Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The bathroom tiles are cold through Shane’s favourite socks. 

Why the fuck did he wear his favourite sock today of all days?

Shane has been sitting on the floor for eleven minutes. He knows because he's been staring at the clock on his phone, watching the numbers change with a kind of dull, dissociated focus that he'll probably be embarrassed about later. 11:04. 11:05. 11:06. The draft is in four hours and he's sitting on the bathroom floor of a Marriott in Los Angeles, and his right ankle is wrapped in a compression bandage that's slightly too tight, and he cannot make himself stand up.

The thing is, he's fine. He keeps saying this to people, his parents, his agent, the team doctors, I'm fine, I'm fine, the timeline looks good, I’m healing extremely well and beyond the projected time. I'm fine. And in the way that actually matters, in the numbers-and-tendons-and-scar-tissue way, he mostly is. Grade III syndesmotic tear. High ankle sprain on the severe end, ligaments stretched where they shouldn't be stretched, a small avulsion fracture at the tip of the fibula that the team doctor described as incidental and that Shane subsequently googled at 2 AM and deeply regretted googling at 2 AM. It happened around 5 months ago in Game 7 of the World Junior Hockey Championships Finals, eleven seconds into the second period, when a Russian defenseman caught his skate wrong along the boards and Shane's entire body went one direction and his ankle went another, and he'd known immediately, not from the pain, which was enormous, but from the sound, this wet, fibrous crack that he felt more in his teeth than his ears, that something had gone genuinely wrong.

He'd finished the shift.

He wants to make sure that's on record somewhere: he finished the shift. He made it back to the bench under his own power and he did not make a sound and then he sat there for whoever knows how long while his ankle swelled inside his skate until the trainer finally noticed him listing slightly to one side and made him take the skate off. Shane had looked at the ankle and then looked away very quickly. Fuck, it was bad. His parents were up in the stands. He didn't want them to see his face, he had never been good at concealing his emotions, always wearing his resting bitch face and reacting way too animated when needed.

They won, if that was any consolation. 4-2, his linemates picking up the slack in the minutes he was out, and Shane had put one in on a bad ankle with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw still aches when he thinks about it just before the trainer had forbade him from returning to the ice or else he would cart Shane off the rink altogether. Hearing that, Shane immediately scratched his leg, self soothing. The last thing he wanted was to not be present when, not if, when his team wins, here at home. 

They won, and he'd stood, well stood is generous, he was leaning heavily on his poor teammate, on the ice with his teammates and the trophy overhead and his right leg barely holding his weight, and he'd thought: this was worth it, this was all worth it, this is fine, I am so fine.

The problem is that Montreal didn't think it was fine.

That's the part Shane cannot say out loud to his parents, or his agent, or anyone really. It is one thing to tell people he's fine. It is a completely different and much more impossible thing to say: I know they're not going to pick me. I can see it happening and I cannot stop it and I don't know what to do with my hands.

His agent, Gerald, called three days ago. Gerald has a voice like a late-night radio host, all smooth cadence and careful pauses, which usually makes his news easier to absorb and sometimes makes it much worse.

"Shane." Pause. "I want to give you a heads up before the draft, because I don't want you going in there without context."

"Okay," Shane said.

"Montreal's been in contact. Their medical team has concerns about the recovery timeline. The ankle, combined with how close we are to draft day and training camp is closer than we think, they're worried about guaranteeing you're at full capacity for the start of training camp and of the season."

"I'll be at full capacity," Shane said. "My doctor said I only need to keep the bandage until the end of the week, and by then I can go back to training, although light at first but they were confident I can skate and train like normal by the end of the month.” 

"I know that. I told them that."

"So—"

"Shane." Another pause. Gerald's pauses are doing a lot of work in this conversation. "I know you’ve been working towards this for years. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, believe me, but I think they're going to pass. I don't think they're going to pick you where they projected. I wanted you to know before it happens."

He'd sat with that for a while. He's been sitting with it for three days, which is probably why he's now on the bathroom floor with cold tiles through his socks and four hours until the draft.

The honest truth, the one he cannot say, is that this was supposed to be the thing. Not just any NHL draft, but this one, and not just any team, but that one. His mother’s favourite team growing up was Montreal, even though they were all from Ottawa, her mom grew up watching Montreal games with her dad, a tradition she carried on when Shane was old enough to watch and understand hockey. He grew up watching the Voyageurs on a TV in his parents' living room, Yuna Hollander sitting on the couch with her coffee and her running commentary and her absolute conviction that Montreal were, empirically, the greatest franchise in professional hockey. He learned the sport in the shadow of that conviction. He built his entire hockey brain around that love, around the idea that someday he was going to get good enough to make it mean something, to walk into that city as a Montreal Voyageur and make his mother watch him play from the seats she'd watch with him from as a kid, and it was going to be perfect. It was supposed to be perfect. He'd been working toward perfect his entire life.

He breathes carefully through his nose. The exhale makes a sound that he doesn't particularly like.

The ankle doesn't even hurt that badly right now. It aches, a dull background percussion that he's mostly learned to ignore, and it's stiff in the mornings, and he still can't push off his right edge with full force, but it doesn't hurt. He's ahead of schedule. His physiotherapist said ahead of schedule and smiled at him and Shane had felt something in his chest unknot a fraction. He is going to be fine. He is fine. He is sitting on the bathroom floor because the tiles are cold and steady and he needed somewhere to be that wasn't the hotel room where his parents are carefully not looking at each other, where his dad has been rereading the same ESPN article for forty minutes, where his mother is doing the thing she does when she's trying not to cry, which is organising objects by size on the hotel room desk, which she has now done twice.

He stands up. His ankle protests mildly.

Shane rinses his face with cold water and looks at himself in the mirror for a moment, and then stops doing that because looking at himself in mirrors does not currently feel productive.

He goes back into the hotel room. His parents look up at him and do their faces, his mother's face that says I have things to say but I am choosing not to say them and his dad's face that says I am trying to read your face to determine how you are and Shane makes the face that he has perfected over years of hockey, the one that means I'm fine, let it go.

"Are you hungry?" his mother says. "We could order something."

"Uh, sure," Shane says.

They order room service. Shane eats about less than half of what arrives. His mother eats all of hers and then steals his dad’s fruit, which is a thing she does when she's pretending she's not worried, because performing normalcy requires performance. His dad tells the same story about being nervous before his own draft that he's told four times this week, and Shane listens the same way he's listened the four previous times, which is to say with genuine affection and a small amount of wanting to climb out the window.

Then they go to the draft.

The venue is at the hotel ballrooms, prospects scattered around. Networking and talking to each other. Shane has been to events like this, well not an NHL draft day, nothing will ever compare to this, whether that’s a good thing or not, Shane is yet to know. He never liked how big and loud this side of hockey was, the lights and the staging and the enormous screens and the tables of team representatives and the banners, it’s all too much. On a regular day, he wouldn’t even consider going but this isn’t a regular day. He reminds himself that nothing is set in stone, not yet. That doesn’t help in the slightest bit, and when it happened, the thing that happens in Shane's chest when he walks in places as such, it’s a mixture of breathtaking awe and at the same time, the kind of terror that makes your hands feel like it will melt off of your arms and somehow it makes you more aware of your hands, aware how sweaty and shaky it is.

He's wearing a suit. This is notable because Shane's relationship with formal clothing is historically fraught, if he could, he would only wear athletic wear, but he and his mother had gone to a tailor in Ottawa last November, before the WJHC, before the ankle, before the draft, before everything, and the suit is dark navy and it fits him correctly, and when he'd put it on this morning his mother had looked at him with an expression he couldn't quite interpret and said, quietly, You look like a hockey player, Shane, and he'd had to look at the ceiling for a second.

They find their seats in the banquet. Shane is hyperaware of his ankle as they navigate the rows, the compression bandage is under his dress pants, invisible, and he walks normally, or as close to normally as he can manage, because the last thing he needs is a photo of him limping into the draft. He sits down between his parents and surveys the room.

There are other draft prospects scattered through the crowd, most of them with families, most of them wearing suits of varying success. He clocks a few he recognises, Smith from Edmonton, Beaumont from Montreal, and then, several rows over and slightly ahead, he clocks Ilya Rozanov.

Rozanov doesn't look nervous. Shane would like to see with his own eyes that Rozanov looks nervous, but he doesn't, he looks like he's somewhere that he expected to be, which is probably because he is. Number one overall pick, the clearest story of the draft season, a Russian center with ridiculous hands and a highlight reel that Shane has studied more than he will admit and in ways he cannot entirely account for. 

He's sitting with an older man, maybe a coach, or a handler, or his dad, Shane doesn't know his family situation, and he's got his arms crossed and he's scanning the room with the easy confidence of someone who already knows how this is going to go.

Shane looks away.

The thing about Ilya Rozanov is that Shane has met him and talked to him exactly once (and played twice), for the first time two years ago, at the World Junior Hockey Championships, in Regina. Team Canada versus Russia, the kind of game that means something on paper even when you're seventeen, and Shane and Rozanov had ended up in a made up rivalry as two of the most talked about prospects. They had faced off each other, not uttering a single word but the aura was talking enough. As the game progressed, Shane had been furious, high on adrenaline and competition, they were lagging behind, and Rozanov, fucking Ilya Rozanov, in his all cocky persona, had looked at him from the penalty box and grinned, not meanly, just with genuine delight, like this was the most fun he'd been having all week, and when he had checked Shane into the boards, he had the time and energy and said, in accented but totally comprehensible English, "You are fast. I did not expect." And then skated away like he had skates instead of feet with the way he moved in full speed effortlessly. Play had resumed and they hadn't spoken again. Until Shane introduced himself in a back alley way. It could have been worse, but it solidified Shane’s position that Ilya Rozanov is indeed a cocky asshole, with amazing stick handling and an even amazing speed on the ice.

He turns his attention to the stage as the commissioner steps up to the podium, and his hands, folded in his lap, are very still.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

"With the first overall pick in the 2010 NHL Draft," says the commissioner, "the Boston Bears select—"

And there it is. Ilya Rozanov, the projected first draft pick, is the first draft pick.

The applause starts before the name is fully out of the commissioner's mouth, and Rozanov stands, and Shane watches him make his way down to the stage, and feels something complicated unfurl in his chest.

The thing about watching Rozanov walk across that floor, head up, that same loose-limbed confidence, smiling now at the commissioner who's reaching out to shake his hand, is that Shane's first feeling is not the one he'll admit to later. His first feeling, immediate and hot and completely unwelcome, is envy.

Not of Rozanov specifically. Shane doesn't know Rozanov. He knows his stats and his highlights and the way he skated in the WJHC, knows the way he looked in the penalty box with that infuriating grin, but he doesn't know him. The envy isn't personal. It's about the stage, the handshake, the Bears jersey they're draping over Rozanov's suited shoulders, the cameras, all of it. That was supposed to be Shane. Not Boston, fuck no, but Montreal, a different stage, a different name, but the specific gravity of that moment, that was supposed to be Shane's.

He sits very still and watches Rozanov pose for photos smugly, and he thinks: I was going to be there. I was going to be exactly there. I had a plan.

The plan was: get into the WJHC finals (done), win the WJHC after losing to Russia the year before (done), get drafted first overall to Montreal (not done, not going to be done, will never be done), spend his rookie contract by proving himself in the NHL, become the player his mother always thought he would be. Clean. Achievable. A fucking Role Model. He has been building toward this plan since he was six years old, since the first time Yuna Hollander sat him in front of the TV and said watch this, watch how he moves, and Shane had watched, and had thought: I can do that. I want to do that. I will do that.

He did not account for his ankle going sideways before the draft. Literally, anatomically sideways.

Eventually, the envy cools into something uglier. He's aware of it happening, the pivot from that should be me to why wasn't that me, what did I do wrong, what's wrong with me, and he has enough self-awareness to clock it even as it happens, but awareness doesn't make it easier to sit with. The ankle. It always comes back to the fucking ankle. One play, eleven seconds, a defenseman he couldn't see coming on his blind side because he was already committed to his play, and all that work, all the early mornings and the tape work and the film sessions and the days where he skated until his legs stopped feeling like legs, compressed down to one bad second of timing.

He didn't get hurt on purpose. He knows this. It doesn't help the way he thinks it should.

The second pick goes. The third. Shane watches the board and counts down the names with a sensation that starts as focused and gradually becomes something with more edges to it. He's watching Montreal's table out of the corner of his eye without meaning to, not hope, exactly, he's past hope, Gerald made that clear, but unable to stop himself from watching anyway, the way you can't stop pressing a bruise or picking on your zit.

Montreal picks fifth overall. A defenseman from Kamloops. Shane looks at his hands.

His mother puts her hand over his, briefly, and then removes it.

He counts the picks. There's a rhythm to it, a terrible rhythm, the commissioner's voice, the applause, the player standing, crossing the floor, the handshake, the jersey, the photos. Over and over. 

Shane sits through it and keeps his face still and thinks about nothing specific and everything simultaneously, thoughts cycling the way they do when he can't turn them off: all the 5 AM practices, all the protein shakes he drank that he pretended to not hate, all the miles on the ice in the Ottawa winter when his breath came out in visible clouds, the six-year-old version of himself watching the Voyageurs with total uncomplicated faith that this was where he was headed, that there was a straight line between there and here. 

The board shows pick forty-seven. Then fifty. Then fifty-four.

He is not going to get drafted. 

The certainty arrives quietly, without announcement, and once it's there he can't unthink it. Gerald said second round. It is the second fucking round. And Gerald had said Boston has expressed interest. But Gerald also said Montreal, and look how that went, and the board is at fifty-four and fifty-five and —

"With the fifty-seventh pick in the 2010 NHL Draft," says the commissioner, "the Boston Bears select Shane Hollander, center, from Ottawa."

Shane stands up.

He doesn't remember deciding to stand up, but his body does it, and then he's walking, and his ankle is fine, it's fine, and his parents are behind him somewhere and the lights are very bright, and he gets to the stage and shakes the commissioner's hand, and someone, a Bears representative, smiling, warm, drapes a Boston jersey over his shoulders, and the cameras flash, and Shane smiles.

He's good at smiling when he needs to.

He stands there in the lights and holds the jersey and smiles at the cameras and thinks, from a very calm and quiet place inside himself: fifty-seventh. Second round. Two rounds and fifty-six names after Rozanov. Sure. Okay.

Okay.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His parents take him to dinner after. A place his dad found on Yelp, which is a thing his dad does everywhere they go, pulling up Yelp on his phone with the solemn thoroughness of someone consulting ancient texts. The food is good. Shane eats more of it than he did at lunch.

His mother talks about Boston, what she knows of it, the history, the sports culture, the architecture, the seafood. She is very carefully not talking about Montreal, which means she is talking about everything else, which is how Shane knows she is performing normalcy hard enough to pull a muscle. His dad asks the server about the local sports teams with genuine interest because his dad is constitutionally incapable of not being interested in local sports. Shane loves them both so much it makes his chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with the ankle.

"Boston's a great city," his dad says, refilling Shane's water glass in that unconscious way he does. "Passionate fans. They know their hockey."

"Mm," says Shane.

"And the Bears," his dad continues, with the carefully calibrated enthusiasm of a man who has spent the whole day mentally revising his talking points. "They're rebuilding something there. The roster's young. You could really —"

"David," says his mother.

"I'm just saying."

"You're saying a lot," she says, which coming from Yuna Hollander is a complete sentence.

Shane looks at his water glass. "It's fine," he says. "It's good. It's all good, Boston is good."

His mother looks at him for a moment with those dark eyes that have always seen through him more efficiently than anyone has a right to, and says, "How's the ankle?"

"Fine," he says. "Feels fine."

She nods, once, in a way that means I believe you and also I am writing something down internally for later.

He sleeps in the hotel that night with the Boston jersey with his name and number folded on the chair by the window, and he lies on his back and looks at the ceiling and thinks, carefully and deliberately, about what comes next. Not tonight, not the dinner or the draft or the look on his mother's face, but next. Moving to a new city, a new country. Training camp. The roster. The season. He's a Boston Bear. That's not nothing. Gerald said they took him because they believe in the recovery timeline, because they're willing to back the projection over the injury, because they think he's worth the gamble.

He is going to be worth the gamble.

He is going to go to Boston and he is going to work harder than anyone in that training camp and he is going to prove that fifty-seventh was a mistake in the other direction, that they should have taken him higher, that Montreal is going to spend the next several years watching him and thinking about the choice they made and feeling the specific, precise regret of having let something go before you understood its value.
He turns this plan over in his mind until it solidifies.

Then he goes to sleep.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His parents drive him.

He told them not to. He made a reasoned argument for why he should fly alone, the ankle, the sitting, it'll be fine, I don't need a whole production, and they listened to his argument with the focused attention of people who have already decided what they're going to do, and then his dad said, "We'll take the Subaru," and that was that.

So they drive. Ottawa to Boston, roughly seven hours with the border crossing, his dad handling the wheel and his mother in the passenger seat with a thermos of green tea she orders online and a crossword puzzle that she does in pen. Shane is in the back with his ankle elevated on his overnight bag and a Gatorade he's been nursing since they left, and the drive is actually fine. Comfortable. The familiarity of his parents' presence in this arrangement, his dad's playlist of classic rock that he's been refining since approximately 1987, his mother occasionally reading crossword clues aloud when she gets stuck. Shane looks out the window at the highway and feels, for the first time in several weeks, something close to settling.

"Six letters," says his mother. "Tenacity."

"Grit," says his dad.

"That's four."

"Resolve."

"That's seven."

"Fervor."

"Oh," she says, and writes it in.

They stop for lunch in Vermont, at a diner with checkered floors and a laminated menu the size of a tabloid, and his dad orders a Reuben, and his mother orders a salad and then steals half the Reuben, and Shane has chicken and rice, which the server brings without comment, and it's fine, it's good, he's used to the food thing by now, the slight social overhead of ordering differently, the way it makes people notice, the defensive reflex of explaining himself before anyone can question it. His mother has never once questioned it. His dad tried once, in the early years of the diet, and received a lecture from Yuna about athletic nutrition that was so comprehensive he hasn't brought it up since.

They cross into Massachusetts in the late afternoon and his mother puts down her crossword and looks out the window with a complicated expression.

"Boston," she says.

"Yep," says his dad.

A pause. Then: "Shane."

"Yeah."

"You know that, wherever you play, we're —" She stops. Starts again. "You're going to be wonderful there. I want you to know that I think you're going to be wonderful there."

Shane looks at the back of her head. His mother doesn't do speeches. When she has something emotional to say she packs it into as few words as possible and deploys them with great precision, like a surgeon with a single instrument. You're going to be wonderful there from Yuna Hollander is equivalent to about four hundred words from anyone else.

"Thanks, Mom," he says.

"I'm not finished," she says. "I also want you to think about, you know, after your rookie contract—"

"Mom."

"Just think about it. Three years isn't so long. If you're extraordinary, and you will be, there are options—"

"I'm not going to Montreal," Shane says.

The silence in the car changes texture slightly.

"I didn't say Montreal," his mother says.

"You were going to."

Another pause. Then, carefully "I was going to say options. Plural. There are multiple teams."

"Sure," Shane says.

She turns to look at him then, just briefly, over her shoulder. She has his eyes, or he has hers. dark and very direct and not particularly easy to lie to. "You're angry," she says.

"I'm not angry."

"Okay."

She turns back to the window. Shane looks out his own window at the highway signs accumulating, Boston: 23 miles, and thinks about how to explain something he's not entirely sure he can articulate. That it's not anger, exactly. That it's something more specific and less comfortable than anger, a kind of private injury that he doesn't have clean language for. That Montreal is his mother's city and he wanted to give it to her, and the wanting of that, the achingly earnest wanting of being able to give her something, is the thing he can least afford to examine right now.

"I'm going to be good," he says. "In Boston. I'm going to be really good."

"I know," she says.

"That's the plan."

"I know, Shane."

His dad, with characteristic timing, says, "There's a really well-reviewed clam chowder place on the waterfront."

Shane loves his dad so much.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His apartment is a three-bedroom in West End, fourth floor of a building with good enough security, an actual working elevator, and a view of the city and a courtyard depending which window you're looking out of. The Bears' housing coordinator had sent him a list of options; he'd picked this one because it was in a close enough distance to TD Garden and had two spare bedrooms he could put a home gym in, or failing that, store his hockey equipment without it smelling up the living spaces, and the other into a sensible guest room from when his parents come to visit.

His parents stayed for three days. They build his IKEA furniture, a project his dad approaches with the methodical confidence of a man who has built seventeen pieces of IKEA furniture and the steadily diminishing confidence of a man who has actually looked at the instruction diagrams. His mother organises the kitchen with her signature Yuna Hollander efficiency, labeling things in her neat handwriting, establishing a logic to the cabinet arrangement that Shane will probably follow without question for as long as he lives in this apartment. She also brings four tupperwares of food from home, pre-made, labeled, stacked in the freezer in a color-coded system that makes Shane want to cry a little bit, though not in a bad way.

The three days feel like a week and also like nothing at all. His parents move through his new apartment with the comfortable familiarity of people who belong wherever Shane is, and he follows them and unpacks boxes and eats takeout on the floor when there's nowhere to sit yet, and it's good, it's really good. He doesn't think about the draft. He doesn't think about Montreal. He shows his dad the TD Garden from a street corner some blocks away, and his dad says huh, it's bigger than I thought with his head tilted back, and Shane feels, standing there on a Boston sidewalk with his father beside him, something that might be the early shape of this is mine now.

Then his parents leave, and he's alone.

He explores. This is his coping mechanism, when things are uncomfortable or unfamiliar, he moves through them physically, maps them with his feet. He walks the neighborhood in the early mornings, his ankle in the lightweight brace, a pace that isn't quite a jog but isn't a stroll either, the particular rhythm of someone working back toward something. The West End has a texture he wasn't expecting, the brownstones, the tree-lined streets, the coffee shops that are open at 6 AM because this is the kind of neighborhood where people are up early. He finds a bakery. He finds a pharmacy. He finds a park with a path around it that is exactly 1.5 km that he knows because he walks it four times the first morning and then looks it up when he gets back.

Two weeks out from training camp, his physiotherapist, a wonderful woman named Diane who has the calm, businesslike manner of someone who has seen a lot of athletes and is impressed by none of their pain thresholds, signs him off for light skating. 

Light skating, she says, which means not speed drills, not edge work, not anything you're currently thinking of doing. She knows him well enough by now to specify.

He skates anyway. Not the things she told him not to, he's not an idiot, he's not going to blow his timeline before camp, but the other things, the slow purposeful laps, the wide gentle turns, the feeling of an edge under him again after months of ice-free existence. The Bears practice facility lets him use the secondary ice in off-hours. He goes at 6:30 AM and has the rink to himself and skates until his ankle tells him to stop, and the first morning it tells him to stop after about forty minutes, and the second morning it's fifty, and the third it's an hour and fifteen, and something starts to unclench in his chest.

He can do this. The ankle is going to be fine. He can do this.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Training camp starts on a Tuesday in September.

Shane is there forty-five minutes early. He is aware that this is excessive. He does it anyway, because he doesn't know where anything is really and he doesn't want to have to ask anyone where anything is, and it's better to figure out the locker rooms and the equipment room and the training areas in empty space than in the chaos of everyone arriving at once.

The cubby assigned to him has his name on it, nameplates already up: HOLLANDER in clean block letters, and seeing it there does something to him that he chooses not to think about at the moment. He changes into his practice gear and tapes his stick in the bench, the way he always does, his ritual, same sequence every time, and thinks about nothing except the sequence of it.

The other players arrive gradually. Shane has done his homework, he knows the roster, he knows the names, he's watched films, but films don't tell you what a room feels like, what the atmosphere and culture will be like. There's a certain specific social ecosystem to a hockey locker room, hierarchies and inside jokes and established dynamics, and Shane has never been particularly natural at reading those quickly. He's good at hockey. He is less good at the part where you walk into a room of people you don't know and become one of them.

He sits at his stall and reads the room without being obvious about it, a skill he's been practicing since primary school. The veterans have a different quality of ease; they know where they are, they own the space in a way that takes time to earn. The other rookies have varying flavors of anxiety. A kid called Ashworth from Florida is talking very loudly about something that happened at preseason orientation, performing confidence at a volume that makes Shane suspect he's as nervous as everyone else. A Finnish defenseman whose name Shane hasn't caught yet is sitting very quietly with his hands between his knees and staring at his skates.

And then Ilya Rozanov walks in.

Shane is not, don’t get it twisted, he wasn't waiting for this. He's been not-waiting for it for forty-five minutes, which is also not a thing he's going to think about. But Rozanov walks in with his equipment bag and that walk of his, this particular gait that occupies space differently than most people, and he stops just inside the door and surveys the room with the same unhurried confidence Shane clocked at the draft.

Their eyes meet for approximately one second.

Rozanov's expression doesn't change, exactly, but something in it does, a slight brightening, something that might be recognition. He continues to his stall, which is two down from Shane's. He unpacks unmethodically, seriously Shane had to physically pry his eyes away before he could do something stupid like take over for Rozanov. He doesn’t, so Shane returns his attention to his own stall and spends a minute of intense focus on making sure his stick is leaning at the correct angle against the wall.

Practice, when it happens, is a lot.

Shane is good. He knows he's good; false modesty is a waste of everyone's time. Though he would never, ever verbalise this thought. He thinks he’s good, but saying it to another living soul is an experience Shane will never wish to happen upon him. But there is being good and then there is this, this crucible of professional-level competition at speed, and the ankle is fine, it's fine, it holds, Diane is going to be very pleased with him, but his brain is doing ten things at once, reading the ice and the new systems and the new line combinations and the way Coach LeClaire runs a practice, and by the end of it he is exhausted in the way that has nothing to do with physical fatigue.

He also cannot stop watching Rozanov skate.

He doesn't want to watch Rozanov skate. This is not a choice he makes. But Rozanov is on the second line and Shane is on the third and their paths cross repeatedly during practice, and every time they do, Shane's eyes find him like a compass finding north, which is irritating, because he came here to compete with Rozanov and you cannot compete with someone your eyes are constantly involuntarily following around the ice.

In his defense, Rozanov is exceptional. Shane already knew this from the films, but film is one thing and watching it live is another, especially when you are playing with him instead of against him. He's fast in a way that looks effortless, that deceptive stride where the speed doesn't seem to require as much work as it does, and his hands are every bit as good as advertised, and there's an anticipatory intelligence to his game that Shane, somewhat unwillingly, recognises. Rozanov reads the ice the way Shane reads the ice. He knows where the puck is going to be before it's there.

This is the most frustrating thing about him.

After practice, in the locker room, Rozanov is in the middle of a story about something involving a car and a navigation system and what Shane gathers is a diner somewhere outside Boston, and three or four of the other guys are laughing. Shane changes out of his gear and listens to this from two stalls over without looking up, and thinks: he makes it look easy. The room thing. He walked in here and within six hours he's making people laugh in the locker room. Shane doesn't know whether to be annoyed by this or not.

He's still deciding when Rozanov appears beside him, because apparently Rozanov does not wait for decisions to be made.

"Hollander," he says.

Shane looks up. Rozanov is standing there in his practice undershirt, hair pushed back and damp, he looks… stupid.

"Yeah," says Shane, ignoring the way Rozanov’s breathing is way too close to him.

"I saw," Rozanov says, with the slight formal quality his English gets sometimes, like he's being careful with word choice, "you have a schedule. In your phone. I saw it when you were checking time after skating drills."

Shane stares at him. "I—what?"

"It was very detailed," Rozanov says. "Color-coded, yes?"

"I—sorry, you were looking at my phone?"

"Was not on purpose." Rozanov's expression is perfectly neutral in a way that Shane suspects means he's being lied to. "These things happen. Can I see Excel sheet?"

Shane's first instinct is to tell him no and to say so with some firmness. What happens instead, involuntarily, is that he laughs. It just, comes out. Because it's such a strange thing to say, can I see Excel sheet, with his fucking deadpan delivery, and the color-coded schedule really is an Excel sheet, Shane made it at 11 PM weeks ago, and something about being seen like that is so unexpected that his defenses just misfire.

Rozanov's expression shifts. He looks pleased in a way he doesn't seem to be trying to hide.

"Come join for coffee sometime," he says. "Or tea, if you prefer." This lands almost like an afterthought but doesn't feel like one.

Shane looks at him for a second. His first instinct, the one that lives deep in the part of his brain that runs on pure self-protective reflex, says no thank you, I came here to compete, I didn't come here to make friends with the number one draft pick. But his second instinct says something less coherent and more inconvenient, which is roughly I can't actually think of a reason not to. He keeps calling Rozanov Rozanov in his head, he realises. Everyone else has become nicknames by now, Marly and Connie and the Finnish defenseman whose last name is Eskola but prefers to be called Kola, but Rozanov is still Rozanov, held at a particularly careful distance.

"Maybe," Shane says, which is not the same as no, and they both know it.

"I will take maybe," says Rozanov, and goes back to his stall, and Shane spends the rest of the locker room time staring at his skates and thinking about what just happened, which is: nothing. Nothing happened. He laughed at a joke. He said maybe to coffee. These are normal human things that don't require further analysis.

He analyses them anyway, on the drive back to his apartment, in the exhausting way his brain does things that don't require analysis.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The first few weeks of camp are like this: long days on the ice, longer days in his head. He learns the systems. He earns LeClaire's trust in increments, a good cycle here, a defensive read there, the accumulated small currency of proving himself reliable. His ankle holds. He can feel it getting stronger daily, the return of the full push he couldn't access for weeks, the edge work coming back like a language he'd temporarily forgotten. By the end of the second week he's doing things in practice that he couldn't do at the draft, and he catches LeClaire watching him with a particular evaluative attention that he allows himself one small moment of satisfaction about.

He and Rozanov circle each other. This is the word for it, circle, they are not in each other's orbit in any intentional way, and yet they keep ending up proximate. The same corner of the weight room. Adjacent spots in the lunch queue at the facility. Shane's bench at the end of a particularly brutal skating drill, where Rozanov sits down next to him uninvited with a Gatorade and says nothing, just drinks it, and somehow this non-conversation is not uncomfortable.

It's the non-discomfort that gets to him. Shane is not good at new people. He's fine at the performance of being good at new people, he can hold a conversation, he can do the small talk, he can be present in a group without visibly drowning in the social logistics of it, but it costs him something, always, this small expenditure of energy that accumulates. With Rozanov, there's no expenditure. He can't explain it. He doesn't like that he can't explain it.

Twelve days into camp, on a Friday afternoon, Rozanov appears in the hallway outside the locker room where Shane is doing his post-practice tape job and says, "Tomorrow there is no practice."

"I know," Shane says.

"Do you have plans?"

Shane looks up at him. Rozanov is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed in the way he stands when he's waiting for something, and his expression has that quality it gets sometimes, surface casual, something underneath it paying closer attention.
Shane does not have plans. Shane's plans for his first free day in Boston consist of going to the farmer's market he found on Google Maps and then probably coming back to the apartment and watching film and rearranging the home gym layout he's been thinking about. These are excellent plans. They are his plans.

"Not really," he says.

"Good," says Rozanov. "I'll pick you up at ten."

"I didn't—"

"Text me your address." As soon as he said it, he’s on his heels, ready to leave.

“Wait, Roz—”

“What?”

“I, um, I don’t have your number.”

Rozanov smiles at him as he makes his way back to where Shane is. Shane didn’t know why he stopped him, he didn’t want to spend his free day with Rozanov of all people. He should have let him leave, without any means of communication, therefore, this hang out that Shane doesn’t want to happen, can’t happen. 

So why the fuck did he stop Rozanov?

“Phone,” He looked at Shane. When Shane just stared at him, he tried again. “You have phone, yes? Give.”

And give he did. Shane watched Rozanov or no, Ilya (the asshole named himself Ilya with a smiley face) and texted himself: hello number 1 draft pick is me shane hollander number whatever draft pick i dont remember not important

It’s not funny, not really. But Shane still laughed, and Rozanov looked at him like he had won the Stanley Cup, his grin seemingly bigger than his ego.

And he's gone, back into the locker room, and Shane is standing in the hallway with tape on his hands and no clear idea of how that happened.

He texts the address.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He tells himself, four separate times in the morning, that this is a normal thing. Two teammates hanging out on a day off. There's nothing to read into it. People do this. He does this, he has done this, with teammates, in juniors, and it's normal and fine and he is going to stop rechecking his phone to see if there are new messages, because there are no new messages, Rozanov said ten o'clock and it is 9:47 and everything is fine.

He is ready at 9:55 and makes himself wait until 9:59 to go downstairs, which is a completely normal thing to do.

Rozanov is already parked outside in a car that Shane immediately identifies as his death bed, something too low in the ground, probably European. He's in the driver's seat with sunglasses on and something playing quietly on the radio and he doesn't wave, just nods once when Shane approaches, like Shane's arrival was a foregone conclusion.

"Where are we going?" Shane asks, getting in.

"Coffee first," says Rozanov.

"I already had coffee."

"Okay. Coffee for me, something else for you," says Rozanov, and pulls out of the space with the confident ease of someone who has either completely mastered Boston driving or has no idea how bad Boston driving is going to get and hasn't been there yet. Shane puts on his seatbelt.

The coffee place is not Starbucks. It's a small independent shop about eight blocks from TD Garden, tucked between a dry cleaner and what appears to be a very small art gallery, with a hand-lettered sign and the particular smell of a place that takes itself seriously. Shane notices that Rozanov navigates directly to it without looking anything up, which means he's been here before.

"How did you find this?" Shane asks, while they wait for their drinks.

"Because Starbucks," Rozanov says, "spelled my name five different ways. None of them right."

"That seems—"

"Ilf," Rozanov says. "One person wrote Ilf. I do not know where f comes from. My name does not have an f. ILF."

Shane starts laughing. He can't help it, it's the delivery, the controlled outrage of it, the way Rozanov's hands illustrate the absent f with a kind of betrayed precision. Rozanov watches him laugh with something that might be satisfaction.

"So then," Rozanov continues, not stopping, "they write Ilya but with y and a switched, so Ilya is now Iyla, which is not a name, this is nothing—"

"That's the worst one—"

"And the third time they write Eel," Rozanov says. "Like the fish. Do I look like fucking fish? Am too hot to be sushi material.”

"Oh my God, stop," Shane says, pressing a hand to his face, laughing so hard his face must be beet red.

"I did not stop going there," Rozanov says. "I wanted to see how bad it could get. The fifth time they wrote Earl. I am not a tea, sorry I don’t drink that shit."

Shane is laughing hard enough that the barista gives him a look. He gets it together while their drinks are being made, chai latte for Shane, which Rozanov ordered without asking, maybe he noticed that Shane’s eye keeps drifting to it on the menu but could not decide fast enough to order it, and a large iced americano for Rozanov with what the barista understands to be an amount of white chocolate sauce that Shane privately considers alarming, and they take their cups to a small table by the window.

“How did you know I liked Chai?”

Rozanov shrugs. “You always get chai at the cafe in the arena."

"You remembered my order," Shane says.

“Am not just pretty face, Hollander. I pay attention to my teammates, is good quality to have, yes?”

"I—yeah." Shane wraps his hands around the cup. He doesn’t fully know which statement he was agreeing to, maybe all of it. But he can’t help but think that it's strange to be noticed like that, in that low-stakes way. It's not a big thing. "Thanks."

Rozanov shrugs, like it's nothing, and tips his head toward the window. "Tell me what you think of Boston so far. Honestly."

Shane considers the question. "It's bigger than I expected," he says. "More vertical. And it's louder than Ottawa."

"Everything is louder than Ottawa," says Rozanov.

"How much of Ottawa have you seen?"

"None. But this seems like safe assumption."

Shane makes a sound that is approximately a laugh and isn't going to commit to being more than that.

They stay at the coffee shop for over an hour. This surprises him, he'd set himself a vague internal limit of thirty to forty minutes, enough to be polite, enough to satisfy whatever obligation his maybe had created, and then they'd go their separate ways. Instead he's still there at 11:15, and Rozanov is telling him about the apartment the Bears set him up in (enormous, unfurnished, in the Seaport District: "It echoes," Rozanov says, with great seriousness. "I say one thing and it comes back to me three times. I feel like I'm in cave.") and Shane is telling him about the farmer's market, he'd mentioned it incidentally, unplanned, and Rozanov looks interested in the farmer's market, genuinely interested, in a way that makes Shane circle back to things he assumed about Rozanov that are already proving unreliable.

He'd thought Rozanov would want to party. This is the thing about number-one picks, about guys with that much natural talent and that much attention, they have a lifestyle that goes with it, and Shane had assumed Rozanov's lifestyle from a careful distance in the first weeks of camp: yes, he went out, yes there was a group of them, yes there was at minimum one night Shane was fairly certain involved a bar in Cambridge. But he'd also come to practice the next morning without evidence of it, clear-eyed and prepared, and Shane had revised his assumptions slightly, and then revised them further over the course of this coffee shop hour, because Rozanov is funny. Not performed-funny, not the locker room performance he can do when he wants to, but actually funny in a way that requires intelligence and specificity, and he's interested in things, and he has the particular quality of attention of someone who is listening rather than waiting to speak. Shane does not give this quality to many people.

He gives it to Rozanov right now, without meaning to.

They go to brunch. This is Rozanov's suggestion, and Shane starts to give his usual disclaimer: I should mention, my diet is kind of specific, I don't want to make it difficult, but Rozanov says, "I know a place," and the place he knows is a small restaurant in the West End, actually two blocks from Shane's apartment, that has an entire section of the menu that is athlete-friendly in the way Shane needs. Shane looks at the menu and then looks at Rozanov.

"How did you know about my diet?" he asks.

Rozanov picks up his water glass. "You don't go to the team lunches or dinners."

"I—" Shane pauses. "I didn't think anyone noticed."

"I noticed," Rozanov says, simply.

Shane looks at the menu again to give his face a moment to do whatever it's doing. He has a complicated relationship with the food thing, it's not something he advertises, it's not something he's entirely comfortable explaining, because most people's response to it falls into one of two camps: either they dismiss it (you're young, you can eat whatever, stop being so rigid) or they make it a bigger deal than it needs to be (oh wow, that's really intense, is that even healthy). Neither is useful. He's figured out over years how to navigate around it, to decline invites and eat before and manage the social overhead of it, but it costs him something every time, this small accumulation of feeling like his needs make him difficult.

"Does it bother you?" he asks Rozanov. "Like, is it annoying, the diet thing?"

Rozanov looks at him with an expression that takes a moment to parse. "Why would it bother me?"

"Most people think it's—"

"Most people are idiots about food," Rozanov says. He doesn't say it harshly, just factually, in the way he says things that he's already decided are true. "You know what works for your body. This is not complicated."

Shane looks at his menu. His chest does something.

"My line mates in juniors used to give me shit about it," he says, before he decides whether to say this.

"They’re stupid and untalented, they’re not in the NHL, yes?" Rozanov says. 

“No, I don’t think any of them got drafted.”

Rozanov smirks. “See, am right. Listen to me, not them.” Then, picking up his own menu,

"What's good here?"

Shane points to the grain bowl. “I’m getting this one.” Rozanov studies it.

"Can I try yours? I will get grain bowl too." Rozanov asks.

"You—yeah, sure."

Rozanov orders a different flavour of the grain bowl. He also orders a separate plate of eggs and a side of toast because he is a large hockey player and one grain bowl is not going to cut it, but he ordered the grain bowl, and when it arrives he tries it, along with a spoonful of Shane’s, with the particular expression of someone calibrating in real-time and then says, with sincerity, "Oh, is good. I thought it would taste like effort."

"It tastes like effort," Shane says.

"It does a little," Rozanov agrees. "But also like lemon and—"

"Tahini."

"Tahini." He tries the word. "Okay. This is acceptable." 

He eats. They eat. The conversation covers hockey and Boston geography and Rozanov's ongoing navigation system situation and at some point Shane starts talking about the practice systems and Rozanov engages with genuine technical interest, and they talk about hockey, like actually talk about it, not just the social surface of it but the real material, the reads and the decisions and the things they see on the ice and Shane doesn't do this. He doesn't do this with people his age. Usually when he starts talking about hockey in a specific way he can see the other person's eyes glaze with polite tolerance, but Rozanov argues with him about a particular breakout structure that LeClaire runs, and it's not the argument itself that matters, it's the quality of attention.

It's 2 PM when they leave.

"Video games," Rozanov says, on the sidewalk.

"What?"

"My apartment. I have a PS3. Just got in mail."

"I—" Shane looks at him. At the certainty of him, standing on the sidewalk in the September Boston sun, like there's an obvious next chapter to this and he's just naming it. "I should probably—"

"You don't have plans," Rozanov says. "You said."

Shane did say that. He said it at 9:59 AM and it was true then and it is still true now, which means he has no argument, which means he ends up in Rozanov's car again, heading to the Seaport.

The apartment does echo. Shane stands in the entryway and hears himself, faintly, and Rozanov says, "See," with a kind of vindicated satisfaction, and Shane says, "Have you looked into furniture," and Rozanov says he has but he hasn't made any decisions, which turns out to be a topic with more substance than Shane anticipated, because Rozanov's process for furniture is apparently to sit with choices for extended periods of time before committing, which is actually a more thoughtful approach than Shane expected.

They play video games for four hours.

Shane doesn't lose gracefully. This is one of his less presentable qualities, he doesn't lose gracefully at anything, hockey or board games or apparently PS3 racing games against a Russian center with suspiciously good reflexes. He loses the first race and demands an immediate rematch. He loses the rematch and demands another. Rozanov wins four in a row before Shane wins one, and the satisfaction of winning one is disproportionate and fully felt, and Rozanov says, "There it is," at Shane's expression, and Shane says, "Shut up," and they go again.

At some point, somewhere between 6 and 7 PM, they look up and realise neither of them has eaten dinner.

"We should eat," Rozanov says.

"Yeah," Shane says.

Neither of them moves. The game is paused on the screen. Shane is sitting on the floor with his back against Rozanov's couch, actual furniture, a good couch, one of the few things that's already been acquired, and Rozanov is on the couch, and the apartment is starting to get dark at the edges of the room.

And it’s good. It's good. It is a very specific and unguarded kind of good that he's not sure he's felt before, or not like this, not with a person he's known for an accumulation of less than two months. There's something about the evening, the loose unstructured ease of it, the way neither of them has been performing anything, that feels like finding something without having looked for it.

"It's getting late, I should go," Shane says, without moving.

"Probably," says Rozanov.

A pause.

Shane stands up. His ankle is fine, he'd forgotten about it entirely, which he takes as a data point. He gets his jacket and Rozanov calls him a cab, and they stand in the echoing apartment entryway while they wait, and Rozanov says, "You're faster on the right edge than you were in the first week. Whatever your physio is doing."

"Oh," says Shane. "Thanks. She'll be pleased to hear that."

"Also, your backhand is improving. LeClaire hasn't noticed yet but he will."

Shane looks at him. "You've been watching my backhand?"

"I watch everyone," Rozanov says as he shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, which is probably true and also not entirely an answer.

The cab notification comes through. Shane pockets his phone.

"See you," he says.

"Yes," says Rozanov.

In the cab, on the way back to his apartment, Shane sits with his jacket in his lap and looks out the window at the Boston streets, lit amber under the streetlights, and feels something moving in his chest that he doesn't immediately have a name for. It's not happy, exactly, though it contains happiness. It's larger than happy. It's the feeling of a day that went differently than he planned and better than he planned, and the specific, slightly vertiginous awareness of someone new having appeared in the landscape of his life.

He puts his face in his jacket briefly.

He thinks: he paid for everything. He didn't ask, he just did. He said I invited you. He tried the grain bowl. He noticed my backhand.

He thinks: this is probably just teammates. Two rookies in a new city, it's practical, it's normal.

He thinks about their conversations, about Rozanov's hands illustrating the absent f from Ilf, about the way the apartment echoes, about four hours of video games without either of them suggesting stopping.

He thinks: oh no.

He goes to bed.

He lies there with the ceiling above him and the Boston sounds coming through the window, different sounds than Ottawa, lower frequency, the city's different rhythm, and thinks, one more time, about the day, and specifically about the part of his brain that is currently calling it something that he is firmly telling it not to call it, because it is not, it was not, it was two teammates having a day off.

Rozanov paid for everything because it was his idea. He found a restaurant that worked with Shane's diet without being asked. He remembered the chai latte. He sat on the floor with Shane for four hours and made him laugh until his face hurt.

Shane stares at the ceiling.

It felt like a date.

His face is extremely warm. He puts both hands over it.

He tells himself very firmly that Rozanov definitely did not think it was a date, that Rozanov is a sociable person in a new city who wanted company, that the I invited you was just etiquette, that none of this means anything specific, that his entire reading of the day is being distorted by his, by whatever this is, this feeling he's been not-examining since approximately the first week of training camp.

He moves his hands. He looks at the ceiling again.

He picks up his phone and texts:

Shane is smiling at his phone in a way that he cannot make himself stop. He texts back a normal number of words and puts the phone down and puts it face-down and then picks it up and puts it face-up again and then stares at the ceiling.

He opens his notes app. He types:

Am I reading too into this? I've never felt this happy before. I think you might be someone that will either make me the happiest or break my heart into pieces. I find myself not caring though, I just want to get to know you more and be with you more.

He closes the note without sending it anywhere.

He closes his eyes.

Outside, Boston moves through its night with the indifferent continuity of a city that doesn't know anything new has just started. Shane lies in the dark and breathes carefully through his nose, and thinks about a day that went differently than planned, and does not sleep for a while.