Chapter Text
Shane Hollander was not a risk taker. This was true of him in childhood into adolescence then adulthood, and it would probably be true of him even beyond that. He had mostly gotten over the vague and pervasive shame of being unable to ever let his hair down, so to speak, and had also mostly figured out how to take all jokes in stride so that he was laughing with instead of getting laughed at.
There was often a level of disconnect between what went unspoken and what Shane knew for certain. He knew when the guys found something funny, for example. A lot of the times he just didn’t understand why. But Shane had grown up in locker rooms, and he was a quick study. Somewhere around age eight or nine Shane realized that the why of it all didn’t matter much. What mattered was knowing when to laugh. Guys liked when you laughed at their jokes. Guys did not like it when you asked them to explain how their jokes were funny. Even just the act of laughing when everyone else did was enough to head off most accusations of outlandishness, so instead of being ‘weird’ Shane could simply be ‘quiet,’ or ‘reserved.’
It was hard to take risks, living like that. Shane had rules for himself; lessons he'd spent years accumulating through trial and error. Everyone else seemed to be in possession of some handbook on how to engage in good and normal human interaction, seemingly innately, so Shane figured pretty quickly that he might as well have one too—only his was cobbled together painstakingly after countless faux pas’ rather than being something totally intuitive. It wasn’t as if he’d written the guidelines down anywhere because that would be either lame or insane depending on who found out, but he repeated them to himself enough that all the words had become familiar, a well-worn path trodden in his mind’s eye.
Don’t be weird. Listen before you speak. Don’t be too quiet. Laugh if other people are laughing. Don’t let the media steamroll you. Don’t read your Instagram comments. For the love of God, stay off Deadspin. If someone asks you a question, ask them the same question once you’ve answered. How was your summer? Good, how was yours?
And so on and so forth; things of that nature. Shane structured his life around those imperatives, which sounded more pathetic than it really was. But he wasn’t an idiot. He knew most people would find the rules—and his relentless repetition of of them—limiting, maybe even suffocating. But it was the only way he knew how to live.
Shane had his routines, and he liked his routines. Every morning he woke up at 7:15 on the dot, 9:15 if it was the day after an evening game. He would make his bed, first thing, then pee and brush his teeth. He would meditate for ten minutes and then do yoga for thirty. He would have breakfast after, a smoothie and an egg white omelet with mushrooms and spinach and feta; or mozzarella, if he was out of feta. He would wash the dishes. The rest of his day was structured in blocks. Exercise and food and media and time at the rink. Sometimes plans with the guys from the team. Shane was well aware of the importance of team building. It was essential that a hockey team had a good locker room, especially as the season crawled on and the stakes grew higher and everyone stretched themselves thinner and thinner.
Most days Shane thought he had everything figured out. Work was easy. His routines were easy. It was the other stuff, the emotional stuff, that was difficult. Or, no, ‘difficult’ wasn’t the right word for it. Perplexing, maybe.
Shane had been fourteen years old when he’d started to get an inkling that he was different. Fourteen was young but it was still later than everyone else around him, which was par for the course. Shane’s mom had always said that he was a late bloomer, which was okay and nothing to be ashamed of. Shane didn’t think he minded being a late bloomer, whatever that meant, except for how he hadn’t hit his growth spurt until he was almost seventeen. That had been bad for hockey reasons in that everyone looked at him like what was Rimouski thinking drafting that 5’6 squirt. The growth spurt had come for him eventually, so that sorted itself out. Plus, by then Shane had gotten pretty good at being quick on his feet to avoid getting slaughtered on ice, which was generally a positive trait to have. He didn’t think it was worthwhile to dwell on nonissues.
But hockey aside, Shane didn’t start to figure out that there was yet another aspect of adolescence that he’d unwittingly missed the boat on until three things happened: one, he started grade nine at Shattuck St. Mary’s boarding school; two, he got a new roommate, Matthew Parker, after Tommer moved back to Michigan; and three, Matty turned out to be possibly the horniest fourteen year old on the planet.
Matty was all about girls. He would sling an arm around Shane’s shoulder when they walked down the hall pointing at girls and listing the things he liked best about each one. She’s smokin’ hot, he would say and gesture to Chloe L. with the long blonde hair, look at those goddamn lips I bet she’d give a mean hummer. Shane didn’t know what a hummer was and didn’t think that he wanted to ask. But he remembered looking at Chloe L. and thinking hard about whether he thought she was hot. She was pretty, Shane supposed, in a girl way, with big green eyes and a pointy nose and toothy smile. He didn’t know what made a girl hot as opposed to pretty.
He had still been sifting through those thoughts when Matty nudged him, an expectant “well?” kind of expression on his face. Shane had nodded jerkily then, and said, “yeah, super hot,” and felt another piece of that strange and amorphous puzzle comprising Normalcy clicking into place. He started paying attention in the locker room, before and after practice. It didn’t take long to realize it was obvious the guys were interested in girls, in a way that was dirtier and more visceral than just wanting to hold their hand or kiss them on the mouth. There was talk of tongues and fingers in places Shane had never even thought of, and listening to it made him feel jittery and nervous, itchy in his own skin.
He was fourteen years old, but he didn’t look at girls and think about kissing them or touching them in a way he had never touched anyone before. He didn’t look at a girl and think that she was hot; he didn’t think much about girls at all. It was okay that he was a late bloomer, but this was just another weight added to the scale against him, Shane thought. Like he was the idiot still paddling for his life on a raft all the while everyone else somehow managed to hop onto the Motorboat of Standard Puberty, or something. He had learned to say fuck you or fuck off but he couldn’t say fuck and mean it in any other way without feeling like he’d turn to dust.
Shane hadn’t been worried, at first. He knew there wasn’t anything wrong with him physically; he had taken health classes, and his dad had also sat him down years ago to have the world’s most uncomfortable talk just to drive the point home or whatever, so Shane figured he knew everything he needed to know and then some. Like, Shane’s dick worked perfectly fine—he got hard just like everyone else did and jacked off just like everyone else did, although he usually wasn’t thinking about anything while he did it aside from how he was experiencing a normal bodily function and wasn’t it crazy that something like that could leave a person feeling so jelly-kneed and floaty afterwards.
But then Shane turned fifteen.
And the boys in the locker room were suddenly turning into men, this great wave of cracking voices settling into baritones, all broadening shoulders and sleek corded muscle and the beginnings of real facial hair—a beard if one was really lucky and not just a greasy little ‘stache—and it was like a million little explosions going off inside Shane’s brain.
It was almost too much to bear, this sudden coming into his own body and desires in addition to the weight of everything else going on with school and with hockey. The QMJHL entry draft was rearing its head and Shane knew that come June—not even a month after his sixteenth birthday—he’d be leaving Minnesota. He’d known for a while that he was good enough to go somewhere with his hockey, but by fifteen he was certain that somewhere was the NHL, although it was probably bad luck to say it out loud.
Shane felt nauseous constantly, thinking about the years and possibilities unspooling before him in one long unbroken net, each cord a connection to a million others, every single one an unbeaten path. The attraction to boys was just one indignity in a line of indignities, something he could hardly stomach thinking about before he had to sit under his desk with his face buried in his knees where it was quiet and dark.
He was better at waking up for practice than Matty was, and every morning he would have to go to his bunk to shake him awake, too scared to touch the bare curve of Matty’s bicep or wing of his shoulder blade so he made sure the blanket was over him every time. Matty was an early bloomer unlike Shane, well over six feet tall by fifteen with the muscle mass to match it. He had dark curly hair and expressive brown eyes beneath heavy brows and a smashed in nose from fighting.
The sound of his laughter, big and unrestrained and actually like it was written in books, all distinct ‘ha ha ha’s, made something shivery and tight coil up in the pit of Shane’s stomach, a sensation he understood only enough to know he hated it. He thought maybe it was because he admired Matty, but that couldn’t possibly be right. Matty wasn’t a particularly talented hockey player and he wasn’t good at school, but he was easygoing and well-liked so maybe that was what it was. But Shane didn’t think so. He also wasn’t particularly adept at lying to himself. He just… liked Matty.
Shane was fairly certain Matty didn’t suspect him at all—mostly because Matty wasn’t especially observant or bright, and because everyone knew what Shane was like: tightly-wound and quiet and neurotic about hockey to the exclusion of all else. Shane knew to keep his eyes down in the locker room, and he always kept his hands to himself outside of it anyway. He had it all under control. He was good at being careful, and he was becoming decently practiced at recognizing when guys genuinely liked him and wanted to be his friend versus when guys merely tolerated him. Shane was what his old roommate Tommer called “an acquired taste.”
Anyway, Shane was pretty sure he and Matty were friends. Matty was a nice guy for all the time he spent being not-so-nice to girls, but by fifteen Shane figured that was just what it meant to be a hockey player in a hockey school. He and Matty ate all their meals together because the team ate every meal together in one big pack. When they ran into each other in the halls between classes Matty would tousle Shane’s hair and say “what’s up big dawg” each and every time, a routine of their own making. Shane never dodged the hair tousling, though he usually had to duck away from the heavy weight of Matty’s arm around his shoulders, which was just too much.
In between thoughts of the QMJHL and the NHL and his tenuous B- in Algebra II, Shane spent an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about Matty: the flex of his back and shoulders when he changed in and out of his gear, his snaggletooth that was visible every time he smiled, his omnipresent sweaty teen boy smell that made Shane half-hard and horrified about it. It felt like Shane had so many thoughts that they couldn’t possibly all fit into his brain, like one morning he would wake up and find everything spilling out from between his ears.
Matty lost his virginity a week before the winter break of grade ten, and he told Shane all about it almost right after, waiting only as long as it took for them to both be in bed with the lights turned off. Shane didn’t want to hear it, but he didn’t want to upset Matty by telling him to shut up. Instead he stayed quiet and listened to Matty describe what it felt like to fuck a girl; how wet she’d gotten and the noises she’d made, high-pitched and whining and begging for dick. Shane was certain that there must have been some level of editorializing, but he was hard in his pajama pants and paralyzed by it, staring up at the ceiling so unblinkingly his eyes began to water. “Wow,” he said, after Matty ran out of steam, hoping that he sounded normal and not at all shaky. Matty didn’t seem to notice. He said smugly, “wow is right big dawg,” then rolled right on over and was out like a light. Shane didn’t fall asleep after that for a long, long while.
This was something he couldn’t talk about with his parents though he called them like clockwork every night right after dinner. Shane wasn’t sure what there even was to talk about, anyway. There was no way he was going to tell his parents about Matty losing his virginity, and he definitely wasn’t going to tell his parents about his own feelings on the matter. He loved his mom and dad but the only thing that he was comfortable talking about ever was hockey. Hockey was the only language in which Shane was fluent.
Roughly two months before the QMJHL draft was when Shane stood in front of the bathroom mirror and sternly told himself to get the fuck over himself. Wanting Matty in a nebulous and unspeakable way was good for nobody. It was probably the proximity screwing with Shane’s head, anyway. Shane and Matty didn’t have much in common aside from their being roommates and their playing hockey together, but it was clear Matty’s playing days were numbered. He’d had three concussions already and Shane secretly thought that he was scared, though Matty never said anything about it. Shane would’ve been scared. Everyone knew you were at greater risk for subsequent concussions after having gotten one, and the effects often accumulated. Shane didn’t want to think about what would happen to Matty twenty, thirty years down the line, even though everyone knew that was just the price you paid for hockey.
Shane simply had too many things to worry about, and in the grand scheme of things Matty Parker ranked fairly low on the list. They exchanged MSN Messenger accounts at the end of the school year and Matty tousled Shane’s hair one last time. He said, “good luck in the big leagues, big dawg, don’t forget us little guys,” and Shane nodded, sure that there was no way he could ever forget Matty even after he made himself stop wanting him. Shane said, “don’t jinx me,” because the draft hadn’t happened yet and he needed everything to pan out in his favor. Matty’s face had done something strange and complicated before it eventually settled on a crooked smile. “There’s no jinxing you, bud,” he told Shane, “you’re lightning in a bottle,” which Shane didn’t really understand but was mostly too busy trying to convince himself that Matty’s smile wasn’t the thing that had made his stomach flip to dwell on it.
After Shane got drafted—first overall—by Rimouski Océanic and moved to Québec, he and Matty spoke a handful of times over instant messenger only for their exchanges to fizzle out with a sobering swiftness. Shane had never been very good at keeping up with people online or over the phone because it was almost impossible to figure out what they really meant without the crutch of their faces or body language.
Most of the time he just ended up staring at a poorly punctuated message trying to figure out what to say in response to a: wats up d00d hows QC n e hot billet sisters around??? He eventually settled on Québec is nice, but I think my French is rustier than I thought it was, and also, I don’t have any billet sisters but the family I’m staying with has a five-year-old son whose real name is Jonathan but everyone calls him Jack which I don’t know where that came from but he’s super cute.
Shane didn’t say: I’m so homesick I cried after calling my parents every single night of my first week here, or the bedroom I’m in is nice but it doesn’t feel right—not like my room back home in Ottawa or even our room in Shattuck, and he definitely didn’t say I miss you, though he was thinking all those things.
It was all just migraine-inducing, really, trying to figure out what was going on in Matty’s head through those messages, if he was still thinking about Shane at all. Shane’s heart kind of twinged like a pulled muscle every time he thought about how it was so easy to lose contact with all the Shattuck boys, but at the same time he wasn’t that surprised. There was too much going on in his life for him to waste time feeling sentimental because hockey was getting harder and he was getting better and now there were NHL scouts at almost every single one of his games wanting to get a look at him. Sometimes they asked Coach permission to speak with Shane after games, possibly to see if he was the sort of character they were looking for on a team. Shane tried very hard to come off as serious and dedicated during those conversations, though he wasn’t sure how successful he was.
Shane had his first kiss a couple months after starting at his new school in Québec, after getting invited to a teammate’s house party where everyone was made to play Seven Minutes in Heaven. Shane secretly thought Seven Minutes in Heaven was a stupid game that they were all too old for, though he knew better than to say it. Anyway, her name was Elise, and she had short mousy brown hair and bangs she kept neatly fastened with colorful clips that changed every day. Shane didn’t understand why she would keep the bangs if she always pinned them back, but he supposed the clips were nice. He was pretty sure they had English together.
Elise had a crush on him, which Shane knew only because one of his teammates had told him with a nudge and accompanying leer. Shane didn’t know what to make of Elise’s crush, mostly because he hadn’t actually figured out her name was Elise until their names had been drawn out of a hat together. Shane suspected somebody had rigged the name draw.
As soon as the closet doors closed behind them, she kissed him before he could get a word in edgewise. Shane learned then that lip gloss actually tasted sweet, even though it was in an offputtingly artificial way. The texture was a nightmare, all sticky and pulling into strings every time he opened his mouth. Afterwards Elise giggled because there was pink glitter all over his lips. “Now you’re pretty, too,” she’d said, smiling, and Shane smiled back on reflex.
So Shane got his first girlfriend in conjunction with his first kiss, although in hindsight Elise was probably a girlfriend in name only. (Shane was really good at coming up with reasons as to why he was too busy to go on dates and even better at figuring out how to never be left alone with her.)
But being able to call Elise his girlfriend made things easier in some ways and harder in others. Things were easier because the guys on the team bothered him way less about girls generally, even in that uncomfortable teasing way Shane could never tell was intended to be genuine or meanspirited. Things were harder because some guys started to bother him about Elise specifically, needling him about how wasn’t it nice to finally be getting some, and wasn’t she a real rocket I mean look at those knockers.
Shane was in fact not getting anything, though he figured that was nobody’s business. But he also couldn’t bring himself to lie, so he kept saying all this bullshit about how he didn’t kiss and tell which made him the butt of even more jokes, although this time he could tell that the laughter was genuine and not mocking, so that was fine because that meant he was in on it. He didn’t have any thoughts about Elise’s knockers, or her status as a rocket or smokeshow or whatever the other guys said she was. He didn’t tell his parents about her, anyhow.
Eventually Elise dumped him which wasn’t a surprise because he was a crappy boyfriend by any measure. He had always tried to be polite, but girls probably wanted more than just ‘polite’ out of a guy, which was fair enough. Then a few months later Shane went to another house party and drank more than he ever had before and lost his virginity, this time to a girl named Ayumi. She told him he’d caught her attention because someone had mentioned he was half-Japanese, but later when she asked him where in Japan his mom had grown up, he’d said, “uh, Kenora, Ontario,” which was the truth and her face had fallen.
The sex wasn’t particularly good and Shane kept getting distracted by just how dizzy he felt, half-scared about how drunk he was and half-scared about hurting Ayumi. She was this tiny slip of a thing. It made Shane feel huge and clumsy and grotesque. Halfway through he ended up closing his eyes and burying his face into her hair to ride the whole thing out, focusing hard on not falling over and on, you know, actually staying hard. He wasn’t sure if she came. Probably not, which he still had the wherewithal to feel kind of sorry about.
She got dressed quick afterward and left him to deal with the condom and didn’t give him her number. He wrinkled his nose at the used condom and lube-smeared sheets and didn’t understand why every single guy on his team seemed so obsessed with sex; Shane thought they were vastly overrating it.
The next day Shane experienced his first ever hangover and spent an entire hour bent over the toilet puking his guts out and regretting every single minute of his life that had led up to that moment. As it turned out tequila tasted even worse on the way back up. He was fiercely glad he had his own ensuite bathroom in the house he was billeting at. Sweating and shivering simultaneously, Shane thought about Ayumi and felt all twisted up inside about it, something thick and greasy coating the back of his throat even worse than the actual nausea he was experiencing. He was a horrible person for how relieved he was at the knowledge that she didn’t go to his school, that she wasn’t close to anyone that mattered in his life.
Once he felt like more of a person, when the vomiting had abated and the pounding headache had lightened into just a dull throbbing behind his eyes, Shane felt that same relief all over again, full-bodied, for an entirely different reason. He had lost his virginity. He had done what was supposed to be done, checked off another box in a list of Standard Life Experiences. Which meant he didn’t need to think about it anymore. Which was absolutely ideal.
So with that out of the way, Shane brutally and efficiently pared down every single part of his life that wasn’t necessary for hockey. He didn’t need a girlfriend and he didn’t need to have sex and he didn’t need to trail after the guys that would probably never make it to the show, destined for a career in the AHL or worse, an office job. All that mattered was doing everything right and maximizing his chances of going first overall, because if Shane was going to make it to the NHL he might as well start out on the highest possible note.
All of which is to say: the whole mess with Matty then Elise then Ayumi had been informative. Shane had dipped his toes into the water and learned just enough to figure out he didn’t like it. With time he’d probably grow to want a girlfriend and then a wife and white picket fence and two-point-five kids, but that time wasn’t now and Shane was okay with it. He had decided his mom was right and that being a late bloomer wasn’t anything to be worried about, especially since he’d done enough so as to not feel self-conscious about it in a locker room. The safest thing then was to do everything by the books. No more thinking about teammates, no more drinking to the point of abandonment, no more goddamn risks.
And then there was the Rozanov thing.