Chapter Text
Shane Hollander woke up with a headache, a dry mouth, and a girl stealing most of his blanket.
For a few seconds, he stayed still and tried to remember what time it was, what day it was, and whether he had practice that morning. The room around him slowly came back into focus. His room at the Sigma house. Gray light through the blinds. Clothes on the chair. Textbooks on the floor. His hockey bag half open near the closet. A water bottle on the nightstand that he was pretty sure had been empty before he fell asleep.
The girl beside him shifted under the blanket and pulled it higher over her shoulder.
Shane looked at the ceiling.
Right.
Friday night party.
Too many people in the kitchen.
Hayden yelling over the music.
A girl laughing at something Shane had said near the stairs.
He remembered all of that.
He did not remember her name.
That was bad, but not surprising. Shane had been told more than once that his life would be easier if he stopped bringing girls upstairs after parties. He had also been told to stop leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor, stop finishing everyone’s protein shakes, and stop acting like being captain gave him the right to boss people around outside the rink.
He had ignored all of those suggestions.
The girl opened her eyes and caught him looking at her.
“Morning,” she said, voice low and still sleepy.
“Morning.”
She smiled a little, then looked around his room with the slow confusion of someone waking up somewhere that was not her own bed. Her top was on the floor near the desk. One of her boots was by the door, the other beside Shane’s laundry basket. The Sigma house was quiet for once, but not peaceful. It had the dead silence of a place full of hungover college students after a wild night.
“You have practice?” she asked.
“Later.”
“I don't have to leave either for like another hour”
There was something in the way she said it that made Shane look at her again. She was awake now, hair messy, one hand still holding the blanket against her chest. She looked amused, like she already knew he was trying to figure out whether he had enough time to be responsible.
He did have time.
Not a lot, but enough.
So when she leaned closer, Shane didn’t overthink it. He kissed her, she laughed softly against his mouth, and whatever awkward morning conversation they could have had disappeared for a while. The house stayed mostly quiet, except for the occasional distant sound of someone coughing downstairs or a door shutting too hard.
Then the moans became a little louder and the headboard started hitting the wall.
Once.
Twice.
An each time louder.
Shane couldn't bring himself to care, thinking everybody was probably still asleep. A second later, someone knocked hard on the door.
“Shane!”
It was JJ.
Shane closed his eyes and the girl looked at him with panic in his eyes.
“Bro,” JJ said from the other side of the door, sounding already anoyyed. “I don’t know who’s in there, and honestly I don’t care, but some of us are trying not to throw up.”
The girl pressed her face into Shane’s shoulder, shaking with silent laughter. Shane reached for the blanket and pulled it higher over both of them.
“We’re not doing anything.”
There was a pause.
Then JJ said, completely flat, “The wall disagrees.”
Somewhere down the hall, another voice groaned, “Tell him to stop.”
JJ knocked again, softer this time, but somehow more annoying.
“I’m serious. The headboard is hitting my wall. My actual wall. I can feel it in my skull.”
Shane turned his face into the pillow for a second.
“Move rooms.”
“I live here.”
“So do I.”
“Yeah, and you're making sure the whole house knows that”
The girl lost the fight and laughed out loud.
JJ went quiet for half a second.
Then he said, “Nice. She’s awake too. Great. Good morning to both of you. Please fuck more quietly.”
Shane grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it at the door. It hit with a sad, soft thud.
“Go away, JJ.”
“I was going away until your bed started attacking the drywall.”
There were footsteps, then another voice from farther down the hall, probably Chris.
“Is he done?”
JJ answered without moving away from the door. “He says they’re not doing anything.”
Chris gave a tired laugh. “Yeah, okay.”
The girl was still laughing when JJ finally walked away, muttering something about ibuprofen and suing the hockey team for emotional damages.
After that, the moment was pretty much gone.
Shane rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling again. The girl settled beside him, still smiling.
“Your friends are loud.”
“They’re worse when they’re awake, but tey are fun, it like a sort of Stockholm syndrome.”
She laughed, then sat up and started looking for her clothes. Shane watched her move around the room without rushing. She didn’t seem embarrassed, which he appreciated. Some mornings were awkward because people made them awkward. She didn’t. She seemed perfectly comfortable picking her boot up from beside his laundry basket and checking her phone like she had known all along how this would go.
That made Shane feel worse about not knowing her name.
She noticed.
“You forgot my name.”
Shane looked at her for a second.
“…I was really hoping you weren’t going to ask me that.”
She laughed.
“You forgot.”
“I know your major.”
“No, you don’t.”
Shane hesitated.
“…I know you have a major.”
She shook her head, but she was smiling. “Madison.”
“Madison,” he repeated, like saying it confidently now could fix the fact that he hadn’t known it thirty seconds ago.
“You’re lucky you’re hot.”
He got dressed while she finished getting ready, and then he walked her downstairs because he wasn’t completely terrible. The Sigma house looked even worse in daylight. Red cups on the floor. Someone’s jacket hanging from the banister. Pizza boxes stacked on the coffee table. A hoodie Shane vaguely recognized as Hayden’s was lying in the middle of the hallway like it had given up.
In the kitchen, JJ was standing in front of the sink drinking water straight from a measuring cup.
He looked at Madison, then at Shane, then back at Madison.
“Sorry about earlier.”
Madison smiled. “It’s fine.”
JJ nodded seriously. “It wasn’t personal. I just thought I was dying and the noise was not gonna help.”
“You always think you’re dying,” Shane said.
JJ pointed at him with the measuring cup. “And one day I’ll be right.”
Shane opened the front door for Madison. Her Uber was already outside, engine running, the driver looking impatient in that specific way Uber drivers always looked outside fraternity houses.
Madison paused on the porch.
“For the record, I’m not offended.”
“About JJ?”
“About the name.”
Shane winced a little. “Still not my best moment.”
“No, but at least you didn’t guess wrong. That would’ve been worse.”
“I thought about it.”
She leaned in and kissed him, quick and casual.
“Bye, Shane.”
“Bye, Madison.”
He waited until she got into the car before going back inside.
By then, the house was waking up in pieces. Somebody was showering upstairs. Someone else was cursing in the hallway because they couldn’t find their phone. Hayden was in the kitchen now, sitting at the table with sunglasses on, even though they were indoors. He had a bowl of cereal in front of him and looked personally betrayed by it.
“Was that Madison?” Hayden asked.
Shane grabbed a water bottle from the fridge. “Yeah.”
That was it.
No big investigation. No dramatic commentary. Hayden had seen enough girls leave Shane’s room that it wasn’t news. None of them cared as much as they pretended to when they were bored. They made jokes, sure, but mostly because everyone in the house made jokes about everything.
JJ sat down at the table and put his head in his hands.
“I need everyone to speak softer.”
“No one’s talking,” Hayden said.
“You’re breathing loud.”
Shane leaned against the counter and drank half the water bottle in one go.
He had a life people understood easily.
That was one of the reasons it worked.
He was Shane Hollander, captain of the hockey team, junior year, Sigma house, decent grades, good family, good manners when he needed them. He was the kind of guy professors liked even when they pretended not to. The kind of guy freshmen on the team listened to. The kind of guy girls smiled at across parties before he even said anything.
He wasn’t perfect, but he was predictable.
At least to everyone else.
There were parts of him that didn’t fit into the version people liked so much. Parts he kept away from Sigma, away from hockey, away from mornings like this one. Those parts lived in deleted messages and apartments across town and names he didn’t save in his phone. They weren’t emotional. They weren’t romantic. They were private, and Shane preferred them that way.
He had never told Hayden.
He had never told JJ.
He had never told anyone on the team.
Not because he thought they were terrible people. They weren’t. They were idiots, but they were his idiots. Still, there were some things that changed the way people looked at you, and Shane didn’t want to find out what that change looked like.
Girls could come to the house.
Guys could not.
That was the rule.
It had worked so far.
Practice later that morning helped clear his head. It always did. The rink smelled like cold air and sweat and old rubber, and Shane felt better the second his skates hit the ice. Hockey made sense in a way people didn’t. If he worked hard, he played well. If he made a mistake, he fixed it. If someone hit him, he hit back harder.
Coach yelled. The guys complained. Shane pushed himself until his lungs burned and the headache from the night before finally disappeared.
After practice, the locker room was loud and damp and crowded. Hayden was arguing with Chris about a class assignment. JJ was lying on the floor with a towel over his face. Someone had music playing from a speaker that kept cutting out every few seconds.
The Sigma mixer came up while Shane was getting dressed, it was technically a joint party, which meant Sigma was hosting, Delta was invited, and half the sororities on campus would show up because Greek life loved pretending rivalry was a social structure instead of an excuse to drink together.
Delta was a men’s fraternity, same as Sigma. Their house was a few blocks away, bigger from the outside but uglier inside, according to Hayden. Sigma and Delta had been competing over everything for years: intramural sports, fundraising events, party attendance, who had the better alumni connections, who had the worse plumbing. Most of it was stupid.
Shane didn’t care that much, he cared enough to beat Delta at every opportunity, obviously but not enough to spend his whole week thinking about it.
By the time evening came, the Sigma house looked almost presentable. Someone had cleared the cups from the living room. Someone had moved the couch back to its normal spot. The kitchen still looked questionable, but the lights were low enough that nobody would notice after an hour. Music shook softly through the floors, getting louder as more people arrived.
Shane was downstairs in a clean shirt, holding a beer he wasn’t really drinking, when Hayden leaned close enough to be heard over the music.
“Our friends are here.”
Shane looked toward the entrance without much interest.
A few guys had just come in, laughing and shaking hands with people they were supposed to dislike. One of them hugged a girl from Kappa. Another went straight to the kitchen like he already knew where everything was. Behind them, a tall blond guy stepped inside and paused near the doorway, taking in the room with a calm expression that didn’t match the noise around him.
“That’s Rozanov,” Hayden said, because apparently he assumed Shane needed names for every Delta guy.
Shane had heard the name before.
Everyone had.
Ilya Rozanov. Russian. Junior. Delta. Quiet, but not shy. Had dated some girl sophomore year for a couple months and then nothing after that. People said he was hard to read. People said he was rude. People said a lot of things about anyone who didn’t make themselves easy to understand.
Shane watched him for maybe two seconds.
Campus gossip had gotten one thing right.
He was really hot.
He also hoped that one of the other rumors about him were true.
Shane was trying really hard to not look to interested in the guy, but he needed to stare, he was mesmerized. This was the moment in the party when a bad idea looked better than it should.
Ilya said something to the guy beside him, and the guy laughed. Shane looked away before he could get caught looking.
Hayden was still talking, completely unaware of anything happening in Shane’s head.
“I’m telling you, if Troy starts poker again tonight, do not let me play.”
“You lost money last time?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“You lost twenty dollars and now you think you have a gambling problem?”
Hayden gave him a concerned look and took a drink from his cup.
Shane smiled and let the conversation move on.
Across the room, Ilya Rozanov disappeared into the party like he was just another guy from another fraternity and for the rest of the night, Shane almost managed to treat him that way.