Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Jackie Pike, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Scene: Ilya Rozanov Makes Tuna Melts in Episode: s01e04 Rose, Hockey Player Ilya Rozanov, Photographer Shane Hollander, Career Ending Injuries, Career Change, Photography, Nude Modeling, Reunions, Second Chances, Mutual Pining, Idiots in Love, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Baggage, Explicit Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Shane Hollander Has Feelings, Ilya Rozanov Has Feelings, Shane Hollander Is Bad at Feelings, Happily Ever After, Work in Progress, no beta we die like men, Retired Hockey Player Shane Hollander, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-14 Updated: 2026-10-12 Words: 11,271 Chapters: 5/6

Into Focus

Summary

A medical retirement took Shane Hollander off the ice, but photography gave him a way to stay close to the game. Now a prestigious editorial photographer, he’s the obvious choice when ESPN revives the Body Issue.

And Ilya Rozanov, fresh off the best season of his career, is the obvious choice for the cover.

They haven’t spoken in nearly seven years. And all the reasons why are suddenly coming back into focus.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

Unlike the way Shane Hollander came up in the MLH — number two draft pick, 2011 Rookie of the Year, back-to-back Stanley Cup winner in 2015 and 2016 — his rise in the photography world was considerably less meteoric, which was perfectly fine with him at the time because slow was what his body needed while he recovered from what the media was all too eager to call a “one-in-a-million catastrophic injury.”

The skate’s blade had caught him centimeters shy of his jugular and severed multiple tendons between his neck and shoulder, and despite months of rehab and several reconstructive surgeries, there were some things his body simply never relearned how to do. He could still hold a stick, still move his arm, still go through most of the motions that had been second nature since he was a kid, but when it came time to shoot, something between his brain and his shoulder refused to cooperate. He knew exactly what the movement was supposed to feel like, could picture it before he tried, but he couldn’t shoot the puck the same anymore. He couldn’t make his arm go.

And that just wasn’t enough for the captain and star center of the Montreal Voyageurs, no matter how long the owners, doctors, coaches, and his teammates tried to convince him otherwise.

After a certain point, all that kindness began to feel insidious, almost insulting, and Shane stopped going to the practice rink entirely. He retreated to his cottage a province over, the place he’d built hoping it might give him some distance from hockey when he needed it in the off-season. All it gave him was quiet and a sense of restlessness he couldn’t shake.

Shane had always had a purpose, had always been doing, accomplishing. Now, an accomplishment had been reduced to pouring his coffee with his right hand without spilling it across the counter or down the front of his shirt, and there were no awards for that. There was no pride in it.

Which was exactly how he ended up sitting over a fresh pot of dark roast one morning, several pages deep into a Google search for new hobbies. Hobbies for adults became hobbies for adults Ottawa, which became beginner classes Ottawa, then beginner photography classes Ottawa, and by the time he found SPAO — the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa — he was already checking whether he had anything scheduled the following Tuesday.

Within the first ten minutes, Shane was already hooked, enamored with the way photography demanded the same kind of precision hockey always had, only without asking his body to do something it no longer could. Still, he couldn’t stop thinking about the tremor in his hand and what it might mean for his ability to actually be any good at this, so when the first class ended, he stayed behind while everyone else packed up and asked the instructor outright.

“Do you think this is something I could be good at?”

She looked at him for a moment before answering. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Mr. Hollander. Your job is to make the photograph look the way you believe it should look. Everyone else gets to decide what they see in it afterward, but their opinion doesn’t matter more than yours does.”

After that, he enrolled in one of SPAO’s private mentoring programs and spent an exorbitant amount of money on every piece of gear Google convinced him he could possibly need. He committed the same way he had with hockey — daily practice, finger exercises, entering competitions — and by the end of his first year with a camera, his fine motor skills were getting there and he’d taken second prize in the Digital Print category at SPAO’s annual A+ Exhibition. It wasn’t Rookie of the Year in the MLH, but it was something, proof that he could be something again.

The news made it back to his former teammates through a Facebook post from his mother, Yuna, who tagged him, and the comments were full of congratulations. Shane read each one in the same tone they would have used on the ice after a grueling matchup, the kind where they came back from three goals down and won it in overtime — like he’d done something that mattered. It made him nostalgic. It made him sad.

He told Hayden as much when Hayden called to congratulate him personally, Jackie chiming in with a “Go Shane!” in the background.

“I don’t know, man. It just doesn’t feel as big, you know? Like, how is this important?”

“You’re talking to a guy who’s had several concussions trying to put a puck into a net with a stick. How is that important?”

“I just— I miss it.”

“So come back.”

“I can’t. You know I—”

“Not like that,” Hayden said quickly. “Come photograph us or something. If you miss being around the team, around hockey, then come back that way. I’ll float it to the powers that be.”

“I’ll think about it.”

And he did, for days on end, until he was thinking about little else. By the time he told his mom and dad over brunch almost a month later, the idea had all but consumed him.

“I think I’m going to move back to Montreal,” he told them around a swallow of ginger ale. “I talked to the VP of Communications, and they’re going to make room for me on the media team as a photographer.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” David said at the same time Yuna asked, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

And those were the two things Shane had been grappling with for weeks. It had been one thing when there was still a possibility of a comeback, but that dream had died with his dexterity. Being close enough to smell the all-but-rancid gear at the end of a game, to hear skates cutting into the ice and sticks knocking against the boards, but only ever getting to have it from the outside? That might actually kill him.

But there were only so many loons he could photograph, and hockey was still the thing he loved most.

And it would put him closer to the thing he could have loved, maybe did love: Ilya Rozanov, the man who had said his name — his first name — like a sacred prayer and sent Shane fleeing in a panic not long after. Ilya had texted a few times while Shane was recovering, but there was only so much of him that could be broken at once, and Shane had needed to focus on the physical. So he put Ilya out of his mind, out of his life, and locked the whole fucking door between them, even if his hand trembled while he did it.

Returning to hockey meant returning to him, even from a distance. Shane could photograph the team, build a life there, and keep doing exactly what he’d been doing: not talking to Ilya Rozanov.

And he did, for several more years, as his work with the team in Montreal led to a job at a national publication, where he discovered a love for editorial photography. From there came bigger assignments, magazine covers, awards, gallery openings, and eventually a career that became far more than the distraction he’d gone looking for all those years ago.

Which was how he became the obvious choice when ESPN decided to revive the Body Issue in 2023 for the first time in years, this time in a digital format. A multi-award-winning photographer who also happened to be a former professional star athlete was a story in itself, and ESPN was keen to tell it. Shane had already signed on to the project by the time someone floated the idea of making his former rival, Ilya Rozanov, the cover story, and no one could say no to that. Their rivalry, reignited in front of a camera after all these years? People would be frothing at the mouth to see what Shane Hollander did with Ilya Rozanov through his lens.

ESPN loved the idea. Shane mostly panicked about it.

The Body Issue had always been as much about the stories athletes carried on their bodies as the bodies themselves. Every year from its launch in 2009 until ESPN sunset the magazine a decade later, some of the biggest names in sports stripped bare in front of a camera to show what their bodies had been built to do, what they had survived, how their particular sport shaped and changed them. The photographs were beautiful and vulnerable, sometimes provocative, and always carefully arranged to show nearly everything without actually showing everything.

Shane understood the appeal. He’d understood it even before his own body became a story people wanted to tell.

But he’d also seen Ilya like this before, dozens of times. Naked above him while Ilya pounded into him, his cross swinging between them. On his knees with Shane’s cock spilling into his mouth. Sprawled across beds and couches and floors, slick with sweat and loose-limbed afterward in a way Shane had once known exactly how to cause. They had been intimate. They had been everything.

And then, almost overnight, it was all gone.

He’d seen Ilya on the ice when Boston came through Montreal during his first few seasons with the team, had watched him look up through Shane’s lens and been grateful for the camera between them, something to hide behind while he looked back. But that was it. Shane wouldn’t reply to the texts that followed each game, and two seasons in, Shane finally blocked his number. He had to move on. Every other part of his life had.

He hadn’t known moving on would eventually bring him here, standing in the lobby of a five-star hotel in New York City, with Ilya’s name sitting at the bottom of the call sheet in his hand, while a small army of hair and makeup artists, wardrobe stylists — as odd as that seemed for a shoot like this — assistants, lighting techs, and journalists moved around him.

It was so impossibly full circle that Shane almost had to laugh. How many times had they met in hotels and stripped down for each other? And here they were again, seven years on, only now Ilya would be bare before him, and Shane would be the one exposing himself through the work.

There was no way to photograph Ilya Rozanov and not make him beautiful. Not in Shane’s eyes.

The thought sits with him throughout the day, lodged at the base of his skull like a chill, as he works his way through two other lengthy shoots in a banquet room buried in the belly of the hotel — one with an iconic EPL player and another with one of the rising stars of the WMLH, the women’s counterpart to the league Shane once dominated. He shoots them exactly as he’s contractually obligated to, but he knows he’s also using them for practice, as unfair as that may be to their final spreads, experimenting with ways to make the images feel raw and gritty beneath the pop of his flash — scar tissue gleaming waxy in the light, stretch marks pulled taut over muscle, every pore starkly visible across their cheeks.

He stares the photos down on the monitor during the midday break and thinks of a thousand ways he could’ve shot them differently, better. But, much like hockey, there’s no getting a moment back once it’s gone. You take the shot and have to trust that you saw it right the first time. On the screen, they read as studies in brutality and strength — raw, unflinching, with no softness in them — and Shane is proud of the work.

His gaze shifts from the monitor to the clock on the table to the call sheet over and over, the minutes ticking by, ticking toward, while he reviews the morning’s work and pulls together his initial selects for executive review. By the time he’s done, there’s no time left to think, which is exactly what he wanted — to keep his brain busy, distracted — until suddenly it isn’t, and he knows he’s only a few rapid heartbeats away from Ilya walking through the door.

He swallows thickly when the producer raises her voice and calls for a closed set.

Then he’s there, handing his robe to someone from wardrobe, who slips out behind him and leaves Shane alone with Ilya. Shane cannot look away. Seven years have changed him, but not enough to make him unfamiliar. His shoulders are broader, his body heavier with muscle, every line of him still recognizable in a way Shane wishes it weren’t. He’s wearing a modesty garment, and Shane hates himself a little for letting his eyes drop that far, for letting them wander and wonder whether that part of him has changed too.

Ilya looks him over too, though Shane is fully dressed.

“So this is what you do now,” he says, stepping closer.

His accent has thinned over the years, lingering now in only a handful of syllables, and Shane outright quivers at the timbre of his voice, deeper now with age. A lump rises in his throat before he can stop it, and he swallows hard, tightening his grip on the camera until the tremor in his hand disappears beneath the pressure.

“Apparently.”

Shane points toward Ilya’s mark on the floor behind him — away, away, away from Shane — and uses the few seconds it takes Ilya to cross the room to pull in a breath and recenter himself in the work, in the weight of the camera against his palm.

“You are good at it?”

“Very,” he replies simply. 

Ilya smiles. “Still modest too.”

The lights settle into place and the room falls quiet as Shane raises his camera between them. Through the viewfinder, Ilya is suddenly close enough to touch, every familiar line sharpened by the lens.

For the first time in seven years, Ilya Rozanov comes back into focus, and Shane’s body recognizes him all at once. His stomach drops, his pulse jumps hard into his throat, and his palm goes damp against the camera grip as his ribs seem to cinch around his lungs. He almost feels nineteen, twenty, twenty-one again, feels every hotel room and hurried goodbye pressing in around him

Around them.

Them.

He forces a breath down into his lungs and steadies the camera against his face.

“Alright,” Shane says evenly. “Let’s begin.”

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: Hockey injuries by position, hockey injuries that require medical retirement, the Canadian spelling of centimeters (got in my head about this one and went with the American spelling after some nice folks on Threads told me it was fine), tendons in the neck and shoulder, photography schools in Ottawa, photography awards in Ottawa, five-star hotels in NYC.

I started writing this before work and couldn’t bring myself to stop, so I took the day off to write about Photographer Shane and ESPN Body Issue Cover Model Ilya instead. For those of you who got the sneak peek of them on Threads and went absolutely feral for ’em, thank you for encouraging me to flesh out the ficlet and give these two a few thousand words to rediscover each other.

This won’t be terribly long — likely 2,000-3,000 word chapters, maxing out around four or five total — but short can still be sweet, right?

Anyway, if you like this, please tell a friend or leave a comment or be an overachiever and do both.

I hope you love these two as much as I already do.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

There’s a surprising obedience in how Ilya takes direction — “turn your head to the right, shoulders back” — and Shane can’t help wondering if this is simply who he is now, what time and age have made of him, or if this particular compliance is just for Shane, some kind of amends or apology for his misfortune, or simply the patience of a predator waiting for the right moment to strike. Either way, he relishes it for the first ten minutes, while Ilya stays mostly quiet and does exactly as he’s told, before the room begins to feel heavy with everything neither of them is saying.

Between the different concepts, poses, and lighting setups, they’re scheduled to be here for at least three hours, and Shane knows he can’t take three hours of this.

But he also has no idea where to start other than the work.

He’s had weeks to imagine how this moment would go, all the things he wanted to say, could say, would say, but every last one of them leaves him as soon as the set closes and it’s just the two of them, and the words suddenly nowhere to be found behind his teeth.

He falls back on the box breathing his physical therapist taught him years ago in the after — the same technique his yoga instructor and psychotherapist have both echoed since — for when the frustration, the anger, the grief become too much to get his hands around. This is all of that and somehow more, held squarely in the frame of his viewfinder.

Seeing Ilya now, like this — not even in the nude, just in the flesh — sends something that feels dangerously close to regret flooding through Shane, rising rancid in his throat until he has to work to swallow it back down.

There’s nothing between them now except the shield of Shane’s camera. No TV glass, no miles, no flattened images on a page. He knows he should start with an explanation, an apology, something that might loosen the tension in his throat and answer at least a few of the questions Ilya must have.

He can’t.

He opens his mouth, and, “So, how have you been?” is the only thing that comes out.

Ilya has his back to him — his glorious back — with his chin tipped just high enough over one shoulder for Shane to catch the slight curve of his mouth at the question.

“All this time, and you want to ask me how I am doing?”

The words are softer than Shane braced for, absent of surprise, anger, even sadness, and somehow that flatness feels worse than any of them would have. He knows how Ilya used to sound when he was hungry, wanting, needing, how his tongue would lick over the syllables as if putting on a show for only him.

There’s nothing like that now, and the question sits between them, heavier than the silence had been, while Shane busies himself with the camera — the shutter button, the angles, anything that buys him a few more seconds to sort out his response. He wants to keep things professional — he needs to — but they have never been all business, and years of nothing stretched between them doesn’t suddenly make them strangers, doesn’t make this easy.

“Is it not a normal question?” he settles on, camera still up like a shield before him, and the humorless laugh Ilya lets out tells him immediately that it was the wrong response.

Silence blankets the room once more, broken only by the click and whir of Shane’s camera, the pop and hiss of the strobe firing into the reflector, and the pulse beating in his ears. Neither of them makes any attempt to fill it, and for the next hour, the only words that pass between them are a call and response of instruction and assent — a shift to his left, the tilt of his head, the drop of his hand.

Shane captures without recognizing, reducing Ilya to a still life, something frozen in time and held at a distance through the lens. He catalogs the slope of Ilya’s shoulders and how they’re broader than they had been, the grey climbing up his sideburns and mixing with his golden curls, the scars on his legs that hadn’t been there the last time Shane ran his hands up them. He sees all of it, but doesn’t let himself remember, doesn’t let himself be moved by what has changed or what hasn’t. And he knows that distance is a disservice to the assignment, to the art, to his craft.

It’s what finally forces the words out of him as Ilya readjusts within the cyclorama.

“I didn’t want you to pity me.”

Through the viewfinder, Shane catches the exact moment Ilya goes still, becoming for a second the very thing Shane has been trying to make of him — something safely removed from the moment. Then his face falls, softens, his shoulders sloping with it, and his eyes land directly in the center of the lens. Shane trips the shutter before he can stop himself, pure instinct after years spent learning to find the most striking part of a subject, and then lowers the camera to his side and looks at Ilya straight on.

There shouldn’t be anything between them for this.

“I didn’t ask,” Ilya says as their eyes lock.

Shane couldn’t do this when they met. He couldn’t hold Ilya’s gaze without eventually looking away, but years behind a camera have trained that instinct out of him. Looking is his job now, at the ugly and the beautiful and everything that lives between them. And Ilya is his job today, standing in front of him with hurt unmistakable in his eyes.

“I know,” Shane gives him softly. “But I needed to say it.”

There are several feet between them, but Shane can almost feel the way Ilya swallows down his pride before he asks, “Why?”

Shane sits with it for a moment, the word somehow impossibly small for everything it could mean.

Why didn’t you want my pity, why did you shut me out, why are you telling me now?

“Because I owed you an explanation.”

“You owed me nothing. We were nothing.”

The words go flat again, made crueler somehow by the complete absence of feeling behind them, and Shane shifts beneath their weight even as he knows they’re his to carry, part of the penance for everything he chose not to say for so long. Ilya watches him struggle with them, eyes dark and unforgiving, waiting to see what Shane will do.

“That’s not—”

The words don’t come.

“No, it’s not.” Ilya’s mouth twists faintly. “But it’s been a long time, Hollander.”

Shane’s stomach turns at his name in Ilya’s mouth, harsh as it had been under arena lights back when they would pretend not to know what their skin tasted like. His throat goes dry, and for one second his mouth floods with the memory of salt from Ilya’s collarbone gathered on his tongue. He shifts the camera in his hands because suddenly he doesn’t know what else to do with them. He tries to pull in a full breath, but it stalls halfway, leaving him standing across from Ilya with his jaw clenched and his thumb worrying the edge of the camera grip.

He looks over at the monitor, though he isn’t really seeing what’s on it.

“We should take ten,” Shane says, his vision blurring as his eyes fill with tears. “Regroup, then move on to the next setup. I’ll send in a robe.”

Before Ilya can answer, Shane is already through the door and halfway down the hall.

He takes the staircase up to the lobby, three steps at a time, turning when he reaches the top to make sure he hasn’t been followed. Part of his heart sinks at the confirmation, but he takes a breath in a way he couldn’t with Ilya in the same room, sharing his air but not his mouth, his lungs, the way it used to be. By the time he’s pressing through the revolving door and out onto the street, every inhale burns.

The city hits him all at once — horns, brakes, voices, the heat rising heavy from the pavement — and it filters into his head as white noise the way crowds in arenas used to. Shane braces a hand against the stone beside the entrance and bows his head as the first tear slips free. Then another. He wipes them away with the heel of his hand, angry at himself for crying and angrier that some part of him had apparently believed seeing Ilya again would hurt less than this.

He counts his breaths until they stop coming so fast. Four in and hold, then four out, and again.

He stays on the street a little longer, staring down at the sidewalk, at the dirt worked deep into the concrete by years of people passing over it. Shane thinks of Ilya without meaning to, of all the places his body still seems to remember him even when there’s nothing there anymore. A mouth at his neck, fingers at his waist, the weight of him between Shane’s legs.

Gone, but not gone enough.

Still there for Shane to find, only to lose all over again.

By the time he straightens, his face feels tight and his chest feels scraped hollow, but he’s better. Even if he isn’t, he has to go back anyway.

When Shane returns to the makeshift studio, he feels wrung through, and the sight of Ilya propped against the bank of antique windows at the far end of the space, early afternoon light surrounding him like a halo, does him no favors. Shane stops in his tracks, already haunted by the image before it’s even gone, and raises the camera almost without thinking, catching the moment before Ilya turns at the sound of him.

“Why did you agree to this?” Ilya asks when he does.

“Why did you?”

For a second, Shane is somewhere else entirely, remembering the two of them grinning through an argument neither had ever intended to win.

You come here.

No, you come here.

They didn’t, and then they did, meeting in the middle and crashing into each other with all the wanting they’d been pretending not to carry.

Shane moves first this time, even as his feet remain still.

“You don’t say no to the Body Issue.”

Ilya just nods and pushes off the windows, his robe spilling open across his chest with the motion, and Shane challenges himself not to look away, to treat this like any other assignment, give it the respect it deserves. It’s just a body like any other. A body that is not under his hands or lips or teeth or weight. That is not his.

His cheeks pink anyway when a familiar glint of gold catches the light between Ilya’s pecs as he approaches.

“Why did you?” Shane asks again.

“Was my idea,” Ilya drops simply as he walks past.

Shane turns after him so quickly the camera almost slips from his grasp as his mind spins back, back, back to the beginning. To a different shoot, different versions of themselves.

“Your idea?” Shane asks at his back.

“They asked me for years and I always said no,” Ilya says with the casual lift of one shoulder as he pulls off the robe. “I finally had a reason to say yes.”

Shane’s heart gives one hard beat, and suddenly his pulse is roaring in his ears.

There it is, bare before him: Ilya’s body and the truth.

Ilya seems casual about both as he moves through the space without looking back, no matter how badly Shane wills him to turn. He wants to see what Ilya’s eyes hold, whether they’re soft at the corners like they were the last time they were together in private all those years before. He worries that if they are, he’ll climb into his lap the same way, and they can’t. He can’t.

Of all the ways Shane had pictured this day unfolding, this was never among them, and he has no idea what to do with the possibility that Ilya might still want something from him. He wants to ask if it’s closure as much as he needs to know if it’s ripping open old wounds, but his body won’t cooperate with any of it. His feet stay planted. His mouth stays shut.

He just stands there, staring at Ilya’s back until the silence finally makes him turn, and Shane sees it there in every familiar line of his face.

“What do you want from me?” he asks quietly into the space between them, because naming it and getting it wrong would be too much to bear, even as much as getting it right could be worse.

“For you to talk.” Ilya holds his gaze. “You want me to be naked for you? You need to be naked for me too.”

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: how long a magazine cover shoot takes, parts of a camera, antique windows, and what those umbrella things on a set are actually called. (Hi. I have zero experience in this realm beyond attending brand shoots.)

I may write the final three chapters before posting any of them, so it might be a little bit before the next update. I need to get the whole thing out of my head before I start mixing up the two WIPs currently fighting for space in my brain.

I appreciate all the love on this so far, and your patience while I finish it out over the next few weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to shout in the comments about how awful I am for leaving it here.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

“Ah, no,” Ilya says with a once-familiar tsk. “Not your clothes.”

Shane starts to flush, his hand hovering near his top button before he realizes it’s even moved there. It’s muscle memory, he tells himself — Pavlovian, surely. But even after all this time, the reality is that Shane is still so ready, so eager to do as he’s told when Ilya’s voice drops and their eyes lock.

On your knees. On your stomach. Come for me.

The words ricochet out of the past and through his mind. Shane clears his throat as they fade, and tips his chin toward the next setup. Ilya follows, crossing to the faux sheet of ice as if he knows exactly where Shane wants him. A blink, a quirk of Shane’s mouth, the slightest curl of his index finger — somehow, Ilya can still read him.

The body remembers. Shane’s certainly does.

But all Ilya gives him now is, “I ask, you answer.”

They negotiate the terms as Shane directs him into position, until Ilya is stretched out on one hip, an arm propped beneath his head, his torso twisted and his legs crossed to give the illusion of full nudity. Shane can veto one question, and hockey is off-limits — why he didn’t go back, why he didn’t push himself harder, whether there was ever a version of his recovery that could have ended differently. He can’t bring himself to talk about it. Not like this, with him.

He knows that leaves almost everything else open: Ilya, the two of them, what they weren’t, what they were, and whatever might still be left of it now. All the questions he’s asked himself — aloud in the shower, silently on walks, whispered into the dark as the days ticked closer to the shoot — and he’s prepared to answer them with the honesty he probably should have been brave enough to offer back then. 

But that came later, in the after, when Shane knew the fabric of his therapist’s couch as well as his own and finally learned how much damage could be done by pretending he was fine. When he learned it hadn’t only been pride that kept him from answering Ilya, but fear too, and maybe even punishment.

He expects Ilya to start there, to go back to the why of it all, asking Shane to explain himself, to grovel, to lay himself out like an offering. But he doesn’t.

Instead, Shane clicks the shutter and Ilya’s mouth tips up on one side as he says, “Tell me about this Shane Hollander.”

It catches Shane off guard, the timbre of his voice as it wraps around his name, and he huffs out a nervous sort of laugh before he can stop himself. He hasn’t felt like this in a long time — awkward, self-conscious, too aware of himself under Ilya’s eyes. He thinks back to the first time they had been together, Ilya stretched across the bed watching Shane undress, naked and grinning like he could see right through him.

“That’s, uh, that’s kind of broad,” Shane says around a swallow. “Can you be more specific?”

He lifts the camera before Ilya can answer, the shutter clicking and lights washing over his bare skin.

When he lowers it again, Ilya asks, “Are you happy?”

The question nearly knocks the breath clean out of him, his hand falling to his side, the camera thudding there against his thigh. Of all the things — all the selfish things Ilya could ask — he starts with this.

And the truth is that Shane doesn’t know.

He thinks about his life as it is now. His days spent at his place of business — Another Shot Studios, so aptly named — and the way his work has taken him around the world. The pride he’s felt in what he’s made, the lives he’s been able to intersect with, to touch through it. The friends he’s made and kept, the moments with them. It’s not fifty goals in a season or a championship, but it’s his.

Except they sit in his head like a list of accomplishments, and Shane has spent enough of his life keeping score to know that winning and being happy have never necessarily been the same thing.

“Enough, sure,” he says after a moment.

Ilya studies him, but whatever he sees in Shane’s face, he lets it go.

“And you?” Shane counters, trying to move things along, away.

“I am the one asking the questions, Hollander.”

From there, the photos and questions come fairly rapid-fire: Where are you living now? Why photography? What’s your favorite photo you’ve ever taken? Were you doing this before you retired? How is your shoulder now? Does it still hurt?

They’re all questions Shane has rehearsed, and he gives Ilya the answers.

I’m just outside of Ottawa full time, when I’m not on location. A nice three-bedroom on a lake. My parents aren’t far. 

I just wanted to try it, find a hobby. But it made me feel useful again. Like I could still be something.

I don’t know if I’ve taken it yet.

No. I didn’t even own a camera until after.

It’s okay.

Some days are worse than others.

By the second hour, something shifts.

Ilya loses his balance mid-shot, and, like a reflex, Shane chirps at him from behind the camera the way he used to from behind the visor of his helmet. Ilya chirps back, and from there the questions loosen into conversation, an easy back-and-forth.

Ilya talks openly about the dog he adopted, eyes shining, and Shane tells him about the two cats he took in last winter — Wayne and Gordie. Shane asks about Boston, and Ilya says he’ll likely retire there. He sounds wistful, but Shane doesn’t push. They compare the places they’ve lived and traveled, catch each other up on who got married, who had kids, who settled down where, who got divorced. Ilya admits he quit smoking, and Shane tells him he’s proud without an ounce of irony. When Shane admits he only stuck to veganism for one summer, Ilya tells him he’s proud too, though his tone makes it clear he means absolutely none of it.

It’s comfortable in a surface-level kind of way, but an hour later, they run out of things to be friendly about. Silence settles over them once more, broken only by the sounds of Shane working and their breathing, close enough now for Shane to hear every inhale as they move into the macro shots, gritty close-ups that put only inches between them.

He catalogs Ilya’s missing teeth without the flipper, the scars along his legs, the creases at the corners of his eyes, the stretch marks pulled across his quads.

It takes effort, real effort, to keep the camera still this close to him, and Shane knows it isn’t the ghost of his injury making his hand — both hands — shake. All day, he’s pointedly compartmentalized, ignored the reality of Ilya naked in front of him and everything that has always done to Shane. Up close, with the fine hairs at the small of his back visible through the lens, the callouses on his hands, it’s harder to pretend.

“Bring that right shoulder forward,” Shane says, forcing his attention back to the frame. “Just like— yeah, good. Then chin down. Not that much.”

“Very bossy.”

“I’m trying to work,” he shoots back firmly over another click of the shutter.

“I can tell. You have a very serious face.”

“Ilya.”

“What?”

Shane lowers the camera just enough to look at him over it. Ilya looks back, brows pulling together slightly.

“You’re naked.”

Ilya glances down. “Yes.”

“And I’m trying to do my job.”

“And?” Ilya’s mouth twitches on the other side of Shane’s lens. “Is it… hard?”

Ilya shifts before Shane can answer, abandoning the pose entirely as he leans back onto his elbows and lets his legs fall wider. The modesty garment keeps anything from actually being exposed, but that hardly seems to matter when the rest of him is suddenly laid out for Shane to look at, chest open, stomach stretched long, thighs relaxed beneath the lights.

He keeps the camera raised anyway, Ilya framed neatly inside it like this is still something Shane can reduce to aperture and angles, light. But Ilya just looks straight through the lens at him, waiting.

Shane lowers the camera.

“Don’t do that,” he says softly, with so little conviction it barely sounds like a warning.

“Do what?”

“Flirt with me.”

Ilya’s laugh is loud and bright, echoing through the space, and Shane shivers beneath it.

“Really?” Ilya says as it tapers. “You thought I would come here and do this and not flirt with you?”

Shane swallows around what his body wants him to say, and hangs his head as he says, “I thought you would be furious with me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Shane catches Ilya moving, folding up into himself before he stands. He doesn’t have to look to know he’s coming closer. He can feel the distance disappearing between them while Shane keeps his eyes fixed somewhere near the floor.

This, he thinks absurdly, is why he never got into wildlife photography. Shane likes being the one doing the watching. He likes knowing where his subject is, what it’s going to do next. He does not like the distinct sensation of being stalked across his own set by a six-foot-three Russian who knows perfectly well Shane can hear him coming.

Still, he doesn’t look up.

“Is that what you want?” Ilya says at his back, and Shane has to fight the instinct to lean into him, to close whatever little distance remains.

Shane says nothing, just gives the smallest shake of his head — once, slow and small enough for Ilya to miss it if he were anyone but Ilya.

“Can I tell you what I want?” 

Before Shane can answer, Ilya trails the backs of his fingers down his arm, the one that only has seventy percent sensation on a good day, and Shane feels every bit of it.

“I want you to let me show you what I would have done then.” Ilya’s voice is at the back of Shane’s neck, humid and close. “What you didn’t give me the chance to do.”

“Ilya—”

“I thought you died, Shane.” Ilya’s fingers stop against his arm. “I got off the ice, I saw the replay, and I thought you died. And all I wanted was to run to you, and I couldn’t. Because of Russia and how we left things and a fucking border and everything else.”

Shane closes his eyes.

“And then you did. You died to me. Only me. And I had no choice in it. When all I wanted was to show you that it changed nothing for me.”

“It changed everything,” Shane gets out.

“For you.”

Shane turns then, finally, and finds Ilya closer than he expected. The hurt is still there, but there’s something else beneath it that Shane recognizes immediately.

“I still wanted you.”

Wanted. The word stings even as every nerve in Shane seems to register how close Ilya is. It drops them straight back into what they’d been allowed to have, all those years of hotel rooms and stolen hours Shane had convinced himself were the whole of it.

He starts to step back, but Ilya catches his wrist.

“No— I’m trying to say you could have taken the sex away entirely and I still wanted you. I wanted to be there for you.”

“I didn’t know,” Shane says barely above a whisper. It might be the closest they’ve ever come to saying what they were to each other, and it’s so painfully late.

“You didn’t let me tell you.” Ilya’s grip loosens around his wrist, but he doesn’t let go. “You didn’t let me see you.”

Shane knows this is the moment — the one where he could lean in and take Ilya’s mouth with his own, let the tears on their faces smear together as Ilya pulls him closer, until there’s nothing left between them but breath and want and everything they never got to say. He can see it in Ilya’s eyes, the invitation and the challenge tangled together, daring Shane to close the distance.

Shane steps out of Ilya’s reach, and this time, Ilya lets him go.

“You’re right. I didn’t,” Shane says to the floor between them.

“Why?”

“I already told you.”

“Why do you think I would have pitied you?” Ilya asks, his voice rising. “When did I ever pity you?”

Anger flares in Shane’s chest, ugly and indefensible, and he knows it’s there because Ilya is right. It had been unfair then, and it had been unfair every day since, every time Shane’s thumb hovered over his blocked number and he thought about undoing it, typing out the apology he’d rehearsed a hundred different ways.

But he couldn’t bear the thought of Ilya knowing this Shane. For so long, Shane had believed that his body was all Ilya had ever wanted from him, and the body Ilya had wanted was gone, mangled in places power had been. He couldn’t stand to look at himself. How could he let Ilya?

“Because I pitied myself,” he says quietly. “And I didn’t want to be some pity fuck for you.”

The Body Issue. His body issues.

Shane almost laughs at the parallel, but it dies somewhere between them. The thing that kept him from Ilya is the very thing that brought him back.

Ilya closes the distance Shane’s put between them in two confident steps, until he’s right in Shane’s face, and Shane doesn’t flinch from the closeness.

“I would never have pitied you,” he says against Shane’s cheek, his voice low and steady. “But I would have fucked you until you remembered who you were.”

Shane opens his mouth, and no words come out. Then Ilya is brushing past him, moving back to his mark and settling into the position he’d abandoned before pressing on this particular bruise.

It takes Shane a moment to collect himself enough to raise the camera again, but when he does, they return to the work. It’s all business between them now, with more than enough already said and still sitting heavily in the room.

Another hour ticks past before Shane sets his camera on the table beside the monitor and Ilya pulls the robe around himself, neither of them saying the shoot is over, but knowing it anyway.

Shane looks at him then, really looks at him, and Ilya holds his gaze as he crosses the set and comes to a stop beside him. Shane braces himself for whatever comes next, but he doesn’t reach for an ending. He doesn’t say goodbye, doesn’t ask Ilya to stay, doesn’t decide for both of them what this is allowed to become.

He just leaves the space there between them, open for Ilya to fill. What he knows he should have done back then.

Something in Ilya’s expression shifts, like he understands exactly what Shane is giving him.

“Fourteen-twelve,” he says as he starts toward the door. “You can come stare without the camera. I would like to do the same.”

Chapter End Notes

The only things I Googled for this chapter were a whole lot of synonyms, so we’re really moving up in the world.

There’s a lot less interiority in this chapter, which is my favorite thing to write in this, so I’m being wildly hypercritical of every word here. Anyway, I hope you still enjoyed me forcing these two to actually speak to each other for once. Even if they’re kind of shit at it.

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

The hall on the fourteenth floor is quiet, or as quiet as anywhere in New York ever gets, the constant din of the city bleeding through every wall and window, even in the priciest of hotels. But Shane’s head is so ungodly loud as he stands there in the middle of it, feet planted squarely between rooms 1410 and 1412, that he’s almost certain Ilya will hear him before he knocks, his mind racing through memories of another room 1410, where Shane first tasted Ilya, first fell to his knees for him, first lost himself in him.

He didn’t know it then, but he knows it now. Time hadn’t erased it, and distance hadn’t either. Neither had pain or grief or regret. Whatever Shane feels for Ilya Rozanov is the kind of thing stars are made of — pressure and heat and impossible distance, still burning long after anyone should expect there to be light.

He wouldn’t be standing here otherwise, ready to tear into everything he’d spent years trying to heal, and bleed out, spilling want, longing, and I fucking missed you all over him.

It took him all of two minutes in the quiet of his own room after the shoot to come to grips with it, as if will he or won’t he had ever actually been a question he was asking himself. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Shane had known that if Ilya still wanted him, he wanted Ilya too — known it from the day the email landed in his inbox that would put them in the same room. 

Still, he’d been determined to walk out of the shoot the way he came into it — alone, with Ilya kept at a safe enough distance that Shane wouldn’t have to remember what it felt like to have him and lose him. That was why he’d left the ending to Ilya in the first place.

And Ilya had filled the space with an invitation. So here Shane is, outside his door, heart in his throat.

He knocks once, slow and soft — none of the urgency he’d had in his knuckles all those years ago, no longer worried about who might see him and what they might say, to who. Ilya opens the door without any of the old caution either, swinging it wide on its hinge and leaving it that way as he leans against the frame, making no move to pull Shane inside or glance down the hall.

“You came,” he says, the words leaving him with a quiet exhale.

Shane nods, and for a moment, they just look at each other across the threshold, as if they’re both still getting used to the fact that this is where they ended up — Shane on one side of the door, Ilya on the other, two feet apart.

Then Shane’s mouth starts to curve, slow and almost shy, and Ilya’s follows until they’re both smiling.

Without a word, Ilya steps back and Shane follows him inside. The door closes heavily behind them, and with it goes every last expectation of professionalism, left in the hall, in the elevator, on the floor of the banquet room beside the robe Ilya had discarded.

Maybe that’s what finally does it, what breaks him open enough to stop fighting how badly he wants this.

Shane moves closer, drawn in until it feels less like crossing the room and more like sinking into Ilya — like the quicksand he’d been terrified of as a kid, certain it would swallow him whole, only to grow up and discover there were worse things than being consumed. And Ilya is here, solid and warm and close enough to disappear into, and suddenly, Shane wants nothing more.

Except disappearing would be too easy, expected. Shane has spent the better part of a decade making himself impossible for Ilya to reach, and he doesn’t want to vanish into him now. He wants to stay right here beneath Ilya’s eyes, with no lens between them, nothing to crop or soften or keep safely out of frame.

Bare.

“So, should we sit or…”

Even as he says it, the words trailing into nothing, Shane knows how useless the question is, like they haven’t spent the bulk of the day getting to this point, crawling and clawing toward it. His body seems to know it too, carrying him closer until there are only inches between them, their breaths tangling in the narrow space.

He stops there. Not because he doesn’t want to close it. Fuck, he wants to. But because Shane has spent too much of their history deciding where the line is before Ilya gets any say in it. So he stays where he is, wanting openly this time, and leaves only the last few inches for Ilya.

Ilya’s hand comes up, one long finger slipping beneath Shane’s collar before the rest of his fingertips follow, traveling over the scar tissue at the base of his neck. When his whole hand is beneath Shane’s shirt, he flattens his palm over the spot. Shane can feel the pressure, the weight through the scar tissue without much of the finer sensation, but something hot and needy still tears through him at the contact.

It feels more intimate than the kiss Shane realizes he’d been anticipating, more exposing somehow, and for a second he doesn’t know what to do with the fact that Ilya has gone straight for the part of him he spent so long trying to hide.

He feels split open by it, devastated and wanting all at once.

“Can I see you?” Ilya’s voice is low and even, the words warm against Shane’s cheek with his mouth this close.

Shane shivers beneath the question, the touch, then very slowly undoes the buttons of his own shirt, letting Ilya make the final move to push it back from his shoulders and onto the floor.

Ilya’s eyes don’t leave Shane’s despite what’s now on display before him. Instead, he holds Shane’s gaze and asks, “Do you still fold your clothes when you take them off?”

Shane expected almost anything else to come out of Ilya’s mouth, and he can’t stop the laugh that slips free, somehow making it past the pulse pounding high in his throat. 

“Yeah, do you mind if I—”

“Let me.”

Ilya’s hand leaves Shane’s shoulder, which he still hasn’t looked at directly, as he bends to retrieve the button-down pooled around Shane’s feet. While he’s there, he lets the back of one hand barely trail down Shane’s calf, and Shane feels all of it, every minute detail of the touch.

It makes his shoulder ache.

Ilya makes quick work of the shirt, his long fingers pressing crisp folds into the fabric before he sets it on the table beside them and steps back in front of Shane.

There’s more distance between them now without Ilya’s hand on him, and Shane finds that he prefers it — at least for this. He understands distance. Sometimes a close-up is too close, all detail without context, one imperfect thing made large enough to overtake the rest of the frame.

He thinks of his shoulder the same way.

Up close, there’s the scar tissue, the places marred and mangled, the evidence of everything his body stopped being able to do. But from where Ilya stands, there’s more of him to see. His arms are still thick with muscle, his chest still broad, his stomach still firm. He’s worked hard for this body, and there’s comfort in remembering that the worst thing that ever happened to it doesn’t get to be the whole picture — especially when Ilya seems intent on taking his time seeing all of him.

His eyes start at Shane’s and travel slowly down his neck, across his left shoulder, along his arm and inward to his navel, then over to his hip and up his side before finally, finally, settling on his right shoulder. Shane expects Ilya to grimace, his eyes to narrow, his brow to pinch — all the versions of horror and compassion and I’m glad it wasn’t me he’s seen over the years — but nothing changes in his expression. He simply brings his gaze back to Shane’s and holds it there, giving the smallest nod before he asks, “Can I?”

Shane knows what he means before he has time to think about it. Ilya wants to touch him.

He nods automatically.

As Ilya steps closer than they’ve been all day — closer than they’ve been in years — Shane braces himself for impact, then closes his eyes as Ilya’s hand meets the hinge of his jaw, then slides down, down, down across his neck and shoulder, then back the way it came until Shane’s face is cradled in his palm and he can’t do anything but lean into it, let himself be held.

If this is as far as it goes — just Ilya’s hand against his face — Shane knows it’s already more than he ever expected to have again.

Part of him hopes this is it. Something this small, even as all-consuming as it feels, might be easier to lose twice.

Then Ilya asks again, softer this time, “Can I?” and Shane doesn’t need to open his eyes to know he’s right there, the idea of distance entirely gone as Ilya’s thumb brushes over his cheekbone. 

The “please” that breaks out of Shane’s throat sounds like he’s begging for mercy, and maybe he is. That’s what it feels like in the seconds between the word and Ilya’s response to it. Please, Ilya, have mercy on me. Forgive me for the things I’ve done. Give me your mouth. Give it to me like I still deserve it. Please, please, please, let me still deserve it. Then Ilya does, and Shane sighs right against his bottom lip and into his mouth as it opens and licks into his own.

Shane’s fingers move up into Ilya’s curls as their tongues meet and slide, and something in him gives at how Ilya feels the same beneath his hands, tastes the same on his tongue, until he’s whimpering at the sheer, crushing familiarity of him. He loses himself in it, and will for as long as Ilya lets him live inside this time capsule of their mouths moving together, his face cupped between Ilya’s hands.

It doesn’t break, doesn’t stop. Not as Ilya crowds into him and Shane’s back meets the wall beside the kitchenette. Not as Ilya turns them and backs them down the hallway, hands firm at Shane’s hips, guiding him with every step. Not as the backs of Shane’s knees hit the edge of the bed and bend, and Ilya’s weight settles over him.

Not as Shane gasps and moans and Ilya devours each sound.

Shane has never been kissed so thoroughly — he’s sure of it — and he wonders briefly if this is simply how all that lost time has to manifest between them. Years and years of what could have been, finally condensed into one needy, begging moment pressed against their tongues and swallowed down. 

He can’t tell yet whether he’s swallowing poison or medicine. He only knows he wants more.

Ilya seems to understand that without being told. The kiss slows before it breaks, his mouth lingering at the corner of Shane’s, then along his chin, giving Shane time to feel every inch of the distance as Ilya works lower. His lips find the underside of Shane’s jaw first, then his throat, his good shoulder, before his tongue drags warm across Shane’s collarbone.

Shane knows where this is going, knows where Ilya’s mouth will move next, and just before it does, Ilya breathes another threadbare, “Can I?”

He answers by sliding his hands up from where they’d been digging into Ilya’s shoulders to the back of his head and pulling him in, pressing Ilya’s face against the place he spent so long believing no one could want to touch.

It’s gentle and slow until it isn’t, Ilya’s tongue moving over the parts Shane can feel and the parts he can’t in exactly the same way, like he’s trying to write the same message into all of him: still you, still wanted.

Shane’s cock outright leaks as Ilya’s mouth works there, a strangled “ah” falling out of his mouth.

“Okay?” Ilya asks, not moving away, just stilling there against the crook of his neck.

“Yeah, fuck, it’s good.”

Ilya doesn’t ask if he’s sure. He just dives back in, taking Shane at his word. Not coddling him, not second-guessing him, not acting like he knows Shane’s body better than Shane does.

Like none of the things Shane thought would matter to Ilya ever did.

Like Shane was wrong.

His throat goes painfully tight, and by the time Shane opens his eyes, they’re already filled with tears. He lets them run silently over his cheeks and down his jaw, his neck, right into Ilya’s path. Ilya still doesn’t stop — just moves his mouth over them, wetting his lips with the salt and the sorrow as he finds his way back to Shane’s jaw.

“Can I?” Ilya asks there, and even though Shane doesn’t know what he’s asking for this time, he nods anyway and pulls him closer.

Chapter End Notes

Things I Googled for this chapter: yet again, a whole lot of synonyms.

Yes, I realize I’m edging you a little bit here, and that this is essentially a whole chapter of them barely making out. But I wanted to give them time and space in this moment. I wanted Shane to process what’s happening in real time instead of just saying they kissed and rushing them into something more. And I wanted to let Ilya take his time showing Shane that he meant every single thing he said. To make up for it, I bumped the chapter count up to six. I hope you don’t mind that part.

As always, I would love to hear what you think. The good, the bad, the emojis instead of words. Bring it on.

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

Ilya just holds him, cradled against his chest as if it’s the natural progression of things, as if all those years hadn’t passed touch-starved and hungry, and Shane knows now that Ilya was wrong about nothing changing. This has changed. The tenderness in his touch, the lack of urgency, the way Shane can bury his face against Ilya’s neck and simply not move until the tears stem.

When they do, he thinks about apologizing, explaining, but when his mouth opens, it’s only for his tongue to slide softly against Ilya’s as if quietly asking for the forgiveness he can’t give voice to, and Ilya licks back like he knows, like they’ve always spoken this language. And maybe they have, because Ilya’s groan needs no interpretation as it fills Shane’s mouth, gets swallowed down into his lungs, and Shane’s body arches into him in response.

They don’t say anything as they strip each other of their clothing, but their bodies keep talking — begging, begging to fit together, to remember, to forget.

They find the bed again bare, Shane turning onto his side so his bad shoulder stays lifted free of the mattress, offered to Ilya openly instead as he folds himself along Shane’s back. One hand grips Shane’s hip and pulls him close as Ilya rocks against him, slow and aching, his mouth brushing featherlight kisses over the scar, up his neck, into the hair at his nape with every shift of his body.

It feels so good, like so much, and a sheen of sweat breaks out across his skin as Shane tries to control his breath.

His whole world is unraveling, and Ilya isn’t even inside him yet.

Yet, yet, yet — because he needs it.

“Please,” Shane says, just to be clear, to be sure Ilya knows, just in case that, of all things, has gotten lost in translation.

He feels Ilya’s cock twitch against the cleft of his ass, before Ilya pulls Shane’s hip toward him, fingertips digging in, the once-familiar length sliding between his cheeks, once then again, grinding against him more roughly with each pass.

Shane says it again and again, a hushed prayer, a hymn of “please, please, please,” until Ilya’s hand leaves his hip just long enough for him to twist toward the nightstand.

It’s been a while, but Shane still knows the sounds that will come next — a drawer handle being pulled, a lid being popped open, the slick sound of Ilya’s fingers as he coats them generously. What he doesn’t expect is Ilya’s shaky breath as he presses his torso flush against Shane’s back again, one long finger just barely against his rim.

“Can I?” Ilya asks roughly at his ear, the words sounding strained — maybe with the effort of holding himself back, of not just taking. But Shane knows him better than that, and shame floods him at even the thought. He wants nothing more than to give Ilya what he should have given him all those years ago — the chance to be trusted with all of him.

It’s all that fills his mind as Shane responds by pressing back into his hand, taking Ilya’s finger two knuckles deep before either of them can even think to gasp about it.

His body used to tense at this, used to brace for the stretch and burn. Now there’s only a warm rush of relief, an ache of recognition as Ilya gently adds another finger and begins to move them in and out, and Shane has to turn his head, stiff and imperfect as the motion is, and take Ilya’s mouth about it. The kiss is messy, half of Shane’s mouth and too much of Ilya’s tongue, but neither one of them shifts to change the angle of their bodies. They just cling to each other as Ilya pumps his fingers and Shane moans into the corner of his mouth, the sound spilling warm against his cheek.

Shane doesn’t know how long Ilya works his fingers in and out of his hole, only that somehow it’s both too much and nowhere near enough, and eventually he’s grasping at Ilya’s wrist and trying to pull his hand away even as his hips keep rocking back onto his fingers.

“Tell me what you want,” Ilya whispers, and Shane looks back just in time to see Ilya staring down at the way Shane is riding his hand, fingers digging into his wrist.

“You,” Shane gasps, his throat tightening at the honesty of it. Then he’s nearly sobbing out, “Always you,” his hand leaving Ilya’s wrist to reach behind him, grasping at Ilya wherever he can.

Ilya threads one arm beneath Shane and wraps the other around his middle, gathering him fully back against his chest until Shane is held there between both arms as Ilya whispers, “You have me,” against his neck. “You always could have.”

Shane tries not to, but a whimper cuts through him, his eyes burn, and all at once he knows he’s going to cry through all of this. Maybe there was never going to be another way through everything he’d buried beneath pride and fear, all that want with nowhere to go for so long.

Ilya’s arms tighten around him at the first tear that drips from Shane’s cheek and lands on his skin, and when he presses his mouth to Shane’s neck again, his breath shakes there too.

It’s all unspoken after that — Shane pressing back against Ilya’s softening cock until it’s rigid and leaking against him again, the answering shift of Ilya’s hips, the way Shane refuses to let go of his hand where their fingers are twinned over his hip except for the scant moment Ilya reaches for a condom. Shane wants to stop him, knowing there’s been no one else, no one since, but that almost feels like too much to say in this moment, so he tries to fit the meaning of it into the way he works himself slowly onto Ilya’s cock. He thinks Ilya understands anyway, in the way he never once presses forward.

When Ilya’s fully inside him, Shane shivers, and Ilya’s grip tightens where his arm holds firm against his chest. Then he’s rocking into him, and every movement feels weighted with everything they still haven’t said.

“Why didn’t you want this?” Ilya asks with a thrust, then, “Why did you run from this?” with another, and Shane’s crying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” with his whole body as his hips work faster.

Their legs tangle, Ilya’s hand closing around Shane’s shoulder to keep him anchored as the pace turns furious, neither of them willing to slow it down. Shane can feel the grief in it now, the anger, the wanting, all of it enmeshed with something softer that keeps surviving every hard thrust, every broken sound between them.

It feels like everything Shane didn’t know he could have.

To be wanted, to be seen, to be loved.

He turns in Ilya’s arms then, shifting him onto his back and only letting him slip out for a moment before Shane is straddling his hips, and finds the same realization waiting for him in Ilya’s watery eyes.

“You feel it too?” Shane asks, his hips entirely still so it’s clear he doesn’t mean the physical, the outright need, and when Ilya nods with his eyes soft at the corners, Shane can’t stop himself from bending to take his mouth, cradling Ilya’s face between his hands.

Their mouths don’t part again as Ilya thrusts up into him and Shane takes all of it, grinding down to meet him, chasing every inch until there’s no longer any distinction between taking and giving, asking and answering. When Shane comes, it happens with Ilya’s mouth still open against his, the sound torn out of him and swallowed down, and Ilya follows close behind, his arms crushing Shane against his chest as they kiss through it, salt and sweat and tears gathering wherever their faces meet.

There, in the after, Shane brings himself to say one true thing out loud, his mind unable to focus on anything else.

“I wanted you so much, it terrified me.”

Ilya laughs, his abdomen quivering beneath Shane, and humiliation burns through Shane before he can even make sense of the sound. He starts to pull away, to hide, but Ilya only holds him tighter.

“You had so much of me,” he says gently, a knuckle underneath Shane’s chin to keep his gaze steady. “It terrified me.”

The laugh stops hurting as soon as Shane understands it for what it is, and then there’s nothing left to do but bend down and kiss him again, softer this time, until the intensity of everything before begins to ebb into something serene, something safe.

Eventually, practicality finds them in the groan of Shane’s belly, the cooling proof of the last hour smeared between them. They clean themselves up, pull on enough clothing to answer the door when food arrives, and eat cross-legged on the bed with the television playing low enough that neither of them has to pretend to care what’s on. The conversation wanders into easier places, then lapses entirely.

Shane moves to clear the plates, and Ilya doesn’t ask him to stay, not like he did back then, the first time Shane ran, and Shane notices the absence of the question. Ilya never glances toward Shane’s discarded clothes or checks the time, never asks what room he’s in or whether he needs to go. For a while, Shane thinks he’s just being careful with him again, until it occurs to him that Ilya doesn’t want to have to ask this time. He wants Shane to choose him without being asked — and Shane wants to.

He looks at Ilya across the bed.

“Can I?” Ilya’s eyes lift from the space between them to his face, lips parting in question. Shane doesn’t leave any room for confusion, for questions, for doubt when he says, “Can I stay?”

“Please.”

Shane climbs back into bed and pulls Ilya against him, surprised by how easily their bodies settle together without urgency now, without either of them trying to turn the closeness into something else, something more. Ilya goes willingly, one arm draped across Shane’s waist, his face tucked against the shoulder Shane spent so long keeping out of his reach.

He lies there listening as Ilya’s breathing gradually evens, feeling half of each warm exhale against the scar tissue, and thinks about how impossible this would have seemed once. Ilya had been angry with him tonight, hurt by him. He had asked questions that still ache in his bones, had fucked him like he needed the answers driven into Shane’s body when words weren’t enough, and then held him through every tear anyway.

Maybe that’s the part Shane never understood. That anger doesn’t negate tenderness, that hurt doesn’t erase want, that Ilya can be furious with him and still press his mouth to the parts Shane thought would make him turn away.

By the time sleep finally starts pulling at him, Ilya’s cheek is still resting against his scar, and Shane has one arm curled around him as if keeping him there could make up for all the times he didn’t.

It can’t, and he knows that, but he stays there anyway, one thumb rubbing the soft skin of Ilya’s bicep.

When Shane finally falls asleep, it’s with Ilya warm against him and a knot made of all their lost years still lodged somewhere in his throat. For once, Shane doesn’t swallow around it or try to choke it down. He finds the loose thread and pulls, no longer afraid of what might come undone with it.

Chapter End Notes

Posting this despite some really nasty things being said about me on the internet today, because I’m trying very hard to stay above all of it and keep doing the thing that brings me joy.

I hope this wasn’t “not smutty enough” or “too lyrical.” I tried to Goldilocks the hell out of it — to give you the payoff these two deserved without losing the voice and tone of this fic, because the tenderness and all the messy feelings are as important to me as the sex.

Anyway. I hope I got it just right. I’d love to hear what you thought in the comments, as always.