Work Text:
Nashville, January 2011
ILYA
The NHL All-Star Game was, in Ilya Rozanov's professional opinion, the most beautiful scam in professional sports.
No hitting. No consequences. Weekend of skills competitions and autograph sessions and parties thrown by equipment sponsors where everyone pretended to like each other. Game itself was joke — Team Europe versus Team North America, which commentators weren't even pretending was anything but marketing ploy to put Ilya and Shane Hollander on opposite sides of ice. League had all but printed money off their rivalry, and Ilya didn't mind because alternative was being ignored, and being ignored was worse than anything.
But Nashville was loud and bright and warm for January, and the Bridgestone Arena crowd didn't care that none of it counted. Twenty thousand people screaming because Ilya Rozanov could fire puck at 108 miles per hour. He could work with that.
He was nineteen years old. He'd been in North America for year and half. He still couldn't order coffee without feeling like he was solving puzzle — large, no, grande, no, that's the other place — and his English curled around certain words like drunk man navigating staircase. But on ice he didn't need English. On ice he was fluent in only language that mattered.
Joint press conference had been that morning. Ilya and Shane, side by side at table draped in NHL branding, fielding questions about their "historic rivalry" as if they hadn't — as if six months ago in Toronto they hadn't —
Reporter had asked long question. Something about Ilya's promise to score fifty goals by end of February and whether he felt pressure of his own prediction with Shane currently leading him 31 to 28. Question had been fast and full of clauses and Ilya's brain had snagged on the syntax like shirt caught on nail. He'd felt heat rising in his face, the familiar humiliation of not being fast enough in this borrowed language, and then Shane had —
Shane had tapped his foot under the table. Gently. Once. And then answered question for him, redirecting it smoothly, giving Ilya time to recover.
Ilya hadn't known what to do with that. He still didn't.
Now it was evening. Skills competition was tomorrow. Tonight was unofficial night off — the night when players went out, got drunk, pretended to be normal twenty-something-year-olds instead of professional athletes whose bodies were insured for millions. Group was forming in hotel lobby. Ilya could see them from elevator bank: Hedman, couple of Finnish guys from his team, some North Americans. Toews was there, easy to spot because he carried himself like man who was always aware of being watched.
And Shane Hollander was there, standing slightly apart from the group, looking at his phone. Black hair, dark eyes, navy peacoat buttoned to throat like he was attending funeral rather than going to bar. Overhead light caught freckles scattered across his nose and cheekbones, and Ilya's stomach did something violent and involuntary.
Six months. It had been six months since Toronto. Since the CCM endorsement shoot where Ilya had asked to have Shane included — had specifically requested Shane, like idiot, like man walking into traffic on purpose — and they'd ended up in locker room together and then shower together and then Shane's hotel room, 1410, where everything had happened too fast and too slow at same time. Ilya remembered room number the way he remembered his mother's birthday: automatically, without trying, fact permanently etched into architecture of his brain.
Afterward, Ilya had gotten dressed while Shane sat on bed with his arms crossed, not looking at him. Ilya had wanted to say something — anything — but his English failed him in moments that mattered most, and what came out was "See you on the ice, Hollander," which was stupidest thing he'd ever said and he'd said lot of stupid things. He'd closed door behind him and walked to elevator and pressed button and stood there in hallway of the Fairmont with his heart hammering against his ribs, waiting for door to open again behind him.
It didn't.
They hadn't spoken since. Ilya didn't have Shane's number. Shane didn't have his. There was no way to reach each other except through machinery of professional hockey — games, events, press conferences — and machinery had kept them apart for six months while Ilya lay in his Back Bay apartment at night trying to forget the sound Shane had made when Ilya's hands found his hips.
He crossed lobby. Shane looked up from his phone. Something flickered across his face — quick, involuntary, immediately suppressed. Ilya had seen it before, in room 1410, in half-second before Shane had grabbed his shirt and pulled him in. Recognition. Want. Terror.
"Hollander," Ilya said. "You are coming out?"
Shane's jaw tightened. "Hayden's making me."
"Hayden." Ilya glanced at the blond guy near revolving door who was talking too loudly and gesturing with both hands. Shane's teammate with the Voyageurs, also selected for Team North America. He wasn't tall — maybe five-nine — but he had energy of man twice his size. "The loud one?"
"That's him."
"He seems fun."
"He's exhausting."
"You think everyone is exhausting."
"Not everyone."
Ilya waited for qualifier. It didn't come. Shane looked back at his phone. Tips of his ears were red.
---
SHANE
Shane should not have come downstairs.
Shane should have stayed in his hotel room, eaten the grilled chicken and steamed broccoli he'd ordered from room service, foam-rolled his hip flexors, reviewed the shot accuracy drill in his head six or seven times, and been asleep by ten-thirty. That was the plan. The plan was good. The plan kept him functional, kept him sharp, kept him sealed inside the machine he'd been building since he was fourteen years old.
The plan did not account for Ilya Rozanov standing three feet away smelling like expensive cologne and looking at Shane with those hazel eyes like he was something worth looking at.
But Hayden Pike had that look he got when he'd decided something was happening and Shane's preferences were irrelevant. Hayden was five-nine and twenty-two and had the social energy of a man who didn't know what an inside voice was.
"It's Nashville, Hollander. You can't come to Nashville and not go to Broadway."
"I've been to Nashville."
"For what, a school field trip?"
"There's nothing wrong with —"
"You're going." Hayden clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to rock him. "Toews is going. If the captain of the Blackhawks can have a beer, you can have a beer."
"I don't drink during the —"
"Ginger ale, then. Whatever. You're still going."
"Where is group going?" Ilya asked from somewhere behind Shane, and the sound of his voice so close made the hair on the back of Shane's neck stand up.
"Lower Broadway. Is the famous street, yes? With the music."
"Honky-tonks," Hayden supplied, grinning.
"Honky-tonks." Ilya repeated it carefully, like he was tasting the word. His accent turned it into something almost elegant. "You have been?" He was looking at Shane, not Hayden.
"No," Shane said.
"Then you should come."
"I am coming. Hayden's making me."
"Good. Listen to your friend Hayden."
They stood in silence. Somewhere across the lobby, Toews laughed. The elevator chimed. A woman in a Predators jersey walked past and did a double-take at Hedman, who was six-foot-six and impossible to miss.
"The press conference today," Shane said, before he could stop himself.
Ilya's expression shifted. Guarded. "What about it."
"The question about your fifty goals. When you —" When you couldn't keep up. When your face went red. When you looked like a kid who'd been called on in class and didn't know the answer. "I just — if that happens again, I can —"
"You can what? Save me?" Ilya's voice had an edge. "I don't need you to save me, Hollander."
"I wasn't trying to save you. I was trying to —"
"You think because I don't speak perfect English, I am — how you say — tupoy—"
"That's not what I —"
"I spoke three languages before I was ten. How many do you speak?"
"Two. And a half."
Ilya blinked. "Half?"
"I'm learning Japanese. My mother's been teaching me. It's slow."
Something in Ilya's face loosened. Not a smile, exactly, but the architecture of a smile — the softening around the eyes, the slight easing of the jaw. "Your mother is Japanese."
"Yeah."
"And your father?"
"Canadian. Very Canadian. He reads the New Yorker."
"What is New Yorker?"
"It's a magazine. It's — honestly, it's pretty boring."
"Then he sounds boring." Ilya said it lightly, but his eyes were steady on Shane's face. "Maybe this is where you get it. Genetic."
"Get what?"
"Being boring. You are most boring man in hockey, Hollander. Everyone knows this."
Shane's jaw tightened. He could feel the heat in his cheeks. "Thanks."
"Is not insult. Some people like boring. Boring is... safe."
The word landed like a stone in water. Safe. The one thing Shane had built his entire life around being: safe. Controlled. Predictable. The machine humming along, no surprises, no disruptions, no moments in hotel rooms with Russian hockey players that made him feel like the floor was dissolving under his feet.
"We should go," Shane said. "The group is leaving."
---
ILYA
Lower Broadway hit Ilya like walking into mouth of some enormous, neon-lit animal. Street was packed — tourists, bachelorette parties in matching pink cowboy hats, college kids clutching plastic cups of frozen drinks the color of antifreeze. Live music bled out of every doorway, overlapping currents of pedal steel and bass drum and fiddle, and buildings competed to be loudest: TOOTSIE'S. HONKY TONK CENTRAL. THE STAGE. Each one throbbing with light and noise.
Ilya loved it immediately. It was opposite of everything in his life that was quiet and empty and controlled.
Their group was scattered along sidewalk — eight or nine guys, loose, half of them already heading toward bar called Legends Corner. Ilya hung back. Shane was few paces behind the group, hands in his peacoat pockets, looking at Lower Broadway with expression that suggested he'd been asked to eat something he found morally objectionable.
"You hate it," Ilya observed.
"It's loud."
"Yes. This is the point."
"I can feel the bass in my teeth."
"Also good. Means you are alive." Ilya gestured at door to Legends Corner, where Hedman was already disappearing inside. "Come. I buy you ginger ale."
"How do you know I drink ginger ale?"
Because at the awards ceremony in Las Vegas last year, you walked up to bar and ordered ginger ale while everyone else was drinking champagne, and I watched you from across the room and memorized it because I was already memorizing everything about you, because I am — kak eto skazat' — completely fucked.
"Lucky guess," Ilya said. "Is most boring soft drink."
Legends Corner was small and dark and deafening. Country band was playing something fast and twangy on stage the size of dining table. Walls were covered in signed photos of musicians Ilya didn't recognize. Bar was three deep.
Ilya wedged himself between Hedman and Toews at high-top table near the back and ordered bourbon — Maker's Mark, neat, because hotel bartender had told him this was what you drank in Tennessee. It burned in satisfying way, like swallowing something that was fighting back.
Shane materialized at the table with ginger ale. Of course. Ilya watched him — the careful way he held glass, polite smile he offered when Hayden Pike said something too loud, the way his dark eyes moved around room cataloguing exits and threats. Shane Hollander experienced bars the way normal people experienced turbulence: as something to be endured, survived, gotten through.
Band shifted to slower song. Something about truck and river and girl, which seemed to be only three subjects American country music acknowledged. Hedman was telling story about fishing in Sweden. Toews was on his phone. Hayden Pike had located jukebox and was lobbying aggressively for "Friends in Low Places" despite live band playing six feet away.
And Shane was at edge of the table, alone, peeling label off his ginger ale bottle with his thumbnail. Gesture was so private, so unconsciously revealing — Shane Hollander, who controlled every molecule of his public existence, picking at bottle label like nervous teenager — that Ilya felt something crack open in his chest.
He finished his second bourbon and walked over. Slid onto stool next to Shane.
"You look like man at his own funeral," Ilya said.
"I'm fine."
"Very convincing. Should be actor." Ilya leaned elbow on the table. "You have been drinking that same ginger ale for thirty minutes."
"I'm pacing myself."
"You cannot pace ginger ale. There is nothing to pace."
The corners of Shane's lips quivered. He was going to smile but didn't. Ilya caught edge of it before Shane killed it. "Maybe I just don't want to drink."
"Maybe. Or maybe you are afraid of what happens when you stop controlling everything."
Shane's eyes snapped to his. Sharp. Warning.
Ilya held his gaze. "I am not trying to fight you, Hollander. I am trying to buy you drink."
"I don't —"
"One drink. Real drink. Not sad colored water. Then you can go back to hotel room and eat your chicken and do your stretching and be in bed by —" Ilya checked imaginary watch. "Nine-thirty?"
"Ten-thirty."
"You are admitting this? Out loud?"
"It's not a secret. Sleep and recovery are the foundation of —"
"Of being most boring man in professional sports. Yes. I know speech." Ilya stood. "One drink. Then I leave you alone."
He went to bar and ordered two bourbon and gingers, because bourbon was good and ginger ale would make it familiar territory for Shane. When he came back, he set one in front of Shane and waited.
Shane looked at glass. Looked at Ilya. Picked it up and took careful sip.
"Good?" Ilya asked.
"It's fine."
"You are not capable of enthusiasm. About anything."
"That's not true."
"Name one thing you get excited about."
Shane was quiet for moment. Band was playing something slow. "Skating," he said finally. "I like skating."
"Everyone likes skating. We are hockey players."
"Not like that. I mean — skating for no reason. On the canal in Ottawa with my parents. When I was a kid." Shane took another sip. "Before it was a job."
Ilya hadn't expected that. He'd expected Shane to say something about shot accuracy or nutritional science or importance of hip flexor maintenance. Instead Shane had given him something small and real and private, and Ilya didn't know where to put it.
"Tell me," Ilya said.
---
SHANE
He shouldn't have been telling Ilya Rozanov about the Rideau Canal.
He shouldn't have been drinking bourbon in a Nashville honky-tonk. He shouldn't have been sitting close enough to feel the heat coming off Ilya's shoulder. He shouldn't have been doing any of this, and yet the bourbon had softened something behind his sternum, and the bar was loud enough to create a pocket of privacy around their conversation, and Ilya was listening.
Not performing. Not chirping. Listening, with those hazel eyes focused on Shane's face, his body angled toward Shane on the stool like Shane was the only source of light in the room.
Shane told him about skating. About the Rideau Canal in winter, the longest skating rink in the world, and how his parents had taken him every Saturday from the time he could walk. His father steady and patient on the ice, his mother fast and fearless — Yuna Hollander, five-foot-four, who skated like she was furious at the ice for existing and wanted it to know. The string lights strung between the bare trees. The smell of BeaverTails from the vendor carts. His first pair of skates, which had been his mother's, two sizes too big, stuffed with newspaper in the toes.
He told Ilya about onigiri. About standing on a step stool in his mother's kitchen while she shaped rice with wet hands, showing him how to press firmly but not too hard — like you're holding something alive, Shane-chan — and how he'd eaten them on the bench at peewee games while the other kids had pizza pockets.
"Your mother sounds —" Ilya paused. Searched for the word. "Svirepaya. How you say. Fierce."
"She is. She manages my brand deals. She's the reason I have the CCM contract."
"The CCM contract." Ilya's mouth twitched. "Yes. That worked out well for you."
The air between them changed. Toronto. The locker room. The shower. Room 1410. Neither of them said it.
"Your parents," Shane said carefully, steering away from the cliff. "You don't talk about them. In interviews."
Ilya's hand tightened on his glass. Barely perceptible, but Shane saw it. Shane saw everything about Ilya Rozanov and he hated that he couldn't stop.
"No," Ilya said. "I don't."
"You don't have to —"
"My mother is dead." He said it flatly, the way you'd report the weather. "Since I was twelve. Pills. I found her."
The noise of the bar receded. Shane sat very still.
"My father has — what is word." Ilya tapped his temple. "His brain is — he forgets. Everything. He is in care place in Moscow. Facility. Most days he doesn't know my name."
"Ilya —"
"And my brother Alexei calls when he needs money. This is only time he calls." Ilya drained rest of his drink. Set glass down with click. "So. I don't talk about them in interviews."
Shane's throat ached. He wanted to say something — anything — that would be adequate to what Ilya had just given him, but there was nothing adequate. No words in any of his two and a half languages that could hold the weight of my mother killed herself and I found her body when I was twelve.
"I'm sorry," Shane said.
"Is long time ago."
"That doesn't make it —"
"Hollander." Ilya's voice was quiet. "Don't be nice to me. I don't know what to do when you are nice."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Be boring. Tell me more about rice things."
"Onigiri."
"Yes. Tell me about that."
---
ILYA
They were on their third drink when Ilya decided they should leave.
Not leave-leave. Not go back to hotel, where their rooms were on same floor and temptation to knock on Shane's door would become physical force that Ilya was not confident he could resist. Just — leave this bar. Go somewhere quieter, where he could hear Shane's voice without leaning in so close he could count freckles on Shane's nose.
He'd counted eleven so far. This was problem.
"I know another place," Ilya said. "Quieter."
"How do you know a quiet bar in Nashville?"
"I asked hotel bartender. I am friendly person. I talk to people. You should try it."
"I talk to people."
"You talk at people. In press conferences. With your media voice." Ilya stood and put on his jacket. "Come. You will like this place. It is boring."
Bar was called the Patterson House. Side street off Broadway, no sign, no neon. Inside: dark leather booths, low lighting, cocktail menu printed on heavy card stock. Opposite of Legends Corner in every way.
"See?" Ilya said, sliding into booth near the back. "Perfect for you."
"I appreciate the condescension."
"Always."
Shane ordered bourbon and ginger without hesitation this time, and something about that — the lack of deliberation, the ease of it — made Ilya's chest do something complicated. Shane Hollander, two drinks in, ordering third like it was nothing. Like Ilya's presence was either making him reckless or just tired enough to stop policing himself for one night.
For a while, neither of them spoke. Silence wasn't awkward. It was just... quiet. Two nineteen-year-old men in dark booth in Nashville, not performing for anyone.
"Can I ask you something?" Shane said.
"You can ask."
"Toronto. The CCM shoot. You asked for me. To be included."
Ilya felt his pulse tick upward. "Yes."
"Why?"
Because I had been thinking about you every day for six months. Because after gym at draft, when we raced on bikes and shared water on floor and you looked at me with those dark eyes, I went back to my room and tried to forget by having sex with — skol'ko? — many women, and none of them were you. Because I am nineteen years old and terrified and you are only person in this country who makes me feel less alone.
"Because is good for brand," Ilya said. "The rivalry. Good marketing."
Shane studied him. "That's not why."
"Is what I am telling you."
"It's not the truth, though."
Ilya picked up his drink. Set it down. Picked it up again. "No," he admitted. "Is not."
Candle between them was guttering, flame leaning sideways in some invisible draft. Shane's face was half in shadow. His tie was pulled loose, collar open at the throat, and Ilya could see the notch of his collarbone and beginning of the freckles that he knew from Toronto extended down across Shane's shoulders like map of something only Ilya had been allowed to read.
"We should probably go," Shane said, though he didn't move.
"Yes," Ilya said, though he didn't move either.
"Stop looking at me like that," Shane said quietly.
"Like what?"
"Like —" Shane's hand was on the table between them, next to his glass, and Ilya watched his fingers curl inward, watched tendons shift under skin. "Like you're remembering something."
"I am remembering something."
"Don't."
"I am remembering your hotel room. 1410. I am remembering sound you made when I —"
"Rozanov."
"— when I put my mouth on your neck. Right here." Ilya reached across the table. He didn't think about it. Hand moved on its own, his thumb brushing the skin just below Shane's jaw, where his pulse was hammering so hard Ilya could feel it through his fingertip. Shane's skin was hot. Impossibly hot. Like blood underneath was trying to get to the surface, trying to get to Ilya's hand.
Shane's breath caught. His eyes went dark — pupils blown, almost no brown left, just black. His whole body went very still, the way it did right before faceoff — gathered, coiled, waiting for permission to move.
"We are in public," Shane whispered.
"Booth is dark. No one is watching."
"Someone is always watching."
"Not here. Not tonight." Ilya's thumb was still on Shane's pulse point. He could feel it racing. "You are most controlled person I have ever met. You control everything. Your body, your diet, your sleep, your — kak eto — your image. But your heart is going very fast right now, Hollander."
"Because I'm angry."
"You are not angry."
"I'm —"
Ilya leaned across the table and kissed him.
It wasn't like Toronto. Toronto had been frantic — hands grabbing, teeth knocking, both of them trying to get as much of each other as possible before panic set in. This was slow. Ilya's hand slid from Shane's jaw to back of his neck, fingers threading into that black hair, and Shane made sound — quiet, involuntary, almost pained — and his hand came up and gripped front of Ilya's shirt and pulled.
Kiss deepened. Shane tasted like bourbon and ginger and underneath that something clean, something that was just him, and Ilya's brain went white and empty the way it only did on ice, in the moment before perfect shot, when whole world narrowed to single point of focus. Shane's mouth opened under his. Shane's fingers tightened in his shirt. Shane kissed him back like he was furious about it, like he wanted to punish Ilya for making him want this, and Ilya felt it everywhere — in his chest, in his stomach, in base of his spine.
"Zaika," Ilya murmured against Shane's mouth. Word slipped out in Russian, something his mother used to call him, something he'd never called anyone — little rabbit, small soft scared thing — and Shane made another sound, low in his throat, and Ilya's hand tightened in his hair and —
Somewhere in the bar, glass broke. Someone laughed.
Shane wrenched backward like he'd been electrocuted.
They stared at each other across small table. Shane's lips were wet. His hair was messed where Ilya's hand had been. His chest was heaving, and his eyes were wild — not with desire, or not only with desire, but with particular species of terror that belonged to man who had just done something he couldn't undo.
"I —" Shane started.
"Don't," Ilya said. His voice came out rough. Wrecked. "Don't say you are sorry. Don't say is mistake."
"We're in public, Roz. Anyone could have —"
"No one saw."
"You don't know that."
"I know you kissed me back."
Shane's jaw clenched. He wiped his mouth with back of his hand — gesture that should have been dismissive but instead looked like he was trying to keep feeling of Ilya's lips from escaping. His hand was shaking.
"We need to leave," Shane said. "Now. Separately."
"Hollander —"
"Separately."
He was already standing, pulling on his jacket, not looking at Ilya. His hands were clumsy with buttons. His neck was flushed red above his collar.
Ilya watched him. He wanted to reach for him again. Wanted to pull Shane back into booth and kiss him until neither of them could remember why they were supposed to be afraid. But Shane's face had that locked-down expression — walls rebuilt, machine rebooting — and Ilya knew that pushing now would break something that might not heal.
"Okay," Ilya said. "Separately."
Shane left without looking back. Door swung shut behind him, and cold January air rushed in for moment before warmth of the bar swallowed it, and Ilya sat alone in booth with two empty glasses and guttering candle and the taste of Shane Hollander's mouth on his lips.
He pressed his fingers to his own mouth. Closed his eyes.
Blyad'.
He waited five minutes. Paid the tab. Put on his jacket. Walked out onto sidewalk.
Hollander was nowhere. Gone. The responsible thing. The boring thing. The thing that kept machine running and secret buried and both of them safe inside their separate, immaculate, miserable lives.
Ilya turned left toward Broadway. Neon swallowed him.
---
SHANE
Shane didn't go back to the hotel.
He should have. Every instinct in his body — the disciplined ones, the ones he'd spent five years cultivating, the ones that told him when to eat and when to sleep and when to stop feeling things — was screaming at him to go back, lock the door, put distance between himself and what had just happened.
But his legs carried him the wrong direction. Away from the hotel, away from Broadway, along side streets where the music was muffled and the neon was dim and the January air was cool against his flushed skin. He walked fast, hands jammed in his pockets, trying to outrun the ghost of Ilya's mouth on his.
He couldn't.
The word Ilya had murmured — Russian, soft, something that sounded like zaika — was lodged in Shane's brain like a splinter. He didn't know what it meant. He didn't need to know what it meant. The way Ilya had said it — low and broken and tender, against Shane's lips, with his fingers in Shane's hair — told him everything.
Shane stopped walking. He was on a side street somewhere south of Broadway. Empty. Quiet except for the distant throb of music and the sound of his own breathing, which was too fast, too shallow, the breathing of someone who was not okay.
He pressed his palms against his eyes. Colors bloomed in the dark behind his eyelids.
You kissed him back. You kissed him back and you liked it and you would have kept going if that glass hadn't broken. You would have let him —
Shane dropped his hands. Started walking again. He circled three blocks, four, came back toward Broadway from the east end, where the noise picked up gradually like wading into surf.
He saw Ilya before Ilya saw him.
Ilya was on the sidewalk near the intersection of Broadway and 4th, standing under a streetlight, looking at his phone. His suit jacket was unbuttoned. His hair — those ridiculous brown curls — was going in six directions. He looked, even from forty feet away, like the most dangerous person Shane had ever met. Not because of his size, not because of the way he played hockey, but because of the way Shane's entire body reoriented toward him like a compass finding north.
Shane should have turned around. Should have taken another street, circled the block, slipped back to the hotel unseen. Instead he kept walking, because apparently every decision he'd made tonight was designed to destroy him.
Then he heard the voices.
"Yo! Yo, Rozanov! Hey!"
Four guys. Late twenties, big, drunk, dressed in jeans and untucked button-downs that strained across their guts. One was wearing a Predators jersey over flannel. They'd spotted Ilya from across the street and were crossing toward him with the loud, lumbering confidence of men who'd been drinking since five o'clock.
"Holy shit, it is you!" Predators jersey shoved his nearest friend. "Told you, man. That's Rozanov. From the All-Star Game."
"Yes," Ilya said, with his camera smile. "Is me. Enjoy Nashville."
"Dude, my buddy's a huge Bears fan. Huge. He's got your jersey."
"Thank you. Is very kind." Ilya pocketed his phone. He was still smiling but Shane could see the shift — shoulders angling, weight settling, the almost imperceptible recalibration of a man who knew how to handle his body in unpredictable situations.
"You out by yourself? Where's your team?"
"Just walking. Long day."
"Right, right." Second guy — taller, goatee, drunker than the first — stepped forward into Ilya's space. "Hey, is it true you and Hollander hate each other? Like, for real?"
"Is just hockey. Off ice, is —"
"Because my girlfriend is obsessed with that guy." Goatee said obsessed like the word had wronged him personally. "Got his poster up. Says he's hottest guy in hockey. I told her, babe, a guy that pretty, takes care of himself like that —"
Shane's feet were moving before his brain caught up. He was across the street and into the pool of streetlight and saying, in his media voice, "Hey, guys, thanks for being fans. We've got an early morning, so —"
"Holy shit." Predators jersey lit up. "It is Hollander. I told you! They're hanging out!"
"I thought you guys hated each other," goatee said, and his gaze moved between them — Shane, Ilya, Shane again — with something sour and speculative. "Funny how you just show up. Like you were together."
"Just walking," Shane said. "Same neighborhood. Have a good night."
"Nah, hold on, hold on." Goatee was grinning now, but it was the kind of grin that had teeth. "I was just telling your buddy here about my girlfriend. She loves you, Hollander. Thinks you're so pretty." The word was weapon the way he used it. "I told her, probably doesn't even like girls, right? No offense. You know how it is. A guy that pretty, who takes care of himself like that, and now you two are out together —"
"Have a good night," Shane said again, harder, and turned.
"— people are gonna talk, boys —"
Ilya turned around.
Shane felt it before he saw it — the air pressure change, the way Ilya's posture went from controlled to something else entirely. Shoulders squared. Chin up. Expression cold and flat, the way it went on ice right before he dropped his gloves.
"What you say?" Ilya asked. Very quiet. His English was gone — not the words but the effort, the careful construction, replaced by something raw and direct and dangerous.
"Easy, bro, I'm just —"
"Say again. To my face."
"Roz." Shane reached for his arm.
Goatee stepped forward. Smirking. Emboldened by his friends. "Hey, your boyfriend's trying to talk to you, Rozanov." He drew out the name, mocking the syllables, and Ilya stepped into his space — all six-foot-three of him, every inch suddenly present and dangerous.
Guy shoved Ilya. Two hands, flat against his chest. Hard.
Ilya hit the wall of the building. Something flickered across his face — not pain, not anger, but something older and darker, expression of man who'd been shoved before, who knew what it meant, who'd grown up in country where the thing they were being accused of could get you killed.
"Ne trogai menya," Ilya said, low and lethal. Don't touch me.
Then Shane was between them.
He didn't decide it. One second he was reaching for Ilya's arm and the next he was in front of him, facing the goatee guy, and someone — one of the friends — grabbed back of Shane's jacket and yanked, and Shane's elbow connected with something that turned out to be a nose, and there was shouting, and then Ilya was past him, and a body hit parked car with a sound like dropped refrigerator.
It lasted maybe twenty seconds. Long enough for Ilya to put the goatee guy on sidewalk with one precise, devastating hit — the kind that ended fights on ice, no wind-up, just physics — and for Shane to take punch to right side of his head that made his vision go white and sparking, and for the first guy to haul his friends backward yelling stop, stop, they're fucking hockey players, stop.
Four men retreated down the block. One was bleeding from the nose Shane's elbow had found. Goatee was limping. Threats were shouted across widening distance. Nothing came of them. Nashville continued around them like river around rock.
Shane stood on the sidewalk, breathing hard. His right ear was ringing. His jacket was torn at the shoulder seam. His knuckles hurt in a way that felt real and good and clarifying, and some distant part of his brain was thinking: you just got in a fistfight on Broadway because someone called you and Ilya Rozanov a couple, and ten minutes ago you were kissing him in a booth, and you have lost control of your entire life.
Ilya was leaning against building, chest heaving, cut on his lower lip bleeding freely down his chin. His shirt was untucked. One of his cufflinks was gone. He looked at Shane with those hazel eyes blown wide with adrenaline.
"You hit him," Ilya said.
"He grabbed me. It was reflexive."
"You hit man. In street fight. You. Shane Hollander."
"Don't make it a —"
"Most boring man in hockey just punched stranger on Broadway." Ilya wiped his lip with back of his hand. Looked at blood. Looked at Shane. Started laughing. "Nikto ne poverit. Nobody will ever believe."
"Nobody is ever going to know."
"I will know. Will remember this forever."
"Your lip is bleeding."
"Yes. Is excellent. I feel very alive." He pressed hand to cut again. "You feel alive, Hollander?"
Shane's hands were shaking. His ear was ringing. His heart was slamming so hard he could feel it in his fingertips. He'd been kissed and punched within same hour. His jacket was torn. His knuckles were bleeding. He felt terrified. He felt electric. He felt like the machine he'd spent five years building had thrown rod and he was standing in wreckage watching it burn and he didn't want to rebuild it.
"Yeah," he said. "I feel alive."
---
ILYA
They walked to the river.
Neither of them discussed it. They just walked — away from Broadway, away from neon and noise, along the Cumberland River where it was dark and quiet and water moved black and slow beneath pedestrian bridge. Bridge was lit blue. Its reflection trembled on surface.
Ilya's lip had mostly stopped bleeding. Shane had given him napkin from his jacket pocket — because of course Shane Hollander carried napkins — and Ilya was holding it against cut while they walked. Shane's right ear was red and swelling. They looked like two guys who'd had either very good or very bad night.
Neither of them mentioned the kiss. It was there between them anyway — in the six inches of sidewalk they maintained between their shoulders, in the way they both kept hands in pockets, in the way Shane's breathing hadn't fully slowed, in the way Ilya could still feel phantom grip of Shane's fist in his shirt.
"Give me your phone," Ilya said.
Shane stopped walking. "What?"
"Your phone. I want to give you my number."
Bridge stretched ahead of them, empty, blue light making everything look like scene from movie neither of them had agreed to be in. Shane's face was unreadable.
"I don't think that's a good idea," Shane said.
"I think is very good idea. I think six months of not being able to talk to you is — plokho — is bad. Is worse than risk."
"If someone sees my phone —"
"So save under different name. Girl's name." Ilya held out his hand. "Give me your phone and give me your number, and I save you in mine under girl's name also, and no one will ever know."
Shane stood very still on bridge. Blue light caught freckles on his nose and scrapes on his knuckles and torn seam of his jacket shoulder, and Ilya thought: you don't look boring right now. You look like someone who has been kissed and punched in same hour and walked to river with man he is trying not to want and is losing.
Shane pulled his phone from pocket. Unlocked it. Handed it over.
Ilya typed his number in. For contact name, he thought for moment. Then typed: Lily.
He handed it back. Shane looked at screen.
"Lily," Shane said.
"From Ilya. Close enough. If someone sees, they just see girl's name." Ilya held out his own phone. "Now you."
Shane took Ilya's phone. His thumbs hesitated over keyboard. Then he typed his number and saved it. Handed it back.
Ilya looked at screen. Jane.
"Jane," he repeated.
"It rhymes," Shane said. "With Shane. Close enough."
Something about this — the two of them on blue-lit bridge, saving each other's numbers under women's names so the world wouldn't see them — was so absurd and so sad and so them that Ilya felt his throat close. They were nineteen years old. They were two of best hockey players on planet. And they were hiding from everyone, including themselves, behind girl named Lily and girl named Jane.
"Okay," Ilya said. "Khorosho. Good."
"Good."
They walked to middle of the bridge. Leaned against railing, side by side. City was behind them. River was below, dark and moving. Blue light held them both.
"Can I tell you something?" Ilya said.
"You've been telling me things all night."
"One more."
Shane's hands were resting on railing. His knuckles were scraped from fight, skin split over middle finger. He looked young in this light. He looked exactly nineteen.
"When my mother died," Ilya said, "I stopped sleeping. For months. I lie in bed and my brain is like — like television that won't turn off. Every channel is something bad. I was twelve. I can't tell anyone, because my father says we don't talk about it. We say she was sick. We say was her heart." He paused. "I found her on kitchen floor. She was cold and stiff."
Shane was very still beside him.
"Eventually I start sleeping again. But television is still there. Some nights it turns on and I can't make it stop. I think —" Ilya's throat tightened. He gripped railing. "I think I will be like her. Someday. I think thing she had — the sadness — I think is in my blood. Nasledstvennoye. Inherited."
"Ilya —"
"In Toronto. After. You were sitting on bed and I was getting dressed and you didn't look at me. But earlier — before — you said 'are you okay?' and I made joke and you let it go. But you asked."
Shane's throat moved. His dark eyes were bright, nearly black in blue light, and his scraped-up hands were gripping railing hard enough that his arms were shaking.
"I notice things about you," Shane said. "For the record."
"What things?"
Shane looked at river. "You wear a gold cross under your jersey. You tuck it in before games and touch it once through the fabric. At the awards in Vegas, you ordered vodka for everyone else at the table but you drank whiskey. You switched when you thought no one was looking." He stopped. Swallowed. "And you laugh louder when you're uncomfortable. When the reporters crowd you, or when someone asks something too personal. You get bigger and louder and it's — it's camouflage."
Ilya stared at him. Ache in his chest had become something structural, load-bearing, like it was holding up rest of him.
"And I don't think you're going to be like her," Shane said quietly. "I don't — I don't know you well enough to promise that. We've been in the same room maybe five times. But you're —" His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. "You're the most alive person I've ever met, and I —" He cut himself off. His jaw worked.
"And you what?"
Shane didn't answer. He was gripping railing so hard his knuckles had gone white over the scrapes, staring at water with rigid focus of man who knew that if he turned to face Ilya he would say something he couldn't take back.
"You don't have to say it," Ilya said.
"Good. Because I'm not going to."
"I know."
Silence. River below. Blue light above. And the thing between them — unnamed, enormous, terrifying — taking up all the space on the bridge.
"What you called me," Shane said, very quietly. "In the bar. The Russian word."
Ilya's chest tightened. "Zaika."
"What does it mean?"
Ilya looked at river. If he looked at Shane right now he would do something irreversible. "Is — how you say. Term of — laskovoye. Like pet name. Like —" He searched for word that wouldn't crack him open. Couldn't find one. "Little rabbit."
Shane made a sound. Quiet. Almost nothing. But Ilya heard it — the breath that caught, the barely audible fracture in Shane Hollander's composure — and it was most devastating sound he'd ever heard.
They stood on bridge for long time after that. River moved below them, black and patient. Somewhere in the city siren wailed and faded. Blue light held them in its strange, cold tenderness, and Ilya thought: I am going to remember this for rest of my life. This bridge. This river. His hands on railing. The way he said "for the record" like he was filing evidence in case he already knew he was going to lose.
"I should go back," Shane said finally.
"Yes. Early morning. Skills competition."
"Right."
"You will be very serious about it. Practice your technique. Very disciplined. Very boring."
"Yes, yes, I get it," Shane muttered.
"Most boring man ever lived." The words came out before Ilya could shape them — the old chirp, the familiar weapon — but his voice caught on it, stripped of its usual mockery, and in silence that followed they both heard what it actually meant.
Shane pushed off railing. Took two steps toward end of bridge. Stopped.
"For what it's worth," he said, without turning around, "I don't think you're boring at all."
"I know. I am spectacular."
Shane laughed. Quiet, involuntary, surprised out of him. Then he walked away, back toward the lights of the city, his torn jacket pulling at the shoulder seam, and Ilya watched him go and pressed his fingers to his split lip and stayed on bridge until cold crept through his suit jacket and his fingers went numb.
---
SHANE
Back in his hotel room, Shane locked the door, leaned against it, and pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw colors.
His ear throbbed. His knuckles stung. His mouth tasted like bourbon and ginger and underneath that, faintly, Ilya — cigarette smoke and expensive cologne and the copper tang of blood from his split lip. Shane hadn't even noticed the blood until now. He touched his own lips and his fingertips came away with the faintest trace of red.
He'd kissed him. In a bar. In public. And it hadn't been quick or accidental or deniable. It had been slow and deep and Shane had pulled him closer, had fisted his hands in Ilya's shirt, had opened his mouth and let Ilya in and made a sound that he was going to hear on a loop for the rest of his life.
Zaika. Little rabbit. Ilya had called him little rabbit with his fingers in Shane's hair and his mouth on Shane's mouth and Shane had almost —
He stripped off his jacket. Showered. Stood under the water with his forehead against the tile and his hands braced on the wall and breathed.
He brushed his teeth. He foam-rolled his hip flexors, because the body required maintenance even when the mind was coming apart.
He got into bed. Turned off the light. Lay there in the dark, in a hotel room in Nashville, listening to his own breathing.
He picked up his phone. Opened the contact. Stared at the name Lily and thought about a gold cross tucked under a hockey jersey, about a mother who left her twelve-year-old son alone in the world, about a nineteen-year-old boy in a six-foot-three body who'd told Shane the worst thing that had ever happened to him on a blue-lit bridge and then asked for nothing in return.
He thought about Ilya's thumb on his pulse point. About Ilya's hand in his hair. About the way Ilya had said zaika like the word was something precious and fragile that he'd been carrying around for years waiting for someone to give it to.
He did not delete the number.
He put the phone on the nightstand. Closed his eyes. Opened them. Picked the phone up again.
He typed: Good night
He stared at it for thirty seconds. Deleted it. Put the phone down.
Picked it up. Typed: Your lip ok?
Stared at it. Deleted it.
Put the phone down. Pressed his face into the pillow. Breathed.
Picked up the phone one more time. Typed nothing. Just looked at the name — Lily — and let himself feel, for ten seconds, the full terrifying weight of what was happening to him.
Then he put the phone down and did not pick it up again.
He didn't sleep for a long time.
---
ILYA
Ilya didn't sleep.
He lay in his hotel room — 1221, just number on door, meaningless — and stared at ceiling and replayed entire night in his head. Honky-tonk. Bourbon. Canal story and the onigiri and Shane's face when Ilya told him about his mother. The booth. Shane's mouth. Shane's hands. Sound Shane made when Ilya kissed him, which Ilya was going to carry in his chest like second heartbeat for rest of his miserable, lonely, spectacular life. The fight. The bridge. Blue light and black water and Shane's voice saying I notice things about you.
He opened his phone. Found the contact. Jane. He stared at it and thought about Shane doing same thing right now, somewhere on same floor of this hotel, looking at contact called Lily and deciding whether or not to use it.
His phone buzzed. Ilya's heart stopped.
Not a text. Notification from Instagram. Some girl he'd hooked up with in October liking a photo. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
He put phone down. Picked it up. Put it down.
Yebat'.
Tomorrow was skills competition. Shane would win shot accuracy — Ilya already knew this, could feel it in his bones. Shane's accuracy was mechanical, inhuman, product of ten thousand hours of practice that bordered on religious devotion. Ilya's game was power. Shane's was precision. They were two halves of something neither of them was willing to name.
And tomorrow night, after competition, after cameras were off and arena was empty — Ilya was going to find Shane. At the boards, in the tunnel, somewhere between performance and truth. He was going to lean in close enough that only Shane could hear. And he was going to say a number.
1221.
This room. This room where he was lying right now with split lip and missing cufflink and taste of Shane on his mouth. This room that tomorrow night would become another 1410 — another number branded into both of their memories, another coordinate in secret geography of whatever they were becoming.
Shane would come. Ilya knew this the way he knew his own name. Knew it because of bridge and bourbon and kiss in the booth and scraped knuckles and women's names in their phones and the way Shane had said for the record and then catalogued every private thing he'd noticed about Ilya as if he'd been keeping inventory of evidence against himself. Knew it because Shane had stood between Ilya and stranger who'd called them what they were, and thrown an elbow, and bled for it.
Shane would come to room 1221. And this time, when it was over, maybe Shane wouldn't dress in silence and leave without looking at him. Maybe this time Shane would stay and stay and stay, and maybe — maybe — silence afterward would hold something other than panic.
Or maybe not. Maybe Shane would push him away again. Maybe this was all it would ever be — two people destroying themselves on frequency no one else could hear.
But Ilya had Shane's number now. Saved under girl's name on his phone, secret tucked inside secret. And that meant six months of silence were over. That meant next time Ilya lay awake in his apartment in Boston at three in the morning with television in his head cycling through its worst channels, he could pick up his phone and text Jane and maybe — maybe — noise would stop.
He closed his eyes. Pressed his fingers to his split lip. Felt sting and behind it, ghost of Shane's mouth, warm and desperate and real.
Zaika, he'd called him. He still couldn't believe he'd said it out loud.
Tomorrow, he thought.
Tomorrow.
---
Twenty-four hours later, at the shot accuracy competition, Ilya beat Scott Hunter's record. Then Shane beat Ilya's by nearly a second. Ilya skated toward the bench where Shane was sitting — Scott Hunter on one side, camera crew nearby. He blew a raspberry. Called Shane boring. Said he was going to bed early, very boring night for him.
Then, quieter, leaning close as he skated past: "1221."
Shane didn't react. Didn't blink. Didn't look at him. Scott Hunter, sitting right there, shifted in his seat.
But under the boards, hidden from every camera in the arena, Shane's hand moved to the phone in his pocket — the phone with a contact named Lily, the phone he'd picked up and put down four times the night before, the phone that held the number of the only person who'd ever called him zaika and meant it like a prayer.
They had never planned any of this. Twenty-four hours ago they didn't even have each other's numbers.
Now they had everything. And it was terrifying. And neither of them would have traded it for the world.