It’s really important to me that Yuna is Unhinged about her David.
You mean her hot hockey player that she pulled by knowing what the hell he was talking about when he talked about hockey games?
You mean her scrumptious husband whose edges were sharp enough to turn on a literal dime?
You mean the “secret weapon” of McGill’s team that lived in the shadows of the fast and the flashy by dint of keeping up and supporting all their spazzy madness in such a way that made it work instead of flop and humiliate the whole team?
You mean Professor Desult’s favorite student? The man who notably hates everyone and took great delight in failing students? His favorite Taxation and Business Tax Principals student, David Leigh Hollander?
This very same David Hollander who got selected for salutatorian because only a few of the right professors knew who he was that his grades and successes really were that genuinely good, and argued the case of this exceptional and frightfully bland student who was also a literal giant and a major support structure in every single thing he was a part of? From the hockey team to the party cleanup crew to the most pleasant lab-mate you could ask for? Literally “the guy” anyone wanted in their corner at a pinch, if they knew his name? Mister “has good grades on a hockey scholarship” himself?
The legendary “who’s that hockey player that’s always with Yuna?” that nobody can quite believe that the bombshell Yuna would be seen with?
That guy? Who looks like the hottest, most generic Canadian “Canada-man” to ever walk the earth? With his quiet smile and his reading glasses and his curls and his enormous arms?
The only boy in all of McGill that Theeeee Yuna ever seriously dated?
She is obsessed with him.
Nobody believes her when she deigns to share some of his insights to life and living and Montreal’s upcoming draft opportunities. “You mean to tell me that David said that? The man who smiles and says three words on a good day?”
Not that she does this often, because that’s her man. Yuna does not share. And David is a little shy and he doesn’t love being talked about. Not so much she doesn’t “kiss and tell”, she doesn’t collect his deepest thoughts and considerations and opinions and tell them to anybody either. Those are special and precious and David entrusted them to her.
David lets her talk him into and out of things for the joy of learning how she thinks. (She never gets him to stop opening doors or carrying stuff though. He’s a very stubborn man and lines like “What? I got these arms for nothing?” are too silly out of his mouth as he flops his arms at his sides like a cartoon character to argue with seriously for long.)
They hike and skate and read and study and go to the movies and hockey games.
They argue over the correct way to sharpen skates and how choppy a power push can be before it’s straight up sloppy and not just fast and hard. They disagree over Pad Thai and go cheese shopping together for “gourmet grilled cheese” nights during finals. They skate and race and compete with grades and silent conversations and meaningful looks nobody else sees. They go around and around over what the meaning of life is and whether there could be aliens and Sasquatches out there in the unknowns.
David absolutely surprises Yuna with a ring and the question on a pretty night, on a pretty bridge, under a bright moon, after a very fun game at the Centre Bell.
(Wouldn’t you know? That was the last time Montreal would take the Lord Stanley for the next few decades.)
They get married and it seems like half the world comes to see Yuna marry that one guy from the hockey team, and twenty-seven new hockey fans are converted during the reception. The other half of the world comes because motherfuckin’ David the Goddamn Menace Hollander married the Hockey Lady of All Time and not a single man he ever hit the ice with wants to miss it.
If they ever have kids, they will be indoctrinated into hockey.
(Almost thirty years later, forty-nine grown men watching the 2009 NHL draft will curse, drain a beer, and buckle in for the best hockey they’ll ever see in their life over this new “Hollander #24” in Montreal blue and red. They have no idea what’s coming, all they know is that it will be good.)
Yuna get herself the pinnacle of the hockey boys at school. She got the man who held up the whole team while looking like it was no sweat at all. Like he wasn’t the steadiest and most consistent knife-booted gremlin in the whole team. (You can take your hot-head, inconsistent center who can’t hit the broad side of a barn twice in a row and shove it, Marsha. When your boy misses a game, nobody blinks. When my David is throwing up his spleen with the flu, the next four games are lost. There’s a difference.)
Really, Shane Hollander was the universe’s answer to the question of what Yuna Hollander could achieve with the only match she would ever accept. And fortunately for the universe and Irina Rozanova’s son, she pulled David Hollander in like a magnet pulls to the poles.
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
