Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Ultimately, Shane had been busy for fourteen days following their first private session.

In those fourteen days, Ilya had developed a problem with clocks.

This wasn’t new, exactly; time had always moved strangely for him, stretching and pooling in his shitty apartment like water finding the low points in a warped floor. He could sleep six hours and not know if it had actually been nine or eleven and it didn’t matter anyway. He could eat the same meal three nights running and only realize on the fourth when he opened the fridge and found the pot empty. Weeks folded into each other when the only landmarks were shifts at Wolfbird, his smattering of private clients, the metro ride between them, and Ilya had built a life that ran fine on that blurriness, the way a man with poor eyesight stops noticing what he can’t read.

The problem was that the blur had developed the occasional snap to focus.

His phone buzzed at 11:47 PM with a photo of a hotel hallway and suddenly Wednesday had a seam in it. He caught himself checking the NHL schedule the way other people checked weather: reflexively, without deciding to, his thumb finding the app like a tongue finding a loose tooth. It’d become a habit.

So, of course, Ilya also knew just what Shane was busy with for those fourteen days.

First he’d flown to New York for their game against the Admirals with Hunter pulling his team ahead by a hair, and then he’d flown all over between both the United States and Canada. After New York was Pittsburgh, and then he was back in Montreal for three days only to fly out again to Philadelphia with the last away game of this stretch being in Toronto. In those two weeks, there’d been work, the adoption event, and Ilya had watched half of the games on television at Svetlana’s apartment, and then one at his own. Four cities, four games, and the Voyageurs had gone 2-2, which wasn’t terrible, but Shane’s plus-minus had dropped and there’d been a turnover in the third period against the Flyers that ended up in Montreal’s net.

And Toronto had outright beat them.

Ilya had seen Shane’s face after that last goal from the Leafs. The cameras loved him even when he was losing, almost especially when he was losing, but Shane always managed to keep his cool while others would fall apart. Shane had skated back to the bench with his jaw set and his eyes blank, already doing the math on what he’d cost his team.

They’d texted sporadically. Shane sent a photo of his hotel room desk covered in playbook pages. Ilya sent back a picture of Tournesol, who’d been adopted by a family in Outremont. Shane asked if Ilya was free Friday. Ilya said yes before checking his schedule.

Three weeks. Twenty-two days since their last session, and Ilya had taken two other private clients in addition to backroom sessions at the bar in that span and thought about Shane during all of them.

He took the orange line to Berri-UQAM, transferred to the green line, and got off at Peel. The cold air found the gaps in his coat and reminded him his knee didn’t forgive the weather. He’d dressed carefully—black jeans that fit well, a charcoal sweater with a clean neckline, his one good leather jacket. The watch sat against his wrist, visible when his sleeve rode up. He’d stopped registering the weight of it until he pictured Shane’s eyes dropping to it, the flicker of recognition, the knowledge that Ilya had kept it.

And this time, after the awkward shuffle inside and the inevitable oh-shit-you’re-in-my-house from Shane, Shane’s gaze did exactly that—snagged on Ilya’s wrist when he reached to hang his jacket on the hook by the door. Shane didn’t say anything. His mouth opened a fraction and then closed, and his ears went pink above the collar of his shirt, and he turned away to get water glasses from the kitchen like a man who needed something to do with his hands.

Ilya let him have it. He didn’t mention the watch, and he politely, patiently, drank the water, before corralling Shane against the cabinetry once more and kissed him there, and then in the living room against the windows, until he’d managed to get the man to say what he wanted.

Shane asked to be praised.

Not in those words. Shane never used the right words on the first try; he circled, backtracked, started sentences he abandoned halfway through like a man testing ice with one foot. They were in his penthouse, Shane on his knees on the living room rug, and Ilya had just told him to ask for what he wanted.

“Can you—” Shane stopped. Swallowed. His thumbs pressed into the tops of his own thighs hard enough to dimple the fabric of his sweatpants. “Today was bad. The whole week was bad. I keep making mistakes on the ice and I can’t stop thinking about—” He cut himself off again. “Can you tell me I did well today?”

Ilya crouched in front of him. Shane’s gaze was fixed on the floor, like he was asking for something he’d already decided he didn’t deserve.

“Look at me.”

Shane looked. His pupils were wide, the brown of his irises nearly swallowed.

“Hollander, you won half the games recently. What is this business of being bad?”

“It doesn’t matter what I won if I still lost. And that turnover against Philadelphia—went right to their center, ended up in our net. Then Toronto...” The sentence died between his teeth. “We shouldn’t have lost to Toronto.”

“What did you do wrong in Toronto?”

“I—” Shane’s hands flexed against his thighs, fingers spreading wide and then curling back in, his nails catching the fabric of his jeans. “I was too slow on the transition. Gave up two turnovers in the neutral zone. The second one led to their winning goal.” He inhaled through his nose, a sharp pull of air that did nothing to loosen him. “And it wasn’t—it’s not one game. New York, I had two clean looks in the last ninety seconds and couldn’t bury either of them. Glove save on the first, pad on the second. I should have gone to the far side on the backhand, I knew the angle was there, but I rushed it and Hunter’s goalie read me.”

His knuckles whitened where they gripped his thigh. “Pittsburgh I scored but we still almost blew a two-goal lead in the third because I kept pinching too high and leaving Hayden exposed on the backcheck. Coach pulled me aside after. And the Philly game, that turnover was a blind pass I had no business making. I saw their center cheating toward the lane and I threw it anyway because I thought Schneider could beat him to it, and he couldn’t, and that’s on me. That’s a puck I should eat every time and—”

It would not stop. Shane was vomiting up the words now, saying it all the way a man reads an itemized bill—each failure catalogued and cost, every goal-against and missed opportunity filed away while the wins got shredded. Ilya had watched Shane play enough by now to know that half of what he’d listed was the ordinary margin of a sport played at full speed by exhausted men on skates.

The other half was Shane Hollander holding himself to a standard no human body could sustain and then flagellating himself for the gap between what he demanded and what physics allowed.

“Cheers from an entire arena, screaming your name, isn’t enough for you, Hollander? To know you did well? What, your ears don’t work or is it that you do not listen?”

How many thousands of people fit into Scotiabank Arena? The Wells Fargo Center? Fifteen thousand or twenty, it didn’t seem to matter, because no amount of people could make Shane Hollander believe he was good at the thing he’d built his entire life around.

The man had entire crowds chanting his name on any given Tuesday and still went home to an empty penthouse to catalog his failures like a clerk in the world’s most depressing accounting firm.

Ilya would’ve laughed if he wasn’t busy being appalled. The man earned more in a season than Ilya would see in three lifetimes and he came home to sort his losses into little folders like a bukhgalter in a windowless office, stamping each one FAILURE in red ink. At least when Ilya counted his own failures he had the decency to do it on a budget. Shane had built a million-dollar operation out of hating himself; built on the refusal to believe the evidence, the conviction that the real verdict was always the worst one, the tireless work of building a case against yourself.

Ilya did the same thing with money. Shane did it with his worth.

Impressive, in the worst possible way.

Ilya had watched the highlight reels. Thousands of people in the crowd losing their collective minds over a goal, and Shane skating back to the bench like a man returning library books. The whole arena could scream his name until they went hoarse and it wouldn’t land, because Shane didn’t believe crowds. Crowds cheered for the jersey. Crowds cheered for the logo. Crowds were stupid.

Ilya, on his knees in a penthouse with his hand on the back of Shane’s neck, was not a crowd.

A therapist would tell Shane to journal. To practice affirmations in the mirror, maybe, reciting I am enough to his own reflection like a man trying to teach a parrot. The parrot would learn faster. Ilya had seen the self-help books on Shane’s shelf besides the hockey ones—spines cracked, pages dog-eared, none of them worth the paper they’d killed a tree for—and thought: Hollander, you do not need a book. You need someone to grab you by the hair and tell you, and mean it, and make you come so hard afterward that your body has no choice but to believe it.

Ilya could do that. Ilya could do that because it was true. It wasn’t even difficult.

“Because I know that you can listen.” He cupped the back of Shane’s neck, thumb fitting into the groove where the muscle met the tendon. The shudder that went through Shane was full-bodied, a crack that splintered down through his shoulders and his spine and undid the locked bracing of his posture until he folded forward, his forehead pressing into Ilya’s hip, the bridge of his nose against the bone there.

He let Shane breathe there for a while, and counted the exhales—five, six, seven—and on the eighth one, Shane’s weight had settled into his knees, and his spine had given up its military posture. Some of the anxious circuitry behind his eyes had gone dim. Kneeling was a funny thing: so simple, and yet here it was doing what fifteen thousand screaming fans couldn’t by giving Shane a single fixed point to exist on, a place small enough to fill.

When his shoulders had loosened enough that the shirt fabric stopped pulling taut across his back, Ilya slid his hand from Shane’s neck to his jaw and tilted his face up.

Shane’s eyes were wet but nothing had fallen. He looked wrecked and furious about it, the way he looked when his body betrayed the composure he’d spent a lifetime building, and Ilya held his jaw and looked down at him and thought, There you are.

Ilya traced Shane’s lower lip with his thumb, pressing the pad of it against the swell of Shane’s mouth until his lips parted further, sucking at the tip.

There you’ve been, this whole time, under all of it.

“You want to be good for me?”

“Yes.” Barely a word. Breath shaped around a consonant and a vowel.

“Then show me. Hands behind your back.”

Shane’s hands left Ilya’s thighs and clasped behind him, fingers locking at the small of his spine. His shoulders drew back with the position, opening up the line of his chest, and the shift put him exactly where Ilya wanted him—upright, exposed, dependent on Ilya for balance and direction and pace.

Ilya unbuckled his belt. Drew the zipper down without rushing. Shane’s eyes tracked every movement, his throat working.

“Open.”

Shane opened his mouth, and Ilya fed his cock past his lips, one hand still cupped around the back of Shane’s skull to control the angle and the depth. Shane’s mouth was hot and wet and immediately, desperately eager. He tried to take too much on the first stroke, gagging, and Ilya pulled him back by the hair.

“Slow. I set the pace, not you.” He held Shane’s head still, thumb rubbing a circle behind his ear. “Breathe through your nose. Take what I give you.”

Shane blinked up at him, lashes damp, and nodded against Ilya’s grip.

“Good. Again.”

Shane hollowed his cheeks on the upstroke and flattened his tongue on the slow drag back, and Ilya’s fingers tightened involuntarily… because that was new. Shane hadn’t done that last time. Shane had been paying attention to what made Ilya’s hand clench in his hair, cataloguing it the way he catalogued game tape, and now he was deploying it like some new play out on the ice. Competitive thing. Clever thing. Ilya felt all that remained of his blood surge downward to his dick, watching rapt as Shane’s jaw went slack and his breathing evened out through his nose, muscles unknotting under his skin until his whole frame loosened and his weight swayed forward into Ilya’s hand instead of bracing against it.

He was listening. He was good at listening, when someone gave him instructions worth following.

Ilya let his thumb drag along the hinge of Shane’s jaw, feeling it work. “Look at you,” he said, and let the satisfaction sit open in his voice. “On your knees in your own penthouse, sucking my cock, and you’re hard from it, Hollander.” He glanced down at the strain behind Shane’s fly. “Does your coach know you follow directions this well? Maybe they are not motivating you correctly. Maybe I should send him a note. ‘Dear Coach, I have found a better use for your center’.”

Shane’s ears went scarlet. His rhythm didn’t falter though, rather it deepened, his jaw going slacker, his tongue working harder along the underside, and his hips shifted forward in a small, involuntary roll against nothing. He was trying to be better at it. Ilya had meant to tease him and instead had given him a performance review he intended to ace.

I am in so much trouble. And the trouble has brown eyes and a mouth that learns too fast.

He buried that thought under the next thrust and kept talking, because talking was the leash he kept on himself; if his mouth was working, his brain could pretend this was still professional.

“You learned this in what—ten minutes? Fifteen? Hollander, you are wasted on hockey. All those years of practice, all those drills, and this is what you were built for.” He rocked his hips forward, shallow, controlled, and watched Shane’s lashes flutter.

“You know what I think? I think you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you exactly what to do with that mouth. Not your coaches. Not your trainers. Me.” His fingers tightened in Shane’s hair. “And the worst part, Hollander? You’re good at it. You’re so good at it I’m going to come down your throat and you’re going to thank me, and tomorrow you’ll be back on the ice and no one—not your team, not your fans, not a single person in that arena—will know just how incredible you are on your knees. I feel sorry for them, truly… but more, I feel like I do not want to share such a pretty thing.”

Shane moaned around him, a vibration Ilya felt in his spine, and his hands spasmed behind his back where his fingers were still clasped; knuckles white, tendons standing out, holding the position Ilya had put him in even though Ilya hadn’t reinforced it once.

Holding it because Ilya had told him to and Shane would sooner dislocate his own shoulders than break an instruction he’d been given on purpose.

Beautiful, ruinous, desperate for it—kneeling and breaking apart on a word.

Ilya pushed deeper. Shane took it, all of it, his throat constricting and then releasing around Ilya’s cock in a rhythm he’d taught himself on the fly, adapting, perfecting, because that was what Shane did. Ilya came with his fingers locked in Shane’s hair and Shane’s name bitten off behind his teeth, and Shane took it without pulling back, his eyes squeezed shut and his lashes dark against his flushed cheeks and his whole body trembling with the effort of staying exactly where Ilya had put him.

Ilya loosened his grip and slowly slipped out of his mouth, fixated on the wet sheen of Shane’s lips, the gloss on his own dick. He smoothed Shane’s hair back from his forehead, fingertips trailing down to his jaw, tilting his face up.

Shane’s lips were swollen and slick. His lashes were wet. His chin was tipped up in Ilya’s hand and his mouth was full of him and his eyes were already asking before the rest of him could—wide, blown dark, locked on Ilya’s face with a raw, starving expression that needed no translation in any language:

Tell me I did well.

Ilya could see it written across every line of him. And he could give it to him now, easily, and watch the whole scaffolding of Shane Hollander come undone.

Instead: “Swallow.”

Shane swallowed. His throat bobbed and his eyes never left Ilya’s face.

“You did very well.”

The sound Shane made was not a word. It came from somewhere behind his sternum, a cracked-open exhale that Ilya felt against his hip, and Shane’s forehead dropped forward into Ilya’s thigh, his shoulders caving inward, the held-breath tension of the last twenty minutes releasing out of him in one long shudder.

“Again,” Shane begged into the fabric of Ilya’s jeans.

And then, because it was true: “You did well.”

“Again.”

So Ilya said it again. And again.

He said it with his hand in Shane’s hair and his thumb tracing the shell of his ear. The words changed nothing and everything. The words were old and useless and Shane drank them like water, bathed in them like the ocean, and the waves washed over him differently, a rising tide of affirmation that dissolved what remained of shame and composure, until Shane wasn’t hearing the English anymore. He was hearing the pitch of Ilya’s voice and the steadiness of the hand on his skull and the fact that someone was still here, still touching him, still telling him he was enough, and his body was converting all of it into permission to stop holding himself together.

His hands had unclasped from behind his back at some point—Ilya didn’t know when—and were now fisted loosely in the hem of Ilya’s sweater, fingers twitching every few seconds like he was checking that Ilya hadn’t moved. His breathing had gone slow and deep. His pupils had swallowed his irises whole. He looked drunk, except drunks were sloppy and careless and Shane, even now, even here, had folded himself neatly against Ilya’s leg with his knees together and his spine curved in a line that would have made ballet-posture coaches weep.

It should be criminal for any man to be able to reduce another with a blowjob. Ilya felt a little dizzy, like a god, like he himself was floating a little. It should be impossible to feel this good by giving someone what they wanted.

Ilya had dropped dozens of clients into subspace over the years. He knew the signs and the neurochemistry if not the words in English: oxytocin, endorphins, the parasympathetic nervous system finally winning the war against whatever cortisol-soaked hell the client had been living in. He’d guided bankers and lawyers and a city councillor through this same doorway and walked them back out an hour later, neatly, professionally, and gone home and made dinner.

Shane on his knees with his fingers curled in Ilya’s sweater and his breathing synced to Ilya’s pulse did not feel like any of those times. Shane trusted him with a totality that bordered on clinical insanity, and the worst part—the part Ilya was not going to examine right now, not with time left on the clock—was that Ilya wanted to deserve it.

He tucked that away and ran his knuckles down the hinge of Shane’s jaw instead, tilting his face up until those blown-dark eyes focused on him, hazy and content and still, somehow, waiting for the next instruction.

“Good,” Ilya murmured. Then, because he was still himself: “Now, Hollander. Let’s see all the other ways you can be good for me.”

Moving, Ilya shifted back against the couch and spread his knees, letting the cushions take his weight. His kneecap throbbed beyond where the pre-session ibuprofen could touch; it lived in the cartilage and came alive in cold weather like a spite-fueled houseguest. He should have rescheduled, maybe, if it was still bothering him this much. Any sane person in his profession would have rescheduled, taken the financial hit, iced the joint, and stayed home.

But… that was not a possibility for Ilya with his lack of savings, his lack of safety net, and worse, his lack of sense when it came to Shane Hollander, who had texted are you free Friday and Ilya had said yes before even considering if his body was on the same page as the mind. So… he would adapt and make it work today. This position—reclined, Shane doing the work above him—was practical. It saved his knee. It would also give him the best view in the city: his own cock plunging into Shane Hollander’s naked body with the skyline of Montreal behind him.

“Stand up.”

Shane stood. His legs wobbled under him and he caught himself on the arm of the couch, blinking, still half-submerged in the praise-drunk fog Ilya had pulled him into. His mouth was still swollen, lips red from their earlier devotions, and his hair was wrecked from Ilya’s hands, and he looked—Christ—he looked like a man who’d been thoroughly used and was desperate to be used further. The front of his jeans strained where his cock pressed against the denim, neglected this entire time, and Ilya could see the damp spot where the fabric had darkened at the tip.

Patience. Ilya had not touched him there yet. He’d been saving it the way he saved the last cigarette in a pack—knowing the anticipation made the thing itself better.

“Take your clothes off.”

Shane’s fingers went to his shirt buttons. He fumbled the first one, then the second, the coordination that made him lethal on the ice apparently useless when Ilya was watching from below with one arm draped over the back of the couch. Ilya didn’t help.

Where was the fun in helping? He liked watching Shane struggle with this, the captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, hands shaking while he tried to undo his own fly because a man on his couch had told him to strip.

The shirt came off and Ilya’s mouth went dry, because knowing what Shane looked like did nothing to blunt the impact of seeing it. Thick through the chest and shoulders, the muscle packed dense for function—Ilya could see where the deltoid bunched from years of stick handling, where the obliques cut in hard from the rotational power of a slapshot. Freckles scattered down his neck and across his collarbones, the dark constellations Ilya had been mapping since their first session, and he wanted his mouth on every single one of them.

Shane pushed his jeans down his thighs, stepped out of them, and folded them. More importantly, despite how far he’d sunken, he folded them neatly, edges aligned, and set them on the coffee table next to his shirt. His cock was visibly straining against his boxer briefs and his hands were shaking and his ears had gone scarlet, and he was folding his jeans. Ilya pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth to keep from smiling. Every time, and it ruined Ilya a little more each time he saw it.

If the man ever stops folding things during sex, that’s when I’ll know he’s truly lost his mind.

“Those too.”

Shane hooked his thumbs in the waistband and pulled them down and stepped out of them, and there he was—naked, hard, nearly six feet of NHL forward with his hands at his sides and nowhere to hide.

Ilya let himself look. Really look, the way he rarely allowed during sessions because looking too long stopped being professional and started being hungry. Shane’s cock was flushed dark and curving toward his stomach, thick enough that Ilya’s throat tightened with the memory of having it in his mouth during previous romps, and while he’d already planned out the night in his head, knew that he wanted it in his mouth again next time, pinning Shane down and swallowing him until he sobbed. The muscle of his thighs bunched with the effort of standing still.

A bead of pre-come welled at the slit and slid, slow and viscous, down the flushed head. Ilya’s eyes followed it, tongue pressing to the roof of his mouth.

Krasivyy. Beautiful. None of the English had vowels enough for the body in front of him. The English ones—hot, sexy, attractive—were blunt instruments. They didn’t have the vowel sounds for what Shane’s naked body did to a room.

“Come here.” Ilya patted his thigh once. “I’m going to sit right here, Hollander, and you are going to do all the work tonight. You want to be good? Earn it. Show me what this body can do when it’s working for me instead of your team.”

Shane crossed the distance between them. Ilya guided him forward by the hip, then pulled him down, straddling his lap, knees bracketing Ilya’s thighs, their bodies pressing together with nothing between Shane’s skin and Ilya’s clothes. The heat of Shane’s bare ass settled against the rough denim over Ilya’s thighs and Shane hissed at the friction.

“Hands on my shoulders. Keep them there.”

Shane obeyed. His fingers dug into Ilya’s shoulders through the charcoal sweater, gripping hard enough that Ilya could feel his pulse beating through his fingertips. Ilya reached between them and wrapped his hand around Shane’s cock.

“Oh God—”

“Not God.” Ilya squeezed, thumb dragging through the slick gathering at the head. “Rozanov. You can remember, yes?”

Shane choked on a laugh that broke apart into a groan when Ilya stroked him, slow and tight, root to tip, spreading the wetness down his shaft. Shane’s cock pulsed in his grip, and the outraged, wrecked look on his face, caught between wanting to laugh and wanting to die, was worth more than his hourly rate.

“You’re—fuck—you’re making jokes right now?”

“I am always making jokes. You should be used to this by now. Fuck, Hollander. I love how wet you get.” He twisted his wrist on the upstroke and Shane’s hips bucked forward, chasing it, and Ilya let him—two, three thrusts into his fist before he pulled his hand away entirely.

Shane whined. Actually whined, head dropping forward, forehead pressing into Ilya’s shoulder, hips rutting forward shamelessly.

“Not yet. Patience, Hollander. Behave.” Ilya kissed his temple, then reached for the supplies he’d set on the side table before the session started: condom, lube, the unsexy logistics that were part of the job but had to be handled before everything turned slippery and stupid. Ilya slicked his fingers and reached behind Shane, pressing the pad of his middle finger against the rim and holding it there, circling in slow passes that let the muscle clench and flutter under his touch. Shane’s thighs locked tighter around his hips.

“Breathe.”

Shane breathed. Ilya pressed one finger in, slowly, past the resistance, and Shane’s mouth fell open and his eyes went glassy and his grip on Ilya’s shoulders turned punishing.

“Good. Push back against me.”

Shane did, rolling his hips down onto Ilya’s hand, and the visual of it, this enormous athlete working himself open on Ilya’s finger with his cock hard and dripping between them, was enough to make Ilya’s brain go briefly, dangerously offline. He added a second finger and crooked them forward, searching, and when he found the spot Shane’s spine arched and his head tipped back and the sound he made was guttural and startled, like the pleasure had ambushed him.

“There. There he is. There you are, Hollander.” Ilya worked the spot mercilessly, three, four, five strokes with his fingers angled and pressing, until Shane was grinding down onto his hand openly, greedily, chasing the pressure with rolls of his hips that he would have been mortified by ten minutes ago and was now too hungry to stop.

Ilya let him have it.

Good. Take what you want. I’m watching.

Shane was grinding down onto his hand now with his eyes open and fixed on Ilya’s face, and the shame that had been clamped over him ten minutes ago had burned off like fog. He was rolling his hips in long, filthy circles, adjusting the angle himself, chasing the pressure with a focus Ilya recognized from watching him on ice—except on ice, Shane’s focus came packaged with tension and self-punishment, and here, now, with Ilya’s fingers inside him and Ilya’s permission wrapped around him, the focus had nowhere to go except toward more. He was letting himself want it. He was showing Ilya that he wanted it, which was harder, and braver, and Ilya rewarded each grind with a curl of his fingers that made Shane’s mouth drop open.

He withdrew his fingers and Shane gasped at the loss, hips rolling forward into nothing.

“Please—” Shane’s voice cracked, his hips canting forward into nothing. “Rozanov, please—”

Ilya liked that word in Shane’s mouth. He liked how hard Shane had to work to say it, how the consonants softened when his body was doing the asking instead of his pride.

“Since you asked so nicely.” Ilya reached between them and shimmied his hips in his jeans, inching them down lower for access, the denim parting around his cock while the rest of him stayed dressed: sweater, belt, the watch catching amber light on his wrist. Shane’s eyes dropped to the gap in the fabric and his throat worked, and the naked want on his face—at the sight of Ilya’s cock freed from his jeans while Ilya himself remained fully clothed, while Shane knelt bare and leaking in his lap—sent a possessive heat crawling up the back of Ilya’s neck. He tore the condom wrapper with his teeth and rolled it on, taking his time about it, letting Shane watch.

“Sit down on me. Slowly.” He held Shane’s hip with one hand. “I have been giving so very much to you, so I think it fair that you do the work tonight. I will enjoy the view.”

Shane sank, and his face went slack, mouth falling open, brow furrowing, a sound leaking out of him that started as a gasp and thinned into a whine. His fingers dug into Ilya’s shoulders hard enough to dimple the skin. Ilya watched his lashes flutter, watched the crease between his brows smooth and then tighten again as he adjusted to the stretch, and read the body searching for pain, for guarding, for pulling away.

But Shane was sinking, not bracing.

“That’s it. Keep going. All the way down.”

Shane lowered himself inch by inch until he was fully seated, Ilya buried inside him to the root, and then he stopped, breathing in harsh pulls, his forehead pressed to Ilya’s and his eyes squeezed shut.

“Open your eyes, Hollander.”

He opened them; brown, blown black, wet edges and shining like stars. This close, Ilya could count the freckles across his nose. Vesnushki. He kissed the bridge of Shane’s nose, where the freckles were densest, and felt Shane’s cock twitch against his belly.

“Now ride me.” Ilya settled his hands behind his head, elbows wide against the back of the couch, and smiled. “You want more praise? Earn it. Make it good, Hollander. I am going to sit here like a lazy king and you are going to work for what you want.”

Shane lifted his hips and sank back down, and Ilya moved his hands to Shane’s waist. He didn’t thrust. He didn’t need to. His fingers marked the rhythm against Shane’s hipbones—a squeeze when Shane hit the right depth, a tap of his thumb when Shane’s angle drifted—and Shane corrected each time without being told, the same way he probably read plays on ice, absorbing instruction through his body faster than his brain could translate it.

Shane Hollander was a professional athlete. His body was a performance machine. And right now every ounce of that training, that discipline, that obsessive perfectionism, was being channeled into riding Ilya’s cock with the focus and determination of a man executing a play he intended to win.

Ilya leaned back and watched, because that was the gift of this position; he could see everything.

The Montreal skyline burned behind Shane’s shoulders; the lit crown of Place Ville Marie, the skeletal cranes over Griffintown, the whole glittering mess of a city Ilya had moved to with six hundred dollars and a duffel bag… and Shane’s body cut a silhouette against all of it, rising and falling, his stomach contracting with each drop, sweat tracking down the hollow of his throat and catching in the freckles along his collarbones. His cock bounced between them with every rise, flushed and neglected and leaking, and his lower lip was clamped between his teeth, and his eyes kept trying to close and he kept forcing them open because Ilya had told him to.

It looked like a shot from one of Shane’s precious films. Something that needed to be recorded and shot, something that needed to be praised in forums for its beauty and artistry. Shane on top of him, naked and wrecked, the whole city spread out behind them like a set designer’s fever dream, and Ilya still in his sweater and jeans with his cock buried in his greedy hole, plunging wetly inside. Ilya had lived in Montreal for three years and never once thought the skyline was beautiful. He was revising that opinion now, though the skyline had nothing to do with it.

If someone had described this scene to him two months ago he would have laughed and then asked how much it paid.

It paid five hundred dollars an hour, he knew.

It was worth four hundred thousand, he thought, maybe more.

“You look incredible. You have no idea what you look like right now. I could watch you do this for hours.”

Shane’s rhythm faltered, his hips stuttering. “I—keep talking. Please.”

“You want to hear it? Fine. You feel like you were built for this, Hollander. All that ice time, all those trainers, all those nutritionists measuring your chicken breasts to the gram—and this is what your body was actually designed for. Riding my cock in your own living room.” Ilya planted his feet and met Shane’s next downstroke with a small, shallow thrust of his own, punching the air out of Shane’s lungs. “Your coach would be furious to know this is where your real talents lie. What do you think your trainers would say, Hollander? Does this count as cardio? Should we be tracking your heart rate? Just how hard can you work for me?”

“Oh fuck—”

“That’s what we are doing, yes.”

Shane laughed and it became a moan when the angle shifted and Ilya’s cock dragged across his prostate on the next stroke. His pace picked up, thighs burning visibly now, the muscles starting to tremble with the sustained effort, sweat running down his chest. His hand dropped between them to grab his own cock and Ilya caught his wrist.

“Did I say you could touch yourself?” Ilya caught his wrist and pinned it back to his own shoulder. Shane groaned, head tipping back. “Rozanov, I need—”

“You need to show me you can finish what you started.” Ilya’s thumb rubbed a circle into Shane’s wrist. “When you’ve made me come, maybe I’ll let you. Maybe I’ll make you wait. And I promise you, Hollander, it will be worth the wait… but no, no hands. You will come on my cock or you will not come at all. But you haven’t gotten there yet.”

Shane groaned, head falling back. “Rozanov, I’m—I need—”

“You’ll come when I decide. And I haven’t decided yet.” Ilya guided Shane’s hand back to his shoulder. “Both hands. Hold on.”

Shane’s fingers bit into muscle, but his rhythm was deteriorating. His legs were shaking, every muscle in him burning, and still he wouldn’t stop. The rolls of his hips were getting shorter and more desperate, and his face was coming apart faster than his body: mouth slack, brow crumpled, a flush crawling down his chest. His knees kept slipping on the leather. His thighs could do this for hours; Ilya had seen him skate full shifts in overtime. It wasn’t his legs that were failing. No, he was losing control just as he was losing the angle, feeling too good, trying to stave off his own orgasm and compensating by grinding down harder instead of lifting.

Ilya saw it happen—the same hinge-point every session had, where the body outruns the mind and the only question is who catches the fall.

"I can’t—" Shane’s voice splintered. "I’m going to—I can’t hold it—"

“You can,” Ilya said.

Whining, thighs trembling, Shane kept trying. His cock was furious between them—dark, drooling, untouched—and Ilya could feel the tension building in Shane’s body, the way his hole kept clenching tighter on each downstroke, the way his breathing had gone ragged and thin. Shane dropped and Ilya’s cock dragged hard across his prostate and Shane’s whole body seized—spine snapping straight, mouth falling open, hands spasming on Ilya’s shoulders.

“Fuck—no, no, I’m—Rozanov —”

He came. Untouched, cock pulsing between them, streaking Ilya in hot stripes while his body clamped down around Ilya’s cock so hard Ilya’s vision whited out at the edges. Shane’s face crumpled and he pitched forward into Ilya’s neck, a broken, horrified moan muffled against his collar, his hips still grinding in helpless little circles as his body wrung itself out.

“Shit—I’m sorry, I didn’t—I couldn’t —I’m so sor—”

He’s apologizing. He just came untouched on my cock like a pornstar and he’s apologizing. Apologizing like he’d just lost a game or knocked over someone’s drink at a party. The Canadian-ness of it alone could kill a lesser man. Ilya had never in his life met someone who needed permission to enjoy the things his own body did to him, and he had met a lot of people. It was sad and it made sense: Shane had never, in all their sessions before, failed to execute according to plan, and his body finishing before Ilya’s was the same as a botched play, a turnover in the neutral zone, puck in his own net.

This sport. This sport and what it did to people. Twenty-some years of being told that losing control was the same as losing, and here was the result: Shane Hollander coming so hard his whole body seized and his first instinct was to say sorry.

Shane’s eyes were wet and his lashes were clumped and his mouth was trembling and he looked like he was bracing himself for a reprimand, the idiot, as if Ilya was going to scold him for being so responsive that his body outran his instructions. Ilya clenched his teeth as a new gravity of a protective, violent sort of possessiveness thrummed through him. He didn’t want the apology; he wanted the wreckage.

This man.

Snarling, he grabbed Shane’s hips, held him down, and ground up into him—one hard, deep roll that punched the apology right out of Shane’s mouth and replaced it with a shocked wail.

“Blyad’, Hollander.” Ilya’s fingers dug into the meat of his hips, fucking up into him in earnest now, each snap snap snap of his hips punishing. “You think I’m upset? Coming untouched on my dick. Do you know how hot that is?” He rolled his hips again, slower, grinding against Shane’s prostate, and Shane whimpered and tried to squirm away from the overstimulation and Ilya held him in place. “No. No. Stay, Hollander, you will take it. Fuck. You were so good; I want to fuck you through it.”

Shane’s arms locked around his neck. Ilya tipped them sideways, guided him down onto his back, followed him without pulling out. His knee screamed. He could not have cared less.

Shane was spread beneath him now, legs hooked over Ilya’s forearms, his spent cock twitching on his stomach, his whole body flushed and trembling. The city kept burning behind them through the floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent, and Ilya had the unhinged thought that if he turned his head he could probably see the Bell Centre from here—the building where fifteen thousand people paid to watch Shane skate, the building Shane went home from feeling like a failure—and here was Shane, pinned to his own couch with his legs in the air, looking up at Ilya like Ilya had hung every one of those city lights personally.

“Good boy, Hollander,.” Ilya pressed his forehead to Shane’s. “Good fucking boy.”

He fucked Shane into the couch like he wanted to drive him through it; long strokes at first that smacked against pert cheeks, bottoming out on each one, letting Shane feel the full drag of his cock in a body still clenching in aftershocks. Shane was oversensitive and it showed—every thrust pulled a flinch out of him, a bitten gasp, his spent cock twitching against his stomach, and his hands clutched at Ilya’s back, scrabbling for purchase on anything at all.

Ilya picked up the pace. Shane’s mouth fell open and the sounds came freely now—ah, ah, ah—punched out of him on each thrust, and he wasn’t trying to muffle them anymore. His thighs shook where they were hooked over Ilya’s arms. Already, his cock was thickening again, filling out against his belly, flushed and wet, and Shane looked wrecked about it—glancing down between them and then back up at Ilya with an expression of dazed, helpless disbelief that his body was already coming back online.

So easy for him.

“Look at that.” Ilya adjusted the angle, drove deep, and watched Shane’s eyes roll. “Getting hard again already. Nenasytnyy. Insatiable.” He bent and bit the hinge of Shane’s jaw, tasting salt. “I love it. I love how greedy your body is for me.”

Shane made a sound between a laugh and a sob and his hips started rolling up to meet Ilya’s thrusts, matching him, working with him, and the drag of his filling cock against Ilya’s clothes left a wet smear on every stroke in a mess that was quickly becoming obscene. His abs clenched with each thrust, his body curling toward Ilya’s involuntarily, and his mouth hung open, wet and red from Ilya’s cock ten minutes ago. Cosmopolitan’s Hottest Man in the NHL. Ilya had seen the magazine cover in a grocery store checkout line before he’d read it at Wolfbird, wedged between a recipe for fifteen-minute pasta and a headline about mercury retrograde. A glossy headshot, Shane looking polished and miserable in a suit someone else had picked. Every woman in that checkout line could buy the magazine. Every man with a browser could pull up the photoshoot. And not a single one of them would ever see this. Not a single one of them, not one, knew what he looked like getting properly fucked.

That, again, was his alone.

That thought hit Ilya somewhere below the professional detachment he was supposed to be maintaining, that he’d long given up on maintaining. The knowledge that this was his—not the sex, the sex was work, but this, the man, the moment, the feeling of him, and the trust so total it bordered on insane, and Shane gave it to him every time like it cost nothing when Ilya knew, knew, it cost him everything.

His hips stuttered. He was close. He was closer than he should’ve been, because the noises Shane was making and the way he kept flexing against Ilya’s hold—not fighting, testing, feeling the strength there and relaxing into it—were doing more damage to Ilya’s self-control than any session had in years.

“Hollander. Look at me.”

Shane’s eyes snapped to his. Dark, glassy, barely tracking.

“Touch yourself,” he said against Shane’s mouth. “Come with me. I want to feel it again. Think you can do that for me?”

Shane’s hand flew between them and he got two strokes in before his back arched off the couch and his whole body locked—thighs clamping around Ilya’s ribs, heels digging into his back, his cock pulsing in his own fist. He came across his stomach and chest in long streaks, his mouth open and soundless for the first few seconds before the noise caught up with the sensation and he moaned Ilya’s last name like a prayer he’d been holding in his throat for weeks, dragging Ilya over with him. Ilya buried himself deep and came with his mouth pressed to Shane’s throat, biting at his collarbone, the juncture where neck became shoulder, tasting the salt-sweat skin where his pulse hammered. For a few seconds there was nothing in the world except the squeeze of Shane’s body around his cock and the hammering of Shane’s heart under his mouth and the slick heat between their stomachs where Shane’s come was cooling.

Still panting, as Ilya returned to himself, he pressed a kiss to the ridge of his collarbone, then his throat, then the underside of his jaw where the faintest whisper stubble was coming in. Ilya could feel every breath of him, every rib, every shudder still left in his spine. Shane’s palms lingered on his back, fingers spread, holding on with the desperate grip of a man who’d let go of everything else and needed an anchor, and as much as he would’ve liked to stay…

Feeling himself go soft in a condom was a uniquely miserable sensation. Groaning still, Ilya pulled out and dealt with it, tying off the end and reaching over Shane to leave it on a napkin on the side table to throw away when their legs started working again.

“Good boy, Hollander,” Ilya crooned, letting his body go lax, and on top of Shane to intentionally flatten him against the couch. The other man was clearly still floating, fucked out and overwhelmed, and to pin him was to keep him from flying away entirely. “Good boy,” he reiterated,pressing his mouth to the freckle below Shane’s left ear—vesnushki, again, always—and let himself breathe.

Praise now would be more important than ever considering that, technically, Shane had failed in his task to make his Dom finish first, and it was critical to nip whatever perfectionist spiral it might cause before it could even begin. He had to show him that even though he had ‘failed’, the world did not end, and he was still perfect.

“That was so good, ty moy molodets, blyad’, kakoy zhe ty krasivyy—”

Ah. So maybe he needed a moment also, to keep himself from flying away, if English was lost to him.

Ilya’s plan had been to get up immediately, deal with the practical aftermath—washcloth, water, the usual choreography of a man who did this for a living. Instead his hand was in Shane’s hair and his mouth was on Shane’s temple and he was murmuring nonsense in Russian that Shane couldn’t understand, which was the only reason he allowed himself to say any of it. Ilya could pour whatever he wanted into a language Shane didn’t speak, and it would reach him as sound, as warmth, as vibration against his scalp, and Shane would never know that Ilya was handing him ammunition that could destroy them both.

Shane’s nose was pressed into the hollow of his throat. His breathing had gone slow and even, each exhale warm against Ilya’s collarbone, and his fingers kept twitching against Ilya’s ribs like a dog dreaming of running.

Get up, he told himself. Washcloth. Water. You are on the clock.

He kissed Shane’s other ear instead, and let his mind wander.

He was thinking that Shane’s hair smelled like his expensive shampoo and also like sweat, and that the combination was better than either one alone. He was thinking that the weight of Shane’s head on his shoulder felt like an answer to a question he hadn’t known he was asking.

He was thinking that the answer terrified him, and that he wanted to ask it again.

He was thinking that he had a list of other clients this week and he would perform well for all of them and feel nothing close to this, and that the gap between performing well and whatever the fuck just happened was widening into a chasm he couldn’t afford to fall into.

And they still had another hour of paid time, and Shane was warm against him, and the city was quiet thirty floors below, and Ilya’s knee throbbed in a slow rhythm that matched his heartbeat, and the watch on his wrist—Shane’s watch, the one he was going to sell, the one he’d been wearing for three weeks now—ticked against the armrest.

He would deal with the chasm tomorrow. He would take a cue from his landlord with the broken elevator, the dying radiator, for all the broken things.

Tomorrow, tomorrow.

All of the broken things. All of the borrowed time. All of it his, for hours.

He did, though, force himself to rise. There were niceties to observe, even if his knee ground when he forced it to bear his weight, even though he had to correct his posture to lean more towards the opposing side.

“Mngh,” Shane complained, though his head had shifted. Even deep down in his float, with that soft unfocused gaze of aftermath and unmaking, Shane’s eyes tracked Ilya’s uneven stride the way they would track a teammate favoring a leg on the bench—automatic, below thought. His brow creased.

And Ilya ignored it.

“Stay here a moment. I will be right back.”

“Mngh,” Shane complained.

Reaching for pre-gathered supplies, Ilya cleaned the salt and slick from Shane’s skin with a towel that felt like a cloud, then turned to himself—but the sweater was a lost cause. He peeled it off over his head and used the dry edge to wipe what he could from the waistband of his jeans before balling the whole thing up. The watch on his wrist caught the low light, a silver eye watching him as he pinched the used latex from the nightstand and dropped it into the kitchen wastebin.

Shane’s laundry setup in the penthouse was, predictably, absurd. A washer and dryer stacked behind louvered doors off the kitchen, both matte black, both with touch screens that looked like they could pilot a spacecraft. Ilya figured out the wash cycle on his third attempt, shoved the sweater in, and hit start. The machine hummed to life at a whisper because of course it did, because Shane Hollander’s washing machine probably cost more than Ilya’s monthly rent, and god forbid it make a sound while doing its job.

He went to the linen closet, finding a blanket that probably cost more than a car. It was heavy, it was cashmere. He draped it over Shane, tucking the edges around his star-athlete shoulders and then:

“Hollander. What movie should I pick from your collection?”

Shane stirred from his prone position on the couch, still heavy-limbed and fogged. “Mm?”

“Movies. You have a thousand of them. I want to watch one.”

Ilya crossed the room to the floor-to-ceiling shelving unit where Shane kept his collection organized by—what was it, director? No. Alphabetically by genre first, and then alphabetical by title within genre, which was exactly the kind of obsessive cataloguing system that a man with Shane’s particular brain would build and maintain and find soothing.

He scanned the spines once more. Lawrence of Arabia. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Criterion editions with their distinctive white spines. And there… ah, he knew this one. Interstellar, the Nolan film, which Ilya had seen exactly once, on a terrible pirated 480p stream at Svetlana’s apartment with Russian subtitles that had been auto-translated from Korean and made no sense. He remembered the organ music. He remembered the docking scene. He remembered very little of the plot but a great deal about the feeling the film had left behind, which was the particular ache of loving someone across a distance that physics said was impossible to close.

He remembered talking about NASA lenses with Shane.

Ilya pulled it off the shelf. “This one.”

Shane, who had managed to pull the blanket up to his chin and looked approximately twelve years old swaddled in it, squinted at the case. “Interstellar?”

“You don’t like it?”

Shane’s head tilted. The movement had too much give in it, his neck loosening before his brain caught up. “I love it. D’you know that they filmed it with… ah… 70mm IMAX film instead of digitally…” The thought floated away from him, and then he tried again anyway. “Um. I mean… the… the score alone…” This time, Shane caught himself, the film enthusiasm crashing into his post-session fog. “Sorry. Yes. Good choice.”

“Don’t apologize for liking things, Hollander. This is a rule.”

Shane nodded, the motion slow and loose-hinged.

Ilya put the disc in, because Shane had a disc player, a proper one, connected to a sound system that probably cost more than Ilya’s immigration lawyer—and settled back onto the couch. Shane shifted to make room but Ilya pulled him back against his side, arm around his shoulders, Shane’s head finding the hollow beneath his collarbone like the space had been carved for him specifically, still malleable and halfway lost in the deep space he’d floated down into.

The film opened. Cooper’s cornfield. The dust. Murph’s bookshelf and the ghost that turned out to be gravity, which turned out to be love, which turned out to be the only force that could cross dimensions.

Ilya was aware, in the way he was aware of most dangerous things, that he had chosen this film for reasons he was not going to examine tonight. He had chosen the film about a man who left someone behind and spent the rest of his life trying to get back to them. He had chosen the film where time moved differently depending on how close you stood to the thing that pulled you in—where an hour near a black hole cost you decades on the other side. He had chosen the film about gravity.

He was wearing this watch, and while they hadn’t really talked about it any more, maybe he needed to and this was as close as he could get. The movie rolled on, and Shane’s breathing had evened out against his ribs. Not asleep—his thumb was tracing a slow, absent pattern on Ilya’s forearm—but quiet, settled, the constant hum of his anxiety finally dimmed to a frequency below hearing. On screen, Cooper was watching the video messages from his children, twenty-three years older in the span of minutes, and his face was doing the thing that good actors and honest people did when grief arrived without warning.

Shane had started to emerge from his space at about the halfway point, occasionally offering commentary on things he found interesting, or just things that he enjoyed. He leaned his head back against the sofa, his eyes tracking the rotating Endurance on the screen and Ilya…

… was thinking about dogs, and Laika, again. Maybe he always was, at least a little bit, in the periphery of his mind, always there but not usually in focus, until the organ score and the black and the spinning spacecraft dragged her up from wherever childhood memories went to fossilize. Ona byla khoroshaya devochka. Mama's voice, Mama's hand in his hair. The dog playing fetch among the stars.

Alone and brave and small and sent somewhere she couldn't come back from in the name of progress and profit and pursuit. There were worse metaphors for his life. Russia had not strapped him into a capsule, but Russia had made it clear enough: bisexual sons who sold their bodies for rent money did not get return trips. And his father was forgetting him by the hour, not long for this world, and his brother had stopped pretending to want him back, and the only person left in Moscow who might have understood was buried in an unremarkable cemetery.

Laika, at least, was a hero for her struggles.

“You okay?” Shane mumbled against his collarbone, registering the shift in Ilya's breathing without fully surfacing.

The question caught him off guard. Shane was the one in the fog. Shane was the one whose neurochemistry was currently rearranged, whose body was still flushed and loose against Ilya's side, who needed monitoring to make sure he didn't crash and spiral into a drop. Ilya was the professional. Ilya was the one who was supposed to be watching him. And yet here was Shane Hollander, half-conscious and fucked stupid, lifting his head a fraction to ask Ilya if he was okay, as if the man on the receiving end of aftercare had any business running triage on the man providing it.

And why was he asking at all? How did he know?

“Watching the movie, Hollander. Shh.”

Shane shh'd. For about a minute.

“This scene is… always stressful,” he admitted, voice dropping into that low, private register he only used in the after. “And sad.”

“Yes,” Ilya agreed, thinking about both the movie and the dog.

“And the music is…” Shane trailed off, searching for the words and failing in a way that Ilya understood implicitly. When they never came, Shane seemed to settle on a different thread of thought: “I listen to the soundtracks.”

“Hm? What? We are listening right now, of course you listen.”

“No, hah, no… I mean I listen to them outside of watching movies. Like, when I’m working out and lifting,” Shane said. “Superhero movie soundtrack ones, mostly—Man of Steel, the Batman stuff. If the music is big enough, I can pretend I’m actually as strong as the Voyageurs’ PR team says I am. Like I’m an Avenger or whatever. Sometimes I pretend I’m lifting a car off some pedestrian.”

Ilya snorted. “An Avenger? Truly? I am sitting on a sofa with a man who thinks he is Captain America because he hears a trumpet flare while he does his squats? Tell me, Hollander. Do you wear the tights under your gear, or are those only for the gym?”

Shane didn’t pull away; he only burrowed deeper into Ilya’s side, his nose pressing against the crook of Ilya’s neck. “Don’t knock it until you try it, Rozanov,” he murmured, his voice thick with the first heavy layers of sleep. “You put on that Man of Steel flight theme and tell me the world doesn’t feel... tell me it doesn’t feel like it has a purpose. It makes the weight feel lighter. Like I’m actually built for it.”

“Mmm. I thought we’d already established what you were built for,” Ilya teased, lifting up his eyebrows and glancing down at his own crotch.

Shane rolled his eyes. He let out a long, shuddering yawn that ended in a soft huff against Ilya’s skin. “Maybe two things can be true.”

“Durak,” Ilya whispered, though he didn’t move. He reached down and pulled the edge of the blanket higher. “A beautiful, muscular fool.”

And… just like before, time stretched. Years passed on Miller’s planet, and so too passed the point where Ilya was supposed to leave after two and a half hours. But he was comfortable. This couch, this penthouse, was nice, and so was this stupid cashmere blanket. He’d heard of cashmere sweaters and knew how expensive they were. But an entire blanket? A King sized blanket big enough for two grown ass beefy men to fit beneath?

Insane.

It was warm, and so was Shane against his side and it was good and he felt sleepy, and if he didn’t have to catch the last train it’d be so easy, too easy, to just fall asleep.

On screen, the organ swelled. Cooper’s daughter, old now, old and dying in a hospital bed, told her father not to stay and watch her go. No parent should have to watch their child die, she said, or the inverse of it, the version where the child releases the parent. Ilya thought about his own father, asleep four thousand miles away, dreaming of dead brothers, and his hand tightened on Shane’s shoulder without meaning to.

And then… a bold new future. An open ending. True love and gravity and time and bullshit and it was beautiful and even more so on this insultingly large OLED TV screen. When the credits rolled, Shane was half-asleep and Ilya’s knee had stiffened into a solid block of regret and the last metro left in twenty-two minutes.

“Hollander. I have to go.”

Shane made a noise of protest.

“The train, Hollander. If I miss it, I sleep on your floor, and I charge extra for that.”

That got a laugh—small and sleepy muffled against Ilya’s chest, but real. Shane sat up, rubbed his eyes, and reached for the water glass on the table, draining it the way Ilya had taught him. Good. He was learning to take care of himself in the aftermath, which was the entire point—not to make Shane dependent on Ilya’s aftercare forever, but to teach him the mechanics of it so he could do it alone.

The thought should have been satisfying. Professional pride: the client internalizes the skill, the client improves, the client eventually stops needing you.

It wasn’t satisfying. It was the worst thought Ilya had ever had.

He stood, stretched, and Shane watched him from the couch, still wrapped in the blanket, and Ilya caught the look—the one Shane wore when the session ended and the real world rushed back in, the one that said don’t go in a language Shane didn’t know he was speaking.

Ilya pretended not to see it. Pretending was getting harder. He gathered his things, retrieving his sweater from the dryer, warm and smelling like Shane's detergent, and pulled his leather jacket back on. Ilya checked his duffel by Shane’s front door. Twice.

“If there is another watch or some other bullshit in here, Hollander, I come back here and shove them up your ass, you understand?”

Cashmere dragging behind him on the floor like a cape, Shane had risen and laughed from the doorway, still flushed and soft-looking in the way he always was after a session, the hard scaffolding and facade of his public face not yet rebuilt. “I’ll behave. Go home, Rozanov.”

“You behave when I tell you to behave. Not after. Don’t get cheeky.” Ilya slung the duffel over his shoulder. Shane’s eyes dropped to his right leg.

“Did you get hurt? I noticed you’re favoring the one side.”

“I am walking. This is how I walk.”

“It’s not how you usually walk. Did you strain your knee or something? I have some really good topical sport cream and a spare brace if—”

“Is old injury and not something I need your worries for,” Ilya said, but he’d said it over his shoulder, already walking away.

The door closed, and Shane didn’t laugh this time.

There was, blessedly, nothing in the bag but his own supplies. He’d checked a third time on the metro platform, just to soothe his own nerves, fingers rifling past his coiled practice rope and the paperback, and found only his own things.

Shane had listened. Good.

And then his phone buzzed as the train pulled into Berri-UQAM.

Additional payment received: $1,000.00.

“Svoloch’,” Ilya hissed. Shane had already paid that through the usual link. This was separate—a tip, sent through the app, with no message attached. A thousand more dollars for a session that had already been compensated, from a man who’d promised, minutes ago, that he would behave.

Tipping was nice. Tipping was appreciated. Tipping was not required and tipping should’ve never been nearly as much as the entire scene. Ilya stared at the notification until the doors opened and a gaggle of drunk college kids stumbled past him.

Ilya stepped onto the platform and typed with both thumbs, which he only did when he was angry or ordering food.

And then his phone buzzed again.

Additional payment received: $300.00.

Three hundred dollars. On top of the thousand that was already extra. On top of the session fee which was already free of Wolfbird’s cut. The math didn’t just scream; it wailed, unspooling the tight, measured lines of Ilya’s budget until they were nothing but static. His stomach hardened, a manifestation of dread settling in his gut as he realized the scales had tipped too far.

He wasn’t the one in control of the transaction anymore. He was being drowned in a surplus.

Ilya’s thumb hovered over the ‘Transfer’ button, a hair-trigger away from sending all of it back. Only…

This little brat. The golden, stubborn, cheeky fucker actually meant it—

—and worse, he’d been watching. Half-drowned in subspace, barely able to string a sentence together about IMAX film formats, and Shane had still clocked the limp. Had tracked it from the couch with those heavy-lidded eyes. Had offered a brace at the door and been shut down and was now, from thirty floors up, trying to help with this new form of malicious compliance.

Get some ice on your knee. As if Ilya were one of his teammates. As if Ilya were someone Shane had the right to worry about.

The worst part was that nobody had told Ilya to ice his knee in… how long now? Sveta, these days, would hand him an ibuprofen, a sandwich, and a shot to handle pain if she noticed him struggling, but she’d also tried for years now to drag him to an unaffordable physiotherapy clinic and failed. A coworker had mentioned a brace to him, once, years ago after a scene with a St. Andrew’s cross and too much standing forced him to cancel a later client that same night. But ice your knee—the simple, obvious thing, the thing you said to someone whose pain you noticed and wanted to shrink—nobody had said that to him since his coach in Trois-Rivières, and that man had only cared because Ilya’s knee affected his roster.

Shane cared because Shane had been paying attention.

Shane would weaponize his limitless bank account until Ilya was buried in a surplus he couldn’t possibly justify, sending double and then double again until the math of his life was lost in exponentials. It was a power play of the most ridiculous sort; a defiant, beautiful absurdity that made him huff out an insane, high-pitched laugh that had other people on the train looking sideways at him.

He hated him for it. He hated him so much he wanted to hijack the train, go back, storm back to the penthouse, and fuck the arrogance right out of him with the siege condoms, knee be damned, until they’d used all fucking forty-whatever were left. He wanted to pin those star-athlete shoulders to the sheets and remind Shane that no matter how many zeros he added to a tip, no matter how much abundance he threw at the walls, he was still the one who belonged on his knees.

He wanted to see him again. Now.

The watch on his wrist ticked, a silver heartbeat in the dark, counting down the seconds until he could see him again.

Etot ublyudok.

Ilya ignored the bastard Shane Hollander for two days following that, though he did put on his brace and ice the everloving fuck out of his leg, only occasionally opening his phone to stare at his bank account at the rare, exorbitant, excess.

There were so many smart things he could do with this money, like going to the dentist for the first time in two years, like paying his immigration fees, and doing some online course to get something on his non-existent resume. The sane thing was to save it, because he was one bad week, one cancelled client, one busted radiator from complete financial collapse, and thirteen hundred dollars was not a fortune but it was a wall between him and the fall.

Ilya, in his infinite wisdom, did none of these things.

He got a haircut.

Not at the place on Masson where the old Portuguese barber charged twelve dollars and talked about Benfica the entire time. He went to the place on Saint-Denis he’d walked past for two years, the one with the exposed brick and the espresso machine and the barbers who looked like they’d been cast in a cologne ad, and he sat in the leather chair and said, “Short on the sides, leave the top,” and let a man named Julien spend forty-five minutes on his head. Julien shaped his eyebrows with a straight razor and put something in his hair that smelled expensive and made it fall in a way Ilya had never managed with the drug store paste he’d been using since he was nineteen. Julian gave him a neck massage and said that the hot-towel facial with imported botanicals was also included in the men’s cut.

It cost seventy-five dollars, and Ilya tipped twenty percent on top of that and nearly orgasmed at how good it felt to be able to do so.

He bought shirts—dark green linen, fitted in the shoulders, black silk, all designer, then several more—from a rack at a consignment shop on Mont-Royal where everything was secondhand but clean and sorted by color, the kind of place Svetlana had been telling him about for months. He bought new socks. He filled his fridge with food including produce and not just shelf stable shit from the center aisles. He bought a pair of boots with actual tread that didn’t have a crack running along the left sole where the cold leaked in, and when he laced them on the bench outside the store his feet felt warm for the first time in recent memory.

He had finally let go of the handle.

Doyti do ruchki. To reach the handle. The handle of the kalach that only beggars ate. Ilya had been reaching for the handle for three years. Tonight he was spending money on haircuts and linen shirts and boots that kept the cold out, and it felt like defiance and stupidity in equal measure, the way his mother used to buy a single expensive chocolate bar every New Year’s and eat it in two bites standing at the kitchen counter, eyes closed, while his father was out.

“Inogda nuzhno byt’ nemnogo bezumnym, Ilyusha,” she’d told him once. Sometimes you have to be a little bit crazy. She’d licked the foil and winked.

Hollander’s thirteen hundred dollars would vanish by Friday. But tonight, standing in new boots on Mont-Royal, Ilya’s feet were warm.

He did not send a thank you text to Hollander for any of it. Instead, he called Svetlana.

“Get dressed. I’m taking you out.”

“It’s a Tuesday, Ilya.”

“So?”

“So where is this money coming from?”

“I got a good tip. Get dressed. Wear the blue thing with the slutty back. I want to spoil you and get laid.”

She wore the blue thing with the slutty back.

Ilya wore one of his new shirts. The green one, which was light enough to catch the draft of the room and dark enough to hide the person he was yesterday. He rolled the sleeves to his mid-forearm, exposing the watch which… this was not work, so he could wear it. He could wear it, tonight on this evening of excess as it was: as jewelry. He leaned against the doorframe and watched the light dance off the brushed steel, intoxicating himself with the lie the watch told. He wanted people to see it. He wanted them to look at the glint on his wrist and assume he’d bought it on a whim, that three thousand dollars was a negligible fraction of his atmospheric wealth. For tonight, he wasn’t a man who counted coins for the laundromat; he was a man of gravity.

After a ridicuously expensive dinner at a restaurant with white table cloths, they started at a bar in the Plateau that served mezcal cocktails with smoked salt and charged sixteen dollars apiece, which on any other night would have made Ilya’s eye twitch. Tonight he put two twenties on the bar and told Svetlana to pick whatever she wanted. She ordered something with grapefruit and chili and he ordered something with mezcal and lime and they clinked glasses under a string of amber bulbs and Svetlana said, “Nu, za zhizn,” and Ilya said, “Za zhizn,” and meant it—to life, to this, to a night where the math didn’t eat him alive.

On the dancefloor, Svetlana revealed her true colors.

Despite her beauty, she was a terrible dancer who committed fully, arms above her head, hips entirely offbeat, and Ilya was a good dancer who enjoyed her wrongness more than his own rightness. The mezcal was doing its work and the music was loud and Svetlana grabbed his hands and pulled him in and he let his body do what it knew how to do—hips, shoulders, the weight shifting low—and a woman at the bar watched him over the rim of her glass and he watched her back.

She was tall, dark-haired, red lipstick, and she looked at him like she was already doing the math on whether he was worth her time. He liked that. He liked women who assessed him the way he assessed clients: expertly and with appetite and the unwillingness to pretend this was anything other than what it was.

She danced with him for two songs and bought him a drink and laughed at his accent when he tried to order in French, and by midnight they were in a corner booth with her thigh pressed against his and her hand on his knee and her mouth close enough to his ear that he could feel the damp heat of her breath when she said her name. Stacey or Samantha or Sophie. He wouldn’t remember.

He also wouldn’t pretend to, and she didn’t seem to require it.

He kissed her because she was warm and willing and he was drunk enough to stop calculating, and because nobody was paying him to do it, and the difference hit him in the sternum the way a drink hits when you’ve been too long without one. Her mouth tasted like gin. Her tongue was clever and unhurried and she kissed the way she’d assessed him—with a confidence that said she could walk away at any point and chose not to. He liked that too. He liked the choosing.

Svetlana caught his eye from across the bar, raised her glass, and turned away. Permission granted, not that he needed it, and he knew she would be fine without him.

If anything, she would be happy for him for not pining over a client.

I wonder if Shane goes clubbing, Ilya wondered, as Susan-Sonya-Sally palmed at his cock through his jeans. Does he go out with his team? Does he dance?

They kissed again, and it was filthy, and Ilya in his drunken haze did not think: I wish Shane were here. That would have been too coherent, too nameable. It was looser than that and worse—a low pull behind his sternum, the sense of a missing frequency in the room, the way a conversation can be good but you keep wanting to turn to the one person who isn’t there to see if they’re laughing too.

He and Stacey-Samantha-Sophie left together. Her apartment was a fifteen-minute walk in the wrong direction from the Métro, and Ilya’s knee sent a low grinding protest up through his thigh with every block, but her hand was hooked in his belt loop and her hip bumped his as they walked, and she was telling him about her master’s thesis on postcolonial architecture, which he did not understand and did not need to, because the real conversation was happening in the way her fingers kept drifting from his belt to the strip of skin above it, testing his stomach, finding the muscle there.

Her apartment was small and warm and none of the decor or furniture mattered; she pushed him onto her bed and climbed on top of him and Ilya let her take what she wanted because this was the thing he almost never got—someone wanting him, not the Dom or the scene. She wanted this nameless, brainless, drunken fuck with a handsome stranger, and he did too, even if she didn’t have enough condoms in her bedside table to prepare for a siege.

She pulled his new green shirt over his head and bit the tendon in his neck and he arched up into it and groaned, and she laughed against his throat.

He fucked her on her side with his chest pressed to her back and his hand between her thighs, working her drenched clit with his fingers while he moved inside her, and she was loud in a way he appreciated. Shane had cheering stadiums. He had screaming lays, people panting and whining, getting exactly what they asked for. He liked making women come. He liked the specificity of it, the whole body shakes, the way it made them squeeze on his dick. She came with her hand gripping his forearm hard enough to leave marks, her back bowing against him, and Ilya kissed the knob of her spine and thought, good, yes, this is good, this is simple and good and no one is paying for it and no one owes anyone anything afterward.

When he came, it was with his face buried in her hair and his hand still wet and his brain, for thirty blissful seconds, completely empty. He didn’t call her Krasavitsa. He stayed strictly in English, strictly in the present. It felt good. It felt good, and it was wonderfully vapid of meaning or wonder.

Afterward she went to the bathroom to clean up, and he lay on her sheets staring at the ceiling.When she returned, she was nice enough not to kick him out right then. There was no skyline here through the window. They did not flick on a movie, and there were none of Hans Zimmer strings.

Ilya lay there, and, for the first time, wondered what film would’ve made sense here anyway.

A documentary about the life cycle of a mayfly, perhaps: vivid, frantic, and finished before the cosmic clock could move a single millisecond. So small it didn’t even move at all.

Shane would know, if he asked. And he wanted to ask, and also to say thank you for the ridiculous tip I had fun wasting it, and in that moment, in the afterglow of perfect meaningless sex, Ilya realized his folly: he had miscalculated the math of the cosmic clock. Humans might only exist for eight seconds before midnight, but Shane wasn’t a flicker of a match. He was a celestial event. He was the gravity that pulled Ilya out of his ‘little while’ and into an epoch of wanting. He was here with a beautiful woman, her naked body pressed against his, and she was smart and she was funny and all he could think about was this stupid hockey player, and what movies he might like.

When did it become a habit to think of him? To want him?

When had that wanting started to follow him, following him here, out of the penthouse and onto the train and through the bar and into this woman’s sheets, patient as gravity, waiting for him to stop running and fall?

He glanced at the watch on his wrist, which had annoying, slightly illuminated aspects so one could tell time in the dark. Tick tick tick.

And no, Ilya thought, it was even worse than this: It wasn’t a habit anymore. It was a collapse.

He did not text Shane, and let himself sleep in a stranger’s bed.

In the morning she made coffee in an actual French press and he liked her enormously and never saw her again.