Archive of Our Own

1. Soulmarks

July 8 2010, Brossard – Day 2 of the Montreal Metros Development Camp

“Dude, did you get a tattoo?”

Shane looked over. Shelly, who had the stall next to his at the CN Sports Complex locker room, was staring at Shane’s left arm.

“Uh, no?”

“What the fuck is it, then? Looks gnarly as hell.”

Shane looked down at the dark squiggly shape on his delt, an irregular blob slightly bigger than a loonie. Its edges were a series of indentations and protrusions, kind of like a jigsaw puzzle piece. If he’d seen this on anyone else, he would’ve assumed it was a tattoo, too. A shitty one that should be lasered off ASAP.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It kinda showed up out of nowhere, like, last night.”

Shelly’s eyebrows had climbed up to his hairline. “You gonna see a doctor about that, bud?”

“Yeah, for sure.” Shane began pulling his t-shirt on. “But it doesn’t, like, hurt or anything. Or feel different from my normal skin.”

“I don’t think that matters. One time, my uncle had a huge mole that looked kinda like Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force? It turned out to be cancer.” Shelly’s voice was solemn. “You should definitely get that checked out.”

“I plan to,” Shane said, and then, to change the subject, began talking about the draft. Shelly, who hated Toronto like they’d personally shot and killed his dog, took the bait, and was happy to rant about how unfair it was that they’d jumped four spots and gotten first pick overall.

###

Shane had lied about the mark—spot, blemish, whatever—showing up the night before. Sort of. It had started as an itchy spot on Shane’s upper arm a few days ago. He hadn’t thought much about it, just slapped on some jock itch cream and called it a day. Fungal rashes were a fact of life when playing a sport in which you sweated constantly.

It hadn’t gone away. It had stopped itching, which was good, but then it grew bigger and bigger and became a reddish welt, which was kinda bad, and then overnight it grew darker and took on that squiggly shape, which escalated it from “kinda bad” to “probably actually for real bad.”

Now that even Shelly had noticed, Shane knew it was time to see the doctor.

The doctor looked at it, poked at it, scraped it, drew a bunch of blood, and referred him to a dermatologist. The dermatologist looked at it, poked at it, scraped it, and took a sample to biopsy.

In the end, it was good news. Kind of. It wasn’t cancer. It also wasn’t a fungal infection, an allergic reaction, or a symptom of a surprisingly long list of diseases and disorders, many of them named after the people who’d discovered them—you never wanted a disease named after some guy, that was a sign you had something brutal and hard to treat, Shane was learning.

The newly-formed mole or mark or whatever wasn’t, as far as anyone could tell, anything bad or dangerous at all.

“All the tests indicate that it’s benign hyperpigmentation,” the dermatologist said. “A little like a birthmark.”

“But I wasn’t born with it.”

“Yes, and honestly it doesn’t fit any of our classifications for birthmarks, either, but as far as we can tell, it’s completely harmless. Come back immediately, though, if it starts changing shape, texture, or color, or if it starts itching again.”

And that was that. Shane had a weird new mark on his arm, and nobody knew why it was there, or how it was formed. It was as if one day his left arm decided: hey bud, gonna stick a shitty little puzzle piece right there. Maybe it’ll rot your arm off, maybe it won’t. Enjoy obsessing over this mystery all rookie season!

At least it didn’t interfere with his ability to play hockey.

###

February 2011

As soon as Shane stepped into Rozanov’s hotel room, only a little covered in nervous flop-sweat at the thought of Scott Hunter discovering him in the hallway, Rozanov said “Is someone chasing you?” with an infuriating expression on his face, and it immediately reminded Shane why Rozanov should never be allowed to talk. This goal could be most efficiently achieved by shoving something into his mouth. Shane opted to use his tongue—efficient and effective.

Rozanov’s mouth tasted like vodka and cigarettes and whatever minty gum he’d been chewing to try and cover up the other two, all things Shane found mildly to extremely offputting, but he didn’t care. In fact, he was finding it strangely delicious. The kisses felt extra good tonight. Really, really good. Possibly even disproportionately good? Touching Rozanov made Shane realize how pent up he’d been. Masturbating hadn’t been enough. The girls he’d hooked up with—not that there had been a whole lot—hadn’t been enough. Not even the discreet black dildo he’d bought from a sex toy store a few months ago had been enough.

Apparently what he’d needed was to kiss Rozanov. It satisfied him in an indefinable way, like he was getting something right; feeding himself something he needed. It was like that one time Shane had fucked with his carb intake to see if the keto people had a point and was exhausted and felt vaguely ill until he started eating rice and pasta again.

It was a fucking weird way to feel about something that wasn’t food, but Shane shoved that thought away in favor of focusing on how Rozanov’s thighs had about as much give as an iron bar, or how his abs jerked and tensed when Shane ran his hands over them. He was so strong—just. Fucking stacked. The knowledge made his brain white out pleasantly, the pleasure looping from chest to brain to dick.

Shane wasn’t sure how long they stood there, pressed against—not even a wall, but the fucking edge of a partition. Doing nothing but kiss and grind against each other while that feeling of finally being fed filled him. He felt a little dizzy when he pulled away. Rozanov was looking a little dazed, too, his giant green-blue eyes with the absurd curly lashes blinking slowly; he made as if to reclaim Shane’s mouth, but then pulled up short.

“This is stupid,” he said. “We have bed.”

“Yeah,” Shane said very intelligently. “Bed.”

In his defense, it was difficult to think because Rozanov had started unbuttoning Shane’s jeans, and truly, what a good idea—no, a great idea. He began unbuttoning Rozanov’s jeans, too; before he knew it, his hand was full of large, hard Russian dick. This was the second time Shane had handled an erection that wasn’t his, and realizing that both times it had been Rozanov’s made his head feel like someone had dropped a rock in a metal bucket and was shaking it all around.

Shane made a protesting noise when Rozanov pulled his hand away, and then a different noise when Rozanov grabbed his chin and forced his gaze back up at Rozanov.

“Bed,” Rozanov said, his voice exaggerating the D at the end.

“Right, yeah. Bed.”

At some point Shane was going to be able to form words with more than one syllable, but realistically, that wasn’t going to happen while Rozanov still had his hands on Shane’s body. They kicked off pants and underwear and kissed and stumbled drunkenly towards the bed; when they reached the edge of the mattress, Rozanov yanked both Shane’s hoodie and t-shirt off in one smooth motion. Rozanov himself was somehow, magically, naked. When had he taken off his tee?

No! Wrong thought. Irrelevant. Shane needed to focus on the most important thing, which was getting Rozanov’s dick in his mouth, now. His mouth was already watering. And yes, this was all pretty fucking gay, but look: Rozanov’s dick was objectively really, really nice: long and thick and the perfect amount of veiny, flushed a beautiful dusky pink. That helped cancel out the homosexuality, like, at least a little, right? Who wouldn’t want to put their mouth on this? It’d be more insane to not want to get this inside at every opportunity.

Before Shane could sink to his knees, however, Rozanov caught Shane’s left arm.

“What is this?”

Shane blinked as he tried to make sense of Rozanov’s words over the rocks-in-a-bucket clamor of extreme horniness in his head, and eventually he realized: Rozanov was looking at the mark on his arm. “Oh, that? That’s, uh. It just showed up one day last summer.”

Rozanov continued to stare at it, his brow furrowed. “It’s not a disease or anything,” Shane hurried on to say. “Like, I got it checked out and the doctors ran a ton of tests. It’s kind of like a birthmark.”

Rozanov pursed his mouth and ran a thumb over it. Shane shivered, then gasped; Rozanov stiffened slightly, his eyes sharpening, becoming more attentive. He rubbed that spot again, and then again.

It hadn’t felt like this when the doctors had touched it. It didn’t feel anything like this when anyone else touched it, either—not when Shane scrubbed it while showering, or when people brushed against it. But when Rozanov touched it—

It felt like Shane’s body was being lit up by an electric current, except there wasn’t an unpleasant buzzing shock, it felt like—like pressure, or heat? An urgent ticklish ache? All those things at once, but pleasurable. In fact, it felt incredibly good, and it kept feeling better the longer Rozanov did that thing with his thumb—a little like having the sensitive spot right under the head of his dick stimulated, except for his whole body.

That turned out to be more of an apt comparison than Shane had expected because he realized, abruptly, that he was on the verge of coming. He slapped a hand over Rozanov’s and hissed out “Shit, shit, stop.”

“Sorry!” Rozanov tried to pull his hand away, but Shane pressed his down harder; as overwhelming as the sensation was, the very idea of losing contact was unbearable.

“No, it’s fine. I, uh”—I was about to come from you touching my arm—“it’s, uh.” Shane swallowed. God, it was hard to make word-shapes with his mouth when his entire body was screaming that he needed to come. “It’s a lot.”

“It hurts?”

“No. Feels good. Way too good, actually.”

“Ah.”

Something about Rozanov’s voice snagged Shane’s attention. He took a look at Rozanov’s face, a proper one.

Rozanov appeared drunk—eyelids half-lowered, his pupils blown so wide and dark that they’d gobbled up his rises. His mouth was slightly agape, the inner surface damp and pink.

“You okay?” Shane asked.

Rozanov shook his head slightly and squeezed Shane’s arm. “It feels good for me, too,” Rozanov said.

Shane frowned in confusion. “What, like, you’re enjoying the texture or something?”

“No. It—it feels good, inside my body.”

A little bubble of laughter rose in Shane’s throat. “What, from touching my arm?”

Rozanov shrugged. “Yes. Is—is weird. But nice. Very, very nice. Also, there is another weird thing.”

“Yeah? This is plenty weird already, dude.”

Rozanov didn’t bother responding, just raised his left arm—and there, right at the bulge of biceps on his inner arm, was a familiar shape. A dark irregular blob about the size of a loonie. A puzzle piece.

“What the fuck,” Shane whispered.

“I went to doctor, too. She say, is nothing bad, but also…” Rozanov shrugged.

“It’s a mystery?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think would happen if I touch it?”

Rozanov shrugged again. “Try it and see.” The words were nonchalant, but Shane could see Rozanov’s chest rising and falling more rapidly.

Shane raised his right hand, which had still been pinning Rozanov’s to his mark, and brushed careful fingertips over the dark shape on Rozanov’s biceps, so similar yet so distinct from his own.

Rozanov drew in a sharp breath as a cascade of sensation shot through Shane. It was different from when Rozanov was touching his mark, but equally startling. Equally visceral. He did it again, just to see how Rozanov would react—just to see what it would feel like—and then tried pressing down on it, hard, with the pad of his thumb.

They made nearly identical sounds of pleasure.

Things became a blur after that. They fell into bed at some point. Rozanov licked Shane’s mark, then sucked on it, and Shane’s vision went dark. Shane scraped his teeth on Rozanov’s, and Rozanov came in a hot, uncontrolled spurt, his dick untouched and twitching, come painting his stomach and chest in long, pale stripes. When he caught his breath, he took Shane’s dick his mouth while Shane reached down and stroked Rozanov’s mark over and over; when Shane came, Rozanov made sounds as if he’d come, too.

Shane lost count of the number of rounds they went. They stayed hard for an improbably long amount of time; they stopped only when the pleasure began to veer into overstimulation, and then pain. By the time they both tapped out, the bed was a complete wreck, both of them covered in sweat and saliva and a staggering amount of semen.

“What the fuck,” Shane whispered raggedly as he lay on his back, his gaze trained on the ceiling. He didn’t know if his heart rate would ever be normal again.

Rozanov, who had thrown a forearm over his eyes, made an inarticulate sound in response.

Now that they were no longer touching, a cold weight began to seep into Shane’s gut, displacing the warm contentment. Reality rolled in with the slow inevitability of a tank as the fluids cooled on his body and began to dry.

What the fuck were they doing? What was happening to them? He reached up and touched the dark blotch on his arm. It felt normal. Ordinary fingers touching ordinary skin. Nothing like when Rozanov had touched it—as if he’d somehow reached right into Shane’s center, latched onto the golden thread of his pleasure, and then pulled it out of him, length by length.

Shane sat up abruptly. “I need a shower.” He looked down at himself and wrinkled his nose. Something heavy and caustic curled in his stomach.

“I cannot move yet.” Rozanov looked over, and in his eyes was an expression Shane had never seen before. A soft and terrifying light. “You can use shower first.”

“Thanks,” Shane mumbled, and stumbled into the shower. He turned the water on as hot as he could stand it, and carefully scrubbed every trace of his—their—pleasure down the drain.

🧩🧩🧩

2. First Words

October 2011

Ilya wasn’t looking forward to stripping in the locker room after the first practice of the season, but refusing to get naked around the guys would have drawn even more attention. Once he was down to his base layers, he took a deep breath, then yanked his compression shirt off so quickly he practically ripped it off his body.

Marleau, one stall away, was the first to notice. His double-take was subtle, but only by Marleau standards. Ilya looked right back, eyebrow raised, daring him to say something.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“So, Roz. Is there something you wanna tell us?”

“No,” Ilya said curtly.

“I mean…” Marleau gestured at Ilya’s chest. Ilya didn’t bother looking down. He’d been looking at it for over a week now. “Is some Memento-style shit going down? Are you having trouble remembering your own name?”

“Wait, Roz got a tattoo?” Dubek said from across the way.

Other voices began to pipe up; heads craned in Ilya’s direction. Cohn snapped his sweaty undershirt at Ilya’s ass and strolled over, and began laughing as soon as he caught sight of Ilya’s chest. Other guys began to congregate. Ilya crossed his arms and arranged a bored expression on his face.

“No,” he said, looking directly at Marleau’s face, “I do this so your mother can keep track of who she’s fucking.”

Marleau’s eyes widened comically, and for a moment Ilya wondered if he’d gone too far—some hockey players were extremely sensitive about their mothers—but then almost immediately he started cracking up.

“Bud,” Marleau said in between wheezes of laughter, “if you can pull a fifty-five-year-old lesbian who used to hammer nails into sheetrock with her thumb to impress girls—you know what, good for you.” He chuckled and swiped a forefinger under his eyes. “Been a while since she’s been with a guy.”

“About thirty years,” said Feller.

“Nah, there’s Cody—so like, twenty-seven,” Marleau said. “I always said giving birth to him sucked so much he turned mom gay.”

“What the fuck is with the question mark, Roz?” Cohn asked, staring at Ilya’s chest. “Like, were you confused?”

“No, but Marly’s mother was,” Ilya shot back. Everyone whooped with laughter, including Marleau.

“Roz, you are one weird motherfucker,” Marleau said, shaking his head. “Can’t believe you tattooed your own name on your chest. And in some kind of weird grandma-ass handwriting. I would’ve pegged you as like, a Gothic writing kinda guy. Or barbed wire.”

“I asked your mother to write it for me. As souvenir.”

“Ha! She does have nice handwriting,” said Marleau. “The nuns beat it into her, but nah, this looks like maybe a different Catholic lesbian. You should give me her number, I could hook mom up.”

The conversation moved on. Some of the guys came over to stare at the words sprawled across Ilya’s chest, and laughed. Ilya laughed, too, because yes, it was a little bit funny. But mostly, it was freaky.

###

The truth was, Ilya had no memory of acquiring the tattoo. He’d gone to bed one night with his body free of any tattoos, or indeed any markings other than his moles and that blotch on his arm; when he’d woken up, Ilya Rozanov? had been emblazoned across the center of his chest in neat flowing script.

True, he’d gotten drunk the night before, but not enough to black out—he didn’t even have a hangover. But the possibility nagged at him. Could you get so blackout drunk that you erased your ability to tell you’d lost a chunk of time?

He’d called Sveta to ask.

“How drunk were you?” she’d said. “Eh, a normal amount of drunk.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Oh, you know. Drunk enough that you make eyes at the cute men in the club and tell me how much you miss dick, but not enough to actually do anything about it.”

“Fuck you,” he’d said pleasantly.

“I love you, too,” she’d said back sweetly.

Sveta was wrong. Or…not wrong. Next door to the actual truth, which was that whenever Ilya got drunk, he wanted to make out with a man. A very specific one.

Ilya still couldn’t wrap his head around what had transpired at the All-Star weekend in February. The things he’d done with Hollander—none of them had been out of the ordinary, not if you looked at it from a purely mechanical perspective. Kissing, touching, licking, sucking, biting. He’d meant to ask Hollander if he could fuck him, but had been too distracted by how good simply touching him had felt, especially when they’d been caressing those strange blemishes on their arms. When they’d touched each other there, it had felt as if they were able to reach each other from the inside, directly caress and suck upon the most tender and pleasurable parts of each other until they had wrung themselves dry.

And then after, Hollander had panicked and left. Ilya had been able to see it and feel it—the tension overcoming his limbs, the stiffness washing over his face. Not that Ilya could blame him. The entire thing had been strange. Eerie.

He still hadn’t told anyone, not even Sveta. What could he say? “See this dark patch of skin on my arm that I touch every day when I shower? That many other people have touched, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose? When Shane Hollander touches it, I become a crazed animal who wants to crack open his ribcage and live inside his body.”

At least Ilya had successfully gotten Hollander’s phone number before he’d fled the scene. Ilya had left a very generous tip for housekeeping; the sheets had been beyond disgusting.

After All-Stars, Ilya done his best to set Hollander aside. He was only one man. A beautiful one, but there were beautiful men everywhere, including Boston. Ilya would kiss somebody, go down on them, fuck them, but once the pleasant torpor of orgasm faded he’d be overcome by restlessness. The pleasure was there, but not the satisfaction.

And so he’d started texting Hollander. Taunts, at first; little chirps, shit-talking. Safe territory. A goad here and there, simply to remind Hollander that Ilya existed.

Every reply made Ilya feel like he had successfully stolen a precious jewel and like he'd won the MLH Cup, or what he imagined winning the Cup would feel like. Even the texts that said nothing but “Fuck you”—or worse, the ones that tried to chirp him back but fell flat. It was an unfortunate fact that Hollander was, as Marleau like to put it, completely swagless.

Ilya was obsessed with a swagless man.

It didn’t matter. The swaglessness didn’t matter. None of it did. Every interaction with Hollander was precious, and Ilya hoarded them all. He would periodically pull up their chat for the simple pleasure of looking at conversations that said nothing of substance whatsoever while an enormous ache pushed against his sternum.

He was acting like a teenager with a crush, but the realization was insufficient to stop him. He had other things to worry about, anyway, like the domovoy in his house who were apparently giving him painless tattoos that made no sense while he slept.

###

November 2011

Hollander had actually given Ilya his address in Montreal. Ilya couldn’t believe it. Mr. “It’s actually an apartment” had bought not one, but two of them, right next door to each other. For the investment, of course. Extremely normal twenty-year-old behavior.

After Ilya had performed the necessary ritual of chirping Hollander, and Hollander had performed the necessary ritual of tell him to fuck off, they’d fallen into each other’s arms and kissed until they lost the ability to think. They had both, by unspoken agreement, avoided touching the marks on each other’s arms. Ilya had an early flight the next morning and Marleau was covering for him breaking curfew as it was; he couldn’t afford to lose five hours to mind-blowing sex that let him taste colors and see sounds and nuzzle against the shape of Hollander’s essence or spirit or whatever it was that made Ilya feel like he was dissolving into an ocean of agonizing bliss.

And then they made their way to the bedroom and pulled each other’s shirts off.

Hollander was the first to break the silence. “Why the fuck do you have your name tattooed on you in my handwriting? And why the fuck does it have a question mark?”

The revelation hit Ilya like a high-stick across the face. “This is your handwriting?” Ilya looked down, as if he hadn’t studied the fucking tattoo a thousand times at this point, then looked back up again. “Hollander, did you know you write like 70-year-old woman who went to school taught by nuns?”

“Fuck you,” Hollander said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was too busy staring at Ilya’s chest. “My handwriting’s nice.”

“Why do you have tattoo of ‘Okay’ in my handwriting?”

Hollander’s eyes widened. “This is your handwriting?” He pointed at the almost illegible scrawl of big, blocky letters. “That’s— What the fuck?”

Ilya shrugged. “Hockey more fun than school, English letters more difficult than Cyrillic.”

“That’s not—what I mean is—” Hollander sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands; his breathing became faster, choppier. “What the fuck is happening? I don’t even remember getting this fucking tattoo, it appeared out of nowhere what the fuck what the fuck—”

His voice broke off in a sharp gasp.

Ilya sat down next to him and pulled him over with one arm, tucking his head against his shoulder. Hollander tried to shrug him off at first, but Ilya tightened his grip and kissed the top of his head, an action apparently so shocking that Hollander stopped struggling. Ilya could still feel the heave and press of Hollander’s breaths against him, hear the jagged and uneven cadence.

“Hollander, you are having panic attack,” he said. “Here, breathe with me. Slowly. Like this, yes? In”—a deep breath, held for a few beats—“and then out. Good. Now, again. In.”

They breathed together—in, hold, out; in, hold, out—until Hollander’s breaths smoothed out into something resembling normalcy. Ilya knew he should be more consumed by whatever freak occurrence had caused these tattoos to appear, but there was no room for that, only for the pleasure of holding Hollander and making sure he breathed.

It was so nice, was the thing. Hollander felt nice in Ilya’s arms, and he smelled nice, and he looked—well, he looked much better than nice. And actually there was nothing nice about Ilya’s feelings towards Hollander, but he was once again approaching wanting-to-crawl-inside-Shane-Hollander’s-body-and-set-up-house-there-forever territory, which sounded like some serial killer shit even inside his own head.

So Ilya said nothing. He held onto Hollander, occasionally pressing little kisses to the top of his head, and stealthily breathed in the smell of Hollander’s boring shampoo and much less boring sweat.

Eventually Hollander spoke up. “What the fuck is going on? First those weird birthmarks on our arms, and now these fucking tattoos? In each other’s handwriting?”

“Maybe you have domovoy, too.”

Hollander raised his head abruptly; good thing Ilya had the reflexes of an elite hockey player, because otherwise Shane Hollander’s extremely beautiful, extremely hard skull would’ve broken his nose.

“What the fuck is a domovoy?”

“Is joke,” replied Ilya. “Russian house spirit from old stories. Not real.”

“Yeah, well, these tattoos are real, so I find myself open all of a sudden to like, a whole lot of fucking options I normally wouldn’t consider.”

“Not to worry,” Ilya said.

Hollander glared at Ilya. “Excuse me if I think random tattoos appearing on my body while I’m sleeping are worrisome.”

“I mean, they do not harm us, yes? I’m sure doctors tell you there is nothing to worry with your body. So yes, is mystery, but not dangerous. Or not dangerous right now.”

Hollander continued glaring at Ilya; it was an attempt to look fierce, but mostly he looked like a rumpled and grumpy kitten.

What Ilya was about to suggest was probably a mistake, but he had never been able to resist mistakes, especially ones attached to beautiful brown eyes and a mouth that was capable of sucking out Ilya’s entire brain through his dick.

“We will solve mystery together. Look things up on Internet, maybe ask people for help. Tattoo makes us look like dumbshits, but is not dangerous. Not really.” Ilya squeezed Hollander. “I am safe, and you are safe. If domovoy try to fuck with you, I will kick their ass.”

Hollander’s mouth quivered with laughter, but his voice was bitchy when he said, “I can kick ass on my own behalf, thanks.”

Ilya clicked his tongue. “Hollander, I have seen you fight. You do not kick ass.” He ran an appraising eye up and down his body. “Do you mean lick ass? Because that you can do.”

The look of outrage was immediate and extremely cute. “Fuck you!”

“Okay,” Ilya replied, grinning. “Do you have condom?”

Hollander gave a garbled yell and pounced on Ilya; Ilya laughed and immediately flipped them so he was on top, and then crashed his mouth into Hollander’s.

They didn’t talk for quite some time.

🪿🪿🪿

3. Soulmate Goose

Shane and Rozanov tried their best to solve the Mystery of the Dumbshit Tattoos, but their efforts stalled pretty much immediately. Turned out that playing hockey at the highest professional level was an exhausting endeavor that devoured all of their time, energy, and focus, and it wasn’t as if they could hire a private investigator to help. Or they could, but only if they wanted to be looked at like they were crazy. Shane wouldn’t even have a chance to explain how the tattoos appeared; as soon as the PI took a look at their chests, they’d probably start backing out of the room slowly.

There was one obvious answer to why two hockey players would have incredibly stupid-looking, incredibly regrettable tattoos, and “appearing suddenly and painlessly in the middle of the night” wasn’t it.

Rozanov tried to remove his tattoo. He refused to give any specifics, but the experience had apparently not gone well. The tone in his voice when he talked about it persuaded Shane that the occasional chirp and having to confront Rozanov’s chickenscratch scrawl on his skin every day was a small price to pay to avoid experiencing whatever the fuck it was Rozanov had.

Shane did quietly consult a couple of psychics. One of them was clearly a scammer. The other, a no-nonsense woman with a buzzcut, showed some promise at first until she told Shane he had a soulmate he needed to find and consummate his bond with, at which point he quietly cancelled his next appointment.

Soulmates. Shane would believe in ghosts and house spirits before soulmates. Even if they were a thing—and surely Shane would’ve had some kind of confirmation they were real before now—it would mean that Ilya Rozanov was his soulmate, which was absurd.

Besides, they’d consummated their bond plenty. Every chance they got, for real. Not only when they played matches against each other, or at the All-Star weekends, or even on the rare occasions when they flew to each other because the scheduling gods had seen fit to give them two or three days off that lined up.

It had started as regular text updates on whatever progress they’d made, which was to say, basically nothing. Shane had been so embarrassed about the psychic consultations he hadn’t told Rozanov about them. The texting had eventually escalated into phone calls, and the phone calls had escalated into phone sex. Rozanov had even persuaded him to do the occasional video call.

The upshot was: Shane was having more orgasms than he’d ever had in his entire life. Plenty of consummation was happening, in person and over the phone.

Plus soulmates weren’t a thing.

Time passed. Shane memorized the Raiders’ schedule so he wouldn’t accidentally call Rozanov at 5 AM or whatever. They started automatically forwarding their flight details to each other’s calendars because Shane got sick of Rozanov asking him when he was flying out or when he was landing when they were out on roadies. And every morning, Shane would look in the mirror and see Rozanov’s writing etched across his chest.

The terrible handwriting didn’t even bother him much any more—he’d grown kind of fond of it, actually, a piece of information that could not have been waterboarded out of him. He’d still sometimes wonder, though: okay? Why okay?

Whatever. The guys had mostly stopped chirping him about it. Everything was fine.

###

February 2014 – Sochi, Russia

Russia’s first-round loss to Latvia revealed a side of Rozanov Shane had never seen. He looked like a washed-out copy of himself in the post-game interviews, bloodless and brittle and quiet. Like someone had decided to carve a Rozanov statue out of marble but had forgotten to animate its limbs properly, or to give it the correct voice.

The loss hit Shane like a punch in the gut, too. It shouldn’t have. It wasn’t as if Shane were Russian, and frankly, if they’d both made it to the finals, Shane would’ve relished wiping the floor with them and taking gold.

Latvia, though. Pure humiliation. The haunted look in Rozanov’s eyes haunted Shane in turn.

Rozanov had warned Shane that trying to call him in Russia would be a very bad idea, so Shane didn’t even bother trying, but he did text. A brief Hey that sucks, you all right at first.

When that got no response, a Yo, u ok? the day after. Silence.

He sent a few others over the next few days—Maybe this is weird but if you want to talk I’m here. And then: Kinda worried about you. The kinds of things he’d send his—a person he knew who was going through a tough time.

More silence.

Rozanov had never done that before. He had many flaws, but failure to text back had never been one of them. Shane would’ve worried about him being disappeared by the FSB for the crime of having an injured goalie and mediocre line depth, except he periodically showed up on TV.

One time Shane thought he saw Rozanov standing alone at the upper tier of an arena, but by the time Shane made his way up, nobody was there. Who knew if that had been Rozanov in the first place, anyway.

Why wouldn’t he text back?

Shane hadn’t realized how much space Rozanov had taken up in his life. Like a river wearing away at the soft parts of a riverbank, Rozanov had somehow carved himself into the non-hockey parts of Shane’s life—which was funny because he was a pretty significant part of Shane’s hockey life, too. His abrupt absence tore something open in Shane and it would not stop bleeding; he walked around feeling like he was missing a limb, or part of a vital organ, which was a stupid-ass thing to feel, because it was just Rozanov.

Just Rozanov.

That old feeling—of never being satisfied, no matter what he did—came back. When had it gone away? It had slipped away so gradually, the pangs lessening with time until he’d forgotten he’d ever had them. It was back now, though, carried deep in his belly. A hunger nothing could touch.

The Sochi games ended. America took gold; Canada took silver. Shane smiled and shook hands and he didn’t cry, not even once, and the entire time ignored the lack that gnawed at him. By the time he flew back with the rest of Team Canada he was more than ready to go home. Leave Sochi behind like a bad dream.

Life resumed. Every day, he’d see Rozanov’s handwriting on his chest in the bathroom mirror; every day, he’d catch sight of that birthmark on his left arm, and think of the complementary blotch on Rozanov’s biceps.

He’d occasionally open their message thread, his finger hovering over the delete button. He couldn’t make himself do it. As bad as the silence was, the thought of deleting all those years of messages made his stomach hurt.

Ultimately, it hadn’t mattered. As new messages arrived, the thread got pushed further and further down his list, until it fell off the first page of messages, then the second, then the third. He stopped opening the thread; it took too much scrolling.

Hidden from sight was basically as good as deleted, Shane told himself. He’d forget about its existence soon enough, even if it ached like a rotten tooth.

###

Shane dreamed of Rozanov.

It was always a different dream. It was always the same dream. It could take place anywhere: the beach, the prairie, a long barren stretch of highway. An ice rink. Shane would see someone in the distance, too far away for there to be distinguishing features, but from the slope of the shoulders and the cock of the hip, he knew. From the pull he felt in his heart, he knew.

Walking and walking then running, never getting any closer no matter how hard he tried; he’d set his teeth and will himself to go faster, until suddenly, he’d be right next to Rozanov, as if Shane’s desire was what had closed the gap when the striving of his body couldn’t get him there.

Rozanov would look at him, and in that moment of recognition they would know something about each other, an unspoken piece of knowledge that passed through the space between their gazes.

And then Rozanov would be swept away. Sometimes it was water—the ocean, a river, a dam breaking. Sometimes it was the precipice crumbling away. Sometimes it was a mudslide or an avalanche. Shane never saw it coming, even as he knew that it had always been there. The thing that took Rozanov away.

Shane would throw himself after Rozanov, and that was when he’d wake up. Emptiness and the sensation of falling. The knowledge that had filled him only moments ago drained out of him as if something had pulled the plug somewhere deep inside him. None of it was real, but in the blink that took him from dream to wakefulness, he could have sworn that Rozanov was real, the only solid thing in a landscape that shifted as soon as Shane looked away from it.

It was a different dream. It was the same dream.

###

March 2014

The first game the Metros played against the Raiders post-Olympics break was also their last for the regular season. It would be a relief. Shane told himself this, over and over. He would see Rozanov, they would play the game, and at the end of the night there would be a winner and a loser, and they could walk away from each other. No loose ends, no ambiguity.

Except, of course, for all the other times they would play each other. Potentially as soon as the playoffs in April. Certainly next year, and the year after that, and the year after that: a parade of years in which they walked away from each other, again and again. But at least the walking away would speak for itself.

The game was brutal. The Raiders arrived ready to draw blood, Rozanov most of all. He smiled a quiet, sharp smile at Shane at their first face-off; Shane had given him a quick look, and then forced himself to focus on the puck drop.

Even that small glimpse at his face had hurt. Rozanov’s beauty wounded Shane in a tender place that he thought he’d torn out in the month or so since Sochi, but he was wrong. There were soft spots left yet.

He could feel the word scrawled on his chest burning. He wondered if Rozanov could feel his name burning too, written as a question directly on top of his own heart.

Rozanov won the face-off, and proceeded to win most of his face-offs that night. The team did the best they could, and Shane tried to do the best he could, but his best, as it turned out, was pretty fucking bad. Very much the opposite of best. His reaction times were shot, his precision sucked, and his ability to see plays developing on the ice—all the openings and possibilities that he could normally assess, automatically and at a glance—came too late if it came at all.

They were lucky to lose by only one goal, and all of that credit belonged to their defensive core and Mitty being possessed by some kind of shutdown demon.

Post-game media was torture, but it at least it was familiar—rote phrases that rolled off his tongue and into the waiting microphones and recorders. He could do this in his sleep. Grit; lost chances; missed shots; almost had it. Some good looks. Gotta push through.

We tried. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.

The press left, eventually. Shane, as captain, should’ve tried to rally team spirits, but he realized, when his fingers shook as he shed the last of his gear, that he had nothing left. Handling media with a composed face had siphoned off the last of his reserves. The expressions on the faces of the teammates he’d failed were pretty bad, but Shane didn’t think he could stop himself from crying if he opened his mouth, which was infinitely worse.

The guys understood. They left him alone; the room gradually emptied. Shane, as always, was last to leave.

“We’ll get ’em next time, bud,” Hayden said on his way out.

Shane nodded, but couldn’t even summon a platitude in return. All he could manage was “Goodnight, Hayds”.

The last thing he expected to see when he got to his Range Rover in the parking lot was a figure in a dark peacoat leaning against the front passenger door. He wasn’t alone, though. Right by his knee, squatting with what Shane could only describe as malevolence, was…a goose? Its beak was pointed right at Rozanov’s crotch, which—Shane couldn’t have seen that correctly. It made no sense.

Right, whispered a little voice inside him, because that spontaneous tattoo makes sense. And that little puzzle piece on your arm that’s a perfect complement to the little puzzle piece on Rozanov’s—that makes sense, too.

Shane’s stomach swooped.

The goose turned its head as soon as Shane came within ten feet. The rest of it remained unnervingly still. It wasn’t a Canada goose, which were everywhere in the city; this was a white goose, like something out of a farm, or a cartoon.

“Hey,” said Shane. His voice sounded shockingly normal, given that his heart was trying to headbutt its way out of his ribcage like the chestburster from Alien. “What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

The sound of Rozanov’s voice—Shane needed him gone, as fast as possible. The game was done. They’d walked away. He was done with this night; he was done with Rozanov. “Asshole. You know what I meant. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Rozanov replied. He sounded tense. “Why don’t you ask this fucker?”

“This—do you mean the goose?” Shane stopped when he reached the car’s hood. The goose was still watching him with a dark, beady eye. The yellow lights of the parking lot made its feathers glow gold.

“Yes.”

Shane rolled his eyes. “Hey there, Mr., or, uh, Ms. Goose, why’d you drag this asshole all the way over here?”

The goose didn’t say anything. Kind of a relief, actually; Shane didn’t think he would’ve been surprised if it had, and that kind of blasé attitude over something so manifestly batshit didn’t say anything good about his state of mind.

The silence dragged on until Shane felt his nerves would snap; he spoke to break the tension. “Come on. Tell me for real what’s going on.”

His voice hadn’t shaken; he sounded a little tired, that was all. Shane felt unreasonably proud of himself. His insides might feel like they were falling apart, but he wasn’t showing any outward signs of it, by golly.

Rozanov exhaled sharply. It was still cold enough that it sent a white plume into the air. “This fucking goose came out of fucking nowhere and pecked me and pulled me until I come to your car.”

Shane blinked. “The fuck?”

“And if I try to leave, it hurt me.”

“The fuck?” Shane stepped closer. The goose didn’t move. “That’s—we don’t even have this kind of goose in the city.”

“And it won’t let me smoke.”

That, for some reason, made Shane laugh. Something about Rozanov’s aggrieved voice. “It—what?”

Rozanov swiped a hand across his curls. It made the palms of Shane’s hands itch. He knew exactly w what they would feel like. The texture, the bounce.

Upsetting thought. Terrible. Why had Shane done this to himself? He felt ill with hunger. He jammed his hands deeper into his pockets.

“I tried to take out cigarette while waiting for you,” Rozanov said, “and this fucker pulled entire package out of my hand and throw it away.” His mouth twisted into a grimacing smile. “Guess what it does when I try to retrieve.”

“It pecks at you?”

Rozanov glared down at the goose. “Stupid fucking bag of violence and birdshit.”

“You seriously can’t deal with a goose? That thing weighs, what, twenty pounds, max?”

“Try,” said Rozanov. “You will see.”

So Shane tried. He tried making a loud noise and stomping his feet; he tried rushing it while windmilling its arms. The goose didn’t budge, just watched Shane.

He’d never felt like an idiot in front of a bird before, which just went to show how it was never too late to experience something new.

When he reached out a foot to try and nudge the goose away, it finally moved—fast, really fucking fast, almost faster than Shane’s eye could follow—and pecked him on his shin, right on top of a bruise that hadn’t quite healed yet.

The pain was exquisite. Shane yelled and hopped backward.

“You see?” Rozanov sounded almost bored.

“Fuck!” Shane bent over and rubbed the sore spot. “Okay, fine. Maybe we need help. I can try calling animal control, I guess? They’re probably closed, though. It’s almost eleven.”

“What do you think I tried first?”

Shane straightened back up. His shin still throbbed. “Did you try calling your teammates? Marleau looks like someone who’d beat up a goose, no problem.” He stopped and frowned. “Where are they, anyway?”

“They go out clubbing. I said I would walk to hotel. And then—” He gestured at the goose. “This appeared.”

“So why didn’t you call them?”

“What do I tell them—strange goose wants me to stand by Shane Hollander’s extremely boring car? I thought you might come out any minute. I did not expect you to take one hundred million years, otherwise I would have phoned Marly.”

Shane crossed his arms “Okay, fine. So, like, what next? The cops? Call the ERT?”

“For goose? You think they will come for a fucking goose? ‘Oh please, officer, send six people with a battering ram and a bazooka to take away big scary bird.’”

“Fine! Fuck. Well.” Shane chewed on his lip while he thought things over.

He didn’t want to do this, but he couldn’t leave Rozanov stranded. There wasn’t another option that he could see.

“Wanna try getting in my car?” Shane asked through gritted teeth. “If you’re quick enough you can close the door on the goose, and then I can drop you off at your hotel.”

An expression flickered across Rozanov’s face, there and gone before Shane could tell what it was, like a shadow of a bird in flight. His mouth tightened until the curves of his lips pressed flat.

“Sure,” Rozanov said. “Cannot hurt. Or—it might, because this bird is very aggressive, but if this does not work then…actually, I don’t know what else to do. Fight this thing to death, maybe.”

“Dude, don’t kill the goose! Jesus.”

Shane walked over to the driver’s side and unlocked the doors. Rozanov opened the passenger side and leaped into the seat, but before he could close the door, the goose exploded into motion, so fast that its movement was impossible to track. Before Shane had stopped flinching, there it was, squatting on Rozanov’s lap.

Rozanov froze. Shane froze. The goose did not freeze. It trampled around Rozanov’s lap until it found a comfortable spot, then settled down with a distinctly smug air.

Shane opened the driver’s side door and peered in cautiously. The goose’s head swiveled to track him. “What the fuck,” he whispered.

“Okay, what now?” Rozanov sounded calm, considering everything; his face was partially hidden by the goose.

Shane licked his lips. “I can…uh…try pulling the goose out of your lap?”

“Do you see,” Rozanov said with exaggerated patience, “that this bird has beak directly at my eye level? I do not think this is good idea.”

Shane drummed his fingers on the roof of the car, thinking furiously. “I have a spare bucket in the trunk. That should protect your eyes? And you can, like, cover your face with your arms.” He paused. “Shit, should I gear up again?”

Rozanov stared at Shane flatly until Shane could feel the heat crawl up his face. “Fine,” Shane muttered. “No gear.”

“But helmet for me, yes.”

Shane dug up the helmet and a spare pair of gloves from the trunk. He studiously ignored the headrush at the sight of Rozanov in Metros blue, wearing Shane’s number. It was only a helmet.

Fuck, it had been a long day. A bad one, and now it was both bad and surreal.

“All right, cover your face,” said Shane as he pulled his gloves on. “Probably your neck, too.”

Rozanov made a choked-off sound that might have been a laugh or a groan of despair.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

Something about the way Rozanov said “yes” did something awful to Shane’s insides, but he couldn’t stop and feel feelings about that, he needed to get this goose away from Rozanov. He flexed his hands and stepped closer, careful not to look directly at the goose.

Misdirection. Deception. He could do this, he was known for being fast and slippery as hell on the ice. Famous for it, even. Fake out the defense, open up maneuvering room, strike where and when they least expected him—

Except this was a single stationary fucking goose, not a couple of d-men circling him like sharks. Was he overthinking this? He was definitely overthinking this.

Fuck it, he was just going to go for it.

He dove for the goose, clamped his hands around its middle and pulled up in a single fluid motion. Genuinely impressive—he’d even judged correctly and pinned its wings. A successful maneuver.

Except the goose was thrashing against him, way stronger than Shane had expected, which made keeping hold of it a real challenge. Also there was quite a lot of screaming and the goose wasn’t coming free, two things which turned out to be related.

The goose had foregone going for Rozanov’s eyes and throat in favor of biting down on his tit. Rozanov’s face was a shade of maroon that Shane had never before seen on a human being.

Shane let go of the goose, who immediately released its grip on Rozanov, and then lightning-fast, turned around and smashed its beak into the upper part of Shane’s right arm. The hit was so hard that it didn’t even register as pain at first; it started off dull and a little numb, before the pain bloomed suddenly and all at once.

Shane staggered back a step, then two, and then bent in double. He drew in a hissing breath through stiff lips; when he breathed it back out it whistled a little between his clenched teeth. He’d taken pucks to the leg that had hurt less.

He breathed through the pain. It was fine. He’d taken worse. He stood back up.

No blood, no dead goose, and no dead Rozanov. Things remained pretty much the same as when they’d started this goose removal venture, except Rozanov was scowling and rubbing his pec, and the goose was glaring at Shane and hissing like an angry snake.

Shane couldn’t remember why he’d been opposed to killing the goose. Saint Patrick’s Day was tomorrow, did people eat goose for that? Perhaps they should start.

“You are okay, Hollander?” Rozanov called out, his voice a bit hoarse. Probably from the screaming.

“Yeah.” Shane shook out his arm cautiously and felt along it, tested range of motion. A little numbness, a lot of tenderness, and he was going to have the mother of all bruises, but nothing felt torn or broken. He absolutely should’ve put his gear back on. “I’ll live. How about you?”

“Same. I am lucky, my coat is thick.”

Shane approached the car slowly. The goose raised its wings and hissed more aggressively; Shane took his gloves off and tucked them under his arm. That calmed it down, but only a little.

“So what do you want to do now?” Shane asked.

Rozanov groaned and thumped his head against the headrest. Shane bit back a slightly hysterical laugh; Rozanov was still wearing Shane’s helmet. “Take me to hotel? And see if demon bird will let me go.”

“Yeah, okay.” Shane chewed on his lips in an effort to shove back the laughter. Ferry Rozanov and the goose around. Sure. Might as well happen.

Shane got into the driver’s side slowly and carefully. The goose didn’t strike him as something that spooked easy, hellacious temper notwithstanding, but better to be safe than sorry. The goose watched his movements closely but did not attempt to menace him—or Rozanov, for that matter. Shane threw the gloves into the backseat.

The drive to the hotel was conducted in complete silence, but it was mercifully short—the Marriott that was the default hotel for most of the away teams, including the Raiders, was literally around the block. Less than five minutes after he started the car, he pulled into a parking space by the hotel and put the car into Park.

Shane turned to look at Rozanov, who was looking at the goose.

“Will you let me out, you bag of shit?”

The goose didn’t respond.

Rozanov reached for the door handle, and the goose did respond then, swiftly and viciously, by pecking his hand. “Sukkablyat!” Rozanov yelled, jerking his hand away.

“No hotel, I guess,” Shane said, his voice as neutral as he could make it.

“Not this one. Maybe it hates Marriott. Try a different one.”

Three hotels later, Rozanov had three more goose-induced bruises on his hand and was no closer to leaving Shane’s car. Shane was beginning to feel delirious from tiredness and hunger and a secret third thing he had no interest in acknowledging.

“You want my gloves?” He eyed Rozanov’s hand; even in the dark confines of the car, lit imperfectly by a parking lot light, dark welts were visible.

“No, I don’t want your stupid gloves,” Rozanov snapped. “I want to be out of this car and away from you and not pinned by, by fucking demon bird.”

Shane absorbed the words for a moment, let them really sink in, keeping his face carefully blank, then reached into the backseat, grabbed the gloves, and held them out to Rozanov.

Rozanov glared at the gloves, his nostrils flaring. A stripe of yellow streetlight caught Rozanov’s eye just so. Something in it glittered. Shane looked away.

The gloves were pulled out of Shane’s hand. Shane didn’t bother looking over to see whether Rozanov put them on, simply put the car in reverse and began backing out of their spot.

“It’s almost midnight, and I’m wiped,” he said, keeping an eye on the car mirrors, taking care to keep his voice level. Put the car in Drive and made a right out of the parking lot. “I need to eat something, I need a hot shower, and I need sleep, in that order. I’m going to do it at my place. You can come with me if you want, or you can sleep in the car, if the—”

A hiccup of laughter escaped Shane. Laughing was the last thing he’d wanted to do, but then he thought of the sentence he was about to say, and another laugh burst out.

He tried again. “You can sleep in the car if. If the g—if the guh—”

It was hopeless. Laughter kept coming out instead of words; he banged on his steering wheel to try and re-center himself but it only made him laugh harder. Next to him, he could hear Rozanov beginning to chuckle, too. Shane pulled over to the side of the road and set his head on the steering wheel and laughed so much that his eyes teared up and he began to wheeze.

Eventually the laughter tapered off into giggles and then into silence. He leaned back on his seat, then turned to look at Rozanov, who was, unexpectedly, looking directly at Shane. He turned away as soon as he caught Shane’s eye.

“I was trying to say,” Shane said, his voice a little raspy, “if the fucking goose won't let you leave. Fuck, that was a crazy sentence. Goddamn. What a night.”

“This fucking bird.” Rozanov sounded disgusted, but a little amused, too. “Do you see what it does now?”

Shane looked more closely, then did a double take. The goose had draped its neck along Rozanov’s shoulder and nestled its head under his jaw.

“Is it…is it cuddling you?”

“Or putting itself closer to my jugular. Difficult to say.” Rozanov hesitated, then continued, an odd note in his voice: “It did this when we were laughing.”

“Oh my god.” Shane began to laugh again. Just a little, and not because it was funny—or not only because. His feelings needed an outlet, and it was either this or cry, and he’d be damned if he’d cry in front of Rozanov. He didn’t even know at this point what the feelings were. Just that he had a lot of them.

“I think this is…get-along goose,” said Rozanov. “When we are nice, it is nice.”

“That’s fucking insane. You know how insane that sounds, right?”

“Maybe tomorrow when we wake up, we find out this is all bad dream because one of us ate too much Taco Bell.”

Shane wrinkled his nose. “One of us?”

“I count as one of us.”

“Good. As long as we’re clear on where the blame is.”

He began driving again. They still didn’t speak, but this silence felt better than the previous ones. Lighter. Cleaner. The goose didn’t so much as stir.

They arrived at Shane’s apartment building fifteen minutes later. This time, when Rozanov tried to open the door, the goose didn’t lay into him. In fact, it jump-fluttered onto the ground as soon as the door opened and waddled off to the side to make room for Rozanov to get out.

Incredible. Who said miracles weren’t real? Shane got out of the car and led them to the front door. It was an odd procession, but Shane was too tired to care about who saw it. He was more than half-convinced he was dreaming, anyway.

As he kicked off his shoes in the entryway, he looked over at Rozanov and was overcome by laughter yet again. Rozanov raised an eyebrow. “What is so funny?”

Shane shook his head. “You’re still wearing my helmet and my gloves. How’s it feel to be 24?”

Rozanov grimaced. “Worst number. Worst team.”

“You can keep them on if you want.” He looked at the goose, who stood directly between the two of them. “The demon bird is still here.”

“I will take them off, but first, I want to test something. Stand where you are, okay?”

Shane raised his eyebrows but nodded, and watched as Rozanov carefully backed away, hands held up in a loose boxing posture. At six feet, the goose began to stir restlessly, looking back and forth between Shane and Rozanov. When Rozanov reached the front door and put his hand on the handle, the goose exploded into motion: one moment it was next to Shane, the next it was hissing and honking and striking at Rozanov.

Rozanov, however, was faster this time, and had stuck a gloved hand directly in the path of its beak. The goose, in its fury, bit down on the glove and yanked it free; Rozanov used the distraction to sprint towards Shane. The goose ran after, murder in its beady black eyes.

Shane shoved Rozanov behind him. The goose had been rearing back to strike, but when it saw Shane in the way it pulled up short. Absurdly, it still had the glove in its beak, held daintily by the pinkie. It flapped its wings and made a half-hearted lunge towards Rozanov, but Shane scooted around to block it.

The goose stood still, staring at them with its evil little eyes. Shane watched it warily. The standoff lasted several seconds, then the goose appeared to lose interest and waddled off to one side, where it proceeded to mangle Shane’s glove by tossing it in the air and then snapping at it when it came within reach, over and over, like a fucked-up goose version of a puck-handling warmup.

The glove started fraying surprisingly fast. Did it have teeth or something? The entire display felt a little like a threat.

“Wow,” came a voice from behind Shane. “My hero.”

Shane whirled around and found himself almost nose-to-nose with Rozanov, who still had the fucking helmet on; Shane whipped his head back so quickly that he stumbled.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said when he’d caught his balance. “I was trying to stop the goose from mauling you. Again.”

“Yes. Very brave.”

There was an expression on Rozanov’s face that Shane didn’t know how to read. Was that twist of his mouth sarcastic, or sad, or mocking, or some other option that his Russian lockbox mind would never give up? He was looking at Shane intently, but he’d been alternating between that laser stare and refusing to look at Shane all night, including during the game, and Shane had zero ability to parse any of it.

He thought about responding, realized there really wasn’t anything he wanted to say, and shook his head. “I’m getting some food and going to bed. You can follow me or not.”

“I have to follow you,” said Rozanov. “I think demon bird wants us to be together.”

Shane whipped his head around. “What?”

Rozanov waved his hand. “Not like that. More like, same space. That is why no hotels, but your apartment is okay.”

Shane opened his mouth and then shut it a few different times, his brain overwhelmed by many different responses, most of them variants of You know how fucking crazy that sounds, right, but then he realized: they were being held hostage by an unnaturally fast, extremely violent goose. Nothing he could think to say right now was crazier than that, up to and including literal gibberish.

“You know what, sure, why not. You were right, this is a fucking get-along goose, like one of those novelty double-wide sweatshirts, except it fucks us up if we try to escape it.”

He turned back around. “I’m going to the kitchen. You do whatever the fuck you want.”

The strange little procession followed Shane into the kitchen. The sound of the goose’s webbed feet tapping on the floor felt like little flicks on an exposed nerve ending. The back of his neck prickled. It’d be funny in a really dark way if he took a beak to the brainstem. Could be worth it, if only to see Rozanov trying to explain his corpse to the police—not that Shane would be seeing anything in this scenario, since he’d be, you know, dead.

Rozanov, on the other hand, moved with complete silence. It didn’t matter, because Shane could tell he was behind him, about two feet back. He’d been able to sort of sense where Rozanov was whenever they were in the same room for years now. Reviewing a lot of Raiders game tape and playing against a guy for years would do that, he supposed. He’d thought at first that it would make it easier to beat Rozanov on the ice. Turned out knowing was, in fact, only half the battle; outmaneuvering him was the other half, which was difficult because he was fast as fuck and shifty as hell.

Rozanov didn’t chirp Shane about his food selection, which was a shock. Not a single “You are allergic to flavor?” or “Hmm, yes, boring food for boring man.” He grabbed a container of quinoa and salmon from the fridge, brought it to the table, and began to wolf it down silently, cold. At least he’d removed the helmet and the glove. Shane was going to lose his shit if he had to see Rozanov in his gear for one more second.

Rozanov looked exhausted. A little mangled, too—Jesus, his right hand looked rough.

Shane firmly shoved away all thoughts of what Rozanov’s bitten-up chest looked like. They were done with that now; Rozanov couldn’t have been more clear in the car. It was all for the best. Shane should’ve ended this years ago. They both should’ve.

Except now there was a goose who appeared to be pissed off whenever Rozanov tried to leave.

Whatever. Shane would call animal control first thing tomorrow morning.

By the time Shane brought his plate of heated-up food to the table, Rozanov was mostly done eating. Shane gestured at Rozanov’s hand. “Goose got you good.”

Rozanov looked down at it and shook it out. “Nothing but bruises and scratches. Is fine.”

“I have first aid stuff in the guest bathroom. Help yourself.”

“How is your arm?”

“My what? Oh! Right, the”—Shane waggled his right arm—“from when I tried to pull it off you. It’s fine.”

Rozanov sat back. “Let me see.”

“What are you, a doctor? No.” Shane took a bite of his food. It was barely warm enough, but he didn’t want to stick it back in the microwave. It was fine; if he ate it fast enough, he’d get all of it down before it congealed into an inedible mass. He began to quickly and methodically shovel the food into his mouth.

“You took a war wound for me, Hollander. I want to look.”

Something in Rozanov’s voice made Shane look up. A hot flush began to crawl up Shane’s neck. He swallowed his bite and said, crisply and succinctly, “Fuck off.”

“What if it is serious?”

“It’s not.”

“You do not know this.”

“You can’t, either.”

“Let me see.”

“Nope. Can’t make me.”

“Want to bet?”

Shane shoved the last bite of his food into his mouth and chewed as fast as he could. Rozanov was looking at him again, and his voice was—it didn’t sound cold anymore, or sarcastic. It sounded warm. Almost…flirtatious.

“I don’t want anything other than getting you and the goose out of my apartment,” Shane said after he’d swallowed. “It’s late. Don’t you have an early flight tomorrow? You can have the guest bedroom. I’ll call animal control tomorrow.”

“You think animal control will work?”

“Well, I don’t have any better ideas,” Shane snapped. “If it doesn’t work, maybe we do need to call the ERT.” Shane stood up; the squeal of the chair legs as they scraped across the floor made him wince, followed by a bigger wince and a bark of surprise when he felt something pinch his calf.

He looked down and there, right by his feet and hissing like a leaky steam pipe in a bad 90s horror movie, was the goose.

Shane snapped. He turned to walk away, but the goose pecked his ankle. He immediately switched to faking it out—if he could break free, he could run upstairs to his bedroom and lock the door behind him. He was pretty sure the goose wouldn’t be able to break the door down like a bird version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Like. Ninety-nine percent sure.

Except no matter how quickly he moved, the goose moved faster. Harrying him when he tried to run past, pecking him and pecking him and every fucking time it fucking hurt. He finally lost his temper and took a swing at it, but it struck before he could land the hit, biting into the meatiest part of his palm right by his thumb, and it turned out geese did have teeth, what the fuck.

Shane entered a goose battle berserk rage. His singular goal was removing the goose from his presence, whether by running away from it or killing it with his bare hands, he wasn’t picky. It wouldn’t let him escape, though, so he raised his other hand to throttle it or maybe just snap its stupid fucking neck but before he could do it, it bit him on that hand, too. Shane was screaming obscenities; he couldn’t remember being this angry in his life.

The arms wrapping themselves around him took him completely by surprise. Strong arms—strong enough to pin Shane and lift him up. The goose released Shane’s hand and grabbed onto the hem of his sweater, worrying it like a wolf trying to break a rabbit’s neck; the fabric tore with a sharp rip. That appeared to satisfy the goose’s bloodlust; it retreated under the table and sat there, scrap of dark blue wool clamped in its beak.

“Fuck you,” Shane yelled. “Let me fucking go!”

“Nope.” Rozanov’s breath was hot against Shane’s ear; he was dragging Shane away bodily from the dining room and towards the couches in the living room. Shane growled and kicked; Rozanov responded by tightening his hold until it was difficult to breathe.

Rozanov dumped Shane onto a couch so unceremoniously that Shane bounced on the cushions and almost fell off. When he tried to get up Rozanov shoved him back down. He tried again; same result. On his third attempt, Rozanov kept his hand on Shane’s chest and said, his voice infuriatingly even, “If you don’t stop moving, I will sit on you.”

Shane subsided. He wanted the goose gone, but the thought of Rozanov on top of him—no.

His eyes were wet. So were his hands. He drew a deep snuffling breath and looked down at the blood welling out of the long, jagged tears on his palms, then tried to wipe them off on the front of his sweater. He didn’t wince at the sting, but it did hurt enough that he immediately lifted his hands and looked at them stupidly.

“Sit here,” said Rozanov. “You said you had first aid kit in bathroom. Where?”

Shane drew in another shaky breath, then released it. “Downstairs bathroom, cabinet under the sink.”

“Okay, don’t move. Goose will be very angry if you do, and I will not be here to save you this time.”

“Fuck off.” Shane leaned his head against the back of the couch and closed his eyes. He sensed Rozanov padding away to the bathroom; heard the cabinet door opening and the soft clatter of it being ransacked.

Shane’s limbs were trembling, and they wouldn’t stop. This was the stupidest panic attack he’d ever had. The white-hot rage that had filled him moments ago had dissipated, and in its place was jelly.

When he opened his eyes, Rozanov was kneeling in front of him and laying out boxes of supplies on the coffee table. He shook the bottle of antiseptic solution at Shane’s face; Shane glared at it.

“We need to wash first before we use that,” said Shane.

Rozanov rolled his eyes. “Okay.” He stood up and offered Shane a hand. Shane ignored it and stood, too. His legs held up all right.

They washed their hands at the kitchen sink.

“Your hand’s way worse than either one of mine,” Shane said. The suds were turning pink. It stung, but he’d endured so much worse from hockey that he barely felt it.

Rozanov shook his head. “More bruises and more teethmarks on my hand, but your wounds are deeper.” He gave Shane a sidelong look. “I know when to stop.”

Shane gave a bitter laugh and rinsed his hands clean. “Yeah. I’m trying to get better about that.”

Rozanov made a noncommittal noise and unscrewed the cap for the antiseptic. “Hold out your hands.”

“I can do it myself.”

Rozanov looked down pointedly at Shane’s torn-up palms, looked back up, and raised an eyebrow.

Shane made a guttural noise in the back of his throat. “Fine.” He held out his hands, and Rozanov poured a steady stream over both sides.

“There,” said Rozanov, “Now you will not die of goose disease.”

“Dude, the goose-inflicted deep tissue trauma would get me long before any goose-communicable diseases.”

The two of them looked over at the goose simultaneously. It was perched on top of the kitchen island, its gaze unwavering. They turned back to the sink. Rozanov poured antiseptic over his own hand, hunted up clean towels for drying off, and they went back to the couch. Rozanov sat on the floor.

“Give,” he said, pointing at Shane’s left hand. After a brief pause, Shane held it out. He couldn’t really bandage himself with how banged up his hands were, and really, how bad could it be?

Really fucking bad, it turned out. Rozanov was gentle as he dabbed up blood using a sterile gauze pad and applied the antibiotic ointment. Shane’s hands were still bleeding a little, so the ointment became pinkish smears as Rozanov worked. Shane couldn’t see his face, only a mop of golden brown curls and a broad set of shoulders.

He’d hung onto those broad shoulders. He’d bitten them, licked them; panted, moaned, stifled cries against them. He knew the texture of the skin there, knew the taste and the smell; could probably draw a map of all the moles from memory, still.

Shane wanted to run around and howl; kick something for the pleasure of watching it break. He wanted to punch a hole in himself to release this, this thing that had grown while he wasn’t looking and was now threatening to burst his skin.

He looked away and tried to make his mind blank. To disentangle himself. Float beyond his body and this situation.

“I’m sorry.”

The words caught Shane by surprise. He blinked and returned once again to his body, which felt like a mistake.

“It’s not your fault,” Shane said. “I don’t know what the fucking deal is with the goose, but I don’t think I can blame it on you.”

“No,” said Rozanov, his voice a little stifled. He smeared a line of ointment across the back of Shane’s hand with a careful finger. “Not for goose. For. For Sochi.”

For one crazed moment Shane wondered if, despite all evidence to the contrary, he could beat the goose out the door. Break a leg off a chair and defend himself using that if he needed to. Or he could just surrender to being pecked. Death by beak in brainstem probably wouldn’t be so bad—it’d be quick, at least, or quicker than whatever the fuck this was.

He drew a deep breath, held it, let it out, and said, “Nothing to apologize for.”

That probably would’ve been more convincing if he hadn’t sounded like he wanted to rip Rozanov’s head off.

Rozanov looked up at Shane’s face, and it was too much—like being doused in boiling oil. Those blue-green eyes, that mouth, the fucking mole on his cheek that Shane had never kissed because if he started he didn’t know if he could ever stop. His gaze darted away.

“You are still really bad liar,” Rozanov said mildly.

“And you’re still really good at being an asshole.” Shane could feel Rozanov’s fingers against his wrist and on the tips of his own fingers, and he wanted to rip his hand away and storm up to his bedroom.

Except the goose would probably get him, and then Rozanov would need to tend his other wounds, and at that point Shane might actually break down crying. So he sat there and let Rozanov touch his hand.

“True, I am asshole,” Rozanov continued. “You like that, I think. But I am coward, and that part you don’t like.” He squeezed Shane’s wrist gently, and ran a finger across the soft, tender skin along its inner surface. “I also don’t like that part.”

Shane stayed quiet. He couldn’t trust himself to speak. He stared over Rozanov’s head at a patch of wall until his eyes ached and his vision blurred.

“Sochi was difficult. My family is—” Rozanov cut himself off with a small frustrated sound. There was a pause and some rustling sounds, and then Shane felt the press of large non-stick pads against both sides of his hands.

“Hold this,” said Rozanov. Shane turned his gaze down and held the pads in place, taking care to look at his hand and only his hand while Rozanov haphazardly wound coban around it.

“Is not too tight?” Rozanov asked.

“It’s fine,” Shane replied.

And on the one hand, it was fine. Everything would stay put long enough until he could see a doctor in the morning, assuming the goose allowed him to leave the apartment. But on the other hand, it wasn’t fine, and in fact nothing was fine, because Shane felt like all the air was being slowly pressed out of his lungs.

Rozanov gestured for Shane’s other hand, and the torturous process began again. Dabbing up blood. Ointment. Touching. Why did Shane need to have a body when he wasn’t playing hockey?

“My father is old-fashioned,” Rozanov said, picking up the conversational thread as if he’d never dropped it. “Losing to Latvia so early was…hmm…shameful. Very difficult. I shamed myself and my team, and also my family. I shamed Russia. My thoughts were. Not good.”

Rozanov fell silent again. Lines of ointment turned pink. Shane found himself staring at the chaotic waves and eddies of Rozanov’s curls.

He thought about punching a wall, or running away, or grabbing a handful of that hair and kissing Rozanov so he’d stop talking.

He sat on his couch, still and silent.

“I saw your messages,” Rozanov continue, “but I did not want to talk to anybody. I wanted….” Rozanov trailed off and turned Shane’s hand over. Ripped open a new package of gauze pads, blotted up the blood from the back of his hand. He worked on that for a while, then applied the ointment. When he was done, he cradled Shane’s torn-up hand in both of his.

“It’s fine,” Shane said. He felt awful—the food he’d eaten earlier sat in his stomach like a block of lead; he began a chant of don’t throw up, don’t throw up in his head. “I don’t even remember what I wrote. They were...nothing. They were—whatever.”

Rozanov looked up at him, his eyes dark and intent, mouth held at a bitter angle. “I remember what you wrote. I wanted to reply, but I did not, so…I am sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Shane repeated, and then said, in a desperate bid to make Rozanov stop talking, “Not a big deal.”

Rozanov blinked. His hands tightened on Shane’s briefly before relaxing, and as he let go, Shane felt a now-familiar pinch at his shoulder.

He turned around just in time to see the goose fluttering onto the back of the couch. Shane scrambled off to one side, heart hammering in his chest. Rozanov promptly popped up onto the couch, putting himself between the goose and Shane.

“The fuck are you doing, Rozanov?”

“You save me from goose all night, so now is my turn.”

“I don’t think I did a lot of saving. It was more like, getting mauled.”

The goose moved its neck as if threatening to strike, the motion eerily snake-like. Rozanov shifted to block it. After a couple of these back-and-forths, the goose drew back its neck, jumped onto the floor, and settled into a squat.

It didn’t stop looking at them, though, its gaze unblinking. Almost reptilian.

“Okay,” said Rozanov. “I don’t think it will bite us now. Give me your hand again.”

Rozanov bandaged Shane’s other hand quickly, both of them keeping half an eye on the goose the entire time. After, Shane stared at his hands because he sure as fuck didn’t want to look at Rozanov. Or the goose, other than to keep its horrible form in his peripheral vision at all times.

“We were something, yes?”

Blood roared in Shane’s ears. “What?”

“Before Sochi. We were—” From the corner of his eye, he caught Rozanov waving a hand. “We were doing something.”

Shane looked up at Rozanov at that. “What, fucking?”

Rozanov made an exasperated noise. “Yes, that, but also—phone calls, all the time. Texting, all the time.”

“Yeah, well, we were trying to figure out all the weird shit that was happening to us. Still happening to us.”

“When was last time we talk about our tattoos, or this, this thing on our arms?”

Rozanov had Shane there. He shrugged.

“Do you know the last time I sleep with someone not you?” Rozanov asked.

It was strange how many things Shane thought couldn’t hurt him anymore somehow still did. He’d thought about this now and then—Rozanov sleeping with other people. They hadn’t talked about being exclusive, so Shane had assumed Rozanov was tearing his way through the eligible women (and some of the ineligible ones) in Boston. The Raiders partied hard, and Rozanov partied hardest out of all of them. Shane had seen the photos and heard the stories.

He’d done his best not to think about any of it. What he didn’t think of couldn’t hurt him.

“No clue, dude,” he said, trying to sound as calm and neutral as possible.

“Me, neither,” said Rozanov.

Shane frowned. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I cannot remember when I sleep with somebody not you. Definitely it was more than one year ago. I can look through phone and find her name, but. Too much to scroll.” He mimed holding a phone and flicking on a screen over and over, sticking his tongue out briefly as he made a face.

“Okay.” Shane shifted uncomfortably on the couch. “I guess it’s been a while for me, too, but I don’t sleep around very much. Like, I don’t think my sex drive is as high as yours.”

Rozanov stared at him, eyebrows raised. Shane could feel his skin flushing red until it felt like he could light up an entire city through the power of his blush.

“Fuck you,” he muttered.

“Yes, fuck me—as in, you have fucked me until my cock almost fall off,” said Rozanov. “Low sex drive? Low sex drive? Hollander, I slept with many, many people, and you alone make me come so much I have to drink entire bottle of Gatorade afterwards. Big bottle, not small one.”

Shane was going to die. Forget the goose, he was going to have a stroke right now. “Sorry?”

“Do not apologize! When we fucked, it was like—not even teenage Ilya could imagine, okay? And teenage Ilya was very perverted and imagined many things.”

“All right, fine. So we were doing…something. It doesn’t mean it was something.”

As soon as the words left his mouth Shane wanted to slap himself upside his head. Doing something didn’t mean it was something? Fucking embarrassing.

Rozanov let out a slow hissing breath—except, no, it was the goose. It hadn’t risen to its feet, but it was staring at Shane, its head angled forward aggressively, its beak partially open.

“What?” Shane asked, which was a fantastic sign of mental stability—talking to a farm animal like it could understand him. “What the fuck did I do now?”

The goose continued glaring and hissed harder. Shane could see the barest suggestion of teeth. He didn’t speak goose, but he understood a threat when he saw one.

“I think,” Rozanov said, speaking slowly, “that goose does not like it when we make each other sad.”

Yeah, if that’s true and it’d been around in Sochi, you’d be fucking dead, Shane thought, and immediately stuffed that thought deep into the lockbox where he kept all his inconvenient thoughts and emotions, and slammed the lid shut.

He said, instead, “That makes no fucking sense. A goose can’t understand what we’re saying, and it definitely can't understand what we’re feeling.”

“All of this makes no sense!” Rozanov was starting to raise his voice. “Not only tonight, but the last four years. First the thing on our”—Rozanov gestured at his arm—“and then the stupid fucking dumbshit tattoos, and now this goose who attacks us when we try to separate and also sometimes when we are together. It understands something. Clearly.”

“Okay, fine. Maybe it does.” Shane licked his lips and sifted through what Rozanov had said. “So I said something that made you sad?”

Rozanov’s cheeks were turning red, but he didn’t look away from Shane. “Yes. When you say what we have—had—is no big deal. Or means nothing.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t the one who decided to stop in the first place.”

Shane hadn’t meant to say that. He hadn’t even realized he’d been thinking that, or had at any point thought that. It had slipped out of his mouth, oops, like how his phone fell out of his pocket sometimes when he bent over.

Rozanov didn’t flinch, but his face did a thing. Like Shane had sucker-punched him. Shane pointed a finger at the goose and said, “Don’t you fucking start,” but it stayed completely still.

Maybe Rozanov hadn’t been that hurt after all?

“I am sorry.”

Rozanov’s voice was low and soft. It hurt something in Shane’s chest, and his stomach, and even somewhere deep in his gut. The goose didn’t attack Rozanov, though. What the fuck? Shane was feeling sad—downright terrible, in fact—and here Rozanov sat, unmolested. Did it like Rozanov better? Was it playing favorites?

“It sucked.” Another thing Shane hadn’t expected to say, but this one he’d actually thought, kind of a lot.

“Yes,” Rozanov said. “It sucked for me also, but—” He shrugged.

Since Shane had boarded this horrible conversational train already, he might as well continue. It wasn’t as if he could suffer more. “So why’d you do it? If it sucked.”

“I was afraid.”

When Rozanov didn’t elaborate, Shane asked: “Of what?”

Rozanov’s face was pale and hard; he looked as if he were trying to swallow an especially large and unpleasant pill. “Of what I wanted.” He shot Shane a sidelong glance. “I want things too much. Ever since I was small—my mother said I was hungry. My father tells me I am greedy. They are both right.”

He looked off to one side, so all Shane could see was the back of Rozanov’s head and the curve of an ear. “But after we lost to Latvia, I realized I was, I was…not working properly? Or…not good? I am not good enough. So I go hungry. Because I did not earn my food.”

“Hey.” Shane tugged at Rozanov’s sleeve. He wasn’t prepared for Rozanov to turn around so promptly. The look on his face—Shane opened his mouth without knowing quite what he wanted to say, but before he could get a word out, he leaned forward, pulled Rozanov closer, and kissed him.

As far as kisses went, Shane had done better. Rozanov clearly hadn’t expected it, and frankly neither had Shane. Their mouths landed awkwardly, teeth clashing with an unpleasant clack; their noses kept getting in their way until they found the correct angle, but once they did, they were kissing, properly kissing, the taste and feel of Rozanov’s mouth deeply familiar. Something inside of Shane settled into place.

They were both breathing hard when they pulled apart.

“I like you,” Rozanov said, the words slurred and a little rushed.

What are we, twelve? Shane thought, and said, “I like you, too.”

“What we are doing—it is very stupid.”

“Yup.”

“We are being irresponsible.”

“Hundred percent.”

“I do not want to stop seeing you.”

Shane opened his mouth to say something nonchalant like Fine, sure, or maybe something a bit more pointed like Okay, so what are you planning to do about it, but what came out instead was “It really, really hurt when we stopped talking.”

“So we don’t stop, then.” Rozanov held up a finger to Shane’s mouth, which had already begun opening to argue. It smelled of ointment and antiseptic solution. “What if we promise to always talk? Even if what we want to say is ‘Stop talking to me.’ I can do this, yes? We can do this. Is small thing.”

Shane thought about it. The voice at the other end of the phone, the text messages that anchored his days: the good mornings and goodnights and the things Rozanov sometimes sent Shane solely to make him laugh. The chirps and random bitching. The kissing; the touching. The sex, god, the toe-curling mouth-watering absolutely filthy sex. The hockey—facing off against Rozanov with fierce anticipation instead of dread.

“Okay,” Shane said against Rozanov’s finger. “I guess we can keep talking. We can keep doing other stuff, too, maybe.”

Rozanov grinned, then, wide and all teeth. Shane wanted to rub his tongue over them. “Of course, Hollander, I know you are desperate for my—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Shane said, and yanked him over for another kiss.

###

Shane wasn’t sure how much time had passed; what he did know was that he really needed to deep-clean the couch at some point. Rozanov was collapsed in a sweaty heap on top of him, and Shane was covered in all kinds of fluids from his chest on down. It felt low-key disgusting.

He liked it. He liked it so much. Probably too much, but he decided, as Rozanov crushed him pleasantly into the cushions, that it was fine, actually. Hockey took up so much of his life that he hadn’t allowed himself to like anything else even a fraction as much. Maybe it was okay to like this one other thing.

Rozanov scrambled off Shane with a sigh and a little grimace. “I need shower.” He looked down at Shane and gave an unholy grin. “Holy shit, you need shower, too. Come, I help you since your hands are useless.”

“They’re not useless,” Shane immediately shot back.

“They’re useless,” Rozanov reasserted. “I will help you shower, then I clean and bandage again. Maybe next time don’t fight crazy goose with bare hands.”

They froze at the same time, eyes widening. Shane shot bolt upright and looked around; so did Rozanov.

The goose was nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t trust that fucker,” said Shane. After a perfunctory wipedown and tugging the bare minimum of clothing back on, they scoured the apartment.

No sign of the goose. But also: no open windows, no doors left ajar—no openings available that would allow a giant fucking bird to escape.

“What the fuck,” Shane whispered as they stood in the middle of his bedroom. “Did we fucking hallucinate it?”

Rozanov nodded towards Shane’s hands. “So, what, you lose a knife fight with your hands?”

 Shane looked down at them. The pain felt real enough.

“What the fuck,” he said again.

Rozanov shrugged. “Another mystery for us to investigate. Give us excuse to text.” He waggled his eyebrows.

“Fuck off.” Shane kicked at him halfheartedly. Rozanov danced out of the way with minimal effort.

“At least this means I am no longer trapped in your apartment.”

Shane was astonished at how his heart sank at that. It wasn’t as if he wanted or expected Rozanov to stay. They both knew the score: they met, they fucked, and then one of them left. Leaving, leaving, always leaving. That was the rule of the game. Just because Shane had allowed himself to like it now didn’t mean anything else had changed.

Rozanov grabbed Shane’s chin and broke his train of thought. “Hey,” he said softly. “We shower first, yes? And then I go, but I will text you when I am back at hotel. Maybe tomorrow we talk more, after I land in Vancouver.”

Shane swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

“Good.” Rozanov smiled then, a soft pleased smile that Shane had never seen before. Shane smiled back, and he could feel it in his own face, too: that same softness, that same pleasure.

It was true that one of them always had to leave, but the flip side was also true: that they’d come back to each other. One thing they had no choice over; the other they did. The fact there was a choice made it terrifying. Painful, sometimes. But there was a sweetness in it, too. Shane could work with that. Shane would make his choice and take the sweet, for as long as he was allowed and for as long as he was able.