Archive of Our Own

JULY 2017 (THE COTTAGE)

“My father was not there. He was gone for two days first. He did not look so surprised.”

The moon hangs full in the cottage window, white and watchful. The bed is warm with them. Their ankles cross beneath the blanket, bare skin touching, the sheets holding their heat. Ilya settles deeper into the pillow they share, his low voice sleep crackled. “He was more angry. Like when she died, she beat him at something.”

Shane doesn’t interrupt. He listens with his whole body, thumb intermittently stroking Ilya’s cheek. Ilya thinks he barely blinks, how closely he looks, how attentively he listens.

“It was snowy, night before. I found her next morning.” His fingers flex against Shane’s side, grounding himself in the line of his ribs. “I woke up early. I went outside first, to see how much snow. Then I went in. I was wet. It was very cold.” It occurs to him, he’s never discussed these details in English. The details drag slower this way, how they slip raw on his nerves. “I was going to my room. I found her on the floor. Her hair was on her face. I moved it. She was warm. I felt bad for touching her. I thought, my hand is too cold for her.”

Ilya pauses, letting a breath fill the cavity of him. His legs have started to feel numb where they’re nested in blankets together. After a moment his thumb finds the peak of Shane’s throat, resting gingerly there. Their wrists nearly cross, how they both touch each other, wound around the air of each other. “I touched here. On her neck. To see if she was breathing. I didn’t know, was this the right spot. I was..I was shaking very much. My mouth didn’t…”

His hand lifts from his neck to gesture faintly around his own lips. “It felt very full. And dry. I did not know what was happening.” Their eyes break for the first time. His lashes sit on his cheeks. They’re slightly damp. “I did, I think. I saw the bottles. I did not want to know.”

Shane’s thumb on his cheek drifts under his eyelid, smearing gently at the damp. His voice is barely there when he asks, testing tentatively the weight of the room. “Was she…where was she?”

Ilya leans into the hand’s warmth, lip catching against Shane’s palm. His eyes have become drowsy with memory. 

“Her bedroom.” His nose wrinkles. He’s returned to his senses of before, a younger version, so weighed down with all it was feeling it felt like a knot of sludge, of worms. “She was sick on herself. I could smell it. I was going to her room, to see would she come outside.” His touch keeps crawling, soothing himself on the warmth Shane’s body in which he treads. His fingers find a curl in the hem of his waistband. He doesn’t dip more than that, he only holds. “She liked the snow. Very much. It was calm to her, I think.” Him also. It used to be.

Shane’s fingers brushing across his lashes fondle closer, inviting them closed. Ilya’s lets them shut. His body stammers and then he allows himself to stretch, his muscles flinching. He feels like he’s trembling everywhere except where Shane touches him. There, everything is still.

“I sat down.” Ilya’s voice drops as he’s distracted by his own English again. He doesn’t like the sound of himself saying these words. It feels invasive, for his memory to be coated in them. “For many minutes I was looking at her. Dead, yes, but…” He shakes his head, in disappointment of his younger self, near disapproval. “I waited. I think, for something to happen.”

Heat rises to his cheeks uncomfortably fast. He sniffles. What pools in his eyes he smears into Shane’s collarbone, curling down to nestle there.

“I went next door. I was very young. I should have called 112.” His mouth muffles damp the words in Shane’s shoulder. The palm that pushes up his skull to cradle him, to sink through his curls, it feels like Shane is holding his brain matter in. “I was scared. I remember what I said. I said to them, ’I think something is wrong.’”

He exhales against Shane’s skin. “Then I heard myself, and I thought, no. I know.” His fingers tighten, then loosen. “I said, my mother is dead. I was mad with myself. I wanted to leave. For them not to come. I did not want them to see her.”

“Ilya.” Fingers push gently beneath his eye. “You don’t, you don’t have to talk about this, if…”

It sounds sorry, too much for Ilya to stomach. “Is okay.” He nuzzles deeper into the comforting lull of his pulse, how his neck sits warm to his temple. “I want to. I want you to know.”

The quiet grows fragile. With both arms around him, on his skull and now the arm slipped around his middle, the pressure around him stifles deeper, choking things inside himself. It’s his own wandering thoughts which suffocate him, the images blurring inside them, not the body holding him close. That’s what is holding them in.

Shane presses a light kiss to the shell of his ear. “I love you,” Shane pushes against his curls. “You can talk to me about anything.”

Ilya’s vision goes gauzy. He curls with a watery sigh into his neck. He doesn’t say the words back. His long, struggling breath reframes them, saying them through his lungs, rattling slow until it smooths; until the words settle into his dragging pulse buried between them. It’s in how he pushes his nose into Shane’s collarbone peaks and feels himself coming back.

Time slows, becoming liquid. Whether he wakes up from something or it’s him returning from something else, it’s the fingers moving soft circles through his hair that pulls him here again. Brings him somewhere softer, which feels strange, but he lets it.

“She made very good soup. After snow.”

Shane gives him a soft, tired smile. “What kind?”

“In English, I don’t know. It is red soup with meat. The bone is still there. There are beets. Cabbage also. And carrots, I think.”

“That sounds really good.”

“Yes.” Ilya pinches lightly at Shane’s middle. “Very healthy.”

Shane squirms and bows his stomach in under his touch. “Sounds like it.”

Ilya feels enough blood in his body again that he can curl in and squeeze around him, yanking him back to chest. “You love me, yes, but you also love vegetables.”

“I love you more.”

“Much more?” There’s lazy comfort in how he mouths at Shane’s neck, feeling how his body reacts a liquid into the touch.

“Yeah. Way more.”

“Hm…” He licks a path gently where his tears have salted Shane’s shoulder. “I am not sure.”

He is.

 JANUARY 2018 (OTTAWA)

He likes that he can speak Russian with her, while his chest feels raw and meat shredded while his head throbs with a sore, unavoidable knowing. He knows the answers to the questions he asks. He’s beating himself over the head with them.

“Nothing?” he barks. The light shifts as he stands from his bedroom floor and begins to pace, his restlessness defeated by the ache underneath it. He can’t see Svetlana’s eyes clearly in the low dark of the phone screen, but he senses how they’re tracking him, the wobble in her lip when she shakes her head. 

“No.” Her voice is miserable with its certainty. “There is nothing.”

“There were boxes,” he insists sharply. “And bags inside them. We took them, I took them out of the frames, I put them together, I put them—”

“No, Ilya.”

“Don’t fucking tell me—” His voice doesn’t rise. It fractures, dips again. He almost apologizes, if he could find the patience to dig it out of his sadness. His eyes find hers through the phone screen. “I will call her. The pictures are there. I will tell her where.”

“It was her.” Her eyes are shining wet, he can see in the grainy image. “Polina threw them out.”

“No.” His mouth chafes hissing around it. “She has no right. She can’t fucking do that.”

“She says your father told her to.”

He lifts the phone because he needs it away from him. He keeps here there but he doesn’t let her look. Not while his hot face presses to the cold glass of the hotel room window. He breathes scratchy against it, his face burning flush. It’s the feeling of fever, how ugly everything feels.

He takes a long, grating breath, stabilizes, centers. Svetlana breathes quiet on the other end. They stay like that for a long time, breathing together while they’re countries apart.

She offers herself because she always will, she will always show up for him.  “I’ll come. I will get there. I will come to you. Okay?”

“No,” he insists while he pinches the bridge of his nose so hard his eyes moisten. “Stay. Ask Polina to look again.”

Svetlana sighs and limply nods.

Out of frame he digs his thumb in his eye socket. He isn’t in the camera anymore, not showing himself and not at her either. He still shakes his head, refusing her offer without speaking, without being seen. She must hear it, somehow, must know what he would say even though he doesn’t.

“You are playing tomorrow?”

This he can answer. “Yes.”

“Can I call you at night? After you’re done?”

He drops his hand digging into his face and he trades the cold of the window on his cheek to cold glass on his palm. “You don’t have to, Sveta.”

“I will.”

He doesn’t bring the phone back to his face. The gentler quiet between them is an understanding. “I’m going to bed now.”

“Okay, Ilyusha.”

It’s hellmouth noise in the rink, is what they say, when cheering and murderously screaming become the same. Fans in the nosebleeds bang their fists against chain walls. The stands vibrate, seeming to creak. It’s an afternoon game afternoon, nothing with stakes more than any other, but it carries the thick, throbbing energy a night game usually gets. I

The noise is because of him, how they love him.

Today for no clean reason beyond the day that it is, knowing that the photos of his mother are gone now that he wants them, and it takes nothing for him to snap.

“That cross-check on Rozanov not being received well.”

“A bit of a hill to die on, but—”

Ilya yanks the rookie around by the arm socket, hard enough that the kid’s skates scrape uselessly, blades squealing as he’s dragged off balance. A jersey bunches tight in Ilya’s fist. The body in his grip is loose but stubborn, not swinging so much as taking it, until red and white jerseys swarm in around them, hands grabbing, voices cracking.

Ilya spits and snarls in a language no one else speaks. His own voice sounding wrong even to him, too barbed and spit wet, words torn loose instead of said. 

“Rozanov’s headed to the box after the whistle, and—oh. Oh wow.”

“That is…certainly not his.”

“No, and he’s still holding onto it.”

He barreling to the penalty box with the rookie’s helmet clenched in his hand. He doesn’t look back to see who’s watching, his confused team, or Buffalo’s defensive shouting. He sits hard when he gets there, knees spread as he drops flat onto the bench. He jams the red helmet between them.

“He’s brought the Admirals helmet with him.”

“That rookie’s going to have to head to the bench without one.”

His fists come down rough on the chin strap. He already threw down his gloves. He hooks his bare fingers in, teeth bared in a curled sneer.

“He’s got it wedged between his knees here.”

He yanks until the vein in his neck pops. The helmet’s plastic resists at first, flexing, biting back against him, and then it gives. The chin strap tears loose under his grip.

“You can hear the building react.”

Nylon fibers poke like hair at his fingers, broken ends biting into his skin. The ruined helmet pressed harder inside his thighs where he’s grinding it, like there’s a skull still inside it, shoving that much pressure back into his body because there’s nowhere else for it to go.

“There it goes. Admirals helmet back onto the ice now.”

He flings it away. The helmet skids and spins across the ice, useless without its strap, cracking near the blue line.

“That’s…yeah. That’s not something you usually see from him.”

“Officials are watching this closely.”

“That’s pure frustration. Crowd loves it, but the league office won’t.”

“Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that gets a call later.”

Next he drops his own helmet. It clatters between his skates, hitting the rubber mat bottom of the box. He hooks two fingers inside his mouth, yanks out his dripping mouthguard, and drops it with a clatter at his feet.

The arena noise keeps rolling, cresting and crashing through the rink, but inside the box it’s stale, like old smoke. His chest feels rope tied. He wants to massage his own ribs, his own fucking bone cavity. He squeezes his knees together, as hard as his body lets him, sucking air in, tight so it’s becoming pressurized.

“Big response here in Ottawa, though. You can hear the home crowd firmly on his side.”

“You don’t always see that with a new player.”

“We know Rozanov’s not just any player. He may be new here, but he’s certainly not new to the game.”

Ilya stares straight ahead at the box’s glass smeared with handprints and sweat, his jaw locked, breath siphoned through his nose. The buzzing under his skin doesn’t fade. If anything, it swells, crowding up into his throat, leaving him nowhere to put it but down.

He hocks and spits again, this time at the glass of the box. It sprays, blurring his reflection to the players on the other side.

He watches numbly, Scott Hunter under-handing the broken helmet to a ref, his rookie beside him without one looking small and stunned. Barely registers how Hunter barks at him across the ice, pointing, snapping, his mouth a harsh line, his too many teeth.

Ilya isn’t listening. Or he is, but it’s low white noise now, drowned out by the hot cloud fuming in his head.

He gnaws his chapped lip until it hurts. He wants to spit in his dead father’s face. He wants a fucking cigarette. He wants to lie down naked in a pile of snow, so cold that it hurts.

It’s blue-black night, long after the game; his house is baked with the run of his heat. Snow thinly frosts the windows. There’s a trail of his things from the door to the couch, his sneakers, his sweatshirt, his snow damp hat. A throw blanket sits at his ankles, useless and half-wrapped. There’s an untouched glass of vodka on the coffee table. 

He’s lying there stiff on his side facing the couch cushions. His body’s mad sure he isn’t sleeping. His stomach curdles from playing and not eating after, or before, or this morning. It’s why his body wrings itself, confused and swallowing, chest bruised, hungover from the storm he carried earlier, the one that’s leaking out his ears and tired, death makes you so fucking tired.

The thermostat clicks off somewhere in the walls. The house settles in shifts. Snow drifts silently down the long windows with patient precision. He presses his mouth deeper in the cushion lining. Breathes fabric until the feeling dulls, or at least changes shape.

His mother is here in that she’s around his neck and in the backs of his eyes but it isn’t enough, he wants her tangible.. His longing for her dressed up as rage and wore him like its own skin.

His new place in Ottawa has longer windows, exposed corners to everywhere. He still doesn’t catch the headlights rolling up the snow dusted driveway. When it starts to hum he stares blankly at his phone buzzing on the table. Assumes it’s Svetlana, checking on him, making sure he hasn’t made a call to burn his late father’s house to the ground, his widow and his childhood inside it.

The doorbell rings twice. He doesn’t move. He rubs his cheek on the thin of a sofa seam. A long hanging quiet, and then a confident knock at the door.

He blinks at the inside the leather, black when it’s this close. He shuts his eyes and the black doubles. He tries not to listen. It goes badly. He hears it, his brain amplifying it.  He feels everything too much. His stomach sloshes. There’s an acid burn in his throat from the guilt he’s been swallowing. Senseless fucking guilt.

His phone keeps buzzing. The knock keeps knocking. There’s hot, stubborn syrup keeping him from moving his legs. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to. It isn’t that he doesn’t hear the voice plucking hesitantly from outside in the cold, calling his name, a question at first, then more of a plead.

Today is a day that none of it occurs to him, that someone he loves and someone who loved him back can die, and then this person who chooses to love him will come, and it will not be the same but it will be in ways unfathomable. None of it occurs to him, that he was never going to have this day alone. He’s very stupid for that. Very stupid that he finally sits up and it’s patiently, dragging himself shirtless across the room, sweatpants hanging loose, following the knocking sounds that have moved from the door to the living room window, the strip of glass at the far end of the unlit room.

It’s only going to be Shane. He knows it’s Shane before he sees him, and this day has made him someone else because seeing him doesn’t send his heart moving right away. It’s dread, almost, that he’ll be seen like this, and that’s a feeling that’s never been for him, never anything close.

He doesn’t move quickly, doesn’t drag him inside from the cold. He moves closer to the black night window and he can’t move it out of his own way; how someone’s death burns your insides doesn’t give you time to clean the wound it makes.

What Ilya knows is his own lip starts to quiver, when he squints and he sees him now instead of only hearing him. Standing here in front of him, snow damp and pink skinned. Shane who should be in Montreal. Shane, who played an afternoon game at the same time he did three hours away. Shane who drove here in the eyes of a snowstorm, looking exhausted and desperate and eager at once, blurry in the night’s dark, his handprints on the window’s surface. Loving him in this certain way, silently, patiently waiting to be let in.

Ilya allows himself to be loved eventually, dragging what feels anchored to him to the front door and opening it. The crisp cold and the smell of snow do something warm to him, warm like sick.

The choking is there and then it’s here, having him closer. His head chases the blur long enough to make sense of it.

Shane is here because he knows.

Shane is here wearing a heavy coat, a hat, and boots, a backpack slung on one shoulder. He has a large paper bag clenched in his hand. He’s wearing a look that’s somehow determined and uncertain at the same time.

A part of him wishes his stubbornness had held out longer, made him uglier, kept the door shut to see if Shane would have ripped his way in. What would it mean if he did? Or why does he think he wouldn’t? He would. He knows he would. Why would he ever have to test that?

It would be a way of hurting himself, maybe, and maybe today is the day to do that.

The pale, plain way Ilya looks at him must scare him. He can tell by the way Shane hesitantly toes off his boots without taking his eyes off him, like he’s nervous to, how tight he goes in the second he has to turn to shrug off his backpack, to place the paper bag on the end table by the door.

“Hi,” Shane says, and it’s soft how his dark eyes are soft.

Ilya sucks in his top lip. He furrows his brow. Considers to himself instead of wrapping his arms around him how he could possibly deserve a second of him.

Shane still reaches. He tugs and he catches Ilya’s wrist, thumb finding the soft skinned inside. Ilya lets himself be touched. He watches him, swallow the filled gut of what it means that he’s here. And how he doesn’t deserve Shane. That he didn’t think to ask how the Metros did earlier. That Shane texted I love you this morning, the words by themselves like a reminding thought, too early for it not to be the first thought he woke up with, and Ilya said nothing back, because grief dries you out, it picks your bones clean. 

He has never called it that, grief. He wouldn’t know how to use the word. It’s a rash, it’s dormant, it’s a parasite sniffing in. It comes back when it wants to. It’s comforting, sometimes, to scratch at it.

Ilya nudges his wrist deeper into Shane’s grip while rubs at his eye with the heel of his palm. Watches between the blur of it, as Shane uses his free hand to wipe the snow off himself. Doesn’t let him go, doesn’t let his eyes go either. 

He only lets himself be touched and read, and maybe it will stay that way.

Until, his nerves moving reluctantly, Ilya reaches out a hand back. He squeezes Shane’s wrist that’s not wound in his. He tugs him. He watches Shane watch how he does. His eyes are already waiting for him when he looks up, coming back, and softly tilting his head. How does someone get any closer, when they’re already sewn up inside of you?

Closer and thank you.

Closer and here.

He keeps holding Shane’s wrist and Shane is holding his looks drowsily down, still asleep in himself in some ways. He strokes his thumb over the thickest part of his palm and it grounds him, has him returning to his own body by touching this other body, Shane’s body, like it’s some salve and he needs it to remember himself.

And he thinks, standing here attached to him in the twin beats of their pulse, of the things people say when someone dies. His mother died a long time ago. He doesn’t have her photos. He’ll never have her photos. He decided on the ice today that it might feel better to hurt someone. It made him fucking angry that it didn’t, that he isn’t allowed to feel better, that something cosmic won’t let him, something spoiled and old in his blood. 

Ilya lets go from sucking his top lip, and he starts worrying the bottom with his teeth. Looks down through his softening brows at the halo of dark eyes looking back. His body doing what it couldn’t before, when he watched him tap on the window and wait for him, to start to swallow how deeply it touches him that Shane is here. How he knows without asking exactly why he is, because this summer Shane asked him the day that his mother died, and Ilya talked about her for hours, and Shane listened.

There’s a hesitant shift, not far away but closer, and a small smile that makes Ilya’s tongue feel swollen when he sees it, how melted it makes him.

“I brought some soup. We have to heat it up, but…” Shane parts half of their hand tangles and he leans away, the takeaway bag from the table a little, eyes slow and careful, shoulders hiked, one hand still twisting light at Ilya’s thumb, still rubbing circles on his skin. “I think it’s the right one. It smelled really good.”

It’s the closest Ilya has ever seen Shane look scared of him. It isn’t as bony as the feeling that attached itself to him when he woke up. It still pinches, unrelenting. It demands to be held, and then insists it should be left alone.

Ilya steps closer, feeling suddenly more wrong on his feet. His eyes hang heavy, drowsy with things that don’t fit together. Relief, maybe. A different kind than being touched. The kind of just being here with him, standing in the mess of it. Of not being alone the way he thought he deserved.

His throat tightens with a self-made anticipation. He needs to be closer. There isn’t a way for him to get as closer as he needs. He steps barefoot into the cold melt puddled from Shane’s boots. Closes the space before Shane can move from him, if he ever would, before he can steer him out of the way of the floor’s damp. His hand pulls from Shane’s hand, so both of his palms can feel him. Push thickly at his ribs, fingers flexing in. Leading him away from the front door, crowding him backward until the couch knocks into the backs of Shane’s legs and he goes down with a punched, anticipatory breath.

They don’t have to think to fit together. Shane’s hands trailing up immediately, steady and sure at Ilya’s hips. They don’t grip to stop him, they anchor the weight of him there. Ilya settles there in ways he wouldn’t, not usually, to be pulled in by him, instead of doing the pulling. His weight dropped possessively into Shane’s lap, thighs clenching around him. It’s a different angle for them, but it is still them. Shane’s hands guiding up his sides, his thick curves, digging the thick edges of rib with his thumbs; all while his dark eyes drag deeply up him in the same way.

Ilya props over him, breathing stiff, his jaw slack. He lets his bare chest be exposed. He watches under swimming heavy lids as Shane’s fingers drag down the front of his body. They make each other’s spectacles, watching how one body touches another. He watches himself breathe heavier under his fingers, longer breaths, easier ones. He doesn’t ask to be touched so much as he asks to be breathed against back. To be kissed the way Ilya kisses him, nudging forcefully in, a wet begging. Shane’s mouth opens pliantly when he gets there. Ilya takes him close and he slackens himself, jaw beckoning, and then asks to be eaten from.

Shane does, slowly, his tongue deep and unhurried, filling him whole, rolling through him until Ilya feels there’s nowhere else for anything to go, everything else in his own mouth, his teeth, all of it, in the way of where Shane should be instead. So deep in him with his tongue that when Shane murmurs against him, Ilya feels the words rumble down his throat. “I love you.”

Ilya’s jaw trembles, like Shane’s words are too barbed to swallow. He can’t speak it back. He says it back with his body, with the palms he presses needily up him, hot palms up his snow damp clothes. Rubs the center of him like he needs the warmth to fuse into his own body.

I am so in love with you, it tells him, the force of his touch. I am so scared you will die before me.

Ilya pushes heavier through his mouth, tasting the cold still clinging from the outside. The winter chill in Shane’s hands sting his face. He shudders and he slacks, mouth dropping open, breathing something more honest, hungrier, and Shane breathes the same honest hunger back.

His eyes are closed and he’s kissing him but they’re dampening as they are, the lids warm and wet. Cold fingers find the slip of tears at his lashes. There’s urgency and hiding. A hasty tangle as Ilya pulls Shane’s sweatshirt up and over his head, giving it to the floor. When Shane’s head clears the collar, his eyes are bold with concern, finding Ilya’s, which are burning and pink. He opens his because Shane’s gaze is too tight on him not to, to find them back.

“Hey,” Shane whispers.

Ilya can’t look.

He looks down between them instead, where their chests almost touch and heave softly each other. He knows where this is going to go, what Shane is seeing on him, how he’s careful in how he wants to say it.

Ilya roughly shakes his head. His curls drop near his ears. Shane doesn’t let him leave, or hide.

“Ilya.”

Fingers tug at the back of his neck.

Ilya grunts and nearly fights from the hands against him, almost does.

“Not now.”

He drops forward, his lungs impatient, his eyes stinging.

“Not now, okay?”

He grinds closer in. Pushes his forehead against Shane’s cheek, breath hitching, the want and the pain of things blending, the words scraping weakly from him.

“Can you—Ilya, can you look at me?” Shane’s words press gingerly at his temple.

“No.”

His spine curls, sitting closer against him, cheek dragging lower until it’s in the crook of Shane’s shoulder.

“I want to touch you.” Want you to touch me, the honesty drawn beside it. 

“Ilya.” 

Every time he hears his name it’s breathier, and quieter, until this next time he has to hear it it’s like his ears are breathing it in. Still, he doesn’t answer, and Shane answers back by pushing his strong arms around him. They’re quiet there. A cold finger traces a slow, long line down his back. The snow twinge to his hot spine makes his eyes flutter, how stark it feels, how calm it makes him.

Usually Ilya would take. He doesn’t this time. He clings tighter around him by the thighs, chest pressed close and melting there, but he relents. He fuses his forehead to his shoulder and he smears his mouth, smudging where he’s secure against him. Safe.

Shane’s line tracing reaches the small of his back. This is what he needs, Ilya wants to tell him, but Shane already knows, and he does. Their breathing together starts to sync.

In the stillness Ilya sniffles, and his closed eyes run hotter, and it gives him away entirely.

The strong body beneath him shifts.

“Come here,” Shane says, steadier this time, and Ilya unfolds and he does, so he can be touched more.

Shane does what Ilya needs him to do. Their heads bump as he nudges in and finds Ilya’s mouth, fingers firm at his chin, guiding without hurry. Ilya goes easily, lips parting, wanting, asking. He doesn’t lead so much as he lets himself be taken up, lets the contact fill the noise inside him. 

Shane’s tongue pressing through his mouth, slow and deep, deliberately wet. His thumbs tracing Ilya’s cheeks, his neck, the ridge of his collarbones, touching everywhere at once, mapping him back into his body. Ilya sighs a low, sharp pass into the kiss, a groan that’s lost somewhere between their throats. It’s the soft and hard combined that reaches him, the want and the care; the you’re safe and you’re everything to me combined.

There’s a short, and then Shane’s fists in his hair, and a shorter breath and the fingers grinding his scalp. Shane’s careful teeth digging the flesh of his lower lip, a slow bite that’s testing, knuckles tugging at his curls deeply and intentionally from the root. And Ilya can feel it. It anchors him. He bares his throat for his mouth, his pupils fat and glazed. His stomach coiling while Shane’s mouth moves slow and messy along the peak neck, down to his collar bones and back again, fingers moving from skull to muscle, finding themselves deep into the knots in his shoulders. Holding him there, insisting he allow himself be held.

Shane doesn’t stop, because he knows him. It’s sometimes scary, how much he does. He mouths carefully the shell of Ilya’s ear, leaves a wet trail that cools where his breath follows, kisses down as far as the nooks of his collarbones, noses warm at the bowls there.

It’s a loss for Ilya that’s rare, that he lets. How he curls closer,  swallowing the love drunk sigh caught in his throat, almost a whimper if it weren’t for how he sucks his own tongue. His hands move without thinking between them, holding the solid shape of Shane’s pecs, his hips. He rolls his own, sometimes, his awakening cock catching friction. Shane lifts a knee now and then to meet him, steady, intentional, pants lightly into Ilya’s skin when he feels his hips chase more, tighten his thighs more to trap him there.

It keeps being this way, the rhythm unbroken, Ilya’s body loosening into the mouth and hands leaving heat and buzz all over him, crowding out everything else.

The throb eases. It’s like a splinter being pulled layers deep. It’s all too much and exactly where he wants it to go. There’s a place where his heart is beating rough and liquid, that spills his ear to Shane’s neck and his arms around his shoulders, and settles him there. pulls a rough sigh from him that spills into Shane’s shoulder and settles there.

“I miss you,” Ilya mumbles, the words slurred around how much of him he feels easing through him. “All the time, I think.”

His mother too. These are very different kinds of missing.

Shane’s mouth lifts, coming to rest the words near the ditch of his temple. “I miss you too.”

Ilya nudges closer, curling into the strong rise and fall of Shane’s chest. Missing someone while they’re pressed against you is hard to learn the shape of. Just as missing someone who has no right of being gone.

His nose stays damp where it rests against his neck. He tastes the dried salt of his own eyes when he kisses there. His body is heavy now, lulled with the feeling of being loved, rocked enough that his breathing evens out and he finally drifts into feverish sleep.

In the early morning, barely before the sun is up, before Shane drives the two hours back to Montreal, they sit in patio chairs in the snow and eat soup for breakfast. Shane tells him about his mom finding a restaurant with a Slavic chef, since he was bad at finding anything on the internet about Russian restaurants. Ilya tells Shane about his mother’s apron, and the different names she would call him when he was small. His sleepy mind works how to say some of them in English. Some of them, he can’t.

Before Shane gets in his car, before weeks pass until their next time together, alone like this, Ilya already starts to miss him. He isn’t sure he ever stops.

“Thank you,” Ilya murmurs as they hug. It’s the same shape as I love you, in ways. He lets himself be squeezed tighter, propping his chin near Shane’s neck.

“I’m sorry,” Shane whispers against him. The hug lasts a long time. When he pulls back to kiss him, it’s Shane’s eyes this time glistening damp.

Ilya doesn’t make him answer why. He only lets him be sorry. His chest stammers with the weight of it. He curls his fingers around the shell of Shane’s ear, tugging him in, so their mouths can tenderly brush again.

Later that morning, alone, Ilya smokes cigarettes while standing in the snow, his chest red from the cold. He thinks about his mother. He isn’t smiling, thinking about her, but he is calm. He brings the spoons and the takeaway bag in from outside, balled and wet. Her soup was much better than what Shane brought him. A strange, solemn moment makes him wish he could call her and tell her that.

There are a lot of things about Shane he would like to tell her.

Knowing he can’t puts an aching, glowing resignation in his chest. It will thin, today, sometime or tomorrow, when he’s back on the ice again, or woken up better. And when it decides, the feeling will come back.

He lets it sit there. Lets it come and go as it does. He doesn’t get to decide when.

He will have to learn to be okay with that.