Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, brief appearances by rose and the metros ensemble

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Canon Compliant, Angst with a Happy Ending, Lack of Communication, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Non-Linear Narrative, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other

Language:

English

Collections:

Hollanov Fest 2026

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-18 Completed: 2026-04-20 Words: 12,473 Chapters: 3/3

your heartbeat, as familiar as my own

Summary

They meet when they're just teenagers. They start fucking not too much longer after that. They also don't really allow themselves to get to know each other until much, much later.

(In which your soulmate will one day say something that proves they understand you. Shane and Ilya don't exactly make a habit of talking.)

Notes

written for the hollanov 2026 fest! this was the prompt i received:

soulmate au where the words on your body are something meaningful your soulmate says to you that shows that they know you. so soulmate au + the mortifying ideal of being known. maybe ilya's is something like "i don't know that side of you at all"?

i took it and kinda ran away with it....i hope you enjoy!

additional cws:
- slutshaming in one brief throwaway line
- shane's canon compliant internalized homophobia
- the briefest of references to them having sex

Chapter 1

Your name is Ilya Rozanov, and it is in a Nashville locker room when the rumors about your soulmark start.

The mark rests over your throat, the words wrapping themselves around your neck. They begin at the one side and curl around to the other side in neat, precise writing. Written like a necklace or a rope, what you see every time you look in the mirror: I don’t know that side of you at all.

Sometimes you think that you can feel those words like they are two hands choking you. Sometimes you think that you can feel them like someone else’s pulse. It is hard to tell the difference, most days, between suffocating underneath them and being loved.

The rumors reach Montreal only a week after the 2013 All-Stars match, barely an hour before they play Boston. Shane had somehow avoided the gossip until back with the Metros, when J.J. brings it up. Soulmarks are private, vulnerable things, but when it comes to Ilya Rozanov, nothing is off-limits to many of the Metros players. Taking Rozanov’s every exposed weakness and turning them all into targets for their darts and knives is an old, familiar, comfortable habit by now.

So J.J. says, “Did you guys hear about Rozanov last weekend?”

And Hayden rolls his eyes, saying, “That goal in the third period that everyone’s talking about? Can we please discuss literally anything other than that disgusting play?”

Privately, Shane thinks that it was a great play—disgusting in that it set his team ahead of Shane’s team by a point, disgusting in that it absolutely defied the laws of physics to get the puck to the back of the net, disgusting in how Rozanov gloated about it to him later that night, but a good play nonetheless. That’s the thing about Rozanov; for all that his game is disgusting to his opponents, it is also objectively fucking brilliant.

“No, no,” J.J. says, grinning as he leans over his knees to tie his skates. “So apparently he wears makeup instead of patches to cover his soulmark, even when he’s playing.”

Hayden frowns. “Isn’t that, like…risky? Doesn’t he sweat it off?”

“They make a special makeup for soulmarks, one that doesn’t even smudge without specific wipes,” Shane says absentmindedly, only half thinking about it when he says it.

There’s no reason for him to know that information, because he doesn’t wear that makeup and everyone on the team is probably aware of that. He’s young enough that his own soulmark still has yet to write itself over his skin. It’s not a fact that he’s bothered to hide nor is it something that has singled him out from the group, though it is common knowledge.

But he knows about this makeup anyway, because he’s seen the bottle amongst Rozanov’s things before. He knows that it looks somewhat like a bigger version of a nail polish bottle, he knows the shape of the brand’s logo, he knows that it’s a sensitive subject. He knows Rozanov reapplies the makeup after sex—it’s the first thing he does when he gets out of the bed. He figures it must be the same after games.

Hayden raises his eyebrows at Shane’s comment, giving him a strange look, and Shane just shrugs a little uncomfortably, avoiding Hayden’s eye. He looks at his locker for a long moment, allowing the conversation to move on from him before he turns around to face the locker room.

J.J. keeps going, and Shane is starting to get the feeling that he’s invading Rozanov’s privacy in a way that he isn’t sure he wants to do. If Rozanov wanted him to know anything about what lies underneath that carefully, diligently applied makeup, he would have told Shane. This shouldn’t be coming from J.J. and it shouldn’t be coming out in the Metros locker room.

But here they are anyway: “Livermore told Donaghue who told Lawson who told me that apparently, the mark is on his neck. That’s why he doesn’t wear the patches—he probably can’t get one to stay there with all the damn talking he does.”

Comeau snorts. “More like he can’t suck a ref’s dick and also get a soulmark patch to stay on his whore throat.”

Shane shifts uncomfortably where he’s standing by his locker, his eyes darting around the room. Only a couple of people are paying attention to this conversation; most of the team is occupied with other loud, excited chatter and the remainder are focused on actually gearing up for the game. He carefully schools his face into something neutral, something uninterested, but he isn’t sure he’s pulling off the look when his heartbeat is suddenly pounding so hard at the cage of his chest.

“That’s not the worst part, I heard,” Miitka says, glancing over at them. He had been sitting on the bench, tossing a stress ball between his hands, quietly observing the locker room, but something about the thinly veiled disgust in Comeau’s voice seemed to have drawn him in.

Hayden rolls his eyes with a breathy laugh, and something sick is beginning to crawl up Shane’s throat. They shouldn’t be talking about this. “What else is there to hear? So what if he covers his mark with makeup? Plenty of people do it like that, probably.”

“Bergen told me that he and Ferguson actually saw Rozanov’s words after the game,” Miitka tells them, voice low. “He must’ve not applied the makeup well enough or whatever, and they each saw either side of his neck. Guess he got lazy.”

Rozanov, lazy, doesn’t compute in Shane’s head, especially not about this. But no one else seems to recognize that.

“Shit,” Hayden breathes out, somewhat disbelieving.

Soulmarks are personal things. No one should have taken away from them the choice to keep their soul to themselves and the people they trust. No one’s soul should be so public as to be the subject of a rivals’ locker room gossip.

For most people, soulmarks are secrets. Even Rozanov deserves the right to that privacy; he clearly wants it. Maybe Rozanov especially needs it, a little more than most of the rest of the world.

This privacy is not something he will be allowed, Shane thinks. Not here, and not with these people.

“He told me—” Miitka pauses for dramatic effect that only serves to make Shane feel more sick— “that Rozanov’s words say that his soulmate won’t want him.”

Shane’s heart stops, and stops, and stops, and stops, and it does not restart. He doesn’t think he breathes again until he’s on the ice, and Rozanov is standing in front of him and grinning and winning the fucking faceoff.

The game starts like that, and it ends like that too. Boston takes the win by a 4-2 margin and Shane feels like shit for so many reasons. He hates losing, hates losing to Rozanov, and he hates the image he has in his head of Rozanov’s words curling around his throat saying I don’t want you.

It feels cruel to even imagine in the privacy of his thoughts, and it just feels wrong to apply to Ilya Rozanov. It doesn’t make sense, when Rozanov is so fucking easy to want, in so many ways.

This fucked up thing between them, this dirty and forbidden thing, is magnetic to Shane in a way that he’s been trying to deny from the start. It’s such a terrible idea for so many reasons that Shane doesn’t have the lifespan long enough to list them all. But it’s something that happened because it’s so, so easy to want Ilya Rozanov. It’s so easy, and it’s so hard to deny him when he wants you back.

Shane wants to—or, no; he wants to want to deny Rozanov everything. He wants to want to make Rozanov beg for it. He wants to want to walk away and leave Rozanov watching him go.

But he’s never been able to do it before, and he’s not able to do it tonight. Predictably, he meets Rozanov in an indiscreet hotel room on the far side of Montreal from where the Raiders are based, and he lets himself get caught up in him.

The only difference between now and every time before is that he can’t stop fucking staring at Rozanov’s throat. It’s the only place on his body that Shane’s never been allowed to touch. He tried to kiss him there once, at the crook of neck and shoulder, and Rozanov froze so abruptly, his entire body going tense before guiding him away with both hands, that Shane never tried again.

He’s seen the makeup before, seen the edges where it blends into skin, seen where the texture of it begins and the smoothness of his skin ends. He knew it was there. But it’s different, now that he knows what’s hidden underneath the careful application of makeup.

It’s not until after they’ve fucked and they’re lying in the bed catching their breath that Rozanov exhales heavily and says, lowly, tiredly, “You’re staring.”

Shane turns away from where he had, in fact, been staring instantly at Rozanov’s neck. His own throat bobs as he swallows. “Sorry.”

Resigned, Rozanov says quietly, “You heard the rumors, then.”

Shane takes a measured breath. He’s not the one who should be freaking out right now. That isn’t fair to Rozanov. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Good. I don’t want to.”

“Okay.” Shane’s voice is small.

Rozanov groans, putting both his hands against his eyes and pressing down. “Fuck. It doesn’t mean anything. Is just a stupid mark. The rumors are exaggerating it, anyway. Okay?”

He sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself than Shane. He sounds like this is a sentiment he’s thought to himself a million times over, and he still has yet to believe it. He sounds as if every time he thinks this, he believes it less.

So Shane says again, “Okay,” and doesn’t believe Rozanov believes it at all. But that’s the end of that. They don’t talk for the rest of the night, until Shane leaves.

You know what you want. You also know what you are allowed to want. These are two different, incompatible things. They always will be, because to exist in your body and soul is to exist in contradictions. You cannot have what you so terribly desire, and this will haunt you for the rest of your life.

You know who your soulmate is now. You know who your heart belongs to, and who can best read you. You know who in the world can understand the shape of your soul best. You know who you will always, in some way, be beholden to. Pulled towards. Stitched next to in the fabric of the universe.

You also know what your words mean, now. You used to hope that maybe they were just misleading; you used to hope that context would make them hurt less. Now, you think that maybe the context hurts more than the words do.

The truth is that you will want this boy for the rest of your life, and you know he will never understand it.

The first soulmark Shane sees that isn’t his own belongs to Rose. She’s good at covering it up when she’s in the public eye—she’s a celebrity; she has to be good at hiding her words if she doesn’t want crazed fans trying to write themselves into her destiny—but it only takes one slip up. They’re in bed together, covered only by a thin white sheet and the encroaching dark of nighttime.

They’re both clearly exhausted from a long day—Shane had a game against Seattle that afternoon; Rose had been shooting the X-Squad movie she seems to hate mostly out of habit—and Shane is telling himself that’s the only reason he doesn’t want to fuck her. They’re both kind of just staring at the ceiling in silence, and Shane figures they’re thinking about the same thing.

He knows he should want to fuck her. Rose is beautiful and kind and genuine, and she takes it in stride that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. She’s everything that he could ask of a girlfriend, and he’s determined to make this work. He’s determined to fix this thing in him that doesn’t—

That doesn’t want her.

Because that’s the truth of it, at the end of the day. He doesn’t actually want her. It makes him feel sick with guilt and perversion and hopelessness that he doesn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less true. He doesn’t want her and yet still, he’s determined to make himself want her eventually. So he lies there in that bed under the thinnest sheet in the world and he very carefully tries to make himself want to have sex.

Rose has been so good to him, has taken it with grace every time he’s said that he’s too tired or something’s sore from practice or he’s just not in the mood. She’s never pushed him to do anything once he says no. But it must be bothering her; she’s a world-famous celebrity and constantly paraded as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. It has to be bothering her that he’s so resistant to anything physical.

Shane knows it’s sure as fuck bothering him.

It only bothers him more when the soulmark patch she wears slips away from her wrist. She’s usually so careful about replacing it once a day, as soon as the stick on it starts to wear off from sweat and movement.

She’s reaching over for him, the light from the streetlamps outside bleeding through the blinds just enough to illuminate her wrist. It happens in slow motion: the patch is peeling up at the corners, warping the colorful pattern she prefers over the neutral skin tone patches, and then it’s fluttering to the sheets between them.

Shane doesn’t mean to read it; it just kind of happens instinctively. There are words in front of him and so he reads them.

She snatches her wrist away from him as soon as she notices, snapping her hand close to her chest and wrapping her other hand around her wrist to cover it. Soulmarks are private, personal things. It’s normal not to want anyone to see the words written onto you, even a partner, no matter how long you’ve been together.

The words are meant to be something someone will say one day that proves they know you. They see you. They understand you in a way that no one else ever can. This is how they will love you.

It’s important, Shane thinks, to keep that kind of thing private. Secret. A short sentence or two that supposedly offers a window into your soul—it’s something no one but you and your soulmate needs to know. Shane’s words are fairly generic, but even he doesn’t want to share them with anyone. If he does ever tell anyone what they are, he wants it to be his choice to show them.

That choice being taken away from Rose makes him ache for her a little. He doesn’t mean to see, but he does.

“Fuck,” she says quickly, something uncharacteristically fragile in her voice. “Um. I’ll replace it. Can you—in my makeup bag—”

Shane swallows hard, still kind of processing what’s happening. The old patch is sitting between them on the sheets, a bright color standing stark against the white sheet. He looks at it for a long moment before Rose clears her throat and he realizes that she’s waiting for a response from him.

“Oh—” and he’s such a shitty fucking boyfriend to her but he doesn’t know how to be better when he doesn’t want to be hers in the first place— “Yeah, of course. Sure.”

He climbs out of bed in a hurry, nearly getting caught in the sheets and falling before he figures out how to move right. He finds her makeup bag in the bathroom and digs out a new patch. This one has cartoon rainbows and clouds and raindrops on it. Something about the naive brightness of it makes him mildly annoyed; enough to fish out a different one that has a more generic paisley pattern.

She’s still lying in bed where she had been when he returns from the bathroom. She’s cradling her wrist against her chest protectively, and Shane kind of wants to tell her it’s too late, he already saw, and he knows, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to say anything. When he opens his mouth to try, something with barbed wire clogs in his throat and he chokes on the words.

“Thanks,” is all she says, quiet, when he hands the patch to her. She sits up and turns around when she puts it on, her back to him and her head hunched over herself.

He should tell her, but he can’t. She didn’t want him to know, and so he’ll have to pretend that he doesn’t know.

With the patch safely back on, Rose rolls back over in bed to cuddle with him. They don’t talk about it, but it’s all that he can think about the rest of the night. She’s warm and soft against his side while she falls asleep. Even if she were to talk, Shane doesn’t think he’d even process that she said anything. He’s too deep into his head now.

He stays awake long into the night, despite how exhausted he had been only moments before this, the words swimming behind his closed eyelids.

It sounds like something he could say, maybe. Maybe. But that doesn’t matter, not really, because the handwriting isn’t his. It’s choppy and messy and emboldened; he always writes with thin, precise lettering. There’s no way that he’s her soulmate.

He should break up with her, probably. But maybe there’s still a way to salvage things. Maybe he’s not her soulmate but that doesn’t mean they can’t work. Plenty of people have relationships with people they aren’t sure are made perfectly to fit their soul. Plenty of people date and fall in love with people they don’t know are the perfect match. It’s not out of the norm at all.

But she deserves so much better than him. She deserves this other person who knows her. Knows her in a way that he never can.

He falls asleep eventually, curled against Rose and thinking about how he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to be able to love her like she deserves.

He dreams of Rozanov, because of course he does.

In the dream, they’re on the ice. The rink is, for some reason, outdoors, and it’s entirely empty except for the two of them. The stands are barren and ghostly. The ice is hard and comforting under his skates, and they’re bent over to take the face-off.

Rozanov is grinning at him, wide and with all his teeth. There’s something contagious about his smile that makes Shane want to smile too, and he hates himself when he gives in to the urge. Rozanov laughs, bright and joyful and unburdened. Shane doesn’t think he’s ever actually heard that sound—Ilya Rozanov, unburdened—but fuck, he wants to so badly.

The puck drops out of nowhere, and they battle for it. Rozanov wins, and this time it’s Shane who laughs. It feels like being a child again, fumbling around on the ice and trying to learn all the tricks to picking up speed. Playing against Rozanov is fucking fun. Every time they play, it brings back a joy to the game that Shane thought might have been otherwise lost forever.

God, the feeling of it. Flying carefree down the ice, not concerning himself about the score or picking up points or a team relying on him to win or a dynasty resting on his shoulders. Just the two of them, playing a game. The fucking indescribable feeling of it.

They’re cornered behind the goal and Rozanov is battling for the puck that Shane’s got trapped with his stick when the dream version Rozanov whispers it.

“Good morning,” he says, voice low and tempting, “I like you.”

Shane freezes at the sound of it, and Rozanov takes the chance to steal the puck. As he skates away to the opposite side of the rink, he tosses a glance back and yells, “Time to wake up, Shane Hollander!”

He jolts awake, sitting straight up and breathing rapid and hard, before he can even begin to think about chasing after him. His heart is panicking, running wildly in his chest.

Rose, who rolled over to the other side of the bed at some point, hasn’t stirred. Shane looks over at her with something untamed in his gaze, something terrified and animalistic in its fear, and tries to ground himself with the sheer sight of her. His girlfriend. White sheet pushed down to her thighs. Bare skin of her shoulder where her oversized t-shirt has ridden down. Hair spilling onto the pillow behind her. A strand caught at her lips.

It was just a dream. It doesn’t mean anything.

It doesn’t mean anything.

He puts a hand to his left bicep, gripping hard until it hurts, all while trying to calm his breathing. He digs his thumbnail into the words tattooed there, covered by the thin patch. He digs his nail deeper and deeper, until it stings, until it aches like a cut open bruise, like a heartbreak.

He doesn’t know who the words belong to; he doesn’t know who his soulmate is. It was just a dream.

Still, in the back of his mind, Ilya Rozanov, who he left alone in Boston: Good morning. I like you.

You are thirteen years old when your words come in, and when they do, it is with a blinding, searing pain; the worst you’ve ever known. No one warned you about this part—no one told you how much it would fucking hurt for your soul to be written over your naked skin like this.

You think you are dying, at first. It’s in the middle of the locker room after practice with your junior club team; you aren’t captain yet but you’re clawing your way up there, and all you can do when you let out a sob of pain is hope that they don’t lose all respect for you when you cry.

It feels like you are being cut open, like your throat is being slit in the shapes of a thousand tiny, individual cuts. It feels as if your soulmark will kill you. Your neck burns hot and mortified, and you clutch at it with both hands in a desperate, juvenile bid to make the pain stop.

To stumble into the bathroom and out of the huddle of your friends you have to shove through all your teammates, both the ones looking concerned and the ones looking like you’re crazy and the ones already coming up with ways to make fun of you.

You manage to get to a mirror: you look wrecked, tears streaming down your face in silent, wracking sobs of pain; sweat beads at your hairline, and you aren’t sure if it’s from practice or the soulmark; your hands clenched around your neck look like you’re trying to choke yourself.

The bathroom clears out, leaving you alone in the mirror. Laughter comes from the other room. You drop your hands from your throat only when the sensation of being cut open and cauterized stops. In reality, it all lasts only a few minutes, but the pain reverberates in your heart for a long, long time.

When you stare at your reflection, it takes you a few minutes to read the words—fair, given that they are mirrored and in your second language—but once you do, their meaning hits instantly, and it haunts you for even longer than the physical pain does.

It happens just before the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The mark comes in with a pain unlike anything Shane’s ever known before. He’s broken bones and twisted joints; he’s gotten hurt during games, gotten hurt during practices, gotten hurt by falling off of bicycles and with his hand slipping while chopping vegetables and when pressing his thumb too deep into yellowing bruises. He thought he knew what pain felt like.

But this is nothing like that. This is a searing fire cutting into his skin so deep that it’s prying open the bones in his upper left arm. He’s alone when it happens, settling down for the night in his apartment in Montreal, and he can’t help but let out a cry of pain when it starts. He can’t help the tears that spring to his eyes when his whole body tenses and screams in pain.

His eyes dart down to his bicep, and then his whole brain numbs over, static crawling over every other thought. There are words carving themselves in black ink over the muscle of his arm—his soulmark, finally coming in.

Your soulmark is supposed to write itself over your body at any point between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. Shane had never been too worried about his, too focused on a million other, more important, things. Not having his yet is not something that he’s concerned himself with overthinking.

But here it is, now. His breaths are uneven, coming in short, panting gasps that don’t fill his lungs all of the way. He feels like he’s just played a full game by himself, like he’s just lost a full game by himself.

The words settle into his skin as he watches in pain: Good morning. I like you.

And Shane doesn’t know what the fuck to do with that. The words are supposed to demonstrate that your soulmate knows you. That they know you, and love you because of it. These words—Shane isn’t sure what the context could be where something as simple as I like you shows that his soul is seen and loved.

It could be worse, he supposes, once the pain has faded. At least he knows his soulmate will like him.

Still, he stares at the mark for a long time. Flexing his fist just to see the words warp around the muscle. Moving his arm up and down just to see it flash in the corner of his eye. Running his opposite pointer finger over the ridges of the lettering. Pressing the flat of his thumbprint into the G.

Soulmarks are strange, nebulous things. The marks never mean what you think they’re going to mean. There’s always some strange catch, some strange twist of fate to them. Shane knows this well. Despite knowing that, though, he can’t help but wonder at his own. What it means, who it could belong to.

He can’t help, too, but to wonder about everything it isn’t saying. Everything it doesn’t mean. The word like instead of love. The good morning of it; the strangeness of a normal morning greeting being the statement that reads his soul best.

The words are fairly generic. Tender to the touch. Relatively commonplace statements. Strange, given what they are supposed to signify, but otherwise mostly unremarkable. So they could be worse. The mark is large, and he’ll have to invest in maximum size soulmark patches, but even that isn’t the end of the world.

Yes, it could be worse—he could have Rozanov’s mark.

Chapter 2

You’ve picked people up in clubs and gone home with them plenty. You’ve hooked up with people without strings attached. You have never stayed the night. You leave before the sun rises, every time. As if you are afraid of the light hitting you, exposing you, while you lay so vulnerably in someone else’s bed.

But you ask him to stay the night anyway. You invite him into your home, into your private space, and you ask him to stay with you. You have been planning this out for what feels like a lifetime—since you met him, maybe.

You wonder if this could be something that matters, something with strings and daylight. Then he leaves, and takes any tentative, misplaced hope in soulmates with him.

Shane doesn’t notice, in the moment when he says the words that Ilya’s been waiting to hear since he was thirteen. He doesn’t notice how Ilya’s whole body goes still, and then slacks; all the tension slipping away from his muscles like he’s finally letting go of some weight that he’s been carrying about for a decade. He doesn’t notice how Ilya looks over at him like he’s seeing Shane for real, and for the first time.

Ilya doesn’t say anything, then, and so they just move on. They move on and everything is okay, is good, even, in a way that things have never been before. They watch the hockey game and they talk about nothing and it’s all so fucking soft and domestic and normal that Shane feels like he’s been thrown off-kilter into a situation he has no hope of navigating successfully.

There’s daylight streaming into the room, into Ilya’s real living room. There’s conversation, as hesitant as it may be. They’re touching in a way that isn’t necessarily sexual. There are windows, and the blinds are open. No one is looking at them but Shane still feels as if the entire world can see his naked heart right now.

It’s wrong—it’s all so wrong. None of this is what they do. None of this is what Shane is allowed to do, not by any metric of his own design nor by the expectations on his shoulders.

Still, he wants this, so badly that it scares him. He wants Rozanov. He wants Rozanov’s first name in his mouth, he wants Rozanov’s heart safe in his hands, he wants his own heart safe in Rozanov’s hands, he wants tuna melts and catnaps in the sun and sex on the couch in a real living space. It’s so fucking terrifying, because he knows he can’t have any of it.

It’s wrong, to want this. He shouldn’t be giving in like this, letting himself daydream and hope and wonder about all these things that can’t ever be. He shouldn’t be deluding himself into believing that this could be real—that Rozanov could ever want these things too.

They do not exist in a world where they can have any of it. They do not exist in a world where Shane can allow himself to even want it, much less ask for it. Life and hockey are not kind like that.

But here—now—it’s as if maybe—it’s like—

And it crashes down around them the instant that Rozanov breathes out his name. It’s part gasp and part moan and part desperate secret. It sounds like it’s healing something in Rozanov to say it, sounds like it’s stitching together two broken pieces of a heart, and so Shane whispers, “Ilya.”

His own terrible, unruly heart wants this to mean something so badly. But Rozanov is trying to kiss him again and Shane’s heart is suddenly in his throat, suddenly choking him, suddenly making him feel so sick that he might collapse when he stands. But he has to stand, he has to get out—

He says Rozanov’s first name and it sits so perfectly on his tongue that it terrifies him. He says his name and it doesn’t feel like he’s being healed or loved or wanted or known; it feels like he’s breaking his own heart.

Ilya—and then Shane is getting the fuck out and he’s not looking back.

But before he leaves—before things fall to pieces around you, the pressure of his lips on yours and his thighs straddling your lap still lingering—before all that: he ruins you in a different way. From the moment you first kiss him, the moment you first fuck him, the moment you first look at those eyes in the daylight, he has left you ruined for anyone else.

And you tease him about it, about you ruining him, about you leaving him unable to feel fulfilled by anyone else. You tease him about wanting you so badly that no one else will ever come close. But even as you tease him, you know the truth. He’s the one who has ruined you.

You will never be able to move on in any way that means something. You will never be able to walk away from this empty handed—this will end with his heart in your hands, or you will not be able to let this end at all. Yes, he has ruined you.

They lose their game 4-1 to Boston, and then Shane loses his entire mind while Rozanov fucks him, and then Rozanov says, “I have ruined you. No one else will do,” and Shane thinks maybe he hates him.

It’s the way that Rozanov says it, like it’s just a given. It’s the way Rozanov’s words whisper over the hollow of Shane’s throat when he kisses him again, lips wet and warm from the running shower water. It’s the way Rozanov looks at him when he pulls back, somewhat amused and somewhat fond, a waterproof soulmate patch wrapped twice around his whole neck. It’s the way Rozanov kisses him hard and passionate and full of something Shane is too scared to name.

I have ruined you, Rozanov says, and Shane hates him for it. For taking him into his arms like this, for starting this fucked up thing they do every time they’re within the same city borders, for ruining him.

Shane tells him to fuck off, and they turn the moment into easy banter and rolled eyes. This is what they do, every time things get to be too much: they step back, and they pretend it doesn’t mean anything. Because it doesn’t—because they don’t.

There are a thousand reasons why they can’t mean anything. There are a thousand more why Shane doesn’t want them to mean anything.

But sometimes Rozanov says things like that, like I have ruined you, and Shane is reminded that they’re playing with fire every time they meet up. They’re pushing each other a little further towards the cliff’s edge, tangled up in each other’s limbs in shady hotel room beds and threatening to tip over the ledge. They’re constantly flirting with the end.

And Shane hates him for it, some days. Other days, he hates himself for it more.

On one hand, it should be easy to blame Rozanov for this. But even if it was Rozanov who wanted him first, Shane has had a million chances to walk away and he’s never taken any of them. He’s had a million chances to deny Rozanov what he wants, but that’s never been a game that lasts very long. When Rozanov texts, Shane answers. When Rozanov tells him to get on his knees, Shane drops down. When Rozanov kisses him like that—almost sweetly—Shane always, always gives in.

He hates Rozanov for asking. He hates himself more for saying yes, every time.

I have ruined you.

Shane is thinking about the words for a long, long time after Rozanov has left for the night. They won’t see each other for another three weeks, but Shane is already counting down the days. It’s not healthy, this thing they have; it’s addictive, in a way that Shane can’t bring himself to quit.

He wishes he knew how to take it all back. He wishes he knew how to unmake this bed they lie in. He wishes he knew how to undo this mistake they’ve made. He wishes he knew how to un-ruin himself. How to fix this.

One day, he tells himself, he’ll meet a woman who makes him want to block Rozanov’s number. He’ll meet a woman who makes him want to turn his head away when Rozanov catches his eye and smirks. He’ll meet a woman who makes him feel just as good as the heat of Rozanov touching him, fingers everywhere and tongue everywhere and cock hard to the touch.

One day, it’ll happen. He’ll tell Rozanov to stop, and Rozanov will listen, because he’s never been anything less than what Shane asks for. He’ll keep his promise not to beg for Rozanov to kiss him in the dark. He’ll stay true to the dream of not wanting Rozanov at all.

But privately, right now, Shane has this daydream. A fantasy, really; one so outlandish and so ridiculous that he barely dare name it for himself.

In the dream, he and Rozanov talk. They just lay in bed and they just talk about nothing. About hockey, about childhood pets, about taxes, about the chores they’re avoiding, about their friends. They lay close enough for their shoulders to be touching, their fingers tangled together underneath the sheets where no one can see them.

Rozanov looks at him with that fond, open look he gets sometimes after they fuck. He looks at him like what they have is something soft and gentle and meaningful, rather than something distracting and dirty. He smiles a little, one of those smiles that the media is never allowed to see and that Shane has only been allowed the privilege of on rare occasions, and he does not say, I have ruined you.

He says, instead, Good morning. I like you.

It sounds beautiful under the weight of his accent and it sounds precious with the curl of his smile and it sounds adoring given the glimmer in his eyes. It sounds like something Shane has been waiting his whole life to hear.

But these are not words that are ever going to come from Ilya Rozanov. Shane is sure of this, and he wouldn’t want to hear them from Rozanov anyway. This secret that they’ve promised to each other is already fucked up enough; they don’t need to add soulmates into it. They don’t need to add into it actually knowing each other.

You are afraid that no one will ever know you. You hide your soul behind armor that you are afraid no one will ever realize is not who you are. You have layers upon layers of defense mechanisms that you are so, so scared no one will ever want to fight past. You are absolutely pointblank terrified that you will die one day, and no one will have ever known you. You are afraid that even you do not know who you are.

But at the same time, there is a boy who could love you if you let him.

Two people who change Shane’s life: first, Rose Landry, when she finally forces him to confront his sexuality in a way he cannot ignore; second, Scott Hunter, when he proves that maybe the sexuality he cannot change could be allowed.

And with that: he doesn’t remember much from the hospital after Marleau hits him; most of it is foggy with the influence of pain and drugs, and much of it is just confusing to look back upon.

What he does remember is Ilya, looking devastated and terrified in a way that Shane has never seen him before; Ilya, saying maybe when Shane asked him to spend the summer together; Ilya, hushing him as he leaves, making sure that he keeps their secret even while high.

It’s strange—for all that the rest of his stay is fuzzy, every moment of Ilya’s visit is sharp and clear in his memory. The feeling of Ilya’s hand over his cheekbone comes with a sense memory, thinking about the way Ilya held his hand still carries a tight pressure around his palm, his recollection of Ilya’s shattered expression is visible behind his closed eyes. Every moment with Ilya is one that Shane treasures, ones that he holds so close to his heart that even the drugs couldn’t take them from him.

So when Scott Hunter changes everything, Shane picks up the phone call from Ilya and as shocked as he is by what Hunter had done, he’s not shocked when Ilya says, “I’m coming to the cottage.”

He hadn’t been expecting, not by any means, for Ilya to agree. When Ilya said maybe, Shane knew as soon as he was clear-headed that that meant no. He knew how scared they both were of what it would mean for Ilya to come to the cottage—it would be opening doors that neither of them would be capable of closing ever again. He knew that it was the start of a dangerous game to play.

But so is hockey, and they both love the adrenaline rush of it anyway.

Still, when Ilya changes his mind at the last minute, Shane understands it. He understands what changed things, he understands that the entire world has been altered in a way it can never come back from. He understands why Ilya sounds so determined when he says it, and why it at the same time feels so impulsive. He understands how brave Ilya is right now, for calling, and how brave Shane himself is, for picking up his call.

He also knows that this is how they have worked from the very beginning. Ilya knocks, Shane opens the door. Shane texts, Ilya replies. Ilya asks, Shane consents. Shane begs, Ilya agrees readily. Ilya calls, Shane picks up the phone.

They’ve never been able to escape each other, not really. They’ve never wanted to, not really. Not in any real, tangible way. Not enough to actually do it. For all the years that Shane spent believing they were a dirty, old, bad habit, one that he could break one day, he knows now that was never truly a possibility. Not when he maybe loves—

He doesn’t allow himself to think it, not yet. This could all still go so wrong.

There are preparations to be made. There are lies to tell. There are secrets to keep. There’s grocery shopping to do. There’s cleaning to be done. There are dreams to dream and anxieties to overthink and hopes to rise, despite everything.

And through it all: Ilya. They text about plans, and talk about nothing on the phone sometimes, in a way that Shane didn’t think they’d ever do. They don’t have phone sex every time and they don’t even turn their video feeds on most nights. They say everything but I’m excited to spend time with you.

It all feels like a promise. Like a mutual understanding that this could be everything, but it could also shatter every misplaced hope they’ve ever had. They could still be so wrong about this, about each other.

But then Shane is picking him up from the airport and no one recognizes them and they actually get away with it. Ilya is sitting in his car and telling him it’s boring and Shane is protesting that it’s good in the snow and it suddenly all feels so familiar that it’s like they’ve done this a thousand times, lifetime after lifetime.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Shane finally admits, and it feels like letting a long breath out of his lungs, it feels like all the tension in his muscles falling away.

And Ilya could say a thousand things, could tease him for it, could play it all off as a joke. Ilya could take this moment and make it something simple, easy; something that isn’t weighted and tentative. He could spin it around the way they both have so many times before, from something real to something simple. Something they don’t have to confront.

Instead, he agrees, and he smiles just a little, that private, worried smile he gets when he’s unsure of himself. Shane wonders how many other people have ever gotten to see that smile.

He says, “But, like…terrified, too, yes?” Ilya asks, and Shane breathes out in relief. They are, then, on the same page, somehow. Yes, yes, he’s so fucking terrified.

He’s glad that Ilya is here. He’s excited that Ilya is here; he’s been looking forward to and preparing for this for the past several weeks.

But also—he’s so fucking terrified. They’re on the cusp of something that matters, something that could change everything. This could either make them into something beautiful or break something that hasn’t even really had the chance to start yet.

They’re taking a leap of faith here that Shane is so fucking scared is going to backfire. But Ilya seems to be feeling the same way, seems to understand, and that much is easing the tension in Shane’s shoulders already.

Isn’t that the most important thing, after all? That Ilya understands? That Ilya is willing to try this anyway, despite the risk and despite the fear and given the fact that it’s Shane he’s doing it all for?

A third person who changes Shane’s life, in every way conceivable: Ilya Rozanov.

So—a leap of faith it is.

They are both so afraid, and they are taking a risk that could ruin them both. But Shane knows he, at least, has been made to be ruined by Ilya from the start, and now he’s finally going to get to own that. He’s finally going to try to hand over the shape of his heart like it could be something that Ilya Rozanov wants to touch.

Something about this moment—about Ilya admitting to his own worry, and to his bravery anyway—makes Shane feel a little braver, too. There are so many things to worry about, but they’re not worth thinking about right now. Right now, they just drive onwards.

There is a boy who could love you, and you are even more scared that he might be starting to understand you. You are afraid, on one hand, that no one will ever know you; but on the other hand, there is nothing more fucking petrifying than the idea that there is a boy who wants to, and he might not like what he finds.

But if he does—if he does like what he finds—what then?

After dinner on their first night together, they don’t really know what to do with themselves.

It’s always been such a rare thing, to have the luxury and privilege of time. Time that isn’t spent getting as many orgasms as they can pull out of each other in the span of a few hours; time that isn’t spent pushing each other around on the ice; time that isn’t spent arguing about hockey strategy and the every team’s chances next season. Time that they can just be with each other.

The thing about that, really, is that they don’t know each other; not in the way that Shane wants to know Ilya. They skipped right past what’s your favorite animal? and straight to can I make you come untouched if I fuck you like this?

It’s not to say that they don’t know each other, because sometimes Shane thinks that the only person he actually knows in any true, intimate, deep way is Ilya Rozanov. He has friends, but when it comes to people who have seen straight through his chest to the color of his heart, he thinks maybe Ilya is the only person on the list. He’s built a home and a career out of living in Shane’s heart in a way that no one else ever has.

But Shane doesn’t know what Ilya’s favorite color is. He doesn’t know his brother’s name. He doesn’t know Ilya’s go-to comfort food. He doesn’t know his guilty pleasure mobile app games. He doesn’t know the names of his childhood teammates. He doesn’t know what his dream pet is.

After dinner, Shane motions towards the couch and Ilya shrugs and follows him. He looks around the room as he does, still taking in everything around him, as if every trinket and book cover and photo frame here is a clue as to who Shane Hollander is when he’s alone. Shane supposes it kind of is. He felt the same way when he first went to Ilya’s apartment in Boston.

They haven’t even sat down before Shane blurts out, “I don’t know how you take your coffee.”

Ilya settles onto the couch, frowning at him. He had pulled on one of Shane’s Metros sweatshirts when it got a little cold, and the sight of him, cozy and soft in Shane’s clothes, now makes something secret glow warmly in his chest. “What?”

“Tomorrow,” Shane says, waving a hand vaguely. He sits down across from Ilya, whose frown deepens just slightly. “I know you like coffee. But I don’t know how you like it. I have dark and medium roast grounds and the instant freeze dried stuff and the beans you have to grind up, but actually I don’t have a thing to grind them, so—and I bought sugar cubes and whole milk and half-and-half and almond milk, just in case, but—”

Ilya’s frown is slowly turning into a bright, wide smile. He laughs, loose and easy and amused. He looks almost—he looks adoring. “You bought a whole grocery store aisle just so I can have coffee?”

Shane shifts a little uncomfortably, not meeting his eyes. “Maybe.”

Ilya’s grin has only widened when Shane looks up. He has that look on his face, the one that makes Shane simultaneously bristle indignantly—he doesn’t think he was being all that unreasonable—and also want to throw himself into Ilya’s lap and kiss him over how beautiful he is.

“What?” Shane demands. “It’s not that weird. You didn’t tell me any groceries you wanted, so I was guessing.”

Ilya hums, sitting up straighter. “Let’s play twenty questions. Take turns asking each other questions, and we have to tell the truth, yes? And then we know each other better. And we don’t have to guess anymore.”

Shane narrows his eyes at him. “I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to play twenty questions.”

“It is in Russia,” Ilya says dismissively.

Shane is almost entirely certain that that’s not true—he’s in fact pretty sure that twenty questions is a relatively universal game; one with a fairly simple set of rules, none of which Ilya just laid out—but he doesn’t argue. If this is how Ilya wants to justify the game, Shane is just going to let it happen. It’s the kind of silly fun that they’ve never gotten to do together.

“You start,” Ilya says, motioning towards him. He still has that stupidly fond smile, and Shane would let him have anything he asked for, whatever his justifications.

“Okay. How do you take your coffee?”

Ilya snorts. “I should have expected that. Cream and sugar. Just a little, not too much. Dark roast is good. Do you like coffee?”

“It’s not really in the diet,” Shane says, shrugging a little stiffly.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Shane sighs. “It’s fine, I guess. I don’t really remember what it tastes like, honestly. It’s been a while. What’s your favorite breakfast food?”

“You’re really concerned about tomorrow morning,” Ilya says, raising his eyebrows.

Nudging his thigh with his foot, Shane just rolls his eyes and says, “Do you want to play this game or not? Answer the question.”

“Pancakes.” Ilya puts a hand on Shane’s ankle and it sends a trickle of warmth up from his foot to the top of Shane’s spine. “With syrup. And strawberries, if I have them. What’s your favorite fruit?”

“Blueberries. Yours?”

“Strawberries again,” Ilya says, “and don’t steal my questions, Hollander. Come up with your own. If you were suddenly one day kidnapped by aliens and taken to a far away planet, what’s the first thing you do?”

Shane can’t help but laugh, his eyes bright as he looks at Ilya and Ilya looks back at him. He feels comfortable here, feels safe and wanted and adored. No small part of that comes from the way Ilya is staring at him so openly, his hand a light weight on Shane’s ankle and his fingers tracing patterns over his shin.

The game goes on, the questions varying from basic to ridiculous to real in a way that Shane wasn’t expecting.

What’s your least favorite color? Do you like cake or cupcakes more? What’s the dumbest expensive purchase you’ve made?

If hockey didn’t exist, what sport would you play? Okay, fine, what’s your plan to invent hockey on your own from scratch if it didn’t exist?

Who in your life are you most grateful for? What would you miss most if it randomly entirely disappeared one day and no one but you remembered it ever existed? You can’t say hockey.

Then Ilya asks, “Who was your best friend when you were a kid?”

Shane frowns a little. “When I was a kid?”

“I don’t want to hear you talk about Hayden Pike right now.”

Snorting, Shane shifts a little where he sits. At some point, he had migrated from sitting opposite Ilya to sitting pressed so close against him that he might as well be in Ilya’s lap at this point. His head is resting on Ilya’s shoulder, and Ilya is absentmindedly toying with Shane’s fingers. It’s pleasant, comforting.

“I don’t know,” Shane finally admits, after a few moments of silence. “I didn’t really have one, I don’t think.”

“No?”

Shane swallows hard, training his gaze on the place where Ilya has interlocked their fingers. “Most of the kids on my team disliked me at least a little—racist or jealous or both. And I didn’t have time for anyone in my school because I was too focused on hockey.”

There’s a beat of silence. Then Shane shrugs, the movement stiff. “Besides that, I wasn’t the easiest kid to get along with. I’m still not, I guess.”

Ilya makes an affronted noise. “What?”

“I’m very…intense,” Shane says, trying to sound as if it’s nothing. Ilya’s grip on Shane’s hand tightens anyway. “In a way that’s not easy to like.”

Ilya is quiet, and Shane tenses a little at his side. Then, slowly, Ilya turns to press a kiss to the crown of Shane’s head. It’s gentle but firm, too, full of intention and meaning. Ilya murmurs, “I don’t know that side of you to be unlikable at all.”

Shane swallows hard, his eyes blown wide as he resists the urge to look up and see Ilya’s face. He doesn’t want to break this moment by making Ilya self-conscious over the vulnerability in his words; he doesn’t want to break this moment by exposing the rawness of his own expression. “Oh.”

Ilya hums. “Your turn.”

“Right.” Shane blinks, again and again and again, and gets himself under control. “Say we both get transported into the world of the last movie you watched. How fucked are we?”

Ilya laughs, and the moment passes. But still—just then, it felt like something important was healed.

Chapter 3

The words around your neck mean nothing good to you—until they do. Until you’re sharing a bed and waking up next to him with the sunlight warming your bare skin and turning him gold in the daylight; until you look at him with sleep still fogging all sense and you say you like him.

You say the words engraved onto his soul because you are suddenly knowing him anew and there is no greater privilege, because you are making discovery after discovery about who he is at his core, because you have always wanted him as he is. You say to him the words that read his soul—you see his heart—and you like him.

“Good morning,” Ilya murmurs, voice and mind both hoarse and hazy with sleep. “I like you.”

And Shane is instantly awake, breath halting where he lies in Ilya’s arms, because those are the words. Those are the words that are written onto his bicep, that’s the shape of his soul spoken on the lips of Ilya Rozanov. His accent curls around each letter sleepily and it is the most beautiful thing that Shane has ever heard.

“I like you too,” Shane whispers, because that is, first and foremost, the most important thing. Then, “Holy shit.”

And he’s not surprised, exactly, that Ilya is the one to speak aloud his soulmark. He had wondered and dreamt enough for this to feel right. He is, however, surprised by how readily Shane believes him, and how much he himself means it when he says it in return.

These two weeks were a leap of faith, a freefall into the unknown, a terrible idea waiting to explode in their faces. Their relationship in general is something that has been waiting to go wrong from the start of it all—but suddenly, with wrenching hope, Shane thinks that maybe the other shoe will never drop. Maybe they can actually make it, make something real out of this, make something honest and vulnerable and true out of what has never been so soft before.

Good morning. I like you.

This was an experiment that could have ruined everything they’ve been tentatively inching towards. But in the span of only a week, they’ve learned each other’s hearts in a way that they’ve never known each other before. They’ve finally spent time together without fucking or arguing or skating. Shane has been able to soak in Ilya’s presence with patience and time and openness; he’s been able to give himself over to Ilya in ways he’s never been allowed to do before. Ilya has been able to do the same in return.

And through all of this, they’ve unearthed a potential reality they’ve always been too afraid to name, much less dare to hope for.

I like you. I like spending time with you. I like doing nothing with you. I like the laughter and the video games and the fire pit and the secret sharing and the bird feeder and the dishes after dinner.

I like making life fun and carefree with you. I like going through the day at your side; I like waking up with you in my arms and going to sleep with my head on your chest.

I have never known you like this before. I have never been allowed to. But now—I don’t think I can ever go back. I can’t fold this up in a box and lock it away and hide it ever again. I’ve admitted it all and let it come spilling out of my chest in riptides.

I can’t take it back, and I don’t want to. Don’t make me have to take it back. Don’t ask that of me. Not when I finally can say I like you.

Ilya smiles, just a little; soft and vulnerable and so open in his affection. He always knows exactly what Shane needs to hear, and this moment is no different. Don’t ask that of me—neither of them are going to.

It makes sense that Ilya is his soulmate. There’s no one else that it could ever have been, not really. It’s always been Ilya Rozanov, from the start. This is the person that his soul was made to be known and loved by.

Whether or not Shane has said or will say Ilya’s words—this moment still matters. This moment is confirmation of something that Shane has been waiting to hear for a long time. They’re compatible in a way that he was so scared they wouldn’t be. Maybe they really can make this real. Maybe there was never anything to fear.

And Shane has always kept his soulmark private, but this is Ilya who likes him as he is and who is his soulmate and who likes him even without knowing that. This is Ilya, who deserves to know that those words are written permanently onto Shane’s skin, a promise from the universe that someone will one day love his ugliness of a soul while knowing what it looks like.

Because the truth is that the soul is ugly, in its own way. It is messy and fragile and scared and flawed. It makes mistakes and it runs away when it should stand its ground. It asks questions that have painful answers and it pushes at buttons that say do not press. It misunderstands and hurts and gets hurt.

But this is Ilya and it’s Shane and their souls may be strange but their love isn’t. This is Ilya, and Shane likes him in his entirety.

So when Ilya smiles a little, Shane presses a kiss to his bare collarbone and murmurs into his skin, mostly inaudible, “It’s you. It’s always been you.”

Ilya hums a little, his arm curling around Shane’s back. He traces a line up and down Shane’s spine, his touch gentle and soft. Shane is so gone for him that it hurts, sometimes, but right now everything just feels warm and safe.

“My soul—” Shane presses another kiss to Ilya’s bare chest, just over his heart, and Ilya’s breath catches in his throat— “knew from the start, I think. Even when I didn’t understand.”

“You soul?” Ilya asks, and he sounds unsure now.

Shane pulls back a little and sits up, leaning on one hand and looking down at Ilya, still nestled amongst the sheets and pillows. He stares down for a long moment, eyes tracing over the lines of Ilya’s jaw and the curve of his lips and all the curls of hair that have fallen out of place. He wants to memorize this moment; the sound of those words spoken so genuinely.

“My soulmark,” Shane finally says, feeling a little like he’s choking on the words. His gaze flicks down to Ilya’s neck, and then back up to his mouth, his cheeks flushing. “You said the words. You said them.”

Ilya stares at him, expression doing something complicated that Shane can’t even begin to decipher. His lips part soundlessly, all words seeming to fail him. Shane swallows hard, shifting to sit straight up when Ilya continues not to say anything, frozen there where he lies.

Then Ilya is disentangling himself from the sheets and stumbling off of the bed, nearly tripping over himself in his haste. Shane nearly calls after him, but his name catches in his throat in sudden terror. Ilya is leaving, is walking away; this was too much, neither of them were prepared for it. Ilya can’t handle it. Can’t handle him.

Shane shouldn’t have said anything. He should have gone to his fucking grave with the fact that Ilya Rozanov just said the words written into his arm. He should have never let it slip. They could have just ignored it, ignored that Shane’s soul was made for Ilya to know, ignored that Shane wants to be loved by him so badly that it bruises. They could ignore this in the same way they ignore Ilya’s mark, and all the rumors about it.

Because the thing is that Shane knows he’s not Ilya’s soulmate. He can’t be, when rumor has it that Ilya’s soulmate is destined to not want him and when Shane wants him so badly it feels like it’s choking him to death some days. He can’t be, when Ilya’s mark supposedly says he can never be known and when Shane needs to know him so intimately and truly that Ilya should just be a part of him.

After a much too long and too still silence, Ilya comes back into the bedroom from the bathroom with a little plastic container of makeup wipes. There’s something almost frantic, anxious, in his gaze when his eyes reach Shane, but he hesitates before sitting back down onto the bed.

Shane waits. They stare at each other for a long moment, Ilya’s mouth opening and closing and cutting off any words before they can reach the space between them.

“Are you…okay?” Shane asks, the words coming to him slow and unsure.

His voice seems to jolt Ilya out of whatever trance he had entered, and he moves to sit on the bed in front of Shane. Carefully, every movement calculated and careful, Ilya pops open the baggie and pulls out a makeup wipe. It looks like any other makeup wipe that Shane’s seen.

“Here,” Ilya says, and they both pretend his voice doesn’t tremble as he offers the wipe over to Shane. “You can—on my neck. I want you to do it.”

Shane swallows. “You don’t have to do this. Just because my words—”

“No,” Ilya says, shaking his head slightly. “No, it’s okay. I want you to see.”

Shane stares at the offered wipe for a long moment, and then he takes it.

It is in a cottage in Ottawa in the arms of your first and only love when you willingly show someone your soulmark.

The sentence curling around your neck is a part of your body that is vulnerable in a way the rest of you isn’t. You are all hard muscle and bold words, but the words leave you exposed and visible. When you first read them, you thought they meant there would be sides to your soul that even your soulmate could never understand. You thought it meant the universe was laughing at you and your ugly, dirty heart.

When you first heard them, you thought it meant your soulmate has seen you, and no longer wants you. You thought it meant your soulmate understood something even you don’t understand about yourself, and he doesn’t like the sight of it. You thought it meant the universe was making a joke out of the way you love.

It takes this impossibly imperfectly wonderful and lovely boy to change your mind.

“Okay.” Shane takes a breath, folding the wipe carefully. “Come here.”

Ilya swallows hard, and Shane follows the movement down the line of his neck to the place where the makeup is. Then he moves closer, until he’s sitting cross-legged right in front of Shane. He tilts his head up to the ceiling, exposing his neck for Shane. His breath is as shaky as Shane’s hands.

But with the first touch of the wipe to Ilya’s neck, Shane’s hands start to steady again. He rubs it in soft circles over the spot where the makeup is layered over Ilya’s soulmark, drawing out shuddering breaths from Ilya’s chest.

There’s something newly intimate about this, unfamiliar despite all they’ve done before. It’s the one place he’s never been allowed to touch, and now Ilya is sitting so still and willingly under his hands while Shane exposes this secret written into his soul and his skin.

Washing Ilya clean of the makeup is a ritual that Shane is going to treasure in the privacy of his heart for the rest of his life. Ilya is sitting before him, so vulnerable that it nearly pains Shane too, but he’s still trusting Shane wholly with his hands at his throat, at his soulmark, at his greatest secret.

He starts revealing the words a few moments later, after making several passes over with the makeup wipes. The ink of Ilya’s mark is a dark black, like Shane’s is, but the handwriting is vastly different. Where Shane’s mark is wide and looping, Ilya’s is careful, evenly sized print. There’s nothing messy or uncertain about the words tattooed over Ilya’s throat.

And Shane remembers, remembers so well and painfully—

I don’t know that side of you at all.

“I thought it meant no one could ever know me,” Ilya says quietly. “Maybe pessimistic, but.”

Shane pulls away from him, one hand dropping to Ilya’s knee and the other hand brushing his thumb over the words. They’re raised and bumpy underneath his finger, something like a very old ridged scar. It must have hurt, when Ilya’s mark came in. The neck is so sensitive and so is the soul.

Ilya keeps his head tilted up as he speaks, his eyes closed tight. “When you said it back then, I hoped I might be wrong. Maybe someone can understand after all. Maybe someone sees something I don’t see, and likes it. And then you left.”

“Fuck,” Shane whispers.

He shifts to straddle Ilya’s thighs, dropping the wipe onto the sheets, and then moves his hand to Ilya’s shoulder blades to pull him into a tight hug. He buries his face in Ilya’s shoulder, breathing him in and trying to ground himself amongst the wake of this new revelation. Ilya has known that they’re soulmates for so long now, and never said anything. He just lived under the weight of that, of their puzzle piece souls, and kept it secret even as Shane broke his heart.

Would things have been different if Shane knew? Maybe. Maybe not. But there’s no changing it now. There’s only choosing to stay, again and again and again, from this moment on.

Shane presses a kiss against the words you at all. At the touch of his lips, Ilya lets out a small, aborted cry.

“I’m sorry I left that day.” Shane presses more kisses to his throat, lips wet against the lines of that side of. “I was scared. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Shane,” Ilya says, voice cracking open at the seams.

Shane pulls back to shake his head a little and Ilya goes quiet as Shane realizes suddenly how close he is to tears. He kisses the hollow of Ilya’s throat again, thinking about the rumors he’s heard about Ilya’s soulmate never knowing him, and he decides he’s going to prove them all wrong.

He wants everything. He wants to know the simple things; what Ilya’s favorite song is, his favorite movie to watch on planes, his go-to comfort TV show, his preferred order to unload the dishwasher in. He wants to understand the harder parts, too; Ilya’s life story, the feelings he’s hidden away from the world and the methods he uses to hide them. He wants to learn Russian to be able to read Ilya’s heart in his first language. He wants to love every ugly and flawed and raw and soft and beautiful side of his soul.

“I like you,” Shane says again, and the sun beams down at them, glowing over the line of Ilya’s neck. “I like every side of you I’ve seen, and I want to know all of the ones I haven’t seen, too.”

Shane kisses underneath the side of his jaw, then trails kisses down his throat until he reaches the start of the soulmark. He tastes somewhat like the cold wet of makeup wipes but Shane doesn’t care about that right now. He cares about Ilya’s whole body shuddering under his touch, breathy and failed attempts at words escaping him.

Ilya’s I don’t know stands out stark and black against his pale skin, and Shane kisses over the words as if he can erase all of the pain that had come with them over the years. It feels as if they have always been meant to get here—or, it feels as if they have always been here, in one way or another.

It’s as if rather than their lives being told in a straight line from meeting to loving, they’ve been tangled in one great large tangle of a joint timeline, turning over in on itself and curling around and crossing over and pulled into knots. It’s one great tangle of yarn, all of it whispering, I have always known you. I will always know you, in this lifetime and the next and the one after that.

“Me too,” Ilya manages to say, rasping the words out. “Let me. Shane.”

Shane pulls back and pulls the patch away from his own soulmark to reveal his words. His wrist is balanced on Ilya’s shoulder, leaving his bicep bare and right in their line of sight. He folds the patch up with his other hand and places it onto the mattress next to them, unwilling to meet Ilya’s gaze.

Ilya already knew what they say, but now they’re there, visible and exposed and tender to the touch. Now they are so obvious that there’s no turning away from this. It would be so easy for Ilya to dig his nails in and claw through them and break Shane Hollander’s heart.

He doesn’t. Instead, he puts one hand around Shane’s wrist and holds him with just the right amount of pressure to keep him stable, to keep him from wanting to run. The other fingers brush so lightly over the words that it draws a high keening noise out of Shane’s lungs, a kind of desperate ache for more.

With that, Ilya leans forward to kiss the words on Shane’s body, the ones written in his handwriting, the ones that read Shane’s soul and prove that it’s desirable to Ilya. Something only for him to see, only for him to know, only for him to understand.

Shane’s breath catches in his throat as Ilya presses his lips to the sprawling lettering. He drops his head back in a gasp at the vibration of Ilya whispering against his skin.

“Let me know you, Shane, fuck.” Ilya trails kisses up his arm and towards his neck, right towards where his own mark ends on his own body. He’s the one moving over Shane, but it’s also him that sounds wrecked and ruined as he does so. “I want this. I want—is that—”

“Yes,” Shane cuts in, voice hoarse, before Ilya can finish the question.

Is that desire okay? Is that touch okay? Is that what you want too? Is that wanting heart of mine okay? It doesn’t matter how Ilya would have asked it—it’s all the same question, and the answer will always unequivocally be yes.

Finally, Ilya kisses him on the lips and it tastes like understanding.

Right now, with his lips trailing over your throat and his thumb pressing on your pulse point, the words around your neck feel like love rather than a noose. Like being understood and wanted anyway, rather than being seen and unwanted for it. Like being known rather than being naked.

He pulls away from your neck and looks at you for a long moment, and you are helpless against the desire to kiss him. So you do, and then you whisper the words into his mouth, I like you, I like you, I like you.

He catches them on his tongue willingly, gladly. Kisses you back. Holds you tighter. I like you, and I know you. I see you, and I like you.

With a breathy, hopeful laugh, you say it once more back, and this time, you know you mean all this, and love, too.