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It started before practice with yet another social media trend Harris wanted the Cens to do, and Shane wasn’t surprised, exactly, but he was a little disconcerted that it was beginning to look like a pattern. His job involved participating in lots of social media content; he really didn’t need “viral trend leads to major personal revelation” to become a recurring thing.
“So it’s baby photos again, but it’s different this time,” said Harris. “Similar! But since that was such a hit, I don’t think anyone will have any issue with more tiny baby Centaurs popping up in their feeds. It was a while ago, anyway.”
He showed his phone around the circle.
“The staff have already done some, we’re going to do a few posts of these spread out over a week or two, really show off different sides of the organizations, not just players. This one is Dale’s.”
It was a picture of a child, probably Dale, absolutely covered head-to-toe in what looked like chocolate icing—not in a cute, baby’s-first-birthday sort of way, in a “your mom is going to be furious” sort of way. The bold white text at the top of the photo said THIS IS WHO, and the bottom said SHARPENS OUR SKATES. It was adorable and made very little sense to Shane.
“Here’s Rachel’s, that’s our new PT, if you haven’t met them yet,” he said, swiping to the next photo, a tiny toddler wearing a diaper as a hat and looking utterly delighted to be doing so. The caption said THIS IS WHO / PHYSICALS OUR THERAPIES. He swiped again.
“Here’s mine!” A tiny Harris, THIS IS WHO / MAKES THE MEMES, “And, of course, Chiron!”
The puppy photo of Chiron (THIS IS WHO / ATE A PUCK) was adorable, obviously, but Shane was still stuck on the last one. It was setting off some sort of weird siren in the back of his head, and he couldn’t figure out why.
“So it’ll be baby photos of you guys, preferably funny ones, with a caption about what it is you do on the team. For those of us who stay behind the scenes, it’s an introduction to the people who make the magic happen, but for you guys, they know you play hockey, obviously, so we want it to be a little more specific.”
Tiny Harris looked a lot like adult-sized Harris. He was a cute kid, chubby-cheeked and gap-toothed. He had an awful case of helmet hair, but under that, his hair was the kind of fluffy-soft that adults and annoying older siblings must have loved to ruffle. The photo was close enough to show his bright green eyes.
“We’re not looking for this is who plays hockey or this is who shoots the puck or something. Think more along the lines of this is who got in twelve fights last season, this is who is scared of the mascot. We want people to maybe learn something about you, but definitely laugh. Shane, I was thinking this is who got Uno banned from the team bus.”
Several people laughed, but Shane wasn’t really listening. Something was still bugging him about that damn photo. Tiny Harris was standing at center ice, absolutely swamped in an adult player-sized Cens jersey, and grinning like it was the best day of his life. The close-up of him was cropped from the middle of a larger group photo, with none of the other children's faces fully visible. It reminded Shane of the photos they took on the last day of his and Ilya’s camps, with all the players and campers—
“Oh my god.”
All the players and campers.
“Holy shit,” Shane said.
“Uh, you good, dude?” asked Bood.
“Yeah, no, sorry, it’s just,” said Shane. He trailed off, turning to look at Harris more fully. “That photo. The one of you, not Chiron. Was that at one of the Cens junior skills clinics?”
“Yes! I went to them all the time as a kid,” said Harris, grinning. Shane couldn’t help but notice that his smile hadn’t changed much. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. “It’s funny, I swore I was going to be a Centaur when I grew up. All the players were so encouraging, too, even though it was probably obvious I wasn’t going to make the cut.”
“And that one, that was the last one before the season started. I think in 1998?”
Harris paused.
“Yes? That sounds right? Looking at me in that photo, I was five, six maybe?”
Shane grabbed his phone. His mom had been on a digitization kick recently, scanning all of their old photo albums. She’d shared the folders (organized with the kind of detailed system that made it obvious the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree) with the whole family. Ilya loved it, he had one picture of “angry kitten baby Shane” he kept using as a reaction image in the team group chat. Shane found the app and opened it. God, there were so many subfolders. Would it be under 90s > ‘98 > August, or Events > Cens > Junior Skills Clinics > ‘98?
“That’s weirdly specific, how’d you guess that?” Harris asked.
“Hang on,” said Shane, still tapping through folders. Probably Events. That was the last one of the summer, immediately pre-season, so Skills Clinics > ‘98 > Summer. He wanted to check just to be sure, but he was already really, really—there! He turned his phone to show Harris.
“Here!”
It was the same group photo, in full.
“Wait, no way!” Harris grabbed his phone, zooming in to the middle row, slightly left of center, and— “Oh my god! Yes, way! There I am!”
Shane couldn’t have stopped his smile if he tried.
“Look to your right.”
Standing next to tiny Harris, arm thrown around his shoulder and an equally ecstatic look on his face, was unmistakably a similarly tiny Shane Hollander.
The face Harris made could only be described as !!!!!!!. He looked up at Shane, jaw dropped. Shane grinned at him. Slowly, Harris started grinning again, too.
“Well! It’s a small world after all, huh?”
Troy, leaning over Harris’s shoulder to see the phone, started laughing.
“Yeah so, does anyone want to fill the rest of us in?” asked Dykstra. “I can’t see that from here, and I’d cuddle up with Harris to see it, too, but his boyfriend’s in the way, so.”
“It’s the same photo, but not cropped to just Harris. Shane is standing right next to him,” said Troy. “How did you miss that when you were editing this?”
Harris still sounded baffled.
“I guess it completely didn’t cross my mind. I was just looking at myself.”
“That hurts, man, it really does,” said Shane. “I can’t believe you forgot all about me. And here I thought we had something special.”
Ilya, having pulled up the photo on his own phone while they were discussing, laughed as he showed it around to the rest of the group.
“Look at the little children! Shane and Harris were the same height back then.”
“Wait, are you guys the same age?” LaPointe asked.
“No, I just hit my growth spurt late,” said Shane.
“And then never hit another one,” said Ilya.
“Shut up, asshole.”
Shane tried to elbow him but he dodged, blowing Shane a kiss as he moved out of range. Shane rolled his eyes, but still mimed catching it.
“Wow. That’s so wild,” said Harris, handing the phone back to Shane. “I totally remember you! You were so good, even at that age. I was really intimidated, but you were super helpful. I can't believe I never connected the dots that my skills clinic friend Shane was Shane Hollander. You were literally my favorite person there, I was so sad we didn’t get to practice with each other again.”
“Why not?” Troy asked. “I thought you said you loved the skills clinics, and I can’t imagine Hollzy skipping one, either.”
“It was our ages, unfortunately,” said Harris. “Skills clinics were separated into different age brackets and we didn’t overlap for very long. This clinic fell perfectly between birthdays so I had just moved up a group, but Shane was just shy of the next one.”
“My mom was so mad about it, too,” said Shane. “She kept trying to convince them to move me up early, but it was my height that held me back. They admitted that I probably had the skills to hold my own with the next age group, but I’d’ve been so much smaller than everyone else, it was a liability issue.”
Ilya snorted.
“So sad. Very star-crossed.”
Shane glared at him again.
Harris frowned.
“I always wondered where you disappeared to. Right around the time we should have been in the same group again, I spent some time in the hospital. It wasn’t hockey-related at all, and the skills clinics didn’t even allow body contact, but my parents still panicked and decided they were too risky for me to do and stopped letting me go. I still went to all the Family Days and stuff, any of their local events that didn’t require playing, and I thought you’d be there too since you were such a big fan. But I never saw you.”
Shane shook his head.
“You wouldn’t have, no. That was right when hockey was getting really serious. I still did skills clinics because it was always useful to train with professionals, but my mom and I talked about it, and as much as I loved Ottawa, we decided non-skill-building team-supportive activities weren’t the best use of my time. I mostly stopped going to games around that time, too. I had my own evening practices or games to worry about. I definitely missed you, too, I just didn’t really have time for anything that wasn’t contributing to my future career.”
Harris laughed.
“Shane, honey, it was a weekend clinic. We trained together for two days. I’m shocked you remember me at all.”
Shane was a little offended, honestly.
“You think I’m lying about missing you?”
“Well, not lying, but there’s no way you’re not exaggerating a bit. It’s fine! You moved on to bigger and better things!”
Shane frowned.
“No. Hang on.” He started looking through the photos again. “You have your own folder, you know.”
“What?”
“My mom digitized every photo my dad took throughout my entire childhood. He was the photographer parent, she was the too busy yelling at the ref parent. One bad call too many, and she’d’ve ended up throwing the camera. But she’s been going through all of them recently, scanning and sorting—”
“And they are so very sorted,” Ilya cut in.
“Yeah, well.” He paused, awkwardly. “She kind of made specific folders for my childhood friends?”
“That’s… intense,” said Chouinard.
“Well, it’s not like I had very many of them,” Shane muttered, before speaking loudly enough for the whole group to hear again. “My core friend group from school has a shared folder because we were usually hanging out as a group, same with any extracurriculars and teams, but Harris was. Kind of an outlier, I guess?”
He held his phone out again, and there it was: a folder clearly labeled “Harris, Skills Clinic Friend.”
Harris looked at him for a moment before taking the phone. He seemed confused. Shane couldn’t blame him; he knew he and his mom both could be a little much. He started scrolling through the folder.
There weren’t that many solo photos. Not enough to be creepy or anything. But Shane and Harris had hung out throughout the whole weekend, so there was a fair amount: Shane and Harris passing a puck back and forth, Shane and Harris chatting with one of the players, Shane and Harris laughing on the ice.
“Wow, that’s more photos than I expected,” said Harris. “And I thought my mom was bad about playing paparazzi every time I went on the ice. I come by it honestly, I guess.”
Shane blushed.
“He may have gotten carried away. But I went to a lot of these, and this was probably the only one where I made a friend.”
He didn’t want to look at Harris while Harris and Troy went through the photos, so he glanced at Ilya, instead. Ilya had clearly figured out what Harris hadn’t yet and was smirking at him.
“And you and tiny Harris were the very best of friends, hmm?”
Luca made a strange sound, covering his mouth slightly. He had a very expressive face, though, so it did very little to hide that he was trying not to laugh. Obviously he’d come to the correct conclusion as well.
“Shut up, asshole,” Shane said again.
“No! It’s cute!”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” said Young.
“You and me, both, man,” said Boyle.
Luca, missing nothing, glanced between the rest of the group and Shane. Harris looked up from the phone.
“Wait, what’s up?”
Shane wanted to die just a little bit, but it was fine. He’d fully brought this on himself, and honestly, it had been long enough that it was mostly funny.
“So, I didn’t really realize this at the time,” he started, then paused. Actually— “It kind of looks like my dad may have, though, but that’s a conversation for another day for sure. Hm. I hadn’t realized that, either.”
“David is a very smart man,” said Ilya. “I could see him noticing.”
“And then not saying anything to me for, like, twenty years?”
“Definitely not.”
“Anyway! There’s a lot more photos with you than any other person I practiced with in skills clinics, and I recognized you from that photo, and yes I really did think about you and wonder why you stopped showing up to clinics and I was actually disappointed that you weren’t there.” He ignored the heat rising in his face and looked directly at Harris, doing nothing to prevent the slightly awkward but still fond smile he knew was growing on his face. “And Ilya is teasing me because he’s figured out that I had the worst crush on you as a kid.”
Harris’s jaw dropped again. Troy was looking back and forth between the two of them, delighted. Hayes started cackling.
“No,” said Harris. “There’s no way!”
“I’m serious!”
“You are not!”
“I actually am.”
“I literally don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
Harris cringed slightly.
“I mean, you’re Shane Hollander.”
“...and you’re Harris Drover?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean! You’re the pride and joy of every hockey fan in Ottawa. Even when you were in Montreal, you were still the hometown kid who made it big. Speaking as the guy who does social media for the team, you wouldn’t believe the ways some of these people worship you. Speaking as a former teenage boy who’d dreamed of being an NHL star but knew it would never happen? I was right there with them. Of course I’m a little bit floored that the golden boy of hockey had a crush on me! Add in the fact that you’re genuinely nice, and you were always super kind to your fans, and you weren’t publicly homophobic? Nobody thought you were gay, but every gay boy in Ottawa had a fantasy or two about meeting you and being swept off their feet, and oh my god I can’t believe I’m actually admitting any of that to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re admitting it to us,” muttered Young, who looked gleefully ready to never let him live it down.
“But I wasn’t the golden boy of anything,” Shane argued. “I was a kid at a skills clinic, and you were nice, and contagiously excited, and funny, and willing to talk to me, and you didn’t get weirded out by my hockey knowledge and call me a nerd, and your eyes were so green and your hair was so fluffy when you took your helmet off for lunch and you saved me a seat and shared your apple slices with me and you grabbed my hand to pull me places and I didn’t even really know I was gay yet, I just knew that I didn’t want you to let go.”
Harris looked stunned.
“Oh. Wow. Um.” He laughed slightly. “You really did have a crush on me, huh?”
“Obviously!”
They stared at each other for a moment before Bood interrupted.
“Holy shit, Hollzy. Why is that actually the cutest thing I’ve ever heard in my life?”
Shane blushed again. He was doing a lot of that today.
“Daaaaaaaaaaamn. What could have been, huh?” Harris said, sounding a little dazed, then suddenly seemed to realize that his actual boyfriend was right next to him. “No offense, Troy! You know I adore you and have also thought you’re out of my league, but. Well. Like I said. Every gay boy in Ottawa had a soft spot for Shane.”
“Or a not-so-soft spot, I am guessing,” said Ilya. Shane glared at him. This was the man he had chosen, the love of his life, the pain in his ass.
“No, I’m not offended. You’re not wrong,” said Troy. “You know also I adore you and frequently think you’re too good for me—”
“Oh, hush,” Harris cut in, glaring at him. “Don’t talk about my boyfriend like that.”
“—but when I first got here, before I knew about those two, obviously, I thought about asking Roz for Hollzy’s number.”
“Wait, what?” asked Shane, amused and flattered.
“Yes. What?” asked Ilya, significantly less amused.
“Can you blame me?” Troy raised an eyebrow. “I had just gotten dumped by a guy who’d apparently been cheating on me for the last ten months of our two-year relationship, and he immediately announced his engagement to someone else. Then I blew my whole life and career up. A rebound sounded like a great idea, low-stakes emotionally but fun. Something uncomplicated. And rumor was that Shane Hollander was gay. Of course I thought about shooting my shot.”
Shane’s brow wrinkled.
“You wanted uncomplicated, so you looked for another NHL player?”
“No, I didn’t just have a jock fetish,” (Harris raised his hand slightly out of Troy’s line of sight and mouthed something that looked suspiciously like I did!, grinning and leaning back against his professional athlete boyfriend), “I was looking at you specifically.”
Shane looked a little bit baffled. Troy wasn’t the only one to roll his eyes.
“Hollzy. My guy. Come on. You can’t possibly have missed the fact that you’re hot as hell.”
“Oh!”
Shane knew that objectively, a lot of people found him attractive. That’s why brands paid a lot of money to spray water on him and photograph him holding up their product. It had never occurred to him, though, that that might extend to people in his life who knew him personally (and weren’t Ilya).
“That’s kind of funny, actually.”
“It’s funny that I had a thing for you?”
“Funny that you had a thing for me, I had a thing for Harris, and Harris had a thing for you.”
“Is it still a love triangle if none of those things overlapped?”
“Didn’t they?”
Troy paused.
“... I don’t know. Did they?”
“Well, you had a thing for me when you first got to Ottawa, Harris had a thing for you when you first got to Ottawa. I didn’t know Harris was here, but if I’d somehow ended up here and not involved with Ilya, I would have been too awkward to actually do anything about it but I’m pretty sure my thing for Harris would have come back, like, immediately. So they didn’t actually overlap, but they really easily could have, had some drafts or trades gone differently. Or maybe if I hadn’t had a no-trade clause when I came out to Montreal.”
Harris looked like a man whose self-perception (and self-esteem) was being turned on its head and aggressively shaken.
“So where does that leave Rozy?” asked LaPointe, professional shit-stirrer.
“In the cuck chair, I guess,” said Holmberg, professional problem-child.
Luca made a sound like one of Anya’s squeaky toys, somehow blushing more than Shane and Harris put together. Ilya glared at them both, paused, looked considering for a moment, then resumed his glaring.
“Oh, what could have been,” Harris repeated, giggling and covering his face slightly. “Holy shit, this is not where I thought some stupid Instagram post idea was going to take us today.”
“It was valuable team-building, though,” said Dykstra. “I think we’ve all learned a lot about each other, and isn’t that always the goal? To become closer as a team?”
“Some of us more so than others?” muttered LaPointe.
Luca wheezed again.
“Well!” Ilya clapped his hands together once. “I think we have all become close enough today.”
“Yes, you do, in fact, have a job to be doing,” said Wiebe, from right behind Bood.
“Jesus, Coach, when did you get there?!” asked Bood, spinning around so quickly he almost fell over. Young, at the end of the line of rookies and almost-rookies, also didn’t fall over, but he did start a domino effect that meant Luca, on the other end, did. The only thing that stopped him from hitting the ground was crashing into Ilya, who steadied him and graciously ignored—
And, there it was. He did not graciously ignore how red Luca turned. He winked at him then laughed when he blushed even harder.
“In my defense,” said Harris, skillfully ignoring the chaos through the power of having seen worse from these same people, “this is actually my job.”
Wiebe raised an eyebrow at him. His face looked stern, but his eyes gave away how amusing he found the whole thing.
“Seducing half the team?”
Hayes practically shouted with laughter. Chouinard covered his mouth immediately, eyes wide and delighted. Harris turned so red.
“As flattering as that is, this started from a conversation about a new trend I wanted to put on our socials. I take no responsibility for anything that happened after that.”
“You take no responsibility for trying so hard to steal my husband away from me?” asked Ilya.
“Oh, shut up!” Harris laughed. “You know I’m very happy with Troy.”
“Troy wants to steal my husband too, apparently.”
Troy rolled his eyes.
“As if we could.”
“Clearly you could have! I am lucky I got there first!”
“Yeah, you are,” said Shane, grinning. “And you’d better keep that in mind. They might get there last if you don’t watch it.”
“Betrayed!” Ilya gasped. “Betrayed by my own beloved husband! How could you, solnyshko, think of the children!”
(“Wait, the rookies or their dog?”
“Children, plural, so probably both?”)
“Leave your socks all balled up in the laundry so they don’t get properly clean one more time, asshole, and see what happens.”
Ilya clutched at his chest.
“Oh, my heart! I can feel it breaking.” He took Shane’s hand, pressing it under his. “Do you feel that, moya lyubov? Do you feel what you have done?”
Shane used their joined hands to tug his husband forward, giving him a quick kiss.
“You know I love you, and would never leave you over laundry. Probably.”
He pushed Ilya away.
“Now, get it together, Captain. Don’t we have a practice to be getting to?”
The look Ilya gave him was dangerous. He’d pay later, both for calling him Captain and for this whole conversation. He couldn’t wait.
Ilya stepped back from the little huddle they’d all landed in when trying to see phone screens.
“You heard my husband! And also your Coach! To the locker room, and then, to the ice!”
He spun on his heel, marching off toward the locker room. The team followed, but Shane paused for a moment. Troy gently turned Harris’s chin for a kiss over his shoulder, muttered something Shane couldn’t quite make out but could tell from Harris’s face must have been something sappy, and started off toward the locker room as well, clapping Shane’s shoulder as he passed.
Shane refocused on Harris.
“For what it’s worth, you really did mean a lot to me as a kid, and I’m so glad to see you’ve ended up so happy. I know playing was your dream, but you’re so great at your job, and I’m glad I get to work with you.”
“Oh my god, stop, you’re going to make me cry,” said Harris. “I’d hoped, when I didn’t see you around again, it meant you’d moved on to bigger and better things. I’m glad I was right. I remember how passionate you were, and how talented. If anyone deserved all their dreams to come true, it was definitely you.”
He paused, wiped his eyes, and laughed.
“And yeah, I’m happy. I may not have ended up playing, but I love my job, and I love my boyfriend, and I love all of you guys, too. I have everything I want, and I’m so glad you do, too.”
They looked at each other for a second. Shane wasn’t tearing up, exactly, but he was pretty close to it.
“Can I give you a hug?” Harris asked.
“Yes. Yes, please, actually,” Shane laughed.
The two hugged tightly for a minute. Harris was warm, and strong but gentle, and fucking hell, he still smelled like apples, Shane had thought he’d imagined that, romanticizing memories of his childhood crush, but no, apparently not, oh my god.
The two stepped back and smiled at each other.
“I hope you know, finding out I could have maybe pulled two NHL players is going to do something irreparable to my ego,” Harris laughed. “You’re never going to hear the end of this, solely because any time I’m having a bad day, I’m going to remind myself by bragging to literally everyone. I’m about to be literally so insufferable.”
“You can use that for my caption,” Shane suggested. “THIS IS WHO HAD A CRUSH ON HARRIS.”
“Wait, stop, I need to do that, actually,” said Harris. “Maybe ‘the social media manager’ instead? Or I could do something coordinating… THIS IS WHO HAD A CRUSH ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER and THIS IS THE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER and use the same picture, cropped so they align…”
His face went distant, already designing the pictures in his head.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” said Shane. “I need to get changed and get on the ice.”
“Hurry, before our men think we’ve run off with each other,” Harris said, wiggling his eyebrows.
Shane laughed, turning away.
“It’s not too late! Feel free to threaten it, if you ever need to keep Troy in line!”
He could hear Harris laughing behind him. Just one more.
“Who knows? Maybe that’s how you’ll catch up to me and Ilya!”
He held his left hand up, waving his fingers (and the ring on one of them) over his shoulder, and heard a scandalized “Shane!”
He grinned to himself as he headed toward the locker room that contained his husband and Captain. He hadn’t expected to be sharing his biggest childhood crush that day, especially not with said crush, but he was quietly thrilled with how it had gone. Everyone involved had gotten a happy ending, and it was so cool that they could share those happy endings with each other.