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Shane didn’t watch movies.
Which was a lie, of course. He watched movies all the time while flying, out of necessity rather than interest. He’d never been able to sleep on flights, and reading made him carsick.
Airsick? Planesick? Whatever. Motion sick.
Regardless, he’d never risk pulling out his reading glasses in front of his teammates or he’d never hear the end of it.
So, he watched movies. Really shitty movies that somehow always had Rose in them. He started to enjoy the routine of finding a shitty, B-List movie starring The Rose Landry and texting her his review the minute it ended. Sometimes they ended up being watchable. Others were given only a single grimace emoji as the entire review.
Since joining the Centaurs, Ilya permanently occupied the seat next to him on every flight, practically sitting on Shane’s lap while they watched whatever in-flight movie was available with Russian subtitles; to help Shane learn the language, partly, but primarily because Shane knew it was easier for Ilya.
Shane didn’t watch movies at home. The last thing he wanted to do on his off day was to sit for two hours trying to unsuccessfully follow the plot. He didn’t want to watch a movie when he could be doing literally anything else.
When he could be doing his husband.
It was an uncharacteristically cold winter in Ottawa, a chill Shane hadn’t felt since the winters he spent at the outdoor rinks growing up.
Shane suggested a bundled-up walk through the paths behind their house — he recently bought ice cleats for that very activity — until Ilya grinned, set a warm hand at the frigid skin of Shane’s lower back and whispered, words thick, “I have a better idea to keep warm.”
Shane splayed himself out on the sectional, legs suggestively spread, beckoning Ilya forth. He didn’t expect Ilya to come from the kitchen with a bowl filled with popcorn and two cans of pop in hand, disappointingly clad in his most modest pyjamas.
He talked as he set them up on the couch, draping a blanket over Shane before he searched the cushions for the remote.
“It’s called A Knight’s Tale. It’s during… I forget the word in English. Sredniye veka. Middle Age? Anyway, I watched this movie all the time. It was the only American tape we had. I don't know where it even came from.”
Ilya sat a very chaste distance away, lifted Shane’s legs to rest loosely at his side, and focused his full attention to the giant fucking tv eleven feet in front of them.
That was thirty-seven minutes ago.
Shane was seething.
Seething to the point of actually watching the fucking movie, and following, for the most part, the fucking plot, and pointedly not looking at his husband. It was something about knights. And jousting. And for some reason, a Queen song was playing. And the main actor was familiar. A man with piercing eyes and curly, mussed dirty-blond hair that landed perfectly messily above his shoulders. Shane was sure the somehow slutty, open tunic they had him in was not accurate medieval attire, but it was working for him. The glimpse of chest made him gasp like an affronted maiden. Ilya was, frustratingly, covered entirely. Not so much of a suggestion of chest hair was visible to Shane. The actor appeared on screen, and Shane nearly gasped at the sight. His muscles.
Not that Shane was noticing, but his face felt warmer than it had earlier. He shivered.
Shane never felt more Canadian than he did in the cold. He was also never as Canadian and mortified as he got when the cold made him horny, as though the animalistic lever inside his hypothalamus switched into overdrive with the survival instinct to keep warm vis a vis his husband’s dick.
He was only human.
Shane was horny, and Ilya was far away and chaste and there was a man’s bare ass on their eighty inch tv screen that was, frankly, not helping his case.
At best, he was hanging at half mast.
At worst, he was hanging at half mast.
Ilya mumbled something around a fistful of popcorn. Shane only heard grumbled vowels.
“Huh?”
Ilya washed his mouthful down with coke. “That is Chaucer,” he repeated. His hand rested mere inches from Shane’s foot, and his whole body screamed to shift, to magnetize himself to Ilya. Shane stilled.
“Who is?”
Ilya nodded towards the tv. “Bare ass guy.”
“Who’s Choncer?”
“Chaucer. You know, like the writer?”
Shane didn’t know, not really. He heard of him before, though with no familiarity. He shrugged instead, hoping that it would prompt Ilya on an impassioned tangent to distract him from Shane’s growing bulge. Besides, Shane liked listening to him talk.
Thankfully, Ilya kept talking in and out of Russian, saying something or other about English literature, but Shane’s attention was held by the blond specimen on the screen, sweat-muddled hair stuck to his forehead.
He kind of looked like…
“Shane,” Ilya insisted, eyes trained to Shane as he waited for a response. Shane had no idea what Ilya said for the past minute and a half.
“Hm?” Shane hummed stupidly.
“You agree?”
“Oh yeah, totally,” Shane went with, blindly, pretending not to notice the knowing gleam to Ilya’s eyes that told him he knew exactly why Shane wasn’t listening. Shane didn’t even know what he had agreed with. Still, Ilya smirked, which set the definition of his jawline even tighter, and Shane bundled the blanket around his traitorous groin.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes, Shane tried to distract himself in any way fathomable from the rippling stud who looked too much like his husband for his sexually conflicted brain to handle. He focused on every imperfection he saw. The slight lean of a picture frame on the perpendicular wall he will have to adjust. The crease of his socks under his toes. The dust bunny under the coffee table. The smudge on the mirror. The piece of paper on the…
Jesus Christ, where the fuck did he know the main actor from?
“Who is that?” Shane huffed, voice steeped with more volume and desperation than he intended. It was the first actual interest he’d given Ilya since the movie started, despite Ilya muttering and commenting in both English and Russian without fail.
“Who?” Ilya responded. His mouth was full of popcorn again. Frustratingly, it didn’t do anything to flag Shane’s stubborn erection.
Shane gestured to the screen, where the knight was faking his way through a dance that wasn’t at all medieval. “That guy, the blond one.”
“He is William. The fake knight. Are you even watching? This is big movie for me,” Ilya pouted. His eyes bore into Shane with an almost crushed insistence. Shane tutted, swatting at the air as though his arm could reach Ilya who was still so, so far away.
How was Shane sweltering and glacial at the same time?
“No, I know that’s — who’s the actor?”
“Heath Ledger?” Ilya provided, and of fucking course.
Shane clapped his hands in victory. “Yes! That’s it, thank you. Fuck, that’s been bothering me.”
When Shane was 15, he accidentally watched Brokeback Mountain. His parents had gone to some event or another, and Shane itched to sneak into his parents’ dvd collection. He’d seen cowboys and was excited to watch a manly movie to prove, to no one in particular, perhaps only himself, that he was a man. It wasn’t until Heath Ledger was fucking Jake Gyllenhaal in a tent did he realize what kind of story it was. And he couldn’t bring himself to turn it off.
He wasn’t totally oblivious. He just didn’t realize masculine men could fuck other men, or frankly even want to. He didn’t realize men could fuck in a movie without it being shunned enough to avoid a dvd release.
He would watch it a dozen times, at least, over the proceeding two years. The only non-hockey poster Shane ever had in his room was a small, cut out photo of Heath Ledger sometime around 2006. He found it in a magazine at the school library. The guilt of ripping it out nearly ate him alive for weeks. He pretended, each time it was noticed, to be envious of the model’s body, using the photo purely as athletic motivation. Which, of course, had been fully a lie, but at the time, Shane hadn’t known the truth. All he knew was his captivation of the man, the dangerous yet soft appearance of him. And perhaps, also, the mental image of him and Jake Gyllenhaal in a tent.
Shane let his mind wander. The yard at the cottage was big enough to pitch up a tent, one obscenely large and in no way reminiscent of camping as it would be glamping.
Maybe he could convince Ilya to sleep outside with him one night next summer, stare at the stars from the skylight atop the tent, slowly trail wanting fingers across each other’s skin until their clothes are tossed aside and forgotten, skin prickled by the cold air and their arousal, and…
And… ah. Shane became fully aware of his presence within his body.
Good news was he was no longer at half mast.
Bad news was he was no longer at half mast because he was fully, almost painfully hard.
The only problem with Shane having a doting husband was that he, well, doted on him. Ilya noticed everything about Shane. From his periphery, Shane saw Ilya’s grin widen, the sideways smirk that meant he was gearing to tease Shane. Shane kept his eyes firmly on the tv, if not to keep his dignity then at least to not give Ilya what he so desperately wanted.
Ilya’s reached out. His hand tightened around Shane’s ankle where it lay outstretched beside him. Shane breathed an aborted inhale, but it was too late. Ilya saw it. He pulled Shane’s legs upon his lap.
“Are you… are you hard, Shane?” Ilya teased. Shane felt his mortification colour his face, but he refused to look at Ilya.
“No,” he mumbled instead, his voice embodying petulantly crossed arms. He was all but pouting.
At his feet, Ilya chuckled and shook his head. His eyes stayed on Shane. He squeezed Shane’s calf, one, two, three, and Shane felt each one in his dick. “Like what you see?”
Shane pulled his legs from Ilya’s lap, using his folded knees to act as a shield hiding his bulge from Ilya’s taunting glare. “Fuck off.”
“Should I be jealous?”
“Stop.”
“Is fine. He is not my type, but…”
“Ilya,” Shane insisted, voice firm with growing annoyance. Ilya dropped it, though not without a muted chuckle. Shane was eager to drop the conversation, wait for the movie to end, and face the consequences of his embarrassment preferably face down in their bed with a hand around the back of his neck.
Shane should’ve known. It couldn’t have been two minutes later when, into the silence that fell between them, Ilya spoke.
“Are you close?”
Shane tossed aside the pillow he rested his arm on, pushing himself up to threaten departure. “I’m leaving,” Shane said, half heartedly yet hoping all the same to hear Ilya ask him to stay.
Ilya leaned towards Shane with his arms extended. The asshole was grinning. “No, stay, I will stop, I promise.”
Shane settled against the couch, arms wrapped stubbornly around his torso. To Ilya’s delight, Shane’s bulge only seemed to thicken. Shane forced an exaggerated pout onto his face to really sell it.
Really, all Shane could focus on was the incessant throbbing in his pants. This is why he didn’t watch movies.
Ilya outstretched his hand and rested it against the closest part of Shane’s thigh, a movement so practiced it couldn’t hide his affectionate desire to be touching Shane in some way. God, Ilya loved him so much it made Shane angry sometimes. They both pretended to watch the movie for a handful of scenes, but Shane could tell Ilya's brain was turning with his thoughts on the situation. His mind was nowhere except in Shane's pants.
“If all it takes is a man’s ass to get you going I should start hiding porn around. Maybe I should buy a fancy copy of Chaucer’s work?” Ilya tested, though his words lacking the taunting cadence of prior.
Shane felt his cheeks heat impossibly. It would have been so easy to agree with Ilya and wish the conversation faded. Brush it off as a sexually minded gay man catching glimpses of men. As if Shane hadn’t spent half of his life becoming desensitized to the view of a man’s bare ass in communal showers. Ilya would have seen right through any sort of haha oops, typical gay me! but maybe it would have bought him time to come up with another excuse, or at the very least, end the conversation by taking Ilya in his mouth.
He was still incredibly gay, but with motives instead driven by the embarrassing desire for his husband constantly fluttering through him. Like a boy with a crush even after over a decade. He was hard because he was thinking about his husband, shirtless, sweaty, chivalrous with expert horse riding thighs being put to use.
“Chaucer’s got nothing to do with it,” Shane said, not without disguising the admission with curt sarcasm.
“It was what then?”
“The Knight… Heath Ledger. He looks…” God, this was fucking mortifying. Shane wanted to disappear. Wanted to drop the whole thing altogether. Wanted to drop his pants or maybe drop to his knees. Jesus Christ, his head was reeling.
“Like sex?”
“Like you,” Shane admitted, and as though it could save him, added a quiet, mumbled, “Kinda.”
Shane was offered a moment’s reprieve as Ilya fell silent. Shane was convinced Ilya finally dropped it, satisfied of having pulled the confession from him. Until Ilya's head turned, quietly considering his next course of action. Ilya placed the bowl from his side on the coffee table, his can next to it, and crawled slowly up the length of Shane’s body. Shane inhaled, too aware of the pressure low in his gut.
“Do you like his lance, Shane?”
Shane groaned at the cheesiness of the line, completely aware of the way it swirled in his stomach. He knew he had no ground here; no matter how sultry and ridiculous Ilya worded it, he was right. He could imagine what was hiding behind the armour he wore; his mind conjured up an image of a body familiar to him. One that was currently teasing him exactly how Shane liked, which only made the inferno under his skin burn molten and vicious and needy.
Shane was completely at Ilya’s mercy, the caught prey that can’t help but surrender. Ilya curled his fingers in a tight grip around Shane’s wrists, and Shane couldn’t hide the whimper that forced itself from him.
“Was it sexy how he speared him?”
Shane squirmed in annoyance, fully aware of himself pulling his metaphorical punches to keep Ilya’s hands locked around his wrists. Yes, fucking finally. Take me. Take me take me take me, he wanted to beg. What came out instead, was, “I fucking hate you.”
“Now, sweetheart, would you say that to Heath?”
Shane shook his head. He loved this game. Ilya loved this game. They’ve perfected it. “You’re not watching your movie,” Shane observed, eyes glued to Ilya’s mouth. The perfect shape of him. The way his lips opened around affected breaths. The glimpse of tongue as Ilya licked over his bottom lip. Shane’s voice was quieter than it had been a moment ago, tension clear and obvious and god, so incredibly arousing.
“I have something much better to watch,” Ilya purred. He slunk down Shane’s torso, tongue lolling as he approached Shane’s groin. Any festering annoyance faded with Ilya's careful worship of Shane's eager, flushed skin. He let his mind go blank, feeling only Ilya.
By the time the movie ended, attention to it long lost, Shane realized he really liked watching movies. He really liked watching movies with Ilya. If each movie-watching experience ended as happily as this one did, maybe Shane would be a more willing movie lover.
Just maybe not on the team plane, despite Ilya’s insistence on joining the mile high club. There were some lines Shane simply refused to cross, no matter how unbearably hot his husband was.
He was only human.
⚔⚔⚔
On the next team flight, Ilya pulled his iPad from his bag as soon as the plane levelled above Ontario.
“I have a movie I want to watch. Will be good,” Ilya said. He handed Shane the second earbud, and Shane took it without question.
Music swelled as the beginning credits began. Shane barely processed the words “medieval” and “jousting” before he stood up.
“Asshole,” he muttered, Ilya’s maniacal laugh the soundtrack to Shane’s determined steps.
Shane sat four rows up, beside Harris, for the rest of the flight. The annoyance didn’t stop the blood from pooling in his dick.
Fucking Chaucer.