Chapter Text
June 15, 2026.
The Ottawa River was silver in the morning light, mist rising off the water. Shane Hollander stood at the edge of the back deck, bare feet on the cold wood, breathing in pine and damp earth.
His body was loose from yoga, the coffee in his hand still too hot to drink. He’d been up for an hour — not restless, just awake.
They had built this house themselves — or chosen every part of it that mattered, which Ilya maintained was the same thing and Shane maintained was not. It sat on the river outside Ottawa, far enough from the city to be quiet, close enough that neither of them had to explain the choice. It was the offseason. For the first time in a long time there was nowhere either of them had to be, no flight, no morning skate. There had been years of separate cars pulling out of the same garage twenty minutes apart, of a life built so no one would talk — but that was over now. They had been out for five years, and the strangeness of that freedom had finally worn into something like ordinary. They had started out as the league’s favourite rivalry — the Russian and the golden boy, two teenagers made to hate each other for the cameras, who had instead spent seventeen years quietly becoming this. Now they were married, and it was June, and the only thing on the schedule was Ilya’s birthday.
Last night had been good. Loud and warm, his parents’ house overflowing with the kind of chaos that came from too much wine and his mother’s insistence on cooking for twenty when there were only four. Ilya had opened gifts at the kitchen table while Shane’s father told stories that grew more exaggerated with each glass of vodka. A new watch. Books. The cashmere sweater Shane had watched him eye for months.
They’d celebrated early, like they had every year. Ilya preferred it—his actual birthday reserved for quiet, for them. No obligations, no performance. Just the familiar weight of Ilya beside him in bed, the low sound of the river, and a day that belonged to no one else.
Ilya’s birthday. Thirty-five. The number landed with a weight Shane hadn’t expected. He glanced around the room—at the worn copy of a book Ilya was rereading, at the indentation on his own side of the bed—a sudden, sharp awareness of all the years they had built, and all the years they still wanted.
He wanted to go back to bed.
Not because he was tired. Because Ilya was still there.
The bedroom was dim, curtains drawn against the early light. Ilya had taken over the whole mattress the way he always did when Shane wasn’t in it—sprawled diagonally, one arm thrown over his face, the other stretched toward Shane’s side as though he’d been reaching for him in his sleep. Shane stood in the doorway longer than he needed to, looking at him.
Thirty-five, Shane thought. You are thirty-five years old today.
He set his coffee on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle the mattress. Ilya didn’t stir. His breathing was deep and even, his face relaxed in a way it never quite was when he was awake. Shane reached out, let his palm settle against the warm skin of Ilya’s back, felt the slow rise and fall of his ribs.
“Ilyusha,” he said quietly.
Ilya made a sound — half-groan, half-protest — and turned his face into the pillow.
“It’s almost seven.”
“Is six-thirty,” Ilya mumbled. “I can hear clock.”
Ilya lifted his head, squinting at Shane through sleep-heavy eyes. His hair was a disaster, sticking up in several directions at once. “You are already awake. You have done yoga. You have made coffee.” He looked at Shane with one eye. “What more do you want from me?”
“I want you to wake up.”
“Why?”
“Because I came back to bed.”
That got Ilya’s attention. He blinked, processing, and then his mouth curved into a slow, wicked smile. “You came back to bed.”
“I did.”
“Because you want to.”
“Because I want to.”
Ilya curled his fingers around Shane’s wrist, pulling him closer.
Shane let himself be pulled down, let Ilya’s arms wrap around him and drag him into the warmth of the sheets. Ilya was furnace-hot, always had been, and Shane was still slightly cold from standing outside. He pressed into Ilya’s chest and exhaled.
“Happy birthday,” Shane said.
“Mm.”
“You’re thirty-five.”
“I know how birthdays work, Hollander.”
Shane smiled at the ceiling. Outside, the river kept moving, indifferent as ever. Anya, their deeply opinionated seven-year-old terrier mix, was a warm and twitching weight against Shane’s feet. For seven years she’d been in charge of their lives, and now she was sleeping on the job.
“How does it feel?” Shane asked.
Ilya considered this with the seriousness he reserved for questions he was actually thinking about, rather than performing thinking about. “Old,” he said finally.
“You’re not old.”
“I have a grey hair.”
“You have one grey hair.”
“That is one too many.”
“It’s distinguished.”
Ilya pressed his lips to Shane’s temple. “On you it is distinguished. On me it is a tragedy.”
Shane laughed, which was still — somehow, after all this time — something Ilya seemed to collect. He felt him smile against his hair.
Ilya’s hand moved slow and warm up his side, a simple, unquestioned touch that still felt like a quiet miracle after all the years it had been a secret. Shane turned toward him, into the reality of their house on the river, a life built from whispers and separate cars. This morning was theirs. All of it.
They moved with the slow certainty of seventeen years. Ilya’s hand found the small, familiar scar on Shane’s shoulder; his thumb traced the freckles across his collarbones like he was counting them, like the number might have changed overnight. Shane arched into him, knowing the precise weight of Ilya’s thigh between his own, the heat of his mouth before it found the underside of his jaw — and then it did find it, openmouthed, unhurried, the scrape of teeth and the soothe of his tongue, and Shane made a sound he’d been making for seventeen years.
Shane’s own hand found the low place on Ilya’s ribs where the skate had opened him to the bone in Boston, years ago — where the scar should have been. The skin there was smooth. It had always been smooth. He had stopped letting himself notice. He noticed now, for half a second, and then Ilya turned his head and kissed the thought clean out of him — slow, deep, a kiss with nowhere to be.
“You taste like coffee,” Ilya mumbled against his mouth.
“You said you liked that.”
“I did not say I disliked it.” He kissed him again, lazier, chasing it. “Research. I am gathering data.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Shane said into the kiss, grinning so wide it barely worked as a kiss at all.
“You are smiling. It is impossible to kiss you when you smile like this.” Ilya pulled back two inches to glare at him, fond and put-upon. “Stop having a nice time. I am trying to seduce you.”
“Doing great so far.”
“I know.” And he leaned back in.
Morning light slid through the slit between the curtains, falling in a warm bar across the bed. Ilya’s mouth left Shane’s and went wandering — jaw, throat, the dip of his collarbone, the old scar on his shoulder, each one kissed like it was on a list he fully intended to finish. “You are taking inventory,” Shane managed. “Yes,” Ilya said against his sternum, perfectly serious, and kept going.
What came after was that they knew everything else by now…by feel, the call and response of want and answer, every question already learned and asked again only for the pleasure of the reply. Ilya’s hands were sure where they needed to be sure and unsteady where it counted, and Shane laughed once, breathless, when Ilya swore softly in Russian at the foil packet, and Ilya bit his shoulder for laughing, and then neither of them was laughing.
“Ilyusha.” Shane got his hands in Ilya’s hair, kissed him through it, messy and off-center.
“I am here.” Rough, raw, his mouth dragging back to Shane’s. “I am right here. Stop talking. No — do not stop talking. I like your voice. But also —” he kissed him again “— less words.”
“You’re giving me contradictory notes,” Shane breathed, and felt Ilya’s laugh more than heard it, both of them moving together now, slow and certain, the morning gone soft and unhurried around them.
It crested close together, how it always did when they’d taken their time — Ilya’s name and Shane’s trading places in the quiet, foreheads pressed, breath shared, until there was nothing left to do but lie there and feel the other one breathing.
Afterward they stayed tangled, slow to let the morning back in. Ilya kissed his temple, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth — small, unthinking kisses, the kind that meant more than the loud ones. They rearranged themselves without hurry, legs laced, the sheet half-drawn over their hips, Ilya’s fingers tracing idle circles on the slope of Shane’s hip.
Shane turned, pressing his lips to Ilya’s collarbone, then his jaw, then — because it was there — the grey hair at his temple. “Good birthday so far?”
“You are kissing the grey on purpose.”
“Maybe.”
Ilya sighed, deeply content, and pulled him closer. “The best part of thirty-five.”
This was their reward: the ease of waking up to this same quiet certainty.
“You know what I have decided,” Ilya said, after a while, in the tone he used for important announcements.
“Tell me.”
“This is the year I get you pregnant.”
Shane laughed — the helpless kind, surprised out of him. “Ilyusha.”
“I am serious. I have given it real thought.” Ilya pushed up onto one elbow, entirely grave. “Seventeen years of effort. Statistically, eventually—”
“That is not how statistics work. That’s not how any of it works. You understand men can’t—”
“I went to school, Hollander. I understand the biology.” He waved a hand, dismissing the entire field of human reproduction. “But I keep trying. One day, maybe, it takes.”
“You’re an optimist.”
“I am an optimist.” He said it like a credential, something he’d earned.
Shane smiled at the ceiling. “And what’s the plan when it ‘takes’?”
“We would have beautiful babies. Obviously.” Ilya’s hand spread over Shane’s stomach, proprietary and absurd. “Your freckles. My hair — the real colour, before you start inventing grey in it. Some impossible combination. Strangers would stop us in the street.” A beat, the grin softening. “They would be ours. That is the only part I am sure of.”
The joke had thinned, somewhere in there, into the thing that lived underneath it. Shane felt the shift.
It was not a new conversation. They’d been having versions of it for years — over dinners, in airport lounges, once at a teammate’s wedding that had made them both sentimental and stupid. Adoption. Fostering. The clinic in Toronto a friend of a friend had used. Ilya was always the one who raised it, always lit up like a boy when he did, and always, somewhere just before it turned into a plan with dates attached, found a way to set it gently back down.
“You actually want to talk about it,” Shane said. Lightly. Not a push. “The real version. Not the getting-me-pregnant version.”
Something in Ilya’s face stepped back behind something else. Not the wanting — the wanting stayed, plain as anything. Something in front of it.
“I want it,” he said. “That has never been the problem. I have never once managed to make wanting it the problem.”
“I know.”
Ilya was quiet, then said in a flat voice: “I would be a terrible father.”
“You would be great.”
“You don’t know this.” A shrug that was working hard to stay a shrug. “I know what cruelty looks like. I grew up inside it. And my mother loved me and still could not stay.” He turned the cross at his throat once between his fingers, not seeming to notice he was doing it. “The cold and the leaving. Both are in me somewhere, yes? It would be a coin toss which one the child got.”
“Ilya—”
“It is the only thing.” He said it almost cheerfully, which was how Shane knew what it cost. “Everything else, I want. Tomorrow. Years ago. Only that one thing stops me.” He smiled, closing the door politely. “And it is too large a thing for seven in the morning.”
Shane looked at him, noting how the joke had brought them to the edge of reality. He let it go. He’d learned, over the years, that leaning on that subject only made Ilya hold it shut.
“Okay, not at seven in the morning.”
Ilya looked at him with something soft and grateful and unwilling to say so.
He sat up, running a hand through his hair. “I need fresh air.”
Shane watched him. “Alright.”
They dressed in silence. Ilya pulled on sweatpants and a worn t-shirt, then moved to the kitchen. Anya’s nails clicked on the hardwood behind him. When Shane followed in his robe, Ilya was already out on the back deck, where the morning had fully arrived.
In the bathroom mirror Shane caught both of them for a second — two athletes still in the shape their careers had demanded, Ilya behind him reaching for a towel, gold curls damp at the edges, tan skin scattered with the moles Shane had spent seventeen years quietly cataloguing the way Ilya catalogued his freckles. His own dark hair was long enough now to tuck behind his ears; his mother’s brown eyes looked back at him, a little tired, not unhappy. The years had been kind. Kinder than they’d had any right to ask for.
The river shimmered in the sunlight. Ilya sat in an Adirondack chair, cradling his coffee. Shane sat beside him, their shoulders touching.
“Not today,” Ilya said, gazing at the water.
Shane didn’t need to ask. “Alright.”
“But I am not saying no, either.”
“I know.”
Ilya was quiet. Then, almost to himself: “It won’t always be ‘not today’.”
Shane let the silence answer for him. He looked at Ilya: the morning light glinting off the gold cross, the messy hair, the single grey strand he wasn’t supposed to see. Thirty-five. The number felt less like a weight now and more like a beginning. After a moment, he stood.
“Breakfast?” Shane asked from the doorway.
Ilya turned and gave him a small smile. “Da.”