if this ship sinks (i give in);

People would sometimes inform Shane that he is a perfectionist, as if this were some grand revelation. He’s no stranger to the trappings of Golden-Boy mythos, or to the labor that such myth requires—squeaky-clean lines and an untroubled smile, with every thread on his body for sale. Even his race is treated as an asset: a tick of a box that sponsors could take pride in. Aspirational. Marketable. As long as he played well, rose up by his own merit, Shane supposed he could live with the condescension. But with tokenization came the call for perfection. Such fame demands flawlessness. It always has.

He’s remained staunch in discipline since his boyhood years: wide-eyed and red-faced and hopelessly awkward when not gliding on ice. For his first few years skating, he pushed himself faster, chasing his best times with his mother, until the ups took notice and taught him real pressure. Back then, they called him a diamond in the rough; but even the finest diamonds still need cutting. Brilliance is only ever achieved through abrasion. But it’s never felt like there’s enough time to polish the facets, draw out the clarity from the color.

Earlier this week there’d been another shoot—this time, Uniqlo. The campaign was a travesty. His mother was unrepentant, networking shamelessly all through dinner. The commercial itself was aggressively camp: over-lit and over-scored, with Shane dressed in immaculate winter layers, baring his teeth on cue.  Shitty artificial snow dusted his shoulders. The narrative, per the director, would be unabashedly cheesy: effortless warmth and modern simplicity, something awful like that.Every now and then, Yuna would toss a glance toward her son, finding only the same inanimate expression. Shane tuned out the table like he would a radio: by shuttering his ears and redirecting his mind elsewhere. While everyone competed to capitalize on his image, he found himself preoccupied with something else.

As a shy, awkward child, Shane would think of loneliness as logarithmic: something that always grew smaller with accruing distance. Formulas and systems made sense to him in that way, even before he could explain them with words. They would help a young Shane to understand his feelings, and serve him wherever social cues might fail. He was good at mathematics, if not especially passionate. Then he got hold of a stick and discovered (through subconsciously-applied physics) that really, everything could be stripped down to numbers—velocity, angle, economy of motion. The translation of those numbers to movement has become a natural part of his play. He can see the openings that others miss. Manipulate each of them into action.

His days at home are partitioned into careful blocks. He wakes early, often before his alarm, and runs the same route with Hayden at six in the morning. He’s grateful for the darkness, the indolent streets, the predictable grievances Hayden makes toward his children. The companionship eases Shane's scrambled brainwaves; the exertion overrides his restless muscles. Evenings on off-days are spent reading—biographies, technical manuals, nonfiction. He is a vociferous and active reader. He pores over text through his spectacles, underlines passages, dog-ears pages. He isolates threads of interest and dives deep.

Whenever the urge strikes to pick up his phone, he sets it face-down instead. As if denying eye contact might drain it of power.

Before bed, he lays out his mat and stretches until every sore fiber loosens, and tries to dull the pounding of his head. He cooks nutritious meals with repeatable steps, always tidying as he goes. He rearranges his space, returns each errant object to its proper place. In order there is comfort; there is also containment.

Repetition has always afforded a sealed system: a private bubble of existence, in which activity could prevail over aloneness. This was how child-Shane learned to survive, friendless and socially-impaired as he was. Of this self-made structure, he built his armor. Filled that great, growing gap with routine and information and distraction—with whatever could command and keep his attention. He tried so hard to shrink it, to narrow that distance. He would have done anything to make it smaller. Anything, to keep those long and lonely nights at bay.

Hockey was the ideal instrument. It became the perfect conduit for Shane’s focus, offering total dominion over body and mind. Hockey became Shane’s religion, his salvation, his north star. He consecrated himself to it, fashioned of himself a most devout disciple; and, for a while, the ice was heaven. There was pressure, but what acolyte goes untested? The pressure made him better. Piety as perfection. Obedience as excellence. For years and years, this was enough. He remained faultless in faith, unwavering in worship. In the belief that if he gave all of himself, that devotion would save him. That nothing unaccounted for could slip through.

And nothing had, until now. Until Shane discovered this chink in his holy armor. One that had been growing exponentially larger, ever since Ilya Rozanov first shook his hand.

And then—as if by some divine jest—that interior fracture became something external.

A crack.

A massive, jagged crack—running right down Shane’s bedroom wall.

He’d only noticed it late and alone in his room, after a blowout home win against Toronto—once the last dregs of norepinephrine had dwindled and his body was starting to fall back to baseline. What likely begun as a hairline fracture had, in the time since he’d last thought to look, devolved into a long, ugly gash. How odd, he’d thought then, for it to escape his notice, given his penchant for sussing out imperfections. Since then, each time he looks, the crack is wider. It cleaves the painted wall through, marring the smooth, unobtrusive ochre he’d so meticulously selected. It feels like a lifetime ago that he’d done that. He’d obsessed over each and every fine detail, every finish and fixture, until his parents insisted he get a designer—put him and themselves out of their combined misery.

So: how in the hell had he missed it?

The true injustice of it is that there should have been warning signs. He should have spotted them immediately, flagged each one for attention, and addressed them before they could fester. Sometimes, it fucking kills him—threatens to split his chest wide open. It’s been this way now for what feels like forever. And this is what it gets him: a plaster heart with a gash like the one in the wall. He can’t even bring himself to seal it over.  

No. Screw it—that’s not even fucking honest.

There were always warnings, plain as day. Any number of signs across every dimension. Shane’s true sin is not a failure to see them, but a failure to act on that knowledge. Or, by transversion, a failure to refrain. He’s had every piece of available data, compounded longitudinally across years, and did nothing with it except to let himself sink deeper. The once-unimpeachable disciple, ruined. His attention has long since been claimed elsewhere: monopolized by something louder even than doctrine, and demanding enough to eclipse his own creed.

He thinks, not for the first or last time, that Ilya Rozanov has unequivocally fucked his head. Dug down deep into his most primitive centers, and taken up permanent residence there.

Like a thumb pressed to a skipping vein, his presence is fixed and insistent: shaping itself to Shane’s internal rhythms, as oxygen flows to his heart. And oxygen, too long denied, becomes its own kind of drug—each hit landing harder than the last. Destabilizing, like sunlight after confinement. Effusive, like spilling water over barren sand.

Sometimes, it all becomes too much to bear, and all that there is to do is give in.

Surrendering himself to that temptation, on those scant few occasions, feels as much like absolution as damnation. So possessed, he lets his thoughts truly scatter: to disperse, unconstrained and unfettered, and settle upon what they will. Which always seems to come back to Rozanov’s face. His lips. The sure, searing grip of his hands. The fault lines that make up his dark, secret smile. And in such a perilous headspace, he will have no choice left but to try and recalculate Rozanov’s rhythm—recapitulate the precise beat of his strokes—with his own slim, unpracticed fingers. Only the four walls of his condo to bear witness. His body always remembers the motions, no matter how long since the last indulgence.

Those times, he lays himself down ungently and breathlessly attempts to work himself open, trapping his dick between himself and the mattress. He could palm it, tend to that far-off ache; but it’s so abjectly, disgracefully better when he leaves it just like that: untouched and weeping. Pleasure is never the point; it’s the stretch that he’s chasing. The fullness, and the pain. Sometimes he lets it all end there at his fingers, teetering on the knife’s edge of his own restraint. On the loneliest nights, though, he’ll uncover the dildo he keeps at his bedside, and fuck Rozanov’s ghost til he no longer thinks.

Now, staring at the crack that just keeps getting bigger, all Shane can think about is asymptotes: about the strange mathematics of longing. Infinitely close, but never quite reaching, so that even a hand pressed flat against the surface will still meet that blank space that lives in-between. Oxygen, flooding his heart through the fissure. It was that infinitesimal sliver of space that he’d used, so long ago, to find his place—to triangulate where he fit within their impossible geometry. Maybe he really once thought he could manage. Now, though…the emptiness feels enormous. Insurmountable. A career-ending threat.

Hockey taught him hurt—hurt, loneliness, and the art of self-armoring. How to take something so corrosive and turn it functional. Sometimes, it is almost easier to think of Rozanov as a stain: like a blemish on one of his smoking barrels, so pungent, so permanently permeated that he feels he could never hope to scrub it clean. No matter how much time and effort he spends laundering his image.

Most times, Shane tries not to think of Rozanov at all.

But most times that he does…

By mid-season, the rhythm has settled.

The days and games begin to stack together—one skyline superimposed on another, arenas distinguished only by their swapped-out colors, their swapped-out chants. Like interchangeable settings on a light fixture. Time compresses; the calendar becomes less of a schedule than a condition. Airports repeat. Hotels repeat. Ice is ice is ice.

Travel still does have its pleasures, especially when Ilya orchestrates an upset. He thinks he’ll never tire of rousing a crowd. In Boston, though, everything cuts a different pattern. The home ice wears down smooth as butter. Boston shows both its love and its vitriol bluntly, forever boisterous and delighted by spectacle. Ilya draws heat from the crowd the way fire draws air. He likes that, the immediate feedback. They know exactly when to rise, when to boo. What they are here to see, and who they’re here to hate.

The Montreal colors always cut differently, too, in the kaleidoscope of Ilya’s head. A singular, salient point of fixation, like a gem-encrusted smear struck clean across the lens.

This is the part of the year where the world narrows to use. Wake. Skate. Eat. Play. Fuck. Recover. Repeat. There is no room for doubt when the body is occupied, no margin for reflection when everything hits and hurts the same way. Goals come easily; assists, easier still. Forward momentum. Motion becomes its own justification.

Ilya doesn’t count days. Instead, his skin build up static—the body already looped in by the brain. It’s automatic, and it shows in his play. He skates harder on impulse. Lets hits linger. And when the days ticking back on the clock in his head start to thin down to the single digits, the electrification gets hard to ignore. Sleep won’t touch it. All that energy is left crackling, begging for release.

Ten days left. Five days left. Two days left.

Go.

Boston loves this part best: the old friendly hatred, burnished and handed down generations. Rivalries here are as much nostalgia as appetite. Spectators sway in their seats, tasting blood in the water. Montreal’s banner is a provocation, and Ilya can feel the crowd rise to meet it—a tremendous roar already cresting toward impact. He likes to give them what they come for. The cheers feed him. The jeers only incite him further. There is a real sort of pleasure in playing the villain. If Boston wants blood, he’ll happily oblige.

On the ice, every sound carries. Ilya steps onto it keyed high and tuned like a fiddle. The house is full, as expected; Ilya throws up both hands, spurs the hungry fans on, and allows the rush and the waves to break over.

The first crack of the puck off the ice splits the air like a gunshot. The Metros come out heavy, testing bodies early, intent on setting the momentum through force. The neutral zone collapses into chaos. The noise spikes instantly, deafening, and Ilya can feel that long-held static finally discharging, every molecule sparking toward perfect alignment.

Hollander is on fire. He’s been on a tear lately, and it shows. The economy of his stride is immaculate. Every movement is pared down to purpose, honed into an artform that’s nearly aesthetic. Passes threaded through traffic, edges caught clean and sure. Each arrival timed barely ahead of the puck. Like he’s found some magic method to move time forward, mere milliseconds ahead of all the other players.

There’s something else to him, too. Confidence? No—something darker, more volatile, percolating just underneath the surface. Hunger? A desire to prove? Whatever Hollander’s game is, it’s dangerous. And it’s working.

They collide near the boards, stick on stick, shoulder knocking shoulder. The impact lands square and clean, a full-body check that rattles Ilya’s frame and sets his teeth singing. He laughs under his breath as they part; the crowd’s boos choke the noise. His heart kicks his lungs, blood gushing fast in his ears. He loves this. The way Hollander’s play never fails to complete the circuit. The way it strikes him conductive, sparks him alive.

The game stretches, high-voltage: a thin-fraying wire.

They trade chances, then goals—Montreal striking, Boston biting back. The crowd surges and ebbs in ferocious crests. Hollander skates like a creature possessed, relentless on the forecheck, cutting angles, beautifully forcing mistakes. In answer, Ilya drives himself harder, faster, quads burning and blood beating and lungs scraping raw. He stays out a second too long, then another. He would not trade this feeling for anything.

By the third, the score reads 4-3.

The Raiders press, desperate and loud, indiscernibly throwing bodies. The zone floods. The Metros bend, but they do not break. When the final horn cuts through the ear-splitting din, it almost feels out of nowhere. The arena erupts in a mass of boos, a wall of sound that imparts its own force.

Ilya throws back his head, mouth wide-open and panting. His chest heaves with effort; salt stings his eyes. The clamor rolls over, thick and furious. He sinks teeth in the inside of one cheek, fighting a grin that threatens to split his face wide open.

Defeat has never felt better.

They line up for the handshake. Hollander’s grip sears Ilya’s, when it comes. His palm feels heated even through the glove. When their eyes meet, Hollander’s are blown wide and scintillating. It holds—long enough to have clear meaning. Before Hollander has even fully released him, all of the blood in Ilya’s system floods south.

The locker room is pandemonium. Gear clatters; tape rends. A kick is swiftly delivered to a stall door, hard enough to rattle the metal. More than a few curses careen off the walls.

“Fucking Hollander,” someone scoffs, and the name passes down hand to hand, beaten down by repetition. Cheap chirps, ugly. Ilya hears the words “lucky” and “soft bitch” and “cocksucker”. Ilya makes no contribution. Instead he peels his jersey off of his aching shoulders and swallows the beat of his sprinting pulse.

“He’s been hot all week,” clips the voice of St-Simon. “Won’t last, ey, Roz?”

Ilya snorts, automatic. He bends to tend to the laces that he’s delayed tying, for the sole purpose of buying himself one more second.

The team’s still buzzing when Carmichael suggests going out—head down to one of those spots in Seaport, where they can throw shots back to drown the loss. A few heads snap Ilya’s way, expectant. He shakes his head, already halfway into his street clothes.

“Next time,” he grunts, flat. “I am not in the mood.” He lets his shoulders sag, just enough to sell it.

A series of groans, each dogpiling the other. Then Marleau’s voice, rough and goading, cuts in from a few stalls down.

 “Montreal’s good for that, huh, Rozanov? Plenty of ways to find comfort.”

This incites laughter, and couple of whistles. Someone shoves his shoulder. Ilya flips off his assailant without looking, snatches up his phone, and makes for the door.

“Try scoring next time, maybe,” he chides the lot of them, and takes off before anybody can clap back.

In the hush of the hallway, with his ears still ringing, Ilya finally checks his screen. There’s an unread message there, already waiting.

Jane: Hell of a game.

Ilya exhales through his nose, thumbs flying.

Nice job, he types.

Lily: Nice job.

Lily: You almost looked happy out there.

The reply comes on the order of seconds, but it feels like minutes.

Jane: We needed it.

Jane: You didn’t make it easy.

Despite himself, there’s a crack of a smile. Much subtler than the one that, a short time earlier, very nearly broke open his face. This version needs no resistance. Involuntarily, he leans back into the wall, the meat of his scapula pressing in deeply. It’s cold where it makes contact with the concrete. Or maybe it’s more that Ilya’s skin is burning.

Lily: Boston fans do not appreciate your effort. Very rude.

Lily: Maybe you need someone to appreciate you hm?

The next pause is eternal. Those three dumb little dots drone on for what might as well be forever. Ilya wonders, fleetingly, if Hollander will always be hopeless at sexting. After four years of data, he knows which way he’d bet.

Fuck it, fuck semantics. With a flourish, he types the hotel name and room number. No more commentary needed, just coordinates—an offering in the form of logistics. He pockets the phone long before the reply arrives, and bolts himself out of the building. True, Hollander might have won the day’s match; but Ilya can already feel the night tilt in his favor.

The hotel smells like sweet chemicals and stale air, neutral in the way of which all hotels aspire. Anonymous carpet. Anonymous walls. A few paintings that might depict water, or sky, or neither. They could be of anything, anywhere. That’s probably the point.

In the entryway, stripped down and starving, Ilya waits.

And waits.

And—

The knock, when it finally comes, is perfunctory—two short raps, almost apologetic. Ilya practically wrenches the door open, revealing Hollander standing there, frozen. His hair is still mussed from the cold winds outside. Ilya wants to grab him and haul him in closer—but Hollander’s already stepped in, and disrobing.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Ilya will not wait a single second longer. If the door closes behind them, he does not hear it.

They fall—right back into that self-same rhythm, in which it seems each of them has become fluent. Months of silence and distance burn down to friction—friction, motion, navigation in space. Slowly, leisurely, he works Hollander open, drawing him incrementally toward immolation. He won’t unbrand his gaze from that face for even a fraction. He wants, needs to see it—the exact point of melting, the very instant Hollander changes state. He coaxes each molecule one at a time, absorbing each and every released ion, until the lattice breaks and all resistance gives way. Until Hollander, once so solid, turns liquid in his hands. Held together no longer by force, but by flow.  

“This is for me,” he whispers in Russian, scarcely above the threshold of hearing. Whispers into Hollander when his mouth falls open—brief, curt explanations that explained nothing at all.

And later, when this dark science has ended, Hollander lets Ilya maneuver him onto his backside, press him open, and fuck him so deeply that neither can speak.

They collapse in tandem, and Ilya, wasted, bores eyes into the ceiling, drifting somewhere decisively out of his body. The white noise of the clock and A/C is a comfort, the all-encroaching silence not yet set in. Beside him, Hollander doesn’t stir immediately, and Ilya is thankful. When he finally does, it’s to reluctantly groan about cleaning. Ilya chuckles, and reaches for the side table, where there lies a damp cloth he’s already prepared. He draws the cool fabric along Hollander’s stomach, gingerly sopping up the pooled liquid. Hollander’s breath catches oddly just then, as if something’s temporarily clogged the machinery. His windpipe seems to be bubbling in his throat.

Then—abruptly—he jerks upright. In the next breath, scrambling for his T-shirt. Hollander’s movements are harsh and disjointed, like each limb is misfiring mid-sequence. His hands shake violently. With a soft curse, he realizes he’s pulled his pants on backward.

“Early flight,” he mumbles, eyes downcast, redressing. “Coach said—anyway, I have to go.” As if this is anything approaching normal. The explanation might be, but for sure not the cadence. Hollander sounds drained, wrung thin. Almost as if he has gone somewhere else.

To watch him is to witness a crash in slow motion. Sentences flood Ilya’s head: questions, declarations, protests. Some words in Russian, some in English, some mangled. “Right,” he chokes out, because it’s what he can manage.

Hollander dresses quickly, efficient in all things. A familiarly unfamiliar sequence. Ilya can see it happen in real time, the reassembling. Armor, reattached piece by piece: the squared shoulders, the stiffened spine, the gauntlets of neutrality slotting back into place.

Even still, he could not shed the stutter.

“I should—yeah. It was great. Thanks, uh, I’ll…see you.”

“Next time,” calls Ilya, scrabbling for casual and ending up with crooked.

Hollander nods once to the crude hotel carpet, and shuffles himself haphazardly out of sight.

The door shuts behind him with a complete lack of ceremony. And for a few moments after, Ilya waits in suspension. The room, now reduced in occupancy by half, has already begun to recalibrate around the egress. Heat rises. Air whooshes. The bed once shared again becomes gravity’s claim. And with Hollander’s absence—fuck—comes the silence. Seeping viciously into each of the cold, vacant spaces, like it’s been waiting all this time with a vengeance.

Hollander hadn’t looked back upon leaving.

It’s nothing, probably. One of the usual culprits. Fatigue, or timing. Too many games packed in too close together.

But Ilya’s stomach is churning.

It’s a strange new sensation, a gut-punch feeling; an unstable bond forming under poor conditions. Cold chemistry—energy, wrongly distributed. Whatever is forming doesn’t want to hold cleanly; it vibrates and pulsates and strains for rearrangement, hot in anticipation of the next collision.

Ilya, who has lived a whole life by gut-instinct, has no framework for it. This destabilization; this reaction that’s forming with no clear instruction.

It feels like gravity tripping. It feels like equilibrium slipping. It feels like whatever distance he’d thought he’s been keeping has already been spliced and reformed without his consent.

There’s still half a season to go on the docket.