Chapter 3: Penalty Box
Shane did not say anything for so long that Ilya started counting.
He got to forty-one. That was a long time, lying naked in a dark bedroom having just said the biggest thing you'd ever said to anyone, and he spent every one of those forty-one seconds watching Shane's face in the city light and trying to read it. He couldn't. For once he couldn't. Shane had gone perfectly blank, the media face, the one he used on the podium after a loss, the one Ilya had spent six years learning how to get under.
Then Shane sat up, swung his legs off the side of the bed, and put his face in his hands.
"Okay," Ilya said to his back. "Okay. That is fine. That is a reaction."
"Ilya."
"You don't have to say anything. I am not asking you for anything. I just wanted to tell you before the press does. That's all." He was talking too fast. He couldn't stop. "It's a good team. They need a captain. It's a good offer. Is not because of you."
Shane turned and looked at him over his shoulder.
"Is a little because of you," Ilya admitted.
"Ilya, the media is going to lose its mind."
"I know."
"Rozanov leaves Boston. Rozanov goes to Canada, to a team two hours from mine. They'll talk about it for months. They'll ask me about it every single day."
"I know, Shane."
"They'll put us on the same highway," Shane said, and his voice cracked, badly, right down the middle, and Ilya realised with a jolt that Shane's eyes were wet. "Two hours and ten minutes. Ilya. In good traffic. I could drive that after practice. I could drive that on a Tuesday."
Ilya sat up very slowly.
"Yes," he said. "That is sort of the idea."
Shane laughed. It came out wet and wrecked and completely unlike him, and he scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand, furious, the way he got furious at a missed open net. "You can't just say that. You can't just text me your address and then fuck me in your bed and then tell me you're moving to Ottawa. You can't do all of that in one night. I have a game on Thursday."
"I had to do it in one night. Otherwise I would lose my nerve."
"You don't have nerve. You've never had nerve. You've never asked me for anything in six years."
"I know," Ilya said. "That's why."
He reached out and put his hand on the back of Shane's neck, warm, and Shane leaned back into it like he'd been waiting.
"Six years," Ilya said quietly. "I never ask for anything. Not to stay. Not to call. Not for breakfast. I was the easy one. You had enough to be scared of. Your face is on every cereal box in Canada. I thought, okay, Shane is scared, I will not be one more thing to be scared of. I will just be the hotel room." He stroked his thumb along the short hair at Shane's nape. "But I am tired, Shane. I am tired of hotel rooms. I want to see you eat breakfast. I want to know what you look like when it's light out. I want to fall asleep and wake up and you are still there. I'm not asking you to tell anyone. I'm not asking for the world. I'm asking for two hours and ten minutes."
Shane was looking at him with an expression Ilya had never seen. Raw. Totally unguarded. Like that clip of him in the All-Star tunnel that had made all those idiots on the internet lose their minds two years ago, except he wasn't looking at Ilya's back now. He was looking straight at him.
"I'm in love with you," Shane said.
The room went very quiet.
"I've been in love with you for... I don't even know. I don't know when it started. Raleigh, maybe. The gas station." Shane laughed again, helpless. "It doesn't matter. I've been in love with you for years and I never said it because if I said it then I'd have to do something about it, and I didn't know how. I still don't know how. But I don't want to be the hotel room either, Ilya. I've never wanted that. I just thought it was all I was allowed."
Ilya didn't remember moving. One second he was sitting on the far side of the bed, and the next he had Shane flat on his back in the sheets and was kissing him like he was trying to climb inside him, and Shane was laughing into his mouth and kissing him back and holding his face in both hands.
"Say it again," Ilya said against his lips.
"I'm in love with you."
"Again."
"I love you, Ilya. You idiot. You animal. I love you."
"I love you," Ilya said, and it came out in Russian first, because some things did, and then in English, and then in Russian again, into Shane's throat, into his collarbone, into the freckles on his shoulder. "I love you. I love you. I loved you in the penalty box. I loved you when I slashed you."
"You can't slash people you love."
"I slash only people I love."
The second time was slow.
They had all night. That was the thing Ilya kept coming back to, kissing his way down Shane's body by the light of the city. They had all night, and the morning too, and nobody was going anywhere. He took his time. He wanted to learn this new Shane, the one who said I love you out loud and didn't hide his face, the one who was stretched out across Ilya's sheets with his arms flung over his head and his eyes half closed, letting himself be looked at.
"You're staring," Shane murmured.
"I'm allowed. I live here."
He opened him up slowly with his fingers until Shane was rocking down onto them, needy and wordless, and then Shane surprised him. He pushed Ilya onto his back and climbed on top of him, flushed and determined, the same face he wore taking a faceoff.
"My turn," he said.
He sank down onto Ilya with his hands braced on Ilya's chest and his head falling back, slow, so slow, until Ilya was all the way inside him and both of them were breathing in shaky gasps. Then Shane started to move. He rode him the way he played, Ilya thought dizzily, focused and precise and relentless, finding exactly the angle that made his breath catch and staying right there, rolling his hips in a rhythm that had Ilya gripping the sheets.
"Look at you," Ilya said. His voice came out wrecked. "Look at you, Hollander."
"Look at you," Shane said, and leaned down and kissed him, sloppy and sweet, without breaking rhythm.
Ilya sat up to meet him. He wrapped his arms around Shane's back and held him close, chest to chest, and they moved together like that, rocking, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other's air. It was slow and deep and unbearably tender. Shane's hands were in his hair. Ilya's were spread across Shane's back, feeling every muscle shift. Neither of them looked away. Neither of them wanted to.
"I'm going to drive to Ottawa," Shane panted against his mouth, "every Tuesday."
"Yes."
"And you're going to come to the cottage. This summer. The whole summer."
Ilya's breath hitched. Shane's cottage. The lake. The place Shane had talked about in hotel rooms at three in the morning like it was the only place in the world he could breathe.
"Yes," Ilya said. "Yes."
"And you're going to make me breakfast."
"I can't cook."
"Then I'll make you breakfast," Shane said, and then he couldn't talk anymore, because Ilya had wrapped a hand around him and was stroking him in time with their rhythm, and Shane was falling apart in his arms with a sound like a sob. Ilya held him through it. He held him so tight. He came a moment later, buried deep, Shane's name breaking in his mouth, and they stayed wrapped around each other long after, shaking, holding on.
Ilya woke up to light.
Real light, grey and pale, the early-morning kind, coming in through the windows over the harbour. He lay there a long time with his eyes closed, afraid to open them. Afraid of the empty pillow.
Then he heard it. A clatter from the kitchen. A muttered curse. Something sizzling.
He got up and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and padded out barefoot, and stopped in the doorway.
Shane Hollander was standing in his kitchen in yesterday's boxers and Ilya's grey Raiders hoodie, two sizes too big for him, sleeves shoved up to his elbows. His hair was a catastrophe. He was frowning at a frying pan with the same intensity he gave a power play. On the counter: a carton of eggs, a sad bunch of spinach, a loaf of bread, and the letter from Ottawa, which Shane had moved carefully out of the way of the eggs and squared neatly against the edge of the counter like he'd been reading it.
He looked up and saw Ilya and turned bright red from the ears in.
"You don't have any salt," he said accusingly.
"You don't eat salt."
"You don't have any salt either. Who doesn't have salt?" He gestured at the pan with the spatula. "It's going to taste like a hospital."
Ilya leaned in the doorway and looked at him. Shane Hollander, in his kitchen, in daylight, burning eggs. Six years. A hundred hotel rooms. Two countries. And this, finally, was the thing he'd wanted all along.
"Hollander," he said.
"What?"
"Good morning."
Shane's face did something soft and helpless and enormous. "Good morning," he said.
On the counter, Shane's phone buzzed. They both looked at it. The screen lit up with a name: Mom. Then a preview: Saw the game!! That Rozanov is such a brute, honey, are you okay? Call me when you're up. Love you xx
Shane looked at the phone for a long moment. Then he looked at Ilya, standing in the doorway of his kitchen in the morning light. He wiped his hands on the hoodie, and picked up the phone, and took a breath like a man stepping onto the ice for overtime.
"I think," he said slowly, "I'm going to call her back."