Hello again. Welcome back to my version of the cottage era. Here is another one shot for your viewing pleasure.

Warnings for distracted driving and a brief mention of suicide.

Hope you enjoy.

It started the night before with Ilya sneezing, quick and sharp in the kitchen, turning away from the cutting board and then raising his head from the crook of his elbow with an expression like he’d startled himself.

“Bless you,” Shane had said, automatically, from where he’d been sitting on a bar stool on the opposite side of the island to watch Ilya chop vegetables for the stir-fry.

He had felt oddly pleased to have witnessed the sneeze. He hadn’t seen Ilya sneeze, yet. It was another first to cross off the list.

Ilya had shaken his head. “Allergies,” he’d pronounced, and resumed chopping.

This proves false the next morning, when Shane wakes up to a hand pressing insistently against his shoulder. “Go away,” Ilya tells him.

Shane blinks, yawns, reaches up to scrub his eyes. The pressure on his bare skin feels nice, so he leans into it. “What,” he mumbles up to the ceiling. He can tell how early it is by the pink glow of the dawn reflected in the polished blades of the ceiling fan lazily rotating above them.

Ilya pushes, harder, more insistently, at the side of Shane’s shoulder. “Go away,” he says, again, and this time Shane hears how congested he sounds. When Shane turns his head on his pillow to look over, he sees Ilya’s eyes are watery, the tip of his nose red. “I’m sick. You will get sick.”

“You go away,” Shane mumbles, his eyes slipping shut again. “I’m tired. We stayed up way too late last night.”

“I told you I am sick.” Ilya sounds genuinely affronted. “You want me to go away? When I am sick?”

Shane can’t help the smile that tugs at his mouth. He’s never heard Ilya quite so whiny, before, at least in any situation where Ilya wasn’t out of his mind with desperation to come. With his eyes still closed, Shane reaches up, pushes Ilya’s hand away from his shoulder, and then rolls over to faceplant onto Ilya’s bare chest.

Ilya’s skin is hot, and clammy, and sticky with a thin layer of sweat. His hand comes up to clasp over the back of Shane’s neck even as he says, again, “You are going to get sick.”

“S’okay,” Shane mumbles into Ilya’s chest. “It’s the offseason.”

“Yes. Because hockey is only reason to be healthy.” Ilya’s tone is sharp, annoyed. His fingers are gentle as they curl through Shane’s hair. He murmurs something in Russian, and then says, “Shane, I am not joking. I think I have fever.”

Shane is almost certain Ilya does, just from the heat he can feel radiating against his cheek. It’s a pleasant sensation. Shane would have liked to kick off his boxers, and snuggle in tight, and rub himself against Ilya’s overheated body for a while.

Instead, he raises himself reluctantly from Ilya’s sweaty chest, yawning, and says, “I’ll go get a thermometer.”

Shane leaves Ilya sweating in the sheets to pad into the en-suite bathroom, which is bathed in pink from where the early-morning sunlight is leaking through the frosted windowpane.

There are a few thermometers in the medicine cabinet. Shane has one of the fancy point-and-click temperature guns that don’t involve touching at all.

He barely feels guilty when he selects the under-the-tongue option, instead.

Ilya complains when Shane helps him sit up against the pillows, complains when Shane gets a hand under his jaw to encourage him to open his mouth. He only stops complaining when Shane tells him to lift his tongue, and then it’s just because he physically can’t.

Shane bends down to peer inside Ilya’s open mouth, beneath the twitching muscle of his tensed-up tongue, to the pulsing red flesh beneath. He is gentle, when he slides the cold metal of the thermometer into that tender, humid space.

After a moment, Shane removes the thermometer, checks the number as he lightly massages his fingertips against the sides of Ilya’s jaw. “One-oh-one,” he reads. “Hold on.” He reaches for the nightstand, finds Ilya’s phone first, unlocks it one-handed to open Google with the wet thermometer still pinched between the fingers he’s cupping around the phone. “That’s mild,” he says, after a moment. “I don’t think we need to go to a doctor.”

“Can’t go to a doctor,” Ilya says, his jaw moving against Shane’s loosened grip. “Then they would know.”

Shane looks uncertainly down at Ilya, who isn’t meeting his eyes.

“Of course we can go to a doctor,” Shane says. “That’s not—  I didn’t say we didn’t need to because of that. I just thought—”

Shane had always gotten the feeling that Ilya felt a knee-jerk repulsion to any sort of medical professional, mostly from the dismissive way he talked about the Bears team doctor, and maybe— selfishly— for an excuse as to why Ilya had never really asked about Shane’s surgery or the minor complications that had kept him there for two long, annoying days afterward. Sometimes Shane had wondered if maybe they’d brought Ilya’s mother to a hospital, after he’d found her, and that’s why there was a bad association.

Sometimes Shane wishes he could sit Ilya down, and ask every question Shane’s ever had about him, and feel sure it wasn’t going to make Ilya run all the way back to the airport.

Shane finishes, lamely, “I thought you might not want to go, if you didn’t have to. Do you want me to take you?”

When Ilya raises his gaze to meet Shane’s, he is frowning. “You think I want to go to doctor for mild fever? Like baby?” After a moment, his scowl deepens. “Why are you smiling?”

Shane places the phone and the thermometer on the bedside table, reaches down and gets his other hand on Ilya’s face so he can rub his thumb over Ilya’s flushed cheek. He likes touching Ilya like this. It’s another first he’s gotten, recently, to touch Ilya’s face when neither of them are hard. “You’re being a brat,” he says, fondly.

“I am not,” Ilya says.

“I thought you would be a really, I don’t know, stoic kind of sick person,” says Shane. “But you’re all whiny.”

Ilya blinks his watering eyes up at Shane. “And this makes you happy?”

Shane considers this. “Yes,” he decides, and leans in. He’s already expecting Ilya to dodge the kiss, so he lets Ilya turn his head before touching his mouth to Ilya’s ear, instead. He savors the press of the hot shell against his lips for a moment before raising his head and saying, “I’ll go drive to the pharmacy and pick you up some medicine.”

“I will come,” says Ilya, stubbornly.

That sort of defeats Ilya’s earlier admonition for Shane to stay away from him, Shane thinks, but does not say. He leaves Ilya then, goes into the kitchen, pours a glass of cold water. After a moment, he fills the electric kettle, too.

Shane returns to the bedroom a few minutes later, drops two coasters on the bedside table, carefully places onto them the glass and steaming mug. He manages to press a kiss onto Ilya’s mouth— open, this time, probably to complain, so that Shane tastes a hint of accidental tongue— before he gets pushed away.

Shane grins, plops the bear-shaped bottle of honey he’d tucked into the crook of his arm down beside the tea, and leaves Ilya for the bathroom.

Later, when Shane emerges freshly-shaved and fully-dressed from his bathroom, it takes him a moment of wandering to find Ilya. He wonders if it will ever stop feeling like such a novelty, to pad barefoot through the house and know that Ilya is somewhere nearby.

He finds Ilya sitting on the couch, arms folded over his chest, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up over a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses. The mug and the glass of water, both empty, are coaster-less on the coffee table in front of him.

It would be a more intimidating picture, overall, if Ilya weren’t miserably sniffling, and if the plastic bear on the table in front of him didn’t have its head now only half-full. Shane bites down a smile as he silently collects the dishes and the honey.

Shane finds it exceedingly pleasant, to have Ilya so malleable. When he hands Ilya a box of tissues by the front door, Ilya doesn’t even protest, he just takes it with another sniffle.

Then Ilya follows Shane, out the front door and to the car, and— unlike most of the other times they’ve gotten in the car, mostly to go to Shane’s parents’ house for dinner— doesn’t even protest when Shane opens the passenger door for him, doesn’t try to tell Shane he can open a door all by himself or try to convince Shane to let him drive. He just tucks his tissue box under his arm and climbs in without a word.

Shane waits until Ilya’s all the way in, until he’s sure Ilya’s limbs are tucked safely away, to shut the door gently behind him.

He finds he’s humming tunelessly to himself as he rounds the car to get to the driver’s seat.

The sun has risen high enough by now that the sunlight is a bright, clear gleam on the lush summer trees. The leaves layered on the branches hanging over either side of the narrow two-lane road at the end of the cottage drive dapple shadows across the windshield, reflect pale green ovals onto Ilya’s downturned face as he unfolds a tissue to blow his nose.

The radio is off. The only sounds in the warm, clean car are the low hum of the AC and Ilya’s congested breathing.

Ilya snorts a little, then says, “You are into this?”

Shane slides his eyes over toward the passenger seat, just briefly, before focusing back on the road. Ilya had pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead, seemingly just so he could get the most out of that brief glance they’d just shared. “Into what?”

“Me,” says Ilya. “Sick. You keep looking at me like you want me to fuck you.”

“I always want you to fuck me,” Shane says. It’s still a thrill, to say it loud. How easily he can say it, now. How painful it had once been, even to think about it.

Ilya says, “I am breathing like— fucked-up little dogs, squished faces, what are they called?”

Shane can feel the corner of his mouth twitch. “Pugs,” he says, and slows down for a stop sign.

“I am breathing like pug, and I am full of snot, and I am all sweaty. And you still want my cock.”

Shane feels the familiar shiver at the base of his spine, the twitch between his legs. He breathes through it. Makes sure his right foot folds down into a nice, measured push when he gets it back on the gas pedal. “I want you to rest up,” he says, as the car moves forward again. “I want you to get better.”

“No,” says Ilya, drawing out the vowel. He’s still congested, but his tone is sharper, now, like he’s regaining some energy, shaking off some of the haze that had gripped him this morning. “You don’t.”

Shane’s smile fades. He flicks another look over at Ilya.

Whatever expression is on Shane’s face makes Ilya sit up so abruptly the tissue box goes rolling off his lap and bumping into the passenger footwell. “You don’t,” he says. His stuffed-up voice is almost awed. “Shane Hollander, that is fucked up.”

Shane can feel his cheeks getting hotter as he swings his eyes back to the windshield. “Ilya.”

“You are a pervert,” Ilya says, in a tone someone might use to announce they had just uncovered a buried treasure chest.

Shane keeps his eyes resolutely on the sun-dappled road unspooling in front of the car. He is fairly certain his face must be almost as red as Ilya’s. “Of course I want you to get better,” he says.

“But,” says Ilya.

“I didn’t say ‘but.’”

“You will,” says Ilya. He folds down, reaches beneath his legs to retrieve the tissue box. Shane can see in his peripherals that Ilya is still smiling, even when he sits up to dab at his nose again. “Because I want you to.”

Shane sighs, like that could hide the giddiness rising like a cough in his throat. What a rush it is to say all these things he’d never thought he’d be able to say out loud. His fingers flex on the steering wheel as he says, “But— there’s something, I don’t know, nice about having you— I like that you’re— needy, I guess.” His cheeks feel like they might actually burst into flame. It’s convenient to have an excuse to not be looking at Ilya right now. “Like you need me.”

“Yes,” says Ilya. “I need you.” He sneezes into another tissue.

Shane flicks on the turn signal, slows down to a stop at another red sign. He mumbles, “I also like that you’re hot.”

“I can’t hear,” says Ilya.

Shane turns to glare at him, to see if Ilya is being an asshole, but Ilya is giving him a guileless look. There is a single tear, leaking down from beneath the left side of the sunglasses.

“I said,” Shane says, tracking the droplet, “I also like that you’re hot.”

“I am always hot,” Ilya says.

Shane forces himself to say it. “I meant temperature-wise,” he says, low-voiced. And then he turns back to the wheel, sits forward, gently accelerates into the turn.

“Oh,” says Ilya, awed. He sneezes. Then he says, “You really are a pervert.”

Shane looks dutifully at the road in front of him and does his very best to pretend he’s not getting hard.

This has never been a particularly effective form of subterfuge around Ilya, who reaches over, then, and gets his fingers around Shane’s right hand, tugs it gently away from the steering wheel.

It’s a long, straight stretch of two-lane road, with no one in sight, and Shane is going sedately under the speed limit. He tightens his one-handed grip on the wheel and lets Ilya draw the other toward him with his dry, hot fingers.

He is just thinking how sweet it is, that Ilya wants to hold his hand, when he finds himself with a handful of Ilya’s erection.

Shane glances sharply down to see that Ilya has placed Shane’s hand on the front of his sweats, where Shane’s fingers have automatically, instinctually curled down to feel out the shape of him where he’s pushing hotly against the thin fabric.

Shane snaps his eyes back to the road, tightens his twin grips, one on the steering wheel, the other on Ilya. His face is getting impossibly hotter. The lane in front of them is blessedly empty, the trees stretching their branches serenely out from either side. “Ilya,” he says.

“You like that I need you,” says Ilya, like Shane needs reminding. He lets go of Shane’s hand so that he can reach up, grab another tissue, dab at his nose. “You’ll take care of me,” he says, dropping the used tissue in the footwell beneath him. “Won’t you?”

“I’m driving,” Shane says, weakly, as if Ilya hadn’t noticed. As if Ilya hadn’t already taken his hand away.

As if Shane had even tried to lift his, once it was free.

“Yes, yes, concentrate on driving,” Ilya says, dismissively, like road safety is some silly whim of Shane’s. He reaches back down, gets his hot fingers around Shane’s wrist, moves Shane’s hand up to his belly before shoving it below the elastic of his waistband.

Shane’s hand bumps down, obligingly, onto the stiff rise of Ilya’s bare dick.

“Is it hot?” Ilya asks. Clinically, like he’s waiting for a diagnosis.

“Yes,” says Shane. His eyes are starting to sting. He realizes he’s been forgetting to blink. He does so, now, and refocuses on the leafy stretch of the road rolling slowly past. “It’s burning up.”

The skin feels so delicate, beneath his dry fingers, so hot and thin. Usually when Shane touches Ilya like this it’s wet, slick with spit or lube.

It feels impossibly intimate, like this, just Shane’s fingertips where Ilya is most vulnerable.

 “Do you think,” Ilya says, enunciating very clearly, “My come will be hotter, too?”

Shane’s throat makes an audible click, as he swallows. He keeps his eyes pinned on the road and says, “I don’t know.”

“Should I find out?”

Shane should say, No. He should say, at worst, Later. Instead, he just keeps his eyes fixed on the road and his hand tight on the steering wheel as he dips his chin into a quick nod.

Ilya makes a satisfied noise from beside him. He sniffles, a little. Then he reaches down, grips his hot fingers tight around Shane’s, and moves their interlaced grips down the hot, dry length of his cock.

Shane drives carefully. He keeps the speedometer a notch below the speed limit. He slows down, for a crosswalk running between two ends of a hiking trail emerging from the trees on either side, even though no one has hit the button to trigger the flashing pedestrian signals.

And all the while Ilya's cock is hot and swollen beneath his grip.

All the while Ilya is sniffling in the seat beside him, moving Shane’s hand up and down, using his dry fingers, the coerced squeeze of his grip.

He's letting out little sighs, whenever he squeezes Shane’s fingers just tight enough, like he’s starting to feel better. Like he’s finally getting some relief.

Shane accelerates, again, past the crosswalk, and feels Ilya pin Shane’s fingers tighter, move Shane’s hand up and down, faster, faster along the hot, silky length of him. Ilya is grunting, now, louder than he usually does, like the congestion’s not letting him muffle it quite as much.

"Fu-u-ck," Ilya grunts, and it's broken into choked-up, congested syllables.

He tightens his grip on Shane’s hand, hunches forward, and lets go, groaning loudly. Shane can feel the hot thump of the cock against his trembling fingers as Ilya pulses into his sweatpants.

Ilya stays like that for a moment, frozen, his dick still twitching, his hand still clamped over Shane’s. His breathing snotty and harsh.

Shane is afraid to look over. He can feel his fingers shaking in Ilya’s grip. He stares ahead, like his gaze has been pinned to the windshield, and stays carefully below the speed limit. He drives. He struggles to make sure his breaths are even, regular, steady.

After a long moment, Ilya sighs.

His hot fingers relax over Shane’s. He reaches up, gets his grip back on Shane’s wrist, pulls Shane’s hand out of his pants.

“I didn’t—” Shane can feel his fingers flex, uselessly, beneath Ilya’s grip. “I didn’t feel if it was hotter,” he says, thinly.

“Ah,” says Ilya. He coughs, like he’s out of breath, before saying, “No dirty hands. You need them for steering wheel.”

Shane, slowly, horribly reluctantly, drags his right hand back up to grip the steering wheel.

“It was, though,” Ilya says. “Hotter, I mean.”

Shane licks his lips. It doesn’t help his mouth feel any less horribly dry.

“Ah,” says Ilya, sighing. Shane can see out of the corner of his eyes that he’s grabbing more tissues, reaching back into his pants. “I needed that.”

Shane nods, dumbly. They’re approaching the first traffic light of the drive, which denotes where the two-lane road connects to the busier thoroughfare, which means they’re getting closer to town. He licks his lips, again, before he rasps, “Feeling better?”

“Oh, yes,” says Ilya, snottily, peaceably. He stuffs the tissues into his pockets before leaning back into his seat and closing his eyes. “Much better.”

Shane is so hard he can taste blood. “I’m glad,” he says, as chipper as he can manage, and slows to a neat stop for the red light.

They complete the rest of the drive in silence, Ilya seemingly out of contentment, Shane because he’s concentrating on not vibrating out of his own skin as he pulls into the pharmacy parking lot.

Out of unspoken agreement, Ilya stays in the car, slumped in the passenger seat with his hat pulled low, as Shane opens his door, steps out onto the pavement, and then grits his teeth before turning around to adjust himself in the safety of the open door.

Ilya, peering at him from under his cap, raises one eyebrow.

“Fuck off,” says Shane, amiably enough. He steps back and shuts the door, gently, so as not to hurt Ilya’s head.

Shane had thought Ilya might fall asleep, while he was in the pharmacy, asking for advice, listing Ilya’s symptoms, buying everything the pharmacist points out to him, just to be sure.

But when he opens the driver’s side door to the car again, he finds Ilya is still open-eyed and watching.

Shane lowers himself back inside, twists around to deposit the bag in the backseat. “I got all kinds of stuff,” he says, getting his key into the ignition.

Ilya is still watching him, as the engine rumbles to life. There is an oddly serious expression on the parts of his face Shane can make out beneath the bill of the cap.

Shane feels uncertain. “You can take a look at it when we get back and see what might help,” he says, somewhat hesitantly. “I made sure to get her to tell me which ones you shouldn’t take at the same time. I took some notes on my phone. We can check that, while we decide.”

Ilya doesn’t answer. He just reaches out and touches his fingers to the back of Shane’s right hand where it has settled onto the steering wheel.

Shane looks over to find Ilya is looking at him with as serious of an expression as he could possibly manage, for someone who’s actively weeping beneath his sunglasses.

“You should try not to get sick, even if there is no hockey,” Ilya says. “Not for hockey. Just for you.”

“Ilya,” Shane says.

“You haven’t even tried,” Ilya says. “This whole time, you haven’t tried not to get sick.”

Shane frowns. “I think it’s okay,” he says, uncertainly. “It’s kind of inevitable that if one of us gets sick, both of us will. We’ve been— practically living in each other’s pockets, you know? There isn’t really a way to avoid it, unless you want to—”

His throat clicks. He can’t bring himself to say, leave.

“I don’t want to,” says Ilya, before Shane can think too much about it. “And, okay. But it’s not just this. It’s— in general. You need to try not to get sick.”

“Okay, sure, I promise not to jerk off any other sick people,” Shane says.

Ilya doesn’t laugh. His expression doesn’t change. “Sometimes you scare me,” he says.

It would be funny, to hear him be so serious in his nose-clogged stuffed-up voice, if it wasn’t for his expression, which is the most solemn Shane’s ever seen on his handsome face.

“What?” Shane kills the engine, turns to face Ilya as much as he can within the confines of the driver’s seat. “Why?”

Ilya reaches up, uses the crumpled tissue in his hand to dab at his eyes. “I need you to care,” he says.

“I care about you,” Shane says. It sounds raw, when it comes out.

Ilya makes a pained nose. A tear leaks out from under his sunglasses. It’s involuntary, Shane knows. It hurts Shane to see it, anyway. “I need you to care about you,” he says. “You need to care if you are okay. Just because.”

Shane bites his lip.

“Even if it doesn’t help with hockey,” Ilya insists. The tear is still rolling down to the corner of his mouth. “Even if it doesn’t have anything to do with hockey. I need you to care, anyway. Okay?”

Shane swallows. He reaches out his other hand, claps it over where Ilya’s hot grip has clamped his right hand to the steering wheel.

Seeing Ilya cry wasn't a first. He'd marked that off the list, early, all the way back in Tampa.

“Yeah,” Shane says, a little hoarsely. “Okay. I can do that.”

Some of the tension Shane can see in the muscles around Ilya’s eyes eases, where they’re visible around the sides of the tinted lenses. “Okay,” says Ilya. He slides his hand out from under Shane’s, brushes the tear away so casually Shane is half-certain he'd never seen it as Ilya leans back into the passenger seat, tugs his hat lower.

“Let’s get going, already," Ilya tells Shane. "Maybe you can drive faster, on the way back. I think snails maybe beat us, on the way here.”

Shane allows himself a slow grin. “Yeah,” he says, and twists his key back into the ignition. “I wonder why that is.” It’s still early in the day, and the cloudless sky is a bright, unmarred blue dome over the parking lot of the shopping center the pharmacy is located in.

There’s still time to get back to the cottage, and get some medicine in Ilya, and then tuck him in for a nap and go swimming, out in the warm water, where he could look up to see the loons gliding past on outstretched wings.

The big glass windows of the master bedroom are still visible from the water, as long as you don’t swim out too deep. Shane will see if he can convince Ilya to keep the curtains open, so that he might be able to look up, as he floats, and see Ilya is right where he belongs.