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The thing about secrets on a hockey team was that they lasted approximately forty-eight hours before someone told the wrong person in the wrong locker room at the wrong volume.
No one spoke of The Drunk Rozy Incident for eleven full days, which Cliff considered a genuine organizational achievement.
It held for two reasons. The first was Victor, who, as their resident European, sat everyone down the morning after with the specific energy of having thought about this while the rest of them were sleeping off the night before, and explained, quietly and with no room for interruption, “You don’t understand what this looks like back home for him. It’s no joke. People get arrested for less than this. He is famous. He is Russian. They arrested so many people during the Sochi Olympics.”
Nobody made any jokes. Even Brad.
The second reason was that Ilya himself never mentioned it. Not the phone, not the conversation, not the fact that he had sat in a room full of people and said, out loud, that he missed a man who had freckles and didn't top. He came to practice the next day the same as always: sharp, a little late, with an expensive coffee, vulnerability did not appear to be a category he engaged with. He ran drills. He chirped Wójcik for something involving his skate edges. He stole Cliff's protein bar, looked Cliff directly in the eye, and ate it without apology.
Cliff let him.
The team had adjusted around the new information the way teams adjusted around most things: by quietly rearranging themselves without saying what they were doing. Connor stopped making offhand comments about Ilya's female company that might have previously been friendly ribbing and were now something to navigate. Brad stopped dead in the middle of a sentence about Rose Landry one morning, visibly recalibrated, and said "she seems like a person" instead of whatever he'd been about to say, which was probably fine. Victor occasionally said things like "Hollander's a good player" in Ilya's presence in a tone so carefully casual it would have been invisible to anyone not already watching for it.
Ilya noticed. Ilya noticed everything. He said nothing, which meant he was grateful, which was as close to gratitude as he usually got.
He still oscillated. Angry some days, moody others, snapping at rookies for existing wrong in a seven-foot radius. The news cycle kept feeding it, because celebrity gossip did not care about Ilya's emotional state: a photographer had caught Hollander and Rose Landry at a restaurant in Montreal, and then at an event, and then leaving her apartment building, and the Internet had its opinions about it, and those opinions kept surfacing in places Ilya couldn't always avoid. He'd gone very still at the gym one morning when it came up on someone's phone. Not angry. Just still, in a way that was somehow worse.
But he no longer looked like he was planning on jumping off Tobin Bridge.
Which was, Cliff figured, progress.
The plan had been Victor's idea, which meant it was elegant in concept and borderline insane in execution.
"Recon," Victor said, at a team dinner where Ilya had been not in the mood for.
"What kind of Recon?" Brad said.
"The kind where we figure out if Hollander is actually gone or just… misfiled," Victor said.
"Misfiled," Connor said. "Buddy, I know you are french but that’s not a person word."
"Hollander is with Rose Landry," Brad said.
"Hollander is seen with Rose Landry," Victor said.
Connor snorted. "That’s a reach, man."
"It’s not a reach, it’s data," Victor said, "Someone needs to talk to him and find out for sure."
"I'm not going," Connor said. "I'm too loud. He'll know immediately."
"You're all too loud," Cliff said.
Everyone looked at him.
He looked at his plate.
"Marley." Victor pointed.
Cliff didn’t even look up. "No."
"You literally have a built-in excuse. MLH 16 thing. He’s gonna be there."
"I know. I read the email."
"You are Boston's most likeable human being," Victor said. "We’ve been over this."
"We have not been over this," Cliff said.
"Brad ran the numbers," Connor added.
"I did not run numbers," Brad said. "But yeah. That tracks."
"I fight people," Cliff said. "That’s my job."
"And everyone likes you anyway," Connor said. "That’s crazy, actually. That’s not normal."
"That’s your whole thing," Brad said. "Golden retriever with CTE."
"Shut up," Cliff said.
"Also," Victor said, the kind of delivery that didn’t require follow-up, "Don't you want to know?"
Cliff did want to know. He had, in fact, wanted to know for approximately six years, which was how long he'd been watching Ilya text Montreal Jane who was definitely not a chick. He just hadn't planned on being the one who went looking.
He thought about Ilya sitting on that couch with a glass balanced on his knee, going quiet in the way that meant the dangerous thoughts were happening.
"... fine," he said. "But I’m not coming back with, like, a report."
"Obviously not," Victor said. "That's Brad's job."
"I'm not making a report," Brad said.
Victor looked at him.
"...I’ll make a quick one," he said. "Nothing crazy."
STEP ONE: RECON
The MLH 16 press event was held in a conference space downtown that had been turned into a sort of controlled chaos of screens and equipment and branded tablecloths, the kind of corporate enthusiasm that the league deployed when it wanted to remind itself it was also an entertainment product and not just a collection of men who hit each other professionally. They had set up multiple stations with the game, large enough monitors that you could see the screen from across the room, and a camera setup in the corner for the short individual interviews that would end up in promotional materials and YouTube previews and probably some kid's game night stream.
Cliff had done these before. They were fine. You played the game for twenty minutes, you answered four questions about what it was like to see your digital face and whether your stats were accurate (answer: always "they're pretty good" even when they weren't), you took some photos, and you went home. The whole thing took maybe two hours.
He spotted Hollander about forty minutes in, at a station across the room, losing what appeared to be a fairly one-sided shootout against a PR handler who was pretending to try.
Cliff's first impression, honestly, was that Hollander looked smaller than he did on ice. Not short, he wasn't short, probably had an inch or two on Cliff, but folded somehow with his shoulders slightly in, there, technically, but not with enthusiasm. He was wearing a grey sweater that probably cost more than Cliff's first car and looking at the screen with the look of someone being asked to evaluate himself in public and finding it unnecessary.
Victor had said the guy was shy. That landed accurately.
Cliff finished his round, handed off the controller, and wandered over in what he hoped read as natural.
"Marleau, right?" Hollander said, before Cliff got there. He didn't look up immediately. Eyes still on the screen.
"Marley," Cliff said. "Close enough."
Hollander glanced over. His eyes were quick, that was the first thing Cliff logged, the way they moved, cataloguing without appearing to. Very similar to someone else Cliff knew, actually, done at a different volume. "Yeah, sorry. I looked at the list"
"You prepped for this?"
"I prep for everything," Hollander said, like this was a mild confession of a personality flaw.
"For a video game thing?"
Hollander looked at him for a second. "It also has the media list."
Cliff didn't say anything.
Hollander returned his attention to the screen. "My face is wrong," he said.
Cliff looked. They were, actually, a little off. The proportions were slightly too broad. "Yeah, mine too. They always mess it up."
"Does yours look like that?"
"No. Mine’s better looking."
Hollander almost smiled. It happened fast, just the edges of it, there and gone. "My stats are better," he said.
"Sure they are." Cliff said.
The game went on for a minute. Cliff picked up a controller. They ended up in a two-player mode almost by accident, not quite by accident.
"So," Cliff said, keeping it easy, "You here all day?"
"Flight out tomorrow," Hollander said. "Early."
"Same." Cliff executed a pass that was pretty good, for the record. "You going to Pittsburgh?"
Hollander's eyes flicked over. "Columbus."
"Other way around," Cliff said. "I'm Columbus. You're Pittsburgh."
"...Right.." A pause. "Pike's wife is having a kid soon."
"Yeah?."
"June." Hollander did a small thing with his jaw, like he was deciding whether to continue. "He’s been checking his phone a lot."
"That's nice," Cliff said.
"Yeah," Hollander said. Something in his voice went softer for a second, the careful edge dropping. "It is."
The press handler materialized, already halfway through the next step before they were done with this one, and steered them toward the interview corner. They went one at a time. Cliff answered his questions and made a joke about his digital face that the handler laughed at in a way that suggested they would absolutely use it. He came back to find Hollander finishing his interview with an expression of polite endurance.
They ended up at the photo station at the same time, which was fine, and then standing next to each other holding controllers while someone directed them to look at the screen and look natural and look at each other as if they were competing, which produced four minutes of mild awkward comedy because Hollander's attempt to look competitive came out looking slightly like he trying not to look at a doctor who was about to give him bad news.
"Less like that," the photographer said.
"Like what?" Hollander said.
"Like the controller insulted your family"
Hollander attempted this. It was not a good attempt, but it was recognizable.
Cliff laughed. Hollander looked sideways at him and the expression cracked, just slightly, into something that might have become a real smile if you gave it another thirty seconds.
"There. Hold that." the photographer said, and took the photo.
Afterward they were sorting out their bags near the exit and Cliff made the call.
"Hey," he said. "You eaten?"
Hollander looked at him as if Cliff had just added an unscheduled item to his day. "I usually just eat at the hotel."
"I know a good Italian place. Nothing crazy. We could have a few beers."
"I don’t really drink in-season," Hollander said.
"Yeah, me neither if I’ve got a flight" That was a mild reinterpretation of Cliff's actual relationship with the rule, but close enough. "Sparkling water, pasta. You're done here, I'm done here. I don't know anyone else in this city and you seem normal enough.."
He said it plainly, without trying too hard. Sometimes people relaxed if you made it pragmatic.
Hollander looked at him for another moment.
"Holzy," Cliff said.
Hollander blinked. "What?"
"It's a nickname."
"That's..." Hollander appeared to search for the right response and come up short. "Why."
"Because your name ends in a vowel-ish sound. It's what we do."
Hollander considered this with visible uncertainty, like he'd been given instructions in a language he almost understood. "That's not— my name doesn't end in a vowel."
"Close enough for hockey purposes."
"Hollander ends in— "
"Holzy," Cliff said again, simply.
A pause.
"...Okay," Hollander said, which Cliff counted as a win.
The Italian place was small and warm and the bread arrived without being asked for, which was the correct way to run a restaurant. Cliff ordered the bolognese. Hollander looked at the menu for slightly longer than necessary and ordered lentil soup and a plate of roasted vegetables with some kind of grain Cliff didn't catch the name of.
"Macrobiotic," Hollander said, like he knew what Cliff was thinking.
"You eat like that all the time?"
"Yeah."
"That’s rough."
"It’s not rough," Hollander said. "It works."
Cliff shrugged. "If you say so."
"It helps with recovery time." He said it matter-of-factly, not defensive about it. "My Mom was a nutritionist. It's— habit."
Cliff nodded. Ate some bread.
The first few minutes were the usual calibration: Columbus, Pittsburgh, the flight times, Pike's impending status as a father, the game schedule in February. They were both people who could do small talk, just not people who loved it, and it showed in the slight pauses before topic transitions, the way they both waited a half-beat too long before filling silence.
Then the bread basket was almost empty and Cliff said, "Kent's gonna to get suspended eventually, right? That hit on Neilson was appalling."
It was a safe one. Kent was an objectively difficult personality, the kind of player where complaining about him was basically universal and therefore a conversational neutral zone.
"Kent," Hollander said, "is the reason I wear a full visor now when we play Toronto."
Cliff looked at him.
"He came into a faceoff in 2014," Hollander said, calm, factual, "and elbowed me in the ear. Looked right at me first." He paused. "He also once told a reporter that my points are all power play inflated."
"...Yeah?"
"I have the fifth-lowest power play percentage of any top ten scorer."
Cliff stared at him. "You know your own power play percentage."
"I know everyone's power play percentage."
"...Holzy."
"So when I call him an idiot, I can back it up."
Cliff choked on his drink. Hollander watched this with an expression that might have been politely appalled but had a thread of something else in it, something like quiet satisfaction, nothing added. Nothing needed.
Oh, Cliff thought. There you are.
He got why Ilya found the guy compelling. Up close, in a room without cameras, there was a sharpness to Hollander that the public image didn't show, he was careful with it, kept it folded and stowed, but it came out in moments like this. The statistics comment. The visor story. Delivered flat and precise, without performance.
The same eyes as Ilya, he thought, and then immediately corrected himself. Different execution. Like the same instrument played at a completely different volume.
"You guys look good this year," Cliff said.
"It’s been fine." Standard answer. Then, a beat later, like he'd decided something: "We had some stuff early."
"You don’t gotta—"
"It’s mostly sorted," Hollander moved his soup spoon. "Comeau had some things. He’s good now."
"Yeah, he’s solid."
"He’s good when he’s right," Said without qualification, no hedging. Team captain voice. "He's been right since November."
Cliff nodded. He ate pasta. He let some time pass in a comfortable way.
"You seeing anyone?" he said, easy as asking about the weather.
"...Yeah."
"Yeah?"
Hollander looked down at his soup.
"There's been, yeah." A pause. "Rose. Rose Landry. You've probably—"
"Seen it, yeah."
"She is," Hollander said. His voice was warm. Genuinely warm. "She’s funny. Not like—" he made a small motion with his hand, "—not fake funny. Just… actually funny.. But she's not— She's very direct. She grew up around hockey, her family's from Michigan, so she actually gets the schedule, which is— " He paused. "Sorry. You didn't really ask for a full— "
"No, it's good," Cliff said.
"She's great," Hollander said again. "She's very fashionable. She knows a lot about a lot of things. She has strong opinions about like, urban planning."
Cliff looked at him. "Urban planning?"
"Her dad works in it."
"...That’s a new one."
"It's interesting," Hollander said. "She's interesting."
"Yeah. Sounds… interesting."
Hollander went back to his soup.
Cliff ate his pasta and filed that away. Warm. Friendly. Admiring. The voice of a man describing someone he liked and respected.
Not the voice of a man describing someone who made him lose his mind.
Cliff had heard Ilya describe people. Women he'd actually been into, not just briefly entertained. It was different. It had a different texture. There was something involuntary about it, something he couldn't quite fold back down. Hollander was folded all the way down. He thought Rose was great. He thought she was interesting. He would probably be a perfectly good boyfriend.
But Cliff had spent enough time around people who were in love to know the difference between that and this.
"She sounds like a good person," Cliff said.
"She is," Hollander said, and there was a sincerity to it that was itself telling. He wasn't performing. He genuinely meant it. He just meant it like a person talking about a good friend.
They finished dinner. Hollander picked up the check before Cliff could, which was fast and unexpected and came with a look that said don't argue, which Cliff respected. They stood outside for a second in the cold.
"Marleau," Hollander said.
"Marley," Cliff said.
Hollander nodded, like he was committing it. "Safe flight."
"You too. Tell Pike congrats."
Something crossed Hollander's face, a small flicker of something genuine, unguarded. "I will. He’ll like that." Then: "Thanks. For dinner."
"Good soup?"
Hollander's mouth moved. Almost a smile again. "The soup was fine," he said, which from him was probably high praise for anything not on the main menu.
Cliff watched him walk away.
Weird , he thought. Really, quietly, privately weird.
He thought about Ilya saying I would date him. Properly. If he wanted.
He thought about Hollander's voice when he said she's great , and the precise careful warmth of it, and how none of it had sounded like a man describing someone who kept him awake.
Yeah, Cliff thought. Definitely not crazy about this girl.
STEP TWO: INTELLIGENCE REPORT
The team meeting was not technically a team meeting. It was Cliff arriving at Victor's place on a Tuesday afternoon and finding Connor, Brad, and Carmichael already there, having apparently materialized by instinct the way they always did when something was happening.
"Well?" Connor said.
Cliff dropped onto the couch. "He's a weirdo," he said.
Victor handed him a beer. "That is not analysis."
"Eats weird. Like—super healthy. On purpose." He paused. "And he's got opinions. Just… hides them"
"About what?" Brad started.
"Everything. Stats, mostlyv" Cliff looked around the room. "Dude knows everyone's power play numbers."
"Shut up," Connor said.
"I'm serious. Mine, yours, Kent’s—especially Kent’s. And he hates Kent."
"Yeah, well, everyone hates Kent," Connor said.
"No, this is different," Cliff said. "This is like… long-term, documented hatred. He brought up something from 2014."
Carmichael blinked. "Okay, that's kinda sick."
"Yeah," Cliff said. "Like— " He thought about how to explain it. "He's got this dry thing too. Like—you think he's just stating a fact, but he's actually roasting you"
Connor made a noise. "Oh I like him."
"Also he calls me Marleau."
"Nobody calls you Marleau," Brad said.
"He does. Read the press list."
Victor looked thoughtful. "That’s… kind of endearing."
"It's kind of weird," Cliff said. "But not bad-weird." He drank some beer. "He's quiet. Not cold. Just… closed. Takes a minute"
"And Rose?" Connor said, careful.
Cliff looked at the ceiling. "He thinks she's great."
"Yeah, no shit," Brad said. "She's a movie star."
"No, like—" Cliff gestured vaguely. "He thinks she's great like… like she's his buddy. Who's cool. And smart."
"That’s not—" Brad started.
"He told me about urban planning," Cliff said.
A pause.
Brad blinked like his brain had briefly disconnected from the network.
Connor blinked. "What."
"Urban planning. Said she’s into it. Said it was interesting."
"...okay," Connor said slowly.
"He said it three different ways," Cliff went on. "All nice. All respectful. None of it sounded like—" he hesitated, searching, "—like he was losing his mind over her."
The room went quiet in the way that meant everyone was thinking something that nobody wanted to say first.
Carmichael leaned forward. He did not know why he leaned forward.
"So," Connor said eventually. "Maybe."
"Maybe," Cliff said. "'m not saying anything. I'm saying he does not talk about her the way Roz—"
"Roz doesn't talk about him," Brad said.
"Exactly," Cliff said.
A silence.
"Maybe he's still into Rozy," Carmichael said, going for it.
"Maybe," Cliff said. "Or maybe he's just not that into her. Could be anything"
Connor looked at the ceiling. "Could be."
"I mean," Brad said, slowly, "I don't know… maybe he’s gay."
"Yeah," Victor said. "Maybe."
They all absorbed the maybe for a moment.
"Also," Cliff said, "He's a good guy, though. Like actually. I'd hang out with him."
This landed as a more significant endorsement than it sounded, and the room seemed to know it.
"Okay," Connor said, leaning forward, suddenly more animated. "So what's next?"
Victor produced a notepad from somewhere. This had apparently been prepared.
Cliff stared at it. "Oh my god."
"It's not a spreadsheet," Brad said quickly.
"It looks like a spreadsheet."
"It's a plan," Brad said.
"You said recon," Cliff said.
"That was step one," Connor said.
Cliff looked at the notepad.
He looked at the room.
Thought about Ilya going quiet at breakfast. That still, not-angry quiet.
"Okay," Cliff said, against his better judgment, which had been losing battles like this for years. "What are the steps."
Victor uncapped his pen.
"Step Two," he said, "is the game."
STEP THREE: THE HALLWAY ENCOUNTER
The plan was simple. The plan was elegant. The plan was, Victor had assured them, foolproof.
They were in Montreal. Away ice. The corridor logistics were different, which Victor had accounted for, and the team had accounted for Victor accounting for it, and Cliff had accounted for the fact that the plan was probably going to be fine right up until the moment Ilya's eyes did the thing they did.
Connor delayed Ilya leaving the visitors' locker room by raising a question about the third period penalty situation. Ilya answered it. Looked at him. Looked at Cliff. Looked back at Connor.
"Are you done," he said.
He walked out into the east corridor.
Hollander was coming from the other direction.
Cliff watched from twenty feet back and felt the air change. They both registered each other at the same moment, no warning, no approach, just a corridor and suddenly four feet of space between them and nowhere for that to go.
Ilya stopped walking.
Hollander stopped walking.
Cliff watched Ilya's face. He'd gotten good at reading the things that crossed it fast, the things Ilya didn't choose to show. There was one now: something unguarded and immediate, lasting maybe half a second. Like a window opening. Then it closed.
"Hollander," Ilya said. Level. No inflection.
"Rozanov," Hollander said. The same.
Across the corridor, Cliff watched Hollander's hand flex once at his side. Just the once, and then still.
"Good game," Ilya said.
"You too," Hollander said.
A beat.
Cliff, from twenty feet away, briefly considered faking a fire alarm.
"How are you," Ilya said.
"Good," Hollander said. "You?"
"Good," Ilya said.
Two beats.
"Flight okay?" Ilya said.
"Fine," Hollander said.
Someone , Cliff thought. One of you. Please.
Nobody said anything real.
"Right," Ilya said.
"Yeah," Hollander said.
And then they walked past each other.
Cliff watched them go in opposite directions and felt the particular resignation, he had invested significant emotional energy into a hallway and received nothing back from it.
He looked at Connor.
Connor looked at the ceiling.
"Maybe next time," Brad said.
"It was too clean," Cliff said. "Nothing for them to react to. They just armored up and walked through it."
"We need something to knock the armor loose," Victor said, appearing from the other direction. "Not a conversation. A situation."
He looked at the ice.
"Warm-ups," he said.
STEP FOUR: TALKING ROZY UP
Both of them were tight during warm-ups. Cliff could feel it from across the ice, the particular coiled quality of two people who had successfully avoided the thing they were avoiding and were now performing their own normality very carefully.
Ilya was running drills with the focused expression he got when he was working out something that had nothing to do with drills. His edges were fine. His edges could survive a nuclear event. But there was something in the line of his jaw that wasn't about hockey, and when he came out of a tight turn near the boards his eyes moved, fast and involuntary, to the Montreal side, and then moved back.
He didn't know Cliff saw that. Cliff always saw it.
Hollander was doing passing work with his wingers at a pace that read: I am doing the thing I am supposed to be doing, and I am not thinking about anything else, and if I do this with enough velocity it will continue to be true. His passes were clean. Mechanical. He botched one, which he did not usually do, and Cliff watched him reset, sharp and deliberate.
"Okay," Connor said. "Marley. Go."
Cliff skated toward the Montreal end, angled easy, nothing aggressive. Pike and J.J. tracked him in the way forwards tracked an opposing enforcer approaching their captain during warm-ups: carefully, with instant calculations. He stopped a comfortable distance out.
"Hey," he said, to Hollander.
"Marleau," Hollander said, and Pike and J.J. recalibrated.
"Good to see you," Cliff said. He felt Pike and J.J. relax slightly behind Hollander in the way that players relax slightly when they realize an enforcer is not, in fact, here on business. "Congrats on the baby." He said looking at pike
"Thanks man,," Hollander said, and something warmed in his expression involuntarily. "We are gonna call her Amber "
"Good name," Cliff said.
Hollander made a face.
Then, casual: "Hey, you know Rozy knows cars, right? My girl's Honda was doing something with the brakes last month, I was going to take it to the shop, Rozy just spent twenty minutes under the hood."
Hollander looked at him.
"Changed the oil while he was there," Cliff said. "I didn't ask him to. He just did it."
Hollander was quiet. Something was happening behind his face, running fast and complex, and then, just for a second, something broke the surface. Not the guard. Not the careful. Something that looked, involuntarily, like of course he did.
Like someone who knew exactly what it would look like. Who could picture it.
It was there for maybe two seconds and then gone.
"Huh," Hollander said, and the word was doing a lot of work.
Cliff skated back.
"What did you say," Connor said immediately.
"Cars. Rozy changes oil."
"For real?" Connor said.
"Yeah," Cliff said. "I don't know man"
Second period, Cliff finished a fight with a Metros winger, got separated by officials, and found himself near the boards by Hollander. Connor appeared from nowhere, arriving exactly when he meant to.
"Holzy," Connor said. "Rozy's been running the penalty kill different this season. Better. Like sometimes you watch him and think, that's what a captain actually does. The reads he makes."
Hollander held his expression carefully. "Mm."
"He sees the play that's five plays away," Connor said. "You know the type."
Hollander looked at Connor like he had been ambushed and was doing math. A pause. Then, carefully: "You've known him a long time."
"Long time," Connor agreed.
Hollander nodded. His stick tapped the ice once. Not impatience. Something else. Like he'd almost said something and decided not to.
A whistle blew. They separated.
Third period, Victor's contribution:
Victor skated past full of relaxed energy, he had somewhere else to be and had simply stopped for a moment, and said, to no one and everyone: "You know what's underrated? Loyalty. Real loyalty. The kind where you just—" he gestured, "—show up. For people. When it matters." He paused. "Anyway. Good game."
He skated away.
Hollander watched him go.
Cliff happened to be nearby. Happened to clock Hollander at the opposite boards.
Hollander was looking at the ice. His jaw moved. Like he was deciding whether to keep something in or let it out, and was choosing to keep it in, and the choosing cost something small.
Late third, Carmichael, on a brief shift, ended up beside Hollander at a face-off dot.
"Your passing is really clean," Carmichael said. "It looks like Rozanov's. Same instincts."
The puck dropped. They went for it.
Hollander, a half-second later, made a pass that was clean and exact and geometrically precise.
He did not look toward the Boston bench.
But his head tilted, slightly. Like someone who had heard something and was carrying it.
Montreal won 3-2. Good game. In the handshake line, Cliff watched Ilya and Hollander reach each other. Handshake. Brief, professional. Eyes that stayed on each other a half-second past the grip.
Hollander, Cliff noted, looked extremely confused.
And Ilya, when he turned and moved down the line, Cliff caught his profile for just a second. The jaw had unclenched. The expression was something Cliff didn't have a name for. Not happy. Not sad. Somewhere between wanting and not yet trusting the wanting.
Gone in a second. Back to the line.
STEP FIVE: THIS WAS NOT THE PLAN
Victor's club was loud in the specific way that meant money had been spent on the sound system and the lighting in equal, thought-out measure. Montreal knew how to do this: the room was warm, the bar was long, the crowd had the easy energy of people who were out because the night was good and not because they were running from anything.
They had been there maybe forty minutes. Ilya had unclenched, properly, not just performing it. He and Connor had gotten into a bit about the penalty box situation with a ferocity that was clearly more entertaining than upsetting, and Brad had found someone who wanted to argue about defenseman statistics, which was Brad's natural habitat, and Cliff had stood at the bar with Victor in the comfortable way they sometimes stood together, not talking much, just present.
Ilya was laughing at something Connor had said. The real one. Cliff watched it happen and felt something in him settle.
Then Brad's posture changed.
Not dramatic. Just stopped. The way movement stops when something interrupts it at the source. Cliff tracked Brad's eyeline to the entrance, and there was a half-second of just: oh.
Victor caught it a beat later and turned, and Cliff saw him run the math in real time: the calculation of it, who was with who, what the vectors were, how bad this could go, and come up with no good answer.
Cliff felt it before he looked. A tightening in the chest that was pattern recognition: the thing that shouldn't happen is happening.
He looked.
Rose Landry, in something dark and easy-looking, talking to someone at the door. Beside her, Miles— something, Cliff couldn't remember, was already scanning the room like someone who treated every space as a challenge. And between them, in a grey jacket, like this had seemed like a better idea earlier: Hollander.
"Okay," Connor said, barely audible.
"Same club," Victor said.
"You said you knew the best club in Montreal!"
"Apparently so does everyone else."
"How do we— ?" Brad started.
"We don't," Cliff said. "We stay exactly here and we're fine, Ilya doesn't have to— "
"Doesn't have to what?"
Ilya, returning from wherever he'd been, two drinks in hand, reading their cluster with the accuracy he brought to everything.
His eyes moved. Found the entrance. The stillness came fast, the way it always came, not a freeze, just a recalibration, internal and instant.
He set one of the drinks down.
Cliff said, quietly: "We can go somewhere less crowded."
"No," Ilya said. Final.
Ilya handed Connors his drinks and made his way back to the bar, like clockwork Miles turned from the bar and his eyes found Ilya across the room and he smiled: warm, specific, the kind of smile that was also an invitation and made no attempt to disguise it.
Ilya's expression moved. Something in it opened, calculating, and Cliff watched him decide.
He straightened slightly. Set his drink down on the bar. He turned around, surveying, and sure enough he found Hollander dancing with Rose Fucking Landry across the dance floor.
His face acquires the expression. Cool, operating, the professional version of unbothered and approached a woman at the edge of the floor with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this since long before he joined the league.
Cliff watched him and said nothing.
Across the room, Hollander and Rose had found space on the floor. Rose was good at this, easy in her body, and she was laughing at something Miles had done. Hollander was doing his best, which meant he was slightly too focused on the mechanics but gamely committed, and Miles was dancing around both of them with the energy of someone who had decided the whole floor was equally his.
Then Hollander glanced toward the other side of the room.
The music had a particular bass frequency that Cliff felt in his chest, and through it he watched Hollander go completely still.
He had found Ilya.
Ilya was on the edge of the floor now, close to the woman, her back against his chest, his mouth near her ear, and he was looking directly at Hollander.
Not by accident. Not a glance. Looking at him, steady and deliberate, the way he looked at things he'd decided he wanted seen.
It was the most obvious thing Cliff had watched him do in years. And it was absolutely not what he meant it to look like. Ilya's jaw was set and his eyes were doing that thing where they went flat and performative at the same time, which was what happened when Ilya was feeling something loudly that he had decided to express as nothing.
Control , Cliff thought. He thinks he's in control right now and he absolutely is not.
Hollander looked at him for three full seconds.
Then he excused himself from Rose and Miles with a word, a hand on Rose's arm, natural, easy. And turned away.
He did not look back.
But Cliff watched his profile for the two seconds before he turned and saw it: the brief stillness after impact, before the adjustment. Not devastated. Not shutting down. Something rawer and less organized than either of those things.
"We can't just stand here," Connor said, from beside Cliff.
"No," Cliff said. "Go."
Connor went in at full volume, because Connor had no other setting.
"HOLLANDER!"
Hollander turned. Rose looked over. Miles perked up with the instant awareness of someone who had been waiting for the scene to get more interesting.
Cliff moved up beside Ilya and put a hand on his shoulder. "There you are," he said. "We lost you."
Ilya looked at him. The woman stepped back first, easy about it. "I'm gonna go find my boyfriend," she said. "He's literally right there." She looked at the general situation with mild amusement. "Good luck," she added, which was directed at no one specifically and possibly everyone.
Ilya watched her go, he appeared to be recalculating.
They were standing together now, the Raiders in a loose cluster, and Rose was already moving toward them with the confidence of someone who found this sort of thing entertaining rather than threatening, which Cliff was grateful for, because she was a movie star and also appeared to be a genuinely sensible human being.
"You played so badly," she said to Connor, delighted. "I watched the whole game on my phone. Painful."
"We had our moments," Connor said, looking charmed despite himself.
Miles had assessed the situation and said, to no one in particular: "If all hockey players look like this, I've been watching the wrong sport."
Hollander's face did something involuntary and alarmed.
"The underwear commercials are the league's long con. New demographic acquisition." Cliff joked, making the group laugh.
Hollander looked at him, startled, and the alarm cracked into something relieved and briefly helpless. He glanced sideways. Ilya was looking at the floot, and there was something at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the private version, the one that came when something landed that he hadn't planned to find funny.
He didn't look at Hollander.
Hollander didn't look at him.
Both of them were very carefully not looking at each other, which meant they were both completely aware of exactly where the other was.
Rose swept them upstairs to the VIP, which was warmer and slightly quieter and had a low table around which everyone arranged themselves in the natural way of groups finding their level.
Ilya at one end. Hollander at the other. Three feet of couch between them.
Miles settled beside Carmichael with the focused attention of a man who had identified his evening's project. Carmichael, to his credit, bore it with the expression of a soldier.
The conversation moved: Rose and Connor continued their disagreement about the game, Brad found his footing with an argument about possession metrics.
Miles had turned to Carmichael approximately four minutes after sitting down and said, "Okay, you. What's your deal."
Carmichael, who had not previously had a deal, became aware that one was now required.
"I play hockey," Carmichael said.
"That's not what I asked."
Carmichael looked at Cliff with the face of a man discovering the fine print too late.
Cliff did not help him.
At some point Rose went to the bathroom. Victor stepped away for a call. Brad got pulled to the floor by a girl with clear intentions. Miles dragged Carmichael after him, laughing, Carmichael accepting his fate with quiet dignity.
"I don't really—" Carmichael started.
"Come on," Miles said, already moving.
Cliff drifted to the bar with Connor.
He ordered two drinks and turned back.
The couch was visible from here. Ilya and Hollander, the group dissolved around them, sitting in the space they'd been circling all night.
Ilya said something.
Hollander looked at the table for a moment. Then he said something back.
Ilya's posture changed. Just a fraction, the held-in quality of it, the careful set of his shoulders, gave a single degree of ground. Not open. Not yet. But the armor had moved. The way ice moves right before it gives.
Hollander's hands, clasped in front of him, unclenched.
"Mild success," Connor said, quietly, beside Cliff.
"Mild," Cliff agreed.
He watched them. Two people in a room with all the reasons to stay closed, and the smallest possible crack letting light through.
"Counts," he said.
"Yeah," Connor said. "It does."
STEP SIX: ???
The All-Star Hotel bar in Tampa had the easy elegance of somewhere that knew it didn't have to try. Warm light, good ice in the glasses, the particular comfortable noise of athletes on a rare stretch of loose time.
Ilya had put on a Hawaiian shirt, which should not have worked and did anyway, which was the most Ilya thing that had ever happened. Cliff had been staring at it for thirty seconds trying to identify where it crossed the line from absurd to deliberately absurd to somehow just correct, and had given up.
When Cliff left to say hello to some former teammates, Ilya was in the middle of a conversation about tire pressure that seemed to be going well.
He was halfway across the terrace when he heard the quality of the air change behind him and turned around.
Hollander was crossing the terrace in a dark linen shirt, sleeves rolled, and he was better dressed than Cliff had ever seen him off-ice. He walked straight to the bar without looking around, and then he did look, because Ilya was right there, and he stopped.
Ilya looked up.
The stillness between them lasted long enough that Cliff held his breath from forty feet away.
Then Hollander sat down.
Cliff stayed where he was.
He could see them but not hear them. Just the shapes: Hollander leaning slightly forward, which he didn't usually do, and Ilya with his drink held loosely, the careful conversation moving in the way it moved when every word was chosen and neither person was willing to say so.
A few minutes in, Hollander said something.
Ilya laughed. The real one. Short, unplanned, the kind that happened before he could catch it and route it through the performative version. His hand moved to the bar's edge, steadying almost. Like the laugh had taken him somewhere and he needed the surface to return from it.
Hollander watched it happen. Cliff, from forty feet, watched Hollander watch it. Saw the thing that crossed his face: quiet, exposed, quickly recovered. The face of someone who had been looking for a crack in the wall and found it and didn't know yet whether to say so.
Carter Vaughan appeared and threw arms around both of them, and they laughed, and the moment dissolved into something easier. They kept talking. The careful quality loosened. Something that had been wound tight in both of them had given a little slack.
When he came back to the bar, Ilya was alone.
"So...? Cliff said.
Ilya looked at the terrace, which was emptier now.
"He broke up with her," he said. Steady. "They were not compatible. This is the word he used."
"When?"
"Before Tampa. A few weeks ago." A pause. "He knew I would be there. He said he did not plan it. But he knew."
"Do you believe him."
A long pause.
"Yes," Ilya said. "He is a bad liar." Something moved in his voice on the last word. Fond, almost. Like it was a quality he'd observed up close, before.
Cliff nodded. Said nothing.
The airport was too bright in the way all airports were too bright after something that was supposed to feel like a break.
All-Star Weekend had been three days of smiling on command, media obligations, and pretending the league’s idea of “fun” didn’t involve being constantly perceived. Now there were bags at their feet, skate bags half-zipped, players drifting in clusters toward gates like they were already mentally back in their home arenas.
Cliff and Ilya stood slightly apart, close enough to be together, far enough to avoid comment. Ilya had his carry-on upright between his feet, one hand resting on the handle like he might leave at any second and simply decide to stop participating in airports altogether.
He hadn’t said much since the last event. Not unusual. But quieter than usual even for him.
Then, without looking at Cliff, he said it.
“He is not my boyfriend,” Ilya said, in the careful voice of someone managing the walls they were starting to take down. “We are talking. Properly. We will see.”
A pause.
“This could be something good.” He turned the handle of his suitcase slightly, watching it rotate. “Like something I cannot control.” A beat. “I keep trying to not ruin it before it starts.”
Cliff looked at him.
The fluorescent lights made everything flatter than it should’ve been, but it didn’t matter. Ilya still looked like himself, just stripped down a little. No ice, no crowd, no noise to hide behind. Just waiting for a boarding group and trying to hold something steady in his hands that didn’t want to stay still.
Six years, Cliff thought. Six years of this.
Of watching him build walls out of professionalism and timing and silence. Of calling it nothing because calling it anything would make it real enough to hurt.
And now here he was, standing in an airport gate area in a hoodie that cost more than Cliff’s first car, admitting he couldn’t control it.
“Yeah,” Cliff said. “I think it could.”
Ilya glanced at the departures board. Then at the floor. Then at nothing in particular, like he was trying to keep his attention from landing anywhere it didn’t need to.
“You are going to tell them,” he said.
“I was going to tell them,” Cliff said. “Post-weekend. You know. Celebratory drinks. General chaos.”
“You have been planning celebratory drinks.”
“Maybe slightly.”
“I knew it,” Ilya said.
Cliff huffed a laugh. “Marley.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you so—” Ilya paused, actually searching for it, brow tightening slightly. “Nosy. Why?”
Cliff leaned back against his suitcase.
That was the thing. He could’ve made it a joke. Could’ve deflected. But the answer was simple in a way that didn’t feel simple at all.
“Because you don’t give up on people,” he said. “Rozy. Guys on the team. Whoever. You just don’t. You never have.”
Ilya finally looked at him properly.
Cliff held it for a second.
“So,” he said, quieter. “we don't give up on you.”
Ilya made a small, dismissive motion with his hand that did not successfully dismiss anything. The expression that crossed his face didn’t make it all the way into anything controlled.
It almost did. It tried to.
Then it didn’t.
He looked away first, like that solved something.
“Shut up,” Ilya said.
But it wasn’t sharp.
It never really was with Cliff anymore.
Cliff nodded once. Easy.
“Drink your coffee,” he said.
Ilya picked up the paper cup from the seat beside his bag and took a sip like it was something to focus on instead of the fact that he’d just said too much and neither of them was going to undo it.
Cliff pulled out his phone.
Opened the group chat.
boys. we’re alive.
He hesitated.
Then added:
good news.
Sent.
Cliff slid the phone back into his pocket.
It went off almost immediately. Then again. Then three more times in under a minute.
Cliff didn't look.
Beside him, Ilya drank his coffee and watched the departures board, and said nothing else, and didn't need to.
Just travel.
Just time.
Just the hard part already behind them, whether anyone said it out loud or not.