Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Same here,” Shane echoes, shifting only a bit in his seat. His eyes rise from his hands on the table to glance at Rozanov—Ilya. David epects them to fall again, for his son to shy away from the intensity on Rozanov’s face, but he doesn’t. “Only one,” he says. 

Beside him, Yuna’s entire body goes stiff, and she sets down her wine glass carefully. David wants to reach out, put his hand on hers, but he’s too busy rerunning the numbers in his head. That’s what you get when you take a hockey player’s knack for stats and figures and train him up to be an accountant: calculations come fast and easy and always.

Shane is twenty-six years old. He’s gay. He’s a professional hockey player at the highest level in the world. It hasn’t even been two months since Scott Hunter came out, and he’s the first out player in the league’s history. The path’s barely trodden. Yuna and Dave had agreed that it was smart to do it the way Hunter had done it, even though it was probably only pure emotion and adrenaline that made him pull his boyfriend from the stands to celebrate with him on the ice. There was probably nothing calculated or pre-meditated about it, but that doesn't mean it wasn’t smart. Captain of the team that just won the Stanley Cup on home ice in New York near the end of his career: waiting like that, for a moment like that, from the perspective of a manager, is smart. Risks are as lowered as they can be, crowd’s already on your side. 

From the perspective of a father, who has just heard his son admit that his plan for the rest of his hockey career is to lay low, stay secret, carry the weight of himself close to chest for another ten years, fifteen years, until he can retire—all Dave can think about is how long that is. How many years stretch ahead for his son. His son. 

Twenty-six years old and brave enough already to sit down at the table with them, look them in the eyes and tell them he’s gay. It hurts David’s heart, to think about him waiting another ten years, another fifteen, to feel comfortable sharing himself with the whole of the world. Hadn’t he always tried to tell him there was nothing, nothing at all, wrong with him? Told him to be proud of himself, told him to get out there and be himself and fight for himself—that that would win him games—that that would be enough?

Twenty-six years old and sitting across the table from them, hands white-knuckled around his glass of ginger ale like this is the hardest conversation he’s ever had in his life.

And he’s not alone. He’s here with Rozanov—Ilya—and it’s not because Dave needed a fucking charger and accidentally caught them together, letting that cat entirely out of the—closet. Not really. Or, not just. It’s because Rozanov, Ilya, is the only person in the entire world that Shane has ever fallen in love with, and David can see it all over his face. All over both of their faces.

They’d considered it—Shane being gay. It’d been an option. But Ilya Rozanov and the way Shane looks at him like he’s the love of his life has blindsided them. 

Blindsided both of them, and there’s almost nothing Yuna likes less than being blindsided. 

So David isn’t surprised when his wife stands and walks into the kitchen. The water runs—switches off—the door to the back garden closes behind her. 

The worst part is that Shane doesn’t look all that surprised either. His head turns automatically when she leaves, following her. Then his eyes find Dave’s, and there’s no terror there. Not like there was at the cottage. There’s just dull acceptance, like he always thought that this would happen, that being rejected by his family was an option.

She’s not mad, David wants to say. We’re so proud of you. We’re so happy for you. We just didn’t know. 

Somehow we missed it, you falling in love. 

“I should…” Shane’s head turns. He trails off. He looks away from David. 

He looks at Rozanov.

“Maybe you should…” Rozanov says, tilting his head back. It’s a language Dave doesn’t know, one they must have invented, just the two of them, at the same time they were growing from boys into men into lovers. 

Rozanov’s hand moves from his glass, drops down beneath the table. Shane’s eyes close. He trusts him. Of course he does. He loves him. Dave’s mind keeps skittering over this fact, a broken record yanked continuously back five seconds every other beat.

“But maybe she doesn’t…” Shane says like it’s a question. He looks at Ilya Rozanov like he’s a life raft in a stormy ocean. His hands have left the table, fallen to his lap. Grasping onto Rozanov’s.

“But maybe it is a bit chilly,” Rozanov replies, and he tilts his head towards Yuna’s empty chair, cardigan slung along its back. “Canada in July, very cold here. I say this and I am Russian.”

David hasn’t checked the outside temperature today, but seeing as how Rozanov is wearing a pair of athletic shorts and a tee shirt, it’s hard to take him at his word.

Shane’s eyebrows quirk like he’s thinking the same thing, but he doesn’t call bullshit. He stands, shoulders slumped, like he’s grateful for the excuse. Like he just needed someone to give him one. And then he goes, grabbing Yuna’s cardigan from the back of the chair and following her footsteps.

And David is left at the table with Ilya Rozanov. It seems that neither of them really knows what to do with that.

It’s—strange. Life tosses all sorts of moments at you. Curveballs and fastballs and hand grenades. David just never thought he’d see this day, never in a million years.

Rozanov—Ilya—looks smaller off the ice. It’s not a word David thought he’d ever use to describe the 6’3” Russian, but there it is. It’s the only one that really fits. He looks—strangely dwarfed by the family dining table, hockey-bruised hands wrapped around his glass and eyes watching David watch him.

David clears his throat. Casts around for something to say. There’s a thousand options, a thousand questions running through his mind—only a handful David thinks he could bring himself to actually ask. 

What does he have in common with Ilya Rozanov? An appreciation for good vodka, apparently. And ice hockey.

“How are your ribs?” he asks. “We heard they were busted.”

He’d heard from Shane, actually. Or he’d heard Shane’s google alert for Rozanov ping on his phone when the sports networks first broke the news. And Jesus Christ, doesn’t that hit differently now. He’d shared a chuckle with Yuna that night about the rivalry between the two players, how it must be getting to Shane if he set up alerts on his phone for news about Rozanov.

Jesus Christ.

“They are fine,” Rozanov—Ilya says, shifting in his seat and straightening his shoulders like he’s under interrogation. “I have been careful with them. In practice and on the ice.”

“You played well with them like that,” David hears himself say. “We watched one of your last games with Shane. He pointed it out. He—uh, I guess he was a bit worried. In hindsight.”

“He worries,” Rozanov says with a roll of his eyes that would put David on the defensive except for the fact that Rozanov sounds so fond that it’s hard to swallow. To hear. “But I am very fine.  Be back to 100% by pre-season.”

“You will be,” David agrees. He taps his fingers against the table. “You work hard on the ice, anyone can see that.”

It’s easy to admit, just the truth, but it makes Rozanov’s eyebrows furrow. Something like confusion flashes across his face. Then something even more naked and unguarded. Vulnerable, maybe, if David can make himself believe Ilya Rozanov is capable of it.

It makes him look younger. He is—so much smaller off the ice than David would have thought. He looks brighter, too. Lighter. He looks like someone David could learn to call Ilya. 

David coughs. He doesn’t—it’s not so simple. This is Ilya Rozanov. For eight years, he has existed in Dave’s mind as his son’s hockey rival. The biggest threat to him, especially during those games they shared ice and fought for the puck. How many games has David watched on the edge of his seat, waiting with baited breath and an aching heart for this man to slam his son up against the boards? High stick him when the ref’s looking another way, drop his gloves and take a swing at Shane’s unprotected face?

Shane never wears his mouth guard. It would have been so easy to give him a mouthful of blood and broken bone, and David has spent eight years worrying about that, even as he told Yuna that Shane was too fast, too good, too wily to ever be brought down by a brickhouse of a player like Rozanov.

It has been years since Dave played hockey himself; he’s forgotten how to pivot on the fly. 

So he doesn’t mean to, but he says stiffly, “Shane’ll be back in top condition at the start of the season too.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees, and he looks pleased about it. “He says his headaches are gone.”

“Your buddy Marlow knocked him pretty good,” Dave says, and he takes a sip of his vodka tonic so that he has to unclench his jaw. “That hit, it had him down for two minutes.”

Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. He’d just crumpled, like an empty can crushed by a metal press. The sports channel streaming the game had had enough class to move the cameras, cut to the announcers and not the still figure of his boy on the ice, but there’d still been footage, hundreds of cameras in the arena held by audience members who’d been less kind. Dave’s seen it. A dozen of times. A hundred times. Marlow comes out of nowhere, gets Shane right at the perfect angle. It could’ve been more than a broken clavicle and a concussion if it’d happened closer to the boards. It could have been—everything.

Rozanov—Ilya blinks at him. For the first time since he walked into the entranceway behind Shane, he lets his gaze fall away. His fingers tap useless rhythms on the table. “He felt very badly about that, Mr. Hollander. But it is hockey. Shane knows this. He told me this.” 

David works his jaw. Eventually, he nods. Then he shakes his head because it isn’t just hockey, not when you’ve got someone you love on the ice. He hadn’t realized that, when he was a kid playing at McGill. It’d been the best time of his life. The best sport in the world. Hell, it still is. But it’s not just anything when your seven year old son spits up his first tooth on the ice and doesn’t even cry about it. It’s not just anything when you’re handing your sixteen year old son the keys to the car so he can drive himself to a hockey game across territory lines and torn between quitting your job so you can go with him and begging him to remember to text you the moment he arrives. It’s not just anything when your son is twenty-six and you’re in the kitchen washing up after dinner and your phone starts ringing past the ‘Do Not Disturb’ with a call from ‘ASSISTANT COACH KAVENAUGH (MONTREAL)’ even though you know it’s the middle of the game and whatever you’re told when you pick up that call might just be the sort of information that ruins plans and lives and all the tomorrows you have left.

It’s not just hockey, but hockey players don’t know that. They think they have the most skin in the game. But really, it’s the parents of hockey players that do.

Maybe Ilya Rozanov will understand that, in twenty years, in thirty. If he has a kid who wants to play as much as Shane had as a boy. As David had.

David swallows down a sudden hysterical bout of laughter when he realizes that the way things are looking, any kid that Ilya Rozanov has—adopts—will probably be his grandchild. Shane’s kid.

Jesus Christ. He finishes his drink in two swallows and puts it down on the table with a too-hard clink.

Rozanov clears his throat. “You played for McGill,” he says, sounding tentative. All of seventeen years old, the way he must have sounded when he met Shane for the first time. Summer before their rookie year. Christ. “It is great school, I know.” 

“It is,” Dave agrees. Then he stands, glass in hand. “Want another drink?”

“Yes please,” Ilya says fervently, following him into the kitchen. The bottle’s still on the counter, next to half a can of tonic and a discarded lime. In the sink are the beginnings for pesto, two bunches of basil leaves and a bag of spinach from the farmer’s market. Yuna and him went this morning. Before they’d realized their son was in love and their whole world had shifted six feet and three inches to the right.

Still, there’s enough for four people. Even two normal people and two hockey players. They’ve been buying extra for years. It rings ironic, but it’s just the truth.

He pours both himself and his son’s Ilya Rozanov another shot—generous—of the vodka before stoppering it and putting it back into its cupboard. Ilya looks like he has less idea what to do in a lived-in family style kitchen than he did at the dining table. 

Dave takes a sip of his drink and leans against the counter opposite the Russian. Ilya. Opposite Ilya. “We’re not disappointed, and we’re not angry,” he says plainly. This is important. This is the truth. They’ve been blindsided and they’ve been left fumbling in the bright light with stinging eyes after being kept in the dark so long, but they’re not angry and they’re not disappointed. 

“I know that,” Ilya says. He says it easily. “I know what angry parent sounds like, Mr. Hollander.”

“Please,” David says, because it’s easier than asking him to explain. He doesn’t think Ilya really has to—but he doesn’t know what to do with that yet. So instead he says, “It’s David.”

Ilya Rozanov smiles at him. Bright and boyish. For the first time since Shane and Ilya arrived, he looks like—like he really is the love of Shane’s life. Like if his boy had to grow up to have a love of his life, they’d look just like this. Bright hazel eyes, unrestrained curls, slumped shoulders.  

What does David have in common with Ilya Rozanov? Good vodka, ice hockey, and apparently, loving Shane Hollander.

He sets his glass down on the counter. “Would you like to help me prepare pasta for supper, Ilya?”

Ilya blinks. He looks blindsided. It’s sort of nice, to do that to someone else for a change today. “Yes,” he agrees. “What would you like me to do?”

“My wife, Yuna, loves pesto,” David tells him, brushing the remaining lime from the cutting board and putting down a bulb of garlic. “But she hates mincing garlic, so that’s usually what I do first.”

He turns to look over his shoulder at Ilya. The boy is watching his hands break apart the bulb with the same expression he wears taking a face-off on the ice. Intense, fully focused.

“Shane’s not much of a cook,” Dave says, peeling the cloves and setting them apart on the board. “The team’s got a contract with a meal provider that knows all of their diets, so he’s never really had to learn. Do you like cooking, Ilya?”

“I made Shane a tuna melt once,” Ilya murmurs.

“Yeah?” Dave asks, and Ilya nods. “That sounds good. Bet he liked it.” 

The words make Ilya’s shoulders droop, make him relax more in the kitchen. He shrugs, then nods again, like he’s not sure if he should agree but wants to. A tuna melt. Two millionaires probably sat in a kitchen one night and made tuna melts. It sounds so simple. David’s chest tightens and then loosens.

“Here then,” he says, passing over the board. “I’ll trust you with this.”

He hands over the knife too. It’s funny; David’s father was a doctor who always wielded kitchen knives like scalpels. David, Shane, and now Ilya all hold them like they’re hockey sticks. You can take a hockey player off the ice….

They work in silence for a minute, for four. Then Ilya clears his throat and sets down the knife so he can look at David straight on. “If you are not angry and you are not disappointed, what are you?” he asks. 

The garlic, all five cloves of it, are in separate, neatly minced piles on the board. It’s both an innocent question and not. It’s an earnest question; it’s one that betrays the boy, maybe more than he realizes. Ilya sounded confident when he said he knew that David and Yuna weren’t angry at Shane or disappointed in them. He sounds confused now, like he isn’t exactly sure what’s left for a parent to be.

David lets out a breath and relearns how to pivot. How to look across the ice and see a teammate waiting for him to trust him enough to pass the puck.

He wants to tell Ilya that when Shane was six years old, he was as interested in playing basketball as he was in playing hockey. It was the parents of the other kids on the peewee team that first pointed out to Yuna and Dave that eventually, he’d have to choose between the sports. Who joked that when March Madness conflicted with the Stanley Cup play-offs, would Shane be on the court or at the rink?

He wants to tell Ilya that hockey, when you’re good at it, when you’re talented and when you show enough promise that people who don’t yet love you can see it too, is as much about what you give up as what you put in. That Shane had had a Michael Jordan poster on his wall until he was ten years old and replaced it with one of Mario Lemieux in gold and black, and that David had kept that old poster in the attic until the day of his son’s draft just in case Shane wanted it back. He wants to say that they’ve watched Shane give up so much for the sport, and they’ve never regretted it and never asked him to reconsider. Never wanted that for him either as long as he didn’t want it for himself.

But they don’t want him to have to give anything else up either. For hockey. For this life he has, the one he’s chosen and the one he loves—and they’re not angry and they’re not disappointed that their son is gay and is in love with another professional hockey player. They just—David just—

He held Yuna’s hand the entire time they were at the farmer’s market. He hadn’t even had to think twice about it, and he certainly wasn’t scared to do it. 

But Shane sounded so resigned when he looked at them across the table, when David asked if their plan was to just keep doing this in secret until they retire, and he’d replied, “Probably. I don’t know.”

No parent wants to see their son give up one thing he loves to put everything into something else. Even if it’s a sacrifice he’s ready to make. As a father, it makes David want to shout and push against the walls of the world until they’re wider, until there’s room for his son. Until his son can have everything he wants: hockey and Ilya Rozanov and picking out tomatoes at a farmer’s market with his lover’s hand tangled up in his.

But he knows Ilya Rozanov probably doesn’t need to hear David Hollander’s thoughts about giving things up. Dave knows exactly how talented Ilya is, how ambitious he is as well. He and his son have so much in common that it’s really no wonder they fell in love. Before a knee injury took him out of the game completely, Dave hiked more than a few mountains. He knows the view’s lonely from the top. 

“I think,” he says slowly, and then he pauses. Considers.

He wants to tell Ilya Rozanov that he gave Shane a beginner’s geology kit for his eighth birthday. That the sales associate had promised it would take at least a few weeks for a boy to sort through the slivers of rock in the kit and label each one. Shane had had them all categorized the next morning. He’d stayed up til dawn, sorting through rock fragments with the shitty magnifying glass and labeling them: Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic until everything was sorted in its correct category, like geology was a competition that could be won.

He wants Ilya to know that. That that’s what had struck him more than Shane being gay, maybe even more than Shane being in love with Ilya—the fact that it had taken eight years for them to get where they are. Shane, who had systems for everything from loading the dishwasher to organizing his closet. Somehow, he let Ilya exist beside him for eight years without a label to whatever was growing between them. That feels monumental. That feels like all David needs to know.

But it’s not his to tell. It’s Ilya’s to realize on his own, or Shane’s to confess.

So he doesn’t say that either.

Instead, he puts his glass on the counter and reaches out slowly, carefully. Like one would approach some wounded animal, maybe, though he’d rather die than admit to thinking that about Ilya Rozanov. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder. “I think,” he says, slowly. Carefully. Like one saying something they know cannot be taken back. “I think we’re just happy to be in the know, Ilya.”

It’s the truth, but it doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like enough for what he’s realized and how his world view has shifted in the last hour. So he adds, “So we can be here. For both of you. In your corner.

You can take a hockey player off the ice, but you can’t really take the instincts out of the hockey player. David hasn’t played since college. He relearns how to pivot all the same. Redistribute his weight. Stay on his feet. Welcome another teammate onto the ice. 

“Oh,” Ilya says. He looks floored. It makes Dave’s chest constrict and then loosen. A boy as young as Ilya shouldn’t look so disarmed to be told he has someone at his back. That look on his face—it’s a gamechanger.

Before he can say anything else, something that would definitely cross a line or show all his cards or make Shane upset, something like asking if Ilya would like a hug or the spare bedroom across the hall from theirs, the back door opens and then closes. There’s the very quiet murmur of voices, separated still by a few walls of the house. But they’re unmistakable to David, who has loved these two voices long enough that he’d know them anywhere.

Underneath his palm, Ilya’s shoulders raise as he turns his head as well, like maybe he feels some similar sort of tug. Towards Shane, David’s Shane. Ilya’s too.

David lets his hand fall away and he turns back to the cutting board on the counter before he can do something mortfying like start to cry. Someone who looks like that at just the barest hint of his son…more than hockey, more than fame or fortune, that’s really all a guy can want for his kid.

And Shane found it. Found him. 

Summer before their rookie year. Christ.

David breathes deep and then lets it go in increments. “Go check on him, I’ll finish up here,” he says. Yuna will be in in a second, of course. As soon as she realizes he’s in the kitchen. She hates chopping up garlic, hates the way the smell of it lingers under her fingernails, but she does love to supervise.

Ilya hesitates, torn apparently between wanting to see his—partner, to make sure that he’s alright, and wanting to finish up what he’s helped start. 

David gives him a smile, the first he’s worn since he realized he couldn’t find that damned charger. He claps Ilya on the shoulder and nods towards the living room, towards Shane.

He turns on the ice. He passes the puck. 

What do they have in common, really, except for hockey and vodka and the fact that they love Shane Hollander enough to do anything for him. To set another place at the table for his lover; to sit down at it in spite of your own fear, your own uncertainty.

Ilya’s out of the kitchen in a second, voice louder than it has been all afternoon as he calls Shane’s name like it’s his favorite word he knows in every language he speaks. 

When David looks back at the door, Yuna’s standing there. The skin beneath her eyes is tight and red like she’s been crying, but she looks so happy that David doesn’t have it in him to worry about the outcome of whatever she and Shane talked about. He knows it’ll be okay. He knows it mostly already is.

“And wash up before dinner, boys!” He calls, raising his voice so it can be heard from the living room. “Shane, show Ilya where the bathroom is.”

Small, muffled noises. A cut off burst of laughter he’d recognize as his son’s anywhere. More noises.

“Alright, Dad!” Shane calls back. He sounds—Christ. He sounds lighter than he has in years. Like a boy again. He hadn’t even realized the burden his son had been carrying. He hadn’t known. He’ll be sorry about that for the rest of his life, but Christ, if it doesn’t feel like everything is going to be okay.

The relief that cracks through his chest is so intense and all-consuming that it makes tears prick at his eyes even as he grins at Yuna, who’s looking at him like she’s already realized all of this and has been waiting for him to catch up. 

She nods, teary-eyed herself, and smiles back wordlessly. They don’t need words. They’ve got a secret language all of their own that they’ve been speaking for decades.

“And leave that bathroom door open, Shane Michael Hollander!” He calls loudly, shrugging into the tone he used to use when Shane was a kid and he needed to be dragged out of the rink by his ear at the end of practice.

There’s a beat of stunned silence, and then: “Oh my god, Dad!” Shane yelps, sounding mortified.

“Michael?” Ilya says at the same time, sounding delighted.

“David,” Yuna scolds, but there’s so much laughter in her voice that nothing else gets through.

David grins and raises his vodka glass to his lips for a victory drink. The crowd goes wild.