusement, eyes half-closed, one hand caught mid-motion as if he had been trying to push Eric away and had failed because he was laughing too hard.
It is a good picture.
That bothers Ilya more than the ugly little caption beneath it.
Because Lowell is not cruel like he is during games. He looks happy. Young. Bright with the uncomplicated confidence of someone standing beside a person he believes wants to be there. His thumb is hooked loosely in the collar of Shane’s coat like he’s familiar with what Shane likes.
Shane looks familiar with him too.
Mine.
He taps the screen awake again.
Troy, who has apparently decided self-preservation is a decorative concept, looks over and immediately says, “Oh my God.”
Ilya keeps scrolling.
“You’re stalking Lowell’s Instagram.”
“Research.”
“Bro, you’re zooming in.”
“Picture is bad quality.”
“You’re zooming in on his freckles.”
Ilya says nothing.
Troy makes a wounded sound. “That silence is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”
“Many worse things have happened to you.”
“Name one.”
“You were drafted by Ottawa.”
“That was emotional abuse.”
Ilya continues scrolling, because Lowell’s account is public and Lowell posts constantly, with the generous stupidity of a man who believes documentation is the same as importance. Shane appears irregularly, almost accidentally, like something beautiful caught wandering into the background of another person’s self-portrait. Lowell dominates every frame he enters. He smiles directly into cameras, arm thrown around shoulders, beer lifted, jaw angled, ego perfectly lit. Shane exists beside him in a series of partial presences: half turned away at a formal table while reading a menu, wrapped in a scarf at a football game while Lowell stands shirtless in the snow, asleep in the passenger seat of a car with his cheek pressed to the window and hair falling over his eyes.
Ilya pauses on that one.
He should not.
He knows, in the abstract, that there are reasonable limits to curiosity and that he has passed several of them already with increasing speed. But Shane asleep is different from Shane embarrassed, different from Shane blushing behind the glass, different from Shane looking guilty because Lowell might have noticed him smiling. Asleep, his face has lost the tension it carries in public. His mouth is softer. His brow unknotted. His body curled slightly inward even unconscious, as though some old instinct remains awake in him, still trying to take up less room.
Lowell’s caption reads:
he said he’d stay awake for the playlist :(
Ilya looks at the photo for too long.
Troy notices because Troy, tragically, has eyes.
“Oh no,” he says, quieter now. “You’re emotionally attached already.”
“No.”
“You’re looking at a sleeping photo for a minute straight.”
“He looks comfortable.”
“That sounded fond.”
“It was observation.”
“You’re going to ruin my season.”
Ilya scrolls faster, which is not retreat, because Ilya Rozanov does not retreat from anything except unnecessary media training, but the warmth caught beneath his ribs has become inconvenient. He opens Shane’s tagged posts instead and discovers, within three minutes, that Lowell’s account has performed a remarkable disservice to the truth of him.
In Lowell’s feed, Shane is only a boyfriend.
In everyone else’s, Shane is a person.
There are university photos, messy and imperfect and badly lit. A literature society event in a lecture hall, Shane sitting cross-legged on the desk at the front of the room with a pen in his hand, arguing with somebody off-camera about a nineteenth-century novel. He is wearing an oversized jumper with sleeves falling over his hands, his hair longer than it is now, curls loose over his forehead, cheeks pink from the force of whatever point he is making.
“He’s wrong,” Shane says in the video, laughing as someone objects. “That’s literally the whole point. The tragedy only works because they mistake suffering for devotion.”
Someone behind the camera says, “You’re taking this weirdly personally.”
Shane laughs harder, bright and embarrassed. “I’m an English lit major. Taking things personally is the degree.”
The room laughs with him, and then he ducks his head immediately afterward, as if he has noticed himself becoming visible and regrets it.
Ilya watches the clip again.
Then again.
Troy leans into the aisle slowly. “Are you replaying student seminar footage?”
“I am learning.”
“You’re developing a parasocial relationship with a literature major.”
“This word does not apply when he watched me first.”
“He watched you play hockey at a hockey game.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not equivalent to hunting down his academic personality.”
Ilya ignores the phrasing because, unfortunately, it is too accurate to argue with elegantly. He searches Shane’s name directly and finds a university profile: Shane Hollander, English Literature, concentration in Romantic poetry and post-war fiction, peer tutor, literature society committee member, recipient of a scholarship Ilya decides is impressive despite not fully understanding what the scholarship is for. There is a small photograph attached to the page: Shane standing awkwardly in front of shelves, smiling like someone has told him to look natural and thereby destroyed any chance of it happening.
Ilya saves the photograph accidentally on purpose.
Troy sees.
Troy covers his face with both hands. “I hate being here for the origin story.”
“Then stop looking.”
“You’re doing it in public.”
“Plane is private.”
“There are twenty-seven people on this plane.”
“Then they are privileged.”
Troy groans and slumps lower in his seat, but he does not stop watching, because Troy enjoys disaster when it comes with plausible deniability and because Ilya is now opening a longer clip titled SHANE HOLLANDER DESTROYS GOTHIC ROMANCE ARGUMENT WHILE TIPSY, which turns out to be Shane in a café booth with friends, visibly warm with drink, gesturing with both hands while insisting that “you can’t just emotionally destroy people for aesthetics” before immediately knocking over his own cup.
The table erupts.
Shane hides his face.
Someone says, “You’re so pretty when embarrassed.”
Shane groans, “I hate all of you,” but he is laughing when he says it, and the sound is fuller than the laugh Ilya saw behind the glass, less startled, less apologetic. It makes something inside Ilya loosen and tighten at once.
He watches the clip twice.
On the third replay, Troy reaches over and takes the phone from his hand.
“No.”
Ilya turns his head slowly. “Give.”
“You watched him spill a drink three times.”
“He looked cute.”
The silence that follows feels immediate and catastrophic.
Troy lowers the phone by an inch.
“Oh my God,” he whispers. “You admitted it.”
Ilya takes the phone back. “He is cute.”
“You’re gone.”
“No.”
“You are. You’re saying his full name in your head right now like you’re casting a spell.”
Ilya does not answer, because he is in fact saying it.
Shane Hollander.
The name settles strangely. Softly. As if it has weight despite being only sound. Shane Hollander. It is too gentle beside Lowell’s name, too careful beside the ugly block letters across the jersey, too alive to sit underneath a caption like mine.
Ilya scrolls back to the seminar clip and watches Shane talk about tragedy again, watches the way his hands move when he forgets to hide them, the way his face opens with intelligence when he is allowed to care about something without being mocked for caring too much.
Troy sighs, long and defeated. “This is going to become everyone’s problem.”
Ilya does not deny it.
Outside the plane window, the night presses black against the glass, broken occasionally by distant beads of city light. The rest of the team settles into the tired rhythm of post-game travel: Zane asleep with headphones crooked over one ear, Dykstra eating something wrapped in foil, Ryan arguing quietly with somebody over cards, Farah near the front with a laptop open and the expression of a woman already preparing statements for disasters that have not happened yet. Ilya should be sleeping. He should be icing his shoulder. He should be reviewing the game, enjoying the win, ignoring Lowell until the next time they meet and Lowell provides entertainment by trying to murder him in full view of officials.
Instead, he watches Shane Hollander explain fictional suffering with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, and somewhere behind the amusement, behind the attraction, behind the absurdity of it all, a quieter thought takes root.
Shane looks different when nobody is claiming him.
He looks real.
And Ilya, who has spent years making crowds look at him, finds himself wanting something far more dangerous.
He wants Shane to look at him and no one else.
Eric had not always made love feel complicated.
That was the part Shane struggled to explain even to himself, because memory remained stubbornly loyal to tenderness long after tenderness stopped being easy to live inside. It kept small things with embarrassing precision. Eric outside the library during first year with two coffees balanced in one hand because Shane had once mentioned, weeks earlier, that campus coffee tasted burnt after midday. Eric sitting through an entire literature society debate despite clearly understanding none of it, grinning every time Shane got too animated and started talking with both hands.
“My boyfriend’s terrifying when he cares about something,” Eric had said afterward with obvious delight. “You should’ve seen him explain symbolism to me for forty minutes in Papa John’s.”
Shane had gone red immediately. “It was fifteen.”
“Baby, it was a lecture series.”
And Eric had looked at him then with such uncomplicated warmth that Shane remembered carrying the feeling home physically, tucked somewhere beneath his ribs like something lit there.
Eric could be attentive in ways that felt almost miraculous to somebody like Shane, who had spent most of his life trying not to inconvenience people with the act of existing too loudly. Eric noticed when Shane got quiet in crowded places. He remembered deadlines. He complained theatrically whenever Shane skipped meals during exam periods and once arrived at Shane’s flat with takeaway balanced against one hip because, according to him, “you cannot survive academically on caffeine and moral suffering alone.”
Rose had liked him at first.
Everybody liked him at first.
That was part of why everything afterward felt so difficult to measure cleanly.
Detroit is meant to be simpler.
Shane tells himself this on the train with Rose beside him, both of them folded into the narrow blue seats while the city slides past the window in long bands of wet pavement, sodium light, dark glass, and the occasional blur of someone waiting alone on a platform with their collar turned up against the cold. Simpler, because Eric is not playing tonight. Simpler, because no one will be standing on the ice with a jaw tightened around every glance Shane does or does not give. Simpler, because there will be no jersey across his back this time, no surname sitting between his shoulder blades like a hand.
He is wearing his own coat.
That feels important, though he would rather swallow glass than say so aloud.
Rose, unfortunately, has known him long enough to hear the things he does not say.
“You look like you’re preparing for an exam in being perceived,” she says, without looking up from her phone.
Shane adjusts his scarf. “I’m fine.”
“You keep touching your collar like it owes you money.”
“It’s itchy.”
“It is cashmere.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t betray me.”
Rose’s mouth twitches, but she lets him have the lie, which is generous of her and therefore suspicious. She has been like this for two days: gentler than usual in the spaces where she would normally be sharp, quieter whenever Shane goes still, less inclined to read the worst posts aloud even though he knows she is still collecting them with the grim discipline of a historian preserving evidence of a civilisation’s collapse. The whole internet has made a mascot out of him, and the worst part is that most of it is affectionate. Shane doesn’t know how to be angry at strangers calling him pretty in all caps. He doesn’t know how to dislike people who keep editing soft music over his visible panic. It would be easier if they were cruel. Cruelty has shape. Kindness from thousands of people at once feels like being buried in flowers.
By the time they reach the arena, his stomach has tightened into something small and hard.
Their seats are, in Rose’s words, criminally good. Six rows behind the glass, close enough to see the scrape marks on the boards, the sprayed chips of ice, the black smudges where pucks have hit and rebounded with enough force to make the plexiglass tremble. The cold rises from the rink in steady waves. The air smells of beer, fryer oil, damp wool, metal, and the faint chemical cleanliness of the ice itself. Shane settles into his seat and exhales carefully, trying to let the enormity of the building arrange itself around him without entering him.
It lasts perhaps four seconds.
The family beside them recognises him.
The mother notices first. Shane feels the flicker of attention before he sees it, a small shift in the air, the private spark of recognition someone tries to hide too late. Her eyes widen, then narrow with the effort of politeness. The father looks from her to Shane, catches up, and performs the same awkward little recovery. Their teenage daughter freezes with the exquisite violence of someone trying not to scream in public. The youngest, a boy in an Ottawa jersey too large for him, leans forward and says with pure astonishment, “You’re him.”
Shane’s soul attempts to leave his body.
Rose, who does not even look up, says, “Be normal.”
“I am normal,” Shane murmurs.
Rose snorts, “You’re sitting like someone awaiting sentencing.”
The mother gives an apologetic laugh. “Sorry. We saw the clips. We didn’t mean to stare.”
“That’s okay,” Shane says, because apparently he would rather die than make a stranger uncomfortable.
The father smiles, careful and kind. “You seem nice.”
Somehow, that is worse.
Shane nods because speech feels increasingly ambitious. Compliments from strangers always land oddly inside him, like objects passed into his hands too quickly for him to know where to put them. He can manage insult better. Insult asks for reaction. Praise asks for belief.
Rose pats his knee. “Excellent hostage energy. Very approachable.”
Shane glares at her.
The little boy leans closer, eyes enormous. “Do you think Rozanov’s gonna score again?”
Shane inhales incorrectly and nearly chokes on oxygen.
“He doesn’t score because of me.”
The silence that follows is immediate, fascinated, and excruciating.
Rose lowers her phone very slowly.
Shane feels the exact moment he should have stopped speaking disappear behind him forever.
“He scores because he’s good,” Shane adds, voice thinning. “At hockey.”
The teenage daughter makes a strangled sound into her sleeve.
Rose presses her lips together until her whole face begins to shake.
Before Shane can humiliate himself further, the lights shift. Music drops heavily through the arena, bass travelling through the seats and into his bones, and the first pucks begin striking the glass with a sound like hard rain against a window. The home team skates out to cheers. Then Ottawa appears through the tunnel in a rush of white jerseys, black gloves, and bright blades.
Shane tells himself not to look for him.
He looks anyway.
Ilya enters the rink laughing at something Troy has said, and there is a terrible ease to him tonight, a looseness in his shoulders that makes Shane’s pulse misbehave before Ilya has done anything at all. He takes a lazy lap, taps his stick once against the boards, then glides backward for several feet as though moving beautifully in reverse is simply another insult he has chosen to commit against physics. His hair is hidden beneath his helmet, but Shane remembers the damp curl at his forehead from clips and interviews and has to look down at his hands for a second because memory, apparently, has decided to become a physical organ.
Rose leans close. “You’re staring.”
“I’m observing warmups.”
“You’re observing him with your entire bloodstream.”
“I can’t observe with my bloodstream.”
“You’re finding a way.”
Shane keeps his gaze stubbornly on the ice, which does not help because the ice continues to contain Ilya Rozanov.
Ilya circles near the far blue line with a puck moving lazily on his stick. He takes a shot, misses deliberately wide, gathers another puck from the scatter along the boards, and then, without any visible searching, lifts his eyes directly to Shane.
Recognition lands across the distance with humiliating precision.
Shane’s hand tightens around the armrest.
He had spent the last week trying to convince himself that the first game had been magnified by cameras and online hysteria. Perhaps Ilya had only been chirping Lowell. Perhaps the celebration had been theatre. Perhaps Shane, unlucky and overexposed, had simply been inserted into a story that had nothing to do with him.
That explanation dies instantly.
Ilya’s mouth curves.
Shane looks away.
Rose murmurs, “Coward.”
“I’m being normal.”
“You picked up the napkin dispenser and pretended to read it.”
Shane looks down.
He is, in fact, holding the napkin dispenser.
Very quietly, he places it back into the cupholder.
The little boy beside him whispers, “He’s still looking.”
Shane closes his eyes. “Please don’t narrate.”
“I’m helping,” the boy says earnestly.
“You’re really not.”
Rose says, “Mason understands tension better than most adults.”
Shane looks back before he can stop himself.
Ilya is still there, watching with an expression that shifts the moment their eyes meet. Satisfaction, yes, but softer at the edges now, as though catching Shane looking has given him pleasure he does not feel the need to sharpen into anything more. Then he drops his gaze briefly to the puck on his stick, adjusts the angle of his blade, and flicks his wrists.
At first Shane thinks it is a shot gone astray.
The puck rises cleanly over the glass, clears two startled reaching hands, cuts through the bright arena air with impossible neatness, and drops directly into Shane’s lap.
For a moment, Shane cannot move.
The puck sits heavy against his thighs, black rubber against dark wool, absurd and undeniable. Around him the arena continues: music pounding, skates carving, fans shouting, glass trembling beneath another shot from the far side. Inside Shane, everything has narrowed to the object in his lap and the heat rushing up his neck.
Rose inhales sharply enough to whistle.
The teenage daughter whispers, “Oh my God.”
Mason looks betrayed on a spiritual level.
With the care of someone handling evidence at a crime scene, Shane picks the puck up.
White tape is wrapped around it.
Black marker curves across the tape in handwriting too bold to be mistaken for accidental.
Still wrong seat. Should be behind my bench.
Shane reads it once.
His brain refuses to help.
He reads it again, slower, as though the sentence might become less insane if approached with literary analysis.
It doesn’t.
Down on the ice, Ilya stands with one glove resting on the top of his stick, watching openly now. He is smiling, and the worst part is that he does not look smug in the way Shane expected. He looks pleased. Terribly, dangerously pleased, as if the puck arriving where he intended matters less than Shane holding it.
Mason’s voice goes reverent. “Can I see?”
Shane, still operating on some delayed and faulty emergency system, hands it to him.
Mason clutches the puck against his chest as if he has received a relic from a saint.
Ilya’s expression changes when he sees that. For the first time, something almost unguarded crosses his face, warmth breaking through the performance so quickly Shane wonders whether anyone else caught it. Then Ilya taps his stick twice against the ice and points toward Mason.
Keep it.
Mason screams.
The sound bursts out of him with such delighted violence that Shane laughs before he can stop himself, bright and helpless and startled out of his own embarrassment. It is not a careful laugh. It is not a polite laugh. It escapes him whole.
Ilya notices.
The pleasure that spreads across his face afterward makes Shane’s stomach drop.
Because the puck was absurd. The message was ridiculous. The public flirting is embarrassing enough to be fatal.
But Ilya looking like Shane’s laugh is something he wanted more than the reaction itself feels much harder to survive.
Rose leans toward him slowly, her voice careful in the way it gets when she is about to be unbearable. “So. Still think the first game was accidental?”
Shane’s face burns. “It could still be coincidence.”
Rose looks at Ilya, who is still watching Shane as if coincidence is a language spoken only by cowards and statisticians.
“Sure.”
“Don’t use that tone.”
“What tone?”
“The one where you think I’m stupid.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Rose says. “I think you’re committed to a very ambitious interpretation of events.”
Mason turns around, still hugging the puck. “He likes you.”
His mother covers her face. “Mason.”
“What? He does.”
Shane makes a faint sound, possibly protest, possibly pre-death rattle.
Rose points gently at the child. “Mason understands narrative structure.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You can’t,” Rose says. “We’re trapped by hockey fans and whatever this is.”
The clip is online before the first intermission.
That is the strange thing about becoming briefly visible to the internet: your own life begins reaching you as footage from other people’s phones. By the time Shane has bought a drink he does not want and returned to his seat, Rose’s notifications are already multiplying with the aggressive cheer of a fire alarm. Someone filmed the puck from the opposite section. Someone else captured Shane’s stunned face in a zoom so intimate it feels medically invasive. The broadcast caught Ilya pointing toward Mason afterward, which makes the whole thing sweeter and therefore infinitely more embarrassing.
Rose, despite promising not to make it worse, reads selected comments aloud because she is apparently committed to public service.
“This person says you looked like a woodland creature chosen by fate.”
“Stop.”
“This one says your face should qualify for emotional compensation.”
“Rose.”
“Someone has called you historic romance-coded.”
“I don’t know what that means and I refuse to learn.”
“This one just says, in all caps, ‘LOWELL GET BEHIND ME ACTUALLY NO DON’T.’”
Despite himself, Shane laughs into his drink.
The laugh fades quickly.
That is the shape of the evening after that: pleasure arriving before guilt can stop it, guilt arriving faster each time, Rose noticing both and pretending not to notice either too obviously. The game itself becomes almost secondary. Ottawa wins. Ilya records an assist and, once, after a shift change, glances up toward Shane with an expression so quiet that Shane looks down at his knees for nearly a full minute afterward.
Shane had not told Eric the whole story about the puck.
Not deliberately. That was the worst part. There had been no conscious decision to hide anything, no moment where Shane thought I will keep this from him. The evening had simply become impossible to explain cleanly once he tried.
He had told Eric about the game afterward over FaceTime while brushing his teeth, phone propped badly against the bathroom mirror while Eric lay sprawled across his own bed, hoodie half-zipped, hair damp from a shower.
“At least Ottawa won,” Eric had said.
“You sound thrilled.”
“I’m capable of maturity in isolated incidents.”
Shane had laughed around toothpaste. “Remarkable.”
Eric had smiled then, warm and familiar enough that Shane felt his whole body loosen by instinct. This was the version of Eric easiest to love: relaxed, funny, looking at Shane as though attention came naturally to him. They had spent nearly forty minutes talking about nothing important. Eric complaining about travel schedules. Shane talking about an essay he was avoiding. Eric insisting Shane’s professors sounded “professionally committed to suffering.”
At one point Eric had rested his chin on his hand and just watched Shane for several quiet seconds.
“What?” Shane had asked eventually, embarrassed.
“Nothing.”
“That’s never true.”
Eric’s smile had gone softer around the edges. “You’re pretty.”
Shane had immediately looked away. “You’re annoying.”
“Still true.”
And Shane had carried the warmth of that conversation around for almost a full day afterward, stupidly comforted by how normal it had felt.
Which was why the text tonight unsettled him so quickly.
Because nothing about Eric had sounded angry before.
Nothing about the call had warned him that the evening might still be sitting somewhere unresolved between them, quietly changing shape while Shane wasn’t looking at it.
Eric: still got the puck?
Two days later, Shane comes home from class exhausted enough that he forgets to prepare himself before entering the kitchen.
Rose is sitting at the table with tea and her laptop open.
Shane stops in the doorway. “No.”
She looks up innocently. “I haven’t said anything.”
“You have your laptop voice.”
“There is no laptop voice.”
“You have several voices. This one sounds like you’re about to present evidence.”
Rose closes the laptop halfway, which is not the same as closing it. “Fine. We can discuss it verbally.”
“I don’t want to discuss it at all.”
“That’s fair.”
The agreement is so unexpected that Shane blinks.
“You agreeing with me feels suspicious.”
Rose studies him over the rim of her mug. He knows what she is seeing: the mess of his hair from pushing his hands through it all afternoon, the university bag hanging awkwardly off one shoulder, the tightness around his mouth from trying not to think about a thing everyone else keeps turning into entertainment. He feels worn thin by the attention, and worse, by the shame of not entirely hating all of it.
He had been at Eric’s apartment the night before.
That is part of the problem too, though Shane cannot explain why without sounding ungrateful. Eric has been talking about it constantly lately: the apartment, the spare key, the empty half of the wardrobe, the second toothbrush already standing beside his own in the bathroom like a small domestic argument. Every mention arrives smiling, dressed as affection, as if the future is already settled and Shane’s hesitation is only a charming delay before he realises what Eric has known all along.
“You’re here all the time anyway,” Eric keeps saying, mouth warm against Shane’s temple, hand at the back of his neck. “Might as well stop pretending you don’t live here.”
Last night, it had been warm and easy at first.
Food cartons on the coffee table. Rain moving softly against the apartment windows. Shane folded into the corner of the couch with his laptop balanced over his knees while Eric stretched out beside him, one hand resting loose and warm around Shane’s ankle as if even that small point of contact pleased him.
“You know what the problem with athletes is?” Eric had asked.
“You?”
“Exactly. Finally, someone understands me.”
Shane had laughed quietly without looking up from his screen.
Eric noticed immediately.
“There you are,” he murmured.
Shane glanced over. “What?”
“I like when you stop thinking so hard.”
Heat rose faintly into Shane’s face before he could stop it. He looked back down at the essay open on his laptop, pretending to reread the same sentence for the fourth time.
A second later, Eric leaned over, folded the laptop shut without warning, and pulled Shane bodily across the cushions into his lap.
“Eric—”
“No,” Eric said firmly, already smiling against Shane’s mouth. “You’ve done enough academic suffering for one evening.”
Shane laughed despite himself, half resisting on instinct even as he let himself be dragged closer. “I have an assignment due.”
“You have me,” Eric replied, scandalised. “Priorities.”
“That’s not how university works.”
“That sounds fake.”
Shane was still smiling when Eric kissed him.
Slow at first. Warm. Familiar in the deeply dangerous way familiarity becomes when somebody learns exactly how to soften you. Eric’s hand slid into Shane’s hair, thumb brushing lightly against his jaw while Shane melted against him almost before he realised he was doing it, the laptop forgotten on the couch beside them, the essay abandoned beneath the clean dark line of the closed screen.
There were moments with Eric that felt painfully easy like this.
That was part of why everything else became so difficult to hold onto properly afterward.
When Eric pulled back, Shane was flushed enough that Eric immediately looked smug about it.
“There,” he murmured. “Much better.”
Shane hid his face briefly against Eric’s shoulder. “You’re annoying.”
“And yet,” Eric said softly, kissing the top of his head, “you keep coming back.”
For a while, everything stayed gentle.
Eric played absently with Shane’s fingers while Shane rested half against his chest, both of them listening to the rain tapping lightly against the windows. The apartment smelled faintly of takeaway and Eric’s cologne and the expensive candle Shane had mocked him for buying last month before secretly deciding he liked it. The evening had arranged itself into something almost domestic, almost convincing: Eric’s hand warm against his back, his heartbeat steady beneath Shane’s cheek, the low sound of the television, the soft clink of cartons settling as they cooled on the table.
Then Eric’s phone lit up on the couch beside them.
A clip started playing automatically.
Arena noise.
Detroit.
The puck arcing cleanly over the glass.
Shane’s own startled face appearing on-screen, flushed and horribly visible beneath the arena lights.
Eric stared at the video for a second.
Then he laughed softly. “This is still insane, by the way.”
Shane’s stomach tightened immediately.
“I know.”
Eric replayed the clip once more, smiling faintly when Mason screamed somewhere in the background.
“The kid losing his mind is hilarious.”
Despite himself, Shane laughed once under his breath. “He nearly passed out.”
“Honestly? Fair.”
The warmth loosened through Shane’s shoulders again, relieved by how normal Eric sounded, how easily the absurdity seemed to sit between them for a moment without turning sharp.
Eric tilted the phone slightly toward him. “How did you even get those seats?”
“Rose got them.”
“They were good seats.”
“Someone from work sold them cheap apparently.”
“Hm.”
Eric’s thumb moved lazily over Shane’s knuckles.
“So why Detroit?”
Shane blinked. “What?”
“The game.” Eric shrugged lightly. “I wasn’t playing.”
The words were casual enough that Shane answered casually too.
“Rose wanted to go.”
“To Detroit specifically?”
“It was just a hockey game.”
“With Rozanov coincidentally there again.”
Shane rubbed lightly at the seam of his sleeve. “It’s an Ottawa game. Obviously he was there.”
Eric laughed softly, though there was very little amusement in it.
“No, it’s fine.” Eric nodded once, still smiling faintly. “I’m just saying it looked bad.”
Shane’s stomach tightened anyway.
“I didn’t think he’d even notice me again,” he said quickly. “I thought the first thing was just because of the jersey and because you were there, and Rose wanted to go and I didn’t think—”
“Shane.”
He stopped immediately.
Eric’s expression softened almost at once, like he regretted interrupting him.
“Baby.” His voice gentled. “You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“You’re talking like you got caught doing something.”
Heat climbed slowly up Shane’s neck.
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Eric said quietly.
The words should have reassured him.
Instead Shane felt himself scrambling harder for reassurance anyway.
“I know. I just don’t want you thinking I went there for him.”
Eric looked at him for a long moment.
Then he sighed softly through his nose and reached over, brushing his knuckles lightly along Shane’s jaw.
“I’m allowed to ask where my boyfriend is,” he said.
Quiet. Calm. Almost tender.
That almost made it worse somehow.
“I know.”
“And I’m allowed to think it’s weird seeing my boyfriend at a Detroit game when I’m not even playing.” Eric’s thumb moved slowly once against Shane’s cheek. “Especially when the guy who hates me keeps throwing pucks at you in front of twenty thousand people.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
Eric gave him a look.
“Shane.”
“What?”
“You can’t possibly believe this is random.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Yes, you do.”
The words landed gently enough to sound reasonable.
That was the problem.
Eric still sounded calm. Still sounded affectionate. His arm remained loosely around Shane’s waist, keeping him tucked against his side even while the conversation slowly tightened around him.
“He likes attention,” Eric continued. “He likes getting under people’s skin. That’s what this is.”
Shane looked down at his hands.
“I didn’t ask him to do any of it.”
“I know you didn’t.” Eric said it immediately, smoothly. “I never said you did.”
But Shane already felt guilty enough that the reassurance barely reached him before shame returned around it.
“I just…” Shane swallowed. “I didn’t want you upset.”
Something flickered briefly across Eric’s face then — satisfaction almost, quickly hidden beneath tenderness.
“That’s it,” he murmured softly.
Shane frowned slightly. “What?”
“That’s all you had to say.”
Eric leaned in and kissed him slowly.
Lovingly. Deliberate. Warm enough that Shane felt his own tension melting despite himself, felt the argument blur around the edges beneath familiarity and touch and the simple relief of Eric still wanting him close afterward.
When Eric pulled back, his forehead rested briefly against Shane’s.
“I’m not mad at you,” he said quietly.
Shane exhaled shakily.
“I trust you.”
The words landed deep because Shane needed them to.
Eric’s hand slid into his hair, fingers gentle against the back of his neck.
“I just don’t trust him.” His mouth brushed lightly against Shane’s temple. “And honestly? I don’t like people looking at what’s mine like that.”
Mine.
The word wrapped itself carefully enough in affection that Shane did not know how to object to it without sounding cruel.
Instead he nodded once against Eric’s shoulder.
Eric’s body loosened almost immediately afterward, tension draining out of him now that Shane had folded back toward him properly.
“There,” he murmured softly, kissing the top of Shane’s head. “We’re okay.”
And somehow, by the end of the conversation, Shane was the one apologising.
Now, in the kitchen, Rose is still watching him.
“I’m serious,” he says quietly. “Everyone’s making it into this huge thing, and I don’t want that.”
Rose’s face softens by degrees. “I know.”
“I have a boyfriend.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not encouraging this.”
“I know you aren’t.”
Relief moves across Shane’s face too quickly to hide.
“I just don’t want Eric thinking—”
“That you did something wrong?” Rose asks gently.
Shane looks down.
The kitchen is small and warm, condensation gathered faintly at the window, the hum of the fridge filling the silence between them. It is the sort of room where things should feel easy: tea on the table, Rose in mismatched socks, someone’s abandoned cereal bowl near the sink. Instead Shane feels the evening press against him again: Ilya’s smile, the puck in his lap, Mason screaming, the comments, the moment he laughed without thinking.
Rose continues carefully. “You watched a hockey player during a hockey game. Then that hockey player decided to behave like a menace in public. None of that belongs to you.”
“He keeps looking at me.”
“Yes,” Rose says dryly. “That part is unfortunately real.”
“I don’t understand why.”
Rose’s expression changes, not into pity, which would have made him leave the room, but into something steadier. “Maybe because he wants to.”
Shane rubs at the seam of his sleeve. “That doesn’t help.”
“No,” she says. “I imagine it makes everything worse.”
He looks at her then, startled by being understood so plainly.
That is the part no one online can see. They can see him blush, see him laugh, see him look down and cover his face and become part of a joke bigger than himself. They cannot see the guilt sitting underneath every reaction. They cannot see how carefully he is trying to hold all of it away from Eric, as if attention is something contagious, as if being looked at too warmly by another man might somehow become a betrayal if Shane fails to disinfect himself fast enough afterward.
“You don’t have to solve it tonight,” Rose says.
“I know.”
“And you’re allowed to exist in a room without being responsible for what someone else does when they see you.”
Shane looks down at the table.
The words enter him slowly, almost painfully, because they sound reasonable and still feel impossible. He has spent so much of his life trying to manage the temperatures of other people’s reactions: soften this, explain that, smile sooner, answer faster, make the right face, choose the right tone, be grateful enough, harmless enough, legible enough. Being noticed has always felt like the beginning of work.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Shane says, quieter now.
“I know.”
“I don’t want Eric thinking I wanted this.”
Rose’s gaze remains on him, calm and sad in a way that makes his throat tighten.
“Looking at someone who looked at you first doesn’t make you guilty.”
Shane tries to believe her.
For a second he nearly does.
Then his phone lights up on the table.
“He isn’t always like this,” Shane says quietly.
Rose turns her mug slowly between her hands. “I know.”
And she does know, or thinks she does. She has seen Eric arrive at the flat after practices still smelling faintly of cold air and ice, wrapping both arms around Shane while Shane protested half-heartedly about being interrupted while cooking. She has watched him sit through terrible black-and-white films because Shane loved them, complaining dramatically through the entire thing while still somehow paying attention to every line. There are evenings she remembers fondly herself: Eric making pasta at midnight because Shane had forgotten to eat while studying, Eric loudly insisting Shane was the smartest person in any room they entered, Eric carrying all the shopping bags because, in his words, “I have athlete muscles. Let me contribute.”
Nothing about them had ever looked wrong from the outside.
Complicated sometimes, perhaps. Intense in ways Rose occasionally rolled her eyes at. But real. Affectionate. Full of enough genuine care that the harder moments blurred around the edges afterward until everyone involved seemed willing to treat them as temporary failures of timing rather than anything larger.
“I’m not stupid,” Shane says after a moment.
Rose looks up immediately. “I know you’re not.”
“He is good to me.”
The words come out defensive before Shane means them to. Rose hears it and softens at once.
“I know,” she says again, gentler this time.
And because she loves him, because relationships are messy and people are imperfect and nobody inside a relationship ever looks exactly like the simplified version strangers build from the outside, she lets the conversation settle instead of pulling it apart further.
Then his phone lights up again.
Eric: my teammates are having the absolute time of their lives with this puck thing btw
The room seems to narrow around the glow of the screen.
Rose does not move.
Shane stares at the message until another one appears.
Eric: apparently my boyfriend is the nhl’s newest celebrity now
Heat creeps slowly into Shane’s face.
A third message follows before he can decide what to do with the second.
Eric: one of them just asked if i should start worrying about losing you to the league
The messages are playful on the surface. Shane can hear exactly how Eric would say them aloud — smiling slightly, voice light, making himself the punchline before anyone else can.
Still, guilt moves through Shane immediately, fast and obedient.
Because suddenly the whole thing rearranges itself again in his head. The puck. The videos. The internet screaming over his reactions. Eric’s teammates laughing about it. Eric becoming part of the joke too.
Another message appears.
Eric: honestly though it’s kinda embarrassing
Shane’s stomach twists.
The typing bubble returns almost immediately, as though Eric regrets the sentence the second it lands.
Eric: not you
Eric: just him making a whole performance out of my boyfriend in front of the internet
The relief that moves through Shane feels awful.
Rose sees his expression change slightly and says quietly, “You don’t have to answer right now.”
Shane already has the phone in his hand.
His thumb hovers uncertainly above the keyboard while his mind begins its familiar frantic inventory: reassuring response, careful response, light response, joke response, something that proves he understands Eric’s side properly, something that proves he is taking the embarrassment seriously enough.
He types:
sorry :(
Deletes it immediately.
Too guilty.
He types:
he’s just trying to annoy you
Leaves it there for three seconds.
Deletes that too.
The typing bubble appears again.
Eric: i know you didn’t ask for any of it
Before Shane can even process the relief from that sentence, another message follows.
Eric: i just hate feeling like everyone’s laughing at us
Us.
Rose exhales softly through her nose.
Shane’s chest tightens immediately around the word.
Because it is true. Eric is hurt, Eric is embarrassed, but Eric is also trying to be understanding anyway.
Another message appears.
Eric: come here tonight?
And then, almost instantly after:
Eric: miss you
The sharpness inside Shane loosens at once, shame melting into tenderness so quickly it makes him dizzy.
Rose watches Shane’s face carefully as he stares down at the screen.
“You look like you’re apologising in your head already,” she says quietly.
Shane locks the phone without replying, though it costs him something to do it. His hand trembles slightly before he tucks it into his sleeve.
Because part of him still remembers laughing.
The kitchen is very quiet.
Rose exhales slowly through her nose.
His hand is trembling slightly. He tucks it into his sleeve before Rose can say anything, but Rose sees anyway because Rose sees too much and loves him enough to pretend, sometimes, that she does not.
After a long moment, she reaches across the table and squeezes his wrist once.
“You’re allowed to be noticed,” she says again, softer this time.
Shane looks away.
This time, the words hurt enough that he almost believes they matter.
The university event is optional.
Eric had texted that morning.
Eric: good luck today
Eric: don’t let them bully you into asking a question lol
Eric: you’ll be the prettiest person there anyway so at least you’ve got that
Shane had smiled at his phone before he could stop himself.
It was embarrassing, how easily sweetness still reached him. One kind message and his whole body softened toward Eric again, as if affection could reset the balance of everything that had come before it. He sent back a heart, then stared at it for several seconds, wondering if that was too little, too much, too casual, too guilty.
Eric replied almost immediately.
Eric: love you
And Shane, standing outside the lecture theatre with cold hands and a nervous stomach, typed it back.
The university event is Troy’s fault.
This is what Ilya decides approximately twelve minutes after arriving on campus, while standing beneath a banner that reads PATHWAYS TO PROFESSIONAL HOCKEY in aggressive capital letters before a lecture theatre packed with university hockey players, sports science students, journalism students pretending they are here for educational reasons, and several people already recording despite repeated instructions not to. Troy had promised something small. An alumni appearance. A few questions about discipline and career progression. Smiling for photographs. Leaving before anyone important became irritated.
Instead there are folding chairs onstage, untouched bottles of water lined up with military precision, a university coach sweating through introductions, and Troy Barrett standing at the podium with the deeply irritating ease of a man returning to a place where he once mattered enormously.
“You went to university?” Ilya had asked earlier.
Troy had thrown a towel directly at his head.
Now the coach is introducing him as “one of our proudest alumni,” and Troy is accepting this information with unbearable dignity while students lean forward in their seats, phones hidden beneath notebooks in ways they clearly believe are subtle. Zane looks entertained already. Ryan has accepted his fate. Two Ottawa staff members hover near the wings with expressions suggesting they are mentally drafting apology emails in advance.
Then the back door opens.
Ilya sees Shane immediately.
The recognition arrives with the force of instinct rather than logic. There are too many people in the room for certainty to happen that fast, too many dark jumpers and winter coats and bent heads, yet the moment Shane slips through the doorway the rest of the lecture theatre seems to lose focus around him.
He is late, which visibly distresses him.
Cold has painted faint colour across his cheeks. His hair is wind-messy from crossing campus too fast, and he clutches a notebook against his chest while his bag hangs halfway down one shoulder. He pauses just inside the doorway with the expression of someone apologising silently to the entire room, then slips toward the nearest empty seat near the aisle with practiced unobtrusiveness.
Troy follows Ilya’s gaze and immediately looks delighted in a way that suggests disaster has become personally rewarding.
“Behave,” Troy mutters into the microphone badly enough that the first few rows hear him.
Laughter ripples outward.
Shane looks up at the sound.
Their eyes meet across the lecture theatre.
Shane stills for the briefest moment, fingers tightening around the notebook in his lap, and something strange happens to the air between them. Then Shane looks away very quickly.
Ilya’s mood improves at once.
Troy closes his eyes in visible suffering. “Oh, we’re all going to die here.”
The panel begins normally enough. Students ask Zane about training schedules and Ryan about recovery. Troy speaks about the university team, long road trips, balancing coursework with hockey, and the humiliation of losing playoff games in buildings that smell faintly of old vending machines and wet equipment bags.
Then someone asks Ilya what advice he would give players struggling under pressure.
Ilya leans toward the microphone.
“Score more.”
Troy sighs deeply.
The lecture theatre erupts.
“That is barely advice,” Troy says.
“It works.”
“It’s barely a sentence.”
“Still useful.”
Near the back row, Shane ducks his head over his notebook, but Ilya catches the small involuntary curve of his mouth.
Another student raises a hand. “How do you stay focused during games when there are distractions?”
Troy makes a choking sound.
Ilya turns his head toward the back row slowly enough that half the room notices before Shane does.
Then Shane looks up.
The colour rises across his face almost instantly.
“Depends on distraction,” Ilya says into the microphone.
The reaction moves through the room like electricity. Laughter. Turning heads. People following his line of sight with delighted shamelessness. Shane goes very still beneath the attention, notebook clutched tighter against his chest.
Troy leans toward his own microphone. “We’re moving on.”
“No, important question.”
“Troy,” Zane mutters through laughter, “you created this situation.”
Ilya settles back in his chair with infuriating comfort. “Some distractions make game worse. Crowd noise. Opponent talking too much. Terrible music. Troy existing.”
“Hostile workplace,” Troy says.
“Some distractions make you sharper,” Ilya continues. “Maybe someone is watching. Maybe suddenly you want to look impressive.”
Several students make sounds they probably believe qualify as subtle.
Shane’s pen slips from his fingers.
It rolls beneath the seat in front of him, and he bends down quickly to retrieve it while half the lecture theatre dissolves into scandalised laughter.
The panel deteriorates steadily afterward. A student asks what quality matters most in a teammate, and after Zane says trust, Ryan says communication, and Troy says accountability, Ilya considers Shane in the back row for one suspended second before answering, “Knowing when to mind your business.”
“That was aimed directly at me,” Troy says.
“Yes.”
Someone else asks whether rivalries help performance.
“Very motivating,” Ilya says thoughtfully, gaze sliding back toward Shane. “Especially when rival has terrible taste.”
Zane folds forward laughing hard enough to lose composure entirely. The room follows immediately. Shane presses both hands over his face in obvious mortification, shoulders shaking once with helpless laughter before he catches himself.
After the panel, students flood the front rows in search of photographs and signatures. Troy is immediately swallowed by current university players asking about Ottawa training camps and old university stories. Ryan becomes trapped beside the stage by someone holding out a water bottle to sign. Zane ends up cornered by sports science students discussing recovery metrics with terrifying enthusiasm.
Ilya waits near the edge of the stage.
He sees Shane stand.
He sees the hesitation too: Shane glancing toward the exit, then toward the crowd, then toward Troy, as though deciding which version of the room is least dangerous. He does not come toward Ilya. He moves toward Troy instead, which Ilya understands and resents with equal force.
Troy sees him approach and brightens immediately.
“Hollander,” he says. “You survived.”
Shane’s smile is small but real. “Questionably.”
“Told you he behaves terribly in public.”
Shane glances, too quickly, toward Ilya.
Ilya, who is being asked to sign somebody’s programme, looks down at the paper as though he has not noticed.
“I gathered,” Shane says.
Troy grins. “You took notes?”
Shane looks down at the notebook still pressed to his chest and flushes faintly. “I tried to. It became less educational as it went on.”
“That’s because Rozanov was invited.”
“I heard that,” Ilya says from three feet away.
“You were meant to,” Troy says.
Shane laughs under his breath, and Ilya feels the sound more than he hears it.
Troy’s grin softens slightly. “You play?”
Shane blinks. “Hockey? No. God, no.”
“Smart man.”
“I like having bones.”
“Also smart.”
“I do literature.”
“Yeah, I know,” Troy says.
Shane pauses. “You know?”
Troy’s expression becomes far too innocent.
“Ilya mentioned it.”
Ilya signs the programme with slightly more pressure than necessary.
Shane’s face goes pink.
“He did?”
“Unfortunately,” Troy says cheerfully. “At length.”
“Troy,” Ilya says.
“What? I’m building community.”
Shane looks as if he does not know whether to laugh or disappear. His fingers tighten around the notebook, but his eyes are bright.
Then the lecture theatre door opens.
Shane’s expression changes before Ilya even sees who has entered.
That is the part that lands badly: the immediacy of it. The way warmth drains out of him as though someone has opened a window in winter. His shoulders tighten beneath his jumper. His mouth softens into something careful. His eyes flick toward the doorway, and for one brief, unmistakable second, they look pleading.
Eric Lowell stands near the entrance.
He is still partially in Boston training gear beneath his coat, hair damp, expression polished into something publicly easy. Several students turn in surprise. More phones lift with badly disguised excitement.
Eric spots Shane first.
Then Troy.
Then Ilya.
The smile remains.
The warmth does not.
“There you are,” Eric says.
Shane nods quickly. “Sorry. I was just—”
“I texted.”
“My phone was in my bag.”
Eric’s gaze flicks briefly to Troy, then past him to Ilya.
“Right.”
Troy, to his credit, keeps his voice light. “Lowell. Didn’t know Boston was visiting campus too.”
“Just picking Shane up.”
“Very boyfriend of you.”
Eric’s smile tightens.
Eric looks at Shane then, and for one small moment, his face warms.
“There you are,” he says again, softer this time, some of the sharpness leaving his voice. “You didn’t answer. I was starting to think you got kidnapped by academia.”
Shane huffs a quiet laugh despite himself. “That would be a slow kidnapping.”
“Death by panel discussion.”
Troy grins. “Careful. That was my panel discussion.”
“Then I stand by it,” Eric says easily, and a few nearby students laugh with him.
For a second, the room relaxes around him.
That is what Eric is good at. Charm arrives naturally on him, fast and bright enough that people settle instinctively toward its warmth. Shane feels it too, the familiar relief of Eric choosing softness instead of irritation, and when Eric reaches for his hand, Shane lets him take it automatically.
“You okay?” Eric asks quietly.
The question is real enough that Shane’s chest tightens a little.
“Yeah.”
Eric squeezes his hand once, thumb brushing briefly across Shane’s knuckles. Affectionate. Familiar. Public in the easy way people always seem to like from them. Around them, the tension loosens another degree. Even Troy’s shoulders soften slightly.
Then Eric’s gaze flicks toward Ilya.
The change is almost too small to call a change at all.
“You’ve been busy entertaining people, apparently.”
The warmth remains in his smile. Something else slips underneath it.
Shane’s fingers tighten unconsciously around his notebook. “It was just the panel.”
“Mm.”
Eric lets go of Shane’s hand and steps closer instead, one hand settling at the small of Shane’s back.
Casual enough for the room.
Precise enough for Shane.
Shane stills under it.
Ilya’s marker stops moving over the programme.
Shane’s eyes flick toward Troy again, and that pleading look returns, smaller this time, buried so deeply beneath politeness most people in the room would never notice it. It disappears almost immediately.
Ilya sees it.
Troy sees it too.
The joking ease drains from Troy’s face by degrees.
For one suspended second, no one says anything.
Then Eric looks at Shane. “Come on.”
Shane nods quickly. “Yeah. Okay.”
Troy’s voice gentles in a way Ilya has rarely heard from him. “Good seeing you, Hollander.”
Gratitude flickers across Shane’s face so fast it almost hurts to witness.
“You too.”
His eyes lift once toward Ilya, uncertain, lingering for half a heartbeat too long, but Eric is already guiding him toward the door, hand steady against Shane’s back, and the moment disappears before it can become anything.
Ilya never gets to say his name.
He stands there with the half-signed programme in his hand while Eric leads Shane out through the crowded lecture theatre and half the university pretends very badly not to watch.
Only after the doors close does Troy exhale.
“Well,” he says quietly. “That felt psychologically catastrophic.”
Ilya keeps staring at the empty doorway.
The look in Shane’s eyes remains lodged beneath his ribs, sharp and impossible to dismiss.
“Yes,” he says.
And for once, Troy does not joke.