Work Text:
It’s sometime in their second week at the cottage when Shane realises he hasn’t stocked up as well as he thought he had. He loses some time trying to discern why and how, and whether he should go into town, but Ilya definitely cannot come with because who knows who will be at the YIG, until Ilya says, “Enough. Can’t we just have them delivered?”
Shane has used a grocery delivery service a handful of times in Montréal but he’s fairly sure that particular service has not made it up here. Certainly he’s never had groceries delivered to the cottage, except –
“Oh, maybe my parents are going into town.”
A text to his mom reveals she’d be happy to pick them up what they need, she has a handful of things to get too. He’s not entirely certain she would have actually gone into town if he hadn’t texted, but he isn’t going to question that too hard, especially when it saves him having to leave Ilya for the hour and a half or so it would take to drive into town, do the shop and come back.
“What do we need?” Shane asks, fishing around in the kitchen junk drawer for a piece of paper and a pen.
“I don’t know,” Ilya says. “You are the one with all the food plans.”
“You’re the one who went through all the coke in like, five days,” Shane says, glancing up from writing Coca Cola to catch Ilya rolling his eyes expressively.
“Has been ten days,” he says. “And it’s a very normal amount of coke for normal people who like normal drinks.”
Shane wrinkles his nose at him, which causes Ilya to break into a grin, and then to push himself off the counter so he can kiss Shane on the bridge of his nose.
Then he glances down at the list. “I’ve never seen your writing,” he says.
Shane also looks down at the handful of items he’s already added, GROCERY LIST printed in all caps at the top. Tries to imagine what Ilya sees in his handwriting, a neat print with some cursive touches sneaking in – a loop on the h in ‘hot dogs’, the way some of the letters blend into each other.
“I guess not,” he says to Ilya. “I haven’t seen yours either.”
Ilya flaps a hand, as though shooing a mosquito away. “You don’t want to see me writing your alphabet.”
Except Shane kind of does, realises he wants to see how Ilya writes Cyrillic too, wants to see what his hands look like in his native language.
He abruptly crosses to the fridge and pulls it open. “What else do we need?”
Shane has mostly forgotten about the grocery list, lost amongst the absolute glut of memories of their weeks at the cottage. They’re at Ilya’s in Boston, in early October. Ilya pours them both glasses of water like he’s done this a hundred times, like this is normal, like this isn’t the first time Shane has been to Ilya’s since before the summer.
The front of Ilya’s fridge is very spare. A Boston magnet. One of those junk mail magnetic calendars from some real estate agent. And, taped at about eye height, a yellow scrap of paper with GROCERY LIST written across the top.
“Is that – is that from this summer?” Shane asks, stepping forward to lay a finger beside it.
Ilya hums inquisitively, looking where Shane is pointing. It’s dark in the kitchen, but Shane thinks he can see his face flushing.
“Ah,” he says. “Yes. I think so.”
“You think so,” Shane prods, crossing his arms and facing Ilya. “Could be another random grocery list.”
“Could be,” Ilya shrugs, and Shane knows that twitch in his jaw that means he’s trying not to grin.
“Written by someone who has very similar handwriting to me.”
Ilya switches tack. “Maybe I want to remember what boring grocery list is like so I can buy the opposite.”
Shane leans back against the counter and nods consideringly. “Very reasonable,” he says.
Ilya steps forward not quite into Shane’s space. “You know me,” he says. “Mister logical.”
And Shane doesn’t think about the grocery list for the rest of the night.
Except he finds himself thinking of it increasingly over the next weeks – in the Provigo, whenever he catches sight of his own, equally sparsely adorned fridge, sometimes just seeing a coke-branded vending machine. He wonders why, of all things, Ilya kept the grocery list. But it’s not until he’s lying in bed in a hotel in Toronto that he remembers Ilya saying, “I’ve never seen your writing.”
Shane rolls off the bed and sits down at the desk, pulls the hotel stationary towards him. He stares at the Delta letterhead, the hotel address stamped along the bottom. This is silly. Shane hasn’t written a letter since he was a kid and his mom still reminded him after every birthday and Christmas to send thank-you notes to his relatives. He has no idea what he’s doing, has no idea if Ilya would even want a letter from him.
Dear Ilya, he writes tentatively.
Then he goes back and adds the date to the upper right corner of the page.
On the bed, his phone buzzes.
Shane picks up the notepad and pen in one hand and flops back across the bed to grab his phone with the other.
As though he’s been summoned, it’s a text from Ilya. Shane is grinning even before he reads it.
Ready to see how a real game is played ;)
Montréal’s game had been in the early afternoon, but Boston is on the west coast tonight and won’t play until 10 PM Eastern time, not too long from now.
Asshole, Shane replies.
Then he turns over so he’s sitting against the headboard and props the notepad on his knees.
I’m in the beautiful downtown Toronto Delta, he writes, you may be able to picture it since it very much resembles every other Delta on this continent.
Is he trying too hard to be funny? Is this what people normally write in love letters? Is this a love letter?
He considers googling what people write in love letters when his phone buzzes with another text from Ilya.
😘
Shane grins. You’re also blowing up my phone currently, he writes. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
That’s an exaggeration, he adds to the letter. But it’s nice. I miss you.
He puts the letter down. Is that too much for what is the fourth total sentence of this letter? But no, he’s allowed to say these things now. He’s still not used to it – used to the overwhelming, wonderful flood of things he’s allowed to say now. So, he picks up his phone.
I miss you, he texts Ilya.
There’s no response but judging by the timing Ilya’s probably put his phone away for the game. Shane turns the TV on.
I’m about to watch your game, he writes. Sticks the end of the pen under his chin and rubs it back and forth. On the TV, an ad for Canadian Tire plays. But right now I’m watching an ad for Canadian Tire. I guess you don’t get those.
Shane lifts the pen from the page and sighs. He thinks he must be doing this wrong. He’s filled up nearly half the page with the most inane bullshit ever committed to paper. A typically boring letter from boring Shane Hollander.
Caught up as he is in his thoughts he nearly misses the first period starting. He looks back at the TV as the whistle blows and there is Ilya and this is something Shane knows how to do – how to watch the game, how to watch Ilya, especially when he’s alone and doesn’t have to worry about how to hold his body, about keeping his expressions in check, about not giving anything away.
It’s halfway through the first period that Shane picks the notepad back up, needing to comment on a play the other team made. Then a few minutes later to compliment Ilya’s assist. Then at the intermission to complain about the quality of the advertisements again.
He passes the game like this and by the end (four-two Boston) he realises he’s filled up six sheets of the note pad, writing on both sides. He looks at the last page, wonders if he should read it over. He vaguely remembers what he wrote – lots about the game, but some…not. There’s definitely a bit in the middle there, written after he’d watched Ilya take a hit and then wipe off the blood from a cut on his jaw, that he thinks if he read over he’d tear up the letter and flush the pieces down the toilet.
So instead he picks up the pen one last time and writes,
I love you,
Shane
The notepad feels like a burning beacon in the pocket of his bag. On the plane he keeps having to squash down the urge to pull it out and – what? Read what he’s written? Write more? He imagines what he’d say to Ilya, describing the plane ride, the airport, everything. He wishes desperately that he could share it all with Ilya, have him…riding along in his head somehow, looking out through his eyes. Which is probably not a normal urge, now he expresses it to himself.
“You look like you’re thinking hard,” Hayden, across from him, says.
“Bad sign, right?” Shane quips.
Hayden grins, “I’m waiting for the smoke to start coming out of your ears.”
Shane laughs, and tries to put the letter and Ilya out of his mind.
Once he’s back in Montréal, Shane buys a hundred pack of small, white envelopes (because that was the smallest amount the tiny Canada Post in the back of the Pharmaprix had), as well as a book of six US-rate stamps with cartoon birds on them.
Back home, he carefully licks the adhesive lines of the envelope, grimacing a little at the taste and trying not to think about papercuts on his tongue. Smooths the flap of the envelope closed. Turns it over and fixes the stamp neatly in the top right corner.
The blank front of the envelope stares up at him, and it’s at that point that he realises he doesn’t know Ilya’s address. Well, he knows the address of Ilya’s building, his apartment number, but he doesn’t know the postal code.
He considers and almost immediately discards the idea of texting Ilya.
Hey, just wondering for no reason at all if I can have the full legal address to your apartment I’ve been to several times now. There’s no way that won’t be suspicious.
So Shane texts his dad.
Do you know how to find a postal code if you know like, a street address?
The response comes twenty or so minutes later. Should be in the phone book.
Then, a few seconds after that, Or Canada Post has postal code lookup online.
Shane pulls up the Canada Post website and isn’t really surprised to see it only works for Canadian addresses. But maybe the US postal service has their own. He spends some time hunting around before remembering they’re called zip codes but once he sorts that out…
Ilya Rozanov’s full home address stares back at him from his computer screen. He stares back at it, then very carefully writes it out on the envelope.
He’s been dithering over the return address, then finally writes decides on his condo address without his name at the top. It’s just a generic Montréal address, that shouldn’t be suspicious to any nosy mail carriers. Do mail carriers have to take an oath of confidentiality, like doctors? He almost texts his dad again to ask but decides better on it.
It’s just that now he can no longer put off dropping the letter in the mail, letting it leave his presence and set off into the world where who knows what will happen to it. The most likely thing, he has to acknowledge, is that it will make it to Ilya’s house, and that Ilya will read it and – and what? Shane doesn’t know why he shies away from the thought, feels as though maybe his writing is revealing in a new and uniquely devastating way, that this letter contains Shane Hollander, stripped bare by his pen in a way he could never be in real life.
He almost tears the envelope open to check. He almost throws it into the recycling. He almost sticks it in the back of a cupboard so he can forget about it.
It’s most likely, he thinks, that it’s a letter that just contains a lot of commentary about hockey.
Shane takes a breath and grabs his keys before he can think any more. Heads down to the mail room. He imagines the outgoing mail slot as a dark maw in the stainless steel of the wall, but really it’s just a rectangle about the size of a hardcover book. The little letter slips in easily. Shane watches for a moment after it vanishes, then turns and goes back upstairs.