first time flying together!!! (“shane hollander have you ever had sex on an airplane” “no and the bathroom is not big enough”)

they looooove photo booths

shane assumes ilya won’t want to do touristy things and ilya assumes shane wants to do all the touristy things (they love miscomm)

“look” “looking”

shane packs the shortest sluttiest shorts (they're late to everything)

they go on hikes holding hands and walks holding hands and sit on the beach holding hands and have dinner holding hands

ilya tries to convince shane to go skinny dipping the entire time (he obliges on their last night there - "what if we get caught" "people do it all the time they dont care")

role play as strangers using cliche pick up lines (“so do you come here often”)

ilya uses this as an excuse to rent a fun and sexy yet irresponsible sports car (shane also enjoys driving it)

shane reads a total of 7 pages of the book he brought

even though they don’t get recognized shane “hottest man in the NHL” hollander gets special treatment everywhere they go - free drinks, chefs send him food, everyone offers to give him their employee discount, he’s every tour guide’s favourite - he also learned a bit of spanish so they’re all so charmed by him!!!

shane and ilya go clubbing but then shane gets hit on too many times and ilya makes them leave ("they were just being nice!" "no one is that nice")

they befriend another couple also on their honeymoon who don't know they're famous hockey players so they get to have dinner with another couple who knows nothing about them!!!!

they go on a boat tour and ilya pretends to fall all the time to freak out shane (“help im falling” “go ahead i don’t even like you” “SHANEEEEE”)

they lounge on the beach for hours and talk and play in the water and just exist ("ilya you need to put on sunscreen properly skin cancer is serious" "UGH YOU ARE SO BORING" "you should go to the dermatologist when we get back" "I get checked every year hollander relax" "okay good because if you get cancer and die I will be so mad" "so sweet" - all this and he asked shane to put sunscreen on his back)

shane loves that this is designated relaxation time and ilya loves relaxed shane

so when they meet, is awkward at first. ilya tries hard to break the tension (there’s no tension, is just shane is shy and sveta wants a piece of him) and then the two of them starts to talk about hockey and just forget that ilya is also there.

now ilya is mad that no one is paying attention to him and even when he glues his body against shane and whines, shane doesn’t even glance at him.

Shane at the resort's 7am water zumba:

Meanwhile Troy: ILYAAAAAA 💗🩷🌸 OMG ILYA WITH PUPPIES 🩷💐🌸 OMG ILYA AND THE KIDS IN THE HOSPITAL 🩷🩷 I'M ILYA ROZANOV'S NUMBER 1 FAN 💕 OMG ILYA PLAYING MARIO KART 💗💘 OMG ILYA BEST CAPTAIN BESTEST BEST FRIEND 💘💗💕🩷 OMG ILYA WEARING A SANTA HAT 🌸🌺 OMG ILYA 💗🩷 ILYAAAA 💐💗🩷🩷💘💞

But once Troy joins the centaurs and becomes Ilya’s friend and then has then has the audacity to come out? As if that erases everything he’s done? Watching people accept and forgive him when Shane was the one taking the brunt of Troy’s treatment? Watching Troy come out at a pride night and celebrate with his team and fall in love when Shane has put himself (and Ilya) through hell remaining in the closet for nearly a decade because of the pieces of shit like Troy? Is still actively going through that hell?

And then when Troy actually becomes best friends with Ilya and Shane joins the team and Shane is expected to be friendly with him? Oh he is fuming. He does not give a fuck that Troy is a better person now and it was his own fears/internalized homophobia making him behave that way. Shane was gay and in an actively hostile environment and you know how often he said slurs in his career? Never. Ilya is in a closeted relationship and from a country where homosexuality is criminalized and you know how often he said slurs? Never. Same with Scott Hunter. The fact Troy was gay the whole time makes it feel like a betrayal. Troy knew what it was like to be othered, and that didn’t stop him.

Shane is so tired of having to bear these responsibilities he never asked for. He’s so tired of taking the blame for his own pain. He’s tired of being the Asian role model who doesn’t get to get angry. Who has to grin and bear it. He never had the option to behave like Troy, so all his internalized homophobia was only ever pointed inward. Troy took the easy way out and he still got the happy ending Shane fought tooth and nail for. It’s not fair.

And now Shane is finally out. He’s finally on a team with his husband with players who support him. But fucking Troy Barrett is there. And he just has to grin and bear it.

“[…] I loved these books. I wanted to do queer joy. I wanted to do something fucking horny, too. Like, I love that. I was like, we don’t get that. I feel like there’s been this weird divorce of sex from art for a while, and the sex you see on TV and movies is always sex nobody wants. It’s all, like, violent and unpleasant and coercive or just something that I’m like, bleh. And the reason that I loved heated rivalry specifically is because the sex tells the story, and it felt like I could really use that, that this was not going to be gratuitous, this was not going to be—and like, who cares if it is, but you have to convince people of stuff like this. So I was like the sex is architecting this relationship through ten years, that’s how they know each other, because when they’re talking, they’re lying, or not quite telling the truth. So it’s almost like…the sex is when they’re allowed to be honest with each other and when they’re allowed to be vulnerable. So the sex is telling you, is giving you story information. And it’s so funny as writing season two, like it is a reminder as we’re working, my cowriter and I, that this story, the plot of this story is emotion. The traditional beats of story, while they matter, they don’t matter anywhere nearly as much as the feeling that you’re left with, because what you want is to keep following the emotional heartbeat of this relationship. And that was always the way that I thought what I loved about the way Rachel wrote heated rivalry was, the way I interpreted it is, the reason it’s written this way, in these snippets of time, is because that’s what they remember. Like, what do you remember about the day you were drafted? I remember standing next to Ilya, I remember the way he looked in that suit, I remember seeing him up there with his dad and wondering what his dad was like. And I remember not listening to my mom. And then, boom, what’s the next thing you remember? I remember not being able to sleep, and I went to the gym and there he was. Like, all of their memories […], it’s told in a language of memory, and sex is such a powerful part of the memory scape of this thing. So I felt like that was a great way to also, you know—and what I promised Rachel, which is the promise I try really hard to keep, was like, I want to take this seriously, because I think what a lot of people do with genre in general, but romance in particular, is they try to make it, they’re like, “this is easy and this is dumb, and we can make this trite”, and I was like, I don’t want to, I want to dig deeper because everything in her book there is the foundation of a very real and understandable queer relationship, and I wanted to be like, I didn’t want to shy away from it, and I wanted to dig into it.”