Archive of Our Own

The pictures circle the internet for months, afterwards.

From an objective perspective, it makes sense. They’re technically good photos: high-resolution but steady despite the chaos, taken by the professional journalists who were at the parade that day to write puff-pieces and instead found themselves in the eye of the storm.

They help the police a lot, these pictures. That’s what Shane’s led to understand, anyway. They present a clear narrative: here are the Centaurs, half-drunk and high on joy from their first Stanley Cup win, marching down the street and shaking hands and screaming in each other’s faces. Here, at the front, here is Ilya walking beside Boodram, wearing a foam finger on one hand and holding a beer can in the other, laughing at something Boodram has told him. Here is someone from the crowd calling Ilya’s name. Here is Ilya turning. Here is Ilya when he sees the gun. Here is Ilya when he’s shot. Here is Ilya pressing a hand to his chest like a scandalized old woman. Here is his hand, wet with blood. Here is Ilya on the ground. Here is Boodram, kneeling beside Ilya on the ground. Here is Boodram pressing down on Ilya’s chest, yelling something into the crowd, which has descended into chaos, people running and hiding and screaming—fathers, college students, young kids, retirees. Here are the police officers tackling the man with the gun. Here is Ilya’s face, slack and open and blank. Here is Shane, falling to his knees beside Ilya. Here is Ilya, very still. Here is Ilya, dead.

Of course, he didn’t stay dead. But for nearly seven minutes, on the way to the hospital, that’s exactly what he was.

Shane still looks at the photos, sometimes, when he can’t sleep at night. That pool of red. That calm, white face.

—

Ilya is barely inside the house when Anya tries to kill him again.

Shane only just manages to wrestle her down. “Anya, Anya, he’s wounded,” Shane huffs, trying desperately to maintain his grip on the wriggliest forty pounds of fluff he’s ever seen. Ilya, leaning back against the doorframe, is laughing, thrilled at the warm reception despite the fact that Anya’s definitely just sucker-punched him right in the stitches.

“My sweet girl,” Ilya coos. “My sweet girl, did you miss me? Did you miss me? I know, it’s been so long!”

Eventually, she calms down enough that Shane can release her. Ilya sits down right there in their entryway and pets her little head, cooing to her in Russian. Anya rolls onto her back and shows her belly, tongue lolling out, the air thick with such palpable joy that it almost bowls Shane over.

Shane makes some excuse about lunch and ducks away to the kitchen, which is just as spare and clean as it has been the last month. How many meals has he eaten here, over the past four weeks? Two. Maybe three. He can’t remember cleaning up after himself, but he must have. Ilya certainly didn’t.

Shane clutches the edge of the sink and stares out the window. He has the sense everything in their home should look terrible, bedraggled—the windows smudged and dirty, the counters covered in dust, the garden overgrown. Of course it doesn’t. It’s only been a month, and they have a gardening service. Everything is neat and trim.

In the hallway, Anya whines in delight. Shane wishes he could feel so joyful. It should feel amazing, having Ilya home. It should feel perfect.

And yet he can barely breathe around the lump in his throat.

—

Six minutes and forty-seven seconds dead. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the ambulance. Three electric shocks. Two emergency surgeries, totaling fourteen hours of work. Twenty-six units of blood. 

Shane has all these figures written in his phone. He wrote down everything the doctors said. Less damage than expected (!!!) after Ilya’s first surgery. Then, a dozen lines down, worse damage than expected, after the second. Results from x-rays and MRIs and CTS: relieved to see his spleen is intact and spinal cord seems free from worry and brain activity too difficult to interpret at this time. 

Details on visiting hours and the name of the charge nurse to whom Shane was supposed to give the list of approved visitors. A contact number for the hospital PR department in case Shane wanted to make a joint statement with any doctors. A contact number for the head of hospital security in case journalists or paparazzi snuck in. Log in credentials for an online portal where Shane could view Ilya’s chart, full of the doctors’ emotionless commentary. 

At one point, a social worker came by. She had blue hair and looked vaguely familiar, though Shane couldn’t place her. “I’m here to talk about what type of care you think your husband would want to receive,” she said, and when Shane just frowned at her, added, “Extraordinary measures. Life support. Things of that nature.”

Shane had done his best to guess what Ilya would have asked for. Resuscitation, yes, but he wouldn’t want to live on a vent for the rest of his life. Experimental treatments were fine. Sure, yes, he would want to be an organ donor. Yes, he would give his skin, too. Yes, his blood vessels. Yes, his eyes—his eyes? Well, if his eyes could help someone. Yes, yes, yes. 

Shane signed the paper, and then he wrote down all these details into his notes app, as if this was something he was going to forget. The woman smiled at him as she left the room, and it was only then that Shane realized that she looked just like a science teacher he’d had as a child. He had the wild idea to ask her if she knew him. But by then she was gone.

—

For the first month or so after Ilya gets out of the hospital, Yuna and David move in. “The neighbor can water our plants,” Yuna had said, when Shane offered a half-hearted protest. “There is no where else we need to be right now.”

It’s nice, having them there: it takes the pressure off. David manages the grocery list and cooks their dinners every night, Yuna makes it her personal mission to eliminate every trace of dog hair from the corners of the house, and both of them spoil Anya to death with half a dozen vigorous play sessions and long walks each day.

All Shane has to do is be with Ilya. He spends long hours sitting on the loveseat, waiting for Ilya’s pain medication reminder to go off on Shane’s phone, watching Ilya as he snoozes on the couch. ESPN playing on low in the background. The vents sighing out a cool breeze to counter the summer heat. Eventually, Shane realizes he needs something to do with his hands, so he watches a Youtube video about knitting and orders some needles and yarn and starts making scarves to donate to the homeless shelter in downtown Ottawa next winter.

Sometimes the love seat doesn’t feel close enough, so Shane takes his knitting to the floor, sitting with his head resting back against Ilya’s shin or shoulder or stomach, slowly counting stitches as he practices his psychiatrist-recommended deep breathing techniques.

“That is very ugly scarf,” Ilya says once, his sleepy breath ghosting over the back of Shane’s neck. Shane wants to smack him, but as soon as he feels the urge he remembers that Ilya is seriously injured and can’t handle even the lightest hit. He closes his eyes and breathes in and out, slowly.

“It is fucking beautiful,” he says, when he trusts his voice again. “And just for that, I am going to make you wear it.”

Ilya groans. “Hollander, it is July.”

“Doctor’s offices get cold,” Shane says. Somehow Ilya’s hand has found its way to the nape of Shane’s neck, and is just resting there, warm and heavy.

“I will look like babushka,” Ilya says. “I will look like tuberculosis patient. No, worse—I will look like man with giraffe neck he has to hide from public view. Giraffe neck covered in hickeys.”

Ilya goes on, for several more minutes, listing all the horrible things he will look like while wearing Shane’s scarf. Shane doesn’t even pretend to argue, just sets his knitting needles down and listens to Ilya’s rough, beautiful voice.

—

The first time Shane saw Ilya’s scars, he thought he might throw up.

Of course, they were different, then. Not so much scars as open wounds, furrowed into little mounds by black spider stitches, weeping into the bandages. One slice up by Ilya’s liver, where a lobe had to be removed to stop the bleeding; one slice low on his belly, where trauma surgeons had to dig around searching for hemorrhaging bleeders; and one line in the middle, made when the bullet itself was plucked out. All three of them bisected by the dark line of hair that crawls up the middle of Ilya’s stomach.

Shane didn’t miss how much the scars looked like Ilya’s cross. Ilya didn’t miss it either. He laughed the first time he saw his wounds, one shaking hand hovering over his stomach. He said something in Russian, too slurred for Shane to understand, but he thought he heard the word mama.

—

They had released Ilya from the hospital because he was stable and because they could do little more for him there than could be done at home. “He’ll recover better if he’s comfortable,” one of the doctors had said. “It’s all rest and letting your body do the work from this point out, anyway.”

Of course Shane likes having Ilya back in their home. In their bed at night; on their couch during the day; sitting in the little plastic chair Yuna bought for the shower so that Ilya doesn’t have to stand up for fifteen minutes while Shane washes him. “I can wash myself,” he had protested, at first, and then three minutes in he was breathing hard and leaning against the shower wall just from the effort of trying to wash his hair.

“Okay fine,” he had admitted, as Shane stepped under the spray to prop him up. “Maybe I need sexy husband to clean me.”

It’s all rest, the doctor had said, and yet of course Ilya isn’t content to sit back and rest. He’s always trying to get up and get himself a cup of soup, walk himself to the bathroom, fetch Anya’s toys from the bin so they can play. “You know, if you bust open your stitches by being an idiot, I will divorce you,” Shane says one day, after he’s caught Ilya sitting on the floor of the kitchen, having gotten winded trying to go to the pantry.

“And miss out on the recovery sex?” Ilya says, grunting only slightly as Shane hauls him to his feet. “You would not do this. It will be too good. The anticipation, all these months of waiting…”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Okay, I’ll stay with you long enough to fuck you, and then I’ll leave you.”

“Ah, but after you fuck me, you will remember how good it is,” Ilya says. “Then you will never leave my bed again.”

“You are the biggest dick I’ve ever met,” Shane says, depositing Ilya gently onto the couch.

“Grammar problem,” Ilya says. He’s flushed and breathing hard, just from that short, supported walk. “I think you mean have.”

Yuna tries ordering a bell online, which she leaves on the coffee table next to Ilya with strict instructions for him to ring it whenever he needs anything. “I mean anything,” she says sternly, and he nods and promises he will, and then ten minutes later he’s limping his way across the room to get the remote.

He only uses the bell when Shane is sitting right next to him, and only then to make absurd requests that he knows Shane won’t fulfill. “Hello, husband,” he’ll say, the clear tine of the bell still ringing in the air. “I would like to request a blowjob please.” Or, “Excuse me, sweetheart, can you please get me three double cheeseburgers from In-N-Out for dinner?” Once he requests Shane buy him a speedboat. “To speed up my recovery. Get it?”

“I wish that boy would just ask for help,” Yuna sighs to Shane one night. The two of them are washing the pots from dinner, Shane scrubbing, Yuna drying. In the living room, Ilya is snoozing on the couch while David does a puzzle under Anya’s watchful eye.

“Yeah, he’s not very good at that,” Shane says, attacking the crusted tomato sauce on the bottom of the saucepan with a Scrub Daddy. Ilya had bought it. He liked the name. He called Shane Scrub Daddy in bed for a week afterwards. When was that? No long before playoffs started, Shane thinks. Not long before everything went wrong.

“Well, I suppose we all have flaws,” Yuna says. There’s a smile in her voice. Shane can’t imagine why. He mostly just wants to break something.

—

The police caught the attacker immediately, but Shane didn’t actually see his face until much later, when he caught a glimpse of a news story in the big TV in the hospital cafeteria.

ROZANOV’S SHOOTER PREVIOUSLY ARRESTED FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, the headline said. Then there was the mugshot. Brown hair was combed neatly over a too-large forehead, brows were furrowed together slightly. A birthmark by one eye. Wrinkled cheeks.

He looked almost normal, in the picture. Unassuming. In fact, Shane wouldn’t know him if he walked into Ilya’s hospital room. In fact, he could have been the one to serve Shane his hospital dinner, or to mop the floor by the nurse’s station, and Shane wouldn’t know a thing.

—

Ilya looks different, now. Shane can’t ignore it, now that they’re home from the hospital and he can’t use the excuse of fluorescent lighting or terrible hospital clothes.

His collarbones are visible through his shirt when he sits up. His wrist bones are like two hard stones under his skin. He’s paler than Shane has ever seen him, and his normally-gleaming curls are flat and dull. When Shane strips Ilya to help him shower, he can’t help but notice all the places where muscle has withered away: his calves, his thighs, the strong lines of his back. 

It’s still Ilya, of course. It’s just less of him than Shane has ever seen before. So Shane kisses the parts of Ilya’s body as they reveal themselves to him: here a kiss for the beautiful line of his shoulders, here a kiss for the lovely twist of his hip, here a kiss for the knob of Ilya’s ankle, which Shane has spent so little time before appreciating, and which he is now so grateful to get to see for one more day, one more hour, one more minute.

“Beautiful,” Shane says, over and over, even when Ilya is sleeping and can’t hear him. Maybe Ilya’s body will hear him. Maybe the parts of Ilya’s body that used to be there will hear him. They’ll hear him and they’ll come back from the brink.

—

During Ilya’s second week in the hospital, he caught an infection. Any progress he made reversed itself neatly and swiftly, like a leaping fish caught in the jaws of a shark.

Soon he was delirious with drugs and fever, calling out for his mother in his sleep.“Mama,” he begged in Russian, his forehead furrowed, his skin slick with sweat. “Don’t leave me with him, please. You know what he will do to me. Mama, don’t go. Please. Please, Mama.”

Shane had petted his hair and reassured him in low, steady tones, until finally the hour turned and Ilya was able to get another dose of morphine. He quieted not long after that, sinking into deeper sleep, and Shane waited until he was sure Ilya wouldn’t wake before he went out into the hall and sank down on the ground and put his head between his knees, breathing slowly.

Later that same evening, Ilya fell into the same delirious spiral, this time demanding to know where his mother was, who had taken her. “I’m sorry,” Shane said to him, again and again and again, in English and Russian and French, hoping something, anything, would break through the wall. “She’s gone, Ilya. She’s dead.” For a moment, sometimes, it seemed like Ilya understood, and the sounds he made—and then five minutes later he was back to asking for his mother, and Shane’s heart broke, and broke, and broke.

—

Ilya had many nurses during the weeks he was hospitalized, but his most frequent nurse, his favorite, was a woman named Oliwia. She had moved to Canada from Soviet Poland many years ago, a university student studying literature with dreams of an academic future. Then she got to Canada and found she didn’t speak enough English to continue in her studies, so she switched to medicine, a field full of international transplants who thought nothing of someone pulling out a dictionary mid-conversation.

She and Ilya discussed many things: which Slavic country produced the best dumplings, gymnastics during the Soviet era, the best spots to find Thai food around the hospital. Mostly, though, they discussed literature. 

Shane had known Ilya liked books, but his own reading tastes were mostly limited to hockey biographies, and so he hadn’t realized how broad Ilya’s interests were. Ilya and Oliwia discussed spy thrillers and popular science books, Palestinian poetry and Scandinavian epics, novels set on Jupiter and novels set in poor neighborhoods outside Dar es Salaam. Their favorite topic was famous Russian writers, with Gogol featuring highest on the list.

“The Nose is the greatest short story ever written,” Ilya said once, and Oliwia, busy changing his catheter bag, had scoffed.

“Spoken like a true Russian,” she said. “Clearly, you have never read Kafka.”

The morning Ilya was set to be discharged from the hospital, she gave him a gift: a used paperback copy of The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka in Russian, wrapped up in brown paper with a phone number written on the outside. “So you can call me and tell me I am right,” she said. “Remember, In the Penal Colony is better than Metamorphosis.”

The book takes place of pride on Ilya’s nightstand. For many weeks, if Ilya isn’t sleeping or sleepily watching TV, he’s reading that book, a pen in one hand and a crinkle between his brows. 

One night, when Ilya goes to bed early, Shane gives one of the stories a try. It’s written in simple language, but it’s still in Russian, and it’s slower going than he’d like. He falls asleep halfway through and dreams that he’s fallen into the story, that he is the doctor trying desperately to reach a sick man through a winter snowstorm, and that that sick man is Ilya, and that Ilya will die if Shane can’t give him a blood transfusion in time.

Shane wakes with a jolt to the darkness of their bedroom, the book still open on his chest, Ilya beside him breathing slow and steady.

—

“My love,” Ilya had said, the first time he’d really woken up post-surgery—after two false starts where he mostly just blinked dumbly up at the ceiling as the doctors swarmed his bedside. “You’re crying. Why are you crying?”

Shane swiped at his eyes. “Why do you think?”

“Is it because you look like shit?” Ilya asked. “If I looked as terrible as you, I would also cry.”

It almost made Shane laugh. “Fuck off.”

Ilya fumbled through the bedsheets until he could brush his hand over Shane’s. “Go home, Hollander,” he says. “Take a shower. Sleep. If your husband sees you like this, he might divorce you.”

—

Shane gets an email from the D.A.’s office. Ilya’s shooter will be charged with a hate crime. We have evidence to suggest that Mr. Rozanov’s sexuality was the primary motivating factor behind the shooting. We believe a judge will find this evidence compelling, opening the avenue for a potentially extended sentence or increased fine. We hope that this will bring you some measure of security…

On and on it drones, this dusty, meaningless legalese. Shane deletes the email, then fishes around in his trash bin to delete it from there, too. He doesn’t mention it to Ilya, and if Ilya gets the email himself, he doesn’t mention it to Shane, either.

—

For a long time after he leaves the hospital, Ilya keeps waking up in the night terribly nauseous, too sick to go back to sleep. At first, the doctors think it’s his pain medication, but they switch his prescriptions and the nausea doesn’t abate, and eventually they decide it must be something about how his inner organs are healing themselves, re-establishing nerve connections to the brain.

Occasionally, the nausea is so bad that Ilya has to dash for the toilet. On these nights, Shane is woken by the frantic shuffling of the mattress as Ilya lurches out of bed. As Ilya retches, Shane follows him to the ensuite, fills a cup with cool water, wets a washcloth, then sits beside Ilya, his legs splayed around Ilya’s hips, so he can hold back Ilya’s lovely curls.

One evening, Ilya’s mad sprint wakes Shane up from a nightmare. In the nightmare, he and Ilya were on a power play for the Centaurs, about to score the game-winning goal, but Shane knew that something was about to go wrong. He could see the dark figure standing in the goal, he saw the weapon in his hands. But in the way of dream logic, he couldn’t stop himself from skating forward. 

Now, plastered against the front of the toilet bowl, Ilya is warm in Shane’s arms. Too-warm, probably, and Shane knows how horrible he must be feeling right now, aches for the frustration at how Ilya’s body’s betrayed him, but—

He’s alive.

Alive.

Shane feels the tears coming but he’s too exhausted to stop them. 

“What is it, Hollander?” Ilya asks, hazy with sleep and sick and still concerned.

Shane buries his face in the back of Ilya’s sweaty t-shirt, pressing a kiss to his shoulder blade. “I’m just so glad you’re here.”

—

There’s plenty of information online about Ilya’s shooting. Twitter accounts dedicated solely to providing “official” updates on Ilya’s wellbeing; Reddit threads dissecting the timeline of events; true crime podcasts delving into the shooter’s history with law enforcement. Dozens of conspiracy theories: there was a second shooter, the second shooter was a former U.S. Navy Seal, the second shooter was an assassin hired by the NHL’s PR team. The NHL has to put out a statement about that last one. Shane screenshots it and shows it to Ilya, who laughs so hard he gets hiccups.

Shane doesn’t seek any of this out, but he does seek out posts from Ilya’s fans. A few have them have written long, heartfelt letters to Ilya which they’ve posted publicly on their Instagrams or Tumblrs in the hopes that he’ll see them. Others have painted portraits of Anya, or made betting pools on what Ilya is doing in his free time. Playing Call of Duty is the winner by a long shot. Shane wishes he could show them the dozen puzzles of meadow scenes that Ilya’s finished since he’s come home.

When pre-season starts up again, speculation comes with it: will Ilya be back to play this year, will he be back to play next year, will he ever be back to play? Sports pundits start doing deep-dives into Ilya’s career, breaking down exactly how and exactly why he’s so exceptional. Headlines start running like ILYA ROZANOV: BEST HOCKEY PLAYER OF ALL TIME?

It’s trumped up, of course. Ilya’s a generational talent, but he’s no Wayne Gretzky. Still, against his better judgement, Shane prints out the article and leaves it on Ilya’s nightstand. 

Fuck you, he adds in the top left corner, in bright green ink, just to keep Ilya’s ego in check.

—

Yuna is out getting dinner and Shane is looking for Ilya’s newest prescription bottle when he hears low voices from the study.

He shouldn’t eavesdrop. He really shouldn’t.

Shane pauses outside the doorway.

“Yuna and I have told you before that you are like another son to us,” David is saying. Shane can imagine the scene: David in one leather armchair, Ilya in the other. Ilya sitting straight upright, even though his stiff muscles must surely be pulling at his ribs. Quiet as a rabbit hiding in its den. Years later, still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Maybe I’m wrong here, but I get the sense, sometimes, that you think we’re just saying that. That we want to support Shane and that’s why we’re saying it. But, Ilya—“

David sighs. “When I say I can’t imagine our family without you in it, I mean that. The way you make Yuna laugh. The energy you bring when the rest of us can be too quiet. And how kind you are, how good you are at listening. You know, how many times you’ve sat and listened to me blab about cyphers or puzzles or whatever book I read that Yuna and Shane are already sick of. And, gosh, you work so hard, Ilya. Even when you’re pretending you don’t. Not to mention everything you do for Shane.”

There’s a sound suspiciously like a sniffle before David continues, “As a parent, of course what I want is for Shane to be happy. And yes, that means I want things to be easy for him, too. But, I don’t know, maybe it’s selfish of me, but even knowing how hard the path has been for you two, I don’t wish anything had gone differently, because then we wouldn’t have you. And, boy, Ilya, I just don’t think I can convey to you what a loss that’d be for us.”

For a long moment, there’s silence—and then a sound like a half-choked sob, and Ilya is saying in Russian, his accent thick, “I’m sorry, I don’t—“

“Come here, son,” David says, and there’s a shuffling sound, and then Ilya really starts to cry.

Shane closes his eyes against the tears pricking and listens to his husband break down.

—

Later, Shane finds his dad in the backyard, watering the patch of tulip bulbs that the sprinklers already drenched.

“Hey,” David says when he sees Shane, lowering the hose. “Is everything okay?”

Shane marches forward determinedly, pulling his dad into a hug. David seems startled but gives in quickly enough, tossing the hose aside with one hand as the other claps Shane between his shoulder blades.

“Thank you,” Shane says roughly, into the soft flannel of his dad’s button-down, exactly like he used to when he was upset as a boy.

“For what?”

Shane shakes his head and squeezes his dad a little tighter. “For everything.”

—

A week after Shane’s parents move back to Ottawa, Shane and Ilya have their first big blowout argument.

Shane barely remembers how they get there, but one minute they’re sitting at the kitchen table eating taco bowls and debating the merits of avocado, and the next Ilya is saying, “We should go on a road trip to Mexico.”

“Oh yeah?” Shane says, spearing a bell pepper. “That’s a pretty long road trip.”

“Well, we have time before season starts,” Ilya says.

Shane drops his fork. “You mean now? You want to go on a road trip right now?”

Ilya shrugs and stuffs a too-big chunk of chicken in his mouth. “Why not?”

Shane wonders if this is what it feels like to hallucinate. “Uh, maybe because you haven’t even been cleared to exercise yet? Your wound isn’t even fully healed. If something happened while we were traveling—“

Ilya rolls his eyes. “Oh my god, Hollander, you are so dramatic. Nothing would happen, and even if it did, there are hospitals in America.”

“We are not doing anything that risks landing us in a hospital, American or otherwise,” Shane says firmly.

It’s a dumb thing to say, even if it’s true: Ilya takes any statement like that as a challenge. A rule he has to break. “I don’t know why you think you can decide what I am going to do,” Ilya says stiffly.

“Let’s try: because I’m the only one of us that can drive right now,” Shane says. He’s suddenly not hungry, and he drops his fork on his plate, chair scraping the floor as he stands. “Also, because I’m your husband.”

“Oh, I see,” Ilya says, crossing his arms over his chest. “So as my husband, you are my jailer, yes? Plan to keep me in plastic packaging for rest of my life so I do not break.”

Shane glares. “That’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair is that I could die at any moment and this would have been for nothing,” Ilya says. “This is second chance and I am doing nothing with it. Just sitting in house like old woman and watching other people do things.”

“I am not talking about this with you,” Shane decides, and marches out of the kitchen, because it’s that or give in to the panic clogging his throat and have a full breakdown by the dishwasher.

He finds Ilya two hours later, after he’s scrubbed the grout in the guest bathroom and cleaned the inside of the toilet tank and put his head between his knees and did deep breathing for a while.

Ilya is on the couch, a blanket half-covering his lap, scowling at the TV. Shane looks: it’s muted coverage of a horse race.

Shane picks up the remote and turns the TV off, and only then does Ilya look at him. “You’re not going to die at any moment,” Shane says, which maybe isn’t the best opening but it’s all he’s got.

“Technically, any of us could die at any moment,” Ilya points out, which isn’t the best response, either, so they’re probably even.

Shane gives Ilya a look, and Ilya sighs. “I am sick of doing nothing,” he says. “I used to do so much. Now everything is so—slow.”

“It won’t be like this forever,” Shane says. “Your body went through a lot, Ilya, it needs time to recover.”

But Ilya just rolls his eyes. “Yes, I know this, you think I do not know this? Everyone only tells me all the time. I want it to go faster.”

Shane considers him, the bags under his eyes, the way his shoulders are still thin, despite everything. He can imagine how much it frustrates him, to see himself in the mirror when he’s used to seeing a Greek god in flesh and sweat. “You never were the patient type.”

Ilya raises an eyebrow, something hot flashing in his eyes. “Oh, now I’m the impatient one? Because it seems to me you’re the one always begging me to hurry up and fuck you.”

Shane laughs because it’s true, and Ilya smiles when he does, like a reflex. Shane crosses the room to slide onto the couch beside Ilya, raising his arm so Ilya can rest his head on Shane’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I said we can’t go anywhere,” Shane says. “We can go somewhere. Just maybe not so far.”

“Chicago?” Ilya tries.

“I was thinking maybe the grocery store,” Shane says, and Ilya snorts. “Or Bood’s house, if you want to get really crazy.”

“Wow,” Ilya drawls. “Not even the cottage? Cruel, Hollander.”

“Well,” Shane says, nuzzling over the crown over Ilya’s head, pressing kisses to his curls. “As much as I love having you all to myself, I would rather not be thirty kilometers from the nearest hospital.”

Ilya sighs, but he also nestles closer into Shane’s neck. “Overprotective mother hen,” he chides, but the sounds are half-mumbled.

Shane looks at the clock. Eight p.m. on the dot.

He kisses Ilya’s head again. “Do you want to lie down in my lap?”

“I would love to,” Ilya says. “But tragically, I am not clear for sex.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “To relax, dumbass. C’mon.”

They shuffle a bit so Ilya has enough space to get his legs up, and Shane puts a pillow on his thighs, and then there Ilya is, blinking his big beautiful eyes up at Shane, his curls gleaming up and just begging Shane to pet them. And why wouldn’t he? So he does. 

“Might fall asleep,” Ilya mumbles, eyelids already drooping. Shane bites back a smile and pats Ilya’s chest with his free hand.

“That’s okay,” Shane says. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

—

A few days later, Shane finally gives in and cedes the job of media management to Ilya. Ilya, who’s been trying to send sneaky emails to Farrah for weeks, is triumphantly ostentatious in the way he clacks out messages on his laptop keyboard, connecting to Zoom calls with his microphone on full volume so Shane can hear the ding before Ilya’s cheery, “Farrah, how are you?”

The media takes it out of him, especially when Farrah starts trusting him with quick phone calls to reporters. It’s just basic statements on his improved health and further healing, but it’s more than he’s done in a long time. “Yes, I am doing very well,” Shane hears from the kitchen. A few moments later: “We will see how things go, but I am optimistic for next season, yes. Yes, thank you, Daniel.”

Half the time, when Shane goes to find Ilya to see if he’s finished his self-assigned work, he finds him conked out on the couch, phone still in one hand, resting on his chest. Part of Shane worries it’s inhibiting Ilya’s recovery, this work, but then he sees the way Ilya smiles after a good interview, hears him laughing during a chat with Farrah, and he stops himself.

Ilya is such an extrovert. It must be tough for him, to see nobody but Shane and his family for so long.

Shane starts inviting the Centaurs over to hang out, one or two at a time. He makes a spreadsheet: Bood and Cassie this Tuesday, then Troy and Harris over the weekend, then all the rookies together at once so they don’t get awkward about it.

Most of the time, Shane hangs around with them. It’s good to catch up on what they’re all doing, to remember that a world exists outside of this house and the hospital. He thinks it’s good for the guys, too, to see Ilya. To realize he really is getting better.

Still, every visit, Shane makes an excuse to disappear for just a little while so that Ilya can have some one-on-one time with his boys. Shane doesn’t eavesdrop and he doesn’t ask what they talk about, but more than once when he comes back in, he finds them with red eyes and sniffly noses.

By the end of the night, Ilya’s usually too exhausted to walk anyone to the door, so Shane sees everyone out, ordering Ilya to stay put on threat of a blowjob ban, just so Ilya can roll his eyes and pretend to protest in front of the guys.

“He looks good,” Hazy says one night, shrugging on his jacket in the front hallway. “So much better than I thought he would.”

Shane glances over his shoulder, the silhouette of Ilya on the couch, already slumping over into sleep. “Yeah,” he says.

“I mean, seriously,” Hazy says. “In my mind he’s still like he was in the hospital, you know? All those tubes. And this—“ He clears his throat, shakes his head. “You’re taking real good care of him, Holly.”

Shane’s eyes burn. He blinks hard. “I hope so,” he says.

Hazy claps his shoulder. “I know you are,” he says. “Just make sure someone’s taking care of you too, yeah?”

—

“What’s up with all these visitors?” Ilya finally asks one night, while the two of them are lying in bed. “You getting lonely, or something?”

Shane rolls onto his side so he can see Ilya better. He’s propped up on two pillows like the doctors recommended, leaving him looking down at Shane, backlit by the glow of the moon outside the window. “I just thought you might be missing hanging out with people other than me,” Shane says. “You seem to be really enjoying the media stuff.”

“Well, I did miss the guys,” Ilya says. “But the media stuff—I like Farrah, sure, but it’s not about that. It’s more that I know you hate media. And you’re doing a lot for me right now.” He shrugs, a little aborted movement against his mountain of pillows. “So it feels good to do something for you.”

—

The first week Ilya was in the hospital, Shane didn’t sleep enough to dream. Just snatches of naps here and there: resting his chin on the side of Ilya’s hospital bed; his head crooked back on an uncomfortable hospital armchair.

Eventually, someone convinced a nurse to take pity on him, and they wheeled a cot in. Cassie and Lisa were there: Cassie bullied him into bed and covered him with a blanket she’d brought from home, while Lisa took up the vacated post by Ilya’s bed, one eye on Ilya’s monitors, the other on a medical journal she’d found in the break room.

Even running on a week of terrible sleep and an exhausting playoffs series before that, Shane could barely manage to keep his eyes closed. His dreams were nauseating and fitful, full of different versions of Ilya dying. He kept waking up heaving, and Cassie kept coming over to whisper that everything was fine, and he kept falling asleep just to wake up again, an endless ouroboros of exhaustion and fear. 

Eventually, he woke to the sunrise creeping into the room. Cassie was sprawled on the floor, using her puffy winter jacket as a pillow. Lisa was still reading the medical journal. She smiled at him when she saw him open her eyes. Her expression was tired but there was real warmth there, too. “He’s going to pull through,” she told him, and there was something in her voice. So sure. All her expertise, which made the other doctors so tentative, making her confident. Maybe Shane just wanted to believe it. He could have kissed her, in that moment. Instead, he went back to sleep.

—

The surgeons had done their best, but even months after Ilya’s operation, his scars have changed the map of his abdomen. They’re thick and tight, deep purple and pulling at the healthy skin around them. The doctors said it was important that Ilya kept moving, to prevent the scar tissue to attaching from his muscles. They evaluate him at every visit, carefully palpating the scars, feeling the slick shift of his organs underneath.

They say the scars have to get used to different types of touch, so Shane runs his fingers over them delicately while he and Ilya lie together on the couch. He kisses them on his way down to Ilya’s cock, and he drags his fingernails over them, lightly, when he’s lying awake watching Ilya sleep. The physical therapist gives them feathers, soft cotton swabs, tiny cold magnets: Shane forces Ilya to sit back and let Shane drag them across his skin, until Ilya is trembling and bucking up against the arm Shane has around his hips, and the little toys fall away.

Every night, Shane massages Vaseline into the scars. He’s methodical about it, starting right in the center of Ilya’s solar plexus and working his way clockwise around his stomach. Twenty seconds per scar. Touch firm but gentle. Ilya watches him do it. Sometimes he runs his fingers through Shane’s hair.

—

Practice starts up again, and Shane doesn’t go. Harris makes a post on the Centaurs’ Instagram showing the players heading out onto the ice for their first day back. The comments are filled with people asking where Shane is. Maybe he just had a conflict today, one person writes. It’s one day. But the comments get louder as the days pass and open practices start and nobody reports seeing him on the rink.

“Are you ever going back to practice?” Ilya asks Shane, a week in. They’re doing a puzzle: an illustrated collection of puppies in a wicker basket. Anya naps by the fire, paws in the air.

“I’ll go back when you go back,” Shane says, without looking up from the coffee table. He’s looking for a very particular edge piece.

“That is stupid,” Ilya says, a line of real anger in his tone. Still, Shane doesn’t look up. He finds the edge piece and clicks it into place. He starts looking for the distinctive sweep of the Golden Retriever’s tail.

“I cannot play hockey,” Ilya says. “It is decided for me, yes? And you have choice. You have choice to play and you throw it away.”

“Would you go, if it was me?”

Ilya scoffs. “Does not matter. Was not you.”

Shane finally meets his eyes. Ilya’s brow is furrowed, lips turned down. He looks so pretty, even when he’s mad. “It could have been me,” Shane says. “He just saw you first. If it was the other way around…”

“And if I became figure skater, we never would have met,” Ilya says. “So?”

Ilya is pretty when he’s annoying, too. “So, we’re in this together,” Shane says. “We’re doing this together.”

Ilya softens. Is he prettier when he’s giving in to Shane? Maybe, but Shane doesn’t think so. “We can do this together, and you can play hockey,” Ilya says. “It does not make it—less, for you to play.”

“I will play,” Shane agrees, turning back to the puzzle. “When you do.”

—

At the beginning, the gifts from fans came in in droves. Stuffed centaurs, hand-knitted blankets, homemade cards, chocolates from Geneva, protein bars from California, custom hospital gowns, novel candles. Books from self-published authors, photo albums made from Ilya’s Instagram pictures, chew toys for Anya, Build-A-Bears dressed like hockey players, vouchers for pizza restaurants near the hospital, long lists of instructions about how to maximize reimbursements from insurance companies, a mug declaring Ilya the best granddad in Florida, vases of sunflowers. Vases of roses, vases of forget-me-nots, vases of daisies, vases of ferns, vases of lilies, vases of poppies, vases of flowers made out of pipe cleaners by childish hands.

Eventually, Bood made a post on Twitter thanking fans for their generosity and suggesting those who wanted to support Ilya’s recovery should redirect their funds to the Irina Foundation. Within an hour, the site was so swamped that the donation portal went down and emergency tech support was called in. Even months later, those pity donations are still trickling in, fattening the Foundation’s coffer like a sacrificial goat.

Shane didn’t know what to do with all the gifts, so he shoved them into a guest bedroom and forgot about them until Ilya stumbled into them months later. Together, the two of them pick through the mountain of boxes, Ilya mostly reading cards and flipping through scrapbooks while Shane ferrets out the moldy homemade cookies and desiccated flowers.

“Listen,” Ilya will say occasionally, raising a construction-paper get well soon card and clearing his throat. Or, “look,” and he’ll be waving around some terribly sloppy crocheted pride flag or a now-expired box of Russian candy.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to get through all of this,” Shane says when, after two hours, their stack of unopened gifts looks no less intimidating than it did before.

He means it as a gripe, but Ilya only smiles, bright and happy. “What?” Shane asks. “Are you enjoying imagining us with a rat problem?” He really should have had someone look through the boxes for food, at least; they could have donated it. Such a waste.

“No,” Ilya says. “No, no, it’s just.” He shrugs, looking down at the stuffy he’s holding in his hands. A worn orange bunny rabbit, with a pink stain on one ear. A gift from a child, maybe. “It is hard to believe,” he says. “That so many people care about me this much.”

—

To his credit, Ilya waits until they’re safely ensconced in their SUV to declare, “Okay, we will fuck tonight.”

Twenty minutes ago, Ilya’s doctor gave them the all-clear for normal sex. Shane anticipated this reaction, because while Ilya was checking out at the front desk with the nurse—from whom he managed to nab a lemon lollipop, because nobody is immune to his smile—Shane cleared their calendars for the evening. 

Now, Shane fiddles with the radio, cranks the car heat—the cold has been giving Ilya so much trouble since the injury—and adjusts his rearview mirror before saying, casually, “Maybe.”

Ilya gapes at him. “Maybe? What do you mean maybe? It has been four months, do you not miss your husband?”

Every fucking night, Shane wants to say. I think about your cock all day long. I want to suck you until I lose my voice. I want to bounce on your dick until I can’t any more. I want you to bend me over your desk and fuck me until I can’t walk for two days, and then I want you to do it again.

“I mean, sure,” Shane says, as he guides them out of the parking garage. “It’s not, like, urgent, though.”

Shane smiles at the parking attendant as Ilya burbles incoherently next to him. 

“Cruel,” Ilya says finally. “You are being cruel. Your husband has been through so much, and now you will not even let him fuck you properly.”

Shane shrugs. He’s full of shit, of course, but Ilya knows he’s full of shit, and Shane knows that Ilya loves that. They may not really hate each other any more, but it’s nice foreplay to pretend.

When they get home, they have whole-wheat turkey sandwiches for lunch, because Ilya is ravenous and Shane has read many studies about the importance of appropriately-timed nutrition in injury recovery, and then Ilya passes out on the couch for his usual afternoon nap, because he might be allowed to fuck but he’s not recovered enough to get through the day yet. While he sleeps, Shane goes upstairs and digs through the guest closet for the package he ordered a month ago, in anticipation of this moment.

When Ilya wakes up, Shane’s sitting cross-legged on the carpet, working on the puzzle Ilya has laid out over the coffee table. He’s wearing a Centaurs jersey with the number 81 and the name ROZANOV on the back, and absolutely nothing else.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Shane says, rising to his feet and enjoying the way Ilya’s wide eyes track him. The jersey covers his cock, but only barely.

“Cannot be,” Ilya says, and actually reaches up to rub his eyes like something out of a cartoon. “This is too good to be real. Am still dreaming.”

Shane shrugs. “If that’s what you want to think,” he says. “I guess I’ll just have to take care of myself then, yeah?”

He laughs at Ilya’s growl as he lurches up to chase him.

It’s beautiful, it’s perfect, it’s everything Shane wanted. The doctor said any position is fine, but Shane wants to be careful, so he rides Ilya and does all the work, bouncing on his cock while Ilya groans and moans and says a lot of things in Russian about how Shane is the biggest slut he’s ever seen in his life.

“Hold on,” Shane demands, knocking at Ilya’s knee with elbow until it falls open, changing the angle just enough so that Ilya is hitting right at his prostate. “Hold on for me.”

“Oh, fuck,” Ilya groans, beyond any other insults, and he’s so beautiful, so beautiful, the sweat-soaked line of his neck, his face screwed up in pleasure instead of pain. Shane presses his thumb in the divot of Ilya’s collarbone and feels his heartbeat pulsing and he comes like that, eyes closed, the scent of Ilya hovering around him like a cloud.

Afterwards, Ilya insists on getting up to get a warm washcloth, even though he’s looking a little peakish. Shane watches him walk to the bathroom, evaluating the almost-normalcy of his gait, the relative lack of effort as he rises from bed.

Ilya wipes him down very gently, then tosses the rag onto the floor and crawls back under the covers.

“That’s going to damage the wood,” Shane says, as if he wouldn’t rather pay for a new floor than have Ilya leave his arms right now.

Ilya kisses him between his eyebrows, where Shane’s worry wrinkles live. “Thank you for my present,” he says. “You look incredibly sexy in my jersey.”

“Well, that’s not a surprise, I look sexy in everything,” Shane says, and is rewarded with the yellow-orange boom of Ilya’s surprised laugh. “Anyway, I know how you can pay me back.”

Ilya raises an eyebrow.

“The jerseys were buy one get one,” Shane says. “So I got you one, too. Yours is in the top drawer of your dresser.”

“Uh, you know I already have my own jersey, right, Hollander? Did I fuck all the sense out of your brain?”

Shane rolls his eyes even as he nestles further into Ilya’s arms. “It’s my jersey, dumbass. I thought you would make a pretty puck bunny.”

Ilya waggles his eyebrows. “Interesting,” he says. “Well, I guess there is only one way to find out.”

—

Ilya makes an exceptionally pretty puck bunny when he’s railing Shane into the mattress.

—

The night before Ilya’s first practice back, Shane cuts his hair.

It’s been months since he last cut it, and it hasn’t grown as much as it normally would, but it’s still getting moppy, especially by the ears. Shane makes Ilya shower, then puts him on a stool in the middle of the kitchen like his mom used to do with him as a kid, wrapping a towel around his shoulders to catch the clippings.

For once, Ilya doesn’t squirm all over the place, just sits still and lets Shane work. Shane feels Ilya’s eyes on him when he moves around to the front, pulling both sides of his bangs taut to check they’re equal lengths, but Shane ignores him. 

“You should have been a barber,” Ilya says afterwards, examining his new haircut in the mirror. “It’s perfect.”

Shane, hovering behind him in the way he always seems to be nowadays, presses a kiss to Ilya’s shoulder.

Ilya hovers in front of the mirror a little longer than necessary, and Shane is about to tease him for his narcissism when he blurts, suddenly, “You don’t think I look different, no?”

Shane meets his eyes in the mirror. “Different?”

“Like, older. Skinny. I don’t know.”

Weaker, Shane hears, the ghost of Ilya’s father sliding between them, even now. He presses up against Ilya’s back firmly, wrapping his arms around Ilya’s waist, one hand over Ilya’s scars.

“More handsome, maybe,” Shane says. “But that’s about it.”

—

“Do you think I will play again?” Ilya had asked Shane once, very early on.

At that point, the doctors knew very little about how Ilya’s recovery would go. He had gotten through the critical period; they were fairly confident he would live. And his injuries, in theory, shouldn’t preclude him from playing hockey, not once he was healed. 

But there was so much they could’t predict. Whether the soft tissue damage would heal, and how fast. Whether the pain, which Ilya was then on opioids to manage, would heal over and fade, or whether it would persist in some debilitating and deforming way. And even if everything did heal properly, whether the effort would be too much for his body. 

Ilya was in his thirties, now. He couldn’t expect to bounce back like a teenager. Perhaps he would be able to skate again, but he would be just that little bit slower than he ever was before. Maybe he would get back to shooting with the slightest bit less accuracy. A ten percent reduction in endurance, a five percent reduction in strength: these were things that could take a player from front-line to third-line, from third-line to bench, from bench to retirement.

But then, this was Ilya. Shane had never met someone who worked as hard as Ilya. Who dug his teeth in and refused to give up. It was a miracle Ilya had made it through his early life, that he had made it to eighteen, that he had made it to Shane. Shane wouldn’t have, he knows. He would have given up.

So who gives a fuck what’s enough to end the career of other players? 

“You’ll play again,” Shane had promised. “And you’ll win.”

—

Half the team cries when Ilya walks into the locker room; the other half cries when he glides out onto the ice, uncharacteristically hesitant but slowly building confidence even as Shane watches. He does one lap around the rink, then another. He looks back at Shane, hovering near the bench, and smirks at him.

“Get your ass out here, Hollander!” he calls. “I want to race.”

It’s the best practice the team’s had in months. Everyone’s passes are connecting, Hazy’s practically doing backflips in front of the net, and even the rookies, who have never been on the ice with Ilya before, are going twice as fast as Shane’s ever seen them, trying to show off for their captain

At the end of practice, Wiebe calls a bag skate for the newbies, and Ilya joins in because he always joins in. Shane chews his thumbnail on the sidelines and watches Ilya’s face get redder and redder until finally he drops out, the first player to go.

Shane thinks he might be upset about it, but when he skates over to join Shane on the bench, Ilya’s smiling. “They’re good kids,” he says, slumping over to put his head between his knees and breathe deeply. “Hard workers.”

“They already worship you,” Shane says dryly. The rookies keep shooting glances their way, like kids trying to check if their parents are watching them.

“Well, who wouldn’t?” Ilya says, offering a flashing white smile. “Sports Illustrated says I am best hockey player of all time.”

“There was a question mark at the end of thay headline,” Shane says, but he can’t even pretend he’s not smiling.

—

The nutritionist at the hospital had given Shane a long list of foods to incorporate into Ilya’s recovery diet: spinach, sardines, bell peppers, sunflower seeds. At the top of the page, written in bold and underlined twice, were organ meats.

Beef liver, pork kidney, chicken hearts. Shane couldn’t find them at the grocery store, so he ordered them online, from an obscenely expensive organic farm two hundred kilometers away. The packages arrived twice a month, in big brown boxes that were cool to the touch, filled with carefully labeled plastic sacks that Ilya pokes through as Shane loads the freezer.

“What is lamb pan-panc—“

“Pancreas,” Shane supplies. “It’s an organ that helps you digest stuff.”

“And pork spleen?”

“Another organ,” Shane says. He pauses. “Honestly, I don’t know what it does. It’s what Forsberg ruptured in 2001.”

“Right,” Ilya says. “Obviously. Why not eat Forsberg’s broken spleen?”

Shane rolls his eyes. “I’m sorry, would you like to do the cooking instead?”

“Oh, if we are getting arrested for cannibalism, I do not want to get involved.”

For all the shit Ilya gives Shane, he doesn’t actually seem to mind any of the dinners. He compliments the food every time, even the disastrous night that Shane somehow turns beef kidneys into unchewable silicone hunks in the Crock Pot, and after a while, once he’s cleared to start cooking again, he effortlessly incorporates them into his own meals. Chicken livers in sour cream, kidneys in madeira sauce, some sort of spicy stew filled with ham and spleen.

“When I was a child, in Russia, meat was not easy to find,” Ilya says, when Shane comments on it. “But liver, kidney, usually these you could get. My mother was a very good cook. She used to make this cake, for special days. Liver cake. With fresh dill we grew out the window.” He sees Shane’s expression and laughs. “There is English expression for this, yes? Don’t hit it until you try it?”

“Knock it,” Shane says, pained. “Don’t knock it until you try it.”

Ilya winks at him. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he says. “I have never seen liver cake here. I cannot make you try it.”

Shane had known immediately that he was going to make it for Ilya, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Especially when he has to blend the chicken livers in his poor Vitamix. And when he has to add all that mayonnaise, like frosting. If his nutritionist saw this recipe, she would probably cry.

Ilya’s face when Shane presents him with the cake is worth it, but only just.

—

The dreams are different every night. Sometimes, it’s a live-action replay of the shooting, Shane laughing and marching through downtown Ottawa with the vague feeling that something bad might happen even as he hears the first gunshots. In real life, Ilya had already stopped breathing by the time Shane reached him, but in dream life, he usually dies in Shane’s arms, often gasping something out in Russian that Shane can’t understand. Sometimes, his body rots right in front of Shane’s eyes, skin withering and blackening with decay, chest splitting open as the maggots eat outward, proving to Shane that there is no bringing Ilya back from the dead this time. He really is gone.

In other dreams, Shane is nowhere near Ottawa. He and Ilya are at Ilya’s old penthouse in Boston, or walking through a rainforest in Costa Rica, or sitting in a blank grey room in some undetermined liminal space. They’ll be fucking or talking or doing some simple everyday task like unloading the dishwasher when Ilya will say, “You know I’m dead, right? You know you’re just fooling yourself?” And with the stomach-jerking terror of falling off a cliff, Shane will remember. Ilya died. Ilya is dead. And even as he reaches forward to try to grab Ilya and prove that he’s real, Ilya will sigh and start to dissolve into little red threads, and Shane won’t be able to gather him as he unspools.

In the worst dreams, Shane is alone and knows Ilya has been gone for a very long time. He tries not to think about those.

Shane never knows what dream he is going to get on any particular night, only knows that he is probably going to get one.

Ilya has started to kiss Shane’s eyelids before they go to bed. “Sladkikh snov,” he murmurs. Shane holds Ilya’s wrist and tells himself that Ilya will be here when he wakes.

—

Ilya starts running again. He’s cleared to weight lift. He does a bag skate with the rookies and makes it until the end. He shoots on Hazy’s goal five, ten, fifteen times, and doesn’t get the puck in the net. Then he does. Then he does it again.

“I have not been this sore since I was sixteen,” he complains to Shane, his legs propped up against the wall to help the inflammation. “Hockey is lucky I love it so much.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Drama queen,” he says, and means, yes, yes, we’re all so lucky.

—

The standing ovation, when Ilya skates onto the ice for his first game back, lasts for nearly ten minutes.

Ilya does long, slow laps of the rink, waving to everyone in the audience, eyes wide and overwhelmed. Eventually, he slows to a stop at the center of the rink, seemingly in the hopes that it’ll help ease everyone back into their seats, but the announcers apparently have no desire to get things moving, and neither does anyone else: the opposing team is cheering just as loud, the stadium staff and the medics and the coaches, the Centaurs themselves hooting and hollering deafeningly.

Instead, Ilya’s left standing out in the middle of the ice by himself, helmet tucked under one arm, his hand pressed to his heart. He’s saying something in Russian, something that Shane can’t decipher from so far away, but he sees the star-eyed expression on Ilya’s face, and he gets the gist. 

Shane cries the whole ten minutes, steady, grateful tears, and he doesn’t even mind when the cameramen clock him doing it and put the video on the Jumbotron. Well, he minds a bit, but only because this should be Ilya’s moment. The next time the image cycles back to him, he shakes his head and waves it off, gesturing obnoxiously to Ilya on the ice.

Eventually, they do have to get things moving: the refs start to make their way onto the ice, and the players are encouraged to head out and begin their stretches. Slowly, reluctantly, the applause stretches and breaks. Shane can’t resist skating over to Ilya and stealing a kiss, even though it temporarily reinvigorates the spectators. 

“Wow,” Ilya says when Shane finally pulls away, smiling. “Did you forget the no-PDA on the ice rule?”

“Fuck the rules,” Shane says, then quickly amends, “Except for the rules from your doctors. Have you stretched your back yet?”

Ilya laughs. What a sound.

—

They win 2-1, which isn’t quite the trouncing they’d hoped for, but they probably could have lost 0-7 and still been thrilled, given the circumstances. One of the goals belongs to Luca, but the other is netted by Ilya, on assist from Shane during the power play. It’s a miracle Shane managed to make the pass:  he couldn’t take his eyes off Ilya the whole game. 

“I love you,” Ilya says to each player as they glide off the ice. “I love you, I love you.” When his eyes land on Shane, his gaze goes dark. “I love you,” he says, but his tone is something else entirely.

They end up the handicapped bathroom before they even make it to the showers, fumbling each other’s flies undone with all the frantic energy of their first time. Shane presses Ilya back against the wall and drops to his knees and sucks him off without removing a single piece of his clothing. Ilya returns the favor by jerking Shane off into his spit-slick palm, foreheads pressed together, breathing ragged, Ilya pressing wet and sloppy kisses all over Shane’s face.

“Do you think it’s obvious?” Shane asks, as he dabs a damp paper towel at the wet spot on his pants where Ilya didn’t quite manage to catch everything.

“No,” Ilya reassures him. “We just need to make it look like you were crying.”

“What?”

“So they know why we ran away to bathroom,” Ilya explains. “It is either to fuck or so you can have breakdown in private. So if you don’t want them to know we fucked…"

“Why am I the one who has to have the breakdown?” Shane demands. “It’s your first game back, you’re the one who should be crying!”

“Ah, but I am Russian,” Ilya insists. “Russians do not cry, so it would not be believable.”

“Pretty sure you’re Canadian now.”

“Eh, I will always be Russian at heart,” Ilya says. “Now, come here, you need to put your face under tap until you look like mad baby.”

Shane’s pretty sure nobody on the team is convinced by Ilya’s staging, but at least it gives them plausible deniability.

—

Later, Shane catches a clip on his phone: Bood doing post-game press in the locker room, Shane and Ilya mysteriously absent. “Thank you to the fans,” Bood is saying. “I’m so glad Roz got the welcome back he deserved.”

“Mr. Boodram, how does it feel to have your captain back on the ice?” a reporter calls from somewhere within the melee. “Any lingering sadness over losing the C?”

Bood snorts. “Not in the least,” he says. “You know, I was right next to him, when he—“ He cuts himself off, shakes his head. His eyes are wet. “It’s fucking amazing to have him back. He’s a fucking badass. Doesn’t let anything keep him down. Like a goddamn cockroach.” Then he laughs. “He’s definitely going to like the English word for that one.”

—

The shooter took a plea deal. “This way, nobody has to testify,” the prosecutor had told them. Shane looked at Ilya, and Ilya looked at Shane, and Shane knew they were both thinking of the publicity a trial would bring: both of them pale and shaky-handed on the witness stand, a crowd of reporters clicking their tape recorders on and off, a sketch artist examining them with her careful eyes so she could best dissect their sadness and pain and hurt for the consumption of the public.

It’s a decent deal. Takes life in prison off the table, but sets the sentence at twenty-five years. Too many aggravating factors to get less than that. A medium-security prison, far from where Shane and Ilya live. Parole eligibility still at seven years. Nothing to be done about that.

It’s the best they could expect, realistically, out of a trial, and yet Shane isn’t sure how he feels about it. He likes the idea of this man having to walk into the courthouse through throngs of fans supporting Ilya; he likes the idea of dozens of witnesses saying to this man’s face what a horrible person he is; he likes the idea of seeing him in the media with shackles on his wrist, wearing a jumpsuit, the object of hatred.

“Is better this way, right?” Ilya had asked Shane, when the cops first warned them it might be coming. They were in the kitchen, cooking dinner. Ilya had only recently regained the ability to stand long enough to pan-fry chicken breasts. Shane was mixing a turmeric dressing. Turmeric is good for inflammation, he had read, and wound-healing.

“It’s better this way,” Shane had agreed, thinking of Ilya, knowing Ilya was thinking of him.

—

“Fuck,” Shane hisses, rubbing hard at his face. He’s drenched in sweat and his hands are trembling, and above him, the ceiling fan turns the air in slow, lazy circles. 

There’s the threaded sigh of sheets rustling as Ilya turns over. “Shane?” he mumbles, accent thick with sleep.

“It’s fine,” Shane says. “Go back to sleep.”

But Ilya is already propping himself up on his elbow, squinting his sleepy eyes. “Nightmare?” he asks.

Shane doesn’t answer. With a soft sound, Ilya slumps back onto the pillows, throwing the blanket back with one arm and holding out the other towards Shane. “Come here,” he says.

Long, slow moments in the darkness. Ilya’s hand drifting across Shane’s back, stroking calming lines down his spine. Shane kisses Ilya’s chest, in the spot where his askew cross usually lays. Then he kisses him over his heart.

“I love you so much,” Shane says. “It’s like I want to—to eat you. Or melt our bodies down into one big pile of oil.”

Ilya hums, accepting the non sequitor without question. “Very Achilles of you.”

Shane drops his mouth lower to kiss Ilya on the ribs. “Achilles?”

“You know, Achilles and Patroclus,” Ilya says. “Famous Greeks? In Iliad.”

“You’ve read the Iliad?”

Ilya opens one eye to squint at him. “Uh, yes,” he says. “Obviously. Is basic education. You have not read Iliad?”

“We’re big on North American writers in school here,” Shane says.

Ilya huffs, closing his eyes again. “Canadians,” he sighs. “All your books are so new. What is your oldest book, a hundred years? The Iliad, it is around for three thousand years. Sometimes it is good to read old things.”

“Isn’t it, like, hard to relate to?”

Ilya sighs again, a sleepy sound. He always does this when he’s drifting off, these constant dramatic sighs like he’s trying to release the tension of the day into the air around him. Anya has started doing it, too, Shane has noticed, but Ilya refuses to believe him and Shane hasn’t yet been able to capture it on video. 

“No,” Ilya mumbles. “Is easy to relate. People are always people.”

He’s asleep not long after that, but Shane stays up a while longer, wondering if the Iliad has anything to say about the shadow of your lover’s eyelashes on their face while they sleep.

—

Not long after that, a copy of the Iliad appears on Shane’s nightstand. Shane shoots a glance over at Ilya, but he’s busying himself with his sock drawer and doesn’t look up. Shane starts reading it after practice that night. It’s a bit of a slog at first, but once he gets used to the language he finds himself falling into it. It’s almost meditative, the way he’s forced to read slowly to understand the cadence of this old and foreign tongue, and Ilya is right that it doesn’t feel outdated in the slightest.

Normally, he hates annotating books, but with this one, he can’t resist getting out a highlighter. There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth, and Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other’s arms, and Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises in us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on.

“I am glad I bought you your own copy,” Ilya says one afternoon, when the two of them are lounging together on the couch, Shane with his now-back-bent and dog-eared copy of the Iliad, Ilya with some novel Shane’s mom recommended. Oprah’s Book Club.

Shane raises an eyebrow, and Ilya waves a hand at the page soaked in yellow ink.

“So many notes.”

It’s the first time he’s acknowledged his gift.

“I don’t know,” Shane says. “I guess there’s a lot to like.”

Ilya shuts his book, now, and turns sideways on the couch to face Shane. “Like what?”

Shane flushes. “What, you want me to—to read to you?”

Ilya shrugs. “You don’t have to.”

If he survives, I’ll do anything he wants for the rest of our lives, Shane remembers thinking in the hospital. If he just pulls through I will spend every day just trying to make him happy. One of many fumbled bargains, made in the dark hours of night when Shane thought day would never come.

Self-consciously, Shane clears his throat.

“No man will me down to Death, against my fate,” he reads, voice starting out wobbly but becoming stronger as he keeps going. “And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you. It’s born with us the day that we are born.”

Ilya hums. “I like that bit. Sounds better in English than Russian.” He shifts until his foot is touching Shane’s shin, and he starts stroking up and down with his big toe, a steady bit of warmth. “So what do you think your fate is, then?”

And all Shane can think is, loving you.

—

In the early days after they got home from the hospital, Shane couldn’t stand to let Ilya out of his sight. He trailed him around the house, to the kitchen for a glass of water, to the bathroom when he had to piss. Finally, one night, Ilya snapped. “Can I take a shit in peace, Hollander, or do you need to see it? Is five minutes apart okay with you?”

Shane went downstairs and sits at the kitchen table with a mug of tea he did not drink. Ilya found him some time later, limping into the seat across from him.

“Shane,” he said, and nothing else.

“You remember what happened with the plane,” Shane blurted.

It wasn’t a question, but Ilya nodded anyway, expression serious. “Some of the guys, they were very scared of flying afterwards,” he said.

That wasn’t a question either, but Shane shook his head. “It’s not that, it’s—I was so scared when I heard that something might have happened. But even then, even before I got to talk to you, I guess it didn’t really hit me. That something really could have happened. It felt like it was a nightmare and I was going to wake up any second. Like, of course you weren’t dead. You couldn’t be dead.” Shane scraped his thumbnail over a bit of gunk stuck to the kitchen island. “But this time, you were dead. And it just sort of hit me. That you’re a person that can die.”

There was a creak as Ilya pushed his chair back, and then he was plastering himself to Shane, his chin on Shane’s shoulder and arms wrapping around his chest. “I’m here now,” he murmured. “I’m fine.”

“It scares me so much,” Shane confessed from the warmth of his husband’s arms. “I’m constantly thinking about how vulnerable you are. It’s like everything can kill you. The stupid cars or a fucking fall in the shower or—or—your own appendix—“

“Shh,” Ilya murmured, rubbing one big palm across Shane’s chest.

“—like, how have we survived as species when we all have a useless organ that just randomly gets infected and, and kills us—“

“Shane.”

“—and who designed the fucking ribcage, by the way, how is it that your ribs can just fucking splinter and destroy your heart or your lungs—“

“Shane.”

“—which, your lungs, fuck, you smoked for so many years, what if you get cancer or heart disease, I looked up all the things you’re at risk for and—“

Ilya kissed him. The angle was a bit odd, but then Shane tilted his head back and Ilya twisted forward and it was exactly like it should be, Ilya’s soft lips and warm breath and confident, licking tongue.

When Ilya finally pulled back, he pressed their foreheads together, noses brushing. The sound of their breath was loud in the quiet room. “You have never lost someone before,” Ilya said, so gently that Shane couldn’t possibly misinterpret it as anything but kind. “Not someone truly important. No?” 

There was Shane’s maternal grandparents, when he was young, who he doesn’t really remember. A kid he knew distantly in high school who hung himself in Grade 11. A half a dozen friends of his parents who he’d chatted with, briefly, at barbecues.

“No,” Shane admitted.

Ilya hummed, thumbs brushing steady lines over Shane’s ribs. “So you did not know, before. That it could really happen.”

Shane couldn’t look away from Ilya’s eyes. Ilya’s beautiful eyes, so wide in the darkness. Shane wished he could capture this moment, wished he could preserve his memories like video tapes so that one day, if he needed to, he could sit and replay them all. “Now you know it can happen,” Ilya said. “And I wish I could tell you that you will forget. But you won’t.”

It took a moment for Shane to understand what he meant. His breath caught his chest. How had Ilya ever made it to him? How had Ilya ever survived? “Never?”

Ilya brushed a kiss to his temple. “Not that I’ve found,” he said, voice full of love.

—

EXCERPT FROM ‘AFTER THE STORM: INSIDE THE HOME OF ILYA ROZANOV AND SHANE HOLLANDER’

By Madeline Beadle

June 18th, 2025, 10:47 a.m. EST

… I get a chance to ask when Anya, the couple’s rescue pup, needs to be let outside. Ilya disappears to take care of his “precious, precious girl,” an endearment he bestows with the sort of soppy coo I hadn’t thought Rozanov was capable of producing, leaving Hollander and I alone in the sitting room.

“You’ve always been a very private person,” I start, as Hollander absentmindedly adds sugar to Rozanov’s coffee cup. “I’ll admit I was pretty surprised when my editor said you agreed to do this piece, let alone to do it in your home. Do you mind me asking what made you decide to open up like this?”

Hollander shakes his head, and for a second, I worry I’ve crossed a line, and then he says, “I don’t know, I mean, I was really stupid, when we were young. Ilya would disagree, but I was—I came from a very privileged background. You know, there were some things, when I was young, about being Asian, but it was—overwhelmingly, I was very, very lucky. And, you know, when your life has always been that way, a lot of the time, you don’t appreciate it. You just sort of take it for granted.”

Hollander’s eyes are wet as he looks out the back window. Rozanov has gotten distracted by the dog, and now he’s crouched on the grass with her, giving her what looks like a very thorough belly rub. “Almost losing Ilya put a lot of things in perspective for me. I spent a lot of time, that first couple of days, thinking about what I would have to say if—if. You know, what I would write in the obituary, the statement I would make.” He clears his throat. “It sounds morbid, but when something like that happens, your mind just zeroes in on the weirdest things. It made me realize how much there was about Ilya I had never shared. Stuff I wanted to share. Like how sweet he is, and how he acts with my parents. You know, stupid things. I wanted other people to know about it so that—so there were other people to remember it, I guess. Like, if anything happened to me, the memory would live on a little longer.”

Hollander shrugs, looking down at his hands. “So, yeah. I’ve always been a private person, but I guess I just realized I want the whole world to know, how great he is, really. And if that means being public about it, I can deal with that.”

Hollander smiles at me, a little self-consciously, like that wasn’t the most romantic—and possibly most emotional—thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.

“Okay,” I respond finally, once I’ve swallowed the lump in my throat. I flip to a new page in my notebook and click my pen. “I think we can do that. Let’s start a list. What do you want the world to know about your husband?”

Hollander smiles.