Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry/Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov/Original Male Character (minor)

Characters:

Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Hayden Pike, Hayden Pike's Children, Jackie Pike, Matt Berninger for some reason

Additional Tags:

alternative universe: authors, Inspired by Pride and Prejudice, this is about jane austen but it's also about e.e. cummings, take the hockey and replace it with words, competency kink in every universe, Ilya Rozanov is a Menace, Ilya Rozanov is a Mess, Angst with a Happy Ending, Shane Hollander: The Straightest Gay Man You'll Ever Meet (Not Really), Ilya Rozanov is a Little Shit, Ilya Rozanov is Obsessed With Shane Hollander, Spit Kink, Light Dom/sub, Internalized Homophobia, i'm trying to get better about tagging so if i'm missing important ones lmk, down pathetic Ilya Rozanov, Autistic Shane Hollander, Author Drags The Publishing Industry, Docking, emotionally significant anal, eating apples sensually, little spoon Ilya Rozanov, monogamy kink, Felching

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-05 Completed: 2026-04-18 Words: 47,370 Chapters: 16/16

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Summary

Hollander’s eyes slid past him, stopped, came back and held, his eyes widening. Ilya smiled, a mocking curve of his mouth, and raised his cup in acknowledgment. Number one, he mouthed, and while he couldn’t be certain in the dim light of the bar, he thought he saw Hollander flush.

Then his chin lifted, challenging, and Ilya felt something hook behind his ribs, a sharp tug, like a fish on a line.

 

Or: Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander make a deal - whichever of them debuts as a #1 NYT bestseller owes the other a blowjob

Notes

cover, beta reading, and chapter art by @Emmota_de_Hayd!!

Chapter 1: infinite jukethrob smoke & swallow to dis/gorge)

Chapter Notes

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.

Ilya had been told this was a party. It was not. It was strange and very American—the music was too loud for conversation, but it was nothing you could dance to. There were drinks but no drugs, not even pot though it was legal. The women took the idea of sexy librarian and stripped it of its pornographic intentions, and the men wore suits but no ties.

Actually there was one man in a tie, looking as if some god of good manners was tugging on it from above, keeping him upright. He looked even more out of place than Ilya felt, though he was surrounded by librarians of all genders, and every one of them looked as though they would happily bring sexy back if he would only look them in the eye.

Svetlana nudged him, drawing his attention. She did not look like a librarian. She looked like she always did, the sexiest and smartest person in the room. She was terrifying, or would have been if he hadn’t known her all his life, hadn’t seen her cry over her first penetrative orgasm (which Ilya gave her) and her first heartbreak (which Ilya did not give her). They had come to New York from Moscow together, and in the five years since she had catapulted to whatever a literary agent’s version of stardom was (a critics’ darling and two instant bestsellers would do that).

Ilya, meanwhile, had written a book.

“Ilya,” Svetlana said, exasperated, and nudged him again. Ilya refocused on the man in front of him—tieless, in his fifties with a tweed jacket and apparently unironic elbow patches—whose smile was a little condescending, a little worshipful.

“I know this isn’t really your scene,” he said. “But it’s a good opportunity—everyone comes to BookExpo parties, and once the buzz really gets going…” Ilya tuned him out again.

Elbow-patches was Ilya’s editor, although Ilya was nearly positive he had barely read Clubfist, and even if he had couldn’t possibly have been able to relate to any of it. It hardly mattered; he’d championed it anyway, and given Ilya an advance that Svetlana had assured him was more than respectable—enough to make it clear that the publisher was behind him, not so much that if it didn’t earn out Ilya would be shunned forevermore.

(The majority of it had gone to Alexei to care for their father. Now that he was dead, Ilya had no intention of returning to Russia ever again. Whatever he earned from now on would remain his and his alone).

Ilya shifted his shoulders, cracked his neck. The mesh of his shirt caught the overhead track lighting when he moved, drawing glances from nearby conversations, which was the point. “Is there anyone in particular I should be talking to?” His eyes were on the man with tie, who had a hand hovering over a caterer’s tray, his full mouth pouting slightly as if he didn’t like any of the options. He picked up a cracker topped with something pale and gelatinous, his long fingers blunt-nailed and careful.

“That’s Shane Hollander,” Svetlana said, following his gaze, and Ilya felt the first spark of interest he’d had since walking through the door.

He knew the name, of course. Shane Hollander had published his first novel at nineteen, and it had apparently been so steadfastly exquisite that it made every book critic on the face of the planet cream their panties, and he’d hit the bestseller list after Pedro Pascal posted on Instagram, “The Loon’s Quiet Call is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Every sentence is a treasure.”

Hollander’s second book had won a PEN/Faulkner.

“He looks like an accountant,” Ilya said.

“You should go talk to him, definitely,” Elbow-patches said eagerly. “If you can get in there.”

Ilya let his teeth show in a smile. “It won’t be a problem.”

He took his time, grabbed a drink and swished it around in his mouth before swallowing. He let himself be admired, stared at, whispered about, until the waves of interest he caused began to lap at Hollander’s shore and his many librarians stepped aside, parting like Moses’ sea.

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya said, tasting every syllable.

Hollander glanced at him, startled into making eye contact. His pupils were large, circled by thin irises only slightly less dark.

“Ilya Rozanov.” He sounded wary, but his gaze flickered over Ilya, not in an inviting or even assessing up-down-up, but all over his body, from the mole on his cheek down to his nipples beneath his fine mesh shirt, over to the curve of his shoulder, back down to his nipples, his crotch, before stopping on his mouth.

He was gay, Ilya knew, from reading his profile in New York Magazine last year—but he would have known anyway, from the way Hollander’s lips went wet and his cheeks went pink.

Ilya shifted his weight, leaning forward just enough to watch Hollander’s nostrils flare. Belatedly he offered his hand for a shake, and Ilya took it, amused.

Hollander’s grip was firm and dry, not quite perfunctory. “I read your excerpt in The Paris Review.”  Ilya smirked, knowing everyone in the room knew just what his mouth was capable of, and Hollander coughed. He had a scattering of freckles overlaid on his blushing cheeks, and Ilya had the odd impulse to smooth his thumb across them, to watch them shift beneath his touch. “It was, uh, really something.”

“Yes, it really was fifty people,” Ilya said, and allowed himself to pat Hollander on the side of his shoulder, reassuring. He was surprisingly solid beneath the suit, the muscles firm. “But not all of them to completion.”

Hollander inhaled through his nose, his pupils dilating even more. “Right, well. Still an achievement. I guess.”

He sounded prudish, like everyone else at this stupid party. Probably he had a boyfriend who never sucked his cock, because Hollander would rather he used his mouth to tell him what an incredible writer he was, the next Great American Novelist.

“So,” Ilya said. “Your next book, it comes out…?”

“Tuesday,” Hollander said stiffly.

“Is that right?” Ilya said, pretending surprise. “Mine too. That is a, what is the word…”

“Coincidence.”

“Good strategy, I was going to say. Everyone will compare my book to yours, and yours to mine. Of course I am new and very loud and my book has a lot of fucking in it. Probably no one will want to talk about that.”

Hollander’s jaw tightened, and he turned his body slightly, angling it away from Ilya and scanning the crowd to see if there were any librarians who wanted his attention—but they weren’t about to interrupt a conversation between the two hottest (in every way) authors of the year.

“I read Midlandia,” Ilya said, nearly casually.

Hollander turned back, though he didn’t meet Ilya’s eyes. “What did you think?”

He’d thought it was beautiful. He’d thought it was at least as depressing as Clubfist, probably more so, because at least Ilya knew how to make people laugh. It had made him want to memorize certain lines and keep them forever, and it had made him want to hurl the book across the room. He’d read the last chapter standing up in his kitchen at four in the morning, shirtless, a cigarette burning to nothing between his fingers, and when he finished he sat on the floor and pressed his palms to his eyes and thought, Fuck you, Shane Hollander.

He shrugged, the movement making the mesh slide across his nipples. “It was okay.”

Hollander’s eyes widened as his brows came down. “Okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Not bad. I liked it when Vernon and Clive killed each other. It was romantic, like Romeo and Juliet.”

“It wasn’t at all romantic!” Hollander said, outraged, loud enough that a few of the nearest librarians turned their heads, startled and delighted. “Clive and Vernon weren’t in love with each other, they never were. They were only in love with the idea of it.”

“Ah, well, maybe it didn’t translate.” Ilya grinned at him, took another sip of his drink. Hollander scowled back. “Go on then,” he prompted. “What did you think of the excerpt?”

Hollander hesitated, and Ilya realized he genuinely wanted to know what he thought—if he hated it, if it turned him on, if it provoked him or made him laugh or made him want to hurl things. But all Hollander said was, “It’s definitely going to get a lot of attention.”

“I always do,” Ilya said, ignoring his disappointment. Of course Hollander wasn’t going to give him a real answer. A caterer walked by holding clear plastic cups filled a third of the way with lukewarm chardonnay. She plucked one from her tray and handed it Ilya, her fingers dragging over his, her eyes sparklingly suggestive.

“What time do you want to get off?” he asked her, mostly to get a reaction out of Hollander.

He didn’t disappoint, making sound of disgust low in his throat and turning away. Ilya’s hand shot out, held him in place. Hollander froze, his breath catching, and something about that little gasp made Ilya’s heart skip a beat, a sensation he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.

“I can leave at midnight,” the caterer said, and bit her lip. It took Ilya a moment to understand why she was telling him this.

“Okay,” he said, a beat too late and off-balance. “I will come find you.” They both knew he wouldn’t, but she shrugged it off easily enough, bearing her bad California wine to greener pastures.

He took a sip, made a face, and set the cup down on a nearby table. He was still holding Hollander’s arm. “How about we make it interesting.”

“Make what interesting.”

“Whoever debuts at number one”—Ilya dropped his voice, leaned in close enough that his breath would warm Hollander’s skin—“gets his cock sucked, as a reward.”

Hollander jerked away, and Ilya let him go. “You can’t be serious.”

Ilya spread his hands, his smile wide and cheerful. “I am always serious about blowjobs. Ask anyone. Ask your friend, Pedro Pascal.”

“That’s—” Hollander’s flush had returned, spreading beneath his freckles and down his neck, beneath his tie. Ilya wanted to chase it with his tongue. “That’s disgusting. No. Absolutely not.”

“Afraid you’ll lose, Hollander?”

“No! Because I’m not—I don’t—” He swallowed hard, visibly regrouping. “I’m not going to suck your dick. I know where it’s been.”

Ilya laughed despite himself, a real laugh, sudden and warm, and Hollander blinked at him, his scowl faltering, his mouth falling open, but then he turned away, for real this time, and soon enough the librarians had encircled him once more.

Another night meant another party, equally terrible though there was almost no overlap in attendees. Ilya was at both, that was all.

Marleau grabbed his shoulders in a hug, shaking him. “Roz! You came!”

“Yes,” Ilya said, trying not to let his teeth rattle against each other. “Tell me you have something besides chardonnay.”

Marleau led him through a thicket of bodies to—dear god—a keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon sweating in a plastic tub of half-melted ice, and poured him a glass that was mostly foam. “Cheers, man.”

“Cheers to you,” Ilya said, and swallowed an obliging mouthful of foam. “What is it, three months on the list for this one? Incredible.”

Cliff Marleau had been the first real friend Ilya had made when he came to New York. Technically he’d been living on Svetlana’s couch, but he’d hardly ever slept there, waking up in some bedroom or another—and one night, that bedroom was Marley’s.

He lay bleary-eyed, nestled between someone very tall and very hairy, and someone else very petite, her long blonde hair draped across his face. The tall, hairy one farted horrendously, waking the blonde. She sat up, looked back and forth between the two of them, and said, “Did you really kiss during the Eiffel Tower, or did you just say you did?”

Ilya honestly couldn’t remember, and the tall guy said, puzzled, “Yeah? Why wouldn’t we?”

The girl got up in a huff and stalked out, snatching her dress off the floor and muttering darkly about being used as a prop for gay guys, leaving Ilya and Big Hairy lying naked in bed together. It was a really nice apartment, with those big windows you always saw in movies about New York but never encountered in real life. “Want me to blow you?” Ilya offered.

Big Hairy had stretched, scratched his balls. “Nah. I like girls. Thanks, though. Want some eggs?”

Ilya hadn’t exactly moved in after that. He still kept most of his stuff at Svetlana’s, and slept on her couch (or in her bed, depending) whenever they hung out. But he found himself in Marley’s guest room more often than he was anywhere else, because even he couldn’t go out every night. They played MarioKart and watched dumb action movies and one night Marleau lifted his head from his bong and said, “This is mine.”

“Your what?” Ilya asked.

It had never once occurred to him to wonder what Marleau did for a living, so the revelation that he was a bestselling author of a series of books about a man trapped in a fantasy RPG—fighting monsters, leveling up, building alliances with hellbeasts—took Ilya aback. “You write books?”

“Nine of them,” Marleau had said proudly.

It had been Marley who had told Ilya he ought to write some of his shit down, who had been his first reader (Svetlana was second only because Ilya was a little terrified of what she might think), who had championed him hard even though Ilya’s work was nothing like his.

Now Marleau was on book twelve, and Del Rey, his publisher, was throwing him a party in a faux-seedy Midtown bar with a photo booth, and everyone was drinking PBR out of Solo cups and pretending they wouldn’t prefer an IPA. There was a cake on the bar shaped like a dragon, though, and that was pretty cool.

The crowd was full of genre writers who sold in airports and got optioned for streaming series, men and women who cranked out a book every nine months like clockwork. Ilya recognized a few of them from various outings with Marley over the years. There was a woman in a leather jacket he was pretty sure Marley was in love with—or maybe he was just in love with her vampire-slaying/fucking/slaying-while-fucking heroine. She was chatting to a grey-haired crewcut Ilya was pretty sure wrote military thrillers set in space.

“Oh fuck yeah!” Marleau burst out, and Ilya went up on his tiptoes to try to see what he was looking at.

A human-shaped golden retriever stepped into Marleau’s arms, hugging him tightly. “How are you, buddy?” He leaned back, noticed Ilya. “Rozanov.”

Hayden Pike didn’t much care for Ilya, because one time he’d hit on his wife at Marleau’s birthday party. It had been a joke, mostly, but Pike hadn’t thought so, and ever since had growled at Ilya with all the menace of a dog behind a fence.

He wrote legal thrillers with one-word titles like Verdict and Chambers and Recess. Ilya had taken one from Marleau’s bookshelf one night when he couldn’t sleep and thought it would have been better to have just stared at the ceiling.

“Pike,” he said now. “Congratulations on Flaccid.”

“It’s Flagrante,” Pike said tightly. “And same to you, for your sex book or whatever.”

“Along with drugs and rock’n’roll,” Ilya said, not really paying attention. He felt a prickle at the back of his neck, like maybe someone had opened a window in the crowded, stuffy room. He took another gulp of his beer and spun around, scanning past a mixture of men who didn’t know how to dress themselves and the ubiquitous librarians, searching for…

And there he was. Shane Hollander, not in a suit and tie this time, but somehow equally ill-at-ease in black jeans and a plain white t-shirt. Ilya watched as Hollander took a sip from his Solo cup, made a face, and wiped foam from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

He wasn’t surrounded by admirers here, though several of the librarians definitely knew who he was. He stood with his back against the brick wall, shoulders hunched, like he was trying to make himself smaller, winding everything inside him into a tight little ball. His gaze moved around the room, restless, avoiding eye contact with everyone, and Ilya shifted slightly, stepping out from behind Pike to draw his attention.

It worked; Hollander’s eyes slid past him, stopped, came back and held, his eyes widening. Ilya smiled, a mocking curve of his mouth, and raised his cup in acknowledgment. Number one, he mouthed, and while he couldn’t be certain in the dim light of the bar, he thought he saw Hollander flush.

Then his chin lifted, challenging, and Ilya felt something hook behind his ribs, a sharp tug, like a fish on a line.

CLUBFIST BY ILYA ROZANOV DEBUTS AT #1 ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST

Raw, fearless autofiction about queerness, exile, and the body as battleground — from a voice unlike anything in contemporary literature

New York, NY — Farrar, Straus and Giroux is thrilled to announce that CLUBFIST, by Russian-born, Brooklyn-based writer Ilya Rozanov, (Svetlana Vetrova of Prose & Co Literary) debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list.

CLUBFIST is the story of Alyosha, a young queer man who leaves home at fourteen, and the decade of reckless, hungry brutality that follow in Moscow bathhouses all the way to the Bushwick club scene. Drawing on Rozanov’s own life with unflinching candor, CLUBFIST is at once a coming-of-age story, a sexual education, and a furious manifesto—or warning label—for living with nothing to lose.

"Ilya Rozanov writes like a man setting fire to his own house and daring you to look away," said his editor, Maxwell Herrick-Levinson. "We haven't seen a debut this fearless, this funny, this filthy, and this emotionally devastating since — honestly, I'm not sure we've seen one like this at all."

An excerpt published earlier this year in The Paris Review drew widespread attention for its graphic depictions of sex (in the scene, Alyosha performs oral sex on fifty people in a single evening) and its provocative interweaving of the erotic and the political. Foreign rights have sold in fourteen territories. Film rights have been optioned by A24.

Rozanov, 24, was born in Moscow and emigrated to the United States at nineteen. He holds no MFA and has cited his influences as "Limonov, Genet, and everyone I’ve ever fucked.” He lives in Brooklyn.

CLUBFIST published simultaneously in hardcover, ebook, and audio, with Mads Mikkelson narrating.

Critical Praise:

"A Molotov cocktail of a novel. Rozanov writes sex the way other writers wish they could write war — with total commitment and zero sentimentality." — Rolling Stone

"Obscene, ecstatic, and brutally funny. You will not be the same person on the last page that you were on the first." — The Guardian

“A blistering, unexpectedly poignant debut. Rozanov’s prose is utterly distinctive: by turns caustic, lyrical, juvenile, and shatteringly precise. An extraordinary arrival.” —Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review

“That Clubfist is also one of the funniest novels of the year is almost offensive. Rozanov has no right to be this entertaining while doing this much damage.” —The New York Times Book Review

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.

SHANE HOLLANDER'S LACUNA VARIATIONS DEBUTS AT #2 ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST

A novel in six interlocking parts — the most structurally ambitious work of fiction this year, from the award-winning author of MIDLANDIA

New York, NY — Alfred A. Knopf is proud to announce that LACUNA VARIATIONS, the third novel by Shane Hollander (Rose Landry of Underdark Literistic), has debuted at #2 on The New York Times bestseller list, marking Hollander's second consecutive week-one appearance on the list.

LACUNA VARIATIONS unfolds across six narratives spanning three centuries — from a cartographer's apprentice in 1780s Vienna to a codebreaker in Bletchley Park to a grief-stricken AI-coder in near-future Reykjavik — each story nesting inside the next like a series of locked rooms, each one containing the key to the last. A novel about the patterns we impose on chaos and the chaos that persists despite them, LACUNA VARIATIONS has been hailed as Hollander's most ambitious and technically dazzling work to date.

"Shane Hollander is the finest structural engineer working in fiction today," said his longtime editor, Catherine Ives. "With Lacuna Variations, he has built something that shouldn't be possible — a novel of extraordinary intellectual complexity that is also, somehow, deeply moving. Every piece locks into place with the precision of a watch mechanism, and yet the final effect is not mechanical at all. It is devastating."

Hollander, 24, is the author of two previous novels: The Loon’s Quiet Call, which catapulted Hollander to international and critical success, and Midlandia (a #1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the PEN/Faulkner award). He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

LACUNA VARIATIONS published simultaneously in hardcover, ebook, and audio, with the author narrating.

Critical Praise:

"Hollander has written the novel the rest of us have been trying to write for twenty years…a masterpiece.” — The New York Times Book Review

"The most exquisitely constructed novel since Cloud Atlas, and in some ways its superior — because where Mitchell dazzled, Hollander slices clean. The final fifty pages rearrange everything that came before, and I mean everything. I finished it and immediately started over." — The Atlantic

"The rare novel that is at once a series of puzzles, a meditation on impermanence, and a genuine page-turner. Hollander makes the architecture invisible — you don't see the gears, you just feel the clock ticking." — Vulture

"Astonishing. The moment you understand the structure — really understand it — the entire novel changes meaning. A tour de force.” — Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“No one writes like Shane Hollander.”— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Alfred A. Knopf is an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Chapter End Notes

The Clubfist excerpt references the exploits of irl chaotic bisexual Grant O’Brien. I feel like this would make him very happy.

The plot of Midlandia is basically Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, but make it gay

Cliff Marleau’s casual bi-curiosity is very precious to me okay.

Also yes, in fact that is Dungeon Master Carl Marleau is writing

Chapter 2: if freckles were lovely and day was night

Chapter Notes

Any savage can dance.

To: shane.hollander@shanehollander.com

From: ilyarozanov81@gmail.com

Subject: #1

Attached please find the results of a full STI panel. All negative. House of Yes, The Onyx Room, 11pm.

Svetlana had given him the shirt that morning, as a reward for going #1. “Jean Paul Gautier,” she’d said, “so find someone who’ll take it off you gently, okay? It was expensive.”

Ilya wondered if Hollander would be gentle. He wondered if he’d show up at all. There was no real reason to think he would, he wasn’t a little boy who couldn’t resist a dare.

He leaned against the bar, shouted his order at the bartender—vodka soda, because the vodka was terrible—and spun around to watch a woman in a harness and not much else doing aerial silk work above the dance floor. The DJ wasn’t bad tonight, mixing Reggaeton with Afro House, making it work, and the crowd was enthusiastic. The room throbbed red, blue, red, and the air was thick with sweat and fog machine fluid.

He checked his phone, his email. Nothing.

Someone with a monroe piercing and biceps almost as big as Ilya’s slid into the space beside him. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“I have one,” Ilya said, not looking at them.

“Can I buy you the next one?”

“I don’t think there’ll be a next one.”

This happened three more times before his drink was gone: someone with a shaved head and a Boston accent, then a very beautiful probably-boy who couldn’t have been more than nineteen and who Ilya would, on any other night, have eaten alive. A man who simply put his hand on Ilya’s ass without preamble, only to look offended when Ilya bent his fingers back.

When he finished, he checked his phone again. 11:31. Hollander wasn’t coming.

He thumbed a text to Marley.

-hey my plans fell thru. u still want to go out?

-fuck yeah man!!! we gotta celebrate!!! where are u???

Ilya carefully didn’t sigh. He was a little disappointed, sure, but that was just because he’d turned down four—well, three—fairly decent offers when by rights he should have been knee deep in the best night of his life by now.

He sniffed, cracked his neck, and started to reply to Marley when he heard, “I’m sorry I’m late,” looked up, and Shane Hollander was there.

He was wearing the exact same thing he’d worn to the Del Rey party: a white t-shirt, black jeans, a mildly terrified expression. The strobe caught the cotton of his shirt in flashes like tie-dye. Probably no one else in the club was dressed like he was, and Ilya shook his head, smiling despite himself.

“I thought you might chicken out.”

Hollander’s chin lifted, jutted out. “No.”

“You want a drink?”

“No.”

Good; Ilya didn’t want one, either. He wanted to feel the soft cotton of Hollander’s boring t-shirt, feel how muscular he was beneath it. He could see the shape of his shoulders under the fabric, the way it pulled slightly across his chest when he breathed.

Hollander shifted his weight, shoved his hands in his pockets. “It was expensive to get in here.”

Ilya scoffed. “So? How big was your last advance?”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“Bestseller bonuses, award bonuses…you can afford a thirty-dollar cover charge.”

Hollander shrugged, didn’t argue. “So do you live nearby? Or did you get a hotel room or something?”

Ilya laughed, throwing his head back a little to show off his chest, his neck. “Someone is eager.”

Hollander scowled at him, his face red-then-blue in the strobe. “To get it over with, maybe.”

“Mmm,” Ilya said, and then the DJ dropped something filthy and Brazilian and the crowd surged and Ilya thought, Not yet.

He grabbed Hollander’s wrist and pulled him toward the floor. “Come.”

“What—no. No, I can’t…Rozanov, I don’t dance.”

Ilya ignored him, and though Hollander could easily have pulled away, he didn’t, stumbling a little as Ilya tugged him past a knot of shirtless men slick with sweat who looked them both over with open interest, to a pocket of space near the middle. The bass was so loud Ilya could feel it in his teeth.

Hollander’s hands were at his sides, his face stricken. Ilya slid a hand around his waist, stepped in so that their hips were nearly touching. He smelled like Arm & Hammer detergent, cleaner than anything else in the room.

“It’s simple,” he said, mouth close to Hollander’s ear. “Just move.”

Hollander shut his eyes, and…

God. It was catastrophic. He had no rhythm at all, nothing, and even when Ilya tried to guide him, hands on his hips, he just kind of nodded, a white guy at a rock show. The thumping beat shook through them both and Hollander moved like it wasn’t even there.

It was, against all odds, a little adorable. Ilya wanted to bite him, but he slid his hands down to his ass instead.

Hollander’s eyes flew open. “Hey.”

Ilya grinned at him. “This is too much for you?”

“We’re in public.”

Ilya let go with one hand, gestured around them, where people were making out, grinding, doing everything except actively penetrating one another. Hollander reached back and firmly moved Ilya’s hands back to his waist.

Ilya shrugged and slid them up his back instead, under his shirt, feeling the smooth valley of his spine, the skin hot, slightly damp—then back down, pressing his thumbs into the hollows above his hipbones, using them to guide him, swinging his hips back and forth.

Hollander genuinely tried, bless him. He found something adjacent to the beat and committed to it, stiff-shouldered, brows furrowing in concentration. It was still painful to watch, and so Ilya was almost startled to realize how fucking hard he was, just from watching him.

There was no earthly reason for it, nothing about Hollander was remotely sexy, except that he could construct a sentence like a Swiss watch but he was completely hopeless at this one simple human thing, and he was doing it anyway because Ilya had taken him by the wrist and said Come.

He stepped in close enough that his erection pressed into Hollander’s hip, felt his breath catch. His hands came up from his sides at last and landed on Ilya’s chest. “Rozanov—”

“Shh.” Ilya rolled his hips into him, slow and deliberate, and Hollander shuddered. He stopped dancing—or whatever it was he’d been doing—and stood there, his fingers curling into the silk of Ilya’s shirt, not at all gently.

He shifted his thigh between Hollander’s legs, felt the rigid line of him through his jeans, and Hollander thrust forward involuntarily, grinding his cock into Ilya’s hip, his head tipping back, his mouth parting. The strobe caught the wet of his lower lip, the tendons in his throat, and Ilya thought, I am going to ruin him.

“Come,” Ilya said again, and pulled him off the dance floor.

He paused after he locked the restroom door behind them, the sudden drop in volume almost disorienting. He could hear Hollander breathing, quick and ragged, and even in the dim overhead light his eyes were glazed, almost unfocused. “This is okay?”

Hollander blinked, coming back to himself, and he glanced around in distaste. It was clean enough, as restrooms went—white tile, graffiti scratched into the mirror, a condom- and tampon-machine bolted to the wall, a yellow splash of piss on the toilet seat. “This is what you do?” he said, his lip curling, dismissive and judgmental.

Ilya’s stomach clenched around a hot burst of anger, unexpected because he was used to that sort of moralizing condemnation, played on it—hell, he profited from it. And he ought to have known better than to be surprised by it from Hollander.

“Yes. It’s what a lot of people do, you know, when they don’t hate themselves for being queer.” It was a shot in the dark—he didn’t know Hollander at all, not really—but Ilya saw it hit.

Hollander’s eyes flashed, all his dizzying softness gone. “I don’t. I’m perfectly comfortable with my sexuality.’

“Sure you are,” Ilya taunted. “How many girlfriends did you go through before you admitted you were gay? How many of them loved you? Shane Hollander, so perfect.”

“I’m here to suck your fucking cock, aren’t I?” Hollander snapped, and shoved him up against the wall. It was cool and tacky through the silk of his shirt, and Ilya’s heart leapt to his throat.

“Are you?” he snarled back. “Then get on your knees, there’s a good boy.”

For a moment, he thought Hollander might punch him—but instead, with a furious sound, he did go to his knees, shoving Ilya’s shirt out of the way, yanking open his jeans. He stopped once Ilya’s dick was out, held it in a hand that shook slightly.

“It’s big, no?” Ilya said, smirking.

“Fuck you,” Hollander said, and took him into his mouth.

If asked, he’d have guessed that Hollander would be fast, perfunctory, with just enough spit to get the job done. Good technique, steady breathing, judicious use of teeth—a Starred Review sort of blowjob, a blowjob you could bring home to your suburban parents.

This was nothing like that.

Shane Hollander sucked cock like it was all he’d ever wanted, his cheeks hollowing as he dragged up once, twice, then all the way down until he choked, fuck, and came up gasping, his chin wet, a string of spit connecting his lip to the head of Ilya’s cock before it broke. He’d barely caught his breath before he dove back down, his eyes half-closed, his free hand gripping Ilya’s thigh hard enough to bruise, moaning hot around him.

Ilya’s hands came around his head, fingers sliding through his soft hair—“Solnyshko,” he whispered—and Hollander blinked up at him, eyes dark and wet. His freckles were stark against his red cheeks, and Ilya stroked them with his thumb before sliding it down to Hollander’s mouth, hooking into the corner, pulling it to the side. “Open your mouth.”

Hollander obeyed immediately, his jaw going slack, his tongue flat and waiting as Ilya leaned over him, let a thin stream of saliva fall onto his tongue. Hollander whimpered, and Ilya thought he might pass out. “Go ahead,” he said gently, and Hollander took his cock back into his mouth, desperate and hungry.

Ilya was fucking astounded. He didn’t think he’d ever received head like this in his life—not because it was the best, or even the messiest, but because, for all the sex he had, he’d never seen anyone want like that.

It didn’t last long. Ilya bent nearly in half as he came, shuddering, his vision going black, his hands still in Hollander’s hair. When he could breathe, he pulled Hollander back, stared down into his blown-out eyes, his tear-streaked cheeks, his swollen mouth. There was a drop of come at the corner of his lips.

Ilya wanted to kiss him. He wanted to have kissed him before starting any of this, after that first party maybe.

He pulled him to his feet, curved a hand around his neck, and reached with the other to return the favor, already thinking of what he wanted to do next—he could bring Hollander back to his apartment, suck him off slowly, god, maybe he’d let Ilya fuck him—

He slid his hand into his pants, and Hollander shoved him away.

“Get off me.”

It took Ilya a second, and even then all he managed was a bewildered, “What?”

Hollander turned to the sink, splashing water on his face and scrubbing furiously, the tap squealing. He grabbed a handful of paper towels, and began dabbing at his crotch, and—oh.

“You came in your fucking pants?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Ilya laughed, because he’d just had one of the best orgasms of his entire life and Shane Hollander was a goddamn delight. “You did! Just from sucking me off? When is the last time you got laid, you’re that desperate for it—”

And then Hollander was shoving him again, his face and eyes red, and Ilya realized, too late, that he was humiliated. “No, it’s okay—Hollander, wait—”

But he’d thrown the restroom door open, the bass flooding back in like a wave, and there was a line of impatient people leaning against the vibrating wall, probably none of whom were looking at the wet spot at his crotch, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Hollander stormed away, shouldering through the crowd without a glance back at where Ilya still stood by the sink, his spent cock hanging out.

Chapter End Notes

Does The House of Yes have single-room bathrooms? I have no idea! My clubbing days are long behind me and I didn’t have a good time anyway

Chapter 3: And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again

Chapter Notes

Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

To: shane.hollander@shanehollander.com

From: ilyarozanov81@gmail.com

Subject: returning the favor

You came in second, it’s only fair that you get to come second. Could even be in a bed this time.

Ilya didn’t see Shane Hollander again.

There was no reason to think he would; they moved in very different circles, after all. He’d sent an email, had never heard back—which was fine. So Hollander sucked dick like he was born for it, so what. Ilya could get laid anytime he wanted, had fucked people with mouths just as pink and shoulders just as broad.

He just wished he’d handled it differently, was all.

It turned out that having a New York Times #1 Bestseller didn’t actually change your life. Three months later, Ilya still had bills to pay, and Bushwick rent was fucking ridiculous. (Rats in your ceiling at $3,000/month, Christ.) Svetlana and Elbow-patches were both after him for his next book, and so Ilya dutifully sat at his laptop with his cigarette and his Celsius and his vodka and tried to find synonyms for whoreson he hadn’t used yet. After three unproductive hours spent diving into the etymology of slag ([i] impurities formed and separated out when a metal is smelted from ore [ii] scoria associated with a volcano [iii] a contemptible person, a scumbag) he texted Marleau.

-what are u doing and is it something better than what im doing

Marleau called instead of texting back, which was unusual enough that Ilya actually picked up.

“What.”

“You texted me!” But Marley didn’t sound offended; he never did. “Hayden invited me down the shore for the weekend, he’s got a place in Lavalette. I’m gonna rent a Corvette, for the rhyme.”

Ilya frowned, lighting a cigarette with the stub of the previous one. “You can drive?”

“I am from Boston,” Marley said haughtily.

“I know,” Ilya said pointedly.

Pike wasn’t happy about Ilya inviting himself along; in fact he was decidedly unhappy, and shouted “Stay the fuck away from my wife, Rozanov!” over Marley’s car stereo, his voice tinny and distorted through the Bluetooth.

“Your wife is very beautiful,” Ilya said mildly. He had his bare feet up on the dash of Marleau’s rented Corvette—yellow, obviously—and was watching the guardrails of the Parkway blur past.

“Yes, I know, which is why I want you to—”

“Roz isn’t interested in Jackie, Hayden,” Marley said. “You have nothing to worry about.”

There was a pause, and then Hayden said, “Why isn’t he, though? She’s fucking hot.”

“Yes,” Ilya said, “and she should leave you for someone who—”

“Because,” Marleau interrupted, “he’s just coming down to work. That’s all. He’s helping me plot out Book 14—I’m having some trouble with the centaurs, like how am I going to justify fucken stables on Level 33, who is mucking that shit out…”

Ilya sat back, pressed his skull against the headrest and let the rumble of the engine calm his suddenly, inexplicably frayed nerves. He was coming down to work, hoping that a little sea air, a little Jersey Shore life would break him out of his funk, get him writing fierce and hectic again.

Hayden’s place was exactly as terrible as Ilya had expected it to be: enormous, aggressively new, all vinyl siding and oversized windows that captured the late afternoon sun like a greenhouse. There was a pool that probably nobody used because the ocean was right there, and an outdoor kitchen with a pizza oven the size of one of those little Fiats. Worst of all, there was a sign over the front door reading PIKE’S PLACE, which Ilya found so depressing he almost got back in the car.

“Ilya,” Jackie Pike said cheerfully, presenting her cheek for a kiss. “So good to see you again. Glad you could join us.”

The thing was, Ilya genuinely liked Hayden Pike’s wife, and had felt like a bit of a shit for flirting with her just to piss off her husband. So he was grateful for the warm welcome, and even more grateful when a pair of thigh-high, indistinguishable gremlins crashed into him.

“Hi!” one of them said.

“Hi,” Ilya said, bemused. “Who are you?”

“I’m Emma.”

“No you’re not, I’m Emma, you’re Ruby!”

Ilya looked back and forth between them, marveling. “How can anyone ever tell?”

“The one who puts salt in the sugar bowl is Ruby,” Jackie said drily. “Anyway, come on in, and watch out for spiders in your bed. Marley, you’re in the room upstairs, and Ilya, since we weren’t expecting you, you’ve got the basement, I’m afraid.”

“No problem.” He heaved his duffle bag over his shoulder, and then, after a moment’s consideration, knelt down to look Maybe Ruby-Maybe Emma in the eye. “I have many skills,” he said solemnly. “And one of the things I can do is tell twins apart. It is a gift. Give me one day.”

“You can’t,” said the other one. “Nobody can, except Mommy. Not even Daddy.”

“Your daddy,” Ilya said, “is a man of limited talents. I, on the other hand—”

“Rozanov, get away from my children before you infect them.” Hayden appeared in the doorway, a backwards cap doing absolutely nothing to hide the sunburn spreading across his forehead.

Ilya got to his feet, eyebrow raised. “I’m making friends.”

“You don’t have friends, except Marley here, and I don’t what the f-…I mean, what the heck he sees in you.” But Hayden was already stepping aside to let him in, because, well, much as Ilya hated to admit it, he was just that kind of guy. If you turned up at his doorstep, he wasn’t going to tell you to leave, however deservedly bedraggled your reputation was.

The basement was more than fine; it had its own bathroom and a sliding glass door that opened onto the beach. It smelled like laundry detergent and mildew in a way that Ilya found perversely comforting. He dropped his bag on the pull-out couch and stood there for a moment, listening to the ocean through the glass, before he went upstairs to try and be sociable.

The kitchen was open plan and enormous, all marble countertops and pendant lighting. Jackie was assembling an elaborate-looking cheeseboard while Marleau talked loudly—and, in all likelihood, incorrectly—about varying approaches to narrative structure. Hayden was on the deck with the twins, pointing at something out in the water, his voice carrying through the open sliding door. It was all quite…nice, and Ilya was reaching for the rosé when he heard a door open somewhere down the hall and footsteps on the hardwood.

“Hey, Jackie? I think Arthur might be hungry after his nap…”

Ilya turned, and Shane Hollander came around the corner in a faded Columbia University t-shirt, a baby in his arms.

He stopped in his tracks. “What the fuck are you doing here.”

“Holy shit!” Hayden called from the porch. “Swear jar for you, motherfucker!”

Shane ignored this. “I didn’t realize you were coming.”

“Neither did anyone else,” Jackie murmured, not looking up from the cheese board.

“Last-minute thing,” Ilya said thickly. His mouth had gone dry. Shane was wearing green swim shorts, short green swim shorts, that stretched across his unexpectedly massive thighs. “Marleau needed help with his centaurs.”

“His centaurs,” Shane said flatly.

After a beat, Marley said, “Yeah, uh. Book 14. I’ve got a stabling problem.”

“Okay,” Shane said. The baby in his arms made snuffling sound of complaint, and he shifted his hold, rubbing the diapered bottom. “I didn’t know that kind of thing required an in-person consultation.”

“Centaurs are very complex,” Ilya said. “They, uh, they shit a lot. That’s the whole problem.”

“Swear jar!” Hayden called.

“What is this swear jar?” Ilya said irritably.

“It’s a dollar every time you say a bad word,” said one of the twins. She had somehow detached herself from her father without Ilya noticing, appearing at his elbow like a very small ghost. “Daddy owes forty-seven dollars.”

“Forty-eight,” said the other twin, from his other elbow.

Shane still hadn’t moved. He was still holding the baby—whose baby? Ilya’s brain was short-circuiting, his chest hot and tight.

“Whose baby is that?” he demanded, accusatory.

“Mine,” Shane said coolly.

Ilya stared at him.

“He’s kidding,” Jackie said. “That’s Arthur. He’s ours. Shane’s just…he’s good with him.”

That may or may not have been true; Arthur let out a demanding squawk, and Jackie sighed, pushing the cheese board over to a hungry-looking Marleau. “That’s my cue.” She took Arthur from Shane, already reaching behind her head to undo her halter top before disappearing into one of the bedrooms.

Shane stayed just outside the kitchen, his expression shuttered. “How long are you staying?”

“The weekend,” Marleau said brightly, as if by being aggressively cheerful he could dispel the tension in the room.

Shane’s jaw flexed, and Ilya thought he could see the muscles beneath his eye twitch. “Great. I’m going for a walk.”

“It’s almost dark—” Hayden started.

“I won’t be long. Back before dinner, I promise.” He slid into one of the pairs of flip-flops by the front door, slammed it behind him. Ilya drank his rosé in three swallows, poured himself another.

“So,” Marleau said, clapping him on the back with his enormous palm. “Centaurs.”

“Right,” Ilya said. “Centaurs.”

Hayden grilled chicken thighs for dinner, and Shane stood beside him, offering his advice and feedback in the way that Men Do. Ilya sat on the beach (“No going in the water!” Jackie warned) with Ruby and Emma playing twenty questions.

“Is it my left nostril?”

“Ilya. Your left nostril is not bigger than a breadbox. You’re so bad at this game.”

“Also your left nostril can’t swim.”

The Pikes had one of those long wooden picnic tables on the patio, with outdoor lights strung overhead and battery-operated candles for ambiance. Shane sat all the way at the opposite end, with Arthur in his lap, and picked at his chicken and grilled corn, eating mostly the watermelon salad.

Not that Ilya could see much of him, with Marleau sitting between them like the Berlin Wall. He was the one who kept the conversation going, talking determinedly about his new editor, about his review in the Times (“‘Workmanlike but enthusiastic,’ that’s a compliment, right?”), about how nice the weather was and what a great dinner, thanks so much you guys.

Shane said very little. When spoken to directly he responded with the bare minimum required by basic politeness, and when Ruby-or-Emma (Ilya was getting close to being able to distinguish between them but wasn’t there yet) climbed into his lap after Arthur had gone to Jackie for his own dinner, Shane let her stay, resting his chin on the top of her head.

“You’re staring,” Marleau murmured, under cover of Hayden’s lengthy account of how he’d have been a great lawyer, actually, if he’d ever gone to law school.

“I’m not.” This was perhaps not quite true.

“Sure, okay.” Marleau poured himself more rosé. “I thought you said you didn’t like him?”

“I don’t.” This was true—Ilya did not like Shane Hollander. He was pretentious and judgmental, and so repressed he was going to atrophy his own dick someday. Ilya didn’t have time for people like that, who made him feel like shit because they couldn’t handle how he made them feel.

Ilya reminded himself firmly of all of this, and got up from the table to help Jackie clear and clean up.

By the time they finished she seemed to have forgiven him for hitting on her that time (or perhaps forgiven him for not hitting on her this time, Ilya wasn’t sure) and she sent him back out to the patio with a chamomile-mint tea for Shane.

“Oh,” Shane said, startled. “Uh. Thank you.” Ilya made sure their fingers brushed as he handed him the mug.

Hayden watched this exchange suspiciously. “How did you know he wanted tea? How do you two know each other?”

“We don’t,” Ilya said, “and I didn’t. Your wife made it for him.”

Shane took a sip too quickly, and coughed after burning his tongue.

“How,” Ilya asked casually, “do you two know each other?”

“Hayden and I were roommates in college.”

Ilya tried to picture this, what Shane would have been like in college, serious and studious, working in coffee shops or in the bowels of the library, writing essays on Joan Didion and Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov. He’d have stayed in his room every night, probably, and looked shocked whenever anyone asked him out on a date.

By the time Ilya refocused, the conversation had moved on, and rather than join in talking about how poorly the Devils were doing this year, he let his mind wander, watching the moths bash themselves stupid against the string lights, listening to the waves crashing in the darkness beyond. He wondered when and how Shane had figured out he was gay, and if it was before or after Hayden had met Jackie.

At last Marleau yawned hugely and announced he was going to work on his outline, which Ilya knew meant he was going to fall asleep watching MMA highlights on his laptop. Soon enough Hayden and Jackie excused themselves as well, and it was just Ilya and Shane alone on the patio.

Shane stood up so fast his chair scraped loudly against the bricks. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

Ilya sighed. “Look, I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“I don’t care that you’re here,” Shane said stiffly.

“You’ve been avoiding me since I arrived.”

Shane looked him in the eye, finally, for the first time since the kitchen, his own eyes shadowed beneath his brows from the lights overhead, his expression deliberately blank. “I haven’t been avoiding you. I’ve been enjoying my evening, talking with my friends. Not everything is about you, Rozanov.”

He went inside, sliding the door shut behind him.

Ilya stayed out alone by himself for a long while, taking the opportunity to smoke a cigarette now that there was no one out here to scold him. He ought to go to bed, too, he knew, or at least go try to write something. He could at least be thinking about writing, about the character he was creating—a orphan in Brighton Beach who cruises sex addiction recovery workshops for hookups.

Instead he thought about Shane Hollander’s thighs in those fucking swim shorts, and the way his mouth had pressed against the top of Arthur’s head.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out where Shane was sleeping—the house wasn’t that big—and Ilya tapped lightly on his door, knowing full well he was probably wasting his time.

Shane opened the door with a toothbrush in his mouth. “What?”

“Can I come in?” Ilya tried to say it silkily, but he was distracted by the toothpaste foam on Shane’s pink lips.

“No.” And he closed the door.

Ilya shrugged philosophically. He never liked feeling unequal in his sexual encounters—if anything, he preferred to give more orgasms than he received, and it did feel like he owed Shane something after last time. But if he wasn’t interested in what Ilya had to offer, then that was his loss. Ilya was very good at what he did.

He went down to his basement, peed and brushed his teeth, and lay on the pull-out scrolling on his phone, trying unsuccessfully to find a position where the support bar didn’t dig into his spine.

The door opened, and Shane marched over to stand at the foot of his bed, glowering at him. He had taken off the swim shorts and Columbia t-shirt, was in nothing but his boxers, his hair flattened on one side like he’d already been lying down. His cock stuck out from his body, almost perpendicular, so hard it must have been painful for him.

“You don’t knock?” Ilya asked mildly.

Shane ignored this. “So you want to, what? Get each other off?”

Ilya leaned up on his elbows, scanned him up and down, taking in his biceps, his pecs, the slight roundness of his belly, the wet spot on his boxers. “You must really like going to the gym.”

Shane made an annoyed sound, waved a hand toward Ilya. “Like you don’t?”

“Not really,” Ilya said, “but I like what it gets me.” He didn’t see any point in mentioning that on the days he didn’t work out, he couldn’t sleep. He heaved a sigh, flung the quilt aside, revealing his own already half-hard cock. “Well, get in then.”

Shane looked at him doubtfully, then heaved a beleaguered sigh and stripped off his boxers, glancing around the room before folding them (who the fuck folded their underwear?) and placing them carefully atop the plastic bins stacked in the corner. He lay on the bed and stared up at the popcorn ceiling, rigid as a plank.

After several silent moments, Ilya said, “So what do you want to do?”

“I want,” Shane said distinctly, “to come in your mouth.”

“By all means,” Ilya said.

Shane rolled over and climbed onto him, legs straddling Ilya’s hips, his weight settling with a confidence his expression didn’t match. His thighs were as warm and solid as they looked, and Ilya’s hands went to them automatically, then traveled up, greedy, grabbing handfuls of his ass, before dragging a finger up the center to ghost over his hole.

Shane hissed, jerked away.

“No?” Ilya asked, surprised. “You like to top?”

There was a pause. “No,” Shane admitted. “But I don’t…it’s been a while. I’d rather you didn’t…uh…”

“No touching your ass, okay,” Ilya said peaceably. “Anything else I should know? How about your nipples? Are those too sensitive, too? Can I put my tongue in your ear, give you a, what is it, a wet willy?”

“How about we don’t talk.”

Ilya grinned, and then he did what he’d wanted to do all evening: he slid down the bed so that he could bite the inside of Shane’s thigh, hard enough to leave a mark, his mouth wide open, just barely high enough that it wouldn’t be seen beneath the hem of his swim shorts. Shane made a choked noise.

Ilya dragged the flat of his tongue over the bite, up the center seam of his balls.

“Get on with it,” Shane said tightly, and Ilya obliged. He gripped his own cock with one hand and Shane’s with the other, shifting to get the angle right before taking it into his mouth. He sucked hard on the tip, got another choked sound in return.

Ilya really was good at this, and he loved it—loved going hard and fast, overwhelming. He wanted, with everything he did, to be a force of nature. But this position was not one in which he could best showcase his skills, and his neck was straining already from trying to bob his head up and down.

Above him, Shane’s body was taut like a wire, vibrating with the effort of not moving.

Ilya pulled off, breathing deeply, running his fist over his cock. “Fuck my mouth, come on.”

Shane dropped slightly, his elbows giving out before he recovered. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ilya said emphatically, and lay back with his mouth open.

Shane was hesitant at first, his thrusts barely perceptible, until Ilya abandoned his own cock and dug his fingers into the place where Shane’s ass became his thighs, encouraging.

This wasn’t a position he loved, not usually—not like Shane probably would—but Shane was so fucking careful about it, like he needed to be told how deep he could go, how fast, so that somehow even like this, Ilya was in control. He guided him into a rhythm, not too fast, not too shallow, and when Shane’s thighs started to shake Ilya hummed around him, deliberate, and was rewarded with a stuttered “Fu-uck,” as Shane’s hips snapped forward.

Immediately he pulled back. “Sorry, sorry—”

Ilya laughed, ran a hand over his lower back, soothing. “I’ll tap out if I need to.”

After that it was faster, rougher as Shane gave up his precious control, and that was what Ilya had wanted tonight—he wanted Shane’s breathtaking want more than anything. Ilya found himself thrusting his hips up into the air, into nothing, so hot he felt it in his chest, the pit of his stomach. He moaned again, unintentionally this time, and Shane thrust hard once-twice-three times, and then he came in Ilya’s mouth, fucking in and out so that it spilled down his cheek.

Ilya swallowed, wiped his mouth on Shane’s inner thigh, and jerked himself hard and fast, coming onto his own stomach seconds later while Shane was still hovering above him, quaking with aftershocks.

And then Shane climbed off him, sat on the edge of the mattress with his back to Ilya, facing the sea. His shoulder blades were sharp as he bent over to put his face in his hands.

“Everything okay?” Ilya felt around for a tissue, wiped himself off.

“Fine.” Shane’s voice was muffled. But then he straightened and stood, crossed the room to the plastic bins where he’d left his boxers, stepped into them, snapping the waistband flat. Ilya lay on his back, watching him.

“I don’t…” Shane said.

“I know,” Ilya said flatly. “This doesn’t mean we like each other. Just a way to get off.”

Shane’s shoulders dropped, relieved. “Right, okay. I’ll, uh. See you in the morning, then.”

“Goodnight,” Ilya said, and after Shane left he dropped into a fitful, restless sleep.

Chapter End Notes

In this universe Hayden is Bingley/Caroline Bingley, kind of. I guess. And I just think there should have been a universe where Ilya saw how adorable Shane looked with Arthur.

Ilya’s novel-in-progress is based on Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke

Also? I want you to know how difficult it was for me to type “flip-flops.”

Chapter 4: the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

Chapter Notes

Mr. Darcy began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.

It was better after that; at least they could be polite to one another and make eye contact. Shane worked in his room until 11am on the dot, and then he took the twins mini-golfing, which he apparently did every day when he was visiting, and that Jackie and Hayden clearly used as some much-needed couple time. And so Marleau and Ilya piled into the Pike’s minivan, and stood to the side smoking weed from Marleau’s vape while Shane paid for two of your smallest clubs, please, along with two adults and one giant.

Lava Golf featured a large white bird with a blue beanie and sunglasses, which did not seem particularly volcanic to Ilya, and an American flag hung from a white picket fence. Emma (Ilya was pretty sure she was the one with a scar on her chin and a dilophosaurus t-shirt) and Ruby (T-Rex t-shirt, no scar, devilish look in her eye) had to be very familiar with the course by now, had to know to try to avoid the shark teeth and the barriers on the NJ Parkway, even if they didn’t have the coordination to do so successfully. But you wouldn’t know it: Ruby, at least, was more interested at using her petite club to attack bushes-cum-dragons, and Emma was more interested in tattling on Ruby.

“Remember,” Shane said patiently. “You want to keep your feet about this far apart”—he demonstrated, planting his boat shoes shoulder-width on the green felt—“and then you hold it like this, see? Hands together, nice and easy.”

Ruby nodded solemnly and adjusted her grip.

“Now just—gentle. The hole is right there. You’re not trying to kill it, you’re just giving it a little push.”

Ruby lifted her club shoulder-high and whacked her fluorescent pink ball like she was teeing off. It bounced off the rotating windmill and landed in the gravel next to Hole Eight.

“All right!” Shane said. “Nice one. I’ll just go get your ball, okay?”

Ilya lined up his shot with his club, squatting down and squinting like he was reading the green at Augusta. He bent his knees, waggled his club. He adjusted his stance. “Hole in one,” he said.

“You’ve already taken three shots,” Marley said.

Ilya ignored this. He swung and sent the ball rocketing off the side barrier, where it ricocheted into the bow of a wooden boat and came to rest farther from the hole than it had started. 

“Oh no!” he wailed, and Ruby shrieked with delight

“You have to keep your feet apart,” Emma told him. “Like this.”

“Like this?” Ilya widened his stance as far as he could without his inner thighs screaming at him, which actually wasn’t very far at all. He should probably take up yoga. He gave it another whack, and the ball dribbled forward about nine inches. “I think my club is broken.”

By the fourth hole, Shane took him aside. “You know, you don’t need to lose for them to feel good about themselves. They’re fine, you can just play the game.”

“How dare you,” Ilya said, outraged. “I don’t need The Great Shane Hollander telling me I am better than this, I am trying my absolute hardest, and you come here and tell me to try better, when I am struggling—”

“Fine!” Shane said, and threw up his hands.

Emma tugged on Shane’s sleeve. “Uncle Shane, can I go? It’s my turn.”

“Sure, yeah. Just remember—”

“Feet apart, gentle push,” Emma recited. She did hit it gently, but sideways; Marleau gave it a discreet kick, sending it up and through the loop-de-loop, rolling to within a foot of the pin.

“Uncle Shane! Did you see that?”

Shane, torn between Good Sportsmanship and the enormous smile on her face, said faintly, “I sure did, kiddo.”

Ruby, not to be outdone, abandoned her club entirely, marched around the loop-de-loop and dropped her ball directly into the cup with her hand.

“Ruby,” Shane said.

“What? It went in.”

“You can’t just…” Shane looked at Ilya for backup before remembering that he wasn’t a reliable authority figure. “You have to hit it with your club.”

“The club is for dragons,” she said dismissively, and went back to thwacking a suspicious hedge.

Later, when they’d been allowed to return to the house for dinner and were sitting at the picnic table on the patio eating veggie burgers (Shane and Jackie) or hamburgers (everyone else), Shane did not sit with the wall of Marleau between them, but across the table, only one seat down. He still talked mostly with Hayden and Jackie, occasionally with Marleau, until, at a lull in the conversation, he turned to Ilya and said, “‘Clubfist’ is an archaic term, you know.”

Ilya just blinked at him, and took a sip of his beer. “Uh-huh.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with, like, going clubbing,” Shane went on eagerly, his elbows on the table. “It means ‘brute,’ basically.”

“Yeah?” Ilya said, getting a little pissed off now. “I fucking know?”

“Just, I know English isn’t your first language, so…”

Fucking unbelievable. Ilya knew Shane was arrogant and pretentious—anyone who read his books knew that—but he hadn’t realized he was such an asshole. “I’m not illiterate, Hollander.”

At least he had the grace to flush. “No, I know that.”

Ilya rolled his eyes, took a long drink of his beer, finishing it, and stood up, grabbing the remains of his burger. He wasn’t hungry anymore.

He didn’t care if it was rude to his hosts—he was here to write, and so he went to his basement and lay on the bed with the sliding door open so he could hear the ocean, smoking a cigarette to keep away the mosquitos. He propped his laptop against his bent knees and wrote squalls of sentence fragments, furious and irrelevant to the plot, but he’d find a place for them somewhere.

through icy waters he rolls with helplessness which others stroke with gentle brushes

and kindred intellects demand allegiance with blunt instruments

i will not kiss your fucking ring

Eventually, there was a tap on the door. “What?” he snapped.

“Ilya?” said a small, thigh-high voice, and he cursed under his breath.

He stubbed out his cigarette before opening the door, and then glanced back and forth between the twins, considering. “You switched shirts,” he said at last. “Emma is a T-Rex now.”

Ruby actually stomped her foot. “How did you know? Daddy didn’t know. Uncle Shane didn’t know.”

“Of course Uncle Shane didn’t know,” Ilya said—quite nicely he thought, considering.

They claimed they had come down to say goodnight to him, but he thought probably they just wanted to put off bedtime—a misdemeanor to which he was happy to be an accessory. “Come on,” he said, “this way,” and thumbed a quick text to Marleau saying he was taking the twins on a short walk along the beach, but that if Jackie really didn’t like that, to let him know and he would bring them back.

Marleau texted back:

-all good bro! Jackie says dont come back in less than 15 minutes

The sand was still warm from the heat of the day, and they picked up fragments of clamshells and ragged gull feathers—“Not seagulls,” Emma informed him pompously, “because all gulls are seagulls, did you know that Ilya?”

“I did not,” he said, and filed that away in his mental folder marked English is Stupid.

The girls got a little sandy, and more than a little wet as they ran up and down like sandpipers through the waves rolling gently up the beach. There was, Ilya thought, a very specific pleasure in walking a beach at night, because beaches were places that seemed as though they ought to exist only in the daytime. Beaches at night were curiosities, where the ocean announced its presence loudly but was never quite where you thought it was going to be.

When at last they got back, Shane was waiting for them on the beach just off the patio. He knelt down in the sand and hugged each twin, saying earnestly, “I love you, Ruby or Emma. Good night.”

“I’m Emma,” said Ruby. Ilya did not tattle.

He made to follow the girls inside, but Shane grabbed his arm. Ilya glanced down at it, his eyebrows raised as slavically as he could manage. “What?”

Shane gave a gusty sigh and let him go, shoved his hands in the gaping pockets of his tiny swim shorts. “My mom is bilingual, okay?”

Ilya paused, tried to think if he knew anything at all about Shane Hollander’s parents. He was…half Japanese, he thought? He got compared to Murakami a lot, even though their books had next to nothing in common. “Okay?”

Shane frowned down at his own bare feet, digging them into the sand. “I just…I have some idea of how hard it is, to write in another language, and…you do it very well,” he finished, a little begrudgingly, Ilya thought. “I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise.”

Ilya considered him, as best as he could in the dim light shining from the house. His mouth was set, his chin stubborn, and he was, Ilya reflected, still an arrogant, pretentious asshole. But he looked just a little bit winsome, with his toes wriggling through the sand and his shoulders hunched like a sulky boy offering an unwilling apology.

“It is easier for me,” Ilya said at last. “Writing. Better than speaking, I mean.” He considered whether he was willing to share this much of himself with the likes of Shane Hollander, and decided it didn’t really matter what he thought. “I wrote Clubfist in English, you know, slowly, with a good thesaurus.”

“I know.”

Ilya shifted his weight, felt the sand under his heels as the indifferent ocean shushed in the darkness. “I like words. I like trying to find the right one.”

“It’s a good word,” Shane said. “I mean, I had to look it up. That’s why I said…” he trailed off, and Ilya thought he was probably blushing, though he couldn’t tell in the dark. “Anyway. It’s an angry word, I think, or maybe…a defensive one?”

“Mmm.”

“And it…I don’t know if this will make sense to you, but it feels right in your mouth. It feels like what it means.”

Ilya knew precisely what Shane was talking about, but all he said was, “Maybe you’re thinking of something else that feels right in my mouth.”

“Okay, let’s not—”

“No?” Ilya stepped in close, gripped his jaw, tilted his head back. “You don’t want me to suck your dick?”

Shane’s breath gusted out, his mouth parting. “I don’t—”

Ilya kissed him, and he tasted of chamomile-mint tea. Shane gasped ever so slightly, his hands coming up to hover around Ilya’s face, his shoulders. His tongue darted out tentatively, chasing Ilya’s and then retreating. Ilya bit his lip in retaliation, and Shane opened his mouth wider, allowing Ilya to sweep in. He thought vaguely of words like plunder and surrender that turned up in bodice ripper kisses, and thought, But this is nothing like that. He could feel his own breath going shaky, his heart racing, and so he pulled back, turning his face away, running his lips along Shane’s jaw, which over the course of the day had grown just enough stubble to prickle.

Shane made a choked sound like a broken off question. “What?” Ilya murmured, and sucked at the tender skin behind his earlobe. He felt Shane’s hands land at last, one in his hair, the other fisting the back of his t-shirt.

“I didn’t think there’d be kissing,” Shane said breathlessly. “Isn’t that right?”

Ilya stilled and stepped back, though he kept his grip on Shane’s chin. “I am not a sex worker, Hollander.”

“No, I—no! I just thought, for a hookup, kissing isn’t…I mean…”

Ilya considered how offended he was, looked at the wet sheen of saliva on Shane’s mouth and decided the answer was, Not enough not to fuck him.

“There can be kissing,” he said, as if granting a great favor. “If you ask nicely.”

“Fuck off,” Shane said—but it was reflexive, and he leaned in for more…so Ilya stepped away.

“Not here, though,” he said. “Wouldn’t want your friends to see.”

Ilya showered and brushed his teeth. He very thoughtfully didn’t smoke a cigarette now that there was going to be kissing. By midnight the house had gone quiet, and even the occasional rumbling of Marley’s laughter as he watched YouTube shorts had died away, to be replaced by his much louder snoring. No one would be able to hear them over that racket; Ilya could make Shane Hollander moan, make him cry out, unable to choke it down.

Except Shane never came down to the basement.

And that was fine, actually—Ilya would be driving away in Marleau’s yellow Corvette in the morning anyway, going back to his life while Shane stayed here in his boring one, reapplying sunscreen on the hour and typing away at his next award-winning novel with the rhythmic certainty of a metronome. Probably they’d never see each other again.

At 1:30 he opened the screen door and lit a cigarette, and when he finished he flicked it into the sand. He lay on his side on the sofa bed, facing away from the ocean and staring at the stack of plastic bins in the corner as he tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep.

In the morning, Ilya said goodbye to Ruby and to Emma, promising solemnly that he would work on his mini-golf game before he saw them next, that he would remember to bend his knees and widen his stance. Jackie didn’t get up to hug him, as Arthur was asleep on her shoulder, but she kissed his cheek when he bent over her, told him he was welcome anytime.

“I don’t know about that,” Hayden muttered, but he gave Ilya a backslapping hug-handshake in farewell.

Shane didn’t leave his room, staying locked away because he always worked until 11am on the dot, and saying goodbye to Ilya and Marleau wasn’t important enough to interrupt his routine.

They drove away with the top down, Marleau puffing on his vape pen, the white vapor dragging behind them as they merged onto the Parkway.

“So these centaurs,” Ilya said. “What you need are some stableboys.”

Marleau turned to him, his hair standing a good six inches above his head in the wind. “You think so?”

Chapter End Notes

Shane, trying frantically to understand the rules, researching hookup etiquette and excited to talk about words: I was accidentally a dick again, huh?

Ilya’s sentence fragments are me playing around with e.e. cummings’ “i sing of Olaf glad and big” I am so sorry sir for using your work in this way, walt whitman would dig it though

Chapter 5: Unbeing dead isn't being alive

Chapter Notes

For @ferretbueller

Adieu to disappointment and spleen! What are men to rocks and mountains?

“Come out with me,” Svetlana said, “you never come out with me anymore.”

She was speaking in Russian, because they always spoke Russian to each other. It was good for both of them, a comfort, but Ilya was the one who really needed it, so that he could always hold the distance between Russian and English inside himself, the gap that existed when a word simply could not be translated. The lacuna, he thought, and rubbed at his nose with his fingertips.

Ilya hiked up his right shoulder, tucking his cellphone against his ear. He spoke around the cigarette dangling from his mouth. “I’m working.”

“Working, yes, always working. Who are you and what have you done with my Ilyushka?”

He typed out a sentence, frowned at it, deleted it. “I thought you wanted me to work.”

“If all you do is write, you’ll have nothing to write about,” she pointed out.

“Seems to work just fine for Shane Hollander,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” He sighed, stubbed out his cigarette and closed his laptop. It wasn’t like he was making much progress tonight anyway. “Where do you want to go?”

“Matt Berninger is in conversation with Pete Holmes at the 92^nd Street Y. Meet me there at 7:00.”

Ilya snorted loudly, disgustingly. “Since when do you care about sad dad rock?”

“Since never, and I never will,” Svetlana snapped. “But I want to go anyway. It will be fun.”

Ilya stripped off the t-shirt he’d been wearing since yesterday, turned on the shower, thudded his fist against the tile to make the pipes stop squealing. “I think that I would much rather do anything else. Anything else at all, and so would you. So why are we going to this?”

“I told you, it will be fun.”

“Sveta,” he said patiently. “I am coming to meet you all the way in the fucking Upper West Side in two hours, which gives me only fifteen minutes before I have to leave and I haven’t showered in two days. So please. Why are we going to this?”

There was a pause, and then: “Rose Landry will be there.”

“Ah, okay.” He put the phone on speaker and stepped under the water. His hair needed washing, but there wasn’t time, so he just angled his head out of the spray in an attempt to keep it dry. “Do you need help with what to wear?” he called.

“Fuck you, Ilya,” she said, and hung up.

Svetlana was waiting outside when he arrived, wearing gold eyeliner, statement earrings, and a loose dress because it was fucking July in New York City and all anyone wanted in the world was to feel a breeze. Ilya was wearing a plain black tank top and jeans because they were the cleanest clothes he had.

He kissed her cheek and told her she looked beautiful.

“I know,” she said, “come on.”

It was a good crowd, younger than he’d have guessed. A lot of women, and he perked up a little, tried to indicate with roving eyes that he was here with a friend, not a lover, and had all the time in the world to get drinks after. Rose Landry wasn’t there yet, so he took a seat near the back, the better to make his escape should the opportunity arise. Svetlana networked a little near the entrance, hovering so she could catch Rose Landry the moment she walked in.

“Hi,” said the woman next to him. She had red cat-eye glasses and a lot of tattooed koi swimming up her arms.

He smiled. “Hi.”

She angled her legs toward him. “Are you a National fan?”

“Afraid not,” he said, “I’m here as a wingman for my friend over there.”

“Yeah, I, uh, saw you come in together.”

“But not together,” he assured her with a wink. “So tell me, why should I like The National?”

She took a deep, preparatory breath, and said, “Oh my god where do I start? I mean, Boxer is incredible obviously, and that was the album that really kicked them off, but if you go back to Cherry Tree, I mean, sure it’s just an EP, but my god, ‘About Today’ is a motherfucking song, you know? And—”

He stopped listening, because Shane Hollander walked into the room.

It wasn’t that Ilya hadn’t known that Rose Landry was Shane’s agent, exactly—it was more that her name had never been important to him in that context before now, because he was far more used to hearing about her as “the hottest woman in publishing worth talking to” from Svetlana, who had been on a campaign to seduce her for years, surging forward during the rare periods of time when Rose Landry didn’t have an adoring boyfriend on her arm, only to recede again when she dated someone “obviously wrong for her, I mean, look at them.”

It was the sort of quixotic effort Ilya would never have expected from the woman who’d snorted coke off his chest at sixteen before telling him to go make himself pretty, they were going out tonight and they needed money.

(Those nights were treasured memories, even the bad ones, because Svetlana was there, the only person who always was).

Now Svetlana was hugging Rose Landry and kissing her cheek—and then she was kissing Shane Hollander, because so far as she knew, Ilya had met him exactly once at that terrible party, and certainly hadn’t been stood up by him in a dank basement on the Jersey Shore.

“…but then you get to Trouble Will Find Me and Sleep Well Beast, and it’s just so intimate, like you can feel yourself in the lyrics even if you don’t understand them, but the sound is, like, so intense, it just builds and builds until it shatters—”

“Hey everybody, thanks so much for coming,” said a guy in a wrinkled suit and sneakers, and Red Glasses cut herself off like she’d hit her own mute button, her eyes beaming, all her teeth showing in her smile.

Svetlana, Rose, and Shane quickly found seats together in the front (because no one ever wants to sit in the front) and Ilya shifted slightly, just enough so he could keep his eyes on the back of Shane’s head.

“When I’m writing,” one of the men onstage was saying (probably Matt Berninger and not the guy interviewing him, but Ilya hadn’t been paying attention to which middle-aged man was which), “I mean, I’m writing lots of stuff, but most of the super-sad lines are just questions I do ask myself and that make me want to cry, and I’m like, I gotta write that down. There are weird ways that you ask yourself really profound questions in sneaky small ways.”

Shane leaned over as Rose whispered something in his ear, and Ilya caught the far edge of his smile.

“You’re Ilya Rozanov, aren’t you?”

Ilya glanced at the seat next to him, found that a man had sat down without him noticing. “I am.”

“I didn’t think you’d be a fan,” he said, gesturing with his chin at the stage. He was speaking a little too loudly, but he certainly wasn’t wrong.

“Yeah, not really.”

“Me neither.” They sat quietly for a few minutes, and then the man said, “I’m Dan Wickham, by the way.”

Ilya turned fully, his eyes widening. Dan Wickham’s Untouchable, the frankly tragic story of a man who systematically destroyed his own capacity for intimacy, had come out a couple of years ago, and while some of Wickham’s prose had been a little cheesy, a little try-hard, and the plot too simplistic, Ilya had loved it anyway, because he’d loved the book’s central character, had wanted to crawl into his chest and restart his heart with his bare hands.

“Wow,” he said, meaning it. “It’s good to meet you. The way you wrote Findley, he was so real, and you could see how it might not have gone the way it did, like in another universe he found a way to open himself up, to not be so scared all the time. How did you build him, like is he a composite or—”

“Shhh,” the girl in the red cat-eye glasses hissed.

“Sorry,” Ilya said, while Dan rolled his eyes.

“Let’s talk after,” he said. “Buy you a drink?”

Dan Wickham was very handsome. He wore Carhartt jeans that probably showed his ass to good advantage when he wasn’t sitting down, and a black Radiohead concert tee, and he had carefully trimmed stubble, very even white teeth, heavy eyebrows.

Ilya nodded. “After.”

The conversation onstage was a good one, probably—Red Glasses certainly enjoyed it, rising to her feet and clapping enthusiastically before racing up afterward to stand awkwardly at the side of the stage, as if hoping Matt Berninger would notice and immediately think, “Oh, she definitely has something interesting to say, better go over there.” Ilya wished her all the best.

“Ready to get out of here?” Dan said.

“Uh, yeah.” Ilya craned his neck, trying to see over the press of bodies, looking for Svetlana—or Rose Landry, because wherever she was, that was where Sveta would be.

Instead he saw Shane, because he was taller, and Ilya said, “One sec,” to Dan and made his way up to the front to see if Svetlana would clear him to leave. (His wingman services mostly consisted of showing up and telling her she looked great, go get ‘em tiger or words to that effect).

As he’d anticipated, Svetlana and Rose were engaged in animated conversation, with Shane third-wheeling beside them, awkward with his hands at his sides. Ilya didn’t know what was taking Rose so long to come around—was she scared of pussy or something? That was stupid. Pussy was fucking great.

“Ilyusha,” said Svetlana, when she finally noticed him, “thank you for coming, you can go now.”

“Thanks,” he said drily. “Hello, Rose, nice to see you again.”

She smiled warmly. “You, too. Congratulations on Clubfist, it’s really something.”

Ilya nodded, felt Shane’s eyes on him. “Hollander.”

Shane’s blank expression didn’t change. “Rozanov.”

“Oh, hey,” Dan said, coming up from behind Ilya. He stuck his hand out to Svetlana. “Svetlana Vetrova, right? It’s great to meet you, I’m Dan Wickham.”

This was enough to distract Svetlana from Rose Landry’s big blue eyes. “Oh! Ilya gave me Untouchable to read, I loved it.”

Dan smiled modestly, looking down at his shoes. “Thanks, that means a lot, coming from you.” He looked up again, glanced at Rose, at Shane. “Hey, Rose.” He leaned in close to give her a kiss. “Good to see you again. Hey, Shane.”

Shane said flatly, “Hi.”

Ilya gave him a sharp look. He’d assumed—apparently wrongly, apparently presumptuously—that Shane’s stiffness had been about him, about having to face him after hiding in his bedroom like a fucking coward. But it wasn't Ilya Shane was glaring at, for once.

Glaring wasn’t the word for it, actually; Ilya had been the object of enough of Shane’s ire to know that this was something entirely different. His whole body had gone rigid, but also shrunken, curving in on himself, his fingernails scratching into his own palms. Shane detested Dan Wickham.

Ilya glanced at Rose, puzzled—she and Shane were rumored to be good friends—but her face was perfectly neutral, her smile polite.

Dan’s hand landed on Ilya’s hip, his thumb hooking into the belt loop of Ilya’s jeans; it was a confident move, but not an overly aggressive one, given they’d already decided they were leaving together, and Ilya didn’t move away from it. In fact, when Shane’s eyes dropped to that point of contact like a stone into water, Ilya leaned in a little closer, tilted his head with a smile.

“We’re going to go grab a drink,” he said. “Anybody want to come?”

“Sure,” Svetlana began, but then Rose said, a little coolly, “I’m beat, actually.”

No could see it, not even Ilya, but he knew Svetlana’s heart sank. “Maybe just one? I have a question for you.” He didn’t, but surely he could come up with something.

Rose glanced at Svetlana, and then at Shane, who nodded and gave her arm a quick squeeze. “All right,” she said at last. “I know a decent wine bar around the corner.”

“Hollander?” Ilya leaned back, letting his shoulder blade graze Dan’s chest. “You coming?”

Shane’s mouth tightened. “No, I’m going to head out.” He bent down to kiss Rose’s cheek, gave Svetlana a quick smile and a “Good to see you.” And then he spun on his heel and walked out, without a single glance at Ilya or Dan.

Ilya watched him go, watched the squareness of his shoulder and the tightness of his stride, the door swinging shut behind him.

“Wine bar?” Dan said. “Sounds perfect.”

It was a perfectly fine evening; Dan was good company, quick-witted with a cutting sort of humor that appealed to Ilya, since he didn’t really care much for other people either. Rose and Svetlana talked mostly to each other, which was precisely what Ilya wanted, though Dan seemed a little disappointed not to have their attention. He kept glancing over at them, laughing too loudly at the things Ilya said as if to draw them back in.

After Rose finished her wine, she stood up and said, “Well, that’s it for me, folks. I’ve got 300k words I need to line edit down to 175k by Monday.”

Svetlana got up to let her out of the booth, and then turned to leave with her. “That’s terrible. Is it the Regency-Era Odyssey retelling? ‘Night, Ilya, nice to meet you, Dan.”

“Ugh, yes,” Rose said. “It’s never going to sell, but if I can just get the author to move past this one, his next book is incredible, it’s…”

Their voices faded, blending into the gently pulsing stereo playing in the dimly lit bar. Ilya turned to Dan, cocked an eyebrow. “So?”

They went to his place, since he lived in a studio off Lexington. The sex was pretty good, all things considered—Dan’s stubble was a little unpleasantly scratchy, but he was a good, confident kisser, and when they got in his bed (king-sized, it took up most of the apartment) he ran his hands over Ilya’s body (“Fuck, you’re so hot, fuck”) and sucked his balls before jerking him off, then jerking himself off and coming all over Ilya’s chest.

After they’d cleaned up, Ilya bent over and fished his pack of cigarettes from his jeans pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

Dan shrugged. “Not if you stand by the window.”

There were two windows, and one of them had a room air conditioner stuck in it, still working hard long after the sun had gone down. Ilya left it running and opened the other, kneeling on the floor so his dick didn’t hang out in the breeze. “So,” he said casually, turning his head to exhale into the warm night. “What’s your beef with Shane Hollander?”

Dan laughed, tucking his arms behind his head and crossing his feet at the ankles, the lamp beside the bed catching the lean cut of his arms. “I don’t have one. He hates me, though, and I have no idea why. He’s jealous, probably.”

Ilya doubted it. Someone who could write like Shane probably wasn’t jealous of anyone. “Envious,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You mean envious, not jealous. You think he wants something you have, not that you’re going to take away something he has.” Because what was Dan Wickham going to take from Shane Hollander? Not any awards, that was for sure, because however exquisitely he could draw a character, his writing simply wasn’t up to it. Ilya wasn’t going to say that, obviously.

“Oh, right.” He shrugged. “Well, either way. We knew each other a long time ago, at Iowa Writers' Workshop. We were pretty close, actually, but he was so fucking hot and cold. Like one minute he wants to devour you and the next it’s like he’s never met you. And I get that it’s tough, you know, when you first come out, but he was such a dick about it.”

Nothing about that surprised Ilya, though he felt a twitch of irritation at the thought of Shane Hollander wanting Dan the way he had, on occasion, wanted Ilya. “I can imagine,” he said drily. “So how long were you two…”

“A year, on and off. And then one day he just—stopped talking to me. Iced me out completely. I never figured out what I did.”

“Mmm.”

Ilya stubbed out his cigarette and closed the window, went into the bathroom and pissed before flushing it down the toilet.

“Have you read his new one?” Dan called. “It’s great, I mean obviously it is, but it’s so fucking cold. There’s no there there, you know?”

Ilya came out of the bathroom and started pulling on his jeans. Dan propped himself up on his elbow, showing off his chest hair, also neatly trimmed. “You’re not staying?”

“Not tonight.” He pulled his tank top over his head, found his shoes, then looked at Dan consideringly. “Give me your number, though. I’ll text you.”

He let himself out. It was finally cooling off outside, just a little, and he decided to walk down to the M train at 57^th. The city that reportedly never sleeps does, actually, in Midtown anyway, and apart from a woman yawning in her pajamas, waiting for her shih-tzu to finish pissing on the sign saying, “Curb Your Dog,” the streets were empty.

He descended into the subway with its stale hot air; he’d be waiting a long while at this time of night. He leaned against an iron pillar and pulled up his notes app.

A man cold like snow doesn’t give a soft white damn who he touches.

Chapter End Notes

I want you to know that I am the girl in the red cat-eye glasses babbling to the absurdly hot Russian man about The National, not even registering that he’s no longer listening to me because his crush just walked in

Anyway this is the interview I’m referencing, not that it’s relevant to this fic AT ALL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SYRnbfQw8o

Ilya, a snippy pedant: you WISH Shane Hollander was jealous OR envious of you he’s NEITHER anyway thanks this was fun

Ilya’s note at the end is riffing on a quote from, you guessed it, e.e. cummings.

Chapter 6: your slightest look easily will unclose me

Chapter Notes

But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.

Ilya did end up texting Dan, and they did hook up again a few weeks later. They met up all the way on the cusp of Alphabet City, went to see an aggressively American band at a bar called Lucinda’s.

“It’s Lucinda Williams’ place,” Dan shouted. “Lots of honky-tonk, but like, semi-ironic, you know? And the folk art is incredible.”

Ilya eyed a painting on wood of a skeleton in cowboy boots playing a banjo. “Uh-huh.”

They stayed for a beer before Ilya, glancing at his phone, decided to hurry things along, running his hand up Dan’s inseam and cocking his head at the door. They took the train to Ilya’s apartment this time, and Dan looked at his coffee-stained mass market paperbacks, his broken-spined Piranesi and The Age of Innocence.

“The English Patient?” Dan said, with some skepticism. “Kinda overwrought, huh?”

Ilya took a sip of vodka. “Nope.”

“Well, the movie was.”

“Still no.”

Dan’s thick black eyebrows furrowed, and he shifted gears, taking Ilya’s glass from him and helping himself to a sip. “I had no idea you were such a romantic.”

Ilya laughed at that, genuinely. “Ah, no. I don’t think anyone would say that about me.”

Ilya prided himself on being a good host, and so he poured Dan his very own glass of vodka, laid him out on the bed and knelt over him, sucking his dick while Dan ran his hands over his shoulders, told him how hot and incredible he was. When he’d caught his breath, he reached to return the favor, but Ilya batted him away.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Too much vodka, I think.”

Dan barked out a disbelieving laugh. “You? The guy who wrote Clubfist? I figured you could go all night.”

Ilya gave him a level look and patted his cheek. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not you, sweetie.”

Unsurprisingly, Dan didn’t ask if he could stay the night.

Ilya felt a little sorry—not that he’d left; that was absolutely the desired outcome, he’d wanted Dan to leave the moment he’d walked in the door. But it wasn’t really his fault, and he was a nice enough guy. Ilya was in a dry spell, that was all, one of those low periods when there weren’t many things that could get him off, get him interested in anything, really. He’d come out of it soon enough, he always did.

“I got you a job,” Svetlana said.

Ilya bit into his sandwich, scattering bits of lettuce that the squirrels would find soon enough. “Why are we eating outside? We could have gone to a restaurant.”

“We are eating outside,” she said, “because it’s a beautiful day—”

“It’s August. It’s nine thousand degrees out here.”

“—and because it is so fucking freezing in my building that I still haven’t thawed. Look, I have goosebumps.”

He glanced down at her arms, blinked in surprise. “What the fuck…how is this possible? Why is your office so cold?”

“The patriarchy,” she said succinctly. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“A job, yes.” Ilya didn’t think much of this sandwich. Too dry. He shouldn’t have gotten turkey; no one should ever get turkey. “What will you have me do, sell hedge funds? Deliver pizza?”

“There was a last-minute cancellation at Bear Mountain.”

Ilya chewed his dry sandwich thoroughly before saying, “What?”

She sighed heavily. “You never listen to me.”

This was patently untrue, but Ilya didn’t bother defending himself because the job, it seemed, was actually a very good one. It was brief, which was a point in its favor, and it paid well (“$20,000 just for spending two weeks lending your ‘expertise’ to Columbia’s most deserving MFA students, and you’d better kiss my feet for that, though it’s minus my commission, of course.”). Best of all, it was out of the city.

“Only six students, and they’re good, I promise, I saw some of the sample work. You’ll run a three-hour session in the morning, break for lunch, do some, I don’t know, hiking or something after that, then an afternoon-slash-evening session. Fourteen days in the countryside, $15,000, far from the madding crowds or whatever. You’ll be able to get some writing done.”

The car service dropped Ilya off a week later, and he got out of the car with his bag slung over one shoulder, squinting through his sunglasses. Bear Mountain was not a mountain; it wasn’t even much of a hill. And it was crowded. There were children everywhere, a carousel—was that a fucking zoo? An actual zoo, if a tiny one, with lizards and bears and shit.

Ilya took off his sunglasses, scrubbed his face with his hands, and put them back on. He wandered around for a while, asking at the front desk at the Inn (“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have anything about that…maybe ask at the Lodge?”) before finally making his way to a table in the corner near the restrooms, which had a small handwritten sign saying, Welcome CMFA!

“Oh! Mr. Rozanov!”

“Ilya,” he said, and stuck out a hand with a gritted-teeth smile.

“I’m so glad you make it at the last minute. My name is Vanessa Andrade, I’ll be coordinating this retreat. Here you are.” She handed him a folder containing, presumably, some kind of welcome packet and, if there was any God at all, his room key.

“Thank you.”

“Come, I’ll take you to the cabin. Well, I say cabin, but of course it’s made of stone. The stone cottages were built…I honestly don’t know when they were built, they look like something the Civilian Conservation Corps would have put together, and of course you know we’re not too far from Hyde Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s estate…”

Ilya followed her in silence as they left the main buildings. In the city, the grass had gone dry and yellow-brown, crunchy, but here the lawn remained green, and the trees that towered over the gravel path rustled pleasantly.

“Your co-instructor is already here,” Diane was saying. “He arrived a couple of hours ago.”

“Co-instructor,” Ilya repeated.

“Yes, Shane Hollander. The students will all be sharing rooms, but you and Mr. Hollander will each have your own, of course. And here we are! If you want to just…”

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya repeated.

Diane paused, possibly for the first time all day. “Yes? He’s just inside, I can introduce the two of you…”

“No. Not necessary. I’ll just…I will introduce myself. I need to make a phone call first.” Ilya forced a smile, fished out his cellphone from his pocket, abandoned his bag by the door to the “cottage,” which, by the way, was nothing of the kind—it was a low-hanging monolith, like a squat bunker with a shadowy front porch.

“Okay,” Vanessa said uncertainly. “Great. I’ll just run back to the Lodge, then, shall I? The students will be arriving after lunch.”

“Yes, thank you. I look forward to meeting them.”

Svetlana answered on the first ring.

“I have done many nice things for you,” he said severely.

“You have,” she said, sounding not at all contrite.

“I came with you to so many boring book people events—”

“You liked them, I know you did, and they’re not boring. Okay they’re a little boring.”

“—all so you could fuck the girl of your dreams, which you have now done and I am very happy for you.”

“I am very happy for me, too.” There was a pause. “Rose says hi. She brought me coffee in bed,” she added smugly.

“I am so glad. I am also glad that you are still in bed at eleven o’clock in the morning. I am very supportive of you, you would agree with this, yes?”

“Of course. You know that I love you very much.”

“So why would you do this to me?” he burst out. “Why is Shane Hollander here?”

There was a pause during which he could hear her taking a sip of coffee. “What is the problem? Rose told me Shane’s co-instructor got Covid, I got you the gig. You’ve met him before, you were fine. He’s a nice guy.”

Ilya sneered at that. “Why didn’t you tell me he’d be here?”

“It must have slipped my mind,” she said mildly. “But it’s a good thing, isn’t it? Rose says he’s run this workshop for the past two years, so you can pretty much let him handle everything. You’re just there to help with the workload, offer individual guidance rather than doing any lecturing. Okay? This is a good thing.”

Ilya shut his eyes tightly, inhaled the scents of dry dirt and green leaves. “Right.” He opened his eyes, blew out his breath. “Yes, sorry. I was just surprised. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, of course, it was incredibly far from fine…but there was no real reason for it not to be. So they’d fucked a couple of times—that was true of most of Ilya’s extended acquaintance. Hollander was flinty, tiresome, but if he was willing to shoulder the majority of the workload (and of course he was, he wore control freak on his chest like a badge) then Ilya was more than happy to take his $15,000 and go.

“Okay. Good.” Svetlana paused, then added, “Don’t sleep with any of the students.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he said, and hung up.

He took a breath, pulled his cross out from beneath his shirt, gripping it for just a moment, just one more inhale and exhale—and then he turned and walked back to the stone bunker, picked up his bag, and opened the door.

It was dark inside, and smelled musty, and once his eyes had time to adjust he could see why: the furniture probably hadn’t been updated since the early nineties, the rug was possibly older than that. There were two vinyl chairs facing a large wood-burning fireplace that no one in their right mind would want to use in August, and a table with four chairs. There was a kitchenette with a microwave, a Keurig, and a tiny refrigerator. This small common area was circled with eight bedrooms and a single bathroom.

Shane Hollander sat at the table, sifting through his packet, his back to Ilya. “Rozanov.”

“Hollander,” he replied. “Which bedroom is mine?”

Shane looked up at that, turned around. He had glasses on, with black rims at the top, the kind that would leave little red marks around the bridge of his nose. They drew his freckles into sharp relief even in the dim light, and Ilya had to catch his breath. “I don’t know,” Shane said shortly. “Pick one.” He went back to work, then stopped and said, pointing, “That one’s mine.”

Ilya opened the door he’d indicated, just to be irritating. “Very nice.” It wasn’t at all. It held a double bed with a threadbare comforter, two sad pillows, and a dresser covered with an assortment of skin care products. “I’m not waiting to piss so you can double cleanse,” he said.

“You can go pee on a tree,” Shane said coolly.

Ilya checked all the other rooms just to make sure they were all equally bad (they were) before settling on the one right next to Shane’s, as far from the bathroom as possible.

“So,” he called out, attempting to be civil, “you’ve done this before.”

“Yes.”

“So how does it work?”

“Read the packet.”

Ilya dumped the contents of the packet across the bed, saw a bunch of sample writings, introductions, schedules.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MFA PROGRAM

Bear Mountain Writing Retreat

August 11–24, 2026

Participant Guide

WORKSHOP INSTRUCTORS

Shane Hollander is the bestselling author of three novels, most recently Lacuna Variations (Knopf), and is the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has led this retreat for the past two years.

Ilya Rozanov is the #1 NYT Bestselling author of Clubfist (FSG). His writing has appeared in The Paris Review. He was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and was named to Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists list.

PARTICIPANTS

Kristin Applebees

MFA candidate, second year. BA from Barnard College. Former youth pastor.

Current project: A novel-in-stories about a young woman’s departure from the evangelical megachurch where she was raised in suburban Dallas. Blends autofiction with sermon transcripts, group text threads, and annotated hymn lyrics.

Marisol Park

MFA candidate, second year. Published in Granta (No. 164). BA from University of San Diego.

Current project: A novel about three generations of a Korean family running a textile business in Manhattan’s Garment District, told in reverse chronological order. 

Clint Oswald

MFA candidate, first year. Former food writer for the Kansas City Star. BA from Kenyon College.

Current project: A novel exploring contemporary American masculinity through the world of competitive barbecue on the Kansas City circuit. 

Risa Dunham

MFA candidate, second year. BA in Journalism from Northwestern. Five years at the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Current project: A novel about a fictional rural Ohio town devastated by the opioid crisis, structured around a single week in an overwhelmed county coroner’s office.

Tess Kowalski

MFA candidate, first year. Poet (three chapbooks, Tinderbox Editions) pivoting to prose.

Current project: A fragmentary lyric-novel about a Polish-American woman cataloging her late grandmother’s apartment in Chicago. 

Joseph G. Levitt

MFA candidate, first year. Former tech product manager at Stripe. BS from MIT, MS from Stanford (Computer Science).

Current project: A novel about a group of graduate students building an AI startup that begins to consume their personal relationships. 

RETREAT COORDINATOR

Vanessa Andrade — Program Coordinator, Columbia University MFA. All logistical questions, scheduling conflicts, dietary needs, and emergencies should be directed to Diane. She can be reached at vanessa.andrade@columbia.edu or by calling the front desk at the Lodge.

SUGGESTED DAILY SCHEDULE

Times are approximate. Meals are served at the Lodge. Coffee is always available.

7:30 AM

Breakfast at the Hiker’s Café

9:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Morning Workshop Session (all participants)

Craft discussion and group critique led by the day’s lead instructor. Manuscripts should be read in advance. Please bring a copy of your marked-up notes for the author.

12:00 – 1:00 PM

Lunch at the Hiker’s Café

1:00 – 3:00 PM

Free time / Individual writing

Use this time to write, rest, hike, or visit the park.

3:00 – 5:00 PM

Individual Conferences

Sign up for a 30-minute one-on-one session with either instructor. The sign-up sheet will be posted on the cottage door each morning.

6:00 PM

Dinner at the Inn

7:30 – 9:30 PM

Evening Session. See the two-week calendar below for details.

TWO-WEEK CALENDAR

WEEK ONE

Day 1 — Monday, August 11  —  Arrival & Orientation

Participants arrive by 2:00 PM. Settle into rooms.

3:00 PM: Welcome & introductions in the cottage common area.

6:00 PM: Group dinner at the Inn.

7:30 PM: Opening craft talk — Shane Hollander on “The Architecture of a Scene.”

Day 2 — Tuesday, August 12  —  Workshop Begins

Morning session led by Shane Hollander. Manuscripts: Applebees, Park

Afternoon: Individual conferences with Ilya Rozanov.

Evening craft talk –Ilya Rozanov: Topic TBD

Day 3 — Wednesday, August 13

Morning session led by Ilya Rozanov. Manuscripts: Oswald, Dunham

Afternoon: Individual conferences with Shane Hollander.

Evening craft talk — Shane Hollander on “Character, Place, Plot”

Day 4 — Thursday, August 14

Morning session led by Shane Hollander. Manuscripts: Kowalski, Levitt

Afternoon: Individual conferences (both instructors available).

Evening craft talk–Ilya Rozanov: Topic TBD

Day 5 — Friday, August 15

Morning session led by Ilya Rozanov. Second round: Applebees, Park

Afternoon: Free. Group hike to Perkins Memorial Tower optional (meet at Lodge, 1:30 PM).

Evening craft talk – Shane Hollander on “Building a Character”

Day 6 — Saturday, August 16  —  Rest Day

No formal sessions. Writing time.

Optional afternoon excursion to the Appalachian Trail (meet at Lodge, 10:00 AM).

6:00 PM: Casual group dinner at the Inn.

Day 7 — Sunday, August 17

Morning session led by Shane Hollander. Second round: Oswald, Dunham

Afternoon: Individual conferences with Ilya Rozanov.

Evening craft talk — Ilya Rozanov: Topic TBD 

WEEK TWO

Day 8 — Monday, August 18

Morning session led by Ilya Rozanov. Second round: Kowalski, Levitt

Afternoon: Individual conferences with Shane Hollander.

Evening craft talk – Shane Hollander on “Precision and Restraint: Self-Editing.”

Day 9 — Tuesday, August 19

Morning session led by Shane Hollander. New pages from Applebees, Park

Afternoon: Individual conferences (both instructors).

Evening craft talk — Ilya Rozanov: Topic TBD 

Day 10 — Wednesday, August 20

Morning session led by Ilya Rozanov. New pages from Oswald, Dunham

Afternoon: Free. Writing time encouraged; revised drafts due Day 12.

Evening craft talk –  Shane Hollander on “The ‘Final’ Draft”

Day 11 — Thursday, August 22

Morning: Free. Reading time encouraged; draft discussion on Day 12.

Afternoon: Optional visit to Hyde Park / FDR Presidential Library.

Evening craft talk – Ilya Rozanov: Topic TBD

Day 12 — Friday, August 23

Morning session led by both instructors. Discussion of all revised drafts.

Afternoon: Final individual conferences (both instructors).

Evening: Open mic / participant readings (voluntary). 

Day 13 — Saturday, August 24  —  Rest & Revision Day

No formal sessions. Use this day to revise and prepare final portfolio pages.

6:00 PM: Group dinner at the Inn.

Evening: Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov read from their current works-in-progress

Day 14 — Sunday, August 25  —  Final Day & Departure

9:00 – 11:30 AM: Final workshop session, co-led. Each participant shares one revised page and receives closing feedback.

11:30 AM: Closing remarks.

Departure by 3:00 PM. Car service available; sign up with Vanessa by Day 12.

Please note: This schedule is subject to change at the discretion of the instructors and coordinator.

Questions? Email Vanessa at vanessa.andrade@columbia.edu

Ilya glanced through the packet, tossed it aside. “Okay I am done.”

Shane made a sound of exasperation. “Read it. We have only until the afternoon to prep. There will be a brief meet and greet when the students arrive, and then we’ll all have dinner at the Lodge. Tomorrow we get to work.”

Ilya was beginning to get a headache, and wondered if he was allergic to whatever the stone bunker smelled of. At least it was cool inside; the thick stone provided shelter from the heat, so that opening a window to air the place out would actually let warm heat inside.

He dragged out a chair and sat down at the table opposite Shane, rested his chin on his hands. When Shane still didn’t look up, he kicked him under the table. “Hollander.”

“What.”

“You are being a child.”

Shane’s scowl was even more precious behind his glasses. “I am trying to work. I’m here to do a job.”

“And what exactly do you think I’m doing here?”

Shane’s pen paused in its scratching. “I have no idea,” he said hoarsely.

Ilya swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry, and he got up to fill a glass from the small sink in the kitchenette. He couldn’t help remembering the last time they were alone in a room together, how Shane had hovered over him so carefully, as if his desire was something to be afraid of—and how he had held his head in his hands after, silhouetted against the sea.

Ilya adjusted himself before he turned around. “I am here to work also,” he said. “I…I need the money.”

After a moment, Shane put his pen down and swiveled in his seat. “I thought you got a six-figure advance for Clubfist.”

This is not a conversation Ilya is interested in having, but neither does he want Shane Hollander thinking he came here on purpose, just to see him. “It went to pay my father’s medical bills, in Russia.” It was easier than saying, I paid my brother to ensure our father did not lie in his own shit. “That’s finished now, but—”

“Finished?”

Ilya’s mouth twisted. “Well, he is dead, so yes. Finished. Sveta thinks I will have earned out this royalty period, with the bestseller bonuses, but maybe not. Either way, I have to wait until the royalty checks come in.”

“How have you…” Shane paused, then said, “It’s none of my business.”

“No,” Ilya said wryly. “It is not. Why are you here, then? You need the money?” This was sarcastic; writers, even bestselling ones, were rarely wealthy, but Shane would hardly be in need of a backbreaking $15k.

“No, I…” he flushed, and looked away. “I like teaching,” he admitted. “I like talking about writing, with other people who like talking about writing. I like thinking about what works and what doesn’t. The patterns that emerge in the way we tell stories, and how and when to break those patterns. It makes me a better writer, to do this.”

There was no reason that should have felt like a confession, but in this dank, dark room, it did, as if Shane was being just as vulnerable in admitting he cared about his work, as Ilya was in admitting he was nearly broke.

“Okay,” Ilya said at last, because he couldn’t think of anything else. They looked at each other for another beat, and then Shane went back to his notes, and Ilya went back to his room, sat on the squeaking bed, and began to read through the packet.

Chapter End Notes

https://www.lucindasnyc.com/
It’s not semi-ironic (whatever that means), it’s just great. Dan is one of those people who knows when something is cool, he just doesn’t know WHY it’s cool

If y’all come at The English Patient, I swear I’ll—

Well I’ll be sad.

Would Ilya make $15,000 doing this? Stranger things have happened but also no they really haven’t

Do I know how MFAs work? I do not. Is this something people get to do? Probably not. Are the stone cottages at Bear Mountain this awful? Maybe? There’s no way they don’t have roaches though.

Re: Bear Mountain - I have never stayed there, though I did take my kiddos to ride the carousel and hike a bunch. It’s actually lovely, very old school, I just think these stone cottages look shady as heck.

ETA: sorry for the confusion, the cottages are called cottages but they are not The Cottage - this is Rosings Park. I just don't want you all to get sad.

Chapter 7: twice i have lived forever in a smile

Heaven forbid! — That would be the greatest misfortune of all! — To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! — Do not wish me such an evil.

The students, when they arrived, seemed a little dismayed by the accommodations, but game enough, and they split into pairs that Ilya suspected were based on sexual preference. Not that there would be much fucking, probably, given how loud the bedsprings were. He could only imagine the outraged expression on Hollander’s face if he was awakened at two in the morning by some rhythmic squeaking.

On second thoughts, Ilya sort of hoped the children did misbehave.

Not that they were children at all—two of them (Clint and Risa) were several years older than he was, and had the aggressively jaded attitude of people who “were in the newspaper business.” Never mind that Clint wrote a BBQ column. (Risa clearly despised him, so that was fun).

Marisol and Tess were rooming together, and spoke avidly about the immigrant experience in a way that only slightly made Ilya want to thump them; Marisol was half-Korean, half-Mexican, and her family had a home in Malibu. At least Tess was from the Bronx, and her grandmother actually had emigrated from Poland.

Kristin, the recovered evangelist, was very sweet, and regarded Ilya with a sort of wide-eyed terror. She loved Shane, though, and was rooming with Risa, while Joe, the nerdiest of the bunch, was clearly very unhappy about rooming with Clint.

All of this was established over dinner at the Inn, an enormous room with an enormous stone fireplace (unlit), evoking a high-end hunting lodge in the 1950s. The group had a “tasting menu,” which meant the University had pre-approved all of the cheapest options. Ilya watched as, down the table, Shane picked at his grilled chicken breast, and once again ate mostly salad.

Once they moved on to dessert, Vanessa-the-Coordinator tapped her glass. “I just wanted to say a few words before we all turn in for the night. First of all, welcome, everyone. We're so thrilled to have you here at Bear Mountain for what I know is going to be an incredibly enriching two weeks. I hope you all know how lucky you are to have such incredible—and incredibly different—authors working with you on this retreat.”

“He writes quiet novels about sad people,” Ilya said, tipping his chair back onto two legs. “I write loud novels about sad people.”

Everyone laughed—except, Ilya noticed, Shane.

“This isn’t going to be much of a vacation, I’m afraid,” Shane said, and the children all swiveled toward him, like plants toward light. “We’re going to drill down deep, engaging with your own work, and with each other’s. Ilya and I will be providing criticism, of course”—there were some groans, some nervous giggles—“but it will be constructive, offering actionable feedback all along the way, and helping you write the book you really want to write.”

Vanessa bid them farewell on their way back to the stone cottage. “I’m staying at the Lodge tonight and then heading back to the city in the morning—but if you need anything, any of you, don’t hesitate to contact me! And of course you have the Bear Mountain Inn staff if you need anything.”

“Thank you, Vanessa,” Shane said. “We appreciate you.”

Ilya kept quiet, but he smiled at her when she leaned in for a handshake, pulled her in for a hug.

“We are all so lucky you were available at the last minute, Ilya,” she said.

“Yes,” Shane echoed. “So very lucky.”

They moved as a herd away from the bright lights of the Inn, following the gravel path into the darkness, the children using their phones as flashlights, giggling vaguely and talking about how many stars they could see. Ilya walked a few steps behind Shane, idly shining his own phone flashlight at his ass, much more appealing than a few speckles of stars. He wasn’t wearing his cute so-short shorts, instead a pair of cargo shorts that fell to mid-thigh, and honest-to-god Tevas and a plaid hiking shirt complete with vents. It was tragic.

“So,” Ilya said, because one of them had to say something. “You like hiking?”

Shane paused just long enough for Ilya to catch up, their steps falling briefly into sync on the gravel. “Yeah. I guess.”

“I don’t know anything about hiking. It’s just walking, right?”

“Basically.”

“So why do you need special clothes?” Ilya gestured at Shane’s general air of middle-aged dad. “We hike from the restaurant to the cottage, do you need those…what are they, the ski poles old people use on trails?”

Shane huffed an annoyed breath, picked up his pace again. “Leave me alone.”

Ilya laughed quietly, shook his head. The trees pressed in close on either side of the path, black pillars forming an arch overhead. “Maybe we will get lost. Did you bring a compass? Which one is the North Star? You were a Boy Scout, yes?”

“No.”

“What’s the one that’s smaller than a Boy Scout—a Cub Scout? You were a baby Boy Scout?”

“No.”

Up ahead, Joe said, “Uh, anyone remember which cottage is ours?” He was turning in a slow circle, his phone flashlight illuminating a confusing array of identical stone paths.

Shane sped up, his strides lengthening. “Yeah. I’ve got it.”

He led them unerringly, and when they all piled into the cottage, Ilya hovered in the doorway; the place felt a lot smaller with eight people in it. Shane cleared his throat, shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts. “Okay. So there’s just the one bathroom, and yeah, that’s less than ideal. I’ve drawn up a schedule—”

Ilya snorted loudly, and Shane glared at him.

“—But ideally, we will all take turns showering—quick showers, please—during break periods throughout the day, rather than all waiting to go at night or first thing in the morning. If anyone really needs—”

“I,” Ilya announced loudly, “am going to piss on a tree.”

After a moment, Clint and Joe came with him, as did Marisol and Risa, though they wandered off into the bushes rather than standing against three sycamores in a row, like widely-spaced urinals. The bark was rough and cool beneath Ilya’s palm when he braced himself, and the air was thick and close with the sounds of crickets.

Tess was still in the shower when they came back inside, so Ilya brushed his teeth in the sink in the kitchenette. “Goodnight everyone,” he called, and received a chorus of goodnights in response.

He tapped at Shane’s bedroom door.

“Come in.” He was sitting on his bed with his back against the headboard, knees drawn up, a steaming mug in his hand, his glasses on. He’d changed into a soft gray t-shirt and flannel pajama pants, and his feet were bare against the threadbare comforter.

Ilya leaned against the doorframe, crossed his arms to make his biceps bulge. “So.”

Shane didn’t even glance up, just turned a page in his book. “So what.”

Ilya straightened, shut the door behind him, and took the two steps necessary to stand next to the bed, so close he could smell Shane’s chamomile-mint tea. “I was thinking,” he said in a low voice, “that you probably want to suck my dick.”

Shane lowered his book. “And what,” he said coldly, “makes you think that?”

Everything about you, Ilya wanted to say. Everything about the way you look when I touch you, the way I feel when you look at me. “You seemed to enjoy it last time.”

Shane kept his face very still, but there were so many other signs, if you knew to look for them: the way his pupils dilated, dark against dark brown irises, the way his breathing stop-started. He was so much more expressive than he realized. “This isn’t,” he said at last, “an appropriate time or place.”

He wasn’t wrong. Ilya shouldn’t have brought it up at all. And yet.

He stretched out a hand, gripped the back of Shane’s neck, not hard. He dragged his thumb across that full bottom lip, and when it opened, he pressed against Shane’s tongue—not hard, just enough to feel it. Shane’s breath gusted out hot.

“No,” Ilya said softly. “It isn’t.”

He pulled his thumb away, and Shane closed his eyes.

Ilya let himself out, went into his own room, shut the door, and lay down on his bed, pressing the thumb still wet with Shane’s spit to his own mouth. Slowly the cottage began to settle, until at last he heard an electric toothbrush in the bathroom, and the splashing of a double cleanse.

In the morning, Kristin Applebees was scheduled to go first. “I know I need to get the conflict dialed in,” she said. “Right now it’s…”

“It’s great,” Shane said. “I know what you’re talking about, you’re worried about the transition from faith to lack of faith. But that will come through the details, the texture that you add. You can build that without laying it out explicitly.”

They were sitting outside, in a grassy patch of shade. Shane’s legs were crossed beneath him, his glasses on, and Ilya leaned back on his palms, one foot stacked atop the other. The children had arranged themselves in a rough semi-circle on the grass, laptops balanced on their thighs, Joe cross-legged on a towel he’d brought from the bathroom, which Ilya respected.

Kristin nodded earnestly. “Yes. I don’t want it to be like, in chapter seven she believed in God, in chapter eight she didn’t. I mean, that’s just not how faith works. I still struggle with—”

Marisol coughed slightly, nudged her sneaker against Joe’s sneaker. Risa typed something on her computer; Ilya suspected she was posting on BlueSky.

“That makes perfect sense,” Shane said. “It ought to be gradual, there doesn’t have to be some big epiphany—”

“Write a scene where she sins,” Ilya said.

Shane sent him a quelling look that he ignored, sitting up and brushing grass from his palms. “Not a big sin, a little one. Like, she eats cheese during Lent. Or whatever it is she would do,” he said, “I don’t know, I only know Russian Orthodox. It’s just an example.”

“Okay,” Kristin said slowly. “I mean, Christian Evangelicals do not celebrate Lent, but I see what you mean. Maybe she kisses a boy.”

“Or a girl,” Marisol said.

“That’s probably too big a sin,” Clint said.

“The point is,” Ilya said, “she doesn’t feel guilty about it. She expects to, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t hate herself for it, she doesn’t talk to God about it, she just lets it be. And maybe that lack of guilt, it’s a loss, yes?”

Shane shifted, uncrossed his legs. “Wait, what do you mean?”

Ilya tilted his head back to look at the dappling leaves, trying to think. It had been a very long time since he’d experienced guilt. “When you feel guilty, it’s because you owe someone something, yes? And you’ve failed to deliver? But without that, you owe nothing to anyone. No one expects anything better of you, or for you. You are free of”—he scrambled for the word in English—“of penitence, of feeling like you have to atone—but that means there is no one who cares enough to ask you to.”

Tess made a breathy “hmm” sound, and Joe placed his elbows on his knees. Shane said, thoughtfully, “Okay. Yeah.”

“But how do I make that clear on the page?” Kristin asked in a small voice. “I mean, yeah, that’s…that’s right, but I don’t want to just come out and say that…”

Shane picked up a leaf and began shredding it, dragging his closely-trimmed thumbnail along the spine, pulling it free. “When she prays, what does she imagine? Who does she think is listening? Because if you can seed that early in the book, and have it fade away, that can serve as your absence.”

“Like a bearded guy in the clouds?” Marisol said, a little sardonically.

Shane’s face flickered with irritation. “No. Like…it’s your book,” he said, smiling warmly at Kristin, “and your character, so this isn’t going to be right, these are just suggestions. But maybe she imagines a figure from a children’s book, or her mother’s dead aunt. Someone not real, but real to her…is there anything in that idea that you could use?”

“Um.”

It was so obvious to Ilya, what Shane was suggesting. It was the glasses on the billboard in Gatsby, Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother. He opened his mouth to say as much, but before he had the chance, Shane said:

“Here, in chapter six, she’s praying—what does she see? Who does she imagine she’s talking to? Right now it’s sort of nebulous.”

“Well, sure,” Risa said. “It’s God. Hard to get very specific about that.”

“Is it, though?” Shane asked. “This is fiction, and the best way to make it feel real to the reader—to make it be real in all the ways that matter—is to make it as specific as possible.” He leaned forward, and Kristin scooted closer, and the rest of the group drew in a little as well, the circle tightening.

Ilya stayed where he was, watching Shane guide Kristin in excavating her story, like an archaeologist carefully brushing away the dirt to help her see the  bones that were already there, underneath. He was so patient, and it should have been boring—Ilya would have been bored if it was him, would have thrown out one possibility and then another and another until he finally gave Kristin the one she wanted and they could all move on. But Shane didn’t do that; he wanted her to find her own way, and he held her hand all the way there.

By the time Shane released Kristin from the gentle vise of his attention, she had the glassy, inward look that meant she’d left the conversation and was inside her book. Shane looked up and saw Ilya watching him, and Ilya was the one who looked away.

“Are we done, then?” Ilya asked, to cover his own fluster. “Was enough, yes? We can move on?”

Shane’s chin went up. “When it’s your turn to run the session, we can move at your pace, but for now—”

“You move like a glacier. We have six students and a lot to get through.”

“Right, yes—remind me what your talk is about tonight? Any idea at all?”

Ilya shrugged. “Not everybody has to plan out every single thing they will do. Some of us are naturally more creative.”

“Is that what we’re calling it.”

“Is this a bit you two do a lot?” Tess asked, interrupting. “It’s hilarious, this old married couple routine.”

Shane’s mouth dropped open. “No. I mean…no. We barely know each other.”

Joe’s eyes scrunched, confused. “Really? I totally thought you guys were friends.”

Ilya barked out a laugh, too loud—but it was hilarious, the idea that he and uptight Shane Hollander would be friends. “No. Definitely not.”

Shane glanced at him, his mouth tightening, but all he said was, “Okay, Marisol. You’re up.”

Ilya’s lecture that night was on the advantages of writing without an outline. He didn’t even necessarily believe in what he was saying (he had a beat sheet for his current manuscript, and had used one for Clubfist, even if neither were particularly detailed) but he took great pleasure in the way it made Shane squirm with discomfort and anxiety, as if the mere thought of winging it was enough to make him break out in hives.

He was so unhappy that he marched off on his own for a walk as soon as the talk was finished. “Don’t forget your compass!” Ilya hollered after him. “And watch for bears!”

“There aren’t any bears,” he snapped, and slammed the door.

Ilya thought there probably were; why else would it be called “Bear Mountain”?

By the time Shane returned, most of the children had occupied themselves with playing Never Have I Ever while drinking from a bottle of cheap whiskey. Ilya declined to join them, knowing all too well the hangover he’d have in the morning if he did. He would have considered it if Shane wanted to play, but he disappeared into the bathroom and came out with rosy cheeks, his hair spiky and wet.

“Goodnight,” he said to the room at large, and shut himself in his bedroom.

Eventually Ilya did the same; if you weren’t drinking yourself, drunk people posturing at one another were not particularly entertaining. He still had plenty of reading to catch up on, especially since he’d be leading tomorrow’s discussion. He stripped down to his boxers and flung the comforter back, intending to let Clint’s self-congratulatory manuscript (#notallmen was a phrase used more than once) lull him to sleep.

And then he let out an undignified yelp when he saw the large—how was it so large, the thing was big enough to drive a car—brown antennaed monster in his bed.

His door burst open. Shane’s hair was sticking up on one side, he was wearing his threadbare t-shirt and pajama pants, and he looked ready to fight a bear, if in fact there were any. “What happened?”

The children crowded around behind him, craning their necks, and Ilya rubbed the back of his neck, fighting the very uncharacteristic impulse to cover himself with a sheet to protect his modesty. “There was a bug.”

Shane’s mouth twitched, just a little. “A bug?”

“Was a very big bug!” Ilya protested. “In my bed!”

“Oh, ew, was it a cockroach?” Marisol said. “Because I cannot deal with those, no way. If there are cockroaches here, I’m leaving, I swear to god.”

“It’s fine,” Shane said. “I’ll handle it.” He shooed the children away and closed the door behind him, leaving the two of them alone in Ilya’s room. For a moment, they just stood there, and then Shane crossed over and peered down at the monster in Ilya’s bed. “He’s a big guy, all right.”

He plucked a tissue from the nightstand and picked it up. Ilya shuddered.

“Squash it,” he said. “So the guts come out.”

“No, thank you,” Shane said. But he wrapped it in several more tissues and pressed hard, killing it, before dropping it into the garbage can. He made a face, and Ilya tossed him some hand-sanitizer.

“My hero,” Ilya said. He meant it to come out sarcastic.

Shane grinned at him, and Ilya felt it like a gust of wind, swaying where he stood. “You’re welcome,” he said smugly.

Ilya stepped in close, and Shane’s smile faded, his eyes shifting back and forth between Ilya’s. “How can I reward you?” Ilya said softly.

“You can stop giving terrible writing advice,” Shane said, but there was no bite to it, and he fluttered his eyes closed as Ilya kissed him.

He tasted like mint and chamomile again, wholesome and clean—but that wasn’t how he kissed. Shane opened his mouth immediately, sucked on Ilya’s tongue, moaned.

“Shh,” Ilya murmured against his mouth. “Children will hear.”

“Then stop,” Shane whispered back. But his hand ran down Ilya’s back, his fingers cool against his skin, settling at the base of his spine, fingers digging in the valley below. Ilya kissed him deep and filthy, then pulled back just far enough to look at him. Shane’s lips were red and swollen, a flush spreading down below the collar of his t-shirt, and Ilya bent to kiss the base of his throat, dragged his mouth up to his ear. “I want to fuck you,” he whispered.

Shane’s breath stuttered and his hips thrust forward. “We can’t.”

This was true, of course—they couldn’t even kiss like this, not here, but they were. Ilya slid his hand into Shane’s pajama bottoms, making him moan again.

“Shh,” he said, and brought his hand back up, held it to his mouth. “Lick,” he ordered.

Shane shuddered and obeyed, working his tongue over Ilya’s hand with a thoroughness that made his stomach clench, and when his palm was wet Ilya brought it back down, running it over Shane’s dick, making him gasp. Shane’s fingers dug into Ilya’s ass before tugging at his boxers, pulling back with a frown. “Do you have lube?” Shane asked.

Ilya did, but he wasn’t willing to let him go long enough to fetch it—because what if he changed his mind, what if he left, what if this was all Ilya was ever going to get—“Spit in your hand,” he said, shrugging.

Shane made a face, and then he glanced at Ilya’s mouth and then away. “Uh. Can you do it?”

“What difference does it make?”

Shane closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “It’s better,” he said thickly, “when you do it. Please.”

Ilya’s mouth went dry, and for a moment he worried whether he actually could, much as he now wanted to. He shut his eyes, squeezed his hand hard around Shane’s cock, thought about sucking it, and worked up enough saliva to be useful. Shane watched him with parted lips and dark, glassy eyes as Ilya spat into his palm.

“God,” Shane breathed, and then his slick hand was inside Ilya’s boxers, and Ilya had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from making a sound.

Their rhythm was fast, a little clumsy, Shane’s hair was in Ilya’s face, it tickled, and the angle was all wrong and his wrist was cramping but none of that mattered with Shane’s forehead pressed hard against Ilya’s collarbone, his breath coming in hot damp bursts.

Ilya tugged sharply on his hair, and Shane gasped. Ilya quickly covered his mouth with his, smothering his cry as he came, as Ilya came with him, hot and wet and so hard, fuck, on and on just from a not-quite-slippery-enough thirty-second handjob, and they kissed all the way through it, panting into each other’s open mouths.

Ilya came out of it slowly, growing aware of the laughter in the common room, of the cricket singing below the window.

“Fuck,” Shane said, and dropped his head to Ilya’s shoulder, turned his face in to his neck.

Ilya’s clean hand came up to cup the back of his head, stroking gently up into the short hairs at the base of his neck, holding him close as Shane’s breathing evened out, as he rubbed his nose against Ilya’s throat.

“You should go,” Ilya said roughly, “before they notice.”

Shane lifted his head. “Right. Yeah.” His eyes were heavy-lidded and still a little glazed, but his mouth curved in a small, sweet, slightly dopey smile.

It made Ilya feel a little sick, made his heart race faster than it had during the sex, and he dropped his hands, stepping back. “Goodnight then.”

Shane blinked, his eyes refocusing. He glanced down at himself, made a face at his wet pajamas.

“It’s okay,” Ilya said. “Go straight to bed, they are drunk. They won’t notice.”

Shane nodded, his mouth turned down with worry, and Ilya had to look away, and busied himself with straightening his comforter to keep from kissing him again.

“Goodnight,” Shane said softly, and closed the door behind him.

Chapter 8: i like my body when it is with your body

Chapter Notes

Do you talk by rule, then, when you are dancing?

And so the days passed, sweaty and dull and glorious. Shane delivered his expert lectures, complete with handouts and worksheets, while Ilya flew by the seat of his track pants, starting a lecture with a vague idea of what it would be about and ending up somewhere completely different, feeling like he understood his own work better by the end of it.

Shane excelled at the one-on-ones, working studiously with the children as they fretted over word choice, character arc, and whether it was really okay to use the word “said” so many times, shouldn’t it be “responded” or “uttered” or “stated”?

“No,” Ilya heard him say, again and again. “‘Said’ is invisible, the reader skips over it to what matters—which is your dialogue.”

Ilya didn’t have that sort of patience. He told Risa that there was in fact such a thing as too much research and too little writing, told Clint that saying his work was equally indebted to Don Delillo and Guy Fieri made him sound like an asshat, told Tess her work was very good, actually, to keep at it, but for the love of god to end a sentence once in a while.

But he was good at rallying the troops, getting them writing, getting them thinking and plotting and discussing. He read their work aloud to them to help them hear when their syntax and dialogue was off, and he woke them in the morning by standing on a chair and shouting the opening lines of Day of the Oprichnik. And he was writing, too, fast and sexy, his sex-addicted carousel operator giving spit-soaked handjobs while the hard plastic horses whirled, the children (actual children) who rode them blissfully unaware.

And every day, when everyone else went for a post-lunch hike, Ilya and Shane raced back to the cottage, bursting through the door and kissing before it had even slammed closed, Shane’s back hitting the wall, Ilya’s hands already under his SPF-treated hiking shirt, finding the damp warm skin beneath. They didn’t fuck, didn’t even do anything beyond jacking each other off (at least they used lube) but they took their time, pants around their ankles, foreheads resting together, watching, as Ilya slid his foreskin up over Shane’s cock, slowly, back and forth, precome mixing slick and hot between them. Until Shane at last began to beg, to bite at Ilya’s shoulder so he couldn’t wear tank tops, and it was too fucking hot for that but he could never seem to remember in the moment—he wanted Shane to leave a mark, to be able run his fingers over the imprints left by his teeth.

One afternoon Ilya made everyone ride the merry-go-round, a crowd of adults standing in line with the eight-year-olds, the summer sun prickling their skin while the tinny mechanical waltz played on a loop. Shane looked deeply uncomfortable as they waited, head bowed, hands in his pockets, but he clambered up onto a beige stallion gamely enough, his legs straddling the pole, strong thighs spread with an embarrassed little smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, and Ilya rode beside him on a turkey (there were several turkeys, along with deer and bears, obviously), hunched over in an attempt to hide his hard-on.

The two weeks passed faster than Ilya would ever have thought possible, until somehow they were nearing the final day. Vanessa had appeared, smiling, promptly at nine a.m., a carton of Starbucks in hand that Ilya was most grateful for after two weeks of Keurig.

“How’s it going?” she asked brightly.

“Fine,” Shane said. “Ilya and I, well, we have very different styles, and I disagree with a lot of what he says, but…”

Ilya waited, eyebrow raised, to see if Shane was actually capable of saying something nice about his teaching. Or his writing, for that matter. He took a long, deliberate sip of his Starbucks.

“It works,” he finished at last. “Our approaches are…complementary.”

Vanessa nodded encouragingly. “Great! That’s great! Maybe you’ll want to come back next year, Ilya?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Ilya said. He was feeling a little disgruntled by “it works,” as if Shane thought him incapable of doing what was, in fact, a pretty basic task: read something, then say what you think about it.

“Well, we can hope, can’t we, Shane?”

“Yes,” Shane said neutrally.

“Are you guys going to come along on the field trip to Hyde Park?”

Ilya could think of little he’d rather do less than visit the mansion of a dead American president. “No thanks,” he said, even as Shane shook his head.

“No,” Shane said, glancing at him, a quick sidelong flick of the eyes that Ilya felt like fingertips on the back of his neck. “We’re going to stay here, I think.”

Ilya felt a little twist of anticipation at that; the children would be gone for hours. Would Shane agree to let Ilya fuck him, at last? He’d kept lube and condoms tucked under his pillow every night, just in case.

He spent the morning writing furiously, loud and horny and funny and mean—mean to his hero, mean to his reader, mean to everyone. He liked it, it was sharp, the kind of thing that would piss people off and sell lots of copies. Maybe his hero would die at the end, crushed by carousel horse, or maybe a carousel turkey.

And then, finally, he stood beside Shane in front of the cottage and watched the van pull away, kicking up a cloud of gray gravel dust—and before it was even out of sight he turned to Shane and said, “The kids are with the babysitter. We can fuck now, yes?”

Shane laughed, tipping his head back, his eyes bright. “Wow, Rozanov. You’re that desperate.”

He was, but obviously he wasn’t going to admit that. “You want me to,” he said instead, stepping in close, backing Shane up against the stone wall of the cottage. The stone was warm, heat-soaked from the day, and Shane’s shoulders pressed flat against it as Ilya crowded into him, one hand braced beside his head. “You’ve wanted me to since the first day. I’ve never seen anyone who wanted to be fucked as badly as you. You need it, don’t you, Shane Hollander? You need my cock in your ass, you need me to bend you over and make you take it…”

Shane’s eyes had gone dark and his breath short, and he licked his lips. But what he said was, “I was thinking we’d go on a hike.”

Ilya pulled back, staring at him. “What?”

Shane’s mouth twitched in that one-sided little smile. “There’s a trail I do every year. I think you’ll like it.”

“A hike,” Ilya said, disbelieving. “You want to go on a hike. Right now.”

Shane pushed on his chest, his smile widening. “Yeah. Come on, let’s get going. But put on some sunscreen first, for god’s sake.”

Shane went inside and returned with a backpack and a tube of SPF 50 and a worn Yankees cap that he put on his own head, pulling it low over his eyes. He looked like someone’s suburban dad, and Ilya imagined pinning him against the porch railing and making him come all over his khaki shorts. It was obscene, the degree to which Ilya wanted him.

“Fine,” he managed, and squeezed out a dollop, rubbing it vigorously all over his face. “Short hike, then we fuck after.”

Shane rubbed a thumb into Ilya’s nose, then his eyebrow. “We’ll see.”

They walked past the Inn and the carousel, past families picnicking on the lawn. It was hot, and the trail was dusty, and Ilya was wearing all black. His t-shirt clung to his back within fifteen minutes. “This is so fun,” he said, as they stood aside to let a group of six go past. “Really. What a way to spend a ninety-degree afternoon. I could be eating your ass right now.”

“Shut up,” Shane hissed, then smiled warmly at the shocked-looking woman who’d clearly heard them. “English isn’t his first language. He meant…”

“Yes, Shane?” Ilya said, entertained. “What did I mean?”

The woman glared at them and stomped off, muttering something about rubbing it in people’s faces.

“You’re such an asshole,” Shane snapped, and Ilya shrugged.

The trail switchbacked up through oaks, pines, and the occasional maple. There were stone stairs carved into the rock much of the time, but occasionally you were expected to just scramble up the granite—Ilya watched as Shane did so nimbly, his thighs working, and heaved another regretful sigh.

“Out of shape?” Shane called back.

Well, after that, hiking got a lot more interesting. They shoved each other out of the way, tumbling into the mountain laurel, laughing as they raced up the trail. Shane was faster on the scrambles, but Ilya’s legs were a bit longer, and he ran the stairs two at a time, his lungs burning, sweat running into his eyes.

Shane tugged at his shirt—Ilya felt the threads snap at the collar—using it to haul himself up, and so Ilya grabbed Shane around the waist as they staggered together into a patch of shade, laughing.

Shane took off his backpack, unzipped it and tossed Ilya a bottle of water. Ilya frowned. “Oh, you had handicap. It’s not fair.”

Shane grinned, his cheeks red beneath his baseball cap. “So I definitely won, then.”

Ilya took a mouthful of water and spit it at him.

They went on, the trail leveling off and then climbing again, and they kept pace with each other now, shoulder to shoulder when the path allowed it, elbows knocking. And then Shane tugged at Ilya’s arm, pulling him off the trail. “The summit has a parking lot,” he explained. “It’s crowded, not really worth it. But there’s another overlook this way.”

Ilya picked his way through the brush, a little wary. “What about rattlesnakes?”

“You scared?”

“No,” Ilya said, sulkily. “What about poison ivy? Or ticks?” He’d read about all of those on the train ride up from the city, and did not want to encounter any of them.

Shane turned around, his expression serious, as he gestured at Ilya’s long pants, his sneakers—“you’ll be fine, and we can do a tick check when we get back if you like. I’ll point out any poison ivy I see, and as for snakes…” He pursed his lips. “I’ve never seen one, but it’s not like I’m here very often. The view really is incredible, but we can absolutely turn around if you want to.”

He was so earnest, and while Ilya did in fact want to turn around, wanted to run back down the mountain before the kids got back from their field trip—he also wanted to see Shane’s precious view, wanted Shane to show it to him, as proud as if he’d been the one to heave this little mountain up from the earth.

“We climbed all the way up here,” he said begrudgingly.

Shane ducked his head and smiled. They picked their way carefully around a patch of poison ivy—“You don’t want to get it on your clothes,” Shane said, “the oils can still cause an allergic reaction”—but soon emerged onto a bare slab of granite, scattered with some sparse blueberry bushes and a few wind-stunted pines growing at listing angles from between the boulders. They stood a scant foot away from the edge, Shane with his hands on his hips, and looked out over the valley.

The view really was quite something: green hills rolling into blue distance, layer upon layer of them, dotted with the occasional spires of antennas, cell phone towers, but if you looked in the right direction it was almost as if there weren’t any towns or cities or highways, as if this particular patch of the world had never changed, as if no one but the two of them even existed, that no one else breathed or walked or laughed or fucked except them.

And Ilya thought, impossibly, that right now, in this moment, he would be perfectly all right with that.

Shane sat down on the granite, his knees propped up in front of him, and pulled two apples from his backpack, only slightly dented from being bounced around as they ran, and tossed one of them to Ilya. They ate together in silence, their shoulders touching, and Shane went all the way down to the core before frowning at it, holding the sticky remains between his thumb and forefinger.

Ilya took it from him and hurled it into the woods, along with the remains of his own, then lifted Shane’s fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean. Shane’s breath caught, and he watched with darkening eyes as Ilya took his time, pressed his tongue to the pad of each finger, his thumb, the hollow of his palm.

Below them a red-tailed hawk carved circles into the thermals, round and round and round, its wings barely moving. The sun was getting low on the horizon, the light turning golden.

“We don’t have time to go back down and fuck.”

“I know,” Shane said breathlessly.

Ilya looked at him. And then he pulled him in by the front of his ugly shirt, knocked off his stupid baseball cap, and kissed the taste of apple and salt from his mouth. He eased Shane onto his back, settling over him—his knees protested the bite of the granite, but Ilya didn’t care—and Shane moaned, his thighs falling open to cradle Ilya between them.

“We can’t. Someone could—the trail’s right there—”

“I know,” Ilya said, and thrust his hips forward, rocking against him slow and steady.

They couldn’t do anything, really, they could hear kids shouting close by—but Ilya kissed Shane’s freckled cheeks, his ears, his closed eyes, his hair, as Shane’s legs came around his waist, as he ran his hands beneath Ilya’s t-shirt, as he moaned and thrust back, his hips lifting off the granite, as he bit at that place on Ilya’s shoulder, re-marking him.

It was a fuck that wasn’t, and it couldn’t even last long, the kids were coming closer, their indistinct voices resolving into actual words. But Ilya didn’t even care about getting off, not really, the ache between his legs was abstract, ignorable. All he wanted was to feel Shane, to be the only two people in the world for just a little while.

Chapter End Notes

i want you all to know that i recognize the irony is using this chapter title in a chapter that is about NOT having sex

Chapter 9: You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of

Chapter Notes

Angry people are not always wise.

On the last full day it rained, and the children barely left the cottage. They stayed in the common room or in their bedrooms, writing or editing or laughing or flirting—all of the things they had come here to do, and Ilya was happy for them, he was, but it was his last day with Shane and so he also resented them so much he thought he might shatter.

Maybe they’d hook up again after the retreat was over, maybe it could even become a semi-regular thing. They both lived in Brooklyn, after all, although getting from Bushwick to any other part of Brooklyn without riding a bus was a fucking nightmare, and Ilya hated buses. He’d do it for Shane, though, for the opportunity to touch him for longer than a moment, to lie in a bed and see what else might make him whimper, because against all reason or expectation Shane Hollander was the most sexually expressive person Ilya had ever known.

So he told himself to be patient, and he read through the pages he’d written over the past two weeks, trying to determine what to read tonight. He wondered what Shane would read, what sort of labyrinth of a book he was writing this time, whether he was sitting on the porch in the humidity, just out of the rain’s splash zone, typing sentences that would, later, make Ilya weep.

By evening the rain had stopped but the air still felt swollen with it, the musty smell in the cottage turning rank. The children grouped around the unlit fireplace, leaning against one another like puppies, while Ilya and Shane took the two fake leather armchairs. Ilya was reminded of the old man muppets, he could never remember their names, and smiled to himself.

“Okay,” Shane said. “So, now you all get the chance to give us a taste of our own medicine! I’ll go first, yeah?”

“By all means,” Ilya said lazily. He stretched out his legs, crossed one ankle over the other, settling deeper into the chair, which exhaled beneath him.

Shane shot him a quick smile. “The working title—and I’m not married to this—is The Lean of the Land, and it’s about a couple in their sixties, so not too old, but they’ve been together since high school, and they live in the same small beachside town where they grew up, in his parents’ house, though it’s theirs now. And the house is on a cliff that’s eroding, and there’s a storm coming, and there’s question whether they’re going to—well. You’ll see.”

He cleared his throat, put on his glasses, looked down at where his laptop rested on his thighs, and began to read:

“Arthur and Meg walked down to the beach after breakfast, because Arthur had read in AARP Magazine that walking after meals stimulated the metabolism. From below, the cliff face looked much as it had the previous autumn, and every autumn before that, though Arthur had been duly warned at every town meeting for the last ten years that he and all the other residents on the dunes needed to take steps to shore up.

“‘We could do the pilings,’ Meg said. ‘There’s time, before the storm.’

“‘We could,’ Arthur agreed.

“She had a fine face, Meg did, which Arthur knew so well he could map every line and slope, but he no longer saw it when he looked at her—he simply saw Meg, who wore a gray bathrobe and liked it when he brought her lilacs.”

Shane went on reading, painting a picture of a good, slow life, but a thoughtless one. Arthur and Meg moved through their routines like figures in a music box, round and round the same track, and the cliff kept eroding beneath them.

And the baseline annoyance that Ilya had been feeling all day began to gnaw at him again, to vibrate in his legs, a fizzy sort of feeling like his blood was running backwards in his body. Because the chapter was technically perfect, of course it was, it was Shane, but it was also the worst of literary fiction, the self-congratulatory safety of writing beautifully about depressed people doing absolutely nothing.

Shane read a lengthy passage in which Arthur debated internally about whether to plant tomatoes in the spring, and it was exquisite, the prose lush and sure-footed, but it was also infuriating because…because Shane wasn’t like that.

And Shane read:

“Arthur stood at the kitchen window and watched the sky darken over the water. He thought, as he often did, about calling his brother, but it had been some years since they’d spoken, and he wasn’t sure what he’d say.

“‘Do you think we should board the windows?’ Meg asked.

“‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ Arthur said.”

Shane closed his laptop and looked up with an expectant smile—and the children, all of them, burst into applause.

“Holy shit,” Tess said. “That was…god, Shane. It was beautiful.”

“Kazuo Ishiguro at his best,” Joe said.

“So what’s going to happen?” Kristin asked. “Are they going to fix the house in time?”

“Spoilers!” Clint joked.

Shane shook his head. “No. It’s just going to slide into the sea.”

“Of course it is,” Ilya muttered.

Shane’s smile flickered. “Sorry?”

“Nothing. It was very good. Probably you will win another award.”

Shane’s mouth tightened, and his eyes darted over to where the children sat, their mouths dropping open. “If you have feedback, please share it—that’s the whole point of this.”

Ilya looked at the ceiling, at the long crack that ran through it like a fault line. He knew, in the rational, self-preserving part of his brain, that he should say something empty—“Great character work, terrific internality”—and move on and read his own piece and let the evening be all that it was meant to be—a warm, collegial send-off.

Instead he said, “Why does Arthur not call his brother?”

Shane blinked, his head drawing back like a bird’s. “Because he doesn’t know what he’d say. It literally says that—”

“No, I heard you, I know what it says. I’m asking you, why doesn’t he call?”

“Because…” he shook his head, mystified. “I mean, that’s the point. He doesn’t call because he doesn’t. He doesn’t fix the house because he doesn’t. His wife doesn’t leave him because she doesn’t. Their life is a kind of—”

“Yes, I understand the metaphor, I’m asking why.”

“That’s the question the book is asking!”

“The book is not asking it because you are not asking it!” Ilya was leaning forward on his knees, his heel bouncing. He could feel the children’s eyes on them, wide, a little horrified, a little delighted. “Arthur does not call his brother because you will not let him. You will not let him want anything, or try anything, or fail at anything. He doesn’t even plant the fucking tomatoes.”

“He’s afraid—”

“Of what? You’ve written a cold little man who couldn’t recognize himself in a line up! What are you afraid of?”

Marisol tittered, and Shane’s face went red and furious—and Ilya was furious, too—he was absolutely enraged, because he knew that Shane wasn’t cold, was so spectacularly far from it, and if he actually wrote like he fucked, the world would never survive it.

Shane took off his glasses and folded them very carefully. “Thank you for your feedback,” he said stiffly. “I’ll give it some thought. Your newest is called Wooden Horse, isn’t that right? Would you like to read from it now?”

“With fucking pleasure,” Ilya said savagely. His hands were shaking, and he gripped the edges of the laptop to steady them as he read:

“Gregor runs the Carousell at Coney Island from May to September. It’s a 1920s Illions, so each of the wooden horses were hand-carved, not a single one like any of the others. Gregor’s favorite is a mare in the outer ring whose painted eye has chipped such a way that she looks like she’s mid-orgasm. He calls her Katya after his ex.

“He unwraps a flavored condom and pops it into his mouth, chewing it like it’s a stick of gum, and smiles widely with red latex between his teeth as he herds the kiddos up onto the horse, down off the horse, up down up down up down, like a hand jerking a dick.”

He could feel himself settling into it, getting into the rhythmic boxing of Gregor’s speech, the patter of it, the way Joe and Risa and Marisol tried to suppress their disgusted faces, to nod along thoughtfully.

“He doesn’t fuck the children—doesn’t want to, it’s important you know that. He likes the mothers, the fathers too sometimes, the babysitters definitely, hell even some of the grandmothers, with their leathery breasts and their smoker’s lips.

“Gregor has a method for clocking who’s bored who’s lonely who’s a performer, and he’ll get them, condom stuck in his cheek like chaw, he’ll get them talking about the horses, making some shit up because who cares really they sure don’t, and he’ll stand behind them pointing out details, grinding his cock into an ass. Sure some of them will move away, embarrassed or angry. You’d be surprised how many don’t.”

He kept going, making Gregor ridiculous and hateful by turns, all the while knowing how to keep his audience hungry for more of it, unable to look away from the wretch of it all. When he finished, they all clapped, laughing and groaning.

Joe offered, “It’s funny. It’s really, really funny.”

“You write so well,” Tess gushed.

Shane had not clapped. He sat with his ankle on his knee and his glasses folded in his hand, his lip curling ever so slightly.

“Feedback?” Ilya prompted him, because sometimes he liked to turn into the punches he received.

“I don’t think you’re interested in feedback. I think you’re very happy with yourself.”

“You don’t like it.”

Shane took a breath, let it out slowly. “It’s very good. Not as good as Clubfist, but good.” There was a pause, during which the rain started up again outside, dripping off the sloping roof. “It’s also disgusting, self-indulgent, prurient, and hollow.”

There was a pause, and then Risa said, tentatively, “Well. I mean, it is called Wooden Horse. I think that’s kind of the idea?”

Shane’s leg dropped to the carpeted floor with a thud. He leaned forward, and Ilya could see the pulse in his throat beating fast, not as dispassionate as he wanted to seem. “Okay, but—so what? It’s funny, it’s provocative, but who cares? It’s a, a magic trick, where the magician is waving a handkerchief to distract you from what he’s really doing—but what are you really doing? You write brilliantly, but it’s all just for show. This book, and Clubfist too, to an extent—they’re a flash in a pan. No one’s going to give a shit, because next year someone else will write something even nastier.”

Ilya couldn’t breathe. He thought he might vomit.

He thought of his carousel operator with his sticky hands and his ruinous, compulsive wanting, and it all felt so small. He thought of himself, on his knees at fourteen, and how sex had been the only power he’d had, which was, obviously, no kind of power at all, not then. He’d written Gregor like a sideshow, a joke, but maybe Ilya had been the fucking joke all along.

Shane put on his glasses, shook his head. “I just think it’s a shame. You’re so good, don’t you want to be more than this?”

The rain had grown loud through the open windows, the room stank of mildew and too many bodies, and Ilya said, “There isn’t anything more than this.”

He left, obviously. He announced airily that he wanted a smoke, so as to avoid looking like he was running with his tail between his legs like a scolded dog, but he needed to get out of that cottage, get away from fucking Shane Hollander.

He stepped off the porch and into the rain, and within seconds his shirt was soaked through, clinging to his shoulders, and his hair was plastered to his forehead—and it was good, shocking, narrowing everything he was feeling down to a single physical sensation. He felt in his pockets for his cigarettes, thinking he’d find shelter under a tree, but they were back in his room because of course he’d barely smoked since he came here.

The door banged open and shut again behind him. “Ilya—”

He didn’t turn around. He walked faster, the gravel beneath him churning to mud in the wet. His sneakers were already filling with water, each step a sick little squelch.

“Ilya, stop. Would you just—stop.” A hand caught his elbow and he spun, wrenching free, and they stood facing each other in the downpour. “Don’t touch me,” Ilya snapped.

“Fine.” Shane was equally soaked, his hiking shirt stuck to his chest and his stomach, his face streaked with rain. He looked half drowned and utterly furious, water running from the ends of his hair and catching on his eyelashes. “Fine. But—get the fuck over yourself, okay? After what you said to me? You fucking called me a cowardly writer in front of the people I’m supposed to be teaching—”

“We’re supposed to be teaching.”

“You’re the one who made it personal! I was just trying to give you feedback—”

“Feedback?” Ilya asked incredulously. “You sat there on your little throne and told me nothing I write is important, that no one will give a shit—”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s exactly what you said! I was there, I have fucking ears.” He wiped the rain from his eyes with the back of his hand—uselessly, because more came immediately. The trees tossed overhead, a sheet of rain blowing sideways into both of them, and Ilya watched it hit Shane’s face, watched him flinch and recover.

Shane lifted his shirt to wipe his face, baring his chest, and Ilya looked and looked away—even now, he wanted him. “Okay,” Shane said. “Fine, sorry, I guess. Just…we can talk about it more after all this is over, okay? We can get dinner, we can work on your writing, and work on my writing too, I guess, whatever.”

“Oh, thank you for that,” Ilya said sarcastically. “The great Shane Hollander, offering me the grace of his expertise. Will you correct my English? You might need to use small words and speak loudly.”

“Oh, fuck you, that’s not—I never said anything like that, I said you write brilliantly—”

That just made it worse. “You want me to write like you,” Ilya said, sneering, “with your sad, beautiful books where no one does anything. You want me to spit on you and fuck you dirty, but no one can know that’s what you’re really like, can they? Can’t put that in your books, can you?”

Shane went white. Even through the rain Ilya could see it, the blood draining from his face, his mouth dropping open. “You…don’t…”

“Oh, but I do, Shane.” Ilya’s voice went quiet, almost tender; he knew how to be cruel when he wanted to be. “I do know what you’re like—you want it so bad, don’t you, but you can’t handle that about yourself, so you fucking run, like your man in a collapsing house, like you’re”—inspiration struck, a truth he’d known without being certain of it—“like you’re untouchable. That’s you, in Dan Wickham’s book, isn’t it?” Shane just stared at him, rain running into his open mouth, and Ilya pushed harder. “Isn’t it?”

“It…yes, but—but you’re wrong, you—”

“Well, I can fucking touch you. I can make you cry you want it so bad. All you want is to be on your knees for me, but that’s fine, because I’m in the gutter anyway, right?” Everything Ilya was saying was true, all of it, even if it tasted rotten in his mouth. “Is that why you won’t let me fuck you? Or no—once I fuck you, that’ll be it, right? You’ll have debased yourself far enough, time to find the next whore.”

“No—”

“That’s what happened with Dan, isn’t it? You got fucked and liked it, and then you hated him for it.”

Shane inhaled sharply, shook his head as if coming out of a daze. “You talked to Dan about me.”

“He talked to me.” Ilya’s chest was heaving, and he might have been shaking. “He didn’t have to say much. I know you froze him out, and he wrote the best thing he’ll ever write about it. You broke him.”

“I broke him?”

“Used him then,” Ilya said. “Like you’ve been using me.”

Shane stared at him. There might have been tears on his face, but who could tell, with all the rain. “That’s what you think I’ve been doing?”

“Isn’t it?” Ilya demanded.

Shane shook his head, pressed his hands to his face. “No.” He made a sound, something between a sob and laugh. “No, it fucking wasn’t.”

The rain pounded the mud around them, rattling the leaves overhead. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled like furniture being dragged across a floor. Ilya’s hand twitched at his side, reaching, and he took a step forward, because he thought those probably were tears, and he couldn’t understand them, but he also couldn’t…he couldn’t…

But Shane gave him a cold look and backed away, until the rain between them might as well have been a wall. “Thank you,” he said, bleak and formal, “for your feedback.”

Shane turned and walked back toward the cottage, his Tevas sucking at the mud, his shoulders rigid—and Ilya stayed where he was, and the rain kept coming.

Chapter End Notes

*insert gif of Elizabeth and Darcy almost kissing in the rain*
Sorry, y'all. I told you this wasn't the cottage.

Chapter 10: you utterly will become with infinite care/the poem which i do not write.

Chapter Notes

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

To: ilyarozanov81@gmail.com

From: shane.hollander@shanehollander.com

Subject: Clarification

Ilya—

There are, I believe, several points of confusion that I would like to clear up. You made several accusations that I did not feel able to refute in the moment, and I would appreciate it if you would allow me to do so now.

(1) You implied that I did not consider you an equal partner at the MFA retreat. This was not—is not—the case. I appreciate the work and effort you put into our time at Bear Mountain. You could have been more prepared, certainly, but it was clear to me that you were invested. You cared about our students, and I believe they found your advice valuable. Obviously we will not co-lead it again, but you should consider another program, particularly if, as you mentioned, you are in need of funds.

(2) My criticism of Wooden Horse and, by extension, Clubfist was not received in the spirit in which it was intended. You gave me honest feedback—which I appreciated—and I endeavored to do the same. Let me attempt to make myself clear now: I know you are a very good writer. I believe that you are capable of being an exceptional, generation-defining writer. But in order to do that, you will need to actually show up. I have read about the men and women you’ve fucked, about the ridiculous and disgusting and salacious things you’ve done—which I have not judged you for, more on that in the next section—but Clubfist never touched on any of the truths I have come to know about you. You think that because you put your sex life on the page, that because you write about fucking and being queer, that this makes you honest—and maybe it does, I can hear you asking me what the hell I would know about honesty, anyway. But I don’t think it makes you vulnerable, and that’s what your writing needs to be truly great. I think you could bring the world to its knees.

Wooden Horse will certainly sell. It’ll make you a ton of money, and maybe that’s all you want. But I do believe there is more to you than this. I believe that you could write a character like Gregor and make the reader love him, rather than sneer and laugh at him. The reader laughs because you’re laughing, but I’ve seen you be kind, and none of that is anywhere in your writing. That is what I meant, when I said you could be more than this.

(3) I was never using you. You implied that I am attracted to you because, what, you’re more experienced than I am? Most people on the planet are more experienced than I am. I have slept with precisely three men, and you were the third. I wasn’t put off by your sexual history, and I didn’t fetishize it either. It would have been nice if you could have given me the same courtesy.

This is none of your fucking business, but it has taken me some effort to find acceptance of my sexuality. I don’t just mean accepting that I was gay, although yes, that took some time, longer perhaps than it should have. A while ago you accused me of having girlfriends that I let fall in love with me, even though I wasn’t attracted to them—and you were right. I wasn’t like you, at fourteen or even at nineteen, secure in my sexual identity. I had a vision for what my life was supposed to be, and being gay didn’t figure into it. I regret that there were people who got hurt while I tried to make my peace with my reality.

You mentioned Dan Wickham as someone else I victimized. It’s true that he and I were in an MFA program together, and I suppose he was the person that helped me accept that I was gay. We dated for about a year. I guess you could say I was learning how to be queer. He was the first sexual partner I had where I actually wanted to be there, and he was very happy to be, as he put it, my guide to overcoming my repression.

I suppose I thought I was in love with him. I trusted him, and I relied on him as I explored—as we explored, I suppose—what I wanted in a sexual relationship. Dan took great pleasure in being my guide, and he had a lot of opinions about what I should or should not want.

I learned, for instance, that I like to be fucked. I do not, however, enjoy the reverse. It makes me nervous, I can’t get out of my own head, and honestly it doesn’t matter why, I just don’t like it. But Dan believed that everyone is naturally versatile, that me not wanting to top was just another symptom of my repression, and so it was something he insisted on, for my own good. Which, unsurprisingly, made it so much worse. We fought often, and I struggled in ways I now understand were unnecessary. It wasn’t easy for me, back then, to grasp what I wanted, and I thought he knew better than I did.

Our breakup was not an easy one. Dan decided that I was ending things because I was cold—frigid, he said—and that I was retreating back into the person I’d been before he met me. And so, as you correctly surmised, he wrote a book about me. Or rather, about a version of me, the one he decided I was—someone too afraid of his desires to live his life.

I felt so humiliated, so exposed, that I did retreat into myself. I slept with one other person, after Dan, and I hated it. It wasn’t his fault, he was perfectly nice—but I felt ashamed of the things I wanted, of wanting at all.

And then I met you.

I am, perhaps, a little afraid of my own desires, a little embarrassed about them—but you made me feel like my desire was something precious, or like I was. Maybe there isn’t a difference.

I didn’t want you to fuck me because I haven’t done that with anyone in nearly five years. It’s intense, for me, and not something I want to just do with someone, the way (I guess) healthy, self-accepting queer people do. It’s the thing I want most, and it’s the thing that makes me feel most vulnerable, and it’s not something I want to do without…an emotional commitment, I suppose.

And obviously that wasn’t on the table, with you. But I had hoped that we could find more common ground than mere sexual compatibility. Over the course of the retreat, I came to respect you and your work more than I think you realized, which is my fault, of course.

I do respect you. And I like you, so much.

It’s all right that you don’t feel the same way. I expect that my emotions are just the product of having some really good sex for the first time in a really long time (maybe ever), so thank you for that.

I doubt that we will see much of each other in the future. I hope that you can take my poorly expressed literary criticism in the spirit in which it is intended—though I can acknowledge, now, that perhaps I did mean to hurt you. I was hurt by what you said about my book—and, by extension, about me—and I lashed out. In any case, I mean it when I say that I wish you the very best.

—Shane

Chapter End Notes

Another chapter immediately to follow. I would not leave you like that.

Chapter 11: Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

She was convinced she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely that they should meet.

Ilya couldn’t make himself answer Shane’s email.

It arrived at 2:47 a.m. the morning after he got home to Brooklyn—Ilya had been awake, of course, and now he wasn’t sure he’d ever sleep again.

It wasn’t that he didn’t try to respond. He typed up draft after draft before deleting them as inadequate, too glib and too honest by turns.

No wonder Shane thought his writing was for shit; Ilya couldn’t write anything that mattered.

Still, he read the email every day—over breakfast, on the subway, in bed when he lay awake—until he could have recited it to Shane if he ever saw him again. (He wouldn’t. Ilya looked for him, of course, changing trains at Barclay’s, at Broadway-Lafayette. But Shane was never there, and Ilya realized he knew next to nothing about him—not where he lived, how he liked his coffee, whether he slept well).

Ilya also looked for Dan Wickham, though if he saw him, he might break his fucking jaw.

It disgusted him, the memory of Wickham in his bed (better than in Shane’s bed, though, and thoughts of Shane and Wickham together made bile surge up into Ilya’s mouth, made him spit into the toilet). Ilya threw out his sheets, went to HomeGoods and bought himself a new set and still hated his bed.

Ilya had brought Wickham home with him because he’d read his book and thought, he must be extraordinary, to have written this man with a gossamer heart. But he’d been wrong; Wickham had written Shane like a moth he’d pinned to a board, and it had been the moth that was extraordinary.

There was just so much Ilya had gotten wrong, so much he hadn’t understood. He’d said terrible things—about Shane’s writing, about his needs—and he couldn’t take them back, couldn’t simply say I’m sorry because how could he ever make it right?

You made me feel like my desire was something precious, or like I was.

He hadn’t known what a gift it was, to be trusted with Shane’s desire. And Ilya had thrown it back in his face.

A month passed, and then another, until New York began to smell almost good again, like leaves and exhaust instead of garbage and exhaust, and suddenly there was a proliferation of beige camel hair scarves.

Ilya wasn’t writing. Instead sat at his laptop scrolling Pornhub, detesting Gregor the condom-chewing maniacal sex addict, but he didn’t know what else he could write, or how not to hate him.

Svetlana was relentless, demanding that he send her some fucking pages for god’s sake, they needed to capitalize on his success, get another book out before everyone forgot about him. So he sent her Wooden Horse, because it wasn’t like he had anything else, and less than 24 hours later she sent him a text:

-It’s the perfect follow-up to Clubfist. Meet me for drinks to discuss. Banzarbar at 8pm, I’ll buy.

He wrote back:

-not tonight, busy

When she didn’t respond (and Svetlana always answered him), he wrote:

-did u get my text, i am not coming

Next he tried calling, and when she still didn’t answer he told himself it was her own fault that she’d be sitting there alone, not that she’d be alone for long if she didn’t want to be.

At 8:15 he stormed in, unwashed and unshaven like the world’s most pathetic cliché, to find her sitting at a table waiting for him, legs crossed beneath a skirt so short her legs had to be cold.

“I ordered you an Aquavit.”

“I told you I wasn’t coming,” he said accusingly.

She shrugged, gestured for him to sit down. “And yet here you are.”

He drank his Aquavit when it came, and drank some of Svetlana’s much more expensive cocktail, as well. And then he said, “What was so important you couldn’t just text me? It’s good, yes?”

It’s not a flash in a pan, here and then gone.

“It’s very good,” Svetlana said, and he believed her because she never lied to him.

“Like Clubfist was good,” he said.

She paused, took a sip of her drink. The rosemary sprig stuck in it bumped gently against her upper lip. “Yes. Like Clubfist was good.”

He peered at her suspiciously in the dim light of the bar. “What?”

“What do you mean, what? I just said it was good. Tidy up the first hundred pages and we’ll send it over to Maxwell. Your editor,” she added drily.

Ilya didn’t know what he’d meant. He just kept hearing Shane Hollander telling him to show up, telling him he could be more than this. “It’s not…you don’t think it’s shallow?”

Svetlana sat back, and she tucked her hair behind her ear before answering; it didn’t stay, a curl springing free immediately. “Why are you asking me this?”

Ilya dipped a finger into his Aquavit, ran it along his lower lip. “I don’t know. I was just…” He didn’t know how to say it.

After a long moment, Svetlana asked, “Oh, by the way—how was it, teaching the workshop with Shane Hollander?”

Ilya could have told her. They were speaking in Russian; he could have said everything, and no one in this overpriced Manhattan bar would have known. “It was fine.”

“Just fine?”

“Yes.”

“Rose said Shane told her you were a very good co-lead, and that perhaps you should do it on your own next year, if you wanted. It would be twice the money,” she offered.

Ilya gave half a second’s thought to what it would be like in that musty cottage without the light coming from beneath the room next to his, without the comforting scent of chamomile-mint tea in the evening. “No.” Then, reluctantly, “Not…not that one. Another one, maybe. I liked teaching,” he admitted.

She studied him, and then said, “You know I loved Clubfist, yes?”

Ilya nodded. His throat felt very thick. Beneath the table, he pressed his thumbnail hard into the pad of his index finger.

“And Wooden Horse is everything you need it to be. It will make a big splash, probably Darren Aronofsky will option it, or Jared Leto. You can keep doing exactly what you’re doing, and you’ll be celebrated for it—deservedly so.”

“Okay.”

“But I wonder,” she said carefully, “what it would be like if you wrote something that matters to you.”

“Wooden Horse, okay, yes. I don’t like Gregor, I don’t care about him.” It was a relief to say it out loud. “I can write something else, I don’t know. Maybe I will make him a better person, something.”

“I am not just talking about Wooden Horse.”

Ilya blinked at her. He inhaled sharply, and downed the rest of his drink. “What do you…” He shook his head. He felt like he ought to be angry or hurt, but instead he was just mystified. “Of course I cared about Clubfist, that’s me, it’s my life—our life.”

Svetlana waved a hand, dismissing ten years of shared past—more than that, if you started counting before they left home. “You wrote about fucking, and about your father and your brother a little I guess. You wrote what happened, but you never really wrote about what it was like. You think I don’t know about the men you sucked off, so I didn’t have to? Where was that in your book?”

“I wasn’t going to use you like that, you’re not…I love you, you’re not a character, and anyway I never did that—”

She gave him a look, and he stopped because, well. He had.

“I know,” she said, more gently now, and reach across the table to touch the back of his wrist. “Ilyusha, I know you love me. I love you, too. And because I love you, I know all of the rest of it, all of the rest of you. There’s so much more of you than you let people see.”

Don’t you want to be more than this?

There isn’t anything more than this.

He didn’t answer for a long while—he wasn’t even aware of how long, as he sat there drawing circles in the condensation rings on the table, thinking, for no particular reason at all, of his mother.

“Do you remember she used to read to us?”

It took Svetlana a moment to understand who he meant. “Tyotya Irina? Yes. So many inappropriate books for children.”

Ilya laughed, the constriction in his throat clearing a little. “Yes. Pushkin and Gogol for bedtime stories, no wonder we were so fucked up.”

Svetlana shrugged, then finished her drink. “Come on. I want a cigarette.”

It was chilly outside, and Ilya zipped up his jacket. They had to go around the corner, away from any restaurants or bars, so no one would glare at them for polluting their air—two Russians huddled in a doorway like it was 2009, the eternal immigrants. Svetlana inhaled, the ember glowing bright. “I don’t think we’re fucked up.”

“Maybe not you,” Ilya said, a little resentfully. “With your successful career and your girlfriend—how is that going, by the way?”

Svetlana’s smile was small but her eyes were bright. “Good. It’s good.”

“I’m glad.”

They smoked in silence for a while. Ilya leaned against the cold brick of the building and thought about what it would be like to write about his mother. Or—not her exactly, but about the feeling he had when he thought about her, the mix of resentment and longing and confusion that he would probably never be able to stand clear of.

“If I wrote something different,” he said slowly, “something that wasn’t…”

He didn’t know how to categorize it, or even what there was to categorize—all he knew was that it would feel like peeling back his own skin, or perhaps debriding it.

But Svetlana said, simply, “Then I would sell it. And it would be the best thing you’ve ever written.”

It was all very lofty and vulnerable and ambitious to decide to write something that mattered, but the trouble was Ilya had no idea how to do it.

He know how to write a scene where a man snorts coke off a stranger’s collarbone, how to write sex that made people shift in their seats on the subway, how to write violence that was funny and funny things that were violent. He didn’t know how to write kindness.

He tried. He sat at his laptop in the apartment that Clubfist paid the rent for, wrote about a beautiful, funny woman who couldn’t get out of bed a lot of the time, and a child who sat on the floor of her bedroom reading to her, sounding out the words when he didn’t know them, prompting her to tell him what they meant.

He wrote about what it felt like when he couldn’t get out of bed, either, and the hours pooled together like oil on water.

And he wrote about Gregor, a lonely man who ran the carousel at Coney Island, surrounded by laughter and smiles and mothers who loved their sons. He wrote how sometimes on slow days he would ride the horse with the chipped eye, up and down and round and round all by himself, and he would wave at his reflection in the mirrors, sure that no one else could see him.

But he couldn’t write anything else. He couldn’t see where the story was going—he had no outline, nothing at all—and he, like Gregor, just kept going round and round, no way to get off, to go somewhere else.

He tried explaining this to Svetlana, and she scoffed. “So go somewhere else then.”

“I just said—”

“No, I mean, actually go somewhere. Leave New York for a while, it worked last time. You wrote so much on that Bear Mountain retreat.”

It had worked, Ilya thought, because Shane Hollander had been there.

“What about renting Sasha’s place?”

Ilya wrinkled his nose. In his mind, it was always Ilya-and-Svetlana, but for her, it was Ilya-and-Svetlana-and-don’t-forget-about-Sasha. He had come to New York a few years after they had, and then he’d gone to Prague, and then Paris, and then somewhere else Ilya couldn’t remember. He’d been back in New York for a year or two, and Ilya had seen him at parties, at drinks. Usually they fucked, there was a kind of comforting familiarity about it. But he didn’t want that now, and Ilya didn’t want to have to deal with Sasha when he wasn’t getting what he wanted.

“He has a place?” This was a reasonable question; Sasha seemed to move in with whoever was willing to take him.

“Mmm.” Svetlana emptied his ashtray into the overflowing kitchen garbage, and opened a window. “His friend’s place, really. In Provincetown. You remember I went up this summer? So fucking crowded.”

Ilya did remember, sort of. He slouched down in his chair, crossing his arms. “I want to go someplace to write, not to party.”

Svetlana gave him a dry look. “It’s November. No one will be partying, no one will even be there. The house is pretty shitty, honestly, Sasha’s friend bought it mostly mostly just as a place to fuck, but it would be quiet.”

Ilya had never been to Cape Cod; he figured there was plenty of fun to be had in New York, why go somewhere that would be crowded with vacationing families and Boston day-trippers? But a chilly, forlorn place with stretches of beaches—he was sure there were beaches—was appealing, in a trite, writerly sort of way.

The royalties for Clubfist had come in; he could afford off-season rents, probably. He looked up to tell her yes, but she was already holding her phone, texting.

“Sasha says bring your own sheets.”

Chapter 12: and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

Chapter Notes

They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.

Ilya dropped his duffel to the floor and put his hands on his hips.

It was a house, he supposed, technically. It was a standalone building, at least, approximately the size of a shed. It was tucked into an alleyway just off Commercial Street, and it was shingled appropriately, with white trim around the single window. There was a king-sized bed, which took up most of the available square footage, which was nice, except that Ilya had brought queen-sized sheets.

It was also fucking freezing.

Ilya had understood, from the safe distance of Bushwick, that Cape Cod was a place of shirtless debauchery, of sunbathing drag queens and lobster rolls. Nobody told him that in November it became some scoured, wind-bitten, post-apocalyptic tundra, like the rapture had come and taken everyone who owned a seasonal lease. Commercial Street, which he gathered was the main drag, was mostly shuttered storefronts and dark restaurant windows, though he could buy some high-quality sex toys if he was really in need.

Well. At least there wouldn’t be distractions.

Ilya found the space heater in the “closet” (read: a curtain on a tension rod) and plugged it in. It produced a smell like burning hair, but it was effective, particularly in such a small space, and Ilya set about trying to make queen-sized sheets fit on a king-sized bed. The solution, he found, was to stretch the fitted sheet sideways at the foot of the bed, and throw the top sheet, also sideways, over the rest. He piled fleece blankets over the top—lobsters wearing Santa hats, dicks wearing Santa hats, and, inexplicably, loons wearing Santa hats.

He tossed his laptop on the bed, gave it a dirty look, and went for a walk.

The wind swept down Commercial Street like one of those black-robed wraiths from that interminable movie Marleau wanted to watch every year, the four-hour extended version where the elf queen gave the dwarf a lock of hair, and Marleau cried into his beer.

He walked along the beach, beneath exposed pilings, looked out at the long jetty that stretched out into the sea. He walked and walked, head ducked against the wind, and then, as the last of the light bled over the horizon, he turned around to head back to town.

He passed a solitary fox trotting down the sidewalk; they nodded to each other in passing, and he imagined that the fox was running a last-minute errand, perhaps picking up a bottle of wine to have with dinner. He ducked into one of the few open restaurants, Canteen—a small space with a menu on the wall. He ordered a lobster roll, since it seemed like the thing to do, and as he ate he thought about what might make Gregor get off the carousel, what might make him want to.

The answer, for Gregor—which was also the answer for Ilya, of course—was love.

The days that followed were, somewhat to his surprise, exceedingly productive. Ilya didn’t write about Shane Hollander; he would never do anything so obvious. Shane wasn’t a character in his book, and even if Ilya had wanted him to be, Shane wasn’t someone Gregor would have fallen in love with, anyway.

And yet, Shane was there on every page.

He was there in the way Ilya slowed his sentences, letting a moment breathe, allowing himself to leave something unsaid sometimes, trusting his reader to hear it anyway. Shane had embedded himself in Ilya’s syntax, smoothing the stop-stutter into a flow that allowed him to plan ahead, to draw lines between one seemingly disparate thought and another.

Ilya wrote about how Gregor walked along the boardwalk and down into the sand every day after Luna Park closed and he had nothing else to do. (Coney Island Beach was not nearly as nice as the beach in Provincetown.) Gregor stepped around inexplicable strands of dental floss, around tied-off condoms and cigar butts and Nathan’s hot-dog napkins. But like Ilya, Gregor faced the Atlantic, a cold, unforgiving ocean, more gray-green than blue, and like Ilya he thought about a pair of dark brown eyes, earnest and sincere and (when it was allowed) so fucking kind.

Gregor’s favorite brown eyes belonged to a much older woman, Jenn with two Ns, old enough to have been his mother, and Ilya shuddered a little at the exposure of his own mommy issues—but Jenn with two Ns was nothing like Irina. She hated books, for a start, and threatened to burn all of Gregor’s if he didn’t get the fuck out of Brighton Beach, if he didn’t put one foot in front of the other across the Brooklyn Bridge and see what else the world had to offer (the Financial District on a Sunday? Not much, but she dragged him onto a ferry, brought him to Governor’s Island where the Musée des Arts Forains had set up an installation, complete with barkers in black and white stripes and red neck-kerchiefs, marionette shows, whirling swings, and, of course, an ancient carousel).

The manuscript was a mess, none of it really coming together in any sort of order, just scenes and moments and snippets, so that he went to the hardware store and bought brown paper and pins and post-its and began shuffling his scenes around like a detective with red string, trying uncover what was happening in his story even as he wrote it.

That was for the mornings, when the light facing through the east-facing window was thin and silver. In the afternoons, he walked—along the nearly-empty streets, up away from Commercial Street toward where people actually lived, past shingled houses with their shutters latched and their gardens cut back hard for winter, the hydrangeas dried and rattling faintly in the wind. Or, more often, along the beach, into the dunes on the other side of Route 6, past run-down artist shacks that were wonderfully picturesque, but that made his tiny apartment in town look like luxury. Most of them were worn to gray planks, their roofs sagging, the dune grass growing up through the floor, lonely and beautiful.

The wind was constant, roaring off the Atlantic with nothing between it and Portugal, salted and sharp with wet that sliced into his cheeks, made him shiver and question his Russian heritage. The sand was studded with fragments of razor clams and deflated globes of moon jellyfish along with occasional long dark rope of kelp. Some days the fog came in so thick and low it seemed the world ended thirty feet ahead of him, hushing everything, so he could hear only his own thoughts—those were the days when he sat in the sand, hunched over and typing a scene into his phone, entire paragraphs, because he could see it all so clearly.

Ilya watched the seals as they bobbed along just offshore, watching him in turn, their heads dark and slick above the waterline, their brown eyes enormous and wet. He named one of them Hollander, though perhaps he named several of them Hollander; it was difficult to tell them apart.

There was a scene Ilya wanted to write, but he kept putting it off. He’d written Gregor cooking potato olivye and syrniki for Jenn with two Ns, he’d written her kissing him, her mouth wide and plush, gentle when he hadn’t touched anyone gently in a very long time. He’d written him fixing Katya, the carousel horse with the chipped eye, smearing plaster and matching paints and drawing the tiniest dot of white in her eye, giving her back her sight, loving her.

Jenn with two Ns would leave Gregor, Ilya had decided; she had more in her life than this foolish man who loved antiquated, anachronistic things—but she would help him off the carousel, and help him look the children in the eye when he made sure their straps were secure, help him smile at their mothers without thinking about their breasts. Maybe in the end he’d run off and join the circus, a Russo-Ukrainian man in a black and white striped shirt and a red neck-kerchief, restoring the zebras and elephants and learning the mechanics of the velocipede carousel. (Ilya spent far too much of his time researching carousels, and wondered if his funds would stretch to a trip to Paris in the Spring).

But before that, there was a scene Ilya couldn’t get out of his head, and it was this scene he kept writing notes for on his walks—so it wasn’t that he couldn’t write it, he just wasn’t sure that he ought to, that he had the right to.

Jenn with two Ns—“Stop calling me that!,” she told him, laughing—pulled Gregor down into the sand to sit beside her.

“It’s disgusting,” he’d complained.

“You’re disgusting,” she’d retorted, but she’d pulled a disposable wipe from her purse-of-wonders and carefully picked up each bit of detritus, nose wrinkled in concentration, and running over to the garbage to toss it all away.

“Here,” she said, and handed him an apple like a smooth round stone, heavy with juice that ran down his wrists and chin as they looked out at the cold grey ocean, the one he used to think he’d lose himself in one day, walking into the sea on a November day like so many foolish people did—only he wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t walk out again.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

He didn’t tell her he was thinking that if he walked into the sea right now, with her brown eyes on him, he thought maybe he’d find himself instead.

That was bad enough; too much like what he’d felt staring at the rolling green hills of the Hudson Highlands, eating a bruised apple and feeling more at peace with himself than he’d ever imagined he could. But at least that was his moment, even if Shane had been present for it (and with his presence had made it possible).

It was the next part that seemed wrong, seemed like a story that wasn’t his alone to tell, though he couldn’t imagine that Shane, left ignored and answered for so long, after the horrible things Ilya had said to him, had any interest in this story at all.

And yet:

Rather than answering, Gregor rolled Jenn onto her back in the disgusting sand, heard her screech, heard her laugh, nestled himself between her legs.

He could fuck her, he knew, could take her back to his little apartment, maybe he could make her squirt, women in their forties were usually the ones that did—but he didn’t want to (later, he would). He wanted to make this beach clean again, to pick out the filth or, failing that, to be the one pristine thing on it, sexual but not filthy, thinking about the sea, about not being alone, about being as large as the world.

Ilya shut his laptop, rubbed his face. He needed to go out, get out of this tiny apartment, off of this enormous bed.

He’d walked most of Provincetown by now, every narrow lane and crushed-shell alley, the harbor like the outer edge of a closing fist, the breakwater he’d attempted before deciding he wanted to live instead.

So today he went south along Shore Road, which left Provincetown heading toward Truro and hugged the bay in a long, slow curve. It was narrow and shoulder-less, cracked at the edges where the sand crept over it, and it rose and dipped with the land. The bay was different than the ocean he’d grown so familiar with—greener and calmer, a flat expanse that turned into sky without ever showing the line of the horizon. It smelled a little fishier, but it was covered by the scents of scrub pine and oak and, of course, the clean cold of the eternal wind.

He walked for hours, passing closed farm stands, a small cemetery with stones worn thin as cardboard. The houses were sparse and set back from the road, half hidden by hedgerows of beach plum. Summer houses, most of them, buttoned up for the season, their driveways empty, resting semi-precariously atop bluffs that made him think of—what had Shane called it?—The Lean of the Land, where a house slid helplessly into the sea, while a listless man watched.

It was growing late; the sun was creeping down to that hidden horizon, and the temperature was dropping with it—but one of the houses had a light on, a single warm rectangle in the blue-gray dusk, and after so long alone it felt like a beacon, and so he kept walking toward it, his shoes scuffing the sand-dusted asphalt, and then down to the beach, so he could look up at it from the shore.

It was very large, though this being the Cape it would inevitably be called a cottage. Unlike just about every other house, it wasn’t shingled, and the late afternoon light was turning it golden. It was modern, with enormous windows and jutting angles reaching toward the bay, cantilevered over the bluff as if leaning forward to peer at its reflection in the water. So much glass he could see the sky through it, though there was no sign of anyone inside.

He wondered who lived there, and why they were here in November when everyone else with houses like this had better sense.

He shrugged, and turned to walk away, along the beach this time, back toward Provincetown. He’d taken maybe ten steps when something caught his eye—a dark shape in the bay, silhouetted against the fading sun, bobbing low in the water, up and down.

Ilya cupped his hands around his mouth, shouted “Hello, Hollander!” at the seal, so loud in the solitude.

The seal stopped swimming, and resolved itself into a man, one of those crazy Polar Bear Club people who jumped into the beach at Coney Island in winter. Ilya shook his head at the general lunacy of mankind, called, “Sorry, my mistake!” and kept walking. He wondered what he’d have for dinner; sushi at Mac’s, maybe?

He could hear, now that he was listening for it, the splashing of the man swimming; it sounded like he was heading for shore in a hurry. Ilya hoped he had a towel and a warm shower waiting for him. He was almost around the bend in the road when the man shouted, breathless and disbelieving, “Ilya?”

Chapter End Notes

Just so’s you know, I ADORE the Cape in the off-season, and if Ilya thinks November is bad he should try February

I also love LOTR, and I missed Marleau but couldn’t work him back into the story so here he is in spirit

True story I did pass once a fox going about his fox business, trotting down Commercial Street in the freezing dusk.

You can think of Wooden Horse as a very whimsical Don John, and anyway this scene is riffing off of e.e. cummings’ maggie and millie and mollie and may

The cottage:

Take this location:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/23-Crestview-Cir-Truro-MA-02666/56791023_zpid/

But imagine this is the house:

https://www.capecoastalsir.com/listing/22601200/21-pleasant-view-drive-orleans-ma-02653/

He had it built.

Chapter 13: Someone asked me what home was, and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue

Chapter Notes

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

Ilya couldn’t move. He wasn’t certain he could breathe. And so he stood on the beach, still and staring, as Shane Hollander jogged toward him, shivering and half-naked.

“It’s you,” he said, panting.

“Yes.”

He was wearing those tiny green swim trunks, not even a wetsuit though the water had to be fifty degrees. His skin was speckled with goosebumps, November-pale, and his nipples were hard and dark.

“You’re here.”

“Yes,” Ilya said again, staring, and then, belatedly, “Sorry. I did not know…” he spread his hands, encompassing the beach, the house, the grotesque cosmic joke of it all.

“No, it’s okay. I’m, uh, glad to see you. It’s been a little while.”

A little while? Months Ilya had left this guy on read, and here he was, like a vodyanoy from the sea, glad to see him. Ilya wanted to reach out to touch him, to feel his icy skin, though of course he no longer has the right. “Jesus Christ, Hollander. Aren’t you freezing? What are you doing?”

He shrugged, but it was belied by his teeth as they began to chatter. “It energizes me.”

“Well it fucking exhausts me,” Ilya said, exasperated. “Don’t you…where’s your towel? Where’s your house?”

Shane gestured back the way they’d come, up the beach toward the bluff, and Ilya shrugged off his jacket, tossing it over his shoulders. Shane flushed, predictably. “I don’t need this—it’s yours, you need it—”

“You can’t keep it,” Ilya said. “It’s the only one I brought. But you are crazy person, you will wear it until we get you inside, yes?” He could hear his accent thickening, and he had to be very careful not to let his fingertips drag across Shane’s cold wet skin as he adjusted the collar.

Shane huffed but didn’t argue, and picked his way carefully across the pebble-strewn beach. Ilya followed in silence, watching Shane’s bare feet, the tendons flexing in his ankles, the line of his calf.

They stopped in front of the only lit house on the shore. “You live here,” Ilya said, because of course Shane did.

“Uh, yeah. Not all the time, obviously.” He handed Ilya his jacket and picked up a large fluffy towel from where it hung over the railing of the steps leading up the bluff, wrapped himself in it. “I don’t like coming here in the summer, too many people, but it’s nice in the fall. And the spring. Winters can be tough, but that’s nice too, sometimes.”

“This is your house,” Ilya repeated stupidly—but it just seemed so unreasonable, that Shane Hollander would be here of all places, in this beautiful house on this beautiful spit of land. It didn’t seem fair.

“Yeah? I mean, it’s a cottage…” Ilya guffawed despite himself, and Shane blushed again, though his lips quirked in a wry smile. “I spent just about every dime I had having it built. We used to come to the Cape a lot when I was a kid, and there’s an apartment on the side, for my parents, you know, for when they’re older…” He seemed to realize he was babbling and pulled the fluffy white towel tighter around himself, up to his cheeks, fucking adorable.

And once again, Ilya couldn’t breathe. “I should go,” he said roughly. “Long walk back.”

“Back to where?”

Ilya gestured vaguely. “Provincetown. Not far.”

Shane frowned. “It’s like four miles. And it’s getting dark.”

“I will not get lost,” Ilya assured him, a little entertained despite everything. “There is only the one road.”

“Yes, but…” Shane looked away at the last dregs of sunlight falling into the bay, and then his mouth firmed. “I’ll drive you, okay? I just need to…” he gestured down at himself, sandy and salty. “Shower. And get dressed. It won’t take a minute.”

“I know about your showers,” Ilya said drily. “And your skin care routine. It will take longer than a minute.”

Shane’s nose wrinkled as he tried not to smile. Ilya had no idea what to make of him. “It’s an outdoor shower, and it’s getting cold. I’ll be quick.”

“Getting cold?” Ilya said, but he followed Shane up the steps to the house. There was a hot-tub, he saw, set into the deck, but it was covered with vinyl, and beside it was a little enclosed closet of a shower, cedar and weather-silvered. “You don’t have a bathroom inside?”

“Of course I do,” Shane said patiently. “This shower is for coming in from the beach. So you don’t get sand everywhere.”

He pulled open the sliding door and gestured Ilya inside. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Ilya walked in and shut the door behind him so as to keep the cold air out. His shoes were covered in sand and he didn’t want to track it everywhere, and so he just stood by the door, taking in the room.

It was—god, it was a beautiful house. There was a stack of books on the coffee table, research by the looks of things, bristling with colored tabs. A throw blanket on one end of the long linen sofa, a frankly absurd collection of throw pillows. There were no photographs that Ilya could see, no Baby Shanes or pictures of his parents’ wedding, but there was art, just a few watercolor seascapes, a little boring, but…nice. It was all just so nice, and Ilya felt like a prowler in the dark, come to ruin it all.

Outside, the water turned on with a groan, and from where he stood, if he craned his neck, he could see steam rising in the patio light. There was no one else here at all, no one for miles it seemed, no one but Shane standing naked beneath the early evening stars. Ilya could picture it with a clarity that felt almost obscene, the thorough way he’d scrub at his hair, eyes closed against the spray, mouth slack, the water running in rivulets through the hollows at the base of his spine.

And Ilya thought, Oh. Oh.

It was such a simple thought, really, a foregone conclusion: Ilya was in love with Shane Hollander. Of course he was, when hadn’t he been, what else did he think this was all this time? He was in the middle before he knew he had begun, and now he stood on the other side of a river crossing, and the banks swelled without him noticing and now there was no way back.

He loved Shane, that was all.

But Shane didn’t love him—couldn’t, not after everything Ilya had done and failed to do, and he never would. And that was quite all right. That is, it was terrible, but it was—fine. Ilya would be fine.

Eventually he would, anyway, because he always was, but in order to hasten the process he needed to get the fuck out of this house, this pristine house that spoke only of peace, of clarity, of Shane. 

He opened the door, as quietly as he could, and shut it behind him. The shower was still running, and he could hear the little splashes, the little interruptions as Shane moved beneath the spray. Ilya took the stairs quickly, heading along Shore Road.

It was colder out in the dark after the warmth of Shane’s house, but Ilya was Russian even if he’d left a decade ago, and he knew how to hunch his shoulders against the wind.

He walked past the empty houses, thinking about the people who came in the summer, and how they must have wondered at the beautiful house that stood empty when all the others were occupied, never knowing that a kind, irritating, dull, endlessly fascinating man lived there—but only in the winter, when no one would know him.

Ilya made it maybe half a mile before a Jeep pulled up alongside him. “What happened to giving you a ride home?”

Shane’s hair was still wet, the corners of his mouth turned down.

“I realized I was late,” Ilya said, a ridiculous, panicky lie. “For Sasha.”

Shane’s frown deepened. “Who is Sasha?”

“No one,” Ilya said. “I mean, an old friend. Not important. I am staying in his house. His friend’s house,” he amended. “He’s not there, though. Neither of them are.”

Shane did not appear to find this particularly illuminating, and no wonder. “Um, okay. Look, I get that you might not…that you didn’t want to stay. And that’s fine! But I said I’d give you a ride, so…”

He was so earnest, leaning his arm on the open window, the engine rumbling, choking out puffs of vapor in the cold, his wet hair dripping onto the collar of his sweatshirt. Ilya swallowed hard.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Thank you.”

It wasn’t a long ride, but it was an awkward one, nearly silent except for Shane’s quiet prompts for directions. He stopped at the alley near Sasha’s apartment, pulled up the parking brake. Ilya wondered idly if his friend the fox was around, if he was watching this ridiculous tableau of human frailty.

He made himself get out of the car. “Thank you,” he said, horribly formal. “It was good to see you.”

“Will you come to dinner?” Shane said in a burst. “At my house. Tonight or, or tomorrow, I guess, since you’re here now. I’ll…I’ll cook for you. Not well,” he added with a tentative smile. “But, you know, I’ll figure something out.”

Ilya shook his head, not as a no, but because he couldn’t understand. “You want me to come to dinner?”

“Yes.” Shane’s face was very serious. “If you want to.”

Ilya couldn’t speak, and so he nodded instead, and Shane’s smile widened, still tentative but so very dear. “Seven? I can pick you up.” He took a breath, and then said, “I sent you an email a few months ago.”

Ilya’s stomach dropped. “Yes. Yes, I…know. I read it.”

“Oh. Okay. That’s good.”

This was horrendous. Ilya wondered if maybe he could submerge himself beneath the jetty, breathing through a bit of beach grass like the fox in the cartoon, and not come out for a thousand years.

He was so busy floundering for what to say, what possible excuse he could have for not fucking writing back, when he realized Shane was still talking. “Then it’s okay if I send it to you? It’s not…you don’t have to read all of it. Or any of it, if you don’t want to. Obviously you don’t owe me anything. But I…” he ducked his head, a little shy, and Ilya’s knees nearly gave out beneath him. “I value your opinion.”

“Okay,” Ilya said, strangled. He had no idea what they were talking about, had completely lost the plot—but it didn’t matter, because the only possible answer was, “Yes, I will read it. And I will come for dinner tomorrow. And you will pick me up in your Jeep.”

“Seven o’clock,” Shane said.

“Seven o’clock.”

Ilya went inside Sasha’s friend’s horrible little sex den, kicked off his shoes and socks by the door, fell on to the bed and lay there thinking of nothing at all—until about an hour later, when his phone lit up with a new email.

To: ilyarozanov81@gmail.com

From: shane.hollander@shanehollander.com

Subject: Shore

Ilya—

Please don’t feel like you have to read all of this—or any of it, I know I put you on the spot. But I’ve given a lot of thought to what you said, the last time we spoke, and I believe you were right. Not about everything, obviously, but about the characters I write, and I think you might like this.

Either way, I look forward to dinner tomorrow.

—Shane

[attachment: SHORE 100 PAGES]

SHORE - 100 PAGES (excerpts)

Arthur and Meg walked down to the beach after breakfast, because Arthur had read in AARP Magazine that walking after meals stimulated the metabolism. From below, the cliff face looked much as it had the previous autumn, and every autumn before that, though Arthur had been duly warned at every town meeting for the last ten years that he and all the other residents on the dunes needed to take steps to shore up.

“We could do the pilings,” Meg said. “There’s time, before the storm.”

“We could,” Arthur agreed.

She had a fine face, Meg did, which Arthur knew so well he could map every line and slope, but he no longer saw it when he looked at her—he simply saw Meg, who wore a gray bathrobe and liked it when he brought her lilacs.

They went inside and sat at the kitchen table, passing each other the bits of the Boston Globe they liked best. Meg loved the obituaries, would read them aloud while Arthur hummed politely because he didn’t really care much about people he’d never met and now certainly never would.

He found himself thinking again about the lean of the house, the way it was slumping like a disappointed shoulder, and he tried to listen this time:

”Oh no, that teacher died. Mr. Rose.”

Arthur considered this. “Did we have a Mr. Rose in school? I don't recall.”

“No, no. He taught in East Boston. He won that award — I'm sure I told you.”

If she had, Arthur would certainly have forgotten it a second later, as she well knew. It was not a source of grievance, merely the mechanism by which their mornings functioned: Meg told Arthur things just to hear herself say them, Arthur hummed.

But today he said, “I don’t remember. How did he die?”

***

The freezer was clogged again, the drain valve iced shut, and so Arthur methodically cleared it out, arranging frozen steaks and bags of peas on the counter in the order in which he would put them back in. He pulled out a squashed little packet, iced with permafrost, eyeing it. It had been in the freezer for just about twenty years, had changed refrigerators and was otherwise untouched.

He had to chip away at the ice to open it, and the piece of wedding cake inside had gone soft and hard at the same time, calcified, so that when he tried to bite into it, just to see how it tasted, he had to scrape his teeth down it like a too-hard popsicle, flavorless.

When it came time to put the packet back, he threw it away instead. Neither he nor Meg would ever miss it.

Over dinner that evening—one of the steaks, some fresh asparagus, Ben’s Original Ready Rice—he said, “It’s been twenty years.”

“I know,” Meg said. “Where do you want to go for our anniversary?”

Arthur didn’t answer; they went to the same restaurant every year. Instead he said, “Do you want twenty more?”

Meg’s face made a series of expressions he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. Not angry, exactly, but confused, a little affronted. “What kind of a question is that? What is that supposed to mean?”

Arthur thought he’d been very direct. “Or would you rather call it quits,” he said, in an attempt to clarify.

Meg set her knife and fork down on her plate, crosswise. “Are you telling me you want a…a divorce? Is that what you mean?”

It was a difficult word for her to say. This wasn’t the 1800s, people got divorced—even Sally and Joe at the harbor got divorced, it happened. But it wasn’t anything that had ever occurred to Meg as something that could happen to her, with her good, quiet husband.

Arthur knew all of that, and so he said quickly, “No.” But he had been quiet for so long he didn’t know how to say what he meant, that Do you want me was the most loving question he’d ever asked.

***

He started with the gutters, because that was something he actually knew how to fix. The aluminum had separated from three of the brackets, and two of the brackets themselves had rusted through, so that the whole assembly hung off the side of the house at an angle suggestive of a poorly-set limb, pouring water onto the foundations every time it rained.

He removed the corroded brackets and replaced them, rehung the gutter. He was aware of Meg watching from the kitchen window, but he didn’t look directly at her, the way you don't look directly at a deer if you didn’t want it to run away.

Arthur didn't have the equipment for helical piers and he knew, rationally, that this was a job for professionals with hydraulic drivers and engineering degrees. But he could dig. He could clear the soil away from the base of the foundation and see what he was dealing with, and he could fill the cracks with epoxy, and he could grade the yard so the water ran toward the bluff instead of pooling against the house.

The afternoon was warm, and he took off his shirt after the first hour, which was something he had not done in the yard since the Clintons were in office. His shoulders were pale and his back ached and the shovel kept hitting rocks, but the dirt moved, and the foundation revealed itself inch by inch—cracked, stained, discolored.

He kept at it the next day, and the next.

Meg did not help, but she watched, and eventually she stopped pretending she wasn’t.

***

He didn't hear her come out. She was just suddenly there—standing at the edge of the trench he’d dug, holding an apple, unsmiling.

“You should stop,” she said. “Take a break.”

Their fingers brushed when he took the apple, electric, and it felt like he’d taken a liberty along with it, even though they slept beside each other every night.

“You missed the spot under the bathroom window,” she said. “The soil’s graded wrong there, too.”

She sat down on the edge of the trench, her legs dangling, and bit into an apple of her own. He watched the juice drip from the corner of her mouth. The fruit was cold and a little mealy—it was early in the season for apples—but they ate anyway, looking out at the water doing what water always did, advancing and retreating, patient and indifferent and endless.

He could have kissed her; she would have let him. She would have kissed him back, and they could go inside and he could put his mouth on her afterward, tasting himself the way she sometimes let him do, even though she didn’t always like it.

Instead he took the apple core from her hand, and held her hand lightly, so that she could pull away, and he drew his tongue over her wrist where the juice had run, holding it over her beating pulse.

Ilya kept reading, obviously. He read the whole thing and wished for more. He read lines aloud to himself in his stuffy little room, aching, unsure of what he wanted, Shane’s body or his words—both, always both, almost as if they were the same thing.

Desire, he decided, was not a thing you carried. It could not be put down and picked up again, and to lose his desire was to lose himself

When he kissed her, she was a country he entered with his mouth.

They were not young and the light was not golden and he still wanted her with a greed that embarrassed him, that made him new.

His mouth on her skin and the tide coming in were the same slow argument—I am here, I am here, I am here, and I will be here with you even if you leave me

It was late when he stopped, nearing morning.

These lines weren’t about Ilya—Arthur was not Shane, Ilya was not Meg, not in any iteration. And yet he thought—he hoped—that they could be, they might be, what if they were.

The light filtered dimly through the single window as Ilya shut his eyes to try and sleep, something he’d been only marginally successful at since shouting at Hollander in the rain. And for the first time since that day, Ilya allowed himself to think about what it had been like to touch him, to feel how strong he was and yet how easily he would give in, how strong it had made Ilya feel in turn, to be granted that trust.

Not all of the memories were good ones, though they were all, universally, scorchingly hot. Shane on his knees in the club bathroom, desperately wanton, perfect—but then the memory would falter, because Ilya had laughed at him. Shane above him at Hayden’s, blustering but hesitant, quivering, fucking into his mouth—Ilya wanted to swallow him whole, wanted to keep him forever, but he’d been the one to tell him to get out, that this meant nothing to either of them.

He tried to jerk off anyway, thinking about love and lust and how perhaps sometimes—not always, but sometimes, maybe, if you were lucky as Ilya had never known how to be lucky—they were the same thing.

He ran his hands over his body and imagined they were Shane’s, but he could not come.

Chapter End Notes

Disney Robin Hood mention

Also, y'all I’m not writing 100 pages of Shane’s fake book. I am just not that dedicated.

Chapter 14: I love you much most beautiful darling more than anyone on the earth/and I like you better than everything in the sky.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

Ilya peered at himself in the mirror above the bathroom sink. He looked haggard, unsurprisingly, and he hadn’t packed much in the way of haircare products and the Stop & Shop hadn’t had much to offer beyond Garnier Fructis, and now he smelled like pineapple.

He’d spent the day exhausted and running around town trying to buy a decent shirt since Sasha’s friend’s apartment didn’t have laundry and everything he had was filthy. And then running around trying unsuccessfully to find a printing service so he could give Shane his own pages of eating apples and being in love even though he didn’t know if he had the courage to do it. He had finally wandered into a Sotheby’s wearing his most charming and flirtatious smile, and Mrs. Kennedy had dithered, blushed, and finally allowed him to email her the file.

And then he’d rolled up the pages and shoved them into his coat and tried not to think about them.

He’d had so much coffee his hands were shaking—or at least he told himself it was the coffee. He hadn’t been able to resist a cigarette, but he’d showered and brushed his teeth twice afterward.

In his twenty-five years of life, Ilya Rozanov had been in a number of awkward, even frankly dangerous situations, but nothing had ever made him more nervous than waiting for Shane Hollander to pick him up in a Jeep Cherokee.

At 6:57, it pulled up outside, and Ilya darted out the door before Shane had the chance to climb out and knock. “Hi,” he said, raising a casual hand. He opened the passenger side door and stuck the bottle of red wine he’d bought in the cupholder.

“Hi,” Shane said, smiling. He was wearing a pale yellow cashmere sweater, thin and agonizingly soft-looking. The sleeves were pushed up just slightly at the wrist. He had an Apple Watch and drove with one large hand on the gear shift even though it wasn’t really a gear shift; the car was automatic.

Ilya looked out the window at the sea.

Shane parked the Jeep in the garage, unlocked the door to the house and stepped aside to let Ilya pass through first. All the lights were on and it was warm inside, with a fire crackling in the fireplace.

“It’s a nice place,” Ilya said, in frankly staggering understatement. “I didn’t say last night, but it’s really nice.”

“Didn’t say because you ran away?”

Ilya paled and shot him a look, but Shane was smiling, a little nervous, a little teasing. “Um, yeah. Sorry.”

Shane shook his head. “It’s okay. I mean, I get it, I think. This is…it was a surprise, seeing you yesterday. I was a little freaked out, too.”

Ilya nodded, unable to speak. He toed off his shoes and hung up his coat, aware of the pages stuck in the inside pocket, damning and terrifying. He walked into the large open space—the kitchen one end, white tile and slate-colored countertops, and there was a long wooden dining table down the center, but the corner that looked out over the ocean and was made up almost entirely of windows held nothing but some low, comfortable-looking furniture: deep couches and small club chairs, end tables and afghans and throw pillows in muted colors. The sun had set and Ilya couldn’t see the bay, but he could imagine it stretching smooth and cold, could imagine sitting here and feeling like there was no need to look anywhere else.

“Do you want some wine?”

“Sure.”

Shane opened the bottle Ilya had brought—a $50 Châteauneuf du Pape, the tag at the store said Wine Enthusiast gave it a 96. The wineglasses were fine-stemmed and Ilya held his very carefully for fear he might break it.

“Um, cheers,” Shane said.

“Cheers.” They clinked glasses, and Ilya tried not to down it all in one gulp. “What is for dinner?”

“Just pasta. I got some clams, though, and white wine. It’s supposed to be pretty easy.”

“Can I help?”

Shane looked a little at a loss, as if he hadn’t really anticipated an offer that was, in Ilya’s mind, just basic politeness. “You can scrub the clams?”

Ilya set down his wine and rolled up his sleeves. The shirt he’d bought was plaid, not exactly his style, but there weren’t many available options that weren’t strictly for summer. He took the brown paper bag Shane handed him to the sink and tore it open. The clams were smallish, gritty and cold and smelling more of the ocean than of fish, and he scrubbed them with a stiff-bristled brush under a stream of water.

“Check for any that are open,” Shane said. He reached past Ilya to grab a colander from the drying rack and their arms brushed, cashmere on bare skin, and Ilya’s whole body went taut. “If they’re open and don’t close right away when you tap them, the fishmonger said to toss them.”

It hadn’t occurred to Ilya that they would still be alive; he scrubbed them a bit more gently. Shane sliced garlic at the counter beside him, and they worked in a silence that was almost comfortable, but not quite. Ilya could hear the fire popping at the other end of the room.

Shane sizzled the garlic in olive oil and said, “I tried to find razor clams, but they didn’t have any. My mom used to take me out looking for them, we’d walk out in the flats with bare feet and try to feel for them with our toes.”

Ilya smiled, picturing a young Shane Hollander, earnest and chubby-cheeked, wiggling his toes in the wet sand. “I would like to see that.”

“I could take you, if you wanted. The next low tide.”

Ilya’s head shot up, but Shane was angled away from him, stirring the garlic intently. “Thank you,” he said softly.

When dinner was ready, they sat catty-corner to each other at the long wooden table. Ilya ate like he was starving; it was delicious, the clams briny and tender, but mostly he just wanted something to do, some way to keep his mouth quiet so he didn’t say something ruinous.

Shane cleared his throat.

Ilya swallowed quickly, said, “It’s good. Really good.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” Shane took a gulp of wine; they’d moved on to white, and while Ilya wasn’t feeling more than a little tipsy, Shane’s cheeks had gone rosy. “Did you, um, get a chance to take a look at the pages I sent you?”

Ilya choked on his wine. “Yes. Yes, I did, I read it right away.” He’d spent all day trying to figure out what on earth he was going to say to Shane about Shore, about the beautiful vulnerability of it—he was a writer but he had no words for this. “I…” he said helplessly, because of course he couldn’t just come out and ask about the apple. “It was really good. Different from your other books. Still nothing happens,” he said, trying to be funny, because Shane was apparently still incapable of anything resembling plot, “but in a better way, yes?”

Shane’s smile looked a little forced, flickering like the firelight. “Right, yeah. Thanks. I’m glad you liked it. I tried to take your advice to heart.”

Ilya wanted to thunk his head on the table.

They finished dinner, and then Ilya washed and Shane dried, painfully domestic. When they finished, Ilya dried his hands on the dishtowel and leaned back against the counter, crossed his ankles. “Thank you for dinner,” he said.

Shane kissed him.

He stepped forward and put a hand on his jaw and kissed him softly, purposefully. Ilya didn’t know how to kiss him back, when every other time had been aggressive, hungry and overtly sexual. And it wasn’t like this wasn’t sexual; Ilya wasn’t sure he was capable of being this close to Shane and not getting hard, but after everything he’d gotten wrong, every stupid mistake, he didn’t want to push too hard, didn’t want Shane to think that this was just about sex, because it never had been even though it always was.

And so his hands hovered uselessly over Shane’s waist, his hips, the back of his neck, all of it feeling like too much. He settled one hand on the counter behind him and the other on his own thigh, stiff and inept.

Shane pulled back, his hand still resting lightly on Ilya’s face. “This okay?”

“Yes,” Ilya said, trying in one word to communicate No it is not okay, okay is for ordinary things, for “yes I will buy milk,” and this is a cataclysm.

He must have failed, because Shane dropped his hand and took a step back. “Look, I know this isn’t…” he gave a small, humorless laugh. “I guess I have no idea what this is. But I wanted to say I’m sorry for what I said before.”

Ilya blinked, had no clue what he was talking about. “What?”

“At the retreat, what I said about Wooden Horse. You’re an incredible writer, Ilya.” He said his name so carefully, the stress in the right place.

Ilya shook his head. “No, you were right, about all of it. You don’t have to—”

“You’re so funny,” Shane said, almost fiercely. “And that’s not easy. I have no idea how to do that. I’m not funny.”

Ilya felt a little hysterical, and very much as if he would melt into Shane’s beautiful oak floors if he kept having to listen to nice things about himself. “No, not true, you are so funny, Shane. Like your Tevas, they are hilarious, and what does your watch do, do you have one of those rings that tells you how well you sleep—”

Shane smiled and shook his head, but his eyes stayed determined. “Let me say this, okay? I said it so terribly before. It’s just—I see so much caring in you, and your writing isn’t…” he broke off, tried again. “You were being caring when you gave me feedback, even if”—his mouth twisted wryly, and he looked away, toward the dark windows and the invisible sea—“you weren’t very nice about it. You were right, everything you said was right, and—”

“No, it wasn’t—”

“It was.” Shane looked up at him, and his eyes were wet, and Ilya wanted to die. “And anyway, that’s why I wanted you to read the pages. And I know…I know you didn’t like them, that they’re still, I don’t know, boring or whatever. That’s okay.”

“I loved them,” Ilya said.

Shane blinked at him, his mouth parting, pink and wet. “Oh.”

“They were...the apple, it…” He couldn’t say it. Ilya pushed past him, crossed to the entryway, his hands shaking again as he pulled the rolled pages from his coat pocket. “Here,” he said thrusting them at Shane.

Shane held them lightly in his hands. “What…?”

“I have to go,” Ilya blurted, and ran back to the door, grabbed his jacket, shoved his feet into his shoes, standing on tiptoe over the heels. He swallowed hard and said, over his shoulder, “I won’t go far, just on the beach,” and closed the door behind him.

Ilya sat on the lowest step with his feet in the pebbled sand, smoking furiously and staring out at the darkness over the bay. The water barely moved, just a faint lapping at the shore’s edge, and the moon lay itself across the surface in a single unbroken line, like a radiant crack in a trembling earth.

He lit another cigarette off the end of the first, struggling a little with the wind, cupping his hand around the ember. He ought to feel cold probably, but was almost too warm for his jacket, so he unzipped it and let the air blow across his chest, calming his nerves.

He heard the sliding door open behind him at the top of the stairs, the quiet scrape of it in its track, and stubbed the cigarette out in the sand before frowning at it, thinking of Gregor on Coney Island Beach, and pocketing both stubs.

Shane’s tread down the steps was slow, measured, and when he reached the bottom he sat next to Ilya on the stair, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, but not quite. The moon was bright enough that Ilya could see his breath puff white from his mouth.

“Ilya—”

“Don’t say anything. I don’t know if you like it, but it doesn’t matter—I want to say this first.”

“I—”

“I love you,” Ilya said in a rush. “I’m so in love with you”—it sounded wrong in English, not enough—“I want to be with you all the time, to wash your dishes. I want to lick your freckles. I want to go to the grocery store with you and dance with you because you are so terrible at it. I want to get angry at you because no one else could make me so angry, I want to fuck you oh my god I want to do that—but that’s not, that’s not…” He was floundering, he was getting it wrong, he couldn’t say the whole of it, the words simply didn’t exist, not in any language, though every single one of them had tried.

Shane swung into his lap, his knees on the stairs on either side of Ilya’s hips, the wood creaking beneath them. He gripped Ilya’s face in his hands, smiling, his teeth white in the dark. “I know,” he said, so gently. “I love you, too.”

Ilya kissed him, and his hand came around Shane’s waist and held him close, and whatever restraint either of them had managed half an hour ago was gone now, their teeth clashing and Shane wriggling closer and gripping him harder though there wasn’t room on the step—and so Ilya tipped them forward so that Shane was on his back in the sand, and he was laughing, mouth open and eyes wet and shining.

Ilya pressed into him and Shane’s legs came around him. “I can’t believe you wrote about that, too, about the apple,” he said breathlessly.

Ilya tugged at the neckline of his sweater—Shane hadn’t even put on a jacket, had just walked out in cashmere and bare feet—and buried his face in his neck, sucking at his hammering pulse. “Of course I wrote about that,” he said into Shane’s skin. “It was the best day of my life.”

Shane made a painful, wondering sound, and his hands gripped Ilya’s hair, tugging his head up. “Fuck me,” he said.

Ilya blinked rapidly, trying to clear his head. “We don’t have to. I’m sorry I pushed you about that, I didn’t know—”

Shane made an exasperated sound, his hips coming up, his hard cock jutting into Ilya’s inner thigh, insistent. “I swear to God, Rozanov, I am telling you what I want, can we please just—”

Ilya groaned and tried to push himself off, to summon the inner strength to stop touching Shane for the five minutes it would take to get to a bedroom. “Okay, yes, we go inside—”

But Shane tightened his legs around his him, said petulantly, “Now, here.”

Ilya thought about it really hard before saying, reluctantly, “No.”

“No? After everything, you’re—”

“No, is terrible idea! No lube, all this sand, no!”

Shane actually fucking pouted, and Ilya laughed, joyful and disbelieving.

“Fine,” Shane said, and he heaved, tightening his legs and using his hips for leverage as he flipped them over, rolling in the sand so that he was on top, his hands already busy at Ilya’s belt. Ilya gasped; Shane’s fingers on his cock were fucking freezing.

“Wait, wait,” Ilya said, “just—” And he maneuvered them into a 69, the logistics very puzzling and inefficient, elbows in sand, knees on pebbles, and they kept pausing to mouth at one another—hands, shoulders, whatever they could reach, undoing belts and dragging down zippers with chilled fingers. Until they were on their sides, heads in the sand, and—at last, fuck—Ilya had the long line of Shane’s cock in his mouth, and Shane’s mouth was on him and it was perfect, like a completed circuit, infinite.

Or maybe not. Ilya’s whole body jerked when Shane sucked him, wet and hot, moaning—and he needed to focus, to reciprocate, that was Shane’s dick in his mouth, it was the most important thing on the planet—but it was impossible, he was so hard and it had been so fucking long—

“Stop, stop,” Ilya panted, but of course Shane didn’t, he just sucked harder and Ilya came immediately, helplessly, spilling down Shane’s throat on the rocky shoreline, in the freezing moonlight, coming with I love you on his tongue.

When his ears stopped ringing and the stars behind his eyelids faded, he thought he would die of mortification.

Shane was laughing giddily as he mouthed at Ilya’s softening cock. “Shut up,” Ilya said, and shoved at his head, his face burning even in the cold.

“No way,” Shane said, “the great Ilya Rozanov, what was that, fifteen seconds? And I thought I was hard up.” And then he cracked himself up again at hard, and Ilya wanted to kill him, wanted to kiss him senseless.

“It has been a long time,” he said, scowling. “Months.”

“Me too? I haven’t—” He batted at Ilya’s head, trying to get him to put his mouth back on him, his cock still hard and flushed dark, curving toward his belly; Ilya resisted just to torture him. “For fuck’s sake…look, I’m sorry I laughed, can we please just…” 

“What, you need something?” Ilya said, grinning, his chin scraping against Shane’s open zipper, licking lightly at the head of his cock, just enough to make him shudder. “Not like you to hold out, what, did you jerk off right before you came to pick me up?”

“Ilya, please, come on—”

“You did,” Ilya said, delighted, and ran his tongue up the underside, slow and wet.

Shane gave an enraged groan, dropped his head back on the sand. “Fuck you. Like you didn’t.”

Ilya’s laughter died, and he turned his face into Shane’s thigh. “No.”

“Bullshit.”

Ilya shook his head, his eyes prickling. It was stupid, it was all fine now, he was just so fucking relieved to be touching Shane again, it felt like a dislocated limb had been set back into place. “I didn’t,” he said quietly, “at all, not since.”

Shane stilled, and there was a pause long enough that Ilya could register the sound of the water lapping at the shore.

“Not since…the retreat?” Shane’s voice was strained. “That was months ago.”

“Yes, I know,” Ilya grumbled. Shane tried to sit up, to get a look at his face, but Ilya tugged him back down, ran a hand over his weeping cock to keep him in place, kissed the indentation beneath the glans gently, tenderly. “It’s not like I didn’t try. I just couldn’t, you know, finish.”

“Oh fuck,” Shane said breathlessly, and shoved at Ilya hard, pushing him onto his back and straddling him, cock in hand, the tip glistening wet. Ilya propped himself up on his elbows, mouth open, ready to take him in, but Shane shook his head. “Spit on me,” he said roughly.

Ilya’s cock gave a desperate twitch, half-filling already. He curled upward, his neck straining, and very carefully let a line of saliva fall onto Shane’s cock. Shane shuddered, his wrist twisting, his hand moving fast. The moonlight turned him blue-white, mythic. His eyes were fierce on Ilya’s face, as he came all over Ilya’s new plaid shirt, moaning, before collapsing forward onto Ilya’s chest, and they lay there panting in the cold sand, tangled together, the bay lapping gently, in and out, on and on and on, forever.

Chapter 15: i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss,

Chapter Notes

I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve

Eventually Ilya became aware that he was freezing cold and extremely uncomfortable. He shifted, groaned, and said, “I have sand in my ass.”

Shane lifted his head from Ilya’s chest; he had come smeared across his yellow sweater like a dark wet comet. “Ugh, me too. It’s a good thing I didn’t let you fuck me.”

“Let me?” Ilya said, outraged.

They stumbled up the stairs, and Shane pawed at Ilya’s sandy jacket as he reached in to turn on the outdoor shower. They left their clothes in a gritty heap on the patio and crowded in together, though the space wasn’t really big enough for both of them. Ilya ran his hands over Shane’s body—his ribs, the dip of his waist, the rough grains of sand caught in his pubic hair—as the steam drifting up toward the sky, and shuddered as the cold air blew in, his skin prickling violently where the spray didn’t reach.

“Get under the hot water,” Shane said, and tried to move over.

“It’s fine,” Ilya said from his knees, because who cared about cold when he could lick water from Shane’s hipbone.

Shane rubbed shampoo into Ilya’s hair and said drily, “I don’t think I can go again just yet.” Ilya made a noise; he couldn’t either, probably, but that wasn’t even really the point. He pressed his forehead to the top of Shane’s thigh, the hot water sluicing down his back. “Come on,” Shane said, tugging him up into a lazy, messy kiss. “Let’s go inside.”

Ilya didn’t want to let him go, particularly once the water was off and they were standing wet in the icy air and hostile wind. “Fuck,” he said, and clung to Shane for warmth more than anything else, arms locked around his back, chin notched over his shoulder. “Where are towels?”

“Inside,” Shane said, and Ilya groaned.

“Poor planning.”

“How was I supposed to know this was going to happen? I hoped we’d, I don’t know, make out or something, not…”

“Fuck on the beach?” He slapped Shane’s ass, made him yelp. “Was pretty easy to predict I think.”

His accent was thick but he didn’t care, he was grinning and shivering, sex-drunk. They tracked wet footprints across the hardwood floor, wrapped themselves in towels and sat on the floor by the fireplace to warm up. Shane squatted, naked, his balls dangling, to toss another couple of logs on, and Ilya watched him through half-closed eyes, smiling dreamily.

“Are you warm now?”

Ilya opened his eyes and pulled his damp towel closer. “Warmer. I am not like you, crazy, jumping into the ocean in winter.” He ran a hand over Shane’s ankle, pressed his palm into the jut of bone.

Shane frowned and then got up, prying away Ilya’s towel and giving him an afghan instead. It was soft, heavy wool, the color of oatmeal. “I’ll make us some tea, that’ll warm you up.”

Ilya figured he was probably dry enough now, and heaved himself onto the couch, leaning over the back to watch as Shane padded upstairs and came back down in a familiar pair of flannel pajama pants and Columbia University t-shirt, smiling shyly as he placed a neatly folded pile of clothes next to Ilya, joggers and a plain t-shirt.

“If you want to get dressed,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

“You don’t want me to?” Ilya teased.

Shane curled his lips in, cheeks flushing. “Not really,” he admitted, and walked over to the kitchen. “I have English Breakfast, but you probably don’t want that since it’s nighttime.”

“Why wouldn’t I want that?” Ilya asked, amused.

“Well, caffeine after two pm isn’t a great idea, obviously…”

Ilya thought of the cup of iced coffee he’d chugged before Shane came to pick him up. “Right, obviously.”

“But I also have ginger, sencha but that still has caffeine—”

“I want chamomile-mint,” Ilya said abruptly. “You have that, yes?”

Shane paused, turning around to squint at him. “Um, yeah. I do. I drink that every night.”

Ilya smiled softly, pillowing his cheek on his hands. “I know.”

He closed his eyes and listened to the small sounds of Shane moving around his kitchen, the click of the electric kettle, the papery tear of tea bags being opened, the clink of a spoon against ceramic. Eventually he came back with two mugs, handing one to Ilya before sitting at the other end of the couch, pulling his knees up and tucking his feet beneath Ilya’s blanket. The mug was thick ceramic, handmade, a little uneven.

Ilya took a sip and made a face. It tasted nothing like it had on Shane’s tongue, and he felt a little betrayed. “What is this, this is not tea?”

“Of course it is.”

“No, this is…” he shook his head, mystified. “This is grass water. Why do you drink this?”

Shane rolled his eyes. “It helps me sleep? It’s comforting?”

Ilya tried another sip just to make sure, smacked his lips. “At least put some honey in it.”

“I don’t need the sugar right before bed,” Shane said patiently.

It couldn’t have been later than nine o’clock, nowhere close to bedtime. And yet Ilya’s eyelids were getting heavy again—he didn’t want to sleep, he wanted to keep talking to Shane, to fuck again and see if he could last more than a minute this time. Christ he was never going to live that down. But he was just so tired, he was so very tired.

“Hey,” Shane said softly. Ilya opened his eyes, found that Shane was carefully taking his mug from him. “Come on, you’re falling asleep.”

And so he was, for a miracle—he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. He wrapped the blanket tighter around himself and followed Shane up the stairs, yawning.

“Here, I’ll get you a toothbrush…”

So Ilya brushed his teeth beside Shane, the two of them sharing the sink, taking turns spitting and rinsing, their elbows bumping. He dropped his afghan on the floor and lay in the bed, arm pillowed beneath his head as he watched Shane hurry through his skin-care routine, patting in various serums and creams with his fingers before climbing in beside him.

“Mmm,” Ilya grunted, and tugged at his t-shirt. “Take them off.”

Shane huffed a laugh, pleased, and stood up just long enough to shuck his pajama bottoms, his t-shirt, folding them and placing them on a chair in the corner before lying back down; Ilya immediately curled into him, fitting himself against Shane’s side, resting his head on his chest. Shane stroked through his damp curls, blunt nails scratching gently.

“Do you mind if I read for a bit?”

Ilya forced his eyes open. “No, of course not. I’m sorry, it is so early, and…” he drifted a hand down Shane’s chest, thumbing at his nipple before grabbing a handful of his thigh, squeezing.

Shane laughed and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “I think you need to sleep, baby. There’s always tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. Tomorrow Ilya would wake up in Shane’s bed, would drink his coffee (shit, he hoped Shane had coffee) and they would eat breakfast and walk on the beach and…well, he didn’t know what might happen after that, but it seemed, improbably, like no matter what it was, it would be something good, even wonderful.

It was just so fucking unlikely.

He ran his lips over Shane’s skin, smooth and taut. He felt him shift as he reached for his glasses, and heard the brush of pages being turned.

Ilya swallowed hard. “Would you read to me?” he whispered.

Shane made a breathy sound, said, “It’s Hayden’s latest, are you sure you want me to?”

Ilya nodded against his chest. “I just want to hear your voice.”

And so Shane read, and the book was very stupid, but it didn’t matter because Ilya wasn’t really listening to the words. He drifted off and slept, deeply, with Shane’s voice in his head.

Ilya woke up hard.

They’d shifted in the night, Shane curled around his back, his own hard-on pressed against Ilya’s ass, one arm draped heavy across his waist. Ilya whispered, afraid to move, “Are you awake?”

The only reply was a quiet, breathy snore. Ilya wished he could see him, was dying to know what Shane looked like when he slept, and had to remind himself sternly that there was no reason to think he would never get another chance, that sleeping beside Shane could conceivably be something he did frequently, often enough that he got used to it, even, though that seemed, as with everything else about the past twenty-four hours, extremely improbable.

It was a sunny morning, the light not golden exactly, but clear, a little ungentle. He hadn’t paid much attention to Shane’s bedroom last night, and so he took in as much as he could without moving—the low walnut dresser with a little dish for his Apple Watch, some loose change, some rounded quartz stones that he must have collected from the shore. There was a bookshelf tucked beneath the window, and through the glass the bay outside was a swath of green-gray against the pale blue sky. A crow hollered at them as it flew past, and Ilya narrowed his eyes at it.

Shane’s arm tightened around his waist, an unconscious squeeze, and then a sharper, snorting inhale at the back of his neck. Ilya could feel the moment consciousness returned, Shane’s entire body going tense as he registered the presence of another person in his bed.

“Hi,” Ilya said, and hated the hesitant hitch in his voice.

There was a pause, and then Shane pressed his forehead between Ilya’s shoulder blades, huffed out a warm, damp breath. “Hi.” His voice was rough with sleep. “What time is it?”

Ilya gave a small shrug, not wanting to disturb him. “I don’t know. Early.”

Shane’s fingers flexed across Ilya’s stomach, making his cock twitch. “Did you sleep okay?”

Ilya nodded, throat a little thick. “Yes. And you?” So far as he knew—though he didn’t know anything, really—Shane didn’t often have people in his bed, and maybe he hadn’t liked it, maybe Ilya had hogged the blankets or snored.

“Mmm, yes.” Shane let him go, rolling onto his back and stretching, his cock dragging across Ilya’s ass, arms extended overhead so his knuckles brushed against the headboard.

Ilya rolled over, allowed himself the gift of Shane in the morning. He had a pink crease on his cheek from the pillow and a sleepy, unguarded smile that made Ilya’s chest feel like it was caving in. “Can I kiss you?”

Shane’s brow furrowed, puzzled. “Of course.”

Ilya’s breath came shallow as he leaned in close and brushed their lips together. Shane made a small, pleased sound and opened his mouth, and he didn’t taste like chamomile-mint or toothpaste, and somehow it was even better that he just tasted like Shane-in-the-morning, hot and slow and a little sour.

Shane tugged at his shoulders, pulled Ilya on top of him between his spread legs, dragging his hands down his back to grab his ass, pressing him closer, and the feeling of skin against warm skin made Ilya’s brain go fuzzy. He sat back on his knees, lifted up just enough to bring Shane’s face into focus. “I love you,” he said, because he could.

Shane smiled, bright and content. “I love you, too.”

Ilya kissed his nose. “Are you hungry? Do you want breakfast? I can make you something.”

Shane shook his head, curled his hips upward, tightening his legs around Ilya’s waist. “Maybe later. Right now,” he said, very seriously, “if you wouldn’t mind, I would very much appreciate it if you would fuck me.”

Ilya’s breath punched out of him, his fingers digging into Shane’s upper arms. “Fuck, okay. Yes.”

Shane surged up, and the slow, wet kiss turned filthy almost immediately, Ilya’s hands sliding down to grope his ass, fingertips ghosting over the edge of his hole. Shane moaned and bit Ilya’s lip before pushing him off, rolling over to yank open the nightstand drawer. Ilya went with him, sucking a kiss into the space between his shoulder blades, making him shiver.

“Oh, shit—”

Ilya dragged his teeth over the knob at the top of Shane’s spine. “What?”

Shane blew out a frustrated breath and rolled over. “I don’t have condoms. I don’t exactly bring people here.”

“I will get,” Ilya said instantly, already swinging his legs off the bed. “Give me your car keys.”

Shane gave a delighted laugh and pulled him back down, kissing him fiercely. “It’s okay. We can go later.” He huffed a breathy laugh against Ilya’s mouth. “Unless you have another set of test results handy.”

Ilya’s jaw dropped, his eyes widening. “You would take me bare?”

Shane flushed, pink spreading down his neck, blooming across his collarbones. “Um. Yeah. Definitely.”

This was not something Ilya had ever done before; he’d taken plenty of risks in his life, a great many of them ill-advised, but this, the giving and receiving of a body without any layer between, he had not. The very idea of it, of being skin to skin inside Shane, separated by nothing at all, made him a little dizzy. “Um. We could…” He hesitated. Somehow this was more embarrassing than saying I love you. “I mean…I have not done that with anyone since I met you. At the party, back in May.”

Shane’s eyes widened, and Ilya added hastily so as not to give him the wrong idea, “Fucking, I mean. Blowjob yes, once.” Ilya didn’t want to say his name; Dan Wickham belonged nowhere near this bed, this cool clear sunlight. “So. I don’t know, probably you don’t want to—we can go get condoms, and then I will get tested, and—”

Shane cut him off with a brief hard kiss. “Yes. Please.”

Ilya dropped his forehead against Shane’s chest, breathing hard, his pulse hammering. “Yes, okay. Yes.”

Shane laughed—a breathless, giddy thing, a little trembly—and handed him the bottle of lube. “Okay. Um. It might take me a little while, since I haven’t, you know. I have a dildo but it’s not that big, so yeah, I don’t know, maybe we should eat breakfast first, if you’re hungry—”

Ilya gave him a disbelieving look. “I am going to eat your ass now, yes? I do not want eggs.”

“I don’t actually have eggs, I have egg whites, they’re much healthier—” He broke off on a gasp as Ilya ducked between his legs, pushed his thighs open and put his mouth on him.

Shane was so warm, so soft, and so fucking responsive, Jesus, his hole fluttering as Ilya licked at it, squeezing tightly around his tongue.

“Fuck, oh my god, fuck—”

Ilya lifted his head, dragged his teeth across the pale stretch of Shane’s inner thigh as he pushed at the back of his knees to lift his ass off the bed. “Look at me,” he said roughly, kneeling over him.

Shane opened his tight-shut eyes, wrecked already, lashes clumped with damp— Ilya held his gaze as he spat into his hole, wet and loud.

Shane gasped, his whole body jerked, and Ilya dragged a thumb through his own saliva, pressing it in, watching Shane’s mouth fall slack and his eyes go hazy. He rocked his own cock against the curve of Shane’s ass, mindless, and drew in a shuddering breath. He uncapped the lubricant with his other hand. Maybe one day they could fuck with just spit, god, maybe—

But for now he poured the lube on thick, swirled his index finger through it before pushing inside, rocking back and forth, watching the muscle give. Shane moaned, and Ilya gathered some of the excess, used it to slick the way as he ran his other hand up Shane’s cock, fisting it lightly. “Is okay?”

Shane nodded, a little frantic. “More please.”

Ilya eyed him doubtfully—he was so fucking tight—but added a second finger, slowly moving in and out, patiently seeking—there.

Shane arched clean off the bed with a cry, his mouth wet and open. “Fuck, Ilya—”

Ilya ducked his head, mouthing along Shane’s chest, the tendons of his neck, whatever he could reach. He was breathing fast and hard, and he had to work to keep his movements slow, scissoring his fingers gently, his fist loose on Shane’s cock because he didn’t want to come, not yet.

Shane was taking deep, dragging breaths, his hands running up and down his own thighs, twitching. “Another,” he said raggedly.

Ilya shook his head. “Too soon, more time.”

Shane whined and shifted his hips, trying to make Ilya go faster, clenching around him. “Come on…”

Ilya bit his nipple hard enough to make him gasp. “So impatient, Hollander. We have time, yes?”

It was meant to come out teasing, but Shane’s eyes shot open, and he took Ilya’s face between his hands. He was panting and his cock was dripping onto his belly in a clear, slow thread, but his eyes were serious. “I think we do. I think we have…I mean…I want you to stay here,” he said in a rush. “Like, always. Or”—he brushed a thumb across Ilya’s lower lip, pressed it inside—“I don’t know what your plans are, I don’t know anything, but…”

Ilya bit his thumb very gently, then leaned down to kiss him more gently still. “I don’t know anything either,” he whispered. “But I would stay here always.”

They kissed some more, slow and tender, until Shane began to squirm and Ilya remembered he still had two fingers stuck up his ass. He curved them upward, pressing firmly to make Shane cry out, and had a brief, filthy fantasy about milking his prostate for hours, dragging it out until Shane was a whimpering, teary-eyed mess.

Another day, perhaps. They had time.

When at last Ilya agreed that Shane was ready, he withdrew his fingers and slicked himself, the head of his cock nudging against Shane’s hole. His hands were shaking and his eyes were prickling and Shane pulled him closer with his legs, one heel pressing into the small of Ilya’s back. “It’s okay,” he whispered, and Ilya pushed in.

Shane gave a low groan, his head dipping back, his throat long and pale and straining. Ilya watched his face carefully, moved very slowly, not just for Shane’s sake but for his own, because Christ.

It just seemed so impossible, this simple, pleasurable act: that Ilya was inside Shane’s body, held by him in the most intimate of ways, so fucking tight. It was the hottest thing he had ever felt in his entire life.

At last he was all the way in, their foreheads pressed together, mouths brushing in not-quite-kisses. “Are you all right?”

Shane took in a shaking breath. “Yeah. It’s just…”

Ilya nodded, dragged his lips beneath Shane’s eyes, tasting salt. “I know, solnyshko.”

“I love you,” Shane said.

Ilya dug his fingers into Shane’s hips, wished he could get even closer. “I love you, too.”

Shane made a sound, half-laugh and half-gasp. “Do you think you could move now? Please? If it’s not too much trouble?”

Ilya leaned back, shook his head, ducked back down to kiss the smile off his face. “So demanding.”

He pulled back slowly, pushed in again, setting a rhythm slow and deep, and Shane began making little punched-out sounds in time with it, breathy little ahs. Ilya shifted experimentally, trying to find the right angle, watching Shane’s face like a barometer, and then—

“Fucking Christ,” Shane said, his hand shooting back to grip the headboard. “There oh my god please—”

Ilya gritted his teeth, angled his hips, and drove in again and again, one hand braced on the bed beside Shane’s head, the other gripping the underside of his thigh, holding him open. Shane’s back bowed up off the mattress, and they kissed messily, tongues sliding across lips and teeth.

Ilya was stupidly close already, a tight hot coil at the base of his spine, and he let go of Shane’s thigh to wrap a hand around his cock. The lube had dried a little and he cursed, fumbling for the bottle, but Shane shook his head frantically and curved his own hand around Ilya’s. “It’s good, it’s so good—”

They worked him together, hands sliding sticky and hot, knuckles catching on knuckles. Shane’s mouth was open, his eyes glassy and wet and fixed on Ilya’s. “Do it, go on,” he whispered.

Ilya couldn’t breathe. He was going to die right here, like this, not a bad way to go. “Do what?”

“Come for me,” Shane panted, his fist flying in tandem with Ilya’s. “I want to feel you in me, I want to feel it spill out, I want—”

Ilya’s precarious control shattered, and he lunged into him, teeth dragging at Shane’s shoulder, his cheekbone, a mouthful of his hair, as Shane clenched around him, spasming. Ilya couldn’t be sure which of them came first, it was all one sensation, Shane’s orgasm and his own, obliterating.

Ilya came back to himself with his face in Shane’s neck, Shane’s hands drifting dazedly up and down his back. “Wow, okay.”

Shane laughed, quaking with it. “Yeah.”

Ilya pulled out carefully—no need to grip a condom to keep it on, that was new, a little thrilling—and Shane hissed, his thighs tightening reflexively. “Sorry,” Ilya murmured, pressing a kiss to his jaw. “Are you okay?”

“Mmm.”

Ilya sat back on his knees between Shane’s splayed legs, admiring. There was come dripping down his belly, and he was flushed and damp and heavy-lidded, one arm flung overhead, fucking magnificent. “You are sore?”

Shane’s eyes fluttered open and then closed again, a small smile playing at his lips. “A little,” he admitted.

Ilya shuffled backward and then froze, riveted: a slow dribble of white was running out of Shane’s hole, catching the sunlight. Ilya’s breath went out of him, and he pushed at Shane’s thighs, spread him open further, and Shane made a confused, overstimulated sound. “What—”

Ilya pressed his mouth there, gentle, murmured, “This okay?” He looked up, and saw that Shane had propped himself on his elbows and was staring at him with wide eyes. Ilya held his gaze as he dragged his tongue through the mess, tasting come and lube, and Shane whimpered, began to shake.

“Ilya…”

Ilya held him steady, hands firm on his thighs, lapping as more began to leak out; he chased it, sealed his mouth over it, held it on his tongue. He sat up, raised his eyebrows in silent question, and Shane gave a wet, wrenching sound, nodding frantically, already reaching for him.

Ilya crawled back up his body, bent over him and kissed him, letting it spill from his mouth into Shane’s—and it was filthy, yes, but it was also painfully tender, Shane’s fingers curling into Ilya’s hair and holding him there, kissing him deep and thorough.

When they broke apart Shane was trembling all over, and Ilya eased off of him, kissing his temple, collapsing on the bed and arranging them so they were lying face to face, legs tangled. The morning had brightened while they fucked, a wide stripe of pale sunshine bisecting the bed, drawing a line across Shane’s chest, dust motes lingering in the beam. There was a bite mark already darkening on his shoulder that Ilya didn’t entirely remember putting there, and he touched it lightly with two fingers, petting it.

Shane opened his eyes, glanced down.

“Sorry,” Ilya said, trying to mean it.

Shane smiled and let his eyes drift closed again. “I like it.”

Ilya buried his face in the pillow, giving himself precisely thirty seconds to wonder if it was possible to be too happy, if maybe happiness was something that was rationed out and he was using up too much of it at once. And then he made himself take a deep breath, inhaling nothing but Shane, and got up to cook him egg whites for breakfast.

Ilya decided that, on the whole, he preferred his scrambled eggs to have yolks.

At least there was coffee, he was relieved to see, and it was good even if he had to drink it black. He eyed Shane over the rim of his mug, blowing across the surface. “Why only egg whites?”

Shane didn’t seem to have any issue with them; he was scooping them into his mouth, eating happily. “They’re high in protein but have less cholesterol, fat…” He took a bite of whole wheat toast, spread with only the thinnest smear of butter.

Ilya frowned and gestured at Shane’s generally perfect physique. “You are what, twenty-five? And you look like a fucking athlete—you just sit around at a computer all day and you look like that?”

Shane blushed. “I like to exercise.”

“To swim in freezing cold water.”

“Not just that. And it’s not like you don’t work out,” Shane said, accusatory. “You’re probably a fucking gym rat or something.”

Ilya shrugged expansively. “Just natural gifts.” This wasn’t quite true; he liked working out, it made him feel stronger, and gyms were (used to be, he thought, with a little flutter of happiness) good places for hookups.

When they’d finished eating and cleaned up the dishes, Ilya leaned against the counter, almost exactly where he’d stood last night. Only now he was dressed head to toe in Shane’s clothes—even Ilya’s underwear belonged to Shane—the sweatpants soft and a little worn, the t-shirt organic cotton with no tag at the back. “What would you do now,” he asked, “if I wasn’t here? What is the next part of your day?”

“Probably write,” Shane said. “I really do want your feedback.”

“I have nothing to say,” Ilya said seriously. “It’s perfect.”

Shane shook his head, though he looked very pleased. “Of course it isn’t. Meg is barely on the page, I need to flesh her out more, I know that, but Arthur’s so internal, so caught up with himself really, that I need to unbend him before she can really be seen…”

It was an interesting question: how to maintain enough narrative distance so that the reader knew things the character did not, and they batted ideas back and forth for a while, before Shane shoved his laptop at Ilya and ordered him to send over the rest of Wooden Horse. And then he read while Ilya flipped blindly through a coffee-table book on obscure islands, trying not to watch every micro-expression that flitted across Shane’s face.

When he finished, Ilya said quickly, “It is a mess, I know. There’s no structure, I know you don’t like that. And Gregor, he changes too quickly, it’s like all it took for him was to meet one person and then bam he is different, he wants different things, he—”

“Sometimes it’s like that though,” Shane said, a little breathless. “Isn’t it?”

Low tide was at 4pm, and so after a lunch of salad (for Shane) and leftover clam linguine (for Ilya), they abandoned their shoes at the bottom of the stairs and rolled up the hems of their pants to walk out into the bay.

The wind was sharp and cut straight through the borrowed fleece to knife between his ribs, but Ilya wasn’t about to complain. He felt very foolish with his sweatpants bagging down over his knees, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that at least, unlike Shane, he wasn’t wearing pants that had little buttons to hold the rolled-up edges in place. (It was one thing for Shane to do it: on him, it just made Ilya want to fall to his knees. But Ilya had to maintain some personal standards.)

“This isn’t as nice as some other beaches,” Shane said apologetically. “First Encounter in Eastham is probably the best, low tide there goes all the way out, for a mile sometimes.”

Ilya couldn’t imagine better than this: the bay had turned into a shining expanse of mud and sand mounded like small wave-forms, rippling and glossy. The sky was the color of the inside of an oyster shell, and the water sat in long shallow pools that caught the light, mirroring the sky back to itself. There were gulls here and there, pecking at the sand, and a pair of crows were flapping wildly, arguing over a string of vivid green seaweed.

Ilya reached out, and Shane’s hand was there, and they walked out together, feet going numb in the cold. The mud gave under his heels with a soft wet suck, surprisingly warmish in the topmost layer, glacial an inch below. The lonely bay was entirely empty, and theirs were the only footprints—and even they disappeared quickly, melting into the shallow water. Occasionally Shane tugged on Ilya’s arm to show him something hidden in the sand, a small secret creature revealed only for this brief moment when the sea had been pulled back like a blanket from a bed.

They squatted low over a place where the sand was cratered with tiny holes, and Ilya watched as one of them exhaled a thin jet of water. “Razor clam,” Shane said, and showed him one of the shells, long and thin and slightly curved, like a straight razor.

Ilya stood up and wiggled his toes over the holes, imagining himself as Shane as a little boy, and then yelped when he felt something hard and smooth slide away from him like a flinch. The crows cackled and took off, scattering overhead like wraiths.

They kept walking, and the light kept changing; overhead the sky was overcast, but down near the horizon the clouds had thinned, and the sun laid long low stripes of gold that turned the wet sand incandescent. Every ten steps there was something to notice—a moon snail, strange small black packets that Shane informed him were shark eggs, which sounded bizarre and frankly untrue. And strangest of all, a low domed shape the size of a deflated soccer ball.

“Oh,” Shane said. “Come, this is neat.”

It was a horseshoe crab, he explained, or what was left of one. The shell was nearly intact, spiked and strange, brown-gray with bits of algae clinging to it, with a long, straight tail like a spike.

“It’s terrifying,” Ilya said. “Like the bug-egg creatures that latch onto your face and come out of your stomach.” He’d watched Alien with Marleau and had decided that only Americans would invent something so terrifying. It was a little unsettling to see it here in the flesh—or chitin, he supposed.

“It’s just a crab,” Shane said, amused. “Well, really it’s an arthropod. And one of the oldest creatures around, it’s survived since the Triassic.”

“Like a giant cockroach, wonderful.” Ilya toed it lightly, skeptical. “At least it is dead.”

“Oh, probably not,” Shane said airily. “That’s a molt, see?” He squatted down in the sand and picked it up, water streaming from its many nooks and crannies, and turned it over to reveal its hollow underside. “He’s off somewhere around here with a brand new shell.”

“What,” Ilya said emphatically, “the fuck. Put down the alien skin suit before it comes and eats you.”

Shane tossed his head back and laughed, loud and happy, and the nearby gulls chattered in answer.

“You know so many things,” Ilya said, reclaiming his cold—and now also wet—hand. “It’s so sexy.”

Shane ducked his head, his cheeks pink and pushed up with the force of his smile. “Shut up. I know I’m not. Not like you, with your whole…” He gestured at Ilya’s whole rolled-up-sweatpants and borrowed fleece sweatshirt and a knit toque with an actual tassel.

“Yup,” Ilya said drily. “God of sex, that’s me.”

“Say something in Russian. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard you speak it.”

Ilya lifted Shane’s palm, pressed a kiss to its salty center. “Lyublyu tebya. Osobenno tvoyu seksual’naya popku.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It means, I love your sexy, sexy brain.”

Shane smiled. “It doesn’t mean that, does it?”

“Nope.”

It was freezing, and they should probably head in. The mirrored sand was turning to water beneath their feet, the tide beginning to roll back in, filling the shallow troughs, imperceptible but persistent. The line of their footprints had vanished entirely; there was no evidence that they’d walked this way at all. But Ilya liked that, liked that he was now a small part of what lay hidden in that still, smooth bay, the strange, secret creatures that remained even when they couldn’t be seen.

He had spent so much of his life hiding while being as loud as he possibly could, a disco ball of a person—and then there was Shane, who was like the long wet mirror of the flats, all surface restraint and unfathomable depth, and somehow or other they had revealed themselves to each other. To know someone like this—to be known like this—Ilya had no language for it.

But he’d learned to live in fluid translation, and perhaps this was something else he could learn: how to love and be loved. He was beginning to think it was the kind of question that couldn’t be answered in a moment, but that could only be walked into like a bay at low tide—carefully, barefoot, always a little surprised by what was already there.

He let Shane take the toque off his head, kiss him with cold, wind-stung lips, and lead him back into the warm.

Chapter End Notes

Please replace loons with horseshoe crabs in this universe they’re definitely creepier

“Lyublyu tebya. Osobenno tvoyu seksual’naya popku.” “I love you. Especially your hot ass.”

Chapter 16: Love is the voice under all silences

Chapter Notes

So far we are equal

ON SALE TODAY: SHANE HOLLANDER'S SHORE, A LUMINOUS DEPARTURE ALREADY BEING CALLED THE NOVEL OF HIS CAREER

NEW YORK —  SHORE, the extraordinary new novel from Shane Hollander, arrives with the kind of pre-publication momentum reserved for the rarest literary events, having already earned starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal; a rave in The New Yorker; a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review; feature coverage in The Atlantic; a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a Book of the Month Club main selection. It is a departure in every sense of the word — warmer, looser, more openly feeling — from a novelist long celebrated for his restraint, and readers and critics alike are responding in kind.

Every autumn the town warns Arthur and Meg that the cliff beneath their house is going; every autumn they stay. But this year, as another storm season gathers and the foundation continues to erode, Arthur asks his wife a question he has not had the courage to ask in twenty years of marriage — do you want me — and in doing so sets in motion a reckoning with the life they have thoughtlessly built together.

What follows is a novel of extraordinary grace: about the work of shoring up, about the patience of water, about what it means to look at the person beside you and truly see them again. Like Annie Proulx's beloved The Shipping News, SHORE finds the epic in the domestic and the mythic in the weather. Readers who have returned again and again to Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge or Kent Haruf's Our Souls at Night will find a new companion — and, quite possibly, a new favorite.

Advance Praise:

“I have admired every one of Shane Hollander's novels, but I have never loved one like I love SHORE. The finest novel I have read this year, and the one I will press into every hand I can reach.” — Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and What We Can Know

“Hollander's precision is intact — no one builds a sentence quite like him — but something has cracked open in these pages. There is such feeling here. I wept, and then I read it again.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“A book about late love, late honesty, late courage. Every marriage deserves a novel this patient, this forgiving, this alive to what stays and what slips away. Stunning.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Critical acclaim from: The New Yorker ★ The New York Times Book Review ★ The Atlantic ★ The Washington Post ★ Vogue ★ Vulture ★ NPR ★ starred reviews in Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal.

About the Author:

Shane Hollander is the author of three previous novels, including the internationally bestselling Midlandia, winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, and Lacuna Variations, a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives with his partner, author Ilya Rozanov, in Brooklyn.

ON SALE TODAY: ILYA ROZANOV’S WOODEN HORSE, A TENDER, UNEXPECTED TRIUMPH FROM ONE OF OUR MOST INCENDIARY VOICES

NEW YORK — Farrar, Straus and Giroux is proud to publish today WOODEN HORSE, the astonishing new novel from Ilya Rozanov, author of the international bestseller and cultural phenomenon Clubfist. Two years after the debut that made him one of the most provoking young writers in decades, Rozanov returns with a book no one saw coming: quieter than his first, slower in its rhythms, willing to leave things unsaid and trust the reader to hear them anyway. It has earned starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal; a cover feature in The New York Times Magazine; raves in The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The Paris Review; feature coverage Vulture, The Guardian, and Harper's; and selection as an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon Editors' Choice, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Gregor operates a carousel at Luna Park. He lives alone in a walk-up in Brighton Beach, eats pelmeni out of a Tupperware, walks the boardwalk at night past the cigar butts and Nathan's napkins, and scouts for hookups at Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings. And then Jenn with two Ns — older, impatient, struggling with her own grief—decides against all evidence that Gregor is worth more than a single sexual encounter.

WOODEN HORSE is a novel about exile and appetite, and about the kind of brutal tenderness that is only available to those who have been wounded, and are cruel in turn. Readers who have returned to Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You or Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life will recognize the register — lyric, confessional, unafraid of the body — but the voice here is Rozanov’s alone: funnier, quirkier, shot through with carousel music and cigarette-tinged ocean air.

Advance Praise:

"No one writes desire like Ilya Rozanov, and no one has ever written it quite like this: softened, complicated, braided through with something that can only be called grace. Gregor will stay with me for a very long time." — Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story

"The funniest, most tender book I have read all year.” —Becca Rothfield, The New Yorker

“I expected to be dazzled. I did not expect to weep. A major evolution from a writer who was already a star.” —Nicholas Dames, The Atlantic

Critical acclaim from: The New Yorker ★ The Paris Review ★ Bookforum ★ The Atlantic ★ The Guardian ★ Harper's ★ Vulture ★ NPR ★ n+1 ★ The Los Angeles Review of Books ★ starred reviews in Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal.

About the Author:

Ilya Rozanov is the author of Clubfist an international bestseller translated into more than thirty languages and the winner of the Lamba Literary Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award. Born in Moscow, he lives in Brooklyn with his partner, author Shane Hollander.

Chapter End Notes

I have had THE BEST time doing this, thank you all for walking with me on what is objectively a pretty weird road of an au.

(I have vague plans for a sequel)

<3 <3 <3

 

NYT Easter Eggs, in increasing difficulty:

Princess Bride by William Goldman (duh)
Kafka's Motorbike by I Made It Up (the book Bridget Jones was publicizing)
Arsonist's Daughter by Grady Tripp (from Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon)

And the one NO ONE BUT ME would ever pick up on bc I think I'm literally the only person that loved this movie:

The Ornithologist's Wife by James Arber (from The Decoy Bride starring David Tennant and Kelly MacDonald)