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December in Ottawa arrived in layers.
Frost needling itself into the corners of the windows. The driveway forever in a state between shoveled and not and the sharp clean smell of cold air when the front door opened and closed a hundred times a day. Irina’s tiny hats breeding in impossible numbers. Christmas music beginning softly and then, under the iron-fisted administration of Yuna Hollander, becoming operational.
But before any of that, before the lists and the wrapping paper and David’s covert pork crimes, there had been the locker room.
Or, more specifically, Ilya Rozanov standing half-dressed beside his stall after practice, staring into the middle distance like a man who had seen battle and lost.
Wyatt noticed first.
“Jesus,” he said, towelling off his hair. “You look rough.”
Ilya did not look up. “I am being persecuted.”
That got attention from the room as Bood, still pulling a hoodie over his damp head, snorted. “By who? Montreal? Toronto? The media?”
Ilya sat heavily on the bench and dragged both hands down his face. “By my own husband.”
There was a moment of silence before Hayden, tying one shoe with the lazy competence of a man who had seen far too much and enjoyed most of it, started grinning before anyone else had caught up.
“Oh,” Hayden said. “Oh, no.”
Wyatt’s expression changed instantly. “Wait. Which H?”
That was the thing now, the code.
Shane himself had created it in a muttered hormonal fit one Tuesday evening while standing in the kitchen with one hand on the fridge door and the other buried in a tub of yoghurt-coated cranberries. He had looked at Ilya with murder in his eyes and informed him that at any given point in this pregnancy he was one of four things: hungry, horny, homicidal or hormonal, and everyone around him ought to start acting accordingly.
The Ottawa Centaurs, being who they were, had treated this as both vital information and the funniest thing they had ever heard.
So now Wyatt leaned back against the tape table and spread his hands. “Well?”
Ilya looked at him with the grave exhaustion of a martyr. “Horny.”
The room lost it.
Troy folded over double against his stall, wheezing as Luca made a sound like someone had physically winded him whilst a blush rose on his cheeks. Even Nick, who was usually better at pretending to be the adult in the room, had to turn away and cough into his hand.
Bood clutched his chest. “No.”
“Yes,” Ilya said darkly.
“No, like, respectfully yes, obviously, we all knew you two were obscene, but no.” said Tanner lightly
“Do not speak to me of obscene,” Ilya snapped. “Even my dick is tired.”
That made Wyatt actually sit down.
Hayden just laughed outright, full-bodied and delighted in the way of a man who had absolutely lived through this before and was enjoying the fact it was happening to someone else now.
“Oh, I cannot tell you how much joy this gives me,” he said.
Ilya glared. “You are bad friend. I dislike liking you now.”
“I am a fantastic friend. I’m just also a father and a husband and therefore I know exactly what’s happening to you.”
“Same,” Wyatt said at once, grinning now. “Oh my God, Roz. You’re in the trenches.”
Bood pointed at him. “That’s what this is my brother, you are in the horny pregnancy trenches.”
Ilya looked between them all with genuine betrayal. “I play professional hockey.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “And?”
“I train every day.” he insisted.
“Yeah.”
“I am thirty-one years old, not sixteen.”
Hayden shrugged. “Shane is nearly twenty-six weeks pregnant and apparently wants to climb you like a tree. The body wants what it wants.”
“Do not say climb.” Ilya muttered, thinking of the previous night where Shane's legs were locked around his waist as Ilya nailed him against the shower walls.
“That means it’s worse than I thought,” Troy choked out.
Ilya leaned his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. “We have game tomorrow.”
Wyatt, now fully invested, came closer and crouched in front of him like this was a serious medical consult. “Okay. Be honest. How bad are we talking?”
Ilya looked at him. “This morning, before coffee.”
Wyatt recoiled. “Oh, no.”
“Then again after breakfast.”
Luca slapped a hand over his mouth.
“Then he looked at me while I was trying to leave,” Ilya continued with the flat affect of a traumatised man giving witness testimony, “and suddenly we are late because apparently my face was ‘annoying him in a hot way.’”
Hayden made a helpless sound and bent over laughing.
“That,” he said, pointing at Ilya, “that is karma for every year you spent acting like a smug little shit.”
“I was not little.” Ilya protested.
“No, but you were a shit.” Hayden replied gleefully.
“Still are,” Wyatt added cheerfully.
Ilya ignored them. “At lunch, he texted me to ask if I was thinking about him.”
Troy wiped tears from his eyes. “Were you?”
Ilya stared. “I am always thinking about him. This is not relevant.”
“It’s very relevant,” Nick added.
“Then tonight,” Ilya went on, like no one had spoken, “if I do not go home with the correct snacks and enough energy to apparently satisfy him, I will be looked at like I have personally ruined Christmas.”
That silenced them, not because they weren’t amused. God, no. This was still the funniest thing of the week.
But because every single man in that room with experience of pregnant partners had, at one point or another, received that look.
Wyatt stood up slowly and blew out a breath. “Yeah, no. That’s real.”
Bood, still grinning, softened around the eyes. “Man. Respect.”
Hayden reached over and clapped Ilya hard on the shoulder. “You’ll survive.”
“I do not want survival,” Ilya said bitterly. “I want one night where my body is my own.”
That broke them all over again.
Wyatt was laughing too hard to stand straight. “No chance. None. You are a resource now.”
“A community service even.”
“Public infrastructure,” Bood corrected.
Hayden, still maddeningly serene, said, “The good news is he clearly still finds you attractive.”
Ilya turned his head very slowly. “I am going to kill you.”
“The better news,” Hayden continued, undeterred, “is that if he’s this horny, he’s probably feeling good in himself. Comfortable. Strong. That matters, right?”
That took some of the wind out of Ilya’s annoyance.
Because yes, that was the thing underneath all of it.
The bitching. The exhaustion and endless keeping up.
Shane was good.
Or as good as twenty-six weeks pregnant in the middle of hockey season could be. Still skating, although not playing, he was taking the off ice game time to work with trainers and nutritionists to maintain a good athletic level. And he was still sharp as shattered glass one minute and melting into Ilya the next. Still planning and wanting and apparently hungry for life in every sense.
Ilya scrubbed a hand over his mouth and sighed. “Da.”
Wyatt’s grin gentled. “You love it.”
“Of course I love it.”
Bood snorted. “You are such a loser.”
Ilya sat back and looked at them with cool contempt he did not at all feel. “I am captain of national team.”
“And in your house?” Hayden asked sweetly.
The room held its breath as Ilya closed his eyes briefly. “In my house,” he said, “I am apparently there to open jars, fetch snacks, rub feet, and fuck him into mattress whenever he points at the bedroom.”
There was momentary silence, before Troy slid dramatically off the bench onto the floor, howling.
Wyatt was doubled over and Bood had to brace himself against a locker.
Hayden, bastard that he was, only nodded with infuriating sympathy. “Yes. That sounds about right.”
By the time Ilya got home that evening he had somehow acquired three emergency snack packets from Tanner, a protein bar from Wyatt “for after, buddy, you’ll need it,” and a solemn clap on the shoulder from Hayden that had felt less like comfort and more like a curse.
The house had not been quiet in almost three weeks.
It wasn’t miserable. It was warm and alive and full. But it was no longer quiet.
There were boxes in the dining room waiting to be wrapped because Shane insisted on doing his own labels, and not just labels, but categorisation. There were lists on the fridge. Lists on the counter. Lists in the Notes app. One paper planner open on the island. A second smaller one in Shane’s work bag. The family calendar colour-coded to an extent Ilya privately thought should probably qualify for intervention.
And in the middle of all of it, gloriously, breathtakingly and impossibly, was Shane.
Twenty-six weeks and change into their second pregnancy, all long limbs and careful grace and a swell that no longer hid beneath his jumpers no matter how offensively oversized they were. He had taken to this pregnancy with a kind of strength that still managed to catch Ilya off guard. Not because he had expected less. Shane was Shane. He was all hidden steel and brutal endurance and a strange exquisite stubbornness that made him seem delicate only to people stupid enough not to know him.
But still, this time there was more ease in him.
The mood swings still came in flashes like summer storms. Sudden, intense, gone before anyone had properly found an umbrella. The aversion to pork had, if anything, deepened into something biblical. Bacon was a no-no. Ham was a one way ticket to the sofa if Ilya dared bring it in the house. The smell of pulled pork had once driven Shane bodily out of the kitchen and onto the back step in socks, where he had stood in the snow-silvered dark breathing through his mouth and muttering that if he died it would be David’s fault for having no respect for his growing second grandchild.
And the yoghurt-coated snacks?
Ilya was fairly certain Yupik, the Montreal-based snack company, ought to be sending them a fruit basket in gratitude at this point or giving them an endorsement.
It had started with raisins, as these things apparently must. Then pretzels. Then almonds and cranberries. Then pecans one week, though those had been rejected with affront the following Tuesday because they were, Shane had said with withering disgust, “too crunchy.” Which meant nothing and meant everything at the same time.
Now the pantry held clear containers of white-coated nonsense like some deranged winter apothecary. Yoghurt-covered raisins. Pretzels. Almonds. Cranberries. Freeze-dried strawberries and one experimental bag of yoghurt-coated peanuts that Shane was iffy about and which therefore remained untouched beside the kettle as a warning to others.
The Centaurs, naturally, had adapted. They were hockey players. Adaptation was what they did.
Tanner kept packets in his jacket pockets like a suburban dad carrying tissues as well baby baggies of pickle slices. Wyatt had a stash in his car, his locker, and at least once, inexplicably, his skate bag. Bood had labelled one tin in the team kitchen HOLLZY EMERGENCY RATIONS only to get yelled at by Shane for “treating me like I’m a zoo animal.” Troy and Harris had begun casually checking in with, “Which H are we at today?”
The team had not shut up about it since. Whilst Ilya, meanwhile, was simply trying to keep up.
This was harder than it sounded, largely because Shane was not slowing down with anything like acceptable obedience.
He was slowing, yes. A little. Enough that Ilya noticed the extra hand he sometimes pressed to the base of his back while standing at the island. And that he sat to pull his socks on now rather than balancing on one leg like a menace. Even Yuna had begun appearing at the house three mornings a week under increasingly flimsy pretences that usually dissolved into, “Move. I am here to stop you idiots from ruining Christmas.”
But Shane himself was still moving through the month with that same brisk, ordered competence that could make domesticity feel like military strategy. Cards. Catering contingencies. Sleeping arrangements. Child-safe decorations. Timed oven schedules and cross-referenced dietary requirements for the invading army of Centaurs and their WAGs and HABS and assorted children who would descend upon the house on Christmas Day in what Shane kept calling, with grim precision, “waves.”
“Stop saying invasion,” Ilya had told him two nights earlier, watching his husband stand at the dining table in one of Ilya’s old grey sweaters and glasses, annotating a guest list with three different pens.
Shane hadn’t looked up. “It is an invasion.”
“It is Christmas.”
“It’s nearly two dozen adults, multiple children, three babies, Luca, and whatever chaos Dykstra personally brings through the door.”
Ilya had smiled despite himself. “Luca is adult.”
“Debatable on the best of days.” Shane snapped.
Now, a week before Christmas, the operation had somehow escalated further because Yuna was in the kitchen.
Which meant Shane had become unbearable in a very specific, highly inherited way.
Ilya stood in the doorway with Irina on one hip and simply watched.
Yuna was at the island in cream cashmere and immaculate lipstick, one hand on a pen, the other on Shane’s paper list, and Shane stood across from her in thick socks, navy lounge trousers, and a forest-green sweater stretched gently over the roundness of his stomach. His glasses sat low on his nose as one hand was planted on his hip. The other hovered over a legal pad covered in tidy columns.
Mother and son.
Same dark precision in the eyes. Same clipped rhythm to their speech when they were in administrative mode and terrifying ability to make words sound like tailored weapons.
“Twenty-three is not enough chairs,” Shane said.
“It is if you stop arranging the room like a tribunal,” Yuna replied.
“I am not arranging the room like a tribunal.” He protested, rolling his eyes.
Ilya looked at Irina. “He is arranging room like tribunal.”
Irina, two and newly militant in all things, repeated at once, “Tibunal.”
Neither Hollander glanced over, caught up in their planning.
“J.J. and Hayden will each bring one highchair,” Shane continued, ticking something off. “Lisa said she can bring the collapsible travel cot if Troy and Harris are planning to stay late.”
Yuna looked up then, arching one immaculate brow. “Are they planning to stay late?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because Troy cannot leave a room if people are still laughing and Harris can’t leave Troy unsupervised after two mulled wines.”
That, Ilya thought, was very fair.
Ilya shifted Irina higher and let his gaze drift over Shane again, helplessly. The glasses. The expression and t way he stood there marshalling a holiday gathering with the same intensity he reserved for playoff strategy.
He was so much like Yuna it would have been funny if it hadn’t also made Ilya want to drag him backward into the nearest room and worship him properly.
Shane caught him staring.
“What?” he asked, immediate and suspicious.
Ilya’s lips curved into an innocent smile as he walked over. “Nothing.”
Yuna did look up then, saw the expression on his face, and made a very soft sound of long-suffering disgust. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not in the kitchen and in front of little ears.”
“Who said anything about kitchen?” Ilya asked, offended.
Shane, to his credit, flushed and pushed the glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “You’re both impossible.”
Irina wriggled on Ilya’s hip. “ 'bushka Yuna?”
Yuna softened at once, all sharpness dissolving. “Yes, my angel?”
“Cookie.”
Shane turned immediately. “No, she’s already had– ”
Yuna was already producing a shortbread star from somewhere on the counter as though by magic. “One.”
“Mom!”
“One,” Yuna repeated, and gave it to Irina, who accepted it with the joy of royalty receiving tribute.
Ilya hid a smile in Irina’s hair.
Shane narrowed his eyes at both of them in a way so uncannily like Yuna that Ilya nearly laughed.
God, he loved this family.
Later that afternoon David arrived and, as ever, made the house feel warmer within ten seconds of taking his boots off.
He came in smelling like snow and aftershave and outside air, cheeks pink from the cold, carrying two shopping bags and wearing the expression of a man prepared to be useful in exactly the ways his wife would disapprove of if she knew the specifics.
He kissed Yuna’s cheek, kissed Shane’s temple, let Irina launch herself at his knees shouting “Gampa!” and then looked at Ilya over the top of her curls with the conspiratorial gravity of a fellow criminal.
“We need wrapping paper,” Shane said from the island without preamble.
David did not hesitate. “On it.”
“And more clementines.” added Yuna.
“Done.” He agreed joyfully.
“And those little cocktail sticks with the decorative– ”
“Say no more.” He replied, suspiciously too happy to be sent out once more on errands. "Ilya can come with me, let you two continue the Christmas war council."
Yuna looked up slowly. “David.”
He smiled at her with thirty plus years of marital survival in it. “Yes, my love?”
Her eyes narrowed, but only faintly. “Hmm.” already suspicious.
Ilya caught the glint in David’s eye and knew it was time.
Three minutes later they were in the car with Irina strapped into her seat behind them as accomplice and alibi, while the list on David’s phone had somehow acquired three extra items in the transfer from kitchen to vehicle.
David drove. Ilya sat in the passenger seat as Irina kicked her boots against the back of his seat and sang to herself in a slurred little braid of English and French.
They made it exactly nine minutes before David pulled into a side street and handed Ilya a foil-wrapped parcel from the paper bag at his feet.
“I saw your face this morning when Shane started on the pork lecture again,” David said kindly.
Ilya looked down.
Bacon sandwich, still warm and enough to bring tears to his eyes.
His eyes closed briefly. “I love you.”
“I know.”
In the backseat, Irina chirped, “Papa what?”
Ilya twisted around, guiltless. “Nothing. Grown-up business.”
David passed him a second bag. “And there’s pulled pork bao buns for later. I’m not taking them into the house. Yuna will smell them from the hall and Shane will stage a coup.”
Ilya bit into the sandwich with something close to orgasm.
Salt. Meat. Grease. Bread. Actual joy.
He moaned quietly as David snorted and pulled away from the curb. “You poor bastard.” Careful to keep his voice low on the bad word.
“Da.” Ilya mumbled around a mouthful.
“You know,” David said conversationally as they turned toward the shops, “I never thought fatherhood for my son would involve me running covert pork operations.”
Ilya chewed, swallowed, and sighed. “Life is strange.”
“Indeed,” David agreed, glancing at him before looking back to the road. “Although, for what it’s worth, this part isn’t actually that strange.”
David looked into the mirror. “You’re in on this too now?”
“Snack,” she repeated, with greater conviction.
Ilya broke off a safe corner of bacon and bread from the end of the sandwich and passed it back. “Do not tell Papa.”
Irina took it, eyes enormous and sincere. “No tell Papa.”
David laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes at the next junction.
By the time they got back, Ilya smelled faintly of mint gum and cold air and David had hidden the remaining bao buns in the garage fridge like contraband.
Inside, the operation had advanced.
Yuna had somehow transformed the dining table from paperwork headquarters into wrapping station. Shane was sitting now, one hand low beneath his stomach in absent support while he checked names off the final Christmas Day roster. His glasses were still on. A half-empty tin of yoghurt-coated cranberries sat by his elbow.
Ilya felt his whole body soften on sight.
His beautiful impossible husband, carrying their second child with more grace than the world deserved, running Christmas like an event manager with a side business in emotional repression, chewing sweet white-coated fruit with tiny irritated bites because apparently that was where all his peace lived now.
Shane looked up as they came in.
“You were gone forty-eight minutes.”
David took off his coat. “Traffic.”
Irina, betrayer to the end, immediately shouted, “Gampa got snack!”
Shane’s eyes narrowed and Ilya froze halfway through taking off his gloves.
David, astonishingly, recovered first. “For her.”
Irina nodded with great seriousness. “For me.”
Shane looked at his father. Looked at Ilya. Looked at Irina, then at the pair of shopping bags, all of which did in fact contain legitimate Christmas items, because David was not an amateur.
His suspicion lingered.
Then a smell drifted from somewhere in the hall, nothing dangerous, only one of the clementine bags splitting slightly open and Shane’s expression changed from suspicion to need.
“Oh,” he said, setting down his pen at once. “Okay, no, I need those now.”
Ilya was moving before he’d fully thought. He caught the bag from David, peeled two clementines in brutal efficient strips, and brought them over just as Shane pressed the back of one hand briefly to his mouth.
That was the thing after so many years together. The unshowy, relentless attentiveness of it and the way Ilya’s body had simply learned Shane’s before his brain caught up.
Shane took one section, then another, shoulders easing by degrees. “Thank you.”
“Da.”
Yuna watched the exchange without comment, but Ilya saw the softness in her eyes.
Then, of course, because the universe was committed to balance, Shane looked up from the clementines and said, “Did you chew gum?”
Ilya did not react quickly enough.
Yuna looked delighted as David visibly abandoned him.
Shane narrowed his eyes. “You did.”
“No.”
“You absolutely did.” he insisted, popping another segment into his mouth.
Ilya spread his hands. “Maybe little.”
Shane stared and David made a helpless noise into his fist.
“Was there pork?” Shane asked, with the terrifying calm of a man already knowing the answer.
“No,” Ilya said.
It was technically true. There was no pork now.
Shane looked at him for one long, brutal second over the top of his glasses. God, just like Yuna. Then he turned to his father.
“Was there pork?”
David, traitor, said at once, “Yes.”
“David,” Ilya said, wounded.
“You were never going to survive that interrogation, son. I would rather take the sacrifice of folding first than you.”
Shane leant back in his chair, clementine section in hand, one brow raised. “You ate bacon.”
Ilya considered denial again, found it pointless, and sighed. “Da.”
“And then came back into my house.”
“Our house.” Ilya corrected, the smallest amount of sass present which perhaps wasn't wise.
“Into my airspace.”
Ilya, who would under any other circumstances have taken this to bed and made something indecent of it, wisely chose humility. “I chewed gum.”
“That is not the point.”
“No,” Yuna said smoothly. “The point is that your husband and your father have been running black-market pig errands behind your back like teenagers.”
David brightened. “That does sound fun when you say it like that.”
Shane closed his eyes.
Then, because he was pregnant and moody and furious and adorable, he opened them again and held out his hand to Ilya without a word.
Ilya went at once and Shane laced their fingers together, squeezed once, and then said, “You’re not allowed near me with pork breath, but you can sit and be ashamed.”
Ilya sat beside him immediately. “I am deeply ashamed.”
“You’re lying.”
“Da. But I promise i was thinking of you the entire time I ate it.”
That got the smallest smile at the corner of Shane’s mouth.
Victory.
The evening folded in around them after that.
Irina, overtired and sticky with a second illicit cookie, fell asleep draped over David like a tiny exhausted queen. Yuna wrapped gifts with terrifying precision. The Christmas Day list was finalised, amended, finalised again, and finally declared law and Shane ate half a tin of yoghurt-coated pretzels, one clementine, three slices of toast, and then announced with abrupt and total conviction that he needed Ilya in bed within the hour or someone was going to suffer.
David excused himself to the garage fridge, shoulders shaking with laughter, leaving a sleepy Irina curled on the sofa.
Yuna did not even blink. “I am old enough to remember him as a baby. Nothing you two do can frighten me now.”
Shane flushed scarlet. “Mother.”
Ilya, of course, was immediately hard.
He looked at Shane.
Shane looked back, pink-eared and furious and beautiful, sweater soft over the curve of their child, glasses still on, one hand braced at the underside of his stomach as if both soothing and presenting the life there all at once.
There was no word in Russian. Still not one that was good enough.
Only this great helpless certainty in Ilya’s chest that whatever else December was, whether that was snow and snack wrappers and covert bacon and military Christmas logistics and the feral beautiful chaos of the Centaurs about to descend on their home. At the end of the day, it was theirs.
Shane.
Irina.
Him.
The baby shifting beneath Shane’s skin.
Yuna and David in the kitchen. A team that loved them and a house too full to be quiet and far too warm to ever feel empty.
Good things, Ilya thought, looking at the life they had made with both hands and all their stubbornness.
Good things, indeed.