Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Money, finances, Established Relationship, Character Study, Relationship Study, gifting

Language:

English

Series:

Part 23 of my anonymous heated rivalry fic

Collections:

anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-07 Words: 7,970 Chapters: 1/1

duel income

Summary

“Do you have a budget?” Shane asked once, early on. 

Ilya looked at him with such patent confusion that for a moment Shane thought that he didn't know the word in English. Then Ilya said, “No, Hollander. I do not have a budget,” voice dripping with disdain.

“You really should,” Shane said, parroting the line he’s heard from his parents so many times before. “It’s important to manage your finances.”

Ilya just rolled his eyes.

-

Or: how Shane and Ilya rectify their very different attitudes towards money.

Notes

this is an exploration of shane & ilya's relationship with money. they are millionaires who we know buy ridiculous real estate and make crazy investments; accordingly, their perspectives on money are kinda wack. if you will be offended by this, please don't read.

• Inspired by [Restricted Work] by whorecoded

The first time they go out to dinner together, all four of them—Ilya, Shane, Yuna and David, six months after the Foundation is announced and not long after Ilya moves to Ottawa, ostensibly a welcome to the city kind of thing—Ilya pulls aside the waiter after he takes their drink orders and murmurs something in his ear. Shane imagines it has to do with keeping an eye out for paparazzi, or maybe the promise of a big tip in exchange for discretion, and it’s nice. The way Ilya thinks of these things. Not necessary, but nice. 

Shane doesn’t realize he’s assumed wrong until, at the end of the meal, the waiter delivers the bill right into Ilya’s hands.

Shane blinks at it, then up at the waiter, who has a smug, self-satisfied grin on his face like he’s pulled something off. “You don’t have to pay,” Shane says.

Ilya shrugs and passes the black cardholder back to the waiter, his Amex neatly tucked inside. “Is no big deal. I can afford it.”

And he’s right, of course. They both can. Ilya makes eleven million a year, in Ottawa; in Montreal, Shane gets ten. Then there’s Rolex, and Reebok, and Ilya’s Adidas sponsorship, and both of their Speedo deals—a meal for four, even at a nice restaurant like this one, even with two bottles of very good wine, is a drop in the bucket.

But there’s something deliberate about the way Ilya had done it. Pulling the waiter aside, asking for the check in advance—because he must have asked. The waiter wouldn’t have assumed, not when the reservation is under Yuna’s name, when David is the clear father figure present.

“Well, thanks,” Shane says, because he doesn’t know what he wants to ask, and he knows this isn’t the place for it, anyway. But he sees the way his parents note it, the thank you for dinner’s they deliver with their goodnight hugs, and he thinks that next time they go out, he’ll make sure he’s the one who pays.

But the next time they eat at a restaurant, it’s Shane and Ilya and Yuna and a PR consultant from the Foundation, prodding them about the timeline of their friendship—“For the website’s About Us page,” the consultant explains, drenching her beautifully fatty salmon in so much soy sauce it’s practically picked—and Shane’s so on edge, trying to remember their carefully-plotted cover story, that he doesn’t notice the bill has been delivered until it’s too late.

“Hey,” Shane says, reaching for it just a bit too slow. Ilya doesn’t even look at the bill, just waggles his eyebrows at Shane as he shoves his credit card in the black carrying case. The waiter disappears in the sleek way of waiters at high-end restaurants who don’t want to draw attention to the fact that this is, in fact, a paid experience.

“It’s my turn to pay,” Shane says. It feels kind of silly to argue about this, but important, too, for some reason he can’t quite put his finger on.

“Ah, well, you were too slow, Hollander,” Ilya says lightly. “Just like you are on the ice. Maybe try to be a little faster next time, yes?” He winks.

—

Shane knows it’s a thing, in some cultures. Bickering over the bill as a sign of love—Japan is one of these countries. Shane doesn’t remember his grandmother very well, but he does remember an explosive argument in a French restaurant when he was young, sparked by Shane’s mother trying to pay for a nice meal celebrating David’s recent promotion. Shane’s grandmother was on a fixed income, ran her dishwasher in the middle of the night to save on electricity costs, but was so insulted by David trying to pay for dinner that she refused to hug any of them goodnight. After that, when they went out together they mostly patronized cheap Chinese restaurants and chain Italian joints, places that were easier to fit into the budget of an octogenarian. 

Of course, Shane didn’t think much about it, then, because he never really thought about money. When he was a kid, there was enough of it; by the time he was a teenager, there was plenty; and once he made it into the MLH, there was so much that his main concern was managing the inflow. His mother got him a financial planner, a bland middle-aged man named Steve, and Shane pretty much lets him decide what happened to the money. He keeps an eye on it, of course, but just enough to make sure Steve isn’t, like, buying himself a house in the Hamptons and visiting strip clubs on Shane’s dime. He isn’t, at least not that Shane can tell.

It’s always surprising to him, in a way that makes him feel like an oblivious asshole, when one of his teammates mentions how much their parents had to scrimp and save to afford new hockey skates when they were kids. People are living very different lives than Shane, even the people who are ostensibly his closest peers, and he knows this, but still it’s very easy to forget.

And then there’s Ilya. Shane doesn’t know much about Ilya’s financial background, but he knows Ilya’s father was an important general in the Soviet military and retained a high government position after the USSR dissolved. Shane doesn’t know much about how the financial systems of post-Soviet Russia worked, but it can’t have paid very well, because as far as Shane knows, Ilya has septa all of his adult life feeding the expensive habits of various Russian relatives, lest they fall into destitution and homelessness.

Shane’s parents, on the other hand, won’t accept a cent of his money. Yuna barely allows him to cover the costs of her travel and accommodation when she accompanies him to games and events. We have plenty of money, honey, she always used to tell him, when he pressed—when he was eighteen and overwhelmed by the dollars sitting his bank account and giving it away to his mother felt like the only way to keep it safe. You just save it away to pay for our nursing homes, huh?

But even in that she wasn’t serious, because they had plenty of money saved for nursing homes. When he was twenty-two, after his Aunt Karen died, Yuna had sat him down and walked through the paperwork. “You’re going to be our medical proxy and our power of attorney, now,” she had said. “You should see the details.” 

The details were a comfortable retirement and good money still coming in from David’s job, and of course by then Shane had already accumulated a comfortable several million in investments that he could cash in as-needed, were the worst to happen.

We’ll be fine, Shane thought, looking at that sheet, thinking of his own bank account balances. There’s nothing to worry about. 

And so he hadn’t.

—

There are a lot of things Ilya spends his money on that Shane thinks are terribly stupid. His wardrobe, for one. Shane understands the concept of investing in high-quality staples that last a long time, treating yourself as a reward for good behavior, whatever. This is not that. 

Ilya goes on a shopping spree with Svetlana at a high-end vintage store in Cambridge and spends $800 on the ugliest fruit bowl Shane has ever seen. He gets a hotel room in Montreal when he visits Shane over the summer, just to keep up appearances, and he books the Presidential Suite. When he decides he needs new socks, he imports them from England, fuzzy things made from the fur of some exotic New Zealand deer that cost over a thousand dollars per pair. He buys ten.

He spends his money in good ways, too. Shane catches him one night with his credit card out in front of GoFundMe, making an anonymous donation to a security guard at TD Garden whose wife just got diagnosed with stage three colon cancer. “Cancer treatment is very expensive,” Ilya tells Shane, as he clicks the button to donate $100,000. He bookmarks the tab when he thinks Shane isn’t looking, and Shane knows he’ll probably be back at this page in a week or a month, pouring a little more into the pot.

It’s relentless, the outflow of cash. Ilya buys housewarming gifts for rookies, fancy strollers for teammates having their first kids. He buys the most expensive bottle of wine at the liquor store, the second-most expensive bottle of vodka. (“Other one is Polish,” Ilya says. “Blegh.”) He buys too many pairs of shoes, too many pairs of sunglasses, too many punnets of strawberries at the farmer’s market so that they end up rotting in his fridge. He buys cars, and then he buys more cars, and then he buys even more, just for fun. He buys Shane’s terribly expensive imported wild-caught Alaskan salmon which they eat nearly every day. He buys massive bouquets of fresh flowers and sends them to Yuna, just because.

“Do you have a budget?” Shane asked once, early on. 

Ilya looked at him with such patent confusion that for a moment Shane thought that he didn't know the word in English. Then Ilya said, “No, Hollander. I do not have a budget,” voice dripping with disdain.

“You really should,” Shane said, parroting the line he’s heard from his parents so many times before. “It’s important to manage your finances.”

Ilya just rolled his eyes. “I make eleven million dollars a year,” he said. “I do not have to worry about managing my finances.”

And he was wrong, of course, and Shane knew he was wrong, but this was early on, in that very first summer, and Shane hadn’t wanted to argue with him. Not because he thought he would upset Ilya, but because it was just very hard to care about things outside of the two of them and the way they fit together. Things outside of the way Ilya’s toes scraped against Shane’s calves when they were fucking, and the way Ilya snored sometimes in his sleep when he was having a good dream, and the way Ilya wiggled on his chair when he was eating something especially delicious.

Anyway, it’s not like Shane is particularly attached to his own budget. He has one, because his parents had always told him it was important—his father who works in finance, his mother who grew up in a household where both her parents worked two jobs to try to make ends meet—and he had started one, when he was thirteen and first puling in money for hockey. 

It had felt important, then, a way to show how grown-up he was, and a way to make purchasing decisions more easily. His budget set the rules for what he could and could not buy: yes, you can get your mother a Kindle for Mother’s Day, because you still have $257 left in your gift budget for the month; no, you cannot get that limited-edition hockey jersey, because you have to save $500 each week for your future car.

By his rookie year in the MLH, Shane had grown out of the need for a budget. He was making nearly $1 million a year, then, a standard salary for a skilled rookie and more money than he knew what to do with. 

He got a financial advisor, who helped him start socking it away in investments. By his third year playing, he had bought his first investment properties, and soon he was a landlord with diversified income streams. It didn’t matter if he spent $100 a month on clothes or $10,000; if he bought the organic peanut butter that was on sale or the one available only at the expensive health-foods store, which probably cost more, per ounce, than human blood. 

But Shane still had his mother’s voice in his ear, her voice saying is this a reasonable purchase and does this fit your budget and what would you say if your family made $50,000 dollars a year and you found out your role model spent money on this? Spent half a million dollars on a car he drives once a month? Let’s think about the optics, Shane.

Shane hates optics. Optics, optics, optics, so much of his life is fucking optics, if he could make the whole world go blind overnight, he’d do it. But he can’t, and if he did, he probably couldn’t play hockey anymore, so, reluctant obedience to the laws of optics it is. It looks good, to have a budget. It’s relatable, and smart, and forward-thinking. Responsible. In the public eye, Shane is all of these things. So he has a budget, and he sticks to it.

—

A few months before they officially launch the Irina Foundation, Yuna sits Ilya and Shane down to go through financials.

“We need to figure out how much each of you are willing to contribute to the foundation each year,” Yuna says. They’re in her home office, which is papered with an embarrassing combination of Shane’s baby pictures and photos of his greatest hockey achievements. 

The first time Ilya saw the room, he spent a good half-hour pouring over every picture on the wall, and on the way home, in the car with Shane, he had admitted, voice wondering, that he liked how many of those achievements featured him, in one way or another. The draft, Rookie of the Year, Shane’s first win against Boston; even their 2014 presentation at the MLH awards. Shane didn’t tell him that that last photo was new, added to the wall in place of pride after Yuna and David found out about their relationship. Shane wishes they still had the selfies, somewhere, but a screenshot from the telecast would have to do.

 “Obviously, we’ve got the hockey camps to bring in money,” Yuna is saying, “but that’s more to draw attention to the charity than anything. The vast majority of the money will be coming from donors, and folks will expect you two to set an example.”

Shane tries to think about what seems like a reasonable number. A million? It seems high, but then he doesn’t exactly need the money, and he is the founder of this whole thing. It’ll significantly impact the growth trajectory of his portfolio, taking out so much money so early on in his career, but Shane’s finance guy has assured him many times that he’ll die an extremely rich man, and—

“Half?” Ilya suggests. It takes Shane a moment to understand what he means.

“Half your salary?” Shane says, bug-eyed. “You want to donate half your salary?”

Ilya shrugs, suddenly looking self-conscious. “I mean, I do not need the money,” he says. “I always meant to donate more but I just never did it. I heard it was risky, lots of charities stealing money, and I was too lazy to research.”

“You are not lazy,” Yuna says sternly, before Shane can. “Half of your salary is very generous, Ilya. You might want to reconsider, before you make such a large commitment.”

Ilya tilts his head, deferential to Shane’s mother as always. “Obviously, I do what you think is best,” he says. “But I have thought about this, and there really isn’t anything else I’d like to do with it.”

“You could save it,” Yuna says. “A nest egg for your future children.” She eyes them both significantly.

But Ilya just shakes his head. “There will be plenty of money either way,” he says. “I am not sure if you know this, Yuna, but I am already very rich.”

It shouldn’t stress Shane out so much, hearing Ilya say that he wants to donate half his salary. They have so much money. Ilya is right: he can afford it. So could Shane. 

But Shane is a person who likes to win, and there’s something about accumulating money—about seeing his net worth figure tick up and up and up—that feels like winning. It’s stupid, of course. He doesn’t need to collect money the way he collects trophies. It doesn’t make him a better person. It probably makes him worse.

And that irks him, too. That in the competition to see who can be the kinder, more generous person, Ilya has apparently already won.

“Let’s just think it over,” Shane says, instead of any of this. “We’ll plan to get back to you in a week, okay?”

They send their donation amounts to her separately, so Shane doesn’t actually know precisely how much Ilya is giving away. He’s certain it’s more than him, though, because in the end, all he offers is $1.5 million. That’s still a lot of money, of course. An obscene amount of money.

Just less than what Ilya had to give.

—

“Oh my god,” Shane snaps, when Ilya gets his third package delivered to the cottage in as many days. “How much shit did you order?”

It’s not so much about the packages themselves as the fact that every time one arrives, Ilya needs to hide somewhere in the house so Shane can go down and greet the delivery man. So far, it’s all worked out fine, and Ilya has hid with minimal complaints, but Shane can’t help but imagine the deliveryman showing up when the two of them are in the backyard kicking a soccer ball around, or when they’re climbing out of their car after a dinner with Shane’s parents, laughing in that lovesick way of theirs that gives them away as a couple immediately. That’s what Shane’s mom had told him, last week, when she caught them giggling together in the living room over something stupid: that she is sure that astronauts could see their love from space.

She meant it as a compliment, of course. A cute comment. Shane had to work very hard not to show her how much it freaked him out.

Now, Ilya surfaces from where he’s ducked down behind the couch, hair mussed from the blanket he’d hastily thrown over himself. “Is for me?”

“Of course it’s for you,” Shane says, rolling his eyes. “I don’t get anything delivered.”

“Oooh,” Ilya says, leaping up. “Maybe it is my new jacket.”

It’s not. It’s a new pair of swim trunks, which are covered in a very ugly multicolored pattern and which Shane is sure cost as obscene amount of money. Ilya confirms this when he holds them up to himself and says, “See, do you like? They are Versace!”

Shane shakes his head. “You are so bad with money, it’s actually crazy.”

Ilya pouts. “Oh, come on, is investment! Is good quality. Shane, come on, don’t you want to see how they look on my ass? Shane—Shaaane—“

Later in the day, they’re lounging on the back deck, watching the sunset over the lake, when Ilya says, “Do you not want me to get stuff sent here anymore?”

Shane blinks over at him. He had been half-asleep. “What?”

“Is too much, maybe,” Ilya says. “Too much stuff in your house? Is okay, I will take these things back to Boston with me, and—“

Shane cuts Ilya off with a hand over his mouth. Ilya, because he’s Ilya, licks his palm. Shane keeps his hand there anyway. 

“I love having your stuff in my house,” Shane says. “It makes me really happy, to look over and see all your junk. It makes me feel like we—live together, I guess. Like this is real.”

Ilya runs his tongue along Shane’s palm again, and now Shane pulls his hand back. “You’re so gross,” he says, wiping his hand on his shirt.

“This is real,” Ilya says, ignoring him. “What is also real is how much I want to suck your cock. Can I—“

Shane groans and falls back into his chair. “Please,” he says, and against his better judgement, knowing that his parents or a mailman or the fucking delivery driver could walk up at any moment, he lets Ilya blow him on the deck, in the warm summer air, as the sun sets behind the trees. He looks at Ilya’s ass the whole time. Ilya was right: the new swim trunks really do show it off.

—

The first of Ilya’s birthdays they spend together as a couple is tricky for Shane. His own birthday was easy: both Boston and Montreal were still in the playoffs, and Shane was on a road trip in Washington. His teammates had insisted on taking him out for a drink, and Ilya had stayed up late so that when Shane finally got back to his hotel room they could call each other over FaceTime and jerk off into their respective fists. Small mercies of playoff runs: Shane, as the captain and the star player, had his own hotel room, so he didn’t have to make up an excuse for Hayden to leave.

When Shane got back to Montreal, he found several deliveries waiting for him. A bunch of sunflowers that must have been left on his doorstep just that morning, because they were remarkably perky and fresh; a package from Amazon that Shane cracked open to discover three new pairs of reading glasses, because he told Ilya he’d broken his backup pair last week; and a much smaller box, aggressively taped, in which Shane discovered a dildo replica of Ilya’s dick.

“You fucking asshole,” Shane said, as soon as Ilya picked up the phone.

Ilya laughed. He was out of breath and Shane could hear the whirring of a stationary bike in the background. “So you got my present.”

“What the fuck,” Shane had said. “This is a terrible gift, Rozanov.”

But it wasn’t, and they both knew it. It set the bar high for Shane even before he came twice on the phone that night with Ilya in his ear, telling him exactly how to move his new toy to pretend it was Ilya’s dick. 

It didn’t help that, by June 15th, both Shane and Ilya were out of the playoffs—it was Cincinnati and Calgary in the finals this year, an embarrassment of a situation that made Shane reluctant to even watch the games—and at the cabin. There were more pressure, Shane felt, to make the day special when he would be there himself to witness it. Less space for errors, no easy excuse about the distance causing problems.

Some of the stuff is easy. He wakes Ilya up with a blowjob, then waits until he’s so worked up he’s fucking Shane’s face to pull away and ride him instead. He had snuck out of bed and fingered himself open in the shower, and Ilya makes a sound like a wild animal when he sinks into Shane with no resistance.

“Holy fucking shit, Hollander,” Ilya says, managing about two thrusts before he comes. Which isn’t the most satisfying for Shane, sure, but it’s extremely satisfying to see Ilya fall apart like this, so full of pleasure that he can’t even keep himself together, and anyway Ilya is a very considerate lover: even though it’s his birthday, he only waits about twenty seconds before he’s tugging Shane up to straddle his shoulders so Ilya can blow him while fingering his come in and out of Shane’s ass. 

Afterwards, Shane takes a shower, cedes the bathroom to Ilya, then runs into town. He gets a dozen donuts from the bakery Ilya loves, plus some terribly sweet iced coffee concoction that Ilya has developed a taste for, and Ilya is gratifyingly appreciative of all of it, so appreciative that it makes Shane feel a little embarrassed, maybe, like he was so bad at this kind of stuff that Ilya expected nothing from him. But then again, maybe it can be nice, sometimes, to surpass people’s expectations, and Shane tries to focus on that instead of the inherent indignity of being underestimated.

The two of them get lunch with Shane’s parents, and Yuna and David fawn over Ilya enough that it takes a bit of the pressure off Shane. David made chicken parmesan; Yuna made box mix cake. They sing happy birthday. They give Ilya a few gifts which he tears into like a giddy kid: a puzzle of the Boston skyline, for David and Ilya to complete together; a new pair of water shoes for the lake; a massive jar of local honey because apparently Ilya had said, once, that he liked it.

The last gift is the only one Shane was warned about in advance, and that’s a key to his parents’ house in Ottawa. “We want you to know you can come and go whenever,” David says, as Ilya stares down, silent, at the key, cushioned on a mass of cotton balls in a tiny old ring box. “Whether we’re there or not. You should consider our house your home, too.”

It takes Ilya a very long time to speak, but when he does, all he says is, “Thank you.” His eyes are wet but he’s not crying, and when Shane squeezes his hand, he offers him a weak smile. 

“Was it too much?” Shane blurts out, basically as soon as they’re alone together in the car. “I told them it might be too much. You don’t have to do anything with it, obviously, and—“

Ilya reaches over the console and takes Shane’s hand. “It was not too much,” he says. “It was—very nice. Your parents are good people.”

Shane glances over at him, quick, before returning his gaze to the road. “Yes,” he says, pretending he didn’t see the tear on Ilya’s cheek. “They’re good people.”

Shane’s gift to Ilya, after all that. feels very anticlimactic. He’s not sure what made him buy it, other than that he knows Ilya likes expensive things, and so he thinks he might like when Shane buys him those expensive things.

“It’s for winter,” Shane says, when Ilya pulls the lid off the box and frowns with confusion at the puffy mess inside. “I know Boston is cold, but you probably have a designer jacket, or something, and this is more practical. Uh, warmer. It’s Canada Goose? I don't know if you know the brand, they fill the jacket with Canadian goose down, which is really warm, and this is the nicest one, with the full weather protections. Ottawa is cold, you know. And it has a lifetime warranty, so it lasts forever, and—“

Ilya interrupts him with a kiss. “I love it,” he says, when he pulls back. “Is very good gift. Thank you, Shane.”

He seems to mean it. He’s looking at Shane that way he looks at him sometimes before they have really good sex, after all. But Shane is having a hard time reading his expression, what with the tear tracks on it from earlier in the day, the wobble on his mouth that started at Shane’s parents’ house and hasn’t quite let up. It’s okay, Shane guesses, as a gift. It’s fine. But it doesn’t compare to the key. 

Which irritates Shane more than it should.

—

It’s not long after that that Shane starts spending more money on Ilya. He can’t quite explain why he does it, only that one day, he’s sitting on his phone, scrolling through Amazon and searching for something to give Jackie for her upcoming birthday, and he sees a horrendously expensive, horrendously ugly designer car charm. It’s a pair of good-luck dice, except instead of being fuzzy they’re solid gold with black accents. Maybe it’s the Raiders colors that make Shane think of Ilya, or maybe it’s just the obvious extravagance of it. Without thinking about it too much, he adds it to the cart and buys it.

He gets them delivered to his own house, so they sit in a random drawer for a while, half-forgotten, until the next time Ilya is in town. By then, whatever strange impulse drove Shane to purchase them is gone, and he’s gone back and forth over whether he wants to actually give them to Ilya. But it seems like a waste to let $3,000 rot in a drawer, so Shane waits until Ilya is on his way out the door to pull them out and practically throw them at him. “Almost forgot, I bought you a gift, okay, bye!”

Of course Ilya doesn’t make it easy for Shane, taunting and teasing and smirking until he cuts open the Amazon box, sorts through the packaging, and actually gets to the gift itself. Then, the smile drops from his face. He raises the dice to the light, twisting them as if to watch them shine.

“It’s okay if you don’t like it,” Shane says, hastily. “I just thought of you when I saw them, and—mmh!”

Ilya kisses him firmly, with lots of tongue, his free hand twisted in Shane’s hair and the other hand still holding the car charm aloft. “I love it,” Ilya says, when he pulls back. “I am surprised you would get this. Seems out of your budget, no?”

Shane rolls his eyes, shoving Ilya away lightly. “I’m just as rich as you are, asshole,” he says. Richer, probably, what with the share of his salary that Ilya is donating away, but Shane tries not to think about that.

Ilya ignores him. “Should I feel special?” he asks. “That you were willing to break your budget for me?”

And it didn’t really break Shane’s budget—insofar as he still has one, his gifts allotment is in the tens of thousands each year, and even a very expensive keychain won’t make much of a dent in that—but Shane only nods, reaching out to cup Ilya’s face so he can rub his thumb over Ilya’s cheek.

“Yes,” he says. “You should feel very special.”

It’s exciting when Shane can get Ilya to blush. It doesn’t happen very often outside of sex. Usually, even when Shane is saying something terribly raunchy or terribly romantic, Ilya defaults to laughter or tears rather than shyness. But there’s an undeniable shyness to him, now, as he ducks his head, tugging at his earlobe with one hand.

“Well,” he says, voice suddenly much softer. “I guess I should say thank you, then.”

“You’re welcome,” Shane says, and when Ilya kisses him this time, he’s ready for it.

It takes five more minutes to get Ilya out the door, but he doesn’t let go of his keychain the entire time. Later, Ilya sends Shane a photo of it hanging from the rearview window of his favorite Porsche, offering a thumbs-up in the bottom corner of the screen.

It shouldn’t make Shane feel so warm. He had given Ilya the gift knowing he would use it, even if he hated it, knowing he would like it just because it reminded him of Shane. But it still makes something silly thump through Shane’s heart, the evidence of it all.

He decides, there and then, to do more of it.

—

He adds a new line item to his budget, which he has written down as gifts for Lily, mainly for his accountants sake. Jerry doesn’t even bat an eye at the $25,000 a month Shane has allocated for the cause, even though it decreases his monthly investments contribution. Shane had kind of expected to be scolded, or to at least be warned about the effects his indulgence would have on his long-term portfolio. Then again, Jerry hadn’t said anything about the Irina Foundation donation, and that was a much more substantial monthly sum. Perhaps Shane needs to stop expecting to be yelled at about how he spends his money.

The first couple of weeks, he spends an embarrassing amount of time trying to think about things Ilya would like. He finds listicles about the best luxury gifts to get partners with expensive tastes. He reaches out to a personal shopper, then feels immediately gross about outsourcing what’s supposed to be an expression of affection for Ilya, and cancels the request. He considers talking to his mom or dad or Rose about the whole thing, but then he’d have to actually explain to them why he wants to buy Ilya expensive things, and every version of that conversation he can imagine includes discussion of sugar daddies and financial power kinks. Which also makes him feel vaguely sick to his stomach. Veto.

In the end, he works himself into such a lather that he decides he’s overthinking it and just starts ordering things. A luxury bathrobe engraved with Ilya’s initials; a leather laptop bag from Montblanc; a four-thousand-dollar pair of shoes from the new Gucci collection that are hideously ugly and therefore probably precisely to Ilya’s taste. He goes out to dinner at a Russian restaurant for a Reebok event, remembers caviar exists, and sends Ilya a case of some of the most expensive stuff on the market. He buys an calfskin leather bracelet, and gives it to him after a particularly satisfying bout of fucking, when Ilya is completely naked and still wet from his shower. Ilya’s white teeth, his hair plastered to his forehead, his tanned wrist proffered with a pleased smile. The next day, Shane buys him three different pairs of expensive sunglasses.

“Is the tax man chasing you?” Ilya asks eventually.

Shane has sent him a monogrammed wallet, and Ilya is showing it off to him over FaceTime, sticking his fingers into the various card pockets in a way that probably shouldn’t be sexual but is getting Shane hot all over.

“Sorry,” Shane says, watching the twist of Ilya’s blunt fingers. “What was that?”

Ilya grins. “Tax man,” he says. “You are spending so much money, I think you must be trying to write off income as expenses.”

“I mean—“ Then it processes what he’s said. “What? No, Ilya! I wouldn’t do that. You can get in real trouble for that.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “Yes, because Canadian government is going to chase down Golden Boy Shane Hollander for tax evasion,” he says. “Please. You could tell CBC you committed fraud and they would say it was joke.”

“High profile celebrities have been prosecuted for tax fraud before,” Shane says. “Nobody’s above the law. Anyway, I have a really good accountant and there are plenty of legal ways to reduce your tax burden.”

Ilya’s eyes sparkle. “I knew I was dating a bad boy,” he says. “Please, tell me more about you evade taxes. Legally, of course.”

Things turn hot and heavy after that, and the conversation is dropped. But Shane remembers it the next morning, when he wakes up from a dream where his accountant took over Ilya’s accounts and informed Shane, grimly, that Ilya would be sentenced to prison in Greenland for the rest of his life on account of poorly-executed tax evasion.

It makes Shane realize that he still doesn’t have any idea what Ilya’s financial situation is really like. He knows what Ilya makes in a year, at least from the MLH, because player salaries are public. But he doesn’t know how much he might have made from endorsement deals or agreements. He doesn’t know how Ilya’s invested his money, or how much he pays his agents, or how much his mortgage cost and whether he’s still paying it off or if he paid in cash. For that matter, he doesn’t know how much Ilya actually has in the bank, after all these years of hockey.

He waits until they have a long weekend together—Shane skipping an optional skate to stay with Ilya for a few days before Ilya sets off on a two-week West Coast road trip. Shane can already tell it’ll hurt, to be away from Ilya for that long. His patience for loneliness is shrinking, lately. It feels like an effort to go a few days without seeing Ilya, let alone a few weeks. He’s been thinking of buying a house halfway between Ottawa and Montreal. An hour commute each way isn’t too bad, and then he and Ilya could see each other most nights instead of only some of them. He wants to talk to Ilya about it, but he also wants to surprise him. He has a vision of giving Ilya a key on Christmas morning, of walking him blindfolded into a house that Shane has bought for the two of them, saying welcome home.

They spend all day Friday fucking, and then Saturday morning, Shane makes coffee and waits for Ilya to stumble down to the kitchen. Like a good boyfriend, he lets Ilya chug his double-shot Americano before drags Ilya onto the stool next to him and opens his laptop. “I would like to talk about money,” he says.

It seems to him like an innocent enough opener, but Ilya swallows hard. “I am not awake yet, Hollander,” he complains, and Shane raises his eyebrow at the empty coffee mug in his hand. 

“Will take more than one coffee to wake me,” Ilya says. “You wore me out, yesterday.”

“Well, then, we can do this half-asleep, it’s nothing crazy,” Shane says. “I just wanted to give you a general sense of my finances, get a general sense of yours.”

“Why?” Ilya groans, the same way he does when Shane tries to feed him a green smoothie or insists they get up to change the sheets after Shane leaves a wet spot on the mattress.

“Because we’re planning a life together, and it matters,” Shane says. Ilya’s mouth twists into an unhappy little line, but after a moment’s pause, he nods. Shane twists his laptop screen so Ilya can see it better. He’s got an Excel sheet pulled up which his financial planner updates monthly: the rough value of everything he owns, all in one place.

Shane’s first sign something is up is the way Ilya’s shoulder’s tighten when he sees the number tallied at the bottom of the screen. “Jesus Christ, Hollander,” he says. “How much does Rolex pay you?”

Shane points to square C12. “That much.”

Ilya shakes his head. “Wow,” he says. He sounds like he’s trying to be lighthearted, but there’s a line of tension in his voice that Shane has learned to read. “I had no idea I had a sugar daddy.”

Shane rolls his eyes, cheeks pinking as he yanks the laptop back towards him. “Shut up,” he says. “You get paid just as much as I do, our assets can’t be that different.”

Ilya smirks. “Oh, our assets are very different, Hollander.”

Which is a deflection if Shane’s ever seen one, so he smacks Ilya’s hand away when it tries to wander to Shane’s ass. “Focus,” he says. “I don’t expect you to have your finances quite this—organized. But you have to have somewhere you keep track of your money, right?”

Ilya shrugs, thumbing at his nose. “I mean, I have accountant. There’s a login.”

It takes Ilya ten minutes to remember it, and then the computer requires two-factor authentication, and when he finally slides the laptop towards Shane, the suspense has built up so much that Shane tells himself that’s the only reason why he feels a sudden, plummeting horror in his stomach.

“That’s it?” he says, before he can stop himself. Ilya’s shoulders have gone stiff, his expression unreadable. “I mean—I know I’m pretty frugal, but I just thought—“

“Yes, well, I am bad with money, everyone knows this,” Ilya says. “Sports cars, expensive clothes, blah, blah, blah.” He shoves back from the kitchen island, circling to open the fridge, but when he gets there he mostly just stares into its depths, like a few extra million might be hidden behind the half-sour whole milk yogurt.

“That’s not what I said,” Shane says. “Anyway, it’s fine. Obviously, this is still a lot of money, and I’ve got plenty, so—“

Ilya slams the fridge door shut a bit too forcefully. The condiments bottles rattle. “Yes, you can take care of me when I am broke. Thank you, Hollander, for your generosity.”

“That’s not what I said,” Shane snaps back. God, how is it that Ilya still riles him like no one else, even after all these years? “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“What else am I supposed to do? You are so shit at explaining yourself, this is the only way we can talk.”

Shane sucks in a breath. It shouldn’t hurt his feelings, really—Ilya’s not wrong. Shane’s terrible at explaining how he feels. His chest still burns.

“Go fuck yourself, Rozanov,” he says, his voice a tinge hoarser than he means it to be, and Ilya huffs out a laugh.

“Wow, great chirp, Hollander,” he says. “Ten out of ten, so creative, I—“

Shane doesn’t hear the rest of it, because by then he’s stormed off into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

—

Pretty quickly, Shane regrets running to the bedroom. He needs to get his energy out—he needs to go for a run, or attack the stationary bike, or lift some dangerously heavy weights that he shouldn’t be lifting without a spotter. Some bitter part of him imagines Ilya coming into the weight room and seeing Shane choking to death under a barbell that’s fallen on his neck and thinks that’d teach him.

But he can’t get to the gym without walking by the kitchen and Ilya, so Shane settles for doing a hundred burpees on his bedroom floor and then getting into the shower. On impulse, he cranks the water as cold as it’ll go, and the freezing cold is such a shock to his system it’s almost as good as a workout. He gasps his way through his usual cleaning regime—though he leaves out cleaning his ass; fuck Ilya if he thinks Shane is going to let him fuck him after this—and by the time he’s toweled off and gotten dressed again, he’s vaguely cold and thinking about cuddles. Ilya gives very good cuddles. Even when Shane is mad at him. Even when Ilya is upset. Something about how heavy he is, the density of his muscle, the way he can grip Shane so tightly for so long without getting tired.

Shane slides on extra-thick socks and pads downstairs. Ilya has migrated from the kitchen to the living room, and he’s laying on his back on the couch with his eyes closed. For a second, Shane thinks he might have fallen asleep, and he wonders if this whole thing can be attributed to an exhaustion-induced attack of crabbiness. Then he sees the way Ilya’s fingers are drumming an anxious beat on his sternum.

“I thought you liked it when I took care of you,” Shane says.

Ilya stiffens, and for a moment, Shane thinks he’s miscalculated and this is just going to start the argument all over again—but then Ilya sighs like a gust of wind. He opens his eyes, twisting on the couch so he can look at Shane. “I do like when you take care of me,” he says. “But I like it because you want to do it. You choose to do it. If you have to do it, if it is the only option—“

Then it’s not special anymore. Okay, Shane can work with that.

“Why can’t you just tell me these things?” Shane says. “Why do you have to make it like getting blood from a stone? It drives me crazy.”

Ilya shrugs, leaning back a bit against the cushions. “You like a challenge,” he says. “I’ve got to keep some things hidden, so you have your puzzle boxes to break into.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Shane says, and as Ilya flinches, plows on, “Literally everything you do challenges me. In a good way. I don’t need you to also challenge me in a bad way.”

Ilya tugs at one ear. “Fine,” he says, finally. “It is great hardship for me, but I suppose I can try to be more—open. About these things.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Thank you for your great sacrifice,” he snipes. Ilya throws up an arm and beckons; Shane doesn’t bother with the pretense of resistance. He circles the couch and plasters himself to Ilya’s side. Ilya nudges him gently, rearranging his limbs until they’re tucked up against each other, spooning, Ilya’s face to the back of Shane’s neck, his hand over Shane’s stomach.

“I think you should buy me something,” Ilya says. “As a yay the argument is over present.”

Shane huffs. “Reward you for an argument you started? No thanks.”

Shane can’t see Ilya’s face, but he knows the way he’s pouting right now, and he expects it when Ilya reaches up with one hand to tweak Shane’s nipple. Shane squirms away from the touch, but all it succeeds in doing is rocking him back against Ilya’s cock, which is rapidly hardening against Shane’s ass.

“You’re insatiable,” Shane says.

“Mm.” Ilya rolls his hips; the hand on Shane’s stomach falls to his thigh, his fingertips so close to the line of Shane’s groin. “What do you think it’s worth? A night with you?”

Shane’s mouth falls open. “I’m not a fucking hooker,” he protests.

“Mmm, no. But if you were. What would you charge? What would a night with you be worth?”

“A million—ah—a million fucking dollars.”

Ilya hums contentedly, scraping his teeth over the knob at the top of Shane’s spine. “And I get it for free,” he says. “This is good value. Good gift. Thank you for the argument is over present.”

“Ilya—“

“Now, be quiet,” Ilya says, finally touching Shane’s cock, “And enjoy it.”

—

After Shane proposes to Ilya, one of the first things he looks into is merging their bank accounts.

It’s a lot more headache for them than it probably would be for normal people. They each have so many different investment accounts, different banking managers with different interest rates and different availabilities for cash, half a dozen accountants and financial advisors between them. Ilya takes one look at the to-do-list Shane has made to try to manage the whole thing and refuses to touch the topic. Shane doesn’t last too much longer; after a week, he gives in and delegates the whole thing to his dad.

He doesn’t think much about it after that, content to have the project taken off his plate, until Ilya comes back from therapy in a huffy mood. Shane asks him what’s wrong, half-convinced Ilya will insist everything is fine, but Ilya just sighs dramatically and says, “I talked to Galina about money today. She laughed at me.”

Shane blinks, pausing with a frozen bag of blueberries in hand. “What?” He’s not super familiar with the rules of therapy, but he is pretty sure your therapist isn’t supposed to make fun of you.

“Yes, it was terrible,” Ilya says. “I told her I feel bad about making my sugar daddy boyfriend take care of me, and she laughed in my face. No hesitation! She is getting too comfortable with me.”

Shane frowns, shaking the berries into the blender. “Did she tell you why she laughed?” 

"I guess she thinks I cannot have a sugar daddy when I make millions of dollars each year.”

“Well.” Shane tilts his head. “She’s not wrong.”

Ilya pouts at him. “Maybe I want a sugar daddy,” he whines. “Maybe I like spending money that’s not mine.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Well, if that’s it, then you better hurry up and get spending,” he says. “Because as of this summer, we’re going to be married, and what’s mine will be yours.”

All of the sudden, Ilya’s eyes are wet. He reaches forward and squeezes Shane’s ass tenderly. “All mine?” he says.

“All yours,” Shane agrees. “So you better go get the credit card.”