Rachel Reid Reveals ‘Unrivaled’ Won’t Be A Smooth Ride — And That’s Exactly What The ‘Heated Rivalry’ Fandom Needed To Hear

In some of pop culture’s most exciting news of the week, the author of the beloved Game Changers universe gave fans their first real look at what’s next for Shane and Ilya — and it’s complicated, messy, and everything we should have expected.

Heated Rivalry Crave

Crave, IMDB

Rachel Reid built one of the most beloved love stories in contemporary romance by making her characters wait. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov spent years stealing time together in secret, orbiting each other across rival teams, across countries, across the carefully constructed walls they’d each built to survive professional hockey as closeted men. When The Long Game finally delivered the ending fans had been aching for, the relief was palpable across every corner of the internet.

But Reid was already thinking ahead.

On May 13th, Spotify hosted an intimate evening in New York City for an immersive celebration of Heated Rivalry and the broader Game Changers universe. The purpose of the event was spotlighting the Books on Spotify experience, including the platform’s new Bookshop.org partnership and its Page Match feature, which lets readers move between audio and physical book without losing their place. As expected, Reid’s reveal of more information about the next book in Ilya and Shane’s series has since stolen the show. Fans are ravenous, and rightfully hungry for more information about their new slow burn obsession couple. Any reveal about Shane and Ilya’s future feels like a full course meal in those shoes. It was a fittingly layered event for a story that lives in multiple formats and refuses to stay still.

“It Isn’t Gonna Be Totally Smooth”

For a fandom that has been waiting on any scrap of information about the forthcoming book since its announcement, Reid’s words landed with the quiet devastation her writing is known for. “Everybody knows about their relationship,” she said. “There’s so many things that are brand new for them. Where in the long game, it seemed like it had a big happy ending for them, but I kept thinking about it, and the year since it came out — it’s like, well, it’s really the start of a whole new kind of weird year of their life that is totally brand new for them, and it isn’t gonna be totally smooth.”

That reframing of the happy ending as a beginning rather than a conclusion — is both a relief and a gut punch, which is, frankly, on brand. Reid has never been interested in giving her characters easy lives. She’s interested in giving them real ones. And real relationships, especially ones built in secret and then suddenly exposed to an entire world, don’t simply become uncomplicated because the love is finally public.

Unrivaled picks up with Shane and Ilya no longer hiding but navigating something arguably more disorienting: visibility. A marriage. Shared teammates. Public scrutiny. The mechanics of a relationship that was forged in stolen moments now playing out in front of everyone who ever watched them on the ice.

The Complications of Going Public

Reid went further, pulling back the curtain on the specific friction that will drive the new book. “We’re going to see them together a lot instead of grabbing time here and there,” she explained. “And yeah, there’s going to be some back up. Not everybody loves that two hockey players are married to each other on the same team. But some people really love it. And I think we’re going to see a lot of support for them both.”

That tension — institutional resistance alongside genuine community — mirrors something the Heated Rivalry fandom knows intimately. Following the show’s premiere, lead actor Hudson Williams noted that the series had resonated with closeted professional athletes. The story was never just a romance. It was a document of what it costs to hide and what it demands to stop hiding. Unrivaled seems poised to explore the less glamorous side of that freedom: the teammates who don’t celebrate, the organizations that see liability where fans see love, the daily negotiation of being out in a world that is not uniformly welcoming.

For readers who came to the Game Changers universe through Heated Rivalry the novel, or the Crave series that brought Shane and Ilya to a massive new audience, this is not a departure. It’s a deepening. Reid has always written hockey romance that takes its characters’ interiority seriously, and Unrivaled sounds like it will demand just as much from them — and from readers — as the books that came before it.

A Universe That Keeps Expanding

The timing of Reid’s reveals is notable. The television adaptation premiered in November 2025 on Crave, based on Reid’s 2019 novel, following rival professional hockey players whose on-ice animosity concealed a secret romantic relationship developing over several years. The show earned a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, landed on HBO Max, and promptly ignited exactly the kind of fandom that does not quietly wait for Season 2.

In the months since, fans have built their own ecosystem around the story. An unauthorized musical parody, written by Dylan MarcAurele and directed by Alan Kliffer, opened Off-Broadway on May 12 and has already been extended through September 7, 2026. NewFest has programmed a free outdoor screening of the series at Pier 17 as part of its Pride 2026 lineup, with executive director David Hatkoff describing it as emblematic of a community that “doesn’t wait for permission to celebrate.” Watch parties, trivia nights, and themed events have proliferated across cities with an energy that most shows never generate even at their peak.

Into that ecosystem, Reid dropped Unrivaled details with characteristic precision enough to feel the shape of what’s coming without giving away the architecture.

What Reid Understands About This Fandom

There’s a reason the Spotify event chose Heated Rivalry as the vehicle for its Books experience launch, and it isn’t just the show’s ratings. It’s the quality of attention this fandom brings. These are readers and viewers who annotate, who reread, who track timelines, who have opinions about minor characters and secondary plot threads. They are exactly the audience that notices when an author has been thinking carefully about what comes next.

And Reid clearly has been. The framing she offered, that The Long Game’s ending was really an opening chapter, that the life Shane and Ilya are building together is genuinely uncharted territory for both of them , suggests a writer who is not simply extending a series because the demand is there. She’s extending it because she found something true to say about what comes after the love story resolves.

Unrivaled is currently slated for 2027. Based on what Reid shared on Wednesday night, the wait is going to feel exactly as long as it sounds.