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Shane is already in a bad mood before Ilya cracks open his apartment door, peers out into the hall like he’s checking to see if Shane has brought anyone with him, and stage whispers, “Are you sure about this?”
“If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to stand around in the hall thinking about it,” Shane snaps, and taps his fingers impatiently against the doorframe.
“Remember when you said, ‘No, not during playoffs, it’s distraction—'”
“Ilya,” Shane growls.
Ilya swings the door wide open and steps back, grinning.
Shane slips inside, shuts the door behind him, secures the lock with a firm click. Then he turns, looks at Ilya, and sucks in a startled breath.
Ilya, who is standing there shirtless in low-slung sweatpants, blinks at Shane. The cut on his forehead, just under where his helmet would press in, looks stark in the glow of the lamp on the low table beside him. “What?”
Shane doesn’t want to say he’d been startled by how lean Ilya had gotten in the month and a half since Shane last saw him naked. It feels like a rude thing to say. He says, instead, “Your ribs are broken.”
Ilya shakes his head. “Bruised,” he corrects, pressing one hand briefly against the tape strapped over his side before he gestures toward Shane. “Your fingers are broken.”
Shane looks down to where his middle and ring fingers are splinted together. “Yes,” he admits. Then he looks back up, applies a more critical eye to Ilya’s body.
He’s standing with his left hip popped slightly to the side, like he’s avoiding putting much weight on his right leg. “You’ve tweaked your knee,” Shane guesses.
Ilya shakes his head. “Ankle,” he says. “You are bad at this game. You have something broken in left foot.”
Shane is startled. “How did you know that?” And then, “Fuck. I mean—” He had been explicitly told not to make it public. If Montreal knew he had broken that rule with Ilya Rozanov, he was pretty sure the front office might have him taken out behind TD Garden and shot before puck drop the day after tomorrow.
No choice but to try and rally, now. “You got stitches in your forehead.”
“Three. But this is obvious,” Ilya says. “Cheater.”
“You’ve lost weight,” Shane says.
The muscles at the corners of Ilya’s eyes stiffen. He says, “Yes. Hard to eat. I’m nervous, during playoffs, you know?”
Shane feels his stomach flutter. “Me too,” he says. He feels nausea crawl into his throat, then. He swallows down bile so he can get out, “But you should be less nervous now, right?”
Ilya is frowning. “I don’t think we should talk about series,” he says.
It’s so gentle it barely sounds like him. It’s so gentle it makes Shane’s shoulders climb toward his ears. “Why? You think I can’t take it?”
“This face,” Ilya says, with a hand vaguely indicating Shane’s expression. “This face is why.”
“Montreal is down 3-0,” Shane says. “You can say it.”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Boston could sweep.” Shane has tried to convince himself that using the word is to jinx the possibility, but saying it out loud makes him taste bile again anyway. “We could lose on Tuesday and—”
Ilya reaches out and takes a hold of Shane’s dick through the front of his joggers.
Shane’s not hard, and Ilya’s grip is not particularly forceful, but it’s unerring. He finds Shane on his first try and holds him firmly, confidently, like he has the right to grab it. Like it’s his to grab.
It startles Shane so much the rest of the sentence dries up in his mouth.
Ilya says, “You don’t want to talk about this.”
Shane finds that this is abruptly true. He licks his lips and says nothing.
Ilya says, “You want me to fuck you.”
His lips are slick and red in the low light. Shane finds he can’t take his eyes away from them as he shakes his head. “You can’t,” he says, aware his voice has dropped an octave. “Not during the series. I'll be too sore. It's too big of a game."
“Ah,” says Ilya. “But you want it.”
Shane doesn’t quite realize he’s swayed inward until Ilya’s other hand rises, plants on his collarbone, holds him back from making contact with Ilya’s mouth.
“Well?” Ilya asks.
Shane reluctantly drags his gaze back up to Ilya’s eyes. It’s hard to think about anything but the way he’s stiffening into Ilya’s firm grip. “What,” he says, hoarsely.
“Do you want it?” asks Ilya, and gives him a squeeze.
Shane’s mouth drops open at the pressure. He sinks forward, lets more of his weight rest on the hand Ilya’s pressing flat to his collarbone. “We can’t,” he says, again.
“Not what I asked,” Ilya points out.
Shane’s eyes sink halfway shut. It’s faintly ridiculous, how much Shane’s life hinges on his self-discipline, and how completely that control fails each and every time Ilya gets his hands on Shane. “I want it,” he admits, on half a breath.
Ilya takes a step back, then, and he doesn’t loosen his grip on Shane as he goes, so Shane is forced to stumble along with him.
Shane shivers and goes, lets himself be tugged by his dick into Ilya’s bedroom, lit by only the lamp on one bedside table, where Ilya lets go of Shane and says, his voice rough, “Take your clothes off.”
Shane obediently reaches for the back neckline of his shirt with his good hand as Ilya strips, quickly, efficiently. It’s easier to think when Ilya’s hands aren’t on him, so he says as he tugs the fabric over his head, “I’m serious. You can’t fuck me.”
Ilya’s hands settle on Shane’s bare waist, making him stutter on the final pull of the fabric over his head. He emerges wide-eyed from his t-shirt to find Ilya, naked now, grinning at him.
“You’ll ask me for it,” Ilya says, with complete confidence.
“I won’t,” says Shane, but it comes out in far too breathy of a tone. He's still kicking off the left leg of his pants when Ilya starts steering him toward the bed, and he still hasn’t quite managed to get them over his swollen foot when his thighs hit the edge of the mattress and he topples back onto the duvet.
Ilya, still standing at the foot of the bed, bends over him. He gets his big hands around Shane’s waist and, seemingly without straining to do it, yanks Shane farther up onto the bedspread.
He reaches down, just in time to cup his hand underneath Shane's broken foot and stop it from hitting the footboard as Shane's heels come bumping up and over the end of the mattress.
Shane makes a sound too high-pitched to be called anything but a squeak.
Ilya looks down at him like he knows just how much Shane loves to be gently pushed around. He smiles before circling the bed and reaching for the bottle of lube already sitting out in the open on his nightstand, the obvious placement of which Shane would make fun of him for, if Shane could find the breath to do so.
Ilya turns the bottle over, squeezes the clear liquid into his palm. Then he clambers up and onto the bed to stretch himself out on the duvet beside Shane.
Shane had expected something similar to what he usually gets from Ilya, his favorite kind of thing, the kind of thing that takes him out of his head the fastest— Ilya shouldering his way under Shane’s thighs, getting his fingers in before Shane’s really ready for them, spreading them apart while Shane grunts and twists against the strain until his cock is heavy against his belly.
That’s not what Shane gets. Ilya’s touch is gentle, as he turns onto his side, then reaches up his clean hand and curls it into the hair behind Shane’s ear. His fingers slide over Shane’s scalp as he leans in and presses his warm mouth to Shane’s.
Shane closes his eyes. He hitches one knee up between them so that Ilya’s other hand can slide down between his legs.
He opens his mouth, then, so Ilya can slick his tongue down along Shane’s at the same moment he circles two warm fingers around Shane’s hole.
Ilya doesn’t slide his fingers inside. He just keeps rubbing there, gentle, as he licks gently along Shane’s tongue.
Shane lifts one hand, gets it on the side of Ilya’s face so that he can feel the hinge of Ilya’s jaw working as he eats gently into Shane’s mouth.
They kiss for so long that Shane gets dizzy, sparks crowding in behind the hot red of his closed eyelids. He’s shivering when Ilya pulls away, barely waiting for Shane to catch his breath before he’s ducking back in, closing warm kisses over Shane’s bottom lip, his top lip, licking at him so just the tip of his tongue presses into Shane’s hot mouth.
Between Shane’s legs, his fingers are still circling with slow, deliberate pressure that has Shane twitching backwards into his touch.
“Please,” Shane says into Ilya’s mouth.
Ilya isn’t smiling anymore, when he pulls back. He’s panting, his mouth red and messy, as he looks at Shane with heavy-lidded eyes and waits for more.
Shane swallows and thinks, dizzily, about how some of that mouthful had to have been Ilya’s spit. “Please put them in,” he whispers.
Ilya leans his face in, close. He watches Shane intently as he presses down with two fingers.
They slide in so easily that Shane gasps, his eyes stuttering shut even as Ilya leans back in to lick inside Shane’s open mouth.
Shane curls his splinted hand awkwardly around Ilya’s head, winds his fingers through the fine hair at the nape of his neck, yanks him even closer. He can feel how soft he is against Ilya’s fingers, how easily he’s letting Ilya work his thumb inside, God, it feels slutty to let him in so eagerly. He feels light-headed, buzzing all over, desperate for Ilya’s mouth even though it’s the only thing he’s tasted for minutes.
“I want more,” he says around Ilya’s tongue.
Ilya pulls back with a wet sound that makes Shane shiver and push back harder onto the fingers hooked inside him. “You can’t,” he reminds Shane.
“I don’t care,” Shane says. He tips his hips forward, then, presses into where Ilya is hot and hard along his thigh. "It's not enough."
Ilya groans, maybe at the pressure against his dick, maybe at the way Shane’s just gone even looser around his fingers. “You do care,” he says, although he sounds vague, like maybe he’s forgetting why. His fingers are moving inside Shane, curling forward, making Shane gasp and jerk against him. “It’s the playoffs.”
“Please,” gasps Shane.
Ilya closes his eyes. He’s so close that Shane can see each individual lash in the delicate fans over his flushed cheeks.
When he opens them, he looks more composed, despite the spit smeared over the chin and the horny glaze to his eyes. “No, Shane,” he says, firmly. “You would regret, later."
“Just a little,” Shane says, wildly. “Just the tip.”
Ilya mouth drops even further open. He looks down to where his hand is still moving between Shane’s thighs. “Just the tip,” he repeats, dumbly.
“Yeah,” says Shane, eagerly, “Yeah, come on, here, here,” and he’s shuffling closer as Ilya slides his fingers out, throwing the leg he’d pulled up beside him over Ilya’s flank, his taped-up foot bobbing in the air, pushing Ilya to the side until his hips are at the right angle for Shane to shift himself downwards until he feels Ilya pressing hotly at the soft core of him.
Ilya is panting. His pupils are blown. He’s staring at Shane like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“Just the tip,” Shane reminds him. He reaches behind himself, gets a grip around where Ilya is hot and satisfyingly thick at the base.
He presses Ilya in, right where Shane is wet and soft for him.
Shane’s mouth drops open at the sweet pressure just inside. His thighs shake with the urge to bear down, to shudder through that familiar hot slide until he finally feels full.
Ilya’s eyes go wide. His hands snap up, grab at Shane’s hips, dig in tight.
Shane only realizes what’s about to happen half a moment before Ilya is letting out a deep, agonized groan and using his grip to force Shane up and off of him, although by then it’s too late. He’s already started coming.
Shane had felt it, just for a moment, as a single hot pulse inside.
He drops down on his side to the mattress beside Ilya and watches, open-mouthed, as Ilya rips his hands away from Shane to reach down and grab at where his dick is already spurting across his stomach.
It’s still twitching in his big desperate grip when Ilya turns to Shane, his eyes wide, and says, “Condom, we forgot the condom—”
Shane, who is so turned on he feels like he might throw up, talks over him. “I need to come.”
Ilya stares at him, open-mouthed, still trembling.
“Please,” hisses Shane.
Ilya reaches up one shaking hand, gets it around Shane’s back, then pulls him over, up and on top of Ilya. “Fuck,” he says, and even as Shane hurries to brace himself and try to keep his weight away from Ilya's taped-up ribs Ilya grabs at Shane’s hips again, pulls him down, guides Shane to rub himself against Ilya’s hip. “Fuck,” Ilya says, again, and reaches his other hand, the one still wet with his own come, down behind Shane.
He touches at the place where Shane is messy and open, where Ilya had tucked that first hot spurt of his come.
Shane presses his face into Ilya’s shoulder. It feels like being punched in the gut, when he comes, grunting into Ilya’s skin, whole-body spasms against Ilya as Ilya grips at him, hard, and with his other hand dips two shaking fingers into the mess he'd left behind.
*
“I’m sorry,” Ilya says, once they’re wiped down and dressed and back in the front hall of his apartment.
Shane looks up from where he’d been tracking his Uber’s approach on his phone. “I already told you, it’s fine,” he says. “I forgot, too. And I already told you I’m clean.”
“I will get tested,” Ilya says. “Tomorrow. Or at least as soon as I can.”
Shane’s mouth twists. He wonders if Ilya has ever been so forgetful with someone else. He would rather die than ask. It’s already embarrassing enough that Shane doesn’t need to offer to get tested, because he hasn’t been with anyone other than Ilya in six months.
He's used to biting back this kind of thing around Ilya, although it's been getting more difficult, lately. At least this time he manages to keep his response to just, “Okay."
Ilya nods, jerkily. He’s in his sweatpants, but he’s still shirtless. Shane can see where the tape over his ribs has begun to come loose. “Good luck for Tuesday,” he says.
“Yeah,” says Shane. He’s suddenly exhausted. The idea of lacing his broken foot into a skate for tomorrow's practice, of getting his splinted fingers into a glove, abruptly sounds impossibly arduous. “You too. You should retape your ribs before you go to sleep.”
Ilya glances down his torso, lifts his arm to get a look at where Shane had gestured. His smile is wobbly at the corners when he looks back up. “Careful, Hollander,” he says. “You will give Boston advantage, if you keep being so nice to enemy.”
“Shut up,” says Shane, but he’s smiling, too, as he toes his shoes on and reaches for the door.
*
Two nights later, swallowed in the din of the fans stacked in the black-and-gold striped bowl of TD Garden, Shane spends the final minute of the break between third period and overtime hunched over on the bench with his gloves tapping an anxious beat against the boards in front of him.
The empty part of the glove, the one missing the finger he has splinted into the middle sleeve, is flopping to that nervous rhythm as Shane tells the defenseman to his right, “Remember, I’ll hit it back to you.” He doesn’t say, If I win the faceoff, because he’s not allowing himself to consider any other outcome. “Then you get the stretch pass up to Willy at the edge of the zone.”
The defenseman nods. “Got it, cap,” he says.
The referees are shouting for them to get back out there. Shane gets up, flings his leg over the boards, hefts himself back onto the ice. The resurfaced rink moves slickly beneath his blades as he glides forward to center ice.
Rozanov is already there, hunched over the dot. Neither of them make eye contact as they wait there for puck drop.
The whistle goes, and Shane gets there first. His blade smacks Rozanov’s, but by then he's already won. He knows without looking back that the puck is on Feller’s stick as he pushes forward, shouldering his way past Rozanov, toward where Wilson is already sprinting toward Boston's zone.
Wilson times it just right. He's perfectly in stride when the stretch pass smacks onto his tape at the line.
Shane sprints up the ice behind Wilson, shadowed by Rozanov, his stick outstretched but unneeded. There’s a Boston defender going down between him and Wilson to block the pass, and Wilson is already taking the shot, instead.
He snaps it up and over the rising glove of Boston’s goaltender.
Shane doesn't get to see if it went in before his momentum carries him past the upraised glove, past the net. He skids to a stop just before the Boston fans rising to their feet and turns just as they start to hammer angrily at the glass to see the puck, the salvation of his season, sitting there in the back of the net.
And then Wilson is jumping onto Shane, wrapping his arms tight around Shane’s shoulders, shouting triumphantly in Shane’s ear.
An answering yell rips out of Shane’s lungs. He gets his arms up, stumbles back into the boards, laughing wildly, hugging Wilson back as the glass rattles against his shoulder blades with the fury of the fans on the other side.
Shane hasn’t thought about God in years, at least not regularly, not since his childhood days at Sunday school. He still finds himself breathlessly thanking Him, over and over again, with his wet face pressed to the side of Wilson’s helmet as the rest of the team comes piling in around them to celebrate.
*
The atmosphere in the locker room afterward is giddy, relieved. All the pregame speeches in the world hadn’t been enough to really convince the guys, at least not at a gut-deep level, that they weren’t headed home tonight.
Shane is standing in his socks in the center of the room, studying the board propped up against the wall— it has sixteen slots, one to hold a puck for each playoff win; there are nine full, now, including the first in what had earlier this night been an empty third row— when Hayden comes up beside him and claps a hand on his shoulder. “We live to fight another day,” he says.
“Hell yeah, we do,” says Shane, looking away from the board to grin at him.
“Knowing your superstitious ass, we’re all going to have to do everything we did pregame exactly the same next time,” Hayden says, grinning back. “Guess I already know what I’m having for lunch on Thursday.”
Shane blinks. He has to drop his gaze from Hayden’s as he feels heat pulse into his cheeks. “Yeah,” he says, slowly. “I guess we do have to stick with the same prep. It’s bad luck, otherwise.”
*
Later that night, Ilya says, his tone flat, “You’re joking.”
He’s sitting slumped on his couch, shirtless again, holding an ice pack clamped to his ribs.
He’s not looking at Shane like someone would ideally want to their lover to look when they’ve just been offered the chance to ditch condoms.
Shane’s pretty sure of that, at least. It’s not like he has a lot of experience with these things.
“Why not?” he says, uncertainly. This is new territory for him. He’s never had to talk Ilya into anything he’s wanted in bed, before. He shoves his hands into his pockets and wishes he’d sat down before he’d started this conversation, because now he feels both like he’s looming over Ilya where he’s standing by the coffee table and like it would be weird to join Ilya on the couch. “You said you were clean,” Shane reminds him.
“You want for hockey superstition,” Ilya says. He says those last two words with the same amount of belief with which someone might say Easter bunny.
“You already knew I was superstitious,” Shane says, stiffly.
“Yes. I know this.” Ilya shifts the ice pack. There’s a new cut, almost parallel to the other, under his eye this time and pinched together with a clear bandage. If it happened during the game, Shane hadn’t noticed. “Superstition for me to lose.”
“You don’t even believe this will really work,” Shane points out.
“I do not want to fuck you for luck," Ilya says. He sounds petulant. "I want to fuck you because you want it.”
Shane blinks. It’s possible he’d forgotten to mention that aspect of it, when he’d been pitching the idea in the first place. “Oh,” he says. “I do want it. Kind of, um, I would say kind of badly.”
Ilya visibly perks up. He pulls himself up, a little, sits straighter against the couch. “Yes?”
“Yeah,” says Shane. He can feel his cheeks flushing hot. “I couldn’t, uh, stop thinking about it, after."
"Me neither," Ilya says, immediately. Shane can see his chest starting to rise and fall more rapidly as his breathing picks up. "What did you think about?"
"How I felt all empty inside, and, uh.” Shane clears his throat. “Wet, afterward."
Ilya slowly pulls the ice pack away from his ribs, leans forward to place it on the coffee table in front of him. “Okay,” he says. "You want that again?"
“Yes," Shane says.
“Okay,” Ilya says. “You want wet, we get you wet."
*
They try it on the couch, this time, with Shane straddling Ilya, his hands on Ilya’s shoulders, trying not to bump that broken bone in the top of his foot against the cushion, careful not to jostle Ilya’s retaped ribs as he gets his knees on either side of Ilya’s naked thighs. “Remember,” he pants down at where Ilya has tipped his head into the back of the couch to stare open-mouthed up at Shane. “Just the tip. You can’t go any deeper.”
Ilya’s face is very red. He says what has to be an angry curse in Russian.
Shane gets his good hand around the base of Ilya’s bare dick. His thighs tremble, as he lowers himself onto it.
It’s a strangely exquisite feeling, even better than he remembered from last time, to have Ilya just barely tucked inside him, Ilya hot and bare against where Shane is wet and tender and sensitive. The base of Ilya's dick, throbbing in Shane’s hand.
Ilya squeezing his eyes shut and shuddering, mouth open, his twisted expression like that of a man in agony.
Shane’s thighs shake. His fingers tremble, where they’re still wrapped around the base of Ilya’s dick. He aches, with how badly he wants to slide the rest of the way down, to feel that familiar hot pressure bare against his insides. “God,” he hisses. “I want you all the way in."
Ilya’s eyes are glazed, when they open. There’s a bead of sweat trickling down his temple as he reaches down, gets his strong grip around Shane’s waist. “You want it deep,” he says, his voice so low it feels like it rumbles upward from the base of Shane’s own diaphragm.
“Yes,” Shane says.
Ilya’s hand slides down, touches at where Shane is stretched around the head. Shane shakes at the pressure against his sensitive rim. “What does it feel like?”
“I feel empty,” Shane groans. “God, it fucking aches.”
Ilya’s breath leaves him in a huff. He slides his hand away from Shane’s rim, gets it back on Shane’s waist. He’s so hard Shane can feel him throbbing against Shane’s trembling palm.
Shane’s voice shakes as he asks, “What does it feel like for you?”
“Like you are squeezing me,” Ilya says. “Like you are sucking me in.” His voice is strained as he lifts Shane up, just enough that Ilya slides out altogether.
Ilya’s biceps are trembling as he lowers Shane back down. Shane, arm twisted awkwardly behind him so that he can keep his hold on Ilya’s dick, angles it so the head slips wetly back inside.
That press back in leaves Ilya shaking underneath Shane. A vein is bulging in his temple as he keeps moving Shane, up again and then back down onto him, just barely, just so he slides in past the rim, slowly at first and then faster, fast enough that Shane has to clamp his splinted hand on Ilya’s shoulder to keep him at arm’s length, to make sure he doesn’t get too eager and slip all the way inside.
Shane's pretty sure he won't get any good luck out of this at all, if that happens.
Ilya pushes inside once more and stops, his hands squeezing tight at Shane's sides. His lip curls. His face contorts.
Shane can feel the head twitch against his rim. He can feel the pulse at the base of Ilya’s dick.
A moment later, he feels the first warm drip onto the top of his fist.
Shane takes his hand from Ilya’s shoulder and reaches downward to where his cock has been bobbing between them. His head is swimming. He’s barely closed his shaking fingers around himself before he’s jolting forward, spilling onto Ilya’s stomach, dizzy and sweating, clamping tight around where Ilya is still tucked just barely inside him.
*
“You are crazy,” Ilya says afterward.
Shane, having just returned from the bathroom, collapses back onto the couch beside Ilya. He had tugged back on his boxers, but his skin is still humming, and he doesn’t feel like covering it in any other fabric, yet.
Ilya is still naked, and he’s right where Shane had left him. He hadn’t even bothered to get up to throw away the dirty tissues he’d used to wipe himself, which are now sitting crumpled on the coffee table in front of him. He’s gazing up at the ceiling with the kind of empty expression Shane has most commonly seen on people who have been recently concussed.
Shane says, after a moment, “Maybe a little crazy.” He likes the way Ilya says it, like it’s more awe-inspiring than alarming that Shane’s a freak. “You liked it, right?”
Ilya turns his head so that he’s looking at Shane. He’s still flushed, and some of his curls are stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looks heartbreakingly pretty, even with those cuts on his face, with his eyes so relaxed and his lips red and swollen. “Hottest thing ever,” he says. "In my entire life."
Shane smiles, even though he’s aware it’s too close to giddy to be appropriate. “Good,” he says.
"I want to watch it drip out, next time," Ilya says.
"That's gross," Shane says, automatically. Then he thinks about it, for a moment, and flushes. "Maybe," he amends.
Ilya grins smugly at him.
“Thank you for letting me try this," Shane says. "I know it’s weird that it's about— well, beating you.”
“I like how you care about winning this much,” Ilya says. “It’s hot. And I am not scared of jinx. I will beat you anyway.”
Shane feels giddy. If he hadn’t been worried about jinxing it, he would have said something as eminently calm and reasonable as, If we really do make it out of this series and we play Vegas in the Final and we win it all I’m flying you out to Nevada and you’re fucking me bare in front of the Cup, all the way inside, deep as you can get, until I shoot all over it.
But Shane is nothing if not a respecter of jinxes, so all he says instead is, again, “Good.”
Ilya rolls the back of his head against the couch. “You seriously think this will make difference for game tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Shane says. He looks down, traces a finger along a seam in the couch cushion just for something to do with his hands. “It makes me feel better when we stick to routine after a win. Like— if one of the guys shows up in a navy suit, and he has a good game, I try and get him to wear it to the next one.”
Ilya blinks slowly at him. “And they do this?”
“Sometimes,” Shane says, self-consciously. “A lot of the guys humor me. They know what I’m like, by now. It’s like— there’s a lot you can’t control in hockey, you know? There’s so many outside factors. There’s so much you can’t do anything about. I guess it’s just nice to— get a little control back, for a change.”
Ilya reaches up to scratch idly at the side of his neck. “I think you have control over hockey more than anyone in the world, maybe,” he says.
Shane frowns. “You do?”
“When you are on, when you have your best games— no one else can keep up,” says Ilya. His tone is vague, faintly dreamy, like he might be close to falling asleep. “Too quick, too smart. You can take control.”
Something about the soft shape of Ilya’s mouth as he looks at Shane is making the center of Shane’s palms tingle.
He takes a breath, puts his hand on the back of the couch, shifts sideways so that he can lean toward Ilya. I can take control, he thinks. “You know, we could do this all the time,” he says.
Ilya says, “Do what?”
“Get rid of condoms,” Shane says. “We could do this for real, if we were exclusive.”
He knows it’s a mistake as soon as he says it, just from the way Ilya’s mouth firms up, the way the muscles at the corner of Ilya’s eyes go stiff and tight.
Ilya’s voice is still even when he says, “Exclusive?”
Shane swallows. It feels like fighting a battle in a war he knows he’s already lost when he says, “I mean, if we only saw each other. If we stopped sleeping with other people.”
Ilya sits up against the couch, drawing his legs together. His tone is a warning as he says, “Shane.”
Shane loses the courage to continue meeting Ilya’s eyes. He looks down at his fingers on the couch cushion and says nothing.
“We can’t do this,” Ilya says. “We can’t be this.”
Panic is slowly climbing up the back of Shane’s throat. He knows it had been selfish to suggest it, that Ilya has more to lose here than he does, but Ilya lets him be so selfish sometimes he loses track of the limits. He needs to cut Ilya off, now, needs to stop him before he starts listing all the reasons why they can’t and, faced with reminders of everything that could go wrong, ends this altogether.
Shane can’t allow that to happen, so he straightens his shoulders, looks up, and pins his gaze somewhere around Ilya’s forehead as he says, as lightly as he can manage, “Okay.”
Ilya’s mouth is twisted into a frown. “You know— you know I wish that we—”
“I said it’s okay,” Shane says, too abruptly, too forcefully. He twists around to find his shirt where he’d flung it over the arm of the couch.
Ilya, still naked, watches from the couch as Shane fumbles his pants back on, struggles to buckle his belt with his stupid splinted fingers.
“I can help,” Ilya says, reaching for his waist.
Shane shrugs him off. “It’s fine,” he says, finally forcing the leather through the loop. When he reaches back to tug his pants into place over his ass, he feels the piece of paper he’d forgotten about poking stiffly out of the back pocket.
Shane hesitates, just for a moment, before drawing it out. “Here,” he says, and doesn’t look anywhere close to Ilya’s eyes as he extends it toward the couch.
He starts moving again as soon as Ilya takes it, bends down to get his socks on. Watches out of the corner of his eye as Ilya slowly, like he’s taking care not to rip the paper, unfolds the page.
Ilya says, after a moment, “What is this?”
“I typed up a few recipes,” Shane tells his feet. “They’re from my mom. They’re supposed to be good if you’re nauseous. They're easy on the stomach. I use them when I’m anxious and nothing sounds good but I have to eat before practice or something.” He is aware that he is talking too much. He takes a breath, straightens up. “Just because you mentioned that you were having trouble eating, you know, because you were nervous about the playoffs.”
“Yes,” says Ilya. His voice is soft. “I remember.”
Shane manages to meet his eyes, just for a moment, before looking away. “Thank you for this,” he says, stepping away from the couch. “It was hot. And I— appreciate it, honestly. Have a safe flight to Montreal.”
Ilya nods, slowly. He is holding the page very delicately, by the edges, like it’s a precious photograph and not a random piece of paper from the printer in the business center at Shane’s hotel. “You too,” he says. “Thank you for my recipes.”
Maybe his eyes had looked glassy, when Shane had glanced at them, or maybe that was just the lighting and Shane’s wishful thinking.
*
Two nights later, back in Montreal, Shane stands on his skates and looks across to where Ilya is standing, his gaze directed to the rafters, his chain between his lips as the Canadian anthem booms through the sea of red and blue in the stands around them.
Shane lowers his gaze to the rink, where the Montreal logo inked beneath the ice between them, and he thinks: This is his arena, his team. Half of the people in the crowd are wearing number twenty-four on their backs. If Shane wins this, they’ll love him for it.
If he wins this, he’ll get Ilya inside him again, hot and bare and shaking with how badly he wants Shane.
Shane doesn’t usually like to think about sex, when he’s on the ice, when his stick is in his hands and the puck is within sight. Tonight, for some reason, it’s making him feel more grounded. It’s making his banged-up fingers stop jittering inside his gloves.
I can take control, Shane thinks, and he’s abruptly certain of it. He’s certain that he can win this. He’s certain that Ilya will come over to his place, tonight, after he does.
He’s certain that Ilya won’t be able to keep seeing other people, in the long run.
Maybe Ilya won’t stop right away. Maybe Ilya will convince himself it’s easier to keep going like this, for now. Eventually, though, it’s going to start to bother him. It’s going to ruin sex with other people for Ilya, knowing that it’s not what Shane wants.
Because Shane is certain, more than anything else, that Ilya— who had sat there on his couch, two nights ago, and gritted his teeth, and let Shane torture him just because Shane had asked for it— wants Shane to have what he wants.
And if Shane can win a Stanley Cup, he can sure as hell win Ilya Rozanov.
A smile tugs at the corner of Shane’s mouth. He’s practically bouncing on his skates despite the faint twinge in his tightly-bound foot as the final note of the anthem echoes through the stadium.
The lights flicker and brighten. Shane skates forward and completes a calm loop around Montreal’s zone before he fist bumps both his wingers and glides forward to where the official is preparing to drop the puck.
Ilya skates slowly up to meet him, twirling his stick in his gloved hands as he goes. The two cuts on his face are tucked away beneath bandages, and someone who didn’t know him might not notice the way he’s favoring one leg as he approaches.
Someone who didn’t know him might not notice how tense and wary his expression is as he bends in, toward the dot, and glances up at Shane from beneath his visor.
Shane grins at him. Maybe Ilya can already sense what Shane’s just figured out. “Good luck, Rozanov,” he says, and leans in to take the draw.