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Eighteen months in the future, when they have covered the repressed homosexuality and the public outing and its fallout and coping with the entire nation of Canada scrutinising his every move, Shane's therapist—whom he likes, generally, because he is calm and pragmatic and knows enough about hockey to convincingly pretend to keep up—will bring up the food thing.
"It's normal to have some anxiety related to your food allergies," he will say in a reasonable tone of voice. "You are naturally aware of the very real risks and they have a very real impact on how you interact with the world around you. What I am concerned about is that you are letting your anxiety control your life in a way that is detrimental to your relationships and your peace of mind."
Sitting in his customary spot just off-centre on the mint-green sofa, Shane will blink at him. "What do you mean, peace of mind." He will intend it as a question but it will not come out like one.
"Sometimes a rational fear escalates beyond what is rational," Leon will say. "You've been working around your allergies for your entire life—checking ingredients, bringing your own snacks, that kind of thing. It sounds like recently you have become afraid to do things you previously felt safe doing, like eating at familiar restaurants or your best friend's house. Would you say that's true?"
Shane will nod.
"What is the worst thing that could happen if you ate dinner with the Pikes like you used to?"
By this point in their therapeutic relationship, this will be a familiar game. What's the worst that could happen? What would happen if the worst happened? What's the most likely thing to happen? "I could eat something I'm allergic to and go into anaphylactic shock and die."
Leon will do one of those things Shane appreciates about him so much: ask a direct question. "Do you think that's a rational or an irrational fear?"
Heart racing in his chest, Shane will dig his fingernails into the meat of his thighs and say, "Well, I didn't die, obviously, but the other part. That did happen."
Right now, Shane is watching four of his teammates play beer pong in the Pike's back garden. They asked him to join but he couldn't, obviously, drink beer after a ball that had been touched who knows how many other people had landed in it, because a) that's gross and b) Muller's wife brought peanut butter biscuits, which he can smell from here, so Shane is On Edge. Jackie had given him a look as she accepted the box and he knows she's going to have the cleaners run a decontamination protocol on the entire ground floor tomorrow but in the meantime…
The thing is, Shane is really good at beer pong. Of course, none of his teammates know that.
A small horde of children thunders by like a herd of wildebeest in one of the documentaries Jade likes so much. Parties at the Pikes' are almost always kid-friendly because Jackie thinks it's good for their socialisation to learn how to keep themselves occupied around adults, so there are anywhere from six to sixteen of them running around and enjoying the lack of adult supervision.
Jama—Shane genuinely has no idea where that nickname comes from, the guy's name is Tyson—scores a pretty impressive shot into a cup of warm, flat beer and the onlookers break out into spontaneous cheers. Shane joins in with a credible amount of whooping and finally takes a bite of the couscous salad that Jackie always leaves in the fridge for him so there is something he knows he can eat at her house. He fucking loves Jackie, and tells her so at least once a month, always within Hayden's hearing so Hayden can laugh and wrap his arms around her and say "stay away from my wife" and land an obnoxiously loud kiss on her cheek.
Something crunches between his teeth on the second bite. It is, distinctly, not the crunch of diced carrot or cucumber or the crunch of fresh pomegranate seeds, which means it's the crunch of something that should not be in Jackie's "Shane Special" couscous salad, which is bad. The cough he fakes into his napkin (green with yellow stars, Arthur's pick) doesn't draw any attention but then he's staring down at the little brown specks in between the green and orange and red and running his tongue over his back teeth and telling himself that it's fine, it has to be fine, he doesn't have time for this right now. They're playing Detroit tomorrow night; they're getting on a plane at fuck-you o'clock tomorrow morning which is why the quarterly team hang started at lunchtime and everyone is on strict orders of three beers max.
Shane takes a swig of his beer—the good-will beer, the one drink he has at these things for cameraderie's sake—swishes it around like he's at the dentist, and surreptitiously lets it swill back into the bottle. Alcohol disinfects, right?
It's fine. It could be anything. Maybe it was a really weird piece of carrot.
Of course, he knows exactly what it is because he's not a fucking idiot. He's balling up the napkin and putting his plate down on top of the nearest surface which turns out to be the kids' outdoor toy box and he's walking inside past the beer pong match and a trio of WAGs holding wine glasses and where did he put his jacket? On the coat rack with everyone else's? Did he get here early enough that Hayden told him to dump his shit on the bed in the downstairs guest room with the kids' raincoats?
His mouth itches. His tongue sits too heavy between his teeth and he can't tell if his throat is swelling up or if he's working himself into a fit over nothing. He barely notices bumping off the corner of the sofa and into Drapeau, who grabs him by the shoulders and laughs and says: "Looks like three beers is still too many, eh, Cap?"
"Sorry," Shane, yeah, fuck, wheezes out. Coat rack or guest bed? Wait, no, this is the Pike house, there's an epipen stashed in the back of the cutlery drawer, isn't there, so he just has to make it to the kitchen—
"Shane? Yo, dude, you good?" Hayden's face appears in his field of vision, which is rapidly narrowing.
"Hayd," Shane says, "reaction. Bad."
"Shit, man, okay, you're gonna be fine—babe!"
He makes it to the kitchen. Hayden is holding on to his elbow and deposits him leaning against the counter where he won't destroy any valuables when he keels over and dies.
"Where's your jacket, man?" Hayden asks.
"Don't know." Big breath that doesn't go anywhere. He's so fucking itchy and he's going to fucking die. He's going to fucking die in Jackie's kitchen while his whole team is watching and that'll be the headline tomorrow, Shane Hollander Fucking Dies In Kitchen. He realises he is leaning against the cutlery drawer and tries to take a step backwards so he can get at the fucking cutlery drawer, and instead of doing that he vaguely tilts sideways and slides down the refrigerator door, taking half a dozen kitschy magnets and Arthur's swim class schedule with him. From down on the floor, he is face to face with Ruby Pike, who is staring at him wide-eyed.
He did grab for the drawer handle as he went down, so Hayden spots the epipen and shoves it into Shane's hand. Shane fumbles with the cap but he's done this a billion times, he could do it in his sleep, he's been practicing how to do it since he was five years old. It's been long enough since his last reaction that the sting of the needle makes him jump, but he lets the injection do its thing, drops his head back against the brushed-steel fridge door and closes his eyes. Just for a minute. He's just gonna sit here for a minute.
Fuck.
He jumps again when somebody touches his face but it's just Jackie, crouching in front of him with her mouth a tight, bloodless line. She exhales a sigh of relief when he meets her gaze and cups his face with both hands the way he's seen her hold one of the kids when they're hurt. The part of him that still thinks he's about to die is really, really grateful that she's here. Jackie's so nice. She wouldn't let him die, actually. So he's probably fine.
"Hey, hey, eyes on me, Hollander." She taps his cheek for emphasis and he wrenches his eyelids up to look at her. "Ruby, sweetheart, I need you to take a step back for me. Hayden's on the phone, Shane, do you think you can get up?"
"Yeah, just." It is easier to breathe, so that's good. Unlikely to kick the bucket, then. "Give me a minute."
Jackie does not give him a minute, but she and J.J. manage to lever Shane up and on his feet where he takes the opportunity to dry-heave into the sink. J.J. is hovering in a way that makes it really clear he does not want to be involved in any of this, because—and this is just a fact about J.J., a fact that everybody knows about him—J.J. absolutely cannot handle needles. He has to lie down and close his eyes to get his flu shot. But J.J. was the first of Shane's teammates to know about Shane's allergies because he kept trying to get him out to restaurants and Shane felt bad lying to him, so he's been stoically bracing for the day that he'd have to stab Shane with a needle to save his life and he's probably just glad it's not this day.
"What the fuck's going on?" somebody asks from the living room. Shane doesn't bother thinking about who and he does not receive an answer.
"I swear I checked the dressing," Jackie is saying. She's rubbing soothing circles on Shane's back. "They changed their packaging and I thought they might have changed their ingredients, too, so I checked. I'm so sorry, Shane."
Losing his staring contest with the drain cover, Shane shakes his head. "Don't think it was the dressing," he says. Breathes. Retches. Realises his legs are shaking like he's just done a double shift on the ice but are doing a pretty decent job holding him up, leaning against the counter with his hips and against Jackie with his shoulder. "Tasted weird."
Next to him, J.J. opens the fridge and pulls out the container of couscous. It's the same one that Jackie always uses (and washes separately even though Shane told her that's overkill) with Uncle Shane <3 scrawled on it in extremely dubious toddler handwriting. He's trying to angle it away from Shane as if it's radioactive or something, but Shane can still see the neat shape of the scoop he took out of it. It looks the same as it always does—he wouldn't have eaten it otherwise.
Hayden reappears with his phone in one hand and Shane's jacket in the other. "Ambulance is on its way," he reports. "You want me to text—uh, anyone you want me to text?"
Shane wants Ilya so bad. His brain is still yelling at him that he's dying and he kind of did almost die and he's going to be out of commission for the next three days at least and he wants his boyfriend, who would never poison him and who is currently in—wherever the fuck, too far away to come watch over Shane and crack a stupid joke to make him feel less like shit. "No," he says. "I'm good."
"Dude, no offence, but you are not good. You look like ass."
"Very helpful, babe," Jackie says. "Shane, sweetie, let's get you out of here, come on."
Comeau's wife asks "is he okay?" and Mitty's girlfriend shushes her before descending into urgent whispers.
With the efficiency of people who had four kids in four years, the Pikes manhandle Shane out to the entryway and sit him down on the bench where the kids tie their shoes. Shane feels the eyes of his entire team and an assortment of WAGs follow him like a physical weight, like when he misses a shot on goal and feels the disapproval of all of Centre Bell follow him to the bench. It makes his skin crawl more than the anaphylaxis does.
Jackie is muttering soothing nonsense to him while Hayden grabs Shane's jacket from the spare room. When he comes back, he also hands him an apple juice box with the straw already stuck in and the little flaps on the side pulled up, because Jade always squeezes his juice boxes too tight, and his face is grim.
"There's peanuts in the couscous," he says with his voice pitched low. "J.J. checked."
With a gasp, Jackie clutches at Shane's hand. "You know I wouldn't," she starts and Shane has to wave his free hand at her to interrupt.
"I know," he says. He does know, because he trusts Jackie with his life, literally, once a week and the one time he had a reaction at her house was because one of the kids hid a leftover Halloween peanut butter cup under a sofa cushion. "It's not your fault."
"Well, whose fault is it?" she hisses, glaring up at her husband like maybe he's the culprit. "How the fuck would peanuts get into a closed container in the fridge? We don't even have any in the house."
Hayden shifts his weight from foot to foot. "Everyone knows Shane is weird about food," he says. "They don't know he's deathly allergic to most of it."
Outside, tires crunch on the gravel drive and the frosted glass of the front door douses the entry in red flashing light. Shane fucking hates this part.
"Are you saying somebody did this on purpose?" Jackie's hand tightens on his. She is a small person, comparatively speaking, but she has impressive grip strength.
"I'm saying," Hayden says, turning his head to talk over his shoulder as he opens the door for the EMTs, "that J.J. thinks somebody did it on purpose."
Thankfully, the one benefit of this clusterfuck is that Shane is not going to be the one dealing with any of the fallout for at least the next twenty-four hours because he is all the way out of commission. A bubbly young woman called Gracie takes over the decision making for him and jokes about requesting a big strong hockey player to come along to all her calls in future when Hayden helps Shane onto the gurney even though he totally could have done it by himself and Gracie's colleague, who does not introduce himself, looks like he's more than capable of manhandling him. Shane drops his head back and resists the urge to slam his fist into something.
Before the silent guy wheels him up to the ambulance, a small voice asks: "Is Uncle Shane okay?" It's Ruby, still, hovering in the doorframe like she's not supposed to be there and waiting to get in trouble. She's almost seven years old but Shane always remembers how tiny her hand was the first time she wrapped it around one of his fingers, and she just watched him collapse in front of her and now he's being taken away by ambulance.
He lifts his head and makes an effort to look alive. "I'm okay, Rubik's Cube." He wants to say something more reassuring and promise that he'll be good as new and apologise for scaring her, but the EMTs only paused to get the ambulance doors open and before he can get enough air into his lungs, Ruby is out of sight.
Jackie clambers in behind Gracie at the last moment. "If I stay here, I'm going to end up on the news," she announces. "When I find out who did this, they'll never even look at a puck again."
"Are you saying it wasn't an accident?" Gracie asks. The doors are closed and the engine rumbles to life to take them to the nearest emergency department. "Because that would be assault. Maybe attempted murder."
Shane makes a noise that starts as a snort and ends as a wheeze. "Nobody tried to murder me."
Jackie's noise sounds a lot less pathetic. "Well, they could have! I am fucking furious. That was fucking scary, Shane. You could have died."
"Swear jar."
"Don't fucking deflect."
If there is one thing Shane does not want to be thinking about right now, it's how a handful of peanuts ended up in his food at a party with his teammates. If he starts thinking about it, he will have a full-on breakdown, probably, and that is not helpful. The monitor that Gracie attached to him to track his heart rate starts beeping in a manner that strikes Shane as overly patronising and everybody looks at him in alarm.
"I'm fine," he says, even though he knows he isn't. He's so fucking tired and his bones have ants in them. "Can we just get this over with, please?"
Jackie's phone rings four times while Shane is getting situated in a (thankfully private) hospital room for his observation period but she refuses to step out and leave him alone. He assures her that he's fine, he's done this before, and she gives him a glare that could wither an elephant and stays stubbornly by his side.
"You need to call your mom," she says when the doctors have left and the anti-histamines are trickling into his bloodstream. "Hayden can handle Coach, if you want."
"No, I'll do it." Over the past year or so, he's gotten used to difficult conversations with his coach. He'll miss the game against Detroit and probably the one in Washington after, but the Voyageurs' season has been good enough so far that it won't make or break anything. There is a pre-written press release for this situation, even, which uses a lot of words to say basically nothing.
Which Ilya will definitely see and then he will know that Shane had a reaction and he knows that there was a team hang tonight. Fuck.
Jackie pats his hand and leans in to kiss his forehead. Shane looks up at her, baffled. "Sorry!" she says. "Reflex. You can kick me out now if you want. I can go sit in the cafeteria or something until you're cleared to go home."
"You don't have to stay, Jackie. There are, like, thirty people at your house."
Her face darkens. "There sure as fuck won't be by the time I get back. We'll talk about this later."
She steps out so he can talk to his mom and, he's very aware, so she can call Hayden for an update. His best friend's face had been as murderous as Shane has ever seen it. Hayden is generally a chill guy but Shane would not be surprised to hear that there were punches thrown after he got carted off by ambulance.
He calls Coach first to get it over with and then let's his mom's fussing wash over him for a bit until he feels calmer. He's fine now, he reminds himself. His epipen worked, and his friends had his back, and he's under medical supervision and in a couple of hours he can go home and go to bed and pretend this never happened. He's fucking fine. He's hungry because he didn't eat before going to the Pike's because he knew that there would be something for him to eat in the fridge, which turned out to be not true, but he's fucking fine.
He really, really wishes Ilya were here.
Right on cue, his phone lights up in his hand and his hand accepts the call before his brain can tell it not to. Great. "Hi, baby."
The other end of the line is silent for a moment, then: "Shane, did something happen?"
Shane closes his eyes. The hospital sheets are somehow both washed smooth and weirdly scratchy and the pillow might be older than Jade and Ruby. "What makes you say that?"
"Because your voice is all scratchy, dumbass. You sound like you smoke three packs a day."
"Well, I don't."
"Shane. You had a reaction?"
With a groan, Shane kicks his shoes off so they drop off the bed and land on the linoleum floor with dull thuds. "Yeah. Fuck. Gonna miss the roadie."
"Are you at the hospital by yourself? Did Pike poison you?"
"No, asshole. It was an accident. It's not a big deal." He's such a bad liar. He can taste how the lies curdle in his mouth. It probably was an accident, he thinks. It wouldn't make sense for somebody to have put peanuts in his food on purpose, because that would be really stupid, even as a prank.
Down in… Philadelphia, right, the Centaurs are playing the Pamphlets tomorrow afternoon—down in Philadelphia, Ilya is making a face. They're not on a video call but Shane can picture the face so clearly: his forehead wrinkling as he both frowns and raises his left eyebrow, the corners of his mouth turned down, head cocked as he's asking an invisible bystander if they're hearing this shit. "So he lets you be poisoned at his house and he leaves you alone at the hospital?"
"Jackie's here."
This gets a noise of approval. "Let me talk to her."
"Dude, she's not—she stepped out for a minute. It's fine, Ilya. I just want to get out of here so I can sleep." Ilya is probably going to call Jackie himself as soon as Shane hangs up. Shane absolutely cannot allow that to happen. "Aren't you going out with your team? You know they just make me sit around for a couple hours, I'm okay."
"Oh, are you sick of me? Tired of talking to your boyfriend who is so attentive and wants to be sure you are okay after you got attacked by sesame seeds?"
Shane's heart clenches. Thankfully, it doesn't set off the monitor. "I could never be sick of you," he says, and he means it. With a yawn, he turns to lie on his side with the phone wedged between his cheek and the lumpy pillow. "I miss you."
"I know, sweetheart." A rustle, and a series of quick taps. "Maybe, since you are not going to Detroit, I can come to Montreal? We have late flight home tomorrow but—"
"Yes, please." He's not embarrassed by how quickly he agrees. They are way past being embarrassed about how much they want each other. "But you'll be tired, I can drive—"
"Uh-uh, no. I can sleep on the plane. You are not getting in a car until you are off watchlist."
It's not a watchlist, and Shane will be perfectly fine to drive by then, but his protest is swallowed up by another jaw-splitting yawn and would have fallen on deaf ears anyway. "Okay," he says instead. "I love you."
"Yes, you sleep. I love you too and please take care and I will see you tomorrow."
"Have fun with the Pamphlets," Shane says. "Their goalie looked like he was asleep in the net against Brooklyn."
"I will bring him a pillow and a teddy bear," Ilya says. Shane can hear the smile in his voice.
"Do they sell teddy bears in Centaurs jerseys?"
"Excellent question, I will find out."
The door opens after a brief and perfunctory tap-tap-tap and a nurse waltzes in to make sure his IV is on the proper setting and also, Shane suspects, to get a look at The Shane Hollander, laid low by a peanut. There is a way people have of sneaking glances even when they have totally valid reasons to look at him directly; medical personnel are usually better at hiding it but maybe this guy's new.
"I have to go," he tells Ilya. "I'll text you when I'm home." And then he hangs up.
"Feeling okay?" the nurse asks, not unkindly. "You probably had more interesting plans for the night, eh?"
"I'm fine." Small talk is not his favourite pastime under any circumstances and especially not when he's in a hospital bed, hooked up to a cocktail of drugs that makes him both sleepy as fuck and feel like there are ants in his bones, wondering if one of his teammates tried to kill him. "Not my first rodeo."
Jackie slips back into the room with her phone clutched in one hand and a packet of chips in the other, which she tosses at Shane. "Double and triple checked," she says. "Since you didn't get to eat."
Fuck, he loves Jackie. He's going to buy her that over-engineered German blender she's apparently been talking about for months and also send her on a spa retreat and also tell Hayden that marrying her was the smartest thing he's ever done and if he ever fucks it up, Shane will kill him.
Speaking of.
As soon as the nurse has run out of excuses to stay in the room, Jackie pulls up her chair as close as she can get and says in a low voice: "Hayden knows what happened."
Shane is so, so tired. "Can we talk about this tomorrow? Please?"
"I'm so sorry, sweetie, but I don't think we can. You need to know so you can decide what your next steps are going to be."
Next steps sound fucking ominous, Shane thinks, and unfortunately he is proven correct. Apparently, once Shane had been carted off and the kids had been corralled upstairs to the playroom, J.J. had threatened to call the police.
"What the fuck," Shane says.
"I can't say I disapprove." There is a bit of blood on Jackie's teeth because she's been chewing on her bottom lip. He realises he has never seen her really angry before and he's not enjoying it even though it isn't directed at him. "You don't fuck with other people's food. If it didn't occur to them that allergies exist, they're too stupid to walk around unsupervised."
But the police had not been called, because the culprit confessed. It had been a dare, a hazing ritual, a test to see if the rookie would cross his captain who, the team apparently agreed, he was too in awe of. The rest of the team didn't know half of Shane's strict diet plan had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the list of foods that will, as he put it to the team nutritionist, severely impact his ability to perform on-ice. The nutritionist had taken it as a personal challenge, the team doctor got a slightly haunted look in his eyes whenever Shane spoke to him, and Coach Theriault had never given any indication of remembering that there was anything out of the ordinary, which Shane appreciated. He'd been able to keep his allergies well under wraps and he preferred it that way.
His memory presents him with the look on Keiron Taillon's face the first day of training camp, when the kid had earnestly shaken Shane's hand and told him how excited he was to play with him. Shane rarely felt old—he was in his prime, thank you very much—but in that moment he'd wondered if he'd ever been that young.
"Who put him up to it?" he asks.
"I don't know if he wouldn't say or if Hayden just doesn't want me to know." She frowns down at her phone, which is buzzing with incoming texts, but doesn't unlock it to read them. "He says they're handling it."
"What the fuck does that mean?"
"I don't know, Shane! I think they should have called the police! I think your teammates are juvenile fuckwits who don't have the sense God gave a slice of toast and there need to be fucking consequences for that much malicious stupidity."
What Shane does not point out is that there are consequences, namely: he is spending his evening in the hospital, and his team will have to play without him for the next two games, which will probably be an unpleasant experience. Since their third Cup win last season, the Voyageurs have been very unpopular in the league and Shane is still their top scorer. He's not an idiot—he has noticed that he is being watched more closely. There are a lot of expectations riding on being Shane Hollander, captain of the Voyageurs, hockey prince of Montreal whose jersey is framed in every sports bar in the city. He knew that being gay wasn't part of that deal and, unfortunately, he'd had the audacity to be gay anyway. There are plenty of people who wouldn't mind knocking him down a peg, and he is coming up on free agency at the end of the season. He will be expensive to keep around and management will want to be sure he's not suddenly decided to become a bad investment because they don't know, obviously, that it's way too late for that.
But how can he continue being The Shane Hollander when his teammates, who are supposed to be his brothers-in-skates, think it's funny to make the rookie poison his food?
"You need to talk to management about this," Jackie says. "You're not safe."
He can't even imagine how that would go down. Hey, sorry to be a bother, but my fellow players almost killed me? What would the organisation even do about it, sensitivity training? Team bonding exercises? And yet, he knows he can't just walk back into that locker room as if nothing happened. The seven-year-old kid inside him who just wanted to eat the stupid cake at his classmate's birthday party wants nothing more than to pretend nothing happened but he isn't a kid anymore and he didn't get to where he is by not taking his allergies seriously. Ugh. He's going to have to talk to his lawyer about this.
He can also never, ever again eat anything around any of his teammates.
Jackie is smart enough not to offer to stay over. Instead, she must have sent a text right after she bundled Shane into the hired car to take him home because before he even has to contemplate the walk up to his front door and, consequently, his bedroom on the first floor, J.J. is there to take charge of him.
"You know I'm okay now," Shane tells him as his friend hunches over to sling Shane's arms over his shoulders, which is unnecessary but looks very funny. If he's honest with himself, Shane is touched by how much Jackie and Hayden and J.J. insist on looking after him even though it makes him feel like a child. "I'm just going to sleep for like fifteen hours. And you have an early flight."
"I am too pissed-off to sleep," J.J. says grimly. "It was this or breaking my hand on somebody's jaw."
Thankfully, he does not try to talk about what happened. Maybe Jackie briefed him or maybe Shane just looks as bad as he feels, because J.J. watches silently as Shane forces down a protein shake from his fridge and then graciously permits him to go to the bathroom unsupervised. When Shane comes out in sweatpants and with his teeth brushed, J.J. is leaning against the dresser in his bedroom and Shane is glad that he always makes sure all of Ilya's clothes make it back to their box at the back of his closet when he leaves.
"You gonna watch me sleep?" he asks, trying to make it sound like a joke.
"I fuckin' might." J.J. crosses his arms and switches to French. "That was fucking scary, capitaine. I know you deal with this all the time but seeing you like that really freaked me out."
Shane sits down heavily on the edge of the bed. "It's still scary for me, too. Every time. I haven't had a real reaction in like a year."
"I could have killed Taillon." The rookie is a professional hockey player, so he isn't delicate, but he's about half J.J.'s size and would have snapped like a twig. "I honestly still might."
"Please don't."
"Hayden and I will back you up when you go to management."
"I don't know that I am going to management."
"Calisse, capitaine, of course you're going to fucking management."
So they argue about that until Shane forces a stalemate by falling asleep mid-sentence. J.J. looks terrified when he shook him awake again, but he does relent so Shane can get some proper rest. Shane wants to tell him to drop it, and not to let what happened tonight affect the team, but he knows that is a stupid thing to say. Shane had crossed a line when he had come out as gay and tonight, after a season and change of pushing and pulling in all directions as team dynamics shifted around this new information, another line has been crossed and cannot be un-crossed. There is a before and an after.
"I don't like you being all by yourself," J.J. says before he leaves. "Are you sure you shouldn't stay with Jackie?"
Really, really sure. "I'll text you proof of life every hour or whatever." And, suddenly, there is another line hurtling towards him, offering itself up with its throat exposed, making itself look small and inconsequential. It's a stupid thing to do, exhausted as he is, but Shane looks at the line and takes a deep breath and sets his foot down firmly on the other side of it. "My boyfriend is coming over tomorrow night to make sure I don't die."
J.J.'s eyebrows rise up so high he looks like a cartoon character. "Boyfriend?"
"I'm not telling you anything else. He's not out. We can't be out, okay? So. But he's coming over."
"We are not done talking about this," J.J. warns then envelops Shane in a brief but fierce hug. "I am so glad the rookie did not kill you."
Ha. Yeah.
Of course, Shane knows that there will be fallout and that everybody and their mother—and his mother—will be blowing up his phone in the morning, which is exactly why he turns on do not disturb and goes the fuck to sleep. He spends the next day trying to keep himself occupied, which is difficult when he's not supposed to do anything strenuous yet so he can't just go for a long run to clear his head. The Centaurs' afternoon game is a godsend because he doesn't often get the chance to properly watch Ilya play, but despite their goalie's apparent narcolepsy, the Pamphlets are still a better team and Ottawa leaves the ice frustrated and defeated.
The worst part is that Shane can see a good team somewhere in there. Ilya is generational, obviously, but it's becoming obvious that Hayes is one of the best goalies in the league and Boodram is a really good winger, and the more you watch, the more it becomes clear that there is a solid core of skill and talent there. If somebody could just figure out how to make it all fit together, they'd finally stop dredging the bottom of the standings. Shane knows that Ilya knows this, and he also knows that this is something they can't talk about.
When he finally checks his phone again to text Ilya have a good flight <3, he has over a dozen missed calls and over fifty unread messages. He opens the thread with Hayden first, because he knows Hayden will get straight to the point.
Hayden Pike
Taillon is off the team.
What the fuck?
"Hey, what the fuck?"
The first thing Shane hears when Hayden picks up the phone is a muddle of raised voices, then the sound goes dull as Hayden, presumably, presses his phone to his chest and leaves the room.
"Hey, dude, how are you?" Hayden sounds a bit out of breath and his voice is kind of echo-y, like he rushed to a stairwell.
"I'm fucking fine, Hayd, what do you mean Taillon is off the team?"
"I mean he's gone. On waivers. He wasn't on the flight this morning and Theriault announced it at practice."
On his sofa in his house in Montreal, Shane's fingers are digging into his thigh hard enough to leave marks. "I asked you not to say anything."
"I didn't! I swear to you that I didn't. J.J. didn't either. We figured your mom would talk sense into you and you'd get your people to handle it."
That was probably what would have happened; at least one of the unread texts from his mom was probably to this effect. "So how does management know?"
This isn't what I wanted, he thinks, and then forces himself to step back and take a good, hard look at that thought. What did he think was going to happen? If he reported the incident—and he had to report the incident, because he could have died—then there would be consequences. He is still Shane Hollander and too expensive a trophy to risk leaving him out for anyone to get their smudgy fingerprints on or drop. And it would look bad, to the public, to the press, if the Voyageurs organisation couldn't keep Shane Hollander safe in his own locker room.
The kid will never play professional hockey again. He's a decent player, good enough to make it onto the Voyageurs' roster after one season in the minors, but his numbers aren't so impressive that they will outweigh the stain of having been kicked off the team that drafted him only a couple of months into his rookie season. I'm so excited to play with you.
Hayden has probably said something; Shane didn't hear it. He drops his phone face-down on the sofa next to him and stares at the TV, where the Centaurs game has been replaced by some idiotic expert panel discussing the LA Monarchs' change of head coach.
Taillon didn't know what he was doing. It wasn't his idea. He did it anyway because he wanted to impress his new teammates, or maybe because he was scared of what would happen if he refused.
Afterwards, he doesn't remember what he says to Hayden before he hangs up. He gets up off the sofa and goes about the rest of the day on autopilot: packing up his laundry to be picked up, picking out a pre-made meal from the freezer, watching the Voyageurs slip and slide on Detroit ice as if they've never played hockey before. Ilya texts him when he lands in Ottawa and tells him not to wait up, so Shane goes to bed and only wakes up long enough to tuck himself into his boyfriend's arms when he finally climbs into bed with him.
In the morning, he says, "Can we please not talk about it?" and something about his face makes Ilya pause.
"Alright," he says after a moment's consideration. He kisses Shane's forehead because they're still in bed and haven't brushed their teeth yet. "We don't talk about it."
And they don't, until fourteen months in the future, when Ilya catches him eating a full meal in their Ottawa kitchen half an hour before they're due at Bood's for Boxing Day even though the Centaurs keep an entire separate table for allergy-safe food because Selena Chouinard can't have nuts either. Ilya boxes Shane in against the counter and asks if he doesn't trust his team—Ilya's team, the team Ilya helped build—and Shane says of course he trusts them about everything else, but he can't eat food that's just been sitting out, and anyway he needs to keep track of his macros.
They only make it to Bood's house because Shane insists he can't make Ilya miss it two years in a row and Shane can tell that everybody knows they're in the middle of an argument. He hates it and he hates himself and he can't bring himself to eat anything. In the car on the way home, Ilya gives him an ultimatum.
Which is why four months after that, Shane tears a sheet of paper into tiny pieces and talks about the day a teammate almost killed him for the first time since it happened.
"I still don't know whose idea it was," he tells Leon. "I think J.J. probably does but I don't think I want to know. That's weird, right? I should care about that."
Leon hands him another sheet of paper. This one is one of those crusty-as-fuck photocopies of a photocopy of a photocopy from a therapy handbook, the text so blurred you can barely read it. "What would it mean to you to know?"
"I don't think it makes a difference," Shane says. The paper makes a pleasing sounds when it tears, quiet but sharp. He's got a nice little pile building up on the side table next to the tissue box and the water glass. "Because nobody stopped it, either, you know? When I came out, it was kind of okay. Nobody really said anything about it right then. But then I started telling them not to be fucking homophobic right in front of me and I grew my hair out and we talked about our camps being inclusive and open to everyone and I could tell that wasn't okay. That there was a limit, and I'd gone too far."
It didn't make a difference whose idea it had been. It wouldn't have made a difference then because Shane still would not have been able to let his guard down and he couldn't afford another slip. The mood in the locker room had shifted and got completely out of control when Hayden and J.J. circled their wagons around him.
Now, eighteen months later, he has been coaxed and coached and therapised enough to realise the magnitude of it all, just how wide the circles had extended outwards from that peanut dropping into the surface of his tenuous peace of mind. Until Ilya confronted him after Christmas, he hadn't even realised that he hasn't been at the Pike's house for dinner ever since, even though that had been a comfortable and cherished tradition for the better part of a decade. He must have made that decision at some point in the immediate aftermath.
"First of all," Leon says when Shane has run out of steam, "I need to apologise for what I said earlier. I did not mean to trivialise your fears and it was insensitive of me to assume that they were irrational."
Shane never knows what to say when his therapist apologises to him, so he doesn't say anything. In here, with Leon, that is allowed.
Leon puts his clipboard and pen down on the arm of his chair. "Second of all, what you experienced was very scary and you did what you had to do to keep yourself safe afterwards. That is the most important thing you just told me. Your safety is always the most important thing, even if other people don't understand. Okay?"
"Sure. I guess."
It's not a very convincing answer. Leon cracks a little smile to show that he noticed that Shane isn't on board but will let him get away with it for the moment. "Obviously we can't do anything about your allergies," he says. "I'm guessing you have a very knowledgeable and dedicated medical team on hand who are working hard to keep you alive and fed and scoring goals, and I will never ever push you to do something to put yourself at risk. So my question is this: are you happy where you are and if not, where do you want to be?"
Shane has to think about it. He has learned that he is allowed to take time to think here, that it is worth finding the real answer instead of the answer he thinks he should give. "I feel safer because I'm in control," he says. "When I know I won't be exposed because I've made everything myself or because the package was sealed and it never left my sight."
Leon nods.
"I got used to my allergies for a while. Maybe I got complacent, I don't know." He had definitely taken too many risks over the years, mostly related to Ilya Rozanov. "It feels like that day was the punishment for slacking off, maybe."
"But you know that's not how it works."
Because this is something they have talked circles around by now, Shane does not roll his eyes. "Sure. I guess. And I guess now… it's just part of the whole thing, right? Getting outed, leaving Montreal, getting asked the same fucking questions about how gay I am and whether I'm ruining hockey by playing with my husband, it's all the same thing. And I have to make up for it somehow. Balance it out. I can't control what other players say to me on the ice, but I can make sure I don't accidentally eat something that could kill me."
"That sounds exhausting."
The second sheet of paper has turned into scraps. His mouth is dry and his left ankle is throbbing because a New Jersey d-man ran him over well after the puck left his stick two days ago and only got a minor for it. Leon is looking at him over the top of his glasses, waiting.
"Yeah," Shane says, and feels something break loose inside of him. "Yeah, it really is."