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The apartment was a stroke of luck, really. With graduation rapidly approaching and a job with the colleague of a professor set up, all Sage needed was a place to live, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t concerned. Downtown Montreal wasn’t exactly the most affordable market on the planet, and that was putting it lightly. She wasn’t the only one struggling either – Chloe and Jace hadn’t even bothered looking in the city.
All that to say, when a beautiful apartment cropped up for about $400 less than everywhere else she’d seen and well within her budget, her immediate thought was “scam”. Regardless, she scheduled a tour for the next day.
The landlord was one guy, Shane Hollander. He was Asian and looked stern, but not in a cruel way. More like he was the type to genuinely believe “it’s just business”. He greeted her at the door with a handshake and explained the layout of the building: there were five units, all but two unoccupied. One belonged to him, but he assured her he wasn’t there often, and the other was used as a showroom for a department store. Her unit was on the second floor, furnished thanks to the showroom, and looked identical to the photos she’d seen online.
Natural light flowed into the living room and kitchen area divided by a mid-size island. The entire main room had hardwood floors, lots of overhead lighting, and an easily accessible bathroom. It was a two-bed with one and a half baths. The smaller of the two bedrooms was much larger than she thought it would be, carpeted, with a large window on one wall and a small closet. She wanted to use it as a home office for her junior editor position, but already had plans for a small reading nook and possibly even her electric drum set in here as well. The primary bedroom was massive, also carpeted, with a large walk-in closet, full ensuite bathroom, and more than enough space for what she needed.
Needless to say, she submitted the application on the spot.
Now, two years later, she couldn’t complain. She liked her job, had thriving friendships, hosted frequent game nights at her truly absurd apartment, joined a little for-fun band with one of her book club members, and even adopted a cat.
Shane was a perfectly fine landlord, all said and done. Sometimes he could take days to respond to her texts, but the only time she had something close to a genuine emergency, he’d had someone there to fix her leaking sink within the hour, so she couldn’t totally hold it against him. Plus, the one time he raised the rent, he followed every law to the letter about giving her ample notice and included his reasoning: he was upgrading security around the building and was covering the cost proportionally among the tenants.
Shane Hollander was… strange. His unit took up the top floor and Sage never knew when he was there or why. Since she moved in, the unit on the floor below his was the only one that stayed empty: the department store was the unit above her on the third floor, she had the second, and the first was occupied by an older gay couple who invited her over for dinner at least once a month. She asked them once about the empty fourth floor and they’d said “a young man like that probably needs his privacy” with an almost awed tone. That answered none of her questions, so she just accepted that her landlord must be a private guy. It fit nicely into everything else she knew about him: he was stiff, awkward, formal, and neurotic so it makes sense to add “private” to that list. She’s never had a conversation with him that wasn’t about the apartment and didn’t feel like he was being held at gunpoint. She stopped taking it personally after she met the department store manager and she shrugged because “he’s just like that”.
As of two days ago, a light in Sage’s kitchen started flickering. Not a huge problem, but it was a nuisance and limited who could come over since a few of her friends were epileptic. She’d texted Shane when it started and hadn’t heard back yet. It wasn’t out of character for him by any means to take days to reply to minor issues, but this was bugging her more than usual because tonight was supposed to be game night and she couldn’t in good conscience subject her friends to that damn light.
Ultimately, she relocated game night to the bar a few blocks away.
When she walked in, the first thing she noticed was the increased crowd. There was a hockey game playing on the TV above the bar, which reminded her that the Olympics were happening in Sochi right now. Apparently, Team Canada was playing tonight. She sighed and found a miraculously empty table to wait for her friends.
Despite being a born and bred Canadian and living in an original six city, she’d never followed hockey closely. She’s absorbed the basics via osmosis, but details like players and statistics escaped her entirely. Nothing against them, or even the sport her country loved so much, she just didn’t care.
So she carried on as usual as the game played on the screens around her. The crowd cheered and groaned in unison, but Sage kept dealing cards.
“Sorry again for moving game night,” Sage said ruefully. “My landlord still hasn’t fixed that fucking light in the kitchen.”
“Shane goddamn Hollander!” Chase crowed suddenly.
“What?” Sage turned to look at him in confusion.
“Sorry, just the game,” Chase said, still clapping.
“No, how do you know my landlord’s name?”
Suddenly every eye turns to stare at her. She wracked her brain for every time she’d mentioned Shane around this group, she’d simply referred to him as “my landlord”, certainly never by full name.
“Sage, what,” Leo added, their voice as confused as Sage felt.
“What,” she said, increasingly lost. “He’s the one who somehow knows my landlord’s full name, how am I the weird one here?”
“Is your landlord,” Leo started slowly. “Shane Hollander?”
“Yeah,” Sage replied. She was getting annoyed now, like she was missing something. “Why?”
Tommy shoved his phone in her face. “This Shane Hollander?”
The picture was Shane, but decked out in hockey gear and giving the camera a severe glare. Nothing like the awkward and stilted man she sent her rent to every month, but unmistakable regardless. And even she, the only person in Canada who couldn’t care less about hockey, recognized those colours and that logo.
“Is he on the Voyageurs?” Sage asked incredulously.
“Did you not fucking know that?” Chase returns, somehow even more shocked.
“No,” Sage exclaimed, throwing her hands up. “How would I possibly know that? You know I don’t pay attention to sports!”
“But,” Leo started, clearly backing Chase up. “He’s Shane Hollander.”
“That means nothing to me,” Sage pointed out. Jace and Chloe watched the three of them arguing like they were watching a tennis match. Chloe seemed to realize that Leo and Chase were about to go on a (likely very loud) rant, so she jumped in.
“He’s, like, the king of hockey right now,” she explained. “He’s Montreal’s starting forward and a genuinely insane player. Like, even if you don’t watch hockey, he’s fun to watch. He’s also the only Asian player in the league, which is cool.” Chloe glowed a bit at the last part – she was Taiwanese and loved sports so much that she became a sports journalist. She frequently pointed out microaggressions from players and her colleagues alike and expressed frustration at the lack of Asian people in professional sports. Clearly, Shane meant something to her, which is the closest that Sage has gotten to caring about sports in a long time.
“Wait, Sage, have you met him?” Chase and Leo seemed to have processed the fact that “the king of hockey” was in fact her landlord and had moved on to being fanboys.
“Yes, I’ve met my landlord,” Sage replied sardonically. “Several times.”
Her friends looked at her like she’d just told a group of devout Christians that God was her close personal friend. She didn’t love it, if she was honest.
“What’s he like in person?” Leo pestered. “Is he cool? I bet he’s so cool.”
“He’s pretty weird, actually,” Sage said honestly. She wasn’t trying to crush her friend's dreams, but they were in the middle of a round of Spoons and she’d really like for someone to notice she’d won instead of badgering her about her landlord. “Super neurotic and awkward. Talking to him kind of feels like he’s being threatened by someone you can’t see.”
Regardless of the admittedly grim description of him, her friends seemed suitably amazed. She decided to not tell them that the fifth floor unit was his. Much as she loved her friends, they loved hockey, and she’d seen them do some socially questionable things in the spirit of that love.
The bar roared in approval again, and everyone turned quickly to look at the screen.
“Hollander hat trick, baby!” Chase cheered. He clinked beers with the man at a table behind them before taking a sizable gulp.
Sage rolled her eyes instinctively, but she was a little blown away by the fact that apparently, her kitchen light was flickering because her landlord was busy competing at the Olympics… She’d text him later to congratulate him.
They picked the game back up during a commercial break, but Jace noticed a spoon missing quickly so it was over within a few minutes. They’d fully lost Chase, Chloe, and Leo to the siren call of hockey, so she and Jace took off home.
On the way, she texted Shane again: “Hi! I caught some of the Team Canada game tonight - congrats! Didn’t realize you were at the Olympics when I texted a few days ago, sorry about that.”
She didn’t expect a response, but woke up to one: “Hello, Sage. Someone will be there today between 10:00am and 2:00pm to fix your kitchen light. His name is Hayden.”
Sage sent a thumbs up back and sure enough, a large blond man was at her door with a lightbulb and a smile at 1:15. He seemed more familiar with Shane than anyone in the building and was clearly a friend of his instead of an electrician despite mentioning that he didn’t know Shane owned property. Like everyone else Sage had talked to, he shrugged it off, fixed her light, sent a picture to Shane, and left.
After Hayden left, Sage pondered which was weirder: that her strange landlord Shane was an internationally-adored hockey star, or that he had friends. It was too much to learn about him in twenty-four hours after two years of nothing personal whatsoever.
Luckily for her, he was just her landlord… and maybe the provider of a signed jersey or two when her friends’ birthdays rolled around.