As far as Shane could tell, Alex didn’t have a job. He didn’t even seem to keep a calendar, although he was always meeting an endless array of friends and acquaintances. He went to brunches and dinners and to dance at clubs until three in the morning as if he never had to wake up early in the morning or do anything he didn’t want to do.

Alex kept inviting Shane over last-minute, just whenever it so occurred to him that he wanted a warm body in his bed. Alex sent texts like “free tonite?” and “what are you doing rn?” with photos of his abs or his dick or, once, sticking half his tongue down a bottle at a club like it was somehow sexy. Shane was annoyed to find himself adjusting his pants as he looked at it.

Sometimes, Alex asked him over while he was still out wherever it was he went and Shane, if he was lucky, would arrive at Alex’s door at the same time as Alex did. On those nights, Alex smelled like alcohol and tasted unpleasant, like the chemical high blowing out his pupils and making him suggest extravagant, impossible things like running away to a tropical island or having dinner together at a nice restaurant in Vieux-Montreal.

Not long after they had started sleeping together, Alex left him waiting on the front step for twenty cold, snowy minutes past midnight. He checked his phone compulsively, even though it was so cold it had mostly stopped working. He kept thinking about how long he should wait. Maybe Alex had forgotten and he wouldn’t come, even though they were meeting at Alex’s home. Maybe he had gone home with someone else, or he was too high to even remember he had asked Shane and it would be another two hours before he finally stumbled drunkenly home. It made Shane’s head hurt to think about and he took deep breaths of frozen air until he could feel the bottom of his lungs ache with it.

His footprints in the snow were almost totally covered by the time Alex came loping around the corner, hands in his pockets and red scarf half-covering his face.

Alex tugged the scarf down and grinned as he walked up the steps. He kissed Shane up against the door—an apology, of sorts. He opened the door and they walked in together. Once they got inside, Alex plucked Shane’s hands out of his gloves and rubbed warmth back into them. He kissed Shane’s nose and the tips of his ears and across his cheekbones and didn’t ask how long Shane had been waiting.

Shane’s fingers were stiff with cold and he fumbled embarrassingly with his clothes before Alex batted his hands away. He let Alex tug them off and scatter them across the living room floor.

Later, Shane gave himself three minutes of post-orgasmic bliss to lay pressed against Alex on the couch before dragging himself upright. He glanced at the clock and hated himself a little.

Alex watched him hunt across the floor for his underwear. He often said things like “always overstaying your welcome, Shane,” or “dragging your feet so you can get off on being kicked out?” or, “your mother must have always complained about your dawdling,” which, of course, she had. This time, he didn’t say anything, just watched Shane.

“I have to go,” Shane said, and didn’t say he had training and practice, or that he needed the perfectly portioned breakfast prepared by his nutritionist for his performance diet. It was too late already to get enough sleep before his morning run. He couldn’t skip the run. He didn’t want to answer his trainer’s questions if he did; he didn’t know what he would say. He had tried to explain to Alex, that first time, and Alex had said, “just go whenever, you don’t need to try to make up some bullshit excuse,” so Shane didn’t try to say why anymore.

Alex said, “I see that,” and stood up, still naked and sweaty and stifling a yawn, and grabbed Shane’s pants from the floor.

Languorously, Alex dressed Shane, kneeling at his feet to pull his pants up his thighs to settle over his hips. Alex guided Shane’s arms into his shirt and tugged it down over his head.

Shane’s head felt fuzzy and he let his eyes unfocus, vision slightly blurring in the dark living room. He let Alex direct his body through the motions, even though he distantly knew it was late and he should do leave quickly.

Alex gently pushed Shane backwards until the backs of his legs hit the couch and he sat down hard. Alex groped through the dark to find one sock, then a second, and tugged them onto Shane’s feet. He kissed each socked foot before lowering them to the floor. He brushed his fingers through Shane’s hair and walked him to the front door. Alex helped Shane into his winter coat, kneeling down to lace Shane’s boots up before triumphantly wrapping his own red scarf around Shane’s neck and tugging a toque down over Shane’s ears.

“Done,” Alex said, satisfied, and kissed him goodbye with tongue.

It was still snowing outside, giant flakes falling in slow motion, but Shane felt warm all the way through. He didn’t want to take his clothes off when he got home, so he slept the whole night like that and woke up right on time feeling as if he had slept a full eight hours, though it wasn’t more than four.

The next time, Alex showed Shane where he had stashed a key to the door on the porch and told Shane to use it whenever he came over. Just walk right in.

—

Alex took his time in bed, spending luxurious hours doing things to Shane, fucking him in the shower and the living room and on the tiled kitchen floor which was heated in the winter and clean and not uncomfortable like Shane had expected. He traced Shane’s many bruises and never asked how he’d gotten them, but twisted himself into awkward positions to avoid putting any pressure on them.

Shane didn’t know what to do with all the time he had with Alex. Free afternoons and evenings passed through his fingers, sweet as maple syrup. Shane thought he had probably never taken his time in his life, never seen the merit in waiting or stopping to smell the roses. Now, Alex’s vases of flowers perfumed the air and he smelled roses whenever he came over.

Alex had thick Persian carpets that he favoured over the sofa and chairs scattered through the house. He would lounge on the floor, watching Shane sat politely on the sofa with that peculiar expression he sometimes got, before tugging Shane down to join him.

Every hookup with a man since Ilya had taken him to his knees when he was eighteen years old had been rushed and intense. Every hour with Ilya was stolen and clandestine and he counted down the days to their meetings for months beforehand. With Alex, time felt hazy and unimportant. Sometimes they just spent an hour or two kissing before they even started to take their clothes off.

He felt angry with it. He wanted this many hours with Ilya, too, and he felt the unfairness acutely. He wondered whether Ilya wanted to just kiss for hours, too. He wondered what the third round of sex felt like with Ilya.
—
He didn’t like Alex, not really. He wouldn’t want to be seen with him in public. There was something about the way he moved. His hips, his hands, the tilt of his head—it all was so terribly revealing. When the guys in the locker room called each other “fairy” and “fag” and “cocksucker,” Shane laughed along and thought of Alex.

Shane wondered if Alex had ever tried to hide it, whether he was even capable. Surely he had. Everyone had at least tried to hide it growing up. Shane wondered if Alex had ever managed it convincingly. He thought Alex might have liked to be able to hide it better, but couldn’t, and so he leaned into it as if that’s what he’d meant to do all along. Shane was grateful it wasn’t obvious in himself.

—

The first time Alex left Shane alone in the house, Shane wandered through, opening drawers and cabinets. In anyone else’s home, he would have felt strange about invading their privacy, though he might still have done it. But he didn’t think Alex would care, and he felt a sense of entitlement to this house. He wanted to go through every drawer and catalogue everything until he could piece all the miscellanea together and make Alex out of the puzzle somehow, as if he could figure him out from all the objects in the house alone.

Alex had grown up rich, probably. Shane was rich too, but he hadn’t grown up rich. He thought about money a lot, and what to do with it, and—with an alarm he could admit was finally unwarranted—how to make more money right now, this minute, so it would last his whole lifetime after he retired.

Alex didn’t seem to think about money. Shane had thought it might be a Russian thing, some sort of post-communist holdover, but Ilya talks about fast cars and has expensive clothes with logos he makes fun of Shane for not recognising.

Alex always had fresh fruit in ridiculous bowls on the counter. There was a piano in the cramped living room which Alex sits down and plays in a way that reminds Shane of being a teenager racing alone across a frozen lake beneath a cold, clear sky.

He had actual paintings on the wall, and not shit modern paintings like Ilya or bland ones like Shane’s designer had picked. These said something about Alex, Shane was pretty sure. Something fundamental, maybe. He looked at them for a long time and thought that if they were speaking, it wasn’t in a language Shane understood. The crammed shelves of worn books said nothing to Shane either, and he opened the pages of dense Russian text to find them annotated with notes and exclamation points that didn’t mean anything to him.

Shane picked up Alex’s passport from the top desk drawer and traced his fingers over the unfamiliar gold lettering on the cover. He opened it and studied the Cyrillic and transliterated Latin letters stacked on top of each other, thumbed at the photo of Alex looking young and vulnerable with a hint of what Shane suspected was eyeliner and traced his fingers over the transliterated “Aleksander.” His place of birth was Kazan. Shane had never heard of it and he went and laid down in the bed and wondered about all the things he didn’t know about Alex until he felt dizzy and confused.

Can he know Alex without knowing any of his menagerie of friends in Montreal, or anything about any of the texts he gets in Cyrillic, or the family members that surely must exist somewhere, or did exist at some point? Can someone really know Shane if they don’t know his family, if they don’t know about hockey? If all they know of Shane is contained to one small house in the Plateau Mont-Royal?

“Does anyone call you Aleksander?” Shane said later, once Alex had gotten back and found him splayed out across the bed staring at the ceiling.

Alex shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “Russian has all these nicknames that our family and our friends use instead. All my friends in Russia call me Sasha. When I was little, my parents called me Sashenka. Alex is my French name, not so much my Russian one.”

“Oh,” Shane said. “Should I call you Sasha?”

Alex smiled and touched Shane’s cock through his pants and said, “Are we friends now, Shane?”

Shane gasped and spread his legs and allowed the distraction. The name “Shane” doesn’t really work in French. Shane wanted to think it was funny, the way Alex’s Russian-inflected French sounded out his one-syllable name, but couldn’t really manage to.

Later, Shane asked Ilya if his friends in Russia called him by a nickname. Ilya said he was Ilyukha with his teammates and Ilyusha with Svetlana and he had been Ilyushenka with his parents when he was young, and no one called him Ilyushenka anymore and he missed it.

Shane’s throat felt full almost to choking when he tried to say Ilyusha. He practiced saying it aloud as he fell asleep for two nights in a row before it sounded right.

—

Alex spoke French with a Russian lilt that teased itself into a near perfect Parisian accent on the few occasions he’d taken a phone call in Shane’s earshot. Shane had tried to ask him about it, whether someone had ever said something to him about his accent to make him self-conscious, and Alex had looked at Shane like he could see right through him, and said, “People ask where I’m from no matter what my accent is. They’re very boring about it.”

It made Shane’s chest ache, and Alex touched his neck, his nipples, kissed his way down his abdomen and taken his cock into his mouth. Shane’s chest ached all the way until he came and then it forgot to ache anymore until Alex carefully said, “It doesn’t feel so bad to be asked where you’re from when you actually aren’t from there” and explained, haltingly, that when he had gone back to Moscow a few years ago, he found to his surprise that spending all his adult years in Paris and Montreal had warped his Russian so that people asked where he was from and didn’t believe him when he said “here.”

Then Shane’s chest ached again, but it was a different kind of ache. For the first time since they started sleeping together, Shane stayed the whole night.

—

Once, when they were laying side by side in bed after Alex had begged Shane to fuck him, and Shane had opened him up slowly and gently until Alex got impatient and pushed himself down harshly on Shane’s cock in a way Shane knew from experience must have hurt, Alex said, “Do you know what made you gay?”

“I don’t know. I think I was probably just born this way,” Shane said, even though he wasn’t actually sure that was true, wasn’t even really sure he was gay. “Did something make you gay?”

Alex was silent for so long Shane thought he had fallen asleep before Alex said, “My hockey coach when I was little, he used to take me into his office while we waited for my father to pick me up and he would take off his pants and masturbate in front of me.” Shane didn’t say anything, but he pressed up close to Alex and wrapped his arms all the way around him and squeezed the curve of his waist and kissed his neck and his shoulders. “I’m not sure if it made me gay, or if I was already and he could just tell somehow.”

Shane kissed his neck some more and felt very helpless. People didn’t often confess their secrets to Shane; he didn’t have any practice at it.
Shane finally said, “It sounds like you were just the last kid left and he was alone. He might have done it to anyone.” He probably had, to some long line of boys since. Shane tried to picture Alex as a child in hockey gear and couldn’t reconcile the image with the man in silk shirts and dangly earrings in front of him.

“Oh,” Alex said faintly, “I hadn’t thought of that. Scheduling.”

—

Shane thought about Alex at practice and during meals and at games when he should be focusing on any number of other things. He thought about Ilya, too, but he was expected to think about Ilya all the time. People always brought Ilya up around Shane, so he didn’t think it was odd how often he thought of him. No one ever mentioned Alex, no one even knew he existed, but still he thought about him.

Had he slept with Alex because he was Russian? Because his accent made Shane think of Ilya? So maybe it was all just about Ilya after all and Alex was a poor imitation to tide him over in the months between Boston games, but that wasn’t true either. Probably it hadn’t been true for longer than an hour the first time they slept together because Alex wasn’t like Ilya, really, except that they were both from Moscow and they were both startlingly kind during sex in a way no other man or woman he had been with ever was. Kind in such a specific way that now when he had sex with one, it always made him think of the other. Shane would choke himself on Alex’s cock and Alex would pull back until he could breathe better and say to be careful and pet his hair.

His whole head felt strange and echoey like he’d just taken a hard hit and he was reorienting himself to which way was up. He felt full up with things he couldn’t say and trapped in some complicated web of his own making where he couldn’t ever tell anyone the whole truth. The truth was so complicated now that he didn’t even know what the whole truth was anymore.

“Do you think you can love two people at once?” Shane asked his mom in a moment of weakness, when they were wrapping up a call about a prospective brand deal. He should have been on his laptop looking at numbers on spreadsheets and coordinating his calendar which was already so full he could tell you exactly what he would be doing half a year from now down to the half hour. Instead, he was laying on his bed with his phone pressed up against his ear and his eyes closed counting imaginary stars in a bright night sky. He should go to sleep soon.

“In what way?” she said, hesitant. “I love you and your father.”

But that wasn’t what he meant, and he didn’t know how to explain anything, or even what there was to explain. He didn’t think that there being two of them was exactly the problem. He thought Ilya would like Alex, even though they’d never met and Shane didn’t know anyone else that Ilya knew. Shane shouldn’t have any idea what sort of person Ilya liked other than Shane himself, who wasn’t really like Alex at all.