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The call came on a Tuesday.
Shane was at Ilya's apartment in Ottawa—their apartment, practically, given how many of Shane's things had migrated there over the past eight months. His toothbrush in the bathroom. His protein powder in the cabinet. A drawer in the bedroom that Ilya had cleared out without being asked, just emptied one day and said, "For your things. So you stop living out of a bag like a refugee."
They'd been watching a movie. Something Ilya had chosen—a Russian film with subtitles that Shane was pretending to follow but was actually just half-dozing against Ilya's shoulder, warm and full from the dinner Ilya had cooked, existing in the specific contentment of a Tuesday night with the person you loved when that person lived two hours away and you'd driven down after practice and the world felt, for once, manageable.
Shane's phone rang. He glanced at the screen. Farah.
Farah didn't call on Tuesday nights. Farah was meticulous about boundaries—she'd once told Shane she'd rather chew glass than interrupt a client's evening unless the building was on fire. Shane had liked that about her. It had made him trust her.
The building was on fire.
"I have to take this," Shane said, sitting up.
Ilya paused the movie. Watched Shane's face as he answered.
The conversation lasted four minutes. Farah's voice was steady and professional and carefully kind, which was how Shane knew it was bad before she said a single word of substance. She explained the situation the way she explained everything—clearly, completely, without editorializing—and Shane listened and said "okay" three times and "I understand" once and "when" once and then "thank you, Farah" in the flat voice he used when he was processing something enormous and hadn't yet decided how to feel about it.
He hung up. Set the phone on the coffee table. Stared at it.
"Shane?" Ilya's hand was on his back. "What is it?"
"I've been traded."
The words came out neutral. Factual. The way you'd announce a weather forecast or a game time.
Ilya's hand stilled. "Where?"
"San Jose."
The name landed between them like a stone dropped into still water. San Jose. California. Pacific time zone. Three thousand miles from Ottawa. A three-hour time difference that would turn their carefully constructed routine of nightly calls and biweekly drives into a logistical nightmare.
Ilya didn't say anything for a long time. He removed his hand from Shane's back—not pulling away, just repositioning, both hands on his own knees now, gripping.
"San Jose," Ilya repeated.
"The Stallions. They're rebuilding. They wanted—Farah said they offered Montreal a package they couldn't refuse. Two firsts, a prospect, a roster player." Shane heard himself reciting the details with clinical detachment, the way he'd discuss a trade on a podcast. Assets exchanged. Value assessed. Human cost unmentioned.
Then, quieter: "My contract negotiation is in three weeks."
Ilya went very still.
"I was going to ask for a no-trade clause," Shane said. "Farah and I had the whole thing mapped out. It was—it was the one thing I wanted. Not the money, not the term. Just the clause. So I could stay. So no one could—" His voice thinned. "Montreal knew. They knew I was going to ask for it. And they traded me before I could."
The silence that followed was a living thing.
"They traded you before you could protect yourself," Ilya said. His voice was very quiet.
"Yes."
"Because they knew you would ask."
"Yes."
"So they—" Ilya stopped. Something moved across his face—comprehension, then fury, cold and controlled. "They moved you because of the clause. Because once you had it, they couldn't move you. So they did it now. While they still could."
Shane didn't answer. He didn't need to. The math was obvious. Montreal's front office had looked at their franchise player—their captain, their face, the man who had given them seven years of his life—and calculated that his trade value was highest before he had the contractual power to say no. So they'd pulled the trigger three weeks early. Business. Just business.
"I report Friday," Shane said.
"This Friday?"
"Yes."
And then Shane broke.
It wasn't like the cottage. At the cottage, when his dad David had walked in and seen them—seen Shane and Ilya tangled together on the couch, Ilya's hand in Shane's hair, Shane's face so open and unguarded that there was no possible misinterpretation—Shane had gone rigid. Locked down. The panic had been cold and mechanical, his brain executing emergency protocols: separate, deny, control the damage. He'd barely spoken for two hours. He'd sat on the porch and stared at the lake and answered Ilya's questions in monosyllables until Ilya had finally sat beside him and said nothing at all, which was the only thing that helped.
This was different. This was hot. This was the panic catching fire.
Shane stood up. Sat down. Stood up again. He walked to the kitchen and put both hands on the counter and then he was talking, fast and uncontrolled, the words spilling out of him like something hemorrhaging.
"Seven years. I gave them seven years. I restructured my contract twice so they could afford depth signings. I played through a separated shoulder in the playoffs. I did every charity event, every media obligation, every—I was good. I was everything they asked me to be. And they—three weeks. They couldn't wait three weeks?"
"Shane—"
"They knew what that clause meant to me. Farah told them. She told them it was the priority, and they smiled and said 'we'll work it out' and then they called San Jose behind my back and—" He picked up a glass from the counter. Put it down. Picked it up again. His hands were shaking. "I was going to stay. I was going to retire here. Montreal and Ottawa, two hours, we had it figured out, and they—"
His voice broke. Not cracked—broke, like a bone, a clean snap he could hear in his own throat. He braced his hands on the counter and dropped his head between his arms and the sound that came out of him was unlike anything Ilya had heard from him before—a single, raw, gutted sob that seemed to come from somewhere beneath his ribs.
Ilya was there immediately. Not touching—he knew better than to touch Shane when Shane was like this, had learned at the cottage that the first thing Shane needed was space and the second thing he needed was someone standing close enough to catch him. Ilya positioned himself beside the counter, two feet away, and waited.
"It's happening again," Shane gasped. "It's the cottage—it's the same feeling—like I built something and it got taken away and I can't—I can't control—"
"I know," Ilya said. Steady. "Breathe."
"I can't breathe."
"You can. You are breathing right now. In and out. Keep doing that."
Shane pressed his forehead to the cool counter. His shoulders were heaving. He was making sounds he didn't recognize—not crying exactly, not yet, just the raw, animal noise of someone whose body was processing a shock his mind hadn't caught up to.
Ilya moved closer. Not touching. Just there.
"At the cottage," Shane said, his voice muffled against the counter, "when Dad walked in—I thought that was the worst it could get. Having something good and watching it get taken. But at least that was—at least your dad is a person. He had a reaction. He worked through it. This is just—a spreadsheet. Some GM looked at a spreadsheet and decided my life wasn't mine anymore."
"Shane. Look at me."
Shane lifted his head. His face was a mess—red, wet, contorted with a fury and grief so intertwined they were indistinguishable. Ilya was standing two feet away with his hands at his sides and his jaw tight and his eyes bright with the effort of not falling apart himself, because one of them had to be the ground and Ilya had decided it was him.
"We had it figured out," Shane said, and his voice was small now. Hollowed out. The rage spent, leaving only the sadness underneath. "Two hours. We had two hours, Ilya."
Shane's throat closed. Because Ilya was right. They'd had it figured out. After years of hotel rooms and missed calls and twenty-three-day stretches of aching, they'd finally gotten the geography right. Ilya's trade to Ottawa had felt like the universe correcting itself—like all the suffering had been in service of this, the two of them in the same time zone, the same country, close enough that Shane could drive down on an off day and be in Ilya's kitchen by noon and they could have dinner together like normal people.
Eight months. They'd had eight months of something approaching normal, and Montreal had sold it out from under them for two draft picks and a prospect.
"Come here," Ilya said.
Shane let himself be pulled. Ilya wrapped around him—arms, chest, chin on the top of his head—and Shane pressed his face into Ilya's collarbone and let the last of the fight drain out of him.
"They timed it," Ilya said, his voice low and furious against Shane's hair. "They timed it to beat the clause. That is not just business. That is—they looked at you and they did the math on when you would have the power to stay and they moved before you could get it. That is a choice someone made."
"I know."
"And it was wrong."
"I know, Ilya."
"And I am very angry."
"I know."
"I want to call your GM and say things that would get me suspended."
Shane made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Please don't."
Ilya tightened his arms. "Three days. We have three days."
"Yeah."
"Then we make them count."
They had three days.
Shane spent them in a state of dissociation that he recognized, distantly, as grief. He called his parents—his mom cried, his dad David said "we'll make it work, bud" in that steady voice that meant he was also close to crying. Shane almost told him—almost said Dad, you walked in on us at the cottage and you handled it and you love me anyway and now the league is taking this away from me and I don't know how to handle it the way you handled it. He didn't. He said "thanks, Dad" and hung up and stood in his kitchen for a long time. He called his Montreal teammates. Bouchard choked up. Tremblay swore. Coach Nadeau told him he'd been the best captain the organization had ever had, and Shane said "thank you" in the same flat voice he'd used with Farah and went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub and pressed his fists against his eyes until the pressure headache dulled the rest of the pain.
He started packing. Boxing up a life with the efficient, methodical focus that was the only thing keeping him from falling apart. Seven years in this apartment. Seven years of views from these windows, of the particular way the light fell across the kitchen in the morning, of the route from the parking garage to the elevator that his body could walk unconscious. He wrapped his dishes in newspaper and something about the mundanity of it—the careful, mechanical task of protecting breakable things for transport—made the dissociation thicken, like fog rolling in.
Ilya drove from Ottawa. He arrived with red eyes he didn't explain and a bag he'd clearly packed in thirty seconds and he walked into Shane's half-dismantled apartment and stood in the middle of the living room surrounded by boxes and looked at Shane and said, "Tell me what to do."
They packed together. Ilya labeled boxes with his messy handwriting—kitchen stuff, bedroom stuff, Shane's boring books—and was aggressively, almost violently normal. He cooked dinner both nights, even though the pots were already boxed and he had to dig them back out. He made jokes. He held Shane in bed at night and didn't mention San Jose.
But Shane could feel the cost of it. Could feel the effort Ilya was pouring into being steady, being the ground, keeping the performance of normalcy running when normalcy had already left the building along with most of Shane's furniture. On the second night, Shane woke at 3 AM and found Ilya's side of the bed empty. He found him in the living room, sitting on the floor between stacked boxes, holding one of Shane's Voyageurs jerseys. Not doing anything with it. Just holding it. His eyes were wet.
"Ilya."
"Go back to sleep." Ilya's voice was rough. "I am fine."
"You're sitting on the floor crying into my jersey at three in the morning."
"Is not crying. Is... Russian melancholy. Very different. Very cultural."
Shane sat down beside him on the hardwood floor, their backs against the wall, their shoulders touching. The apartment was dark and half-empty and wrong, and Ilya was holding a jersey that would never be worn in this city again, and Shane thought about how Ilya had been the strong one for three days straight without cracking and how unfair that was—how Shane's grief had taken up all the oxygen in the room and left none for Ilya's.
"I'm sorry," Shane said.
"For what?"
"For making this about me. You moved to Ottawa to be close to me. You rearranged your whole career. And now I'm leaving, and I've been so wrapped up in my own—" He stopped. "This is happening to you too. And I haven't asked you how you are."
Ilya was quiet for a while. Then he said, very softly: "I am not okay, Shane."
The honesty of it cracked something open. Shane took the jersey from Ilya's hands and set it aside and pulled Ilya against him, and for the first time in three days, Ilya let go. Not dramatically—Ilya's grief was quieter than Shane's, less visible, expressed not in spirals but in stillness. He pressed his face into Shane's shoulder and breathed in shuddering, uneven pulls, and Shane held him on the floor of the apartment they were dismantling and thought: we are both losing this. Not just me. Both of us.
They sat there until the sky started to lighten. Then they got up and kept packing.
On the last night—Thursday, Shane's flight to California in twelve hours—they lay in Shane's stripped-bare bedroom on a mattress with no sheets because the sheets were packed, and the overhead light was on because the lamps were packed, and everything was wrong.
"It's three hours," Shane said to the ceiling. "The time difference. When it's ten PM for you, it's seven for me. I'll still be at the rink most nights when you're going to bed."
"We will figure it out."
"That's what we always say."
"Because we always do."
"This is different. San Jose isn't a two-hour drive. It's a six-hour flight to a different country. We'll see each other—what, twice a season? When our teams play?"
"We will see each other more than twice."
"When? During the All-Star break? Off-season? That's months apart, Ilya."
"I know the math, Shane." A flicker of sharpness in Ilya's voice—the first crack in his aggressive normalcy. "I have been doing the math for three days. You don't need to tell me how far San Jose is from Ottawa. I have Google Maps."
Shane turned his head on the bare mattress. Ilya was staring at the ceiling, jaw tight, the tendons in his neck standing out. The overhead light was unflattering and harsh, casting shadows under his eyes, and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
"I'm scared," Shane said.
Ilya turned to look at him. "Of what?"
"That this will break us. That the distance will—that we'll become what we were before. Missed calls and unsent texts and watching each other on screens."
"We were that before and it didn't break us."
"We weren't in love before. Not—not like this. This is worse. Knowing what it's like to have you two hours away and then losing it—" Shane's voice cracked. "That's worse than never having it at all."
Ilya rolled onto his side and pulled Shane against him, wrapping around him like a wall. "Listen to me. We survived years of hiding. We survived hotel rooms and secrets and almost getting caught and the entire hockey world trying to keep us apart. We survived you being an emotionally constipated disaster."
"Thanks."
"You're welcome. My point is—San Jose is far. But we are Shane and Ilya. We have survived much worse than a time zone."
Shane pressed his face into Ilya's chest and breathed him in—the smell of him, skin and soap and something warm underneath that was just Ilya—and tried to memorize it, the way he memorized everything, because his brain was already calculating the hours until he'd smell it again and the number was too large.
"I don't want to sleep tonight," Shane said. "I don't want to waste the time."
"Then we don't sleep."
They didn't sleep. They talked—about nothing, about everything, about the first time they'd hooked up at the All-Star Game and how Ilya had been so nervous his hands shook (a fact he still denied). About the cottage. About Ilya's cat, Czar, who would be confused when Shane's shoes stopped appearing by the door. About stupid things, safe things, the conversational equivalent of holding hands in the dark.
At 5 AM, Shane's alarm went off. They lay there and listened to it blare for a full thirty seconds before Shane reached over and turned it off.
"I have to get up," Shane said.
"I know."
Neither of them moved.
"Ilya."
"One more minute."
Shane gave him five. Then he got up and showered and dressed and picked up his carry-on bag, and Ilya drove him to the airport because the alternative was a cab, and a cab would mean saying goodbye in the apartment, and saying goodbye in the apartment would mean being alone immediately after, and neither of them could handle that.
The drive to Trudeau was twenty-five minutes. They didn't talk. Ilya drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand holding Shane's in the space between the seats, and Shane memorized the pressure of his grip the way he memorized game tape—every detail, every frame, stored against future need.
At the departures drop-off, Ilya pulled over and put the car in park. The engine idled. People streamed past with luggage and purpose and places to be.
"Don't get out," Shane said. "If you get out, I won't—just stay in the car."
Ilya's jaw tightened. He nodded.
Shane unbuckled his seatbelt. Picked up his bag. Looked at Ilya.
Ilya was staring straight ahead through the windshield, both hands on the steering wheel now, his knuckles white. His eyes were bright. He was holding himself together with visible effort, the way you'd hold a cracked glass—carefully, firmly, knowing that one wrong movement would shatter it.
"I love you," Shane said.
"I love you too." Ilya's voice was barely there. "Go. Before I do something stupid like follow you."
Shane leaned across the console and kissed him—quick, hard, his hand on the back of Ilya's neck—and then he got out of the car and walked into the terminal without looking back.
He made it to the gate before the tears came. He sat in a plastic chair between a businesswoman and a family with two small children and put his sunglasses on and cried silently for twenty minutes while the departure board blinked SAN JOSE — ON TIME — BOARDING SOON.
His phone buzzed.
I am still in the parking lot. I cannot make myself leave. This is very stupid and also I am blocking traffic.
Shane laughed. It came out wet and broken.
Go home, Ilya.
Home is wherever you are. So technically I should be getting on this flight.
That's not how trades work.
Stupid system. I will write letter to the commissioner.
Please don't.
Too late. Already composing. "Dear Mr. Commissioner, your trade rules are bad and you should feel bad. Sincerely, Ilya Rozanov, who is very angry and also blocking traffic at Montreal airport."
Shane was laughing and crying at the same time, hunched over his phone in the departure lounge, and the businesswoman next to him was giving him a concerned look, and he didn't care.
I love you, he typed. The real version. Not "you too."
I know. Now get on your plane. I will be here when you land.
Shane boarded the flight. He had a window seat. He watched Montreal shrink beneath him—the river, the mountain, the city that had been his for seven years—and he pressed his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes.
Six hours later, he landed in San Jose. The sun was blinding.
San Jose was bright and warm and wrong.
Everything about it was wrong. The sun was wrong—too constant, too cheerful, a relentless California optimism that felt like a personal insult. The rink was wrong—newer, shinier, without the particular scuff marks and idiosyncrasies of the Bell Centre that Shane's body had learned over seven years. The locker room was wrong. The water pressure in the practice facility was wrong. The time on his phone was wrong, three hours behind the life he'd built, a constant reminder that when he woke up at 6 AM, Ilya had already been awake for three hours and hadn't texted because he was trying to "give Shane space to adjust," which was Ilya-speak for "I am also drowning but I don't want you to know."
The team was fine. Professional. The Stallions were young and hungry and rebuilding, and they'd acquired Shane to be the veteran presence, the leader, the franchise cornerstone around which a contender could be constructed. His new teammates were respectful and eager, and the coaching staff was progressive and talented, and none of it mattered because Shane went home every night to a rented apartment that smelled like new carpet and nothing else.
The time difference was a knife that cut a little deeper every day.
Shane would finish practice at 1 PM Pacific, which was 4 PM in Ottawa, and by the time he'd showered and eaten and sat down to call Ilya, it was 6 PM in Ottawa and Ilya was at practice or in a meeting or on a bus to a road game. They'd text instead—short, careful messages that tried to carry the weight of everything they couldn't say out loud and buckled under it.
how was practice
good. how was yours
fine. new D system is coming together
that's good
yeah
Shane stared at these exchanges and wanted to scream. This was not how they talked. They talked in long, wandering conversations that went from hockey to philosophy to Ilya's theory that Czar was plotting world domination. They talked in Ilya's voice—warm, accented, full of digressions and jokes and the particular way he said Shane's name that made it sound like a word in a language only they spoke. Texting was a pale, thin substitute, like trying to get warm from a photograph of a fire.
They managed one real call in the first week. Tuesday night—11 PM for Shane, 2 AM for Ilya, who picked up on the first ring because he'd been waiting, because Ilya always waited.
"Hi," Shane said, and his voice did something embarrassing.
"Hi." A pause. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Fine. Just—" He pressed the phone harder against his ear, as if proximity to the speaker could approximate proximity to the person. "Your voice. I missed your voice."
"You talked to me yesterday."
"Texting isn't talking."
"No," Ilya agreed quietly. "It is not."
They talked for forty minutes. Ilya told him about a fight Czar had gotten into with a houseplant ("the plant lost, obviously, Czar is apex predator"). Shane told him about the new systems and his new linemates and the weird smoothie place near the rink that was objectively worse than any smoothie place in Montreal. They talked around the edges of the real thing—the ache, the absence, the Ilya-shaped hole in Shane's days—because talking about it directly would make it bigger and they were both trying very hard to keep it manageable.
At the end, Ilya said, "It is 2 AM and I have practice at nine and I am going to be terrible tomorrow and I don't care. Call me again tomorrow."
"It'll be late for you again."
"I don't care, Shane. Call me at four in the morning. Call me during practice. Call me during a game. I will pick up. I will always pick up."
Shane hung up and lay in his dark apartment in San Jose and pressed the phone against his chest and thought about Ilya in his dark apartment in Ottawa, three time zones ahead, already tomorrow, already living in a version of the day that Shane hadn't reached yet. The metaphor felt too precise to be accidental. They were always slightly out of sync now. Always reaching for each other across a gap that wasn't just distance but time.
The second week was worse. Shane's schedule intensified—road games, back-to-backs, the particular grind of a team trying to build chemistry with a new centerpiece—and the windows for calling shrank until they were trying to connect through cracks in the day, stolen minutes between obligations that never quite lined up.
Shane called after a road game in Denver. Voicemail.
Ilya called during Shane's morning skate. Missed.
Shane texted: sorry, was on ice. call tonight?
Ilya texted back three hours later: tonight I have team dinner. can't skip. tomorrow?
Tomorrow didn't work either.
By the third week, Shane had started doing the thing he hated most: performing. Not on the ice—on the ice he was fine, he was always fine, hockey was the one area of his life where his body knew what to do without his brain's permission. The performance was everything else. Smiling at teammates. Laughing at jokes. Saying "I'm settling in great, thanks" to reporters with the same flat competence he'd once used to say "just one of those nights" after a bad loss. The mask was back on, and it fit as well as it ever had, and Shane hated that—hated how easy it was to pretend he was fine, how practiced, how automatic.
At night, alone, the mask came off and there was nothing underneath but want.
He developed a routine. After dinner (eaten at the table, not over the sink, because Ilya had made him promise), he would sit on the couch and open his phone and scroll through Ilya's Instagram and look at photos of a life happening without him. Ilya at a team dinner, laughing. Ilya at the rink, sweaty and grinning. Ilya with Czar, the cat draped across his lap like a furry orange blanket. Each photo a window into a world Shane used to be part of and now only observed from the outside, three hours and three thousand miles away.
One night—a Wednesday, four weeks in—Shane was scrolling and he found a photo Ilya had posted of the Ottawa skyline at sunset, taken from what Shane recognized as the balcony of Ilya's apartment. The caption was in Russian. Shane screenshotted it and pasted it into Google Translate.
Beautiful city. But something is missing.
Shane locked his phone. Put it face-down on the couch. Pressed both hands over his eyes and breathed through the wave of loneliness that hit him like a physical force—not sharp, not dramatic, just enormous. A tide that filled every room of the apartment and left him sitting on the couch at 8 PM on a Wednesday in San Jose with his hands over his eyes and his chest full of water.
He picked up the phone. Called Ilya. It rang. And rang. Voicemail.
Shane listened to the greeting—the Russian words, his own name buried in the middle, Ilya's voice warm and teasing even in a recording—and this time, for the first time, he left a message.
"Hey. I saw your photo. The sunset. I know what's missing." A breath. "I miss you. I know I'm not—I know I don't say it enough and I know the time zones make everything harder and I know you're probably asleep right now because it's eleven there and you have practice tomorrow. But I miss you. Every day. Every stupid day in this stupid sunny city. Okay. That's it. Goodnight. I love you."
He hung up. Stared at the phone. Considered deleting the voicemail, because leaving a voicemail like that felt dangerously close to the kind of vulnerability he'd spent his life avoiding.
He didn't delete it.
In the morning, he woke to a text from Ilya sent at 5:47 AM Ottawa time: I have listened to your voicemail eleven times. I am keeping it forever. also your "stupid sunny city" line is very funny. I am going to chirp you about this for years.
Then, a minute later: six weeks, Shane. six weeks until San Jose plays Ottawa. I am counting.
Shane read both messages twice. Then he got up and went to practice and played the best he'd played since the trade, and when a reporter asked what had changed, he said, "Just settling in," and smiled.
Six weeks. He started counting too.
He unpacked his boxes. Hung his clothes. Put his protein powder in the cabinet. And in the bedroom, in the back of the drawer, under a folded Bears t-shirt he'd kept for years, he found a note.
Ilya's handwriting. Messy, slanting, written on a torn piece of paper that Ilya had clearly slipped into the box when Shane wasn't looking.
I hid this so you would find it when you are sad and unpacking alone. I know you, Hollander.
San Jose has good weather and bad hockey and you will fix the second one because you are you.
What Montreal did was wrong. You deserved that clause. You deserved the choice. They took it from you and I will be angry about that for a long time, maybe forever. But they could not take me. No clause required.
I will be here. Not in the apartment (unfortunately) but HERE. Call me at stupid o'clock. Text me during morning skate. Send me photos of your new locker so I can make fun of it. I don't care about the time difference. There is no time that is wrong to hear from you.
Also I stole your good hoodie. The gray Voyageurs one. You can get it back when I see you.
Which will be soon.
Because I am not doing another twenty-three days. Not ever again.
I love you.
— Your Ilya
Shane sat on the edge of his new bed in his new apartment in his new city and read the note four times and pressed it against his chest and cried. Not the graceless, cathartic crying that Ilya had witnessed and held him through. Quiet crying. The kind you did alone in a room that didn't feel like home yet, because the person who made places feel like home was two thousand eight hundred miles away.
Then he wiped his face. Put the note in the nightstand drawer. Picked up his phone.
Found your note. I'm crying in San Jose. Are you happy?
Ilya's reply was instant, despite it being after midnight in Ottawa: yes. crying is healthy. also I am awake because I cannot sleep without you here and this apartment is too quiet.
Go to sleep, Ilya. It's late there.
Make me.
I can't make you do anything from three time zones away.
Then come home.
Shane stared at those two words until the screen blurred.
I will, he typed. As soon as I can.
The weeks crawled. Shane threw himself into hockey with a ferocity that alarmed his new teammates. He was first on the ice and last off. He stayed after practice until the equipment managers gently kicked him out. He played with a sharp, almost angry edge that the San Jose media interpreted as competitive fire and leadership and everything they'd hoped for when they'd traded for him.
It was none of those things. It was a man trying to outskate his own loneliness.
He got better at the time zones. Not good—never good—but better. They carved out a window: 9:30 PM Pacific, 12:30 AM Eastern. Late for Ilya, but Ilya swore he didn't mind, and Shane stopped arguing because he needed the calls the way he needed oxygen and pretending otherwise was a lie neither of them believed. They'd talk for twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, sometimes longer on nights when Ilya didn't have an early skate—rambling, disconnected conversations about nothing and everything, the verbal equivalent of holding hands.
But phone calls were not the same as presence. Phone calls couldn't replicate the weight of Ilya's arm across Shane's chest at 2 AM, or the smell of garlic when Ilya cooked, or the specific warmth of another body in a bed. Phone calls couldn't replace waking up on a Sunday morning and driving two hours and being in Ilya's kitchen by noon. Shane had taken that for granted—not consciously, not carelessly, but in the passive, inevitable way you took for granted the air you breathed until suddenly you were underwater.
He missed Ilya in ways that embarrassed him. He missed the sound of Ilya singing (badly) in the shower. He missed the way Ilya left cabinet doors open and didn't push chairs in and existed in spaces with a cheerful disregard for order that used to drive Shane insane and now felt like the most precious thing in the world. He missed Ilya's hands—broad, calloused, always warm—and the way they found Shane's back, his neck, the curve of his hip, with an unconscious possessiveness that said mine without ever saying a word.
He missed being touched. That was the simplest and most devastating part. Not sex—though he missed that too, with a physical ache that ambushed him at inopportune moments—but touch. A hand on his shoulder. A kiss on the back of his neck while he made coffee. The casual, incidental contact of sharing a space with someone who loved you. In San Jose, no one touched Shane except to check him into the boards.
The Stallions played the Ottawa Senators in late November. A Saturday night game in San Jose, which meant Ilya flew to California and was in the same time zone for the first time in six weeks, and Shane couldn't see him until after the game because they were opponents now, and the cruelty of that—of Ilya being in his city, in his building, thirty feet of ice away, unreachable—was a special kind of torture.
Shane hadn't anticipated the rivalry.
He should have. The media had been building it since the trade was announced—Hollander vs. Rozanov: A New Chapter—because the hockey world loved a narrative and two former Eastern Conference rivals facing off in new colors was irresistible content. The pre-game packages showed highlight reels of their greatest Montreal-Boston battles. The broadcasters discussed their "legendary rivalry" with breathless enthusiasm. The word "hatred" was used more than once.
Shane watched the pre-game hype on the locker room TV and felt sick.
"You guys really went at it, huh?" Dawson, one of the young Stallions defensemen, was grinning. "I watched some of those old clips. Rozanov's a beast."
"He's a good player," Shane said evenly.
"You two got beef? Like, real beef?"
"It's hockey. Everyone's got beef."
"Yeah, but the way you guys go after each other—it's like personal. My buddy says Rozanov actually left the bench once to fight a guy who hit you. How wild is that?"
Shane's jaw clenched. "That was a long time ago."
"Still. Dude must really respect you or something."
Or something. Shane laced his skates and willed the game to start so he could stop having this conversation.
The game was brutal.
Not dirty—just intense, physical, two teams competing hard with the added electricity of a marquee matchup between franchise players. Shane and Ilya were on the ice together constantly, and every shift was a performance: the body language of rivalry, the careful hostility, the trash talk they'd learned to weaponize as cover.
"Nice backcheck, Hollander," Ilya said during a faceoff, loud enough for the linesman to hear. "Getting slow in your old age."
"Fuck off, Rozanov."
"Such language. Very un-captain."
Shane won the draw. Ilya won the next one. The crowd ate it up—the tension, the competition, two elite players pushing each other to the limit. The broadcast showed a split-screen comparison of their stats. The commentators marveled at the intensity.
In the third period, with the game tied 2-2, Shane and Ilya collided along the boards. Not a check—a battle for the puck, both of them grinding for position, bodies pressed together, and for one fraction of a second their faces were inches apart and Ilya's eyes met his and Shane saw everything—the exhaustion and the want and the horrible comedy of two people in love beating the shit out of each other for the entertainment of thousands.
"I miss you," Ilya murmured, so quiet the mics couldn't possibly catch it.
"Shut up and play," Shane said, and stripped the puck off him and fired it up ice and tried to pretend his hands weren't shaking.
San Jose won 3-2 in overtime. Shane scored the winner. The arena erupted. His teammates mobbed him. Across the ice, Ilya skated toward the tunnel with his head down, and Shane tracked him until he disappeared, the way Shane always tracked Ilya, even now, even from three thousand miles away.
After the game, Shane did his media. Showered. Changed. Waited.
His phone buzzed at 11:47 PM.
marriott on market street. room 1404. door is open.
Shane drove to the hotel with his hands tight on the steering wheel and his heart in his throat. The hallway on the fourteenth floor was empty. The door to 1404 was cracked open. He slipped inside and turned the deadbolt and Ilya was there.
He looked like hell. Beautiful hell—still in his suit, tie loosened, hair messy from running his hands through it, a bruise blooming on his forearm from a second-period board battle—but hell. Tired and wound-up and vibrating with six weeks of stored want.
"Hi," Ilya said.
Shane didn't say hi. He crossed the room in three steps and kissed Ilya with six weeks of desperation behind it, grabbing the lapels of his suit jacket, pulling him down, and Ilya made a sound like he'd been gut-punched and wrapped both arms around Shane and lifted him slightly off his feet.
"God," Shane said against his mouth. "God, Ilya."
"I know. I know."
They kissed like drowning people finding air. Frantic and clumsy and teeth-clicking, Shane biting Ilya's lip, Ilya's hands already under Shane's shirt, yanking it over his head. They left a trail of clothes from the door to the bed—Shane's shirt, Ilya's jacket, Ilya's tie, Shane's belt—and by the time they hit the mattress they were both stripped to the waist, hands everywhere, rediscovering territory that six weeks had somehow made new again.
"I scored the overtime winner against you," Shane said, because apparently his brain had lost the ability to filter.
Ilya bit his collarbone. "I am aware."
"Are you mad?"
"I am furious." Ilya bit harder. Shane hissed. "You looked very good doing it. This made it worse."
"You had a great game. Two assists."
"Stop complimenting my hockey and take your pants off."
Shane took his pants off. Ilya took his pants off. They came together on the hotel bed, skin to skin, and Shane gasped at the contact—the heat and the solidity and the overwhelming reality of Ilya's body against his after six weeks of phone calls and video chats and his own hand in the dark pretending to be someone else's.
"I need you," Shane said. "Fast. We can do slow later. I need you now."
Ilya understood. He always understood. He reached for his bag—because Ilya, unlike Shane, had come prepared—and then his slicked fingers were pressing inside Shane, and Shane arched into it with a moan that was too loud for a hotel room and he didn't care.
"More. Faster."
"You are very bossy for someone who just beat me in overtime."
"Ilya, I swear to God—"
Ilya added another finger and Shane's protest dissolved into a gasp. Ilya worked him open with efficient urgency—not careless, never careless, but without the aching slowness he sometimes employed when they had time. They didn't have time. They had tonight, maybe tomorrow morning, and then Ilya would fly back to Ottawa and Shane would drive back to his empty apartment and the clock would start ticking again.
"Ready," Shane panted. "I'm ready, come on—"
Ilya pulled his fingers out and pushed inside him in one long, steady thrust, and Shane's whole body went electric. He wrapped his legs around Ilya and pulled him deeper and Ilya groaned and dropped his forehead to Shane's shoulder and for a moment they were both still—just breathing, just connected, just here.
"I missed this," Ilya said, his voice raw. "Not just sex. This. Being close to you. Feeling you."
"Move, Ilya. Please."
Ilya moved. Hard, deep thrusts that rocked Shane up the bed, and Shane grabbed the headboard with one hand and Ilya's shoulder with the other and held on. The headboard was hitting the wall and someone in the next room would probably complain and Shane didn't care because Ilya was inside him and above him and everywhere, and the noise in his head—the loneliness and the wrong time zones and the wrong city—went blissfully, beautifully silent.
"You feel so good," Ilya gasped. "Six weeks—Shane, six weeks is too long—"
"I know—"
"I can't—I am not doing this again. I will demand a trade. I will retire. I will—"
"Don't be dramatic—oh fuck—right there, don't stop—"
Ilya shifted his angle and Shane shouted, his grip tightening on the headboard. Ilya hammered that spot relentlessly, and Shane was falling apart—cursing and gasping and saying Ilya's name in a register he didn't recognize as his own.
"Touch yourself," Ilya said. "I want to watch you."
Shane wrapped his hand around himself and stroked, fast, matching Ilya's rhythm. He was already close—embarrassingly close, six weeks of wanting compressed into minutes—and when Ilya leaned down and kissed him, deep and filthy, tongue sliding against his, Shane came with a broken cry, clenching around Ilya, his vision going white.
Ilya lasted three more strokes before he followed, buried deep, a guttural groan ripped from his chest, his whole body shuddering. He collapsed onto Shane, heavy and sweating and perfect, and Shane held him and breathed and felt the world slowly reassemble itself around them.
"Ow," Shane said after a moment. "Headboard."
"What?"
"My hand. I was gripping the headboard. I think I have a splinter."
Ilya laughed into his neck—that full, helpless laugh, the one Shane had been surviving on the memory of for six weeks. "Only you would get injury during sex."
"It's your fault. You were—it was very—" Shane gestured vaguely. "Vigorous."
"Vigorous." Ilya lifted his head, grinning. "This is what you say? Vigorous?"
"Shut up."
"I have just given you best orgasm of your life and you describe it as vigorous. You are worst boyfriend in the world."
Shane went still. Ilya's grin faded, replaced by something softer, something uncertain—as though he'd said a word he wasn't sure he was allowed to use.
"Boyfriend," Shane said.
"I—yes. If you want. Or not. We haven't—we don't use—"
"Boyfriend," Shane said again, and the word felt different in his mouth than he'd expected. Not heavy. Not frightening. Just... accurate. A simple, obvious description of the person lying on top of him in a hotel room in San Jose.
"Yeah," Shane said. "Boyfriend."
Ilya's face broke into a smile so wide and unguarded that Shane felt it in his chest like a physical impact. He kissed Shane—quick, warm, joyful—and said, "Good. Boyfriend. I like this. Very official."
"Don't make it weird."
"I am going to make it very weird. I am going to call you my boyfriend in every language I know. Мой парень. Mon copain. Boyfriend."
"You speak French?"
"I speak enough French to call you my boyfriend. This is all the French anyone needs."
Shane laughed and pulled him down and kissed him, and they lay tangled together in the wrecked hotel bed, and for a few minutes the three thousand miles didn't exist.
Later, in the dark, Ilya said: "I have idea."
"Mm." Shane was half-asleep, warm and boneless, Ilya's chest against his back, Ilya's arm heavy across his waist. "What idea."
"Off-season. We go to the cottage. Your cottage. Every summer. No negotiations, no schedules. Just us."
Shane's chest ached. The cottage. His cottage, still sitting on its lake outside Ottawa, untouched by trade packages and front office spreadsheets. The place where David had walked in on them. The place where Shane had first let himself imagine a life that looked like this.
"My cottage is still in Ottawa," Shane said. "That's a long way from San Jose."
"Is not long way from me. Is right here, Shane. And in off-season, you are not in San Jose. You are wherever you want to be." Ilya's arm tightened around him. "Come home to the cottage. Come home to me. I will be right there."
Shane pressed back into Ilya's warmth. The cottage. The lake. The porch where he'd sat and stared at the water after his dad had walked in, and where Ilya had sat beside him and said nothing, which was the only thing that helped. The kitchen where something was always burning on the stove because Ilya got distracted. The bedroom with the creaky bed and the window that let the morning light in.
They hadn't taken that from him. Montreal's front office could trade his contract, but they couldn't trade the cottage. They couldn't trade the lake or the dock or the sound of Ilya reading to him in Russian on a summer afternoon.
"Okay," Shane said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. The cottage. Every summer. Ours."
Ilya pressed his lips to the back of Shane's neck and murmured something in Russian—low and private, the words just for Shane and the dark room and the space between them that was, for now, zero.
"What does that mean?" Shane asked.
"Means 'wherever you are is where I want to be.' More or less. Russian is more poetic."
"Everything is more poetic in Russian."
"Yes. This is because Russian people feel more."
"That's not true."
"Is a little true. You Canadians—you feel things and then you put them in a box and sit on the box. Russian people feel things and then they write a novel about it and cry."
"I'm not putting things in a box."
"You are literally putting things in a box. You have been putting things in boxes your whole life. I love you anyway."
Shane smiled in the dark. "I love you too. Even from San Jose."
"Even from San Jose," Ilya repeated. "But also—come home soon."
"I will."
They fell asleep like that—pressed together, breathing in sync, the hotel room quiet around them. In the morning, Ilya would fly east and Shane would drive back to his apartment, and the distance would reassert itself like a tide coming in. But there would be a note in Shane's nightstand and a cottage waiting on a lake outside Ottawa and the word boyfriend sitting warm and new in both their mouths.
And there would be this: the knowledge that three thousand miles was just geography. That time zones were just numbers. That the thing between them—this stubborn, impossible, world-rearranging thing—had survived hotel rooms and secrets and twenty-three-day silences and a two-hour drive that became three thousand miles, and it was still here. And there was a cottage on a lake outside Ottawa that no front office could trade away, waiting for summer, waiting for them.
It would always be waiting for them.
Shane slept. Three time zones away, Ottawa waited. But here, in a hotel room in San Jose, the distance was zero and the clock had stopped and everything was, for the length of one night, exactly right.