Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships:

Scott Hunter/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Kip Grady/Ilya Rozanov, Kip Grady/Shane Hollander/Scott Hunter/Ilya Rozanov, Kip Grady/Scott Hunter

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Kip Grady, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

implied/referenced trauma, they're all so stupid and in love, Hurt/Comfort, Multiple Orgasms, Sexual Overstimulation

Language:

English

Series:

Part 6 of Scrabble Is Boring Anyway

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-29 Words: 7,450 Chapters: 1/1

The Cross on His Chain

Summary

After a night out, Ilya, Shane, Scott, and Kip share a car ride to Scott's apartment.

Notes

Thank you for returning to this incredibly indulgent series. I have nothing left to say for myself.

Kip has his legs folded sideways across Scott’s lap like he’s been poured there.

Which, more or less, he has been.

Black eyeliner is smudged under his lashes. The reflection in the window captures all this exquisitely. His hair, which he’d blown out straight, has started curling again at his temples. He looks wrecked now in the way that makes people stare at him more, not less.

(And he can have Ilya to thank for that.)

But Kip isn’t thinking about how Ilya had almost gotten him off on the dance floor. 

He’s thinking about…

Shane.

Whose hand now rests on Kip’s ankle, thumb moving absently over the bone. He’s scrolling his phone with the other hand, but every few seconds, his eyes drift sideways, checking on him.

Kip winks.

Shane blushes and looks back at his phone.

Kip does love this side of Shane. This six-foot-something of NHL first-line center who can’t hold eye contact with a boy in smudged eyeliner.

Off the ice, he’s nothing like the player he sees on TV.

Now Kip finds himself thinking about their first time together a few months ago in Montreal. He had watched Shane inside Scott, and then Scott inside Ilya, and nothing in his universe got smaller. 

That’s the part he can’t stop turning over.

Kip had always known the sky is full of stars. He’s never been the jealous type. Cupping his hands around a single flame and hoarding it? Sure, that’s one way to love someone. What Montreal had shown him is what it looks like when those stars move toward each other. More love means more light scattered across a wider dark. Beautiful, sure, yet diffused.

What he hadn’t been prepared for is the constellation of it. The way Shane’s hand on Scott’s hip and Ilya’s mouth on Scott’s throat and Kip’s own fingers threaded through all of theirs until it turned into something distinct.

All of this is very different from Scott’s understanding of what love should mean. Or, what it used to mean, anyway. Kip can recall that very Catholic recalibration well enough on their flight back from Montreal.

Kip chuckles at that memory.

Ilya lifts a brow. 

“Private joke,” Kip says, and lets his head fall back against the window, watching the streetlights stripe across the ceiling of the car. “Just thinking about Scott’s face on the plane back from Montreal.”

“What face?” Ilya leans forward, elbows on his knees, eyes sharpening. “I want to know this face. We are rodnye now, yes?”

Scott groans and tips his head back against the seat. “He’s talking about my existential crisis at thirty thousand feet.”

“Ah,” Ilya says, nodding sagely. “The one where you realized God is real and he wants you to have foursomes?”

Kip bursts into laughter and he feels Scott’s hand tighten reflexively on his calf. 

“That’s not—” Scott starts, but he’s fighting a smile. “That’s not what happened.”

“He kept trying to explain it to me, but…” Kip says, waving a hand lazily over the space between them. He shifts, lifting his head so he can see all three of them. “But then he grabbed my hand and said… what was it again?”

Scott’s jaw tightens. “I said that watching you with them didn’t make me love you less. It made me see more of you.” He looks at Shane, then Ilya. “Like someone pulled the lens back and showed me the whole sky. The star was still there. It just wasn’t alone anymore.”

The car is very quiet.

“And it was more beautiful for it,” Scott says, voice rough. “Not less.“

Kip couldn’t have recounted the gist of that conversation better himself.

Watching Scott be extraordinary for someone else just made him more extraordinary, not less. 

Definitely not less.

Look at what you are, look at how someone else gets to see it too.

Ilya stares at Scott for a long, unblinking moment. The streetlights slide across his face one after another, and for just a second his eyes hold the light the way water does. And then he clutches his chest with both hands and says, “Scott, this is most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me, and I was not even there for this conversation.”

“I’m never telling you anything again,” Scott says, but he’s laughing and now Kip is too.

Shane is the quietest of them, but his thumb has stopped moving on Kip’s ankle, and when Kip looks over, Shane’s phone is dark in his lap and his eyes are fixed on Scott with an expression that Kip recognizes because he’s felt it on his own face. That stunned, helpless look of someone falling in love with a person they thought they already understood.

“You and him.” Ilya points between Shane and Scott. “So alike.” He settles back, one arm slung along the seat, and levels his gaze at Scott. “In Montreal, you weren’t so...”

“Articulate?” Scott offers dryly.

Kip smiles and makes himself comfortable.

This is about to be good.

“No.” Ilya waves the word away. “You weren’t so...” He makes a fist, then opens it, searching for English that fits. “Tight. Like a knot. In Montreal you were—” He snaps his fingers. “There. Present. You let things happen to you. Now you are back inside your—” He taps his own temple. “Your head.”

Scott’s mouth thins.

“Is okay,” Ilya says, softer now. “I understand. Montreal was cottage with only us. This is the world. Different rules.” The corner of his lips curls upward. “But we are almost to your place now. And soon it will be a room with only us again.”

“You’ll have no problem believing this,” Kip says, “but this isn’t mine and Scott’s first rodeo.”

Ilya’s brow furrows. “Rodeo,” he repeats slowly, tasting the word. “This is... cowboys? Horses?” He looks at Shane for help. “Why are we talking about horses?”

Shane answers him. “It means this isn’t the first time Scott’s wanted to keep something precious locked away where no one else can see it.”

Kip shifts his legs off Scott’s lap and sits up straighter, the playfulness draining from his posture.

Scott’s jaw has gone tight, his hand frozen where it had been resting on Kip’s calf.

“Okay, so, before Scott came out,” Kip continues, his voice careful but steady, “our entire relationship happened inside his apartment.” He glances at Scott, and there’s no accusation in it. That’s just the quiet weight of their history. “That’s what made me leave the first time. And it’s what made him finally come out.” He reaches over and takes Scott’s hand, threading their fingers together. “I’m not saying that’s what’s happening now. But I do see you pulling back into yourself, babe.”

Scott doesn’t speak for a long moment. His thumb traces a slow line across Kip’s knuckles, and when he finally exhales, it sounds like something structural giving way. “I know,” he says quietly. “Old habit.”

“Wait.” Ilya holds up a hand, brow furrowed. “So ‘rodeo’ is not about horses. It is about... hiding boyfriends in apartments?”

Again, Ilya turns to Shane.

“It means they’ve done this before,” Shane tells him quietly. “Not the four of us. But the part where Scott wants to protect something by keeping it hidden.”

“American English is a crime against language!”

The corner of Shane’s mouth twitches despite the weight of what Kip has told them.

Ilya nudges Scott. “Oi.”

Scott looks up, guarded, and Ilya holds his gaze.

“I would like to fuck Kip tonight.”

At that point, even the driver’s eyes flicker to the rearview mirror.

Ilya catches the driver’s eyes in the mirror and holds them with the flat, pleasant stare of a man who has fought professionally on ice for a living. “Road,” he says simply.

The driver’s eyes snap forward.

Ilya turns back to Scott, unfazed. “I am asking. Not taking. Their lead, yes?” He glances at Shane.

Scott looks at Kip. Kip looks at Scott. They have the sort of shorthand of people who have loved each other long enough to hold entire conversations in a glance.

Kip’s mouth curves. “I’d like that,” he says.

Scott turns back to Ilya. “Then you ask him,” he says. “Not me. He’s not mine to give.”

Something shifts in Ilya’s expression. What’s left underneath is surprisingly tender.

“Kip,” he says, and his voice is low, careful, the accent rounding the vowel. “Would you like to be with me tonight?”

“Just you?”

Ilya’s eyes move across the car—Shane, Scott, back to Kip. “However you want it,” he says. “All of us. Some of us. Just us. You tell me.”

Kip makes a show of considering it not because he’s uncertain but because he wants Ilya to see that this answer isn’t impulsive. “I want you,” he says. “And I want them with us.”

Shane’s breath catches, and he turns to Scott, something raw and wanting breaking through the careful composure he’s held all night.

“I also want you,” Shane tells Scott, his voice low enough that it’s almost lost under the hum of the car. “If you want that too.”

Scott reaches across the seat and takes Shane’s face in both hands, the way Kip had done on the dance floor, and kisses him slowly. It’s a yes that doesn’t need words.

Ilya watches them kiss then leans close to Kip’s ear. “Why is he so gentle with Shane and with me he is like—” He mimes pulling a chain taut. “Like I am dog that needs leash?”

Kip reaches out to trace the gold chain at Ilya’s collar with one finger.

“Maybe because you keep wearing one,” Kip says softly, letting the chain slide through his fingers.

Ilya goes very still. His breath catches in a way that’s almost imperceptible, but Kip is close enough to feel it. “You are dangerous,” Ilya murmurs, and his voice has dropped into something low and wondering. “Small and beautiful and dangerous.”

“I’m not that small.”

“You are perfect size,” Ilya says, and there’s nothing teasing in it now. He lifts Kip’s hand from the chain and presses a kiss to his knuckles, old-fashioned and oddly reverent. “For fitting exactly where I want you.”

“I want you to know that I am very, very turned on right now.”

“Good,” Ilya says against his knuckles. “Hold that thought, kotyonok.”

The car takes a corner too sharply, and Scott’s weight shifts, his shoulder pressing into Shane as his hip bumps solidly into Ilya’s thigh. The chain reaction is immediate. Ilya lurches sideways into Kip just as Kip leans in, and their mouths collide, teeth clacking together with a sound that makes Shane wince.

“Ow,” Kip says, pulling back and touching his lip. “That was—”

“Scott’s ass,” Ilya finishes, rubbing his own mouth. He shoots Scott a look over his shoulder. “Very nice ass, but bad timing.”

Ilya reaches around and swats it.

Scott yelps—actually yelps—and the sound is so undignified, so completely at odds with his whole carefully-constructed persona, that Shane starts laughing, so sweet and soft that it makes his shoulders shake and the freckles around his eyes crinkle.

“Did you just—” Scott twists around, outrage warring with something that looks suspiciously like a flush creeping up his neck. “Did you just spank me?”

“You were in the way,” Ilya says, entirely unrepentant. He settles back into his seat, leaning against Kip, and spreads his knees wide, taking up space the way he always does. “Consider it feedback.”

“Feedback,” Scott repeats flatly. He straightens his shirt, but the flush has spread to his ears now and he can’t quite meet anyone’s eyes. “I’ll give you feedback.”

Ilya catches Scott’s wrist before he can pull away and tugs him close, mouth brushing the shell of his ear. “You want to give me feedback?” he murmurs, low enough that Kip can barely hear them. “Take care of Shane tonight. Show me what you can do when you stop thinking so much.” He releases Scott’s wrist and sits back, leaning back against Kip. “That is the feedback I want.”

Scott’s throat works. For a long moment he just looks at Ilya. There’s pride there and want and the particular frustration of a man who isn’t used to being handled. His eyes flick to Kip, then he exhales and turns to Shane, cupping his jaw with one hand.

Shane tilts his head to the side, only the barest smile touching the corner of his lips.

“We’re almost here,” Scott tells him.

Shane lets himself lean into Scott’s palm.

Kip watches appreciatively. 

“Good,” Shane tells him. “Because I’m done saying goodnight to people I want to wake up with.”

.𖥔 ݁ ˖⋆ ˚❆

The elevator opens directly into the apartment. The space looks like it was once designed to be photographed and never actually lived in.

The ceilings are high and the city sprawls below them. Everything is muted. The floors are the color of honey, and the furniture is shades of grey and cream and soft blue that probably have names like “dove” and “mist” and “morning fog.” 

This place is quite possibly more boring than Shane’s cottage.

The kitchen is open to the living space, all waterfall-edge countertops and integrated appliances that disappear into the cabinetry. A pendant light hangs over a breakfast bar. The art on the walls is abstract, tasteful, and the kind of thing Scott would have never had the instinct to choose for himself.

That had to have been thanks to Kip.

Ilya stands in the center of it all, turning slowly, taking it in, and decides he won’t make a chirpy remark.

Which is why the next words that come out of his mouth are what they are:

“Have you fucked him against those windows?” Ilya asks, nodding toward the glass where Manhattan glitters below.

Kip drops his keys into a ceramic dish by the door without breaking stride. “Scott has fucked me on every flat surface in this apartment,” he says, shrugging off his jacket. “Including the breakfast bar, which I don’t recommend. Cold on the ass.”

Ilya laughs, bright and loud, the sound filling the tall ceilings. “I like him,” he tells Scott.

“You like everyone who says things that make me uncomfortable,” Scott mutters, but he’s already moving toward the kitchen and asking everyone what they want to drink.

“Water,” Shane says. He’s standing by the windows, hands in his pockets. “I want to be sober.”

Ilya watches Shane silhouetted against the skyline and feels something crack open in his chest that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with what Shane meant, even if he didn’t say it outright. 

For this. For us.

“Water for me too,” Ilya says, and crosses the room to stand behind Shane, pressing his mouth to the back of his neck. “Look at you,” he murmurs against his skin.

“What?”

“Being so brave,” Ilya says simply, and wraps his arms around him from behind, chin resting on his shoulder so they’re both facing the glass, the city laid out beneath them like something they could hold. “And stunning.”

Shane leans into him. There’s an exchange of breath, an open-air kiss. Then Shane presses his forehead against Ilya’s forehead, and the cosmos might have just imploded. The stars might have just collided and shattered galaxies.

But Ilya’s universe has gotten very small and very specific. Because from here—this close, closer than the ice has ever allowed, closer than a bench, closer than a hotel hallway at two in the morning—he can see Shane’s freckles. They show up in HD broadcasts and magazine covers and the thumbnail of every thirst edit some seventeen-year-old in Winnipeg has ever posted. But knowing about them and seeing them are two different things, the way knowing the ocean exists is different from standing in it. They’re everywhere. Scattered across the bridge of his nose in a dense, warm wash, like someone had flicked a brush loaded with copper. They thin out over his cheekbones and space themselves wider as though each one had chosen its spot. There’s a cluster beneath his left eye, five or six of them grouped so close together they almost form a shape. 

They’re darker where the sun has been and lighter where it hasn’t, trailing down toward his jaw. Some are no bigger than a pinprick. Others are wide and soft-edged, more blush than mark.

Ilya lifts a hand and traces a line between three of them, just below Shane’s left eye. 

Shane’s breath stutters.

“What are you doing?” Shane whispers.

“Counting them,” Ilya says.

Shane’s eyes close, lashes dark against those cheeks, and Ilya feels the tremor that runs through him, so he tilts Shane’s chin up with two fingers and kisses him like he’s trying to memorize the architecture of his mouth.

The press of lips is dry and warm, a question asked in the quietest possible voice. Then Shane’s hand comes up to grip the front of Ilya’s shirt and pulls, and the kiss deepens into something unhurried and devastating, Ilya’s tongue tracing the seam of Shane’s lips until they part.

One hand cradles the back of Shane’s skull while the other is splayed wide across his ribs where Ilya can feel Shane’s heartbeat hammering against his palm.

In this moment they’re two people who have been keeping themselves small for years and are, for one unguarded moment, allowing themselves to be the full, terrifying size of what they feel.

Scott appears beside them and presses a glass of water into Shane’s hand, then Ilya’s. His fingers brush Ilya’s when he does it, and Ilya catches them, holds them against the cold glass for a beat.

“Thank you,” Ilya says, and means more than the water.

Scott nods once, tight, and retreats to the kitchen island where Kip has already hoisted himself onto the countertop, legs swinging. 

Kip takes the glass Scott offers and drinks half of it in one long swallow. “So,” he says, looking at Ilya across the room. “How do you want me?”

Ilya feels Shane’s ribs expand against him.

“I want you where I can see your face,” Ilya replies. He lets go of Shane slowly, pressing one last kiss behind his ear, and crosses the room to stand between Kip’s knees. Kip has to tip his head back to look up at him from the counter, and the angle does something devastating to the line of his throat and the smudged black under his eyes.

Ilya cups his jaw and tilts it.

“You are so pretty it makes me stupid,” Ilya tells him.

Kip merely grins and replies with, “Scott likes compliments too, you know.”

Ilya glances over his shoulder at Scott, who is leaning against the opposite counter with his arms crossed, watching them with an expression caught between hunger and something almost scholarly.

“Scott,” Ilya says, holding his gaze, “you have the best ass in the NHL and I am including myself in that ranking.”

Scott rolls his eyes and walks away from them to be with Shane.

Kip hooks a finger through Ilya’s chain and pulls him back. “Eyes on me,” he says softly.

Ilya smirks, pointing an accusatory finger.

“You,” he says, letting the finger hover an inch from Kip’s nose, “are going to be a problem.”

Kip wraps his hand around Ilya’s finger and guides it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to the tip. “I’ve been a problem since the day Scott met me,” he says against Ilya’s skin. “Ask him.”

Ilya replaces his finger with his mouth, kissing Kip slowly, one hand sliding into his hair while the other braces against the counter beside his hip. Kip tastes like orange bitters and water and something sweet underneath, and he kisses back with a precision that surprises Ilya every time.

Meanwhile, Scott turns to Shane.

“Come here.”

Ilya hears Scott say it and flits his eyes over to watch him take their water away and set the glasses down. Before Shane can protest, Scott bends and lifts him, one arm under his knees, the other across his back, hoisting him off the ground with the kind of effortless strength that comes from fifteen years of professional hockey.

Shane makes a soft, surprised sound. “I can walk—”

Scott makes it approximately four steps before his arms start shaking. “Jesus Christ,” he grunts, adjusting his grip. “You are significantly heavier than Kip.”

“I’m two hundred pounds of muscle, you idiot,” Shane says, but he’s laughing, arms locked around Scott’s neck, bearing as much of his own weight as he can.

Scott makes it two more steps on pure stubbornness before his knees buckle and he deposits Shane gracelessly onto his feet in the hallway, both of them stumbling into the wall. Scott braces one hand above Shane’s head, breathing hard, grinning despite himself.

“Very romantic,” Ilya says from behind them, Kip wrapped around him, arms draped loosely over his shoulders. Unlike Scott, Ilya isn’t even breathing hard. “You need to work on your deadlift, Hunter.”

“Man, fuck you, Ilya! You try lifting someone.”

“Are you watching me?” Ilya says, tucking his arms under Kip’s thighs and lifting him. Kip tightens his legs and laughs against Ilya’s neck. “But Kip is made of air and eyeliner, so this is not fair comparison.”

“For what it’s worth,” Shane tells Scott quietly, and Ilya barely catches it: “No one’s ever tried to pick me up before.”

Scott’s hand is still braced above Shane’s head, and something in his face goes soft and fierce at the same time, and he kisses Shane against the wall.

“I am literally clinging to a six-foot-two Russian like a koala while two other men make out against my wall,” Kip calls back to them, chin hooked over Ilya’s shoulder as he whispers to him which way to go. “Bedroom is that way.”

Ilya carries him there, following Kip’s murmured directions—left, then right, through the door at the end—and deposits him gently onto a bed that’s absurdly large and covered in more pillows than any four people could ever need.

Ilya surveys the mountain of pillows and turns to Scott, who has appeared in the doorway with Shane pressed against his side. “How many pillows does one man need?” He picks one up and examines it. “This is not bedroom. This is pillow fortress. You are building defenses, yes? Against what? Comfort?”

Kip, already sprawled across the mattress, props himself up on one elbow and gives Ilya a look of exaggerated patience. “They’re not decorative, Rozanov.” He grabs one and tosses it to him. “You’ll thank me in about twenty minutes.”

Ilya catches the pillow one-handed and lets it drop to the floor. He pulls his shirt over his head in one clean motion, the cross on his chain catching the low light.

Kip sits up on the bed and unbuttons his shirt. The fabric slides off his shoulders and pools behind him on the comforter. He’s narrow through the chest, lean without being slight. A beauty mark sits below his left clavicle. He lifts his hips and pushes his jeans down, taking everything with them in one unhurried motion, kicking them off the edge of the bed. 

He’s all clean lines except for the eyeliner that’s smudged under his lashes, and against all that bare skin, it makes him look like something out of a Nikolai Ge painting.

Kip reaches behind him and slides a pillow beneath his hips. He looks up at Ilya through those smudged lashes and lets his knees fall open.

“Told you,” Kip says. “Better this way.”

Scott reaches into the nightstand drawer and tosses a condom and lube across the bed. 

Ilya catches both. He sets them down beside Kip’s hip without looking away from him. He kneels on the bed and runs both palms slowly up Kip’s thighs, watching the way Kip’s stomach tightens at the touch.

“Shane would like it if I took it slow,” Ilya says.

Kip’s gaze flicks past him. “Shane and his ground rules.”

“Shane cares about you,” Ilya says simply, “and wants me to take care of you. So I am going to take care of you.” He lowers his head and presses his mouth to the beauty mark below Kip’s clavicle. Kip’s pulse jumps beneath the skin.

Ilya works outward from there. He traces the ridge of Kip’s collarbone to the hollow of his throat, where the skin is thinner and the heartbeat louder. Down the center of his chest, along the sternum, feeling the heat of him. Kip runs warmer than Shane, like there’s something burning behind those ribs that the lean frame can’t quite contain.

Shane is like water. It’s clean but not sterile. There’s something mineral about Shane, like lake water over granite. Cool to the touch until something stirs him, and then the whole surface changes until he’s slick and wet and it gathers where Shane’s skin is softest.

With Shane, it’s always been like the tide is rising around Ilya. The precum that beads at the tip of him carries a scent that is darker and sweeter than the rest of him. And there is something briny and vital beneath all that, the smell of coastline, of a body of water that is deeper than it looks and warmer below the surface.

It’s the kind of scent that makes Ilya want to press his face into the source and stay there.

But Kip is the opposite. 

Beneath him, Kip is like fire, visible, throwing sparks. Everything is on the surface, everything offered, nothing hidden. Even now, his skin flushes from the chest up, pink spreading like watercolor.

He smells like smoke and citrus and the sharp, bright tang of someone who burns everything he feels.

Ilya traces the flush with his tongue, tasting salt and warmth and something sweet—whatever expensive thing Kip puts on his skin that Scott surely bought for him—and feels Kip’s fingers thread into his hair, holding on.

“You taste expensive,” Ilya murmurs against his sternum.

Kip has lost his edge. The clever, glittering surface of him is thinning, and what’s coming through underneath is softer, breathier. “Ilya—”

“Shh.” Ilya moves lower, his mouth following the trail of hair below Kip’s navel, and Kip’s stomach hollows with a sharp intake of breath.

He takes his time with Kip’s hip bones and discovers that when he sets his teeth against the left one, enough for Kip to feel the edge, Kip’s whole body jolts and the hand in Ilya’s hair tightens into a fist.

Ilya uncaps the lube, slicks his fingers, hooks one arm under Kip’s knees and presses one finger carefully against him. His finger presses past that puckered ring of muscle until he feels only that silken warmth inside him.

From the corner of his eye, he sees Scott push Shane back onto the pillows nearby. The two of them sprawl over one another, limbs tangled together.

Scott works Shane’s shirt up and off. Shane arches when Scott’s mouth finds his neck, and the sound he makes—soft and guttural—vibrates through the mattress so that Kip hears it too, turning his head toward them with glazed eyes even as Ilya slides a finger deeper, crooking it to find the spot that makes Kip’s hips stutter upward.

“Ilya!”

Scott has Shane’s jeans open now, pushing them down, and Shane lifts his hips to help, his gaze finding Ilya’s across the bed, dark and wanting, while Ilya adds a second finger for Kip and bends to murmur something in Russian against his thigh—

“Rasslabsya dlya menya.”

Relax for me.

Ilya watches Kip’s mouth fall open, watches Scott settle between Shane’s legs, as Kip clenches around his fingers and whines for more.

Ilya gives him more—a third finger, slow. He watches Kip’s face for any discomfort, but finds only that open-mouthed, heavy-lidded expression of someone being gently taken apart. 

He tears the condom wrapper with his teeth and rolls it on one-handed, the other still working inside Kip until he’s unable to wait any longer. He withdraws his fingers and lines himself up, one hand bracing beside Kip’s head, the other lifting Kip’s hips to meet him.

“Look at me,” Ilya says.

Kip’s eyes focus. The eyeliner is ruined now, smeared across his temples, and he has never been more beautiful.

Ilya pushes in slowly, watching every fraction of it register on Kip’s face, the stretch, the fullness, the moment when discomfort tips into something else entirely, and he holds himself still when he’s fully seated, trembling with the effort of it, giving Kip time to breathe.

“Oh,” Kip whispers, and his hands come up to frame Ilya’s face. “Oh, you’re—”

“I know,” Ilya says, because he does. He’s big and Kip is not built like Shane, and the difference matters.

The mattress lurches beneath them. Ilya braces instinctively, one hand slamming flat against the sheets, and Kip’s eyes go wide before a breathless laugh escapes him—because beside them, Scott has Shane’s thighs pushed back against his chest and is driving into him.

Shane’s head is thrown back, mouth wide open, and the sounds he’s making are wrecked and gorgeous and without shame.

The bed frame groans against the floor, sliding an inch across the hardwood with the force of it. Kip grabs Ilya’s shoulders and holds on.

Ilya can hear the obscene squelching above it all—the slap, slap, slap of damp skin against skin.

They’re close enough that when Ilya turns his head he can see Shane’s cock lying heavy against his own stomach, flushed dark and leaking, a thread of precum connecting the tip to the skin below his navel. It pools in the shallow dip of muscle there, and every time Scott thrusts up, Shane’s body jolts and the thread stretches and breaks.

“Your boyfriend,” Kip gasps, watching them, “is so wet.”

“You have no idea,” Ilya says, bottoming out before pistoning into him so hard that the bed frame shrieks another inch across the hardwood and Kip’s hand shoots above his head and slams flat against the headboard to brace himself.

A moan spills out of Kip that’s higher and needier than anything Ilya expected.

“There?” Ilya asks, already knowing the answer, and does it again, but deeper this time, angling his hips until he feels Kip clench around him and shake.

“Fuck— there, yes, right there—”

Ilya sets a rhythm that’s merciless. Long, slow strokes that bottom out with enough force to make Kip gasp, then a grinding pause at the deepest point, his pelvis pressed flush against Kip’s ass, rocking in tight circles that keep pressure exactly where Kip needs it. He watches Kip’s cock leak against his stomach, untouched.

Beside them, Scott has Shane folded nearly in half, one hand fisted in Shane’s hair, the other gripping the headboard for leverage, and the wet sound of skin meeting skin fills the room alongside Shane’s broken moaning.

Ilya lowers himself onto his forearms, caging Kip beneath him, chest to chest, and feels Kip’s cock trapped hot and hard between their stomachs. He rolls his hips again and Kip whimpers against his throat, legs locking around Ilya’s waist, heels digging into the base of his spine to pull him impossibly deeper.

Shane’s hand finds Kip’s where it’s braced against the headboard, fingers sliding between his and closing tight, and Kip turns his head to look at him, both of them wrecked, both of them pinned beneath someone else’s weight.

“Stay with me,” Ilya says against Kip’s ear, because Kip’s body is starting to shake in a way that means he’s close. The trembling has migrated from his thighs to his stomach to the hand that’s gripping Ilya’s shoulder, and his cock is pulsing against Ilya’s abs with every thrust, leaving a slick trail between them.

“I’m here,” Kip manages. “I’m here, I’m—fuck—”

Ilya shifts his weight to one forearm and slides the other hand down between them, wrapping around Kip’s cock, and Kip’s entire body bows off the mattress. He’s wet too. Not the way Shane gets wet, not that slow, gathering tide, but the sharp, immediate slickness of a body that’s been on the edge for too long, leaking in pulses that coat Ilya’s fingers each time he bottoms out.

“Don’t let go of him,” Ilya says, nodding toward Shane’s hand.

Kip’s grip on Shane tightens.

Then Scott changes his angle, and Shane’s whole body lurches sideways, his shoulder pressing into Kip’s. The sound that tears out of him is guttural and loud, and it’s that—Shane losing the last thread of his composure—that tips Kip over.

Kip comes with his hand in Shane’s and his face turned toward him, their foreheads almost touching, and the sound he makes is Shane’s name, not Ilya’s, and Ilya doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all.

The name on Kip’s lips could be any of theirs and it would mean the same thing.

Kip clenches around Ilya so hard that Ilya’s rhythm breaks. He buries himself to the hilt and grinds, his hand still working Kip through it, feeling the hot spill of him between their bodies, and Kip is shaking and gasping and laughing and maybe crying. It’s hard to tell when it’s all mixed together, pleasure and relief and the overwhelm of being seen by this many people.

Ilya doesn’t come yet. He holds still inside Kip and breathes through it, because there’s more. Scott is still moving, and Shane is still climbing, and the night isn’t finished.

Shane’s hand is crushing Kip’s now, his knuckles white. A soft sound is punched out of him with each of Scott’s thrusts.

Scott is relentless, sweat running down the channel of his spine, his jaw clenched with the effort of holding back, and when he bends down and puts his mouth against Shane’s ear and says something that none of them can hear, Shane’s whole body seizes.

He comes untouched.

His cock pulses against his stomach in thick, heavy waves, adding to the mess already pooled there, and his body clamps down around Scott hard enough that Scott gasps and stutters and then drives in one final time and holds, his face buried in Shane’s neck, his shoulders shaking, coming.

Kip watches, still trembling through the aftershocks, his hand still locked in Shane’s. “Oh,” he whispers. “Look at you. Look at both of you.”

Shane turns his head. His eyes are glazed, his lashes damp, his freckles standing out vivid against the flush that runs from his cheeks to his chest. He looks at Kip then lifts their joined hands and presses his mouth to Kip’s knuckles.

The sound Kip makes is very small and very raw.

Ilya, still inside Kip, still hard, still aching, lowers his head to Kip’s chest and begins to move again—slowly, this time, shallow strokes—and Kip, oversensitive and still fluttering, takes him.

It doesn’t take long. The orgasm gathers low in Ilya’s spine and rolls through him. He comes with his mouth pressed to the curve of Kip’s throat, one hand curled around Kip’s back, holding him, and thinks about Shane, still splayed open and trembling beside them, having been so full of Scott, and the thought that surfaces is so specific and so hungry it makes his hips jerk through the last pulse of his release.

Ilya wants to put his mouth where Scott has been, wants to taste them both at once, wants to press his tongue inside Shane and find the evidence of what just happened and make it his too. He wants to let the salt and musk of Scott mix with the deep, endless taste of Shane on his tongue until the line between yours and mine dissolves into ours.

When Ilya finally withdraws, he keeps one hand steady on Kip’s hip, and Kip hisses softly at the loss. He ties off the condom, knots it, and leans over the edge of the bed to drop it, then he’s moving, turning toward the other side of the bed, where Shane is lying exactly as Scott left him, on his back, legs still open, chest heaving, his stomach painted with his own release and his body clenching around nothing. Scott has collapsed beside him, one arm flung across Shane’s chest, breathing into his shoulder with the stunned, emptied-out stillness of a man who has left everything he had inside someone else.

Scott left him a mess.

Ilya can see it before he’s close enough to taste the lube and the worked-open flush of skin that was stretched around someone not long ago, and beneath all of it, Shane’s own slickness.

Scott wore a condom, so what’s left behind isn’t the evidence of Scott’s body but the evidence of what Scott did to Shane’s. That swollen, tender give of muscle there has been used well. The lube will still be there, slick and sweet. And underneath that will be the bitter, flat taste of latex.

But everything else is Shane. The salt-musk smell of him, concentrated and raw. The wetness that’s entirely his own.

Ilya lowers his head.

The first touch of his tongue drags a mewl out of Shane. He’s oversensitive—of course he is, Scott was just there—and the taste that floods Ilya’s mouth is clinical at first. There’s a bitter trace of where the condom had been, but then, beneath all of it, Shane. Dark and deep and salt-sweet, that deep-water taste that Ilya has only ever found at the source, and here it is, stronger than he’s ever known it because Shane’s body is still in the aftermath of being fucked open, still clenching softly around nothing, still wet with its own wanting.

Shane’s hand finds Ilya’s hair and grips.

“Ilya—I can’t—I already—”

“Yes, you can,” Ilya murmurs against him, the vibration of his voice making Shane’s hips jolt. He presses deeper with his tongue, tasting everything Scott left behind and everything Shane is still giving him, and Shane sobs, his back arching off the mattress.

A bead of precum swells at the slit and spills over, tracing a slow line down the shaft, and Kip reaches across and catches it on his fingertip. He brings the finger to his own mouth.

Scott makes a strangled sound.

Ilya flattens his tongue and drags it slow, then points it and presses inside further until he can taste the earthy richness of him. Shane’s thighs stay clamped against Ilya’s head before falling open again, shaking, surrendering.

“Right there,” Kip says softly, watching Shane’s face with the focused attention of someone memorizing something they never want to forget. “He’s right there, Ilya. Don’t stop.”

That’s when Ilya slides two fingers in alongside his tongue—gently, so gently, because Shane is swollen and sensitive and already so open—and crooks them, and Shane screams.

When Shane comes apart, it’s with a broken sound, his cock barely hard, his body producing almost nothing, just a thin, clear pulse against his stomach while his insides flutter against Ilya’s tongue in waves.

Ilya stays until the trembling stops, until Shane’s grip in his hair loosens from a fist to an open palm resting over his head. He gentles his fingers, softens his tongue, eases back, pressing one last kiss to Shane’s thigh, soft as anything, before crawling up the bed to collapse in the narrow space between…

Well.

He had been aiming for the space between Shane and Kip, but reconsiders and changes course to wedge himself between Shane and Scott instead, throwing an arm across both of them.

Scott grunts at the intrusion.

“Miss me?” Ilya asks, settling in.

Scott doesn’t answer that, but his arm does wrap around Ilya’s waist now like it belongs there, which it does.

Kip presses his face into the pillow beside Shane’s head, and Shane curls against Ilya’s chest. As for Scott…

“You are like fucking furnace,” Ilya tells him.

Scott doesn’t open his eyes. “And you’re like a glacier. We balance out.”

“Demon on the ice,” Kip murmurs, half into the pillow, “furnace in the sheets. Scott runs hot.”

Shane huffs a breath that might be a laugh, his face still pressed against Ilya’s chest. “So does this one,” he says, tapping Ilya’s sternum with one finger. “He just hides it better.”

“I hide nothing. We are rodnye,” Ilya says, offended. “I am open book.”

Three separate snorts answer him.

“You are the most closed book I have ever met,” Kip says, lifting his face from the pillow. “You’re a book in a locked case in a library.”

“In a country that no longer exists,” Shane adds.

“With the pages glued together,” Scott finishes.

Ilya looks between the three of them. “You rehearse this?”

“Didn’t have to,” Scott says, and there’s a lazy satisfaction in his voice.

Ilya turns his head and bites Scott’s ear.

“Ow— what the fuck—”

“Open book,” Ilya says against the cartilage, teeth still grazing. “See? Very open. Very transparent. I want to bite you, I bite you.”

Scott shoves at his shoulder but he’s laughing, one hand coming up to cup his ear. “You are feral.”

“You like it,” Ilya says, and the room goes quiet because nobody contradicts him.

Kip stretches across Shane to trace the line of Ilya’s jaw with one finger. His finger trails down to the chain, following it to the cross. 

Ilya catches Kip’s hand and holds it against his chest, over the cross.

Shane tenses for a moment between them, and Ilya soothes him. His free hand finds the back of Shane’s neck, thumb pressing into the tight muscle there in slow circles, the same spot he always finds when Shane is winding himself into knots. He doesn’t say anything, just keeps the pressure steady and warm until Shane’s shoulders drop and his breath evens out against Ilya’s chest.

Kip’s fingers rest against the cross, and Ilya feels the weight of it differently now.

His mother gave him this chain two years before she swallowed those pills and left him to find her body. He had been old enough to understand what death meant. Too young to understand why she chose it.

Shane knows. They built the Irina Foundation together in her honor, named for a woman Shane never met but carries anyway because Ilya carries her.

Kip and Scott know too. They donated to the foundation before Montreal, before any of this, back when they were just two couples who orbited each other at All-Star weekends and charity galas. They know what the cross means. They know what Ilya lost.

But knowing and touching are different things.

Maybe they’re right, maybe his pages are glued together and the library is locked and the country no longer exists.

But hey, maybe that’s what happens when your mother swallows a bottle of pills and the adults around you speak in whispers for a month and then stop speaking about it at all. You learn to glue your own pages shut. You build the library yourself, brick by brick, and you lose the key on purpose.

The silence stretches long enough that Ilya thinks everyone has let it pass, the way people usually do, the way he prefers.

Then Scott moves.

He shifts closer, closing the last inch of space between his chest and Ilya’s back, and presses his mouth to the knob of Ilya’s spine.

Ilya’s breath catches.

Scott’s arm tightens around his waist, pulling him back into all that absurd, furnace heat, and his hand finds Ilya’s where it rests on his own chest and covers it.

“It’s alright. We’ve got you,” Scott says against his spine, so quiet that Ilya almost doesn’t hear it. No performance in it. No eloquence. Just a man pressing warmth against a cold place and staying there.

Ilya’s jaw works. He stares at the ceiling and blinks, and blinks again, and his vision swims for just a moment before he swallows it back.

“You are very annoying.”

Scott’s mouth curves against his vertebra. “I know.”

“You and your stupid warm hands.”

“Sorry,” Scott says, not sounding sorry at all.

Ilya closes his eyes. He lets himself be held from behind by Scott and from the front by Shane.

Kip’s hand slides away from the cross and rests over Scott’s arm now.

Shane’s breathing evens out first. Then Kip’s, slower, deeper, his fingers going slack against Scott’s wrist.

Scott lasts a little longer.

“Hey.”

“What,” Ilya says, not opening his eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

Ilya turns the cross once in the dark.

Then he lets go of it too.

“Me too,” he says, and means it in every language he knows.