Chapter Text
Shane arrives in Europe first, on a Sunday, when it’s cold and raining and the sky is overcast, which Shane thinks matches the way he feels pretty nicely. He thinks he might have felt more nervous, even slightly panicked, if the weather had actually been nice when they’d touched down.
It’s not because of why they are there, exactly, but it is. The hockey part of it is fine, fun even. A bright idea MLH leadership cooked up as a way to drum up international interest in parts of the world that don’t buy enough hockey merch, maybe. Send two teams, during the late January bye week, to Europe, to play a couple of exhibition games against some city teams there, then play a couple of friendly games against each other. Call it the Global Series, even though it’s just Europe, Canada, and the United States, and that it isn’t for anything other than publicity. And it makes sense, perfect sense actually, to send two teams with a famous and historic rivalry. Like, if you didn’t know much about hockey, or anything about hockey, you could hear rivalry and think it might be fun to check out. Maybe the players will fight. Maybe you’ll feel the bite of the animosity down on the ice from up in the risers. Sounds like fun. Buy a ticket.
That’s not the part that has Shane buzzing in his seat, too keyed up to sleep on the flight, and tapping his fingers on the handle of his luggage at baggage claim, and turning his music up loud on his headphones on the bus ride to the hotel on their first stop– Zurich, to play the city’s Lions– so that he won’t have to talk to anyone. That part is because of course the other team the MLH has chosen to send to the Global Series is Boston, and Ilya Rozanov is in Boston, and the thought of seeing Ilya Rozanov again, for the first time since November– and Shane has learned so much about himself since, it’s almost like he’s a different person on the other side– the thought of that, is what is making him feel this way.
Shane isn’t going to see Rozanov until Tuesday, a different city and two exhibition matches from now. They aren’t even in the same country yet. But it’s the knowing that it’s coming, that they will be in a hotel together and staring at each other from across the ice and breathing the same air, that has him like this.
Shane knows he has to talk to him, has to make an opening for it, despite the schedule being so tight he isn’t sure where he’ll have time to shake off the jet lag. He knows there is so much unsaid between them, apologies and revelations and declarations and pleas. He knows he has to be the one to do it. He’s known that since he saw Rozanov at the club in Montreal, since he left his house in a panic in Boston. It’s just, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen after that. If Rozanov will even talk to him in the first place. Shane thinks he will, but maybe he’ll just tell him to fuck off, and find a club in Paris to pick up a girl and bring her back, and maybe text Shane a picture of him fucking her– no, that won’t happen. It won’t. And anyway, he has to talk to Rozanov, because. Because Shane doesn’t think he can survive in this in-between space otherwise, this place where they don’t speak and he feels the lack of it like his bones are hollowed out and his gut churns uselessly on the emptiness.
That is why he’s freaking out. And why he knows that Montreal’s flight to Zurich touched down first. He’s memorized both of their schedules for the week. It felt necessary. Boston’s flight is not set to arrive for another two hours, and they’re heading to Berlin. Shane wonders, on the bus ride, whether he’ll feel it when Ilya Rozanov has landed on the same continent as him again, whether he’ll just know. Part of him kind of hopes he does.
The hotel in Zurich is nondescript, no-nonsense. Zurich is a no-nonsense city. They don’t have much time to sightsee. Theriault has them doing press an hour after check-in, then a team dinner with the guys from the Lions, and Shane is pretty sure he’s going to be staggering back to his room and passing out after that. Unpacking, he can already feel the otherworldly exhaustion creeping in, from not sleeping on the plane and the general wrongness his body feels from moving too quickly from one part of the world to the other. He’s afraid to sit down on the bed, lest he is tempted to fall into it and miss press and get royally chewed out.
He takes questions in English and German, which is a little strange, waiting blankly for the translation in his ear, hotly aware of the intervening silence, of his face in the cameras. How does it feel to play hockey in Europe? It’s an honor. He’s excited to introduce Montreal to new fans. He’s grateful for the opportunity to play here. Is he familiar with Zurich’s team? Yes, he watched game tape to prepare. He’s looking forward to the face-off with Légère, their captain. No, he’s never been to Switzerland before.
He isn’t asked about Boston, whether he’s looking forward to that, too. Yes, of course, he would say, if he was. It’s always great to play Boston, they are always a challenge. Rozanov, of course, is going to be tough to beat, but Shane is looking forward to it.
He checks his phone after the conference and sees that the Raiders’ flight, according to their schedule, touched down an hour ago. He didn’t feel it. Ilya Rozanov is in Berlin. Shane is in Zurich. Barely an hour and a half apart. A little closer than Montreal and Boston, by air.
And they will both be in Paris in two days.
They win the first game against Zurich, 4-2. It’s fun, in the way that the All-Star Game is fun. Low stakes. Not a lot of worry about lines, though Theriault has him on the ice a lot, probably because it’s what the fans want to see. He took a small handful of melatonin the night before, which is maybe why he feels awake enough for the game, but shaky and lead-limbed after. He passes out at barely nine-thirty.
He feels slightly better for the second game, in the afternoon on Tuesday, but they lose that one, 2-4. It’s a convenient back and forth, he thinks. It’ll look good on the Wikipedia page for this event. Boston won both of their games against Berlin, 4-0, 5-3. That almost seems like bad sportsmanship.
The most of Zurich Shane gets to see is a coffee shop just outside their hotel on Tuesday morning, and the brief glimpse of it he gets from the plane to Paris. Some of his teammates complain on the flight that it would have been nice to spend a day in Switzerland, to sightsee a little bit, but Shane sort of wishes they had skipped it entirely, wishes that he could have slept for two days and fast-forwarded straight to Tuesday, to Paris, to Ilya Rozanov.
Shane wonders, on the bus to the hotel, if he’ll see Rozanov tonight, or if he’ll have to wait until tomorrow night’s game. Both options feel equally daunting, equally thrilling. It would be better to see him before the game, probably, Shane thinks. He should text him. Tell him he needs to talk– no, ask him if they can talk. If Rozanov hasn’t lost his number by now. No, he wouldn’t do that. Right?
“Rain here too, huh?” Hayden says, peering out the dark window, half of his face lit red by the tail lights of cards in the traffic around them. “Hey Shane, you ever been to Paris before?”
“Huh?” Shane forgot to put his headphones in, thought everyone was tired enough that he didn’t need to. Whoops. “No. First time.”
“Same,” Hayden says, which Shane is not surprised to hear. Hayden married his high school sweetheart and has been living and breathing hockey since he was six years old, just like Shane. No, he hasn’t been to Paris. “Hope we get to see a little more of the city, eh? Jackie wants me to get some cute clothes for the kids. I’m like, babe, we’re going to be in the hotel or at the rink the whole time. I just hope I get to see the sun sometime.”
“Yeah, totally,” Shane says, though he hasn’t put any thought into where he would go in the city if they did have time unaccounted-for in the schedule, what gifts he would get his parents. They’re not huge gift-givers to begin with. He supposes the brand meetings he agreed to are enough of a gift to his mom, at least. He’s staying an extra day to meet with Dior, because they value face time, and Mom thinks it’ll look good for him to have at least one high fashion brand in his cadre, and Shane doesn’t know or care enough to argue any of it. But there isn’t enough time around the extra day– not even a whole day, really, more just an afternoon– to sightsee, so Shane hasn’t planned anything. First time in Paris, and he’s doing exactly what he does at home, but with a bonus helping of jet lag.
The hotel is on the same bank as the arena where they will be playing. Shane can see the oblong dome of the Stade Bercy as they pull into the hotel parking lot. Hayden’s right, they’re probably not going to be seeing much more than this combination for the few days they are here. Theriault would probably say: it’s a work trip, boys, and they are here to work.
They have their rooms to themselves, at least. That’s nice. It will be a total waste if Rozanov tells him to fuck off. If Shane doesn’t get to put it to good use. He’s probably getting ahead of himself.
The hotel is grey. Grey floors, grey carpet, grey window treatments. Like it’s meant to be ignored, fade into the background. There are small idiosyncrasies that remind him he’s not in North America– the bed is smaller, the shape and height of the toilet gives him a kind of uncanny valley feeling he has never associated with bathrooms before. The hotel shower is the kind where the head is on a handle and attached to a long, snaking tube. Everything is just slightly, subtly different, like it’s designed to quietly drive Shane insane.
He’s strangely homesick for the hotels he’s more familiar with, the places he goes the most. He misses the Radisson in Boston where Shane climbed onto Rozanov’s lap and rode him until he came so hard it hit Rozanov in the chin and he made Shane lick it off. He misses the hotel from the last All Star Game, where the bedspread was inexplicably paisley print and Rozanov whispered Russian into his ear as he pulled Shane’s head back with a hand in his hair. He misses the audacious hotels in Vegas, where the bathrooms are palatial and fitted with dual-head showers and jacuzzis like it’s Disneyland for horny freaks like him.
But it’s okay. All he needs this hotel to provide is the opportunity to talk to Rozanov. All he needs Paris to provide, really. Just the space to say what he really, really needs to say.
I’m gay, Rozanov. And. Also. Also I think I’m in love with you and I think you might also like me more than just a fuck buddy and I don’t think I can leave Paris without knowing if that’s true.
Or some version of that, at least.
Shane unpacks his suitcase and puts his clothes away into the drawers of the hotel dresser even though he will only be here three nights. He does this even when he’s only staying one night. He hates pulling stuff out of his suitcase when he needs to change. The clothes he’s already worn, from Zurich, are folded but separated from his clean ones, and he puts those away as well, in a separate drawer. He does a miniature version of his normal hotel bed inspection, because he’s dog tired after the hour and a half of traffic on the périphérique from Charles de Gaulle and he almost doesn’t care about bed bugs as a result.
He can hear voices in the hallway, a general din of conversation. It’s late, but probably not too late at all for the plans the average hockey player makes when there’s no game until the following night. Go out, get drunk, find a girl, maybe. Shane has been the odd man out in this way his entire career, not just because he’s not interested in the finding a girl part. It’s why he gets along better with the older guys, the married guys like Hayden, who don’t go out much, either, but he can’t blame the younger guys who do. It’s Paris. It’s Europe. These games have no bearing on stats or playoff contention, so it doesn’t matter much if they play like shit tomorrow.
Shane wonders who is going out tonight on his team, trying to suss out the players from the voices as they approach his door. Riley, probably. If he’s going, Lowry’s going, too. JJ wouldn’t miss a chance to flirt in French, he thinks. He’ll probably play up the Quebecois accent with the girls. Oh, you say copine here, we say blonde in Quebec. That sort of thing.
The voices approach, reach the threshold of Shane’s hotel door, and become clear enough for him to make out the conversation being loudly and carelessly conducted in the hallway.
“I do not care if you marry this girl next week, Marley, you are not missing out on Paris clubs because of fucking girlfriend.”
Oh fuck. Oh my god, Shane thinks. It’s not Lowry, or JJ. It’s fucking Ilya Rozanov. It’s his deep, rolling voice, his carefully enunciated words, his clipped vowels, his r’s growled in his throat. His breathing, his footsteps.
Rozanov. Ilya.
Shane’s heart is in his throat and he isn’t even sure what he’s doing until he’s at his door and he’s already got his hand on the handle and pulled it halfway open, and he’s stepping out and staring stupidly down the hallway at the receding backs of Cliff Marleau and Ilya Rozanov, grey carpet and grey paint on the walls all just making Rozanov glow like a fucking candle in the middle of it, makes the blond in his thick curls brighter, the definition of his huge body under his obnoxious shirt more severe. Or maybe that’s just Shane’s hunger for him, his desperation to see him, or just a Pavlovian response to being in any hotel where Ilya Rozanov is close enough to touch. Shane’s mouth is watering like it’s getting ready for him.
And he doesn’t know what his intention was in opening the door and staring at Rozanov like a lovesick idiot, doesn’t know if there was any intention to it at all other than raw, pathetic wanting. But it probably wasn’t to have Rozanov hear the door open and turn around and see Shane watching him, and stop in his tracks and stare.
Normally, opposing teams do not end up on the same hotel floors, for obvious reasons. But apparently, none of the rules matter here. It is just another thing that makes this hotel, this series, different than what Shane is used to. Another thing that has him feeling flat-footed, throat tight, eyes hot. Or maybe that is just because of the way Rozanov is looking at him. His eyes are a deeper blue than normal in the grey hallway. Or maybe Shane has just forgotten them. He knows that’s not it, but it is a nice fantasy, imagining that he might not have every part of Ilya Rozanov’s body memorized so accurately.
“Huh?” Marleau says, noticing Rozanov has stopped a step or two behind him. He looks back to where Rozanov is looking, sees Shane. “Oh, Hollander. Shit, they’ve got us on the same floor?” He laughs at the coincidence of it. No, a coincidence only to Shane and Rozanov, probably. To Cliff Marleau, it’s probably nothing at all.
“Hey,” Shane says, to Rozanov.
Rozanov nods. His eyes cast up and down the length of Shane’s body. Shane is keenly aware he looks stupid, that he’s wearing the worn-out shit he wears to sleep in hotels. He has a set of clothes he packed specifically for the conversation with Rozanov. He told his stylist to pick something appropriate for a date. Hah. Feels like a joke at his expense, now.
“Hello, Hollander,” Rozanov says, before he turns back in the hallway, continues on his way with Cliff Marleau.
Shane feels inexplicably humiliated as he closes the door again. He stands with his back against it, hearing his name rolled along the smooth baritone of Rozanov’s voice. He feels the heat in his crotch immediately, pathetically, and presses his hand against himself, not even sure if he means to dampen down the arousal or goad it further. Fuck.
Rozanov looked carefully neutral, saying his name, eyeing him up and down. It could be because Cliff Marleau was standing right there, could see and hear anything they said or did. It could be because Rozanov doesn’t give a shit about him.
Shane retreats to his bed, kicks forlornly into the covers. He gropes for his phone on the nightstand, but only scrolls down to Lily in his conversation list and stares at the last message he sent: Here, at Rozanov’s house in Boston in November. His thumb hovers over the keyboard, but he doesn’t even know what it is he wants to say. Just some version of Please talk to me.
But Rozanov is going out with his team, in Paris. He probably doesn’t want to hear from Shane tonight. He probably doesn’t care to hear from him at all.
Hello, Hollander.
Shane groans and tosses his phone to the far side of the bed. He rolls on his stomach, pressing his face into his pillow, and reaches into his shorts, fondling himself, thinking about the high arches of Rozanov’s cupid’s bow and the curl his voice adds to Shane’s name, and comes too fast. It feels, somehow, like a defeat.
He has to talk to Rozanov before they leave. He has to find a way.
But he doesn’t see Rozanov again until face-off the next night, where it’s impossible to create an opening, where the lights are just as bright as home and the crowd seems just as hungry for the competition. The announcer’s French lacks the edges of those in Montreal, but otherwise this is as familiar as any game Shane has ever played. Nobody goes too hard, nobody pushes themselves for saves and chances out of fear of injury, even though it’s a little early to get too worried for playoff contention. It’s fun enough. Rozanov avoids him on their shifts together, doesn’t take opportunities to check Shane into the boards like he might at home. There’s no bite. Shane wonders if Rozanov got too drunk last night, if he smoked too much, if he didn’t sleep enough. If he was kept up by someone else.
The Metros win, 3-1, and Shane is put front and center for press, and his accent sounds harsh in his ears, surrounded by Parisian reporters and unfamiliar faces. Then, there’s a dinner, just his team, out in Pigalle. The art in the restaurant is all different variations of The Moulin Rouge, photographs and caricatures and watercolors. He wonders if Boston has been whisked off somewhere, too, and where.
The rain makes the night feel more frigid than the temperature on his phone would imply, and Shane thinks about Rozanov standing outside, collar turned up, trying to light his cigarette. He saw so many people smoking that morning when he went out for a coffee, casually freezing at outside cafe tables, fingers poised around cigarettes, newspapers and cell phones and tiny coffee cups in their free hands.
It made him wonder how much of Rozanov’s smoking habit is influenced just by being European, though Shane also thinks maybe it’s wrong to generalize. It made him think of Rozanov, regardless. More than usual. Probably.
He heads back to the hotel as most of his teammates break off into groups and start strategizing their after-dinner plans in the city. It’s too late to sightsee, and too late for any gift shopping, and those are the only reasons for Shane to go out in Paris. Hayden rides back in the Uber with him, texting with Jackie.
“I’m gonna call when we get back, to say hi to the kids and Jacks,” Hayden says, “if you want to jump in.”
Shane wants to say no, but the only reason to say no is because he wants to leave himself open in case he miraculously runs into Rozanov at the hotel again. So he says yes, and spends fifteen minutes in the hotel lobby with Hayden, waving at the tops of his kids’ heads as they chaotically pass the phone around and Jackie asks them how they’re liking Paris so far.
After, he returns to his room, only hoping a little that he will see Rozanov in the hallway again, not too disappointed when he doesn’t. He’s pretty sure it’s Marleau on his floor, anyway, not Rozanov, and he’s even more sure that Rozanov is going out tonight like almost everyone else.
It’s just, Shane is already thinking about how Boston leaves tomorrow, early evening, and there’s one more game to play, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to talk.
He decides, lying in the dark, that if he doesn’t have a good opportunity to talk by tomorrow afternoon, he’ll make one. He’ll just ask Rozanov to come to his room. He’ll just have to take the risk that he’s left on read. He can’t control that. He has never been able to control what Rozanov does. But he can at least ask.
Ilya feels sick to his stomach.
It’s not a new feeling, not even for the venue, this long, swooping VIP booth and his teammates on either side of him and an array of drinks and bottles spread out in front of them. He had felt sick to his stomach in Montreal, at another equally dark and thumping club, seeing Shane Hollander with Rose Landry on the dance floor. His gut had churned even as he had pulled that girl he wheeled away from the lights and tried to get interested in fingering her off to the side of the club, wanted to do it while he knew Hollander was still in the same room, but it had proven impossible. Ilya had felt so unsettled on the plane to Berlin that he’d sat with the air sickness bag clutched in his hand for the last four hours of the flight. At least looking sick to death on a plane was easy enough to explain away.
Hollander’s teammates are here, too, at the same club, but Hollander is not; Ilya has made absolutely certain of that. He can’t help it, knowing they are in the same city for two nights. He has to scan every room he enters with the urgency of a SWAT team conducting a sweep. Probably none of them should be here, and Desjourneys usually wouldn’t allow it with an afternoon game the following day, but this is for fun and nobody cares what they do as long as no one gets injured before the real games pick up again back home.
The sick feeling in his stomach had been bearable in Berlin because Hollander wasn’t there. Ilya isn’t sure if there is a geographical limit to how bad he feels thinking about Hollander, but separate cities seem to dampen it enough that he can still play decent hockey, as long as he’s not in Montreal. Or Paris.
And Berlin was fun, in a way. Fun clubs. Another version of Ilya, who had never met and subsequently lost Shane Hollander and thus might know some peace in his lifetime, would have had an absolute blast there. Ilya had thought about trying to get into Berghain– alone, none of his meathead American teammates would have possibly been let in– but he didn’t bother. Just didn’t feel up to it. It would feel worse, he figured, to try to fuck and to discover that he was still miserably unable to do much more than picture Hollander’s pretty face and feel sorry for himself. The games themselves had been fun, too. No challenge at all, but the Polar Bears had seemed happy enough just to play against them. They had gone out drinking all together, after, and the atmosphere was so effervescent and lively that Ilya had almost tricked himself into believing he understood some German. That feeling had carried him all the way through the flight to Paris and the bus ride and hotel check-in.
But that was before Ilya ran into Shane Hollander down the hall from Marley’s room.
Someone sets a full beer down in front of him– Connie?-- and Ilya picks it up automatically, and thinks of Hollander’s face, the pure shock and the wide eyes and half-open mouth, so soft, the same expression Hollander sometimes wore when Ilya showed up at his hotel room, like he couldn’t believe how Ilya looked. It would make Ilya feel powerful, proud of himself. Warm all over. He liked watching that expression melt off Hollander’s face when Ilya kissed him, a reward for making Ilya feel so good about himself.
“Hollander looked fucking pissed,” Marley had said, last night at the club, laughing about the fact that they had all the players from both teams so haphazardly assigned to the different floors.
He didn’t look pissed at all, Ilya had thought, but knew he had no way to explain how he knew that to Marley. That he knew it because he had spent the last eight years studying Shane Hollander like it was his second job. Maybe it was. And he was bad at it, if so, because he hadn’t seen Rose Landry coming at all, but he at least knew what that look on Hollander’s face meant. And it didn’t mean pissed.
Ilya had leaned up against the bar with Marley and wondered, seriously, if he could fuck Hollander this week, even with the movie star girlfriend. That’s what that look had implied. Ilya wanted that to be enough to cure the churn in his stomach, that Hollander still would fuck him if Ilya tried.
The problem, Ilya thinks now, necking his beer so no one tries to talk to him, is that he doesn’t think it is. Even if a miracle happens, and Ilya sends Hollander home to Rose Landry with the imprint of Ilya’s cock still inside him, it feels somehow worse than nothing at all. Like a consolation prize. Ilya gets Hollander’s body, and she gets him.
So he won’t. And Hollander hasn’t spoken to him, anyway, other than that Hey breathed out into the hallway between them. He’s maybe avoiding Ilya on purpose, so that he isn’t tempted.
Or maybe this isn’t hard for him at all. Maybe Hollander can compartmentalize whatever attraction he feels for Ilya and go on with life easily, without it causing the same constant sickness in his gut that Ilya feels. Maybe he’s saving himself just for Rose. Maybe it’s become that serious between them.
The thought makes Ilya want to fast-forward through tomorrow’s game and get the fuck out of Paris already. Another fun city, wasted. Another place that a different Ilya, an Ilya not chained to a man who has already relegated him to the past, would have probably loved. Sasha was right, in Sochi, when he said the women and the men are both beautiful here. But Ilya finishes his beer and calls an Uber back to the hotel early and blames the jet lag when his teammates protest. He doesn’t want the beautiful men and beautiful women of Paris in his bed. Just one beautiful man, sleeping one floor above him, that he can’t even have.
Ilya had been surprised at the roar of the crowd when he and Hollander had lined up for the first face-off. It had made him wonder if their rivalry has become so famous that it has managed to cross the Atlantic. The thought makes him feel good, in that even here, across the world from their respective cities, he and Hollander’s names are linked together, if only in this way. And it also makes him feel terrible, because it’s just another reminder that what Ilya wants, deep down where his stomach churns around it, is impossible. Even here, people are invested in their animosity.
Ilya lies in his bed and wishes, like he has too many times already, that he could rewind everything and go back to before Boston and convince himself never to try to invite Hollander to stay the night. He’d probably be fucking Hollander right now, if none of that had happened. Maybe it could still be fun. Zero stakes.
He might have to go back earlier for zero stakes, though. Before the summer, when he caught himself texting Hollander to ask what he fucking ate for dinner instead of dancing at the club with Sveta. Maybe before that, before his MVP win in Vegas, where he stayed up all night after Hollander left with his thoughts like a tornado in his mind and barely made it to his flight to Moscow at all. Maybe before he was inside Hollander for the first time. Maybe before Juniors. He met Hollander the first time he was ever in North America. Maybe he has to go all the way back to Russia, then. Maybe it’s never been zero stakes, not since the moment Hollander’s stupid earnest face was in his vision, beautiful freckles and overly honest eyes and tiny soft smile and perfect white teeth. Maybe it’s always meant too much to Ilya.
Ilya’s phone rings in the dark. It’s only when he sees Alexei’s name on the screen that he feels humiliated for hoping it said Jane instead. He cuts the call, puts his phone on do-not-disturb. It’s too late for it to be for anything good. His family never calls for anything good.
Ilya goes to sleep hoping that when he wakes up, he’ll already be back in Boston, where maybe Paris and Hollander will be far enough away not to matter anymore.
Shane doesn’t like to attribute much to luck. Sure, he’s superstitious, to the extent all hockey players are; he can become downright psychotic during playoffs. But great players don’t get that way by being lucky. They create the opportunities, they make the moves that allow luck to channel its way to them. A defenseman might fall for a deke, instead of reading the feint for what it is, but that isn’t luck; that is strategy being executed correctly.
All that is to say, Shane does not attribute it entirely to luck when he heads out of the hotel the morning of their final game to grab a coffee and finds Ilya Rozanov smoking under the awning just beyond the entrance doors. He figured, if Ilya was smoking somewhere, he’d probably be doing it around now: early enough in the morning that he won’t feel it in his lungs on the ice later, late enough that the sun has come out behind the ever-present gloom. If there is any bit of luck to it, it’s that Rozanov chose to do it in such a conspicuous place, a happy coincidence that France seems to let people smoke just about anywhere they please.
Rozanov has athletic gear on, nothing audacious, not like what Shane saw him wearing in the hallway. As if he’s trying to do the opposite, blend in to the scenery, the grey hotel and the grey morning, but it’s probably not that. It’s probably that he just came out for a smoke after his morning workout. He wouldn’t be wearing dark clothes just to hide from someone, someone maybe like Shane.
Like always when he sees Rozanov, Shane’s struck by how good he looks, how his body fills out his clothes, how his eyes and his hair play each other up until both look like they glow. This has always been part of why Shane is so afraid to be seen around him, because he knows how he must look, when he looks at Rozanov. He can’t help how much he likes to just look at him, and it’s all wrapped up in the complicating factor of their history, that Rozanov’s bowed lips Shane likes to stare at have also been around his dick more times than Shane can probably count. That Shane knows what it feels like to sink his fingers into Rozanov’s glowing blond hair and hold on for dear life.
Rozanov, in contrast, doesn’t always start hot. His eyes don’t always look glad to see Shane. Right now, he is doing that assessing thing with his gaze he sometimes does, looking Shane up and down, like an inspector at an auction. Measuring him, evaluating his worth, maybe. That look always makes Shane want to jut his chin out and straighten his spine, put on some kind of expression that shows he’s fine with it, fine with Rozanov disassembling him with his too-blue eyes and his fierce Slavic eyebrows. Like everything with Rozanov, Shane feels himself get incongruously turned on under his impassive gaze. He briefly wonders, not for the first time, if fucking him has turned Shane irreversibly into some kind of deviant.
“Hello, Hollander,” Rozanov says, his deep voice made deeper by the gravel of tobacco he’s been sucking into his lungs.
“Hi, Rozanov.”
Shane’s eyes flicker to the burning end of the cigarette, perched between Rozanov’s slightly pursed lips. He makes that expression sometimes, when he’s about to kiss Shane. And now that’s all Shane can think about, of course.
Rozanov catches the look and shakes his head. “Don’t say it.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Shane says, even though he probably was. Smoking is bad for you feels permanently poised to come out of his mouth around Rozanov.
Rozanov lifts his eyebrows, clearly disbelieving, correctly skeptical. Shane bites a smile down. He casts his eyes around them. The hotel is here because the stadium is here, and ‘here’ is not a particularly beautiful part of the city. It has the kind of nondescript, functional architecture of a place where tourists are not the focus. If not for the cafes dotting the street, unmistakably and ostentatiously French with scalloped fabric awnings and huddles of rattan bistro chairs, Shane and Rozanov could be standing anywhere, in almost any city.
But he’s casting around for something to say, to break the ice, and the city is a blessedly neutral topic.
“So, uh, how are you enjoying Paris so far?”
Rozanov shrugs with one shoulder, his face noncommittal.
“Is okay.”
“Yeah,” Shane says, nodding, trying to take the nearly nothing Rozanov is giving him and turn it into something. “Totally. Um…”
“What do you want, Hollander?” Rozanov says, wearily. Tired. Of Shane, already, maybe.
Shane puts his hands in his pockets. He wants to say the things he needs to say to Rozanov. That’s what he wants. But of course, that’s fucking impossible here. They are three meters from the hotel entrance, if that. People are coming in and out, and every time the doors open he catches a bit of loud conversation, and no matter how quietly he says it, he can’t say, I’m gay, and not just gay, I’m in love with you, and not just gay and in love with you but also I want you to maybe do something about it. Not here. He probably shouldn’t do it anywhere where anyone else could hear them either, but. But this is where they’ve found themselves, so maybe he can pivot. Maybe he can strategize.
Every other business on this street is a cafe, it seems. Shane was going to go back to the one he went to yesterday, but it’s kind of close; he could pick any of them, and maybe that would be private enough, a cafe three blocks down instead of one.
“I was, um, going to get coffee,” he says. “Down the street, there’s a decent cafe.” Of course, he doesn’t know if that’s true, but it’s Paris, can any of the cafes here be worse than decent? “Do you want to…?”
Ilya’s gaze softens a little, shifts a little closer to the expression he wears when he arrives at Shane’s door versus when he leaves. He takes the cigarette from his lips, seems poised to say something. Then, the entrance doors open again, someone from the Raiders. A guy from the management team, not a player, but wearing enough conspicuous Boston gear as to be unmistakable. Stepping outside to take a call, or grab a smoke, too, or a coffee. He taps Rozanov on his shoulder as he passes, and Shane can see Rozanov’s wince, his eyes flinching at the touch. He looks away from Shane, as if even making eye contact is too dangerous under observation.
“No,” Rozanov says, when the staff member has walked far enough away that he won’t be overheard. “We can’t.”
“Okay,” Shane says, and he understands, he really does. He just doesn’t have any better ideas. He can’t figure out how to maneuver this. His luck has apparently run out.
He already said he was getting coffee, was planning to even before he ran into Rozanov, so now he has to turn around and walk away down the street and know that Rozanov is going to watch him the entire time, smoking his cigarette in a way that makes it feel like an indictment of Shane.
“Is too much caffeine for you, I think,” Rozanov says, a tiny smile creeping up one side of his face.
“You’re one to talk,” Shane says, mouth quirking up to match, and he feels warm, the way he always does when Rozanov makes a joke at his expense. Warm in multiple ways, since that’s all wrapped up in their history, too.
“Goodbye, Hollander.”
“Yeah. See you, Rozanov.”
Shane turns around once more, when he’s safely down the street, and sees Rozanov has been joined by a couple of teammates out front. So he was right to say no, they couldn’t. Shane turns back quickly, hustles to the first cafe he comes across, doesn’t care at all what he said about going to one further away. It doesn’t matter.
He’ll talk to Rozanov later, he thinks. There will be another chance.
But they don’t get another chance. Their final game on French ice starts rather early, which doesn’t seem to be a problem for the audience in attendance, maybe because ice hockey is a rarity here and the French fans don’t mind that the schedule is bizarre. First puck dropped before eleven AM– another thing that has Shane off kilter during his time abroad. Chalk it up to culture shock.
He thinks about Rozanov the entire game, how he’s going to talk to him, whether he’ll get a chance at all. The schedule is brutally tight; they have a weird lunch for both teams, a show of intermural camaraderie, so Shane has to shower and change right after the game, so no chance to talk in between. There’s not a lot of time after lunch, either, before both teams head to the airport and Shane to his brand meeting, but maybe that’s the only opportunity they will have.
He’ll text him. That’s the way that’s always worked for them, isn’t it? That’s the correct strategy. Shane just has to trust that Rozanov will answer. That he wasn’t saying No, we can’t about anything more than the coffee.
Because they have to. They have to talk. Shane doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do otherwise. Doesn’t know how to just go back to Montreal if Rozanov and what he thinks and what he feels about Shane is still a giant question mark, swirling over both of their heads.