Chapter 1: Memorandum of Understanding
Shane printed the agreement twice, because the first copy had a typo in clause six and he was not going to hand Ilya Rozanov a document that said "trade rumors" with one r. Ilya would notice. Ilya would frame it.
He set both copies on the kitchen table anyway, the bad one face down, and lined up a pen beside them. Then he moved the pen to the other side. Then he went outside and stood on the porch and looked at the lake, because the lake did not care who had won the second round in six games, and that made it the only thing within two hundred kilometres he could stand to look at.
It was a little after nine. The sky over the far shore had gone the colour of a bruise healing, purple going yellow at the edges, and the loons were doing their haunted-house thing out past the point. The dock needed staining. He'd put it on a list. He had a list for the summer that was already a page and a half long, and nowhere on it, in any form, was the word Boston.
Headlights came up the gravel at twenty past.
Shane knew it was him before the car cleared the trees, because nobody else would drive a matte black German thing worth more than the cottage down a cottage road. It bottomed out on the last dip with a sound like a dropped tray. The engine cut. The door opened. A long leg came out, then the rest of him, unfolding into the porch light in a white T-shirt and sunglasses he absolutely did not need at night.
"Hollander," Ilya said, like he was announcing a terrible diagnosis. "Your road is trying to kill me."
"You could have driven slower."
"I did. This was slow." He pushed the sunglasses up into his hair, which was longer than it had been in April, curling at his neck. He looked tired around the eyes. He looked like someone who had played twenty-two more hockey games than he had a month ago, and then lost the final, and then got on a plane, and then rented the stupidest car in Ontario. "It is very dark here. There are no lights. I heard something scream."
"That's a loon."
"That is a murder." Ilya came up the steps with one duffel bag, which meant there was a second, larger duffel bag in the trunk that he would ask Shane to carry. He stopped one stair below Shane, which made them almost the same height, and for a second neither of them did anything at all.
They had never done this. That was the thing Shane kept running into, all spring, like a doorframe in a new apartment. They had done hotel rooms. They had done a borrowed condo, once, and his own place in Montreal three times with the blinds down. They had done two nights, at most, and then airports and silence and texts with no names in them. They had never done six weeks. They had never done a place with a kitchen that was going to be theirs to mess up.
Ilya looked at his mouth and then, deliberately, at the door behind him.
"Inside," Shane said, a little hoarse.
"Yes," said Ilya. "Before the loon comes back."
Ilya found the agreement in under a minute, because he walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, and the table was between the door and the fridge.
He picked up the face-up copy. He read the first line out loud in the voice of a man reading a ransom note.
"Memorandum of Understanding." He looked up. "You made a memorandum."
"It's not a big deal."
"It has a title." Ilya flipped it over, as if there might be more on the back. There wasn't. Shane had kept it to one page on purpose. "Is there a lawyer coming? Should I call mine?"
"It's just so we're on the same page." Shane went to the sink and ran water into a glass he didn't want, for something to hold. "We said on the phone we weren't going to talk about it. I wrote down what 'it' means. That's all."
What he did not say: that they'd agreed on the phone in March, too, and Shane had lasted until the first commercial break of the next Raiders game before texting Ilya something he still couldn't think about without his ears going hot. That they'd agreed in Las Vegas at the awards, and lasted until Ilya said the word "Calder" in the elevator about somebody else entirely, and Shane had gone quiet for two days. That every time they tried to be two people who were not hockey players, hockey came in through the vents like smoke.
Ilya pulled out a chair, sat in it backwards, and read the memorandum properly. Shane watched him do it in the dark window over the sink.
"One," Ilya read. "No talking about hockey. Okay. Two. No talking about 'adjacent subjects,' including but not limited to: the playoffs, either team, any team, the draft, free agency, contracts, injuries, the media, trade rumors, the Hart, the Conn Smythe, the Lady Byng." He paused. "Hollander, nobody talks about the Lady Byng."
"I wanted to be thorough."
"Three. No watching highlights. Four. Phones stay in the bowl after dinner." He turned his head and found the bowl, an ugly blue ceramic thing Shane's mother had made in a pottery class and given him with great ceremony. "This bowl?"
"That bowl."
"Five. If someone breaks rules one through four, the other person may assign a penalty." Ilya's mouth did something complicated. "What kind of penalty?"
"I didn't decide. Something fair."
"Two minutes for roughing?"
"That's hockey," Shane said. "You just broke rule one."
Ilya looked at him for a long second, and then he laughed, a real one, head tipped back, the kind Shane had heard maybe a dozen times in eight years and could have picked out of a stadium. It hit him somewhere under the sternum. He turned around and drank half the water so he'd have something to do with his face.
"Okay," Ilya said. "I will sign. But I have amendments."
"It's not that kind of document."
"Every document is that kind of document." Ilya held out his hand without looking, fingers wiggling, and Shane, who was weak, gave him the pen. Ilya wrote on the bottom of the page in his slanting, backhanded scrawl, the one that made every autograph look like a threat. He wrote for a while. He crossed something out. He wrote more.
Then he slid it across the table, and Shane leaned over his shoulder to read it, which put his nose close enough to Ilya's hair that he could smell airport and some stupid expensive shampoo and, under it, just Ilya.
Clause 6 (amendment by I. Rozanov): Shane Hollander will swim in the lake every day, even when he says it is cold. It is not cold. He is Canadian.
Clause 7: Nobody may say "Hollander" in this house. It is a hockey word.
Shane read the second one twice.
"You call me Hollander," he said.
"Yes." Ilya tipped his head back so he could look up at him, upside down. "For six weeks, I don't."
It was such a small thing. It was a word. Shane had heard Ilya say it with contempt across a faceoff circle, with mockery in a press scrum, with that low, rough, private weight in hotel rooms where it meant something else entirely. He'd never heard Ilya say anything else to him with any regularity. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard Ilya say his first name in daylight.
"Okay," Shane said.
"Okay?"
"I'll sign it." He took the pen back and signed under Ilya's name, neat, the way his mother had taught him, and dated it. Then, because he couldn't help himself, he added Clause 8: Ilya will not touch the thermostat. He initialled it.
Ilya read that and made a wounded noise. "It is a cottage. It is supposed to be cold. You said."
"The lake's not cold, though," Shane said, "because I'm Canadian," and Ilya grinned at him, wide and crooked and delighted, and Shane felt his whole careful plan for the summer slide a couple of inches sideways on the table.
He'd made up the big bedroom on the lake side. He had also, in a fit of something he didn't want to look at directly, made up the small bedroom at the back with the single bed and the quilt with ducks on it, just in case. Ilya walked past the small room, glanced in, saw the ducks, and said nothing about it at all, which was somehow worse than if he had.
They brushed their teeth side by side at the double sink. It was so domestic that Shane kept forgetting how to do it, like he'd forgotten the order: brush, spit, rinse. Ilya caught his eye in the mirror with a mouth full of foam and raised his eyebrows, and Shane almost choked.
"What," Ilya said, around the toothbrush.
"Nothing. You're just. Here."
Ilya spat, rinsed, and wiped his mouth on Shane's towel instead of his own. "I am here," he agreed. "You invited me. I have a memorandum."
Later, in the dark, with the window open and the lake making its small, regular sounds against the dock, Shane lay on his back and listened to Ilya not sleeping. He knew what Ilya sleeping sounded like. This wasn't that. This was too still.
"You okay?" he said.
A pause. "Yes."
"You're lying."
"I am a little lying." The mattress shifted. Ilya turned onto his side, toward him, and Shane could just make out the line of his shoulder against the window, the pale gleam of an eye. "Can I ask a question about the memorandum?"
"Sure."
"Clause one. No talking about hockey." Ilya's voice was very even. It was the voice he used with reporters when someone asked about his father. "What if I have something I need to tell you, and it is about hockey? But it is not really about hockey. It is about." He stopped. "It is about other things. But also hockey."
Shane's heart did something unprofessional. He stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped a bit like Prince Edward Island that he'd been meaning to deal with for two years.
"Is it bad?" he asked.
"I don't know." Ilya was quiet for a long time. "Maybe it is very good. Maybe you will hate it."
"You can tell me."
"No," Ilya said, and Shane could hear the smile come back into his voice, thin and tired. "I signed. I am a man of honour. We have a document." His hand found Shane's wrist under the sheet, thumb resting right on the pulse like he was checking it was there. "Six weeks, Shane. Then I tell you."
It was the first time all night he'd said it. Shane lay awake for an hour afterward, Ilya's thumb still on his wrist, trying to think of a single piece of hockey news good enough that it might be very good, or bad enough that he might hate it, and not finding one, and finding, every time he got close, the same impossible answer waiting at the end of it like a light left on at the end of a dock.