Rating:

Explicit

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, 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: 2026-10-09 Words: 72,382 Chapters: 14/?

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

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.

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

Rozanovs
- Grigori Ivanovich (b. 1963) — father; alcohol-related dementia; calls for Irina
- Irina Petrovna née Belova (1966–2003) — mother; playwright; her death is the hinge
- Polina Viktorovna née Mikhaylova (b. 1974) — stepmother since 2007; neither villain nor much else
- Aleksei Grigoryevich (b. 1987) — brother; drinks, asks for money
- Ilya Grigoryevich (b. 1991) — POV
- Natalia Anatolyevna (b. 1989) — Aleksei's wife
- Darya Alekseevna (b. 2011) — Aleksei's daughter

Vetrovs
- Sergei Viktorovich (b. 1961) — ex-Boston goalie, HOF; now Minister of Sport
- Yelena Igorevna née Sokolova (b. 1964) — Sovremennik actress; Irina's friend, hence Ilya/Svetlana
- Svetlana Sergeevna (b. 1988) — dual national; law degree, never practised

Orlovs — Moscow
- Konstantin Andreyevich (1928–2011) — grandfather; engineer/Gossnab; arranged the 1992 merger
- Arkady Konstantinovich (b. 1955) — eldest; businessman
- Nina Konstantinovna (b. 1958) — diplomat; Geneva; hinge to Lausanne
- Viktor Konstantinovich (b. 1962) — runs Moscow's top hockey academy
- Marina Sergeyevna née Kalugina (b. 1959) — Viktor's wife; ex-skater, choreographer
- Konstantin Viktorovich (b. 1984) — hockey; heir to the academy
- Yekaterina Viktorovna (b. 1986) — surgeon, then research
- Aleksandr "Sasha" Viktorovich (b. 1989) — ballet, Bolshoi pipeline

Orlovs — St Petersburg
- Andrei Pavlovich (b. 1957) — cardiologist, runs a department
- Vera Andreyevna (b. 1989) — neurology; fellowship in Hamburg
- Pavel Andreyevich (b. 1993) — software, Baltics

Orloffs — Lausanne/Geneva
- Nicolas (b. 1951) — runs the family office; dislikes Russia
- Hélène (b. 1984) — art market, restitution work
- Alexandre (b. 1988) — fund management; wary namesake of Sasha

Orloffs — London
- Mikhail "Michael" (b. 1962) — law, private banking; the structuring man
- Sofia (b. 1991) — art advisory

Siem Reap—July 4

Ilya showers in under four minutes, feeling, oddly, like he has won a lottery he never entered.

Sasha is here. Ilya didn’t ruin it. Or not completely. Sasha’s first words to him—almost the first words out of his mouth—had been mine, still, after everything. Ilya doesn’t know what he owes yet, much less how he means to repay it. But there is a chance. There has to be, because Sasha crossed half the world to find him in fucking Cambodia, God knows how many planes and trains and taxis, put his arms around him and said mine, still.

That’s more than enough. More than Ilya deserves, more than he had allowed himself to hope for.

He dresses and takes the stairs two at a time. He hears Marly laughing before he reaches the bottom.

“No,” Marly says. “No fucking way.”

“I assure you,” Sasha says, “almost to the bone. There was blood everywhere. Have you ever seen a ten-year-old with bloody teeth and lips? It is not a sight one easily forgets.”

Oh, boy. Sasha is telling stories. Of course he is. And naturally it has to be that one. He loves that one. It appeals to his fundamentally malicious spirit.

“Couldn’t you think of something better to tell him?” Ilya says, striding into the courtyard—and then hesitates.

They have colonised one end of it. Svetlana has her feet tucked beneath her on the sofa, Marly sprawled beside her with a beer in hand. Sasha has taken one side of a two-seater, his untouched beer on the table in front of him. There is an empty chair opposite them, another place beside Svetlana and Marly, and then the open cushion at Sasha’s side.

Normally there would be no question. Ilya would sit there—or, more likely, attach himself to Sasha’s ribs like a remora and stay there until physically removed. But they haven’t seen each other in more than a year, and while Ilya currently wants nothing more than to cover as much of Sasha’s skin with his own as possible, he isn’t sure that access is still his. He never earned it in the first place. It had simply always been there, like a door nobody thought to lock. Doors get locked.

Sasha arches both eyebrows and makes an impatient gesture at the empty place beside him.

Not locked, then. Whatever else is owed, it isn’t this. Another stupid wave of euphoria goes through him. Unearned or not, undeserved or not, there is nothing like an unexpected gift to make a man feel like king of the world.

His hesitation has been noticed. Svetlana’s eyes sharpen; Marly looks baffled, then a little sad. Neither says anything.

Ilya drops beside Sasha. “So. You’re telling him the Yuri Morozov thing.”

Sasha nods and wraps an arm around his shoulders, hauling him closer without ceremony; at least twenty per cent of the nervous energy leaves Ilya’s body.

“I had just explained our master plan.”

“In fairness, it was a good plan. Svetlana came up with it. My suggestion was to steal a car and run him over.”

Marly laughs, shocked but not especially surprised. He knows who he’s dealing with by now. “Breaking into Sasha’s ballet academy is definitely better than vehicular murder. I’ll give you that.”

“We almost had it,” Ilya says. “If they’d let me climb out the window with the files—”

Svetlana rolls her eyes. “You always say this as though one day somebody will agree with you.”

“They would if they understood tactics.”

“We were on the sixth floor. He wanted to slide down the drainpipe like a fireman.” She turns to Marly, long-suffering. “Though he is correct that we nearly got away with it. If we’d remembered to keep a proper lookout, we’d have been gone before Morozov returned.”

“Right.” Marly sits forward, beer dangling between both hands. “So let me see if I’ve got this. You break into the infirmary to steal confidential medical files—yes, yes, evidence, noble cause, whistleblowers, fine. The bad guy catches you red-handed. Roz stuffs the”—he takes a breath—“loot under his shirt and tries to run. Morozov grabs him. Roz bites him hard enough to bleed. What happens next?”

Ilya shrugs and uses the movement to edge a little farther into Sasha’s side. “About what you’d expect. I was a vicious ten-year-old, but I was still ten. He threw me into a wall like I weighed nothing.”

Sasha makes a pleased sound. “Foolish man. Almost anything would have been preferable.”

Marly grins. “Let me guess. You didn’t appreciate somebody smacking your baby around.”

“Precisely. Although because Russia was then, and remains, hopelessly patriarchal, Morozov made the mistake of watching me.” Sasha glances toward Svetlana. “He ought to have been watching the thirteen-year-old girl who was playing junior-league hockey and had just picked up a lamp.”

Svetlana hums, eyes gone pleasantly distant with memory. “I broke his nose in two places and would have gotten more but people started arriving.”

“Drawn, you understand, by all the screaming,” Ilya says.

Marly is grinning again, but there’s something more incredulous underneath it now. “Okay. Obviously this worked out somehow, because none of you ended up in juvie or a Siberian salt mine or whatever you people did with delinquent aristocrats. But how? You broke into a school, broke into an infirmary, stole medical records and assaulted a teacher because another kid told Sasha something was wrong.”

Sasha hums.

“Irina Petrovna came for us, of course.”

His voice changes on the name—not softer, exactly, but touched by something older than softness, the note Ilya has heard all his life whenever Sasha speaks of her, on the increasingly rare occasions he speaks of her at all. Reverence, perhaps. Something very close to worship.

“And as it happened,” Sasha continues, “Morozov had been running the scheme for years. He was destroying genuinely exceptional children to make room for mediocre ones whose parents could afford him. It had gone nowhere because he was clever enough to reserve his worst behaviour for scholarship students and families nobody important would listen to.”

“Until you,” Marly says, growing more serious as he catches the change in the room. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m pretty sure Sergei Vetrov’s little girl didn’t count as somebody a ballet teacher could shut up.”

He isn’t wrong: Vetrov’s little girl was not somebody Yuri Morozov could have silenced. Neither, for that matter, was Ilya—and Sasha least of all.

That had always been the stupidest thing about their entire stupid plan: none of it was necessary. Sasha could have told his parents. He could have told anyone at the academy that he had told his parents. He could have breathed the names of one or two uncles in the right direction, and the problem would probably have disappeared before dinner.

But they had been ten, twelve and thirteen, and justice had seemed much more satisfying when personally administered.

“So.” Marly looks between them. “Irina Petrovna came to get you. Who was that again?”

Ilya jerks slightly. Who was—

Has he never even said her name?

“My mother,” he says, so startled by the question that for once the words don’t hurt properly. “Well. Ours, really. In every way that mattered. She came for us.”

The memory arrives before he is ready for it.

His mother in something grey, he thinks, grey with little dots, walking into the administrative office where the three of them had been arranged in a row like prisoners after a failed coup. Her perfume, the click of her shoes, the way the whole room seemed to dim around her as she came in.

She listened to everyone, examined Ilya’s shoulder, glanced through the papers Svetlana still refused to surrender, and asked Sasha three quiet questions. Then, somehow, over the course of half an hour, she turned three children caught breaking into an office, stealing confidential records and assaulting a teacher into an institutional investigation of falsified medical clearances and bribery.

She called none of their parents—not Sasha’s, not Svetlana’s, not even Grigori. She simply took all three of them home herself.

Ilya comes back to himself a little shaken. Has it really been that long since he remembered Irina except to grieve her? Since he thought about something she had done instead of the fact that she was gone?

“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat. “So she fixed it. The school didn’t exactly want it becoming public knowledge that one of their senior instructors was crippling scholarship kids to clear places for whoever bribed him most, and Mom didn’t especially want them making a public spectacle out of us breaking in and stealing things. Everybody discovered discretion. We went home.”

Marly frowns. “Wait. Are you actually related? I thought the whole three-musketeers blood-pact thing was sentimental.”

Svetlana clears her throat. Her eyes rest on the two of them for a moment, expression complicated.

“We’re not related,” she says. “Our mothers were friends.” She gestures between herself and Ilya. “Their fathers were friends.” This time between Sasha and Ilya. “But when it came down to it, Irina more or less raised the three of us.”

As best as anyone could.

Sasha lets the quiet sit for a moment. Then, without shifting at all, one arm still draped across Ilya’s shoulders, he says, “On to less pleasant matters, regrettably. Ilya, your father is alive. He is in a hospital above Montreux, in the mountains, and they are looking after him properly. Aleksei is well, and so is Darya Alekseevna.”

The atmosphere in the courtyard drops straight to hell. Ilya’s heart skips, then slams twice against his ribs.

“Jesus Christ, Sashenka,” he says through numb lips. “Jesus Christ.”

Sasha’s arm tightens around his shoulders, in acknowledgement, not comfort. “Reminiscing has its time and place, but this is important. It is important you know that they are alright, that they are settled, and that their wellbeing is no longer your responsibility.”

A muscle jumps in Ilya's jaw. Yeah? Says fucking who—

Calm down. You couldn't keep yourself alive; Marly and Svetlana did that. Hardly a position from which to get precious about who's responsible for whom.

And yet.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I got this.” He looks around, doesn't see anything more interesting than Sasha’s abandoned beer, but beggars can't be choosers. He takes a swing; it's lukewarm, stale and tastes like socks.

Marly puts his beer down and starts to get up. "I'll get out of the way." He pauses halfway up. “What?”

What, he asks. “Sit down,” Ilya says.

Svetlana gives him an impatient tug at the back of his shirt. “God, Cliff.”

“I figured this was family shit.”

“It is,” Sasha says.

Marly looks at him. Sasha waits him out.

“Oh,” Marly says, and sits back down. “Right. Okay.”

The embarrassment would be funny if Ilya had room for it. He doesn’t. Ilya breathes out. His hands are flat on his thighs. He watches them to see whether they're shaking, and they are, a little, so he leaves them where they are.

"When did he—"

“We landed on Thursday. I stayed until Saturday to make sure everything was running as it should. It’s—good. A château in the Swiss Alps; looks like something out of The Sound of Music.”

Thursday. Ilya doesn’t even know what day it is now. He’s been here living it up while Sasha handled the work he should have been doing, handled it better than Ilya ever could have, and probably paid through the nose for the privilege. Meanwhile, Ilya couldn’t even answer his fucking calls. He shifts closer until he can rest his head on Sasha’s shoulder and tries to absorb the sheer scale of the fuck-up.

“Thank you,” he says. He can manage that much, at least.

Sasha sighs, but presses a brief kiss into his hair. “Of course, Il’ka. Always.”

No, not always—But there's no point saying it; Sasha means it the way he means everything, which is exactly as far as it currently goes.

"Right," Ilya says. "That's the diagnosis, then? Alcohol-related dementia?"

Marly is stiffening up. Strange. Then again, maybe not so strange. He'd met Grigori here and there over the years, and they'd always got along. Marly likes almost everyone, and Grigori could be very good with people when he wanted to be; he had to be, to survive that many years of schemes, thefts, and betrayals. Or maybe he's just a good guy who doesn't like making light of anyone's suffering. Yeah. Probably that.

“Alzheimer’s,” Sasha says.

Ilya closes his eyes, gives up, and wraps an arm around his waist. He gets one leg up between Sasha’s, tucks his foot under his thigh and presses as close as he can while maintaining some semblance of decency. Ideally they would at least lose their shirts so he could get some skin contact, but whatever. It is what it is.

“Fucking Alzheimer’s.” How dare he? How dare he not get dementia, or cirrhosis, or liver cancer—or any cancer, considering he’s smoked a pack a day for the past fifty years. How fucking dare he—

“How bad?”

"He knows people more often than places," Sasha says. "Aleksei most days. Me, still."

"He knows you?"

"He has known me since I was six and, that aside, I’m told I’m rather memorable."

Incredibly, Ilya manages a bark of laughter. That’s true.

“He asks for Irina Petrovna,” Sasha continues, voice cool and clear and precise. “Constantly.”

Ilya lets that sit for a moment, lets the implications unfurl one by one. Wow. That’s—an ugly set of coincidences, but perhaps unavoidable. God does like to keep things balanced.

“Yeah? What did you do about it?”

“I told him she left him,” Sasha says. “That she left, that she is happy and cherished and treated with every courtesy, and that he will never see her again until he dies. Every time he forgot, I told him again. My reading suggests that some things still stick, so the nurses have instructions to remind him too. Whether they will is another matter. His snivelling and howling will probably irritate them more than my money persuades them, but hope springs eternal.”

The peonies have started to go at the edges. Already? They've hardly been here for a couple of hours. A small lizard is darting near one; he looks curious.

“Right.” At least his hands have stopped shaking. At least he’s not freaking out anymore. He’ll take plain old sadness; it’s a better deal. “Good that you didn’t overreact.”

“I found that telling the truth was pleasing enough,” Sasha says.

Move on. Change the topic.

"How did you do it?”

“Via the appropriate channels,” Sasha says. “As befits a distinguished public servant suffering from a degenerative neurological condition. His remaining access was closed, anything sensitive in his possession recovered, and his incapacity formally established by specialists at the Almazov Centre in St Petersburg. The remaining security concerns were assessed, reviewed and found manageable, and permission for specialist treatment abroad was duly granted.” His mouth turns slightly. “Everyone involved behaved with exemplary compassion and administrative efficiency.”

Right.

“You called Arkady Konstantinovich?”

“He handled things in Moscow, yes. Nina Konstantinovna handled the residency and guardianship in Geneva. The Orloffs in Lausanne arranged the financial side to avoid the inelegance of large transfers from Moscow to Switzerland, and Nicholas and Michael structured the trust and payment vehicles to the clinic. Everything is spotless, my darling, I assure you."

Appropriate channels? That's one way of putting it. When the Orlovs move, they move like a well-oiled machine, flattening whatever stands in the way politely, legally and from at least three different countries at once. Ilya counts three so far, assuming Nicholas and Michael are the London cousins. And now Sasha is part of the machine, which is something he spent years resisting.

That’s how it goes, though. They never put much pressure on him; they never thought they needed to. They let their infamous black sheep charge off on his own because sooner or later the going would get rough and he would need what the family could provide. Then they would be gracious and generous and never once rub it in. They would solve the problem, make the introduction, remove the obstacle, smooth the path—and later, when a cousin’s daughter needed a place in an arts programme or an Orlov foundation wanted Sasha on its board, Sasha would do the same. And he would be gracious.

“How generous,” Ilya says to the peonies. “How fortunate that Arkady Konstantinovich developed such great fondness for my father and me.”

Sasha looks at him, silent. Then his expression grows—serious is not right. Animated, perhaps, in a fierce way.

“My uncle is beside the point; I wanted it done. Alzheimer’s is neither gentle nor quick. He will live in a beautiful château, waited on by smiling, unflappable professionals, and none of it will give him any peace. Everyone around him will be a stranger, speaking languages he doesn’t understand, and it will make him even more paranoid and confused. He will be afraid until he dies, alone and in pain. And they’ll keep him alive for a long time, Il’ka. That’s what places like that are for.”

Alright. Ilya should say something. If ever there were a time to fucking speak, it is now. He won’t. And neither will anyone else, it seems. Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe all four of them should have to sit with it.

“Jesus Christ,” Marly says into the silence. “That’s—fucking intense, man. Note how I’m not touching any of the commie spy shit you people are talking around. None of my business. But—” He looks at Ilya, wide-eyed. “What the fuck, man?”

“Recall that we grew up together,” Ilya says, most of the way numb. “Grigori is—My mother—” There is no good way to finish that. Not a one. “I don’t like to think about that.”

“And now you never have to again,” Sasha says. “As far as you are concerned, he is already in Hell, or as close an approximation as fate and I could arrange. You don’t need to waste another ounce of pain, stress or thought on him. He is solved.”

“Move on, Sasha,” Svetlana says. “Tell him about Aleksei.”

Sasha pauses, then leans back to study Ilya’s face. Whatever he sees there makes him frown. “I—I apologise, little prince. I shouldn’t have—” He stops, plainly lost as to what, exactly, he should or shouldn’t have done. “I should have been more gracious,” he settles on. “You are on vacation, and an overdue one. Let us speak of more pleasing things.”

Ilya manages a weak, shivery smile. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Aleksei is thriving,” Sasha says at once, with visible pride. “You will be pleased by this, I know. The place I found for him and Darya Alekseevna is a lovely two-bedroom overlooking Krylatskiye Kholmy. Excellent schools nearby; I checked. His worthless wife left too, good riddance, so Uncle found them a very well-recommended nanny—” He stops. “What? What did I say now? This is good news. I know it is.”

“Nothing, nothing,” Ilya says, trying to pull his messy heart back into his chest. “I just—You and your uncle bought Aleksei an apartment?”

“Not just an apartment, if you would let me finish,” Sasha says waspishly. “He works for Arkady too, and uncle has nothing but praise for him.”

Wow. Let it never be said that Sasha doesn't do things thoroughly when he decides to do them.

“He’s clean too,” Svetlana says. “Aleksei. It’s still early, so we’ll have to see, but he seems determined to hold on to the opportunity. He knows he has a good thing with Arkady Konstantinovich.”

Yeah? “And what does he do?”

"He is an aide. Broadly."

"An aide."

"He likes it a great deal."

Ilya puts a hand over his eyes. He would, yeah. Twenty years of Aleksei shouting about freedom and money and respect and being nobody's dog, and he'd have handed the lot over on the first morning for a man worth following.

"Good," he says. "That's good."

"He asks after you."

"Does he?"

"You needn't do anything with that."

"No."

An apartment, a job, an international, entirely legal human smuggling campaign—

“And Polina?”

Sasha scoffs. “Nothing worth mentioning, happily enough. She accepted the settlement offered, annulled the marriage and—” he waves an absent hand. “Gone away. I hadn't considered the matter past that.”

Ilya is glad to hear it; more than he expected he would. He never disliked Polina especially—she was vain and opportunistic and stupid in fairly ordinary ways, and those are common defects and not usually capital crimes. Sasha took her existence personally from the first week. She had walked into rooms where Irina used to stand and presumed to take up a role Irina once had. Of the three of them, Ilya has always been the least interested in revenge. Svetlana prefers humiliation, Sasha prefers annihilation. Polina was lucky to have made it out of there alive.

He settles higher against him. "And me? Can I come back?"

There is no hesitation at all, and Ilya is grateful for that before the answer even arrives.

"No. Not now. Perhaps not for a very long time. If things harden instead of passing, then perhaps not at all."

No, I'm sorry. No promise that politics turns over eventually. No sentimental nonsense about home being wherever the people who love you happen to be standing. Just the thing itself, cleanly delivered, and then quiet.

Ilya lets his head slide sideways until his cheek rests against the heavy curve of Sasha's shoulder, and Moscow comes to him all at once and entire. His apartment. The old rink. His mother's grave with the stone that needs cleaning. The particular grey the river goes in November. The twenty-four-hour shop off Patriarch's where the woman behind the counter still calls him Ilyusha and refuses to charge him for cigarettes because she remembers him at sixteen. He hadn't understood he might not get any of it again until Sasha told him he might not.

"How bad is it?"

"Nothing official. That is a good deal of the difficulty—there is no warrant that we can fight, no charge, nothing we can go at cleanly. Only the dissatisfaction of people who are not required to explain themselves to anyone."

Ilya nods. Nobody has to draw it for him. He signed things for his father at nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. Grigori put paper down and said sign, and Ilya signed, and his financial due diligence at that age went as far as whether the account would cover a car. He may very well be guilty of—any number of things.

Ilya breathes out through his nose. "Yes. Alright."

"There are no warrants, investigations or inquests, just so we're clear," Svetlana says, a little pointedly. "Things are settled. It's best not to unsettle them. Arkady Konstantinovich does good work, but bigotry is unpredictable, and with the mess in Chechnya—"

What? Fucking war, on top of everything else? "What mess in Chechnya?"

She looks at him for a moment.

"They've been arresting gay men," she says. "Since February. At least a hundred, as far as anyone knows. They're being held somewhere near Argun, and some of them have not come back."

Ilya's stomach drops.

"Oh."

"People are getting them out. There's a hotline, there are volunteers, men are being put on trains to Petersburg with nothing but what they were wearing." She turns her cup on the saucer. "Kadyrov's office says it can't have happened, because there are no gay men in Chechnya. And that if there were, their families would deal with it."

Nobody says anything for a moment.

"The timing is unfortunate,” Sasha says, with some reluctance. “Novaya Gazeta printed it on the first of April. You went in front of the cameras on the seventh. To the people at home it seemed—deliberate."

As if. As if Ilya had ever wanted to make a political statement about anything. He had come out from spite, mostly, and because of that relentless pressure in his chest insisting there was no choice—that anything, absolutely anything, was better than that awful, rotting darkness.

“It wasn’t deliberate, as you well know,” he says, and sighs. “God, what a fucking statement to make. People are dying, and Ilya Rozanov goes on live television and says, I don’t need to lie, so I won’t.”

“There are no coincidences, only God’s will,” Sasha says. “And from what I understand, it helped. Considerably. People were frightened, confused, reluctant to involve themselves—you know how it is with Chechnya, all that history, all that fear of another wretched mess catching fire. Then you went on television and set off a grenade, and suddenly hesitation became more difficult to justify. Worse for you, perhaps, but useful.” His mouth curves into a half-smile. “I understand you have merchandise now.”

All insanity, everywhere you look. But he’s not wrong. If it had to happen—and it had to happen—then at least it served some purpose.

“I only bring it up because it made an already stupid situation stupider,” Svetlana says. “You’re not just Ilya Rozanov, beloved hockey player anymore. You’re Ilya Rozanov, queer-rights hero. I don’t know what would happen if you went home now, but I have no interest in rolling the dice and then spending six months lining the walls of Lefortovo with TNT to get you back out.”

“Yeah, no, I get it.” He really does. God. What a fucked-up set of coincidences. “Whatever. It’s whatever. We’ll figure it out.”

“That’s exactly right,” Svetlana says. “And with that settled, there’s nothing else hanging over us. Grigori is solved. Aleksei and Dasha are taken care of. Your assets in Russia have been liquidated, consolidated and invested, with a four-person board administering the trust. The Krylatskoye apartment is in Dasha’s name, and they have a generous income from the trust, which Aleksei will continue to receive for exactly as long as he keeps his end of the deal.”

A trust. As though there could possibly be enough left for one. Ilya may have had barely five years of classroom learning, but he can do addition. Grigori’s facility alone would have swallowed the combined Rozanov assets in Russia twice over. That’s before the apartment and the generous lifetime income, and not a cent of it came out of Ilya’s American accounts.

He stops there, deliberately, the way you take your hand off something hot. Not now. Not today.

Chapter End Notes

Excerpt from the poem

Ghaflah

In Islam, “Ghaflah” refers to the sin of forgetfulness

I forget she taught me
how to pray
I forget her prayers
And mine

I do not remember
kneeling down
to ask for wisdom
high-top sneakers
or linoleum chips
to animate
my zip gun

I have never remembered
the blistering fury
the abyss
into which
I capsized
after her last
compromise

I wish I had found her
that first woman
my mother
trying to rise
up

I wish I had given her
my arm

both arms

I have never forgiven her
for going away

But I don’t remember anything

 

(Find the whole poem at https://punchinthefacepoetry.com/tag/june-jordan)

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

This one was basically second half of the previous one. Fun fact, I wrote the last part of this chapter first, then went back and wrote chapters 4 and 5 around it lol. You never can tell how these things will go. And - a new record. Chapters 4,5,6,7 and 8 have been outlined as one chapter.

so, you know, the ten chapter thing above? Dubious at best.

Siem Reap—July 4

Even Svetlana is exhausted by the end of that miserable conversation, and she wasn’t the one who got up before dawn to go to a temple. Man. If he’d known what was waiting for him, he would have planned the day better.

Nevertheless, when Ilya looks around the courtyard at the wreckage of his three favourite people, he discovers, to his considerable surprise, that he is the one with something left in the tank.

“Alright,” Ilya says. “On your feet, men. And lady. We’re going.”

Sasha looks at him like he'd gone mad. "Going? Where, to the beach? If you think there is a single chance I go a step closer to the fauna of this cursed place, you are out of your mind."

That would be funny. The closest Sasha has ever willingly come to a beach was sprinkling a handful of pebbles on a poolside dock.

"We're going to the spa," he says firmly. "I need a massage, and some of those ladies are ruthless with their bony elbows. A soak, a massage—hell, we can pay somebody to smear green mud on our faces and do our fucking nails. But we're going."

Sasha pauses, then shrugs, imperious. "A fine plan. One I am shocked came from you and not your dashing gentleman caller."

It's hard to say who laughs hardest at that, Ilya, Svetlana or Marly.

Massages hit exactly the right note: pleasant, stupid and, best of all, not conducive to conversation. Ilya spends a wonderful four hours eating fruit while tiny women do incomprehensible things to his face and wax him clean from the neck down, which he certainly hadn’t asked for but Svetlana probably had. It seems like the kind of thing she would find funny. Since he doesn’t have much body hair to begin with, and he’d already been bitching about the patch the tattoo artist shaved off, he decides it’s fine. Besides, being all smooth and slippery like a mole rat is hilarious, and it suits his alter ego as an exclusive Russian prostitute.

Dinner afterwards is a relaxed affair. Marly leads them to the restaurant, as he has most nights since Bangkok. Svetlana and Ilya rarely care enough to decide for themselves, but sooner or later the sibling instinct kicks in, and then they'll happily kill each other over whose turn it is to pick.

It's a good place, small, ten tables in a courtyard with a mango tree growing through the middle of it and lanterns strung badly in the branches. Ilya eats without paying much attention to what.

Sasha spots it between the second and third course, when Ilya leans back, and the shirt gives up.

He stops with his glass halfway to his mouth.

"There is a camel next to the bear."

"Yes."

"On your body. Under the skin. There is a camel next to my bear."

Ilya finds he has enough energy for a smile. "Yes."

Sasha sets the glass down and looks at it for a while—clinical, unkind, personally wounded, the expression he keeps for other dancers' feet.

"I have defended that bear," he says, "for seven years. To my mother. To Kostya. To Zoya Arsenyeva—"

Zoya Arsenyeva. Ilya's brain stops on it entirely, the way you stop on a familiar face in the wrong body. Sasha defended his tattoo to their old physics teacher? When? Where? For what possible reason? The woman must be seventy.

"—I have argued, every time, that it is not kitsch pretending to be irony but kitsch that means it. That a man may put a bear on himself in complete sincerity and be more serious for it, not less. It is the finest argument I have ever made. I have been making it for seven years."

"It's a good argument."

"It is an unanswerable argument." He picks the glass back up. "And you have gone and given it a companion without consulting me."

"I didn't think—"

"Evidently not."

"It's from a book. You like things from books. And doesn't it remind you of Svetlana?"

"That is beside the point, Il'ka. You cannot simply complicate my bear without prior warning—"

Svetlana, true to form, finds the perfect moment to retaliate. "He hasn't even read the book."

Sasha's whole face changes.

"You have not read it."

"I'm a hundred pages in."

"You have put an animal you do not know on your chest. Next to my bear."

"I mean," Ilya says, "can you really know a camel before putting it on your chest?"

Sasha considers this.

"No," he says. "But you can fucking inquire."

Sasha eats, and eats well, Ilya notices. Almost as much as Marly and certainly more than Ilya, which makes sense—he’s a professional dancer and built accordingly. It’s only remarkable because he so rarely bothers, usually making up the difference with meal-replacement shakes he chokes down with great effort. He’s exhausted, too, properly so: heavy-eyed and fading. Lausanne was a long trip, and heaven knows what his days looked like before that, but still—it’s barely past ten and Sasha already looks ready for bed.

They all do, to be fair. Ilya can barely see straight. He's been awake since half past three. He has been up a temple staircase in the dark, and learned that his father is dying in Switzerland, and that he cannot go home, possibly for years, possibly at all.

Marly gave up somewhere around the third course and has gone quiet in the way he does when he's had a large day, which is to say he sits closer to people and says weirder things. To wit, he's asking questions about ballet that nobody would ever think to put to a principal of the Bolshoi, and Sasha looks endeared enough to unhinge his jaw and swallow him whole. Has he ever forgotten and spun the wrong way? No. Has he ever caught his hair in somebody's costume? Also no—he keeps it short, and the stuff that ballerinas glue theirs down with could bond concrete. Are the costumes hard to get out of? Yes. And then the pièce de résistance: do they keep them on mannequins somewhere in the theatre, so the dancers can wander in and pick whichever one they like best?

Ilya gets stuck on that image for a stretch. A great dark room with ceilings higher than the dim light can reach, an endless forest of costumed mannequins, dancers frolicking between them, choosing their skin for the night.

The walk back isn't far. In the lobby, Marly says goodnight. Svetlana says something about the morning; Ilya says yes to it without hearing what it was. Then Sasha gets in the lift, and Ilya gets in after him, and neither of them says anything, and Ilya leans his shoulder into the wall and shuts his eyes for the four seconds it takes.

The lamps are on beside the bed and nothing else. Beyond the glass, Siem Reap glows low and scattered through the trees, and somewhere down two dogs are having an argument.

Ilya stands in the middle of the sitting room for a second and can't think what to do with himself. Thus far he moved by rote, hadn’t thought about a single thing except how fucking tired he was. And now—

Sasha’s luggage is stacked by the wall, one case standing open, his jacket slung over the back of a chair. A book lies face-down on the low table. Something awful, no doubt, grim and depressing. At sixteen Sasha went through a phase of reading almost nothing but diaries people had kept while confined in insane asylums.

"Well? What are you doing, standing there like a big lump? Go get ready for bed.”

Ilya goes.

The bathroom is exactly what it always is. The same perfume. The same ten thousand glass bottles he decants his creams and gels and powders into, arranged with the same obsessive care and in the same incomprehensible way.

Ilya splashes his face, picks one up at random and opens it, which is a mistake. He freezes, throat working. It smells like Moscow. It smells like Sasha’s first flat on Bolshaya Nikitskaya with the enormous cold bathroom and the bad water pressure, like Sasha at nineteen doing something complicated to his hair for forty minutes while Ilya sat on the edge of the tub and complained. It smells like Svetlana’s first pair of stilettos, and Ilya’s first time fucking someone other than the two of them. It smells like being seventeen and knowing exactly where he would be sleeping and who would be there in the morning.

He puts the cap back on and sets it down where it was. Sasha’s toothbrush is in the glass by the tap—and Ilya’s is right next to it. He stares at it, uncomprehending. It’s his, the one Svetlana brought for him, the brand he always uses because his gums bleed and he’d been postponing the trip to the dentist. So, what, did Sasha just—take it? Did he go up to their suite, find his toothbrush, and carry it down here? Probably, yeah. That’s exactly the kind of thing he might do. Thoughtful. Presumptuous. Insane.

Christ in Heaven, what the fuck is Ilya supposed to do with a man like that?

He'd apologise, if it made any difference. Sasha doesn’t forgive. He has never forgiven anybody anything, because forgiveness requires a debt, requires alteration. Sasha doesn’t do that. Sasha watches, he observes, and he accepts people precisely as they are. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t judge, doesn’t nag—and then one day he stops turning up. Ilya has seen it happen to men who never knew it was happening. Nobody gets a warning, because a warning would be a negotiation, it would be influence, it would mean asking people to be anything other than who they are, and Sasha doesn’t negotiate with truth.

He and Svetlana were always exempt from that. Not from the watching—there’s no exemption from the watching—but from the leaving. They’re his. They’ve been his since they were children, held somewhere above the general run of humanity, and Sasha’s tenderness with them is a thing so few people have witnessed that Ilya could name every one who has.

The observation has been made, though. Somewhere in that clean accounting Ilya has been adjusted into a man who can take everything offered to him and still disappear when it suits him. That’s not an accusation. Sasha will never once raise it, will never be cold about it, will go on kissing his hair with exactly this much feeling for as long as there is feeling to spend. It’s simply the truth.

Ilya could change it, of course. Easily. All he has to do is stop being that man.

Then he brushes his teeth, properly, taking his time, because it is a thing with a beginning and an end.

He can’t bring himself to look in the mirror.

When he comes back, Sasha has his shoes and socks off and is working on his cuffs, and Ilya crosses the room and pushes his hands away without thinking about it at all.

"Here. Let me."

The cufflinks are gold and jade, not a pair he knows, but they have Sasha written all over them: ostentatiously expensive and completely unserious. Ilya would be amazed if they were not commissioned—if Sasha had not carefully, and in great detail, instructed some jeweller to carve two tiny frog heads from jade, pick out their pinprick eyes in gold, and mount the whole ridiculous thing in matching gold settings.

He gets the first one out and drops it in his own pocket, to save the thirty minutes it will take in the morning for Sasha to remember where he put it. Then the other wrist, and he doesn't let go of that one straight away. He turns it and presses his mouth to the inside, where the skin is thinnest, veined with blue and green, and stands there a second with Sasha's pulse against his lips.

God, he loves him. It goes through Ilya like something falling—the whole enormous weight of it, unwieldy, more than he has room for tonight. Twenty years of this man. This ridiculous, murderous, complicated creature who got on a plane in Switzerland and came four thousand miles to be here, with him.

"You can relax, little prince," Sasha says. "It's finished. Your family is safe, and so are you." He cards a careful hand through Ilya's hair, and Ilya lets the movement tip his head back, lets himself have the eye contact. "There is no need to worry."

He exhales a long breath, closes his eyes, holds there for a beat, with Sasha's fingers in his hair, then nods, straightens and reaches for the ten million buttons on Sasha's shirt. One day Ilya will persuade him into a shirt made from a single continuous piece of fabric, something you pull over the head in three seconds with no buttons, clasps, hooks or laces anywhere on it. Not today. Today the count is thirty-two, not including the two at the collar and the four at the cuffs.

"Worry?" Ilya finishes the last button down the front, then takes Sasha's wrist to do the cuffs. "Why would I worry when you and Svetik slew all the dragons for me?"

He smiles a little and nudges Sasha half a step back, slipping the open shirt from his shoulders. Sasha holds on to the stern look for another beat, then relents, slides his arms from the sleeves, folds the shirt once, and drops it over the back of a chair.

Sasha is built differently from Ilya, differently from most men Ilya sees day to day: long through the back, narrow at the waist, the muscle lying close and hard against the frame instead of heaped onto it. Ilya has been looking at him for the better part of his life, more or less since he started forming stable memories, and can't imagine ever stopping, ever growing tired of it.

Sasha looks down at him. Ilya kisses him, and it is easy, the way it has always been easy—no hunger in it, no passion, no real lust—but enough comfort and acceptance in it to make a man lose his footing. Sasha bends, one hand settling at the side of Ilya's neck, and kisses him back with the same absent tenderness with which he might pet his hair or straighten his tie. Ilya's eyes fall shut, relaxing even more.

Life—Moscow—Grigori—broke all three of them, but Sasha was bred to be a monster. And monsters do not cherish; they worship. Sasha loved Irina the way a child loves God: completely, effortlessly, with no distinction between love and faith. Then God died in the back bedroom.

Something smaller and harder grew in the ruin. Sasha learned to cherish: the tedious, deliberate business of keeping a person precious without first making them sacred. He learned it for the other two children who were there with him, and for nobody else since. And so here he is: too human for a monster's clean amorality, too narrow in his mercies to pass for a man.

A beat, and then Ilya is back in his body, and Sasha is still kissing him. Has been, this entire time, while Ilya flounced off to ruminate on monsters and men. He finds himself, absurdly, laughing a little. Then again, harder, when he opens his eyes and sees Sasha's unimpressed expression.

"Go to bed," Sasha says. "I need to scrub the dirt from my skin, and I suspect it will take sandpaper. Couldn't you have gone somewhere more civilised? Tokyo, perhaps?"

Ilya shrugs. "I can honestly tell you that I've about as much control over my life this year as a jellyfish in the ocean current. The trip was all Marly and Svetik. I think they wanted me as far away from Boston or Moscow as they could get me."

Sasha sighs, then pushes him back by the chest. "Go to bed. I will be right there."

Ilya does as he's bid, all but launches himself into the bed, and twists, watches him leave. He's gained at least—he cocks his head, looks at him objectively—ten pounds of muscle. At least. He didn't spot it earlier, what with the loose shirt, but it's clear now when he's walking away with that ballerino grace. The Orlovs married each other for four centuries, and it shows in the faces—but every so often, plainly, somebody sensible had a look at the results and snuck the village blacksmith in through the back. You can see it in the shoulders, in the solid wrists, the hips. Sasha could haul timber with the best of them.

By the time Sasha gets into the bed, Ilya’s rearranged things to his liking, made a sort of diagonal facing nest that he pulls Sasha down into, into the space he left for him. Their legs tangle. Ilya puts his head on his chest, below the collarbone, and shuts his eyes.

"So how did Arkady become so charitably interested in the welfare of my family? I don't know that I've seen your uncle since I was fourteen."

Sasha is quiet. Ilya lifts his head enough to see the smallest quirk at the corner of his mouth.

"He didn't. He doesn't. I made a bargain."

Yeah? Shocking.

"Will you tell me about it?”

Sasha falls quiet, face a little far-away. Ilya reaches up and runs his thumb once along the line of his jaw, the skin that you are always surprised to find isn't cold.

Finally, he sighs, looks a little petulant about it. "Nothing terrible, Christ, Ilya. I went to rehab, if you must know."

For several seconds Ilya only looks at him. Then the evidence he's been collecting all evening without understanding rearranges itself: the colour in his face, the still hands, the complete and uninterrupted presence behind the eyes.

"You're clean."

"Yes."

"Sober?"

"Certainly not." Sasha gives him a look of mild offence. "Your entire wretched bloodline could be hanged, drawn and quartered on the stage of the Sovremennik and I would still decline to surrender champagne."

Ilya laughs once, quietly, and then kisses him, slowly this time, and Sasha accepts it without comment, with one hand cupped at the back of his head. Ilya kisses his mouth and then the corner of it and then the high plane of one cheek, as though repetition might alter the information. It does not. When he finally draws back, Sasha has acquired the faintly long-suffering expression he reserves for sentiment aimed his way.

"Spare me."

"How long?"

"Three months since I left Marshak. Nothing I am not prescribed, nothing bought illicitly, and nothing stronger than the occasional CBD sweet."

Ilya looks at him. Really looks, now. Beauty has never told him one useful thing about Sasha's health—Sasha looked beautiful high, and beautiful starving, and beautiful in a hospital bed with a line taped into his arm and his skin grey enough to frighten the nurses. Things like Sasha do not become less beautiful near death; they only begin to lose their hold on corporeal form. He has hold of it now. He is here, entirely; no portion of him running on ahead toward the next thing or dragging along behind the last one, no hard light behind the eyes, no slight failure of timing. Sasha is simply inhabiting himself.

Three months clean. Marshak would have kept him at least sixty days, which means the deal was made sometime in February. Maybe the end of January. Right when Ilya was at the absolute peak of his hysterics. Sasha called him from fucking rehab, and Ilya didn’t pick up.

His eyes prick, embarrassingly. Leave it. Now is not the time. He leans back far enough to look at Sasha properly, then lays a palm against the side of his neck, slides it around to the nape and up into his hair. “You look lovely.”

Sasha turns his face away, which is answer enough.

"I assumed Svetik had her fingers in that deal. One of these years she'd have had you locked up eight months in some cushy Danish prison to get you clean." Clean-ish, at the very least.

"No. I made the deal. She didn’t know about it—and she had enough to do."

Something in the sentence makes Ilya go still. Sasha's fingers close loosely around his wrist, and he looks at their hands rather than at Ilya's face.

"Helena left her."

"Helena? Helena Voronina?" Ilya raises himself on one elbow. "What do you mean, left her—" And then he understands, and lies back down. "Oh. How long were they—"

"Eleven months, near enough."

Ilya has to sit with that a while. Not the part about a woman. While Svetlana was always comfortably straight as far as he knew, threesomes notwithstanding, that is simply new information, and he can carry it without difficulty. It's the rest. He searches backwards for it and finds nothing at all. Were there photographs? Did she say her name over dinner, more than once, and he let it go past him? He cannot bring up a single thing, which is its own kind of damning.

Sasha does not say so. That mercy has teeth in it.

"She never told me."

"No, I imagine she didn’t. That conversation, thank the Lord, I leave to you two."

Fair. "Why did Helena leave?"

Sasha pauses, stills, then twists, gets his left hand buried in Ilya's hair deep, down to the scalp. It's not quite a hair pull and not quite a hair scratch, and Ilya lets the shudder travel down his shoulders, arms, and back.

"Predictable human weakness. When things became bad, Svetlana put down most of her own life to hold you and me together. Helena tolerated that for as long as she wished to tolerate it, and then stopped."

Ilya frowns into his chest. "She left because Svetik was taking care of her people?"

"So I understand. Presumably there would be more, but that was the fact that mattered."

He lies quiet, turning Helena over. He had liked her—pretty, composed Helena, who remembered birthdays, who once brought Ilya a book because he'd mentioned the author six months earlier and she had written it down. He cannot get that woman and the one who walked out because Svetlana's family became inconvenient into the same frame. Sasha can. Sasha has never had the slightest difficulty redrawing an entire person around a single act of disloyalty.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing." Sasha's gaze goes faintly imperious when Ilya lifts his head. "Svetlana forbade it."

The laugh gets out before he can stop it. Of course. And yet: Helena Voronina wakes up every morning in possession of her own life. Polina got a settlement. The deal with Arkady Konstantinovich stands. Sasha has spent the year practising forms of restraint that nobody who didn’t know him would recognise as moral labour at all, and it has cost him something every single time.

“So the bargain was yours? Because of Svetik?”

“Because of both of you. And myself.” Something shifts in his expression. “She had a hell of a year. I saw no reason to make it worse.”

There is something almost unbearably tender in how dryly he manages to say it. Ilya turns his face and kisses him again, then higher, into the hollow of his throat, and finally lingers over the pulse there.

“What exactly did you promise?”

Sasha begins counting them off against Ilya’s back with his fingertips, drawing slow, deliberate lines into the skin with the sharp edge of a nail. He isn’t quite drawing blood, but he is leaving marks.

“One, I remain clean while I am dancing.” A line. “Two, I stay out of Moscow for five years.” Another. “Three, I stop sleeping with people who visibly mean me harm.” A third. “Four, if I insist on adventurous company, two discreet men stay near enough to intervene.” The fourth. “Five, when my two-year contract with the Mariinsky ends, I give serious consideration to a contract in Paris, London or New York.” The fifth line goes horizontal, striking through the first four.

Ilya hums. The list is sensible enough that he suspects its main purpose is to obscure the reality of the first condition. Three months clean, without a relapse. He can barely imagine it. Sasha has been medicated since he was eleven. By thirteen he was self-medicating on top, once it became clear what sort of doctors he was being taken to see: the expensive kind, employed to prevent embarrassment to a bloodline rather than treat anyone.

His own attempts at regulation were sincere at first and increasingly experimental after that, but whatever else they became, they were constant. And then he simply stopped. Decided to, and stopped all of it at once—the opiates, the hallucinogens, the stabilisers, the amphetamines, the elaborate cocktail of drugs for sleep after the drugs for staying awake. Now there is almost nothing. Some CBD. Lorazepam at night.

Sasha watches him thinking. Then: "Is there more? Anything more I could do?"

The question is sincere. Ilya gives it real thought, because it would be kinder to give him something. He knows this the way he knows most things about Sasha: by knowing himself. In that position, he would want a task, a person to call, a door to go through. Something concrete that can be begun and finished.

He slides higher instead and gets his mouth against the side of Sasha's neck. "You could think about New York. After the Mariinsky. You could live with me."

Sasha exhales through his nose, and his hand tightens once at Ilya's hip. "The only circumstance in which I would willingly reside in America is one in which I had gone there expressly to bring about some local apocalypse. You should come to Paris instead. I am told they have hockey there."

“Paris. Christ preserve me.” Ilya tips his head back to give him better access. “Better death.”

It is only a joke, barely even that, and Sasha turns under him so smoothly that Ilya is on his back before he has quite decided whether to resist. He could, probably, but lets Sasha keep the advantage, one hand loose at his side. Then something in the stillness above him makes the joke come back differently. Ah.

Ilya reaches up and touches his cheek. “I’m alright. It’s alright.”

The inhale is slow enough to count. Four in, four held, four out. That’s new. Someone at the clinic in Petersburg taught him that; it doesn't seem to be working.

“Don’t tell me what you are.” Sasha lowers himself in a slow, controlled fold until his forehead comes to rest near Ilya’s shoulder. “I know what you are. You are alive.”

Ilya closes his eyes.

“We thought that that was it, you realise? That there was nothing to be done. That you would leave us as she left us.” Sasha’s fingers tighten once at Ilya’s side, then loosen. “Svetlana could go to you. I couldn’t. I had to take what was happening from her, or from Sergei Viktorovich, or read whatever those half-literate animals managed to publish.” There is no anger in it anywhere, which somehow makes it worse. Anger, Ilya knows what to do with. “You know I have never expected any of us to die in bed at ninety, Il’ka. I know life can become unbearable, and that one day, one way or another, I am going to lose you. None of that gives you the right to tell me it was alright.”

No. It doesn’t. Ilya cannot argue a single word of that.

"I'm good now," he says, after a while. "I fixed some of it. I dropped some of it. I feel good, Sasha. I'm not going back there."

That's all he has to offer, and Sasha doesn't ask for more. For a few seconds there is only his breathing, deep and precise, and then Ilya’s body takes over. The mechanics are older than thought.

Sasha is taller, so Ilya shifts down and draws him in at an angle, one arm high across his back, the other around his ribs, until Sasha’s head settles properly on his chest and the long line of him has somewhere to go. Close, then closer, nearly hard enough to bruise. Sasha has never wanted light comfort—no fingertips, no soothing little pats. He wants pressure, a body made into a wall around him. Ilya knows where to put his mouth in Sasha’s hair, how to angle his chin so the man can breathe without moving, and how slow and deliberate to make his own breathing until Sasha starts to follow.

He has done this a hundred times. After overdoses, after violent men, after hospitals. He held him through the worst of the anorexia, when Sasha was all long bone and fury, and the doctors spoke to them as though death were another appointment to be scheduled. He could do every part of it in his sleep.

He has never done it as the thing that caused the hurt. He cannot promise Sasha safety. That would be a blasphemy even Ilya understands: to sin while confessing, to swear off the sin with the innocent blood still warm on his hands. So he says nothing. He breathes: in, hold, out, hold. Sasha follows.

“I don’t need your guilt,” he says eventually, into Ilya’s chest. “Or, God forbid, your shame.” A pause. “But don’t tell me it was alright. It is never alright when you are in pain. It may not be helped; it may even be that you deserved it, that you brought the whole of it down on yourself—but none of that could make it alright.”

Yes, well. Only there is a word for pain a man has earned, and the word is punishment, and it is judgement and justice. And those have to be alright. They have to mean that all is right.

Ilya looks down at him and says none of it.

Sasha looks up. The hurt in his eyes makes them, for once, look entirely ordinary. “Let me grieve, Ilka. Let me be furious that you suffered and let me be glad that you came through. Both things are true.”

Ilya’s arms tighten. “Alright.”

Chapter End Notes

# Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love

 

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

Not a word about the chapter count. Not a peep.

Sasha stays for four days and is incredibly weird throughout, even by his standards.

Nothing mysterious here. Sasha’s weird, surrounded by weirdos, and the whole crew is living through a weird patch. Cambodia hates him—climate, wildlife, service, the works—and he hates it right back, with interest. But the real thing is, he’s got his eye on Marly.

He likes Marly, too, although that is a more distant concern. Sasha generally assumes that people he finds interesting will have the sense to find him interesting too, and experience hasn’t punished the assumption often enough to cure him of it.

The curiosity is the real problem.

Sasha’s a misanthrope, but people get under his skin anyway. One of those contradictions you have to swallow if you want him in your life. He thinks humanity is a failed science experiment and will go off for weeks about some ancient French play, picking fights over whether the playwright got the psychology right. Maybe that’s just the artist in him. Ilya’s known athletes who could spend twenty years sharing rooms, meals, wins, divorces, and surgeries with a guy and never once wonder what was going on in his head. Sasha, though, can’t watch someone cross a restaurant without wanting to know why they walk like that, why they look so fucking gutted, why they’re eating alone or with people they hate, or love, or love in some deranged, inside-out way.

So yeah, he’s into people, and he’s sharp enough to crack most of them open and scoop out whatever he wants. Marly, though, is a fucking problem.

It’s not that Marly’s guarded—total opposite. Two days in, Sasha’s got the whole file: parents, sister, busted knee, the almost-wife at twenty-three, his opinions on the Bears’ defence, and a way-too-detailed story about a canoe, a snapping turtle, and his dad’s little toe. Marly answers anything. If he doesn’t want to, he says so. If he doesn’t know, he says that too.

Which just makes Sasha twitchier. Ilya gets it. Sasha has met men who act simple because simplicity is useful. Men who perform decency because it makes other people lower their guard. Men who genuinely are decent but have three locked rooms behind the decency where they keep ambition, shame, resentment, appetite. He knows people from so many countries, classes, and occupations that he can usually find the seam within an hour.

Marly either has no seams, or he’s hidden them somewhere nobody’s looking.

He likes hockey. He likes food. He likes women. He likes his parents. He likes his friends and actually gets happy when good shit happens to them. He wants enough money to not think about money, and he’s had that for years, so he doesn’t. Sasha’s family? Interesting, but only in the same way Cambodian temple drainage is interesting: Jesus, that’s wild, sure, tell me another one. He’s impressed by skill, amused by extravagance and apparently immune to prestige.

Worst of all, he thinks Sasha’s hilarious. That makes everything worse.

The trip to the café-bar thing, time to make two coffees and back, takes about twenty minutes, which Ilya knows because he’s one song short of the end of his twenty-five-minute sprinting playlist.

I’m in your blood, I am your drug, I am your wind, your stupid dog—

It’s good to get out of his own skull for a bit. Sasha’s leaving tomorrow and Ilya’s being a little bitch about it; no point pretending otherwise. Twenty-four hours left, probably less, and instead of just living, he keeps running through what he could ask for, all the things he could say to make Sasha stay. Loser shit; not happening. Sasha would kick him in the head for even thinking about it.

Your angry mum, your precious cum, I’m the best that you ever had—

Svetlana is on the bench under the fig tree, set back beneath the arcade where the shade holds. He hands her the smaller cup and sits beside her, listening to the song wind down and the next one begin.

X gon’ give it to ya, fuck waitin’ for you to get it on your own—

He takes out the AirPod—best thing Americans ever made, except possibly inventing hip-hop in the first place, and even Ilya knows enough about race relations in American history to understand that this is a complicated argument to make—considers offering it to Svetlana, and doesn’t. She never did have much taste for large men barking at her.

“Sasha, do you think he’d stay if I—”

Her hand comes up, and two fingers settle across his mouth. Not aggressive. Firm, like she’s pressing a page flat. Ilya stops, mostly because this is rude, and then he hears it.

“—being reductive. You learn a man through his virtues and his sins. Your virtues are visible from orbit, and I can’t see past them. That makes me nervous.”

Oh.

Sasha and Marly are out on the tiles in the low chairs, angled toward one another, three-quarters turned away from the arcade. Neither has looked around. Neither has any reason to. Ilya goes very still, which is stupid. They aren’t hiding. He and Svetlana are sitting on a bench in a public courtyard; nobody has crept anywhere, nobody is hiding, nobody is lying. Still, there is an immediate, primitive conviction in him that they are about to be caught doing something bad.

He looks at Svetlana. She isn’t looking at him or at Sasha. Her eyes are somewhere beyond the wall, and her whole body has gone quiet in the way it does when she is taking something down exactly, for later use, by her, in some manner nobody will see coming. She got here first. More importantly, she made the decision already when she put her fingers over his mouth.

Good enough. He’ll ride that excuse into the grave.

He slides lower on the bench, puts an arm around her, and pulls her halfway into his lap. That’s the only move he allows himself, slow and careful so he doesn’t scrape a shoe, knock a cup, or do anything that might make either man turn around. Svetlana comes easily and settles her weight against his chest. He keeps the coffee in his other hand and goes still again.

“—you met me three days ago, bud.”

“And I am talking about the man I have met over those three days. So either actually are the simplest man in the northern hemisphere, or you are an accomplished performer. I would admire either, but I would still like to know.”

Jesus. Sasha isn’t playing. He isn’t being especially aggressive, but he means this enough that most of his usual decoration has dropped away—the urbane drawl, the dramatic timing, the Russian vowels he puts on when he wants Americans to notice he’s foreign. He almost sounds American.

Marly is quiet for a second. When he answers, his voice has come down a register, and it isn’t the friendly one. “What the fuck does that mean, man?”

“It means I am tired of the cheerful idiot routine. Stop making yourself harmless for five minutes and talk to me like a man.”

“Why?”

“Because I am leaving my Ilya in your care, and I would rather do so from a position of understanding than trust.”

Ilya’s fingers tighten around the cup.

“Alright,” Marly says after a moment. “Fine. Fuck me, might as well. You were on the right track before. It’s not pride. Not lust, not wrath, not greed.”

Jesus. Sins? Why the fuck is Sasha asking Marly about sins?

“Envy,” Sasha says.

“Yeah.”

“Envy.”

“I mean—yeah. Course.” Marly makes a sound a little like a laugh, with all the humour removed from it- the negative impression of a joke. “I’m just this. What you see is what you get, and that’s not much. I’m not like you, or Svet, or Roz. There aren’t hidden depths, no cynical world-weary wisdom or whatever the fuck you tragic nightmares have going on. Even my folks were embarrassed by me before hockey took off.”

Every muscle in Ilya’s body is screaming to move. He wants to cross the tiles, drag Marly out of that chair, hug him until his ribs crack, then shake him until he gets it: he’s got it all backwards. Being whole and easy and kind isn’t some embarrassing lack of character, it’s the rarest fucking thing any of them have ever seen. The rest of them have spent half their lives trying, and failing, not to envy it.

He does none of this, obviously; that would be insane. Better opportunities will come; he’ll get him later.

The lack of a visual is starting to get to him. Him and Tsvetik both; her hand is clamped around his wrist, nails digging in just shy of blood. Yeah, fuck that. He shifts on the bench, dragging Svetlana with him, until they’re angled toward the other two instead of sitting there like idiots with their backs half-turned. On one hand, much better. He feels instantly fifty per cent less likely to fly off the handle and start slashing wrists in the name of blood oaths. On the other, he’s just torched what little plausible deniability they had. No pretending now, no claiming the conversation had happened behind him and unfortunately entered his ears. Now he’s physically rearranged himself for a better view, like some horrible little gossiping snake. If Marly turns around, Ilya is going to die.

Worth it, probably, because at least now he can see Marly is fine, for better or worse. Ilya knows him, knows what he looks like pissed off, genuinely hurt, fed up with everything. None of that is true now. He’s more serious than Ilya would like, sure, but also calm. Composed. Even a little curious, if the twitch at the corner of his mouth means anything.

“So it’s envy, I guess,” Marly says. “Or fear, which somehow isn’t a sin even though it should be. That I’m not gonna be enough. That I’m too slow, too—uninteresting. Good lay, fun ride, nice to have around. Not somebody you look up to.” He lifts one shoulder. “Not somebody you respect. Yeah.”

Ilya looks at Sasha and knows the expression immediately. Sasha is revising. Whatever he arrived with, whatever he has worked out over three days and been so pleased with, is being quietly dismantled and put back together differently.

He looks a second too long. Svetlana’s fingers tighten once around his wrist. Enough.

“Envy,” Sasha says. “The only sin that offers no pleasure. Of course. So obvious, in retrospect.” He leans back, tips his head back to the sky, then sighs, enormously. “Heaven preserve me, that’s so hot. Alright, nothing for it. Let’s go.” He stands, walks several steps away, then stops and looks back over his shoulder with enormous impatience when he realises Marly isn’t moving. “Well?”

Marly looks up, expression breaking into honest confusion. “What?”

“Are you coming?”

“Are you having a psychotic break, man? Is it a stroke? How’s your arm?”

Sasha rolls his eyes and gestures toward the building. “Are you coming to the room. We can’t very well fuck here. We’ll be arrested.”

“What?”

“Sex.” Sasha exhales through his nose. “I want to have it with you. Right now. What’s the holdup?”

Marly stares at him blankly. “What the fuck, man?”

“Are you saying you don’t want to?”

Marly opens his mouth, closes it. He looks lost, plaintive and, around the edges, either amused or flattered. “I mean—I can’t say I’ve thought about it. I’m fucking your sister. More or less. And you and Roz are doing your own thing. And Roz is my best guy, you know? And me and Roz—”

“There is not a single way, shape or form in which the three of us haven’t had sex over the years,” Sasha says. “And I assure you neither of them  would mind.” Then he looks over at them, pointedly and with just enough malice that Ilya tenses before Marly even turns.

Marly turns, expression flattening. Ilya’s stomach clenches. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Roz.”

Ilya makes himself hold the look. “Yeah?”

Marly looks at him for a long beat, then passes a hand over his mouth, rubs at it a little, eyebrows pulled together, the way he does on the bench when a call goes against them, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

“Right,” he says. “You’ve been there for a minute, I’d take it?”

Ilya nods, watches it land. The confusion comes first. Then the hurt, quick and clean, and then Marly inhales a long, sharp breath and—lets it go. Just like that, all of it visible, every beat.

“You got anything to say about this? Considering.”

Yell. Take a swing. Anything.

“No,” Ilya says. “Not my business.”

Marly waits. Ilya fights the urge to squirm like a schoolboy.

“Go for it,” Ilya says. “For what it’s worth. Obviously, Godspeed. Full blessings.”

Marly nods, then looks past him at Svetlana. Fair enough. Ilya’s permission is mostly decorative here. She gets off his lap and crosses the tiles. Four steps. Marly starts to stand, and she puts one hand flat against his chest, so he sits again.

“Do you want to sleep with him?”

He looks both hunted and thrilled; more of the second, by at least half; that’s encouraging. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Then do. He’ll be good to you, and he’ll stop the second you tell him to.” She says it like a train time delivered by a station clerk. “You needn’t worry about any hurt feelings on my account; I’d watch, if he were inclined to let me.”

“I’m not,” Sasha says. “How you dug up an actual storybook knight in America, I have no idea, but you did, and I want him. You’ve had plenty of him already; I’m not sharing.”

Marly barks a laugh. He’s blushing a little; such a softie.

“Marly likes praise,” Ilya says generously. “And deserves it. If you don’t treat him with the grace he deserves, I will take a bat to every bottle, jar and vial in your room.”

“I’m so intimidated by your posturing, Ilyusha, you have no idea,” Sasha drawls. “Take anything from me but my worldly possessions.” He turns back to Marly, expectant. “Well? I realise the proposition is rushed. If time were more generous, I’d spend a couple of days plying you with gifts and flowers to curry your favour, but these are the cards we’ve been dealt, and we must do the best we can with them.”

Marly rubs a hand over his eyes. “Jesus Christ. I can’t fucking believe—” He looks at Svetlana, then at Ilya. “You’re sure this is alright? I’m gonna be so pissed if this is some fucked-up loyalty test. Proper upset. I’m gonna be emotional and sad about it and everything. I’m gonna feel betrayed.”

Bless him. They must have brought their nonexistent emotional intelligence home if he feels the need to lay this out so thoroughly.

“For all his melodrama, Sasha is a generous lover,” Ilya says, as gently as he can. “Good choice for your first time with a man. As for the rest—” He shrugs. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not precious about personal boundaries around these parts. There is no trap.”

“No trap and no expectation, Cliff,” Svetlana adds. “Not now, or later.”

Sasha, who has closed his eyes as though in pain, opens them. “Of course there aren’t any expectations,” he says. “Why would there be expectations?”

“I didn’t say there were.”

“You just said it.”

“I did not,” Svetlana says. “I said he could say no.”

Sasha’s expression sharpens into something even more aggrieved. “Was that ever in doubt? Everything else aside, I don’t have anything to coerce him with.”

Marly opens his mouth, but Sasha has already decided. “No, no. Quite right. You don’t know me. It’s wise to demand verbal conditions ahead of time, with appropriate witnesses.”

Marly looks at Ilya, eyebrows as high as they can go. Ilya shrugs. There is no stopping him now.

“Three days ago I did not particularly want to sleep with you. You were just as beautiful then—I have eyes. The whole absurd Hollywood-leading-man arrangement is extremely effective. But beautiful men are not sufficiently rare to justify the additional investment.”

Marly’s mouth twitches. Sasha ignores it.

“What changed is that I spent three days trying to find whatever you were hiding, and when you finally understood what I wanted, you gave it to me. I had done nothing to earn that. You have no loyalty to me. You barely know me. And still you gave me something private and painful because you could see I was frustrated and thought knowing it would make me feel better.”

He looks annoyed now. At Marly, presumably.

“That is incredibly attractive,” he says. “So are the warmth, the courage and the pathological absence of pretension.” A small pause. “Apparently the insecurity is attractive too, although I strenuously object to its contents.”

Well, shit, he’s not wrong. It’s hitting Ilya weird too—makes him breathless, sharp-edged. Sasha’s not wrong.

“I have adjusted accordingly. I now want to have sex with you. Once, or more than once if it suits us both, for as long as I am in the country—which is until two o’clock tomorrow—with repeat performances in the future should circumstances remain favourable. I am not offering a romance, which should suit us both, all things considered.”

“Okay,” Marly says slowly.

“Good. Now, since the point of your safety and dignity in my care has been raised—”

Marly is beginning to grin. “Has it?”

Sasha either doesn’t notice or considers it irrelevant.

“I’m not claiming a moral position; I am objecting concretely. Plenty of people want to fuck me, desperately. I do not need to debase myself by coercing those who don’t.” He purses his lips a little, like he’s swallowing an unbecoming sneer. “Men and women call such things conquest because they will call almost any personal failure a conquest rather than admit they were not wanted.”

Christ in Heaven, this is a lot, even for Sasha. Ilya can track it, knows that the only way Sasha has to say I’ll be careful with you is sideways, at length, and zoomed out by about ten thousand feet up, but who even knows what Marly is going to make of it.

“So yes. Hurting you like that would not only be expensive because Svetlana and Ilya would not take it lightly, it is also not to my taste. I don’t want anything from you badly enough to make myself contemptible for it. Certainly not sex.”

Marly’s grin has gone softer, more endeared than amused. Good, against all odds. Against all odds, it could be that Marly might be the one man who finds Sasha’s insanity charming instead of reasonably, rationally, incredibly threatening.

“If you want me, come upstairs,” Sasha says. “If you’re curious, curiosity is sufficient. If you’re nervous because you’ve never fucked a man, nervous is manageable. If you’d rather not, stay where you are. Nobody will make a thing of it and I won’t press the matter in the future.”

He pauses, stares into the middle distance, as though consulting an imaginary flow chart.

“In conclusion and for completeness, I would very much like to get you naked, suck your cock and have you fuck me. But only with your full, unwavering and informed consent throughout.” He nods twice—to himself, Ilya is almost certain. “Yes. That covers it.”

Marly is scarlet, but Ilya knows this man, knows what he looks like when he’s entirely, comprehensively charmed.

“Bud,” Marly says, “I can honestly say elaborate risk assessment has never been this big a part of someone asking to fuck me.”

Sasha frowns. “Is that unusual?”

“I mean.” Marly gestures vaguely at himself. “Kinda.”

Sasha takes a moment to study him—the mass of his shoulders, the depth of his chest, the whole engineering of a man built to produce enormous force in very little time.

“Then your past lovers were worth very little,” he says. “Which is not, sadly, difficult to believe. You’re lovely and gentle, and people who are neither find that a provocation.” His mouth tightens. “Particularly disappointing, since you may be the easiest man in the world to be decent to.”

Marly laughs. Not the bark from before, but a proper one, warm and delighted, and something in his shoulders gives. He looks at Svetlana. She smiles. Then at Ilya, who nods enthusiastically.

“Fuck it,” Marly says. “Lead on.”

They see neither of them for several hours. By the fourth hour, Ilya is impressed; by the fifth, he figures they took a nap halfway, and approvingly brings up a tray of food and a couple of bottles of champagne and leaves it at the door.

Eight hours or so later, Marly appears in the courtyard alone.

He looks mostly normal. Lips a little bruised, which is as it should be, and the absence of such would be the alarming part. A few sedate marks low on his throat, absolutely tame for the circumstances. Not a single claw mark on his neck or chest, not a single bruise he can see.

Sweet. That’s so sweet.

Ilya turns around, flips to his back and props himself up on his elbows.

“Well?”

Marly stops. “Oh my god, we are not doing a fucking postgame.”

Ilya hums. “I mean, we could.”

“We won’t.”

Svetlana looks up from her phone.

“Was he good to you?”

Marly gives her a wounded look.

Svetlana looks back patiently. “It’s a serious question,” she says.

Marly rubs both hands over his face.

Then, helplessly: “Yeah.”

Ilya slumps back in the chair. Marly wanders over, steals Ilya’s lemonade, takes a sip, makes a face—right, he doesn’t dump five spoons of honey in like a lunatic. He puts it back, drops behind Svetlana, wraps around her like a big cat. She hums, kisses him, buries a hand in his hair, and goes back to her phone. Probably work; she’s the only real adult in this circus.

Sasha appears perhaps ten minutes later, showered, changed and immaculate.

He walks past Marly, runs two fingers absently over the back of his neck, and takes the chair beside Ilya.

“Your friend is delightful.”

“Thank you.”

“I wasn’t complimenting you.”

“Yes, you were.”

Sasha considers. “Fair.”

T

he following morning starts auspiciously. Or inauspiciously—Ilya can never be very certain about these things. He troops down to get some eats, when he finds Marly at the daybeds, laughing, properly laughing, at something in his hands.

Oh, god, he thinks, as he creeps closer to investigate. Lord in Heaven, that’s the ugliest thing he’s ever seen—

“What the fuck is that?”

Marly presents the thing, beaming. “Present.”

The watch is terrible. Audemars Piguet—a brand Ilya has hated on sight since he first saw it—a thick rose-gold bracelet, a black-grey face, unnecessary machinery ticking away behind glass on the back. Sasha can pull it off in that avant-garde Eurotrash ‘you have to have excellent taste to have such bad taste’ way. On Marly—barefoot, in swim shorts and a ratty T-shirt for some Halifax sports bar—it’ll look like the spoils of a hate crime.

Ilya sighs. “Christ.”

“It’s fucking awesome.”

“Marly, it’s hideous.”

“No, look.” He flips it over and tips it back and forth in his hand. “Look at the little gold thing move.”

“That’s the rotor.”

“I know.” Marly tips it again, delighted. “Look at it go.”

Sasha comes in behind him, nods. “It suits you.”

Ilya looks up

“What the fuck, Sashenka. Why would you do this?”

Sasha gives him a look of pure arrogance. “Because I wanted him to have it.”

Marly’s grin softens.

“Thanks, man,” Marly says. “Seriously. It’s sick.”

Sasha inclines his head, pleased.

Ilya looks between them and then at the watch. It’s for sure gonna stay. He sighs, grabs Marly’s hand and shoves the stupid thing on. It barely clears his paw; Marly has to tuck his thumb in and squeeze his fingers together, turning the whole massive hand into a blunt cone before Ilya can force the bracelet over. The clasp barely catches under his wrist, the gold pulled so tight over the bones there’s no way in hell it’s comfortable.

“Let it never be said,” Marly announces, examining the watch again, “that I am not settling extremely well into my backup career of fucking bougie Russians happy.”

Sasha frowns.

“What is bougie?”

Ilya closes his eyes in despair.

Sasha leaves two hours later. The car is waiting under the covered entrance, luggage already inside. Sasha has changed into something pale and ridiculously crisp for a man about to spend the next several hours sweating through tropical heat.

He says goodbye to Marly first.

“Thank you for taking good care of my Ilya,” he says, “and my Svetlana, and myself. I hope to repeat it soon, when time permits. By it, I mean the sex.”

Marly laughs, pulls him into a proper bro hug—takes him by the hand, reels him in, slaps his shoulder, the whole nine yards. They’re just about the same height, but Marly is much broader; he swings him around like a dog with a weasel in its mouth.

“It’s been wild, man. Visit soon.”

Sasha turns to Svetlana next. That goodbye is quieter. A hand at the side of her face, a few words Ilya doesn’t catch. She kisses his wrist before letting him go.

Then there is nobody left but Ilya. Sasha looks at him. Ilya looks back. After everything they said the first night, there is very little left worth saying badly. Sasha reaches, tugs him into a kiss, dry, soft, so chaste it almost feels like some weird way of taking his temperature.

“Be well, Il’ka.”

“I am.”

“Stay that way.”

Then he gets into the car and goes.

Chapter End Notes

Excerpt from “A poem for Mark”
June Jordan

…
and you said
“Rubbish!” to the notion of a national
identity
and if I answered,
“In my country—”
You would interrupt me, saying,
“You’re not serious!”
but then I thought I was
about “my country”
meaning where I’d come from
recently
and after only transatlantic static for a single
phone call
up against my loathing to disrupt and travel
to the silly land of Philip and Diana
never having hoped for anyone (a bebop-
antelope) like you
so quietly impertinent and teasing
it was 4 A.M. the first time
when we stopped the conversation
And long before my face lay nestling on the hotel
pillows/well
I knew
whoever the hell “my people”
are
I knew that one of them
is you

Chapter 8

Chapter Notes

Chapter End Notes

### *Roman Poem Number Seven*

*June Jordan*

After dinner we take to the streets
let the alleys lead us as they will
into darkness and doorways
regardless
we scratch through the city hot
with wine
our feet our legs as steady
as a kiss on the wall.
In the dress shop
dirty dresses hang idle while
the owner rearranges her own
wool embroidered
heavy legs and plays with the jewelry
someone must have died
to give away.
Her companions make themselves
comfortable with sweat
in the little store
hustlers
curling sideburns royal
blue wide
wale corduroys packed
smooth in the high
black patent leather boots.
“These jewelry, they are very old.
From Paris. You will like them.”
And she hands around the shoebox
graciously.

Two of the men begin to wrestle
each other.
“Wait!” calls the third.
There is a piece of lint
on the back-slash pocket
of his friend.

Chapter 9

Chapter Notes

I doubt i will summon up the ability to write straight up explicit scenes, but nevertheless, imma tag this as explicit anyway, since this and the next chapters will have plenty of sex in it, as explicitly as i can write it lol

Da Nang (Jul 12–24, twelve days)

Cliff puts his foot down about the Nissan, in a very Cliff way, meaning very literally and, somehow, charmingly. On their last morning in Luang Prabang, he plants himself between Svetlana and the driver’s door and announces that the car is going back to Vientiane on the transporter that brought it; nobody is driving it four hundred kilometres for the pleasure of terrifying him one final time, and their next mode of transport will have wings, a professional pilot and no involvement from either Russian beyond sitting still.

Svetlana, having extracted all available entertainment from the GT-R and possibly damaged Marly’s relationship with automobiles for life, agrees without argument. She expresses her gratitude to the dealership, as she prefers, with zeroes. Two days later they fly into Cam Ranh and are driven north in a perfectly respectable black Mercedes, complete with a blank-faced driver. A local in his sixties, who refuses to tell them his real name, insists he’s named Ralph with a stone-faced unflappability that makes Ilya a little feral with admiration.

“See?” Marly says, turning around to look at the two of them in the back. “Normal car, normal driver. Not once in the past hour have I felt mortal terror.”

Svetlana lowers her sunglasses and looks across at Ilya. “You see what I endure.”

He does. He sees the mountains, dry and green, clawing up past the road, and the sea on the other side, flashing blue as if it’s daring him to look away. New country, new currency, new language on the signs. By now, the sensation is almost dull. Vietnam. Fine. Fuck it. Why not.

Their little villa perches on the mountainside at the edge of Da Nang, just distant enough from the city to feel private, yet close enough for Marly’s relentless devotion to sightseeing.

The airport sits almost in the city’s heart, so the drive is barely worth mentioning. Scooters swirl around the taxi like fish darting past a rock. Flags hang from every lamppost, two to a pole: the national one, and another, red with a yellow mark in the corner. He can’t place the first, or the second, or the third. Some celebration, maybe; half of Asia is red and yellow. On the fourth pole, the wind snaps it straight. Hammer and sickle.

He knows he shouldn’t be stunned, but he is. He barely stops himself from staring at the flag snapping in the heat above women balancing iced coffee on scooter backs. No one even glances up. It never looked this easy at home.

It’s not like he didn’t know. Yelena Petrovna in fifth grade, saying the brotherly Vietnamese people like it was all one word. His father at the kitchen table, bottle two-thirds gone, ranting. The posters at Izmailovo, a whole table of them, colourful and bold. A fist. A jungle. An American plane coming down in flames. Hands off Vietnam! Ilya wanted one so badly he would have stolen it if there’d been any chance he wouldn’t get caught. Perhaps most clearly, every skinhead in Moscow spending the lazy afternoons when they couldn’t find some gay kid chasing Vietnamese immigrants instead. Чурка, чурка, Россия для русских.

So he knows. He’s always known. It’s just—

On the edge of a market, over a stall that’s mostly plastic stools, there’s a sign. Small, hand-lettered, sun-bleached, almost pink.

БЛИНЫ. ПЕЛМЕНИ. МЫ ГОВОРИМ ПО-РУССКИ.

They spelled it wrong. Of course they did.

“Look,” Ilya says.

“I see it,” says Svetlana, without looking up from her phone.

The boredom in her voice hooks something raw in him. Some dumb, ugly spark of anger. You see it? Must be nice, being so fucking casual. Must be nice, not even bothering to look. You’re not the one who got exiled. You’re not the one who got told, over and over, that home was gone for years, maybe forever.

Marly sends him a careful look. Some of it must be showing; Ilya hasn’t been any kind of sad around him for a while.

“You wanna—” Marly glances out the window. “I don’t see nothing except a pretty beach town.”

Ilya drags in a breath. He’s being fucking nuts.

“Nothing. A sign.”

“What sign?”

“Pancakes,” Ilya says. “Dumplings. We speak Russian.”

“Huh.” Marly peers out at the street as though there might be Russians hiding behind the scooters. “Is that a thing? Russians, here?”

“Not especially here,” Svetlana says. “Farther south, more. But you remember America massacred a great many Vietnamese people a while back. You remember, broadly speaking, whose side we were on?”

“Oh.” A pause. “Oh. Huh. Never would’ve thought about that, honestly. It’s still a thing?”

“Not really. And yes. Of course it is.” She rolls her eyes and goes back to her phone. “Vietnam, Cuba, SSSR. Shame on American aggression. That sort of thing. Half crude propaganda, half actual history. Then again, even crude propaganda tends to stick when it’s been seared in with blood and napalm.”

Ilya looks at her. The flat voice, the eye-roll, the layered derision. That’s new. When did that happen? Svetlana has never had much time for the flag, and neither has he, but this is something evolved. Matured.

Which kind of sucks, to tell the truth. Ilya isn’t much for geopolitics—or politics of any kind, for that matter. He’s never thought much about any of it. It happened before him, and Mother Russia, for better or worse, taught her children not to be sentimental about the past or starry-eyed about the future. Still, out of all the recent history, he always thought the Vietnamese thing was one of the things they had done—pretty well, on balance.

“Shit, okay,” Marly says. “Will that be an issue?”

Issue? Why would it be an issue—

Svetlana scoffs. “Of course not. I checked. Da Nang is fine. I wouldn’t have brought him here otherwise.”

Oh. Right. Something in him folds up a bit. Yeah, it could’ve been a problem. There are places they don’t go anymore. Too many Russians, too many expats, too many men on discount holidays, drunk and loud with their opinions about the Big Gay Traitor. Honestly, the ones abroad are sometimes even worse, desperate to prove they’re still hard as nails.

Whatever. It’s whatever.

Then there’s a river, and over it a bridge that is a dragon. An actual dragon, yellow steel humping across the water in loops, its head reared at the far end with its mouth open. Then a beach road, long and straight, hotels on one side and sea on the other. Signs in Korean, in signs, in windows, printed and hand-written. On the sand, three couples in wedding clothes are having photographs taken in the full heat of the afternoon. One bride holds her hem out of the surf while the photographer shouts at her. Ilya watches them until a hotel gets in the way.

Then the road climbs. The mountain comes up out of the end of the city like something that was there first: jungle, rock, very green. Marly reads from his phone that there are monkeys on it, rare ones, grey with red legs and faces like they’re wearing makeup. He is going to find them if it kills him. Two turns, three, and on the fourth the city is gone.

The house is below the road. That’s the first surprise. You come in practically at the roof: a gate in a wall, steps going down, the house hanging on the hill beneath them, and beneath the house the garden, then more garden, all the way down to a cove the size of a hotel room with rocks at both ends.

Europe, he thinks, absurdly. Yellow walls, the old kind, lime faded and blotched where rain seeped in. Green shutters. Clay tiles on the roof, patched in places. Liguria, if you squint.

Then you stop squinting. The shutters are latched with twisted wire. The hall floor is cement tile, red and grey flowers worn into a smooth, dull path from door to stairs by somebody else’s decades. By the door sits a little red shrine. Inside is a fat clay man with his belly out, grinning, three sticks of incense, and a saucer with two mangoes and a small green banana. Ilya nearly puts his foot through it. The caretaker, whose name Marly learns in the first minute and Ilya sometime the next day, says something sharp from the kitchen, and Ilya lifts both hands at the clay man. Sorry. Sorry, old man. The old man keeps grinning. Forgiven, apparently. Or not worth the trouble of immediate retribution.

Svetlana is already negotiating with the caretaker through Google Translate and cash. When she found time to acquire local currency is precisely the sort of witchery Ilya doesn’t need to know. She points toward the little house at the bottom of the garden, where the caretaker and her husband live, then toward the main house and holds up her phone. Mornings only. After that, privacy. The caretaker looks at Svetlana, then Marly, then Ilya, and whatever conclusion she reaches, she keeps to herself. She takes the money.

Upstairs, the floors are wood, nearly black and cool. Outside, it’s thirty-something, the air thick as a wet towel over your mouth, but the boards under his bare feet are so cool he stops, shifts one foot to the next to check, then seriously considers lying down. He does. It’s fucking bliss.

The whole front of the house is a balcony: deep, roofed, a hammock at one end that Ilya already knows he will spill blood over. Below, a crawling plant is eating a wall alive, pink so bright it looks like a mistake. Another has bare, knuckled branches like an old man’s hands and flowers anyway, dropping them onto the steps. There’s a tree Ilya cannot for a moment believe is a naturally occurring species, with hard green fruit growing straight out of the trunk in fists, as if it couldn’t be fucked with branches and put them wherever it pleased.

Past all of it is the sea. Far along the curve of the mountain, on the slope above the water, a woman stands. White, the height of a building, facing out to sea, one hand raised and the other held before her.

“Lady Buddha,” Marly says from the hammock. When the fuck— “For the fishermen. So they come home.”

Ilya looks at her a long time. She doesn’t look back. She’s busy. She has the fishermen.

He goes down to the tree later, while the others unpack. The caretaker’s husband tells him something that may or may not mean it’s some sort of fig. Ilya puts his hand flat on the bark between two clusters. Warm. Rough. The supposed figs are hard and green, and there are so many of them. He stands there with his hand on a tree like a fucking hippie until the back of his neck burns.

The pool is small, green stone and green water, filled almost to the lip, with a step along one side to sit on. By four o’clock it’s the temperature of soup. Svetlana goes in first, sunglasses on, like a woman whom servants would otherwise lower in, if she hadn’t had them recently executed. Marly goes in second. He’s too big for it; he sits on the edge and slides in, and the water rolls over the lip across the hot stone. He wraps an arm around Svetlana, tucks her in close, presses a kiss into her hair, laughs when he dislodges her sunglasses, and they fall into the water.

Ilya stays on the stone. He watches the wet patch darken the stone in the shape of a country, then shrink from the edges, quick, and vanish in a minute. He watches the whole minute, then shifts to Marly’s fingers on her shoulder, the little spaces between them showing skin, the easy calm of his other arm stretched along the pool’s edge. It’s striking, beautiful, and it’s just a gap the width of a finger. He sits on hot stone in Vietnam, fond of it, fond of them, fond of the fucking gap.

“Get in,” Marly says.

“There’s no room.”

“There’s room.”

There isn’t, really. He gets in anyway; water spills over the edge again.

The sun goes behind the mountain at six as if someone pulled it. Dusk doesn’t last long after that. The sea goes gold, then grey, and before seven the lights are coming on. The city’s first. Well, not the city itself, the mountain’s in the way, but a glow above the ridge, orange, like a fire in the next village nobody’s worried about. Then the boats. One out on the water, a white light so bright it hurts. Another. Then fifty, a whole line of them far offshore, a second coast made of lamps. The husband told him, or Marly looked it up, that they’re for squid. The lights bring them up out of the dark to see what’s happening, and they come, and that’s that. The white woman on the mountain is lit now too. She stands over all of it.

Farther along the water, there’s a seafood place, and it has a karaoke machine. A man is singing something slow and sad, badly, in Vietnamese, meaning every word. The tune, though—the music cuts straight into Ilya’s chest. Fuck you, he thinks, closing his eyes. You don’t gotta be a dick about it.

He fights the urge to hum under his breath, then gives in. The idiot painter who sells his house for flowers for a woman who gets on a train and leaves anyway. Pugacheva in a tent dress on a stage, arms out, playing from the television in the corner of every kitchen he was ever a child in. New Year. Weddings. Somebody’s uncle, tie off. His mother fucking hated it. Thought it was drab, empty sentimentality.

The man singing it loves it. Loves it enough that his voice wobbles on the long note, thick with emotion and, in all likelihood, booze. Maybe it’s better in Vietnamese.

The shutter opens behind him. Svetlana comes out, her hair wet, and stands at the rail.

“No,” she says.

“I know.”

“Christ in Heaven.”

She listens. The verse goes past. The chorus comes round, and the man gets a run at it and misses the same note in the same place. She snorts with derision, but her heart’s not in it.

They stand there. The squid boats burn white against the dark water. Somewhere below them, the man starts the last verse, and the lights on the karaoke machine turn the terrace red, then green, then red again. Very quietly, not to Ilya, not really out loud at all, Svetlana comes in two words behind the Vietnamese. “V noch’ yeyo poezd uvyoz.” Quiet, solemn, flat, the way you’d say something to yourself while getting dressed, getting ready for bed, looking at yourself in the mirror at half past four in the morning when your mind is the most hostile thing in your life. “No v yeyo zhizni byla pesnya bezumnaya roz.”

At night, the train carried her away, but in her life there was the insane song of roses.

Ilya doesn’t look at her. If he looks at her, she’ll stop. She gets through the line and stops anyway, then makes a considerably more sincere noise of disgust.

“Sentimental trash,” she says when the song has passed into some other ballad from ye olden days, also in Vietnamese. “How fucking dare they.”

Yeah. Ilya kind of wants to go down there, find that man and pay him.

Behind him, the shutters bang.

“Alright boys and girls, it’s time for dancing—,” Marly says, then pauses. “Yikes. What’s with the fucking gloom?”

Ilya can’t quite look at him yet. Not when he’s feeling wobbly, too much of his belly clawed open to be properly himself.

“You think you can have moody fucking Russians in your life and not deal with inexplicable bouts of melancholia,” Svetlana says, her voice low and rough. “Fuck you.”

Oof. That’s a lot of swearing. She almost sounds like a hockey player, if not for the slightly more elevated vocabulary. Even her flawless Boston accent is slipping, the sounds forming farther back in her throat.

“Fair enough.” Marly hesitates, visibly decides to roll the dice, and ambles forward to plant his elbows on the railing. “You wanna talk or—and do note my incredible cultural fluency here—go find some bar that serves shitty Russian vodka about it?”

Ilya exhales a long breath. “You got it, brother. Let’s get fucked up.”

He goes to find a shirt. On the way through the hall, he stops and looks at the tiles again: red flowers, grey flowers, the path worn through them to the door, the clay man grinning up from the floor through the incense smoke. He thinks fuck you, fondly, at nothing in particular, and goes upstairs to get dressed.

The blues don’t last long enough to reach the first bar. Da Nang at night is too bright for gloom: warm pavement, open doors pouring music into the street, scooters weaving everywhere, flowers exhaling something thick and sweet into the heat. They wander aimlessly, stopping wherever catches their eye, having a drink here, another there, gossiping and people-watching until even Svetlana seems to forget they came out to brood.

They draw stares everywhere. Fair enough. Ilya and Marly tower over most of the crowd, broad enough to make even the lanky European tourists look compact. Svetlana would turn heads on her own, wrapped in a slip of silk that barely pretends to hide the fact she’s wearing nothing beneath. Together, they’re impossible to miss and far too drunk to mind.

The place they finally settle on is halfway between a bar and an outdoor club: tables scattered around an open floor, a live band on a platform barely high enough to qualify as a stage. The music is light, familiar and magnificently indiscriminate. Something old and rock-and-roll—Ilya is fairly sure it’s Elvis—followed by an American R&B song from a year or two ago, followed without explanation by ABBA.

Among the three of them, it’s impossible to say who dances worst. More importantly, none of them has enough shame for it to matter. After the second round, they abandon the table and make utter fools of themselves. Marly dips Svetlana first—badly, but with gusto—then hands her to Ilya, who spins her and drops her so low her feet scramble and her dress flares dangerously high. She resurfaces swearing and laughing. Then, in the name of fairness, Marly dips Ilya. Ilya returns the favor with much more force. By the end, Svetlana is draped over Marly’s shoulder, breathless, and strangers are cheering them on. A complete circus.

Eventually the band takes a break and returns subdued. The louder crowd thins toward the tables, people leaning closer over drinks as the music softens. Ilya goes for another round. By the time he turns back, the song has changed again. Something slow and Vietnamese.; he doesn’t understand a word.

Marly and Svetlana are still on the floor, except they aren’t really dancing anymore. Marly’s hands sit low around her waist, and her arms are loose over his shoulders, their bodies fitted together without any apparent thought given to it. They sway a little, not quite on the beat. Svetlana has taken her shoes off at some point. One bare foot rests between Marly’s, the other shifting when he shifts, as though she has decided he can be responsible for keeping both of them upright.

Marly says something. She shakes her head against him. He bends farther and repeats it into her ear, his mouth almost brushing her hair, and this time she smiles. Not the sharp little smile she gives when she’s won something. Something smaller. Private. Her face settles against the side of his neck.

Ilya stands at the edge of the floor, cold glasses pressing damp circles into his fingers, and looks at them.

There’s something almost indecently peaceful about it. All the showmanship has faded. No teasing, no one trying to outdo the other. Marly’s cheek settles against Svetlana’s hair. His hand moves slowly over her back and stops, splayed as if it’s found its home. Svetlana’s fingers drift through the short hair at his nape. She hardly seems to notice. Neither of them says a word.

They look incandescently happy. Not excited. Not dramatic. Just happy in that quiet, careless way people are when they’ve forgotten anyone else can see them. Then Marly does see him over Svetlana’s shoulder. His eyes meet Ilya’s and his eyebrows go up.

Ilya lifts Svetlana’s wine. She catches the movement from the corner of her eye, immediately removes one hand from Marly’s neck and makes an imperious little bring it here gesture.

Ilya laughs and goes to rescue the great romance from dehydration. They stay another hour, possibly two. Time gets slippery.

Ilya goes for another drink while Svetlana is occupied with somebody she apparently knows from Bangkok and Marly is investigating whether the kitchen will still feed him.

“You really are terrible at that.”

He turns.

The woman beside him is tall, older than twenty and younger than forty, with pale blond hair cut blunt at her jaw and long, strong legs under a blue dress. Flat sandals. Grey eyes. Her nose has been broken once and healed slightly crooked, freckles scattered over the bridge. Ilya likes the nose. Likes the mouth considerably more.

“At what?”

“Dancing.”

“You were watching me.”

“It was difficult not to.”

“Then consider I am an excellent dancer.”

She laughs. Throaty and loud, a little raspy. Swedish, he thinks, or somewhere near enough. More importantly, she is looking at him very directly.

“Drink?”

“Yes.”

He signals the barman, the ancient gesture for another of whatever she’s having, apparently understood in every drinking establishment on earth.

She lifts one eyebrow. “You assume I want another.”

“You said yes.”

A small smile. “Fair.”

“Ilya.”

“Liv. And yes, I know.”

He makes a face.

“Oh, don’t pout. I’m Swedish. Some hockey gets in by osmosis.”

“I will try to forgive you. You don’t watch?”

“I know what offside is.”

“Then you watch.”

“I also know what SQL injection is. Doesn’t mean I spend my weekends hacking banks.”

He looks at her. “You cannot expect me to understand this reference.”

That gets another laugh. “Occupational hazard. Cybersecurity.”

Ilya brightens. Smart. “Ah. Computer police.”

“No. I design security architecture for payment systems.”

He leans down a little. Her perfume is strange for the heat, darker and more old-fashioned than all the citrus floating around the place. “So. Computer police.”

Liv laughs sharply. “Fine. What do you do?”

“Hockey.”

“Really? Shocking.”

“No, that’s basically it.”

Her drink arrives. She takes it, still smiling, and Ilya lets himself look properly now—strong shoulders, narrow waist, very good legs, excellent cleavage. Nothing fragile about her, nothing particularly decorated either. No jewellery. No makeup he can see. She catches his eyes on their way back up and makes no effort to pretend she hasn’t.

The smile changes.

There it is.

“You’re less subtle in person,” she says.

“I come across as subtle on television? Are you joking?”

“I thought you wanted me to pretend not to know who you are.”

“Is that really what you think I want from you?”

Her mouth curves. “No. Not really.”

Somebody squeezes between them and knocks her forward. Ilya catches her automatically, one hand around her waist. She is warm through the dress.

Neither of them moves.

Liv looks down at his hand and then back at him. Ilya lets his thumb move once over her side. He wants her. Wants the dress off, wants his hands on the rest of her, wants to know whether that cool, amused mouth stays clever when he distracts her properly. Nothing complicated about it. She is beautiful, she knows exactly what he is doing, and her eyes drop to his mouth long enough to tell him she’s been thinking the same thing.

“You married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

Her gaze moves toward the table, where Svetlana is standing between Marly’s knees while he says something into her ear.

“They’re—” Ilya shrugs. “Family. Also together.”

“Ah.”

“Complicated family.”

“I have one of those.”

“Everyone says this.”

“Three divorces, two shunnings and a sister who joined a commune.”

Bless her. Is that what complicated means to good Swedish girls with fancy degrees?

Ilya nods solemnly. “Okay. You win.” Jesus willing, you won’t ever even know just how much you win, how many people won, how consistently, for how long, for your life to be possible.

“My own divorce was boring by comparison.”

He glances at her left hand. No ring. “Recent?”

“Eight months.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

She means it. Something happened; she survived; now she’s in Vietnam in a blue dress, picking up a hockey player in a bar. Sensible woman.

“You here alone?”

“Friends.” She gestures vaguely behind herself. “One is dancing with a German woman. The other left with a pretty Spanish boy.”

Then she steps closer.

Well. Fine.

Ilya bends and kisses her.

Liv meets him immediately, one hand going into his hair as his closes more firmly around her waist. Her mouth is soft and confident, and when he deepens the kiss, she pulls him closer by the back of the neck. Ilya likes that. Likes the sound she makes when his hand shifts higher along her side; likes even more that she makes no attempt afterwards to pretend she didn’t.

When they separate, neither goes far.

“Well,” Liv says.

Ilya smiles. “Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

Marly has appeared beside them, wearing the expression of a man doing his absolute best not to look delighted with himself.

“Hi. Cliff.” He offers Liv his hand. “We’re heading back soon. Just wanted this one to know.”

“Liv.” She shakes it. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

“Give me five,” Ilya says.

“Sure.” Marly retreats with one deeply unhelpful grin.

Liv watches him cross back to Svetlana. “Sweet guy.”

“Yeah.”

She looks at Ilya again. “We’re coming here tomorrow.”

“Maybe I’ll see you.”

A beat. She laughs. “But probably not, right?”

Ilya considers her, charmed all over again. “Probably not.”

“Good.”

That catches him. “Good?”

“I’m recently divorced, in Vietnam with my friends, and you’re a professional hockey player I met twenty minutes ago.” Her hand settles lightly against his chest. “I think we can survive not lying to each other.”

Jesus Christ. Reasonable woman indeed.

Ilya smiles. “I had a very good time.”

“So did I. If you happen to be here tomorrow, come find me.”

“That I can promise.”

“Very generous.”

“I am famous for generosity.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He kisses her once more, because he wants to and she plainly wants him to. When he draws back, her hand remains against his chest for another second.

“Go,” she says. “They’re waiting.”

They are. Marly has Svetlana’s shoes in one hand and his other arm around her while she apparently explains something of enormous importance into his shoulder.

“Goodnight, Liv.”

“Goodnight, Ilya.”

By the time he reaches them, Svetlana has recovered one shoe and is putting it on with a hand braced on Marly’s shoulder.

Marly glances past him. “She seems cool.”

“She is.”

“You seeing her again?”

“Maybe.”

“Nice.”

Svetlana holds out her hand for the other shoe. “Are we done?”

“No,” Marly says. “I said three words.”

“Three too many.”

Ilya laughs and drains what remains of his drink. “What are we doing tomorrow?”

Marly brightens immediately. “Islands.”

Svetlana closes her eyes.

“Oh, excellent,” Ilya says. “You’ve told her already.”

“I mentioned it.”

“You informed me,” Svetlana says, “that we were apparently going on a boat.”

“Yeah.”

“That is not mentioning.”

“It’s basically mentioning.”

They start toward the exit. At the edge of the terrace, Ilya looks back once. Liv catches his eye and raises her glass.

He lifts two fingers to her and keeps walking.

The islands go very well.

Better than well, actually. Marly gets his boat, Svetlana gets an awning and enough cold drinks to make the arrangement tolerable, and Ilya discovers that snorkelling is considerably less objectionable when nobody expects him to swim anywhere in particular. They spend most of the day moving between little coves and reefs, getting sunburned despite Svetlana’s best efforts, eating on the boat and arguing over absolutely nothing.

Somewhere in the middle of this, Ilya finally gets far enough into Pyramids to discover that the camel tattooed across his sternum is called You Bastard and is, furthermore, the greatest mathematician in the world. Naturally, this requires celebration. The celebration spills into dinner, then considerably past dinner, and somehow they end up staying two nights on the islands, technically sleeping in the bungalows Svetlana rents and more realistically sleeping wherever the booze and sun catch up to them.

The excursions become less ambitious after they limp back to their villa. Nobody stops going anywhere; they stop feeling obliged to. The heat settles heavily over the coast, thick enough by afternoon that even Marly’s tourist conscience can be defeated by a pool and a cold beer. Breakfast drifts toward noon. Lunch appears whenever somebody remembers it. They swim, nap, read, drink wine after breakfast and open another bottle because there is nowhere they need to be afterwards.

The villa seems to shrink around them in the nicest possible way. Doors stay open. Shoes disappear. Marly lives in swim shorts. Svetlana spends increasingly large portions of the day in some combination of linen and bare skin. At night they gather on the terrace or in the big room facing the water, where the air-conditioning loses its fight with the open doors and the sea makes one low, continuous sound beyond the glass.

Marly and Svetlana have never been shy with one another. Ilya has had months to get used to the casual kissing and weeks to watch the escalation: Svetlana sitting in Marly’s lap when there are perfectly good chairs available, his hand resting under the back of her shirt, the two of them disappearing for twenty minutes and returning looking insufficiently repentant. Most of it barely registers anymore. When it acquires unmistakable intent, Ilya generally leaves.

Not pointedly. Nobody has ever asked him to. He recognises the direction of travel and finds somewhere else to be. His room is thirty feet away; there is usually a book to finish, food to investigate, another balcony on which to fall asleep. Other times he doesn’t bother. If they’re only kissing, who cares. If Marly has his hand under her shirt, Ilya has seen considerably worse before breakfast. He has fucked Svetlana more times than any reasonable person could be expected to count and spent enough nights in beds with Marly and various women that modesty between the three of them would be a fairly recent invention. There is no rule. There is simply a point at which the evening stops involving him, and he drifts elsewhere.

For a while, that is all it is. Then one night the point comes and goes, and Ilya stays where he is.

They have eaten late and barely, mostly things delivered to the villa because nobody could be bothered putting on real clothes. Two empty wine bottles stand on the table, and another is open between them. Ilya is stretched out at one end of the big couch, with Pyramids propped against his stomach, making slow, barely noticeable progress. Svetlana is tucked against Marly at the other end, one bare leg thrown over his, his hand moving absently along her thigh. Nothing unusual there.

They start kissing somewhere around the bottom of Ilya’s page. He keeps reading. At some point Svetlana shifts into Marly’s lap. Ilya turns a page. Later, Marly says something too low for him to catch, and she laughs into his mouth, the sound muffled and unexpectedly young.

Ilya looks up.

Marly is smiling at her. Not the enormous stupid grin he gets when she makes him laugh, or the vaguely stunned expression he still sometimes wears when she walks into a room looking particularly devastating. Something smaller. His hand has come up around the back of her neck, thumb moving once beneath her ear while Svetlana looks down at him through the curtain of her hair.

Christ, they’re lovely.

Ilya looks back at his book and manages perhaps half a paragraph.

By the next time he glances over, Svetlana has Marly’s shirt open and pushed off one shoulder. His mouth is against her throat. She closes her eyes for a second, then catches his jaw and turns his face exactly where she wants it. Marly goes willingly, smiling against her skin when she gets impatient with him.

Still very much themselves, then. Ilya takes a drink.

Normally, somewhere around here, he would pick up the book and wander off. His room is thirty feet away. But he is comfortable: pleasantly hazy from wine and heat, sunk deep into the couch with a thin cotton throw over his legs, the book resting warm and heavy against his stomach. He doesn’t feel like moving.

Marly’s hand disappears beneath the loose drape of Svetlana’s skirt. She makes a small sound into his mouth, shifts closer and murmurs, “Put some fucking effort in, coward.”

Whatever adjustment follows works. Her head tips back. Marly watches her face with such complete attention that Ilya smiles before he realises he is doing it. His book remains open on his stomach. He has not read a word in several minutes.

Svetlana notices first. Her eyes open and find him over Marly’s shoulder. There is no startle in her face, no embarrassment, only a brief assessing lift of one eyebrow.

Ilya shrugs. What of it?

Her mouth twitches. Marly follows her attention a second later.

Well. Better ask, or risk Sasha materialising from the shadows specifically to disembowel him.

“This okay?”

Cliff blinks once, then looks faintly amused. “Sure, man.”

“Good.” There. Civilized. Fucking polite. Ilya puts the book aside and settles deeper into the couch.

Cliff’s amusement sharpens. “You wanna watch, or—”

“Just watch.”

It’s true. He isn’t even hard. He doesn’t particularly want to join in. There is just this hazy, aimless pleasure in looking at them: something hot and soft and good enough that he can feel it somewhere below thought.

Svetlana turns her head toward him. Ilya looks from her to Cliff and discovers, somewhat to his own amusement, that he means exactly what he says next.

“You’re pretty together.”

For once Svetlana has no immediate insult available. Cliff, meanwhile, positively lights up.

“Don’t make it weird,” Ilya tells him.

“You’re the one watching me fuck my girlfriend.”

“See? Already weird.”

Svetlana puts a hand over Cliff’s mouth. “Ignore him.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

Ilya reaches for his wine. “Don’t mind me. As you were.”

“Well.” Svetlana turns back to her lover, her hand sliding from his mouth to his jaw. “You heard him. Let’s give him something pretty to look at, hm?”

Pretty doesn’t quite cover it.

They are calmer together than Ilya would have guessed, although most of the surprise is Svetlana. Cliff tends to meet whatever is offered. Give him something slow, and he goes slow; give him tenderness, and he seems almost relieved to have somewhere to put all of his own. Svetlana is another matter. Tonight she is sweet about it. Slow. Almost hypnotic.

Still bossy, obviously. Love has not worked miracles. She catches Cliff’s wrist when she wants his hand somewhere else, murmurs an instruction against his mouth, and he smiles like being corrected is the best thing that has happened to him all year. He obeys without the slightest injury to his pride. He is rewarded accordingly: her mouth on his, her fingers sliding into his hair, the little involuntary sounds she makes when he gets something exactly right. Every time one escapes her, Cliff looks absurdly pleased with himself.

Ilya’s enjoying this way too fucking much.

With him, Svetlana has never been easy. Neither of them is. Even their gentlest sex tends to acquire edges: somebody pushes, somebody refuses to give ground, affection becoming provocation because neither of them knows how to leave a good thing alone. At their sweetest they make a game of it. At their worst they have had to find antiseptic afterwards. Sex has carried other things between them for years—worry, apology, anger, comfort, resentment, the need to get through when ordinary language has failed.

This carries nothing except itself. Cliff wants her. Svetlana wants him. Apparently that is enough.

There is nothing cheap in that simplicity. Cliff watches each new reaction as though she has entrusted it to him. Svetlana keeps touching him even when she has no apparent reason to: a palm spread over his ribs, fingers at the back of his neck, her thumb passing once over his cheek. His mouth finds the inside of her wrist. She laughs softly, and he smiles against her skin. Nothing is being settled. Nothing is owed. They are pleased by each other. That, more than anything, seems to unravel her.

Ilya knows the architecture of Svetlana’s self-possession. With him there is always some lock to pick, some structure to dismantle before she will let herself go soft. Sometimes they do it with pressure, sometimes pain, sometimes sheer bloody persistence. They know exactly where the other keeps every bolt and hinge.

Cliff does not seem to know the locks are there. Or perhaps he knows and has no interest in opening them. He touches her without asking anything from the touch, and somehow she opens anyway.

Later, when the sharpness has gone out of her altogether, Svetlana folds against him with her head on his shoulder. Cliff gathers her in without interrupting whatever he is murmuring into her hair. She answers without lifting her face. Ilya cannot hear either of them, and he doesn’t need to.

There is something almost ridiculous about how much he likes looking at them. The two of them folded together badly on a couch, mostly naked now, hair mussed, wine abandoned on the table. Nothing grand about it. Nothing cinematic. They are not even particularly graceful. They are just in love.

He takes another drink and lets the warmth settle somewhere soft and stupid inside him.

Chapter End Notes

These Poems

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

Chapter 10

Chapter Notes

This and the next one are gonna be our more or less explicit chapters. Heads up :)

It happens again the next morning, although calling it voyeurism already seems a little dramatic.

Ilya is on the daybed with coffee and his book; Svetlana is stretched along the other end with one bare foot in Cliff’s lap. He starts rubbing her ankle while they argue about dinner. She tells him he is doing it wrong. Cliff tells her there are only so many ways to rub an ankle. Svetlana informs him that this is the sort of statement made by men who have never once been good at anything involving their hands.

”Hey, Roz,” Cliff says, looking over at him. ”Did we decide on that seafood place tonight?”

Ilya turns a page. ”You decided. I said all fish tastes the same.”

Cliff looks appalled. “That is the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.”

“Not even top ten. Not even in the last hour.”

Svetlana opens one eye. “Would you two shut up?”

Cliff grins and bends to kiss the inside of her ankle. The change in her face is small but unmistakable, a flicker of something that passes through her and is gone, but Ilya sees it, and Cliff does too. The next kiss lands higher, against her calf, and then higher still, slow enough that Svetlana’s book drifts lower in her hands, until it comes to rest, forgotten, against her stomach. She reaches down, fingers threading into his hair, guiding him with a certainty that is almost absent-minded, as if she is only now remembering what she wants.

Ilya looks down at his book, eyes moving over the same paragraph again. He could focus if he wanted to, could get up and leave the room, could insist on his own privacy or theirs. He does none of these things.

Cliff glances up eventually, still with one hand wrapped around Svetlana’s ankle. “You gonna keep pretending to read that?”

He arches an imperious brow. “Who’s pretending? If you need me telling you what you’re doing wrong, ask politely.”

Svetlana laughs, a soft sound, eyes still closed. Ilya lets the book fall to his lap, surrendering the pretense of reading. No one says anything about it.

By evening the whole thing has lost even that much ceremony. They are sprawled around the big room with the doors open to the dark. There is wine on the table. Svetlana has one leg over Cliff’s lap, and somewhere in the middle of a conversation he slides a hand up under the loose hem of her dress.

She keeps talking for a while, maybe half a minute, but the sentence unravels, her voice tightening around the words until they simply stop.

Cliff says, “What was that?”

She looks at him. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

His mouth twitches. His hand moves again; Ilya can track the movements under the rough-spun linen. Svetlana inhales through her nose and turns her head toward Ilya as though he has somehow become responsible for this.

He lifts his glass, watching her. "He’s not wrong, Tsvetik. You’re looking a little flushed."

“Fuck you.”

Cliff is laughing against her shoulder.

“Both of you,” she says, with great dignity, “are insufferable.”

"Yeah, babe," Cliff murmurs, and his mouth finds the place just below her ear. Ilya watches the shudder move through her, the small tightening of her shoulders, the way her fingers close hard around Cliff’s wrist and then let go. Cliff notices too; his face goes intent, open in that boyish way Ilya has come to look forward to, a look that always seems to mean more than it says.

Soon she is sideways across his lap, one arm looped around his neck, Cliff’s hand spread wide over the bare length of her thigh. Her mouth finds his, slow and unhurried, and when he shifts beneath her she makes a quiet sound, the kind that would not embarrass her, not even if someone were foolish enough to point it out.

Cliff reaches blindly toward the table. “Roz.”

Ilya follows the gesture, finds the abandoned glass and passes it over.

“Thanks.”

“Welcome.”

Cliff drinks, hands the glass back, then returns the hand to Svetlana’s thigh.

“This is abominable behaviour,” Svetlana says, then her breath catches, throat working. Ilya watches with interest. That’s a fun trick.

He sinks deeper into the cushions as she exhales, patience snapping all at once. She pulls her dress off in a single, impatient movement, bats his hands away, and drags his trunks down, her nails leaving red lines along his skin as she goes.

"Right," she says, straddling him properly, exhaling a long breath through her nose as she settles herself. "I have to do everything around here, by the Father and the Son—"

Ilya laughs, sinking further into the cushions. Apparently this is just what they do now.

After that, Ilya starts getting involved in ways nobody seems to count. At first it is only practical. Cliff reaches blindly for a pillow, and Ilya kicks it within range. Svetlana twists awkwardly against the couch, and he catches her shoulder before she slides off it. Once, watching Cliff spend far too long messing around, Ilya has to intervene before she loses her patience and claws his eyes out.

“Get to it, Marly.”

Cliff looks over. “What?”

“Stop it with the fucking kitten licks. What is this, high school? Thumb, there—higher—What are you, afraid she’ll fucking dent?”

Svetlana opens her eyes. “Ilyusha.”

“Tell me I’m wrong. Lie to me, right now.”

Cliff’s mouth twitches. “Jesus Christ.” He looks at him, warm and hot. “Like this, Roz?”

Ilya hums, looks, then looks a bit longer than necessary, tracking the firm but yielding circle of his thumb. Cliff’s dexterity is a fucking marvel; he’d always thought so on the ice, hands deceptively precise when they want to be.

“That’s just right. Now, what are you doing with the other hand again? Wasting everybody’s fucking time is what—”

After that, apparently, advice is permitted. Not much—he is not running a clinic—but Cliff seems to enjoy asking, and Ilya knows Svetlana’s body better than nearly anyone alive. Sometimes it is a glance, sometimes a muttered question. Once Svetlana objects on principle and proves Ilya right less than thirty seconds later by coming so hard, it takes her a full minute to start breathing properly, which he considers a significant personal victory.

Other times Ilya contributes nothing at all. One afternoon he falls asleep on the enormous daybed while the three of them are talking. When he wakes, the light has moved halfway across the room, and Cliff and Svetlana are still exactly where they were, except naked and no longer talking.

Ilya blinks at them. Svetlana, one hand buried in Cliff’s hair, glances over.

“Good morning.”

“Mm.”

“Did we disturb you?”

He considers this. “Apparently not.”

Cliff laughs against her shoulder. Ilya rolls onto his other side, finds the cool half of the pillow and closes his eyes again.

Another time he wakes because Svetlana’s heel bumps his thigh. He catches her ankle without opening his eyes and moves it somewhere less annoying.

“Thank you,” she says, breathless.

“Welcome.”

Cliff starts laughing.

“Shut up,” Ilya tells him.

There is a brief struggle of some sort beside him; Svetlana tells Cliff to behave, and Ilya drifts back toward sleep with the vague impression that nobody intends to.

It becomes ordinary with alarming speed.

Touch enters the same way. A hand at Svetlana’s back when she is leaning too far. Fingers closing around her wrist before she knocks a glass onto the floor. Once she falls sideways, laughing at something Cliff says and Ilya catches her around the waist, steadies her and keeps her there. Svetlana settles against him for a moment as naturally as she has done all her life, warm and loose from wine and laughter, then turns back toward Cliff. Ilya’s palm stays at her waist until, eventually, there is a reason it doesn’t.

A couple of nights later, her curls become the problem. They are everywhere, a great red tangle spilling over her shoulder and across Cliff’s face while he tries to kiss her. Svetlana keeps impatiently pushing them back only for them to fall forward again.

“For fuck’s sake,” Ilya says.

He reaches over, gathers the whole warm, unruly mass in one hand and pulls it away from her face.

Svetlana turns toward him. His fingers are still threaded through her curls; for a second nothing happens. Not hesitation, exactly; more like all three of them arriving at the same obvious conclusion and discovering nobody remembers who started walking toward it.

Then Svetlana’s eyes drop to his mouth. Ilya kisses her. She answers without pause. Of course she does. There is nothing unfamiliar here—her mouth, the hand that comes up around his jaw, the little pressure of her nails at his neck. He knows all of it. The months between this kiss and the last one seem suddenly less like a boundary than an interval.

Then Ilya opens his eyes and remembers there is another man approximately eighteen inches away.

Cliff is staring. He’s not upset, Jesus Christ, not remotely. Ilya has known Cliff’s various expressions of sexual enthusiasm for years, more thoroughly than either of them apparently understood until recently, and this one requires no specialist interpretation.

Still.

“This okay?”

Cliff looks at him, throat working for a beat. “What do you think, asshole?”

Ilya grins. “We’re being responsible adults now.”

“Since when?”

“Recently.”

Svetlana, still close enough that their noses nearly touch, sighs. “I believe the witness has answered.”

Ilya turns back to her. “Hey,” he says, turning back to Svetik, nudging their noses together, smiling into her mouth. “We’re all about informed consent in this house, or so I understand—”

Ilya does not do much more that night. He does not even take his clothes off. He stays beside them while Cliff fucks her, close enough that Svetlana can turn her face into his shoulder when she wants to, close enough that he can catch her hips when she starts sliding down the couch and pull her back into place. He kisses her when she reaches for him, strokes her hair out of her face, keeps one hand spread over her ribs while Cliff works her steadily toward the point where she stops trying to talk altogether.

That part is familiar. Svetlana getting overwhelmed is familiar. The difference is that Ilya is not the one doing it.

He watches Cliff watch her instead. That is almost better.

Cliff has gone quiet with concentration, one hand firm at her waist, the other braced beside her, face open in that way he gets when something matters enough to strip the jokes out of him. Every time Svetlana makes a sound, he looks at her as though he has been handed useful information. Every time she asks for something, he gives it to her.

Ilya finds himself helping. “Don’t stop,” he tells him once, when Cliff starts to hesitate because Svetlana has gone tense and breathless between them. “She’s close.”

Svetlana makes a rough, choked noise into Ilya’s neck.

“What?” he murmurs, smiling against her temple. “You are.”

Cliff laughs under his breath and keeps going. A minute later Svetlana comes hard enough to lose whatever remained of her dignity, body going rigid between them before collapsing against Ilya with a broken little sound. He holds her through it, one arm around her middle, mouth at her ear, murmuring whatever nonsense occurs to him until the tremors ease.

Cliff is still breathing hard when he looks up. Ilya grins at him over Svetlana’s shoulder.

“Very good work.”

“On God, Roz, you’re such a fucking asshole.”

Svetlana, eyes still closed, says weakly, “Both of you shut up.”

She falls asleep not long afterwards, sprawled over Ilya’s chest as though she has personally conquered the territory and intends to hold it. Cliff gets up to clean up, and Ilya watches him move around the room with the loose, exhausted satisfaction of a man who has had an excellent evening.

“Fun?” Ilya asks.

Cliff looks over.

“I mean it. I don’t wanna step on any toes. By which I mean your toes.”

Cliff gives him a sleepy, wrung-out grin. “Don’t fucking touch my toes, you freak, and we’re good.”

“Aw.” Ilya lets his head fall back. “There goes my master plan.”

“Thought you were slick, too.”

“I am slick.”

“Mm-hm.”

Cliff disappears briefly and comes back with water. Svetlana stirs when he sits down beside them, makes a small dissatisfied sound and reaches unquestioningly across Ilya’s chest toward him.

Cliff stops. Ilya looks at her hand, then at him.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Come here.”

He gets an arm under Svetlana and shifts her over. She complains without waking, catches a fistful of Cliff’s shirt and settles against him immediately, all loose limbs and red curls, as though that had been where she meant to end up in the first place.

Ilya pulls the blanket over them both. The three of them talk for another minute or two about breakfast, alarms, whether anybody is getting up before noon. Ilya loses track somewhere in the middle. The last thing he hears is Cliff saying, very quietly, “Night, bud.”

“Mm.”

Then nothing.

Things escalate, perhaps predictably.

For the most part they stay easy about it. Wine, heat, Svetlana drifting from one of them to the other, Ilya helping when he feels like it and otherwise letting Cliff set the pace. Stays when he pleases, leaves when he doesn’t. Then one night they switch to vodka.

Svetlana is in Ilya’s lap before the second glass, sideways across his thighs with one arm around his shoulders, already in a slightly poisonous mood that suggests someone is going to get hurt for fun. She watches Cliff get up for more ice, then runs one finger down the open neck of Ilya’s shirt.

“You’ve been a very good boy lately.”

Ilya looks at her. “Have I.”

“Helpful. Patient. Domesticated.”

“Careful, Tsvetik. You sound disappointed.”

“I am disappointed.” Her eyes move over his face. “I remember you being more interesting.”

Ilya’s smile sharpens. “Funny. I was about to ask whether all this romance had made you soft.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Soft?”

“Sweet little kisses. Holding hands. Letting him fuss over you.” His hand closes lazily at her waist. “Very touching. Barely recognise you.”

Cliff returns with the ice just in time to hear her say, pleasant as anything, “Bold words from a man who spent a week lying around being a helpful little bellboy while somebody else fucks me.”

Cliff stops halfway to the table.

Ilya stares at her for one beat, then laughs, low and delighted. “Oh, you fucking bitch.”

She gets both hands into his shoulders and drives her nails in. He is on his feet before he quite registers moving, Svetlana coming with him, legs locking around his waist as he backs her into the wall. He is hard immediately, absurdly so after days of floating pleasantly around the edges of other people’s sex. Her mouth curves when she feels it. She yanks his head back by the hair, then catches him by the jaw, sharp points of her nails digging in, brief but meaningful.  Ilya gets one hand into her curls in return, pulls just enough to bare her throat and bites down at the side of her neck.

Cliff has gone quiet behind them. “You gonna fuck her right there, Roz?” he asks, voice rough now.

Ilya looks over his shoulder just long enough to catch his face.

“She likes me,” he says. “She’ll let me get away with it.”

Svetlana’s nails drag down his back. “Will I?”

Ilya turns back to her. “You will.”

She smiles slowly. “Maybe you should get on your knees and beg like a good boy. Then I’ll consider it.”

He laughs against her throat.

“Maybe you should make me.”

And that is more or less the end of coherent conversation.

He still does not touch Cliff directly, not in any way that would require either of them to call it what it is. But the line has started to blur. Ilya notices him now, not merely in the old, factual way of knowing what Cliff looks like half-dressed, what he sounds like when he is getting off, how broad his back is after fifteen years of hockey. Those things have all been filed away for years without consequence. This is different only by degree, which makes it harder to point at.

A hand lands at Cliff’s waist when Ilya reaches past him for a glass and stays there a fraction too long. Cliff looks down at it, then up. Ilya sees the question, feels the heat under it, and doesn’t move immediately. Then he does, and nobody says anything.

The same thing happens the next morning when Cliff comes out of the shower in a towel, hair wet, shoulders still shining with water. Ilya looks. This time deliberately. Cliff catches him, one eyebrow lifting, and Ilya lets his eyes travel once, slow enough to make the point, before meeting his gaze again. Cliff’s mouth twitches. A minute later they are arguing about monkeys.

That is how it goes after that. Nothing heavy, nothing furtive, nothing either of them appears inclined to turn into a conversation. Just an awareness that has become reciprocal, quiet and unmistakable, surfacing in glances and accidental touches that no longer feel entirely accidental.

It is not a problem. If anything, that seems to be the point.

Singapore (Jul 24–Aug 1)

Singapore gets him immediately. The heat is still there, but everything else has changed: glass, steel, trees growing out of buildings, immaculate roads and enough money moving around openly that Svetlana finally stops looking like an exotic species. Ilya loves it immoderately. Immodestly. It could be the ambience. For all the lazy lust of the weeks in Vietnam, it seemed almost innocent in comparison. Here, among all this wealth, all this deliberate opulence, innocence seems like something that happens elsewhere.

They eat constantly, walk more than he expected to tolerate, take boats when they can, and disappear into malls, museums, and rooftop bars, eating intense food in small portions. Cliff is delighted by all of it because Cliff is delighted by tourism as a concept; Svetlana is delighted because Singapore appears to have been designed by people who respect planning, air-conditioning and expensive shoes. Ilya mostly likes the feeling of being somewhere where he’s clearly the least interesting person around.

They do not stop fucking, exactly, but they fuck less. There is too much else to do, and none of them seems interested in making the hotel the point of the trip. Sometimes they come back late, sweaty, and half-drunk and fall into bed together; sometimes they shower, order food, and pass out without touching anybody. The arrangement remains easy, pleasurable and strangely unimportant. Svetlana is the farthest thing in the world from a new lover, and Cliff is still not Ilya’s lover at all, except in the handful of ways that have started to blur when nobody is looking too closely. There is heat there now, certainly, but no urgency. Ilya does not spend the day waiting to get them alone again. Mostly he spends it deciding what he wants to eat next.

“You two have the strangest vibe,” Cliff says eventually. “Like weird siblings.” 

They have spent most of the afternoon doing very little with great commitment, stretched across the bed with the curtains half drawn against the heat, touching and kissing whenever somebody could be bothered. Ilya fell asleep somewhere in the middle of it and woke twenty minutes later with Svetlana’s mouth on him again, which seemed as good a reason as any not to move. Now he is lying with his head against her stomach, one arm loose across her hips, while Cliff watches the two of them with the thoughtful expression of a man trying to identify an unfamiliar animal.

Ilya snorts and presses an absent kiss to Svetlana’s side. “Gross, Cliff.”

“I said weird.” Cliff shifts onto one elbow. “It’s like—buddy-fucking, maybe, but both more and less.”

Svetlana huffs, hoarse and sleepy. “You would know about buddy fucking, I suppose.”

Cliff’s eyes flick toward Ilya. “I mean—not really. Not really.”

Ilya looks up.

There is enough history between them now that the glance does not pass cleanly as nothing. Cliff’s gaze holds for a second too long, warm and curious in a way Ilya has become accustomed to recognising, and Ilya lets his own answer it without bothering to hide. Neither of them smiles. Neither looks away quickly, either.

Then Svetlana huffs a laugh, and shifts under Ilya and says, “If nobody feeds me soon, I am going to become unpleasant.”

Cliff reaches for the room-service menu. The moment goes with him.

Chapter End Notes

# When I or Else

when I or else when you
and I or we
deliberate I lose I
cannot choose if you if
we then near or where
unless I stand as loser
of that losing possibility
that something that I have
or always want more than much
more at
least to have as less and
yes directed by desire

Chapter 11

Chapter Notes

Ubud, Bali (Aug 1–11)

Cliff kisses him two days after they get to Ubud. There was no real introduction to it, except that they’re naked and vaguely moving in the direction of sex, and Cliff decided this was the next obvious thing to try.

Ilya’s nose is wrinkling two heartbeats later. He opens his eyes, briefly dreading the conversation he is going to have to have, then immediately sags with relief. Bless the Lord, and hallelujah, Cliff looks just as displeased by the experiment as he is, mouth pressed tight as if he has bitten into foil.

“Nope,” Cliff says, pulling back. He smacks his lips once, grimaces. “Nope, nope.”

Ilya pauses, then grins. “What, no sweet kisses for me? No cow eyes for poor wretched Ilyusha?”

“Fuck off.”

“Oh, come back here, coward—”

Cliff tries to get away, and that is obviously a mistake. Ilya goes after him; they tumble across the bed in a brief, stupid wrestling match, and within seconds Ilya has him pinned badly enough to lean down and plant several loud, obnoxious kisses over his cheek and forehead while Cliff laughs, swears and tries to shove his face away. Svetlana watches the entire performance from beside them with growing contempt. By the time Cliff finally manages to throw Ilya off, both of them are breathless and grinning, and whatever possibility the kiss might have raised has been thoroughly, joyfully disposed of.

“Well,” Svetlana says. “That was embarrassing.”

“I agree,” Cliff says, wiping his face. “Keep that animal away from me—”

And that is the end of that—but not, as it happens, the end of everything. Svetik has been remarkably sweet with Cliff, but she is still fundamentally Svetlana, which means she can only play nice for so long before the alpha bitch in her sits up and demands some air.

“How about we switch things up tonight?” she says after lunch. She has one bare foot tucked beneath her on the sofa and the particular composed expression that usually means she has already thought something through much farther than anyone else in the room. “Darling, you mentioned that women have fucked you before, and that you liked it.”

Cliff stills. His attention fixes on her immediately, then flicks once toward Ilya. Ilya feels similarly arrested and decides, with unusual wisdom, not to interrupt.

“Yeah,” Cliff says. “I have. Loved it, actually, when it was done properly.”

“You’ll find I do most things properly or don’t bother doing them at all.” Svetlana gives him a moment with that, mercifully. “Would you be interested in trying it with me tonight?”

With what? Ilya thinks, a little lightheaded. He knows perfectly well she did not bring sex toys to Southeast Asia, unless there are dimensions to her packing habits that dip straight into magic. Had she ordered some? Could you have such things delivered to a villa in fucking Bali? Probably. Svetlana could arrange artillery delivery to a convent if sufficiently motivated.

“Sure,” Cliff says. There is a beat while he considers the practicalities, his eyes brightening rather than retreating from them. “Yeah. What did you have in mind?”

“Just me. A toy, plenty of prep, nothing heroic. We see how it goes.” Her voice stays matter-of-fact, even if her smile is beginning to look distinctly hungry. “There is no harm in deciding halfway through that it doesn’t suit you.”

Ilya knows that last part is meant for him as much as Cliff. He has never had much interest in being fucked himself, not from principle or aversion; it simply never became part of the repertoire. When Svetlana got into this particular mood, Sasha had always been the obvious candidate, and Sasha was such a quintessential pillow prince that any sexual arrangement allowing him to lie still while beautiful people did things to him struck him as evidence of a just universe. Ilya had happily participated in vibrators, rings, gags and restraints, not to mention the regrettable eighteen months when all three of them became extremely interested in bondage and impact play. He had never wanted anything inside him badly enough to investigate further.

Cliff, though. Jesus Christ. Cliff had. Cliff liked it. Cliff was going to let Svetlana—

Ilya swallows. Fucking hell. Somehow, despite all the things they already did, all the objectively incredibly hot things he’d happily done, this makes him wobble. He’d held her in place while he fucked her, teased and edged and drove her halfway to incoherence not a week ago, and now he’s breathless?

“And, uh.” His voice has gone slightly hoarse, which is embarrassing but unavoidable. “Would you rather I wasn’t—”

“Nah.” Cliff answers quickly enough to stop him. He looks wide-eyed now, but in a good way: excited, distinctly apprehensive, entirely interested. “Stay, man, if you want to. If that works for your—” He looks back at Svetlana. “Whatever you’re planning.”

“I don’t have a plan as such.” The smile she gives him is presumably intended to be reassuring and ends up perhaps ten degrees north of starving. “But Ilyusha being there would, of course, be a delight. We’ll take things slowly. There is no prize for making this more complicated than it needs to be.”

Ilya wants to make some dumb joke about taking things slowly, but he still feels a little slapped stupid. How would–How would it even work? Would he—Would she lay him out on his stomach, hips propped on a pillow? Would she—And how would—Cliff is not especially loud during sex, usually more grunt and breath than anything else, but would that change when he is the one being fucked? Would he get louder? Quieter? Bossier? Would he lie there and take it? Would he be sweet about it? Would he beg, or demand, tell her exactly how he wants it?

Cliff is quiet, as it happens; not remotely.

The first experiment goes exactly as advertised. Slow and careful, nothing heroic, nothing outrageous. Just the two of them, on the bed, and Ilya, sitting up a little farther away, staring with his heart, inexplicably, in his throat. He’s still as a statue, and the stillness has begun to feel like a decision he keeps making over again, one breath at a time. He could leave. He has left before, on other nights, and nobody has ever made a thing of it.

If Cliff is in feeling—uncomfortable or unsafe or displeased in any way, Ilya can’t tell; he seems, yeah, a little distracted by the new game, a little preoccupied, but not that much. As reported, girls had fucked him before; he knows, broadly speaking, what to expect. Ilya being there is, yeah, probably a lot, but it doesn't seem to be tripping him up anywhere near as much as it is Ilya.

There is nothing careful or restrained in how much he likes it. Cliff goes loose and heavy beneath her hands, sweat beading on his nape, sliding down his skin, muscles surrendering one by one until he seems almost boneless. There is nothing submissive in him, either. Receiving does not change Cliff by a fraction. He is still opinionated, still perfectly willing to say what he wants and visibly pleased when he gets it.

Ilya doesn’t touch him at all the first night, but does on the second. Careful, slow, disbelieving, he reaches out, slowly enough that Cliff can see it coming, and draws one hand down his flank. The muscles under his palm tighten at once, as if in answer. Svetlana’s hand keeps its slow circuit over Cliff’s chest, and her eyes come up over his shoulder. She does not stop what she is doing, which is its own kind of answer.

Ilya stops with his hand resting in the softer space beneath Cliff’s ribs and looks at him. He does not need to say it. This alright? Want me gone? Cliff meets his eyes. Then his breath goes long and careful, and his body turns almost imperceptibly into Ilya’s hand. Well. Alright.

Ilya nods once and runs his palm down the same path again, and does not take it any further than that. He does not especially need to. It is enough, strangely enough, to touch Cliff while he comes apart under Svetlana’s hands—to feel the heat of him, the shudder that moves through his back, the way his body answers Ilya’s palm without either of them having to make anything more of it than what it is. He has put a hand on this back a hundred times without thinking about it: through a shirt, in a locker room, shoving Cliff off a weight bench. Now, he keeps his hand there, moving it in long unhurried passes, and because he does that, Cliff stops holding his shoulders up off the mattress and lets his weight go. That much of a reaction is enough to make Ilya’s chest clench, to keep his breath steady and his back straight. It’s enough to make his head spin, to have influenced things that much, to have been the cause and had caused the effect.

Things progress, as these things do, over the next few days, with no real snags, and Svetlana’s collection grows by degrees. First the things she already knows Cliff likes, then a few more targeted purchases. By then, even Ilya has begun to wonder if the three of them ought to talk about it openly. It seems like the sort of thing responsible adults would discuss before arriving at it naked and breathless. But there are limits to how much clarification is needed when, on the third night, Svetlana has arranged a neat row of new toys across the bed, and Cliff stands beside her in nothing but shorts, colour high in his cheeks, staring down at them.

“The last one is roughly Ilya’s size,” Svetlana says, because apparently subtlety has finally exhausted her patience. Her hand settles lightly at the back of Cliff’s neck. “I would not begin there, darling. There is no reason to prove anything.”

Ilya’s mouth goes dry. The floor feels impossibly far away, his hands hanging at his sides, huge and useless, and he is suddenly, acutely aware that he is standing there, being measured. Cliff looks at him then. He is embarrassed; there is no hiding it, but the embarrassment is not shame. His eyes are bright, his breathing shallow, and beneath the flush Ilya sees the same curiosity that has carried him through everything else. Cliff looks over the row again before reaching for the smallest.

“Let’s start here and move on from there,” he says, and his voice comes out steadier than Ilya’s would have. “I’ve liked everything else.”

Svetlana’s expression softens for a moment, though the hunger underneath it does not. “Very good answer.”

She takes the toy out of his hand and sets it aside, then turns him with a palm at his waist and arranges him with the calm authority that has been driving Ilya quietly insane for days. “Come here. Knees under you this time.”

Cliff obeys, glancing back once as he settles. Not at Svetlana. At Ilya. The look holds long enough that Ilya’s mind goes entirely blank. Should he say something? What the fuck could he even say? This is fucking crazy. It’s---

He is aware of everything at once: the broad line of Cliff’s shoulders, tension gathering and releasing down his back, Svetlana’s hand moving, slow and soothing, over his spine, the heat in the room, the sound of all three of them breathing. Something about Cliff letting them see him like this is almost unbearable. Nervous, vulnerable, open to being watched, touched, pleased, with none of the usual barriers left.

Ilya’s throat is tight, his palms damp, feeling like a man who has walked into the wrong house and found his own furniture there. He moves closer without deciding to. Svetlana’s hand leaves Cliff’s back long enough to catch Ilya by the wrist and draw him the last few inches in, and lays his palm flat at the small of Cliff’s back. Her fingers stay wrapped around his wrist for a second longer than the gesture needs.

“Stay,” she says quietly.

As if he were going anywhere.

Two nights later, they’ve worked through Svetlana’s array of toys by means of a methodical regimen Cliff is determined to call bootycamp, because he is an abomination from Hell. Tonight they’ve already been at it for a couple of hours, taking everything slow and hot, gentle in the strictly physical sense—none of them has so much as a love-bite—and psychologically merciless. Even Ilya has been reduced to hazy obedience, a worker bee hanging on Svetlana’s every word.

Svetlana’s mouth is close to Cliff’s ear, her words landing warm against his skin, her hand drifting over his chest in slow, idle circles. “How about it, sweet boy,” she says, “I’ve got you all worked up and ready. Do you want to try the real thing? Do you think you’d like that?”

“I—” Colour sits high across Cliff’s cheekbones, and his mouth is bitten red. “Yeah. I mean—sure. If everybody’s on board.”

“You can say it, gorgeous.” Her thumb strokes once beneath his ear. “In fact, I’m going to insist this time. People who cannot talk about sex should not be having it.” She waits until he looks at her. “Do you want Ilya to fuck you?”

lya’s body tightens, the question curling around him like a hand across his windpipe. He has asked lovers the same thing before, in words considerably cruder than Svetlana’s; made them say what they wanted, made them ask for it, sometimes made the asking half the game. None of it has ever seemed remarkable. Just sex, the blunt little ritual of naming what was about to happen. But this is Cliff on the bed, and suddenly, everything is new.

Cliff takes a breath. His eyes come back to Ilya and stay there. “Yeah,” he says quietly, then repeats more clearly: “Yeah. I do. Please.”

Svetlana turns her head. ”Ilyusha?”

Ilya is already nodding. ”Yes. Fuck. Yes.”

“Good.” She kisses Cliff once, slow and approving, then starts arranging them with the calm practicality of somebody setting a table. “Here. Turn a little. No, darling—toward me.”

She slips beneath him and draws him down along her side, half over her, their faces close, one of his thighs caught between hers. Cliff settles naturally into the space she makes for him. His back is to Ilya now, Svetlana fitted close along his front, holding him without pinning him there. She pulls him down and kisses him deeply.

Ilya moves in behind them. The mattress gives beneath his knee, the whole bed shifting around the new weight, and for a second he has the strange impression of stepping into a slot made for him, specifically. Insert peg A into slot B, etcetera.

“There,” Svetlana murmurs against Cliff’s mouth. “Better. A little this way. Good. Good boy.”

Cliff exhales hard. Ilya lays a hand between his shoulder blades. That alone feels different now. It isn’t forbidden, not anymore, but it is deliberate. He lets his palm travel slowly down the groove of Cliff’s spine. He is powerful even at rest, and he is hardly resting now; everywhere Ilya touches, muscle jumps beneath his hand, tightening and releasing, answering him. By the time he reaches the softer space beneath Cliff’s ribs, he can feel the quick, hard rhythm of his breathing through his whole body.

Ilya stops there for a moment, palm flat against him, and breathes. In and out, nice and easy. Pull yourself together.

Svetlana watches him over Cliff’s shoulder. Ilya looks at Cliff instead.

”Still good?”

“Yeah.” Cliff’s answer is immediate. He gives a breathless little laugh. ”Very fucking good.”

Right. Game face on, Rozanov. Slow and steady, you know how it goes. You’ve been careful with inexperienced lovers; you know how to build these things up.

He digs his thumb into the hard knot at the base of Cliff’s neck, slow and firm, warming the skin first and then working deeper into the muscle until it begins to give. Cliff groans into Svetlana’s mouth, a startled, shivery sound—the release of an ache he had apparently stopped noticing until Ilya took it away.

“That’s fucking cheating.”

Ilya grins against his shoulder. “Always.”

“Fuck you.”

“Not quite.”

Svetlana makes an amused sound and kisses Cliff before he can answer. After that, there is very little room left for talking.

Ilya puts a hand flat on Cliff’s hip to hold him, swallows, fights against the sheer surreality of it all. It’s—he’s—

But it’s okay. He’s okay. They’re, all three of them, okay. They have done more than this, fucking hell. There had been talk of fucking Svetlana together, and yeah, it was said in jest, Christ, what if we—, but these things were never actually jokes, not really, and Tsvetik is as crazy as they come—

Focus. It is bad form to think about one lover when you are practically inside another, or working toward it. Bad form even when the first is right there, whispering filth into Cliff’s ear with that impossible Svetlana sincerity—hot enough to make him squirm, tender enough that not a word of it could be mistaken for anything but adoration.

Ilya should say something. Now would be the time for—something. Fucking anything. Jesus Christ, Rozanov.

Yeah? What? His usual shit would sound cheap here, too close to mockery with Cliff this raw and open. He could try sincerity, but that would be worse. That voice belongs to her. She can call him beautiful and make it mean exactly what she means. Coming from Ilya, it would sound like an imitation of something he does not feel.

Fine. Don’t lie, then. Say something true. Simple enough, right? Open your stupid fucking mouth and say something true. Lord knows there is plenty there. Enough of whatever the fuck this is to rattle him clear open with it, his skin too tight, his chest so full it almost hurts. Plenty of material to choose from. So just—

Fuck, fuck, but he hates this feeling. Knows it, too, better than anyone should. By the end, with Shane, there had been nights when even the usual nonsense deserted him. No filthy little running commentary, no stupid jokes, none of the easy shit that kept sex safely sex. All he could manage by the end, there, was Shane’s name ground out between his teeth and the quiet certainty that if he let them, the animal noises building in his throat would come out hurt and plaintive, not hot and sexy. So, he shut his mouth, locked his jaw, pressed Shane’s face into the pillow, when looking at him became unbearable, because even that was too much, and Shane, even cock-drunk, even half blind, would see it in his face anyway. Anyone would.

And, well. Let it never be said Ilya had been wrong about that. The moment he stopped hiding it—the moment he let himself look, let himself be looked at—Shane ran so hard he rearranged his entire fucking life around getting away—

Ilya’s breath catches. What the fuck are you doing, Rozanov? What are you doing, dragging the corpse of a failed relationship into a fucking three-way? Into this three-way? Really?

Cliff makes a low sound against Svetlana’s throat. She kisses his temple.

Ilya looks down at his hands. Right. Focus. You are here, right now, about to fuck your best friend. If there has ever been a time to keep your mind on the fucking job, it is now.

“One more?” he asks, waiting for the jerk of Cliff’s head. Mostly pro forma; he cannot imagine Cliff wants to stop now. Svetik has had him open on considerably more, but—well. She did that. Her fingers, her toys, her breath warm against his neck. Ilya’s hand is not a toy, and he is not Svetlana, and the difference shows in the way Cliff’s shoulders lock and then, slowly, give again when Ilya presses and finds the place that sends his whole spine arching off the mattress.

Ilya looks away for a second. At the wall. At nothing. When he looks back, Cliff is still there. Still warm. Still waiting. Then Cliff pushes back into his hand, wordless and unmistakable, and something in Ilya unclenches. There. Fine. He wants more? Ilya can do more.

“How about it?” he says, with an effort at calm. Polite, almost. His mouth is fuckign watering, not in a particularly erotic way. The urge to sink his teeth into a heartbeat, to feel his mouth fill with blood, to have it drip and pour into his throat—He shivers again. Christ.  “You want more? It can–We can just do this. It will be good for you.”

He stills, stops moving his fingers, leans a little to emphasise his point, to demonstrate the next step won’t be fingers, won’t be toys handled, teasingly, by his hot girlfriend, won’t be anything but what it is—getting fucked by a cock, a man, undeniable.

Cliff’s hand comes back and grabs his forearm, hard. Ilya stops. Can’t tell if he’s disappointed or relieved. Cliff’s had enough. He wants out—

“Not—” Cliff’s voice is thick. He shakes his head against the sheet. “Not stop. Just. Give me a second.”

“Sure, yeah. Of course. Whatever you need.”

Ilya stays where he is, unmoving, his hand steady on Cliff’s hip, breathing with him through the pause. Svetlana’s hand moves in slow circles over Cliff’s chest, silent now, her presence enough. When Cliff’s grip loosens, his hips shift back, just enough.

”Okay,” he says. ”Go.”

It’s okay. He said it’s okay—And, past that, it’s more than. Physically, the muscle gives easily, more easily than some of the other times Ilya had done this for men, had been the first. It’s incredible, and sometimes this means it feels like it can’t possibly be wrong- that something that feels this good can’t be anything but right, blessed. Other times, he can sort of see what the inquisitors and the skinheads were going on about: how it was too good, too intense to see the shiver in a man’s throat, to open a space for yourself, to be, in the moment, unsure if you’re giving something or taking something away.

He keeps it slow, careful, stops whenever Cliff’s breath catches wrong. The last of it takes longer than the rest and makes Ilya’s heart skip once, then start racing, sweat beading along his neck, jaw clenched against the animal urge to shove forward and claim—to kick Cliff’s knees wider, pin him down by the throat and drive in hard, lean close enough to hear the overcome gasps, the wet moans.

But he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. That is fantasy logic, where everything happens exactly as you mean it to, where the person under your hands somehow knows that the lunatic holding their life in his hands would sooner die than actually hurt them. Real people cannot know that. They have no reason to. In real life it would hurt, humiliate, frighten—almost always. Almost.

“Jesus Christ.” Ilya can see the tension, the effort it takes for Cliff to swallow. ”Okay. That’s—okay. Yeah.” Then, “Move, man. Come on.”

Svetlana laughs, low and pleased. “You heard him.”

It is clear, unambiguous, and its certainty cuts through the haze, lets Ilya breathe again, lets him move without second-guessing. There is nothing left to question, nothing to hold back for.

After that, it’s easier to focus on the work of it, on the part he is good at. He looks close, removes all the distractions, removes his own body as much as he can. He finds the right angles, adjusts to every shift, every wordless request, quick enough that Cliff never has to ask twice. The trick is to listen, then do. Simple enough, even for a dumb hockey player. It’s all there, in the body, clear as day. He counts his breaths by the movements of his ribs beneath his fingers, easing off when one catches, pressing harder when Cliff pushes back. His thumbs leave pale marks on Cliff’s hips, fading and returning. Svetlana is soft and molten beside them, her hands moving in slow, luxurious patterns, guiding Cliff forward into her touch, then back into Ilya’s.

It is easy, improbably so, the rhythm found quickly, though it still feels as if both of them are reaching toward Svetlana, seeking her approval, her benediction, her absolution. Svetlana turns Cliff’s face to her with gentle fingers and kisses him, Cliff kissing back, distracted and noisy.

Then Cliff pushes back, gets one arm around Svetlana’s waist and braces the other against the bed with her hand caught in his, and claims the rhythm for himself. He adjusts, finds what he wants, nudges his face deeper into the crook of her neck and does it again, breathing ragged and full. Ilya slows almost without meaning to, hands tightening at Cliff’s waist as the world narrows abruptly to the space between them. His knee slips on the sheet; he catches himself with one hand planted beside Cliff’s shoulder, muscles locking, blood running hot and urgent under his skin.

“Jesus Christ,” Cliff says after a moment, excavating himself from the snarl of Svetlana’s hair. He leans back far enough to lay his head sideways against her breastbone, chest heaving. “Jesus Christ, that’s so fucking good—” He pushes back again, then again, and makes a sound of pure, thwarted frustration. “What the fuck is this pussy shit, Roz? Come on. Fucking commit.”

Ilya draws in a long breath. Easy, Rozanov. Calm down. The urge to give Cliff exactly what he is asking for, to take the words at face value, close his teeth over the pulse in his throat and finally stop holding himself back—he doesn’t do it; he’s not a fucking animal, but he wants and wants.

“Do it,” Svetlana says after a beat, one hand still spread over Cliff’s thigh, eyes fixed on Ilya. “But slow, Ilyusha. Careful.”

Ilya bares his teeth at her. Fuck you. Jesus Christ, fuck both of you. He gets a hand around the back of Cliff’s neck and pushes him down into Svetlana, then gets on with it as directed—not faster, but harder, putting his weight behind each movement and making himself wait through the fraction of a second between one and the next. You wanted fucking commitment? You don’t even know—Slow, sure. Careful, of course; Ilya’s not being careless in the least. But nice? Nobody asked for nice.

“Jesus Christ,” Cliff gets out after a while, the words blurring together, strained around the panting. “That’s—fuck, that’s so fucking much.”

Ilya is sweating now, forehead pressed to the back of Cliff’s shoulder, every muscle in his body taut with the effort of keeping enough control to listen and not say something stupid like, yeah, yeah, it fucking is.

“Good?” he manages. “Want me to slow down?”

“Man, I’ll fucking kill you. Swear to the fucking Lord.” Cliff’s voice cracks when Ilya’s hands settle more firmly at his hips, fingers digging in. “I’m serious. Don’t you fucking dare—oh, God. That. Jesus, like that, do that again, what the fuck—”

So he does.

Svetlana has gone quiet too. She watches Cliff with that soft, intent concentration, one palm moving slowly over his sternum while the other cradles the back of his head. Whenever his face tightens, she kisses him somewhere—the corner of his mouth, his cheek, his temple—and every time he turns toward her as though by instinct, seeking her without seeming to know he is doing it. Her legs are tangled with his, her hips making small, idle circles against his thigh, and Cliff’s hand has found its way between them, distracted and clumsy but stubbornly devoted to the task.

Heat works its way up Ilya’s spine, slow and mean. He draws it out anyway, wanting to hold on to the shape of them like this: Cliff bent toward her, Svetlana curved around him, their bodies shivering together. Her fingers disappear into his hair. His mouth moves against her skin. They speak in fragments that barely survive becoming words, soft things broken apart by breath, while Ilya stays behind him with his hands locked at Cliff’s hips and keeps the whole arrangement moving.

Cliff comes first, loud and breathless, the sound rougher than anything else in the room. He pushes back against Ilya even as his face turns into Svetlana, and she gathers him closer, murmuring to him, that’s it, good, good, like she is talking him safely down from somewhere high.

Ilya stops, stays, waits for Cliff’s breathing to settle before moving again, short and rough. Cliff’s voice is all he needs, exhausted but certain: yeah, fuck, come on; he comes with his forehead pressed to Cliff’s spine, hands locked around his hips, the force of it leaving him empty and shaking. For a few seconds there is nothing but the ringing in his ears, his heart battering against his ribs, the fine tremor running through his jaw. He has to focus on relaxing his hands; they don’t want to let go.

Afterward, everything becomes very simple. He eases away carefully, steadies Cliff when he sags, then disappears into the bathroom long enough to wash up and come back with warm water, towels and something for them to drink. By then Cliff has turned over and folded himself across Svetlana, his face tucked beneath her chin, one arm loose around her shoulders. He is still trembling, for once not seeming to be interested in being reassuring, or funny, or particularly brave. He simply lets her hold him. Svetlana has one hand buried in his hair and the other spread warm across his back, keeping him close without asking anything of him, her mouth brushing his temple whenever another shudder moves through him.

Ilya tidies around them without much thought. He wipes away what needs wiping, strips the damp sheet out from under their legs and pulls a clean one over them, passes Svetlana the water when she reaches for it. Cliff rasps out a thank you, and Ilya squeezes the back of his neck in answer. Neither of them seems inclined to move very far. Svetlana keeps combing her fingers through Cliff’s hair, murmuring something too low for Ilya to catch, and Cliff keeps settling closer by degrees, each adjustment small and instinctive, as though some part of him has handed the problem of being alright entirely over to her.

By the time Ilya has gathered the glasses and straightened the room, they have gone quiet. He stands beside the bed for a moment with the towel still in his hand, looking at them: Cliff loose and spent against her, still strangely vulnerable; Svetlana curved around him, watchful and tender, holding him through whatever remains. Both of them already returning to the shape they know best. It is good. Better than good. Exactly as it should be.

God, they’re so in love. Ilya looks at them, at Cliff’s big hand splayed across her ribs and her mouth moving against his hair. Most beautiful fucking thing in the world.

Nothing else particularly needs doing. He folds the towel, sets it down, straightens the water bottle beside it and collects the empty glasses. That was a lot, particularly for Cliff. They should have a little time to themselves, to recalibrate in peace.

He carries the glasses to the kitchen. It feels cooler out here. He rests one hand on the marble after he sets them down and leaves it there for a moment, letting the cold work into his palm. His breathing is still too deep, the last of the exertion lingering in his muscles. He rinses and dries the glasses, puts them away, retrieves his book from where he left it and stretches out on the sofa with it propped against his chest.

He tries to read, but the words blur, the same paragraph repeating until he gives up and lies there, listening to the house settle, to the quiet. Somewhere farther in, a floorboard gives softly, then nothing. The air-conditioning hums.

When he wakes, the book is facedown beside him, the villa is dark, and somebody has pulled a blanket over his legs, up to his waist. He looks at it for a second then tugs it higher, wraps it around his shoulders until it bunches warm and reassuring around his neck, rolls onto his side and goes back to sleep.

***

Chapter End Notes

Excerpt from Free flight

Maybe I’m kidding

Maybe I need a woman
a woman be so well you know so wifelike
so more or less motherly so listening so much
the universal skin you love to touch and who the
closer she gets to you the better she looks to me/somebody
say yes and make me laugh and tell me she know she
been there she spit bullets at my enemies she say you
need to sail around Alaska fuck it all try this new
cerebral tea and take a long bath

Maybe I need a man
a man be so well you know so manly so lifelike
so more or less virile so sure so much the deep
voice of opinion and the shoulders like a window
seat and cheeks so closely shaven by a twin-edged
razor blade no oily hair and no dandruff besides/
somebody say yes and make
me laugh and tell me he know he been there he spit
bullets at my enemies he say you need to sail around
Alaska fuck it all and take a long bath

la-ti-dah and lah-ti-dum
what’s this socialized obsession with the bathtub

Maybe I just need to love myself myself
(anyhow I’m more familiar with the subject)
Maybe when my cousin tells me you remind me
of a woman past her prime maybe I need
to hustle my cousin into a hammerlock
position make her cry out uncle and
I’m sorry
Maybe when I feel this horrible
inclination to kiss folks I despise
because the party’s like that
an occasion to be kissing people
you despise maybe I should tell them kindly
kiss my

Maybe when I wake up in the middle of the night
I should go downstairs
dump the refrigerator contents on the floor
and stand there in the middle of the spilled milk
and the wasted butter spread beneath my dirty feet
writing poems
writing poems
maybe I just need to love myself myself and
anyway
I’m working on it

Chapter 12

Chapter Notes

This one is - upsetting. Ilya pushes himself hard - shocking, i know - and doesnt communicate - even more shocking - and is an idiot, overall.

All uphill from here though!

In a hotel bar in Yogyakarta, leaning over a pool table with a cigarette he is not allowed to smoke tucked behind his ear, Ilya says, "I want to try the other way."

Cliff misses. Not the shot—the ball. The big idiot's cue goes straight past the white and catches the felt with a small, expensive sound. Ilya looks down, then up at him. "Correct reaction, Marly, really. Super—"

"You mean—"

Ilya waits for several amusing moments. "Take your time, yes?"

Cliff stands straight. His face has changed in a way Ilya finds gratifying until he notices the care being taken with it: the effort to look interested without looking too interested, the question being assembled behind his eyes. Jesus. He has made a proposal, not disclosed an illness.

"Yeah," Cliff says. "I mean. Yeah, of course."

"Strong argument."

"Would you let me get a fucking sentence out?"

"Please."

Cliff puts the cue down. He is smiling now, unwillingly, and Ilya may stop being irritated with him. "Yeah," he says again, quieter. "I'd like that."

From the little table against the wall, Svetlana turns a page of the menu. "He has wanted to for a month."

"Thank you," Cliff says.

"You are welcome."

Ilya glances at him. Cliff looks back, caught and a little defiant about it, and for a moment Ilya forgets the next thing he was going to say. Well. Good. "Later," he says, retrieving his own cue. "First I finish humiliating you."

"You're losing."

Ilya looks, pointedly, at the tear in the felt. "This means you lost, you realize?"

Svetlana makes a small sound into her glass. Under the table her sandal finds his ankle and rests there while he considers the shot.

They are staying one night. Tomorrow there will be another car, another airport, another place Svetlana has decided they ought to see before they die, apparently an imminent event judging by the itinerary. Their bags are upstairs, mostly unopened. Ilya likes this about travelling: how little is required to leave. Put the charger back. Count the passports. Nothing has to become a life merely because you have spent a night in it. He takes the shot and misses. Cliff has the good sense to say nothing. Smart man.

The thought has been with him longer than he admits when Svetlana asks. She asks outside, while Cliff goes back for the sunglasses he has managed to lose between the table and the door. Ilya is finally smoking his cigarette. The heat lies over the street with the weight of something upholstered.

"Since when?" she says in Russian.

He shrugs. "A while." She looks at him, then reaches up to straighten his collar, which requires straightening only if one has decided to touch him and needs an excuse.

"What?"

"Nothing."

He catches her hand before she can withdraw it and kisses her knuckles extravagantly. There. That improves matters. She laughs and pulls free, wiping the back of her hand on his shirt.

He does want it. He wanted it before he spoke; speaking has merely made the rest of the day inconvenient. Cliff reaches over him to hold a door, and Ilya notices his wrist. Lunch is three streets away. He notices the wrist again there, beside a glass of something pink and revolting which Cliff insists is excellent. Then he notices Svetlana noticing, and gives her the finger beneath the table.

"What?" Cliff says.

"Private conversation."

"Okay. Cool. Love those. Those always work out so well for me."

Ilya steals a piece of fruit from his glass. It is revolting too. Everything is as it should be. Cliff complains about the theft of some hideous thing Ilya has immediately spat into a napkin; Svetlana refuses to arbitrate; a small child at the next table regards all three of them with eloquent contempt. Ilya likes the child. He likes the afternoon. He likes the fact that later exists, waiting upstairs among their badly packed clothes. There is no reason to make anything difficult.

He has never much wanted this. There have been offers, naturally, and people who took his refusal for an opening bid. Those people had disappointing evenings. He has thrown them out of his apartment, out of a backstage corridor and, once, memorably, out of their own front door, in whatever they still had on. With Shane—

He reaches for his water.

Cliff is explaining something to Svetlana with two forks, neither of which belongs to him. She listens with the gravity she brings to exceptionally stupid men and exceptionally expensive shoes. When Ilya puts his glass down she absently touches his knee. Here are two people who want him and are pleased to say so. He has asked. Cliff has damaged hotel property in his enthusiasm. Ilya ought to be allowed to enjoy that. He does enjoy it.

On the walk back he steps between them and puts an arm around each of their shoulders, which is inconvenient for everyone and therefore worth doing. Svetlana complains that he is heavy. Cliff tells her to imagine what it is like having to carry his whole professional career.

"You are very funny today," Ilya tells him.

"You make me nervous."

It is said lightly enough to pass as another joke. Ilya turns his head anyway. Cliff is looking ahead, smiling a little. For once, Ilya leaves the opening alone. He tightens his arm instead.

By the time the door locks behind them that evening, he has almost convinced himself he has stopped thinking about it. The room is forgettable in the deliberate way transit hotels are forgettable: beige walls, dark curtains, a fan turning overhead without moving enough air to matter. Orange streetlight presses in at the edges. They are here for one night. Tomorrow they will leave and none of them will remember the carpet.

Then Cliff leaves his watch on the desk and pulls his shirt over his head. Ilya looks. Cliff catches him. There is a small pause between them, newly conscious, and Cliff's mouth twitches.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Good."

He looks away first, which annoys him more than it ought to. Whatever. Focus, Rozanov. Start a slapfight now and Svetlana kicks you out of the bed for days. And he wants it. Standing there in the weak light, he wants it now. If he is going to do it, it is these two. There is nobody else.

He drops onto the bed. Svetlana comes back from the bathroom with her hair down, and for all the thinking he has done about tonight, the first few minutes are almost amusingly ordinary. She lies down facing him and draws her nails up his chest, one slow, teasing pass, until the skin tingles. He catches her wrist and pulls her closer; she lets him. Cliff is still by the desk, not quite watchful but nervous. Excited. Ilya puts a hand out behind him without looking.

"Marly. Today."

The mattress dips, and Cliff's weight settles heavily and comfortably along his back.

Svetlana's mouth moves to his throat and he lets his eyes slip shut, tilting his head back onto Cliff's shoulder. His body is loose under her hands, responsive in the ordinary, reassuring way bodies are supposed to be. Heat gathers. His breathing deepens. She slows when she knows she has him, and his hand tightens at her waist.

"Lanka."

"Mm?"

"Stop playing."

She looks up. The amusement is there, but so is attention; she has always known when the joke is over. "Alright, Il'ka. Anything you want. Come on, up—"

They get him naked, both of them. It's ridiculous, to tell the truth, and hot too. Svetlana's hands are steady and straightforward. Cliff is careful. Slow. Considerate, maybe, in a way that makes him want to bare his teeth and start a fight. Lose the fight. It's nerves, probably. God, he'd kill for a drink, a double of something cold and mean.

He stretches out across the mattress instead. One hand slides into Svetlana's hair; the other reaches back until it finds Cliff's thigh. Cliff's palm settles against his ribs in return, broad and warm. The three of them have become good at this without ever discussing it. A shoulder moved before it becomes inconvenient. A knee shifted. Someone reaching and finding a hand already there.

Ilya can sprawl. He can demand. He can close his eyes and let Svetlana take her time, because he knows how quickly either of them will stop if he asks. No danger in giving up a little control when you know exactly where it went: to hands infinitely gentler than your own.

Svetlana shifts lower, and something in her attention changes. He opens his eyes. She is watching him with the particular focus she gets when curiosity overtakes mischief. He grins back, warm and lazy and held securely between the two people he trusts most. No apprehension in him at all.

"Go on," he says.

She does not go on. She comes back up the bed instead and takes her time, slow and thorough, winding him up on purpose, because she knows exactly how to turn impatience into helplessness into pleading with him, and has always considered that valuable information. Cliff lies stretched out along his side and, now that it is actually starting, can't settle. His hand lands on Ilya's ribs, lifts, lands on his arm, lifts again.

"Marly. Put the hand somewhere and leave it."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Here." He takes Cliff's wrist and puts the palm flat on his own stomach. "There. Was that hard?"

Svetlana laughs against his throat. Familiar. That helps. Then her hand slips lower and he is warm and loose and thoroughly distracted. He lets her draw it out, because this is the part he knows: her mouth, her hands, Cliff's weight along his side, broad and warm and comforting.

He's half out of his mind by the time she finally gets her fingers into him. It's strange. Not bad. Strange enough that his body goes still for a second while the rest of him catches up.

"Alright?" she says.

"Mm."

"Use your words, my love."

"Drown in a well."

She kisses the corner of his mouth and continues. Then strange becomes good. His whole body discovers it at once, a shiver running from the base of his skull and grounding in his heels, breath catching hard enough to hurt. He makes a sound he didn't intend, and then another one on purpose, because that's what you do. You give something back.

Svetlana works him patiently, watching his face. Cliff's hand moves slowly over his shoulder, his hair, the hinge of his jaw. Ilya's thighs start to shake.

"Good," Cliff says. "So good. Here, shift a little. That's good, isn't that better—"

It is better. It's fantastic, bizarre, makes sweat bead on his forehead. Jesus Christ. If this is what it's like for her, all the times he has had his fingers in her under a restaurant table while she kept her face straight—how did she do it? How the fuck—

They've barely started and he's losing control of his own muscles, panting, head filling with static. And it's only her fingers. His hands open and close on the mattress. He bites the inside of his cheek to stop the third sound.

"Again," he says. "Lanka. Again."

She does.

"Fuck, fuck—" It comes out hoarse. "Keep going. Is fine."

Then her hand is gone, and she is leaning off the side of the bed, and something dark and curved comes out of her bag. Ilya laughs before he can think. A vibrator. Smooth, impersonal, nothing to say about any of it. Easier than her fingers were: no skin, no life, no questions. He can be casual with an object. He has been casual with far more complicated things.

"Go on, then," he says. "Show me."

She does. Strange, the way her fingers were strange, only less so; then not strange at all. For a while it is almost the old arrangement: Svetlana doing something to him, Cliff along for the ride, nobody needing anything from Ilya at all.

Then she finds the angle, and his hips are rolling back to chase it before he has agreed to anything. The sound that comes out of him is one he has never made before. There is a shake starting in his thighs. Wanting to come is an ache, a violent one, and wanting it never to stop is another, and the two arrive at once and cancel each other out, so that all he can do is lie there and shiver. He can count his own heart: in his throat, in his temples, at the tips of his fingers where they dig into the sheet. Each breath is shorter than the last, and tears on the way out.

"You're doing so well, Il'ka."

The words land harder than expected. He has taken compliments his whole life, but this one punches the air from his lungs. His breath snags, a thin, audible pull, and pins and needles crawl up his forearms.

He manages a choked laugh. "Obviously."

She smiles and presses a careful kiss to the highest point of his hip bone. Cliff's hand moves too, slides up his side, over the jump of his ribs, until the heel of it settles flat on Ilya's sternum, right over the racket. His voice follows, low and close at Ilya's ear. "There you go. That's it. You're doing so well, Ilya."

The whole name. Quiet and certain. Ilya's chest stutters; his head falls back onto Cliff's shoulder, and a shiver works down the length of him, head to toe.

"Yeah?" Rougher than he meant it. "Tell me that after I come."

"That's the plan," Cliff says.

Svetlana moves the toy again, and Ilya stops pretending he has anything left to say. He's got this. He's always got this. Nothing to worry about. Cliff's thumb strokes once, slowly, over his collarbone. Svetlana kisses the inside of his knee.

"You're perfect," she says.

He laughs, and it comes out right, and he grins down the bed at her. All good. All exactly as planned. This is what he asked for.

The change arrives without ceremony.

Svetlana's rhythm stops. Her hand lifts; something passes between them over his body. The mattress dips as Cliff moves down the bed and she moves up it, and then she is stretched out along his side with her head on his pillow, and the toy is moving again. Same angle, same pressure, same work. It takes his body a full second longer than his head to understand that the hand holding it is bigger.

Cliff's hand. Not gentler. Not rougher. The same thing done the same way by someone else, and that should be nothing. That should be nothing at all. The knuckles braced against his thigh are Cliff's knuckles. The forearm across his hip is Cliff's forearm, and he has seen that forearm do a thousand things—haul gear, hold a door, pin him to a mat in Tampa—and none of those things ever made his stomach drop like this. It drops anyway.

Not bad. Not good. Just a drop, the floor slipping a centimeter under a bed that was already settled. His shoulders come up toward his ears, and he breathes out through his nose, long and even, so nobody can hear anything wrong in it.

"Alright?" Cliff says, from the foot of the bed.

"Yeah." It comes out fine. "Is good."

He keeps his eyes open a beat too long. Svetlana is right there, a hand's width from his face, and her eyes are doing the cataloguing thing, filing him away for later, and he can't have that right now. He can't have anyone looking at him like they can see the floor moving under the bed.

"Wait," he says.

Cliff stops at once. The toy slides out.

Ilya rolls onto his stomach. Casual. A sprawl, the way he'd shift in any bed after any night. He folds his arms under his head and tucks his face into the crook of one elbow, and it's better. It's so much better. The linen smells of hotel laundry and some floral detergent he'll never name, and the light is off his face, and nobody can read him here.

"Okay," he says into his arm. "Go."

Cliff's free hand settles on the back of his thigh. Then the toy again, slow.

It's still good. Better, fucking incredible, slow and patient, the slick sound of it loud in the quiet room, his body pressing into it on its own, hips tilting back—none of it is wrong. Nothing is wrong. He asked for this. He asked for it with them. He wants it now.

"There you go, love," Svetlana says, close to his ear. "Good. So good, Il'ka."

The praise goes through him warm. His mouth loosens; for a second he almost smiles. Then the warmth keeps going, down beneath his ribs, into a place that contracts so sharply he has to swallow. He wants her to say it again. Christ, he wants her to say it again, and already his face is too hot and there is nowhere comfortable to put his eyes.

His heart gives a hard, misplaced beat. He waits for the next one and gets three, close together, each higher in his chest. The breath he takes does not seem to reach them. He takes another. Too much air now, his mouth dry around it, and behind him Cliff is saying that's it, you're doing great, so gorgeous, and he has to hold still to hear it.

Cliff's thumb moves on the back of his thigh. A slow circle. For a moment he goes loose with relief: his head grows heavy, his hands stop trying to find somewhere to be. Then the relief keeps opening. Something beneath his breastbone gives another inch and he catches his breath, abruptly certain that this is far enough.

He reaches out blind and finds Svetlana's hand on the pillow. Grips it. She squeezes back, encouraging him.

Nothing hurts. He keeps checking this, almost angrily: nothing hurts. There is only too much arriving at once, with no pause in which to swallow or settle his shoulders or finish feeling the last thing. He presses his forehead harder into his arm. The pressure is plain and local. He can make it stronger. He does, until the rest of the room has to happen around it.

Her other hand passes over his hair and his throat closes. Such a light touch. He could lift his head and dislodge it; instead he lies beneath it with his teeth pressed together, enduring the terrible gentleness of her fingertips. At the end of each stroke there is a second when she is no longer touching him. He waits for that second. When it comes, he cannot stand it.

Cliff keeps the same pace. Ilya tries to let his weight go. His shoulders drop, but his stomach tightens to make up for it; he eases that and finds his hands clenched. Somewhere in him there must be one last muscle he has not thought to release. If he can find it, this will become easy. He lies very still, searching, while the effort of lying still spreads through the rest of him.

The toy comes out. A slick pull, a soft sound, then nothing where it was. The absence is loud. The fan turns overhead. Same click on every rotation. He counts them without meaning to, loses count, starts over. Somewhere below, metal scrapes across concrete.

"Is this okay?" Cliff, behind him, hands working slowly up and down his thighs. "You good to continue, bud?"

It takes Ilya a breath to get the words in order. One breath. Nobody notices a breath; he has been panting into his own arm for ten minutes.

"No, Marly. I changed my mind, I want to go play more pool." Muffled. He turns his head so they can hear the rest. "Yes. Come on."

Cliff laughs, short and relieved, warm on the small of his back. Svetlana laughs too. Her hand goes back to his hair and she settles against his side. She believes him. Everyone believes him. Anyone who ever doubted his limits learned better.

Inside his chest something is beating itself sick. He lets it. It's fine. They're fine. There isn't any more to it than that.

"So fucking sassy, fuck—" The mattress dips. One hand comes to rest on his hip, broad and warm. The other—Fingers. Bigger than Svetlana's, thicker, blunter somehow. Cliff's fingers, Christ, fingers he's seen clenched around his shoulder, around Svetlana's waist, that he's seen fuck Svetlana much like they're now fucking him, Jesus, Jesus Christ—

His hips push back into it. His breath goes fast and wet against the sheet. Cliff works him open slow and patient, and it's good. It's so good. He'd forgotten for a minute how good. The slick sound of it fills the room, and he shuts his eyes and takes it, lets Cliff take him apart by degrees, lets himself want this—

Cliff draws his fingers out. Ilya follows them half an inch, chasing. The absence again, worse than before.

"Okay?" Cliff says.

"Yeah." He means it. For this, right now, he means it. "Come on."

The mattress shifts. Cliff's knees settle wider. A foil packet, a soft tear. Ilya hears himself swallow. Then Cliff's hands find his hips and he pushes inside, hot, blunt, unmistakable.

Ilya's breath stops. Jesus. Jesus. This is not a toy. This is not fingers. This is Cliff, his Cliff, pushing in slow and careful, giving him time to take it, to get used to it, until Cliff's hips are flush against him. Cliff folds down over his back, his breath stuttering against Ilya's shoulder blade.

"Fuck," Cliff breathes. "Fuck, Ilya—"

Ilya's hands grip the mattress. His eyes are open against the dark of his own arm. He can hear his pulse in the pillow.

"Yeah," he says. Rough. "Move." Please, God, move. Don't leave me here, heaving like a stuck pig—

Cliff moves. The drag of it is deep and bright, and he answers it honestly—hips rolling back into every thrust, breath tearing, straining against the sheet. He never imagined anything could feel like this, that he could be pinned so tight, filled and pulled and drawn and fucking quartered—

He lets himself have it for a while. Lets himself be exactly where he is.

A sound comes out of him. Low and punched, the noise a man makes when something lands right, and Cliff's rhythm stumbles—a hitch in the hips, a sharpening of the breath behind him. Ilya goes still. Not because of the sound, because of what the sound did.

He could do that again. He does. The next one is softer, steadier, made on purpose. Cliff's hand tightens at his hip, and the next thrust goes deeper. Oh.

He knows this. He has always known it, from the other side. He has spent years being the man who reads a body underneath him and answers it, who knows exactly what he wants to feel under his hands and says so. He knows the sequence the way he knows his own breath.

So: the arch, a beat before Cliff finds the place that would have bowed his spine anyway. The noise, on schedule. Fingers spreading wide on the mattress—grip, release, grip again. Timed, pretty, exactly right.

"Yeah," Cliff says against his shoulder, low and wrecked. "Yeah, God, fuck, that's it, that's—"

Ilya preens. He's good at this. He has always been good at this, and the proof is in Cliff's voice, in all that size and hunger leaning into him harder every time he gives it the sound. For a minute it's fine. Better than fine. It's a game he knows how to win, and winning is warm. Svetlana's fingers move in his hair. Everything is exactly as it should be. Then, between one breath and the next: when did he last feel any of it?

Cliff thrusts again and the arch happens, the noise happens, the hand, and he watches them go the way you'd watch a stranger work. Skilful. Certain. Nothing to do with him at all.

He can make this perfect; that's something. That's—Good, isn't it? He can give them exactly what they need, and nobody has to know that underneath he's—

Never mind that. Focus on other things. The pleasure is still there, bright and real, going through him with every push—Yes, focus on that. It's fine. It's good.

"You feel incredible," Cliff says. "So good—"

The words arrive like something precious handed through a window. Ilya makes the sound. The right sound. He makes it perfectly.

Then Cliff shifts, pulls him up a little by the hips, tilts them somehow. It's nothing. An inch. But it wasn't in the sequence, and the sound that goes out of Ilya is not one he made. High, cracked. Nobody chose it.

"Fuck, yeah," Cliff says.

And the room comes in. All of it, at once. The drag of the sheet under his chest. The grip on his hip. Sweat cooling in the small of his back. The exact weight of another man's chest against his shoulders, the slow push and pull of it. Nothing to hold. Nothing to do. A body being moved by somebody else's rhythm, and no say in it at all.

The white-hot paralysis goes away fast, four seconds, maybe, and then he gets a hand back on the wheel. Puts a sound out, gets his hips going. It doesn't take. He knows what the sound is for now. A minute ago he was doing this with them, and now it is being done to him, and he can't get back across.

There has always been a half-second between a thing happening and him, between him doing a thing and the thing being done. There's nothing like that here. Everything is coming straight through with nothing in front of it, and his hands keep opening and closing on the mattress like somebody else's.

It feels fantastic, every single thing. He's shaking from the ankles, his thighs are going, and it feels fantastic.

"Look at you," Cliff says, close enough that the words land on his skin. "So fucking gorgeous. So good, Jesus, I'm gonna lose my fucking mind—"

A minute ago he couldn't get words like that to reach him. Now they go all the way in, and there is nowhere in him to put them.

Then Svetlana shifts. He knows that shift. Has known it since he was fifteen: she's got an idea. She'll take his chin and turn his face up and kiss him, and then she'll want the next thing, and the next, because that's how she is and it has always been half the fun.

Her hand comes under his jaw.

"No—" It's out before he's decided anything. He turns his face away from it, back down into the dark. "No. Like this."

Cliff slows. Doesn't stop. A hand comes flat between Ilya's shoulder blades and stays there a beat too long. A question gathering. A breath drawn to ask it.

No. We are not doing that.

"Don't stop." He gets his voice under it, low and rough, and it isn't difficult, because every word is true. "Is good, Marly. Like this. Don't stop, please—"

He pushes back to prove it, and that's true too. His thighs are shaking, and that's true. He shapes the sound as it comes out, hoarse and strained. He knows it's hot. He knows exactly what it does to the man behind him.

"Fuck, Ilya, Jesus fucking Christ—"

Cliff picks it back up, harder, taking him at his word. Because Ilya Rozanov says what he wants, always, isn't it? He said it. He made it really fucking clear.

He gets his face into the crook of his elbow, down in the dark where there's only the sheet and his own breath coming back off it. Better. One thing, one direction, nothing new arriving. It would have been nothing, the kiss. She has kissed him a thousand times. Only he can't take one more thing coming at him from a side he isn't watching. He's run out of sides.

He needs Russian. Needs to hear it, needs something real in the fucking room. Something undeniable and correct. Needs to speak it, needs it in his head, his chest, his mouth. Needs to be himself. He reaches, gets as far as a breath and there's nothing behind it. There's only English in him and English isn't touching this.

Svetlana slides down beside him until her shoulder is under his cheek. He lets her. Same direction. Nothing new. It's fine. For a moment he rests. Really rests, the weight of his head given over, his mouth soft against her shoulder. He can hear her swallow. Such a small, living sound. Then she touches the back of his neck and he comes tight all at once. No reason. No warning. His body has shut its fist around something, and he is inside it.

"Илюша," she says, and he wants to go home.

The wanting is so sudden his arms almost go out from under him. Home where? There is no picture with it, no room he could name. Only the ache of having been away too long, and her hand moving through his hair as though she knows the way. He turns his face into the pillow, breathes heavy.

Behind him Cliff is close; his rhythm has gone ragged. His hand leaves Ilya's hip, comes up the length of his arm, and opens beside his own. Ilya puts his hand into it and feels the fingers close.

It helps. He feels worse. His throat aches with keeping something down, and the hand holding his is so gentle that he wants to hurt it. Squeeze until it squeezes back. Give him something he can bear to answer. He moves his thumb instead, once, across Cliff's knuckles. A little kindness. He can still do that.

The body knows the rest. The sound, the arch, the push back. Cliff makes a noise, wrecked and grateful, and comes. Moments later Ilya comes too, somehow. He observes it with tired interest from behind his own eyes. It's done well, he likes to think. He'd have wanted the man under him to come this prettily.

The fan makes its rounds. The room is still orange. From outside it looks like it went fine. Probably, it did.

Cliff's weight lifts off his back, and the cold starts under his hair and works down. He waits for the shiver to pass through him. It catches between his shoulders and stays. Svetlana says his name twice before he turns. Her mouth is still soft from the evening. He watches it change.

She draws the sheet over him, smoothing it at his shoulder with a hand that stops before it reaches his neck. He wants the hand back. When she touches him again he has to hold himself still beneath it, his teeth meeting hard enough to hurt. Over her shoulder Cliff is sitting up. There is something wrong with his face too, and Ilya looks down before either of them can make him responsible for it. He ought to say something. He has said plenty tonight, and now he cannot get his tongue comfortably behind his teeth.

"Give me a minute." His voice comes from farther down than he expected. "I'm just cold. Give me a minute."

Cliff moves. Ilya's fingers close in the sheet—a small, useless handful—and Cliff sees it, and stops halfway off the bed. Very good, Rozanov. Fantastic. He lets go.

"Water," Cliff says. "I'm getting water. Okay?"

The tap runs for a long time.

Svetlana's hand lies on the mattress, palm up. He looks at it until she starts to take it back. Then he catches her wrist and puts the hand on his chest. His heart is going like he has just come off a shift. The rest of him is half frozen, half asleep. It makes no sense. He's so cold.

She asks him something in Russian. He understands every word and cannot put them together.

"Lie down," he says. "Please." She lies down.

Cliff comes back with a bottle and a wet towel. He has put his shorts on crooked. The twisted waistband is the first thing Ilya sees, and for some reason it makes his throat ache. The water is warm. He drinks too much and has to stop with his mouth full.

"I'm not hurt." He hands the bottle back; he has started squeezing it and the plastic is making a noise. "I want you to know this."

He looks directly at him, with an effort that sends his heart climbing again. There ought to be some expression he can put on his face that will make this easier. He can feel himself trying them, the beginnings of a smile, a frown, and stops before either takes hold. Jesus Christ, Rozanov, you're losing it, you're losing the fucking plot.

"I hear you." Cliff folds the towel, which is already folded. Holds it out. "Can I?"

Ilya nods. The cloth is warm. He holds the edge of the mattress until it is over. Afterwards Cliff sits on the bed. The far edge of it.

"Come back." Cliff looks at him. "Cliff." He lifts the sheet. "Please."

It comes out pathetic and plaintive, embarrassing as hell, but it works, which is probably the only thing that matters. Cliff lies down with his arm close to his own side. Ilya takes it and puts it across his waist. He has to do this for them now, apparently; he has to show them where they are allowed to be. He keeps his hand over Cliff's until the fingers uncurl against him, then stops pressing and tries to stroke them a little. His fingers are still pretty clumsy, the shiver in them almost slow, almost rheumatic, like the hand of an old man. He feels a little like an old man, losing the concrete sense of time and self, losing his fucking marbles.

Svetlana draws the sheet over all three of them. The room is hot enough to sweat in. Only one of them is cold.

For a long time he listens to them breathe. His own breathing will not find a rhythm; he keeps getting to the end of an exhalation and needing another little breath, an ugly, unfinished thing that catches in his throat. Neither of them comments. Outside, the metal scraping begins again. Someone calls down the street. Ilya thinks of the man doing whatever work makes that noise, putting his weight into it, stopping to wipe his face. He would like to be tired from something he could point to. He would like the use of his hands back.

"I wanted it," he says against Svetlana's hair. Cliff's arm tightens a little, then eases. Ilya feels the correction and presses his palm down over the hand. "Listen. I did." The words are true and he waits for them to do something. He has never had much patience with people who need the same thing said several ways, but he would say this all night if it would take that look off Cliff's face. "Please don't go."

"I won't. I'm here. I'm not leaving." Cliff's voice is low, close to his ear. He starts another sentence and gives it up; Ilya feels the breath of it against his hair. After a while Cliff says, "You don't have to keep telling me."

Ilya turns his head enough to see him. The muscles beside Cliff's mouth are held tight, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the bed. Ilya wants to insist until he looks back, wants to make him understand, and is suddenly too tired to raise his voice.

Svetlana takes his hand in both of hers and rubs the fingers, slowly. He used to put his frozen hands under her coat, after a long walk. She called him every name she knew and never once made him take them out. For a moment he can't swallow.

The shaking lessens by degrees. His jaw lets go and leaves an ache beside his ears. He can feel the weight of his legs again, can move a foot without first looking to see where it has gone. When Svetlana reaches toward the lamp he catches her sleeve. She leaves the light on and lies back down.

He sleeps a little and wakes with his mouth dry. Nobody has moved. He can hear her breathing and knows she is awake; he has known her long enough to know when she is lying still for him. He closes his eyes before she finds out that he knows.

In the morning he showers until the mirror is white and his skin is red in patches. Dressing takes too long because he keeps forgetting what he is looking for. He goes through the open bag twice before he sees his shirt on the chair. When he comes out, the bed has been stripped. Svetlana is on the phone with the driver. Cliff comes out of the bathroom with three toothbrushes wrapped in a hand towel. Ilya takes his own and puts it away.

He sleeps most of the way to Borobudur. At a stop he wakes with Svetlana's hand under his head, between him and the door. He pushes into it before he is all the way awake, then sits up. There is a red mark across her wrist where his weight has been. He takes her hand and rubs the mark with his thumb, and finds he can't look at her while he does it.

The next room opens onto a shaded terrace. Wide bed, cool linen, a fan that moves air without a sound.

"Which side do you want?" Cliff says.

Cliff has never asked this in his life. Cliff falls on a bed and that part of the bed is his.

"Doesn't matter."

Cliff waits another moment. Then he leaves his bag by the wardrobe.

They go where they planned to go. They eat where Svetlana has chosen and walk until the heat drives them inside. Ilya sleeps. In the car, by the pool, twelve hours at night, and wakes up thirsty. He loses his sunglasses and finds them in Cliff's bag. Cliff takes them out of the case and hands them over by the bridge, careful of the arms. Ilya has seen him throw those sunglasses across a locker room.

On the third day he comes out of the bathroom in a towel and Cliff looks at the desk, stares at an empty glass on the desk like he's never seen anything like it before.

"Is very nice glass," Ilya says. Fuck, even his English is abandoning him.

"What?"

"You like? I can ask downstairs, maybe they sell."

Cliff laughs. Half a second late, and politely, like for a sponsor.

Ilya goes back for his clothes. He shuts the door gently.

Svetlana still touches him. A hand on his back when she passes, her legs across his on the sofa. But afterwards she waits. If he pulls her closer she comes; if he lets his hand drop she lets him go. At night he lies awake with her palm on his chest, wanting it to move on its own.

He finds her on the terrace with the laptop open. The screen has dimmed. She closes it when he sits down.

"Did you talk to Marly?" In Russian it comes out blunt, after days of English. Nothing wrapped around the words.

"Yes."

"And?"

"And you should ask him, not me."

He picks at the corner of her napkin. She looks at his hand until he stops.

"I told him he didn't hurt me."

"I know what you told him."

"It's true."

"I know that it is true." There is a pulse going in the side of her neck. She is tired in a way the trip has not made her before. He has made her that tired, plenty of times—usually by doing something awful; usually to himself. "I was there, Ilya."

He waits.

"I was watching you the whole time. I always watch you, you used to complain about it." Her hands are folded beside the laptop, the knuckles gone white. She breathes in. "You were so cold, I could not even get your hands to warm."

"I don't know what you want me to say, Svetik."

She turns her palm up on the table. He has put his hand in it before he decides to. Her thumb moves across his knuckle.

"I don't want you to say anything for me, my love."

Below the terrace a gardener is winding a hose around his arm. Water darkens the path at his feet.

They are still at the table when Cliff comes back. He went for a walk, he says. Ilya didn't know. For weeks he has known where both of them are without thinking about it.

Dinner comes out to the terrace. Rice, fish, a basket of bread nobody ordered, a salad that is mostly tomatoes. Ilya pushes the tomatoes to the edge of his plate, the way he has pushed them to the edge of every plate for eight years. For eight years Cliff has eaten them off it without looking.

Svetlana eats half of hers. Then her phone rings, or she decides that it has. "The driver," she says, and takes it inside, and closes the terrace door behind her.

Cliff points his fork at Ilya's plate. "Can I—?"

Ilya shoves the plate across. The cutlery jumps. They both look at it.

"You don't have to ask me."

"Sure." Cliff takes one tomato. "Thanks."

Thanks.

Fuck this.

"Marly. Look at me."

Cliff looks. It costs him; Ilya watches it cost him.

"Lanka says I should ask you. So I am asking."

"Ask me what?"

"I don't know. Whatever it is. Why you say thank you for tomato."

Cliff puts the fork down. He rubs his face with both hands, hard. When he takes them away he looks older.

"You went grey, man."

Ilya says nothing.

"I've seen you get your face opened up and ask the trainer for his phone to take a selfie. I've never seen you like that. You shook for an hour. I looked at the clock; it was an hour."

"I was fine."

"Sure you were. Completely fine, yeah." He stops. Starts again, lower. "I was right there. I had my hands on you. I thought it was great. I thought it was fantastic—And you were going through that the whole time, and I didn't know."

"I said don't stop."

"I know you did. I believe you. That's what's fucking me up." Cliff's voice goes on him and he waits for it to come back. "I don't know what happened. I don't think you know either. So what am I supposed to go on, bud? You tell me. Because I—I can't fucking sleep, Ilya. I keep seeing you flinch away from me, and I keep asking myself why I did that to you, and I don't have an answer."

Ilya's fork is still in his hand. He has an answer. He has had it ready for three days. I wanted it. I asked. Nothing hurt. All true, all said already.

He doesn't know. That's the stupid part. If he knew, he would say.

"It is a tomato, Marly."

"I know it's a tomato."

"So take the fucking tomato."

Cliff almost laughs. A real one, the start of it. Then it goes, and he nods, and looks at the plate between them.

After a while he takes another. He doesn't say thanks. A moment later he glances up, checking, and Ilya has nodded before he can help it.

He eats everything left on the plate so that nobody can notice him stopping.

That night Cliff shows him photographs someone has sent from home. Ilya leans in to share the small screen. He asks about a face he doesn't recognize; he listens to a story he has heard before and doesn't say so. At some point Cliff's elbow comes to rest against his.

He stays exactly where he is until Svetlana asks if they are coming in. When Cliff stands, the warmth stays on his arm a few seconds. He holds the arm still.

In the morning he opens the itinerary. Rooms beside other stretches of water, a boat, another week of having everything brought to wherever they have decided to lie down. He watches the little film of the boat's deck twice. Sunlight moving over cushions nobody has sat on. Then he closes it and starts looking for somewhere else.

It takes all day. By night there is a map, a list, four emails written with more care than he has given anything in weeks. When Cliff comes in he turns the screen around before he can find a casual way to do it.

"Would you come with me?"

Tents, very small, under the roof of a cave. Cliff bends to look, one hand on the desk.

"Where is that?"

"Vietnam. In the middle. You walk in two days, through the river, sleep inside."

"Through the river."

"To the waist, it says. Sometimes chest."

"Roz. You can't swim."

"I can swim."

"I've seen you swim."

"Is walking. In water. Different thing."

Cliff scrolls. "'Leeches are common but harmless.'"

"See? Harmless."

"Instead of the boat?"

"Instead of all of it. I am sick of the beach." Nobody has complained about the beach. His mouth is dry.

Cliff looks at the tents for a while. "I've never done anything like this."

"Me neither."

It is a relief to have nothing better to offer.

Svetlana comes and reads over their shoulders. How far is the nearest hotel. Who will know where they are. Whether the guide is a real guide or a man with a torch.

"I am not sleeping in a cave," she says at last. "Send me the dates. I will find somewhere with walls."

He sends them before she has finished the sentence.

Cliff stays after she takes her laptop to the bed. They open the equipment list. Neither of them knows what half of it is.

"What's a gaiter?"

"For leeches, I think."

"You said harmless."

Cliff reaches past him for the trackpad. His forearm comes down on Ilya's shoulder and rests there. Ilya keeps his eyes on the screen.

When they have gone to bed he goes back to the bookings. Every cancellation wants another confirmation. He reads the terms, accepts the loss, waits for the page to change. Behind him Svetlana asks Cliff something about the first flight; Cliff answers half asleep, then corrects himself. Ilya cancels the boat, the rooms on Lombok, the last week beside the water, and shuts the laptop while the screen is still thanking him.

He sits for a moment with his hands on the lid. Then he goes to bed and puts his cold feet on Cliff's legs.

"Jesus Christ," Cliff says, smacks him, hard, and doesn't move.

Chapter End Notes

Poem for Haruko

I never thought I’d keep a record of my pain
or happiness
like candles lighting the entire soft lace
of the air
around the full length of your hair/a shower
organized by God
in brown and auburn
undulations luminous like particles
of flame
But now I do
retrieve an afternoon of apricots
and water interspersed with cigarettes
and sand and rocks
we walked across:
How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world

Now I do
relive an evening of retreat
a bridge I left behind
where all the solid heat
of lust and tender trembling
lay as cruel and as kind
as passion spins its infinite
tergiversations in between the bitter
and the sweet

Alone and longing for you
now I do

Chapter 13

Chapter Notes

Floof, pt1

The hotel Svetlana has found is pretty. Quaint, probably: a cluster of low buildings around a round blue pool, thatched awnings over the balconies, a handsome garden beginning to get above itself. Flowering branches lean across the paths. A palm has grown sufficiently close to their veranda to participate in anything they might do on it.

They are on the beach side of Đồng Hới, where the streets loosen towards the sea into guesthouses, seafood restaurants and stretches of pale, hot sand. Farther in, the town gathers along the Nhật Lệ River: fishing boats, shopfronts open to the pavement, cafés with low chairs crowded into whatever shade is available. Ilya likes it. There is somewhere to walk, somewhere to eat, and very little he feels obliged to look at.

Their three rooms occupy the upper floor of one building and open onto a shared veranda. The hotel belongs to a family whose members keep appearing to welcome them, take a bag, find another cold drink. They seem accustomed to guests who arrive with backpacks, leave their larger bags behind while they go trekking, and return grateful for a shower. Their chances of surviving Svetlana are slim.

Ilya and Cliff leave her to begin negotiations and carry their things upstairs. When they come back, she is speaking to the manager in careful English, giving him the grave, attentive courtesy that usually precedes a considerable expenditure. The manager listens, makes a note, asks a question. She looks towards the adjoining building, which contains six rooms and, at present, several guests.

"Interesting," she says. "Yes. Let us discuss that."

Cliff follows her gaze. "How long are we staying again?"

"Two weeks," Ilya says. There is a little more, but he likes the sound of two weeks. It is a quantity of time a person can hold without having to think about what happens after it.

That night he brushes his teeth in his own bathroom, considers his own bed. Sits on it. Lays on it. Closes his eyes. A hand closes over his heart, not tight, not punishing but—there. Right. You might as well try, Rozanov. Nothing good comes from not knowing where you stand.

He goes next door, pauses outside long enough to hear Svetlana turn a page, then pushes the door open. Nobody says anything. She moves her book. Cliff, most of the way asleep, shifts an inch towards the wall and then, a moment later, another inch, to be sure. Ilya lies down in the space they have left him. He has kept his knees together, his hands close to his chest; after a while he lets one leg straighten until his foot touches Cliff's. Nothing happens. Svetlana picks up her book again. He lies listening to the pages, with his foot where it is, until the effort of staying awake becomes more than he can manage.

By the next afternoon the third room is an office. A small woman of about sixty stands in its doorway in a grey blouse, a document case tucked under her arm, directing two men with a stepladder. One of them begins to explain something. She hears him out, points, and he moves the ladder.

Ilya has spent the morning nosing around the riverside fish market with Cliff and has missed the opening stages of Svetlana's campaign but knows what he'd seeing. He sits on the low wall beside the steps with a cold bottle against his neck and watches a man carry a desk past him. He is curious. He is not surprised.

"Good afternoon, young man. I am told you are the one who wished to see the caves."

It is Russian. It is the Russian of his first school reader, every syllable crisp and correct, every word pronounced as though she expects him to be taking notes. He is on his feet before he has decided to stand.

Her name is Hạnh. She studied in Leningrad and has been teaching Russian at the university in Huế for twenty years. For the next fortnight she will serve as Svetlana's interpreter and, from what Ilya can gather from past experience, her consigliere. Nobody mentions a fee in front of him, but he knows Svetlana, and he knows what it costs to persuade an established professional to abandon their life at a day's notice. He suspects Hạnh is making something approaching her annual salary. As well she should. If she can produce everything Svetlana appears to have asked for and will yet think to ask for, she will have earned it twice over.

She asks him a few questions about himself. He answers in complete sentences, hands, bizarrely, clasped behind his back. Beside him, Cliff watches with growing interest.

The guide comes the same day, in a van. His name is Hùng. He is about fifty, built like a middleweight, and surveys them with professional composure. Ilya suspects their firm handshakes and carefully selected jungle-appropriate outfits have failed to establish them as rugged, reliable men men who are a good addition to any adventuring company or whatever the fuck these people call themselves. After the moment had passed, Hùng asks to see what they have brought.

They lay it out along the veranda. It makes a substantial display. Hùng walks the row with his hands behind his back while Ilya begins to feel that they should have left some of it in the bags.

"Sleeping bag we have. Helmet we have. Lamp we have." He lifts a gaiter by its strap. Ilya chose the gaiters. "This keeps out snow."

Cliff glances at Ilya, who declines to acknowledge him; that was his contribution.

Then the boots: two pairs, side by side, the most expensive things on the veranda. Hùng crouches and presses a thumb into the leather.

"Waterproof?"

"Completely," Cliff says. "They did a thing with a hose in the store."

Hùng nods. He goes back to the van, returns with a bottle of water, and pours it into Cliff's left boot. Then he holds the boot up by the loop at the heel. Nothing comes out. Not a drop.

"Very good boot," he says. "On the way to Hang En, we cross the river maybe twenty times. Water up to here." He touches his hip. "It goes in at the top. Then you carry it."

They look at the boot. Hùng gives it a small, demonstrative swing. They can hear the water inside.

What they need has holes in it. Hùng produces a green canvas boot with a rubber sole and two small drainage eyelets near the instep. It looks as though it should cost less than the socks Ilya bought to go with his. He bends it, examines the sole, passes it to Cliff.

There is nothing in the van large enough for either of them. Hùng makes a phone call, has them trace their feet on the backs of two forms, and makes another call. Their boots will come up from Huế on the four o'clock bus that afternoon.

The car comes at six. They eat out of cardboard boxes on their knees while the road leaves the coast and the land begins to stand up. One minute there are rice fields, flat, with white birds walking in them; the next there is a wall of grey rock with forest hanging off it, another wall behind that, and the road going in between.

Ilya had expected shade to mean cool. Under the trees it is the same heat with the light taken out of it, oppressive and wet. Within ten minutes his shirt is stuck to him front and back and sweat is running off his elbows. He has sweated through full gear in overtime, but that was from working. This comes from standing still while alive.

Cliff finds a stick in the first quarter of an hour: straight, shoulder-high, with a knob at the top. He says it is for the hills. Ilya finds a better one. Before the first hill they have stopped to establish a consensus on the matter via a honourable sword fight. Hùng let them, watched them with a placid expression and only made vaguely impressed noises about their stamina.

The reason for his calm acceptence in the face of their idiocy came soon, when they waded further into the forest and the roots started to become troublesome. He tells them they’re to step around them, rather than put their weight along them. Which is all well and good but everything in the wretched forest is covered with a thick coat of damp green leaves. Ilya promptly plants his foot on a green root and goes down hard enough to lose his stick.

"Блядь," Hùng says to the forest. The rest is also Russian. "Where is he putting his feet, this one? On his head he should walk."

Every case ending is wrong. Every curse is exactly right. Ilya sits up in the mud.

"I heard that," he says, in Russian.

Hùng looks him over again, as if a horse had spoken. "You are Russian?"

"Moscow."

"Moscow!" It comes out of him like a cork. He offers Ilya a hand and begins explaining: four years, eighty-seven to ninety-one, a truck factory, a hostel with eleven to the room. A foreman called Gennady Petrovich taught him everything he knows. He supplies several examples, with gestures, while Ilya gets his breath back and then loses it again laughing.

"What?" Cliff says. "What did he say?"

"He says I walk very well. A natural forest walker. Innate talent, he says. Very impresive"

"He did not say that."

"And this one," Hùng asks in Russian, tipping his head at Cliff. "The big one. He is also a sportsman? He looks like a cupboard."

"Hockey. Both of us."

"Hockey." Something comes into Hùng's face that was not there for Moscow. "Gennady Petrovich took me. First winter. I had never seen a game."

He supported Spartak because Gennady Petrovich supported Spartak; it was not a question. They went whenever they could get tickets, and he can still do the chant. He demonstrates, at full volume. Something leaves a tree.

"Which club?"

"Boston."

"Boston. America." Hùng considers him. "Where Vetrov went." He spits neatly to one side, then looks faintly apologetic. "Gennady Petrovich did this. Every time they said his name. Eighty-nine. He called him a traitor and a whore. Then they showed him on television in the other sweater, and he cried."

Ilya opens his mouth, thinks of Svetlana back at the hotel, and shuts it. This is too good to spend in a forest.

"What?" Cliff says. "Why'd he spit? Did I do something?"

"He knows hockey."

"He does? Ask him who he likes."

"You," Hùng says to Ilya. "Defence?"

"Centre."

"Centre." He looks at Ilya's boots, then at the root. "With these feet."

He has not followed hockey since he left Moscow. He has no idea whether either of them is any good. Hockey belongs to Spartak, to Gennady Petrovich, to the charmed fog of his youth. It's no more real than his first girlfriend. Ilya retrieves his stick, already excessively fond of him.

They start up the next slope. Hùng now complains about each of them in the language the other understands. Cliff is delighted to be asked whether Moscow has any ground, and grows suspicious when Ilya laughs at something he cannot follow.

Something calls overhead, two notes like a squeaking gate.

"Woodpecker," Cliff says.

"Woodpecker knocks. Is cuckoo."

"You've never seen a cuckoo in your life."

"Have too, many times, all the time—"

"Drongo," Hùng says, without turning round.

Later, a black bird with a forked tail crosses the path at head height. Ilya says, "Drongo," and Hùng looks up and agrees. He keeps looking after it, trying to remember the shape of the tail.

For a while the path is too narrow to walk abreast. He follows the dark patch of sweat between Cliff's shoulders, shortening his stride where the ground rises. His breath settles to the walking. When Cliff stops to drink, he takes the bottle afterwards, wipes his mouth on his wrist and waits for him to put it away. He could keep going like this for a long time.

At a steep drop, Cliff goes first and reaches up. Ilya takes his hand and comes down. Cliff keeps hold until his other foot is planted, then lets go and moves on.

They stop at a stream. Cliff sits on a rock, pushes down the top of his sock to scratch, and goes quiet.

"Roz."

"Mm."

"Roz. There's a thing."

There is a thing. It is on the inside of his ankle, just above the bone, dark and glossy and very slightly moving.

"It's on me."

"Yes."

"I have a sock on. I have a special sock on for this exact purpose—"

"'Common but harmless,'" Ilya says, and that is as far as he gets.

The laugh comes from somewhere under his belt and he has to sit down to have it. He laughs until his stomach cramps and his eyes run, while Cliff holds the foot as far from the rest of himself as it will go.

"Get it off. Roz. Stop laughing and help me, you asshole, it's getting bigger."

He tries to get up. His legs will not do it. Hùng comes back along the path, takes Cliff's ankle in one hand and works a thumbnail beneath the leech. It lets go. He flicks it into the leaves, then gets gauze out of his bag for the thin, bright line running into Cliff's sock.

"Bleeds for a while. It's okay. Small one."

"Small one," Cliff repeats.

Ilya folds forward over his knees. Hùng looks down at the two of them.

"How did they live to this age?" he asks in Russian. "Who was feeding them?"

At the pool below the waterfall, Hùng holds out an orange life jacket.

"I can swim," Ilya says.

"I am told you can." Hùng continues holding it out.

Hùng checks the straps himself, closes them tight and checks again. In the water the jacket holds Ilya's chest higher than he would prefer, and his attempts at swimming become a laborious paddling. Eventually he stops trying. The water closes cool against his armpits; his feet hang beneath him without having to bear anything. He tips his head back. Through the leaves there is a patch of white sky, almost painful to look at after so much green.

Cliff swims past, turns and comes back. For a while Ilya follows the sound of him with his eyes shut. Then the splashing stops. When he opens them, Cliff is on the bank with his phone.

"Marly, by the Son and the Father—"

"Turn a little. Other way. That's perfect."

"I will skin you for leather—"

"This is going to Hammer." Cliff smiles down at the screen. "I’m sending it to my parents. This is going on my wall, bud."

Ilya tries to turn his back and succeeds only in completing another slow rotation. Cliff is still laughing when he comes round again. He lifts a wet hand to give him the finger, then lets it fall back into the water.

In the afternoon Hùng brings them to a tree with buttress roots rising above Cliff's head and a crown lost among the smaller trees beneath it. They stop talking. Hùng lets them stand there. Water drips somewhere a long way up, although it has not rained.

"She'd like this," Cliff says eventually.

"She would like it from a chair."

"So we bring a chair."

Ilya leans against one of the great roots while Cliff walks round the trunk. The bark is rough through his shirt. He drinks the last of his water and stays there a little longer, watching a drop gather at the end of a leaf above him. By the time it falls he has lost sight of it.

On the way out they want to know how large Hang En is, how deep the river crossings are, and whether somebody in very good condition could do the two-day trip in one. Hùng says no in both languages.

The sticks go in the boot of the car. Nobody has disputed the sticks are coming. In the back seat they divide up what there is to tell Svetlana. Cliff wants to open with the leech. Ilya says the leech goes last; you build to the leech. They are still arguing when the sea comes back into view.

They reach the veranda at half past five, having left their shoes downstairs but retained the sticks. The office door is shut. Svetlana's voice comes through it in Russian, level, the voice in which she repeats a figure to someone who heard it perfectly well the first time.

Cliff raises a hand to knock. Hạnh looks at him over her glasses from a table that was not there this morning. He lowers it.

"She is free at seven," she tells Ilya in Russian. "There is food. You are to wash before sitting on anything."

"He has a wound. He wants to display it."

She looks at Cliff's ankle, where the sock has dried brown. "A leech?"

"Small one."

Something happens at the corner of her mouth. She opens her document case, takes out a little red tin with a gold star on the lid, and sets it in front of Cliff. Ilya recognises it before her fingers leave the table. There was one in the drawer beneath the bathroom mirror for his entire childhood. He cannot remember anybody buying it. It had simply always been there. Every house has one, even the crazy ones like Sahsa's.

"For the itch," Hạnh tells Cliff in English. "Later. Not on broken skin."

While she is speaking, Ilya notices the second fan. There is a new awning over the exposed end of the veranda, and a chair with arms, and the smell coming from the kitchen is considerably more interesting than it was yesterday. A man in a white jacket emerges, nods to them and goes back inside. By the pool, two women are unfolding a massage table.

"The chef," Hạnh says, returning to Russian. "He came from Đà Nẵng this morning. The ladies also. They are staying."

"What's she saying?" Cliff asks.

"Svetlana bought a cook."

"She what?"

"And two massage ladies."

Cliff looks at the office door. "Okay," he says. "Yeah. Okay." He takes the tin and goes to wash.

At seven Svetlana comes out with her hair pinned up around a pencil and no shoes on. They are clean and fed, waiting on the step with their phones.

"Would you like to hear about my day?"

"No," Ilya says.

"There was a leech," Cliff says.

It takes an hour and most of a second dinner. Cliff tells it standing up. In his version the leech was the length of his finger and Ilya abandoned him. Ilya corrects the length and lets the rest stand. Svetlana inspects the ankle, some photographs of leaves in which a drongo is alleged, and finally, with ceremony, Ilya in the life jacket.

She studies that one, then takes the phone out of Cliff's hand and sends it to herself.

"Traitor."

"I'm having it printed," she says. "On canvas."

Ilya has a blister from the new boots, a good one, and rests his bare foot on the edge of her chair so she can appreciate it.

"You will live," she says, keeping her hand around his ankle.

It stays there while he tells her about the heat beneath the trees, about Hùng and the truck factory, and what Gennady Petrovich used to do whenever the television said her father's name. She laughs so hard at that that the chef looks out of the kitchen.

Ilya is talking too fast, in two languages, with frequent interruptions from Cliff. At some point he notices she has stopped looking at the photograph he is showing her and is looking at him instead. He holds the phone higher. She looks at the phone.

Cliff leans over her shoulder to find the waterfall. There is mud behind his ear that the shower missed. She rubs it away with her thumb, and he tips his head to make it easier without interrupting his account. Ilya watches. His own heel rests warm in her other hand. He is glad of them; it sits in him as plainly as the food. He reaches for another piece of fish.

"When's the cave?" Cliff asks.

"Wednesday."

"That's four days, Roz. Call the guy."

He calls the guy. Hùng says that tomorrow they will sit down. He says it in Russian, at length, and Ilya does not translate the middle part.

For two days they mostly sit down, and the household assembles around them. Svetlana reserves the mornings for herself: a massage at eight, slow lengths of the pool with her sunglasses on and her chin clear of the water, coffee brought by a young man Ilya has not seen before. At one she begins taking calls from Moscow. At seven she emerges for dinner, which has begun to have courses.

Cliff has a massage and can be heard having it. Ilya has one and wakes with the weave of the towel printed on his face and no immediate recollection of where he is. A truck comes. A technician climbs onto the office roof with a white dish the size of a café table.

"The hotel has internet," Cliff says. "I'm on it right now."

"The hotel has some internet," Svetlana says, watching the man on the ladder.

Ilya's phone lies face down beside his chair, on top of the paperback with the camel on the cover. The reception is perfectly good. He knows because he has checked the weather.

Later, while the other two sleep, he sits with a glass of water going warm between his hands. He had liked what they were doing before. The afternoons that went on for hours, the private jokes, the pleasure of being expected in their bed. They had all been so pleased with themselves. It had all seemed so immediate, so reasonable. A drop runs down the glass onto his wrist. He wipes it against his shorts and sits there until somebody starts moving about inside.

They go inland the evening before, the two of them, with one small bag each and the sticks. Svetlana sees them off at the gate. She kisses Cliff. Then she straightens Ilya's collar, which belongs to a T-shirt and has nothing in it to straighten.

"Do not die in a hole," she says in Russian. "I have paid for the fish through Thursday."

The guesthouse has two narrow beds and a fan in a cage. They are in bed by nine, like boys before a tournament.

"You nervous?" Cliff says, in the dark.

"About walking?"

"About the river."

"Is to the thigh."

"He said chest. Sometimes."

"I am tall. I can walk it just fine."

The fan goes round. After a while Cliff laughs, once, through his nose, and turns over.

In the morning there is a van, and Hùng, and six porters who look at the two of them and then at each other. The van leaves them at a gap in the trees beside the road, and from there it is down: an hour of it, steep, on roots and red clay, with the forest shut over their heads. The porters go past in the first ten minutes, at a trot, in plastic sandals, each under a basket the size of a refrigerator. One of them is smoking. Then the slope gives out and the trees stand back and there is a valley, flat-bottomed and full of light, with a river running over stones along the middle of it, so clear that Ilya takes the first crossing for shallower than it is. The water comes over the tops of his boots at the second step. On the far side it leaves again through the brass eyelets, in two neat jets.

"You feel that?" Cliff says. "That's four hundred dollars I didn't need."

They cross it again, and again. He stops counting at nine. The sticks turn out to be useful, which neither of them had intended. There is a village partway, a few houses on stilts and a schoolroom, where lunch has been laid out for them under one of the houses. Forty people live here, Hùng says; the nearest road is the one they came down from. A woman is spreading something to dry on a mat. A man splitting bamboo looks up at the size of Cliff, says a word to the man beside him, and both go back to what they were doing. Ilya eats five spring rolls and is offered a sixth by a girl of about nine, who has been counting.

In the afternoon the river is deeper. At one crossing it is brown and quick and above his waist. Hùng stops them on the bank, watches it for a while, then leads them across with one of the porters beside them.

The current leans on Ilya like a crowd. He plants his feet where Hùng shows him and feels his weight settle. Halfway over, Cliff's foot rolls off a stone. Ilya catches his pack strap before he has finished going, braces against the pull, and holds while Cliff finds his footing. The porter has his other arm. They wait until he is steady, then move on.

"Is walking," Ilya says on the bank, with water pouring out of his boots. "In water. Different thing."

"I will pay you to stop."

"You, for example, were swimming."

The cave, when they get to it, is a slot under a cliff with cold air coming out. They put the helmets on. Hùng makes Cliff take his off and adjusts the straps before allowing him past. Inside there is a slope of boulders the size of cars, and they climb it by lamplight with the argument still going. It has been going since lunch. It concerns which of them would last longer alone in this forest, and it has reached the stage of hard evidence.

"You would eat a wrong berry," Ilya says, over his shoulder, hauling himself up. "The first day. You would see a berry and you would—"

He has reached the top.

It takes him some time to understand what he is looking at. There is a floor, a long way down. There is a pale shape on the floor, and green beside it, and along the edge of the pale shape a row of coloured specks that he takes for litter. Then something moves among the specks and it is a man. They are tents. The pale shape is a beach, a whole beach, with a lake lying against it, and over all of it, from an opening he cannot see the top of, light is coming down in a long blue slant as it would into a cathedral with one wall gone. Things are turning in the light, high up, like dust. They are birds.

"Oh," Cliff says, beside him. Then, quietly, "Roz."

"Yeah."

They stand there with their lamps on, lighting nothing. Hùng, below, lets them. He has seen people stand there before.

Down on the sand everything is the ordinary size again, and somebody has made tea. There are tents up in a row, a kitchen under a tarpaulin, a fire, a line strung between two poles for wet clothes. Ilya floats in the lake in his orange vest, turning, and looks at a roof too far away to have any detail. Cliff swims out to the middle and back and for once has nothing to say about it.

The clothesline is full by the time they get to it. One of the porters, a man who comes up to Ilya's breastbone, shows him how to put up another. Round the pole, across, under, through, pull. It takes him two seconds and it holds like a weld.

Ilya does it. The knot slides down the pole. The porter shows him again, slower, and Ilya tries again. This one holds until he hangs a sock on the line.

He stands over it. He has been able to do anything with his hands that he was shown once since he was six years old. It is the entire basis of his life.

Cliff reaches for his phone. Ilya points at him without speaking. The porter waits until he has Ilya's attention, then makes him follow each movement with his own rope. This time it holds. Ilya hangs everything he owns on it and makes Cliff pull on the end.

Dinner is on a tarpaulin on the sand: pork, greens with garlic, fried tofu, a chicken, rice, a pot of soup, small bananas. All of it came down the mountain on somebody's back and all of it is hot. They eat like men on a per diem. Cliff is telling Hùng about the leech, at which Hùng was present, and without breaking the sentence he reaches over and takes the piece of pork off the edge of Ilya's plate.

"That was the crispy one."

"Should've eaten it, then."

"I was saving."

"So you saved it for me. Anyway, it's on my ankle, right, and this guy is on the ground—"

Afterwards Ilya lies on his back on the sand, away from the fire. The opening has gone from blue to a darker blue. The birds are coming home. They pour in through the top of it by the thousand with a noise like rain on a tin roof, and they do not settle; they go round and round under the ceiling, shrieking, each one apparently with a complaint.

You would hate these birds. He thinks it in English, in order, like he would like hearing it: the birds, the soup, the boots that took a bus. The knot. He would know the knot. He would do it without looking, at the cottage, on a boat, and then go red because he had been seen being good at something. He would ask what the porter's name was. Ilya did not ask.

His hand is at his pocket. There is nothing in the pocket, and nothing it could reach from here if there were, and that is not the reason. He takes the hand away and puts it flat on the sand, and presses, and the sand takes the shape of it. He is glad to be in this cave. He looks for the gladness and it is exactly where he left it. The other thing lies down next to it, and neither of them moves over.

"You good?"

Cliff has come away from the fire with two tin mugs. He stays standing until Ilya moves his hand off the sand beside him.

"Yes. Come."

He sits, passes over a mug and turns his own between his palms. "Roz. I've been meaning—" He stops. Ilya waits, his fingers tight around the warm metal. Above them the birds keep screaming. Cliff looks up. "Jesus. Do they do this all night?"

"How should I know?"

"You're the bird guy."

Ilya laughs, and after a moment Cliff lies back beside him. Whatever he was going to say remains between them, but he stays, and the tea is warm, and Ilya is grateful enough to leave it alone.

The tent was made for two people, and the people it was made for were not them. Cliff blinds him twice with his headlamp while finding a dry shirt, apologises, and turns it off. They settle shoulder to shoulder.

"Your elbow."

"Prove an alternative other than cutting it off, or kindly shut the fuck up, bud."

Ilya considers the available alternatives, finds none, and closes his eyes.

He wakes once in the night. It is not dark. The opening is a paler grey than the rock, with three stars in it, and the water is still talking to itself along the edge of the sand. Up in the roof the birds shift and mutter. Cliff's curled around his back, hot as a radiator. He goes back to sleep.

The way out is the way in, backwards, and at the end of the valley, in the worst heat of the afternoon, there is the hill they came down. It is the best hour of the two days. He would not have guessed that. It goes straight up, on the roots and the red clay, and within five minutes there is nothing in his head but the next place to put a foot. His thighs burn in the old way, the good way, the third-period way. Behind him Cliff is breathing like a bellows and has stopped speaking, and Ilya has stopped too. It goes on like that for forty minutes, which is the longest either of them has been silent in the other's company without one of them being asleep. Near the top the porters go past with the kitchen on their backs.

It is nine at night when the car puts them down at the gate. There is music. On the terrace four young people in black are playing something slow on strings to an audience of one, who has a glass in her hand and her feet on a second chair. She stands up when she sees them. She gets to within two metres and stops.

"No," she says, and points at the showers.

There is a basket outside his door for the clothes and a rack under the awning with a fan trained on it. A woman takes the boots away, holding them out in front of her; she reaches for the sticks and is prevented. Hạnh directs them past two new armchairs and a daybed to where the massage tables wait. It is nine at night, and both women are still here, and dinner has been kept. Someone has thought about every single thing he is about to need. He would like to find it offensive and is too tired.

"Who are they?" Cliff says, of the quartet.

"From the conservatory in Hanoi. They came on the train." She sits down again. "Well? Tell me."

"So there's this — okay. It's a cave. But it's—" He holds his hands apart, then further apart, then gives up on his hands. "It's big."

"How big?"

"Roz."

"Big," Ilya confirms.

She waits. That is all there is. Cliff is asleep on the table before they have finished his left calf; the woman looks at Svetlana, who lifts one shoulder, and carries on. Ilya gets through the soup. He means to go to his own room. The first bed he comes to is theirs, and he lies down across the bottom of it for one minute with his feet still on the floor.

He wakes when she lifts his feet. She sits where they were, puts them in her lap, and opens the laptop on his shins.

"There were birds, Svetik," he says into the sheet. "Thousands. They screamed all night."

"Tell me tomorrow."

"And I tied a knot."

"I am sure it was a very good knot."

They sleep until eleven. At noon Hạnh comes along the veranda with a folder. The flights on the first want confirming, she says, and the second expedition leaves on Sunday.

"So. Seven nights," Svetlana says, turning pages. "Three of which you are not here."

"Seven?" Cliff lifts his head off the cushion. "We just got here."

Nobody answers him. Ilya looks along the veranda: the awning, the rack, the three doors. He knows where the light switches are now. All of them. He could find the one outside the bathroom in the dark, and has.

Chapter End Notes

Excerpt from ‘It’s Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean’

How small it has become!
That clean white shirt!
How delicate!
How slight!
How like a soft fist knocking on my door!
And now I hang the shirt
to dry
as slowly as it needs
the air
to work its way
with everything
    

It’s clean.
A clean white shirt
nobody wanted to spoil
or soil
that shirt
much cleaner now but also
not the same
as the first before that shirt
got hit got hurt
not perfect
anymore
just beautiful

 

a clean white shirt

 

It’s hard to keep a clean shirt clean.

Chapter 14

Chapter Notes

Floof pt 2 with teeth

This one and the last one were supposed to be one chapter but while i dont have dignity or discipline, i will not have 12k chapters.

Also pour one out for Cliff who is going through the strangest kind-of-sort-of heartbreak he hadnt expected and doesnt know if its justified, and he'd like to bring it up except his best guy is even crazier than he thought. You'd think after learnign abotu the evil dad and the dead mom and psychopath best friend and vampire, you would be up to date on a guy's psychoses, and you would be wrong.

By late afternoon Svetlana is behind her door with Moscow. Cliff and Ilya are outside Ilya's room beneath a line of wet clothes. Ilya put the line up himself after breakfast, between the awning post and the rail, and has already tested the knot twice. The sticks lean against the wall. He sits with a shoe in his lap, trying to find the stone that has been under its insole since the valley.

Cliff has been quiet for a while. Ilya shakes the shoe over the tiles, gets nothing, and puts his hand inside again.

"That thing I was going to ask you," Cliff says. Ilya looks up. Cliff has his elbows on the chair arms, his hands loose between them. "Did you know it was happening? While we were still—during. Or did it only hit you afterwards?"

The stone slips beneath the insole. Ilya leaves it there. Right, Rozanov. Focus. Think. Don't fuck this up, you miserable son of a bitch.

"Some of it. I knew it was getting too much."

"And you thought it would pass?"

"I thought I could manage." He puts the shoe down. His mouth is dry. "Usually I can."

"Usually," Cliff repeats. He waits. Ilya can see the question forming and almost reaches for a better explanation, something less likely to cause trouble. "What do you mean, usually?"

"When you don't want to be doing something any more. But you are doing it." Ilya scratches at a loose thread on the chair. "You go away a little. Let your body get on with it."

Cliff sits back slowly. "Roz. Come on. Please."

He has pulled the thread far enough to expose the stuffing. He pushes it back with his thumbnail.

"You have a bad few days. You haven't slept. Uppers to stay awake, downers to not kill someone, booze to not jump out of a window. Painkillers for your shoulder or your knee, whatever it is this time. You can't remember the last time you were not in pain." He looks up. Cliff has not moved. "And there are people in your house. All you want is a fucking burger. Something warm round your neck. The game on, with no sound. You are cold and everything feels sharp, and these people are here, and you invited them."

He wishes Cliff would look at something else.

"So you give them what they want. You know how long it will take, more or less. You can be good company without being there past the basics. Afterwards they go home, and you take a hot shower, deal with your shit."

"Jesus Christ." Cliff passes a hand over his mouth. "How often?"

Ilya shrugs. He has never counted. He dislikes the shape of the question, the suggestion of a record he should have been keeping. "How the fuck should I know? Don't look at me like that. I have had plenty of perfectly good sex."

"I didn't know." Cliff's eyes are wet. Ilya looks away, furious with the day, with himself for having said so much. It's too soon for this—but he's owed. Ilya hurt him, and he's owed. "I knew you were having a rough time, but—you can kick them out, Roz. Then you order the burger. Or you call me and I'll do it. Any of the boys."

"Or I can get through it in thirty minutes and not deal with the drama." He hears himself and looks up. "That's not what happened with us. Completely different situation. You would have stopped, we would have stopped, there would be no drama. I know you would."

"Then why didn't you say?"

His shoulders have gone tight, his back. It takes effort to keep his voice even, to think. Deal with it, coward. You should have had answers ready. You don't, so think. Lay out your fucking sins.

"Because it was good. Because I wanted it, Marly. I was safe and happy and I thought—I thought I would calm down and stop freaking out and let it be good." He rubs his forehead. "So I took a step back. Like always." No. Tell the truth. "Only, I couldn't. Usually the distance comes with control, and I wasn't in control. Things were happening to me, all of it new, and so much, Marly—I couldn't keep the distance. So I just went quiet. Until it was over."

Cliff's hands close on the chair arms.

"I don't know what to do with that," he says. "You were fucking losing it, and I was praising you. It makes me—" He shakes his head. "If someone did that to Nicky, if I saw her shaking like that after sleeping with her boyfriend, I would kill him, Roz. I wouldn't wait for explanations, I would snap his fucking neck. And I did that, and—"

Ilya reaches for his wrist and leaves his hand there, his thumb against the pulse. A motorbike starts beyond the garden. He listens until it has gone.

"I am sorry for doing that to you," he says. "Maybe I went deeper than normal, I don't know." Or there has never been anybody there afterwards to see his face. He looks at the shirt moving beside the door. "I thought it was useful, being able to turn things down. Like a stove, you know? Turn the little wheel, turn the temperature down, catch your fucking breath."

Cliff waits. Well, you're in it now. Might as well finish.

"Only, turns out you can't turn down the stove. You can just stop feeling the hand you have put on it. Then you come back and your hand is burnt, and you have to deal with that." Which has been worth it, so far, when it was only his hand. When it didn't put that look on his best friend's face, dread and hurt and shame. "It is really fucking annoying."

Cliff turns his hand under Ilya's and holds it. He looks at their fingers, at the little splits and grazes from the rocks.

"You poor dumb idiot." His voice is thick. "You factored it in. You fucking plan for it—Jesus. Okay."

Ilya wants to make a joke, but there is something raw and childish in his chest which he does not trust himself to disturb. He lets Cliff hold on. Inside, Svetlana laughs at something, short and fake, and he can picture the face she is making.

"I liked watching you with her," he says. Cliff looks up. "Before any of this. You and Lanka. Even when she was being impossible, you were happy it was you she was being impossible with. So I thought, these are my people. They love me. It's alright to—be near that."

He remembers Svetlana asleep against Cliff's shoulder; Cliff saving a piece of something for her, then forgetting and eating it, then going out to buy more. The easy wastefulness of their affection. They have so much of it they can spend it without noticing.

"And it was good. Most beautiful thing in the fucking world, two people in love, bursting with it. So I wanted to be closer, and that was good too. I kept thinking, a little more, something else we could do, and then I would—" He moves his free hand. There is nothing to put there but the truth. "Be happy enough to stop wanting the rest, I guess."

Cliff looks hurt. Ilya's throat closes. He could give him something easier. The timing was wrong. They tried it and it didn't work. Both true, both things he could say and stop.

"I miss him," he says instead. "All the fucking time. Everything I see, I want to show him, and then I remember. It takes so much energy, not thinking about it. Not stalking him on the internet like a psycho. Just to see what he's doing. If he's doing well."

He has not said the name. He has put him between their chairs anyway.

"I know, bud." Cliff's thumb moves against his fingers. "I wish I could help."

"You have helped. So much." Ilya bends his head until he can trust his voice. "If things were different, it would have worked. I would have soaked up your romance from the sidelines until I got over it. It would have worked for sure."

Cliff says nothing. Ilya listens to the sea. He wants to be missed by the person he misses. He can barely admit the smallness of it, after everything he has tried.

"I thought I understood what you wanted," Cliff says eventually. "You kept wanting more, and I thought—yeah. Okay." He rubs his forehead with his free hand. "I need a minute."

Ilya gives him the minute. It is harder than defending himself, sitting here while Cliff has something he cannot make better.

"We don't have to keep fucking," Ilya says. "I don't want to keep fucking, to tell you the truth." He had expected some grand difficulty in saying this. Instead it comes out plainly, and leaves him tired. "I never wanted to—complicate things. I just thought it was good and warm and safe. So different from—" He gestures vaguely. "Everything else, everyone else, you know? You knew all of me, had all of me, and just wanted me happy."

"Yeah," Cliff says at once. "Of course. Yeah." He shifts forward in the chair. "But, Roz. This other stuff. The stuff you've been doing to yourself. Will you talk to somebody? Somebody who actually knows how to help?"

Ilya looks at him. Cliff is holding his hand too tightly now. He does not seem to know it.

"I think I need to," Cliff says. "For me. I'm still fucked up about it. But I need you to go too. I'll come with you. I'll sit outside. I'll get down on my fucking knees and beg, right now. I need you to go, bud, please."

"Marly." Ilya turns towards him, startled. "You don't have to do that. Of course. You want me in therapy, I am in therapy."

"Yeah?" The hand around his is shaking. "When we're home? You'll make the appointment?"

"Yes. We can find a therapist together. All three of us." Well—that's not ideal either. Svetlana has never considered therapy anything other than a security risk and a made-up scam of the decadent West. "Maybe we ask your parents, actually?" Yeah, that sounds better. Lauren for sure knows a bunch of fancy therapists in Boston.

Cliff looks away, blinks and nods. Ilya watches the side of his face, obscurely guilty not to have understood sooner how much Cliff needed this.

"Although," he says after a moment. "If we both go in, that would be couples therapy. You know this?"

"Bud." Cliff wipes his eyes with his wrist. "I'm pretty sure we're common-law married in some places. If I want to go to couples therapy with you, I will. I probably fucking should, too. Maybe they'll teach me how to get you to pick up your fucking socks."

"My socks are on the line."

Cliff looks at the line, then gets up with a muttered complaint about his legs. He lowers himself onto the broad arm of Ilya's chair and gathers him in, a hand at the back of his head.

"You weigh too much for this," Ilya says into his shirt. He moves his foot, finds somewhere for his hand, and holds on.

"Then stop talking and distribute it." Cliff kisses the top of his head, awkwardly, and stays bent over him until Ilya shifts and they can sit without hurting each other. The fan comes round again. Neither moves when it goes away.

Dinner is loud again. The quartet has an audience at last and plays up to it; Cliff requests a song they have not heard of and hums it badly until the cellist takes pity. Ilya eats off both their plates and is robbed in return. Svetlana, passing behind his chair, kisses the top of his head.

Later, when the musicians have finished and Cliff has gone upstairs, Ilya stays beside her. She slips off her shoes and puts her feet on the empty chair. He has been moving his glass around a wet ring on the table long enough for her to notice.

"What is it?"

"Marly and I talked."

"I thought so." She waits. He can hear somebody clearing plates inside.

"I don't want to do it any more. The three of us. The sex." He looks at her. "I wanted to tell you myself."

She takes a slow breath and rubs her thumb over a mark on her bare knee. "Neither do I."

He had prepared himself to explain. For a moment he cannot think what to do with the explanation.

"I love you, and I have no doubt that you love me," she says. "But it is different with you and me and Sasha than with you and me and Cliff. To tell you the truth, I wasn't sure you and he wouldn't end up a couple, the way he and I have. Then it would have been balanced, or more balanced. That isn't what happened; we should have stopped sooner."

He cannot argue with that. They sit while the crockery goes on in the kitchen. He wants to lay his head in her lap and have her tell him they are all right, which seems a considerable request just now.

"I want everything else," he says. "Need it. I don't know how to be without it."

Her face moves. She reaches for his hand across the table.

"That was never in question, my love."

He bends over her fingers and kisses them. She leaves her hand against his cheek for a moment, then draws it back to tuck her hair behind her ear.

"I think I'll sleep in my room tonight," he says.

"Do you want me to come?"

"No. I want to try." He traces the ring his glass has left. "It is only next door."

"Yes," she says. "It is."

At bedtime he goes into their room for his charger. It has been in the wall on Cliff's side since the first night. Svetlana sits against the headboard with her glasses on. She holds out the water glass he has left on the table, and when he bends to take it she kisses his cheek.

"Sleep well, Il'ka."

"Night, bud," Cliff says from the bathroom, through a toothbrush.

His own room smells of nothing. The bed is still made so tightly it looks painted; he has to pull to get into it. Through the wall there is a voice, another, then her laugh. He lies in the middle of the wide bed with the charger in his hand.

He was happy in those beds. Even knowing what he knows now, he cannot make himself wish all of it away. He wants one of the earlier nights back, complete, down to the things they had not yet thought to ask of one another. Through the wall Cliff says something he cannot make out. Ilya puts the charger on the floor and turns onto his side. He stays awake for a while, listening, and nobody comes to see why.

The next day is ordinary. Cliff, wanting the sofa, sits down on Ilya's legs without a word and opens a magazine. In the afternoon Ilya goes past the office for a towel and hears her through the door, in Russian, saying Arkady Konstantinovich in the voice she uses for people she intends to outlast. Is she talking about Aleksei? Is she talking to Aleksei? He stands there for the length of one breath. Then he gets the towel. And towards evening Cliff, sent to ask Hạnh about the car, comes back from her table walking slowly.

"I saw her ledger thing," he says. "It was open."

"And?"

"There's a number at the bottom." He sits down. "Roz, I thought it was a phone number."

"Euros?"

"I think so. I hope it's not dollars. Is it worse if it's dollars?" He looks across the garden to where she is lying on the daybed she bought, under the awning she had put up, being brought something on a tray. "We’re practically in a jungle."

She lifts her sunglasses, sees his face, and puts them down again. "Don't be provincial, dearest," she says. "It is beneth you."

They go out once more, for three days, into country nobody has tidied. They are insufferable. They know about roots and green rock and leech socks, and they explain all of it to Hùng, who taught it to them. Hùng listens with his hands behind his back. They have brought the sticks again.

Below the second camp the river comes out from under a cliff and widens into a pool, green and slow and so clear that the stones on the bottom look close enough to pick up. Cliff is in it before his pack has hit the ground. Ilya stands on the bank for a moment. Then he goes and gets the orange jacket himself, and does it up, and wades in until the water takes his weight.

He floats. He turns slowly, arms out. Somebody puts a tin mug of warm beer into his hand, and he holds it up out of the water like a torch. The cliff goes by, and the trees, and the camp with its smoke, and Cliff's head, and the cliff again. Nobody takes a photograph. Up under the rock, where the river comes out, there is a dark place the light does not get into.

"Something lives in there," Cliff says. He is treading water, looking at it.

"Fish."

"Bigger than fish."

"Hùng would have said."

"Hùng wouldn't have said. That's exactly what he wouldn't have said." He swims a little way toward it and stops. "We'd need the sticks to hunt it."

Bless you. You couldn't hunt a parsnip. There was a fish place in Florida once where they let the customers pick their own lobsters out of a tank. Cliff took one look at them—horrible, bizarre things, the closest Ilya has ever come to seeing monsters from hell—went white, and tried to talk the whole table into buying the lot and putting them back in the ocean.

"Sticks are at the camp."

"So it lives. For now."

Ilya turns. The dark place comes round again, and goes. He would not, he finds, be anywhere else.

On the last afternoon they reach a village and wash under a tap in their shorts. Ilya sits on a low wall with his boots beside him, waiting for the car. His phone finds a signal and begins vibrating against his thigh.

He takes it out to check the time. A moment later he is on Shane's team website, opening the roster. It is a stupid place to look for news of somebody. He knows this. The names load, then the jersey numbers, but the photographs remain grey squares. He scrolls to Shane's and waits.

"Roz! Car!"

Cliff is standing in the road with their packs at his feet, waving a stick. Ilya looks down at the screen once more. He knows the photograph; he has seen it a hundred times. He wants it to load anyway. After another moment he puts the phone away and picks up his boots.

It takes her two days to strike the court. The dish comes down off the roof and goes back into its cases. The quartet plays a last evening and is put on the train with an envelope each. The furniture she bought is given to the hotel, which did not ask for it; the manager walks round the daybed several times, like a man who has been left a valuable horse. The chef has written out the names of three places in Moscow where she is to eat and one where she is on no account to eat. She knows that his daughter sits her exams in October, and what in. The masseuses are embraced. The boy who brought the coffee is given something folded small, and looks at it, and has to sit down.

Hạnh gets a box. It came from Moscow by a route Ilya does not want explained, and it has Bunin in it, nine volumes, in the grey bindings. She opens the first one and reads the title page standing up. Then she closes it and says, to Svetlana, in her schoolroom Russian, that it has been an instructive fortnight. On her way out she stops at the step where Ilya is sitting and puts a small red tin into his hand, and closes his fingers on it.

"For colds, young man," she says. "Under the nose."

The two of them pack. The things they have acquired no longer fit. The photograph has come, on canvas, a metre across, and stands against the wall of his room: a man in an orange jacket with his chin on the collar, turning. Svetlana wants it in the hold. Cliff wants it as carry-on, so that he can look at it on the flight. The four-hundred-dollar boots go back into their bag, unworn apart from the fitting. The canvas ones Cliff will not throw away; they are wrapped in a hotel towel and given a bag of their own. At the bottom of his duffel, under everything, Ilya finds the paperback Cliff bought him at the airport in June, the one with the camel on the cover, swollen to twice its thickness from six different kinds of damp. He has carried it across half of Asia at four pages a day. There are forty pages left. He does not pack it.

The sticks would have to be packed separately and checked through every flight. Hạnh's assistant, a young man employed principally to make telephone calls, has established this with the airline. The news is taken badly. In the end Hùng comes for them. He comes on a motorbike on the last afternoon, to be paid and to say goodbye, and while he ties them along the frame, with a knot Ilya recognises, he asks what Moscow is like now.

"I haven't been in a year," Ilya says. "More." He does not say the rest of it, and Hùng does not ask. "They pulled down the kiosks. By the metro, all of them. One night, with bulldozers."

"The kiosks." Hùng is honestly shocked. "Where do you buy cigarettes?"

"I don't know. I wasn't there."

Hùng pulls the knot tight. "Gennady Petrovich is dead, I think," he says. "He would be ninety."

He pats the sticks. "I keep. You come back, they are here." Then, with a hand on Ilya's shoulder: "Put your feet on the ground, you fool. And this one, the cupboard. Do not let him eat berries." He shakes Cliff's hand in English and rides away with the sticks standing up behind him.

When the bike has gone, Cliff and Svetlana walk out along the beach. She carries her shoes. Ilya watches them as far as the round boats and lets them go.

He takes the book down to the chairs at the bottom of the garden, where the sand starts, and opens it where he left off.

The great-grandmother gets him. He has been laughing at the zombie relatives, at the introductions conducted through a catastrophe, because apparently there is no circumstance in which a family will abandon the opportunity to tell you who you are related to. The dead kings have come out of their pyramids and are discovering that being dead has done very little to improve their opinion of one another. But the boy, their boy, needs to get up there. The enormous pyramid has to go, and he cannot reach the top, and suddenly all these ancient, quarrelsome people are climbing onto one another to get him there.

They pass him up. Someone wants to know whether he remembers them. His father introduces his great-grandmother. There is no time for any of this, which does not prevent it happening. And Ilya is laughing, and then he isn't, because the boy is standing on his family. Literally standing on them. All those lives, and here he is at the end of them, being helped a little further.

He lowers the book. Beyond the gate the sea is pale and unpleasantly bright; someone has dragged a chair into the shade beside his, leaving two long scores in the sand. He thinks of his grandmother, his father's mother, whom he has not thought about in years. He tries to remember her voice and cannot, although for a moment he has the sensation of almost hearing it, the way his own name sounded when she said it.

She had a grandson. She still has one. He is here, getting sunburnt, with a healing scratch on his shin and too much lunch in his stomach. His mother had him. Before he knew anything about himself, before there was anything to know, he was in her arms.

It sits strangely. Heavy, a little tender under the ribs. His grandmother, his mother, his brother. His father, too, whether either of them likes it. He has spent years hardly looking behind him, but they are still there, will always be there. Whatever happens about Russia, whatever people decide he is allowed to call himself when he gets back to Boston, it cannot reach backwards and unmake the child. He came from somewhere. There were people there. He is made of them, down to things he will never know enough to recognise.

For a while he watches the water. Then he finds his place and reads to the end.

When he is finished, he closes the book and rests it on his chest. His heart is sore and going at double speed, dealing with the sneak attack; the rest of him has gone sluggish. Goddamn it. He ought to move further into the shade, but that would involve getting up, and he is tired in a way that makes the small necessities of having a body seem unreasonable.

He thinks about Dios. Thousands of years arranging the world exactly as he wants it, until there is scarcely anything left of the man except the business of making tomorrow resemble yesterday. Dios must have had a family once. He cannot remember them. Then he loses, because you always lose eventually. The kingdom is taken away and he is thrown back to the beginning, into a world where none of it has happened yet.

And he starts again, exactly as before. Of course he does. Ilya lies with his hand over the book and thinks that his father would do the same. Take Grigori and put him back where he began and he would find the same men. Betray the same friends. He would see which way things were going and get there first, stepping over whoever had been slow enough to believe him. There has been nothing unfinished about his father for as long as Ilya can remember. Nothing you could tell him that might get inside and alter the workings. Given another life, he would use it to be Grigori again.

A little wind comes off the sea. Ilya closes his eyes.

Only—his father asks for Irina.

He has forgotten where he is. Sometimes he forgets his children; more and more of his life is going somewhere he cannot follow it. But he asks for her. He is still a big man. He could hurt somebody, make himself a difficulty. Ilya knows what his father does when the world refuses him something. This time he doesn't. He cries. He begs them to bring his wife.

Ilya does not know whether he remembers her face. Perhaps he knows exactly whom he is asking for. Perhaps there is only a place beside him where somebody ought to be, and he knows her absence even when he doesn't know himself.

There might be years inside a morning like that. A whole life between asking and asking again. He cannot know what his father has lived through by the time a nurse comes back into the room. Perhaps he keeps going back to the beginning, like Dios, reaching the same place and finding that what he wants is her.

It is a strange thing to hope for his father. So small, considering what there is to answer for. So late. But Ilya lies there wanting it anyway: that somewhere inside that ruined life there might be a man who loves his wife. That when he dies there might be someone in his heart besides himself.

"Ilyusha?"

He opens his eyes. Svetlana is beside the chair, looking down at him. He rubs his face while she pulls the other chair closer.

"What is it?"

He lifts the book off his chest so she can see.

"Oh," she says, more gently. "You finished it."

He nods, and she settles beside him, tucking one foot beneath her.

"He couldn't stay," she says. "Just because it was his home, doesn’t mean it still is or always will be."

For a moment Ilya has no idea what she is talking about. Then he remembers the boy. The actual, living boy whose story he has ostensibly been reading. Teppic gives up being king. He leaves the place that made him, the family and the obligations and the whole enormous apparatus of what he is supposed to be. He has done what he can there, and there is a world outside it in which he might like to live.

Ilya looks at her, then down at the book. He has been busy with his fucking ancestors. He did not even notice this other business being conducted under his nose.

"What?" Svetlana asks.

"Nothing." He puts the book face down on the table and accepts her hand, which she has held out without comment. And this is supposed to be a fucking children's book? A silly little adventure about a returned prince, with a camel in it who does mathematics? He would like to know what the fuck it thinks gives it the right.

At dinner, which is only the hotel's dinner again, Cliff and Svetlana work out the landing. Her eleven cases went yesterday with a freight company and will be in Boston before she is.

"They are going to the apartment," she tells Cliff. "I am going to you. I already called housekeeping to get the house ready."

Ilya has stopped eating. He has been thinking of Boston as ice, the boys, a telephone call. Now he pictures the lift opening onto his old floor, the kitchen with the light the wrong colour, the bowl of fruit someone used to replace every week whether he touched it or not. His stomach closes around the thought.

He sold that hellpit. He knows he sold it: the woman's cards on Cliff's kitchen table, the papers, the message that it was done. It closed in May. He has been relieved not to own it ever since, without once considering where, exactly, he means to go after collecting his bags.

"Roz," Cliff says. "What's the face, bud?"

"I should book somewhere. For when we get in."

Cliff puts down his fork. "Why would you do that?"

"Until I find a place. I can't live in a fucking suitcase."

"Suitcase? Which suitcase? That suitcase? There's nothing in that suitcase you can use in fucking Boston, are you crazy?" He shakes his head. "Your stuff's in the house. Boxes are in the garage. We'll dump our vacation shit in there, someone will deal with it eventually."

"I know where my stuff is, Marly."

"Then what—oh." Cliff looks at him as if he has started speaking in tongues. "You're coming home with me, dummy. Your room's still there." He holds the look a moment longer, then picks up his fork. "'Book a place.' As if. I finally got you fed up to where I want you. I'm not sending you to a hotel to live on the minibar."

"I am ninety-eight kilos."

"Ninety-eight beautiful kilos. I made those."

"I made some," Svetlana says.

"The chef made some."

"I made the chef."

Something in Ilya's back lets go. Twenty-six, no address, six boxes in a garage, clothes in Marly's house. One country poorer than he started with. One fuck-off summer vacation richer. Maybe Moscow is out of bounds—but Vietnam isn't. That's Russian enough.

"Saturday," Cliff says. "After we land. There's a dumpling place that opened in July I've been looking forward to. I'm not cooking."

"You have never cooked," Svetlana says.

"I've so cooked! Tell her, Roz."

"He has made me pasta," Ilya says, and reaches across for the last of the prawns before either of them can. "Tuna and pesto and onion. Tasty as hell."

On the last morning they walk down through the gate before the heat. The sand has not been raked. The round boats are pulled up where they were on the first evening, black with tar, no bigger than bathtubs, and a long way off some people in hats are doing something with a net. There is nothing left to see here that they have not seen. They look at it anyway. The sea comes in over his feet, warm as a bath, and takes a little of the sand from under his heels each time it goes.

"Hammer's got ice," Cliff says. "Starting the eleventh. Seven every morning, before the kids come in."

"Who is going?"

"Him. Seb. Some of the Providence guys. Me." He scratches his jaw. "I haven't had skates on since April. I'm gonna go out there and look like a fucking giraffe."

"You always look like giraffe."

"I want to work on my left side. I've got nothing there. Two years I've had nothing there. Puck comes to me on that side, I just turn around and give it to you."

"I know. I have noticed." He has never thought about it on purpose, and it is there anyway: Cliff along the boards, the turn, where his weight goes and where it ought to. "It is your feet, not your hands. You turn before you have the puck."

Cliff looks down at his feet, in the water. "Fuck. Do I?"

"Every time."

"Seven in the morning," Cliff says.

"Seven in the morning."

He can feel it, right in his chest. Not the idea of it. The thing: the first push, the blade taking, the cold coming up off the ice into his face in an empty building with half the lights on. His calves know it. He has not wanted that in—he does not know how long. He had thought it was one of the things that had been used up.

"Tell me when you are going," he says.

"I just told you. The eleventh."

"Tell me again on the tenth. I will forget."

"You won't forget."

The water goes out from under his heels. Behind them, up at the gate, Svetlana is calling that the car is here, that she is not going to say it twice.

"No," he says. "I won't."

Chapter End Notes

### _Poem for Haruko_

All day I did things fast
picking up leaves
scrubbing a saucepan clean
racing through an Asian American anthology
of poems
All because it hurt so much
to think about you hurt
because
I moved so slowly
and in circles
seemingly insensible
to how you held a towel
wide as your slender arms are long
to fold around me
shivering from the bathtub
how you held a children’s story
close to my almost closing eyelids
how you held me
free
as I could ever hope
to be