Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Magical Realism, Curses, magical vagina acquisition, Shane Hollander Has A Vagina, Phone Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Light Dom/sub, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, POV Ilya Rozanov, Crack Treated Extremely Seriously, Scent Kink, light degradation

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-08 Words: 15,097 Chapters: 1/2

Roman Numeral Seven

Summary

“Um,” Shane sighs. “It’s a curse, I guess.”
Icy dread and hot anger coalesce into a hard ball in Ilya’s chest. “What curse?”
Shane tosses his head, runs a hand through his hair. He looks out the window, because whatever is going on with him is clearly too agonizing to experience while looking directly at Ilya’s face. He crosses his arms over his chest, lurches a single step towards Ilya like he’s attached to a string pulled taut.
“Remember rookie season,” Shane says, apropos of nothing.
Ilya cuts a sharp, humorless grin. “Most of it.”
“They put you on Curse Protocol. You said it was a hazing thing. And I told you, do you remember, that I’d heard of guys—”
“Getting their dicks cursed off,” Ilya says.
“Yeah,” Shane says, eyes refusing to settle. He looks fucking hunted, like he expects to be brutally struck down in the very near future. “Well.”

Shane Hollander is not the first hockey player to be the victim of a nasty playoff curse, but this one is a little different. Ilya rises to the occasion in a couple of ways.

Notes

Chapter 1: Nobodies No Sympathy

2010

Sometime between scoring his 41^st and 42^nd NHL goal, Ilya Rozanov wakes up covered in spots and immediately presents himself to be inspected by the team doctor. The spots don’t itch, they don’t come with any other concerning symptoms and they are perfectly round, symmetrical and evenly distributed across his entire body, which tells Ilya literally everything he needs to know even before Doctor Taylor makes the pronouncement.

“It’s a curse,” he says, with a bit of a shrug, looking pretty profoundly unconcerned.

“So I go to witch?” Ilya asks, lips pursing and arms crossing. “Does team have witch, or do I find myself—”

“No, nothing like that.” Taylor removes his gloves, so unbothered by the situation that he isn’t even looking in Ilya’s direction anymore. “It will go away on its own, Rozanov. No need to involve a witch. The team disapproves of the intervention of witches—”

“So then this was accident?” Ilya demands, louder than he intends—or maybe not, because he’s mad in a way that he hasn’t been since the last time his feet were on Russian soil and he wants someone to know.

“Of course not,” Taylor huffs. “Curses don’t happen on accident, kid. Someone bought it, probably a bit of fun—it’s harmless, really. All of your vitals are perfect. This won’t interfere with your ability to play. You’ll be benched for the game tonight if the curse lasts past the five o’clock threshold, but it should be long gone by tomorrow. This one doesn’t normally last longer than 24 hours.”

“This one?”

“It’s a typical hazing curse, Rozanov. You’re not the first rookie to wake up with spots.”

Ilya’s hands tighten onto the parchment paper liner on the medical exam chair. “Someone on team did this? Someone on Raiders?”

“The league doesn’t condone it.” Taylor’s eyes flip between Ilya’s face and Ilya’s hands. “If someone owns up to it, they’ll be fined. Sit out for a game. But, y’know, kid…” Taylor sighs and sits in his little rolling chair again. He’s a perfectly average-looking man three times Ilya’s age with gray hair and an earnest look forced onto his face with such fraudulence that it activates something in Ilya’s brain that says run or hit. “In America, we have this saying—don’t rock the boat. It means—”

Ilya chooses hit.

It takes two guys to drag Ilya, kicking and screaming out of the team medical offices. They drag him down the hallway, into the showers and spin the cold tap. They throw Ilya under it fully-clothed.

“If I ever find out which of you fuckers did this!” he snarls in Russian, curls and water in his eyes. “You’re fucking with shit you don’t even understand! I swear to God, if I ever find out—”

Boston Raiders @BostonRaidersNHL

Ilya Rozanov #81 is on Curse Protocol and will not dress for tonight’s game vs. the Florida Bobcats.

--

Jane
| Link: [via Twitter] Ilya Rozanov #81 will not…
| ?

Ilya
| I am fine. Stupid hazing thing.

Jane
| Was it a bad curse?

Ilya
| There are good curses?

Jane
| No
| I just mean that sometimes you hear about bad ones
| I don’t know like guys will get their dicks cursed off or whatever

Ilya
| Oh so you are worried about my dick.

Jane
| You wish

Ilya
| Don’t worry my Jane. Dick will be here for you whenever you want it.

Jane
| Fuck you

Ilya
| Promise?

2015

Ilya texts Shane Does your cock miss me like mine misses you? and then promptly skates out onto the ice to wreck the lives and steal the Cup dreams of every player on the Monuments. Back in the locker room three hours later, he cackles in his stall when he sees that the Metros have also capped off their first round playoff series with a win against the Rouge. D.C. and Detroit are out, headed home to lick their wounds. In four days, Boston will host the Metros for the first two games of the second-round series.

The articles say Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander, Hollander, Hollander, Hollander. Here and there is a nod to the Raiders, to the expert way that Ilya Rozanov and his team of Boston brutes have sent the Monuments packing in spectacular fashion on this night, but most of the news media cannot remove itself from halfway up Shane Hollander’s ass.

Ilya, really, is in no place to judge. It’s a nice place to be. His teammates, however, are not men of taste in the same way Ilya is and have no tact about the matter.

“Jeee-sus, the press needs to get itself off Hollander’s dick.” Sean “Hally” O’Halloran is a call-up from the Providence Raiders, a result of Johannson’s unfortunate collision with the Monuments’ sasquatch-like D-man in the first game of the series. Hally is a Boston-bred winger with a Shane Hollander-shaped chip on his shoulder. To be fair to him, his nickname in the AHL is apparently Dirtbag, shortened from Dirtbag Hollzy, shortened from Irish Dirtbag Shane Hollander, which had been his cross to bear by reason of his similar name and red hair.

But Hally, like everyone, has also watched Shane rip through the league like tissue paper for the last four months. Even Ilya can admit that Shane has been on a tear in the latter half of this season. The reports coming out of Montreal tonight prove it. It’s not exactly a morale boost for the next team to face him.

“The press are always on Hollander’s dick,” says Sebbin, who’s got a grin the size of the fucking harbor cracked onto his face. “It’s the only action he sees, Hally, you’ve gotta give him what he can get.”

The locker room choruses with twenty men howling Ohhh and bouncing up and down, rejoicing in a chirp successfully landed. Ilya’s head is fully in his stall as he laughs himself blue. Boston is in the second round of the playoffs and this entire locker room is caterwauling about Shane Hollander’s dick, Ilya’s favorite topic of discussion. It’s a good fucking night to be Ilya Rozanov.

Nobody is allowed to escape the locker room without a secured promise that they will be showing their face at the club that night, or at least a good excuse not to. The club being wherever the divine wisdom of Marleau and Carmichael decide on. Ilya has final say, which he will deliver with the authority of a king in an hour or so when the address arrives in the team chat with seven different people frantically texting to get his attention. @Rozanov @Rozanov are we doing this hey Rozy hey Cap—

He gets into his car, hair still dripping from the shower, and drives ten minutes to his apartment. Later tonight he’ll bring someone back here, probably, and then send her home in the wee hours with advice on a nearby coffee shop and a story to tell, and then he’ll drive out to his house in Brookline and decompress from the series for exactly 72 hours before he turns around and meets Shane Hollander at center ice.

Speaking of Shane.

A reply to his text finally pings onto his phone as he’s puttering about the place considering an outfit and consuming carbs to soak up the shots he’ll do at the club. He’s changed into a pair of sweatpants and nothing else.

Jane
| How much does it miss me?
| Fuck I want your dick right now

Ilya immediately presses call and leans his elbows on the kitchen counter.

“Hey,” Shane says, far too casually for someone who is apparently very desperate for Ilya’s dick—and is still thinking about it, if the flashing dots in the texting window before Ilya placed the call were any indication.

“How is my friend?” Ilya asks. He picks up a coaster—polished stone, a gift from Sveta, never used—and spins it on one corner like a top.

“Feeling pretty fucking good,” Shane says, and there’s a little moan at the end like he’s stretching. Or. “I won a fucking playoff series tonight, in case you haven’t heard—"

Yes, all by yourself, Ilya doesn’t say, because he’d probably mean it a little too much.

He spins the coaster again. “Sorry, I mean your dick. My friend Little Shane. How is he?”

“Don’t call it Little Shane. Fucking gross.” Shane sighs, and there’s a brief pause. Then he pushes on, because Shane Hollander is an enigma wrapped in a mystery and Ilya can never predict where he’s going to go or what he’s going to do. It was just as likely that he would reject the call, or tell Ilya to fuck off after the first text, or ignore Ilya for the next six days and then absolutely without prompting send a Snapchat image of his entire ass spread apart in the mirror of his walk-in closet.

Instead, it’s this.

“I’m so hard for you,” Shane says. His next words are muffled, like he’s hiding his face in a pillow, and Ilya can see it so clearly in his mind’s eye because he’s seen it enough. One eye and one cheek peeking out from behind the dark blue plush of his fancy little pillowcases, looking at Ilya like the erection between his thighs is a problem that Ilya personally needs to accept blame for. “How is, um. My friend?”

Ilya covers his mouth so that Shane can’t hear his laugh, because he will definitely think that Ilya is laughing at him and then this conversation will end with Shane’s feelings hurt, and Ilya doesn’t want to deal with that right now. He also doesn’t really want to explain the giddiness he feels in his chest, like a tiny ball of sunshine is sitting on his heart. He doesn’t really even want to explain it to himself.

“Would you like to see?” he asks, and hopes that the smile in his voice isn’t too obvious.

“…yeah.”

Ilya sends through a videocall request and Shane accepts too quickly. Eager thing. He is almost as Ilya imagined him to be: stomach-down on his bed, face mostly inside a pillow. He’s fully dressed, however, which is a departure.

“You look pretty tonight,” Ilya says, because it’s his typical greeting of an evening.

Shane pushes up on his elbows and his pupils make several short, jerky trips across his eyes. “You too.”

Ilya, whose hair is still damp and flat from his hat, can only grin. He walks into the bathroom, stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror that dominates the wall opposite the shower, and hooks a thumb into his sweatpants. He hears Shane breathe sharply when the length of Ilya’s cock, half-hard and heavy against his leg, appears.

“Fuck,” Shane says. Ilya watches him fumble around on his bed, looking just for a moment like a beached fish, before he settles kneeling on the blankets. Knees apart, ass on his feet. He’s wearing a deep navy Metros crewneck and gray joggers. The joggers stretch generously over his hips when he pulls them down, hooks the waistband under his balls and lets his flushed cock pop free of his pants.

“That’s it,” Ilya murmurs, pressing the speaker of the phone close to his mouth because Shane likes a low, intense sort of talk when he’s down, when he has that look on his face. Also because the bathroom is large and echoey and it makes Ilya feel a bit like an arena announcer when his voice bounces back on him too much. “Touch yourself.”

“I am,” Shane says. “I—fuck, are you looking?”

“Yes,” Ilya drawls. Casually, like looking at Shane Hollander isn’t an idea that dominates his waking and sleeping thoughts.

“Okay,” Shane sighs, pleased. “You should, ah, you should touch yourself too. Wanna see.”

There is something obscene in the juxtaposition of Shane’s cock, purple-brown and so wet, being the only bare part of his body. He’s otherwise bundled, sweetly rumpled in loungewear, and Ilya indulges a brief, brilliant fantasy. Shane in Ilya’s bed or on his couch, there for Ilya to come home to. Dressed just like this. Sweatshirt, joggers, black socks. Soft fabrics that feel good against the skin, where Ilya could bury his head and not think for awhile. Then he would undress Shane just this much, just until this same triangle of skin was bared, just until Ilya could wrap a hand around his cock and say This is mine—

Ilya shakes his head. “Not tonight.”

Shane makes a pitiful little protesting sound, and Ilya indulges him with two quick strokes of his cock. The waistband of his sweats pops back up once his thumb is no longer holding them at bay, so Shane can’t see anything but the drag of Ilya’s knuckles against the inside of his pants.

“Rozanov,” Shane begs. “Please?”

“Such a needy fucking thing,” Ilya sighs. He pulls the waistband down past the apple of his hip and postures himself with his cock in his hand, unmoving. “You need it that bad? Can’t get off without seeing my big fucking cock?”

“Yeah,” Shane says, hand blurring between his thighs. “So big. So good. Fuck, I love it. I love your cock.”

Ilya wonders if Shane could tell that his dick twitched on the word love instead of big or cock. Probably not; Shane’s not noticing much of anything now, aside from the inside of his own eyelids as his head tilts back. His free hand is fisted into the blanket between his thighs like he sometimes grips onto Ilya’s hair.

“Look at me,” Ilya demands. “You wanted to see my dick so bad, you look at it now. Eyes open, Hollander.”

Shane wails in protest, but his eyes open—and there they fucking are. Ilya can’t remember the last time he had a dream without seeing those eyes, brown and warm and soft for him. For Ilya.

“Such a slut,” Ilya says. “Begging for cock you can’t even touch. You want to come?”

“Yes,” Shane says. Frantic. “Please. Please.”

“Why should I let you?”

“I—fuck—I won.” It comes out as a snarl. “I fucking won and I—and I asked, Rozanov, I asked for it nicely."

“You did. Very polite slut.” Shane’s thighs are visibly trembling even with the low lighting of his bedroom and the less than stellar quality of the video feed. “Yes. Fine. Make yourself come.”

“Thank you,” Shane whines from three hundred kilometers away. “Thank you, I—oh, fuck! Gonna come. Rozy—”

Ilya’s cock twitches again.

Shane catches his cum in his hand, which is—fucking goofy, and not sexy at all, and not something that should make Ilya’s cock leak against his thigh, but there it is. He pulls his sweats up to cover the evidence while Shane is still panting, eyelids fluttering, too engrossed in the come-down to notice.

“Good,” Ilya praises, exiting the bathroom now. He sits on the edge of the bed and waits for Shane to open his eyes again. His chest heaves and his hand is curled awkwardly in his lap, holding and hiding the evidence of his release. He considers making Shane lick it, but he isn’t sure he has the time to bring him back from something like that. Especially not over the phone. Instead he says, “Go wash your hands. Drink some water.”

“Mm-hm.” Shane’s eyes flutter closed again. He sways slightly.

“Hollander.”

“Okay,” Shane sighs, petulant, and if Ilya was there he’d smack him on his still-exposed ass. The way Ilya wants to be there is not helpful and, again, not something he wants to examine.

Shane returns in less than two minutes, coming into the frame with a fwump as he drops stomach-down back onto the bed. He has his water bottle in hand, a massive metal thing. Ilya knows exactly the sound it makes when it falls off the bedside table and rolls across the floor because the mattress is rocking too hard. He knows that the water in it is from the electronic water cooler in the Metros’ players lounge. He knows that Shane prefers the taste of it to the water that comes unfiltered out of the tap at his apartment, but also prefers the water from the tap at his childhood home to either of those other sources. He should not, he thinks, know any of this.

“Are you really not going to get off?” Shane mutters, pretty lips wrapped around the straw of the bottle. It has both a spout and a straw nozzle. Shane vastly prefers the straw unless he is absolutely dying of thirst. When he shares the water bottle with Ilya, he pops open the spout as if he expects Ilya to be bothered by the idea of sharing the straw with him. Ilya had recently found out that this is because Shane is averse to drinking after people, at which point Ilya had unscrewed the lid, spat inside it and handed it back to Shane. He’d never seen Shane’s eyes go so dark so fast.

“Not right now, no,” Ilya murmurs. He leans back on one hand, flips the camera back around so that Shane can see him. He thinks Shane will enjoy the view of his flexing shoulder and the glint of his cross in the hollow of his collarbone. “Going out soon. Want to be horny at the club.”

“Ah,” Shane says, infusing full sentences into it. He drops his eyes, drinks his water.

“The Metros not going to party after their big win?”

“Not tonight. Tomorrow, maybe.”

This doesn’t surprise Ilya. Generally speaking, the Metros are an older and more settled team than the Raiders. Shane is, in fact, still one of the younger players on the roster, five years on from his rookie season. Ilya is closer to the middle of the pack on the Raiders’ roster now. Shane is also an outlier where a wife and kids are concerned—in that most of his teammates have at least one of those things.

“Speaking of your win,” Ilya murmurs. He’ll be a little sweet, he thinks, because he can’t touch. “Congratulations. I heard you played well. Also that Karkov wiped the ice with his stupid face. ESPN said they put him on Curse Protocol halfway through game.”

“Yeah, some sort of leglock thing. Fucking idiot doesn’t have curse-blocks on him.”

Ilya, who also doesn’t have curse-blocks, just shrugs. “Is Russian thing. Does not surprise me.”

“Rozanov. Tell me you have curse-blocks on you.”

Ilya just winks. “Tell me about Karkov’s curse. Do you think it hurt? Looked like a broken nose, maybe more. Lots of blood on his ugly face. Did he cry?”

Shane snorts. “If people knew about your thing with Karkov, they wouldn’t even care about our rivalry anymore.”

Ilya, in fact, could not care fucking less about Kirill Karkov—aside from the fact that, two summers ago, Detroit and Boston had played an exhibition series against each other in Stockholm. During a mixer with both teams and a great number of Swedish players, the subject of the Metros had come up. Boston and Detroit, both natural enemies of Montreal hockey, had both been talking shit. Only Karkov had used a word to refer to Shane that rhymed with sink. It had made Ilya see red in a way he couldn’t remember experiencing before or since. It probably would have even if Shane Hollander wasn’t the man who’d frequented Ilya’s bed and his sweetest dreams for at least two years at that point.

Karkov is missing four teeth. He’d left two of them at Ilya’s feet on the ice in Stockholm.

“He should be glad the Metros won,” Ilya says. “I would love chance to take more of his teeth.”

The corner of Shane’s mouth quirks up, amused and knowing. Ilya never told him what he’d heard in Sweden, but it’s a short process of elimination to the truth. It’s doubtful that Shane hasn’t heard exactly the same or worse straight from Karkov’s mouth. Ilya can’t think about it too much or he starts genuinely contemplating criminal violence.

“I bet your boys aren’t happy,” Shane says. “Detroit would have been fucking easy to beat. Now we’re gonna come down there and bash your fucking faces in.”

“Oh really?”

“Really,” Shane says, grinning now. He’s glowing with his success and recent orgasm. He’s beautiful in a way that makes Ilya’s stomach ache. “We’re gonna destroy you.”

“Is like you said,” Ilya says. “Detroit was easy to beat.”

“This is my year, Rozanov,” Shane says. He’s still smiling, but the teeth have slipped back behind his lips. He’s intent, focused. “I fucking know it’s my year.”

For a moment, Ilya can do nothing but believe him.

“My mom, she’s…” Shane turns his face away, towards something that is softly glowing and casts his face in gentle orange. The fireplace, Ilya thinks. An oddly sensual detail of Shane’s otherwise boilerplate bedroom. “You know how sometimes, people talk about having visions? Like, it’s a magic thing but you don’t have to be a witch—”

“Maybe,” Ilya mutters, immediately uncomfortable. He rises from the bed and turns on the light in his closet.

“My mom has dreams sometimes. Or maybe she used to. When she was pregnant with me.”

“Mm.” Ilya sets the phone on the chest of drawers against the wall of the closet and sets to flipping through shirts. He can see Shane on the screen out of the corner of his eye, can see the very tiny shape of his socked feet waving behind his head as he continues to lay on his stomach and whisper about things Ilya doesn’t want to hear.

“She never told me what the dreams were about,” Shane says. “But when I was a kid, the last time the Metros won the Cup, one of the players brought it to Ottawa, because he was from there. A bunch of local teams were invited to see it. I went with my Timbits team. They brought it around for the kids to touch but my mom held the back of my collar so I couldn’t get too close. She said it was fine for the other kids but it’d be bad luck for me. Took me a few years, but I kind of figured out what that meant.”

“Well,” Ilya says, as he selects one of his louder shirts. “You do have a few more years to make it, Hollander.”

“Asshole.”

“I’m just saying,” Ilya says, hands at his shoulders. “When I win again this year, don’t cry too hard. Doesn’t mean your mama’s dream was wrong.”

Shane is grinning again, and Ilya can tell from the shape of the words when he says, “Fuck you, Rozanov.” He turns to catch it, the shine of Shane’s teeth and eyes from the screen and the way his cheeks bunch up under his eyes, freckles moving.

“I will go now,” Ilya says, picking up the phone. Shane is contented, safely back on Earth from the haze of his submission. “I will see you in a few days.”

“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you,” Shane says, making it sound like the sweetest thing.

“Okay. Goodnight, Hollander.”

“Have fun.”

Ilya’s mother had not learned magic, and she was distrustful of the practice like most good Russian women were. She would pay her visits to the White Witch, of course, when she had to. There were some things that people only trusted witches for, despite medical interventions coming into vogue. Ilya’s mother worried about the moles on his body, and the White Witch of Yaroslavl dealt in holistic skincare, so they would drive to her hut in the countryside of Yaroslavl Oblast twice a year.

“The pattern of his beauty marks says much about him,” the White Witch of Yaroslavl told Irina, more than once. If Ilya ever learned her name, he certainly doesn’t remember it now. He only remembers her violently red hair and the scrape of her rings as she rubbed poultice into his back. “There is magic in the mundane, Irina Ilynichna. I can read them for you, if you like.”

“No, thank you,” Ilya’s mother had said.

“Marks on the body,” the White Witch of Yaroslavl continued, heedless. “They are part of the body’s natural magic. The spirit of it that touches our four elements. Beauty marks, freckles, birth marks. Even scars, depending on how one receives them. Was he born with these?”

“Some of them. Others came in. I bring him here so that he won’t have more.”

“You are right to do so. The boy should not be walking around with his life on display like this. Magic can be obscene like that. Trying to show us what it knows, even when better left in ignorance.”

“Okay,” Ilya’s mother had said.

The White Witch of Yaroslavl lived a long, woodsy walk from Irina’s childhood home, and so they would walk there afterwards. They would usually pass a house with irises planted along the fence and children who sometimes played in the yard. A pair of twin girls who always paused to stare at Ilya like he was a friend they’d met before, but didn’t know the name of.

Other times, Ilya would not go with his mother. He knew she’d gone to visit the witch because she’d come home smelling like incense and hot metal. Her hair would be frizzed and unmanaged after spending several hours sat over the witch’s cauldron, which was never not bubbling with the base ingredients of any given spell. She would tell Ilya’s father that she had gone for womanly reasons. Because this was one of the generally-accepted reasons for a woman to pay a visit to her local witch, Ilya’s father didn’t ask many questions.

Ilya was vaguely aware that his father wanted another son. Alexei was a fuckup already by thirteen. Ilya was pretty and soft-spoken and took too closely after his pretty, soft-spoken mother. He was also vaguely aware that whatever his mother was doing at the witch’s hut, it wasn’t in the pursuit of a third child.

In general, though, Ilya simply liked to go places with his mother and she liked to take him. It bothered his father, though only to an extent, because Irina had at some point stopped framing the outings as taking the baby with her, and more as Ilya coming along as a masculine representative of the house. It was an argument they had, but not one of the big ones. Quiet, idle and almost calm, with no real resolution.

“Are you looking after your mother when she’s around all of that magic?” Grigory would snap his fingers to get Ilya’s attention, ask the question, frown.

“Yes, sir.”

At eight, Ilya was at his mother’s elbow in a hut belonging to an apprentice of the White Witch of Moscow, from whom Ilya’s mother had bought a spell to burn on the stove. It was meant to burn overnight and then, in the morning, fill the house with an ‘uplifting energy’ that would give good will to the company they were expecting for lunch. A superior of his father’s, his wife, their sad-looking teenaged daughter who Ilya always pitied for no reason he could discern. Polina, he thought was her name.

The Apprentice looked at Ilya, whose shirt was slightly too small. It was summer. Much of his arms, the moles thereon, were uncovered. He’d been growing like a weed. She squinted at Ilya’s left bicep, sighed, and said, “It is so difficult, when a child is feared by his father.”

“Jesus Christ,” Irina muttered under her breath, as she dragged Ilya out of the hut. “Witches never know when to keep their mouths shut, Ilyusha. You should never listen to what a witch says. Their minds are so full of magic, they don’t know how to talk like people anymore.”

“Okay,” Ilya had said.

Her name is Elyse. Ilya discovers over the course of the night that she is a medical student at Tufts, that while the Raiders were on the ice earlier in the night she was taking a grueling exam, and that she has only the vaguest idea of hockey as a sport.

They do tequila shots together, licking up the side of their shot glasses, sucking on lime. Ilya switches to beer, Elyse chugs most of a very tall glass of water. They dance. Ilya turns her around to grind on her ass, not for any particular reason aside from being hard and wanting to rub his dick on something. When she feels his erection, she puts a hand back on his hip and pulls him closer. She’s the same height as him in her heels and has a muscular sort of body. Wide shoulders for a woman, shapely biceps, smallish tits and surprisingly defined abs under her shirt.

“Pilates,” she tells him. “And yoga, when I can.”

“Ah, yoga,” Ilya says, thinking about Shane and the position called child’s pose, the name of which Shane had given him when he’d been sinking into it on the edge of the bed, Ilya standing behind him.

“Shouldn’t call it that,” Ilya had laughed, hand between his shoulder blades. “Not right now, anyway. Jesus, Hollander.”

“’s what it’s called,” Shane had slurred into the sheets. “Oh, fuck, feels so good—”

It was also, Shane told him later, called balasana.

“I have a friend who does yoga,” Ilya tells Elyse presently. “Very into it.”

“Cool!”

Elyse goes back to his apartment with him after texting a picture of herself with Ilya under the streetlight where they wait for the Uber. It doesn’t escape Ilya that the groupchat she drops the picture into is titled In Case I Go Missing. By the time they get in the car two minutes later, Elyse has already received a number of responses including a thumbs up emoji, the words Have fuuun, and a third message reading He looks so familiar lol.

“Sorry,” Elyse tells him, though she doesn’t sound it at all—she had clearly intended for Ilya to see the messages. “You can never be too careful, you know?”

“Sure,” Ilya says, thinking about all of the secrets that live in his own pocket.

Ilya offers another water as they walk in the door, which Elyse accepts, and in very short order they progress to the bedroom. The water bottles are left half-drank and perspiring on the bedside table.

(The offer of water is mostly because, last time Shane had been here, he’d criticized Ilya’s choice of water brand. Ilya had found himself buying a pack of Fiji the next time he’d placed a grocery order and, lately, has been trying to offload the rest of the Dasani on people who aren’t bitchy enough to complain about the water selection offered to them in other people’s homes.)

Elyse says she likes to be on top, so they do it that way. Her hair stays up the entire time, though a few strands come loose and Ilya curls his fingers around them. She’s soft, wet and tight, and almost silent as she rides him. They only speak to say Yes or Harder or one time No thanks, because Ilya forgets himself briefly and puts his hand against the back of her head, grasping.

“It’s just,” she pants, still bouncing. “It’s pinned, so if you pull it—”

“Yes, sorry—”

“No worries. Unh, unh—”

He finishes inside her, ties off the condom, flips her over and buries his face between her thighs, and he can hear her knuckles creaking as she grips on to the sheets by her hips. She’s louder now, and by the time she pushes his face away from her, she’s actually laughing with incredulity.

“Holy shit,” she says, pushing herself up on her elbows. “You are, like, freakishly good at that.”

“You’re welcome.” Ilya grins as he wipes his mouth on the inside of his wrist.

“I’m serious,” she says. In a wordless signal that they are done for the night, she’s adjusting her bra straps and glancing around herself on the bed to find her panties, which she locates behind one of the pillows. “If I was getting that kind of head on the regular, I wouldn’t get anything done. It’s kind of scary. They should, like, study you in a lab.”

Ilya huffs out a laugh, thinks about the words freakish and scary. Wonders, briefly, what he looks like through Elyse’s eyes.

“I will add your comment to the box,” Ilya says. “At the end of the month, we do drawing. You can win free donut from Dunkin.”

Elyse chuckles, a sensible little laugh in the back of her throat. Ilya tries not to let it show that he’s just a little frustrated. He’s sure that joke would have landed with someone who didn’t have half their mind already on the next exam they had to take, or whatever Elyse had clearly been trying to clear her mind of this evening. All the same, Ilya can’t really blame her for having half of her attention on the sex, because it sometimes feels like he only has half his attention on the sex he has nowadays.

With one very notable exception.

He manages to convince Elyse to take two additional Desani water bottles with her on her way out the door. She kisses him, thanks him, and tells him that he should feel free to look her up if he’s around over the summer, when her program clears up. The way she says it, he thinks they both know he won’t—and not only, though she of course has no way of knowing this, because Ilya is never in Boston in the summer.

Afterwards, in the bedroom in the dark, he takes out his phone and stares at the conversation with Jane. Just to test himself, just to see the fucking words written out somewhere other than the inside of his own eyelids, he types I think about you all the fucking time.

He’s careful to delete every letter before he turns over and groans theatrically into the depths of a pillow.

Ilya becomes aware that the Metros have landed at Logan International because, against all good sense, he follows Hayden Pike on Instagram. The first thing Hayden Pike does when he touches down in a new city is post a picture of the skyline from the plane. There is always some fuckass filter on it, named after a bird or a city in Virginia or, like, a fucking dessert. This one is called Celeborn, and Ilya doesn’t know what on God’s earth that is, but it seems to serve the sole purpose of giving everything a weird blue hue.

Coming to beat your asses, @BostonRaidersNHL! #GoMetsGo #MetrosCupRun2015

Ilya stares at this particular Instagram post and its particularly inspirational caption for perhaps too long, because it brings with it a little gift, and probably the true reason why Ilya chose to follow Pike’s boring-ass Instagram in the first place:

Very occasionally, somewhere amongst the incessant posts about his half-feral children and his far too beautiful wife and his droves of lookalike stubbled teammates, Pike will do something actually useful and post an image containing Shane. The pictures are rarely of Shane, strictly speaking. He’ll be in the background of a yard party, staring down at a grill with deep intensity. He will be standing off to the side, his attention focused on something in the distance. Smiling in the middle of five or ten other guys who all orbit him like they hope that some of his greatness will peel off and stick to them.

On this Instagram post, the side of Shane’s face is visible against the oval of the plane window. His eyes are closed. He is obviously asleep. He looks small, vulnerable, and perhaps a little sick. Ilya wants to strangle Hayden Pike with his bare hands, because this feels somehow almost more obscene than if he’d posted a picture of Shane completely nude.

This is also the reason why Ilya texts Shane Have you landed? despite knowing for a fact that they have, given that the skyline picture was posted an hour ago. Also despite knowing that it’s a departure from the unspoken agreement that they probably, really should not communicate during this playoff series.

Shane replies Yes, almost instantly. Ilya watches, as he often does, the typing bubbles bounce for a few moments, and then fade away again.

Ilya
| How was flight?

Jane
| Normal I guess
| Why

Ilya
| [image]

Jane
| OK?

Ilya
| You look like maybe you are stressed or something.
| Or are you just so worried about Boston beating your ass that you make yourself sick. Psychotic or whatever.

Jane
| Do you mean psychosomatic?

Ilya
| 🤷🏻‍♀️

Shane
| Whatever. I’m fine just tired. Didn’t sleep much last night.

Ilya, who’s been pushing his luck for the entire conversation, decides to let it drop and doesn’t think about it for a few hours. Tomorrow, he will meet Shane at center ice, tell him how pretty he looks over the puck under the guise of a chirp, and win Boston the first game of the series.

In the afternoon, Ilya makes an appearance at Warrior Ice Arena. LeClaire is placing all of his hopes and dreams on their penalty kill percentage and is drilling formations like a megalomaniacal king at any given opportunity. Boston is not so good at keeping all six men on the ice, even during playoffs, but LeClaire has made it his mission as a coach to have a PK so beautiful it makes grown men weep.

So Ilya drills the PK for 45 minutes, winds down and heads back to the locker room. There are always at least a few extraneous guys loitering around the practice arena; most of the guys don’t have full gyms in their houses like Ilya, and they utilize their open access to the players’ lounge if nothing else. Connors and St. Simon are on the treadmills when Ilya passes by the large windowed wall of the gym. He nods at them on his way.

In the locker room, there is an additional handful of milling bodies. Carmichael hunched in a towel in his stall, Auden gearing up. O’Halloran and Sebbin sit in their adjacent stalls and chat—they knew each other in the AHL, before Sebbin’s call-up back in 2012, and apparently stayed friendly through the move. Ilya doesn’t pay them much mind as he retrieves his phone from the cubby shelf above his stall.

“…she’s studying to be an Apprentice, right?” Sebbin is saying, rolling socks up his calves.

“Yeah, she’s doing this mail-order thing under one of the White Witches in Utah. I guess the Boston one doesn’t take apprentices anymore.”

“Is she even allowed to do that? I thought you had to apprentice with, like, the local witch.”

“I dunno, man. Nobody’s stopping her. And I kinda tune it out when it comes up. Not that I don’t, like, support her career or whatever, it’s just, magic is kinda woman stuff and I don’t think I’m really meant to understand—"

Ilya snorts, quietly, into the back of his stall. He clears three separate texts from Alexei out of his phone—one of them a reminder to transfer money, as if Ilya needs it; one of them to inform Ilya that their father had attempted to go to a pub that hadn’t existed in a decade and ended up scandalizing a neighbor; one requesting that Ilya call him, oddly civil aside from the suggestion that Ilya remove the cock from his mouth before he does so.

Alexei has been hurling insults of that nature at Ilya since he was approximately age thirteen. Ilya thinks that he genuinely forgets that ‘sucking cock’ is not an agreed-on euphemism for fucking about. Alexei has no reason to believe that Ilya actually does spend any significant amount of time with a dick in his mouth.

It would not, in fact, go amiss to suck some cock right now. Ilya’s body is proving to be bitchy about its awareness of Shane’s proximity. Shane is somewhere on the ice at TD Garden right now, a moving dot on the rink in the video the Metros’ social media manager had posted twenty minutes ago. A clip of their practice filmed from one of the eye-in-the-sky press boxes.

“…so anyway, my girl helped hook me up with a witch out in Albuquerque or something, and she sent me this—”

“Dude,” Sebbin says, very quietly. “You shouldn’t pull that shit out in front of Rozy. He fuckin’ hates magic.”

“What, really? He’s fuckin’ Russian, you’d think…”

Ilya turns and immediately sees the object in question; Hally has a tiny vial grasped in his hand. A spell vial, clearly. He snaps his fingers and points towards the door of the locker room. “Fuck off.”

“Told you, man,” Sebbin mutters. “Sorry, Roz.”

“Uh,” says Hally, curling the spell vial into his palm until it disappears into his massive paw. “Yeah, Rozanov. No offense.”

Ilya tosses his hands, nearly dropping his phone. “Whatever. Keep magic shit out of my locker room. Put the spell in your car or some shit. Don’t bring in here again.”

Sebbin and Hally, who’s really starting to earn the Dirtbag monicker in Ilya’s eyes, rise from their stalls and shuffle out in the direction of the gym.

“No, but seriously, man.” Dirtbag clearly does not realize that his voice carries further than the ten feet between himself and the locker room doorway. “Russia’s where magic comes from or something, it’s totally weird—”

A message pings through from Shane.

Jane
| I need to see you.

Shane has been to the city apartment a handful of times—enough that, at some point, Ilya decided that it was worth it to give him the door code. It had felt precarious to do so, like a joke that had been taken way too far, but Shane had taken it in his stride. Ilya had given him a handful of very practical reasons—the residential entrance was less monitored than the public-facing lobby; their schedules did not have to align with absolute perfection to avoid Shane loitering in an alley; Ilya could stave off suspicion by lollygagging all he wanted at the rink before their inevitable collision, returning to his apartment with the knowledge that Shane was waiting for him.

And yes, Shane is waiting for him.

He’s taken off his jacket and draped it neatly over a dining chair. The open floor plan of Ilya’s apartment provides an unobstructed view from the door to the rest of the first floor; the lofted second floor exists up a floating staircase and houses all three bedrooms. On previous visits, Shane would already be up the stairs, sitting on the edge of Ilya’s bed. Currently, he’s standing in front of the massive windows, arms crossed, unquiet. He’s wearing a grey sweater and navy slacks; not dressed up, but dressed in some upwards trending direction. The Metros traveled today, and the press would have been snapping pictures of Montreal’s boys on the jetway. The league prefers clean lines and neutral colors and tailored trousers.

He turns his head when Ilya enters, and Ilya doesn’t know if it’s the light behind him or the color of his shirt that brings it out, but there are smudges under his eyes that look utterly purple.

“Hey,” he says, like he’s not standing in Ilya’s penthouse apartment looking like shit.

“Whoa,” Ilya says, because he can’t help himself. “Baby, you look bad.”

Shane rolls his eyes. His mouth does an odd crumpling thing against his teeth.

“Tell me,” Ilya says, softly, after a moment of this.

“Um,” Shane sighs. “It’s a curse, I guess.”

Icy dread and hot anger coalesce into a hard ball in Ilya’s chest. “What curse?”

Shane tosses his head, runs a hand through his hair. He looks out the window, because whatever is going on with him is clearly too agonizing to experience while looking directly at Ilya’s face. He runs through the possibilities in his head; something painful, something actually detrimental to Shane’s ability to play, something that will take him out of the playoffs, something humiliating—

Shane crosses his arms over his chest, lurches a single step towards Ilya like he’s attached to a string pulled taut.

“Remember rookie season,” Shane says, apropos of nothing.

Ilya cuts a sharp, humorless grin. “Most of it.”

“They put you on Curse Protocol. You said it was a hazing thing. And I told you, do you remember, that I’d heard of guys—”

“Getting their dicks cursed off,” Ilya says, because even at the time he’d thought it was such a Shane flavored thing to say, and he’s had the thought many times since. He does actually spend a concerning amount of his time rereading old texts between Jane and Lily. Including and perhaps even especially those early ones, when Shane was so hard to pin down and the minor successes were all the sweeter. Shane initiating a conversation; Shane telling some small, sarcastic joke; the few times early on when Ilya had sent the ubiquitous are you up text and Shane had actually responded yeah.

He’s read them a lot, is the point.

“Yeah,” Shane says, eyes refusing to settle. He looks fucking hunted, like he expects to be brutally struck down in the very near future. “Well.”

Ilya’s Russophone mind does sometimes struggle to parse these fucking conversations that Shane likes to have—the ones that are part innuendo, part implication and almost nothing is just said out fucking loud. One of the great exertions of Ilya’s life is translating everything Shane Hollander says or does into a language that makes sense, typically Russian but also sometimes the language that sex speaks.

This one takes him a moment.

“Gone?” Ilya demands. “Is just—is gone, Hollander? You are smooth like Ken doll down there—”

“Oh my God,” Shane whispers, devastated. “Shut the fuck up. No. Who taught you—no. Rozanov. Oh my God.”

“Then what? Don’t tell me you have a pu—”

“Don’t.” Shane’s eyes slam closed, arms tightening around the middle of himself like he thinks he’ll be sick, or is afraid he will be. Like the stereotypical visual innuendo of someone who has something horribly fucking wrong with them. His next words even sound like a gag. “Don’t say it.”

Ilya’s fingers go pins-and-needles numb at his sides.

“Shit,” he says, finally, and probably in Russian. “Shit, this is…”

“Yeah,” Shane breathes. “Yeah.”

There’s a moment of silence. Neither of them particularly knows how to move on from this. Ilya’s mind is spinning at a speed that would make the Earth itself weep with jealousy. He thinks about what is living underneath Shane’s clothes. He thinks about the picture from the plane and the clip of the Metros’ practice this afternoon and he wonders when this whole thing happened. He wonders if it hurt. He wonders how Shane fucking showered. He thinks about Shane in the shower, and then he thinks about Shane naked and then he lets himself think the words ‘Shane’ and ‘hasapussy’, all one word like even the secrecy of his own mind can’t comprehend the magnitude, and then his knees try to buckle.

“I need you,” Shane starts, and Ilya is nodding before he even finishes, “to come—”

“Yes,” Ilya says, nodding emphatically. “Yes, of course.”

“With me—fucking stop—to talk to the witch.” Shane’s feet shift, and is he carrying himself differently? Ilya doesn’t know, he hasn’t paid this much attention to a man’s crotch since Sveta told him that you could judge dick size from the shape of a man’s zipper when he stands, a skill which Sveta occasionally still uses for evil.

“The witch,” Ilya says, and it’s just sounds his mouth is making the first time. Then he comprehends and repeats, “The witch?” with such incredulity that Shane’s eyes widen.

“Yes.” Shane is, perhaps, remembering Ilya’s reputation in that moment. Or not—it’s not anything that Ilya has ever shared with him outright, and he has no idea what does and does not travel outside of locker rooms. Shane Hollander has no real reason to know that there is a blanket ban on magic in the Raiders’ locker room, just the same as Ilya has no reason to know that in Montreal, a certain brand of body spray is so thoroughly blacklisted that players can’t even own a bottle in the privacy of their own homes. Nevertheless, Ilya does know this.

(“Sorry,” Ilya had said, laying on top of the hotel bedspread behind Shane, who’d just retched for a third time. Ilya’s skin was still pink from scrubbing the scent of what was supposed to be pachouli and tonka bean off himself, but the damage had been done. “Can you still smell it? Maybe is on the pillows. Should I—"

“Shut up,” Shane had said. “Shut up. You’re making it worse.”

“It hurts very bad?”

“Have you ever had a fucking migraine?”

“No. Is like headache? Like, very bad? Headache?”

“Shut up. Please stop talking. Give me the bucket.”

Then he’d tried to say go away, don’t watch me do this, and Ilya had politely turned his head but decidedly not left the bed. Then he’d put a cold rag on Shane’s forehead, curled a knee against his back and rubbed his shoulders, and pretended that this was a very normal thing to do for a person you casually had sex with. He’d taken the washed-out ice bucket with him in the morning and threw it in the dumpster round back of the hotel because Shane catastrophized so badly about someone unknowingly filling it up with ice ever again. The Raiders had sent Ilya the itemized room bill with the ice bucket item underlined and several question marks. He’d paid the fine without comment.)

Presently, Ilya says, “What the fuck do you need me for?” because it is so genuinely the last thing he wants to do, and Shane looks like he would rather just jump from the balcony than actually seek out the local witch. Neither of them needs to be doing this shit.

Shane flinches very gently, only really in his eyebrows and fingers. “Because—I trust—or, fuck, I don’t think you’ll lie to me about what she says, and I feel like this is the sort of thing that the language barrier could fuck with—”

“Hollander. Not all witches are Russian. This is stereotype.”

Shane rolls his eyes so hard that Ilya is surprised they don’t get stuck. “I know that.”

“The Baba Yaga thing—that is myth. Or maybe she was real, but she didn’t make magic. You know this, yes? I know you are Canadian and only think about hockey, Hollander, but magic is not Russian.”

“I know! Oh my God, you are so fucking—” Shane turns halfway around, screams into the back of his hand. “Fuck, Ilya! I know that most witches aren’t actually Russian. The White Witch of Boston is. Google says she only speaks Russian.”

Ilya’s lips twist up into what is surely not a smile—some ugly imitation of it, maybe, because Shane’s eyes dart down to his lips and the worry seems to renew and multiply.

“Why do you need a witch?” he sighs, finally. “Curses go away on their own. Even doctors say this.” Ilya hasn’t been cursed since the spots rookie season, and he’s made damn sure that there’s no repeat performance under his captaincy. But the NHL guidelines regarding Curse Protocol are clear: wait for the magic to take its course, make medical interventions where needed, do not under any circumstances involve a witch. The magic will fade on its own. Ilya’s body was free of any spots that his skin didn’t make on its own by the following morning. Karkov, with his leglock curse, had only been laid flat for about forty minutes before the curse started to fade. Just long enough to win the Metros their ticket to Boston.

“This one isn’t going away,” Hollander says through his teeth. “It’s been two days, Rozanov. The guys are getting suspicious. I can’t undress.”

Ilya begins to gnaw on the inside of his cheek. In echo, Shane’s jaw does that rhythmic clench-unclench-clench thing that Ilya does, occasionally, think about when he is inside other people.

“I need—” Shane’s lips pause, work themselves soundlessly around the shape of what he’s trying not to say.

Ilya is terrified that the next word out of Shane’s mouth will just be you for the second time, and then he’ll be obligated to raze this fucking city to the ground if that’s what it takes to break this fucking curse. All while wondering what it looks like between Shane’s thighs. Furious at the injustice of never getting to find out, and of wanting to.

Fucking magic.

“Yes,” Ilya says, preempting his own complete loss of sanity. “Fine. Now?”

Shane softly closes his mouth, purses his lips and lets his eyes crawl across the wall behind Ilya’s head. “Or never, I guess.”

“I vote never,” Ilya says, petulant, and Shane—well, he laughs just a little. And Ilya is happy to hear it, and wants him to do it again, and wants to feel it from inside him.

Witch’s huts are a little different in the U.S., it would seem.

The White Witch of Yaroslavl had lived in a true hut. A wooden izba, it sat on a piece of land surrounded by garden beds, trees blocking it in on three sides. It had a particular shape to it that implied magic lived within; Ilya isn’t sure he would be able to describe what that meant, but anyone else who’d ever seen a witch’s hut in the Russian countryside would immediately agree with him. The kitchen was centrally located within the house and every room looked inwards onto it. It had been an old building, purpose-built, handed down from witch to apprentice for at least a handful of centuries.

The White Witch of Boston lives in a fucking condo. A duplex, even. Ilya stands outside a literal white picket fence and lets his eyes drift over the planter beds lined up neatly below the bay window of the western-side condo. The other side of the duplex is very obviously occupied by someone with small children. There is a Cozy Coup on its side on the postage stamp lawn.

“Is this necessary?” Shane bitches for a fourth consecutive time, pulling at the scarf that Ilya has carefully draped over his face so that only his eyes and the top of his head show. “Don’t we have to give her our names, isn’t that—”

“Do not give her your name unless she asks,” Ilya says, far too intently for even his own taste. “Actually, you don’t speak at all. I speak to her. This is why you brought me here, yes?”

Shane’s eyes narrow above the fold of the scarf. It’s cute in that kind of bodily unbearable way that Ilya has come to associate with Shane Hollander. He has to imagine that a similar feeling to this is the one that makes gorillas beat their chests.

“I brought you here to translate,” Shane says. “Not to have a conversation over my head. Stop it.” He slaps at Ilya’s hand as he reaches out again in an attempt to adjust the scarf. It keeps slipping down and showing a small constellation of freckles on the high peak of Shane’s left cheek, which completely invalidates everything that Ilya is trying to achieve with this lost-in-the-Sahara style look he’s foisted upon Shane.

“Witches are sneaky,” Ilya tells him, intent. “They will look at you and they will know things. I do not want a witch to know things about you.”

It’s a bit too on the nose. Shane’s eyes go soft and half-lidded, like he’s really thinking about what Ilya said. Like he’s trying to draw a line between two points and both of them are Ilya Rozanov.

Before any of those thoughts can come to fruition, the door to the condo swings open.

The White Witch of Boston is somewhat advanced in age. Her diminutive height is exacerbated by a distinct hunch. Her hair is so silver it’s nearly white, and it flows down her back like so much water. Her eyes are the kind of piercing blue that always make Ilya feel haunted by his own father.

In Russian, she says, “Why are you making an old woman wait? You have been on my lawn for ten minutes. Come in or leave.”

Ilya grits his teeth, looks at Shane and nods towards the door.

Immediately inside the condo is the kitchen. This, at least, is somewhat reminiscent of the huts Ilya remembers from childhood. The kitchen has clearly been remodeled with the needs of a practicing witch in mind. A hearth burns away in the center of the room—though it’s terribly modern, with a faux-brick finish and a stainless steel venting hood that disappears into the ceiling. An enormous pot simmers over the fire within, belching steam. The floorplan of the condo is open, much like Ilya’s own apartment, and beyond the hearth is a seating area with two cranberry-colored loveseats facing each other, a wooden table in the middle and, surprising Ilya endlessly, a television mounted to the wall.

He doesn’t think he ever imagined that witches watch television. Or drive cars. Or do anything that isn’t particularly ancient and ominous. He supposes he imagined them reading, though in the contexts of grimoires and recipe books rather than novels. The bookshelf against the adjacent wall doesn’t appear to be organized with any particular method in mind, though most of the titles are in Russian and few seem to have anything to do with magic. Some of them are the kind of train station romance novel that Ilya remembers women his mother’s age slipping out of their bags to read on benches in the park. Mob bosses with hearts of gold and princesses with secrets. Atop the shelf, as though ready to be picked back up at a moment’s notice, is a well-loved copy of Anna Karenina.

“Hello,” he says, hands folded, hovering next to the hearth as he takes all of this in. “My friend has a problem and we are hoping that you can—”

The witch gestures towards the sitting area, showing off a floral manicure and several golden rings. She says, “Sit down. I will be with you shortly.” Clearly for Shane’s benefit, she switches to English that even to Ilya’s ear is heavily accented. “Tea, coffee, water?”

“Uh…” Ilya glances at Shane. “Do you want something to drink?”

Shane opens and closes his mouth like a fish, looks at his shoes and says, “Rozanov. Can you just tell her—”

“No,” Ilya sighs. “Not really. We are, like…” He gestures with his arms aloft, sways his body slightly. “Dancing with her now. This is how it always is with witches.”

Shane’s jaw clenches-unclenches. He rolls his eyes and tucks his hands into his pockets and says, “Water’s fine.”

They move into the seating area and place themselves on the edge of the cushions, stiff and straight with only the comfort of their touching knees to soothe. Immediately after they sit, Ilya hears the soft jingle of a bell and discovers that it’s coming from a cat trotting along the floor. It is perhaps the fluffiest cat Ilya has ever seen, completely white with enormous tufts spilling from its ears and different colored eyes. One blue, one brown, and a sweet little face.

“Hello, darling,” Ilya murmurs to it, when it butts its face against his calf. “How are you? You are very pretty.”

Shane’s head wobbles on his shoulders for a moment. An expression of discernment. He recognizes at least one of those words. Darling or pretty. Maybe both. In sound if not in definition. It isn’t surprising, because Ilya does call him those things, too.

The witch brings in a tray. It is burdened with a full tea service and a perspiring pitcher of water. It lands in the middle of the low table, jingling alarmingly, and then she is arranging the teapot, teacups, a tiny bowl of jam, spoons. She pushes the pitcher and a tall, narrow glass in front of Shane. She fixes herself tea in a way that reminds Ilya of Sundays and mournful music and the smell of incense.

Once she is content, she fixes them with a stare and there is absolutely no noise in the room for almost a full minute. Even the cat stops rubbing its face against Ilya’s feet and abruptly cuts off its own purring.

“I am Olesya Semyonovna,” she says. “I am the White Witch of Boston and the Coven Mother of the eastern seaboard. My mother was Ekaterina Ivanovna. Her mother was Lyudmila Stanislovovna. What are your names?”

“Ilya,” he says immediately. Gesturing to his side, he adds, “Shane.”

Olesya Semyonovna raises her eyebrows expectantly, and Ilya sighs.

“Ilya Grigorievitch,” he says, grudgingly. Of Shane, he asks, “Do you have a middle name?”

It’s strange, maybe, that he doesn’t know after all these years.

Shane blinks his eyes several times, rapid and fluttering. “Uh, it’s David. After my dad.”

“Ah. Perfect. Very Russian.” Ilya rolls his eyes but doesn’t look away from Shane when he says, “He is Shane and David, which is his father’s name.”

Olesya Semyonovna seems less than impressed. “He is cursed, yes? And he wants it fixed? He must tell me who he is. He needs to uncover his face and tell me his names.”

“No,” Ilya snaps, entirely cognizant of his own rudeness. “His face stays covered. You can see his eyes. Those are the important part, yes? For your—purposes?”

Shane is frowning, and Ilya can tell just from the set of his eyes. The way his brows dip. Across from them, the witch clucks her tongue and says, “The soviets raised a generation of boys who are scared of their own shadows. Do you even know why magic scares you so badly, Ilyusha?”

“Do not call me that,” Ilya snaps. Then, in English, “Hollander. What is your mother’s name?”

“…Yuna,” Shane says. Ilya thinks he knew this.

“And her mother?”

“Mitsuko. Is this—”

“Yes. Necessary, I’m sorry. One more—do you know your grandmother’s mother’s name? Your, ah—”

“My great-grandmother? I mean, I don’t know if I ever…”

Abruptly, Ilya reaches out and grabs his hand. He’s only a little surprised when Shane squeezes, hard enough that Ilya feels his bones grind together in a way that should feel painful but is really quite the opposite. Grounding and perfect. He squeezes back just as hard.

“Please try,” Ilya says, in a way that he hopes conveys that this is not fun for him either. That he would like to stop all of this, if he could.

Shane sighs, tilts his head back. “I think her name was…Chiyo. Chiyoko, maybe. I don’t know, I never met her. She died before I was born. In Japan.”

Olesya Semyonovna says, “Many people have crossed many oceans for us to be sitting here together,” and it’s such witch bullshit that Ilya cannot help the violence with which his eyes roll.

Ilya presses his leg, knee to heel, hard against the side of Shane’s and rapidly announces, “We play a particular sport. People, fans, other players—they use curses to engineer better odds for a certain team to win. Shane is—” He glances very quickly at Shane, finds no real indication that he recognized his name in the flood of Russian, and pushes onward, “the best player on his team. Probably in the league. He has curse-blocks on him but only for the usual sport curses and this is…not that. The curse is not going away and if his team finds out, he will not be allowed to play and his team will lose games.”

“What curse?”

“Do…do I have to tell you?”

Olesya Semyonovna snorts inelegantly through her nose. “Yes, of course.”

Ilya breathes deep, unsure why it feels as though he is inviting this woman—this stranger with strange ways—into his home, into some protected portion of his being. Into his bed, even, as though the concept of Shane is inseparable from the most intimate aspects of Ilya’s own life.

“It changed his…anatomy,” Ilya says eventually, trying to be delicate if only for the benefit of the elderly. Which he assumes Olesya Semyonovna to be, although the longer he looks at her the more confused by her he becomes. Her hair is silver and her face lined, her back hunched, but she carries herself in a stable way that almost entirely offsets her stature.

“In what way?”

Ilya sighs. “What is—between his legs.”

“And what, exactly, is—”

“A pussy, ah?” Ilya snaps, tossing a hand. In English, because it’s become clear that Olesya Semyonovna can at least generally understand English, if not respond in it, and he’s not interested in playing that particular witch game anymore. “He normally has dick, and curse has given him pussy. Yes? So can we fix it now?”

“Oh my God,” Shane sighs, hand over his eyes.

Olesya Semyonovna rises from the couch and crosses to the bookshelf, which she peruses with no particular indications of urgency. Beside Ilya, Shane is breathing like a racehorse and his knee is bouncing at a speed that is visibly perturbing the cat, which had jumped onto the back of the couch behind Ilya and is busily pressing its massive body against the length of his shoulders. Ilya places a hand on Shane’s thigh, clamping down.

“Stop,” he murmurs. Shane obeys immediately, catching a grunt in the back of his throat as he does so. Ilya rhythmically tightens each of his fingers in turn, letting the frantic keeling of his body find mooring in each plush give of Shane’s flesh.

Olesya Semyonovna returns with a large book—the quintessential tome, Ilya thinks, as she pushes the untouched tea service aside and thumps it down. Ilya is not a master of reading upside-down, and he thinks it’s perhaps harder to do with Cyrillic even if one’s first language uses that alphabet. He does manage to glean that the title of the tome is Curses of the Body, Mind and Soul, before Olesya Semyonovna is flipping the book open to what Ilya imagines is the index, and then forward again to a particular page.

“There are several known curses with the effect you describe,” Olesya Semyonovna says, as she lifts a delicate pair of reading glasses onto her face. They have previously been hanging from a beaded chain on her neck, which caused a soft susurrus each time she moved. “They are all considered sex curses primarily, although they have specific secondary traits which may prove illuminating if we can isolate which curse was used.”

“That is literally impossible,” Ilya intoned. “Anybody on the continent could have cursed him.”

“Sex curses are particular in their requirements,” says Olesya Semyonovna, eyes still on the book. “The person who cursed him would be obliged to have access to his biological material in order to cast the curse.”

“What,” Ilya demands. His eyes turn wildly towards Shane. “You mean his—”

“My what?” Shane demands

“No,” Olesya Semyonovna sighs, long-suffering. “Hair, usually.”

“We shower in public,” Ilya says, intent. “We—we play a high-contact sport. People get their hair yanked out all the time. And we are…public figures. There are any number of ways someone could have access to his hair. Or—or any other part of him, really.” In English, and mostly for Shane’s benefit, he says, “He has been threatened and stalked.” Briefly, two years ago and at a time when he and Ilya had not been in contact. Coming into that knowledge had made Ilya feel a sort of impotent fear that was only rivaled by the roar of inconveniently possessive anger that had surged in his chest.

So as not to examine that memory any closer, he adds, “Had a bag stolen, once. I think last fall. Was full of clothes, some used, and—”

“I told you, I don’t know if it was stolen, or—” Shane’s eyes widen in recognition. “Wait, does that have something to do with—"

Olesya Semyonovna waves a hand, dismissive. “Unlikely. If we cannot identify the particular curse used, then the curse will have to be broken the natural way.”

“I already told you,” Ilya growls, “it has been days. Two days, yes?” Shane gives a hesitant nod, obviously thrown by the quick transition from Russian to English.

“Sex curses are not broken by time,” Olesya Semyonovna says, and Ilya groans with his palms over his face.

“Rozanov,” Shane says. “You need to tell me what the fuck is going on. I can’t understand—"

“I don’t fucking understand either!” Ilya flings both hands away from himself, pointing at the witch with his thumbs folded onto his fingers, shaking in emphasis. “She talks in fucking circles, Shane. Fucking witches. I tell you they all are like this. They say, ‘Magic is to help you,’ and then when people get cursed, because they make the fucking curses, all they want is to make you say your grandmother’s name and look at moles and say, ‘Oh, your father, he hates you’—pah, fuck.”

He falls back against the couch, a marionette with its strings cut. Olesya Semyonovna is unaffected by his outburst. She sips her tea, traces a finger down the page of her book.

“You say this is sex curse,” Ilya says. His voice sounds rough to his own ears, frustration and exhaustion scratching in his throat. He shouldn’t fucking be here. “What does this mean?”

Next to him, Shane leans forward, taught like a bowstring. Like the curve of his spine would make beautiful music if plucked.

“You know of our four elements, yes?” Olesya Semyonovna doesn’t wait for his response. Ilya isn’t sure he would have honored such a stupid question with one, anyway. “Flame, water, wind, earth. All magic comes from these things. They are the foundation of our practice. However, magic goes even deeper than the physical foundation of things. Underneath the physical is where you find the spark of magic—the source itself. They are love, hate, time, faith and death.”

Ilya feels a shiver arch up his spine. “I do not see how any of this is relevant.”

“It is all relevant, Ilya Grigorievich.” Olesya Semyonovna looks to Shane, lowers her reading glasses. “Sex curse is not like body curse. Body curse is from hate. Hate is not strong. Sex curse—can also be from hate, but must also be from love. Love and hate are…” She holds up her hands, links them together, shrugs.

“So how do we break it?” Shane is pale, knee bouncing again.

“Sex curse is broken by love. Is strongest, most powerful. But also most…” She glances at Ilya, says in Russian, “Fickle.”

“This is not the first time a hockey player has ever been cursed with a pussy,” Ilya snaps. “There must be some way. This—love and hate bullshit, it makes no sense. I have heard people say that you can break the curse if you—” He stops, mouth twisting.

Olesya Semyonovna smiles as though Ilya is a child who’d just discovered how to spell their own name.

“It is a form of love, no?” she says.

Olesya Semyonovna sends them off with a spell. A powder, some sort of glamour that will make the eye slide over what shouldn’t be seen. It doesn’t give Shane his dick back, or even really make it look like he has one, but—allegedly—the guys in the shower will be none the wiser.

They test it on one of Ilya’s moles. He pulls off his shirt and Shane mixes the powder with water and a little bit of dirt from a potted plant in Ilya’s living room—one that might as well belong to the housekeeper for how often Ilya has ever watered it. Ilya stands with his hips against the kitchen counter, fingers tapping as Shane rubs the concoction he’s made onto one of the moles somewhere halfway up Ilya’s spine. He lights a match, holds it so briefly to Ilya’s skin that he only feels a split second of heat, then blows on it with pursed lips and cool, gentle air from his own lungs. Ilya remembers another lifetime, when his mother had done something very similar.

“How do you know to do this?” Ilya mumbles, elbows on the counter now. He feels wrung out, like a rag so old that it is better off thrown away.

“My mom puts curse-blocks on me every summer,” Shane says. “She has since I was a kid. They work basically the same way. You need something from all the elements. Fire, water—”

“Yes, thank you, I know,” Ilya snaps, and then immediately adds, “Sorry. I do not…like this.”

“Hm.” Shane leans against the counter beside him, arms folded, biceps bunched under his sweater. Ilya only barely resists the urge to lean over and put his teeth against the widest part of Shane’s bicep—though from the look on Shane’s face, Ilya isn’t hiding the urge well. He smirks, lashes dipping over his eyes several times, and looks down at the counter. “Anyway, she waits until a windy day and then she fills this old kiddy pool with lake water and I—” he huffs a laugh. “I sit there while she dumps a bunch of curse-blocks over my head, and then a bunch of sand, and then she burns incense. It takes hours. It’s a fucking nightmare.”

Ilya screws up his mouth against what he wants to say, and then says it anyway. “She does these things because she loves you, I think.”

“Yeah,” Shane says softly, not necessarily happily. “I know.”

He straightens away from the counter, wets a cloth and wipes the dirt and powder from Ilya’s back. A quiet moment is lost to utter stillness as Ilya feels Shane’s gaze heavy on his skin.

“Did it work?”

“Yeah, it’s…it’s weird.” Ilya feels Shane’s fingers smooth in a long, arching glide along his spine. He cannot stop the goosebumps that rise up, or the tensing of his stomach, or the twitching of his cock.

“I can feel it,” Shane murmurs after a moment. “And it’s like…I know it’s there? But when I try to look at it my eyes just slide away, and I can’t remember what it looks like.”

“You think it will work for you?”

“I mean, yeah. Nobody is trying to look directly at my dick; that’s kind of the point. But maybe you wouldn’t know that.”

Ilya throws a smirk over his shoulder and Shane smirks back. The sleepless purple smudges under his eyes abide. He’d said very little on the way back from the witch’s hut, lost in thought with a thumbnail between his teeth. Ilya had translated the entire conversation to the best of his ability and Shane had absorbed it all in almost complete silence, only humming and scoffing at certain points. Now, the lids fall over his eyes again, and Ilya thinks about what he must do.

“Maybe I touch you a little,” Ilya murmurs, straightening up from the counter, turning to lean his hips back against it. Shane shuffles his socked feet on the kitchen tiles and looks down to watch himself do it. Ilya looks too, briefly, just to enjoy the way his toes curl.

“I don’t know,” Shane mumbles. “It feels really…different, and I don’t know if…”

Ilya raises his eyebrows, tilts his head. “You know I have touched pussy before?”

“Fuck you.” It’s like a fucking reflex for the guy. So is the pretty blush that creeps up underneath his freckles. “So have I. It’s not like I don’t know—but it’s different. It’s weird, it feels…I don’t know, wrong in a way—”

“Yes,” Ilya sighs. “I know, dorogoy, and I am sorry.” There has never been a more perfect, awful example of the fact that their bodies are not their own. They are performers being paid handsomely for the task of piloting property that belongs to the NHL, to their respective teams and, more broadly, to the fans of those teams. It’s a concept that Ilya made his peace with when he came to this country, the lesser of two evils when juxtaposed to the idea of remaining under his father’s thumb for the rest of his life. It’s a concept that feels like fucking sandpaper when he thinks about it too hard—especially when he considers that someone, maybe someone in this very fucking city, took such liberties with a body that is in some ways more precious to him than his own.

“I am sorry,” Ilya says again, more insistently. “But you heard the witch, yes? Maybe we can break the sex curse with sex.”

“You said that she said a bunch of bullshit about love and hate—”

“Hollander.” Ilya waits for him to look up, baleful and reluctant like a scolded child. “I will not touch you if you don’t want. You know this by now, yes?”

Shane gives a single, jerky nod.

“Good. So is fine. We have this…thing.” Ilya gestures with distaste to the corked spell vial still on the counter. “Should get you through the series. But the offer is, ah, under the table.”

“On the table.”

“Yes, is what I said.”

Evening is settling over Boston like a blanket, though it’s not late enough that Ilya feels the need to extend the offer of a ride back to Shane’s hotel, or even one of the guest bedrooms upstairs. Shane also seems uninterested in leaving—he drifts to the couch, where he sits with his knees drawn up and his eyes out the window. Ilya slides two meal plan trays into the oven to heat and flips through channels on the television. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realizes that this is the longest they have spent in each other’s presence without fucking. It should feel odd. It should grate at Ilya’s skin that Hollander isn’t leaving, the way it does when someone overstays their welcome in Ilya’s bed. Ilya waits for his presence to begin to chafe.

It never does.

The sun is orange on the harbor when Shane drops his legs, shuffles down on the couch, and presses his toes to Ilya’s thigh. He says, “Hey.”

“Hm?” Ilya grunts, eyes still on the television. The Celtics are neck-deep in their own playoff series, though the Knicks are wiping the floor with them on their home court. It’s a bit like watching a slow-motion trainwreck.

Shane’s toe nudges again. “Hey.”

Ilya looks at him, then, and Shane blinks slow, licks his lip and jerks his chin. Ilya is crawling towards him before he even truly understands that he’s moving.

“Fuck,” Ilya hisses into Shane’s open mouth, enjoying a hero’s fucking welcome in the plush give of Shane’s lips and the wet, open expanse of his mouth. Shane arches up underneath him, slutty for it immediately, and there’s a swooping, incongruous moment where Ilya’s dick slots into the space between Shane’s legs and there is nothing but heat. He misses the pressure, the filthy sensation of an erection against his own, but this is—

“Oh fuck,” Shane whimpers, arching against him again. “That feels—that’s—”

“Are you wet?” Ilya says, sucking kisses down Shane’s jaw. “Are you wet for me, huh?”

“I don’t…maybe, maybe.” Shane gives a jerky, aborted thrust of his hips and groans in something that sounds a little like agony. “God, fuck, I don’t know. Rozanov, I need—”

“Okay, yes, shh.” The couch is enormous (Ilya finds it crucial that his furniture can, for the most part, be fucked upon) more than big enough for Ilya to slot himself between Shane and the back of the couch. He shoves at Shane until he rests on his side, heaves one of his thighs backwards over his own hip, feels Shane’s foot hook behind his calf. Somewhat redundantly, Ilya says, “Spread your legs, baby, fuck.” He doesn’t find it redundant at all when Shane moans and tries to part his knees further.

The heat between Shane’s legs is fucking unbelievable to touch. Ilya feels it even before he’s worked his hand completely into Shane’s pants, but once he has he cannot believe just how hot it actually is—and yes, he’s wet. Ilya takes a moment to prod, two fingers stroking broadly to map with touch what his eyes can’t see. Shane’s thick, gorgeous dick (Which Ilya is struck, momentarily, with yet more poignant yearning for) has translated into fat lips and a sizeable clit that twitches against the heel of Ilya’s hand.

“What do you need?” Ilya asks, lips mashed to the side of Shane’s head. Sweat is building between them already, misting up on the back of Shane’s neck and in the hollow of Ilya’s throat. Ilya’s forearm feels like one uninterrupted strip of pure heat where it lays against the broad expanse of Shane’s belly, plunged into his pants, hand roasting in the fire between his legs.

“I don’t know, I can’t—” Shane groans, head swinging back against Ilya’s shoulder, hips moving in a frustrated figure-eight motion like he can’t figure out what feels right. “I’ve never—it doesn’t feel the same, it’s not—”

“Shh,” Ilya says again. “Okay, sorry, sorry—no more questions.” Shane whimpers his relief and cranes one big hand back to find, as is his habit, the back of Ilya’s hair to pull. It’s a buoy of familiarity in a sea of strange, and Ilya grunts encouragement into the side of Shane’s neck when his fingers creak closed in a strong tug. He speaks into the cavern under Shane’s ear, pressing the pads of his fingers down. “Just tell me when it feels good, huh? Tell me when you like it.”

“Fuck,” Shane hisses, as Ilya’s fingers circle. “Oh, fuck. Rozanov.”

“Good?” Ilya sucks Shane’s earlobe into his mouth, feels him quake.

“Yeah,” Shane breathes. His hand is clench-unclenching against Ilya’s scalp in a way that reads as completely unconscious. He shifts his hips, still searching for something. “It’s…it’s good, it’s—a lot, maybe you should…fuck…”

Ilya presses his hand down, sinks his middle finger down into tight and wet. Shane’s back bows in a way that almost sends him rolling off the couch.

“Shit, shit,” Shane chants. “That’s—oh my God—”

“Good?” Ilya asks again. Shane pants in his ear, hips shifting, saying nothing. Ilya wishes his other hand wasn’t trapped under Shane’s body, left to do nothing but ineffectually flex against his hip. He would normally have that hand at Shane’s throat or at Shane’s waist, poised with a smack to prompt him into a response. Now, in the moment, he can only burrow his fingers underneath Shane’s sweater, find skin and pinch.

“Fuck!” Shane yelps.

“Stay with me,” Ilya growls. “Can’t go off in that little head by yourself this time. Use your words. Good?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Fuck, yeah. But it’s not—I need—fuck, I don’t know, I don’t know—"

“Okay, new plan,” Ilya grunts, and hauls himself out. Shane yelps to find himself falling back against the couch, though Ilya catches him before his head flops against the arm. Between Shane’s spread legs, one knee curled under himself and the other braced on the floor, Ilya tucks all four fingers of both hands into Shane’s waistband and tugs.

“Wait-wait-wait—” Shane’s hands snap to Ilya’s, halting them halfway. The beautiful plane of Shane’s belly stretches out between Ilya’s hands, heaving with his breath. Skin pulled more taught against the muscle at this point in the playoffs. It’s all a player can do during a series to eat enough to keep from passing out on the ice, let alone to keep up any sort of consistent weight. Ilya has now seen Shane’s body in most of its forms—preseason bulked, a nice layer of fat softening him and making him beautifully heavy in Ilya’s arms. Mid-season, arms and legs thick and strong. Now this—a body that tells a story of sacrifice, of the brutal work that Shane has already put in over the post-season. Precious for it, though Ilya would never say it out loud.

Below Shane’s belly, a thick thatch of black hair. A plush mound, fatter than what normally sits at the base of Shane’s dick. And the barest peek of—

Shane clamps his legs closed.

“I don’t,” he pants. “You shouldn’t—”

“Shouldn’t?” Ilya prompts, mouth dry. “Shouldn’t look? Shouldn’t—fuck, Hollander, I keep telling you I’ve seen pussy before. I like pussy.”

“And I keep telling you,” Shane snaps, “that I have too. I know what they’re supposed to be like, and this isn’t—it’s—”

“You think you have ugly pussy, Hollander?” Ilya can’t quite keep the incredulous laughter out of his voice. Mostly because the idea of Shane having an ugly anything is so blatantly absurd as to be almost insulting to Ilya’s good taste. Somewhat because Ilya has been thinking about putting his face between Shane’s thighs for hours now and this is a new and creative kind of blue-balling that strikes Ilya as sort of fucking hilarious. Of course the guy who made Ilya chase the idea of his asshole for two years and remained a virgin the entire time would pull something like this. Of course that guy would discover he had a pussy two days ago, beg Ilya to help him and then arbitrarily decide that said pussy was ugly and hang a Closed for Business sign between his legs even when Ilya had been his most loyal fucking customer.

Shane fucking Hollander.

Shane turns his head, glares at the muted television and seems to sink a few inches into the couch just to put that much distance between himself and Ilya’s still-outstretched hands.

“Hollander,” Ilya tries again. “Is—is not a big deal. I have seen lots of pussies. I’m sure—"

“Oh my God,” Shane sighs, eyes fluttering closed in something like anguish. “Shut up. Now’s not the time for your fucking hockey dudebro Casanova bullshit, Rozanov, fuck.” Ilya busies himself mouthing hockey dudebro Casanova while Shane gnaws on his bottom lip, stares at the basketball game and shifts his hips. When he speaks again, fingers dug deep into the couch cushion below him, it’s to say, “It just doesn’t look—I don’t know, normal. And what if there’s, like…a smell?”

“A smell?”

“Yeah. I’m not really sure—like, it just…” Shane is still pretending to be utterly engrossed in the Celtics laying down to die, and his entire bush is still hanging out like a new and particularly fascinating piece of decoration for Ilya’s minimalist penthouse, and Ilya wants to put his fingers back inside his cunt so badly that it should probably be medically concerning for its likelihood to cause a stroke.

“Hollander,” Ilya murmurs. “Is a cunt, yes? Should smell like a cunt. I know those locker room fucks say shit, but they are idiots who wouldn’t know how to eat pussy if it came with instruction manual. Besides.” He raises his two fingers to his nose, sniffs audibly and at length. “Smells good to me.”

“Fuck,” says Shane, whose eyes double in size within the next split second. The shade of red on his ears and neck is violent. “You’re so gross.”

Ilya opens his mouth and surprises even himself when he says, “Please let me see your pussy, Hollander.” It’s heavy-handed. Ilya is almost never so forthright and he certainly doesn’t fucking beg. Even when barking up Hollander’s proverbial tree, he never debased himself like this.

It’s a risk, and it doesn’t pay off.

“Fuck,” Shane says again. Then surprises Ilya again when he says, “No. Not—not like this. I can’t—” He’s panicking.

“Okay, okay, Jesus. Shh.” He taps his fingers—still a little tacky—against the side of his own thigh, shifts his weight a little to wake up his dozing foot, and says, “So…you still—”

“I should go,” Shane says, abruptly, and he must mean it because he scrambles off the couch like it’s threatened his family. Ilya mourns each loss of skin as Shane pulls his clothing back together—the bush covered with a tug, the zipper pulled up, the sweater smoothed down over the plateaus and valleys of Shane’s stomach. He stands there stiffly for a moment, looking for all the world like he’d just wandered in off the street, a stranger who’d never in his life had Ilya’s fingers pressed up inside his cunt—like someone who isn’t still, probably, wet.

“Uh,” Shane says. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”

“Uh-huh,” Ilya says, eyebrows eloping ceilingward.

“Sorry,” Shane mumbles, and he has the shame to look apologetic before he’s tearing through the apartment towards the front door.

Ilya hasn’t even heard the click of the automatic lock before he’s falling back, shoulders and head hitting the couch at the same time he retrieves his throbbing cock from his pants. It feels like he’s been hard for fucking hours, and maybe he has with all of this bullshit today—Shane fucking Hollander standing in front of him and saying I need you and I trust you. All before he even let Ilya put a hand in his pants, which he can still feel the heat of even now—

He clamps that hand over his mouth, huffs the scent that remains. Masculine, body-savory, and just a little familiar when he thinks about the taste of Shane’s cock, the warning gush of precum right before he comes.

Ilya comes across his own belly in less than a minute then lays there, soft dick in hand, cum going cold on his shirt, foot numb from his own weight. It takes him a minute to realize that Shane, in his haste to leave, had forgotten both the spell vial and his nice, expensive wool jacket.

“Fuck,” he mutters, tossing an elbow across his eyes. “Fuck.”

On the screen, though Ilya doesn’t see, the Knicks’ star forward sits down in the middle of the court and frantically frees his feet from his shoes, because they have abruptly tripled in size and taken on the shape of watermelons.