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some hockey-typical misogyny, a technically open relationship no one is happy about, not NOT consent issues?

It would be incorrect to say the photo had gone viral. It was only interesting because it was Shane. In the photo Shane was unsteady, clearly drunk, outside a club. The quality of the shot wasn't good enough for Ilya to make out the pink flush that must have been over his cheekbones, but his mouth was half open. The person coaxing him into the car had broad shoulders, his head turned away; there was only a glimpse of an ear, the rest unidentifiable.

No one would have called it incriminating. The Metros captain, having a wild night out with the boys. The hockeysphere had mostly reacted with amusement. So Hollzy does know how to have fun. But Ilya looked at the stranger's fingertips pressed to the small of Shane's back and thought: this man is going to fuck him. There was no mistaking the intent. Ilya knew it with the certainty of someone who had been fucking Shane Hollander for ten years.

The thing was: it had been Shane who'd said, "You can."

Tail end of summer. Ilya had fucked Shane out on the dock that afternoon and was paying for it with prickling sunburn across his shoulders. Worth the price. He was idly thinking about pinning Shane against the kitchen counter and sucking him off, so he'd only been half paying attention when he said, "What?"

"I'm just saying. It'd be suspicious if you didn't."

Sometimes Shane had conversations in his head and only included Ilya halfway through. Usually this meant he had spent a lot of time thinking about an exciting new way Ilya could fuck him, so Ilya gave up on the aloe and wandered over behind Shane. "If I didn't what, sweetheart?"

Shane was focusing hard on the stove; Ilya leaned down and bit the curve of his neck. Out on the dock Shane had smelled like lakewater and sunscreen, but now he was himself again, clean, warm. His hair was getting longer at the edges, shaggy over the ears.

"Hook up," Shane finally said, when Ilya had sucked a bruise onto his neck. "During the season."

It was so incongruous Ilya didn't understand at first. It had been a long time since he'd had trouble with English. "Is this a new game? You're my puck bunny?"

"No, I'm just saying." Shane finally turned. The lid was rattling on the pot. "We'll be together in the summers, obviously, that's a given. But you have like, a reputation—"

"Reputation," Ilya said.

"So it's weird you're not, and we tried, last season, but half the time we're not even in the same country, so if we can't, and you— wanted."

The schedule had been bad last season. Some days two games in different timezones meant they couldn't do anything but text, hours between each response. But there were the precious stretches of time when their free days lined up at home, the holiday breaks, video calls when they could. It wasn't always phone sex—sometimes they were too exhausted to get more than half-hard—but plenty of times Ilya had gotten Shane naked and pliant, touching himself the way Ilya told him, and brought himself off with Shane's sweet bitten-off noises in his ear. Ilya wouldn't have said at seventeen this was what happiness looked like, but that Ilya hadn't known a lot of things.

"Okay," Ilya said, amused. "If I want to." He hadn't wanted to. Sometimes he thought Shane had ruined him for anyone else. "You know I can survive not fucking every day, right?" He slid his hands down the back of Shane's shorts and discovered he wasn't wearing underwear. "Or maybe you're worried my dick will fall off if I don't use it. I can see how that'd be bad news for you."

"Fuck off," Shane said, but he let Ilya pull the shorts down his hips. "No, wait, the pasta."

"It'll keep," Ilya said, and got on his knees. "I want this first."

He took Shane's dick in his mouth. Shane shuddered when he came, bare feet flexing on the hardwood, bucking hard into Ilya's mouth. There was nothing else like this: Shane above him, panting, incoherent, knees buckling. Ilya swallowed and pressed his thumb into the divot of Shane's ankle, heart thumping and stupid with love, and said, "You can, too, if you want."

They discovered the pasta had fallen apart in the water, when they finally picked themselves up; but that had been the smaller mistake.

The Centaurs were in Vancouver, the Metros at home: bad timing. Ilya didn't text Shane about the picture, and Shane didn't, either. On the way back home, fifth loss in as many games, Dupont whistled at his phone and said, "Damn, Roz, Hollander's doing more partying than you."

Ilya had about half a second before the picture was in his face. He made his eyes big, incredulous. "You think this is partying? He is a lightweight. Probably he had one beer and then got tucked into bed."

There was scattered laughter. "It's true, I heard he doesn't drink during the season."

"This is the season, idiot."

Shane still made faces at Ilya's vodka, but in the right mood he could be convinced by wine. When he had enough he got loose, affectionate. Once, he'd knocked a glass over onto Ilya, tiny trailing droplets and then a final, spreading splotch across the front of Ilya's tee. Shane had peeled the shirt off Ilya's abs and licked over the places where the wine had bled through; Ilya still had the shirt, even though the stain had never come out.

"Next time we play Montreal, maybe I invite Hollander out for drinks," Ilya said. His mouth felt tender, like he'd bitten a lemon. "Get him hungover, see how he plays then, huh?"

More laughter. Dupont got roped into a card game. Ilya slumped into his seat and looked at his own phone, where he hadn't responded to Shane's last text: Good luck tonight. It wasn't luck Ilya needed. He'd had two goals but the other team had had four. Hockey's a team game, Shane was always saying after losses like that, strained and polite to the mic in his face. Obviously there were some gaps tonight. Our job is to find out how to address those together.

Ilya put his phone back in his pocket, started a movie, and fell asleep half an hour in.

The flight to Ottawa took six hours. Ilya drove himself home and staggered into the house quite ready to throw himself into bed; and then he snapped wide awake with the shock of Shane rising up from the couch.

"I have to go soon," Shane rasped. He was wearing a Dynamo sweater even though he had plenty of his own clothes here. Sleep still clouded his mouth.

Ilya could have done anything then. Said he needed sleep. Gone to kiss Shane where the hoodie string had left an imprint across one cheek. It wasn't a free day for Shane. At best they had an hour.

Instead he said, without any conscious thought at all: "How did he fuck you?"

Shane took it like it was a hit on the ice, braced, unflinching. "Ilya."

Ilya dropped his bag and kicked off his shoes. "No, tell me." The stranger in the photo looked big; maybe he had held Shane down the way he liked. Probably that was why Shane had picked him. "Did you bring him up the fire escape? Did you let him open you up?"

"We went to his place," Shane said thinly. This was worse. Ilya couldn't picture Shane in the stranger's apartment. What would he have done—eyed the height of the ceiling and the size of the windows, or gotten to his knees right there in the entranceway, too busy to look? Had he been eager, or had he made the stranger work for it?

Ilya was in front of Shane now. He put a hand on Shane's chest and pushed, and Shane went easily, folding back onto the couch. Ilya went after him, knees bracketing Shane's thighs, one hand on Shane's shoulder and the other worming under the waistband of Shane's sweats and into his briefs. Past Shane's cock, behind his balls, rubbing a dry finger over the soft rim of Shane's hole. "Did he fuck you here?"

"No," Shane said, "no, it was— I jerked him off, he blew me, we didn't—"

"Oh, I see," Ilya said. "Can't have anyone saying that Shane Hollander" —a firm press; Shane's hole clenched— "takes it up the ass, that he just loves sucking dick—"

"It's an aggressive NDA."

It landed slowly. Of course there was an NDA. Shane had been prepared— he had planned, ahead of time—

Shane said, "Do you not have one?"

"What the fuck for, all the people I'm not fucking?"

"What?" Shane went pale. "What are you talking about?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I told you you could," Shane said, "you said you would—"

Ilya's head hurt, and his chest hurt, and his shoulder was twinging from a hit he'd taken in Vancouver. He pulled his hand out of Shane's pants and shook out his shoulder. "Yes, you said, very stupid, I could fuck anyone I wanted." He was snarling, like a wild animal. "Why would I want to, Hollander? Why would I need anyone else?"

"Because Ottawa fucking sucks!"

It was like losing an edge and slamming into the ice, full-speed. They didn't talk about it. Last season, Ottawa, bottom of the Atlantic. Ilya had had a month and a half of nothing before the Metros lost the conference finals, and still Shane had never—

"I wanted you here," Shane was saying, syllables grinding together, "I wanted it so fucking much, and now Boston hates you and you're losing and it wasn't even— we never have any fucking time together—"

"Shane."

"—so I wanted to give you something, okay? Go out with the team. Have fun, meet somebody. You like it. You always—"

Shane had confessed, once, that he used to jerk off scrolling Ilya's Instagram. Forearm over his eyes, halting, like Ilya hadn't done the same with his Speedo ads. Ilya in a new city, new clubs, new girls. A knot in Shane's throat and a hand on his dick.

"I thought you would," Shane said, quieter. "I thought I could let you, but I didn't— I kept thinking about you—"

The sun was coming up, filtering through the curtains. Ilya felt rung like a clear pane of glass. He spat into his hand, back into Shane's pants, wet around the length of Shane's cock. "You thought about me," he said. "With girls? Big tits, great ass" —his grip wasn't gentle, but Shane was firming up anyway— "maybe a little slutty, eager to spread her legs—"

"Yes," Shane said, bucking up into Ilya's touch, "I— you'd hold her up against a wall, slide right into her—" He was leaking precome into Ilya's hand, so much of it. "It would be easy, she would be so wet for you—"

"But sweetheart," Ilya said, with a vicious jerk of his wrist, "you're all those things, and I already have you."

Shane came. Head thrown back, panting like he'd been sprinting, pulses of it hot over Ilya's hand. He was going to be sore. He was going to need new briefs. He twitched as Ilya coaxed the last of the orgasm out of him, wincing and uncomfortable and open, still, to anything Ilya might demand from him, and said, "Yeah. You do."

Ilya was so fucked. He pressed his face to the warm crook of Shane's neck, breathed in the smell of him, felt the steady beat of Shane's heart beneath his, and Shane's arms came around and held him.

"I'm sorry," Shane eventually said. "I know you really liked it in Boston."

"I did," Ilya said. A city with shitty clubs and a fuck-off attitude. It had been nothing like Moscow. "I loved it. But then I loved you, so."

"It's not that simple, though."

"Well. No." A depressingly long losing streak. The lurch when he walked into TD Garden and turned toward the visitor side. There were things Ilya would always miss. But wasn't that life: a clear certain thing you shaped yourself around, whatever the cost. First it had been hockey. Now—

"I don't want you to hook up with anyone else," Shane said. "I changed my mind."

"Okay."

"And I won't, either."

"Okay," Ilya said again. "Anything else?"

"We should get married," Shane said. "Make it official, you and me."

Ilya couldn't help it: he laughed. "Oh, really?"

"In Ontario you can still search for a marriage as a third party but in Manitoba I think you can't access it at all if you're not involved, so the next time we're in Winnipeg—"

"You've been researching," Ilya marveled. "How long?"

"A while," Shane said. "I don't know. Just in case."

Ilya had had five and a half hours of sleep. The Centaurs were probably going to lose, and lose, and lose. But Ilya looked at Shane under him, a mulish set to his jaw, and thought he would choose it again. Shane Hollander, planning their future, steel-eyed and sure. Ilya wanted to follow him there.

inspired by a tumblr anon, i hope u see this

please tell me if you know anything about the manitoba vital statistics office policy on searching marriage records!