Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Hanahaki Disease, Angst, Pining, Falling In Love, Love Confessions, Does it count as miscommunication if they aren't actually communicating, Emotional Sex, ONLY happy endings in this house, Canon divergent from end of ep2, Very mild gore (this is hanahaki so we know he will be coughing some stuff up), Discussion of death and mortality (because again: this is hanahaki), Mention of Irina's canonical suicide, Everything I know about hockey I learned from fanfiction, No AI was used in any way in the creation of this work, Blow Jobs, Anal Sex, emotional closeness through sex, ilya rozanov is not okay, how is that not a tag what are we doing here

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-24 Updated: 2026-05-30 Words: 19,530 Chapters: 2/3

limerence

Summary

The first one is perfect. A deep crimson, brightening to scarlet at its edges and thick, firm between his fingers. It's undamaged, not even torn at its thinnest parts for all of its violent means of arrival into the palm of his hand, but sticky with saliva making its texture unpleasant. It is, otherwise, a flawless rose petal, like something you would see in a drawing; an oil painting.

It's such a beautiful thing, and so small, to be killing him.

Ilya rubs at his breastbone and clears his throat but there's nothing else to come up; not today. Closing his eyes so that he doesn't have to look at himself in the mirror over the sink he pictures his lungs turning to dirt so that the roots of the rose can plant themselves in him; choke him from the inside.

That's not quite how it works, he knows.

It may as well be.
 

Notes

Hey there again, welcome to my angst vehicle. I have tagged for everything that's upcoming however given that we go through a tough spot or two I would point a big neon arrow towards the happy ending tag - I am far too delicate for a HNC, but not too delicate to make the boys work for their happy ever after; Hanahaki opens some wonderfully painful potential doors, especially for a character who says he wouldn't kill himself 'unless he couldn't help it', and I have flounced shamelessly through a bunch of those.

The definition of 'limerence' at the start of chapter one is from Miriam Webster. Hover over Russian text for translation.

Chapter 1: One

limerence: lim.er.ence (noun) - a state of intense often involuntary romantic attachment to a person who does not reciprocate the feelings and that is often characterised by excessive preoccupation and obsessive behaviours.

The first one is perfect. A deep crimson, brightening to scarlet at its edges and thick, firm between his fingers. It's undamaged, not even torn at its thinnest parts for all of its violent means of arrival into the palm of his hand, but sticky with saliva making its texture unpleasant. It is, otherwise, a flawless rose petal, like something you would see in a drawing; an oil painting.

It's such a beautiful thing, and so small, to be killing him.

Self-deceit is a skill; to be good at it takes practice and Ilya is an expert, the lies he has told himself about what he is doing with Shane Hollander his masterpiece.

He drops the petal onto his bathroom counter and spits into the sink; it is frothy-pink. His hands, resting on the counter's edge, are trembling.

A single petal, and his masterpiece of self delusion is razed to the ground leaving only the bitter, unhelpful truth standing in its place.

Ilya rubs at his breastbone and clears his throat but there's nothing else to come up; not today. Closing his eyes so that he doesn't have to look at himself in the mirror over the sink he pictures his lungs turning to dirt so that the roots of the rose can plant themselves in him; choke him from the inside.

That's not quite how it works, he knows.

It may as well be.

**

When the off-season starts to feel like it's ending is usually when the emails start arriving in threes and fives. The direction of cause and effect is debatable, whether a few weeks of idle time is all that people like Shane — people who live in the pro hockey trenches — can cope with, or whether the influx of messages, of new season planning, is what flips Shane's brain back over into thinking about the season.

It doesn't make a lot of difference either way, but come August when the plans for training camps start to be made and the preseason schedule is announced, Shane starts to feel like he's on the tail end of summer even if officially there's still a few weeks to go.

Outside of the couple of weeks he carves out for himself — that he blocks out in his calendar months in advance so his mom and his agent can't commit him to anything, so that he can go to his cottage and breathe air that isn't loud with voices and people wanting things from him — there is always something he's meant to be doing. The endorsements and the photo shoots and the interviews, it's the part of being who he is that he likes the least but he can't look his mom in the face and say he doesn't want to, not when she tells him matter of factly, "This is your retirement fund, honey, even you can't play hockey forever," like it's something he doesn't already know.

So he goes and he smiles and he answers their questions with his pre-prepped press-conference answers and takes his shirt off and holds still for photos if its that kind of day and he lets his mom organise it all because if it was left up to him he probably would just throw his phone in the lake so that he can deny all knowledge and never have to show up anywhere that's not a hockey rink ever again.

It's probably why, when he arrives for an interview filming on the last Monday in August he thinks it's about the Olympics, but it's actually the captain of this year's Olympic gold medal winning team alongside the captain of the team that won the Cup this year, so he finds himself sitting on the other end of a table to Rozanov under studio lights answering questions that feel like someone's doing an unimaginative compare and contrast exercise of two completely different victories.

He hasn't heard from Rozanov since Vegas, outside of a few texts while he'd been in Russia, and those had been flirty, inconsequential things that Shane had only responded to because he couldn't help himself. If he closes his eyes he can still remember how heavy the weight of Ilya's eyes felt on him as he watched Shane put his fingers inside himself and that remembered weight makes Shane, unfailingly, hard — so he doesn't remember.

Or, he tries not to. At the least, he makes himself limit it to nights when he's alone and the lights are long since out.

He is, he realises, staring at Rozanov's forearms where they rest on the desk in front of him with hands clasped; the cuffs of his shirt are flipped back and Shane can see the bones of his wrists, the clear visible strength in the muscles of his arms that he uses to pin Shane down when he fucks him, that —

"— and Shane, after a successful season for you personally with your success at the Olympics —" Shane blinks and looks to the interviewer, whose name he has forgotten, "— but a playoff season that ended early with the Metros beleaguered by injuries, how are you feeling about the upcoming season?"

Shane smiles his best helpful interviewee smile — small, bland, engaged but not too friendly, one he's practised in front of a mirror enough to know exactly how it looks on his face — and as he answers the question he doesn't look back Rozanov; doesn't want to be able to confirm or give lie to the surety he feels that Rozanov's eyes don't leave him the entire time he's speaking.

**

"There is no flight from Toronto to Boston until tomorrow."

Shane stops walking and turns; Rozanov is leaning against a wall just inside the door to the studio's parking lot, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. His eyes track a path from Shane's face, down his chest and his legs, lingering all the way down and back up again. The back of Shane's neck feels suddenly hot.

"So I am staying in hotel here. I will fly out in the morning." He rolls the cigarette between his fingertips like he's not really paying attention to what his hands are doing. It's hot here, in the glare of the late summer sun coming through the glass doors that's baking the air without the studio's climate control to adjust for it, and Rozanov's shirt — thin and dark blue — is clinging very slightly to his stomach. He must be starting to sweat. Shane tries not to picture it.

"I drove," Shane tells him in the end, since Rozanov seems to be waiting for him to say something. "I'm heading back to Montreal."

"That is a long drive."

Shane shrugs, his agreement and his dismissal both. He quite likes the drive; it's illegal for him to use his phone while he's driving, so he can't be expected to check his emails.

Rozanov digs into his pocket and fishes out his cell phone; his thumbs tap at the screen for a few seconds and then Shane feels his own phone buzz in his pocket and he knows the message waiting for him is an address; a room number.

"You shouldn't drive so long if you are distracted, tired," he waves a hand: and so on.

Shane wishes he didn't look at Rozanov and want, but he does; Rozanov is looking at Shane in a way that makes everything feel too warm, like he might only be looking at Shane standing still in the middle of a hallway but he's thinking: I know what you look like naked, I know what your face looks like when you come, I've been inside you and I'm the only one you've ever let do it.

He makes himself remember the way that he'd felt after Vegas; the black hole in his stomach that had followed him out of the elevator and had still been with him days later, that sense that he'd very badly misunderstood, after that time in Montreal, and that his view of what they were doing had been corrected and left him missing something for it.

Not that they're doing — well, anything. They can't be doing anything.

Shane's fingers itch for his phone, wanting to look at the message Rozanov has sent him even though they're only standing three feet away from each other. Rozanov is waiting for Shane to say something, and Shane doesn't want to feel like he did in the elevator in Vegas, not ever again.

He looks down at his car keys in his hands, turns them over in his fingers. Rozanov is still watching him.

"In an hour," he says, quietly enough that he's not totally sure Rozanov could have heard, but he did — his mouth quirks in a smile and he nods, and Shane walks out into the parking lot.

**

In the hour before he knocks on Rozanov's hotel door, Shane tells himself over and over that he can just not go — he doesn't even have to text to say he's not coming, although maybe he should just to be polite, but he can just not go; he doesn't ever again have to feel like he did in the elevator in Vegas if he doesn't go. Cycling through all of these objections though is, he knows, like watching the piracy warning ad at the beginning of a movie — the thing you have to sit through to get to the thing you came here for but not anything that really applies; not something that's going to change the fact that he's going to watch the movie.

He can make objections to himself all he likes, he knows he's still going to Rozanov's room.

What he doesn't tell himself, absolutely does not let himself think, is that as much as he doesn't want to feel like he did in the elevator in Vegas, he does want to feel like he did sitting in his stairwell in Montreal, when he was stupid and naive and hadn't yet spent six months of total radio silence learning that whatever Shane might have thought of what they had done together that night, Rozanov hadn't thought it was worth anything at all.

Shane knocks on Rozanov's door fifty-five minutes after he left him in the studio parking lot and he hears the lock slide open almost immediately; Shane lets himself have the fantasy that Rozanov was waiting for him just inside, that he's as eager for Shane's body as Shane is for Rozanov's, however much he might try to convince himself that he doesn't want what he wants.

Shane steps inside and Rozanov barely gives him enough room to come through the door before he's backed Shane up against it and reached over his shoulder to slide the deadbolt home.

"You came," Rozanov says. He's unfairly attractive, hair loosening from the gel that had held it camera-ready for the interview, his skin carrying a light tan from the summer. He has changed his clothes to track pants and a tank that lets Shane see the impressive muscles of his shoulders and so he looks since he can; wants to touch but presses his palms flat to the door behind him instead.

"I said I would, didn't I?" He sounds belligerent, defensive.

"You have a good summer? You miss me?"

Shane rolls his eyes. "Fuck off."

"I thought about you," Rozanov says, and he sounds strangely like there's not a trap in it, so Shane asks —

"You did?"

Ilya lets out a low, satisfied hum. "Yes, I thought about you many times," he smiles darkly, "in many different positions."

"What did you think about?" Shane asks before he can think better of it, and hates that it sounds like he's fishing for compliments but even though Shane's braced for it, Rozanov doesn't make fun of him.

"I thought about this," Rozanov pulls their hips together, so that Shane can feel that he's halfway hard and Rozanov must definitely be able to feel that Shane is too, and Shane thinks that's what Rozanov is talking about, that he thinks about dicks and hard-ons or whatever, but the position's secondary; he's moved Shane out of the way so that he can fit a hand behind Shane, in between him and the door.

Rozanov pushes Shane's shirt up out of the way with little flicks of his fingers and then presses his thumb to Shane's spine, right at the small of his back.

"This part," he murmurs. Their mouths are so, so close. Shane wants to kiss him, but wonders if that's not something they do any more. "The shape this part of you makes when I'm fucking you, the —" he traces a shape in the air with his other hand; a curve. Arch, Shane thinks; the arch of his back. "I thought about that."

His eyes fall to Shane's mouth and he licks his lips.

"And your mouth. You have such a good mouth."

It might be the words themselves or the praise in them that makes Shane shiver, he isn't sure, and his mouth is filling with saliva in anticipation. If he can't have kissing then he wants Rozanov's dick weighing down his tongue instead. Rozanov seems to want something back, though, because at Shane's silence he asks, "What? You did not think about me?"

It's asked innocently, deliberately and performatively so, and Shane flushes warm-red.

"Fuck off," comes out of him on a reflex, and Rozanov pulls a face of mock-hurt.

"No? I have never touched you good enough to think about after?"

It would be a lie to say no, no I don't think of you, I don't ever think of you — although Shane wants to say it anyway. But Rozanov gave up something first, said he thinks about Shane's body when they're apart and that makes it a little easier to tell him, "When you watched me," even though his voice is very, very quiet, "I think about when you watched me."

Rozanov's dick fills further; they're still pressed together from belly button to knee and Shane can feel it. Rozanov's thumb presses hard against Shane's spine and Shane's skin is starting to buzz with the need for hands on him; he wants so very badly and he dare not take.

"I want to watch you suck my dick."

Just the words make Shane's knees want to buckle, and he's nodding, feels fucking shameless in that way that only Rozanov has ever brought out in him; he's half a second from dropping to the floor when Rozanov starts pulling at the buttons on his shirt, stripping him efficiently, pulling off his own clothes with an urgency that feels carefully contained. Rozanov's clothes make a puddle on the floor as they move toward the bed, lit in the weak evening sunlight.

Shane's pants are unfastened and his shirt held in his fingers when Rozanov sits down on the edge of the bed, naked and hard and unembarrassed about it, and leans back on his hands. Watching. Shane sets his shirt over the arm of the plush chair that's pushed up against the wall; he kicks off his shoes and drops his pants and as all of his clothes join his shirt on the chair he is aware of Rozanov: watching him. He doesn't stop looking as Shane moves to the bed, and when his hands find Shane's sides, palms and reaching fingers broad and rough taking hold of him, Shane —

The point of Shane's summers are to have a break. He tries not to see anyone he doesn't know really well, he goes out of his way to lift out the mental effort of new people so it's not like he'd be dating anyone, he spends time at his cottage by himself on purpose, he —

He hasn't had another person's hands on his bare skin since Rozanov, in Vegas, and just the warmth of him, the roughness of calloused skin on him, it makes his whole body thrum with wanting more of it.

There's a feeling in his head like the buzz of static, wiping out his self-consciousness as he climbs on top of Rozanov and he wants to kiss him so badly so he does, only realising once it's too late to take it back that he still doesn't know if this is something that isn't meant to happen between them, any more — but Rozanov's mouth opens under his sweetly; welcoming and without hesitation.

Shane lets himself indulge, just for a few seconds; Rozanov kisses him wet and open-mouthed and hungry and Shane pushes him back, eventually, before he can let himself get too carried away, and thrills to know that Rozanov's still watching him when he moves down the bed and starts to suck him.

He hasn't had that many chances to do this, but it's definitely one of his favourite things of the things that him and Rozanov do together and it's almost disappointing that he'll have to give it up one day, when he finds someone to settle down with. He likes the sounds that Rozanov makes, the little ones, and the flushes of taste that go with them that let Shane know he's doing well; he likes how Rozanov pulls on his hair when he gets close like he's trying to pull him off but still pushes his head down to keep him on him, like maybe Shane's making him feel good enough that even Rozanov isn't quite sure which he wants more.

When he's close to coming Rozanov plants his feet on the bed so that Shane is bracketed between his thighs which start to shake, with all his muscles clenched tight, and when Shane looks up at him just to see, to know, Rozanov is still watching him — right up until his eyes fall closed and his body convulses and he pulls Shane off of him and comes over his belly, his fingers joining Shane's on the length of his cock to finish him. He moans as he does, says, "Hollander, fuck, fuck —" as he spills over his belly.

Shane's jaw aches, his cock hurts for how hard he is and he's still working to catch his breath but he's curious, because he's not really sure he wants Rozanov to come in his mouth — it sounds like it would be kind of gross and he's not sure if he'd like it, but Rozanov always swallows when they do this the other way around and Shane just wants to know, so he ducks his head and sticks his tongue out and carefully, gently, licks the head of Rozanov's softening cock through the stickiness of come there.

Rozanov jerks and gasps and grabs for his shoulder but doesn't push him off and Shane sucks, just barely, tongues the slit for a moment and lets it go when it's clean. It doesn't taste bad like he thought it might, and he thinks — he thinks about Rozanov's come in him, not like when they fuck because they always use condoms, but when he swallows what's in his mouth he thinks: Rozanov's come is in him. His dick jerks and leaks and his face flushes and he tries not to think too hard about what it is about that, exactly, that turns him on so much.

When he sits back, though, Rozanov is looking at him like he can't believe what he's seeing; he's panting and his mouth his open and he says, "Fuck, Hollander, every time you try to kill me," which Shane thinks he should probably take as a compliment, alongside the urgency with which Rozanov urges him onto his back.

Shane moans a shameless, "Oh, f-fuck," as Rozanov puts Shane's dick in his mouth and he knows this is going to be over so much faster than he's ready for, especially as Rozanov palms at his chest, tugs sharp on his nipples and holds Shane down with his weight when he tries to fuck deeper into the heat of him.

That's something else that Shane likes more than is sensible to think about.

His hands clutch at Rozanov when he comes and Rozanov swallows around him, won't let him get away until there's nothing left of him, until all of him that exists is his own skin in the places where Rozanov is touching him.

Rozanov lets him go and rests his forehead against Shane's hip, breathing calming.

"I want to fuck you," Rozanov says, biting little and soft into the crease of his left thigh, pushing his leg up and out so that he has room to go lower. "Do you have time? You are very hot, Hollander, will not be long I will be hard enough again."

It's so very, very tempting. It feels like indulgence, though; like something he shouldn't let himself have when he's had this today already, when he can still taste Rozanov in his mouth and his own dick isn't even all the way soft yet.

"I have to get going," he says instead, and the words sound almost natural, "It's a long drive to Montreal."

Rozanov shrugs and tells him quietly, "Ok," and he smiles although Shane thinks he's disappointed, which Shane finds strange given how easily Rozanov can find himself someone to have sex with if he wants it that he would care so much about getting it from Shane twice instead of once.

It's not even a lie — the length of the drive — but it's not like he has an early morning planned, he could stay a little longer; allow himself to indulge, this once, but once Rozanov lets him up and Shane heads into the bathroom it feels too late to change his mind.

When he comes out Rozanov is sitting on the end of his bed in his underwear, his phone in his hand; he looks up when Shane comes back into the bedroom and watches as Shane picks up his own underwear from his pile of clothes and pulls them on, then reaches for his pants.

"You had good summer?" Rozanov asks, dropping his phone onto the mattress next to him.

"Uh, yeah, I guess," Shane tries not to frown as he fastens his fly; Rozanov's hardly ever tried to talk to him before about anything that doesn't have to do with hockey or one of their dicks and he's not sure how much detail is too much. "Saw my parents, and I went to — I have this cottage, in Ottawa, real private, out the way of everything, you know? Construction on it just finished in June. I went there for a while."

"Sounds nice," Rozanov says, and Shane looks over at him waiting for the backhand to the compliment but there doesn't seem to be one, only Rozanov sitting on the end of the bed they just fucked in holding his shirt out to him. Shane reaches out for it, but Rozanov snatches it back just as his fingers are about to take custody of it, holding the collar in both hands so he can look at it and say, "Shane."

Shane blinks. That usually comes with a Hollander attached to it, and it's strangely friendly to hear Rozanov call him by only his first name.

"Shane?" he says again, like it's a question, and starts to smile, wide with all white teeth, "Why does your shirt have your name written in it, Shane?"

Wincing at the embarrassment, Shane tries to grab it from him but Rozanov stands and moves out of his way. Shane doesn't need to look, knows that on the collar of the shirt just where the tag has been carefully cut out is his name written in small capital letters in wash-proof pen.

It's so his mom can separate his and his dad's stuff easier when she does his laundry; she buys clothes for both of them and one white shirt looks a lot like another in a pile of them.

This doesn't feel like something he can say to Rozanov and ever live it down.

"Shut the fuck up," he snaps instead and tries again to take the shirt back but Rozanov stands and holds it behind his back.

"Do not be embarrassed," he says, still grinning, "Shane, I forget your first name sometimes also."

"Oh, fuck you, Ilya," he snaps, and tries to snatch his shirt from behind Rozanov's back, but he leans away. Their chests touch, and Shane wants for a fleeting moment to lean against him. "My mom does it, ok?" he admits, bracing for the inevitable mockery, but Rozanov's face softens instead, and he lets Shane take the shirt back.

He watches as Shane tugs it on and fastens the buttons, bottom to top.

"That is nice," Rozanov says, just as he's finishing on the last button, "you are grown but she still wants to look after you."

Shane isn't sure how nice it is up against being absolutely mortifying when his — his person that — when the person that he's having sex with notices and points it out, and he's about to say something to that end but catches, before he can open his mouth, a certain wistfulness in Ilya's eyes where he's still looking at the buttons of Shane's shirt. There's something there that's a little mournful and absolutely not at all Shane's business, so he shrugs instead of replying and puts his shoes on.

Rozanov has only dressed as far as having pants on by the time Shane's ready to leave and probably he'll want to shower once he's got Shane out of his way, but as Shane reaches for the deadbolt on the hotel room door Rozanov pulls on his elbow to turn him back around, just far enough to kiss him. It's soft and lingering and there's the slightest brush of tongue against his bottom lip.

Shane feels warm; the orgasm-fizz in his blood is fading but the lessening of its effervescence is slowed, most sweetly, in careful kisses. He thinks about how he felt in the elevator in Vegas and can hardly compare.

It's not like he thinks this is anything, like kissing makes what they do anything, but it makes it, maybe, so that Shane isn't anyone. That Rozanov is here with him, and not just a man who's willing.

"See you in preseason," Ilya tells him, almost a whisper, and then, eyes bright, adds, "Shane."

Shane laughs and rolls his eyes. "See you in preseason," he reaches for the door handle again, but smiles back in the end, and teases back, "Ilya."

**

The hotel water pressure is good and the temperature almost hot enough to scald and Ilya stands in the shower until his fingertips wrinkle. He can still feel the impression of Shane's hands on his hips, his thighs; of Shane's mouth, greedy for him.

He has the sound of his first name, now, in Shane's voice: a perfect opportunity, taken.

Putting all of this away, calling it meaningless and packing it down into nothing in his mind in the way that he can do so deftly, seems like a pointless exercise; the pair of petals that sits on the hotel's bathroom countertop calls out those efforts for the mockery that they are.

The literature is unclear on whether seeing Shane will give Ilya less time; Ilya knows this, he has read extensively since the first petal came up in his apartment in Moscow the day he arrived there at the start of summer. The size of a mass in the lungs can be measured, its growth tracked, but how that correlates with the variable tides of feeling — how to define, to track, the strength of love, how it grows and changes in presence and in absence is —

Is not something that medicine can quantify.

If he is going to die for loving Shane Hollander and have no choice in either of those things then he will love him as much and for as long as he can, even if he will have to do it as carefully, as inwardly as he is capable so that he is allowed to drag it out for every last bittersweet moment.

Shane will notice, Ilya is sure, if Ilya is different with him — is softer, closer — but Ilya will tread carefully and accept the risk. Shane will never love him back but that is the awful point of all of this, and at least when Shane has enough information to understand why Ilya is being different with him, Ilya will be gone, and beyond having to explain himself.

**

The first text pings in two days after Shane gets back from Toronto, and his eyebrows lift when he sees it's from Lily. It's too soon; they'll play against each other in the preseason but he's only just moved back to his apartment in Montreal, there's no reason for Rozanov to be in touch until a day or two before the schedule has them in the same city, if he even wants to hook up again so soon.

The text is a link, and he taps it: it takes him to a website for little white iron-on name tags, meant to be stuck into kids' clothes; you can order them printed with the name of your choice. The ones Rozanov has directed him to have a little cartoon hockey stick design on either end.

His phone vibrates in his hand, and another text banner appears at the top of his screen.

Lily: Might be useful for new season. Clothes mix up easy in locker room.

"What an asshole," Shane mutters, but finds he's smiling just a little bit anyway. For good measure, he types out a reply and sends it without letting himself think too much about it. If there's anything he doesn't have to overthink it's fucking name tags.

Shane: My jersey already has my name on it, asshole.

A pause: three bouncing typing dots and then, horrifyingly:

Lily: what the fuck

Lily: You think that is why they put Hollander on the back of it???

Shane sputters out meaningless mortified part-words at no-one and shoves his phone into his pocket.

**

Their joint interview airs just before training camp starts and Shane watches it with half an eye while he eats meal prep chicken standing up in his kitchen. He looks at Ilya talking about the Raiders' victory, about the ups and downs of their season and turns off the sound, watches Ilya's mouth move as he makes words and thinks about how, a couple of hours after this was filmed, that mouth had been on Shane's body.

It's stark against six months of silence, though, that Rozanov's messages carry on coming in every couple of days in little flurries of three or four. Shane doesn't reply at first, wonders if maybe Rozanov's sending them to him by mistake, but they keep arriving. A link to an article about the Metros' chances for the upcoming season, positing them as poor; a picture of a very fluffy grey kitten, a link to a website arguing seriously for the existence of Bigfoot with the comment, "Big hairy guy in woods, maybe is hockey player got lost after playoffs."

When training camp has caught steam the messages get more specific and Shane thinks that they might not be meant for someone else after all, and Shane starts to write replies that he doesn't send, waiting for the other shoe. There's never anything that Rozanov shouldn't say to someone on an opposing team, just little complaints and chirps and teasing, it's almost — if Shane didn't know better he'd say, almost — friendly, little nudges asking for a reply:

Lily: New goalie is eight feet tall. I think you will not get anything past him.

Lily: Did you have yet this cucumber gatorade? like drinking grass, horrible.

Shane quite likes the cucumber Gatorade but doesn't say so, although eventually, Shane smiles and worries a little and writes and deletes half a dozen times but replies:

Lily: Rookies are children. Never were we this young.

Shane: I guess you must be old like Scott Hunter by now.

Lily: Why do you say this to me?

Lily: Shane you are terrible, cruel person. the world must be told.

Shane: Shut up and sort out your rookies.

Lily: do not worry, none of them are as pretty as you

It's not every day but it becomes more often than not; Rozanov ends up making him blush more than he doesn't with texts Shane ends up deleting just in case, but it's — nice. It's actually nice, like when they're playing against each other but without the crowd and without the pressure, just able to bounce words backwards and forward between each other without worrying about who might hear.

Shane moves into the first games of the season talking to Rozanov more regularly than he talks to almost anyone else and he wonders if this makes them friends. Friends who meet up sometimes and have sex, like some of the guys on the team have their regular hookups, only more than that — sex friends, Shane supposes, that would still have the friends part even if the sex were off the table.

It feels a little better, somehow, to have a sex friend than a hookup; less sordid and not so much of a pro-sports-asshole stereotype, and even though he acknowledges only to himself with a little spidering of guilt that he never mentions this maybe-friendship to a single other person, it can't surely be so bad to be friends with Rozanov. The fact that they fuck sometimes is irrelevant; a stupid risk that they probably shouldn't be taking and one day they'll stop it, when Rozanov gets bored or Shane meets someone he wants a proper relationship with, but friends —

They more or less work together. They're going to see each other regularly for their whole careers. Shane doesn't want to have to have a rivalry with anyone, doesn't want the mental effort that all that dislike needs to feed off of. He can act it up for the League all he needs to, but sometime soon they'll stop hooking up like risk-taking morons with nothing to lose and Shane finds, as he reads through four texts in a row bemoaning the change in brand of the stick tape that's now the Raider's locker room default, that he might quite like if he's got a friend when all's said and done; someone who knows him and understands him the way that Rozanov does and almost no one else can.

Shane wonders if Rozanov thinks the same word about Shane: friends. He can't decide how he feels about that whichever way the answer falls, so he puts the question away and does his best not to think about it again.

Once, Shane comes out of the bathroom on his way to bed, muscles sore from the effort of the day, to find his phone displaying a missed call from Lily. His thumb hovers over it for a long time, wondering. He scrolls back to their text chain but can't see anything in it that might prompt a call, just where they left things that morning with Rozanov bitching about the apparently woeful state of the Dunkin' fall menu.

Putting his phone on its charger on his bedside table, Shane clears the missed call notification and looks to make sure that the little red number one in its circle has disappeared. It's strange, but he figures that it was probably a mistake. Rozanov would never call him on purpose.

**

They meet at the beginning of October. Shane tells Hayden he's going for a walk and heads out barely an hour after they've checked in to their shared room in the same hotel they always stay at in Boston, then he walks to the end of the block and calls a cab to take him to the hotel where Rozanov is waiting for him. It's fancier than the one the Metros are staying in, upscale and expensive and carrying an expectation of privacy with it, so that Shane almost feels that the staff there can't see him for all they seem politely ambivalent to his presence as he walks through the doors, collects the keycard that's waiting for him at reception and crosses to the elevators.

Shane doesn't encounter another person on his way to the room, the carpets under his feet thick enough that he can't even hear his own footsteps, the implication of privacy — that he goes entirely unnoticed — soothing to the watchful corners of his mind. Rozanov answers the door in track pants and a wash-worn henley, its thin cotton fighting for its life against the stretch of his arms and his shoulders. Shane's eyes track the shape of him without his say-so.

With the door clicking closed behind him Shane gives an awkward little smile and says, "Hi," and Ilya smiles back at him, steps close and kisses him soft and deep and hungry, his hand on Shane's face with his thumb pressing into the soft part under Shane's jaw like he has every right.

He quirks a smile as he lets Shane go and says, "Hello, Shane," but Shane's head is swimming.

This is Rozanov when he's not postgame, when he hasn't come from anywhere except, Shane assumes, his house.

He mumbles back, "Hi, Ilya," but he's thinking about how there isn't the lingering smell of locker rooms around Ilya's clothes, or the bland man-scent of the generic body wash that ends up in the dispensers in every rink shower Shane's ever set foot in. There's no undertone of cigarette smoke or blur of food and alcohol and bodies that sticks to someone who's been in a roomful of people all night.

Ilya smells fucking amazing, so good it's unfair; Shane ducks his face to press into the side of Ilya's neck, his mouth open against him so that his tongue can press to skin and he inhales and groans before he can remind himself to hold it in. Ilya's wearing cologne and there's something that's probably his shampoo or hair products and it's those but it's also not, not at all. Shane's been near plenty of guys who were wearing cologne and never before wanted to just hump one of them until he comes.

He's getting hard, and Ilya's fingers are digging in at his waist, holding them flush together; Shane's face is still against Ilya's neck, his mouth making little bites to the soft part above his collarbone. Ilya's hand is in his hair, twisted up like it gets when Shane sucks him off.

Ilya tugs at him until Shane lifts his face; Ilya is looking at him with a familiar heat, but he lifts his eyebrows in a question, too.

There's no room for embarrassment left in him, although maybe he'll find it again later, so Shane kisses him open-mouthed and tells him, "You smell fucking incredible." Ilya's hands spasm on him. "Fuck me?"

Ilya puts him on his hands and knees to fuck him and Shane's head drops and his back arches and he moans when Ilya's dick pushes in and stretches him wide. He's ready to brace himself, waiting to feel Ilya's broad hands take their place on his hips and pull them hard against each other, but once Ilya's in him all the way his arms move around Shane's chest to pull him back and up, drag him so that he's kneeling upright with Ilya's chest to his back and his dick still in him, absolute acres of skin pressed flush to him.

Fucking like this isn't so frantic, Ilya's thrusts not so hard; Ilya doesn't pull out all the way and Shane can't really fuck back on to him, has to work to keep upright instead and let himself be taken, so it's more of a grind, more of Ilya filling Shane obscenely full and not letting him get away from it. Ilya holds Shane against him with an arm across his chest while Shane gasps and pants and lets his head drop back, turns his face into Ilya's neck so he can breathe him in and pant wetly against his cheek and scrape teeth against his jaw and inhale, fumbling behind himself to press his hands to Ilya's thighs, his ass, into his hair.

By the time he comes Shane is a trembling mess; Ilya's nails drag sharp lines across his hip and his belly to loop loosely around his dick and Shane's eyes fly wide and he fucks into Ilya's grip and barely has time to beg, "Please, oh yes, please —" before he's shuddering and crying out and spilling over Ilya's hand.

He goes boneless after, needs Ilya to hold him up so that he doesn't collapse into the puddle he's made on the bedspread; Ilya's still hard in him, fucking in and bringing little whimpers of overstimulation out of him as he does. Shane feels perfect.

"Can I come on you?" Ilya asks, accent thick against Shane's ear.

Shane can still hardly think. "Wh-what?"

"On your back, can I come on — oh, oh fuck —" His voice is tight and Shane recognises it, with the short, hard thrusts into him. He's going to come, and Shane's nodding before he knows he's decided to.

"Yes, yes do it."

Ilya pulls out of him suddenly enough that Shane gasps high and sharp and the arm that's been holding Shane up lets go; Shane catches himself on shaking arms to keep himself from falling on his face and sees the condom dropped on the mattress to the side of them; it's only seconds before Ilya groans and Shane feels him spilling onto his skin, spurting onto the top of his ass cheeks and the small of his back; Shane bites his lip so that Ilya can't hear him moan softly at the filth of it.

Shane ends up letting himself drop in the wet spot anyway, head resting on his arms as he gathers himself, collects his scattered pieces and resets them into the right shape — which is always, after Ilya is done with him, slightly different and slightly more comfortable than he'd been keeping himself before, as if he can feel that he's stretching to find the right dimensions for himself.

"Блядь, I wish I could take a picture of this," Ilya murmurs, and presses his thumbs into the roundness at the tops of Shane's ass cheeks. It's such a bizarre thing to want; Shane looks over his shoulder with a frown.

"Why?"

Ilya laughs and drops down onto the bed next to him, settling on his side facing Shane with his head propped up on his hand. "Shane, if you are telling me you do not know why I would want dirty pictures of you I will not believe you. Personal use only." He grins but it's not mocking, and Shane thinks that he might be blushing.

They smell of sex, now, as well as whatever it is of Ilya that makes Shane want to press his whole face against his chest and breathe in, and although he doesn't really know what does and doesn't constitute a sex-friend activity he thinks that even in this moment of strange quiet that would probably be a weird thing to do. He moves close an inch, maybe two, instead, so that they're touching from his hip to his toes.

He glances back over his shoulder to where he can't quite see the state of himself, and replies, "Oh. Oh, I. Really?"

Shane needs a shower; his skin is cooling and the thing that was hot three minutes ago is about to encounter sober thought and be disgusting, but before he can start to do anything about that Ilya reaches out and drags a fingertip along the ridge of his shoulder blade, from the centre of his back outward to its edge, but his eyes stay on Shane's face.

"Really, yes. You are very beautiful, Shane Hollander. I hope the others you allow into your bed tell you this also."

The words are soft and serious, said as fact and not as teasing, and Shane's breath catches and holds. He isn't sure where to start: with the incongruousness of Ilya calling him beautiful or with denial of its truth; with the knee-jerk rebuff that he doesn't have other people that he goes to bed with, give or take a girl or two over the years that really didn't go so well — or with a passing back of the compliment, saying that Ilya is beautiful, too, in this moment with its closeness and soft light and quiet breathing.

He doesn't get the chance to say anything, though; Ilya presses a soft kiss to his slack mouth then stands and flips on the bathroom light; he recovers the condom and throws it in the trash and asks, as if nothing unusual has come out of his mouth, "You want shower first? You need it." The fucker winks at him, and Shane scowls and stands and pushes past him into the bathroom.

**

The first time Rozanov calls and Shane answers, it's to argue about an ESPN interview.

"I know you did not forget," he starts, as soon as Shane picks up and before he can even get a word out, before he can decide between a tentative hello or a more demanding what do you want.

"What?" he stutters out instead, thrown.

"You tell this reporter on EPSN you don't remember how many goals I scored last season —" Shane rolls his eyes and finds himself smiling the smallest bit, glad that there's no one here with him in his kitchen to see, "and you know it was seventy —"

"Hey, woah, it wasn't seventy anything, it was sixty six."

There's a silence that carries Rozanov's indignant annoyance loud in it. "You liar!" He sounds delighted, somehow. "You try to tell me my own scores and you cannot admit you are wrong!"

"You can't count All Stars, that's barely even real hockey. We were talking about the regular season; in the regular season it was sixty six."

"I think perhaps you do not want to say it was such a big number."

"Fuck you, I'm being accurate."

"And you know it, Shane, hm?" He sounds quietly victorious.

That's not wrong, but — "I know lots of players' stats. That's not weird."

"Oh yes, what was Pike's for last season, hm?" Shane pauses. He knows this. He knows this for basically every high scorer in the league, and somehow Rozanov's quiet smug confidence has driven everything he knows right out of his head. "You remember Pike, yes, fifteenth best Metro?"

"Fuck off, Hayden did just fine last season, he," Shane pauses, all his thoughts in a tangle. He doesn't understand how Rozanov does this to him.

"It is all right, he is very forgettable. Not like me, hm, Shane?"

"You're such an asshole," Shane tells him and fears that he might sound fond, "I don't know why I even picked up."

"Why did you pick up?" Rozanov asks, curious.

"I thought you were someone else," Shane lies, when the answer lies embedded instead somewhere in his own curiosity.

"Well, now we agree you are obsessed with me —"

"I am not obsessed with you."

"— I need to go," Ilya says, and Shane can hear noises in the background that sound like they might be doors slamming, then muffled voices, "which is a shame, I did not even get chance to ask what you are wearing."

"What I'm wearing?" Shane asks, stupidly.

"Yes. Maybe if I call again you will tell me." The sound of voices is getting louder wherever Rozanov is. "Then you will take it all off for me."

"Fuck you, no I fucking won't."

"We will see. Goodbye, Shane."

He hangs up and leaves Shane standing in his kitchen, staring at call ended on his phone screen, halfway hard and not sure if he's disappointed or relieved that Rozanov hung up without letting his voice drop into that lower, softer, dangerous register that makes Shane shiver and want to do deeply ill-advised things because they feel good enough that he loses his grasp on rational thought.

Maybe next time, he thinks, instead — and rolls his eyes at himself and shuts his phone away into the nearest kitchen drawer with an, entirely necessary, slam.

**

The routine of the season grinds itself along and takes Shane with it in its teeth. It keeps going well for Montreal, the wins stacking up, and by Christmas there are stifled, hesitant murmurings about the playoffs, about their chances; about bringing the Metros finally bringing the Cup home. Shane listens and puts it away and buckles down.

He's never played better in his life.

Rozanov agrees, which Shane knows by how much shit he gives him for it.

By the turn of the New Year it's starting to feel weird if a week goes by and they don't text or call or something, and their schedules are lining up beautifully for them to have almost regular hookups — if more or less once a month counts as regular, but Shane finds that he thinks so — or at least his body does, with its twitchy sense of dissatisfaction building to an uncomfortable peak when the time between their meetings breaks the three week mark, and the need to touch by the time they're safe behind a hotel room door is a physical thing, a hand on his back pushing him always closer.

It's the friends question, though, that itches at him; that the hooking up feels like the icing on the cake, the addictive, perfect bonus to having Ilya as his utterly unlikely friend, a foundation that he would be miserable to lose, at this point and that he hopes outlasts the place where physical wanting and poor decision making meet. He finds he doesn't like the idea that Ilya might have other friends like him that can also lose themselves in Ilya's touch like Shane gets to, and more than once finds himself trawling the tabloid news feeds for proof of them — of Rozanov's women — and finds himself gratified that he can't find anything particularly recent.

It's right after All-Stars that Shane cracks, just enough to get the question out, needing to know that he's not building up some awful one-sided thing that'll leave him feeling like he's really lost something when they finally see sense and stop fucking, if he finds suddenly that Ilya isn't in his life at all.

It hadn't exactly been his plan to say it the minute he walked into Ilya's house, but he's in Ilya's house; it's the first time Shane's been invited over and he can't get it out of his head that this, too, isn't a casual fuck sort of thing, and even though he's probably opening himself up for mockery just by asking he finds himself breaking their frantic kiss to blurt it out while Ilya's still backing him up against the inside of his closed bedroom door.

"Hey, so — we're friends, right?" Shane's a little ashamed of himself that there is a whiny little twist of pleading to his question, but if Rozanov says no, laughs the concept away, Shane knows he'll be disappointed. He'll be hurt.

It isn't entirely welcome, the thought that Ilya has the power to hurt him.

The heat in Ilya's face fades into something neutral and he looks at him without a flicker to his expression for long enough that Shane all but feels that hurt incoming, but then Ilya smiles and the relief is a rush even if Shane is sure that smile doesn't quite look right; it doesn't quite reach his eyes.

"Yes, Shane, we are friends."

Shane's grin is reflexive and full of relief; he'd thought so, but hearing it back spreads warm in his chest, bright and glittering.

Rozanov looks away, clears his throat, then looks back to Shane with a tease in his eyes. "Now we know we are friends I am going to suck your dick for you. Spirit of friendship, yes?"

**

Ilya is a fool. With the roses giving him no choice in the matter he'd accepted the truth that he loved Shane Hollander bare days after he'd cold-shouldered him out of his penthouse in Vegas, but it had been a love born of wanting and distance, of watching and waiting and need building up into a mass of emotion. It was love that had grown from stolen slices of him: watching his games and his interviews and reading his articles and seeing his face, the determined downturn to his eyes as he'd refused to meet Ilya's at the red line, all of it making Ilya burn for the wanting of him until it all fused in him as love, and —

And it's a shadow to what he feels now, with months of conversations and visits that Ilya engineers more frequently than should be believable as coincidence, if Shane really thought it through. Now that Ilya knows how to make Shane laugh and can hear it in the brightness to his voice when he's trying not to; now that Ilya has put his mouth on every square inch of Shane's body, has felt him shake and heard him beg and seen that fleeting peace in his face for the few minutes after they're finished, when Ilya can lie with him and Shane doesn't mind.

It's the most tragic indictment of any hope he had left that Shane might ever feel the same for him, that he has declared them, so very, very tentatively, to be friends, when even the love that Ilya had felt at the start of summer seems as nothing, in retrospect; childish and long since outgrown. What was shallow, albeit real, now runs messy and tangled and deep, and all the way through him.

Chapter 2: Two

Chapter Summary

Shane knows that it's nearing the end of May but is a little fuzzy on the actual date, so when he arrives home from the airport one step closer to the final after ending New Jersey's run in game six, there's a moment when he's surprised that he's got as much mail as he does. There's a parcel about the size of a shoebox as well as a little stack of envelopes, most of which are thick paper and rigid, like they have card in them rather than paper. It takes him a stupidly long moment to realise that they're birthday cards; that this week — he thinks, isn't sure and has to check his phone for the date — tomorrow is his birthday.

Chapter Notes

Shane hasn't been back to his apartment in a week, every single part of him hurts and there's a black hole of hunger in his stomach that no amount of brown rice and chicken is able to satisfy. Objectively he's an absolute mess: exhausted, battered, bruised and taped and wrapped — and still, he feels fantastic. This is it: this will be it, he knows it to his bones, there's no other way he's going to let it happen. This is their year. Their Cup.

It's going to be his — Montreal's — Shane can almost taste it.

He knows that it's nearing the end of May but is a little fuzzy on the actual date, so when he arrives home from the airport one step closer to the final after ending New Jersey's run in game six, there's a moment when he's surprised that he's got as much mail as he does. There's a parcel about the size of a shoebox as well as a little stack of envelopes, most of which are thick paper and rigid, like they have card in them rather than paper. It takes him a stupidly long moment to realise that they're birthday cards; that this week — he thinks, isn't sure and has to check his phone for the date — tomorrow is his birthday.

Standing at his kitchen counter and flicking through the pile of mail Shane pays it only a sliver of his attention in favour of the parcel, which has customs stickers on it, he sees, and he pauses and sets the letters down when he realises that it's postmarked Boston.

There's no return address, but there doesn't need to be; Shane only knows one person in Boston so even though he has no idea what Rozanov might be mailing to him he has no doubt that he's the one it's come from. Shane picks the box up: gently shakes it. It's not very heavy and when he shakes the box there's a little shushing sound of something moving in there, but nothing that gives anything away.

Fetching a pair of scissors out of a kitchen drawer for the tape on the lid of the box, Shane fiddles with his phone until he finds their text thread, then asks:

Shane: Did you know it's my birthday?

Lily: yes.

Shane: how??

The typing bubble appears and disappears, then eventually another message pings through: a link to Shane's wikipedia page.

Lily: turns out even second best hockey player is on internet.

Shane feels momentarily stupid, because of course Rozanov actually could have found out his birthday from so many different places — but then his brain stalls over the fact that he's gone to the trouble of looking it up; of — apparently — sending him a gift.

Except, they're friends. Friends know this stuff about each other. Shane taps the search in without really thinking about it, Ilya Rozanov birthday, and it only takes about ten seconds for him to find out it's only three weeks away.

Lily: Think of me when you use it 😉

Shane remembers the parcel, then, and sets his phone down to pick up the kitchen scissors and carefully slice through the tape holding it closed. There's a box inside surrounded by packing paper, matte black and sleek — expensive-looking — and Shane carefully lifts the lid off and blushes furiously, instantly at the toy he finds there, audacious in its size, thick silicone in gold. Think of me when you use it, Ilya had said.

Of fucking course.

Shane's phone buzzes on the counter, and he snatches it up.

Lily: You want to say thank you, send me a picture 🥵🍆🍑

Shane's first reaction is a sort of indignant, embarrassed anger: as if, like he would take pictures of himself like that just for anyone — but he's pulled up short at the thought because Ilya really isn't, actually, just anyone; possibly hasn't ever been, if he's honest about it, and he trusts him not to be stupid with something like that.

There's already a dildo sitting in the back of a drawer upstairs. He doesn't really use it all that often; it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get himself off and it's never as satisfying as the real thing, is so deficient compared to Ilya's touch and the knowledge of Shane's body that drives it.

Shane doesn't exactly make a decision to do it but he takes the whole box upstairs with him anyway, strips and takes the dildo out of the box — washes it first because he's not an animal — but then he takes the lube out of his drawer and settles himself on his bed and does just as Ilya had asked him, and thinks of him the whole time.

It takes a stupidly short time, to say Shane is alone and is tired and all of him aches like playoff hockey and no part of him was even thinking about sex a few minutes ago, but there's something about knowing that Ilya thought of him, that he picked this specific thing out for him, that he'd planned it, mailed it to arrive for Shane's birthday, has been picturing him using it and wants to see and is waiting for it.

So he pushes it into himself with slippy fingers and thinks of Ilya's talented hands and his mouth and his dick and his voice, the constant low murmur of it in Shane's ear when they fuck until he comes eventually with a groan, satisfied and, yet, still wanting for the feel of skin and the weight of heavy muscle over him.

Shane fumbles for his phone before he thinks better of it and takes an awkwardly-angled picture of himself before the orgasm high can fade out of his blood, then lies back on his bed and looks at it. There's nothing identifying, save the edge of impact bruises on his thigh that you can't tell flood up to his hip out of frame and that'll be yellowing or gone in a week; there's just the toy still half in him, his softening dick and a puddle of come on his belly.

Shane: Promise you'll delete it?

Lily: Yes

The reply is immediate, like Ilya really was waiting for him, and Shane knows even as he reads it that he didn't actually need the confirmation; he does trust Ilya in this, more than he's ever trusted anyone with himself — so he sends it then deletes it out of his own photos for good measure, and leaves his phone on the bed while he cleans himself up. He comes back a few minutes later, dressed and with the first tinges of real self-consciousness starting to claw at him, to find more messages waiting.

Lily: oh fuck Shane

And then, after a gap of ten minutes or so:

Lily: I have deleted now

Lily: is a shame. It looks so good in you.

Shane smiles and tells himself he shouldn't feel so flattered by a compliment over a fucking dirty picture, and picks up the parcel that the dildo came in to throw it in the recycling — but as he breaks the box down flat something else falls out and drops to the floor; it clatters. He bends, picks it up.

It takes him a minute to place, but their faces are still babyish enough that the picture must be from the Prospect Cup; Saskatchewan. They aren't looking at each other, staring straight ahead into the camera, the entirely unoccupied stands of the rink rising behind them and half a foot of empty air in between them, Shane's black and red jersey alongside Ilya's red and white. They look so unbearably young.

Shane remembers pictures being taken — pictures of everyone; the teams standing in awkward rows, the practises, shots of just himself — and of him and Rozanov, the final's two team captains standing awkwardly side by side and not saying a word to each other. He's never seen this one before.

This photo was taken before they'd ever spoken. Shane had followed Rozanov outside after this to introduce himself, because he hadn't wanted to do it with half the team and the photographer watching. This is them before they were ever them, and even so Shane remembers the urgency that he'd felt — that he had to go outside and talk to him; the inevitability of it.

He has no idea how Ilya would have gotten hold of this; he must have gone looking for it, searched it out, then for reasons that Shane cannot put together he had it printed up, this reminder of where they started together, and put it in a thin black frame and sent it to him for his birthday.

What Shane is supposed to think of this he has no idea, but what he does feel is — is —

Big. Massive, in his chest.

He fumbles for his phone again and looks at the screen until it comes back into focus.

Shane: Nice picture. Where did you get it?

Lily: Was worth the effort. You look like small child.

Shane: Not more than you do.

Lily: You were very short.

Lily: tiny legs. no surprise you lost.

Shane looks back to the picture to check and, all right, he hadn't finished growing yet, but there was still barely anything to draw a difference between them.

Shane: Fuck you

Lily: Happy birthday.

It's soft, the feeling pushing beneath Shane's breastbone, and warm; welcome. Terrifying.

**

Svetlana's tears are angry, and she wipes them away with her fingertips like they have insulted her. In between them on the table rests a rose: a full bloom, but in pieces. There is a small green leaf attached to the bottom of the largest clump of petals.

"You will not have the surgery," she tells him. She knows well enough not to make it a question.

He thinks about a pink scar on pale skin, barely healed. About arguments that he couldn't help but overhear before the pink scar appeared, and of the flowers that he had found crushed in the trash — but they didn't keep flowers in the house, so he hadn't understood at first where they had come from.

It had always been the worst thing when his father made his mother cry, and so he tried not to listen while it happened and tried to comfort her afterwards, but he remembers in particular how fiercely she had screamed it, told his father I do not want it and how he had shouted straight back at her You will have it anyway, and it had been too loud for Ilya to be able to avoid without going out of the house but he needed to be there after they argued in case he could help her, and so he stayed, and listened.

You will have it anyway, and not long after that the pink scar appeared. Bandaged, first, and then healing and a livid pink, cutting down her breastbone.

Ilya had thought she had just been sad. He had heard of it, the flower disease, and with the flowers in the trash and the scar to work from he had thought that he could put it all together. He was old enough to know that love could make you sad sometimes, but he didn't understand why all the light had gone from his mother's eyes on the day she came back with a scar.

She'd told him, later, sitting at their kitchen table with a cigarette in her hand although she hadn't smoked since before he was born, "I do not love him any more. He is gone. But so is my mama, and my sister, and you."

She had held his hand, but looked at it as if his touch confused her. "You are gone, too."

The pink scar hadn't yet faded to healed-white by the time Ilya found her in their bathtub, and he had understood her reasons.

"No," he tells Svetlana, "I will not have the surgery."

**

Shane's mom had said that MVP was practically a done deal, and it went against the grain to imagine it as his before anything was announced but Shane had hoped; captaining the team that brought the Cup back to Montreal after sixteen years had to count for something, after all. He'd still barely believed it, standing on the stage reading out the acceptance speech his mom had written for him and even as he did feeling his phone buzz in his pocket, Rozanov choosing that moment on purpose to text him, the absolute fucker.

Shane replies to the room number with 11pm? as soon as he's off the stage, because he'd been waiting for that exact invitation for hours, if he's lying to himself, and weeks if he isn't — so Shane was never going to do anything else.

Rozanov is in a penthouse again this year, although a different one, and still Shane feels a strange deja vu as he takes the elevator up to his floor and follows the short corridor to the only door that there is to go to when the elevator lets you off here. He remembers how he felt leaving Ilya's room a year ago and swallows away nervousness while he reminds himself that it hasn't felt like that since, that the anticipation that thrums through him as he lifts his hand to knock on the door is real and thrilling and not just because he's going to have sex tonight — good sex, sex that will make his muscles ache and his body feel like it's doing the only thing that it was made for that doesn't involve a pair of hockey skates.

The anticipation is for Ilya. For the way he looks at Shane and Shane feels like —

He feels like, maybe —

It really doesn't matter what it feels like, because being sex-friends doesn't come with feelings outside of the bounds of their carefully yet also somehow imprecisely delineated friendship.

But sometimes, Ilya looks at him like he's — like maybe he thinks that Shane is something precious, like maybe this isn't all in Shane's head and Ilya feels it as well, like they're —

The door opens.

Shane steps inside and closes it behind him. Ilya is standing a metre or so away, stripped to the waist. He's definitely slimmer — leaner — than a few months ago. It's hard to keep weight on in the playoffs, Shane knows that well enough, but Boston's run ended weeks ago and there's something about him that makes Shane think thin, think unwell, rather than simply underfed. Maybe it's the shadows under his eyes; they make him look tired.

This is what the summer is for, anyway — resting, healing — and he pushes the thought out of his mind and lets Ilya kiss him welcome.

Ilya blows him stretched out on the suite's enormous couch before he takes him to bed, strips him and puts him on his stomach and fucks him slow and hard with his whole weight stretched out heavy over him, his mouth busy on Shane's shoulders and the back of his neck but Shane doesn't even care that he's going to be marked up to hell and back while Ilya is pinning him down like there can't be any moving him, whispering little choked words in Russian into his hair.

After, Ilya moves off to the side of him just enough that Shane can turn over onto his back but he doesn't get up, not for a while. Shane is still not able to pull his thoughts properly together and he is wading through the very middle of the bone-deep satisfaction that he has never found anywhere else but with Ilya, so he hums, pleased, and Ilya mouths at his shoulder and then his jawline until Shane turns his head far enough for them to kiss, all slow, tongue and syrup-sweet; kisses that would lead to fucking if they hadn't only just finished.

"Food," Ilya murmurs to him, once Shane's skin is starting to cool. "Room service. You want? I order now and we can shower while we wait."

Shane is about to open his mouth and say no, Ilya doesn't have to, Shane can get going so he doesn't overstay his welcome but before he can open his mouth his stomach growls, and Ilya smiles at him.

"Sorry," Shane winces, "the food at this thing is always kinda bad, and it's all tiny little plates."

"Yes, this. Is like they do not know they are feeding hockey players at the hockey awards." Ilya's hand has come to rest on Shane's stomach, just below his belly button; he's stroking idly with his thumb. "So, room service, yes?" He presses a quick little kiss to Shane's mouth and stands, leaving Shane suddenly unhappily cold, but he comes back soon enough with the menu in his hands. "You want to choose or I should just order one of everything?"

Shane knows he shouldn't really stay, but — he is hungry, and they're friends; friends can eat together and it's not strange or too much or too intimate, and so Shane picks his food from the menu and Ilya orders it and asks for housekeeping to come in and change the bedlinens, too, if it's not too much trouble which it should be, at this time of night, but Ilya is charming and polite and leaves a huge tip on the dresser. It's from the other side of the locked bathroom door that Shane hears the sounds of someone moving around, stripping the bed with efficiency as Ilya's hands hold firm to his sides and taps questing, restrained fingers against his asshole and Shane turns to scrape his teeth along Ilya's collarbone and his heart races and he thrills at the nearness of the faceless person on the other side of the door and the safety of the bolt thrown across it.

They eat sprawled on the unnecessarily large couch and when they're done and Shane's starting to think he should make noises about leaving before Ilya has to ask him to go, but he doesn't get chance before Ilya tugs him back to the bedroom and tumbles him into the enormous bed with its crisp, fresh sheets and kisses him until there's nothing left in Shane's head but the press of Ilya's mouth — and it's lovely, and it's late, and he's warm and tired and he feels so good just right exactly here, and he doesn't exactly realise that he's definitely going to fall asleep if he doesn't get up until he does.

Sleep.

Shane wakes with the daylight. He is pressed tight against something that's spread down the length of his whole body, his back and his ass and his legs and is warm to the point of too hot, that's making him sticky with sweat and feels grounding and wonderful and is breathing deep and Shane wakes enough to realise that it's Ilya just as the weight on him shifts and Ilya moves off him. Shane finds himself making a little noise, hardly audible even to himself, but most definitely one of unhappiness for the disturbance.

The bed dips as Ilya climbs off of it and Shane hears the padding of footsteps and then the closing of a door — the bathroom; there's the sound of the lock clicking. Shane blinks open his eyes and looks out of the window into a shockingly bright Vegas skyline, strangely unremarkable in daylight.

He has spent the night in Ilya's bed. They have woken very early, it might not have been that many hours since he fell asleep if he were to count them, but it was dark and now it's light so that means he's spent the night.

Through the bathroom door Shane hears the sound of Ilya coughing. He's going to come back out any minute.

While the rules around hookups, around friends who fuck are strange and not instinctual to him still, Shane is sure that spending the night sleeping one on top of the other, pressed together so fully and so wonderfully that Shane can still feel Ilya's skin against his if he concentrates, he can still feel —

Ilya coughs again, and there's the sound of water running — the sink, he thinks, not the shower.

This isn't right; they aren't people that spend the night together — friends of the kind that Shane believes that they are don't cuddle all night in the same bed and he's sure that hookups don't either; that's a key distinguishing feature. They were tired and they'd both had a few drinks and they fell asleep, sure, and now Shane needs to make sure Ilya knows that he understands it isn't what they do, it isn't what they are to each other. He doesn't want them to stop doing this thing they do together just because the boundaries blurred too far one time without the thought to keep them solid.

Shane sits up and looks around: he spots his underwear right where he left them on the seat of the chair in the corner; his suit is draped over the chair's back. He stands and picks up his underwear and pulls them on, and has one arm in a shirt sleeve when Ilya comes out of the bathroom.

Ilya stumbles to a stop when he sees Shane standing, partway dressed, and his face falls into something like disappointment but Shane can't guess if it's disappointment that Shane's getting ready to leave or disappointment that he didn't manage to get gone while Ilya was still in the bathroom.

"I think then that you do not want to order breakfast."

Shane puts his other arm in its sleeve and concentrates very hard on his buttons. "It's ok, I'll get out of your hair."

"You have flight soon?" Ilya asks, and Shane shakes his head.

"Not until later, uh, one-thirty, I think." He pulls his pants up, zips the fly. "You're leaving for Russia tonight, right?"

"Yes," Ilya says, coming closer, walking around the bed to stand in front of Shane as he sits to tug on his socks. Ilya's still naked. "We will not see each other until next season."

Shane slips on one shoe, the other. "You'll text though, right? Let me know you got there all right?"

"Yes, Shane, I will text. I will send boring 'wish you were here' from arrivals at Moscow Sheremetyevo." His voice curls around the Russian, and Shane shivers. Ilya is smiling at him but his eyes look sad, and not for the first time Shane wonders what drives him to keep going back to Russia every summer when he doesn't seem to actually want to.

Shane opens his mouth to say — something, he isn't sure exactly what. There are words piling up in his throat and waiting behind his teeth, and he feels like if he lets them out he'll be asking Ilya not to go to Russia this summer, at least not for all of it. There must be somewhere else Ilya wouldn't mind being for a few weeks that won't put him thousands of miles away in a place that he doesn't seem to actually want to go to anyway, and if by some massively unlikely turn of events Ilya's choices are being in Russia or sitting by himself in his house in Boston, he could always come to stay with Shane for a while; it might be fun, it —

It's a stupid, stupid idea and Shane knows there's no way that he can actually voice it. He's never brought up Russia with Ilya and had a response from him that's better than knee-jerk vitriol and Shane doesn't want them to go their separate ways on a sour note, not when they had such a good night and Shane slept well enough that he feels like there isn't a single tense muscle in his entire body.

Instead Shane takes a step forward, and Ilya welcomes him with a kiss; it's a strange feeling, Shane with all his clothes on and Ilya still all bare skin, and Shane's breath sighs out on a moan.

"I'll see you in the fall," Shane says when they part, and it already feels like far, far too long away. He feels separated; maimed, like he's leaving something important behind as he makes his way out of the bedroom, his suit jacket dangling from his fingers and he thinks it's fine, and it makes sense because they're friends, he's sad not to see his friend until the new season starts, he's disappointed to have to wait months for sex again — sex like this, at least, the earth-moving, incredible kind — and he turns with his hand on the door handle to call a soft, "Bye, Ilya," over his shoulder, and Ilya is standing in the doorway to the bedroom, arms loose by his sides, watching him go.

Ilya nods, slow, and tells him, "Goodbye, Shane," and, with the solid click of the lock unlatching the door opens under the pressure of his hand and he leaves the penthouse without looking back again, however much the prickling of Ilya's eyes on the back of his neck makes him want to.

**

The morning is always the worst: something about the restive state of sleep, the body's processes unimpeded by the demands of the conscious hours. The flowers have time to grow and settle and push their way up and Ilya rarely wakes and doesn't bring up a handful of something.

He has learned, now, all the proper terms in English for the parts of a flower, given that this is the language used for most of the reference articles he can find that seem remotely objective. Petals first, certainly, but he understands the stamen, the carpal, the receptacle, and can recognise them when they are in his hand, dismembered from the violence of coughing. The sepals that he sees as a green mush and would be the tiny leaves at the base of the rose's head were he to be looking at one in a vase, started to appear not long ago, and are a bad sign.

Any progression past petals is a bad sign. He knows that the more extensive the visible structures, the more extensive the root.

He doesn't need a mouthful of flowers to tell him that: he is a professional athlete. He knows how hard he should be able to push himself before he is gasping for breath, and he knows that he can no longer push anywhere near that hard.

He has been pushing anyway, and gasping.

This Vegas hotel bed still smells like Shane, like when Ilya presses his face into Shane's neck, and Ilya determines that he will lie in it until housekeeping arrives to tell him he has to leave: he will lie here and breathe in what Shane has left behind and hate him as hard as he can, hate him for what he has brought Ilya to in case he can hate hard enough to overturn the love that festers in him. Ilya will hate Shane for how much Ilya lives to see him smile for him and for the touch of his hands when there is softness in them and Ilya can pretend Shane feels something in return that isn't a pleasure of convenience.

Assuming that Ilya is still here to see the end of this summer he and Shane will not see each other again until then, and even though that isn't Shane's fault at all, Ilya tries his hardest to hate him for that, too.

**

There's an itch living under Shane's skin and no matter what he does he can't make it go away. He can't settle into the offseason, can't shake the feeling of momentum, of needing to be on his way somewhere, and for the stretch of the first week as the sun starts to burn the air warm he throws open the windows of his cottage, the first summer he's been able to plan ahead to spend in it since construction completed, and sleeps with the breeze from the lake keeping him cool. He hopes it will calm him, will soothe the feeling that he's late, that he's missing something — but it doesn't.

After that week is when he has to acknowledge to himself that the only time he feels like he's in the right place is when he sees Ilya's texts ping through; when they go back-and-forth arguing over the importance of sunscreen or bat between them the news on the summer trades as it starts to come in — or when they call, when Ilya tries to explain to him the ridiculous intricacies of the plot of some Russian tv show that Shane lacks the language and the context to understand, until Ilya gives up and, grinning, tells him to take his clothes off if he wants to give Ilya some different entertainment.

He downloads an app and a podcast, googles when he needs to and practices sitting outside on the deck, and the first time that he tells Ilya, "иди на хуй," the five seconds of silence that follows with his face frozen in shock on Shane's phone screen is pristine, shattered in the end with Ilya's delighted laughter.

"Did you only learn the bad words, Hollander?"

Shane ducks his head against the pleased flush that he can feel rising and tries to put his sounds in order because he hadn't only learned the swear words, hadn't even started there, but they'd been pretty high up the list given the Rozanov of it all. He makes his mouth into the unfamiliar shapes, says the sentence he'd practised, "Нет, но я знаю очень мало."

"Accent is terrible. But very impressive, Shane. I am impressed."

Ilya's voice is soft, then, and Shane smiles and changes the subject and turns over the thought that this isn't something that you do for a sex-friend — this is only barely something you do for a friend, to learn an entire new language that you have no use for except to talk to that one person. To have a secret, just you and them.

He tries to put that thought away, but it surfaces at the most inconvenient times and he acknowledges it alongside the truth that even as his solitude at the cottage ends and he moves into his mom's summer schedule of interviews and photoshoots and promos, it remains true that he has spoken to Ilya every day since he left for Russia; he has spoken to Ilya more than he has anyone else all summer and still doesn't feel satisfied with it — Shane wants more of him.

Shane thinks a lot about Vegas — sometimes the time at the start of summer where Shane had stayed the night and woke up feeling gloriously content, but mostly he thinks about Vegas a year ago. About the emptiness that had gutted him in the elevator, and before that the shining special feeling he'd felt he all but glowed with as Ilya watched him from the chair at the end of the bed.

But before that, standing in the men's room fresh off the stage and still wearing his tux with his heart skipping doubletime in his chest, with Ilya so close and feeling a thousand miles away, like even that few inches were too far for him to touch, and then —

Shane thinks a lot about when Ilya had kissed him, standing together a bathroom door away from half the MLH. About how it had felt like having oxygen in his lungs again after being starved for it, except that he hadn't known that he hadn't been breathing. It had felt like the colour had been saturated back into the world.

He had been waiting for it: six months he had been waiting while he tried to convince himself he didn't care and when it was offered he'd let himself drown in it.

Almost half of summer has burned away before Shane realises — or no, not realises, because he always knew, but he understands — that he feels that way again, now. That the feeling has grown and unfurled and stretched lazily through him until it occupies the background of everything he does.

The summer passes in a steady roll, and Shane spends it underwater holding his breath, waiting for Ilya to bring him up for air again.

**

In America there is always a risk — a likelihood — that any medical records Ilya has would find his way back to the team physicians, but Ilya wastes little time after he returns to Russia before making a discreet appointment at an expensive private clinic where they ask his name but take deliberate steps not to check that the one he gives is the truth; he feels that confidentiality is about as assured as it possibly can be.

He hasn't seen it before, only the roses it pushes up and out of him, but sitting in the dark-panelled office of a bland-faced doctor who looks at him with evident pity, Ilya can see the dark winding shape of it on the scans displayed on the screen to his right. The doctor is pointing, indicating the stems and where they're choking him and the roots and where they're suffocating him and giving everything its proper, medical name, and Ilya can't hear it; he tightens his grip on the arms of the chair that he's sitting in until his knuckles turn white and waits until the longing passes, the desperate pointless wishing that Shane were here to hold his hand.

There's a pause in the explanation and Ilya looks back to the doctor, who is waiting, expectant.

"The first petals?" he says, in a way that means he's repeating himself, "When were they?"

Ilya swallows. He can feel it in his throat now, almost all the time. "Last summer. July."

The corners of the doctor's mouth turn down just enough to be noticeable, and he nods. "I see."

"How long?" Ilya asks, because that is the point of this, after all. He didn't need a pretty picture of his chest at a fancy medical centre to tell him that he is going to end, but it would still be useful to know when.

The doctor offers his spread hands, palms up, in a expression universal to mean that he doesn't know. "These things are not exact. They are often unpredictable."

"Try."

"Perhaps six months." His eyes flicker to the pictures of Ilya's chest and the dark tangled mass in the middle of it. "Probably less."

Ilya's eyes close and he nods. Enough time to have his affairs in order; hopefully enough time to see Shane again.

No. It is almost the end of summer and there is nothing left to be accomplished here except to burn up time. He can fly back early: he will make sure he sees Shane again.

"There is of course every chance of reversal even up until the very end stages, if you achieve reciprocation."

Ilya wants to laugh: what an awful fucking term for needing someone to love you back. He coughs instead, which turns into a wet hacking thing and the doctor passes him a cloth to bring up his roses into.

The doctor looks at them, after, spreads out the cloth on his desk and turns over the bloody mess of petals and pistil and stem with the end of a pen that he takes from a drawer. He frowns as he does, then in the end sighs and sits back in his chair.

"Six months?" Ilya asks.

The doctor tips his head to one side; the other. "Probably less."

**

From the moment Shane had let Ilya into his apartment it had felt different. Ilya's eyes and his hands had been all over him from as soon as the door had closed behind him and there had been wanting there and none of that had been unusual, but there was something else with it; an urgency. A passion; something that makes Shane feel like Ilya is there with him, truly and only with him and the rest of the world might not even be there any more.

Ilya had pulled Shane to pieces before he'd even gotten him properly naked; he knows by now how to treat him just how Shane likes best and as he had taken Shane's clothes off one piece at a time, for every part where their skin newly touched Shane's reason blurred and his desire sharpened and he's been a desperate mess for an age, now, trying to be as good for Ilya as Ilya is to him despite the steady dissolution of his power of thought.

Held safe under Ilya's hands, Shane doesn't know how he made it through the whole long drag of summer without this — and he arches and gaps as his body wakes up and he can breathe again.

Ilya holds his legs open wide and pushes them back towards his chest as he fucks him, as he keeps fucking him and Shane thinks he's going to have fingerprint bruises on his thighs but he can't stop him, couldn't even consider it, just like Ilya isn't stopping. Shane hadn't worked it out the first time, had wondered the second, but as he watches Ilya's mouth drop open now, for the third, he recognises the expression on his face twist almost into pain as he deliberately slows the movement of his hips and Shane is fuckdrunk and split open but still understands that Ilya's stopping himself from coming.

"What —" Shane gasps out but Ilya leans forward to kiss his words away and press their foreheads together after, eyes open wide and blue and looking right into him.

"Not yet, yes? Not yet." He starts to thrust again, shallow little things. "Ok? Shane, is ok?"

Shane is burning up and wants to come but doesn't think he could stand it if Ilya stops fucking him when he's pouring out desperation into him with every single movement, so he says, "Yes, yes, I'm going to come but don't stop, ok, don't stop," and so Ilya doesn't, even as his mouth falls open and he drops his head to watch Shane come which just makes it hotter, knowing that Ilya's looking down at where he's fucking into him and where Shane's coming for him until Shane is whining from it and grabbing for him.

"Ok?" Ilya asks, grinding into him so that Shane's eyes roll back as he nods through the fizzing perfect burn of it and he catches fingers in Ilya's hair to pull him down and kiss him messy and deep.

Ilya fucks him and puts his mouth to Shane's neck exactly where it always makes him shiver and he bites sucking and wet until Shane cries out, and he fucks him and whispers in Russian, making the same mushed and mumbled words over and over, but Shane can't hold a thought so has no hope of remembering to try to understand later, and Ilya fucks him. Fucks him until Shane moans harsh on every thrust back in, until Ilya's shaking and his hips are moving in a constant helpless stammer and Shane can barely tell what sounds from him are words and what are moans and cries and gasps, until his hair is damp with sweat and his arms are shaking, holding Shane's legs open and pressed to his chest, and Shane hadn't understood, hadn't known, has never felt —

Ilya chokes out, "Shane," and tells him mysteries full of unfamiliar vowels alongside rolling r's and says, "ok, is ok?" when Shane whimpers as he gets hard again, and eventually, when Ilya loses himself completely, gives Shane's name to him against his tongue and Shane breathes out Ilya with something that sounds even to himself like awe and Ilya comes with a sob that breaks in the middle, his whole body tense and shaking and wracked with it as it goes on and on and on.

Shane winces at the ache when Ilya lets his legs down and pulls out of him, then Ilya ties off the condom and shimmies down Shane's body and before Shane can form any words Ilya swallows him down with a focused determination and makes him come again in barely a couple of minutes with three fingers stuffed deep and his throat working the head of his cock with the same driving urgency he'd fucked him with.

Ilya collapses on top of him, after; he goes with a soft oof all at once like his muscles have all given up on holding him at the same time. His forehead thumps to Shane's chest and Shane feels Ilya's mouth pressing lightly to his sternum and the wet pant of his breathing; Shane's fingers find Ilya's hair without him telling them to and they hold. Spasming and restless, they hold.

He breathes and he doesn't move and he feels satisfied down to the heart of himself; his body aches in a way that will be a delicious private reminder in the morning, he feels — Ilya shifts, slings his arm around Shane's side to hold loosely on to him, and Shane feels — rearranged. The scattered pieces of what they are that had never quite fit together — being rivals and hookups and friends — it's all true, all of it, and absolutely, completely wrong inside what they actually are, what Shane thinks they are already neck-deep in, which is, oh god, which is bottomless.

The mattress shifts, and Ilya pushes off of him, their skin sticking and pulling from the sweat and the come and the lube that covers them, just enough to be noticeable as they separate. Ilya sits and shimmies to the other side of the bed. He's looking at the opposite wall with a set, determined line to his jaw.

"I will shower now, ok."

It's a question, Shane thinks, although Ilya doesn't say it like it like it is one and he's already standing when Shane replies, "Sure," in a voice that he's fairly certain doesn't shake, and Ilya disappears through the door for the en-suite and closes it behind him.

If this were a hotel room, or Ilya's house, Shane would be the one making quick steps to leave, he's fairly sure, but he's lying in his own bed with the sheets ruined with bodily fluids and his heart is beating harder than it had been while they were fucking — while Ilya was fucking him, making Shane feel like he was all Ilya wanted in the world and what Shane had felt back had been too big to name, too big fit in him — and still is awfully, unforgivably familiar, like it wasn't new at all — only kept squashed into the corners of his mind.

Shane throws his arm across his face and tries to calm his racing mind with rationality, with justification that makes this not what it feels like, this well of emotion that hasn't so much opened up in him as that he's taken his blindfold off to see it, to recognise what he spent all summer circling around and —

Ilya doesn't touch him like that. Only he does, he does, he's always touched him with care even if this was closer to reverence and Shane is consumed by how much he wants to do it again, how much he needs to pull Ilya back into bed and press his mouth to his neck and taste and breathe and keep him there, and moreso now that wanting is impossible.

When Ilya comes out of the bathroom he's already dressed, hair still damp and skin flushed from the steam of the shower; Shane is sitting in exactly the same place, somehow, although he feels like he's travelled miles and is spinning around a million times a minute.

"I need to get going," Ilya tells him, "curfew," and Shane nods, absentminded, and won't even realise until hours after his front door closes behind Ilya that preseason hasn't even started yet, that this was a visit of fortuitous timing, a spare day before Rozanov needs to show his face at training camp and there's no curfew that he's going to need to skirt the edges of for weeks. Shane makes to get up, but Ilya shakes his head and comes to stand by the side of the bed. "No, stay. I remember where the door is."

All of this feels wrong; Shane wants to grab Ilya by his t-shirt and drag him back into bed or else he wants this last couple of hours to not have happened so that the ground feels steady under him again, and instead he's being kissed goodbye so sweetly he wants to cry.

Ilya looks at him from very, very close when he pulls away, and his mouth is smiling but his eyes are pinched and horribly sad and Shane understands that he did that, somehow, he made Ilya make that awful face, but Ilya's only telling him "Goodbye, Shane," tone just-slightly mocking as if this is all normal.

So Shane says, "Goodbye, Ilya," and Ilya steals another kiss before he turns and leaves the bedroom.

Shane listens to the thud of his footsteps down the stairs, shuffling sounds that he can barely hear that have to be shoes and coat going back on at the front door, then the door opens and closes and there are no more sounds to hear, and Ilya's gone.

**

Opening the door of his cab and getting inside, resisting the urge to slam his fists against the seat in front of him and scream as they pull away from the curb, Ilya can't even think it was a stupid thing to do. It would only be stupid if there were fallout to come from it, if there might be an upshot that mattered. But if he is realistic with himself down to the dark terrified place at the heart of him he believes that he might not get to see Shane in person again; might not have the opportunity to touch him after today before Ilya's love for him finally finishes him off.

It had seemed like the only thing he could do — a gift to himself, horribly selfish — to throw all his pretence aside and just this once give everything over and let himself touch Shane like he loves him. It fast became impossible not to drag it out as long as he could stand it, speaking his devotion into the hollow dip of Shane's shoulder in broken language, complicated and slurred, that Shane wouldn't have a hope to understand, until he could no longer stop the wanting of his body from overcoming him.

The fact that Shane hadn't understood, had looked at Ilya afterwards with disbelief in his eyes, with wariness, with a fundamental incomprehension hurts as much as the rose will that he can feel clawing it's way up the back of his throat.

Stupid or not Ilya can't make himself regret it, but it's the first time that he's felt it — really honestly let himself understand — just how badly he wants to have his feeling be returned, and for the sake of his self and his heart and his head as much as for his life; how much he wishes he were good enough for Shane to love him back.

**

It's isn't that Hayden's a bad friend. Hayden is great, he was Shane's first real friend on the Metros and things are easy with him; he doesn't make Shane do things he doesn't want to, doesn't push too hard when Shane needs to hide behind his walls — he's always let Shane keep his secrets, even if he doesn't always like it. It makes him easy to spend time with and they've always got on, right from the first time he invited Shane over to dinner.

But Hayden has no filter between his brain and his mouth, he has a face that gives away his every thought and he has never, ever been able to reliably keep a secret.

Jackie, however, is a fucking steel trap, and won't spare his feelings over giving him honesty.

It takes some manipulating to wrangle a couple of hours with her when Hayden isn't around, but he hedges around wanting to talk to her about Hayden's birthday even though it's not for another six weeks and they never even exchange gifts at each other's birthdays anyway, have never made much of a big deal about them. Shane thinks about this in hindsight when he's spinning the falsehood to her, about Ilya's birthday and the gift Shane had sent, about how natural it had felt to do it with the justification of friends that he knows now doesn't match the definition,

It's almost certain that Jackie sees through him from the get go. Most likely if she'd believed that he actually wanted to discuss birthday plans she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of carving out an evening for him, but as it is the twins are at her mother's and the baby's asleep upstairs, Hayden has been banished to JJ's for the night and although she's working to a single glass of wine limit in deference to baby number four, she's making sure that Shane picks up her slack.

He's only been wine drunk with Jackie once before and he thinks it's probably for the best that he only has blurry memories of half of the evening.

Jackie loves hockey and joins in as she lets him ramble about his plans for the preseason and his thoughts about the rookies coming in this year; he knows he's talking for the sake of talking, to put off what he's actually here for, and he knows she's letting him and is about to force his hand as her responses dwindle from sentences to words to nods and smiles and noncommittal sounds.

Shane shuts up, then. Fiddles with the stem of his wineglass and looks at the couch in between them, covered over with a soft blue throw that's been graffiti'd by one of the twins with ballpoint stick people.

He breathes and lines up his thoughts and Jackie sips her wine and watches him; waits.

It's a couple of minutes before he manages to make the words and Jackie gives him his space to sit in them, to lay out his thoughts in his head and second guess himself and set himself right again; to bolster his courage and decide not to back out and to tell Jackie the thing that he's never said out loud, and with a voice that wobbles just a little, he says, "I've been seeing someone."

He can almost see Jackie's eyes light up although her face doesn't seem to move at all. She doesn't blink as she sips her wine and between them the baby monitor gives a gentle crackle. "Have you?" She sounds interested, innocently so, and Shane knows it's an act designed to keep him comfortable and he is grateful to her for it.

"Yeah. Kinda."

She raises an eyebrow. "Kinda."

Shane shrugs. "Kinda."

The moment stretches and Jackie lets him stew in it before she prompts, "You want to expand on that?"

The impulse to shake his head and just say no, no not really, to leave the baring of his secrets there for tonight, is crushingly strong, but he can't stop here, not now he's started.

"It's been a long time. A few, uh. I guess it depends how you count it but really, it's been a few years."

"Years?" Jackie spits out through a mouthful of wine and then holds up her free hand in apology. "Sorry, sorry. I'm listening, go on."

"It's just been a casual thing," Shane continues, and across from him Jackie makes a quiet sound in her throat that holds in it about a hundred thousand questions. "But lately it doesn't feel like that any more."

Jackie smiles softly. "No? What does it feel like?"

Shane looks down into his wineglass and runs the tip of his finger along the rim. "You've been in love — that is, you are in love, you love Hayden?"

"I do." It's a simple answer, and without hesitation, and Shane marvels at it a little.

Shane nods and turns his wine glass between his fingers. "How did you know? That you loved him?"

She sighs and sets her wine glass on the coffee table. "Shane, we can play this game all night but it's not going to help you for me to list off what I see in Hayden."

"It isn't?"

"You don't want to know what I see in Hayden or how I knew he was the guy I wanted to spend my life with. You want to know whether the person you're crazy over is the one for you."

It's not that easy; can't be nearly that easy, even if she's right. "I — yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Then I have one question for you: What happens if you imagine never seeing them again? That person, specifically, not what they do for you. Hayden brings me breakfast in bed every Sunday he's home, maybe some other guy would do that, but do I want someone to do that who isn't Hayden? No. I don't want Hayden to ever not be in my life, it makes me sick to think about it."

It's a way of thinking about it, Shane supposes, only it's surprisingly difficult; he tries to imagine someone else's body on him, someone else's voice in his ear and someone else's smile. He imagines going to the effort of trying to learn another language for someone else, pictures someone else giving him stupid thoughtful sentimental half-horny birthday presents and a touch that isn't from Ilya's strong, calloused hands with their deft fingers and — it's useless. It's like his brain whites out, like his imagination's failed and there nothing to picture if Ilya's not there.

He blinks Jackie back into focus, and makes a soft, devastated, "Oh."

"Got your answer?" she asks, conspiratorial like she knows what it is already. He doesn't trust his voice, and nods. "You don't look thrilled about it."

"It's — complicated."

Jackie shrugs easily. "Does it have to be?"

"I don't know how it could be simple."

She reaches out and takes his free hand. "All you need to do now is find out if he loves you back."

Shane has already nodded before he hears the words, and his terror-drenched stillness is punctuated by Jackie holding on to his hand harder.

"It's ok, I won't tell."

"How did — how did you —"

"Just a guess, I swear."

"Really?"

"Shane, you are the only one of Hayden's friends," she lays her hand on his arm and leans forward to make sure he catches her emphasis, "the only one that I've never caught looking at my tits."

"Oh. Oh, well, I — ah —" Shane stops and tries not to pull a face. He feels like now he's supposed to look at Jackie's — to try to look down her top, to prove her wrong.

"I have good tits, Shane."

Shane winces and focuses somewhere a few inches to the left of Jackie's left ear. "Yep, yes, uh. Definitely."

"Would you want to sneak a look down my shirt, Shane?" she asks, and the fact that she's very matter of fact about it is the only thing that stops him dying from mortification.

Still, he's choked out a horrified, "No!" before he can think about it and Jackie raises her eyebrows, recovers her glass from the coffee table and and sips her wine in a very clear expression of victory.

"Tell me about your guy," she says instead, and Shane is insanely grateful for the pivot, "is he hot?"

Shane thinks about Ilya's chest, about the heavy muscled breadth of him, about pecs and delts and obliques and the definition of them, of how skin skates over muscle as he moves, the perfect shape of his ass and how his body moves as he fucks him, as —

"Still with me over there, honey?"

Shane's face feels warm. "Yeah, sorry."

But Jackie's right. He really doesn't want to look at her tits.

**

It hasn't helped, although it also has — he has a conspirator, now, in his own feelings, and although he gave Jackie absolutely nothing — as best as he can convince himself from turning the conversation over in his head again and again and then again, just in case — someone else out there knows that he's in love.

Oh, god, he's in love, and he can't even lie to himself and say it's shallow or ignorable or even new.

It's thrilling and it's awful and it's unbearable in both of those ways, but Shane can't stop himself thinking that the last time him and Ilya fucked, when all the pieces of who they are to each other had come together and made sense to him, finally, it had felt — and not just to Shane, he's sure — like they really were something; could be something. It hadn't felt like Shane was alone in the overwhelm of his heart, and he wonders if perhaps the sadness in Ilya's eyes when he'd left Shane sticky and astonished in his bed is proof that Ilya knows it, too.

The preseason has barely gotten started, and Shane's already got the schedule memorised. Montreal will play at home next week while the Raiders head to New York, but the week after Montreal goes to Boston.

Which gives Shane a fortnight to work out what he's going to say — and whether he's hoping more for Ilya's reciprocation or his dismissal, and a clean heartbreak.

**

Vaughn's shoulder to Ilya's breastbone is hardly anything — it's barely even contact and less than a minute after the first buzzer, and on the rebound of it Ilya doesn't hit the boards as much as rest against them; Vaughn's already turning away from him when Ilya feels his body mutiny, when he breathes in on a wheeze and can't find space to exhale.

This game had been a bad idea from the start; he'd been all but rasping in his breath like an asthmatic when he'd first taken position for the puck drop. He'd known better and carried on anyway, and now he knows that he gets to pay for it.

Ilya drops his stick and slams his hand against the boards and gasps — tries to, but his throat doesn't have much room in it. He's trying to cough it all up, the petals in his throat, but he can't breathe in enough to cough out. Sinking to his knees Ilya drops his gloves and scrambles for the strap of his helmet; it feels like it's cutting into him, like it's the thing responsible for cutting off his air even though he knows that his not being able to breathe has nothing to do with his gear — with anything outside.

His helmet clatters to the ice and he's retching; play has stopped around him and he can hear Vaughn's protests, his, "Hardly even fucking touched him, man," and the ref's skates in his periphery. Someone's asking what's wrong, if he's ok.

Ilya has to get off the ice.

He tries to rise and can't, tries to breathe and fails, tries to cough and his chest stutters and a spray of red comes out of him: blood with congealed little pieces that he recognises as petals although they look like the flesh of him in soggy red, but that's not all of it, there's more that's stuck.

He has to get off the ice.

He can't breathe.

Ilya stands, forces himself to his feet with the control of one muscle at a time. There are medics heading to him and, although the edges of his vision are starting to fuzz he recognises that there's a crowd around him, black and red jerseys both watching in horror, the refs urging them back as the medics close in on him. Ilya focuses on them, their blue uniforms, and takes two steps towards them, then four, unsteady on skates he should be able to navigate better than solid ground. The medics can get him off the ice, away from the cameras and out of view so that if this is it, if this is the one that does it —

Ilya would rather not die on live TV.

He falls as the medics reach him; they catch his arms on the way down and ease him onto his back; someone is calling for a stretcher. They're talking to him, he can hear questions, but he can't answer because he has no air and they see that, are trying to help him.

There's a thought that comes and flies away that there is a chance that Shane is watching this game live.

Kneeling on either side of him, the medic on his right tells the other, "There's something in his throat, I can see it," and then her fingers are reaching behind his teeth, plastic glove sensation on his tongue to the back of his mouth where the flower is and she takes hold of it as the other medic tips his head back; she pulls and it hurts, it's his lungs on fire and his throat torn out and she swears, a, "Jesus fucking Christ," that falls into stunned more than worried or horrified, but it's working, she's getting it out.

"Holy fuck," the other medic hisses, as Ilya feels it start to tear loose, "is that what I think it is?"

There's a little, "Uh-huh," from the one on the right, the one who has hold of the rose, and she tugs one last time and it comes free and Ilya gasps, heaves in air, feels his back arch off of the ice with the force of it and he coughs on the exhale, sputters up copper and turns himself onto his side to spit the mess of it out onto the ice so he doesn't choke. His chest heaves and his head starts to swim from the influx of breath instead of the lack of it.

The roar in the arena isn't the crowd, today, only the rush of blood in Ilya's head, of his breath returning to his lungs and when he turns his head he sees the shocked paramedic on his right side holding a full bloom, bloody and dripping, leaves and stem and shapes that, next time, will likely have grown into thorns.

One of the medics is failing to find soothing in her tone but has the vocabulary ready to go at least and tells him, "You're gonna be fine, steady in and out, we'll have you in the ambulance in no time." Ilya drops to his back and stares up at the lights of the rink.

That's the end of it, then. Of the secret, yes, but of his time, too. There's very little further to progress to from complete, fully formed roses; this is the last ice he's ever likely to set foot on.

Someone is pulling at him; they are shifting him onto the stretcher, and Ilya closes his eyes against the brightness of the arena's lights.

Chapter End Notes

See you next week for part the third and final :)

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