Hug now, escape later

I am back because I need more of the gay hockey show gifs in my life.

At the end of summer, when Covid numbers were at a lower point, I took the risk to visit her in her new apartment and I quickly realized that, unlike when I’d spent the night at her house before, the couch wasn’t made up like a bed. She explained that since her new couch was so fancy and pink, I couldn’t possibly sleep on it, and so I needed to sleep in the bed with her. You know, out of necessity. I woke up with her snuggled around me in the middle of the night.

We’re dating now, and I genuinely think I’m going to marry her. Just the other day, though, I mentioned that if she hadn’t been weird about her fancy couch, I probably never would have like confessed my feelings. AND THEN she stood up, took the cushions off the fancy couch, UNFOLDED IT INTO A HIDE-A-BED, and said “I KNOW.”

there was only one bed

ilya and wyatt instantly clock him but everyone else is confused and asks luca which president/how did he even steal the laces/why would the president have themed hockey laces

bonus (at night, in bed):

troy: *shifts to face harris as if he forgot to tell him something important* hey did you know haas stole a president’s shoelaces once? but he ran out before we could get the details out of him

harris: don’t worry about it troy *yawns* i’m sure he was just too flustered to come up with anything else, now let’s go to sleep we have an early day tomorrow

i forgot that ilya goes to the club ALONE. none of his fellow NHL teammates go with him. He knows scott hates him (or at least hates how he gets under his skin on the ice) but he goes to support him anyways.

If they gave Tough Guy a chance they migbt really fall in love with Ryan Price! No shade meant I love Ryan lol

Ahahahaahahha I mean you said it not me anon. There is a post that goes around sometimes that's basically to this affect, it's something like "just as a desert fox cannot conceive of the ocean fandom cannot conceive of truly confident individual"

I'll be a bit less mean and just say that it's very hard for anyone to imagine the experience of a person who's as singular as both Shane and Ilya are, especially if you're a bit young and haven't embarked on a career yet. Over the course of my career I've met a decent number of prodigies and star academics and field leaders, and I think seeing that kind of thing up close does make you really understand what kind of personality is required. It's not people who are paralyzed by self doubt, I'll say that much.

(Same with Rose btw. At some point you kind of have to accept that the sort of person who becomes a mega movie star is probably not someone you'd want to hang out with)

This is the same man who basically said "come to my cottage, I'll show you the best time and we can fall in love for real," he's no stranger to romance, to wooing, he literally wants to do it right, because Shane doesn't do anything in half-measures.

Okay okay, now the sex. After Ilya says yes, Shane starts to move it into steamier territory with the very emotionally driven need to feel Ilya's heart beat under his shirt after the near-death experience. Ilya wants to show Shane he's alive because Shane is feeling anguish over the thought of almost losing him, and Ilya is like 'Ah I will fuck him about it and that will feel good." But then they literally start tearing the clothes off of each other while they growl possessive shit at each other like "yours" and "mine" and then Ilya lays Shane out on the carpet and they just fall into each other. Importantly, up until now, Ilya has been very focused on fucking Shane "properly" or whatever that means, wanting to give Shane the sex he wants and be the perfect boyfriend of Shane's dreams. He's also trying to numb his own issues with sex. He doesn't want to waste their precious time together talking about his depression, he wants to do the thing they're both really good at, which is having great sex.

I think it's important here, during the proposal, that they don't do anything elaborate. This is contrasting the other sex scenes in the book where they're both using sex as a way to show love, yes, but also as a way to avoid communication. This is sex, but here the vulnerability and openness of their hearts is literally the point. No crazy positioning, no dirty talk, they are literally just grinding on each other and seeking pleasure from each other's bodies. At one point in Ilya's inner monologue he thinks: "This wasn't frantic rutting—this was Shane loving Ilya with his body. Careful, steady thrusts that matched the rhythm of their pounding hearts." Ilya also thinks about how he wants it to last forever, but realizes that they will have moments like this for the rest of their lives. He doesn't have to cling to this moment more than any other, he doesn’t have to make it the best they’ve ever had, they'll have more, they'll have everything together.

I'm not saying that their rough, athletic sex is in some way inauthentic, it's not at all, they both love it, but Ilya's journey in the book is one towards self-actualization, where he can be himself while also being open about his emotions and needs. It's an important moment in Ilya's journey to openly communicating with Shane because Ilya realizes that Shane loves him for exactly who he is, not for what he gives him. Their aligned sexual needs don't mean that Ilya has to suppress his emotions in order to be something that he thinks Shane wants to see.

This part gets me good, every time, showing how the straight-forward prose brings the emotions and meaning to the forefront:

Hunting for some coochie

Wrote a G up on his belt

So to me this is the quintessential patchy beard:

Shark legend Joe Thornton is way off on the other end of the spectrum:

But for a more normal but full beard I'd actually cite Oscar Isaac as the peak specimen here

what if they really looked like hockey guys

like, what if we just put that into the narrative right there. they actually look like hockey players. i hardly even dare to imagine what would have happened if Tierney had cast two guys who could act, maybe, but who weren't models. what if Shane didn't have huge gorgeous wet brown eyes and the most gorgeous nose and jaw? What if his skin wasn't dewy and translucent? What if he was just some guy? What if Ilya didn't look exactly like Michelangelo's David, and had his nose broken a couple of times? What if they both had helmet acne? What if they just looked like the actual kind of guys who play hockey? Like, you know they both have eight-packs and absolute dump truck asses, that's really the appeal of the hockey romance genre, but they've got fucked-up feet and neither of them have their own teeth.

I don't know, it just sometimes feels a little immersion-breaking to constantly be reminded of how unusually beautiful each of these two guys is. Like... in real life hockey players don't generally get underwear-modeling contracts, and if they do their teammates chirp them pretty mercilessly. \

I don't know that I'm actually interested in that level of realism either so I can see that this take isn't going to get traction but. Just throwing that out there because I can't stop thinking about it, LOL.

I guess you could argue that their beauty is non-diagetic. Like the actors look like that so that the viewer can understand. Whatever the theoretical real-life Shane looks like, to Ilya he looks like the objectively gorgeous Hudson Williams because Ilya is just so attracted to him, and likewise vice-versa. maybe Ilya really does kinda look like Ovechkin in real life, but to Shane he looks like Connor Storrie because of true love's goggles. Etcetera.