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There were three true constants in Shane Hollander’s life: his mother, his father, and his sport.
(The fourth thing, important as it is, didn’t come until later.)
Shane couldn’t even remember the beginnings of hockey. He’d seen the photos, seen his tiny first pair of skates that his mother had been holding onto for thirty years, but he had no independent recollection of any of it.
Shane was an awkward child. Hell, he’s an awkward adult. As a kid, though, he had no idea what he was doing ninety percent of the time. He wasn’t funny. He wasn’t interesting. He wasn’t cool.
That was fine. Shane didn’t mind not making friends or not talking to people. Social interaction was overwhelming, and besides, he had better things to do with his time. He wasn’t training to go pro, not really, not back then, but it didn’t change the fact that practicing was basically his favorite thing to do.
(Looking back, Shane wonders if it was some sort of continuous feedback loop: he was horrible at making friends, so he had more free time, so he might as well practice, and then he’d get even better, enjoy the rush of improvement, and love the sport that much more, so might as well practice, and then he’d get better again—)
Really, it didn’t matter. Shane loved hockey before hockey ever loved him back. Even if he’d never gotten good, he couldn’t imagine himself to ever stop trying.
Then he got older, however, and he did get good. Very good.
It surprised Shane, throughout his teenage years, how much people were willing to overlook. He hadn’t particularly improved at socializing—and any improvements he had made were more than matched by his peers, so the gap was roughly the same—but things that had once been off-putting or strange became quirky and fun. His obsessions, his routines, his unbreakable focus went from being boring to being cute.
Shane himself hadn’t really changed. Not at the core. But he was headed to juniors, and then he was headed to the NHL, and everyone knew it. It was a level of social credit that Shane never could’ve bought or learned. He was five-eight, five-nine, five-ten. He’d put muscle on his frame. He’d apparently grown into a handsome face. When Shane looked at himself, he didn’t see it: he saw mottled, freckle-stained skin and worry-bitten lips. The girls in his life disagreed. He was attractive, now. No. Ask half his classmates, and they’d have said that Shane Hollander was hot.
Shane had never had anything but the most perfunctory of interest in girls. He wanted to date and marry one eventually—obviously—but with his demanding schedule, he’d never had time to hound after them like most of his teammates.
He'd never prioritized it, anyway.
Unlike his friends, though, Shane didn’t have to chase. They came to him, and Shane let it happen. He still remembered Maya, his first girlfriend. He remembered her blonde hair, her sweet smile and long pink nails, the way it felt when she used them to scratch his scalp. He remembered her excitement to be wearing his jersey on game days; he remembered the way she’d scream when he won.
Shane remembered the first time she asked him to fuck her, and he couldn’t get it up. He didn’t understand why. Not at the time, anyway.
Over the terrifying years of adolescence, Shane learned how to play this game, too. The rules were obscure and complicated and not written down, but no one ever seemed to call Shane’s penalties. People were happy to just be in his orbit. He made friends and got invited places and snagged girls, and it didn’t really require any effort at all. It happened to him, not because of him.
For the first time in his life, Shane fit in. In the colorful light of overwhelming house parties and the blue-black tones of conversations outside, Shane felt what it was to be liked.
Maybe that was why Ilya had been so threatening from the start.
Shane had one thing. One. Rozanov was charming and witty and confident and handsome, all the things that Shane had never seen in himself. If he lost hockey, he’d still be the kind of person artists made songs and poems and paintings about.
Things were different for Shane. When hockey left him, he would have nothing left to give.
He wasn’t sure when things shifted, when the thing he loved most became a gaping, unfillable maw inside him that craved more, more, more. When his team won games, he was no longer proud of himself for the victory; he was relieved he’d checked another box. Being the best was no longer the goal. It was the bare minimum. With Rozanov around, Shane couldn’t sit undisputed in his throne.
Despite all of that, Shane didn’t hate Ilya. He should’ve, but he didn’t.
(He couldn’t. Not with those hands, those lips, that hair, those eyes. A large palm flat on the center of Shane’s back, warm breath against the skin of his neck.)
Hatred, no. Constant annoyance? Yes. Ilya made that easy. Competitive drive? Absolutely. And the public ate it up. The roles were settled before they even debuted: Rozanov was the rockstar, the bad boy, the one chasing after glory and fame and pissing people off as he did it, and Hollander was the kind, talented leader who was in it for the love of the game.
It wasn’t wrong, per se. It just wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth, of course, was that Shane was just as egocentric as Ilya. That Shane craved success and adoration and applause and history just as much as Ilya did—if not more.
There was precisely one difference between Ilya’s attitude and Shane’s: Ilya let his hunger show, and Shane did not.
The first time Shane stepped onto NHL ice, he felt like the little boy he’d been a decade and a half prior, still learning to balance, still learning to skate. He’d looked up and saw thousands of spectators screaming things he couldn’t make out. He'd seen the jersey he'd dreamed of wearing since he was ten. He'd seen the one, single arena where he had something to give.
This, Shane knew, was the light of his life. This was the thing he’d build himself around, the rock he’d stabilize himself against. Being good wasn’t enough. Being great wasn’t, either. Money couldn’t satisfy him. Neither could fame.
There was one thing that would make Shane happy: the knowledge that anyone who tried to compete against him would flinch. The implicit understanding from everyone in this arena that he was the best. The singular, undisputed best. When that day came, Shane would be oh-so-humble, oh-so-kind. Of course. That went unsaid. The source of his humility would be politeness, however. Not a lack of justification.
(Modesty isn’t really modesty if there’s no achievement being played down.)
When things with Ilya changed (cottage loon bonfire sweetheart boyfriend I love you Ottawa), things with hockey didn’t. Sure, his most difficult competition was more or less neutered, but Shane still wasn’t done. He had at least ten more good years left in him, as long as he took care of himself. As long as he ate right. As long has he never took a break, and cut out flour and refined sugar and full-fat dairy, and started meditating, and skipped the champagne on New Year’s Eve, and—
Years passed with Shane’s head down, focused on the ice. So focused that he didn’t see Ilya tearing at the seams.
Ilya would be fine. They only had to hide a few more years, and they saw each other as much as they could, and who cared what people believed as long as they had each other behind closed doors?
Besides, no matter what happened, Ilya wasn’t going to leave him. Hockey might.
Then, one January, a plane flying from North Carolina to Florida nearly dropped out of the sky, and Shane was reminded that leaving might not be Ilya’s choice.
Shane had chosen between Ilya and hockey dozens of times. When Ilya asked to fuck him the very first time, in that hotel crawling with their peers. When Ilya kissed him messily on a couch and begged him to stay. When Ilya looked him in the eye and asked him point-blank. For so long, Ilya had been secondary. Shane wanted him, but only insofar as it didn’t risk his career.
Shane was so worried about fading away, he never noticed that he’d captured the sun in his hands.
The slip had been gradual. So gradual, in fact, that Shane failed to realize it until mortality forced him to. Sometime between seventeen and twenty-nine, Ilya had usurped what Shane had always believed to be his other half. He’d burrowed in under Shane’s skin and made himself a home.
The change was monumental, yet simple: Shane wanted his career, insofar as it didn’t interfere with Ilya.
When the outing came, Shane was terrified, and embarrassed, and disgusted, but not as much as he should’ve been. Not as much as he’d always imagined (and he’d imagined this moment many, many times). Being confronted with the possibility of having the life he’d worked for taken away was scary, but it no longer felt like a death sentence.
For the first time, Shane saw the joy in a life without hockey.
Shane could only imagine the conversations that happened in every locker room across North America that day. Ilya was disliked, yes, but it didn’t remotely compare to the hate that half the league seemed to harbor for him during his last few years in Boston. He was irreverent, arrogant, dickish, and good. He was better than them, and he knew it, and he was despised for it. Moving to Ottawa had allowed the focus on him to fade, at least partially.
Shane, though? Shane was at the inarguable peak of his career. Shane was everywhere people looked. Shane was practically the face of the NHL.
(No one gets excited to watch bad things happen to failed people. It’s expected. Nobody circles around to see the mediocre stumble. When the mighty fall, the crowd roars.)
Shane’s humiliation and misery was a source of entertainment that day. He knew it. He knew that there were many, many people in his life who were overjoyed to watch him finally crash. He knew that he’d gifted loyalty, dedication, and his best physical years to a team that ultimately failed to provide anything in return, and he knew that he’d given his soul to a sport that only loved the pieces of him it could stomach.
The thing he’s had devoted his first thirty years to tried to wedge itself between Shane and the center of his next thirty. The NHL told Shane to bet on either his future or his past.
When the entire world looked Shane in the eye, he refused to flinch.
It didn’t go the way he thought it would, after that. He’d pictured blacklists and terminated contracts and discrimination lawsuits. He’d pictured some new phase of his life, involving wedding rings, a dog or four, and winters spent cuddling by the fireplace in the cottage. He certainly didn’t picture what he got: calling his husband captain, sharing a locker room and a home and a bed with him, a rejuvenated joy for something that hadn’t felt like it used to in years.
Nowadays, it’s not that Shane doesn’t want to win. He wants to win more than ever, he wants to win for Ilya, and for his parents, and for the town that had made him the man he is.
No. Shane still wants to win. The difference is that he doesn’t need to win. Maybe it’s because unlike before, Shane knows that hockey isn’t the only thing he has to give. Maybe it’s because he’s got nothing left to prove. Maybe it’s because for the first time in his life, he isn’t worried about what most people think of him.
Regardless of reason, Shane knows this: when he leaves hockey, there will be an entirely new, unbelievably joyful life for him to settle into.
The lights in the arena are bright, but they’re also cold. Distant. The flashes of paparazzi bulbs give Shane anxiety, and the key lights and reflectors at photoshoots make him feel like a specimen being pinned.
There are better suns to chase. Deep orange hues from a dimmed bedside lamp, dappling two naked bodies like paint against canvas. Pink daylight streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, the smell of breakfast drifting through the cottage. The white-hot glare off a golden crucifix, the man it belongs to beaming with his feet in the lake.
Ilya Rozanov. The light of Shane’s life.