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:

Established Relationship, Post-Episode: s01e06 The Cottage (Heated Rivalry), Top Ilya Rozanov, Bottom Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Anal Sex, Anal Fingering, Frottage, Domestic Fluff, Armpit Kink, Shane Hollander's Cottage, this is about being in love with someone for a decade but also not knowing their birthday

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-17 Words: 12,039 Chapters: 1/1

build a nest for us to sleep in

Summary

Shane doesn’t know how to grocery shop for two. He doesn’t know how to do any of this, really. He’s keenly aware that this was the longest stretch of time he’d be spending alone with Ilya, with any one person ever, outside of his parents.

In a way, it feels like playing house, unpacking the groceries and setting out a set of towels and washcloths for him. It is playing house. This is what it might feel like, to be able to have him all the time. The thought feels impossible to contemplate, terrifying to dwell on for longer than a minute or two at a time.

on finally getting to know your situationship of 10 years

Notes

vignettes from the cottage (both during ep6 and beyond) + playing house until you figure out how to do it for real + gin rummy + pit stuff + trying to cut your boyfriend's hair + learning how to be domestic when you've literally never been domestic with anyone ever

was thinking a lot about jacob saying that shane and ilya at the cottage are like two puppies learning to play and this came out of that

title is from all my stars aligned by st. vincent

Shane drums his fingers on the wheel, checks and then double-checks Ilya’s flight’s arrival time. He had almost downloaded the Air Canada app this morning, but he figured that would be overkill. He’d settled for keeping the flight tracker pulled up in a tab on his phone, that morning scanning the weather in Boston, then the weather near him, then the weather in Boston again for good measure, in case a thunderstorm or some freak July blizzard might delay him.

He had changed the sheets in his bedroom this morning, and then, not wanting to assume anything, had changed the sheets in the nicest guest room as well, the one with the second-best view of the lake. Then, not wanting to assume that Ilya would want a lake view, he’d changed the sheets in all the other guest rooms too. 

Usually, he had a cleaning service to come in and do all of this, but the idea of anyone else intruding or suspecting anything made his stomach flip. He rearranged the pillows on the couch, then took a spare toothbrush out from his medicine cabinet in case Ilya might’ve forgotten his. He put fuel in the motorboat and dug through the storage trunk in the boathouse to find a second life jacket, trying it on to make sure it would fit.

Once the house had been prepared, he’d gone into town to stock up on enough groceries to make sure they wouldn’t have to leave for at least ten days. Ilya had been incredibly unhelpful when Shane had asked him about food restrictions, answering his texts with a series of question marks, then a second message that just read you know what I like followed by a grinning red devil emoji, which made zero sense no matter which way he tried to interpret it. 

When he got to the store, he realized he had no real idea of what Ilya wanted, what he liked to eat. He had seen him eat before, of course. He’s watched Ilya down his choice of chicken, fish, or steak as he held court one hotel ballroom table over from Shane at countless MLH events, and stared at the line of his back, broad and shirtless post-sex, while Ilya sticks his entire head into Shane’s fridge, bemoaning the lack of options as he wolfs one of the carefully portioned meals Shane’s nutritionist had prepped for him. 

He just doesn’t know what Ilya eats in private, that’s all. What he chooses to eat when he’s alone, when it’s just him. He doesn’t have a clue. They’ve never spent more than a few hours together at a time.

So instead, Shane goes with his gut, filling his cart with what he likes and what seems the most inoffensive: lean ground beef for hamburgers, corn on the cob, salmon and hangar stacks wrapped in butcher paper, a few six-packs of beer. He stares at the apples for a long time, trying to figure out how many to get for the two of them: a dozen? Would Ilya care about organic over non-organic? Probably not, but he wants the nicest versions of everything for him either way. A dozen organic apples into the cart, followed by a bulk-sized carton of blueberries, a rainbow-colored kid’s cereal he’d spotted once at Ilya’s apartment, three pints of $12 ice cream, all in different flavors.

Shane doesn’t know how to grocery shop for two. He doesn’t know how to do any of this, really. He’s keenly aware that this was the longest stretch of time he’d be spending alone with Ilya, with any one person ever, outside of his parents. 

In a way, it feels like playing house, unpacking the groceries and setting out a set of towels and washcloths for him. It is playing house. This is what it might feel like, to be able to have him all the time. The thought feels impossible to contemplate, terrifying to dwell on for longer than a minute or two at a time.

He’s never been in a situation like this before, one where the landscape ahead felt so totally uncharted. Shane’s whole life up until now had flowed smoothly from one milestone to another: juniors, then the draft, then a long, uninterrupted stretch of racking up trophies and Stanley Cups and medals during his professional career. 

Everything about this, about Ilya, makes him feel completely, totally unmoored, especially during these strange new days. A few months ago, the idea of spending a week, maybe the entire summer, alone with Ilya was unthinkable. He didn’t know which way was up anymore.

Now, checking his rearview mirror to see if he can catch Ilya emerging from the arrivals hall, Shane feels the same way he did waiting to step on the ice during his first game with the Metros, shifting his weight awkwardly on his skates from side to side in the entrance ramp to the arena, listening to the distant roar of the crowd and feeling as if he was watching himself from above. He can sense he’s on the knife-edge of something very big. He just doesn’t know what that might be yet.

He doesn’t even know what he wants it to be. For Ilya to be—what, his boyfriend? It seems like a bad joke, and yet. 

There is a part of him, very deep down, that doesn’t think of it as a joke. In fact, he can imagine it very clearly, if he lets himself: waking up next to Ilya, holding him as they fall asleep at night, kissing him without it needing to go anywhere, kissing him just because he wants to. Being able to really talk to him, the way he can’t talk to anyone else, talk to him about—.

He cuts the thought off before he gets ahead of himself.

Overnight, the cottage sprouts strange new growths: a second pair of sneakers by the front door, a toothbrush next to Shane’s on the sink counter (Ilya had forgotten his, and Shane feels smug as he hands over his spare). 

Ilya is neat, Shane knows this— his apartment and the countless hotel rooms of his that Shane had snuck into over the years had always been tidy, and he’s the same as a house guest, but still. It’s impossible not to notice another person’s presence here where there hadn’t been one before.

The one other addition Ilya has brought with him is the cigarettes. He tries to hide it as best he can from Shane, tiptoeing down to the lake early in the mornings and slipping back into bed twenty or thirty minutes later with his feet cool and clammy, like he’s been dangling them into the water, and smelling like smoke. When Shane sets a chipped dish he’d been meaning to throw out onto the deck table to use as an ashtray, Ilya makes a dramatic show of hanging his head like a guilty dog, then curling his cheek into Shane’s hand, smiling up at him sheepishly.

“I don’t care that you do it,” Shane had said, lying badly. “You don’t have to sneak away every time.”

Ilya snorted, turned his head to bite at the webbing of Shane’s hand where his index finger met his thumb.

“You do care. Okay to say so. I won’t do it around you.”

True to his word, he doesn’t. He doesn’t smoke as much as Shane had imagined, anyway. He alternates cigarettes with pulls off of a candy-colored vape and chewing cinnamon-flavored nicotine gum that Shane can still taste in his mouth when they kiss, spicy and warm with a bitter metallic bite underneath. 

He doesn’t know if Ilya’s cut down on smoking in the past few years or if this is some new arrangement, an adjustment for Shane’s benefit. They’re both doing that a lot lately, reshaping their habits, their lives bit by bit to make space for each other.

He’s smoking now though, sitting out on the deck with his bare feet propped up on the railing. Ilya taps the slowly lengthening ash of his cigarette into the bowl Shane brought him every so often as he talks on the phone. Shane is in the kitchen, chopping a fat yellow zucchini for dinner. There’s water starting to bubble on the stove for pasta, a tub of fresh ricotta out on the counter.

Ilya’s voice filters in softly through the open door, but Shane can’t understand a word of Russian, so he lets it wash over him without meaning. 

Ilya is talking to Svetlana, has been talking to her for nearly twenty minutes now. He’s animated on the call, gesticulating wildly with his hands, cigarette ash drooping between his fingertips, as if she can see him. 

Shane catches himself getting distracted by the way Ilya’s laugh makes his mouth stretch wide across his face until he can see all of his teeth, the chipped real ones and the fake ones, just a touch smoother and whiter than the others. He likes the way the fake ones feel when he gets his tongue into Ilya’s mouth, slick and slippery. He wonders if Ilya would ever let him hook a finger into his mouth, let him touch them directly.

What is he saying to her? For all of his planning about what to tell his parents, they hadn’t talked at all about what Ilya was going to say, who he could or couldn’t tell about where he was spending his July. The idea of someone else knowing makes his skin prickle until he has to shrug his shoulders up to his ears to shake the feeling off.

Ilya wouldn’t tell her he was with Shane. Shane knows he would never tell, not unless Shane had given him permission himself. But he wonders if Svetlana knows Ilya the way he does, knows that he likes men. They’ve never really talked about it, he realizes as he uses the dull edge of the knife to slide coins of zucchini into the pan. The oil sizzling in the bottom of the pan spits as the moisture from the zucchini hits it. 

Ilya had told him, of course, about his experiences with his coach’s son, and Shane knows there must be other guys beyond that. But he’d never thought to ask, so wrapped up in the two of them. There were so many things he’d never thought to ask him about. Svetlana probably knew him so much more, so much deeper than Shane did, he realizes with a pang.

When the sauce finishes, he sets a lid over it to keep it warm and steps out to join Ilya on the deck. He wants to touch him in some way, tuck his toes under Ilya’s thigh or slide a hand under his shirt to rest on his waist, but he can’t quite figure out how. Anyways, it feels too intimate to do while he’s on the phone with someone else.

On the other end of the line, he can just about make out Svetlana’s voice, tinny and far away. She calls Ilya Ilyusha, and Shane sounds it out in his head, turns the syllables of it over until they’re smooth and polished like river stones. He wonders how it would feel to call him that too.

“Two minutes,” Ilya mouths silently. 

Shane waves it off with a nod. He’s not in any rush, and besides, it’s nice to sit out here, to look out at the dark green-blue of the lake lapping the shore and let the evening birdsong and the rustle of trees and Ilya chattering away in Russian, unintelligible to Shane’s ears but warm all the same, melt into each other, fading together into something like music. 

One afternoon, it’s hot in a way that makes even the short walk down to the lake seem unbearable. Instead, Shane lets Ilya mash the down button on the air conditioning’s remote control (a network of mini splits that he had worked closely with his contractor to be as silent and near-invisible as possible, thank you very much) until the number bottoms out.

“Absolutely not. Anything below 15 degrees is just energy inefficient,” he says, taking the remote from him and adjusting it back to a saner temperature.

Ilya responds by blowing a raspberry, wrapping his hand around Shane’s ankle in his easy, affectionate way Shane has come to learn. 

“I love air conditioning,” Ilya says. Shane has been shuffling the deck of cards for several minutes now, and he thinks it’s finally perfectly randomized. “One of the best things about America. Frosty everywhere, all the time. Makes you sick, though.”

Shane is tempted to try to correct him on this, but he knows it’s useless. Ilya is full of countless tiny superstitions and hunches, he’s learned. He’d asked Shane this morning if he believed in spirits, voice chipper as he stirred milk into his coffee. The question was so out of nowhere that all Shane could think to ask was like whiskey?

He deals them seven cards each, sets the rest of the deck between them. The AC kicks in, a low hum cutting through the dense summer air.

“I don’t understand why I can’t be the banker or dealer or however you call it,” Ilya says, pouting.

“Because you don’t know the rules. How can you be in charge of the whole game if you don’t know the rules?” 

Even with the air conditioning, it still feels thick and muggy in the living room. Ilya has been shirtless all day, the tops of his shoulders pink from hours at the lake the day before, cross nestled between his pecs, stuck to the skin from sweat. 

If he looks at it for too long, it makes Shane’s mouth go dry. It makes the rules for gin rummy fly right out of his head.

The rules don’t seem to matter all that much anyhow. Ilya is distractible and slow to catch on, and Shane is admittedly not a patient teacher. To be fair, his student is less focused on learning how to play than he is on trying to crawl into Shane’s lap so he can grope at his dick over his shorts and steal unsubtle peeks at the cards in Shane’s hand. Nobody can blame him for getting annoyed.

“You need three of a kind, not just pairs, Ilya,” he says with a sigh. He can feel his motivation to play ebbing away, fighting a losing battle against frustration and heatstroke and Ilya’s hand climbing its way up his shin.

“Says who?” Ilya’s got both his hands on Shane’s legs now, one wrapped under each knee, and he’s using them to pull him down the length of the couch they’re both sprawled across, until he’s nearly draped over him.

That’s the rules of the game, Shane wants to say, but he knows when he’s been beat.

“Too hot,” he complains, folding his body over Ilya’s anyway. Ilya slides one big hand up to splay across Shane’s back, pressing them until they’re even closer, flush together with a thin sheen of sweat over them both, skin overwarm. Shane’s whole body feels so pleasantly heavy like this, as if he could sink right into Ilya, let the summer heat melt them together into one. 

His ears prickle and buzz with sensation, something fizzy that spreads down to the nape of his neck as Ilya kisses his neck with a soft, open mouth. His tongue presses flat to where the hollow of his throat meets his collarbones, and Shane feels Ilya’s tongue rasp a wet trail over the skin there, licking up beads of sweat. He knows he should find it gross, but instead it sends all of his blood rushing straight to his dick.

“Fuck,” he mumbles, the hazy air in the room starting to spin, and Ilya murmurs something back in Russian. Shane nudges his head up from where it’s buried in his neck to kiss him. 

Ilya’s mouth tastes like salt, the inside of it warm and wet and marine. Shane sucks on his full bottom lip until he swears that he can feel Ilya’s heartbeat pulsing underneath the thin skin there, and when he pulls back, a crystalline line of spit connects them for a moment before breaking. He groans at the loss and dips back in to lick it up.

He’s learning how much they both enjoy this, having long, unhurried stretches of time like this to let the feeling between them build, to make out sloppy and lazy like teenagers. They’d met, started up like this when they were 17, he thinks as he sucks at Ilya’s tongue, but they could never do this then. Not like this.

The intensity of the sex they’ve been having so far at the cottage is new. They’ve always been so good at this, fit so naturally together. Sex has always been the easiest thing for them, so it surprises him that there are still new dimensions he’s discovering to it, new noises they can wring out of each other, new shapes they make together. It makes him wonder how much more they could learn about each other, from each other, if they’re given more time.

When they’re grinding together, basically dry humping, Ilya’s eyes go glassy, his face ruddy and blotched. He switches to Russian mainly, little phrases that he refuses to translate, but that make Shane’s stomach flip nevertheless: moy zaychik, moy lyubimyy. 

His hands are everywhere: sliding over the expanse of his back, thumbing over one of Shane’s nipples and then coming back to tweak it hard, making Shane moan and his hips stutter forward. Ilya laughs at that.

Between the blazing sunlight pouring in through the windows and the building heat between them, Shane’s brain feels like it’s melting. He copies Ilya’s move from before, nuzzling at the crook of his neck and pressing the point of his tongue against his skin there. 

Above him, Ilya slides a hand into Shane’s hair, fingers sliding through the strands, stroking it back. Shane loves when he does this. It makes him feel like he’s being pet, like he’s something cherished. He wants to tell Ilya he can do this whenever he wants.

“Fuck,” Ilya groans, using the hand in his hair to tug Shane up by the hair sharply, almost meanly. He gazes at Shane for a beat, eyes heavy-lidded as he looks at him over. 

Shane’s mouth is still open slightly, and Ilya takes advantage of it, sliding his thumb between his slack, parted lips and pressing it down against Shane’s tongue, gently but firmly. His eyes don’t leave Shane’s once.

I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you, Shane thinks, but he barely has time to sit with that thought, let alone say it out loud, before Ilya’s thumb slips out of his mouth and he’s using his hold on his hair to move him once again, this time pressing Shane’s face down until it’s pressed into the crook of Ilya’s armpit.

There, his smell is overwhelming, a concentrate of Ilya, musky and mammalian and all-encompassing. He moans into it, letting Ilya press his nose against the hair there, nestling his face in. Ilya’s hand is cupping the back of his head, thumb sliding over the nape of his neck in sweet little circles. Shane feels hypnotized by the scent of him, by the way their sweaty bodies are sliding together. He’s totally lost in it, in Ilya.

Both of their cocks are fattening up as they push their hips together, lazy, unfocused grinding that’s turning more purposeful. Shane pauses his mouthing at Ilya’s armpit for a moment to spit into his palm and shoves it down between them so he can take them both in hand. Ilya groans appreciatively and he follows the noise up, licking against his lips again until they open for him.

They’re both desperately hard, both leaking at the head. He can’t tell whose precum is coating his hand, whose sweat and spit is filling his mouth, dribbling down his chin. He can’t tell where he ends and Ilya begins. It doesn’t matter.

He doesn’t want to cum, at least not first. Shane wants this to last for hours. But that’s not going to be possible, not when he has the length of Ilya’s cock dragging heavy and warm against his, slicked together by Shane’s spit, not when he has Ilya’s hand kneading at the meat of his ass, grabbing it in hard, squeezing handfuls that are sure to leave a mark tomorrow. He can feel Ilya breathing faster and faster in shallow breaths against his mouth.

“Ohhh,” he groans, moving down to kiss and suck over Shane’s jaw, his chin, over the shell of his ear. “So good. Moy lyubimyy. Shane—”

In the end, he doesn’t have to worry about who cums first. They both finish one right after the other, tumbling into it together. He nearly whites out when he does, and for one wild moment, he swears he’s on the verge of finishing a second time, back to back, hips rabbiting against Ilya and sliding his dick against the slick mess they’ve made together that’s now pooled on Ilya’s abs.

They’re both panting as they come down, breaths huffing against each other. Ilya’s hand is skimming up his back, and for a few blissful seconds, Shane is able to completely ignore how filthy they both are. 

With anyone else, he would be repulsed, but with Ilya, he likes it. He likes all of it: the smell of his unshowered body, how Ilya’s curls are damp and matted under his fingertips. He even likes, for one brief, lovesick moment, the tacky mess of cum and spit and sweat that’s drying between them on their abdomens, gluing them together.

Eventually, the incessant heat wins out over his need to be pressed against Ilya, and with a groan, he forces himself to roll off. He keeps close though, keeps carding his fingers through Ilya’s hair. It makes him hum softly.

“Stay,” Ilya says, and he does.

There’s nowhere else to be right now. There’s nothing else to do but this. The knowledge is warm in Shane’s chest. The tension is seeping out of his body, knocked loose by the sheer brute force of an orgasm, of Ilya Rozanov, and he can feel his muscles relaxing one by one. Something in him is gently unspooling. 

Despite all of Shane’s meticulous planning, eventually they run out of food.

Ilya insists on coming along on his trip to the store, even though Shane brings up the very good point that he might be recognized, even at the one tiny grocery store in easy driving distance of the cottage. Ilya counters with an offer to wear a baseball cap and to stay in the parked car while Shane shops (“Like how bad people do with their dogs, Hollander,” he says, and Shane frowns at being compared to a negligent pet owner).

So Ilya sits in the Jeep with a window cracked, playing some iPhone game that involves quickly popping brightly colored bubbles that seems to require the volume turned up as loud as possible. Shane shops as quickly as he can. 

It’s easier than his first panicked grocery run. He knows Ilya’s preferences now: he likes hot dogs and nearly every kind of fruit and when Shane sears salmon on the grill. He drinks his coffee with about an inch of sugary creamer, but he also likes very strong black tea, brewed hot even in the summer. They both like the same brand of unflavored whey protein powder and the same intensely spicy hot sauce that nobody else in Shane’s life seems to enjoy. He likes sandwiches piled high with turkey and extra red onion, and Shane’s learned he likes it when Ilya makes one for him too. He doesn’t like pasta salad (too slimy) or oatmeal (tastes like glue). 

The cashier checking him out is a scowling high schooler, who blessedly either doesn’t recognize him or is too sullen and teenage to acknowledge that she does. Even though she doesn’t seem to care if Shane lives or dies, he imagines her asking what he’s shopping for, rehearses the conversation in his head to pass the time as she scans his items.

For me and my boyfriend. My boyfriend is visiting me. My boyfriend is staying with me.

They haven’t used that word yet. Shane doesn’t even know if that’s what Ilya wants, if that’s what he even wants. But he practices his lines all the same, saying the word over in his head as the cashier hands him his receipt and then goes back to her phone with a sigh.

On the drive back, Ilya rolls the window down before taking a hit of his vape, but the cloud of artificially sweet vapor still drifts toward Shane anyway. 

“What the fuck even is that?” he says, wrinkling his nose. It’s sickly sweet and cloying, but there’s something vaguely familiar to it. 

Ilya holds it out to him, nudges the mouth of it to his lips. “Try it and guess.”

Shane wants to protest, wants to cite articles he’s half-read about popcorn lung and nicotine addiction. Realistically, he knows one hit isn’t going to turn him into some sort of vape fiend, so he takes it.

“Just— easy. Like that. Not too much.” Ilya looks amused as he watches Shane inhale a lungful and then quickly exhale, wheezing toward the end.

It’s lighter than he imagined, not as thick as cigarette smoke, and the flavor is warm and sugary and sticky. “Fuck,” he says around coughs, laughing. “Is it— birthday cake?”

Ilya is delighted, proud and practically crowing. “Very, very good! So smart, very good. Yes, birthday cake. The best flavor, after mango.” He smacks a kiss onto Shane’s cheek and takes the vape back from him, slides his hand around Shane’s bicep and squeezes hard.

Shane pops a piece of gum into his mouth to wash out the taste of fake vanilla.

“When’s your birthday? I realized— I don’t think I actually know,” he says. 

A summer birthday, at least that’s what he vaguely remembers. It’s unsettling sometimes, the things he realizes he doesn’t know about Ilya, despite knowing him for nearly a decade. He has a running list: his parents’ names, if he’s allergic to anything, what he wanted to be before he wanted to be a hockey player, if there was anything else at all.

Ilya takes a hit off the vape, lips wrapped around where Shane’s just were. “June 15.”

I missed it, Shane thinks, as if they’d ever celebrated birthdays together, as if he’d, what— make him a cake? Buy him a gift? The idea seems ridiculous, and yet knowing that it’s passed Shane by without him doing anything to celebrate feels suddenly unbearable.

“It’s okay. Next year, you get me a very expensive gift, yes?” It’s as if Ilya can read his mind. 

Shane rolls his eyes, waves it off, but he’s stuck on the words next year, next year, next year. Next year, they might celebrate Ilya’s birthday together. Next year, he might buy him a birthday gift. Next year, they might even spend Shane’s birthday together, if they aren’t still slogging it out in the playoffs.

He splays his free hand out on Ilya’s thigh and gives it a squeeze. Ilya picks his hand up, presses his knuckles to his lips in a soft, closed-mouth kiss.

The drive home from the grocery store is one he’s done a thousand times, and his mind wanders as they pass through the trees. Ilya might come back next year, he thinks. Next year, the year after, the one after that, years and years and years with Ilya stretching out in front of him. He feels so greedy for all of them. 

By the first week of August, Ilya’s hair is curling down over his ears. 

He shakes it out of his face every few minutes, and a bandana has appeared from god knows where that he uses as a makeshift sweatband when they work out. It’s too long now though, and as much as Shane will miss the way he can loop a curl around his finger several times over or grab indulgent handfuls of it when Ilya sucks him off, he’s also tired of Ilya shaking his head out like a wet dog when they swim. It’s time for a trim.

Ilya insists that Shane be the one to cut his hair, and though Shane protests at first, it makes sense. He can’t imagine what they’d say if Ilya came into the one barbershop in driving distance. 

They’ve been holed up here all summer, only emerging when needed for groceries and dinners at Shane’s parents’ house that grow a little less awkward each time, and once for a late-night trip to urgent care, when a wineglass shattered in the sink as they washed up after dinner. Ilya had only needed three small, tidy stitches to close up the gash, but that night he’d insisted he was too injured to be on top, that Shane had to ride him, and Shane had happily, easily given in.

They’ve been in a sunwarmed bubble these past few weeks, and sometimes Shane finds himself wishing for something to happen— another lockout, a natural disaster, a lockout and a natural disaster— to delay the start of the season. Other times, he feels like he could crawl out of his skin with how badly he wants to get back to it, to get out on the ice again.

He’d asked Ilya to stay for the rest of the summer a few weeks ago. They were stretched out on the dock after a swim, the sun drying beads of water onto their skin. Shane had his foot hooked over Ilya’s ankle, watching the clouds scud overhead, a bird on an arcing flight path.

A hawk, he thought. Or maybe a falcon.

He couldn’t tell if Ilya was asleep or not. The way that they were laying on the dock was the same way they’d arranged themselves in bed every night since Ilya had arrived, Ilya on the left, Shane on the right, legs tangled up together. Most mornings, they would wake up with Shane folded behind Ilya, his face mashed into the crook of Ilya’s neck, his arm draped heavy over Ilya’s sleeping frame.

He stroked over Ilya’s side with his knuckle in little circles as he watched the bird loop over the lake. His ribs had healed well, the soreness from the start of the summer faded away now, knitting themselves back to full strength. Ilya’s skin was still cool from the lake.

He looked over at him. Ilya’s eyes were shut, but he could tell from the way he was stretching his feet out, letting his quads tense and then relax, that he was awake.

“Stay the whole summer,” Shane whispered softly, before he could change his mind. Stay forever, he wanted to add.

Ilya cracked one eye open. “Okay,” he said, before Shane had time to backpedal, before he had time to worry about Ilya saying anything other than yes. These days, Ilya didn’t give him space to worry.

And so he stayed.

Now they’re back on the dock, and Shane finds himself with a pair of kitchen scissors in his hand, worried that he’s going to disfigure his boyfriend. Ilya’s original pitch had been for them to use the clippers he uses for his face, but the idea of taking a razor to his curls was too much for Shane to bear, and so now here they were. They’d dragged a deck chair out to the middle of the dock, brought out the scissors and a chip clip from the kitchen junk drawer that Shane is using in an attempt to section some of his hair off. 

Ilya reaches around to poke Shane’s hip. “Just start already, zaychik. Or I’ll buzz it all off myself.”

“You’re too vain for that,” Shane says, pulling a curl taut until it’s straight. 

Two months spent out in the sunshine have lightened Ilya’s hair. Some of the wispiest front bits are a fine pale gold, and it reminds Shane of a baby picture Ilya had shown him, a fat and grinning toddler with a curly shock of white-blonde hair and one large front tooth sat on his mother’s lap. Irina had the same smile as Ilya, warm and bright and all teeth. Looking at the picture had made Shane’s chest feel tight.

“I am, which is why you need to start now. Think about how annoying I will be, crying over my bald head.” 

He would still look good bald, Shane thinks.

“Very annoying, yes,” he says instead. 

After the first snip, it’s easy. The nice thing about cutting hair is it falls into a pleasantly mindless rhythm after a certain point, trimming sections until they match, brushing the shorn hair off Ilya’s shoulders, starting again. Everything else fades away except for the water lapping against the dock pilings and the crisp snip of scissors gliding through hair. He barely even needs to look at what he’s doing. Shane might be good at this.

After Ilya’s hair is no longer flopping over his ears, he pulls back to examine his handiwork. He’s actually very good at this. It’s genuinely impressive how neatly the hair sits at the nape of Ilya’s neck, and Shane’s deeply satisfied at another new talent discovered, the same way he had been the first time he’d held crow pose in yoga or successfully poached salmon. He wants to take a picture for posterity.

He thinks that maybe this is something he can do for Ilya next year too, every summer from here on out. He can cut his hair, keep the kitchen stocked with blueberries and black teabags and fruit snacks, can make room for Ilya’s things in his dresser drawers and for Ilya in his bed. 

He can show Ilya all of the things he loves about this place that he didn’t get the chance to this year, the things he’s loved since he was a kid: the pink and purple wildflowers that bloom on the trail that runs behind the cottage, the little spotted frogs who live on the far side of the lake, the annual meteor shower it had been too cloudy for this year. For years, the time they’d had together was measured in hours, half-nights in hotel rooms, and now, suddenly, he thinks that they actually might have a whole lifetime together. They’re at the beginning of something for once, instead of finding themselves rushing toward the end.

Maybe this is something he can do for Ilya, make a home for them together somewhere, here at the cottage, in Ottawa and in Montreal and somewhere in between.

“All done,” he says, and bends down to kiss Ilya’s shoulder blade. His skin is starting to turn pink.

When Ilya turns around, Shane has to bite his lip hard to keep from gasping, or laughing, or both. All his careful, neat trimming in the back means nothing when the front is fully lopsided, one tuft of hair sprouting straight up into the air. He has bangs now, somehow, or at least half of a bang. Ilya looks like a toddler who’s given himself his first haircut, and Shane is the one to blame.

“What have you done to me?” Ilya whips out his phone, stares at himself in the front-facing camera with dismay. “Hollander, you have botched me. You fucked me up. Hold this.”

He hands Shane his phone as Shane starts to reel through possible apologies and offers to send Ilya to the expensive barber of his choice to fix this. Before he can do any of that though, Ilya does a few neat snips, peering at his reflection in the camera closely as he does.

Whatever he does, it’s further proof to Shane that Ilya is some kind of miracle worker, that the hidden laws of the universe behave differently, better, when he’s around. It still looks kind of fucked up, but it’s no longer the trainwreck Shane had given him. It’ll be fine in time. It’ll grow.

“If you’re such an expert, why did you make me do it?” Shane grumbles. 

He hates when Ilya is better than him at meaningless shit like this. The other night, Ilya had beaten him in three back-to-back games of Uno after dinner at his parents’ house, and Shane had needed to do a lap alone around their backyard to keep his cool. 

Only children, Ilya had said with a mournful shake of his head and a wink to Yuna and David. Always sore losers.

Ilya shrugs, shaking the last few clipped-off bits of hair off his shoulders as he does. He’s still sitting down, and he uses the angle to press his face to Shane’s stomach, blows a raspberry there.

“Because I knew you’d say yes,” he says, lifting his head now and propping his chin against Shane’s stomach as he looks up at him, and how can Shane argue with that?

A few days later, Shane has a call with his agent that leaves him feeling tight and itchy all over, even though it had been perfectly pleasant. He’d told her he was gay the week before, and she had been wonderful and supportive and not too prying. The call today is a follow-up on that conversation, talking through timelines, contingency plans, all logistics and no feelings. 

It was expressly designed to make him feel better, knowing that there were plans in place, that all of this was being thought of in a methodical, careful way. He’d set it up this way on purpose. All of it was done to cater to him, to make him feel safe, and yet.

He feels the tension most in his shoulders, rigid and stiff as he closes his laptop and scrubs at his eyes. One room over in the kitchen, Ilya is making a smoothie, and the sound of the blender cuts through the walls. It’s almost worse that it’s a little muffled, a distant but inescapable mechanical grinding.

When he feels like this, it’s as if he’s five years old again. 

Shane remembers sitting on the bench at his first rink, waiting for the coach to call his name, picking at his skate laces that his mother had tied for him (bunny ears, Yuna had said when she did it, watching him to make sure he was paying attention, so that he could learn to do it himself). 

He hadn’t gotten used to how noisy and bright it was there yet, and he wanted to cover his ears against the sounds of lockers slamming and loud chatter. That same locked up feeling settled across his shoulders, until it felt almost like a vise grip and he had to shrug them up to his ears once, twice, a third time before he felt like he could exhale fully.

The only thing that seemed to fully push the feeling away was wobbling out onto the ice.

That’s not exactly going to work right now though. How can he tell Ilya that, that he needs to do wind sprints, an uphill run with a weighted vest for resistance, one hundred burpees one right after the other to feel less heavy? How is he supposed to burn this sensation off, this anxious knot that’s sitting heavy in his chest, with someone else in the other room? 

The only real solution is to wait for the feeling to pass, for his body to unfurl again on its own. There’s no helping it.

Shane and Ilya are together, but in many ways he’s alone in this. Ilya doesn’t experience these things the way he does, doesn’t have the same leaden weights of expectation and responsibility that have followed Shane around since he was seventeen. He doubts Ilya’s ever looked at his sponsorship contracts closely enough to read the phrase morality clause and find himself returning to the words over and over again to think about what it might mean in practice, what it’s meant to guard against.

How could Ilya know? How could he understand any of this, what it’s like to be Shane? How could anyone?

When he enters the kitchen, Ilya still has the blender cranked at the maximum speed, even though the smoothie looks like it’s been done for several minutes. It must’ve been several minutes that the blender’s been going. It feels like it. The tension is pulsing out from Shane’s shoulders now, moving down into his arms until he’s forced to flex his fingers out.

“I think it’s done, Ilya.” He reaches over him to turn it off, pressing the button hard enough that the blender skids back against the countertop an inch, almost tipping over.

It’s finally quiet for a moment. Shane is prepared for Ilya to squawk in protest or start the blender up again just to be obnoxious. At the very least, he’s expecting Ilya to ask why he’s being such a dick.

Instead, Ilya just looks at him, and Shane gets the sense that he’s peering straight into him, like every thought and feeling and sensation moving through Shane is completely transparent and open to him in a way they aren’t even to Shane himself. It’s unsettling, being seen like that.

Ilya doesn’t call him a dick. “Maybe we take the kayak out,” he says instead. “You show me those otters you’ve told me so much about.”

It feels so out of nowhere, so totally disconnected from everything that’s happened up until that point and from the terrible churning feeling in Shane’s body that all he can do is blink at him. 

“Okay,” he says. They’ll take the kayak out.

They hadn’t used the tandem kayak so far this summer. It was more fun to each have their own, to race each other and splash each other with their paddles rather than having to coordinate their pace.

It’s early in the day, and the water is still and glassy when they set out. Ilya had insisted on sitting in the front seat even though he didn’t know where they were going. He’s taken his shirt off, and all Shane can see in front of him is sunburnt ears and golden curls and Ilya’s shoulders, scattered with moles. Every time he dips his paddle into the water, Shane can see the muscles of his back pull and flex.

It feels like some sort of twisted newlywed game or teambuilding exercise, having to direct Ilya toward a spot Shane only nebulously knows while he can barely see where he’s going. As they get further out on the water, all he can think about is loosely remembered landmarks and how to guide Ilya there.

“I think it’s up there, do you see it? Just past the tree that’s all crooked?” He nudges Ilya, turns his head gently so he can see where Shane is pointing. The sun is starting to rise higher in the sky, the day growing steamier with humidity, and he can feel the sweat trickling down his back, sliding down in rivulets.

Ilya is paddling choppily, sending a spray over them both. “What kind of navigating is this? All of these trees look the same.” 

Nature seems to be a relatively new concept for Ilya, Shane has learned. The first time they swam in the lake, he’d been less than enthused about the idea of paddling out to deeper waters.

“Do these fish bite?” he had said, up only to his calves on the shore as Shane floated on his back several yards out. He stood there, hands on his hips, surveying the lake with suspicion.

Shane had laughed, but he swam back toward him, wrapping a hand around his ankle. He gently towed Ilya out until they couldn’t touch the lakebed anymore. Eddies of colder water, untouched by the sun, swirled around their feet as Shane wrapped an arm around Ilya’s waist, treading water hard enough to keep them both afloat. 

Ilya still looked dubious, but he was softening as a minute, then two, passed without incident. “I never swim in lakes,” he said, head tipping up toward the sun. “Pools only. I like when you can see the bottom.”

“City boy,” Shane murmured, then pulled him into a kiss.

They’re both even sweatier by the time they’ve dragged the kayak ashore in the little tree-sheltered cove where Shane had spotted the otters. He’d seen them a week or two earlier out on a run: flashes of sleek brown fur dipping in and out of the water. 

As soon as he saw them, he knew he wanted to bring Ilya out here. Ilya loved animals of all kinds. He stopped for long, indulgent stretches when they were out getting ice cream or running on the public trails to pet people’s dogs, squatting down to their level to talk to them, and Shane had seen him get misty scrolling through a chimpanzee sanctuary’s Instagram that he followed for some inexplicable reason. 

It was one of the things that Shane loved most about Ilya, the big, soft heart at the center of him, guarded in so many ways but offered up so easily to scruffy dogs and to strangers’ babies and to Shane.

Ilya flops down on the grass as Shane peers into the water for any signs of life. “I think we’ll need to wait for a bit,” he says as Ilya wraps a hand around his ankle, trying to pull him down onto him. “They probably got scared when we paddled in.”

Ilya succeeds at pulling him down onto him. The air is thick and muggy now. There are soggy, dark clouds gathering in a clump on the horizon, but where they’re lying is still bathed in a patch of golden sun.

He expects Ilya to kiss him, to slide a hand down the front of his shorts to cup his dick, or up his back. Instead—

“Now will you tell me about your call this morning?” he asks, brow wrinkled a little with concern. The brim of Shane’s Metros cap jutting forward is preventing them from being totally flush. Ilya takes it off of him and flips it around so it’s facing backwards, nestling it gently on his head. Pleased with his handiwork, he smooths a loose piece of Shane’s hair back.

The tension he’d felt before has totally dissipated from Shane’s shoulders, flowing out of him during their paddling, like riverwater rushing out into the ocean. How had Ilya known what to do?

“It’s— yeah. It’s fine. It’s not anything bad, it’s just…” He trails off, not able to articulate what about it had set him off.

“Makes it more serious now,” Ilya finishes. “Other people knowing.”

Shane blinks down at him. 

That’s exactly it: running through potential crisis communications plans and drafts of PR statements with Farah in case something, somehow got leaked does make it all feel more tangible in an unpleasant way. It brings real life back into the sweet, warm haze he and Ilya have been existing in all summer long. It’s scary.

He nods. 

How had it been so hard to say this to Ilya earlier? Why is it that saying it now makes it feel like something in him is unlocking, easing open?

“It is scary, yes. But we have each other, yeah? Like teammates, kind of.” Ilya’s hand is running up and over his bicep in slow, concentric circles. Shane breathes out shakily, nods again.

It really is that easy, he thinks. It feels stupid that it’s that easy. It is scary, and they both know that, and it feels good to admit that to himself. But they have each other. They’re teammates. 

Ilya is a known quantity, a true fact, a solid bedrock of love and care and tenderness underneath it all that Shane can always fall back on. Shane can be that for him, too. The thought of it takes his breath away.

Maybe that’s all loving someone is. Maybe it’s being scared together and choosing to do it anyway, day after day. It’s learning someone inside and out, until you know their favorite cereal and their tells when they’re cheating at cards and that you can always trust them, that they can always trust you.

There’s a splash, a rustle in the reeds sprouting up from the shores. They catch sight of the otters a split second before they disappear back under the water: two of them together, gliding through the glassy surface of the lake.

Ilya squeezes Shane’s arm, and he thinks he’s about to say something to him: I love you or that’s you and me or some other stupid mush, but before he can, the clouds, which have been drawing closer, growing darker, open up overhead.

It’s a true summer storm, out of nowhere and all at once. They have a split second of warning before the rain starts to come down in fat drops, soaking them both to the skin.

Shane makes a break for the kayak, pulling a shrieking Ilya along. They’re both laughing, stumbling down the waterlogged banks together, dropping their bodies heavily into the kayak. Shane’s shins are covered in mud and he has to wring his baseball cap out before he can start paddling. He can’t remember the last time he was this happy. Maybe it’s the happiest he’s ever been.

By the time they get back to the dock, they’ve been paddling against the storm for fifteen minutes, both drenched and shivering. The rain is coming down in lashing sheets now instead of drops.

“We should shower,” Shane says, toeing his now-soggy sneakers off before he steps inside. 

Ilya’s hair is plastered flat to his head, dripping muddy rainwater where he’s standing. “Why shower?” he asks, shaking his hair out like a dog. “We’re already soaked.”

The mud, Shane wants to tell him. The mud and the fact that now that the adrenaline has worn off, Ilya’s teeth are chattering. He looks almost blue from the cold, and all Shane wants is to warm him up.

He doesn’t say any of this though. Instead, Shane shucks his sodden shirt and shorts off in the entranceway, where they land with a damp thud. He knows that Ilya will follow.

He runs the shower hot until the bathroom fills with steam, fogging the mirrors. Ilya is curling a hand around his waist, fingertips sliding down over his hipbone as outside, the rain beats steadily against the roof. 

Shane can’t believe how loud the rain is, even in here. It’s as if everything outside of them has been swept up into this rainstorm except for here, except for them; like the only warm, safe place in the world is underneath the spray, their wet bodies pressed as close together as any two bodies could be. 

Ilya’s coming back to life underneath his hands and the hot water, skin turning from blue to a flushed, rosy pink. His jaw is still rattling a little, and Shane kisses him until it stops. 

As cold as Ilya had been, the inside of his mouth is as warm and familiar as ever. Shane loves every inch of it: his full lips that are parted softly under his right now, the way his tongue sweeps confidently into Shane’s mouth, the craggy, unfinished edge of his chipped right canine. 

He knows Ilya’s mouth in a way that feels hard-coded into his body, deep-rooted. He’s always taken to him the same way he took to hockey all those years ago: effortless, a natural talent.

Each of Ilya’s kisses is hungrier than the last. They’re both hardening up but neither is doing anything much about it yet, content to just let their cocks slide lazily against each other as they make out, smearing precum against their stomachs that’s quickly washed away by the shower spray. Ilya’s hand is splayed out over Shane’s ass, fingertips digging into the muscle there and grabbing a handful in a way that Shane has come to realize can only be described as possessive. The thought makes him shiver, despite the scalding shower: the idea, the fact that he belongs to Ilya, that Ilya belongs to him. He feels drunk on it. It feels like a miracle.

Eventually, they stumble out of the shower, dizzy from the steam. Ilya holds out a towel for Shane, and Shane lets himself be wrapped up in it. Ilya does it until he’s practically swaddled, cocooned in it and they both laugh as he tries to break his arms free.

“Ruining all my hard work,” Ilya says, pinching his hip once Shane’s wriggled out of the towel. “My Shane sandwich.”

Sometimes, Shane can’t believe they’re like this, speaking so sweetly, so stupidly to each other, Ilya’s eyes soft and heavy when he looks at him. It’s corny, to be honest. He had always assumed that if he ever somehow ended up in a relationship, he wouldn’t be like every other couple in the world, with the ridiculous baby talk and pet names and the secret, shared language. And yet, he still manages to have the capacity to surprise himself. He’s happy to discover that he’s exactly like every other person who’s ever been in love before.

“I love you,” Shane says softly. He cups Ilya’s cheek with his hand and Ilya melts, turning his face into his palm and rubbing against it like an overgrown house cat. He says it a second time, because he can.

Rather than say it back, Ilya keeps nuzzling at his palm, his hand sliding around Shane’s waist and pressing closer to him until he’s walking them backwards toward the bed together. 

Shane lets him nudge him down onto his back, lets him climb over him on all fours, caging him in. His hair is still wet from the shower, and it’s dripping onto Shane’s forehead and cheeks. He would let Ilya do just about anything, Shane thinks.

Outside, the rain is still coming down in a steady stream. It isn’t that late in the afternoon, but the clouds make the bedroom dimmer than usual, the trees outside the windows turned a wet, lush deep green. Ilya pushes the last fold of the towel off Shane until it pools on the floor next to the bed.

It never takes much to get Shane going, not when it’s the two of them. Before Ilya’s even touched his dick, when he’s still just softly mouthing along the line of Shane’s jaw as his hand travels downward, Shane’s hardening up.

He likes the way their bodies feel flush together like this, cool and clean after a shower. He likes that Ilya smells like his shampoo and the way he can feel his pulse jumping and quickening in time with Shane’s until it almost feels like they have the same heartbeat, the same heart thumping through the both of them.

Ilya gets his hand around him, slides his thumb over the head the way Shane likes. He swipes the precum that’s already gathered there over him until Shane’s dick is twitching and throbbing in his hand. 

“Fuck,” Shane breathes out. Clearly something about Shane’s awed voice encourages Ilya, because he wraps his lips around his dick and takes him down slowly.

Nobody’s ever looked as good as Ilya, he thinks, watching Ilya’s head bobbing up and down on his cock. He can’t even think of a qualifier, a specific circumstance, maybe because of the way Ilya’s mouth is turning him hazy and stupid, making his brain leak out of his ears, or maybe because it’s just a true statement as it is. Nobody’s ever looked as good as Ilya.

Ilya lets him get fully hard in his mouth before he pulls off. There’s a little string of spit connecting his lips and Shane’s dick, and the way his mouth looks, all shiny and wet, makes Shane groan involuntarily, makes his hips buck up into the air.

“Over,” he says, nudging at Shane’s hip. Shane turns himself over in bed so he’s flat on his stomach, hard cock pressed down into the mattress. It all feels so good, so heavy and buzzy. He folds his arms to make a little cradle for his head and groans into his forearm.

Ilya palms at his ass with one big hand, then spreads him open. Shane groans at the feeling of cool air on his hole, of suddenly being so exposed to Ilya. Above him, Ilya’s low laughter, something mumbled in Russian.

It’s intoxicating, having all of Ilya’s attention so focused on him like this. When they’re fucking, he feels the way he does after a particularly punishing workout: entirely in his body, alive and euphoric and whole.

Ilya presses closer, then spits directly onto his hole. Shane barely has time to react before he’s following it with his mouth, licking it right back up with his tongue, warm, wet kisses that are sending all of the blood in Shane’s body straight to his dick. His hands are still on his ass, grabbing it, squeezing the muscle there hard and holding him open.

He pulls back an inch or two as he fumbles off to the side for something. He’s still close enough that Shane can feel his breath on his skin, little puffs of air against his hole that make him clench up, too sensitive, a live wire. He’s going to go crazy if Ilya doesn’t touch him again. He might die. He’s a split second away from whining for it, to pressing back against him and begging for more. He thinks he might be able to cum just like this—

Before Shane can totally humiliate himself, Ilya takes pity on him and slides two lubed fingers slowly inside of him, crooking them upwards. He groans at the stretch and presses up onto all fours so Ilya can get even deeper, head hanging down. He already feels so good like this, wrung out and pliable, like a ragdoll. Ilya’s other arm is wrapped around his torso, holding him up, his face mashed into Shane’s hair.

“Want you to fuck me,” Shane mumbles, before he can even be asked. He knows it’s coming, knows Ilya will always give him whatever he asks for, so happily, so easily. He still wants to say it though. His tongue feels thick and clumsy in his mouth.

Ilya laughs again and traces a path from behind Shane’s ear to the back of his neck with his nose. “I know, zaychik.”

Of course he does. He always knows, and Shane always, always wants it. Maybe this is where he’s happiest, pinned under Ilya in bed, about to have Ilya’s cock buried inside of him.

He can feel it pressed against him now, fat and grinding against him more and more urgently. Ilya pulls his fingers out and grips at Shane’s hip, the head of his dick nudging against his opening. Three of his fingers are wet and sticky with lube, still a little warmer than the other ones from being tucked inside him. The thought of that is so filthy that Shane can’t help but push back against him, so that Ilya slides inside of him, just the tip popping in.

Now Ilya really laughs and gives his ass a cheerful smack for his impatience. It works though, because he follows it up by pushing in all the way, stretching Shane open around him.

Shane still likes to use condoms in principle, because the mess is annoying, but he can’t deny how good it feels to have Ilya inside of him like this totally bare. It feels so intimate, so intense, like no two people have ever been as physically close as they are in this moment.

Ilya thrusts all the way inside once, twice, and then pulls out, making Shane cry out at the sudden loss. Ilya slides his dick between the cheeks of his ass, teasing him. He can feel his hole, now wet and stretched ready for Ilya, open and close around nothing and he could almost cry at how unfair it feels.

“Being greedy, Ilya says, and all Shane can do is nod. He always is with him.

Ilya’s not mean though, at least not right now, and he doesn’t make him wait for long. When he pushes back into him, he starts fucking him right away, no teasing this time, just his hips snapping hard into Shane. All Shane can hear is the sound the rain makes outside as it hits the slope of the roof and the wet, steady slap of Ilya fucking him, Ilya’s shallow breathing in time with Shane’s, the noises they’re making together.

It’s good like this for a while, Ilya’s hand braced above him on the headboard as he fucks into him, Shane’s dick throbbing insistently between his legs as he does his best not to touch, to make this last as long as possible. Just as he’s about to nudge Ilya so they can flip over, finish face to face, Ilya wraps his hand around his hip and does just that, pressing Shane onto his back, pushing his knees up to his chest.

Ilya presses his forehead to Shane’s, and his eyes are wild, locked in on his. Folded close like this, Shane can see the neediness, the hunger he’s been feeling since they stepped out of the shower reflected back at him. Knowing that Ilya feels this too, that this is just as big and all-encompassing for him as it is for Shane, feels almost too much to bear.

“My baby,” Shane says softly. He has a hand pressed to Ilya’s flushed cheek and he shifts it so he can press two fingers against Ilya’s full lips, pushing gently until they open around them, sucking them gratefully into his mouth. Shane has never been so in awe.

He knows he’s going to cum first and he doesn’t care enough right now to hold off, not when Ilya is filling him up like this, suckling at his fingers so urgently. He lets it happen, squeezing Ilya’s cock when he does, his own dick shooting his load untouched onto his abs. 

Ilya picks up his pace, hips pumping into him in quick, rabbity thrusts that send little shockwaves through his body as he comes down from his own orgasm. He hasn’t dropped Shane’s fingers though, doesn’t seem to want to because he finishes with them still in his mouth, groaning around them. 

When he’s done, he collapses onto Shane, a warm and pleasantly heavy weight. He huffs out a big breath that ends with him flapping his lips together like he’s an exhausted racehorse, then picks up his head to grin at him, satisfied and sunny and flushed.

Shane feels fucked out, limbs loose and wobbly. He feels like he could float away, off the bed and through the ceiling. He’s never felt so in love. Nobody’s ever been in love as he is, in this moment. He knows that for sure.

The rain outside has died down to a steady patter, and Shane finds himself matching his breath to its pace against the roof, slowing and deepening. The bedroom is a small pocket just for them, or maybe it’s the whole world, he thinks, nothing outside, nobody else, just him and Ilya. 

Ilya is drawing little nonsense shapes on his chest. How is that he had known exactly what Shane needed, when Shane himself hadn’t? He has no idea. Maybe he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out.

The last week they spend together at the cottage, Shane has trouble sleeping. He knows why, obviously: knowing that in a few days he’ll drive Ilya to the airport and they’ll go back to spending weeks at a time apart, the great big uncertainty of what that’ll look like now that they’re together, in love, now that it all carries a strange new weight. 

The frustrating thing for Shane is that knowing the reason behind a feeling, understanding the logic behind it, does nothing to actually make the feeling go away, even if he feels like it should. It doesn’t even help him sleep through the night.

He isn’t sure what time it is when he wakes up: two in the morning, maybe three. The past few nights when this has happened, he’s tried to roll back over into sleep without looking at his phone or waking Ilya, but he realizes now the space next to him in the bed is empty. Ilya’s not there.

It’s almost funny, how sharp a pang he feels when he realizes it. A few weeks ago, he didn’t know what it was like to sleep next to Ilya at all. Now he can’t imagine anything else.

The first few days that Ilya was at the cottage with him, Shane had found himself holding his breath in the rare moments they were apart: when Ilya broke away ahead of him on a run, long legs disappearing around a curve in the trail, or when he made a smoothie and Ilya slips off to sneak a morning cigarette in the least subtle way possible, coming back smelling like smoke and sweet dawn air, sliding cool hands under Shane’s t-shirt as he tried to measure out protein powder and flaxseed.

He was afraid in those moments that this was something he had dreamed up, that Ilya had changed his mind, or left, or that he just never came at all. He knew it was irrational. How would he leave without a car, they’re so deep in the woods, he had just told Shane that he loves him, and Shane’s told him that he loves him too, and yet—. 

Sometimes, in those early weeks, he would wonder if this was going to be his only chance at this, if the whole thing would just vanish at the end of the summer. He still felt like Ilya could slip right through his fingers if he didn’t keep an eye on him at all times.

But if it was going to be his only chance, he was going to do it the way he did anything else he really wanted: thoroughly and completely and single-minded. He was going to do it well.

Shane can’t avoid jostling his phone awake when he slips out of bed. The blue light cutting through the dark room makes him wince: 3:45 in the morning. He gropes around for the t-shirt Ilya had shucked off onto the floor and pulls it on over his head.

It’s easy for him to find where he’s going, even in the early hours gloom. He can navigate this place in the pitch black, totally blind, and in the same way, he already knows where Ilya is.

He’s left the sliding door open as if he knew Shane would be just behind him. He’s sat out on the porch in one of the Adirondack chairs, feet propped against the railing, wearing Shane’s hoodie and the boxers he’d gone to bed in. He looks so beautiful like this, the lines of his profile faintly illuminated by the moon overhead and the pinprick glow of his cigarette, and it makes Shane’s stomach hurt.

“Is there room for me?” Shane’s voice comes out soft, like he’s trying to avoid waking someone, even though it’s just him and Ilya for miles. Ilya doesn’t say anything, just smiles sleepily and moves over. They must look ridiculous like this, two tall, broad men half in each other’s laps on a chair made for one, but Shane doesn’t care.

Ilya settles an arm around him and stubs his cigarette out, and the last bits of smoke curl up from the ashtray. Pressed close like this and still half asleep, Shane can’t bring himself to mind the smell. It’ll always make him think of Ilya, of this summer and of years of hotel room hookups and of feeling his tongue twist in a freezing cold parking lot as he tries to introduce himself to a beautiful boy that everyone has told him he’s supposed to hate. 

How could it bother him, knowing all that? How could he ever feel anything else?

Ilya’s voice is quiet too, still rough from sleep in the way Shane loves. “I wanted to see the moon,” he says.

The moon is huge tonight, full and creamy white above the lake, making the dark water below it shine all pearly. 

My night sky app says it’s a supermoon, Shane wants to say. He doesn’t want to ruin the moment with that, but then—

“It’s a supermoon,” says Ilya. “I learned it from your boring app.”

Shane blinks at him. “You downloaded the app?”

Ilya shrugs. “You know so much about the stars here, and the trees, and whatever. I wanted to know these things too. For when we’re apart and you can’t tell me oh, it is a regular-sized moon over Boston tonight, but super over Montreal. The moon is one of my favorite things about this place.”

Shane has a million things he wants to ask him, like what is it about the moon over the cottage Ilya loves so much, and how are they going to be able to do this, be apart again when they know now what it’s like to have each other all the time, and does Ilya think of this the same way he does, countless shared summers and hockey seasons and moons stretching out in front of them?

“The moon is going to look the same over Boston and Montreal,” he says instead. “Same time zone.”

“Hm,” says Ilya. “So Ottawa too, then. Still the same.” 

He seems satisfied by the answer, and tucks his head into Shane’s shoulder as they watch the moon overhead. Shane scratches his scalp gently, feeling like he could slip back into sleep at any moment.

You’re my best friend, he thinks. You’re the best thing I have. He almost keeps it to himself, but he’s tired of that. He doesn’t want to hold back around Ilya any more than he already has over the years. 

His whole life, Shane had felt like he knew himself thoroughly, like there was no part of him that hadn’t been pored over by himself or his parents or hockey scouts or the public. He’s been surprised this summer to learn there were whole unexplored rooms inside of him, territories and provinces yet to be charted. 

He didn’t know before how much love he had to give someone, for instance. He didn’t know just how wide he could open his heart.

“You’re my best friend,” he says. He’s not looking at him, but he can feel Ilya’s smile against his neck.

“Good,” Ilya mumbles, not I love you or you’re mine too. That’s alright though. Shane knows that he’s Ilya’s best friend too.

He doesn’t know when they both made the jump (maybe when Ilya called him to tell him he was coming, maybe that first time Shane opened his hotel room door to him, maybe all those years ago, in that parking lot in Saskatchewan), but they’ve made it. They’re already on the other side, and there’s no going back.

Ilya’s not leaving, not anymore. He knows that now. Even when Shane wakes up to Ilya’s side of the bed empty, he’s always there with him, coming back to him eventually. They’re both under the same moon.

He doesn’t know how long they sit there like that, until the first weak, watery rays of sun start to crest over the lake. Maybe he fell back asleep for a bit, or maybe he’s just been hovering like this, between sleep and waking and half in a dream for hours.

As the sun keeps coming up, the fear of what’s coming after the summer becomes less and less, still there but receding into the back of his mind until he barely thinks about it at all. Maybe he’s getting better at this, being with Ilya. Maybe he’s a natural at it.