Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Ilya read the text three times on the Métro, thumb hovering over the screen as if repetition might change the words into different ones—a cancellation, maybe, or a just kidding, or the more familiar coordinates of a session, a room number, a time. He could work with those. He knew the grammar of a booking the way he knew Russian: fluently, without thinking, the syntax built into his hands.

But… a random loading dock on De la Gauchetière had nothing he recognized.

He’d changed twice, which was already twice more than he’d changed for any client in all his years of doing this work. The problem was not complicated. Most of what he owned was either built to sell—the fitted shirts, the dark trousers, the belt with the good buckle—or built to survive—track pants, gym shirts with the Adidas logo cracking off, a Dollarama hoodie that cost seven dollars and had a bleach stain on the cuff.

He had dressed for work, and he had dressed for not-work, but he had never had to dress for whatever the fuck this was.

His nice shirt came off because it smelled like his work detergent and because wearing it meant arriving as Rozanov, which was a costume, and Ilya did not want to be in costume tonight, even though costumes were easier, the costume he knew how to walk in. It was also stupid because he would be skating, so he couldn’t wear anything nice.

His hoodie lasted eleven seconds. He was not showing up to the Bell Centre in a seven-dollar hoodie from rue Masson. Jeans were too stiff. Athletic joggers were too tight and his grey sweatpants, well…

He was nervous, not a moron.

He ended up in a dark pair of athletic sweatpants, which felt illegal to wear out to see someone, and a black crewneck from Simons—the one piece in his closet that didn’t belong to either life—and the boots and the coat because he had no other coat, and the watch. Shane’s watch. His watch. Whoever the fuck’s watch it was at this point, and it felt good on his wrist as he fastened it, even though it also was probably the wrong thing to wear.

The Bell Centre rose out of the block between De la Montagne and the train tracks, massive and dark at this hour, with its signage unlit. Ilya had passed this building dozens of times on the way to the Métro and dozens more while jogging along Saint-Antoine when it wasn’t too cold, and it had always registered as a landmark for other people—a building full of ice he was not allowed to touch.

A place for players.

Former players need not apply.

He found the grey door on the east side. It was propped open with a rubber wedge, and beyond it, a concrete corridor lit by caged fluorescents ran straight and long into the guts of the building. The air that came through the gap was cooler than the street, tinged with the flat mineral smell of machine-made ice and the chemical bite of ammonia from the compressors, and underneath that, fainter, the rubber-and-sweat smell of hockey equipment baked into the walls over decades.

Ba-thump, ba-thump. His heart was pounding, and it felt vaguely illegal coming in this way, like he was breaking in, and it was exciting. Ilya stood in the doorway and breathed it in, and his body did what his body always did with that smell: it went back.

Twenty years back, to the rink in Moscow’s Khovrino District, where he’d first learned to skate, where the boards were warped and the ice was rough and the dressing rooms smelled like mildew and old tape and frozen rubber, and his father had stood behind the glass with a cigarette and watched him fall and get up and fall and get up and never once told him to stop.

He stepped inside and pulled the wedge free and let the door close behind him.

The corridor led past equipment cages and storage bays stacked with orange pylons and nets in need of mending. Ilya told himself he was here because Shane had asked, because the ice was free and the invitation was generous, and refusing would have been rude. He told himself this was curiosity and nothing more, a man revisiting an old skill the way you might revisit an old neighborhood—to confirm you’d outgrown it, to prove it no longer fit. His boots echoed on the concrete, and the lie echoed with them, louder in the empty corridor, and Ilya had spent enough years listening to people’s voices in the dark to know when someone was nervous or lying.

Even when the someone was himself.

He had not missed ice in years, and he missed it now so badly his hands shook in his pockets.

Somewhere deeper in the building, a ventilation system pushed air through ducts that hummed a low single note, the kind of sound that lived below hearing and settled into the bones instead. He followed the corridor around a bend and through a set of double doors with VESTIAIRE / DRESSING ROOM stenciled in faded bilingual paint. Then down another corridor, narrower, where the walls were cinder block painted Voyageurs red and blue, and the floor changed from concrete to rubber matting that swallowed his footsteps.

He came around a final corner, and there was the tunnel mouth, wide enough for a Zamboni, opening onto the ice.

And there was Shane.

He shouldn’t have been surprised to see him or by the fact that he was already on the rink, skating slow laps along the far boards in full gear minus the pads—track pants, a long-sleeved compression shirt, gloves, his helmet hanging from his stick by the chin strap. He hadn’t seen Ilya yet. He was moving the way Ilya had only ever seen on television: long crossover strides that ate the ice in smooth diagonal arcs, each push rolling through his hips and extending fully before the blade lifted and reset, his shoulders loose, his weight centered so low it would be the envy of anyone who knew how hard it was to maintain.

The rink lights were on, but the arena lights were off, which meant the ice was bright, and the twenty-one thousand empty seats above it disappeared into darkness. Shane moved through that borrowed cathedral like every square foot of it were his, like the ice had been poured for him personally and the darkness above was just the ceiling of his living room. He was entirely comfortable. In his element.

It reminded him, bizarrely, of seeing an apex predator in the wild, entirely comfortable in its territory and the knowledge that it was the fastest, strongest thing for miles.

Ilya stood in the tunnel mouth with his hands in his coat pockets and watched, and what he felt was not admiration, though admiration was in it, and not envy, though envy was in it too. It was older than both. It was the ache of a body remembering a language it had been forbidden to speak, the same ache that hit him at fourteen when he’d heard Richter’s recording of Rachmaninoff on his mother’s radio and understood for the first time that beauty could be a wound—that you could hear a thing so complete it broke you open with the knowledge that you would never make it yourself.

Shane on the ice was that recording. Shane on the ice was the whole concerto, and Ilya was standing in the hallway listening through the wall.

And he wanted to be out there.

He wanted blades under his feet and cold air filling his lungs and the sound—that sound, the scraping hiss of an edge biting ice—traveling up through his ankles into his shins and settling in his teeth the way it had when he was twelve and fast and unbroken.

Shane completed his lap and turned at center ice and saw him.

And smiled.

Ba-thump-thump. And—the fuck? Since when did a smile, the same one he’d earned so many times before now in Wolfbird’s session rooms, in Shane’s own bedroom, in the loose minutes of aftercare when Shane’s guard was down and his body was still warm and his mouth would pull crooked and easy, harder on the left side, since when did it make his heart do that?

Ilya had always filed it as a private thing—a Shane-smile that only happened indoors, behind locked doors, inside the container they’d built for it. He had never seen it at a distance, moving towards him, across a hundred feet of open ice, aimed at him like a greeting.

“You made it,” Shane raised a gloved hand and waved, his breath fogging under the rink lights. He glided toward the tunnel, stopping at the boards in a spray of shaved ice that settled on Ilya’s coat. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come.”

“I actually almost didn’t,” Ilya admitted, sighing. “Alas. I am a man of my word, Hollander. Even when my word is stupid.”

“I appreciate your stupid word. And you will appreciate that I set up skates for you; they’re there on the bench.” Shane jerked his chin toward the players’ bench, where a pair of black skates sat side by side on the rubber mat, laces loose, a roll of sock tape beside them. “Size forty-six. You said your shoe size was twelve, right? I had to guess on the brand, but these should be close.”

Ilya looked at the skates. They were Bauers; mid-range, not the custom-molded monsters the pros used, but decent enough, with fresh blades that reflected all overhead lights like strobes.

Shane had bought skates for him? Shane Hollander had gone to a store and purchased a pair of skates in Ilya’s size and brought them here and set them on the bench with tape, and the fact of this—the planning, the forethought, the admission that he had been thinking about tonight in advance—rattled around in his skull.

“You… bought me skates?”

“Hm? No, did you want me to? Sorry, next time I can—ah, are you messing with me, Rozanov? No, I didn’t buy these. They’re loaners from excess equipment. Though… honestly, the guys won’t miss them much if you want to keep them. I won’t tell.”

“You stole me skates.”

“You’re welcome.”

“In Russia, this difference gets you sent to Siberia. But fine, fine, I will allow it this once.” Ilya picked up the right skate and turned it over in his hands, running his thumb along the blade’s edge the way his first coach had taught him—testing the hollow, checking for nicks and… ah. Was that muscle memory, then? How his thumb knew what to feel for before his brain remembered why.

It’d been years since he’d even thought about checking for nicks.

“These are good.”

“I would hope so.” Shane was leaning on the boards now, arms folded on the top rail, watching Ilya handle the skate with attention that bordered on hunger—the same focus he’d turned on the film during aftercare, on Ilya’s hands during sessions, total and undivided and aimed now at the sight of Ilya doing a thing that belonged to the world Shane loved most. “You can tell?”

“I am not completely useless.”

“Never said you were.”

Ilya sat on the bench and pulled off his boots. His socks were wrong—dress socks, thin, the kind he wore to work—and he pulled those off too and wrapped his feet in the tape the way he’d done as a teenager when his socks had worn through, but there was no money for new ones. The skates went on. He laced them up, starting from the toe and pulling each cross tight with the flat of his hand, and his fingers knew this too, the sequence automatic, threaded through ten thousand mornings in dressing rooms that smelled like this one.

Left foot. Right foot. Stand. Test the flex.

His knee protested—a low grinding at the inside of the joint, the same warning it had been sending for weeks—but Ilya ignored it the way he ignored everything that tried to stop him from doing things he’d already decided to do.

“Ready?” Shane asked.

“No,” Ilya said honestly. “But I don’t think that part changes if I wait.”

Can I still skate?

He stepped onto the ice, and the answer was yes and no at the same time.

Yes: his body remembered. The first push—right foot, inside edge, the blade gripping and releasing in that specific ratio of friction to glide that no other surface on earth replicated—sent a signal up through his ankle and up up up past thought, past thinking, and into the rare space of what was known.

His hips knew where to sit. His spine knew the angle. Eight years of muscle memory woke in sequence, joint by joint, rising through him the way sound rose through water, and for one full stride, he was seventeen and fast and the ice in that stupid Khovrino rink was rough under his blades and his knee was whole and his country was behind him and everything ahead was still possible.

No: the second stride ended it. His left knee caught—not locked, not yet, but a grinding hitch in the rotation that sent a flare of heat up through his inner thigh and made him grab the boards with both hands. His right leg compensated immediately, muscle memory rerouting the weight distribution the way it had been rerouting it for years, silently, the body solving problems the mind refused to name. He could stand. He could glide. He could push with his right and coast on his left and approximate forward motion in a way that, from a distance, probably looked like skating the way a man limping probably looked like walking—technically correct and fundamentally wrong.

Can I still skate?

He could move on ice. Whether that counted was a question he was not ready to answer in front of Shane Hollander, who was circling back toward him now with his stick across his thighs and his head tilted, watching Ilya the way Ilya watched clients during intake—reading the body, assessing the damage, calculating what was safe to ask for.

“Take your time,” Shane said, and the fact that he did not say are you okay or does it hurt or any of the other things people said when they wanted to help and didn’t know how—the fact that he said take your time, which gave Ilya the space without demanding he fill it with reassurance.

He pushed off the boards. One stride. Two.

His knee ground and he ignored it.

Three strides and he was moving, slow, listing slightly to the left where the weaker leg couldn’t match the push of the right, and the wind—there was wind, actual air moving across his face, cold and clean and tasting of nothing at all, which was the taste of speed even at this pathetic crawl—filled his lungs and his eyes stung and he did not know if that was the cold or the other thing, the thing he would not name here on Shane Hollander’s ice with Shane Hollander watching.

He made it to the far blue line before he had to stop, catching the boards and letting his weight hang on his arms while the knee pulsed its objection.

He was skating slow, lazy figure-eights with his stick across his thighs, close enough to see Ilya clearly and far enough away that Ilya could grip the boards and grimace and swear under his breath without an audience. It was the same instinct Ilya used during scenes—reading the distance a person needed and holding it—except Shane had never been trained to do this. He’d arrived at it on his own, the way he arrived at most acts of care: without announcement, without seeming to realize he was doing it at all in the first place.

Which was… as alarming as it was endearing.

And Ilya understood, standing at the blue line with his knuckles white on the boards and his breath ragged and his left leg threatening mutiny, that Shane had given him this on purpose.

The rink, the skates, the loading-dock coordinates—those were logistics. The gift was the question itself. The chance to step onto the ice and find out if his body still remembered. Shane had offered it the only way Ilya could have accepted: by being present without watching too closely, by standing at center ice and trusting Ilya to come back when he was ready.

Nobody did this for him.

Or… not nobody. Svetlana would have, though differently. It would not have been here at Bell Centre, and they would’ve had cheap rental skates and blisters by the end. She would have held his arm and fussed and insisted on coming onto the ice with him in her boots because she could not skate at all, gripping his jacket, swearing in Russian when he stumbled, laughing, and pulling him back up again, again, as many times as needed.

But she would have made it an event, a project, because that was how Sveta loved: loudly, with her whole body blocking the door.

Shane had opened the door and stood to the side and let Ilya walk through it alone. He was barely even looking at him now, pretending to be enthralled with some meaningless other thing to give him space to figure it out, to fail, and to be frustrated because Shane… Shane Hollander, of all people, would understand that Ilya needed to do this himself, or the answer didn’t count. It was a little thing, but a meaningful one.

It was a little thing that you noticed and you did for a person you were paying attention to, and when you cared enough, despite it being so small.

Ilya pushed off again.

This time, he made it past the blue line, past the hash marks, past the far faceoff circle, his strides evening out as his body negotiated a truce between memory and damage. He was slow. He was graceless. He listed to the left, and his edges were sloppy; a scout would have wept, and his father would have told him to push through, and his coaches at Trois-Rivières would have pulled him off the ice and into the training room.

But none of those people were here.

The only person here was Shane Hollander, who had started skating alongside him now, matching Ilya’s crippled pace with a restraint that must have cost him—Shane, who at full speed looked like gravity’s personal exception, throttling himself down to keep stride with a man who could barely round a corner.

“Your crossovers are shit,” Shane said.

“My crossovers were always shit. I was a center. I went straight.”

“Then you were a shit center; nobody goes straight in hockey.”

“In hockey? No. I would have destroyed you. It is a mercy that we never played against each other.” Ilya grinned, and it was the real one, the crooked one, not the Dom mask. Shane’s mouth pulled sideways in a way that suggested he was fighting a laugh and losing. “Besides, Mr. Hockey, I am not sure I am liking this arrogant streak. Show me yours, then. If you are such expert on crossovers.”

“You want me to show off?”

“I want to watch you work for me, yes,” Ilya said, and the callback landed between them—he’d said the same words during a session once, a different context, a different kind of watching—and Shane’s ears went pink above the collar of his compression shirt.

Shane hesitated half a beat, then dropped his shoulder and accelerated.

The difference was obscene.

Ilya had been a hockey player, so he knew what good skating looked like from the inside—the feeling of it, the centrifugal pull in the hips during a tight turn, the way the ice grabbed the blades on a hard stop and sent vibration through the whole leg—but knowing what it felt like did not prepare him for what Shane Hollander looked like at speed. Shane hit the corner, and his crossovers were textbook, each stride rolling through the ankle and across the foot and pushing off the outside edge with a transfer of weight so smooth it looked like the ice was moving under him instead of the other way around. His stick trailed behind him at arm’s length, forgotten. His center of gravity dropped into his hips, and his legs churned, and each push was full extension, hip open, blade biting until the last possible millimeter before the recovery. Ilya stood at the boards and watched the way he’d watched Shane on television except this was not television, there was no glass between them, and the sound of Shane’s blades reached him in full—that scraping hiss, the one he’d missed, the one that used to live in his own shins—and it was all for him, because he’d asked.

Shane carved a full lap at three-quarter speed and then opened up on the back stretch. Ilya watched twenty-six years of training and genetic luck and obsessive discipline compress into a human body moving at thirty-five kilometers per hour on a surface made of frozen water. The want that hit him was so tangled he could not separate the strands: the want to skate like that again, the want to have never stopped.

He wanted the want to be the ice under those blades; he wanted to press Shane Hollander against the boards and kiss him until neither of them could breathe. It was all the same want. It had always been the same want—to be inside the thing he loved. He had just been calling it by different names.

Shane looped back and stopped in a spray of ice at center, breathing hard, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright.

“Passable,” Ilya said. “I give you six out of ten. Maybe seven.”

“Seven?”

“You are sloppy on the left turns. Your shoulder dips.”

“My shoulder does not dip.”

“It dips, Hollander. I had coaches who would have made you skate lines for that. Turtle steps, back and forth.”

“You’re critiquing my skating. You—the man who was holding the boards ten seconds ago.”

“I am critiquing from a position of superior international experience. I have played hockey on two continents.”

“I’ve also played in two countries, Rozanov.”

“Tsk,” Ilya rolled his eyes, unimpressed, “North America is one continent. It does not count twice because you crossed a border. I crossed an ocean, Hollander. Show some respect.”

The rink lights buzzed overhead and twenty-one thousand empty seats held their breath in the dark and Ilya’s knee was a low fire and he was happier than he’d been in months—maybe longer, maybe since before the injury, maybe since before Canada—and the man responsible for it was standing six feet away with ice shavings in his hair and a flush climbing his neck.

“Yeah?”

“You know I hate this word.”

“Mm. Yes, I do. But you talk a big game, and now I’m curious.” Shane skated to the bench and came back with a stick. He held it out. “Here. Show me your six-out-of-ten shot. Your best shot.”

Ilya took the stick, palms prickling with sweat inside his gloves. He gripped the shaft harder to compensate, which was the wrong instinct—he knew it was the wrong instinct, his coaches had spent years beating the death-grip out of him—but his coaches were in Moscow and Trois-Rivières and his hands had not held a stick in years and they were nervous, the traitors, even as his mouth kept performing its usual function of saying the opposite of what his body felt.

“I am not going to show you my best shot, Hollander. My best shot has a name. It is called ‘The Rozanov,’ and it is a privilege, not a demonstration. You have hardly earned it.”

“Your shot has a name?”

“All great shots have names. Gretzky had The Office. Ovechkin has The Spot. I have The Rozanov, and you will see it when you have earned it and not before.” He pointed the blade of the stick at Shane’s chest. “Behave, and maybe I teach you later. Misbehave, and you will never know.”

Shane shook his head, laughing, trying to look serious while his whole face was fighting the grin and losing ground by the second. “You’re stalling.”

“I am building anticipation. You should recognize this. I have used this technique on you many times, and you have always been very grateful.”

Shane flushed from the collar up, and Ilya savored that before winking and dropping his eyes to the puck near the faceoff dot.

His hands found the grip. Left hand at the top, right hand two palm-widths down, the butt of the stick resting against the inside of his left forearm. The position his fingers had learned before puberty. They remembered it the way they remembered his mother’s hand: instantly, completely, with a fidelity that made the years between feel thin.

He dropped a shoulder and took three strides toward the net. His knee screamed on the plant, and his wrist snapped, and the shot went wide by a foot and a half and hit the glass behind the net with a flat crack that echoed through the empty arena.

“That was… um… I… not six out of ten,” Shane offered. “Was that The Rozanov?”

“Fuck you, Hollander. That was the warm-up. The warm-up does not count.”

“Well, your warm-up went over the glass.”

“In Russia, this is called a warning shot. Maybe I aim next one at your pretty face.”

“That would be threatening if I thought you could aim well enough to hit it.”

“Kakoy nakhalniy,” Ilya said, and the warmth in it undercut the words entirely. “You little shit. Where was this mouth during sessions, hm? All that ‘yes Rozanov, please Rozanov,’ and now on the ice, you grow teeth.” He shook his head, grinning. “You are so comfortable out here on your ice that you go feral. I like it. You will pay for this later, but I like it.”

Shane fished the puck out from behind the net and flipped it back to him. Ilya wound up again, and this time the knee held for half a second longer. The puck hit the post with a ring that traveled through the iron and into the crossbar and hung there, a sustained note, the sound of almost. Ilya stood at the faceoff dot and listened to it fade. His hands were shaking on the stick—not pain, not cold, the other thing, the one that lived in the marrow of this and could not be spoken in English.

I can still shoot. I can still skate. I am slow and broken, and it hurts, and the puck hit the post instead of the net, but I can still do this.

This is not finished.

I am not finished.

Shane retrieved the puck again, and this time, instead of flipping it back, he skated it over and stopped in front of Ilya and held it up between two gloved fingers, pinched at its edge, the way you’d hold a coin before a magic trick.

“One more,” Shane said.

Ilya took the puck from his fingers. The gloves made it clumsy, and their hands collided, knuckles against knuckles. but neither of them pulled back. Shane’s eyes were on his—brown and warm and stupid with hope—and Ilya thought, I like you.

And then: I should not like you, and you are looking at me the way you watch your movies, the way you look at the ice, the way a person looks at the place where they are most themselves, and I do not know what to do with that because nobody has ever looked at me and seen a place they wanted to be.

He dropped the puck, wound up, and put it top shelf—clean, sharp, the mesh snapping with a sound that filled the entire arena and came back to him in an echo that arrived from twenty-one thousand seats that nobody was sitting in, and it was still the loudest thing he’d ever heard.

Shane threw his arms up. An actual celly. Arms in the air, stick raised, like Ilya had just scored in overtime and not put a wrist shot past an empty net from twelve feet away at the speed of an elderly man crossing a street.

“That’s a fucking shot,” Shane said, and he was grinning, and Ilya was grinning too, and the grin hurt because it was pulling muscles in his face he hadn’t used in this configuration: the configuration of being delighted, of having done a thing and having it witnessed and celebrated by a person whose opinion had become, against all professional advice and personal survival instinct, one that mattered.

“Again,” Ilya said.

Shane fed him another puck. This one went wide, clanging off the pipe behind the net, and Ilya swore in Russian and Shane laughed and fished it out, and sent it back.

“You’re dropping your elbow.”

“I am not dropping my elbow.”

“You are. Here—” Shane skated behind him, and Ilya felt a gloved hand on his right elbow, lifting it two inches, repositioning the joint. Shane’s chest was close to his back, the heat of him detectable through the gap. “There. Lock it. Now shoot.”

Ilya shot. The puck went low and hard, caught the bottom corner of the net, and Shane said, “There it is,” with a satisfaction that belonged to a coach, or a linemate, or a person who had invested in the outcome and was watching the return come in.

“So… will you show me now? The Rozanov?” Shane asked.

“You think just because you help me with one shot that I will—” He paused. Looked at the net, then at Shane and his stupid hopeful face, then back at the net. “Okay. Fine. You have been good tonight. I will show you.”

Shane’s eyebrows went up.

“Do not look so excited, is embarrassing. Feed me a puck and stand where you can see my hands.”

Shane sent one sliding to the faceoff dot and circled around to Ilya’s left, dropping low on his edges so he was watching from the angle a goalie would see.

“The principle is deception. Lying.” Ilya said, pulling the puck in close to his body. “You come in on the forehand. The goalie reads forehand. Then—” He shifted his grip, rotating his bottom hand, and moved the blade behind the puck as if setting up a backhand shot. “You switch. Backhand position, but Hollander, you need full commitment, your whole body sells it. And then the goalie moves...” He held the pose, the puck sitting on his backhand, his weight loaded on his right leg because his left could not take the plant. “And then—fast, Hollander, this part must be fast—you do not shoot the backhand. You leave the puck right where the fuck it is and come back to the forehand and go high. Over the shoulder. The goalie is already down and moving the wrong direction. He cannot recover in time.”

He tried it. The motion was there—the fake, the transfer, the snap back—but his knee buckled on the weight shift, and the shot floated wide and soft and hit the boards waist-high with a dull thud.

“Blyat!” He leaned on his stick. “Ah. You get the idea. It needs speed. It needs a run-up and a knee that bends and about six months of practice to get the timing back. When I was nineteen, I could do this at full sprint and put it top corner, and the goalie would not move because the fake was already past him.”

“If… if your knee is okay for it, could you do it again? Please?” Shane asked. He had the look on his face that Ilya had seen during sessions when Ilya was explaining a knot or a technique—that absorptive focus, the one that meant Shane was filing every detail into the architecture of his memory where it would live and be retrieved at a moment he chose.

His knee was not okay.

Ilya did it again. Slower this time, walking through each phase, letting Shane see the hand positions and the weight transfer and the moment where the fake committed and the real shot began. The puck went higher—not top corner, not clean, but directionally correct, and Shane nodded and skated in and collected the puck and brought it back.

“The timing between the fake and the release,” Shane said. “How long?”

“No time. That is the point. The fake and the shot are—” He searched for the English. “They are the same breath. You breathe in on the backhand, you breathe out on the forehand, and the goalie only sees the inhale. By the time he realizes you have exhaled, the puck is already past him.”

Shane was looking at the net with the same focus he’d given Ilya’s hands. The look of a man memorizing a room he planned to return to.

“Is named after me,” Ilya added, “so do not go stealing it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I am very serious. If I see this on television, I will sue.”

“You’d have to get a lawyer first.”

“I have one, and the jury will be moved by my accent and my tragic backstory. They will weep, I will steal all of your money and your nice penthouse.”

“Ah, so I’ll be homeless, then?”

“No. You can sleep over. Sometimes. I let you visit your movie collection on weekends.”

They kept shooting. Ilya’s knee loosened enough to let him plant with half his weight, which was enough for wrist shots and the occasional slap shot that had more sound than accuracy. Shane kept feeding him pucks and kept correcting his form—elbow, hip angle, weight transfer—and each correction brought him into Ilya’s space for three or four seconds before he drifted back. Ilya catalogued every instance, the cumulative minutes of Shane Hollander’s proximity offered freely, and the number kept climbing, and neither of them acknowledged it.

His last shot rang off the crossbar and dropped straight down onto the goal line, half in, half out.

“That counts!” Ilya barked out.

“That does not count!”

“In Russia—”

“If you say ‘in Russia’ one more time, I’m taking the stick back.”

“In Russia… I would say it is time for this anyway,” Ilya handed it to him, because his knee had made the decision for both of them about fifteen minutes ago, and since then, the joint was all but screaming at him. He’d be in agony for it tomorrow.

Tomorrow, tomorrow.

It was nice, for once, that it was never today.

“Can we sit? I need a minute.”

They ended up on the bench.

Ilya sat, and Shane dropped onto the bench beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched through the layers—Ilya’s coat, Shane’s compression shirt—and neither of them moved to correct the distance. Around them, the rink buzzed with compressors cycling, the lights buzzing their single sustained note, and the ice stretched out in front of them scraped and scored with the evidence of the last hour: Shane’s crossover arcs carved deep and clean, Ilya’s wobbling tracks cutting shallower grooves alongside them, two different handwritings in the same surface.

Ilya’s breath was still coming hard. His thighs burned from compensating for the knee, and his lower back had tightened into a knot. The cold air sat in his lungs the way it used to—that particular fullness, ice-rink air that was thinner and drier than street air, air that tasted the way a tuning fork sounded, a single clean frequency with nothing extra in it.

He did not want to leave.

He wanted to sit on this bench with his bad knee and his taped feet and his ruined shot and the ache in his back and the man beside him whose shoulder was warm against his, and he wanted to stay here in this arena that was too big for two people and exactly the right size for what was happening between them.

Whatever it was.

Shane pulled off his gloves and laid them on the bench. His hands were red from the cold, the knuckles dry and cracked the way hockey players’ hands always were—the constant cycle of sweat and cold and tape and glove leather that turned skin to something closer to canvas. He flexed his fingers, and Ilya watched him do it because Ilya watched Shane’s hands the way astronomers watched the sky: compulsively, with the understanding that the interesting things happened when you weren’t expecting them.

“You’re better than you think,” Shane said. He wasn’t looking at Ilya. He was looking at the ice, at the tracks they’d left. “Your left outside is weak, but that’s the knee, not technique. I can see you were not a shit center at all, huh? I hate that I didn’t get to play against you.”

“You are being kind.”

“I’m not being kind, I’m annoyed. Really, I hate that we didn’t get to play, because I can see that you were good. That footwork doesn’t disappear. It’s in there.”

“In there, underneath many years of not skating and too many cigarettes and one extremely uncooperative joint, yes. Buried. Like archaeological dig. You would need a shovel.”

Shane turned his head. This close, on the bench, the angle put his face eighteen inches from Ilya’s—closer than they’d been during any session except the sessions themselves, and in those the proximity had a framework, a set of understood rules about who was allowed to lean in and why.

Here, there were no rules.

They were two men on a bench in an empty rink, and the only framework was the one they were building in real time, plank by plank, each minute they stayed here instead of leaving.

Shane’s freckles. Vesnushki. Ilya could see each one distinctly at this distance, scattered across the bridge of his nose and fanning out across his cheekbones, denser on the left side than on the right. He knew he had catalogued this before but he catalogued it again because the lighting was different here—rink light was bluer than the amber of Wolfbird and whiter than the dim bedroom lamp in Shane’s penthouse—and in this light the freckles were darker, and the contrast against his skin was sharper. Ilya thought about constellations, about how the same stars looked different depending on where you stood on the earth, and how he had seen Shane’s face in so many kinds of light now, and it kept changing, and it kept being the same face, and he kept wanting to look at it.

His want for Shane could fill the arena. It could fit inside a freckle.

And he was not going to survive this.

He knew it the way you knew weather was coming, from the pressure dropping behind his ribs, the atmosphere thinning, the whole climate of him shifting toward a season he had not dressed for and could not afford to enter. Ilya Rozanov, who had held men and women in the palm of his hand and walked away clean every time, who had made a career of knowing where the line was and standing exactly on it—he was not going to walk away clean from Shane Hollander. The freckles alone would ruin him. The freckles and the way Shane said, “Take your time,” which was the same thing as saying I see you and I won’t look away and you are allowed to be bad at this, and when had anyone last given Ilya permission to be bad at anything?

“Can I ask you a question?” Ilya said.

“You’ve been asking me questions all night.”

“Those were about hockey. This is not about hockey.”

Shane’s throat moved. A swallow. Ilya tracked it the way he tracked every involuntary response—the Dom habit, the reader of bodies—but the tracking felt different tonight because tonight he was not Rozanov conducting intake. He was Ilya sitting on a bench, wanting to know the answer to a question he had been carrying since the elevator.

“Okay,” Shane said.

Ilya looked at the ice. The tracks. His and Shane’s, overlapping in places where they’d skated side by side, separating where Shane had pulled ahead. He thought about what Sveta had said on the bench by the pond with the coiled strip of cardboard in her cup: “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were here too? Doing something boring together?”

They had done something boring together.

They had skated, badly and well, and laughed about it, and the whole evening had been the most boring and the most extraordinary hour of Ilya’s recent life, and now they were sitting on a bench, and Ilya was about to ruin it because he could not stop himself from reaching for things he could not afford.

“This tonight,” Ilya said. “This was not a session.”

It was not a question. He said it flat, the way he said things in Russian when he needed them to be true—declarative, grounded, no uptick at the end to give the other person room to disagree.

Shane’s hand, resting on his thigh, went still.

“I know we call it that,” Ilya continued. “I know that is what we have been doing, but this—ah—skating like this, it was—” He stopped. English failed him here, the way it always failed him when the thing he needed to say was too large for his second language. In Russian, he had the word.

Настоящее—nastoyashcheye—which meant real but also present, the thing happening now, the opposite of performance or rehearsal.

“It was… real,” he said, and the English word was smaller than the Russian one, but it was close enough. “And good.”

Shane had not moved. His hand on his thigh, his shoulder against Ilya’s, his face eighteen inches away with its freckles and its flush and its brown eyes that were looking at Ilya now the way they’d looked at the In the Mood for Love staircase scene, when he learned that Ilya used to play, with the focus that bordered on obsessive, the focus that made the person standing inside it feel like the only fixed point in the room.

“Yeah,” Shane said. His voice had dropped into a softer, caught-off-guard register. “Yeah, it was.”

Ilya’s hand was on the bench between them. His fingers were six inches from Shane’s, on the same rubber mat. The gap between them was the gap between professional and personal, between Rozanov and Ilya, between I am your Dom and this is what you pay for and I am a man sitting next to you and I would like to touch your hand because I want to, not because you are paying me to want to.

He moved his hand. Two inches. His littlest finger crossed the remaining distance and rested against the side of Shane’s hand, the lightest possible contact; a graze, a question asked with skin.

Shane did not pull away.

But Ilya did feel Shane move.

Just a fraction—a tilt, the pad of his ring finger pressing back against Ilya’s, the two of them conducting an entire negotiation through the square centimeter where their hands met.

It was nothing.

It was two fingers touching on a bench. It was the smallest possible gesture, and it was the largest thing that had happened between them because every other touch had been inside the arrangement, inside the scene, inside the structure that made touching safe by making it professional, and this was outside.

This was just his hand moving because he wanted it to move, and Shane’s hand staying because he wanted it to stay.

This was Ilya reaching and Shane maybe reaching back, and the reaching was the point, the reaching was the whole fucking movie Shane had described on his couch. They just go to buy noodles, they go skating, they sit on a bench, that’s all they’re doing, and the camera films it like it’s the most important thing two people have ever done.

Because it is. It was.

I can still skate.

Can I kiss him?

And here he was, reaching, millimeter by millimeter, waiting for the projectionist to cut the reel.

Ilya turned his head. Shane was already looking at him. They were close—closer than eighteen inches now, because one of them had leaned or both of them had, the distance closing the way distance closed in dreams, without clear physics—and Ilya could see the ring of darker brown around Shane’s irises and the place where his bottom lip was chapped from the cold and the faint scar on his chin from a stick he’d caught in a game two seasons ago, a detail Ilya had found on YouTube at three in the morning and never admitted to anyone.

“Hollander, I…” Ilya said, and then stopped, because Hollander was the wrong name.

Hollander was the client. Hollander was the arrangement. And Ilya opened his mouth to say Shane, to say his first name outside of a scene for the first time, to cross the last line that still existed between them, because if he could say it here—on the ice, in the cold, with no session and no money and no framework—then the word would mean what he needed it to mean, which was: I see you. You. And I would like you to see me, too. The man underneath, who is less impressive and more afraid, who has more problems than sense, and a bad apartment and a borrowed life in a country that doesn’t want him, and who is sitting on this bench next to you because there is nowhere else in this city he would rather be.

“I have been thinking, and, since this is not a session, you should call me Il—”

The door at the far end of the arena banged open.

The sound traveled through the arena the way all sounds traveled through empty arenas, amplified and enormous. A metal door hitting a metal frame, the bang ricocheting off the glass and the concrete and the twenty-one thousand empty seats, and then footsteps, and then a man’s voice calling out in French—

“Allo? Y’a quelqu’un?”

A door banged somewhere in the corridor above them, and Shane’s hand was off the bench, vanished, before the echo reached the ice.

Vanished as if the hand had never been there at all in the first place, as if the fingers Ilya had felt pressing back against his own were a hallucination, as if the entire last ninety seconds had been a scene in a film that the projectionist had cut before the reel finished. Shane was on his feet and three feet away before Ilya’s brain registered the distance, and the speed of it—the pure trained reflex of that withdrawal—told Ilya more than any confession could have.

A man appeared at the far end of the rink—middle-aged, in a Voyageurs staff jacket, carrying a clipboard. Facilities, probably, or arena operations doing a late check. He squinted across the ice at the two figures by the bench.

“Ah—Hollander? C’est toi? J’savais pas que t’avais réservé ce soir.”

“Ouais, ouais—” Shane’s French was good, Ilya knew that, but it was a different good now, and entirely flat compared to breathy, bratty quips. Regardless, the words were lost to him, and so was the moment. Shane called back across the ice in a rapid Québécois that Ilya could only half-follow, catching pratique, catching ami, catching the word entraînement—training—and the word ami again, friend, the second time louder than the first.

The man in the staff jacket nodded, made a note on his clipboard, waved. “Pas d’problème. J’fais juste ma ronde. Bonne soirée!”

He disappeared back through the door.

The bang echoed again, and then the arena was empty, and they were alone, and the three feet between them on the rubber matting of the players’ bench was the widest distance Ilya had ever stood inside.

And… Shane didn’t sit back down.

He was standing with his weight on one leg, his gloves in one hand, his stick in the other, and his shoulders had climbed to a position Ilya recognized from their earliest sessions: high, locked, the trapezius muscles pulling everything upward and inward, the body’s attempt to become smaller, to take up less space, to present less surface area to the world. The flush that had been climbing his neck during their conversation was gone, and his skin had gone the other direction—pale under the freckles, the blood retreating inward, and his eyes were moving fast, scanning the tunnel mouth, the far doors, the dark upper bowl, cataloguing exits and sight lines the way a man catalogued them when he lived his life expecting to be caught.

Blyat.

Ilya stayed on the bench. He did not reach. He did not close the distance. He had spent enough years reading bodies to know that the worst thing you could do to a person in the grip of a panic response was pursue them, and Shane was in the grip of one now—Ilya could see it in the way his breathing had gone shallow, in how tight his chest was, and the way his posture had reset to game-day straight.

Shane’s face was the media-trained mask, the one Ilya had watched him wear in post-game interviews and sponsor events, the one that said I’m fine, everything is fine, nothing to see here, and it was the most frightening thing Ilya had seen on that face because it meant the real Shane—the one who had been sitting beside him thirty seconds ago with his finger pressed against Ilya’s, saying yeah, it was real—had gone somewhere Ilya could not follow.

“I should—” Shane started, and stopped, and started again. “That was good. Tonight. The skating. Thanks for, uh. Thanks for coming out.”

Thanks for coming out. The words landed, and Ilya heard them for what they were: a door being closed. Not slammed—Shane was too controlled for slamming—but pulled shut with the firm, definitive click of a latch engaging. Thanks for coming out was what you said to a trainer after a physio session, to a teammate after a practice skate, to a service provider who had performed a service and was now being dismissed.

“It was a really good session,” Shane added, and the word session went through Ilya’s ribs like a blade.

It was not a session.

Ilya had been sitting on that bench with his hand open and his name—his first name, his real name, the one his mother had given him—half out of his mouth, and Shane had just put the entire evening back in its box and taped it shut and written SESSION on the label in the neat handwriting of a man who organized his entire life into categories that kept the dangerous things separate from the safe things, and Ilya was being filed under safe now, which meant professional, which meant paid, which meant not real.

“Hollander,” he said, and Ilya heard his own voice, and it was even and steady and belonged to Rozanov, because Ilya—the one who had been here a moment ago, the one on the bench with his finger against Shane’s—had retreated to go lick his wounds behind a mask with the same speed Shane had retreated behind his.

Two men, both trained to disappear when the lights came on.

“Right. And—so—it’s late, I know. We should go. I should go.” Shane was moving now, skating toward the bench to grab his helmet, his water bottle, gathering his things with the efficient haste of a man clearing a scene. “I’ve got a road trip coming up for the next away games. Columbus, then Chicago, then Winnipeg. I’ll be gone about ten days. I’ll, uh. I’ll text you when I’m back, and we can figure out the next one.”

The next one. Meaning the next session.

Meaning the next transaction. Meaning: I will come back to you when I need the service, and in the meantime, please remain in the compartment I have built for you, which is labeled ‘Rozanov’ and is located in the part of my life that no one sees, and do not try to climb out of it again because I cannot have you where people can see.

Shane might not have meant any of that.

Ilya knew this.

He knew, in the rational part of his brain that still functioned beneath the hurt, that Shane had panicked—that the staff member and the clipboard and the echoing door had triggered a reflex that had nothing to do with Ilya personally and everything to do with twenty-six years of hiding.

He knew that the flinch was not a verdict on Ilya’s worth but a measure of Shane’s fear, and that those were different things, and that a more generous reading of this moment would give Shane the benefit of the doubt and wait and try again later when the danger had passed.

But Ilya was not feeling generous.

Ilya was sitting on a bench in borrowed skates with the ghost of Shane’s finger still warm against his and his own name still caught in his throat like a bone. What he felt was not generous while he was trapped, falling deeper, into the gap.

The gap between what Ilya was realizing he wanted to have and maybe be to someone like Shane and what Shane would allow him to be. And it had a name, and the name was the arrangement, and the arrangement was still running, and Ilya was still inside it, and Shane had just reminded him of that with a word:

Session.

“Sure,” Ilya said. “Text me. I am free most days.”

The lie came out smooth. He was free every day. He was free, and he was broke, and he was sitting in a cathedral that belonged to Shane Hollander, and he had no duffel bag and no framework and no mask thick enough to cover what was happening underneath it.

Shane had his gear gathered. He stood at the mouth of the tunnel, half-turned, his profile lit by the rink lights and the rest of him in shadow, and for one second—one—his composure cracked. Ilya saw it in the mouth. The bottom lip pulled between his teeth, bitten down, and the eyes—

God, his eyes. They were wide and panicky and shining, very stubbornly not looking at Ilya at all.

“Goodnight, Rozanov,” Shane said.

“Goodnight, Hollander.”

Shane turned and walked into the tunnel, and Ilya listened to his footsteps on the rubber matting—quick, receding, the sound of a man leaving a room he’d been happy in—and then a door opened and closed, and the footsteps were gone, and the arena was empty, and Ilya was alone on a bench in twenty-one thousand seats of darkness. And—

His phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He pulled it out.

Payment received: $500.00

And also a twenty percent tip. So timely and considerate of him.

So awful of him, really.

This was not a session. Or… it hadn’t been for Ilya. But maybe it had been for Shane, who tipped his Dom the way he might tip a waiter at a restaurant: generously, automatically, the money moving through the app with the same frictionless ease as every other transaction in his life.

It was just money to him. It didn’t matter.

He took the Métro home and climbed the stairs to his floor, to his unit, and locked the door behind him, peeling off his jacket and letting it fall to the floor. He kicked his boots off to land wherever the fuck they did, lost under the couch or wherever else. A hateful, awful part of him wanted to send the money right back, and a worse part of him knew that doing this would make this a problem. That would make Hollander panic even more, or, fuck, he might send back a $1000 in this expensive feedback loop.

So he didn’t send it back.

He opened his banking app, paid the hydro, bought an OPUS pass, paid the Vidéotron, and watched the numbers subtract themselves from the numbers Shane had added, and put the phone face down on the counter.

Then he brushed his teeth, got into his cold bed, and lay there, the whole city going on outside as if nothing had happened, because for the city, nothing had.

Ilya texted Svetlana the next morning.

Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

The full name. She would register that. Between them, the full name was a fence, a way of saying this far and no further, and Svetlana was a woman who respected fences even when she could see over them.

A pause. Longer than her usual typing speed, which meant she was choosing her words, which meant she already understood what he wasn’t saying, how poorly things had gone, and was deciding how much of that understanding to show him.

And then, fifteen seconds later:

He locked the phone and set it face down on the arm of the couch.

He did not want to talk. He wanted to work.

But more importantly, he did not want to think.

He worked.

Thursday he took overflow clients from another Dom: a regular, a woman in her fifties who wanted to be told she was beautiful while Ilya wrapped her wrists in silk cord and made her kneel, and she cried, and Ilya held her through it and said the right things and meant them because he always meant them, even when the rest of him was somewhere else, and she tipped well and left looking lighter.

A second client that evening: a man who wanted impact play—paddle, hand, structured escalation—and Ilya delivered it with the calibrated focus of a man who had been doing this long enough that his hands could work while his mind floated above the room and observed from a distance.

Friday, he took three sessions. The first was a phone call—a client in Toronto who needed to be talked through a panic attack using Dom commands, which Ilya did from his kitchen while eating cold rice from the pot with a fork, his feet up on the table, his voice pitched low and authoritative while his free hand scrolled his banking app and watched the numbers climb. The second was at Wolfbird, a new intake Svetlana had screened—a young man, nervous, first time, who wanted to be flogged and then fucked and couldn’t say either word without blushing.

The third was Reneé back in Westmount. Reneé with her perfect body and $1000 platinum blonde hair and a need for pain, to receive it, to make it, to break beneath it, and her pretty stacks of cash tips at the end in lieu of aftercare.

Ilya smiled at her and thanked her and took the Métro home and felt nothing.

Saturday, he took a new client and would probably never see them again.

Six sessions in three days. His account climbed. The math rebuilt itself dollar by dollar, session by session, the numbers stacking in their column like sandbags against a rising water line. There were bills, and he paid them. There were clients, and he took them. He worked the way his father had worked—not because the work was good but because the work was there, because a man who was working did not have to be a man who was feeling. The factory floor and the Dom’s chair served the same function: they gave your body a task so your mind could stop eating itself.

Shane had texted once, between sessions.

Three texts in under a minute. Ilya could see the shape of them, the way they’d been composed: the first one brisk and businesslike, the second one reaching for specificity to prove this was a real booking with real intent and not a man who’d spent multiple days on the road looking for an excuse to make contact, and the third one—no pressure obviously—undoing all of it, the tell, the giveaway, because Shane Hollander did not say no pressure when he was booking a haircut or a table at a restaurant. He said no pressure when the thing he was asking for mattered enough that a refusal would wound him, and he needed the exit built into the invitation in case he had to pretend it didn’t.

The man who had filed him under session and left the arena without looking back was now asking for another session, as if the word hadn’t been the thing that gutted Ilya on the bench, as if they could pick up the arrangement where they’d left off and skip over the part where there’d almost been a way over the gap.

And the worst part—the part Ilya could not forgive himself for—was that the texts made his stomach flip. Because of the no pressure obviously, which was Shane’s version of standing in a doorway with his weight on one foot, ready to bolt, and Ilya recognized that posture even through a screen and wanted to grab him by the wrist and pull him back inside.

Only an idiot would crawl back to this.

He was an idiot.

And… he needed the money.

That was true and sufficient, and he did not have to look underneath it since it had always been there before Shane and would be there after Shane.

Ilya locked the phone and set it face down on the arm of the couch.

This, too, was work.

He scheduled the session, maintained the arrangement, and kept the line intact.

Rozanov could do this in his sleep. Rozanov had been doing this for years—the easy banter, the flirtation that was also a fence, the jokes that kept the client warm and close and never close enough to see the mess behind the curtain. His thumbs knew this language the way his legs once knew crossovers: automatically, the muscle memory of a man who had practiced distance until it felt like intimacy.

The problem was that Ilya had also done the other thing, the weak thing, the thing Sveta would see through in a heartbeat: he had not said no. He had not cancelled or even tried to explain that no, he did not want another session, and it was getting harder and harder to go back to kneeling inside an arrangement that no longer fit the shape of what he wanted. He had reached back because Shane had reached first, and reaching back was the part he could not stop doing, even when he knew it was going to cost him, even when the math of it—the emotional math, the one that didn’t stack in columns—did not add up and was not going to, but if he said no then it would be over, and then there was no excuse for Shane to return and he would be gone.

I do not want to lose the person.

It was weak.

He knew it was weak. Sveta would tell him it was weak, and she would be right, and he would do it anyway. The alternative was silence from Shane Hollander’s number, and that loneliness already sat in his apartment like a second tenant, taking up the couch, drinking his sparkling water, refusing to leave.

Wednesday. Usual time.

Rozanov would show up because he was invited. Ilya would stay home, because he was a stranger.

And Ilya couldn’t even be angry anymore, or even hurt, that Shane had run off in the moment at the rink, because Ilya would have done the same thing, had done the same thing, was doing it right now—choosing the work, choosing the structure, choosing the known architecture of Rozanov over the terrifying open floor plan of Ilya. Ilya, without the work, was just a man with no answer to the question of what he was for.

The passing days were not interesting, but Ilya did not need them to be interesting; he needed them to be profitable, and they were. He let the work fill them the way water fills a jar, taking the shape of whatever container you give it and leaving no room for air.

He took more clients, earned money, sent money across an ocean to be spent on medicine and cocaine or whatever else his brother spent it on—on bills, on Marchand’s invoice, on groceries, on a new set of sheets for the bed—and the days were a comfortable, dissociative blur. Today was no different. And considering the elevator was still broken and that mythical, impossible tomorrow, tomorrow and next week, next week still hadn’t arrived, Ilya used the stairs in his apartment building. There were three flights between his apartment and the street, and he took them the way he took most inconveniences: quickly, without thinking about them, because it helped to pass them faster.

He was running late for his shift. His phone said 7:14 p.m. His shift started at 8:00 p.m., and the Métro was a twelve-minute walk. He locked the apartment and started down, walking into the old concrete stairwell, met by the liminal space of any shitty building’s unkempt corridors, where it was likely that the ventilation hadn’t been serviced since the nineties.

Ilya took the stairs two at a time, the way he always did, left hand trailing the railing out of habit.

Between the third and second floors, he pivoted on the landing. His left foot planted first. His weight shifted forward, already committed to the next step, and his knee—the one that had ended hockey, the one that had been grinding and catching for weeks now, the one he’d been icing with bags of frozen peas and swallowing ibuprofen for and ignoring with the same disciplined, idiotic denial he’d learned from his father, who had once finished a twelve-hour factory shift on a broken toe because real men do not stop—did not follow through the turn.

The joint seized. Locked at a half-bend that refused to go further in either direction, and the pain arrived all at once, a white burst that shot up through the inside of his thigh and turned the stairwell fluorescents into a smear of light. His hand clamped the railing so hard the tendons in his wrist stood out. His other palm slapped the wall, fingers splaying against cold plaster, and his duffel bag swung forward on its strap and hit the railing with a dull clang that echoed up and down the empty shaft.

“Blyat—”

The word ripped out of him before he could swallow it, bouncing off the concrete, and for a stretched, terrible second, he was nineteen again, sprawled on the ice in Trois-Rivières with his knee bent the wrong way and his coach screaming at the referee and the crowd noise thinning to a hiss as the trainers ran out. That had been the end of the first life.

He’d known it then, too—had felt it in the sickening looseness of the joint, the way the ligament let go and took the future with it. He’d known it, and he had screamed, and then he’d stopped screaming because his father had taught him that much at least, that you swallowed the sound and let it rot inside you where nobody had to look at it.

You swallow the agony and let it rot deep inside your own ribs, where nobody else has to look at the decay. A structural failure in the dark. A loss of pressure incident. Ilya gripped the iron railing, burying the pain in the marrow of his bones, and let the ocean crush him.

His quadricep fired, and his brain sent the signal to straighten, to push through, but the knee did not comply. It didn’t matter why or what had torn or how badly—only that the joint had locked and he was caught between the railing and the wall on a concrete landing that smelled like old grease and someone else’s cigarettes, and the only direction available to him was down, onto the step, which is where he went.

He sat and gripped the railing with both hands, breathing hard through his nose, and when he tried bending the knee slightly, coaxing the torn flap free the way he’d work a jammed hinge, the grinding sensation that answered, wet, interior, bone on bone with a piece of gristle caught in between, sent his stomach lurching up toward his throat, and he stopped trying.

Through the wall, his downstairs neighbor’s television was going. Some French game show with applause and a jingle. Ancient plumbing clanked somewhere above him. The world was doing what the world always did, which was continuing without him, and Ilya sat on the stairs in his work clothes with his duffel full of restraints and massage oil and blindfolds and the good leather cuffs he’d spent two hundred dollars on, and he counted. Raz. Dva. Tri. Counting was good because it required focus, and focus was a leash he could put on the part of his brain that was already running away in panic, thinking about all the shifts he’d miss, the income lost, the money for Russia, the lawyer’s payment due in nine, rent—

Chetyre. Pyat’. Shest’.

Four. Five. Six.

His mother’s cross pressed against his sternum, warm from his skin. He closed his hand around it through his shirt and held on.

Some hundred and more counts later, the joint released. A sick, wet pop, and his leg swung free, and pain redoubled, deep and hot and spreading fast, and he was sure the swelling had already started. He was going to lose the whole night.

He was going to lose more than a night, and he knew it.

Ilya sat back against the wall, his leg stretched out on the step in front of him at an angle that looked perfectly fine and felt absolutely fucked. The game show audience laughed on the other side of the wall, and that was—it was—

“What the fuck is my life?” Ilya moaned into his hands, rubbing at his eyes. Breaking down before work to a prerecorded laugh track? In an adjacent hall, a door opened and closed and footsteps crossed a floor above him and kept going, nobody coming down, nobody coming to check, because nobody in this building knew his name—he had made sure of that—and now here it was, the privacy he’d paid for, sitting right next to him on the step like a loyal dog.

He wanted a cigarette.

He wanted to call his mother. The reflex arrived the way it always arrived, as a reaching—his hand toward the phone, his chest toward a voice that had been gone for years. It didn’t matter that he knew. His body reached for her the way a plant turned toward light because that is what plants did, what they needed, with the full stupid faith of a living thing that had evolved to need warmth.

Mama.

He could hear her: Ilyusha, get up.

The same two words she’d said when he fell on the ice as a child, while his father said nothing, when he cried over a schoolyard fight, when he was sick and didn’t want to eat.

Ilyusha, get up.

She’d said it firm and warm, and it had always worked—her voice the hand under his arm. He wanted it now so badly that his teeth ached, threatening to crack, from clenching against the sound he would not make, and she was in the ground, she was in the ground, she had been in the ground since he was twelve, and he knew no voice was coming through that much earth.

And it didn’t matter what he knew, he still felt, and all he could think was Mama would know what to do.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, harder now, until he saw sparks.

Ilyusha, get up.

He was fucked. He was fucked.

“Ladno,” he said to the empty stairwell, his own voice strange and rough in the echo. “Okay. Okay.”

He pulled out his phone. 7:22 now. Thirty-eight minutes until his shift, and he could not stand, and the stairs went down from here, not up, and even if he crawled back to his apartment, there was only a paltry bag of peas to use as ice.

He called Svetlana instead of texting, which, between the two of them, meant the same thing as pulling a fire alarm.

She picked up on the second ring.

“What happened?” No greeting. She already knew. Ilya didn’t call.

“My knee,” he said, and he could hear the shake in his own voice, which infuriated him because he was not a man who shook. He was the man who held other people while they shook, that was his entire function. “I’m on the stairs. Between third and second. It locked, and I—I can’t put weight on it, Sveta, I tried, and it’s—it is bad. It’s bad.”

A beat. He heard her set a glass down—she was already at Wolfbird, already behind the bar, already working.

“I’m coming. Don’t move.”

“Where am I going to go? I am sitting in a stairwell like a pensioner who has fallen, and I cannot get up. This is the commercial. I am the commercial now.”

“Shut up. Don’t move. I mean it, don’t try the stairs alone, you idiot. I know you, and you will try.”

“I am not an idiot.”

“You have been ignoring that knee for two months, so actually, yes, you are. Sit there. I’m telling Aimée I’m leaving, and I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Do you need anything?”

“A new body. And a cigarette. And an elevator that works.”

“I’ll bring ibuprofen. Sit.”

“I am already sitting, Svetlana, I have explained this—”

“Then keep sitting.”

She hung up. Ilya let the phone drop onto his chest and stared up at the stairwell ceiling, watching a long strip of peeling paint curl away from the plaster, stripping the corridor down to its ugly, decaying bone. His knee was a hot, swollen knot under his slacks. He could feel his own pulse in it, thick and angry, and above him, the fluorescent light buzzed and flickered in the particular way of fluorescent lights in buildings where no one cared enough to replace them.

He texted Shane while he waited.

He stared at the words. They were a lie, and Ilya valued truth, but the truth was I am sitting in a stairwell because my body is failing me for the second time in my life, and I am scared, but that was not a text you sent to a client. That was not a text you sent to anyone, if you were Ilya, because the people who got to see you scared were either dead or on their way with ibuprofen, and there was no third category. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Ilya locked the phone. He did not need anything from Shane Hollander. He needed his knee to work. He needed to not be sitting in a stairwell that smelled like old grease with his supplies scattered across the landing and his livelihood seizing up inside his own body. He needed a time machine, or a new skeleton, or for his father to have put him in better skates when he was six so his form would have been right from the start, and the ligament wouldn’t have torn, and he’d be in the NHL right now instead of selling orgasms out of bar backrooms in a city that couldn’t even be bothered to fix his elevator.

He needed a lot of things, and none of them were available by text.

Svetlana found him fourteen minutes later, slightly out of breath from the walk and the three flights of stairs she’d taken at a jog. She assessed the situation with a single look—Ilya on the step, leg extended, duffel bag tipped sideways, his face doing the thing he knew it was doing where he looked completely composed while his hands gave him away, gripping the railing white-knuckled.

“Up,” she said, and crouched beside him, threading his arm over her shoulders. “Lean on me. And if you say you’re fine, I’m going to leave you here.”

“I was not going to say I’m fine.”

“Good. Because you look like shit.”

They stood. It was an operation because she was 5’4” and he was 6’3”, and his left leg couldn’t bear weight. The geometry was absurd. His arm draped over her shoulders, her hip braced against his, and she staggered slightly under the first real shift of his bulk before planting her feet and refusing to buckle.

“This is ridiculous,” she said as they negotiated the first step down. “You weigh as much as a refrigerator. Call your hockey player next time.”

“No.”

“He’s an athlete. He could carry you like a bride. It would be romantic.”

“Svetlana, I will throw myself down these stairs.”

“You would land on me, and then I would kill you, and then who would stand pretty next to the bar when I make cocktails? I would be lonely without you.”

She got him down the last flight, one step at a time, Ilya’s hand white on the railing, his teeth clenched, and his knee screamed with every jarring descent. On the ground floor, she propped him against the wall by the mailboxes and went outside to hail a cab. Ilya stood there in the sour light of the lobby and looked at the OUT OF ORDER sign on the elevator door and thought about how many things in his life had that sign on them now, how many doors that said not this one, try another, there is no other.

She didn’t ask why he wouldn’t call Shane. She already knew—Ilya would sooner drag himself to the hospital on his hands and knees than let Hollander see him like this. Broken equipment. A body that had already failed him once and was now proving, with the blunt indifference of biology, that it would keep its promises about doing so again. Shane looked at him and saw the Dom, the authority, the man who held the room by walking into it. Ilya was not going to show him the version who couldn’t walk down a flight of stairs in his own building. He was not going to hand Shane Hollander a reason to see him as less. Not when less was the thing Ilya feared most in any language.

The cab pulled up. Svetlana held the door. Ilya folded himself into the backseat, the knee stiff and blazing, and she climbed in after him and gave the driver the address of the clinic on Saint-Hubert. As they pulled away from the curb, she reached over and took his hand, and he let her, because Svetlana was the one person on this continent who was allowed to see him hold on.

The walk-in clinic on Saint-Hubert was a GMF tucked above a pharmacy, reachable only by a narrow flight of stairs that Ilya had to conquer one grueling step at a time. Inside, at the glass partition, the receptionist didn’t look up from her monitor.

“Bonjour-hi,” she said, the classic Montreal greeting delivered with zero inflection. “Votre carte d’assurance maladie?”

“I don’t have a RAMQ card,” Ilya said. His work permit had died long ago, leaving him in a bureaucratic dead zone where he had no clear legal status. Unless he was dragged in bleeding from a severe, life-or-death accident, Canada’s universal healthcare meant absolutely nothing for him.

She finally looked up, her gaze scanning his face for a moment before landing on the debit machine.

“One hundred and eighty dollars for the consultation, then. C’est payable d’avance. You can pay in advance.”

Gritting his teeth, Ilya tapped his card against the Interac terminal, and watched the screen—COMMUNICATING, AUTHORIZING—a three-second eternity before the green APPROVED flashed. He did the math over and over and over in exponential spirals. $180 was cheap. $180 just to be seen, and he still needed to be fixed.

The machine spat out a long, curling receipt that he stuffed into his pocket like a shroud.

They sat in a row of interlocking plastic chairs. A TV mounted in the corner played a silent loop of MétéoMédia with the weather, showing a coming storm over the St. Lawrence. Beside them, an old man was hunched over a crumpled copy of Le Journal de Montréal. The silence was punctuated only by the rhythmic thump-hiss of the radiator and the occasional cough from the hallway.

Svetlana had her ankle crossed over her knee and was scrolling through her phone, tilting the screen away from him when he glanced over.

“Stop looking at my phone.”

He straightened up. She shifted closer to fill the gap, not looking up from her screen.

“When they call you back,” she said, still scrolling, “do you want me to come in or wait out here?”

He was twenty-six years old and an adult fucking man. A visit to a doctor was nothing. He had handled worse. He had survived things so much worse: death, isolation, his injury at nineteen without anyone in the room except a trainer who didn’t speak Russian and a team doctor who spoke to him like a broken appliance.

“Come with me,” he said anyway, biting back the please.

“Okay.” Sveta heard it anyway, and she locked her phone and put it in her jacket pocket, and he could feel her not asking the questions she already knew the answers to—are you scared, Illyusha—holding the silence between them firmly and without flinching. She saw him. She knew. She was the mirror she’d always been, the only one he could stand to look into.

“Rozanov?” A nurse appeared in the doorway with a clipboard, glancing between them.

Svetlana stood first and offered him her arm. He took it, levered himself upright, and they followed the nurse down the corridor together, Ilya’s gait stiff and lopsided, Svetlana matching his pace with her hand light on his elbow, steering him the way she steered drunk patrons at Wolfbird—efficiently, without fuss, letting them keep their legs under them.

In the exam room, the doctor was a young woman who spoke to him in French and then switched to English when his answers came back halting. She bent his knee, rotated it, pressed her thumbs along the joint line while Ilya gripped the edges of the exam table and stared at the fluorescent lights. When she performed one test—hand on knee, rotating the shin while flexing and extending—the joint clicked audibly, and Ilya’s jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

“I think this might be a meniscal tear,” she said, snapping her gloves off. She scribbled on a pad and handed him a referral form. “Normally, I would put you on the list at Hôpital Notre-Dame, but even if you pay the hospital fees upfront without the carte soleil, you’ll be waiting for a slot to open up. I don’t think either of us wants you to wait, so—” She tapped the referral form against the table. “Go to a private imaging center—IRM Sud-Ouest or VM-Med. They’ll see you within the week, maybe even today if there’s an opening, but since you’re not covered, it’s eight hundred and fifty dollars out of pocket.”

Ilya didn’t have eight hundred and fifty dollars. He had six hundred and thirty-two dollars, which normally would’ve been a comfortable and unusual cushion of excess considering the extra work and the fuck-ass tip from Hollander previously; a sum that, forty-eight hours ago, felt like a stable floor. Now the floor had rotted out.

But now there were new bills, new pain, and next month was coming, and all of it was always coming.

Svetlana, in the plastic chair beside him, said nothing. She opened her banking app, showed him the screen, and transferred several hundred dollars to his account while he watched.

“Don’t,” he begged.

“Already done. I love you, Illyusha, so just pay me back when you can. Don’t make it weird.”

The MRI, done the same day after another taxi ride and an exorbitant fee, confirmed what the doctor suspected: a minor meniscal tear in its preliminary report. It was a “wear and tear” injury born from years of unrehabilitated damage from long-lost rinks prepared like a trap. The cartilage had been degrading silently, compensating until the structural integrity simply gave way on a Rosemont stairwell, where a single pivot on a concrete stairwell had finished the job.

They’d given him a CD of the images as a souvenir.

The news, at least, was not the worst version. No surgery. Instead, a regimen of “conservative treatment” that felt like a slow-motion bankruptcy: rest, high-dose NSAIDs that made his stomach sour, a hinged knee brace that felt like a shackle, and physical therapy sessions at a private sports clinic that cost a hundred and twenty dollars an hour. Ilya felt dizzy, like he were drowning. Like he was still in the MRI tube and sinking down down down beneath the atmospheric pressures of the cost of therapy, sessions lost, the MRI, the clinic, the upcoming invoice from Maître Marchand, his next month’s rent with its five percent rent increase, which meant an extra ninety a month on top of the eighteen hundred he was already hemorrhaging. None of these numbers was catastrophic on their own.

Together, they were a black hole sucking in all the light.

The doctor had also prescribed crutches. She’d said it plainly, the way doctors said things that weren’t negotiable: “You need to stay off it as much as possible for the first week. Crutches, not limping—limping will compensate with your hip and your back, and then I’ll be seeing you for those too.” She’d written the prescription on the same pad as the referral, torn the sheet off, and handed it to him.

How unfucking sexy was that? Crutches?

Crutches meant the neighbors he’d spent two years avoiding would see him struggling down the stairwell and offer to help, and he would have to speak to them and accept their hands on his arm and their pity on his situation. Crutches meant the Métro, where people would stand for him like he was some little old lady. Crutches meant arriving at Wolfbird on sticks would not inspire people to want to kneel and suck his dick for cash, and the other Doms would see them too and know he was down, and word moved through that industry the way it moved through a hockey locker room—fast, and with consequences.

Crutches meant being a man who needed crutches, and Ilya was not ready to be that man in front of anyone who wasn’t Svetlana.

But… he had little choice. So he would use crutches, and he would figure out how to afford rest, which meant no kneeling. No kneeling meant half his repertoire was gone. The brace was a clinical, velcro-strapped eyesore under his slacks, and his clients did not pay four hundred dollars an hour for a Dom who looked like a rehab patient.

He sat on the exam table after the doctor left and stared at the brace strapped to his leg and did the arithmetic. Twelve to fifteen sessions a month. Half of those required him to be on his knees at some point—pinning a client to the floor, kneeling over them on a bed, dropping to eye level when they were bound in a chair. Floor work, transition work, leverage work. The knee was load-bearing in every position that paid well. Without it, he had standing scenes, wall work, verbal domination, and whatever he could manage from a seated position, which sounded like a retirement plan for a Dom twice his age.

His body was the product. Every tendon, every joint, every hinge and socket, and the muscles that moved them. This was inventory. This was what he sold: the ability to move someone, hold someone, carry someone’s weight when they couldn’t hold themselves upright. The knee wasn’t an inconvenience; it was a fucking factory shutdown, his own bodily Chernobyl that would send clouds of deadly radiation out to poison every other facet of his life.

This was the breakdown, the collapse, and he was going to drown—no—implode under the ocean of it all.

Implode. He would implode like one of those old Soviet submarines in the world wars, or one of those commercial divers who worked at depth for weeks at a time. In the dark and so far away, and unlike the sport divers and thirty-meter recreational divers that hunted for shark teeth in sunny Florida, they dealt with saturation work and the weight of atmospheres, living in pressurized chambers, breathing helium-oxygen at three hundred feet, spending months of their career in the dark with the weight of the ocean pressing in from every side.

The decompression schedules ran for days.

And it still destroyed them, slowly, joint by joint. The cartilage degraded, and the connective tissue gave out in ways that didn’t show up on any scan until something suddenly didn’t work anymore. They did everything right, and it killed them anyway, because the ocean doesn’t negotiate and doesn’t care whether you followed the rules. And when the dive bells failed—Loss of Pressure Incident, they called it, clinically, like naming a hurricane—the hull stopped pretending it was anything other than what it had always been: metal, surrounded by dark water, and buckling under fathoms deep.

It was over in nanoseconds.

And… Ilya had been running on a blown seal for years.

A machine with a cracked gear doesn’t produce at half capacity. It sits on the floor and waits for someone to fix it, and no one was coming to fix it, and the repair cost money he’d already spent on the diagnosis.

He could work through it. He’d worked through worse. He’d played hockey on a sprained ankle at seventeen and finished the period, and his father would have been proud of that if his father remembered anything at all anymore. But hockey rewarded stupidity: you taped it, you skated, the crowd roared, and adrenaline bridged the gap between damaged and functional. Dom work didn’t always have adrenaline. Dom work had a client kneeling three feet away, trusting him to be in complete control of his own body, and if his knee buckled mid-scene, if the joint locked again the way it had on the stairs, he’d lose more than the session. He’d lose the client, and they could be hurt. There could be injuries. He’d lose the reputation.

He’d lose the one thing he was actually, certifiably, inarguably good at anymore.

Two weeks minimum, the doctor said. Possibly six. Rest, ice, elevation, the NSAIDs that churned his stomach to acid, and the physical therapy he couldn’t afford on top of the MRI he’d already paid for with Svetlana’s money that he now owed back. He was drowning in numbers, a riptide of rising slope, its rise rapidly outpacing his run. Two weeks of no income meant rent was a problem. It made Russia a problem, his visa application a problem, everything was a goddamn problem, stacked in a column whose sum kept rising like water in a sealed compartment. That was the thing about structural failure: it was never one catastrophic break. It was a seal giving way in a missile tube—a hairline thing, seawater finding the gap by pressure alone, mixing with whatever it wasn’t supposed to touch, and the explosion that followed wasn’t the disaster. The explosion struck just as you finally noticed, and it was already far too late.

While he spiraled, Svetlana got him home.

She half-carried him up the three flights, even with the crutches, and Ilya leaned on her and hated every step. She was petite and slight, and she still hauled him up those stairs with her shoulder jammed under his arm and her hand fisted in the back of his jacket, swearing at him in Russian every time he tried to take more of his own weight.

“I will kill you, Illyusha,” she hissed at him, straining, “I love you to the end of the world, but I will kill you, and no one will find your body.”

“Yes, but in death, I think my knee will stop hurting. It could be better than this.”

“Do not joke about things like that! You asshole! And stop trying to take that step, Ilya, really, I am going to kill you—”

He loved her. He did not deserve her before, and especially not now.

Inside the apartment, she deposited him on the hideous couch, propped his leg on the arm cushion, and disappeared into the kitchen behind his head. He heard the freezer open, the rattle of ice being cracked from a tray, cabinet doors swinging wide, the fridge sealing shut. She was taking inventory. Svetlana always took inventory—of fridges, of medicine cabinets, of the people she loved—cataloguing what was present and what was missing and filing it away for later use and blackmail.

She came back with a dish towel wrapped around a bag of frozen peas—the last bag, the one he’d bought days ago along with the arugula and the good tomatoes and the sparkling water with the green label that reminded him of the brand his mother used to keep in the fridge in Moscow, the one European indulgence he never gave up even when most Americans and Canadians called the carbonated version of water a waste. For the first time in recent memory, his fridge was full, and it was almost satisfying to have someone, Sveta, see that.

Shane’s tip had filled it, and it was strange to be injured in an apartment that had food in it, to be falling apart in a kitchen that was, for once, stocked—as though he’d furnished the room for a version of himself that no longer existed, the one from last week who had two working knees and the luxury of buying arugula.

Svetlana dropped the bag of frozen peas onto his kneecap. The plastic crinkled loudly. Then she reached into her own oversized bag and pulled out a flat, crinkling paper packet stamped with bright red and yellow Cyrillic. Перцовый пластырь. A pertsovyy plastyr’.

“For later,” she said, dropping the ten-by-ten centimeter square onto the coffee table. “When you can, you put this on. I always keep a few handy. I also have iodine; I can paint a grid. Or I go down to the market, buy a raw cabbage. We crush the leaves, wrap the joint in wool. It pulls the swelling down even more.”

“Sveta, I do not need cabbage.”

“You have no idea what you need. You are a stupid man. My grandmother used badger fat.” Before he could argue, she went back into the kitchen and moved things, rummaging about. She shoved a stack of bowls aside, the ceramics clattering together. “I will find someone in Montreal who sells badger fat. It reeks of wet dog, but you rub the grease deep into the hinge, and it works.”

“Sveta, you don’t have to—”

“Shut up. Where are your plates?”

“Above the stove.”

She found them, along with the silverware, mugs, the ibuprofen, a bottle of sparkling water, and a sleeve of crackers. He listened to her rearranging his kitchen around his failure, each thunk of ceramic on laminate its own small liturgy, the gospel according to Svetlana, which held that nobody suffered alone in a kitchen she’d found her way into.

“I’m staying tonight,” she said, coming back into the living room, laying out a plate heaping heavy with easily eatable food from his fridge and pantry, and then sat on the floor beside the couch, her back against the base of it. She pulled her knees up and tipped her head back to look at him upside down.

“You’re not staying tonight.”

“I’m staying. You can’t get to the bathroom without help, and I’m not leaving you to crawl.”

“I have the brace and those crutches now, and I can walk. I do not need or want you here to watch me suffer. You are wonderful and beautiful and could be spending time with any one of your paramours, and since I will not be working or fucking, my only hope of a good time is to hear your stories second hand. Sveta. I am begging you. Do not stay here. Go out, find a woman with an amazing ass, and fuck her with that strap of yours, and then call me and tell me about it.”

“Ilya.”

“Svetlana.”

She held his gaze. He held hers. It was the same argument they’d had a dozen times—when his fridge broke, when the heat went out that one year January, when the bad client had left him shaking and she’d shown up at his door with soup and fury. Sveta wanted to stay because Sveta loved him and love, in her particular dialect, was expressed through aggressive caretaking and refusal to leave. Ilya wanted her to go because needing help and accepting it were two separate skills, and he had only ever mastered the first.

“I will be fine. I have peas and ibuprofen, and I will not move from this couch until morning. I promise.”

“I do not like this.”

“I know. But please.”

Sveta reached up and found his hand and held it, her thumb pressing into his palm the way she did when she was deciding whether to push or let go.

“... Fine. But will come back tomorrow afternoon to check on you. Please promise me you will not take the stairs alone.”

“I will not take the stairs alone.”

“I hate you. You absolutely will, because you are an idiot who thinks he is invincible, and I have known you for years, and you have not once stayed where I put you.”

This was true. He didn’t argue it.

“Tomorrow,” she repeated. She squeezed his hand once, hard, then let go and stood. She gathered her coat, checked the lock on the window—she always checked because the latch was loose and she’d told him to fix it three times—and stopped at the door.

“Call me if it locks again. I mean it. Any time, even three in the morning, I don’t care.” She opened the door, then paused. “Ilya. You are going to be okay. This is not the end.”

He looked at the ceiling because looking at her face when she said things like that was not something his body could manage right now, alongside everything else it was failing to do.

“Goodnight, Sveta.”

“Goodnight, you stubborn fucking man.” She paused in the doorway, and for one held breath, she looked the way his mother had looked in the doorway of his childhood bedroom in Moscow, backlit, checking, making sure the boy in the bed was still breathing before she turned away. Sveta was not his mother. His mother was dead. But the body doesn’t know the difference between one woman leaving a room and another, and Ilya’s throat closed on a sound he did not make.

She was not his mother. She was Svetlana Vetrova, who had once held his hair back while he vomited cheap vodka into a snowbank on Saint-Laurent, who had called him an idiot in three languages and then walked him home and put him to bed and left water and aspirin on the nightstand. She was alive, she was here, and she was the closest thing to being loved that he had left, and he would die before he told her that so pathetically, with the tears fighting to come out of his eyes, because if he cried then she would cry and hit him and then she would stay and sleep on the floor, the couch, anywhere she fit in the apartment.

The door closed. The lock turned from the outside. She’d had a key since the second week he’d lived here because she’d demanded one, and he hadn’t argued because arguing with Svetlana about safety was like arguing with weather.

And then she was gone, and he was alone.

He lay on his couch with the bag of peas on his knee, the brace propped on the arm cushion, and stared at the ceiling of his Rosemont apartment. The radiator ticked. The elevator was still broken, which was a problem and would continue to be a problem, only it was even more of a problem now with this most recent anatomical betrayal. Outside, Montreal went about its evening, the 97 bus rumbling past and shaking the glass in his windows, uncaring and unaware of the collapse.

The next morning, Ilya put on his coat, locked his apartment, and took the stairs down one at a time, gripping the railing with his left hand, the crutches under his right arm because he refused to use them on the stairs where they’d be more liability than help. The brace was stiff and hot under his jeans. On the ground floor he shifted the crutches under both arms and swung himself through the lobby and out into the cold, and hated every second of it—the aluminum bite against his ribs, the way people on the sidewalk parted for him, the visibility of it, the way the crutches announced damaged, broken, handle with care to every stranger that saw him before he’d even opened his mouth.

He limped six blocks toward Beaubien, passing the Cinéma Beaubien with its classic marquee. The neighborhood was waking up—old men in newsboy caps carrying baguettes from Première Moisson, and the smell of roasting coffee wafting from a nearby, expensive third-wave cafe.

He leaned the crutches against the display case where they slid and clattered against the glass, and unclasped the Aquaracer from his wrist and set it on the counter along with the box from his pocket, and within that, the folded slip of heavy cardstock that proved its authenticity.

The man behind the counter turned it over, checked the case back, the serial number, then offered a crisp twenty-three hundred, which was less than retail but more than Ilya had expected. Ilya took it.

Before even leaving the pawn shop, he went on his phone and paid back Sveta.

He put the rest to the side because now the excess was back, the fuckass stupidly large number in his bank account. He was going to be fine, it was going to be okay, and he had enough to make sure everything was covered again, but only because he’d lost the watch and with it the daydream of a man who wore such things, the illusion, the fantasy that Shane Hollander thought he should have it.

He was just Ilya again, Ilya with his knee, his problems, and a fat bank account for the moment.

If I am only Ilya, only this, then he will realize there is not very much here. And he will leave. And I will have lost the client and the person.

I will have lost the person.

The inside of his wrist looked bare where the band had been, the skin slightly lighter from wear, a ghost-print the sun hadn’t touched. He buttoned his cuff over it and walked out into the afternoon. On the way home, he composed and deleted six texts to Hollander.

The first was honest: I sold the watch. I’m sorry. I needed the money.

The second was deflecting: Your watch has found a new home. Very sad. Send flowers.

The third was a lie: I was always going to sell it.

I hate lies.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth were variations of the first three, rearranged like furniture in a room that refused to look right no matter where he put things. The problem wasn’t the words. The problem was that every version required Hollander to know that Ilya couldn’t afford to keep a gift, and that knowledge would sit between them in a way he couldn’t steer. Hollander would feel guilty, or generous, or worse, sorry for him, and Ilya would rather swallow dirty gravel from the ground than see pity on Shane Hollander’s face.

It was easier that way, and Ilya had built his whole life on the things that were easier, and one day that foundation was going to collapse under him, and he’d deal with it then.

Not tonight.

Tonight, he had rent to calculate, a knee to ice, and a session with Hollander he needed to reschedule and think of an excuse for that he was not going to think about until he could not ignore it anymore, because thinking about it before then meant admitting the week organized itself around those hours, and admitting that meant admitting the rest. The rest was a door he knew was there, that Sveta kept encouraging him to knock on, but he wasn’t ready to open or even step through.

He limped home, showered with one hand braced against the tile and the brace off and his leg held stiff under the spray, ate something he wouldn’t remember, and let the hours bleed out through the afternoon the way they did when he wasn’t paying attention to them—dishes in the sink, nonsense trash on the television, the crutches propped by the door where he’d abandoned them because using them inside the apartment was somehow worse than using them outside.

By the time he noticed the light had left the kitchen, it had been dark for a while.

He put the ice pack on his knee and sat in the dark of his apartment and didn’t think about any of it, and the place on his wrist where the watch had been kept time anyway; phantom seconds, ticking against bare skin, measuring a little while that was already over.

He had sold so many things in his life. The hockey gear went first, then the silver chain his grandmother had brought from Novosibirsk, then, incrementally, every object that carried the weight of having been chosen for him by someone who loved him. The watch was the last of these, hidden away like a secret, tucked into a duffel bag and buried there not with mud but to be found like a love letter, knowing Ilya wouldn’t find it until later. It was warm from being close to Shane’s things, and that warmth was the cruelest part, that the metal remembered the heat of the man who’d given it even after the man was gone.

And now the watch was behind glass on Beaubien, and the wrist was bare, and the phantom ticking continued, faithful, keeping time to a rhythm that no longer had a song.

He’d had a chance. On the bench, on the ice, in the almost—he’d had a real chance, and he’d fumbled it by being stupid and forgetting who they were and where they were and what Shane stood to lose if anyone saw. What was he thinking? Doing anything at the rink at all? It was his fault. He’d been too excited, too soft, too hopeful.

Shane had flinched because Shane was scared, and Ilya knew fear, lived inside other people’s fear for a living. He’d still pushed, still reached, still tried to pry the arrangement open in a twenty-one-thousand-seat arena with unlocked doors and security cameras because he’d wanted the answer more than he’d wanted to protect the man he was asking.

And then he’d done what his father would have done—buried the hurt in work, taken every shift, ground himself into the floors and the stairs and the kneeling until his knee finished what the rink in Trois-Rivières had started. His own fault. The lost moment and the torn cartilage, both his.

And now the watch too. The last thing that had let him believe he belonged in the same room as Hollander, sold for twenty-three hundred dollars that would be enough, and never enough.

He had lost the man, the watch, and his own body.

Only…

No. No. He had not lost anything. Not yet. He was not about to give up. The watch was gone, but not the man. He wouldn’t give Shane the opportunity to realize that he was just Ilya, he could still be Rozanov for him. He could. He would. Even with this brace.

“Ya yeshchyo zdes’,” he said to the dark apartment.

I am still here.