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By six o’clock, Shane had convinced himself that the problem was the cheese.
There was too much of it, probably … or not enough … or it was the wrong kind. One of the wedges smelled assertive in a way he did not trust, and another was faintly damp, which seemed biologically suspicious. He stood at the kitchen island with his hands braced on either side of the board and tried to look at it like a normal person, as if normal people regularly entered into ethical disputes with dairy and deli meats. He worried the crackers had gone soft at the edges because he had opened them too early.
Ilya appeared in the doorway with Mika asleep against his shoulder, one broad hand spread over the ridiculous smallness of her back. She had been fighting her nap for forty minutes with grim commitment, her tiny body arching away from sleep as though it personally insulted her. Ilya, who had faced down enforcers, hostile reporters, hockey fans, his own father, and Shane in a mood over crumbs in the bed, had finally defeated her by walking in slow circuits around the upstairs hall and muttering in Russian until she went limp with outrage.
She was now boneless against him, one cheek pressed to his shirt collar, mouth slack, fist tucked under her chin. Ilya looked smug in the exhausted, reverent way he only looked after successful baby negotiations.
Ilya glanced down at the board Shane had been fiddling with for the best part of an hour, then back at Shane, his expression caught somewhere between tenderness and open mischief.
“Is just food, Hollander. Calm the fuck down.”
“It looks wrong.”
Shane closed his eyes.
He heard Ilya’s soft laugh, felt it land somewhere between irritation and relief. It was almost absurd how efficiently Ilya could puncture him. Shane had spent the afternoon cleaning their home into a fragile lie, rearranging, checking and making lists he did not need. Ilya had spent the afternoon keeping their daughter alive, insulting her affectionately, and somehow looking relaxed while wearing spit-up on his shoulder.
“They are good people. They will not judge,” Ilya said.
Shane opened his eyes. “I know that.”
“You do not know that. Your face is all,” and he waved a hand around Shane’s face while blowing a raspberry.
“I just want it to go well,” Shane sighed and that quieted Ilya, who rarely let silence arrive without kicking at it first. His expression shifted, the mockery softening at the corners.
“I know,” Ilya said, placing a gentle kiss on Shane's forehead.
Mika made a small hiccuping sound against him, a delicate grunt of disapproval. Ilya adjusted his hand at once, smoothing his palm over her back again, and Shane’s ribcage hurt.
Parenthood had introduced whole new categories of pain that were not physical pain at all, just feelings arriving in places that did not have room for it. His chest was too small, his throat was too narrow, and his hands had become unreliable around anything tiny. Shane looked away because if he kept watching Ilya hold their daughter like that, with one hand steadying her overlarge head and his mouth shaped around something tender, Shane would have to either touch him, cry, or kiss him senseless, and none of those fitted into the schedule.
Shane had not realised how lonely they both were until Ilya had suggested inviting people over. That was the worst part, the delayed knowledge of it. For months, everything had been centered on their daughter; her feeds, weight, sleep, and her astonishing ability to produce laundry. Their world had shrunk gladly and brutally around her to something warm, dim, repetitive and milk-scented.
It had become the two of them passing each other in hallways at ugly hours, trading bottles, kisses and muttered updates about nappies, both of them raw with love and so tired they occasionally forgot words. Like actual words. Shane had once pointed at the kettle and called it the steam box, and Ilya had accepted it without comment.
Shane loved that world so much it frightened him at times; but somewhere inside it, he had missed them just being Shane and Ilya.
He knew others often thought of him as reserved, and maybe by their standards, he was. He did not like noise, crowds, overlapping conversations, or the strange public work of guessing which version of himself a room expected, but he did like people. Good people. Safe people. Company that did not feel like he was being examined. Ilya was better at it, at least from the outside. He liked a room with laughter in it, liked having people to provoke, feed and insult into fondness. Shane knew he liked the little performance of being unbearable until everyone was somehow enjoying themselves, and Shane wanted that for him, too. Wanted it for both of them, really.
But wanting people was not the same as knowing how to let them in. Shane thought that they had kept themselves private for so long that privacy had become a reflex, so that even after the worst of the public noise had receded, even after marriage, fatherhood and the slow construction of a life no one could take from them by looking at it, he still felt the old lock in his body. The old habit of closing doors. The old calculation of who knew what, who could be trusted with which version of them, how much tenderness was safe to leave visible on the coffee table next to coasters no one ever used. Tonight felt like trying to undo that habit without making a performance of it, like opening the door and hoping, absurdly, that nothing precious got damaged by being seen.
Wyatt mattered because he belonged to Ilya’s team, or their team, though Shane still felt like a transplant into the Centaurs; a careful import, welcomed kindly but not yet fully rooted. Shane knew the team loved Ilya with the resigned devotion of men who had survived years of being mocked, defended, captained, bullied and loved by him. They knew him as a player, a leader, a menace as badly behaved with expensive taste and a mouth that needed more media training than any one organisation could reasonably provide.
Shane wanted them to see him like this. Not because Ilya had anything to prove and Shane would have bitten through his own tongue before admitting such a thought aloud, but because this was Ilya, too. The man who could make a rookie cry and then make sure he had eaten properly. The man who chirped goalies, hoarded black shirts, hated complicated forms, made filthy jokes in two languages, and had learned the exact pressure needed to settle both his husband and his daughter. Shane wanted someone from that bright, loud, masculine, sweaty part of their life to come into their shared home and not find it strange. He wanted Wyatt to see Ilya as a father and not make a thing of it. He wanted to be a family where someone else could see.
Just after seven, the doorbell rang, and Ilya, now without Mika, passed behind him on the way to the door, his fingers brushing Shane’s hip as he went.
Shane inhaled. “Please behave.”
“No.”
Then Ilya opened the door, and Wyatt came in carrying what appeared to be the entire contents of a board game shop. His face was barely visible over the stack. Blond hair, blue eyes, bright smile, and the expression of a man who believed, sincerely and incorrectly, that bringing twelve games to dinner was reasonable. Lisa followed with wine and the calm, long-suffering patience of someone who had already fought and lost several battles before arriving.
The evening came at Shane in fragments. Coats collected. Lisa’s cold cheek against his. Wyatt’s warm, full-bodied hug, given with the same unembarrassed commitment he appeared to bring to everything, including talking without obvious need for breath. Ilya taking the games from him and immediately looking offended by their weight. Lisa handing over the wine. Shane saying something about food and hearing his own voice come out too formal, too polished, too much like a man auditioning for the role of relaxed host.
Then Lisa smiled at him, “Your home is lovely,” she said, and the words slipped into him because she did not make them bigger than they needed to be.
Wyatt had already spotted the food, “Is this one of those fancy snack things?”
“Apparently,” Shane said, as if he had not spent the afternoon arranging salami into little folds because that was what grown-ups did when other grown-ups came over, despite still not knowing what the fuck charcuterie actually meant or why everyone had agreed to say it with a straight face.
Ilya leaned against the counter. “Is meat on expensive wood.”
Wyatt laughed and began loading a cracker with more sliced prosciutto and cheese than was structurally advisable.
Shane felt himself loosen by degrees. Wyatt ruining the board helped. Lisa asking about the photos on the bookshelf as if she genuinely wanted the answers, helped. The wine helped, too, obviously, because Shane was anxious, not stupid.
Ilya poured cabernet for himself, Wyatt and Lisa, then pinot for Shane.
Wyatt noticed, because goalies saw everything. Lisa noticed too, one eyebrow lifting with quiet interest. Ilya did not wait for the question. Shane saw the grin arrive first, sharp, filthy and delighted, and knew immediately that his husband had found a way to be both accurate and unforgivable.
“Red wine makes him slutty and sick.”
Wyatt made a delighted choking sound. Lisa pressed her lips together, which Shane respected less because her eyes were clearly laughing.
“It was one time,” Shane said, which was a mistake because it confirmed there was a story.
Ilya set the pinot in front of him with a quick kiss. “Light baby wine, solnyshko.”
Shane took it with dignity, by which he meant he took it without throwing a grape at his husband.
For the first twenty minutes, Shane could not tell whether the evening was working or whether everyone was simply being polite with unusual skill. Wyatt examined the house with cheerful curiosity, not nosiness, but a kind of open wonder that made Shane less defensive. Lisa asked about the cheeses. Ilya moved through the room with his usual loose ownership, topping up glasses, eating half the salami, and grilling Wyatt on his game choices.
The first was rejected almost immediately when Lisa lifted the rulebook and declared it thick enough to concuss a child. Others were dismissed for their overly complex world-building, excessive number of pieces, or the fact that Wyatt became visibly more excited the more impossible they sounded, which Shane did not trust as a selection method.
In the end, they settled on trivia, which Shane thought should have been safe. He was smart; he knew things. His mind stored details and arranged information into clean organisational units. Unfortunately, the game revealed that his knowledge had become frighteningly hockey-specific, as if every non-essential fact he had ever learned had been evicted to make room for penalty-kill formations and shooting percentages. He could remember the exact sound Ilya made when his knee was bothering him, the date of an away game in 2018, and the name of a mediocre backup goalie who had once played fourteen minutes against Montreal, but he could not identify a Renaissance painter under pressure. His brain, confronted with general knowledge, opened the wrong drawer, found nothing but stick tape and unresolved feelings, so quietly shut itself again.
Wyatt was worse, which helped and not ordinary-man-at-trivia worse, but seemingly operating under some private system of knowledge in which every question either connected to comic books, goal keeping, or something his sister had once told him in a parking lot. His wrong answers were not random; they had a strange structure. If it involved geography, he began with confidence and ended, thirty seconds later, somewhere near Gotham. If the question involved history, Wyatt somehow arrived at Adventure Time. Shane watched him make three separate mental turns in the space where most people would have simply said “I do not know”, and became convinced that Wyatt’s mind had never once travelled in a straight line unless a comic-book panel had drawn it there for him.
Ilya looked between them with sorrowful disgust.
“Canada’s schools failed you both.”
Lisa was frightening because she did not look like she was trying. Answers simply arrived from her, clean and correct, with the same calm precision Shane imagined she used when patients attempted to explain their own illnesses and injuries badly. Wyatt watched her with the wounded admiration of a man who had married up and fucking knew it. Shane had heard how he had gone into hospital with broken bones and somehow came out with a sling, a treatment plan and Lisa’s phone number. Shane was still not entirely sure whether that counted as romance or a failure of hospital policy, but Wyatt looked at her as if it had been the best discharge outcome in Canadian medical history.
Ilya was good too.
Shane could feel Wyatt’s and Lisa’s surprise at first, the little flicker every time Ilya answered something about arts, literature or science. It made Shane’s protective instincts rise, hot and immediate, though he knew they meant nothing by it, and that people often underestimated Ilya. They heard the accent when he was tired, the bluntness, the dirty jokes, the deliberate laziness around grammar when he did not feel like making himself easier. They saw the wolfish smirk, the performance of arrogance, and they missed the mind working fast underneath. Shane never missed it, and watching Ilya answer correctly, beautiful and smug, made something in Shane soften into private pride.
Shane noticed the room had slowly changed. The cushions had shifted out of their careful positions. The cheese wedges had been wrecked. Olives sat scattered in their little dish, tiny, oily and defeated. Wine glasses had migrated across the coffee table, and one of Mika’s muslin cloths, which Shane was certain he had removed from the room earlier, lay over the arm of the sofa, soft, pink and faintly ridiculous among the game boards. The house no longer looked like the version of itself he had prepared. It looked like people lived there. It looked like people had been allowed in.
Thank fuck.
Maybe that was why Shane finally let himself sit back properly, no longer hovering at the edge of the evening. His thigh rested against Ilya’s, and for a moment, he felt the old, stupid expectation that someone would notice. Not because they were doing anything remarkable. That was almost the point. Ilya’s knee was against his, and his fingers brushed Shane’s wrist when he reached for a card. His hand settled briefly on Shane’s thigh, warm, absent and married, the same way Lisa’s hand found the back of Wyatt’s neck when he groaned over a lost point, the same way Wyatt’s foot nudged hers under the table. Small touches. Nothing touches. The kind of contact that passed between couples without asking permission from the room.
And nobody cared.
Wyatt kept arguing with Lisa about an answer he had no hope of defending. Lisa kept winning with quiet brutality. Ilya kept touching Shane like Shane was his, not secretly, not defiantly, just ordinarily.
That was what made Shane’s chest ache. It was not exactly being seen, and not being ignored either, but something gentler than both. It was being allowed to exist in the same room as another couple without their marriage becoming the point of the evening. Just Ilya’s hand on his thigh. Just Lisa laughing at Wyatt. Just cards on the table, wine in the glasses, Mika’s muslin cloth on the sofa, and nobody asking Shane to make his happiness smaller.
The spleen question arrived after Wyatt had misidentified the capital of New Zealand as Middle-earth, in a way that made Lisa briefly reconsider the entire institution of marriage.
Ilya knew the answer, but not in English. Shane saw it immediately, the quick, bright certainty, then the flash of irritation as the word caught in the wrong part of his mouth. Ilya snapped his fingers twice and repeated selezyonka under his breath, which could have been the answer or a small, rapid-fire sneeze.
He reached for his phone, and Shane caught his wrist, laughing.
“You cannot Google the answer.”
Ilya looked offended. “Am not Googling answer, am Googling me.”
It made just enough stupid sense that the room allowed it.
“Spleen!” Ilya announced at last, triumphant.
Wyatt stared at him. “How the fuck did you know that?”
“Almost rupture it rookie year,” Ilya said.
Shane’s smile caught.
Ilya kept looking at the card, casual and careless, already past it, and the room moved on around him. Wyatt made a joke about spleens being optional; Lisa corrected him with enough alarming detail that Wyatt put one protective hand over his side. Ilya laughed again, easy and untroubled, but Shane stayed for a second in the small cold space the sentence had opened.
It was another injury Shane had not known about. An old pain folded into a season he had not been close enough to touch. It was ridiculous, probably, to feel grief over something that had happened years ago and healed without him, but there were still these gaps in their life, these rooms Shane had never stood in. Games he had not watched. Trainers’ tables he had not hovered beside. Pain Ilya had swallowed alone, or with other people around him. They had built a life together out of fragments first. Stolen nights, long stretches apart, places of wanting with nowhere safe to live. Of course, there were multitudes Shane had missed. Still, the knowledge moved through him with an old, familiar ache. Ilya seemed to feel it, and his hand found Shane’s and squeezed once, and Shane held on for a second longer than necessary.
Later, Wyatt drew a question about opera, and Ilya answered without hesitation, but Shane felt the change in him almost before the answer had left his mouth. It was small, just the quieting of his expression, the way some part of him seemed to step back from the room while the rest of him stayed exactly where he was. Lisa asked how he knew, and Ilya looked down at the board.
“My father liked opera.”
Shane’s hand moved to Ilya’s knee, a small touch he could offer without making the hurt bigger. Ilya covered Shane’s hand for one warm second, then let it go.
Wyatt picked up the next card, and Lisa looked into her wine. No one asked another question, and no one pressed the bruise to see how deep it went, and Shane felt the relief of that catch in his throat. The room had learned something and, gently, left it alone.
The baby monitor crackled just as Lisa was about to win, and the whole room went still with the absurd obedience of adults who had all, somehow, accepted the authority of one small person upstairs.
Mika made a thin, outraged sound.
Shane’s body moved before thought did, but Ilya was already standing and crossing to the kitchen with the quiet certainty of repetition. Bottle from the fridge, warmer on, muslin over his shoulder. There was no performance to it, no announcement and no fuss. It was just Ilya in his own kitchen, sock-footed, testing milk against his wrist while Wyatt watched him with a softened expression Shane felt more than saw.
Then Ilya disappeared upstairs, and a moment later his voice came through the monitor, low and warm.
“Malen'kaya diktatorsha.”
Mika answered with a furious little noise, as if objecting to the accuracy of the description, and Shane laughed under his breath and turned the monitor down a little, returning most of Ilya’s voice to the dark nursery.
“He called her a little dictator,” he said.
Wyatt smiled into his glass, and Lisa’s eyes stayed on the monitor for a second longer, soft in a way that changed the air without breaking it.
“He is good with her,” she said.
Shane felt the old, unreasonable urge to defend Ilya from the surprise of that, but there was no surprise in her voice, only recognition. Maybe envy, though not ugly, but the tender kind. The kind that maybe hurt because it had nowhere to go yet.
“You both are,” Wyatt added, quieter than he had been all night. “This has been really nice. Thank you for inviting us over.”
The words landed more deeply than Shane expected. Nice was too small for what he felt, but maybe that was why it worked.
“We have been trying,” Lisa said, her voice quiet and her face softening when Wyatt’s hand found hers.
No one asked what she meant; the sentence already knew itself.
Shane looked at their joined hands, at the careful hope in the room, and rejected every useless comfort before it reached his mouth. Bodies were not fair, and wanting was not a promise, however badly people needed it to be.
“I really hope it works out for you both,” Shane said, because it was the truest thing he could offer.
When Ilya came back downstairs, he had a damp patch on his shoulder and the satisfied exhaustion of a man who had negotiated peace through milk. He sat beside Shane without ceremony, close enough that their bodies found each other again, and kissed him once, brief and warm. Then he leaned forward to inspect the next game they had begun unpacking, which was Pandemic, because apparently Wyatt believed the natural recovery from emotional vulnerability was simulated global catastrophe.
Lisa sorted pieces with careful precision. Wyatt looked alarmingly ready despite all available evidence to the contrary. Ilya assessed the board, and Shane picked up his cards, feeling Ilya’s hand warm against his back and the monitor quiet at the edge of the room. For the first time all evening, nothing in him braced.
“Okay,” Shane said. “Let’s save the world.”