Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog

Additional Tags:

Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Slice of Life, Long-Distance Relationship, Spoilers for Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Hurt/Comfort, Hockey Fights, Hockey Injuries, Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Being Assholes (Game Changers)

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of all's well that ends well (to end up with you)

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-12 Completed: 2026-01-24 Words: 4,825 Chapters: 2/2

i go home (just to see your face)

Summary

Ilya misses the hit, the first time, digging a chunk of cookie out of his ice cream. But he catches the slow-mo replay, which is probably worse.

Notes

Anyone who knows me from any other fandom is 0% surprised right now that two loosely connected fics posted a few days apart have become a series. I don't think I'll be writing them in any semblance of chronological order, but I'll keep the series organized in chronological order rather than posting order.

This one takes place sometime during The Long Game, after they're outed but before the playoffs. How much time was that in the book? Zero memory of that right now, but time is a flat circle or whatever.

Title from "I Work Nights and You Work Days" by To Kill A King.

Chapter 1

Montreal is playing Detroit, and the game is rough. Ilya wouldn’t go as far as saying Detroit is playing dirty, exactly, most of the hits have been clean, but it’s a physical game, and Shane is spending a lot of time against the boards. At one point in the second period, the camera gets a shot of Shane telling Byrd, one of Detroit’s defensemen, to fuck off as he shoves away from him. There’s fury in Shane’s eyes and Ilya is a little surprised because Byrd is an asshole, but Shane is usually good at letting everything on the ice but the hockey roll off him. He never fights, rarely even chirps at anyone besides Ilya (and for years any chirping between them has really just been flirting), generally stays focused on playing over anything else. He has earned his reputation for being single-minded on the ice.

The second period ends, and Ilya mutes the TV, uninterested in the intermission commentary by Montreal’s usual home game guys, one of their former goaltenders who retired two years before Shane and Ilya’s rookie year and a French Canadian sports journalist who gets under Ilya’s skin for no reason other than the way he says Shane’s name always sounds…snide. He scratches Anya behind her ear in the spot that makes her back leg thump the floor, her tongue lolling happily out of her mouth. When she’s had her fill of attention and goes to flop in her bed in front of the fireplace (which of course Ilya has lit for her), he grabs his phone from the coffee table and texts Yuna.

Ilya

Very physical game

Yuna

Yes. Byrd is Shane’s shadow tonight.

Ilya

Montreal enforcers seem extra useless, too

Yuna

🫤

Yuna is having a bit of a reckoning in the wake of how shitty Montreal has been since he and Shane were outed. She can always root for Shane, of course, but Ilya can see that it is getting harder and harder to root for Montreal. It must be difficult, as a lifelong fan. 

He gets himself ice cream from the freezer and a spoon from the drawer (it is silly to dirty a bowl when he is going to finish what is left in the pint) and is settling in on the couch again in time for the third period to start up. 

He misses the hit, the first time, digging a chunk of cookie out of his ice cream. But he catches the slow-mo replay, which is probably worse. Byrd hooks his stick around Shane, gives it enough of a tug to unbalance him, and Shane takes Byrd’s knee to his face on his way down. It’s not a terrible hit, he’s not bleeding when the coverage switches back to the live feed, but he has dropped his gloves, his helmet has come off, and he swings his fist into Byrd’s face. Unfortunately, Byrd has four inches and probably fifty pounds on Shane and his returning swing is heavy enough to break Shane’s nose. Hayden joins the fray, but none of the other useless fucking Metros on the ice do, Boiziau included. Ilya’s pretty sure he sees some of them smirking on the bench when the camera pans to show the refs skating over to break things up. 

The lower half of Shane’s face is covered in blood, now, and he skates to the Montreal bench and disappears into the tunnel to get checked out during his penalty for fighting. Ilya takes several deep breaths. It could be worse. He has seen so much worse, has been on the ice when Shane was down and didn’t get back up. 

He texts David. 

Ilya

Should I start driving?

Yuna would tell him no either way, because Yuna will be thinking about Ottawa, and the flight Ilya needs to be on in the morning to play in Raleigh, then Nashville, then Tampa, then Dallas. Ilya is not so worried about that; he can easily get to Montreal and back tonight before he needs to be on the plane tomorrow at seven, and he could just as easily fly commercial from Montreal to Raleigh. Wiebe would understand, if it needed to happen. David will be honest with him, because David will be worried about the same things Ilya is worried about. Not the broken nose, so much, but the fighting.

While waiting for David’s reply, Ilya pulls up the dog hotel’s app on his phone to see whether there is availability to bring Anya tonight if he needs to, instead of tomorrow morning. She doesn’t stay there very often anymore; Yuna and David like to watch her but they’re leaving from Montreal in the morning for a trip to Hawaii with friends from McGill.

His phone buzzes and Ilya taps into David’s message.

David

He texted. They’re going to reset his nose. 

He’s done for tonight.

I think it’s okay to stay put.

Ilya switches off the TV, since he has no interest in watching Montreal lose (or win, but they’ll almost certainly lose without Shane; at least when they’re winning it means Shane is on the ice). He keeps his phone in his hand, because if Shane is texting David…

His phone buzzes again. 

Jane

I’m fine.

Ilya snorts, shaking his head. 

Ilya

Pics or it didn’t happen

Jane

That doesn’t even make sense. 

It doesn’t, but it still achieves Ilya’s goal of seeing Shane’s face, because his phone starts ringing with a FaceTime. He answers, and when the call connects and Shane’s face is on his screen, Ilya can’t help but wince.

“Sweetheart,” he says. There are already bruises blooming around Shane’s eyes and his nose is swollen. 

“I’m fine,” he insists, his voice thick. 

“What was Byrd’s problem?” Ilya asks. “I saw you tell him to fuck off.”

Shane sighs. “I was hoping that wasn’t on TV.”

“You also punched him in the face.”

“Knocked out one of his teeth. Bet that didn’t make it on TV.”

“It didn’t,” Ilya confirms. 

“Byrd was…nothing new,” Shane says, and he looks so tired that Ilya is thirty seconds from getting in the car so he can drive to Montreal and just hold Shane. Make sure he sleeps. “I don’t wanna talk about it here. They’re all going to come off the ice soon.”

“Do you want me to come see you?” Ilya asks. 

“Always,” Shane says, “but no. You wouldn’t get here until almost midnight and then you’d just have to leave again at like three.”

“Five,” Ilya insists. 

“Either way,” Shane says. He frowns and then flinches because it hurts his swollen face. “Mom and Dad will come check on me.”

“Is not the same.”

“I know.”

“Will you call when you get home?”

“Yes.” Shane nods.

“I love you,” Ilya tells him.

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” Shane says back. “I’ll call you in a little bit.”

Ilya hangs up, and calls Anya to the door for her last walk of the night. They just do a short one, up to the corner of their street and back. She dances around his feet in the kitchen for her bedtime treat and leads the way up the stairs. When only one of them is home, she’s allowed to sleep in their bed and she settles comfortably in the exact middle while Ilya putters around, brushing his teeth and pulling on one of Shane’s hoodies to sleep in. (It’s too short in the sleeves, like all of Shane’s clothes on Ilya, and he likes to tease Shane about that but he won’t tonight. Probably.) 

His phone rings as he is crawling into the bed next to Anya. Just a regular call, not a FaceTime, and he frowns, sliding his finger across the screen to answer.

“Are you hiding your broken nose from me? I have already seen it.”

“You wouldn’t be able to see me anyway, I’ve got a bag of frozen peas on my face,” Shane says, and his voice does sound a little muffled. 

“Hurts?” Ilya asks. 

“They gave me a painkiller,” Shane says. “I’m mostly just trying to get the swelling down.”

“Tell me what Byrd said to you.”

Shane sighs heavily. “What do you think, Ilya? He called me a fag. I hear it every game, it just pissed me off more than usual tonight.”

Every game. Ilya has these things said to him too, but not as often. He does not know if it is just because everyone knows he is more likely to throw a punch than Shane (or, most likely, goad them into punching him so they end up in the box) or if it’s more insidious than that, something about the intersection of Shane’s sexuality and his race or what people think they know about what happens between them behind closed doors.

“I’m so annoyed,” Shane says, and he sounds it. “I’m annoyed with myself for hitting him, because now he knows he got under my skin, and I’m annoyed for being annoyed, because why do I always have to be the bigger person in the name of fucking sportsmanlike conduct but he can say that shit to me and nobody bats an eye?”

“He deserved to get punched,” Ilya says. “I think you should hit whoever you want to. Every game.” Shane huffs a laugh. “I’m serious. Well, actually I think you should have team hitting people for you, but…”

“I can’t talk about that now,” Shane says, and his voice sounds thick for reasons beyond his swollen nose. Ilya regrets not getting in the car the second Shane threw that punch. 

“Okay.”

“I’m just so tired.” 

“Do you want to sleep?”

“No, not that kind of tired. I’m…” Shane pauses, and Ilya waits. “What was the point of hiding all those years, trying to be exactly who the league wanted me to be, if this is how it is now? This is how it was always going to be and I feel like we wasted so much time.”

“Sweetheart,” Ilya says. He’ll never get tired of Shane’s sharp little intake of breath every time he says it. “Was not wasted. A lot of it was necessary, for both of us.”

“I don’t know how to be anymore. On the ice. Maybe off it, too.”

Ilya’s not entirely sure he follows the grammar here, but he thinks he understands the sentiment. So much has changed for them, so many of the things they were trying to protect and control are now just out in the world, exposed. For better or worse. And there has been plenty of better, but there has also been so much worse. 

For some reason, he can’t help thinking about the season Shane started to grow out his hair, Ilya’s last in Boston. Ilya’s two weeks at the cottage bloomed into what was left of the summer, and both of them needed haircuts badly by the time they returned to their teams. Ilya had gone to the barber almost the moment he stepped off the plane, tired of the way his hair itched the back of his neck and the tops of his ears, dreading the idea of putting a helmet over it which surely would make his whole head feel itchy. But Shane had kept growing his until it was long enough to twist into a little bun and make Yuna complain he looked like a sheepdog when it was down, all shaggy and long around his face. He’d eventually gotten it cut by a real hairstylist, who made it look like a deliberate choice and not just like he’d somehow gone a year forgetting that hair grows and needs to be cut, but it’s still longer than it had ever been before that summer. 

Ilya had asked about it, the next summer at the cottage, while they were in the bathroom one morning, brushing teeth and grinning toothpaste smiles at each other in the mirror, giddy with the weeks of summer stretching out ahead of them. Shane had shrugged when Ilya asked him, but later, drinking coffee on the dock, he’d said, “Everything feels so different since last summer. I think I wanted to feel different too.”

“And do you?”

“Yeah,” Shane had said, nodding.

“Did you fall asleep?” Shane asks him now, his voice low in Ilya’s ear.

“No,” Ilya says. “Just thinking.”

“Dangerous,” Shane says, and Ilya thinks there’s the hint of a smile behind his words now. 

“You had to put up with so much bullshit when you couldn’t defend yourself because you were protecting our secret,” Ilya says. “But our secret is out. And you’re Shane fucking Hollander. Maybe is time to remind them.”

Shane laughs. “Only you could make fighting on the ice seem noble.”

“Doesn’t have to be just fighting.” Ilya shrugs. “Maybe it’s all the things we couldn’t do before.”

“Like what?” Shane asks. 

“Like…I wanted to come to your game tonight. Sit with your parents, cheer for you.”

“Oh,” Shane says softly. “Yeah. Fuck, you should’ve told me. I would’ve gotten you a ticket. Can I come to your next one at home? Do the schedules work?”

“I’ll look later,” Ilya says, although he knows that they do, if Shane is willing to either drive late or wake up very early to get back to Montreal for an afternoon home game. “Harris gave me Pride tape. Leftover from Pride night. But I ordered my own, I wanted the bisexual colors.”

“Of course you do.”

“The colors are better,” Ilya insists, “Prettier.”

“Your stick will be very pretty,” Shane agrees. His voice is taking on some of the lightness Ilya remembers from the hospital after his concussion, so the painkillers from the Montreal team doctor must be strong. Ilya wishes again he were there and not here. 

“Do you want the tape from Harris?” Ilya asks. 

“Coach won’t like that,” Shane says sadly. “Most of the team won’t.”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know. It feels like I have to weigh every decision against whether the fallout will be worth it. I’m so stupid, because I thought at least that would get better when we were out. That I could stop being so careful.”

Ilya scowls. “You are not stupid.” 

“It will get easier,” Shane says, although not with much confidence. “People will get used to it.”

“And until then, you can punch them.”

Shane sighs. “I can’t punch all of them.”

“No,” Ilya agrees, “you have to leave some for me.” He has plans for Byrd when Ottawa plays Detroit in a few weeks. 

“What time is your flight tomorrow?” 

“Seven.”

“You’ll text me?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, “of course.”

He never gets on the plane without texting Shane anymore. He doubts he’ll ever be able to again, for both their sakes. 

“I think I should sleep,” Shane says. “I’m feeling loopy.”

“Yes, sleep, moy lyubimyy.”

“Love you,” Shane says.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Ilya promises. “I love you.”

Ilya hangs up the phone and sets it on his charger. Anya snuggles in closer to his side, a comforting warm weight in the bed. It will be nine more days before he can see Shane again, and Ilya feels every one of them like a weight on his chest. It’s ridiculous because they’ve spent more of their relationship apart than together and it should get easier but it just gets harder. They live in the negative space the other leaves behind, and Ilya can’t help thinking of the wish he has been holding onto for longer than he’d ever admit. If he and Shane were on the same team… 

Maybe he should thank the useless fucking Metros for doing their best to push Shane out, because it’s clear that’s what they’re doing. It certainly makes his childish hope feel more realistic.

Ilya picks up his phone again, and takes a picture of Anya, her chin resting on his lap. He texts it to Shane, not entirely expecting a reply, but he gets one anyway. 

Jane

Home soon. ❤️

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Mea culpa to my beloved Buffalo for slandering you in the first paragraph of this chapter. But, alas, in this fictional universe (and in most seasons in reality), you do unfortunately suck (we will not talk about this season or we'll jinx it).

I realized that I have used both Montreal Voyageurs and Metros interchangeably in this series, so I've gone back through and committed to Metros since that's what I was using more. Also it's easier to spell. 😂 We hate them either way, though.

Shane has his suitcase in the back of his car and the engine started before the rest of the Metros have gotten off the plane. He has no interest in spending any more time than necessary with them (even Hayden, whose relentless attempts to mediate the shitshow that is the Metros locker room right now have started to wear on Shane) and none of them put up any kind of fight as he’d walked up the center aisle of the plane. Comeau had been loudly inviting everyone to go out and celebrate today’s win, like beating Buffalo is some kind of achievement, and Shane didn’t need to look at anyone else to know he wasn’t included. 

He connects his phone to his dashboard display and punches Ilya’s address in Ottawa into the GPS so he can get traffic updates. Right now the route looks clear, and he shifts the car into gear and pulls out of his parking spot. 

They have a full day off tomorrow, an optional practice Sunday that Shane absolutely won’t be attending, and a game at home Tuesday night. He’s tempted to find an excuse not to be at Monday’s practice, and the urge is so foreign to him it makes him vaguely nauseous. 

Shane shifts in his seat, trying to get comfortable. There’s a bruise on his back making that difficult, and another one on his hip that the seat belt buckle is digging into uncomfortably. The knuckles of his right hand are red and sore, and the bruises around his eyes from last week’s broken nose have started to go sickly greenish-yellow. He considers himself lucky he’s kept all his teeth this week, at least, after getting in more fights than he has in his whole career. Man in the Crease even devoted ten whole minutes talking about Shane’s noticeable uptick in penalty minutes in this week’s episode. Both hosts claimed to be mystified by it and it had taken most of Shane’s willpower not to tweet at them that if they couldn’t understand what was going on, they were being willfully obtuse.

It’s not sustainable to keep this up, especially without most of his team backing him up, but punching Byrd in the face had unleashed something in him, years of frustration and hurt and paranoia and anger that he’d been pushing down for the sake of keeping his secrets. Or maybe it’s that it doesn’t feel like he has anything left to lose, now that most of the things he’s been afraid of since he was eighteen have happened.

He stops to stretch his back about halfway and tops off the gas tank since it will be one less thing to do when he needs to drive back to Montreal on Sunday night. He pulls through a Tim Hortons drive-thru to get a coffee, more because he still wants to be awake when Ilya gets home from Dallas late tonight and not because he’s feeling particularly tired now. 

(Well, he’s tired, but more emotionally than physically. Drained, maybe, is the better word for it.) 

His phone buzzes in the cupholder with texts from Rose and from Hayden and his parents. He mostly ignores it, but when Ilya texts that he’s on the plane, Shane dictates a reply to Siri that’s probably riddled with spelling errors. He doesn’t care; it’s impossible to let a pre-flight text from Ilya go unanswered now. 

He’s made good time; it’s just a little before nine when he picks Anya up from the dog hotel and nine-thirty when he’s hitting the button on the remote that opens Ilya’s garage door. He parks in his spot, making sure to leave enough space for Ilya’s Mercedes, and closes the garage door before getting out of the car. He doesn’t want to make small talk with the neighbors if anyone walks by while he’s unloading Anya and his bags. 

Anya goes straight to the couch in the living room, sniffing out Ilya. 

“He’ll be home soon,” Shane tells her, and goes to fill her water bowl in the kitchen. The fridge is pretty much empty, given how long Ilya has been on the road, but Shane isn’t really hungry. (Ilya will be hungry, because he’s always hungry when he gets off the plane, but Shane suspects he’ll go straight for one of the eight cartons of ice cream in the freezer.) 

He hauls his suitcase upstairs and pulls all the dirty clothes out of it, dumping them in the hamper, which basically fills it, so he brings the hamper downstairs to the laundry room to start a load of their laundry. Pretty much everything is just t-shirts and hoodies and sweatpants and probably fifteen odd socks because Ilya somehow doesn’t care if his socks match. Doesn’t even mind wearing two socks of different heights or thicknesses, which is the kind of thing that would buzz low-level in the back of Shane’s brain all fucking day until he was melting down with the wrongness of it. Shane considers spending the hours between now and when Ilya gets home matching all Ilya’s socks in the drawer that is dedicated to just loose socks, except that he worries it will just become a Sisyphean task he does for the rest of his life, because he doesn’t imagine it’s the kind of thing Ilya will suddenly be inspired to start doing one day. 

Then again, maybe there are worse things than a life spent matching up Ilya’s socks.

He takes a long shower, trying to let the hot water ease some of the tension out of his back and shoulders, but he’s not sure it’s successful. When he dries off, he pulls on sweatpants he’s had since high school and a hoodie of Ilya’s, one of his favorites, soft from years of washing and starting to go a little threadbare at the cuffs. 

When he gets back downstairs, the washing machine is done and he moves everything over to the dryer. The clock in the kitchen tells him it’s now half past ten, and Shane sighs. Ilya won’t be home until after two. 

He drops into the corner of Ilya’s giant sectional, the only piece of furniture that he’d cared to bring to Ottawa from his Boston house, and Shane’s not surprised because it’s the most comfortable couch he’s ever spent any time on. 

Shane switches on the TV and Anya jumps up on the couch to curl up next to him. He spins through channels, for once not interested in any of the hockey games or highlights that flicker in front of him. Not finding anything else he’s interested in watching either, he switches over to Netflix and puts on a random episode of Friday Night Lights. He’s seen all of them more times than he can count, because for years it was the show he put on in the background when he needed noise in his empty apartment or when he needed distracting from hockey. He lets the familiarity of it wash over him, lets his brain switch off.

Halfway through the third episode the dryer buzzes, and Shane makes himself leave the comfort of the couch to go get their clothes out and fold them. They’ll be so wrinkly if he doesn’t. As he stands in the laundry room folding their tangled mess of athletic wear, not even really trying to separate anything except the branded Metros and Centaurs gear, Shane looks down at that stupid fucking Centaur and wonders. 

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and scrolls down to Farah’s last email from a few days ago, nudging him politely. She’s been trying to get him to make a decision about his contract with Montreal and whether he wants to re-sign. He doesn’t, obviously. The GM must know that by now.

He starts typing before he can second guess himself. Can we get me to Ottawa? 

But he doesn’t send it. Not yet. He needs to talk to Ilya first. It probably isn’t even possible with the salary cap and Ottawa doesn’t need him when they already have Ilya. 

His phone buzzes with an Instagram message from Ilya, and Shane feels the same jolt of panic he usually does. He opens it immediately.

Ilya

Everyone on plane is asleep and i am so bored

Are you home?

Shane takes a picture of their stack of laundry sitting on top of the dryer, sending it to Ilya. 

Ilya

You can send better pic than that

in our bed maybe 😈 

Shane

You’re literally on a plane

with your entire team!

Ilya

I told you

everyone sleeping 

Shane finishes folding the last of the laundry and goes back to the couch. There’s a different Friday Night Lights episode playing now, and Shane watches it for a minute, a vivid memory of the summer after the draft, when he’d watched a lot of this show, trying not to obsess about Ilya. (He’d obsessed about Tim Riggins instead, which…who was Shane kidding?) His phone buzzes again. 

Ilya

Please? 

Has been so long

Want to see you

Shane, it turns out, is powerless against Ilya saying please. He pushes down the awkwardness he always feels trying to take a picture of himself that he doesn’t feel weird and insecure about. They never look like him, somehow. He refuses to let himself overthink it, shifting on the couch to get a little more comfortable, one arm tucked behind the cushion under his head, the other extended to snap the photo. When he looks at it, he realizes his sweatshirt has ridden up, exposing a sliver of skin and his hip bone, darkened by the bruise there. But he’s not making a dumb face and hasn’t accidentally blinked, so he sends the picture to Ilya. 

Ilya’s response is immediate.

Ilya

Fuck 

Shane

This is unfair

I still have 3 hours on this plane  

I want to bite you

🥵

Shane

You literally asked for a photo

God I miss you

I want to be on the same team

It’s not the right way to talk to Ilya about this, at all, but he sends it anyway. He doesn’t know how he went so many years not telling Ilya anything; most things don’t feel real now until he shares them with Ilya, even the things that are just silly wishes or errant thoughts that probably can’t go anywhere. 

Ilya

Ottawa? 

Shane

I mean yeah

Unless you’ve got a trade planned

you haven’t told me about

Ilya

I will go talk to coach right now

if you are serious

Shane

Of course I’m serious

You said everyone was asleep

Ilya

I will wake him up

Shane

Ilya no

I’ll email Farah

We can’t have them accuse 

us of tampering

Ilya

What is a little tampering 

between boyfriends?  

Wait engaged 

Even better 

Is basically pillow talk

Shane

Yeah we actually have to be

MARRIED for the legal stuff

to apply to us

Ilya

Fine

No tampering until after the

wedding 

Boring but okay

I will not mess up chance to

be on same team finally

Shane

I love you

I’ll see you soon

Despite his best efforts, Shane does fall asleep on the couch, Friday Night Lights still playing in the background. He’s disoriented when he wakes to the sound of the door from the garage opening, and it takes him a second to remember that he’s in Ottawa, not Montreal. He hears Ilya drop his duffel bag in the hallway and then he’s coming around the corner into the living room, and a whimper works its way out of Shane’s throat at the sight of him in his henley and his black jeans, his necklace catching the light from the glow of the TV. 

“Sweetheart,” Ilya says, and then he’s stretching out on the couch on top of Shane, heavy and warm. Shane could fall asleep like this for the rest of his life and never once complain about it, and somehow, miraculously, it seems like he might just get to do that. 

“I missed you,” Shane says, dragging his jaw across Ilya’s, nosing at the mole on Ilya’s cheek and then wincing, his nose throbbing. 

“Me too, sweetheart. So much. Not just because you send me thirst traps while I’m on the plane.”

“Thirst traps,” Shane repeats, a little weakly. He’s too tired to banter properly, and Ilya smiles, pressing a soft kiss to Shane’s mouth. 

“Is bedtime, I think.”

“Let’s just stay here. For a minute,” Shane says.

“A minute will become six hours and you will complain in the morning that your neck hurts from sleeping on the couch.” Ilya says, but he’s shifting to wedge himself between the back of the couch and Shane.

“Yeah, maybe.” Shane says. “Still just want to stay here, though.”

Ilya smiles, and kisses Shane’s chin, then the corner of his mouth, then each of his cheeks, lips dragging slow across his freckles. 

“Okay,” Ilya agrees.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you to everyone reading and commenting and kudosing this series. I appreciate you all, especially for putting up with me writing all out of order, adding chapters to things we thought were oneshots, etc. I can promise that that chaos will continue, given the WIPs I've currently got going. 😈

Feel free to come yell at me about these boys on tumblr, I'm heydoeydoey there too.