Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Anal Sex, Oral Sex, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, During Canon, Canon Related, Ilya Rozanov Makes Tuna Melts, Shane Hollander Also Makes Tuna Melts, We're all making tuna melts in this one boys, Ilya Rozanov Going Through It, POV Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, It just takes him several time loops to figure that out, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, It takes him even longer, Time Loop

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-18 Completed: 2026-03-28 Words: 34,332 Chapters: 5/5

The shape of things we know

Summary

“Where are you going?”

“To the arena, Hollander. We are playing a game in three hours.”

“That’s tomorrow, Rozanov,” Hollander says, smirking like Ilya might be fucking with him and he wants to make sure he’s in on the joke. He looks behind and around him. “Um, can I come inside?”

“Hollander, we have game today. You were here yesterday.”

Hollander is striding toward his kitchen, looking over his shoulder at Ilya like he’s getting tired of the joke. “Very funny. I was in Montreal yesterday, Rozanov.”

“Hollander.” Ilya goes to stand in front of him. Hollander’s eyes flicker up and down his body the way that Ilya usually craves, but is rather unwelcome right now. “Today is Thursday. Game is today. Yesterday, you came to my house. We ate tuna melts, watched Buffalo game. Then, you left.”

“Rozanov, it’s Wednesday morning. And I’ve never been to your house before.”

“Hollander…”

“Look at your phone if you don’t believe me.”

Ilya snorts like a bull and pulls his phone out of his pocket, swipes down on the screen to look at the date.

Wednesday, November 9th.

---

Or: Ilya Rozanov in Groundhog Day!

Notes

Okay, well, welcome to the fic idea that has completely taken over my brain: Ilya Rozanov in a tuna melt themed groundhog day torment nexus.

Items of note (maybe):

1. My primary canon is the TV show, I don't try too hard to match details to the books.
2. If I can't find a detail in a cursory google search (like Buffalo's team name), I'm making it up
3. I don't know exactly what day the Tuna Meltdown happens but apparently it's in November. I decided it is a Thursday game based on vibes.
4. Obviously no AI has been used. AI can't possibly be this deranged.
 

Title is from the poem "Relativity" by Sarah Howe, which has more or less become the secondary source of inspiration for this fic.

Chapter 1

Ilya sits on his couch, still sticky with the aftermath of sex, long after Hollander has left his house. Hollander left in his sweatpants, his shirt; Hollander’s clothes are still probably pooled on the floor in Ilya’s bedroom. He wouldn’t be surprised if his shoes are still sitting by the doorway, he left so fast.

Fuck.

Boiling, nauseating shame swirls in Ilya’s stomach, makes him want to throw up the food he made for them. God, he is so fucking stupid. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

He had thought, back when he had memorized this particular carve-out in the schedule, the perfect eighteen hours or so they could actually spend in one place together, that this was going to be fun. He could fuck Hollander more than once, in new and inventive ways, in his big, well-designed house; he knew Hollander would almost consider it foreplay when he got a look at the architecture. That was all it was supposed to be– fun, and not rushed, not some big deal. Not some grand statement or anything.

So why did he buy all this ginger ale when he thinks it’s fucking disgusting? Why did he offer to cook Hollander food? Why did he call him by his fucking first name when Hollander made him come, like he’s Ilya’s fucking boyfriend?

He’s not Ilya’s boyfriend. He can barely even be called Ilya’s friend. They don’t know anything about each other. He’s just a guy Ilya likes to fuck because he is a challenge, and Ilya loves a challenge. And because he has a face full of freckles and a cute little mouth that looks so pretty wrapped around Ilya’s cock. And because he whimpers like a puppy when Ilya fucks him, like he might die from how good it feels.

That’s all. And now he’s gone, but it was nothing to begin with, so it’s still nothing now. So fuck this. What the fuck is Ilya still sitting on his couch for?

Ilya stalks into his bedroom, heading for the shower. He was right; Hollander left in his clothes. Hollander’s pants and the t-shirt he came in are pooled on the floor by the bed and the sight makes Ilya’s heart flop over, but he does not investigate that emotion any further. He gets in the shower and stands in it for about forty-five minutes, much longer than he needs to wash off the cum and spit and sweat on his stomach. He stays under the water and thinks about Hollander moaning out his name- Ilya. Anglicized, emphasis in strange places. For some reason, he doesn’t mind that he pronounced it all fucking wrong. Not when it was breathed out against his mouth while Hollander trembled against him.

Well, he thinks, as he towels off his hair and stomps around his room, he still has a day off before his next game. He can still salvage it in some way. Call up Marley, go to a club, even though it’s a Wednesday. Scroll through his contacts until he finds a girl he knows is good for it and invite her over. Call Sveta, see if she’s busy– no, not Sveta, she’ll know immediately that something is wrong with him and make it her life’s mission to get it out of him. Nothing is wrong with him; he’s fine.

Hollander said “I can’t do this,” before he left. It sounded final in a way that tugs at Ilya’s mind. There have been times where they haven’t spoken for months, one leaving the other on read until the urge to fuck is too great and they spin back into each other’s orbit again. But all of those times, no one has ever said something like “I’m sorry,” or “I can’t do this.”

Not that it matters to Ilya. It doesn’t matter. There is nothing here but simply fucking because it feels good. The best of Ilya’s life. But that’s okay. That’s fine.

He will probably manage to hook Hollander again, when they are in proximity to each other next. He doesn’t think Hollander fucks anyone when he’s not fucking Ilya, is even more sure of it now that Hollander answered him in the least convincing way possible when Ilya asked if he likes girls. So, eventually, he will get horny enough, desperate enough, and Ilya can corner him somewhere, or send him the right combination of text messages, and Hollander will be at his hotel room door again, making his fake exasperated face even as he’s sinking to his knees.

It’s okay that Ilya doesn’t get to spend the night with him, this time, in his own house. It’s not a big deal. He’ll just throw the rest of these stupid ginger ales away.

Ilya throws himself back on his couch, intending to scroll through his phone until he finds someone he wants to drag out, be it a girl or Marley or Connors or whoever. He doesn’t intend to spend hours sitting there, doesn’t realize he has until he looks up and sees the sun is setting. He’s sitting more or less in the spot where Hollander straddled him, where he breathed his name out against Ilya’s skin. Ilya. He doesn’t think he could pronounce it like Hollander did even if he tried. He did that and then lost his mind about it. Lost his mind about Shane. But that was just a slip of the tongue. It didn’t mean anything. Hollander freaking out about it makes it seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

He still hasn’t called anyone, hasn’t even really been scrolling on his phone, by the time it’s dark, has mostly just been staring at the screen absently. He’s been thinking about the plan he had for the night, if Hollander had stayed: there was another game to watch in primetime, San Francisco, they would have watched that. If it got boring, Ilya would have blown Hollander on the couch while he pretended to watch it, like it’s some game he’s winning by acting like he doesn’t enjoy getting his dick sucked. He would have made something for dinner, or ordered in. He would have taken Hollander into the shower and eaten him out, then pulled him into the bed and fucked him again; the worst part of all of this is Ilya had deliberately not gone as hard as he’d liked to, earlier, anticipating another round. He didn’t want Hollander to be too sore or too overstimulated to go again.

The rest of it is hazier, had felt exciting and a little scary to picture too sharply. Hollander curling up against Ilya’s chest and drifting into sleep, close enough under Ilya’s chin to smell his shampoo and feel the little puffs of his breath against Ilya’s neck. The way Hollander’s eyes might look, soaking in the bright morning light of the eastern-facing windows in Ilya’s bedroom. Brighter than Ilya’s ever seen them before, which is always in shitty hotel lamp light or under a helmet in fluorescent arenas. He’d imagined they would probably fuck again in the morning, slow and still half-asleep, Ilya sliding up the side of him and taking him from behind, like he just slipped in by accident in his sleep.

Anything after that is too hazy, too far ahead into an impossible stretch of time for Ilya to have planned it any further. And it doesn’t matter now, anyway. Hollander isn’t here. He’s gone. He “can’t do this.” And Ilya doesn’t care.

Maybe he would have called him Shane again. Maybe he would have called him that all night. Maybe Hollander would have called him Ilya, too.

In the end, Ilya doesn’t do anything. He stays on the couch until it’s late enough that he goes to bed. He doesn’t get any texts– not from Hollander, not from anybody– but that’s not out of the ordinary, that doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that’s out of the ordinary is how fucking bad Ilya feels, how his stomach is curdled like the aftermath of a night out drinking even though he’s stone sober, how he keeps needing to blink hard when his eyes go suddenly blurry. He’s being very stupid.

He looks at the last string of text messages they sent each other, phone glowing in the dark. It had seemed very important, last night, to make plans for Hollander to come over today. Ilya had needed to know if he was coming or not, so he would know if he needed to buy ginger ale, groceries. He had sent Hollander his address at 10:35PM, had waited for the thumbs up, the read receipt, and then had promptly put in an Instacart order. Reading through it, Ilya feels humiliated. He feels like Alexei calling him a faggot, a little hot spike of anger and shame stabbing him in his gut.

He rolls over and puts his phone face-down on the nightstand, shuts his eyes, and eventually sleeps.

Ilya wakes up the next morning and briefly feels better until he remembers he has to play a game this afternoon against Shane Hollander.

The part of him that likes being a prick thinks it might be fun to bring Hollander’s clothes he left behind to the arena and have them delivered to the Metros locker room. The part of him that wanted to know what Hollander’s eyes look like in the morning feels like throwing up.

The first one wins; he thinks maybe he’ll feel a little better if he imagines the look of mortification Hollander will have if he has to explain. He rolls himself out of bed and goes to retrieve Hollander’s clothes from the floor, but he can’t find them. That’s weird. He ends up looking for them for a good thirty minutes before he gives up. He’ll find them later, at some inconvenient time that’s going to make him feel sick and sad when he does, but that’s a future problem. Right now, he needs to get started on his game day routine and stop thinking about Shane Hollander’s stupid clothes.

He drinks a preworkout and scrolls through the sports news on his phone, looking for the final score for the San Fran game, but can’t find it. They’re playing another primetime game tonight, Ilya sees. Or it’s the same game, and he was wrong about the schedule. He could have sworn it was yesterday, but maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention when he filed it away on Tuesday night for something for them to do together, before everything went sideways.

Ilya goes for his run, down his quarter-mile driveway, through the quiet streets of his secluded neighborhood. He comes back, fixes his protein shake. He checks his phone, no new messages. Sometimes Ilya gets a game-day chirp from Hollander, especially if they’re supposed to meet up to fuck after, but since that’s not happening, it’s not a huge surprise there’s no text waiting for him.

At 10:30AM, he showers. He’s got a little more time before he has to drive downtown, so he can take his time. Or so he thinks, but he starts thinking about Shane moaning out Ilya again, so he cuts the water off and goes about drying off and getting dressed.

By 11, he’s preparing to leave. He does another sweep of his room, unsuccessfully trying to find Hollander’s clothes. Grabs his bag, his headphones, stops in his kitchen to pull a bottle of water out of his fridge, grimaces as he has to push aside the ginger ales to reach it.

Ilya’s about to head out the door when someone knocks on it. Well, knocks on the wall first, then the door, then rings the doorbell, which makes the app on Ilya’s phone light up. He could check the camera from the app, should probably do that, because no one is ever at his door unexpectedly, but Ilya feels passively self-destructive enough right now that he can’t be bothered to worry he’s about to get mugged or kidnapped or whatever.

He just goes to the door and pulls it wide open, and standing on the other side is Shane Hollander.

Hollander does not look upset or freaked out or angry at Ilya. He looks nervous and anticipatory in that way that he always does when they’re seeing each other for the first time in a while. He holds that look, usually, saying stupid things like he’s here to discuss the weather or the game, until Ilya kisses it out of him. It’s like he needs permission to be horny, can’t admit that he wants to get fucked until Ilya gives him some signal.

Ilya knows that look very well, knows exactly what it conveys, except for right now, when it makes zero fucking sense at all.

“Hollander? What the fuck are you doing here?”

Hollander looks at him, confused and annoyed, and somehow still looking like he wants to be fucked.

“What do you mean? You invited me here.” He gives Ilya a once-over. “Where are you going?”

Ilya chooses to ignore how Hollander has apparently forgotten he ran out of Ilya’s house like it was on fire in favor of the more obvious fact. “To the arena, Hollander. We are playing a game in three hours.”

“That’s tomorrow, Rozanov,” Hollander says, smirking like Ilya might be fucking with him and he wants to make sure he’s in on the joke. He looks behind and around him. “Um, can I come inside?”

Ilya steps aside for Hollander and closes the door. “Hollander, we have game today. You were here yesterday.”

He doesn’t bother with the rest, because Hollander should know it. He’s having a weird, bad deja vu. He’s reminded of the first time his father said something– bring some bread when you come home– that didn’t make sense. He doesn’t want to be worried about Hollander like that, doesn’t think he can handle it right now.

Hollander is striding toward his kitchen, looking over his shoulder at Ilya like he’s getting tired of the joke. “Very funny. I was in Montreal yesterday, Rozanov.”

Ilya is still standing by the door, headphones around his neck, bag in hand, shoes on. He doesn’t know what to do, so he just watches Hollander take slow strides around his foyer and sweep his eyes up to the ceiling.

“Woah, this is really nice. Did you have this built, or do you know who did?”

Something like nausea hits Ilya in a wave. Hollander is acting like he’s never been in Ilya’s house before. He said the same thing, yesterday, because he has such a hard-on for real estate. Ilya had been smug and laughing and had backed Hollander up onto his kitchen island and gave him something better to do than talk about his fucking architect. Now, he lets his bag fall, limply, and uncurls his headphones from his neck to let them pool on top of it. He toes out of his shoes, and follows behind Hollander.

Hollander is the worst liar Ilya has probably ever known, and he has no poker face whatsoever. He can barely chirp without curling a smile around the words, like he’s proud of himself for being funny. So Ilya can tell this isn’t a joke, or some bit he’s doing to get Ilya riled up as payback for calling him Shane yesterday. For whatever reason, he sincerely does not realize that he was already here, and that today is, in fact, the hockey game they have to play against each other. He seems to have forgotten that any of it happened.

Ilya thinks of his father again and suddenly feels like he has to convey to Hollander that he is mistaken, and that it is very important that Hollander understands.

“Hollander.” Ilya goes to stand in front of him. Hollander’s eyes flicker up and down his body the way that Ilya usually craves, but is rather unwelcome right now. “Today is Thursday. Game is today. Yesterday, you came to my house. We ate tuna melts, watched Buffalo game. Then, you left.”

You ran away, you freaked out, you called me Ilya and then abandoned me.

He doesn’t say any of that. He waits for recognition to spark in Shane’s expression, for him to remember some part of it. But Shane just looks at him with his brows pitched together. He looks worried, for Ilya, which is absolutely infuriating.

“Rozanov, it’s Wednesday morning. And I’ve never been to your house before.”

“Hollander…”

“Look at your phone if you don’t believe me.”

Ilya snorts like a bull and pulls his phone out of his pocket, swipes down on the screen to look at the date.

Wednesday, November 9th.

He unlocks the screen as quickly as he can manage, swipes to his calendar app. The little dot indicating the current date floats squarely in the middle of Wednesday.

“Are you feeling okay?” Hollander says.

Ilya shakes his head, closing out of the app and opening it again. Still Wednesday. He doesn’t bother a third time.

Hollander puts his hands out and runs them along Ilya’s arms. After the way he ran out yesterday– he ran out yesterday, right?-- the gesture is almost a shock.

“Um, if it’s not a good time, or something, I can go,” he says. “Or, if you wanna talk instead…”

Ilya does some calculations in his head, takes some odds. He could be crazy. This could be the first sign of whatever is wrong with his father arising in him, an indication of a generational curse. That is the worst version of what this could be.

Or, he could have dreamt it. A disturbingly vivid dream, ticking down from minute to minute, so clear that he remembers entire conversations, but a dream nonetheless. He has dreams like this sometimes, devastatingly detailed ones, usually involving his mother in some way. That would make some sense, he thinks. He never seems to have dreams where things go right.

So that’s probably what it is. A dream he confused himself into thinking really happened, because it was so alarming. Not a great realization, that he’s dreaming about Hollander like this, but much fucking better than the alternative.

Ilya lets out a big sigh and brings his hands up to curl around Hollander’s biceps. He’s grounded again. It is Wednesday, and Hollander is in his kitchen, looking confused and concerned and horny. Ilya is going to fuck him for the first time in months. He gets to fuck Hollander in his big bed in his big, secluded house, and he won’t have to leave after. He can stay all day, all night, and into the next morning.

And this time, he’s not going to say his fucking first name. He’s going to keep his wits about him a little better, and do things right.

“I do not want to talk,” Ilya says, cupping Hollander’s face, tipping it. “We can talk after.”

And just with that, Hollander has forgotten the whole thing. He’s rolling into Ilya’s grasp, moaning into his mouth. Ilya lifts him up onto the kitchen counter, keeps his arms taut as he presses his body forward so Hollander has to lean back and hold onto his biceps for balance. From the way he squeezes into them, strong fingers kneading the muscle, Hollander loves it. He loves being bullied a little.

They make out in Ilya’s kitchen until it’s either Ilya fucks him right there or takes him to bed, and he chooses bed. He picks Hollander up and staggers into the bedroom with him, Hollander wrapping his legs around Ilya’s waist and moaning like he fucking loves being carried, like he isn’t the same size and weight as Ilya and just as strong. At the corner of the bed, Hollander gets naked as quickly as possible, letting his pants and shirt crumple to the floor instead of folding them like he normally does.

Ilya remembers that now, because it was notable yesterday, too. Not yesterday– in his dream. It made his chest tight, that Hollander was so desperate for him that he wasn’t willing to break away long enough to fold his clothes. Were they on this side of the bed, in his dream? Ilya remembered it being on the other side.

“Rozanov?” Hollander says, arching up to kiss a line down Ilya’s jaw. Ilya turns to him, wondering why he’s even trying to remember. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is Hollander, naked beneath him, breathless with anticipation.

They end up at the head of the bed, Hollander riding him, Ilya sinking fingers into Hollander’s ass and letting him dictate the tempo, until Ilya decides he wants it faster, harder, and flips them over. He was proud of that move, yesterday, proud of the way Hollander’s eyes went briefly wide and his pupils seemed to dilate when Ilya threw him around.

Not yesterday, he reminds himself again. He dreamt it. Was it exactly like this?

Hollander moans and shakes and comes, legs tight around Ilya’s waist, and Ilya lasts thirty more seconds and comes, too, filling the condom. He feels briefly weightless, briefly perfect, blissed-out. Until he sees the concern filling Hollander’s eyes and knows he’s somehow fucked up.

“Is everything okay?” Hollander asks.

“Everything is fine,” Ilya responds.

Of course it’s fine. His dick is still shoved up Hollander’s ass. His favorite place to be. But Hollander is still looking at him like he’s somehow looking behind Ilya’s eyes.

“You seem kind of distracted, that’s all.”

“Hey,” Ilya cuts in. “Don’t leave. Don’t be boring and go back to hotel. Stay here tonight.”

Hollander’s eyes go wide, but he can’t really go anywhere. Ilya is still inside him, after all.

“What?”

“We have no morning practice. We can fuck more. I know you have it in you if you really try,” Ilya says, introducing a challenge, knowing it’ll sweeten the deal immensely. Hollander makes a face, like he’s thinking of reasons why he can’t, and Ilya interjects. “It doesn’t matter what you told Hayden. He does not care if you don’t come back to hotel.”

Hollander makes a choked noise. “How do you know what I told Hayden?” he says, sounding defensive.

Ilya almost says, Because that’s what you told me, yesterday.

“Lucky guess,” he says instead. “Because you are predictable.”

Hollander rolls his eyes. “Get off me.”

Ilya raises his eyebrows, waiting for an answer. Hollander’s eyes do that deep scan again, like there’s some ulterior motive he’s searching for in Ilya’s gaze. Then, he blows out his breath, theatrically.

“Okay, I’ll stay.”

Counting the dream, it is the second time Ilya has successfully convinced Hollander to stay, but that doesn’t make him feel any less triumphant about it.

It is only after Hollander returns from the shower, spoons back into Ilya, and falls asleep in Ilya’s arms that he has that climbing sense of deja vu again. They are already in uncharted territory, they’ve never had the time to take an afternoon nap together, but this is exactly what Ilya dreamt about. Hollander’s weight on his outstretched arm feels familiar. Ilya has had dreams with a lot of detail before, but he isn’t sure he’s ever felt sensations like weight so clearly that he can recall them back like this. There is one dream he has with his mom, where he’s twelve years old again, and he can seemingly lift her off the bathroom floor with ease.

He doesn’t let himself sink too deeply into remembering that dream now, though; that would be a perfectly good way to ruin what is happening in his bed, Hollander cuddling into him and tickling his nose with his spiky black hair.

He wishes they could do this all the time. Has for a while, if he is honest with himself. This Thursday game is the perfect convergence of factors, of time they don’t have to account for. He’s never had Hollander twice in one day. If he’s careful, maybe he can have him even more. He lets these feelings congeal in his ribs, sticky in his chest, warm and buzzy, and relaxes into Hollander until he feels him stir. He presses a kiss to the back of his neck, where it’s still slightly damp from the shower.

“Hungry?”

“Hm?” Hollander seems to have really fallen asleep curled up into Ilya’s body. He’s groggy and only half-listening. “Yeah, sure.” Then, he tries being funny. “Hungry for what?”

The line sticks to Ilya’s teeth– For food, pervert. He feels that vertigo, again, and lets it go, just rolls away from Hollander and doesn’t say anything. He has a clean pair of sweatpants, a black t-shirt folded at the side of the bed, that he put there last night because he wanted to see Hollander in his clothes. The combined cost of the items is about two thousand dollars, but they resemble the boring shit Hollander normally wears closely enough that Ilya thinks he might not notice he’s forcing a bit of actual fashion on him. He tosses them in Hollander’s direction on the bed, goes for his own clothes while Hollander shrugs them on. The workout gear from before, when he thought he was heading to the arena this morning. They’re both in black, they’re both in Ilya’s clothes, so they resemble each other a little.

Hollander in his home, in his clothes, in his bed, and staying the night. It’s going a little too well, Ilya thinks. No wonder his dream ended in a fiasco. His brain was probably trying to temper his expectations.

They wander into Ilya’s kitchen. He watches Hollander take another long look around the open floor plan, at the custom cabinets and integrated appliances. He loves the most boring shit. Ilya knows if he showed him his McLaren it wouldn’t register even half as much interest.

Ilya does not normally cook for himself. Last night, when he was putting in the grocery order, he had to cast around in his mind for something to make that he was confident he wouldn’t fuck up. Something like pasta, or sandwiches, and pasta had immediately felt too domestic, reminded him too much of sitting in his Moscow apartment’s kitchen watching his Mama stirring sauce. So sandwiches it was.

But now, he doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want to ask Hollander if he wants to have tuna melts, even though he doesn’t have anything else in his fridge. It feels ominous, suddenly.

That’s ridiculous, though. It went like this in his dream because it was on his mind when he went to sleep. That’s all. It doesn’t mean anything more than that.

A tuna melt is just a fucking tuna melt.

“Do you like tuna melt?” he says, though it feels like dragging nails on a chalkboard to do so. He pulls one of the ginger ales out of the fridge and slides it across the marble counter to Hollander.

Hollander stares at it in his hand like Ilya has just pulled out a wedding ring and presented it to him. “You want to make me a… tuna melt?” His eyes are wide, fixed on the branding on the green can.

Ilya blows out his breath. “Do not make a big deal, please. Is not big deal. It is just what I have groceries for.”

Of course, he doesn’t mention that this is because he bought those groceries especially for this purpose. He isn’t suicidal.

“I’m not,” Hollander says, instinctively. If Ilya asserts something, Hollander must deny it or push it back onto him. It is automatic. “It’s fine. Sure. I’ll take a tuna melt.” He flips the tab of the can of ginger ale and takes a long, determined swig, like doing so will prove how laid-back he’s being about this whole thing.

He was so much more pliant when they were naked together, Ilya thinks. The further they move away from the bed, the more Hollander starts reacting like a feral cat Ilya is trying to trap in a cage. This is exactly how it went, before, too.

No, not before. This never happened before. That was just a dream.

Why can’t he dream about winning more Stanley Cups, if he’s going to have such premonitory ones.

Hollander watches him quietly as he prepares the sandwiches, pulling what feels like ten different ingredients out of the fridge. Thankfully, the prep mostly consists of chopping shit up and throwing it in a bowl to mix together, because Ilya feels like he’s maybe defusing a bomb instead, the way Hollander’s mouth twitches down at the corners and his eyes keep widening as he watches.

“You have more away games after tomorrow, yes?” he says, because hockey is always a safe topic between them. Hockey and sex, pretty much their only areas of mutual interest, and probably the only areas of interest in Shane Hollander’s life, anyway. “Tampa, yes? Or Dallas?”

He knows immediately he’s said the wrong thing because Hollander recoils back in his chair and has to catch himself before he falls off of it.

“You’re following the Metros’ schedule now? How did you know that?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. That was another thing from the dream, wasn’t it? They talked about this. Why does he know that? He must have seen it on the TV schedule, or heard someone talk about it.

“Hollander, relax,” Ilya says, and could be equally talking to himself. He probably shouldn’t be handling the knife in his hands, the way his heart is beating right now. “I am not private investigator. I think I heard Coach talk about it, or something.”

“I don’t know where you’re playing next,” Hollander says, and Ilya can tell he’s doing calculations in his head. Staying the night, plus tuna melts, plus ginger ale, plus knowing his schedule, it equals something too big, too different than their usual routine. Too close to– ugh. Enough.

“Buffalo game is on,” Ilya says. “Go sit on the couch. I can’t concentrate with smell of ginger ale.” He waves Hollander away with the back of his hand. “Food will be done soon.”

Ilya finishes prepping the sandwiches with little fanfare once he’s alone. He hears the TV turn on and the background drone of sports commentary from the living room. At the last minute, he decides to tear open a bag of frozen french fries and pop them in the oven. He’s pretty sure Hollander eats nothing but salmon and rice, in fact he’s sure he read as much in an article about him somewhere. It suddenly feels like a test, to find out if Ilya can make Hollander eat something objectively terrible for him just by the power of his charisma or stupid cocky charm. He sets the tuna melts aside to finish toasting later and wanders into the living room to find Hollander.

Hollander is sitting stiffly at one end of the couch, eyes fixed on the television. He looks up at Ilya as he approaches, seems briefly terrified that Ilya is going to sit right next to him. Again, Ilya thinks, he has to treat him like a wild animal, has to ease him into every minor interaction that doesn’t involve his dick or his mouth. If it wasn’t for that, Ilya might think Hollander actually hates him. God forbid he might want to get to know him a little.

Ilya takes a spot at the far end of the couch from Hollander, where he can lay his body across the long chaise portion of his sectional. Hollander’s eyes rake down his chest and legs when he does. That part, at least, is as obvious as ever. Ilya thinks he could probably snap his fingers right now and Hollander would be lowering himself mouth-first into Ilya’s lap in a matter of seconds. Maybe it’s just the promise of more sex that is keeping Hollander in Ilya’s house at all.

Well, isn’t it the same for him? He wants to fuck Hollander more than once, because he can. Because their schedules allow for it, for once. It is that simple. It is no more than that.

The game is objectively terrible, enough that even Hollander doesn’t seem too interested in it. They chit-chat about Ilya’s former teammate Ryan Price, now enforcer for Buffalo, who is huge and fearsome on the ice but radiates a similar oppressive anxiety to Hollander in the locker room. Speaking about him now, Ilya wonders if maybe there’s a similar reason for Price’s internal turmoil, too. Not that he knows exactly what makes Hollander appear ready to combust when he’s in Ilya’s presence, but he has a pretty good idea. He just needs to investigate further.

“There is a girl here I like very much, Svetlana. Her father is famous goalie for Russian team. She knows everything about hockey.”

As he expected, Hollander immediately reacts to this new thread of conversation as if Ilya is casually describing a murder he committed. His eyes lock onto the television screen, like this 1-1 Buffalo-Carolina game is suddenly riveting.

“Wow,” he says, extremely unconvincingly. “That’s cool. Is she your girlfriend or something?”

He’s jealous. He might as well be wearing a sign on his forehead, saying as much. It fills Ilya with a strange, dangerous flood of heat, of pride. He wants that reaction from Hollander. He wants even more of it.

“No, nothing like that. She is old friend. Sometimes we fuck–” he notices Hollander flinch out of the corner of his eye– “but it is nothing more than that for either of us.”

If he’s being honest, it hasn’t been even that with Sveta for a while. She’s been busy, yes, but lately when he sees her, they end up mostly watching games and talking puck, rather than having sex. He’s not sure when that started, when he stopped feeling the instinctive reaction to fuck a woman the minute they wandered into his vicinity. Especially Sveta, who knows him well enough that sex with her is probably second best only to Hollander, who doesn’t need him to puff up his chest and put on any hockey star airs, just get her off and then switch back to being her friend.

It’s just lately, he hasn’t wanted to. Not with her, not with the beautiful women who approach him at clubs in Boston and Moscow in the summers. She had even made fun of Ilya for it, because he had spent most of his time on his phone, texting Hollander stupid things between vodka shots.

There’s something there that feels like a scab that Ilya wants to pick, and is terrified to, at the same time. There’s a throughline from texting Hollander at the club all night instead of taking a beautiful woman home, to planning a meal for Hollander at his house, to convincing him to stay the night, to Ilya having dreams about Hollander that are so vivid that every part of this conversation feels like he’s having it for the second time. He’s afraid that the scab runs deeper than it appears at first glance, that if he worries it too much, he’s going to open an artery, and bleed and bleed.

He leaps up from the couch when the oven timer goes off.

“Stay here, I will get it,” he says.

He finishes with the sandwiches, tosses them on a couple of plates with a haphazard pile of the fries and some pickles. It’s not Mama’s pasta, but it’s still a bit domestic. He takes the pickles off the plate, like that will fix it. He tells himself he’s being stupid, puts them back on.

“Here you go,” he says, as he places the plates close to each other on the coffee table.

They eat in silence, and Ilya thinks about Ryan Price, externally terrifying, internally molten. He used to steadfastly refuse to go out with the team on go nights. He has heard Hollander is much the same. There are twitter profiles and puck bunny blogs dedicated to who everyone in the MLH may be fucking, and he’s never heard of either of them seen with any woman, even photographed with one in a club. Ilya once saw a post wondering if Sveta was his girlfriend, because they got papped at dinner together. They had called her Russian model and influencer, which had pissed her off, even though she is ostensibly both of those things. She just has higher aspirations than mere model, influencer, and Ilya Rozanov’s WAG, and was highly insulted as a result.

But he has never seen Hollander on one of those blogs. He’s never seen any pictures of him at a club, with a girl on his arm, with anyone.

“Do you like girls?” he says. “I never hear about you with them.”

Hollander coughs around the remnants of the pickle he’s got in his mouth. “Yes, of course. Obviously.”

He’s a terrible liar. And he ate all the fries on his plate. Ilya is so fucking happy.

He wants to pull at that thread. He wants to get Shane Hollander to admit to him that actually, no, he doesn’t like girls. It suddenly feels important, that Ilya knows for sure, that Hollander says as much.

But he doesn’t get the chance because his fucking father calls first.

He stares at the Cyrillic letters on his lock screen and briefly considers sending the call to voicemail. But Papa will just call back. He’s been calling more and more, and it’s painfully ironic to Ilya that despite having never said a single kind word to him in his life, it seems that as his mind goes, it’s Ilya that he reaches out to and not Alexei. When he was merely confused, it was once a week or two, but now he’s calling all the time. He called yesterday, too, and interrupted Ilya on the couch with– no. That was the dream.

“Sorry,” he says to Hollander, and takes the phone into the hallway with him.

“Papa, what is wrong?”

It’s hard to understand his father on the phone, lately. He’s confused as a matter of course, but what Ilya had not expected with the diagnosis of dementia is that the predominant emotion left behind when his father forgot about everything else would be rage. He is always irate at Ilya, when he calls. He screams now, no preamble of hello.

“Ilya, you are late coming home again, you will not disrespect your father this way,” he mumbles.

Ilya doesn’t bother to correct him. Papa, I’m in Boston, not Moscow. It has been eight years since I lived with you in that apartment. I am twenty-five years old, and not your twelve year old child who has a curfew anymore. It doesn’t matter. It would be like arguing with a ghost.

“Papa, where is Polina?”

He tries not to be surprised when his father does not seem to even know who Polina is. It had been this way in the dream, too, as if these beats of their conversations are so well-worn that his mind can conjure them up with exact specificity.

Ilya hurries his irate father off the phone by telling him to wait while he calls Alexei. Alexei’s worthless fucking phone, that Ilya pays for, goes to fucking voicemail, and he spits out an epithet and tells Alexei that he doesn’t even know what he’s fucking paying him for if he isn’t watching his father like he’s supposed to. He hangs up and briefly considers breaking his phone in two with his bare hands.

But he won’t do that, because Hollander is here. He wraps his fingers around his Mama’s cross until he feels a little more stable, then walks back into the living room and plops down beside Hollander on the couch.

The TV is still on, the game is still 1-1, still fucking boring, and he knows Hollander was listening to the phone call and not watching the game at all. Hollander’s face is all scrunched up with concern, freckles folding in on each other across the bridge of his nose. Ilya wants to kiss him, instead of hear the next words out of his mouth, which he already knows will be:

“Is everything all right with your father?”

Ah, so you speak Russian now?

He doesn’t say it. He can’t say it, it’s beyond deja vu. It’s too fucking weird. Instead, he reaches for Hollander, grabs him by the shoulders, pushes him back against the cushions, crawls between his thighs. He licks the taste of ginger ale out of his mouth, and Hollander forgets about Ilya’s family as soon as his dick is hard, as soon as Ilya feels it pressing up through the sweatpants he leant him and against his crotch.

He is not superstitious, but all the same, he remembers what happened in his dream. If he doesn’t call Hollander Shane, maybe Hollander doesn’t freak out, doesn’t bolt off his couch and run out his door with two thousand dollars of Ilya’s clothes clinging to his body.

So Ilya doesn’t even give himself the opportunity to. He keeps his mouth full instead, nestling into the crook of Hollander’s thighs and lapping at his dick, swallowing around it, pumping him with his mouth. Hollander pulls hard at his hair and arches against his couch and moans and says filthy things with his innocent voice.

“Your mouth feels so fucking good, Rozanov.”

Ilya has fucked Sveta on this couch, as well as probably a hundred other girls. He doesn’t think he’ll ever do that again, now that it’s been christened by Hollander’s body like this. Nothing else will look or feel this good again. Hollander is steadily ruining him for anyone else.

“You’re gonna make me come, oh my god,” Hollander moans.

Ilya runs a hand up Hollander’s shirt, squeezes hard into his chest, runs his thumb over the hard nub of his nipple. Snakes his fingers up through the neckline, reaches for Hollander’s throat, his jaw. Hollander turns to suck Ilya’s thumb into his mouth, circling it with his tongue. He reaches behind him to cling onto the couch cushion for dear life.

Ilya doesn’t want to think about anything but Shane Hollander. Shane Hollander’s mouth, his dick, his hand in Ilya’s hair. Shane Hollander’s pretty voice moaning for him. Shane Hollander’s flushed face, his red lips.

Shane Hollander.

Shane.

“Oh fuck, I’m gonna come. Oh fuck… fuck… Ilya!”

He comes hard in Ilya’s mouth. Ilya keeps going through it, knows Hollander likes it when he’s taken right to the edge of too much. Hollander’s hands release their tight hold on Ilya’s hair, on the cushions behind him. He’s quiet. He’s not even moaning anymore.

Ilya glances up and can see Hollander’s eyes are wide and staring at the ceiling. He knows, instantly, that Hollander is going to leave.

Sure enough, Hollander shifts under him, tucking himself back into his sweatpants before his dick is even fully out of Ilya’s mouth. He sits up, abruptly, swings his legs out from under Ilya’s body, nearly kicking him to do so.

“Um, uh, I should… I should go…”

He’s already getting up off the couch. Ilya still has the taste of Hollander’s cum on his tongue.

He thought it would be different, this time. But this is, somehow, exactly the same.

In his dream, or his premonition, more accurately, this next part devastated him. The I’m sorry part. The I can’t do this part. He thinks it will probably be easier this time only because he already knows it’s coming.

“I’m sorry. I, uh, I can’t do this. I’m sorry,” Hollander mumbles, stumbling over the words to the script Ilya already has memorized.

He was wrong, it still hurts. Still makes his stomach wring out and his eyes burn.

He doesn’t bother to respond, because he knows it’s futile, has learned at least that much. Hollander stands awkwardly in the living room for a moment, like he’s waiting for it. The fucking gall of him, to expect Ilya to beg for him to stay.

“I’m sorry,” he says one more time, when Ilya remains silent and seated on the couch, then he’s gone.

What is the point of dreaming about it, Ilya thinks later, hours later, still on his couch, if he can’t change it?

Ilya wakes up feeling like he has been run over by a train. His eyes are dried out and burn when he drags his eyelids across them. His throat is scratchy, like the beginnings of a flu. He runs a hand heavily up and down his face, wills himself upright. No time to lay in bed and feel like shit; he has a game today, after all.

A game against Shane Hollander. Who was here yesterday, in his bed. Who ran away.

That doesn’t matter. It has to not matter. If it matters, then that means…

Ilya reaches for his phone on the nightstand. No missed messages. Not a surprise. It’s unfortunately later than he usually wakes on game days. He’s going to have to cut his run short.

He wonders if Hollander will even meet his gaze at the face-off. He is kind of hoping they won’t even have one. Let him go up against Boston’s second line. Ilya could use a break.

He goes to the bathroom, washes his face, brushes his teeth. He shrugs on a tank top and track pants. Pops in his headphones. He feels slightly better in the late morning sunlight and November breeze, with his music loud in his ears and his sneakers crunching over leaves. He’ll cut his shower short, instead.

He has to leave by eleven, eleven thirty at the latest for an afternoon game, but he can’t bring himself to turn back toward his house until long after he knows he’ll be late to leave. He just doesn’t fucking care, doesn’t want to think about why he doesn’t care. The reasons why are tangled up in dark eyes and freckles and I can’t do this and that scab Ilya is steadfastly refusing to pick at.

He still has fucking ginger ale in his fridge. Ginger ale is disgusting. He probably can’t even give it away. The only person he knows who would accept it said he was sorry and ran out of his front door yesterday.

It’s already eleven AM by the time he turns back around toward home, and he is definitely going to be late, even if he skips his shower. His lungs burn, but it’s something to think about besides Shane fucking Hollander. Shane Hollander in his bed, on his couch, in his clothes. Did he leave in Ilya’s clothes? Are Shane Hollander’s stupid boring clothes still pooled on the floor by his bed?

Ilya’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He ignores it.

He should send Hollander an invoice for those sweatpants, right to the Metros locker room. See the look on Shane Hollander’s stupid beautiful face when he has to explain that. No, I like girls, you see, I don’t moan and writhe and come for Ilya Rozanov and maybe no one else, ever. That’s why I’m wearing his clothes. Because I don’t like him and I am definitely straight. And that’s why I beg Rozanov for his dick like I’m going to fucking die if I don’t get it.

Ilya is practically sprinting by the time he reaches the half-mile curve of his driveway. His phone buzzes again, and again. Insistently. He’s not exactly late, yet; it’s a little early for Coach to be mad at him for missing warm ups. He’ll just skip the shower and stay in his running clothes and just take his protein shake to go–

He stops dead in his tracks, halfway up his driveway. Shane Hollander is standing at his door, phone clutched in his hands. He turns at the sound of Ilya’s sneakers on the asphalt, looking confused and annoyed.

“Where were you, Rozanov? You told me to come at eleven.”

Ilya feels like he is going to fall down. The world feels unsteady and tilted beneath his feet. His legs are weak, and not from his run.

This can’t be real. This can’t be happening.

Ilya stays still so long that Hollander starts walking toward him, eyebrows shifting together in concern.

“Rozanov? You okay?” he asks, biting his lip.

No. No, no, no. This isn’t possible. It just isn’t.

“Hollander,” Ilya says, choked.

“Hey. Is something wrong? Do you want me to…” Hollander trails off, like he isn’t sure how he wants to end that sentence. Help? Leave?

Maybe Ilya needs him to do both. Maybe one is the same as the other.

“I am not feeling well, I think,” Ilya says. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re out for a run, but you aren’t feeling well,” Hollander says incredulously.

Great, now Ilya has fucked up. Record time, too. He screws his face into something hard. “Well, we have game today, so I need to get ready.”

But he forgot. He forgot that Hollander is here, which means there is no game. It means that somehow, for some reason he doesn’t understand, it’s Wednesday, November 9th, again. And Hollander is looking at him like he isn’t sure if this is a joke played at his expense, which means Ilya is the only one who knows this to be true. So he’s going crazy, he’s losing his mind. He’s going to be ranting and raving on the phone like his father before long. They will send him back to Russia when he can’t play hockey, because he’s crazy, and he will be a cautionary tale, or a sob story. Ilya Rozanov, so promising, a young talent, but the combination of professional pressure and his father’s cursed genetics rendered him a lunatic at twenty-five years old. A real shame.

He doesn’t bother waiting for the reply he can see forming on Hollander’s lips to open his door and step inside. Hollander follows behind him, like he owns the place.

“Rozanov, is everything all right? The game is tomorrow. It’s Wednesday.”

“I know,” Ilya says wearily. “I told you I am not feeling well. I am confused, I think.”

“Do you… want to talk?”

No, Ilya thinks. He does not want to do that. He wants to sit by himself and consider all of the ways his mind is crumbling, alone. And besides, Hollander’s offer is not sincere. The worst thing they can do is talk. It is like running through landmines. One false move and both of their heads get blown off.

“I think I need to rest,” Ilya says.

But Hollander is still, somehow, angling for ways to stay in Ilya’s orbit. He’s so transparent about it, hovering after Ilya even as he is retreating down the hall, following after him. Obvious to everyone, except himself.

It turns Ilya’s stomach. Hollander’s stupid handsome face, scrunched up like he really is worried about Ilya vaguely not feeling well. Ilya wants to spit at him. He wants that concern to curdle to disgust, or fear, like it will if they run through this day again. Might as well get it over with.

“I don’t have any plans today,” Hollander says, as if that isn’t obvious. His plans for the day were to come to Ilya’s house and get fucked. He’s still trying to make that happen. “I can stay, for a while. We don’t have to… do anything…”

By the time the last word is spoken, dropped out of Hollander’s mouth like it’s falling out of his pocket, Ilya is close enough to him to feel it breathed out against his mouth. He crowds Hollander up against the wall and keeps him there with a hand to his jaw. Hollander’s eyes glaze over, happy to be getting what he wants, his mouth falling open in anticipation for Ilya’s tongue.

Might as well get it over with.

Ilya doesn’t take him to bed this time. He kisses him, sloppily, in the entryway, halfway to the living room, drops his pants, turns Hollander around to face the wall, and fucks him hard, right there, forcing him forward with a hand between his shoulder blades. It’s nothing like the sex they had in his bed, when he was convinced he had dreamed of doing this before, or the time before that, when it was happening for the first time. That had been soft, careful. Ilya hadn’t wanted to wear him out too soon. But that doesn’t matter anymore. He can fuck him hard, hard enough for him to feel it for the rest of the day. When he leaves, he’ll still feel it, and that gives Ilya some satisfaction, at least.

“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,” Hollander moans. It’s the first time, for him, in months, probably. It’s probably too much. His ass is so tight that it hurts a little. Ilya fucks him through it. “Oh god, Rozanov, oh my god…”

Hollander collapses against the wall when he comes, like he can’t hold himself up anymore, trembling on his legs like he’s a baby deer and not a fucking athlete who destroys his body worse than this for a living. If it was anyone else, Ilya would think they were just putting on a show for his sake, but Hollander isn’t a good enough liar to do anything but be authentically wrecked by how much he loves when Ilya fucks him.

Ilya grunts behind his gritted teeth and shoots his load deep into Hollander’s body, pulling out only when he’s softening. Hollander turns around, leaning his head back against the wall, gazing at Ilya through heavy eyelids, the pulse in his neck visibly thumping.

“Oh my god, that was so hot.”

Ilya steps forward into Hollander’s body, takes his jaw in his hands, slips his tongue between Hollander’s waiting lips. He takes a long drag off Hollander’s mouth, savoring it like cigarette smoke. Then he pulls away.

“Please go.”

He sees the words hit Hollander like a freight train. “What?”

“I gave you what you want. Now go. Please.”

Anger flashes across Hollander’s face, curling his lip, but his eyes are soft and wounded. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Ilya looks down between them, where they are both still half dressed, pants shimmied down to their thighs, shirts a mess.

“I am not kidding, no.”

“At… at least let me take a shower–”

“There is shower at your hotel.”

Ilya steps away, tucking himself back into his track pants. Hollander stands, mouth agape, at the wall, breath starting to come in big waves, like he’s building up to a panic attack.

“I can’t go back to the hotel like this,” he says. “I’m rooming with Hayden, he’s gonna know that we…”

“I don’t care about Hayden,” Ilya says.

He’s so tired of this. He’s tired of Hayden. Of I can’t. Of Hollander being so happy to take and take until the moment Ilya tries to get something real out of him, and then nothing.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Tell Hayden the truth, then.” Ilya says, stepping back into the space between them, leaning forward until he can almost kiss him, and breathes his words out against Hollander’s lips. “Tell him that Ilya Rozanov’s cock in your ass made you come, and that you fucking loved it.”

Hollander shoves him away, arranges himself hastily back into his jeans.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” he spits out, and then he’s out the door, and Ilya has gotten what he wanted, and he’s fucking miserable for it.

Ilya retreats to his living room, sits heavily down on his couch. He ought to take a shower. He ought to go to a hospital.

He stays on the couch.

He thinks about what could be happening here. As far as he sees it, there are three options.

One, he’s crazy.

His father’s mind is full of holes, reduced to nothing but confusion and rage, like a trapped animal. His mother’s mind was like a sworn enemy, fighting her and breaking her down until she finally surrendered. Both of these can be hereditary, Ilya supposes. Could the genesis of both have been lying dormant in Ilya’s mind all along, waiting for some spark to ignite the inevitable consumption of his sanity? He feels pretty fucking confused, and pretty fucking sad. A little bit of Papa, a little bit of Mama.

Two, he’s dreaming.

Ilya thinks he knows the difference between reality and dreams. But maybe he is in the throes of some kind of lucid dream, one that he cannot figure out how to wake up from. Maybe he is in a coma, in a hospital somewhere. Maybe this is his life flashing before his eyes.

His mother believed dreams could be prophetic. She had all sorts of secret thoughts, secret lessons she only taught him when his father was nowhere near. His father sneered at the tarot cards, the crystals she carried in her pocket and tucked under Ilya’s pillow for protection. Ilya used to sit in her lap and recount his dreams to her, as she ran her fingers through his curls and explained to him the meaning inherent in the images he recalled to her. He used to write his dreams down in a journal to remember later. After she died, he threw them away, and never again tried to make sense of them.

Three, he is not crazy, or dreaming, and this is real.

He has no rational explanation for why he is reliving the same day, of course. It is probably impossible that this is real, and Ilya is the only one who is aware that Wednesday, November 9th has happened three times already. But Ilya doesn’t feel crazy, as weak of a defense as that is. He doesn’t feel like he’s dreaming. He’s felt Shane Hollander beneath his fingertips, he’s sat through each excruciating minute of this day and felt it pass as if it was any other ordinary day.

He wonders what his Mama would say. He wishes he could ask. She believed in supernatural events. She believed dreams could be omens, could be premonitions. That they were meant to guide you to some truth that could only be revealed outside of the realm of the conscious mind. She liked to say that dreams were their most vivid when you were lying to yourself.

Ilya thinks that is, at least, a start.

He stays on his couch all afternoon, all evening, reading about dreams, about wormholes, about parallel universes, until his head hurts. He doesn’t feel any closer to understanding how the fuck he gets out of this.

He thinks about Hollander’s face, scrunched up with concern. Hollander, angry and hurt, asking what he’s supposed to do. Hollander, asking if Ilya wants to talk. Hollander, breathing out his first name. Ilya. And then collapsing in on himself, shock and fear falling like a curtain over his face. Scrambling up from the couch, throwing words behind him like grenades in his retreat. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.

His father calls. He thinks of letting it ring, turning off his phone. He answers. His father screams at him that he’s late, that he’s disrespectful, that his mother has coddled him, made him lazy and undisciplined. He hangs up and leaves a voicemail for Alexei. Where the fuck is Alexei? Where is Polina? Probably out, drinking and snorting away the money Ilya has given them for his father’s care. His father is on seven different medications now, and Ilya wonders if anyone is giving them to him. One of them is supposed to keep him sedated enough to prevent these kinds of phone calls, so he supposes that’s his answer.

His father is caught in a loop of his own. In his mind, Ilya is perpetually a belligerent teenager. Ilya’s mother is alive, and eternally disappointing him. And he’s angry, and confused, and stuck. And he will never get better, will never break out of it. Does he realize? Does he think he isn’t crazy, that everyone else is crazy? Does Ilya feel, in fact, the way that everyone who loses their mind feels?

Ilya opens up his text messages to Hollander. Nothing since 10:35PM, Tuesday night. His fingers fly over the keyboard.

I’m sorry.

He deletes the words and tosses his phone onto the couch.

He doesn’t realize when he falls asleep, still in his clothes, still on the couch, staring at the ceiling.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Welcome back for Part 2 of Tuna Time Loop!

Ilya wakes up in his bed. He doesn’t bother to check his phone for the date; he knows what he’ll see if he does. The fact that he is back in bed is evidence enough.

He falls back asleep, wakes again to knocking on his door. Fuck. He gropes for his phone. 11:00 AM. Hollander is so punctual for this appointment.

The knocking grows more insistent. Ilya’s phone buzzes.

Hollander is texting him: I’m here. Where are you?

Ilya could go to the door and let him in.

He hasn’t tried the alternative, yet.

I’m sorry. I’m sick. I think it is flu. I do not want you to get sick, too. Next time.

Ilya knows this will work on Hollander, because he won’t risk the remote possibility of having to miss a game due to illness. Hollander’s devotion to hockey is greater even than his desire to have Ilya fuck him.

Hollander texts back, Oh, okay. Feel better soon. He doesn’t hear any more knocking.

It shouldn’t bother him so much, not to see him for the first time in four identical days. Not to touch him. It shouldn’t feel like he wants to take it back as soon as he’s sent the texts. That’s stupid.

In all the years they’ve been sneaking around like this, this is by far the most time they have spent together. Three days. Could have been four, but Ilya has just sent him off with a lie about the flu.

It shouldn’t feel like he’s giving something up, because he’s not. If anything, he’s reverting to the mean. Ilya is used to not seeing Hollander for months at a time. That is, generally, how they live their lives: separate from each other, only occasionally intersecting, two moons in diametrically opposed orbits. They know almost nothing about each other.

It shouldn’t feel worse not to see him, than to see him and go through this same day again. Surely, it’s worse to have him come over, only to leave, just when Ilya feels like he’s begging for him to stay.

Ilya can’t possibly have gotten used to having him here, under these circumstances. That is pathetic. That is worse than pathetic: that means something. So that isn’t what it is.

Ilya is just horny. He just likes that face. That mouth. He would fuck every single day if it was presented to him on a silver platter like Hollander always does.

Any man would. No big deal.

And anyway, it will be worth it, if this is how he moves forward. Maybe that is the lesson Ilya’s meant to learn. That it’s wrong to make this thing with Hollander any more than it is. That he’s being punished for trying to. If not seeing Hollander means he doesn’t have to wake up on Wednesday, November 9th again, then he can handle missing this chance to be with him.

Ilya wakes up before the sun is even fully out and checks his phone. It is Wednesday, November 9th.

Fuck.

Ilya tries not inviting Hollander to spend the night. Hollander says he should leave, Ilya says okay. He kisses Hollander hard, in the hallway by the front door. Hollander ends up on his knees in front of Ilya, looking at up at him like he’s an object of worship. Ilya cradles his head and loses himself in the warmth of Hollander’s pretty mouth. Then, Hollander stands up, flushed and proud of himself, and kisses Ilya before he’s out the door.

Ilya wakes up on Wednesday, November 9th.

Ilya tries just watching the game with Hollander. He doesn’t offer to make food. He doesn’t test Hollander’s resolve with french fries and a tuna melt.

Hollander still ends up in his lap, jerking them off together in his broad hand. They come at the same time, and Ilya can’t look away, and neither can Hollander. They stare into each other’s eyes as they orgasm, and even though Ilya is sure he kept his fucking mouth shut, Hollander still flies off the couch, still freaks out, still leaves.

Ilya wakes up on Wednesday, November 9th.

He tells Hollander not to come over, sometimes, texting him as soon as he wakes up. He’s sick. Something came up. An appointment he forgot about. A practice. There’s a flu going around. He knows by now it won’t work on solving his problem, but he uses the time to do research. Hours on his phone until his traps hurt from hunching over.

Even people who believe in every supernatural phenomenon under the sun can’t seem to agree on what is and isn’t possible. His google searches start to resemble the sort of disordered ravings he would expect from a guy shouting into a megaphone in front of the subway.

Maybe he is stuck in a wormhole, caught in a moment in time like a hamster on a wheel.

Maybe he is experiencing a temporal paradox, unable to change the past, thus forced to constantly repeat it.

Maybe he’s insane. Or in a coma. Or already dead.

Maybe hell is watching Shane Hollander walk away.

His father calls, every day. Sometimes he tries to explain that he’s twenty-five years old, and he lives in Boston, in America, and he’s a professional hockey player, best in the league, and he hasn’t lived in that Moscow apartment since he was eighteen. His father is shouting at a ghost.

When is the next time Alexei is supposed to come? He doesn’t know. Where is Polina? He doesn’t know.

Sometimes, his father seems to understand, goes quiet on the phone. He doesn’t insist Mama is alive. He says that yes, he is taking his medicine every day. Yes, Alexei brings him food.

But it’s always gone the next time, erased by the loop. Eventually, Ilya stops trying. He lets himself have just the two choices: answer the phone, do not answer the phone.

He reads one article that he thinks he understands, about Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. He has to look up many of the words, even though the article is in Russian. Ilya stopped going to school at eighteen, after all, and takes hits to the head for a living. This is the first time he wishes he were a little bit smarter about something other than hockey.

The theory, from what Ilya can understand, explains that time is not exactly like a one-way ticket forward. Time is a dimension with points on it, coordinates to different events, indicating not just where but when. The past still exists, at the same time as the present, and the future, the way each cell in a reel of film exists at the same time, only appearing to move when the film is run sequentially.

Maybe he is the victim of a film projector that is stuck on a particular cell, tilted out of alignment for some reason, unable to continue playing the movie. Maybe he can do something to jostle the film back into place, and keep going.

It sounds nicer than some of the alternatives, at least.

He gets restless in his house after a while. Sometimes, on days when Hollander leaves quickly, or Ilya convinces him not to come over at all, he takes one of his cars out for a drive, just for a change of scenery. He tries to drive out of state, heads an hour and a half north to Maine, and gets a hotel for the night. He wakes up in his bed at home the next morning.

He gets worried that maybe his hockey skills will degrade if this goes on long enough. After all, he feels every repeated day as if it was fully passing. He hasn’t played a game of hockey in longer than he wants to think about. Sometimes, he goes down to the practice rink, just to reassure himself.

He wonders if this counts as getting older. It is hard to keep track of the days– anything he writes down is simply erased in the morning. He loses count in his head sometime after twenty.

One time, he decides to stay awake and find out exactly what happens when the day resets. He wonders if he will see things in his house fly backwards, rearrange themselves, blink out of existence, like Mary Poppins is waving her umbrella around his house. A small, hopeful part of him wonders if staying awake to observe the reset might prevent it from happening. Maybe he will get a clue on how to change it. He sits on his couch and waits.

Sometime around two AM, he gets a sudden pain in his head so sharp that it makes his vision go momentarily white, makes him almost collapse to the floor. It feels like the worst migraine he has ever had, the worst concussion, the worst hangover, rolled into one piercing, red-hot stab through his brain. His stomach flips over and he is afraid he might vomit, or pass out, or die. Then, almost as soon as it started, it is over, and he feels shell-shocked but otherwise fine. He opens his eyes.

He is lying in his bed. It is now a minute after two AM, on Wednesday, November 9th.

He doesn’t bother staying up again.

The day goes roughly like this.

Ilya wakes up in his bed. It’s Wednesday. It’s sunny outside, just beginning to get chilly for the season.

If he’s up for it, he goes for a run. Sometimes he takes a shower. Sometimes, he does neither, and just lies in bed.

Hollander comes right on time, at eleven AM, anxious, needy, looking to get fucked.

Ilya obliges him.

Sometime after a shower, or laying around in Ilya’s bed, or pulling their clothes back on in the hallway, Shane starts to hem and haw about leaving.

Ilya asks him to stay.

Shane puts up a weak resistance, but ultimately agrees. It’s never too hard to convince him to.

Sometimes, Ilya pulls him into the kitchen right away. Sometimes, it’s the living room. Sometimes, he crowds him in the shower, has him again under the running water. Sometimes they stay in bed for hours. Shane is so soft and pliant by the second or third time Ilya makes him come.

Ilya’s father always calls in the afternoon. Sometimes it’s at two, sometimes three. It’s late in Moscow, and Ilya’s father gets confused late at night. There is supposed to be a nurse. Alexei is supposed to manage it because Ilya can’t. Because Ilya is seven hours across time zones. Alexei is never there when Ilya gets the phone call. Alexei never picks up his phone.

Hollander always asks Ilya about his father. Ilya always deflects.

They hang around on Ilya’s couch or in his kitchen, or in his room if Ilya is feeling especially lazy.

What happens next varies from day to day. Sometimes Ilya says Hollander’s name. Even if he doesn’t, Hollander seems to always end up saying Ilya’s name. It doesn’t seem to matter how it happens, but it does. And Hollander leaves. Just as there is some connection, something more than just sex between them.

He always leaves.

It always hurts.

The best part of the day, Ilya thinks, is Hollander’s face when he comes. It is the only time that Ilya thinks he’s really seeing Hollander let himself go. His pretty mouth opens, moans the syllables of Ilya’s last name. His black eyelashes flutter and his brows draw together like he’s in the throes of a dream.

And Ilya is the only one who ever gets to see it. It feels special. He keeps that thought close.

Ilya has slept with more people in his life than he can count, and he cannot remember how any of them looked when they came. The girls from the clubs and the puck bunnies, that goes without saying. Ilya is already bored of them by then, more enjoying the tactile sensation of skin against his own than any specific details of the women. But he can’t even remember Svetlana clearly. He hasn’t been trying to.

He’s also losing count of how many times he’s had Hollander like this, gasping and desperate for him, blown apart by the relief of it after so long without Ilya, in his mind, at least. And he remembers every one. The times Hollander says Ilya first, the times he just says Fuck! Or Oh, god. The times he doesn’t say anything at all, too far gone for words.

One time, he starts to cry, and Ilya ends up holding him and whispering Shane against his hair. Hollander lets him do it, that time.

Ilya would have thought the worst part of the day is when his father calls. And it is horrible, if not predictable. It’s horrible to hear his father slur his words over the phone, the bitterness and anger crystal clear even if the exact phrases are not. But it is expected, after a while. It is how his father has always been. Ilya’s hardened enough to it, he supposes.

No, the worst part of the day is when Hollander leaves.

Ilya thinks he would be hardened to this, as well, by now. Hollander always leaves. Hollander has left him before. He pushed him away at their very first MLH awards. Ilya didn’t speak to him for six months after the Olympics. But that was years ago. It almost feels like a lifetime ago, even in the fishbowl Ilya has found himself swimming in.

Something about them has changed, though the motions of their relationship have stayed the same. They are apart, they meet, they fuck, they leave each other. That is the beginning and the end of it. It’s all they can be. But in this repetition, something has distilled in Ilya’s mind, every time he reaches out to Hollander, and Hollander leaves:

He doesn’t want it to be this way anymore.

He wants Hollander to stay. Has wanted it since that first Wednesday, maybe even before. It’s why he has a six pack of disgusting ginger ale in his fridge. Why he wants to see Hollander eat his unhealthy food and sit on his couch and watch a terrible hockey game with him. Why he picks at Hollander’s obvious disinterest in women, in seemingly anyone not named Ilya Rozanov. He wants him to stay, because… because…

Fuck. He knows the because. But he can’t say it, even to himself. How can he say it? If he does, then that means…

It means too many things. It means something too scary, too overwhelming. It means never going back to Russia. It means putting himself out in front of danger, his career, his life. And most importantly, most terribly, it means putting himself in front of Hollander. Opening himself up, prying himself apart with trembling fingers and pulling his heart out for Hollander to do with it as he sees fit. If he did that, and Hollander still chose to leave, Ilya doesn’t think he could survive it. He’s survived everything else in his life so far, but he is sure he isn’t strong enough to survive that. So he keeps it to himself, says nothing incriminating out loud, dangerous words trapped behind his gritted teeth. And Hollander leaves. And Ilya always wakes up alone.

His mother believed that dreams were their strongest, their most prophetic, when you were lying to yourself. Your conscious mind might be deceived, but your subconscious knows better, and makes sure to put you in your place. The key to understanding your dreams, she said, was knowing yourself, and being honest.

If that is the case, Ilya thinks, then he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He’s great at lying to everyone. But he’s even better at lying to himself.

There is nothing particularly special about the Wednesday he finally comes clean.

Ilya is in the kitchen, putting french fries in the oven, fiddling with the temperature. Hollander is in the living room, probably sitting ram-rod straight on his couch, afraid that if he relaxes too much, he might melt into the cushions and will have to admit that he actually would rather be here than anywhere else. Ilya doesn’t mind much, anymore. He knows that once he’s next to him, Hollander will uncurl out of himself. He can’t seem to help it. He will always end up swooning toward Ilya, tilting into his orbit. Ilya looks forward to it every time, Hollander’s gaze going soft, his body turning unconsciously toward him, his fingers twitching like they want to reach out.

Ilya finishes up in the kitchen and wanders out to join Hollander in the living room. There he is, sitting upright like he’s been called up to testify in court. Ilya’s clothes look good on him, but he is rather glad that Hollander doesn’t always go out dressed like this. He wants to be the only one who gets to see Shane Hollander not wearing stupid gym clothes.

Hollander is not focusing on the game much. Ilya can’t blame him. He keeps waiting for Buffalo not to be terrible, for Carolina to work up some fucking energy on the ice, but the score is always 1-2, 2-1. Utterly forgettable, both teams eternally mediocre.

“It’s going to be a little while,” Ilya says. “For food.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Hollander is perpetually nervous, still. He clutches the can of ginger ale like a totem, like Hollander is aware of its outsized importance. It means Ilya knows him, at least a little, and Ilya wanted to show him that. He even knows what brand Hollander likes the most. It’s the smallest thing, but Ilya wanted him to know.

Today, he isn’t going to tease him about liking girls or tell him about Svetlana, or even ask him if he knows Ryan Price, hapless enforcer for Buffalo. He hasn’t been doing much of that lately, anyway. He likes to make Hollander squirm, loves it actually, but when he already knows the answers, it starts to feel like he’s just being mean.

Instead, he walks over to where Hollander is perched at the edge of the couch, stands in front of him, blocking the view of the television with his body. Hollander stares up at him like a rabbit caught in the shadow of a bird of prey.

“Hey,” he says weakly. “I was watching that.”

“No, you weren’t. Is very boring game.”

Ilya leans down, stretches over Hollander, pushes him back into the cushions. Hollander lets him, gripping his forearms. So easy for him, always so willing. He hums as Ilya moves over him, pink lips quirking up in a smile.

Ilya thinks he might slip his hand into Hollander’s pants, or drop his head down to his lap and nose at his dick through the fabric, or tear them off entirely and fuck him for the second time today right there. He thinks he might stick his tongue down Hollander’s throat, or kiss a wet line across the bridge of Hollander’s collarbone, or nibble on his earlobe. But he looks down at him, into his pretty face, his parted lips, and instead he finds he just wants to look at him. Finds, in fact, that he can’t look away.

It’s right there, splashed across Hollander’s face like the freckles that Ilya has never gotten tired of counting. It’s there, in the way Hollander’s dark eyes stare hard into his, like he can see behind them, right to the trembling heart of him. It’s there, in the way he can’t seem to stop himself from saying Ilya’s name, from the way he can’t seem to tear himself away from Ilya, how he always fights him when Ilya tells him not today, next time, maybe, sorry, but not today.

Ilya hasn’t told him that for a while. He doesn’t actually remember how long it’s been. But he’s realized, belatedly, that if he has to spend an eternity reliving the same day forever, he wants to do it with Shane Hollander.

He knows what it means, has known for a while. He’s thought that maybe if he didn’t say the words out loud, it would mean they weren’t true. But he can’t keep it in anymore. This dream has forced him to stop lying to himself, after all.

So he says the words, out loud, and knows he’s breaking his own heart.

“Ya tebya lyublyú.”

Shane shifts under him. “What does that mean?”

I love you. Oh, how I love you.

“Is secret,” Ilya says, blinking hard.

But he wishes, stupidly, that Shane knew Russian.

He bends down and presses their mouths together. Shane arches up into him and Ilya makes him forget that he has said anything at all. He leaves him, naked and panting, shuddering Ilya’s name. Ilya can’t hold himself back, either.

“Shane, oh god, Shane…”

He doesn’t even make it to the food, this time, before Shane is gone.

He didn’t think it would hurt more, after he’s finally realized how he feels. He didn’t expect that. Maybe he was stupid not to.

It does hurt, and it hurts worse. It hurts like the first time. It hurts like Ilya is never going to see Shane again.

But he will see him tomorrow, and it will be like it never happened. Because for Shane, it never has.

Ilya is stuck on a set of coordinates where it is always Wednesday, November 9th. It is the day he admits to himself that he is in love with Shane Hollander. And it is also the day that Shane Hollander runs away as soon as that fact becomes clear.

If this is one of Mama’s dreams, Ilya thinks, then he wonders what else it could possibly want from him. He is, at least, finally being honest with himself.

He is in love with Shane Hollander.

It is Wednesday, November 9th.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks so much for reading! I know I said weekly cadence but I found myself with free time today and got to proofing/editing this chapter to post. As always, I really love reading comments, as probably all writers do, so thank you so much for leaving them/kudos/etc, I appreciate it so much! See you back here for Chapter 3.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

So I've ended up uploading chapters faster than I originally thought, here's chapter 3! I've got a little more to go with Chapter 4 & 5 but we'll get there soon.

In some ways, it’s easier to deal with everything now that Ilya has admitted he loves Shane.

Not Jane. Not Hollander. Shane. Shane. The name has been trying to escape past his lips every chance it gets. He can’t keep the illusion of distance anymore, least of all in his own mind. It’s Shane. Always Shane.

He sees him every morning, and his heart blossoms, warmth spreading across his chest. It’s always been there, but he had fought it until now, so determined to keep his own feelings from himself. So determined to make this just about sex, just about bodies intersecting, when it hasn’t been just that for a long time, if it ever was. Maybe from the first time he met Shane Hollander, teenaged, nervous and eager, in the alley in Saskatchewan, he’s been running from how he’s really felt. Counting freckles like it doesn’t mean anything. Refusing to eject fully from his orbit. Always coming back. Always reaching for him.

It’s easier to feel it now that he is no longer fighting it.

But, of course, in most ways it’s harder.

Shane still leaves, still runs out the door, like he’s looked at Ilya’s heart held in his outstretched hands and found it terrifying. Ilya is still waiting for that not to feel like he’s been gutted down the length of him.

There is Shane’s fear, and there is Ilya’s fear.

He loves a man, which no one can know. It would be bad enough if it were only that, but he loves Shane Hollander, not just any man. Maybe the worst possible man for this to happen with, the most famous man in their sport, who generates more revenue for the MLH than any other player. He could not love him and have his love returned and have anyone know. Ilya is sure that if he was somehow found out, if they were found out, the consequences would be greatest on him. He is not the prize pig of the MLH. He is just a good player who has not made too many friends in the intervening years. If one has to get sacrificed, Ilya knows who it will probably be.

The risks are too great, undiminished just because Ilya has admitted his feelings to himself. The league cannot know. Ilya’s fate is already in its hands, his freedom revolving around the whims of men who may not be Russian themselves but are more alike in their narrow ways of thinking than they may care to admit. He gets caught, he causes enough press to cause a scene, or his team reacts badly and wants him gone, and he’s back in Russia. And Russia cannot know. His father, his brother cannot know.

Maybe it is safer to just be stuck here forever, in his safe home, on this safe Wednesday, where he can fuck Shane forever and no one bothers them. So he never plays hockey again. Is that such a big deal? He and Shane may never become something more, and Shane may always run away when Ilya tries to pull him closer, but Ilya can love him in the hours between, and never be found out.

Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe Mama’s dreams are protecting him from the dangers that await if Ilya’s love ever escaped these four walls.

Maybe it can be enough.

Now that he has said it out loud, Ilya finds it almost impossible to keep to himself anymore.

He wraps Shane in his arms as soon as he’s through the door, kissing away the surprise, and he whispers it against his hair, pressing him into the wall.

Ya tebya lyublyú.

He breathes it out after Shane makes him come with his pretty mouth, eyes locked on Ilya’s from down between his legs.

Ya tebya lyublyú.

He says it when Shane is nervously watching him put together the ingredients for tuna melts, trying not to bolt off of the chair for the door.

Ya tebya lyublyú.

“What does that mean?” Shane says. “Ya tebya lyublyú?”

He says this one day when Ilya has not said it to him at all, yet, but was thinking of sneaking it in while Shane had his ass in the air and face buried in his couch cushions. His pronunciation is choppy, like his tongue is stumbling through the consonants, but it’s clear as day.

Ilya’s blood goes cold. The sandwich in his mouth tastes suddenly like ashes. Nothing is stopping Shane from looking it up on his phone. Hell, if Siri is listening right now, she could just come right out and give the whole game away. Ilya is sure he hasn’t said it today, but maybe he’s forgotten. Maybe he’s gotten so used to saying it, how good it feels to do it, that he’s become careless.

“Where did you hear that?” he says flatly.

Shane looks confused and annoyed, like he thinks Ilya is fucking with him. “You said it to me.”

“No, I didn’t.” He tries to sound more confident than he feels. “Maybe you heard from some other Russian hockey player.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, but is looking a little lost, like he’s casting around for the memory of where the phrase might have come from. “You said it when we were…”

“I never said this,” Ilya cuts in.

“We were on the couch, and you were…” Shane trails off. His eyebrows draw sharply together. “No, I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking of something else.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’ve never been here before, right?”

Ilya’s heart thumps wildly in his chest. No, this Shane has never been here before. But Shane has been here hundreds of times, each known only to Ilya. Has heard Ilya whisper and groan and mumble Ya tebya lyublyú maybe as many times already. And he has never, never remembered any of them.

Until now.

“No, you have never been here before. Is first time,” Ilya says, before he can change his mind. He grins, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Maybe in your dream? Maybe I say it to you then. You are having very nice dreams about me, if that is the case.”

“Fuck off,” Shane repeats.

He doesn’t look entirely convinced. His fingers tap against his knee, his sandwich forgotten, half-finished, on his plate in front of him. The Buffalo Cutlasses are tied with the Carolina Reapers, 1-1. Ryan Price is skating around absently on Ilya’s big television, without being given much to do. Maybe the saddest part of all of this is that Ilya is doomed to watch the worst fucking game of hockey forever.

“What does it mean, then?”

He won’t be able to say it, himself, if he tells him now. Until tomorrow, at least. Unless Shane somehow remembers. Ilya is both terrified and desperately thrilled at the prospect.

Maybe, maybe something is changing.

Ilya reaches out to snake his fingers around the back of Shane’s head, turns him so he can kiss him, deep, licking across the pout of his full lips.

“It means ‘I love you’, Shane.”

Shane’s entire face goes red. He lifts off the couch as if propelled by a spring.

“What?” he says hoarsely.

Ilya hardens his expression into something like a smile, shrugs with one shoulder.

“You ask, so.”

“I…”

Ilya gets off the couch, takes a step toward Shane, who instinctively steps back.

“I, um… I’m sorry, I think I have to…”

“Go, yes. I know.”

“Um, thank you for the food. Sorry I didn’t…”

“Is okay. Shane, listen.” Ilya doesn’t try to chase after him. It never works, anyway. Shane hasn’t left yet, but he will, any moment now. Ilya doesn’t have a lot of time. “I have said it to you, before. Many times. Right here, on the couch, watching same hockey game. Eating same tuna melts.”

Shane looks appropriately confused, and freaked out. His breaths are coming a little too fast. Ilya wonders, for the first time, how he gets back to his hotel. Does he have a hundred panic attacks in a hundred Ubers?

“That doesn’t make any sense–”

“I know. But you remember one thing. So maybe tomorrow you will remember one more.”

“Tomorrow…?”

“When you are back here, on the couch again.”

Shane shakes his head forcefully, like maybe he can reset his brain like a magic 8-ball if he does.

“Are you trying to fuck with me before the game, or something?”

“No. No, Shane, I am not trying to fuck with you. Is okay. You can go.”

As Shane is hurrying toward the door, Ilya has one last set of parting words for him:

“See you tomorrow!”

Ilya’s heart beats hard long after Shane is gone.

Shane stalks into Ilya’s kitchen, wearing only the sweatpants that Ilya has given him. He goes right to Ilya’s refrigerator, casually, and pulls out one of the ginger ales, like he knows it’s going to be there.

Ilya watches, trying not to let the excitement he feels bubble too high to the surface and spook Shane.

“Ah, I see,” he says instead, stretching just so he can watch Shane’s eyes rake over his body. “You make me come and now you walk around like you own the place.”

Shane looks down at the ginger ale in his hand, already popped open and sipped, like he hasn’t considered how this looked until now.

“Sorry.”

“No, no.” Ilya waves his hand. “Have it, is for you. I do not like the taste.” He makes an exaggerated face as Shane takes another sip. “Whenever you kiss me and it tastes like ginger ale I want to–” he sticks out his tongue like he’s going to vomit.

“Asshole,” Shane says, “no, you don’t.”

Ilya sidles up beside him, leaning against the kitchen island. He cocks his head and leans forward, until his lips are pressing into Shane’s. He works them open with his tongue, swipes lazily into Shane’s mouth, tastes ginger ale and mouthwash. Shane must have used some in the shower.

He pulls away and Shane’s eyes follow him.

“No, I don’t,” Ilya admits.

If Shane hasn’t already tried to leave once, this is usually where he tries the first time. Ilya made him come twice in bed and followed Shane into the shower to get his dick sucked, so he hasn’t tried yet. So it’s not much of a surprise, if anything about this day can be considered a surprise anymore, when Shane pulls his eyes away from Ilya’s mouth and takes a steadying inhale.

“I should probably go,” he mutters.

Ah, it’s not strong enough. It’s not one of the real ones. Ilya reaches out, traces over Shane’s cupid’s bow with his thumb. He’s so pretty and nervous; there’s a flush across his nose, under his freckles.

“Or you could stay,” he says, easily, the line rehearsed a million times. He knows when Shane will say okay, when he has to say more, and when he doesn’t. He doesn’t say more. He waits for which of Shane’s bullshit reasons he will hear today.

“I’m, uh, rooming with Hayden at the hotel,” Shane says. This is one of Ilya’s least favorite. “He’s going to think something’s wrong if I don’t come back.”

“Do you have somewhere to be? Besides hotel.”

“No,” Shane says. “Just…”

“What do you do? Back at hotel, when you go.”

The period of this day after Shane is gone is unknown to him. For all he knows, he goes back and cries. Or finds someone else to bring over, just to prove he wants someone, anyone other than Ilya Rozanov. Ilya doesn’t think Shane is really capable of that.

But, he supposes, he doesn’t really know.

Shane looks at him. “Sleep, usually,” he says earnestly. “We see each other pretty late.”

For a moment, Ilya is confused. It’s always eleven AM, actually, on the dot. But that’s just Ilya’s wormhole life. Shane is, of course, talking about the stolen hours in hotel rooms and after evening games that have made up the entirety of their relationship until now. For him, this is still the first time they have been together in the middle of the day.

“Well, today it is not late. It is not even two PM.” Ilya shrugs, leans back against the countertop. “You can take a nap here. Is very terrible game coming up soon between Buffalo and Carolina. It will help you sleep.”

Shane laughs. “It probably will.”

“Shane, stay.”

“What?” Shane says, eyes wide, like Ilya has just committed some grave sin, and takes a few steps backward.

Ilya keeps his face perfectly neutral, waits for the initial panic to dissipate. Like offering a stray dog food: Start by throwing it far away, then closer, then closer, until it’s in your lap and it doesn’t know why it didn’t want to be there all along.

Ilya is so good at this now. Maybe it’s not important if he calls Hollander Shane, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it doesn’t keep Wednesday, November 9th from repeating again. But Ilya wants to do it. He isn’t sure he can keep himself from doing it. Ya tebya lyublyú, Hollander just doesn’t sound as good in his mind or on his lips as Ya tebya lyublyú, Shane.

“That is your name: Shane. No?”

“Obviously. But we don’t…”

“We don’t what? I am not your coach, or MLH Commissioner. Am I?”

“No…”

“No? I am not? Okay, then what is big deal?”

“I’m not saying it’s a big deal, but–”

“Listen.” Ilya steps back into the space Shane opened up between them. “On ice, you are Hollander. In hotel room, too, maybe.” He leans forward into the air separating their breaths. “When I come to your house, and fuck you until you can’t even get off your bed, you can tell me to call you Hollander then, if you want.” Shane tilts his mouth up for Ilya to kiss and he knows he’s succeeded. “But right now you are in my house, so it’s my rules, Shane.”

Shane’s eyes are half-open and big and deep brown. So pretty. The most beautiful eyes Ilya has ever seen. Especially like this, so needy, like Ilya is all he’s ever wanted. Maybe the silver lining of all this is Ilya gets to see them like this every day, raw with hunger and scared and soft.

Ilya lifts him easily up onto the countertop and positions himself between Shane’s thighs, lets his arms slide past Shane’s waist, forearms coming to rest on Shane’s thick quads.

“Rozanov,” Shane whispers.

“Ilya,” he corrects.

And Shane is kissing him, hotel room forgotten, Hayden no longer important, just like that. When Shane pulls back, he’s smiling.

“Okay.”

Why can’t you just say yes the first time, when it’s what you want? Ilya wants to ask. Thinks maybe, this time, Shane will answer. But he’s on such a roll, right now, it would be a shame to waste the day.

“Okay? You will stay?” Ilya runs his hand over the muscle of Shane’s thigh, squeezing into it, kneading, his thumb encroaching into the heat of his crotch.

“Yeah, sure.”

Shane sinks easily back against Ilya’s mouth, opening for his tongue, legs widening just so under Ilya’s hands like an invitation. Ilya pulls back, grinning wide.

“Ah, but I have… caveat.”

“How do you know that word?” Shane mumbles, almost pouting, already impatient to get fucked again.

“Oh, you do not know? I can find dictionary for you.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, laughing, hands still tangled in Ilya’s hair. “I know what it means.”

Ilya could be talking about sex, which is clearly what Shane thinks. He could see about trying to top his personal best, which is five times in one day, when he and Shane stayed in his bed all day, his phone off, his father’s phone call gone unanswered. Ilya had fallen asleep and woken up to find Shane already gone, that time.

But he wants to see something. He wants to see if it was a fluke, before, that Shane remembered something.

“Okay, smart man,” Ilya says now, taking one more drag off Shane’s mouth. “Caveat is: you must help me with making lunch.”

“What?” Shane looks mildly shocked.

Ilya raises his eyebrows high, all pretend innocence. “Oh? What did you think I would say?”

“Rozanov…” Shane takes in the look Ilya gives him and corrects himself. “Ilya. I don’t cook. I don’t even know how.”

“No problem,” Ilya says, sliding his hands down the length of Shane’s legs as he pulls away, turns for the refrigerator doors, throwing them open. “I will be head chef, and you will just follow orders, okay?”

“Ugh, fuck off,” Shane says, as he comes down off Ilya’s countertop with a little groan.

“No, no, you say ‘yes Chef’,” Ilya says, as he pulls containers from the fridge and stacks them haphazardly on top of the counter.

“Oh my god, I hate you so much.”

“Wrong again. You are terrible assistant, you know.”

He pulls out the mixing bowls, the pans, the knife and cutting board, takes the lids off the containers. Shane looks at the vast spread of ingredients and items for prep without comprehension.

“What is all of this for?”

“For tuna melt.”

“I don’t know how to make that. I’ve never made one before.”

“No, but you have watched me make it many times.”

Ilya’s expression is calm, but he watches carefully as Shane mulls this over in his mind. He has a strange, inscrutable look on his face, but it isn’t necessarily confusion– Ilya knows that one, well. It’s internal, something Shane is thinking over as he looks between the tuna in its plastic container and the mixing bowl and the celery and the pickles.

He doesn’t say, What are you talking about? He doesn’t say, I’ve never seen you make this before. He doesn’t say anything.

Ilya begins to feel that swell of hope again, though he’s almost afraid to lean into it too much. He thinks, wouldn’t Shane say something if he had no memory of this at all?

“I think you can figure it out if you think hard enough,” Ilya says.

He watches Shane begin to assemble the ingredients. He chops the celery into tiny, manageable pieces, combines them in the mixing bowl with the tuna and mustard and lemon juice.

“Where’s the mayo?” Shane says, and Ilya realizes he forgot to get it out. He can’t keep the stupid smile off his face as he goes for it.

“I think that’s it,” Shane says quietly, when he’s stirred the mixture into a uniform spread.

“Almost.” Ilya reaches into the jar of pickles with his index finger and thumb, wiggling his eyebrows and licking the juice off when Shane makes a disgusted face. He gently nudges Shane to the side with his hip to take over at the cutting board, rendering the pickle into tiny little pieces.

“Oh, no pickles,” Shane says, wrinkling his nose beside Ilya. “I hate pickles.”

“Yes, I know,” Ilya says, “but whenever I leave out pickles you say–”

“--This could have used pickles.”

Now, he looks authentically confused, at himself, at Ilya hovering over the bowl with the cutting board. Ilya could kiss him, he’s so happy. So, it seems it wasn’t just a fluke, the other day, Shane remembering Ilya’s Russian I love you.

Maybe things are changing, just a little. Shane is not exactly the same as he was every time before.

It’s the closest thing to hope Ilya has had in a long time.

“Okay,” Ilya says, dumping the pickles into the bowl. He makes a show of pushing Shane away from the prep station they’ve set up on the countertop. “Is almost ready. I will finish. I don’t trust you with hot pans.”

“Fuck off,” Shane smiles.

“No, it’s ‘yes Chef’, remember? Go turn on game, it should be starting soon.” He calls after Shane as he retreats toward the living room. “Do you know how to use my TV?”

“It’s a TV,” Shane says over his shoulder, “I can figure it out.”

“Yes, but I have seen your passes. Your vision is very bad, you may not be able to see tiny letters on remote control.”

“Fuck you!”

The game is, unsurprisingly, terrible again. Ilya barely pays attention anymore, chewing the corner of his sandwich thoughtfully. His thoughts are on the day so far, on the tiny revelations that have sparked to life between Shane at his door and Shane now, enjoying the pickles in his tuna melt despite himself.

Shane remembers. He remembers things from before– the same day, but a different Shane. It has taken hundreds of repetitions, but here they are, Ilya and Shane, not Hollander and Rozanov, and Shane isn’t freaked out by it. And he remembers the tuna melts, and he remembers Ya tebya lyublyú, he remembers.

Ilya thinks about that metaphor he found in his frantic research, of time as nothing more than a strip of film, a collection of stationary cells depicting a time and a space, only given the illusion of movement by the actions of the film projector and its ability to trick the eye. Ilya pictures himself stuck in this single frame, this otherwise ordinary day, unable to move forward, unable to proceed to the next act of the story.

Maybe something is nudging the projector, little by little, back into place.

“Do you know who is Albert Einstein?” Ilya says.

Shane snorts out a surprised laugh. “What?”

Ilya supposes that is a fair question. They are sitting in his living room, eating lunch, watching hockey. Ilya is the only one thinking about the fickle whims of the universe. Shane is probably only thinking about whether Ilya is going to touch him again. Or whether the coaches of both Buffalo and Carolina are aware that they are, in fact, meant to help their teams win an actual game.

“I am just wondering.”

“I mean, I know who he is. And I think we learned about E=MC² in high school,” Shane says earnestly.

“Yes, there is that,” Ilya says, wiping at the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “What about theory of relativity?” He sounds the words out carefully. “Do you know what that is?”

“Uh, I might have heard of it. Why?”

Why, indeed. Because it has them both caught in its web like a spider. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, all the same. All Wednesday, November 9th. Maybe he can explain it. If he can, maybe Shane will realize that he, too, is a stationary actor on a broken piece of tape.

“I do not know any of the words in English, okay, but is very interesting,” Ilya says. “Is basically like this: maybe time is not just one way only.” He makes a motion with his hand and his open palm, like a car driving down a road. “Time does not happen in same way for everyone all the time. If you are at edge of universe, edge of black hole, traveling at speed of light, time looks different to you than to me, sitting in living room and watching very slow hockey game.”

Shane snorts. “Why am I traveling at the speed of light?”

“Is figure of speech, okay? Listen. Theory of relativity says, all of time is always there. Is not gone forever, just because we think today is over and now it is tomorrow. Yesterday is still there, tomorrow is also there, too. We just can’t go anywhere but forward. We do not know how to travel to other parts of time, unless something incredible happens. And then maybe we end up in different place. Or same place, but different time. Or same place, same time, again. Instead of same place, next time.”

Ilya’s explanation is probably all mangled, filtered through what he can manage in English, but it will have to do. He watches Shane for a hint of understanding, maybe a spark of realization.

“Huh,” Shane says, his brows furrowed together in concentration. “I don’t really get it. It sounds, uh, complex.”

“Yes, it is. But maybe… you do know what I mean.”

Shane stares at him. Commentary drones in the background, so much unimportant noise. “I do?”

“Do you ever feel like you have experienced something before, when you know this is impossible? Like… ah, what is the word?”

“Deja vu?”

Ilya cocks his head. “Ah, this is French word. There is nothing like that but in English?”

“It’s deja vu in English, too.”

“Then yes,” Ilya says, “deja vu.”

Shane looks down at the tuna melt on his plate, like he’s reconsidering how he knew how to make it, as if he’d seen it done a million times. He does not cook, he does not eat greasy sandwiches, but here they are. He is quiet, thoughtful when he replies.

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Yes. Like I know you do not like pickles unless they are hiding in tuna.”

Shane looks to him. There is recognition in his eyes. “Ilya…”

“And like you have maybe learned Russian words from me that you don’t remember I taught you before,” Ilya says, heart in his throat. “Like…”

“Ya tebya lyublyú,” Shane says.

“Yes, Shane.”

Shane’s voice is barely above a whisper. “Ilya, this is–”

Whatever is poised to come out of Shane’s mouth is interrupted by the insistent buzz of Ilya’s phone. His father.

“Fuck!” Ilya says. He grips his phone in his hand like he intends to throw it at the wall. “I will be right back.”

Ilya’s heart is pounding as he retreats to his room to take the call. His father, as always, is bellowing into the phone as soon as the call connects.

“Ilya,” he shouts. He has never used a nickname in all of Ilya’s life, as if he is a stranger, or loathe to imply any affection for his child. “Where are you? It is after 11. Why does your mother allow this? She is neglectful and–”

“Father,” Ilya cuts in. He doesn’t think he can take this today. “Now is not a good time. I will talk to Alexei.”

His father’s voice rises to a near panic in his anger. “You do not disrespect me like this. I tell you to be home and you must be home.”

“I know, father. Let me call Alexei, okay?”

“I am not talking about Alexei!” His father slurs, tongue sluggish over the consonants and dragging past the vowels. “I am talking about you, Ilya, you! You and your worthless mother who lets her son talk back to his father, like he is a big man. Both of you will learn some respect, even if I have to beat it into you–”

Ilya hangs up. He makes the cursory phone call to Alexei’s voicemail, hisses into the machine that he pays him to take care of their fucking father, and promptly turns his phone off completely.

It could be from the high of finally, finally feeling like maybe Shane had been starting to understand, but Ilya is shaky from the call in a way he hasn’t been since maybe the first time. He runs his hands through his hair, touches his mother’s cross. Takes some deep breaths. In, out. Shakes his head like he can jostle the thoughts out of his ears with enough force. Then, he returns to the living room and sits back down on the couch beside Shane.

Ilya can feel Shane’s eyes boring a hole into the side of his head. He knows if he turns, Shane will look all concerned and adorable, freckles scrunched up over the bridge of his nose, big dark baby-calf eyes wide and worried.

It’s one of the greatest ironies of this day, Ilya thinks. For someone so afraid of getting caught, he wears his expressions so transparently. Ilya can tell what he wants even when Shane can’t say it.

“Is everything okay with your family?” Shane says.

When they were about to head to Sochi, the night Ilya fucked Shane for the first time, he had asked about Ilya’s family. When he had him in his penthouse suite in Vegas after the MLH awards, he had asked about his family. He is always trying to pry Ilya open, inspect him from the inside, peer into the darkest corners of him.

Ilya has always resisted. Sometimes, he jokes that Shane is keeping tabs on him, memorizing his Wikipedia page. Sometimes, he distracts him with a kiss, with a hand sliding under the waistband of Shane’s pants. Sometimes he just pretends he doesn’t hear the questions. But he has always resisted. It’s one thing to fuck your rival at every opportunity, take his virginity, invite him to your house, go through the same fucking day a thousand times with him, fall in love with him in the process. It’s another, entirely, to let him know you. Ilya has wanted to keep this part of him, this shame, private forever.

But Ilya is tired. Exhausted down to his bones, his marrow. He’s so tired of his father’s rage, his confusion, his recriminations of his mother. He’s tired of having to bear the burden, alone. He’s had to do it countless times, today and yesterday and the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. And he’s tired.

So he turns and looks at Shane, into his earnest doe eyes, his stupidly sincere expression. He loves Shane so much. This can’t be harder than that.

“No,” Ilya says. He sighs. “Nothing has ever been okay with my family.”

He doesn’t expect Shane to understand what he means. He continues.

“That was my, ah. My father on the phone.”

Shane nods.

“Yeah, I could, uh, hear you talking to him. Sorry.”

Sorry, Shane says, like he isn’t currently asking Ilya to spill his guts all over the couch. Sorry.

“Is okay.” Ilya takes a breath in, breath out. “My father is sick. He has dementia.”

It is the first time he’s said it in English. He’s not entirely sure where he learned the word. He has never had anyone he needed to translate it for. Even his coach doesn’t know what’s wrong with his father, is barely cognizant that he is sick.

“That’s terrible,” Shane breathes. “Is it… very bad?”

“Yes.” And Ilya says for the first time, too, in Russian or in English: “He is dying.”

“Oh fuck,” Shane says. His gaze narrows in sympathy, honing to a point, the better to delve further into Ilya’s heart. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yes.”

Ilya looks down at his hands, his tongue pressed to the back of his teeth. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe he can keep the rest.

Of course, he can’t. Shane won’t let him.

“Is he in Russia?” Shane asks.

Ilya nods slowly. “He is in Moscow. With my brother.”

“Oh.”

Shane goes quiet. Maybe he’s trying to picture Moscow, the sort of house Ilya’s father would live in, that Ilya might once have lived in, too. Ilya is sure he won’t be able to. Whatever he is imagining, it is darker. It is narrower. Constrictive, like Ilya spent the first eighteen years of his life inside the belly of a snake. Shane probably cannot imagine a family that is like a bear trap instead of a father and a brother.

“I’m sorry. It must be really hard being so far away from them.”

Ilya snorts. He nods absently. He thinks about saying Yes, it is and ending things there. Shane doesn’t know any better, he will believe him.

Instead he stares up at the ceiling, thinks for a long time, for the word he wants to use. He wants Shane to understand him, if he’s going to bleed out all over the two of them like this.

“Is… complicated.”

Shane nods. Not because he gets it, but because he’s waiting for Ilya to say more. To give him everything that’s left inside. The parts he hasn’t said out loud to anyone before, least of all himself.

So Ilya does.

“My entire life, I wanted my father to die. I blame him for what happened to my… to my mother.”

Shane mercifully does not cut in, looking for an explanation. Ilya stares at the ceiling. He’s sure he can’t bear to look into Shane’s eyes right now and face whatever expression is on his face.

“And now that it’s actually happening, I feel…”

Like what he wanted all along was not for his father to die, but just to be free from him. Or for a different father, as if he could just roll some dice and try again. Because he isn’t strong enough to bear it, bear the sort of family he has. Other people might be able to, but Ilya is not strong enough. And it makes him feel pathetic and small.

“...I feel like a failure.”

Ilya thinks, if he were stronger, he’d be able to take care of his father as his mind crumbles and his body steadily shuts down. Not because of love, or because he owes him a debt for putting him on this earth, or anything like that. But simply because Ilya should be strong enough to do it. He should be able to show his father that he can. But all he’s showing him, at the end, is that he can’t.

“I feel like I cannot even do this much, as his son. Even if I hate him. Or… or…”

Something is clogging up his throat, choking the words before they escape his lips. The lines of the ceiling are going blurry in his vision. He feels tears gather along his eyelashes, accumulate at the corners of his eyes. They feel like they might tip over any moment, that once he allows this, he will not be able to stop them.

“Or like, like he was right about me. That I am disappointment.”

This is more than he has ever said to anyone in his life about this. Even Svetlana, who knows his father, does not know this much. He would never tell her, and she would never ask. But Shane asks, again and again. Shane has asked enough times to finally crack him open. Ilya feels as if his ribs have been pried apart, his heart exposed to Shane’s scrutiny.

“Oh fuck,” Shane says. His voice is so soft, like he doesn’t want to scare Ilya. Like Ilya is a small, wounded animal, and Shane must be gentle with him.

“He thinks… he does not remember that my mother is dead. That I am not there. And every day, he calls me, and he tells me again that my mother was weak and bad and that I am also weak, and bad. I think… I think he hates me, too.”

There are hot, wet lines trailing down the sides of his face now. The tears he didn’t realize had started to spill are now impossible to claw back. He can’t see the ceiling anymore through them.

The cushions beside him shift, and he feels a weight come to rest across his legs, and then his vision is filled with Shane’s face, soft and beautiful and pained. For him. Shane’s thighs rest on either side of his own. Shane’s hands come up to frame his face, splayed out across the tracks of Ilya’s tears.

“Oh my god,” Shane says. “Oh my god, Ilya, I’m so sorry.”

Shane says his name like he’s forgotten he is supposed to be afraid of it. It’s natural, gentle spilling past his lips. He wipes across Ilya’s cheeks with his calloused fingers. He is heavy in Ilya’s lap, but it is a comfort, like a thick blanket wrapped across Ilya’s legs.

Ilya has been wrung out, emptied. He has given Shane everything, everything he has words for, Russian or English. What’s left is the part that he doesn’t even know how to say, the tears his father beat him for when he found his mother dead, because he was weak to cry.

He is weak, like his father has always suspected. Maybe that is the innermost nature of him. But Shane is not telling him he’s weak. He is not telling him to stop crying. He is kissing the tears away from Ilya’s face and whispering his name and maybe this is why Ilya has had to sit on this couch with him a thousand times and lose him again and again, so that he can finally have this.

Ilya wraps his arms around Shane’s broad body and buries his head into Shane’s chest. He feels the warmth of Shane’s skin through his shirt, against his forehead. Shane’s hands comb through his hair and run across the back of his neck. He presses soft kisses to Ilya’s temple, and Ilya cries against him.

“Ilya…”

“Fuck, Shane…”

Shane lifts Ilya’s head toward him, finding his mouth, bending down to meet him there. It’s warm, and safe, and soft. Ilya chokes his breath back and exhales and breathes Shane back in. He can taste salt on Shane’s lips, between his teeth. Shane’s body is solid against him. It feels like Ilya could collapse into him, put his whole weight into it, and Shane could bear it. That he wouldn’t move an inch. But Ilya just kisses him until he can barely breathe, until he feels the corners of his eyes go finally dry. Shane is right there through it, holding him, running fingers through his hair and wiping the tracks from his cheeks and whispering his name against his lips.

I love you. Ya tebya lyublyú. I love you.

Shane holds him the way no one has since he was twelve years old. The way he thought, maybe, no one would again. The way he probably doesn’t even deserve. And he has told him everything, and Shane is still here.

No, he hasn’t told him everything. There is still the thing that is bigger than just his dark house, his bear trap of a family. Always in the back of his mind.

He pulls away from Shane’s mouth, leans their foreheads together. Listens to Shane breathe. And he tells him, voice low, like the words are too terrible to say except in a whisper.

“Do you know that in Russia I can go to prison for this?”

Shane rears back. His eyes are wide. “No. Holy shit.”

Ilya grips into the fabric at Shane’s back, presses against him, and Shane takes the weight like Ilya knew he would.

“My entire family is police. If… if we ever got found out, and I was kicked from league… I still have Russian passport.”

He can feel hot tears pool at the corners of his eyes again, spill down his cheeks, and he feels bad for ruining Shane’s hard work to dry them.

“If I was sent home to Russia, for being with a man…”

He doesn’t want to finish the thought. Shane’s stare is too intense, red-rimmed and pitch black. Ilya tips his head forward, searches for Shane’s lips again. He catches, instead, at the side of Shane’s mouth. Shane’s moved his head away.

“Shane…”

Shane is shaking his head softly.

“You can’t do this. Holy shit, Ilya, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

No, Ilya thinks. No, please. Not again. Not after this.

“Shane…”

He can hear the desperation in his own voice. He’s seen this look on Shane’s face a thousand times. No, maybe not exactly like this. Shane looks miserable and afraid, but those emotions look like they are outside of him. Not tuned to an internal turmoil, but pointed white-hot at Ilya. Shane is afraid for him.

And Shane is leaving.

He is talking even as he’s sliding gently off Ilya’s lap, even as Ilya’s hands drag against his shirt, like he can make him stay if he just holds on tightly enough.

“You have to be able to see your Dad. You can’t risk it. I’m not… I’m not worth it.”

No, Ilya wants to say. You are. You are the only thing in the entire world that is worth it.

The words catch in the back of his throat, and all that comes out instead is a choked, “Shane, please.”

Please. Please stay. I can’t do this again. I can’t do this.

Shane is standing between Ilya and the entryway, shaking his head, looking sick and scared and unbelievably sad.

“Ilya. We can’t. We can’t do this anymore.” Shane’s voice is soft as he doles out the verdict. Life without parole. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Ilya.”

“Shane…”

But Shane is already gone. Ilya drops his head down to his knees and cries. He cries until he’s sick of it, until he feels almost nauseous, completely upheaved. He cries like he is twelve years old, and his father is not there to put the fear in him and force his eyes dry.

Eventually he is spent, and nothing comes but a bleak emptiness, like some internal basin has gone to zero. Ilya makes his way wearily to his room, limbs heavy, head pounding like he’s about to have an aneurysm. He crawls onto his bed and falls asleep in all his clothes, his face red and damp, sticking against his pillow.

Ilya wakes up the next morning.

It is Wednesday, November 9th.

Chapter End Notes

Sorry y'all, I told you we were taking Ilya into the torment nexus with this one 😥

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

Content warning for this chapter: oblique references to suicide.

The next day, Ilya does something he hasn’t done in a long, long time. He rolls over, in the early morning November gloom of his bedroom, and reaches for his phone. He scrolls to Shane’s messages, and types:

Don’t come over today. I am not feeling well.

It doesn’t feel good, but nothing feels good. It feels necessary, like the burn of antiseptic over an injury. Ilya doesn’t know how he could even face another day of Shane Hollander right now.

Shane buzzes insistently in his phone. His first message is considerate, practiced. Sorry you’re sick. Get better soon. He follows it up with questions. Always questions. Do you have a fever? Do you think you’ll play tomorrow? Do you have Tylenol? He can’t seem to bring himself to leave Ilya alone. Until, of course, that isn’t what Ilya wants anymore, and then he’s all too eager.

Ilya spends the day mostly in bed. He knows he ought to drive to the practice rink and try to keep his skills from succumbing to total atrophy, but his arms and legs feel like they’re full of lead and his throat is scratchy and dry. His eyes itch from crying.

He cried, in front of Shane, for his fucking family, for himself. And Shane cried for him. And then told him that it was impossible for them to love each other. Like Ilya doesn’t already know that. Like he hasn’t spent every fucking day that his father calls thinking that exact same thing.

Maybe he is not so much trapped in the realm of the physical, but in the realm of the spiritual, after all. Maybe he really is in Hell, and they were right about what happens to boys like him.

Or maybe Hell is everything else outside of them. Hell is the two of them ever being found out. Hell is being sent back to Russia. Hell is knowing he has to go back, that his father will have his final wish, in his imminent death, of reeling him back home one more time.

He wishes Mama had thought to tell him what happens when the dream doesn’t end, long after he’s stopped lying to himself, but also can’t come true. What happens when being honest is almost worse.

Shane was finally starting to understand. He could see, through Ilya’s clumsy orchestrations, the reflection of the fishbowl glass that they are imprisoned inside. First, just a little, and then the next day, more. It was finally starting to happen. Something was changing. But Ilya does not feel strong enough to try again. He feels like maybe he will never be.

Maybe he can manage to never see Shane again. Tell him every day that he is too sick. He is sick, it is not much of a lie. He is tired. He doesn’t think he can do this anymore. He will repeat and repeat this day, but at least he won’t have the weight of Shane’s fear and longing bearing down on him. Shane, who thinks that no one can see his feelings plain on his face, as long as he himself is set on never acknowledging them. Even as he turns ya tebya lyublyú over and over in his mind, and makes Ilya tell him what he means by it, when he knows damn well what it means. Even as he asks Ilya to share with him all the worst parts of himself, his stupid fucking sob story, and then pulls away, for Ilya’s own good. It’s a cruel joke at his expense.

But the real joke is that Ilya loves him, anyway. Through all these endless days, through all the times he’s watched him fly out the door. Ilya loves Shane Hollander.

And Ilya has seen it, too, reflected back in Shane’s eyes in his rawest moments. He saw it when he told Shane about his father. He’s seen it when Shane is trembling under him, gripping hard into his back, and staring into his eyes, like he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of the pleasure he’s making Ilya feel. He’s seen it, in fits and starts, in instants, every day that he’s repeated. Shane has been forced to stay in his orbit until he can’t hide it from Ilya anymore. Ilya thinks– hopes, fears, prays– that Shane Hollander loves him, too.

But it is apparently not enough to think, maybe even deep down to know. Not enough for Ilya to nudge the tilted projector back into place. Shane always leaves, a hundred times, a thousand times. Shane chooses his own fear over Ilya every time.

Ilya knows what Shane is afraid of. If he were to stay, he’d have to admit to Ilya, to himself, that he is different. Ilya doesn’t particularly care for labels or even much for the concepts of different or normal, but Shane’s entire life seems to balance precariously on the need to be slotted neatly beside everyone else he knows. Ilya can send him into a panic attack just by joking too much that he’s gay, like the word in his mouth is more alarming than Shane’s dick. Ilya thinks Shane really might prefer spending eternity in a day that repeats forever before he admits what he wants, who he is, to himself.

And today, Ilya does not feel ready to face that fact.

Ilya spends the day watching garbage on TV with his phone turned off. His father will still be angry and confused tomorrow. His brother will still be unreachable. Shane will still be there, unless Ilya tells him not to come. They can all wait until he’s damn well ready for them to torment him again.

That night, he lies in bed and runs the edges of his mother’s cross through his fingers. He’s run through so many google searches on spiritual phenomena, on dreams and past lives and fate and destiny, everything he remembers her telling him. Her superstitions, her tarot cards, her crystals.

He hasn’t tried talking to her, yet.

“Mama,” he says quietly, though he’s alone and his house is huge and secluded and no one will ever hear him. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Am I even supposed to convince Shane Hollander to stay? Because I can’t. I’ve tried, but it is impossible. Why am I not allowed to just give up? Why isn’t there another way out?”

For a moment, his thoughts grow dark. There is another way. A way his Mama did, in fact, show him.

He does not let himself normally think like this. It can feel like a chasm in the corners of his mind, growing wider when he chooses to stare too long into it. It feels like he could easily jump in, if he doesn’t tear his thoughts away.

But he is alone, here, and no one responds to his whispered words. He does not hear his mother’s voice. No harps or trumpets signal any incoming divine message. Ilya is alone, and the chasm feels as close as it has ever been, wide open and waiting.

Another thought bubbles up from the bottom of the muck: what if he has already done it? What if that explains everything? What if there is no way out, because this is what comes after?

He thinks about how Shane might have felt, if that’s what’s happened. What he might be going through right now. Ilya thinks of how he looked, telling him that he wasn’t worth risking Ilya’s life over. The pain in his eyes. Ilya doesn’t want to think about Shane’s eyes looking like that because he…

Ilya pulls himself upright, turns the light on beside the bed. He runs his hands roughly over his face. No. He isn’t going to do that. He isn’t going to think about it anymore. He is going to do what he has always done, which is dig the fuck down and power through. No matter how it makes him feel. He has never been particularly afraid of causing himself pain. Knock a tooth out, get a black eye, break an arm, it’s worth it for the point, for the goal, for the win. He once bit half of his tongue off and didn’t even notice until the ref forced him off the ice.

His coach in Russia loved to say that pain was a message, a missive. Pain was meant to be listened to, but not run from. Pain, if leaned into, led to breakthrough.

So he’ll try again. Leaning into pain. Hoping for the breakthrough to come.

He just… needs a little more time.

Don’t come today. I am not feeling well.

Ilya’s fingers have memorized this phrase. It is terse, it gets the point across, it does not open any room for discussion. If he is too wishy-washy, if he couches his rejection in Sorry or Maybe next time, Shane has a tendency to pry into the soft juncture between the words and try to force an opening between them that he can slip through. Ilya has learned to be concise.

Even so, he’s failed more times to keep Shane from his house than he’s succeeded. A more poetic version of Ilya might think that it’s fate that makes Shane seem almost desperate to keep showing up, wide-eyed and anticipatory, at his front door. Maybe Einstein would hypothesize something more substantial, more grounded in the physical. Maybe the planet that Shane and Ilya’s twin moons have orbited around for so long in opposite directions has collapsed in on itself, a tiny black hole opening up in Ilya’s living room, pulling them both inexorably toward it.

Or maybe Shane is in love with him.

Part of him can’t believe he ever thought otherwise. Why would Shane Hollander, who seems to relish denying himself actual food and a social life as a sacrifice to the Hockey Gods, try so hard to come over just to have sex with him? Maybe Ilya had to see him try, over and over, to work his way into a connection when Ilya turns away to be sure. They can both be dense and stupid. Ilya has just had more time to come to terms with his own denseness and stupidity.

Ilya takes the whole day again. He turns his phone off. It feels almost luxurious, to not think about anything, to relax inside the fishbowl. Zoo animals probably feel this way, he thinks. He went to the zoo once, as a child, holding his mother’s hand, his brother too old, too independent by then to want to. Some of the animals slept: red pandas, orangutans, hanging out of artificially planted trees and lounging on viewing platforms for delighted schoolkids and chattering tourists, seemingly unbothered by their conditions. But others, the bears, the tigers, had paced back and forth across their enclosures, unsatisfied, vaguely aware that they were inside not much more than a dressed-up cage.

Ilya had hated it. He remembers wanting to fling the doors open and let the animals free. There is a zoo in Boston and he has never been, and not just because he is no longer a child.

Ilya has read that there are some animals that can’t be kept in enclosures at all. They never acclimate to a life of captivity, even if all of their needs are met within it. They claw at the glass. They hurt themselves. They stop eating, in protest of their conditions, and die.

Ilya knows he is more like the bears and tigers than the red pandas that he wants to admit. He knows that, left to his own devices too long, he will be clawing at the glass and eyeing the permanent exits.

But another day– hell, another week– of swimming in circles won’t hurt him, probably.

Don’t come today. I am not feeling well.

Ilya feels a strange sense of accomplishment as he sends the message and turns off his phone. First thing in the morning, just after eight. This is becoming so easy.

He will try again, he tells himself. Tomorrow, maybe. He just wants a little more time to not have to try, or think. Or hurt, for that matter.

The shower feels nice, and there is nowhere to be. So he stays. His fingers are pruned by the time he shuts the water off and thinks about getting dressed.

He steps back into his bedroom, towel slung around his waist for the benefit of no one’s modesty but his own, throws on his sweatpants. No shirt. He never wears one by himself in his own house. His father always made him dress like the president himself was about to walk through their front door any minute. It was a sight to behold him in casual athletic gear, the last summer that Ilya was there, simply because he couldn’t work his hands through the complexity of buttons and zippers anymore.

It was then, probably, that he knew his father was dying. Maybe already gone.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, but it’s a strange, insistent vibration that he does not recognize. He has most of his notifications turned off; even his text messages, he chooses who he whitelists out of do-not-disturb. This one is unfamiliar, a heavy staccato of buzzing against his hip.

He pulls out his phone and looks at the icon on his lock screen for a moment. There is a message that flashes into legibility when he presses this thumb against the home button.

Motion detected at front door.

Ilya swallows and presses hard into the notification. It whirls his phone awake and navigates him to the camera lodged below his doorbell.

Shane Hollander is standing at his door, looking nervously around, behind and to the sides of him. His arm is half-raised, like he’s deciding whether he plans to knock.

It is barely nine o’clock.

Ilya stares at the tiny, fisheye version of Shane on his phone screen. His whole body tenses, a taut line up his spine where his nerves converge in an ice-cold thrum of anxiety. He does not feel ready to face him. It’s been only three Wednesdays since Shane told him through red eyes that he wasn’t worth risking his life for. It’s not enough time. Ilya still feels depleted, unable to draw from the wells of cocky self-confidence or bravado or self-preservation he normally uses to prod Shane, little-by-little, into accepting his encroachment. If Shane comes inside, the day will probably be shot to begin with. Ilya doesn’t even think he can muster up the energy to use the name Hollander right now.

But, even now, Ilya misses him. Which is so pathetic that he briefly feels crazy for it. There is no expiration date on the number of days he can see Shane. He has seen him every day, the same exact way, long enough that he has lost count. He has no reason to believe that pattern won’t extend into infinity. There is no reason to miss Shane, except that Ilya is in love with him, and so now he feels strangely empty– cut in half, hollowed out– without him around.

He’s walking down the hallway to the door before he’s really even finished thinking about what he’s going to do. Shane is a little shocked when the door opens before he’s even knocked on it, and he stammers out the beginning of an apology that Ilya is sure he practiced the whole ride over from the hotel.

“Hey, Rozanov, I’m sorry, I just–”

“Ilya,” he corrects.

“What? That’s…” Shane’s gaze goes briefly inward. “Ilya? Sorry. I know you told me not to come…”

“Yes. I did.”

“I just… I don’t know. I just…” Shane abruptly closes his mouth, like he’s decided to stop completely and start over. “Are you okay?”

“You came here to ask if I am okay?”

“I… yes. Well, no. It’s… okay, well. It’s weirder than that.”

Ilya leans into the space between the doorway and Shane. “Weirder how?”

Shane pauses, chewing on his bottom lip. Thinking about what to say next, maybe. He seems to steel himself, lifts his head to meet Ilya’s eyes.

“I felt like I had to come.” He shakes his head softly, like he himself can’t believe what he’s saying. “Sorry. I know that’s fucking weird. I just felt like something really bad was happening, and I had to come.”

“Oh.” Ilya’s fingers twitch. For a moment, he feels like reaching for his cross.

“Sorry. Can I come in? I know I’m–”

“Yes.”

Ilya makes a deal with himself as soon as Shane is behind his door, toeing off his shoes, because he is still raw and exhausted and heartsick.

He is going to be honest, from the start, today. He will not turn it into a game or dress anything up with ‘house rules’ bullshit. Shane will be Shane, Ilya will be Ilya, and if Shane asks him questions, Ilya will just… answer.

It’s worth a shot, at least. He is out of all other ideas.

“I don’t think I want to fuck right now,” he says over his shoulder, catching Shane’s jump when he does. “Sorry.”

“No! Uh, no, I thought we could just, um, talk.”

Ilya mulls that over. He leads Shane to the couch before sitting heavily down himself.

“Okay.”

Shane stands stiffly at one end, casting his eyes around the room, like he has no idea what to do next, now that he’s made it inside. He stares at the black screen of the television and slowly lowers himself down to sit on a corner.

Ilya glances over Shane’s jacket that he hasn’t taken off, still half-zipped from the early morning chill outside. “You have another place to be soon?”

“Huh?”

He holds out his hand. “Give me your jacket.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Shane slowly shrugs out of his jacket, folding it carefully over his arm before he hands it to Ilya. Ilya briefly wants to toss it on the floor just to make Shane call him an asshole. Shane’s face is scrunched up and his eyes are far away, and Ilya doesn’t know what that expression means. He drapes the jacket gently over the side of the couch and briefly wonders if Shane has unconsciously trained him to behave.

“I like this place a lot,” Shane says. “It’s really nice.”

Ilya wants to laugh. He’s heard every possible iteration of that sentiment except the most basic: nice. He can feel the smile tugging at the corners of his lips. It’s ridiculous that Shane can make him feel a little better just from being his annoyingly straightforward self for two minutes.

“Yes.”

Shane reads the wrong thing from Ilya’s smile. “Sorry. I’m being boring.”

No, Ilya wants to say, you’re just deflecting. But he doesn’t know the word for it in English, so he just lets his smile spread up the sides of his face.

“Yes. It’s okay. If you became too interesting, I would think you had been replaced by body double.”

Shane laughs. “Asshole.”

Ilya relaxes back into the cushions, kicking his legs up. He considers turning on the TV, even though it’s way too early for the game. Maybe he can find some commentary to pretend to listen to, just so Shane doesn’t have to stare at the empty screen like he is.

“Hey,” Shane says. “Are you really okay?”

He’s turned to Ilya now, giving him that look. That how is your family? look. That what does ya tebya lyublyú mean? look. That look that he wields like a crowbar to pry Ilya open. Ilya’s first instinct is the same as always. Distract him. Kiss him. Make a joke. Anything except tell him the truth.

But Ilya is being honest, today.

“Probably not,” he says. “No.”

Shane just looks at him like that’s exactly what he expected Ilya to say, nodding his head.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“You said you felt like something bad would happen, before.” Ilya supposes this is his way of ‘talking about it’. “What did you mean?”

Shane’s gaze turns inward.

“Uh, yeah. I’m not totally sure, either. It’s like, maybe a subconscious thing?” Shane catches the brief confusion in Ilya’s eyes and corrects himself. “Subconscious is like, I don’t really know the reason, because it’s deep in my brain. So it’s just like a feeling.”

“Oh, okay.” Ilya is a little disappointed. Maybe he was hoping that as long as Shane was showing up unexpectedly to his house, he’d come equipped with the answers to everything wrong with him.

“I had a dream, or something,” Shane goes on. “And then I saw your text that you weren’t feeling well. And it felt like, I don’t know. You needed my help, or something.” He blows out a breath. “Wow, saying it out loud makes me sound really fucking weird. Sorry.”

“No, not weird. I just was not expecting it. Thank you for coming, Shane.”

Shane moves infinitesimally closer on the couch, turns his body towards Ilya.

“Yeah, of course.”

He gazes at Shane, at his worried face. Shane’s body language is like an invitation. Look at me. Talk to me. Again, Ilya’s instinct is to reach for him. Fill him with desire so he can’t think enough to worry for Ilya’s sake. Even if Ilya doesn’t really want it, and Shane says he doesn’t either, just wants to talk. Ilya knows that if he has Shane in his arms, he’ll allow it anyway, and everything will be briefly painless.

Sex has always been his ultimate anesthetic, better than alcohol, better even than hockey. He could leave his house with his father’s fist still imprinted in his cheek and feel better as soon as the club lights swam in his vision and someone’s mouth was on his dick. The first time he fucked Sveta, his brother had thrown a bottle at his head and called him a faggot who didn’t know his place. It had felt like a place to hide, her body, her bed. Anything but tell her, or anyone, the truth. Even in this endlessly repeating day, sex can still be his escape. Shane will let him. He can tuck his head into the warm, delicious cavern of his neck and hide himself deep inside.

The scared, trapped animal inside him hates the thought of being honest. Honesty hurts. Worse than getting checked head-first into the boards or cracking a rib or scraping his face against the ice. Part of him is screaming that he tried this before. Tried being honest with Shane, and look where that got him.

But even that part of Ilya is exhausted, and out of ideas. Even the fear of more pain is not too strong to ignore, anymore.

Pain is the lesson, his coach once said. Let it result in a breakthrough.

Okay. Ilya might not believe it, himself, but he will try.

“I think I am, maybe, very tired,” he says.

“Tired?”

“Yes. I have been trying the same things over and over, and I am getting tired of trying. I am getting…”

Ilya doesn’t want to say desperate. He doesn’t want to say depressed. He doesn’t want to say that other thing, the darker thing. He’s not really there yet, right? He is just not feeling up for the fight, right now. It is only temporary.

Right?

Ilya waves his hand, like he is swatting away the end of the thought. The unfinished sentence hangs in the air between them. Shane scoots himself closer, until he’s right up alongside Ilya. Like Ilya has to be sufficiently miserable for Shane to give himself permission to do so. His fingers reach out to brush Ilya’s curls off his forehead, and Ilya closes his eyes and leans into the touch.

Ilya thinks of his mother, listening to him talk about his dreams. It’s like Shane knows, without explicitly knowing, how to do the same thing. Subconsciously. He just touches Ilya, gently, and draws the deepest parts of him to the surface. It is probably what Ilya loves most about him.

It feels luxurious, letting Shane pet him, like he’s a child again. Like all he’s ever wanted. Shane’s fingers are rough when they trace against his skin, as tough and scarred as his own. His mother’s hands were so delicate and soft, her fingers thin and long. He remembers them almost as ethereal as air. But this feels just as good, just as safe. Ilya wants to just stay here, as long as Shane will let him.

He doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep. His eyes feel thick and gummy when he opens them, like maybe it’s been hours. Ilya hopes not, feels vaguely embarrassed by the possibility. He shakes his head a little, like a dog, and casts his eyes around for Shane, worried that he might already be gone.

But Shane is right there, next to him on the couch. He still has a hand in Ilya’s hair, resting at the base of his neck. Ilya wonders if he stayed like that the whole time Ilya slept. His other hand is scrolling absently through his phone.

“Fuck,” Ilya says, his voice hoarse. “Sorry.” He has never said sorry as much in his life as he has since meeting Shane. They don’t warn you that fucking a Canadian might just turn you into one.

“Hi,” Shane says around a little smile. He wraps a finger around one of Ilya’s curls and tugs on it gently.

“Hello.”

“You really were tired.”

Yeah, Ilya thinks, a little surprised himself. It seems he really was. It feels like he’s had the first restful sleep he’s gotten in a long time.

“Ah, what time is it?” he says, shifting his neck, stretching his legs a little.

Shane’s eyes flicker back to his phone. “It’s twelve.”

Right around this time is normally when Ilya is moving them between the bedroom and the kitchen, if he does. If he doesn’t fuck Shane a second time, or linger in the shower with him, or screw up the entire day early and send him running.

Ilya feels better about the first or second prospect than he did when Shane originally showed up at his house today, like the nap has managed to reset his mood back to its baseline: hungry for Shane, pulled like a magnet toward his body. He reaches a hand out and runs it along the heavy muscle of Shane’s thigh.

But it’s Shane’s stomach that responds with a growl instead of his dick.

“Sorry,” Shane says. “I had a weird morning. I didn’t eat anything today.”

“Oh, okay.” Ilya thinks that what Shane is not saying is that it’s Ilya’s fault, somehow. Shane is starving to death because of worry for Ilya. “I have food.”

“I know.”

“Is not, ah, macrobiotic nonsense, though. Real food.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you’d never have anything healthy in your house.”

“Imagine how good of a hockey player you would be if you ate like me.”

“Uh huh. And when you drop dead at thirty-five and I can play until I’m fifty, we’ll talk.”

Ilya goes to get up, but Shane tugs him back with the hand resting in his hair. Ilya is shocked at how fucking good that feels. His legs open a little, automatically. He looks to Shane, who seems unaware that he has done anything at all.

“It’s fine. I’ll go,” Shane says, rising from the couch in a stretch. Then, he walks off to the kitchen, with all of the confidence of someone who has been here a million times.

Of course, Ilya follows him.

Ilya slides into one of his counter-height stools, so he can watch Shane round the kitchen island and go right to his refrigerator. Shane starts pulling out all of the ingredients that Ilya has used to make a million tuna melts. Pickles, mayo, mustard. He grabs a ginger ale out of the shelf on the door and cracks it open.

He knows where the cutting board is, where Ilya keeps the knives. He rummages around in the cabinets until he finds the exact mixing bowl Ilya always uses. He does all this, like it’s second nature. Like it is nothing for Shane Hollander to walk into Ilya Rozanov’s kitchen for what should be the first time in his life and make himself at home.

It is only when everything has been spread out on the countertop that he seems to realize that something out of the ordinary is going on. He doesn’t seem to know what to do next, except look to Ilya with more than a little concern.

“Well, that was fucking weird.”

“What are you making?” Ilya says softly.

“Tuna melts,” Shane says. “But I’ve never even made one before.” His eyebrows furrow into a little worried point in the center of his forehead. “Why was I about to make tuna melts?” he says, maybe more to himself than Ilya.

“Maybe you know I like them very much, and you are trying to impress me.” Ilya says.

He shouldn’t. He told himself he wasn’t going to play games, he was just going to be honest. But it feels like Shane is on the verge of coming up with something profound on his own. He worries his lip between his teeth, glancing at Ilya, at the things in front of him.

Finally, he says, “Do you know what deja vu is?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, nodding. “French word, but same in English. I know.”

“Well, I kind of feel like I’m having the worst deja vu of my life, right now.”

Shane runs his hand absently around the lid of the pickle jar. Ilya has to work to keep his expression neutral, not break out in a smile that Shane will almost certainly read as making fun of him, as Shane continues.

“I want to ask you something, but I’m scared it’s going to make me sound like a crazy person.”

Hope twists in Ilya’s chest, for the first time in all of these last miserable days. He quickly says, “Okay. Ask.”

Shane looks over Ilya’s head, still chewing on his bottom lip, glancing around the room, before landing back on him. “I’ve never been to your house before, right?”

Ilya considers how to answer this for a moment. He ought to be careful with what he says next. He shouldn’t just let the hope spreading its tendrils across his nervous system make him too eager.

He says, “It depends.”

Shane’s eyes flicker to his face. “It depends? On what?”

“Do you want normal person answer? Or do you want crazy person answer?”

“I guess… both?”

“Okay. Well, normal person answer is: this is the first time you have been to my house.”

Shane takes this in. Maybe it’s Ilya’s wishful thinking, his desperation even, but he doesn’t think Shane looks totally convinced.

“Okay,” Shane says. “And the crazy person answer?”

“You have been to my house for the first time many, many times.”

Shane’s eyes go wide. He looks like he might make a run for it right there. Ilya is half-prepared for this, already working his expression into something neutral, for his own sake.

But Shane does not run. He stands in the kitchen with his hands bracing against the edge of the countertop and stares at everything he implicitly knew to pull out of the fridge, shaking his head.

“What the fuck?” he breathes.

“I told you it was crazy person answer.”

“No, I know. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, I know. You have ginger ale in your fridge for me, and tuna for tuna melts. Which are gross, by the way.”

“They are not gross,” Ilya says. “You love them. Is secret, you eat something with cheese in it. Only I know this.”

“And your guest bathroom has a weird faucet that I can never figure out how to turn on.”

“You have to push down and then to the side.”

“Yeah, you’ve said that before. And the guy who did your kitchen cabinets also designed the kitchen of some guy on the Celtics.”

“Jaylen Brown. He is not just some guy.”

“Shut up,” Shane says, breathing out a thin little laugh. “This is fucking crazy. Why do I know all this?”

“I told you why.”

“Right. But what does that mean? I’m so fucking confused.”

“I don’t know what it means,” Ilya says. “But it is Wednesday, November 9th. Tomorrow will also be Wednesday, November 9th. Yesterday was also. Day before.”

Ilya waves his hand in a continuing motion, as if the innumerable time he’s spent repeating the same exact handful of hours is nothing so much as a small inconvenience. Oddly, it feels that way right now a bit, Ilya buoyant on the realization of just how much Shane remembers.

He remembers, and he came anyway. He came because he remembers.

This day could still end up going sideways. Shane could still run out the door. Ilya might not even blame him, after all he’s just been told. But Shane remembers. Bits and pieces, more and more every day. And the unconscious gravity of those fragments of memories pulled him back here, back to Ilya’s house, politely insisting he needed to come inside.

It feels like, maybe, it’s the beginning of a breakthrough.

“What the fuck…” Shane repeats, with a tinge of panicked laughter.

“Yes. What the fuck.”

“It’s always the same?” Shane says.

“Mostly the same. Some parts always.”

“Some parts?”

“Tuna fish is always the same. Buffalo game is always–” Ilya blows a raspberry. Shane snorts.

“Well, Buffalo sucks, that isn’t a surprise,” he says. “And other stuff is different?”

“Mm.”

“Like what?”

Of course, what Ilya thinks of are the worst things.

Like one time I told you about my family, and you abandoned me. Told me you weren’t worth it.

One time I taught you ‘I love you’ in Russian, and you ran away then, too.

“Well, you’ve never made me tuna melt before. Is always me. Poor kitchen slave.”

As if being reminded, Shane’s stomach makes another empty sound. It’s enough to distract, for now.

“Let’s eat,” Ilya says. “Same fucking day will still be here, after.”

So Shane cooks, and Ilya goes to the living room and turns on the game, and waits for him. He comes out with the two sandwiches, pickles on the side of Ilya’s plate. No fries, sadly. Ilya supposes that would be a bridge too far.

They’re quiet while they eat. Shane seems lost in his thoughts, while Ilya feels so buzzy and nervous that it’s almost like a high.

“The tuna could have used pickles, I think,” Shane says.

“Yes,” Ilya says, and something about his tone makes Shane go quiet.

“Do I always say that?”

Ilya smiles. “Yes.”

“So you remember everything?”

“Yes, Shane, I do.”

“How many times has it been?”

“I don’t know. I tried to keep track, but I lost count. It’s… a lot.”

“A hundred?”

Ilya shakes his head. “More.”

“A thousand?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Fuck.” Shane presses his thumb into the furrow between his brows. “And I’m asking you if you’re okay. Obviously, you’re not fucking okay.”

“Shane…”

“We’ll figure this out, Ilya. We’ll figure something out.”

Ilya wants that to mean so many things.

They sit beside each other on the couch, empty plates in front of them. The teams tie up the game, 1-1. The commentary is about how neither team has had a coherent strategy this season, how a convergence of factors are at fault. How the lineups are new, and they need more practice together, as a team, as a unit.

Repetition, the commentator says. That’s the key.

The buzz of Ilya’s phone startles him. He didn’t think it was so late, not quite time for his father to call. Shane looks at the Cyrillic on the screen and up at him.

“Your father?”

Ilya almost wishes Shane didn’t remember that part.

“Sorry, I will take this,” he says, and Shane nods.

Ilya lets the phone vibrate in his hands, standing in the doorway to his bedroom. He thinks, for a moment, of not picking up. Let it go to voicemail today. His father will still be angry tomorrow, and confused, and Ilya will still be unable to do anything about it. He’s taken this call a thousand times, heard his father’s rage and fear and frustration and stood and taken it all. He knows his father’s lines by now as if he’d rehearsed them, the same monologue, every day. The same movie. He could just… not answer.

“Hello, Papa.”

His father begins his diatribe. “Ilya, where are you? Do you know what time it–”

“Papa, listen,” Ilya says.

His father continues the tirade, but that’s okay, Ilya thinks. He won’t remember this, whether the day repeats or not. The thought is oddly comforting. Ilya can say whatever he wants at last.

“I’m sorry, Papa. I’m sorry that I am not there. I’m sorry I can’t take care of you. And I’m sorry… I’m sorry that I can’t forgive you. Even though I want to. I can’t.”

That’s all he’s ever wanted to say to him. He isn’t sorry that he’s weak, that he still cries and hurts and loves. That he loves a beautiful, flawed man so completely that he thinks he might renounce his country for him, if given the chance to. That once his father dies, Ilya is going to close the entire book on Russia and his family, shut the doors to that dark and strangling house, and never return. He isn’t the least bit sorry about that.

But he can be sorry for the things he wishes he could do, even if his father doesn’t hear him, or understand, or acknowledge it. Even if his father will still be angry tomorrow, just the same. At least Ilya will know he’s said it.

Ilya takes in a thin, shuddering breath. Okay. It’s enough.

“Papa, I’m going to call Alexei now, okay? I have to go.”

He hangs up the phone and calls his brother. Leaves a perfunctory voicemail that Alexei probably never listens to. Alexei is going to do whatever the fuck it is he’s doing instead of taking care of their father. Avoiding the inevitable, in his own way.

Maybe the best that Ilya can hope for is that his father knows a little peace soon. That’s probably the only way any of them will.

He puts his phone back in his pocket.

Ilya hates the sudden anxiety that threads along the tracks of his veins, tangles around his heart, as soon as he’s put his phone away. This is where he heads back to the living room, sits back down with Shane, and tries unsuccessfully to overcome the war in his mind. This is where it always goes wrong, isn’t it? These next few moments are his undoing.

And if Shane remembers his father, then what else does he remember? All of it? The part where Ilya told him, his whole heart open for display, that he would choose Shane even if it meant he could never go home? The part where Shane told him he wasn’t worth it?

Will Shane even be in the living room when he returns? Or will he have already left again? Did he work himself up to a panic while Ilya was busy with the mundane horror of patching together the remnants of his broken family?

But when he returns to the living room, Shane is still there. Right where Ilya left him, staring at the game with the volume all the way down, mind on everything else.

We’ll figure it out together. Maybe Shane really means that, this time. Maybe it’s okay if Ilya lets himself believe it.

Ilya is cautious as he returns to his place on the couch, like Shane might bolt if he makes any sudden movements. Shane watches him sit down, nodding his head in the direction Ilya came from.

“Does he remember you? When he calls?” Shane asks.

Ilya shrugs half-heartedly. Shane has overheard a thousand versions of that phone call. Even if he doesn’t know a word of Russian, Ilya thinks he must understand some of it by now. The hurt it leaves behind, at the very least, must be apparent.

“He remembers a version of me. Me as a child. Not me, now.”

Not any part of his hockey career, which his father always treated like a perpetual disappointment. His father’s mind had already started slipping by Ilya’s rookie season, letting this be known in subtle contradictions, in brief glimpses of confusion. By the time he won the Cup, his father was already too far gone to even acknowledge it. Now, all that’s left is for Ilya to watch his father die from afar, perpetually his disappointing child.

“Is that why you always go back to Russia in the summer?”

Ilya thinks about how last summer, he had spent more of his time calling doctors and filling prescriptions and forcing his father to drink water than he had dancing in clubs with Sveta and an endless string of girls he found himself less and less interested in.

“It’s part of why, yes.”

Shane is quiet for a long time, mulling over his thoughts, before he speaks.

“I don’t understand why you do this, then. Aren’t you scared? Why would you risk everything?”

Shane’s words feel like fingers digging into Ilya’s bruises, like he’s working blood into a cut. Fuck, Ilya doesn’t know why this should even take him by surprise. He knew Shane probably remembered everything he told him about Russia and his father. But it’s still soft and sore, and Ilya is still scared. Shane is tense beside him, like he’s trying not to panic. Like he’s anticipating an answer that he himself is terrified of. The why that even Ilya himself denied was true, until he was forced to confront it again, and again.

But he remembers everything. Which means he remembers that, too. Which means he’s waiting to hear what he’s already expecting Ilya to say, that there is only one reason Ilya would choose Shane even over going home, even over his own safety.

“I think you know why,” Ilya says softly.

Shane’s eyes are wide and scared. He nods absently, takes in a breath too big, lets it out too fast. Ilya has seen this a thousand times, the seed of the panic that builds and builds until Shane is out the door. Soon, he will turn away from Ilya, rise from the couch, whisper I’m sorry. And that will be the end. Predictable, and devastating all the same.

“Shane…”

“What happens now?” Shane says. “I don’t remember this part.”

Ilya’s voice is quiet. “Well, you usually leave.”

Shane nods along to this. He must be feeling the swell in his chest by now, telling him to get out. He turns his face away, blinks hard as he glances around the room, like he’s trying to tether himself to something other than Ilya.

“What happens when I stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you don’t remember?” He looks to Ilya, almost like he can’t believe that to be true.

“No, Shane. Because it’s never happened. You always leave.”

Ilya watches the words register in Shane’s expression, his eyes wide, dark pools of shock and shame and fear. His chest is still rising and falling, too fast, his mouth working like he’s trying to hold back the words that Ilya is waiting and dreading to hear. I’m sorry. I can’t.

But Shane takes a breath. Another breath. And presses his mouth into a thin line, the way he looks when Ilya stares at him from across the face-off circle, when Shane has set his mind to winning the puck.

“Well, I’m not going to leave,” he says. It looks like it takes everything in him to say it, but it’s there, already in Ilya’s heart, lodged like an arrow. “I promise.”

Ilya has never been a particularly superstitious player. He doesn’t bother wearing the same socks through playoffs, he sleeps on the wrong side of the bed sometimes, just to tempt fate. So maybe it’s the circumstances he’s found himself in that have him afraid to speak, even to muster up a thank you. As if saying anything could still make things go wrong. He feels like he’s balancing on the edge of a wire, thousands of feet above the ground, and he just felt the wind pick up and blow across his back.

So he just stares at Shane, whose chest is still working in and out at too fast of a pace to be healthy, but whose face looks like he’s about to win the face-off. Ilya has seen that look before goals, before the sort of humiliating feints Shane does around him that leave him looking stupid. He doesn’t know if he’s ever seen it off the ice before. Shane looks, for once, something beyond just scared shitless to be sitting in Ilya’s living room while they are honest with one another.

And then, Ilya feels like he’s going to cry, and that’s probably just as bad as saying the wrong thing out loud. So he gets up, picks up their empty plates, and stalks off to the kitchen, where he can run the water and pretend to wash them and maybe sniffle where Shane can’t hear him.

He’s there, at the kitchen sink, holding onto the edge of the counter with his head dropped below his shoulders, when he feels arms wrap around his chest and the weight of Shane’s head fall onto his back.

“Hey,” Ilya says wetly.

“Is this because of me?” Shane says. His voice is muffled against Ilya’s skin. Ilya can feel the words reverberate in his body. “Is this my fault? Because I always leave?”

Ilya brings his hand up to find one of Shane’s, laces their fingers together. He realizes as soon as he does that he’s wanted to do it for ages. Could he have, this whole time? Or did they have to spend a thousand afternoons together for him to be allowed to?

“I don’t think it is anyone’s fault,” Ilya says quietly.

Shane buries his face further into Ilya’s back, warm and dangerously damp.

“I’m scared,” he says finally.

“I know.”

“I don’t know what will happen if we…”

Ilya squeezes Shane’s fingers. “I know.”

“If anyone found out… What will happen if they find out about me? If they find out about you?”

“I don’t know.”

Shane bites down a laugh. “I thought you’d know everything by now.”

Ilya leans his head back. Shane’s spiky hair tickles his neck. He turns into it, letting it brush against his lips.

“I think now we know about the same.”

“Well, I don’t know shit. Except what you’ve told me, I guess. Ilya, fuck, aren’t you scared?”

“Probably, I am.”

“What if you get kicked out of the league? What if you can’t go back to Russia?”

“Shane…”

“What if your father dies and you can’t even go back home to bury him?”

“Shane…”

“What.” Shane makes a wet sound behind him. “What is it.”

Ilya turns in Shane’s arms, so he can run his fingers along the corners of Shane’s eyes, red-rimmed and glossy. He leans forward and rests his forehead against Shane’s, breathes in the air between them.

“I am scared, Shane. I am. I am scared you will leave. I am scared that I won’t ever get the chance to find out what happens after this.”

Shane’s voice is hoarse. “There are worse things than me leaving, I think.”

“No, there are not.”

Shane shudders against him, shakes his head where it rests against Ilya’s. Ilya pulls back, tries to catch his eyes. They are so dark and deep, full of fear of things he can’t control.

How can he tell him? That somewhere in the eternity of this day, he’s stopped worrying about tomorrow. That the future is just another point on a map, or a cell in a strip of film. Film can be edited, it can be moved around. It isn’t destiny.

“I don’t know what happens to us,” Ilya says. “But I think we will be okay, whatever it is. Because this time, you stay. I thought maybe that was impossible, but you remember everything, and you still decided to stay.”

And if Shane is still here, then what chance does the future have to hurt them? It can be changed. It can all be changed.

As long as Shane stays.

Ilya takes Shane’s face in his hands, tips his head up so he can’t turn toward the fear. So he’s just looking at Ilya, who maybe can be brave enough for both of them.

“Shane,” he says. “It is okay. I am not in Russia. I am in beautiful house in Boston with beautiful, scared man.” He drinks in Shane’s damp smile like cold water after second shift on the ice. “And it will be okay. We will figure something out. Right? Because…”

He wants to tell him why he’s come to be so sure about this. Why he believes Shane, when Shane can barely seem to believe himself. He wants to be honest, but honest means saying because I love you, Shane Hollander, and the words catch on his teeth as Shane’s eyes grow wet again, and Ilya gets caught up on wiping the threat of tears away, tracing his fingers across the orion’s belt of Shane’s freckles. But he tries again, voice cracking with the effort.

“Because I…”

But Shane Hollander, loath to lose to Ilya Rozanov in anything, even this, says it first.

“Ya tebya lyublyú, Ilya.”

Pronounced all wrong, no matter the number of repetitions, conjured up from memory without any practice. It’s the most beautiful thing Ilya has ever heard in his life.

Ilya doesn’t realize he’s crying until he hears how sad and choked his own voice sounds when he says, “Fuck, Shane,” and collapses against him, buries his head into Shane’s neck.

“Sorry,” Shane murmurs, running a hand over Ilya’s back.

“Shut up,” Ilya says, squeezing into him. He will stay here forever, if allowed. “I love you. I love you so much.”

Ilya doesn’t know if this is it, the way out he’s been looking for through a hundred, a thousand repeated days. But it has to be, because it feels like freedom. Shane’s breath against his lips, his wet, trembling kiss. His love, given over with shaking, scared hands.

This is everything. And if it took a million days more to get here, Ilya would do it. If they both had to be wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, in order to finally get it right, then it was worth it.

And if he wakes up tomorrow and it’s Wednesday again and he must start over?

Well, he will have the memory of this, and he’ll know it’s not impossible. What is impossible about this? Even planets in opposite orbits can collide, if willed so by a strong enough gravity. Beams of light, on parallel paths, can find themselves curving into the irresistible pull of a black hole, and come out the other side forever changed. What else could this be between them, but the strongest force of all?

“I love you, Ilya,” Shane says.

Maybe the tilting of the world that Ilya feels is the movie reel, clicking back into place. Maybe it is just the unavoidable gravity of Shane Hollander, pulling Ilya out of his own orbit forever. He can’t resist it. He doesn’t remember why he ever wanted to.

“Ya tebya lyublyú, Shane.”

They end up in the place they have almost always started, Ilya’s bedroom, falling down together in his unmade sheets. It’s already near dusk, everything cast in shadow. Ilya crawls over Shane’s body in the growing dark, groping over his clothes, trying to touch all of him at once. Shane tugs his shirt over his head, throws it toward the end of the bed, where it slips off the corner and ends up on the floor.

“Touch me,” Shane whispers, running his hands through Ilya’s hair, down his back.

The best part of Ilya’s day, every time, he thinks, as he does as he’s told, watching Shane writhe and arch into his hand, as wetted as he can manage with spit and precome.

“Are you going to come for me, like this?” Ilya says, a play at control that he doesn’t actually feel. He wonders, not for the first time, if Shane knows just how much he runs Ilya’s life. If he told him to get on his knees and beg for Shane’s ass, right now, Ilya would gladly do it. Shane has some idea that Ilya is the boss in bed, but really, it’s always been the other way around. Ilya worships him.

“No, want you inside me,” Shane breathes.

He moves toward the nightstand, grabbing for lube and condoms. He flicks on the light so he can see Shane’s quivering stomach, the flush beneath his freckles. Shane intercepts him halfway, his mouth wild. Ilya thinks he might die if he’s forced away from Shane’s hungry kiss, his tongue that’s going everywhere. So he slicks his fingers up blindly, doing his best with his eyes closed and his mouth on Shane’s. He gropes his way around the muscle of his stomach, the curve of his ass, dipping into the cleft as Shane opens his legs for him. He massages around Shane’s hole, lightly, teasing like maybe he won’t plunge his finger in, but Shane wraps his strong legs around Ilya’s waist and bucks into him, impatient and needy. Ilya loves him so fucking much. Of course he’ll give him this. He doesn’t really want to wait, either.

“Shane,” Ilya says, and slips both fingers inside. Shane can take it, he’s waited all day for it.

“I think I remember this, too,” Shane says. Ilya feels the curve of Shane’s smile against his lips.

“Yes, we have had lots of practice.”

Ilya plunges his fingers as deep as they can go, curls them inward, searches out Shane’s prostate. Shane throws his head back and moans, and Ilya’s reward is the exposed skin of Shane’s neck offered up for him to bite and lap at.

“Ready?” he says, even as he’s rearing back, working on the condom, pouring out more lube onto his fingers to slick himself up.

“Please, Ilya, I need you.”

Ilya pushes himself in to the hilt, eyes sliding closed, powerless against the way it feels inside Shane’s body. Burning hot and impossible to escape, a supernova, an exploding star. Ilya wandered into Shane’s orbit at eighteen years old and has been caught in his gravity ever since. Shane tried to leave him, and the very laws of physics bent to keep them from remaining apart. There is nothing more powerful in the universe than the magnetic pull of Ilya to Shane.

Shane has Ilya by the back of his neck, closing the distance between them.

“You never got tired of this?” he says, eyes wide open, glassy and soft.

Ilya wants to laugh. Could Ilya get tired of food? Of water? Of air? It is an equally ridiculous question. What else could I love you possibly mean?

“Never.”

Shane’s smile is a kiloton bomb in Ilya’s chest. He bends down to swallow it, and kisses him the entire time, until he can’t breathe, until he’s shaking and pounding into Shane so that he comes first, because Ilya is going to embarrass himself otherwise.

“Oh god, Ilya!” Shane cries, around the edge of Ilya’s lips, flooding the space between their bodies. And Ilya is gone too, almost at the same time.

“Shane…”

Ilya thinks, no matter what happens next, he’s never going to stop saying his name like that. The power it has over him. Maybe their entire lives, they won’t be able to call each other anything but Hollander and Rozanov in public, but here, in Ilya’s arms, he will always be Shane. His Shane. His neutron star. His gravity well.

Long, long after, when they are cleaned up and dry and the night has caught up to them in earnest, Ilya lies with Shane on his chest, feeling him breathe and absently sifting his hands through Shane’s hair. Now that he’s gotten exactly what he wanted, the day almost feels too short. He could use another thousand days of lying with Shane just like this.

“What is going to happen tomorrow?” Shane says quietly, nosing into the crook of Ilya’s neck.

“I don’t know.”

“Will we forget everything?”

Ilya blinks hard in the darkness, glad Shane can’t see from under his chin.

“Impossible,” he whispers, pulling Shane tighter.

“Yeah.”

Ilya presses a kiss to his forehead. Shane tilts his chin up to meet his lips. For now, it’s enough.

Ilya holds Shane until his breathing evens out, until he is asleep in Ilya’s arms. He still has a few hours to go until two AM. He could stay awake, face whatever is coming head-on. See if they are moving forward or staying in place.

But he doesn’t want to feel Shane slipping from his embrace. He doesn’t want to have him beside him one moment, and not the next. If he falls asleep like this, the two of them wrapped up in each other, maybe he can stretch this moment out forever.

Ilya closes his eyes, and slips into a dream.

Chapter End Notes

One more chapter! Thank you for sticking around for this story, I've loved reading the comments people have left, I'm so happy y'all have enjoyed it so far.

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

Final chapter! Feels more like a coda than a chapter, at just 4k words, short and (semi)-sweet. No chapter warnings, enjoy <3

Ilya wakes up groggy and still tired, the kind of gummy exhaustion that hangs on after oversleep. His head pounds at the temples, tight behind the eyes in the way that will lead to a full-blown headache before long. Maybe he’s dehydrated. He’ll have to take some acetaminophen and drink water before he heads to the arena. He can’t lose to Shane just because he’s woken up feeling like shit.

A little endorphin flood swells in his chest as soon as he pictures Shane in his mind, padded out in his away game jersey. It’s odd, but it feels like Ilya dreamed about him. The remnants tug at the edges of his consciousness, and Ilya has the distinct sense that he was in the middle of something long and arduous, and Shane was there, and… he doesn’t remember much else.

Shane came to his house yesterday, right? Ilya had intended to ask him to stay, but maybe he forgot to, or chickened out, because he’s certainly not here now. The entire plan had been rather off-the-cuff, midnight grocery order notwithstanding. Ilya’s sure he would remember it if something as monumental as Shane spending the night in his house had actually happened.

Ilya lets himself come slowly to full awareness, not moving, letting his phone rest on the nightstand somewhere behind him. He waits until the grogginess fades from his eyes to fully open them, the sun briefly making his head throb worse. He’s a little sore– it’s probably the weird position he fell asleep in, curled over on his side, arms outstretched. Like he was holding something. But it’s just him in bed, light pouring over his sheets. Ilya rolls over, presses his face into the pillow. It smells like something spicy and woody, like the cologne Shane wears.

Shane. So he must have been here. But the details are incorporeal, tangling up in the dream, and what remains is this warm flood in his chest. This soft ache Ilya feels at the thought of him.

That ache feels like it’s wrapped around a confession, a specific set of words that Ilya swears he can recall himself saying, as unbelievable as it is: I love you, Shane.

Ilya sits up in vague alarm. What the fuck– did he tell Shane Hollander he loved him last night? More unbelievable still, he remembers Shane’s voice, telling him the same thing, in Russian.

It’s that detail that assures Ilya it must have been the dream. Ilya dreams mostly in Russian, even after so many years in the United States. He wakes up sometimes and must remind himself that no, Boston wouldn’t trade him unexpectedly, his coach does not speak Russian, that wasn’t real. It must be the same now.

Nothing else makes sense. Shane would not say that. Maybe not ever, even in English.

Still, it lingers in Ilya’s mind as he forces himself into running shoes. He’ll feel better with some circulation, just a twenty, thirty minute circuit around the neighborhood. His head pounds with each heavy step on the asphalt, but at least he finally feels awake. The breeze across his neck and shoulders feels nice, cooling, like an ice pack running along his damp skin. By the time he’s back home, pulling bottled water from his fridge, he thinks he might not even need headache medicine.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, just around eleven AM, when he’s almost out the door.

[Jane]
See you tonight :)

Ilya thinks he must be stupid, to be so happy to see this. Shane doesn’t normally text him before games, except to chirp stupid shit like Ready to lose? as if he’s eight years old. Sometimes, if they have plans after, he’ll text him his room number, without any other incriminating information, like they are a pair of fucking spies. Like Shane is afraid the fucking CIA is tapping their phones.

But they don’t have plans tonight; that was yesterday. And Shane’s texting him anyway, in this gratuitous, anticipatory way, when he isn’t even going to get fucked after. Like it’s Ilya he is looking forward to seeing, and not just Ilya’s body or the orgasms it can provide.

And then there was that dream, that I love you, whispered in Russian. Hours removed from it, what Ilya can still remember is that it had felt like those words had been hard-earned. That it had taken him a long, long time to hear them.

Ilya is not actually that deep in denial. He knows what it means, to dream about Shane like that. To have his chest constrict like he got hit in the solar plexus just from a text message and seeing the name Jane on his phone. He had a whole plan for Shane to spend the night, because all he wants lately is more time with him. Not just to fuck. He just wants Shane near him. Even if he chickened out in the end, and didn’t ask, it doesn’t change the fact that the plan was there. What Ilya really wants, what he really feels, is all laid bare in just the idea of it.

He doesn’t even think of him as Hollander anymore, he realizes. It’s Shane. It’s been like that for a while, maybe. After all, he put their names in Shane’s phone as Lily and Jane, when they could have been Holly and Rose. The pseudonyms have allowed him to get away with calling Shane by his first name for longer than he probably would have consciously allowed himself.

It’s a little dangerous, to switch over in his mind from what is safe to maybe what he really wants. He wonders what might happen if Ilya called him Shane one day. Would Shane freak out, run away? Would he whisper Ilya back?

In his dream, he thinks maybe both happened.

He sees Shane at the opening face-off, as they hunch down across from each other. The first thing Ilya thinks of is the fucking dream, and Shane’s voice saying ya tebya lyublyú.

For a brief moment, Ilya wants to whisper it across the dot.

Shane’s eyes are shadowed beneath his helmet, but Ilya can see them well enough, deep brown and focused all on him. Through the edge of competition, Shane’s ever-present desire to win, his gaze is almost soft.

“Hey,” Shane says.

“Hi.”

And it’s nothing, except they are both smiling wide when the puck drops, and the grin stays on Ilya’s face the rest of the game. Even when Boston loses at home to Montreal, 4-3. Even when Shane is gone from his city, headed to Tampa on a flight right after the game, a perfectly boring city for a perfect, boring man.

Shane texts Ilya pictures of his teammates’ latte art; not his own, of course, he lives on air and seaweed or whatever. Ilya texts back a picture of a box of Dunkin Donuts, with bites taken out of more than half of them. Shane calls him disgusting. Ilya sends back a picture of his grinning mouth, full of starchy donut, cloyingly sweet strawberry jam running down the corners of his lips. Shane sends him an emoji of throwing up, which he might actually do when faced with carbohydrates. Ilya texts back: next time is your hole instead ;-) and the dots appear and disappear and appear again.

[Jane]
You’re so gross

I can’t believe I miss you

Ilya feels like he might fucking cry, with sugar and fucking strawberry jam all over his face. He texts back quickly, wiping his hands on his shirt so he doesn’t smear the screen.

[Lily]
I miss you too

He watches Shane and, unfortunately, the rest of the Metros decimate Tampa in their own house. Ilya has absolutely no claim to the victory, except that he might be secretly and terminally in love with Montreal’s captain, but he feels a fierce pride all the same.

Shane texts him on the flight to Dallas, a blurry photo of some shitty X-Squad movie that Ilya has probably also watched, maybe even on a flight to Dallas himself. Ilya texts him his dick in his hand. But he warns him first, with Look what happen when I think of you, so if Shane is sitting next to one of his teammates he can angle the phone away.

He looks up Shane’s next home game for no real reason at all.

His father is not well, worse by the week, lately. He calls and he’s more confused and angry than ever when he does. The whiplash Ilya feels when he’s staring into the phone at Shane’s texts and pictures and his father’s name pops up is close to a heart attack. If he had another way to communicate with Shane, he’d probably have tossed his phone in the Atlantic Ocean by now. He doesn’t want to be reminded anymore that his father’s death, and that final trip to Russia to deal with it all, still looms over his future.

Ilya calls Shane once, after his father babbles to him on the phone about losing to America in the Olympics, like he’s pulling threads from history to invent new ways to be disappointed in him. Shane is somewhere in the Midwest, and he sounds tired on the phone. Ilya doesn’t tell him what his father said, because it doesn’t matter. It’s as incorporeal as the remnants of a nightmare. It’s just that his nervous system doesn’t know that, automatically reacting to a threat that isn’t real. He just says, “my father called,” and somehow Shane knows enough to know he doesn’t need to ask. Instead, Shane drones on about turnovers in the Dallas game, and the ways his team’s defencemen need to tighten up. Ilya listens to the even tone of his voice and is shocked at how much better he feels after they’ve hung up.

It’s different between them. Has been since Shane was in Boston, if Ilya had to put a pin on it. Nothing outward has changed. They are still largely apart from each other, still pulled in opposite directions, only meeting to clash, like two planets that occasionally, dramatically eclipse. Every horrible thing in Ilya’s life still looms over him: his family that hates him, but relies on him, which makes them hate him even more. His country, which he still has yet to devise a permanent escape from beyond convincing Svetlana to marry him for a green card. The fact that he is in love with someone who he isn’t sure he can be with, the way his teammates can be with their women, kissing them on the ice after winning the Cup and marrying them and raising children with them without the threat of ruining their careers and lives.

These things used to chill Ilya down to the marrow. He used to tell himself that every time he met up with Shane, it would be the last time, that all they were doing was delaying the inevitable. Even inviting him to his house, his plan to have him stay the night, was the sort of self-destructive impulse Ilya gets that makes him reach for cigarettes and start fights that he knows he won’t win. He used to be so afraid.

He doesn’t know why that’s changed, only that he knows, deeply and assuredly, that it has. That they don’t hold each other at arm’s length anymore. Like some pact has been made, or promises exchanged, but Ilya knows they haven’t, except maybe in a dream. Shane whispering to him in Russian, holding Ilya while he cries, brushing tears away from his face. Ilya saying they will figure it out, together.

His mother said dreams could be prophetic. She said they could reveal the most honest version of yourself.

Maybe that’s why.

Ilya is at home one night, weeks after their last game against each other. He’s half-watching a movie he doesn’t understand, even with the subtitles on. Too many scientific words. He doesn’t know what he was thinking, putting on something about space travel. He’s about to text Shane and ask him what color of underwear he’s got on– not strictly necessary, they’re always black– when his phone lights up with an incoming call.

Shane.

Ilya connects the call, and Shane’s face fills his screen. He’s propped up on a mountain of pillows, lit from the side by a bedside lamp. Ilya notices all of that absently, because his mind is focused like a laser on one thing.

“You wear glasses?” he says, and quickly takes a screenshot for posterity.

Shane rolls his eyes, exasperated with him already.

“Only while reading,” he says, taking a put-upon tone, as if Ilya called him and not the other way around. He’s a bad liar and an even worse actor, and it makes Ilya suspect Shane wore glasses on purpose to see his reaction. He takes them off like he’s embarrassed. Ah, well. Ilya has the photographic proof for later.

Ilya can ask him, in person, what color underwear he has on now. Or ask him to take them off and put on a show for him. Have him put the glasses back on first, of course.

“What are you reading?” he hears himself say instead. There must be something wrong with him. Even Shane looks a little surprised.

“Um…”

He holds up the book to the screen. A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking. Ilya raises his eyebrows.

“I’ve been kind of interested in this stuff lately,” Shane says bashfully.

A big, stupid grin spreads across Ilya’s face. He knew Shane read; he’s seen books on his bedside table when he came over to his apartment to fuck, but he would have thought they would all be about hockey. Shane’s interests don’t seem to extend far beyond their sport, and Ilya, and those two topics are probably more intertwined in Shane’s mind than even Ilya imagines them to be.

“Wow. Mr. Science Man.”

“Shut up,” Shane says reflexively. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“What am I going to say?” Ilya asks.

He’s thinking about Shane’s glasses again. He’s going to imagine Shane wearing them every time he texts him at night, now. Ilya may need to start FaceTiming him, like this, instead. He’s clearly been missing out.

“You’re going to say I’m boring and I’m reading a boring book.”

“I was not going to say that.” Ilya puts his hand to his chest like he is deeply hurt.

“Really,” Shane says flatly.

“I was going to ask you what it’s about.”

Ilya briefly saw the cover when Shane held it up: a serious looking man seated before a backdrop of the cosmos. Ilya’s movie is still paused on the television in front of him. A tiny spaceship is frozen on the screen, dwarfed in the vastness of a black hole that it is flying dangerously close to. For some reason, the concept had been strangely compelling to him.

Shane snorts out a laugh.

“Honestly, it’s kind of hard to understand. I usually just read about hockey.”

Ilya grins wide enough to hurt and is briefly alarmed at how good he feels for knowing Shane so well.

“Ah, see? Now, that is boring.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Okay. Anyway. It’s talking about Einstein, um, the theory of relativity?” He looks a little apologetic. “Sorry. That probably doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“I know what it means,” Ilya says softly.

He can’t possibly explain why, but he knows what it means. It feels like a deep, old memory has risen to the surface. A word comes to mind: subconsciously. He’s been feeling bits and pieces of that all the time lately. When he talks to Shane, recently, their conversations feel laden with experiences that he can’t tie to any time or place in particular. At home, just walking around his house, his emotions sometimes feel pulled in unexpected directions, as if by invisible strings. He’ll find himself getting inexplicably choked up in his kitchen, standing by the sink, and it makes him miss Shane for no reason at all.

And here it is again: what the fuck does he know about Albert Einstein, anyway? Nothing, and yet it’s so familiar that it grates on him. Like he ought to know, or maybe once did, but the why has slipped out of his brain like sand through his fingers.

“Tell me about this,” Ilya says, because he doesn’t know how to explain how he feels even to himself, let alone Shane. “Theory of relativity.”

“Uh, okay. Well, it’s talking about spacetime, and time dilation? And black holes, stuff like that.”

Ilya’s eyes flicker to the television screen. From what he could gather of the plot, the astronauts on the ship were worried that a thousand years would pass inside the black hole, and it would feel like just a day to them. Time dilation.

A single day, stretched out to a thousand years by a bend in the laws of physics. A movie, paused on the same frame too long. Ilya feels strange. He stares at the television and wonders why he thought to watch this movie, why Shane thought to read that book.

Shane sighs. Ilya wonders if he’s been asked a question that he missed. But no, Shane’s just frustrated with himself.

“Sorry, I’m not doing a good job of explaining,” he says, and Ilya wonders just how long he had been zoning out, looking at the TV. “Like I said, I don’t really understand it.”

What is that word? That French word that English borrows. Deja vu. Did Shane teach him that? That is the closest thing to what Ilya feels right now. Not the same, but maybe close.

“Maybe I can read this book sometime, too,” Ilya says, finally wrenching his attention back to Shane’s face. “I think maybe I would like it.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Shane adjusts himself in his little pillow cavern, scooting himself further upright. “Anyway, that’s not why I called. I, uh, wanted to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“So, uh, listen…” Shane immediately looks like he’s breathing too hard. He stops, blows out a breath. And starts talking again, too fast. “I don’t know, maybe you think this is too much, and I understand if you don’t want to–”

“Shane–”

“But I was, um, having lunch with my parents? The other day?” Shane’s voice ticks up like he’s asking Ilya if this is true, instead of telling him so. His brow is furrowed in the center of his face, but the camera is sadly too shitty and the lighting too low for Ilya to make out the pinpoints of his freckles. It’s a shame; he likes when Shane gets worked up and wrinkles the ones along his nose. “And they were talking about Wimbledon and how Rolex wants me to go this summer…”

Ilya can see how nervous he is, even without the nonsense about Wimbledon that Ilya doesn’t understand the relevance of at all. It catches in Ilya’s chest, making his heart thump louder, too, as if in sympathy. If Shane was in front of him right now, Ilya would already be kissing away the worry lines in his forehead. But instead, he’s quiet, waiting for Shane to continue.

“And I realized that I only have like, two weeks off a year. And I didn’t want to spend it with someone that I don’t even–” Love. Ilya can hear the ghost of the word even as Shane presses his mouth together, and instead says, “--know.”

“Oh.” Ilya’s heart pulls at the unsaid part.

“So I was wondering,” Shane continues. “I have this cottage? In Ottawa?”

“Yes, I know.”

The corners of Shane’s mouth manage to tug both up and down at almost the same time. “You do?”

Ilya nods. “I saw on TV.”

He in fact saw it just the other day, waiting on Svetlana to get ready to go out– she was promoting a car dealership at a club as a brand ambassador, but god forbid anyone call her an influencer– and flicking through sports channels until Shane’s pretty, summer-freckled face had filled the screen. He had had to pretend to be disinterested in Shane Hollander arching his back like a porn star on his giant television in front of a sparkling lake that looked like a Renaissance painting.

He had thought, sprawled on his couch, I wish I was there with him.

“It’s super private,” Shane says, like he needs to sweeten the deal. Like Ilya wouldn’t meet him at the top of an active volcano, if he asked. He would meet Shane on the fucking moon. “It has its own road that no one can even get into, normally. So we would never be seen by anyone. And anyway–”

“Yes, I will go,” Ilya says quickly.

“Oh. What?” Shane exhales like he just finished a sprint.

“To your cottage with you. In the summer. That is what you are trying to say in one million words, right?”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” Shane blinks at the screen. “You don’t need more time to think about it? I know you have things with your, uh, your dad.”

Again, Ilya thinks he ought to be surprised by this, Shane knowing about his father. Ilya doesn’t remember ever telling him, can’t even imagine why he would. But Shane knows. And Ilya knew, somehow, that he did. Suspects, in fact, that Shane might know everything about Ilya.

“No, I don’t need time to think about it,” he says. The only other thing he thinks he can say is I love you, Shane, but it would be a waste to do that over the phone. Not when he has just been invited to what the TV program called Shane’s oasis. Not when he could maybe say it beside that sparkling, serene lake. Or on his knees. Or sinking into the inviting warmth of Shane’s body.

Besides, he doesn’t want to do something embarrassing, like cry, on a fucking video call.

“Oh, okay. Great,” Shane says. The tightness relaxes out of his shoulders. His brow evens out, planes into a smile. “Thank you, Ilya. I’m really glad you’re coming.”

Ilya blinks hard. He doesn’t speak until he is sure his voice will come out perfectly even.

“Me too, Shane.” He smiles so wide he wonders if the screen cuts it off at the edges. “But I have caveat.”

Shane laughs, rolls his eyes with his whole head, into the pillows at his back. “Oh my god. Here we go.”

“Yes,” Ilya purrs. “I want to see you reading sexy Stephen Hawking book about spacetime with your cute glasses and no clothes on.”

Shane shakes his head, like he can’t believe Ilya is who he is. And smiles, like he loves it. Loves him. It’s been there the whole time. Ilya just had to allow himself to see it.

“Maybe,” Shane says.

“Mm. I think that is a yes.”

“Good night, Ilya,” Shane says.

“Good night.”

Ilya turns down the volume on his television, but lets the movie play. He watches the black hole fill the screen, like it’s pulling him in, too, along with the movie astronauts in their tiny movie spaceship. It’s probably supposed to be scary, but Ilya finds it strangely calming, instead.

It’s a risky maneuver, flying into a well of gravity so strong you may not ever get out. Choosing to do so, instead of running away from it. Even the rules of physics fail around a force powerful enough to curve light beams and tie knots in time itself.

Ilya doesn’t know what awaits them, on the other side of the cottage. On the other side of finally having the time and the courage to just be honest with each other. Somewhere beyond that is his family, is Russia, is their sport and the recriminations and even danger that may come.

But maybe his dreams have been prophetic after all, like Mama said. Maybe he was shown, somewhere along the way, that the future is nothing that can’t be changed, that certain forces are powerful enough to bend time and destiny itself to their wills. What is all of that fear, in the face of love? It is nothing so much as a lesser, weaker gravity. What is the distance between them? The time they haven’t yet had? Nothing that can’t be closed, or stretched, dilated like a perfect afternoon.

A day can be eternity. Eternity can be a moment.

He thinks, as long as Shane is with him, he would take either.

Chapter End Notes

And that's it for Tuna Torment Nexus! This fic ended up in a really interesting place from where I thought it would go when I started it. It ended up being much more about Ilya's father and him working through his feelings about his family than I originally envisioned. But that's such a big part of what holds Ilya back from being fully able to accept being in love with Shane that I suppose it's natural he would have to deal with that in his time loop in order to come out the other side. That part of the fic almost felt like it was developing itself as I progressed through writing it.

Thank you SO MUCH for reading. I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed reading people's comments, and I will try to get back to everyone, because I am so unbelievably grateful and happy for everyone who liked reading this weird little fic as much as I liked writing it! I really feel like I found the people who match my freak with this one. Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts/comments on the final chapter, too. <3

See you all again, hopefully, for the next one!