• For Anonymous_ID.

I loved writing this; thank you for the great prompts. I hope you enjoy!

Ilya had complained, but his suitcase is light and when Shane sets it in the front entrance he wonders what he’d actually decided to pack. It’s summer on the lake, but sometimes it gets cold in the nights and Ilya has his nose pressed to the glass in his tank top, still, sun filtering through over his shoulders.

Shane had this place built to his exact specifications years ago, had known signing his contract exactly how he was going to spend it. It wasn’t made for sharing with other people, but once Shane goes looking it’s easy to find space, places where he can nudge over his shoes or his jackets and carve out a hollow to be filled.

Ilya asks, early on, only half-serious, “Were you thinking about me when you designed it? Did you imagine me here? Imagine this?” Here being: shirt off, pants on the way, almost leaning on Shane in the bedroom, words pressed into the side of his face.

“I didn’t,” Shane says, truthfully.

Now that Ilya is here, he almost wishes he had. It would feel like something from inside Shane that Shane could offer up to him, some perfect and exact kind of gift. But the truth is that Shane built the cottage so that Shane could hang out on the lake, miles of emptiness in every direction, and not have to think about or speak to or consider anyone else. Not even his parents. Not even Ilya, who across from him at centre ice or over the hotel bed sometimes felt more like an inverted mirror of Shane than anything else, like when you’re at the carnival as a kid and you can recognize your hand, your foot, your jacket, but still not recognize yourself.

That impression survives all of a day or two of cottage-time, right up until Shane comes down the steps and finds Ilya with both hands on his hips staring at the coffee pot. “This is impossible,” he declares.

“What on earth did you do to it?” Shane eyes up the equipment but it’s not even a complicated machine. It’s the kind of drip-through glass carafe that his dad used to nurse when Shane was a kid.

“Oh, who knows?” Ilya says, waving a hand in the air and dropping it heavily to the counter. It takes a moment for Shane to register his genuine frustration and another to figure out how to respond, which is: he unplugs the machine, opens the top and carefully takes everything out. He slams the flat of his palm into the body of the machine.

Halfway through refolding the little cup and ribbing Ilya mercilessly for being a rich, useless guest—“Look at your house,” Ilya splutters—some switch in Shane’s brain flips, like when he looks up and sees the whole pattern of the play. Ilya stops being Shane’s Ilya and just becomes Ilya. His own Ilya, maybe, annoyed with his palm on the table in Shane's house. Shane feels himself flinch, curling in along the spine and ricocheting outwards. It’s perfectly, purely unintentional; he can’t let Ilya see it. Shane knows that flinch is going to live in him for the rest of the day.

After they get found out, Mom and Dad come carefully over at five o’clock, as agreed, and Shane thinks the only thing that stops Dad from making a joke about having waited for Shane’s text before they came over—or, well, before they turned down the drive into view of the cottage windows—is that Shane is certain he looks exactly as anxious as he feels.

Which isn’t to say he's not happy; he’s so happy, happier than he thinks he’s been since he was a kid, delighted in a way that makes Ilya stop in the entryway that day and just beam at him. But he has never had to be in a room with all three of these people at once, and the stuff he was too panicked to worry about before rises to the surface now.

“Hey,” Ilya says, while Shane hovers at the window, watching his parents’ car wind down the entryway. He reaches over and catches Shane’s fingers where he was tapping them against the back of his thigh. “You look like you are waiting for the President to come to dinner, not your parents.”

“Prime Minister,” Shane corrects absently.

“Mm, no, the President of Hockey, maybe,” Ilya says. He threads his fingers through Shane’s own. “Breathe.”

He gulps in air; realizes he wasn’t, in fact, breathing; tightens his fingers around Ilya’s; drops his head to the glass. “I’m fine.”

Ilya kisses at the back of his neck and then Shane really is fine. “You are, yes,” Ilya mutters, directly into his ear, so that Shane is flushed and laughing when his parents really do come up to the door. He wants to say it’s easy to open the door and let them in, but it’s not. It’s hard.

It’s hard to stand between Mom and Dad and Ilya and figure out how to solve that puzzle, and eventually Shane resolves to stick his hands in his pockets and be his parents’ son. He hopes that Ilya will think of it as a kind of letting him into a space instead of as a kind of kicking him out.

He’s not sure it works. Ilya sneaks glances at him all through dinner, not the normal kind of teasing but puzzled, almost worried, and for lack of a better idea Shane sneaks his foot across the table and taps at Ilya’s shoe. Ilya taps back, but he doesn't stop looking at Shane. After dinner, he keeps his hands to himself and Shane almost caves and texts him, under the table, please touch me. I can’t do it but you can, they’re not your parents.

He does corner Ilya in the kitchen, pouring dessert wine. “Stop it,” Shane hisses. “You’ve already made a good impression, you don’t have to act like someone else.”

“You’re acting like someone else,” Ilya whispers back. And—oh, he’s annoyed, maybe, at Shane. Genuinely annoyed and not in the little ways he goes quiet about Russia.

“I’m not,” Shane snaps, and he takes the glasses out to place in his parents’ hands.

It works, though; Ilya lightens up and Mom slowly eases into her seat now that she doesn’t feel like a guest. Shane doesn’t lean into his boyfriend’s hand on his shoulder, but he lets himself sink into the feeling a little: the pressure, the warmth. And then after they’ve all waved good-bye in the driveway, Shane lets himself drop properly into Ilya’s arms and he lets Ilya ask, “Are you sure this is okay?”

Which is not what Shane had expected him to ask. “What? Yes. Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

“You’re all—like a spring,” Ilya explains. “You didn’t want your parents to know, so I thought maybe—”

“I did,” Shane says. “I did want them to know. I just didn’t know how to tell them.”

“Okay,” Ilya raises his hands up. “So we are all right?”

“We’re always all right,” Shane says. “I just can’t—in front of my parents.” It's one thing to tell them and another thing to open that door where they can see. He can be Ilya’s Shane the rest of the time.

Ilya just looks at him, considering. Considering what, Shane doesn’t know.

“You’re different, too,” Shane says. “Here.” As opposed to—what? Not different than on the ice. Different than in a dozen identical hotel rooms, maybe. Different than on Instagram or in the gossip that winds through the hockey grapevine.

Back before it had become—back before, when all Shane had been expecting was the best sex of his life and, if he'd been lucky, Ilya's head in his lap—Shane had woken up in the middle of the night after the finals and texted Ilya all of the information he might need: the dates Shane was free; the cottage address and the co-ordinates, because even with the right address the GPS gets lost on the roads; the good local weather station; prospective meals Shane could have brought up; things to do around the cottage.

Then he’d tossed his phone across the room and stared at the ceiling for a while, until it started vibrating on floor and he’d had to go trudge across the room to pick up Ilya’s call.

“What is this, are we camping?” Ilya had asked immediately. “Are you trying to trick me into a little tent in the woods?”

“What, no,” Shane had been grinning before he was quite aware of it, amused against his will. “It’s really nice. You’ll see, there are a lot of windows and—”

“I can fly in to Ottawa on the Tuesday,” Ilya had interrupted, proving that he had, actually, read all of Shane’s texts. “You can come pick me up.”

“At the airport?” That’s what it sounds like, but—

“Yes, at the airport. I don’t know anyone else in Ottawa.”

Shane had bitten down, hard, on his tongue; he'd tasted metal behind his teeth.

And Ilya’s voice had softened, just the sharp edge turning in. “I don’t want to drive in Canada. You can park out in the back and text me where you are, like a bad Uber.”

Shane picking him up would be four hours more of Ilya; what’s more, it meant Ilya in a car, which was a kind of Ilya he hadn’t seen yet. “If we get pulled over—”

“I am your stupid American cousin,” Ilya had twisted his voice on the last words, sounded for a minute really shockingly Boston.

“You’re not stupid,” Shane had said on automatic. “And people will recognize you.”

“They will not.”

“Maybe they don't in Boston,” Shane had shrugged. “That’s not true here.”

Ilya had rolled his eyes, jerky on the screen. “You’ll be careful,” he'd said. “I'll be careful. It's the off-season. Come pick me up, please.”

“Yeah,” Shane had nodded. “Of course I will.” And that had been the end of it.

That very first day, staring down into Ilya’s suitcase, open on the floor of the bedroom with clothes neatly packed inside, Shane’s fingers tingle. Ilya has only briefly stepped away, but Shane is impatient; he imagines those clothes stacked into the empty drawers. He wonders how Ilya likes to dress for the summers, if he packed something different or the same as what he would have carried home.

At the very top of the stack is a dark hoodie, yellow hardware on the strings and in the tags at the back. It’s not like anything Shane has seen Ilya wear, but it looks kind of like Shane’s old jacket still hanging in the Montreal condo. For a long time, looking at Ilya felt like looking into the black hole of Shane's own desire, but now Ilya is just a person Shane loves and the hoodie is just a hoodie. All Shane's wanting belongs to him.

He leans down and picks it up; when Ilya finds him like that two or three minutes later, bundled up in Ilya’s jacket with the hood thumbed between his fingers, he just about cackles and then picks Shane up.

“You’re amazing,” Ilya says. Shane doesn’t know what he means yet, but he will soon.

Linked on tumblr here.