Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander/Original Male Character(s)

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Original Male Character(s), Original Female Character(s)

Additional Tags:

Good Parents David Hollander/Yuna Hollander, Underage Drug Use, Recreational Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Shane Hollander Has a Sexual Awakening, Minor Character Death, Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Humiliation Kink, Intercrural Sex, Kink Negotiation, < but only if you quint it's mostly dirty talk, Dubious Consent, dubcon layered on dubcon, Feminization, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, the power of poorly negotiated kinky sex CANNOT overcome addiction except for these two but they're on some freak soalmate shit so imma let it slide, Dom/sub, role play, Mean Dom Ilya Rozanov, Sadist Ilya Rozanov, Masochist Shane Hollander, Original Characters - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts, Avoidant Ilya Hollander, Avoidantly Attached Ilya Rozanov, much like me mans is fighting DEMONS and GOD to not run away and puke and never speak again when people are Nice or Express Affection

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-07-11 Completed: 2026-08-15 Words: 31,661 Chapters: 2/2

A Cloud Around His Body

Summary

Cocaine was somehow everywhere in Shane’s life, at every party, in every pre-season lecture from coaches, in every post-season warning, every wild story the guys told to tempt the rookies into pleasure and scare them into line. And yet, Shane didn’t actually know much about it. He was too chicken, too prudish, maybe. He thought he was too good to ever need to know. Maybe Rozanov was right.

“Okay.” Ilya’s agreement startled Shane from his thoughts. “My Jane… she is good lay, mm? The best, maybe. And she doesn’t like coke, not even for fun. So, I will not do it. One year. To prove a point and keep her happy. I do not have addiction problem, so will be easy-peazy. And when I win, I will get whatever I want. Okay?”

-x-

Or, my Shane and Ilya cocaine thesis

Notes

hi, folks! if you're waiting for another installment of the "sailing, sailing" series, hang tight! i needed something else to shake loose the creative juices and hudconvent's incredible tumblr post unlocked something for me. so here's my shane and ilya cocaine thesis. at present, this is all i have written !! i have another chapter outlined-kinda but it's nowhere near done and i'm too excited about this chapter to hold it back. so for now, please enjoy this one shot!

Chapter 1

May, 2006

Shane first saw someone high on coke at Danny Felder’s graduation party. The place was loud when Shane showed up twenty-five minutes late (at Brandon Korbik’s insistence because dude, like, nobody shows up on time, that’s fuckin lame man, I’m savin’ your life here) and only got louder from there. Felder found strobe lights to mount near his parents’ ceiling and a weird black ball that spun and threw circles of color onto the walls. Shane pressed his back into the far living room wall as it was lit up with orange geometry, then blue, green, pink. His Sidekick, freshly gifted to him for his fifteenth birthday and programmed with three entire numbers, ached where it jammed into his butt cheek. In the living room, people shouted over the music and gripped the kinds of red solo cups Shane thought only existed in movies and made out with their girls and—Jesus, Cody Biller was basically fucking his on-again-off-again girlfriend on the couch to the jeering delight of Boone and McLeod who stood behind to ogle.

It occurred to Shane, right about then, that he was probably the youngest person there. He’d just turned fifteen two weeks ago, and he only got an invite because Felder’s mom made him, which Shane knows because Felder fucking told him so. It was played like a joke – Ah, my mom was such a bitch about it, said I gotta invite the baby. I told her she didn’t give me a little brother on fuckin’ purpose – so Shane faked a chuckle with the rest of the locker room, but it still stung. He debated not going. He didn’t want a pity invite. He didn’t want to be the little brother trailing behind, unwanted. He still had to pack and clean his room tomorrow before summer training down in Vermont, and he still had that paper on King Lear to finish—the one Mrs. Delaney let slide on the promise he’d turn it in before the end of May. But his Mom encouraged him to go to the party when he brought it up in passing, told him it’d be good for him, a chance to socialize, show face; didn’t he want to be Captain?

Dad drove him and stalled out two streets down from Felder’s house. Before Shane could point to the right place, Dad grabbed him gently by the back of the neck.

“Listen,” he said. “You’re probably gonna see some stuff in there. Booze. Drugs. You don’t have to do any of it. Okay? You don’t have to drink. You don’t have to smoke or take a hit or-or. Nothing at all. Alright? Not a damn thing. You blame me, tell them your dad is a real hardass. Say it back.”

“My dad’s a real hardass,” Shane said. The words didn’t roll easily off his tongue, but he tried.

“Good.” Dad sighed and the sound was too big to sit easily on the console between them. “You don’t have to tell me names, alright. You don’t have to tell me anything. But the second you’re scared, the second something feels off? You call. You call me, I don’t care what time it is, I don’t care. Alright? You call me and I’ll pick you up and I won’t ask any questions. What are you gonna do the second something seems off?”

“I’m gonna call you.”

“And what are you gonna tell them if they give you grief about it?”

“My dad’s a real hard ass. If he catches me smoking or drinking or whatever,” Shane dares to adlib, “he’ll skin me. I’m just gonna head home.”

“Good,” Dad sighed again. He put the car back in gear and inched down the street. “I love you. You’re a good kid.”

On the couch, Biller trailed his hand into the dark space between his body and his girlfriend’s. She… squeaked? Then she shoved at him until he got off with a too-loud, “What, you’re playin’ shy now?”

Shane tensed, took a step closer.

But then the girlfriend—Kathy? Chloe? Kimmie?—grabbed Biller’s hand and tugged him across the living room, up the steps. Behind her, Biller made jerking off motions and stuck his tongue out like a celly to the hoots and shouts behind him. So. Probably it was fine.

Shane let himself relax into the wall again. His mom had made him go to all these bystander trainings about girls and rape and stuff. No means no, that kinda thing. Shane knew if she was upset, he was supposed to shove Biller off of her, get between them, tell him to quit being a piece of shit. The goal was to make a scene, give… Courtney? Christie? Kaylie? He was supposed to give her a chance to get away. And if Biller got nasty? Well. Shane didn’t fight on the ice often, but he knew how to finish a fight. Uncle Jack and Michael made sure of it.

But also like… if he didn’t have to be the buzz kill, he didn’t want to be. Especially as the fucking baby.

A door swung open beside Shane and he almost fell flinching away from it. Jesus, he thought that door was a fucking closet. But no, Ryan Felder was falling from the bathroom. Shane had met Danny’s older brother once or twice. They recognized each other because it was hard not to. Ryan was the only person anyone knew over six-five, and Shane was the only Asian kid in the room most of the time. So yeah. Hard not to recognize one another.

“You doin’ good baby bro?!” Ryan was loud, probably had nine inches and forty pounds on Shane, but he was generally friendly. So, Shane accepted the heavy hand on his shoulder, smiled.

“I’m good, man, I’m chillin’. You?” Shane winced as his voice cracked on the last word, gripped his ginger ale a little more closely. But Ryan didn’t give him any grief about it.

In fact, Ryan didn’t seem to have processed anything Shane said. He sniffed hard with a cheeky smile, giving Shane a look like they were in on a joke, like Shane was supposed to know what the fuck that meant. “Never better, baby; never fuckin’ better. You finally outta pampers yet? What year you in?”

Shane answered the questions, asked some back about Ryan’s minor league team and first games on the road. Then a hard strobe and a circle of color hit at the same time and Shane realized two things at once.

Ryan was beautiful. Reddish hair falling in a flop across his eyes, light brown eyes that would usually unnerve Shane but tonight they felt nice. It felt really nice to be at the center of Ryan’s attention, all of it poured into Shane, all of the air between them electric and buzzy. And Ryan’s shoulders, God, the dude wasn’t called The Tank for no fuckin’ reason. Shane abruptly remembered being boarded by him at a pick-up game. He knew just how hard that huge body hit. He wondered what it’d be like to be pinned again between the wall and Ryan, if this time Ryan’s breath would be harsh against his neck, maybe, if Ryan leaned down—wondered if his huge hands would drift like Biller’s did to the dark space between them—wondered if Shane would ever work up the nerve to pull Ryan Felder up the stairs—

Shane also realized Ryan was high. Like. Really high. His hand, when he shoved his hair back, was trembling. And his eyes, his pupils, Jesus, they were blown to hell, even as a strobe flashed and Shane had to squint against it. Ryan was flushed down his neck, grinning too hard to be talking about shitty hotels on the road, and he was twitchy-trembly in his sneakers. Shane had taken his shoes off at the door, unthinking, habit. Now he wished he’d left them on.

“Anyway, baby, Imma head out,” Ryan said. He grinned harder somehow. His canines were fucking huge. Shane tried not to squirm in his socks. Ryan reached out a trembling hand. Shane’s imagination did awful, traitorous things to him. They dapped. Ryan slipped around the perimeter of the room, bounded up the steps. Just a few minutes later, he came loping down them, winked at Shane, and disappeared through the glass front door.

Shane stayed in the living room for another hour as carefully measured by the grandfather clock’s chimes in the hallway. He forced himself to mingle and talk, to shake off the… fear? The buzz in his stomach? Now that he was looking, he saw three other people dip into that same bathroom and come out grinning, whooping, ready to fuckin rumbleeeee as they hooted. Danny Felder laughed from the center of the room each time and proudly boasted that Ryan got them the good shit.

Shane dipped into the kitchen to take a breath. Some girlfriends were already organizing into an impromptu WAG-style email thread. He skirted around them to toss his long-empty ginger ale into the recycling. He dipped into the open kitchen bathroom and—

There was a barber mirror sitting on the closed toilet seat, a damp smudge of white pushed into the corner. It was just… sitting there. And slumped in front of the hand soap bottle was a baggie with white still at the bottom. For a second, Shane thought he might have fallen into a cop show. Like any second some badge was gonna bust in, snap on blue gloves, pick up the baggie between two fingers, and say, tutting, Rich kids and their damn cocaine.

Oh. Holy fuck.

It was cocaine. There’s—holy—oh fuck. Ryan Felder probably thought Shane was waiting to get into the coke bathroom, because apparently the Felder’s have a coke bathroom off their living room and another one off their kitchen— oh shit Felder’s dad works in finance—was that a stereotype or was that real—or—what the fuck? What the fuck.

What the fuck. Oh god, what the fuck, oh god, what the fuck, what the actual fuck. It was a relentless hum in Shane’s ears. His need to piss was completely forgotten. He just left the bathroom, shoved out the Felder’s side door, pulled out his phone, and called the top number.

“Shane?”

“Dad—uhm—”

“I’m coming. I’m getting up now, alright, kid? I’m on my way.” There was shifting fabric, murmuring, what might have been Mom’s voice on the other end, then, “Where are you?”

“Felder’s. I mean—I’m in the yard. The side yard.”

“Stay in the yard, alright? Do not go back inside.” Dad sounded weirdly urgent, which didn’t make sense, but also, maybe, did. Ryan Felder thought Shane Hollander was waiting to do coke. Shane Hollander wanted Ryan Felder to drift his hand into the dark space between their bodies. Fuck. Maybe Shane should have been weirdly urgent too?

“Stay put,” Dad was saying. “I’m on my way.”

March, 2013

The baggies were everywhere once Shane was drafted, and so were mirrors – nicer, edgeless mirrors so no coke would get lost in the corners – and glass tables and acrylic plates brought by strippers for their convenience. Shane lost track of how many conversations he had with dude coked out, or on their way to it, or on their way down from it. He never lingered long, not like he had unwittingly with Ryan. (Ryan Felder, who left the AHL after he shattered his tibia during a game in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA of all goddamn places. Ryan Felder, who followed his dad into finance, married a nice white girl, and disappeared into Facebook notifications Shane stopped checking.) Nobody was as interesting or funny as they thought they were after a line, and nobody made Shane wonder about their hands in dark spaces. Nobody except Ilya Rozanov, who didn’t need to be high to be interesting and funny, to make Shane curious.

So it wasn’t that Shane was surprised to find himself making meaningless small talk in a kitchen with a dude coming down from a coke high and itchy to get started on the next ride up. He was surprised it was his cousin Michael, and he was surprised Michael had the nerve to ask if Shane had a Montreal dealer.

“Nah, man,” Shane said, resting his paper plate on the counter. “I don’t do that stuff.”

He kept it simple, as was his rule. With weed, Shane was willing to stick around and say the kind of stupid, meaningless shit that always got passed around between guys. Stoned players were the best. They thought everything was so funny, they smiled so big, Shane could be as honest as he wanted and it didn’t matter. But coke? Nah. He kept it simple and he got the fuck outta dodge if he could.

He’d seen asshats lose their ever-loving minds, throw punches at opponents, teammates, their fucking wives because they “got confused,” because they didn’t like what they thought they heard, because someone wouldn’t appease them fast enough. When things got real ugly –Comeau, 2012 immediately comes to mind – Shane would wade in. He wasn’t the baby anymore; he was the fucking captain. It was his team and he’d resurrected them from bottom tier nothings, so he’d break up whatever bullshit he wanted, and when they sobered up they’d thank him for standing between them and the front office deciding they weren’t worth the cost of coverups.  

But Michael wasn’t one of his guys. Michael was his cousin, Uncle Jack’s pride and joy, the baby born just six months before Shane, the closest thing Shane had to a brother. More to the point: Michael was a recently-retired pro boxer and wouldn’t feel badly at all about laying Shane out. Michael wouldn’t have to answer to LeClair or the GM or anyone. Uncle Jack wasn’t speaking to him, Aunt Kim had cut off all his credit cards and was one blow-out fight from joining Uncle Jack in the silent brigade. Michael was desperate. Shane knew desperate because he’d been desperate for a hell of a lot in his life, and because desperate had a funk, a pheromone stink that hovered in a cloud around the body.

“Bullshit,” Michael scoffed. “All you hockey fuckers do it. I know you’re—you’re the fuckin Golden Boy or whatever, God’s gift to Canada, but I know you’re no fuckin’ saint.”

Most guys do at least a little, bumps at the party, maybe someone else’s leftovers rubbed on their gums for a cheap thrill. But Shane wasn’t built for casual—Rozanov is different—and anyway he hadn’t ever wanted to. He felt like a livewire all the time, no way coke would make that better. And he didn’t need coke to feel alive. He had entire stadiums screaming his name.

“Sorry, man.” Shane wasn’t really sorry. Even if he had a dealer, he doubted Michael could afford the designer shit Shane’s guys snorted. “I’m not your guy.”

“You’re such a fuckin’ pussy.” Michael shook his head, shrugged off a twitch, snorted and spit a thick wad of mucus into the kitchen sink. Shane was glad he was closer to the door than Michael was. It hurt, seeing Mike brought so low.

“Guess it makes sense,” Michael was saying. “The fag’s got a stick up his ass. Breaking news. This and more at eleven, eh?”

Michael laughed, nasty. Shane told himself it didn’t matter. Mike was just in a bad way. Everyone at the repast knew Michael was high, and everyone was being very polite (very fucking silent) about it. A funeral is a bad time to bring out that someone is strung out on coke and barely holding it together through a messy, years long divorce after their boxing career crashed and burned. At least there aren’t kids involved, Mom had whispered as they stood at the edge of the first pew and gazed at Grandpa’s closed coffin near the altar. Kids make divorce so much more complicated.

But there was a kid, or there would be soon. Shane thought about asking how Twyla was holding up, whether Michael had seen the announcement of her pregnancy with her new boyfriend. But he couldn’t bring himself to be so cruel. Not to Mike.

“Alright, man,” Shane managed. His body was aching. He’d carved time out in the middle of the playoffs to be here, to be with his family. He had a red-eye out tomorrow to South Carolina, to play in a city no hockey was ever meant to be played in, to get started on a deep run in the playoffs and win his first fucking cup. He didn’t have time for this shit. He loved Michael and he hurt for him, but not enough to hit up Comeau for some rando’s number. He loved him enough to make sure he got home safe, and that would have to be good. “You got a ride home? You need a taxi?”

Michael stared at him. Was that betrayal curling his lip? Rage? “I don’t need your fuckin’ pity, Shane.”

It was different, being called Shane after so many months of hearing nothing but Hollander. Even in Rozanov’s beautiful accent, Hollander was Hollander.

Hollander knew how to wade in, Hollander knew how to shove a guy away from his girlfriend when that girlfriend was nursing a black eye, Hollander knew how to corral a puke-happy drunk into the backseat of a car, Hollander was responsible and respectable and let the guys have their fun without jeopardizing the team’s image, and he was valued for it.

Shane? Shane couldn’t do shit.

“You think you’re so much better than me,” Michael said, finally pushing off the counter to get in Shane’s face. “You read your own fuckin’ press clippings, you think you’re all that. But you’re nothing. Worse than nothing. You think we can’t see right through you? You and your best friend Pike, like two peas in a fuckin’ pod, all you ever hear about, Hollander-and-Pike, Hollander-and-Pike. You think we don’t know?”

It was so close and so fucking far that Shane wanted to laugh. Hayden couldn’t have been straighter if he wanted to be. “Your gaydar needs a little tuning,” Shane said, just in time to catch a mean jab to the soft space below his spare rib.

Michael was two inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter, but with a lifetime of training and the strength of someone who wasn’t looking to win, only to hurt. Shane breathed into the pain, let it roll through him and stayed on his feet to shove Mike back a step. It was all so much easier on his Grandma’s tile than on ice. Rozanov had caught him with an elbow to the same spot weeks ago, then sucked on the bruise until Shane was keening and delirious with pleasure, stroked Shane with too much lube so the wet snick of it echoed in the empty space behind Shane’s eyes.

“Piece of shit faggot,” Michael snarled. Shane could hear movement in the dining room, scraping chairs and footsteps, but he kept his eyes on Michael. Michael, with eyes the same color and shape as Shanes’—Michael, who Shane loved but couldn’t stand to see like this—Michael, who thought he knew so much—Michael, who knew just enough to gut Shane like a fish. “Y’think you’re so much better than the rest of us! You go to hell, you cock sucking son of a bitch!”

“Go home,” Shane said. He was quiet, steady. He pulled Hollander over his shoulders like a coat against the bitter winter wind. It felt like too little, too late. “Go home, Mike. Sleep it off.”

“Look.” Michael shifted closer again, dropped to a pleading murmur. “Just gimme a number, a name. Nobody has to know, alright? Nobody. I—I shouldn’t’a called you a cock sucker. Huh? You’re a good man, alright. A great man. You’ll be a great husband, huh? Make a nice girl real happy. I just need you to help me out. You want a line? A cut of the payment? Whatever you want. C’mon, man, you know me. You know me.”

“Shane?” Dad’s voice was quiet, hesitant but not uncertain. He had wrinkles around his eyes now, at his neck. He was getting old. Too old to be fishing Shane out of dicey situations.

“We’re good,” Hollander said. He pulled himself to his full height, looped an arm around Michael’s shoulders. “Michael was just heading home.”

Hollander was more than familiar with getting close to a body, moving that body where he needed it to be. It wasn’t hard to get Michael into the driveway, or to shove him toward his car.

“You good to drive, man?” When Michael nodded too fast, Hollander shook his head. “I’ll take you home, Mike. C’mon.”

September, 2015

Rozanov was giddy off a win when he unlocked the service door in the kitchen, bringing with him a gust of cold air from the back stairwell. Shane glanced up from doing fuck all on his phone and turned to face him.

Rozy was a beauty tonight: playing like the devil was at his ankles, like he could smell the second cup on Shane and wanted to lick it off him. He got a goal of his own plus three assists, including a mean blind pass that led to the winning goal. Raiders take Metros in the Metro’s barn, 4-3, just a minute before the third period closed.

On the one hand, Shane was pissed. He knew from pre-season his guys were too comfortable after the first cup. They needed to act like they wanted another. Maybe other captains were content to touch the cup once. Shane wasn’t other captains.

On the other hand, Shane was very inclined to reward Roz for such a beautiful play, for the kind of trust among teammates that Shane knew took so much work to cultivate, for the kind of hockey that would take him straight to the Hall of Fame. Shane hadn’t been sure he’d see Roz at all. He hadn’t responded to Rozy’s text because it was just a question mark and frankly Shane deserved a bit more effort. Then there had been noise about the Raiders going on a tear through Montreal, corroborated by Ilya’s own Instagram stories before someone, presumably front office, wiped them. They probably locked him out of his own account too.

But when Shane texted the most recent entry code, Ilya had sent a slew of sex-adjacent emojis (water droplets, two eggplants, a red face with its tongue sticking out) and an ETA.

Shane wasn’t sure he’d have noticed if Rozanov’s nose hadn’t started bleeding. It was like something from a movie. One moment, Rozanov was licking into Shane’s mouth with desperate urgency, the next something wet and hot was smearing between them and iron was blooming on Shane’s tongue. Blood, so familiar and so out of place.  

Rozanov pulled back with an irritated noise in his throat. “Fuck,” he grumbled and wiped at the blood with the back of his hand. “Stupid fucking—shitty Canadian blow—I told him—”

“Blow?” Shane’s voice sounded far from him. It echoed strangely in the kitchen, glancing off the wine glasses Shane never touched, rolling around the decorative bowl Shane filled with clementines when they were in season and otherwise left empty.

“Yes, blow,” Rozanov snapped. He shoved past Shane to get to the sink, raising his voice to speak over the gurgling rush of water. “Blow, snow, dust, can only be so many names for same stuff on this stupid continent.”

“You’re high.” It was an observation. Observations were good. Grounding. Shane didn’t know why his world was spinning off its axis, didn’t know how to right it again. “You… you came even though you’re high?”

Rozanov inhaled hard and looked around like the answer to Shane’s question might be on the tile backsplash. “Yes? And?”

“I—”

But Rozanov was already bullying back into Shane’s space, finding the soft skin between Shane’s ear and the hinge of his jaw. “Less talking,” Rozanov insisted. “What does it matter?”

“It matters because you’re—”

“Because I’m sexy?”

“Because you’re better than this.”

Rozanov pulled back slowly. Shane gripped him by the arm, then by the shoulder, shifted again to hold him by his waist, the same waist that fit so perfectly between Shane’s thighs.

“I didn’t—I’m sorry.” Shane wasn’t even quite sure what he was apologizing for: saying it or meaning it. “Just… maybe we should… I’m exhausted from the game. So. Maybe tonight isn’t the night.”

“You are calling this off,” Rozanov said slowly. “After you text me, you are saying maybe not tonight? Over one stupid line?”

“I don’t fuck with that stuff, man—”

“Man?” Rozanov’s eyebrows were occupying the same square centimeters as his hairline. “Man? You—oh my fucking—this is ridiculous. You know this?”

Shane clenched his jaw. This is exactly why he didn’t fuck with coke highs. There’s no brake, no off ramp. Rozanov’s eyes were blown and staring right through Shane. His pupils had swallowed his irises and it wasn’t even Shane’s fault this time.

“You should sleep it off,” Shane said. He couldn’t look away from Roz’s eyes, the betrayal of them.

“Is one line,” Rozanov argued. “I’m barely even high, I told you—fucking cheap shit Marly got.”

“You didn’t tell me, actually.”

Rozanov threw up one hand, a familiar gesture Shane associated with dissatisfied irritation at a ref’s call. “Okay, it doesn’t matter. Is not a big deal, Hollander!”

“I mean—it kinda is! You’re compromised, Rozanov, off your fuckin’ game!”

Why was Shane arguing with Rozanov? He should shove Roz out, or go to bed and lock the bedroom door, or—

“Off my game?” Roz had drifted toward his shoes, kicked beneath the kitchen island, but didn’t move to put them on. “I am not off my game, Hollander. I am good all the time. What, you never smoked a little and fucked? Done molly, whatever?”

“No.” Shane wrapped an arm around himself. He felt… inexperienced, suddenly. Immature. And hypocritical, which sat heaviest in his gut. He could want it when he was fifteen and Ryan fucking Felder was high at his little brother’s grad party, but not now as a full grown adult? It’s not like he didn’t know Roz had done coke before. It’s just…

“No, of course not.” Roz pulled up a mocking mew. He stalked forward, getting so close Shane would have to tweak his neck awkwardly to meet his eye. Shane stared down at where their chests met. “Perfect golden boy Hollander, never done nothing wrong.”

“That’s not—” Shane forced a hand between them, shoved just enough to get some breathing room. “I just. Look. I don’t want you to regret this in the morning.” That was easier than admitting…  

Admitting what? That Ilya was more aggressive than usual? That Shane liked it? Shane felt aware, in every atom of his body, that Ilya could do real damage and Shane would let him. Shane might even beg for it. And if Ilya looked back in the morning and regretted what he’d done, Shane might never forgive him.

“I will not regret it.” Roz’s words should have been an affirmation, but they sounded more like a threat. “Never. I couldn’t.”

Would he say that if he were sober? Shane didn’t dare ask, but he must have thought it loudly enough for Roz to hear.

“All these years,” Roz marveled. His hand was huge and immovable on Shane’s jaw. Shane didn’t even know when it got there. “Everything I have done to you, and you think I could regret it now?”

Shane couldn’t be held responsible for what his body did when Roz got close and spoke like this. He felt his spine go soft in Rozanov’s grip, even as his dick got so hard it made his head spin.

“Make up your mind, Hollander,” Roz insisted. “You want me or not?”

“You know I do,” Shane found himself admitting.

“Then have me.” Rozanov tipped Shane’s face up toward the ceiling. “I told you, is nothing. I am not even that high, only did one line before you text me.”

“You keep saying that like it’s supposed to make me feel better.”

“Should,” Roz grumbled. “I can handle much more. But it’s the season still, so.”

A shudder of uncertainty rolled through Shane. He shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t. He didn’t want to take advantage of Rozanov for some sick high school thrill. But God, he always wanted Rozanov: wanted to touch him, wanted to feel the full weight of him ranged above Shane, wanted to feel the heavy press of his dick deep in Shane’s guts.

“It’s fine,” Roz continued. “Is not big deal so fucking relax, Hollander. I probably lost my virginity on coke fucking decade ago.”

“A decade?” Shane felt all the looseness in his body evaporate.

“Da, sure,” Rozanov agreed easily. “So, c’mon—”

“We were fourteen a decade ago.” Sound was moving strangely around the kitchen again. This time, his voice came from somewhere above him, while a dull roar took up in his ears.

Like déjà vu, Roz pulled away again. He shrugged his broad shoulders. Where he stood, he was a lunar eclipse, haloed by the overhead light with all his features carved in the dark. “Okay?”

“You were doing coke at fourteen?!”

“Fuck this.” Roz ripped away from him, striding down the narrow walkway between the counter and the island. “You are right,” he spat. “Tonight isn’t the fucking night.”

Shane’s body reached out to grab Roz before his brain could spin up a plan.

Roz snatched his arm away. “You want to—to fucking lecture me?” He laughed incredulously and swiped a hand across his face. “First the cigarettes and now this. You are my fucking father, huh? My papa? You need me beg permission to take sip of vodka next?”

Shane grabbed again, caught Rozanov’s head in both his hands this time, forced him to stay close.

“I’m not your father,” Shane said, though he knew it came too late. “And I’m not trying to be. I’m—”

“But you want to tell me how sad! Poor little Ilya, fourteen and snorting coke—!”

“It is sad!” They were forehead to forehead, grill to grill, breathing each other’s air. If Shane were to kiss him now, would his tongue burn from the coke Roz almost certainly scrubbed into his gums? “You were just a kid, Roz!” 

“And now I’m not! I survive! I make it out! You think I am some weak fuck, some little bitch, cannot handle it?”

“I think you’re making stupid decisions—”

“And who are you to—”

“I think I’m scared!”

Shane squeezed his eyes shut, like that would block out the surprise that flashed across Rozanov’s face. What the fuck was he doing? Why was he saying any of this? They didn’t do this. They weren’t like this. Shane’s blood was pounding in his temples, in the thin skin on the inside of his wrist. Rozanov’s hands came up to mirror Shane’s, grabbing him around the ears, holding him close.

“You are scared,” Rozanov repeated. The empty air of the kitchen cradled his words. “Of what?”

Ryan Felder, who died of a heart attack at barely twenty-seven. Benny Rike, who played on Shane’s championship-winning Junior’s team, who should’ve gone pro but never made it to the fucking combine ‘cause he was on a bender. Matthias Yuke, Adam Shore, Peter Pusalki, Gio Guzman, probably twenty others whose names Shane had forgotten, whose horror stories weren’t unique enough to stand out and just became background fuzz.

Most of them were casual too. They snorted sometimes, injected never. But they still blew it: one too many DUI’s, one too many accidents, one too many assault charges, that one time Tyler Izbecki tried to kidnap his ex’s kids. They were too much of a liability, so their careers got cut short, and without the game, what did they have to fall back on? What else could give them the rush?

Shane pulled a shrug up from the floor of his pride. “I’ve seen guys brought to nothing by coke.” He tried for a laugh, but what came out was a ragged gasp. “You can’t leave me at the top by myself. Alright? What the fuck am I supposed to do, rack up trophies and cups alone?”

Rozanov scoffed, a hot burst of air across Shane’s lips. It wasn’t dismissive but it wasn’t far off either.

“I do not have this problem, you know?” Roz began. “Boston’s doctors, they throw this word around, tell the guys, if you have a problem, we can help. Bullshit. All they do is send players to the crazy house, wonder why they don’t get better.”

“Rehab isn’t a crazy house.”

“I’m fine,” Rozanov insisted. He pulled back, knocked his skull gently against Shane’s. “I do not have this—this addiction problem or whatever. I can stop whenever. I do for fun, mm? My brother, he does because he has to. Because he has this problem. He cannot stop, burns through it like nothing, always chasing the next high. But not me. I do coke because I like it. You ever done?”

Shane shook his head, let his nose bump Roz. Rozanov, beautiful, reckless Rozanov, turned the gesture into a caress, a nuzzle.

“No,” Rozanov agreed. “Goody Hollander would never. Such a good boy, mm?”

Shane couldn’t stop himself from gasping or leaning into Rozanov if he wanted to.

“Feels so good,” Roz moaned. It was pornographic, an obvious ploy, and fuck Shane but it was working. “Like I am king of the world.”

“But I want—”

Shane barely stopped himself in time. His face and chest burned in mortification. He was about to say the stupidest thing to ever cross his lips: But I want to make you feel that good. I want to be the thing that makes you feel like a king.

Is he that dumb? Pitting himself against fucking cocaine? How many wives, parents, siblings had already tried and found out the hard way they couldn’t compete?

“You do.” Ilya darted in to bite down on Shane’s cheek. When Shane opened his eyes with a noise of protest, he saw more focus in Roz’s gaze. “You do. Coming hands free? Crying pretty tears when I grab at your bruises? When I fuck you so good you see God, snot running across those pretty lips and drool on your pillow? All your perfect tricks for me?”

“Not for you,” Shane tried to insist. His face was so hot Rozanov could probably feel it radiating against his own.

“No?” Roz grabbed his jaw, tipped him like he wanted to see Shane in a new light. Shane let himself be moved, let that familiar thrill of wrongrightgodfuck wash down his spine. “You do this for everyone?”

“Just you,” Shane confessed on a whisper. Folding like a goddamn lawn chair. It was embarrassing. Shane was helpless as he admitted, “Only you.”

Shane’s reward was two quick slaps, a hand rushing through his hair to scratch at the shaved hair on the back of his head. Shane thought he could feel Rozanov’s fingerprints on his neck if he tried.

“Just for me,” Rozanov mused. “My perfect slut, mm? Like the best drug in the world.”

Something pinged in Shane’s chest—worry, fear. Desperation, a cloud around his body. “Then… then you don’t need it. The coke, I mean. You have me.”

Rozanov paused then let go of Shane entirely. “I have you?”

There was a genuine question in Rozanov’s voice, which was insulting.

“Yes,” Shane breathed. “You fucking know that.” When Ilya was quiet too long, Shane pried his eyes open. He didn’t even know when he’d shut them. “You think I’d do this for anyone?”

Rozanov seemed to chew on this for a long moment. His face shuttered.

“Maybe you are right,” he agreed. Which—what? “Maybe not tonight. You are too sweet. Maybe… maybe I am not to be trusted when I am high, and you are so…”

He trailed off to whisper something in Russian. Then his lips were crashing into Shane’s, his tongue a welcome weight and warmth in Shane’s mouth, their bodies clicking like puzzle pieces, all the stupid cliches, they were all wiped from Shane’s mind, replaced by a litany of IlyaIlyaIlya.

When Ilya released him from the kiss, Shane gave in and let his head rest on Ilya’s shoulder, holding him close, refusing his departure.

“Stay,” Shane begged. “Stay, I’m sorry—”

“I should go,” Rozanov said. It was so gentle, so painful. “You are…”

“I’ll make you a deal.” It’s all impulse, all desperate need to keep Rozanov here, to keep him Shane’s even in some small, doomed way.

“A deal?”

“Da,” Shane said, then cringed. But Rozanov only laughed, so Shane pressed on. “A deal. A dare, even.”

“Oh, a dare. Well, in that case—”

“Shut up.” Shane dragged his head up to look at Ilya’s nose, his mouth. He couldn’t stop the small smile on his face if he wanted to.

“Shut up is not a very good dare, Hollander—”

“I dare you to stop.”

“Stop talking? Yes,” Roz riffed, “This is implied in shut up, Hollander. Surely you understand—”

“I meant the coke.”

The silence was abrupt, as was the end of Rozanov’s smile.

“One whole year,” Shane continued. His tongue felt like it was bloating to fill his entire mouth. His hands trembled where they rested on Rozanov’s waistband. Still, he forced himself to continue. “Including the off season and bye weeks.”

When Roz didn’t immediately respond, Shane dared to add, “I mean, since you can stop whenever.”

Ilya flicked his eyebrows up, pinned. “And when I win?”

“Whatever you want.”

Roz’s focus sharpened further than Shane thought was possible. “This is very big blank check you give me,” he pointed out.

“I will not regret it,” Shane repeated.

Roz tipped his head, like he was filing this away for later cross examination. “Is just one problem, Mr. Sneak Around. How am I explaining this, mm? My team, they call me fucking Snow Plow. They have expectations, I have responsibilities as captain—”

“Wait—they call you a fucking snow plow?” Shane was more thrown by this than anything Ilya Rozanov had ever said before, excepting, maybe, I might knock. “Just how much coke are you snorting, Rozanov?”

“Enough,” Roz said with a warning look. “And now you want me to just stop?”

“Blame me, then.” Shane swallowed hard. “I mean, don’t tell them Shane Hollander dared you. Obviously. Just—tell them Jane doesn’t want you doing coke anymore. Tell them…”

Shane paused to gather courage he didn’t realize he’d need. It wasn’t a secret, what happened to Michael. It was just…

“Tell them Jane’s cousin OD’d.”

It was just that Shane couldn’t say it outright.

“Tell them she was the last person to talk to him, last person to see him alive and, and, just… tell them it really fucked with her. So. Yeah. That's why.”

Rozanov’s attention was always heavy, a physical presence on Shane as unique as his touch. Shane wanted to live in the spotlight of it forever, even if it meant saying things he’d never said to anyone outside his family.

“Is this true?” Rozanov had gone utterly still. “This really happened to… to Jane? And her cousin?”

Rozanov curled the ‘j’ sound, blurred the line between Jane and Shane. It was distance and closeness both, a path forward that Shane hadn’t known he needed until Ilya offered it on a plate.  

“Yeah,” Shane breathed.

He hadn’t… it wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t. He just never talked about it. With anyone. He got off his red eye to South Carolina, got the call from his dad, and got right back on the first returning flight to Montreal. And when Hayden and JJ asked why he’d missed the first game of the series, Shane only said funeral stuff and left it there.

“She, uhm.” Shane looked at the floor and cleared his throat. “She and her cousin, they were only six months apart. And I—I mean. Jane ended up driving Michael home from their grandpa’s funeral. His name is. Uhm. His name was Michael. And he was a boxer. But uhm. Jane drove him home ‘cause he was too fucked up and Jane was worried he’d wrap himself around a tree. So Jane drove him home. My—Jane’s parents went to check on Michael the next day because Jane was worried about him. We all were. They uhm. They found him. He overdosed in his living room. So. If anyone gives you grief about it, you tell them— tell them Jane was really fucked up about it. And Jane doesn’t fuck guys who do coke. So. Just blame Jane.”

The silence was overwhelming.

Shane could see Ilya’s heartbeat pounding in his neck. How long did coke stay in the system? Cocaine was somehow everywhere in Shane’s life, at every party, in every pre-season lecture from coaches, in every post-season warning, every wild story the guys told to tempt the rookies into pleasure and scare them into line. And yet, Shane didn’t actually know much about it. He was too chicken, too prudish, maybe. He thought he was too good to ever need to know. Maybe Rozanov was right.

“Okay.” Ilya’s agreement startled Shane from his thoughts. “My Jane… she is good lay, mm? The best, maybe. And she doesn’t like coke, not even for fun. So, I will not do it. One year. To prove a point and keep her happy. I do not have addiction problem, so will be easy-peazy. And when I win, I will get whatever I want. Okay?”

It sounded like a real question, and Rozanov waited like he wanted a real answer. Shane nodded once. “Okay.”

Rozanov sealed it with a kiss, one that sent shocks of perfectyesmoreplease out from Shane’s spine in waves.

Rozanov pulled back. “I should go.”

“Do you have to?”

Rozanov shrugged, sniffed hard and had the conscience to look a little guilty about the gesture. “I mean… I did a line at the club. My Jane, she does not like when I do this.”

“But… But Jane gets it. She gets that stuff, you know. Happens.”

“Stuff happens?” Ilya threw his head back to laugh. “Ah, yes, line jumps up from glass right into my nose. Happens all the time, you know. Complete accident.”

“Fuck. Off.” But Shane laughed too: at himself, at Roz for being such a goof. He laughed because he felt frothy, felt like he’d won something, like he’d found a way to stopper the ocean. “I’m just saying I know hockey culture, asshole.”

“Mm, my Jane, so knowledgeable.”

“You don’t have to go,” Shane insisted. “Just… maybe we can just sleep? Is that—”

Ilya’s laughter died to something smaller, harder to read.

“Never mind,” Shane hurried to stay. “I’m—I’m making it weird. I’ll stop. It’s cool. Totally cool.”

But Roz only shrugged. “Maybe is part of our deal? I do not do coke, so I can sleep inside. Like a good dog.”

There was a cruel mocking in Ilya’s voice, but it was off. Like someone else’s words stuffed in his mouth. A good dog. It was infuriating, actually. Who the fuck was this jackass to talk shit about Shane’s Rozanov?

“You’re nobody’s dog,” Shane scoffed. “A wolf, maybe. But not a dog.”

It sounded lamer out loud than in Shane’s head. But Ilya still smiled, still pushed and turned Shane until he was being walked backward through his own apartment.

“A big bad wolf,” Ilya growled. “With a big cock—better to fuck you with, huh?”

Shane stopped halfway up the steps to let Ilya lick into Shane’s mouth. The glass was cold behind him. That’s why he arched into Ilya’s body, into the cock that was in fact big and better to fuck him with. No other reason.

“But not tonight,” Ilya said. “Tonight, my Jane wants me to sleep it off. And I want to keep her happy, yes? So, we sleep.”

“Fuck,” Shane bit out, unsure if he was frustrated with himself for saying no, or with Ilya for actually listening to him for once. “I want you.”

“Too bad,” Ilya said. “I am an honest man. I made honest deal with my beautiful Jane. She says no, so.” He shrugged, but the gesture was belied by his grin, the way he grabbed Shane’s hand and ran up the rest of the stairs like a little kid getting away with some grand heist.

He tossed himself onto Shane’s bed, still in his clothes, then flopped around to get all of them off. His shoes were toed off, his pants tossed one way, his shirt another.  Then he sat at the edge of the bed to watch Shane fold his clothes, leaned back on his hands and gazing with utter delight.

“Shut up,” Shane warned preemptively as he rolled his hoodie and set it on the dresser.

“I said nothing!”

“You were gonna.”

“Nuh-uh. Scout is honor or whatever the fuck it is.”

“Scout’s honor,” Shane said. He placed the pile on top of his dresser to be sorted in the morning. “Like. The honor of a scout. A boy scout, I guess.”

“Which side you sleep on?”

“I don’t care,” Shane said instead of admitting that he usually slept right down the middle and flopped back and forth. “Whichever works for you.”

Ilya rolled half an inch to the left, then patted the right side. “Come. I want to hear about all my prizes I will win when I finish my year of no cocaine.”

“Prizes?”

“Da. I have to decide: what do I want with this big, blank check my Jane gives me? Do I want trip to Ibiza? Your body in pretty lingerie?” Before Shane could parry that, Ilya continued, “And how will incentive work? Bonuses, like with points? Will I get reward for three months, six months, nine months?”

Shane didn’t know what to do with his body. He laid down flat on his back, legs outstretched, then felt dumb and crossed them at the ankle. That was worse, maybe, but he had to commit to something. His hands folded across his sternum without his permission.

“I mean… as Jane’s representative in these negotiations, ah,” Shane cleared his throat in a fussy gesture that was half character and half uncertainty. “I’d prefer to hear what you think would be an acceptable prize. So I can relay the information to my client with, uh, utmost transparency.”

“Mmm.” Ilya tapped his finger to his thumb in faux thought. Of course, Ilya looked cool: on his side, propped on his elbow, huge bicep bulging and still pumped from the fucking game. Those arms looked so good holding his weight as he fucked deep into Shane. It was unfair, Shane thought suddenly, that a guy so cocky should also have so much cock to back it up.

“I think, maybe, I should get to call Jane—a little reward, you know? When I would usually get high with my buddies, I will call her. Instead of coke, I hear her pretty moans, listen to her touch herself.”

Shane felt his dick twitch, the traitor. He grew hard in his shorts and watched Ilya track the rise of his dick with a lecherous grin.

“She is so pretty down there,” Ilya continued. “Her skin is so soft, and she gets so, so wet, dripping down my wrist.” Ilya shifted a bit more on the mattress, shoving his own hand artlessly into his boxers. It was probably dry—

“Lube,” Shane rasped. He was a good host, after all. “In the… fuck, Rozanov, in the drawer.”

“Not yet. We are in no rush, Mr. Hollander. Negotiations like these, they can take some patience. I am patient man, mm? When I want something, I can wait as long as I need.”

Ilya’s hand moved slowly, so slowly, hidden by his boxers but obviously stroking.

“I want—” Shane cleared his throat, pitched his voice back down. “I’m gonna touch myself too. In the interest of fairness.”

Ilya reached out whip fast, popped his finger against Shane’s cheek like a doctor knocking bubbles from a syringe. The sharp snap of pain made Shane jolt and sent shameful heat running through his chest, his balls, the soles of his feet.

“Don’t you dare,” Ilya warned. “I am not done saying my terms. Can you be trusted, Mr. Hollander? Will you disappoint me?”

Shane gripped the pillow under his head, both as protection for his still hot cheek and because he worried what he might do if he didn’t—worried what punishment Ilya might mete out—worried and worried and was so hot with it, he thought he might unravel entirely.

“I’ll be good,” Shane promised. God, he shouldn’t be so fucking easy. It was pathetic. His legs straightened and bent restlessly against the quilt. He felt fifteen again and caught between Ryan Felder and a living room wall, or freshly-drafted sitting in a too-small Toronto gym, or—god. Any time Ilya looked at him like this, predatory and pleased with his prey, Shane felt stripped down to the fucking studs. “I’m—I’m listening, sir. What are your terms?”

“Mm, fuck.” Ilya pulled his hand from his boxers to spit in his palm. The sound was thick in the quiet of Shane’s bedroom. “Yes, add this to the list. My Jane, when she moans and cries for me, she will call me sir, mm? She will be so polite, so good for me.”

Shane curled his toes into the mattress. He wanted that, viciously. “Of course, sir. And to be clear—how, uhm. How would Jane be good for you?”

Ilya’s laugh was a little mean, a little mocking, but he kept up the stupid role play so clearly Shane wasn’t that bad.

(Or maybe Ilya just liked that Shane was kinda lame. Maybe Shane liked that Ilya thought he was a little pathetic.)

“Depends. Maybe sometimes she tells me her fantasies, what she thinks of when she is alone, touching herself.” Ilya paused to reach deeper into his boxers and squeeze his balls with a groan. Shane watched, rapt, as Ilya continued, “Maybe sometimes she follows all my orders. Maybe sometimes she takes picture—of her legs, her tits, her pretty clit, her hole.”

Shane tensed as uneasiness and desire warred in his guts. Pictures would be monumentally stupid. They’d be proof.

“Jane would, uhm. Jane would like to request that all photos be deleted within two hours.”

“Four,” Ilya parried. “I will need time to have the best ones printed, huh?”

The thought of it poured through Shane in a rush of pleasure: Ilya collecting a set of dirty pictures of Shane, his cock, his hole, his balls, his thighs, just him, all Ilya ever needed. Shane thought maybe he was going crazy. His dick drooled into his briefs and made a cold spot that shifted and dragged against his head each time he flexed his hips.

“Private printer,” Shane insisted, because he still had some functioning brain cells to bounce together. “At home. I’ll pay—I mean. Jane will pay for it.”

“Oh, Jane will?” Ilya’s eyebrows were high on his face, unimpressed and mocking. “Jane thinks I am so cheap, I cannot buy my own printer? I need her?”

“N-no, sir—”

“No.” Ilya’s face grew hard. “She needs me. Say it.”

“She needs you,” Shane agreed. His dick twitched, got wetter, got harder. Shane’s mouth was dry from how long he’d been panting with it open. “Please, sir, can I—”

“Take your cock out,” Ilya said with a lazy wave of one hand. The other still worked under his boxers, back to stroking and fondling his head. “I want to watch you drip, mm? You make such a stain on your nice briefs. You are not so wet as my Jane when I touch her, but you’ll do.”

“Thank you,” Shane breathed, shoving his briefs off, freeing one leg until the fabric wrapped around the opposite calf.

“Mr. Hollander,” Ilya purred. “You were holding out on me. Look at that big cock. So pretty. Almost as pretty as my Jane.”

Shane preened. He arched his back and flexed his thighs so his dick hovered and dripped into his belly button. He did have a pretty cock; he loved when Ilya told him how perfect it was. What a pretty ornament, Ilya said once. Shane wished he could carve the words into his grey matter.

Ilya pulled his hand from his boxers to stroke one finger up Shane’s cock, featherlight and still sticky from his spit. Shane bit his lip to dampen the moan that bubbled in the middle of his chest.

“Prettier,” Shane insisted as Ilya’s fingernail teased Shane’s head. “Prettier than your Jane.”

Another flick of Ilya’s finger, this time to the think skin at the base of Shane’s dick. A cry of alarmed pain punched out of him. His knees jerked up reflexively to his chest, just in time for Ilya to shove them back down to the mattress.

“I did not ask you to speak, Mr. Hollander.”

Shane was dizzy with pain, with pleasure, with the cotton in his head, with the lack of oxygen and his own shallow, panting breaths. “No, sir.”

“No, I didn’t,” Ilya agreed. “So now you will listen, mm?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. You’re learning. My pretty Jane, she needs me and she will answer when I call. I will tell her, malysh, I want you, put on a show for me, mm? And she will because she is so desperate for it. She will touch her pretty tits for me, pinch her nipples until they are swollen and puffy and aching, until her pretty parts are leaking into her panties.”

Ilya slapped his hand hard against Shane’s nipple. Shane arched into the assault, then curled away when Ilya pinched with his nails.

“She will touch herself,” Roz continued, still gripping Shane’s nipple, still sending hot bolts of pleasure through his body, “however I want. However I say. She will moan and whimper for me, yes, sir, anything, sir, whatever you want, Ilya.”

Shane squirmed at the falsetto Ilya affected. He cried out when Ilya finally let go and blood rushed back to his sore chest. He wanted to deny it, wanted to insist he didn’t sound like that. But he couldn’t be certain, not when Ilya made his head so fuzzy, took him out of his body and stuffed him back into it when they were done.

Shane’s hand drifted to his other nipple. Ilya didn’t stop him, so he flicked gently over the top of it before pinching it hard. A sob leaked from between his clenched teeth. The air was so cold, his dick was so hot, his cheeks were warm enough to be felt on the pillow.

Ilya paused to cuss in Russian, push his own boxers off before turning, stretching to reach for the lube. Shane was treated to his insane back, the curve of his ass, the soft white blond hairs of his upper hamstrings—

Then Ilya was back. He popped the cap to the lube and dumped far too much of it right onto Shane’s cock. It was cold, shockingly so, and prompted a gasp and cry from Shane.

“Ach, quit being a fussy bitch,” Ilya snarled. Then he put significantly less in his own palm and resumed stroking, faster and smoother this time. “Touch yourself. I want to watch.”

Shane’s hand slipped in the lube, the sound disgusting. He could feel the cold trailing down the seam of his balls, into his ass crack, matting his pubes to his skin. With so much lube there was no friction, almost no pleasure. It was like he wasn’t touching himself at all.

Shane whined in a way he hoped was plaintive and pathetic enough to prompt some action from Ilya, anything at all.

But Ilya only laughed. “Da, yes, my Jane—she will moan like this, huh? Needy little whore. Just how I like her.”

“Yes, sir.” Fuck, some of the moisture was evaporating already, keeping Shane cold and hot at once. The noise was disgusting, pornographic, exactly how Ilya liked it best.

“Mm. Maybe I will listen to her shove two fingers, three, her whole fist into her own pussy. Maybe I make her fuck herself with one of her pretty toys. Maybe—maybe I have her use her vibrator—”

“I don’t have a vibrator—”

“Shut up,” Ilya hissed. He was vicious, teeth bared and so, so beautiful. His eyes were blown from arousal and maybe lingering coke. Where did Shane’s effect end and the drugs begin? “I will buy her a pretty vibrator, then. Maybe I will make her use the stupid theragun, use it ‘til the tip of her clit is bruised.”

Shane squeezed hard under the head of his cock like he could bruise it himself.

“Nnngh, yes, sir. Bruise—bruise me, sir.”

“Da, just like that. Go on, malysh, stroke yourself. Let me see. It feels good?”

“No,” Shane whined, because it didn’t. It felt gross, felt like a useless task because there was so much lube that he couldn’t get a good grip. He could feel the wet spot getting cold beneath him already. It was awful. He never wanted to stop.

“No?” Ilya affected a big pout that twisted at the margins from his own gritted teeth. “Ooh, poor baby. Touching yourself just for me and it doesn’t even feel good. Such a good whore for me. Such a perfect toy.”

Ilya’s own hand was moving quickly. Shane watched and his mouth opened without his input, desperate for the weight and taste of Ilya on his tongue. Shane’s dick oozed and drooled across his knuckles, adding to the mess of him. His nipples throbbed with his heartbeat, which thrummed loudly in his jaw.

“Your toy” Shane agreed, late and breathy and brainless. He felt like he was floating in a sea of Ilya, like there was nothing in the world but the mattress beneath them and Ilya’s eyes above him. “C’mon, c’mon, please, I’ve—I’ll be so good. So good, sir. Touch me. Please. Don’t you—don’t you want to play with me?”

“You would have me cheat? On my perfect Jane?”

“She—please, sir. She doesn’t have to know.”

“Fuck.”

Shane was moving, being moved, faster than he could process. His limbs were jelly in Ilya’s grasp. He was shoved onto his side, then half onto his stomach. Ilya’s grip was bruising as he yanked Shane’s thighs into place, stacked them on atop the other, reached up a careless hand to swipe lube from Shane’s pubes. Ilya reared back, made a noise deep in his throat—

Something hot and wet bloomed in the space just beneath Shane’s balls.

“Oh, fuck,” Shane cried. His dick twitched dangerously, his balls pulled up tighter.

“Don’t you dare,” Ilya snarled. His grip was sudden, a merciless ring around the base of Shane’s dick. “I’m not done with you. Such a desperate whore—you like playing games with me? Huh, Shane? You tell me no, Ilya, we cannot fuck, then you whine like a bitch in heat until I have no choice? Look what you make me do.”

Ilya’s arm bullied under Shane’s head until his forearm could curl up to pin Shane in the crook of his elbow. His cock was huge and hot between Shane’s thighs as he started to move. Each thrust rubbed deliciously against the seam of Shane’s balls. The sound of it, the wet facsimile of their fucking, echoed in the room. It was all too much, and Shane didn’t want to stop, and he wasn’t certain Ilya could stop, and—

Shane could only manage a weak cry of warning.

“You are close?” Ilya asked. He was panting, done affecting nonchalance, and the break of it was enough to melt Shane’s brain straight from his head. His hand disappeared from Shane’s dick, moved instead to steady Shane’s rocking hip. “I am not even fucking you, malysh. You are just that desperate. That pathetic. C’mon, show me. Show me how easy you are for me.”

Shane wondered whether Ilya’s mocking falsetto was right. Some keening, animal noise was being torn out of him as his balls emptied, as hot waves of pleasure rolled up his spine and down to his toes. Everything was Ilya, Ilya, Ilya, Ilya, more, please, Ilya. His thighs shook, twitched, clenched hard around Ilya’s cock.

Then Ilya was grunting, pushing Shane all the way onto his stomach. Ilya’s dick was hot where he shoved it between Shane’s ass cheeks. His thrusts were sloppy, rabbity, fast and hot and so, so—

“Da, that’s—Shane.”

More heat, this time wet and searing, like a cleansing sun burning away the desperate fog around Shane’s head. Ilya was moaning through clenched teeth, probably so beautiful. Shane made do with the memory of it: Ilya’s flushed face, his throbbing jaw, the way his pupils swallowed up the green-blue of his eyes.

They panted together in silence for long minutes. Shane let the aftershocks twitch and roll through him. He was a mess, sticky with lube and come, a walking wet spot. He’d never felt better. He managed, after long minutes of panting and grinning goofily into the pillow, to free his face enough to say, “So, Mr. Rozanov? Are those terms to your liking?”

Ilya guffawed, landed a just-hard-enough slap to Shane’s ass cheek.

“Yes,” he said with a grunt. There was movement, a sudden emptiness where the heat of Ilya’s body used to be. But the ache was soothed by Ilya’s voice carrying from the ensuite, the rush of water from the tap, the proofs that Ilya had not left and was in fact coming back. “These suit me very well, Jane.”

Again, the curled ‘j’. Was there always this much truth in their charade?   

Ilya’s grip was much more gentle this time as he pulled apart Shane’s ass cheeks and ran a hot washcloth between them. Shane moaned, buried his head back into the pillow despite the wet spot of drool. It hurt so good. He was so achy, a phantom hurt, like his body couldn’t reconcile that Ilya had been in his bed and not fucked Shane’s hole puffy.

“Shh, I know,” Ilya murmured. “I know, soon, malysh. I’ll be done soon.”

He was true to his word. He was efficient as he rolled Shane again and cut through the worst of the lube coating Shane from belly button to mid-thigh. Shane would have to shower and swap the bedding if he didn’t want to wake up glued to his own damn sheets. That sounded like an awful amount of work.

“C’mon,” Ilya murmured, tugging Shane up gently.

Shane groaned. He felt loose limbed, soft kneed, totally unprepared to be vertical. But Ilya was a steady presence.

“So good,” Shane found himself saying. “Y’re so good to me, Ilya.”

Ilya shook his head and was quiet for a while. “You are too sweet,” he repeated. “Too sweet. And I am… I am maybe too high for this, still.”

Still, he supported Shane’s weight into the bathroom, let Shane kneel at his feet while the water warmed, and sat Shane on the tile bench to wash him carefully. Shane insisted on returning the favor, though he was unsuccessful in getting Ilya to sit. It was… nice. It was really fucking nice, safe with the bet between them, safe in the comfort of Shane’s home. Ilya even let Shane wash his hair.  

“What time’s your flight out?” Shane asked after they tossed a towel down and fell back into the middle of the bed.

“Early,” Ilya said. “6, and 4:30 call at hotel.”

“Wake me up before you leave?”

Ilya stiffened briefly in Shane’s arms. Then he exhaled slowly. “Da,” he said then blinked like he was surprised too. “Yes, but… Jane’s cousin. Michael. Did he leave note?”

Shane listened to the fan waving softly above them. “No,” he said. “He didn’t. It was ruled an accident, but I don’t… Jane doesn’t know. He was in a bad way at the end.”

Ilya made a soft sound of acknowledgement. When Shane opened his eyes, Ilya tugged at him until they were sharing a pillow, their limbs tangled and stacked.  

“I’m sorry,” Ilya said. “I—I understand. I also… I can’t…”

When Ilya stalled, Shane asked, “Did… Did Lily lose someone?” At Ilya’s nod, Shane continued, “A teammate? A school friend?”

“Her mama.” Ilya’s eyes were closed, squeezed shut. When Shane reached out to glance the backs of his fingers against Ilya’s cheek, those eyes squeezed even tighter. “Not cocaine, but pills. For nerves. It was a whole bottle but still they say... What was your phrase? Rules an accident?”

“Ruled,” Shane repeated on a whisper. “Ruled an accident. I’m… tell Lily I’m so sorry.”

“Tell the same to Jane.”

For a long time, all they did was breathe. Finally, Ilya fluttered his eyes open.

“One year,” he said. “One year, and I can have anything.”

“One year,” Shane agreed.

“I will enjoy this year,” Ilya said. His voice was quiet but firm, with a certainty that bordered on a threat. “And then, I will enjoy my reward.”

Ilya’s promise burned warm between Shane’s ribs. He tucked himself closer. Ilya shifted and Shane found his nose tucked into the soft space between Ilya’s face and the pillow, Ilya’s exhale blowing across his lips and cheek. Between one breath and the next, without quite noticing he was close to the edge, Shane fell asleep.

Chapter 2: two

Chapter Summary

A nickname is a kind of relic, one part proof of what has passed and two parts hope for days to come. Ilya hasn’t lived up to his Snow Plow fame since Marlow sat with him in August 2014 while he shivered through heart palpitations and hot flashes in a hotel suite’s empty hot tub, eating a loaf of corner store bread dry to stop himself from puking up a slurry of tequila, vodka, and body glitter. But there’s nevertheless a holy shine to being known as the Snow Plow—the guy who can hold his weight; the little rookie who worked hard and played harder; the cocky bastard with balls to back it up; the guy who could drink everyone under the table, fuck all night, then play better than ever in the morning. He has rarely been the underdog and never allowed himself to stay so for long. It’s like he told Shane: Ilya Rozanov is a survivor. He takes the worst shit heaven can throw at him and he throws it right fucking back.

But does God have to find quite so much to throw?

Ilya sits under the strobing lights, the bass pulsing through his chest and the high hats a physical force against his skull, and realizes this will be harder than he anticipated.

Chapter Notes

i am back with chapter two !!! kisses to all :) this chapter is similar to the first: not as much smut as you would imagine, a lot of attention to character history. i hope you like it.

also FUCK i just realized i spelled marlow / marleau / marley / marly like nine different ways. sorry y'all ! have mercy !!

Week 0

The first few hours after the high are the worst. The roaring buzz of delight sloughs off to a lull. Then the lull is replaced by the sense that, somehow, his walls are watching him. He’s certain he’ll never be happy again, sure that if he looks out the window he will find a SWAT team training weapons at the door demanding his surrender—for what? He does not know and it does not matter. It’s a miserable, miserable feeling, and he sweats it out sitting upright beside a sleeping Shane, who snores softly and buries his nose into Ilya’s thigh. It passes in increments; it always passes because it must. In these moments, he’s sure he’ll never do cocaine again. Probably, this is how Alexei feels: confident after the high that the worst has passed, that he’s learned his lesson.

There’s an itch under Ilya’s skin, which will grow until all he can think about is how to get back to the rush and delight of coke. At least the itch makes him fast, makes him skate like the devil is nipping at his heels. But there is no skating to be done; only getting whatever rest he can before his alarm hauls him away from the warm air beneath Shane’s sheets at 4:05am.

When he sleeps, he dreams suicide dreams. He finds himself inside his father’s apartment; the first one, before they moved and Papa married Polina. In this apartment, which always smells like it does in his memory, good tobacco and carpet powder, every door he opens leads to the same tableau. He shakes his own shoulder and begs Mama to wake up. He opens a door he knows will lead to the bedroom and finds himself OD’d on his mother’s bed. He leaves, opens the next door to call for help. In this room, the very same bedroom, his mother is face down and limp on the bed and he is certain it’s his own body.

Eventually, he catches onto the logic and forces himself awake ten minutes before his alarm. He tries to slip from bed but Shane wakes anyway. Shane smiles, and all the dread makes Ilya miserable, but under it is something tender. Something vicious, too. He takes a kiss then shoves his hand down to jerk Shane’s pretty dick quick and merciless under the covers. Just because he can.

Week Three  

A nickname is a kind of relic, one part proof of what has passed and two parts hope for days to come. Ilya hasn’t lived up to his Snow Plow fame since Marleau sat with him in August 2014 while he shivered through heart palpitations and hot flashes in a hotel suite’s empty hot tub, eating a loaf of corner store bread dry to stop himself from puking up a slurry of tequila, vodka, and body glitter. But there’s nevertheless a holy shine to being known as the Snow Plow—the guy who can hold his weight; the little rookie who worked hard and played harder; the cocky bastard with balls to back it up; the guy who could drink everyone under the table, fuck all night, then play better than ever in the morning. He has rarely been the underdog and never allowed himself to stay so for long. It’s like he told Shane: Ilya Rozanov is a survivor. He takes the worst shit heaven can throw at him and he throws it right fucking back.

But does God have to find quite so much to throw?

Ilya sits under the strobing lights, the bass pulsing through his chest and the high hats a physical force against his skull, and realizes this will be harder than he anticipated. Alexei’s call still bounces through Ilya’s head. His brother is worst when he needs a fix: wheedling, guilty, making promises he cannot keep. He never calls and says the money is for drugs. He says it’s for food, for Maryja’s new winter clothes and schoolbooks, for Father’s medication, for repairs on Grandfather’s apartment off Gorky Park. Alexei promises he’ll send receipts; he’ll do right, he’ll take care of the family while Ilya is away. But he doesn’t. He can’t. And worse, he really means it every time. Every time Alexei thinks this time is the last time before he gets clean and stays that way. Just one more payment. One more high and then he’ll be done.

It makes Ilya’s throat ache. It makes him want to skate until he is wheezing and dry heaving over the bench. It makes him want to do a line, because at least a line will make him feel like he can stand under the weight on his shoulders.

Ilya catches Marley’s eye at the far end of the table. Marley is nursing a beer that’s sweating over the hair on his knuckles. Ilya is sweating too – from the heat of the dance floor below them, from his own racing heart. Marly agreed in advance to buy the coke as an unofficial alternate duty. Usually, Ilya would buy it: the guys will want it, and it’s better for Ilya to supply clean shit in controlled doses than let each man fend for himself. But it feels like cheating to buy, and Ilya knows that if he buys, he’s going to want to taste to confirm the blow’s quality, and then where will he be?

Across from Ilya, Connors picks up a bit from the loose corner pile with his pinky and smears it up under his top lip. Bulging from his bottom lip is a wad of that white nicotine shit he’s always begging Ilya to try.  Rykksy, the infant Ilya has assigned himself to look out for, looks down at the tray on the table like it might bite him.

Ilya sees the out and grabs it with both hands. “Ah, ah, pass him—SKIP!”

Ilya makes himself grin and bops Rykksander’s forehead like a naughty dog. “No rookie’s playing guilty on my watch, huh? Come. Come! I want a smoke.”

Does Ilya want a smoke? Maybe. He wants away from the fresh hundred Grant is rolling into a too-tight, uneven tube. It’s too many rotations, too many creases for the fine shit to be lost inside. Alexei would never be so careless.

His hands were so much larger than Ilya’s back when he taught Ilya the right way to snort. They never rushed in those days. Coke was luxurious then, something verboten to be indulged. Let the good be good while it’s going, as Alexei would say. He loved speaking in riddles back then.

Ilya blinks and watches Grant unroll the hundred and smear the wettish remains along the backside of his lip. He makes a quick gesture to Marly: cut him off. Grant’s a light weight, relatively speaking. Any more than a taste of coke in a night and he’s guaranteed to need bail money. Easier to keep him distracted than explain to LeClaire why someone from legal needs to call the bar and have them drop charges against Grant. Again.

Ilya rises all the way and hauls Rykksy with him. They dance across the dance floor—or, rather, Ilya dances and weaves his way across the floor while Rykksy parts a path by virtue of being six-foot-nine and two-hundred-eighty pounds.

The winter air when they emerge from the bar is wet and warm with incipient snow. Rykksy’s silent as they lean against the brick façade. Ilya shakes out the first cig in the pack for him and holds it out, but the rookie declines.

Fine by him. Ilya takes a drag of the lucky smoke and lets the heavy spice-and-acid of it dance in the back of his throat. American Spirit Blacks, because the convenience store closest to their hotel somehow didn’t have his preferred Marlboros. Ilya flips the small box idly, eyes the man in a headdress like he might start telling Ilya what to do with his life. The Americans are better than he expected. The symbolism of that is annoying.

“I’m going to make a call,” Ilya says. It’s rude, probably, to just stand and ignore Rykksy while the poor rookie can’t even enjoy a drunk smoke. “You need a taxi? Uber?”

“Thanks for inside,” Rykksy says. Ilya clenches his fist against the urge to squirm under such direct acknowledgement. “I don’t, like, uh… none of that. You know? I just… this is not for me.”

“That’s fine,” Ilya says. And it is. The Raiders have a reputation for partying, sure. But not everyone is an animal. “Ander and Bubbles are sober. They play Mario Cart and shit when we go out. Maybe they are in there now? The hotel, I mean.” 

Ilya’s phone buzzes insistently in his pocket. When he pulls it out, Не отвечай flashes across his screen. Four messages. Now five. He should obey his own warning: don’t answer.

Ilya opens the WhatsApp thread.  

It’s photos, mostly: a bare cabinet, Maryja smiling and waving from the couch, a blurry picture of an orange pill bottle. Ilya can’t read the label, but he can make out his father’s name. He can also see the dirt under Alexei’s fingernails. There was a time Alexei was fastidious to the point of vanity about hygiene. Where have those days disappeared to?

Ilya has no way of knowing when any of these photos were taken. Hell, the cabinet photo may well be staged. But it makes Ilya nervous that he can’t be certain. He can’t just bang on the door to Alexei’s apartment or swipe a key from Alexei’s landlady and let himself in. And whether the photo is old or recent, Masha is too young to be so skinny. She should still be round in the cheek and tummy with baby fat, storing up energy to learn in school and grow tall and strong. She should still be cuddled up with Ekaterina, listening to her Mama read her bedtime stories.

But God only knows where Katya is—likely driven to hiding with a friend or her mother by Alexei’s ravings and accusations. She’s smart to do so. Papa never stooped so low as to hit Mama, but Papa had an honor Alexei always lacked. Ilya’s jaw aches with how hard he’s clenching it. He forces his mouth to open enough to take a hard drag of the cigarette. He holds the air until his body forces him to release it in a hard burst of smoke.

He wishes he could smuggle Ekaterina stateside somehow with Masha in her arms. He wishes he could do anything more meaningful to help them. He doesn’t begrudge Katya for leaving periodically, any more than he begrudges his own Mama for…

Another hard drag. He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Katya would be found dead in a dumpster if she tried leaving Russia with Masha. Ilya knows this and it makes him furious. He is so grateful for the Raiders, because he does not have to be home. He is so resentful of the Raiders, because he cannot be where he is needed.

Rykksy gestures inanely in Ilya’s periphery. “My Uber is being close,” he says. “I meet him at the…” He gestures to the crosswalk halfway up the block. Ilya waves him on, keeps an eye on the lanky little fuck as he idles by the light post. Moments later, a Nissan pulls up. Rykksy has a brief conversation then folds himself into the car.

Ilya watches it disappear into the night. He should call Shane. He should book a flight back to Moscow. He should kill Alexei. He should block his entire family, delete his WhatsApp, and change his name. He should steal Masha and raise her himself. He should drop the cig before the filter burns his finger.

He crushes the smoldering butt underfoot and shakes out another. If Shane were here, he’d complain about the smell even as he wormed his way into Ilya’s embrace. Ilya doesn’t bother fighting a smile as he navigates to Mrs. Ivaniva and texts her. Has she watched Masha recently? Is his niece in good health? Could she please purchase some microwave meals to keep in her apartment? Something easy for Maryja to make. Ilya is concerned about Alexei’s ability to secure non-essentials. Ilya will send the money shortly.

Non-essentials. This is what he is reduced to: absurd fucking allusions and self-censorship because he is very famous and Alexei has been brought very low and Ilya pays Mrs. Ivaniva quite a bit but the tabloids might offer more.

Ilya tries to do the mental math. Midnight in Columbus, Ohio, so… seven a.m. in Moscow. Mrs. Ivaniva is definitely awake. Alexei likely hasn’t yet gone to sleep. And where is Masha? It strikes Ilya as morosely funny. If the truth about Ilya and Shane were ever to be discovered, people would assume one was throwing games for the other; sabotaging hockey for dick. But Ilya never wants to sabotage the season more than when he is worried about his family and eager to return to Russia.

Shane’s contact is up before Ilya really thinks about it. He has not yet taken Shane up on the offer, but he knows, somehow, that Shane meant it. Shane manages to mean everything he says. Ilya hits call. The line rings for long enough that Ilya thinks Shane won’t answer at all.

Then, “H’llo?”

Guilt and pleasure snap at each other’s muzzles in Ilya’s gut. Some of the swirling pressure in his forehead eases.

“Ilya?” Shane says. He sounds out of it, confused. Ilya is a bad man for finding that as arousing as he does. “Hello?”

“Malysh,” Ilya greets. “I did not realize bedtime was so early for good little babies.”

“I—what time is it?”

“Half past midnight, eastern.”

Shane grunts. Ilya hears sheets shifting on the other end of the line. “You’re okay?” Shane breathes down a yawn. “You need me, sir?”

Always, Ilya wants to say. But that is too much. Shane is so… He is too sweet. Earnest. Sveta used that word once to describe a rookie from Bumblefuck, Serbia who narrowly managed to charm his way into her bed. Maybe that earnestness makes Ilya want to do bad things to him. Maybe Ilya too lacks Grigori’s honor. Ilya is brought back to Shane’s smile, his yawning pleasure at being woken before Ilya left. In the dark, cradled by his soft striped sheets, Shane had been flushed from sleep, puffy eyed, vulnerable, so vulnerable Ilya wanted to take a bite out of his stomach cavity. But those are the kinds of things that cannot be said.

“What are you wearing?” That’s an easy starting point. Simple. He needs the focus of simple right now.

“Pajamas?” Shane still sounds so confused, so tired. Ilya calls to mind his pout and furrowed brow. “Like… a t-shirt and boxers. Socks.”

“Mm. Take off your panties.”

Another sharp breath across the line, this one decidedly less tired. “Yes, sir.”

Shane is so good it makes Ilya’s balls ache. “And put the phone on speaker, up on your pillow. You have—uh—” Fuck, how is he supposed to ask a chick if she has lube?

“Lube?” Shane provides.

“Yes, this.”

“In the bedside.”

“Take it out but don’t use yet.”

“Okay.” Shane’s obedience, given so sweetly. Ilya could tell him to do anything and he would. Shane Fucking Hollander, a dog at Ilya’s beck and call. It’s heady. Ilya shifts against the brick and thanks God for his tight pants keeping his dick mostly down.

Connors pokes his head out. “You good man?”

Ilya pitches the phone back so he isn’t shouting in Shane’s ear. “Yes! Just, ah, calling Jane before she goes to sleep.”

Connors makes a whip noise, one that sours Ilya’s smile. Connors doesn’t notice. He’s already going back inside with a shout about Ilya not being seen again that night. Good. Ilya could use the excuse.

“Are you at a bar or something?” Shane asks. “I can hear the music.”

“A club,” Ilya clarifies. It’s a worthwhile distinction. “The guys are inside but Marley is watching them, making sure nobody does anything stupid. Usually I would, but...”

“Mm. You’re a good captain.”

Too sweet. Too much. Ilya breathes down the urge to ruin Shane. “Yeah?” he goads. “You would do as I say? Skate suicides ‘til you puke because I ask?”

“Pretty sure that’s just a regular game between us,” Shane points out. Then his voice is close, like he’s turned into the mic. “Yeah. I would. If you asked.”

“Stroke your neck,” Ilya says. On track; he needs to get them back on track. “Gently. Tease yourself, malysh. Tell me how it feels.”

Shane pulls air in between his teeth. The hiss is sweet on the back of Ilya’s tongue, a balance to the acid smoke between his fingers. “Yes, sir. It’s—my fingers are cold. And it feels. Good. I’m… I wish it was your fingers. Touching me? Your hands are so warm.”

Ilya wishes so too and he dares to say as much. Shane’s moan is soft yet; they’ve just gotten started. But it lights Ilya up nonetheless. “Now touch those pretty nipples for me,” Ilya instructs. He takes a deep breath without a drag, sinks into the pleasure and focus of listening to Shane follow his orders.

Shane’s breath hitches across the line.

“Your pretty tits,” Ilya muses. “So sensitive for me. The best I’ve ever seen.”

That’s… truer than he realized. They’re not big: an A-cup, maybe. But Ilya is a tits man, and like any self-respecting tits man he knows a mouthful is all anyone needs from cradle to grave. And Shane’s are so sensitive. It’s like there’s a plum line from his areola, the prettiest shade of rosy brown, to his leaking dick.

Shane offers another soft cry of pleasure. It’s all so close, delivered straight to his phone’s mic. If Ilya closes his eyes, he can place himself back in that room, close enough to share the air from their lungs. Ilya knocks his head back into the brick. “Are you feeling good, shchenok?”

“So good, sir,” Shane says. “I’m—I’m circling my fingers like you do when you—when you suck me. It makes me crazy. They’re so… you made them so—.”

“Are you wet?” Ilya asks.

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Yes, sir. Hard and wet. I’m—nnh, it’s on the sheets.”

“Mmm, my baby is making a mess.”

Shane’s next breath is punched out of him in a ragged cry. Ilya realizes his mistake immediately. He’s always couched endearments in Russian—at least, the traditional ones. Whore is a kind of endearment between them when the moment is taut with pleasure. But baby? Sunshine? Darling? These, Ilya has always given to Shane in a shroud.  

“Run your hands down your stomach,” Ilya says. Shane makes a soft sound of agreement. “Spread your legs for me. And pull your knees back. Show your hole off for me, hmm? You know how I like to see you.”

A party comes stumbling out of the club. Ilya tracks their movement. They’re all drunk, and none of them are on Ilya’s team. Two girls hold each other up. Lovers? Friends? None of Ilya’s business.

“O-okay,” Shane says. “I’m—can I--?”

“Not yet,” Ilya says. “Stroke your inner thighs. Tease them. Your cum gutters too.”

Ilya might be a little tipsy, but he has the sense to lower his voice at the last part. He’s fairly certain women do not have cum gutters. But Shane does. They aren’t very pronounced unless he’s flexing hard to make himself last, folded up with his knees around his ears while Ilya fucks him. Then he’s nothing but avenues for liquid: the ridges of his abs for his precum, the line of his cheeks for his sobbing tears, the upper dip of his lip for snot, the round of his chin for drool. He gives Ilya everything, then.

Shane makes a noise of discontent on the other end of the line. “Not—that’s gross, Ilya.”

“That’s gross, who?”

“Sir.” The immediacy and contrition are gratifying. “But… it’s so gross. Don’t… don’t call them that.”

It’s so sweet that Shane thinks Ilya gives a damn what Shane wants to be called.

“Hm, so gross you got soft?” Ilya calls to mind Shane’s humiliated desire: the way his cheeks become blankets of red, the way purple runs down his neck and pink shoots up his ears. There’s nothing that makes brown give way to pupil in Shane’s eye faster than pointing out how much he loves debasing himself for Ilya.

“No,” Shane admits. “No, sir, can I—”

“So needy,” Ilya coos. “Touching yourself for barely five minutes and you need a hand down there. You’re lucky I’m in a good mood. Go ahead.”

“Lube?”

Ilya laughs and pins his phone against his shoulder to pull out his headphones. It’s bad form, probably, to have phone sex in the back of the Uber he’s about to order, but headphones must be better than speaker. “No,” he says. “No, I’m sure you are wet enough without.”

#

The first time Ilya knew he’d done too much coke, he was with Sasha. He felt totally, inconsolably alone. Even Sasha’s warm, long body draped across him was not enough. He could feel every microscopic point of distance between them. He left Sasha’s room before anyone in his house woke.

Ilya walked all the way home. He couldn’t feel his fingers or toes when he finally got the key through the door but that didn’t stop him from grabbing his bag and going to the rink. His new coach was harsher than Sasha’s father, even less tolerant—perhaps because he knew just how hot Ilya would have to burn, how fast he’d have to move to break Russia’s gravity. But this coach took one look at Ilya and let him plead off. After practice, the coach cornered Ilya in his office, made him promise he’d never be so fucking stupid again, and didn’t even demand Ilya suck him off as repayment. That was the closest to merciful Kuznetsov ever was. Ilya won him gold at Junior’s in thanks.  

Week Seven

Ilya thinks it will be different when he next sees Shane in person: harder, probably, to stuff all the intimacy they’ve built back in the closet. Calls have become check-in texts, have become sprawling conversations about dogs they saw on runs and stupid social media challenges and bullshit jock taxes. He even gave Shane his WhatsApp.

Ilya is wrong: it’s not harder to stuff away, it’s impossible. He makes the four hour drive to meet Shane in New York. Shane, fresh off a win against the Admirals, is as intoxicating as ever.

It’s too good, getting to hear his own name slurred through hitching, overwhelmed sobs; too good to smack Shane, shake his head like a naughty puppy, get him so worked up all he can whimper in warning is sir, sir, sirsirsirsirsir—until he’s coming and squeezing like a vice on Ilya’s dick. It’s even better to pull out and watch Shane’s puffy hole twitch; better to stroke Shane’s skin as he returns from Jupiter, twitching and seeking Ilya’s warmth. Best to call him Shane and be called Ilya in kind.

Probably, all of this is too good to last. Probably.

Week Nine

Papa was prescribed some medicine for a mild case of pneumonia; common for elderly adults in the humid winters, as Ilya was assured over direct message. (Papa’s newest doctors reliably use the dinky little portal, which is more than can be said of whatever hacks Alexei found last time. It’s a relief: Ilya is no longer quite as dependent on his brother for reliable information.) Ilya video calls Papa on WhatsApp in the morning – at the ass crack of dawn for Ilya, but a reasonable hour for Father – so he can watch and make sure Papa’s taking the pill and breathing in his inhaler.

The physical ailments, at least, are hard for Papa to forget about. They press on him endlessly. But his memory lapses, his wild swings from nostalgic to furious, his panic and fear? Those are more difficult for Papa to remember. He is unwell and unhappy and he has forgotten why. He doesn’t remember to take his mood stabilizers in the evening because he does not remember his mood is unstable. He has forgotten when he last saw Alexei; he has forgotten that Maryja and Ekaterina and Polina even exist; he remembers Irina, but not that he resented her and was cruel to her, and the same can be said of Ilya. Ilya bears this with a clenched jaw.   

When Ilya hangs up with Father, he goes for a run. There’s nothing else or him to do with the nervous, useless energy that fills his chest. Five kilometers, sometimes ten. It aggravates his Achilles tendonitis and his shins, but there’s little that doesn’t.

Ilya hasn’t even showered yet. He’s still rolling out his calves and hamstrings on his living room floor, careful to stay clear of his genuine wool Persian rug Sveta shipped him during his second season, when his phone begins buzzing with a WhatsApp call. Don’t answer. He should go shower. He picks up the call from Alexei instead.

His brother is drunk. It’s enough of a plot twist that Ilya actually listens to him for a while.

Drunk or high, Alexei’s monologues cover the usual shit: complaining about prices, complaining about Mrs. Ivaniva, complaining about Katya. He detours into expressing his conviction that Maryja is learning to manipulate people, his apparently fervent prayers than his daughter doesn’t become a bitch like her mother. Then it’s back to complaints about the weather, about Moscow, about criminals and ne’er-do-wells, about work and ungrateful coworkers.

Ilya wonders, not for the first time, how Alexei has managed to hold onto a job. But maybe he is being too harsh or thinking too highly of the police. Perhaps Alexei is more than capable of doing his job while high; does it better, even, with the roar of coke blocking out whatever morals and conscience he has left.

Ilya lies on his back, rubber ball still stuck beneath his calf, and lets Alexei’s voice roll over him. It would be easier if he didn’t care. If Ilya didn’t love his brother, he could block him and vow to never speak with him again. If Ilya was home, he could haul Alexei to another rehab; Ilya can afford better now, and maybe throwing money at the problem will finally be the solution. Maybe Alexei would stay clean longer than a few months. Ilya is now two months… sober? Is that the word? It’s been a little over two months since he even touched cocaine, which is nowhere near his maximum.

Does it count as sobriety if Ilya hadn’t intended to get clean at the time? If coke was just distasteful and inconvenient? Is it sobriety now, if he’s doing it to get his dick wet? Ilya doesn’t think it should count. Finally, Alexei pauses to take a swig.

“Where is Masha?” Ilya has learned not to ask about Katya, unless he wants to be treated to an hour-long insensible tirade. “She’s with Mrs. Ivaniva?” 

“With the whore.”

Ilya’s stomach turns. He called Shane a whore last week just to watch his cheeks turn pink.

“She thinks I’m stupid,” Alexei growls. “But I have eyes in my fucking head. I see everything. I know everything. I know she’s sleeping with—with that fucker Stepan. I don’t know why she won’t just quit that useless job already. I support us, I am the man: I cover every bill, buy her all her clothes, get Marusya all her toys.”

Toys are all Alexei can claim. Ilya pays for Marusya’s private early-education daycare, which meets four days a week, as well as all her uniforms and books. Ilya also pays for their water and electricity and, more often than not, covers the rent and late fees. But Ilya doesn’t bother opening that can of worms. “When is your next shift?”

Alexei ignores his question and gets to the heart of why he’s calling. Ilya jams his fingers into his eyes so he does not cuss out his drunk brother.

It’s a pattern they both know well. They are too old and Ilya is too powerful for Alexei to demand the money outright; not like he did when Ilya was fresh to the States, lonely, uncertain how to wield so much authority. But Alexei has other ways of getting what he wants from Ilya.  

“You know how humiliating it is, asking that—that cocksucking bitch downstairs for a bit of bread or stew for my daughter? My cabinets are bare, Ilyukha. There is—there is a problem with payroll, you know, and I will have enough money soon. But right now, I need your help. You know I would ask Papa if he were better.”

“What happened to the last twenty thousand I gave you?”

Ilya thinks some of what Alexei lists – new clothes for Masha, a day trip for Ekaterina, Father’s medications, new pipes for the master bathroom’s sink in Grandfather’s apartment – might be real expenses. Perhaps four thousand USD, spent on the most expensive form of everything, might cover that. But the other sixteen? Almost certainly those were spent on alcohol, cocaine, meth, and when Alyosha could stomach no more of those, on coats, fresh cuts of meat, physical goods that can be bartered later.

Ilya is getting too old for this. He is sick of this pattern, sick of his brother, sick of loving this totally dysfunctional family.

“You need groceries, yes?” When Alyosha mumbles out his agreement, Ilya continues, “Then call me when you are in the grocery—video me on WhatsApp. I will send you the money then.”

“Ach, you useless faggot. You need to control everything, just like Mama—miserable if you cannot have your finger in every pie—”

Ilya hangs up. Alexei calls again. Ilya silences the call. They repeat the pattern a few more times until Ilya unlocks his phone and blocks Alexei’s number. Then, nauseous with guilt, he opens his calendar app and schedules a reminder this afternoon to unblock Alexei again.

It’s easier in the daylight to resist. Getting high during the day, especially during the season, strikes Ilya as… more worrying than if he were getting high at night. Getting high in daylight is bad, probably. That’s the sort of shit addicts do.

Is he addicted to Shane? Ilya hits call anyway.

It only rings for a few moments before Shane picks up. “What’s up, babe? I’m on a run with Hayden.” His voice remains steady over the beat of his shoes on the pavement, but the words are broken up. Ilya can hear the three-two breathing pattern: what’s up—inhale—babe I’m—inhale—on a run—inhale—with Hayden.

A tenor voice far from the phone hollers Hiiiiii, Lily!

Ilya lets himself grin in the privacy of his apartment. Babe pings brightly in his chest. Babe, babe, babe, the sort of casual, North American endearment that rolls so easily off the tongues of other players. “Please tell Pike that only pity keeps him on the Metro’s roster. If he did not have seventeen mouths to feed on one salary, he’d be sent down so fast his bobble head would spin.”

“I’m not—that’s not true,” Shane insists. “He doesn’t have a bobble head.”

“But no comment on the Metros?” Ilya laughs. “You are on headphones?”

“Uh—Jeez, Hayd! You make a habit of running with your eyes closed?! That truck was big as the fuckin’ moon. You get run over, I’m tellin’ Jackie that it was your fault and she should leave you at the damn hospital.” Shane pants over the line. “Nah,” he finally says. “No headphones. Hayd and I usually talk when we run so…”

“Freak.” Ilya is probably taking too much of Shane’s time, his attention. Probably, he should save this teasing and domesticity for his reward. “Call me later. You’re playing Ottawa this afternoon, yes?”

“Yeah, home barn.”

“Good. Call me when you are done destroying them.”

“Yes—uhm. Yeah. Okay.”

“Such an obedient boy,” Ilya teases, just to hear Shane hiss and growl and lose his careful three-two control. “Goodbye.”

Ilya checks the time. He isn’t needed at the arena for another hour, and then it’s just PT for his knee before a self-scheduled workout but… Grant’s been playing guilty. More guilty than usual. Ilya opens the contact and hits call.

“Get up,” he barks. “Good morning, whatever, get the fuck up. We’re getting breakfast… Did I phrase this as a question? No. We’re getting breakfast, captain’s orders. I’ll be there in twenty, send me your address or I hack into front office systems and steal it.”  

#

When Ilya thinks of his history with coke, he thinks of the phases of the moon, or maybe the tides: waxing and waning, ebbing and flowing, never really stopping. He smeared it into his gums at Alexei’s eager insistence at fourteen, piggybacking on Alyoshka’s purchase, and so began the cycle. Flowing and waxing when he was new to Boston, fresh meat in a room that he sees, looking back, was run by addicts who did not want to be lonely; waning in the run up to his captaincy, ebbing to almost nothing again after he recovered from Sochi.

He never did rehab. Rehab is for addicts. He could get clean all by himself, thanks, because he wasn’t getting clean as such; getting clean implies being dirty, and he is better than that. Stronger. Wiser. He knows his limits. He knows when he has done too much.

(Has he asked too much of Shane? Could he quit Shane, if he needed to?)

Week Ten

Ilya has three rules about coke: he does not get high during daylight hours; he does not get high alone; he does not buy in his home city. Breaking any of those rules is a slippery slope. If he starts buying coke in clubs in Boston, it will become lines at his house in Boston, which becomes getting high in secret at his house in Boston—no. It’s too messy. Coke is only for nights after away games, when he’s surrounded by his players and where he can pick up and dump a dealer in no time. If he wants coke in Boston, he needs to want something else. He learned this rule well in 2011, and again in 2014. He will not be so stupid as to make himself learn it again.

So Ilya really can’t even help MacGuire, and that’s another failure. He was so worried about Grant, he wasn’t paying close enough attention to the other half of the d-man pair. Now MacGuire is looking wide around the eyes and demanding Ilya get some decent blow and finally get this fuckass party started, while Simmy bullies closer through the bar.

“I’m not getting you shit,” Ilya shouts. He is shouting to be understood over the music, and because he’s pissed. He’s guilty. He’s the captain, it was his job to change the room’s culture around drugs and partying. He thought he had. Clearly, not enough.

Tonight should have been a good night, especially since they squeezed a win out from the Admirals. But the win was far too close for Ilya’s comfort, and Mrs. Ivaniva called during the second period because she hadn’t seen Katya or Masha in a week, and Shane has been on a brutal winning and scoring streak while Ilya’s shoulder is fucked after a bad fall on the ice, and—

“You need to get it together,” Ilya says. “What, you need coke every night--?”

“Right now?? Right fucking now you wanna be better than—”

“You need it so bad, but you cannot find your own—”

“Get off my fuckin’ dick, you piece—”

“You approached me!! You get off my—”

“Oh this is my fault?? Who’s always buying for the fucking table--?”

“A small amount! So nobody gets stupid about it!”

“Hey!” Simmy grabs them both by the shoulder and pushes them toward the door. Ilya shakes him off to walk under his own steam. He isn’t going to be walked like a fucking dog on a lead, balls snipped off, panting for a fucking treat.

“You good, man?” St. Simone has shoved them opposite directions. While Ilya throws himself into the brick wall of the bar, MacGuire stumbles toward the curb.

Ilya watches MacGuire pace and mutter to himself and dry heave a few times. He watches and does nothing because clearly, he’s already done enough. Ilya wants to start running and not stop until he’s made it to whatever stupid Colorado city Shane is sleeping in. He wants to curl up on Grandmother’s ugly couch and bury his face in Mama’s soft tummy and let her stroke his curls. He wants many, many impossible things. “Fine. He was… eager for coke. We have made a monster, maybe.”

“With the dust?” Simmy flicks his eyebrows then shrugs. “You remember how it was.”

How could he forget? When Ilya and Simmy joined the Bears, the team skewed toward men who knew they were sent to Boston to die and who would snort anything, smoke anything, swallow anything to feel alive. It was a carnival everywhere the old Raiders went: team-prescribed opioids they shared like breath mints, meth, molly, weed, cocaine, even heroin lollypops a vet’s wife bought with the help of a sketchy psychiatrist and a pharmacy willing to look the other way. Those were the golden days of Ilya “Snow Plow” Rozanov – nights passing one after another in the warm haze of inebriation, each party a gauntlet to run. What St. Simone, Marley, and Ilya offer now is nothing in comparison. What’s a few grams split between eight or ten grown men? Most of the guys on the team today have no idea what hell they narrowly escaped. What a beautiful thing for them.

“You need to call somebody?”

Ilya feels his neck twinge as he whips his head to look at Simmy.

St. Simone only holds his hand up in surrender. “Whenever coke comes, you sneak out to make a call. I thought you have a sponsor. AA, you know?"

“What the fuck is AA?”

Simmy and Ilya blink at one another.

“Ah. I thought you were getting clean.”

“I am. I mean. No, it’s Jane, she does not… she lost her cousin to coke. An overdose. She… does not want me doing it. So...”

Ilya flaps a hand in dismissal, but St. Simone claps him hard on the shoulder. “Wow, wow, finally, huh? You guys are for real, something, yes?”

Ilya would like to be. Very much. “I’m on probation,” he jokes. The words are brittle between his teeth. “A trial run: I stay sober for one year, I get whatever I want.”

“Ahh,” St. Simone nods with a sly smile. “You’re thinking a ring?”

A ring. Marriage. Ilya hadn’t gotten that far. He thought even asking the right to hold Shane without a time limit and dream of their simultaneous retirement was too much. But now that it’s on his mind…

Babe pings in Ilya’s memory, bright and easy and thoughtless. Babe, put our passports in the firebox before we forget, please. Babe, do you want Thai or Indian? Babe, where did we put the gifts for Masha? Babe, quit fuckin’ around. Babe, Maryja’s adoption papers finally came in.

Perhaps, maybe, Ilya would like a ring with Shane even if Marusya were not in the picture. Maybe, perhaps, Ilya needs to get a fucking grip. Across the sidewalk, MacGuire finally pukes into the gutter. Ilya and St. Simone watch with matching, heavy sighs.

“I should have known,” Ilya says. “Where one goes, the other follows. Grant was … too excited. Too eager.”

“You’re not god,” Simmy points out. “And they got hooked on—what? A line once every other week? No way. They must be using when no one is around.” Simmy pauses, and though Ilya doesn’t take his eyes off MacGuire, he can feel his A’s eyes on him. “You can’t know everything, Rozanov.”

Hearing his name stressed correctly aches. “It’s my job to know everything about these men.”

“Your job is to get a puck in the net and stay on top of your blades. Everything else?” Simmy waves the thought away. “And what are me and Marlow, chopped carrots?”

Speak of the devil. Marlow pokes his head out and immediately goes to help MacGuire steady himself on his feet. Ilya allows himself two thick breaths before joining the fray. MacGuire is blubbering about his wife. His wife is… leaving him? Yes, leaving him. That seems to be what Marlow pries from MacGuire’s drunk ranting. Ilya resigns himself to having MacGuire sober up on his couch for at least the next few nights.

“I can take him,” Marly says, but Ilya shakes his head.

“I need your eyes on Grant,” he says. “And Simmy, keep tabs on the rest of those goons. I think, probably… probably we should not buy for the team anymore. Maybe, we talk to LeClaire or AGM, see about bringing rehab people in to discuss these things again. We take it more serious this time. Mack will sober up with me, is fine. My responsibility.”

Ilya gets MacGuire and himself into an Uber without fully remembering how. MacGuire is still mumbling about his incipient divorce, the separation, the travel, the alcohol, the drugs, the parties. Ilya is surprised that Mac’s wife is the one serving papers. Usually, it’s the other way around: men like MacGuire getting tired of their wives after a few children, wanting a woman who asks less of him, lets him continue being an overgrown tween. But, if MacGuire’s drunk ramblings are to be believed, his wife has had enough, moved on, found a man she wants to spend her life with. MacGuire probably used to be that man, Ilya thinks – but he drinks too much, gets high too often, squanders too much of their precious time with the boys.  

If Shane and Ilya were married, they would have almost no time together. One of them would have to retire, or at the very least change teams, for them to have anything approaching a life. Ilya just about qualifies for permanent resident status in the United States. Would he be willing to start the process again to seek Canadian citizenship? What are the terms of mixed citizenship marriages? And what would that upheaval mean for Marusya?   

Ilya’s phone buzzes in his back pocket. When he fishes it out, he expects to see Alexei’s contact, but JANE burns in the dark back of the car.

You alright? Fan shot, u & #14 getting into uber.

Seemed like he was holding u up?

Ilya knows his read receipts are on, but he doesn’t respond. He can’t. He’s—he’s too angry. Too defensive. Shane is too earnest and Ilya is too mean. He wants to cuss Shane out. Instead he shares his location, closes his phone, and shoves it back into his pocket.

“You got a girl?”

MacGuire, Raider’s Number Fourteen, is drooling on Ilya’s shoulder.

“Jane,” Ilya says. He makes cold eye contact with the driver, who looks back to the road and turns up the radio.

“Should text her back,” MacGuire advises. “Chicks dig that shit. Makes ‘em feel… Good. I guess.”

“She worries,” Ilya says. “She is… too good for me, probably.”

“You can pretend.” For a moment, Ilya thinks MacGuire means Ilya could pretend to be sober.

“Pretend t’be good enough,” MacGuire continues. “Might be… better. Y’know? Better’n th’ truth. And maybe someday it is th’ truth. That’d be nice.”

Ilya chews on the inside of his lip until it bleeds, then tongues the wound. The rest of the ride passes only with whatever Hot 100 radio the driver is humming along to tunelessly.

He hauls MacGuire out of the car and into his guest bedroom. MacGuire collapses onto the bed, rolls onto his side. After a moment, he drools thick saliva and baby barf onto Ilya’s nice hardwood floor. Ilya seriously considers whipping the shoe he’s just tugged off MacGuire’s foot at his head. He puts a towel and a bucket there instead.

When Ilya finally pulls his phone from his pocket, he’s got several unread messages from JANE:

You’re going back to your house? Is that why you shared your location?

Seriously, are you alright? Call me if you need / want.

Even if you “lost” the bet. 

Did you go to bed? If not, I’m here if you want me.

Like I said, even if you lost.  

The whole thread makes Ilya sick. It makes him physically nauseous and dizzy with the desire to shut off his phone, throw it off his balcony, change his number, never speak to Shane again. It’s not that he’s upset with Shane. He’s not. He’s just—

He paces his room for several minutes to build up the nerve to hit call.

“Ilya? Are you—”

“It was MacGuire.” Ilya knocks his head a few times against his en suite doorframe. Each word feels like it’s being torn from his diaphragm. “MacGuire got too drunk. Probably, he was drinking before we got to this bar.”

Shane inhales, but Ilya continues. “I cannot say more. It’s team stuff. But, I am good. Clean. Sober, still. No bets lost. Sorry.”

“Hey.” Shane’s voice is so soft. Ilya wants to scream. “Can I—can I video call you?”

“Sure, okay.” Ilya is already switching to video when he realizes. “You don’t believe me,” he says, instead of hello or good evening or even god, you look stupidly handsome in that hotel bathroom with one earbud in and the other tossed across your shoulder.

“I do,” Shane insists far too quickly. “I do, seriously.”

Ilya grits his teeth and flicks on the bathroom overhead. Then he pulls the camera close to his face, opens his eye with one hand, and flicks up the vanity lights with his elbow. On command, his pupil shrinks to a pin-prick.

“Proof,” he hisses. “Since you need—”

“That’s not why I asked—”

“If you do not believe me then why the fuck—”

“Would you just stop?” Shane’s brows are pulled tight. He’s got a bruise on his cheek, now that Ilya’s looking.

“You took a puck to the face?”

“An elbow,” Shane answer. “And I believe you. I do. I just—I was worried you were sick or- or that you got roofied or some shit, I don’t know. I just.” Shane’s eyes shut as he exhales hard through his nose. “I was worried about you. Fuck. Goodnight.”

“Wait—”

But Shane has already hung up the phone.

#

Shane doesn’t text for four days and Ilya is too chicken shit to push it. Not when he was in the wrong. Still, Ilya jumps at every notification, every pinging phone, even the alerts that sound nothing like his ringtone. Just in case.

He goes to Coach’s office, sits through a very uncomfortable conversation where he explains how much has changed and what still needs to be done, then helps wrestle the guys into another, more serious talk about rehab. He even quizzes them in the group chat to make sure they were listening. And when they all go out for beers later that week, Ilya, Marly, and Simmy announce they will no longer be providing anything stronger than alcohol; players will be expected to abide by that during the season.

Through it all, even when his hands shake from stress because Papa is hospitalized again with pneumonia, Katya turns up at Mrs. Ivaniva’s door with a dislocated jaw, and Ilya’s left winger forgets how to play hockey on a week-long sprint across the middle of America, Ilya stays clean. Just in case.

On the fifth day, Shane texts. Just, hey.

Ilya lurches to respond but finds he can conjure no words. In a record-breaking three minutes, he sends back, hey.

Shane’s bubbles rise and drop for seven agonizing minutes before he writes Jane missed you. Call her later?

It’s normal. It’s fine. It’s all fine.

#

They’re in Montreal for Ilya’s three-month reward. Ilya tucks his entire fist safe inside Shane and milks Shane’s prostate with his knuckles until Shane comes with a hoarse cry, until he’s soft and pissing himself across thousand thread-count sheets. Ilya fucks the loosened hole afterward while Shane shoves at him weakly and protests and begs him to stop and promises that Ilya can do anything else, and in the end Shane still comes with a howl that makes Ilya black out.

And when they’re done, Shane lets Ilya wash him carefully in the bath – not the shower, the bath, like something out of a movie or Ilya’s wildest fantasies – and stroke Shane so, so lightly until he comes a third time. Hat trick to Rozanov. Ilya stays the night. He thinks he might have vertigo in the morning, waking to Shane’s sleeping face and fluttering lashes in a Montreal sunrise.

Week Twenty-Four

He’s maybe panicking. He is maybe, just a little bit, panicking. He has called Papa— he has to rest the phone on the hotel table to count because his hands are shaking too badly to hold the phone steady. He has called Father twenty-six times in thirty hours. He cannot reach Polina or the care nurse who usually checks on Father. Alexei is not answering his phone. Katya has not been active on WhatsApp in well over a year.

Ilya has never chartered a private jet before, but that might be what this comes down to. Especially since he is in Minnesota. God, Minnesota. That was the worst game of his life, as Sveta took time out of her busy day to text him. They won, of course. But it was a grind, a much harder game than it should have been. Ilya missed at least seven shots on goal that he should have made, would have made if sixty percent of his mind weren’t distracted because his dementia-riddled, elderly father has gone missing and he cannot reach any of the many people who would theoretically be responsible for knowing where he is.

He huddled in a corner of the away locker room to call again and again between periods, begged off doing press from the bench, and blasted out to take a private car back to the hotel the minute the final buzzer sounded. So, yes. Probably, he is panicking.

He calls again, helpless and beyond hopeless. “Pick up,” he whispers. “Pick up, pick up, god, please, pick up the fucking—”

“Ilya?”

“Papa!” Ilya collapses into the desk chair.

“Ilya, where are you?”

“I’m in Minnesota—”

“Minnesota? You think you are so clever. God will punish you for lying to your father. Where are you, really? Why are you not at school?”

“School let out early. I’m with friends,” Ilya says instead. “I’m with friends, I’ll be home soon.”

“You must hurry home, Ilyushenka, your mother will be cross. It’s already so chilly out.”

“It’s cold? Papa, where are you? What do you see around you?”

“I see the street, doorways; what does it matter, Ilyusha, I’m out running errands! I have—I have errands to run. Does your Mama still need molasses?”

Molasses? When did Mama ever need—? “No, Papa. I don’t believe so.”

“I think… I’m almost certain she needed… but I cannot... I could have sworn…”

“It’s alright, Papa. It’s okay. Where are you?”

“Ach, you are too old for me to always have to pick you up from school, running this way and that. You can get a ride from your friends, yes?”

“Yes, Papa. But where are you?” Ilya pops the call on speaker and sends a message to Alexei again. Papa left the house, where the fuck are you?? Then to Mrs. Ivaniva. Is Alexei at his apartment? I need to speak with him immediately. Then to Katya, I’m so sorry to bother. Have you seen Alexei? Then to Polina, I believe Father has left the house without his caregiver. Please call the police and report him missing as soon as you read this. His health is very poor, and he is a danger to himself.

Papa is still rambling. Ilya pulls him up short, promising, “Yes, Papa, I will call Alexei and ask him for a ride. I will be home soon. Stay where you are, okay? Mama is looking for you. Please stay where you are.”

Then Ilya hangs up and dials a number he intended to pass his entire life without calling.

“Moscow Police, non-emergency line.”

“Hello, officer. Good morning. I’m calling to report an elder missing.” Ilya floats up to the top of his St. Paul hotel room and listens to himself answer the officer’s questions.

The officer beings with a detailed physical description. How tall is the missing person exactly? 176 centimeters, but he stands with a slight stoop. What was he wearing the last time he was seen? He wore a grey t-shirt and a plaid robe when Ilya called him yesterday for his medication check. Is he heavyset, muscular, thin? He is thickly built with a soft stomach and a proud gait, but he tends toward dizziness and may therefore be walking close to a wall. What is his coloring, what does he look like?

He looks like Ilya. Or Ilya looks like him. Alexei favors Irina, with dark hair, dark eyes, a round face prone to plump cheeks and a soft jaw. From Mama, Ilya got his curls and his sadness, and from Papa, Ilya got everything else.

What is his name? Grigori Stepanovich Rozanov.

The officer recognizes Ilya then. Ilya promises to bring home several signed hockey sticks over the summer if calls are sent out to dispatch immediately to find Papa. Someone knocks on Ilya’s door, then pounds on it.

“Excuse me, I need to…”

Ilya opens the door to find St. Simone shouting down the hall about cutting everyone off after two rounds. “You are coming, yes?”

Ilya shakes his head. “Ny—no. No, there is family… stuff. I must stay close to my phone.”

St. Simone holds up his hands and pulls a whoops kind of face. “Sorry for shouting,” he whispers. “Everything is okay? With your father?”

What a quaint way of phrasing this absolute catastrophe.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ilya says. From Simmy’s look, they both know he’ll do anything to squirm out of that promise later.

The officer is still on the other end of the line and growing impatient. Ilya closes his door gently. A competing call from Papa comes in. Ilya puts the officer on hold and listens to Papa’s raging fury at the state of the streets, how Ilya’s mother never sweeps the way she should and never puts Papa’s keys back in his pocket, how he has been stuck outside banging on the door to no avail.

Ilya sits on the edge of a bed in St. Paul and pinches his nose so Papa cannot hear him crying.  

 In Moscow, Papa grows sad suddenly. Remorseful. “Your mama was so beautiful,” he laments. “Before she had you, she was so happy.”

Ilya hangs up on both calls. He walks calmly to the bathroom, pushes the toilet seat all the way up, and pukes. Then he walks to the hotel room’s minibar and does a shot of fireball. It’s disgusting—maybe because fireball is disgusting American shit, and probably because he never rinsed out his mouth.

He feels utterly empty.

He stares at his phone for a long time. Papa does not call back. Likely, he is still raving in the streets of Moscow, speaking into a phone with nobody on the other end of the line. Ilya is a disgraceful son. Ungrateful. Dishonorable. At some point, the officer hung up.

Ilya lays down on the bed and stares at the closed drapes until his eyes grow gritty and each blink stings. A call comes across the line from Connors. Ilya ignores it. The Simmy calls. Ilya ignores that too. Marley is the third caller, and Ilya only barely manages to pick up.

“You good, man? We’ve been calling you—”

“What do you need?”

“One of the rookies is stuck in a dumpster and I don’t know what to do. Should we call the cops? Or like… an ambulance? We sure as shit can’t call LeClaire.”

Ilya rolls onto his back and wishes Shane were here to stroke his hair. “No,” He finally says. “Call the fire, uhm, firemen, not emergency line just… Google regular number for them. Or ask this bartender about closest…. Fucking. What is word. Place where the fire trucks park.”

“Fire house?”

“Da, sure. Where are you? I will meet you there.”

On the walk, Ilya calls Shane. “One of my rookies is in a fucking dumpster, I don’t even know which one. And Marly is afraid to call LeClair which means I will probably have to call LeClaire and explain why I was not minding a million-dollar asset while he got shitfaced across the country.” A thousand other problems threaten to boil over—Alexei’s violence and drug abuse, Grigori’s elopement, the fraying hold Ilya has on hit team, but Ilya does not know where to begin with those. Best to say nothing.

Shane pauses on the other end of the line. “Is that… does that happen often? Boston rookies in dumpsters?”

“No,” Ilya acknowledges. “But fuck, does it have to happen in St. Paul?”

“Ugh,” Shane agrees. “St. Paul. I lost Bullseye in St. Paul last year and it was fucking bullshit. Are you in a nice hotel at least?”

“Fine. Good, honestly. I wish I was there. But no, I’m walking to fucking dumpster in the fucking cold.”

“You said you weren’t with them?”

Ilya exhales heavily. “No. Was… my father. He is sick.”  

“Oh, Ilya.”

Ilya stops at the street corner and closes his eyes. He squeezes one hand into a fist in his pocket. Too sweet. Too earnest. Ilya should be given an Olympic fucking gold medal for not stomping his phone into dust and sweeping the sparkling remains into the sewer drain.

“Sick like… like addiction?”

“No—”

“Oh. Sick like cancer?”

Ilya wants to laugh. He really does. “Like dementia.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yes. He… he does not remember my brother or his wife or his granddaughter. He does not remember… fucking... the word. Woman who helps.”

“Maid?”

“No, ahh… nurse! He does not remember who is the nurse, why is she in his house. She scares him and he grows violent. And today he… he sbezhal. Uhm. Leaves home without being allowed. Sorry. I don’t know how to… English is hard right now.”

“It’s okay.”

Ilya blinks up at the streetlight. It isn’t okay. He’s lived in America for a decade, all his adult life, and he can’t speak fucking English? One bad night, one phone call home, and he falls apart?

“He remembers me and he wants me home and I can do almost nothing to help,” Ilya admits. The streetlight is cold under Ilya’s forehead as he leans against it. “I pay for the nurse, his medicine, the best doctors I can. I beg him, Papa, come to America, come live with me. But he does not understand, because he does not remember that I do not live in Russia any longer. His wife will leave him soon, probably take as much of his money as he can, and my brother will be close behind. He—Alyosha—my brother, he is getting worse every day. Violent with his wife. Leaving my niece with this landlady, neighbors, strangers. And I do not know what to do. How to help. I…”  He sounds pathetic even to his own ears. This is embarrassing. He should hang up. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I—I should go.”

“Wait! Wait, just… can I stay on the line? Like, don’t hang up. We don’t have to talk. It just seems… I dunno. Unfair.”

“Unfair? What does fair—Jane.”

“I wish I was there,” Shane blurts. “It’s unfair, alright? It doesn’t seem fair that you’re dealing with all this shit—your brother, your dad, your rookies. And I know you have people in your corner, Vetrova and Marlow and St. Simone.” Shane says St. Simone in French. San See-mown. It’s cute. It gives Ilya the strength to continue down the block.

“But… I dunno,” Shane says. “I want to help. I want to listen, if you want to talk.”

Ilya doesn’t want to talk about any of this, actually. He wants to drink, or take a thousand grams of edibles, or swallow a whole bottle of pills, or…

“I wish I could run drills all night,” he says aloud. It’s a non sequitur, but Shane lets him speak. “When I was young, there was extra room in Papa’s apartment. We used to have live-in maid but Mama fired her. Probably Papa was sleeping with her; I don’t know, I was too young. Anyway, for years room is empty. I used to go in with balled up socks for a puck and practice all night. I had to be very careful about the noise. Papa was drunk asleep on couch. But I would sneak across hall, veeeeery careful not to bang stick on door frame. I would shove hoodie at, uhm, at the door crack? The bottom of door, you know, to stop the light. There was one lamp still in this room; I think from Mama’s room. It made weird shadows and it was hard to see socks. But still I would run drills all night. It was so quiet. The only quiet time in the house. And it was like…”

Ilya pauses to check his phone’s map. He walked past the street he was supposed to turn on. Dammit.

“It was like whole world melts away,” he continues once he’s back in the right direction. “Only thing that matters is hockey. I was ten, maybe? Nine? Old enough to know, you know… to know hockey would be big for me. I thought then, okay, Russian League is my future. I had no thoughts of America, then. Just I will marry nice woman, treat her very well: fur coats and nice car and money for petrol and new clothes and flowers every Monday. I will tell her every day she is beautiful and I love her, you know. Kiddie dreams. Then Mama dies. We move and Papa marries Polina and…”

Ilya exhales hard. A tweaker stumbles past him without looking up.

“There is no extra room where Papa moved us. So, I would go to basement of apartment building, into laundry room. There was old grandmother, Mrs. Kozlova, God rest her, and she would watch me skate around in my socks on filthy laundry floor while she is praying her beads. One day, she says, Ilyushenka, stop, the floor is still wet. I said, what? She says, I mopped it earlier, so your socks do not get dirty; do not make your Mama wash those filthy socks. I say, My Mama is dead.”

Shane exhales a soft, sympathetic sound on the other end of the line. Ilya doesn’t know how to stop speaking. He can’t even really say why he’s divulging any of this, what has compelled him to talk and talk and talk. He is monopolizing Shane’s time. He should be better but he cannot be.

“And she feels bad for me. So, she has me go back, all the way upstairs, seventeen floors with no elevator. She says, go get your laundry. I am—what? Thirteen, then? Maybe still twelve. Papa demands clean floor, so my clothes already are in box thing. Hamper. And they stink. Smell so fucking bad. Still wet from the sweat three days later, you know? But she washes them. She sorts and washes them and shows me, Here, Ilyusha, here is how you sort correctly, here is where you put this soap, here is how you fold right. She even shows me how to iron my slacks.”

Ilya can see a gaggle of men spilling from an alleyway off the street he’s on. Marly steps into the streetlight and waves Ilya down.

“Still today I wash my clothes the way she taught me,” Ilya says. “Hang on. I see Marly and Simmy. Maybe… depending, I might have to mute. Team stuff.”

“Okay.”

There’s ambient noise on the other end of the line that Ilya listens to with half an ear: a door opening and closing followed by beeping, perhaps Shane’s own laundry machine. Water running. Dishes clanking. A spray bottle squirting. Shane keeps a clean house, which is a fucking relief. Ilya had to move out of Marly’s place prematurely during his rookie season because it was that or strangle him for leaving food scraps and open food containers all day on the counter. Hearing Shane clean up at the end of the night and finish up chores before bed? It warms his heart. Babe, he thinks. You’re thinking a ring? he thinks.

In St. Paul, Marly catches him up: Toy Story wanted to demonstrate that dumpsters behind bars are basically free cafeterias because they throw away good stuff all the time. He scaled the side and hopped into the dumpster, but he wasn’t expecting it to be basically empty. So now he’s standing shin-deep in muck of some sort and he can’t jump back out.  

Fucking amazing.

Ilya mutes himself – and earns some ribbing from Marly about his Precious Jane – before asking the questions Marly and Simmy were probably too scared to ask. Frankly, Ilya is scared too.

Can Toy Story roll his ankle? Yes, but it fucking hurts. Can his ankle hold weight? Not really. Can he wiggle his toes? No…? Cap, why can’t he wiggle his toes??

Great, now the rookie is panicking and something is probably broken in his foot. Thankfully, a pickup truck painted fire-red with gold lettering pulls up before Ilya has to explain bone trauma to a twenty-year-old man.

Ilya relates the situation to the head fireman, who looks at the dumpster like it’s personally affronted him. Or maybe he’s trying to look through the solid medal wall to scowl at the rookie currently whimpering and answering questions. Ilya unmutes his call and stands back while the two firemen set up a pulley system and one hops in.

“Jaaaaane,” Marly croons at the outside of Ilya’s headphones. “Jaaaane, Roz loooooves youuuuuuu.”

“Fuck off,” Ilya mutters, shoving him lightly. Then he realizes he’s pulled a phrase directly out of Shane’s mouth and feels his cheeks heat.

“Ahh, he’s blushing!! He’s blushing, Jane!!!”

“No, I do not blush! I told you, Russians do not do this.”

“Are you actually blushing, babe?” Ilya’s heart jumps into his throat at the teasing, soft voice in his ear.

“Maybe,” Ilya mutters. “Only because it is cold.”

Shane makes a suspicious noise. “You think two degrees is cold? What would friendly Russia have to say about that, Rozanov?”

Ilya cackles despite himself. Friendly Russia. What a jackass. Maybe Ilya does love him. Probably, that’s a bad idea. Bad things happen to the people Ilya loves.

A fireman emerges from the dumpster with Toy Story on his back. They’re filthy and even from a distance Ilya can see that Toy Story’s ankle and foot are fucked. Christ.

“I have to call LeClaire,” Ilya says. “Fuck. Fucking fuck.”

“Okay,” Shane says. He does not ask for more information, and Ilya’s heart threatens to burst with… fuck, with love. Fucking shit. “Thank you for telling me about the room and, uhm. And Mrs. Kozlova. You can call me back when you’re at the hotel? If you want?” Shane asks.

Ilya clenches his teeth. “Okay,” he says. “I will. I—uhm. Goodbye for now, malysh.”

“Talk soon, sir.”

#

Ilya sets his phone on the hotel pillow and falls asleep listening to Shane snore softly in Montreal. He wakes just a few hours later to a competing call ringing across the line. It’s an international call, Russian extension code.

“Privet, dobr’ye… dobroye utro?”

A crisp, soprano voice tells him she’s calling from a hospital in south Moscow. Grigori Stepanovich Rozanov was brought in by concerned bystanders. He is being treated for wounds on his feet and mild difficulty breathing. How soon can Ilya come to the hospital?

Ilya explains the situation: he’s a hockey player playing internationally, he cannot fly home, he will contact the care nurse and his brother. The nurse is sickly sweet and coos at him and tells him how hard that must be. Ilya wants to snarl down the line at her that she knows nothing, that she can take her pity and shove it up her own ass. But he clenches his teeth and thanks her through them instead.

His call to the care nurse is longer than it needs to be but helpful nonetheless. She wasn’t on duty, she explains, and she screens client calls as a matter of course. But she gives Ilya the alternate nurse’s number in the event something similar happens, God forbid it, and agrees to go to the hospital right away. Ilya checks his WhatsApp. Nothing from Alexei. Nothing from Katya. Mrs. Ivaniva’s message pings in just as Ilya is about to give up. Alexei has returned home, slamming doors and stomping up steps. He sounds “out of it.” Masha is with the neighbors, but Mrs. Ivaniva will collect her now.

Ilya calls Shane back and wakes him in the middle of the night. “Go back to sleep, malysh,” he murmurs.

“Mm,” Shane hums. “M’kay. Yessir.”

Ilya sits against the headboard in the dark and listens to Shane’s breathing steady and deepen once again. He listens just to know Shane’s right where Ilya left him.

Week Twenty-Nine

As it turns out, Ilya’s got three recovery days overlapping with Shane’s game in Pennsylvania. Ilya flies to Pittsburgh to watch him play. It’s reckless, probably; stupid, almost certainly. But he is greedy for simple pleasures these days.

Sveta buys the tickets in her name. Ilya wears a beanie and the most nondescript clothes he owns, topped with a huge black scarf that covers part of his face. He makes it halfway through the second period before his face is blasted across the jumbotron during a commercial break. He smirks for the camera, makes a silly I’m watching you move with two fingers in a V. From the bench, Shane shakes his head and brushes his hand under his chin in a clear fuck you gesture that will get him fined. Ilya sends him an apple pay to cover the charge.

The money doesn’t feel dirty. It doesn’t feel like when he sends orders to Alexei, or his father’s sister, or his mother’s cousin Sergei, or to any of the old friends who still ask him to cover debts and the odd anniversary dinner. It feels like care. Protecting what’s his.

Later, in the ugly AirBnB McMansion Ilya reserved for them, Shane wanders around making tutting noises about the fixtures and scolds him for coming to the game. But he doesn’t sound very upset; probably because by that point, he’s distracted by Ilya kissing and sucking at his rim. They don’t talk about the game that night except to dissect Pittsburgh’s powerplay in the shower and wonder why the hell they don’t play their backup goalie more often over late take-out Chinese.

The next morning, Shane checks his phone while Ilya orders a take-out order of pastries and egg-veggie-bite things he fully plans to feed Shane by hand while Shane kneels at his feet.

Ilya, what the fuck is this, Shane scoffs. Moments later, Ilya’s phone pings with the fine money sent right back. That feels good too.

They don’t talk about it, not even when Ilya orders an Uber for Shane and sends him off with a kiss too sweet and slow to be anything but love. They don’t talk about anything at all. It’s bliss.  

Week Thirty-One

Ilya is knocked out of the playoffs after a not-deep-enough run. He watches from his father’s spare bedroom in Moscow as Shane wins the cup a second time in a row. The silver chalice in the cathedral, and Shane is their patron saint. It makes Ilya ache with pride and grief. It should be him. It should be them together. It could only ever be Shane, indomitable Shane, who becomes putty in Ilya’s hand.

They fill the early off-season with long WhatsApp voice messages and video calls. Shane props his phone on the boards at his summer home’s asphalt rink and Ilya parks his in the gravel past the lot he had paved behind his father’s home. They talk over headphones—bitching about the heat, the sun, how weird roller blades are after a whole year on ice. They challenge each other and make up ridiculous drill sequences to master. In the evenings, Ilya makes simple dinners and cares for Masha and his father. Shane speaks French with Marusya, who is learning it via immersion at the daycare Ilya pays for, and sings quiet songs for her to follow along.

Babe, Ilya thinks. A ring. A hyphenated name. Maryja Ilyinichna Hollander-Rozanov. A lot of name for such a small girl but her Uncles (her Papa and Daddy, perhaps) would teach her to be strong and bear it.  

Ilya trains in Moscow with Coach Kuznetsov and runs practice for the U-16’s as payment in kind. Kuznetsov asks if he’s got a wife yet and is surprised when Ilya says no. Huh, he says. You’ve got that shine about you. Shane trains in Toronto and his face fills out with his summer bulk and Ilya grows a little gut to match the stretch marks on his shoulders all the while they are calling, calling, texting, calling, eating up each other’s time in a digital world of their own.

In the heat of July, Ilya flies Shane out to Copenhagen because it’s an easy tourist visa for both of them and Ilya has travel miles to blow.  They hole up for four luxurious days in the penthouse suite of a boutique hotel in Christianshaven, and across 96 hours they’re apart for only a handful. It’s a feast of skin, kisses, thoughtless closeness.

Shane dips down to the gym each morning while Ilya runs through the narrow streets. Shane putters about making coffee and arranging pastries while Ilya calls Papa and watches him take his morning medicine. They curl up on the suite’s couch to watch German reality television neither can follow. Shane starts making up his own translations, and Ilya laughs until he is crying and snorting, which makes Shane laugh until he can only gasp into Ilya’s neck.

Late in the evening on their second night, while Ilya blows cigarette smoke out the window, he laments that he cannot take Shane to the opera house.

It’s beautiful, he says. Made just for Mr. Architecture. There is a restaurant three doors down that has insane ratatouille. You would love it.

Shane looks at him carefully from the devastated bed. You’d want to? Go on… go on a date, I mean?

Ilya shoves his tongue into the spot where his bottom teeth overlap and hide gunk for him to floss out. He nods his head once. He can’t even fake casual with his heart beating so heavily in his chest. Yes, he manages to say. I would. I want.

Shane nods back. Me too. I want.

Ilya snuffs his smoke on the outer windowsill and goes to Shane, a moth to the flame.

When they leave, Ilya goes first. He tucks a surprise wrapped in socks into Shane’s bag before he leaves. It’s a novelty puck, standard black but printed with white Cyrillic on the bottom to mark its origin: the arena Ilya won his first national championship in at twelve. Ilya signed the blank side in Boston Gold. His Cyrillic signature. Fifteen hours later, Shane texts him a photo of Ilya’s signed puck set in the middle of Shane’s bedroom mantle. Place of pride. 

Week Forty-Seven

Shane is in Boston but he isn’t with Ilya, which is fine. It’s totally fine. It’s just… Shane is in Boston. Ilya knows Shane is in Boston because Shane abandoned his team at the hotel to spend a long afternoon with Ilya: riding Ilya like a champ, napping in Ilya’s bed, eating Ilya’s food, sitting on Ilya’s couch talking about fuck all. They’d watched a new ESPN documentary about the Soviet game. Ilya complained about the half-assed subtitles while Shane marveled at Vetrov’s skill.

Did his daughter ever play? Shane had asked when a late-90s photo of Vetrov and Sveta came onto the screen. You guys were friends, right?

Mm, from childhood. But, no, she never played, Ilya said. Her Mama is a doctor, said it was too dangerous for her brain. She would be amazing, though. You ever date another hockey player? Ilya had asked when the air went quiet around them.

Shane bridled like Ilya had asked an absurd question. What? No. Obviously not. It’d kill my career.

Not if she were PWHL player, Ilya pointed out.

Shane had blinked at him like his entire system was rebooting. It was cute, but maybe not cute enough to distract Ilya.

You have never… I mean. Ilya had realized too late that he should go about this gently. You like what we do, yes?

Shane had nodded.

And you have slept with women. Or, girls maybe when you were boy?

Shane nodded again and looked away. A fine line of water welled on his lower lash. Ilya had tutted and reached out to gently knock him under his chin. Seems like maybe… maybe girls are not for you?

Shane had only shrugged. Just gotta, uhm. Just gotta meet the right one.

Ilya had swallowed the hard pang in his heart.  Maybe, he had allowed. I thought maybe Sveta would be right one. We have known each other for years, our whole life basically. But… sometimes the right one is not a woman. I love her like a friend, you know? Always. But...

Ilya’s phone rang before Shane could respond or Ilya could finish his thought. Ilya would have been glad if it wasn’t Papa in distress. When he came back, they’d dropped the line of conversation. Shane had been fiddling with his napkin, tearing it into thin strips, rolling those strips into perfect little balls, setting those perfect ornaments side by side on the table. Ilya had forced himself to relax back into the couch. Let it go.

Shane had been wary at first. Hesitant. But when Ilya pulled him closer with a soft hand on his shoulder, he went easily; like he wanted permission, needed to be told what he could have. And when he left, he let Ilya tuck a kiss into his hair before asking, The guys want to go out tonight, win or lose. Some bar in the north end they want to try? Would you, I mean—?

You can go, Ilya had allowed. Go be with your friends. They will need encouragement after we make you into Zamboni, mm? Clear the ice with you.

That was terrible, Shane had said with a grin. He had done that thing—the look, where he managed to look up at Ilya despite standing half an inch taller. Okay. Can I—like. Should I plan to go to back to the team’s hotel?  

Mm, no. Come back here, Ilya had said. It’s fine. And after the bar, when you come home— Ilya hadn’t known how to finish it, how to walk back what he’d just said.

But Shane had smiled; grinned, really.

Okay, he’d said. I’ll uhm. I’ll text you. Bye, sir. Then Shane had tucked a kiss under Ilya’s chin, a dog seeking to appease before departing.

Ilya does not regret saying yes. He is not a monster. Their time is short, but not so short he would force Shane to choose between Ilya and his team. But Ilya is lonely tonight and bored; unexpectedly so after a loss in the home barn. Ilya hadn’t really expected to win—LeClaire was messing with their lines to compensate for MacGuire being out with an injury and Ilya’s former left winger finally, after many months of decline and sloughing through the ranks, being sent down. But they put up a good fight. Montreal only won by one.

Ilya is warming up his meal prep in the microwave and thinking about a bit of yoga for his hip flexor – Shane got him into it over the summer, okay? Ilya is pissed too – when he pulls down a bowl and realizes… he’s going to have to move soon. Free agency is coming faster than he would like. Not next year, but the year after. Does he want to stay in the States? Permanent residency is great, and he’ll be eligible before he finishes his Boston contract. But he would still have to travel on a Russian passport—the same passport that could be taken if he were outed—and residency doesn’t give him nearly enough extradition protection, should the Kremlin decide to make him an example—and could a permanent resident sponsor, say, a child?

But does he want a US Passport? It’s stronger than Russia's in the West, certainly.

A hyphenated last name. Matching Canadian passports.  It’s crazy talk. Ilya would have to… he’d have to play for a Canadian team, probably, if he wanted to satisfy Canadian citizenship requirements. Or he could seek asylum in Canada. But why would he seek asylum in Canada if he already lived in the US and hadn’t, technically, broken any Russian laws? And if he sought asylum, how would he bring Masha?

Ilya’s phone is out to call Shane before he quite processes what he’s done.

“HEY!” That is not Shane. That’s not Shane at all. Ilya stays quiet on his side of the phone as the voice shouts, “IT’S LILLYYYYYYYYYY!!!”

A raucous cheer goes up before organizing into a chant: LI-LY! LI-LY! LI-LY! LI-LY!

Finally, there’s someone shouting against the grain, shuffling, a shouted AWWW, NO—and then Shane, breathless in Ilya’s ear. “Sorry. Sorry, I’m. Sorry. Hang on. Gimme a sec.”  When Shane is out in the open air, he asks if he should come back home.

“I just… would you ever… would Jane.” Ilya clears his throat. “Would Jane ever let Lily play on her team?”

Shane is quiet. “What? I don’t… what does that even mean?”

“I mean Montreal.” Ilya pops open the microwave with one hand. “You said they are good, no?”

“Ily—Lily, I don’t know what you’re saying. I’m so tipsy right now. Are you okay?”

Ilya bites his tongue hard. He’s taking too much. Asking too much. The summer was too good to him. “I’m fine, Shane. I’m just thinking out loud. Ignore me.”

“No, I—don’t do that. Don’t fuckin’ do that. Okay? I’m just… really fuckin’ confused. Can we, like. Can we talk when I get back? I’m sorry, babe, I want to help I’m just—like—I’m not following.”   

There’s noise from Shane’s end, someone calling his name. He shouts them off without moving the phone away from his mouth. Ilya probably shouldn’t find that as charming as he does.

“We will talk when you are home,” Ilya says. He smiles despite himself as glee tingle down his spine. Home. Babe. A ring.

“Okay. Bye, babe. Talk soon.” Then, quieter. “Bye, sir.”

The line clicks down. Ilya shoves a spoon into the meal prep and swallows it down.

Hardly an hour later, Shane is back in his arms. Ilya doesn’t bring it up because—well—he just can’t. He can’t bring himself to ruin a good thing. He can’t face Shane’s face when Ilya suggests playing on the same team; Shane will probably scrunch his brow and pull down the corners of his lips and tell Ilya that can’t happen. It would ruin everything. Who are they without a rivalry?

Ilya can’t do it. He’s too chicken.

But he accepts Shane’s warm, floaty smile and his gentle nipping at Ilya’s jaw. He herds Shane into the bathroom to brush his teeth—so you do not wake up tasting like dumpster, malysh—and rinse his pretty face and strip down to his boxers. Shane isn’t that drunk, really, but Ilya likes to care for him, and if this is how he gets it then so be it.

When Shane is cuddled to his chest, Ilya thinks maybe, for once, he is satiated. Maybe this can be enough: stolen moments in a season, a digital world of their own, a rivalry that is more playful off the ice and still lethal on it. And someday, when they retire, maybe Ilya can move to Canada. Maybe he can take Marusya with him. Maybe they can be a family then.

Just as Ilya has told himself this, Shane speaks. “Playing with Jane,” he says. “You’re thinking… playing for Montreal?”

“It was nothing—”

“Bullshit. You called me. Or. Lily called Jane. That’s something. So.” Shane clears his throat and buries himself deeper into Ilya’s neck. Ilya feels Shane’s next words, cool on his skin, as Shane reaches out to draw meaningless diagrams on Ilya’s back.

“So, problem: Montreal doesn’t have cap space. They couldn’t take Lily right now if they wanted to. Next problem: staggered free agency. Jane signed a, uhm. Longer contract than Lily. So a chunk of Montreal’s money is tied to Jane. Buuuuuuut. If Jane convinces, say… Hayyyyyley? Hayley Pike. And. Uhm. Jeanine Boiziau. And Gillian Comeau. Well probably Comeau is going to be traded before his contract. Her contract. Hopefully. But Hayley and Jeanine and Tyyyyy—oh! Twyla Drapeau.”

Ilya smothers his giggles into Shane’s hair. This is absurd.

“Heyyyyyy,” Shane pokes Ilya in the ribs. “Jane is being serious. Oh my god, I sound like Elmo.”

A honk of laughter escapes Ilya, which sets Shane giggling, which makes Ilya laugh harder because Shane’s giggle is so high pitched and silly.

“ANYYYway,” Shane says over Ilya’s squawking. “If Jane can convince—fuck, I can’t remember—”

“Hayley, Jeanine, Twyla,” Ilya reminds him.

“Yes! Thank you, babe. If Jane can convince Hayley, Jeanine, and—and Thalia to take a pay cut, that will… maybe? Probably free up space for Lily. That’s option one. Option Two is, I mean, Jane and Lily could play for another team. The Penguins. The Admirals. Even Ottawa, they’ve got good bones.”

“Not… Not Pittsburgh or New York. I… Lily is looking for not an American passport. Canadian. It is… with Trump and Putin, is not safe.”

Shane lays a soft kiss on Ilya’s chest. “Let me think about it. Okay, baby? Let me think about how to, uhm. How to make it happen.”

Ilya kisses Shane’s forehead because he is close, because Shane has gone soft and sleepy in Ilya’s arms, because Shane is too sweet, too earnest for him. “You are too good,” Ilya says. “Far too good for me.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says tartly. “You’re too good for me, sir. Should be. Should be classed as a performance enhancing drug.”

“What? When I suck you til your balls deflate like capri sun?”

“EW!” But Ilya can’t take him too seriously because Shane is laughing so hard he is shaking the bed. Ilya grins. He has never seen Shane so giggly. Is this what pillow talk with him is always like? How will Ilya ever fall asleep again without this?

And what is this they have, exactly?

Shane’s breathing eventually slows from his laughter, then settles. He makes a soft noise in his throat. “Not the sex,” he says, long after Ilya thought he fell asleep. “Not just the sex. You.” 

Ilya swallows hard. His heart is pounding behind his ribs, in his temples, in the thin skin behind his knees.

“Is that okay?” Shane asks.

“More than okay.” Ilya can barely find enough breath to make the words real in front of his face. “Is the same for me. Always. Always, always you.”

“What do you want for your reward?”

Ilya blinks. What more could he ask for? “I don’t know yet,” Ilya admits. “I think already I have everything.”

Week Fifty

Ilya has been staring at his phone for too long now. He should… He should call somebody. LeClaire, maybe. His travel agent. He should decide if he is going back for the funeral. If he goes, could he stop himself from taking Maryja?

Katya is dead of natural causes. Of course. A woman with no known medical problems died at barely 25 of natural causes. Ilya supposes Alexei is natural by a certain definition. Mrs. Ivaniva has sent him a message about it.

Ilya should… he should do something. He did nothing to protect Ekaterina, nothing to save her. He reached out, sure. But always about his brother, or his niece. Never about Katya herself. He knew what Alexei was doing. Should he have gone to the press? But what would the press have done? He could not have called the police; that much is clear.

For the first time in nearly a year – two weeks, Shane had said on the phone last afternoon. Just two more weeks – Ilya seriously considers buying an eight ball. The next game between him and Shane won’t be for another month. Shane would never have to know. Ilya goes to his calendar—sees the photo of his own puck, his Sharpie signature in Boston gold—whips out his phone and calls Shane—the line rings and rings and rings—

“Hi, this is Shane! Sorry I missed your call. I’ll ring you back as soon as I can. Leave a message, would ya?”

Ilya stares at the phone in silence, even as it beeps at him. He watches the message timer count up—three seconds. Four. Five. He hits the red button just in time for a return call from Shane to come in.

Ilya seriously considers letting it ring to nothing. He seriously considers emailing LeClaire with his retirement letter and fucking off to Moscow. In the end, he swipes open the call.

“Lily,” Shane says. “I’m gonna call you right back, okay? Right back. I just—I’m in this hotel bar thing, and I gotta get to the parking garage and I’m gonna lose--actually! Actually there’s a stairwell. I’m gonna. Just. Hang on, babe, okay? Are you okay? You doing alright?”

“I’m okay. Not really.” Ilya takes a shaky inhale. “Bad, probably.”

There’s quiet, then a woman speaking softly.  

“Alright,” Shane says just as low. “Thank you—it was really awesome meeting you, Rose. You have my number, so, like, text me. I’ll get you in at that CrossFit gym, they really are insane.”

“You were on a date?” Ilya doesn’t know what on earth compels him to ask as much. Katya is dead, and he’s asking whether Shane was on a date. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“No,” Shane says. “No, I mean, Rose is… nice. I guess. But no, I just met her randomly at this restaurant J.J. dragged me to. I told him I just wanted to stay home, but—I mean—I dunno, I wanted to float the paycut thing, so—but then we got separated and I was just kinda wandering, looking for a spot to text you, actually, and then Rose Landry was in the booth, so we got talking, and—I mean, like, she’s nice? But. Anyway. Are you okay?”

Ilya breathes in time to Shane’s rambling. It’s a rope that Ilya can climb to pull himself out of his own head. Maybe he should hang himself. Maybe he should get a fucking grip.

“I wanted to uhm—” Ilya clears his throat. “I want to do coke. Very badly. My sister. Like, my brother’s wife? She is dead. I think, probably, he killed her.”

“Holy shit. Fuck, Ilya.”

Ilya swallows. “I will never know for sure.” His voice sounds far from himself, like it got lost somewhere by his dining table and couldn’t find its way back to the living room. “But I suspect, probably this is what happened. Maryja is still with him. I don’t know… I think probably I should go back to funeral. Moscow, I mean. Gospodi—her parents—how will I face them?”

“Ilya, I’m so sorry.”

Ilya’s laugh is hollow. “Yes. I am sorry, too. Sorry for bringing you into this—”

“Don’t you dare,” Shane hisses. “Don’t you dare fucking apologize. I’m your—I’m. I’m your boyfriend. So. There.”

Ilya’s breath escapes him in a cough. Maybe he is in a coma? Maybe that’s what’s happened? “My boyfriend?” Ilya repeats.

“I think so? I mean, I asked Rose—not naming you, obviously. I wouldn’t put you in danger like that. Never, I swear, Ilya. But I said that Lily and I were, you know. And I just kinda. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I think I’m probably your boyfriend. And you’re, you know. Mine. So. You don’t get to apologize for family being crazy. That’s one of the big rules.”

“The big rules,” Ilya repeats. He feels… he has no idea what to feel. Katya is dead, Marusya is in the care of a man who probably killed his own wife in a coke-fueled rage, and Grigori is in hospice care. But Shane Hollander is his boyfriend. “I did not know there are rules. Never have I been, you know. A boyfriend.”

“Well, you’re pretty good at it already. I’m… I know it’s not worth much, but I’m so sorry, babe. I’m so, so sorry. Do you think you’ll fly out tonight?”

“Can’t,” Ilya says. He sits on his couch and watches snow fall in Boston—late, this year, but better late than never. “The last flight from Boston to Moscow left hours ago; next one won’t be till tomorrow. And she is not, you know. She is not next of kin, it is deep in the season, points are tight…”

“You think they’ll bar you? Hang on—for Mike? Yeah, thanks.”

There’s the zip and click of a seatbelt, then an indistinct voice. “Oh, yeah, I get that all the time,” Shane is saying. His accent is different, twangier than Ilya has ever heard it. “Nah, I’m from Manitoba. But I wish, man! Wish I was that good. I did Timbits, you know, nothin’ serious. Now I work for Merril-Lynch. Yeah. Gimme a second.”

When Shane speaks again, he’s murmuring. “Stay on the line, okay? I’ll be home soon.”

Ilya debates packing, but he decides against it. If they hadn’t fumbled in the middle of the season and fallen into a losing streak, maybe the conversation would be different. But Ilya has already put them on notice about his father. Asking to leave for his sister is probably pushing it.

Shane makes small talk with the driver in an accent that’s familiar and totally absurd. Almost a parody of himself. He’s talking about his life as Mike, a man who used to box but now he works in private finance, and it makes Ilya ache to think that Shane’s cousin is still so real for him. For this Uber ride only, Michael is alive again—a normal guy making his way home on a normal night after a few beers in downtown Montreal.

When Shane finally says goodnight to the driver, Ilya has waffled on whether to go to Moscow at least three times. He does not want his brother to die. He loves Alyosha, he wants him to be well. But he wants more to be sure Maryja is safe. Ilya could not save his mother; he failed to save Ekaterina. He will not be so foolish this time.

Ilya opens Maps, does a bit of searching and pushing the map around, sends Shane a pin. “Tomorrow,” Ilya asks. “Tomorrow, can you drive there?”

“Vermont? I—yeah. I can, actually. I can be there by, like, ten in the morning? If that works?”

“Ten a.m.,” Ilya agrees. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

Neither of them hangs up. Ilya barely sleeps, is still groggy when he hauls himself from bed at 7:30 to brush his teeth, shave, rinse off, and climb behind the wheel of his GLE 350. She chirps at him, blinks her dash soft blue in greeting. He connects the phone without losing Shane, who is climbing into his own car somewhere north of the border.

They start their drive with murmured good mornings. Shane orders from a Tim Horton drive thru; ten minutes later Ilya pulls through a Dunkin. Then it’s silence, interrupted only by the occasional instruction from Shane’s GPS and their blinkers clicking.

Ilya sees Shane’s car when he pulls in: a boxy Range Rover already parked in a poorly-plowed spot beneath a pine tree. Shane is already sat in the trunk, the back row pushed down, quilts laid out and two pillows propped behind the front seats. He holds a steaming thermos. Shane Hollander, so good. So sweet. So damn earnest.

When Ilya sips from the thermos, he tastes black tea and raspberry sweetness.

Ilya still wants to take a bite out of Shane’s stomach cavity. The SUV is too small to fuck in comfortably, but that doesn’t stop Ilya from spitting thickly into his own palm and stroking Shane off slowly, relentlessly, well past overstimulation, digging red crescents into the underside of his cock with his thumb nail. It shouldn’t still be so intoxicating, having everything he could possibly want from Shane. It shouldn’t be, but when Ilya pulls Shane to lay flat, demands his stillness, and ruts against the coarse curls of his pubes, he finds that it is.

They lay for long hours across the lowered seats of Shane’s Range Rover, the trunk carefully closed around them. Ilya feeds Shane halves of old-fashioned Timbits. He still does not know what to do about Katya, Marusya, Alexei. But when Ilya tells the whole sordid tale, everything he probably should have done and did not, Shane doesn’t flinch away. He doesn’t feed Ilya bullshit platitudes. He just listens. Then he mentions kinship adoption; floats it, an option, something Ilya might consider. No pressure.

“This is being boyfriends?” Ilya asks. He wants to be sure of this.

“Yeah,” Shane says. His eyes are so warm looking up at Ilya, pillowed against his chest. “Yeah, I think so.”

Week Fifty-Two

One year arrives with only a cake-and-birthday-candle emoji from Shane. Ilya dares to send a heart. Shane sends one back. They call in the afternoon and talk about nothing important: ordering new dishes to freshen up the apartment, finally contracting with a new cleaning service, a bullshit new roundabout built way too close to a highway exit, Pike’s children and their screen time, MacGuire’s split custody starting over the summer, the Ukrainian grocery that opened up around the corner from Shane’s favourite coffee shop, the magical world of Muji that Connors got Ilya into.

It’s only all the little things that make a shared life. It’s good.

Week Sixty-One

Ilya is waiting in the baggage claim of Logan International, bouncing his knee.  According to the plane tracking app Shane showed him, Marusya’s flight landed ten minutes ago.

Probably, they are all still coming off the plane, getting their bearings. Perhaps Masha is asleep already in the ambassador’s arms. Ilya relates deeply. He began his draft day disoriented, listening to a deboarding announcement he barely understood in a language he was less proficient in than he’d hoped after so many years of study. He fell asleep on the run and woke up in a strange new land. Masha has not been on the run, as such. She has been living, surviving the impossible with no concept that her world could be any different. Now, she will live with Ilya.

It was not difficult to convince Alexei that signing Maryja to Ilya’s care would be a fair trade for undisputed control over Papa’s remaining assets. It is hard to square the Alexei he last saw with the man so proud to hold his newborn daughter. He’d handed Ilya a cigar with a cheeky, shocked grin that day four years ago. The day he and Ilya sat in a conference room to complete the kinship adoption paperwork, Ilya had come with a lawyer retained with the help of the LeClaires, and Alyosha had come nearly thirty minutes late in rumpled, too-large work clothes. He’d smelled strongly of burning plastic and sickly sweetness—crack. Probably, he will overdose with all the money Ilya has handed to him. Ilya considers puking into the trash can overflowing with Dunkin cups.

It’s for Marusya, Shane’s voice reminds him. Shane has been good, letting Ilya rehash the same fears over and over. Alexei has to decide to get sober for himself. This is about Masha, her wellbeing.

Shane is right, of course. Ilya’s boyfriend has a funny way of being that. He is recovering in Ottawa, soon to be out of his sling. Somewhere in New York, the Admirals are playing for the Cup. And Ilya is in the Logan baggage claim waiting for the best of his family to be handed into his arms.

His phone pings. Ilya glances again at the escalator down before looking at his phone.

Admirals are up, Shane texts.

Your head, malysh, Ilya texts back.

Please be careful watching this game.

OMG, you and my mother, Shane fires back.

My head is FINE. She thinks the Admirals have it btw.

Good gift to Hunter, Ilya writes with a small smile.

One last party before his bones turn to dust.

Idk he might have 1more season.

Any sign of Masha Bear?

Not yet. Plane landed fifteen minutes ago.

Probably still going thru airport.

Ilya had tried to get them to fly private, taxi in the smaller terminal, away from prying eyes. No dice. For stupid, bureaucratic reasons that were not clear at all to Ilya, it had to be this way.

He’s about to look up the Admiral’s score when people come streaming down the escalator. There are plenty of people speaking Russian, the words a familiar wave of meaningless data points passing over him. Then, near the back, is Marusya, standing on two feet, holding an older woman’s hand. She looks tired and confused. Her auburn curls are in a disarray. Her mother would be so disappointed.

The hand-off is anticlimactic to the point of absurdity. They sit in the Dunkin café area, Maryja on Ilya’s lap and her too-small suitcase at his feet. He shows his US ID and his Russian passport. He signs the last of the forms. The older woman, whose name passes into one of Ilya’s ears and directly out the other, notarizes the documents, hands Ilya a folder with Maryja’s amended birth certificate, Russian passport, and certificates of adoption, and congratulates him on his new daughter.

Then she is gone, striding toward a concierge desk and asking loudly about them getting her a taxi to the closest hotel.

Maryja Ilyinichna Rozanova looks up at Ilya with a sleepy blink. “Uncle Ilyusha,” she pouts. “Where’s Mrs. Ivaniva? I’m hungry.”

“Mrs. Ivaniva is in Moscow, little bug. She sends you love and kisses. There are snacks in the car. Close your eyes, mm?” Ilya whispers. He blinks slowly, the way he did when she was fresh to the world and small enough to be held on his forearm. She mirrors him, struggles to flutter her eyelids back up. “You are home, now, Masha Bear.”

When Marusya is safely strapped into her car seat, swinging her head this way and that around the parking garage and clutching the bag of goldfish Ilya surfaced from his glove compartment, Ilya connects his phone and calls Shane.

Shane speaks before the line has fully connected. “-id you see?”

Ilya balks. “See what?”

“Hunter—Scott Hunter, he—he kissed a guy on the ice. Like. A regular man. A WAG. Or I guess—it doesn’t matter. He kissed his boyfriend, husband, whatever, in front of everyone, on the ice.”

Ilya brakes abruptly where he was pulling out of the parking spot. “Oh my god.”

“No, I know! I know. I—fuck. Fuck. It wasn’t like a cute peck or anything, there was tongue. At least a little bit. I’m—holy shit, Ilya, do you think he knew?”

“That he was gay? Yes, probably it had occurred to him once or twice.”

“No, asshole, about us.”

“Malysh, I have no fucking clue. Wow. We are not…” We are not alone. He knew, mathematically, there had to be other queer players. But it’s one thing to know, and something very different to have a player kiss his ‘boyfriend-husband-whatever’ on ice. Ilya exits the garage and lets the car slow on a long run up to the red light, tapping his brake only at the very end. “What are commentators saying?”

“Mostly bullshit, stalling for time. Lots of this is unprecedented and we’ve never seen this before and what a celebration and there’s one for the record books.”

Ilya laughs at Shane’s announcer bit and takes the slowest left he’s ever made.

“Wait—that’s your Benz blinker.” Ilya’s heart tries very hard to burst out of his chest. Of course Shane would know the sounds of his cars’ blinkers. “You’re—Do you have Maryja already?”

Ilya eases up to the roundabout and dares a dizzying glance into the rear-view. At her own name, Maryja has made a good faith effort to open her big eyes. She’s got a pile of half-chewed goldfish in her mouth. “Yes,” Ilya says. “She is very sleepy; well past her bedtime.”

“Holy—holy shit. Oh my god, Ilya, you have a daughter.”

“Hunter is gay, I am world’s hottest DILF, many things happening tonight—”

“Fuck Hunter, this is way more important. It went okay? There were no issues with the handoff or paperwork or anything?”

“No, it was really very—Jesus Christ, sure Mr. Chevy with your shitty engine, you can come into this lane. No need for signal or nothing. Just go, is fine, I can read your mind.”

“Jackass,” Shane offers in support. “Oh shit, lemme—can I get you one of those sign thingies, sir? Baby on board?”

Ilya chews the inside of his cheek. “Probably… yes, probably this is an good thing for me to have. In emergency, God forbid it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Ilya huffs. “Mm, no, here I am to say thank you.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Nuh-uh? What you mean, nuh-uh?!”

They’re laughing—delirious for stress, from exhaustion, from Shane’s pain medications, from the relief. They aren’t alone. They aren’t alone. They won’t have to live like this forever, in secret, stolen moments.

“I mean…” Shane inhales slowly. “I want to be… good. As a person, I guess, in general. I try really hard. But sometimes… I don’t know. There’s this image of me? I guess? And he’s so big. And I’m just Shane. I don’t know how to be him, you know. But then you… you tell me exactly how I can be good, sir. I can help you. I can be… useful. And. I know it’s hard. You’re really independent and resourceful. You don’t need me.”

Ilya scoffs.

“You don’t,” Shane insists. “I know that. But you let me help anyway. And you take care of me too. Like, really good care of me. Better than anyone. So.”

Ilya can imagine Shane’s shrug, his flushed cheeks. He swallows his doubts that he has done anything at all to take care of Shane. “I am still here,” he says when he feels the silence stretch thin. “I am just… you have taken my words, Shane.”

Ilya follows the curves of the highway, sticking to the middle lane and the exact speed limit, and tries to think of something to say that isn’t I love you or let’s get married or will you be Marusya’s other father.

“You know,” Ilya says. “I am sorry about the cottage.”

“I know. This summer just wasn’t right.”

It wasn’t. Maryja will need a travel visa to travel with Ilya when school is out of session. When it’s in, he will need a nanny. He needs to arrange all of this, and get Maryja acclimatized to America, set her up with doctors, get all her vaccines. In some ways, Grigori has died and Masha has taken his place. And in some ways, Ilya would not trade this for the world. He loves his… his daughter. He loves her as an extension of her brother and he loves her for herself; for the simple miracle of being alive in his backseat, snoring soft, baby snores and drooling open-mouth onto her puffy jacket. At least she managed to swallow the goldfish before conking out.

Shane has been so good about his dashed hopes. Who knows what might have happened this summer at Shane’s fortress of solitude?

“But…” Ilya shrugs in the privacy of his car. “LeClaire’s wife is running training camp here in Boston. Three weeks, co-ed with the Fleet. It will be difficult, different than you are used to. You will have to eat real food, Mr. Macrobiometric Diet—”

“Macrobiotic,” Shane huffs.

“Yes, whatever, listen. You will have to eat real food, do a real bulk. It will be hot all the time, the humidity is miserable, the beach honestly is not good, the drivers are fucking terrible, every street is too narrow and double parked, there is enough cobblestone to kill a herd of horses. But if you can handle all this—”

“I can handle it—”

“Hush. I am speaking.”

Shane’s breath catches. The quiet on the other end of the line is gratifying.

“If you can handle it, then I will call up LeClaire. Tell her you are joining as my guest. A diplomatic mission.”

Ilya hears Shane breathe the words back over the line, diplomatic mission, like he’s in awe of Ilya stringing together a few syllables on the fly.

“And if you should fly in a week early? Maybe two?” Ilya wets his lips. “I will be here. We can maybe still be, you know…”

Shane’s breath floods Ilya’s cabin in a whoosh of sound. “Masha’s pretty smart,” Shane broaches.

Ilya makes a noise of agreement. He called her each night after Katya’s funeral, borrowing more of Mrs. Ivaniva’s time than he can ever repay. They talked about her schoolteachers, her classmates, her French, her letters and counting. They talked about America; about living with Ilya, at first hypothetically and then very seriously. She is frighteningly observant and very silly and bull-headed like her Papa. The world will be her oyster; Ilya will make certain of that.

“She’ll put it together,” Shane blurts. “If her… if her Papa and a man are, you know. Going to bed each night. Kissing and stuff.”

Yes. Ilya thought about that. “Then, she figures it out. I do not… growing up, it was a big hush-hush, you know? Mama was very, uhm… kosmopolitichnyy, I do not know how you say in English. She knew many people, you know, had lots of friends. We knew there were gay people. But it was a big secret, always.”

Ilya pauses to collect his thoughts. A river runs under him as he crosses the bridge leading into his suburb. Masha has always lived close to the water, as has Ilya. The child of a fish is a little fish. The apple does not roll far from the tree.

“It was… to be gay in Russia then was not illegal. But it was dishonor. You would shame not just yourself but your parents, brothers, sisters. And this… I was not ashamed, maybe, but I knew I should be. I thought it could never be that I would be, uhm… that I could have a life with a man. A husband with children and cats and such. I thought always it has to be woman. I do not want this for Masha. This limit? This feeling that, oh, I should be ashamed, never can I speak of this, I will not dishonor my Papa.”

Another roundabout, another long, two-way throughway crowded in by trees and starlight. Shane is quiet, listening, giving.

“I want to be a good Papa,” Ilya says into the quiet of his car. “And I think probably a good Papa does not build a life on lies. I know what it is to live always in shame and secrets. We know. It is no good. If she knows, maybe… maybe it is better. If it is like normal thing, no big deal. Papa has a boyfriend and Totya Sveta has a girlfriend and Uncle Connor has wife and so what? Does not matter. Love is love, whatever.”

Ilya presses his palms hard into the wheel as he turns. He’s one long line of tension, neck to left foot where he braces against the wheel well.

“And if she tells somebody?” Shane asks. “What if she does a family tree at school and her NHL father has a boyfriend? What do we do then?”

We. Babe. A ring. Three matching Canadian passports. Ilya grips the wheel. “Then we flee to Canada, cry asylum. I have a rich boyfriend out there, you know.”

“Ilya—”

“I know. I know, malysh, you think I have not thought of this?”

“I’m not saying you haven’t,” Shane snaps.

“Okay.” Ilya slaps his hand against the top of the wheel. Pressure, always so much pressure. They cannot fight the entire league, so they snap at each other. Wolves in a cardboard box. “Okay,” Ilya says again, softer. “I am sorry. Okay? You are only being safe, I know. I just… I cannot live forever in secret. And I must think—okay, sometimes, we will finally be free of Russia. I must live for then, not for now.”

“I get that,” Shane echoes. He is soft now, too, his voice pitched low and scratchy. “I get that. So. Okay. I can… uhm. Two days from now, 10am from Ottawa to Logan. Is that too soon? Do you need more time to, like, settle? Or…”

Probably, Ilya should wait. He should be patient. But when he pulls into the gravel of his long drive and glances into the rear view, Maryja’s riot of dark curls greets him. He does not want to wait. He wants them both within reach, right now, always.

“No,” Ilya says. “Not too soon. Call me when you land?”

“Sure. Okay.”

“Tell me how much is first-class ticket. I will send—”

“Ilya, you don’t—”

“Tch. This was not question.” Ilya puts the car in park. “You will tell me how much is the first-class ticket. I know you have money, malysh, I am not stupid. Be good.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ilya disconnects the phone, pulls it tight to his ear as he steps out of the car. “And for all this back talk, during the flight, you will get up and jerk off in the bathroom. Take a picture when you finish. Don’t clean up. I want to see the proof when you land.”

“Christ. Yes, sir.”

“What do you say?”

“Thank you, sir.” 

“Mm.” Ilya pops open the door and reaches in to unclip Maryja’s five-point. His shoulder is hitched awkwardly to hold the phone up to his ear. “You’re welcome, puppy. Call me when you are boarding and call me again when you land. I will wait for you. Pack for two weeks and bring something nice to go out. Good restaurant nice, mm? Nice slacks, suit jacket, button up. No tie, you will wear one of mine, yours are ugly. I have washing machine and pick-up dry cleaning you will use.”

“Yes, sir. Can I—uhm. Can I touch myself tonight?”

“Oh, that’s sweet, you think I will let you. Bring headphones into plane bathroom with you: I will send a video. You ever done something on a plane?”

Shane’s breathing deeply on the other end of the line, trying to calm his body down. “No, sir,” he admits.

Ilya grins and lifts Maryja carefully onto his hip opposite the phone. She flops, dead to the world, still snoring lightly. “First time. I like this. Popping your cherry, eh?”

“You already did,” Shane says.

Ilya nearly eats shit in the gravel.

“In—in Montreal?” Shane asks like Ilya could ever fucking forget that night. “2011. That was my first time going, like, all the way. With anyone. So. Thank you, sir.”

Ilya squeezes his free hand into a fist. “You are doing this on purpose,” he grits out. If he punches his entry code in with more force than usual, well, that’s between him and God.

“Goodnight, sir.” Shane hangs up.

Ilya grins as he kicks his shoes off and slips Maryja’s light-up sneakers off her feet. Shane is going to pay for that.  

#

Ilya watches Maryja explore the toy corner he set up in their living room. The first full day home, Maryja clung to him, cried at every effort he made to put her down, refused to sleep in her own bed, barely separated from him enough to eat. But today, she is willing to venture a bit further away as long as she can see him. Every once in a while, Maryja comes up to show him this and that, or just to give him a hug or to have him kiss Beary on the nose. She does not know it yet, but Beary was Shane’s gift.

“Dyadya Ilya,” Maryja says from the play corner. “When will Papa come to America?”

Ilya joins her in the toy corner on his knees. “He might not come to America. He is… he is sick, sweetheart. You know when he would come home very loud and angry and looked very hungry?”

She nods her head.

“He was like that because he is sick,” Ilya says. “When you get a belly ache from too much sugar? It is like this. He cannot stop making himself sick. And that is dangerous for you. Until he stops making himself sick, he cannot come stay with us.”

“But when?”

Ilya shrugs. “I do not know, sweetheart.”

Her lips pull down into a severe frown, the kind only possible with the soft features of a child. “But… when he gets better, will I live with him again? In the apartment?”

“No, sweetheart. You will live with me until you are all grown up. I am your Papa now.”

Maryja takes this on with a look to the windows. Maybe… Ilya’s home has a large yard. Once, it was used to throw ragers for the team. Should he get a dog? No, he just got a child and a boyfriend. He should pace himself.

She goes back to setting all the dolls in piles—soft ragdolls to the left, plastic baby dolls in the middle, two nesting dolls set carefully side by side on the right. “Will Mama come to America?”

Ilya feels his eyes well. He’d wanted to bring his own Mama to America so many years ago. But by the time America was in reach, Mama was long in the grave.

“Your Mama is with the angels, my clementine. She will not come to America. She is always with you: in your memory; in the photos you brought from Russia. But no, Marusya, she will not come to America.”

Maryja squeezes a ragdoll hard in her small hands and starts to cry.

Ilya finds himself in tears as well. It’s not fair, what coke has done to their family. It’s not fair that someone so young should lose her Mama. It’s not fair that she should be taken from everything she knows because what she knows is precarity and danger. It’s not fair, and Ilya can never make it fully right. If he had done more… But that way is endless ruin. He cannot undo the past, however much he wants to. He can only hold her as she sobs and flails and grieves.

Somewhere over New York, Shane is flying toward them. A family of three. They will figure it out. Maybe Ilya will join the Metros and finally make a proper team out of them. Maybe Shane and Ilya can both move to Ottawa, resurrect the Centaurs. Whatever they do, they will figure it out together. God knows they have done more with less on the line.

Masha does not move away, even when she has cried herself out. Ilya shifts to sit crisscross and tucks her into his lap.

“Do you remember, last summer, you spoke with my friend in French? Shanechka?”

Masha thinks for a moment then nods and begins singing one of the silly songs Shane taught him.

“He is coming to stay with us, for a little while. A few weeks. I… I like him very much. He is…” This was supposed to be easy. Simple. No big deal. But now, Ilya cannot say it in Russian. “He is my boyfriend,” he says, switching to English for the final word. “He will sleep in my room and spend time with us.”

Masha tenses in his arms. God only knows what men Alexei was shuttling through that little apartment.

“He is a good man,” Ilya soothes. “He is nothing like—like your old Papa. You are safe here, mm? Always. You are with me.”

Masha does not relax, per se, but she nods. “We’ll sing in French?”

Ilya laughs. “Yes. You can sing and speak in French. He has many books he would like to read with you, and some dolls. They will come soon, maybe the day after tomorrow.”

At the promise of fun, Masha squirms out of his arms and begins playing again—this time setting aside the baby and nesting dolls to build little block beds for the ragdolls.

Ilya checks his phone. Nothing from Shane yet, but the flight should be landing in an hour.

“Marusya, look at me. In twenty minutes, we will clean up and get into the car. Alright? I will set a timer.”

But Masha has already dismissed him to put her dollies to sleep, narrating all the actions in French. His bright girl.

#

Shane is surprisingly inconspicuous, even with a massive hockey bag slung over his shoulder. He tosses his bags into the trunk and winks at Ilya through the rearview mirror. Then he’s sliding into the passenger seat and turning to Maryja.

“Bonjour,” he says with a small smile.

Masha tucks her face into Beary, peeking out with one eye.

Shane gasps, asks a question in French. Masha dares to look with both eyes before answering in a few words. Shane makes a low sound of understanding, asks another question in a teasing lilt. Masha giggles. Then Maryja is laughing, raucous laughter at whatever Shane is going on about. Ilya breathes very carefully. His heart is full nearly to overflowing. If he inhales too much, shifts too quickly in his seat, he might… he might do something rash like ask Shane if he can’t just stay forever.  

Then Shane is looking at him with brown eyes that are so warm in the sunlight, and this part of the parking lot is damn near empty, and Shane’s big hand is reaching out to rest on Ilya’s thigh.

“Hi,” Shane whispers.

Ilya—he just has to. He has to reach out to run his hand through the hair on the back of Shane’s neck, caress that strong column, cup his cheek, stroke his cheekbone.

He kisses Shane. In the parking lot of Logan Airport, his daughter in the backseat, Ilya Rozanov kisses Shane Hollander. It feels like a homecoming.

“Hi.”

Chapter End Notes

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