*crying over santru*

Yuna Hollander does not hesitate to scoop that charitable opportunity up.

They get their 12 players, one for each month. Shane gets his birth month, May. The tagline on top of his photo is: "I may be a two-time Stanley Cup winner, but I still get checked regularly for early onset heart disease."

During the following preseason, Ilya walks in on the Bears howling with laughter about something. Never one to be left out, Ilya demands to know what's so funny. He's passed a Heartthrob Against Heart Disease 2018-2019 calendar and joins in on the laughter as he flips through these idiots. That is, until he gets to May.

Shane is on the ice, a hockey stick slotted across his broad shoulders, arms draped over it. He's shirtless, only wearing gloves and his baggy hockey pants, ridden down on one side to show off the top of his underwear and the deep V just above his hips. They must have had him do pushups because his abs are more defined than usual, deep cuts across his stomach shimmering with a thin layer of sweat. His hair was messed up, like someone had run their hands through it. He was looking directly at the camera, a little smirk on his face like he knew exactly what he was doing. His biceps...

The calendar was snatched from him, which was probably a good thing, if the saliva pooling in his mouth and the tightness of his pants were anything to go by.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.

So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.

This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.

Not seeing Rozanov is not an option, so instead Shane picks out a few other cities to regularly go out by himself in. He'll go for a long walk, maybe sit down somewhere for a drink, and then catch a taxi back to the hotel an appropriate amount of time later. It's honestly pretty nice, unwinding by himself in this way, and now disappearing after games is not a thing specific to Boston! It's just another strange Hollander quirk!

Unfortunately, he fails to account for the guys on the team jumping on the most obvious explanation for all these disappearances, which is that Shane now has a girl in every port.

Word about this starts to spread quick, because it is so out of character for Shane, and pretty soon half the league is under the impression that he's some secret playboy.

@scunthotter

🕊️ 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧𝐞: 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞

01. gently brushing the other's hair out of their face to tuck behind their ear. 02. wrapping a blanket around their shoulders from behind. 03. brushing tears off of their cheeks. 04. reaching out hesitantly before resting a hand on their back. 05. placing a cup of tea or coffee in front of them. 06. sitting beside them while they are asleep to watch over them. 07. sharing silence with them. 08. pulling them into a tight hug. 09. writing something quietly and passing them the note. 10. fixing a piece of their clothing carefully.

🔥 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐰𝐨: 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐟𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫

01. staring at them in silence for a long moment before walking away. 02. slamming a door shut without explanation. 03. packing their things up, slowly and deliberately. 04. breathing sharply through their nose and refusing to meet their eyes. 05. cleaning something obsessively in silence.

🥀 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞: 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐞𝐱𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧