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October 2010
Alice Richter was bored out of her goddamn mind.
After a month and a half of classes in her second year at McGill and not a whole lot of extracurricular fun, she was in dire need of entertainment and maybe, possibly, some friends who weren’t the random people she’d met at first year orientation the year prior. So, when a few of the guys on her floor invited anyone who would listen to watch the Montreal v. Boston game on the TV in their lounge, she decided why the fuck not.
That decision, it would turn out, would quite literally change her life.
Coming into university, Alice had been dead set on studying government, on finding some way into politics, some way to leave a mark on the world, but after watching the crowd go wild over two rookies, two guys her age, after watching those two rookies crouch down at the faceoff circle, after experiencing tension everyone called rivalry, everything changed.
For weeks after that game, her Twitter feed was full of people shipping random hockey players. All of it was in good fun, all of it felt like the sort of mindless entertainment she’d been craving, and all of them were dead set on shipping Shane Hollander with his fellow Montreal rookie, Hayden Pike.
Alice, though, Alice had been itching for a career in politics because she liked to argue, she liked to be contrarian, it was fun. It was fun to get people fired up, it was fun to bring out that fire in people that she’d only ever seen when they were talking about something they were genuinely passionate about, when they were trying to explain why they believed in something so thoroughly.
In the grand scheme of things, shipping hockey players who were, more than likely, straight wasn’t really an opinion worth arguing over. But that absolutely did not stop Alice from picking a ship out of left fucking field just for shits and giggles.
Hayden Pike and Shane Hollander made a strange amount of sense; they were always together, Shane seemed comfortable around Hayden in a way he never seemed comfortable around anyone, they were a matched set of Canadian golden boys who could do no wrong.
Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov on the other hand made no sense at all. They were always chirping each other in the press, the League had built an entire marketing campaign around their rivalry, and they were never ever spotted together off the rink.
So, of course, that was the ship Alice tied her line to and thus was born @hollanov.
* * *
December 2016
Choosing to study law in Quebec had certainly been a choice but now, after seven years of school and months of studying for the provincial bar exam which (in Quebec) required a French language component, she’d, miraculously, landed her dream job with the Montréal Voyageurs association back in August.
She loved the job, but the environment maybe wasn’t what she’d dreamed. She knew hockey was a traditional sport, but it was also the sport she’d fallen in love with and she loved Montreal. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to move somewhere else, so she sucked it up.
Roger Crowell sucked so bad and the Voyageurs management might’ve been nearly as conservative as Vladmir Putin but she was in Montreal, she was getting to read and draft and negotiate contracts which fed into her competitive nature and her love of the sport, and she’d, somehow, become sort-of acquaintances with one of the guys she’d spent the past six years tweeting about obsessively.
Shane Hollander wasn’t just a fixture of the Voyageurs franchise; he was a fixture in the building.
When she’d taken the job, Alice had never imagined that she’d even cross paths with the players outside of the final days of contract negotiations, but Shane Hollander seemed to be everywhere. He knew every single person’s name (and the names of their spouses, children, and pets), he was the absolute pinnacle of Canadian politeness and he was smarter than literally anyone gave him credit for. He remembered everything, asked questions that actually made you think, and seemed to actually care about the answers. He was around so often that, if she didn’t have access to his file, if she hadn’t had paper and ink proof that he had a permanent address, Alice honestly might’ve assumed that he lived at the rink.
All of this to say, she wasn’t shocked to spot Shane down the hall long after practice had ended. She was planning to simply nod hello, accept his polite smile and maybe answer a random kind question, and carry on with her day. But, instead, she watched him get tugged into a dark corner by Hayden Pike. She knew, for absolute certain after months spent in the same building as them, that the people shipping them on the internet were entirely deluded, but it was still fun to watch it happen, to wonder what those girls would say if they could see the way the two best friends interacted when they thought no one was watching.
There was also the whole Rose Landry situation which made it pretty clear that all of them were deluded.
You couldn’t go online without hearing about it and you certainly couldn’t exist around any of the Voyageurs without hearing about it.
She decided to just walk past to get to her office and not acknowledge the duo. Whatever they were talking about absolutely was not her business and she wasn’t about to eavesdrop and hear something she shouldn’t. Her plan, however, was foiled when she remembered that Hayden Pike had never quite learned the concept of an inside voice.
“Bud, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but we gotta.”
“Talk about what?” Shane asked, his voice closer to a whisper but still audible in the empty hall. Alice was stuck between wanting to pick up her pace to get past them and trying to find an alternate route between Point A and Point B that she knew didn’t exist. Maybe she could just turn around, leave the building, and come back in another entrance. That might be better than overhearing any piece of this conversation.
“Boston Lily,” Hayden said, the tone of his voice making it clear that he thought he was whispering. He was not. “Something happened last time we were there and now you’re dating Rose? Seriously, Holly, what’s happening. You’ve been seeing her for years and now it’s just over?”
“Hayd I can’t,” Shane responded. He sounded panicked and pained and Alice turned on her heel and decided to take the long way around even though it was December in Canada and her coat was in her office. She’d live; it was fine.
* * *
January 2017
Right, so, maybe, Alice had underestimated just how much Montreal’s management sucked.
Maybe she’d also underestimated just how much her direct coworkers sucked.
“Why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut?” Alan, her boss and somewhere around number 6 on Alice’s hit list, asked. “Now we’re losing talent and we have to renegotiate contracts all because he can’t keep it in his pants? Dick.”
Alice wanted to light the building on fire.
Everyone around her was talking about Shane like he’d committed some crime, like he was sexually promiscuous and had ruined all their lives with his manwhoring ways when really he was just gay.
He was gay. That was it. That was the extent of Shane Hollander’s crimes.
As far as she could tell, he didn’t even have a partner, though Hayden Pike’s voice asking about Boston Lily had rung through her head a few times. It seemed odd that Shane wouldn’t tell his best friend more information about a person he’d supposedly been seeing for years, and Alice sort of had to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Boston Lily wasn’t, in fact, named Lily. But even then, it’d been YEARS. He maybe had one partner. He hadn’t assaulted anyone, he hadn’t slept with half of Montreal, he hadn’t started some sort of gay sex cult that met at the community center on Wednesdays. He hadn’t done anything to deserve the way people were talking about him.
So, when Shane came upstairs a week before the All Stars game to talk about the implications of his agent waving his No Trade, Alice made sure to intercept him before anyone else could.
She’d only been a lawyer for, like, seven months, but she absolutely knew enough to answer his questions and, unlike everyone else in this hellscape, she wasn’t a total fucking asshole.
She locked them in the conference room that was hidden by cubicle walls and the obnoxious fern one of the ladies from accounts payable insisted they keep around and then she answered every single one of Shane’s questions as efficiently and neutrally as she could all while trying not to cry at the look of total shock on Shane’s face that she wasn’t treating him like a problem.
“Thank you,” Shane said 45 minutes later, his big brown eyes were glassy and his lower lip was red from where he’d been chewing on it and Alice really wanted to ask who Boston Lily was just so she could send them a congratulations for having spent years with this absolute specimen of a man. But she didn’t. She kept her mouth shut and consciously avoided saying anything entirely inappropriate.
“Of course,” she answered easily before taking a breath and letting the professional mask crack, just a little, “I hope wherever you go next treats you better. This place fucking sucks.”
Shane let out a laugh that sounded like it’d shocked him, like he hadn’t laughed in a while and had forgotten he was allowed, and then he was grinning and Alice found herself subjected to the full force of Shane Hollander’s smile. A real smile, not the polite one he wore while talking to staff throughout the building, not the practiced one he wore in front of media, but something real and warm and all-encompassing.
“Yeah,” he said, still grinning at her like she’d made his entire week. It was a heady feeling, watching Shane Hollander experience real joy. “It kind of does. Does it suck for you too?”
And, somehow, after months of telling herself to just stay quiet, keep her head down, and suck it up, she found herself admitting just how much she hated this place to Shane fucking Hollander of all goddamn people, “it sucks so bad. God, Hollander, these people are stuck in like 1816, I don’t even think they know women are allowed to vote now. They don’t trust me to do anything, they talk about minorities like they’re a burden, it’s like they’ve never suffered consequences for being dicks! But I love Montreal and I love hockey and sports law jobs are so hard to find, especially for women and I feel ungrateful for wanting to leave but I think I’d cut off my left arm for a job literally anywhere else.”
Shane stared at her for a second, like he hadn’t actually expected her to be honest, and she felt her cheeks heat up, embarrassed all of the sudden, but Shane didn’t give her time to back track, to try and brush it all under the rug in an attempt to save face, “that fucking sucks,” he said, entirely earnest. Then he paused for a second, his eyes going a little distant before he nodded like he’d come to some conclusion she hadn’t been brought in on yet. “Give me your phone.”
Alice just complied, not knowing where this was going but deciding that arguing felt futile.
She watched in total shock as Shane added his number into her contacts and shot off a text to himself.
“I’m gonna find somewhere better,” he said, “I don’t know where, but I’ll find it and I’ll let you know. You alright leaving Canada?”
“Yeah,” she said, blinking quickly and trying not to cry. The world did not deserve Shane Hollander. That was for damn certain. “I mean, I’d have to check licensing requirements but I know some of my classmates moved to like New York or Boston.”
Shane’s whole expression melted at the mention of Boston and at least two alarm bells went off in Alice’s brain.
“Boston’s a good organization,” he said, clearing his throat slightly and then moving on like he hadn’t said something nice about Boston while in the Voyageurs’ building. If anyone over heard that, they might honestly decide they hated him more for being decent toward Boston than for liking dick. “New York too, maybe. All I know is I’m getting out of here and no one with as good a heart as you should be left behind in this shit show so I’ll keep an ear open, let you know if I hear of anything.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” Shane shrugged, “you seem smart, you answered all my dumb questions and you’re the only person who hasn’t made it seem like this is my fault. Also, I’m starting to realize that compartmentalizing makes it really hard to enjoy your job.”
“Yeah,” Alice admitted, “thank you, Hollander.”
“Call me Shane,” he said, flashing her a soft sort of grin. “I really appreciated this, Alice. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, “and thank you, too, it felt good to admit that it sort of totally sucks here.”
“Cathartic,” he responded, a knowing glint in his eye, “I’ll get out of your hair.”
And then he was gone, like he’d never been there at all, the new lightness in her heart and Shane Hollander’s name and number in her phone the only evidence that things were changing.
It felt weird, logging onto twitter and posting on an account titled @hollanov after that moment, but it also sort of …didn’t? It was like the Shane she’d seen in that conference room, the Shane who’d let her rant about their shitty fucking organization, wasn’t the same Shane as the one they were all talking about online. Everything that happened online was fake, at least with the people she interacted with.
There were certainly some people who took it too far, who speculated on the reality of a situation, who commented nasty things about Jackie Pike and Rose Landry, but Alice had never put up with that sort of behavior and she certainly wasn’t going to put up with it now. Now that she knew the truth, now that she knew how much the truth had hurt Shane, she wouldn’t let people hurt him online like they’d hurt him in life.
* * *
February 2017
Shane Hollander was no longer a Voyageur.
Alice watched Shane leave the building, flanked by Hayden Pike and Yuna Hollander with David Hollander trailing behind, for the last time and hoped against hope that he’d find something better in New York City.
And, when the trade was officially announced two days later, she scrolled through the posts of Montreal fans wishing Shane well and forced herself not to wonder how many of them would be on his side if they knew the real reason.
It was hard not to think about it, though. It was hard to separate out the Shane she knew with the Shane Hollander these people were talking about. She had to wonder how many people had seen that smile he’d flashed her in that conference room the month prior, she had to wonder how many more people would be seeing that smile now that he wasn’t stuck in a place that’d started to go rotten.
And then @lilyhollander1221 posted a picture of Shane that Alice knew for a goddamn fact had never been posted publicly. Shane didn’t post random content like mirror selfies. He posted brand deals and official team photos and maybe, sometimes, a photo that’d been taken by Jackie Pike that kind of showed he had a personality outside of hockey. He absolutely, one hundred percent certainly, did not post gym pictures in tight little tank tops that could easily be classified as thirst traps.
Boston Lily.
It was insane. There was no fucking way that this random twitter account, an account that seemed to live for threatening Shayden shippers, ragging on Scott Hunter’s age, and telling anyone who’d listen that Shane Hollander was the best player in the League was Boston Lily. Especially considering the fact that Alice was nearly certain that Boston Lily was, in fact, a man.
But she still filed the information away, stored it somewhere with the knowledge that there was a person Shane had been regularly seeing who his best friend knew absolutely nothing about beyond their (alleged) first name.
That information was very quickly joined by the fact that Ilya Rozanov had been scratched for two full weeks of games directly following Shane Hollander’s injury, that only one of those weeks had been spent back in Russia for his father’s funeral, and that he’d been spotted in the Ottawa airport a day after he’d been seen returning to Boston Logan.
The issue with going to law school, see, is that neurologists have conducted studies showing that it quite literally changes your brain chemistry. A legal education teaches you pattern recognition with such intensity that it changes the way your synapses fire. You learn to spot the smallest things, you learn to recall information quickly and in the right order, you learn to notice when something seems off and your brain is then trained to immediately find a way to make it make sense.
So, really, it wasn’t Alice’s fault that every piece of information was immediately mentally color-coded and filed away into a codex labeled Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov??. If anything, it was McGill University Faculty of Law’s fault.
* * *
May 2017
The rings threw her for a loop.
The rings and a quick Google search confirming that, in Russian Orthodox tradition, wedding rings are worn on the right hand.
The rings and the tradition were filed away and Alice forced herself to not think about it because, honestly? It was an objectively fucking insane conclusion.
And then Josephine, one of the few people from her law school class she actually kept up with, sent her a text on a normal Thursday morning that said hey, I think I just saw those two hockey players you like at work.
The issue here was that Josephine worked at Windsor City Hall.
There were very few things that Alice could imagine Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov doing at Windsor City Hall in the middle of fucking playoffs.
It only got crazier when the Admirals social media admin, a girl named Amanda that Shane had mentioned several times across his sporadic texts assuring her that New York was a good place to work and that she should maybe keep an eye out for job postings, seemed to start crashing out on their official Twitter. Alice didn’t want to read too far into it, but it really looked like the behavior of someone who’d just been given life-altering information by a friend and then had been told they needed to keep it secret.
And then Shane scored.
Shane scored and kissed his ring and the camera panned to Ilya Rozanov, casually in the crowd of a game in Detroit sitting with Shane Hollander’s parents, who had his lips pressed to the knuckles of his right hand.
So, with a mental conspiracy board full of bits and pieces of information and a slight mental break where she said the name Ilya and Lily back to back enough times that both words stopped making sense, Alice came to the fucking bonkers conclusion that Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov were, in fact, married. And, worse, that @lilyhollander1221 wasn’t actually a deeply unhinged teenage girl but was, instead, the Captain of the Boston Bears.
She had no clue what to do with this information.
It wasn’t like she could slip into “Lily’s” DMs, it wasn’t like she could text Shane. She had no real way to explain why she knew any of this beyond the fact that she knew why Shane had left Montreal. Every other piece had been gathered by either accidentally overhearing a pair of stressed out best friends in the hall or by analyzing information as it was presented or by an outside source that clearly hadn’t realized what she’d seen.
It was insane, it was actually ridiculous, honestly, and all she could do about it was suffer in silence.
* * *
July 2017
Shane Hollander: You’re going to get a call from Will Matthews sometime in the next two days. He’s the Head of Legal here in NY. He just fired someone because they were being an absolute dick about Scott and complained to Christina about it so Christina told me and I passed over your resume. Get the fuck out of Montreal, Alice. You deserve it.
Jackie Pike: Hey, Alice! We’re having a belated going away party for Shane and an on-time party for all the other guys who are leaving tonight. I know it’s last minute but Shane wasn’t planning to be in town so everything sort of just came together today. I know Shane would like to see you, he mentioned how much that conversation with you helped.
Alice stared at her phone, at two texts that’d come almost back to back, and wondered how to even begin reacting to either.
Despite getting several texts from Shane hyping up New York’s organization, she’d never imagined that he’d do anything beyond putting in a good word for her if she applied to an open position, she never imagined that he’d go so far as to set up an interview. Jesus. Everyone who’d ever called Shane Hollander nice didn’t even know the half of it. It was his summer break, he was probably out at that cottage that everyone teased him about hiding at and here he was, taking time to find her a path out of Montreal because she’d complained about it in the single time they’d ever spoken face to face for longer than a passing greeting.
And he’d apparently mentioned her name enough times that Jackie Pike knew to invite her out with the team.
Jackie had her number from Hayden’s contract negotiations but she’d never really expected Jackie to use her number for anything beyond legal concerns.
And then a third text came in from an unknown +1 phone number: Alice, this is Will Matthews, I got your resume and contact information from Shane Hollander. I’ll be in the office until around 5pm EST today if you’d be able to give me a call. If you’re busy today, no worries, we can talk another time. From what Shane told me this morning, you seem like the exact sort of person we’re looking for.
Alice stared at her desktop that’d gone into sleep mode sometime after Shane’s text came through. She stared at the red and blue Voyageurs logo that she’d seen only a week prior on a trade announcement saying that Dallas fucking Kent would be taking Shane Hollander’s spot and then she walked out of the building and called Will from the parking lot.
Nine hours later, she found herself in a huddle of people in a club in Old Montreal, staring at the openly grinning face of Shane Hollander as he nearly tackled Jackie Pike before picking her up clean off her feet.
“Oh, Alice!” Shane said, his eyes lighting up as the group hug finally dispersed and J.J. and Mitty broke off to buy the first round. Shane had somehow gotten hotter in the few months since he’d moved to New York which Alice had known, in theory, but seeing it in person was a different experience all together. His hair was longer, his ears were pierced, he’d put on a significant amount of muscle, and his smile was so bright she could feel it in her ribs. She smiled, not really knowing what to say, and the next thing she knew she was being wrapped up in possibly the most comforting hug she’d ever experienced.
“Hey, Shane,” she greeted, her voice coming out muffled as she instinctively buried her head in Shane’s chest. She’d kind of forgotten how tall Shane was after mostly seeing him standing next to Scott Hunter for the past couple of months but it was easier to remember that he had a solid six inches on her while she was being half suffocated by the force of his hug.
“You talk to Will?”
She nodded in confirmation and felt Shane let out a relieved huff.
“Thank you,” she said, hoping she could get across just how much his kindness meant in two short words.
He squeezed her a little tighter and then stepped back, keeping a hand on her shoulder as he shook his head a little and his smile turned soft, “happy to help.”