Chapter 1: Two Minutes for Slashing
The penalty box at TD Garden smelled like rubber matting and old Gatorade, and from inside it Ilya Rozanov had the best seat in the building.
He sat with his elbows on his knees and his helmet pushed back and watched Shane Hollander skate.
Two minutes for slashing. It had been a good slash, honestly. A beautiful slash. Hollander had come around the net with the puck on his backhand and that look on his face, the one that meant he'd already decided where it was going and God help anyone in the way, and Ilya had done what he had done to Shane a thousand times since they were nineteen: brought his stick down across Hollander's gloves, hard, and watched the puck skitter off into the corner. The crowd had loved it. Eighteen thousand people in black and gold on their feet, screaming. The ref had not loved it.
Now Montreal had the power play, and Ilya had two minutes to sit here and watch Shane work.
He was good at it. That was the infuriating thing, still, after all these years. Ilya had been watching him since the draft, since the two of them stood side by side on a stage in rented suits pretending not to look at each other, first and second overall, and he had never once got tired of watching Shane Hollander play hockey. The way he held the blue line like it owed him money. The way he didn't celebrate goals so much as file them, a little nod, a glove tap, next. The way his whole body changed when he had the puck, like he'd finally been handed the one thing in the world that made sense.
It had been like this all night. On the opening faceoff, crouched over the dot with their sticks an inch apart and the linesman's arm up between them, Shane had kept his eyes on the ice and said, so low that only Ilya could hear it, "You're cheating on the draw."
"I never cheat."
"You always cheat. You creep forward. Every time."
"Maybe I want to be closer to you, Hollander."
Shane's stick had jerked, just slightly, and the puck had dropped, and Ilya had won it clean back to his defenceman while Shane was still recovering. That was the thing nobody understood about their rivalry, the thing the broadcasters with their graphics and their head-to-head stats never quite got. Ilya didn't beat Shane by being faster or stronger. He beat him by knowing exactly where the soft places were.
Second period, they'd collided along the boards behind the Montreal net, and for a second they'd been pinned together, Shane's back against the glass and Ilya's chest against his, both of them digging for a puck neither could see. Shane's breath had been hot on his jaw. The crowd on the other side of the glass had been pounding on it, inches from their heads.
"Get off me," Shane had said through his teeth.
"You smell nice. New shampoo?"
"I swear to God, Rozanov."
"Is very nice. Coconut." Ilya had kicked the puck loose with his skate and spun away up the ice, and left Shane standing there against the glass, red to the ears, looking murderous, while the Boston fans howled with joy at whatever they thought had just happened.
Then the third period, and Shane coming around the net, and the slash. He hadn't planned it. That was the honest truth, and he would only ever tell it to one person. Shane had come around that net with the puck and that look on his face, and Ilya had been hit, out of nowhere, by a wave of wanting so huge that he'd had to do something with his body, anything, right that second, in front of eighteen thousand people. So he'd brought his stick down.
It was, he knew, sitting in the box, not a healthy way to express love.
Hollander picked up a pass at the point and faked the shot and slid it across, and Montreal's winger buried it, and the Garden groaned, and Ilya's penalty was over.
He stepped out of the box and onto the ice. Shane was skating back toward the Montreal bench past him, and for one second they were close enough that Ilya could see the sweat at his temples and the red flush high on his cheekbones that was half exertion and half fury.
"Nice slash," Shane said, without looking at him.
"Thank you. I practised."
"You're an animal."
"Yes," Ilya agreed, and skated off with his heart going much harder than two minutes in a box could explain.
Boston lost four to two. Ilya did not care very much. He did the scrum in the locker room, said the usual things in the usual voice: good effort, they were better tonight, we'll be ready Thursday. One of the beat writers asked him about the slash and Ilya grinned and said "What slash?" and the room laughed, and the clip would be on every hockey account by midnight under a headline with the word RIVALRY in it. Then he showered and dressed and sat in his car in the players' garage under the arena with his phone in his hand.
He had done this a hundred times. More. He had a system, and so did Shane, and the system was very, very good. Shane would text from the Montreal team hotel, something boring, nothing that would look like anything if someone found it: an emoji, a number. Ilya would wait an hour, so the hallways had emptied, and then drive to the hotel and park two blocks away and walk in through a side entrance with his hood up. Shane would open the door before he knocked. The lock turned twice. And then, for a few hours, the world would be a hotel room. Same beige carpet in every city. Same blackout curtains. Same tiny bottles of shampoo that Shane always lined up on the bathroom counter by size.
And then, before it got light, before the cleaners started their carts down the hall, one of them would leave.
It had been a hundred hotel rooms. More. Boston and Montreal and Toronto and Tampa and Raleigh, every city in the league, two countries, six years. Ilya knew Shane's body better than he knew his own. He knew the noise Shane made when Ilya kissed the inside of his wrist, and the scar on his left knee, and that he slept on his stomach with one arm under the pillow. He knew Shane's favourite brand of electrolyte drink and the name of his mother's dog and the way he looked at four in the morning, hair a disaster, mouth soft, that very serious face gone loose and easy with sleep.
He had never once seen Shane Hollander eat breakfast.
His phone buzzed. The contact said Hollander. It had always said Hollander. Ilya had decided years ago that if anyone ever looked through his phone, the most suspicious thing in the world would be not having the guy's number. Of course he had Hollander's number. He hated Hollander. Everybody knew that.
Hollander: 9
The room was on the ninth floor. It always was, at this hotel. Shane asked for it.
Ilya looked at the number for a long time.
Then he opened a different thread. Svetlana. Her last message, from two days ago, still sitting there under his: You are 29 years old. You are a millionaire. You are a captain in the NHL. And you are still sneaking into hotels like a married dentist. Ask him, Ilyusha. Or stop crying to me about it.
He hadn't answered her. He'd been crying to her about it, a bit, for most of the season. Ever since Christmas, when he had sat alone in his apartment overlooking the harbour with a takeout container and a hockey game on and realised that he wanted, more than he had wanted anything in a long time, to have Shane Hollander sitting next to him on the couch. Not in a hotel room. Not at two in the morning. Here. Eating takeout. Complaining about the sodium.
It was not a lot to want. It was everything.
And under that, quieter, the other thing. The letter from Ottawa's general manager, sitting on his kitchen counter under a roll of hockey tape where he didn't have to look at it every time he walked past. He had not told Svetlana about the letter. He had not told anyone. He had read it so many times he could recite the second paragraph, the part where they said they saw him as a leader, the part where they said the word home. Two hours and ten minutes from Montreal. He had checked that too, on his phone, late at night, and then cleared his search history like a spy covering his tracks, which was ridiculous, because he was a grown man and he lived alone and nobody was checking.
He opened Shane's thread again. He typed the hotel's address, the way he would on any other night, to confirm. He looked at it. He deleted it.
He typed his own address instead. The building on the waterfront. The floor. The code for the side door, the one by the parking garage, where the doorman didn't sit.
Then, before he could lose his nerve, he added: Not the hotel tonight. Come home.
He pressed send. And then he sat in his car under TD Garden with his heart going like a breakaway, staring at three little dots that appeared, and disappeared, and appeared again.