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Ilya Rozanov has a great life. He’s the best at what he does, he’s rich, he has a great team, he’s the owner of the best dog to ever be a dog, and he’s Shane Hollander’s husband.
It’s good, and it’s becoming easier to remind himself of it and truly believe it, even on the bad days. And as he settles in next to his husband on the flight back from their first away game of the season in New York, he feels more settled than he has in a long time.
Sure, flying still isn’t his favorite thing anymore, and he’s not sure he’ll ever not be able to clutch at the Shane’s hand during takeoff and landing, but ever since Shane told the story of them meeting his parents for the first time on the flight to New York, he’s much calmer about the whole situation.
They really can get through anything together.
“Hey, Roz,” Troy Barrett says, popping up from the seat in front of them. “It’s your turn for a story.”
He almost considers passing today. He’s tired from the game the night before, and having the weight of Shane leaning against him is almost like a weighted blanket. Let someone else tell be the distraction for today.
But then he realizes, as he glances at Shane, just how many good stories he has in his arsenal, and there’s really no one better to entertain his team. He is their captain after all. Their fearless leader, and he takes his title very seriously.
It’s his duty, really, to share a story and fluster his husband for the benefit of the group.
He hops up and practically bounces into the aisle, smile wide on his lips as he taps a finger against his mouth, trying to think of which story he wants to tell as the plane buzzes in anticipation of what he’s going to say.
Everyone seems excited. Except for Shane, who seems weirdly calm, which is odd considering there’s at least a hundred percent chance the story Ilya’s about to tell is about them.
He sees Troy sitting in front of Shane, and his first great idea hits him.
“Today,” he says loudly, enjoying how everyone quiets when he speaks. “Today, I will tell you about the time Shane got jealous because Tro–”
“NO, Ilya,” Shane interrupts him, and Ilya greatly enjoys watching Troy’s head snap towards Shane, who glows like a freshly picked tomato.
And that’s fine, really. Being Shane Hollander’s husband means he has so much material to work with.
“Okay, well, what about the time you bought us a sex building?” he asks, and barely gets the sentence out before Zane Boodram makes a loud exclamation.
“A what now?” he asks, as the eyes of everyone on the plane flit back and forth from Shane to Ilya.
“Definitely not,” Shane snaps, and Ilya grins, knowing Shane is probably already so mortified that he can easily suggest his next idea, and that it will probably be greenlit.
“You are so boring, my lovely husband,” Ilya groans for dramatic effect, and it works because a small smile returns to Shane’s unfairly pretty face. “What about the time you panicked so much you got into a relationship with Rose Landry because I said your first name?”
There’s an audible intake of breath, and Ilya watches as a number of emotions cross Shane’s face before it finally settles into something that looks resigned.
“Fine,” Shane says with a roll of his eyes, and the team cheers as Ilya’s smile grows so wide he knows his cheeks will start to hurt soon.
This particular story used to cause him a lot of pain to think about. A summation of everything the two of them wrecked because they couldn’t manage to communicate how they felt. But now, it mostly just makes him laugh.
Mostly. He still doesn’t like to think about Shane and Rose together. He’s not that evolved.
He claps his hands in front of him. “It all started with tuna melts.”
“Tuna melts?” Troy asks with a confused look on his face.
“Like the sandwich?” Wyatt echoes, and Ilya nods.
“Yes,” Ilya says. “Shane likes tuna because of the omega threes, which he tells me are important.”
“Wow, that’s like the least sexy sandwich imaginable,” Zane says. “No wonder this ends in disaster.”
“You might want to back up just a tiny bit,” Shane pipes up, his skin still flushed around his cheeks. “There’s some context missing here.”
Yeah, like seven or eight years' worth of context, but he guesses they don’t need all of that to understand.
“Shane came to my penthouse that night in Boston, and I asked him to stay over for the first time.”
A chorus of suggestive ‘ooooo’s’ greets that small tidbit of information, and Ilya’s glad to see Shane biting his lip to hold back a wider grin.
“And he said yes?” Nick Chouinard asks.
“Of course he did,” Ilya winks, and Shane shakes his head and rolls his eyes again.
“To be fair, he waited until after sex to ask me,” Shane says, as if it explains everything, and considering the knowing head nods from more than a few of the guys, maybe it does.
“Ah, waiting until he’s all gooey inside from your dick,” Wyatt chimes in, tapping his temple. “Smart, Roz.”
“Can we not talk about my insides being gooey from dick, please?” Shane moans, his head thrown back into the headrest, but Ilya ignores him.
“Yes, I am brilliant, Hazy, thank you for that acknowledgement,” he says, moving on quickly so no one has a chance to disagree. “Anyway, Shane agreed to stay in his post-orgasm bliss, and then I asked if he was hungry.”
“Oh, I bet you did,” Zane calls out, and Ilya pauses for several of the whoops from the rookies to die down.
“So, I made us tuna melts, turned on a game, had cold ginger ale for him in the fridge–”
“And you didn’t marry him on the spot, Hollander?” Troy asks, and Shane’s blush begins to creep down his neck again.
“He probably would have if it had just been the gingerale,” Nick says. “Roz fumbled it with including the tuna.”
“He loved the tuna, thank you very much,” Ilya goes on. “And I thought everything was going well. We joked around–”
“That should have been your first clue something was wrong if Hollander was telling jokes,” Zane teases and Shane holds up his middle finger.
“Fuck you, I’m hilarious.”
Ilya grins at him and goes on. “We cuddled on the couch, we talked about women.”
“You thought it would be a good idea to talk about women?” Evan Dykstra asks incredulously.
“Hey, it’s never a bad idea to respectfully talk about women,” Wyatt chides not unkindly.
“Yeah, but maybe not the best idea when you’ve just dicked down Shane Hollander and you’re trying to get him to stay the night,” Troy adds, and Shane groans again.
“Why is everyone assuming I’m the one who was getting dicked down?” he asks. “Maybe it was the other way around.”
Troy’s head tilts to the side like he’s trying to figure something complicated out in his head. “Was it?”
The entire team looks at Shane expectantly. He folds his arms over his wide chest and slinks down into his seat. “No,” he says somewhat petulantly, and god, Ilya loves him so much.
“So, how’d you take him talking to you about women after you’d agreed to spend the night with him?” Zane questions, and Shane shrugs in response.
“I hadn’t admitted to myself I was gay at the time,” he tells the group, and Ilya can only look at him fondly. He really does put up with a lot, being married to Ilya and also being a member of this weird, wonderful family of misfits. “Ilya was trying to feel me out.”
“Oh, I bet he was,” Zane calls out, reaching up from the row behind Shane to lightly and affectionately ruffle Shane’s hair.
“He wasn’t picking up at all what I was trying to do, so I told him I liked him,” Ilya continues, and several of the men aw, Coach Wiebe included.
“Okay, don’t give him too much credit for that,” Shane says, and Ilya starts to laugh, knowing what’s coming next. “He told me he didn’t like me as a person, but that I had a good mouth.”
“It was an admission of love!” Ilya defends, and finally Shane laughs too.
“Yeah, can’t believe I didn’t figure that one out,” he says, and Ilya knows that even if Shane had managed to figure out Ilya loved him at the time, things probably would have ended the same way. And to be fair to Shane, Ilya hadn’t really known what all he was feeling either.
They just weren’t ready.
Fuck, they’ve really, really come a long way.
“It must not have made you that upset, because we had sex again,” Ilya goes on. “Like good, good sex.” The memory of how intense it was, how in love he was, has never really left Ilya.
“How good was it?” Wyatt deadpans right on cue, reliable as ever.
“I’m glad you asked,” Ilya responds just like Shane had when he was telling his story of the two of them. “It was not even conventional sex, but it was incredible.”
“Not conventional?” Luca questions.
Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. “I have so many regrets and it’s not even ten in the morning.”
“Shane had us both in his hand,” Ilya says, enjoying how the straight members of the team all seem to be working out the logistics in their heads while Troy nods appreciatvely and Luca looks intrigued.
“Wouldn’t that be like…super dry though?” one of the rookies asks, and Ilya shakes his head.
“Shane tends to be very…”
“Ilya,” Shane warns.
”…wet,” Ilya supplies and he watches as Shane leans forward and hangs his head in his hands.
He lets out a strangled, “Oh, my god.”
Ilya knows he’ll pay for this in one way or another later, but he keeps going though because this is the important part.
“But I had never been so connected to anyone before that day. It was like we had to be so close that we had no choice but to breathe each other’s air.” He says this with an almost reverence that has Shane immediately raising his head back up. A hush falls around them for a moment that stretches on as everyone else melts away, all traces of embarrassment gone from Shane as their eyes lock, and Ilya can tell he’s remembering it, too.
It had been a seismic shift for them. Their worlds cracking open before they could finally commit to rebuilding something that would last.
And while their relationship has lasted, Ilya should have known that on this plane with this team, the peaceful moment of connection with his husband absolutely would not.
“Breathing each other’s air after you just had tuna melts?” Zane asks, breaking the spell.
Ilya’s eyes break from Shane’s, and he sees Luca Haas’ nose crinkle at the thought. “Ew,” he says, and the sentiment becomes clear on nearly every other face Ilya can see.
“That’s gross you two,” Tanner Dillon says, and at least a dozen heads nod in agreement. Ilya makes a mental note to try and convince Wiebe to move him down to the fourth unit for that.
Wyatt shakes his head. “You were willingly that close to each other after consuming tuna, and you didn’t realize you were in love?”
“Idiots,” Evan says with a smile, and Ilya can see Shane almost smiling back.
“Then in my own post-orgasm bliss, I called him Shane and he practically ran out the door.”
A thrum of voices starts up and nearly everyone starts speaking at once.
“What?!”
“Why would that matter?”
“It’s your literal name?”
“Did you finally come to your senses and get grossed out by the tuna?”
“Why the hell would that make you run?”
“You really ran because he called you Shane?” Troy’s voice manages to sound above the rest, his brows drawn down. “You didn’t even flinch when I called you that for the first time.”
“Okay, well one, I’m not sleeping with you,” Shane says, and Troy flushes like he’s just realized what he’d said. “And two, he’d never called me anything other than Hollander. We’d gone from quick hookups to me staying the night and him cooking for me and cuddling on the couch and first names. It was a fucking lot.”
There’s some mumbling of agreement before Wiebe asks. “You didn’t go after him?” Ilya thinks he can sense a hint of disappointment in his voice.
“He would not have liked it, I don’t think,” Ilya says almost quietly, catching Shane’s gaze. “And I was sort of covered in come because of the…” he trails off and makes a crude gesture with his hand.
A consensus of oh and okay, that makes sense rings throughout the plane.
“And less than two weeks later, he was dating Rose Landry, and I thought I had lost him forever,” Ilya pouts dramatically.
“Damn, Hollander,” Wyatt says. “You really kicked him to the curb because he said your name.”
“I never thought I’d say this, but poor Roz,” Nick laments for Ilya.
“You make Roz fall in love with you and you date Rose Landry?” Evan says. “The greed of men.”
“You’re a man,” Shane points out.
“You cook a guy a horrible sandwich, and he gay panics straight into the arms of a movie star,” Zane says.
“I was really confused!” Shane cries out defensively. “And spoiler alert, we got back together. You all were at our wedding!”
“And you’re still friends with Rose Landry,” Troy says helpfully.
“Greedy!” Evan shouts.
Shane opens his mouth to retort, but Luca manages to speak first. “But wait. How’d you finally get back together after all that?”
“Ah,” Ilya says, patting him on the head as he begins to walk back to his seat next to Shane. “Do not be so greedy, young one. That’s a story for another time.”
“Oh, come on, Roz!”
“Next time,” Ilya placates, but everyone continues to voice complaints until Tanner speaks up.
“Can’t we just have Hollander and Roz tell the stories from now on? I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface, here,” he says, and Ilya decides maybe he can put off that conversation with Wiebe until Tanner inevitably says something else that’s dumb.
“Yeah, if we have to put up with their ridiculous amount of PDA, I think it’s the least they can do for us,” Troy says, as if he has any room to talk with the googly eyes he makes at Harris on the daily.
Any relief Shane might have had at the story being over evaporates immediately. “Surely there’s something else we can do to–”
“All in favor, raise your hands!” Zane calls out and every hand shoots up, including the flight attendants who poke their heads out from their jump seats. Every hand except for Shane.
Zane smirks at Shane. “All opposed?” he asks, and Shane’s lone hand raises into the air.
“Strongly,” he says, but Ilya can tell he knows it’s a losing battle.
“Sorry, Hollander,” Zane tells him, even though he doesn’t look it in the slightest. “This is a democracy. Majority rules. And even if it didn’t Roz and I have the final say.”
“I think technically that belongs to me,” Wiebe says with a warm smile. “But I’m not going to complain about this one.”
“Great,” Shane mutters, as the others cheer their victory and Ilya sits down next to him patting his leg consolingly.
“Do not worry,” he says because he knows Shane will. “We can tell the stories together.”
Shane lets out a huffy breath as his hand finds Ilya’s. “Fine, but we’re talking about which stories we tell ahead of time. No surprises.”
Ilya forces a serious look on his face. “Of course.”
“Otherwise, I might start pulling my hair out.”
Ilya gasps, and it’s only half-mocking, because sue him. He loves Shane’s hair. “Not your hair.”
“My hair will be the least of your problems if I have to endure our teammates talking about my gooey, dicked down insides again.”
Ilya wiggles his eyebrows a bit. “The sex buidling does not seem so bad, now, does it.”
Shane playfully elbows Ilya’s ribs. “I think our next story should be that first photoshoot and how you were so enamored with me you just happened to suggest I be involved, too.”
“We probably should start back towards the beginning,” he replies, and then he lowers his voice as he speaks directly into Shane’s ear. “But only if we can include the part where you got hard looking at me in the shower.”
He watches as Shane’s eyes grow wide and his cheeks once again flush red. A near permanent fixture on this particular flight, and he loves it so fucking much.
“We’ll have to workshop that together before the next away game,” Shane says, reaching up to adjust the directional nozzle of his air conditioner so air is blowing directly on his face.
“I suppose we will,” Ilya says, placing a kiss to the side of Shane’s head. “Together.”