Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Established Relationship, Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, And the Cloistering Ordeal of Being Loved, And the Annoying Ordeal of Being Married, idk they are working ouyt the realities of marriage, but they love each other very much etc etc, References to Depression, Implied/Referenced Suicide

Language:

English

Series:

Part 15 of my anonymous heated rivalry fic

Collections:

anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-23 Words: 5,546 Chapters: 1/1

the art of long-term cohabitation

Summary

“Sometimes, I wish he was a worse person,” Ilya admits one night, while he and Yuna are doing the dishes. Shane and Ilya had come over for chicken parmesan, and it had been a lovely dinner, right up until David, clearing the plates, mentioned that he had met a guy at the store the other day who was a big fan of Shane’s, had a kid who idolized him.

David asked if Shane could sign a piece of merchandise for him, maybe record a video. Shane said yes, because he had a rule, about doing things for child fans. Now, Shane was off shooting a video while Ilya did the dishes, and Ilya already knew the way it would require Shane to drag his public face up from the depths of his stomach, the work it would take him to shed it afterwards, the way it would taint this evening.

Notes

• Inspired by forget there's any other place by Anonymous

There’s talk that one of the Metros defensemen will be traded to Ottawa next season.

For now, that’s all it is—talk. Mostly it’s sports pundits saying it, who have picked up the gossip from a minor hockey blog run by an anonymous source. But the minor hockey blog has a decent track record with these things, and when Ilya had asked Wiebe about it, Wiebe had answered in a carefully noncommittal way that made Ilya think it might actually happen.

It’s not a bad trade, strategically. The kid is twenty-three or twenty-four, maybe, still on the upswing in his career, but he’s stagnated in Montreal. Not getting the guidance he needs, maybe. One of the Centaurs’ left defensemen is retiring at the end of the season, a lingering knee injury no longer able to be ignored, and this kid would be a good substitute. Someone worth trying out, at least, before the team resorts to grabbing an AHL player, or a rookie who doesn’t know the first thing about the realities of professional sports.

But he’s been on the Metros for five seasons, since he was first drafted, which means he was a rookie there when Shane was captain. Shane’s last season as captain—his disastrous last season.

Of course Shane has decided he needs to reach out to him.

“There is nothing to say to him,” Ilya insists, for the third time this afternoon. “If anything, he should be reaching out to you.”

Shane frowns at him. “Ilya. He was just a kid.”

They have a day off practice and so they’re at a park, with Anya, exploring the hiking trails. Shane is wearing the hiking shoes he insists on wearing when they walk on anything that can reasonably be described as a trail, even though half the time, the “trails” end up being paved in asphalt. Ilya is wearing trainers that cost over a thousand American dollars on resale, though Shane doesn’t know that. Shane probably thinks they were two hundred bucks and considers even that extravagant.

“He was nineteen years old. That is old enough to know not to be a homophobic dickwad.”

“Nineteen is young.”

“By nineteen, we were already fucking,” Ilya says. By nineteen, Ilya had already been providing for his family financially for several years. By nineteen, Ilya’s father’s memory was starting to go and Ilya was already looking into legal guardianship. By nineteen, Ilya had lived without his mother for seven years. By nineteen, Ilya already had a detailed backup plan for what to do if and when his hockey career ended, a backup plan which involved a very tall building and a very long fall.

But Shane, who at nineteen still brought his mom to major NHL events and advertising campaigns, only sighs. “Yeah, and that was a stupid decision. It’s not his fault if he made a few stupid decisions, too.”

Anya finds a particularly interesting plant and stops to sniff around aggressively at its roots. “That's a blue-beech tree,” Shane tells Ilya, nodding to the plant. “A sapling.”

Shane the wild man, Shane the Boy Scout. He had told Ilya, once, that he had wanted to be an Eagle Scout as a kid, but when hockey ramped up he hadn’t had the time for it anymore. Another thing on the long list of things he’s sacrificed for the game, and sacrificed gladly. Is it only Ilya that feels sad, when he pictures this list in his mind’s eye?

“You don’t owe him anything,” Ilya says.

“Maybe,” Shane agrees. Anya decides she’s done looking at the plant—at the tree—and they start walking again. “But it’s the right thing to do.”

And Ilya loves this about him. He does. He loves how forgiving Shane can be. He loves how generous he is with his time and with his heart. Ilya has a habit of holding grudges, and it can make him small and grey and bittered, like a troll scrounging his way through life under a bridge when all he needs to do is walk up the fucking stairs to society. Shane is big enough to do the hard thing and take the stairs, even if it means he has to be kind to an asshole in the process. It’s always seemed admirable to Ilya—gallant, like something a knight would do in a story.

Now, though—now Ilya sees Shane taking the high road for the millionth time, and it makes him want to scream. Because Shane is going to be the one who suffers for this. When Shane gets nothing but an asshole reply, he’s going to be the one who feels shitty about it, though he should feel nothing but vindicated, and Ilya will be the one who kisses him and feeds him stupid macrobiotic salads and sits alone on their couch while Shane takes a long, unplanned run on the afternoon they were meant to spend fucking around together. And it isn’t a hardship, of course. Loving Shane could never be a hardship. And yet sometimes Ilya wishes Shane could just be a little less generous, a little more selfish, so that Ilya could love Shane without having to deal with this too.

That evening, Ilya sits on the couch with Shane for half an hour as Shane hems and haws over the content of the Instagram message. When it’s finally done, Ilya confiscates Shane’s phone and pulls Shane’s feet in his lap to rub. It makes Shane relax a little bit, but still his shoulders are tense. When they go to bed that night, Shane sleeps on his side, facing away from Ilya.

—

For the first few years that Shane and Ilya were together, Ilya was constantly worried about making Yuna and David like him. Even after Yuna and David had insisted he was like a second son to them, that they loved him, that they enjoyed his presence. They weren’t liars, of course, but Ilya was very aware of how precarious his position in their life was. They may say they loved him like a son, but if it came down it, if he and Shane broke up, there’s only one side they could possibly be on. Family is only family if you can’t lose it.

After he and Shane got married, though, Ilya started to relax a bit. He didn’t really think he and Shane would get divorced, and if they did, there would be warning signs. Shane would make them go to couple’s therapy first, if nothing else, because he was of the staunch belief that almost any marriage could be salvaged, and though Ilya didn’t share this opinion, broadly speaking, he liked that Shane thought this way. Certainly Ilya agreed that no matter what, his and Shane’s marriage could be salvaged, if for no other reason than that Ilya was willing to do whatever he needed to do to make it happen.

But that was in the abstract. In the reality of day-to-day life, Ilya sometimes had to remind himself that he loved everything about Shane, even the irritating parts. It was normal, probably, to feel this way about one’s husband, and normal, too, to want to complain about it, and over time, he found himself going to Yuna.

Yuna knew Shane almost as well as Ilya did, and so she always knew what he was talking about, when he mentioned something that was annoying him. More important, she loved Shane almost as deeply as Ilya did, and so Ilya never felt guilty for confiding in her. She was allowed to agree with his complaints about Shane in a way he wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else, because he trusted that when she said it, it didn’t change the fact that she was willing to do anything for Shane.

“Sometimes, I wish he was a worse person,” Ilya admits one night, while he and Yuna are doing the dishes. Shane and Ilya had come over for chicken parmesan, and it had been a lovely dinner, right up until David, clearing the plates, mentioned that he had met a guy at the store the other day who was a big fan of Shane’s, had a kid who idolized him.

David asked if Shane could sign a piece of merchandise for him, maybe record a video. Shane said yes, because he had a rule, about doing things for child fans. Now, Shane was off shooting a video while Ilya did the dishes, and Ilya already knew the way it would require Shane to drag his public face up from the depths of his stomach, the work it would take him to shed it afterwards, the way it would taint this evening. That was what got Ilya thinking about it.

“Last week, we were at hotel,” Ilya continues. “I wanted to take Red Bull from mini fridge. Price is crazy but I say, that’s okay, next time we are out, I get another one and replace it. They will not know, we don’t pay crazy price, it is fine. But he wouldn’t let me. He said it wasn’t fair to have the hotel distribute the Red Bull when they hadn’t purchased it, and if someone got sick from tampering they wouldn’t be able to trace back the batch number, and maybe the Red Bull would be bad because it wasn’t stored properly, and he probably would have kept going but I made him stop.”

It had irritated the shit out of Ilya at the moment, completely unfairly, because Shane had offered to go down to the corner store to get Ilya a Red Bull. But Ilya didn’t want one if it meant his husband had to get dressed and go out into public and risk getting spotted by fans while buying Ilya an energy drink he didn’t really need. This was supposed to be a relaxed day, on a relaxing weekend. Not to mention the risk that Shane would see the candy bars and the sodas and it would make him think about his diet again, and a weekend off of his macrobiotic schedule would be nothing more than a fever dream.

“Yes, he’s always been like that,” Yuna says, passing the scrubbed spaghetti pot to Ilya for him to rinse. “He has a hard time breaking rules. I had a friend, when I was younger, who suggested we break him out of it by asking him why. Why can’t we break this rule, who’ll get hurt, that kind of thing. But he’s so smart, he can come up with good reasons to obey pretty much any rule. Even the stupid ones.”

“I am not a very good rule-follower,” Ilya says, and Yuna laughs. "It drives me crazy, sometimes.” Then he remembers who he’s talking to, and hastily amends, “I mean—“

“No, I get it,” she says, which is good, because Ilya had no idea what he was going to say next. “Me, too.”

“Does David do anything like that?” Ilya says. “Stuff that drives you crazy, I mean.”

Yuna laughs. “Does he? Oh, boy. By now, the list has gotta be a few pages long.”

It should make Ilya feel better, knowing he’s not alone. But it makes him think of himself, twenty or thirty or forty years down the line, with his own list, Ilya greying and aching and still alive, and then he has to think of something else so he doesn’t get really irrationally furious about it.

— 

Sometimes, Shane gets into these ruts where he only wants one kind of sex—only wants to blow Ilya in the shower, or have Ilya fuck him on his stomach on the bed, or ride Ilya on the living room couch. It’ll last for three or four days, which in the lives of Shane and Ilya means between two and eight fuck sessions, depending on how busy the hockey season is, and by the end of it Ilya is—well, he’s not sick of it, because it’s still sex with Shane, but he’s well past ready to do something else.

For a while, Ilya couldn’t figure out why Shane was doing it, and after weeks of ruminating over it in the dark hours while alone in his bedroom, he finally asked Shane. Shane, so shy about sex, had blushed. “Sometimes, I just get this—feeling,” he says. “That something’s not right, I guess? Like, it’s good, but there’s something missing. Like when you’re trying a new trick on the ice, and it’s good but it’s not great, yet. So you practice it until it clicks.”

“You are practicing having sex with me,” Ilya says, disbelieving. “Hollander, who are you practicing for? Is there going to be a televised competition I don’t know about? Do you have a roster of men lining up for your ass after you’ve perfected your skills?”

Shane had rolled his eyes and smacked Ilya on the shoulder and said, “Shut up, you know I don’t want anybody but you.” Which was satisfying enough that Ilya didn’t mind it when, the next week, they got caught in a loop of Shane riding Ilya reverse cowgirl while Ilya was splayed out on the cold, hard kitchen tiles. But after that, when Shane gets stuck in a rut of handjobs in bed, Ilya’s goodwill fades.

“Come on, Hollander,” he whines, as Shane slicked up with lube for the third day in a row. “Can I fuck you, please?”

Shane shifts, his gaze fixed intently on Ilya’s cock, like maybe what had been missing the last four times was just his attention. “Not today,” he says. “I want to do this.”

And of course Ilya wants to give Shane whatever he wants during sex. Ilya is insatiable, Ilya has a relentless sex drive, Ilya will do whatever and wherever and whenever just to make Shane happy. This has been the bedrock of their relationship from the very beginning. It was what drove the two years of frantic, sex-crazed texting that Shane required before he agreed to let Ilya inside him. 

Sometimes, though, Ilya finds himself questioning this narrative. Maybe he’s getting old; maybe it’s the medication he’s on, which the psychiatrist had warned him at least three times could cause erectile dysfunction. But there are days when Shane gets that look in his eye, and Ilya knows that Shane wants to fuck him, and he feels—nothing. Ambivalent, maybe.

And now, Ilya feels ambivalent, and Shane is wrapping his wet fist around Ilya’s cock, and before Ilya can think better of it he stills him, with a hand on wrist.

“Not today,” he says.

Shane looking up at Ilya through his lashes, bent over Ilya’s cock, his mouth plush and wanting. It should drive any man insane. Why isn’t it driving Ilya insane, right now? Aside from the fact the had it this morning. And yesterday evening. And the evening before that.

For a moment, Ilya worries that Shane will get upset about it, but eventually, he sits back on his heels. “Okay,” he says. “I’m going to go clean this off, then.”

He walks naked, sashaying his hips, and for once, that doesn’t do much for Ilya either. He wonders if Shane is going to have a freak-out in the bathroom over this, but there’s just the sound of the sink running and half a minute later, Shane is coming back in the bedroom, slipping on his boxers, sliding back into bed beside Ilya and grabbing his book from the bedside table. He looks completely normal, like he doesn’t really care about it one way or another.

“Are you mad at me?” Ilya asks, because he can’t help it.

Shane frowns. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“Don’t be mad at me,” Ilya says. “We can do handjob if you want to. Shane, come on.”

“You don’t want to,” Shane says. “It’s fine, I’m not mad.” But he’s doing that thing with his voice where Ilya can’t tell if he means or not, and he’s not meeting Ilya’s eyes.

—

The next morning when Ilya gets up, he feels bad about everything that happened, so he tries to kiss Shane into wakefulness. Shane sighs into his mouth happily for all of half a second, and then he wrinkles his nose and pulling away. “You didn’t brush your teeth,” he complains, and the sour feeling is back.

Ilya takes Anya for a run in the neighborhood, and they pass by a gaggle of pre-teen boys that Ilya has never seen before. He cuts neatly to the other side of the street to avoid them, and for a moment, thinks he’s succeeded, before he hears—loud enough that he can hear it over the thumping bass in his headphones—“holy shit, is that Rozanov?”

It’s kids, even if it’s older kids, and Ilya should stop, because it’s the right thing to do, but he’s selfish, and so he doesn’t. He thinks of when he was twelve years old, what he was doing, and he wraps Anya’s leash more securely around his wrist to make sure she doesn’t try to go say hello. He keeps running.

For the rest of the afternoon, Ilya hides out in his office, ostensibly working on paperwork for the Irina Foundation and really just watching Netflix on his laptop. He emerges for dinner—tofu stir fry and buckwheat, low sodium soy sauce, this fucking macrobiotic diet that made Ilya lose fifteen pounds the first year of his marriage before he started working Coffee Crisps into his meal plan—and they eat it on the couch in front of more Netflix. Shane clears their plates and they lay together like that, for a while, Ilya’s head in Shane’s lap, Shane’s fingers threading through Ilya’s hair.

They’re watching some horror series that varies wildly in quality depending on the season. This one features the ghosts of American settlers haunting an old house and trying to murder the nice family that recently moved in, having, of course, purchased the property with the very last money they had to their names. Classic capitalist stakes in a classic capitalist show. 

Ilya’s favorite season was the first one. In that season, one of the characters was an anemic-looking teenage girl who scowled at everyone and eventually slit her wrists in the bathtub. The scene showing her death made Ilya feel almost sick with joy to watch, a thrumming of recognition that reminded him, almost, of the first time he had locked eyes with Shane across the ice. You know me.

He had watched that season before he met Shane, and presumably Shane had watched it, too, but they had never discussed it, the way Ilya might feel about it or the way it might remind him of his mother. Some things, Ilya had found, it was better not to talk about. They might make Shane cry, and most of the time, almost all of the time, Ilya didn’t want Shane to cry.

He thinks of it a lot, though, when they watch this show. That feeling he had had, watching that scene, and the fact that if he watched it now, he wouldn’t feel the same way.

Shane pauses their episode halfway through, standing to stretch. “Bedtime, I think,” he said.

“Oh, come on. Let’s finish the show.”

“It’s ten p.m., Ilya,” Shane says, already heading off to the kitchen to put the kettle to boil. This is his routine: ten p.m. nighttime sleepy tea, then to the bathroom to brush his teeth and do his skincare routine, then fifteen minutes in bed reading a book. Then fucking, if they want to fuck. Then sleep. Every night for the past four years, and, presumably, every night for the rest of Ilya’s life. He’s happy about it, really. He likes it, the way that Shane is so predictable, the way that makes him a stable place for Ilya to rest.

And yet, Ilya thinks I will be doing this every day for the next fifty years, and suddenly it’s back again, that inexplicable fury.

“Come on, Hollander,” he says again, a bit of vitriol in his voice now. “Let’s be fun for once, please.”

Shane—does he miss Ilya’s tone, or does he just not care? “You can finish it up, if you want,” he says. “I can catch up later.”

“Yes, except then tomorrow we will be out of sync, and I will have to rewatch it with you or you’ll get pissy,” Ilya snaps. He follows Shane to the kitchen the way he used to follow Alexei around the house as a kid, desperate to get his attention.

Shane raises an eyebrow at him, pulling a mug down from the cabinet. “I don’t think I’m the pissy one right now.”

Ilya huffs. “Okay, fine, I’m pissed off! I have the right to be pissed off.”

Shane crosses his arms over his chest. He’s getting mad, now. Ilya had wanted this, so why does it make his stomach twist to see? “Oh, yeah? Why is that? Because from what I can tell, we’ve had a pretty good fucking night!”

Ilya snorts. “Yes, of course you say we did, because it followed all of your little rules. So many rules for me to follow! Dinner at eight, always, bed at ten, always, like a fucking grandpa—I used to have freedom! I could do whatever I wanted!”

“You can still do whatever you want!” Shane snaps. “What is it? You want to snort coke off a stripper? You want to fuck some girl you pick up in a bar? Be my guest!”

“No!” Ilya yells. “Sometimes, I want to kill myself! And I can’t! Because of you!”

Shane’s mouth falls open.

Ilya makes himself stop and take a slow, deep breath. “That came out wrong,” he says, voice carefully measured. “I—you know I don’t want to fuck anyone else. I am over that. The clubs, the partying, I don’t care about it. I don’t miss it.”

Shane’s eyes are suddenly glimmering. “But you miss—what? Planning to kill yourself?”

Ilya bites his lip. “I miss having the option,” he admits.

Shane nods, once, and then suddenly he’s sliding down against the cupboards to sit, cross-legged, on the kitchen floor. He wraps his arms around his knees. “I don’t know what to do with that,” he says.

Tentatively, Ilya sits down beside him. When Shane doesn’t move away, Ilya puts his arm around Shane’s shoulders, tugging Shane’s head over to rest in the crook of Ilya’s neck.

“I don’t know if you can do anything,” he says. 

Shane’s breath catches when he sighs. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

Ilya tilts his head to rest on top of Shane’s, rubbing his cheek on Shane’s soft hair. “Not really,” he says. “I still think about it, sometimes, when I feel bad. But there’s a lot I would miss out on, if I left now. Taking care of Anya in her old age. Taking care of your parents. Winning seven more Stanley Cups with you. Retiring together, at the cottage.” An afterthought, because Shane is too still in his arms: “Lots and lots of really good sex.”

Shane snorts. The sound is wet, but it’s something. Ilya twists so he can get a hand on Shane’s face and press their foreheads together. “I don’t want to leave you,” he tells Shane.

“But you want the option.”

Ilya shrugs, helpless. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. I can get—claustrophobic, I guess.”

Shane works his jaw. “I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about that,” he says. “I don’t think I can—change.”

Ilya kisses him. Even upset as he is, Shane doesn’t hesitate for a second to lick into Ilya’s mouth, his entire focus on Ilya. He’s always like that in the bedroom: everything in the world comes second, even the most important things, to the feel and taste of Ilya on top of him. It drives Ilya crazy.

“No,” he says. “Is not you. I did not explain right. It is—my own head, yes? My own head is claustrophobic. Not you.”

Shane sighs. He sounds like an old man, and Ilya hates himself for making him sound that way. “How would you feel?” he asks. "If it were me. Wanting to die.”

Ilya flinches back. “Don’t say that.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever thought about it. What it sounds like, when you say these things to me. Do you think I love you less than you love me?”

Abruptly, Ilya pulls back, shoving himself up off the tile. “I don’t want to think about this.”

“Maybe we should anyway. Ilya!”

Ilya goes to their bedroom and starts getting ready for bed. Anya has already put herself to sleep; she raises her head when Ilya enters the room, then settles it back down on her paws when he doesn’t stop for a pet. Ilya brushes his teeth, washes his face, and is halfway through putting on his night serum—Yuna had gotten it for Christmas, told him he would thank her one day when he was old and grey and free of wrinkles, and the idea of that, being old and grey, was foreign and terrifying enough that Ilya had mostly managed to use it as intended—when Shane enters the bathroom. He’s wearing his pajamas and side-eyeing Ilya, but he doesn’t say anything, just starts up on his own routine.

His takes much longer, and so Ilya has been lying in bed for a while, in the darkness, when the covers pull back and Shane climbs in beside him. “I know you’re not sleeping,” Shane says.

Ilya rolls over. “I wasn’t pretending,” he says, and doesn’t know if it’s a lie or not.

“I don’t like going to bed angry,” Shane says, like Ilya doesn’t know this—like this isn’t one of the marriage rules that Shane had made very clear from the get-go. Ilya wishes he knew where he got it from, because he knows it isn’t Yuna and David. In the end, though, there are too many places he could have found it, movies or magazines or advice books all parroting the same trite advice. Ilya could ask Shane about it, probably, but he prefers to imagine that Shane came up with it himself. That full of love for each other, he and Shane were reinventing the art of long-term cohabitation.

“So you want to talk,” Ilya says.

“I’d like to, but we don’t have to,” Shane says. “I won’t force you.”

No, you’ll just force me to live my life, even if I’m miserable. Ilya could hate every single day of his existence, every single minute and hour, and he knows Shane would still want him to live. He could be the saddest man on planet Earth and if Shane got wind Ilya was thinking of ending it he would commit him to a psych ward without a second thought.

It’s selfish of him, really, which irritates Ilya in a whole new way. How is it that Shane, who is so meticulous about following his little rules, who is so conscientious about thinking of others and taking only his fair share and fulfilling his obligations, can be so greedy with something like this?

“You’re not depressed,” Ilya says. It’s not a question; Shane nods anyway.

“No, I’m not,” he says. “I don’t think I ever have been.”

Which Ilya knew, of course. It’s still good to hear it. “Do you ever wish I was the same way?” he asks. “That I wasn’t depressed and didn’t have these—hang-ups.”

“Of course,” Shane says. No hesitation, no consideration at all. Ilya doesn’t have time to figure out how he feels about that—bad, probably—before Shane is continuing, “I think it’s the way you feel about me, and my rules.”

“Your rules?”

Shane shrugs, a muffled movement in the darkness. “You know, all the ways I have to behave. What do they call it, a rigid moral code? That I can’t lie, and I have to give people a second chance, and all that.”

“You know about that?”

Shane snorts. “I am at least a little self-aware.”

“No,” Ilya says. “I mean, that I…” It feels wrong to finish the sentence.

But Shane supplies it for him. “That you’re irritated by it, yeah. I heard you talking to my mom about it, a while back.”

Ilya stomach twists in violent disgust. Stupid, stupid, you selfish bitch, says the voice in the back of his head.

“I didn’t realize,” he says, softly. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Shane is tracing shapes on Ilya’s chest, now, organic blobs across his pec and down his ribs. “I think it’s part of the deal, right? Of being married to someone. You can’t spend this much time with someone and not get annoyed by them sometimes.”

“Yes, but—I can try to be better.”

Shane sighs against his chest. “Okay. If you want to. You don’t have to, though.”

Ilya can’t understand how casual he’s being about this. “I don’t want to annoy you.”

“But you will. If it wasn’t this, it’d just be some other thing,” Shane says. His voice is slowing, a sure sign he’s dropping off towards sleep. “Think of it this way. You still love me even though I’m weird with rules, right? Like, you wouldn’t love me more, if I lied more, or something.”

Ilya drags a hand through Shane’s hair. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to love you more than I already do,” he confesses.

“There you go. It’s the same with me. It’s—it’s just you. It’s about you.”

Ilya can’t think of what to say to that, so he just lays there for a while, neck tilted down at an awkward angle so he can watch the top of Shane’s head, the profile of his nose, as his fingers still on Ilya’s chest and, slowly, he falls asleep.

—

The next morning, Shane is running on the treadmill when Ilya charges into the gym and declares, “We should have a code.”

Shane, breathing hard from the pace he’s going, tilts his head. He doesn’t even have to take out his AirPods or whatever because he’s a psychopath who runs in silence. Meditative, he says; neurotic, in Ilya’s opinion. “For what?”

“For when I am being whiny and self-pitying and pissing you off,” Ilya says. “You say something like starfruit, or Haley’s comet, or—I don’t fucking know, whatever. And I piss you off less.”

Shane huffs his way through another few steps, thinking. “Do you get a code word for me, too?”

“Of course,” Ilya says. “Cockslut, maybe. Or tomato.”

“You use both of those words too often for them to be code words,” Shane says. He keeps running, but doesn’t say anything else, and Ilya knows he’s turning over the idea in his mind, so he goes to sit at the bench press and does a few light reps, even though he’s wearing nothing but boxers and his night t-shirt and Shane is probably going to be annoyed by the sweat left on the cushion.

“No, thanks,” Shane says, finally.

Ilya grunts and lets the bar drop back onto the rack. “No thanks?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “I’m good. I mean, you can have a code word, if you want, but I don’t want one.”

“Why not?”

“It feels wrong.”

That’s it—nothing else. He keeps jogging along. He’s started to sweat, now, little beads at his temple. “Why does it feel wrong?”

“I don’t know. It just does.”

“Shane,” Ilya says. “That is bad reason.”

Shane meets Ilya’s eyes in the mirror. Abruptly, Ilya remembers how hot it is that Shane is a professional athlete: that he can run like this, at a speed that most people probably couldn’t maintain for more than sixty seconds, for at least half an hour and still only kind of be sweating. That he can carry on a full conversation while running along on a treadmill with no headphones because he has the concentration and dedication of Atlas. Except unlike Atlas, somehow, he’s happy. Ilya has made him happy.

“Sorry,” Shane says. “That’s just how it is.”

Of course Ilya has to fuck him, then. He pulls out the plug for the treadmill, drags Shane off the machine—Shane who’s not protesting at all, even though Ilya knows he hates an interrupted workout—and takes him back to the weight bench, where Shane sits on top of Ilya, their chests pressed together, and lets Ilya fuck him. Ilya doesn’t have a lot of leverage, so he has to use his arms a lot, but Shane does half the work of dragging himself up and down on Ilya's cock, and afterwards they sprawl out together on the gym mats, breathing hard, the imprint of Ilya’s sweaty ass pressed into the bench.

“We’re going to need to clean that,” Shane says. “Give me a minute and I’ll go get the wet wipes.”

There’s a look on his face, a particular whirring in his eyes. “We’re going to be doing this exact same thing tomorrow, aren’t we?” Ilya says, and Shane looks over him, the expression on his face so patently guilty, that Ilya can’t help it—he laughs.