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It’s official, Shane Hollander is shit at wedding planning.
Every day he thanks God for his mother who has taken to wedding planning with gusto, having never met a planning or logistical challenge related to Shane that she didn’t relish beating into submission, and Ilya who has come to adore his parents and will patiently listen to his mother list 7,000 different options about whatever the issue de jour is and then make a decision about something like flowers or the flow of the ceremony just to see Yuna smile.
Yes, Shane is thankful, he reminds himself. He would happily delegate all of his wedding decision-making to his mother or to Ilya even though the decisions Ilya makes are often wrong (no Shane does not want white lilies at the ceremony, no Anya should not be the ring bearer, that’s Arthur’s job). He has tried, in fact, to delegate all of his decisions to them and they have mostly allowed him, but they still come to him and ask him for his opinions on things as if he has magically developed opinions on these things within the past 24 hours. He hasn’t. At least not for quite some time.
There had been a brief and fleeting moment, shortly after Shane and Ilya were outed and had decided that they really were going to go ahead with the wedding that summer, when Shane had had interest in planning the thing (though in his mind it was a much simpler affair than whatever is happening now). In that fit of delusion, before reality took hold, he had started by searching for a wedding checklist online. He always had liked a good checklist.
The checklists, though, were… overwhelming. Invitations, suits, flowers and ribbons, lights, food, a photographer, place settings, music… Despite having gone to many of them over the years (and even being best man in Hayden’s), Shane had no idea so much went into planning a wedding. Then again, he has been kind of sort of focused on hockey which, as a professional hockey player, is kinda sort his actual very well-paying job. So sue him.
After he got over his initial shock at the size and scope of planning a wedding, he quickly found that all of the normal wedding checklists put together by and for blushing brides were not going to be helpful for whatever it was he and Ilya were (not) planning.
Hair and makeup? Well, he could just cross that one off the list.
Find a dress? Also not needed.
Did he want a wedding shower? Honestly what for?
Booking a cake tasting? Shane doesn’t even eat cake.
Are they going to write their own vows? Fuck no. He’d never been much of a writer in school and several concussions later he didn’t need to subject anyone but Ilya to anything romantic he might attempt to say much less write.
Once he had confirmed the requirements—date, license, rings, officiant, plan to send back the officiated license—were covered, he trashed the list and promptly checked out of anything more. And that was about when his mother had a small apoplexy and had taken over.
He secretly thinks this is what his mother has always wanted. She’s always taken a heavy hand in planning Shane’s career and future. Now she gets to plan the wedding that she always envisioned for him. Maybe she didn’t envision a groom standing next to Shane instead of a bride, but she’d gotten over that remarkably fast. And Ilya was a shock, sure, but wedding planning has brought them even closer than they had been before.
Now Shane sometimes feels like he has to share his fiancé with his mother. He would get jealous, but ultimately he knows it’s for his own benefit and it makes them happy, so it makes Shane happy.
Mostly.
Sometimes it feels overwhelming, too.
“Weddings are supposed to be too much,” Yuna counters when Shane gets frustrated with her over her needling. His mother has made it clear that while many things about weddings may be too much, his guest list for his own wedding is “not nearly enough.”
It’s small for a reason, he tells her (and himself).
The wedding is taking place in Ilya’s backyard at their home in Ottawa, it’s not a large venue.
The truth is also that Shane just doesn’t know who else he would want to be there during what he views as a deeply private event.
Outside of his family and his parents’ friends, Shane doesn’t have many close friends; Rose, Hayden and Jackie, JJ, now that he’s come around again. This is apparently not enough people according to his mother.
In a last ditch effort to appease her, he adds his agent Farah, Scott Hunter and Scott’s husband Kip, and Ryan Price and his boyfriend Fabian, only to be told they are already on Ilya’s list. Of course they are. What a brown-nosing asshole.
Exasperated, his mother orders 25 more invitations than necessary and starts interrogating Shane about any last additions to the guest list as if he will suddenly become regretful about not inviting someone he hasn’t thought of since he played in juniors and would probably prefer never to think about again.
Shane, who has never dodged calls or texts from his mother (really!), may or may not start using his media training on her. Non-answers and polite redirection have become so second nature to him and she can hardly blame him for it having spent an irrational amount of her own time coaching him on his media presence and the need for a ready and polite answer to any question.
Nevertheless, she persists.
Shane tolerates it (mostly) until one day when he comes home from a run to find her and Ilya at the table in Ilya’s kitchen drinking coffee and looking at Shane’s old team photos that his mother has kept bound in several albums, obviously engaged in a plan with nefarious intentions.
Shane is a large, powerful man. He is in impeccable shape, he can throw a nasty punch, his hand eye coordination is razor sharp. He is not afraid to enter his fiancé’s kitchen, he is not afraid of the wrath of his mother and lover conspiring against him over their morning coffee and 28 years of Shane’s life.
Still, if Shane tip toes just slightly over to the cabinet to get himself a glass to fill with water and if he happens to surreptitiously look over Ilya’s shoulder where he is cooing gleefully at “baby Shane” which is really 14-year-old Shane posted stiffly with his AAA team in Kingston, well, more embarrassing things have been done.
Neither of them need more coffee. Neither of them need to be combing through Shane’s awkward past (both of them essentially lived it with him). Neither of them need to be asking why he didn’t keep in touch with some of these “lovely boys.”
Most of them were not “lovely boys.”
Shane does not say this even as he looks at the faces of those beautiful boys who were sometimes entirely terrible to him. It’s not that he doesn’t wish he was still friends with them and doesn’t wish he wanted to invite them to his wedding. But that wasn’t really his choice, was it?
“Do you remember Preston McNamara?” Yuna is smoothing her fingers over the photo in Ilya’s hand as she says it. “What ever happened to him? It’s a shame you two don’t keep in touch.”
Of course Shane remembers him, remembers a lot about him. He remembers Preston being what he thought was his best friend. He remembers being so excited that Preston was on his AAA team. He remembers Preston distancing himself from Shane for reasons Shane didn’t understand at the time, but now thinks he does all of a decade later. It still makes him sad.
Maybe if the world were different—if hockey were different—he would be inviting Preston to his wedding. But it’s not and he’s not and he doesn’t like the implication his mother is making—that he should invite someone he hasn’t seen or wanted to see for the past 12 years to his wedding. Specifically his (not nearly) big (enough) gay wedding.
Next to Preston’s smiling face Shane also sees Todd Palmer’s face and instantly gets the sour, metallic taste he associates with fear in his mouth. Shane holds a lot less sympathy for Todd. In fact what Shane feels for Todd borders on ill will. It makes him crazy to think that all these years later, just the sight of Todd can still make his heart race and his adrenaline spike. He shuts it down before he loses control, breathing in deeply through his nose and pushing the negative feelings away. He’ll probably have an anxiety attack over it later.
“It’s not like I haven’t been busy with my career or anything,” Shane snips instead, draining his water to wash the sour taste out of his mouth. He should be making himself a post-run smoothie but that would continue the interrogation. Instead he says, “I’m going to take a shower.”
Ilya finds him 45 minutes later as he’s looking at his reflection in the still foggy mirror.
Ilya has a green smoothie in hand and although Shane knows the texture and consistency won’t be just right, he appreciates the effort and will endeavor to drink it anyway.
“What is wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Is not nothing, solnyshko. You have forehead pinch.” Ilya smooths the space between Shane’s eyes with his thumb as he says it. Shane turns away, embarrassed by Ilya’s concern. Ilya does still tease him a lot, and Shane still tells him to fuck off plenty, but this past year their relationship has deepened in many ways and this newfound communication and encouragement of vulnerability is still uncomfortable to him sometimes.
“I was just thinking,” Shane says, snapping out of it and taking the offered smoothie.
“About what?”
Ilya is quiet, just allowing the silence to make Shane squirm. Shane hates how easily Ilya can become a lock box on his own feelings, but he can make Shane crack about his own feelings like a cheap briefcase.
Still Shane tries, though he has to keep his lips in a tight grimace to do so.
“This is about your mother?” Ilya presses after Shane doesn’t respond.
“Yes. No. Sort of,” Shane sighs. “AAA was a difficult time for me.”
The truth is that AAA was about the time he started to realize he was different. It’s also about the time when the slurs started and his mother and father started coaching him on turning the other cheek and taking the high road. It’s about the time that his obsession became his disinterested mask used to appear as if it would deflect all the hurt. It hadn’t.
“They were mean to you, yes,” Ilya surmises. “Picked on you?”
Shane huffs and pushes out of the bathroom. It’s too humid and he already feels like he can’t breathe.
Ilya follows him into the bedroom where Shane starts pulling on his boxer briefs.
“No, they never really picked on me, I was too good at hockey,” Shane says, realizing he’s deflecting even as he says it.
Ilya just waits.
“AAA is when the chirping turned to posturing with a lot of bigotry and slurs,” Shane explains slowly, carefully. “Unfortunately a lot of them applied to me whether they knew it or not.”
Shane still feels slightly unsteady so he sits on the side of the bed and stares vacantly into the middle distance as one particular memory calls itself up unbidden.
He’s never told Ilya this story. It’s not one he ruminates on or anything. In fact he hadn’t thought about it in years—not until he’d seen shitty Preston and even shittier Todd’s faces in that team photo.
Shane takes in a steadying breath and feels Ilya’s hand come to the back of his neck to center him and give him the courage to start talking.
It was the fall after he’d turned 14 and they were playing a tournament that weekend near Toronto. Normally most of their travel was via bus and hotel stays were pretty rare due to the cost, even though they bunked two to a bed, four to a room. But on that trip the drive was judged to be just long enough and their first game of the next morning just early enough to justify a hotel so there they were, locked into their hotel room that night; Shane, Preston, Todd and Jackson Hale.
Shane had been anxious all day about it, but the thought that Preston would be there with him had made it better. And it was better for approximately 25 minutes. Better until they were ready for bed and Preston ceremoniously pulled a smuggled Penthouse magazine out of a secret pocket in the interior lining of his bag. It was 2005 and internet porn was a pretty rare thing then so it was the first time Shane had ever seen real, proper porn and there was a little part of him—the bit under the anxiety that they were doing something wrong, something that would surely get him in trouble—that was excited about it.
Unlike some of his friends and teammates he hadn’t really found himself having much in the way of crushes or urges related to girls. Maybe if he saw a naked woman those urges would come. Maybe he was just a late bloomer.
Preston set the magazine on the bed in front of them, and they all eagerly watched as he paged through it. Women with exposed breasts, stiff nipples. Women with their legs spread showing perfectly groomed vaginas.
Shane studied the pictures carefully with a sort of detached curiosity. A sort of ‘oh, so that’s what that looks like.’ And it was educational if not alluring.
Unlike Shane, it became apparent real quick that Jackson liked what he was seeing. He was a big kid, lanky and tall, already his voice was changing. It appeared he’d also grown elsewhere because his erection was prominently tenting his pajama shorts by the time Preston had flipped the first page.
Shane probably wouldn’t have noticed that Jackson was hard if he hadn’t very noticeably adjusted himself or if Todd hadn’t reacted to it.
Some sort of unspoken conversation that went over Shane’s head followed then and all the other boys already had their hard dicks out by the time Shane even felt his twitch in his shorts.
Shane was always a half second too late in social situations. Just enough for it to be awkward and noticeable. Luckily with his teammates his hockey skills canceled it out.
He scrambled to follow suit, pulling his pajama pants down just enough to fist his cock in the way they were all doing. Even though he’d been looking at the magazine for a few minutes, it took a beat for him to actually get hard. Now he knows that what caused it was him peeking at his teammates fisting themselves, the pink and purple heads of their dicks peeking out through their fingers.
In hindsight Shane would have wanted to study that view and commit it to memory, but he understood enough then to know that wasn’t acceptable behavior, so he pretended to keep his eyes on the magazine even as he closed them and focused instead on the feeling.
After all of them had finished and cleaned up with half a box of tissues, the air in the room got awkward. Todd was the first to break the weird silence.
“If you tell anyone about this,” Todd threatened Shane with a sneer. “Anyone at all. I’m gonna tell them about what a fag you are because you just jerked off in front of a bunch of guys.”
Shane blinked at him, startled. Hadn’t everyone just jerked off together? Still, fag was a word Shane was well acquainted with by then, having heard it plenty that year.
It was the year that same sex marriage was legalized in Canada and in the run up to that there was a lot of media attention over the Civil Marriage Act—both for an against.
Every time they saw a rainbow anything Todd would sneer about the gays and how he didn’t want that fairy rainbow Pride shit shoved down his throat.
At the time Shane didn’t know he was gay. He truly didn’t realize it until he and Rose had had the conversation that led to their breakup when he was 25. But there is a small part of him that wonders if it wasn’t for people like Todd who made it so scary to be gay that Shane might have come to the conclusion sooner.
Shane wants to say he’s above it all now, that it’s all water under the bridge. After all, he’s the NHL hero and Todd is what? Nothing. Or at least not something compared to the likes of Shane Hollander.
The truth is that Shane knows what happened to Preston and Todd. A few years ago he’d set up a second, private Instagram, mostly to follow Ilya who had started posting more often on his after he’d moved to Ottawa. Shane’s second profile is more akin to what a real Instagram of his own making would be like and it’s the handle Ilya had used to send the panicked notes to Shane when he thought the Centaurs’ plane was going to crash.
Since he gets to use it under the guise of anonymity, from time-to-time Shane has also used it to stalk some of his old friends and teammates, Preston and Todd included.
Preston had gone to McGill and played for their hockey team, but quit hockey after college and became an accountant. He is now married with a couple cute kids. Todd on the other hand, still plays in a beer league. He also owns and manages a gym… with his husband. Yeah, turns out the man who had for over a year tormented Shane by threatening to out him as a fag (and Preston too, by proxy) was himself gay.
And maybe Todd didn’t know he was gay, maybe he was like Shane and was genuinely bewildered by or scared to explore that side of himself. Or maybe he just didn’t want all that Pride shit shoved down his throat because subconsciously he wanted room in his throat for the dick he couldn’t admit he wanted to be sucking, and he took it out on Shane. Either way, Shane isn’t sure he can forgive him.
A sudden, twisted desire settles in Shane, maybe he does want to send Todd wedding invitation. Maybe if he does, he would include a little note.
Getting outed and wedding planning has inexplicably made me think of you. Sorry it wasn’t you who got to tell everyone what I fag I am. Hope you’re doing well.
And maybe Shane is a petty bitch.
And maybe it’s part of what Ilya loves about him.
Shane turns back to Ilya and notes the bloodthirsty glint in his eye. His protectiveness always awes Shane.
“Mom might be right, maybe I should invite some of my old teammates,” Shane says watching Ilya as he does. “Remind them who they were slinging all of those slurs and insults at.”
Ilya smiles wickedly. “If they come, will you let me rough them up? What’s that saying about a woodshed?”
“Take them behind the woodshed,” Shane fills in.
“Yes that,” Ilya confirms. “I’ll show them how I feel about how they treated you. Give them a taste of their own medicine.”
Shane returns his smile with a genuine one of his own and reaches for Ilya’s hand and gives it a squeeze to calm him. “Nah, no fighting at our wedding. You and Mom are working so hard to make this wedding amazing. If I actually invited them and they came I’d just want them to see how happy you make me and how proud I am of who I’ve become despite them.”
Ilya nods with enthusiasm Shane knows he can’t trust.
“A good wedding involves a fight. Maybe you invite them and you punch them. Nothing would make me more proud.”
And Shane believed him, even if it was proof that they were both shit at wedding planning.
Thankfully there was Yuna for that.