Archive of Our Own

Shane had to bring a rookie on his morning run. Didn’t have to; had offered, after a polite and pathetic call from a member of their training staff about the rookie’s lack of work ethic, without those words being used. They thought the rookie would take guidance better from a player, someone who had been through what he was going through, so Shane said the kid (only two years younger than Shane, but people saw Shane as grown, now) could come on his morning run and he’d talk to him.

“Ugh,” Helen, the trainer, said. “Thank you. I knew I could count on you, you’re so nice.”

Shane wasn’t nice. He just followed rules.

This started with very basic rules, the ones on the classroom wall: treat others the way you want to be treated – that didn’t always work for Shane, because a lot of the ways he wanted to be treated were unusual. So he disregarded that one, looked for more specifics. Sharing is caring. Okay. Shane didn’t so much like sharing, but he could do things he didn’t like. He wouldn’t necessarily offer, but if people asked he wouldn’t say no. Don’t yell, don’t disturb others, don’t interrupt – done. Do what you’re told – gladly. Include people – Shane wasn’t often in a position to do that, but sure. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all – that proved a bit of a challenge, but he got the hang of it eventually. Keep your own space clean – Shane hadn’t needed to be told that one. Say please, say thank you, say excuse me. Easy, easy, easy.

More sophisticated rules got added to his repertoire in high school and locker rooms, ones about parties and girlfriends and online communication, but he was surprised how often he could get by just relying on the kindergarten basics. He got more opportunities to include people once he became a big name in hockey spaces, and it was a straightforward and enjoyable way to earn good will. He was a little weird, and he didn’t always get things, but he was a solid guy, really. That was how people talked about him because he followed rules. It was how he made sure he was liked. Other people who were liked followed rules too, only it seemed to come natural to them.

As he had many times before, Ilya confounded Shane, because Ilya was well-liked, too, and Ilya didn’t give a fuck about these rules. He broke them gleefully and if he was challenged on it he’d act nonplussed, like he hadn’t known the rule existed, which was obviously bullshit. Ilya had to know that it was rude to turn his back on someone speaking to him (‘but I can still hear with my back to you; ears are on side of head’) because he seemed to know exactly how long he could get away without texting back to make sure somebody was on edge but not fully mad, or the exact cadence to use, the exact amount of eye contact, to make someone feel either inside or outside of a joke. Shane was media trained to the bones, but he’d seen Ilya snake out of unvetted questions with an ease that made him sick with envy. Ilya played people almost as well as he played hockey. So when Ilya was rude, blunt, obscure, it was a choice. Ilya always seemed to have choices. Shane had very few.

Maybe he just wasn’t always good at recognizing the options available to him.

Shane had known Lee since he bought his apartment in Montreal as a rookie. The apartment was across from a park, and while Shane had graduated to luxury, elite versions of almost everything in his life, his shower and his gym and his diet, a park was, more or less, a park. He ran there, and so did Lee.

Shane liked Lee because Lee didn’t expect much of him, just made some small talk whenever their runs lined up, which wasn’t every day. Shane liked Lee because Lee was a college student and even though Shane had never considered that life for himself he enjoyed getting glimpses of it. Lee’s running gear wasn’t fancy, wasn’t really gear at all, and sometimes the reason he missed a morning was that he was hungover. Lee was smart and listened to audio books when he ran, which Shane figured had to be about as weird as his own habit of listening to motivational affirmations. Lee recommended Shane books and Shane flatly informed him he wasn’t going to read them, and that just made Lee laugh. The books always sounded pretty fancy and complicated, and Shane liked that Lee thought he might like them, as though he wasn’t a meathead jock. Shane had never been that academically ambitious, but it wasn’t due to lack of brains. He’d have striven for more than mediocre grades if the incentive always offered to him was something other than keeping his options open. That was what his teachers had said, what the guidance counselor had said. If hockey didn’t work out, he’d want to be able to go to a good college, and he’d need better grades for that. Shane didn’t want a single glimmer of comfort or safety in the prospect of not making it, so he’d prided himself on his ability to land neatly on C every test.

So maybe it wasn’t that Shane was denied having choices, or that he didn’t recognize them, but more that he actively sabotaged them. He didn’t want a way out.

Shane texted Lee in advance: a rookie’s coming with me today btw. Only afterwards he realized this was unnecessary; they had never coordinated anything before. They either crossed paths or they didn’t. They had each other’s numbers only so Lee could send him book recommendations, the latest one a running memoir by a Japanese author, almost overly thoughtful. Shane knew deep down he wasn’t giving Lee a heads up for Lee’s sake, but his own. He didn’t want Lee to say hi to him, to talk to him, in front of a teammate. Lee was gay. Shane hadn’t known until his second year in Montreal, when Lee had offhandedly mentioned an ex-boyfriend; Shane was pretty sure his reaction had been normal and acceptable. He didn’t think Lee’s gayness was obvious, but he also thought maybe he wasn’t the best at noticing stuff like that.

Lee sent a thumbs up and wasn’t at the park anyway. Shane brought the rookie to his building’s gym after the run, tried to give him advice, wasn’t sure if it landed. He couldn’t worry too much, though; he’d read up on giving advice the night before, so he knew he hadn’t totally fucked it up. A part of him could see the fluff piece already, Shane taking younger players under his wing, what a good guy, what a lucky kid, what a great player to learn from. Shane had started filtering more and more of his life through that lens. When he picked one product over another in the grocery store, sometimes he’d hear it in his head narrated by commentators. A brave decision, let’s see if it pays off, or, Just what we’ve come to expect from number 24.

Lee was back the next day, and they sat on a bench afterwards for a brief chat, which is what their maybe friendship had evolved into. Lee said, “What did you mean, rookie?”

Shane frowned at him.

“Like, what’s a rookie?” Lee asked.

Shane didn’t get the joke, played it straight. “A first year player,” he said.

“Right,” Lee said, smiling. “But a player in what? You play something?”

Shane stared. “Hockey.”

“Nice,” Lee said. “Is that fun? What’s the league?”

“The NHL,” Shane said, thinking maybe this wasn’t actually a joke.

Lee turned to him, eyebrows raised. Shane nodded. Lee took out his phone and looked something up, presumably Shane Hollander.

“Holy shit,” he said, and laughed. “Shane. How the hell has this not come up before, why didn’t you tell me?”

Shane shrugged.

“I thought pro athletes were all, like, egomaniacs,” Lee said. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t make sure I knew.” He frowned at his screen. “And, fuck, you’re like really good.”

Frankly, Shane hadn’t told Lee because he assumed it went without saying. He understood that sounded like something an egomaniac would think, but he didn’t mean it like that, really. He would have also assumed Lee knew who Hayden was, or his coach. It was hard for him to comprehend the idea of someone who knew nothing about hockey. He heard about that happening in America, but surely not in Montreal. Some of the wags were seen as knowing basically nothing about the sport, but they still knew the players, knew the positions and the basic rules, knew what span of months the season swallowed. Shane assumed that was the baseline. He was sure he’d made references to Lee, about practice or travel, but maybe too off-handed.

“Guess it’s on me,” Lee said. “I’ll be honest, I thought you were living on daddy’s money. Those aren’t vanity muscles, huh?”

Shane frowned, sort of insulted. “No,” he said.

“Some guys have bodies like yours and they just, like, work in IT,” Lee said. “At least you do something with yours. Put it to use.”

“It’s probably good for people with desk jobs to work out,” Shane said. And they definitely didn’t have bodies like Shane’s, but he shouldn’t get into that. Lee laughed, because he found Shane very funny.

Shane watched a lot of movies on planes, and sometimes the movies on planes were romcoms, so he knew he was supposed to have a best friend beside him to lean in and say, oh my God, he was totally flirting! But Shane did not have a romcom best friend, and so it took him years to work out that Lee had been flirting since basically their first interaction, that Lee was presenting him with a choice. In the meantime, there was Ilya Rozanov.

Shane wasn’t sure Ilya flirted. Telling someone you wanted to fuck them wasn’t really flirting, he didn’t think, but then probably that was why it worked on Shane. He did not need a romcom best friend interpreter. There were many ways Ilya left him feeling uncertain, many mysteries of Ilya that Shane wasn’t sure he’d ever solve, but the fact that Ilya found him attractive had been pretty unambiguous from the jump.

So he really didn’t know what to make of the aftermath of the Olympics. Over the years he’d come to take Ilya’s desire for granted. The texts, the unflinching gaze, on those few precious occasions where Shane had deemed it safe, the firm, constant touch. Everything around it was a mess, confusing, but Ilya wanting him stayed the same. Until Sochi.

It was yet another mystery; Ilya wasn’t this much of a sore loser, they’d gone up against each other enough times for Shane to know that. Shane was convinced he must have fucked up somehow, broken one of the rules for post-sex conduct, the kind of rules that Ilya didn’t have to follow but Shane always, always did. Shane had tried to make his inquiries as to Ilya’s well-being casual but maybe Ilya had sensed the neediness, just as he’d sensed everything else. Maybe Shane wasn’t supposed to have asked at all, maybe he cared too much, maybe Ilya wouldn’t have shown concern if it was Shane who was visibly upset. But that was hard to believe, too, considering how much concern Ilya had shown when he had taken Shane’s virginity. And Shane thought probably he shouldn’t think about it like that, that the fact that it was his first time was a side note to the fuck, not that big a deal, but Shane was maybe too old-fashioned. Ilya was his first and they both knew what a big deal it was to be the first at something. Shane thought, ridiculously, of Ilya posing with one finger raised, smile toothy and smug. Shane Hollander’s number one pick.

Shane should have cut his losses, or at least tried to wait Ilya out, but not understanding made it all harder. If Ilya had just made it clear that he’d only been interested in fucking Shane once, or if he’d made it clear that Shane’s expressions of concern had freaked him out, then Shane could walk away. But Ilya had given him nothing, explained nothing, and Shane could feel the not knowing on his skin, always, the way less than a year ago he’d been feeling Ilya’s dirty texts, and he couldn’t let it go.

So he started texting Ilya. There was something distant about it, the words on the screen delivered to a fake name, something almost unreal. Ilya’s lack of response became in its own way comforting, like Shane was shouting into the void, like Shane could say anything. He always ended up deleting the texts after sending them, not because they were incriminating but because they were embarrassing. I’m drunk lol and the Minnesota commentators have said your name five different ways in just this one game and, after a couple months, I’m touching myself and Please help me get off and Don’t you want to make me come. Nothing worked, nothing got Ilya’s attention. Shane had never known how to get Ilya’s attention; he’d always just had it.

If it was twisted, extended foreplay it was working. Shane was, along with everything else, unfathomably horny, thinking about Ilya possibly more than ever, not helped at all by watching Ilya vicious and brilliant on the ice every night Boston played. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that it was around then that he finally picked up that Lee was maybe interested.

Lee was still sending him book recommendations that Shane wasn’t taking, and Shane had started bringing sachets of electrolyte powder to put in Lee’s water. Lee was quite possibly the first friend Shane had had since he was a toddler who didn’t have a connection to hockey. He was surprised that wasn’t a deal-breaker, but Lee made such easy company that it didn’t matter that Shane’s one conversational safe bet was off the table. And then, in the midst of his easy-going chatter, certain comments started standing out. You must have people all over you, and do you ever relax, what do you do to unwind?, and I love getting you all speechless. Shane wasn’t sure if Lee was getting more blatant or if Shane was just slow on the uptake. Anyway, he started considering his options.

There was a chance he’d never fuck Ilya again, and along with that being a tragedy in its own right, it could also mean he’d never fuck a man again. Shane didn’t want that, but unless another closeted player was going to shamelessly insinuate themselves into Shane’s life, he wasn’t sure who he could turn to. Lee was maybe the only safe option – trustworthy and entirely separate from everything else in Shane’s life. And he was attractive; Shane hadn’t noticed at first, but he was. He looked after himself, and he had a nice smile and nice hands and he was in decent shape for a non-athlete. Shane wasn’t sure he’d have necessarily given him a second glance if they passed on the street, but he figured that didn’t matter, because they weren’t passing on the street. This was Lee, of the futile book recommendations and the running shoes split at the seams. He’d grown on Shane.

Shane made up his mind on a road trip, two more unanswered texts and a low grade level of arousal he couldn’t do anything about in shared hotel rooms, and had to wait four days to be back in Montreal. On the first morning Lee wasn’t there, and on the second Shane was practically vibrating.

“Hey, Shane,” Lee said, as Shane approached him at the water fountain that served as their customary starting point.

“Hi,” Shane said, and held up the electrolyte packet, shook it a little like its presence was somehow exciting or unusual. Lee smiled and took it, his fingers pinching the opposite end from where Shane was holding. He always seemed to take care to not touch Shane, even as he continued to flirt.

“How was the business trip?” Lee asked as he unscrewed his water bottle lid.

“Good,” Shane said, observing the process. “We went three one.”

Lee glanced up, eyes wide. “Awesome,” he said, with the tone of someone who had no idea what had just been said to them, and Shane laughed. It was a minor miracle he didn’t find Lee’s hockey ignorance intolerable. Now that he’d begun to see Lee as a sexual prospect, he wondered if that was the explanation, if he took comfort in how entirely separate Lee was from hockey. It made it safer, neater.

“So I was thinking. After, would you like to come back to mine for…” Shane drifted off, winced. He’d come up with pretenses, multiple ones, for inviting Lee to his, but suddenly they all seemed embarrassingly unconvincing. Especially when the offer was being made so far in advance, not casual or spontaneous at all. He should have waited until after their run.

Lee’s smile grew gradually. “Yeah,” he said. “Sounds good.”

Shane had been pretty confident that Lee would agree, and yet it still felt shocking. He nodded a few times. “Cool,” he said, and then started stretching.

They ended their run by the water fountain again, and instead of sitting on the bench for a brief chat before parting ways, they left the park together, crossed the street and approached Shane’s apartment building. Shane’s initial instinct was to lead Lee around back and bring him through the fire escape like he had Ilya, but that would be more suspicious than anything. There was nothing weird about having a friend over after a run. It was the morning, not a usual time for hook ups. He could put the TV on if he was worried about people hearing, but he was good at staying quiet, anyway. It felt strange, but nice, leading Lee to the main entrance, nodding hi to the security guy at the front desk.

“Hockey money’s crazy,” Lee said, as he stepped into Shane’s apartment.

“It’s really not when you compare it to other major league sports,” Shane said, then realized that was probably pretty obnoxious.

“I’m comparing it to minimum wage and tips,” Lee said, but he didn’t sound insulted or annoyed, just amused. It was part of why Shane found him so easy to spend time with.

“Right,” Shane said. “Would you like anything?”

Lee looked at him, cocked his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m all full up on electrolytes.”

Shane laughed, then swallowed. Ilya had taught him many things, but not subtlety. He turned and started walking to his room. Lee followed.

“So,” Lee said, as he closed the door behind him. “No chance I’m reading this wrong, is there?”

“No,” Shane said.

“Good,” Lee said, and crossed the space between them to kiss Shane.

It was instantly the best kiss of Shane’s life, non-Ilya division. Lee smelled of sweat, his hands were big and gentle on either side of Shane’s face, his body making the inches of air between them warm. Shane deepened it, felt smug when Lee’s hands shook.

It felt like Lee would have been content to do nothing more than kiss, but Shane pulled away and took his top off, the sweat in it drying uncomfortably anyway. Lee’s eyes were big and dark as they scanned Shane, and Shane enjoyed it very much. This was not boding well, he realized, for his being at all attracted to women, but he managed to shelve the thought.

As Lee started removing his own clothes he said, “I don’t have anything.”

“Lube and condoms in the nightstand,” Shane said.

“Condoms?” Lee said.

Shane nodded. He’d built this up too much in his head, he wouldn’t settle for less than getting fucked. Lee hurried to retrieve them and Shane, once naked, got on the bed. He leaned against the headrest, and when Lee joined him he brought his knees up, feet apart.

“I was gonna go to the library,” Lee said, and Shane laughed.

“Sorry,” he said. “You still can, if you want.”

“Fuck you,” Lee said, smiling widely, and lowered himself between Shane’s legs.

He got Shane ready very efficiently, not gratuitous at all, and then arranged himself above Shane, positioning his dick at Shane’s hole. It was already blessedly different from sex with Ilya.

“I, um, mightn’t last,” Lee said. “It’s been a while. And I’ve been wanting this for a while.”

Shane had to stop himself from smiling. Very, very different from Ilya. “Me too,” he said, although he supposed, honestly, that was really only true about the first part.

Lee slid in slowly, one hand pressing into the mattress for balance, the other fitting around Shane’s, squeezing, sweet. Shane tried very hard to not imagine holding hands with Ilya during sex. Lee’s forehead landed on Shane’s shoulder, and he held himself still for a few moments before beginning to thrust. His movements were rhythmic, neither gentle nor rough, neither fast nor slow. Steady the way Lee was. Shane closed his eyes.

Lee’s warning proved accurate, he came quickly, but Shane didn’t mind, was too happy to feel full again, to feel skin against his, to be kissed, had no realistic desires beyond that. Lee finished him off with his mouth, and after Shane came Lee rested his head against Shane’s hip. Shane’s hand, the one Lee had been holding, scraped through his hair, a little overgrown and flat against his skull, and Shane grimaced at the sweat. The sex hadn’t been exactly athletic, but it had been preceded by a run. “I’m gonna shower,” Shane said.

Lee looked a little uncertain as Shane extracted himself from under him, so Shane said, “It’s a really nice shower. You can use it after if you want.” Lee smiled.

Lee had to get back into his gross running gear after the shower, had already started pulling it on by the time it occurred to Shane to offer to lend him clothes. Sharing is caring. Shane himself had changed into an almost identical outfit as he’d worn for the run, because he had afternoon practice to get to and he liked arriving early.

Standing by the door, about to leave, Lee asked, “So was this, like, a one time thing, or?”

Lee was fidgeting, and it made Shane aware of how still he was holding himself. “I’d like to do it again, if you would.”

“Definitely,” Lee said. His enthusiasm was pretty charming, how open he was.

“Good,” Shane said. “Not, like, every time, and obviously I’m—” he faltered. Lee knew nothing about hockey, and this had definitely not come up before. Maybe it wasn’t obvious. “Nobody knows I fuck men. Nobody can know. I can’t really do more than just… well, what this morning was. That’s sort of all there is.”

“Okay,” Lee said. “I can work with that.”

At practice Shane felt almost giddy, hyper. He was smiling. He’d never fucked Ilya immediately before spending time with his team but he could only imagine it would make him feel sort of tormented, sure everything Ilya had done to him was visible, like Ilya made him into something else, another person entirely, and he needed time to return to being Shane Hollander. Now he was almost enjoying the secret, that he’d had sex with a man, that he’d had good sex, something many of his teammates seemed to think him incapable of, and nobody knew. It was fun.

He was still riding this gentle wave of excitement when he got home from the team facility, and he wasn’t really thinking when he texted Ilya, I fucked someone else today. He stared at it, put his phone facing down on the coffee table and ate a banana in the kitchen, marveling at how quickly excitement could fade, then went back to his phone and clarified: A guy. I liked it. Like that might be enough to catch Ilya’s interest. It still wasn’t. After twenty four hours, Shane deleted the last text too.

It went basically exactly as Shane had envisioned. Mostly he and Lee proceeded the same as ever, casual friends, but every now and then Shane invited him up to his place and they had sex. It improved on the first time, lasting longer for one thing but also becoming more familiar, more comfortable. It was the kind of sex Shane imagined his teammates talked about, relaxing and satisfying and possible to integrate into a normal routine. He resolved to not text Ilya again, because the last text being about him having good sex with someone else would be one of the most effective last texts he could imagine, but that resolve lasted two weeks, and then Ilya scored or assisted on each of his team’s five goals against Miami, and Shane sent, have they drug tested you yet.

When Shane got the email asking him if he’d present an award with Ilya at that year’s ceremony he said yes so quickly that he couldn’t pretend he was dreading it, couldn’t pretend it was beyond his control. But he barely slept the night before as though it was a cruel fate foisted upon him, his usually near-dead-person resting heart rate climbing up to what the internet described as a window of concern.

At the award show and after, in Ilya’s suite, Ilya acted like nothing strange had gone down between them, like it was the same as it had been before his silence, which was both insult and relief. Shane would prefer to pretend he’d never sent those texts. Ilya let him until after, sitting up in bed.

Shane was trying to fight the discomfort and uncertainty edging in on him; he’d gotten what he’d wanted, what he’d been desperate for for months. He should be happy, at least until the morning. He should be able to say something that felt like how it had felt after the other time they’d fucked, contented, familiar, almost affectionate. Before he could find the magic words, Ilya said, “Have you been with anyone else? Since you slept with that other guy.”

Definitely not contented or affectionate, although it was familiar. Shane flushed, humiliated at the casual reference to those texts, the confirmation that Ilya had read them, only indirect like the shameless desperation they revealed was not worth remarking upon. “Uh, no,” Shane said. “Not anyone else. But I’ve slept with that same guy a couple more times.” He didn’t want Ilya to know Lee’s name, as though it would give Ilya some power over or insight into the situation.

“Right,” Ilya said, like he was annoyed he hadn’t put that together. “This is like you.”

“What?”

“If it worked for you, you would keep doing it,” Ilya said, and Shane shifted, felt accused of something. Ilya could say he was good at hockey and Shane would feel accused, probably.

“I mean, I guess,” Shane said. “I imagine that’s how everyone is.”

Ilya shrugged.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Shane asked, before he could stop himself.

Ilya looked at him like he’d said something stupid. Shane cringed. “No, it is good for me,” Ilya said, his lip curling up. “Healthy competition.”

And Shane felt even more uncomfortable, because there wasn’t any competition. Tonight had confirmed it. What he had with Lee was closer to masturbation than it was to sex with Ilya, even sex without kissing or eye contact.

Ilya turned back to looking ahead, not angled into Shane. “Does he think he is only one who fucks you?” he asked.

“Well, he has been,” Shane said, trying to not sound bitter about it. “The only one. Recently.”

Ilya made a noise. “But he knows you were not virgin,” he said.

“Yeah,” Shane said. One condom already missing from the pack, that first time. “I mean, at least, I assume.”

“He knows,” Ilya said, nodding. “You do not fuck like virgin now.”

Shane flushed. “It’s not like – I’m not a slut.” The word came out weird, forced, like his body resisted saying it. He wasn't sure why he took such offense to Ilya's claim. Maybe because of how amazing the sex had been the time he had, presumably, fucked like a virgin.

Ilya looked at him wide-eyed, baffled. “For fucking two different people? No, this does not make you slut. Is it other player? Teammate?”

“No,” Shane said, probably unjustifiably outraged considering he was currently naked in bed with another player. “He doesn’t play hockey.”

Ilya nodded. “Do you like fucking a fan? Some guys, they like it a lot.”

Shane had to imagine Ilya was one of those guys. No way he was passing up on having his ego stroked like that. Anyway, he seemed to divide all of humanity, or at least the adult male population, between the two categories of players and fans, which was pretty telling in itself. “He’s not a fan,” Shane said. “He didn’t know who I was. He’s—a friend.”

Ilya, for a moment, stilled. Then he turned away from Shane and magicked up a cigarette. Shane watched as he struggled to light it, as though there was a breeze, as though they were out in the cold like the first time they’d met. It finally caught, but Ilya took it out of his mouth again to say, “So sweet.”

Shane shrugged. He sort of felt it was the best he could hope for, a guy he actually liked, who he felt comfortable with, who he trusted and didn’t feel insane about. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, hadn’t wanted to talk about it at all. “So,” he said, after the silence got unbearable. “Russia this year was something else.”

The off-season passed productively and without sex. Shane was splitting his time between Ottawa and Montreal, Ilya was in Moscow (one week in July spent on some island with his favored teammates, Shane monitoring obsessively via social media all the while), and Lee was back in his hometown. Lee’s hometown was only an hour out of Montreal, and he came back to the city sometimes, but Shane put their sex on pause. Shane and Ilya had hooked up four times – at least when Shane excluded the kiss on the balcony at the end of rookie year, as to anyone with sexual experience, which now included Shane, it wouldn’t count as a hook up, even if he’d gotten off to the memory of it repeatedly over the following summer. Anyway, four hook ups with Ilya to six with Lee. A not insurmountable lead, and for some reason Shane didn’t want Lee to run away with it. He didn’t want Ilya to become only a minority of his sexual experience, so even though Ilya was almost always in a different country than Shane and Lee was almost always in the same city, Shane tried to keep it balanced.

It did cross his mind to just end things with Lee entirely – the fears that had led him to Lee, that he might not ever fuck another man, had proven unfounded. Ilya wanted him again, was paying him attention again. But it seemed like too explicit a concession to Ilya’s importance to end things just because he had Ilya back. And if he did stop seeing Lee, it was the kind of information Ilya would dig out of him, would demand an explanation for, and Shane wouldn’t be able to convincingly lie. So he’d keep seeing him, but only once the season started.

He didn’t have sex with women, either. That was harder to excuse during the off-season, when he had more time and less responsibility, but Shane suddenly wasn’t that interested in making excuses. Maybe because now they would only be for his teammates’ sake, not his own. He knew he wasn’t into women. He hadn’t really reckoned with it yet, hadn’t had to, but the knowledge had settled lightly into the periphery of his mind.

It had been easy to categorize Ilya as an outlier, to reason it was normal to not feel that intensely about random women he met at bars when he strongly suspected very few people felt that intensely about anything or anyone. Ilya had cast some kind of spell on him, and Shane could not be blamed. But Lee was different; sex with Lee was, he suspected, what sex was normally like. Fun, satisfying, not verging on ego death. And the sex he’d had with women didn’t even come close to that. He could no longer attribute his lack of success to his high standards. He wasn’t obsessed with Lee, didn’t feel dizzy when he showed up or sick when he left; the standards Lee met weren’t all that high, and Shane was still enjoying it.

Once the season started, and Shane resumed his 6am park runs, he invited Lee up to his place again. It was good, about as far removed from the sex he’d had in Vegas as he could imagine, sweet and fun and manageable, and it meant when he saw Ilya in Boston two weeks later, he wasn’t wound up from months without.

Although it still kind of felt like it. In the hotel room Ilya booked for them he felt as wrecked as he had in Vegas, as he had when he’d let Ilya into his apartment. He shook under Ilya’s hands, let Ilya push him against the wall. “Did you have good summer?” Ilya asked, against his mouth. It was just so he could hear how far past conversation Shane already was, and Shane knew that was why Ilya was asking, but it wasn’t like he could do anything about it. He nodded.

Ilya kissed the corner of his mouth. “Did you travel anywhere?” he asked. “Relax?”

“Rozanov,” Shane said, pleading.

“Yes, I was very relaxed,” Ilya said, as though Shane had returned the question. One hand worked Shane’s fly open, the other slid inside. Shane closed his eyes as Ilya wrapped his hand around his already hard dick. “Didn’t find anyone as needy as you, though. I looked everywhere. Russia, America—”

“Fuck you,” Shane said, but when Ilya laughed he almost wanted to join in. He was too excited to be in Ilya’s proximity again. He’d feel humiliated later.

Ilya’s knees bent, like he was about to drop to the floor, then straightened again. “You are still fucking your boy?” he asked, his hand tight on Shane’s dick, and Shane couldn’t even get mad, couldn’t do anything but tell the truth.

“Sometimes,” he said.

“You get tested?” Ilya asked.

Shane’s dizzy arousal cleared somewhat. “What?”

“STI screens,” Ilya said.

Shane stared at him. “No,” he said, quiet, hoping both that it didn’t sound like a question and that Ilya would treat it like one anyway.

“Multiple casual partners,” Ilya said, and squeezed his dick as admonishment. “You should get tested.”

“Do you?” Shane asked, realizing only then that was probably something that should have occurred to him to ask a long time ago. He put Ilya’s dick in his mouth bare, let Ilya come on his face, on whatever.

“Yes, monthly,” Ilya said, and then smiled. “All clean, baby.”

“You don’t have to blow me,” Shane said. “I’ll get tested for next time.” It came out easily, automatically, and only after he’d said it did he realize how hard he would find it to work out the logistics of that. Did they do different tests for gay sex?

Ilya shrugged, started moving his hand again. “You blow me,” he said.

“Yeah, but you get tested.”

Ilya made a face, almost apologetic. “Is not always… up to date. When you and me fuck.”

Shane refused to let himself be disappointed by that, be hurt or angry. Of course Ilya had sometimes fucked someone else, between monthly results and seeing Shane. Probably sometimes multiple people. Multiple casual partners. His brain caught on something new instead. “Has it ever not been clean?”

“I would tell you if I could give you something,” Ilya said, frowning.

“That’s not why I’m asking,” Shane said, even though it was really the only reason he should have to ask. He just wanted to know if Ilya had ever gotten sick from sex with other people. Just the idea made Shane mad, and it took him a couple moments to realize it wasn’t at Ilya but rather at the strangers who might have passed anything on. This was pretty hypocritical considering it hadn’t even occurred to Shane to get tested, but now that it had he couldn’t, wouldn’t hurt Ilya. He had to be better than that, better than anyone else who had, who had even risked it.

“Don’t blow me,” Shane said. “At least not without a condom. Just fuck me.”

“Just,” Ilya repeated, smiling. “Oh, how will you survive. Just fuck you.”

Ilya pulled his hand out of Shane’s pants and pushed him further into the hotel room, toward the bed. Shane shoved back, so Ilya wrapped his arms around Shane’s middle from behind, hefted him off the ground. Shane yelped, got an elbow in Ilya’s side that made Ilya curse as Ilya brought him to the bed. Shane broke free only when they were right up against it, tugged Ilya down onto it with him. Ilya’s hair had gotten disheveled in the tussle and Shane used it as an excuse to touch it, pushing it off his forehead, post-game damp and springy. Ilya’s expression changed into something softer, younger, something that made Shane’s breath catch. Ilya swallowed and then stood, started pulling off Shane’s jeans. Shane removed his own sweater, and Ilya immediately neglected his task to reach up and grope Shane’s pecs, thumbing the nipples. Shane smiled and fell back on the bed. “You’re getting predictable,” he said.

Ilya gave him a look, one eyebrow raised, lethal, but Shane knew with self-satisfied certainty that it was the kind of comment that got under Ilya’s skin. Sure enough, once they were both naked, and Ilya was guiding Shane onto his knees like Shane wouldn’t be able to figure it out on his own, Ilya said, “I could fuck you same way over and over forever and you would still thank me.”

Forever. The word almost froze Shane. He gathered himself enough to say, “Fuck you, I’ve never thanked you.”

Ilya hummed, his hand squeezing Shane’s ass, smoothing down the length of his back and then squeezing his neck. “This is rude, you should thank me,” he said.

The words were instantly on Shane’s lips. He clenched his jaw. Ilya dropped the thread of conversation as he began working Shane open. Shane could feel him hard against the back of his thigh; he loved how much Ilya loved fingering him. Ilya grabbed Shane’s hand, bent it awkwardly behind his back, pulling at Shane’s shoulder, and guided his fingers to his hole, rubbed them over it. Shane whined as Ilya asked, tone almost wondering, “Does it ever get this soft for you?”

Shane shook his head because that was what Ilya wanted and Ilya dropped his hand, let Shane get it back under him. Probably that was as close as they’d get to holding hands during sex.

Shane dropped to his elbows as soon as Ilya sank in. For a while, as they found the flow of it, the only sound was the wet push and pull and their heavy breathing. Then, as though they were in the middle of the conversation, Ilya said, “I think your boy is predictable. I think he wastes you, is why you’re here. Easy dick at home and you still come to me.” Those words, ground out between thrusts, didn’t even sound like they were for Shane. Ilya was getting himself off.

“Stop,” Shane said, his face crumpling up, forehead pressed into pillows.

“Don’t say stop,” Ilya said, bending over Shane so he could feel the breath of his words on his back. “Say thank you. Thank me for this dick.”

Shane held off for five thrusts, and then Ilya reached his hand around. “Thank you,” Shane said, bursting out of him.

Ilya moaned, the next thrust especially forceful. “For what?”

“For your dick, for—” He went silent, nothing able to get past his throat. For your hands, for your mouth, for looking at me.

“Fuck,” Ilya said, too loud, broken, and pulled out. Shane made a wretched sound, tilted his ass up like he could entice Ilya back, but he could already hear the wet slip of the condom coming off, and moments later felt Ilya finish on his ass and back, something in Russian, not praise, something else. Shane couldn’t tell if Ilya liked seeing his come on Shane’s skin or if he just liked denying Shane when he was so close to orgasm. Probably both; Ilya was so good at getting what he wanted it was usually more than one thing. It must have been an awkward angle, because Ilya’s hand hadn’t left Shane’s dick. With his other hand he shoved three fingers in Shane’s hole, exactly what he’d needed, thank you for your fingers, and Shane came.

They showered together, kissing rather than trying to force a second round, Ilya’s fingers lightly rubbing swirls in Shane’s hair. It made Shane sleepy, it made his toes curl. Ilya hadn’t done that before. Not predictable. After, as they got dressed, Shane tried to sound confident when he said, “New rule.”

“New?” Ilya asked, instantly antagonistic, looking at Shane disbelievingly. “We do not have rules.”

Shane scoffed. They had so many rules. “How about not telling anyone we’re fucking?”

“This is not rule, this is just...” Ilya searched for the word. “Common sense. Like wearing clothes.”

Shane decided to not get bogged down in their divergent philosophies on what constituted a rule. There was obviously a rule about wearing clothes. “You’re not allowed to talk about other people during sex.”

Ilya’s face smoothed out, placid and serious, no joke in his voice, just that lethal honesty he could sometimes deploy. Not even bothering to entertain the pretense that Shane’s rule was of general application, rather than targeted at one specific off-limits person. “I only know about him because you wanted me to know about him.”

It landed like a slap, the implication obvious enough even Shane caught it, that Shane was into Ilya talking about it, that it was one of those things he had asked for without asking. But, Shane realized, remembering how wrecked Ilya’s voice had sounded around the words, it was more dangerous than that. It was something Ilya was into. Maybe it was how he spoke to all the girlfriends of other men he apparently slept with, gloating. Healthy competition, he’d said, and Shane knew how competitive he was. Maybe Ilya liked knowing there was someone he could be glorious in comparison to.

Shane said, “I told you about him at a point where I thought you and I were never going to fuck again.”

It was pretty rare for him to feel like he’d gotten the last word with Ilya.

On the ride back to his actual hotel room he searched, STI from semen on skin?

He brought Lee up to his place two weeks later. Lee said, “Hey, I was wondering if we could try something a little different?”

How was that for predictable. Shane smiled at him. “Sure.”

“So I’m not sure how you feel about this,” Lee said. “But I was wondering if you’d want to fuck me.”

Shane tried to work out if that could mean something other than the obvious. He didn’t think so. “You like that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Lee said. “I mean, I really like what we do too, and obviously you like that. I just like it either way.”

“Right, but what’s your preference?”

“I don’t have one,” Lee said, apparently as easy going about this as he was about everything else. This was one of those times Shane felt a little embarrassed in front of Lee, unworldly. He hadn’t known there were guys who liked it equally both ways; he was almost certain he didn’t, and Ilya didn’t seem to either. Shane had assumed it would always work out like that. He and Lee hadn’t even talked about it, Shane had just spread his legs. Maybe it was embarrassing for him to have just assumed they were on the same page.

“The question is how strong is your preference,” Lee said.

Pretty strong. “I don’t know,” Shane said. “I’ve never fucked a guy.”

“Oh,” Lee said, eyebrows up. “Okay. Well, obviously, we don’t have to.”

“But you want to,” Shane said.

Lee shook his head. “Only if it’s something you’re up for.”

“I can,” Shane said. “I’ve fucked women, you know.”

“I know,” Lee said, cocking his head. “But you didn’t like it.”

“But I did it,” Shane said. “I can do it.”

“I’m not—” Lee looked caught between laughing and something else. “Shane, I’m not doubting that you’re physically capable of putting your dick in my ass. You don’t seem to want to, and I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to do.”

There was something to his tone, like he couldn’t believe he had to say that, like that was supposed to go without saying. Shane couldn’t imagine a world where it went without saying. Ilya mustn’t have been able to either, considering how often he checked. Shane said, “I don’t know if I want to or not, I’ve never done it. I’d like to try, I’d like to know.”

Lee looked at him, assessing, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But if you at any point decide you don’t like it we stop.”

Shane didn’t think he could really confidently know whether or not he liked it unless he followed through to the end, and he also didn’t like the implication that if he didn’t like it he couldn’t handle finishing the job, but it seemed important to Lee, so he said, “Sure.”

The first part, getting Lee ready, was fine. Shane wasn’t into it the way Ilya was into it, or Lee, but it didn’t make him feel uncomfortable. Fingering women had made him so uncomfortable he’d worried he was selfish in bed. And he liked seeing how much Lee liked it, the way he jerked and his breath caught, an element that had always been painfully missing from sex with women. The most embarrassing part was putting on a condom, something Shane hadn’t done sober in literal years, and he fumbled with it a little. Lee laughed, but it was kind, like they were both in on the joke, and Shane relaxed. If this didn’t work out he trusted Lee to be okay with it, to not make a big deal of it, to not stop talking to Shane. It wasn’t like it would get back to his teammates, something Shane for some reason needed to remind himself. As though they’d judge him for not fucking a guy right.

Lee had put himself on his knees, and Shane was happy to trust his judgment. He got on his own knees behind Lee and slowly pushed inside.

It was nice, the physical sensation on his dick, the tightness. The same way he could appreciate the physical sensation of fucking a woman with alcohol in his system and his eyes screwed close. But this time he could keep his eyes open because the view was nice too, Lee’s back and ass, the curve of his spine and jut of his shoulder blades. Ilya’s back was unbelievable, a work of art, something by a sculptor with a patron as rich as God. Shane never got to see it during sex, see how it worked as Ilya fucked into him, which it for the first time occurred to Shane to regret. Maybe strategically placed mirrors.

Anyway, he didn’t hate it. He got a little bored at one point, the repetitive thrusts, but it wasn’t making him feel sick which was a huge win. When Lee got louder Shane got his hand on him. He knew the rules of this kind of sex well, which took away so much of the stress he associated with sex with women. Lee came, and it wasn’t a spectacular orgasm but it wasn’t faked, either. Shane pulled out and started jerking off, for some reason didn’t have the guts to come anywhere on Lee, came into his own hand.

After a while, like he was getting his breath back, Lee turned onto his back. His eyes remained mercifully closed as he asked, “So, verdict?”

“It was good,” Shane said. “I definitely have a preference, but if you ever really want it like that in particular, I’m, you know. Happy to help.”

Lee waved a lazy hand in the air. “Nah. Like I said, I’m easy.”

Easy dick at home, Shane heard in his head. That new rule would be very important.

When Lee left, Shane had a strong impulse to text Ilya to tell him what he’d done. It wouldn’t be to provoke him in any way, he just sort of wanted Ilya to know. It felt weird to have a new kind of sexual experience and for Ilya to be ignorant of it. It felt weird to have done something for the first time with someone other than Ilya, but then he and Ilya had never shaved each other’s heads, either. Some things there was no point in trying.

The next day Lee did not come up to Shane’s, but on the bench after their run he said, “A guy at the bar I was at last night was talking about Montreal’s chances this year. He said he thought you were gonna win the championship.”

Shane nodded. “Yeah, our odds are pretty good,” he said. “Analysts like us. Still early in the season though.”

“I don’t think this guy was an analyst,” Lee said. “So your team is good, then?”

“Uh, no, we’re great,” Shane said. “Sorry, just. Good doesn’t win championships.”

Lee smiled. “And you’re Montreal’s best player?”

Shane made a face. He didn’t want to just flatly say yes, but anything else would be a lie.

“Damn,” Lee said. “I’m impressed that you’re willing to fuck someone who doesn’t understand how talented you are. Like surely that’d be a real ego boost.”

Shane glanced around them to see if anyone could have heard that comment. He didn’t think so.

“Sorry,” Lee said, sounding genuine. He was usually pretty good at matching Shane’s caution.

“It’s fine,” Shane said, forcing his body to relax.

“Anyway,” Lee said. “I was thinking it’d be cool to see a game sometime. I kind of feel like I should.”

Shane nodded. “It’s a good experience, I think even if you don’t really know the sport. I could get tickets for you and anyone you want to bring.”

“Seriously?”

Shane frowned at Lee’s surprise, nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t talk to you or anything, not at the arena. But if you want to go with some friends, sure, I can make that happen.”

“Awesome,” Lee said.

It had seemed awesome to Shane, at first. He couldn’t get Lee fancy seats, because those were conspicuous, but he could get him nice ones with a decent view of the action, better than any Shane or his parents had ever had when he was growing up. He liked the idea of sharing hockey with Lee, liked the idea of Lee seeing him doing what he was best at.

And then Lee asked for tickets to the Boston game.

Shane stared at the text for ten minutes, then went and had dinner at the Pikes’, came back and stared at it again. It was a stupid thing to freak out about. He wasn’t even sure what he was freaking out about – that Ilya would somehow spot Lee, figure him out, or that Lee would somehow be able to tell that Shane and Ilya were fucking. The latter actually seemed like a slight possibility. Shane and Ilya benefited a lot from how unbelievable it would be to anyone in the hockey world for them to be sleeping together. Lee wasn’t part of the hockey world.

But Shane would just keep more distance from Ilya, wouldn’t indulge him on the ice so much, and it would be fine. He texted back: Sounds good! It’d be nice to see you after the game (celebrate a win, haha) but that night I actually already have plans, sorry.
He definitely still planned on fucking Ilya that night, but he was also hoping he could get Lee to volunteer to switch to another game. It did not work.

Aw damn. I only have one friend who gives a fuck abt hockey and this is the weekend she’s free! We can debrief in the morning :)

It became very important to Shane that Montreal would win that game, and they did. Ilya sent him a couple questioning looks about the level of intensity, but by the time he started matching it it was too late. Shane was also sort of hoping, for some reason he couldn’t really understand, that Ilya would play poorly, but that didn’t happen. Lee witnessed greatness on both sides, even if he wouldn’t be able to appreciate it.

Shane felt weird letting Ilya up to his place that night. He was almost certain Lee was fucking other people, and there definitely was no expectation of exclusivity, but there was something a little sleazy feeling about fucking Ilya without Lee knowing when earlier in the evening Lee and Ilya had been in the same place. A text had come through from Lee after the game, but Shane hadn’t opened it yet. He couldn’t multitask like that, not with people.

Then Ilya’s hands were on him, and all the weirdness melted away. Ilya said, “One of my players is fucking the ex of one of your players.”

Shane had entirely been expecting dirty talk. “What?”

Ilya nodded sagely. “Conners and Merchant,” he said. “Some instagram girl. I thought there might be ugly fight.”

“I’m shocked there wasn’t,” Shane said.

“We were keeping eye,” Ilya said. “You weren’t. You did not know.”

“No, no one told me,” Shane said.

“They should tell you these things,” Ilya said. “Captain.”

Shane frowned. He’d thought this was just gossip, because Ilya loved gossip. “Wait, are you giving me advice? Fucking hockey advice?”

Ilya smiled. His hands were still on Shane, rubbing up and down his arms. “Locker room advice,” he said. “Talk to Merchant maybe.”

“About his ex?” Shane asked. “He should leave that shit at home. Anyway, it’s over now.”

“Yes, but there will be next time,” Ilya said. “Maybe not Merchant, but. People should know to talk to you. Yes we should leave things at home, but it is hard, you know this.”

“What does that mean?” Shane asked, and pulled out of Ilya’s grip.

Ilya looked surprised. “Nothing,” he said. “Everyone should know this, we all know this. Sometimes what is happening in your life affects hockey.”

Shane shook his head. Ilya widened his eyes like he thought Shane was being difficult. “Well,” Ilya said. “Maybe nothing really has happened in your life yet.”

“Fuck you,” Shane said, and then rolled his eyes. “Just fuck me already.”

“I followed your rule,” Ilya said, afterwards, his chin digging into Shane’s shoulder. “I did not talk about your boy.”

“This counts as talking about him,” Shane said. They were lying in his bed, as much a tangle as the sheets. He was tracing a finger up and down Ilya’s arm.

“The rule is for during sex,” Ilya said, and poked at Shane’s soft dick, as if to draw attention to the fact that they were no longer having sex.

Shane couldn’t stop himself. “He was at the game today.” Maybe he’d felt a little like he’d been lying to Ilya, too.

Ilya needed only a moment to recalibrate. “Unfair,” he said, frowning. “Should have told me before, I would have put on show for him.”

“Your team falling apart in the final five minutes was a show,” Shane said, and Ilya made a face.

“You should have invited him,” Ilya said.

“I did, that’s why he was there,” Shane said.

Ilya laughed. “You should have invited him to here, with us,” he said. “You would like two at once, I think.”

“Fuck off,” Shane said, aghast.

Ilya straightened up a little, leaning over Shane on his elbow, clearly warming to the topic. “You don’t like the idea?”

“Obviously not.”

“Why?” Ilya asked. “You are embarrassed of him? Is he ugly? Tiny dick? Annoying laugh? Does he smell bad?”

“You smell bad,” Shane said, because he was still pretending to hate the cigarettes and the body wash exclusively sourced from hotel showers. Ilya grinned, fell back on the bed and got Shane under his arm, pulled him against his chest, as though to subject him to his scent. The horror. Shane’s eyes closed.

“Why?” Ilya asked again, dog with a bone, as though it was an entirely reasonable suggestion.
“You know why,” Shane said, his mouth barely moving, pressed against Ilya’s pec.

“Oh, yes, I get it,” Ilya said. “You don’t want guy you’re fucking to know you fuck guys. Terrible secret.”

“He doesn’t know I fuck you,” Shane said. “You don’t know him, you’re not out to him.”

Ilya shrugged. “If you are out to him, it is safe for me to be out to him. I don’t mind him knowing about me.” The apparent trust shocked Shane.

“So, what,” Shane said, still not convinced Ilya wasn’t just fucking with him. “You’d just take my word for it?”

Ilya nodded, like that was easy. “You are more careful than me,” he said. “I should only fuck men you say are safe.”

Shane imagined for a moment the reality that implied, where he could vet the men Ilya fucked, make sure they were… what? What would he want them to be? This conversation was a minefield. “Maybe the rule should be no talking about him at all,” Shane said.

Ilya honest-to-God whined. “No,” he said. “You are no fun, you hate fun.”

“Yeah, and I hate threesomes too,” Shane said.

“Can’t know until you try,” Ilya sing-songed, and Shane thought about topping Lee. Felt weird, again, that Ilya didn’t know about it. Shane blew air on Ilya’s nipple, admonishingly.

Ilya said, “So will you tell him about me?”

“No,” Shane said, automatic and indignant. It was a crazy idea, even if he couldn’t really explain why, now that he had Ilya’s permission. Who was he protecting? Ilya looked at him, scanning, watchful, then shrugged and nodded. The guilt welling in Shane didn’t make any sense.

“So, what did you think?” Shane asked, on the bench the next morning.

“Uh,” Lee said, and Shane laughed. “No it was – I should’ve done more research, beforehand. I didn’t really understand what was happening, what was supposed to be impressive. That’s on me. You scored, though! I know that’s impressive.”

Shane shrugged. His goal honestly wasn’t the coolest part of his game last night. “So were you just bored the whole time?”

“No, not even slightly bored,” Lee said. “Like you said, it’s a good experience. The crowd was going crazy so it was easy to get into. Even if I didn’t really know what I was into. And I was with my friend, we had fun. We did spend a good, like, twenty minutes of the game rating players on looks. Sorry.”

Shane smiled. “As long as I was high up,” he said.

“Of course,” Lee said. “I’d say no competition, but holy shit that guy from Boston.”

Heat immediately started creeping up from Shane’s chest. “Which guy,” he said, which he figured was plausible enough. Ilya wasn’t the only good looking guy on Boston. Maybe the only holy shit good looking guy. Shane imagined telling Lee that the holy shit good looking guy was up for a threesome.

“Like, their main guy. Their you,” Lee said. “My friend follows him on instagram now.”

“Oh,” Shane said, instead of: his instagram is useless, you have to follow his friends.

Lee said, “I think I’d find it hard to work in an environment where every single one of my coworkers was jacked as fuck. Do you not find it hard?”

“You mean, like, being attracted to them?” Shane had to stamp down the wave of defensiveness. Lee was gay, Lee didn’t know about hockey, Lee wasn’t accusing him of anything.

“Yeah,” Lee said.

“No,” Shane said. “I’ve been playing hockey basically my whole life, you just sort of learn to switch it off. I don’t think about other players like that. And locker rooms aren’t really sexy environments. I mean a lot of what I see is pretty unattractive.”

Even though this was true for everyone but Ilya Rozanov, it still felt like outright lying. Ilya – at least under the guise of that guy from Boston – had specifically come up, attraction to other players had specifically come up, and Shane had acted like it had nothing to do with him. Keeping Ilya under wraps was such a universal policy he’d never thought about what it meant before that he was keeping it from Lee. Lee had mentioned on a couple occasions other hook ups he’d had, casual and easy going. Shane was making it a bigger deal by keeping it to himself. He just didn’t know if he could have sex with someone else if he wasn’t allowed to pretend that Ilya didn’t exist.

Even though there was always a buffer of at least a week between fucking Ilya and fucking Lee, going from one to the other grew complicated. Shane hated it, but it made the sex with Lee less satisfying, too much of a clear contrast with what sex could be. And it wasn’t all Lee’s fault; Shane had never tried to communicate what he liked. Even if some of what made sex with Ilya special was inimitably Ilya, some of it had to be just that it was tailored to Shane’s taste, and there was no reason he and Lee couldn’t reproduce that.

Just as Lee had when he’d wanted Shane to fuck him, one morning in Shane’s bedroom Shane said, “I was wondering if we could try something different today.”

Lee smiled, excited, and stepped closer. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “Like, in terms… In terms of how you treat me.”

The excitement persisted, but was joined by confusion. Shane reached out and took hold of Lee’s t-shirt, sat down on the bed and pulled Lee into sitting down too. “Have I been—?”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with what we’ve been doing,” Shane said, this part practiced, the one thing he’d been able to confidently plan how to say. “What we do is great, I just thought it could be fun to experiment.”

Lee nodded. “So treat you how?”

Shane was instantly flushed, as much worried about embarrassing himself as he was about turning himself on just talking about it. “Like, more… decisively. Like authoritatively. Not in a weird way, not like it’s a big deal, just, you know. Call the shots. And not like making me do things I don’t want or anything, it’s all stuff I want, it’s just that you decide what I want. Kind of.”

He could see Lee not getting it, and he couldn’t blame him. Shane was trying to explain something inexplicable, the alchemy Ilya worked, the contradictions he inhabited. It was far more art than science.

“Could you maybe give me some specifics,” Lee said, leaning back on his hands. When Shane and Ilya started talking about something kind of serious, Ilya didn’t stop touching Shane. He’d been jacking him off when they’d talked about STI tests.

“I don’t know,” Shane said. “The point is it’s up to you. How you want me to come, when you want me to come. What you want me to do to get you off.”

“Where’d you get these ideas?” Lee asked, eyebrows up. Shane couldn’t tell if he found the ideas themselves surprising, or just their coming from Shane.

“Porn,” Shane said, and imagined how that would make Ilya laugh. “Just – don’t be so nice, you know? Tell me what to do. Expect it of me. Even if it’s hard.”

Lee edged him, which was a pretty safe bet given the parameters, and not something Shane ever had enough time with Ilya to do in a real way anyway. It worked, Lee was impervious to his begging and Shane came harder than maybe he ever had with Lee, but afterwards he felt cold, vaguely nauseous.

They hadn’t laughed once. They always laughed during sex, more than Shane laughed with Ilya, one of the few advantages sex with Lee had. But Shane had told him to not be so nice, and maybe that’s what Lee had thought he meant. No laughter. That wasn’t what he’d meant. None of it was what he’d meant. Ilya wasn’t impervious to Shane’s begging, he loved Shane’s begging.

There was warmth, Shane realized, with Ilya. Even when he was taunting Shane, there was warmth. He knew exactly how to make someone feel either inside or outside the joke, and he always made Shane feel inside it, at least when they were fucking. It wasn’t cruel, it wasn’t even really adversarial. He was like a coach, a comparison Shane didn’t want to dwell on too long at all. Ilya set goals for him to meet, and he wanted Shane to meet them, he wanted Shane to be able for whatever Ilya asked of him, and he was happy when Shane did. He was impressed when Shane did, even sometimes blown away, or else smug, like he’d known exactly what Shane was capable of, like he could claim some role in Shane’s success. Shane didn’t know why he hadn’t been able to articulate any of that to Lee; maybe because once he started describing it he wouldn’t have been able to stop. Sometimes Ilya let Shane push back, sometimes he negotiated. Sometimes the rules of the game were far more about Shane’s pleasure than Ilya’s. Sometimes he let Shane manhandle him. Ilya got the balance perfectly right, picked his moments precisely. Shane couldn’t summarize it in brief. Every rule for how Ilya worked came with twenty exceptions, and all of them made sense, except maybe only to Shane and Ilya.

Shane was humiliated, really, that he’d made Lee do that, and that Lee had no idea as to why, couldn’t have any idea because Shane had avoided telling him about Ilya.

“I’ll be honest,” Lee said. “It was fun to try, but I’m not so sure I’m into that.”

“Yeah,” Shane said, feeling equal parts guilty and relieved.

Lee turned toward Shane, expression questioning. “You weren’t into it either?”

“Not really,” Shane said. “Sorry, I guess that’s not for us.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Lee said. “I think stuff like that is often, you know. Best left to porn.”

Shane nodded and, despite how awful he felt, had to hold back laughter.

The playoffs approached, which meant no contact with Ilya and very little with Lee. Lee understood that from last season, but it was different this time around because Lee was moving. He’d be doing a one year grad program in Vancouver, and he’d gotten a job there for the summer beforehand. Montreal swept the wild card in the opening round, so Shane had a good few days off before the next series started, and while it wasn’t actually free time, all of it needing to be dedicated to hockey in one way or another, he stepped away for a few hours to make an appearance at Lee’s going away party. This, he thought, was pretty magnanimous of him, made him a pretty good friend, but he understood nobody at the going away party would be able to appreciate that.

Lee’s friends knew about him, in that they knew he and Lee went running together most mornings. They knew because Lee had told them before there was anything to keep secret, including that his running buddy was Shane Hollander, Montreal hockey savior. Shane was pretty sure there was a chance Lee had also told them that he found Shane attractive, or maybe even had a crush, but Lee didn’t bring that up and Shane didn’t ask. He’d prefer to believe Lee’s friends saw everything between them as entirely platonic.

As far as parties went it was a nice time. It was at Lee’s place, which Shane had never been to before. It was small and a little worn down, Shane’s property brain cataloging everything that needed work, but they’d made it nice for the party, fairy lights and balloons. The fridge was entirely covered in photos of Lee with family and friends, and Shane was glad he wasn’t drinking, because that was liable to make him overly emotional.

It was a party for Lee but Shane sort of felt like the guest of honor. His arrival was a big deal, so many people excited to see him after apparently hearing about him for years. Three people hugged him by way of greeting. It was becoming pretty clear that Lee was beloved, and that these people were gracious enough to extend some of that love to Shane, if just for the evening.

He’d been worried, too, that it would all be fancy artsy college grads making conversation he couldn’t follow, but he was far from the odd one out. Lee, it seemed, could and would befriend anyone, and Shane’s longest conversation of the evening was with a single mom who used the same laundromat as Lee and who Lee sometimes babysat for. Shane felt a swell of affection. He’d almost forgotten that before everything, before he’d noticed the flirting or invited Lee up to his apartment, he’d just really liked him as a person.

That was Shane’s longest conversation of the evening, but not the most memorable. When he was preparing to head home, not wanting to fuck up his sleep schedule, he was approached by Lee’s friend Addie. She slipped after him into the bedroom where everyone had left their bags and jackets and closed the door behind her. His ears rung with the relative silence.

He’d been introduced to Addie when he first arrived, and remembered her because she was one of the friends he’d heard about before, one of Lee’s closest. They had used to live together. Addie smiled at him, wide, and said, “I’m so glad you came, it’s been great to meet you after all these years.”

“Same,” Shane said, easy and automatic because he’d been having variations of this exchange all night. “Lee’s told me a lot about you guys, it’s cool to finally put names to faces.”

“Well,” Addie said. “There’s been an open invitation to you for a long time now. Better late than never, though, I guess.”

Shane didn’t know what to say to that.

“I’ll miss him,” Addie said. “Will you?”

“Of course,” Shane said, on guard. “But I mean, we’ll keep in touch. And I’ll be out in Vancouver a couple times too.” Shane hadn’t learned from his experience with Lee; he still assumed everyone knew what he did for a living.

She looked away, took a few moments to respond, like she was building up to something. “Actually, I think it would be better if you didn’t keep in touch.”

Shane turned to her sharply, too stunned to speak. She still didn’t look at him. “It’s a really good course, and Vancouver’s a great city. He should be able to enjoy it. I don’t want him to be stuck back in Montreal.”

Shane didn’t know what that meant. “Stuck how?”

“By you,” she said. Addie’s so fearless, Lee had told him, she’s never not said what was on her mind. “I don’t buy the oblivious straight guy routine, you have to know. He’s been obsessed with you for years, he’s basically entirely stopped dating.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Shane said, lamely.

“It was fun when it was just a little crush,” Addie said. “But Shane, you’re an inch away from breaking his heart. You should back up.”

“We’re just friends,” Shane said, which was apparently so useless that Addie gave up, rolling her eyes and leaving.

Shane was shaken on the ride home. He didn’t like Addie’s opinions at all, and he didn’t like how badly he was struggling to convince himself she was wrong. In his bed, unable to sleep (no socializing during play offs, even sober and with curfews – new rule), he tried another tack.

Maybe Lee was obsessed with him, but so what? Somebody could fairly describe Shane’s feelings for Ilya as obsession, and he was perfectly happy fucking Ilya a handful of times a year. He couldn’t conceivably want more. He also suspected that what he had with Ilya was more important to him than it was to Ilya, but that didn’t mean he’d want Ilya to cut him off. Addie was operating under the assumption that Shane was straight, that Lee’s feelings were hopeless, but that wasn’t true. Even if Lee’s feelings were stronger than Shane’s, that didn’t mean Lee wanted what they were doing to stop. And if Lee did want that, he could say so himself. Shane shouldn’t listen to to advice from someone he’d never met before.

Shane won the Cup, and then won again, and it was easily the greatest twelve month span of his life. Second to the hockey was the sex with Ilya. It wasn’t so much that anything had changed, but rather that it had grown. They were more confident, they understood each other even better. Shane knew things about Ilya’s body he thought there was a chance he was the only person who knew, despite the crowded field. They had no more hiccups, moments where they were working at cross-purposes or accidentally insulting each other. He could have lived in that year forever. He never wanted to stop winning at hockey, and he never wanted to stop fucking Ilya.

He kept in contact with Lee, saw him when he played in Vancouver, but they didn’t sleep together. It was riskier when they didn’t have Shane’s apartment to go to, but that wasn’t why. With sex no longer habit, it just kind of stopped occurring to Shane as an option. For that year they were firmly friends.

Shane didn’t know what Ilya knew, if he could somehow tell that Shane had stopped sleeping with anyone else, but he stopped bringing Lee up so much. It added to that feeling that was growing in Shane when they got together, that nobody else existed, or at least that nobody else mattered.

One Boston Montreal match up that year was the second game of a back to back with travel for both of them, and both of them got knocked around bad over the two games. Ilya lost another tooth, his lip all swollen, and he’d lost a step of speed, too. Shane thought his hip, but he wasn’t sure. Shane himself couldn’t close his left fist all that tight around the stick, and standing up straight hurt his back. That was just the greatest hits, there were a dozen other minor hurts on both their bodies too. The game was in Boston and Shane wouldn’t get checked out until they were back in Montreal the next day. He had no idea when Ilya would get checked out, but Ilya wouldn’t tell him about it anyway. In the locker room after the game, Shane’s teammates quiet from both fatigue and the loss, Shane texted, we can skip tonight if you’re too banged up. He held back his smile, not wanting to upset the general atmosphere of despair, when Ilya responded, ????? Obviously not.

But that sex was weird, felt like some kind of first time. Shane could kiss Ilya but not hard, and neither of them could push the other around, and Ilya seemed to need to get his weight off his legs quickly.

So they didn’t just spill onto the bed to fuck, they did all the foreplay there too, the gentle kissing and the slow careful stripping of each other’s clothes off their bodies. It took what felt like an honest five minutes for Ilya’s t-shirt to be fully removed. And then, the both of them exhausted along with everything else, they went back to kissing for another five minutes. Shane, in an attempt to move down to Ilya’s neck, knocked his forehead into Ilya’s busted lip and Ilya yelped, pulling away. Shane’s stream of apologies were interrupted by Ilya’s light laughter, which Shane soon joined. It was sort of a ridiculous scene.

Ilya was dead set on actually fucking Shane, maybe because it had just been blowjobs and rimming the last time they’d met up, and it took them a while to find a position that was comfortable for both of them. Shane was unduly moved by it, by working with Ilya, by the care they were taking with each other. Eventually Shane ended up on his left side, curled slightly forward, right leg elevated on a pile of pillows, Ilya warm and close behind him, his breath on Shane’s skin. It didn’t mean anything, Shane said to himself, over and over. They were fucking like this because they were physically incapable of anything else.

Or maybe, he thought wildly, they were using that as an excuse. There was no medical reason for Ilya to be slow and careful fingering him, too, but he was, like that was as sensitive as the bruised and battered parts of Shane. When Ilya slid inside they both groaned, a mix of aches and pleasures. “I do not want to hurt you,” Ilya said, suddenly, and Shane didn’t know why he’d felt it necessary to say aloud.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

A result of the combination of his position and whatever lower body injury had made him move so carefully on the ice, Ilya couldn’t fuck into Shane with much force, so instead it was just a slow grind, a constant unrelenting pressure, never pulling out more than a couple inches. Shane felt tears in his eyes, imagined a world where Ilya might just choose to take his time with Shane like this. Neither of them was really moving except the slight flex of their hips, and it amplified his awareness of the few sources of stimulation, Ilya inside him, Ilya’s breath on his neck, the up and down rub of Ilya’s hand on his stomach.

Shane’s tears rarely made their way out during sex, but this time they did, Ilya’s thumb honing in on them like they were magnetized, rubbing them over Shane’s cheekbone. When Ilya came it seemed slowed down like everything else had been, seemed to take forever, and Shane wished wildly to be able to really feel it, for Ilya to come inside him bare.

Afterwards they were quiet, almost like they were embarrassed by what they’d done. Usually after sex that good they talked about it, sharing in smug satisfaction. Shane suspected they both wanted to treat this as though it wasn’t in any way remarkable. It would be too telling otherwise. They didn’t see each other often enough for any data point to be overpowered by the larger mass. Every encounter was consequential. This was, now, a kind of sex they had.

Standing at the door, Ilya gestured vaguely at Shane’s whole body. “Text me that none of it is serious,” he said. Shane stared at him. Injury updates to rival players was so obviously taboo.

“Okay,” Shane said. “You too.”

The closest to difficult sex with Ilya got was when the fire alarm went off in the Boston hotel they had booked a room in. Shane, obviously, freaked out. He was shirtless and hard and Ilya's fly was undone and people would see them, together, at whatever stupid assembly point they would have to go to.

And Ilya said, his mouth against Shane's jaw, "It is fine, ignore it."

"What?" Shane said. 

"Ignore it," Ilya said. "No real fire, it will stop soon." 

"Rozanov," Shane said, outraged. But didn't push him off. "It's a fire alarm."

"So many times I hear fire alarms," Ilya said, with the tone he reserved for complaints about American nonsense. As though they didn't have fire alarms in Russia. "Never have I been in fire. There is no smoke, no screaming, no staff. We are fine."

"But you're supposed to leave," Shane said. If Ilya gave him any space, Shane would be able to find the sign saying so. In event of fire, and a list of bullet points, none of which said to continue making out with your clandestine lover. 

"If you want to go, you can go," Ilya said, but he was kissing Shane's neck, so obviously he didn't really mean that. Obviously Shane couldn't go. 

"This is bad," Shane said, his head thunking back against the wall, and then the alarm stopped.

"See," Ilya said. "Rules aren't for real life. Just insurance and lawsuits and stuff. Trust your instincts, Hollander. Hotel is not on fire, we know this." 

"That doesn't make sense," Shane said, but Ilya was guiding him down, and Shane followed. 

At the start of the season following Shane’s second Cup win, Lee moved back to Montreal to start a PhD on some middle English epic, and they resumed their morning runs. A week went by without Shane inviting him up, which wasn’t unusual, especially when they had so much to catch up on, but he began to feel antsy about it.

He’d considered ending the sexual element of their relationship once before, just over a year ago after he and Ilya had fucked in Vegas. He had decided against it because he didn’t like how much power it ceded to Ilya, and he made the same decision again. It would be too weighty, too significant, to stop having good, convenient sex with someone he liked. He was already a little worried that his thing with Ilya was seeping out of the box he’d put it in.

A week after Lee’s return to Montreal, Shane invited him up to his place. The first time he’d had sex with Lee he’d only had sex with Ilya once. Now he was fucking Lee after a year of only fucking Ilya, and it felt stranger, harder to make the switch. He’d always had Ilya in his head, but this time it felt like the sex was more about Ilya than about Lee, like this was if anything an extension of some game he was playing with Ilya. Sex and Ilya had become inextricable, indistinguishable, like two necklaces left in a pocket.

Shane was just being dramatic, surely. He needed time to get used to it, to fall back into their rhythm. And Lee certainly seemed to enjoy it, anyway. That had to be the next best thing to great sex; sex his partner thought was great.

Shane’s next time in Boston Ilya dropped a pin like he always did, and Shane only realized on his way over that it wasn’t a hotel. He was on his way to Ilya’s house, and Ilya had basically tricked him into it, had given him no time to prepare. God, he was impossible. Shane didn’t know why he was smiling.

After fucking face to face and largely without words, and after napping, and after Ilya preparing them food, Ilya said, “I have friend like yours.”

They were sitting on his couch, last night’s games on with the volume low. Shane was focused on shutting off his property brain, because it kept telling him how perfect everything about Ilya’s home was. Shane furrowed his eyebrows, and Ilya elaborated: “Who I fuck.”

“I think you have a lot of friends like that,” Shane said, blandly.

“No, but, good friend, real friend,” Ilya said. “Her name is Svetlana. She is very good to me. We grew up together, in Russia, and now she is in Boston too. We have lots in common. Hockey, cars, parties. It is very nice. Makes sex different.”

It was such a worst case scenario it didn’t even feel real. The words weren’t fully landing. Shane rewound the conversation, trying to figure out what would have prompted this. He was pretty sure the last thing they’d talked about was how annoying they both found a detergent commercial. “Awesome,” he said.

“You have lots in common, with your friend?”

Your friend, Shane supposed, was better than your boy. Ilya’s tone was different to any other time he’d brought up Lee, less antagonistic. Shane decided to take it in good faith. Anyway, talking about Lee was infinitely preferable to talking about Ilya’s lifelong friend who took care of him and liked hockey and cars and could apparently just follow him wherever the fuck he went. And had probably been fucking him longer than Shane had, a record Shane had kind of assumed he held.

“No, actually,” he said. Ilya raised his eyebrows at him like he expected more, and Shane tried to oblige. He’d never talked about Lee to anyone before, didn’t know what to say. He knew what he’d say in the hypothetical world where someone asked him about Ilya and he could answer honestly. He’d already chosen all his favorite anecdotes.

“It’s weird how little we have in common. But he’s able to make friends like that, he has this really random mix of friends, because he’ll just talk to anyone. I met him when he was a college student, he’s doing his PhD now, on English literature. He recommends me books even though I never read them. I mean, I read books, just not the books he recommends. But he says he wants to broaden my horizons and that he’s going to keep recommending them until I read one. I sort of like that our tastes are so different. We only met because we’ve been going on runs in the same park since I was a rookie. Otherwise it’s like, completely different worlds. That’s still when we see each other, on our morning runs.” He stopped then, unsure if it was too much, surprised by how pleasant it was to talk about Lee, even to Ilya.

“Hollander,” Ilya said, eyebrows up, lip slightly curled. “Your boy is in love with you.”

“Shut up,” Shane said.

“Serious,” Ilya said. “What time do you run?”

“6am.”

Ilya nodded, like this was proof. “Nerdy college boys do not go for 6am runs.”

“Obviously he does, that’s how we met,” Shane said.

“Maybe once, for new year’s resolution, or something,” Ilya said, shrugging. “But not every day for years. He is obsessed with you.”

“He’s not,” Shane said, and it came out a little forceful, almost angry.

“It is hard to believe?” Ilya asked, and he sounded sort of annoyed too.

“You don’t even know him,” Shane said.

“Okay,” Ilya said, holding his hands up. “He is using you for easy sex, then, sorry. You like it, fucking a friend?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Shane said, and then Ilya’s phone rang.

Shane didn’t really remember the trip from Ilya’s back to his hotel, a fight-or-flight fueled escape. He was pretty sure he knew what Ilya had been angling at – though he wasn’t certain because he was never certain about anything with Ilya – which was that he and Ilya could have an arrangement like Ilya and Svetlana or Shane and Lee, that they could be friends alongside the sex. And friends would mean Ilya making Shane food and holding him while he slept and talking about hockey and calling him Shane and ignoring questions about his family, sure, but seeming more amused by them than annoyed, like maybe eventually he would answer. Shane panicked just thinking about it. His hands shook, and apparently now when his hands shook the only thing he could think to want was for Ilya to squeeze them still. Which was extra embarrassing because it wasn’t something Ilya had ever done before. How much of what he wanted from Ilya was something that didn’t even exist? He’d made the right choice, leaving. The only choice.

Getting back to Montreal, out of Ilya’s city, was a relief, and then it wasn’t. Lee was acting weird on their next morning run, and Shane couldn’t stomach another upset to the arrangements of his life.

“Do you want to go up to mine?” he asked, at the end. He hadn’t been planning on it, but Lee was all quiet and it was freaking him out, and Shane wanted reassurance that they were okay.

“Actually,” Lee said. “Would you mind if we talked out here, first?”

Shane stared, wanting desperately to say no but unable to come up with a way out of it. “Okay,” he said, and sat down on their bench.

“I hate that I’m doing this,” Lee said, sitting down too. “I’d really rather not, but it’s kind of reached a breaking point. The way we’re going, this thing between us, I can’t keep doing it.”

“Oh,” Shane said, after a pause, looking straight ahead. “Why not?”

“Well, I like you too much, Shane,” Lee said. “I thought time apart would help but it hasn’t. I don’t want to issue ultimatums, but I can’t really stand it much longer, you know. Being your bro except when you want me to fuck you. I need something more, or else… I don’t know. I guess I’ll find another park to run in. Or just start running at a godly hour.”

“Lee,” Shane said, his words slow even as his mind raced. “You have to know I can’t come out. I can’t have a real relationship right now.”

“I know,” Lee said hurriedly. “I get that, and that’s not what I’m asking for.”

“So what are you asking for?”

“Just something more than this,” Lee said. “Spending more time with you, being able to text you when I think of you, eating meals together, whatever. Whatever you can give. I just want more.”

None of the specific requests were in themselves all that intimate, but even Shane couldn’t play that oblivious. He knew that Lee was asking for them with a certain tenor, distinctly different to how Shane spent time with any of his teammates. And Shane couldn’t think straight enough to figure out how he felt about that, if he was able for that. Can’t know until you try, he heard all playful in his head, because he might have fled Boston but he was still in Ilya’s shadow. Amid the panic, there were two reliable facts: Shane was good at follow through, and Shane wanted Lee in his life.

“Okay,” Shane said, his voice shallow, breathy.

Lee turned to him, looking astonished. “Okay?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” Shane said, lip crooking up. “I’ve got time. Let’s spend more time together. Okay.”

Lee came back to his apartment, and they didn’t fuck, which Shane could frame as commitment to this new version of their relationship, rather than the fact that he could still feel Ilya’s hands all over him, could still see what Ilya’s face looked like when Shane hurt him. They ate together, side by side on the couch, and it was nice. Lee put his arm around Shane’s shoulders and that was actually really nice, something warm to sink into after holding himself rigid for days.

Three mornings later they fucked, and afterwards Lee said, “So, this is real, right?”

“Yeah,” Shane said.

“It feels like one of the realest relationships I’ve ever had,” Lee said, and Shane said nothing.

That evening Shane got a call from JJ, inviting him out, and Shane gave in easily. Shane had a theory that JJ was actually a good guy, like good to the bone, unflinchingly, automatically good. And maybe it wasn’t really part of his reputation because he felt no need to draw attention to it, so natural a lot of people didn’t even notice. Shane suspected this phone call would not have been made if Shane had not seemed entirely out of it for the last week. Shane’s conscientiousness was rarely subtle, if only because he was clumsy about it. Even if it wasn’t his intention, it meant people always noticed. He was growing uncomfortable with all the credit he got. He wasn’t sure he was a good person.

Shane hadn’t had to think about women in a romantic light in a long time, but Rose Landry was beautiful and easy to talk to and knew hockey. Still it remained mostly a thought experiment, him and Rose swapping numbers with a friendly hug at the end of the night. He could remember it, though, now, the panic he used to feel. He’d always been more or less resigned to his attraction to men, and even with the environment he’d come up in it was hard for him to see much wrong with it. The absence of attraction to women was far more damning. If he wanted to fuck men it could be an indulgence, the way people indulged in alcohol or gambling. It couldn’t be his whole romantic life. He thought about how much simpler things would be if it wasn’t his whole romantic life.

He stayed up late that night, intending to settle the matter once and for all. All the definitions of heterosexuality he read online were to do with feelings, with sexual and romantic attraction, like if a man married a woman and had children with her and stayed faithful to her he still wasn’t straight if he didn’t feel the right way about it. That flew in the face of everything Shane had learned in sports, which was that results mattered more than anything, that follow through was the measure of the man.

He found blog posts and forum discussions by women who had been in relationships with closeted gay men without their knowledge, some of whom had even gotten married, had children. One woman had learned her late husband of forty years was gay when his lover showed up to the funeral. Shane imagined being one of the men under discussion and it made him a little sick. There was resentment, and feelings of betrayal, but worst of all pity, like the men were tragic figures, maybe even pathetic.

There were pictures of him with Rose online the next morning, and about a dozen texts about it, mostly from teammates, a couple from his publicist. Texts from his mom were glaringly absent, considering he knew she had google alerts set up for him and had been awake for five hours already.

And then a text from Lily. Shane’s heart spiked, his hand trembled, and he didn’t care what it was about. All that mattered was that Ilya was somewhere thinking of him, spending time on him. Ilya hadn’t bothered to send the photos or a link or specify in any other way what he was talking about. He had just said, Does your boy know about this?

Shane opened it, stared at it. Wanted to respond more for the brief thrill of interacting with Ilya again than out of any desire to clarify the situation. Eventually he sent, Rose and I are just friends.

And suddenly the decision was made. He followed up: And I’m seeing ‘my boy’ now. Like seriously.

Ilya responded, Poor Rose Landry, and then, a moment later, Told you. Shane stared at it for too long before realizing what Ilya was referencing; his claim that Lee was in love with Shane. It would be weird to get defensive about it again, so Shane just deleted the texts.

Shane was, if nothing else, grateful for the opportunity to tell Ilya how things had changed with Lee. He’d wanted to since it happened, the only way he could think of to communicate to Ilya that they weren’t going to see each other again. He was terrified that, despite how Shane had left in Boston, the next time they were in the same city Ilya would still send the customary text. And he was terrified he wouldn’t be able to say no. Now, maybe, Ilya would leave him alone. Which was what he wanted. His hands were still trembling, and he slipped them under his thighs.

An hour later a call from Rose Landry came through, the contact name looking bizarre on his phone. “I assume you saw,” she said, by way of greeting.

“Yeah,” he said. “There are about fifty different people making sure of it.”

She groan-laughed. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This is a nightmare, I’m, like, a curse upon people.”

“It’s totally fine, I’m used to attention and speculation. Not on your level, but still.” Then he frowned. “I’m sorry if this is annoying for you.”

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “You’re the first guy in years who I’ve been rumored to be dating that I can actually stand being in the same room with.”

Shane smiled. “So, uh,” he said. “Should we wear disguises next time we meet up?”

Rose laughed. This part of his life, he thought, he would fight to keep simple.

The next few weeks passed smoothly. Shane went out with Rose and her friends, marveling at the different dynamics – different rules – at play, all the things they could say that Shane’s teammates wouldn’t dare, and vice versa. Rose worked as a go between, providing many asides to Shane about who was mad at who and what the subtext was of seemingly innocent comments; the romcom best friend interpreter of his dreams. Lee loved hearing the secondhand gossip from Rose’s group, and Shane realized with some regret he basically never told Lee about his teammates. This was the first time he’d been able to reciprocate when Lee talked about friends. But, as with almost everything, Lee didn’t seem to mind.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise how easy it was for Shane to accommodate this new version of their relationship. Lee really wasn’t asking for much; Shane just had to watch movies with him sometimes, and text when he was on road trips, and eat meals with him, Lee following along with Shane’s dietary requirements. Shane already knew he was good at that stuff from the couple of girlfriends he'd had, where the difficulties had only been with sex, which he and Lee already had figured out. It was like halfway having a boyfriend, and Shane was secretly grateful there was such an unassailable reason they couldn’t fully commit. He wouldn’t want to have to sleep in the same bed with someone else, or have somebody already there when he came home, or have to worry about his parents’ approval. What he had with Lee was basically ideal, although he was smart enough not to say that.

And he didn’t think about Ilya. He stopped watching Boston games, he stopped checking up on Ilya’s social media, stopped checking up on Ilya’s friends’ social media, stopped re-reading their texts. He was honestly pretty proud of himself all around.

Shane woke up on a random Tuesday with a missed call from Ilya that had come through at 5am, only a half hour earlier, although Shane imagined for Ilya it was the other end of the day. It felt like it had to mean something, like it should change something, but it didn’t. Shane drafted texts in the notes app that never amounted to more than, hi, did you want to talk, and still didn’t send them.

Boston were coming to Montreal on a Friday, two days after Lee’s birthday and the night he was having his party. Shane had accepted the invitation before he’d made the connection. It was fine; it was good to have solid plans for the hours after the game, so Ilya’s absence wouldn’t feel so conspicuous. He just had to hope he wouldn’t be noticeably out of sorts to Lee. There would be three days off until the next game, so he’d already given himself permission to drink a little, a couple beers to take the edge off.

The edge had been sharpening all week, everything seeming a potential breaking point – the jokes about Rose, Hayden exalting the virtues of fatherhood, his mom trying to pin down the off-season even though it wasn’t even spring. But of course why would he waste breaking over any of that, when Ilya Rozanov was an option?

Shane’s plan for the game – for the game within the game – was to ignore Ilya and just focus on hockey. That was torn apart immediately, Ilya leaning toward him at center ice and saying, low, “Is your boy watching us tonight?”

It made Shane furious, the tetchy gripes of the past week nothing, flies he could bat away, in the face of the brilliant, incisive cruelty of Ilya. What if someone had heard, what if someone wondered? It wasn’t even crude, wasn’t disrespectful, that plausible deniability that Ilya thrived on. And the arrogance in his knowing how little it took to push Shane’s buttons, to throw him off, that he never had to do more than hint. Never expending more energy on Shane than what was absolutely necessary, which wasn't much. Shane was easy - easy to fuck and easy to bait. Shane had forgotten Ilya could do this to him, and Ilya’s skill hadn’t dulled with disuse.

Montreal’s win had nothing to do with Shane. None of what happened that game had anything to do with him; he felt out of his head. He was relying entirely on instinct, the movements of hockey more familiar to him than anything. He was effectively doing it in his sleep.

The only other moment he experienced with any clarity was Hayden saying, idly, “I wonder if Rozanov is sick or something.”

There was no call to celebrate a win that underwhelming, not when winning had become their norm, anyway. Shane slipped out early to get to Lee’s without even having to make an excuse. In his car he had a bottle of wine – the kind his mom liked – and a gift wrapped book, a pretty obvious choice of present for someone whose whole thing was reading, but Shane figured it had enough of a personal touch because of all of Lee’s recommendations; Shane was finally returning the favor. He hadn't read it himself, but it had won a bunch of prizes that year, so his only concern was that Lee might have already read it.

Lee was delighted with it without even unwrapping it, just based on it obviously being a book. He left it in the room with all the coats on the bed, a pile beside of it presents. There was more than twenty, though most of them were quite small looking; Shane couldn’t understand having that many good friends, even logistically. Lee’s life was so full. His early morning runs with a hockey star had been described to Shane as unbelievable for anyone other than Lee. It had always been endearing, and that night Shane realized it was also a relief. He could slip out and Lee wouldn’t really notice. He could fuck up and Lee wouldn’t be badly hurt. It was the opposite of how it felt with Ilya, like there was nobody else but them, like nobody loomed larger in either of their lives. Shane was such a small part of Lee’s life, really.

The party was in full swing by the time he arrived, so he caught up with a couple of shots before accepting a beer. At midnight, a text from Rose: Ilya Rozanov is at the club!! Drowning his sorrows. Your dominance on the ice has driven him to a life of chemical dependency.

And five minutes later: Or fucking out his sorrows maybe lol. Your dominance on the ice has driven him to a life of whoring. I sort of think anyone who sleeps with him in this city is a traitor to Montreal and should be exiled? Thoughts?

Shane put his phone on do not disturb. He could not get mad at Rose for calling Ilya a whore.

The third beer went to his head; he felt woozy, out of himself like he’d felt on the ice but far less safe. Navigating a party was not instinctive the way navigating a game was. He retreated to the coat-and-present room, sat on the floor with his back to the bed. He didn’t even know if it was Lee’s bed or his roommate’s. He wasn’t sure how long passed before Lee showed up, bearing a glass of water. Not long enough for Shane to have pulled himself together.

“There you are,” Lee said, and sat down beside him, a little clumsy. Drunk too, but better at wearing it.

“How’d you notice I was gone?” Shane asked.

“Because I looked around and couldn’t see you,” Lee said, smiling.

“But there are so many people,” Shane said, and Lee shrugged, handing over the glass. Instead of drinking it Shane pressed it against his cheek. The room was too warm.

“You’re not doing too well, are you champ,” Lee said.

“I’m good,” Shane said. “It’s so nice. Your life is so nice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “I’m so happy for you. You’ve so many good things. All your friends, and all your books, and all your hobbies.”

“And you,” Lee said.

Shane shook his head, waved a hand. Not that, not him.

“The world’s first humble professional athlete,” Lee said, smiling. “God, I love you.”

Shane recoiled. “No you don’t,” he said, automatically.

Lee’s smile faded, but he looked more confused than anything. Confusion was the most negative emotion Shane had ever seen him wear. “What?”

Shane shifted, shook his head again. “Lee, don’t say that.”

“It’s okay,” Lee said, cautiously. “I don’t expect you to say it back right now.”

“Well – obviously,” Shane said. He could tell from Lee’s face he wasn’t saying the right things, but he was drunk and panicking.

“Obviously?” Lee repeated.

“I’m closeted,” Shane said. He still felt out of control, but the fog separating him from reality was fading. “I can’t have a real relationship, I’ve been clear about that from the start.”

“Being closeted makes it impossible for you to love someone?” Lee asked. “That’s not how it works.”

“No, but—why would you even want to love someone closeted? That’s awful, Lee.”

“That’s not how it works either,” Lee said.

Shane raised his knees, put his head between them.

“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I shouldn’t have brought this up now.”

Shane nodded.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“No,” Shane said. “This isn’t – we don’t talk about this. This isn’t anything.”

Shane couldn’t see Lee, so he initially took the silence as agreement. Then Lee said, “What isn’t?”

Shane raised his head, turned with a question. Lee looked something more negative than confused, though Shane couldn’t entirely place it. “What isn’t what?”

“What isn’t anything?” Lee asked. “Are we not anything?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Shane said.

“Okay,” Lee said. “Maybe it’s fucked up to have this conversation drunk, but suddenly I’m feeling like this is the first time you’ve been honest with me, so.”

“I’m honest,” Shane said, which was such a lie he had to look away.

“I guess I thought if you were doing this, it must mean you want it,” Lee said. “Because why would you do something you didn’t want, right.”

Shane couldn’t follow exactly what was happening in Lee’s head.

“Shane,” Lee said. “When I asked for more than just occasional, casual sex, why did you say yes?”

Shane didn’t want to answer. He couldn’t think of anything that would be acceptable. If you don’t have anything nice to say...

“Oh, fuck,” Lee said, and stood up. “Fuck you.”

Shane scrambled up too, but couldn’t stand, sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know what’s happening,” Shane said. “I thought things were okay.”

“So did I,” Lee said. “Why did you say yes?”

“Because you were going to end things,” Shane said. “You were going to stop seeing me. You said you didn’t want to issue an ultimatum but you kind of did.”

“Fuck me,” Lee said. “Sorry for saying I liked you too much to keep having meaningless sex with you. What a horrible situation to put you in, how cruel and unfair.”

Shane closed his eyes, tried to navigate this. Lee had never been complicated before.

“How long were you going to go on like this, with me?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know,” Shane said. “I never really plan beyond the season.”

“Fuck,” Lee said. He sounded panicked.

“I’m sorry,” Shane said, trying to choose his words carefully, the alcohol and panic continuing to get in the way. “I was selfish, I was going through something, and the idea of not seeing you anymore scared me.”

“What were you going through?” Lee asked.

Shane shut up.

“Jesus Christ,” Lee said. “You can’t even tell me that? Do you trust me at all? Do I know you at all, or have I been fucking a stranger this whole time?”

“There’s someone else,” Shane’s mouth said, honest entirely without his permission.

In what was probably the worst reaction possible, Lee didn’t seem all that shocked. “How long?” he asked, after a pause.

“Always. The whole time.” Shane swallowed. “Since before I met you.”

Lee nodded, looked away.

“Not – it was just sex with them, too, and I haven’t been with them in months, but.”

“But you can’t move on,” Lee said.

“I’m trying,” Shane said, quietly.

“Yeah, okay,” Lee said, and turned and left.

Shane fell back on the coats, stared at the ceiling. He shouldn’t have come, not after playing Boston. Somehow this was Ilya’s fault. He felt sick, ashamed, evil. He wished they’d had this argument somewhere else. To leave he’d have to walk through all of Lee’s friends. Fucking Addie. He didn’t have the strength.

He sat upright and pulled out his phone. He didn’t know why, didn’t know what part of him was making the decisions, but he pulled up Ilya’s contact and pressed call. As soon as it started ringing he saw the wisdom in it; he would spill the mess inside him and Ilya would tell him what it meant.

Except it went to voicemail. Ilya had left a voicemail, when he’d called at 5am: two seconds of silence that Shane had nevertheless saved.

Shane didn’t leave a voicemail, hanging up immediately, humiliated and remembering Rose’s texts. And then, not a minute later, Ilya called him back. It took Shane a few rings to give in, to pick up. “Hi,” he said.

Ilya was quiet.

“Are you – where are you?” Shane asked.

“Something is wrong?” Ilya asked.

“Yeah,” Shane said. He wasn’t sure if it was based on his calling in the middle of the night or if there was something in his voice that gave it away. “Where are you?”

“Hotel hallway,” Ilya said. “There is nobody here. Had to leave my roommate to talk.”

His roommate. Shane wondered who Ilya shared a room with. If they were nice to him. “Good,” Shane said.

“What is wrong?” Ilya asked, tone gentle and low but also matter of fact, like whatever it was was something he could do something about. Shane started crying.

It had to be the alcohol more than anything; Shane didn’t cry, not like this, not fully. He hadn’t since he was a teenager at his maternal aunt's funeral, mostly from seeing his mom cry.

“It’s okay,” Ilya said, voice very soft and vaguely panicked. “Shane, it’s okay.”

Hearing his name again made Shane cry harder. “It’s so fucking not,” he said.

“You are hurt?” Ilya asked. “The hit in Detroit looked bad.”

Shane’s ribs had been bruised almost black, but he hadn’t thought about it really since it happened. It was a week old by now. “No,” he said. “It’s Lee.”

“It’s what?”

“Um, the guy I’m seeing,” Shane said. Even though it was because of his own careful efforts, in the moment it shocked him that Ilya didn’t know the name. “Was seeing.”

“Lee,” Ilya repeated.

“He told me he loved me,” Shane said. “God, I’ve fucked up really bad. Ilya—”

Ilya’s tone turned quickly bored, flat. “You will fix it. He has been following you like puppy for years, and this is first time you kicked him. Not enough for dog to run away.”

Obviously this made Shane feel worse, and Ilya played people almost as well as he played hockey, so that must have been his intention. “It’s not like that,” Shane said, lamely.

“Okay,” Ilya said. “Then you fucked up and he will never fuck you again. So sad. Goodbye.”

“What?” Shane said, but Ilya had hung up. Shane tried again, desperate and unthinking, but the call didn’t connect. He stared at his phone for he didn’t know how long. Possibly the two greatest interpersonal fuck ups of his life, back to back.

Shane would have to leave. Lee wouldn’t let him hide in this room all night, with his birthday presents from all his friends. The plan had been drink a little, sober up, drive home. He’d drank too much and didn’t have time to sober up. Again a decision he wasn’t that conscious of making, he called Rose. Going for the hat trick, maybe.

It wasn’t like they’d known each other long, but Rose was so careful, and so kind. They’d spent a lot of time together over the past few weeks, and she wouldn’t ask the questions that Hayden would, that any of his teammates would.

Or maybe it was that she would be easier to lie to.

“Shane!” she said, sounding delighted as she picked up. “We’re still out, do you want to join?”

“No,” Shane said, and cringed. He should have just called a fucking cab, which for some reason only occurred to him now; this was insane, and selfish. He could handle being alone. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have – I’m drunk, sorry.”

“Are you alright?” Rose asked.

“Yeah,” Shane said, and the other line got quieter, like Rose had stepped away from her night. “Just, you know. Can’t handle alcohol.”

“Is your friend looking after you?”

Shane put a hand over his mouth in case his breathing betrayed him. But Rose was very observant, and that was good enough for her. “Shane, where are you?” she asked. “Send me the address, I’ll come get you.”

“It’s fine,” Shane said. “I can get home.”

“But you called me,” Rose said. “You don’t want to be alone. I don’t want you to be alone either, send me the address.”

“Okay,” Shane said, giving in probably too easily, and then with dread: “My car’s here, oh God.”

“You don’t want to go back for it?” Rose guessed, and Shane’s silence was once again an answer. “I’ll get it for you tomorrow. You can crash at mine tonight, and in the morning you can give me your keys and I’ll go get your car. Just tell me where it is, where you are. Okay?”

Shane sent Rose the address, and waited for her to text back that she’d arrived, and then escaped Lee’s apartment without looking at anyone. He wasn’t sure how conspicuous it was, could only hope people would be too drunk to notice. He didn’t have the strength to give polite goodbyes, and for all he knew Lee had already told everyone he’d fucked up and they’d see through the charade anyway.

He slipped into the back of the black car that stood out in the neighborhood so bad he could see people staring from their windows. Rose was in the back, too, and none of her movie star friends, who Shane liked but was relieved to not see then. “Hi,” she said, smiling, and grabbed his hand as he climbed in, squeezing. He wasn’t sure how much of it was comfort and how much of it was steadying him. He was a little less coordinated than usual.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

Rose shushed him. “We’re friends, this is what that means. How are you feeling, do you need to throw up?”

Shane shook his head. The thing was he wasn’t even that drunk; just a lot more drunk than he’d like to be when he was also fucking up his personal life.

“Okay,” Rose said, and held out a bottle of water to him, so like Lee Shane had to look away. He wondered how drunk Rose was, how much fun she’d been having when he called.

“Babe,” she said. “What’s wrong? Did you fight with your friend?”

Shane leaned back against the seat, close to her, their heads only inches apart. Very quietly he said, “It wasn’t a friend. Or it was, but not just. We were sleeping together.”
“Okay,” Rose said.

“It was a guy,” Shane said.

Rose didn’t seem surprised. In the morning Shane would find that distressing.

“You don’t have to whisper,” she said. “The driver can’t hear us.”

Shane nodded. “I fucked up really bad,” he said, at normal volume.

Rose hummed sympathetically. “We don’t have to talk about this now,” she said. “We can wait until the morning.”

Shane shook his head. Why wait? “His name is Lee and he’s so lovely,” he said. “And I don’t want him enough. And he’s mad at me, now. Which sucks because before anything we were friends and I’d like to still be friends.”

“That could happen,” Rose said. “If you just give him time.”

“Actually I’m not sure we were ever friends, really,” Shane said, immediately correcting himself. “I never told my parents about him, or Hayden, or anyone. Even though we didn’t sleep together for years, when we first met. Why wouldn’t I have told anyone? I must have known. I must have, like – been keeping him there, like a back up plan, the whole fucking time. Waiting for him to step in when—” Even then, with the alcohol in his system and the overwhelming urge to confide in Rose, he bit back Ilya’s name. “When it suited me.”

“I think you’re being real hard on yourself,” Rose said. “Shane, you’re a problem solver. You’re not gonna solve this tonight. Don’t try to, okay? We can talk tomorrow.”

Rose shepherded him to her hotel suite – Shane would have to check for pap shots in the morning – forced him to drink water, called up for a toothbrush and let him use her fancy face wash, then got him settled on the couch.

He woke up when room service arrived, wheeling in two breakfasts. He listened to Rose’s charming, friendly chatter as she paid, and sat up once the door had closed again. He didn’t think he would have been visible to the hotel employee.

“I know you’re a health freak,” Rose said. “I did the best I could within this menu.”

She didn’t make him leave the couch, setting the food on the low table in front of him. She sat across from him on the floor, her legs crossed beneath her. She was in such good form it was a little obnoxious; Shane wondered if that was how he seemed to his teammates. She’d eaten nearly half her breakfast before Shane found the energy to lift his fork.

“I think maybe,” he said, staring at the eggs. “I think maybe I’m a bad person.”

Rose made a considering noise, like she was taking it under advisement. Then she said, “It sounds like you’re in your twenties and you made sort of selfish and short-sighted decisions about sex and romance.”

Shane nodded morosely, eyes still on the eggs.

“Which is to say,” Rose said, slower as though addressing a child. “You behaved pretty predictably.”

“What?” Shane finally broke eye contact with the yolks.

“If this is the worst thing you’ve done,” she said, “You’d basically be on the path to sainthood in my circle of friends. Which you shouldn’t take too much comfort from, my friends are terrible. But you’re not terrible, Shane, even if you’re not a saint either.”

“What do I do?” he asked, because suddenly it seemed like he could trust Rose with his life.

“Shower,” she said. “Then we can game plan.”

So Shane abandoned the breakfast he wouldn’t have eaten on a good day and showered. He wasn’t sure he could return to the couch of despair, not if they were moving from wallowing to game planning, so he settled in the high-backed armchair by the window. Rose sat in the other, a card table between them.

“What do I do?” Shane asked again, aware of how pathetic it was. He really had no experience with this. Even with his high school girlfriend he’d escaped anything that could have been described as relationship drama. He felt helpless.

Rose shrugged. “This is messy stuff, there aren’t rules. I guess the question is do you want to make up with Lee or do you think it’s better to let it come to an end?”

“I don’t think I could make up with him if I wanted to,” Shane said. “Not without lying.”

“That probably means it’s not a good idea, anyway,” Rose said. “It’s not your fault, Shane. You just didn’t feel the way about him that he felt about you. That happens.”

Shane nodded. “It’s not just that,” he said, slowly. He couldn’t believe himself, believe what he was about to do. “There’s someone else. Part of why everything went wrong is because there’s someone else.”

“Oh,” Rose said. “A guy?”

Shane nodded.

“And you have feelings for him?”

Shane nodded.

“Why aren’t you together?”

“It’s complicated,” Shane said. He sounded like he was being forced to talk about it, words flat and guarded. “We used to be, or we used to sleep together at least. He wanted more, I think, and I freaked out.”

“Do you think he still wants more?” Rose asked.

“I don’t know,” Shane said, his voice small, like he could hide that the possibility that Ilya had moved on from him was a nightmare. She’d been at the same club as Ilya last night, Shane remembered. Maybe she knew if he had ended up going home with someone. Fucking someone and then listening to Shane cry on the phone, Jesus. “I fucked up with him too.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

Shane grimaced at the memory. “Last night.”

Her expression made it clear this was scandalous news, but she continued with her fact finding mission. “Was he at the party too?”

“No,” Shane said. “I called him. Before I called you.”

Finally she broke, letting out a single bark of laughter. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’m so sorry, but you’re a mess. God, you’ve got the world fooled.”

Shane groaned, sunk lower in the seat.

“Shane,” Rose said, tone admonishing as she tried to restrain her amusement. “Why the fuck did you call your ex at your boyfriend’s birthday party?”

“He’s not really my ex,” Shane said. “And Lee wasn’t really my boyfriend. And I just wanted someone to talk to.”

“Don’t try to make this sweet,” she said. “You wanted your ex to comfort you about your current relationship woes? At your boyfriend’s birthday party?”

She was enjoying the alliteration. Considering all she’d done for him over the past twelve hours, he’d let her have it. “No,” Shane said. “No, honestly, that wasn’t it. Although he thinks it was too.”

“So why?”

“Because I miss him,” Shane said. “And I was drunk and upset. And I think if he hadn’t hung up I would have said something.”

Rose tilted her head. “Like that you miss him? Like that you want him back?”

Shane nodded, rubbing a hand over his face. It was a strange feeling, being this open with someone. He could see why people liked it, the lightness and freedom that came with it, but it was terrifying too.

“Then it’s a good thing he hung up,” Rose said. “You can’t tell him that on a drunken phone call from your boyfriend’s birthday party. Is he in Montreal, could you go see him?”

“Not for a while,” Shane said. He knew Rose was perceptive, and his omitting Ilya’s name while he’d told her Lee’s was pretty telling. But there were a lot of hockey players.

“Well next time you see him, then,” she said, like it was that easy. He looked at her and she smiled.

“Can you tell me about him?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, and he did. He continued to bite back the name and danced around the hockey, but he told her everything he’d daydreamed about being able to share with somebody some day, starting with the time boiling water had spilled on his hand from a broken hotel room kettle and Ilya had run out for burn cream and came back with, for some reason, fridge magnets too, and ending with the way Ilya still looked at him, all these years on, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

When Shane got home he lifted his Ilya Rozanov ban. He gorged on highlights and strained his thumb tapping through the stories of every hot young Bostonian he’d placed somewhere in Ilya’s social network. The hockey was ruthless and gorgeous and the social media was unrevealing, and Shane’s need grew. He opened the texts, scrolled back months, filled in the jagged blanks left by the too revealing messages he’d had to delete. He kept scrolling, kept scrolling, kept scrolling. Got to, I fucked someone else today.

Had he been doomed even then, was it always going to end up here? What was he supposed to regret? What was he supposed to have learned? Maybe he’d get clarity later. For now there was just Ilya.

Shane was adding hubris to his list of sins; he was inexplicably confident that he’d be able to get Ilya back in some form or other. The hardest part was the waiting. They had no games scheduled until after the all-star break, and Ilya was not a guarantee to show up to all star weekend. Thank God this year was in Tampa. The sunshine and nightlife might capture Ilya’s interest.

And maybe, Shane let himself think, maybe Ilya would want to see him too.

So he planned for Tampa. Getting time together at all-stars was harder than when one of them was in the other’s city, too many commitments and too many other players around. But they’d find the time somehow. Shane would book a room in another hotel across the city, or he’d press the emergency stop button on the elevator. Whatever it took. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted but that didn’t scare him; he’d take whatever Ilya would give, and Ilya would surely give something. He always did.

Ilya gave him this: he called him pretty, and he held his gaze, and he responded to his questions. He made fun of him to kids and asked for money. They couldn’t talk about anything, not with everyone around, but it felt like there was some understanding between them anyway. Shane was high on it already. If that was all there was he couldn’t imagine it not being enough. And then there was more – Ilya on the sand beside him, the two of them alone for the first time since Boston, the sunset just for them, the sea just for them. Ilya giving him his hotel room number, a dirty habit turned sacred.

Shane wanted to drop to his knees as soon as he was in the room, but he didn’t trust either of them to safely go any further without words. They needed to talk.

Ilya started, without looking at him. “Did your boy take you back?”

“No,” Shane said. He hated that Ilya thought he might still be with someone else, even showing up to his room. Hated that Ilya would accept that, would let Shane do that to him. “I didn’t ask him to. It was unfair, the whole time. I didn’t really have feelings for him. Not romantic feelings. So.”

Saying the phrase romantic feelings to Ilya felt dangerous, so the rest of this conversation would probably feel like running into a burning building. Ilya nodded, his hands clenched on the cabinet he was leaning against. Shane was sitting on the edge of his bed. The distance between them was awkward.

“I told him about you,” Shane said.

“Ah,” Ilya said, and glanced up for a moment. “Threesome is back on.”

“Shut up,” Shane said. “I didn’t tell him your name, or anything. But I told him there was someone else.”

Ilya frowned, the picture of cluelessness. “He already knew you were not virgin,” he said.

“That’s not what I mean,” Shane said. “Not someone else I used to fuck.”

“Oh?” Ilya said, like he had no idea what Shane was getting at. But he always knew, he always fucking knew.

“Ilya,” Shane said, and saw how Ilya flinched. “I couldn’t be with him when I could only ever think of you. It wasn’t fair to anyone.”

Ilya looked at him, alarmed, and then away. “I have this effect on people,” he said. “Hard to get over. Just give it time, Hollander.”

“Fucking stop, Ilya,” Shane said. “I know this is – mostly my fault, and I’m sorry, but please. Please listen to me.”

Ilya’s jaw twitched.

“Come here,” Shane said, softer. He didn’t like talking to him and not touching him. Ilya looked at him, looked scared, and Shane held out a hand. Ilya took it, let Shane pull him gently to sit beside him. Their hands rested between them, still clasped. Ilya was staring down at them, and Shane was staring at Ilya.

“What changed?” Ilya asked.

“Nothing,” Shane said. “I guess that’s the problem. All these years and I still have no defenses against you. I still think about you all the fucking time. It doesn’t get easier, and I don’t get better at it. It’s one of the only things I’ve never been able to manage.”

“I don’t want you to,” Ilya said, barely more than a whisper, and Shane kissed him.

Ilya kissed back, immediately demanding, his tongue prying Shane open, his hands holding Shane in place. Shane felt settled in his own skin in a way he hadn’t since the last time Ilya had touched him. He wanted to give in entirely, to let Ilya do whatever he wanted, but he couldn’t. He broke the kiss, climbed onto Ilya’s lap as penance. Ilya’s hands smoothed up beneath his shirt, and Shane shivered.

“I’m so sorry,” Shane said. “For leaving, in Boston, and for – after. I’m so sorry if I hurt you.”

“If,” Ilya repeated, like it was a funny word he'd never heard before.

Shane allowed an inch of space between them so he could catch Ilya’s eye. “You’re kind of hard for me to read sometimes,” he said. “You didn’t like me with someone else?”

Ilya huffed out a disbelieving laugh, like it didn’t even warrant confirmation.

“I think most people probably don’t process jealousy by suggesting a threesome,” Shane said. “In my defense.”

Ilya smiled and put his forehead in the curve of Shane’s neck. Shane ran his hand down Ilya’s back.

“I was jealous of everything,” Ilya said. “I was jealous he got to fuck you when the sun was up. It ruined mornings. Fucking 6am runs.”

“I’m so sorry,” Shane said again.

“I'm sorry too,” Ilya said, straightening up. “For hanging up when you called.”

Shane cringed at the reminder. “I was drunk, and calling you was stupid and unfair.” Rose’s words a little more than his own, but still.

Ilya shook his head. “You were upset. I like being who you call when you are upset.”

And Shane thought, God, he might be in love with me, but he tried to put it aside before it got too deep. “I like it too,” Shane said, and kissed him, soft. Against Ilya’s lips he said, “You’re my boy.”

“Fuck,” Ilya said, jagged, almost laughing, and kissed him hard. Shane wanted to give him everything.

They got naked, and then Ilya gathered Shane back in his lap, fucked him holding him, Shane holding him back, his arms around Ilya’s shoulders and his legs around his hips. Slow, impossibly close, clinging desperately like nothing would be enough, but in the aftermath Shane’s feeling of satisfaction was reflected on Ilya’s face.

They’d only talked about the last few months, they’d said nothing of the future. Whatever they were was nameless, unmapped. But Ilya didn’t want Shane to build defenses against him, and Ilya wanted to be the person Shane called when he was upset, and that was enough, at least for now. They’d make up the rules as they went along.

(When Shane arrived back in Montreal, he had a text from Lee waiting for him. It came as a surprise. A few weeks back Shane had sent a long apology, co-written by Rose and including the offer of custody over the 6am park runs, but it had understandably gone unanswered.

Lee had sent him a link. I still can’t look at you but I do really think you would like this book.

Shane took time drafting his response, and it ended up just being: Thank you, I’ll check it out. He wasn’t sure if that was awkward or cold or otherwise inadequate, but he figured Lee had a good enough grasp on how Shane worked to not take offense. They’d been friends for a long time, and friendships were something other than the sites of operation of pre-established networks of rules. He pulled up his conversation with Ilya, newly repopulated with Ilya’s outrageous sexts, and sent, Shut up. What books do you like?)