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Once they were out, once they were married, once they were teammates, Shane had assumed they’d get pretty obnoxious about it. A full blown press tour, Instagram lives, wandering through the city holding hands, Shane dressed inconspicuously because he didn’t really know how not to but Ilya in the clothes that screamed Rich and Not North American the loudest. Not a baseball cap or pair of sunglasses between them. When it was still a secret that was what they’d talked about, during and after sex, whenever Ilya got Shane drunk – the places Ilya would take Shane to show him off, the stories Shane would tell in lifestyle interviews, about his husband.
That held true for maybe a week, and then they’d been invited to a launch party, and they’d turned to each other and both seen it in each other’s faces – that they’d really just rather stay in. They had, and since that night they’d had a hard time getting back out.
During the season, of course, they didn’t have a choice. And hockey was something different again, hockey was what they’d had together before they’d had anything else together, and Shane wasn’t sure it was possible for either of them to resent it, no matter what it put them through. Family dinners and team bonding time were a little harder to always get excited about, and press and brand commitments were near impossible.
In the first iteration of their relationship there had been such a clear divide between their time with each other and their time with other people that now blurring the boundaries stressed Shane out – figuring out who he was with Ilya when he wasn’t alone with Ilya. It had been a little stressful when they were together but not public, navigating his parents and the Pikes and the charity, and it was a lot more stressful now that they were out, integrating their relationship with their public personas. Playing on the same team was another level of sharing each other again. They had to check their relationship at the door at least a little, and they had to give in to the larger dynamic of the locker room, not just create their own.
When they got back to their place after a day with other people, it felt how it had felt showing up to each other’s hotel rooms after not seeing each other for months. They’d wanted to escape their cage, but they’d been in that cage for a decade and they’d made a home of it. Out in the big wide world, they got homesick.
They had big plans for the off season – they would beg injuries, because of course they would have injuries at that point. They could already feel their beginnings, Ilya’s thumb and jaw and shoulder, Shane’s lower back and wrist and ankle. Well, both of Ilya’s ankles and Shane’s other ankle too, because they hadn’t had an ankle feel quite right between them since their fourth season in the league, but Shane’s left ankle in particular, at this point. Once the play offs finished, in misery or triumph, they would meet with the consultant doctor both of them usually hated, the one who never advised anything less than four missed games, and get what they wanted: an order to rest up for multiple weeks. Shane would mark it out on the calendar on the cork board in the hall that Ilya mocked him for keeping, considering the much more closely maintained calendar app on his phone. Shane thought of it as the family calendar, the stuff just for him and Ilya, the fun stuff. And they were at a point where rest for injuries would be fun. Just the two of them, a perfect excuse, no obligations.
But that was still at least a couple months away. Until then they had this – the days off between games where they had no practice, no brand obligations, no charity work, no social commitments, no babysitting duty, no Hollander family events. It wasn’t all that common. Shane hadn’t realized just how public going public would be.
They got home in the evening after an afternoon game in Vancouver, the last of a five game road trip, with nothing in Shane’s phone or hallway calendar for two whole days. It was over a week since they’d been in their house, but it was shiny and tidy from the cleaning service that had been there that morning, and the fridge was full of pre-prepared meals from the team-approved chef.
The house was too big for just two people, but after all those cramped hotel rooms Shane loved it. If he screamed at the top of his lungs nobody but them would hear. Sometimes Ilya did scream, randomly, half to freak Shane out and half just because. Shane had one time tried complaining about it to their team only to be told that screaming was a form of wellness, of inner release. So apparently Shane taking issue with it was just him being repressed again, which Ilya had been happy to learn.
Shane never ate well on road trips, and Ilya only ate well when Shane was eating well, so they were both antsy for good proper food when they got to the kitchen. Ilya retrieved two carefully measured portions of chicken salad and handed one off to Shane, who’d procured cutlery for them. Then Ilya pulled out a carefully measured portion of stir fry and upturned it over his chicken salad.
“Immediately you just fucked up our week,” Shane said. It was like a second job, keeping Ilya to any kind of regimen.
Ilya made grabby hands for a fork, so Shane handed it to him and watched with sick fascination as he took a mouthful of his two meals in one. Chicken and salmon, Jesus Christ. “I will skip dinner tomorrow, put us back on track,” Ilya said, mouth full.
“You skipping dinner is what makes the week fucked up,” Shane said. “Also you’re just going to order something in.”
Ilya smiled and shrugged and Shane focused back on his chicken salad. They didn’t take their food to the table, just ate standing over the kitchen island, occasionally knocking their hips into each other. Despite twice the portion size, Ilya finished his meal at roughly the same time as Shane. He always ate food like someone was threatening to take it from him. Ilya said Shane ate food like an only child. Shane wasn’t sure any other person had ever had any kind of opinion on the way he ate food.
Ilya washed, Shane dried, Shane applied moisturizer to Ilya’s hands because Ilya never did himself and also never wore dish gloves, and then Shane force fed him after dinner mints, because chicken and salmon, Jesus Christ. After enduring these indignities, Ilya retreated to the living room where he sprawled flat on his back on the couch, turning the TV on, which was already on ESPN and mute, how they liked it. Instead of Shane joining him he sat on the floor in front of the couch, by Ilya’s hip, his back to the TV. Eventually he’d get up and curl against Ilya, or on Ilya, but he just wanted to look a little first.
From this angle he could see how Ilya’s belly was swelling from the dinner. Shane pushed Ilya’s t-shirt up and started rubbing circles around his navel, resting his cheek against the corner of the couch cushion, the angle exaggerating the curve. It made him excited for when Ilya would start bulking again. Not that he preferred Ilya bigger, but he loved witnessing the change. For too long he’d only gotten glimpses of Ilya in one state or another, never getting to see how those states morphed into each other, day by day. Clean shaven to stubbly, bruised to healed, hulking to lean. Now he did.
“I love seeing you like this,” Shane said, flushed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever stop feeling embarrassed at how deep his feelings for Ilya ran. Sometimes Ilya would mess with him about it, accuse him all outraged of being obsessed, of having a crush.
“You want to get me pregnant,” Ilya said, like it was a given.
Shane smiled. “No, just. I love seeing parts of you that other people don’t get to.” Literally thousands of people had seen Ilya topless, but Shane didn’t think any of those photos had been taken immediately after a big meal.
Ilya exhaled through his nose. This was why it was worth saying embarrassing things, because of how Ilya reacted, like he’d just been given an unexpected and ostentatious gift. “Yes, same,” he said. “About you.”
But it wasn’t quite the same. Ilya didn’t have as many hidden parts. It felt like striking gold whenever Shane discovered one. “Sometimes I feel like most of me is stuff only you see,” Shane said.
“Hmm,” Ilya said. “I think you should jerk off about it.”
Ilya could switch out of sweetness pretty abruptly. Shane looked at him, eyes wide, and Ilya just raised his eyebrows.
“Now?” Shane asked.
“Yes, now,” Ilya said. “Stay where you are.”
So Shane put his hand – not on his dick, on his own stomach, because he wasn’t even turned on right now, hadn’t even been thinking about sex.
Not that it took much, took long, with Ilya’s eyes on him. His dick was twitching before he’d pushed down his waistband. He slipped his hand into his briefs, rubbed himself over, then reached for the drawer in the coffee table to get the lotion, wetted his grip. As he slid back into his pants he knelt up higher so he could bend over Ilya and drop his head down, nose into the crease of Ilya’s warm thigh, press his face against Ilya’s clothed crotch. Ilya’s hand wrapped in his hair, held him there, the first real touch he’d given Shane, so Shane wouldn’t move for anything. He got to work, pulling himself into full hardness, and he wasn’t thinking of anything in particular or wanting anything in particular, just appreciating being near Ilya like this, the weight of Ilya’s hand. It was an objectively sort of humiliating position to be in, made worse by the fact that Ilya, his dick against Shane’s cheek, wasn’t hard – or he was a little, but not fully. Shane always felt so weird about that, being hard when Ilya wasn’t. He pulled his cheek away, pressed his mouth down instead, open, hoping to trick Ilya into needing more. Ilya didn’t move, didn’t change the rules of the game, but he got harder beneath Shane’s still tongue, and it was probably that that got Shane close to the edge.
“Only I see this,” Ilya said. Of course only Ilya saw it. Shane wasn’t sure it existed when Ilya wasn’t there. Ilya tightened his grip in Shane’s hair, the first move he’d made since he put his hand in Shane’s hair, and Shane came.
Shane pulled away from Ilya’s crotch, rested his head against Ilya’s thigh, breathed.
“Feel better?” Ilya asked, like Shane had been restless for it, like Ilya hadn’t just foisted the orgasm on him out of nowhere. Shane ignored him, turned around and jostled open the drawer in their coffee table for the wet wipes. He climbed out of his sweats and his briefs, cleaned himself under Ilya’s gaze, and pulled the sweats back on. Ignored Ilya’s protests and left to appropriately deal with his briefs and the wet wipes, returned and lay down along Ilya’s side.
“Finally,” Ilya said, all drawn out and dramatic, as he pulled Shane closer against him. “You like making me wait.”
“If I’d left that stuff here I wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes on the couch before I had to go deal with it,” Shane said. “You know that.”
Ilya made a noise of reluctant agreement. “And now you have dealt with them, how long will you last on the couch?”
Shane smiled. It was a big couch, comfy. Ilya had chosen it, one of the few items in the house he hadn’t been happy to leave to Shane and Shane’s designer. “How long do you want me?” Shane asked.
“When is our next game,” Ilya asked, even though Shane knew he knew.
“Two days,” Shane said. “Home, seven pm, against Edmonton.”
“Okay,” Ilya said. “So we can stay here until six that evening. Plenty of time to get to the arena, get changed.”
While they mightn't make it quite until then, Shane did suddenly want to stay on the couch for as long as possible. After over a week in hotel beds the orthopedic mattress upstairs was obviously the right choice, but Shane might pass it up just this first night. Ilya had already, in the past, called the couch their slutty mistress.
He settled more firmly against Ilya, his cheek on Ilya’s chest. Ilya’s chain was beneath him, digging into him, so he pulled it free and kissed it, and at Ilya’s hum, put the pendant into his mouth. Ilya squeezed the back of his neck, and Shane slid his hand down Ilya, past his waist band, squeezed his hip, scratched the hair, settled his palm at the base of Ilya’s dick. Ilya’s free hand wrapped lightly around Shane’s forearm, just above his wrist, and he used his heel to drag Shane’s leg between his, and then they were finished arranging themselves.
“Starting now?” Ilya said.
Shane leaned his hips more heavily against Ilya’s, and said, “Now.”
This was a game they’d been playing for a while, always while cuddling, where they’d hold themselves completely still. First one to move lost. In the past the record was forty minutes, but with this time off Shane imagined them staying like this for hours. Days.
The second secret object of the game was to snooze. It was where the game came from, even, Shane telling Ilya that when he’d struggled to sleep as a child he’d just force himself to stop moving, stop rearranging himself, and it would somehow still his mind, too. Something Ilya knew that nobody else knew; not because it was a secret but because nobody had ever spent as much time combing through Shane as Ilya had. Ilya had resurrected it in this new form, and Shane suspected it was because he wanted to feel in some way tied to Shane's childhood, the way Shane was looking for a way to tie himself to Ilya's.
It was hard to explain how much their privacy meant to Shane, having their own world, their slutty mistress couch and lying completely still and Ilya screaming in the kitchen while Shane unloaded the laundry. It was hard to explain because for so long all that had mattered was proving himself to the world, as a hockey player and latterly as Ilya Rozanov’s keeper. Shane’s name had appeared three times on Ilya’s wikipedia page back when Ilya was in Boston, and he’d check it every couple months, read those three sentences again and again, one with reference to their draft class being considered the most talented in over a decade, two with reference to records they held jointly. His name got added twice more once they started the charity. Now it was up to thirteen Shane Hollander hyperlinks, and that thrilled Shane, it did, how hard it would be for anyone to know about Ilya without knowing about him, too. It just also thrilled him to know how completely inadequately that wikipedia page captured him and Ilya.
Playing on the same team together wasn’t even something they’d had time to build a fantasy of before it was happening, but it presented a similar paradox. A new shared group of trusted friends to witness them and know them, which meant so much, and a new group of people that Shane and Ilya sometimes needed to guard themselves from.
Shane and Ilya weren’t just teammates. Ilya was the captain. It was still a little weird, seeing all these other grown men wait for Ilya’s say so the way Shane did. When he first signed with Ottawa he’d worried he might struggle with it because – well. Because one time one of Ilya’s non hockey friends was being annoying and Ilya had told him to sit down and shut up and he had, immediately, and Shane had kind of seen red. He still didn’t really like that friend much. He didn’t like someone responding to Ilya the way he did; it was his response. He was an only child, he didn’t know how to share. Thankfully, it turned out Shane had been in hockey long enough to distinguish between players following their captain’s lead and the specific way he liked to follow Ilya. The only slight complication was that watching Ilya run the room could get Shane turned on. Ilya insisted this wasn’t a complication but rather a perk. The point was, regardless, that it was a space where Shane felt profoundly and intimately bound up in Ilya, and a space they necessarily had to share with others.
The only time things were simple was on the ice or in their home, just the two of them. On the couch, the muted TV flickering across their faces, touching all over, well-fed, tired, nothing that needed saying. Shane did drift off.
He had no sense of how much time had passed when he came into consciousness again, and anyway couldn’t really remember what time it had been when they’d gotten on the couch in the first place. It was definitely fully night by now, but Ilya wasn’t sleeping, he was on his phone, and Shane didn’t really feel all that tired either, more energy than he’d usually have first thing after a nap. The chain was out of his mouth – he could feel it back under his cheek where it would probably leave a mark – but his hand was still in Ilya’s pants. That, he realized, was why he felt so awake; his thumb was hooked around the base of Ilya’s dick, which was hard. He tightened the curl of his hand around it and heard Ilya’s breath turn gravelly in the back of his throat. He dragged his hand up, let his thumb catch at Ilya’s head, pulled down again.
“You awake?” Ilya asked, quiet.
“Obviously,” Shane said, smiling against Ilya’s arm.
Ilya made a noise of dissent. “You were doing this in your sleep, too.”
Shane lifted his head, aghast. “Jerking you off?”
Ilya hummed out a laugh, putting his phone down flat on his chest. “Not really,” he said. “But squeezing.”
“Jesus,” Shane said, dropping his head heavily back down.
“It was hot.”
Of course Ilya thought that. “Yeah, well, you’re gonna have to put up with a boring old fully conscious hand job, now.”
“You know boring makes me come so fast,” Ilya said.
“Have you been awake the whole time?” Shane asked, looking down at his hand working over Ilya, under the cloth. The room wasn’t brightly lit and at some point Ilya had turned off the TV, but the corner lamp was doing enough for Shane to still make the movement out. Shane’s other hand was trapped between them, but Ilya, as though reading Shane’s mind, pulled the waistband of his sweats down so they could both see Shane’s grip on him.
“I think so, yes,” Ilya said, his voice hard in that way it got when he was in Shane’s mouth or ass or hand, when he had to exert force to stop it from breaking.
“How long did we stay still?”
“Fifty minutes,” Ilya said, and Shane looked up so he could see the smile he heard. “New record.”
Shane smiled back, and Ilya hooked his fingers along Shane’s jaw, pulled him into a kiss. Shane pulled himself half on top of him even though it made the angle of the hand job weird, and kissed him sloppily and gratuitously. He was suddenly struck by an intense, disbelieving happiness, like his twenty year old self had just woken up in his brain and looked around at the life he’d somehow made for himself. That Ilya had made for him. It was not the first time he’d gotten this feeling, nor the first time on this couch, nor the first time with his hand down Ilya’s pants.
The drag wasn’t as dry as it should have been, and Shane wondered how long Ilya had been hard, leaking, before Shane woke up. There was sweat too, Shane’s hand was sweating, all warm and tucked away. When Ilya started to come Shane tried to break the kiss to watch but Ilya held him in place with his hand on the back of Shane’s neck, bit down on Shane’s lip and made a noise that vibrated into Shane’s jawbone. Ilya kept the kiss going after, too, when Shane had pulled his hand away from Ilya’s softening dick and had to keep it hovering in the air, not able to clean it until Ilya let him go.
Once Ilya deemed himself sufficiently well-kissed, and once the clean up was dealt with, they repositioned themselves again, tangling their legs in a new configuration, Shane a little higher on the couch so he could see the crown of Ilya’s head if he stretched. “What were you looking at?” Shane asked. “On your phone.”
“Clothes,” Ilya said, picking his phone back up and unlocking it.
“Ugh, Ilya,” Shane said, warningly. Ilya owned an amount of clothing that Shane found concerning. Shane had earnestly told him he should talk about it in therapy, which had made Ilya laugh very hard.
“Found something I like, look,” Ilya said, and navigated to the right tab. The page had a European name at the top that Shane didn’t recognize, but he suspected if he called it a brand Ilya would get annoyed, because it was a designer or a fashion house or something. Anyway, Shane’s real concern was the t-shirt – six hundred dollars for a silky t-shirt with weird metallic details. Ilya swiped through the photos slowly, like he wanted Shane to appreciate all the different angles.
“That’s so fucking ugly,” Shane said. “Where would you ever wear that?”
“Film premieres,” Ilya said.
“When have you ever been to a film premiere,” Shane said.
“Weddings,” Ilya said, like film premieres had only been the first item on a list and Shane had interrupted him. “Doctor’s appointments. Yard work.”
“Seriously,” Shane said, frowning at the screen. “Would you ever wear that?”
Ilya shrugged, then gently pushed Shane off him, leaving his phone on Shane’s chest as he rose from the couch. Shane watched him leave the room, come back less than a minute later with something in his hand. He placed it on Shane’s chest, turned the phone facing screen up, and climbed back on the couch, hefting Shane against him. Careful not to jostle his phone, or Shane’s wallet.
“Fuck you,” Shane said.
“Maybe,” Ilya said. “But first I want the shirt.”
“Really?” Shane asked, turning to look at him, and Ilya gave him a quick peck. Shane began to feel that squirming version of something, humiliation or importance or a combination of both that really ought not to exist, that he sometimes felt like Ilya had invented, had planted in him. Ilya had said something similar, once, that the way Shane could make him feel powerful and exposed at the same time shouldn’t have been possible.
Ilya shrugged. “I like it,” he said, like that was all, like it was Shane’s decision, really, what to do with that. Shane took out his card and bought it. Felt that panic and sense of lost control that hit at any large and unjustifiable expense, but it was immediately worth it for Ilya’s wide eyed smile, the way he got when he couldn’t quite believe Shane.
Ilya crawled down the length of him, pushed down his waistband, looked up and smiled and said, “No mess this time,” and took him into his mouth. Not yet fully hard, Shane still had the brain capacity to wonder if they’d keep like this during this little break, taking turns getting off, never at the same time. It was pretty fun, not something they’d done before.
This, Shane spending money on Ilya, had been a thing since their first visit to the cottage, when Ilya had seen how many of the groceries Shane had gotten specifically with Ilya in mind. It hadn’t quite made sense to Shane, how much that seemed to mean to Ilya, but it got him hooked pretty quickly. He could buy Ilya a candy bar or a book or gold cufflinks and Ilya would get all awed and emotional.
Ilya bought Shane things too but that didn’t really have the same kind of thrill, because Ilya gave hundred dollar bills to trick or treaters, had already picked out the watches he would get everyone on the roster if they won the cup this year. Shane used the calculator app for tips and got his shoes repaired instead of replacing them. On the flip side: Shane had a grandma who still sent him money at Christmas, and since his mom’s death most of Ilya’s gifts had come from sponsors. So it just meant more, to and from both of them, when Shane was doing the spoiling.
Ilya pulled off to lick up the length of him and the analysis momentarily shut down, Shane focusing on the first thing that had ever gotten him out of his head other than hockey, Ilya Rozanov’s mouth. His hands stroked through Ilya’s hair, felt over the stretch of his jaw, as Ilya groped his chest. Ilya wasn’t taking him all that deep, kept letting Shane’s head hit and rub against the roof of his mouth. Sometimes during games, if the stakes weren’t all that high, Ilya would try something new for no reason at all, just to see if he could, and he was like that with giving head, too. In both cases it tended to work out well for him. Shane came and Ilya took it all, no mess.
Ilya worked his way back up the couch and pulled Shane on top of him, stroked up and down his back as Shane recovered.
The analysis returned: they were kind of running through their greatest hits, sleeping on the couch, motionless cuddling, Shane spending stupid money on Ilya, like they had to pack as much as possible of themselves into this time together. Which was a little silly, because it wasn’t like they ever had much time apart. Shane knew it was ridiculous to miss Ilya in this new life of theirs, but he did, an echo of how he’d missed him when he’d actually gone weeks or months without him. They just didn’t always get to be this, this most fundamental version of them. Not when they were Yuna and David’s kids, or charity ambassadors, or teammates. Back when they had hardly ever got each other, once they did it was always tinged with anxiety over the imminent ending, and Shane still felt that too, when he was at home with Ilya. Probably that was why they hadn’t gone to bed, why they hadn’t called it a night. They needed to make the most of this. Shane had managed not to notice the time, when he’d been buying that t-shirt on Ilya’s phone.
“Were you dreaming of me?” Ilya asked.
“What?”
“When you were sleeping,” Ilya said. “You were—” Ilya twitched a little, tilted his head from one side to the other. Ilya had found all these other ways of communicating, back when he’d struggled with English, and even though he was essentially fluent now he still sometimes liked using gestures and pantomime and exaggerated facial expressions rather than or alongside words. Shane liked it too, liked all of Ilya’s physicality.
“And you want me to be doing that about you?”
“I want everything to be about me,” Ilya said, which was lucky, because everything was. “Do you remember your dream?”
“Bits of it,” Shane said. “It was kind of weird. I was in this room and I had to get through a bunch of paperwork before I could leave, but I stopped being able to read it. Like it was just sort of squiggles on the pages. But I kept signing all the places marked to sign even though I didn’t know what any of it was.” Shane belatedly realized this was a lame thing to confess, that he literally dreamed of paperwork.
“Baby,” Ilya said, sounding shocked and laughing a little. “This is not good. This is very bad.”
“You mean because it’s boring?”
“No,” Ilya said, eyebrows up, but there was still laughter in his voice, so Shane didn’t worry. “I mean I am scared the love of my life has these dreams. Being stuck in a room, not understanding important stuff.”
“It’s not like it really means something,” Shane said, always skeptical of anything to do with his subconscious. “I sign a lot of forms, it’s gonna come up.”
“Do you sign these forms in rooms you can’t leave?”
Shane rolled his eyes. “You’re into dream interpretation now?”
Ilya smiled like he had a secret, and after a couple moments revealed what it was. “I do some of it in therapy,” he said. “Talk about my dreams.”
Shane stared at him. “I think I’m jealous of your therapist,” he said, and Ilya laughed.
“Offer still stands,” Ilya said. His therapist apparently wanted Shane to come along to one of Ilya’s sessions. Ilya said she was just angling for an autograph, but it was obviously more serious, something like couple’s therapy, and Shane wasn’t sure he was willing to do that. He could only imagine the things she knew about him, the things Ilya had shared about him, which he wasn’t allowed to begrudge Ilya but which still sort of terrified him.
“Tell me one of your dreams,” Shane said. “And tell me what she said about it, I bet she was wrong.” He was playing it up to make Ilya laugh again, and it worked. But also there was no way there was somebody better at understanding Ilya's brain than Shane.
“I dreamed recently that you and me had built a bunker,” Ilya said. “In our yard. Because there was a tornado coming. We were bringing all these supplies down there. Lots of supplies, because we didn’t know how long it would last.”
Shane smiled into Ilya’s shoulder. “That’s nice.”
“Really?” Ilya asked, sounding amused. “My therapist did not think so.”
“Told you, she’s wrong,” Shane said. “You and me, together, looking after each other. Surviving the storm. It’s nice.”
Ilya’s shoulder shook beneath Shane as he laughed. “I have finally found something you would be bad at,” he said. “You’d be a fucking terrible therapist. You’d think everyone was doing fine.”
Shane smiled. Ilya pulled him further on top of him, pursed his lips ridiculously for a kiss. Shane obliged. Pulled away to say, “Not everyone. Us.”
Ilya said something in Russian, too quick for Shane to parse, because sometimes when Ilya spoke it it was still just for him. His arms tightened around Shane.
Unwelcomed, Shane had to swallow a yawn. “Do you know the time?”
“No,” Ilya said. “Later than you usually stay up during the season, though. Can we sleep here?”
Shane nodded his head against Ilya’s chest. They were still wearing the clothes they’d worn on the plane, and they were on the couch, and there was a lamp still on, and they hadn’t brushed their teeth or pulled the blinds, but these were all things Shane could get away with, with Ilya, no need for propriety or to prove himself. And if he woke up sore and gross and cranky and regretful Ilya would just love him sore and gross and cranky and regretful.
When they rose from the couch the next morning Ilya patted the back of it affectionately, like it was a horse he was dismounting after a long journey, and Shane fell in love with him a little bit harder. They brushed their teeth and showered, pulled on clean clothes, made coffee and returned to the couch, this time sitting upright, Shane’s legs across Ilya’s lap, ESPN on mute. Ilya’s fingers were playing with the hairs at the nape of Shane’s neck, and Shane was struggling to keep his eyes open.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Ilya said, “Sometimes I think maybe it would scare you if you knew how much I loved you.”
“Ilya,” Shane said, chiding, forcing his eyes open. “I do know.”
“I think crazy things,” Ilya said.
“Like what?”
“Like building a bunker for us.”
Shane smiled. “You know I’m on board with that.”
Ilya pulled at his hair and Shane said, “I’ve been thinking crazy things since we got home.”
“Good,” Ilya said, and Shane settled against him, turned his attention to the college basketball highlights on the screen.
“Do you ever envy other couples?” he asked, after a while. “Because they’ve always had this, and it’s so normal to them, and we had to go without for so long.”
“Oh,” Ilya said. “No. The opposite, really.”
Shane couldn’t work out what the opposite of that would be, so he tilted his head.
“Like, when I think of other couples,” Ilya said. “And I think of what we’ve been through... I don’t know. I feel proud, maybe. I wonder if they would be able to survive what we survived. It is not easy to love someone as much as we love each other, to get through everything we got through. We’re real lovers. We’re like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Ilya, they die,” Shane said, a little embarrassed to be pedantic, but. Survival just really hadn’t been their thing.
“Well then we’re even better than them,” Ilya said. “Which proves my point, really. We're the best couple of all time.”
“Ah,” Shane said. “Thanks for letting me know. That’s a relief.”
Ilya pinched his cheek. “If I haven’t convinced you, just picture these couples you envy having bad sex. Then you won’t mind so much everything we’ve been through.”
“Because our sex is good,” Shane said.
“Yes,” Ilya said. “It makes everything worth it.”
Shane laughed. He drank some coffee and watched Ilya drink some coffee. “I just want you all the time,” Shane said. “And I'm not used to sharing you. I've never learned to share. Even though I like the things I'm supposed to share you with."
Ilya nodded.
“Is that how you feel too?” Shane asked.
"Yes,” Ilya said. “Like, I hate that our lockers aren’t beside each other. Even though I know why and I think those reasons are good.”
“Right,” Shane said, feeling a little relieved. “Exactly. I wish we didn’t have to care about anything else.”
Ilya nodded. “Unfortunately we are the best hockey players of all time,” he said. “And we have family and friends who love us deeply.”
"The best family and friends of all time," Shane said, to make Ilya smile. “So what do you do about it?”
“I do what I did when we started out,” Ilya said. “When I have you all to myself I pretend it will last forever.”
Shane swallowed, kissed the side of Ilya’s nose. “So we’re just never going to leave this couch again,” he said.
“Never,” Ilya said, happily.