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:

Smut, Explicit Sexual Content, Top Ilya Rozanov, Bottom Shane Hollander, Anal Sex, Oral Sex, Size Difference, Size Kink, Strength Kink, Body Hair, Hockey-Typical Violence, Accents, Voice Kink, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Shane Hollander is Obsessed With Ilya Rozanov, Competence Kink, Shane has thoughts about masculinity but not involving race or homophobia, 5+1 Things, No Beta

Language:

English

Collections:

*Heated rivalry melts my heart*, Hollanov 🥰, Fics LunaK does not want to lose track of

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-26 Words: 14,367 Chapters: 1/1

what a man (a mighty good man)

Summary

Shane was gay. That was the entire point of this whole thing. He was a man who loved another man. And he was a man. 

He was a professional athlete, nearly six feet tall, just about 200 pounds. But for every single thing about him that he felt like served to qualify him as a man, it was like Ilya had somehow turned the dial up to eleven. 

And Shane loved it. 

or, five times that Shane is overwhelmed by his husband's masculinity and one time that Ilya realizes he is not the man of the house. 

Notes

I keep having fucked up little thoughts about these two, and enough of you have explicitly referenced my sex scenes that I figured I’d just go for it—and also writing Open Doors was bumming me out a little because oh my god is Ilya just a little guy with a lot of feelings.

This is radically different in all ways from Private Meetings and Open Doors because I just wanted to write some silly little PWP. idek anymore, dudes.

Really, this is just 14,000 words of porn. The only plot can be summed up by “Shane is a manly man who likes that Ilya is somehow even manlier.” Whatever that even means. Masculinity is a social construct and if you think you're a man then you're a man (it really is that simple. There's no rules or playbooks and you don't have to be a specific type of man to qualify). Enjoy.

As usual, not beta'd and barley proof-read.

Shane was gay. That was the entire point of this whole thing. He was a man who loved another man. And he was a man. Not that he ever put a lot of stock into the idea that being a bottom meant being a bitch—although sometimes he did like the idea of being Ilya’s bitch—but he was a man, damn it. 

He was a professional athlete, nearly six feet tall, just about 200 pounds. But for every single thing about him that he felt like served to qualify him as a man, it was like Ilya had somehow turned the dial up to eleven. 

And he loved it. 

1.

Maybe it was the fact that he was unlucky, but he had never had all that much body hair besides his legs, underarms, and groin—and what he did have, he usually shaved. 

He was glad for his own sake when the Commissioner decided that playoff beards made it harder to recognize players and they had fallen out of fashion. Although some of the veteran players still bothered, making sure he had a clean shave every morning had always been part of his routine and disrupting his routine for the sake of someone else’s superstition had always driven him a little bit crazy. 

Ilya on the other hand could always grow a wonderful beard, the hair growing in thick and full over the almost two months of playoffs. Ilya wore his body hair better than almost anyone Shane knew. He loved to trace his hands down Ilya’s legs when he’d toss them into his lap, feeling the soft crinkle of his leg hair under his palms. He loved the feeling of Ilya’s chest hair under his cheek when he’d collapse onto him, sated and exhausted. 

God, he even loved the thick scent of a stupid deodorant that came in an aerosol can that clung to the hair under his arms or the scent of salt and sweat and musk that clung to the hair between his legs. 

But Shane was at home, not traveling due to a cold that he was now mostly recovered from, and Ilya was in the middle of a two-week long roadie. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Ilya in days.

He lay in the dark in their bed, his phone on his chest and ten days of shitty sleep behind him, waiting for Ilya to get back to the hotel after celebrations with the team so they could talk. 

Ilya: miss you lyubimyy

Only three words, but with how much he missed his husband, they were everything.

Shane: Yeah.

Yeah. That was all he could say, because he was a fucking coward and was still always a little hesitant to put into writing just how easily Ilya could unmake him. Then, thirty seconds later:

Shane: I miss you too. 

Only seconds passed before his phone was buzzing against his palm again. 

Ilya: how much?

Shane’s stomach clenched. He could picture Ilya’s face clearly—that heavy-lidded, cocksure look that Shane had come to expect on his husband’s face. The one that meant he knew exactly what he was doing to Shane despite the two thousand miles between them and he was going to sit and wait for Shane’s confession. 

Shane: A lot.

Ilya: that is not very specific hollander

He huffed out a breath, fingers flying on the keyboard.

Shane: It’s late.

Shane: I’m tired

Ilya’s reply followed so quickly that it almost embarrassed him that he was that easy to figure out. 

Ilya: liar

He stared at the word for a long moment before he fell for it—just like he always did. 

Shane: Fine. I’ve been thinking about you since you left.

It was still a little embarrassing, doing this through text. But he missed Ilya and he knew that he still had enough of a croak to his voice that he didn’t want to try to switch to an audio call. 

Ilya: what are you thinking about

There it was. Shane exhaled at the ceiling.

Shane: You.

It wasn’t an answer. He knew it wasn’t an answer, and he knew that Ilya would immediately call him out on his—

Ilya: what about me

Ilya: be specific

Shane: God you’re annoying. 

The defensiveness, the chirping, it was second nature and came more easily than trying to be sexy in a text message.

Ilya: you love it

Ilya: what about me shane

He closed his eyes. Opened them again. He felt his face heat in the empty darkness of their bedroom even though there was no one to see him, like an idiot. 

Shane: Your body.

Ilya: yes?

Shane: Yeah. 

Ilya: what about my body

Shane pressed the heel of his hand down against his sternum, trying to still his pounding heart. The house suddenly felt very quiet around him and he reached over, clicking on the noise machine just so he didn’t have to hear his own breathing or the pounding of his heart in his ears. He knew Ilya knew him—the sorts of things he thought about on nights like this—and he knew that if he dragged out the inevitable, he’d cause himself much unneeded embarassment. 

Shane: The hair on your stomach.

He sent the message, and the moment he heard it whoosh away he wanted to throw his phone out of an open window. The response took a moment to come in, and he stared up at the ceiling, waiting for Ilya to send him something teasing, mocking—call him out for absolutely terrible he was at th—

Ilya: i think about your hands

The simplicity of the message hit Shane hard, and he took a moment to just breathe as he reread the message. 

Ilya: you always put them on me

Ilya: touching me everywhere

Ilya: like you can’t help it

His reply to Ilya was quick, more honest than it might’ve been if he thought about it. 

Shane: I can’t. 

Ilya: good

Ilya: what yould you do if you were here

Shane’s hand drifted down to his stomach without him even consciously deciding to move it. Then, realizing exactly what they were doing, he very consciously moved it lower. 

Shane: What do you want me to say?

Ilya’s answer came quickly. 

Ilya: the truth

Shane: I’d want to be on top of you.

Before he could ssecond-guess it, he kept typing. 

Shane: Want to feel you inside of me.

Shane: Want my hands on you. I’d want to be able to smell you.

He couldn’t see Ilya, but he knew that somewhere in Vancouver he was smiling an absolutely shit-eating grin. 

Ilya: where

Shane: Your chest. Your arms. 

Shane: I like—

He paused there, knowing that Ilya could see the dots appearing and disappearing as he waffled about how to say it and whether or not to send it. 

Shane: I think about what your forearm feels like.

Shane: The hair there.

Shane: When you have your hands on me

There was another pause, and he knew with certainty that Ilya was enjoying this in a very different way than he was.

Ilya: you are so fucking hot when you tell me these things

Shane felt the words move through him, warm and low, and he didn’t need to be able to see himself in the mirror over their dresser to know that he was blushing. 

Ilya: even when you stop and start like this

Ilya: teasing me with typing bubbles

Shane: Fuck off.

Ilya: no.

Ilya: keep going

Ilya: tell me what else

Shane: Ilya.

Ilya: tell me malysh

Shane let his eyes drift closed, typing one-handed from muscle memory instead of looking at the keyboard as his other hand pushed down his underwear. 

Shane: I’d want to watch.

Shane: I always watch you. I’d watch my hands on you and I’d watch what happens when I move on you.

Shane: I’d want to see what it looks like. What I do to you.

Ilya’s reply is a little slower to come through.

Ilya: you want to see what you do to me

Shane: Yeah.

Ilya: send me something first

Before he could overthink it, before he could remember that there had been years where the risks of sending these pictures wasn’t worth the reward, he was taking the photo—one handed and clumsy, dim, lit only by the light of his screen.

Ilya: fuck

Ilya: youre already so wet

Ilya: always so wet for me

Shane made a soft, almost wounded sound into the empty room as his hand reflexively squeezed just a bit tighter, smearing the wetness down his length as he shuffled over so that his head rested on the pillow that was thick with the scent of Ilya’s shampoo instead of his own. 

Shane: Your fault.

Ilya: yes

Ilya: hold on

Shane held on. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. Two. He forced his hand to slow, knowing that he’s never all that far from the edge when he’s thinking about Ilya and he’d be damned if he got off before Ilya’s response. But it was harder to resist the impulse to just move when he was alone than when Ilya was there, pinning his wrists down or forcing him into motionlessness. 

When the photo came through, it stopped his breathing. 

Ilya on his back, the hotel lamp throwing a thick stripe of gold across the center of him. His hand rested loose and open against his hip, and Shane could see the shiny slick of moisture on his palm. The trail of hair running below his navel was wet—slick and matted, and he could clearly see the beads of cum clinging to the hair. 

Shane stared. He couldn’t make himself stop staring. He could practically smell it, taste it, could see the look on his husband’s face as he lay on a king-sized bed in a hotel two thousand miles away, coming with Shane’s name in his head or on his lips. 

Shane: God

Shane: God, Ilya

Ilya: yes?

Shane: you’re so I want to put my mouth there.

Ilya’s response is fast—probably faster now that he can use both hands again. 

Ilya: where

Shane stared down at the photo, feeling breathless.

Shane: You know where.

Ilya: say it

Shane: In your hair

Even as he sends it, he feels his face burn and his hands tighten, one on his phone and the other around his cock. 

Shane: Where you

Shane: Where it is. I want to taste it

Ilya: shane

Even though text, even with just the single word of his name, he could feel that there was something different in his tone. Something that had slipped past Ilya’s cocky confidence and into something more raw. 

Ilya: i wish you were here

Ilya: i would give you everything you want

His hand was moving again, skin hot and slick beneath his palm. 

Ilya: i would hold your head down and make you clean me up

Ilya: and then i would flip you over

Shane’s whole body pulled tight as his hips fucked up into his hand. 

Shane: Tell me

He could practically hear that low sound Ilya would make deep in his throat when he read the message. It probably wasn’t all that different from the sounds that were punching out of his own mouth with every stroke of his hand. 

Ilya: would take my time

Ilya: you always want me to go faster

Ilya: i would not go faster

Ilya: not until you beg

Shane fired off his response before he even realized his was moving, bringing both hands up to his phone. 

Shane: I don’t beg

Ilya: you do

Ilya: you always beg

Ilya: you think you dont but you do

Ilya: you get that look

Shane: What look?

Ilya typed for a long moment, and Shane’s hands remain clenched on his phone, cock momentarily forgotten as he waited. 

Ilya: like youre trying not to need it

Ilya: fuck i love that look

Ilya: love fucking it right off your face until you admit how much you want it

Shane stared down at his phone for a moment, his stomach doing something complicated. 

Shane: Okay, wow.

Ilya: too much?

Shane: No.

Ilya: good

Ilya: touching yourself?

Well, now he was. His hand returned to his cock, shivering at the sensation and at the memory of Ilya moving over him. He could practically feel the weight of Ilya’s body, smell his skin, taste him in the air. 

Shane: Yes

Ilya: think about what i said

Ilya: think about begging me for it

Ilya: think about what you do to me

Shane scrolled up, looking back at the photo Ilya had sent him. His hand flew as he looked—the wet gleam of it caught in the soft hair on Ilya’s stomach. He thought about pressing his mouth there, breathing it in, lapping at the warmth of it. He thought about Ilya’s hand in his hair, pressing him in and making him stay.

Shane came quietly in the dark of their empty room, the photo still lit in his hand. He took a moment to lay there in the dark, his own mess cooling on his torso as his heartbeat slowly returned to normal. 

Ilya: good?

Shane: How did you know?

Ilya: 😂

Ilya: you stopped texting back

Ilya: also i know you

Shane huffed a laugh, wishing for not the first time that Ilya was back home with him or that he’d followed the team to languish sick in a hotel room closer to his husband. He was happy to have the scent of Ilya on the sheets beneath him, but he would give almost anything to be able to bury his face in the crook of Ilya’s neck instead.

Shane: Yeah. You do. 

Shane: That was good. Really good.

Ilya: only good?

Shane: Great.

Shane: Amazing.

Shane: Life-changing.

Shane: Are you happy now?

Ilya: very

Shane could practically hear the smugness in Ilya’s message. 

Ilya: go wash up and sleep

Ilya: home in three days 

Shane: I know

Ilya: i meant it about the begging

Ilya: i will make you beg for it

Shane rolled his eyes, shuffling off to the bathroom carefully with his phone still in his hands. 

Shane: Goodnight, Ilya

Ilya: goodnight

A minute later, his phone buzzed again, the sound harsh against the bathroom counter. 

Ilya: shane

Shane: What?

Ilya: the thing about your hands

Ilya: i meant it

Ilya: im always thinking about them all over me

2. 

Shane had always known—in an abstract sense—that Ilya was bigger than him, stronger than him. It wasn’t something he’d ever looked at too closely—the same way he didn’t think too hard about how many boxes he ticked off on certain conditions within the DSM-5. 

Shane wasn’t weak, and he definitely wasn’t small. He had been training his body since he was seventeen years old to be the closest thing to perfection that he could obtain, and he knew that the results weren’t nothing. He knew what he looked like, and he knew what he could do as a result of his carefully planned routines. 

But then there was Ilya. 

They had been in their home gym, working out together alone instead of traveling to share the hot, humid gym the team used. Shane had been working on chest and arms when he noticed—not for the first time, but for the first time with intention—that no matter what weight Shane finished his set on, Ilya would add another  or two to the bar without comment before starting his own reps. 

And if Shane did four sets of eight, Ilya would do six sets of twelve—but with the same easy tempo, never slowing down or changing his breathing pattern in any way that suggested the weight was even noticeable. 

He noticed it again on the bench. And the cable row. When Ilya finally finished his last set of pull ups and dropped down from the bar—not even breathing hard—he reached up to grip the bar again one-handed just to stretch his shoulder. The sight of his biceps and deltoids flexing had Shane searching for something else to look at before he said or did anything humiliating. 

It wasn’t really about the numbers on the plates, or a competition of strength. It was something so much more specific than that—it was something about how Ilya’s body could handle weight and resistance like it was absolutely nothing. 

It was something about the three-inch difference in their height that Shane could feel every inch of when they were standing close and Ilya had him pressed against their front door, when he had to tilt his chin slightly to make their lips meet, how Ilya’s large warm hand spanned the back of his neck when he’d scruff him and pin him down on their bed. 

He was thinking about it—or, more accurately, he was trying not to think about it—two nights later when he dropped a glass. 

It was a stupid moment of distracted clumsiness while he unloaded the dishwasher and fumbled one of the good glasses—the heavy ones that his mom had bought them as a wedding present. It had hit the tile floor and exploded into little shards across the floor.

He stood there for a long moment, looking at his bare feet and trying to calculate the geometry or physics of getting himself to safety when Ilya’s hands were on him. 

Both of them, one at his waist and the other around the back of his thigh, and Shane just left the floor. He left the floor, lifted clean and easily, and was swung up and deposited on top of the kitchen counter in one smooth motion before he had been able to even blink. Ilya stepped back, finding his own footing in the mess in those stupid Adidas slides, and crouched to brush at Shane’s feet to check them for glass. 

“I was handling it,” he said. 

“You were about to step on glass,” Ilya corrected.

“I was calculating.”

Ilya looked at him for a moment, clearly trying not to laugh, and stepped off to find the broom. Shane just sat on the counter, staring at his hands, and tried to find his composure. 

This was the thing he’d been trying not to think about. It wasn’t exactly the manhandling—or it wasn’t the manhandling alone. It was the ease of it, the way Ilya could just move him without effort or drama or any sign that Shane was a fully grown man who had to throw weights around as part of his job. By most people’s standards, he was a large person. 

And Ilya had just picked him up and placed him on the counter the same way he would’ve lifted Anya. 

He could hear the broom moving on the tile, but he kept his eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling, attempting to keep his expression neutral. 

The thing he hadn’t really been examining too much was how much he liked it. He liked the sudden loss of the floor under his feet, the way his stomach would swoop when Ilya tossed him over a shoulder. He liked being moved around according to Ilya’s whims like he was completely at his disposal. Liked knowing that if Ilya wanted Shane to be somewhere, he could just reach out and make it happen and there was nothing that Shane or his own bulk could do about it. 

The broom stopped.

“You have a look,” Ilya said, voice coming from somewhere near the stove. 

“I’m on the counter. I’m thinking about the counter.”

Ilya stepped in close, tugging on Shane’s chin to force eye contact. “Cheeks are very red for counter, lyubimyy. Try again.”

“You could’ve just handed me the broom,” Shane said, trying not to squirm. 

“Yes,” Ilya agreed.

“That would have been the normal thing to do.”

Ilya tilted his head slightly, eyes darting around his face. “I could put you back, if counter is the problem.”

Shane held his gaze and said nothing. 

Up close, the size of Ilya felt like a very specific thing—the width of his shoulders, the extra couple of inches of height that meant Shane was only able to look him directly in the eyes because of his position on top of the cold marble. Ilya rested his hands on either side of his spread thighs, bracketing him in as he leaned in closer. 

“Tell me,” Ilya said. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Shane said—which was a lie. 

“Yes, lyubimyy, you do.”

Shane looked at him, cheeks hot. “I liked it. When you—I liked it.”

Ilya’s expression didn’t change at all, but something did—something subtle in his eyes that Shane had learned how to read over the years—that meant something like there it is.

“I know,” Ilya said. 

“You know,” Shane repeated flatly. 

“Shane,” Ilya said patiently, rolling his eyes. “You have liked it every time since very first time. You think I do not notice this?”

Shane’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t even try to argue.

“When I pin your wrists,” Ilya said, starting to count on his fingers. “That time in Toronto when I push you against boards after whistle. Last February when I—”

“Okay,” Shane said, hand slamming up to cover Ilya’s mouth. “Enough, I get it.”

He felt Ilya smile under his palm, and he pulled Shane’s hand away before pressing a soft kiss to the palm.

“I like it too,” Ilya whispered, leaning in closely. “In case you were wondering.”

Shane had not been wondering. Nope. He had been very purposefully not wondering because the drawer where he put those thoughts was locked up tight and nailed shut. 

He reached up and tangled his hand into Ilya’s shirt, yanking him forward. Ilya let himself be pulled, kissing him slowly and unhurried before he—with no particular warning—got his arms around Shane’s waist and pulled him off the counter. 

Shane made a sound that he would deny until his dying day. 

Ilya carried him easily, like he weighed nothing, carting him up to their bedroom. With his face pressed into the side of Ilya’s neck, he could smell the day on him—faded cologne and light sweat—and could feel the muscles in Ilya’s arms and back flex as he walked. 

Instead of entering their room, Ilya paused in the hallway, pressing Shane’s back into the wall and using the weight of his body to pin him up off the ground. 

“Tell me what you want,” Ilya said, voice dropped down low. “Properly.”

“I want to go into our room.”

“And?”

Shane cleared his throat, nuzzling his face into the column of Ilya’s throat. “I want—I want you to—”

“Take your time, lyubimyy,” Ilya said, which wasn’t half as generous as it sounded. 

“I want you to throw me around a little,” he said, voice rougher than he’d intended. “Since apparently we’re talking about it now.”

Ilya looked at him for a long moment. His expression was still controlled as always, but something in it had shifted into something different—the look that was only meant for Shane that he’d spent years craving. Ilya pushed him further into the wall, one hand coming up to press heavily beside his face. He used his hips to pin Shane into place, forcing him back so he could see his face more clearly. 

“You could have told me this years ago, you know.”

“I’m telling you now,” Shane gasped, rolling his hips slightly against Ilya’s. 

“Yes,” Ilya said. “You are.”

He readjusted his hands under Shane’s thighs, and Shane was moving again, off of the wall and carried into the bedroom before he was deposited onto the bed with enough momentum that he bounced once his back his the mattress. He lay there, looking up at the ceiling for only half a second before Ilya was over him, the size of him blocking out the overhead light like a cloud in front of the sun. 

“Hi,” Ilya said, looking down at him. 

“Hi,” he tried, but his voice came out embarrassingly unsteady. 

Ilya lowered himself, his weight settling over Shane in increments. The specific heaviness of him, the sense of being pinned down by something that would not be moved despite how much he might struggle. He knew he was strong, but under Ilya’s weight and against Ilya’s strength it didn’t matter in the slightest.

He planted his hands on Ilya’s back, feeling the muscles there bunch and tense as Ilya shifted around him. 

They took their time getting undressed—which really meant that Ilya took his time peeling off individual layers of clothing and Shane tried to rush and was entirely ignored. Ilya peeled his shirt off with a patience that bordered on cruelty and when Shane tried to flip them, Ilya just caught him by the hip and forced him back down onto his back like it was nothing. One hand, one push, and Shane was on his back again, staring up at the ceiling trying not to shiver at the feeling of being manhandled. 

“You did that on purpose,” Shane said. 

“Mmm. Yes.”

“Ilya—”

“What did you tell me downstairs,” Ilya said, clearly expecting an answer even though he was not asking a question.

Shane huffed out a breath. “That’s not fair.”

“What did you tell me.”

“That I wanted you to throw me around.”

“So…” Ilya said, spreading a hand flat on Shane’s sternum and pressing down, weight behind it, to push him into the mattress. 

The thing was—and this was the thing, really—Shane was capable to throwing people around too. He wasn’t helpless, had never been helpless. Not on the ice or anywhere else. But when Ilya held him pinned with only one hand and looked at him with that expression, it was like all of the fight just drained out of him. All the training, all the competitiveness, it all just stopped under Ilya’s hands. 

He was hard—he had been since the kitchen counter—and when Ilya’s thumb dragged across the head of him, Shane’s hips bucked off of the mattress in an involuntary movement. But Ilya was there, pressing them down with one forearm.

“Stay.”

“I’m not a dog,” Shane snapped reflexively. 

Ilya looked down at him. 

Shane stayed. 

Ilya’s fist worked him over until he was making sounds he had absolutely no control over. Until his hands were fisted in the sheets so he wouldn’t risk tearing out Ilya’s hair, and until he was close enough that his vision was starting to go white and he was about to say something that might have been please—and then Ilya stopped, sat back on his heels, and just looked at him.

“Ilya,” Shane moaned out, desperate for him to keep going. 

“Mmm… no.”

Ilya flipped him easily, hands roving down Shane’s back and sides before he snaked a hand under Shane’s hip and pulled, dragging him backwards onto his hands and knees. Shane went with it helplessly, let himself be rearranged and repositioned by Ilya’s hands according to Ilya’s preferences. The loss of agency in it moved through him in a way that felt warm and electric as it buzzed through him. 

“Good?” Ilya asked, mouth pressed against Shane’s shoulder. 

“Yeah, fuck,” Shane panted. “Don’t stop.”

Ilya reached for the nightstand and Shane waited, arms and legs trembling, for him to return. 

Stretching him was as slow and careful as it ever was, but when Ilya finally pressed in and bottomed out—freezing there, hands clamped tightly onto Shane’s hips—Shane could feel the whole length of him and let out a wounded sound that practically bounced off the walls. 

Ilya set a devastating pace—not rushed or frantic, but deep and measured as he rolled his hips in a rhythm that was resistant to Shane’s attempts to influence him into speeding up. Every time he tried to push back or change the angle, Ilya simply held him where he wanted him and continued. 

He had only just given up on trying to manage any of and just take it instead when Ilya pulled out without warning and flipped him over, one hand on his hip and the other at his shoulder, rolling Shane in one smooth motion. Before Shane could even fully process the movement, Ilya was back inside him. Shane’s legs were high onto Ilya’s shoulders, and the full weight of his body pressing Shane into the mattress and the change in angle hit something so specific within him that his mouth fell open as Ilya’s hips punched a soft sound out of him. 

“There?” Ilya said, smiling down at him with smugness as he watched Shane’s face.

“Yes—” he managed to gasp out. “God, yes. There—”

Ilya’s rhythm changed, shifting to something deeper and harder as he bullied against his prostate and the headboard began to hit the wall. Shane dropped a hand down towards his cock and when Ilya didn’t stop him, he started to stroke himself in time with Ilya’s movements. 

Ilya continued to drive into him with a focus that no longer showed any sign of patience. Shane let his eyes roam over him—the size of him filling Shane’s vision entirely, the flex in his jaw as he ground his teeth together, the flex of his arms and chest as he moved. 

“You feel—” Shane started before he lost the sentence. 

“I know,” Ilya said, voice rough. 

“Don’t stop, don’t—”

“I won’t,” Ilya said, grinding his hips down hard. “I have you.”

Those three words had Shane’s back arching off of the mattress with Ilya’s name on his tongue as he came on his stomach, hand flying as his entire being narrowed down to IlyaIlyaIlya. Ilya followed not long after, a low and broken sound into the side of Shane’s neck and his hands tight on his hips like he couldn’t force himself to let go. 

Shane became aware, slowly, of the shape of the ceiling again and of Ilya's weight pressing heavily down on him,  his face still buried against Shane's neck.

Shane dug his hands into the muscles of his back and held on.

Ilya lifted his head after a while and looked at him, his curls a sweaty disaster.

"Okay?" Ilya asked.

"Yeah," Shane said. His voice came out absolutely wrecked and he had to clear his throat around it. "Really okay."

Ilya lowered his head back to Shane's shoulder, pressing a kiss against the warm skin. 

“Ilya," Shane said, after a a few minutes of silence.

"Mm."

Shane thought about please and don't stop and I have you and looked at the ceiling.

"That was different," he said.

"You said what you wanted," Ilya said, simply. "I listened. This is what talking is."

"You've been waiting," Shane said. "Haven't you. For me to say it. You already knew.”

"I told you," Ilya said. "I know you. I can wait."

"You're insufferable," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya said, pressing another kiss to Shane’s lips and rolling back on top of him. “And you love it.”

3.

Shane had never been a fighter. He knew it was a part of hockey, but it wasn’t a part of how he played the game. 

It didn’t really bother him when other people did, but he wanted his playing to speak for itself, not for his fists to do all of the talking. He had other tools—his hands, his edges, his ability to make other players look like idiots without needing to drop his gloves. 

He’d taken a hit or two over the years but rarely gave them back. His little petty scrum with Scott Hunter had been the greatest extent of his foray into the real violence of hockey. He had never understood the appeal of it—the theater of it—just two men grabbing each other by the jerseys and swinging their fists around until someone dropped.  And he’d said so—publicly—more than once. 

Ilya was going to make him revisit that position, maybe. 

The game against Montreal was the third of the season and the first one at home, and he’d known from the moment the season schedule dropped that it was going to be a disaster. It had been his team, they had been his team, and they’d made it clear game after game that they still had not forgotten or forgiven. 

He tried to keep things professional, tried not to address the speculation and the drama in the media room. But there was a version of Shane that lived deeper below the professional veneer that ached to voice his thoughts on the Voyageurs that he would never share publicly. 

Ilya did not have similar restraint. 

The first fight happened in the second period, and he was honestly surprised that it had taken that long. Gagnon, one of the more poisonous presences in the Montreal locker room, had slammed Shane into the boards from behind on a play that was already over and lingered just long enough to make sure he felt it. 

He was fine, really. He was always fine. Always had to be. He was just shifting back to get ready for play to resume when Ilya materialized from the left side of his vision and had Gagnon by the jersey before the refs had even moved. 

And Shane just stood there and watched as his husband flicked off a glove and slammed a tight fist directly into Gagnon’s shocked face. 

Ilya fought the same way he did everything else—with intention, no wasted effort, and his face absolutely focused. Gagnon was bleeding from the mouth by the time a linesman got between them and his jersey was half pulled over his head as he coughed and spit at the ice. Ilya just let himself be pulled back by Bood without any resistance, moving himself toward the penalty box before the ref could even send him in. 

He glanced at Shane on his way past, moving with the unhurried affect of someone who firmly believed they were justified in their actions even as a slightly manic grin spread across his face. 

Shane didn’t meet his eyes, thoughts and pulse racing. 

The thing was—and this time it was actually genuinely new information—something had clenched within him when Ilya had grabbed that fist full of Gagnon’s jersey. It was something that settled fast and low and he didn’t have a clean name to give it. He’d spent the entirety of his career being largely self-sufficient on the ice. He wasn’t someone who needed defending as he usually carved his way across the ice so quickly that no one could keep up. He didn’t want to be someone who needed defending. 

But watching Ilya take Gagnon apart with that wild expression on his face—

The second fight happened in the third. Comeau had spit something out right after the face-off that Shane hadn’t caught, but he could guess based on what he’d gotten used to hearing in the Voyageur’s locker room what he might have said. Then Comeau was on the ice and Ilya was standing over him, blood on his knuckles. 

It only took a moment before Ilya was pulled down on the ice with him, other Voyageurs jumping into the fray, as Ilya traded hit after hit with any member of the team he could get his hands on. Shane skated a wide circle around them and tried to locate his own internal organs. 

By the time they were in the car headed home, Shane hadn’t said a single word in almost forty minutes. Ilya was driving, a butterfly bandage on his chin and an ice pack resting on the knuckles of his right hand in his lap. 

Shane stared out the window, watching the city move past. He thought about Ilya’s face when he’d grabbed Gagnon’s jersey—the lack of hesitation and the full force of his rage directed onto him. He thought about the weight of Ilya’s eyes on him on the way to the penalty box, and the enormity of what it meant to have someone so firmly in his corner that they’d literally bleed onto the ice for him without being asked. 

He thought about his own knees. 

“Shane,” Ilya said, turning the car off in their drive. 

“Inside,” Shane said, yanking at his seatbelt. “Get inside.”

Ilya looked at him for a moment and then got out of the car, walking up slowly behind him. He knew Ilya probably thought he was upset. It’s not like Shane had exactly been quiet throughout his career about how much he disliked fighting. 

The second he had his jacket off, before the front door was even closed, Shane was dropping to his knees on the entryway floor and staring up at Ilya who had gone very, very still. 

“Shane…” Ilya said again, voice pitched very differently than when he’d tried in the car. 

“I know,” Shane said, scooting closer. “I know, just—” he paused to fight with the belt in Ilya’s slacks. “Just let me, yeah?”

“Let you,” Ilya repeated, his voice dropping low enough that Shane could feel it in the bottom of his stomach. 

“Or make me, I guess. Take it from me,” Shane said. “However you want.”

Ilya let out a shaky exhale, hand sliding into Shane’s hair. He wasn’t pulling—not yet, at least—just holding, a thumb at Shane’s temple. 

“You were watching?” Ilya asked. “The fights?”

“I always watch,” Shane said, yanking the pants down. Ilya’s grip tightened just a fraction, slowly and deliberately, and Shane’s eyes flickered closed before he forced them back open. He wanted to see. He needed to see—Ilya looking down at him, the cut on his face, the split knuckles on the hand that Ilya had pressed to his own stomach, lifting his shirt out of the way. 

He pushed Ilya’s length down into his throat, feeling Ilya’s hand tighten further in response, and felt his own breath huff sharply out of his nose. Ilya took his time at first, his hand in Shane’s hair setting the pace. He guided him slowly, thumb moving in slow, small circles against Shane’s temple. Shane brought his hands around to the backs of his thighs, trying to push himself down faster, but Ilya just ignored him, setting the pace that he wanted. Shane had no choice but to just take it, to relax into it, and felt a sense of satisfaction in it. 

“Look at me,” Ilya said, voice tight. 

Ilya held his gaze for a moment, jaw clenched tight, before his hips rolled forward and the hand in Shane’s hair shifted. It was just a suggestion of roughness, that Shane was exactly where Ilya wanted him and would stay there until Ilya was done with him. Shane breathed through it and forced his eyes to stay locked on Ilya’s even as he moaned out around the heft of Ilya’s cock in his mouth. 

“You want this,” Ilya confirmed, not quite phrasing it as a question. Shane tried to mumble some sort of agreement, but he knew it had come out embarrassingly enthusiastic. 

Ilya’s breath hitched, and he gave Shane exactly what he’d been asking for. 

His hips moved without his usual patience, his hand in Shane’s hair nothing close to a suggestion. Shane had no choice but to let his jaw go loose and his eyes go wet and he tightened his hands around the back of Ilya’s thighs and just took it. 

Shane thought about Comeau and Gagnon on the ice, the way they’d had to just take the beating that Ilya decided they deserved, just like he was taking every hit into the back of his throat that Ilya felt like he needed. He was hard as a rock in his own pants but Ilya’s pleasure was the only thing on his mind. 

Ilya came with a broken, choked off sound above him that Shane could practically feel in his chest, his hand forcing Shane all the way down until his nose was buried in the hair at the base of his cock and the taste of Ilya was thick in the back of his throat. When the sensation became too much, Ilya pushed him back and Shane fell onto his heels, breathing hard. 

Ilya slid down the door—not gracefully, just dropped and folded himself down onto the entryway floor beside Shane until they were both on the floor. Ilya looked at him for one moment, jaw tight and eyes dark, before his hand closed tightly around Shane’s length. 

Shane gasped, fighting for air at how the feeling of Ilya’s warm hand wrapped around him knocked the breath out of him even more effectively than his cock had. He writhed, trying to move away from the brutal, almost overstimulating speed that Ilya had chosen, but Ilya just pinned him with one leg and leaned more heavily into him. 

“Take it,” Ilya said, pressing down onto him. “You take what I give you.” 

His grip was firm and he worked his hand over Shane with a precision that made it almost impossible for Shane to hold his eyes open. Normally Ilya would’ve dragged it out, tried to force every broken moan or whimper out of him. This was something else entirely—almost violence, as though Ilya had decided to move and the only thing for Shane to do was to just accept it. 

It didn’t take long—not that it ever did. Shane came with his whole body jerking against Ilya’s grip, one hand scrabbling for purchase on Ilya’s thigh as he worked him through every second of a messy, wet release without letting up or backing off, forcing him to accept the overstimulation until Shane was wheezing out soft, broken sounds before he let go of him. 

Ilya stroked his thumb over Shane’s hipbone, and even that was almost too much for him to bear. 

“The fights,” Ilya said after a moment, his voice starting to return to normal. 

“Yeah,” Shane said, his voice still wrecked. 

“Tell me.”

Shane looked at Ilya’s open expression and reached down to snag his hand, kissing the split knuckle on the hand that had just taken him apart on the floor. 

“I liked watching you. It’s nothing, sort of stupid—”

“No,” Ilya said, cutting him off. “Not stupid. Explain.”

“You were like a guard dog or something, and it’s not like I need you fighting for me.”

“I know,” Ilya said simply. “You do not need me to. That is not why I did it.”

Ilya sighed, pulling Shane into his chest. “Gagnon ran you from behind when play was over. Comeau ran his mouth at face off. I was already there. So…”

Shane felt his head rise and fall as Ilya shrugged one shoulder. “So?”

“I wanted to,” Ilya said. “Different from needing to. I wanted to.”

Shane sat with that for a moment, letting the warmth of Ilya’s desire to protect him settle under his skin. 

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya agreed.

4. 

Shane’s voice was… fine. 

He knew it was fine. It had never really been a source of complaint from anyone—good enough to get him speaking roles in some of his sponsorships, at least. Announcers, interviewers, the French-language media who sometimes asked him questions in Québécois so thick that it took him a half second to figure out what he was supposed to say… all of them had managed perfectly well with his voice. It was a pretty normal voice, all things considered. Did all the correct things that a voice was supposed to do. 

But he felt like Ilya’s voice made him sound like an awkward teenager again. 

It didn’t matter whether he was listening to Ilya speak in Russian or English, the sound of his voice always ignited something within him. In Russian, Ilya’s words sat differently in his mouth—more musical, rounder somehow, consonants landing with an authority Shane could feel in his chest. He only had a few words of Russian—some incredibly important and some bordering on useless—but he didn’t need to understand what Ilya was saying, he only needed to hear it. 

Even in English, which Ilya spoke with his accent still thick despite almost fifteen years in North America, his words carried the full weight of his chest. Even when he was half-asleep, barely coherent, saying nothing more significant than “what time is it, Hollander”—his voice was the same. Low and rough like it had never once cracked uncertainly. 

Shane’s own voice in comparison was just… a voice. Normal pitched and functional and not embarrassing. It was just that when paired with Ilya’s, he was sometimes more highly aware of his flat affect and sometimes too-rounded Canadian vowels. 

He noticed it most acutely when they did interviews together, when the media milked their relationship for the viewership that still craved traces of their “rivalry”. He noticed it on the bench during stoppage, in the car, in grocery stores, at dinner with friends. He noticed it every time Ilya opened his mouth and sound came out, which was everywhere, constantly, and always. 

He’d been only slightly slower to examine what Ilya’s voice did to him in bed. 

Because here was the thing. When they had sex, Shane was aware—had always been aware—of the differences in the sounds they made. Ilya groaned. Ilya made low rough noises that started in his chest and fought their way out of his mouth. Noises that Shane could feel just as much as he heard. When something felt good, Ilya made a sound like he’d been struck. When he was close, he got quiet in a way that was louder than the noise—a tamped down sound, low and sustained, that Shane had learned to recognize as the specific sound of Ilya relinquishing his grip on his composure. 

Shane… whimpered. He moaned and he gasped and he made sounds that some part of his brain recognized were higher and more helpless and significantly less dignified than the sounds Ilya produced. He had never been self-conscious of this exactly, but he had noticed it. 

They had been laying in bed, late on a Sunday morning. Shane was on his back and Ilya was beside him—mouth buried in the crook of Shane’s neck—doing very little but doing it with such intense effectiveness that Shane was already making small, helpless sounds that he had very little control over. The sort of sounds that happened when Ilya hyper-fixated on one part of his body and wouldn’t be redirected at all. 

“You’re so—” and then Ilya had groaned something out in Russian, voice low and rough. His mouth was still pressed against Shane’s skin and he’d felt the words buzz across his skin. Shane made a noise in return that was not small or helpless but loud and immediate. 

Ilya lifted his head, looking at him with interest. “Yes…?”

“What did that mean?”

Ilya’s mouth curved as he rested his chin on Shane’s chest.

“Mmm… perfect,” he said. “More or less.”

“In Russian.”

“No, Hollander. In Portuguese. Yes, in Russian.”

Shane stared at the ceiling and made a decision. 

“I want you to talk.”

Ilya stared at him blankly. “Talk.”

“While we—” Shane gestured between them at the general position they were in. “I want to hear you. I want you to tell me… things.”

“Things,” Ilya repeated, but that wicked little smile was on his face again. 

“You know what I mean,” Shane said, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. 

“Tell me anyway.”

Shane allowed himself to look at Ilya and felt hit chest clench. “I want to hear your voice,” he said. “When you—it does something for me. The way you sound. I want to—I want you to talk me through it.”

Ilya looked at him for a long moment, his expression shifting into something that was somehow both softer and darker. 

“Okay,” he said simply. 

Ilya settled over Shane, pinning him with his hips and dipping his head to whisper directly into Shane’s ear. “Then I will talk. And you will tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I won’t want you to stop,” Shane gasped, suddenly feeling like he couldn’t get enough air. 

“No,” Ilya agreed. “I don’t think you will.”

Ilya moved slowly, hands tracing down Shane’s body deliberately. His voice followed his hands, low and rough, as he narrated everything like he had all morning and planned to use it. \

“You have no idea,” he said, palm trailing down the center of Shane’s chest, “what you look like right now. Every time I touch you is like this. You go—soft. No, not soft. Open. You open wide up for me.”

Shane let out a little sound in the back of his throat, knees falling wider apart on instinct. 

“Da, yes, just like that.”

He wrapped his hand around Shane’s cock without urgency, just holding, as he spoke against Shane’s temple. “I have been thinking about this since this morning. Since you were still sleeping. I was watching you and thinking about getting my hands on you.”

Ilya slowly began stroking, the movement completely unhurried. 

“Thought about how you sound. How wet you get. You’re already wet, Shane. You feel how wet you are?”

“Ilya—” Shane’s voice came out thin, breaking when Ilya ran his thumb over the broad head, swearing through the wetness that was collecting there. 

“I know, malysh, I know.” His thumb dragged and pressed, and Shane’s hips bucked up before Ilya was pressing them back down with his forearm. “Stay. I want—I am not done yet.”

Shane directed a helpless sound toward the ceiling. 

“Good,” Ilya hummed, voice dropping to a register that Shane could feel in his back teeth. “That sound. That is the one I think about on the road. Specifically that one.” He kept working him slowly, wrist turning as he watched Shane’s face. 

“You don’t even know when you make it. That is what—that is what makes it so…” Ilya paused then, searching for the word in English. “—devastating. That you don’t even know.”

Ilya reached for the nightstand eventually, one-handed and still talking—explaining to Shane everything he was going to do in the voice that Shane could feel everywhere. And Shane just lay there and listened and took it and made sounds that he had no control over while Ilya prepped him with patient and thorough hands. 

“You want it,” Ilya said. It wasn’t a question, and his fingers pressed deeper, wrenching a moan out of Shane that was immediate, high, and undignified. “Yes, I know. Tell me.”

“God, I want it,” Shane said. “Want you. Ilya—please—”

“I know what you want,” Ilya said, sounding pleased. “I always know. You are—very easy to read, Hollander. When you want something your whole body says so.”

Ilya pressed his fingers deeper and Shane’s back lifted from the mattress. “Like that, see? Exactly like that.”

Ilya added another finger and lowered his voice, barely above a whisper. “You are so—blyad—you feel so good. Do you know how good you feel? Every time. Every single time.”

Shane’s fingers were twisted in the sheets so tightly that he worried he might rip them, and he could vaguely hear himself making noises that the neighbors could probably hear. 

When Ilya finally—finally—pressed in, bottoming out and holding himself still while Shane adjusted, he kept talking—rough and relentless. “There—yes. Take it. You take it so well, you always—”

He let out a rough exhale, the only sign of a crack in his composure. “You have no idea. You feel—” 

Ilya moaned something in Russian, seemingly losing his patience or capacity for the English language as he pressed his forehead against the side of Shane’s head and said something short and fervent into Shane’s hair that he couldn’t even begin to try to translate.

“What?” Shane managed to ask—barely. 

“You are perfect,” Ilya said, rolling his hips. Shane found himself suddenly incapable of asking questions. 

Ilya set a pace and kept talking through it—broke up now, less composed, his grammar slipping more like it always did when he was deep in concentration on something else. “You feel—god—every time, Shane. I am not—I cannot—” 

Ilya ground his hips down, a fierce, slightly mean movement. “God, the sounds you make, Hollander. The way you look stretched out on my cock. Keep making those sounds for me, Shane. Don’t stop.”

She had no intention of stopping, but that was mostly because he hadn’t been aware that he’d started. He’d been so focused on the sound of Ilya’s voice that he hadn’t realized that Ilya had been punching soft little sounds out of him the entire time, and he couldn’t have stopped them now if he had wanted to. Ilya’s careful, unhurried pace fell apart into something more urgent that was even less likely to help Shane find his own control again. 

“Eshchyo,” Ilya said, mouth against Shane’s ear. “More. Let me hear you.”

“I’m—fuck, Ilya, I’m close, I’m so—”

“I know,” Ilya said, voice certain. “I know, come on. I want to feel you. Come on, Shane.”

There was always something about how Ilya said his name, the specific sound of it when he said it like this, in no other context than on twisted sheets and—

Shane came apart completely, thighs shaking as he made a mess on both of their torsos. He came with Ilya’s voice in his ear and his own hand on his cock, and for a moment afterward he couldn’t have even told you if Ilya was still talking because his ears were ringing too much to hear anything else. He was brought back to awareness only by the low groan that Ilya pressed into his neck, the sound vibrating across his skin as Ilya buried himself inside4 of him again. 

Eventually, their breath settled back down and hi heart stopped racing quite as quickly. 

“That thing you said,” Shane said eventually, throat slightly sore. His voice didn’t sound rough in the same way as Ilya’s, but instead sound absolutely wrecked and worn out. “In Russian—in the middle.”

Ilya hummed and Shane could feel the vibrations through Ilya’s chest. “You cannot imagine,” he said. “More or less. I was trying to say that you have no idea what you do to do.”

“I think I have some idea,” Shane said, pressing a kiss into Ilya’s chest. 

“You don’t. Believe me.”

5.

Shane was not, by any objective measure, “poorly equipped”.

He knew this. He’d known it since he’d been about sixteen and his very first attempt at a girlfriend had given him a reason to consider it. He’d spent the entirety of his adult life in  locker rooms with other men, and while he definitely went out of his way not to let his eyes stray, sometimes the energy would get weird when another player would try to start a literal dick measuring contest. 

He was in peak physical conditional and the relevant part of his body had always been perfectly proportional to the rest of him. He’d never heard any complaints, and he didn’t have any either. 

Ilya had even told him once that it was a shame that he was born to be a bottom when he had the perfect cock—“or maybe second best, Hollander. I can think of a couple ways I have you beat.”

But then, like always, there was Ilya. Literally from the very first time he’d seen him naked in that shower at the CCM shoot, Shane had been able to file that away with all of the information he knew about Ilya Rozanov. He was annoying, self-assured, kind of an asshole—a huge fucking dick with a huge fucking dick. 

He could remember kneeling in front of him up against the door of that first hotel room, staring for a just long enough that it had been starting to border on impolite. And Ilya had let him stare. He had stood there with the patience of a man who had been stared at before and probably thought that it was a perfectly reasonable response given the position they were in. 

He could remember the way it looked, wrapped tight in latex and resting against his own after Ilya had prepped him to take it for the first time and how Ilya had just looked down at in with a look that was equal parts amused and sincere. 

“I know,” he had said, “I will go slow. I will make it fit.”

The thing about Ilya’s cock—the thing that Shane had catalogued alongside all the other things—was that it wasn’t just the fact of its  heft and weight, although those were significant in their own right. It was long and thick and the weight of it in Shane’s hands had made him understand the meaning of the word ‘substantial’ for the first time. 

But it was also the way that Ilya used it. The way he understood it as an instrument, something to wield with precision instead of aiming it in a particular direction and hoping for the best. 

Shane really didn’t like to think about the sex he’d had with his ex-girlfriends before he’d found Ilya. 

No, Ilya knew exactly what he was doing with it. Had seemingly always known exactly what he was doing. 

Shane thought about it one afternoon when he had nothing else useful to do with his brain. They had a proper day off—no game, no practice—and Ilya was somewhere else in the house doing something close to nothing, which left Shane to lie alone on the couch pretending to read while actually thinking about his husband. The way Ilya occupied his mind wasn’t actually that dissimilar to how he thought about hockey—a singular, focused intensity that he was increasingly giving up on trying to control. 

The weekend before had been—he closed his book, no longer pretending to read it—Saturday had been a whole thing. 

It had started ordinarily enough, which meant it started the way most things with Ilya did. Ilya acted, and Shane’s body agreed before the rest of him had time to catch up. They’d been watching something on TV, and then they definitely hadn’t been, and then Ilya had him upstairs. 

Shane had come for the first time that night before Ilya had even fully undressed, which was apparently a thing that happened now, as Ilya’s hands and voice had absolutely dismantled him and Shane’s self-control had the structural integrity of wet tissue-paper. 

Ilya had looked at him—face flushed and completely wrecked when they’d barely even started—and had given him that private little smile. 

“One,” Ilya had said. 

“Shut up,” Shane had replied. 

Ilya had not shut up. He hadn’t let up either—hadn’t taken his own satisfaction and called it a good night the way a lesser man might have. Instead, he’d turned the full weight of his attention onto Shane, working him through oversensitivity with patient hands until the oversensitivity had turned into something else, and then driving him over the edge a second time with a thoroughness that bordered on illegal. That second time had been in Ilya’s mouth, and although Shane had lasted slightly longer, he’d felt slightly less dignified about it.

Shane was pretty sure he’d made noises that night that his body would never be capable of replicating. 

By the time Ilya had finally pressed inside of him—the third act of a very long performance, still in command of himself and Shane bordering on incoherent—the size of him hand landed differently than it usually did. Shane had felt fuller, more present. So sensitive that every movement registered at a volume that was both too much and not enough. 

Ilya was thick enough that even fully prepared, even relaxed and wanting and two orgasms deep, it felt like he was pressing against everything all at once. He was a presence that required accommodation and Shane’s body had to consciously decide to accept the intrusion. His length had found angles that Shane felt in his stomach, and Ilya had just looked down at him with that same patient expression and a quiet “okay?” that hand Shane replying with something that may or may not have even been words. 

Because that was the other thing. 

Ilya could outlast him by so much that the ratio was almost unfunny. Shane’s endurance wasn’t terrible—some might call it excellent, especially given the lengths he could go to on the ice. He had excellent cardiovascular fitness that had been measured and documented and one doctor had even deemed “remarkable”. But under the specific circumstances of laying in a bed under Ilya, he had far less stamina to speak of—because Ilya was very good and Shane’s body had opinions about that. 

Ilya could last a very, very long time. It wasn’t something that Shane had truly understood the full implications of until he was experiencing it. It was probably another item on the checklist of Parts of Ilya Rozanov That Should Probably Come With a Warning Label. 

Ilya’s control was… extraordinary. He ran hot, Shane knew he ran hot, and knew when Ilya was close from the specific set of his jaw and the change in the breathing and the way that Ilya’s hands would tighten. But the distance between Ilya is getting close and Ilya is done was a span that he could apparently extend—possibly through the force of sheer willpower—almost indefinitely until he had decided he was done if he put his mind to it. Shane found it both impressive and occasionally infuriating. 

He’d asked about it once. Ilya had considered the question, before just telling him “When I was younger, I couldn’t. So I learn.”

“You learned it,” Shane had said. 

“Most things you do you have to learn.” Shane had found his obnoxiously reasonable answer to be aggravating in the moment and he thought about it constantly afterward. Ilya had learned—had practiced—how to last long enough to tear him apart. Of course he had. 

The result of all of this—of Ilya’s sheer size, his stamina, his devastating sense of purpose in bed—meant that Shane had been forced to learn exactly what his own body was capable of. He’d had to learn that under the right set of circumstances, he was apparently capable of great things. If the ‘right set of circumstances’ meant Ilya’s hands and cock and the look in his eyes, and the ‘great things’ meant shooting load after load onto his own chest until he was coming dry with a mangled moan against Ilya’s sweaty skin. 

Because Ilya had settled in, held absolutely still—its own particular torture—fully seated with every inch accounted for. And then he’d started to move. He’d rolled his hips, pulling back just enough to feel it before pressing forward again. The depth of it had landed somewhere in Shane’s stomach and radiated outward down his spine. 

He’d found the angle that made Shane’s vision unreliable and he had stayed there with the focused precision of a man who held the map to the terrain around him. Every stroke hit the same place, deep and exact, and Shane had stopped trying to moderate his sounds somewhere around four minutes in—and had given up on his attempts at composure two minutes after that. He was loud, embarrassingly loud. And Ilya’s breathing had stayed deep and controlled in the way that meant he was nowhere near his limit when Shane was approaching his third. 

“Ilya—” he’d gasped, voice absolutely wrecked.

“I know,” and the bastard had the audacity to not even falter in his rhythm. “Go ahead.”

“You’re not—”

“Not yet,” he had said, with that goddamn composure. “Go ahead, Shane. Come.”

So Shane had gone ahead and came.

He came with his back arching and Ilya still somehow moving through it while Shane shook around him. And when it crested and broke and Shane finally went limp, Ilya had slowed his pace but hadn’t stopped. 

“Good,” he said, mouth pressed to Shane’s jaw. “That’s three.”

“I can’t—”

“You can,” Ilya had said simply, rolling his hips again in a long, slow pull that forced a moan from Shane’s body that indicated that his body might agree with Shane regardless of what his mouth was trying to say. 

And that previous Saturday, by the end—when Ilya had finally let go of his own control and had followed Shane over the edge with a groan that Shane had felt in his own chest cavity—Shane was somewhere beyond counting, beyond coherence, his voice worn down to something that probably didn’t count as English anymore. And he was certain that Ilya hadn’t lost count, because Ilya noticed most everything about him and forgot nothing and could always find a way to bring it up at the most inconvenient possible moment. Probably the next time they had dinner with Rose. 

“You’re thinking very hard,” Ilya said from the doorway, startling him so much that he dropped the book he definitely wasn’t reading. 

Ilya was leaning against the jamb, a cup of coffee in hand, watching Shane with a look that meant he’d probably been standing there for a while and Shane hadn’t even noticed. 

“Reading,” Shane said. 

Ilya looked pointedly at the book on the floor. 

“The book is closed.”

“I finished.”

He could tell from the look on Ilya’s face that he knew it was bullshit, and he picked the book up to toss it onto the coffee table with something he hoped looked like dignity. Ilya came into the room, setting his coffee beside the abandoned book and settling on the couch next to Shane. He settled onto the couch like he owned it—which he did, but it was technically Shane’s furniture too according to the marriage license, even though Ilya seemed to occupy space like that was only a technicality. 

“What were you think so hard about?”

“Nothing,” Shane said, automatically. 

Ilya waited. 

Shane looked into the middle distance, weighing his options. He was pretty sure that Ilya would outlast him here, too, if he didn’t just confess. 

“Saturday.”

Ilya just hummed, reaching for his cup of coffee. 

“You don’t have to sound like that,” Shane said, slightly annoyed at the way Ilya had seemed to expect that answer.

“Sound like what?”

“Smug,” Shane said. “You don’t have to sound smug.”

“I am not smug,” Ilya said. “I am… satisfied.”

“That’s the same fucking thing, asshole.”

Ilya shook his head, silencing him with a look. “It is not. Smug is about me. Cocky, yes? Satisfied is about… both.”

Shane hated that Ilya had a point,. 

“I was thinking about…” Shane paused, eyes darting back out into the middle distance again. “How you do that.”

“Do what?” Ilya asked. His voice had already changed, dropping slightly, the way it did when he seemed to know exactly where a conversation was going. 

“The—” Shane waved his hand, gesturing vaguely. “The control thing. How you just… I was… twice—before you even…. And you were just—” he ran out of words before he even formed a full sentence. 

“In control?” 

“Yeah. That. Yes.”

Ilya looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup. “Does it both you?” he asked, his tone genuine.

“No, god no.”

“Good,” Ilya said simply. 

“It’s— I just don’t know how you do it. I can’t…” he paused again, searching for the words. “When it’s you, I can’t—I don’t last. You know I don’t last. And you just—”

“You last,” Ilya said, cutting him off. 

“Not like you do.”

“No one lasts like me,” Ilya said, shrugging. “Is not a competition.”

“I’m aware that it’s not a competition,” Shane snapped. “I’m just… it’s a thing a think about. The difference. How you can just hold on to yourself when I—I lose track of everything that’s not you. When it’s you, I lose track immediately.”

Ilya sat the cup back down, leaning forward to cup Shane’s face in his hands. “That’s the point, malysh. That is what I want. I want you to lose track. I want—” Ilya paused, something small shifting in his face. “I want to be the one who does that. I want to be the only one who does that to you.”

Ilya released his face, leaning back but not breaking eye contact. “So I hold on. I hold on so you don’t have to. You don’t have to worry or think or focus. I get to turn brain off for you, yes?”

Shane just looked at him for a long moment. 

“That’s—”

“A lot?” Ilya asked.

“No, no. That’s… Yeah. That’s good. That’s really—yeah.”

Ilya’s mouth curved up in a smirk, the way it usually did when he said something that rebooted Shane’s brain. “Also… I like it. Watching you. I would hold on through anything to watch you for longer.”

Shane felt his face do something he couldn’t really control. 

“And then there’s the size thing,” he said, since he was apparently doing this now. “It’s… also a thing. For me. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had noticed,” Ilya said with faux solemnity.

”Yeah, I’m sure you did, asshole.”

“You are size queen, Hollander. First time, you stared so long I thought there was problem.”

“There wasn’t a fucking problem, Ilya.”

“Oh I know. You made this little—” Ilya made a small wounded sound in the back of his throat that Shane prayed to god he hadn’t actually made, “—and then you look at my face and you fell to your knees to taste it.”

“Come here,” he said reaching his arms out for Ilya. It wasn’t something he said often, usually content to follow Ilya’s lead, which was probably why Ilya’s face softened so much at the sound of it. Ilya went, moving across the couch to settle over Shane.

“The control thing.”

“Mmm?”

“Do that,” Shane said. “I want you to do that. However long you want. I want to—I want to lose count again.”

Ilya just stared at him for a long moment. Shane watched the muscle in his jaw tick, the tell Shane had been reading for years.

“You are sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Ilya lowered his head until his mouth was beside Shane’s ear and his weight was fully settled over him. “Then we will be here for a while.”

“Okay,” Shane said—voice already gone rough. “Good.”

+1

Ilya had many skills. 

He knew this. He’d gone out of his way to make sure that he did. He’d worked hard for most of them, and had taken for granted the ones that had simply arrived with his body. He could speak two languages, he could cook, he could drive in conditions that made most people want to stay indoors. He had excellent spatial awareness, he could read a game two plays ahead, and he’d been doing so with great success since he was a teenager. He’d somehow managed to pull Shane Hollander and convince him to sign up for a forever together. 

He could not, it turned out, do anything useful with his hands outside of a hockey rink or a bedroom. 

It hadn’t mattered much, before Shane. He had always lived in high rise apartments where he spent enough money that other people were paid handsomely to solve his problems. When he’d bought his first home, he’d always had enough money to pay people to solve them, or he’d known someone who knew someone who could get it done. 

He’d never needed to worry about the infrastructure of domestic life, it had always been managed by someone else, and he’d just let himself be carried along. 

Shane managed their infrastructure. 

He had anticipated many, many things about marrying Shane Hollander. He’d figured that there would be stubbornness, competitiveness, the specific way Shane had of saving his warmth for private moments. He knew the difference between Shane’s laugh when he was trying to be polite and when he laughed because Ilya was refusing to be polite. He had anticipated the good and the difficult and the messy and he had thought he was choosing all of it with eyes wide open.

He had not anticipated the wrench. 

The first time he saw Shane on his back under the kitchen sink, Ilya had stood motionless in the doorway with his empty coffee cup and watched Shane in silence for approximately four minutes. He had a neat row of tools laid out beside him, and he was doing something with a wrench that Ilya could not follow or explain. 

Shane had been mumbling to himself, first in English and then French when he got aggravated. When Shane had finally slid back out and seen Ilya, there was a streak of something thick on his cheek and his sleeves were pushed up to the elbows. 

“Fixed,” Shane had said, matter of factly. Ilya hadn’t even known there was anything wrong with the sink in the first place. 

“You know how to do that?”

Shane looked at him like the question didn’t make sense. “Well, yeah. I mean I was technically a landlord… do you not know how to fix a leaking pipe?”

“No.”

Shane sat up, reaching for a rag that he’d placed carefully folded next to the row of tools. 

“Who fixed your pipes before if something happened?”

“Someone else,” Ilya said, still slightly baffled. 

Shane wiped his hands off carefully, looking up at Ilya as his face curved into the smile that Ilya knew was reserved just for him. “Good thing you married me, then.”

Ilya agreed with that, silently, from the very core of his being. 

It happened again later, with the car. His car, the new one—the one he’d bought for the sake of practicality and responsibility. It had been making an odd noise for a couple of weeks that Ilya had been monitoring with a vague concern and no plan at all. Shane had hopped in the driver’s seat to move it down the driveway and was immediately suspicious. 

“Have you looked at it?”

Ilya had shrugged, popping the hood and walking around. He looked at it twice even, confirmed that there were in fact machine components inside, before slamming the hood shut again. 

Shane had just sighed, popping the hood again. He did something with his hands that involved a specific socket from the tool box that lived in the garage, tightened something Ilya couldn’t even see, and the noise was gone when Shane moved the car back and forth in the driveway. 

“Where did you learn that?” Ilya asked, curious as he leaned against the side of Shane’s Jeep. 

“My grandpa owned a shop. He taught me some basic vehicle maintenance. He was really big on… self-sufficiency, I guess. Wanted to make sure I didn’t get swindled on an oil-change or something.”

Ilya thought momentarily about his own grandfather—an almost carbon-copy of his father. 

“Well he succeeded, Hollander. You are very sufficient.”

Shane looked at him with an odd expression—the one he normally wore when he was pleased but trying not to be, like he always did when he was complimented for something besides his hockey. Ilya watched closely as Shane put the socket wrench back into its correct place in the case and closed the lid on the toolbox.

It was the TV that made things particularly clear to him. 

They had agreed to rearrange the living room as a part of their spring cleaning. Shane had replaced a few pieces of their furniture, and after the older Hollanders had come over for dinner, Yuna had complained that the Feng Shui of the room was wrong and it had sent Shane into a spiral of re-designing the entire room. 

There was a new location picked for the TV, and it needed to be relocated to the opposite wall. Ilya had volunteered to help, and Shane had dropped an instruction manual for a mounting bracket into his hands with a pointed look. He gave the booklet a solid ten minutes of effort before determining that although it was written in a language that seemed to share the same alphabet as English, it clearly operated on entirely different principles and could not be deciphered using modern knowledge—so he’d sat down to watch instead. 

Shane had done this before—that much was immediately clear. He’d found the studs in the wall using a tool that Ilya hadn’t even known they owned, marked their place in the wall with a small pencil that had somehow migrated to just behind his ear, and drilled into the wall with a precision that did not require measuring twice because he was Shane Hollander and had gotten it correct the first time. 

Ilya especially watched the tendons in Shane’s arm flex as he pressed the drill into the wall. 

“Hand me the level,” Shane said.

Ilya had just stared down at the tools on the floor. Since when did they own so many tools?

“Which one?” 

Shane had just pointed without even looking, hand outstretched to accept what Ilya handed him. Shane had held it up against the mounted bracket, checked it, made the slightest of adjustments, and declared it correct with the certainty of a man who trusted his own eyes. 

“Can you hold the TV for me?”

Yes. Ilya could absolutely lift the TV for him, and he was glad to do it. 

He lifted it and Shane guided it into place with both hands, stepping in close to reach past Ilya. For a moment, Ilya was aware of the warmth of Shane’s body, the press of their bodies together, and the competent hands moving only a few inches from his own face to find teh bracket by feel instead of sight. 

Something clicked into place—something in the mechanism and something within Ilya—and Shane stepped back. 

“Good, go ahead and let go.”

Ilya let go. The TV sat on the wall at a perfect angle, exactly centered on the wall and perfectly level for someone sitting on the couch. Shane stepped back further, head tilted slightly as he surveyed it with his arms crossed.

“Good,” Shane said again, more to himself than to Ilya. 

Ilya just stared at the back of Shane’s head and realized that he could recognize something that—from long years of experience—might be a problem. 

The construction project had been Shane’s idea. He decided he wanted built-in shelves in the library, floor to ceiling, on the wall that currently held nothing but a painted surface of solid gray and Ilya’s vague intention to do something about it eventually. 

Shane had drafted when he wanted on paper—an actual drawing, measured to scale and notated, dimensions of each shelf carefully marked in pencil. And then he’d gone to the hardware store twice and come back with wood and brackets and more tools. And he spent an entire weekend turning a blank wall into something. 

Ilya told himself he would work on teaching Anya a new trick in the yard. He lasted two hours before he was haunting the doorway of the library, watching instead. 

Shane had the radio on low, some French talk radio that Ilya would’ve called boring if he felt capable of speech. He had a sawhorse set up in the middle of the room and he was working with a focus as he reduced the world to just the plank in front of him and a pencil line to follow with the saw. There was sawdust on his shirt. In his hair. He measured something against the wall with his arm extended, reading a tape measure like it could tell him where the last of the missing Faberge eggs were. 

There were—goddamnit—there were screws in his mouth. Screws in his mouth, waiting to be needed, and the sight of it was—there were no words in English or Russian and probably not in French either for what the sight of it was. Ilya stood in the doorway and felt the problem turn into something heavy. 

Shane glanced up, spitting the screws into the palm of his hand. 

“Are you bored? I can find something for you to do.”

“No,” Ilya said. “I am watching.”

“Watching me… put up shelves?”

“Yes.”

Shane just stared at him for a moment before a quick flicker of recognition crossed his face. 

“Ilya.”

“Keep working,” Ilya said, voice suddenly feeling a bit thick. “I am watching.”

Shane held his gaze for only a moment longer before he turned back to the wall. But his posture had changed almost imperceptibly now that he was aware that he was being watched, and he knew why. There was a different sort of deliberateness to his movements now. 

He drove a screw into a bracket with the drill, and the sound of it was efficient and clean. Ilya pushed off of the doorframe, crossing the room to bracket Shane against the wall. 

“Are you finished?” Ilya asked, breathing into the hair at the nape of Shane’s neck. 

“I have four more—”

“Are you finished?” Ilya repeated, grinding the hard line of his erection into Shane’s ass and nipping lightly at his earlobe.

There was only a moment’s hesitation. “They can wait.”

Ilya spun him around so they were facing each other. There was still sawdust in Shane’s hair, pencil lead on his finger tips. Shane stared up at Ilya with an expression that was one part surprise and one part certainty and it lit something within him on fire. 

“You drew a plan,” Ilya started, mouthing at Shane’s throat. “ You measured everything. You went to the store twice. You know how to do every part of this.” Ilya shook his head, slightly dizzy. “I did not know you could do this.”

“It’s just shelves,” Shane said, voice unsteady as his head tipped back to expose the column of his throat. 

“Is not just shelves,” Ilya said. “You fixed the pipe. You fixed my car. You hung—you take care of things. This house. You take care of it like you take care of me.”

Shane looked at him and Ilya pulled the drill from his slack hand, placing it on top of the sawhorse. “I am not—I did not know it would be—”

“A thing for you,” Shane finished for him, the corner of his mouth starting to lift. 

“Do not.”

“It’s a little funny,” Shane said, smiling wider. 

“Is not funny,” Ilya said, getting his hands under Shane’s shirt to touch his slightly damp chest. 

“You have been watching me,” Ilya said. “I have always seen you watching me and thinking such filthy little thoughts.” He pulled back to look at Shane’s face. “I have also been watching.”

Shane fell still under his hands, and Ilya kept talking. 

“You fix things,” he said, voice low. “You know how everything works in this house. You know what tool to use. You just—you just know. You do not have to ask or look it up or hire someone to fix. You just know and you just do. Very inconvenient time to find this out about myself.”

“What are you finding out?” Shane asked, back arching a bit as his hips bucked against Ilya’s, 

“That this—” Ilya gestured at the half installed shelves and the tools spread across the room. “—is a very big problem for me.”

Shane was fully smiling then, even as he continued rolling his hips against Ilya’s. “The shelves turned you on.”

“No,” Ilya corrected immediately. 

“You. In this room, with the—” Ilya ruffled Shane’s hair, brushing out the sawdust. “—and the screws in your mouth, and the measuring—”

Shane barked out a laugh, short and free and real. “Ilya—”

Ilya kissed him, partly to stop the laughing and mostly because he had been standing in that doorway watching Shane for an unreasonable amount of time and had exercised a commendable amount of restraint in not just bending him over the sawhorse in the first place. Shane’s hands came up and one of them was still slightly dusty and for once Shane didn’t comment on the mess it left on Ilya’s shirt. 

When Ilya pulled back, Shane looked up at him with an open expression that laid bare all of the realities of the careful work Shane put in to hold their life together in one piece. 

“Upstairs.”

“But your shelves…” Ilya teased. 

“Can wait.”

“Yes,” Ilya agreed. “They can wait.”

Shane picked the screws up from where he’d set them down—because of course he did, because he was Shane—and placed them carefully back into the box they had come in before he let Ilya take his hand and drag him out of the room. 

The shelves, when they were finished the next day—Shane had woken up earlier than Ilya and had quietly crept downstairs to finish, which is where he was at ten o’clock when Ilya finally found him again—were perfect. Level, solid, installed directly to plan. Built to last. 

Shane glanced over his shoulder when he heard Ilya pad into the room. 

“Don’t.”

“I am doing nothing,” Ilya said, leaning against the doorway to watch. 

“You have a look.”

“I am drinking my coffee,” Ilya said, taking a long, exaggerated sip. 

Shane turned to the shelves—Ilya couldn’t see what he was doing, but he could see the bunching of the muscles in Shane’s back through his thin tshirt. 

“Five more minutes, and then I’m done.”

“Take your time,” Ilya said, settling in to watch. 

And so he drank his coffee and watched his beautiful husband build something out of nothing and thought that there was probably no other version of his life that could have ever brought him the same satisfaction as knowing that he’d be spending the rest of his life with this man.