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Ilya has felt a little crazy ever since he heard his name called from the stage at the 2009 draft.
He’d risen jerkily out of his seat, a puppet whose strings had been given a sharp tug, and before he’d even decided to walk, he was walking, squeezing past applauding strangers and out into the aisle leading up to the stage.
Up behind the podium a bright screen had displayed the Raiders logo, the harsh yellow glow forming ugly halos around the heads of the general manager and commissioner, whose expressions had looked satisfied, expectant, as they’d joined in on the applause.
These strangers had decided Ilya would spend the next three years of his life in Boston, and so Ilya would spend the next three years of his life in Boston.
It had occurred to Ilya, then, as he’d ascended the stairs at the side of the stage, as he’d slid his numb fingers into brisk handshakes and then ducked his head to pull on the jersey they’d handed him, that he was not in control of his own life.
That hadn’t been the first time Ilya had realized this, of course. He had known it ever since he’d reached out over the fresh pit they’d dug in his family’s cemetery plot and loosened his fingers to let the lily clutched in his fist drop.
It might have been the first time he had really accepted it, though.
It was a pretty good life, a very American-dream life, the one Ilya wasn’t in control of. It would be silly to complain about no free time and strict diet plans and stricter workout plans and always being told where to go, where to be, what language he could speak and who he couldn’t fuck, when the payoff was a big house and nice cars and millions of dollars left over in his bank account.
And despite all of that— even though he’s not a teenager, anymore, even though he’s had to years to have gotten used to it— the lack of control still makes Ilya feel crazy.
At least, it had made him feel crazy right up until two days ago, when he’d put Shane up against the windows in his sun-drenched cottage bedroom for the first time and gotten one hand under Shane’s jaw, the other around Shane’s left upper arm.
Shane had gone liquid in his grip, sagged back against the glass. Tipped his head back, parted his lips, and waited for Ilya to decide what to do next.
It was like some anxious, twisting animal in Ilya’s chest had abruptly gone limp.
It was his own choice, what to do next, Ilya had thought, and tightened his grip.
Two nights later, on the couch beside the firepit, Ilya notices the bruise when Shane, getting flushed halfway through his second glass of wine, shrugs off his jacket and turns to drape it over the back of the cushions.
It’s stark in the flicker of the orange light, a dark line pressed into the swell of his bicep, just below the sleeve of his t-shirt. By the time Shane twists back around, Ilya is already closing his hand over it to find that his thumb and forefinger line up perfectly with the edges.
Shane’s eyes dip to follow Ilya’s gaze. “What are you thinking?” he asks.
Ilya isn’t sure. He hasn’t quite decided how to describe the feeling that keeps swelling up inside of him, when Shane offers Ilya soft parts of himself to squeeze. “Does it hurt?” he asks, instead of answering.
Shane reaches for the side table, collects his glass of wine as his eyes flicker back up to meet Ilya’s. He takes a slow sip, then says, “Yes.”
Ilya feels certain, when he says, “You like it.”
Shane’s mouth is wine-stained, his gaze steady. “Yes,” he says, again.
It makes Ilya feel a strange kind of aching pride, to see Shane’s bravery. To see how comfortable in his own skin he seems, now that he’s no longer choking back the things he wants to tell Ilya.
He looks especially beautiful like this, freckled and dark-lipped, with his skin shining golden in the firelight. Ilya smiles at him as he carefully, deliberately tightens his grip on Shane’s arm.
Shane’s breath catches audibly in his throat.
“What do you like about it?” Ilya asks.
Shane’s gaze dips back down to where Ilya’s fingers are pressing into the bruise. He takes another drink of wine, then says, “I like it when you leave marks.”
Probably true, but that answer doesn’t force Shane far enough out of his comfort zone for Ilya’s liking. Ilya presses his thumb in deeper, watches the reflection of the flames in Shane’s widening pupils, and says, “You like that I’m stronger than you.”
It’s a hit, an easy one. Shane’s mouth, which had been going slack with arousal, compresses abruptly before he says, “You are not.”
“I think I am,” Ilya says.
It’s delicious, how easy it is to rile Shane up. All it ever takes to get him flustered is a tug at his competitiveness. He sits up straight, lowering his glass as he demands, “What are you deadlifting?”
“Two twenty five,” Ilya says.
Shane’s mouth wobbles. A beat too long passes before he says, a little breathlessly, “Kilograms?”
“Yes,” Ilya says, although he usually counts pounds in Boston, because that’s what the weights in the cottage gym are in. He loosens his grip on Shane’s arm, strokes his thumb over the bruise, as if in apology.
Shane shakes his head, like he’s trying not to let himself get distracted from what he’s clearly decided is a competition. “I’m faster than you,” he says.
“Hm,” says Ilya. “Running or skating?”
Shane hesitates. His face is getting redder.
Ilya’s pretty sure Shane’s not tracking, at least not very well, just how quickly he’s been downing that wine, and he’s even easier to read than normal when he’s tipsy. Ilya can practically see Shane working to calculate which terrain he’d be more likely to win on before he says, decisively, “Skating.”
Ilya hums, lifts his free hand, see-saws it in the air. “Maybe.”
Shane sits up, abruptly enough that Ilya’s loosened grip falls from his bruised arm. “Definitely,” he says, outraged. “Probably outright. Definitely in an agility course.”
Ilya arches one eyebrow, a move calculated to rile Shane up even more, because Ilya loves Shane like this, when he gets indignant and demanding. It’s the easiest, quickest way to get him to be rude, to turn him into a frustrated, pouting brat too irritated to admit how badly he wants to be taken in hand.
“If you say so,” Ilya says, as doubtfully as he can manage.
“I can prove it,” Shane says, and stands, so abruptly he almost spills his wine. He looms there, between Ilya and the fire, his black hair gleaming, and thrusts his hand down toward Ilya.
Ilya doesn’t hesitate, just smiles, picks up his own glass, then reaches out with his other hand to clasp Shane’s warm fingers, obligingly let himself be pulled to his feet.
Shane lets go of Ilya’s hand, then. Hands Ilya his own wine glass, turns, picks up to the top to the fire pit, clamps it down to smother the flames.
Ilya, bemused, stands there and watches, a half-full wine glass in each hand. The sloping lawn between the cottage deck and the edge of the dark water is lit now only by the glow leaking out from the windows behind them. “Where are we going?” he asks Shane, who is still bustling around, stashing away all of the fire-starting equipment.
Shane stands, turns, so that the light from the cottage washes over the determined expression on his face. “The rink,” he says.
They go in through the sliding door on the deck. Ilya leaves the wine glasses on the kitchen counter as he follows Shane to the side door and out again, onto the short, stone-tiled path winding toward where the gray outbuilding, framed by trees at the foot of the hill on which the cottage is perched, is lit only by solar-powered night lights that click on when the sun sets.
There’s a cold wind curling in from the water, but Ilya hasn’t bothered to put on shoes, and the stone tiles are still sun-warm against the soles of his bare feet. When Ilya glances back over his shoulder, he sees the cottage looming above them, lights shining cheerfully through the big living room windows.
It’s a dark night, with the moon just a thin sliver sliced out of the star-studded sky domed above them. With the dark trees curling around the house’s left flank and the inky ripple of the water to the right, the cottage looks like it might be the only source of light left in the world.
Shane reaches back, clasps Ilya’s hand in his. Tugs him impatiently down the path, toward where more automatic lights flicker on as they approach the outbuilding.
Ilya has been inside, mostly to use the gym revealed in the stark overhead lights that Shane flicks on as they enter. But he’s only once been into the back room once, back when Shane, still giggling, hair still mussed, had given Ilya his initial tour of the property.
The miniature rink is bigger than Ilya remembers, when he sees it for the second time. It must be half the size of an NHL sheet, waiting behind boards and tall glass panels with its smooth, wet surface painted with faithful replications of face-off circles and a blue line.
“Regulation markings?” Ilya asks.
Shane, who had stopped behind him, to flick on the remainder of the lights, scoffs, “Obviously.”
The smell of the ice is familiar, grounding. It feels like it’s pulling Ilya back into his body, after that floaty feeling he’d gotten from the wine.
There is a small set of locker room stalls on the wall opposite the rink, stocked with hockey equipment and skates. Ilya stops by the boards, leans against the outside of the glass and crosses his arms over his chest to watch as Shane, flushed and determined, strips off his pants, climbs in his boxers into a pair of hockey pants before he leans down to reach for skates.
He turns, then, and sees Ilya watching him. “Well?” he says, impatiently, and hooks his thumb toward the stall beside him. “We’re practically the same skate size, aren’t we? What are you waiting for?”
Ilya wouldn’t have minded waiting forever, if it involved watching Shane Hollander’s deft hands on his skate laces.
It’s not necessary, of course, to take off your shirt before putting on hockey pants. Ilya decides to do it, anyway, just for good measure.
Shane straightens from his skates, sees Ilya’s bare chest, rolls his eyes. And then he clomps past Ilya, in his t-shirt and bulky hockey pants, swings open the door to the rink, and skates out onto the ice.
Ilya looks down, tugs open the tongue of one of Shane’s spare skates. There’s something intimate about sliding his foot into a skate that had already been fit to Shane’s proportions. Forcing himself in there. Making himself fit.
By the time Ilya follows Shane out onto the ice, Shane has already almost finished setting up the agility course, a cone-staked slalom spanning almost the entirety of the half-rink.
Ilya shuts the rink door behind him. Then he glides in slow circles, just to get his blades underneath him, as he watches Shane skate back, observe the course with a frown, and then re-approach so he can reach down and twitch the last cone slightly farther out.
It’s so very appealing, to see Shane like this, bare-legged beneath his hockey pants, with wine stains at the corners of his mouth and the bruise stark on his upper arm.
Shane looks up, sees Ilya watching, and pushes off to skate toward him. Ilya sees when Shane gets closer that he’s holding a stopwatch.
“We’ll skate to the other end and back,” Shane says. His expression is very serious. “Time stops when you clear the last cone. Maybe we’ll do a time penalty, or something, if you knock a cone over.”
“I won’t,” Ilya says. “We can wait to figure out until you do it.”
Shane grins at him, and Ilya can see the effect of the alcohol in the soft way it spreads across his face. “Asshole,” he says, fondly. And then he skates away, showing off his neat backward strides, until his elbows fetch up against the glass.
Shane holds up the stopwatch, says, “Ready when you are.”
Ilya extends his arms, rolls out his shoulders. Skates slowly to the beginning of the course.
It’s only when he’s standing there, eyeing the line of cones between him and the opposite end of the rink, that he realizes how very badly he wants to win.
“When do I start?” he asks, looking down. He suddenly wishes he’d taken this a little more seriously, that he’d put on socks or spent more time lacing up his skates or maybe hadn’t so cheerily taken his shirt off, so that his skin was now getting goose-pebbled in the chill of the rink.
“When I say go,” Shane says, like it had been a stupid question.
Ilya frowns. “Yes, but when will you—”
“Go,” Shane shouts, and Ilya doesn’t even have time to curse at him before he’s pushing off, darting past the first cone with Shane’s giggles echoing off the glass in his wake.
Ilya is clumsy, a little drunk and in ill-fitting skates, but he can skate. He’s been skating since before he could walk, skating before he’d been able to stand upright on the ice without his mother’s hands hooked under his arms. He’s seen the photos that prove it.
He wheels through the course quickly, deftly, and when he skids to a halt on the other side in a shower of snow he looks up, breathing quickly, to see Shane watching him with a small, quiet smile on his face.
“How’d I do?” Ilya pants at him, grinning back.
Shane says, “That was hot.” He flushes, then, like he hadn’t meant to say it. Looks down at the stopwatch and says, “Thirteen-point-two.”
“Ha,” says Ilya, satisfied. “Beat that.”
Shane, still flushed, skates forward, then hands Ilya the stopwatch and waits for Ilya to take his spot by the boards. “Hand on the button,” he says, bending down in front of the first cone, more like he’s about to take a faceoff than start sprinting.
“Sure,” Ilya says.
“Press it as soon as I’m past the first cone,” Shane instructs.
“Yes, Shane.”
“Or else it won’t be accurate when we—”
“Go,” Ilya says, just to be an asshole, and Shane is still gasping in outrage when he leaps forward with the sharp sound of his skates biting into ice.
Ilya’s never seen a hockey player who skates like Shane, before. He’d noticed it a decade ago, back when he was watching Shane’s highlights on YouTube and telling himself it was because he admired Shane’s technique, and Shane had since confirmed it in one of their late-night talks by the fire: Shane had learned from a figure skating coach, early in his career, and you can see it now in the deft way his blades cut the turns.
Shane curls past the last cone, swings around and keeps coming, grinning, toward Ilya. “Time,” he demands.
Ilya says, “Fifteen seconds.”
Shane’s mouth drops in outrage. “You liar,” he cries, and cuts just enough to slow down just before he shoulder-checks Ilya into the boards.
Ilya had braced for it. Shane, expecting him to go down easy, loses his balance when Ilya doesn’t budge, and he might have fallen hard if it wasn’t for Ilya reaching out, getting his hands under Shane’s arms, slowing Shane’s descent in time to turn his tumble into more of an abrupt sit-down on the ice.
Shane, mouth jarred open by the impact and still breathing hard, blinks up at Ilya. “That wasn’t my real time,” he pants.
His legs had splayed open, when his ass had hit the ice, and the edges of hockey pants have ridden up high on his muscled thighs.
“Ilya,” Shane says. He places his hands on the ice behind him, shifts forward, like he’s about to get up. “Tell me my—”
Ilya braces one hand behind him, against the glass. Lifts his right skate and lightly, carefully— making sure to keep all of his weight on his back boot, the one still on the ice— lowers it to rest the blade of his skate on the mesh-reinforced cup at the front of Shane’s pants.
Shane abruptly stops talking.
The skate is a practice boot, nothing like game-day quality, and the blade is a little dull.
It’s still sharp enough to cut, the silver gleaming in the fluorescent lights over the rink, and Shane is staring wide-eyed down at the press of it against his cup.
Ilya can’t see any movement, beneath the stiff curve of the mesh built into the front of Shane’s pants. He can still tell from the set of Shane’s shoulders, from the look in his eyes, that Shane is starting to get hard, splayed out on the ice with his dick beneath Ilya’s skate.
Ilya’s breath catches. He leans forward, just slightly, watches the edge of Shane’s cup start to bend beneath the weight of the blade.
His arousal is a dull thrum in his ears, a sting at the back of his eyes. He makes sure to keep his tone light, even, when he asks, “What did you say?”
Shane hasn’t taken his eyes off of Ilya’s skate. His arms give out, a little, so that he falls back to his elbows on the ice. He’s breathing so forcefully Ilya can see the rapid movement of his chest beneath the fabric of his t-shirt.
“I feel like,” Ilya says, “you were being rude.”
Shane’s eyes are so wide Ilya can see the whites all the way around. He makes a strangled sound at the back of his throat. His biceps are starting to tremble beneath him.
He looks big, like this, with his shoulders bunched and his muscled thighs spread wide. He’s so strong, and so quick on his skates, deft with his hockey stick, brave where Ilya has faltered; and he’s here, underneath Ilya’s blade, caught, pinned. Out of options. Left to Ilya’s control.
Ilya knows he’s showing too many teeth, when he grins. “I didn’t hear a please,” he says, and slides his skate blade, slowly, lightly, over the bulge of Shane’s cup.
Shane makes a guttural sound. His hips twitch before he forces them back down, his bare hands curling against the ice as he forces out, “Please...” and then seems to forget where he’d been going with it as he watches the slow drag of the blade over his cup.
“Please what,” Ilya prompts. His thigh is starting to burn with the effort of holding his foot aloft, of keeping the pressure of the blade against the fabric of Shane’s pants only the lightest scrape.
It’s worth it, to watch Shane visibly unravel beneath him. “Oh, God,” he says. Blurts it out, really, like he hadn’t meant to say it. “God, I can’t even remember what I wanted.”
Ilya’s teeth ache with how badly he wants to bite him. “Your time,” he prompts.
“Oh, right,” Shane breathes, “right, right,” and one hand is coming up from the ice, now, reaching for the top of Ilya’s skate, wrapping around it. Not like he’s trying to pull it away, more like he’s trying to find something with which he can anchor himself.
“Can I please,” Shane says, his voice thin, “please know my real time.”
Ilya looks down to see Shane’s bare fingers shaking against the top of Ilya’s skate.
Ilya is so hard that the edges of his own built-in cup are starting to hurt as he reaches into his pocket for the stopwatch, pulls it out, checks the screen.
He turns the timer around, silent, holds it out below him.
Shane raises his head, performs a half-crunch, squints upward. His face falls.
Ilya clicks his tongue. Does his best to keep his expression impassive, disappointed, like the way Shane’s starting to squirm beneath Ilya’s blade isn’t making him light-headed. “Try again,” he says, and lifts his skate from Shane’s cup. His thigh twinges with gratitude as he lowers it carefully back to the ice.
Shane is still sprawled on the ice, sweating, his wine-stained mouth open so he can gasp for air.
Ilya lifts an eyebrow. “What?” he asks. “You don’t think you can do any better?”
That gets Shane moving, lifting himself up with shaking hands, folding his legs so he can get his skates underneath him and rise with considerably less grace than he would normally. “Of course I can,” he snaps, and skates off, back to the start of the course, with all the steadiness of an infant deer trying out walking for the first time.
It had been a joy to watch Shane skate tipsy, with his movements smooth and his limbs long and loose.
It’s even better, Ilya finds, to watch him skate hard, dazed and aroused, stumbling a little on the turns. He clips the last cone with the heel of his skate as he swings around, spits out a shaky curse that echoes around the rink.
Ilya licks his lips. He presses the button as Shane clears the edge of the course and skates slowly over, his stance wide-legged, like he’s trying to make room for his cock.
“So I’m stronger than you,” Ilya says, “and faster than you.”
Shane is flushed, as he comes to a halt in front of Ilya. “You cheated,” he says.
“Yes,” Ilya agrees, amiably enough. He reaches out, gets his hand on Shane’s shoulder. “People who are stronger and faster than you can do that. People who are stronger and faster than you can do what they want.”
He pushes downward on Shane’s shoulder.
He doesn’t have to exert very much pressure. Shane folds like he’d barely been able to restrain himself from doing it without prompting, shockingly graceful in how he gets his bare knees to the ice, and then he and Ilya are both fumbling at the front of Ilya’s hockey pants.
Ilya takes himself in hand, bare, and there’s something jarring, shocking, about seeing his own hard dick against the familiar white glare of the ice. To be in skates, and to take himself in hand.
To have Shane Hollander, on his knees on the ice, his blades gleaming behind him and his wine-stained mouth open wide.
“Fuck,” says Ilya, and presses the tip of his dick against Shane’s lower lip. “God, fuck, Hollander, you are so fucking dirty.” He’s in awe. He’s in love. He gets his hands on Shane’s face, tips it gently back, gets Shane at just the right ankle. Leans forward to slide slowly across the plush wet cushion of Shane’s tongue.
Shane looks up at him, wet-eyed. Ilya can feel his throat flex, the same muscles that move when he yawns, as he gets himself open wide.
He’s so wet, the grip of his mouth so tight and hot around Ilya’s aching dick. “Feels good,” Ilya groans, and then reaches down, gets a grip on Hollander’s shoulder, tugs at him. Slides one skate in between Shane’s legs as he does so, presents Shane with his bare shin. “C’mere. Come closer,” he commands.
Shane’s eyes are watering, now, and his head’s so far back there’s no way he could see the movement, but he must understand what Ilya means, anyway. He shuffles in closer, bare knees scraping the ice, until he’s straddling Ilya’s skate. Until the slippery fabric at the front of his hockey pants rubs against Ilya’s shin.
“Oh, Hollander,” Ilya says, stroking his hands over the sides of Shane’s face, his smooth black hair. Thumbing a tear from his bottom lashes. Says, like he’s just now noticing, “You’re hard? Just because I stepped on your dick?”
Shane’s hands spasm where he’s left them slack against his sides, because Ilya hadn’t told him to move them, because what he does with them is up to Ilya. His nostrils flare. He leans forward, makes a wet noise. The soft cling at the back of his throat feels impossibly good as it stutters against the head of Ilya’s cock.
Ilya groans, clutches at the sides of Shane’s face. “It’s so fucked up,” he groans, “that you’re going to think about this every fucking time you’re on the ice.”
Shane’s eyes widen. His hips stutter forward, up into Ilya’s bare shin.
“Oh, Hollander, you’re fucked,” says Ilya, his vowels getting longer as he tightens his grip on Shane’s ears, dips himself in hot, wet slides into Shane’s wet mouth. “You’re never going to be able to get it out of your mind, you’re fucked,” and Shane is fumbling closer, rubbing urgently against his shin, now, fuck, it all feels so good, he can feel his balls drawing tight already.
The smell of the rink is sharp in his nostrils, the echoes off the glass and the bright lights so familiar. If he half-closes his eyes he might be in TD Garden. He might be standing at center ice.
“You’re going to skate up for the face-off,” Ilya hisses, pulling Shane’s sweet mouth down harder. Shane’s lips are so soft but he’s getting clumsy, now, he’s too focused on humping against Ilya’s shin, there are hints of teeth, it hurts, Ilya’s starting to lose it. “I’ll be waiting there,” he groans, his fingers flexing, “and you are going to look down at my big boots and my big fucking blades and you are going to think about what they felt like against your cock—”
Shane’s hips spasm against Ilya’s shin, and he lets out a thin sob— it must be agony, the friction as he shudders and pumps come into the mesh— and it’s that, the wet clutch of his agonized groan against the head of Ilya’s cock, that makes Ilya close his hands over the sides of Shane’s skull and double over him with a groan that echoes off the boards as he paints hot lines down Shane’s throat.
They stay there, tangled, for a long moment. And then they slowly pull apart, Ilya reaching down to slide his cock out of Shane’s throat as gently as possible, Shane leaning back, wincing, one hand reaching down to massage one ice-scraped knee, the other gingerly pulling at the waistband of his hockey pants, like he’s trying to get the mesh away from where he’s most sensitive.
Ilya gets down on his knees, right there on the ice beside Shane. Leans over him, his beautiful boy fucked-out and sprawled on the rink, gets Shane’s chin in his hand, closes his mouth gently, tenderly, over Shane’s hot, swollen lower lip. Then he pulls back, just far enough to meet Shane’s eyes, and says, “You are okay?”
Shane blinks at him. There are still tears clinging to his lower lashes, but the muscles beside his eyes are soft, relaxed like they usually only are on painkillers. “That was so hot,” he says.
The relief is a sweet, hot seep into the base of Ilya’s spine. “Good,” he sighs. He gets back up on his skates, then. Makes sure his wobbly knees are steady, before he reaches down for Shane. “Time to go now,” he says. “Or else, I might get tempted, start stepping on you again.”
Shane shivers, smiles, obligingly lets Ilya tug him to his feet.
There’s a small shower, just one spigot on the wall in a tiled room off the gym, with pump-bottles of soap bolted beneath. It’s far less luxurious than the showers in the cottage, almost industrial, and it reminds Ilya so much of the first place he ever saw Shane hard that he has to make an effort not to think about it as he leans against the far wall and watches Shane hurry through a quick, wincing wipe down.
It makes Ilya feel impossibly fond, watching Shane scrub methodically at his messy upper thighs. He’s not trying to be sexy, just getting clean as quickly as he can, so that he can rejoin Ilya, so that the two of them can walk back up the hill and settle back down on the couch, by the fire or inside, or curl up together in bed.
Ilya says, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the water drumming on the tile, “Thank you.”
Shane looks up from where he’s rinsing off his soapy hands in the spray. “For what?”
“Letting me decide,” says Ilya. “Trusting me. It is…” he wants to say, generous, but that doesn’t feel quite right, seems to imply that Shane is doing this as an act of charity, or something. “Hot,” he finishes, lamely.
Shane’s mouth, scrubbed clean now, quirks into a smile. “I like it too,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt less anxious, you know?”
He says it so easily, like it’s simple. Like he’s not scared.
“It kind of— empties out my head, for once,” Shane says. “I like it so much.”
Honest, guileless, bare. Not even trying to hide the relief in his voice.
Shane turns, then, before Ilya can rein in the expression on his face.
He looks at Ilya for a moment, like he’s seen it, but he doesn’t say anything. Just smiles and shuts off the water, reaches for one of the striped towels stacked on the shelf in the wall.
Back out in the gym, Ilya in his sweats and Shane wrapped in towels, Shane stops. He gets his hand around Ilya’s wrist, stands in front of him, tips his head up.
Waits for Ilya to decide what to do with him.
It’s not much of a debate, for Ilya. He leans down and sips a long, warm kiss from Shane’s lips.
Shane still keeps his hand wrapped around Ilya’s wrist when they separate. He uses it to tug at Ilya’s arm as he leads them back through the gym and toward the outbuilding door.
Outside, in the quiet of the night, the cottage lights are still blazing at the top of the slope. The air is colder than before, the stars in the sky domed above brighter than Ilya had remembered.
“I’d dreamed about that,” Shane says, as he leads Ilya back up the stone path.
Ilya drops his gaze from the stars to see Shane’s profile, silhouetted by the lights from the cottage, from where Shane has half-turned to face Ilya. Shane’s fingers are warm, and firm, where he’s reaching back to wrap them around Ilya’s wrist. “Which part?” Ilya asks.
He can see the smile curling over Shane’s profile, as he says, “Fucking you at center ice. With everyone watching.”
Ilya lets out a shaky exhale, through the sudden pulse of arousal. He wonders if there will ever be a point when Shane stops surprising him, as he confesses, “I hadn’t imagined, before.”
“You will now,” Shane says, sure of himself.
“Yes,” Ilya agrees. “All the time.”
Shane says, “You did lie about my time, right?”
“Yes,” Ilya confesses. “I pressed the button early.”
“I thought so,” Shane says, satisfied, as he turns back to face the direction they’re walking. “I am faster than you.”
“Yes,” Ilya says, a third time. Speed is one of many categories in which Shane would earn the superlative between the two of them. He’s faster, braver, more honest. He’s given Ilya his leash, and he’s still more powerful, because he’s the one letting Ilya hold it.
It’s the first time Ilya can remember, that it doesn’t bother him, to think of someone else with more power over Ilya than Ilya himself.
Ilya curls his fingers down, tries to touch the sides of the hand wrapped around his wrist. “Light the firepit again,” he says to Shane’s back. “I want to be outside a little longer.”
“Okay,” says Shane, and redirects where he’s leading Ilya, away from the side door to the cottage and around to the firepit out back. Without hesitation, easily, like he’s happy to let Ilya choose.
His grip on Ilya’s wrist might be tight enough to bruise.