You and I (don't let go), we're alive (don't let go)
With nothing to do, I could lay and just look in your eyes
Wait (don't let go), and pretend (don't let go)
Hold on, and hope that we'll find our way back in the end (in the end)

-'About You', The 1975,

From the album 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language'

“Hold your horses,” Ilya sneers, putting his hands on her shoulders. Sveta plants hers on his hips, pushing them out from where they’d slipped into his pants.

“Hold my horses?” she repeats, her English a little rough—nothing like the polished version her best friend is starting to speak.

Ilya looks at her and bites his lip in a way he probably thinks is sexy, but really just makes him look like a frog. Not that Sveta wouldn’t sleep with him anyway—in fact, seeing him like that only fuels a desire they’ve both only recently discovered.

“It’s just an expression—it means you need to calm down,” he explains in Russian, raising his eyebrows and nodding slowly. He makes it obvious he just wants to show off his stupid language, because Sveta knows that Ilya actually likes it when she doesn’t calm down.

“Fuck you,” she shoots back, catching the sparkle that flashes in his eyes, and she slides her hand right back to where it was before.

Ilya has red eyes and smells of smoke, and he has sex in a way that Sveta sometimes doesn't understand. He's hungry, he touches her as if she's slipping through his fingers.

"I'm not running away," she whispers while Ilya holds her waist, squeezing tight. "You never know," he moans in her ear as he comes inside her.

They fuck without a condom, Ilya says it's better, Sveta agrees just enough not to make a fuss about it. She has her friend buy her morning-after pills sometimes, when she thinks it's necessary, and maybe her period has already been over for a while. Other times Ilya pulls out. Other times it doesn't matter enough to either of them.

Sveta is fifteen when she looks at pieces of her breakfast floating with bile, with her hands on the sides of the toilet; she gets up; asks a friend to buy her a test. They do it together and her friend puts a hand on her shoulder and doesn't even look at her when she says it's positive.

Ilya is impassive when Sveta tells him, and shows him, "Fuck no, don't touch it, I pissed on it."

Ilya looks at her and bites his lip again. "Are you happy to have me—forever?"

She doesn't answer, they don't talk about it. They're two kids. Sveta is still fifteen when she wakes up with blood between her legs.

There's a part of her that believes, and maybe always will, that it's Ilya's fault she lost that baby. Ilya was like a vampire when he was a kid, everything he didn't have from his family, he sucked it out of Sveta, from Sveta's neck, between her legs. Nothing they ever did was ever careful or healthy enough. God doesn't give babies to people like them.

She purses her lips and wipes her tears while Ilya pulls up his shorts and touches his cross.

Sveta knows Ilya is sleeping with Sasha. She never asks; she doesn’t want to hear the answers, she doesn't want to know how she would react.

She knows because she knows Ilya. And because of the way Sasha looks at him—the same way she thinks she does. Like Ilya belongs to everyone and no one, and like you still want to keep him all for yourself.

Sometimes she sleeps with Sasha too, and it’s pathetic for both of them. Sasha almost never finishes, and Sveta has to close her eyes to get there. But the way they hold each other afterward is comforting, less hungry than the way Ilya holds her.

Sasha should be angrier than Ilya is: at school they call him a faggot; he often shows up with a black eye; his father’s a hockey coach who never has a kind word for him. But Sasha has already given up. Sveta thinks he was born that way, already resigned.

Ilya lives like every breath he takes is an act of revenge against the world. Sveta can’t tell whether, in his eyes, she’s a friend or another executioner.

There’s one night when it’s the three of them, and it's the only time it happens. It becomes a kind of power play neither Sveta nor Sasha knows how to meet. Ilya kisses them both the same way, takes the same things from each of them. They divide him between them in fragments. They’ll keep doing it for years.

Maybe, in the end, it's their fault that it takes Ilya years to be whole again.

When Ilya speaks English, he’s funny. He seems like a different person. Russian is a language that, for him, will always carry his mother’s last words, his father’s insults, his brother’s coldness. English is a new beginning; no one has ever been cruel to him in that foreign language.

Sveta starts learning it with him just to hear him laugh more, to hear how his voice softens around different sounds, how the sharp edges of him—so wholly Russian—seem to ease, in a way. When Ilya speaks English, he feels like a child to her for the first time since she’s known him—which is to say, their whole life.

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes," Ilya declares, pointing a finger at Sveta, on her chest, just above her breast. It's a nothing gesture that, with the way Ilya sounds, makes a blind desire grow in her lower belly.

"What does it mean?"

Ilya pulls his finger away, Sveta swallows to stop herself from telling him to put it back, to push it harder against her skin.

"It means Sasha is an asshole."

Sasha came out to his father, and now his father won't let him out of the house. Sveta doesn't think he's an asshole, but Ilya doesn't know many ways to define people. Mostly, for him, almost everyone is an asshole.

"He's really an asshole," he repeats, and his hands close into fists on his knees. Sveta takes off her shirt and takes one of his hands, puts it between her legs. She distracts him as she can, as she knows how; they've never had much else to hold onto.

"He won't say anything," she tells him when she's about to come and Ilya doesn't stop, fucks her harder.

There was something

'bout you that now I can't remember

—'About You', The 1975,

From the album 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language'

Sasha licks Ilya’s ear and puts a hand behind his neck. “Can I suck your cock?”

Ilya nods and smiles against his lips, pulling him closer. “Of course you can.”

Sasha gives him a faint bite on his neck and takes a second to look at the mark. He’d love to bite deeper, harder—he’d love for Sveta to see it.

He kneels between his legs and Ilya tugs his hair. His cock in his mouth is warm and big.

“You like this? Should keep you here forever, fuck.”

Ilya groans and runs his thumb under Sasha’s eye, wiping away a tear.

Sasha wants to tell him he’d stay kneeling for him, as long as he wants, until he doesn’t need anyone else. Sasha could be so good for Ilya, ready to satisfy him. He wants to say so many things, but he has Ilya’s cock in his mouth, and can’t say anything at all.

Ilya comes moaning his name.

Sasha starts smoking for Ilya because Ilya gets the habit of pulling out a cigarette every time they finish to fuck. Sasha doesn’t know what to do with himself, doesn’t know where to put his hands—they aren’t exactly the kind of guys to cuddle—so one day he asks if he can take a drag. Ilya winks and brings the cigarette to his mouth, holding it between his fingers.

“You like it?” he asks and chuckles when Sasha coughs.

It’s disgusting, the taste, the smell, the feeling in his throat and lungs, but then Ilya takes another drag and moves the cigarette away from his face; he kisses him, breathing the smoke into his mouth.

Sveta would never start smoking—her grandmother died of a shitty lung cancer. The idea and Ilya’s mouth are enough to get him hooked.

Sasha will quit smoking when Ilya leaves for America.

He’ll fuck another guy much later.

“You shouldn’t let me do whatever I want,” Ilya tells him while pressing out a cigarette against his skin. It’s the first time they do it, and Sasha doesn’t understand what Ilya means—because it was Sasha who begged for it. He needs something that leaves a mark this time, so he blinks and says nothing, closes his eyes and comes while Ilya throws the cigarette away and kisses the mark it left.

“It’s the last time,” Ilya says, no hint of joking or lightness in his voice. It's a tone that doesn't leave Sasha room to argue.

The part of sex Sasha finds most humiliating is the preparation. Cleaning and touching himself where it’s intimate. He hears his father’s voice, every time, and all the times people called him a faggot.

Ilya tells him it isn’t necessary, that they can do other things, the rest, but Sasha kisses him and says it doesn’t matter. That it's fine.

Every time it’s a ritual that ends in tears that only stop when Ilya puts his hands on him. But Sasha clenches his teeth and keeps going.

There will be a day when he can prepare himself for sex without crying. That day will come, and it won’t be with Ilya.

Ilya is sweet when they fuck. He asks if it hurts, he stops when Sasha doesn’t answer but has a strange expression.

With Sveta it must be different, because Sveta has a pussy, which is made for that. Sasha thinks about it every time he feels Ilya inside him. He thinks Sveta must be wetter, warmer, welcoming. It feels unfair, and so he never complains even if it hurts. He tries to please Ilya as much as possible, tries to make him come quickly.

Every time, Ilya tells him he's hot, and afterward tells him he’s his best friend, and that nothing changes. Sasha feels changed every time. Something has to change—this fact that he likes taking it in the ass. Sometimes it seems to him that he’d take anything from Ilya. Once Sveta told him that he has no sense of self-preservation.

Sveta and Ilya become weirder than usual for a while. She cries all the time, and he smokes more cigarettes than he’s used to. He constantly asks if they want to get drunk, and if they say no he drinks a whole bottle of vodka by himself.

Once, Sasha overhears them talking and Sveta tells Ilya that it’s his fault. Sasha doesn’t know what she means, but it’s exactly what he thinks sometimes—that it’s Ilya’s fault.

“Do you want to fuck Sveta too?”

“All three together, you mean?”

Ilya nods and puts a hand on his thigh, strokes him, inside, high up, so close to his cock that Sasha would say yes to anything.

“Yes, all three together.”

Sasha nods.

Sometimes they fuck—him and Sveta. It’s always depressing. Every time he hopes he’ll discover he likes women, that Sveta’s breasts will do something for him, that he’ll want to lick her pussy as much as Ilya wants to.

That same night they end up at Sveta’s place, and it’s Ilya who makes the first move, who strips them both. Sasha has never felt so naked, and he’s never felt so kindly toward Sveta. He doesn’t understand their dynamic. He only knows he tries to take everything he can from Ilya, and that Sveta does the same, and for at least one night, neither one of them wins.

"Tell me I'm your girl," Sasha moans, his head on the pillow and his ass up. Ilya pulls out and puts a hand on his back, strokes him slowly and moves his mouth close to his ear, "You're my boy," he says softly. Sasha wants to be everything for Ilya, but if that's what he gets, he'll make it enough.

"You speak English now?" Sasha asks him, because Ilya has slipped out a phrase he doesn't understand, and Sveta doesn't seem surprised at all.

Ilya shrugs. It's no secret he's going away. He has played hockey since he was a kid, always had Sasha's father as his coach. That's how they met, and it's another of the things Sasha will never forgive his father for.

"It's a stupid language," he comments, because he never knows how to react to the intimacy his two friends share. It's something he can't stand up to, can't compete with. Sasha isn't a girl—it's a difference that will never be bridged.

“It’s a funny language,” 

For Sasha, nothing about all this has seemed even remotely funny for a while now.

And so Ilya leaves for America.

Sasha hates the States. He’s heard people talk about it his whole life – sometimes badly, sometimes with admiration and idealization. He, Ilya, and Sveta were born with the death of the Soviet Union; sometimes Sasha feels like its reincarnation, already surrendered even before he begins.

America is taking Ilya away, and Sveta says she’ll go with him. No one asks him anything, and anyway, he couldn’t have gone.

Sasha remains still and unmovable.

“I’ll miss you,” Ilya says in English, and Sasha understands that.

Fuck off, he wants to tell him. He wants to tell him that sometimes he feels like Ilya is another part of his body, a sort of limb he doesn’t know how it works or what it’s for, and that is constantly being ripped away from him.

The night before he leaves, they fuck, and afterwards Ilya lingers kissing him. To Sasha it feels like hours pass. He doesn’t go to say goodbye at the airport, he stays home and cries and locks himself in his room.

He doesn’t leave for days.

Sasha and Sveta remain friends, because it’s easier without Ilya between them. It’s easier because Ilya now belongs to everyone, and there’s nothing left for them to fight over.

One day Sveta tells him that Ilya is about to marry another hockey player. Sasha wants to laugh, and cry, and amid it all, he feels a certain consolation, knowing he's been more than just Ilya’s dirty little secret, and that—at least—Ilya is not marrying Sveta either. They both loose, in the end.

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