Chapter Text
The yoga mat was blue. Not the blue Shane had ordered, he'd ordered graphite, which was the color on the screen when he'd added it to the cart, but what arrived was this particular blue, a sort of deep slate that read as blue in any natural light, and he'd kept it because returning things was a different kind of friction than just adjusting. He had adjusted. The mat was blue. He knew where it was.
He knew where everything was.
He knew his reading glasses were on the left side of the bathroom counter, which was where they always were, because Ilya had started leaving them there two years ago after Shane kept losing them and Ilya had, without announcement, designated a location. He knew the ginger ale was on the second shelf of the refrigerator, three cans, behind the Greek yogurt. He knew the good knife was in the third drawer because the second drawer stuck in cold weather and it was April in Ottawa and still cold enough that the second drawer stuck. He knew Ilya was in the kitchen because he could hear him, the specific sound of Ilya moving through the kitchen in the morning - unhurried, slightly heavier on the left foot, the particular ceramic sound of his coffee mug against the counter.
Shane unrolled the mat in the space between the couch and the television and stood on it in his socks for a moment, orienting. 6:04am. Tuesday.
He could feel Ilya not watching him from the doorway.
This was a specific skill Ilya had developed over (Shane counted backward without meaning to) approximately four years. Before that, in the early years, Ilya had watched openly, the way he watched most things: direct, undefended, occasionally saying something that was either a comment or a question and sometimes both. "You do this every week." (Observation.) "Does it work." (Genuine inquiry.) "Your downward dog looks like a man who has been told what downward dog is but has never personally met a dog." (That one was commentary, delivered without particular cruelty, which was Ilya's register for teasing, dry and not unkind and absolutely accurate.) Shane had, in those early years, found the watching distracting in a way he couldn't fully articulate. It wasn't that he needed privacy for the yoga. It was that being watched changed what the yoga was. The Tuesday yoga existed to manage certain inputs and regulate certain outputs and being observed altered the system.
He hadn't said any of this. He had probably done something with his posture or his face that communicated it, because at some point (he couldn't identify when), Ilya had stopped watching from the doorway and started watching from the kitchen instead. Which was: still watching. Shane was aware of this. But the kitchen was far enough away, and the angle was such that Shane's back was mostly to it, and the quality of observation from the kitchen was different - ambient rather than focused, the way you're aware of a window even when you're not looking at it.
He came into warrior one and stayed there. His right knee was stacked correctly over his right ankle. His hips were relatively square. The sun had not yet cleared the top of the neighbor's roof and the room was in the gray particular light of early April morning, which Shane did not dislike. He disliked many things about the sensory texture of his days but not this, the pre-sun light, the specific quality of the quiet. The house had a Tuesday morning sound that was different from other mornings. He didn't know why. He hadn't investigated. Some things he left alone.
From the kitchen: the sound of Ilya's mug on the counter again. The creak of the third floorboard from the left as Ilya shifted weight. Shane knew that creak. He knew which board and he knew Ilya's specific relationship to it - Ilya never tried to avoid it, had never, in all the years of living here, learned to step around it. Shane had pointed this out once, not as a complaint, just as an observation, and Ilya had said, "I know where it is," and Shane had said, "then you could avoid it," and Ilya had said, "yes," and continued stepping on it indefinitely. It wasn't carelessness. Shane had arrived at the conclusion that it was something more like contentment. The creak meant he was in the kitchen of his house in the morning, and he did not need to step around the evidence of that.
Shane moved through the sequence. He knew it without thinking. Warrior two. Triangle. The balance poses, which he was not good at and which was the point, not to be good at them but to work the specific system that needed working. He wobbled on tree and found the wall with his eyes, fixed on a point above the television, steadied. The room was getting lighter by degrees.
He was aware, at 6:22, of Ilya coming to the doorway.
He didn't turn around. He finished the balance sequence, moved into the seated poses, the forward folds that he was genuinely good at because he was genuinely inflexible in a specific direction and had worked it down over years until he could fold in half with some conviction. He heard Ilya settle against the doorframe, not sitting; Ilya never sat in the doorway, he leaned, the slight sound of his shoulder against the wood. Coffee mug. The creak of the floorboard as he shifted. Then quiet.
Shane folded into the final stretch, forehead toward his shins, and thought about nothing in particular.
This was not accurate. He thought about: the Senators game tape he needed to review, the article on neutral zone play that was maybe sixty percent finished and that he kept meaning to return to and kept not returning to, the specific question of whether they were out of oat milk (he thought yes, he was probably eighty percent confident yes), a response he needed to draft to the youth hockey foundation about their October schedule, whether the headache that had started around his right eye on Saturday was screen time or something else (screen time, almost certainly; he'd adjusted the monitor brightness and it had helped somewhat).
There had also been the visual thing, three times in the past two weeks: a shimmer at the outer right edge of his field, four or five seconds each time, the image going slightly wrong the way a monitor went wrong when the refresh rate stuttered, and then correcting itself. He had adjusted the monitor's color temperature and had ordered blue-light-blocking lenses for the frames he kept in the desk drawer. It had helped, approximately. He had logged it and moved on, which was the protocol, which was what you did with a problem that had an available explanation and whose available explanation was holding.
He thought about Ilya, in a general ambient way, the way you thought about a room you're in.
He sat up. 6:44am.
"Mug is on the counter," Ilya said.
Shane didn't turn around yet. He sat cross-legged on the mat for a moment in what passed, for him, as sitting without a specific purpose, a kind of directed nothing, which he was not naturally good at and which the Tuesday yoga existed partly to practice. He could hear the radiator. He could hear the particular sound of the neighborhood in early morning, the distant specific sounds of other people's routines, which he found acceptable at this distance.
He rolled up the mat. He put it in the corner, which was the corner, which was where it always went.
Ilya had already moved back to the kitchen by the time Shane came in. He was at the counter, not doing anything in particular, just standing with his coffee in the way that Ilya stood - weight on his left foot, the right heel slightly raised, which Shane had once theorized was a skating habit and Ilya had said, "maybe," with the tone of someone who had not thought about it and didn't need to. He looked up when Shane came in, not in the way of someone who hadn't been watching but in the way of someone who was acknowledging the transition between one space and another. His hair was still flat on one side from sleep. He was wearing the old Raiders practice shirt with the neck stretched out that he'd had for something like a million years and that Shane had at several points considered throwing away and never had.
The mug was on the counter. It had ginger ale in it instead of coffee, which was not a mug thing, but Ilya had given up pointing this out approximately two years ago. Shane picked up the mug. He drank some ginger ale. He leaned against the counter next to Ilya, not touching, the six-inch gap between their arms that was the default setting.
"The tape," Ilya said. Not a question.
"This afternoon."
"I have physio at two."
"I know." Shane did know. He had this information.
Ilya's shoulder was a centimeter from his now. He'd moved, slightly, in the way he sometimes did, incrementally closer until the gap was different. Shane was aware of this the way he was aware of the radiator and the neighbor's car starting three houses down and the specific weight of the mug in his hand. He leaned, slightly, into the warmth of Ilya's arm.
Ilya did not react to this. He drank his coffee. The kitchen was getting lighter.
"Do we have oat milk?" Shane said.
Ilya considered this. "I think no."
"I thought no."
"There is regular milk."
"I know there's regular milk."
"The milk is also liquid," Ilya said, which was not helpful and was possibly the point, and Shane made a sound that was not quite a sigh and was not quite anything, and Ilya's coffee mug came to rest against the counter with the specific sound Shane knew, and then Ilya's hand found the back of Shane's neck.
Not moving. Just there. Warm, the specific temperature of Ilya's palm against the back of his neck, the particular weight of it, which Shane could have described in considerable detail if asked because he had extensive data on this specific sensation accumulated over (he ran the number without meaning to) eight years this July. Nearly eight years. More than a third of his life. Ilya's hand on the back of his neck in the morning was a fact of the universe in the same category as the mat in the corner and the reading glasses on the counter and the ginger ale cold in the refrigerator, a fact that predated and postdated most things Shane could name.
He stood in it for a moment. The kitchen light.
"I'll get oat milk," Ilya said.
"You don't have to. I can—"
"Have to go past the store anyway."
"You don't go past that store."
"Will go past the store." The hand moved away. Ilya picked up his coffee. He was looking at something outside the kitchen window, the backyard in its early April state, which was wet and brown and would eventually be something else. He had a specific expression Shane had catalogued over years and returned to frequently: the expression of someone who is not thinking about the thing in front of him but is, temporarily, at ease. Not happy in a way that announced itself. Just... at ease. Present in the kitchen of his house in the morning with his coffee and his stretched-out shirt, watching the backyard.
Shane had loved him for a very long time.
He was aware of this the way he was aware of most large and structural facts about his life, without drama and not constant, but as a kind of ongoing background reading, available when he checked. He had been seventeen the first time he'd met Ilya, at World Juniors in Regina, and he'd lost the game and also something else, some equilibrium he hadn't known he had, and he'd spent a subsequent number of years figuring out what that meant. He had figured it out. He had done something about it, eventually. He had spent a considerable amount of time being afraid of the doing something about it and then had done it anyway, and here was the kitchen with the morning in it, here was Ilya watching the backyard, here were the reading glasses on the bathroom counter and the ginger ale on the second shelf and the creak of the third floorboard from the left.
"I'm making the pasta thing tonight," Shane said. Not a question.
"You made it last week."
"I want to make it again."
Ilya's expression shifted, very slightly, toward something dryer. "It takes forty-five minutes."
"I know how long it takes."
"I'm just — yes. Fine. The pasta thing." He turned away from the window and looked at Shane, the direct uncomplicated look that Ilya had always had and that Shane had spent a long time learning to receive without looking away. "Do you want to eat early or can I—"
"You can finish your thing by six."
"I don't have a thing."
"You were going to watch the Oilers game."
"Can watch recap later."
"You can watch it. I don't start the pasta until six-fifteen anyway."
Ilya looked at him for a moment. Something in the look that Shane had gotten good at reading over years, not calculation, more like a kind of attentiveness, the specific attention Ilya paid when he was deciding whether to say a thing. He decided not to say whatever it was. He nodded, once. He finished his coffee.
"I'll be at the rink by eight," he said.
"I know."
"Don't forget the thing with Farah."
"I'm not going to forget the thing with Farah." He had, in fact, already forgotten the thing with Farah, and now remembered it, and took out his phone and looked at it: 10am, Farah, phone call, contract extension timeline. He had it. He'd had it the whole time. He put the phone away. "I have it."
Ilya made a sound that was not quite a laugh and was not quite nothing. He put his mug in the sink. He passed Shane on his way out of the kitchen and his hand landed, briefly, on Shane's shoulder, not the slow deliberate touch from before, just contact, the ordinary traffic of two people sharing a kitchen, and then he was gone down the hall toward the bedroom to find his gear.
Shane stood in the kitchen alone. He drank his ginger ale.
The light was fully up now, the April morning coming through the kitchen window at the low angle it came from in April, and the house had the sound it had on Tuesday mornings, which he couldn't explain and didn't need to. He could hear Ilya in the bedroom, the sequence of sounds that was Ilya locating his equipment bag, which involved at least one drawer opened and closed and the sound of Ilya's skates against each other, which was a sound Shane knew the way he knew the creak of the third floorboard.
He should review the tape. He should draft the foundation response. He should figure out the neutral zone article, the part in the third section that wasn't resolving, the argument he was trying to make about pressure and momentum that kept sliding away from him when he tried to pin it down. He'd had that problem for about ten days now, the sliding-away quality, the sense of reaching for something and finding the hand slightly too slow. He'd attributed it to the article being difficult, which some articles were. He'd come back to it.
He put his mug in the sink next to Ilya's coffee mug. He went to get the reading glasses from the bathroom counter, where they always were, and he put them on, and went to sit at his desk, and opened the tape.
Outside, a bird was making a sound in the backyard. Something Shane didn't know the name of. He could hear Ilya pulling the front door shut behind him, gone to the rink, the Oilers game to watch later, the store for oat milk on the way back, and the house was his for the morning, and everything was where it was.
The headache, when it came at 8:43am, started in the same place it had been starting for three weeks now, a specific point just above and behind his right eye. He adjusted the monitor brightness. He made a note. He returned to the tape.