Archive of Our Own

PRELUDE: YEAR TWO

2012

Rozanov doesn't ask anymore. He still checks in—good, yes?, more?—murmured against the back of Shane's neck between bites, and Shane says oh my God please or harder or just moans enough to apparently mean both, and that's the entire conversation. The careful frame Shane has spent years constructing around himself, Rozanov just walks through like it isn't there. Hooks a hand in Shane's hair and pulls until Shane's neck snaps back and his whole body follows like it knows no other way to be, and that's the negotiation. That's all of it.

Shane hates him for that. He hates him the way you hate something that keeps being right about you.

It's Rozanov's room tonight. Montreal won, 4-2, Shane with two goals and an assist and the live-wire adrenaline of having beaten Rozanov on a line change. Having watched the disbelief crack open his face before the blank slammed back down. Shane has been thinking about that expression for a few hours. Since the final buzzer. Through the presser. Through the shower where he stood under too-hot water until his skin went red and thought about nothing except Rozanov's face when he realized he'd lost the puck, that one fraction of a second of oh. He's gotten off to that look in hotel showers far more than he'd ever admit.

Shane is on his knees before Rozanov gets his shirt off. He doesn't mean to do it that fast. He always means to be slower, cooler, less obvious about how bad he needs it. But Rozanov barely gets the door shut before Shane is crowding into his space, clawing his hands into the back of his shirt and his scalp like a feral alley cat, sinking down. Like gravity, there is no decision in it.

He mouths at the front of Rozanov's pants until the fabric is wet. Shane feels him getting hard under his lips and thinks: there it is. That possessive satisfaction, being the cause of it.

Rozanov's hand drops into his hair like a reflex, fingers curling at the roots, and the low sound he makes, the one he can't swallow, goes straight through Shane. Rozanov tugs his hair back, a sharp bright pain, pulls him off like he has a plan to carry out. "On the bed," he says, and his voice is wrecked at the edges, which means Shane got to him first, which means Shane is winning something. "Now."

Shane gets up. Rozanov shoves him, a flat palm between the shoulder blades, and Shane goes, catching himself on the mattress. He turns around with his jaw tight. Doesn't say anything.

They are not gentle with each other. Shane has had to come to terms with this through the years, that he has never wanted gentle from Rozanov, and that the first time Rozanov pulled his hair and bit down on his nipple hard enough to bruise, something in Shane's body went weak with relief.

Rozanov flips Shane onto his back, one hand in his hair, one knee slotted between his thighs, and Shane goes because fighting it would require wanting to fight it, which he doesn't, not when Rozanov is looking at him like that. He gets Shane's shirt off and then his own, and then he just. Looks. The unguarded kind.

The nightstand drawer slides open, and Shane feels almost relieved. "Rozanov—"

"Whining already?" Rozanov mocks, uncapping the bottle. "What, Hollander, you want it dry?"

Shane's mouth snaps shut. He doesn't have a response that isn't worse than silence.

Rozanov takes his time. This has surprised Shane consistently, across two years, that the urgency of the door and the shove never translating to haste. He works Shane open with a thoroughness that has made Shane say things he will not repeat in daylight, his long fingers slick, watching Shane's face the whole time with rapt attention that makes Shane want to turn away.

He doesn't let him turn away. "Look at me," Rozanov says, the first time Shane tries it.

"I don't—"

"Look at me." The fingers curl inside him, and Shane groans before looking at him.

And then Rozanov says something. It's been three months since the first time, sometime in November, experimental at first, a question underneath the action, and then more decided. Shane had not expected it. Had not been prepared for the visceral body response, or for Rozanov noticing it and returning to it with persistence. Tonight continues the same way.

"Fuck Hollander, you're so wet for me."

"I'm not—" Shane starts, which is not a refusal, something different he doesn't have a word for. His body betrays him, grinding helplessly against Rozanov's knee.

"You are." Like he's reading a stat line. His fingers work into Shane slowly, slick with lube and with Shane's fountaining precum, and Shane's breath punches out of him in a noise that is humiliating and involuntary. "Fuck, Hollander. You like that? Feel that. Look at you. So perfect." A pause, almost thoughtful. "Made for me."

"Rozanov—"

"So fucking easy for me. Every time. I barely touch you and you're—" He presses, deliberate, right there, and Shane's thighs try to snap shut, but Rozanov's muscled forearm pins them open. "—like this for me. Look at how wet you get. This greedy little pussy."

Shane honest to God whines. He hates himself for it in the same moment he hates that he can't stop it. He's gasping like he ran a marathon.

Rozanov dives after it, a shark at the first drop of blood. Understanding flashes across his eyes, and he does not stop. "That's it." The satisfaction in Rozanov's voice is obscene. "That pretty, wet little pussy," he croons, condescending, which does unspeakable things to Shane also. Filthy, squelching noises fill the room. "I know your clit aches so bad, hm? So swollen for me."

Shane’s protests dissolve into a sharp, embarrassed gasp. 

"Shh, is okay, I take care of you. So wet and needy and good for me, perfect for me. All for me, only for me. Obedient. Beautiful. Deserves a reward, yes?” He looks drunk, wrecked, eyes glittering. He laughs, breathless and giddy. The sounds are downright pornographic. Shane can hear himself—the wet, slick noise of it every time Rozanov moves, too loud in the quiet room, impossible to pretend isn't happening. “Beg," he orders. "Beg for it."

And Shane folds like wet cardboard, like he always does. "Please, oh fuck—" Rozanov hits his prostate just right, and Shane spasms hard. Tears leak from the corners of his eyes. "Please, please—" His head is all floaty and empty and he can't think. He's dizzy with it.

"Always please," Rozanov mocks, laughing lightly. "Never what you want though, mm?"

He gets a broken half-whine in response. The best Shane can do, this far gone.

"Can't use your words?" His lips curve up. "You have to try, just for me. What do you want? Tell me what you want."

A desperate hand flies up to grab Rozanov's wrist. It's too much, it's too good.

Rozanov slaps it away.

He tuts, clicks his tongue like he's disappointed, and Shane nearly sees stars, whining helplessly. His cock is spit-slick from earlier, Rozanov having given him just enough to work him up before taking it away again.

"Ah, ah. Don't touch. Is rude. And you are not rude, Hollander." He pulls Shane's wrists above his head with one hand and lets go. "Stay." A beat. Shane doesn't move. Satisfied, he continues, "Good. So polite, my boring little Canadian. Be good for me."

Shane breathes out, wet and shuddering. His hips circle automatically. Chasing.

Rozanov finds the angle he's been finding since the beginning with dedication of someone who took it personally the first time Shane fell apart too fast and has been running experiments ever since—and he presses, and Shane's vision whites out at the edges.

"Oh," Rozanov says, delighted in a way that is going to haunt Shane specifically, "there it is."

Shane's face burns. "Fuck—f-fuck—Rozanov, I swear to —"

"Watch," he demands.

Shane forces his eyes open and looks. Sees Ilya's large fingers disappearing into him, over and over, shining wet, the stretch visible every time he pulls back. The sound of it. Shane makes a noise that has no dignity left in it at all.

"You are going to come," Rozanov says, informational, like he's giving Shane the weather. His fingers speed up. The calluses catch at Shane's rim over and over again, making him cry out. His fingers are relentless and Shane is drooling, he realizes. His mouth slack and open and beyond his control. "Just from hands pinned. Look at you."

"M' not—"

"You are. Because I say so. And you listen so pretty." His free hand slides up Shane's stomach, over his sternum, and finds his nipple. Rozanov's hands are large and rough and when he pinches down—not gentle, not apologetic—Shane whimpers sharply. Raw and genuinely embarrassing—

"There," Rozanov says, very quietly, "good girl."

The world goes white.

Shane comes so hard his body arcs off the mattress, a silent scream tearing through him, both fists slamming into the headboard. Rozanov works him through it without mercy—doesn't stop, doesn't ease, pounds deeper through Shane's clenching and keeps his thumb grinding over his sensitive nipples the whole time—and Shane cries. Actual tears from being taken outside himself more than the overwhelming physical act of it.

"Wait," he chokes out. "Rozanov, it's too much—" His vision blurs, his brows furrow. He starts squirming away in newfound desperation, stomach tensing. "Roz—ah! S'too much, please too much! T—"

"One more." Certain. Steady. Like he knows Shane's body better than Shane does.

Shane's head is thrown back, gasping, yelping. He can't get away, he can't—

"I know you can," Rozanov murmurs. His eyes gleam. Lock on where Shane's hole twitches desperately around his glistening fingers. "You are made for me. Made to be my good little slut."

He grins, sharp and wicked, and in the end, that's what does him in.

Shane comes again forty seconds after the first—drier, sharper, more devastating—and this time he doesn't just cry, he sobs, two wrecked ugly sounds that he shoves into the pillow, and his legs shake for a full two minutes while Rozanov holds him through it, one hand still buried inside him, the other loosely fisting Shane’s cock, saying things against his throat in Russian that Shane cannot translate and will not ask to, because it isn't for him to have. It's for Rozanov to keep.

Rozanov, groaning, comes on Shane’s thighs and stomach maybe thirty seconds later, just from rocking gently against the mattress. He doesn't do that.

Afterward, Shane lies starfished on the mattress, dazed, unable to move. He hears Rozanov get up. Hears the soft sound of him, the ease of him after, the unhurried way he moves while Shane is still figuring out how to be inside his own skin. He hears him chuckle. Low, almost sweet. And it is the thing Shane hates most: that he sounds happy. No victory in it or gloating. Just genuinely, privately happy, the quiet satisfaction of something going exactly right.

"Poor Hollander," Rozanov says. It isn't mean. "That good, mm?" The washcloth is cool and slow between his legs as he meticulously cleans him up. Peppers kisses along the creases as he goes.

Usually, Shane would come back with something. Asshole or fuck off. Usually, he's reassembled enough by this point to find it funny.

He gets up. Goes to the bathroom. Runs the cold tap. He is fine. His shoulder is holding, despite the brutal check in the second period. His line chemistry with Koch is finally clicking. He has another game in two days. He is absolutely, completely fine.

Good girl.

He turns off the tap.

He has known what it means since the first time Rozanov said it—watching Shane's face when he did, reading him like he was reading the ice—and Shane's body responded before his brain could run interference and Rozanov saw that, and has been returning to it since. Shane knows. He has been lying awake thinking about the specific way Rozanov says it. What it reaches. The word fits something true about Shane that he hasn’t said out loud, hasn’t yet decided to know about himself. The other things he says: so wet, so tight, so good for me, perfect, made for me, this greedy little pussy.

Shane's face in the mirror is wrecked. Bite marks at his throat and shoulder and chest. Eyes hollowed out, the look that comes when he’s been pushed past the last of his defenses.

He looks like someone who just got exactly what he wanted. He is furious about it.

Shane goes back out. Rozanov is on his back against the headboard, mostly dressed again, looking unreasonably intact. Shane knows this is a lie. The slight unsteadiness to his breathing, the color still in his face, the fact that he came from watching Shane fall apart alone. But it is a very good lie, and Shane doesn't have the resources right now to look past it.

He grabs his shirt off the floor. Finds his pants. The ritual of reassembly, every piece going back in the right order. He is Shane Hollander. He is in control of himself. He has a game in two days.

"You're leaving," Rozanov says. Not a question.

"Yeah." Shane doesn't look up.

"Okay."

The word is too easy. Shane's jaw tightens. He pulls his shirt on, checks his pockets for his keycard by reflex, and Rozanov doesn't say anything else, and that's worse. The silence of someone who has decided to let him go, personal opinion aside.

Shane gets to the door.

"Hollander."

He stops but doesn't turn around.

"You played well tonight," Rozanov says.

It is such an ordinary thing to say. Such a neutral, harmless, ordinary thing to say after two years of this, after good girl and made for me and Shane crying into a hotel pillow like a pathetic baby—and something about the normalcy of it, the blandness of Rozanov just reaching for you played well like it's any other sentence, cracks something open in Shane's chest that he did not budget for.

He turns around. "The things you said." His voice comes out level. He's proud of that.

Rozanov is watching him carefully now.

"The things you called me." Still level. Still controlled.

A silence. Rozanov doesn't move.

"Don't do that again," Shane says.

"Okay."

"I mean it." He's aware of his own hands, where they are, what they're doing. He is not making fists on purpose. "You do it again, I call this. The whole thing. Done."

"Okay," Rozanov says again. The careful voice. The one that means he's actually trying to understand something, which is the problem. Because if there were even a layer of theater to this, something to push against, Shane could leave. He could leave right now and it would be fine.

"I'm not—" Shane stops. "I know what those words mean. I know what category that is for you, and I'm not in it." He stops again. His throat feels tacky. "I'm not a girl. I'm not yours to—"

The sentence falls apart. He lets it.

Rozanov is very still.

The silence stretches. One beat, two. Rozanov absorbs what Shane just said and does not try to deflect it.

"I'm not one of your whores," Shane spits.

It lands the way he knew it would. Rozanov's face sits lower than usual—and he goes still.

The silence after it is long enough that Shane hears his own breathing.

"I didn't call you that," Rozanov says finally, evenly.

"You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean." It isn't an agreement, just an acknowledgement of hearing it.

"Then you understand why—"

"You came," Rozanov says, eyebrows furrowed, "in approximately four seconds. I think this is new record."

"I know what I did."

"And again—"

"I know." Shane's voice breaks at the edge of it, the careful level thing finally giving, and he hates that his voice does that right now of all times, that Rozanov is watching it happen. "I am aware of what happened, I don't need the recap, I was there."

"I am not—"

"You cannot do that!" The control goes, and it’s almost a relief—clean, sudden, like a bone snapping. "The good girl! The so wet for me! The—you can't say those things and then look at me with that face like you know something about me that I don't! We are equals. Actually, I'm better than you right now, I scored twice tonight, I beat you on a line change and I watched your face when you figured out you'd lost the puck—" He stops. "We are not whatever that is. Whatever you make it when you say those things."

Rozanov is quiet for a moment. Just watching him. "Then what is it."

"Controlled contact," Shane says. The answer he's had ready for two years, waiting for Rozanov to ask it straight. "That's all."

"Controlled contact."

"That's all."

Rozanov's voice, when he speaks, is still careful. "Then why does it matter what I call you."

Shane's hand tightens on the lapel of his jacket.

The question sits between them. Shane has an answer, but it's the thing he has been not-looking-at for four months in the dark of his apartment, and he is not going to say it in this room, tonight, with his body still aching and Rozanov's eyes on him like that.

"See you in two weeks," Shane says.

Rozanov's face shifts. Real, sudden, like the floor moved under him. He swears in Russian, then in English, fumbling to get up. "Fuck. Hollander—"

Shane opens the door.

"Fuck, Hollander—"

Shane walks back to his room thinking about the Montreal locker room. About Comeau and Lefebvre and the low, satisfied way they talk about girls, the same tone they use for a good stick flex or ice time. Things Shane has laughed at in the right places when someone looked at him for it, like a gun to his head.

He thinks about what Rozanov's locker room might sound like. Whether there are things Rozanov says, or doesn't say. Whether his name comes up as names do here, Comeau's phone making the rounds—my Jane, have you seen my Jane, such a pretty perfect little hole—passed around the room in someone's mouth like something owned. The girls probably don't know they're on that phone. Shane finds this both contemptible, on Comeau's part, and faintly irresponsible, on theirs. Which is not the same thing as purely thinking Comeau is the one who should stop.

I want to be what he can't stop talking about. He thinks about good girl and his body answering before he had time to refuse. The tears he couldn't stop. The thirty seconds of being taken past every line—

Shane gets to his room. He is furious and ashamed and still half-wrecked and his boxers are damp and sticky and he cannot for the life of him figure out which of those things is winning. He doesn't sleep for a long time.

PART ONE: ROOKIE

2010

The NHL was not the OHL with more money, which was what Shane had expected. It was the OHL with better lawyers. The same curriculum. Just better lawyers and a different word for it.

Shane walked first into the Metros locker room at eighteen years old and understood within forty minutes exactly what kind of room it was and how to be in it. The veterans were twenty-five, twenty-six, thirty-one. They had contracts and agents and publicists. They had media training and personal brands. They did not haze rookies in bus bathrooms, but they made rookies pay for team dinners at restaurants where the tasting menu started at four hundred dollars and went from there.

He paid for three dinners in September and didn't say anything about it to anyone. He smiled when he was supposed to smile. He was the second overall pick and he knew that meant he was the most watched person in the room and that watching would not stop.

There was a veteran winger named Colquhoun who talked about women in the locker room. He wasn't loud or crude in the obvious way, but it was just a running commentary, delivered in a tone that said this is normal, this is just how we talk, and if you have a problem with it, you're the one with the problem. Shane understood Colquhoun's function in the room. He was the temperature gauge. He pushed slightly further than the room's actual comfort level to establish where the ceiling was, and then everyone else settled comfortably below it because at least they weren't Colquhoun.

The content wasn't the point. Shane had understood the curriculum since he was fifteen. He just hadn't had to perform it at this level before, for people who could actually hurt him if his score came back wrong. He was not going to be Colquhoun. He was also not going to be the guy who made anything difficult. Theatre had taught him that three years ago.

Shane kept his head down. He scored. He said the right things after games in the language of athletes who have been media-trained since fifteen. Hard-fought game. One shift at a time. Proud of the guys. He learned his linemates’ tendencies through tape, repetition, and pattern recognition, the same method he used for everything else, and played at a level that made it impossible to question him on anything else. By January he was first line. By February he was performing it all well enough that Colquhoun himself laughed at something Shane said and called him a natural. By April he'd been nominated for Rookie of the Year. By the following June he had the award.

Rozanov had been passed over.

Shane kept his face still at the ceremony and thought about nothing. And when they argued on the roof after like idiots, right out in the open where anyone could see, Shane ran with his tail between his legs, mouth still red and bitten and wet, all the way back to his room.

The showers were still the worst part. Shane had to remind himself every single time: nothing happens here, this is a room where people clean their bodies. He'd showered in locker rooms since he was eight years old and he'd been managing the exact same thing every single time—the angles, the careful discipline of keeping his eyes at a fixed middle distance that wasn't on anybody and wasn't pointedly away from anybody.

By the time he hit the NHL he was good at it. Practiced. He could shower in a room full of naked men and think about game tape, genuinely, as he thought about anything else. He'd been doing it for ten years. But for ten years, showering had not involved the possibility of being watched while he carefully avoided watching anyone else. In junior hockey, nobody particularly cared what Shane Hollander was doing, even when he was very good at it. He was just the competition, the showoff, the thing that would be left behind if they ever managed to outdo him. In the NHL, people cared what Shane Hollander was doing. He was the second overall pick, at only eighteen. He was going to be famous before he was twenty-one and richer too, and everyone in this room knew it, which meant everyone in this room was tracking him.

He adapted. He went earlier, then later, finding the rhythm. By October he had a sequence that worked—in at the right moment, out while the room's attention was somewhere else. It was exhausting, no single moment he could point to, just the build-up of it. He went home, ate his salmon and brown rice, and watched game tape.

A converted warehouse in the Distillery District. Blue tarp over concrete, lighting rigs and craft services and three wardrobe people who kept addressing Shane as Mr. Hollander with the reverence of people who knew exactly how famous he was going to be in eighteen months.

He'd known Rozanov was booked for the same CCM shoot. He’d known it as he knew game schedules: automatic. He'd spent the preceding days telling himself this was fine, trying to forget the night of the draft, and the way Rozanov's warm hand had brushed against his. That he'd watched a hundred hours of Rozanov footage since he was a kid and the footage was research and meeting the subject of research in person, for longer than a stupid introduction in Saskatchewan, was not different from that, functionally.

Rozanov was late. When he arrived, twenty minutes past call time, the room rearranged itself without knowing it had. Shane had watched this happen on footage a hundred times and here it was in person. He was taller than Shane by a measly inch maybe, less of a gap than he’d had in Saskatchewan. The curls were doing something. The smile he gave the wardrobe people was doing something worse.

Shane looked at the lighting rig till he saw black dots.

"Hollander." The accent landed on his name differently than it did in his head. Slightly more emphasis on the second syllable. Hol-lander.

"Rozanov." He turned. Kept his face in exactly the right configuration. "Good to see you again."

Rozanov looked at Shane for a moment, the same look he’d given him across the ice at Worlds: unclassifiable. "I have seen your footage," he said.

"I've seen yours," Shane said.

Rozanov smiled. It was the slower one, the four-second grin, the door opening. Shane had a document with seventeen pages of notes on this smile and here it was six inches from his face and every single note was wrong because none of them had accounted for for how it changed the air in a room.

"We will be story, yes?" Rozanov said. "A show they want."

Shane said, "Probably," and went to talk to wardrobe, and that was the first real time. More than just his embarrassing rambling at Worlds, the one-sided conversation, and double handshake in five minutes. The second time was later, in the locker room they'd been given for changing for the shoot. Shane was in there alone, working through the inventory—voice, hands, posture, eyes—the same check he did before anything was filmed or photographed. He heard Rozanov before he saw him. Someone entering a room with no self-consciousness about entering.

"You do this before games too?" Rozanov asked. He was leaning against the doorframe, still in his street clothes, watching Shane with the same open curiosity he gave everything, as though looking itself cost him nothing.

"Do what."

"Check yourself. Make sure everything is right." He touched his own face briefly, not self-conscious, just indicating. "Like this."

Shane said, "I'm getting ready."

"Yes," Rozanov said. "I know." He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room and started changing with ease. "I do not do this. I used to think maybe I should. Maybe it would help."

"Did it?"

"I think no." He pulled his shirt over his head. Shane looked very pointedly at the hook on the opposite wall. "What you are doing, is like…armor, yes? Put on before you go out. But armor is heavy."

"It's not armor," Shane said, bewildered. "It's just preparation."

"Okay," Rozanov said.

They were photographed and videoed together for four hours. Shane knew how to work a camera. Rozanov did not seem required to. The camera went to him the same way rooms did, without him doing anything at all. When they met each other’s eyes for the photographer, Rozanov's face stayed open, and Shane had to correct for it.

At one point, mid-setup, one of the photography assistants—a skinny guy in his twenties, eyeliner, obvious gay—said something to Rozanov in a low voice that made Rozanov laugh. Shane watched that laugh happen and felt something go sideways in his chest.

When Rozanov laughed with Shane later—eyes finding his, both of them bent at the waist for the posed faceoff—something in Shane's chest came loose. The thought arrived without permission: there. Take that, assistant guy.

In the car back to his hotel Shane opened the untitled document and stared at it for a long time. He added one line. Then deleted it.

Shane called it that, internally, somewhere in the second year: controlled contact. The hockey term, incidental, not intentional, and within the rules. Doesn't count as interference because both parties were moving toward the same space and the collision was, technically, inevitable.

At the All-Star Game, January 2011, Nashville, they were put on opposite teams because of course they were. The press had been packaging them as a rivalry for eighteen months and what was a rivalry if not two people who kept ending up in the same frame on opposite sides of the divide. They were photographed together eleven times before the skills competition even started. Shane kept his face in the correct position for all eleven. Rozanov seemed to not have a position to keep his face in, just a face that operated freely in whatever direction it felt like. Shane could not afford that approach, and had maybe stopped being able to imagine otherwise.

He won the shot accuracy competition. Rozanov had watched him finish his last target from the boards with his arms crossed and that expression, the one that was somewhere between evaluation and something else. Shane skated off and did not look back.

The doors closed in the elevator. The number lit up for the twelfth floor. 1221. Shane told himself this was information gathering. He had been studying Rozanov for three years from footage in Juniors and now he had an opportunity to study him in person and a serious student of the game did not decline available information. The fact that the tape was now in a hotel room on the twelfth floor of a Nashville Marriott was a mere logistical detail and not a categorical distinction.

Shane had known, on some level, from the moment the elevator doors closed that he was going to walk through this door. That the inventory was running on a different frequency tonight and had been since the shot accuracy competition, since the CCM shoot, since room 1410 in 2010 and the moment Shane’s entire worldview shifted. That the untitled document had forty-three entries now and he could recite all of them in order.

Rozanov looked at him, the look without a category, and said in that slightly delayed English, “you won today.” Minutes later they were across the room, Ilya against the wall, still laughing at Shane complaining about Scott Hunter next door. After that, it became a consistent, unforgettable thing.

He was not prepared for Rozanov's hands. He had some understanding of what this would be like—he wasn't an idiot, he had the internet—but theory didn't cover Rozanov's hands. Didn't cover his mouth.

He made noise, a lot of it. He was—it was—Rozanov didn't leave room for it. He just removed Shane from his head and put him somewhere else. He always got back to his head afterward, safe and sound, but the distance between where he'd been and where he usually lived gave him vertigo.

Rozanov worked him hard, his mouth wet and warm and devastating.

“Oh my God,” Shane heard himself say, from somewhere far away, as if standing over his body and watching it happen to someone else. His nails tightened around Rozanov’s scalp. “Oh my—I can’t, I can’t—”

Then Shane was barreling to the finish line before he could stop it, Rozanov chasing with unforeseen quantities of greed, nose flush against Shane’s stomach, swallowing every single drop.

Afterward, Shane lay pliant and loose in the dark of the room and thought about what it would feel like next time, as Rozanov had sensually promised, inside him for the first time instead of a lonely little dildo. Then he filed it. Incidental. Both parties moving toward the same space. Within the rules. Then he went back to his room. He did not look up the rules of interference in the NHL rulebook to check whether his categorization held. He was asleep before he'd have gotten to it anyway.

The first time Shane played in Boston, he threw up in the visitors' bathroom before warmups. It wasn't nerves. Or not exactly. It was what he'd been managing at a distance for two months and now had to manage up close. Distance was safe. At distance, Rozanov was footage. The untitled document. Something Shane could pause, rewind, analyze. Up close, Rozanov was six feet away at faceoffs. The first time since CCM, since room 1410, close enough that the system started to strain.

He came out of the bathroom stall, rinsed his mouth, looked at himself in the mirror. Voice: controlled. Eyes: manageable, if he kept them where they needed to be.

He had, by this point, established a set of on-ice protocols for dealing with Rozanov that he had not explicitly named as protocols because naming them would have required acknowledging why they were  necessary. The protocols were: do not initiate contact unless tactically required, do not engage in chirp exchanges that went longer than two beats, do not under any circumstances watch Rozanov in the warmup in a way that was visible to other people. There was also a more general protocol that had been developing since the CCM shoot which was: do not be alone with Rozanov in any space smaller than a locker room and do not be in a hotel elevator with him and if you end up in a hotel elevator with him think carefully about whether you are getting out.

He had not tested this last protocol yet. He went out for warmups.

Being in the same building with Rozanov meant knowing exactly where he was. It was just data, his brain tracking threat in his peripheral vision without being asked to. Shane was doing drills at the far end of the ice and Rozanov was at the other end and Shane knew the distance between them.

In the game itself, he faced the faceoffs. In footage you could study faceoffs, the weight distribution, timing, Rozanov cheating the draw left nine times out of ten and knowing you knew and doing it anyway. But footage didn’t include Rozanov’s breath. The air wasn’t that cold, and yet his breath was visible anyway, briefly, six feet away; Shane had forty-three pages of notes on Ilya Rozanov, and not one of them accounted for this. He won two out of three faceoffs.

Afterward, in the locker room, Hayden said good game, man, you looked like yourself out there which was the nicest lie anyone had said to him all week and Shane said thanks and meant it. That night in his hotel room Shane opened the document and added an entry and then deleted it and stared at the cursor for a long time.

Nobody told Shane what getting what he wanted did to the wanting. Shane spent three years as a kid wanting Rozanov from a careful distance, which is to say he spent three years wanting something that could remain abstract, filed under competitive interest and tactical awareness and untitled document, do not open. The wanting was manageable at a distance, yes, but it was even, occasionally, even useful. It made him watch Rozanov more carefully than he watched anyone else, and watching Rozanov carefully made him a better player, which was a rationalization he'd been running since Kingston at sixteen. After the CCM shoot it was different. After the CCM shoot the abstract became specific.

He adapted. He was good at adapting. He took what had happened, put it in the hotel-room category alongside everything else that had happened in hotel rooms over the years—the hazing, the drinking, the long silences with people he was learning to trust in a controlled way—and he told himself it was the same kind of thing. A transaction. A release valve. And it just happened to involve Rozanov's mouth and was categorically no different from any other method.

He watched more tape. His game that season was the best it had ever been. He did not think about Rozanov. He thought about Rozanov constantly.

He won Rookie of the Year and shook hands with a lot of people and kept his face in the correct configuration and went back to his hotel room in Las Vegas and watched Rozanov's footage on his laptop after yelling at him on the roof until two in the morning.

PART TWO: ROZANOV

2011

By 2011, the document runs to sixty-three entries. On-ice tendencies, off-ice, press, footage, locker room, elevator, a hotel room in Nashville that Shane has failed to not think about 84% of the time since it happened. And a whole lot of other shit.

Rozanov was the first overall pick who'd grown into his body with the ease of someone who'd always expected to. Six-foot-two, 215 pounds, curly golden hair he did nothing to tame, a jaw and a nose the hockey press described as rugged and distinctive and occasionally as unfairly photogenic for a man who'd had his face rearranged by pucks three times. He had a chain with an unusual cross on it, usually tucked below his shirts and jerseys, gold and delicate. On most men, it would probably read as a statement and on Rozanov it read as simply a thing he wore because he probably liked it.

He spoke Russian like repentance and foreplay were functionally the same thing. His English was technically parseable but emotionally informed by hockey fights and Bruce Willis films, which was how Shane once got told "shh, I know, baby" like someone was talking him through cutting the red wire. (Yes, he came immediately; no, they weren't going to talk about it).

Rozanov played hockey with open aggression that wasn't undisciplined—precise, targeted, appetite mistaken for chaos. He wanted things. He went and got them.

And then there was the scrum in front of the Boston net, February 2011. A forward from the Montreal Metros—not Shane, a third-liner—shoved Rozanov's helmet and said suck my dick, Rozanov, you fucking hack, which was fairly standard scrum language, the verbal equivalent of a warning shot.

Rozanov looked at him with relaxed amusement and said, you would like that, yes? I know you been watching me all night.

The ref laughed. He actually laughed. The third-liner looked like he'd been concussed. Rozanov skated away, lighthearted and almost giddy with it.

Shane, watching from fifteen feet away, felt something in his jaw lock. He jacked off to the memory for three weeks after, ashamed but not enough to stop.

Off the ice, Rozanov was the same. He carried himself with ease around people that Shane had been trying to reverse-engineer since the CCM shoot. It wasn't charm, exactly, because charm was strategic and Rozanov wasn't being strategic. He was just present. He walked into a room and was in it, fully. He talked to the equipment guys the same way he talked to the general manager. He made fun of his teammates, even the vets, in a way that felt like affection rather than cruelty, and they guffawed despite being six, seven years older than him, and ruffled his hair. Shane had watched enough footage to understand it was actually a skill of knowing when to push and when to ease off—deployed with as much precision as his wrist shot and apparently as unconsciously.

He slept with women. A lot of women.

He wasn’t discreet in the way that implied discretion was a value. He simply excluded it from other people’s business. He didn’t talk about it in the locker room the way Colquhoun did; his teammates read his silence and brief smiles as evidence of a hidden life too improper for a gentleman to share, and left the story there. He just went home with someone or he didn't, came back the next day, talked about hockey. If they showed up in the tabloids, that wasn't his problem. The women were incidental to his public self in a way that should have made them more legible and made them less.

Shane knew who some of them were now. He would not examine how or the depths of his internet stalking. He filed all of it under competitive intelligence. He opened the file constantly.

PART THREE: CAPTAIN

2012 – 2016

Theriault gave him the C at twenty-one.

Shane had known it was coming the way he knew most things—read it, pattern by pattern, before it was announced. He accepted it with the face he’d practiced, the one that said honored, ready, this was the plan, without the rest of it: that he’d been working toward this since he was six years old in his mother’s kitchen; that he wanted it more than he could articulate to anyone, like something built into his DNA rather than chosen; that being captain of the Montreal Metros at twenty-one was exactly what he was supposed to be.

He looked at the C on his jersey and thought: now the room is mine to keep. The room was a different room than Kingston. Older, better-paid, better at their public face. The culture was not crude, and nobody said anything in front of cameras or reporters that could be clipped and played back. The slurs lived only in the locker room, men who'd decided that certain things only counted in certain spaces. Shane had understood this logic since he was fifteen and had never been in a position to challenge it. He was not in a position to challenge it now either because he was the position.

Being captain meant that the room's culture was his culture. What he tolerated got tolerated. What to address, what to let become ambient, when to say something and when saying something was its own kind of problem—was not written anywhere. Shane was good at it. He was careful and consistent, and he picked his moments and when he did say something it landed correctly because he didn't say things that weren't going to land. Theatre had taught him the principle, and he'd been refining the practice for five years.

He had to be careful; he needed the room to trust him, needed to be legible to them, the right kind of man in their reading of it. Captain covered a lot of ground. Captain was a masculinity of its own. Authoritative, controlled, demanding, earned. He could operate inside captain and be untouchable as long as nothing else became visible.

There was a thing that happened in February, at a bar in Montreal. Shane clocked it too late. He’d been watching the room as he always watched rooms, clocked Laroche in the corner and the girl with him, decided it was fine because she’d been upright and laughing when they came in, then looked away and did the math wrong; by the time he looked back she wasn’t upright anymore.

Hayden got there first. Shane was right behind him.

The girl was bad. More than drunk-at-a-party bad, the other kind, eyes not tracking, head dropping forward and then jerking back up like she kept losing the thread. There was a drink in her hand she wasn't holding so much as had forgotten to put down. Laroche had his arm around her waist in a way that looked, from across the room, like he was holding her up. There was a second drink on the ledge behind them. Laroche's. Full.

Shane grabbed him by the back of the collar and walked him sideways into the corridor by the bathrooms, fast, away from the sightlines, away from the forty phones in forty pockets in the room behind them.

"What did you give her," Shane said.

"Nothing, she just—"

"What did you give her."

Laroche looked at him. "She wanted to have a good time, I just—"

Shane got very close to him. "You are going to go outside," he said, quiet and very even, "and you are going to get in the first car, and you are not going to speak to a single person between here and there, because if this ends up anywhere—if anyone saw anything, if she talks, if there is one photo—I cannot help you. Do you understand me? I cannot help you and I will not help you and you will have thrown away everything for this. Go."

Laroche went.

Switch's voice in his head: once it stops being contained, it stops being yours. Shane was not a fucking idiot. Shane stood in the corridor for a second before he went back out. The girl had slid further down the wall. Hayden was crouched in front of her, his jacket off his shoulders, talking to her quietly. The bartender was moving from behind the bar.

Shane looked at her once. He went outside and got in the second car.

Nobody spoke on the ride back. Laroche was in the front seat. Shane looked out the window at the city going past and thought about whether Laroche started Thursday and what he would say to Theriault and how to frame it and whether fourteen goals was enough to survive this if it got out, and the answer was probably not, and that was a problem for tomorrow.

Being captain came with unexpected protection. Shane had not expected this and it was one of the stranger benefits of the position. Nobody showed the captain nudes of their puck bunny hookups. Nobody made the captain sit through the group chat thread where six different guys were trying to out-graphic each other describing what they did to whoever they'd had in their room after the last away game.

Oh my God—please—Rozanov—

The captain was adjacent to all of this. He knew it was happening, it was always happening, it was required. But he existed slightly above it, which meant he wasn’t required to perform enthusiasm for it.

Hayden helped. Hayden was the best AC Shane could have asked for and also, functionally, a human shield. Hayden talked about Jackie.

Harder—don't stop—right there—

He talked about Jackie constantly and in the kind of detail that made the other guys visibly itchy because they liked Hayden, they respected him, but the Jackie content was a lot. And when Shane stood next to Hayden in the married-guy, maybe-Mormon-guy (?) ambient radiation, a little of it stuck to him. Nobody gay-speculated about the guy standing next to the man who was showing you videos of his daughters dressed in pink learning to skate for the fourth time that week.

Please, I need you—please—

Shane absorbed the domestic energy like a cold, through proximity and nothing else. He also did his due diligence. Parties sometimes. The right appearances. Women at the right moments, in a bar or two. Nothing serious, nothing long enough to require actual intimacy but long enough to have something to show for it. He was good at women the same way he was good at everything: prepared, controlled, exactly as much as was required and no more.

s'not enough—more—

He texted back at appropriate intervals. He was seen leaving places with them once every few months, as he'd decided he would be, and what he felt was a kind of distant friendliness.

yes, yes, yes—

It was not sustainable and he knew it. The women did not find the appearance as satisfying as his teammates did at first, and then it wasn’t enough for them either.

—don't stop—

The noise started around twenty-three. They weren't quite rumors, but a low noise in certain corners of the hockey internet that the mainstream press mostly declined to touch because he had not given them a hook. No statements. No slippage. No catchable evidence.

Please—I can't—

Just the accumulation of small things: the not-girlfriend, the lack of girls in any real sense, the looks he sometimes sent Rozanov across a faceoff circle—though he didn’t think anyone had quite gotten to that one yet, thank God.

Colquhoun made a comment once. Shane let it land and move on because it was easier.

I—you're going to make me—

He was careful and consistent.

don't stop don't stop—

The rumors remained ambient.

please, I'm co—Rozanov, I'm co—

He had two Cups by twenty-four and, like, three fan groups dedicated to his freckles alone.

Ro—

He was untouchable.

The loss was devastating. Shane knew it. Rozanov knew it. The second period had swallowed them whole and the third had only made it respectable, Shane's goal at 18:47 that didn't matter, that would never matter, because they'd still lost and he'd been the reason, turnover in the neutral zone with two minutes left in regulation, gift-wrapped.

Rozanov let him in without a word.

Shane went straight to the bed, tugging at his shirt collar. Rozanov followed, then hands at his shoulders, both of them, turning him around—and Rozanov kissed him as he sometimes did, no sign of stopping, nothing but unrelenting hunger, one hand at his jaw to hold him there.

"I played badly," Shane said, when Rozanov finally let him up for air.

"I know." Rozanov looked at him, moved over Shane. "Take your shirt off."

Shane took his shirt off.

Rozanov stepped forward and got his mouth on his throat and said, low, against his skin, "You had twelve shot attempts. You backchecked the entire third period on a bad knee."

"The turnover—"

"Was bad." He bit down, not lightly, and Shane whimpered, the sound pulled out of him before he could decide to make it. "And you scored anyway. Take your pants off."

Shane took his pants off.

Rozanov sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him—just looked, with that unhurried focus he sometimes had. Shane stood there and let it happen, and tried not to think about the turnover, and mostly failed.

"Come here," Rozanov said.

Shane came.

Rozanov got his hands on him, palms flat on his hips, thumbs pressing into the jut of his hip bones, and looked up at him. "You want to be good," he said. Not a question.

Shane's jaw tightened. "Yes."

"Then be good." He pulled him down onto the bed and got his mouth on his throat, his collarbone, the flat of his sternum. "You are already good. You do not need to earn it."

"Rozan—"

"You are already good," he repeated, against his ribs, and Shane's hands twisted into his hair. He thoroughly took Shane apart. Fingers first, working him open with focused expertise, and the whole time, his mouth moved. Sometimes just warm breath dragged across Shane's inner thigh, the slow press of his lips against the inside of his knee. Sometimes Russian Shane couldn't follow. Sometimes English he almost wished he couldn't.

"You know what I think about," Rozanov said, conversational, like his fingers weren't three knuckles deep, "when I watch you skate."

Shane keened, the sound reedy and embarrassing, and tried to muffle it in his own arm.

"Your edges." Rozanov pressed—found the place, the precise angle—and Shane's hips jerked hard, thighs trembling. "The way you read ice before anyone else does. You were already turning before puck got there. I saw it. You see the play three seconds before it happens."

"Fuck—Rozanov—"

"I watch your hands," Rozanov continued, like he wasn't doing something extremely deliberate with his own. "Every game. The way you carry the puck on your backhand through neutral zone—nobody else does it like that. Nobody." He curled his fingers and Shane's whole body arched off the mattress, a long, broken moan tearing out of him. "Most beautiful hands I have ever seen."

"Please, I can't—I can't listen to this right now—" Shane squirmed, trying to get some friction, some relief, some distance from Rozanov's voice and his hands and all of it at once—but Rozanov was right there, all his weight settled.

"I decide what you listen to."

"Oh, fuck—" Shane groaned, long and ragged, his head dropping back, eyes squeezing shut.

Rozanov made a low, satisfied sound and changed the angle, slightly, deliberately, and watched Shane's reaction with the focused attention of someone running an experiment he knew the results of. "There." He pressed again. Shane's back left the mattress entirely, a broken whine spilling out of him. "You are holding everything. Let it go."

"I can't—"

"You can." He added his mouth and the warmth of it, open and slow against his opening, pulled a groan out of Shane that he felt in his sternum. Shane stopped having opinions.

Rozanov's tongue dragged slow across his rim, working in unhurried circles, and Shane's hips canted up with a sob—not crying, just overwhelmed, just too much everywhere at once—his thighs shaking on either side of Rozanov's head. The sounds Rozanov made were not quiet. Shane could hear him, the wet, focused noise of it, and had to press Rozanov's free fingers into his own mouth, suck on them to keep quiet. By the time Rozanov lifted his face Shane was sweat-damp and teary and so far past thinking that the turnover felt like something that had happened to someone else, in another city, a long time ago.

When Rozanov finally looked up at him, chin and nose and mouth wet, his face had that look, the one Shane had fifty-two pages of notes on and still couldn't name. Hunger, yes, but underneath it something steadier. Shane grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him up to kiss.

"Tell me," Rozanov said and licked into his mouth. “How you want me.”

"Fuck me. Please."

Rozanov grinned fiendishly, and shoved the fingers harder. "I am fucking you."

"No." Shane heard the whining but couldn't stop, too busy meeting the fingers thrusting into him. "No, you know what I—too much." His legs squirmed suddenly in increasing panic. "Fuck, I'm gonna come, I'm gonna, not y—Rozanov, no—" He planted his feet and pushed away from his mouth frantically. "Roz—no, no, no!"

Rozanov took pity on him, pulling out his fingers at the very last second.

"Asshole." He was shuddering still, trying to recover from the near-miss. "Please," Shane added, his voice wrecked. His stomach was tight.

"Mm. Please what?" He tilted his head to one side.

"Please, put your cock in me. You know I want your cock in me. Please. I need—I want to be good, let me be good for you—"

"You are already—"

"Rozanov." Shane's hands fisted in his shirt. "Please."

Rozanov looked at him for a long moment. The water clinging to his dark lashes. "Yes. Okay." He let Shane drag his pants down for him.

"Yes," Shane panted, reaching between their bodies, hooking the other arm around Rozanov's neck so he couldn't escape. "Here," he groaned, and lined up Rozanov's drooling tip with his clenching hole. "Please, here, inside. Now."

Rozanov's pulse jumped, betraying his mask of cocky indifference. He was so hard, the veins on his neck and forehead straining. Rozanov pulled Shane down into his lap and Shane ground down instinctively, barely lifting his hips at first, just rocking, just pressing himself as close as he could get and chasing the drag of the head around his rim. His hands were braced on Rozanov's chest. His thighs were shaking like Rozanov had already fucked him.

"Oh fuck." It spilled out of Shane's mouth immediately, as Rozanov finally guided himself and sank in. Shane moaned, saw Rozanov's slowly flushing face, and moaned again. He planted his knees, lifting his own hips. "Yes, right there, please move, harder, yes, just—"

Rozanov's cock hit his prostate on the third roll of his hips and Shane's mouth dropped open on a long, stuttered ah—and then again on the fourth, and he stopped trying to control the sounds after that, just let them come, his stomach tensing with the effort of keeping his pace slow and grinding and good. He was drooling, mouth slack and open, chin wet with it, and couldn't do anything about that either.

Rozanov's eyes found it immediately. He didn't say anything. Just looked, and something in his face went very still. Rozanov got a hand on his jaw, tilted his face down, and kissed him—filthy, his tongue sweeping in, claiming—and Shane whimpered into his mouth, his lips trembling too much to kiss back properly. Rozanov just took over, teeth catching his bottom lip, swallowing every sound Shane made.

"You want to know what they say on our bench," Rozanov said against his mouth, casually, like Shane wasn't rolling his hips in slow, desperate circles on top of him, "about you."

Shane groaned, long and aching, forehead dropping to Rozanov's shoulder.

"They say you are the best player in this league." His hands settled on Shane's hips, holding not guiding, thumbs pressed into the jut of bone. "They are right."

He gasped, clenching hard. Rozanov couldn’t possibly mean that. “W-wait—"

“I would not be this good without you.”

Shane sobbed. "Please—"

"Your first step." He let Shane keep rocking, kept watching his face. "Fastest I have ever seen. Every defenseman in this league knows it and it does not matter. You are already gone." Shane whined, grinding down harder, chasing something just out of reach. "Your crossovers in the offensive zone—I have been trying to find a weakness in them for four years."

"Mmfh—"

"There is none," Rozanov said. And then he flipped them.

Shane’s back hit the mattress and Rozanov came down with him, full weight settling in. Shane just gasped at the ceiling for a moment. The shift, Rozanov above him, decided. And then thinking stopped the second Rozanov moved.

He fucked him hard. Shane had asked for it and kept asking with his hands and his voice and Rozanov gave him everything he asked for and then a little more, his palm settling warm at Shane's throat—not squeezing, just present, warm and certain—and Shane's whole body arched into it without instruction, a long moan tearing out of him that he felt in his chest.

"My whole bench watches you," Rozanov said. His mouth was at Shane's ear. "Every game. Every shift. You come out of tunnel and it goes quiet for a second—you know this? Grown men. They go quiet." He fucked into him and watched Shane's face with complete attention, like he was memorizing it. "They would give anything to be here right now."

Shane whimpered out little ah, ah, ahs, airy and nothing left of Shane Hollander in it at all.

"They talk about you. In the locker room, after games." He shifted his angle and Shane cried out, sharp and high. His thighs were shaking where they bracketed Rozanov's hips, and he couldn't stop them, couldn't stop any of it. The headboard knocked noisily against the wall. "What they would do. What they would give. To be like you." His hand at Shane's throat pressed just slightly. "But I know what you sound like. I know what you look like when you fall apart." His mouth dragged to Shane's jaw, his cheekbone. "I am the only one who gets to do this to you."

"Yeah," Shane gasped, "yeah, yes, only you, please—"

"Your slap shot," Rozanov continued, relentless, like Shane wasn't shaking apart under him, like his voice wasn't fraying at the edges too. "Hits top corner every time. Every time. I have faced it forty-seven times. I know exactly where is going and I still cannot stop it." A devastating roll of his hips. "They talk about that on our bench too. How does he do it. Nobody knows. I know. I know everything about you."

"Fuck," Shane sobbed, his nails gone white at Rozanov's shoulders. "Fuck, please—"

"They would be so jealous," Rozanov said, low and certain, against the hinge of his jaw. "If they could see you right now. If they could see what you look like when someone finally takes you apart." Shane moaned, helpless, his shoulders shuddering. "But they cannot. Nobody sees this. Nobody gets this." He pulled back just enough to look at Shane's face—really look at every ruined detail. "Only me."

Shane reached up and grabbed him by the back of the neck. "Please," he said. His voice was gone. "Please, Rozanov, I'll be so good, m' being so good, please just—"

Rozanov reached down and took one of Shane's hands, pulled it up between them and pressed his mouth to his knuckles, against his palm, still moving, not slowing down at all, his eyes on Shane's face the entire time. "Most beautiful hands I have ever seen," he said against Shane's palm. Then, lower: "Tak khorosh dlya menya. Most beautiful player I have ever watched. The best edges. The best hands." A beat. "Mine."

"Please," Shane chanted, over and over again, both hands locked white-knuckled on his shoulders, tears tracking sideways into his hair. "You feel so—fuck, Roza—I'm gonna come, Rozanov you're gonna make me come, oh fuck Ro—"

"Come on," Rozanov grunted against his jaw. "Come for me. I will too."

It was a command, and Shane's body could never resist. He went rigid, one long, shuddering beat, and then detonated in violent short pulses, a broken moan torn out of him that started high and went ragged and didn't stop for a long time. He was trembling, twitching, still clenching helplessly as Rozanov followed thirty seconds later—a low, wrecked sound against Shane's throat, both hands gripping, buried deep, pulsing where Shane kept squeezing around him, unable to stop.

Shane blinked. Once. Twice. His vision kept strobing at the edges.

Rozanov held him through it and didn't move and didn't speak, just kept his hands where they were.

Eventually Shane's breathing came back to something normal. He ended up with his cheek on Rozanov's chest, looking at nothing, Rozanov's hand moving slowly through his hair and across his chest he was so fond of. Rozanov had pulled out quietly, dealt with the condom, come back. His hands were always coming back.

"Holy shit," Shane said, finally, still panting. "I think I almost passed out."

"Holy shit," Rozanov agreed, smiling a little, like he knew a joke Shane didn't. "Next time, I will make you." He ducked, chuckling, and narrowly avoided Shane's vicious fist.

The Boston hotel was quiet.

"The turnover," Shane started.

“The turnover was bad,” Rozanov said, flat as fact. “You also scored. You also had twelve shot attempts and you backchecked for twelve minutes on a knee you did not tell me was bad.”

Shane turned his head. "How did you know about my knee?"

"I watch you skate." He said this like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I always know."

Shane looked at the ceiling. His hands were still in Rozanov's hair.

"Sleep," Rozanov said. "You will be better Thursday."

"I'm not sleeping here."

"You have fifty-five minutes before you need to go. I will wake you." He pressed his mouth to Shane's temple. "Sleep."

Shane slept. He woke up exactly on time, as promised. He went to his hotel room and lay in the dark thinking about nothing except Rozanov's hands and how he'd said mine and when, exactly, somewhere between walking in and walking back out, the second period had stopped living in his shoulders.

He was better Thursday against Washington. He scored three times and his edges were exactly what Rozanov had said they were, and when the hats rained down—blue and red, filling the ice—all he could think about was the look on Rozanov's face in the quiet after, eyes closed, something satisfied in the set of his mouth, in the moments before he put himself back together again.

It was the middle of a road trip, some forgettable city in the Western Conference, and they'd been on the road for eight days which was long enough that everyone had developed small grievances with everyone else's habits. The hotel had a business center with a printer, which was where Shane had gone to print game tape stills at eleven p.m., which was how he ended up in the business center while Hayden was on his laptop FaceTiming Jackie.

Shane would have left, but Hayden waved him to stay, the gesture of a man who was comfortable enough with Shane's presence. Shane sat in the chair by the window and looked at his tablet and listened to Hayden talk to his wife.

Hayden was talking about Ruby. Ruby had, at the age of three, developed a scheme to trade Jade's possessions for goods and services from the neighborhood children, which Hayden found both alarming and extremely impressive. He was describing this to Jackie with the narrative warmth of a man who was going to spend the next ten minutes on this story because he found it genuinely delightful, not because it was brief or efficient, just because he wanted to tell it and he had a person who wanted to hear it.

Shane watched the printer print his game tape stills and thought about nothing.

He thought about this: the ease of being wanted by someone who had decided to want you. Hayden talked to Jackie like talking to her was something he did because he wanted to, because the wanting didn't have to be earned every time. Shane had never had a person he could call from a business center at eleven p.m. He had the untitled document. He had the secondary burner Instagram account. He had hotel rooms in cities where they both had keys to other doors and chose neither of them.

Rozanov posted on Instagram a lot. His stories, not the feed. Every city he landed in, a story went up. Usually, it was nothing. Plane seat, window, tarmac. Location tag. It was very obviously to pick up. Anyone who knew Rozanov even the littlest bit from the media narrative knew it was like shouting from a rooftop: hey, I’m down to fuck! Show up if you’re less than three kilometers away!

Shane did not have an Instagram. He had a brand-managed account run by his publicist's office that posted approved content at approved intervals. He followed Rozanov on a secondary account (@ottawa _realty) with no identifying information that he had created in February of his rookie year and had never examined as a behavior.

The location stories appeared in that account’s feed. So did about five hundred Rozanov fan account posts, meticulously documenting his fashion choices, the girls he was seen with, the bars he went to, his goals and assists, and the apparently legally binding bromance with his AC Cliff Marlow. In the comments, women with usernames like @marlanov, @realrozalow, and @ilyarozanovswife debated timelines, read lip movements like forensic analysts, and treated “he looked at him for 0.4 seconds longer than necessary” as admissible evidence in court.

For the sake of his sanity and cardiovascular health, Shane did not search “Hollanov.”

Women were terrifying.

Shane called it monitoring competitive intelligence, and in that framing, Rozanov fit. This was technically not untrue. The monitoring was thorough and systematic and he had learned things that were genuinely useful. The cities where Rozanov's conditioning varied, the rhythm of his off-season, when he was a bit too roughed up from a game, the subtle tells in his public affect that preceded a peak performance stretch.

He had also learned the names of certain recurring women, cross-referenced against tagged posts and sports gossip columns. The approximate frequency of Rozanov's encounters.

Kathryn from Buffalo who appeared twice in Rozanov's Instagram stories, location-tagged in the same bar. A trainer whose name he'd found cross-referenced in a Boston Globe sports column about athletes and their support teams. A model from a different Toronto shoot who'd appeared in a tagged photo six months after. A girl in Stockholm, flagged by her flag emoji. And Svetlana Vetrova, who was different from all of them because Svetlana kept coming back.

Svetlana wasn't a city-specific story. Svetlana was not a puck bunny or a trainer or a model but apparently someone Rozanov had known before all of this, who understood the whole apparatus and moved through it with him rather than around it.

Svetlana appeared in Moscow and in Boston twice one month and once in Chicago, which meant she traveled for it, which meant it wasn't just convenience. Svetlana was gorgeous in a way that was itself a kind of armor: dark reddish curls, sharp cheekbones, and an air in photos that Shane could only describe as she knows exactly what she looks like, which made Shane feel, irrationally, like she'd won a contest Shane hadn't known was running.

She posted in Russian. Shane could not read Russian. He did not use translation software on her posts because that would be examining something. Her father was some famous goaltender. Whatever. (700+ NHL games over 14 seasons; career record hovering just above .500 on mostly competitive teams; .910–.915 career save percentage; 2.50–2.70 career GAA; 25–35 shutouts; long-time starter, briefly shared starts later in career. So, like, fuck that guy and fuck his daughter, too).

Shane knew all their faces as he knew defensive zone coverage schemes. He didn't call it jealousy. Jealousy implied a claim, and he didn't have one. He felt instead the wrongness of watching someone else occupy a space he had been holding open without knowing he was holding it open.

He looked at Rozanov's latest story—JFK tarmac, blurry, three in the morning—and opened the tactical document instead. The Svetlana entry he looked at for thirty seconds longer than any of the others. Then he closed the folder. Then he opened it again. Then he put his phone face-down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling of his Montreal penthouse until his alarm went off at five.

He went to practice. He was first on the ice. He was always first on, last off. He was a good captain.

PART FOUR: THE WOMEN (AGAIN)

2016

There were several versions of this and they all happened in the same room with minor variations in geography. Hotel room. If not a hotel room, Shane's sex condo. But there was always the anonymity to it. The generic bed, the blackout curtains, the ice machine down the corridor. A hotel room was not Rozanov's Boston mansion and not Shane's Montreal penthouse and not any space that belonged to either of them in any meaningful way. What happened in a hotel room stayed in it, the rule of locker rooms everywhere.

Shane had rules. He had not told Rozanov the rules; he'd built his behavior around them and figured Rozanov could read enough of it. The rules were not before a game, only after; not with anyone else present or nearby in a way that created risk (especilly after Scott Hunter); and not anything that couldn't be called physical rather than something else—that one wasn't a rule so much as a thing he didn't look at.

They were in a Boston hotel, somewhere in the middle of the season. They'd been at it for a while. Long enough that Shane's brain was somewhere south of functional, which was the part he'd stopped pretending he didn't crave—and Rozanov said something, and then he stopped moving and looked at Shane and said something else. It wasn't dirty, wasn't the praise-kink thing, the feminization thing, or any of the things Shane had filed and returned to at three in the morning more times than he was going to count. It was about Rozanov wanting to keep him.

Four seconds. Shane's body answered before his brain could. In four seconds, from one sentence, all over the sheets and pillow and mattress, Rozanov had data Shane had never authorized him to have; he watched Shane’s body answer the question Shane had been refusing for six years, saw the thing that undid him, and kept it.

And then Shane was back and the shame arrived like a delayed hit and he shoved Rozanov backward hard enough that Rozanov actually had to catch himself.

"Don't." His voice came out wrong. Too loud, wrong register entirely, the opposite of controlled. "Don't fucking say that to me. What the fuck is wrong with you."

Rozanov looked at him. The mild face. The face that cost nothing. "Okay," he said.

He breathed through it. He was fine. He was absolutely fine, this was his body reacting, that was all, this wasn't confirmation of anything. He had a sick sort of déjà vu, back to year two, to good girl, which Rozanov had not touched with a ten-foot pole in all the years that followed, probably because he was waiting for Shane to address it first. (Shane did not. He just came back the next time without a word and demanded Rozanov fuck his brains out, and he did.)

But this was different. This wasn't a kink, or an experiment, or anything that could be remotely mistaken for self-fulfilling.

This was just Rozanov being exactly who he was: a man who had been fucking Shane for six years, at least four of them exclusive on Shane's end, at minimum. A man who knew his body intimately, and who had, at some undiscernible point, begun to treat the worship the way worship was meant to be treated—holy, careful, almost reverent. On his knees at an altar where Shane's body became the bread laid out for him alone to consume, and what was left of him after—the shaking, the coming, the spill of saliva down his chin—became wine: taken like sacrament, like something holy enough to ruin him, like he would be unmade if he ever stopped.

Shane's body was not just a stranger hole to warm his cock in anymore. It was a ritual to him. And that apparently meant he liked to say beautiful things to it now, out loud, and not in Russian anymore. Things Shane's body apparently had opinions about that his brain had never been consulted on.

"That's—I'm not—" Shane was aware that the sentence was incoherent. His hands were doing something he didn't want them to be doing. He pressed them flat against his thighs. "Don’t fucking say that gay shit to me."

"God forbid," Rozanov said. His mouth turned down, flat with a small edge of annoyance, but he didn't move. He watched Shane as he watched play from the boards: patient, unreadable, waiting for something to open up, and no urgency to interfere until it did.

"I came too fast." Flat. Just a fact, delivered in a voice stripped of everything. He sounded exhausted. He was exhausted. "In four seconds. Don't tell me you didn't notice."

"I noticed," Rozanov said.

"Then don't stand there like it doesn't mean anything. Don't stand there like you didn't just—" He stopped. The sentence had too many possible ends and none of them were ones he was going to say out loud. "Don't act like it didn't happen."

"I am not acting like anything happened. I am just standing here. And you are yelling at me like crazy person."

"Fuck you."

"Hollander." Now he was definitely irritated. His eyes gleamed with it and still, underneath, relentless, the something—

"Stop looking at me like that." Shane's voice shook a little. He pointed at him with one accusing finger, which felt stupid immediately, and he dropped it.

"Like what."

"Like you know something."

"I know nothing," Rozanov said, "because you have meltdowns and say nothing." A beat. "But I think maybe you know something. Yes? I think that is the problem."

Shane was panicking and he could hear it in himself and he could not stop it. His body had just handed Rozanov a piece of information, and Rozanov was standing there with it and not saying what he was going to do with it and the not-saying was worse than anything he could have said.

"It was a reaction," Shane said. "Physiological. It doesn't mean anything."

Rozanov's mouth twitched, acknowledging everything Shane had just said and declined to agree with any of it. And there it was again, the patience of someone who'd decided to wait and meant it, who'd be standing there when Shane ran out of things to hide behind.

Shane was getting dressed before he knew it. "Fuck. Sorry. I'm—I'm sorry."

Rozanov sighed. He'd seen this show before. He didn't say it wasn't fine, which meant it wasn't.

Shane was a coward. He was exactly what Rozanov said—a crazy person who had meltdowns and said nothing and always came crawling back for seconds—and he left anyway, because the alternative was staying in this room until he said something he couldn't take back, and he had given Rozanov enough tonight. In four seconds, from one sentence.

He went to his room and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. Not thinking about Ilya's—Rozanov's, what the fuck—eyes when he'd said it. Not thinking about what the words had done to him. Not thinking about those four seconds or how they'd felt from the inside, being taken out of his own head and left somewhere warm and dark. And liking it. Worse. Liking it.

He opened his phone and started looking at game tape. He was looking at game tape for three and a half minutes before he realized he was looking at Boston footage. Rozanov footage. He closed it. He opened Montreal footage. He watched it for forty-five minutes and didn't process a single second of it.

A different hotel, a different city, somewhere between both, later in the season. Or earlier. He's genuinely lost track.

They had a rhythm by now, which. Well. A rhythm implied repetition implied pattern implied something and they were not doing a thing—it was controlled, incidental. Rozanov didn't have to ask anymore, hadn't for a while. Shane didn't have to pretend he wasn't going to say yes.

It had been going for a long time, long enough that Shane was in that place below his usual defenses, where he couldn't account for his own thoughts. He'd mostly stopped fighting the place. He was riding Ilya—Rozanov, fuck—riding him hard, when the thought surfaced. Thoughts were okay. Thoughts could be lecherous, dangerous, whatever they wanted. Except then it came out of his mouth.

"Oh, please, I want it without the—"

Full stop. Record scratch. Shane's brain caught up to his mouth approximately one syllable too late.

Rozanov went still.

Without the—

Horror hit Shane all at once. The word was right there. Two syllables. He had said more embarrassing things in this room, in rooms like this, said them loudly and without hesitation. He could not make himself finish this one because finishing it made it real, a humiliating stated desire to Rozanov of all people.

Rozanov was frozen. He didn't pull away but he didn't move either. His hand came up to stop Shane's frenzied rocking.

"What?" he said. Carefully. His eyes were wide. Genuinely shocked. And Shane had thought Rozanov could not be surprised, had maintained that assumption for years, and here was evidence to the contrary, presented at the worst possible moment.

White-hot panic detonated somewhere behind his sternum.

"I'm sorry, fuck—" He was talking too fast. He knew he was talking too fast and couldn't stop. "That was—it wasn't a real thing, it was just something that happened, brains do that, people have thoughts they don't mean, I'm not—I was clearly not thinking and now I need you to just—forget it, Rozanov, I'm serious, it doesn't mean—" killmekillmekillme "— anything, it doesn't mean anything, just forget I said it—" KILLMEKILLMEKILLME—

"Hollander—"

"I said forget it." Shane was thinking fast of the exit he always used, how to get upright, get dressed, walk out of this room and into a different room and never come back to this moment in time. "I don't know why I said that. I don't—that's not something I'm actually asking for. Something came over me. I'm sorry. Forget it."

"Sha—Hollander."

Just his name, or most of it—caught and corrected halfway through. Like Rozanov was reaching for something and had stopped himself just short of—

Rozanov was still inside him.

He was still—they were still—

"Oh my God," Shane said, to no one, to the ceiling, to whatever governing force had decided this was how his life should go. "Oh my God."

Because apparently it wasn't enough—the six years, the hotel rooms, the untitled document, the secondary Instagram account—apparently what this situation required was for him to have a complete psychological collapse while still physically impaled on Ilya fucking Rozanov. Fantastic.

"Oh my God—"

"Okay." Rozanov's hands came up—large, warm, certain—and wrapped around his biceps. "Okay. Breathe. In. Out."

"I'm not—I don't—this isn't a—"

"You are having panic attack." His eyebrows were doing the thing, the crinkle that meant he was actually worried and was going to express it exactly this much and no more. "In. Out."

They breathed together. Shane breathed because being told to breathe by Rozanov was less humiliating than passing out in his lap, which had seemed, for approximately three seconds, like a genuine possibility. He breathed until the white noise receded and the room came back and he could feel the ice cold of what he'd just done settling over him like something he was going to be carrying for a long time.

When enough time had passed that Shane was reasonably confident he was not about to die, or flee into the wilderness and let a family of moose adopt him—whichever came first—he looked at Rozanov. Directly. The way he usually avoided doing in these rooms, in these moments. He looked at the face he'd been playing against for half a decade and sleeping with for exactly the same amount of time.

Rozanov looked right back. No armor, no performance. He didn't say anything. He waited.

"It's a fantasy," Shane said. His voice was steady. He'd had years of practice making his voice steady. "People think about things they don't actually want. That's a documented psychological phenomenon."

"I know," Rozanov said. His eyes were soft. It made it worse.

"It was a mistake. It came out of nowhere. I'm sorry." Shane's heart was still hammering. He breathed through it. "Please don't make it into something it isn't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You have a very loud face," Shane said. He didn't apologize for it.

Rozanov's didn't quite smile. "You have a very loud mouth," he said.

The pressure in the room shifted. It wasn't gone, it was going to stay somewhere forever probably, Shane understood that immediately. But moved, shifted, somewhere he could breathe. Shane found he could take a full breath and that he could almost look at Rozanov without feeling like the floor was glass.

Rozanov flipped them over, one hand, easy and controlled, like Shane weighed nothing and wasn't a two-hundred-pound elite athlete, and proceeded to do what he always did, which was take Shane apart at the seams with a thoroughness that had genuinely ruined him for other people, not that he'd said that out loud or ever would. The filthy things Rozanov said. Shane's own voice saying things he'd stopped being embarrassed by. Rozanov with a suspiciously tender washcloth after, which still made Shane want to say something about it and he never did. The appropriate, curt amount of time to linger, and then Shane gathering himself, finding the pieces of the person he was outside this room and assembling them back into place.

"Well," Shane said. "I should probably—"

"Yes," Rozanov said.

Theater. All of it. They were very good at theater. But Ilya—and it was Ilya now, having slipped past somewhere—looked at him differently for the rest of the act. Like he knew where the trapdoor was now. Like he'd come around back of the stage mid-performance and seen the scaffolding, the ropes, the sandbags, the sweaty little guy pulling levers behind the velvet—and had decided not to say so, had walked back around front and taken his seat and watched the rest of the performance. Understanding exactly how the trick works but still watching to see what the magician does with it.

Shane hit his marks. Said the right lines. Laughed when he was supposed to. Let Ilya kiss him goodnight at the door, which wasn't how they usually did it, and didn't say anything about that either. He did the tricks. But once someone had seen the false bottom, the secret shelf, the magician's hand and the crammed little rabbit—

Shane lay in the dark and thought about it for longer than he wanted to. He knew why he'd said it. He could see the logic of it, even after he'd been thoroughly embarrassed by his own mouth. A condom was something Rozanov used with women. Always with women. They were practical, obvious, nothing to do with Shane. And then he also used them with Shane, because if there were all those women, Shane didn't really want that in him either.

No condom meant no precaution. The category shifted. He would be something that didn't require one, something the women couldn't be. He looked at this thought for five seconds. Then three more. Then he turned off the light.

Eighteen days later he saw Rozanov across a faceoff circle. Rozanov won the draw. Shane tracked him up the ice. Nothing happened differently. Nothing was said. The game was the game. Shane told himself that was fine. He was getting worse at believing himself.

The specific hell of Svetlana Vetrova was that she made sense. With the others, the Buffalo girl, the trainer, the model from the shoot, Shane could tell himself they didn’t matter. They were categories of women. Not people. Categories didn’t fight back.

Svetlana kept coming back. Which made her a person. Which was inconvenient.

She was Russian. From Sokol, Moscow, same as Rozanov, which meant she had known him before he was a brand or a rivalry or the most written-about player in the Eastern Conference. She had known him when he was seventeen and didn't have anything to protect yet.

Shane hated her for that. Irrationally. Completely. Consistently.

There was a photo. Reposted to a fan account before it disappeared. The two of them young, fifteen, maybe sixteen. She was draped over his shoulder like she had always been allowed there. They were both laughing. Rozanov’s face in it was a face Shane had never seen.

She was gorgeous. Annoyingly so. The kind of gorgeous that didn’t need effort.

He screenshotted it. Deleted it. Retrieved it from the trash. Put it in a folder labeled Research. Added four more photos within the week. In three of them she was laughing. He had started to recognize her laugh by the shape of her mouth.

Shane had never made him laugh like that, not in public. Definitely not like that.

He found an article: What Women Do in Bed That Drives Men Wild (According to Men). He read it twice. He took notes. Deleted them. Then memorized all five anyway.

Number three: run your hands through his chest hair, slowly, men find this incredibly intimate.

One night, he tried it.

Rozanov looked down at him. “Does the hair bother you? I can shave.”

“You would shave it?” Shane asked, incredulously.

He shrugged one shoulder. “If it bothers you. Like the lights did, or—”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Shane said too fast.

“Okay.” He smiled, and it was like getting shot. He kissed the corner of Shane’s lips before licking into his mouth with more focus.

He'd found the video three weeks ago. Twelve seconds of Svetlana at some Moscow gala, her head tipping back when she laughed, one hand coming up to rest at her own collarbone—unconscious, loose, the gesture of someone who found their own body easy to inhabit.

Shane had watched it forty-one times. He'd stood in front of his own mirror and tried the angle, tried the looseness.

He'd looked insane. He'd done it again anyway.

He watched porn. Women specifically. Five videos. Seven. With the intensity of reviewing tape. Movement. Sound. Timing. The softness.

Svetlana was probably just like that naturally.

The next time with Rozanov he tried to adjust. Slight arch. Different angle. More intentional.

Rozanov stopped. “Are you trying to break your spine?”

“No.”

“It looks like it hurts.”

“It doesn’t.”

“You fold yourself in the wrong direction.”

“I said I’m fine,” Shane snapped, offended and deeply humiliated. “Are you going to fuck me or are we doing physical therapy.”

Rozanov lifted him off the mattress and the conversation was over.

He tried kissing differently. Softer. Slower. Like women in movies. Like Svetlana probably kissed.

Rozanov pulled back. “Uh.”

“What?”

“You do not do this. You kiss me so hard time before, you split my lip.”

“I was trying something.”

“Try something else,” Rozanov said, and did it correctly, which involved Shane’s head hitting the headboard and Rozanov’s hand moving up just in time to catch it like it mattered.

He attempted to master the art of the seductive laugh. Low, slightly breathless, designed. He had seen it deployed in the Research folder and in videos and in the vicinity of Rozanov at three separate public events by some doe-eyed woman.

He tried it. The sound that came out of him was not that.

Rozanov stared at him.

Shane stared back.

"What was that," Rozanov said.

"Nothing," Shane said, face hot. "Nothing. Forget it."

“Do not do that again.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Never again.”

They did not mention it after. Immediately and by mutual unspoken agreement. Shane would take this one to his grave. And he decided the sex approach was not going to cut it.

Svetlana had perfect skin. No freckles. No interruptions. No evidence of history or anything that might make her harder to look at.

Shane bought tinted moisturizer. Three forums. Forty-six reviews. Untraceable usernames. This was a normal thing to do, and he was a normal person doing it. He applied it before Rozanov arrived.

Rozanov walked a slow circle around him. Squinted. "Something is on your face."

"Moisturizer."

He stepped closer. Shane stepped back. Rozanov stepped forward.

Shane hit the counter behind him.

"You covered your freckles."

"It's just—"

"Wash it off."

“Excuse me?”

“Wash it off.”

"Fuck you, are you insane, where do you get off—"

"If you do not, I will do it for you."

"Like hell you will—"

Rozanov picked him up.

Shane fought him the whole way, because neither of them ever did anything halfway. They hit the floor twice. Something broke from a corner table. Shane got an elbow in and Rozanov swore in Russian and Shane felt briefly victorious before Rozanov slammed him through the bathroom door.

Then Shane was underwater. He came up coughing.

Later, in the shower when Rozanov came, he aimed for Shane's face. Deliberately. With eye contact. And then looked at Shane's freckles, decorated, with the satisfaction of someone who'd made his point.

Shane put flowers in his apartment. Tulips. Lavender. A eucalyptus bundle from an interior photo tagged in a comment on Svetlana's friend's public account. He had no idea what he was doing. That was consistent.

Rozanov stood in the doorway. Looked at the tulips. The lavender. The eucalyptus. Glared at Shane like he had done something to him personally. "Did someone give you these."

"No?"

A pause. "You bought flowers."

"People can have plants,” Shane defended.

"Yes," Rozanov said, slowly. Blinked. "People can have plants."

He didn't bring it up again, but Shane noticed him looking at the lavender once, briefly, with an expression Shane could not read.

The lavender died eleven days later because Shane had not researched that part.

He found out what perfume Svetlana wore. This required comment threads, fan accounts, a deleted Instagram story, and a reply from someone named @rozanovsrealwife1991 who had, unbidden, included the concentration and the season she typically wore it.

Maison Margiela Replica: Flower Market. He ordered it. He wore it.

Rozanov walked in. Stopped. Sniffed. “You are so unscented I do not notice you enter rooms sometimes. Dogs and babies do not trust you.”

“I’ve always worn this.”

“You have never worn nothing.”

“I have.”

“Why do you smell like flowers.”

“People change,” Shane said, with dignity.

Rozanov’s hand came around his neck, gentle but firm. Shane was already tilting his head back. A reflex. Rozanov whispered, softly, “You do not fucking change.”

Later, he buried his face in Shane’s chest and inhaled. Stopped. Did it again. Made a sound Shane couldn’t file anywhere.

Svetlana sold luxury cars (340 Boston Providence Hwy, Westwood, MA 02090). Rozanov had Porsches and Audis (baby blue, bright green, black, nauseatingly orange as a traffic cone). Shane had called him a showboating asshole for this on two separate occasions, which just made Rozanov come faster, as he always did when Shane was a little mean to him.

Shane spent forty minutes on a Porsche forum at midnight.

“Tell me about your cars,” Shane said, the next time.

“What the fuck,” Rozanov said. “Is this what they call digging gold.”

"The 911 Turbo S," Shane continued, as if he had not spoken, "has an interesting—"

Rozanov groaned, loud and long-suffering, and fought his way upright like he was ninety instead of twenty-four—and in excellent shape. "Only you could make cars boring, Hollander.” He grabbed Shane by the wrist and dragged him outside.

"Wait—"

"Shut the fuck up," Rozanov said, and pushed him into the back seat.

Shane came so hard he lost thirty seconds of time. Just clean passed out. Rozanov was laughing against his throat after. The leather smelled expensive.

"The 911 Turbo S," Rozanov wheezed, still laughing, grabbing his own stomach. "Oh fuck, Hollander, I think I pull something—"

"Asshole," Shane said, but he was laughing too, against his will, which was the worst part. They went another two rounds before the cramped space got too bad to bear.

He noticed women in photos with Rozanov bit their lip. Lower lip, slightly. Svetlana did it. Multiple women did it. He didn't think it was necessarily a sex thing. Just something to make conversation more inviting. He did it once when Rozanov was looking at him, the way he did. Deliberating between pouncing on him or finishing his thought.

Rozanov stopped. Looked at him.

Shane wanted to actually die. He wanted to leave his body there on the couch and live out the rest of his days as a monk.

"Hollander." Rozanov's voice was strange. Cut like cold water.

"Nothing," Shane said, immediately.

“Do not perform for me,” he said, sounding strangled.

“I’m—”

“If you ever fake it with me, I will never speak to you again.” He was dead serious. “You are not some puck bunny trying to get in my bed.”

Shane tried to look away, but Rozanov grabbed his chin hard. Held him still. “I will never speak to you again. Do you get me.”

Shane nodded as best he could, with his jaw pinned.

Rozanov looked at him for one more long minute before he looked away, jaw tight, and kept talking like it hadn’t happened.

He was riding Rozanov when it happened—and it was not performed, just the angle and the depth and the overwhelming fact of it—and he put his hand flat against his own stomach and said, "oh my God, I can feel you—"

He felt Rozanov go rigid beneath him.

The pressure of his own palm against his skin, and underneath it—impossibly, undeniably—the faint fullness of it, the outline of something that shouldn't be felt from the outside but was. "—in my stomach," Shane finished, and pressed down, and felt the slight pressure of it there and whined. High and cracked and absolutely demolished.

Something detonated in Rozanov's face. His hands flew to Shane's hips and gripped hard enough to bruise. "Fuck," he said, low and wrecked. "You feel that?"

"Yeah," Shane said, whimpering loudly and reedy, pressing Rozanov’s hand down on it this time. Rozanov's palm was warm and wide and Shane pressed it flat, held it there, watched his face fall apart while he covered the full span of Shane's waist.

"I'm going to—" Rozanov's jaw was taut, voice scraped raw. "I'm going to fuck you so hard you feel it for days. Feel me for days. I am going to put a baby in you—"

"You can't—" Shane started, which was not a no, which Rozanov apparently correctly identified because he flipped them over and proceeded to do exactly what he had described. Shane braced himself against the headboard as Rozanov slammed into him over and over again, unrelenting and vicious. Shane's knuckles went white against the wood. The sounds in the room were obscene—the slap of it, Rozanov's breathing gone ragged and uneven, Shane's own voice pleading and begging so loud it went hoarse. His other hand, Shane pressed against his own stomach in Rozanov's absence and felt it there and moaned, desperate and needy and louder each time.

"Inside me, inside me, inside me," he panted, maybe without meaning to. "Please, inside, please—so fucking good—" He was crying, he realized. From being too full of it, too much, his body not big enough to hold all of what was happening to it.

"Fuck," Rozanov groaned, eyes darkening. The bedsprings creaked in protest. "You are just so hungry for it. Is never enough, yes? It was not enough for me to fuck your tight, hungry hole so hard you cannot think—you just had to have my cum in you too—"

The orgasm hit Shane so hard and furiously he saw black spots, eyes rolling back. It came sharp and fast, no warning, a shockwave of sensation that left him reeling. He sobbed as it tore through him, his body going rigid around Rozanov's cock beneath the force of it. Every muscle locked, milking wildly, shaking just as desperately, and Rozanov's hands were on his hips holding him down through it.

Rozanov came inside him right after with a whimper. No condom—which had started as a thing Shane had asked for once, panicked about, and then asked for again three months later without panicking, and then again, and now was just a thing they did occasionally, when they both wanted it badly enough to throw all reason out the window. He came inside him and then waited to watch some of it spill out, and then used his fingers to fuck his cum back in. Shane groaned into the pillow, eyes wet, hips twitching back toward it involuntarily, which was its own separate humiliation.

Rozanov pressed his sticky palm flat against Shane's stomach after, covering Shane's trembling hand with his own, and looked at what they were doing and made a noise like something had been taken from him.

Shane looked at the ceiling. Thought about the way he always fell apart crying during sex. The way the rest of that had just come out of him like instinct, like he'd internalized it.

Shane Hollander had opinions about Rozanov's women. He knew this about himself, and he would not say out loud to anyone including himself on any morning after a game.

The opinions were not about them as people. They were a category. Rozanov moved through these women like he moved through everything else. Openly. Without the weight Shane attached to wanting. A girl in his Instagram stories, a girl at a charity event photographed by someone's phone, a girl at a bar after an away game—it was all easy and visible and apparently uncontaminated by shame. The wanting and the having were just things that happened, sequential and unguarded, and when they ended, they ended and Rozanov went somewhere else.

Shane looked at this and felt the combination of contempt and hunger. The women were to blame, in his opinion, and he didn’t correct himself. She's nothing, she's temporary, she doesn't know him, she has no idea what this is. He told himself: she chose this. I am in a position I never chose and she chose this and she doesn't understand what the price of it is.

The version of the no-condom thought, the one he hadn't said out loud and didn't say out loud, the one that lived in the document under the unnamed heading, was to be something they couldn't be. If Rozanov was with him, here, in a hotel room in a way that couldn't be replicated by anyone else on the list, then Shane was not interchangeable. He was not a convenience. He was not a city on a roster or a category or forgettable.

He was specific, and specific meant he couldn’t be swapped out for someone prettier.

He went through both lists and at the end had a list on one side that was longer and a list on the other side that contained one item that made him feel simultaneously sick and desperately competitive. He opened Rozanov's Instagram stories. JFK again, different month. A girl just barely visible in the background. He closed the app. He opened game tape. He watched game tape for forty minutes.

He did not think about any of it. He also threw up in the bathroom at 2 a.m. But this was irrelevant. Something he ate.

He'd seen them together twice. Once at a league event in November, Rozanov's hand at the small of her back, easy and proprietary, her laughing at something he said with her head tipping back exactly like the video. Once at a restaurant Shane had no business being near, through a window he'd had no business standing at, and he'd stood on the sidewalk for eleven seconds before he made himself walk away.

Rozanov's mouth played with his nipples now, suckling gently and then harder, his hands moving with the unhurried efficiency Shane had spent years not-thinking about, and Shane was supposed to be below the inventory by now—

The collarbone gesture. She does it without thinking. She has never once had to think.

"She doesn't get this."

The room stopped. Rozanov slowly pulled his mouth away. "Who."

Fuck. "Nobody—"

"Who is she."

"I said nobody, I was thinking about something else, just keep—"

"Hollander."

His name in Rozanov's mouth, even now, even with the edge in it. Shane had seventeen pages on that and not one of those pages had prepared him for it happening at this moment, while he was lying here having said the one thing he'd spent six years not saying.

"Who is the girl," Rozanov said. Flat and certain. Getting his weight back like he was going to actually stop.

That was what broke it. "What the fuck do you care," Shane said.

Silence.

"You have a girl in every city." Shane could feel his own voice going wrong, the control fraying. "You post a story from a tarmac and you've got someone in your room by ten. You've been doing that since you were nineteen years old, so what the fuck do you care what I'm thinking about—"

"You are being serious right now—"

"Yes, I'm serious."

"You are—" Rozanov sat back and looked at him with something between disbelief and something that had heat in it. "Completely psychotic, Hollander—"

"Oh, I'm the psychotic one—"

"You are in my bed, you say some woman's name—"

"I didn't say a name—"

"You said she—"

"That's not a name—"

"—and then you want to act like I'm the one—" Rozanov made a sound of complete disbelief. "If I said a woman's name in bed with you, you would cut my dick off!”

Shane opened his mouth. Well, with detached clarity.

"You're being such a fucking baby," Rozanov said, disgusted. He looked away.

"I'm being a baby?" Shane's voice cracked at the edge and he hated it, hated that Rozanov could see it. "You're the one acting crazy, interrogating me like you have some right—"

"I have every right—"

"You sleep with other people!"

"You are not other people," Rozanov said. The flat version. The version with no inflection because it was true.

Shane's mouth closed.

Rozanov looked at him. The heat in his face hadn't gone anywhere, and he was breathing hard. "You are not other people," he said again, quieter. Then: "Shut up. I don't want to hear another word."

He moved back in and he fucked him like he almost hated him. This wasn't the patient version, the slow deliberate six-years-of-this version. He flipped Shane onto his stomach, got a knee between his thighs and shoved them apart, and pushed in with barely enough prep and barely enough lube and no preamble whatsoever. The burn of it was immediate and delicious and Shane's breath left him all at once, a punched-out sound. Shane cried out against the pillow, sharp and ragged, his hands flying out to grab at something, anything—

Rozanov's hand came down flat between his shoulder blades and pressed, pinning him. "You want to think about her," he said, low and rough against the back of his neck, moving, setting a pace that didn't ask for anything, "think about her now. Think about her while I fuck you. See how far you get."

Shane couldn't think about anything. He could barely think about the room. He was thinking about the drag and pressure of Rozanov slamming inside him, the weight of Rozanov's hand between his shoulder blades, the way his own hips were trying to move back to fuck himself on Rozanov's cock and couldn't because Rozanov had him pinned—

She has him in the first language, something offered, surfacing briefly from the wreckage—

The hand didn't move. Didn't need to. Just the fact of it, keeping him down, keeping him exactly where Rozanov wanted him. He grabbed a fistful of Shane's hair and pulled his head back and fucked up into him, hard, and Shane moaned, loud and cracked and undignified, his fingers scrabbling at the sheets. He got a fistful of nothing. The cotton was damp under his palms.

"Again," Rozanov said.

"Rozanov—"

"That. Again." He thrust forward and Shane moaned and whimpered again, helpless, his back arching. Rozanov's free hand came around and found Shane's nipple—pinched, hard, no warmup—and Shane gasped, the shock of it running straight down his spine.

"Fuck," Shane gritted out. "Fuck, don't—"

"Don't what." He did it again, harder, rolling it between his fingers until Shane was writhing under him trying to get away and simultaneously pushing back into every thrust. "Don't what, Hollander. Play with your tits? Fuck you hard? The way you always beg me for my cock like you will die without it? Finish the sentence."

Shane couldn't finish the sentence. He had his face shoved into the pillow and he was sobbing, wet and breathless. His lips were pressed to the cotton and everything coming out of him was muffled and wrecked and it didn't matter, nothing about restraint mattered anymore. Rozanov had let go of his hair and gotten both hands on him now—one at his hip, grip so tight it was going to leave finger-shaped bruises, one still working his chest, moving between both nipples with a methodical cruelty that made Shane's vision swim.

She laughs like she's never had to hold anything back, his brain offered, desperate and flickering—

"Her name," Rozanov said. Voice dropped, almost conversational, which was worse than the open fury. "I want it. Give it to me."

"Nobody—"

"Her name." He punctuated it with a thrust that drove Shane halfway up the mattress and wrung a broken cry out of him.

"Nobody, I don't—there's nobody—"

"Liar," Rozanov said, and there was something in it that wasn't anger anymore, something rawer, and he fucked into Shane like he was trying to prove something through sheer physical force, like if he went hard enough and deep enough he could reach whatever Shane was keeping back and pull it out by the root. Loud, gasping breathing and dripping obscenities crowded the room. "You think she—" He stopped. Started again. "Go ahead. Say her fucking name. Just try it. I want to hear you try."

Shane couldn't say anything. His mouth was open against the pillow and nothing was coming out, no words, barely breath, just the wet press of his own lips and the tears tracking sideways down his face into the cotton and a low continuous whine he couldn't stop. Rozanov was everywhere. His hands, his weight, the relentless pace that hadn't let up once, that was going to wreck Shane and Shane knew it and was pulling him in anyway, both hands reaching back to grab at whatever he could find—

His nails caught Rozanov's forearm. Raked down.

Rozanov hissed, sharp, involuntary, and his hips snapped forward and Shane screamed into the pillow, muffled and destroyed.

"Again," Rozanov said. His voice had changed. Lower. Something unraveling at the edges. "Do that again."

Shane did it again. He reached back and got both hands on Rozanov's sides and dug his nails in and dragged, and Rozanov groaned, low and rough and unguarded, and the pace went vicious, punishing, and Shane's eyes rolled back. His throat ached. The pace was punishing enough that he couldn't brace against it, couldn't do anything except take it, his whole body rocking forward with every thrust.

"Is what I thought," Rozanov said, moaning raggedly. "That's what I fucking thought."

He flipped Shane over somewhere around the third orgasm, or what Shane thought was the third, he'd stopped counting, stopped tracking anything, his brain was operating at about fifteen percent capacity and most of that fifteen percent was dedicated to breathing. Rozanov got his legs up and over his shoulders and looked down at him, clearly pissed. Which unfortunately, did very little to stop the ache in between Shane's legs.

Shane looked up at him with wet eyes and an open mouth and absolutely gone.

"There you are," Rozanov said. Low. Possessive. He reached down and wrapped a hand around Shane's cock—callused palm, no preamble, immediate and relentless—and Shane's hips bucked up off the mattress and he yelped, desperate, his body arched like a bow. His jaw was slack. His face was a complete disaster, probably, and he knew it and couldn't do anything about it.

"Look at you," Rozanov said. "Can't even make a sound. That's what you are right now. That's what I do to you." He stroked him once, twice, tight and deliberate, and Shane's whimper finally cracked into a moan, broken and wrecked and very loud. "There it is."

"Please—" Shane's voice was destroyed. He didn't know what he was asking for. More, stop, harder, something. "Roza—please—"

"Please what." Still moving. Still working him with that hand. "Tell me what you want."

"Don't stop—"

“I’m not stopping,” Rozanov said. Certain. Absolute. "I am never stopping. You understand me? This—" he thrust forward and Shane sobbed, actual tears streaming now, thighs trembling against Rozanov's ears— "—you think anyone else gets this? You think she gets this?"

She has him in every year, every month, Shane's brain tried, faint and desperate—

"You are going to show me. Show me how good you take my cock. You are going to feel every bit of it, and you will come on my cock, or not at all."

Then Rozanov's hand twisted just right and Shane came, sudden and obliterating, vision going white, a long "Rozanov" tearing out of him that went ragged at the edges and didn't stop. Rozanov fucked him through it with erratic thrusts, kept his hand moving through it, kept going until Shane was begging from the oversensitivity and clawing at anything he could reach—Rozanov's arms, his chest, his back—drawing more blood somewhere from the sharp groan Rozanov made, and Rozanov said "good," like that was exactly what he wanted, like Shane tearing him open was the correct response, and didn't slow down.

The way Shane's hole opened for him, stretched out over the slick, glistening flesh of his shaft. The way every glance downward threatened to undo him completely. Burning, overwhelming. Shane clenched over and over, choked gasps forcing their way out, riding out the shockwaves.

"Again," Rozanov demanded.

"I can't, I literally can't, m' going to—"

"I didn't fucking ask. Again." He found the angle. The one he'd been finding since Nashville. And held it. Shane's mouth fell open and he wailed, just once, his body locking up and then releasing in a full-body shudder, tears and drool and his nails leaving fresh marks down Rozanov's forearm. He could feel the marks he was leaving and couldn't stop, couldn't make his hands do anything else.

Rozanov hissed.

"Yours," Shane moaned. He hadn't decided to say it. It just came out, scraped raw. "I'm yours, okay? I'm—" His hands fisted the sheets, beyond words. Just incoherent gurgles and begging, over and over again.

"I know," Rozanov fumed. Like a fact. Like the ice was hard and the puck was black. "I have always known. You are the one who keeps forgetting.”

The room filled with the wet, relentless rhythm of flesh meeting flesh, punctuated by Shane's strained cries and Ilya's mindless moaning.

He got a hand under Shane's lower back and changed the angle and Shane's vision strobed, going unfocused. White, gray, then nothing.

Blackness.

When Shane came back to, an uncertain time later, forty seconds or forty minutes, Rozanov was still inside him, still moving, his mouth at Shane's throat, his chest, the hinge of his jaw—biting, not kissing, marking—and Shane didn't know how long he'd been gone, hadn't known he'd gone at all until he was suddenly back and blinking at the ceiling, and the sounds coming out of him were sobs, had apparently been sobs for some time, wet and weepy and beyond his control.

"Fuck," Rozanov was moaning, between strings of Russian, again and again. "Fuck, I'm, fuck—" His face was flushed red, deep and dark, the veins in his throat and forehead jumping. "Oh, fuck. So pretty. So sensitive. So fucking beautiful when you cry for it."

There was only this, only the weight and heat and fury of Rozanov over him, inside him, taking him apart with focused intensity. Rozanov, who also competed at the highest level in the world and was applying all of that to this—

Rozanov came with his face pressed to Shane's throat, both hands gripping hard enough that Shane was going to be purple around his hips tomorrow, saying something in Russian Shane didn't have, murmured twice, and that was all.

Afterward, it was quiet. For a long time.

Shane lay on his back with his forearm over his eyes and breathed. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been taken out, wrung, and put back in wrong. There was blood under his nails. There were marks on his skin that hadn't been there an hour ago.

Rozanov's weight settled beside him. His hand landed on Shane's ribs, placed there like it belonged.

Shane could feel him not sleeping.

"You're not going to tell me," Rozanov said eventually. Unevenly.

"No," Shane said.

A long silence.

"I want to know," Rozanov whispered.

"I know."

The hand on his ribs didn't move. "Does it hurt?" Rozanov asked, tracing an idle finger along Shane's puffy, abused rim.

Shane turned his face away quickly. "No." His nose burned.

Shane looked at the inside of his own forearm. He felt the pit sitting at the bottom of everything, still there, still the exact same shape it had always been, unchanged by any of what had just happened. The video was still on his phone. The photo was still in the folder. Svetlana Vetrova still had the laugh and the collarbone gesture and every room she'd ever walked into and he was never going to be able to do anything about any of it.

Did she get his hands?

Large and callused and certain and deliciously tormenting. His thumb pressing into the inside of Shane's wrist, just enough to feel. Around his rim, over and over again. In his mouth to shut him up when he got too loud, the way he always did. Shane's body going still under it.

Did she go still like that.

The marks were his. All of them. Shane checked his back, his neck, his biceps, after, like auditing a ledger.

Did she leave marks.

He checked more carefully.

Rozanov lifted his head from the pillow. "What are you doing."

"Nothing."

Rozanov put his head back down. Snorted into the pillow.

Shane finished checking before Rozanov dragged him down for round two.

Did she get the Russian.

The private whispers, the one with nothing left in it. Shane had pieces, things said into the side of his neck he had no translation for, that she would have understood completely, without—

Did she get this.

The warmth of him after. The twenty minutes before he reassembled. The washcloth, quiet, without commentary.

Did he do it for her the same way.

She had the seventeen-year-old. The sixteen-year-old. Fifteen on some Moscow rink. Fourteen, unknown to anyone. The face from the photo, the one Shane had looked at enough times he could reconstruct it from memory, that face had been hers first.

The perfume bottle was still in the cabinet. The folder had thirty-one items. The lavender was dead on his windowsill.

Did he love—

PART FIVE: ROSE

2016 - 2017

Hayden Pike didn't know about Rozanov. Shane was certain of this as he was certain of most things he had deliberately constructed. Hayden knew that Shane was private, that Shane didn’t talk about women, that the rumors were probably rumors because rumors were usually just noise, right? Shane was different, sure, but “different” was something Hayden could afford to leave unexamined, especially when Shane Hollander collected Cups like fridge magnets. Shane Hollander was a walking myth, a hockey saint elevated just far enough above the rest of them that you couldn’t picture him needing anything basic, like sleep or emotional stability. Hockey Jesus, but without the fuckass camel-toe sandals.

Hayden didn’t know that the slightly elevated tension before every Montreal–Boston game was not, strictly speaking, competitive adrenaline. That when Shane disappeared for three hours during the All-Star break in Las Vegas and missed his phone call, it was not because he’d found a quiet gym, but because he was being edged within an inch of his life. That the reason Shane sometimes looked at his phone with an expression Hayden had once described as “reading your own autopy” (“the thing when you die” “autopsy, you fucking idiot”) was because of a secondary Instagram account Shane had never mentioned to anyone.

@ottawa_realty, despite its extremely respectable name and aggressively beige aesthetic, spent significantly more time zooming in on increasingly incriminating angles of one Ilya Rozanov’s very real, very distracting, bounce house ass than on anything resembling property investment.

Shane loved Hayden with the same dependence he had on his own stability. Structurally, not sentimentally. As a load-bearing wall, not a preference. Hayden talked about his wife and his daughters and the insane amount of money they'd spent on a swing set and Shane could stand next to this and it worked better than armor because it was invisible, which was the only kind that actually worked. Hayden didn't require performance. Shane did not know how to value that correctly until it was too late.

After Shane had, predictably, completed yet another meltdown and been a crazy person in Ilya’s presence (“Shane,” “Ilya,” oh God—), and for the first time in their lives, had not come crawling back without a word, Rose Landry appeared. She materialized in his periphery as things tended to, through someone else’s phone and Instagram story, and Boiziau’s relentless inability to take no for an answer. Some charity dinner party in Montreal that half the Metros had attended and that Shane had politely declined because charities and parties and charity parties, together, one thing, required a form of social management that cost more than it gave back (and he felt like he’d ripped his soul out and thrown it through broken glass in Ilya’s Boston house, okay?)

She'd arrived at nine-thirty, along with half the X-Men cast, apparently. He knew this because Boiziau's story had a very clear timestamp and Rose Landry in the background. And because, Boiziau, annoying nagging fly (and dear friend) that he was, called Shane at nine-forty-five and told him to get his ass here, right the fuck now. No fucking excuses, putain.

Shane knew who she was. He would have known who she was even without the hockey press's affection for writing about celebrity appearances at charity events—she was a different kind of famous than athlete famous, a different category of recognition, and Shane had developed radar for all categories.

He looked at his phone after the call for a moment. He closed the Instagram story and the app altogether. And because he was done curling up in his Montreal penthouse like a wounded animal, especially since he’d pulled the trigger himself and had no one else to blame for it, he went to the party.

At one point that night, when it all got to be too much, the way it always did at charity parties (one miserable, loaded thing), the bartender claiming he could have anything but then not even serving him ginger ale, Shane slid into a dimly lit booth thinking he could find refuge there.

Instead, she was right across from him. Hiding the same way, apparently. She demolished truffle fries with military efficiency Shane was both impressed by and deeply terrified of.

“Have a fry, Shane Hollander.”

And nobody really said no to Rose Landry, probably, so he did.

Later, Rose said, "I've heard you're the last person at every party."

"I leave early, too," Shane said. Maybe she would realize he was deeply pathetic and lame and he could go back to licking his wounds.

"Me too.”

But Rose was not stupid. She was not a category. She was not one of Rozanov’s usual swimwear-model, bleach-blonde Instagram roster girls. She was a person with opinions and a presence in a room that was both maximally visible and unperformed, the kind some people had—Shane didn’t feel her working; he just felt her there.

He thought, for the first time in a long time, about a different version of the answer. The version where the untitled document stayed closed because there was someone who occupied the room in a way that didn't leave space for what was in the document. He said, "It always seemed like a viable strategy," and she laughed, and the laugh was the beginning of something he understood immediately, had been studying now for a while through a different lens, and entered anyway.

It was not nothing. Shane wants to be precise about this, later, when he's thinking about it in the cottage with the lake glittering outside and the coffee going and Ilya breathing in the other room like something permanent—it was not nothing. Rose was real. The dinners were real. He liked her company. She was very smart and she made him laugh and she didn't need anything from him except what was actually capable of giving, which was attention and relative honesty and loyalty, and in that sense they were genuine.

It wasn't sustainable. It didn't fix the low-level noise either, the rumors, the careful management, increasingly threadbare. He was twenty-four, almost twenty-five, and the management was getting more expensive. He could feel it as he feels an injury before it becomes one—the precursor tightness, the body signaling before it gives out. He needed something to point at that was visible and that read clearly.

Rose Landry was the best answer available to the question he had access to and he knew it when he started and he took it anyway because the alternative was nothing except the hotel rooms he burned down and the secondary account he couldn't bring himself to delete and the document. A document that fucking haunted him asleep and waking.

She found out, and he didn't even have to tell her. That was what he'd been most afraid of, even if it was cowardly: the conversation, the moment of saying it aloud for the first time. But she didn't need the conversation. She was smarter than the conversation required.

In the wine bar in Old Montreal, she looked at him across the table and said, "You don't have to explain anything if you don't want to," and he said, "No, I should," and then he did. She was not surprised. She was kind, which hurt worse. She said, "I know," and he said, "How," and she said, "Shane," in a very particular tone, and he understood.

He sat with the shame of doing a thing he understood was unfair and doing it anyway. He sat with it long enough to feel it properly and then he thanked her for the dinner, and she laughed, brief and a little sad, told them they were going to be best friends, for real, and they went their separate ways. On the drive home he felt, underneath the shame, something else that perhaps should have brought him more shame, but didn't, not when it had been under a lot of things for a long time. Relief.

Shane had watched it live because of course he had. Scott Hunter, New York Admirals captain, standing at a podium after winning the Conn Smythe, speaking into a microphone like a person who has decided something and is not going back on it. The crowd noise was enormous and then it changed, a room recognizing what it had just seen.

Shane watched the broadcast with the sound low in his parents’ house, his arm still in a sling. He was happy for Hunter. Professional solidarity, when someone in his industry did something difficult and it worked. Hunter was a good player, and a legitimate story, and the press was going to do what the press did with it and that was—that was good. That was fine. He thought about what it cost Hunter, and the energy he'd spent every day keeping the thing contained. He thought about what you must become to survive the release, and all the scrutiny that comes with it. He thought about whether Hunter would have the same face in a year, relieved and open and finally himself, or if would wither over time from the pressure of what it took to get there. He turned off the broadcast and went to bed.

Shane’s phone rang at one-seventeen in the morning, a few weeks.

He looked at the screen. Lily. He answered.

Ilya’s voice, slightly rougher than usual, sounded of celebration and having stepped outside to make a call they'd been thinking about making for a few hours.

I’m coming to the cottage, he’d said, after the kiss that could not be undone. Shane thought of it every time he answered the phone.

Now he said: “I sent you flight details.” There was something uncertain, fragile in it, as if giving Shane another chance to back out.

Shane was quiet for a moment. That relief was even louder, practically screaming to be let out in Ilya’s face. His knees felt weak with it. “Okay,” Shane said, warmly, smiling before he could stop it. “I’ll pick you up. I’ll—I’ll send you a screenshot of a map of the airport, where I’ll park my car. Don’t worry about a thing, I’ve got it all planned out. I’m—”

Ilya was laughing. Low. Unguarded.

Shane stopped.

Ilya was smiling too, now. Tentative, young. Shane could hear it in his voice. “I have to go now. I will see you soon, yes?”

“Yes.” Yes, yes, yes. Anything. Forever, if you ask.

Shane looked at the dark ceiling of his bedroom. He thought about Scott Hunter's face at the podium. A person who had decided something. He lay in his own room with the AC running and his pulse somewhere in his throat.

He thought about the rules, the hotel rooms, and the untitled document that wasn’t really untitled—he knew what it was about, had always known, just hadn’t put it at the top.

He thought about the no-condom thought and the words Rozanov had said with heart eyes Shane hadn’t been ready for then and the four seconds and Svetlana's face in a photo he shouldn't have found and the fifty-two pages of notes on a smile that were wrong, all wrong.

Ilya said, "Do not worry so much, I think."

"Okay," Shane said, the smile softening but still there.

And then, in the register Ilya used when there was no one to perform for—the one Shane had pages and pages of notes on, years before he ever heard it up close: "Shane."

"Okay,” Shane said again, but differently. He whispered back “Ilya” and they listened to the sound of it together.

Shane hung up and lay in the dark for a long time. He didn't file anything. He just lay there with it, which was the first time in nine years that he'd done that, and it was uncomfortable and it was something else too and he didn't have a name for the something else, but he stopped trying to find one and just let it be there.

Outside, Ottawa was quiet. Familiar. Ilya, he thought, because he could now. An altar. A prayer. Ilya, Ilya, Ilya. He dreamt of blue-green eyes and a mischievous smile, of golden summer light slipping over Ilya’s back and gathering there like it belonged. Of the moles along his skin, scattered and quiet, becoming constellations when the light hit them just right.

PART FIVE & A HALF: THE SUCK MY DICK INCIDENT

2011 | February

Shane had thought about this thing that happened in February 2011, on and off, for six years. Shane was on the bench when it happened. Which was, in retrospect, the worst place to be—a front row seat with nowhere to hide his face.

It was a scrum in front of the Boston net. The Metros were up by one with six minutes left in the third and Boston was getting physical. The controlled kind, targeted, penalties low, communicating clearly that they'd make this uncomfortable till the clock said otherwise.

A third-liner named Garrett—Montreal, not subtle—had been jawing at Rozanov for most of the period. It was standard cover, the verbal equivalent of a nudge. Garrett had approximately six phrases he rotated, and Shane had heard all of them and they were not interesting. What was interesting was Rozanov's response to them, which was to not have one, its own kind of destabilization—if you want to unsettle someone with language and they look at you like you're a force of nature, like you're a thing that happens rather than a person who's trying, it takes away the response that makes chirping worth doing.

So, Garrett escalated. Which was predictable.

"Suck my dick, Rozanov," Garrett said, in the middle of the scrum, at the volume that was technically within the range of ambient game noise. Refs didn't call ambient game noise. "You fucking hack."

Shane, from the bench, clocked it. He watched Rozanov's face.

Rozanov looked at Garrett with the expression he wore when something was slightly beneath him in an entertaining way, amusement and contempt in it, but mostly just interest. Then he smiled, sweet as an angel.

"You would like that, yes?" he said, loud enough to carry but casual, like saying probably going to rain later. "I know you been watching me all night. Is okay. I am very watchable."

The ref—who had clearly heard this, there was no ambient noise that covered a declarative sentence delivered at full volume by a six-foot-two Russian man—laughed. He actually laughed, turning away to hide it and failing.

Garrett looked like he'd been concussed. He had no response. The script he'd been running required a kind of shame to land and Rozanov had declined to provide the shame, had just picked up the accusation and handed it back with interest, and the mechanism didn't work without the shame.

Play resumed. Shane looked at his stick. He looked at the boards. He looked at the clock.

Garrett bitched about it in the locker room afterward, called Rozanov all sorts of things Shane had been hearing his whole life. But—and he did have to hide his face this time, in his cubby or turned toward the showerhead—Shane could not stop smiling. Grinning like a fucking idiot.

He thought about it for three weeks afterward. He filed it under competitive intelligence: Rozanov, I.V., public persona. He knew it was the wrong file and used it anyway. He came all over his shower walls at home to the memory of Rozanov's shiny eyes and wry smile, over and over again until he was dry and out of breath. And then the next day, and the next. The way he'd said it, all cocky, with that lilting accent that had Shane kneeling without a word. With the same pink, plush lips he used to make Shane cry and beg and come under him: I know. Is okay. You fucking wish.

He also thought about the way it cost Rozanov nothing. It wasn't a calculated move designed to unsettle Garrett, which it had also done, but that was a secondary effect. The primary thing was that Rozanov just genuinely didn't care. He wanted things openly and the wanting didn't make him lesser. He absorbed the implication and handed it back and his face didn't change in any way that suggested the implication had landed.

Shane put himself in it—the public version, the one that had to survive—and asked: what does that response cost. The answer was everything. His captaincy, his reputation, two Cups, and the third he was clawing and bleeding for, the carefulness he'd been performing since he was sixteen, no—fifteen, no—fourteen, no—six. He could not hand that implication back with a smile when he was the thing the implication implied. The only people who could hand it back were the ones it didn't fit, so when they tried it on it looked absurd, and the absurdity was the point.

Rozanov's masculinity was a suit that fit so well it was impossible to see the seams. He wore queer-adjacent language like a costume, briefly, ironically, and then took it off and it left no mark because it was never really on him. Because it was a joke. Because it was just Rozanov the Womanizer, Rozanov: Gay or European, Rozanov being Rozanov, meaning: someone who took up enough space that everything he did became its own category, evidence of nothing but itself.

For all his sick pride and inside knowing, Shane ran the same words in his own mouth, internally. You would like that, yes? I notice you watch me. But he could not say those words. He could not say those words without them being true, and that was the entire thing.

PART SIX: THE DOCUMENT

2007 – 2017

Shane had started it at sixteen as a tactical file. That was the truth and it had stayed true for a while. The tactical sections were extensive and genuinely useful. He had Rozanov's faceoff tendencies by zone and by period and by game situation. He had his shooting percentage from different positions on the ice and how it varied under pressure. He had his defensive zone coverage patterns and where the gaps were. He had his penalty tendencies, not the stupid penalties, the strategic ones, the ones Rozanov drew with awareness of what he was doing—and how to exploit them. He had years upon years of notes on Rozanov's conditioning that were specific enough to be embarrassing if anyone else read them, but no one did.

The tactical sections were useful. He was a better player for them. His game tape preparation for Boston games was better than his preparation for any other opponent and it showed in his numbers.

The other, untitled sections were not tactical. He hadn't meant for them to develop. They had developed anyway, through neglect rather than attention. Through accumulation, the slow build of entries that didn't fit anywhere else and had to go somewhere. There was a section labeled press/media that had started as an analysis of Rozanov's interview technique and had gradually filled with observations about his face when he was saying something true versus something performed, his voice in Russian versus English, the way his hands moved when he was actually thinking versus when he was performing it. There was a section labeled miscellaneous that was not miscellaneous. It was the section for things that didn't fit anywhere else. It was the longest section. He had never read it all the way through in a single sitting. There was a section with no subheader that he opened infrequently and added to rarely and had never titled, because naming it meant knowing what it was.

There was a long gap. Then an entry from the night of a Las Vegas hotel room in 2011 that read: don't know what to do with this. Then eight months of nothing. Then a single line from the night of the NHL Awards: Head hurts. Stomach too. Then nothing until the night of Scott Hunter's kiss on the ice, after which he stopped adding to it, because after that the section wasn't necessary anymore.

He didn't know what it was a love letter to. He knew what it was a love letter to. He closed the document.

PART SEVEN: THE WOMEN (ONE LAST TIME)

2017

It happens in the after, Rozanov on his back, Shane half on top of him. Two in the morning. Neither of them has anywhere to be for six hours, and it becomes a room where nothing is required.

"She has a tell," Rozanov says.

Shane waits. There is no context yet.

"Before she laughs. Her chin dips first." A pause. The ceiling. "Just a little. Then she laughs."

Shane turns his head.

Rozanov is looking at the ceiling.

"What are you talking about?" Shane asks.

"Don't cut my dick off."

The sentence lands. The blood leaves Shane's face.

"She sold me my first Porsche." The ceiling. The calm of a man who has decided the order and is saying it that way, taking his time. "The baby blue one. Back when her business was new, and my name helped probably.” An almost smile. “It would not help now, I think. She is bigger than that. But she has been a good friend to me for a long time."

Shane is sitting up. He does not remember deciding to sit up.

"The flowers," Rozanov says. "In your apartment. Lavender. Eucalyptus bundle. She has the same ones. Her place in Moscow."

Shane's hands find the sheets.

"The perfume. I bought her that perfume."

Everything stops. Like a game stops when a body hits the ice and doesn't get back up.

Rozanov has not moved. He is still on his back. He is still looking at the ceiling. "Two years ago. For her birthday." The pause is very deliberate. "I know what it smells like, Hollander."

You do not fucking change.

He knew. Standing in Shane's apartment, smelling her perfume on Shane's skin, he knew. He said you do not fucking change and pressed Shane against the wall and kissed him and that was all. He said nothing else. Shane thought he had gotten away with something, and he hadn't. Rozanov had been carrying this for—

"How long."

Shane cannot speak. This is not a choice. His throat has done something that prevents them. His heart is doing something wrong and very loud and he can feel it in his teeth, in the backs of his hands, in the place where his ribs meet his sternum—and the room is very far away and also extremely close and the inventory is running—

Voice—

"The eucalyptus bundle," Rozanov says, into the silence, "was from an interior photo. Tagged in a comment. On her friend's account."

Something flickers at the edges of Shane's vision. White. Gone. White again.

"I saw the notification," Rozanov says. His voice has no temperature. "Her friend. Following someone who follows me. Account with no posts. Just follows. About five hundred accounts." He pauses. "All Rozanov-related."

He turns his head on the pillow. Looks at Shane for the first time.

Shane gets off the bed. He does not mean to. His body does it, three steps toward the wall, nowhere to go, the wall right there, and he stops with his back almost against it. He can feel his own pulse in the tips of his fingers.

"She is who you were talking about," Rozanov says. Still the bed. Still that voice. "In Boston. Back then. You were in my bed and you said she and I asked you who and you would not tell me." He stops. "I went through everyone. Every name. Every woman with any connection to both of us. I could not make it make sense." A pause. "And then I understood I was looking wrong. You do not see women, Hollander. You saw mine."

"I can explain—"

"Then explain."

"She has—you are the one thing I have never been able to—she has context on you that I don't, she has you in the first language, she has everything before the armor and I needed to understand what that—" He stops. He can hear himself. He sounds insane. He has been insane for a year and no one caught it until now and the horror of that, of how long it went on, of how normal it had started to feel—

"And you," Rozanov says, very quiet, "like everything else in your life. Could not let it go."

Shane's mouth closes.

"Tell me about the perfume," Rozanov says. "How you found it."

"I already—"

"Tell me."

"Comment threads." Shane's voice is approximately sound, having lost most of its other qualities. "Fan accounts. There was a deleted story—someone screenshotted it before it came down. And there was a reply to a post. With the name of it."

"Which post."

"Someone had posted a photo. Of you. At an event. She was in the background and someone in the comments identified—"

"Which account gave you the name."

Shane looks at the wall.

"Hollander."

"@rozanovsrealwife1991," Shane says. To the wallpaper. To absolutely nothing.

The silence stretches.

"This account," Rozanov says, carefully, "gave you the name."

"Yes."

"And the concentration."

"Yes."

"And the season she typically wears it."

"Yes."

Each yes lands in the room separately. Shane can feel each one land.

"How many photos do you have of her," Rozanov says.

Shane's head turns before he can stop it. "What—"

"You have photos. How many."

"I haven't said anything about—"

"How many, Hollander."

"I don't know how you—"

"How many." The voice Rozanov uses on the ice when something is going to happen regardless of what the other team does about it.

"Thirty-one," Shane says. The word falls out. "In a folder. On my phone." He can hear himself saying this. "It's labeled—" He stops.

"What is it labeled."

The pause goes on too long.

"Research," Shane says.

Rozanov makes a sound. Shane has never heard that sound before and is going to be hearing it for the rest of his life.

"There is also a video," Rozanov says.

The bottom drops out of Shane's stomach. The floor going, the physical sensation of something falling that has no floor below it.

He is going to be sick. He is going to be all over the ground, and it will be the last way Rozanov sees him, and there is nothing he c—

"Twelve seconds," Rozanov says. "Moscow gala. Posted by an account that reposts family events." Another pause. "I know that video. I watched it with her once. She found it funny." He lets that sit in the room for a moment. Just long enough. "How many times."

The room is doing the strobing thing. Close, far, close. And his breath is not going anywhere useful and he needs to answer and he cannot answer and Rozanov is waiting—

"Hollander."

"Forty-one," Shane says.

And then—because there is nothing left, and this is where it finally gives—all of it comes out at once. Shane's voice stops working. Something prickles at the back of his eyes. He blinks it back so hard his vision goes fuzzy. He is not going to cry. He is a professional athlete who was hit by a car-sized man at forty miles an hour two weeks ago and skated off the ice under his own power. He does not cry in hotel rooms at two in the morning about Svetlana Vetrova's father's career GAA, he does not, he is not going to—

His knees hit the floor.

It isn't really a choice. His legs stop—his knees hit the carpet and his shoulder catches the wall and he is down, one palm flat on the floor, and his breath is—

His breath is not—

It is coming in but not going down. Stacking in his chest and not releasing and he breathes in again and it makes it worse, significantly worse, and the carpet is very close to his face and there is a sound coming out of him between the breaths that he does not recognize—

"Fuck."

Rozanov leaps off the bed. Both feet on the floor at once.

"Hollander."

Fast across the room. Crouching. Both hands on Shane's face, tilting it up. His hands are very warm. They are always warm.

"Hey. Look at me. Look at me right now."

Shane's vision strobes. Rozanov's face. White. His face. White. His face.

"I'm sorry—" Shane's voice is wrecked somewhere in the middle of the word. "I'm so sorry, I know you don't—I know you're going to—" He tries to breathe. Nothing goes through. "I can't, I can't brea—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

"Stop—"

"You're going to leave, I know, I know you're—" The sound comes out of his chest again, ugly and unwilling. "I'll leave you alone, I swear to God I'll leave you alone, I won't text you, I won't—I'll delete the account, I'll delete all of it, I just—" He tries to breathe. Fails. Tries again. "I can't, I can't, I'm sorry, I know you hate me, I know—"

"I do not hate you." Sharp. Immediate.

"You should—"

"Stop." Rozanov's thumbs press into his cheekbones. "Stop talking. You cannot fucking breathe and talk at the same time. Stop."

Shane stops. He shuts his eyes. It's spinning, all of it.

"In," Rozanov says. "Right now. In."

Shane breathes in. Halfway. Something catches.

"More. Come on."

Further. It goes somewhere this time.

"Out."

He breathes out. The strobing slows.

"Again."

In. Out. In. Rozanov's hands on his face. Still right here, not having moved toward the door. Not having said anything about leaving.

"Again."

Out.

The room comes back. One place instead of three. The blackout curtains. The carpet rubbing under Shane's knees. Rozanov crouched directly in front of him, and on Rozanov's face—Shane looks at it, now that he can look at things—there is fury. It is there in his jaw and the stillness. But it is not the only thing there.

Rozanov looks at him. His thumb moves, slow, across Shane's cheekbone and the freckles there. He leans forward and presses his mouth, briefly, to Shane's mouth. "Fuck," he says, very quietly, against Shane's hair. His bottom lip trembles, very briefly. "You fucking idiot."

Shane makes a wounded noise. A hand flies to his chest like he physically feels the blow.

"I mean this," Rozanov says, pulling back to look at him, putting his hand over Shane's where it's guarding his heart, "in the most sincere way I have ever meant anything."

Shane looks at him. He knows his face is a disaster.

Rozanov looks right back. Something in it that Shane has seventeen pages on and still cannot name is sitting right on the surface of it.

"I know why you did not ask me," Rozanov says. His thumbs are still on Shane's face, near his mouth. He is not moving them. "About her. About any of it." He pauses. "I know why you went looking instead of asking." Another pause, shorter. "I was an asshole, Hollander. With everything we were doing. The way things were between us. I made it—" He stops. Starts again differently. "I know I made it so you could not ask." His jaw moves. "I am probably still an asshole. I don't know yet." His shoulder lifts slightly. "But if you ask me something, I will tell you. From now. If you want to know something about her. About any of it. You ask me." He holds Shane's eyes. "Okay?"

Shane cannot speak for a moment.

"Okay," he croaks out, at last.

Rozanov looks at him for another moment. Then he sits down on the floor beside him, not across from him, beside him. Back against the wall, shoulder against Shane's shoulder, looking out at the room like there is something interesting to look at out there.

"She sells cars," Rozanov says, eventually. “Which I know you know by now.”

Shane flinches.

Rozanov’s hand comes up to his hair, gentle. "Stop. I am telling you she is not interesting. She talks about cars for too long." He rolls his eyes, running his tongue over his teeth in thought. "Her new thing is sustainable upholstery. Okay?"

Shane exhales through his nose. He does not have it within him to laugh, but it's close enough that it counts for something.

Rozanov turns his head and looks at him. "I am furious," he says. "Yes."

"I know. I know, I’m—”

"She is my friend. She is a real person, not a problem for you to solve." He pauses. "And you are also completely insane. What you were doing in front of your mirror, Hollander."

Shane closes his eyes.

"I am not going to ask," Rozanov says. "I know what you were doing." Finally, he adds, "You looked like you were disappearing. These last months. Hiding something. I did not know what." He swallows. "I thought it must be terrible. Something unforgivable. Because of how hard you were trying to keep it from me. Now I know."

Shane opens his eyes. Looks at the wall across the room. This is how it ends, then. Slowly, then all at once, like dying.

Another long silence passes. Then Rozanov gets up off the floor. He stands and he looks down at Shane still curled against the wall and extends a hand. “Get up.”

Shane blinks once. Twice.

"You will get cold," Rozanov says, and Shane takes it.

Rozanov pulls him up. His legs work, distantly and unreliably, but they work. Rozanov leads him back to the bed, helps him in before settling in his own spot beside him and his hand finds Shane's wrist under the sheet—not holding it, just there and warm—and Shane looks at the ceiling and breathes.

"You're still mad," Shane says.

"Yes," Rozanov says.

"But you're not lea—"

"I will buy you something," Rozanov interrupts. "That smells like you, not like her. Something pretty." He exhales through his nose. "And you will stop being so completely fucking psychotic."

"I'll stop," Shane says.

"You will stop."

"I will."

A pause.

"The lavender," Rozanov says, "was a nice touch."

"Please.”

"I thought lilies were your favorite."

"Please."

"And how did you even learn any of this? Sveta does not have a guide for boys who want to be girls on a YouTube. The biting and the blinking and—fuck, Hollander, did you watch porn? Did you go to a club? Did you touch yourself to it? Tell me." Rozanov's eyes glimmer with it, the game he's creating.

"Please," Shane begs weakly, shaking his head. His lips tremble. "Rozanov."

“Now you are embarrassed?”

“You’re trying to embarrass me,” Shane points out. He blinks too fast.

"Tell me what you were doing. In front of the mirror."

Shane's mouth goes tight.

"Out loud."

"You already know—"

"Practicing," Rozanov says, like he's handing it to him. "To be her. Because you cannot take it." He tilts his head. "It should be you. It has always been you." His voice drops. "Needy little thing. Greedy for it. Your fingers just aren't enough, are they. Not when you're imagining me there."

Shane squeaks. His face burns, heat up his throat and into his ears. He can feel his own pulse.

"Not perverted, you say," Rozanov continues. "Completely normal. Drooling all over yourself, fingers up your hole, pretending you are her, pretending it is me." He pauses. "How many times."

"It wasn't—"

"How many."

"...a lot," Shane whispers.

"Because you thought you were losing. And you are a terrible loser. So you went back and did it again, and again." His eyes don't move from Shane's face, piercing through. "Were you ready? When you were done. Was it enough?"

"No."

"Look at me."

Shane looks at him.

"You did all of that for me. Say it."

"I did it—" His voice breaks. "For you."

Rozanov says nothing for a moment, just looks at him. Shane's face is probably bright red.

Then he rolls over. Slowly. Deliberately. Until Shane is under him and there is nowhere to go and nothing to do about it. He looks down at Shane's wrecked face from close enough that Shane can see exactly what is on his face, which is fading fury and something else that has been there this whole time. “You are so fucking crazy. I should fucking run.”

Shane whimpers.

"You followed five hundred accounts." He pins both of Shane's wrists above his head.

Shane's breath punches out. The grip is immediate and total. Shane's fingers spread uselessly against nothing. “It hurts,” he gasps.

There will be bruises on his wrists tomorrow, and fuck, maybe he is a fucking freak, because he can’t wait to see them, for everyone to see them. Blue and purple and in the exact shape of Rozanov’s fingerprints. He can feel the pressure of it, the specific ache where each finger sits.

"You like it," Rozanov says, flippantly. "You watched twelve seconds of video forty-one times." He leans down, mouth finding Shane's nipples, as it always does. Wet and open-mouthed, not gentle, teeth dragging. "Because I was in it for four of them."

"N-no—"

“You wore a woman’s perfume. For me to find. And lick off you."

Shane moans, jerking away. His whole body twists, which does nothing, which Rozanov doesn't even register. “No, don’t say th—"

"And still somehow," Rozanov says, like he is working something out, like he is genuinely baffled by his own response to this information, "somehow that is the most—" He stops. His jaw works. "I have never been so fucking hard in my life."

Shane makes a sound that he will not recover from.

"Yes," Rozanov groans, against his skin, like that's the answer to something. “Beautiful.”

His teeth press down. Shane's whole body arcs, then goes pliant in his arms.

"I'm going to fuck you now," Rozanov says, casually, moving down his throat to his collarbone and marking his teeth there. He licks at Shane's nipples for a few minutes longer till he's squirming and panting. He grabs Shane's dick without warning, smearing the precum over the head, and then slowly licking it off between his knuckles while looking Shane in the eye. Shane moans, wanton and lewd, and it cracks in the middle. His hips jerk up without permission. "You are going to beg for it. Cry for it, all pretty how you always do." He pulls back to look at Shane's face. "And you are going to take it like the good girl you are."

Shane squeezes his thighs together. His face is catastrophic. "Anything," he sighs. The edges of the room have gone soft. There is only the weight of Rozanov above him and the warm press of his mouth migrating lower. "Anything you want."

Rozanov looks at him for one more moment—smiles, quick and boyish—and then his mouth finds Shane's ear and his grip on Shane's wrists tightens and he says, very quietly, into Shane's hair: "I know."

Shane will say this once and clearly and then close the file on it. The women were not the problem. They were never the problem, just the place for all his anger and insecurity to go.

He was lying in a hotel room in some city in the Eastern Conference with his phone on his chest and Rozanov's Instagram story on his screen—tarmac, a coffee cup, and noticeably no location tag, whatever city this was, it didn’t matter—and he was twenty-six and he had two Cups and a third one on the way if he had anything to say about it and a captaincy and a document he'd never finished naming and he could feel, underneath all of it, the taste of the thing he'd been hiding. It wasn't getting smaller.

He closed the app. He set the phone down. He stared at the ceiling. He whispered it in his head, briefly, the private act of naming something in a dark room when certain nobody can hear.

In January, before all of it, Shane sent Ilya a text at 2 a.m. Two nights before the All-Star Game. You going to Tampa?

Shane was in his Montreal apartment. He was in bed. He had not been able to sleep, which was lately how most nights went.

Lily read it. He did not respond.

Shane stared at this for hours. Three dots of typing nowhere to be found. No sign he’d done anything more than opened it, realized it was Shane, remembered Shane was as good as dead to him, and closed it.

That night, Shane ran for so long he thought he’d puke from it. Then, he picked himself up from the kitchen hardwood and did yoga, because there was nothing else to do about it. He’d made his bed, now he had to lie in, or whatever his mom always said.

In Tampa the hotel was not the same hotel. Shane was at the Marriott because the league had blocked the Marriott; Rozanov was at the W because Boston's management had blocked the W. This was a logistical fact that Shane absorbed with the part of his brain that dealt with logistics and then carefully did not think about.

He thought about it constantly.

The All-Star Game had an energy that was different from the regular season—lower stakes, which produced a different kind of performance and a different kind of person, which was something Shane observed in everyone around him and tried to do himself and mostly failed at. Regular season he knew who he was. He played the game. He was good at the game. He was the best player in the league, arguably, in a good season, and this was a good season. He tried not to think about how All-Star Weekend was always theirs before.

He was, it turned out, still obscenely lucky. Did something good in a past life. Because finally, finally, here was Ilya Rozanov on his team, wearing the same jersey, and he could not escape him. Shane grabbed the chance by the throat and squeezed.

Thank you, thank you, God, he’d thought the night before, buzzing with adrenaline and anticipation and that same puke-y nervousness. He wasn’t even a religious person. Thank you, God. I won’t waste it.

He tracked Rozanov the same way he tracked Rozanov in any game. Knowing exactly where he was on the ice. Knowing, from forty feet, his precise mood from the set of his shoulders, which was data he'd collected over nine years without intending to and which was now just automatic.

Rozanov played the game. He was also very good at the game. He was also watching Shane, and Shane knew this without evidence through an ambient second sense.

When he kissed Shane’s helmet, and Shane laughed and said, “what the fuck,” he felt the crinkles around his eyes before he could stop them, felt the bright, happy burst in his ribs, unavoidable. And he thought: it’s always been you.

The green-blue eyes sparkled back, mysterious as always, and just—beautiful.

After the game, on the beach, Shane had swallowed down all his nervousness, any potential puke, and he tapped his thumb against Ilya’s. You, you, it’s always been you.

They ended up at the W (room 1217) because Shane's ride had dropped him at the wrong hotel, oh no, and he'd been twenty minutes from his own room, and Rozanov had been generous enough to shelter him from the Tampa heat still sitting heavy on the night.

Shane looked at him, once inside the room. "This is stupid."

"Yes," Rozanov agreed. He wasn't arguing.

"We're in a city where both of us have public profiles this weekend."

"Also, yes."

"This is the opposite of controlled."

Rozanov smelled of cigarettes, the only crack in the easy way he held himself, and looked at Shane like when Shane was being interesting to him. "You did not come because it is controlled," he said. "You came because you want to."

Shane was quiet for a long time. "I know."

Rozanov said something in Russian first, which he sometimes did, which Shane had never asked him to translate. Then in English: this looks serious.

Shane looked at the wall behind him. He was aware, distantly, that he was running the inventory without meaning to. Voice. Hands.

"You feel it too, don't you?" The words came out before he'd decided to say them, which was not how Shane said things. "The last time we were together. It was different."

Rozanov shrugged and looked away.

Shane noted this. He had, by now, an extensive file on Rozanov's tells—the ones that meant I'm not going to answer that versus the ones that meant I don't have an answer—and this was neither. This meant I know exactly what you're talking about and I'm not going to be the one to say it first. Shane had never named this tell in the document. He was naming it now, in the wrong room, at the wrong time, with no place left to file it.

"Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about," he said. "This is hard enough without you being an asshole."

Rozanov's eyes went flat. The sparkle from the ice earlier was gone. "What do you want, Hollander." I have been here before, in this room where you almost say the thing, and I am not going to do this again unless you actually say it.

"I—"

"We get together, and we fuck. Is simple."

"Simple."

"Is simple for me."

"Bullshit," Shane shot out. Then, because the inventory was still running and his hands were still and his voice was still controlled and there was apparently nothing left to hide behind: "I think I'm gay." All in one breath. A confession that was the tip of another confession.

Rozanov stared at him. Then he laughed—the actual one, quick and startled and over before it decided to happen. "Oh yeah? What makes you think that?"

Shane's glare only seemed to make it worse. "Fuck off. You're not gay."

"No." Serious again, instantly. "Not—completely."

Sometimes Rozanov was so mercurial with his moods it made Shane queasy.

"Well, I think I might be. Completely."

Rozanov studied him. Shane recognized this look too—it was the one from footage, the one from the CCM shoot, the one from every faceoff circle for six years. I have been reading you for a long time.

Shane had fifty-two pages of notes on Ilya Rozanov and he had never once considered before that Rozanov might have his own document.

"Okay," Rozanov said finally. "So, you are gay. So what?"

"So, it's sort of a big deal! To me, at least. Sorry if I'm boring you."

Rozanov slid off the mini fridge and crossed the room and sat carefully next to him. Without touching him. The measured distance—Shane had a file entry for this too: Rozanov’s careful proximity. Shane's whole system went offline how it only did here, in these rooms, with him.

"Why are you telling me this," Rozanov said.

"Who else am I going to tell?" Shane laughed, and it came out wrong, and he didn't fix it. "It's not just—being gay is one thing. But this. This fucking your archrival thing, this is another thing."

"That is why is a secret."

"I know that. But last time, and for the record, I am sorry about last time. But before it went wrong, before I—" He stopped. He was aware he was not going to be able to finish this sentence in Shane Hollander's voice. He finished it in the other one, reserved only for these rooms. "It was nice. Before."

A silence.

"It was," Rozanov admitted, finally.

And eventually, after all of it, there was a stray tear—Rozanov's, which holy shit—which led to Shane in his lap. Which led to his hands on Rozanov’s face like something that required care. And Shane kissed him first, and had not happened very often, the first departure from the established sequence in all these years.

After, they lay in the dark. The Tampa humidity was poisoning the room's air even with the AC running. Rozanov's hand was on Shane's chest. They cuddled for a bit—cuddled—Rozanov gently stroking his hair, and Shane played with the cross around Rozanov’s neck.

“Are you religious?” he asked. “Or do you just wear this?” If it was religious, Shane did not think Rozanov's chances looked good. Shane had himself held it on his tongue during a few spirited missionary sessions.

“I don’t go to church anymore,” Rozanov said.

“But you believe in God?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Shane didn’t reply. He just considered this information.

“You think that is silly?” Rozanov asked.

“No! No, I’m just surprised, I guess.”

Rozanov laughed softly.

“What?” Shane asked.

“You don’t believe in God, but you believe if you put right skate on before left you will play a terrible game.”

Shane shook his head and smiled. “That’s different. That’s science.”

Rozanov snorted and kissed the top of his head. “It was my mother’s.”

Knowing what Shane knew now… “Oh. Do you want to tell me about her?”

“No. Not tonight.”

“You can, you know. You can tell me anything.”

Rozanov kissed him again, this time on the mouth where it could more effectively shut him up.

Then, because it genuinely was getting late, Shane said, “I should probably go.”

“Stay.”

“Can’t.” But his heart fluttered at the fact that Rozanov was asking.

“No one will even fucking notice. This weekend is chaos.”

“Too risky.”

Rozanov shook his head. “When will I have you for as long as I want?”

Shane’s heart leapt. “I don’t know. As soon as possible?”

“Yes.” Rozanov cupped his cheek with one hand. Thumbed the freckles under his eyes. “After I win the Stanley Cup this year, we should go somewhere.”

Shane rolled his eyes. “You’re not winning that cup. And where the hell would we even go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere that isn’t a hotel room. Somewhere no one knows us.”

“What, like the moon?”

“No, like…Fiji.”

“Nope. All it takes is one Canadian tourist with an iPhone.”

“We’ll climb a mountain. Find a cave.”

Shane smiled sadly. They weren’t going anywhere together and they both knew it. “You’re going back to Russia this summer?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.”

“Where will you go?”

Shane thought about the cottage. He'd been building it—not building it himself, obviously, but he'd been designing it in his head since he was twenty-one, a newly minted captain, the dimensions of a place that was his and no one else's, that was private in a way his Montreal penthouse couldn't be, that existed off the grid of the system he operated in. Shane hadn't invited anyone to the cottage. Ever.

“I have a cottage.”

Rozanov said, "I know. I saw the ESPN segment."

Shane laughed. He couldn't help it. He laughed in the dark of the hotel room in Tampa at the ridiculousness of everything, and Rozanov's hand on his chest pressed down slightly, like he was holding something in place, and Shane let it stay there.

They didn’t talk about the cottage again, because Shane could tell it made Rozanov a little skittish. That this…thing…was still new and fragile. But he thought about the cottage a lot. He thought about asking Rozanov, maybe next time when they would see each other again, after the game.

"I watched your tape for three years before I knew you," Shane admitted, so the humiliation was shared and fair again. "In Juniors. It was why I had to introduce myself, before we played. I had to know."

What he didn't say was that Rozanov had been with him through all of it without knowing. In a bus bathroom on the highway in November. In a motel trying not to vomit. In a locker room after. Something to dream about that wasn't where he was, and made the world a little larger.

Rozanov raised his head at this, looking at him incredulously. “Seriously?”

"Don't make it weird," Shane said.

"I won't make it weird," Rozanov said.

He made it a little weird, but he was secretly pleased, and Shane could tell, and loved that he could tell.

Just before he left, Rozanov said—a pause first that meant he'd decided something and was committing to it—"Goodnight, Shane." The slight too-much emphasis on the first syllable; no one else ever seemed to say it quite the same.

Shane felt it in his chest; it was maybe the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. “Goodnight.” He ducked his head to hide his smile. “Ilya.” And in his own room after, he lay there feeling it until he fell asleep.

The night before Ilya was expected to come to the cottage, Shane couldn’t sleep. He tried everything. A Japanese tea his mother used to make when he was small and sick. Soup from David's reliable recipe, the one for upset stomachs. Running like a workhorse so the exhaustion would knock him out. A weird meditation app with an unsettling British accent. Nothing. Nada.

I’m coming to the cottage.

Shane looked at the ceiling and thought about the whole system and the document he'd been writing for nine years. He thought about whether you could take all of that down without everything else coming down too.

He thought about what was under it.

He thought about what it would feel like if what was under it got to be out in the open where it was not managed and it did not require a hotel room and it did not go in the untitled document, whether he would recognize himself without the management.

"Do not worry so much,” he had said on the phone, in his adorable Russian accent that’d faded a little through the years, but not so much that Shane had to miss it.

"Okay," Shane had said.

Then: "Shane."

"Okay," said again, differently. “Ilya.”

Shane had hung up and lay there. He did not open the document. He just lay there with everything he'd been keeping out of the light, and let it be in the light—it was only a lamp in the dark of the bedroom at one in the morning, but better than nothing. It was what it was. It had always been what it was.

Outside, the wilderness was quiet. Crickets chirping. The occasional loon calling out to a lover.

He thought: Tomorrow.

He thought: I'm going to have to be a different person.

He thought: Maybe I already am.

Then he stopped thinking and let the dark be dark and let the morning be the morning's problem and slept, for the first time in a very long time, without anything to file.

"What—" Shane started. The light through the cottage glass was warm on his face.

"Shh." Rozanov got a hand on his hip and took the pace away from him. "Let me."

Shane let him.

Usually Rozanov found the angle and stayed with it, relentless, single-minded, until Shane couldn't remember his own name. Instead, he slowed down. Pulled almost all the way out and pressed back in, all the way, taking his time about it, and Shane felt every single inch of it on the way in and on the way out and his breath left him in a long, unsteady exhale. He could feel the stretch of it on the way back in, nothing to do but feel it.

Rozanov watched his face with the attention he usually kept for the ice. "You make a sound," he said. Still moving, slow and deep, like they had all the time in the world. "When it is just right. You know the one."

"I don't—"

Rozanov shifted the angle. Just barely. The very edge of it.

Shane made the sound. It came out before he could do anything about it, soft and involuntary and completely unguarded.

"Da," Rozanov said, very soft. "Vot tak. There." He pressed in again, same angle, unhurried, watching Shane's face open up around it. "That one."

He pulled back. Pressed in again. Slow. Shane's hips rolled to meet him and his hands found Rozanov's face and dug in. The muscle and mouth and jaw under his palms, warm and solid.

"I think about this sound."

Shane's brain tried to do something with that and failed.

"When I am not here." Rozanov's mouth moved to his throat, his jaw, the soft place below his ear, and his lips were open and warm and not rushing anything. "On the ice. Before warmup, sometimes. I think about it and I think—" he pressed in, deeper, held it there until Shane made a small desperate noise against his will, "—seychas ya yego uslyshU." Now I'll hear it.

"Rozanov—"

"Ilya." Still moving. Still unbearably slow. "Say it."

"Ilya," Shane said, and it came out wrong—too much in it, nine years exactly—and Ilya made a sound against his throat in response, low and involuntary, that Shane felt purring in his sternum.

He kept the pace slow. Kept it through Shane's hands pulling at him, trying to drag him closer, faster, deeper. Kept it slow through Shane's hips chasing something Ilya kept deliberately withholding. Kept it slow when Shane said please and then please again and then something worse than please, something with his name in it that came out cracked and undignified, his own voice embarrassing him and he couldn't stop it.

Ilya pulled back until it was just the pulsing tip, and a few shallow thrusts to tease it. Then he slipped free completely.

Shane made a bereft sound. "What are you—"

Ilya moved down his body. He took the head of Shane's cock into his mouth—just the tip, just his plush lips, soft and unhurried—and looked up at him from under his lashes and Shane's head fell back against the pillow and his hands flew into Ilya’s hair and he groaned.

Ilya hummed. The vibration moved through Shane like something seismic. Shane's thighs trembled on either side of his head. His hands tightened in Ilya's hair without meaning to.

He pulled off slowly, dragging his lower lip, and kissed the inner crease of Shane's thigh like it was something he'd been meaning to do. Like he had time for this. Like he had all the time there ever was.

"Ilya," Shane said. His voice was wrecked. "Please."

"Shh." He worked his way back up, mouth at Shane's hip, his ribs, the center of his chest—open-mouthed, warm, not performing anything—and then he pushed back in, slow, and Shane arched up to meet him and his thighs locked around Ilya’s hips.

Ilya let himself be pulled. He said things. Russian first, most of it lost on Shane, syllables that moved through him without landing as words, and then like he needed Shane to actually have it:

"You don't know," he said, "what you look like. When you stop managing."

Shane turned his face away.

Ilya turned it back. His thumb at Shane's jaw. It wasn't hard, but a plea of some kind.

"When you stop managing," he said again, and found the angle, and this time held it—slow and deep, his skin pressed flush against Shane's, no space between them anywhere—and Shane's breath stuttered and his fingers curled hard into Ilya’s back. "When you are just—tebe khorosho." When you feel good.  He fucked two fingers slowly into Shane’s mouth, at the same time. Shane's lips closed around them without thinking. The weight of them on his tongue, the taste of his salty skin. "This is—the truth is—" He stopped. His jaw moved against Shane's cheek. When he spoke again it was quieter, Russian first and then in English:

"The truth is there is no one like you."

Shane came without deciding to. His body did it without permission—below everything he'd spent nine years building to keep himself functional—and the sound he made was the one Ilya had named, could only hold on with both hands and let happen.

He felt Ilya come undone around it. Someone losing the last of their control—the sharp exhale against Shane's throat, the hands gripping his hips like something about to slip away, the low broken sound against his skin that Shane was going to be carrying for the rest of his life.

Afterward Ilya didn't move, his forehead pressed to Shane's.

Shane looked up at him. As he'd always been looking.

Ilya looked back. As he always had. His eyes were soft. And wet.

Shane made a wounded noise. "Ilya?" His hands flew up to brush the tears away. "Are you okay?"

Ilya never cried during sex. Shane did. Ilya cried in Tampa. At a video of a puppy licking a turtle's head. At the stars after too much vodka. Outside of sex, Shane couldn't remember the last time. He must have been a child.

And Shane had hated Ilya for it, for so long. Hated that he could cry because a girl's dress at the club was beautiful, because the stars were out, because he was drunk and alive and feeling things. People found it charming. Shane was the hockey robot, apparently only capable of it when his body was pushed past its limits.

He didn't know what any of it said about either of them except maybe that they were meant for each other.

"Ilya?" Shane asked. "Don't cry. Baby, please don't cry. I'm sorry, what can I, what did I—"

Ilya shook his head, smiling a little. Sniffled. Pressed a sweet kiss, slow and gentle to Shane's mouth.

"Ty smotrishь na menya," Ilya said quietly, his thumb moving once across Shane's freckles, then his cupid's bow. Like he was thinking out loud. Like he'd forgotten Shane was there to hear it. "You look at me." He paused. "I think I will never see anything as good as this."

"Ilya," Shane whispered. Just his name. Just that.

CODA: WHAT THE DOCUMENT WAS

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