Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories:

F/M, M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau/Svetlana Vetrova, Kip Grady/Scott Hunter, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau/Ilya Rozanov/Svetlana Vetrova, Shane Hollander/Rose Landry, Ilya Rozanov & Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Svetlana Vetrova, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Kip Grady, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post Tuna Melt Debacle, Breaking Up & Making Up, POV Ilya Rozanov, Depression, Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Forgiveness, Healing, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Ilya Rozanov Gets A Hug, Get Loved Loser, Cliff is the chillest guy on the planet, Slow Burn, Endgame Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, but it takes a bit to get there

Language:

English

Series:

Part 4 of Set in Heated Rivalry-verse

Collections:

Pay Attention

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-24 Updated: 2026-08-27 Words: 19,526 Chapters: 4/10

What would I say?

Summary

Shane Hollander runs from Ilya’s penthouse like he’s escaping a crime scene. Ten days later, he’s dating Rose Landry. Shortly after that, a gay scandal in the NBL ends a man’s career overnight.

Ilya takes the hint. Being Ilya Rozanov, he takes it personally.

Notes

Okay guys! So!

This one came out of left field. What happened is that stress is fucking stressing and when that happens, I read poetry. And I was reading this stunning collection of poems by June Jordan, and somehow this fic happened. For reference, the collection is called Directed by Desire.

Im not going to fall prey to the unleashed and feasting chapter count, because it’s most of the way drafted. It needs work, god does it, since the whole thing grew out of this emotional state driven by lack of sleep and devastating poetry. But it’s drafted, meaning we can expect deviations of a couple of thousand words here and there, not chapters, or, Jesus help me, dozens of chapters.

A bit of a different format, but only just: Typically, I only have one poem per fic. This one has one poem per chapter (plus one for the whole fic) stashed in the notes below, because that’s how I wrote them. Feel free to ignore them, but I’d recommend you give them a try. Jordan is a genius.

It’s Ilya’s POV so mind the—you know. The darkness. The close relationship he has with violence. Mental health struggles. All that good stuff.

The true MVP of this fic is Cliff Marlowe. I’m not as surprised by this as I perhaps should be.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

The light in the kitchen has the wrong colour. Too yellow, too late, too much like four in the morning, which it is.

For a long moment, Ilya considers: I could smash it, right now. The glass in his hand is heavy, quality crystal. His aim is good, even now that he’s half drunk half hungover. One throw—He can picture the sound of it perfectly, how the glittering shards would come down; beautiful, if brief.

He’s sitting down at the kitchen island, somehow; he doesn’t remember how this came to be. The girl left—what was her name? Maria? Marlene? She was fun; about as fucked up by her life as Ilya is, and handling it about as well as he is. Meaning, violently. She wanted him to slap her, he recalls. When he wouldn't, she slapped him first, hard, ring snagging on his cheekbone, drawing blood. Not the first blood spilt that night, but the first drawn deliberately, in anger. Things went downhill from there. Christ.

His phone is there, face down, next to the fruit bowl full of fruit that the meal service people keep leaving and replacing when it moulds. He shouldn't check it. Nothing is there. It’s four AM, the boys are asleep like functional adults. The less functional adults—he can just about predict that slop, word for word. Hey, Roz, hi, there’s this awesome party! Rozy, we miss you baby, come, come, come. Yeah. If he sees another person before he gets some sleep, he will slit their throats upon first contact. There is nothing on that phone worth checking. Leave it alone.

He should sleep. He considers the light fixture again; he can break it tomorrow. There’s—there’s a game, no? He’s pretty sure he’s playing a game—Not tomorrow, though. Day after. Home game against—Quakes, maybe? Does it matter? Point is, he should sleep. He should drink the water the girl had the presence of mind to leave on the counter, next to the glass he’s actually drinking from. What is he drinking? Diluted vodka? Why the fuck is he—Oh, right. The ice had melted. Disgusting. He should pour it out. Eat something. He should do a lot of things.

He picks up the phone.

Nothing. The only chat he cares about has been quiet since November twenty-first. Hand on his heart, swear to Christ, he’s not even mad anymore; he’s not even really tempted to smash the phone into the wall, curse it for what it refuses to give him. No, he’s just—fucking sad about it. Moping like a moody little bitch.

He doesn’t even need to type anything, the page is already open; he pulls it down, refreshes the feed with more pictures, more news. They’re a handsome couple, he can’t deny. Shane glorious in his hideous, boring clothes. Rose Landry, in fur, with shiny hair and a radiant smile. Just the type of girl Shane Hollander should be with. Whirlwind romance, the headlines say. Do we sense an engagement ring in the future?

Ilya inhales a long, shuddering breath, takes a gulp of the swill, and manages to exhale more or less evenly. He swipes away the browser and intends to check his email, but a new notification appears. WhatsApp. Group chat. One of the big ones, the ones that barely ever have anything interesting. Yeah, the time zones make these big chats a bit messy, but nothing like this. Another notification. Another.

You see this shit?

Fuck, man. Brutal.

Jesus Christ. Career over.

Fucking fag—

Ilya’s clicking into the link before his brain even finished reading, a sick whine ringing in his ears, heart pounding in his chest. For a second, half a second, before the page loads, he doesn’t quite know where it is. His hands are tingling, lungs running on empty, heaving. His mind is blank, running in circles. Fuck, it’s him. Of course it’s him. Someone's got something. This is it, this is what happens, what you were afraid of since fuckign rookie season. It’s it, it’s fucking done. You fucked him up, you destroyed his life, of course you had, you ruin everything you fucking touch—

The page loads.

It's not him.

It's some other man. Baseball, looks like. Late twenties, shy smile, the kind of face Ilya wouldn't mind looking at twice. There are photos. There are tweets from a man who used to fuck him. There are statements from his team that read like funeral notices. He's been cut. He's done.

Ilya sets the phone down, sits there for a long time, breathing. The force of the relief is sick, as sick as its shape and make. It's not him. Fuck Cole Garrison. A hundred Cole Garrisons could have their lives ruined, reputations destroyed, mental health wrecked. A thousand. Every single man in the fucking world—God, it’s not him. Thank Christ. Thank the fucking Heavens.

The relief lasts maybe a minute and feels like a lifetime, like he was born, lived, and died in it. He lets himself dissolve in it, bask in the warmth—But it goes away eventually. It always does. What bubbles up in its place is a lot more familiar; warm, too, in its special, infernal, way.

It’s not the quiet, simmering anger he’s been functioning on for weeks. No, this is the real deal, the blinding, red-behind-the-eyes rage. What the fuck are you doing, you snivelling idiot? What was that? You just felt every cell in his body drop out of formation for a man who left you without a word and is currently being photographed at premieres with a woman. A woman who ticks all the boxes, who can go to fancy premieres and hold his hand and come to his fucking games wearing his fucking jersey—What the fuck are you doing? How pathetic are you?

The phone doesn’t survive, unsurprisingly; it’s a wonder it lived this long. He’s been going through them a bit, recently, so Svetlana sent a box over last week. He has some more, he’s pretty sure. Fucking—

This. This is the message. The universe takes some poor kid and ruins his life so that Ilya, three thousand miles away, can sit at his kitchen island at four in the morning and finally understand that Shane was right to leave.

Fuck.

Fuck that.

Fuck him.

He picks up the glass, drains it, picks up the bottle, pours another. His hand is shaking and it makes him angrier.

He doesn't sleep.

The next weeks happen to other people. That's what it feels like. Ilya sits inside his body while some dark, unknowable force drives it around.

He doesn't go to the All-Star.

He sends an excuse—sick, family thing, his dad—and the team accepts it because nobody wants to ask. They're all walking around him like he's a time bomb, a corpse lumbering around, breaking things. Management hasn't said rehab yet. They will. He can see it in Harrison’s face every time they pass in the corridor, that careful clinical look people get when they're costing out a problem. He’s their best player. He’s their biggest asset. He is flaming out, everyone can see it, and the PR people are keeping a lid on it with increasingly ludicrous amounts of money.

Hollander brings Rose Landry to the ASG. There's a photo of her in his jersey at a sponsor party. Ilya finds it at two in the morning, drunk, idly considering a third gram, and laughs and laughs, until even the soul-dead groupies that followed him home flee in fright.

He drinks from sundown. Then from earlier. The hangovers are worse than the drinking so he takes coke to flatten them out, and then he can't sleep so he drinks more, and then he can't get up so he takes more coke, and on it goes. He plays. He plays well sometimes, in a mad kind of way, because the only thing that quiets the noise is spilling blood, his own or other people’s. The Bears are losing anyway. Nothing he does matters.

He gets into a scrap with a kid from Buffalo who said something—Ilya can't remember what—and would have shattered his jaw if Lyosha didn't drag him off. There's a fine, talk about a suspension, a press conference Kisel handles like a pro. The few people in Russia he hasn’t blocked yet send him admiring messages on Signal, compliment his balls, his form, his attitude. Hammer flies into Boston to take him out for steaks afterwards. Kid, listen. Calm down. What is going on?

Ilya doesn't listen.

Aleksei calls from their father's house, drunk, asking for money, while in the background his father shouts for Irina, Irina, Irina, and Ilya hangs up and sits on the floor of his bathroom for forty minutes thinking about whether he could fly to Moscow and kill them all and be back in time for the next game.

He decides probably not.

He calls Svetlana instead. She tells him that she loves him, that she will handle it, that he needs to stop. He nearly chokes on the tears he’s trying to suppress, which is doubly humiliating. That he’s crying like a child is compounded by the even more humiliating sin of trying to hide it. Of her having to stay on the line until he sleeps, because Ilya fucking Rozanov can’t even survive on his own.

When he wakes up there’s a message on his phone. Stop it. Don't be a coward. He doesn't stop. Whatever is happening, it feels so far out of his control, there is nothing for him to do. He’s strapped in, going where he’s going. The only thing left to do is to is make peace with the approaching abyss.

Marly comes over on a Thursday.

This is not, on its own, alarming. Marly comes over all the time. He has a key; he has had it since Ilya bought it, and the one before that, all the way back to the rat-infested hole he rented back when. What's alarming is the way he comes in—no shout, no shoes toed off at the entrance, no opinion delivered before he's all the way through the door. Huh, Ilya thinks, hazy. Marly’s not wearing a coat. Why the fuck is he not wearing a coat—

Marly sits on the coffee table, not the couch. On the coffee table, facing him, knees bracketing Ilya’s two scorching-hot touchpoints of life. God, he’s always run hot, but it’s not that cold, is it? It can’t be—

"I love you," Marly says.

"Oh fuck."

"No, listen. I love you, you're my best friend, I'd take a bullet for you. So I'm gonna say this and you're gonna shut up and let me. Okay?"

Ilya nods, because it's easier.

"You're killing yourself."

Ilya opens his mouth.

"Shut up. I said shut up." Marly hasn't raised his voice. He’s not grimacing, not shouting or snarling. There's just something tense about his voice, a note of dread Ilya has only heard once, years ago when Nicky was in a car crash. Ilya drove him to the ER himself, and could barely comprehend what fear had done to his friend. “I don't care about the games. I don't care about the fights. I care that you’re going to kill yourself, or kill someone, and I don't know which one is closer at this point, only that they're both close."

Ilya looks at the floor.

"Talk to me. Please. What the fuck is going on?"

The silence stretches. The fridge hums in the next room. Outside someone honks. Ilya thinks: I could lie. I could lie pretty easily. I've lied for years. I could lie until Marly gives up and gets a drink after all and we go do some dumb shit.

He thinks: I can't do this anymore.

He thinks: literally. I literally can't.

He thinks, bizarrely: I don’t want to die.

"Hey, man," he says. "If I did something—really stupid. Like—really, really stupid. Would you—Would you stay, after? With me?"

"Yeah, bud. Ride or die."

He says it without missing a beat.

"You haven't even—"

"Don't need to. Whatever it is. Ride or die." Marly watches him for a second. "Does it have something to do with Montreal Jane?"

Ilya's face must do something. He doesn't even know what. The urge to throw up is becoming concerning, but he’s known how to push that shit down since he was in puberty.

"Yeah," he says, eventually. "Well. Not really but sort of. I just—I want to do something about that."

"What, like, get her back?"

"No, I—" His mouth has gone dry. "No. That's—They’re—There's a new partner. Good one. Yeah, it’s a whole thing. I just—I want to do something."

Marly studies him. Marly has many faces. This is the one he uses when he's about to tell Ilya he's full of shit, but kindly. "Roz, listen to me. I'm with you if you wanna kill a man. All of us are. AK has got cement-laden caskets at the ready; this is not in question. But what is this about, man? What are you telling me?"

Ilya stands up. Sits back down. Stands up again. His legs don't know what to do. He walks to the window and back. He says, to the ceiling, fast, before he can chicken out —

"I fuck men." It comes out louder than he meant. "I—men and women. Always. My whole life."

There's a pause.

"Okay," Marly says.

Ilya turns around.

"Sorry?"

Marly is sitting on the coffee table looking at him with an expression Ilya cannot parse. Something between ‘okay’ and ‘and?’. "Sorry, was that a secret?"

Ilya stares at him.

"Like—I just assumed we didn't talk about it?"

"What?"

"Oh, man." Marly's face does a complicated thing. "Oh boy. You—you did. You thought you were—Ilya. Bud. We had threesomes."

"We fucked girls."

"I mean," says Marly. "Barely, right?"

Ilya sits down on the floor.

"Sorry," Marly says immediately. "Sorry. It's none of my business. I don't know anything. Thank you for telling me."

"No. No, what? I didn't—I never fucking touched you."

Marly gives him a look of such patient, kind pity that Ilya’s mouth sort of goes dry. "Bud," he says. "I don't know what you think straight guys do. In my experience, if your dick touches your best friend's dick in a sexual situation, for no reason except that you wanted it to, you might be doing some gay shit."

"Hold on. But then you—"

Marly shrugs. "I don't really think about that stuff. I like who I like. Never fucked a guy, but, like, a couple of girls have fucked me and I liked it well enough. If it happens, it happens, you know?"

Ilya is, for one long bright second, almost laughing.

"And—people know?"

"Mm. Pretty sure most of the team thinks you and I hook up when we room together."

"We do not—"

"Roz, that blonde girl. Laura. You were telling her how to blow me, like, in great detail. That's—I mean. You have to know that is not very straight behaviour, right?"

Ilya tries to remember. He was drunk. The girls they were with were kinky, liked being bossed around, Marly is the softest person alive and wouldn't bully a worm, so Ilya had—taken over. A little. As a favour. He shuts his eyes.

"Okay," he says. "Granted. Maybe that one was—adventurous."

"It's fine," Marly says, gently. "I want to be clear that it's fine. I figured you are like me. You liked what you liked, didn’t see the need to throw a parade. And, you know—the Russian thing. I get it."

Ilya feels like he's standing on a deck in a storm.

"Lyosha. Pasha. They—they didn't—"

"Buddy." Marly's face is doing the pity thing again. "Listen. I'm sorry. I know you're going through it, and I'm not trying to mess with you. But—they have eyes, man. And we've played together since the day you got drafted."

"They've never—"

"They've never said anything because, Hammer would have broken arms and legs and made them say please and thank you after. More importantly, you've been our Captain for years. They would storm the White House on your say-so. Or, like, the Kremlin or whatever the fuck."

Ilya laughs. It comes out wrong, too loud, bloodied, bruised and beaten, but it's, at base, a laugh. Marly watches him do it. Then he stands up off the coffee table, crosses the small distance, and pulls Ilya bodily up into a rough hug. Ilya goes like a man who's been waiting to be moved, who was falling for a long time and hadn't expected being caught was on offer.

"Jesus Christ," Marly says into his hair. "I can't believe you thought we didn't know. You're the least subtle person in the whole world."

"You’re such a fucking liar Marly."

"I am not."

"You said we cuddle. We never—"

"Bud. The Orcas game. Two years ago. You crawled into my bed and passed out on my chest like a fucking lapcat."

"You will not survive what I am going to do to you."

"Mm-hm. Mm-hm."

Later—half an hour, maybe more, Ilya has lost track—they're back on the couch, properly this time, and Ilya is drinking the water Marly has put in front of him, and the world has the strange clean light of post-thunderstorm.

"So," Marly says. "Going back to your original point."

"Right."

"You wanted to do something dumb."

Ilya stares at the coffee table. The empty glass. The light through the window has shifted; how long has Marly been here?

"I want to come out."

Marly goes very still. "Okay," he says. Carefully. "You want to develop that for me? It's none of my business, of course; a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. But—that's a fairly extreme move, buddy."

Ilya laughs. It's at least fifty per cent less hysterical than the last one; he notes the percentage with pride. The part of him that wanted to put a noose around his neck and jump out the window an hour ago has dimmed. Gone quiet. He's not sure he believes it's gone for good, but it's quiet for now and he’ll fucking take it.

"There was a guy," he says.

"Right."

"It was—it was good. I've never—you know I've never been a relationship guy. It's never been—I don't do that. But this time. I thought we had—I thought this was a thing. And he—he didn't betray me. We weren't anything. We couldn't be anything." He hears his voice get sharper. "He took care of himself, did what he should and I can’t—I can’t do it anymore. I can't. I'll go fucking crazy."

"Yeah," Marly says. "Yeah. Okay. Montreal Jane, yeah?"

Ilya doesn't answer.

Marly doesn't push.

"Right," Marly says, after a moment. "Okay. What's your contract like? What does Kisel say?"

Ilya thinks about Kisel. Kisel who once said, in his hearing, that fags should be sent to prison to be fucked to death by the inmates. Kisel who has handled his contracts since he was nineteen.

"He doesn't know."

"No shit, he doesn’t know. What does he say about your naturalization? Where are you on that?"

Ilya stares at him.

"I—Svetlana is American. She is a citizen. I could marry —"

"Man, what?"

"What?"

"You are the Captain of the Boston Bears. You are a millionaire. You don't need to marry a fucking woman to get citizenship, what is wrong with you?

Ilya opens his mouth.

“No. Don’t answer that.” Marly points at him, mock-severe now, mouth relaxed, a little wicked, a little dumb. “Have you drank, fucked, snorted and gambled all your millions away?”

“No?”

“Super. Then I’m pretty sure you can just invest a million in something and America gives you one. Like, just hands it over, I think.”

Despite himself, Ilya blinks. “That’s real?”

“Pretty sure. Pretty sure Nicky’s little boyfriend was moaning about it the other week. Even if it wasn’t, there are other, simpler ways; more options than deportation or a fake marriage to Vetrova.”

Ilya looks away. “She loves me. It would not be fake.”

Marly leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Listen to me. We get a lawyer. An actual lawyer. Ideally, we march your trashbag agent behind the shed and shoot him between the eyes. We do this properly.”

“Kisel is not—”

“Kisel is fucking vermin. We get a lawyer. You bring Vetrova. You figure out where you stand. How long have you been here, what visas, what papers, what permits. All of it.”

Ilya says nothing.

“Then you talk to whoever you need to talk to. Your agent; new one, for preference. Management. PR. The league, maybe. I don’t know. We make a list.”

A laugh catches somewhere in Ilya’s chest, hooks in his throat, causes some fucking damage. Marly sees it. His mouth twitches, but he doesn’t let the moment go to waste. Not all the way.

“I’ll come with you. Hammer will come. The boys will come. Hell, I’ll bring my dad.”

Ilya looks at him.

Marly is smiling now, helplessly, like even he knows this part is ridiculous. Like he’d really like to cry if it was allowed. “My dad will love this. He already loves you, and, regardless, this is like, his Super Bowl, are you kidding? Millionaire immigrant hockey queer in need of legal help? That’s his fucking Cup run.”

“Your dad hates hockey.”

“He’ll make an exception.” Marly reaches out and knocks his knee against Ilya’s. “Point is, the thing you’re not gonna do is get fucking deported to the commies.”

Ilya presses both hands over his face. Calm down, Jesus.

“The org is gonna bitch,” Marly says. “Sponsors might bitch. The press will be unbearable for, like, a couple of months. Maybe longer, because people love being weird about you.”

Ilya’s hands stay where they are. Possibly they’re there to stop the flood of denials, curses, pleas and thanks that are stuck in his throat presently.

“But you won us our first Cup in thirty years. You’re our Captain. You’re our guy. Nobody is spiriting you off anywhere.”

Ilya laughs. It hurts his chest. He doesn’t stop.

“What?”

Who fucking knows?

“Nothing, man.” Ilya wipes his face on his sleeve. He feels, for the first time in months, like there might be a floor under him. “Yeah. Let’s—let’s make something happen.”

Chapter End Notes

Wasted

by June Jordan

You should slice the lying tongue of your love
into a billion bits of bile you swallow
one bilious element at a time
while
scalding water trembles drop
by drop between
(you hope)
between your eyes because
you said you loved me
and you lied
you lied
All you wanted was to rid me of my pride
to ruin me for tenderness
you lied
to thrust me monstrous from the hurt
you fabricated claiming
all the opposites of pain
while maiming
me
the victim of your whimsical disdain
And I still love you like the river
in the rain
in vain
you lied
in vain.

 

 

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Life is still nuts. Even for this one that i have drafted, there's barely ten minutes a day to write. Christ.

Chapter 2 

Timeframe: ~February 3 → April 7, 2017

He does come out, sort of. There is no theatrical press conference, not a single impassioned declaration, no staged pap discoveries, Ilya being seen at x with y doing z. No, there are only endless meetings, countless conference rooms filled with dead-eyed men and women in suits saying fascinating, fascinating, well, let's see now in careful neutral tones that mean fuck you, fuck you for bringing this mess to me, how dare you ruin my month with this shit?

He doesn't sleep well, but better than he had. He hasn't had a drink since Marly's bizarre intervention—which is, incidentally, shaping up to become the longest he's been sober since he was fourteen—and isn't playing quite as badly. Losing more than he’s winning, yeah, but looking less like he’s trying to outrun a terminal diagnosis. 

Time does an odd thing in this period. Away stretches are hellish as a rule, one hotel looking more or less like another, one game blurring into the next. You have to work hard to stay at least peripherally connected to the real world. If you don't? There are plenty of loud things to disappear into, even if you take drugs and booze off the table. Food-bus-skate-nap-game-bus-sleep, rinse and repeat. Nobody asked him to do press, but he mumbles through basic questions now and again. Meetings follow him around the continent, appointments, deadlines, conferences. Typically, an average day would have ten hours of sleep, eight hours of hockey, two hours of food and four hours of meetings.

Marly stays glued to his side through all of it. They room together on the road like rookies, and when they’re in Boston, Ilya lives at Marly’s house. He hasn’t seen his condo since the intervention. He’s probably going to sell it, since burning it down would cause paperwork. Fire would be ideal, obviously—honest, biblical, excellent for demons—but he doubts the wretched thing would even catch. There isn’t enough life in it to burn.

Kisel goes first.

Ilya tells him in the office on a Wednesday, with Marly in the room. Kisel looks at Ilya, at Marly, back at Ilya. You don't need to be a mind reader to know what his conclusions are. Then he says, in the practised smoothness of an insurance agency denying coverage, that he doesn't think his firm is the right cultural fit for this kind of announcement, and that he wishes Ilya all the very best.

Marly stands up; Ilya stands up faster. Holy Christ, but his head hurts.

"That's what we came here to do, brother," he says as calmly as he can. "Fucking cool it. He'd like nothing more than to get hit. Get one last check."

In the elevator down, Marly says, "I will kill him."

"Tomorrow, maybe."

"Tomorrow," Marly agrees, mollified. 

He tells the boys properly that weekend, brings them all over to Marly's house, even the rookies, sits them down in the living room and tries not to feel like an absolute clown.

"I'm bisexual."

They look at him.

"Okay," says Kaner. "You mean, like, going forward we should say that?"

"Not yet. But I am—I am working on it. Marly's been helping me."

There's a beat.

"Cool," Seb says. "Are we still on to watch the Hounds game, or?"

"Yes," Ilya says.

"With burgers?"

"Sure."

"And cones, after?"

"No fucking cones. If you want ice cream eat it from a bowl like a fucking adult," Marly says from three feet to the left of him where he's leaning on the wall.

"Aw." Seb shrugs. "Okay, cool. I mean, cool that you're working on it. About time." His eyes bounce from Marly to Ilya, then again, and finally settle on Ilya. "Any other announcements? Things you'd like to clear up?"

Jesus.

"Don't be a dick," Marly says, eyes hooded. "There has never been an out queer player in any major league in the world. He's doing a lot."

Seb arches his brows. "I mean, I did say that it was cool. I meant it." He cocks his head. "The Russian thing—is that a problem?"

Ilya, very carefully, doesn't laugh his last breath away. "Yes and no. I will get a visa—and Svetlana is working on it as well. Settling things."

"Yikes." Seb sighs, leans back. "Sucks, but can't be helped; you gotta live your life, bud."

Yeah.

"I know—" Ilya manages to look evenly over the knot of Russians on the left. "—It's gonna be bad. Back at home. I cannot help you there. You will have to—figure that out."

"Figure what out?" Dima, bless him, looks adorably panicked, English only barely legible after three years playing for the Bears, and six in America all up. "You want we do something? Should we already have do something? Nobody not say nothing to me—"

"He meant that playing for a gay captain makes you gay," Pasha says. "This is what they will say, only more and worse." He waves an irritated hand. "I know you do both, Ilyusha. But they will say gay."

They will not say gay, they will say attention-seeking, AIDS-ridden, cock-hungry degenerate, and that's if they're feeling nice that day.

"Focus," Ilya says, trying to hold himself together. "I am saying that I am not doing this for the good of the team, or game or the fucking Motherland. It's for me, start to finish. And I want you to do the same." He exhales, keeping his jaw relaxed with some effort. "Nobody knows more than I do that there will be a cost. Paying it makes sense for me, but I won't tell you it does for you."

"Cost, like—price? Price we pay for this?" Dima says. He hasn't seen the kid look this serious in a bit. Hasn't seen him look less like a kid, either. "You think it is less than price for being snake scum? Less than never sleeping with peace again?"

"Men who would spit on you for this have left already," Tokha says, then shrugs. "Even if I think you do not need to do this, that this is a bad move—you are my captain. If you want to fight this fight, you will not fight it alone."

Lyosha, who in a way has most to lose, being something of a legend in Moscow's fast-and-furious echelons, is the last to speak. He's lounging, relaxed, eyes hooded and glittering. Between the inexplicably sleeveless shirt, shitty tattoos, jaw you could hammer nails with and permanently malevolent, ice-cold eyes, he couldn't look more like an arms dealer if he tried.

"None of us is free from sin," he says, smiling. "I have done plenty of things that would disgrace me, if they became known. It is a strange thing for me to think it is better that I hide these things instead of standing behind them, but—" He rolls his shoulders in an eloquent gesture of spiteful unconcern. "—This could be because things I do are disgraceful in a way fucking men is not."

Right. Ilya doesn't hesitate, because he spoke the truth; he would have gone through with it even without their agreement. It is—touching, yes, emotional in a way he can't look at right now, but it's their business.

"You have time to decide either way," he says. "Marly says it is important I do this the right way, so I will. Nothing will come out until the end of the season. If any of you change your mind, you will have time to move without fuss. I spoke to management already about this, they will help."

"Roz is not a small presence on the scene," Marly adds, voice quiet. Serious. "In the league. This will be loud. We will not mind if you move." He pauses, unsticks from the wall and stands closer, almost shoulder to shoulder with Ilya. "I will mind if you don't think it through. We can handle it, Roz can handle it, but be sure you can as well."

"We get it, Christ," Seb says. "I don't know why you act like we never thought about it. Roz isn't telling us he decided to start fucking men, he has been fucking men this whole time. He's telling us that he's going to come out responsibly; Mel and I have been bracing for much worse." Ilya must be making some expression, because he—softens, maybe, lets some of the ever-present fuckboy cynicism relax. "Which we would have handled too, bud. Mel has plans."

"We should have her over," Marly says—to Ilya, which is some sort of concerning, probably. "Talk about those plans." He turns to Seb. "How are her shifts?"

"Hellish. Management changed, budget cuts, whole thing."

"I'll organise it," Hammer says. Ilya jerks a little—Hammer hasn't said a word since this deranged little presentation started; Ilya kind of forgot he came. "Mel and I get brunch on Sundays; I'll loan you the slot this once."

They what?!

"Cheers, man." Marly claps his hands once; it shouldn't ring loud, but it does. "Alright, boys, that about wraps it up. Let's go watch that game. Seb, you're on burgers. Forty-seven, you're on snacks—"

That is the entire conversation. The Hounds lose, which means there's a localised but intense riot. Lyosha might very well be arranging for the refs' houses to mysteriously catch fire in the night. Kaner is stealing every fry in the room—it doesn't fuck with his meal plan if he didn't order them—and Dima is snoozing in his chair. It is, Ilya thinks, the most normal evening he has had since November.

Hammer hugs him at the door, hard, no words. Ilya goes to bed and sleeps for ten hours.

Svetlana comes and goes. Moscow, Boston, Moscow again—she bounces back and forth all spring, turning up at Marly's door every couple of weeks without warning. There's a room at Marly's that's hers now. Steven Grant arrives the week after one of her departures.

He is the new agent, arriving much as Mary Poppins might: recommended by no one in particular, summoned by disaster, having heard there was trouble and a Kisel-shaped hole to be filled. He is also, Ilya notes in the first three seconds, distractingly handsome. Forty-one, but looks thirty. Dark, unhurried, with a few days of stubble and a face that belongs on the poster for a film about a man having a beautiful crisis in a foreign city. He does not look like someone who represents hockey players. He looks like the reason someone quits representing hockey players.

"Mr Rozanov." The accent is English, of course, warm and flattened at the edges. He taught history for nine years before becoming a sports agent, Ilya read on his CV. Apparently, it prepared him well. "Lovely to meet you. May I be candid?"

"Yes."

"I think you've been very brave. I also think a great many people are going to want to make a great many things happen at your expense. My job, broadly, is to make sure you profit at theirs instead." A grin, quick and unguarded, ten years younger still. Christ. "Does that suit?"

"Yes."

"Marvellous."

The rest of the meeting passes in unrelated chitchat. Grant compliments the tea, asks about the houseplants, offers trivia about the architectural history of Marly’s house. It is, Ilya realises later, the most concise and relaxing interview he has ever conducted.

He also spends an unhelpful fraction of it considering Steven Grant’s mouth, and the lively sparkle of his eyes. Idle admiration, obviously. Ilya has spent his life mostly managing to keep his admiration of beautiful men theoretical. Besides, Grant wears a lovely gold wedding ring, decently old and not often removed, and Ilya is already in the middle of something that feels distinctly like a prolonged, simmering mental breakdown. Under these sterling circumstances, he is not even truly tempted to wreck both their lives.

The grind closes over him after that.

There is the management meeting where Robert Harrison—a man Ilya has worked with for six years—refuses to make eye contact for the first forty minutes and then, finally, says: We want to support you, Roz, we do, but we're going to need you to accept some help here. Which is how Ilya finds out the team has hired a PR agency, on the team's tab, and the agency is sending someone tomorrow morning. The someone in question is a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Gretchen who walks in wearing blue steel-tipped leather boots and tells him, by way of introduction, that her last client was an actor whose career she fixed after a sex tape leaked. He likes Gretchen immediately.

The immigration lawyer is called Frank Collins.

Collins is not a beautiful man. He looks like a small, angry badger who has spent thirty years stewing in dark rooms over points of law, and smiles when he talks about the State Department the way other men smile when they talk about an ex they loathe with an obsessive, almost loving intensity.

The first time they meet, he asks Ilya seventeen specific questions about every time he has entered or left the United States since 2009. Then he leans back and says, with that smile—

“Mr Rozanov. May I ask why, in God’s name, you have not been a permanent resident of this country for the last three years?”

“I—”

“It is, I want to be clear, an embarrassment to my profession that you are not. I have not, personally, done anything wrong in this matter, and I would like that on the record. But somewhere, somebody has been quite spectacularly bad at their job, and I look forward with considerable pleasure to finding out who.”

He smiles again. Ilya makes a small private note never to be on the receiving end of that expression, in any context, ever, for the rest of his life.

“Okay,” he says.

“Marvellous.” Collins steeples his fingers. “Let us begin.”

Things blur further.

There is the financial advisor who walks him through what millions of dollars in liquid assets means in practice, and what it means for visa categories, and what it means for working with hedge funds and investment groups, should Ilya ever wish to do such a thing. He does not wish.

There are forms. There are translations of forms. There are notarised translations of forms. There is a particular Tuesday afternoon when Ilya signs his name forty-seven times in a row and he has to go outside and smoke six cigarettes in a row before his hands stop shaking and the urge to set the building on fire and dance in the flames leaves his heart. When he comes back, Svetlana has finished the last twenty-three signatures herself in a passable forgery.

There are games. He plays. The Bears lose more than they win. They are not making the playoffs. They were never making the playoffs. Coach stops yelling at him about his minutes and starts simply lowering them, the way you'd lower a sick relative into a chair.

Ilya doesn't mind. He scores anyway, sometimes. When he's on, he's on. When he's not, he's not. Nobody brings it up much because it's clear that he's backing away from the abyss one bloody meeting at a time, and jeopardising that for some points this late in the season would be insane.

He plays the Voyagers twice in March.

Hollander is, of course, very careful; Hollander is the most careful man Ilya has ever met. He doesn't look at Ilya during warm-ups. He doesn't look at Ilya during the anthem. When they line up for the puck drop his eyes go to the linesman, to the puck, to the ice, to his mouth, his nose, to a point three feet behind Ilya's left ear. He never lifts them higher.

Ilya stares at him.

It's allowed, surely. He's been staring at Shane Hollander since he came to this wretched country. He has been staring at him since they were both teenagers. He has been staring at him, feels like, his whole fucking life. He is allowed to do so now that he finally has him here, in the flesh.

Pathetic, he thinks, wonders at himself. Look at yourself. Is it worth it?

The puck drops. He wins the face-off.

All this effort. All this stress. All this fucking pain.

The play moves to Ilya's left. Shane goes with it.

For him. Because of him.

He skates after the play. The crowd is a sound. He thinks: No. For me. He thinks: I am doing it for me. He thinks: But if I were not doing it for me, would I still be doing it?

He thinks: Yes.

The honesty of that makes him angry enough to put his shoulder into Leduc and send him sprawling. The whistle goes. He's called for interference. He sits in the box and watches the kill from there. Hollander is on the PP. He scores and does not look at the home bench.

Ilya goes home that night, and eats the pasta Marly has made him and goes to bed at ten o'clock. In the morning he has a meeting with the immigration lawyer.

He keeps going.

And then somehow it is the end of the season. The playoffs start in five days. The Bears are not in them.

Ilya sits in an over-bright conference room in a building somewhere in downtown Boston, behind a long table with a microphone in front of him and a glass of water that he will not touch, and looks out at a sea of faces.

He is not panicking.

He has been bracing for the panic. He was so sure it would arrive on time, the way panic always has: the great beast with fanged jaws, rarely failing to make him lose his head and do something stupid. But it’s not there. He’s not sure if he’s too tired, or if he’s done so many panic-inducing things in the last three months that he’s gone numb. Maybe he hasn’t stopped panicking at all, honestly. Maybe the stupid thing he tends to do when driven into a corner is—this, in fact.

Maybe not. He feels—not calm, Christ, but not in free-fall either. He's focused, like the puck is about to drop. Win, win, win, you fucking know it. Win. Move. Fight.

He leans into the mic.

"Just so it's clear," he says. "I think it is ridiculous that this needs so much fucking drama."

There is a small ripple of laughter. They don't know what this is about, but they know it's big. After the year he's had, it's an open secret that he's one police charge away from a court-ordered stint in some clinic or other. If fucking only. He sees a man in the third row write something down.

"I also think it is none of your business. But not correcting the record has started to seriously affect my life. So, here we go." He takes a breath. He does not need it. "I am—I think the term is bisexual."

The room goes still. Ilya tracks their expressions, men rearing back, women paling a little. Yeah, he thinks, taking refuge in the temporary relief of petty malice. Yeah, you didn't expect that, you assholes. You thought it would be something familiar. Rehab. A pre-emptive denial of domestic abuse, of rape allegations. Nope, no, it's worse, but only cause it's better.

He keeps going.

"I do not like this term, because it makes people think I am trying to appear less gay. Queer, I learned, is more vague yet therefore more accurate. I have been with women. I have been with men. I enjoy both. They enjoy me back. This is, as I said, not your business. But lying is—" He waves a hand. He looks straight into the camera. He is not speaking to Hollander. He is not. "Lying has its place, I guess. I am Ilya Rozanov, captain of the Boston Bears, best fucking centre this game has ever seen. I do not need to lie, so I won't."

The room explodes.

He sits back. The Bears people and his own team step in smoothly, the way they've been waiting to. He looks around. Marly is at the back of the room, against the wall, arms folded, face very calm. Seb is next to him, Tokha next to Seb, all of the boys there, scattered. It is a ridiculous show of force—what are the reporters going to do, charge the stage?—but he appreciates it.

That is it, then. He did it.

Grant leans into the mic. He's good at this part—better than good. He has a way of looking mild and reasonable, almost apologetic, like a man explaining a parking dispute to a neighbour. 

"Mr Rozanov's view," he says, in that warm, unhurried Earl Grey voice, "is that he, as one of the top players in the league, and a man with considerable personal and professional resources, would rather such outbursts"—meaning the NBL kid, the photos, the firing, the whole spectacle—"be targeted at people who can reasonably handle the consequences."

He smiles. Ilya makes sure to smile too. The TV cameras like the contrast. He has been told, repeatedly, that the TV cameras like the contrast.

"In other words," Grant continues, "and if you will forgive a colloquialism from my side of the pond, I can sum up Mr Rozanov's thoughts on the matter as follows: Come on, if you think you're hard enough."

The room makes a noise that is half laughter and half something less polite.

"Nevertheless," Grant says, "for my part, I have great optimism that no such confrontation, legal or physical, will prove necessary. The year is two thousand and seventeen, ladies and gentlemen. I have no doubt we can be adults about this, and treat it as what it is—a piece of personal information that, as Mr Rozanov so rightly put it, is nobody's business but his."

He folds his hands.

Collins leans toward the mic next.

"Mr Grant is entirely correct," he says. "My client has been treated with nothing but respect by the Boston Bears organisation, its players, and its management. We have nothing but compliments for their conduct."

He smiles. It is the smile.

"That said. I have not, unlike Mr Grant, been blessed with a particularly pure spirit. And I am, regrettably, certain that what should be a mundane press release will not be received as such. So allow me to be clear." He looks at the room. The room looks back. The room, Ilya notes, does not breathe. "My firm, and I, take such matters very seriously. We will pursue every case, big or small, to the full extent of the law. We will not be slow. We will not be tired. We will not be merciful. The Bears' ownership made an offer to give my client paid leave for the next season, to wait out the worst of it somewhere warm. We refused. We refused because we feel quite confident we are equipped to deal with whatever may arrive."

He pauses.

"Bear that in mind, ladies and gentlemen."

He sits back down. The room, for a long second, does nothing. Then the racket explodes, questions all but shouted out, people on their feet. He has no less than twenty cameras on him, most of them live-streaming. It's very important he does not lose his shit.

"Mister Rozanov—what has led to—"

"Mr Rozanov, have you been in a relationship with a man, or—relationships, multiple—"

"Are you and Cliff Marlowe—"

He answers the first three the way Grant coached him: short, bored, that's private, that's private, that's also private. Marly's name he lets sit a beat too long before he says, flat, "Marly is my linemate and my friend. He is here to keep everyone safe."

That gets a laugh, but they smell it now. The hunger comes off them like heat off the ice, and the questions stop pretending to be questions.

"Did you know when you signed your extension? Did the Bears know they were paying a—"

"Is this why your numbers collapsed this year, is this what the drinking was—"

"Does your family in Russia know? Have they disowned—"

That one lands. Not because it’s clever but because for half a second, Ilya sees it clearly: his father in the chair by the window, asking for a dead woman he all but killed himself. The news reaching him somehow, finding whatever little piece of him remains inside. The piece that can still understand. The piece that’s suffering. The thought is equal parts violently terrifying and cosmically satisfying.

That said, it’s not like he cares, like he even knows the first thing about Ilya.  The thing they want isn't information. They want to watch something open up in him, live, on twenty cameras. They want to see where he bleeds.

"My family is not your business," he says, and his voice doesn't do anything at all, which is its own kind of victory. "Nothing about the people I love is your business. You can have me. That's the deal. Just me." He stands. Grant is already rising beside him, smooth, a hand light at his elbow, that's all for today, thank you, that's all. "Goodnight."

He gets maybe four steps before the noise becomes a wall behind him and Marly is there, and Hammer, and the boys folding in around him like a door closing, and he is walking out of the brightest room he has ever stood in and into the rest of his life, whatever is left of it.

It's done. He said it, and he will, Christ willing, never have to say it again.

Marly drives him home. Ilya is asleep the moment he touches the first soft surface—the carpet, embarrassingly. He falls asleep right there, fully dressed, curled up on the floor next to the fireplace like a dog. It's probably a sign of something; he doesn't know what. Svetlana and Cliff let him be, only tuck a pillow under his head and a blanket over his shoulders. In the morning, Svetlana opens a bottle of champagne and doesn't make him talk about it. Just like that, his season is over, and somewhere south of all this there are apple trees Ilya doesn't know about yet.

Chapter End Notes

Sunflower Sonnet Number Two

Supposing we could just go on and on as two
voracious in the days apart as well as when
we side by side (the many ways we do
that) well! I would consider then
perfection possible, or else worthwhile
to think about. Which is to say
I guess the costs of long term tend to pile
up, block and complicate, erase away
the accidental, temporary, near
thing/pulsebeat promises one makes
because the chance, the easy new, is there
in front of you. But still, perfection takes
some sacrifice of falling stars for rare.
And there are stars, but none of you, to spare.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Ilya doesn't know what to expect after.

Fair enough. There's no template for this, no precedent, nothing to brace against in any organised way. The punishments—

They're happening. Sure. He's on the news, he's all over YouTube, everyone and their cat has a theory about who he fucks and who fucks him and what it all means. Half of them think it's a smokescreen—that he did something genuinely monstrous and is making all this noise to bury it. Girls he has never met crawl out of the woodwork to describe, in detail, things he supposedly asked them to do, who else was in the room, how it went.

And Marly was right, in the end. There were signs—discreet ones, breadcrumbs for any enterprising sleuth willing to drop the no-homo chanting for thirty seconds. Ilya never spotted them himself, but then, he has never been a reliable witness to his own life; he figures the blind spot is allowed. The point is there are clips now, and threads, and strangers breaking him into little pieces and reassembling them to fit whatever new shape of him they've decided on. Which is—

Strange. Uncomfortable. But not unfamiliar, and not, if he's honest, much of a shock. People have been doing this to him for years. The Russian-fuckboy-menace act generated scandal by the truckload, every bit as reductive as the stuff they're running now. He can see how it would gut someone like Seb or Hammer—men who kept their lives clean. For Ilya it's only the same machine, swung a few degrees to the left.

No. The strange part is the bracing itself. You spend your whole life waiting for a punishment you never even named, and the terror of it is so vast it holds you petrified. Then it comes. And when it comes in the best possible shape it could come—four months of planning, hundreds of thousands of dollars, the best people in the world hired to land it soft—you find the paranoia has outlived the threat. He can't unclench. Can't make his body believe there's no second blow, no real monster crouched just out of frame, waiting for him to drop his guard so it can finally take the thing it came for.

It'll pass on its own, probably. One ordinary morning the monster simply won't come, and his brain will give up the watch. Until then, if this is the worst of it, he'll take it and say thank you.

What he is not braced for, in the middle of all of it, is a car in the driveway at four in the afternoon.

It's the sound that gets him first. Ilya is at the kitchen table with cold coffee and a phone he isn't reading when an engine comes up the drive, throaty and expensive and slowing outside the house, and every wire in him pulls taut at once.

Here it is. Here's the monster.

"Huh," Marly says from the window. Not alarmed. Interested. "Buddy. There's like a hundred and eighty grand worth of Porsche in my driveway."

Ilya is out of the chair before he decides to move. Marly lives in a nice enough neighbourhood—big old houses, real lawns, trees older than most of the people living under them—but not Porsche-before-breakfast nice, and Ilya's first thought is player, and he isn't wrong. Scott fucking Hunter is unfolding himself from the driver's side of a black two-seater that has to be custom, because Porsche does not build those things for men that size. Then the passenger door opens. The insanity increases in scope and intensity.

A man gets out—young, dark-haired, small beside Hunter, pretty enough that Ilya's attention snags on him despite everything. Hunter waits for him to come around the car, then puts an arm across his shoulders as they start up the walk. They pass under the window and disappear toward the porch.

The doorbell rings.

Right. Okay. Scott Hunter is here, at Marly's house. How does Scott Hunter know Ilya is staying here? How does Scott Hunter know where Marly fucking lives?

"Well, shit," Marly says, and goes down the hall to put an eye to the peephole. He leans back after a second. "Did my eyes deceive me, or was that a twink under his arm?"

Ilya stares at him. Marly waits. "Apparently not."

The bell rings again. "Should we—" Ilya gestures uselessly at the door. "We can't leave them standing out there."

"We can do whatever you want, man." Marly keeps a hand near the deadbolt without touching it. "You don't feel like dealing with whatever the fuck brought Scott Hunter to my house, I'll tell him you're not in."

Ilya looks at the door. Scott fucking Hunter, with a Porsche and a twink. "No. Open it."

Marly does, and there he is on the porch, looking happier than Ilya ever imagined he could. Not pleased. Lit up—wide-eyed and nearly breathless with it, alive in a way Ilya hadn't known the dead-eyed freak could get. His right arm is still around the pretty one, who is maybe five foot six and looks five foot nothing next to Hunter, and who has a soft, pouty mouth and the unmistakable air of somebody who has never once in his life worried about being mistaken for straight.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Ilya's trysts have not generally branched into the flamboyantly gay. Those men tend to have more self-respect and considerably less patience for hotels and back entrances and Ilya's elaborate requirements for plausible deniability. This one is standing in broad daylight tucked under Scott Hunter's arm.

For one genuinely deranged second Ilya wonders whether the guy knows who Hunter is. Whether Hunter hired him—some insane coming-out present: Ilya Rozanov announces he's queer and Scott Hunter responds by turning up with a decorative homosexual. Yeah, all right, calm down, Rozanov. Hunter is a mess and a legitimate psycho whom Ilya would readily believe capable of beating a man to death with his bare hands and going home to sleep fine, but he isn't that kind of psycho. Besides, anyone twisted enough to stage it would then have to explain how he knew where to hire a gay escort, and historically that much homosexuality has been well beyond the courage of such men.

Marly shifts half a step forward—not enough to block Ilya, just enough to take possession of his own doorway. "Hunter."

"Marlowe." Hunter sounds absurdly cheerful. The pretty one smiles.

Ilya looks from the boy to Hunter, then back again, and finds his head empty of everything but question marks with a few exclamation points thrown in for spice.

“You'd best come in,” he hears himself say. “Fuck.”

Things don't make any more sense once they're settled in the living room—shoes off, jackets politely hung up, Hunter following every instruction from freshly introduced Christopher Grady with a delight that is genuinely difficult to withstand.

He's got some balls on him, does Grady. Ilya would be the first to say that needling Hunter is a well-loved pastime, but he tends to be repaid sooner or later by getting crushed into the boards by two hundred pounds and change of a player who can't chirp to save his life and, over the ten thousand years he's been playing, has developed a very efficient alternative. Ilya's mind has consequently formed a fairly strong association between fucking with Hunter and the pain shortly to follow. And then there is Grady, fondly bossing him around with every indication that he expects to be obeyed promptly.

Ilya is still staring at the unlikely pair—a couple, they have to be a couple, except they also can't possibly be because what the fuck—when Hunter tosses him a set of car keys. Ilya catches them on instinct. Then he looks down at the keys, back at Hunter, and discovers he has absolutely no idea what is happening.

"I wanted to mail it," Hunter says. The bugfuck intensity is all still there, only turned somehow. Pointed at something good. "Kip made me be the better man."

You would think, Ilya reflects, that being this far gone over Grady, the smallest, softest boy in the Western Hemisphere—a student, apparently; art history, if Ilya understood correctly; the world is a circus and everything is insane—would file some of the serial-killer edge off him. It does not. It just makes him look like a pet shark on a leash.

"Liar." Grady is laughing, fitted under Hunter's arm like he was built to measure. Like Hunter had him grown to spec in a lab. "He was so impressed. We both were. What you did was life-changing. Inspiring."

Ilya, who has not yet managed one coherent sentence, keeps his jaw off the floor through force of will.

Marly, God bless him, does what Marly does: says something warm and stupid about the car, and changes the subject. Ilya just fights the urge to take his beer and run and not stop for several thousand miles.

"I'm not out yet," Hunter tells him after a while. Bashful, of all things. "Talking to my people about it. We're aiming for September."

Jesus Christ.

"And—obviously I'd like to think I'd have managed it eventually. On my own." He says it the way a man says a thing he has stopped believing. "But not soon. Not like this." He turns the glass around in his hands once. "I was—where I was, I could've stayed there another ten years. I'd made my peace with staying there. And then you got up and did it, and it was like somebody turned the lights on in a room I'd been sitting in the dark in my whole life." A shrug, awkward on that huge frame. "So. I owe you a lot more than an ugly car. Figured it's as good a place to start as any."

Right.

Ilya's brain does what it always does with a debt: it reaches for the ledger. It's the only accounting he trusts. You give what you're given. You love who loves you, exactly that much and no further. You keep the columns straight, and then nobody can open you up and take something you didn't agree to hand over. A car he can handle. A car has a number on it; he can send back something with a bigger number and sleep fine.

Except Hunter isn't paying for a car. Hunter is trying to pay for something that wasn't given to him, wasn't done for him. Because he didn't do it for Hunter. He didn't do it for anyone. He'd have done it if every closeted man in the league had written him personally begging him not to and, the other way around, wouldn't have done it if they begged him to.

Marly must clock that the overworked little hamster running Ilya's brain has fallen clean off its wheel—because he steps in, and Ilya gets a minute alone with the thing clenching in his chest.

Because here is Scott Hunter. Happy. In love. Sitting on Marly's couch with a pretty boy against his side and a light in his face that has no business making Ilya want to put a fist through the drywall.

Scott Hunter got his man. How is that fair.

But—no. Hunter had his man before. Already had him. All he had to do was not lose him. And that's the thing, isn't it. That's where you're different. You don't get that with grand gestures and shock value. You get it by being someone a person wants to stay with, not just someone they want to fuck. By being, crucially, not the kind of man who doesn't rate a first name five years into whatever the fuck the two of you were doing to each other.

And they keep saying inspiring. Grady said it, glowing; Hunter said it with his whole rebuilt face. As though Ilya had walked up to that podium out of courage and not the plain animal fact that he had nothing left to lose and no one left to lose it for. There is no bravery in jumping once the building is already burning you alive.

He doesn't say that. Obviously. It would be insane—they don't know the first true thing about him, and he doesn't know them. He is inspiring inasmuch as he scared Hunter into getting off his ass and fighting for a boy who'd apparently resigned himself to leaving. What's true on Ilya's side of it is nobody's business. Let the man have his romance. It costs nothing to let him have it.

So he takes the keys. Chirps a little. Says one thing, then another. Compliments the boy—Kip, the man's boyfriend is genuinely named Kip, Ilya is going to stab himself in the throat—and talks shit about Hunter's stamina, his age, his rumoured performance issues. Kip laughs so hard he has to put his glass down. Hunter looks at Kip laughing for a second too long, with an expression Ilya has to look away from.

Jesus Christ, Scott Hunter is gay. Ilya can't get over it. Can't stop staring, either. If he'd known—if he'd had so much as a clue—he'd have killed himself trying to get those hands on him. Then he stops the thought cold, because Kip is asking him something about the leather and Marly is watching him sideways, and there is, mercifully, a car to discuss.

They stay two hours. It is, against all odds, easy. Hunter asks careful questions about lawyers and timelines and takes the answers seriously, writing nothing down, filing everything; Kip eats three of his own pastries and tells a long story about a smoothie order that has Marly wheezing. When they go, Hunter shakes Ilya's hand and doesn't make a speech about it, which Ilya appreciates more than he could ever explain.

Then the two of them are gone down the road in a rental, and the Porsche is still standing on the grass.

Ilya looks at it for a long while from the porch. A hundred and eighty grand of somebody else's gratitude, parked in the sun. He can't work out what he's supposed to do with a thing like that. Send it back and it's an insult. Keep it and he's accepted terms he never read.

You take what you're given, he thinks, and no more than that, and you give back to the line and not an inch past it, and then nobody owns you.

The melancholy that comes in after Hunter leaves makes a real effort. Credit where it's due. It comes in hard and looks, for a bit there, like it might take the whole summer.

Then there is Cliff.

Cliff gives him exactly thirty-six hours of moping—Ilya clocks it later, and is almost offended at the precision—before he is hauling him off the couch by the back of his shirt and steering him toward the car.

"We're going to my parents'," Cliff says, cheerful as a man announcing a holiday. "You'll hate it. Most boring place on earth. Nothing but apples and flowers and good middle-class people who wage total war on each other through the HOA. We're there till the sixteenth of June. Then Bangkok."

Ilya blinks at the windshield. "That's oddly specific."

Cliff looks at him a moment too long. Something passes over his face—careful, then deciding not to be careful. "Your birthday, bud," he says. "We do your birthday at mine, then we go set the world on fire. It's gonna be great."

It is, somehow, great.

Marly is not wrong about the town. It is the most boring place on earth. It is also—Ilya keeps catching himself—strangely fascinating, the way an ant farm is fascinating: a whole alien order he doesn't understand but can't stop watching. Apple trees in rows. Flowerbeds edged so clean they look 3D-printed. Two neighbours waging a cold war over the precise legal height of a hedge, conducted entirely through the homeowners' association and passive-aggressive notes left under windshield wipers.

It ought to bore him to death. Instead he can't look away. He came up somewhere else entirely—concrete and ice and the grinding violence of not enough, and then, later, so much, too much, all the time—and there's something almost unbearable in a town whose worst problem is a hedge. He braced, quietly, for contempt. It's what he felt in the rich quarters of Moscow, in LA, in every glossy place that paid for their suburban extravaganza with the hunger of other people conveniently far away. It doesn't come. What comes instead, in the long soft evenings, is closer to wonder. That people get to live like this. That children grow up here believing the world is fundamentally safe, and are mostly right. That it was on offer all along, somewhere, to someone. He moves through the manicured calm of it like a man convalescing—like a man let into a country he never expected a visa for, half certain someone will come to take it back.

He has met Marly's parents plenty of times over the years. Not once, in all that time, did it occur to him they'd clocked him as not straight the entire while.

He can't say for sure, of course. But if they hadn't known before, they get over it with frankly insulting speed—because they give him the room that connects to Cliff's through the shared bathroom.

"Yeah, they think we're—something," Cliff says, supremely unbothered, dropping Ilya's bag on the bed. "I told them we're not, but you know how they get. Stubborn." He shrugs. "If it's gonna weird you out, I'll make them quit."

Ilya—who was never once in his life introduced to the parents of a person he was sleeping with, Svetlana and Sasha excluded, and they sit in their own strange file marked childhood, complicated—looks at the bathroom door standing open between the two rooms and finds he is, of all things, charmed.

"It's whatever," he says. "Your family."

"I told them the truth. Far as I'm concerned that's the end of it." Cliff grins. "They'll quit for sure once Vetrova turns up, anyway."

"She's coming here?"

Cliff's eyebrows climb up and up. "I mean. Yeah. Obviously."

The first nights in the connecting room are the worst of it, which surprises him, because the days are fine. Better than fine. The days are apple trees and terrible lawn-mowing and Marly's mother feeding him like he's wasting away in front of her. But the house goes quiet around eleven, and the quiet has teeth.

He lasts two nights. Two nights he lies on the soft, barely used mattress, in the deep hush of Northampton at the dead end of dark, and tries to hold himself together. To meet the alien strangeness of the place the way he manages to in daylight.

Only he isn't alone in daylight, is he? Marly is there, and Marly has never met a room he couldn't be comfortable in, never met an hour he wouldn't fill with whatever he felt like doing. Days are one thing. At night Ilya can't breathe. Marly is right there, an arm's reach and a bathroom door away, breathing slow and untroubled—the breathing of a man who has never once had to wonder whether he was allowed to exist—and the best Ilya can do is lie still and wait for the sun.

It is four in the morning. The light through the gap in the curtains is the wrong colour—too thin, too grey, the exact dead shade he learned by heart over the winter. He's an expert in that light now. He could tell three a.m. from half past four with his eyes shut.

"Jesus Christ, Roz."

He jerks, heart rabbiting. What—

"Why d'you gotta be so fucking messy about everything?" Marly is still grumbling as he climbs into the bed, hauls at the blankets, shoves a knee in. Ilya has gone entirely mute, eyes round as saucers. What the fuck. "Couple hours left, so—down. C'mere. More. Good." A heavy arm lands across him and settles. "Now shut your eyes and rest. It's all good, man. You're good."

Ilya doesn't say a word. Just lies there, two-thirds buried under Marly, who is already gone again, asleep between one breath and the next, throwing off heat like the firebox of an old steam engine. Ilya goes under not long after.

They wake past noon. When they finally stumble downstairs, Derrick has left them waffles, a dish of apple butter, and a full carafe of coffee, and said nothing at all about any of it.

Svetlana turns up on the sixth day, the way she does—no call, no warning, just there on the back porch one morning with a monstrous suitcase, a ridiculous coat, a pair of sunglasses, and something clicks quietly into place. The days make sense now, for all that they get stranger. The blur is built out of small, undramatic things—the three of them orbiting the house and the garden through the long, flat heat of it. He mows the lawn once, badly, while Svetlana suns herself on the porch like the very image of a Russian mail-order bride, and he thinks his mother would laugh herself sick to see him with a lawnmower, and is surprised the thought doesn't make him want to drown the way it would have a month ago.

The paps love it. Not the local ones—those have shame and taste—but the out-of-towners who drove up specifically for this, who park their long lenses at the mouth of the cul-de-sac and earn the eternal enmity of the HOA. Ilya and Cliff alone were only ever good for wholesome nothing: two enormous men doing yard work and walking downtown for ice cream and cigarettes. But now Svetlana is here, and that is scandal.

He takes a few selfies with her. Sends them to Gretchen, who runs his socials and is, by trade and by temperament, a psychopath. She loves the messy shots, makes them land without ever making it obvious a professional touched them. It is, weirdly, fun. He has not had fun with a phone in a long time.

"Bad form, ducky," Svetlana tells him the next morning. She does a media sweep every morning over coffee, the way other people do a crossword, frowning at her phone with the specific disapproval she reserves for sloppiness. "I doubt you meant to imply you brought your girl to your best friend's house. But that's how it's reading."

Ilya blinks. Is that bad form? He can't see how, considering it's broadly true. He did bring his girl to his best friend's house. Granted, if anyone has brought anyone anywhere, it was Cliff who brought him. But the rest seems hard to argue with.

"Luckily," Svetlana continues, correctly reading that he is neither awake enough nor socially competent enough to be useful in this conversation, "it's easily fixed. Come."

Cliff is asleep again. He woke long enough to eat, drink coffee, and spill into the daybed in the back yard, where he now lies like a man who spent the season toiling in the salt mines. Svetlana arranges herself along his side with unsettling ease—they have met often enough over the years, and liked each other well enough, but Ilya always assumed the liking was shallow, a surface courtesy—and lays her head half on his back, half on her own folded arm. Cliff stirs, wriggles for a better position, then curls a little around her and dozes off again.

She arches a brow. "Well? Take the photo."

Right.

It turns out Svetlana objects not to being called Ilya's girl, but to the implication that this makes Cliff not his boy. A problem she solves by taking candids and instructing him to forward them to Gretchen.

"No—but that's not what this is, though," Ilya says later, baffled. "We're not—"

"Neither are you and I." She rolls her eyes. "You have never had a single romantic thought about me, nor I about you. And yet when people assume there's something, you don't trouble yourself to deny it. It's nobody's business who we fuck, or when, or whether—isn't that the party line? So. Why bother, for Cliff?"

Ilya pauses. Good point, actually. It does look like a double standard. He turns it over. Yeah? So? Double standards are fine when the realities are different, and Svetlana and Cliff are not the same, their situations not the same—

But. Also. Maybe it is good to pretend that they are. He spent currency he can't get back to become an out queer man, which means he ought to get used to acting like one—which means making peace with the fact that the people who stayed in his life are at peace with the whole of him. Everyone knows now. He said it out loud, had a whole fucking conference about it. So the ones still here decided they could survive the assumptions that come with it. Cliff brought him home to Lauren and Derrick. Cliff, by definition, made his peace with the rumours before he packed the car.

"It's not like that with him, though," Ilya says anyway, because even where the pretending is useful, even where it's probably good for his sanity, the difference is real. Some other man—some pretty, doe-eyed thing, his hapless agent, say, with those brown eyes he keeps revisiting—he wouldn't have minded the assumption at all. But Cliff—

"It's not. But there was never a chance for it to become anything," Svetlana says. "I'm not saying I see something. I have no idea. But you don't hold yourself with him the way you do with the others. He's not just a friend. And he could not care less what people think. So I don't see why you should."

Yes. Well. People assuming a thing is one matter. Deliberately staging a thing that isn't there is another.

And then—he hums, lost in it. Did he stage anything, though? Has a single picture implied something that wasn't, in fact, happening? He and Cliff have been on-and-off folded together for weeks. Svetlana and Cliff have done a good deal more than fold. Nothing's been arranged. No shot more intimate than what was happening anyway, no staging, no drama. So.

So what, exactly, is he implying that isn't true?

"Think about it," Svetlana says, and stretches out flat, all that golden length on display in the indecent little bikini she's taken to wearing in the garden when it's only the three of them and there are no parents around to scandalise.

She's gone again two days later.

He comes down to coffee and her room is stripped and made and there's a note on the fridge in her hard, slanting Cyrillic—back soon, water the thing on the windowsill, don't be an idiot—and that is the whole of it. Moscow, presumably. Family obligations, probably; hers, or Ilya's. She doesn't explain, and Ilya learned long ago not to ask for the details.

It isn't a shock. Svetlana comes and goes; she keeps so many plates in the air that expecting anything else is foolish. Besides—Svetlana is thrilling. She is exciting and inspiring. She is not what anyone would call comfortable, or comforting. An environment like this can't survive her, nor she it.

Cliff is about as surprised by the sudden departure as Ilya is, meaning not at all. He snorts, shrugs, and goes on bossing Ilya around exactly as before. The only thing that changes is that Lauren takes Svetlana's movie ticket.

The days without her are different in one respect: they train more. Now and then they'd hit the gym Derrick built into the back of the garage, but mostly it's kid shit. Soccer, basketball—there are courts within walking distance for practically any sport you could name. They mess around with local kids too young and too uninterested to care about a gay scandal so long as they get to hang with two NHL stars. Cliff insists they try badminton, then tennis, then golf. Ilya—who somehow resisted the hideous, inexplicable curse of golf that runs so rampant through the league—refuses that one with such fervour that he doesn't even notice he's agreed to try polo until he's standing in front of a horse that is regarding him with frankly well-earned scepticism.

It's staggering, the number of sports they get through in the nine days it takes Svetlana to come back. Cliff drags them to a rink at one point, but they give it up once the attention turns oppressive. Nothing for it, Cliff says, with the deranged cheerfulness he has perfected into an art. Let's go to the river.

Rowing, it turns out, is much harder than it looks. And Ilya, it turns out, is a poor swimmer. He can swim—he's not an invalid—but he hasn't swum more than three metres since he was nine, and doing it with a capsized boat over your head and Cliff Marlowe choking to death on his own laughter beside you is, frankly, a lot.

"No more fucking rowing," he says once he's hauled himself out, and flops onto his back in the grass, chest heaving. "Or sailing. Or surfing, or fucking water polo. No."

"That was," Cliff manages, "so funny, man." He may actually have tears going down his face. "Like a drowning cat. Oh my God—"

They make a contest of everything, because they are who they are. Crossbars, ten shots a side, loser owes push-ups. They bet in push-ups rather than money, because money means nothing to either of them and push-ups hurt.

Lauren and Derrick, who raised two children on the principle that tired children are obedient children, wholly approve of this use of their time and enable it in their own fashion. Ilya isn't sure either of Marly's parents has fully grasped that their son is a twenty-nine-year-old man and no longer a gangly teenager. He doesn't mind. Not when it means food cooked in the appropriate volume and protein content, and gentle suggestions from Lauren along the lines of: Oh, by the way, dear, I've booked you two a fencing lesson. Well, I say lesson, it's a six-hour block. Lovely little studio northeast of here. Oh, it's only a thirty-minute drive, don't be a baby. You can show Ilya around that part of town, and if you've time afterward there's a massage place nearby I'm told is very good.

If she minds at all that her grown son and his alleged boyfriend are frolicking around town together, she doesn't show it. If anything, she seems thrilled to have them seen. She keeps a running collection of delighted anecdotes about which neighbour or HOA officer caught them doing what stupid thing and called to complain.

Svetlana comes back two days before his birthday, sunburnt from somewhere that plainly wasn't Moscow, offering no account of the gap. He doesn't ask. He just picks her up and sits her in his lap and buries his face in her hair—not quite hiding from the world, but taking refuge. Resting up.

Really, when you think about it, the true stars of this bizarre little adventure are Lauren and Derrick.

Ilya has always got on fine with them, more so once they got used to him. But they are the prototypical suburban article—upper-middle-class, a retired professor and a literary agent, American-wholesome all the way down to the apple orchard and the welcome mat. Ilya was a lot for them and vice versa. But Svetlana?

It is genuinely hard to say who is more shaken: Lauren and Derrick by Svetlana, or Svetlana by them—by people who appear to have no agenda whatsoever. And then it gets worse. She arrives in the apparent capacity of Ilya's girlfriend, disappears without warning, comes back, and then, with no ceremony at all, starts sleeping with their son.

Two days before his birthday, Lauren puts him to work on a cherry pie. Which is to say she makes the pie and he cleans and chops, which is the correct division of labour and he knows it.

"So—not to pry, dear," she says, crimping the edge of the crust with two practised thumbs. "But are the three of you—"

Ilya shrugs, caught between honesty and the fact that he is speaking to a man's mother. "The two of them are. I am—" giving a helping hand now and again. He does not say it. Jesus, Ilya. That's his mother. And it's not, strictly speaking, true. He fucks Svetlana now and again, but—not often. "Cliff and I aren't. We're friends."

She snorts. Shrugs it off, easy. "All right. Do you think she likes him?"

Bless her.

"She does now," he says, and it is God's own truth. "He—Cliff really saved my life, you know. I wasn't good. I was—" He hunts for it, gives up on the soft version. "I wasn't going to make it, the way things were going. And Svetlana, she doesn't have a lot of people. But she has me. So. Yes. She likes him."

Lauren nods. Goes a little quiet. A little sad. Good work, he thinks, bringing down the mood, Rozanov.

"I'm sorry you had to go through that," she says at last. "You're a good kid. I've always thought so. I'm—I'm sorry." She wipes the flour off her hands and doesn't look at him while she says the next part, which is how he knows it's important. "And I'm glad Cliff brought you. I won't lie—he was worried. Really worried. If the intervention hadn't worked, Derrick and I were going to come ourselves. See if we could help him figure out what was going on with you."

Christ. These people. Best not touch that now, or ever.

"He's the best," Ilya says. His voice does something he didn't ask it to and doesn't appreciate. "I owe him a lot."

Lauren shrugs—the family gesture; he sees now where Cliff gets it. "He'd say he owes you. He won't say much, you know Cliff. Makes a friend on every street corner, talks to everyone, easy as breathing." She slides the pie into the oven and shuts it with her hip. "But you're the first friend he ever brought up to me that he said was one to keep. Said it just like that. To keep." She straightens and looks at him—this small woman who reads books for a living and, it turns out, reads him too. "First. And so far, the last."

Ilya stands in the warm kitchen with cherry juice on his hands and does not trust himself to say a single word. To keep. Jesus Christ. Ilya is nobody's to keep, and he can keep no one. At best he can be sheltered, given temporary refuge, set on his feet and sent off to march. He's not—

"Pie takes forty minutes," Lauren says, kindly handing him the exit. "Go wash your hands."

His birthday arrives in a strange crescendo of demented wholesomeness.

Ilya hasn't had a birthday without fifty grams of coke and hired entertainment in—he starts to do the math and then stops. A long time. Now he's sitting in a picket-fence house in New England, eating a home-cooked dinner, after which comes a two-tier cake with colourful sprinkles baked right into the sponge, and there are streamers, and a paper banner reading HAPPY BIRTHDAY strung over the table at a slight diagonal because Derrick is tall and overconfident with a staple gun, and there is a glass pitcher of lemonade the size of a modest barrel.

The boys send things. The group chat becomes a war zone of voice notes and embarrassing photographs. Hammer sends forty seconds of himself and Seb failing to find a single shared key. Lyosha sends a paragraph in Russian that is mostly weird omnidirectional threats and one line, at the very end, that isn't. Ilya reads the last line twice and puts the phone face down.

"A movie next," Lauren announces, "and then I'll let you kids go out and do whatever it is you do. Derrick's got the projector up."

They do not, in the end, go out.

Ilya, fool that he is, assumes the film will be boring the moment the animation starts and they tell him it's about an old man who flies his house to South America on a bunch of balloons. More fool him.

The first ten minutes of that movie are a crime. Whoever made it should answer for it before a court. Ilya is sniffling before he properly understands what's being done to him, somewhere around the part he will absolutely not be thinking about. He's a wreck by the time the credits roll—openly, helplessly, a two-hundred-pound man undone by a cartoon house and a happy ending and a chair that stays empty. Svetlana is pretending very hard that she isn't also crying. Cliff has the decency not to say anything at all; he just hands them both lemonade and cake, and tugs them close, so they're both kind of, sort of cuddling him on either side.

All three of them go to bed after, hauling along leftover cake and a bottle of wine. Ilya is asleep before the third bite, wedged between Cliff's enormous bulk and Svetlana's insignificant one.

The healing isn't finished. He knows that. He still wakes some nights to the true four-in-the-morning light and the weight of wanting on his chest. He's a difficult guest more days than he'd cop to—short with Marly, strange around his parents, gone quiet and absent, cruel to the version of himself that let it all get this bad. But it's fine. Better than fine. The infection has drained, the bone is set, the wound is clean, and he can breathe all the way to the bottom of his lungs again.

In the morning, they fly to Bangkok.

Chapter End Notes

### Resolution #1,003

I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
in response to passionate and eager love
I will be nobody’s fool

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

YES the chapter count went up
To quote Natalie: Yes, it's very funny. Let's all laugh.

Bangkok—June 16–23

Thing is, hockey players travel a lot. Sometimes it feels like he hasn't stopped moving since he was fourteen and started going to international camps. And the less said about NHL roadies the better—all stress, all the time, hotels and buses and planes bleeding into one another until they become a sort of universalised blur. After his first year the only way he knew which city he was by was the team he was playing.

So one would expect Svetlana's excursion into South East Asia to feel similar. And it is Svetlana's; this level of glamorous chaos has her paw prints all over it. Ilya had no say in where he's going, what he's bringing, how long he's staying, or what he's doing when he gets there.

It could have felt the same. It doesn't. 

He brought almost nothing. Marly packed them one hand-carried leather suitcase stolen from his mother, which fit their sneakers, some watches, and three pairs of boxers. At the airport, he confiscated Ilya's phone and put a paperback in his hand instead, bought on the spot. Some colourful monstrosity: a man in black, knife in his mouth, riding a camel. Why a book about pyramids, when they are going to the wettest place on earth, is beyond him.

The camel is very mean-looking. He likes the camel.

"Reminds me of you," he tells Svetlana. 

She nods, approving. "I do enjoy spitting on fools. And he is right, besides. You are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to experts to deal with American drama. Let them."

Ilya lets it go. It's not as though there's anything worth hearing. The boys know to call Cliff if something's on fire—or, more sensibly, Svetlana—and Collins and his doe-eyed agent have become blossom buddies and don't need him for anything.

"It is an interesting choice, with that said." Something in her face has changed. "Did you pick it for a reason?"

Cliff doesn't look up from the shelf of schlocky murder mysteries he's browsing for himself. "Camel looked cool as fuck. Like he said; reminds me of you."

And there it is—an actual blush, on Svetlana Vetrova, rising up her cheekbones in real time, and Ilya has to nearly choke himself to death to keep from saying a single word about it.

"Idiots, the pair of you," she says. "I will get the set, or at least whatever they have in this miserable. Oh—good, Small Gods, that is an excellent place to start—"

The hotel is called the Mandarin Oriental, which sounds very much like a massage parlour in a strip mall off Sunset that doubles as a brothel, and is instead one of the most ridiculous buildings he has ever been inside.

One advantage of being born poor and then getting very rich, very immorally, is perspective. He knew hunger. He learned new- money flash, once Grigori elbowed, cut and shot his way to the top. He observed old-money derangement through Svetlana and Sasha, where nobody could say how much there actually was—half of it illegal, the other half legalised so pro forma the paperwork was its own punchline. Then America turned out to have a fourth kind. Millionaires dressed as janitors, who hid every shred of personal preference so carefully that the mask soon became the face and there was no personality left to obscure.

All of which is to say that Ilya has no particular taste to offend. What he does have is an eye for a joke, and the Mandarin is a very good one: demented, brass-heavy, a hundred and fifty years of obscene luxury for its own sake. Shame is for the poor and the dead who couldn't defend their wealth—his kind of place.

Most importantly, it's on the river, and there is a boat.

Not a taxi. A boat, teak and brass, with a man in white who hands you down into it like you're being helped off a horse. It crosses to the restaurant on the other side. The crossing takes ninety seconds.

Ilya loves it unreasonably. He rides it back and forth four times, putting his hand into the hand of the boatman like an eighteenth-century noblewoman, never mind that he has a foot and fifty pounds on him. Marly, cursed with an upbringing in good taste, can’t quite get into the spirit of the thing.

"It's forty metres," he says, following him down the steps again. "We could swim it.

“There are snakes.”

“There are no snakes.”

“Marly.” Ilya settles into the seat and spreads his arms along the polished back. “It’s Bangkok. There are snakes.”

He has no idea whether there are or aren’t, but they’re in Southeast Asia. As far as he’s concerned, there are snakes lurking behind every corner and under every leaf, and he is fully prepared to be a bitch about it.

Svetlana looks it up. There are, in fact, snakes. Granted, none of the local species appears to have developed a taste for hotel guests, but that is not the point. Marly said there were no snakes. Ilya accepts his victory with characteristic grace.

The suite is mostly gold, a mix of Russian-approved bright yellow and the darker, classier stuff. Walls are covered in silk, porcelain is paper-thin and painted with delicate little flowers, orchids are everywhere, and their suite has enough square footage that Ilya spends a delightful hour going room to room touching things.

The bath has its own room. Not the bathroom. That's separate, and has a shower with discreet benches, and some suspiciously well-placed ledges he is certain exist so people can fuck in it more easily. The tub has a room of its own, and it's magnificent: gold-veined stone, no overhead light, only low lamps around the walls that make the air itself seem thick and wealthy.

"I'll sleep in here," Ilya announces, throwing himself into the empty tub fully dressed. "Leave me. I've found my home."

"I'm sure neither the hotel nor its future guests would object." Svetlana doesn't look up. "Frankly, I'm shocked they haven't branched out into actual human slaves as an amenity. Do let me know if you decide for certain. I'll make a killing selling you."

By any reasonable assessment, the three people on this trip should move straight into bacchanal excess. Ilya hasn’t planned for it, but they are who they are and, more importantly, they are where they are. Sin and decadence are simply what he expects to happen.

He knows exactly how those nights go. Dinner late, most of the calories in the form of hard spirits, cubed cheese and cured meats. A good cocktail bar after that, then somewhere louder. By then someone has met someone else, and taxis start arriving with small plastic bags delivered to the door like room service. Then it’s five in the morning in a hotel room none of them recognises, eight people in it, three of whom nobody invited. Nobody is having fun anymore, but nobody wants to leave, because none of them would be there if there were anything good to return to.

He's good at those nights. Svetlana is better. Marly survives them by remaining inexplicably Marly throughout.

The first night they eat by the river. Then they have drinks upstairs because there's a breeze. Svetlana takes her shoes off under the table and puts her feet in Marly’s lap, and he rubs one absently while explaining that Ilya’s habit of leaving his own end to somebody else is going to get one of them hurt next season. Ilya disagrees violently. This becomes a fight about systems, which becomes a fight about who is supposed to be standing where, which becomes a fight about whether Ilya has ever skated back to help without being screamed at first.

Svetlana orders another bottle and sides with Marly.

“What is this? Betrayed by my own blood, as men have always been betrayed, through the pleasures of the flesh.”

“Relax, High Inquisitor. He’s right. Twice in March I watched you turn around and leave while the puck was still behind your own net.”

“I was terrible everywhere in March.”

“Yes.” She drinks. “And next year you won’t be.”

At some point he notices it's nearly three, that all of them are sleepy-drunk and hazy with good food, and that he would maim and kill for the right to stumble back to his froofy gold room and sleep for twelve hours.

Svetlana yawns. "Bed."

"Fuck yeah," says Marly.

Since Ilya and Marly arrived with underwear and whatever they wore on the plane, Svetlana dressing them was always understood. The amusing part is that she appears to have developed a theme. Also entirely in character: her longstanding habit of dressing Ilya like a rent boy is confusing Marly badly.

“Oh, come on,” Marly says, contemplating the latest combination: rough-spun mostly see-through linen trousers and a gold silk shirt cut almost to the sternum. “He can’t wear that. He looks like we pay him by the blowjob.”

“That shirt is Gucci and cost four thousand dollars, you uncultured swine. Besides, I dress to emphasise his best qualities. His mouth ranks very highly.”

“Uncultured—you can see his underwear.”

Ilya catches the eye of the private-shopping consultant who had arrived with Svetlana’s order. Ms Ploy has plainly concluded that Ilya is, in fact, a very expensive hooker and, consequently, appears prepared to extend professional solidarity against foreign sex-tourist trash.

“I am not entertaining your puritanism,” Svetlana says. “The only offensive thing about his underwear is that you packed Calvin Klein instead of the silk boxers I keep buying him.”

Ilya lets his face go long-suffering.

Ms Ploy’s answering sympathy is so immediate that he nearly ruins the whole thing by laughing. Yes. Terrible. Very hard, being purchased. The woman is a monster.

She straightens a shirt on the rail. “Perhaps the ivory, Madam. It photographs better.”

Ilya would go to war for Ms Ploy. Conquer nations and lay them at her feet.

“Well spotted. We’ll take both.”

Svetlana arches an imperious brow at him. Ilya sighs and reaches for the next piece.

The funniest part is that neither she nor Marly seems to realise that, by morning, half the hotel will have concluded that the two Americans—Svetlana’s name notwithstanding; she travels on her American passport most of the time—have brought a Russian plaything with them.

Ilya can’t even fault the logic. Svetlana is equally bossy with both of them and has, in fact, ordered clothes for both, but Marly’s wardrobe is all beautiful, sober menswear: linen shirts, tailored trousers, things a rich man could wear into any country club on earth. Ilya is never more than a stiff breeze away from showing nipple.

“With respect, Madam,” Ms Ploy says, “the gold silk will not last the week in this heat. It will mark.” A small pause. “If you permit, one or two heavier pieces to alternate. It preserves the good shirts.”

Svetlana considers this with the gravity of a woman being briefed on troop movements.

“Show me.”

Ms Ploy gives Ilya another tiny, sympathetic smile: I tried to get you a proper shirt. This is the best I could do.

Ilya shrugs back, ever philosophical about the hazards of the skin trade: It’s not as though the clothes are the worst part of earning money on your knees.

The rooftop bar is sixty-three floors up and, in his professional assessment, has an insufficient railing. Marly won’t go within two metres of the edge. Svetlana has already gone to the glass. She turns, finds him planted at the bar with his back to it, and smiles.

“Come here.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Cliff.”

“That voice doesn’t work on me.”

It works on him. He gets within a metre of the glass and stops dead, at which point she reaches out, catches two fingers in the front of his shirt and pulls him the last step.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t look down.”

“That’s exactly what people say when they want some poor schmuck to look down.”

She laughs and doesn’t let go of his shirt. Marly has one hand locked around her wrist, which he either hasn’t noticed or has decided is preferable to falling into Bangkok. Then she gets her phone out.

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Smile.”

“I hate you.”

“Yes.”

She takes one, then another. In the second, Marly isn’t looking at the camera. Svetlana studies it for a beat too long, expression going still, then locks the phone and slips it away without showing either of them.

Ilya has drifted to the glass himself at some point. Heights have never done much for him. His fears, for better or worse, tend to organise themselves around his failings as a brother, son and man. The view is very good: sixty-three floors going straight down, the whole city lit beneath them. He looks at it, then at Svetlana still holding Marly by the shirt and Marly still holding her wrist.

Huh.

He finishes his drink.

“You,” Svetlana says. “Here. Two steps left.”

Yeah, no chance.

“How about I take one more of you, then you release Marly from your claws before he passes out.”

The tattoo happens on Thursday and is nobody’s fault. They pass the place walking back from lunch: clean glass, bright lights, a man inside with sleeves down to his knuckles doing a crossword. Ilya stops for perhaps four seconds. Marly notices. Of course he notices. He gives Ilya one look, then keeps walking. Sensible. He has known Ilya for nine years and has apparently concluded that acknowledging an impulse only gives it something to push against. Ilya watches him get six paces away. It is a sound theory.

The bell over the tattoo-shop door rings.

“Fuck,” Marly says behind him.

The problem is explaining what he wants. Ilya gets the book out and points to the camel on the cover. The artist takes it and studies the animal with the concentration of a doctor shown an X-ray.

“This is from a story?”

“Yes.”

“What is the story?”

Ilya opens his mouth. He is forty pages in. So far it concerns a boy sent abroad to be educated by professionals, an examination he might fail, several murderers and a great deal of administrative difficulty surrounding pyramids. It is also funnier than anything Ilya has read in years, in a way he could not explain without sounding touched in the head. A camel has not featured thus far, but it’s coming, Lord willing.

“I don’t know yet.”

The artist nods.

“It is on the cover,” Ilya says. “I like it.”

“Why?”

Ilya waves the book a little, gestures at it with his other hand. Does he really need to say it? “Look.”

The artist considers this and, apparently finding it sufficient, asks where he wants it. Ilya taps the bare space near his sternum.

“Alright. Take shirt off.”

He takes his shirt off. The artist looks at the Russian bear on his left pec, done when Ilya was nineteen and equipped with the particular discernment available to nineteen-year-old men making statements about themselves. Then he looks at the camel, turns the paperback sideways and holds it against Ilya’s chest.

“In front,” he says, indicating the bare space toward the sternum. “Bear here. Both this way.”

“Yes,” Ilya says.

He had not considered the relationship between the two animals until this exact second. Now any other arrangement would be idiotic.

Marly has come back in and is standing by the door with his arms folded. “You haven’t even met the camel.”

“No.”

“You don’t know anything about him. He could be a traitor. He could doom the quest.”

“Already you judge him.”

“You haven't even met him.”

“The book made me laugh ten times on one page.”

“The camel didn’t.”

Ilya refuses to entertain this unnecessary pedantry. “He contributed.”

Marly opens his mouth, closes it, and sits down by the window. The artist looks between them and says nothing—a professional.

The sternum, it turns out, is a terrible place to get tattooed. Thin skin, little padding, bone directly underneath, with nowhere decent for the needle to send the vibration except through the entire ribcage. The artist explains this beforehand in the resigned tone of a man whose obligation is to warn idiots and whose spiritual obligation ends there. Ilya, who once had a tooth pulled on a bench between periods, waves him on.

Twenty minutes later he develops a more nuanced position.

“How’s that toughness going?” Marly asks.

“Excellent.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

The needle crosses bone again, and Ilya’s skeleton briefly attempts to leave without him.

“Shut the fuck up, Marly.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“How well you know me.”

It takes nearly two hours, largely because Ilya refuses to make the camel smaller once he has committed to it. By the end, his back is damp against the table, his jaw aches, and he has developed a private hatred of three separate bones he would have paid dearly not to know so intimately.

Worth it.

The camel is fantastic: small, furious, legs stretched forward with tremendous purpose, plainly going somewhere, neither rushing nor dallying. The bear occupies its old territory on the left, larger and darker and considerably more serious, but they face the same way now. The effect is less heroic than Ilya might once have preferred, and significantly less lonely. He likes it much better.

Svetlana arrives forty minutes before the end, presumably summoned by Marly, and stands at the artist’s shoulder in silence long enough that the man’s hand slows.

“Well?” Ilya says.

“The line work is good.” Then she smiles, wide and helplessly endeared. He knows that expression. She wears it whenever he does something she finds exceptionally, disarmingly stupid. “You haven’t even read the book.”

Ilya sighs. “Marly already complained plenty. You can skip this part.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining. It’s brilliant.”

She reaches toward the fresh ink. The artist slaps her hand away. Ilya goes very still; Marly does too. Nobody has slapped Svetlana’s hand away from anything since she became old enough to decide for herself what counted as a proportionate response.

“Need time to heal,” the artist snaps. “Or it gets infected. I already should put bandage, but the boy insists.”

Ilya nods solemnly. He did insist.

Svetlana stares at the man for one long beat.

“My apologies, sir.” Ilya and Marly relax in tandem. Crisis averted; she respects his gumption. “Let me just—”

She takes one quick photograph, and Ilya can’t even bitch about it. They probably make a hilarious picture: Ilya shirtless and sweaty on the table, Marly grinning like a clown in the background, the paperback suspended beside them in a complicated arrangement of clamps and wire so the printed camel looks like it's supervising its own reproduction.

“Fantastic,” she says. “You can bandage him now. And while you’re at it, tell me exactly how he should care for it.”

Ilya and Marly stay where they are while the two maniacs proceed to bond over his future compliance. Marly’s eyes drop to the gold shirt folded over the chair. Then to the fresh camel sitting exactly where the shirt opens.

“Well,” he says. “At least the wardrobe makes sense now.”

Koh Samui—June 23

The island is where the glamorous sex tourist schtick shifts into something much softer.

Villa is doing difficult work for several buildings, an infinity pool, staff quarters and a staircase down to a private strip of beach. Flowers float in the baths when they arrive. Somebody has chilled coconuts. By the time he finds his bedroom, his case is unpacked, and his shirts hang by colour.

He stands looking at them for a moment. This is, objectively, insane. Then he finds his sunglasses folded beside the bed, and puts them on.

The first afternoon, he falls asleep outside at four. He's damp from the pool, stretched on a lounger with the book open on his chest. Below him the sea keeps doing the same quiet thing. Marly and Svetlana are arguing about whether some fruit counts as citrus. He hears them, and then he doesn't.

When he opens his eyes, the sky has changed colour.

There's a blanket over his legs. His drink is still on the table beside him, melted, hot, and disgusting. Nobody has moved him. Nobody is waiting for him to wake up.

Marly is at the far end of the terrace with his phone.

"How long?"

"Like, three hours?"

"Hm."

"You good?"

Against his better judgement, he tries the drink and spits it out immediately. Christ in Heaven.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"No reason."

The days loosen after that. Breakfast when somebody gets hungry. Water, heat, his camel book. Sometimes Svetlana wants to go somewhere, and they go, because resisting Svetlana takes more energy than obeying her. Sometimes Marly wakes up with an idea involving pancake bars or backflipping into the pool or finding a gym, and Ilya agrees, because these are respectable uses of a day.

The picture Svetlana posts one afternoon is barely a picture: the two of them asleep on the daybed, shoved together into the available shade. Ilya's head against Marly's stomach. Marly's hand in his hair.

The homosexual agenda has been postponed until after our naps.

Ilya reads it. Then reads it again. Is he missing something?

"I don't get it."

Marly makes a wounded noise. "You don't—buddy."

"They already think we fuck. It's an old joke."

Svetlana smiles. "Exactly."

Right. Not a joke; mind games. Or, in other words: none of his business. He reaches for the mango.

The pictures keep coming. Ilya asleep. Marly eating. Svetlana reading. Three pairs of feet at the edge of the pool. His healing tattoo. Nothing much happens in any of them. That's probably why they work.

One morning he comes outside and finds Svetlana sitting sideways across Marly’s lap. The sight isn’t remarkable enough to stop him at first. She’s showing him something on her phone. Marly has an arm around her waist, his thumb moving slowly against the silk at her hip.

Except, of course, it is remarkable. Lovely. Humbling, even, never mind the honour of getting to see it happen from this close. He thought, once, that one day—

Never mind that. Better to look at Svetlana: the easy smile on her face, the way she looks down at Marly like he’s treasure in the old sense of the word—something won, something guarded, something you bury bodies over. Yeah; that helps. He thought it might.

He crosses to the table, takes the toast off Marly’s plate and sits down.

“Hey.”

“You have your own.”

“Yours is mine, and mine is mine and—”

Marly launches a piece of watermelon with admirable precision, then looks at him, smug, as though to say: what, are you going to retaliate with her on my lap?

Oh, you poor thing. Ilya met Svetlana when he was seven, and she was ten. By twelve they had established that proximity, witnesses and expense offered no protection whatsoever. There are no rules in sibling fights, only blood and revenge.

Ilya picks up the glass of fruit yoghurt and sprays it wide.

Siem Reap—July 4

Svetlana has booked a place with a courtyard, which means the heat gets in early and doesn't leave at night. Ilya doesn't mind. Marly has spent a week complaining about the air conditioning in three separate countries and has now gone completely quiet on the subject, which is how Ilya knows he has given up.

They come back from the temples at eleven, filthy and sunblind and mildly annoyed with each other in the way of men who got up at four voluntarily and have had several hours to regret it. They collect Svetlana from Psar Chas on the way, where she has spent the morning doing something expensive to a market that has no idea what to do with a crazy woman who will haggle to the death over a copper elephant pin, then buy half a stall’s worth of fabric that she will have to pay a fortune to ship back home. She gets into the car with iced coffee and no interest whatsoever in what they have seen. Places of worship, in all fairness, never held much value for Svetlana, who resides firmly in the material.

At first Ilya thinks the flowers are hers. There are too many of them for a hotel: peonies massed in two low bowls on the shaded side of the courtyard, white and heavy-headed, some still shut tight at the centre. They look absurd in Cambodia. Expensive in the particular way of things that have no business existing where they are and have therefore been flown in under refrigeration at somebody's insistence.

Svetlana slows. Only slightly, but Ilya sees it. Then he sees Sasha.

He is sitting beyond the flowers with one long leg crossed over the other, reading something while four members of hotel staff orbit at a respectful distance. Pale trousers, dark shirt, no jacket in the heat. He has always possessed the irritating ability to make any chair look undersized. Beside him is a single suitcase. The rest, presumably, has already been made somebody else’s problem.

Ilya stops so abruptly that Marly walks into the back of him. "Sasha."

"Mm." He does not get up immediately. He finishes whatever he is doing with the end of his own thought, which takes perhaps two seconds and is entirely for effect, and then he unfolds. It takes a while. It always has. Sasha stands up in stages, like scaffolding going up, and at the end of it he is somehow looking down at Ilya from a height Ilya has never once got used to.

"Look at you." He says it quietly, like a man checking that a thing has survived the winter. "Look at you. Mine, still, after all that."

Ilya can't say anything at all, which is new. He had not known. Not one word, not a hint. After the three calls in the spring that he had let ring out, there was nothing, and he assumed the nothing was the answer—made peace with it, accepted it as deserved, made a quiet place for it and put a stone over the top and was careful not to go anywhere near it.

He crosses the courtyard in four long steps, and then Sasha takes hold of him. There is an indignity peculiar to being embraced by somebody taller when one is six foot three and has spent most of his adult life being the large object in the room. The arms come high around his back, one hand closing almost between his shoulder blades and the other farther down, and Ilya finds himself gathered in rather than merely met halfway.

Ilya puts his face in his shoulder. "Sasha. You're here."

"I am."

Past him, he can see Marly in the archway, sweat through his shirt, holding both their bags and watching all of this with an expression of frank, untroubled fascination. Svetlana has stopped beside the flowers, iced coffee still in one hand, looking at Sasha with something Ilya cannot quite read from here.

Sasha's hand moves once between his shoulder blades. "Tsvetik."

"You came."

"So it would seem."

Sasha reaches out and straightens her collar, though it doesn't need it. Svetlana takes the hand off her shoulder and kisses the knuckles, eyes shut.

"The peonies are a bit much," she says. "What did you do, have them flown over from Amsterdam?"

"Indeed I did. And I was correct to do so. They are exactly enough."

Ilya looks between them. "You knew."

"I did not."

"Lanka."

"I did not know." She takes another drink of her coffee. "I invited him in April. He did not say yes. He did not say no. He said"—her voice goes flat and exact, and it is Sasha's, unmistakably—"we shall see what the summer looks like."

"And we have, indeed, seen," Sasha says, turning to look at Marly with unhurried interest, the way you would look at a horse somebody had told you a great deal about. "This is him?"

"This is Cliff Marlowe. Marly." Ilya's voice does something on the way out, and he ignores it. "Marly, Aleksandar—"

"Sasha." He crosses the courtyard and puts out his hand. "You are the one who went to his house."

Marly, God bless him, has been in professional locker rooms since he was fifteen and can be made uncomfortable by absolutely nothing. He drops the bags and shakes. "I mean, I just drove him back to mine. Anywhere probably would have done it. That place was a morgue."

"Yes. Well." Sasha is still holding his hand. "Nobody else went."

Ilya can practically see the moment when Marly decides to drop it and let the weirdo be. "You want a beer, bud?"

Sasha considers this the way another man would consider a startling and elaborate sexual proposition, complete with props, a wide array of participants and sophisticated staging. "I would like a beer very much," he says. “And then you will tell me how you tricked him into eating enough to stop alarming medical professionals.”

"Oh, man, you have no idea." Marly is already moving. "My mom got hold of him—"

Ilya sits down on the edge of the fountain, in his filthy shirt, in the heat, and lets the two of them go past him into the house. He does not trust his face at all for about thirty seconds. Svetlana comes and stands beside him. 

"You hoped," he says eventually.

"I hope constantly. It is a defect of character." She looks down at him. "Go and wash. You smell like a river, and he has been travelling for two days to sit in a chair and pretend he wasn't waiting."

Chapter End Notes

### On Your Love

Beloved

where I have been

if

you loved me more than your own

and God’s

soul

you could not have lifted me

out of the water

or

lit even one of the cigarettes I stood

smoking alone.

Beloved

what I have done

if

you discounted the devil

entirely

and rejected the truth as a rumor

you

would turn from the heat of my face

that burns

under your lips.

Beloved

what I have dreamed

if

you ended the fevers and riot

the claw and the wail and the absolute

furious

dishevel of my unkempt mind

you

could never believe the quiet

your arms

make true around me.

In your love I am sometimes redeemed

a stranger

to myself.
### On Your Love

Beloved

where I have been

if

you loved me more than your own

and God’s

soul

you could not have lifted me

out of the water

or

lit even one of the cigarettes I stood

smoking alone.

Beloved

what I have done

if

you discounted the devil

entirely

and rejected the truth as a rumor

you

would turn from the heat of my face

that burns

under your lips.

Beloved

what I have dreamed

if

you ended the fevers and riot

the claw and the wail and the absolute

furious

dishevel of my unkempt mind

you

could never believe the quiet

your arms

make true around me.

In your love I am sometimes redeemed

a stranger

to myself.