Chapter Text
Shane crashes over the boards and collapses onto the bench, a lit-fire of exertion burning in his lungs as he pants for air. The barn is cacophonous with the life of the game;, bright lights flashing overhead, their names being cheered and booed from different directions, fans hitting at the Plexiglass behind his head. An overwhelming battalion on the senses that Shane parcels up and squishes down and channels, in his mind, back into the hockey, as he tries to catch his breath enough to get back on the ice in a minute.
Third period of their third game against the Toronto Beavers. Boston won the first game of the round, and lost the second; Toronto are hungry for it just like Boston are, and things feel more balanced than Shane would like. Without Feller, who’s now recovering from knee surgery, their third line is limping. Shane’s pulling more ice time per game than usual, and it’s leaving him hollowed out with exhaustion, fighting pulled muscles and deep bruises and a sprain in two of his fingers that he’s not going to talk about. The game sits tied. It’s a long slog in either direction to win the round, but nobody wants it to go to seven games.
Shane’s birthday was a couple days ago. Twenty-two years old. Cake with his parents at his apartment in Boston, then fucked into the mattress by Ilya after they left; it’s a funny kind of curse, to Shane, that his birthday will always sit dead in the middle of playoffs. Any year he’s in them, he won’t care about his birthday because he’s focused on hockey; any year he’s not in them, he also won’t care about his birthday because he’s bummed about hockey. Right now, sucking down his water bottle and a panting sweaty mess, he’s filled with a thousand times more excitement and potential and dull-throbbing want than he was for celebrating another year around the sun.
A small, tear-open packet is wafted towards Shane from down the bench. He takes it thankfully, bringing the salts up to his nose and taking a sharp inhale, wincing as air floods his lungs like a slap to the face. It wakes him up a little, gets his oxygen pumping. The strong, unpleasant smell of them always reminds him of his mom scrubbing the kitchen floors when he was a kid, that chemical-wrongness of bleach.
“Thanks,” Shane huffs out, as he tosses the packet back to Berry. An elbow jostles beside him, huge bodies shuffling with a couple irritated words, and then Ilya is squishing himself onto the bench beside Shane, his stick spinning between his hands.
Shane tries to keep his eyes face-forward on the ice, tracking their limping third line for the last seconds of their shift. No progress towards the goal, the puck’s stuck behind Toronto’s defence. Shane rattles his stick against the boards, shouts, “Fucking shots on goal, Panda!” as Panders goes skating past like he doesn’t even fucking know there’s a game happening around him. Shane’s eyes sting from the smelling salts. A thick elbow digs into his padded side, and when he glances over, Ilya is tilting his head Shane’s way, nearly close enough to knock helmets
“We are going to win,” Ilya tells him lowly.
“Don’t jinx it,” Shane warns, but the tone of Ilya’s voice does something to settle his hyper-frayed nerves, in a strange way.
Ilya in playoffs is more serious than Shane’s used to. For all Ilya can be a shithead and completely unserious in his personal life, he loves this game; he cares, like Shane cares, the way you only really can when you’re the best in the world at something. They both want this win like an internal organ, a transplant they might die without. Ilya likes stroking his own ego and being able to back it up, so he takes winning seriously. If Shane was anywhere else right now than a rink with seventeen thousand people screaming at them, he might think about how hot that is.
But they’re here, so Shane is locked the fuck in as Ilya tilts closer, holding his glove in front of his mouth so the cameras or the other team on the ice can’t see what he’s saying, and tells Shane, “Their goalie is hurt. Left side. You will see when he lunges. Perfect for deke.”
Ilya smells like rank sweat and hockey gear, a concentrated punch of locker room boy where he’s pressed against Shane. It wakes Shane up more than the smelling salts. His lungs flood with air as he turns his gaze to the Toronto goalie, piecing together the saves he saw in the first two periods.
The need to win is almost like a sex drive. Primal. He feels like he’s skating from between his legs as the second line tap out and Shane hits the ice again. Emotion and thought don’t go into it – just the animal feeling of his body as he pounds it into the rink, follows the puck like the scent of blood is on it, grabs it onto his stick. He’s slammed from behind and comes out quick, scrabbling for the puck, managing to hit it between the Toronto defence’s legs and pick it up again on the other side. Precious seconds out here to make count. He paces them to his heartbeat. The loom of bodies surrounds him and he eyes a gap in the line, sends the puck whizzing over to Marley just as he’s collided with again, rough ache as the bone of his hip collides with the boards.
Voices are calling out from every direction; clock ticking down above their heads, Marley sends it to Rozanov. Shane ducks out from the body of the Toronto wing and takes off, flying down the ice, too fast for the Beavers’ sluggish defence to catch. Cold air whips through his lungs, catching rough in his throat as his thighs scream. He follows his own momentum in the curve around behind the goal, escaping the scrum around the puck.
He’s just rounding the other side when Rozanov slams the puck towards the goal. It would look like he’s aiming to score, if you didn’t know how good he is when he’s really trying. Instead, the puck sails wide by an inch, landing buttery smooth on Shane’s blade, for Shane to whip into the goal through the gaping hole of the goalie’s left side.
Roars erupt around them. Shane throws his arms in the air as his momentum on the ice carries him around towards the bench; Hayden says, “Dude, sick,” and slaps his hand from the bench, just as Ilya appears behind him and plasters himself over Shane’s back.
“Fucking beautiful,” Ilya growls, as he grabs around Shane’s neck. Shane feels himself reddening with the praise; his blood pounds with the goal. Marley knocks the side of his helmet. A couple hands grab at him, jostle him in excitement. A few minutes to go and they’re leading.
It’s a brutal game of keep-away for the last few minutes, but they manage it, Heikky holding the goal like a brick wall. The final seconds tick down to roaring screams.
Boston wins the game.
“Two more to go,” Ilya says, with a nasty grin, as they pour onto the ice to celebrate.
After a playoffs win is what Shane imagines it feels like to be high. The buzz runs through his whole body and distracts him from everything else. He jams a cap backwards over his sweaty hair and gives a few press answers in the locker room with his head spinning, barely paying attention to what he’s saying – “Yeah, team are gelling well, making good passes, definitely a team effort,” all things he’s said a million times before, and his heartrate won’t slow down, adrenaline tingling up and down his body.
Across the room, his eyes meet Ilya’s; Ilya has a camera shoved into his face as well, stood there shirtless and sweaty, probably giving more exciting answers than Shane is. Ilya winks at him.
Thankfully Shane’s still so flushed from the game that nobody can tell when he blushes. The press are chased out eventually to let them all actually get undressed, and when the cameras are gone Shane dawdles for a minute, replying to his parents’ texts of congratulations. It’s just one game in a series, of course – there’s still two more to win this round, and two rounds to go to the cup. He can’t let himself get too giddy on it, but still.
There’s this special feeling when the hockey is good. Not just that they won by luck, but that they really played for it, and earned it. Shane feels it deeply, viscerally, kind of like the feeling he gets in bed when Ilya tells him good boy after he does something filthy. A reward for pushing his body to an unusual limit. Shane’s buzzed on the win in a way that makes him kind of horny, not helped by the way his eyes keep catching on Ilya, shirtless and sweaty, wrestling with a couple guys across the room. Their broad bodies pressing into his. The meaty sound of muscles slapping.
So it’s no wonder Shane’s a little distracted when Berglund, half-dressed and scrolling something on his phone across the room with a weird look on his face, calls out, “Yo, Marleau, when the hell did you give this quote?”
Marley shrugs, as he dumps his foul-smelling gear into the equipment bin and wanders past Shane’s face with his entire dick out. “I donated some cash to them last year, so they reached out when they were doing the whole partnership thing ‘cus they wanted a few players to support it. No big.”
Shane, unsure what’s going on, doesn’t say anything in the moment. There’s always some kind of gossip in the locker room, and it rarely has anything to do with hockey, so he rarely cares. It’s playoffs – they should be focused. He keeps his mind on his breaths, stretching out a sore knee as he sits in his stall, trying not to get a semi in the locker room because he’s looking at Ilya too much. He needs a second to calm down before he hits the showers.
So of course it’s Ilya, victor of the wrestling match and now scrubbing a towel over his sweaty armpits in his stall, who shouts across the room; “What are you fuckers talking about now?”
Berry says, “It’s that You Can Play thing. You know, the gay sports charity or whatever? League just announced they’re partnering with them.”
Shane’s blood goes cold as the ice.
He freezes for a second where he’s slouched in his stall, and then forces himself to keep his eyes down while his heartrate rockets. His fingers fumble pulling off his socks as he tries not to give away his moment of shock. He’s heard of the charity in the past year or so, but only vaguely, around the edges of anything related to his own appearances and events; never heard the name said in the locker room before. He desperately hopes nobody’s looking at him.
“Oh. That is good,” Ilya says, casual as anything, as they all keep getting undressed, sweaty and winded and high off their win. “But why the fuck they want a quote from Marley?”
“That’s what I’m saying, dude. Not exactly Shakespeare, is he.”
“Hey, assholes, I got important shit to say, you fuckers are just too dumb to get it,” Marley says, smacking Berry’s junk with a whip of his towel.
“What is the quote?” Ilya asks across the room, while Berry tries to smack Marley back – like it’s a casual question, like it doesn’t mean anything to him. Shane’s blood pounds. He doesn’t know how Ilya’s even speaking right now. Shane’s tongue feels swollen and awkward in his own mouth.
Dubek, already out of the showers dripping water everywhere and now holding Berry’s dropped phone, rattles off in a terrible impression of Marley’s broad accent, “‘Doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight or whatever, we’re all brothers if you can score a sick bar down on the ice.’ Wow, big words, Marley. Real poet shit.”
“Fuck off, man, I’m speakin’ from the heart.”
Shane finally gets his rank socks off and drops them to the floor. He sets about working off his UnderArmor layer, cold sweat itching at his body. Nobody’s looking at him. He’s sure, nobody’s looking at him. They’re all more undressed than he is and half of them are heading into the showers already; who cares if Hollander’s being slow, tucked half out of sight in his stall? But he still feels it. The eyes. The desperate, scrabbling need to grab his own phone and read every word of this fucking press release.
“You really think that, though?” a voice says across the room, from inside a cloud of Axe. It’s Mullins, a defenceman they traded for earlier in the season, who Shane hasn’t really exchanged two words with off the ice yet beyond learning that he likes to fish and everyone calls him Mullet. “I dunno, would be kind of weird if there was some faggy dude in the locker room checking out our dicks, wouldn’t it?”
“I seen what you’re packing, dude, nobody wants to check out that moldy hot dog,” Marleau says, which makes a few of the guys laugh and Mullins flip him off.
Nobody calls him out on saying fag, because of course they wouldn’t; it’s far from controversial language in the locker room. It’s usually just not used when actually talking about gay people, because gay people never really come up. Mostly it’s a generic insult for anything that happens to offend them in the moment. This goes closer to home. Shane’s worked off his UnderArmor and grabbed his towel, but when he tries to make his feet move across the room to get to the showers, they won’t do it. His mouth tastes like metal. He sits right where he is and takes a quick, quiet breath.
“I did not know this was a thing you care about, Marley,” Ilya says. His voice is suddenly closer to Shane. Shane doesn’t want him to come over here. Doesn’t want to be anywhere near this conversation. He doesn’t look up, rooting through his toiletries bag with numb fingers, looking for nothing in particular as the blood swirls in his ears.
“Yeah, dude,” Marley calls out, his booming voice filling the whole fucking room, so casually. “My cousin did the whole sex change thing couple years back, so she got me thinking. We were on all the same kiddy league teams together and she seemed fuckin’ miserable when she was a dude, you know? Now she’s all happy and shit, but everyone’s up in her business about it even though she’s just chilled the fuck out being an accountant in Toronto, like, who cares what she did with her dick? I just don’t wanna do my own taxes. Anyway, I figure it’s the same with hockey. Who cares if you suck dick at home so long as you score some filthy goals?”
Yeah, Shane thinks, kind of hysterically. He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes for a second, the sight of the locker room disappearing from view as the voices fade away on their retreat towards the showers, Mullet and Loops grouching something about weird perv shit. Who cares, right? Except for absolutely everyone, everywhere Shane goes.
They win the fourth game of the round in Toronto. They’re in a nice hotel, spongy king beds and thick walls, but the team are spread out all over the place rather than being confined to one corridor like usual; apparently there’s some kind of business conference going on downstairs which has them filled up. Shane isn’t sure why anyone would host a business convention during NHL playoffs, but there’s a whole world of weird people with bad priorities out there.
He’s aching and so tired that his body feels like soup when he finally gets into his room that night. His suitcase is perched neatly on the edge of the dresser, left there by player services; the bed looks crisp, the air-con is whirring softly. Shane could pass out and sleep for a thousand years.
He hesitates in the doorway, not taking his shoes off yet. It only takes a minute of pretending not to wait before his phone buzzes.
[From: Rozanov (Boston Raiders), 11:14]
Cum upstairs ;)
Shane texts him back a middle finger emoji, but he opens his suitcase, shoves a change of sweats and his toiletries into his spare gym bag, and creeps back out into the hall as soon as Ilya texts his room number.
Of course, he takes a moment to make sure none of his teammates are lingering in the hall. But they’re spread out all over the hotel, and anyway, they’re all fucking exhausted – long past the point of the season where wins are celebrated by late-night drinking and picking up women, it’s all most of them can do to keep their bodies in check at this point of the round. Nobody’s going to be out prowling the halls. Shane heads down the hallway to the quiet embrace of the elevator, leaning his head back against the cool metal walls as he waits for it to take him upstairs.
The whole building feels quiet; it’s dark outside, night has set, and the city is heading into sleep. Shane takes a deep breath, feeling the air get deeper in his lungs than it has in a few days. He’s so sore that there’s a constantly low-level thrumming in his body, like all his muscles are beating to a rhythm. He’s almost restless with exhaustion, the way extreme tiredness can loop back around into a level of tension that keeps you on edge. The thought of Ilya’s warm mouth against his skin is the only thing powering Shane’s legs to keep moving once the elevator dings; he glances around before heading off down the dim hallway, glancing at room numbers to try and find 513.
503, 505, 507. A corner in the hallway, view blocked by an ice machine. Shane turns it.
“Hey, dude!” Hayden says, standing up with crunch as a metal scoop full of ice drops from his hand. He’s in flannel pyjamas and slides, a purpling bruise from the Beavers’ six-five defenceman blooming on the fat swell of his left eye, ragged stubble of his playoff beard making him look unkempt and overtired. “You can tell it’s playoffs when there’s a queue for the fucking hotel ice, huh. What’s bothering you, knee again?”
“Um,” Shane says. He can’t quite make a good answer come out quickly enough. He can see the second Hayden’s gaze catches on the fact that he’s carrying a bag, that he’s not changed out of his street clothes yet, and frets around the edges of the information.
“Isn’t your room on the bottom floor, though? Thought it was just me and Rozanov who got shoved all the way up – oh,” Hayden says, as it lands, all at once. Then, they just stand there for a second.
A slow flood of embarrassment works through Shane’s exhausted body; less urgent or mortified than usual, perhaps simply by virtue of how run-down he is. But it’s still there, the anxiety of it all worming its way through the gaps left in his hockey-centred mind.
“Uh, yeah,” he says, for lack of anything else. Then, the urge to defend his hockey kicks in. He mutters, “Listen, it’s not, like, distracting me or anything, so it doesn’t really matter what I do with my nights, okay?”
“I can tell, dude,” Hayden says quickly. “You’re playing like you’re on fucking fire. Nobody thinks you’re distracted.”
This soothes Shane’s frayed nerves maybe a little. He sucks in a breath and rocks back on his heels, mind gone blank again. He hates the awkwardness in the air between them, when a few months ago Hayden had been one of his closest friends; he hates that he doesn’t know how to talk about it, too.
Hayden tries again. He says, “So, uh, you read the presser about that You Can Play thing?”
A tinny taste in Shane’s mouth as he swallows.
“Yeah,” he says.
He’d read it the second he got home the other night, in a private tab on his laptop like someone might come check his fucking browser history. The language of it had been fairly clinical; a brief statement from the NHL commissioner about how they wanted to set a standard of acceptance in sports. Three brief quotes from active players, including Marley, saying they were cool with the idea of a gay player in hockey. The article had specified that the partnership will take the form of educating players on LGBT issues, holding inclusivity seminars at the rookie symposiums, and giving public service announcements for fans. There will apparently be the chance for players to seek counselling or advice about their sexual orientation through Behavioural Health, which sounds laughable to Shane. Being gay has nothing to do with his health.
Shane will, frankly, believe half of it when he sees it, and he’ll believe any of it mattering even less. They could only scrounge up three active players to give nice quotes in the article. Instead of a welcoming step forward for acceptance, Shane feels it more like a loaded gun pointed at his head. That anyone’s even talking about this is a threat.
He kind of thought nobody knew there might be gay players in hockey. Certainly, nobody ever acts like they think about it; gayness is a chirp or an insult, so absurd as a suggestion it makes everyone laugh. He doesn’t think any of the team really care about social issues. Most of them don’t even vote. Don't even recycle, which would make Shane's dad angry. They don’t think for more than two seconds about anything that comes out of their mouths - how the hell would they manage to be welcoming if they found out someone on the team was gay?
Shane doesn’t think he sounds particularly thrilled when he says, “It’s, uh, good, it sounds good.”
“Totally,” Hayden agrees, a little too quickly. “I mean, I totally support it. Good to have, like, backing from the league, right?”
For a second there’s a deep and unpleasant silence between them. Hayden’s brows are quirked downwards like a worried puppy, trying to dance around Shane for response. Shane doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.
Hayden breaks the silence for a second time with a low sigh. He leans against the wall and tilts Shane’s way. “Listen, man, I feel like we’re not close anymore and it’s bumming me out. I’m sorry if I was weird about this stuff or whatever.”
The apology is unneeded, but he’s also not wrong about the way they’ve drifted recently. The thing is it’s not Hayden’s fault, or at least not solely his fault; Shane has been too mortified to even consider talking to him honestly about anything to do with Ilya, and that’s been such a huge part of his life the last few months that he’s stopped knowing how to talk to Hayden altogether. Not that Shane has ever been the best conversationalist. And not that he wants things to be weird. But Shane wants lots of things he doesn’t get.
“No, it’s not–” Shane tries, shuffling his weight between his aching fault. “It’s really not your fault, Hayd. You’ve been pretty chill about everything. I’m just, uh. I guess I’m still not sure how to act when someone knows about – this.”
“Is it ‘cause I don’t like Rozanov?” Hayden asks. “Because dude, I hate both my sisters’ husbands and I still manage to eat Thanksgiving dinner with them every year. Like, we can figure it out, okay?”
The idea of forcing Hayden and Ilya to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner – even a regular dinner like Shane had with Svetlana – is so abruptly funny that it makes Shane snort outloud.
Shane doesn’t want to avoid Hayden. Dinner with Svetlana a couple of weeks ago drove the idea into his mind, in a way – that even if only a couple of people can know about them, Shane could at least learn to be open in front of those particular people. There’s not necessarily a reason to hide anything from Hayden anymore.
The problem is that his body hasn’t caught up with his brain. He thinks he wants to strive for that, but the thought of even breathing Ilya’s way in front of Hayden still racks him with a cold-blood petrification. Hayden has been as chill as he could have possibly hoped, but they’ve not exactly rubbed it in Hayden’s face. He and Hayden have only barely discussed it; implications and half-sentences. What if they try to all sit down to dinner together, and seeing the actual evidence of Shane and Ilya and their gayness is too much after all? What if seeing it, really seeing how gone Shane is for Ilya Rozanov, makes Hayden decide he actually can’t tolerate or understand it?
Shane swallows thickly, looking at the flickering of the city lights out the dark window to avoid Hayden’s face. Hayden says, “Maybe we all get dinner together next day off, or something? I won’t be a dick if he isn’t.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Shane says, but he doesn’t mean it. “Um, listen, I’m actually gonna head back down to my room. Make sure you ice your face properly before you go to sleep, okay?”
Shane turns around, and flees back to the elevator.
Ilya’s still waiting on him, but Shane just can’t do it. Can’t walk past Hayden with Hayden knowing he’s going to Ilya’s room to have gay sex or gay cuddles or gay bed-sharing after a brutal game of hockey. What if someone else sees him in the halls? They’re in a fucking huge hotel with players and probably fans and reporters and all sorts of people who know his face. Something in Shane’s chest swings shut like a swollen door in a warped frame, wedged airtight.
On the way back down to his own room, Ilya texts him, where are you?? Take such a long time i get cold ((
Shane replies, coast wasn’t clear. Going back to my room.
What does even mean, coast wasn’t clear? Who cares if you are visiting? Maybe you are coming to my room to make strategy about our epic goals
maybe we took wrong gym bags by accident
maybe you lost bet and have to have sleepover on my floor
Million reasons for you to come here, why are you panicking?
The problem isn’t the reasons. The problem is that if someone did question him, Shane knows he wouldn’t be able to get out any of those excuses without sounding like he was losing his mind. The more anxious he gets, the worse he is at lying. The more he overthinks it, the more hyper-aware he is of every small, strange choice he makes; every shift of his body, every stammered syllable. In some ways, admitting that he’s gay and that he wants Ilya so badly has made this even harder. He has so, so much to lose, and he’s so aware of it.
He gets back in his own room and shuts the door and takes off his shoes and sits on the edge of the bed, and his hands shake. His stomach is tight. The dark room gapes and yawns around him, but Shane doesn’t know how to make himself start going about his nighttime routine. His phone buzzes in his hands. Ilya again; i am coming to your room instead if you are this boring about it.
His fingers are shaking as he types back, no don’t come down here. But Ilya doesn’t reply. Shane folds his hands over the back of his neck and forces himself to take deep breaths, and a few minutes later, there’s a sharp knock at his door.
Even slightly panicking, Shane isn’t immune to the magnetic call of Ilya’s body. He gets up and opens the door, glancing out in the hallway to make sure nobody’s watching them before he hurries Ilya inside and locks the door behind him, checking it twice to make sure it really closed.
Then, Ilya turns Shane and backs him up against the wall, his strong hands spreading across the thick muscle of Shane’s waist, worming underneath his Raiders t-shirt. He looks older with the thick-growing start of a beard, rough and masculine in a way that makes Shane’s groin clench even while he’s panicking. He peers into Shane’s eyes, forcing Shane to stare back at him from an inch away; he smells like nice shower gel and he’s warm, like he’d already been in bed. Shane shudders. Lets out a torn-up breath.
“You are freaking out,” Ilya prognosises. “Why? We played so good today, your goal was so sexy.”
“That’s half the fucking problem,” Shane admits, shaky and morose. He leans his body into Ilya’s, tucks his face into Ilya’s neck, wraps his arms around Ilya’s shoulders and hangs on tight. “The better we get, the more I remember how much we have to lose.”
Ilya’s hands rub up and down his back in comforting waves; it reminds Shane of the smooth swish of a stick on fresh ice as they pass back and forth for drills, an unbroken chain of cooperation between their bodies as they keep the puck to a rhythm.
“This is about the gay charity,” Ilya decides, which is only maybe half true, but certainly part of it. “That is a good thing, Shane. They try to make the league more accepting, less scary for us.”
“Yeah, but all it’s doing is making people talk about it,” Shane says, into Ilya’s skin. He swallows thickly, his breath ruffling Ilya’s curls. “Most people didn’t even think about that shit before. And I just – fuck, I don’t know. It’s not just about that, although it’s shitty timing. I just don’t know how we’re meant to keep this up. The hiding. We go everywhere with the team – I mean, fuck, my parents are meeting me back in Boston, like – when are we supposed to be together without anyone hanging over our shoulders?”
For a moment, nothing interrupts them except the repetitive hum of the air conditioner and the matching sounds of their breaths. Ilya’s body is warm, solid, even for Shane’s heavy weight to rest against. He holds Shane tightly, rubbing at him, soothing him. His body is so deliciously comforting that Shane wants to get lost in it.
Fuck. Shane drops to his knees with no warning, wrapping his arms around the fat swell of Ilya’s ass and nuzzling his nose into Ilya’s crotch through his loose basketball shorts, where Ilya smells the most like himself, hot and sweaty and sexy. The soft warm imprint of his dick pillows Shane’s sore face, and Shane lets out a shuddering breath as he just kneels there, breathing it. Ilya’s hands work into the roots of his hair after a moment, and tug gently.
“It’s okay,” Ilya mumbles lowly, as he soothes Shane’s scalp and the back of his neck. “It’s okay, Shane, we are safe here. Nobody knows, okay? Nobody can see us in this room. Not the team, not your parents. You do not need to worry right now.”
Like this, it’s a little easier to let Ilya’s words work into him. If Ilya tells him not to worry while he’s on his knees, Shane won’t worry. He lets Ilya rub at his head, and tell him soft things, and then take him to bed eventually. They give into the deep exhaustion pulling at their muscles together, falling through the mattress into sleep.
They lose the next game – Dubek’s playing through a stomach flu he caught from his girlfriend’s kid, and they just don’t have enough depth with him feverish and shaking in his skates, throwing up in the bathroom between periods, and Feller still out.
It’s not enough for the Beavers to take the round, though. Boston pound out an exhilarating 5-1 victory in the sixth game, with a buzzer-beater goal from Marleau sealing the deal; they have officially taken the conference semis.
Marley breaks his stick against the boards and howls as they all swarm around him, the crowd losing their minds, cheering so loud it feels like the rink stretches all the way up to the sky. The hot jostle of sweaty hockey bodies after a win is familiar to Shane; the pounding of gloved hands into padded shoulders, wild grabbing hugs that would be seen as weird and gay anywhere off the ice. He’s flushed with excitement from winning, he couldn’t care less. In their frenzied celebration, Hayden slings an arm around Shane’s neck, and for a second, Shane manages to forget that he’s not just like everyone else.
By the start of June, they’re all dropping weight like popped balloons, bruised and sore, and Shane has two of his fingers taped together because a shooting pain goes up his arm whenever he tries to bend them, but it’s not bad for halfway through playoffs. Shane agrees to go to dinner at Hayden and Jackie’s on a rest evening before the third round begins. He’d rather be at home, watching tape of the Pittsburgh Polar Bears on loop with two servings of nutritionist-prepared salmon and Ilya’s head in his lap. But Hayden gives him puppy eyes and Shane thinks about him saying we’re not as close and he does want to go, really, or at least he wants to hang out, wants to remember how to be friends without constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of his own gayness.
Hayden does say, stiltedly and weirdly, that Shane can bring Ilya if he wants. But when asked, Ilya says he would rather swallow a hockey puck, which settles it easily, since Shane didn’t really want to bring him anyway.
“So, Shane,” Jackie says, when they’re all sitting down to dinner – baby being rocked on her chest and the toddlers already in bed upstairs, the closest thing to alone you can get at the Pike house. “How are you doing lately?”
Before she’s even got her sentence all the way out, the baby monitor beeps on the table in front of her, and she peers down at the big plastic screen. Hayden says, “I can get it, babe.”
“No, hon, it’s okay, I think she’s settling again.” She watches eagle-eyed for a second as she strokes Arthur’s back; they have one of those fancy monitors that looks right into the nursery with a camera. Seems kind of creepy to Shane, but he’s not a parent. Shane takes a sip of ginger ale and waits.
“It’s always Emma,” Hayden tells Shane, conspiratorially, when the monitor finally goes quiet again. “Hates sleep. She’s a little monkey. Every single night we wake up at like, 2am with her jumping on top of us.”
“Hah,” Shane says, because Hayden is grinning, not because he thinks that sounds particularly fun. Shane hates sleeping without his white noise machine and perfectly calibrates his schedule around a solid 9 hours a night. How does Hayden reliably build muscle if he’s not getting enough hours of REM? “Uh, must get annoying.”
“Oh totally, yeah, but it’s also pretty cute. You’ll understand one day when you’ve got kids, man,” Hayden says.
“I mean, maybe not,” Shane points out, and then takes another sip of ginger ale while Hayden and Jackie exchange a glance.
“Right,” Hayden agrees quickly. “I mean, obviously, dude, you don’t have to. It’s, like, your choice, right?”
“Oh my god, babe, you are so awkward sometimes,” Jackie tells Hayden, with a fond eye-roll. She turns to Shane and says, “Shane, I know Hayd promised not to tell anyone, but I wheedled it out of him – it’s not his fault, I promise. He didn’t give any details! But, like, just so you know, I do know about you being gay.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured,” Shane admits. He’d honestly kind of forgotten they hadn’t had that conversation explicitly yet. He doesn’t see Jackie all that much – a dinner every couple weeks in the season, waving to her at games when she comes to sit in the WAG box – and in his mind, she’s just blurred together with Hayden knowing. Shane does admire that about their relationship, in a way. They’re kind of gross with pet names and don’t seem to actually share any hobbies, but they are definitely a team. As much of a team as you can be when one of you is travelling half the year and the entire house is run by nannies and housekeepers, at least.
Shane likes the idea of being a team. It’s how his parents are. How he pictures every good relationship to be.
“So you know that we love you, right?” Jackie says. One of her hands is smoothing up and down over the baby’s back while she holds him in the other arm, a practiced motion of easy caregiving. Shane doesn’t know much about what Jackie did before she was a mom; she was already pregnant when he first met her. She’s only a couple years older than him. He remembers her mentioning something about a marketing course once, but he’s pretty sure she didn’t finish college. He’s thinking about that as she says, “And whoever you wanna date, it doesn’t matter to us.”
“I’ve told him that,” Hayden says, defensively, which makes Shane laugh a little.
“Well I just know how guys are, babe, I bet you didn’t really say it right.”
“No, uh, I appreciate it, Jackie,” Shane tells her. The baby fusses in her arms and spits up a yellow-white string of drool onto her flowery dress. “And you, Hayd. I’m sorry I freaked out so much at first. I sort of hadn’t worked through it myself yet. I still don’t really wanna talk about it.”
“Don’t apologise, man, I get it,” Hayden tells him. Shane manages a deep breath, and lets himself meet Hayden’s eyes; not as awkward as he was expecting it to be. “If there’s anything I can do to, y’know, make it easier, let me know.”
“Thanks. Uh, it’s all good, really,” Shane says. “Just, um, not telling anyone, still. I really don’t want the team to find out. I mean, you’ve seen how some of them are, and I’m not trying to be a spokesperson or anything. I really just want to keep playing hockey.”
“Well, duh, dude – you’re the best at hockey,” Hayden says. “You shouldn’t be doing anything else.”
This is perhaps the most comforting thing Shane has ever been told. He doesn’t think he should be doing anything else, either. He doesn’t think he should ever have to think about a single thing other than puck and dick.
“Well, I think its great,” Jackie says, grinning at him with her pearly-whites while she wipes baby sick off herself with a napkin. “Now I can set you up with cute guys! Did Hayd tell you my hairdresser is gay? At least, we’re pretty sure he is. He dresses really well.”
“Uh, we maybe put a pin in that babe,” Hayden says, eyes flickering to Shane. It’s a soothing confirmation, at least, that Hayden hasn’t told Jackie everything. She knows the what, but not the who. His messy tie to Ilya is still out of the landscape of his sexuality, to her, even when to Shane it sometimes feels like the entire core of it.
“Wait, why?” Jackie asks. “Come on, I want Shane to have someone nice waiting at home for him. And then we can have double dates.”
For a second, Shane looks at the two of them and imagines it. The big house they’re sat in, decorated not by a pre-booked interior designer like Shane’s is, but mostly by Jackie – this he knows because she’d complained about how Hayden would only have an xBox and a La-z-Boy if I left him to his own devices! The squirming, bald baby in her arms that means she can’t hold her knife and fork at the same time to eat. The green-flashing video monitor on the table for the other two to keep watch over. Woken up at 3am by someone jumping on you or peeing the bed or whatever. The big, shiny diamond on Jackie’s ring finger, carefully judged by the other WAGs in relation to Hayden’s salary, posted from every angle on Instagram.
When they do fluff pieces about the team on TV or for social media, Hayden’s wife and kids are always shown, linked to his name. They live in this house together, share the bed every night, host their parents for visits and then complain about in-laws to their friends. When Hayden’s kids were born or Jackie was sick with the pregnancies, nobody questioned Hayden needing time off, because that's his person. Everyone knows everything about them as a couple. Public. Shared. Easy.
For a second, Shane tries to work his way past his squirming discomfort with their relationship and imagine himself onto their path.
Not the big white-dress wedding and the screaming babies and the boring Episcopalian church services, but the solid, established normality of it all. Him and Ilya living in a house like this. Sharing their lives out in the open. Anniversaries of theirs public in the locker room, joint photos on Instagram, visiting his parents and going to sleep together in the same room.
“I. Uh,” Hayden says, while Jackie still looks at them, expectant of an answer to why Shane can’t get a cookie-cutter suburban boyfriend who’ll join her wine club. Hayden’s clearly not good at lying to his wife. That’s probably a good thing, in the grand scheme of life.
“I’m not really interested in anything outside of hockey, Jackie,” Shane tells her. It’s sort of true. Ilya is hockey. The rest of it isn’t worth thinking about.
Then, the only thing that stands between them and the Stanley Cup Finals is the third round, and the Pittsburgh Polar Bears.
“You’ve been playing well, honey, and Pittsburgh only scraped through to this round because they played Ottawa for the semis and they were just horrendous. You don’t have anything to worry about,” Shane’s mom tells him while she moves things around in his kitchen cabinets, lining his wine glasses up in neatly specified order. Shane’s not quite sure what was wrong with the way he had them organised before, but he lets her keep doing it, because he knows it’ll make her happy, and he never fucking uses his wine glasses.
“I think so too,” Shane agrees, kneading at the sore muscles of his thigh with one hand. It may sound big-headed to say it, but nobody expected Pittsburgh to get this far this year, and the Raiders have been consistently outscoring them. Their round starts tomorrow evening, and Shane already feels pretty good about the first game. His knee hasn’t been giving him any trouble, and Dubek’s over his flu; the team have been focused, keeping their heads down. Shane spins in the stool at his kitchen island and asks his mom, “What do you think of their goalie, though? Terrible save percentage in the regular season, but then he’s pulled two shutouts so far in playoffs. He can turn it on like a switch.”
“Well, sure, that’s impressive in a vacuum,” his mom says. Finally happy with the glasses, she closes that cupboard and turns to his wall instead, flicking through his calendar. “But consistency is what matters, and Williamson is about the least consistent player in the fucking world, so I don’t think you need to worry.”
Shane makes a little hum, watching as she notches her glasses down onto her nose and takes out her phone; cross checking her schedule for him with the written calendar that she keeps updated every time she visits, even though Shane’s also got the shared calendar on his phone for his photoshoots and press and events and appearances.
“Ilya thinks their second-line center is hurt,” he says idly, while she scribbles things down. Shane takes out his own phone and flicks back to the video clip Ilya’d sent him earlier, slowed down to half speed to highlight a wince on the player’s face as he pulled out of a hit last week. He lets it loop a couple times, squinting down evaluatingly. “Ribs, maybe.”
“Well, Ilya’s a smart player, he knows what he’s talking about,” his mom says, not looking up from her pen. Shane’s heart blooms in his chest for a moment. Yeah, Ilya’s smart. He likes that his mom knows it, even if she wouldn’t know in a million years why Shane cares.
There’s a noise from the hall behind them as Shane’s dad knocks into a doorframe, says, “Oops,” and then appears. He comes up behind Shane and pats him warmly on the shoulder, where Shane’s aching, hockey-pushed muscles are always tense these days.
“Sure you don’t wanna come with us, kiddo?” he asks.
“No, no, you guys enjoy lunch,” Shane says. “I’m not eating anything off my meal plan until the end of playoffs now. I’ll just heat up one of my pre-prepped and I have tape to watch, anyway.”
“Well, I do want to try the new sushi place. But maybe we should get our food to go, come back and eat with you.”
“Mom, seriously!” Shane laughs. She’s so like him, sometimes – never takes a hint. “I’ll survive alone in my apartment for one lunch. Please just let me focus.”
“Okay, okay, I get it, I’ll stop hovering,” his mom says, which is certainly a lie, but his dad manages to wrap her jacket around her shoulders and coax her towards the door anyway, winking at Shane behind her back. Shane loves his dad so much.
The first two games of this round are home games for Boston, so of course his parents wanted to visit for them. It’s great having them here. Really. Their familiar presence soothes Shane’s peculiarities and warms up his rigid world and gets him out of the stuck worry in his head, sometimes. He feels safe in the way you're safe as a child, released from having to think about your own practicalities. It’s just a little – stifling isn’t the word, but it’s close. They’ve been here two nights, and he already needs air. Maybe not air. He needs Ilya’s air. He needs to breathe out of Ilya’s lungs. And he can’t do that when his parents are staying in the next room over from him.
Shane waits three minutes after they’ve left for lunch before he pulls up his texts. He told himself he was gonna wait at least ten, but, well – three is nearly halfway to ten, if you think about it, and halfway’s not bad.
[Sent: 12:42]
They’re gone, you can come over now.
[From: Rozanov (Boston Raiders), 12:42]
😍😘💋👆💢🍆💢💦
[Sent: 12:43]
Would you learn to text like a fucking adult?
Is that explosion supposed to be my asshole?????
His doorbell rings before he gets a response, which is maybe for the best. Shane leaves his phone abandoned on the kitchen island and rushes to the door, opening it and finding a strong hand on the centre of his chest, pushing him hard into a wall before he’s even had a chance to say hello.
The door slams shut, and Ilya’s mouth is on his, the rough gripe of Ilya’s stubble scratching against his chin. It’s maybe more than stubble, now, his thick hair settling into the beginnings of a proper beard. Shane’s pretty proud of his own facial hair, which doesn’t grow nearly as fast as Ilya but which he thinks looks kind of nice shadowing his jaw in black; he hates how it feels, though, the itchy sensation of it when he rubs his face. This is only possible to forget while kissing Ilya, because everything else feels so good that he doesn’t care. Ilya’s lips crush wetly at his, warming Shane up from the centre. He goes gooey as his whole body is pressed by hard muscle into the hard wall, wedged deliciously immobile, and their mouths work together. Shane licks Ilya’s teeth, tasting sugar on his tongue. Ilya makes a low, helpless noise and works a hand between them to squeeze Shane’s dick through his sweatpants like it’s his personal stress ball. Shane squirms, the sensation a little too tight to be comfortable but also unbearably erotic, like much of what Ilya does.
“Fuck off,” he mutters, smiling, into Ilya’s mouth, as he tries to both escape and lean into Ilya’s hand at the same time. Ilya laughs, biting Shane’s lip and rolling it into his mouth before he finally pulls back a little.
“No,” he says. “When you keep me waiting for two whole days, I have to kiss you like I am going to die. I think you want me to die, actually. That’s why you have me sleeping alone like a sad orphan in a fairytale. You want me to get eaten by a wolf.”
“Two days is not a long time, Ilya,” Shane says, rolling his eyes as his hands catch around Ilya’s biceps. Unfortunately, he knows what Ilya means. It’s become a surprising agony for him, too, to sleep apart, and Shane never even expected he’d enjoy sharing a bed with anyone at all.
Half the problem is that he and Ilya still spend all their time together; all day at team meals, practice, games, warmups and cooldowns, coaching and strategy, shared rides from their apartment or buses to hotels. Having him so close in public places is almost worse than not seeing him at all; the way he’s so close through a pane of glass that Shane can’t reach through to touch him.
Right now, Shane can touch him. “We have ninety minutes max,” he mumbles into Ilya’s mouth, as his hands work beneath the tight fabric of Ilya’s tank and press into a thick bruise on his side, making Ilya groan, low and pained. Shane’s dick gets hard.
“You are evil,” Ilya tells him. “Take me to bed.”
“We can’t be too rough,” Shane reminds him, as they start stumbling down the hall, Shane backwards, being led by his hips. “I'm already bruised all over and I can't put weight on my knee in case it gets fucked up again before the game.”
“Yes, sure, the most vanilla sex. But remind me how many more games we are winning this year without your stupid sex ban?” Ilya points out, and, well, he’s not wrong. Shane puts his face in Ilya’s neck and huffs the scent of his skin as they tumble over the threshold to his room. Shane gets the door closed, just about, but Ilya’s moaning into his neck and rubbing his broad hands up Shane’s sides and god, Shane’s so weak for him. He tilts back into Ilya’s arms, scrapes his teeth on Ilya’s skin, biting a little too hard.
They tumble to bed. Shane gets naked down to his tube socks and sucks Ilya’s cock so thickly and wetly and enthusiastically that his whole face is wet with tears by the time Ilya grabs him by the hair and pushes him down so hard he can’t breathe and floods his mouth with the sour taste of cum. Shane’s ears ring. His nose is snotty, his throat is sore. He feels lighter than air. He’s so hard that all Ilya has to do is suck on his fingers and make a tight ring around the head of Shane’s cock for him to fuck into for a few seconds, and then Ilya kisses him and Shane feels the scratch of his beard all over, and he comes in about three seconds.
After, they sprawl sticky and sated in the bed. They definitely didn’t need the whole ninety minutes.
“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya mumbles, carding his hand through Shane’s hair and breathing hard. His stomach’s all sticky looking. Shane wraps one of his hands around the thick swell of Ilya’s pec, squeezing at the bulging muscle, feeling the give of it beneath his hands.
Shane says, “Mullet’s been favouring his left side. You don’t think he fucked his ankle when he tripped over Graddon last week, do you? I rewatched the fall and it does look like he came down on that side first, but he got up and skated off fine.”
They’re quiet for a moment. Then Ilya says, “Oh my god, shut up about the team right now, I have barely finished coming.”
He sounds so genuinely confused that it makes Shane laugh. It’s maybe not the time to talk about playoffs, except that everything they do, right now, is the time to talk about playoffs. They’re living it, breathing it. There’s no days off; today’s supposed to be a rest day and they still spent the morning at the practice rink, getting checked over by physios and rolled out by the sports therapist and having plays drilled into their heads by coach. They’re not supposed to be individual people, right now. They’re products of an entire team. A whole city.
Ilya flicks Shane’s temple to make him stop thinking, so Shane does the next best thing to talking about hockey, and puts Ilya’s fingers in his mouth. Just two of them, the thick index and middle, down to the second knuckle. He presses them into his tongue and sucks a little bit; not trying to turn Ilya on, just enjoying the feeling of them filling up his mouth. Saliva floods and pools in his cheeks. Shane lets out a contented sigh, and tension melts out of his body as he lays on top of Ilya's chest.
“Jesus, Shane,” Ilya says, looking down at him with a nearly wounded expression. He presses his fingers down into Shane’s tongue a little harder. Shane gnaws lightly with his teeth, not enough to leave a bite mark, just enough to really play with the idea of having Ilya trapped inside him, enjoying the hard give of his body. He holds onto Ilya’s wrist so Ilya can’t take his hand away, and just leaves them in his mouth. Ilya says, “Fuck, and you wonder why there is nobody else for me? Who else am I going to find who tries to eat me when I am just laying in their bed?”
Shane can’t think of a single response to that, except the happy feeling he gets from thinking that Ilya’s not doing this with anyone else but him. That probably nobody else ever did do exactly this, to Ilya, back in his past. Other people sucked Ilya’s dick and made him come, but other people didn’t use his fingers as a calmative afterwards. He’s finding, lately, that he has no embarrassment about doing insane or weird things with Ilya, as long as he knows he’s the only one who’s done them.
Tilting his head further onto Ilya’s shoulder, Shane lets himself enjoy the sensation. The musty taste of Ilya’s fingers as he tongues at them, still picking up the taste of cum and his own dick there; the ragged sounds of Ilya’s breath, the sweaty smell of his skin.
Then –
The low thud of a closing door.
“Shane, honey?” his mom’s voice calls out from the hall.
Shane jolts up like he’s been zapped by electricity. His heart lurches and dips and for a second he feels like it stops altogether, his breath clenching in his throat, making him choke – the white-hot feeling of panic grips him from every side as he scrambles off the bed, grasping wildly for his clothes.
A low creak, muffled steps. “Shane?” his mom’s voice again.
Hot breath lands on the back of his neck as Shane slips, fumbles with his sweatpants, failing to get them over his legs; Ilya whispers against him, “It’s okay, don’t panic.”
“My fucking parents are here, Ilya,” Shane hisses, whirling around; white spots of frantic stress blot at his eyes. Fuck, he can’t go out there like this, shirt all twisted, still smelling like sex, cum on his breath, tear tracks on his face – he’d die if they saw him like this. His dad’s low voice, chatting about something unintelligible to his mom, floods down the hall and works through the crack under the door.
“Tell them you are getting in shower,” Ilya whispers – barely a breath, really, saying it right into Shane’s ear, other hand cupping his neck. He must be able to feel the way Shane’s pulse rockets and jolts, maybe can even notice the ice-cold flood falling down Shane’s spine. Ilya pats his neck, quickly. “Quick, go on.”
Shane stumbles towards the bedroom door. Behind him he hears Ilya padding quickly into the en suite; a second later, the shower cuts on, a muffling patter of water hiding the noise of another body in the room, of Shane’s panicked breaths.
Shane cracks the bedroom door open just a hair and shouts through the gap, “I - I’m in the shower! I’ll be out in a minute!”
“Oh, okay, hon–”
Shane closes the door tight, clicks the lock on it. He’s abruptly grateful the bedroom door has one, even if it always felt a little unnecessary before. Ilya appears back in the door of the en suite, pressing his finger to his mouth; still naked, splattered with Shane’s cum, standing unabashedly nude while Shane’s panic melts and squeezes inside of him. He scrunches his eyes shut for a second, takes a shuddery breath.
Ilya’s next to him again. He drags Shane into the en suite and then rubs a hand over Shane’s back, pulls him in, presses their bodies close until Shane’s belly is following Ilya’s as they breathe together. “Don’t panic,” he says again. “It is all okay. They don’t know.”
“Fuck,” Shane mutters. “Shit. That was so close, though.”
Ilya squeezes the back of his neck, and the tension floods out of Shane’s body. He doesn’t know when Ilya got so good at that. Guilt gnaws at him, remembering this is the second time in as many weeks Ilya’s had to talk him down from a total panic attack; surely, this isn’t what Ilya signed up for when he first wanted to hook up with Shane, thinking he'd have some fun corrupting the uptight hockey prodigy. Ilya didn't ask for this broken, pathetic part of him. But Ilya just stands there for another few long seconds, and holds Shane in the language of bodies that they both speak better than anything.
“Okay,” Shane mumbles, once his heartrate has settled in his chest again. He knows they don’t have the luxury of time – ten minutes at most before he needs to have showered and be ready to act like a normal person to his parents, find out why they’re back early from lunch, whatever, but the immediate danger is gone. He swallows, and tries to drag himself back together. “Shit, okay. Fuck, I’m sorry about this.”
“It’s okay,” Ilya mumbles. His hands grip at Shane’s body, up and then down his arms, like he’s testing his own strength. The rhythmic noise of the shower fills the room, a rapid metronome. Then, more slowly, Ilya says, “You know, Shane, you could tell them. I do not mind. They are your parents, they would be okay about it. And then you would not need to be so worried about hiding.”
“What?” Shane asks. “What? No. No, I can’t do that. Shit, Ilya, are you crazy? They can’t find out.”
“Okay, it was just a suggestion,” Ilya says quickly, placating. Shane draws back a little, blinks at him. Fuck, is Ilya insane? Shane can’t tell his parents. He doesn’t even know how he’d find the words. He doesn’t want them to think about him having sex, or to look into this painful part of himself that he tried so hard to change. He doesn’t want them to think there’s something he’s failed at.
“You don’t get it,” Shane insists. “My parents gave up so much for my career, Ilya. It cost them a fortune, getting me through hockey. My dad turned down a promotion he wanted so we could stay in the right area for my Junior team. My mom left her job completely to manage my career. They drove me places every day, made their whole schedules around me for years, barely had their own lives with how much shit I had going on, and it was all to get me to this point. I can’t tell them I’m doing something so fucking dangerous that I could lose my whole career if it comes out.”
“But maybe we would not lose our career,” Ilya says. “I am not wanting to fucking come out to the whole world either, but worse case scenario. What about this whole charity thing now? League officially partnered with them just to say it would be okay if there are gays in hockey.”
“Just because the league says it’s theoretically okay, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be hell,” Shane says. He feels veering on an edge of hysteria even thinking about it. “They couldn’t kick us out just for being gay, but we could get the shit kicked out of us on the ice by every homophobic player in the league until we’re so injured we can’t ever play again. We could get traded to shitty bad teams on different sides of the country because Boston doesn’t want a pair of fags on the starting line. Everything isn’t magically okay just because the commissioner made some bullshit press release with a charity half the guys have never even heard of.”
He knows he's being unfair; the people who run that organisation are probably doing great things to try and make Shane's life a bit easier. But the brutal part of him just truly doesn't give a shit. It’s every trembling, hideous worry he carries around with him all the time. Shane rubs hard at his face, the sharp catch of stubble under his palms grating at him until it feels like his nerves are all on fire, sending hot-cold flushes of nausea through his body like a flu. Ilya rubs his hands up and down Shane’s arms, callouses catching on his skin.
“Okay, okay, you are right, I know that. But we are not talking about the whole world. Is just your parents, yes?”
“Ilya, I can’t tell them. What would that fucking say to them? Like, I don’t appreciate everything they did? Especially with –” He swallows, a thick glob of saliva that nearly chokes him. “Especially with what happened when I ended up in the hospital. I can’t worry them about another thing. I just can’t, I’m sorry.”
“Shane, they just love you, I do not think they would be worried about you being happy,” Ilya says, but Shane barely hears it. They’re wasting water by running the shower without being in it. He’s on a clock and he needs to get Ilya out of this apartment before his mom decides she needs to re-organise his sock drawer or something and everything goes to hell.
“Look, we’ve got to shower,” Shane says. “Then I’ll get dressed and go and distract them. I’ll text you when it’s safe to sneak out, okay?”
He gets into the huge, open shower stall and starts rapidly scrubbing himself down beneath the boiling spray, pinking his skin with the loofah as he works off every trace of what they were just doing. Ilya gets in behind him after a long, quiet second. He takes his turn under the water when Shane's done, washes the cum off his stomach and then pisses down the drain, which usually makes Shane get annoyed and tell him how gross he is; right now, though, neither of them say a thing.
They win the first two games of the round smoothly. Pittsburgh’s goalie isn’t pulling any of his miracle saves, and it does seem like they have more injuries than they’re letting on, the team playing cautious and defensive – not a good strategy for playoff hockey. Then, they fly to Pittsburgh.
Shane feels awful that he’s happy to be away from home. It’s just so much easier to sneak into Ilya’s hotel room than to sneak him into an apartment where Shane’s parents are also staying, and not worry about being caught. Ilya doesn’t mention the idea of coming out to anyone again in the following days, and Shane holds him tight in bed each night, their heavy, aching bodies sprawled together, Ilya breathing wetly into Shane’s neck. The comfort is easy in the dark. They’ve got more important things to focus on right now.
On the ice, Shane channels all his itchy, anxious malaise into his stick.
He’s glad that he learned how to make hockey a part of himself a long time ago – it doesn’t break with his mood, but rather gives him somewhere to put the bad things, to use everything that scares him like a driving fuel. He rams hard into Pittsburgh’s players, shouldering them into the boards, snapping between their legs with his stick, pounding relentlessly into the ice. Every cell of his body goes into it. He skates through every bruise and pain, pushing himself harder, faster. Let them call him a fag. Let them try and trade him. The miserable worst-case scenarios burn up so hard inside him that Shane plays like a demon, smashing goals into the net and imagining it hurts it. Crashes back into the bench, stings his nose and makes his eyes water with a sniff of salts, forces the flood of air into his lungs, pushes against Ilya’s hard body on the bench, smells his sweat, hops the boards back onto the ice and does it again, working his jaw around his mouth guard and shouting so hard his throat goes hoarse.
They knock out Pittsburgh in the fourth game of the round, not letting them take a single win.
Shane catches Ilya around the neck and squeezes him tight among the celebratory huddle of Raiders at centre ice, as the crowd screams around them, mostly boos; they're on Pittsburgh's turf, after all. Ilya flashes his grin sideways at Shane, his crooked teeth shark-like and captivating. In the cover of bodies where anything can look accidental, one of Ilya’s hands works down Shane’s side a little too slowly, and Shane lets it. Marley lands on them, Connors, Hayden, a muffled shout of voices barely audible over the sound of the fans, the sweat-stink and hot collision of their bodies more noticeable – Shane and Ilya twine at the centre of their entire team, and the promise beats through them all like a rapid, matching heartbeat as they shout.
“Let’s fucking go, Hollander,” Ilya growls into his ear as they pour off the ice into the tunnel, gloved hand squeezing the side of Shane’s head. Shane grabs him back, shakes him roughly from side-to-side, which makes Ilya laugh a nasty pearl of a laugh.
“No fucking it up this year, you all hear me?” Shane says, as the straggle of their team pour into the locker room together. “This is our fucking year. We’re taking it home if it kills us.”
“Hell yeah, Hollzy!” Marley whoops, scruffing Shane’s head. “That’s the fuckin’ spirit, brother!”
“Those cocksuckers in Chicago aren’t gonna know what hit them, am I right,” Connors shouts, to a chorus of rough shouts. Ilya comes up behind Marley, still grinning; rosy-cheeked and pink he looks such an absurd cross between a Renaissance cherub and an ancient Greek warrior that it makes Shane’s stomach twist and flip to even look at him. They’re surrounded by hollering teammates and Shane still sort of wants to get on his knees for Ilya right here. This is his third fucking season and he already doesn’t know how he can keep up all this hiding; Shane wants to play for twenty more years, and he can't stop looking at Ilya.
Happiness and the terror war inside Shane as he retreats to the showers. The Stanley Cup finals loom ahead of them, and the shadow of something else stretches up behind.