Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

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

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Pining While Fucking, POV Alternating, Idiots in Love, Ilya Rozanov Has PTSD, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, Mutual Pining, Anal Sex, Suicidal Thoughts, Oral Sex, Shane "I just want to be normal" Hollander, Ilya "I'm worthless" Rozanov, Emotional Infidelity, Fighting As Foreplay, Second Chances, Getting Back Together, Cheating, laughably and canonically accurate absence of hockey

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-06 Completed: 2026-05-10 Words: 70,338 Chapters: 11/11

think twice (and come back for a third time)

Summary

Shane is heavier than he used to be; his weight bears down on Ilya in a new way. He’s put on pounds of muscle since Ilya last touched him like this. Ilya flattens his palms, skims them under Shane’s undershirt, feels the flat solidity of his abs, the bulk of his lats, the swell of his chest. It’s the same and it’s new, this body; it’s the boy he couldn’t stop thinking about when he was 18 and the man he loved enough to let go at 26 and the person who somehow always comes to find him when he’s lost.

A stranger, and the love of his life.

 

—

or, Ilya's father doesn't die in 2017; Ilya breaks up with Shane instead of confessing his love. They get older, but not any less stupid about each other. Shane gets a boyfriend; Ilya gets on medication; they work on becoming whole people. And they always find their way back to each other.

OR a story for those who love Shane and Ilya's baby love but ALSO think it's hot when people in their thirties make active choices about who they are and what they want in their partner!!

Note: the "cheating" tag refers to the relationship between Shane and his aforementioned BF, not to Shane and Ilya cheating on each other.

Notes

*taps mic* is this thing on?
Um hi, I haven't written fanfiction in 15 years but HR has literally exploded my brain so here we are. Enjoy the angst, I promise we'll get to a better place by the end!
The title is from Suki Waterhouse's song "Think Twice." Alternate title, from the same song: god it feels good to abandon myself.
PS Covid doesn't exist in this universe kthnxbyeeee
Note: now that this is completed, some notes! You will see as I wrote, I waffled about whether or not there was actual going to be actual cheating. Just to be clear, there *is* cheating (although it's ambiguous for reasons that will become clear). I'm leaving the waffling author notes for posterity.

Also, this is kind of a hybrid monster of show and book canon. It's mostly show canon, with two exceptions: 1) team names, because I just like Voyageurs as a name and 2) the building Shane buys to hook up with Ilya in, which isn't in the show but is just such a delicious character detail it needed to be in this story.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

In 2017, Ilya watches Scott Hunter win the MVP award. He sits in the audience and feels himself hollowing out with every word Hunter speaks about belonging, about finding a home in someone. When the audience laughs and claps and sighs, he laughs and claps and sighs. How brave, someone whispers at his table, and Ilya nods along. His face feels like it’s made of plaster, like it could come off in one piece if he pulled hard enough. 

Somewhere in the audience, Shane Hollander is also clapping along. Ilya is pretending to not know exactly where he is, even though he saw him as soon as he walked in the room, and tracked him until he sat down at the Voyageurs’ table. Like always, Ilya feels the distance between them strung tight like a live wire. If he plucks it, will it sound the same alarm, deep in Shane’s body, and bring him to Ilya by the end of the night? Or will it go slack, with no one on the other side to hold onto it? 

Ilya was the one who had ended it. He has to keep reminding himself, every time his phone pings and a bolt of adrenaline rockets through his chest, every time he opens his texts and automatically starts scrolling to the thread with Jane: You chose this. You broke the only precious thing you had, and now you have nothing. Just like you always knew you would; just like you wanted.

Even now, months later, the pain is bright and physical, deep in his ribcage, his gut. It’s worse with Hollander in the same fucking room. Even though Shane is righteously ignoring him to his face, Ilya can feel his eyes burning into the back of Ilya’s neck. He isn’t looking, but he’s sure Shane is cycling through emotions, and that each of them are being broadcast all over Shane’s beautiful face, if anyone cares to look, to decode.

Ilya wants to turn around and tackle him off his seat and pin him to the ground and fuck him. Or just hug him, maybe, and smell his hair. Or just be near him, maybe in the seat next to him, just close enough to be able to talk to him, see with his own eyes that he exists, that he didn’t just dream up Shane Hollander like a lonely child in a fairy tale.

This. This is exactly the kind of pathetic shit Ilya is not supposed to be thinking. It’s why he broke it off, of course; because Shane was asking him for something, and Ilya didn’t have it to give. He’d been in Russia, after his father’s stroke, and Shane had just kept… asking him how he was. Wanting to be there for him.

And really, what could Ilya have said? I choose Russia over you? I choose my family over you?

Or, more honest: I have to choose Russia over you. Because of my family.

Or, most honest, and so most impossible: I choose you. I don’t get a choice.

There is no world in which he gets to have Shane Hollander. Not in any way it matters. It isn’t even worth cataloguing the reasons why; it’s as inevitable, as inescapable as the heat that comes from friction.

It’s easier to pop the blister than to wait for it to happen on its own. It’s better to get the pain over and done with, while it still feels like you’re in control of it. It is, of course, better to never be in the position to feel pain in the first place—but if you were careless, and irresponsible, and you let an annoying Canadian hockey player somehow worm his way under your skin, into your dreams, into your blood—well. It’s still better to pop the bubble than to be caught unaware by its inevitable bursting.

After the ceremony’s over, and everyone has flooded into the hotel bar to start the real celebrations, Ilya drifts, and drinks. When he’s waved over by a teammate or a manager or a journalist, he goes. He glad-hands and compliments and chirps, like he’s expected to. He slaps backs and pumps hands and kisses cheeks. 

Shane doesn’t look at him once.

When Ilya can’t take it anymore, he liberates a bottle of vodka from the open bar—he barely needs to flirt before the bartender is handing it over with a wink—and goes back to his room. 

He thinks about texting Shane his room number. He thinks about drinking so much he never wakes up. He thinks about going back downstairs and flirting the bartender into the nearest bathroom and fucking him against the door. 

He doesn’t do any of those things. He lays on his bed and stares at the ceiling, waiting to feel in control of the pain.

***

In 2018, the Bears win the cup for a second time, and Ilya wins MVP. He’s feeling good, manically good, as the room cheers him a second time at the hotel bar. Every face is turned towards him, every set of eyes on him, and for once he feels like he deserves it. He gave everything he had that season: worked through a sprained MCL in the preseason, gave up smoking for real, and even deigned to listen to the team nutritionist for once. On the ice, his whole body is a blade; sometimes he feels honed to such a fine point his edges are disappearing. He’s been playing the best hockey of his life.

He hasn’t texted Shane in 10 months. He’d had a moment of weakness in August,  the night after he’d finished moving his father into a long-term care facility. He’d said goodbye to his father—bending over him to brush a kiss against his papery face—and Grigori had said blankly, “Have we met before?”

“No,” he’d said, “we haven’t.” Then he’d gone home and texted Shane, do you miss my cock inside you? 

He’d wanted to ask if Shane missed him, full stop. It didn’t matter in the end; he'd re-blocked him before he could find out whether Shane would reply.

But since then he’s been good. When he watches Shane score another should-be-impossible goal, or catches a glimpse one of Shane’s bizarre wet-t-shirt ads that Ilya can never escape, or takes the face-off against Montreal and has to actively leave his body in order to not look Shane in the eye and beg for forgiveness—when the hum inside him that goes Hollander Hollander Hollander gets louder, becomes more of a howl—he texts Svetlana. Or he goes to a club. Or, increasingly, to a bathhouse in Providence, where he knows he isn’t Ilya Rozanov, Boston’s star center, Russia’s prodigal son; he’s just a warm mouth, a willing cock. It’s not what he wants, but it makes not having it survivable.

But now he’s standing on a chair, and Shane Hollander is clapping for him. He has a bitchy, disgruntled look on his face, and his clapping is perfunctory, but when Ilya looks at him, he looks right back. His eyes are dark and big, and they reflect the low, warm light of the room when he looks at Ilya. Ilya wants to bite into him like an apple, right through to the core of him. 

And so he isn’t surprised when, at the end of the night, he somehow finds himself alone with Shane in the hotel elevator. Shane doesn’t look at him as he gets on,  but stands there scowling, his arms folded tightly against his chest.  

Ilya presses the number to his floor. Shane doesn’t. 

“What floor?” asks Ilya. He looks at Shane askance, out of the corners of his eyes, because looking at him directly is too much, too bright. 

“Fuck you,” says Shane, with real feeling.

Ilya smiles.

They don’t speak after that. As soon as they’re safely inside Ilya’s room, Shane has him crowded up against the wall. It isn’t slow and tender, like the last time they fucked—has it already been over a year?—at his house in Boston, before everything went to shit. It’s desperate and rough and over too fast. They don’t even get all their clothes off; afterwards, Shane goes to the bathroom to clean up, and Ilya lays on the bed, slowly coming back to himself, his briefs still shoved halfway down his thighs, idly counting the buttons on his shirt that had been ripped away. 

When Shane comes out of the bathroom—fully dressed, his hair back in order but his mouth still a telltale mess—he looks, for a second, like he wants to say something. Usually Shane gets fuck-dumb and boneless after sex, but his spine is already ramrod straight again, his shoulders around his ears. He presses his lips together in a thin line. Ilya braces for impact.

“You played great hockey this year,” Shane says finally, and he leaves the room without a backward glance.

Alone, the last warmth of his orgasm haze dissipating and the cold of self-hatred creeping back in, Ilya says to himself, You deserve this.This is what you worked for. 

***

In 2019, neither Montreal nor Boston makes it past the second round of the playoffs. In Vegas, Ilya doesn’t bother with the hotel bar; he goes straight to his room and takes off his suit. He’s still in slacks when the knock on the door comes. This time Ilya’s prepared for it, for the shock of need and desperation, for the way time speeds up as soon as Shane’s clothes are off when all he wants is for it to slow down. He presses Shane against the hotel door, Shane face first against the wood, his forehead pressed against the map of emergency exits, Ilya flush against him, one hand braced against the door and the other hand snaking down to palm Shane’s dick. 

“You came here because you’re desperate for it,” Ilya growls into Shane’s ear. “You need it, you need me to fuck you.”

“No,” says Shane, but he bucks against Ilya’s palm. 

“Yes,” says Ilya. He felt lightheaded, high just from the smell of Shane, his seaweed shampoo, his cedar aftershave. “No one fucks you like I do. No one makes you come like I do.”

“No,” says Shane again, but he makes a high keening sound when Ilya takes his hand away.

It takes all of the willpower he’s mustered in his 28 years, but Ilya drops both his hands and steps back. Not far back. Far enough that he can register the cool air of the hotel room against his skin instead of Shane, Shane, Shane.

“If you tell me to stop, I will,” he says, and he hopes he doesn’t sound as wrecked as he feels.

For a moment Shane is silent. His shoulders heave as he regains control of his breathing, his palms flat against the door, bracing himself now that Ilya’s not there to hold his weight. Goosebumps sweep across the back of Shane’s neck and shoulders as the room’s air conditioner kicks on. Ilya doesn’t even remember getting Shane’s shirt off.

Shane doesn’t lift his head from the plastic sign. His shoulders rise and fall.

Ilya sways forward, just a centimeter. He can’t help it. He’s always been powerless against Shane’s gravity, never able to simply stay in orbit, always on track for the next catastrophic collision.

“Tell me to stop, Hollander,” he rasps, and now he knows he sounds as wrecked as he feels.

Finally, Shane’s shoulders drop. “No,” he says a third time, and something ugly in Ilya, the loneliest, angriest part of him, roars in triumph at the defeat in Shane’s posture, the tremor in Shane’s voice. “Don’t stop.”

Ilya is on him before he’s finished getting the words out. He trails hot, messy kisses up the crook of Shane’s neck, covering one of Shane’s hands on the door with his own as he springs Shane’s always-ridiculously-hard cock out of his boxer-briefs and starts to stroke him with the other.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, Hollander,” Ilya babbles, as always unable to control his mouth and his body at the same time. “I’ve got you, I’m going to give you what you want. I’ll give you what you came here for.”

“Augh,” says Shane, letting go a little more, letting Ilya take his weight. He tips his head back and rests it on Ilya’s shoulder, eyes closed.

“No one else can fuck you like this, Hollander,” Ilya said, and he pushes his hard-on, still trapped in his slacks, against the cleft of Shane’s ass.

He takes his hand away—Shane keens again, a sound Ilya knows he’ll dream about for the rest of his life—and grips Shane’s jaw, his palm against Shane’s lips. “Lick it,” he said, “get it wet,” and he had forgotten—how could he have forgotten?—how obedient Shane is, how eager to follow instructions. Shane laves Ilya’s palm with his tongue, sucks his thumb and then his fingers into his mouth, laps his tongue all the way to the skin between each finger.

“Fuck,” Ilya says, finally ripping his hand away and returning it to Shane’s dick, which is starting to leak precome. “You’re so fucking hot, you’re unbelievable, you’re—”

“Rozanov,” Shane interrupts, “Shut the fuck up and fuck me. I’m not going to—I can’t—”

“Shh,” Ilya soothes, but he doesn’t slow his hand. “I’ve got you, Hollander, I’ve got you. It’s okay, you can come. Come on.”

Shane begins to protest, but Ilya tightens his grip. Just a little. “You can come,” he continues, “because you’re going to come twice tonight.”

“Big—big promises,” Shane gasps, but he’s squeezing his eyes shut.

Ilya ignores him. “First you come in my mouth,” he says, holding Shane still even as he begins to push restlessly, mindlessly back against him. “Then I eat you out until you cry and beg me to fuck you. Then you come again, on my cock.”

“Oh,” says Shane weakly, going limp. “Okay.”

“You think you can do this, Hollander?” Ilya scrapes his teeth along the juncture of Shane’s collarbone and shoulder. “You think you can be good for me? This is what you wanted, yes?” He lets go of Shane’s hand—he hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been gripping it, or how maybe how tightly Shane had been gripping him—and turns Shane around to face him.

“I—yes,” says Shane, “Fuck—just—”

Ilya is already dropping to his knees. He would love to take his time, see what other noises he can pull out of Shane, but he’s clinging to the shreds of his own self-control as it is. It is literally all he can do to open his mouth and swallow Shane down, hands on his hips to hold him still against the wood.

“Ahhh,” sighs Shane, and Ilya wants to swallow that down too. Shane’s fingers rake through Ilya’s hair, flexing and unflexing unconsciously.

Ilya relaxes his throat, slides forward until his nose brushes Shane’s pubes and Shane’s dick bumps the back of his throat. He closes his eyes, savoring the feeling, the stretch in his jaw, the little waves that roll over Shane’s body as he fights to stay still, to be good.

“Look at me,” Shane gasps, clumsily pawing at his face, “Look at me, Ilya.”

Ilya turns his eyes upwards, looks up at Shane through his eyelashes, and Shane comes down his throat, staring back at him.

Later, his hair wet from the shower, Shane sits on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes. Ilya, wrapped in a towel, reclines against the headboard, watches the familiar curve of his spine. This time, he knows Shane won’t tell him he’d played great hockey; he hasn’t. Something had happened over the summer, when he was in Russia, sleeping on his brother’s couch most nights because Alexei was fuck knows where and his wife was on bed rest for her third trimester, playing cards with his father who only recognized him to insult him. He had flown to Moscow, the morning after the NHL awards, feeling knife-sharp and honed to a point; he returned to Boston ground down to the hilt, with a permanent ache in his right hip from Alexei’s horrible couch. He’d played shitty hockey all year, and he can only hope Shane will be kind enough to not mention it—or worse, pity him.

Instead, Shane, still facing away from him, says, “I don’t know why I keep doing this. It makes me feel like shit.”

Ilya’s stomach clenches; a dull ache runs from the core of his ribcage, down his arms, through his hands. He wants to say, I only ever want you to feel good. I would do anything to make you feel good.

He wants to say, You shouldn’t come back. This is it, this is all I can give you: orgasms and feeling like shit about yourself. The Ilya Rozanov experience.

He wants to say, Whenever you knock, I’ll open the door. Whenever you want me, I’ll let you in, I’ll say yes. Even if it kills us both.

He doesn’t say anything. His tongue is thick in his mouth and he can’t trust his English and he doesn’t know what he could say that won’t make things worse.

Finished tying his shoes, and seemingly not expecting a response, Shane gets to his feet. At the door he pauses, looking back at Ilya, that shy, almost-smile that Ilya could draw from memory on his face. If Ilya had a heart, it would ache with how beautiful Shane always is, especially when he’s walking out the door.

“See you next year?” Shane asks, mostly succeeding at not sounding hopeful.

Ilya closes his eyes. It’s his lot in life to let Shane Hollander go, over and over. That’s the price of getting to have him at all. Even if just for one night, Ilya is willing to pay it.

“We’ll see, Hollander,” he says. He doesn’t open his eyes until he hears the click of the door as Shane pulls it shut behind him.

***

In 2020, Ilya’s father finally dies.

It’s during playoffs, which doesn’t matter, because the Bears didn’t even get a wild card slot. Ilya makes it to his father’s bedside before his death, not that that matters either; one look at his father tells him that Grigori Rozanov left the planet long ago.

He pays for the funeral. He pays for his father’s wife (he will not call her his step-mother), enough to set her up for life if she’s not an idiot. He pays for his brother’s mistress’s new condo, just to get Alexei to shut the fuck up. He doesn’t care; he’ll pay what he needs to get the fuck out of there. To never have to talk to these people again.

He flies straight to Las Vegas from Moscow. He’s presenting the Lady Byng award again, though thankfully not with Hollander this time—although, as soon as he lands and has his schedule shoved in his hand by a hyperventilating PA, he sees that Hollander was presenting an award as well.

Sometimes, he wonders if he’s actually already dead, condemned to repeat the same story over and over again, without ever being able to change the outcome.

So, of course, he lets his shoulder brush against Shane’s as he walks past him on the way to the stage.

And, of course, after he’s done presenting, he goes straight to the little out-of-the-way bathroom, the same one he followed Shane into all those years ago.

And, of course, Shane is there. Waiting for him.

Shane doesn’t let him speak. He grips Ilya’s lapels and propels him back towards the sink. Shane has always kissed like he was drowning—it was one of Ilya’s first favorite things about him—and his mouth is hot and needy on Ilya’s own. Even for Shane, though, there is something grasping about the way he’s kissing Ilya, something unfamiliar and desperate.

Shane trails his mouth away from Ilya’s, down his jaw, along his neck. His hands fumble at Ilya’s belt.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” he says, as he sucks at Ilya’s pulse point.

Ilya fights to focus, to come back to himself enough to give Shane what he’s asking for, even though he doesn’t know what it is.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” Shane says again. He’s finally gotten Ilya’s belt undone and he’s biting and sucking at Ilya’s collarbone.

Ilya tilts his head to give Shane better access. His hands come up of their own accord, smoothing Shane’s suit jacket, skimming underneath his collar. “This doesn’t mean anything,” he hears himself agree.

Shane’s hand is on his dick and his mouth is on the spot just beneath his earlobe. Ilya hopes he remembered to lock the door.

“I don’t mean anything to you,” Shane whispers, now using his other hand to shove Ilya’s shirt up, enough to dig his fingers into Ilya’s abs and ribs. “I’m nothing to you, I’m nothing.”

Ilya wants to protest, but Shane is circling his nipple with his thumb, pinching it lightly between his fingers, scraping the blunt edge of his thumbnail over the sensitive skin. He groans instead, unable to form words, too lost in the feeling of Shane’s hands on him.

“Say it,” Shane insists. He bends and closes his teeth around the same nipple he’d just been pinching. He tightens his grip on Ilya’s dick, adds a twist of his wrist. “I mean nothing to you, this is nothing.”

“I—Hollander, fuck,” Ilya says instead. He wants to say it. He wants to give Shane what he’s asking for. He doesn’t know why he can’t, except that it isn’t true. More than that, he doesn’t want to hurt Shane. Even when he’s asking to be hurt.

“Say it,” says Shane again, and he goes to his knees.

On this dirty bathroom floor, said Shane’s ghost, almost a decade ago. Please.

“You’re nothing to me,” Ilya says, but he cups Shane’s face as he says it, strokes his cheek and jaw with his thumb like he could smooth away the sting of it. “This is nothing.”

“Yes,” says Shane, “Please fuck my mouth.”

Ilya is only a man. A man with poor self-control at the best of times, sure, but he defies anyone with a dick who’s remotely inclined towards the masculine form to resist Shane Hollander, on his knees, opening his mouth, asking to be used.

It’s over too fast. It’s always over too fast. When Ilya reaches for him, planning to return the favor—this time without any bitching about the bathroom floor—Shane pulls away, reaching into his slacks to adjust his obvious erection, refusing to meet Ilya’s eyes.

Ilya lets his hands drop, remains leaning against the sink, panting, trying to reorient himself to the world. Shane takes two large, pointed steps away from him, then looks into the mirror to begin fixing his face and his hair. His cheeks are flushed, his mouth is red with obvious beard-burn from Ilya’s stubble, and his eyelashes are wet. He frowns at himself and bent to splash some water on his face.

He is so breathtaking when he’s messy, when he allows Ilya to make him messy, to drag him over the edge of his own desire. Ilya wants to tell him so. He isn’t sure he knows how to, in English, or maybe even in Russian. 

“I’m seeing someone,” Shane says. He is washing his hands and still not looking at Ilya.

Silence. Ilya, belatedly, tucks his soft dick back into his pants. His skin is a little tacky still, Shane’s saliva not yet dry.

“A man,” Shane says, though Ilya hasn’t said anything. “I’m seeing a man. He’s—good. He’s good to me.”

“Oh,” says Ilya distantly. He is concentrating on doing up his fly and not throwing up. “That’s good.”

Now Shane is drying his hands with a paper towel. He’s somehow managed to put his hair back in some kind of order and the flush has receded from his cheeks and mouth. He looks almost normal. Like Ilya never touched him at all.

There’s a roaring in Ilya’s ears. Or maybe it’s his brother, at their mother’s funeral, whispering in his ear: I guess she didn’t love even you enough to stay around, golden boy. Or maybe it’s his father, the last time he’d been lucid enough to know who he was talking to: Thank God your mother isn’t alive to see you now.

“Yeah,” Shane continues, because he’s still talking for some reason, still looking vaguely over Ilya’s shoulder rather than directly at him. “So, I mean, I think we can’t—I mean I think this shouldn’t happen again. He’s a good guy and I think he wants—I think he’s serious about me.” He pauses again and for a moment he looks at Ilya, really looks at him. There’s something searching in his eyes, like he’s waiting for Ilya to say something.

“Okay,” says Ilya, because what else is there to say? They’re nothing. This is nothing; that’s what Shane was trying to tell him. Ilya can feel darkness pulling at him like a tide, with a touch as soft and welcoming as his mother’s. His father is dead, and this is nothing, has always been nothing, and what, otherwise, tethers him to the shore?

“Okay,” says Shane, nodding to himself, back to looking over Ilya’s shoulder. He looks for a second like he’s going to hold his hand out for Ilya to shake. Instead he turns for the door. “Well, bye, I guess.”

“Goodbye, Hollander,” says Ilya. Then he lets the tide take him.

Chapter End Notes

Ahh! Thank you for reading. This started as little brainworm about just "what if the toxic situationship just gets dragged out a little longer" because toxic situationships are my lifeblood. In life and fiction! Lol sob. Anyway, it evolved into something a little more in-depth, so this chapter is kind of more like a prologue to get us a couple years out of the initial break up.
Up next: Shane! Learns things! About himself! Kind of.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Uh... this kind of got away from me in terms of length. Oops?

If you're curious, Alex is based (visually and name-wise) on Alexander Hodge.

Like I said in the tags, there's no actual cheating (beyond like, Shane just being in love with someone else the whole time, but whatever) in this story!! But there IS Shane getting fucked by someone who isn't Ilya, so... you've been warned.

TW: Shane has some (a lot) of self-hatred happening towards the end of this chapter, and there's also a teeny bit of kink-shaming. Just to be clear, kink is good as long as it's safe, sane and consensual!

PS this chapter is extremely OMC-heavy and I promise the rest of the story will be less so! We gotta lay the groundwork, people.

In 2017, Shane comes out to his parents.

It’s been months since Ilya ended things without explanation, and Shane is still wandering around with an open wound. He’s at the cottage, which is normally the place that soothes his soul, but he does not feel soothed. He goes to sleep every night promising himself that he’ll wake up and feel better and his first thought won’t be Ilya Rozanov. This is a self-defeating exercise, he knows; the only thing or person Shane has ever broken promises for is Ilya.

So he wakes up every morning with Ilya’s name heavy on his tongue. Or with his dick straining and drooling, halfway to shooting off, his hands winding in the curls of dream-Ilya’s hair even as he vanishes. Or to the sound of a door closing, footsteps coming towards him, and the sweet knowledge that it’s Ilya, coming back to bed, to him.

Or to a pit in his stomach and a grainy film over the world because he’s been tossing and turning all night, too raw, too hollow, too alone to sleep.

Yuna catches him on one of these raw, grainy days. She and David are visiting the cottage, quietly stocking Shane’s fridge. They’re concerned about him, he knows, which is why he’s been tolerating their daily visits even though he kind of wants to tell them to leave him the fuck alone.

She comes to sit on the couch where he’s lying with an arm thrown over his eyes, having claimed to them that he’s somehow caught a summer cold despite being literally alone for three weeks. She takes his socked feet in her lap. After hesitating, his mom asks, “What’s wrong, Shane? You seem sad.”

She’s asked this before, of course; she’s been asking all summer in slightly different wording, but something about the way she asks the question this time opens a pressure valve inside Shane. He meets her warm brown eyes.

And then he just tells her. And then his dad a minute later, when David joins them. I’m gay. I’m sad because I got dumped and I don’t even know why or what I did. He stops just short of telling them any identifying details about Ilya or the fact that the man who dumped him is a hockey player, but he does cop to the years-long… thing. It feels wrong to call it a relationship, and even when he’s word-vomiting up his truth he can’t bring himself to say the words fuck buddy or even friends with benefits to his parents. Not that those are right either.

Nothing changes. Everything changes. They hug him, and all three of them cry a little, and they ask his forgiveness, and he asks theirs. Then they eat dinner and play Monopoly. It’s good. It’s the best case scenario, and Shane is so, so grateful that they are his parents.

Well; not the best case scenario. He had once, and only once, allowed himself to daydream about what it might be like to come out to his parents with someone by his side. Not covered in his own snot, crying over his first real heartbreak, pathetic and single and too fucking old to be doing this. But with someone with him, someone he could introduce to his parents and say, See? You don’t have to take care of me any more, because I found my person.

Okay. The person he daydreamed about was Ilya. He daydreamed about it more than once. It’s pointless to lie to himself about it now. He’s finally starting to get that it doesn’t matter if he says the wish aloud; it isn’t coming true either way.

***

In 2018, Shane meets Alex at a gala for something Yuna is on the board of, something to do with Asian Canadian Professionals. It’s New Year’s Eve; Shane had made a rookie mistake and, in a moment of self pity, told his dad that he didn’t have plans. Within an hour Yuna had been on the phone begging Shane to attend. She hit him with the one-two of “you are important representation for all young hockey players” and “you need a social life.” Yuna: 1 million. Shane, and the world at large: still 0.

Alex’s eyes meet Shane’s in the mirror as they both bend to wash their hands, and the hair on the back of Shane’s neck rises. He’s been an ostensibly single gay adult man for long enough to know when he’s being cruised. He finishes washing his hands, then turns to dry them. When he turns back around, Alex is drying his hands, facing him, the barest hint of a smile—a dimple, Shane realizes belatedly—crossing his face.

“I’m Alex Sullivan,” he says, in an accent Shane can’t quite place, holding out a hand. Alex has brown eyes and brown skin, and Shane allows himself to think that Rose would say: god, he’s almost handsome enough to get away with that soul patch.

Shane shakes the offered hand. “Shane,” he says, and then, belatedly, “Hollander.” The guy really is handsome—a little taller than Shane, less bulky but still fit and muscular—and he’s wearing a gold chain around his neck underneath his dress shirt. The energy he’s exuding is not not what Shane might… or might not be looking for, if he were looking for anything, which he isn’t.

Okay. So maybe Shane’s still working on the adult gay man thing.

Alex lets his hand linger in Shane’s. He makes meaningful eye contact. “Your mom is really persistent,” he says, finally letting Shane’s hand go. “She called my firm every day for like two weeks to get us to come to this thing tonight.”

“God, I’m sorry,” Shane says, mortified. “She does that.” And then, because he can’t help himself: “So you’re an…”

“An Asian Canadian Professional, at your service,” he says with a little bow. “Well, Asian-Australian-Canadian?”

Well, that explains the accent. “Cool,” says Shane, “What, um, profession?”

Alex’s smile grows. He has two dimples, Shane notes abstractly; one is just slower to appear. He also seems to have taken off his suit jacket at dinner and rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and his forearms are muscular and dotted with small black tattoos. “I’m an immigration lawyer. I’m a junior partner at a firm that works with immigrants in Montreal, primarily Chinese-speaking populations, who need legal representation.  We also work with a lot of queer families, dealing with immigration paperwork, adoptions, that sort of thing.”

“Wow. That’s really cool.” Shane is suddenly self-conscious, in a way he’s maybe never been so acutely before, of his lack of a college degree. It occurs to him to wonder how old this man is; he’s maybe ten years older than Shane himself? Fifteen? Shane has no idea what a “junior partner” is.

“Yeah, we actually weren’t going to come because we couldn’t afford a table, but your mom said the table was paid for by an anonymous donor,” Alex goes on, with that same easy, knowing smile.

“Ah,” says Shane. He vaguely remembers Yuna asking him to cover the fee for a few tables.

The bathroom door swings open, and Alex, with a wink, turns to go, catching the door as it finishes opening.

As the night winds down, Alex comes over with his partners to say thank you to Yuna.

“Have you met my son, Shane?” says Yuna to Alex specifically.  Shane cuts his eyes at her, hoping to telepathically convey how much he needs her to, just once in his entire life, back the fuck off. She blithely ignores him, still gripping his wrist with one hand and pulling him a little forward. “He’s a world-class hockey player. Probably the best in the world, actually, right now.”

“Momwetalkedaboutthis,” Shane hisses, through the sides of his mortified smile.

The dimples reappear. “Hello, Shane,” Alex said. His voice is low and gravelly, and his eyes are warm.

“Hello,” says Shane lamely, conscious of Yuna’s head turning to listen to them with one ear even as she engages someone else in conversation.

Alex holds out his hand, and Shane shakes it. Alex’s hand is large, his grip firm and dry.

Alex and his partners move away. When they’ve gone—and after telling his mother that she’s lost her plus one privileges for the foreseeable future, until she proves she can behave herself, which will probably be never—he takes a look at the card Alex left in his palm. One side is Alex’s business information. The other has his phone number, scrawled in pen.

Shane doesn’t call.

***

Seven months later, though, he runs into Alex again at another of Yuna’s functions. This time, Shane awkwardly realizes he’s behind Alex in line at the bar, but Alex spots him before he has the chance to retreat. It’s a summer evening, and they’re on a balcony in Verdun, overlooking the St. Lawrence.

“Uh, hi,” says Shane.

Alex gives him the same knowing smile he gave him before. “Hello, Shane,” he says. “Nice to see you again.”

Shane orders a vodka soda and says, for the first time in his life, “Make it a double.” It’s disgusting. Shane drinks it down.

They orbit each other all night. Shane can feel Alex’s eyes on him and the weight of that makes him shiver. The vodka has him feeling reckless, with the sun going down at last and the syrupy humidity in the air that comes just before the heat breaks. For weeks, he’s been shoving down any and all feelings about letting Ilya fuck him (again!) on awards night, but tonight, Shane can finally name at least some of his emotions. They are: horny. And angry. And horny.

Finally, as the night wraps up, Alex comes over to him. “I know this is kind of thirsty,” he says, pronouncing “thirsty” somewhat dubiously, like an adult man who learned the term from teenage girls, “But is there any chance that if I gave you my card again, you’d call this time?”

“Or,” says Shane, trying to project confidence he does not feel, “You could just take me home right now.”

Alex’s eyes darken. He licks his bottom lip, leaves it a little shiny with spit. “Okay,” he says, simply. “Let’s go.”

Shane feels a little slutty, a little sexy and powerful. Unfortunately, he then has to say, “Okay, one second, I just have to say goodbye to my mom,” which kind of ruins the effect.

Alex takes him home anyway. He kisses his way up Shane’s thighs, over his belly, and asks him what he likes. Less in the heady, tell me every depraved thought you’ve ever had, I want you to show me every dark and dirty corner of your mind way that Ilya would sometimes make Shane say what he wanted. More in a customer satisfaction questionnaire kind of way. Still, Shane likes Alex’s matter-of-fact way of fucking him. Do you want it from behind? How would you rate the pace, on a scale of 1 to 5? He comes into the pillow Alex has put under his hips, and afterwards Alex invites him to sleep over, and offers him a toothbrush, and fucks him again in the morning. It all feels so normal and good. Not steeped in shame and anxiety, not ecstatic and world-shattering. Just good.

***

They keep seeing each other. First once a month, then every few weeks, then once a week. Alex goes back to Australia over the holidays and even though the time difference is 15 hours, they text almost daily. When Yuna asks him what he’s smiling at his phone about, on Christmas Eve, Shane even admits he’s been seeing someone, though he refuses to give her any more details. He waits for the panic to clamp down in his chest, for the room to start darkening at the edges, then realizes it’s not going to come. Apparently when you’re not secretly dating your extremely public rival, you can just talk about your relationship with the people you love, and it can just feel good, even easy.

In February, Shane meets some of Alex’s friends. Alex hasn’t been pushing it, much; he respects that, for his own reasons, Shane is not interested in coming out publicly. But Shane has been practicing, a little; he finally came out to Hayden and Jackie, and then, a few months later, JJ. It feels good to let the world expand a little, to have more people in his life he can be fully himself in front of. So when Alex says they’ve been invited to have dinner with a group of Alex’s queer lawyer friends—who, he promises, will love him, and are also too gay to be interested in hockey (his words)—Shane just says, okay, let’s go.

Like Alex, Alex’s friends are mostly in their early 40s. They’re multilingual and cosmopolitan; they talk about books they’ve read, art shows they’ve seen, and European cities they’ve summered in. Sat amongst them, Shane feels… Uncultured. Inexperienced. Kind of stupid, really.

It’s not a feeling he’s used to. Sure, sitting quietly, listening to a group of people he’s supposed to be a part of, feeling apart instead, like a glass wall only he can see is between him and everyone else—that’s a familiar sensation. But Shane has always, at least, felt secure in his talent. While his ability to fit in with his teammates is always in question, his right to be among them never is.

It doesn’t help that he’s sat next to Ryan, the 22-year-old snowboarder brought by Christian, a partner at Alex’s firm. Ryan, Alex had explained in the car, is Christian’s boy-toy of the month; there will probably be a new one the next time Shane sees Christian. But when even Ryan gets into the heated debate about the ski-in resorts in Gstaad, however, Shane can’t help but let the word boy-toy roll around in his skull. Is that what he is, to Alex? Shane hopes not; it doesn’t really sound like a good thing.

Other than Christian and Ryan, the other people at the dinner are Lakshmi, yet another law school friend, and her wife Mel, a stunning, androgynous-looking chef-turned-local-TV personality. Of all of them, Shane likes Mel the most; she has interesting stories about being the personal chef for various celebrities, and she doesn’t speak to Shane like he’s an idiot. She even knows Rose, having worked for her as a private chef while Rose was filming the X-Squad sequels in Canada.

The other shoe drops, finally, when the pasta course comes out. Lakshmi, who has so far ignored him, leans across Mel and says, “So, Shane, Alex tells us you’re not out. Why is that?”

The table grinds into silence. Shane’s eyes dart to Alex, a nonverbal plea for rescue. Alex had warned him about this, too; Lakshmi’s more bark than bite, super protective of her people, but once she loves you you're her person for life.

Alex says, “Jesus, Lakshmi. Take it down a notch, please. I told you, Shane is a public figure.”

Lakshmi does not seem to find this convincing. “Public figures can’t be out? My wife would beg to differ.”

Mel, who has been chatting with Christian about something, makes a show of tuning back into the conversation, as if it’s not the main attraction of the evening. “What about me, love?” She picks up Lakshmi’s hand from the table, gives it a showy kiss.

Lakshmi cracks a smile, but her eyes don’t leave Shane. “You’re an out queer public figure. I’m just saying. It’s not like it’s unheard of.”

Shane doesn’t know what his face is doing. His first instinct is to get up and flee from the table. No, to be honest, his first instinct is to spit back, You don’t know anything about me. I don’t owe you shit. Go fuck yourself. But neither of these instincts is particularly useful, considering he wants these people to like him, or at least, wants Alex to keep liking him.

Unexpectedly, it’s Ryan who speaks up next. “I mean, no offense to Mel, but it’s not really the same thing.”

Lakshmi’s cool gaze goes to Ryan; Shane tries not to heave a breath in relief. “Oh?” Lakshmi asks, and her tone conveys that she likes people who call her wife’s status as a star into question even less than she likes people who force her friends back into the closet.

Ryan does not seem aware of the danger he’s stumbled into. “Yeah, I mean like, it’s public access television versus, you know, global superstar. This dude’s like, the LeBron of hockey!”

Shane cuts his eyes at Alex again, now trying to nonverbally communicate that I fucking told you your friends would know who I am. Alex lifts a shoulder in a helpless shrug, as if he hadn’t essentially stood Shane in front of this firing squad himself. Shane hears himself going into his automatic, press conference friendly spiel: “Oh, I mean, I can only hope to have the longevity and trajectory of LeBron’s career.” It’s the wrong response, he knows that, but he’s spent so much of his adult life having press-friendly phrases crammed into his head that they just spill out of him whenever someone hits the right pitch or says the trigger word.

Lakshmi makes a bitchy face. Mel pours her some more wine. “Okay, and? Why does that matter?”

Alex finally cuts in: “Well, there’s never been an out NHL player. Like ever.”

Shane opens his mouth to point out that this isn’t true, but closes it again, realizing it probably wouldn’t help his case. Lakshmi looks like she wants to say and again. Ryan, still apparently on Shane’s side, cuts across her: “And he’s—” he gestures to Shane instead of saying his name—“like, already the first Asian hockey player to ever win a Stanley Cup.”

“Asian Canadian,” corrects Shane automatically, just as Alex says, “He’s Asian Canadian.”

There’s a beat. Fleeing still feels like a reasonable option to Shane.

When Alex speaks, Shane can actually tell he’s annoyed. It’s the first time he’s really heard Alex sound anything other relaxed. “Are you satisfied, Lakshmi? Is that enough for you?”

Clearly, the tone in Alex’s voice is also notable to Lakshmi, who finally looks a little abashed. “Okay, fuck, fine, sorry,” she says, raising her hands in a universal gesture of letting it go. “I just… you know, it’s shitty when you watch your friend made into someone’s dirty little secret.”

“He isn’t,” says Shane, matching her cool tone now. “I’m out to my parents, my friends. Just not, you know. International media.” Because he can’t help himself, he adds, “Which you would have known, if you had asked me instead of making assumptions.”

Mel catches Shane’s eye, maybe winks a little.  Lakshmi, even more cowed, sighs, “Right. I get that. Sorry, again. I guess I didn’t really think about how backward and fucked up professional sports are.”

Shane wants to defend hockey. He wants to agree that yes, sports are fucked up, and yes, it’s hard to be in two worlds at once, and no, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But mostly he wants this conversation to be over, and anything he might say would be in direct counter to that most important goal.

So he presses his lips together, says nothing, and lets the conversation move on.

***

After dinner, they go back to Alex’s place. Shane deeply, with all his heart, does not want to talk about it. He’s talked out, even though he didn’t say much all evening; just the hyper-verbosity of everyone around him has exhausted him. He’s annoyed though, on edge, stuffed full of words he’s trying like hell not to say.

As soon as the door opens to the apartment, he kicks off his shoes and heads straight for Alex’s room. He wants to get fucked and then go to sleep. He wants to never have to go to a dinner party with Alex’s friends again. 

Following him, Alex says, “Look, I’m sorry about Lakshmi.”

“It’s fine,” Shane tosses over his shoulder. (It’s not.) “She cares about you. I liked her, I liked all your friends.” (He didn’t.)

Shane feels itchy, like his skin is too tight for his body. He wants Alex’s hands on him. He wants… he wants the way it used to be with Ilya, sometimes; when one or both of them was pissed about how the game went, and they took it out on each other. It was such a fucking thrill, to know he didn’t have to hold back, that Ilya could take whatever Shane wanted to give him—his weight, his anger, his desire—and give it back to him just as fiercely.

What would Alex do, if Shane shoved him against the wall, sank his teeth into the tendon of his neck? Would he push back? Would he pull Shane’s hair? He wants to try, wants to see, but he holds himself back, opting instead to turn around and start crowding Alex backwards towards the bed, unbuttoning Alex’s shirt as he goes.

Alex lets himself get herded, but stops Shane’s hands, holding them instead. “Do you want to talk about it, though?” He asks, and his face is all gentle understanding.

Shane does not want gentle understanding. He does not want to talk. He pulls his hands out of Alex’s and goes for Alex’s belt instead. “Talk about what?”

Alex doesn’t stop him again, but he rests his palms on Shane’s chest. “About why you haven’t come out. I mean… you said your friends on the team took it well.”

It’s obvious Alex is not going to let this go. Shane finally drops his hands, disgruntled, and steps away from Alex; if they’re not going to fuck immediately, Shane wants out of his street clothes.

Alex waits him out as he changes. Finally, after yanking on the pair of sweats he’s started leaving at Alex’s, Shane answers the question. Annoyance makes him blunter than he normally would be. He says, “It’s like that guy Ryan said, okay? I’m already the Asian hockey player. I’m never just the hockey player, let alone the greatest hockey player. Just the Asian one.”

Alex takes a seat on the edge of the bed. “What’s so wrong with being the Asian one?”

Shane runs his hands through his hair, digs his fingers into his scalp, yanks a little on his own hair just for the sensation. “Nothing,” he says finally. “I’m just… not that Asian. Like every time my mom made me hang out with her Japanese friends’ kids when I was little they just made fun of me for being a banana, or whatever dumb shit. I don’t speak Japanese, I didn’t even know my grandparents that well because they died when I was young and my mom barely talks about them. I have a white last name. Every time I get invited somewhere or honored just for like, being Asian, I feel like shit, because I’m not.”

Alex pats the bed beside him. Shane doesn’t go. With a sigh, Alex says, “I get that. You think I don’t get that? My name is Alex Sullivan. My Irish grandma calls me a mongrel and my Chinese grandma calls me a foreigner.”

Shane doesn’t want to be talking about this. He doesn’t want to say any of this, but the problem is, once he starts talking, it’s hard to stop. He spends a lot of time shoving these specific feelings deep down inside him; like memory foam that’s been compressed in plastic, as soon as they hit the open air they become unwieldy, enormous, endlessly expanding. He pulls on his own hair again, folds his arms around his stomach like he can hold the words in.

He can’t. He says, “I know, but like… you don’t get it. Because it’s also like that with being gay, for me. Like I’m gay because I like dicks and I like getting fucked, but I’ve like, never even been to a gay bar. I don’t have any gay friends. If I come out and I’m the gay Asian hockey player who doesn’t actually know anything about being either of those things? But everyone expects me to have like, meaningful shit to say and wisdom to dispense or whatever fucking else? And then I never, I never get to be just a hockey player, like ever again?”

Not white, but not Asian enough. Not straight, but not gay enough. Not like everyone else, and not good enough to make people forget that fact. Not enough. Shane wants to crawl out of his own skin, wants to dip himself in acid and erase every identifying feature, wants to put on his skates and just sprint until his legs give out.

Alex seems to have finally cued into the fact that this is less an ordinary conversation about reasonable insecurities and more like Shane’s primary wound. He stands up and comes over to Shane, who is now just standing in the middle of the room, hugging himself, holding himself together. “Okay, okay,” Alex soothes, running a hand down Shane’s back. “You’re about to hyperventilate. Slow down.” He pulls Shane into him, keeps smoothing his hands up and down Shane’s spine.

They stand there for a moment. Shane is shaking. Alex says, “Look, that’s a lot. I know I don’t get it. But some of that… some of that is easy to do, easy to fix. Like, do you want me to take you to a gay bar?”

Shane huffs a laugh. Held like this, in Alex’s arms, he can smell Alex’s cologne, the musky scent of his skin. It pulls him back to himself; he wants to bury his face in Alex’s crotch and just fucking stay there. Thinking about this brings him back to his original mission: right. Get fucked. Stop talking about this. He says, “Maybe, but right now I want you to fuck my mouth until I choke on your dick.”

He drops to his knees without any more preamble, just to make extremely clear that he’s done with this conversation.

It’s Alex’s turn to laugh a little, seeming a little shellshocked by the abrupt turn. “Jesus. Well, that’s very gay.” He doesn’t stop Shane this time though, puts his hands in his hair instead, which Shane takes as a sign to begin working on his belt and fly in earnest.

When Shane goes to pull Alex’s semi-hard dick out of his briefs, though, Alex stops him again, smoothing his hair on his forehead. “I don’t, uh… I don’t really like that stuff though.”

Shane sits back on his heels, confused. He’s pretty sure Alex doesn’t mean blowjobs; or he hopes so at least, because he’s given Alex dozens of them, and it would be weird for him to bring up not liking them now. “What stuff?”

“Like dominating, you know,” Alex says, “I’m pretty vanilla, I guess. I like to… like treat my partners well, you know. Is that okay?"

Shane is abruptly, totally mortified. He doesn’t often think about the fact that 80% of his sexual experiences have been with Ilya, and he’s never thought about the possibility that what he and Ilya did together was anything other than normal. Gay, obviously, but normal.

Apparently, though, he’s wrong. Apparently making someone choke on your dick, even if they’re asking for it, is not treating them well.

Alex is waiting for a response. Shane kinds of wants to die. Or like, somehow rewind the conversation, to back before Shane had utterly fucking humiliated himself by asking for something weird. Something normal, loving people didn’t do to each other.

But now if he does anything other than suck Alex’s dick it’ll be even weirder. So he makes himself say, “Of course that’s okay.” For good measure, he adds, “I don’t even really know why I said that.”

He gives Alex a good, normal blowjob. Alex gives him a good, normal blowjob in return. Shane lies awake for a long time after Alex falls asleep, carefully packing all those unsightly, unwieldy parts of himself away again. It’s hard; it hurts; he can’t quite get them back into the shape they were in before. But he’s good at it. It’s probably accurate to say that making himself smaller, making himself into a recognizable shape, is his life’s work.

By the morning, Shane is mostly back to himself. If there are a few raw edges, a few stress fractures, well, Alex doesn’t seem to notice.

***

After the 2020 awards, flush with the victory of setting boundaries with Ilya, Shane calls Alex and invites him to stay at his cottage.

Okay, so those boundaries had been set while Shane could still taste Ilya’s come on the back of his tongue and was still hard as a fucking rock. Nevertheless, they had been set. Shane had told Ilya that it couldn’t happen again, that it’s serious with Alex, that Alex is serious about him. He’s 90% sure he’s right about that, but they haven’t exactly had a conversation about it.

So: Shane invites Alex to the cottage.

Alex, of course, points out that as a person with a “normal job,” he actually doesn’t have the summer off—but, if Shane’s okay with him working while he’s there, he thinks he can swing a week or two out of office.

Shane is giddy when he hears Alex’s car pulling up at the cottage, nerves fluttering in his stomach. He’s never shown the cottage to anyone other than his parents. He takes Alex’s hands and leads him through the house, and Alex is suitably impressed by all the little custom details that Shane had built in for himself, although he also can’t stop himself from keeping a running estimate of the cost of everything in the house aloud.

It’s early evening when Alex gets there, so after the tour, Shane pours Alex some wine and tells him to go relax outside while Shane makes dinner. When he comes out on the deck 40 minutes later, bowls of quinoa and greens and salmon in hand, Alex is on the phone.

“I’m so sorry,” Alex mouths to Shane, “It’s work.”

Shane makes the gesture for go ahead. He waits 20 minutes for Alex’s phone call to end, but it doesn’t. Alex jostles him a couple of times, points at his food, mimes at him to eat. Eventually, he does. It’s another 15 minutes before Alex gets off the phone.

“God damnit, I’m so sorry,” he says as soon as he puts the phone down. “I just have this really complicated case and there’s a filing deadline next week and Christian is up my ass.”

Shane smiles around a mouthful of cold fish and slightly overcooked quinoa. “No problem,” he says, “I know your work’s important.”

They finish dinner in relative quiet. Shane is just about to propose a fire once the sun sets when Alex says, “Babe, I’m really sorry, but I need to do a little work on my laptop tonight. Do you have a wifi password?”

Shane has always imagined having a partner with him at the cottage. True, he’d imagined more time spent actually together. Lazing in the sun on the dock, taking dips in the lake, letting the day slip by while they read and napped and munched on fruit and cold cuts. Hiking in the woods. Sitting quietly and watching the fire together, under the stars. Shane still does all those things, as he does every summer, by himself.

But: normal people don’t have summers off. And just because he’s not getting everything he ever dreamed of doesn’t mean that what he has isn’t good. It’s good to fall asleep with Alex’s warm weight against his back. To wake up to the soft morning sun together and shower together and kiss lazily under the streaming water.

He goes to have dinner with his parents a few times while Alex’s at the cottage, but Alex always begs off,  opting to bolt down a premade salad in between Zoom calls. Each time, Shane thinks about telling his parents that he has a boyfriend, that someone has finally come to stay with him at the cottage, which he knows they privately fear is his fortress of solitude.

He doesn’t though. It feels too awkward to explain: yes, I have someone, yes, he’s here, no, he’s not here. Mostly he doesn’t want to see the looks on both of his parents’ faces.

He keeps waiting for it to come up—the relationship thing—on its own. The fact that it hasn’t yet unnerves him, makes him feel like he’s missed a social cue or five. Finally, the day before Alex leaves, Shane forces himself to ask. Unfortunately, because he’s spent the morning psyching himself up and being lightly, lovingly bullied into action by Hayden via text, he barges into the room Alex’s been using as his office without knocking, right into the middle of a Zoom meeting Alex is having with his boss and a client who is definitely crying, the words “Are we dating?” already out of his mouth before he’s registered the situation.

“One sec, guys, sorry,” Alex says, and mutes himself.

“Oh my God,” Shane says, “I’m so fucking sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Was your client crying? Never mind, oh my god. Fuck.”

Alex stands, makes his way over to Shane slowly. How many times had Shane stood in a hotel room, watching Ilya coming closer to him, and thought, prowling? Ilya the predator, alive to every twitch in Shane’s flanks, to each hot, doomed breath huffed out of Shane’s open mouth as he waited to be devoured?

Alex isn’t prowling. He’s—gentling, maybe, signaling that he isn’t a threat, the way someone might approach a skittish horse or a large dog.

“Shane,” Alex says, “Did you want something?”

Right. Not the time to be thinking about Ilya, or the look in his eyes as—or the heat of his hands as—anyway. Shane makes a monumental effort to yank the formless edges of his disintegrating brain back into some kind of functioning shape. “Uh, I asked, um, if we’re dating?”

“Right now?” Alex asks, one eyebrow lifting a little. He looks like he’s trying hard not to smile. “Right now it’s 11:30 am and I’m at work and you’re supposed to be doing your little hockey drills.”

“Shut up.” Shane doesn’t let himself get derailed by “little hockey drills” although it’s very tempting. “I meant like, you know, are we… what are we?”

Now Alex does laugh. He puts his arms around Shane’s shoulders, tugs him in for a hug. “God, sometimes I forget how young you are.”

Shane bites back a reflexive I’m almost 30, aware that counting decades by “almost” won’t win him any points in the maturity game. He lets himself be held, grudgingly wraps his arms around Alex’s waist.

“You want to go steady with me, Shane? Be my boyfriend?” Alex coos, kissing his cheeks, his forehead, putting his palms on either side of Shane’s face and squishing. “Are you going to pin me and take me to the prom?”

“Ugh.” Shane goes to disentangle himself from Alex, pull his face out of squishing range. “Never mind. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Alex relents, stops squishing, but doesn’t let Shane go. Holds him close, palms the back of his head in that soothing way he has, guides Shane’s head to the crook of his neck. “Okay, okay,” he says, and Shane can feel his chest rumbling as he speaks. “Let’s be boyfriends. For real. I want to be. Although I do prefer the term lover.”

“Ugh, gross,” Shane says again, but he doesn’t pull away. Lets Alex hold him, sway them a little in the sunshine. The windows are open and Shane can smell the hot, dusty scent of the pines, the smoke leftover from the grill last night, the brackish water of the lake, Alex’s minty shower gel.

It’s everything he’s been wanting. It’s nothing he imagined. Maybe Alex is right after all; he’s young. Maybe adulthood is about looking at the gap between what he wants and what he can have and thinking, this is good, this is enough. I can let this be enough. 

Chapter End Notes

Thank you lovely people for reading! Your kudos and comments warm my cold heart!
Since now we're really in it, some thoughts on where this story came from and where it's going: like I said in the summary, I'm an elder millenial who loves Shane and Ilya's baby love story BUT ALSO I hunger, I yearn, for older and (kind of) wiser love. Especially for Shane; I know it's hot that Ilya's basically the only person he's ever really had sex with, but I also think it's hot for him to actually have other sexual and romantic experiences that help him understand *why* what he has with Ilya is so special.
It's also meaningful to me, as a fellow wasian, for Shane to actually date a non-white person for awhile. I hope it's obvious that Alex isn't his person in this chapter, but I also want Shane to be able to have some conversations about race with someone who can actually hear and understand that part of his experience. Again, even if he doesn't end up with Alex (DON'T WORRY HE DOESN'T) he can still learn from their relationship.
Finally, we are eventually heading back to Ilya's POV, although not next chapter. Honestly we don't want to be in Ilya's head for the next few years. I am ALSO a fellow CPTSD-haver and clinically depressed person and baby, sometimes it's better to just NOT gaze into that particular abyss. Don't worry, he's going to pull out of it, and we WILL be going back to him soon.
Up next: the elder Hollanders make an appearance; Shane and Ilya finally have an actual conversation with actual words.

Chapter 3

Chapter Summary

Alex finds out that Ilya Rozanov is a certified hottie. Sexual terrorism ensues.

Shane and Ilya have a conversation! With words!

Chapter Notes

This is a Heated Rivalry fic, so you should already know to expect some time jumping. For clarity, I've started doing a little time-stamping, at least so we can keep track of what year it is.

TW: suicidal ideation.

2021

They are halfway through dinner with Shane’s parents when Yuna brings up Ilya Rozanov.

“Rozanov’s been moved to the Bears’ second line, did you hear, Shane?” she asks, as she uses her fork and knife to carve some chicken thigh meat off its bone.

Shane chokes a little on the wine he’s taking a sip of. He doesn’t like to drink during the season, but he also doesn’t want to endure anyone needling him about his rigidity tonight. Alex gives him a sidelong, questioning look, and Shane coughs a little, he hopes convincingly. “Went down the wrong pipe,” he says, and Alex puts his warm hand on Shane’s thigh, rubs it soothingly for a second, then goes back to eating.

His parents, Shane knows, are watching the interaction with something like evaluation. It’s March, seven months since Alex and Shane became “official,” but this is only the second time they’ve actually shared a meal with his parents; Shane and Alex’s joint schedules, and the fact that Alex tends to spend at least two months a year in Australia, have made this a special occasion.

“Mom,” Shane says, setting down the wine glass, “Alex doesn’t care about hockey. Can we talk about something else?”

“I care about hockey when Shane plays it,” Alex says quickly, “I just don’t really know enough about it.” He cuts his eyes at Shane, and belatedly, Shane remembers Alex saying earlier, please stop saying I don’t like hockey in front of your parents. I want them to like me.

Yuna seems to take this as an invitation to keep talking about hockey so long as she explains it to Alex first. It was not. Social cues are not Shane’s strong suit, and they aren’t his mother’s either.

“Well, you know, Shane’s the best, of course,” she says.

“Of course,” Alex agrees, with only the barest hint of placation in his voice.

“Mom,” Shane tries again.

“But—” she speaks over him, “There used to be another player that could keep up with him, at least. Challenge him a little.”

“Right, right, Ivan Rozanov, right?” Alex says gamely.

“Ilya,” Shane mumbles into his plate of salmon and spinach leaves, because apparently he just can’t help himself.

Yuna nods, pleased. “They were in the same draft year, and he was drafted to Montreal’s biggest rivals.”

“Boston Bears,” adds in David, used to providing backing track commentary on his wife’s hockey monologues.

“The league made a big deal about their rivalry, and for a few years, no one could match Shane in the points race except him. I don’t know what happened to him though. The last few years he’s just… he hasn’t been the same player. Still talented, of course, but just less…” she searches for the word.

“Drive,” supplies David.

Yuna nods. “Exactly. Less drive on the ice. Less hunger.”

“He won the Cup and the Conn Smythe twice,” Shane points out, needlessly. He doesn’t know why he feels obliged to defend Ilya. Everything his mother’s saying is true; Ilya isn’t the same player he used to be. Sometimes there are flashes of his old brilliance, his razor-sharp presence on the ice, but mostly, these days, Ilya plays like his mind is somewhere else. Shane adds, “And his father died.”

“That’s right,” says David, nodding. “I heard about that. Poor guy.”

“Well, that was only last year, though,” Yuna says. “He hasn’t played well since that last cup run.”

Shane doesn’t have anything to say to that. It appears no one else does either; they all take a bite of their relative meals in silence.

Just as Shane wonders if the silence is getting awkward, Alex leans forward and says, “So, Shane said you guys are finally going to go on that trip to Asia that you canceled in 2020.”

That gets Yuna’s attention. “Oh, yes, Alex, we wanted to talk to you about this! Shane told us you’re from Japan?”

“That’s not what I said—” Shane begins, but Alex’s hand is back on Shane’s thigh, squeezing a little. Shane takes his hand, laces their fingers together, squeezes back.

“Sort of. Well, I was born in Tokyo, but we moved when I was young.” Alex says. “My parents were there for my dad’s work. We left when I was three.”

“You moved to Montreal?”

Alex laughs. “I wish! I love it here. No, we moved to Singapore, and then to Sydney, and then when I was 16 I went to boarding school in Massachusetts, and then to McGill in college.”

“McGill!” says David automatically, raising his fists a little. “Shane, did you tell us he went to McGill?”

“I told you,” says Shane, slightly mutinously.

“I’m sure I would have remembered,” Yuna joins in, “so I don’t think you told us that he went to McGill.”

“I told you that he went to McGill, but he didn’t play hockey at McGill,” Shane says, now frowning. “You only heard ‘he didn’t play hockey.’”

“Hmm.” The elder Hollanders are temporarily silenced by the likelihood of that scenario.

I’m 30 years old, Shane says to himself, I’m 30 years old I’m 30 years old.

“But I do speak Japanese!” says Alex, in that same game way, breaking the stalemate. “Well, some. My parents both speak it.”

The conversation about Alex’s family, and the number of languages Alex speaks, takes them all the way to the dessert course, which only Alex and David order, although Yuna eats almost half of David’s chocolate cake when it arrives. There’s finally a lull in the conversation, and then Yuna says, “You know, I think he’s injured. He’s been favoring his right hip for years now.”

It takes even David a few seconds to locate his wife’s meaning. “Oh, Rozanov?”

Shane groans and buries his head in his hands. “Mom, please stop talking about hockey.” And Ilya Rozanov, he does not add, not trusting himself to say his name aloud.

“Shane, it’s fine,” Alex says, looking a little exasperated. “We can talk about hockey, I understand this is a hockey family.”

“That’s right,” says David to Yuna, back on her wavelength. “It was 2018, the Bears were the Voyageurs’ opening game opponents, and we had dinner with Shane—”

“Yes! I said, didn’t I, that he looked slow, like he had a hip flexor injury, maybe an S.I. joint thing? Oh, and Shane—” Yuna turns to him with that familiar look of (fierce) motherly pride and (gentle) motherly disapproval, “You hit him so hard that night. Didn’t you knock out a tooth?”

“It was fake anyway,” Shane mutters sullenly. He tries not to hunch his shoulders. I’m 30 years old I’m 30 years old.

Truthfully, he does feel bad about that hit. Shane had spent the summer alone at his cottage, stewing in the potent mix of shame, humiliation, anger, and arousal that only Ilya Rozanov activated in him. He was furious with himself for following Ilya to his room and furious with Ilya for letting him in. He couldn’t stop wondering what it all meant, why he couldn’t stay away, and why, if Ilya didn’t want him, he kept looking at Shane as if he wanted everything from him. He was a nervous wreck by the time the game rolled around, so visibly on edge that Hayden had taken to speaking to him in the low, slow tone he used to soothe his toddlers.

He’d taken the face-off against Rozanov and felt like he was going to vibrate out of his skin waiting for him to look up, needing to see his eyes to know where they stood, but Ilya had stared at the puck, barely acknowledging his presence except at the very last second, right as the puck dropped, when he had met Shane’s eyes. Shane didn’t know what he was expecting, but the blankness in Rozanov’s gaze hit him like a blow to the chest. Shane lost the face off.

His mom is right, though: something had been off with Rozanov that night. In retrospect, that was partly why the check into the boards landed so hard; he was expecting Rozanov to meet him, as he always did, with the full weight of his body. Rozanov never held back with Shane—on the ice or off—and that was one of the reasons Shane loved to play against him. That night, however, he either hadn’t seen Shane coming or simply didn’t bother to brace for it.

Or Shane’s mom is right, and he’d been injured, and Shane had made it worse. Fuck.

“Shane knocked out someone’s tooth?” Alex looks amazed and sounds a little disbelieving. “This Shane? My Shane? Cries when he has to kill a spider?”

“I do not cry,” Shane objects, “I just think it’s better to move it outside than to kill it.”

“Oh, Shane can give as good as he gets,” sniffs Yuna, “but he has manners, so he doesn’t unless he has to.”

“Okay,” says Shane loudly, “We are changing the subject now.”

“Yes,” David backs him up, “I’d love some espresso before we try to drive home.”

The conversation moves on, and the tightness in Shane’s chest gradually loosens. If he’s lucky, he’ll never have to talk about Ilya Rozanov with any of these people ever again.

***

Unfortunately for Shane, as soon as they get home, Alex wants to talk about Ilya Rozanov. When Shane comes out of the bathroom post-shower, still idly scrubbing at his hair with a free towel, Alex is sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at his phone. “Babe,” he says, “This Rozanov guy is super hot. Why didn’t you ever tell me hockey guys were hot?”

“I’m a hockey guy,” Shane grumbles.

“And you’re very hot,” Alex says distractedly, “But damn. Have you seen this?” He holds up his phone to show Shane a shot from a cologne ad Ilya did recently: a black and white shot of Ilya, in a thin silk shirt and boxer briefs, draped over a velvet armchair, legs spread obscenely, the silk shirt doing nothing to conceal the cut of his abs, the dark of his nipples. His mouth is a little open, and he stares up at the camera with a heavy-lidded gaze. Get ready to score, says the copy beside his face.

Yes, Shane has seen it. He had, in fact, jacked off to it, a month ago, one desperate night in Boston, after playing a game against Rozanov that had felt like the old days, Rozanov his old ferocious, joyous self, no less dazzling and infuriating for being so much rarer these days than he had been in the early years of their careers. Hayden had been out drinking with an old college buddy and Shane had been innocently scrolling Instagram when he had been assaulted by the sight of  an almost-naked Ilya Rozanov, spread out and smiling, raking his fingers through his own hair and winking roguishly at the camera.

Shane isn’t proud of the seemingly instantaneous, uncontrollable way his body reacts to Ilya Rozanov. He’s especially not in love with that reaction when it’s happening in front of the man he sort of chose over Ilya Rozanov. Or at least chose over whatever the fucked up thing was that he used to have with Rozanov. Which was nothing. He hands Alex’s phone back to him and goes into the walk-in closet to put his towel in the hamper and pull on clean briefs to sleep in and hope Alex didn’t notice the way Shane’s dick jerked and started to thicken just from looking at the ad.

Nothing ever goes Shane’s way, though, and when he comes back into the bedroom, Alex is now sitting on the edge of the bed facing him and smiling knowingly. “You do think he’s hot,” Alex says. “Did you ever, you know…”

Shane holds his breath, mostly unconsciously.

“…Get a peek at him in the showers?” Alex finishes.

Shane exhales. He does not think about Rozanov, at 19, turning to him in that shitty locker room shower, eyes dark with an emotion that Shane wouldn’t allow himself to name but which turned something inside him hot and liquid all the same.

“We’re not on the same team,” he says to Alex, aiming for stern, though his dick is more interested than ever. “And I don’t look at other players like that.”

Alex reaches for him. Shane lets himself be pulled in by the hips.

“Hmm,” says Alex, bending to kiss Shane’s stomach, rubbing his beard and dragging his mouth against the sensitive skin. His fingers hook inside the waistband of Shane’s underwear, toying a little with the elastic, but he doesn’t pull them down.

Then he pulls back and asks, “So you never thought about Rozanov’s big dick?”

Shane makes an undignified noise. Alex’s smile grows.

“Never thought about him fucking you?”  He bends down to mouth at the head of Shane’s cock through the cotton.

“Nope,” Shane grits out. “Never crossed my mind.”

He concentrates on what Alex is doing, which feels good. He does not think about Rozanov folding his knees back, that first time. Or Rozanov fucking him over the arm of his couch, pressing his face into the leather with one heavy hand.

Alex finally pulls down Shane’s briefs. “But you would look so pretty,” he says, “getting fucked by him.”

Shane needs him to stop talking about this. He has possibly never needed anything more than for Alex to shut the fuck up, in fact. He summons his wits and clasps Alex’s face in his hands, turns it up to his own, and kisses him. “Babe,” he says, “stop talking about someone else fucking me, and fuck me.”

That works, as Shane had hoped it would. He crawls into Alex’s lap and lets him finger him and then fuck him like that, Alex leaning back on his elbows while Shane rides him. Shane does not, does not, does not think about Ilya. About Rozanov. Fuck.

***

2022

A fractured collarbone and a pulled shoulder keep Shane out for most of the back half of the 2020-2021 season. He breaks the collarbone, waits the twelve weeks, does the required physiotherapy and then some, follows every instruction to the letter, then goes out and pulls his shoulder and possibly re-fractures his collarbone in his first game back. He misses All Stars, he misses four fucking months of the season, and Montreal misses their shot at the Cup, going out in a shocking 4-0 the first round. He watches the playoffs from his parents’ couch at their cottage, where he retreated to heal after the second injury because Alex was working on a big case and Shane didn’t want to distract him.

The Bears make it to the second round. Yuna was right, of course, and Ilya has been playing second line most of the season, a flashy 22-year-old named Stevens that the Bears had traded out of Colorado taking first line center. Ilya keeps his head down, does his part, scores a few assists and a few goals over the series, but when they lose their final game to DC, he doesn’t look disappointed, or even make that brittle face he makes when he thinks he’s doing a good job tamping down his emotions. He doesn’t really look like he’s there at all, in fact.

The next season is more of the same. Shane is back, and the Voyageurs are winning again, and that’s good, although sometimes Shane catches himself sometimes looking at his jersey, or sitting in the room after a game, familiar bodies and sounds humming around him, and wondering… something. He doesn’t allow the thought to form into words, even; just feels it pass through him every now and then, a cold wind.

Shane moves in with Alex, or rather, they move in together, into the penthouse of the apartment building Alex was living in downtown. It’s farther from the practice rink than Shane’s old condo was, but that’s okay. It’s closer to Alex’s law firm—where he’s finally made senior partner. Sometimes, though, when Alex is out of town, or when Alex is staying so late at his office and Shane has to get up so early for a flight they wouldn’t see each other anyway, Shane goes back—not to his old condo, but to the half-finished condo he’d bought to hook up with Rozanov in.

He had it finished, finally, enough that he doesn’t feel like a ghost haunting an abandoned building when he stays there. It’s still barebones, but there’s a TV, some food in the fridge, and an extra pair of reading glasses in the nightstand. It’s closer to the rink than his actual condo had been, after all, and he’s never bothered renting out the other apartment in the building. Sometimes being the only person in an entire building feels like just the right amount of isolation for Shane; he’s allowed to feel lonely, he reasons, when he is really, truly alone.

If sometimes he catches himself pressing his nose deep into a pillow for a moment, even knowing that he’s changed and washed the case at least hundreds of times since the last time anyone’s head but his has touched it—well, he doesn’t have to put words to the feeling. He can let it pulse through his traitorous heart, sing in his blood. Just for a second. When he’s alone.

The Voyageurs face the Bears in the second round of the playoffs. Ilya’s still on the second line, so he doesn’t take the face-off against Shane. In fact they barely share the ice at all, Ilya vaulting over the boards just as Shane stumbles off the ice.

Ilya’s still good, of course; still elite. He’s fast and ruthless, and despite his reputation, he’s never been a selfish player. He just isn’t as… sparkly. He doesn’t chirp back when players tried to rile him. When he scores, his celebrations look mechanical, like he practiced them in the mirror. Shane knows, because Shane had practiced celebrating in a mirror when he was young, and only found out later that instead of making him more comfortable in front of the cameras and the crowd, it made him look even more awkward and robotic than he normally did.

The Voyageurs win the series, 4-2. “Good game,” says Shane, shaking Ilya’s hand as they moved down the line after the final whistle was blown. Ilya’s eyes move over him as over a blank wall.

Montreal makes it all the way to the conference finals before losing to the Admirals. Scott Hunter retired at the end of the last season, and Shane barely knows the center, another 22-year-old. They make it to game 7, but still, Shane wonders for the first time if the Voyageurs’ managers are looking at him and thinking about what his line would look like with a younger man at the center.

The NHL awards are in LA this year, something about a union contract and a worker’s strike in Vegas, but it’s all functionally the same: a glitzy hotel, surprisingly shitty food given the amount of money being splashed around, a view of the city lights.

Alex isn’t here, of course—Shane still isn’t out to anyone but his closest friends on his team, and anyway, award nights are boring even if you know what they’re for and everyone who’s receiving one. Shane makes his way around the room during the commercial breaks, catching up with old teammates and training partners who play in the Western conference now, doing his best to dodge agents and reps who want to corner him into doing a new ad campaign, a new sponsorship. He mostly still lets Yuna handle those things for him, and in truth, Shane is getting tired of spending his summer breaks on ad shoots. He has more money than he’s ever going to be able to spend, and he’s done more than enough to secure his legacy already; does he really need to be the new face of the next sports drink too?

Shane is restless; he can’t sit at his table for long before he’s up again. He doesn’t admit to himself what he’s doing, even as his gaze sweeps the room again and again, searching for and not finding those telltale curls, those broad shoulders. He knows Rozanov is at the awards—even having had a shitty few seasons, he’s still a big name, and he still has the C on his jersey; the Bears, and the league, aren’t about to let him disappear. Or maybe they would, because he really, really does not seem to be at the ceremony. Not that Shane is looking.

He finally finds Ilya stretched out on a lounge chair next to the rooftop pool, which is closed but still lit with an eerie blue glow. Ilya is smoking, and the ashtray beside his chair says he’s been at it for some time. His eyes are closed, and he has one arm bent behind his head. There’s no one else on the roof top.

Shane stands in the shadows, watching him, debating just turning around and going back downstairs. He isn’t going to do that—he came all the way here looking for exactly this—but arguing with himself about what to do about Ilya Rozanov is, at this point, its own kind of self-soothing.

Finally he squares his shoulders, walks over to Ilya, and drops down into the lounge chair beside him.

“That’s not good for you,” he says, because he can’t help himself, “You were supposed to quit smoking like a decade ago.”

Ilya doesn’t open his eyes. “Go away, Hollander,” he says.

Shane tries not to feel warm at being recognized by the sound of his voice—the sound of his footsteps, maybe. After all, hadn’t he known, deep down and just like always, where to find Ilya, just like Ilya had always known where to find him?

Shane does not go away. He stretches his legs out on the chair, tries to tuck one hand behind his head to mirror Ilya, feels stupid, settles for folded arms instead, realizes he looks defensive if he crosses his arms that tightly, tries to relax, tries to remember that he’s been alive for 32 years and he’s had arms for all that time. Finally he sits back up, swings his legs down, sits facing Ilya instead, hands grasping the edge of the chair.

Ilya cracks an eye open as if to check if Shane is still there, just in time to catch the end of Shane’s contortions. There’s something in his face for a moment—something amused, almost fond—and then it’s gone, and he closes his eyes again, tilting his face away from Shane to blow smoke the other direction.

The silence builds and builds between them, like a charge slowly humming down a once-dead line. It must grate at them both, because Ilya snaps out, “What do you want, Hollander?” just as Shane works up the courage to ask, “What’s wrong with you?”

Shane laughs a little, purely out of nerves. Ilya glares at him as he stubs his cigarette out, half curling up to do so. “What do you want?” He says again, finally.

Shane doesn’t know how to answer that question, couldn’t if he tried. Ilya’s eyes on him have always made him feel like a lit match being borne towards a gas leak. Instead he asks, “Are you injured? Do you need like, surgery, or something?”

Ilya breaks eye contact, lies back down again. “What are you talking about, Hollander?” He asks flatly. “I am not injured.”

“Then why...” Shane hesitates. He doesn’t know how to say any of this tactfully. To be fair, Ilya has never seemed to be a person who values tact. “Why are you on the fucking second line? Why aren’t you playing like you used to? What happened to you?”

Ilya’s jaw tightens, but he still looks away. A pulse point in his neck beats, just underneath the skin. Shane used to put his mouth there, just there.

“Is it… Are you…” Shane gropes for the words. Are you sad. Are you okay. Is it always going to be like this between us.

He somehow goes with the most awkward option of it all. “Is it because of me? Because of… us?”

Now Ilya huffs out a laugh. He crosses his arms over his chest, and it does, in fact, make him look defensive. He looks younger that way, a little curled into himself, as if to protect his soft middle from Shane’s reach.

“Don’t think so highly of yourself,” he says. “Not everything is about you.” Another ghost of an expression flits over his face—a familiar one, both teasing and frustrated.

“Fine,” Shane says, rolling his eyes. “What then?”

He flexes his hands against the metal rim of the chair, flexes his toes in his dress shoes. Belatedly, he takes off his tie and shoves it into his pocket. He wants to crawl onto the lounge chair with Ilya, wrap his arms around him and hold him. He wonders when, actually, the last time was that Ilya Rozanov had been held, not for sex but just for comfort, just for care. He hopes it was recently; despite the way it twists his stomach, he’d rather picture Ilya being loved than being lonely.

For a long time, they just sits there, Ilya almost on his side, facing away from Shane. Shane stays where he is, looks at the ground, waits.

Finally, Ilya says, in a voice Shane has never heard him use before—more hollow, farther away—“My mother killed herself, did you know?”

Shane stills. He knows Ilya’s mother is dead, that she died when he was young; he’d read as much on his Wikipedia page, years after they’d started hooking up, and spent more than one night counting each and every time he’d ever asked Ilya about his parents or his family, hating his naive, sheltered past self for every one of them.

“How old were you?” Shane asks. He doesn’t think it’s the right question, but it’s the one that comes to him.

Ilya exhales, slow and maybe a little shaky. He’s looking out at the neon signs and flashing billboards and high-rise buildings that make up Hollywood’s skyline. He says, “Twelve.” Then, like it’s being dredged out of him by a net: “I found her.”

Shane doesn’t make the conscious decision to move, he just already is: getting onto the chair with Ilya, folding his body around him, getting one arm under his neck and another across his chest, pulling the other man into him. Ilya jerks in surprise and then protests as Shane invades his space, but he lets Shane pull him close and bury his nose in his hair.

“Hollander,” he says, “You are enormous. I am enormous. This chair is made of plastic.” The way his hand creeps up to entangle with Shane’s hand on his chest is telling on him, however.

“Metal,” Shane corrects automatically. Ilya smells of cigarettes and beer and the piney scent of his cologne. Shane is not going to admit to himself how many times over the past few years he smelled that cologne on someone in a crowd and felt his whole body turn towards the scent without his permission.  “At least the frame? I think it’s fine.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Shane tries to hold Ilya tightly without suffocating him, and he’s alive to every place his body is pressed against Ilya’s own.

Ilya says, still sounding somewhat sour, “I thought you said we’re not supposed to fuck anymore.”

Shane loosens his hold a little, suddenly self-conscious, but Ilya grips his hand with enough iron that Shane takes the cue and tightens his hold again.

“This isn’t fucking,” Shane says, as much to the stab of guilt named Alex that lances through him as to Ilya. “This is… calming.”

“Calming?” Shane can’t see Ilya’s face but he knows his eyebrows are raised in skepticism.

“Mm. I saw a documentary where cows that were going to the slaughterhouse got in like, a hugging machine first. You know, hugging compresses the nervous system, calms them down.”

Now he knows Ilya’s rolling his eyes. “Why are you always trying to murder me, Hollander? Now you have to compress me before you kill me?”

Shane huffs a laugh, and if his eyes are a little wet, well, no one can see them. He presses his forehead against the top notch in Ilya’s spine. “Shut up, idiot. I’m trying to… I need to, to know if you—do you ever think about it? What—what your mother…”

He can’t finish, but he knows Ilya can piece together what he’s trying to ask. 

Ilya takes a long time to answer, long enough that Shane feels himself starting to panic, starting to clutch onto Ilya even tighter for fear of what’s coming. Finally Ilya says, “Sometimes. But not—not really, not actually. Just sometimes I think, what would it really matter, you know? Who would miss me, what would actually change?”

Now Shane is crying, and he knows Ilya can hear it in his voice, if he couldn’t already feel it on the skin of the back of his neck. “Don’t say that, Ilya, fuck, don’t say that. So many people would miss you, fuck. Your team would miss you, your fans would miss you, Jesus, the league would miss you!”

“They would miss number 81,” Ilya says, “not Ilya Rozanov. Not really. And honestly, probably not even that, not anymore.”

Shane knows he shouldn’t say the next thing. He shouldn’t be doing any of this, he shouldn’t be here, he should be in his hotel room, texting his boyfriend goodnight. But he is here and it feels like he’s clinging to Ilya at the top of a cliff and a cold wind is blowing and Ilya is slipping, slipping. Shane would put his own body between Ilya and the edge if he could; he would probably put other people there too, if it spared Ilya, if it kept him here, where it’s safe, where Shane can hold onto him.

“I would miss you,” Shane says, even though it’s cruel to say it, even though it’s selfish. “I do miss you. Fuck, Ilya, if you—if you actually—” He feels a sob rising in his chest, can hear it in his throat.

“Shh,” Ilya soothes, even though he’s supposed to be the one being comforted.

Shane holds his breath, swallows the sob back down. Holds himself together. This isn’t what he’s here for; this isn’t about him. He takes a few steadying breaths and then says, “I need you here, Ilya. On this planet—on the ice. I need you to be—you again. I miss you, so much. I miss competing with you, playing against you, playing with you. You push me, you challenge me like no one else does. It’s not as fun without you, it’s not as good. I don’t want to do it without you.”

He pushes himself up on his elbow, looks down at Ilya, makes eye contact to make sure he knows Shane really meant it.

“You are talking about hockey, yes?” Ilya asks dryly.

Shane laughs, a wet and slightly snot-filled laugh. Ilya is the only person who can swing him from laughter to tears and back in moments. He brings all of Shane’s emotions right to the surface. It’s unbearable, how bright the world is when Ilya is in it, and how lifeless it is when he isn’t. “Fuck you, yes, I’m talking about hockey. I’m talking about you.”

Ilya looks away at that. Shane grabs his chin and pulls it back towards him, using Ilya’s old trick against him. “Listen to me.  Go to therapy. Get on medication. Go to the fucking acupuncturist, I don’t care, whatever. Just take care of yourself.” He hesitates, then adds: “And hire a private coach. Work on whatever it is that’s going on with your game. Just get your shit together.”

Now Ilya laughs. “Oh, it’s easy, I see. Of course. Shane Hollander knows what to do.”

Shane won’t be deterred. “I didn’t say it was easy. I said get it done.”

Ilya looks at him a little heatedly, from under his lashes. “Say that again, Captain Hollander.”

Shane hits him, or shakes him, or both, and they laugh, or cry, or both. “Shut up! Shut up. Promise me. You won’t… you won’t go anywhere. You’ll stay here. You’ll be here.”

Ilya stops laughing. He looks at Shane for a long time. Shane lets him, and looks back. He’d forgotten how good it feels—how agonizing it is—for everything inside of him to be on display, laid out for evaluation.

“Okay, Hollander,” Ilya says, and though he doesn’t turn his head to kiss Shane’s palm as he once might have, he leans his cheek a little, just for a moment, into his hand. “Okay. I will try.”

“Promise,” Shane insists, and he thinks for a second of spitting in his palm, forcing Ilya to shake. He would pinky promise, he would cut his palm open and let their blood smear and mingle together, he would do anything, no matter how childish or unhinged, if it meant that Ilya would promise him, if it meant that he would stay.

“I promise,” says Ilya quietly.

It isn’t enough, but it will have to be enough. Spent, Shane drops back down, wedging his arm back beneath Ilya’s head and spooning up to him again.

They don’t talk much for a long time after that, other than occasionally bitching at each other as they try not to acknowledge how uncomfortable it is to be wedged into a lounge chair with another professionally large man. It’s a little cold, and there aren’t any stars, and the many lights of the city bounce constantly off their faces, and there seems to be more than one freeway near by, but neither of them say anything about leaving. Shane presses his cheek against the back of Ilya’s neck and feels the other man breathe, slow and rhythmic, in his arms.

Shane wakes up to the sun on his face. The sky is burning a relentless blue into his retinas even through his eyelids and the day is already starting to get hot although the sun is still not fully up. He knows even before he opens his eyes that he’s alone.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you for reading!!

Also, now that my draft is almost 30k deep (this is probably why spring break is a bad idea?), I can confidently say, I was lyyyyying about there not being any cheating. Sure, it's definitely going to be a letter of the law/spirit of the law distinction, which you can bet Shane is going to cling to for dear life, but I think we as adults can agree, even if you're in an open relationship, continuously getting sucked into a secret physical and emotional entanglement with the person you're not in a relationship with is CHEATING! (Also so is fucking that person. Do not worry, smut is coming.) Sorry for being a lying liar who lies.

Next: Ilya navigates American healthcare, does CBT worksheets, and has a weird encounter with Yuna Hollander.

Chapter 4

Chapter Summary

Ilya learns fun words like cognitive behavioralist! Yuna adopts a stray! Shane suffers through yet another unpleasant dinner!

Chapter Notes

If it hasn't been obvious yet, it's going to be VERY obvious in this chapter that I know little to nothing about 1) hockey and 2) Russia. Apologies to all and sundry if my portrayal of either of those things is cartoonish.

Lakshmi and Mel are inspired by Padma Lakshmi and Melissa King, two devastatingly beautiful women who really embraced couples costumes last year, which could of course mean nothing.

TW: forced outing, depression.

2022

Go to therapy. Get on medication. Take care of yourself. Get your shit together.

Fucking Shane Hollander.

Ilya has been underwater for years at this point. Sure, there were periods—days, weeks, once even three agonizingly short months—when he made it to the surface. Gasped for air, felt the sun on his face and the cold air of the rink in his lungs, sometimes even made it out to a club where the music was loud enough and there were enough hands and eyes on him to keep him in his body. It never lasted.

He’s fine. He’s still playing hockey, never misses a practice. He’s not first line any more; that’s fine, his hip’s fucked anyway, and he has nothing left to prove and no one left to prove it to. He’s still getting laid regularly, although obviously less than he did when he was in his early 20s. He still enjoys it, mostly. At least from the moment his body registers that sex is in the foreseeable future, which it often does before his mind realizes the same, right up until he comes, he enjoys it. Then he gets the fuck out of there as fast as he can, before the orgasm haze can dissipate enough for anyone involved to start seeing clearly.

It’s fine, it’s been fine, he’s a millionaire and every six weeks or so he gets treated to the sight of the love of his life. So it’s from afar even when Shane’s literally less than a meter away. So it’s as Shane gets injured and injured again and put on IR and, presumably, taken care of by his beautiful older (rich?) boyfriend that Ilya definitely does not have a separate burner Instagram account to stalk (which he had to do because as far as he knows the man has never been to a single hockey game). It’s fine. At least Ilya gets to see him, and this way he doesn’t have to worry about ruining him. It’s enough just to know he’s breathing, to watch him sprint across the ice—those fucking thighs—with that raw look of competition on his face.

It’s enough. Ilya is fine.

So of course Shane fucking Hollander has to follow him to the fucking roof in LA. And of course Ilya doesn’t do any of the very sensible things he should, like punch Shane in his stupid beautiful mouth, or tell his stupid kitten face to go away and leave him alone, or at the very least, get up himself and go away and not do this to them both. No; instead, Ilya tells him one of the deepest secret he’s ever kept, shows him the dark and scared and sickly parts of himself that he’s never shown anyone before.

And fucking Shane Hollander holds him.

Ilya, as usual when Shane Hollander is around, wants to shout what the fuck at the sky. He doesn’t know why he brought up his mother to Shane. He doesn’t know why Shane isn’t kissing his neck or sticking his hand down Ilya’s pants or seemingly do anything other than holding him tightly. He doesn’t know why it feels so good, and he doesn’t know when the good feeling’s going to end.

It’s unbearable. It’s unbelievable. The only possible explanation is that Shane Hollander was sent from God to torment him, not in any of the usual ways, but in the cruelest way of all, through his heart and his cock simultaneously. (Okay, being eaten by birds forever is worse; this is still torture.)

Always a coward—thank you Papa—Ilya extracts himself from Shane’s grip while the sun is just beginning to peek over the horizon. Shane is an objectively large man, Ilya knows this, but he looks small in the lounge chair, curled around a negative space.

I need you here, Ilya. I need you to be you again.

Saved by the calendar, for once, or maybe as usual; the car to take Ilya to the airport will be at the hotel in half an hour. He’d booked an early flight, eager to get the fuck out as soon as it was socially acceptable to do so.

He indulges himself—Shane is fussy about sleep normally but once he’s down he’s down, this Ilya knows—and squats down next to the chair, close to Shane’s face. Moves the hair off Shane’s forehead. Traces the ridge of Shane’s brow, the jut of his cheekbone, with his thumb. Leans in just close enough to get one last huff of him, right at the base of his throat, where he smells of cologne and detergent and skin and sweat and maybe, just an infinitesimal amount, of Ilya.

And as he packs his bags, gets in the cab, sits in traffic, flies home, he hears Shane’s voice in his head: Go to therapy. Get on medication. Take care of yourself. Get your shit together.

I miss you. I don’t want to do it without you.

Promise me you won’t go anywhere.

Like it’s so fucking easy.

It does sound kind of easy, though, when he hears Shane put it like that; straightforward, a checklist. Do these things to get your shit together, and thus, have your shit together.

Well, fine. Ilya has always loved a challenge.

Especially one from fucking Shane Hollander.

***

Okay. The easiest one on the list is hire a coach. Fix your game. Hockey is simple; Ilya has always appreciated a clear directive. He asks Sveta to find him a coach, and she hires Bruce O’Laire, one of her dad’s old teammates, who Ilya already knows because Bruce attends every home game and has since he retired in the 90s. His Boston accent is so thick that Ilya sometimes has to ask him to repeat himself.

After a three hour session, Bruce waves him over to the boards. When Ilya gets there, he says, “Don’t hire me.”

Ilya frowns. He’d actually thought it had been going well. He’d been enjoying the meditative feeling of the old school drills Bruce was running him through. “I did something wrong?” He asks. “I can do it again, tell me what to fix.”

Bruce claps a hand on Ilya’s shoulder. “You were great, son.” Ilya flinches a little, doesn’t tend to enjoy being called ‘son’ by men of Bruce’s generation, but he doesn’t interrupt. “No, I mean, whatever your problem is, it’s not in your form. You’re in great shape. You should probably see a physio about that hip—” he points to Ilya’s right hip, an injury he had not disclosed—“but you look great out there. You’ll be playing for another decade if you keep your fitness up.”

“Okay, so…” Ilya has come off the ice while Bruce talked. “What is problem? Because you know there’s a problem. You’re at every game, you see how I play.”

“You’re right, I’m not going to lie to you. You’re not playing like you should and you haven’t been for awhile now. But I’m telling you I can’t do anything for you. Try a sports psychologist.”

Well. Fuck. Cross that one off the list.

***

Okay, so he goes to the team physio, who refers him out to a specialist, who turns out to be a very beautiful Vietnamese woman who Ilya definitely fucked in her very tasteful apartment not that long ago. She had reminded him of someone he grew up with, the daughter of a former North Vietnamese ambassador turned Soviet underboss of something or other who hung around Grigori and his government pals. Ilya had kissed her once, chastely, on the cheek, while all the mamas oohed and aahed. That’s probably why he remembers the doctor at all; more and more, Ilya can barely recall the sex he’s had, even when he’s literally just finished having it.

The doctor asks him in an extremely professional voice if it’s okay for her to touch his groin, because his injury is in the hip flexor area. Ilya has no idea what his face does in response. He gets through it without embarrassing himself or her and thanks her profusely and very professionally and then, there is no other word for it, flees.

Nope. Not so easy to get it done now, is it, Shane Hollander?

Fuck, thinking about Shane saying those three words, the determined look in his eyes, gets him harder than thinking about any of his recent sexual encounters does, Dr. Le included, respectfully.

***

Ilya feels like he might be on the verge of failing at yet another one of Shane’s objectives when he arrives at Boston Connect, a nondescript clinic in Brookline. He’s standing outside, having a cigarette—he doesn’t smoke often anymore, truly, but it’s always more delicious when there’s a high chance someone’s going to glare at him judgmentally while he does it. Boston Connect looks more like a storefront than a clinic, with big, bold branding painted on the outside of its windows. Ilya never finds it more difficult to repress his inner post-Soviet disdain for America than when he’s engaging with its healthcare system.

Distasteful branding aside, however, Ilya is tickled by the wording. The windows read, Boston Connect: A Whole Person Approach to Integrative Medicine.

He’s fairly sure he knows what all those words mean. Integrative he can guess at. But he genuinely has no idea what a “whole person approach” or “integrative medicine” is. “Whole person” is what snags him; he’s never encountered the phrase before, but it has a graspable meaning to it that the other phrases don’t.

Am I a whole person? He asks himself, taking one last puff of cigarette. He grinds the butt out with his heel and then picks it up and puts it in his pocket to throw away later, because he isn’t a complete asshole.

Shane’s voice says, Get your shit together.

Okay, okay, he says to the voice. And he goes in.

Amy, a pale, perky blonde nurse who self-identifies as a “Vermonter” and then moves on before Ilya can ask what that is, not that he was going to, explains to him that a “whole person approach” means that they treat the “whole person, not the disease.”

“Ah,” Ilya says, nodding. He’ll Google it later.

It turns out, though, that what it means is that in addition to weighing him, taking his blood pressure, and running an STD panel—normal doctor things—the office also gives him several evaluative forms to fill out about his mood (he lies on this one), his substance usage (he lies on this one too), and his exercise regimen (he gets perhaps too into filling out this one with rigorous honesty).

“Well, we don’t have to worry about your physical fitness,” quips the doctor, looking over his forms with a raised eyebrow. She spends extra time on the form that asked about depression. Ilya had definitely lied on that one; he was supposed to rate how often he had the feelings listed, and he had mostly answered “several days” and once or twice “more than half the days” and both of those were vast understatements. He had thought he had modulated his responses enough to not raise any red flags, but maybe non-depressed people simply never experienced any little pleasure in doing things or feeling hopeless. Ilya has a hard time imagining what that’s like.

“I want you to set up an appointment with Amy,” says the doctor.

Amy, it turns out, is not a nurse—oops—but a “cognitive behavioralist,” which are again words Ilya thinks he understands, at least pieces of them anyway, but the meaning of the phrase is completely unknown to him. Oh well, more to Google.

Amy hands him even more forms, calling them “worksheets.” Ilya eventually understands these are intended to be homework, which he was not expecting,  but honestly, filling out a piece of paper seems easier to wrap his mind around than meditating or yoga. She explains to him that in order to change his behavior or overcome difficult emotions, he needs to spend some time identifying the components of those emotions. What triggers him? What sends him into a spiral?

“Can I have more of these?” Ilya asks, looking at the sheet in his hand. In case it’s a weird request, he adds, “I have bad handwriting, will probably fuck the first one up.”

She smiles and prints him a few more copies.

***

He tries it when he gets home. First: Choose a situation that triggered difficult emotions.

Easy. Shane Hollander.

Okay, probably that should be more specific. He ponders for awhile, then with a shrug, writes down: Shane breaking up with me.

It’s not really an accurate summary of the situation, but Shane and I fucked for seven years and then we accidentally called each other by our first names and then he ran out and dated a movie star but then he came back and said he liked me and I said I liked him but then I broke things off with him and then we kept fucking until he said we couldn’t seems like it won’t fit in the little box on the form.

Okay. Next box: thoughts. He reads the instructions on the back of the form: Thoughts are the way we make sense of situations. They can be verbal or non-verbal. Thoughts are the running commentary we hear in our minds throughout our lives. What thoughts occurred to you during or after this difficult situation?

Ilya spends most of his life actively trying to not recall the things he says to himself in his own head, especially during what the sheet is delicately calling “difficult moments.” The voice in his head sounds too much like his father. Even just listening to it, really tuning into what’s constantly scrolling like a news ticker-tape in the background of his mind, has the potential to send him back down into the darkness.

But okay. For the sake of the exercise. For perky Amy.

When Shane told him they couldn’t keep fucking, he had thought: I always knew this wouldn’t last forever. I just was hoping it wouldn’t end today.

That’s honest, and not too bad. Not too painful. Okay. He had thought: Of course. You’ve found someone who actually deserves you. I always knew you would.

Okay, so what he had really thought was: I could never deserve you, and now you finally figured it out.

Okay, so what he had really thought was: You’re so fucking beautiful, you’re perfect. Shane Hollander, hockey god, golden child, good fucking person. And I’m nothing. I’m shit. I’m not even worth being around you, let alone being inside you. I’m tainting you just by being in your presence. I’m taking your shiny gold and I’m making it ugly and dirty and I can’t stop myself.

And yep, there it is: that last one was the real voice inside Ilya’s head; his father’s voice, his brother’s.

Shane’s voice is still in there, too: Take care of yourself. Get your shit together. I need you.

But it’s drowned out by the chorus, getting louder and louder: you’re shit, you’re nothing, you’re worthless, you’ll always be worthless.

Fuck this. Ilya throws the worksheet in the trash and gets himself some vodka.

Then he sits down with a blank worksheet and tries again.

***

Okay, so get a therapist: check.

He’s managed to cross exactly 0 more items off the checklist when his life turns over.

On the first Monday of October, Ilya is unceremoniously outed to the press. Some muscle-bound bro Ilya had the bad sense to bring back to his own apartment to fuck goes to the press, and apparently while Ilya was taking a post-orgasm nap said bro took the opportunity to go through his house and take enough photos—of his trophy room, of the home gym that is constantly a feature of Ilya’s Instagram timeline, of Ilya himself, passed out and shirtless and extremely identifiable—that the story is virtually bulletproof.

On Tuesday, he’s called in to the Bears’ management office to meet with a truly stunning array of people who are apparently in charge of his career but whom he’s never met in his life. Off his agent’s advice, Ilya refuses to either confirm or deny, but he knows that even the refusal is a confirmation. He’s already heard from Marly that some players have been complaining about having to shower with him.

On Wednesday, Russia’s Ministry of Culture releases a press statement, declaring that Ilya Rozanov is no true son of Russia and will not be welcome back into the country unless he denounces his hedonistic Western lifestyle.

On Thursday morning, his agent calls him to say that the Bears want him to waive his no-trades clause.

By Friday afternoon, he’s in a press conference room at the Canadian Tire Center, wearing an Ottawa Centaurs jersey, in front of a firing squad of reporters. The questions come rapid fire, rat-tat-tat: “Ilya, do you think your sexuality is why the Boston Bears traded you? What do you have to say to the Boston fans who are feeling betrayed right now?” “Ilya, do you think your new team will have a problem with your sexuality? Will you be in the team locker room?” “Ilya, do you think you’ll ever go back to Russia?” “Ilya, what message do you have for the man who outed you? Are you still seeing him? Are you single?”

Ilya grits his teeth, repeats the phrases his agent wrote down on a post-it note for him: “I’m very excited to play for the Centaurs. The Bears traded me because they’re looking to rebuild the second line and I was ready for something new, it’s no secret. I have no ill-will towards the Bears. I’m not interested in commenting on my sexuality.”

When it’s finally over, Ilya shakes off his agent and the team handlers, pretends to need the bathroom. He just needs a fucking moment. He feels like he hasn’t had time to take a breath all week, let alone actually reckon with the reality that he’s suddenly in a different city, in a different country, and nothing will ever be the same. He doesn’t head for the team locker room—actually he doesn’t even know how to get there from the warren of back offices he’s in, on top of really, really not being in the mood—but just turns random identical corners until he spots an open office door. It’s Friday, after 4; he takes his chances and darts in, shuts the door behind him. Sags against it with his eyes closed; in a blink he’s slid all the way down to the floor, hugging his shins, pressing his forehead against his thighs. It’s a familiar position; it’s the one he used to sit in while listening to his father scream at his mother through his bedroom door.

“Oh,” says a voice, “I’m sorry, were you looking for someone? Are you—oh.”

Fuck. Nothing ever goes his goddamned way. He’s horrified to feel wetness on his cheeks.

“Oh, hon,” says the voice, and the person—definitely a woman, he can tell from the voice and the light smell of perfume—crouches down next to him, puts a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I know who you are. It’s terrible what’s happening to you. I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry,” Ilya says from between his knees, not feeling capable of raising his head and looking anyone in the eye at the moment. “Sorry, very sorry. I will leave soon. I did not mean to disturb you.”

“It’s okay. Take your time. Here—” the person stands, retrieves something. Sets it by his feet: a plastic water bottle, cold from the fridge. Then the person settles down on the floor next to him, not saying anything else, seemingly content to wait.

It takes maybe a minute, maybe more, but Ilya finally takes a deep breath, loosens his grip on his own knees. Tries to surreptitiously wipe his face on his arm as he takes a drink from the offered water bottle. Then looks at his benefactor.

Warm, brown, familiar eyes are gazing at him. Ilya feels like he’s been stabbed in the heart, or perhaps electrocuted. “Hollander?” He asks, stupidly.

Yuna Hollander looks a little pleased to be recognized. “Oh,” she says, “Well, yes, I didn’t think you’d… have we met? Well, I suppose you know my son. I’m Yuna.”

“Yes, I mean, no, we have not met. I do know your son.” Of all the lies and understatements and half-truths Ilya’s told this last week, this one is probably the most egregious. “You, ah, you look like him.”

Yuna looks even more pleased at that. “You’re Ilya, right?”

He nods. He still feels like he’s missed something. Hollander has a way of appearing mysteriously in his life, but he wasn’t aware that it was a family trait. English is coming slowly to him, as it always does when he’s feeling knocked off track. “You… work here?”

“Oh, it’s a side job,” she says, with a shrug that’s so familiar it makes Ilya’s throat want to close. “You know, I’m Shane’s manager, and of course there’s a lot to do, but he’s an adult now, he handles a lot of it himself, and honestly he’s scaling back on appearances and things. We live in Ottawa, so when the Centaurs needed some PR help, you know, organizing charitable donations and things, and David’s been traveling a lot for his job recently, and well… it made sense. Sorry,” she adds with a light laugh, “You probably don’t care about any of this.”

There is very little in the world that Ilya cares about more, really, than every mundane detail of Shane Hollander’s universe. He can’t say that, of course, so he says, “Thank you for the water. I’m sorry for interrupting,” instead.

She shakes her head. “No, of course, I totally understand. Or, not understand, but… I get why you might need a minute. I was watching the press conference for awhile, but I couldn’t take it. It’s just so awful, all of it. I mean I actually can’t believe the Bears traded you like that, after everything you’ve done for them! You played with them for thirteen seasons. You’re their captain, for God’s sake!”

“I do not have any ill will,” he says automatically, although the words feel bitter in his mouth.

Yuna snorts. “Well, I would.”

Ilya presses his lips together, tries not to smile. She actually doesn’t look that much like Shane, beyond the eyes, but the righteousness is very, very familiar.

She hesitates, then adds, “And… are you upset about… your country? I saw the statement. I’m so sorry. Do you have family there still? I know your father died a few years ago—I’m sorry. I’m being inappropriate.”

“No,” Ilya says shortly. “Father is dead. Mother is dead. Brother is shitty person. I wasn’t going back there anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees. He lets his head thunk back against the office door. “Sometimes it’s not so bad to be… what’s the word—childless? No.”

“An orphan?” Yuna supplies, then presses her lips together. Her eyes—god, they are just as big and expressive as Shane’s, it’s actually physically difficult to bear—are filled with something like tenderness.

“Yes,” Ilya says again. “An orphan.”

They sit there for awhile longer. Ilya’s phone is on silent, but his Apple Watch lights up every few seconds with another call or message. His agent is starting to panic; Ilya’s not sure what trouble he could possibly get up to in this essentially empty arena, but obviously, he’s been gone long enough that the bathroom excuse is no longer holding up.

“I should go,” he says.

He gets to his feet—admittedly a little creakily, in case he needed more reminders that he’s not 20 anymore— and holds out a hand to her, helps her to her feet. “Thank you,” he says stiffly. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”

“Oh, please.” She waves this off, then, after a moment’s hesitation, draws him into a hug.

Ilya has not been hugged like this in—a long time. He’s much larger than her, but she draws him to her seemingly without noticing, puts his face into her shoulder, and rocks them a little back and forth. She isn’t built at all like Shane—she’s shorter, of course, and wiry and thin where Shane is broad and meaty—but the pressure in her hug is somehow reminiscent of him all the same. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she says soothingly, as if he is crying. Actually, he might be; his eyes are burning as he screws them tightly shut and presses them against the wool of her cardigan. “You’re doing great,” she whispers, “You’ve been really brave.”

Ilya has never envied Shane his family. Sure, he’s seen his parents in the stands at every game, and sure, he’s seen the three of them, moving together through a crowd or sitting together at a table, a little, indestructible unit. It’s always seemed so far outside of Ilya’s own experience of family that it isn’t worth comparing.

But just for a moment, while this strange, fierce woman he’s never met before hugs him, he allows himself to wonder what it would have been like, to have a mother like Yuna Hollander. A mother who would answer his emails for him just to make his life less stressful. A mother who would hug him, wipe his tears, and then send him back out onto the ice, buoyed by her unshakeable belief in him. A mother who was alive, who stayed.

Ilya lets her hold him for longer than he will ever admit.

Eventually, though, he sniffles and pulls away. She keeps her hands on his arms, makes him look her in the eye. Takes a deep breath through her nose, clearly indicating she wants him to follow her, so he does. They breathe out together, slow.

“Good,” she says, nodding, and she wipes a thumb under his eyes, tucks some of his hair behind his ear. “You’ll be fine. You’ve got this.”

He gives her one more nod, straightens his shoulders, and extracts himself from her grip. He’s halfway down the corridor when he hears her running after him.

“Wait, Rozanov,” she calls, “I mean, Ilya.”

She runs up to him, eyes bright with an idea. Another electric shock runs of longing runs through him.

Yuna says, “Do you have plans for Thanksgiving?”

***

Ilya has spent more of his life than the average person at fancy occasions where rich people throw their money at questionably good causes. Especially as his reputation as a young phenomenon on the Russian national team was growing, and Grigori’s formerly useless second son became a useful trophy to display at social events, Ilya learned to glad-hand and sweet-talk donors and sponsors just as he learned to get beautiful women at the bar to sneak him drinks.

Which makes it all the more unusual that Ilya can’t leave his goddamn tie alone—it’s too tight, so he loosens it, then it’s the wrong length, then it’s too tight again—and his knee is bouncing a mile a minute under the table.

“Stop fussing with that,” Yuna says, batting his hand away from his collar. “It looks fine.”

Ilya isn’t sure what possessed him to say yes to this. Other than the fact that he isn’t sure Yuna Hollander understands “no” as an answer. And even if she did, he’s not sure he can picture himself saying it to her. He certainly had been unable to say no every time she called to invite him to dinner at the Hollander house, which she did every two or three weeks, seemingly having decided after Thanksgiving that  he was now her and David’s semi-retirement project and he didn’t have any say in the matter.

He didn’t mind it. Or, okay, fine; he liked it. He liked it a lot. He liked stopping at a bakery near his apartment and choosing whichever delicacy looks just glazed and buttery enough to tempt even Yuna, who, like her son, treated all desserts with suspicion. He liked helping Yuna with the dishes after dinner and when David poured him a second glass of vodka and pulled out a book of crossword puzzles. He especially liked when they left him alone in the living room and he could take his time examining the photos and memorabilia that crowded every surface of the house, a hundred little Shanes peeking out at him from every frame. His favorite is a photo of Shane, at 6 or maybe 7 years old, in what are probably his first pair of skates, beaming gap-toothed at the camera. Even by 11 or 12, Shane’s smile in photos, when it appeared, had become tight, practiced; but in this one his smile was open and joyful and unashamed.

Still, enjoying a free meal twice a month seems weird but within the bounds of normal, even if it is with your secret ex’s parents. What is not normal—what is feeling more and more deranged—is agreeing to be your secret ex’s mother’s date to a New Year’s fundraiser where your secret ex’s boyfriend’s law firm is getting honored.

Ilya is fairly sure Yuna doesn’t know anything about his past with Shane. Still, though, he sometimes wonders if she has her suspicions. She had, he thought, purposefully concealed the part about Shane and his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s law firm until after Ilya had already said yes, and even then she trickle-truthed him (a term he learned from Sveta, and one he is delighted to be able to apply): oh, you might know some people there became well, Shane might be there, I did invite him became oh, did I not tell you Shane’s boyfriend Alex’s firm is getting a big honor tonight became well, of course, we’re sharing a table with them.

Too soon, and literally eons later, Yuna says, “Oh, there they are!” And stands to wave a group of people over. The group comes over: it’s a pair of extremely beautiful women, one in a silvery sequined gown and one in a very well-tailored suit, and behind them, Shane and his boyfriend.

Fuck, Shane looks good. He’s gotten his suit jacket tailored (Yuna’s doing, Ilya surmises) and it makes his shoulders look fucking fantastic, just barely straining against the fabric. He’s wearing a dark green tie that makes his brown eyes glint gold in some lights and bottomless dark in others.

He’s also looking at Ilya like Ilya has surprised him with a knife in a dark back alley. The fight or flight response is so plain on his face that Ilya is sure someone other than him will notice it.

“And this is Ilya Rozanov,” Yuna finishes, apparently having introduced herself to the two women while Ilya was not listening. “My date for the evening!”

“Wow, the Ilya Rozanov,” says Shane’s boyfriend, holding out a big hand. “I’m impressed at the caliber of your date, Yuna.” To Ilya he says, “I’m Alex Sullivan.”

Ilya bites back the urge to ask him how he knows who Ilya is, considering he has never been to a single one of Shane’s games, that he can tell. He shakes the man’s hand instead. Shane is hovering over his shoulder, still in an extremely obvious panic spiral.

“Good to see you, Hollander,” Ilya says blandly, just to make him twitch. “It has been awhile.”

“Uh, you too, Rozanov,” Shane says faintly. “I didn’t know… you… were going to be here.”

“Blame your mother,” Ilya says, with a shrug, and the look Shane shoots Yuna’s way is so venomous it almost makes Ilya laugh out loud.

The two women with them turn out to be Lakshmi—in the gown— and Mel—in the suit. Ilya can tell they are lesbians because Lakshmi looks at him with the kind of clinical interest a scientist has in a new rat and Mel looks at him with the unthreatened confidence of a woman who knows she can fuck her wife better than any man could. They seem nice, and interesting, and they are fantastically good looking, but unfortunately, they also seem to be Alex’s friends, so Ilya hates them on principal.

Shane still seems to be at Category 5 of his panic attack. Ilya takes pity on him and excuses himself from the table to go get a drink.

“Bring me a chardonnay, honey,” Yuna calls after him. He winks back at her; catches Shane’s scowl and turns away again.

When he comes back, the seating has been decided, and a seat has been left open for him between Yuna and Mel, with Shane and then Alex on Yuna’s other side. Yuna and Shane are whispering heatedly to each other, and Ilya takes his seat as unobtrusively as he can, trying not to be as obvious about eavesdropping as he feels.

He catches Shane saying, “I still don’t understand why you even invited him. You spent the first like, decade of my career cursing at the screen any time his name even came up.”

“Shh,” Yuna shushes him. “I did not. And anyway, don’t be so close-minded. Ilya’s a nice young man, and he doesn’t have any family here in the US. He’s been coming over for dinner with me and your dad. Didn’t you see what happened to him in the press this year?”

“Of course I did, it was awful,” says Shane. “God it was so… it was really awful to see him go through that. I mean—” he catches himself—“To see anyone go through that.”

Ilya tries not to react. He had been tempted, that week when everything fell apart, to unblock Shane’s number. Just to see if he reached out at all. But then he’d decided it was worse to unblock him and know for sure that he didn’t reach out, wasn’t going to.

Then Shane asks, slightly hysterically, and doing a very bad job of modulating his volume if he doesn’t want to be heard, “Wait, did you just say he’s been coming over to dinner? To the house? You let Ilya Rozanov in our house?”

“Honestly, Shane, I’m surprised at you,” Yuna says, and her voice is a little more severe this time. “I didn’t think you took the rivalry thing between you two seriously anymore. And there are some things in the world that matter more than hockey, you know.”

Shane is silenced by this, possibly cowed by Yuna’s tone or possibly just because his entire world view has been shattered by Yuna Hollander acknowledging that hockey is not the most important thing in the universe. Ilya manfully resists the urge to lean around her and stick his tongue out at Shane, but only barely.

They wade through a round of unappealing appetizers (why don’t rich people ever eat good food?), during which Ilya mostly talks to Mel about the overlap between Russian and Chinese cuisine and studiously ignores Shane. When dinner is served (Shane gets a salad for dinner that, seemingly, no one else was offered; of course he does), Alex seems to decide that it’s finally time to try to engage Ilya in conversation.

“So Ilya,” says Alex. He’s spinning the stem of his wine glass between his thumb and finger in an extremely annoying way. “You’re a hockey player too, right? You play for somewhere in the US right? New York?”

This is a fine line to walk. He doesn’t want to piss Shane off (more). But he also really doesn’t like this man. For unrelated reasons. He settles for as neutral an answer as possible. “Yes, I play hockey. For Ottawa, now. Boston, before this year.”

Alex nods, still looking at him evaluatively. “And Yuna’s your… manager? Sorry, I’m just trying to figure out your connection to the family.” He gestures in Yuna and Shane’s direction with his wine glass. I’m trying to figure out why the fuck you’re here, Ilya translates in his head.

Ilya has lived in English-speaking countries for 13 years, and he still gets self-conscious about his English at the worst fucking times. He says, trying to speak neither too slowly nor too fast, “She is not my manager. We… met. At the arena.”

Yuna puts a warm hand on top of is, squeezes lightly. “Ilya has the most wonderful idea for a foundation,” she says. “A hockey camp for LGBTQ kids. To help them feel included.”

“Yuna is being generous,” Ilya says, “It was mostly her idea.” He squeezes her hand back, and she smiles at him. Behind her, his eyes focused on their hands together on the table, Shane is doing something very complicated with his face.

Mel says, a little belatedly, “Oh, I do know you who are. You’re the hockey player who…”

“Got outed, traded from team, and banished from country in one week?” Ilya keeps his tone light as he says this, not wanting to steer this conversation down too dark a path.  “Yes. That is me. I am very famous for many reasons, but yes, mostly for that one.”

Alex looks surprised. “Oh, so you’re … gay?” He looks at Shane, for some reason.

“Bisexual,” Ilya says, trying to shape his mouth around the word as if he says it aloud all the time. Alex is still looking at Shane, who seems to be fascinated by the label on his dinner napkin.

“I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s really fucked up.” Mel says. Ilya wants to be annoyed at how likable and sincere she sounds. “I think the camp idea is really cool.”

Lakshmi, who has mostly talked to Alex and ignored everyone else at the table all evening, leans forward a little to join in. “Is it really a good idea though?” She asks. “I mean, isn’t the league really homophobic still? Is it really fair to encourage kids to pursue a sport that’s never going to accept them?” Like Alex, she uses her wine glass to gesture vaguely in Ilya’s direction. “I mean, it sounds like what you went through was pretty traumatic, Ilya, and isn’t there only one other out player in the whole league?”

Shane flushes a dark red and looks down at the table.

“Well,” Yuna objects, “I wouldn’t say never. I mean, Ilya’s found a really good team in the Centaurs. And actually, one of his teammates, Troy Barrett, came out last year too! And Shane… Shane’s making some progress with his team.” Now it’s Shane who gets treated to Yuna’s comforting hand, as she rubs his back and squeezes his shoulder a little.

Shane raises his head and looks Ilya in the eye. Ilya realizes, as he does so, that it’s the first time he’s really looked at him all evening. It sends a thrill through Ilya, makes his dick twitch a little and his spine straighten.

Shane says, very clearly, “I think it’s amazing. It’s so important. Nothing will change in the league unless someone makes them change.”

Shane is looking at Ilya with that all-too-familiar combination of adoration and heat and challenge, and it’s making Ilya’s stomach do stupid things. Ilya wants to grab him by his tailored suit jacket and throw him down on the table and ravish him, right here, in front of his boyfriend and his mother and the entire fucking world. He wants to howl at the fucking sky: Shane Hollander thinks I’m amazing.

Alex clears his throat. Ilya barely looks his way. “Well, I think it’s great too. I wish someone would be more interested in the world outside the NHL.”

Moment over. A cloud passes over Shane’s face. He says, dryly, and without much amusement, “Subtle, babe.”

Ilya represses a little moue of disdain at babe.

Alex holds up his hands, an I don’t want to fight gesture. “I’m just saying! You’re not going to be playing in the NHL forever. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about, you know, what your legacy is going to be outside of the league.”

Yuna, never one to let a conversation about Shane’s career go unmanaged, intervenes: “Well, he still has to cement his legacy in the league by winning at least two more cups before he can retire.”

Shane sighs. “Mom.”

“Shane,” she says back to him in the same tone. “You’re going to get five cups. I’ve been saying this since you were twelve.”

Alex, Ilya realizes now, is breathtakingly stupid. This is made obvious by Alex leaning forward to say, “Yuna, I know you mean well, but this is part of the problem. If you would just let him breathe, let him make his own choices—”

“Alex,” Shane cuts across him, “Shut the fuck up. Don’t talk to my mom like that.”

It’s the coldest, the most definite Ilya has ever heard him. Jesus. He has to close his eyes and think about roadkill for a second just to stop himself from getting a semi at the fucking table. 

“Language,” Yuna says, seemingly automatically. She has clearly not yet decided how she’s going to react.

Ilya takes the opportunity to lean in himself and say, “Yuna is wrong anyway.”

All eyes turn to him. Lakshmi looks like she’d forgotten he was here. Alex looks like he’s contemplating how good Ilya’s English is, if he even knows what he’s saying. Shane… Ilya can’t look at Shane right now.

“Sorry?” Alex says, politely if stiffly.

“Yuna is wrong,” Ilya repeats himself. “Shane will not have five cups before he retires. Many people have five. Five is nothing. Shane will have six, because he is the best.”

Yuna smiles at him gratefully.

Shane stands up abruptly. “Alex, can I talk to you for a minute? In private?” He levers Alex up from the table before he has a chance to respond and says, very woodenly, to the table at large, “We’re going to get drinks.”

The table is silent as they go. When Ilya finishes congratulating himself for not staring at Shane’s ass as he goes, he realizes that Lakshmi is now looking at him with narrowed eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be his rival, or something?” She asks. “You seem very… impressed by him.”

“I am a big man,” he says, hopefully easily. Shit, apparently his congratulations to himself were premature. “I can admit that he is better than me.”

“Hmm,” Lakshmi says, making an extremely skeptical face.

Lesbians. They always fucking see right through him. This is why Ilya hates it when Sveta goes through a woman phase.

Awkward silence reigns. Out of the corner of his eye, Ilya watches Shane and Alex as they stand in line at the bar, obviously trying to look like they’re not doing what they’re doing, which is arguing. After a moment, Alex throws up his hands again, and then leaves Shane in the bar line and comes back to the table.

Taking a seat, looking more at the table than at Yuna, Alex says, “Yuna, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I just… I’m very stressed. With work. And all this.” He waves a hand around vaguely.

Of course he’s shitty at apologies, on top of everything else. Alex should be counting his lucky stars that he’s tall and looks good with tattoos; he doesn’t seem to have that much else going for him. Ilya should probably stop glaring at him.

Meanwhile, Shane seems to have chosen to drink at the bar itself rather than return immediately to the table. Ilya lets his eyes wander over to him, and to his surprise—or maybe to his complete and utter lack of surprise—Shane is staring right back at him.

They look at each other across the room for what feels like a long time. Then Shane turns on his heel, puts his drink down, and heads for the hallway behind the bar, where a neon sign says “Ladies and Gents” in close-to-illegible script.

Ilya counts to five in his head, and follows.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you beautiful people for reading and commenting! It's sooo strange and weird to have people reading my writing and giving such lovely feedback!!

Ilya's Adventures in Therapy are brought to you by this diagnostic form and this CBT worksheet.

 I did NOT foresee this becoming, secondarily, a story about Yuna and Ilya becoming friends, BUT HERE WE ARE. The heart wants what it wants.

Also, FYI, if you are a filthy American like me: Canada's Thanksgiving is on the second Monday of October, which is why Yuna is asking about it.

Up next: More inappropriate erections and emotional fireworks in bathrooms! Shane has a fight about heteronormativity! Ilya pushes buttons, because that is what he is best at!

Chapter 5

Chapter Summary

Shane's pushing it down and praying*; Ilya tries to be nice. Both have mixed results!

Chapter Notes

*Yes, Shane's theme song this chapter is "Pushing It Down and Praying" by Lizzy McAlpine—softer, harder, in between/you know just how to get to me/he is stable, you are deep/i know just how to get what i need...

New Year’s Eve, 2022

Shane is washing his hands at a deliberately glacial pace when the thing he is not going to admit he’s waiting for happens, which is: Ilya Rozanov follows him into the bathroom.

Ilya stands at the door for a microsecond, eyes sweeping the room, under the stall doors. Shane already knows they’re alone; he’d done his own version of this check when he came in a minute ago. He also noticed, not for any particular reason, that there isn’t a lock on the bathroom door.

“Go away, Ilya,” Shane says, and even he isn’t convinced by the words coming out of his mouth. “I’m not in the mood.”

Ilya’s face assumes its most casual position. He’s running his tongue along his bottom teeth seemingly unconsciously, and Shane is definitely not watching where his cheeks bulge and stretch as his tongue moves around his mouth.

“I’m just here to piss, Hollander,” Ilya says, sauntering to a urinal with poised indifference. “You can have your existential crisis over there, no one is bothering you.”

Existential crisis, Shane mouths, impressed despite himself. “You’re an asshole,” he says so Ilya can hear.

Ilya snorts but, otherwise, is true to his word, facing the wall without saying anything more. Shane contemplates washing his hands again for lack of something better to do. He can only bear the silence for about three seconds before he finds himself blurting out, “Are you okay by the way? With… everything that happened? I tried to call you, a couple of times, but I’m pretty sure you still have me blocked.”

“Oh, do I?” asks Ilya airily, giving himself a shake and zipping up his fly. “I’m fine, thank you for asking, Hollander.”

“Fine,” Shane snorts disbelievingly, but he doesn’t push. If Ilya wanted to talk to him about it, he could have fucking unblocked him. Shane had sort of thought, after the night on the rooftop, that Ilya might … he didn’t know. Forgive him? Shane doesn’t need his forgiveness.

He’s aware he’s working himself up, or Ilya is. Probably both. Being aware of something is unfortunately—Shane has had to learn this over and over, in body and mind—not the same as being in control of it.

Ilya, moving slowly as if to not startle Shane, comes to stand next to him at the sink. Shane has been thinking about washing his hands for so long that he now has to wash his hands again, which he does. He studiously looks at his own hands as he does so; not at the mirror, and definitely not at Ilya beside him.

“I would like to know, though,” Ilya says, quieter now that he’s not talking across the room at Shane, “Why you are with someone who does not like hockey.”

Shane was expecting something like this, but he still feels annoyed by it. He grabs a paper towel and then, in spite of himself, turns back to Ilya. “He doesn’t not like hockey, he just doesn’t… know about it. And besides,” he adds, a little bit horrified to hear himself parroting the couples counselor he and Alex had met with one time before both declaring it wasn’t for them, “Romantic partners don’t have to share every single interest.”

Ilya purses his lips thoughtfully, examines an invisible spot on his chin in the mirror. His tongue is in his cheek again. Shane turns around, leans back against the counter; he can’t pretend he’s not staying put for the conversation, but he can at least not embarrass himself by staring at Ilya’s mouth.

“Okay,” Ilya says, in the tone of someone humoring delusions. Shane bristles at it even though he knows that’s what Ilya wants. “So then why are you with someone who is rude to your mother and talks to you like you are idiot?”

Okay, that lands. A bit too well; Shane feels a flush of shame as he realizes he’s somehow already forgotten about what just happened with Alex and his mother, too focused on not noticing how extremely biteable Ilya’s pecs and ass look in his suit.

“He doesn’t,” Shane says, lamely. “I mean, he was rude to my mom, but he’s under a lot of stress at work. He doesn’t… do the other thing.”

Ilya shoots him an impatient look. “Yes, he does. Silly little jock, does what his mommy tells him, only cares about his silly little puck and his silly little stick.” He leers a little to underscore the last bit, in case Shane misses his meaning.

“Stop it. He doesn’t talk to me like that.” Shane is very aware that Alex does talk to him like that; more and more, in fact. Still, who the fuck is Ilya to make him feel bad about his relationship? Ilya, who as far as Shane knows, has never had a fucking relationship in his life?

Shane is opening his mouth to say so when Ilya says, in a different tone of voice, “You should be with someone who treats you…” He seems to grope for a word, finally deciding on “…better,” although the frustrated look on his face means it’s not the word he was looking for.

Shane can’t help the bitter laugh that escapes him. “Like you did?”

Ilya finally turns to face him. He doesn’t look casual anymore, or teasing; just … Shane doesn’t have a word for it. Sad, maybe. “No, Shane,” he says, “I was not good to you either. I know this.”

Shane doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just looks back at Ilya.

It’s a mistake. There is nowhere safe to look. Ilya’s eyes are almost gray in the fluorescent light. His hands are fucking enormous, his forearms muscled and strong. His curls, Shane knows, are probably a little crunchy with gel, just at the ends. His strong jaw, his soft mouth, his big chest, fuck. The anger that had flooded Shane is draining just as quickly, leaving only a buzz of adrenaline in its wake.

Shane might be imagining it, but it feels like the air gets thicker. Ilya is getting closer to him. Shane is pretty sure he isn’t imagining that.

“Don’t,” Shane hears himself saying, as if from far away. Ilya is getting closer, closer. Fuck, Shane can smell him, the whiskey and cokes he’s been drinking, the musky, masculine scent of him. He can feel the heat of Ilya’s body. If he doesn’t get out of here in the next ten seconds, he’s afraid he’s going to do … something. Better not to even let it crystallize into words. He may or may not be gripping the counter for dear life.

“Don’t, Ilya,” he says again, barely a whisper. He squeezes his eyes shut, as if that will help. “Don’t touch me.”

I’m not responsible for what happens if you do, he does not add. Saliva is pooling in his mouth.

Ilya says, so close to Shane’s ear that Shane swears he can feel the air his mouth displaces, his voice dropping lower into a register that twists Shane’s gut, floods heat to his groin, “I’m not.”

Shane’s eyes fly open, and Ilya has pulled back a little, the better to catch Shane’s gaze with his own—arrogant, knowing—and direct it down to Shane’s stupid fucking dick. Which is hard. Because Ilya Rozanov has, as usual, rendered him just as dumb and horny as he’d been at 19.

And then Ilya’s pulling away, having retrieved a paper towel from the dispenser behind Shane. His face is already rearranging itself into a shit-eating grin, although slowly enough that Shane can see the transformation happen.

Shane has no idea what expression his own face is making. He gapes at Ilya, tries to process the sudden absence of his body in Shane’s space.

“Why,” Shane manages, “Do you always fucking pull this shit in bathrooms?”

Ilya barks out a laugh, although not a particularly warm one. “Better go,” he says, pumping his eyebrows at Shane mockingly. “Don’t want to miss your very important boyfriend winning his very important award.”

And with that, he shoots the wadded paper towel towards the trashcan without really looking—it goes in, of course it fucking does—and leaves.

Shane lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

He knows this exact feeling: this ache along his jaw, under his ribs, deep in his stomach. He’s felt it before, at 19, at 20, 23, and at 26, fuck, and 28, and 29. 31. God. What is he doing, what are they doing? Because whatever it is it’s been going on his whole fucking adult life, and that feels like it means something, and it feels like he should know what it means.

Applause starts in the dining hall, which means Shane should have been back at the table awhile ago. He looks himself over quickly in the mirror, adjusts his thankfully-flagging hard on, and goes before he gives himself more time to think about it.

The introduction to the award is still going on when Shane slips into his seat.

“Where have you been?” Alex whispers.

“Sorry,” Shane whispers back, “I felt sick for a second, I think I ate too many of those crab things.” He hadn’t eaten any of the crab things, but he knows Alex doesn’t know that, and feels only a little bit actually sick at the lie.

He barely looks at Ilya for the rest of the night, but it doesn’t matter. Shane has breathed in his air, processed each molecule of recycled oxygen. Taken Ilya into his blood.

And his heart, his traitorous heart, is pounding, pounding, pounding.

***

2023

Shane has seen his parents fight—really fight—twice in his life. Sure, they bicker, and get into what his father calls “snits” and his mother calls “the joy of sharing your life with another living breathing human.” They egg each other on, sometimes, and that can get unpleasant for everyone, and every now and then Shane can sense that they’re getting on each other’s nerves and would probably benefit from some separation. (In these cases, usually about once a year, he invites his mom to come stay with him for a week or two, or suggests to his dad that there’s some project at Shane’s cottage that he could use Dad’s help with.)

The real fights, though, the ones so raw they couldn’t hold back until they were alone and Shane couldn’t hear them; only two of those. Both about Shane, both about hockey. The first was when Shane was 11; Shane had broken his second bone of the year, and the day he’d come home with his second cast, Dad said something about Shane maybe slowing down on hockey, maybe even taking a “step back.” That had led to three days of furious, semi-whispered fights, until his parents had sat him down to officially Give Him a Choice about hockey. Why would I want to slow down? 11-year-old Shane had asked, genuinely confused. I’m getting really good. Coach says I could be the best U-13 player in Ontario.

The second time had been about Shane going straight into the Major Juniors instead of to college. That one had been a full seven days of agony before Shane lost patience and sat them down himself to explain that actually, he didn’t care what either of them thought, because it was his decision and he was making it.

He and Ilya fought. They bickered, obviously. Riled each other up, definitely. Mostly they poked each other’s bruises, metaphorically. And literally sometimes, which Shane tries not to think about, and definitely not when he’s bringing himself off in the shower. But their fights were explosive, ephemeral; they yelled at each other until they’d bled themselves of enough tension and could get back to fucking.

Anyway. None of these kinds of fighting have prepared him for the way he fights with Alex.

It’s just—constant. Or as constant as it can be, given how rarely they’re even in the same space these days. When they’re apart, they alternate between long stretches of “giving each other space” or arguing over text. When they’re together, they’re performing happy couple-hood for (mostly) Alex’s friends and (rarely) Hayden and Jackie and (rarest of all) Shane’s parents, or they’re doing what they’re doing now.

Which is fighting.

Shane doesn’t, honestly, know what the fight is about. There is no end or beginning to the fight; it just burns on, sometimes dying down to embers only to be fanned right back into the open again.

Right now, they’re fighting about Shane’s parents. Kind of.

“I just don’t understand why,” Shane says, “It’s so hard for you to go to one fucking hockey game with my parents, when it seems like you can go out with Christian and Lakshmi whenever you feel like.”

Alex looks harassed. “It’s not whenever I feel like, it’s my one actual night off in like three weeks.”

Alex is standing in the walk-in closet, getting undressed. Shane is doing yoga on the mat he’s rolled out beside the bed. His yoga teacher had given him a 15-minute routine to do before bedtime, and Shane feels like he’s been sleeping better since he started doing it.

So he is in downward dog as he says: “Okay, and we’ve been together for three years and you’ve been to two games with them. They just want to get to know you.”

Alex, in his underwear, crosses behind Shane to get to the bathroom. “I know that, Shane,” he says as he goes, “And I’m sorry I haven’t gotten to go to more of your games or spend much time with your parents. I know that’s important to you.”

“Yes, it is, and you have a night off tomorrow and could go with them, is what I’m saying.”

“Shane, why do you even want me to? Your mother and I didn’t exactly get along last time we saw each other, remember?”

Alex comes back out, sits down on his side of the bed. Shane, in the middle of a forward fold, says through the gap between his shins, “Obviously I remember. That’s why I’m asking you to go to this game with them.”

Alex groans as he sits back against the headboard, half-looking at something on his phone all the while.

Shane sinks into a runner’s stretch. He can’t stop himself from saying, “And I feel like this should go without saying, but when I say I want you to spend time with them, I don’t mean I want you to pick any fights with my mother.”

“Yes, thank you, I said I was very sorry about that,” says Alex, not sounding particularly sorry. “But Shane, come on.” He looks up and catches Shane in the middle of a triangular hamstring stretch, folded over one straightened leg. “Do you have to do that while we’re having this conversation?”

“Yes,” says Shane, shortly. He continues his routine.

Alex rolls his eyes. “Fine. All I’m saying is, maybe if your mom wasn’t so enmeshed in every aspect of your life, you wouldn’t be so…” He gestures vaguely and trails off.

Shane has been told, by many people over the course of his life, that he is stubborn to a fault. He almost stops his stretching to respond to this, but he doesn’t. He finishes stretching his other side, and throws in ten minutes of foam rolling. When he can’t come up with any more plausible reasons for delaying, he finally rolls up his mat and gets in bed beside Alex, who is still on his phone.

He could just go to sleep.

He says instead, “What did you mean I wouldn’t be so…” he repeats Alex’s gesture.

Alex groans again. “I didn’t mean anything. Just that you’re, you know, kind of… repressed. And yes—” he catches Shane’s eye roll—“heteronormative.”

Now it’s Shane’s turn to groan. “Alex, please, please. Don’t try to make me feel stupid for wanting, like, normal things. Monogamy is normal for most people!”

“Because most people are straight people!” Alex snaps back. Then he takes a breath. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to fight with you right now, Shane.”

“I’m not trying to fight with you either,” Shane says back, automatically. He isn’t, he thinks. The fight just keeps happening, sweeping them both along in its wake.

“Okay, let’s not fight,” Alex says, already looking back down at his phone.

Shane picks up his book, stares at it for awhile. It’s a book about football in Japan; Alex had given it to him, saying, I mean, it’s not about hockey, but I thought you might still be able to enjoy it. Finally, he gives up, puts the book down, and turns off his bedside lamp. He doesn’t say goodnight.

As soon as he’s settled in the bed, though, Alex unceremoniously rolls on top of him, pinning him under the covers, his legs bracketing Shane’s.

“I thought,” Alex says, lowering himself so his chin rests on Shane’s chest, his belly warm and soft against Shane’s crotch. “That you liked our little adventures last year.”

“Oh my god, don’t call them that,” Shane groans, even as he feels himself flush. He fights the instinct to cover his eyes. He couldn’t anyway; Alex is pinning his arms down. “I… did, I guess,” he adds reluctantly.

“You seemed like you enjoyed them,” Alex says, nudging one knee in between Shane’s thighs.

“Okay, but,” Shane squirms a little, not really trying to free his arms. “That’s not all you want. You don’t just want more … adventures, ugh, I don’t want to call them that.” Unfortunately Shane hates the word threesomes even more. He wishes there was a different word to use, maybe something that captured his primary sentiment on the experience, which was: hot, sure, but also logistically stressful in all sorts of ways, enough so that the anxiety to make sure everyone was having a good time ended up eating away at whatever pleasure surplus might have been gained by adding an extra person. Shane prefers sex that makes him stop thinking, not sex that makes him think more.

“I said we don’t have to if you don’t want to. But don’t you ever, I don’t know, like, think about it, when you’re on the road?”

“What? Hooking up with someone?”

“Yes, Shane,” Alex says with exaggerated patience. “Maybe even getting to fourth base.”

“Shut up.” Shane, abruptly, does not want to be pinned down anymore. He pushes on Alex’s shoulders, scooting himself back even as Alex sits up. Alex settles back on his knees but doesn’t return to his side of the bed.

“Do you?” Alex asks. “Think about it?”

Shane huffs a sigh. “I don’t know, okay? I mean, yeah, I sometimes go out with the guys after games, and we go to clubs or whatever, and… there are guys, sometimes, sure, when I think about it. I guess.”

“Okay, so,” Alex reaches out a hand, draws one finger down the approximate location of Shane’s ankle underneath the covers. “What if next time that happens, when you see a guy you think is hot, you just… see where it goes?”

“And you’d be fine with that?” Shane asks, because he still can’t really wrap his mind around it. “If I like, took some random guy back to my hotel room?”

“Shane, I told you, a lot of gay men have open relationships,” Alex says, “It’s really not that weird. You’re traveling all the time, we’re practically in a long-distance relationship ten months out of the year—and I’m not complaining about that—” he adds, forestalling Shane’s interjection, “but I just… don’t think it’s a big deal if we both need a little relief now and then. It’s just sex; it doesn’t have to mean anything.”

Shane presses his lips together. Just sex; just relief. He thinks, for no reason at all, of the one time he’d done yoga in front of Ilya, as Ilya dozed in a post-orgasm haze. It had ended, as many things did with Ilya in those days, in the both of them getting so sticky with cum and lube and spit and sweat that Shane had just thrown the yoga mat away rather than try to figure out how to clean it. They’d been what, 21? 22? Obscenely young, it seems to Shane now. Wastefully young.

He pulls himself back to the present, where Alex is looking at him, expecting an answer.

“I’ll think about it,” Shane says finally. “We can… try. Maybe.”

Alex slides back up Shane’s body, pressing loud, lip-smacking kisses against the covers over Shane’s legs and stomach as he goes.

It’s only after they’ve had sex and the lights are off and Alex is lightly snoring that Shane remembers: Alex still didn’t say he’d go to the fucking game with his parents.

***

For maybe the first time in his life, Shane wants to lose the game he’s about to play. It’s the All Stars Game, and for the second time in his life, Shane is playing on a line with Ilya Rozanov.

Okay. Maybe saying he wants to lose is an overstatement. He’ll probably still be annoyed if his team loses.

He just wants the game to be… normal. Maybe even slightly worse than normal. He wants to race just a hair too fast up the ice and pass to open air, Rozanov and his other wing (some kid; Johnson? Out of DC? Whatever) helpless in his wake. He wants Rozanov to misread his feint and take off in the wrong direction. These are the kinds of errors Shane drills out of his own line with endless repetition and unrelenting standards, and easy to make with someone you’ve barely played with. Secretly, Shane always hates the All Star Games for this exact reason; sloppy play makes him itchy. Tonight, he wants that itch, that sense of wrong-ness.

What Shane doesn’t want is the kind of on-ice synchronicity that should take years to develop—it took at least five years with Hayden, Shane’s best fucking friend, after all. (Okay, eight.) He doesn’t want to feel like his body has a separate radar just for Ilya, and Ilya’s has one for him. He doesn’t want to find himself grinning in the middle of a play for the sheer beauty and satisfaction of it.

He doesn’t want to have fun. Especially not with Ilya Rozanov.

Who is sitting down on the bench next to him. In his skates and pads, holding his game jersey in his hands. His hair is held back from his face with a little elastic headband. The black compression shirt he’s wearing is clinging to his abs and pecs and nipples in a way that should, frankly, be banned in a place as sexually repressed and backwards as he understands Florida to be.

Shane feels dizzy. He wonders if he ate enough today.

Ilya says, “I’m looking forward to playing with you again, Hollander.”

He definitely didn’t eat enough today. Shane turns to his locker and starts rooting through his bag for a pre-made protein shake. “Uh,” he says, looking very intently at his bag, “Me too. Should be fun.”

“Can we—” Ilya seems to hesitate. He lowers his voice. Shane can feel panic starting to unspool in his gut, slow at first, but with an inevitable acceleration. “Can we talk, after?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Shane breathes, not daring to look at him.

“Not for—” another catch in the throat. He pushes on: “Not for that. I just want to apologize. And maybe…”

This time he’s cut off by Roberts, their captain, who comes roaring in. “Let’s go, boys!” Roberts booms, “Let’s kick those Western Conference cocksuckers in the teeth!”

The locker room roars back, if a little half-heartedly. Shane abandons the shake and hurries into his jersey; Ilya does the same beside him.

They start to empty out of the locker room, a flood of hockey gear stench and adrenaline. Ilya puts out a hand, seems like he’s going to touch Shane, hold him back, but then drops it again.

“Hollander,” he says, again. “After?”

Shane’s heart is in his throat. He doesn’t want to be left behind by the team. He doesn’t want to be alone here with Ilya. “After,” he says finally, and then he pulls away.

By the end of the first period Shane’s forgotten his promise to himself to not enjoy playing with Ilya. He’s forgotten everything, in fact, except the ice under his blades, the fizz in his blood, and the shark-like grin on Ilya’s face. Nothing matters except the next play, the next pass, and Ilya’s body crashing into his, again and again, in celebration.

The Eastern team puts up a decent fight, but they don’t win. Shane barely notices.

After, Shane is standing on the hotel terrace, gazing out at the beach and the ocean beyond. It’s dark, but the beach is lit with torches, so he can see the surf. The air is pleasantly warm, and Shane’s on his second beer.

The door opens; someone comes to stand beside him.

“This feels familiar,” says Ilya.

“Mm,” Shane agrees, but he doesn’t say anything else.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Ilya says, abruptly. “I am tired of hotels.” He’s already striding off, barely pausing to shuck off his shoes and socks before he hits the sand.

“Uh, okay,” says Shane, and follows. He’s glad it’s dark; Ilya is wearing shorts that would probably be a respectable length on a normal person but due to Ilya’s impossibly round ass are starting to tilt towards indecent. These are not helpful observations and Shane doesn’t want to be distracted by them.

They walk for a few minutes in silence. Shane doesn’t tend to like the beach—sand is his enemy—but even he can admit that the night is warm and lovely, the sound of the waves soothing. He thinks about the last time he was on a beach with Ilya, the terror and hope that had lanced through him like a lightning bolt when Ilya had dared to touch his pinky against Shane’s.

Now they’re here. It’s only occurring to Shane now that he barely even worried about what people would say, seeing them together on a walk like this. Barely glanced over his shoulder before following Ilya out onto the sand. Six years ago, that fear had been so thick in his mouth he could taste it.

As usual, Ilya seems to know what he’s thinking. “I guess sometimes it is a good thing,” he says, “To play so shittily for so long that no one even remembers we used to be rivals.”

Shane opens his mouth to say you weren’t playing that shittily. Instead, he goes with, “You’ve been looking really good this year. You and Troy Barrett seem to really have something.”

Ilya looks a little pleased, despite himself. Then his expression shifts again. “That’s what I want to talk to you about, actually.”

They keep walking. Ilya doesn’t say anything else.

“Okay,” Shane says after what seems like an egregiously long time, trying not to sound impatient. “Are you actually going to say anything, or…”

Ilya huffs a breath. “Fuck, Hollander. Fine. First I want to say I’m sorry. I should not have… done what I did. At the dinner on New Year’s.”

Technically, points out a tiny, treacherous voice in Shane’s head, you didn’t actually do anything.

“It was not… nice.” Ilya continues. “I am sorry for not being nice.” Shane’s not sure he’s ever heard Ilya use the word nice in this way, like something to be aspired to, desired. He’s also not sure he’s ever heard Ilya apologize. Not to him, not really.

“Uh,” Shane says. His throat feels dry. “It’s okay. I mean. Thanks, I guess.” He’s not even sure what they’re talking about, not really. The last time in the bathroom? The time before that? Every fucking time they’ve ever not been nice to each other?

They’ve come to a small pier, where a single light shines at the end of it, straight into the water. Without discussing it, they turn off the path, make their way slowly up the pier, lean against the railing at the end of it. The smell of salt and fish is stronger here. The moon is just beginning to peek out from behind some wispy clouds.

“Second,” Ilya says, “I want to say thank you.”

Okay, now Shane really doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

“What you said at the awards. On the roof. It was very… I needed that. I needed to hear that someone… I don’t know. Believed I could get better, I guess.”

He’s looking down at the water, where the light is shining. Shane is looking at him, at the cut of his cheekbone, the crooked line of his nose, the sweep of his eyelashes. Shane is afraid that if he opens his mouth he’ll ruin it, this, whatever this is.

“I did what you said,” Ilya says, very quietly now. “Or, I tried. Before I got traded, you know, I even found a therapist. Well, a ‘cognitive behavioralist.’” He says the words slowly, shaping his mouth around them. Shane has no idea what that is. “I am looking for a therapist now, in Ottawa.”

“That’s good,” Shane says a little faintly. “I’m really… I’m glad.”

He drags his eyes away from Ilya’s face. In the water, he’s noticing now, the light seems to be attracting long, silvery fish. They keep swimming up from the depths, mouths open, seemingly trying to catch the light in their jaws. It’s kind of gross and kind of terrifying. It’s an easier sight to bear than Ilya, in the moonlight, saying sorry, saying thank you.

“I’m so fucking angry you got traded like that,” Shane says to the fish. “And I’m even angrier that you got outed like that. God, you should have fucking, I don’t know. Hired a contract killer or something, taken that fucker out.”

“How do you know I didn’t?” Ilya waggles his eyebrows at him. “I am Russian. I know all sorts of people.”

“Shut up,” says Shane, giving him a little shove.

They watch the fish. Their black eyes, their tiny, terrible jaws. The way they keep coming up and coming up and coming up from below.  Shane wonders if it’s the same ten fish or if there’s a thousand of them down there, in the dark.

“Do you ever…” Shane blows out a breath. “I mean, do you wish you could have like, come out on your own terms? Like did you ever think about doing that, before… before?”

Ilya shrugs. “For what? Why does it matter? I am not Scott Hunter, I do not have nice handsome boyfriend to kiss on the ice.”

A single drop of something hot and unnameable slides down Shane’s gullet, hits his gut and diffuses. He doesn’t know what possesses him, but he says, “So, you’re not… seeing anyone?”

The look Ilya gives him is a familiar one: impatient, amused, knowing, wanting. “No, Hollander,” he says, with the same precision he said cognitive behavioralist. “I am not seeing anyone.”

They stand in silence for a second. Then Ilya says, “And you… you are still seeing…” He pretends to not remember Alex’s name.

Shane rolls his eyes, tries not to take the bait. “Alex. Yes.”

Ilya makes a face like Shane has said he’s dating one of the teethy fish still surging below them. Shane tries not to, but he feels instantly defensive. “Fuck off. I don’t appreciate you, like, judging my relationship.”

Ilya makes an even worse face at this, just as reactive as Shane to the shift in tone. “What does it fucking matter what I think about your relationship? Why do you care what I think?”

“I don’t,” Shane snaps back, aware that he’s revealing oh how very much he does care.

Ilya snorts at this.

“Fuck you! You don’t know anything about my relationship, okay. You don’t know anything about me.”

“I think I do,” says Ilya, and suddenly he’s in Shane’s space again, or Shane is in his. Shane never knows what his goddamn body is doing when Ilya is around. It just does things without his conscious permission, leaving his mind to scramble after it.

Right now, his body feels magnetized to Ilya’s. Each centimeter closer they move, the pull gets stronger, stronger.

“Shane,” Ilya says, and his eyes are dark, and his gaze is on Shane’s mouth. “Come to my room.”

Shane wavers. Thinks about magnetizing.

Goddamnit. He remembers himself, abruptly. Wrenches himself out of Ilya’s gravity. “No,” he says, angrily, “God, fuck you! I’m not doing this with you. You don’t get to—you can’t—” he’s spluttering now, losing the thread of logic in the surge of hot anger and hotter want. He gropes around for words to capture the depths of this feeling, but what he comes up with is, “You ended things with me, remember? You don’t get to just—just fucking say you’re sorry and then act like everything’s fine!”

“I did? I ended things?” Now Ilya’s pissed too, for all that he was trying to be nice and sorry and whatever else two seconds ago. “It wasn’t you saying ‘Ilya, we can’t do this anymore’ while you were still wiping my cum off your mouth?”

“Shut up.” Shane has a dizzying urge to push Ilya over the railing and let the fish eat him. “Don’t be fucking vulgar.”

Ilya throws his hands up, makes an indefinable noise of rage and frustration. “Oh my god, you make me fucking insane, Hollander!”

“Shut up,” hisses Shane, but more urgently now. “Lower your voice, Jesus.”

Ilya groans, sinks his head into his hands. They stand in silence for a few beats. Shane, dimly, is aware that he’s shaking, vibrating with the force required to hold everything he wants to scream in Ilya’s face inside.

“Enough,” he says, finally. “Enough. I’m not doing this with you, Ilya. I’m done.”

He spins on his heel and goes, wanting to move fast enough that he can’t change his mind. It’s maybe closer to fleeing than it is to stalking out with his head held high, but whatever gets him out of range. Fuck, fuck. He hadn’t meant to… he wasn’t trying to… he just wants…

His head is too jumbled. Thoughts are clattering around and nothing is resolving into meaning and all Shane can think of is Ilya’s eyes on his mouth, Ilya saying come to my room, Ilya saying Shane.

He’s walking quickly, eating up the ground they’d covered in half the time. He becomes aware, though, that he can hear footsteps crunching after him.

He sneaks a glance; Ilya is ten yards away from him, walking slower, but still: following him.

He stops in his tracks. “Did you not fucking hear me?” He snaps back towards the approaching figure. “We are not doing this.”

“I heard you, Hollander,” Ilya says coolly. He continues walking. Towards Shane.

Shane fish-mouths at him. Ilya is drawing closer. “If you heard me,” Shane hisses, “Why are you following me?”

Ilya draws abreast of him, gives him a deadpan look. “We are staying in same hotel.”

“Oh.” Fuck. Shane needs to get a fucking grip.

It’s Shane who now follows behind, sheepishly trailing after Ilya back across the terrace, through the reception hall where the party is still raging, into the hotel lobby. He half expects Ilya to head for the bar once they get inside, but he angles for the bank of elevators instead. Shane, footsteps growing heavier all the time, hesitatingly follows him.

I’m going to my room, Shane says to himself. I’m texting Alex good night and I’m going to sleep. Beside him, Ilya pulls out his phone as they wait for the elevator, scrolls idly. Anyone walking by, Shane thinks, would think they were just two strangers, standing side by side.

The elevator arrives. Ilya steps on it. He settles himself against the mirrored back wall, then looks out at Shane with one arched eyebrow. It’s the same face he’s made a thousand times at Shane across the face-off circle, the same challenge.

Shane follows him on. Ilya has pressed the button for the 15^th floor. Shane pushes the button for the 16^th.

The doors close.

Ilya scrolls his phone, the epitome of casual. Shane… Shane might be having a panic attack. There’s certainly a squeezing pressure in his chest, a constriction in his throat. His heart rate is certainly accelerating.

He thinks, for some reason, of Alex saying, It’s just sex.

Saying, a little relief.

Relief. What does that even mean, even look like? Shane has been living with this tension for years now. It’s like living at a higher altitude; his body has adjusted to the deprivation, learned to make the most of what it has.

The elevator is going up. 6^th floor. 9^th floor. 11^th floor. Shane’s heart is beating in his throat. He wonders if Ilya can hear it.

14^th floor.

15^th. The doors slide open.

“Okay, well,” Ilya says, putting his phone in his pocket, making to go. “Good night, Hollander.”

Shane wants relief. Shane wants, full stop.

Ilya is leaving.

Shane says, "Wait." Puts out a hand. Catches Ilya by the waistband. And holds on until the doors slide closed again, leaving them both inside.

Chapter End Notes

Ahahaha... I am the man with butterfly meme, asking "is this edging?"

Thank you lovely lovely people for reading and commenting. Your comments bring me so much joy and life and motivation to write! A coworker actually said I looked "happy" which you can imagine is EXTREMELY RARE FOR ME.

I am unfortch back at work so writing/posting is slowing down a little, but I'm hoping to get next chapter out on Saturday. Also the chapter count... may have gone up... but only by a little!

Re: the Alex of it all. Open relationships are fine and good as long as they are negotiated clearly between all people involved! E.g. DON'T bring it up while you're trying to have sex with your partner and DON'T agree just because you secretly deep down want even the flimsiest cover to justify fucking your ex. Unless you're a fictional character and then DO because your suffering is delicious.

Re: Shane canonically not being into threesomes. He is ALSO not into them in this universe. He just also cares less because, whatever, it's Alex.

Up next: we! earn! the! sex tags! otherwise known as 6k words of SMUT and FEELINGS and SMUT. see you there!

Chapter 6

Chapter Summary

Ilya makes sure Shane stays hydrated.

Chapter Notes

This extremely gratuitous amount of Shane-worshipping is brought to you by PELOTON

Tw: highkey (fairly un)ambiguous cheating

PS—come and cum are the same word and there's no rhyme or reason to when I use which one, only vibes.

Shane’s hotel room has a couch.

“My hotel room does not have couch,” Ilya says, looking at it accusingly. “Why do you get a couch?”

“Please shut up,” says Shane, and he pushes Ilya down onto the couch, more or less wrestles him onto his back, and sits on top of him, ass to crotch.

Ilya is pretty sure he died. He doesn’t know when it happened. Maybe when Shane left him on the dock, a boat had come out of nowhere, sped into it and killed him. Maybe there had been an earthquake and he had been right on the fault line as the earth cracked open and bam, impact death, so quick he didn’t notice it happening.

He must be dead, because in life, Ilya’s life, Shane Hollander is not on top of him, hands against his shoulders to hold himself up, his weight pressing Ilya down into the couch. That is not happening.

He hadn’t really thought Shane was going to come to his room. He had in fact looked himself in the eye in the mirror earlier in the day, before approaching Shane in the locker room, and thought definitively, I am not going to fuck Shane. This is not about fucking Shane.

And he had been doing well! He’d said he was sorry for the New Year’s Eve thing. He’d said thank you. He could have released those last ties of obligation to Shane and left it at that.

But then Shane started asking questions.

Ilya loves and hates Shane’s questions. He asks a lot of them, which is mostly charming. Okay, very charming. They are usually very direct, which Ilya likes because he doesn’t have to work to parse their meaning. They are also a means for Shane to steer conversations towards what he’s trying to communicate without having to actually say anything himself. Which Ilya is starting to hate.

And Shane’s questions had led them to what Shane actually wanted, which was, seemingly, to yell at Ilya for judging his relationship with Alex. Ilya is also starting to hate having to watch Shane say Alex.

Questions are one thing, but the problem with Shane yelling is that it always gets him at least a little hard. In general, any time it happens, even in games, or at least as much as the jock and the pads allow. But more specifically, Shane yelling at him. Preferably somewhere they’re alone, but in public or on the ice works too.

It is much more difficult to remember not to fuck Shane when he’s setting his jaw and firming his brow and getting in Ilya’s fucking space even though Ilya is being nice and trying not to fuck him.

Come to my room was the eject button. Ilya knew before he said it exactly how Shane would respond: say no and storm away.

It was usually satisfying to be able to predict Shane’s reactions. Control the pain, etc. It felt nothing but hollow to watch him walk away this time.

Anyway, somehow in between Alex and Shane storming off and Shane reaching out and hooking his fingers inside Ilya’s waistband and saying wait, Ilya died. That’s the explanation.

“Ilya?” Shane is clasping Ilya’s face in his hands. “Are you with me?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, and he sucks Shane’s thumb into his mouth.

Shane’s eyelids flutter. He presses down, experimentally, and just the weight on Ilya’s tongue makes his vision go hazy.

Shane bends down to lick into Ilya’s mouth without removing his thumb first. He sucks on Ilya’s bottom lip, puts his tongue in his mouth, fucks his thumb gently in and out. Ilya does what he can, curls his lips and tongue over what they can reach, but mostly he lets Shane in, makes room for him. His hands are on Shane’s ass, his hips, his thighs, grabbing handfuls like a man going into the desert, taking all the water skins he can carry.

Shane pulls back a little to look at the mess he’s already made of Ilya’s face. Pulls his thumb out too—Ilya hopes he doesn’t make an embarrassing noise, but he can’t actually hear himself over the pounding of blood in his ears—and smears more spit over Ilya’s lips, applying it like lip gloss. He’s looking at Ilya’s mouth as if hypnotized. Ilya pulls him down, mashes their mouths together, too lust-drunk for any attempt at coordination or finesse.

Shane is heavier than he used to be; his weight bears down on Ilya in a new way. He’s put on pounds of muscle since Ilya last touched him like this. Ilya flattens his palms, skims them under Shane’s undershirt, feels the flat solidity of his abs, the bulk of his lats, the swell of his chest. It’s the same and it’s new, this body; it’s the boy he couldn’t stop thinking about when he was 18 and the man he loved enough to let go at 26 and the person who somehow always comes to find him when he’s lost.

A stranger, and the love of his life.

His mouth is the same though; the noises he makes; the way he rolls his hips unconsciously, the way he doesn’t try to brace his own weight but lets Ilya hold it all, lets Ilya hold him.

He doesn’t even know he’s murmuring Shane, Shane, Shane into their kisses until Shane pulls back again, gives him a shy smile that is only a little breathless.

“Ilya,” he says. And then he takes his shirt off.

Ilya blacks out for a second. Maybe ten. When he comes to they’re both shirtless and horizontal on the couch. Shane is stretched out on top of him and at some point the back couch cushions were summarily thrown to the floor. Ilya has one hand on the back of Shane’s neck and one hand sliding from the arch of Shane’s low back over the swell of his ass and back, dipping every now and then beneath the waistband of Shane’s shorts. Shane has one hand wound tight in the hair at the nape of Ilya’s neck and one hand on his chest, rolling Ilya’s nipple lightly and luxuriously between his thumb and fingers. Ilya likes that he can press Shane to him like this, that Shane is doing the same, that they both have the same instinct to get closer, hold tighter.

He’s always loved that they’re the same height, almost exactly, and he loves it most when they’re lying down. They’re lined up everywhere; nose to nose, chest to chest. Dick to dick. Ilya is hard, obviously, and so is Shane, but Ilya isn’t feeling any particular urgency to do anything about it. He wants to stay in this feeling; he wants to have it for as long as he can.

Ilya isn’t a mind reader, although he’s been accused of it before. It’s more accurate, probably, to say he’s a body reader. Bodies have always been easy for Ilya, his and others. Bodies speak their own language and Ilya’s is an expert in every tongue: anger, sadness, jealousy, desire. It’s how he knew even before he stepped in that locker room shower, that first time with Shane, that Shane would be unable to resist looking at his ass. It’s how he knew at breakfast that his mother would be in bed with a “headache” by noon. It’s how, after his mother died, he knew to make himself scarce, head the rink or for Sveta’s, when his father slammed the door in a particular way when he came home.

And it’s how he knows, even before it happens, that Shane is about to wake up to the reality of what they’re doing, panic, and push his own eject button.

It starts in his arms, his back; one at a time, muscles that were slowly starting to relax reverse course, and Shane goes from loose and pliable to tense and unyielding under his hands. His hands stop moving. He stops making that pleased noise low in his throat.

Even knowing it’s about to happen doesn’t prepare Ilya for the panic that floods him as he feels Shane start to pull away from him again.

It’s too soon, he wants to say, please, not yet, just let me have this for a little while longer. He’s ready to beg, has it queued up in his mouth.

Shane pulls back and says, “I need to take a shower.”

Oh. That’s not what Ilya was expecting him to say.

He reels a little, still awash in a sick flush of adrenaline. But okay, he can get it together. “Okay,” he says, only a little fuzzily. “Okay. We can shower.”

“No,” Shane says, getting off him, one hand on his chest for balance and to prevent him from getting up. “I want to shower by myself.”

Ilya sits up too. He doesn’t know what’s happening. His body is no help, heart still pumping triple time, tongue thick in his mouth. Is Shane telling him to go? Or… the possibilities contained in or make him dizzy.

“Okay,” he says again, because there isn’t enough blood going to his brain yet to form other words.

Shane doesn’t go far; he stands next to the couch, looking down at Ilya, leaning the meat of his thigh against Ilya’s side. “I’ll be quick,” Shane says.

So get out quickly, Ilya’s brain fills in.

“You can, um, get a drink from the mini fridge if you want. Or turn on the TV or whatever.”

Oh.

He’s catching up, though he still feels a little seasick. He even manages to flirt a little, now that he’s fairly sure he can. “Oh, are you paying, Mr. Hollander?”

“Shut up.” Shane brushes a hand, lightly, through the curls that are starting to mat to Ilya’s forehead, then, looking slightly embarrassed by the gesture, turns and goes into the bathroom.

Ilya heaves a huge breath, slumps back against the couch with his eyes closed. This is good. He can catch his breath. He can pull it together. He can… actually, hydrating sounds like a good idea.

Ilya almost never drinks Coke anymore. He contemplates it for a second, just for the nostalgia of it, but doesn’t really need to add caffeine and sugar to the adrenaline already surging through him in waves. He gets himself a fancy mineral water instead.

Then he just kind of hovers. He’s still not on solid ground, not sure what’s okay for him to do and what isn’t. Is getting on the bed too presumptuous? Is sitting on the couch too casual? What exactly are the rules here?

The shower is on, but the bathroom door suddenly opens, and Shane sticks his head out. It takes him a second to locate Ilya, standing in the corner of the room, looking out the window and sipping his mineral water for lack of anything else to do.

“Oh,” says Shane, spotting him. “Okay.”

“Did you need something, Hollander?”

“Um, no.” Shane bites his lip. “I just… I thought you might have. I wanted to see if you were still…”

It takes a second for Ilya to parse this in his head. Then it dawns on him: this is a test. Shane has left him alone to see what he’s going to do, if he’s going to take the opportunity given to flee. Or stay, and wait.

Ilya is going to stay. Obviously.

“I’m still here,” he says, aiming for a reassuring smile. He holds up his drink. “Drinking your fancy expensive water, see?”

“Good,” Shane says. “Okay.” He pulls his head back in to the bathroom, goes to shut the door, then seems to think better and sticks his head out again.

“Yes, Hollander?” Ilya asks with exaggerated patience.

“You can… you don’t have to just stand there. You can get on the bed.”

“Oh,” says Ilya, because his brain once again can’t furnish any actual words.

Beet red now, Shane withdraws back into the bathroom, closes the door again.

Well, okay. Hard to misinterpret that. He sets his water on one of the night stands, and, after hesitating, shucks off his shorts and socks, gets on the bed in only his underwear and the gold cross that never comes off.

He feels… he doesn’t know what he feels. Excited, and terrified. Echoes of the panic that had overwhelmed him earlier are still ringing in his ears, buzzing in his fingertips, and it makes him feel raw, exposed. Having time to wait puts him on edge; it gives him time to think, and the first thing he thinks about is that afternoon in Boston, when Shane had kissed him and said his name and then fucking left while Ilya was still cum-dumb and covered in both their jizz. He thinks about the weeks after, when Shane was dating Rose, and Ilya was manically cycling between doom-scrolling “Hollandry” Reddit forums and fucking anyone with a pulse who came in range and showed a modicum of interest and drinking essentially all the time, as much as he could get away with.

He thinks of Shane saying we can’t do this anymore, and the tide that swallowed him after. He thinks of the darkness he is only just beginning to crawl out of.

Ilya doesn’t want to be thinking. He wants to be carried away. Wants to be so far down the slope of the bad idea that the only thing to do is give into gravity and let himself fall. Wants to want Shane so much, to be so lost in Shane’s body and mouth and world, that nothing else matters, including what happens to him, to them both, when it’s over.

The shower cuts off, and a few minutes later, Shane emerges, wrapped in a towel. Ilya knows from one look at his face that he’s thinking, too. He’s lost that flushed, dazed look he gets when he’s turned on; now he just looks… thoughtful, maybe. Serious. But he smiles upon seeing Ilya on the bed, and that helps; he doesn’t seem like he’s about to kick Ilya out in the next few minutes, at least.

Ilya’s only a little disappointed when Shane takes off his towel and sets it aside, revealing not his naked body but a clean pair of briefs he apparently smuggled into the bathroom when Ilya wasn’t looking. He’s not sure he’s ready, anyway, for the sensory assault that is Shane Hollander naked. Better to ease into it. It’s enough, actually, to have him hot and damp from the shower, to be able to see the way he’s flushed from head to toe from the heat of the shower.

They look at each other, across the distance of the bed. It used to be like this sometimes, both of them trying to out-wait the other, trying to see who could withstand the incredible force their bodies exerted on each other longer.

Ilya holds out his hand. After a moment, Shane comes to him.

He stretches out on his back next to Ilya on the bed. Looks up at him through dark eyelashes. Shane’s cock is still half-hard, but his mouth is tense, and his eyes are wary.

Slowly, slowly, Ilya encroaches. He drops a kiss on Shane’s shoulder, his skin warm and clean-smelling and so fucking smooth that Ilya can’t resist rubbing his whole face against it. Slides a palm down Shane’s chest, across his low belly, scratching his nails through his sparse happy trail. Shane closes his eyes, tilts his head a little to make room for Ilya as he presses more kisses over Shane’s traps, his collarbone, up the tendons of his throat.

It’s too much, it’s never enough; Ilya could spend an hour at least, he thinks, just on the spot right under the hinge of Shane’s jaw, and he also can’t fucking stop himself from dragging his hungry mouth across all the soft skin he can reach. He slings a thigh across the top of Shane’s, meaning only to bring him a little closer, to press against his side, and then in seconds he’s on top of Shane, reaching down with one hand to push at Shane’s knees until he gets the hint and opens his legs, lets Ilya settle between them. He tries to trail teasing kisses over Shane’s nipple and ends up tonguing and scraping his teeth against it while he discovers how much of Shane’s tit he can fit into his mouth.

Shane goes, “Fuck,” then “Fuck,” then “Fuuuuck.”

Ilya would be happy if that’s the only word Shane speaks to him for the rest of his life; he fits at least an entire sentence into its inflection. Sometimes a paragraph. He drags his blunt nails through Shane’s armpit hair, down his ribcage, digging in hard enough to leave red trails where he’s been. He’s only able to tear himself away from Shane’s chest when he’s distracted by his abs, his hips.

He’s sliding his tongue down the valley of muscle that cuts across Shane’s hip when it occurs to him that actually, fuck whatever he was thinking earlier about not being ready; he needs Shane naked now, needs access to the entirety of him, every square inch of him. He looks up to find Shane already watching him, pupils blown wide and mouth slightly open. He raises an eyebrow, puts his mouth to the place where his waistband meets his skin; Shane nods.

Ilya would normally be talking more than he is now. He just… his mouth is busy. And he doesn’t have words, currently. In any language. It doesn’t matter; he’s as attuned to Shane now as he was on the ice earlier. Feeling inspired, he peels Shane’s briefs down over his thighs with his teeth, rubbing his face along the crease of his thigh as he goes.

“Nnghh,” says Shane. “Fuck, Ilya.”

Okay, he’ll be happy if Shane only says two words to him from here on out. His name in Shane’s mouth makes him shudder every time, something hot worming up his spine.

Ilya pauses to look up Shane’s body. From here he can see so much of Shane, it’s literally breathtaking; his throat closes. Yes, obviously, his cock—Ilya had forgotten how much he likes Shane’s cock, how fat and hard it gets—and his nicely symmetrical balls—which Ilya also feels immense fondness for—but also his thighs—which are fucking enormous—and his stomach and his ribs, juddering with breath, and his throat, and, and, and.

He says, “You are so fucking beautiful.” Because it’s true. Because they’re the only words that come to mind.

Shane makes another strangled noise and covers his face.

Ilya would protest, but Shane puts his other hand in Ilya’s hair and guides his face back to the crease of Shane’s thigh and, well, it would be stupid to resist such a delicious demand.

He loses time for awhile. Ilya is careful not to suck or bite hard enough to leave a mark that will last, and he’s careful not to think about why. At some point he puts his hand on Shane’s dick and swipes his thumb over the head, just to check how wet Shane is—a good amount already, another thing Ilya likes about Shane, fuck, Ilya likes everything about Shane. Shane bats his hand away after a second, which fair enough; he’s running this show, clearly. Ilya is fine with that. Ilya is more than fine with that. At his core, he still feels unsure about what they’re doing, what the boundaries are, and it’s a relief for Shane to make his desires so plain, so easy to follow.

Shane’s smell makes him heady, the flex of the thick tendons of his groin under Ilya’s tongue and the light pressure of Shane’s hand on his head turns something in his core molten. He’s grinding his hips into mattress just for relief. He’s happy to do what Shane wants, but if Shane wants something other than Ilya sucking him down to clumsily blow him while humping the blanket like a teenager, he’s going to have to make that clear soon.

He reluctantly pulls his mouth away from Shane’s skin to say so.

“Come here,” pants Shane, tugging on his hair.

Ilya goes, happily. He’d forgotten he’s still wearing underwear; he’d forgotten his own body, by and large. He abruptly remembers it again when every part of him presses against Shane’s again: thighs, stomachs, chests. He dives back into Shane’s mouth tongue-first, smears wet kisses along his jaw.

Shane says into his ear, “Do you want to fuck me?”

“Oh, fuck,” he says helplessly. It’s honestly a surprise he doesn’t cum right there. He buries his face in Shane’s neck. The tip of his dick is sticking out of the waistband of his briefs and he grinds it against Shane’s low belly a little desperately. “Fuck, yes, Shane, I want to fuck you.”

Shane arches a little, rolls his hips, pushes the length of his dick against Ilya’s own. They both groan and Shane’s hand scrabbles at his briefs until Ilya finds the wherewithal to yank them down, at least enough to tuck them behind his balls, too desperate to do much else.

Shane says, voice a little muffled because his face is mashed into Ilya’s hair, “Ask me—” he tips his head back, interrupted by sensation of skin on skin, then catches his breath and says again, “Ask me. Nicely.”

It takes a second to cohere into sense in his brain, and then Ilya processes what he said. He pulls back to look at Shane’s face. Shane is smiling, but it isn’t a particularly nice smile. It’s the smile Shane gets when he knows he’s going to win.

“Shane,” he says lowly, loosely palming the heads of both their dicks, rolling the tips of them in his hand, smearing the liquid there, “Please let me fuck you.”

Shane closes his eyes and drops his head back against the pillow behind him, but the smile doesn’t go away. He says, “You’ll have to ask nicer than that.”

This takes even longer to make its way through Ilya’s brain; his thinking is syrupy slow, his focus contracting to where his dick is rubbing against Shane’s. Then it hits him, and he narrows his eyes at Shane. “Oh, I see,” he says. “You go to shower and you come up with little plan to get revenge on me, for what? Fucking your brains out in Vegas? Hottest sex of your life?” He pinches Shane’s nipple, the one that he’d already made puffy with his teeth earlier. Shane’s eyes roll back in his head, but he’s still got that fucking smile on his face.

“After you ghosted me for six months and beat me for MVP,” Shane reminds him, breathlessly.

Ilya pinches his nipple even harder just to hear the noise Shane makes, then lowers his head to kiss it in repentance. He gets a little distracted while he’s down there, but then Shane’s tugging on his hair again, pulling him away, back up to eye-level. He looks impatient, wanting Ilya to get on with it, but he also looks just slightly uncertain, as if he isn’t totally sure Ilya’s going to do what he asked.

Ilya can’t have that. He clasps Shane’s face in his hands, only a little clumsily, and says, mustering all the sincerity he’s capable of when his dick is this hard, “Shane, I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you so badly it makes me insane. I always want to fuck you. Please, please. Please let me fuck you.”

Shane licks his lips. His pupils are so dilated his eyes are almost black.

He says, “No.”

Ilya freezes. Even though, in retrospect, he probably should have expected this too.

Before he can start to spiral, though, Shane says, “But you can watch.”

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

Ilya’s sustained checks in the teeth that have had less impact than this. His whole body rocks with the force of it. He looks down at Shane’s dick, which is hard and flushed and steadily leaking.

“Okay,” he says, a little dumbly. “Okay.”

Then Shane is wiggling, shoving him, shimmying them both out of their underwear for real, muscling them both into place as he wants. His movements are jerky, the way they always get when Shane starts losing control. Ilya ends up on his stomach, face level with Shane’s crotch, no longer in between Shane’s legs but stretched beside them.

Shane’s already wrapping a hand around himself, jerking himself quickly, squeezing the tip of his dick in a way that Ilya knows is going to make him come too soon. Ilya leans forward, presses his open mouth against Shane’s thigh. “Slow down, sweetheart,” he says, not noticing the pet name, “Slow down for me.”

Shane whines, but his hand slows, his grip loosens.

“Good,” Ilya says. “God, you’re so fucking hot, Shane. So beautiful.”

“Tell me,” says Shane, “Tell me what you want to do. Tell me…” he squeezes his eyes shut. “Tell me you want me.”

Words fall out of Ilya’s mouth without his say-so; he doesn’t know what language they’re in, or if they make any sense. Somewhere in there is Shane, fuck, I want to suck your dick, I want you to come on my face, I want to come on your face and rub it into your freckles, I want to fuck your ass with my tongue, I think about fucking you every day, I think I will die if I never get to fuck you again. And other horrifyingly true statements, probably, which Ilya’s brain kindly erases as soon as he says them.

Shane is breathing heavily, his eyes still closed. His lips are flushed the same dark red as the head of his cock. He’s trembling, though, on the edge of something,

Ilya says, lowly, “You need something inside of you.”

Shane’s eyes fly open. Ilya knows he’s right because Shane still has the wherewithal to glare at him.

“Go get the lube,” Shane says, voice gravelly. “It’s… you know where it is.”

Ilya sets his teeth against Shane’s thigh, bites down lightly. Then, reluctant to tear himself away, he stands. First, he hands Shane the mineral water he’d set down on the nightstand earlier. He goes to mini fridge and gets another, sets it on the nightstand as well. He’s not intentionally dragging this out, but he feels Shane’s eyes on him and he can’t help but preen a little. It feels good to let him look; he wonders if it’s the same for Shane.

Ilya does, in fact, know where the lube is. He’s well acquainted with the discreet little zippered compartment in Shane’s check-in luggage. Inside it, he finds what he expects to find, which is lube and condoms. He also finds what he did not expect to find, which is a purple dildo.

Ilya’s first instinct is to laugh. In delight, mostly, but also a little in shock. He bites it back, but can’t resist picking it up and waggling it at Shane. “Did you want me to bring this too?”

Shane glares some more. “Shut up. No. Hurry up.”

Ilya does as he’s told, but not before discreetly comparing the dildo to his own dick before he puts it back in its secret little spot in Shane’s bag. It’s shorter than his dick but about the same width.

This information pleases him until it doesn’t. As he’s going back to Shane, an unpleasant, acidic wave washes over him, and it takes a few seconds to realize what the feeling is. Reality.

He shuts it out.

He gets back on the bed with Shane, who has sat up against the headboard to drink the mineral water Ilya gave him. Ilya lies on his side, propping his head up on one hand, watching Shane drink water with a hyper focus that’s as calming as it is thrilling. Shane puts the drink down.

Ilya says, “Give me your hand.”

Shane does; Ilya brings it to his mouth. He sucks on Shane’s middle and index finger for awhile, making eye contact with him all the while, until Shane is squirming and pressing a hand down against the base of his dick to try and control his own arousal. That seems like enough, so Ilya lets his hand go, though not without drizzling lube onto Shane’s fingers as well, and onto his dick for good measure.

“Start with one,” he says.

Shane rolls his eyes. “Ilya, I know how to finger myself.” He’s planting his feet as he says it, still keeping Ilya outside of the spread of his legs. Ilya, trying to be helpful, takes hold of one shin and pushes it closer to Shane’s ass, stopping just short of starting to bend his leg at the hip. Shane lets him do it, even shifts down a little to help him, grips his other thigh, so that they’re both holding him open.

“Show me,” Ilya says. “You wanted me to watch, I’m watching.”

Shane’s middle finger sinks in easily. Ilya waits until he’s up to the second knuckle to ask, “Do you use your purple dildo with your boyfriend?”

Shane jerks, then groans as his finger brushes his prostate. “What?” he asks, hazily.

Ilya repeats himself, pinching the skin of Shane’s inner thigh a little to make sure he’s paying attention.

“N-no,” Shane says finally, his head thrown back so he can avoid Ilya’s gaze. “No. He doesn’t know I have it.”

Hmm. Interesting. Ilya tries not to flush hot with victory at the words, but it’s a lost cause.

He says, “Add another finger.”

Shane tries to glare at him again, but he’s rapidly losing his ability to do so. He also does what Ilya’s told him to do. For long moments, Ilya can’t look at anything but where Shane’s fingers are disappearing into him, sliding past the tight ring of muscle.

Shane’s stopped pumping his dick, distracted; Ilya reaches out and loosely wraps his fingers around Shane’s wrist, urging his hand up and down until Shane catches on.

Ilya, because he can’t help himself, asks, “Who do you think about when you do this to yourself? When you fuck yourself with your dildo?”

Shane works so, so hard to pretend he’s like everyone else. It breaks Ilya’s heart. He wants to be able to tell him there’s no one else like him, no one as beautiful and talented and determined and good. No one who feels as much as Shane; no one who responds to him like Shane does. No one who feels like Shane, who makes him feel what Shane does. When he’s with Shane, he feels broken open and right at the surface of himself. He feels like he might be good, too.

Shane’s eyes are filled with so much feeling. More shame than Ilya wishes were there, and more tenderness than Ilya knows what to do with. Shane says, “You. I think about you.”

Ilya must be hit with another spike of some hormone or other, because he starts babbling again. Now it is mostly please, Shane, please, let me fuck you, I need to fuck you, I’m actually going to die if you don’t let me fuck you, in English and Russian, and other words besides.

Shane gasps, “Ilya, fuck, touch yourself. I’m close, I’m going to.”

Fuck. Ilya takes hold of himself; he’s been hard for so long, keeping tight control over his own arousal, that it takes him a second to even feel his own hand on his skin. When he does finally feel it, the sensation is so much his whole body shakes a little.

Shane is making the high, hitching moans he does when he’s close to coming. He takes a gulp of air and says, “Does it… does it feel like this with anyone else? For you?” He doesn’t hide from Ilya’s gaze this time, looks right back at him.

Ilya says, honest because anything else feels impossible: “No. Only you. Always only you.”

Shane’s eyes roll back in his head and he comes, spurting on his own stomach.

The sight makes Ilya’s insides turn liquid. He has enough focus to ask frantically, “Can I—where—”

And Shane gestures to the mess on his stomach and says, “Cum on me, fuck, Ilya,” and he is, he does. They both moan as it hits Shane’s skin.

They lie next to each other and pant for awhile, trying to recover their breath.

Shane says, voice low, “Ilya.”

Ilya looks up. Shane, making eye contact all the while, swipes two fingers in the cum on his stomach and holds them out to Ilya.

Ilya leans forward, sucks them down. He holds Shane’s gaze and holds Shane’s fingers in his mouth, holds the salty taste on his tongue. Thinks about sacrament; the ritual of taking another's body into your own.

Shane pulls his fingers from Ilya’s mouth with a soft, wet pop. Then he’s pulling Ilya up and kissing him fiercely, licking into the mess in his mouth, tasting them both on Ilya’s tongue.

Time passes. They go from kissing deeply to kissing each other’s faces to just breathing each other’s air and back again. It’s late, or it’s early. At some point Ilya goes to the bathroom and cleans up and brings a warm washcloth out to Shane. Shane, sleepy, lets him wipe his stomach, between his thighs, his balls and soft cock, his asshole. He’s smiling a little, probably unconsciously. It makes Ilya’s heart clench, to see him this way again: soft, safe. It’s been so many years since he’s seen this version of Shane.

Which is his fault.

Reality again. Ilya pushes it away, though he knows he’s on borrowed time.

He probably shouldn’t, but he gets back in bed with Shane, draws the sheet and cover over their legs. He doesn’t lie all the way down; sits back against the headboard and drinks more water. Shane insinuates himself under Ilya’s arm and rests his head on his chest. When he holds out his hand, Ilya hands him the water, then takes it back when Shane is done.

He tries not to see the clock. He can see the clock. It’s past 3 AM, and he needs to leave for his flight in two hours.

He possibly needs to rethink his preference for early morning flights.

Shane, mysteriously on his wavelength as usual, must also be thinking of the last time they (sort of) spent a night together, because he says, “Why did you leave me on the roof in LA? Last June?” His face is mashed against the side of Ilya’s chest and he’s not looking at him again.

Ilya closes his eyes. He feels stripped of all tactics, all evasions. He says, “I didn’t believe you wanted me to stay.”

Amy, the cognitive behavioralist at Boston Connect, had once given him a worksheet on “cognitive distortions.” You do that one, she’d said, pointing at catastrophizing, For sure. But try to identify which other of these you might be experiencing or engaging in frequently.

Seeing only the worst outcomes in a situation. Only the worst in himself. Always knowing that deep down, if Shane really knew him, really saw him, he wouldn’t want him to stay, wouldn’t want Ilya anywhere near him.

No, not knowing. Believing. Thinking.

Maybe he’d had it backwards, and Shane had been the one to see him clearly after all.

Maybe they had seen and known and liked each other for who they really were,  and it was only their own distorted reflections that made them run away.

Shane says, very quietly, “Are you going to leave right now?”

This time Ilya makes him look up, hooking a finger around his chin. “I have to leave for flight in two hours,” he says, “But if you want me to stay until then, I will.”

Shane swallows. He bites his lower lip, and Ilya has to bend down and kiss the place his teeth are worrying. Shane says, against his mouth, “I want you to stay.”

So he does.

They set an alarm. He brushes Shane’s toothpaste onto his teeth with his finger, which Shane protests but doesn’t offer a solution for. He paws through Shane’s extremely large collection of skincare while Shane tries to bat him away.

They’re pretending, playing house, and they both know it. They’re not even going to sleep, really, not going to do more than doze, too wired from each other’s presence and the impending alarm.

Still, they get in bed together. Still naked. Ilya pulls Shane to his chest; Shane drapes his leg on top of Ilya’s, rests his head on him.

They hold on to each other for as long as they can.

Chapter End Notes

Ahhh! Thank you for reading and commenting, it truly gives me so much joy!

The soundtrack for this chapter is I Want You to Love Me by Fiona Apple.

This is the longest and smuttiest smut scene I have literally ever written, so I hope I did the source material justice, lol.

I put this out early because I wanted toooo but now probably it will be a few days until the next chapter. Aiming for Wednesday if not before!

Up next: Shane does some processing. Yuna does some meddling.

Chapter 7

Chapter Summary

Rose and her Greek chorus of personal assistants give Shane some things to think about. Ilya gets Yuna a snack.

Chapter Notes

“Can I ask you a question?”

Dr. Galina Molchalina has her legs crossed. She’s tapping her pen on her open notebook, looking at Ilya with her usual serenity. It’s his fourth session with her.

He likes her so far. She’s very good at not reacting to anything he says with anything other than gentle interest. He’s tried a couple times to shock her—breezed through a few fairly visceral details about his childhood, dropped a few fairly vulgar details about his sexual life—and she’s only ever nodded and encouraged him to keep talking.

She also speaks Russian, which makes things both easier, because he can articulate his thoughts so much better, and harder, because he can’t hide behind vagueness and imprecision in his native tongue.

Ilya motions for her to ask her question, generously forbearing to point out that technically, she already did.

She says, “It’s been two weeks since you last saw this… man. You said you think about him a lot, and you want to know how he’s doing, and what he’s thinking about what happened between you two.”

He’d told her about his relationship with Shane last session, because he was trying to trust her—but he didn’t trust her enough, yet, to actually tell her Shane’s name or anything about who he was. Still, even without his name, talking about Shane to another person—another person who knows at least the general shape of what’s really gone on between the two of them all these years—is kind of dizzying.

“Yes,” he says, unconsciously wiping his now clammy palms on his pants. Talking about Shane is dizzying, yes; also terrifying. “Is that the question?”

She smiles at this. “No. The question is, why haven’t you unblocked him on your phone? That seems like a fairly simple way to find out how he’s doing.”

He bites his lip, flexes his fingers. Thinks about it. He’s been avoiding asking himself this question.

Eventually, he says, “I am not ready.”

She lets that hang for awhile, then says, still very neutrally, “Not ready for what?”

He tries. He really does. He wants to be able to put it into words, the feeling that grips him when he thinks of finding Jane in his contacts and… And then maybe…

No. Not today. He can’t name the thing that surges in his throat, hammers at the walls of his ribs. He says, “I am not ready… to say why I am not ready.”

She nods like this doesn’t surprise her, and writes something down. He wonders if he’s disappointed her.

He wonders if he’s disappointed himself.

***

Shane finds comfort in routine. He enjoys doing the same thing over and over, tweaking small aspects one at a time, fine-tuning his experience of a day.

When his mind is disorganized, routine soothes him, helps him feel contained. When he fails—loses a big game, makes a stupid mistake, doesn’t achieve the goals he sets for himself in a particular game, month, season—improving his routine helps him move forward. Hockey has taught him that his body is a machine with inputs and outputs: it needs to be maintained, it can always be made more efficient. A routine makes this maintenance easy.

Since spending the night with Ilya in Florida two weeks ago, Shane has clung to his routine like a life raft. His mind is not so much disorganized as it is disintegrating. He can’t sleep and he’s been skipping optional skates for no real reason and he’s horny all the fucking time, jerking off like he’s 25, and he doesn’t feel in control of any of it. His nervous system sustained an electric jolt and hasn’t yet fully recovered.

The one saving grace is that Alex is in Australia for another two weeks. Shane needs to get his head on straight, to figure out what the fuck happened, or is happening, between him and Ilya, before he talks to Alex about it. He’s been staying at his investment condo instead of at the penthouse. He tells himself it’s because the commute to the rink is more convenient but then he also can’t stop himself from going to the penthouse at least every three days to check on the plants and get the mail, so he’s not exactly saving gas or time in the car.

He’s doing exactly that—driving to the penthouse to water the plants, because he’s going to be out of town for a few days—when Rose calls.

“You’re on speaker, babe, Dana and Andrew are here,” she says. Two voices go hi from farther away. He tries to remember who they are; one is Rose’s personal assistant, he’s pretty sure, and one is… her makeup artist?

“Uh, hi everyone,” he says.

Rose immediately launches into a story about a party she went to last night, and the run-in she had with an actor that Shane had once made the mistake of saying was hot in front of her.

“First of all, I actually think he might be gay. You might have a chance!” She says brightly. “But, um, second of all, I think he was on meth, so you probably shouldn’t go for it. Oh, and like this is all hypothetically speaking, if you weren’t in a relationship, of course.” She tacks the last bit on a little belatedly.

“Sure,” says Shane, mouth dry. “Tell me more about the party.”

Rose’s happy chatter gets him all the way to the apartment building, where he asks to call her back before driving into the underground parking lot and parking in his reserved spot. Riding the elevator up, he thinks about Rose saying hypothetically.

Shane has never, ever told anyone the full truth about his relationship with Ilya Rozanov. Part of him is afraid that this secret is the only real thing tying the two of them together, and that if he tells it, the spell will break. Most of him knows that keeping the secret is possibly ruining his life.

He’d told his other secret, after all, at least to the people that matter to him. He’d said I’m gay aloud and no one had yelled at him or hit him or left him or stopped loving him. It had been such a huge relief, really, he’d literally felt lighter as he moved through the air some days.

That had been in the first few months of seeing Alex. It had felt so good to tell his friends and family that he had a boyfriend, a partner. He was so tired of the look everyone got on their faces when they danced around the question of if he was seeing anyone, why he was alone, didn’t he want someone in his life. Being able to say I have someone, you can stop worrying took some of the sting out of having to say I’m gay and I’ve been lying to you.

He calls Rose back when he gets into the apartment. She finishes her story about ending the night at a Buddhist chanting meditation at Courtney Love’s house. He doesn’t tell her he doesn’t know who Courtney Love is.

“Okay, I’ve been talking for a long time,” she says. “So what’s going on with you? How’s Alex?”

“He’s fine,” Shane says distantly. “He’s in Australia. Hey, Rose, can I ask you, um, a hypothetical question?”

“Sure. Hang on.” She murmurs something, presumably not to him, and someone answers back. “Okay sorry, I just wanted to be sure I could be on the phone for this next part. We’re covering up my tattoos for this film shoot that starts tomorrow. Okay. Go ahead.”

Shane sucks in a breath. Somehow while waiting for Rose he did not formulate a better way to say this. “Okay, so, hypothetically, there’s this person, and you’re just… very attracted to them. Extremely attracted to them. And you’ve known them for a long time, and you have … sex with them. Sometimes.” This is coming out even worse than Shane had imagined it, but he plunges on, unable to stop now that he’s started. “And every time you do have sex with them, it’s, um, it’s so hot it’s like your brain melts out your dick? Or, I guess, in your case, your, um…”

“Clit?” Volunteers one of the non-Rose voices.

“Oh my God,” Rose says, clearly to the room at large, “He hates it when I say clit. He made the worst face back when we tried to fuck and I asked him to—”

“Rose,” Shane hisses, “I didn’t hate it, and that’s private!”

“Sorry, babe,” she says, not sorry. “Okay, I’m focusing. I mean, honestly, Shane, I’m kind of surprised. I didn’t think you and Alex were that… sexually charged.”

“This isn’t about Alex,” Shane corrects, before he registers what she said. “Wait, what makes you say that?”

“What? Wait… did you just say this isn’t about Alex?”

Fuck. Shane is bad at this. He was just trying to see how it felt to let just a little bit of the secret out, relieve a little of the pressure.

“No,” he says, aware he is caught but doggedly hanging onto his plausible deniability. “I meant because it’s hypothetical.”

“Okay,” Rose says, sounding annoyingly like Ilya for a second—humoring him. Then she softens and says, more seriously, “So, in this hypothetical scenario, how long exactly have I been having sex with this person?”

Shane is pacing through the open layout of the first floor of the apartment. The cleaners have been since he was last here, and the wood floors are very shiny, because no one has been walking on them. He says, “Uh… Thirteen years. Give or take.”

“Jesus! Okay, and in this hypothetical I’m the ripe old age of 32…”

“Shut the fuck up,” Shane laughs. “I’m literally two years older than you.”

“Not according to the internet,” she sings back. Then she does the math. “So I’ve been fucking this person since I was 19? In this hypothetical?”

“Uh, yes,” Shane says.

“And how often do I see this person?”

“Not much. Or… kind of a lot. Like... every six to eight weeks. For most of the year.” Shane winces as he says this. He loves many things about Rose, and one of them is that she understands the reality of an NHL schedule. 

Another thing he loves about her is how smart she is, how fast to diagnose the truth of a situation, including his own.

So he knows what she’s about to ask when she starts, “Um, Shane… is this person…”

“Don’t ask that right now, please,” Shane says, a little desperately.

“Okay. Okay. So do I… have sex with this person… every time I see them?” She’s asking the question slowly, as if she’s searching for the right words, the ones that won’t spook Shane into shutting this entire conversation down. Yet another reason he loves Rose is just this: how well she seems to understand him.

Shane sits down at the dining table and bangs his forehead lightly on the table’s flat surface. It feels cool against his flushed face. His heart is racing. He says, “Ugh. It’s complicated. Sometimes, yeah, every time. But that was like… years ago. And then once a year, for awhile. And then… nothing for, uh, a long time.”

“Until recently?” Rose asks cannily.

Fuck. He should have tried talking about this to someone else, someone who wouldn’t ask so many fucking questions. Like Hayden.

Rose pushes on, not even really waiting for the answer: “And after thirteen years, the sex is still hot.” 

Shane says, still pressing his head against the table and now closing his eyes so as to better shut out himself saying it, “Yes. I mean, no. It’s not just hot. It’s like …  Like give up your earthly possessions and follow him around worshipping his dick hot. Like…” he pauses, but then goes ahead, “Like buy an entire building to have sex with him in so you can be as loud as you want while he fucks you hot.”

There’s a long pause.

“Shane Hollander,” Rose says, “You’ve been holding out on me.”

“Rose,” Shane moans, laughing in spite of himself. “I have to go soon, I have to drive to Ottawa to have dinner with my mom. Just… just… what would you do, if like, hypothetically, you thought things were completely over with this person, like, for good, but then, you had this whole night together, and it was just—it was a lot and it felt really good, like crazy fucking good, but also really fucking scary?” It’s all tumbling out of him in a rush, now that he’s allowing himself to say any of it.

“Okay, okay. Well, who ended it?”

“He did,” Shane says automatically, but for some reason, he thinks of Ilya’s face, on the dock, twisting with something that looked awfully like hurt. I ended it? It wasn’t you saying ‘we can’t do this anymore’ while you were still wiping my cum off your mouth? The memory makes him flush a little with residual anger and embarrassment. Ilya still knows all of Shane’s trigger points, knows exactly where to press and where to stamp to get whatever reaction he wants out of him.

He says, reluctantly, “And then I did, I guess. I don’t know, it’s complicated.” He realizes too late he’s dropped the pretense of using the second person. Luckily, Rose is a kind person, and she doesn’t mention it.

“And who started it again? This time?”

Shane exhales slowly, pondering this. He finally says, for a third time, “It’s complicated.”

Honestly, he’s tired of keeping score. It’s an unfamiliar feeling; Shane loves almost nothing more than quantifying victories and losses, gains and setbacks. It soothes him to know exactly how he measures up, exactly where he needs to go.

But with Ilya, Shane has lost the count. They’ve both asked for more and been pushed away in return. They’ve both run away, both lashed out, both hurt each other, both refused to admit they were hurt. It doesn’t really feel like there’s any winning in this game any more, if it ever did.

“Okay, well, you’re not great at hypotheticals, Shane, because I could really use some more details than this. But hypothetically, what I would do is…. I don’t know. Probably marry this person? Can I just say him?”

Shane groans again, finally sitting up. “I’m seriously asking you.”

“I’m being serious, Shane!” she says, and she does sound earnest, although with Rose it’s hard to tell, especially over the phone. “Thirteen years of mind-altering sex and what sounds like a lot of emotional warfare isn’t really a ‘situationship’ any more, it’s like, a Michael Ondaatje novel.”

“Maybe a Wong Kar Wai film,” one of the other voices on the call says. There are oohs of agreement. Shane starts; he’d forgotten, again, that he’s still on speakerphone.

“I don’t know who either of those people are,” Shane says impatiently.

“Um, think epic, tragic, beautiful love story,” Rose says.

Shane frowns. This is not as helpful as he was hoping it would be. He had sort of been hoping that Rose would say he was being ridiculous, that he should put it out of his mind and focus on more important things, like perhaps, his boyfriend. He does not like thinking about his whatever, his situationship, with Ilya, as an epic love story.

Or as tragic.

“But what if it’s just sex?” He asks, a little desperately. “Like, hot sex, okay, the hottest sex of my life, but like, just sex, right? I shouldn’t… sex isn’t the only thing that matters in a relationship, right?”

“Well, I don’t know, Shane,” Rose says, “Is it just sex? Because there’s sex and then there’s like, sex. You know?”

Shane furrows his brow, trying to parse her meaning. Finally, he just says, “No, I don’t know. What do you mean?”

Rose blows out a long breath. “Like, there’s sex that feels good, and you know, meets a need, or whatever. And then there’s sex that… connects you. Connects you to the other person, but also like, to yourself.”

“Yeah, like,” adds one of the speaker phone voices, “Does this person make you cum or do they make you see God?”

Another disembodied speaker voice, laughing, builds on this: “Or like, when he kisses you, do you get horny or do you transcend time and space?”

“Ooh, I’ve got one,” says Rose, eager to join in. “Does he fuck your ass or does he fuck your soul?”

“Okay, I get it,” Shane says, cutting across the fun before they can escalate. “Thank you, that was very… clear.”

Rose has to hang up soon after that, someone new arriving in her suite with a wardrobe emergency she needs to deal with. It’s for the best; he really does need to get on the road, and she and her assistants have given him a lot to think about. She’s about to hang up when she comes back on the line, crying, “Wait, Shane!” so that he brings the phone back to his ear before hanging up.

“Don’t think for one fucking second you’re getting out of giving me actual details, Hollander,” she says, very threateningly for someone so fundamentally warm and light. “I will talk to you soon.”

“Ugh,” he says, “Fine.” But he’s smiling as he says it.

He makes himself finish his routine—water the calatheas, which are very fussy and which Alex is very fussy about, and go through the mail, picking up a regular delivery of protein powder. Then he gets on the road, hopefully in time to beat some of the afternoon traffic to Ottawa.

It’s not until he’s on the highway, setting his car on cruise control—while keeping his attention focused on the road and his hands on the wheel, of course, he’s very responsible with cruise control—that he allows himself to think about the conversation.

The thing is, he does understand what Rose meant about sex vs. sex. He’s never put it in those terms before; never allowed himself to think about it at all, really.

For most of his life, the only sexual experiences Shane had were with women or with Ilya. Sex with women was… obviously torturous, for him and, he can now admit, probably all of the women he was with, although at the time he’d convinced himself they were getting something out of sleeping with him even if he wasn’t getting anything out of it himself. Rose has disabused him of that notion pretty thoroughly over the years, which, he guesses, is her right.

He’d thought for years that the heady rapture he felt with Ilya was simply the inverse of his lack of desire for women. Ilya was the first man Shane ever touched, ever let touch him; before Ilya, Shane had never understood what other people meant, when they talked about fucking like it was something they needed as much as food or oxygen. Falling to his knees and tasting Ilya’s dick for the first time—19, clumsy as shit, literally out of his head with lust—had been the first time, outside of an ice rink, Shane had ever felt like he knew what his body was for. He sometimes wished he could put his body away with his skates at the end of hockey practice and only shrug it back on when it was time to play again; sex with Ilya made him want to be in his body all the time, the better to be able to press it against Ilya, to let him inside it, at any opportunity, at a moment’s notice. He had thought, or at least told himself very convincingly, that the intensity of the way his body responded to Ilya was due to the simple relief of finally experiencing genuine sexual desire, of sharing that desire with another person.

In the last six years—since Ilya first blocked him, after flying to Russia to deal with his father’s stroke—Shane has had a fair amount of sex with a fair amount of men. Nothing like Ilya in his heyday, of course, but once or twice a month, for a few years there, Shane went to a club, bought one drink, and quickly found someone to go into a bathroom stall with, or, more rarely, go home with. He preferred clubs to apps because he didn’t like the thought of just showing up at a stranger’s house—too intimate—and he definitely wasn’t about to give his address out to a random person on the internet. He preferred clubs not in Montreal because it lessened the likelihood of ever running into a man whose dick he’d sucked while with his team or, God forbid, his parents.

He’d figured out pretty quickly that yes, he liked sex with men. It was not torture. It was, at worst, mentally and physically stimulating in a way he finally understood his body craved, even if sometimes as impersonal as a handshake. At best, it was hot and satisfying and even fun, although Shane was never tempted to get anyone’s phone number or even commit their names to memory. Sometimes it felt shameful or dirty and sometimes it made Shane sick with anxiety about someone selling a story to the public, but even those feelings lessened over time. Sex with men was just like anything else, he discovered; the more he did it, the easier it became.

He also figured out, less quickly because he was reluctant to admit it, that liking sex with men was not the same as feeling whatever it was he felt about sex with Ilya. Liking was a synonym for enjoying, taking pleasure in. He didn’t enjoy sex with Ilya, he fucking inhaled it, ground his face in it, went through withdrawals without it. He didn’t take pleasure in Ilya’s body or his cock or his cock in Shane’s mouth or in Shane’s ass, or or or, he was obsessed with it. Sex with Ilya was the only time, aside from playing hockey, that Shane felt every part of his body at once; and just like while playing hockey, the consequence to most of his body coming awake, online, was that most of his brain turned off. On the ice, Shane’s consciousness whittled down to his spatial awareness, the parts of his mind that controlled and anticipated and analyzed. In bed, with Ilya, Shane was whittled down to just the parts of himself that could feel good and that could want more.

He kept waiting for sex with someone else to feel like sex with Ilya. He kept telling himself that he was romanticizing his connection with Ilya because he was lonely and just wanted to feel close to someone, known by someone. At the 2018 awards, after Ilya won MVP for the second time, Shane had two vodka sodas and followed Ilya onto the elevator and then into his hotel room, and the whole time, he told himself he was simply proving that sex with Ilya was nothing special, only exaggerated by his memory. Then Ilya had pushed him to his knees almost before the door had fully closed and held Shane’s head down when he came, exactly the way he used to, as if nothing between them was broken. He’d muscled Shane over to the bed and produced a travel packet of lube from literally nowhere, Shane was always impressed with how he did that, and then sucked Shane’s cock while shoving two fingers inside of him until Shane locked his thighs around Ilya’s ears and came so hard his ears rang and his vision spotted. It took all of ten minutes and they said literally zero words to each other until Shane congratulated him for his excellent hockey before fleeing and it was the hottest thing that had happened to Shane all year even if he’d cried in the shower afterwards.

So okay, sex with Ilya was a special kind of hot, but that was probably only because it was dirty and secret and toxic. That’s what he’d told himself at the next year’s awards, when, while passing by him in the line at the bar, Ilya whispered his room number to Shane during a commercial break; Shane had headed straight from the ceremony to his hotel room shower to Ilya’s room, somehow certain that Ilya would not be out partying but would be there to let him in. Ilya had made good on his promise to eat Shane out until he cried and Shane came stuffed full of Ilya’s cock in his ass and Ilya’s fingers in his mouth and he just kept telling himself, I only love this so much because I hate myself for doing it; something must be broken inside of me, to want this so badly.

Then he’d started seeing Alex. In the beginning, Shane’s attraction to Alex had felt blissfully uncomplicated. Alex was muscular and lithe and extremely competent in bed; he helped immigrants and queer people gain safer, happier lives for a living; he had a big family in Australia that he was really close to; he was so far from the closeted universe of the NHL and the secret, shameful world Shane and Ilya had built within it that he seemed like he was from a different galaxy altogether. It had been easy to slot himself into Alex’s life, and that’s all Shane thought he wanted: to fit together with someone, to not be alone. Alex had made it easy for him, never complained about his schedule or how often Shane was on the road, never—at least in the beginning—judged him for his naivety and inexperience in all things of the world not hockey. Even the fact that he didn’t care about hockey didn’t really bother Shane; he cared enough about hockey for at least two people, and maybe it was better, after all, to keep hockey out of his sex life.

Sex with Alex had been exciting because it was novel; other than Ilya, he’d never even had sex with the same man more than once, and it felt good, to become familiar with and to another body. So what if, once that novelty had faded away, all that was left was comfort and convenience instead of desire? If his time with Ilya had proven anything, he figured, it was that he’s certifiably an adrenaline junkie, so he tried to lean in to that zip of uneasiness that thrilled up his spine when Alex did things like strongly suggest that Shane let someone from the club suck him off while Alex watched. And so what if the novelty of those experiences, too, faded even more quickly, each less interesting than the last? Intensity was toxic; stability was safe; so what if he’d started to feel, again, like his body was something he’d like to leave at the rink?

He’d just… let it go on like that. Put his head down, focused on the next meal, the next game, the next season. Treated his relationship with Alex like he did any other challenge: told himself he had the raw elements of something good, and that if he just tried hard enough, believed in himself enough, did the right combination of things in the right way, he could unlock the thing that would make those elements great. Keep tweaking the routine, make marginal gains, any progress was good progress. Anything other than success was a matter of doing something wrong, or not trying hard enough.

And he probably could have gone on doing that. Not forever. But for awhile. For much longer than he should have.

If not for Ilya Rozanov.

Who had, once again, crashed into Shane’s life. A direct attack on his foundation, which turned out to be flimsy as wet cardboard. A critical hit. 

The fucking kicker of it all was, Shane hadn’t even let Ilya touch him, hadn’t even let himself touch Ilya. In retrospect, that may have been the dumbest idea Shane’s ever had.

He’d just thought that maybe, if he didn’t suck Ilya’s dick or let Ilya fuck him, maybe he wouldn’t lose himself so utterly. Maybe if he didn’t just do what Ilya told him to, didn’t just give in to whatever Ilya wanted, then he could get out of this room, this night, with at least his dignity intact if not his understanding of his own moral center. He’d let Ilya watch—he wouldn’t let either of them touch—and then the itch would be scratched, at least for another few years, during which Shane would maybe have gotten a lobotomy or found some other way of excising this man from his consciousness. He just wanted to feel good; he just wanted relief. He just didn’t want to end the night feeling fucking pathetic, hating himself for his own weakness.

He’d also, admittedly, kind of thought Ilya would just laugh at him and fuck him anyway. Like bringing their hookup to a screeching halt to take a shower by himself, most of him really just wanted to see how Ilya would react. To see if this Ilya, the real Ilya, was closer to the version of Ilya in Shane’s head that fucked him and left him, smoked in bed to let him know he’d overstayed his welcome, texted him I can’t do this and then blocked him for six fucking years—or to the other version of Ilya. The one Shane kept close, the one Shane tried not to handle too often even in his own mind, for fear of smudging it, wearing it down. The Ilya that made tuna melts, that asked him to stay. That called him Shane, that first time.

Ilya hadn’t laughed, or tried to fuck him anyway. Ilya had said yes, okay, and then watched him with exactly the same rapt, ravenous attention that he had that first time, in Vegas. And Shane had responded to that exactly like he had in Vegas: by losing his fucking mind. Saying things he had no business saying, confessing things he hadn’t even admitted to himself yet. This time, though, Ilya was right there with him, and the look in his eyes, and every filthy, hungry word that fell out of his mouth just made Shane feel so… so…

So himself. Every part of himself. Every part of his body, yes, but also all the ugly, unwieldy parts of him, the ones he works so hard to keep away from the light. The seawalls Shane has spent his entire emotional life building to contain all of the hurt and anger and loneliness and desire he’d ever swallowed had finally buckled, given way to the tide inside him, but instead of drowning, Shane was just… floating along. Enjoying the view. Finding a weird beauty in the wreckage he and Ilya always made of each other.

And it hadn’t felt toxic. Shane hadn’t felt crumpled at the end of it, like something used and thrown away. He’d felt good. Peaceful, even. Something that had been knocked loose and rattling around inside him had been put right again.

He doesn’t know what to do with that feeling. He doesn’t know what to do with the possibility that the core of what ties him and Ilya together isn’t intensity or toxicity or tragedy, but maybe—what had Rose called it?

Connection.

Surprised to find himself at the end of a drive he barely noticed was happening, Shane pulls into the parking garage of the Centaurs’ practice rink, where his mother’s office is. He bangs his head on the steering wheel a few times, now that he’s no longer driving and it’s safe to do so.

He probably needs to see a therapist. He probably needs to break up with Alex. He definitely needs to make sure everyone on Rose’s team has signed an NDA.

He wants to see Ilya again. He wants to know if Ilya has been thinking about him.

Right now, though, he needs to pick up his mom for dinner. That, at least, is easy.

***

Yuna’s face lights up when she sees him, and then immediately un-lights at the sight of the box in his hands.

“Oh, Ilya,” she says, “I told you to stop buying me those!”

Ilya grins and opens the box, shows her its contents: two hand pies, crust golden brown and shiny and topped with crackles of sugar.

“I was getting one for me,” he says, shrugging off his gear bag by the door. “It’s easy to get two. One is cherry, one is strawberry rhubarb. You can have the rhubarb,” he adds magnanimously, even though it’s the best one.

“We’ll split them,” Yuna says. Like her son, she’s uncomfortable with generosity, and so like with her son, Ilya likes to lavish her with it when he can. Not like his father used gifts—not to assert power, establish hierarchy. Just because it feels good, he’s discovering, to care for someone who doesn’t expect it or demand it from you.

“You knew I was coming,” Ilya accuses as he settles on the low two-seater couch Yuna had found in some dusty basement closet four floors down and forced him and Troy to carry up for her. “You have already turned on the kettle.”

It’s true; Yuna’s electric kettle is already well on its way to boiling, and there are two mugs waiting next to it.

“Hmm,” says Yuna, “Well, you do normally come by after your afternoon skates on Fridays.”

He tries not to feel weird about that. It isn’t that weird to hang out with your ex’s mom regularly enough that she knows to put out the honey with the tea selection. Is it? They usually talk about Ilya’s charity idea, anyway, which is actually pretty close to becoming a reality—Yuna’s printed out a lot of paperwork that she keeps threatening to force Ilya to read every word of. It’s not weird to talk business over tea with someone, even if she is your ex’s mom; he’s pretty sure of that.

“So how was your appointment with the psychiatrist?” Yuna asks, as she pours water into both of the mugs. “Was it helpful?”

Okay, so they don’t only talk about business.

Ilya thanks her as he takes the mug and holds it gingerly between his hands. It’s a cold, blustery day in Ottawa, occasional gusts of wet snow rattling the office’s window. Yuna has a space heater blasting on high, and the heat of the mug in his hands, and the herbal smell of the room, makes him feel sleepy and cozy, like he’d enjoy curling up under a large blanket.

He blows on the tea a little. “I think it was helpful, yes,” he says after he’s thought about the question for a few seconds. “He wants me to try… I don’t remember the name.” He digs his phone out of his pocket to open the notes app: “Sertraline.”

“That’s great, Ilya,” Yuna says. “Actually, David took that for a year or two after his father died. It really helped him. But, you know, everyone’s different.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, “The doctor said it might not be the right pill, but that it is a good start.”

Ilya tries not to wonder if Shane knows this fact about David. He tries to keep Shane separate from his relationship with the Hollanders as much as possible, although of course it’s a futile battle. It’s just that Ilya knows how much Shane keeps from his parents, because he wants to protect them, or he wants to protect the image they have of him. It’s hard not to wonder what Yuna and David keep from him, too.

To redirect himself from that train of thought, Ilya says, “I also am seeing a psychologist. She speaks Russian. I like her.”

Having produced a knife from somewhere in her desk and neatly sliced both hand pies into halves, Yuna pushes a napkin with one half of each pie towards Ilya. “That’s great,” she says, “That was really fast! Wow, it took me two years to find a therapist I like, and that was in a dominant language.”

“She is the only therapist who speaks Russian in Ottawa,” says Ilya, “So it was not that hard to choose.”

“Fair enough,” says Yuna.

They sip their tea and eat their pies in silence for a little while. Ilya watches the snow splatter against the window and tries not to get any crumbs anywhere, which is extremely hard to do when you’re eating something designed to be flaky and eaten by hand.

“Do you miss speaking Russian?” Yuna asks, startling Ilya out of his hunt for a fleck of cherry filling that had landed on Yuna’s desk.

“Sometimes,” he says, vaguely. If he gets Yuna’s desk sticky she’ll ban baked goods and honey for at least a month; he is very committed to not letting that happen again.

“You never… talk about Russia,” she says, slowly. “Or your family.”

“No,” Ilya agrees, giving up on his search with reluctance. “I don’t.”

He looks up, meets her eyes. Yuna gets very Shane-like sometimes, especially when she is active listening; her eyes get bright and focused and serious. Maybe it’s more accurate to say Shane gets Yuna-like.

Either way, it’s very effective at making Ilya feel guilty, even when he’s 99% sure he hasn’t done anything wrong.

To assuage the guilt, and because he’s found the best way to distract people from asking him about himself is to ask about them instead, he asks, “Were you born in Japan? Or here?”

Yuna gives him a look that she says she knows what he’s doing, and she’s only allowing it out of the goodness of her heart. “I was born there, yes,” she says, after a beat. “But we immigrated when I was two.”

“Do you speak Japanese?” He isn’t just distracting her; he genuinely does like to talk to other immigrants. It makes him feel less alien, maybe. More hopeful that what he’s left behind doesn’t have to shape what’s ahead.

Yuna picks up one of the pie halves and squints at it, perhaps trying to determine its flavor, then gives it a nibble. Then she makes a face. “Stop getting cherry.”

“They only had one rhubarb left,” Ilya says repentantly. “I’ll go earlier next time.”

She sighs, then says, “It’s complicated. My speaking Japanese.”

He waits her out.

“I grew up in Montreal, you know? Not here in Ottawa,” Yuna says, finally. “My parents spoke Japanese, and moving to a city that spoke two new languages at the same time was… very hard for them.”

Ilya nods. “And French is a terrible language,” he points out. “No one should have to learn it.”

Yuna rolls her eyes. “Actually, English was harder for them.”

Ilya nods at this too. “Yes. English is also a terrible language.”

She smiles at this, which he feels victorious about, for no real reason.

“I’m not comparing this to your… situation, from what you’ve told me about,” she says, slowly. “My parents wanted me to succeed, I never doubted they loved me, but… they didn’t want me to speak Japanese. I mean, I did, because they did, but they thought people would look down on me if they thought I spoke anything other than English or French. And being the only person in the house who was comfortable speaking English or French meant that a lot of the time, I had to just… do a lot of things by myself. Especially because my parents were working all the time. As I got older it was… it was easier to just take care of a lot of things myself rather than involve them.”

Ilya stands up to pour them both some more hot water. “I get it,” he says. “What was the word again? Orphan?”

She flinches a little, and Ilya is afraid he’s used the wrong word, said something inappropriate or stupid. Then she sighs and says, “Yes. I guess. In a way. At least it felt like that, pretty much as soon I was old enough to ride the bus by myself.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, nodding again; this unearths a memory he hasn’t thought about in years. “Me too. I had just been allowed to take the Metro by myself when…” Nope, not getting on that train of thought. Ilya seizes on adolescent bluster instead: “Of course, I had already taken the Metro by myself, tens of times, but nobody knew that.”

Yuna rolls her eyes again, but more fondly.

“Probably hundreds of times,” Ilya breezes on. “Let’s see, how old was I when Sveta and I snuck out of school and…” He begins to ostentatiously count on his fingers.

“Yes, I get it, Ilya,” she says, laughing. Then she looks sad again. “I’m sorry, though. You shouldn’t have… had to do that. By yourself. You know… I never let Shane ride the bus at all.”

He tries not to pull a face. Why is he not surprised that Shane Hollander is not a public transit user?

He obviously doesn’t succeed, because she sees his face and says as in self-defense, “We did take him on the train!” Beat. “A few times. I mean… never by himself.”

Ilya can’t help himself. “Yes,” he says, “This makes perfect sense to me, knowing Hollander.”

Yuna laughs a little at herself, ruefully. “It’s probably ridiculous. I just never wanted Shane to ever feel like he had to do anything by himself. Not if he didn’t want to. And honestly, he never wanted to! Well… not when he was young, at least.”

He tries a little harder, this time, not to make any expression at all.

“Or maybe,” Yuna sighs, “Alex is right, and I smother him, and it’s made him, I don’t know…”

As always when Yuna brings Shane up, Ilya feels like he is balanced on a razor’s edge. He doesn’t want her to stop talking, and he doesn’t want her to know that’s what he wants. He doesn’t want her to be suspicious that he knows so much about Shane’s life, and he also wants her to know that he listens to her and remembers what she says.

“Yuna,” he says, feeling his weight disperse along the wire he’s walking. “You did a good job raising Shane. He is a good man.”

She smiles at this.

“But,” he presses on, “Some things every person has to do alone. Some things you cannot do for him. Sometimes you have to let him do what he wants, even if what he wants is to date a snobby lawyer who is rude and wrong.” He can’t help the last bit slipping in.

Yuna makes a sound that, in Ilya’s experience, means, we’ll see about that. He would feel bad for Alex, being on the wrong end of that particular noise, but… he doesn’t.

“Oh shoot,” Yuna says, looking at the clock. “Speaking of Shane, I’m meeting him for dinner soon. I need to get some work done before then.”

Ilya tries, valiantly and for the third time, to not make a face. He doesn’t know if he likes knowing that Shane’s in town.

“I’ll go,” he says, standing.

***

Shane is still in a daze as he heads for Yuna’s office, and so he gets lost a few times before he actually gets there. Then when he gets there, or where he thinks is the right place, there’s an unfamiliar gear bag by the door, so maybe he’s not in the right place at all. This fucking place is like a maze.

“Mom?” He calls out, rapping on the half-closed door before pushing it open. He catches sight of her pretty immediately and relaxes; at least he’s not barging in on a stranger. “Whose gear bag is that?” he asks, pushing the doorway fully open.

She looks somewhat comically surprised to see him. “Shane?” She asks, setting down her mug. “I thought I was meeting you at the restaurant at 6:30.”

“I don’t know why you would think that,” he says, frowning, “Considering I texted you this morning and said I would pick you up here at 5. Whose gear bag is that?”

There’s a little cough from the corner of the room behind Shane. “Oh,” he says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize someone was—” He stops.

Ilya Rozanov is standing awkwardly next to the couch in his mother’s office, where he’d clearly just been sitting. He’s holding a mug that says ONTARIO MITES 1998.

“That’s my mug,” Shane says faintly. Then, realizing what he’s looking at: “Are you—are you having tea with my mother?”

“No,” Ilya says, setting the mug down sheepishly.

“Yes,” says Yuna firmly, coming over to kiss Shane’s cheek. “Hello, honey, it’s good to see you, even if I wasn’t expecting it.”

Shane continues to scowl at Ilya over her shoulder as he accepts her kiss. “You should have expected it,” he grumbles, “I texted you about it.” What are you doing here? He mouths at Ilya, but Ilya only shrugs, either pretending to be unable to read his lips or actually unable to do so.

“Okay, well, honey, the reason I said I’d meet you is because I have a Zoom call with the rep from Mercedes in a few minutes, and I don’t know how long it will take!”

Shane is beginning to feel suspicious. His mother is both extremely on top of her own calendar and extremely fucking meddlesome. And not very good at acting.

“I can wait,” he says, slowly. He flicks his eyes over to Ilya, who is edging towards the coat stand, which he will have to cross around Shane to get to.

“Oh, you’re probably hungry,” says Yuna, sitting down at her laptop and opening up a calendar app and something else. She says, over her shoulder, too casually to be believable, “Ilya, have you eaten yet?”

Ilya looks in between the two of them. Shane narrows his eyes at him and shakes his head, no. Ilya is beginning to look a little delighted, which makes Shane’s stomach flop over in dread and … something else.

“No,” Ilya says, “Thank you for asking, Yuna. I am hungry, actually.” He looks like he might be biting back a grin. “Worked very hard at practice today.”

“She actually asked if you’ve eaten,” hisses Shane, “Not if you’re hungry.”

“Shane, don’t be a dick,” Yuna says briskly, apparently done with the charade. “Take Rozanov to dinner.”

Shane gapes at her. Yuna Hollander has called many, many men a dick in front of Shane. Usually refs or other players and sometimes Shane’s coaches. Definitely Ilya Rozanov, more than once. Never Shane himself.

“Yeah, Shane,” Ilya parrots. “Take Rozanov to dinner.” Then, with a sidelong glance at Yuna to make sure she’s not looking, he mouths, Don’t be a dick.

Shane is beginning to wonder if he got hit by a car on the way to Ottawa and has somehow landed in hell. His mother has set him up on a date with Ilya Rozanov. Ilya Rozanov has just mouthed the word dick to Shane in front of his mother, and Shane, who is now going to be haunted to his literal grave by this moment, got a little turned on when he did. He needs to get the fuck out of this situation.

The only way out is through; the only way out, in this case, is to acquiesce to Yuna Hollander.

“Rozanov,” says Shane, through his teeth, “Do you want to come have dinner with me at This Is Very Obviously a Fucking Trap restaurant?”

“Language,” Yuna says, reprovingly, but she otherwise doesn’t try to deny the charges.

“You literally just called me a dick!” Shane throws his hands up. “Oh my God. I’m leaving. Come on.”

He grabs Ilya’s coat off the rack to stop himself grabbing Ilya by the arm, and marches off. After a second, he hears Ilya scrambling after him, but he doesn’t stop to check.

He rounds a few corners until he’s reasonably sure Yuna won’t be able to hear them, and then he stops abruptly and turns on Ilya, who stops just short of walking into him by accident, so quickly has Shane changed trajectory.

“You,” Shane says, poking a finger into Ilya’s chest, “Need to stop hanging out with my mother. It’s really fucking weird.”

Ilya does not bite back his grin this time. “You are just mad she called you a dick.”

Shane is still touching Ilya’s chest. Possibly he’s flattened his whole hand against it. He can’t be sure. “She’s my mom, she’s supposed to take my side,” he argues back. “And you’re a bad influence!”

Belatedly, he snatches his hand back and keeps walking. He spares a thought to hope he knows where he’s going, because he’s walking fast enough that Ilya is sort of just trailing along behind him rather than walking with him.

Eventually, Ilya puts his hand out, forces Shane to slow a little. “Are you actually mad at me?” He asks, frowning. “I had nothing to do with this, you know that, yes?”

Shane blows out a breath and forces his pace to slow. “No, I know,” he says. “She’s just…” He’s struck by a sudden horror, and then struck a second time that it’s taken so long for this specific thought to occur to him. “You don’t think she knows, do you?”

He has to stop walking for a second, woozy with it.

“No, Hollander,” Ilya says gently, and he looks like he’s going to put his hand on Shane’s shoulder. But then he doesn’t. “I think she’s just… what is the word for when you mess—no, meddle—”

“Meddlesome,” Shane says. “That’s exactly what she is. Fucking meddlesome.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees. “And she does not like your snobby lawyer boyfriend.” He isn’t looking at Shane as he says this last bit.

Shane narrows his eyes at him, but chooses to start walking again instead of responding.

Ilya, however, doesn’t. He stands where Shane has left him. It takes a few seconds for Shane to stop his marching and register that that Ilya’s no longer beside him.

“You know,” Ilya says, still looking at the floor, “We don’t actually have to do this. I was just joking back there.”

Shane stops walking again. Unbidden, he hears Rose again: epic, tragic, beautiful.

Shane says, softly, “Let’s just go, okay?” When Ilya’s expression doesn’t change, he adds, “She’ll know if we don’t.”

That gets Ilya to raise his head. He considers briefly, then nods, jogging a little to catch up with Shane. “Okay. You are right. We have to go.”

He jostles Shane with his elbow as he goes by, just enough to make him stumble. Shane elbows him back.

Something sparks in Ilya’s eyes. “Last one to the parking garage,” he says, “has to pay.” And then he starts running.

“Fucker,” Shane spits, and then, because there is no other alternative, or at least none that feel as good, takes off after him.

Chapter End Notes

omg why is this chapter so long? I had initially planned for the entire dinner to also be in this chapter but it was already 8.5k words so... next time!

THANK YOU wonderful people for reading and kudosing and commenting. I read all your comments multiple times and it's the best feeling!

New Girl easter egg for those who enjoy: "Yeah, I mean, I saw through space and time for a minute, but that's not the point!"

If you, like Shane, do not know Michael Ondaatje and/or Wong Kar Wai, what are you doing with your life? JK. But do yourself a favor and watch Happy Together, Wong Kar Wai's queer film that Jacob Tierney has referenced more than once!

Up next: Alex comes back from Australia (everyone boo); Shane finally gets his shit together and breaks up with him (everyone cheer). Also, ballet.

Chapter 8

Chapter Summary

A dinner date and a mistake. Okay, fifteen mistakes. At least.

Chapter Notes

This chapter took longer than I planned for it to (thanks migraines) and it's also NOT the promised breakup and ballet because these two just had to take at least two more turns on their emotional rollercoaster. Sorry not sorry!

The restaurant is one that Shane and Yuna have visited often, in the last few years; it’s a tiny sushi restaurant, darkly and warmly lit, with only a few tables and a long bar at the back of the room. They’re seated at the end of the bar, hidden from most of the main dining room and tucked into a corner nook that’s as private as possible without actually being a private room. They’re Shane’s preferred seats; he’s sure Yuna booked them specifically.

It isn’t until they’ve been seated and handed drinks menus that Shane really starts to freak out.

They’ve never done this before. They’ve barely ever been alone in public before. They’ve certainly never sat down for a meal in the kind of low light that turns Ilya’s skin golden and his eyes green. Shane actually doesn’t even know what Ilya likes to eat. Does he eat raw fish? Does he know how to use chopsticks? Is he going to be disappointed, bored, grossed out?

“Looks fucking good,” Ilya says, his eyes on the slabs of fresh raw fish laid out on the bar behind the glass.

Shane clears his throat. He can do this. He has used his mouth to make sounds and other humans have understood them; surely he can do it right now. He manages, “Do you, uh, eat sushi a lot?”

“Not a lot,” Ilya says, now paging through the drink menu with interest. “But I like it.”

“Well, I eat a lot of sushi, and this place is really good,” Shane says, inanely. “I come here with my mom a lot.”

They go silent as they look at the menus. When the waiter comes by for drink orders, Shane expects Ilya to order vodka—he’s never actually seen him drink anything else, other than beer—but he orders Japanese whiskey instead. After a beat, Shane orders the same.

Ilya seems to sense Shane’s question. “Vodka in Ottawa is shit,” he says. “All anywhere has is Grey Goose or some other American shit. I have given up. And I have had Japanese whiskey before. It is very good.”

They go back to the menus. Shane tries to soothe the humming in his brain by assuring himself that it’s a comfortable silence, aware that he is very far from comfortable. He’s bouncing his knee under the table, which is probably annoying, but Ilya doesn’t react to it. Shane can feel, just barely, the warmth of Ilya’s leg next to his own. Or maybe he’s imagining it.

Ilya announces, “I don’t know what any of this is.” He sits back and closes the menu. To Shane, he says, “You order.”

Shane’s mouth goes a little dry. He takes a slightly-too-big gulp of water and almost chokes on the surprise ice cube that comes with it. “Uh, okay,” he says after he’s recovered. “Is there anything you don’t like?”

“I will like what you get,” Ilya says simply. “I trust you.”

Shane makes a weird noise in the back of his throat that he hopes Ilya doesn’t hear. “Sure,” he says.

Shane loves to sit at the bar at sushi restaurants because you can order just a few things at a time, eating in rounds, progressing through the meal at whatever pace your own hunger and taste dictates. He orders them a few kinds of nigiri, figuring he’ll be able to better gauge what Ilya likes and wants more of if he gets a variety. He’s not particularly interested in interrogating why it feels so important that Ilya enjoys himself; he can save examining his own ulterior motives for a time when he isn’t still facing down the barrel of an entire dinner alone with Ilya Rozanov.

Their whiskey comes. It’s smoky and smooth. Shane catches Ilya watching him try it, eyes on his mouth and throat as he swallows. His gaze makes Shane’s face and neck heat up.

It also reminds him of the last time he had felt the entirety of Ilya’s attention on him. Which he is trying not to be reminded of, not least because they’re in public and he likes this restaurant and he doesn’t want to have to avoid it forever because he humiliated himself by popping a boner at the bar.

But also because even though their time in the hotel room in Florida had felt good, it had also felt… heavy. The air between them had been dense with all their history, all the ghostly versions of themselves, all the blows they had ever landed on each other’s egos and all the bruises they’d left on each other’s hearts.

Shane doesn’t want to feel heavy, right now. He wants to have time with Ilya that isn’t laden and raw and complicated. He just… wants to have dinner with him.

So he seizes on the first topic of conversation that comes to him, which ends up being the foundation Ilya and Yuna are working on turning into a reality.

Ilya’s eager to talk about it; Shane can tell he’s excited. He’s also careful to highlight all the work Yuna has been doing, saying more than once that none of it would be possible without her. It makes something in Shane’s stomach feel weird to hear Ilya talk about his mother with so much admiration and warmth.

No one in Shane’s life has ever really… well, liked Yuna before. His dad, sure; David is warm and laidback and easy to like, and correspondingly, everyone likes him. Hayden texts David for tips on barbecuing in the winter and JJ is always on Shane to invite his dad out with them when he’s in town.

Yuna, though, is prickly. She’s hyperfocused on Shane’s career, adamant that he deserves the best and refusing to back down from anything until she’s gotten her way. Shane knows she’s overbearing; Alex is far from the only person to ever point out that Yuna is involved in Shane’s life to a perhaps unhealthy degree. Hayden’s never actually said anything about it, but Shane has caught the looks he and Jackie pass between each other sometimes when Yuna comes up in conversation.

Yuna is all the things people accuse her of being, but she’s also warm and loving and unflinchingly protective of the people she loves. Her sheer belief in Shane has been the ground he’s stood on his entire life; he wouldn’t be the athlete he is—the person he is—without her.

And Ilya is friends with her. Allows himself to be dragged to fundraising events by her. Seeks her out after practice to have tea with her in her office.

It makes Shane feel … a lot, actually. Too much to name.

They come around to the topic of the name of the foundation; Ilya has been delaying doing the paperwork Yuna has given him because he can’t decide on a name.

“Yuna says to call it the Rozanov Foundation,” Ilya says, wrinkling his nose. “But it does not feel right.”

“Why not?” Shane asks. He’s trying not to watch Ilya fumble with his chopsticks. He’s been putting on a good front, but he really doesn’t know how to use them, and while it is very charming to see how much rice he’s lost to his little bowl of soy sauce, it’s also kind of driving Shane nuts.

Ilya finagles most of a seared salmon nigiri into his mouth, and then closes his eyes in pleasure as he chews and swallows. There’s no real point in pretending Shane isn’t watching the bright red flesh pass through his lips, rest on his tongue, go down his throat.

“It is my father’s name,” Ilya says eventually. He points at the last salmon nigiri on the plate. “We need more of that.”

“Have that one,” Shane says. He ponders Ilya’s answer while he flags down the chef to order more nigiri, adding on two salmon and avocado hand rolls and also asking for a rubber band.

“I did have an idea,” says Ilya, after he has managed to get the last piece of salmon into his mouth with the help of his other hand. “But it is stupid, maybe.”

“Try me.”

Ilya takes a swig of whiskey, clears his throat. Finally, he says, “Irina. The Irina Foundation.”

Shane doesn’t know this name, but he can guess. “For your mother?”

Ilya nods. Shane wants put a hand on his shoulder, rub his back until the sadness in his eyes softens and fades away again. He digs his fingers into his own thigh to stop himself reaching out.

“That’s perfect, Ilya,” he says instead. “It’s really beautiful.”

Ilya smiles at him. He looks for a moment like he wants to reach out to Shane, who holds his breath, digs his fingers deeper into the meat of his leg. Neither of them move, however.

The hand rolls arrive, along with the rubber band. Ilya scarfs down his with obvious joy at being able to use his hands. Shane eats his with a little more restraint—it is really fucking good, and it does boggle the mind how they’re getting fresh avocados in Ottawa in winter—and then sets to folding the little paper sleeves the chopsticks came in into thick squares.

“Give me those,” he says once he’s finished his task, gesturing for Ilya’s chopsticks.

Ilya gives him a skeptical look, but hands them over. Shane puts the squares of paper between the square wooden ends of the chopsticks and then winds the rubber band the chef had brought around them until they’re secured tight.

“Here,” he says, passing them back to Ilya. “That’s how I learned to use chopsticks. They’re way easier to use this way.”

Ilya tries them out dubiously, but his face lights up when he sees how much easier it actually is. “Thank you, Hollander,” he says. That smile again.

Shane blurts out, “I’m jealous of the work and my mom are doing.”

Ilya raises an eyebrow, still pinching the chopsticks together in the air, either for practice or just because he’s enjoying it. “Hollander,” he says, “I know she called you a dick today, but I promise I am not stealing your mother from you.”

Shane kicks his foot. “Shut up. No, I just mean, I wish I could be doing something like that. More… meaningful, I guess. I don’t know.”

The chef drops off the nigiri Shane had ordered. Looking triumphant, Ilya uses his modified chopsticks to pick up a piece, swirl it in soy sauce, and pop it into his mouth without losing any rice. Shane doesn’t want to know what his own face is doing; he’s sure it’s something embarrassing, something fond or soft or sappy.

Ilya smacks his lips. “You can help,” he says, looking back at Shane. “With the foundation.”

“Help with what?” Shane asks. “I think you and my mom have it pretty covered.”

Ilya shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe the camps, when we actually start them. You could help me coach the hockey camps in the summer.”

Shane’s stomach clenches. He tries not to imagine it, but it’s already playing out in his head: spending every summer with Ilya. Seeing him every day, skating with him. Maybe after the kids were done for the day the two of them could linger on the ice, racing each other, doing shot competitions, trying and failing at playing goalie. Maybe they could have dinner after, just like this. He wants it so much, so fiercely, it’s almost a physical pain.

Don’t do this to yourself again, he tells himself. You already know he doesn’t want that with you.

But why else would he have suggested Shane help him in the summers?

Maybe he’s just being nice.

Some version of these thoughts must have played out as agony on Shane’s face, because Ilya says, “Unless you do not want to. Because it would be weird. Because you are not out.”

“What? No.” Shane shakes his head a little to clear the thoughts. Not heavy, not complicated, he reminds himself. Just dinner. “I mean, maybe people would think it’s weird, but I don’t really care about that. I want to help. You would want me to?”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “No, I do not want the best hockey player in the league involved in my hockey charity.”

Shane’s stomach, so recently unclenched, does a little flip at that. Ilya had called him the best once before, at that New Year’s Eve gala, but Shane had dismissed it as Ilya just trying to get under Alex’s skin. Now, however, the only skin it gets under is Shane’s own; he’s been called the best by many people in his life, but it’s Ilya saying it that pierces straight through him.

“You’ve been playing pretty well yourself,” Shane says, because it’s true. Ilya’s back on the first line with the Centaurs and he’s been putting up big numbers; he’s within distance of Shane’s current points total, although Shane has scored more goals.

Ilya meets his eyes, smiles that smile again, the same one he’s been making all night.

Then he points at a piece of nigiri on the plate. “What is this one?”

Shane is grateful for the subject change. It pulls them back from the edge again. “That’s tuna.”

“I thought this one was tuna.”

Explaining the difference between akami, chu-toro, and o-toro—with a digression on bigeye vs. bluefin, because Shane finds categories of things interesting and Ilya seems to find Shane’s interest in things interesting—takes them through another round of ordering and eating. Ilya tells a story about Marlowe dragging him to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant at 2 am and then promptly puking all over the belt. (“I think the fact that it was open at 2 am should have given you pause anyway,” Shane says, wrinkling his nose.) Then Shane tells a story about how he’d demanded that there be sushi at his tenth birthday party, despite Yuna and David’s pleas with him to choose something more kids from his school would eat. He refused, and it turned out none of the white kids in Shane’s class, or on Shane’s hockey team, would eat any of the sushi, and they also would go on to whisper that Shane’s house smelled of fish for the rest of the year. (“Fucking assholes,” Ilya says, frowning.)

And they just go on like that. Telling each other stories, making each other laugh. Shane feels warm down to his core and Ilya keeps smiling that smile and it’s good, it’s light.

And they almost—almost get away with it. Almost get through the whole meal without hurting each other or provoking each other or crossing each other’s boundaries.

Until the man at the table closest to them gets down on his knee and proposes to the woman he’s sitting with.

The whole restaurant falls silent, breathless with anticipation. When the woman nods yes and covers her mouth to hold in a little sob, everyone applauds, even the sushi chefs.

Shane applauds, dutifully, with everyone else. When he turns back to Ilya, he can’t parse the look on his face.

Shane doesn’t know what possesses him. Maybe the whiskey has loosened the connections between his tongue and his brain. Maybe he is, deep in his soul, a glutton for punishment. Either way, he hears himself asking Ilya, “Would you… ever want to get married? Like in general, in the future.” He adds the last bit hastily, already regretting it.

Ilya frowns thoughtfully at him, clearly not having expected the question. After a minute, he says, “I don’t know. I always thought I would. But… I don’t know.”

Shane nods. “Me too,” he says, meaning both that he’d always thought he would, and that now, in this moment, he’s not sure it’s ever going to happen.

Something crosses Ilya’s face, sharp and unhappy. “You will marry your snobby lawyer?”

“What?” Shane barks out a laugh in surprise, which makes Ilya’s face go even darker. Hastily, so he doesn’t have to think through the implications of what he’s saying, Shane says, “No, no. Definitely not. That’s not what I meant. I mean… Alex doesn’t even believe in marriage.”

Now Ilya is making a more recognizable expression: disdainful. He says, “I didn’t know marriage was something you could believe in or not. Like the tooth fairy.”

“Yeah, well.” Shane does not really feel up to explaining the complexities of Alex’s feelings on the institution of marriage, although he’s heard the spiel enough times he could probably do it by heart.  Then he adds, because apparently he isn’t done digging this hole as deep as he can, “He doesn’t really believe in monogamy either.”

This surprises a little laugh out of Ilya—more of a scoff—as he turns his attention to finishing off the last of the yellowtail.

Shane thinks, for a second, that maybe it’s okay, they’re okay. Maybe even though the specter of Alex has been raised between them, maybe even though they’ve ventured into definitely unsafe currents, they can find their way back to more solid footing. If neither of them push. Or pull. Or wander deeper, farther from the shallows they’ve been coasting in all evening.

Then he notices the muscle in Ilya’s jaw ticking.

“What does this mean, he does not believe in monogamy?” Ilya asks. “You are not monogamous?” He shapes the word in his mouth carefully.

“Uh, monogamous means like—”

“I know what it means,” Ilya cuts across Shane’s fumbled explanation. “I’m asking if you, Hollander, are monogamous with your snobby lawyer boyfriend.”

“Stop calling him that, you know his name,” Shane says automatically, aware that he’s stalling for time.

There is no way to answer this without detonating a landmine or two. Shane doesn’t even know what answer Ilya is looking for, what would satisfy him, if anything. Is it better to lie and say actually we are monogamous and I cheated on him with you? Or to lie in the other direction and say we aren’t monogamous and everything that happened in Florida with you was 100% above board? Or to tell the messy truth, which is that in the moment—the moment when he pushed Ilya down onto the hotel room couch, and the moment when he let Ilya pull his underwear off with his teeth, and the moment when he dipped his fingers in the mess of their cum on his stomach and Ilya had taken them in his mouth with the same reverence some people take the Eucharist—Shane hadn’t cared whether Alex would be hurt or angry or betrayed; in fact, he hadn’t thought about Alex at all?

He’s taking too long to answer this. Ilya’s eyes are narrowing, getting stormier, with every second that passes.

“It’s complicated,” Shane finally says, because he needs to say something and nothing else feels right to say, even though he knows it’s not a good answer and it’s not going to stop the slow slide they are both doing into the deep end.

It doesn’t. Ilya asks, voice dangerously stripped of inflection, “So what happened in Florida. He knows about it?”

Shane shifts in his chair, tries to catch the eye of a waiter or a chef. They’d been done with the meal, anyway; Shane had been entertaining the idea of asking Ilya if he wanted to have some tea before they paid the check and left—just to stretch the evening out a little longer—but it seems clear now that that won’t be happening. Everyone is ignoring him, still focused on the engagement, which seems to have also involved a surprise visit from several of the couples’ friends, who are now filling the restaurant. Shane tries not to think about the fact that every extra body in the room is also an extra camera lens, an extra microphone. It’s been so long since he’s had to think about what might happen if he and Ilya are spotted in public together, let alone overheard having this specific conversation.

“Um,” Shane says, lowering his voice because he can’t help it, even as he frantically gropes in his brain for something to say other than: “Kind of. He knows … uh, that something happened. That I, um, hooked up with someone.”

Ilya’s voice gets even flatter. “So you said there was someone, but you did not say it was me.”

Shane’s neck and face feel flushed. He feels cornered, even though he walked them into this conversation himself. “We don’t … really share details,” he says, even more quietly.

He finally catches a waiter’s eye, makes a signal for the check. When he looks back, Ilya’s face has turned mean and sour. The change is subtle—a tension at his mouth, a deadening of his eyes—but it hits Shane hard in the chest. Fuck, fuck. He wants to invent a time machine just so he can go back ten minutes and slit his own throat instead of initiating this conversation and then having to actually live through it. 

“I am happy for you, Hollander,” Ilya says, patronizingly. “You are no longer boring virgin. I’m sure you and snobby lawyer get up to all sorts of very exciting and wild things together. Good for you.”

Shane sucks air through his teeth, tries not to get pissed at all of the implications buried in Ilya’s monotone delivery. Fails. “Fuck you, Rozanov,” he grinds out through his still-clenched teeth instead.

The waiter finally brings the goddamned check. Ilya leans forward as if to pull his wallet out of his pants and Shane waves him away with irritation. His bloodline engineered this disaster of an evening and his own big fucking mouth brought it to its inevitable conclusion, so the least he can do is pay. What the fuck was he thinking, imagining he and Ilya could just have dinner?

They’re silent as they put on their coats and walk out to Shane’s car. It’s still snowing, though lightly; the roads are clear. Ilya gets in the passenger seat without a word, slamming the door behind him. Shane takes the opportunity to take three deep breaths; by the end of them, he hopes, he won’t feel quite so dizzyingly, irrationally angry.

It doesn’t work. As soon as Shane’s started the car and started driving, he says, “I fucking hate it when you call me boring.”

Ilya stares out the window and doesn’t respond. If he’s hoping that ignoring Shane will make him shut up, he has chosen the wrong tactic, because it only makes the buzzing under Shane’s skin louder, which in turn only makes Shane feel less in control of whatever the fuck is coming out of his mouth.

“I’m not fucking boring,” he says, over the buzzing. “You would be… you would be surprised.”

This gets a response: Ilya snorts disbelievingly, although he’s still looking out the window. The sound sends yet another zip of fury up Shane’s spine.

“I do not think so,” Ilya says, voice dripping condescension.

Shane may or may not be shaking; his adrenaline has spiked. He has completely lost the thread of what he’s saying. He only knows that Ilya’s tone makes him want to bare his teeth. Or punch Ilya in his teeth.

Apparently, some part of him thinks it’s appropriate to say: “Threesomes. I’ve done—I’ve had them. Some.”

Now Ilya turns his head, a slow, deliberate swivel. He looks at Shane in silence for a second. Shane grits his teeth, makes himself look at the road.

They’d talked about threesomes once, Shane remembers; Ilya had said something like if you have never tried it, how do you know you won’t like it? And Shane had said, I just fucking know. He wonders where that version of him went, that said no so definitively.

He wonders if Ilya is going to bring the conversation up—if he even remembers, which he probably doesn’t. Instead Ilya says, “Okay. I did this at sixteen. What else.” The last bit is a question, but he doesn’t make it sound like one.

Shane huffs. “Okay, well, we also—” he cuts himself off abruptly.

“Speak up, Hollander,” Ilya says, sneering now. “How can you surprise me if I cannot hear you?”

Shane drives in silence. Flexes his hands on the steering wheel, feels his own jaw muscle ticking. If there was a way to seal his own mouth shut, he would. But he’s never been able to not respond to Ilya’s taunting.

“We went to a professional Dom once,” he says. “We— Alex and me. Well. It was really… for me.”

Ilya’s silence is of a different quality, and Shane chances a look at him. He still looks pissed, but he also looks like he’s trying to understand what Shane just said, and can’t quite put it together without more context.

“A what?” Ilya says finally, apparently deciding he’s more interested in knowing than he is in protecting his position as the supposed sex god to Shane’s boring virgin. For the moment, at least.

A teeny part of Shane wonders who the fuck came up with these labels—sex god, boring virgin—and why they’re both clinging to this dynamic long after it’s had any truth to tell them about their relationship, if it ever did at all.

The unthinking but unfortunately working majority of Shane says, “A Dom. Like. Um. Because I sometimes like… some things. That Alex wasn’t really into. So it was like… a compromise.”

Ilya is silent even longer this time. Finally, he says, slowly, sounding at least 50% sure he’s still not fully grasping Shane’s meaning, “A professional Dom is someone who… dominates. Professionally.”

“Shut up,” Shane says automatically, and then, “I mean, yes.” He adds, after a second more, because why the fuck not at this point, “We only went once. I didn’t really like it.”

They’ve somehow made it to the practice rink; for the second time today, Shane has no memory of the drive he just completed. He should maybe not be driving so much. 

As Shane pulls into the garage, Ilya says tightly, “Snobby lawyer pays other men to fuck you because he won’t do it properly himself. This is what you are telling me.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Why the fuck does it matter how I say it?” Ilya snaps, raising his voice for the first time in the conversation. “Why are you telling me this? I do not fucking want to know this, Shane!”

“I don’t know, Ilya!” Shane yells back. “You fucking asked!”

Mercifully, finally, he parks the fucking car. Ilya’s scrabbling at the door, trying to unlock and open it before Shane’s even put the car into park.

“Just—hang on, fuck. The doors don’t open if I’m not—”

“Goodnight, Hollander,” Ilya is snarling, “Tell Alex that someone says he should be more grateful that you are such a fucking adventurous slut.”

“Ilya, what the fuck—”

But Ilya’s out and the door is slamming shut behind him.

Shane sits in the silence he leaves behind. His ears are ringing. His heart is pounding. He’s not sure what happened except that he knows he just made a huge fucking mistake, several in fact, in a row.

He doesn’t want to cry so he punches the steering wheel instead. The hurt feels good so he does it again. Then he stops because if he breaks his hand right before playoffs the list of people who will never forgive him will be much longer than just himself.

Then he goes after Ilya.

***

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Ilya takes the stairs three at a time. He’s a fucking professional hockey player so his legs barely burn but any bodily sensation that isn’t a deep need to claw off his own skin is helpful right now. He’s so fucking mad at Shane he wants to spit blood in his face. He’s so fucking mad at himself he wants to—

Ilya forces himself to slow and take deep breaths. After a moment, he doubles over, racked by a wave of what feels like all the pain he’s been running from his whole life. His sad dead mother, his shitty dead father, his homophobic country, Shane saying he knows I hooked up with someone in nightmare slow-motion, and Ilya always, always unloved, unloveable. It’s enough to take him out at the knees, if he lets it.

He tries not to let it. Forces himself to keep moving, but at a more reasonable pace, and to keep breathing.

When he gets to Yuna’s office, he’s confronted with several unpleasant realities: his keys are in his gear bag; his gear bag is in Yuna’s office; the office door is locked.

He bangs his head on the door, a few times, just in case that does anything. He maybe kicks it too. The highlights from his fight with Shane are starting to scroll through his mind, a reel edited just for him.

Not monogamous. He knows something happened. Boring virgin. Professional Dom. Adventurous slut.

Jesus. He’s never actually called anyone a slut outside of sex. He’s certainly never said it and meant it the way he just had—full of fury, aiming for grievous injury.

It’s hypocritical and it’s not fair and he didn’t fucking mean it and he’s ashamed of himself and he still kind of wants to fucking throttle Shane in a non-sexual way. Well, a mostly non-sexual way. He definitely wants to throttle Alex, in an extremely non-sexual, and possibly fatal, way.

And the key he needs to unlock the door is locked behind the door. God damnit.

“Uh,” says a voice behind him. “I have a spare key for the office, if you need it.”

Because of course he fucking does. Ilya stops banging his head on the door, straightens up with some attempt at dignity, and moves aside.

Shane unlocks the door.

Ilya goes into the office.

Shane follows him in.

They’re on each other before the door is even shut, Ilya shoving Shane up against the wall, Shane’s head bouncing off the drywall with a loud thump. They are not so much kissing as they are gorging themselves on each other. Ilya tastes blood and he doesn’t even know which one of them has drawn blood and which one of them is bleeding. He’s using his hands and his full weight to pin Shane, pushing his thumbs hard into the grooves of Shane’s hips. Shane is pulling Ilya’s hair so hard that he would be legitimately concerned he’s about to rip chunks of it out if he could spare a single brain cell for anything other than Shane beneath him and his own hot angry blood beating in his ears.

He is not being gentle and he doesn’t particularly care. He grabs the soft warm bulge of Shane’s dick through his pants and squeezes, feels him harden underneath his hand.

“Ilya,” Shane moans as he squeezes harder, and Ilya wants to weep, wants to scratch Shane’s face, wants to fuck him with Alex on speakerphone, none the fucking wiser.

They’re still in their coats and neither has bothered to turn the lights on.

“You want me to fuck you, Hollander?” Ilya asks, and he hates the sound of his own voice, cruel and alien. “You need me to fuck you because no one else can?” He sucks Shane’s earlobe, sinks his teeth into the flesh of his neck, just below his pulse. Last time he had cared about not leaving marks; now he wishes bruises could be permanent, that he could be sure that at least some part of Shane will never be free of him, even if he wants to be.

“Yes,” says Shane, letting out another groan when Ilya grinds the heel of his palm against Shane’s cock, the athletic pants he’s wearing doing exactly zero to shield him from the pressure of Ilya’s hand. “Yes, I want it, fuck, Ilya.”

Ilya grips the collar of Shane’s shirt, yanks it sideways, stretches it out over his collarbone and chest in a way he knows Shane will be pissed about later, and attacks the warm flesh now revealed: the hard ridge of Shane’s trap, the place where his collarbone meets his shoulder, the skin beneath his throat. “And your boyfriend? What will you tell him? That someone fucked you so good you forgot he existed?”

Shane’s head is thrown back, his cheeks are flushed, he’s panting. It’s a sight that would normally send Ilya rocketing into the next stratosphere of arousal. Right now he feels outside of himself, like his body is an object in a room he isn’t in.

“I—whatever,” Shane says, clearly losing the fight to hang on to coherency, “I’ll tell him whatever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to tell him.”

All Ilya really hears is it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.

He’s trying. He’s really fucking trying to lose himself in this, in Shane. He’s never had to try before, with Shane; he’s never been anything other than deeply, unbearably in his body with Shane. Burying himself in Shane has always worked, has always held this feeling at bay even when nothing else would, not booze or girls or hockey or sleep.

it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter

It’s not working. It’s not going to work.

He drops his hands. Presses his forehead, just for a moment, against Shane’s own, then pulls away.

Shane opens his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Shane,” Ilya says. “I don’t want to do this. Not with you.”  

Chapter End Notes

Ahhhh!

Hey, so has anyone else ever had a fight that goes from 0 to sixty so fast that you're screaming the most hurtful version of every mean thought you've ever had before you even notice? No, just me and my toxic exes? K, great. Anyway. These two had to have at least one knock-down drag-out fight, right? Except they're them so actually they can't fight about what they actually want to fight about so instead... whatever the fuck this is!

Thank you so much for reading and commenting and kudos'ing. I read all your comments multiple times and they are the reason I have written more words this month than I have since I was in grad school!

As mentioned in the note at the top, this was not the chapter I planned or promised, because the chapter I planned would have been 12k words long, so I split it in half. Also, more suffering this way. You're welcome!

Up next: a ballet, a break up, and some emotional honesty (for real).

Chapter 9

Chapter Summary

A ballet! A breakup! Boys being emotionally vulnerable! And Yuna Hollander doing the math.

Chapter Notes

Ilya has never understood why Shane has a reputation for being wooden and emotionless. He’s heard it over and over: Boston teammates calling Shane a fucking hockey robot, commentators getting kicks out of alliterations like stone-faced Shane Hollander.

Yes, Shane is reserved in public, or with people he doesn’t know or doesn’t like; he measures words as carefully as he measures his carbohydrate consumption. And yes, he doesn’t have much lilt or movement to his voice, relying mostly on volume rather than inflection to convey his meaning.

But his face betrays him, every time. You can read everything he’s feeling as he feels it on his face, if you bother to look, if you learn its language.

Admittedly, Ilya has spent more time studying Shane’s face then the average person, although he doesn’t really understand that either; who can look at Shane Hollander’s face and not want to catalogue every small detail of it? Ilya has looked at Shane’s face from what feels like every distance and every angle, through every emotion; he hoards each expression like a private art collector, keeping his memories behind glass where even he can’t reach them to smudge them or wear them down. He knows how Shane’s mouth goes slack when he’s getting fucked, how his eyes burn like hot coals when he’s across the face-off line, how his brows draw together when he’s spiraling, how tensely he holds his jaw when he’s doing something he doesn’t want to.

Which is why he can tell the exact second that Shane registers what he just said. Everything soft and wanting and open in his face goes rigid at once: his mouth, his jaw. The flush on his cheeks turns mottled. The hurt in his eyes takes Ilya’s breath away, but it’s gone in a flash, locked beneath searing anger.

It takes him a few more seconds to actually respond. Then he spits, as venomously as Ilya has ever heard him, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Ilya stands there, silent. He still sort of has Shane backed against the wall, even though he’s no longer caging him in with his body. From this angle, in the weird bright light of snowfall at night, he can see the pulse beating in Shane’s throat.

He can’t help himself—he puts his hand out, going for Shane’s shoulder, or neck, or cheek, he’s not sure.

Shane knocks his hand away, snapping, “Don’t fucking touch me.”

They stand there in silence, the only sound their ragged breathing and the groan of a faraway furnace. Belatedly, Shane fixes the collar of his shirt, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Ilya should move back and let him out, let him go. He knows this. Shane has offered him something—fuck me before I go back to my boyfriend—and Ilya has said no. That can be the end of it, that should be the end of it.

Shane makes the decision for him, shouldering past him. “I can’t fucking believe,” he’s saying as he does, “that I let you do this to me again.”

The fight had gone out of Ilya. He could swear it had. But the anger opens up again at this. He wheels around. “I’m doing this to you?”

He doesn’t even remember Shane pausing to take off his boots, but somehow he is now having to sit down on the couch to put them on again before he can storm out. Another version of Ilya—younger, more brittle—would have taken the opportunity to arrange himself in a casual position while Shane is focused on his boots, the better to look unaffected and aloof when Shane looks up again. This version of him just tries to hide the shaking of his hands.

“I’m doing this to you?” Ilya repeats. “What the fuck am I doing to you?”

Shane stops yanking on his boot laces to glare up at him. His hands, Ilya notes distantly, are also shaking. He looks agonized and almost afraid, like he’s dredging up something from some deep crevice inside him and he doesn’t even know what shape it’s going to take when it’s finally revealed. He finally gets out, choking on it as he does: “You won’t leave me alone!”

“What?” Ilya asks, genuinely bewildered.

Shane drops his head into his hands, clutches his skull in frustration. “God—you won’t fucking—you won’t leave me alone, and I don’t know what you fucking want from me! I don’t know what you want, I never have!”

“You don’t know what I want?” Ilya echoes, dumbly.

Shane is standing seemingly without being conscious of it, surging towards him in that way he has, where Ilya never quite knows if he’s going to kiss him or punch him. He fists his hand in Ilya’s sweater instead of doing either of those and gives him a shake. “We were—we just—you were the one, back then, you were the one who asked me to stay. I was fine, I was—we could have just kept fucking, and you, you wanted more, you fucking bought me ginger ale and asked me to stay the night with you.”

“And then you ran away and fucked Rose Landry,” Ilya says, automatically.

Shane ignores him, talks over him. “And then I fucking came out to you and told I liked you and I wanted more and you said yes! You—you called me Shane and you kissed me and you told me about your dad and then you just fucking left. You went to Russia, you sent me one fucking text, and then you blocked me. You fucking blocked me and you never even fucking told me why! Or what I did!”

Ilya has to close his eyes, the sticky, nauseating wave of guilt and shame that washes over him is so strong. He’d thought, at the time, that he was sparing Shane, saving him from Ilya’s shitty life and the darkness that eventually takes everything Ilya cares about. It doesn’t sound like Shane feels like he’s been spared.

“And then I’m finally—I’ve finally fucking moved on, and I’m happy, I have a boyfriend—”

Ilya can’t help but sneer at that. “Yes, you seem really fucking happy with your boyfriend.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Shane gives him another shake. His voice is steadily getting louder, edging into yelling. Ilya spares a thought to hope no one else is left in the building. “Why won’t you leave me the fuck alone? What do you want from me? Because you obviously don’t want to be with me and I guess you don’t want to fuck me, so what the fuck do you want?”

“I want you to say that what happened two weeks ago mattered!” Ilya finds himself shouting back before he can stop himself. “I want you to fucking choose me, Shane! Even though I’m an asshole and I’ve hurt you and I don’t deserve it, I still want you to choose me!”

Another silence, just as jagged as the last. Shane’s hand loosens, fractionally, its hold on Ilya’s sweater.

Shane says, looking just as bewildered as Ilya had a minute ago, “What?”

Ilya closes his eyes, tries very hard not to groan aloud. He feels winded, but not hollowed out. Gently, ready to pull back, he puts his hand over Shane’s where it’s fisted over his chest, and untangles it from his sweater. “Can we just sit down, please?”

Shane allows his hand to be maneuvered, but his face remains set, and he doesn’t move otherwise.

“Please,” Ilya says, as softly as he can. “I just—I think we need to talk. I would like for us to talk.”

Slowly, warily, Shane walks himself back to the couch and sits back down. He doesn’t even fully lean back against the cushions; he keeps his spine stiff, his weight balanced forward, ready to leap up and make for the door at any second. Ilya supposes that’s fair; it’s more than he expected, maybe more than he deserves.

He only allows himself to take a breath when Shane is seated and seemingly not going anywhere. He runs his hands through his hair, takes a moment to turn on the small lamp beside Yuna’s computer, shrug off his coat, and hand Shane a box of tissues before he pulls Yuna’s desk chair over to near the couch. He sits facing Shane but a little askew from him, not quite ready to face him directly.

Shane looks at the box of tissues in his hand as if Ilya has insulted him. “I’m not fucking crying,” he says, although his eyes are wet and his nose is clogged.

“I didn’t say you were,” Ilya says, mildly.

Shane, still frowning at him, blows his nose. “Thanks,” he mutters as he balls up the tissue and tosses it at the small wastebasket. Always polite, even when he’s seething. Ilya loves him so much it’s stupid.

Ilya sits there for a minute, trying to gather his thoughts. As always, the faster his pulse beats, the more he needs the words, the more English slips away from him.

And Shane, as always, is impatient with the silence. “So…” he says, prompting.

“Give me a minute, Hollander, fuck,” Ilya says, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the anxiety and uncertainty flickering on Shane’s face. He can’t close his ears, though, and he can still hear Shane shifting, a rustling that might be his coat finally coming off, or might be him crossing his arms to better guard himself against whatever Ilya is about to say.

“Okay,” he says slowly, because even though he’s not ready, even though he doesn’t know all that he needs or wants to say, he knows that if he doesn’t begin, he never will. “First. I am… very sorry for ending things that way with you. I should not have done it like that. It was very, very shitty of me. I was feeling very… overwhelmed… with my family, my father. I felt a lot of pressure. I thought I was sparing you from having to be involved in my shitty life. But that does not make how I treated you okay.” The words burn his throat as they come out, the cleansing, searing burn of vodka or the first inhale of an icy winter night.

Shane isn’t looking at him now. He’s staring down at his hands, something conflicted twisting his face.

Ilya pushes on. “I am sorry for hurting you,” he says, and he doesn’t like how small his voice is when he says it. “It was not what I wanted. I would do anything to change it or make it better, but I can’t.”

Shane bites his bottom lip, still looking down. His hands twist, fretfully, in his lap. He says, finally, “You didn’t just block me, Ilya. You’re still blocking me. It’s been six fucking years. I mean, those first few years after—I followed you like a fucking dog in Vegas, I kept coming to your hotel room, I fucking threw myself at you for god’s sake. You could have—literally at any time I would have—I don’t know how I could have been clearer that I would have, that I always wanted you to—” He breaks off, either unsure of how the sentence ends or still not ready to say the whole of it. 

Ilya closes his eyes again, sits with the truth of this. Part of him wants to argue: you didn’t make it clear, you said I made you feel like shit, you told me you’d found someone else and we were nothing. Another part of him knows both things can be true. Shane thought he was clear, thought his actions could only be interpreted one way, saw his side of their relationship and filled in the blanks for Ilya’s side. And Ilya… did the same.

The radiator clangs to life with a roar of gas. The windows shudder as a gust of wind hits them. The air still smells faintly of the tea they were drinking this afternoon. Some part of Ilya wonders if this is the last time they’ll be alone together like this, held safe in a bubble of space and time where nothing matters but the two of them, the warmth of their bodies, the pounding of their hearts.

If it is the last time—if this is the end, really the end—then, at least, he can be honest. He can let Shane in. Let him see what has been true all along, and what hasn’t. Just once, he can try to do this. 

He says, “You told me to go to therapy. I went to therapy. Do you want to know what I learned?”

“Um…” Shane says, eyes flicking up to him at the shift in topic before flicking away again. “Okay, I guess.”

Now it’s his turn to dredge something up from the depths of himself. It’s as painful, as terrifying as it looked, as he’s always known it would be. Slowly, he says, “I learned that I have a voice in my head. It sounds like my father, or maybe my brother. Or me, I don’t know. But all day, all the time, this voice is saying, Ilya, you are worthless. You are bad. You are a piece of shit. Anyone who likes you, who thinks you are good, has just been fooled by you. No one could love you if they knew how bad you really are. Even when I win the Stanley Cup, I hear this. Even when I win MVP. Even… even when the beautiful hockey player I have been obsessed with for years says he likes me and wants to be with me.”

The agony is back on Shane’s face. He says, “Ilya…” but doesn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence.

It doesn’t matter; Ilya needs to keep going, needs to say this before he loses the courage and the clarity he’s feeling, in this small room, in this soft weird light. He says, “So when you say to me things like this makes me feel like shit, I hear, you are shit, you make my life shit, I would be better without you.”

“Ilya,” Shane says again, leaning forward now. He puts his hand, tentatively, on Ilya’s knee. “I didn’t…”

Ilya shakes his head, doesn’t look at him, continues. “And when you say, it is okay to fuck because I don’t need to tell my boyfriend, I hear, you don’t matter, Ilya, you are just a good fuck, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted from you. Is that what you mean?”

“No,” Shane says vehemently, squeezing his leg with some urgency.

Ilya covers Shane’s hand with his own, squeezes back, tries not to hang onto it as if it were a lifeline. “Okay. Well, I think you do this too. I think when I say, Shane, I will die if I don’t fuck you, you hear, Shane, I only care about fucking you. Yes?”

Shane doesn’t say anything, but his grip on Ilya’s leg doesn’t lessen, either.

Ilya says, “And when I say, Shane, I do not want to do this with you, you hear, Shane, you are too boring, you have always been too boring, and I am going to find someone better to fuck. Yes?”

“Yes,” Shane says quietly. He releases Ilya’s leg but doesn’t pull back. Instead he turns his hand over, presses his palm to Ilya’s, wraps his fingers and thumb loosely around his wrist. Ilya mirrors him; they grip each other, not quite holding hands, but something close. Shane’s hand is dry and warm in Ilya’s.

The steady pressure of Shane’s hand, the fact that he has not pulled away yet, gives Ilya the courage to say, “Okay. Then I want you to try, please. Try not to listen to the voice in your head that tells you what I am saying. Try to listen to me. And I will try… to say it the best I can.”

He makes himself look at Shane. Shane’s gaze flits away from his, but then comes back to him. Holds.

Ilya says, “I do not just want to fuck you. I do not think you are too boring. I want to… be with you. But I can’t do this with you any more.” He gestures, with the hand Shane’s not gripping, to the room around them. “I don’t want to feel bad and shameful when I’m with you. I don’t want you to feel those things either. I don’t actually like fucking you in bathrooms or for the hour we can sneak away in the middle of the night.”

Shane’s eyes are deep and shiny, reflecting the lamp light. Ilya keeps waiting for them to go dull, for the openness deep inside them to slam shut against him. They don’t. They get a little shinier, a little softer, as he speaks.

Shane says, with a watery smile, “Are you sure? Because I really think you might have a thing for bathrooms.”

Ilya huffs. “Well, maybe I do now,” he admits, “but I didn’t before. This is your fault.”

“Hmm,” Shane says. He’s looking back at their hands now, and he’s not smiling, but his eyes and his mouth still have that softness to them. It makes something in Ilya start expanding with a sudden rush. He tries not to stamp it down, squeeze it out, even though every instinct in him screams at him to; he lets himself know what the feeling is, even though every instinct tells him not to.

The feeling is hope. It’s filling his ribcage. It’s making him feel lightheaded. He takes a breath, tries to get a hold of it, not sure how to walk the line between extinguishing it inside himself and just trying not to be carried away by it.

“Okay,” he says, “That’s what I want to say. Can you… can you say what you are thinking? And I will try to listen to what you are saying, and not what I am hearing?”

Shane closes his eyes. Ilya supposes it’s only fair to let him take his time, but now that he’s on the other side of it, he’s as impatient as Shane was.

Eyes still closed, Shane picks up Ilya’s hand, the one he’s holding with both of his own. Presses his cheek to Ilya’s palm, leans his weight into it.  Ilya lets his thumb sweep Shane’s cheekbone, gather some of the dampness at the corner of his eye. The feeling in his chest—the hope—swells again, impossibly.

Shane turns his head, presses his mouth against Ilya’s palm. Not quite a kiss. Then he lets their hands fall, without letting go of Ilya, back down to his lap. Ilya finds that somehow, he’s scooted closer to Shane, so that their knees are interlocking.

Shane says, with a deep breath, “I’m going to break up with Alex. He’s not—he’s in Australia right now, but when he comes back.”

Ilya can’t help his hand twitching a little, in Shane’s grasp. His mouth is suddenly dry.

“It’s not… not because of what you just said. Or what happened two weeks ago. Or, not just. Not that—” Shane suddenly looks alarmed— “Not that it didn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Fuck, Ilya. It mattered so much. You matter so much. You always have.”

Shane’s chewing on his bottom lip again. Ilya wants to tug it out of his teeth. Possibly with his own teeth.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, he cautions internally—although, is he? The hateful voice inside him is quiet, for once, as quiet as it ever gets, and he thinks—no, knows—no, hopes—he’s hearing Shane correctly. Understanding him, for once.

“Alex and I, we’re not… compatible,” Shane says. “I think I’ve known that for awhile. Maybe I knew it the whole time. I think I couldn’t really let myself, like, fully… be in it with him. Or with anyone. Because there was always... someone else.”

“Hayden?” Ilya guesses, dryly, around the lump in his throat.

Shane laughs and knocks his knee against Ilya’s. “No, idiot,” he says, just as dryly, “J.J.”

Ilya knocks his knee back, harder.

They both laugh, and then Ilya can’t help it; he folds forward over their hands, presses his face against Shane’s legs. He just wants to be closer to him, just needs a second to breathe him in, to make sure this is real. He notices his eyes are damp as he presses them against the silky smooth fabric of Shane’s pants; they probably have been for awhile.

He’s still, at least partly, waiting for Shane to push him away. He feels another knot in himself loosen when Shane runs his hands, gently, through his hair instead, smoothing the curls at the back of his neck.

After a minute or ten—time has gotten syrupy, reduced to the heat and solidity of Shane’s thigh and the feeling of Shane's fingers in his hair—Shane tugs him back up, although he keeps hold of Ilya’s hand.

“Ilya,” he says, “I don’t want…” He stops again, seems to work to rearrange the words in his head. Then he says, “You’re right. I don’t want this—us—to feel bad, or shameful, or dirty. I want—we have so much more to talk about. I have… more to say to you. About how I feel. And what I want. But it doesn’t feel—it’s not right, right now, not until I talk to Alex. I need to—I need to get my shit together.” His mouth quirks up, a little, on these last words.

Ilya thinks about Shane holding him, on the rooftop in LA, saying, get your shit together. Saying, I don’t want to do it without you.

“Okay, Hollander,” he says. “Get your shit together. Do what you need to. And then…”

“And then,” Shane agrees, and the feeling in Ilya’s chest grows larger, somehow.

Somehow, they stand up, get their coats and boots on, without falling into each other again. It takes almost all of Ilya’s willpower, every second Shane is still in reach, to not just shove him back down onto the couch, cover his body with his own. But he holds on to Shane’s words: I have more to say. We have so much more to talk about.

It means… he thinks he knows what it means. Hopes, at least. It means, at a minimum, that this is not the end; this is not the last time; Shane wants more, thinks there’s more of this to be had. More of them, of Shane saying us, saying we.

He walks Shane to the door of the office like it’s the door of his house. He knows better than to follow him to the garage, knows he needs to let Shane leave. For now.

Shane says, “We play you in Montreal in three weeks, last time before playoffs. Will you… will you come over, after? To mine? And we can… talk?”

“Okay,” says Ilya, unable to say more, afraid his voice will give out on him.

Shyly, gently, Shane kisses his cheek. Then he turns and goes.

Ilya lets him go. Wonders if—hopes—it’s the last time he has to.

***

Alex’s flight from Sydney to Vancouver is delayed, which means he misses his connection to Montreal and has to wait several hours before he can get booked onto another one. He finally arrives in their penthouse at 11 am after over 24 hours of air travel, while Shane’s at practice, and by the time Shane gets home a few hours later, Alex is so deeply asleep he’s in the REM stage and drooling.

Shane stands in the doorway of their bedroom, watching him fretfully. He’s been waiting to talk to Alex face to face for weeks now, and since his last conversation with Ilya, he’s run every possible iteration of this conversation in his head. None of the scenarios he invented, however, began with Alex dead to the world. He wants to shake him awake right now, but even Shane recognizes that it would be psychotic to wake someone up out of a deeply needed sleep just to break up with them.

There’s a ticking clock on the conversation though, for two reasons. The first is that Shane doesn’t think he can sleep in bed with Alex tonight. He definitely doesn’t want to have sex with Alex. Refusing to do either will start the conversation anyway, because Shane can’t explain why he doesn’t want to without explaining the whole thing. Better to do it before the question of getting into bed arises.

The other reason is that he and Alex are supposed to go the Montreal Ballet tonight with Hayden and Jackie.

Hayden had enlisted Shane months ago; Jackie had done ballet as young girl, and once a year, when the Voyageurs had a by night, they used their date night to go to the ballet and then to a hotel downtown. Usually Jackie’s sister and husband came along, but they couldn’t for whatever reason, and Hayden had begged Shane to take the tickets so he didn’t have to invite Jackie’s cousin, who he hated.

(“You just want me to be your drunk driver to the hotel,” Shane had said, rolling his eyes.

“Not just,” Hayden had said.)

He forces himself to walk away from the bedroom, sit down on the couch and watch game tape for awhile. He hears Alex stir a few times, but he doesn’t seem to wake. He’s still antsy so he goes and does yoga for another hour. By the time he’s finished and showered, there’s only about 30 minutes until he needs to leave to pick up the Pikes.

He’s just resolved to leave Alex a note about where he’s gone and resign himself to having the breakup conversation tomorrow when Alex wanders, yawning, into the kitchen, wearing only boxer briefs.

“Hey, babe,” he says, leaning into kiss Shane’s cheek where he’s sitting on a stool at the counter.

“Hey,” Shane says, trying not go stiff. “Welcome back.”

Alex shuffles around, getting himself a glass of water, before turning back to Shane and registering what he’s wearing.

“You look nice,” he says, taking in the slacks and wool cardigan he’s wearing.

“Um, yeah,” says Shane, “I was about to head out actually, to the uh, ballet? With Hayden and Jackie? I thought you’d probably just want to sleep so I wasn’t going to…”

Alex drinks his water, idly scratches at his stomach as he processes this. “Fuck, yeah, I forgot about that.”

Shane lets his eyes skim over Alex. He’s still attracted to him, still likes the black tattoos on his forearms, his muscular stomach, his broad shoulders. Even his stupid fucking soul patch, which he somehow never comes back from Australia without, doesn’t take away from the handsomeness of his face.

The attraction is more appreciation than anything, though; there’s no hunger in it, no craving to touch and smell and taste, even though it’s been over a month since they’ve seen each other. Alex clearly feels no hunger either; after the perfunctory cheek kiss and the general once over, he’s barely looked at Shane since entering the kitchen.

“No, I’ll come,” Alex decides.

Shane blinks, having lost the thread of the conversation. “What?”

“To the ballet.”

“Um, why?” Shane asks, before he can stop himself, then corrects, “I mean, aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to keep, um, recovering?”

“I mean, yeah, I’m jet lagged obviously, but I also just slept for six hours,” Alex points out. “Honestly, I feel pretty chipper right now.”

“But…” Shane gropes for an excuse that isn’t I’m breaking up with you and every second I know that and you don’t is excruciating and therefore I absolutely can’t go on a double date with you and my best friends. “Um, but you don’t want to just… take it easy tonight? Hayds booked a table at that French restaurant Jackie likes, you know, the really formal one...”

“Nah, I like that place. And besides,” Alex slides by Shane, squeezing his shoulders as he goes, “Of the two of us, I’m the only one who knows anything about ballet, so it doesn’t really make sense for you to go by yourself, right?”

“Right,” Shane says, dully. Six weeks ago that comment alone would have set them off on a fight that would probably ruin the night and definitely last into the next day, at least. Now, he just bites down on the inside of his cheek and lets it go.

Dinner is fine, as fine as it can be; Alex, despite his claims of being chipper, seems to still be slightly dazed, so he doesn’t talk much. Hayden and Jackie have a cocktail each and then split a bottle of wine between them, getting increasingly giggly as the meal grinds on. Shane does his best to keep a smile on his face and the conversation focused on the Pikes.

The ballet is not what Shane expected. Well, some of it is. Alex perks up as they sit down and spends the time between being seated and the lights going down explaining how the first dance they’ll be seeing is an anti-war classic first choreographed after World War I. Shane has to admit it’s actually interesting, although he can’t really focus on what Alex is saying because Hayden and Jackie have moved onto public drunkenness stage two: shameless handsiness.

Shane has only ever been to the Nutcracker, so he’s expecting a full symphony, lavish sets, and tall blonde women in opulent tutus. Instead, the first act takes place against an almost entirely black backdrop, with the dancers lit so they stand out from the shadows. There aren’t any tutus, but there a lot of weird masks and women in peasant dresses and muscular, graceful men in what look like BDSM harnesses. The only instruments are two pianos. It’s not boring, that’s for sure, but Shane isn’t sure what to think about it other than that.

After an intermission spent standing in line to get Hayden and Jackie more wine against his better judgement, Shane settles in for the next act. Alex only has time to say, “Oh, I’m excited about this one,” before the lights fall.

When they come up again, a man and woman are standing alone on the stage. They’re dressed simply,  the woman in a leotard, the man shirtless and in flowing pants. They stand at an angle to the audience, feet flat and angled outwards; the stage and backdrop, again, are simply black and unadorned.

The music begins; a single piano, one measured note at a time, crystalline high notes riven every so often by resonant bass notes. A cello joins in, plaintive. The man and woman sway, for a moment, from side to side. Then they really begin to move.

Shane has never seen anything like this. The dancers move slowly, with incredible control. They bend together and apart, their bodies arcing like tall grass in wind. The shapes they make are impossible, somehow elegant and awkward simultaneously, both sinuous and jagged. The male dancer is beautiful and strong, but the woman is who Shane can’t stop watching. Over and over, her partner lifts her, and she reaches and curves into the air, her body somehow both perfectly secure and utterly free.

For large parts of the dance, the dancers aren’t even looking at each other. They dance side by side, in sync, and even when they come together, it’s rare they’re face to face. It doesn’t matter; their bodies move as if tethered together at every flexion point. Again and again, they move away from each other, then come back to each other, and it’s not just the man holding the woman; she takes his weight too, directs his movement. Each time they give themselves to each other bonelessly; each time, they hold each other, bend together into a new and even more beautiful shape.

In the dark, as the dancers’ spines bend and legs and arms extend, Shane cries. He’s thinking about how he felt in the hotel room in Florida, weeks ago; how Ilya’s eyes on him made him feel safer than he’d ever felt, and freer too. Free to be hyper-focused, anxious, controlling—he’s all these things, he knows he’s his mother’s son—but also free to be soft or needy or confident or just himself, just Shane, with no performance or people pleasing layered on top.

His whole life, he’s fought to hide the ugly parts of himself. Watching these dancers, held in this slow, deceptively simple melody, he can see that the ugliness is what makes it beautiful. That without the flat feet and the sharp angles and the occasional jarringly sonorous bass notes, the dance would be pleasing, enjoyable even, but not this, this wrenching, hypnotic, melancholy thing.

He’s thinking about the voice in Ilya’s head, the one that lies to him, that makes him see only the worst in himself. He has a voice in his head too, he knows, or maybe two voices; one saying you’re too much, the other saying you’re never enough.

He’s thinking that the only time those voices are quiet is when he’s with Ilya.

He’s thinking he wants to let himself be ugly. Wants to know that whatever shape he makes, however contorted, however rigid or flexible or impossible, he will still be held, still be safe.

Wants to know that Ilya will hold him, and wants Ilya to know that Shane will hold him too, when he needs it.

Jackie, next to him, suddenly takes his hand and squeezes it. He looks over at her, belatedly wiping his face, realizing she’s caught him crying. He’s embarrassed until he sees she’s crying too, just as moved as he is, although probably—definitely—for different reasons. Grateful, he holds onto her hand until it’s time to applaud, which he does, possibly more enthusiastically than he ever has.

He doesn’t even notice that Alex barely applauds.

He’s somewhere else, in a future he’s only just starting to let himself believe he can have.

***

The drive to Hayden and Jackie’s hotel is excruciatingly awkward but blessedly short. Hayden and Jackie are doing what Shane’s dad would call “canoodling” in the backseat of Shane’s Land Rover and what Shane, when he has the misfortune to have to look in the rearview mirror, would call “drunken groping.”

Jackie is also trying to pretend this is not happening and hold a conversation with Shane, which he honestly wishes she would just give up on.

“It looked like you really liked the duet,” she says to Shane, as Hayden more or less devours her earlobe.

Hayden pulls away. Shane is probably imagining the sucking noise his mouth makes as it detaches. He knows he doesn’t really have any room to judge, but he at least has the decency to debase himself in private.

“Ooh, I know that one, babe,” Hayden says, too loud. “That was a folie à deux, right?”

“Jesus, Hayd, you speak French,” Shane says. “Try to act like it.”

Jackie, giggling, loudly corrects him. “It’s pas de deux, babe. Folie à deux is like when two people go crazy  together. Or something.”

“Oh right,” Hayden says, “Like the Joker movie. Speaking of, what the fuck was up with all the creepy masks in the first dance? And what were those leather things the guys were wearing?”

Alex makes a tiny snort of derision. It’s the first noise he’s actually made since the ballet ended; he’s been uncharacteristically, stonily silent. Shane shoots him a sidelong warning glance, but Alex doesn’t say anything more.

Then they’re at the hotel and the Pikes are spilling out of his backseat (Hayden belatedly and gracelessly extracting his hand from where it had found his way up Jackie’s shirt as they go). Hayden stops at Shane’s window to give him a fist bump. “Thanks man, you’re a life saver,” he says.

“You’re sure that vasectomy worked, right?” Shane asks. “Like you went to the doctor and made sure?”

“Yep,” Hayden says, giving him an only slightly wobbly thumbs up. “Cleared to raw dog my wife!”

“Gross,” says Shane, and rolls up his window over the sound of Hayden’s cackling. Once the window’s shut, he says, “They’re definitely just going to order room service and pass out in front of a movie.”

Alex doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t say anything for the entire drive home, either. Shane drums his fingers on the steering wheel; the ballet, especially the pas de deux, had transported him, allowed him to forget all that’s looming over them. In the oppressive silence of the car, all of it comes flooding back to him.

As they pull into the apartment’s underground parking lot, Alex finally stirs. He says, not looking at Shane, “You know, since I’m up, I might as well get a little work done. I have a lot of emails to catch up on. I might just—”

Shane cuts him off, seeing his window closing. “Alex, before you do work, you and I need to talk. I mean, I have to talk to you.”

He parks the car. Alex says, still not looking at him, “Talk about what? The fact that you fucked Ilya Rozanov in Florida? I already know that.”

He gets out of the car and closes the door behind him before Shane can summon a reply.

Shane sits there, shell-shocked, for a moment. He’s sure his mouth is open. He’s sure he looks stupid, as if he’s just been slapped with something silly, like a fish. He doesn’t look in the mirror to check; he just hurries after Alex.

They share a tense, silent elevator ride. Shane grinds his teeth, breathes through his nose, tries to regulate his heartbeat. As soon as they’re in the apartment and the door is closed, Shane bursts out, “What the hell are you talking about?” A not-exactly-small part of Shane is clamoring to know how Alex knows, how it’s even fucking possible, given he’s told exactly zero people the full truth of his relationship with Ilya, and the only people who even know parts of it don’t know Ilya’s name. Who else knows? Has he been obvious? Has the entire world somehow always known the secret he’s thought he’s been keeping for fifteen years?

Alex, stripping off his coat, laughs meanly. “Shane, I’m not stupid. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice that the only thing that gets you hard these days is talking about Ilya Rozanov?”

Shane feels himself flush, a sensation both hot and numbing that spreads across his face and down his chest. “Oh,” he says weakly, humiliated. He hadn’t noticed, after all, and it was his body. Or maybe he’d just shoved the noticing down deep, alongside all the other feelings he deemed not useful or appropriate in any given moment.

“Oh,” Alex repeats, rolling his eyes. He looks more flustered than Shane has ever seen him; he’s running a hand through his hair and hopping a little as he tries to kick off his shoes. He finally gets them off, then stands there, gathering himself. Eventually, he says, “Look, it’s fine, I get it, okay.” He does not sound like it’s fine, but continues, “He’s your ex, right? The one you talked about?”

Shane fish-mouths at him, unable to find any words. He’d told Alex the bare minimum about the ex that broke his heart, even less then he’d told his parents. Alex had never asked for details.

“I figured it out when he said he’s bisexual at that dinner. And I know he was with you in Florida. The two of you playing together was literally all over North American news.”

Shane knows words are needed. He still doesn’t have any.

Alex looks at him, now more impatient than flustered. “Okay,” he says, “So I know. Can I go work now?”

Finally, Shane’s jaw creaks open. The first thing he manages is, “What the fuck? You want to just go work? Why aren’t you more mad about this?”

Alex rolls his eyes again. He heads for the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt, and Shane trails after him, still in a daze.

Alex says, stripping off his shirt and getting a hanger out of the closet to hang it back up, “I mean, I am pretty fucking mad you never said that he’s your ex. And that you didn’t say he was the one you fucked in Florida. Or—” another mean laugh— “the one that fucked you, I’m guessing, unless you’ve been hiding even more from me than I think.”

Shane flushes even hotter at that. He’s really getting fucking tired of the men in his life assuring him that there’s nothing weird or shameful about bottoming, and then throwing it in his face like he should be ashamed of it later. Unbidden, he thinks of Ilya saying, he should be grateful you’re such an adventurous slut. Right now, in this moment, he’s never felt less ashamed of how much he likes getting fucked. He feels shame about a lot of things—lying to Alex, treating Ilya like a dirty secret, the years he’s spent avoiding the truth of his own emotions—but not that.

That’s not the issue right now, though, so he navigates around that particular surge of anger and says instead, “Okay… and… what about the part where I had sex with my ex? Are you mad about that?” It feels weird to call Ilya his ex, but, again, that’s not the issue at hand.

Alex is now taking off his slacks, smoothing the wrinkles out before he hangs them up too. He’s always done this, Shane realizes; he treats his clothes, his things, with the same careful attention Shane does. He likes his space orderly, likes to keep things neat and tidy, to leave no trace of himself in the rooms he leaves behind.

It’s another thing Shane mistook for compatibility, probably, when it was just simple commonality: a thing they share that has no real bearing on who they are as people.

Alex says, “Do I need to be mad about that?”

There’s a suspicion somewhere in the back of Shane’s head that he hasn’t been allowing out. He knows it’s not fair to voice it now; he knows he’s the one in the wrong, really, between the two of them. Still, he can’t help but ask, “You’ve been fucking other men this whole time, haven’t you? When I’m out of town.”

Alex’s face doesn’t even twitch; he doesn’t have the grace to look caught out. He doesn’t answer the question, but says instead, in that patronizing tone of voice that always makes Shane’s adrenaline spike, “Shane, you know I’m always safe. I’ve told you it doesn’t mean anything.”

Shane searches himself for anger, for betrayal. He only feels exhausted. Well, there’s a little anger.

He says, “To you.”

“What?” Alex asks, condescension slipping a bit.

Shane repeats, “It doesn’t mean anything to you. Just like it doesn’t mean anything to you if I fuck someone else. But you never fucking ask if it means anything to me.”

Alex, having shrugged on sweats and a t-shirt, finally turns to face Shane again. “Okay,” he says, voice thick with scorn. “By all means, tell me what getting fucked by Ilya Rozanov means to you.”

Rendered speechless again, Shane just gapes at him.

Alex snorts. “That’s what I thought.”

He goes to move past Shane, who’s still hovering in the doorframe to the bedroom. When Shane doesn’t move, Alex sighs, folds his arms across his chest.

“Do you even like me?” Shane asks, because it’s the question that comes to him. “Have you ever?”

Alex just looks at him. “Do you like me?”

Shane doesn’t have an answer to that, which he knows is answer enough.

They stand there and look at each for a long moment. Alex is the first man Shane ever said I love you to, although he can admit now that he’d never fully meant it, or maybe just hadn’t known what it meant when he said it. Neither of them have said anything like that to each other in months. He hadn’t expected Alex to cry or beg him to stay, but he also hadn’t been expecting this sheer indifference.

“I’m in love with Ilya,” Shane says, because he needs it to be explicit even though he knows they both know. And because it’s the truth, and Shane is tired, so tired, of running from it. “I want to be with him. That’s what it means.”

Finally, finally, Alex’s face does something other than sneer. It’s not devastation—it doesn’t even really look like hurt—but there’s sadness there, maybe regret. Just briefly, he reaches out, touches the back of his hand to Shane’s cheek.

“Shane,” he says, “I do like you. I respect how hard you work. I admire your focus and your dedication and how much you love your family. But you and I want really different things from a relationship.”

Shane feels something release in his chest. It can be this simple, he realizes. They don’t have to hate each other or do irreparable damage to each other. Neither one of them has to be the villain.

They can just want what they want, and know that the other isn’t capable of giving it.

“Yeah,” he says, finally moving out of the way to let Alex go. “We do.”

***

On the Friday before the Montreal game, Ilya stops by Yuna’s office.

It’s the first time he’s been in the room since his conversation with Shane. He sort of feels like it’s going to look different, somehow changed by what had transpired between the two of them. The way that he feels changed.

But it looks and smells and sounds just the same: minty tea, warm light, the ticking of Yuna’s analog clock. The electric kettle is already on. The honey is out.

Yuna smiles when she sees him.

“Oh good,” she says, “You didn’t bring pastries this time.”

“I respect your wishes,” Ilya says, seriously, and then adds, “And Harris and Troy found them in the locker room and ate them all before I could stop them.”

They catch up, as usual; Yuna tells him about David’s misadventures in pickleball, a sport he’s been forced to pick up because all of his friends have stopped playing tennis, and he tells her about the player called up from the AHL to replace Bood while he undergoes surgery on his shoulder.

She doesn’t mention the dinner with Shane. Ilya doesn’t either.

“Oh, I forgot,” she says, at a lull in the conversation. “I was going through a some of Shane’s things to put into storage and I found something you might like to see.” She turns to rifle through her purse.

Ilya feels a twinge of dread in his stomach, though he doesn’t know why, at least not immediately.

Yuna hands him a small framed photo from the CCM ad photoshoot he and Shane had shot before their rookie year. Shane and he are glaring at each other from either side of the frame, a bright light shining right between their faces, etching their silhouettes in shadow.

If Ilya closed his eyes, he knows he would be there again; standing in that dingy locker room, rank with sweat and unwashed gear, watching steam begin to unfurl through the room and deciding whether or not to give in to his instinct to follow Shane Hollander—infuriating, arrogant, beautiful Shane Hollander—in to the showers.

He doesn’t often feel fond of past versions of himself. But that one—the one who swallowed down his own nerves, his own desperate desire, threw back his shoulders and sauntered after Shane: Ilya will always be grateful for him.

Slowly, he becomes aware that Yuna is still holding the photo out to him, and he hasn’t said anything in a socially inappropriate amount of time.

“Oh wow,” he says, flatly, reaching out to take the photo from her, hoping she didn’t notice.

Her gaze on him—level, sharp—says she noticed. “What year was that, do you remember? It was your rookie year, right?”

“Summer before,” Ilya says, swallowing around the lump in his throat. It takes monumental willpower to not trace the line of Shane’s nose with his finger. He remembers having to force himself to look away from Shane’s freckles, which the layers of photoshoot makeup had not quite covered up. He remembers making Shane laugh for the first time, the way it made his stomach clench, the way he immediately wanted to do it again.

Fuck. Four days until the game. He wants to see Shane so badly he feels sick with it.

“You know what’s funny,” Yuna says.

The dread in his stomach, which had faded at the sight of the photo itself, comes roaring back.

Fuck. Shane has an annoyingly excellent memory. The universe may have been kinder to Ilya recently, but he knows the chances that Yuna does not share that particular trait with her son are slim to none.

“After you stumbled into my office last year—” Yuna gives him a warm smile at that, so maybe he’s not totally fucked here—“I just kept thinking that actually I had met you before.”

Oh. Nope. He’s fucked. Completely.

“Oh?” He says, aware that his reaction is once again delayed.

She nods, her eyes never leaving his. “And then I remembered, we didn’t actually meet, but we did run into each other on the elevator once. Or, you were on the elevator, and I almost got on. Do you remember?”

Ilya may or may not be sweating. His brain is unhelpfully going oh shit oh fuck oh shit and doesn’t have anything else to say for itself. “I don’t know,” he hears himself say. “Maybe.”

Yuna says, evenly, “I remember it pretty well. I was going down, and you were going up. I remember that because I had the strangest thought as the doors were closing.”

Ilya closes his eyes. He’s caught. (They’re caught—oh fuck, Shane is going to melt down about this—he can’t think about Shane right now.)

He says, “Yes.”

Yuna continues, relentlessly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be weird if he was going up to see Shane?”

“Yes,” Ilya says again, tonelessly. “I’m saying yes, you are right. You were right.”

Yuna holds his gaze for awhile longer. He looks back at her, trying his best not to give in to his instinct to make a joke of it or otherwise try to charm her or deflect her attention.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” She asks. “The one who—who broke his heart. The one who broke up with him without saying why.”

He flinches. He wasn’t prepared for that; he didn’t know Shane had told his parents anything about their relationship, although obviously at some point he’d come out to his parents, something that the Shane of 2017 still had panic attacks at the thought of. (He’s momentarily sad he doesn’t know this already, feels the ache of the six years of Shane’s life he missed being part of. He needs to stop fucking thinking about Shane right now.)

“Yes,” he says again. “That was me. Although—” he cuts himself off, then sighs and lets himself say, “Although I did not mean to. Or want to.”

Yuna leans back in her chair and takes a sip of her tea, seemingly digesting this.

“I was young and stupid,” he feels compelled to add. “Well, not so young, but very stupid. I thought… I did not think he would be so hurt. I thought he would be better off without me.”

She asks, “Are you still in love with him?”

Fuck, fuck. Are Hollanders his kryptonite, or whatever it is Marly is always talking about? Why does he keep ending up pinned down and disarmed by big brown eyes and blunt questions?

“Yes,” he finally says, because what else is there to say?

“Does he know that?”

He knows she won’t be satisfied with an it’s complicated, so he says, as truthfully as he can, “Probably.”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“I am working on it,” he says.

Something complicated moves over her face, too fast for Ilya to decode. Then, to his surprise, she laughs.

“Oh my god,” she says, “I made you two go to dinner together.”

He laughs too, a little. “Yes. That was… unexpected. Shane thought you might… know something.”

“I didn’t,” she says. “Honestly, I just wanted you two to at least be friends. He’s so rude to you, and you’re one of the only openly queer NHL players…” She trails off, doing the calculations. Then she looks at him again, with renewed attention.

She says, “He’s rude to you.” As if it’s a revelation.

Ilya is a little lost. At least he has stopped sweating. “Yes,” he agrees, “He is very rude to me. This is true.” He judiciously does not add that he likes it when Shane is rude to him.

“Shane isn’t rude to anyone,” she says. He snorts, but she continues, “Except to people he feels safe around.”

Oh.

They sit with that. Seeing that her cup is empty, Ilya offers her the kettle, and she holds out her cup for him to refill it.

Then she sets it down, leans forward, and takes his hand in both of hers. Looks him in the eye again. He does not think of Shane, squeezing his hand, bringing his hand to cheek and pressing his mouth—does not, does not, does not.

“My son,” Yuna says, and for an instant, she is completely, solely Shane Hollander’s mother, the woman who scowled at him every time he skated by her and who had always, deep down, scared the shit out of him, “deserves to be loved for exactly who he is. And he deserves to be valued and treated well by the people who love him.”

Ilya doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he nods.

Then her face relaxes the slightest bit, and she’s Yuna—his… friend? He doesn’t know the right word for whatever their relationship is—again.

She squeezes his hand, and says, “So do you, Ilya. You deserve those things.”

He takes a breath. His vision is a little blurry; maybe he is allergic to peppermint tea. He asks, before he can stop himself, “Are you sure? How do you know?”

“Oh,” she says, a little brokenly, and she squeezes his hand harder. “I’m sure. I just know. Because you’re you.”

He squeezes her hand back, just as hard.

He feels that feeling in his chest again, warm and bright. He lets himself feel it.

And he lets himself think about Shane.

***

Fri, Apr 7, 2023 at 19:02

Lily

Tuesday? After the game?

Jane

Yeah

Can’t wait.

Chapter End Notes

Ahhh! We're almost there, you guys!

Thank you so much for reading and commenting and kudosing. I started posting this fic in part to prove to myself that I can, actually, finish a story, and your comments have been so motivating!

The pas de deux that makes Shane cry is "After the Rain." The anti-war ballet that creeps Hayden out is The Green Table.

The theme song for this chapter is "Giver/Taker" by Kacey Musgraves.

Up next: we land this plane! In the most Hollanov of ways: smuttily and happily.

Chapter 10

Chapter Summary

Cue Carly Rae Jepsen's "Cut to the Feeling" and then Beyonce's "VIRGO'S GROOVE," please.

Chapter Notes

The Voyageurs win 4-3. It’s a good game; it’s been a good season. Both teams are already guaranteed a spot in the playoffs, and Montreal is the odds-on favorite to win the Cup, although no one will say that out loud.

Ilya checks Shane twice, traps him by the boards, intercepts his passes; in general, he’s a fucking pain in the ass, and Shane’s not the only one on his team calling him an asshole all night. Ilya also gets two of the Centaurs’ three goals. Shane has to bite his cheek to stop himself grinning every time Ilya does something spectacular, or spectacularly annoying.

On the way home, vibrating with aftershocks of adrenaline from the game and new waves of anticipation, Shane thinks about all the times in his life he’s done this exact drive: away from a game against Ilya, towards a night with Ilya, or at least a night spent thinking of nothing but Ilya.

Ten years ago, he would have spent this drive furious with himself for every second his attention wasn’t where it should have been. Tallying every mistake he made, every time Ilya bested him, recounting these incidents to himself in exacting detail. Then he would have taken his anger and shame out on Ilya’s body, and Ilya would do the same to him.

Six years ago, Shane would have spent this drive soaking in humiliation. Reliving every moment he had given over to the desperation he felt for any sign from Ilya that he’d changed his mind, that things weren’t over. He would have been ruthlessly trying to silence the part of him that wanted to cry out what did I do wrong, let me fix it, tell me and I’ll do it, I’ll do anything, just tell me.

Now, a month away from turning 33, Shane finds himself not agonizing about Ilya, not torturing himself. Instead, he’s wondering what his life will look like, on the other side of his career. What will his days, his years look like without the scaffolding of the hockey season to shape them? When he no longer has to live and die by a schedule someone else made for him? He isn’t ready to find out, not yet, but even the question itself is new. He’s played 13 seasons in the NHL, and he’s been lucky to have a career free of major injuries; if his luck holds, he has another five, seven more left. More of his career is behind him than in front of him, and the years beyond—on the other side—are starting to feel more real than they ever have.

He gets to his condo. He does his post-game yoga routine. He takes another shower. Then he wanders around aimlessly, looking for things to clean or rearrange or take care of, because he’s only about 25% mentally present and that’s all he’s capable of at the moment.

The other 75% of his attention is split evenly between the door buzzer and his phone. He almost jumps out of his skin when they go off simultaneously.

“Jesusfuck,” he says, massaging his chest as if he’s been shocked, and he buzzes the building front door open.

Footsteps. A knock.

What will his life look like, on the other side of this? He’s opening the door before he even puts words to the question.

He’s opened the door so fast, in fact, that Ilya’s hand is still raised.

“Hello,” says Ilya, lowering his hand. He’s still in his game day suit although he’s taken off his tie and his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt the usual indecent amount.

“Hi,” says Shane, a little breathier than he would like.

Ilya stares at him. “Are you going to invite me in, Hollander?”

Belatedly, Shane moves aside to let Ilya in. Ilya takes his shoes off by the door automatically, eyes scanning the condo. “This looks familiar,” he says, “but I never saw the front entrance before, so, I’m not sure.”

“I thought you liked my back entrance,” Shane says, straight-faced.

Ilya frowns at him for a moment, then looks delighted. “You make sex jokes, Hollander? I didn’t know this about you. This is new. Tell me another one.”

“Shut up,” Shane grumbles, already regretting it. He moves past Ilya into the kitchen, opening the fridge so he can hide the flush of his face inside it for a second. Ilya follows him, takes a seat on a counter stool.

“You are living here now?” Ilya asks, probably having spotted the few cardboard boxes in the entryway. “Didn’t you have another apartment that you never invited me to? What happened to that one?”

“I, uh, sold that one,” Shane says, and he surfaces from the fridge, having successfully cooled his face off, with a mineral water for Ilya and a ginger ale for himself.

“But not this one?”

He should have known it was a lost cause; his cheeks heat as soon as he meets Ilya’s eyes again, even while across a counter from him. “Um, no. I kept this one. And I’ve been living here since, um, since I broke up with Alex.”

“Ah.” Ilya’s face remains neutral, although Shane can tell it takes effort. “So you…”

“I did,” Shane confirms. He lets that hang for a moment, then says, “You got here earlier than I thought you would.”

He knows why; he knows Ilya must have hurried, clearly had gone straight from the team bus into a car to take him here rather than go up to his room and change or have a round or two with his teammates before heading out, as he used to. Ilya has on none of his usual armor; no cologne, no leather jacket, no carefully arranged hair.

Shane knows what it means when someone lays down their weapons and walks into a room defenseless.

He just, sort of, wants Ilya to know he knows.

“I did,” Ilya agrees, and leaves it there.

Shane rounds the counter. Comes to a stop in front of Ilya, almost close enough—but not quite—to brush his thighs against Ilya’s knees where he’s swung around to face him. Sets the ginger ale down and then the water in front of him.

It’s very hard to look at Ilya. It’s very hard to look anywhere but Ilya. Shane’s eyes catch on the chest hair revealed by Ilya’s unbuttoned shirt, the rounded muscles of his chest. They catch on the spread of Ilya’s powerful thighs. They catch on Ilya’s beautiful mouth, his sharp jaw.

Shane’s mouth is dry. He swallows. His eyes catch Ilya’s eyes, which are caught on Shane’s throat.

“Hello,” Shane says, idiotically, to prevent himself from falling on Ilya like a starving man.

Ilya smiles, slow as syrup. “Hello, Shane,” he says. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Thank you for being here, Ilya,” Shane says, smiling back, and one of his hands has somehow drifted to Ilya’s knee without him noticing.

Ilya’s legs shift, just a little. Opening.

Shane shifts, just a little, swaying so that he’s almost between Ilya’s knees. But not quite.

“Um,” Shane says, licking his lips unconsciously. “We should talk. We need to talk.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees, but his hand is gliding down Shane’s ribs, his fingers curving around Shane’s waist. “We should.”

He doesn’t pull; Shane goes anyway, stepping fully between Ilya’s legs, both hands flattening along his thighs and sliding upwards.

“Hi,” Shane says again. From up close he can see where the green of Ilya’s eyes is ringed with grayish blue. He can see the pulse beating in Ilya’s throat.

“Hi,” Ilya says back, still smiling.

“Can you—when do you have to leave? Can you stay tonight?” Shane asks, in a rush. He manages to take his hands off Ilya’s strong, muscled thighs but just ends up fussing with the collar and buttons of Ilya’s shirt instead.

Both of Ilya’s hands are on him now, sweeping up his sides and then settling on his hips. “I can stay,” Ilya confirms, “Team is already headed back to Ottawa, but I told Coach I had to stay for a business meeting. Practice is optional tomorrow. I don’t have to leave until tomorrow night, early Thursday morning maybe. If… if you want me to stay.”

“I do,” Shane says, “Want you to stay. If you want to.”

“Shane,” Ilya says, “I think we are going in circles.”

Shane kisses him. Ilya gets with the program immediately, licking into Shane’s open mouth. It’s not a sweet, lingering kiss, although Shane wants that too. He just wants this more, right at this moment: a kiss wet with saliva, Ilya’s tongue in his mouth, Ilya’s bottom lip between his teeth. Ilya’s hand comes up to hold Shane’s jaw, angle his mouth and face where Ilya wants him.

Shane wants to crawl into his lap and grind their dicks together. He wants to drop to his knees and have Ilya feed him his cock, one torturous inch at a time. He wants so much, he wants everything. He’s almost paralyzed by the wanting.

He pulls out of their kiss, rests his forehead against Ilya’s. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to talk,” he says, voice already gravelly, “Until after I’ve had your cock in my mouth.”

“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya says, deep and guttural. He slides one of his large thumbs into Shane’s mouth; Shane sucks him down, grateful. “Fuck, I love you.”

Shane’s eyes, which had been fluttering closed at the sensation of Ilya’s thumb against his tongue, fly open. His jaw drops; Ilya’s thumb slides out unceremoniously.

Ilya looks caught out. “Um, I mean…” he trails off, apparently unable to furnish an ending to that sentence. Then he frowns. “I didn’t want to say that during sex. I don’t want you to think…”

“I don’t care about that,” Shane says, cutting him off. “I mean, I love you too. Obviously.”

Ilya gives a strangled laugh. “Obviously?”

Shane kisses him again. Just Ilya’s mouth against his own makes his whole body light up. The fact of his hand on Shane’s face, the pressure of his thighs where he’s caging Shane in; Shane feels like every cell in his body is vibrating.

“Obviously,” he says. “Extremely obviously.”

Ilya groans into their kiss and wraps his arms around Shane’s waist, pulls him flush against his chest. “I love you, I love you,” he says, dragging his mouth along Shane’s jaw, down his throat, mumbling something in Russian that Shane can guess means the same thing. “I will tell you this when we are not fucking, I will tell you this every day. I will also tell you this when we are fucking.”

“Good,” says Shane, slightly delirious. “I love you so fucking much.” He grabs Ilya’s face, returns it to his own, kisses him deep. He feels insane; he feels like he’s going to float away. He feels like he really, really needs to have Ilya’s dick in his mouth.

He gets out, “I just, I really need to—” and then he goes to his knees.

He doesn’t bother to pretend he has the coordination to deal with Ilya’s belt and zipper; he just rubs his face along Ilya’s dick, which he can feel going from mostly-hard to fully hard even under several layers of fabric.

“Ah, god, Shane,” Ilya says, and then he reverts to Russian again as he undoes his belt and fly. In English, he says, “This is what you want? You want to suck my cock?”

“Yes,” Shane says, mindlessly, as he watches Ilya pull his dick out of his briefs and stroke himself a few times. Saliva is pooling in his mouth. “Yes, Ilya, let me, I want to.”

“You can, sweetheart,” Ilya says, guiding his dick towards Shane’s waiting mouth. “You can have it.”

Shane uses his lips to cover his teeth, to make a tight, sucking ring of pressure for Ilya to push his dick into. He brings his hand up to cover Ilya’s hand where it grips the base; Ilya lets him take over, moving his hand to Shane’s hair instead, which makes Shane make a noise in the back of his throat that he would be embarrassed about if he still had the capacity for higher-level thinking. Fortunately, he does not, because he makes the noise again when Ilya tightens his grip.

Shane pulls down on Ilya’s foreskin, exposes more of the head of his dick, and stays there for awhile, working his mouth over the sensitive ridge again and again. He pumps his hand to meet his mouth, lets his drool work its way down the shaft to make the glide of his hand wetter.

It isn’t just one sensation, it’s all of them: it’s the taste of Ilya’s skin, the weight of him in Shane’s mouth, the stretch of Shane’s jaw as he opens his mouth wider to take more of him in; it’s the smell of him, the locker room shower gel and beneath that the traces of game sweat and hormones he didn’t shower off thoroughly enough; it’s the sound of him saying Shane’s name over and over, the sound of their ragged breathing, of Shane’s mouth and throat sucking him in and down. It’s the memories shivering through him of every time he’s done this before, and the thought that there might be more of this, an entire future of it, maybe.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Ilya chants, somewhere above him. “You’re so fucking hot, Shane, you’re so good for me, you take me so well, fuck.” He pushes down on Shane’s head, not that hard but not gently either, and Shane lets his jaw go lax, lets Ilya move him up and down the length of his dick. He feels his own eyelids fluttering, feels a wave of pleasure so intense it would have brought him to his knees if he wasn’t already there at the feeling that he’s making it good for Ilya, he’s being good for Ilya, that Ilya is getting what he wants, which is him.

“God, Shane,” Ilya says again, and he cums hot and pulsing into Shane’s mouth.

Shane’s not finished swallowing before Ilya’s wrestling him upwards—Shane goes bonelessly, entirely unhelpful until he realizes Ilya is trying to pull down his pants to get at his dick, and even then he can really only manage to stand there, his hands on Ilya’s shoulders for balance.

Ilya holds out his hand and Shane, unquestioningly, opens his mouth, drools what’s left of Ilya’s cum mixed with his spit into his palm. “Fuck,” Ilya says, watching him with dark eyes, and he brings his hand down to pump Shane’s dick. “You are perfect.”

He wraps his other hand around the back of Shane’s head and brings him down to kiss him, saying over and over against and into Shane’s mouth: “You’re perfect, you are so fucking beautiful, you suck me so good, no one, no one is like you.”

Shane’s orgasm hits him like an electric shock: his whole body goes rigid for a long moment before he cums with a gasp and a shout, seeing stars. Ilya strokes him through it, pressing kisses down his jaw and neck.

Shane comes back to himself some seconds, or maybe minutes, after. He’s slumped against Ilya’s chest, and Ilya seems to be using a kitchen towel to wipe them both clean.

“Ilya, I use that towel for things I eat with,” Shane says. Ilya gives him a pointed look, continuing to wipe down both their stomachs, which Shane has to admit is fair. “Fine, but don’t put it on the counter when you’re done, put it in the sink.”

“Yes, yes,” Ilya says, twisting around to reach a long arm across the island to drop the towel in the sink as told. Then, abruptly, he slaps Shane’s ass—not hard, but also not gently—and Shane jumps a little. “Come on,” he says, “Let’s go shower, we are sticky.”

“Good idea,” Shane says, but he stays there slumped against Ilya’s strong chest until Ilya smacks his ass again.

***

In the shower, Ilya lets Shane wash his hair. He closes his eyes and rests his forehead on Shane’s shoulder as Shane rubs slow, careful circles of first shampoo and then conditioner into his hair. Shane feels an almost unbearable tenderness for the man in his arms, who has hurt him so much, who has given him so much pleasure.

“I love you,” Ilya says, just as Shane is opening his mouth to say the same.

“Say it in Russian,” Shane says, and Ilya does.

Shane tries to say it back to him: Yah tee-bah loo-bloo.

“Very good,” Ilya says, which Shane knows means he thoroughly butchered it. He doesn’t care. He kisses him anyway.

***

Ilya puts on Shane’s t-shirt and sweats, and Shane is both annoyed and extremely turned on by the way the shirt stretches across Ilya’s shoulders in a way it most definitely does not on Shane. The pants too are a little short on Ilya, probably in part because of his stupid fucking perfect ass. Shane hates him and also wants him to never wear anything but Shane’s clothes again.

“Are you hungry?” Shane asks, trying to be a good host.

“Maybe later,” Ilya says, “We should talk, no?”

“Right,” Shane says, the dryness in his mouth turning a little sour. “Okay. Let’s just—” he gestures at the bed.

They get situated: Shane, feeling nebulously anxious, sits up against the headboard, his knees drawn up, and Ilya stretches out on his side, propped up on one elbow.

Shane chews his bottom lip; Ilya watches him do this for a few moments, then puts his hand on Shane’s thigh. “You have questions you want to ask.”

“Yes,” Shane says, relieved.

“Okay, so, ask.”

“You—you ask them too. Ask me. If you want to,” Shane says, aware his words are coming out garbled.

Ilya says, “Okay, but you have a lot of questions usually, so you start.”

Shane pauses to take a breath and feel the excruciating pleasure of being known by someone else. Buoyed by that, he lets himself say, “I want to do this for real, Ilya. I want to be with you, I want a relationship with you. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” Ilya says plainly.

Shane lets out most of his breath, but not all of it. “Okay. And if I—if I say I want to be monogamous? Is that something you—you want?”

Ilya looks mildly offended. “This is the first question you ask me?”

Shane sets his jaw, waits for the answer.

“Shane, of course, I want this,” Ilya says. “I am in love with you. I do not want to fuck anyone else. I do not want you to fuck anyone else. Okay?”

“Okay,” Shane says, “Okay.” He finally fully exhales, feels the tension he’s been holding melt out of his shoulders and arms.

Belatedly, he adds, “And no threesomes.”

Ilya grins a little at this, but then says seriously, “I don’t care, Shane. I mean what I said. There is no one else.”

Shane heaves a sigh and lets himself stretch out his legs, slump a little against the headboard. “Okay, you ask something,” he says, picking up one of Ilya’s hands and pressing a swift kiss to the back of it.

Ilya works his jaw for awhile, something complicated on his face. Shane, for once, doesn’t rush him. Finally, Ilya says, not looking at him, “Why did you stay with Alex for so long? If he… if he made you feel like you are not enough. Like you should be grateful that someone only wants you.”

Oh. Shane wasn’t expecting the question for some reason. Even though he knows it’s fair to ask.

He slides down further, until he’s on the mattress, and turns on his side, propping himself up on his elbow to mirror Ilya. “It’s complicated. It wasn’t like that in the beginning.”

“What was it like?” asks Ilya, steadily.

Shane closes his eyes, thinks about how to put it. “Alex’s dad is white and his mom is Asian, like me. He came out to them when he was in high school. All his friends are queer and like, leftist or whatever—shut up,” he interrupts himself to say, seeing Ilya’s eyebrows go up at leftist.

“I just have never heard you use that word,” Ilya says, “It is hot. Keep going.”

“Well, Alex and most of his friends are immigration lawyers or academics or, you know, they run a nonprofit or something. Jobs that have ‘real impact’ in the world. ‘Real jobs.’” He puts the last phrase in air quotes.

Ilya makes a sour face. “Ah. Hockey is not a real job? You make real money, no?”

Shane laughs a little. “Yeah, about that, Alex’s family is like insanely fucking wealthy. Like, generationally. So the fact that I made money from sponsorships and ads and stuff was more like… another mark against me, I think.”

“I hate him,” Ilya says flatly. “I will hurt him if you want me to. I will punch him in his face.”

“Shh, I’m trying to answer your question. I just, my whole life, I haven’t felt like I’m enough of anything to like, claim it.”

“Not hockey?” Ilya asks.

Shane smiles at this. “Okay, except hockey,” he acknowledges. “But like, I’m Asian, but I’m not really Asian, because my dad is white and I don’t really speak Japanese. And I’m gay, but like… I don’t really know what it means to be gay. Or, I didn’t. And Alex was older, and he was all the same things I am, so I didn’t have to explain anything to him, and he could… he could explain it to me instead. He was so confident, and like, had so many people around him that were like him too, like a community, you know?”

“Not really,” Ilya says honestly. “I have never met another devastatingly handsome bisexual Russian man who is also a generational hockey star.”

Shane punches his arm. Ilya grabs him and they wrestle until Ilya ends up on his back and Shane ends up mostly on top of him, resting his chin on top of his hand, which sits on Ilya’s chest.

Ilya says, idly rubbing a hand down Shane’s back, “I’m sorry you have to… explain those things. To me.”

“That’s okay,” Shane says, smiling, “I don’t mind explaining it to you. I don’t really feel that way any more, anyway. I feel like… I know myself better. And I care less about what other people think about me or how I define myself.”

“That’s good,” Ilya says, and squeezes him a little in his arms. “I still hate him though.”

Shane is distracted rubbing his nose against Ilya’s chest, feeling the scratch of his chest hair through the t-shirt’s thin cotton, and doesn’t respond.

Ilya asks, eventually, “So, you do not speak Japanese with your mother?”

“No,” Shane says, “She put me in Japanese school for a few years when I was young but she never really spoke it to me herself. And when I wanted to quit so I could play more hockey she said I could.”

Ilya nods to himself, cards his fingers through Shane’s hair. “She told me that her parents did not want her to speak it, because people in Montreal would look down on her.”

Shane frowns. “She did? She never told me that.”

“Ah,” says Ilya, looking a little awkward. “Sorry.”

Shane makes a face against Ilya’s chest. “I guess I never asked her.”

“Hmm,” Ilya says, carefully neutral. He hesitates, then adds, “I should tell you, I guess. Your mother… knows about… me. You and me.”

Shane sits bolt upright. He knows he looks horrified and he knows that’s probably hurtful and he should try to look less so, but what the fuck.

“What the fuck,” he says. “Did you tell her?”

“No, obviously I did not tell her, Shane, fuck. She … found a photo from that, um.” Ilya looks a little flushed himself. “That CCM ad. The one from summer before our rookie year. When we… for the first time.”

“Okay…” Shane says, still mostly numb. “She’s seen that before. I think she signed off on the final photos. Why would that matter?”

Ilya looks at the ceiling as if for assistance. “Well, she remembered that she… ran into me in the elevator. When I was going up. To see you. And she sort of… I don’t know, put it all together when she saw the photo again.”

“You ran into my mother on your way to hook up with me the first time,” Shane repeats, faintly. “And you never told me?”

Ilya cuts a look at him. “Do you think I should have told you? You think you would have handled that information well?”

Shane presses his palms into his eyeballs with a groan. The pressure feels uncomfortable, which feels good. If he thinks too hard about his mother knowing—about his mother running into Ilya about 60 seconds before Shane had his mouth on his dick for the first time, about his mother remembering running into Ilya because she somehow had been able to smell Ilya’s intent to fuck her son on him like a bloodhound—he’s going to do something insane, like move to Newfoundland and change his name and become an ice fisherman.

“Shane,” Ilya says, bringing him back from dreams of anonymous shacks on frozen lakes at the edge of the world where his mother will never find him. He’s sat up too and is rubbing a hand up and down Shane’s back. “She was good about it. She was not mad. I mean, she put on her very scary face and told me you deserve to be loved for who you are, but she was not actually mad.”

“Oh my god,” Shane says, limply. “I used to have literal nightmares about this. About my parents finding out about you. Us. You.”

“But she was good about it,” Ilya stresses again. “Stern, mama bear, very scary, but good. She… she said I broke your heart. When I blocked you.”

“You did,” Shane says, too overwhelmed already to soften the truth, to spare either himself or Ilya.

Ilya’s face twists. He reaches out, and Shane goes to him, lets Ilya pull him to his chest and lie back with him against the pillows. Shane uses his grip on Ilya’s shoulder to drag himself closer, hooks a thigh over Ilya’s, clingy and not feeling the need to stamp out the impulse in himself, for once.

Shane says, “I think I get why you did it. Or… I don’t hate you for doing it anymore. But can I ask why it took so long for you to unblock me? Like… after the rooftop, I kind of thought you would. Or even after Florida. I kept… I kept texting you. Just to see.”

Ilya is silent for a long time, but his hands are both sweeping a steady rhythm up and down Shane’s spine still, so Shane waits. He distracts himself by putting a finger on top of Ilya’s gold cross where it lies at the base of his throat and pushing down, ever so slightly, along all its edges.

Ilya swallows, catches Shane’s hand with his own. “This is making it hard for me to think,” he says, moving Shane’s hand away from his throat.

Shane huffs a little but does his best to make his hands stop wandering. He’s the one who asked the question, after all; he does want to know the answer, even if part of him is already curling up defensively in anticipation of the blow he senses is coming, even if he doesn’t yet know its shape.

Finally, Ilya sighs and begins. “I know I hurt you when I ended things. I will always be sorry for that and I will tell you again how sorry I am later. But you need to know that doing that, ending things with you, also hurt me. I was not in a good place. I missed you, obviously, and I was very angry with myself. I was not… very careful and I did some stupid things.”

Yes; Shane had known that, in the small place in his mind he’d allowed himself to know things about Ilya. He’d seen him at the awards, a few months after Ilya had blocked him; seen the dangerous edge to him, the angry set of his mouth, the darkness of his eyes. He’d seen how Ilya had pushed himself on the ice that next year, the year he won the Cup and MVP for the second time. Ilya had played brilliantly that year; Shane had seen him and known it was because he was burning up everything he had. He’d seen, and he hadn’t done anything. Because he was feeling righteous. Because his feelings were hurt.

Shane thinks of the emptiness, the heaviness he’d felt that summer. He’d lasted two and a half weeks holding that weight on his own before he was crying in his parents’ arms. They’d brought him groceries and rubbed his feet while they watched movies with him and gamely tried to come up with a list of gay young men they knew that Shane could go on dates with. They’d held him as he’d held it, the absence inside him, until it had grown small enough that he could handle it on his own.

He thinks, if not for the first time then for the first time with real clarity, Ilya had no one to hold him. Ilya had to hold it alone. He has always had to hold everything alone.

Ilya is saying, “And then, when you—in the bathroom in Vegas, when you said you were seeing someone and that we meant nothing—”

It takes all of Shane’s considerable muscle control to not visibly flinch. He tries to never think about that night. The morass of anger and humiliation and rejection and shame that surrounds those memories is too great; it sucks him in if he even gets near it.

“It was… it was very bad, Shane,” Ilya says. His hands are still now on Shane’s back, although he’s still holding him close. “It was very bad for a long time. And I am not blaming you. It’s not because of you I am this way.”

Shane can’t help it. He needs to be closer to Ilya; needs to hold him better, tighter. He gets in his lap because he can’t crawl inside his skin. Muscles him upwards a little so he’s sitting up enough to lean his weight against Shane, for Shane to wrap his arms around his chest and shoulders and rock him a little with the force of his grasp.

“No, no, no,” he finds he’s saying. “Blame me. Fuck. Blame me. I do. I’m so sorry, Ilya. That was… that was really cruel of me. Really selfish. I wasn’t… I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t still in love with you and—I was just being really selfish. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Because he had known, really, had known it long before finding him on the rooftop in 2022, since 2017 probably: Ilya was not okay, and Shane was the only person who knew even part of why or maybe that it was happening at all.

Let it never be said that Shane does not learn his lesson, at least, because he keeps to himself the part about Alex saying I don’t really like that stuff and I like to treat my partners well. The part where Shane had wanted Ilya to fuck his mouth and bruise his throat and force tears to leak out of his eyes because he wanted to convince himself that the wanting was dirty and rooted in self-hatred, just like his wanting for Ilya.

And he’d been thinking about that, and not the look he’d seen again on Ilya’s face earlier that night, the look that said Ilya wasn’t there, that he was somewhere far away and coming back was getting harder, when he’d gotten to his knees in front of Ilya and begged him to use him and tell him it meant nothing. And later, when he’d begged Ilya, not with his words but with his entire being, to say something, to care at all that Shane was suggesting they end things for real, and Ilya had looked at him like—like the part of him that was Ilya had been turned off.

Shane had seen that, and he had thought about himself, and his own hurt feelings, instead.

And then he’d left him alone like that.

Shane couldn’t have known, not really. He couldn’t have done anything different than he did, with the information he had. He knows this. He knows this and he still feels guilt and regret and shame roll through him in waves. Wanting to fix it. Knowing there’s nothing to fix.

He’s pressing Ilya’s face to the juncture of his shoulder and neck with one hand and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over, rocking them both back and forth, and his neck is wet where Ilya’s face is against it, and Shane doesn’t care at all if it’s spit or snot or tears or all three.

Ilya sniffles enormously and wetly, which solves at least one mystery; there’s definitely snot on Shane’s neck. Shane wants to be disgusted and feels kind of grateful instead. Grateful to be holding him now, at least, in the present, even if he didn’t and couldn’t in the past.

Ilya says, turning his head so he doesn’t speak directly into Shane’s chest, “I didn’t unblock you because I was scared, Shane. I am scared. I do not want to feel that way again. I do not want to lose you again, and so it was easier not to… try to have you again.”

Shane only holds him tighter, closer. “You’re not going to lose me,” he says. “You never have to go through that alone again.”

Ilya snorts, or maybe he’s just trying to clear his nasal passages. “You can’t promise that,” he says. “Even Shane Hollander cannot control the future.”

“I can,” Shane insists. He puts his hands on either side of Ilya’s face, tilts it towards his own. “I do. For this, I do. I promise, Ilya. You’re not going to lose me again. You’re never getting rid of me.”

“I think it is you who is never getting rid of me,” Ilya says, and then they’re kissing.

It’s not the desperate hungry kissing they were doing in the kitchen or the lazy sated kissing they were doing in the steam of the shower. It’s the kind of kissing he’s only experienced once before in his life; with Ilya, the night he’d told Ilya he was gay and Ilya had cried in front of him for the first time. It’s slow and deep, and the heat is there but it never boils over, just simmers, holds steady, in the pressure of each other’s mouths and hands.

Like an endurance workout, Shane finds himself thinking, idiotically, some minutes or hours in. No breaks, no stops and starts; just forwards, just deeper in.

If he didn’t already know what it feels like when Ilya fucks him, he would probably be content to do just this for the rest of his life: kiss Ilya, exactly like this. Shane feels simultaneously like he’s never been more present and like he’s drifting away on a soft cloud of good feeling.

He hears, for some reason, Rose’s chorus of assistants: like seeing God. Like transcending time and space. Like fucking your soul.

He can’t help it; he laughs. Out loud. Into Ilya’s mouth.

Ilya pulls back, looking mildly put out. “I am doing something wrong?”

“What?” Shane asks, and laughs again because Ilya looks genuinely annoyed. There are obviously some very strong chemicals and hormones being pumped through his body, he thinks abstractly. “No, I’m sorry, I was just thinking about something Rose said.”

Ilya’s face gets even darker. “You are thinking about Rose Landry while I’m fucking you?”

“You’re not fucking me,” Shane points out. He grinds down a little, rubs his ass unsubtly against the growing bulge in Ilya’s lap.

Ilya corrects without changing his facial expression, “You are thinking about Rose Landry while I stick my tongue in your mouth and play with your tits?”

“No, it wasn’t even Rose, it was like her assistants. And it wasn’t—it was about you, okay, I was thinking about you. Don’t stop doing that, fuck.” He grabs at Ilya’s hand and puts it back on his chest, where he’d been playing somewhat torturously with Shane’s nipple.

The expression lifts, if only a little. “And what were you saying about me to Rose and her assistants?” Ilya’s other hand drifts down to Shane’s hips and grabs hold, forcing him to stop moving and holding him still while Ilya starts to grind his own hips instead.

“Um,” says Shane, distracted by the feeling of Ilya pressing his fattening cock against Shane’s ass and Ilya’s fingers digging into his hip.

Ilya tweaks his nipple a little harder, a favorite trick of his to get Shane to pay attention, although it usually has the opposite effect.

Shane gets out, “I didn’t say it was you but I said there was someone who I had incredible sex with and I was worried it was just sex but also worried it was more than sex. And then she said sex is sometimes sex and sometimes it’s like, everything. I don’t know. The assistants said something about transcending time or space or something. And I was just…”

“Being kissed so good you transcend time and space?” Ilya says, eyes glinting, and fuck, his English has gotten really good if he could follow the nonsense Shane just vomited up and make a joke at the end of it.

“Kind of,” Shane admits, because Ilya is fucking smart and he’s been navigating living in a foreign country since he was 18 and thinking about how much he admires Ilya really fucking does it for Shane, apparently.

That and the now-insistent pressure of Ilya’s hard dick, dragging in slow slides along the seam of Shane’s ass.

“I have another question,” Shane says, and Ilya’s eyes go dark like he already knows what Shane’s going to say. “Can you fuck me now, please?”

“Fuck yes,” Ilya says immediately, and Shane’s on his back on the bed before he can blink.

***

Shane thinks the conversation is over. He is wrong, and he is naked and has already been reduced to babbling by the time he realizes this.

Ilya is still wearing Shane’s sweatpants, and he’s already edged Shane to the brink of one orgasm and then forced him to come back from it before pushing one of his thick, blunt fingers into Shane’s ass.

“Another,” Shane demands, shoving back against him. “Come on, Ilya.”

“Wait,” Ilya says, implacably. He pulls his finger almost all the way out, slow, before pushing it back in.

“Now,” Shane says, “Now, fuck, give it to me. Or just put your dick in me, fuck. I’m ready, I want it.”

“Not yet. Stop moving.” Ilya pushes in deeper, his knuckle an insistent pressure on the spot behind Shane’s balls, and Shane may or may not squeak a little when Ilya finds his prostate and rubs against it with the pad of his finger.

What feels like all the blood in his body is rushing to his dick, his balls, the spot inside of him that Ilya is pressing just-this-side-of-too-firmly against. Shane just tries to breathe through it.

Ilya says, conversationally, “So you think it is just hot sex, you and me?”

“Wh-what?” Shane pants. He admires once again Ilya’s grasp of the English language; he feels like he’s lost all of the languages he’s ever spoken.

Ilya pulls his finger completely out of Shane’s body. Shane bites down on his lip, hard, to keep from crying out at the loss.

“You think this is just hot sex,” Ilya repeats, now just tracing his finger around Shane’s rim, while Shane clenches his abs and tries, tries not to shift his hips, because Ilya has told him to stop moving. Then Ilya shoves his fingers, two of them, back inside Shane.

“Ah,” Shane cries, back arching as he tries to simultaneously get away from and get more of the sensation.

“You are ready for me,” Ilya says, scissoring his fingers experimentally, and Shane would flush if he didn’t sound so approving, like Shane has done something right, like he’s proud of Shane.

“I told you,” Shane says somewhat piteously, “I told you, I’m ready, I want it, Ilya.”

“Answer me first,” Ilya says.

Shane doesn’t remember being asked a question. He doesn’t remember his own name, maybe.

Ilya reminds him, helpfully, “You told Rose we just have hot sex, and that is all.” He’s fucking his fingers in and out of Shane at the same time, though, so maybe helpful isn’t the word.

He doesn’t seem to really expect a response because he’s still talking. “You think this is so good because, what? Your body likes my body? We have, what is it, good chemistry?”

“Um,” Shane says, “Kind of?”

Ilya frowns down at him, and pulls his fingers out again.

“No, no,” Shane cries, thrashing a little, “No, Ilya, please.”

“Calm down, I am getting a condom,” Ilya says.

This calms Shane down a little, enough that he can keep the whining to a minimum until Ilya is back over him, finally naked, sitting back on his heels between Shane’s legs and slicking himself with lube. Ilya’s tone may still be cool and unbothered, but Shane can see from this angle that he’s flushed and breathing shallowly and there’s a bead of sweat working its way down his temple.

But the effect of seeing Ilya looking so desperate is that Shane loses what little control he had. “Now, Ilya, now, now,” he chants, heedlessly, gripping the backs of his thighs and pulling his legs up, holding himself open, begging with his mouth and his body for Ilya to fuck him.

“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya groans, and then he’s bending forward and putting his mouth on Shane’s hole and it’s so, so good but it’s not what Shane wants.

Ilya surfaces, grinning, saliva smearing down his chin. He looks feral.

“Please,” Shane says, because it’s the last word he’s still holding on to.

And then Ilya is finally, finally lining up the head of his dick against Shane’s ass and Shane can feel it, the blunt pressure starting, and Ilya is still fucking talking.

“Your body doesn’t just like my body, Shane,” he’s saying, “That’s not what this is.”

“N-no?” Shane manages, which honestly he should get a prize for, because Ilya’s cock is right there and Shane can feel it and he’s not fucking putting it inside him because he’s trying to prove a point and Shane would kill him except killing him would not make Ilya fuck him faster.

“No,” Ilya says, grabbing his jaw and forcing Shane to look at him. “You fucking love it,” he snarls, and then he says, “Don’t cum,” and grabs the base of Shane’s dick for good measure and that’s all the warning Shane gets before Ilya thrusts into him, all the way in, his balls slapping against Shane’s ass with the force of it.

“Oh, fuck,” Shane says, and his whole body goes limp, like his strings have been cut, except for his dick, which pulses and drools and turns even redder than before.

Ilya’s pace is punishing immediately; he’s gripping the backs of Shane’s thighs and slamming into him and it’s so fucking good, his cock is so big and Shane is so full of him, and Shane is begging for more and harder when he really means keep fucking me forever, I never want this feeling to end, I want to bounce on your dick until I die.

“You love it, you love my cock,” Ilya’s saying, “Your mouth loves it, your hole loves it.”

“Yes,” Shane agrees, feeling feverish, feeling the orgasm he’s not going to be able to stop starting to build in his fingertips and toes and throat and balls. “I love it, Ilya, I love your cock, I love it when you fuck me with it.”

“Tell me,” Ilya says, fucking him harder, so deep inside him that Shane feels like he can taste Ilya’s dick in his throat, “Tell me how it feels.”

“Like I was made for it,” Shane says immediately, honestly, “Like you fucking fit inside me, like I’m… like I’m…” He squeezes his eyes shut, can’t quite make himself keep going.

“Like you’re what,” Ilya says, and his hips are stuttering, his thrusts getting ragged. “Say it, Shane, like you’re what.”

“Like I’m perfect for you,” Shane gasps, like it’s being punched out of him by Ilya’s thrusts, “The perfect hole.”

“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya groans, “You are perfect, the perfect hole for me, so fucking perfect for me.”

“I’m going to cum,” Shane babbles, “I’m going to, I need to, Ilya, I’m going to—”

Ilya wraps his big fucking hand around Shane’s dick and Shane makes an inhuman noise, something between a sob and a shout. “It’s good, baby, you did so fucking good, you’re perfect, you can cum, I want you to cum for me.”

Shane cums so hard and for so long he feels like he’s shaking apart, like he’s literally drowning in the feeling. He barely even registers Ilya going rigid above him and coming too, with an inhuman noise of his own.

Ilya collapses on top of him. Shane takes his weight uncomplainingly, loves the feeling of being borne down into the mattress, of being so completely covered by Ilya’s body. After a few seconds, Ilya pulls out of him, rolls off him and to his feet, padding to the bathroom to dispose of the condom and come back with a warm washcloth.

Shane just lies there as Ilya wipes him down, gently, enjoying the sensation, his eyes mostly closed. “I should get up,” he mumbles when he feels the mattress dip with Ilya’s weight again. “Change the sheets. Brush my teeth.”

“Shane, it’s 2 am,” Ilya says, crawling in behind him and drawing Shane closer so his back presses against Ilya’s chest. “You played a hockey game earlier tonight and you just had your brains fucked out by the love of your life. Just go to sleep.”

“It’s gross,” Shane complains, but he’s folding his arms over Ilya’s and, there is no other word for it, snuggling deeper into the mattress and comforter and Ilya’s arms.

Ilya presses kisses against the top knob of his spine. “There is not even a wet spot. Stop complaining. Go to sleep.”

“You are, you know,” Shane says sleepily. “The love of my life.”

He thinks he hears Ilya say it back, but he can’t be sure because he’s already asleep.

***

Shane’s phone alarm goes off at 6 am.

“You have early morning practice?” Ilya asks, jolting awake.

“No,” Shane says, reaching over to silence it. “That’s just my morning alarm so I can go for a run.”

“You are going for a run?” Now Ilya looks put out.

Shane hesitates. It’s not a game day. It’s not going to kill him not to go for one run. On the other hand, a routine isn’t a routine if you only do it when it’s convenient.

On the other, other hand, Ilya’s dick is hard against him, and the bed is warm, and Ilya won’t be here tomorrow.

“No,” Shane relents, “I’m not getting up.”

Ilya, muttering to himself in Russian—Shane catches the word Hollanders, he’s pretty sure—wrestles him down until Shane’s on his back and Ilya is sprawled on top of him.

Shane is slowly waking up to the reality that he is naked, and Ilya is naked, and Ilya is here, in bed with him, and Ilya loves him.

“I love you,” Shane blurts out, just in case that part wasn’t real.

Ilya’s smile is slow and sweet. “I love you too,” he says, as if it costs him nothing, as if he says it every day.

He rocks his hips lazily, drags his dick a little along the inside of Shane’s thigh. Right: naked, and warm, and here. Belatedly, Shane remembers he didn’t even brush his teeth last night because Ilya had cried in his arms and snotted on his neck and then fucked him into a literal stupor.

Disgusting, he thinks, giddily.

“Want to suck my dick?” Ilya asks.

“Yes,” Shane says, because he does.

***

“That was new,” Ilya says. He sounds winded.

They’re lying side by side, on their backs. Shane can’t even summon the energy to lift his head to look at him. “Sorry,” Shane says automatically, “Should I not have, uh…” he makes a gesture that he hopes Ilya understands as sat on you while I jerked myself off and came all over your chest and throat and then licked it up.

“Not that,” Ilya says.

Shane sifts through his mental tape of what they had just done together. It’s hazy, and his brain feels more like ooze than matter. Then he realizes.

“Oh shit,” he says, and he does lift his head this time. “Ilya, I’m sorry, I should have asked, or—”

“It’s fine, Shane,” Ilya says, and though he still sounds a little breathless he doesn’t sound mad, or traumatized, or anything. “I would have told you if I did not want you to.”

He’d just been out of his head, is all; he just hadn’t thought about it. He’d been sucking one of Ilya’s balls into his mouth and had been seized by the desire to lave his tongue over Ilya’s asshole and so he did. Ilya had jerked and said fuck very loudly and so Shane had done it again, and Ilya had spread his legs wider for Shane so he could reach more with his mouth, and well.

It wasn’t like he’d never wanted to, before. He’d wanted to, very badly. He’d gotten off to thinking about eating Ilya out. Obviously; Ilya’s ass was a gift from God to every person on the earth who got to see it, let alone touch it, let alone put their face in it.

He just had never had the nerve to ask about it.

“Had you ever… had someone do that?” Shane feels his face burning.

Ilya shifts a little. “Once before,” he says finally. “I didn’t like it much, that time.”

“Did you… like it this time?” Shane asks, nervously.

Ilya gives him a sardonic look. “No, I cum so hard I black out to be polite.”

“You blacked out?” Shane repeats, biting back a smile.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Ilya grumbles. After a moment, he says, in a careful tone of voice, “We never did that before.”

“No,” Shane agrees.

“But you have done that before.”

Oh. Shane’s stomach drops a little. He can still, distantly, hear Ilya calling him a slut and slamming the car door shut.

“I guess,” he says, cautiously. “I mean, yes. I have.”

Ilya doesn’t say anything to that, but he does put an arm around Shane and draw him in, so that Shane’s head is resting on his chest.

“Can I be honest,” Shane says, against Ilya’s chest, not really a question.

“Of course,” Ilya says.

“It used to really bother me, sometimes,” Shane says, trying not to rush the words out. “Like that you were so experienced and I… wasn’t. Not like jealousy—or not at first, not just that—but… I felt so inexperienced with you. Like you had some kind of advantage over me. You’d had all this sex with all these people and I’d literally only ever had you.”

“And Rose Landry, and all the other sad girls you fucked very badly,” Ilya says, because, Shane supposes, he simply can’t help himself.

“Shut up, oh my god,” Shane says, pinching Ilya’s side. “I’m just saying. I understand, now, better than I did. It feels like we’re more… even. Maybe that’s fucked up. Is it… is it weird for you?”

“No,” Ilya says simply. “Is okay.”

After a moment, he seems to realize that that’s not enough, and heaves a sigh. “I know what you mean,” he says, “And I knew you felt that way. Back then. I liked it, a little. Being… the winner, or something.” He makes a face like it’s not the right word, but Shane knows what he means.

“I know you did,” he says, scraping his teeth against Ilya’s pec briefly just to feel him shudder.

Ilya buries a hand in Shane’s hair and says, “I am not upset that you have had sex with other people. And I should not have called you a slut like that. It would be… very hypocritical of me, to feel that way. And I don’t.”

“But…” Shane prompts.

“But,” Ilya says, “It was hot when I thought, no one else has seen Shane Hollander like this. No one has ever made him feel like this but me.” He turns Shane’s head up to him. “Not just hot. It… made me feel like I mattered. Like what we were, together… it mattered.”

Shane puts his own hand in Ilya’s hair, grips him at the back of the skull just like Ilya is doing to him. “It did matter. It does matter. Fuck, Ilya, that’s what I’m trying to say. You are the only one who sees me like this because you’re the only person who makes me feel like this. And I get now that that’s not because you’re the only man I’ve ever been with. It’s because you’re you. And you matter. This matters. More than anything.”

“Not more than hockey,” Ilya says, but he’s smiling.

“Hockey isn’t forever,” Shane says. It’s something other people have said to him, and he’s never believed it before. He’s certainly never said it aloud. It thrills him as much as it terrifies him, to speak it into existence: hockey isn’t forever, but some things are, can be. “I told you you’re never getting rid of me.”

“I will never want to,” Ilya says, and he’s crushing Shane to him, planting kisses all over his face, rubbing his unshaven jaw against the sensitive skin of Shane’s throat, and Shane is just starting to wonder how much time they have, actually, and if it’s enough for Ilya to fuck him again, when his second alarm goes off.

Fuck. That one he can’t ignore; he really does have practice soon. Honestly, it might be for the best; they’re not 22 anymore, and they could probably both use some time to rehydrate and recover before trying to get off for the fourth time in 12 hours.

He manages to peel Ilya off him and convince him to stay in bed while Shane showers; he knows if Ilya got in the shower with him, Shane would be late to practice. If he made it there at all. When he comes out of the bathroom, Ilya is lying on the bed, still happily naked, scrolling his phone. Shane’s stomach clenches at the sight.

“When do you have to go?” He asks, trying to sound casual.

Ilya says, opening his email to double check, “Flight is at 11 tonight. I will need to leave at 8:30, 9 maybe.”

“Okay.” Shane scrubs at his hair with a towel, stares at the clothes in his closet, tries to convince his body that it wants to leave this warm room that smells like him and Ilya together and go skate around in the cold for three hours. “I’ll be back at like, noon, or 1 maybe.”

“Okay,” Ilya says easily, opening up a game on his phone. “I will be here.”

The thought of that—Ilya in his home, in his bed, waiting for him to come home—feels so fucking good that Shane has to leave the room in self-defense.

***

When he gets back from practice, Ilya has changed the sheets of the bed and put on some underwear, but otherwise seems to not have moved from where Shane left him.

“I brought lunch,” Shane says faintly from the door of his bedroom. His eyes are on the thick, dark trail of hair that starts from Ilya’s bellybutton and disappears under the waistband of what Shane is fairly sure are his underwear.

Ilya, very aware of Shane’s gaze, tucks one casual arm behind his head, stretches out more of his golden body for Shane to devour with his eyes. Shane knows the look on his face is probably stupid and dazed. He feels like a cartoon animal salivating over a meal, so overcome by the delicious smell and sight of Ilya’s body that he’s being lifted into the air and floated over to it without his say so.

“I could eat,” Ilya says, eyes dark, and Shane would scoff at the corniness of this if it didn’t make his dick twitch.

He finds himself standing over Ilya, unsure how or when he actually left the doorframe. “You changed the sheets,” he says, through lips that are starting to feel numb and heavy with want. His hand lands, clumsily, on the back of Ilya’s neck, digging into the curls there.

“I thought you would like,” Ilya says, and he’s starting to look just as dazed as Shane feels. He pushes his head into Shane’s hand like a cat demanding more pets.

“We’re just going to have to change them again,” Shane whispers.

“So we change them,” Ilya says, and, seeming done with this part, he yanks Shane down to him, and Shane goes, grateful.

They fuck slow and filthy, on their sides, bodies pressed flush and hot against each other, Ilya’s teeth on Shane’s earlobe, his mouth on Shane’s neck and chest, sucking bruises in his wake, mumbling deliriously in Russian and English and what is probably sheer babble, just sounds. Shane feels like he’s breaking open, like each kiss and thrust and gasp sheds another layer of skin, exposes a raw, fleshy, new thing that has somehow been inside of Shane all along. He says I love you, I love you, I love you, and then he’s reduced to Ilya, Ilya, Ilya, and then he can’t say anything at all, gone to a place beyond words.

After, they eat the salads Shane brought back with him, both of them fucking ravenous suddenly. They play X-box for a little while and then Shane tries to review game tape but finds himself dozing instead, stretched out on his back on the couch with Ilya mostly on top of him, their skin warmed by the spring afternoon sun that cuts through Shane’s windows.

He doesn’t think he’s sleeping, he’s pretty sure he’s mostly awake, but then he looks at the clock and it’s already 5 pm, and there are only a few hours left before Ilya has to leave. Shane tries not to let the panic that grips him momentarily at the thought take over. Ilya has to go; he reminds himself that Ilya will come back. They’re doing this; Ilya is his, and he’s Ilya’s, and that isn’t going to end when Ilya leaves the apartment.

Still, he holds him tighter, as if that will make the hours go slower.

“Mmph,” Ilya says indistinctly, because Shane has squeezed him awake. Then, with a face-cracking yawn, he says, “I’m hungry.”

Shane drags himself up, gets some pre-prepped chicken and vegetables in the oven, starts some brown rice into the fancy rice-cooker his mom bought him that sings to him when it’s done. They eat sitting at the counter stools, not really saying much, both of them mostly on their phones, but sat close enough together that their thighs press against each other, the whole warm length of them.

Desperate for a way to pass the time that won’t devolve into just staring at the clock, Shane puts on a movie that Rose recommended and they sit on the couch together to watch, Shane tucked firmly against Ilya’s side.

The movie is weird. It’s about quantum universes and there’s a lot of martial arts, which is the part that he thought Ilya would like, and it’s also somehow a very sad story about a queer girl and her immigrant mother, which is the part that Rose probably that Shane would like. Also there’s a lot of shit about universes where everyone has hot dogs for fingers, which makes Ilya laugh way harder than Shane thinks it deserves, and a bagel/black hole that is somehow a metaphor for depression, which makes Ilya go quiet and, Shane thinks, maybe wipe his eyes a few times. It’s honestly the weirdest movie Shane has ever seen, but it does, at least, distract him from the countdown in his head to Ilya’s imminent departure.

When the movie ends, they just stay there. Ilya idly moves his fingers through Shane’s hair, and Shane plays with Ilya’s cross and feels the sweep of his ribcage as he breathes.

He says, “Do you think there’s like… another universe… where you and I… I don’t know. Figured our shit out earlier? Didn’t spend so much time…” alone, he thinks, but what he says is, “… not together?”

Ilya hums a little as he processes. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe.”

Shane feels a stab of intense jealousy at this, which he knows is ridiculous.

“But,” Ilya says, running his thumb over Shane’s cheek and jaw, along the freckles that spread over Shane’s nose, which he knows Ilya has always been weirdly obsessed with. “Then maybe… we would not be us.”

“What do you mean?” Shane asks, and he doesn’t stop himself from nuzzling into Ilya’s touch, because it feels good, because he can.

“Maybe… maybe if you did not date snobby lawyer, then… you wouldn’t feel so much like…. You know who you are.” Ilya’s speaking very slowly, putting the words together with effort, obviously not sure how to articulate what he’s trying to get at. “Maybe if I did not go through such a bad time, I would not have… figured out how to take care of myself.”

“I could have taken care of you,” Shane says fiercely, still sore from the thought of all the years he hadn’t done exactly that.

“I know,” Ilya says soothingly, “I know you could have. But it is probably good that I can do it myself, no?”

“Maybe,” Shane admits. “I just… I hate thinking that like, there’s a better version of me. A version who was more brave, or more honest, or just… better. And he gets to have years with you that I don’t get, because I wasn’t those things.” He knows he’s not making sense. He knows there’s no point to getting emotional over a fictional alternate universe where he and Ilya stopped making each other miserable and started making each other happy earlier, years ago. He feels it anyway.

“Shane.” Ilya makes him look up at him. “I do not care. I do not want any other version of you. I don’t even want a different version of this. I want this one. I want this version of you. This is the best version of you.”

“How do you know?” Shane asks, voice small.

Ilya smiles. He presses a kiss to Shane’s forehead. “Because you’re mine,” he says simply. “And we fit together, here, like this. This version of you and this version of me.”

“Oh,” says Shane, and if his eyes are hot, well, it’s been an emotional 24 hours. He can forgive himself getting a little weepy.

“Yes, oh,” Ilya echoes, and kisses him.

They kiss for awhile like that, luxuriously, longingly. Shane clasps Ilya’s face in his, runs his thumbs over Ilya’s brow, his cheekbones, tries to memorize the feeling of this moment, the exact sensations of this man, this body, this moment together.

It goes on for a long time; it’s over too soon, and then they’re in the entryway, and Ilya’s bag is over his shoulder, and Shane doesn’t want to let him go, and he knows he has to.

“We might not be able to see each other again until the playoffs are over for both of us,” Shane says, fussing with the zipper of Ilya’s jacket for lack of something better to do with his hands. “Alone, I mean.”

Ilya’s eyes are soft, like he knows exactly how hard Shane is fighting his desire to drag Ilya back to bed and chain him there for the foreseeable future. “I know, sweetheart,” he says. His arms go around Shane’s shoulders and he pulls him in for a hug that’s almost rib-cracking in its intensity and pressure. Shane wraps his arms around his waist, squeezes even harder.

Ilya says, into Shane’s ear, “You’re going to win the Cup.” Shane shudders against him. Then Ilya pulls back and says, meeting his eyes, “But I am going to make it hard for you, Hollander.”

“I know,” Shane says, smiling even though his eyes are wet and there’s a part of his brain that’s screaming jinx, he’s jinxing you, now you’ll never win. He ignores that part of himself; it’s easier than it’s ever been. He says, “Text me when you land. And when you get back to your house.”

“I’ll call you,” Ilya promises.

They kiss again, whisper I love you into each other’s mouths, try to say with their hands and mouths what they can’t say with words. Then Shane is opening the door, and Ilya is going, is gone.

Shane doesn’t watch him go. He doesn’t need to. The future is unfolding in front of him: what his life is going to look like, on this side.

He can’t fucking wait for it to begin.

Chapter End Notes

Very wee epilogue and some final author's notes to be posted immediately after this!

Shane and Ilya watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, which also features a Wong Kar Wai universe, which is the real reason Rose recommended it.

Chapter 11

Chapter Notes

Epilogue

After Shane wins the cup, they go to the cottage.

They fuck in the sunshine. They go swimming and find each other in the water, float weightless in each other’s arms, learning the shape of each other all over again. They make dinner, and Ilya discovers that Shane will, actually, eat ice cream if it’s off Ilya’s body.

They dream together under the pines and the bright blue sky.

There are dark days. Days Ilya can’t make it to the surface, can’t move through the unspeakable weight that holds him down. Shane has them too, days when his body betrays him, fails him the way all bodies eventually do, and he stays in his practice rink shooting pucks at targets until his calluses are bleeding and Ilya has to come pry the stick from his hands.

They hold each other through it. And the dark days never last, even if they also always come back.

It’s good. It’s more than good; it’s ugly and beautiful, full of pain and pleasure. It’s a life, their life, and they build it together, a day at a time.

Chapter End Notes

Ahhhhhhh!

OMG y'all. We made it!

Thank you so, so much for reading and commenting and kudosing etc. Real talk, I started writing this because I've been writing a novel for literally 6 years and it's been 4/5s done for 2 years and no one but me has read a word of it?? And I just needed to prove to myself that a) I *can* finish a story thank you very much and b) it feels good to let people read my writing. And really it has felt SO GOOD, I can't even say how good, to have such a wonderful response, so THANK YOUUUUU.

As I've been writing, I've made a little soundtrack for each chapter to help me get in the emotional zone. Here are the links and liner notes, if anyone's interested:

Chapter 1 - POOR CHOICES by skuzland — sip my spit, drain my blood/suck me dry, call me cunt/I'll break your heart, that's what you want
Chapter 2 - Keep Yourself Warm by Frightened Rabbit — you can't find love in a hole/it takes more than fucking someone/to keep yourself warm
Chapter 3 - Cruel World by Active Child — count your blessings, you won't need them/when you're gone, it's a cruel world (trigger warning for Magicians fans)
Chapter 4 - I Want To Be Well by Sufjan Stevens — I'm not fucking around/I want to be well
Chapter 5 - Pushing It Down and Praying by Lizzy McAlpine — it's only a question/if somebody brings it up/so I'm pushing it down and praying/he won't see it when I cum
Chapter 6 - I Want You to Love Me by Fiona Apple — While I'm in this body/I want somebody to want/and I want what I want/and I want you to love me
Chapter 7 - Happy Not Knowing by Carly Rae Jepsen — I'll only go so far/I don't have the energy/to risk a broken heart/when you're already killing me
Chapter 8 - Think Twice by Suki Waterhouse — Me and my drifter mind/heart in the water, lost in the tide/I always think twice and go back for a third time
Chapter 9 - Giver/Taker by Kacey Musgraves — I would give you everything you ever wanted/and I'd never ask for any of it back/and if I could take only what I needed/I would take everything you had
Chapter 10 - Cut to the Feeling by Carly Rae Jepsen (we crossed the line/and it was on this time) and VIRGO'S GROOVE by Beyoncé (baby, come over/come be alone with me tonight)
Chapter 11 - U R MINE by Kaeto — less the lyrics in this one, more just vibes and melody

If you want more from me, I may or may not already have an outline for a Hollanov AU? (Here's a hint.) And it turns out this writing and posting thing is addictive, so look for that sooner than later, or subscribe to my profile.

 

And there you have it!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.