Chapter Text
The phone rings at 3:14 a.m.
Ilya stares at the screen for a second before answering. Not because it's late, but because it's Shane and Shane hasn't called him in months.
They still see each other at games, but ever since he had met “Braxton” or whatever the finance snobs' name was and started dating him, Shane had disappeared from his life.
Ilya keeps telling himself he isn’t bitter about it, and their hook-ups in secret had to end at some point. He just didn’t want it to be over another man whom Shane had deemed safe enough to love openly, unlike Ilya.
No more texts, no more calls, no more late-night sex marathons. Now his phone is lighting up with Shane's name at three in the morning.
"Hollander?" Ilya answers.
Silence.
Breathing.
Then:
"Can you come get me? I’m in Boston."
Immediately, he is fully awake. Sitting up in bed, while swinging his legs to get up. Because Shane sounds wrong, he’s not drunk and he doesn’t sound like he has been crying but he sounds so off. Like every ounce of energy has been drained out of him.
"Where are you?"
Shane gives him an address. An apartment building that Ilya doesn’t recognize.
"What happened?"
A long pause.
Then quietly:
"I don't want to be here anymore."
The words hit like a punch.
"Hollander."
Another pause.
"Please come pick me up."
Ilya is five steps ahead of Shane right now, already grabbing his keys. "I'm coming."
The line disconnects.
Twenty-five minutes later he's standing outside a very nice apartment building, his heart hammering so hard it hurts.
Shane buzzes him in immediately. The apartment door is cracked open and for a second Ilya just stares. The place is a disaster, a lamp knocked over, a chair lying on its side, broken glass glittering across part of the kitchen floor.
Something cold settles in his stomach.
"Hollander?"
The answer comes from the living room.
"Here." His voice sounds small.
Ilya follows it before he stops dead in his tracks.
Shane is sitting on the floor beside the couch; he’s not crying, but his eyes look dead as he stares ahead. Just sitting there staring at nothing.
The second thing Ilya notices is the blood, there is a thin line dried along his cheek from a cut near his temple. Tiny pieces of glass still caught in his hair.
For a second the entire room goes white with rage. "Who did that?"
Shane immediately looks away, “Brandon got upset that the dinner he made didn’t fit my diet and he kind of lost his temper. It was a bad day at the office for him; he was on edge, and I wasn’t exactly acting grateful. He left, took the only car I had access to.”
For a moment Ilya thought about the fact that he thought this Brandon guy lived in Montreal, but from what Ilya knew he was rich. He probably had multiple properties and traveled for work. Ilya just hadn’t known he had a place in Boston. He decides it isn’t a good time to bring this up.
"Shane," Ilya says carefully, using Hollander’s first name. Shane doesn’t seem to acknowledge the change.
"He didn't mean to; he’s been so stressed." Shane’s answer comes quickly, as if he has already defended this point to people time and time again. How long had this been going on?
Ilya feels sick. "He threw a glass at you."
Shane flinches at the accusation, “He threw a glass in my general direction.”
Ilya is having a very hard time believing that Shane is telling the truth right now, or maybe Shane is also lying to himself.
He had noticed at games the way Shane always looks exhausted lately—the constant checking of his phone. Ilya had chalked it up to some stress with sponsors or something; besides, Shane wasn’t Ilya’s to worry about anymore.
"He didn't mean to," Shane repeats.
"He threw a glass at your head," Ilya repeats.
"He was angry."
Ilya closes his eyes for one second, running his hands over his face like this was a bad dream he could wake up from. Because if he doesn't, he's afraid he'll put his fist through a wall. When he opens them again Shane is staring at the floor.
Shoulders hunched, somewhat curled in on himself. The way people wait when they expect to be yelled at or blamed or told they deserve it.
"What really happened?"
For a long time Shane says nothing.
Then:
"I forgot."
"Forgot what?"
A humorless laugh, "he wanted to make me dinner."
The words sound ridiculous. Childish.
"I stopped to get groceries." Shane swallows. "My phone died."
Silence.
"He thought I was ignoring his dinner plans, and when I told him I couldn’t eat the dinner...."
Ilya stares.
Shane keeps talking. Like once he's started he can't stop.
"He said I don't care about him." Another laugh broke from Shane. Thin and miserable, "He said I embarrass him."
The cut on his temple stands out starkly under the apartment lights.
"He said nobody else would ever put up with me. I know I’m high maintenance, but that was a lot."
The sentence hangs there heavily in the room and from the way Shane says it, Ilya knows this isn't the first time he's heard it. Maybe not the hundredth.
"I should've called." The words come out barely above a whisper. "I should've found a charger."
This twists at Ilya’s heart, he still thinks this is his fault.
"No," Ilya says firmly.
Shane doesn't look up.
"No," Ilya repeats.
"I should've—" Shane starts.
"No." Ilya raises his voice a little.
The word comes out sharper this time. Finally, Shane raises his head, and for the first time, Ilya realizes Shane isn't afraid of his boyfriend getting angry. He's expecting it, planning his careful little life around it, and enduring it.
"Look at me." Ilya says more softly.
Slowly Shane does.
"You forgot dinner."
A tiny nod.
"Your phone died."
Another nod.
"Neither of those things means someone gets to throw a fucking glass at you."
Shane's expression crumples. Just slightly. The first sign he's actually hearing it.
"He wasn't always like this." The sentence sounds desperate. Like Shane is trying to convince himself, not Ilya.
"He’s usually nice, it’s just all this work stress."
Ilya's chest aches. Because he believes him. People like that usually are nice at first. That's how it works.
"I know." Ilya sighs. The simple answer seems to hit harder than an argument would.
Suddenly, Shane's eyes fill with tears. "I don't know how this happened." The terrifying realization that he doesn't know when things became this bad is hitting Shane’s expression.
One moment, he's sitting upright. The next, he's folding forward, face in his hands, crying so hard he can barely breathe.
Ilya crosses the room immediately. Just dropping down beside him and pulling him close. For one horrible second, Shane tenses. Like he's expecting to get hurt. Then he realizes it's Ilya and completely falls apart. The sound that comes out of him is devastating.
“He’d kill us if he knew you were here,” Shane mutters, and somehow Ilya doesn’t think that Shane is exaggerating.
Ilya wraps both arms around him and holds on, "You called me."
Shane nods against his shoulder, "I didn't know who else to call in Boston." The confession comes out muffled and somehow makes Ilya hold him tighter.
Outside, dawn is beginning to lighten the sky. Inside, the apartment is silent except for Shane's uneven breathing.
"He's going to be angry that I left."
Ilya looks around at the broken glass. At the blood on Shane's cheek. At the wreckage of a life that was happening. Then he puts a hand on the back of Shane's neck.
"You're not staying here."
For the first time all night, Shane closes his eyes.
Eventually, Ilya stood up and said, "Come on," in the same calm tone he might have used to tell Shane they were leaving a restaurant before closing, and Shane nodded without arguing and went to collect the few belongings he seemed to care about: his phone charger, his wallet, his passport, and a small duffel bag from the bedroom.
The elevator ride down felt suspended outside normal time, the kind of silence that follows a disaster when both people are too exhausted to perform conversation, and the parking garage was nearly empty, cold enough that Shane hugged his jacket around himself even though the temperature wasn't really low enough to justify it, which Ilya recognized as shock rather than weather because he had seen enough injuries, panic attacks, and post-game crashes to know when a body was running on leftover adrenaline.
When they reached the car, Shane automatically moved toward the passenger side and then stopped with his hand hovering inches from the handle as if he'd forgotten, for one disorienting second, what came next, so Ilya unlocked the door without comment and waited until Shane climbed in and buckled his seatbelt before starting the engine.
The drive back to Ilya's apartment was quiet in a way that would have been unbearable if either of them had possessed enough energy to fill it, streetlights sliding across Shane's face in intermittent bands of gold that kept catching the cut near his temple and the dried blood along his cheek, and every time the light touched the injury Ilya felt the same surge of anger rise in his chest.
After almost twenty minutes, Shane unlocked his phone and stared at the screen. "I have three hundred missed calls and texts," he said eventually, his voice flat with exhaustion rather than panic, and when Ilya glanced over, he could see the endless notifications stacking over one another.
"Don't answer any of them tonight," Ilya said.
Shane gave a small laugh. "I wasn't planning to."
A few miles later, he opened an airline app, typed Montreal into the destination field, and stared at the available flights for so long that Ilya wondered whether he would back out, but eventually Shane selected a departure for the following afternoon, entered his information with fingers that still shook slightly, and booked a one-way ticket home. “I need to go to Montreal, we have a game in a few days.” He mutters, like he somehow needs to justify to Ilya why he would be going to his home city.
"That sounds smart," Ilya said, because it did, even though the finality of the booking landed in his chest like a weight.
By the time they reached Ilya's house, the eastern horizon had begun to pale with the first hint of dawn, and Shane looked even more exhausted than he had in the apartment, as if the simple act of deciding to leave had allowed his body to stop pretending it could keep going indefinitely.
The house was dim and quiet, carrying the familiar smells of coffee grounds and laundry detergent and whatever takeout Ilya had eaten two nights earlier.
Ilya notices Shane's shoulders visibly loosen the moment the door shuts behind them, not because he was suddenly okay but probably because his nervous system finally believed nobody was going to start yelling at him again in the next thirty seconds.
Ilya disappeared down the hallway and came back with a towel and a toothbrush still sealed in plastic, setting them on the bed in the guest room with the same practical efficiency he used for road-trip packing.
"You can use these. The bathroom is across the hall. If you need anything, wake me up."
Shane looked at him then, really looked at him, eyes red from crying, cut bright against pale skin, relief and shame and something unmistakably familiar all tangled together, and Ilya felt the old pull in his chest so strongly that for one dangerous second he imagined crossing the room, touching the bruise-shadowed edge of Shane's jaw, pulling him close, kissing him the way he had wanted to since the moment the phone rang at 3:14 in the morning.
The desire was real, immediate, and wildly inappropriate, because Shane still had a boyfriend, an abusive boyfriend he absolutely needed to leave, and the last thing Shane needed tonight was another man turning his vulnerability into an opportunity, so Ilya stepped back instead of forward and forced his voice to stay steady.
"You should sleep. We can figure out the rest tomorrow."
Something flickered across Shane's face, disappointment maybe, or relief that Ilya wasn't going to make this more complicated, and then he nodded. "Yeah. Okay."
When Ilya reaches the door, Shane says, "Thank you for coming."
Ilya swallowed past the knot in his throat. "There was never a chance I wasn't going to."
He closed the door gently behind him and stood in the hallway for several seconds afterward, listening to the muffled sounds of Shane moving around the room, and only when he heard the mattress creak and then silence settle over the apartment did he finally allow himself to lean against the wall and try not to acknowledge the truth he had been avoiding for months: one phone call had been enough, one phone call from Shane saying Can you come get me? and Ilya would have crossed any distance, broken any schedule, ignored any consequence, because whatever else they were or weren't to each other, whatever boundaries he needed to hold tonight for Shane's sake, the part of him that belonged to Shane had answered before the first ring finished.