Chapter 3: Three-on-Three
Ilya opened the door before Shane knocked, which meant he had been standing right behind it, which meant he had probably seen the video too.
He was in a hotel robe over track pants and he had a laptop open on the bed behind him with the clip paused on Shane's face. When Shane saw it he stopped in the doorway, and Ilya, for once in his life, looked caught.
"I was going to send it to you," he said. "As a joke."
"Four hundred thousand people have seen that."
"Six hundred now. Come in, before TSN sees you."
Shane came in. The door closed behind him with the expensive soft click that hotel doors made at this price point. Ilya's room was bigger than his, because of course it was, and there was a room-service tray on the desk with the unmistakable remains of a hot chocolate on it, whipped cream ring and all. Shane looked at it, and Ilya followed his gaze and didn't even try.
"Is not mine," Ilya said.
"Okay."
"Is the housekeeper's."
"Sure."
They stood there. The clip glowed on the laptop. On it, frozen, Shane looked like a man who had just been told some very good news by someone he wasn't allowed to love.
"I don't know what my face is doing," Shane said finally. "In that. I don't know what I was thinking."
"Yes, you do."
"Ilya."
"You were thinking: that idiot is wearing my favourite cologne again. You were thinking: he tugged the hat, he is so funny and handsome, I should not have written black coffee, I am a monster." Ilya sat down on the end of the bed, heavily, and looked up at him, and the jokes were all still there in his voice, but his eyes weren't joking. "Everyone thinks you are acting. Is the best part. The whole world watched you look at me like that and they all think it is a bit. They make edits. They add sad music. 'The rivalry is so real.'"
"It's not funny."
"No," Ilya agreed. "Is not funny. Is a little funny."
Shane sat down beside him. Not close. Close enough. The mattress dipped and tipped them a degree toward each other.
"Priya wants us on the same line tomorrow," he said. "For the three-on-three. She came and found me after the skills thing. She says the clip is the best thing they've posted all year. She wants a give-and-go. She wants us to celebrate together." He laughed, and it came out wrong. "She wants us to hug, Ilya. On the ice. With the cameras. She said 'lean into it.'"
Ilya was quiet for a moment. Then he reached over, took the Boston hat out of Shane's hand (Shane had forgotten he was still holding it), and set it very gently on Shane's head.
"Then we lean into it," he said.
The three-on-three tournament was twenty minutes a game, one long period, no hitting, no defence to speak of, all of it an excuse for the best players in the world to show off for each other. The Atlantic Division drew the Metropolitan in the semifinal. Shane and Ilya started together on the ice with a Tampa defenceman who spent the first shift laughing at them.
"You guys know you're on the same team, right?" he said, when Shane and Ilya both went for the same loose puck and nearly took each other's legs off.
"He knows," Shane said, at the same moment that Ilya said "He forgets."
It took them most of the first game to stop doing that. Seven years of reading each other from opposite benches, every habit, every lean, every tell, and none of it knew what to do when they were wearing the same colour. Shane kept skating to where Ilya was going to be so he could stop him. Ilya kept dropping his shoulder to beat a check from Shane that wasn't coming.
Then, with four minutes left and the score tied at five, something clicked.
Shane picked up the puck behind his own net and looked up the ice, and he didn't need to look. He knew. He knew Ilya was going to swing wide on the right, where the Metropolitan defenceman was cheating to the middle, because Ilya always went right when he was tired, and Ilya always got tired around minute sixteen because he never paced himself in exhibitions, because he thought pacing was for cowards. Shane put the puck on the boards without lifting his head. It came off at exactly the angle he wanted, into empty ice, and then it wasn't empty, because Ilya was there.
Ilya carried it to the hash marks, drew the goalie, drew the defenceman, and dropped it back between his own skates without looking, because he knew, too. He knew Shane would be there, trailing on the left, because that was where Shane had been on every two-on-one either of them had seen since they were nineteen.
Shane was there. He didn't even have to shoot. He just had to touch it. The puck went in off his blade and the net bulged and eighteen thousand people stood up.
He didn't remember turning around. He remembered Ilya hitting him at full speed, both arms around his shoulders, gloves thumping against his back, the two of them nearly going down and then not going down because Ilya had his weight, the way Ilya always had his weight. His helmet knocked against Shane's. Up close his face was flushed and shining with sweat and he was laughing, breathless, right into Shane's ear.
"Lean into it," he said.
So Shane did. For one second, then two, he let himself hold on. His arms around Ilya's back, his face in the crook of Ilya's neck where the jersey met the shoulder pads, smelling sweat and ice and that stupid, stupid cologne. Somewhere above them the jumbotron was showing it. Somewhere, the coffee people were losing their minds. He didn't care. He held on one second longer than any rival ever would, and then the Tampa guy crashed into both of them, howling, and it was a pile, and it was a bit, and nobody would ever know.
They lost the final to the Central Division by two. Nobody cared about that either.
The stairwell on the arena's lower level smelled like concrete and hot dogs. It had one flickering light and a sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY, and it was the only place in the building Shane had found all weekend without a camera in it. He had looked. He was the kind of person who looked.
Ilya came through the door three minutes after Shane did, still in his base layers, hair wet from the shower, and stopped on the landing.
"You picked a romantic place," he said.
"It was the only place."
"I know. I looked too." He came down two steps so they were nearly level. "You played very well, Hollander. That pass."
"You were tired."
"I was not tired."
"You always go right when you're tired. Minute sixteen. You never pace yourself."
Ilya stared at him. Slowly, a smile started at one corner of his mouth.
"You get them all wrong yesterday," he said. "Every question."
Shane had been thinking about how to say this since the elevator last night. He had thought about it through the whole semifinal, and in the shower, and all the way down the stairs. He had rehearsed it, because that was who he was. And now that Ilya was in front of him, wet hair and stupid grin and a bruise starting on his jaw from the Tampa guy's helmet, he couldn't remember a single word of it.
"I knew them," he said instead. "All of them. Double espresso and then the sequel. Hot chocolate on game days, extra whipped cream, and you lie about it. The car door when you were nine. Your middle name. You like the bagels in Montreal, the sesame ones, from the place on Saint-Viateur, and you pretend you're only there for hockey." His voice was shaking. He let it. "I would have gotten every single one of them right, Ilya. I'd have won eight to nothing. I just couldn't."
The light flickered. Somewhere above them, a door banged and footsteps went past and faded.
"I know," Ilya said, very softly. "I know you knew. I watched you write the wrong ones. Your face, Hollander. Every time. Like it hurt."
"It did."
"Good," Ilya said, and stepped down off the last stair and kissed him.
It wasn't like the hotel rooms. Shane had known Ilya's mouth for years, in the dark, in a hurry, with a game the next day and a flight in the morning and the lock turned twice. This was slow. This was Ilya's hand coming up to cup his jaw, careful, like it was the first time and he wanted to remember it. This was Shane's back against the cold concrete and his hands fisted in Ilya's damp base layer and the light buzzing overhead and both of them still, for once, not in a hurry to get anywhere.
When Ilya pulled back, he didn't go far. He rested his forehead against Shane's.
"Six hundred thousand people," he said, "and nobody knows."
"Eight hundred, probably. By now."
"Eight hundred." Ilya laughed, warm, into the space between them. "Is a big city. Hollanov."
"Please don't."
"Population: two." He kissed Shane again, quick, at the corner of his mouth, and stepped back toward the stairs. At the landing he stopped and looked down at him, and the grin was back, but it was a different one, the private one, the one that had never been on any jumbotron in the world. "Next year," he said. "Next All-Star. If they put us together again. You will answer right?"
Shane looked at him. He thought about cameras, and contracts, and Priya's metrics, and his father's face, and the woman with the glitter-glue sign screaming in the stands.
"Ask me next year," he said.
Ilya pointed at him, delighted, like he'd scored, and was gone.
Shane stood alone in the stairwell for a long time. Then he took out his phone and opened his contacts and looked at the name there. Lily. He put his thumb over it. He typed an I, and an L, and stopped, and looked at it, and held his breath.
Then his phone buzzed in his hand, and the name at the top of the screen was still Lily, and the message underneath said: Is same time in Boston on the 3rd? I will order you sad chicken.
Shane laughed out loud in an empty stairwell, and saved nothing, and typed back: Yes.