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The word for masochist is almost the same in Russian as it is in English. That’s part of the reason Ilya knew what Shane was from the jump.
Ilya has a working theory that pretty much every professional athlete, including himself, fits to some degree in the category. It takes a willingness to hurt to push your body so consistently past its limits.
But that’s about where the enjoyment of suffering ends for Ilya, who is ready as soon as he’s done making sure he’s still one of the top athletes in the world to eat well and drink even better and fuck, for a while pretty much any hot woman who wanted it and now, for a long time, just the prettiest boy he’s ever known.
He has learned, over the years, that this is not where it ends for Shane.
Shane sometimes eyes the pastries under glass domes at the smoothie shop down the road from his Montreal apartment like he wants to think about how good they might taste before he turns around and orders his usual kale blend.
Shane has asked for Ilya’s drink at a gala for their charity, not to taste it but to bring it to his nose for a sniff before he lowering it, passing it back to Ilya, and raising his glass of water to his polite smile.
Shane, now, takes his pretty lips away from where they’d been pressed to the head of Ilya’s dick and says, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’ve decided I’m going to try celibacy.”
Ilya blinks down at Shane. His back is still up against the door, the one fronting the hotel room in Hartford in which they are meeting tonight because Shane is playing a game here tomorrow and it was close enough to Boston for Ilya to drive, into which Shane had pressed him pretty much the moment he’d stepped inside, so quickly Ilya's pants had already been halfway down his thighs by the time he had said hello.
Shane’s lips are wet and shiny, his eyes still glittering with tears from the first time he’d forced himself all the way down to the base. Ilya stares at this and echoes, dumbly, “Celibacy.”
“Yeah,” says Shane, reaching up and closing his warm grip around the base of Ilya’s dick to give him a friendly squeeze.
He doesn’t offer to explain the word to Ilya, likely because after one too many tries in the early days after they'd made their relationship official Ilya had pointed out he was pretty sure his English vocabulary, if not his grammar, was better than Shane’s. (“Right now, I read The Art of War,” he’d said. “In English. When was last time you read book in English?” And then, because it had come out meaner than he’d intended it to, “Sorry.” Shane had just frowned for a moment before shrugging, conceding the point and then, after some consideration, asking if Ilya thought the book could apply to hockey).
In this case, however, Ilya feels like he could have used the help. “But,” he says, and looks down at where Shane’s fingers are gliding over his spit-slick dick. “You are— um. Now.”
“Well, you can come,” Shane says, like that’s obvious. He lets go of Ilya’s dick and stands with a quiet crackle of his knees. “It’s just me that can’t.” Then, “Come on, let’s get to the bed,” like he hadn’t been the one stopping Ilya from getting more than two steps into the room.
Ilya, left alone against the door, slowly toes off his shoes and gets his pants all the way off. By the time he’s stripped and approaching the bed, Shane is waiting for him with his shirt and pants already tossed on the chair at the side of the room, hard in his pale grey briefs with hands braced behind him on the duvet as he watches Ilya’s approach with his eyes expectant and his messy mouth open so he can catch his breath.
Ilya stops in front of him. “Why,” he says.
Shane blinks his wet eyes at him. It’s ridiculous, how Ilya can still be caught off guard by how pretty he is, with his dark eyes and his broad shoulders, so hard from getting his mouth on Ilya that his dick is painting a wet spot against the soft fabric of his briefs. “Why what? Why can’t I come?”
“Yes,” says Ilya. He stops himself from adding, obviously.
Shane says, “I read an article.”
This is a phrase that prefaces many of Shane’s explanations of new ideas as to how to torture himself. “Hm,” says Ilya.
“You don’t have to say it like that,” says Shane.
“I say nothing. I hum.”
“You don’t have to hum like that, then. I just like to stay informed.”
“What did article say, Shane?”
“It was written by this cyclist. A really good cyclist,” Shane hastens to add, as if Ilya had jumped in to question the guy’s qualifications. “He did a kind of self-experiment where he timed his rides when he was having regular orgasms versus when he wasn’t, and he was consistently faster when he wasn’t.”
“Okay,” says Ilya. “So you, what? Want to take up biking?” Shane would look good in the shorts, at least.
Shane wrinkles his nose at Ilya, like he can tell Ilya’s picturing him in spandex. “I’m going to see if it makes me a better skater, that’s all,” he says.
Ilya blinks away the image of Shane straddling a bike seat. “How long,” he says.
Shane shrugs. “I was going to try for two weeks and go from there.”
Ilya has weathered elbows to the guts with more grace. “Two weeks.”
“It won’t be that bad,” says Shane, who is starting to look uncertain. “I still want you to come, uh, you know.” His cheeks pink up. “As much as you want.”
Ilya steps forward, then, and swings his leg up so that he can knee-walk onto the mattress beside Shane. He reaches up, gets his hand in the center of Shane’s bare chest, and presses him slowly down into the duvet.
Shane goes, wide-eyed, lips parted. His heart is pounding against Ilya’s palm.
Ilya looks down from where he’s kneeling over him. “But you like me in your mouth very much,” he says.
Shane’s eyes are starting to look a little glazed. “Yeah,” he says, hoarsely.
“You might like it so much it makes you come,” says Ilya. “Very risky. Better not to do at all, yes?”
It’s a gamble, one that immediately pays off with Shane widening his eyes and shaking his head so that his dark hair gets mussed up against the duvet as he says, “No, it’s fine. I’ll still try.”
Ilya arches his eyebrows. He slides the hand on Shane’s chest downward, shifts so that he can get a firm grip on either side of Shane’s waist, his thumbs settling comfortably into the muscles padding the notches between Shane’s ribs. “You like looking at me,” he says. “Very much.”
Shane sighs at the pressure. He says, again, “Yeah.”
“Maybe you like that so much you come,” Ilya says. “So, what? Are you not going to look at me?”
Shane smiles, wide enough that it creases his red cheeks. “I’m not going to come just by looking at you,” he says.
He says it like Ilya’s joking. That’s fine. He’ll figure out how serious this is to Ilya soon enough. “Are you sure?” Ilya asks.
Shane’s smile falters. “Yes,” he says.
“You don’t sound sure,” Ilya points out.
Shane licks his lips. Their faces are so close that his eyes are flickering between each of Ilya’s, like he can’t decide which one to focus on.
Ilya leans back and looks down beneath the hands he has spanned over Shane’s ribs, down to where Shane is straining against the front of his briefs. If anything, it looks like he’s gotten harder since he stopped blowing Ilya.
He twitches under Ilya’s gaze, just one visible pulse against the wet patch slowly spreading across the front.
“Don’t,” says Shane, thinly.
“I am just looking,” says Ilya.
“I’m not going to come,” says Shane.
If Ilya hadn’t been able to tell he’s gotten Shane just from that little wobble in Shane’s voice, he would have known from the way Shane props himself up on one elbow to better follow Ilya’s gaze to the hard line of his dick against the fabric. He fills in the part Shane isn’t saying: “But now you want to see if you can.”
“Um,” says Shane, who loves to hurt, who loves to want but not get. He is staring down at the wet spot on the front of his briefs. “Yeah, I— kind of do, yeah.” And then, quietly, like it’s just to himself, “I can always start tomorrow.”
Ilya doesn’t respond to that. Sun Tzu said as long as you knew both the enemy and yourself you had nothing to fear from one hundred battles.
He gets up to sling one leg over Shane’s thighs, then settles in with his ass pressing against Shane’s knees, adjusting himself to make sure he isn’t in danger of bumping against Shane’s bulge before tightening his grip on Shane’s waist.
Shane shifts upwards as Ilya does so, gets both elbows on the mattress beneath him so that he’s half-crunched upward, his forehead almost colliding with Ilya’s as both of them look down at the front of Shane’s briefs.
Shane twitches, again, a visible push against the damp fabric.
Ilya swallows down an answering surge of wetness in his mouth. He says, making an effort to keep his voice even, “I think it’s about focus, probably.”
Shane nods. His expression is serious, now. He’s got that look of concentration Ilya imagines he must wear when he’s in the huddle, listening to his coach describe some new set play. “Okay,” he says, nodding.
Sun Tzu says the opportunity to defeat the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. “What is best sex thing you ever felt?” Ilya asks.
Shane glances away from his own dick to narrow his eyes at Ilya. “Sex thing,” he repeats.
Ilya looks placidly back. “Can be with anyone,” he says, helpfully.
“Yeah, right,” mutters Shane, and then: “Maybe… um… maybe the first time we went without a condom?”
Sun Tzu had recommended to attack where the enemy isn’t expecting it. Ilya, not having heeded this warning, has to fumble a hand away from Shane’s waist to squeeze at the base of his dick. “Fuck,” he blurts out.
Shane blinks up at him. He looks faintly smug.
Ilya regathers himself. “Concentrate,” he scolds, like it’s Shane that had almost lost the thread of things. “Think very hard. What did you like about this?”
“Um,” says Shane, looking back down between his legs. “I liked… you felt hotter than normal, when you first pressed against me. And your face was kind of, I don’t know, twisted up, like it felt so good it was hurting you.” Another twitch against the fabric. He finishes, breathlessly, “Half of me thought you were just going to shoot before you even got inside.”
Ilya can’t help himself, then. He gives himself a few tight strokes, too rough now that Shane’s saliva has dried up but sweet anyway, sweet enough to make his mouth open on a silent groan. “Yeah,” he says, breathing harder. “And then what did it feel like inside?”
Shane’s eyes are flickering from his own erection, to Ilya’s moving hand and then back again. “Hot,” he says. “Slippery. And then when you came—” he licks his lips. His dick twitches, the hardest one yet, a jerk against the wet spot that makes Ilya’s fingers grip tighter in sympathy. “I could feel it moving inside of me, but I kind of wished—”
Ilya’s hand is moving faster. He’s getting that sour taste he gets in the back of his mouth right before he comes. It’s getting more difficult to keep his eyes open as he grunts, “Wished what?”
“I wished it was wetter,” says Shane. “I wished there was even more come.”
Ilya’s gut lurches. He leans forward, grunting, and wrings himself between Shane’s legs, paints slick white streaks over the straining line at the front of his briefs.
Shane makes a sound like he’s been punched in the sternum. His hips rise, his torso lifting, his abs taut beneath Ilya’s thumbs as he bucks, like he’s trying to shove his dick up into the too-light purchase of the fabric.
“I can’t,” he grits out. “Ilya— I need to come— I can’t—”
Ilya reaches down, hooks his fingers under the waistband of Shane’s ruined briefs, yanks them down. Then he curls in, folds himself forward to get his mouth on Shane’s dick, manages two deep pulls before he can feel the familiar bump-bump of the thick underside vein against his tongue.
*
Shane says, afterward, “The thing is, I think I was pretty close.”
Ilya looks over, toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, to where Shane is visible as a silhouette through the pebbled glass wall of the shower. He extracts the toothbrush, leans forward to spit, and then says, still foamy-mouthed, “Yes?”
“Yeah,” says Shane. He sounds thoughtful. “I think I could get there. I just need to practice more.”
At least he’s not talking about never coming again, Ilya thinks, but he can’t help but feel like he’s exchanged one enemy for another. He’s still a little too come-dumb to remember if Sun Tzu had said anything on the matter.
“I could take supplements,” he says, instead of expressing his concerns.
“Supplements?” says Shane, like he’s worried he misheard.
Ilya drinks some water from his cupped hand, swishes, spits again. “You know,” he says. “For more come.”
Shane says, “Like, zinc?”
Ilya wipes at his mouth with the back at the hand, then raises himself from the sink to smirk at the shower wall. “Ah,” he says. “You have already been doing research.”
Shane’s arms, raised to scrub shampoo into his hair, freeze. After a moment, he resumes moving. “Zinc has a range of health benefits,” he says, stiffly.
“Uh huh,” says Ilya, and folds up his travel toothbrush. It's a green version of the blue one usually used by Shane, who had brought an extra for Ilya. Ilya hadn't asked him to do that; Shane had thought of it all on his own.
*
Sometimes Shane gets on the phone to text or call Ilya and drops, completely without warning, a photo or video that makes Ilya feel like his world's just been tilted on its axis.
Two days later, an example: Ilya, who has just cracked open his takeout container— he’s gotten obsessed, lately, with a nearby food truck, and this is his third chicken and rice with extra everything of the week— hears his phone buzz against the table. He reaches for it, taps open his text thread with Shane.
It’s a photo. He grins to himself as he taps to open it.
His smile freezes.
It’s an image of Shane, cross-legged on the floor in dark jeans and a Metros jersey, smiling down at the tiny black-and-white kitten he’s cradling in his arms as another kitten, this one gray, perches on his shoulder.
Ilya isn’t quite aware he’s hit the button to call Shane until his phone speaker is crackling. “Hello,” Shane says. His tone is polite, like Ilya might be calling for business reasons.
“You have more?” Ilya says.
“More what?”
“More photos,” says Ilya, impatiently. He taps on the square of the picture to see if he’d missed more hiding behind it, but it’s still just the one. “From, what? Team photoshoot? You have more, yes?”
“Yes,” says Shane. He sounds like he’s grinning. “You’re so demanding. You like it? It’s cute, isn’t it?”
Cute, Shane says, so light and casual, like it’s not so sweet Ilya’s teeth are about to rot right out of his skull. “If you don’t send more, I’ll die,” he says.
“Dramatic,” Shane scolds. He’s definitely smiling, now. “Hang on a second. Do your best to stay alive.”
“No promises,” says Ilya. He chews on his plastic fork as he waits. It occurs to him, abruptly, that the situation has presented him with a perfect metaphor. Sun Tzu says to wait to move until you see an advantage. Ilya knows, because he’s been recently re-reading in a vague attempt to hone his battle senses.
Ilya’s phone buzzes against the table again. Ilya taps to open the photos. He takes in Shane holding the black and white kitten up to his face. Shane, giggling as the kitten sticks a paw out, braces itself against his cheek. And then— even more devastatingly— Shane with a small golden puppy, Shane with two small golden puppies, Shane with his big hand cupped over the entire back of a small golden puppy that is looking up at him with shining eyes like it’s never seen anything quite so wonderful in its entire puppy life.
“Are you crying?” Shane says, suspiciously.
“No,” says Ilya. “I sniff because I have allergies.”
“You are ridiculous,” says Shane. He sounds so fond it hurts, a deep ache right in the center of Ilya’s breastbone.
Ilya rubs at his nose, puts his phone down on the table, and tries to rally. “Very cute animals,” he says.
“Yes,” Shane agrees. “The team calendar is going to sell like crazy this year.”
Ilya is almost distracted by the idea of people having photos of Shane pinned up in their bedrooms— a phenomenon he is acutely aware already exists but sometimes, when caught off guard by a reminder, finds he still has strong feelings about— before he forces himself back on track. “These cute animals,” he says. “If they wanted a toy, would you say no?”
“What? Of course not,” Shane says. “The photographers brought plenty of toys we could use to keep them occupied. Did you see that mouse-on-a-wand they gave me for the little cats?”
“No,” says Ilya, paging quickly through the photos to find it. “So if they— oh, I like it, it’s very cute— if they wanted to play, or to eat a treat, you wouldn’t say no, right? Because they are cute and haven’t done anything wrong and they deserve it, right?”
There is a pause on the other end of the line.
“Ilya,” says Shane. His tone is more cautious, now.
Ilya soldiers on. “We are animals, you know, in lots of ways,” he says. “It’s okay to have treats, sometimes.”
“I’m not a kitten, Ilya,” says Shane. He sounds distant, suddenly, his tone spare and cold.
“I know you aren’t,” says Ilya. He tries to think of something Sun Tzu might have said about the situation and comes up short. “It’s a metaphor for, ah.” As always, in times of stress, he feels betrayed when his English deserts him.
“Soft parts of you,” he concludes, eventually. “Parts inside.”
“You can look at my stats,” says Shane. His tone is brittle. Ilya wishes he had asked where Shane was, before they’d started arguing, so that he could picture what he looks like now. Something about the background noise makes it sound like he’s outside; maybe in his backyard, phone to his ear because he’s too self-conscious to have it on speaker in public, knuckles going white with how hard he’s gripping the sides of the case. “My top skating speed jumped by one-point-three miles per hour since I started my diet.”
“Yes,” says Ilya. “I believe you. But sometimes— sometimes it’s not about being the best. Sometimes it’s about being happy.”
“Being the best makes me happy,” says Shane. He sounds frustrated. “I’m going to go. I told my mom I’d call her about this brand deal she’s working on.”
“Okay,” says Ilya. He can’t bring himself to say he’s sorry, because he’s not sorry. He’s glad he’d said it. He’s hoping his words might settle over Shane and sink in, slowly, the way rainwater pools before soaking into dirt. “I love you,” he says, instead.
“I love you too,” says Shane, and even though he snaps it, he doesn’t hesitate to do so.
Ilya stares at the blank screen of phone the thoughtfully, for a moment, after Shane’s hung up. And then he goes to take his daily dose of zinc.
*
Sun Tzu says to be prudent. He says to be patient as you lie in wait of your less prudent enemy. And so Ilya waits, and saves one of the images of Shane holding a puppy as his lockscreen, and wishes idly that he could keep one in his pocket when he’s on the ice, like a solider pocketing a photo of his sweetheart at which he can gaze in the trench.
Ilya waits, and he eats his zinc tablets, and he plays hockey, a win in Columbus and an ugly loss in Chicago.
As he’s icing his jaw in his hotel room after the latter Shane says from the phone Ilya has propped up against his desk lamp, “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
It’s probably a good thing Shane never actually read The Art of War when Ilya recommended it. There’s a chance he might see right through all of Ilya’s tactics, if he had. “Oh?” hums Ilya, rotating his desk chair as he shifts the ice pack against his jaw.
Shane takes a deep breath. He’s on the couch in his place in Montreal, and he’s wearing his glasses. Ilya can see in the reflection flickering over the lenses there’s a hockey game playing on mute on the television across the room. “I was being inconsiderate,” he says. “I should have— asked, first, if I wanted to change something about the way we have sex. It was unfair of me to try something like that without checking on how you felt about it first.”
This had not been the conclusion Ilya had been hoping Shane would reach. It is, undeniably, thoughtful nonetheless. “Sweet,” he says, reaching out his free hand, coming just short of touching the image of Shane’s freckled cheek. And then he admits, “I would like if you check with me about things like this, yes."
“Okay,” says Shane, nodding, his expression serious, like that will hide the two spots of color high up on his cheeks. He is, after all this time, after all the ways they’ve been together, still unable to talk about sex without blushing. “I understand. But, um. I’ve also been thinking.”
Ilya, who is patient, who is prudent, waits. He knows better by now than to expect that he’s waiting for the revelation he’d been hoping for, that Shane is about to widen his eyes and say, by the way, Ilya, what you said to me the other day about my inner self being a kitten who needs love really clicked and I bought one of those croissants I’m always eyeing at the smoothie shop this morning and I didn’t even ask for a caloric breakdown first.
Sure enough, this is not what Shane had been working up the courage to confess. Instead, he takes a deep breath and says, “The thing we tried, last time. I still really want to try again.”
Ilya, who had bashed his jawbone against the top of the boards courtesy of a Chicago stick to the back earlier that night and who had subsequently been given team-approved painkillers, is physically incapable of getting hard. His body, always game, tries its best anyway. He shifts in his chair as he repeats, “The thing.”
Shane’s face is getting redder beneath his glasses. “You know,” he says, and adds the next words all in a rush, barely any space between them. “Coming without being touched.”
One of the best things about Shane, one of the most addictive, was that he really doesn’t realize how alluring all of his fantasies are. He isn’t saying these things to be hot, he is saying them because he really feels them. He says things like, I want to come to nothing but the memory of your come in me, blushing all the while, just because he’s trying his best to be honest with Ilya.
He's not even trying to drive Ilya out of his mind. It just comes naturally, when you’re Shane Hollander.
“Okay,” says Ilya.
“Okay,” repeats Shane. He’s still blushing.
He’s about to be blushing more. “I have a surprise for you,” Ilya says.
Shane blinks at the camera. “You do?”
Ilya lowers the ice pack as he twists around, digs in the toiletries bag he’d plopped down at the side of the bed. Emerges with the bottle of supplements in his hand.
He makes sure the label is pointed in the right direction before he turns back, holds it out to the camera, and watches Shane’s face.
His reward is immediate. Shane’s blush deepens until it looks nearly purple in the glow of his phone screen.
It takes Shane a few too many beats to respond before he says, his voice thin, “Did you get that approved by a doctor?”
“Yep,” says Ilya. He pops the end of the affirmative with relish.
Shane visibly winces. “Oh my god, a team doctor?”
“Yes,” says Ilya. “I tell team doctor this beautiful girl I’m seeing wants more of my come.”
“Ilya,” Shane says. “That’s gross.”
It would have sounded more like he meant it had that last word not wobbled on the way out.
Shane clears this throat, rallies. “They had you adjust your diet, right? Because zinc occurs naturally in some foods, so—”
“Yes,” says Ilya, who can tell by now when Shane, tripping into a nervous ramble, would be grateful to be cut off. “No oysters for me.”
Shane gives a small smile. “You don’t even like oysters,” he says.
“Not really,” Ilya agrees. He is still, even when he tries, nowhere near as good at depriving himself as Shane is.
*
The next week brings Canadian Thanksgiving, which by what Ilya knows is pure coincidence— and his gut is sure is an honest-to-God miracle— falls on a date on which Ilya is already scheduled to be in Ottawa for a road game the evening prior.
The miracles continue. Ilya gets the next day off and the coach’s blessing to skip the team flight scheduled for it.
Ilya had told him he was spending the holiday with a family friend. Coach, not knowing how unlikely it was Ilya’s family would have a friend Ilya would have any desire to spend time with, had nodded and told Ilya to save him a turkey leg.
Shane, who played a home game in Montreal night the same night Ilya was scoring in Ottawa, is already at his parents’ house when Ilya pulls his rental car into the drive the next afternoon.
He kisses Ilya on his parents’ front porch, his mouth closed and his lips cool, his hands, probably freshly-scrubbed, damp as he folds them over Ilya’s.
Ilya kisses back with his eyes open because it still makes something tremble deep inside him when Shane touches him like this, out in the open beneath the sun and clouds, with the silhouettes of Shane’s parents moving behind the glass windows beside them. He doesn’t want to miss even a second of it.
It's a warm afternoon on the lakeside. Shane’s dad spends the afternoon in the kitchen, cooking up a meal that seems remarkably similar to the American Thanksgiving dinners Ilya’s shared with teammates over the years, occasionally popping out to the back porch where Ilya is sitting with Shane and his mom.
Ilya leans back on a cushioned wire bench across from the two of them and sips at the glass of white wine Shane’s dad had poured him and watches the two of them, with their matching smiles and the wind off the lake ruffling their sleek black hair. Both are so pretty it stings at Ilya, the same way the spikes of sunlight off the water behind them occasionally prickle at his eyes.
Ilya isn’t really sure he’s ever told Shane how he feels about getting to share evenings like this with Shane and his family. He isn’t quite sure how he’d say it out loud.
Maybe Shane’s noticed that Ilya never really drinks, much, around his family; maybe he thinks it’s because Ilya’s nervous.
Of course, Ilya is nervous, at least a little, because it’s very much imperative that Shane’s parents like him.
Mostly, though, it's because he doesn’t want the alcohol dulling the memories of moments like these, so casual and unstructured, nothing to do but pass the time and everyone so at ease with one another. Shane’s mom patting her hand lightly over Shane’s knee and Shane, accustomed since childhood to such casual displays of affection, turning to smile at her.
Shane's dad comes back out onto the porch, then, and claps his hand down onto Ilya's shoulder. "By the way, saw that spin-o-rama you scored on in Chicago," he says, and whistles appreciatively. His hand is still resting on Ilya's shoulder, like he's not even thinking about it. Like it's as natural as embracing his son.
*
By the time Ilya parks his car in the drive of Shane’s cottage, it’s almost evening.
There are no lights on inside the cottage, but enough of the sunset is still lingering in the orange sky over the lake for Ilya to see the gleam of Shane’s smile when he turns to look back at Ilya while as he locks the front door. “I want to see,” he says over his shoulder.
Ilya isn’t immediately sure what he means. Shane had more to drink than Ilya, and he had avoided carbs at dinner— Ilya, biting his tongue, hadn't so much as shared a commiserating glance with Shane's mom about it— not to mention he has the poorer tolerance between the two of them.
Even if he hadn't noticed these things, Ilya would have been able to tell Shane’s tipsy by the way he braces a hand against the wall as he toes off his shoes, by the way he doesn’t immediately reach for the light switch when he’s done, just stops there with one palm braced against the wall and looks at Ilya with the whites of his eyes reflecting the setting sun.
Ilya realizes, after a moment of trying to make out his pretty face in the dusk, that Shane is waiting for Ilya to say something. “You want to see,” Ilya says, and thinks for a moment before landing on, “My dick?”
Shane lets out a sharp sound, and exhale edging on a giggle. “You’ve been taking supplements,” he says, prompting, like Ilya might need to be reminded. “I want to see.”
He’s so soft for Ilya, his smile wide, his shoulders loose. It makes Ilya want to grab him tight, squeeze him until he squeals.
Sun Tzu says to head straight for the enemy’s weak point.
Ilya steps forward, gets his hand under Shane’s jaw. Grips him tight, gets his smile squashed between Ilya’s forefinger and thumb. Then he says, his voice light, “I thought you said you wanted to work on your problem.”
His vision has adjusted enough to the dim light by now to make out how wide Shane’s eyes have stretched. Shane says, barely able to get the words out through Ilya’s grip on his chin, “My problem?”
“Your problem where you need a hand on you to come,” Ilya says. “You wanted to fix. Or have you forgotten already?”
Shane’s pupils are slowly expanding. “I didn’t forget,” he says, although he’s having trouble landing on any of the consonants. There’s drool collecting on the web between Ilya’s fingers.
"You were focused, before," Ilya says. "But not focused enough, I don't think." He releases Shane's jaw and asks, "Do you think you can be coached?"
Shane straightens indignantly at this, pushing himself away from where he’s still braced against the wall, so quickly he briefly wobbles before regaining his balance. The white shapes of Ilya’s fingers, still pressed into the sides of his jaw, are slowly fading to red. “Yes,” he says, in a tone indicating it’s outrageous to even question such an obvious fact.
“Okay,” says Ilya. He lets doubt creep into the word, just a tinge, still enough to get Shane’s nostrils to flare. “Then maybe you are not being coached well enough, this is all.”
It’s a fine line to walk, with Shane, making him feel like he needs to prove himself without nettling him. Ilya has gotten very good at walking it. He watches Shane’s throat bob in the dusk before he says, “What should I do, then?”
“Go get changed,” says Ilya. “Let’s go to the gym.”
*
The gym in Shane’s cottage is sunny during the day, lined with cardio equipment facing the big windows looking out onto the lake. There’s a space next to them where Ilya knows Shane sets up his mat for morning meditation when the weather isn’t nice enough to do it on the lawn.
Ilya, when in a more somber mood, feels something twist in his chest when he looks at the setup and thinks of Shane pounding at the treadmill, trapped behind the glass, with his gaze fixed on the birds gliding free over the water.
But by now it’s too dark to see the water, and Ilya’s not feeling particularly melancholy anyway, because Shane has arrived in the gym, and although he’s wearing a reluctant expression like he’s not quite sure what Ilya has talked him into he had chosen his very smallest shorts, the little white ones with the compression legs beneath mesh slit all the way up the sides of Shane’s muscled thighs.
“You show up to practice like this?” Ilya asks, delighted. “Looking like a slut?”
Shane makes a face at him, like it’s not even more obvious under the ceiling lights in the gym when he blushes. “These allow for a greater range of movement,” he says, primly.
“Oh, good,” says Ilya, nodding, like that’s something he’d been worried about. He steps back, then, and leans over to poke his bare toes toward the mat he’d spread out in front of the window. “Sit,” he says.
Shane squeaks his way over. He’s wearing a compression tank and calf-high socks, clean white sneakers to go along with the shorts. He lowers himself the mat, gets his knees up and his hands planted. The muscles at the tops of his shoulders bunch up as he leans back to brace himself.
He looks up at Ilya and waits.
“Not like that,” Ilya says. “Like you’re going to meditate.”
“This is my yoga mat,” Shane says. “Not my meditation mat.”
There is no possible way, Ilya thinks, there is a difference between those two things. He makes a mental note to argue about it later before he says, “You’ll do it anyway, for me, won’t you?”
Shane nods, just a barely perceptible dip of his chin, before reaching down to pull off his sneakers, one by one. He sets them beside the mat. He settles back, folds his legs up in front of him, gets his feet up on each opposite thigh. Then he straightens his spine, places one hand on each knee, and closes his eyes.
Ilya looks down at him. He’s very appealing, like this, so straight-backed and elegant, with his meaty thighs spread wide and his shorts pulled to just a thin white strip of material over his bulge.
“Try to empty your mind,” Ilya says.
“It's usually easier when someone isn’t talking,” Shane says, his eyes still closed.
Ilya’s going to need him a little more cooperative than that for this to work. He reaches down and unzips his own pants.
Shane twitches slightly at the sound. His hands flex and then relax on his knees, but he doesn’t open his eyes.
“Tell me one thing you like about putting your mouth on me,” Ilya says.
Shane keeps his eyes closed as he says, “I like the sounds you make when I do it.”
“Good,” says Ilya. “Another thing.”
Shane licks his lips. “I like when it’s hard to breathe,” he says. “I like when it makes me dizzy.”
Ilya’s hand flexes against his thigh. He tugs his pants down, then his briefs, halfway down his thighs, just enough that he can take himself in hand. He looks down at Shane’s serene expression and says, “Another.”
Shane turns his closed eyes toward Ilya, a flower blindly seeking sunlight, and says, “I like the way it tastes.”
Ilya swallows. “Okay,” he says. It comes out a little hoarse. “Mind empty except this. Think about the sounds, and think about being dizzy, and think about—” Jesus, he can barely get the words out, his throat is dry, he has to swallow hard first— “the way it tastes. Three things. Nothing else. Okay?”
Shane doesn’t answer. His eyebrows draw slightly toward one another, though, like he’s concentrating.
Between his legs, against that thin strip of fabric, his cock gives a visible twitch.
Ilya takes his hand away from his dick, regretting even the momentary loss of pressure as he cups his fingers beneath his chin and spits. Then he gets his hand back on himself and moves through the first slow stroke, steady and slick enough to make a sticky, clinging sound as it goes.
Shane’s brows are moving closer together. The fabric stretched between his splayed-out thighs is growing even tighter.
Ilya pauses, spits again in his hand. The slide is even louder on the next draw. His head, each time it peeks out from his foreskin, is plummy and wet. He's already aching for it.
And so Ilya slowly rubs himself to full hardness in front of Shane's pretty face as Shane, close-eyed and cross-legged, concentrates with all he has, thinks only about Ilya's dick in his throat and nothing else as he slowly, steadily, fills out the front of his shorts.
Ilya waits until the line between Shane’s brows smooths out, until his knees relax back down from where they’ve flexed upward from the mat, before he says, “I haven’t come in a week.”
Shane twitches. His eyes start to open.
“Three things, Shane," Ilya reminds him. "Focus up.”
Shane clamps his eyes shut, along with his mouth. His hands twitch. He shudders, a nice shivery thing that looks like it slips upward from his tailbone to the nape of his neck.
His dick thumps, hard, against the shorts stretched taut between his legs.
“I was saving up,” says Ilya. He’s breathing hard, now, and not trying to quiet it. His hand wants to move faster, but he forces himself to keep each pull slow, even, rhythmic. “Wanted to give it all to you, since it wasn’t enough last time.”
Shane’s eyelids spasm. He keeps them shut, seemingly through sheer force of will.
“Maybe it tastes different, now,” Ilya says, like it's just now occurring to him. "Maybe it tastes sweeter."
Shane’s mouth moves, soundlessly. A muscle in the side of his neck flutters.
His hips are shifting slightly, rocking upward from the mat. He’s not trying to stop them. It’s like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
Ilya’s eyes thin. It’s not entirely of his own volition that he’s tightening his grip, moving faster, veering rapidly toward the edge. He can taste his orgasm on his tongue when he grunts, "Open your mouth."
Shane opens.
"Wider," Ilya demands.
Shane's pink tongue gleams as he stretches his jaw.
Ilya makes a circle out of his fist, fucks rapidly into it. “There will be so much of it,” he says, his voice sounding strained even to his own ears. “It's going to soak you, fuck. It’s going to get you so wet.”
Shane lets out a sharp little noise, something that sounds like it’s been cracked out of his chest. His hips shudder upward from the mat just as Ilya grunts, curls forward, and comes in a heavy spurt over his open mouth.
Ilya's hand spasms. His next shot stripes Shane down the throat and below his collar, between his straining pecs and all the way down to the hard bulge of his muscled stomach against the tank.
Shane’s eyes pop open. His mouth shuts. There's come on his lips and chin as he strains forward, the tendons in his neck flexing, a vein in his forehead bulging.
Ilya looks down, wringing out the final pulse of his orgasm, forcing his fluttering eyelids to stay open so that he can drop his eyes from the come soaking into the fabric to watch as Shane’s dick, completely untouched, kicks and spurts against the inside of his shorts.
Shane lets out a series of sharp, almost panicked grunts, his knuckles going white as his hands clamp down on his knees like he's fighting not to give himself relief by reaching down to squeeze.
Ilya groans through his teeth as he shakes through what feels like a second, spikier orgasm that feels like getting shocked in the base of the spine. "Good," he says, almost slurring it. "Good job, good boy, that's my good, good boy."
When Ilya's vision is less spotty he leans down, breathing hard, to study the mess streaked over Shane’s chest and belly. “It’s actually,” Ilya pants, still catching his breath, “not as much as I thought it would be.”
Shane doesn’t look like somebody who’s in the right frame of mind to be assessing comeshot volume. He looks more like someone who’s been recently hit in the back of the head with a heavy object.
His dick is still twitching in his soaked-through shorts.
He slowly unfolds his legs before collapsing backward to lie belly-up on the mat, his workout clothes soaked, his limbs still twitching, his face still locked into an expression somewhere between agonized and beatific.
Ilya can't help himself. He's still in his dinner clothes, the chinos and button-down he'd worn in an attempt to impress Shane's parents. He ruins them as he gets down, plasters himself to Shane, and sinks in to lick himself from Shane's chin, his lolling tongue. Squirms one hand down between them, as he does so, to squeeze at the front of Shane's come-soaked shorts until Shane jolts and squeaks beneath him.
*
It is, all in all, a perfect Thanksgiving. So Ilya is dismayed when he wakes up the next morning and burrows under the covers to apologize for what he’d put Shane through yesterday by putting Shane in his mouth, only to be met with Shane’s hands under his arms, tugging him gently but insistently upwards.
He emerges, blinking, to encounter Shane pressing a sweet kiss to his mouth. “Thank you,” he says, “but I really want to try that celibacy thing, now. Can I do you instead?”
Ilya had known he would get just an hour or two at the cottage this morning before he had to head to the airport.
He just hadn’t known they would spend it fighting.
Ilya sits up, wipes at his mouth, and says, “You said you would check with me before changing things.”
“I am checking with you,” Shane says, shuffling back and sitting up against the pillows to mirror Ilya. The covers fall away from his bare chest, from his tight muscled waist. “This is me checking with you.”
“But I don’t want it.”
Shane begins blinking rapidly, like if he could just clear his vision the conversation will start making sense to him. “It’s my body,” he says.
Ilya doesn’t like how uncertain Shane sounds about that. “I know that.”
“So I get to decide. And once I see if it makes me faster—”
“Don’t act like it’s about that,” Ilya snaps. "This is just like dinner last night. You don't really think eating a bite of dessert will make you score fewer goals. You just like punishing yourself."
Shane’s face is getting that stiff, removed look that Ilya hates, the one he wears during press conferences and when talking to groupies who approach him at bars. “I don’t see why you have such a problem with me trying to be a better player,” he says.
Ilya gropes for words. He wants to say that he sees the pattern, he sees how much Shane loves depriving himself of good things, and that he thinks he might be next on the list, that their relationship might be the next thing Shane shaves off in order to focus on the game.
But he’s not sure how to say it without implying he’s something as good as a slice of pie or an orgasm, and he can’t think of anything Sun Tzu might have had to say on the matter.
And then— deeper than that, and worse— is a question he doesn't want to ask, because he doesn't want Shane to start thinking about it: what does Ilya have to offer Shane if he's not making Shane come?
“It’s like you don’t want to be happy,” he says, eventually, despairingly.
“What would you know about being happy?” Shane snaps.
Ilya looks down at where his hands are curled loosely over the covers in front of him.
Neither of them speak, for a few moments. And then Shane says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Ilya flexes all of his fingers, one by one, just to make sure they’re still working, even though he’s getting that familiar cold feeling beneath the nails.
Shane says, “Ilya?”
It’s not so bad, sometimes, when that numb feeling settles over him, like a thin film between him and the rest of the world. It happens, sometimes, and Ilya knows it will pass. At least for now it lets him feel as removed from the situation as Shane had looked moments ago. “It’s okay,” says Ilya. "I guess I don't know that much, really."
"It's just for two weeks," says Shane. "We'll be spending most of it apart anyway."
He says it like it's reassuring, like Ilya will find it a relief to be apart. Does Shane find it a relief, when they're not around one another? “I should start packing," Ilya says.
"I'm sorry," says Shane, again. "I shouldn't have thrown that in your face."
And Ilya says, again, "It's okay."
The cold feeling doesn’t go away, not as Shane trails Ilya uncertainly around the cottage as Ilya gathers his things, not when Shane presses his mouth against Ilya’s at the door.
"I really am sorry," Shane says.
"I'm sorry, too," Ilya says, although he doesn't feel sorry. He doesn't feel much of anything, really, in that moment.
Ilya drives to the airport carefully. He goes the speed limit. He slows to a complete stop at every red sign. His hands are cold, and Shane’s right. He doesn’t really know anything about being happy, anyway.
A text buzzes on his phone. Ilya doesn't look, partly for road safety, and partially because his lockscreen is still Shane with a puppy, and it would be wrong to look at that and feel nothing.
*
Sveta, who has been traveling frequently lately, is in Boston a few nights later, and so Ilya goes out with her and gets very, very drunk.
It’s a mistake for several reasons, one of them being that he has a game tomorrow afternoon, and another being that he should know better than to overindulge when he’s been stewing in such maudlin thoughts.
It really shouldn’t be surprising when, with the taste of the third chacha shot he’d just done still sharp in his mouth, Ilya turns to Sveta and says in low-voiced Russian, “Do you think you could love someone even if they weren't making you come?"
Sveta, who had just lifted her cocktail to her mouth, considers this. “I love you,” she says, and takes a sip. They’re tucked into a back booth at the Georgian hole-in-the-wall down the street from her apartment, close enough together that their shoulders bump as she sets the glass back down. “And you haven't made me come in ages."
“I mean love someone like a boyfriend,” Ilya says.
Sveta’s eyes widen. “You have a dead bedroom?” She drops her voice to a whisper: “With Shane?”
Ilya makes a face at her. “No. Not a dead bedroom.”
Sveta flaps a hand at him. “I was about to stop believing in love. You guys have insane chemistry. There’s no way the sex isn’t, like, the best sex ever.”
“Yes,” says Ilya, because it’s not like he can deny it. Shane couldn’t really say for sure, because he doesn’t have a large enough sample size. Ilya does, and he knows for a fact that if there was such a thing as a Conn Smythe of sex it would be going to Shane. “It’s good. It’s great, amazing, the best. But I’m worried about what we would have without, you know?”
Sveta nods. “Yeah, I’ve had relationships like that,” she says. “Sex was amazing, but afterward, it was like, ‘Get out of here, you’re so fucking boring, I’d rather be anywhere but here, looking at anyone but you.’"
“Yeah,” says Ilya, slowly.
Sveta is grinning as she raises her glass for another drink. “You can’t relate to that at all,” she points out, and darts out her tongue to lick at the rim.
“No,” Ilya admits.
“Okay,” Sveta says. “So what’s the problem?”
"We had a fight," says Ilya.
"Okay," Sveta says, again. "And you made up?"
"Yes," Ilya says, slowly. "He apologized. I apologized. He called and apologized some more and I said please stop apologizing and he apologized for that, too."
"Sounds very Canadian," Sveta says.
"But we still— we still might not have sex for a while," Ilya admits, dropping his eyes to the table. "He's got this thing going on. And I think— well— I'm worried that if I’m not making him come, he’s going to see he's got here, with me, and he might not really like it."
Sveta puts her glass down on the table with a loud clink. “Ilya,” she says, firmly. “You always accuse me of self-sabotaging in relationships—“
“Because you do, I told you you’re overthinking your thing with that guy—“
“—so why are you making problems where there aren’t any? It’s okay to just be in love, you know. It doesn’t have to be tragic.”
Ilya’s mouth twists. He looks down at his empty shot glass.
Sveta’s hand creeps into view across the table, settles on the back of his where it’s wrapped around the glass. “Everything is okay,” she says. “He loves you. You love him. Let’s get another round, and you can listen to me complain about not being in love so that you can feel better about having a hot boyfriend you’re obsessed with, okay?”
“Okay,” Ilya agrees, and clears his throat before reaching behind himself to dig in his pocket for his wallet.
*
Shane calls Ilya the next morning from a hotel room in Denver. He’s been up for a while, if his bright eyes and post-workout flush are any indication. “I got The Art of War,” he says, proudly, holding the phone below him and tipping his chin to smile down at it. “I read part of it on the plane yesterday. Some of the guys made fun of me.”
Ilya, who had woken up hungover and in a bad mood, smiles back despite himself. “You did?”
Shane, sitting on the side of the hotel bed, props his phone up against something on the nightstand and leans over to rummage out of sight of the camera. He leans back into the frame with an enormous book in his hands.
Ilya’s mouth drops open. “What is that?”
Shane frowns. “The Art of War,” he says, like maybe Ilya’s already forgotten what they were just talking about.
“Shane,” Ilya says. “This is short book. That’s huge.”
“No, it’s a special edition,” Shane says. “See?” It turns out he’s picked up some ridiculous kitschy copy, with embroidered dragons on the soft fabric of the cover, and each right-side page featuring a few lines of English text mirrored by Chinese characters on the left.
“Oh, perfect,” says Ilya. He can’t stop grinning. No wonder Shane’s teammates had been laughing. “So you can pick up some Mandarin to go along with your perfect French and your pretty Russian.”
Shane, who is almost as harsh of his beginner Russian as he is of his command of the French language— which sounds perfectly passable to Ilya, but which Shane had once told him is clunky enough that some idiots in the Montreal front office had actually hesitated to draft him— wrinkles his nose. “Obviously not,” he says.
“Well,” says Ilya, lifting his phone to keep his face in view as he leans back against the couch. His headache feels like it’s started dissipating since he picked up the call, which is convenient, as he’d been too lazy to go fetch his ibuprofen from the bathroom. “What did you think?”
“Well,” says Shane. “I went in thinking about how to apply it to hockey.”
“Of course,” says Ilya.
“And I mean, yeah, of course it applies, the general philosophy of it, but it applies to a lot of things. It kind of got me thinking about—” Shane tips his gaze upward and frowns, like he might be able to find the right words on the ceiling. “It’s just kind of crazy that it’s all so relevant now, right? Like, this guy was around two thousand years ago and he’s giving advice we use now?"
Shane looks back down and shrugs. He looks embarrassed. “I don’t know,” he says. “Just made me feel— weirdly connected to someone who lived all that time ago, I guess.”
It’s incredible, even after all this time, that Ilya can still be caught off guard by the surge of fondness he sometimes feels around Shane.
“Shane,” he sighs. “You have to try fiction. These Russian authors, they are so good at making people feel real. It's same thing, same connecting. You feel like you know these people, sometimes."
Shane nods. He has that determined look he gets when Ilya recommends things, sometimes, like someone’s just given him a new workout to tackle. “Okay,” he says. “What should I read?”
Ilya blinks up at the phone. He flashes back to his childhood bedroom, the creased books on the shelf above his bed, the teenage novels he'd pored over after hockey practices. Hard to think of that sullen-faced boy in his narrow bed someday picking up one of those tattered copies to hand it to a clean-shaven Canadian.
He’d love to get Shane reading some Dostoevsky. He imagines a world where Shane would laugh with him about the The Brothers Karamazov, although in reality the width of the spine alone would probably scare him off.
“I will think about this,” Ilya says, after a moment of deliberation.
“Okay,” says Shane, and smiles down at the camera. “By the way, I have good news.”
Ilya blinks. “Yes?”
“I’m ending the celibacy experiment,” Shane says. “I did more reading on it, and the guy was kind of a hack. There are way more reputable sources that kind of say the opposite. Plus— I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do tend to deny myself stuff, and I don’t want that to affect us, you know?”
He must be facing a window. His eyes are glittering as they reflect the Colorado morning sunlight.
After a long moment, Ilya says, hoarsely, “Yes. I know.”
“Okay,” says Shane. His cheeks are slowly getting pinker. “I have twenty minutes before I have to head out. Do you want to?"
Ilya is struck by a sudden pang of concern. He grips his phone tighter. “Shane,” he says. “Would you still have called, even if you didn’t think we were going to have sex?”
Shane looks alarmed. “Oh. Do you not want to?”
“No, no, of course I want to,” Ilya says, impatiently. “But if I didn’t— if you knew I wouldn’t— would you still have called?”
“Well, yes,” says Shane, like it’s obvious. “I wanted to show you my book.”
"Oh," says Ilya. "Right." Of course Shane had wanted to show him his book; he'd wanted to talk about history and fiction. He'd wanted Ilya's book recommendations. Before he goes he'll ask Ilya about the cramp Ilya's been getting on his left side, and he'll want to get Ilya's opinion on that rookie winger making his debut for Nashville tonight in Boston.
What a ridiculous thing, Ilya thinks, to be concerned they might run out of things to talk about.
He can’t think of anything relevant Sun Tzu said, right now, but Svetlana said it’s okay just to be in love.
“Okay,” says Ilya, and reaches behind himself to grab at his collar and yank his shirt over his head. “I’m going to make sure to come extra, just for you.”
“I don’t really think that’s possible, Ilya,” says Shane, but his tone is light. When Ilya re-emerges from his t-shirt he sees Shane is smiling down at the screen like there’s no one else at whom he’d rather be looking.