a little while after they move in together officially, ilya finds a beat-up spiral-bound notebooks in one of the boxes that still hasn’t been unpacked in the guest room. he flicks through it, expecting old plays that shane wrote down years ago, but finding only names on names on names. all players, organised by season, starting in the 2017/18 season. that’s almost five years of hockey. the notebook is almost full.
MARAKOV (C) 28 - BARRETT 17 - KENT 32 - MEURIAX (A) 04
and on and on and on. and for a second ilya thinks holy shit, is this a list of shane’s freaky hockey sex dreams? so he all but runs downstairs, holds it out to shane and wiggles his eyebrows and says i found your sex diary, hollander, very scandalous. and shane looks so confused, because the only sex dreams he’s had for the past ten years have been about ilya (and once, embarrassingly, stephen colbert)
so he looks at the notebook and looks kind of embarrassed and says “oh. no, ilya, that’s not a freaky sex book. don’t be such a pervert.”
which, honestly, ilya is kind of relieved— he doesn’t want to think about shane having sex dreams about troy barrett. but shane still looks kind of uncomfortable, so ilya keeps prodding. and shane sighs heavily, like he really doesn’t want to say, like he’s ashamed, and says
“i just. i don’t know, i guess i knew we’d come out one day. or i hoped we would. so i wanted to write down whenever someone said something, like, homophobic to me. or racist, too, i guess. so when we came out, if these guys started being like wow fuckin’ a, boys, we love you guys, like. y’know. i’d have a record. that i’m not crazy.”
ilya frowns, and puts both of his hands palm-down on the counter; his legs suddenly feel very weak.
shane shrugs. “i mean, i’m not— chirping is one thing, y’know? i only wrote them down if it was really bad. like, slurs, and stuff. i don’t know. it’s stupid. i stopped after we got engaged, i just… it didn’t seem important anymore.”
and ilya isn’t sure what to say, standing like an idiot, eyes fixed on this unassuming, beat-up notebook that holds a record of all the times someone tried to make his husband feel small because it was the only way they could even think of getting a one-up on him in the rink. and that he’d written them down not as a way to try and get some small justice for himself, but, what? as a record. a list of names of people they couldn’t trust if they ever offered their public congratulations.
shane goes back to what he was doing— making dinner, chopping kale beside the sink and having a one-sided conversation with anya about how she needs to stop begging, because it’s just leaves, and he knows she won’t eat leaves. and ilya just has to sit there, thinking about all the players who had said similar things to him, thinking about the tweets and the instagram comments and podcasters, thinking about the mental weight shane had been carrying for the both of them for so long.
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