Imagine you're Shane Hollander and everyone you know is getting married. You go on Facebook and see your friends from school settling down with girls they met at work, girls they knew at school, girls they found on an app.
You speak to cousins who you remember playing pond hockey with when you were 10 years old (when you would all say you never wanted a girlfriend because they'd get in the way of you winning the Stanley Cup). They've sent you engagement photos and save the dates (and you've won the Stanley Cup).
Your teammates have all proposed to their beautiful, understanding girlfriends and you are invited to all their weddings (never with a plus one).
You've spent the better part of the decade hooking up with your arch rival behind the closed doors of hotel rooms. Until you walked out of his home and told yourself you couldn't go back. You couldn't let this be any more than sex, and the only way to do that was to break it off completely.
You think, distantly, about how no one has ever made you feel the way Ilya Rozanov does, but maybe that's because you haven't found the right woman yet.
You see the way Hayden smiles at Jackie when he sees her after a game, the way your cousins look like they're glowing in the photos of them down on one knee on the beach at sunset. You see anniversary posts online where couples post about how wonderful they make each other feel, how even at their worst they love each other so, so much. Maybe you'll feel like that too when the right girl comes along.
And then the right girl comes along.
She is so funny. She is so beautiful. She understands your world. She understands what it feels like to be public property. To have to play a caricature every day. She asks you so many interesting questions, but never anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. Your best friend in high school had her poster above his bed. She's your dream girl and you like her so, so much.
And you still don't feel it.
You think you can make it work. You'll bend and shape yourself into what she needs and she can be enough for you. She's so nice and so pretty and so understanding. You think that you'll make yourself her perfect man, and she can be your perfect woman and it can be perfect. You will be perfect together. The whole internet already thinks you are perfect together. You can be perfect, it'll just be another facet of the character you have to play every second of every day (you stop yourself from remembering every hotel room where you didn't have to pretend at all).
You think maybe this is actually what it feels like to be in love. Maybe it's not meant to feel like your desire is clawing out of your chest, like you're splitting your ribs apart to let the other person in. Maybe it feels like embers settled in the hollow of your stomach, heavy but warm. It sometimes feels like a vice clenching around your torso, but maybe that's just the butterflies everyone talks about.
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