First Encounter During the 2010 CCM Promotional Shoot in Toronto

The first encounter during the 2010 CCM promotional shoot in Toronto begins as a professional opportunity for Shane Hollander and becomes the first scene in which his attraction to Ilya Rozanov surfaces. The meeting places them together before either has played an NHL game, under the polished, carefully staged gaze of a commercial shoot.

The Promotional Shoot

In July 2010, Shane had signed a lucrative endorsement deal with CCM, one of the biggest hockey equipment companies. He was excited: he had not yet played a single NHL game, and the contract already marked a significant step in his career. Then he learned that CCM had signed Ilya Rozanov too, turning what might have been a solo promotional opportunity into an encounter with his future rival.

While the crew prepared the shoot, Shane took a couple of laps around the ice in head-to-toe CCM gear, including a custom black jersey bearing the company logo where a team crest would normally appear. His name and number, 24, were on the back. Wearing makeup and trying not to sweat before the cameras were ready, he stopped skating and waited on the bench, watching the crew adjust the lighting. After a few minutes, he sensed Ilya at the other end of the bench and turned to see him standing there, also in makeup. Ilya teased him, “Very pretty,” and compared him to a doll; Shane pointed out that Ilya was painted up too. The exchange gives their first meeting its characteristic mix of performance and provocation: both are dressed for the same commercial, but their attention is already fixed on each other.

From Curiosity to a First Kiss

The attraction that the shoot’s teasing had left unspoken soon became physical and impossible for Shane to dismiss. In the shower, he found himself transfixed by Ilya’s body; when he realized that he was visibly aroused, he looked down in horror, only to see Ilya turn and notice. Asked what he had been thinking about, Shane answered, “You.” The admission made explicit what his attention had already betrayed. Ilya asked whether Shane wanted to touch him, and Shane’s desire was mixed with alarm at the fact that it was Ilya, of all people, who had drawn it out.

Later, Shane tried to make the hotel room look less like a place where he was waiting: he put on a baseball game with the sound low, switched off the overhead light, turned on the lamps, and checked his reflection. At seven minutes after nine, he checked the peephole in case Ilya was playing a prank. Ilya was alone. Shane turned off the television and let him in, still unsure whether the meeting was a good idea. Ilya tilted Shane’s chin up and kissed him. Shane initially froze, eyes open and lips pressed together, caught in panic; when Ilya traced his lips with his tongue and threaded his fingers into Shane’s hair, Shane finally yielded, closed his eyes, and returned the kiss. He had never kissed a man, and his alarm was sharpened by the thought that this was not just any man but Ilya. Yet his body continued to answer before he could settle what the encounter meant: he took Ilya’s thumb into his mouth, then sank to his knees and began to pleasure him, shaking but choosing to continue. The scene turns the promotional meeting’s wary flirtation into a secret sexual encounter, while leaving Shane frightened by both his desire and the identity of the person he desires.

The Encounter's Afterlife

The encounter did not leave Shane with a clear label or an easy resolution. After Ilya dressed and stood to leave, Shane felt an urge to ask him to stay, then tried to dismiss it: what had happened was a mistake, he told himself, and should be no more than a quick, no-strings hookup. He wanted Ilya out of the hotel room and wanted to forget the night, even as he imagined pulling him back and doing it all again. That contradiction—desire pressing against an insistence that the encounter meant nothing—became an early pattern in their relationship.

Shane could accept that he was willing to have sex with a man, and considered whether Ilya might simply have been the first man to give him the chance to experiment. But finding someone else was not a straightforward alternative. Shane expected his career to make discretion more difficult, feared rumors about his sexuality, and understood the NHL dressing room as a place where homophobic slurs were common. He could not imagine being the first openly queer player, and was certain that he would not be the one to take that risk. The scene's private awakening therefore begins under a public constraint: Shane's desire has become undeniable, but the world in which he hopes to succeed offers no safe way to acknowledge it.

That pressure appears in miniature when another player calls Ilya a slur on the ice. Ilya shrugs it off, privately conceding that it is partly true. His casual response does not make the surrounding culture harmless; it shows how openly hostility can circulate even while the truth of his desire remains concealed. The secrecy protecting the men is not simply a private arrangement between rivals but a response to a professional environment in which being identified as gay carries an evident social risk.

The hotel hookup also sets up a recurring struggle over what their meetings mean. Years later, in Boston, their hookups have moved from hotel rooms to Ilya's penthouse. Shane had objected to visiting because someone might see him entering the building, but his unspoken objection was more intimate: going to Ilya's actual home made their arrangement feel personal. He tells himself again that he will end it and return to his hotel, while recognizing that he has broken that promise too many times to count. The change of setting makes visible what the first night had already exposed: the supposedly disposable encounter has acquired a place in their lives that neither man can keep calling impersonal.

Much later, at dinner with Hayden and Jackie, Shane names the scale of what began in secrecy: he has been attracted to his male archrival since he was eighteen and has kept the relationship hidden for almost ten years. His anger gives way to a silence in which Hayden admits that Shane could have told him, then apologizes for making the dinner about himself. The exchange does not erase the years of fear, but it marks a change in who is allowed to know and respond. A first encounter that Shane tried to reduce to a mistake becomes, in retrospect, the beginning of a durable relationship whose secrecy shaped both his private choices and his sense of what could be said aloud.

The Choices the Encounter Opens

Afterward, Shane could see three possible ways forward: avoid men altogether and stay with women, seek a man who could be discreet and patient, or let whatever was happening with Ilya continue without examining it too closely. None offered a simple escape. The first would mean refusing a desire he had begun to recognize; the second would require finding privacy and trust in a world where he feared exposure; the third preserved the connection while postponing any decision about what it meant. The encounter thus leaves him not with a settled identity or plan, but with an unwanted choice between suppressing desire, risking discovery, and returning to the one man he insists is a mistake.