Chapter 3: Clause One
Shane lasted three days.
He was proud of the three days, in a grim sort of way. He swam every morning. He fixed the hammock, finally, and Ilya lay in it reading his brown-paged mystery and announced that the butler had done it, and then, two chapters later, that the butler was dead, and was outraged for an entire afternoon. Shane returned Mrs. Dumont's pie dish and stood on her porch for ten excruciating minutes talking about her grandson's beer league team while she looked at him with that same unreadable expression, and he did not die, though it was close.
He did not say Ottawa. He held it in his mouth like a hard candy he couldn't swallow.
It was worse at night. Ilya slept like a man who'd decided something, heavy and easy, one arm flung across Shane's stomach like a seat belt. Shane lay under the arm and ran the numbers. Ottawa was a Canadian market. Ottawa was a Canadian market with a media corps that already wrote three columns a week about Shane Hollander's hometown connections. Ottawa was a twenty-minute drive from his parents' house, where his mother's ceramic frogs lived on every windowsill, where his father still kept a framed photo of Shane at his draft in the front hall. Ilya in Ottawa would be Ilya in Shane's actual life, the one with people in it, where a cousin from Moscow wasn't going to cover it.
And Ilya would be giving up Boston for it. The harbour view. The team that had just gone to the final. Whatever money the voice on the other end of that phone call had been trying to talk him into. All of it, to come and be a Centaur, which was, Shane thought with a certain amount of hysteria, a team named after a horse.
On the third night, the storm came in.
It had been building all afternoon, the air going thick and yellow over the lake, the far shore disappearing behind a grey wall. The loons went quiet. Around nine the wind arrived all at once, like someone had opened a door, and the first crack of thunder was so close that Ilya, who was standing at the stove, dropped a wooden spoon.
"That," he said, "is not a loon."
The power went out at nine-fifteen.
Shane knew where the candles were. He knew where everything was, because he'd put it there, and he went around the kitchen in the dark lighting them, one on the table, two on the counter, one on the windowsill where the storm was throwing rain at the glass so hard it sounded like gravel. When he turned around Ilya was sitting at the table with his chin on his folded arms, watching him, gold light all down one side of his face.
"Very romantic," Ilya said. "You planned the storm."
"Yeah. I called a guy."
The thunder rolled again, longer this time, and the whole cottage shook with it. Ilya's eyes went to the window, then back. His voice changed a little. "You are quiet. Three days."
"I'm always quiet."
"No. You are quiet like a person, normally. Now you are quiet like a goalie." He tipped his head. "What happened?"
Shane opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked at the fridge, where the moose was holding up the memorandum again, slightly crooked now, because he'd put it back badly at one in the morning with shaking hands.
"I'm going to break clause one," he said.
Ilya went very still.
"I'm going to break it, and you can give me a penalty, you can give me a game misconduct, I don't care." He heard his own voice going fast and high, the way it did in interviews when someone asked him a question he hadn't prepared for. "I heard you. On the phone. Last week. I was on the dock and you were by the woodpile and I didn't mean to, I swear I didn't, but I heard you say Ottawa."
Lightning lit the whole room white and then dropped it back into candlelight. In the half-second of it Shane saw Ilya's face, and it wasn't angry. It was scared. He'd never seen Ilya scared, not like that, not once in eight years. Not on the ice, not in the press, not with his hand on Shane's chest in a hotel room at four in the morning saying things in Russian he wouldn't translate.
"Shane," Ilya said.
"Are you doing it? Asking for a trade?" Shane's hands were shaking. He put them flat on the counter behind him. "Because if you're doing it for me, you can't. You can't. You'd lose Boston. You'd lose your whole team. The media in Ottawa is insane, they'll be in your face every day, they'll want to know why you'd leave a contender for, for a, they'll want to know everything, and you won't be able to tell them, and I can't—"
"Shane."
"I can't be the reason you give everything up and then I can't even—" His throat closed. He pushed through it. "I can't even hold your hand in a grocery store."
The rain hammered at the window. A branch scraped along the side of the cottage like fingernails. Ilya got up from the table, slowly, the way he skated in warm-ups, the chair scraping back, and came around it and stopped in front of Shane, close enough that Shane could see the candle doubled in both his eyes.
"Can I break clause one also?" Ilya asked quietly. "Or is only you?"
Shane nodded. He didn't trust his voice.
"Okay." Ilya took a breath. "I asked for Ottawa. Yes. I asked in May, after the final. My agent thinks I am crazy. Boston thinks I am crazy. I think I am a little bit crazy." His mouth twitched, just at one corner. "But I am not giving anything up. You have it backwards. You always have it backwards, it is very annoying."
"What do you mean, backwards?"
"I mean Boston is a nice apartment." Ilya said it simply, like a fact about weather. "I have a view. I have a car with a name. I go home after a game, and it is very quiet, and I eat ketchup on bread over the sink. For years. And then I come here." He gestured, a short sweep of his hand that took in the candles, the stove, the warped kitchen table, the penalty chair out there somewhere in the storm. "Two weeks. I am happy two weeks. I did not know, before, it was possible to be happy for two whole weeks in a row. I thought it was only two nights. Then airport."
Shane's eyes were stinging. He blinked hard.
"I don't need to hold your hand in a grocery store," Ilya said. "I mean, I would like. Someday. But I need to be ninety minutes away, not eight hours and a plane. I need to drive to my boyfriend's stupid cottage on a Tuesday. I need to be close enough that if your mother makes more frogs, I can see the frogs."
"You said boyfriend," Shane said, and his voice cracked right down the middle.
Ilya blinked. "Yes?"
"You've never said boyfriend."
"Well." Ilya looked, for the first time all summer, embarrassed. The tips of his ears went pink in the candlelight. "It is a very bad word in Russian. Not bad. Small. It sounds like you have a boy who you are friends with. Is not big enough."
"What's the big enough one?"
Ilya looked at him for a long moment. Then he said something in Russian, low and careful, three words, and Shane didn't know them, had never heard them, but he understood them anyway. He understood them the way he understood the angle of a pass before it left the stick. He understood them all the way down.
"I love you, too," Shane said.
He hadn't planned to say it. He hadn't planned anything about this summer except a memorandum and a dock stain and a list a page and a half long, and none of it had survived contact. It came out of him like the storm, all at once, and after it was out he found he wasn't scared at all. He was just very, very tired of not having said it.
Ilya made a sound that wasn't a word in any language and kissed him.
It was nothing like the hotel rooms. Those had always had a clock in them, a door, a flight. This one had candlelight and rain and nowhere to be. Ilya kissed him slowly, both hands coming up to hold his face like Shane was something he'd been handed carefully and told not to drop, and Shane grabbed a fistful of his T-shirt and held on, and the thunder went off right over the cottage and neither of them flinched. When they finally broke apart it was only by an inch. Ilya rested his forehead against his and breathed.
"You are crying," Ilya observed.
"You are, too."
"No. It is the rain. Your roof leaks."
Shane laughed, wet and helpless, and Ilya kissed the corner of his mouth, and then his cheekbone, and then his eyelid, very gently, and Shane thought he might actually just fall down there on the kitchen floor and never get up.
The storm blew itself out around midnight. The power didn't come back. They sat at the kitchen table with the candles burning down and Shane's mother's ugly blue bowl between them, both phones inside it, face down, buzzing occasionally, ignored.
Shane got the memorandum off the fridge. He got a pen from the drawer. He sat down and turned the page over to the blank back, which he had left blank on purpose because he'd wanted to keep it to one page, and he started writing.
Ilya leaned over his shoulder to read, warm and heavy, his chin hooking over Shane's collarbone. He smelled like candle smoke and rain.
Amended Memorandum of Understanding, Shane wrote. Clause 1: We are allowed to talk about hockey if it's about coming home.
Ilya made a small noise against his neck.
Clause 2: Next summer, too. And the one after that.
Clause 3: Ilya can say Hollander again. Shane wrote it, and paused, and then added: Sometimes. In private. Only if he means it the other way.
"What other way?" Ilya murmured, in a voice that made it very clear he knew.
"You know what other way."
"I am Russian. I need it in writing."
Shane felt his face go hot and wrote nothing, and Ilya laughed into his shoulder, a low, warm vibration. Then Ilya reached around him and took the pen out of his hand and wrote, underneath, in that slanting scrawl that made everything look like a threat:
Clause 4: Shane Hollander will come to the press conference in September. Not to say anything. Just to be in the room.
He signed it. He held the pen out.
Shane looked at the clause for a long time. September. A podium. A Centaurs jersey with Rozanov across the shoulders. A room full of cameras and microphones, and him somewhere at the back of it, in a hat, pretending to be there for something else, watching Ilya smile into the flashbulbs and say, in his terrible, deliberate English, that he was very happy to be coming to Ottawa for personal reasons.
He took the pen. He signed. He dated it.
"There," Ilya said, satisfied, and kissed the side of his head. "Now it is legal."
Outside, the clouds were pulling apart over the lake, and the moon came through in pieces, laying a long broken road of light across the water all the way to the dock, where a single wooden chair sat at the very end, soaked and empty, waiting for whichever one of them broke the rules next.