Chapter Text
“What’s this?” Shane turns away from his parents’ fridge, holding an unfamiliar box. A white box, like the ones for pastries, with a ripped sticker reading “Irina’s” that used to keep it closed.
He’s used to their fridge—it’s been organized in the same way and has featured the same things consistently for nearly thirty years. His parents like their routine, same as him, and the grocery list has been printed out since before he can remember. It’s comforting; comforting the same way that seeing his room, untouched since the last time he stayed the night, is comforting. This is home, with his parents.
So, a new thing in the fridge is weird. Not right, maybe. He feels a little off-kilter because that’s not supposed to change, not his parents fridge. It doesn’t do that. Shane isn’t over often, but it stays the same. It’s home, and home shouldn’t change.
“Oh! Oh, honey, that’s from this new stall down at the farmer’s market—it’s Russian food!” his mom lights up with excitement. That startles Shane even more, seeing as Yuna Hollander has made a career out of being reserved and presentable and calm enough to overshadow his own offness. “There was this nice young man- David, what was his name?”
She barely turns towards her husband, but shifts because she knows he’ll respond—even across the room, focused on the day’s crossword, like every Sunday.
“Ilya!” And Shane’s dad looks equally excited, grinning wide.
“He was so nice, sweetie; we didn’t know what to get, so he assembled us a box of his favorites. They’re very good—you should try some!” she suggests. Well, it's much more of a declaration. Yuna Hollander never does anything in half measures; she would probably rather die than leave anything up to a wavering chance. He would try some of the farmer's market Russian food, so help her God.
“Mom, my diet—” Shane protests feebly.
“Just try one, Shane.” The box is already out of his hands, somehow, and his mom is lifting the lid. There’s a variety of foods—a little cake, a few potato-shaped things, some small pancake-looking things, and what looks like dumplings—crowded all together in the box. Yuna hands him one of the little pancakes, sure in the way that means she isn’t expecting rejection.
Shane takes it, resignedly, but the smile on his mom’s face is bright enough to cancel out the twinge he feels whenever he breaks the diet. He breathes in deep because it's fine. He can be nice and normal about trying new foods and new foods in the fridge and new routines. He can. It's fine. Even though his parents were this special outside thing, unconcerned with his strange habits because they get him. Usually, Yuna wouldn't hand him something completely new, or at the very least tell him every ingredient in the weird little pancake. Even though—even though—it's not normal, he can be normal. He can.
When he takes a bite it’s—surprising. Strange, but not bad. Actually, pretty good. He had expected a pancake, since that’s what it looked like on the outside, but instead it’s cooked cottage cheese, basically. Lumpy, sure, but not awful and disgusting and spit-it-out worthy.
“Is that the syrniki?” David pipes in, now watching Shane’s reaction just as carefully as Yuna. “Ilya said it goes best with jam—we’ll have to get some next Saturday.”
Yuna agrees, grabbing one of the pens scattered across the kitchen island for any frantic notetaking. She goes to the fridge door, where the printed grocery list is hung up by an old Voyageurs logo magnet. She writes, small and clear at the bottom, jam (for syrniki).
Shane doesn’t react. Well, he doesn’t move, which is a reaction in and of itself, but he’s neutral on the outside. On the inside he feels a bit like laughing maniacally. A bit like tearing his hair out or punching something. A single phrase rotates in his head, over and over: it's changing.
Shane doesn’t realize when it starts, but it begins to happen either way. The name Ilya sneaks into conversation; his parents mention eating borscht and medovik and a new flavor of vareniki on their weekly calls. Sometimes it’s “Ilya said they source as locally as possible” and sometimes it’s “Ilya was telling us about that park where they put on concerts in the summer”. David gushes about how charming he is. Yuna jokes about him being a flirt, even though he’s only Shane’s age. It takes Shane a while to notice, and it takes him until “on our hike Ilya was telling us about how he used to play hockey, actually” to realize. Because Ilya—Ilya who runs a stall for Russian food every Saturday, Ilya who always gives them an extra free sample, Ilya who always compliments his mom—is an Ilya who is going out for hikes with his parents.
That’s weird, right? Like, he has their phone numbers. They have a group chat Ilya named ‘Russian Food Fanatics’. He sends Shane’s mom pictures of his dog, Anya, almost daily. And then Yuna sends each picture to the family group chat, so Shane’s seeing pictures of this dog all the time.
It’s weird—it’s definitely weird. Abnormal.
Shane doesn’t think about it a lot, though. Or he does, but that’s the Shane Hollander baseline for anything. He works and he plays hockey and he calls his parents and he tries his best not to frown when the name Ilya pops up. Which is hard, since it pops up so often.
He manages about two months of staying as quiet as he can around the topic of Ilya, not telling them his thoughts, before he breaks over a call.
“Ilya’s trying to open up a full restaurant with his friend Svetlana—they’re trying to lease a space right now! The farmer’s market is just to build clientele for when it opens. We’ll definitely be frequenting it! Oh—and it’s going to be named after his late mother, isn’t that sweet?” Yuna is saying.
“Yeah, real nice,” Shane replies blandly. “Hey—you guys get that you’re, like, paying him, right?” he blurts out after half a second.
There’s a pause. Through the screen he can see his mom’s face shift. It’s that one particular expression gets—a what are you trying to say, sweetie look. “Yes, honey, that is how it works.” Yuna laughs out her response, confused and patronizing served with a nice sugary coating of fondness.
Shane can tell she doesn’t know what he’s on about, and probably won't understand, but presses forward anyways. “I don’t know! He could, like, extort you guys financially. Worm his way into your hearts and beg you for money. Or steal your credit card information. This could be a massive scam!”
“Honey, Ilya isn’t scamming us.”
“You don’t know that! He’s Russian, he could have—I don’t know—connections.”
“Ilya’s just a nice boy—he’s our friend, Shane. And yeah, he’s your age, but that doesn’t mean something’s wrong here. I can guarantee he is not exploiting us financially.” Yuna says it in her Mom voice, fully direct to make sure he knows she’s absolutely serious.
Shane humphs.
Sure, he’s being childish, but this could be a real issue! His parents are getting to the age where they might fall for a scam—he’s being careful. Keeping them aware of danger. A completely normal reaction to his aging parents becoming friends with a young guy who might be a bit sketchy. Convincing himself is scarily easy, but Shane doesn't dwell on that.
“You should meet him, Shane. He’s a great guy—and a hockey fan! A Bears fan, sure, but he’d probably die to meet Shane Hollander. I bet you’d get along, honestly,” David chimes in cheerily. The mere idea of meeting Ilya makes Shane’s stomach turn.
“Maybe,” he says, and they move on.
Rose thinks it’s hilarious, because of course she does. She straight up cackles the first time he mentions Ilya.
“You look so grumpy!” Rose gasps out between giggles. “Why do you have beef with this random guy? He literally works at the farmer's market. You are the greatest hockey player in the world.”
“It just seems sketchy to me,” Shane grumbles, before taking a big swig of the nice wine Rose brought. “Rosé for Rose and her favorite ex!” she had exclaimed upon her suitably dramatic entrance. Now they’re both tipsy, nearing the edge of drunk, so Rose is laughing too loudly at everything and Shane can barely stay grumpy.
“Literally how?”
“It’s just—it’s weird! They hang out with him, he sends pictures of his dog! It’s strange!” He gesticulates loosely at the air between them, past the point of his usual mobility control.
“Shane. Shane, you know that those are things that friends do, right? It’s important to me that you know that,” Rose says with the full force of her theater school training focused on looking serious.
He waves his hands in the air without any real direction or purpose. “Of course I know that! You just—you don’t see how they talk about him! And they talk about him all the time. It’s just—ugh.”
Rose laughs at him. It’s a sparkling laugh, a laugh like champagne. Shane kind of deserves it and kind of doesn’t, so he feels a bit put out about it. Then he also starts laughing because this is objectively absurd.
Her eyes light up bright and her cheeks flush when she laughs in a way he knows is beautiful. Sometimes he feels a pang, knowing he could never want her. He would be lucky to, honestly. He is lucky—that Rose loves him now, as his best friend. But Shane sees his friends— Jackie and Hayden, Rose with her revolving boyfriends—and can't help but feel the pang of loss. Wanting, maybe, too. But he’s a closeted gay pro hockey player who is probably too neurotic and too specific and too much for anyone, anyways. He has to be ok with the fact that finding love for him is so close to impossible he can’t even conceptualize it. He has to be ok with what he’s already lucked out on—wonderful close friends who do love him, and put up with him, and listen to him.
That will just have to be enough.
Ugh, he's had too much wine for this—he should remind Rose not to be so wonderful, next time, so he doesn't start feeling too lonely and trapped and starved. So full of want with nowhere to go.
Later, when they’ve shifted so that Shane is sitting normally and Rose is sprawled out on the sofa with her feet in his lap, a romcom she was shocked he hadn’t seen playing in front of them, Rose says, “I think you should meet him?”
“Who?”
“The—the farmer's market boy. The one you hate…”
“Ilya.”
“Ilya! Yeah, I think you should meet him. See what the big deal is—vet him, even. See if the guy’s actually this big scary Russian who’s preying on your poor, defenseless parents,” Rose explains.
“I didn’t say that!” he protests.
She sits up just to lean forward and boops his nose, saying “I know,” with a shit-eating grin.
Rolling his eyes, Shane concedes with a “I’ll think about it.”
She grins wider, shark-like.
To get the four-for-four opinions of all the people he’s closest to about this Ilya situation, Shane decides to bring it up to Hayden. He’s hopeful that his best friend will agree and sway the tides ever so slightly in his favor. Because this situation now feels like a battle, like a hockey game, and he’s two points down in the second period.
“Cute dog,” Hayden says. Shane’s shoved the newest photo of Anya, Ilya’s dog, into his best friend’s face, pretty much.
“Maybe.”
“Who’s is it?”
That was the response Shane had been expecting, had prepared for, to bring it up. Hayden is nothing if not predictable, and Shane is nothing if not a pattern seeker.
He begins to explain the entire Ilya thing, complete with his parent’s and Rose’s point of view, and the mostly unnecessary but contextually important details of the food he makes. Hayden, being the good friend that he is, stays mostly quiet throughout Shane’s rant and doesn’t point out that he’s fixating on something that doesn’t matter very much.
Maybe it doesn’t—Shane can recognize that he’s being a bit neurotic about it, sure—but even then, he doesn’t need it pointed out. It’s been pointed out always, sometimes to his benefit but largely not. He’s been teased and chirped for his rigid and demanding routines since Juniors, or maybe before. He’s been called uptight and a prude and a neat freak and anal far too many times to count.
“You’re right, that is weird. You’re sure it isn’t, like, a scam?” Hayden says when he finishes, brow furrowed. Shane is mostly sure he’s genuine, which feels so relieving to be believed that he lets out a full sigh.
“My parents said it can’t, and I trust them, but they wouldn’t really know, right?”
“Right. It’s a bit sketchy, for sure. And it’s not like…a sex thing? Like, you don’t think Mama and Papa Hollander are getting adventurous with this dude? From what you’re saying it seems like they adore him.”
“Ew, Hayd! That’s so gross! They’re my parents!” Shane splutters at him. He adamantly denies it, even as a tiny voice pops up in his head, reminding him of all the times he’s heard them call Ilya handsome and sweet and funny and very strong. No, no, no. He won't even go there. There's no way at fucking all his parents are sexually involved with a man his age, no way in hell. “What if I suggested that Janelle—”
Mentioning Hayden’s mom anywhere near the concept of sex sends him spluttering, a mirror of Shane. Shane laughs—a rare, mostly unforced one, since it’s hard to startle him into humor, these days—and Hayden quickly joins in, letting go of the conversation topic easily. He’s a good friend like that.
Hayden’s phone buzzes. “Oh, hey, I’ve actually gotta run—Jackie needs me to the store real quick. See you, man!”
Shane tries very, very hard to ignore the pang he feels when Hayden leaves to go help his wife. It’s less about the leaving and more about the easiness in which he fits himself around her, and vice versa. The way they love each other in the practical, day-to-day things. The routines they have, and the way they break them for each other. Shane likes to think, if he could ever fall in love, he would want one like that. A love built in the little moments, the moments alone, the sweet, domestic moments.
He’s nothing if not a pattern seeker, a routine-oriented man. It would be nice to be loved within that.