Archive of Our Own

Tuesday

The plane had only been in the air for about fifteen minutes before Ilya started feeling uncharitable towards babies, and the uteruses that produced them in general. In the baby’s defence, the plane was hot, loud, and cramped. Also in the baby’s defence, Ilya hadn’t bought himself a first-class seat because he’d been too busy dithering and worrying about flying to Ottawa, and had left it too late to get his usual choice. It wasn’t the baby’s fault that all six feet three inches of him was crammed into a window seat next to it, face turned to the window and headphone volume up higher than any audiologist would ever recommend. It wasn’t the baby’s fault that it was clearly grizzling because it was 7am and it now found itself hurtling through the air at 600mph.

“I’m so sorry about this,” the baby’s mother said to him with a wince. Ilya paused his music, and grimaced back in a way that he hoped look more like what can you do? and less like was it born with a megaphone in its throat?

“Is fine,” he said politely.

“She’s not usually this bad on flights, I swear. We just had a late night, so she’s all out of whack.”

That was something Ilya could relate to. He’d been up at 3am for the flight, but the last time he’d checked his phone it had been one in the morning. He’d been up all night doing very cool, casual things. Things like Googling ‘weather in ottawa july’ and ‘how do you know if someone wants to be your boyfriend’ in an incognito tab. Things like trying on every t-shirt in his wardrobe to find a nominal selection of outfit options that screamed both I did not think too much about what I’m wearing and I want to look nice for you. Things like staring at the last text he’d received from Shane, sent at 10.45pm the night before.

Jane

Monday 14^th July, 10.45pm

 

Jane
Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Sleep well!

 

Ilya
Me too
Goodnight Shane

Given that Shane’s interest in fashion extended only as far as hiring a whole other person to build him a wardrobe and ensuring that his shirts were carefully ironed (if the everpresent neat pile in his apartment was anything to go by), Ilya had to admit that his subconscious had an ulterior motive for stressing him out about his carry-on choices. He was carefully trying to avoid probing that too much this morning.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ilya replied to the young mother. It wasn’t the baby’s fault, after all.

The baby had, thankfully, quietened somewhat, and was now staring at him with a singular-minded focus that made him feel distinctly like he was being cross-examined in a witness stand. He tried a gentle wave in the baby’s direction, and resolutely did not go slightly gooey when the baby smiled back at him, cheeks wet but now sufficiently distracted.

“She likes you,” the mother said, amused. Ilya waved at the baby again.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-one months tomorrow.”

Ilya nodded the kind of nod that both acknowledged the age and implied that he did not know what the fuck that meant developmentally. “Ah.”

He tried a smile with the baby. A cheek puff, a pout. The baby laughed. He was killing it.

“What’s got you heading to Ottawa, then?” the mother asked.

Ilya cycled through a few rapid responses. I am about to go and fuck the brains out of North America’s biggest hockey star for two weeks. I am about to go and cross some very wobbly lines in the sand with my situationship of seven years who I am in love with. I have absolutely no fucking idea what is waiting for me in Ottawa, and that has kept me up at night for weeks now. He settled on:

“Visiting a friend.”

The mother nodded. “That’s nice.”

“You?”

“Ugh,” she groaned, exasperated. She’d clearly been waiting to talk about this with someone. “Visiting her dad for a while.”

Now, look. Ilya wasn’t a snitch, and if his entire hockey career had proven anything, it’s that he was good at keeping a secret. However, he was just a man, and that man loved a bit of drama.

“He’s not good?” Ilya replied, trying to keep his voice light.

“Yes and no,” said the mother, rolling her eyes. “He’s a dick. But he’s good to her, so I’m trying to keep the split civil for her sake.”

A faint bell rang in Ilya’s head. “You share, ah, custody between Boston and Ottawa?”

She nodded again. “Yeah, I get out every few months, and then he comes this way in-between.”

The bell got louder. “And it works?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. We can see each other regularly enough to support her, which is what matters.”

“Do you like Ottawa?” he heard himself ask.

“It’s nice. Quiet, so I’m not really sure what he’s doing there – but it’s nice.”

Ilya fixated on her previous reply. We see each regularly enough. Enough to co-parent, and co-parent well – which meant, surely, that a fledgling relationship between the USA and Canada was easy work. Right? Besides, Montreal was a shorter flight anyway, and they both had the flight patterns down. All they’d need to do would be increase the regularity, schedule it a little closer. Shane loved a schedule. But she’d also said Ottawa was nice. Unrelatedly, Ilya had been looking at Canadian immigration law at 2am a few nights ago. He wasn’t even enjoying going out clubbing anymore, so he didn’t mind quiet, in theory. Ottawa’s team was dogshit, but he wouldn’t even need to get on a plane. Besides, he liked a challenge.

Oblivious to Ilya’s mental torment, the mother hesitated briefly as the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign turned off as they levelled out.

“I’m so sorry to be a pain in the ass,” she rushed out. “Is there any way you could hold her just so I can run to the bathroom for, like, two minutes?”

Ilya’s brain rebooted quickly, looking back at the mother. “Oh, um – sure.”

She sighed in relief. “Thank you so much,” she started, already going to unbuckle her seatbelt, “I was late to the airport so I had to rush through departures.”

And then Ilya was left with a lap full of baby, who was still staring into his soul but was now also very intrigued by his baseball cap. Securing his hold around her torso a little more firmly, he couldn’t help but grin as grabby hands made for the brim. He popped it quickly off his head and onto her own, smiling again when it made her laugh.

“It suits you,” he said quietly.

She babbled back at him, bad mood now long gone, and he nodded sagely in response.

“Absolutely.”

She then started clambering over him, with one very near miss, to reach the window on his other side. He hefted her up a little, turned her to face it, and snorted when the brim of the cap she was still wearing thunked lightly off the glass.

“There is not much up here, sorry. Some clouds, over there. Sun is that way. Maybe another plane soon, but it won’t be close enough for you to see it. Maybe you can wave at them anyway though, yes?”

The pair of them practiced waving at the non-existent planes for a moment, and Ilya remembered doing the same out of the window of his brother’s apartment with his niece a couple of years prior. She’d been slightly older then, but they’d spent a fun few minutes waving at all the passers-by from the first floor, cheerfully yelling hello! at anyone who was in-range. He’d barely seen her when he was back in Moscow to sort his father’s estate, only a brief meeting with her at the funeral and the dinner afterwards. He was too busy trying to avoid Alexei. She’s six now, his brain supplied. How many months was that?

“Thank you, thank you,” came the mother’s harried voice behind him. “I really appreciate it!”

“Is fine,” Ilya said again, and this time, he meant it. “We were saying hello to the other planes.”

The mother smiled, and plucked the baby out of his lap with the ease of someone who did it roughly seventy-five times a day. “Were you?” she cooed at her daughter. “That’s nice of you.”

“She was very polite to them.”

“You’re good with kids,” the woman said amiably. “Anyway, sorry, we’ll let you chill now. I usually hate chatty people on flights.”

She turned to mess with the screen in front of her, finding a movie and talking under her breath to her daughter. Ilya watched them for a moment longer, before the headphones went back on and he went back to window-gazing. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that if there was one thing he would not be doing on this flight, it was chilling.

̶

An hour or so into the drive to Shane’s cottage, Ilya was worried that his palms were clammy. He’d folded his hands around one of Shane’s and dragged it onto his lap like it was the easiest thing in the world, but he was now doing some truly Hollander-level overthinking about it. Was it too much? What did Shane mean by relax with you? When should he let go of his hand? Did he have to? How the fuck was Ilya supposed to relax when his heartbeat was echoing through his chest and up into his ears, hammering away at the inside of his skull?

There was nary a Russian on the planet who hadn’t perfected the art of the blank face, so Ilya knew that if Shane tried to look at him out of the corner of his eye (he’d been doing it constantly since the airport parking lot) he’d see nothing that betrayed quite how much Ilya was spiralling. But he also knew he was sweating as he thought, brain scanning as he tried to sift his feelings into boxes and calm his heart rate. So, clammy palms.

Shane broke the silence first. “I bought pasta. For dinner tonight, I mean. Is that okay? Do you like it? Pasta, I mean? I guessed that you would. I hope that’s fine.”

Shane’s gaze moved to him properly, flicking back to the windscreen like the good, law-abiding Canadian that he was, and Ilya felt his pulse slow a touch. Logically, he’d known that Shane would likely be nervous too, given that he was already made slightly anxious by, well, most things. However, there something almost comforting about seeing it in front of him now, laid out in the way his throat moved and his bottom teeth worried at his top lip. This raw new thing that Ilya saw unfurling in front of them scared the shit out of Shane too. They were two intrepid explorers, both stood at the start of something uncharted with their hands clasped.

“Yes, Shane. I like pasta,” he said sarcastically.

“Great, great,” Shane replied, distracted and eyes back on the road. His hand squeezed inside Ilya’s, and Ilya felt something jump under his sternum. “It’s chickpea pasta, though.”

“It’s fucking what?” Ilya whined. “What the fuck, Hollander.”

Shane scoffed. “It’s higher in protein, less carb-heavy-”

“-Less fun-”

“-You haven’t even tried it yet-”

“-I am not even Italian and I am offended-”

“-I’ll do a good sauce with it,” Shane finished. “And meatballs?”

Ilya hummed. “I can work with meatballs.”

̶

Several fucks later, and Shane was true to his word. He stood in the kitchen, boxers and a ratty old top thrown on hastily, watching the saucepan like a hawk as the meatballs and red sauce bubbled away. Ilya sat at the kitchen island, legs kicking lightly against the footrest of the stool as he studied the graceful slope of Shane’s shoulders, the gentle tilt of his head.

“It smells good,” Ilya said. Shane stuck his pinky in to the sauce, tasting it and letting out an unconvinced hmm in response.

“I feel like it needs something.”

Shane grabbed a teaspoon from the drawer next to him and dipped it into the sauce, turning to face Ilya with his hand cupped underneath it to catch the drips. As he moved around the island, Ilya’s pulse picked up again and his brain smashed together a montage of nights like this from some imagined future. Shane cooking for him in their kitchen, offering his creation up for Ilya’s judgement. Maybe there would be a nice playlist on. Maybe the pasta would be actual pasta, not chickpea. Maybe they’d be cooking for more than just the two of them. Christ.

“Try it?”

Ilya diligently leaned forward and slurped a bit of sauce off the spoon, making sure to lock eyes with Shane as he did so. He might be having an existential and romantic crisis, but he was not going to miss a prime opportunity to make Shane blush.

“Maybe some basil?” he suggested. “And a little more pepper.”

Shane nodded to himself. “Yeah, perhaps.”

Ilya grabbed the spoon from him and turned the little sauce remaining on there to face Shane. “Check if I’m right. I do not want to ruin it.”

Shane pulled a face and snatched the spoon back, throwing it into the sink as he returned to the simmering pot of sauce and reached for the pepper grinder next to him. “Gross, I’m not sharing your spoon.”

Ilya raised an eyebrow. “Your mouth was on my dick less than an hour ago.”

“Well, that wasn’t in the kitchen-”

“-And my tongue was in your asshole.”

Shane turned to him, expression deadpan. Ilya grinned.

“God, you’re such a charmer.”

“Not God,” Ilya started, and Shane groaned when he realised where the joke was going. “Just Ilya.”

Wednesday

Ilya had spied a couple of kayaks tucked away around the back of the cottage. When he’d been mentally laying out contingency plans 1 through 15 in case things got awkward, top of the list was simply ‘find something competitive to do’. Shane would compete over quite literally anything, he’d learned, whether it be a race to the top of the stairs or competitive breakfast-making. He’d loudly declared that his spinach and mixed berry protein smoothie was ‘better for like, every macro’ than Ilya’s omelette. Ilya responded by telling him that the competition he’d won was, in fact, most boring breakfast eater.

But to Ilya’s surprise – and, to hell with it, his overwhelming private joy – he’d discovered that their silences filled themselves naturally. It didn’t seem to matter that the most time they’d ever spent around each other was a number of hours, nor that they’d never really done anything outside of fuck, talk hockey, and eat the odd ill-fated sandwich. There were seven million things that Ilya wanted to know about Shane, and it seemed, from his line of questioning, like there were seven million and one things that Shane wanted to know about Ilya.

Regardless of all of this, the sun was out and the lake looked, in Ilya’s opinion, fucking gorgeous. So: kayaks.

“What’s the best book you’ve ever read?” Shane asked him, watching as Ilya struggled to reach backwards and apply sunscreen between his shoulder blades. Without comment, Shane plucked the bottle out of Ilya’s hands and shoved him round with one hand, turning to squeeze out and delicately rub in some of the cream.

Ilya thought for a moment. “I liked War and Peace at school,” he replied. This seemed to shock Shane, whose head popped around Ilya’s side to grab his eyeline.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Ilya said. “It was long, but I remember it was very beautiful.”

“I’ve never read it.”

“Ah, well. Give it a couple of weeks and you will be able to read it in Russian. No translation needed.”

“Oh yeah?” Shane muttered, refocused on working the sunscreen in so diligently that Ilya was certain his spinal cord would probably now be UV-protected. “You seem very certain of that.”

“I will teach you,” Ilya declared. “I told you, you will be a natural. But I will only teach you the important things first.”

“I’m not sure War and Peace contains the words please fuck me harder, Ilya.”

Ilya grinned, wiggling his shoulders. “You will just have to find out.”

̶

To no one’s great surprise, Shane turned out to be both a fantastic kayaker and a terrible fucking bragger about it. Ilya grumbled in all the right places as Shane called from twenty feet ahead to hurry the fuck up, Rozanov, but he secretly smiled and ferreted away the knowledge that no one in the league would ever believe that the Golden Boy would be capable of throwing him a middle finger and a dry this is actually so embarrassing for you. This bitchy, annoying Shane? This was his and his alone.

“Your kayak makes your ass look shit from here.”

“Blatantly untrue,” Shane retorted, dropping a cheeky smirk over his shoulder.

“Where are these fucking otters, Hollander?” Ilya yelled. “Or did you forget your glasses and mistake them for floating garbage bag?”

“Fuck off. They’re literally over this way. Think you can make it?”

Ilya put both his sizeable biceps and his inability to back down from a challenge to work, paddling furiously to catch up as Shane laughed at him. They raced each other to the far side of the lake, pulling the kayaks onto the pebble shore and collapsing in a heap. From inside his own boat, Shane produced a small rucksack and a couple of bottles of water, chucking one to Ilya while he unpacked two protein bars, two bananas, and two bags of vegetable chips.

“Oh my god,” Ilya said. “You are actually a rabbit.”

“I am not a rabbit!” Shane replied, indignant. There was a brief lull while the pair of them half-drained their water bottles, before Shane nudged one of Ilya’s snacks in his direction. “You need to eat.”

Ilya shrugged, picking up one of the protein bars and dragging the banana towards him. He inspected the flavour of the bar, and was happy to see that it was chocolate chip. He looked at Shane’s, which just read apple.

“You don’t want this one?” Ilya offered, holding it out to him. “Better flavour.”

“No, I’m good,” Shane said, suddenly a little meek. “I don’t like those ones, but I thought you would.”

Ilya didn’t know what to do with that, except let it roll around in his brain and fill his chest up like a balloon. Shane Hollander, in a grocery store buying snacks that he didn’t like, just because he knew Ilya would. Stocking his cupboards twice over, filling two water bottles and remembering to put ice in them both.

“Thank you,” Ilya replied quietly, turning the bar over in his hand.

Shane smiled at him, warm enough for Ilya to feel his own face burn. “You’re welcome.”

“You can get those vegetable chips away from me, though.”

“Have you ever even tried them?”

“I don’t need to. Disgusting vegetable creation.”

“I mean, a potato is literally a vegetable too.”

“Exactly! And it is perfect vegetable for the job, so I don’t need to try a burnt radish.”

Shane laughed out loud, and Ilya realised that it was a laugh he’d never heard before. Shane’s laughs previously were always quiet things or shitty snorts, but this? This was brash, a bit of a squawk that echoed down the shoreline. His lake laugh, maybe. It went straight to the top of the list as Ilya’s favourite, and he grinned helplessly back at him.

“You like it out here, don’t you?”

“Favourite place on Earth,” Shane replied with a soft sigh, turning back to face the water.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said. “I feel like I get to breathe out here. Everything is always so busy, you know? Like in the season, we just bounce from place to place and it’s non-stop. Here, it’s just me.”

“And now me,” Ilya said. It came out weaker than he wanted it to, closer to a question that he wasn’t yet sure he had the right to ask. But Shane looked back at him, another smile quirking his face. He wanted him here, Ilya tried to remind himself. He’d asked him to come.

Shane nodded. “And now you.”

Ilya pressed his lips together to hold back the words he knew he’d end up speaking soon.

̶

It got cold quickly after the sun went down here. Ilya learned that the hard way as he tried to Russian his way through their evening drink on the porch, only to bury himself in the soft fleece of the hoodie that Shane forced over his head like a patient father trying to dress his child for school.

“Better?”

Ilya pursed his lips, not willing to give Shane the satisfaction of two wins in one day. Shane chuckled quietly anyway, swirling the beer around in the bottom of his bottle absentmindedly. His hand had stayed on Ilya’s arm after their battle with the hoodie, and it was searing a delicious brand into Ilya’s skin through the fabric.

“I will cook tomorrow,” Ilya started. “What is your favourite meal?”

Shane blew out a breath, leaning back but still not breaking his hold on Ilya’s arm. “God, I don’t know. I really like salmon.”

“Come on, Shane.”

“I really do!” Shane replied with another laugh. “My dad makes this amazing salmon with a cilantro crust. You’d like it, I think.”

“I would?” Ilya asked, trying desperately not to read too much into it and failing miserably.

“Yeah,” said Shane, like he was deciding there and then. And thus it was that Ilya would like his dad’s salmon. “He’s a good cook.”

“Well, that is not fair then. I cannot make you something that you know your dad will make better. How will I impress you then?”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” Shane asked lightly. “Impress me?”

Ilya clucked his tongue. “Probably, yes.”

They locked eyes for a moment, and Ilya watched as Shane searched his gaze, knowing that he’d find the exposed nerve that Ilya was guarding behind it.

“Make me your favourite meal,” he said after a moment. “What is it?”

“Ah, I can’t make that one,” Ilya replied, words starting to stick in his throat. He swigged his own beer to try and loosen the next ones. “My mama always made it the best, and I never learned how.”

“Yeah?” Shane said. “Was she a good cook?”

Ilya nodded. Beyond the deck, he could hear the wind as it rustled through the trees to meet them, and he huddled down further in Shane’s hoodie. His mother had been sitting on the edge of his mind since Shane had declared the cottage honesty policy and he knew, deep down, that it wouldn’t be long until he told Shane the thing that he’d not spoken out loud to a soul since before he moved to America.

“She was. She used to make everything herself. Bread, soups, jam. I used to watch her do it, but I never asked her to teach me. Stupid of me.”

“Well, I don’t think any kid wants to listen to their mom, really.”

He saw the opening for the small mercy it was that Shane had offered him. “Mm, not even when they are your manager?”

Shane let out a noise like ugh, shaking his head. “You’re an asshole.”

Ilya shrugged, and pulled his arm back a fraction, twisting it as he did and letting Shane’s hand graze down it until it met Ilya’s palm. He carefully fed his fingers through the gaps between Shane’s own, and took a deep breath when Shane curled his fingers tightly over his knuckles.

“Chicken. I will cook chicken.”

“My dad makes a great chicken parm.”

“Fuck off, Shane.”

Thursday

The nape of Shane’s neck smelled faintly like eucalyptus.

The salt of the sweat from a night tangled up together under the duvet, the distant scent that he’d wash off in the shower, and eucalyptus. He’d had one real taste of it on the day that now tasted like tuna and cheese in his memory, but here, Ilya could bask in the gentle morning sun and bury his nose in the soft tuft of hair without shame.

His brain had taken Shane’s policy to heart, and without realizing it, he found himself murmuring the same observation under his breath.

“Hmm?” Shane replied, muffled in his pillow but shifting to face Ilya slowly, eyes still closed. Under the sheet, Ilya felt Shane’s shin rotate on top of his, felt the downy hair on his calves and the just-so-lightly calloused skin on his heels graze his own.

“You smell like eucalyptus,” Ilya mumbled again. He’d lost his perch at the back of Shane’s neck, and busied himself sluggishly with trying to find a new one in the lovely golden dip of Shane’s clavicle.

“S’my shampoo,” was the reply. “You used it too.”

Ilya hummed. “Yes.”

He felt Shane’s head move, turning to press his own nose into the patch of skin behind Ilya’s ear. Heard him take a deep breath, almost a sigh.

“Mm, you smell like it too.”

“We smell the same, then,” Ilya muttered into Shane’s throat.

“We do.”

Ilya rubbed a hand over Shane’s chest, fingers catching but not lingering on his nipples as he passed up, across, down Shane’s sternum. He got an answering rumble, a pleasant little thing that had him tucking his hand underneath Shane’s mid-back. Shane flexed his shoulders backwards, and Ilya heard the light crack of his spine.

“Whattimizzit?”

“What?”

Shane cleared his throat. “What time is it?”

Ilya groaned. “Don’t know. Who cares.”

A shiver ran through him as Shane lightly passed his fingertips over the pinkish skin of his back. Shane had fussed yesterday, told him that he needed to reapply sunscreen more. There was a tiny sting as his fingers moved over it now, but Ilya leaned into the prickle, pushed himself backwards a smidge so that he could feel Shane’s touch in even sharper relief.

“Wanna do yoga.”

“Do it later. No rules for when yoga must happen.”

“S’better in the morning.”

“Bed is better in morning too.”

A huff of air over Ilya’s ear told him that he’d won the fight for now, and Shane’s arm came to wrap more firmly around his shoulders. A part of his brain came slowly online and told him to bank this moment. Bank it, bank it.

“Fair.”

̶

Shane was fucking insatiable in the summer. Call it the heat, call it the solitude, call it the post-season adrenaline with nowhere to go. Whatever it was, he was absolutely up and ready whenever the mood called. They’d been choosing a movie to watch after a late-lunchtime swim, escaping the very hottest part of the day and retreating under the air conditioning, only to find themselves sandwiched together the couch, chests pressed together with Shane on top whilst Ilya idly flicked through until he found something with an explosion or two.

It had been on for, Ilya swore, five minutes before he felt Shane’s hand trail down his side, moving across to his front to where the edge of his hip met the inside of his thigh, making a slow path back along the crease.

“We just started watching this.”

“I know,” Shane replied mildly, other hand snaking underneath Ilya’s vest top. “I’m watching.”

“Okay then. What has happened?”

“Nothing. The opening credits literally just finished.”

“I have wanted to watch this film for a while,” Ilya said.

“Sure,” Shane mumbled. “Watch it then.”

But it was easier said than done when you had the most beautiful man in North America slowly starting to knead at your pectoral, taking his time to squeeze and pull just so.

“Shane.”

“Shut up. M’watching.”

“What have they said?”

“I don’t know,” Shane replied. “You’re fucking talking over it.”

Shane’s hand moved down slowly from his hip to trail his fingers in spirals around the delicate skin at the back of Ilya’s knee. Ilya felt his leg jerk out in response, and the dual-attack of tingles in his leg and the sturdy groping of his chest sent a shot through his groin.

“Shane.”

“Yup.”

“I told you this morning. My dick is probably broken.”

“Sucks to be you. Mine’s not.”

There had already been an explosion, not ten minutes into the movie, but at this point Ilya would have found it hard to identify what language they were speaking, let alone what the plot was or why said explosion had occurred so early on. The hand on his leg was working its way up slowly, dancing around the waistband of Ilya’s sports shorts, which were steadily growing tighter. Shane shifted on top of him – easy enough to feel accidental, were it not for the way in which the movement deliberately pushed their hips together.

Ilya exhaled heavily through his nose as Shane pushed a wet, lingering kiss to the patch of skin that peeked out above his vest before turning back to face the screen, one hand now moving from his chest to go down, down, towards the waistband on the other side of his body. Lifted his hips just so, so that he could sneak Ilya’s shorts down a couple of inches and run his fingers across the sensitive plane of his pelvis. Bring his palm down to push slowly, firmly, against his cock, before settling his body weight back on top.

“Fuck. Shane.”

They stayed like that for a while, Ilya starting to smell the singing of his nerve endings as Shane started up an excruciatingly slow rhythm over the top of his shorts. Press, grab, rock, release. Press, grab, rock, release. On the screen, someone had now started chasing someone else in a Mustang. Or a Ferrari. Or a fucking milk float. Whatever.

Shane shifted his weight towards the back of the couch, lining himself up so that each of his legs fell ever-so-casually over either side of one of Ilya’s thighs. It had the combined effect of both allowing Ilya to feel the hard line of his cock, pushing up against the seam of his own shorts, and creating some free space for him to grope Ilya with a little more enthusiasm. To push the heel of his hand down just a little bit harder, to rub in small little circles that his hips were unconsciously copying against Ilya’s leg.

Ilya had long known that he had magnets in his hands when it came to Shane, because they acted completely out of his control and likely in accordance with some law of physics whenever he was within five feet or so. As Ilya tried in vain to pay attention to the movie – because he wasn’t lying, he really did want to see it – he felt one of his arms move to press down on Shane’s lower back, urging him to grind harder, deeper against his leg. The other came to cover Shane’s hand, squeezing over the top in time with Shane’s own movements. There was a bead of sweat beginning to trail its way down his neck to settle next to his chain, and Shane caught it with a shift of his head and a flat lick of his tongue.

Ilya moaned. “God. Fuck.”

Shane answered it with a whine of his own, trapped somewhere in a bubble at the back of his throat. “Doesn’t feel broken to me,” he gasped out quietly.

Ilya managed to croak out a laugh before it cut off with another moan at an extra-firm squeeze from Shane, hips rocking up to meet their hands while Shane’s ground down on his leg. He felt Shane start to pick up his own pace, ass drawing back before pushing deeper into his thigh, and urged Shane to time the hand on his shorts with his own.

“Fuck, yes, like that.”

“Yeah?” Shane whined, panting into the hollow of his throat and letting the humid exhales collect on Ilya’s overheated skin. They rocked against one another harder, rougher, more desperate, and on the screen the car chase had turned into a foot pursuit, guns firing indiscriminately.

“Shane-”

“-Oh, fuck-”

The fizzing in Ilya’s gut wound up and up, winching him towards some imagined peak. Paused at the top for one moment, suspended in a state of not-up and not-down, before dropping over the edge and plummeting as he came.

“-Yes, fuck, Shane, Shane-”

“-Uh, Ilya, god-”

He pushed his hand down on Shane’s lower back as hard as he could, forcing his hips downwards and lifting his own thigh to meet them. A choked groan into the side of his neck and the judder of Shane’s pelvis told him that he’d not come alone.

There was a moment of silence while they both caught their breath. On the TV, someone yelled are you fucking done yet? and they both laughed, the tops of Shane’s shoulders vibrating in Ilya’s eyeline. He moved his hand from Shane’s back to the damp strands of hair by his crown, brushing his fingers over them and lightly digging his blunt nails into Shane’s scalp.

“Your water bill is going to be crazy, Hollander.”

“Shuddup,” came the muffled reply into his chest.

“I mean, how much water can your well hold? Because I think I have showered here more than ever before-”

“-Stop talking, Rozanov,” Shane retorted, lifting his head up to meet Ilya’s eyes. “And fucking cuddle me.”

Ilya snorted, moving his other hand from top of Shane’s and wrapping it snugly around his ribs. “I know you are about to get very grossed out.”

“I’m already grossed out. I just want to stay here for a minute.”

And really, Ilya didn’t have an answer that wasn’t fuck, me too. Wasn’t does it only have to be a minute or would you let me live here forever?

Friday

Ilya was a city boy, through and through, but he wasn’t too proud to admit that he saw the appeal of the nowhere-ness of Shane’s cottage. In his early twenties, he’d existed in a state of go-go-go, filling every second that he wasn’t asleep with noise, music, drinks, people. But here, he’d found was quite comfortable with the absolute silence that met him outside of the walls of the house. The way that, if he slid the back door open early in the morning, he’d be met by time stopping and a blanket of quiet, as though the dawn mist that hung over the lake were a muffler that stopped any sound from ever reaching their shore.

Beyond a nose-wrinkle when he slid a cigarette out of the pack, there’d been no words from Shane yet on the smoking. If he turned quickly enough when Shane was nearby, he’d catch a flash of exasperation or a nervous eye on the burning end of the stick, but Shane largely shut it down and let a carefully neutral expression slide back into place. On the peace of the deck, Ilya lit one now, taking a deep inhale, exhale, and watching as the smoke curled upwards.

“Morning,” came a voice from behind him.

He turned to find Shane in the doorway, hair ruffled from sleep and mouth gaping around a yawn, scratching one shin with the heel of his other foot. He was rubbing one eye lightly with a finger, and Ilya was struck by a fondness that threatened to consume him whole. He’d seen more sleep-lazy Shane in the last three days than he’d seen in seven years, and it left him with the distinct feeling that there was probably no version of Shane on Earth that he wasn’t obsessed with.

“Hi.”

Shane made his usual cigarette face again, before schooling it quickly.

“I think I’ve found your favourite spot.”

Ilya smiled, caught. “It’s peaceful.”

“If only the world could hear you say that. The gossip rags would lose their minds.”

It was early, it was still, and Shane looked horrendously cute, which is what Ilya blamed for the brief lack of control between his mind and mouth.

“Ah, no. I think this me is just for you.”

Shane’s hand stopped mid-eye rub and he tipped his head to one side. There was a moment where just stared at Ilya, and as a breeze passed through the downy hair on his temple, Ilya worried for a moment that he’d taken cottage honesty too far. But then a slow smile grew on Shane’s face, blooming from a twitch at the corner of his lip to a full, teeth-out grin.

“Just for me.”

Ilya nodded, and Shane’s smile stayed in place as he ambled across the deck and settle himself, ever graceful, in the chair next to him.

“Do you like it here?”

Ilya turned back to the lake, lest Shane read his answer in his expression. He wanted to say I feel calmer here than I ever have anywhere. He wanted to say the you I see here is my favourite you and I want to work out how I can bottle it and ship it to you when you are stressed and I don’t know how to help.

“Yes, I like it very much,” was what he chose to say instead.

“Good,” Shane said softly. “I’m glad. I’d like you to come back.”

The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, sending a faint orange to cut into the lilac of the dawn, and there they were again. The words, sat so heavily on Ilya’s tongue he could almost taste them.

̶

They were both very bad at soccer. Shane had found a ball somewhere in the basement, years old and a touch deflated, and they’d taken it out to the sloped lawn to kick it around. Ilya could tell that Shane hated being bad at it about as much as he did, but neither of them were inclined to stop. There was something about keeping your feet busy that freed the mind up to having conversations that might otherwise have felt too heavy.

More and more, Ilya found he was freakily keen to unburden himself. If there was any kind of impossible something that they could grasp here, he knew that they’d find it in the weeds of these fragile admissions. And fuck, if his time here had shown him anything, it’s that there was no going backwards from this that wouldn’t feel like a death of some type.

He passed the ball to Shane, who had to stretch to reach it. “I was scared to be here with you, I think. Were you scared to ask?”

“I was when I first thought of it, yeah. But not in the hospital,” Shane said with a snort. “Those drugs were so good you probably could have told me that I’d shown the Commissioner my favourite gay pornos and I’d have laughed.”

Ilya chuckled. “You were cute high. And after?”

Shane considered his answer for a minute. “I was nervous that you wouldn’t want this, I guess.”

“This what?” Ilya asked.

“This much time. We never have like, time. I was worried that we’d get here and have all this time together and you’d realise that you preferred me in – I don’t know. Fragments. I know I can be a lot.”

“Did someone tell you that you were ‘a lot’?” Ilya said with a frown, fingers curling derisively into quote marks over the final words.

Shane shrugged. “People don’t always have to. Just like, comments on my diet, the routines. All of it. I know it’s a lot, even if it’s also boring.”

Something at the back of Ilya’s brain started to itch uncomfortably. “Do I do that?”

The deep brown of Shane’s eyes were a reflecting pool when his face didn’t want to give something away. In the early years, when thinking too much about what they were doing, about who Hollander was becoming to him, felt like a luxury Ilya couldn’t afford, he’d learned that after they were done, he needed to turn his gaze to anywhere that wasn’t Shane’s eyes. He could have been shrugging something off with a level voice and a flick of his head, or redressing in silence, but his eyes couldn’t help but look hurt, look intense, look kind.

Ilya chanced a glance now, afraid that he’d find that he was one of those people who’d made Shane feel like everything that made him who he was should be apologized for. How would he atone for it? How would he make Shane see that he’d sit at a kitchen island and watch him make a smoothie every day for the rest of his life if he’d only ask? But when he looked, the brown of them was amused, glittering almost.

“Mm, sometimes. But I don’t think you don’t mean it.”

“I can stop.”

Shane shook his head. “I don’t want you to. It’s different with you. I think everything is.”

Ilya smirked. “Because me calling you boring turns you on?”

“No,” Shane replied, defiant and lying. “Because I feel like you like all that stuff about me.”

Ilya grabbed the ball from the grass, tucking it under one arm and walking over to where Shane stood, mouth pursed to hide his grin. He pressed a short, dry kiss to Shane’s lips, wondering faintly how even that felt like a revelation.

“You are right. I do.”

̶

The very centre of the flames in the firepit were the same colour as his mother’s hair. A bright yellow that, when he focused, became a shock of blonde curls, untameable in the wind and throwing themselves over shoulders or a forehead, peeking out of hats. Ilya had a moment every now and then, when a night was particularly calm, where his fingertips ached with the phantom feel of his mama’s hair slipping across the skin of his hand. He’d feel the strands tickling his palm and the delicate skin at the join of his fingers noticed the void keenly, like he was missing a part of him. He used bury his hands in her hair when he was sad, tuck the tip of his nose into the underside of his jaw and feel her throat work around the my darling boy that lay within it. They would sit at the table in their kitchen, him in her bony lap, and he’d sink his hands in just to feel it.

For the first time in over a decade, he’d told someone. She was so beautiful, and she was so sad. Behind him, Shane’s fingers ran slow, calming circles in his own hair while he watched his mother’s curls dance in amongst the coals.

Did it make him weak, now? No, it couldn’t. She wasn’t weak. She was loud, and he remembered the almost witchy cackle of her laugh, the way it would wrap around him when they walked home from practice or darted through the market at the end of their street.

It was near silent here, but not unpleasantly so. Shane hadn’t realised it yet, but he was quietly humming under his breath as one hand wound in and out of his hair, the gravel of it rubbing up against Ilya’s skull and lulling him into a half-sleep.

His mother had been dead before he understood what it really meant to love. As a boy, it wasn’t learned from her, but innate. It was the way her smile would fill his chest and buoy him, even if his brother was mean or he’d been checked too hard. The way the kitchen would smell of herbs and his bed was always just untucked the way he liked. He’d been too young to put a name to the feeling she left him with when she kissed him on the forehead at night, or the way he’d ached to make her proud as he battled against boys older than him on the ice, scrapping for the spot she thought he deserved. Not until she was gone, and he’d realized the name for the absence that had become a chasm with no bottom.

Ilya had a memory. He wasn’t older than ten in it, maybe, the thought of it warped around the edges by the abstract sense that he didn’t know how real anything was inside of that moment – but he knew she’d been there. He’d found a pigeon in the park, breath shallow but almost perfect-looking on the side of the pavement, and he’d cajoled her into wrapping it gently in her favourite scarf and taking it home so that he could care for it. His father was at work for another few hours, so he knew he had time to make it feel safe. He took it to the basin in their bathroom and carefully tested the water from the tap until it was the perfect lukewarm to wash it under.

His mother had brought him a shoebox, and lined it with the scarf. He knows the smell by now, she’d said. Ilya had sat over it all night, and when the pigeon had gone still, he’d found his mama in the kitchen, drinking tea. She’d taken one look at his face, screwed up and red-stained, and dragged him onto her lap. My darling boy, she’d said. You are so good. He’d asked her if the bird had felt any pain, and she’d cupped his chin in her palm and whispered oh my love, how could it? Not when you were so good to it.

It went to sleep, she’d said. What a pretty dream it must have had. My lovely, kind boy, she’d said. She’d threaded her own hand into the curls at the base of his own neck, just like Shane was doing, and sat with him while he’d cried into the wool of her jumper. She’d taken him back to the park the next day, and they’d found a corner at the very edge of it, under a tree, where they could bury it. He’d cried again, and she’d bought him a steaming mug of hot chocolate in the café across the street. She’d read him his favourite story that night, snuggled up next to him under his blankets until he fell asleep to the soft sound of her murmuring.

“Hey,” Shane whispered now. “Are you okay?”

Ilya blinked and he was back in front of the fire, too warm on one side from the hot line of Shane’s lap and the fire, but cold on the other. His throat felt too tight to speak, so he nodded softly. He hadn’t said the words to Shane yet, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d told his mother. When had it been? Had he told her he loved before he darted off to school, picking up his friends on the corner? Had he told her after a game, when she’d spent hours of her own Saturday screaming his name from the side of the rink? Had he told her that night, when she’d given the pigeon her favourite scarf and then dragged her little boy onto her lap just so she could hold him while he cried? When was the last time he had told his mother that he loved her?

The forgetting was its own second kind of grief, and Ilya decided now that he wouldn’t let it happen twice. He would tell Shane that he loved him, and he would sear the memory of it into his brain forever. He’d feel the sting and the burn of it, knowing that whatever happened, many years from now, here would be a memory that he could not write over. Here is when I was in love, it would say. Here was when I told him. All Ilya could pray for was that Shane’s nervousness, the way his eyes looked too big for his face and the flush that would crawl its way up his cheeks when Ilya caught him staring, was in service of a feeling that echoed his own.

“You’re cold. Let’s go inside,” Shane said quietly.

My lovely, kind boy, Ilya thought.

Saturday

Ilya Rozanov woke slowly on Saturday morning, and considered himself a singularly lucky man. As the feeling rushed back into his limbs, one by one, the air in the bedroom felt different now. It was like the walls and the windows and the fucking headboard knew that Shane loved him and he loved Shane. That Shane had lain awake thinking of how they would make a future together, and that hearing him say it out loud had made the thing in his chest stutter and twist. He wanted to bury his head in a pillow and scream like a teenage girl in a 90s romcom. He wanted to skip through a field like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. He did neither of these things, and instead listened to the soft sounds of Shane in the kitchen beyond.

He fell back into a half-doze, one arm idly flung across his stomach, but came to again as footsteps reached the doorway.

“Good morning,” Shane said, a mug in each hand. “I made coffee.”

Ilya cracked his eyes open and made grabby hands. “My hero. Come here, please.”

Shane huffed lightly, but padded over to his side of the bed and held the mug out.

“Sit up, or you’ll spill it.”

“I have never spilled anything in my life.”

“Sure.”

Ilya grinned, waggling his eyebrows, but pushed himself to a seated position with his hands dutifully, before plucking the mug from Shane’s hand and taking a sip. Shane sipped his own drink, half-facing Ilya from his perch on the edge of the mattress.

“Ah, no. You are too far away. Here, please.”

“Oh my god,” Shane mock-whinged, rolling his eyes. “Are you going to be this clingy from now on?”

Ilya shook his head seriously. “No, I will be worse. I am still waking up.”

They stared at each other a moment, both pairs of lips twitching as they competed to keep composure. In the end, Shane lost, and his big, beautiful smile broke free as he looked away with a little embarrassment staining his freckles.

“I guess I can deal with that.”

Shane placed his mug on his nightstand and crawled across the duvet to Ilya, who placed his own coffee down in a mirror image so that he had his hands free to yank Shane over to straddle his legs. He wrapped a hand around Shane’s neck and pulled him so their foreheads touched, and felt the answer of Shane’s palms sliding across his chest. Pressed a soft kiss to his lips.

“Hi,” Shane murmured.

“Hello,” Ilya replied.

“I love you,” Shane said quietly, blowing out a breath afterwards that ghosted over Ilya’s chin.

“Ah, so it wasn’t a dream.”

“Nope,” Shane said, popping the ‘p’ and leaning back. “It was not.”

“Good. I love you.”

They both cracked up, a little dazed, and Shane reached over to grab Ilya’s coffee, taking a sip for himself. Ilya made a noise like hey, what the fuck? and Shane raised his eyebrows.

“What’s yours is mine now. Deal with it.”

“I am in love with a fucking thief,” Ilya said, snatching the mug back and taking a huge gulp to spite Shane, wincing as it scalded the inside of his mouth.

“That thief made the coffee.”

“Yes, for me. What, you take back presents when you give them for birthdays?”

“You’re so fucking annoying.”

“Me? I am not the one who showed up with a coffee and then stole it back!”

Shane scoffed, and made a melodramatic show of shifting off Ilya’s lap so that he could lean and grab his own mug, slurping it noisily and letting out a loud ahhh as he swallowed. Ilya smiled at him, besotted.

“Happy now?”

“Much better. Although I need you to come back here or I will probably die.”

“Well,” Shane started, reclaiming his position on top of Ilya and dropping his mug down next to the other one on the nightstand on Ilya’s side. “We can’t have that.”

Ilya wrapped his arms around Shane’s torso, heaving him up so that he could slide them both horizontal in the bed. Shane let out a grumble at being jostled, but settled his full body weight on top of Ilya’s with an oof, hands coming around to cup the top of his head.

“Are we going to be lazy all day?” he mumbled into Ilya’s chest.

“Not all day. I want to swim later. First, give me twenty minutes to drink my coffee and then I will fuck the shit out of you for a little while.”

“How romantic.”

“Ah, so you don’t want me to? That is fine, I will go back to sleep.”

“Now,” Shane warned, head lifting up to stare at Ilya. “Let’s not be too hasty.”

̶

Well, shit. Less than twenty-four hours into being Shane’s whatever-he-was-now, and he’d been caught playing grab-ass by the man he blindly hoped would be his father-in-law one day. Not ideal. He sat opposite Mr. Hollander now (David, please) and the two of them tried to stare anywhere but out of the window to where Shane was currently crying on his mother’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” Ilya blurted. “About earlier.”

David looked back at him quickly, a little wide-eyed. “Oh no, I’m sorry. I intruded. I didn’t mean to, er, interrupt-”

“-No!” Ilya bit out, face flaming in a way he had thus far resolutely believed could not happen to a Russian. “You didn’t interrupt anything.”

“I mean,” David said with a wry smile. “It kinda looked I did.”

Ilya hung his head with a groan. “Oh my god. Sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize, Ilya. I’m a grown man who understands what other grown men get up to.”

A second groan, louder and into the hands that were now covering his face. David chuckled.

“This is not the impression that I wanted to make on you.”

“Well,” said David mildly. “It’s the one that we have. So. Hello, I’m Shane’s father and I’m very sorry that I saw you kissing my son earlier.”

Ilya looked up from his hands to see that David had stuck one of his own out across the table to shake. His eyes were a different colour to Shane’s, but they had the same warmth in them that had him relaxing minutely and gripping David’s hand in a firm, brisk handshake.

“Hello, Shane’s father. I think I am Shane’s boyfriend, and I am very sorry that you saw me kissing your son earlier.”

“No harm done, but I’ll be sure to buy a new phone charger right away. Another drink?”

“Please,” Ilya replied with a nod. “It is very good. Do you get it imported?”

“Yessir,” said David, uncorking the bottle and leaning over to top off Ilya’s glass. “A fella who’d emigrated from Saint Petersburg interned at the Bureau a few years back and gave me a bottle of it. I turned up the next day with a hangover and demanded he give me the name of whoever shipped it in for him.”

Ilya hummed a little and they both fell silent. He racked his brain for conversation topics – what had Shane said about him? He had no fucking idea what the Bureau was, so that was out. He could cook chicken and salmon. He was nice. He played hocke- fuck, yes.

“Shane said you used to play hockey?”

“I did,” David said. “Up until university, but then it sort of fizzled out after that.”

“Did you like it?” Stupid question, Ilya. No one plays hockey until their early twenties unless they like it.

“It was fun, for sure. I was never quite serious enough about it to take it any further though. I was studying economics, and my father was pretty set on that taking priority.”

Ilya nodded again. The intense expectations of certain fathers were not something he was unfamiliar with.

David cleared his throat. “I, uh. I was sorry to hear about your own father earlier this year.”

“Oh,” Ilya started. “Thank you.”

“Were you close?”

Then, because he was an idiot who had forgotten that he was supposed to be making a good impression on David, Ilya laughed scornfully. “No,” he declared, before immediately wondering whether it was possible to kick himself physically as well as metaphorically.

But David’s smile turned cheeky, and a little bit rueful. “Oh, I get that.”

Ilya opened his mouth to reply, but the back door opened and they were rejoined by Shane and Mrs. Hollander – Yuna, he thought – who both looked a little red-eyed but otherwise no worse for wear.

“All okay?” David asked lightly. The pair nodded, and Shane retook his seat next to Ilya, reaching out unconsciously and twining his fingers through Ilya’s. Ilya squeezed tightly and Shane gave him a nod, weary but quietly happy.

“Right,” Yuna said, clapping her hands together. “I’m making pasta.”

Shane turned his head. “I-”

“-Nope, we are not having chickpea pasta. Deal with it.”

She looked at Ilya and rolled her eyes like honestly, and Ilya failed to hide a conspiratorial smile in response. He had in-jokes, he realised. In-jokes with the in-laws. When he looked back at Shane, he gave Ilya a small raise of his eyebrows. There you go.

Sunday

“Shane.” Silence.

“Shane.” More silence.

“Shane?”

“Oh my god. What?”

“Come and lay on the sofa with me, please,” Ilya whined, arms outstretched across the cushions on the back towards Shane. He stood by the dining table, gym gear on, fiddling with his headphones in a way that furrowed his brow, tongue poked between his teeth. Ilya wanted to scream about it.

“No,” Shane replied. “I’m going to work out.”

Ilya let out a dramatic ugh and flopped backwards into the corner of the sofa, throwing his head to one side to really sell it. “You are leaving me.”

“For an hour, to go run on a treadmill. You could come too, if you wanted to.”

“I do not want,” Ilya said, head sticking back up above the sofa.

Shane rolled his eyes, popping his headphones in one at a time having successfully untangled them. Stretched his arms above his head and leaned to one side, making the material of his muscle tee ride up to show the lithe V of his hips. Ilya pouted and tilted his head, making no effort to conceal his wandering gaze. Shane rolled his eyes again.

“It’s an hour, Ilya. You have a phone, a TV, an X-Box, and my laptop is right there. You’ll live.”

“I’ll miss you,” Ilya said, softer than he’d expected to.

Shane smiled fondly. “You’re an idiot. See you in a little while.”

Ilya watched as he padded into the hallway, heading for the small gym studio at the rear of the cottage. He tried not to think too intensely about how he’d miss Shane for all of an hour – not when they had months, years even, ahead of them where their time would be defined more by being apart than together. How would Ilya put it all away now? How could he know how it felt to wake up with Shane wrapped around him and then return to his empty bedroom in Boston? How could he walk around with this much in his chest and have nowhere to put it?

Determined to distract himself, Ilya leaned from the sofa to drag Shane’s laptop off of the coffee table and onto his lap. As he opened the lid, the screen flickered to life on a spreadsheet, half-started with a simple list of reminders in the first column and a large calendar filling the rest of the sheet. Ilya didn’t know when he’d had time to make it. The title of the spreadsheet was simply ‘The Plan’.

IR – BOS 17/18

IR – 18/19 – Ottawa? – cap space? Rebuild? Close to parents, 2hrs to MTL. Good culture?

Immigration law / green card – a thing in Canada?

Irina Foundation – ask Mom re: consultant for setup

On the calendar, he scrolled down to see that it ran from August to August. There was next to nothing in there yet, but Shane had already made a small key – because of course he had, Ilya thought. In a box coloured blue was SH to BOS, while a red cell was labelled IR to MTL. Christmas and Easter had already been coloured green, which Shane’s key helpfully told him was SH/IR to OTT. SH/IR to OTT to spend Christmas and Easter with Yuna and David, already assumed, accepted, and booked in before they’d even seen a game schedule. Under January 7^th was Russian Xmas and under June 15^th was IR B-day. Under July 16^th was Anniversary?

He was making good on his words from the other night. One spreadsheet at a time, Shane was scrabbling to build them a life together. He was ready and waiting with his list and his calendar so that when the season started, he could sit down and calculate where, when, and how they’d see each other. He was planning for Ilya, which Ilya was coming to understand was a crucial way by which the Hollanders showed care.

Ilya could safely say that he’d never had the urge to cry looking at a spreadsheet before, but now he felt his eyes stinging and he swallowed around the burn in the back of his throat. As he heard the distant whir of Shane’s treadmill start up from the gym, Ilya carefully moved the mouse on screen to July 16^th and deleted the question mark.

Anniversary.

̶

“God, Ilya,” Shane whined.

Ilya pounded into him harder, reached a hand around and under him to finish him off. Shane let out a choked groan, muffled by the pillow, before Ilya felt him tense around him as his abdomen seized taught.

Chasing his own release, Ilya brought his now-sticky hand back to grip tight at the meat in the hinge of Shane’s hips, slamming into him with a chanted fuck, fuck, fuck. From his slumped position on the bed, Shane twisted his torso so that he could send one arm back, fumbling to grab Ilya’s ass and push him tighter against Shane’s own, holding him flush against his body. Ilya moaned long and loud, and pulled Shane back to him as he came, upper body falling flat against Shane’s back.

They both lay there for a moment, chests heaving, before Ilya ran a hand down Shane’s side as he pulled out. He fell to the other side of the bed, and Shane dragged his head around to face him, eyes only just starting to refocus.

“I don’t think we need to worry about the sex getting boring,” Ilya mumbled after a minute.

Shane mmhmmed into the pillow, and reached out a hand to lay it heavily across his sweaty clavicle.

“Nuh-uh. Think s’all good there.”

Ilya tapped his fingers lightly on Shane’s ass. “Okay?”

Shane nodded, and it bunched up the pillowcase underneath him. “Glad I ran this morning instead. That will not be happening tomorrow.”

Ilya laughed a little ha between breaths, and used his hand to yank lightly at one of Shane’s ass cheeks, pulling it towards him in a little c’mere movement that had Shane heave himself up a few inches, only to flop unceremoniously against Ilya’s chest, face tucked somewhere near his armpit.

It was still for a moment, broken only by Shane humming contentedly under his breath when Ilya brought his non-sticky hand to his hair, tracing circles clockwise on his scalp. He let himself drift, and strangely found himself remembering the words of the mother from the plane. It’s quiet, but nice.

“Did I tell you that I met a baby on the plane?”

“What?” came Shane’s muffled reply into his bicep.

“On the plane here. I was sat next to a nice lady and her baby. She was very cute. We were waving out of the window when her mama was in the bathroom.”

Ilya felt Shane smile into the skin on his arm. “That’s cute. How old was it?”

“She, Shane. Don’t be rude. And her mama said twenty-one months.”

“I have no idea what that means. Do they talk at that age?” Shane asked, tilting his head upwards so that he could look at Ilya’s eyes.

Ilya shrugged. “She didn’t, but I don’t know. She was sweet.”

Shane smiled, a dazed little half-formed thing that Ilya knew meant he was close to falling asleep. “I bet she liked you.”

“Her mama said she did,” Ilya replied softly. Shane smiled again, and Ilya found himself searching his face eagerly, looking for some kind of approval. Shane liked that kids liked him. Shane assumed that kids would like him. Shane thought it was cute that he was holding a baby on the plane.

“Do you want kids?” Ilya heard himself ask. Somewhere at the back of his brain was an Ilya from a few years ago telling him to play it fucking cool, dude, but he couldn’t bring himself to pay attention. The Ilya of now needed to know everything about the man with whom he was in love, needed to prise the smallest glimpses of what their future could be out of him so that he had something to cling onto when he was back in Boston.

“We’re really speed-running the boyfriend benchmarks, huh?” Shane said, amusement clear in his voice despite the hoarseness from his moans and yells earlier, and his current sleepiness.

Ilya looked down at him, quizzical. “What?”

“Well, in a few days we’ve covered ‘I love yous’, met the parents, talked about moving countries for each other. And now we’re having the kids talk. That usually takes most people a couple of years.”

“Neither of us are most people-”

“-Alright, egomaniac-”

“-It must have taken your friend Hayden Pike thirty seconds given that he has eight hundred children-”

“-He has four-”

“-But I want to know,” Ilya finished. “Do you?”

Shane adjusted himself on Ilya’s arm, moving his head back just a touch like he could tell that Ilya’s shoulder was beginning to go numb. “Do you?”

“Yes. Stop avoiding the question. Do you?”

Shane was silent for a moment, eyes focused somewhere around a foot away from Ilya’s face.

“I think yes,” he said, considering. “But I guess I’ve never thought about it too hard.”

Ilya stayed quiet, and changed the direction of the fingers in Shane’s hair.

“I mean, I haven’t dated much so it didn’t come up often. And then whenever it did, with like, family or whatever, I would just say that I was focused on my career. Which is true, but like, in hindsight I was probably compensating or something?”

“Compensating?”

“I didn’t wanna think about it,” Shane started. “Because I didn’t wanna marry a woman and do all of that with her.”

There was something almost flippant in the way he said it, and Ilya felt his heart constrict as his mind flooded, unbidden, with memories of Shane in the early years. So nervous, skittish, so terrified of who he was and what he wanted. Stuck to the wall of his hotel room, skirting the edges of it as he attempted to skirt the edges of his own psyche. He imagined a young Shane sat around a dinner table, palms as clammy as Ilya’s had been in the car, telling his family that he was too busy to think about girls, too dedicated to his sport. Telling himself as much as he was telling anyone in earshot. He didn’t think about it, he didn’t want it. But privately: he couldn’t want it.

“And now?” Ilya asked slowly.

“Well,” Shane drawled, trying to joke his way through the discomfort. “I know that adoption exists now-”

“-Shane,” Ilya sighed.

“Sorry, sorry,” Shane replied meekly, eyes coming back to meet Ilya’s gaze. “I guess it’s still new for me to think about ‘having a future’ in that way. But yes, I think. I like kids, and I would like a family.”

Ilya gave him a little nod, and was grateful for a second that Shane couldn’t read his mind. In it, Shane as he was now was back around that dinner table, but this time Ilya sat next to him. This time, there was a little boy who looked like Shane and a little girl that looked like his mama. Maybe she was twenty-one months as well.

“Me too.”

Monday

“I fucking hate that you smoke, you know.”

Ilya turned around from his place on the dock, cigarette dangling from one hand as Shane stood with a cocked hip on the last slat, where the wood met the grass. “What?”

“I hate it. It’s fucking gross, and you’ll get cancer and your lungs will be shit, and you’ll have to retire early. And you’ll be coughing in bed, and then you’ll get a cold or a flu and it’ll take you out like a fucking nuke.”

Ilya nodded slowly. “Do you want me to stop smoking here?”

There was a pause while Shane inhaled heavily. “No. I don’t want to make you do anything. I just want you to know how I feel.”

He’d said nothing the entire week before, Ilya thought to himself. No snarky comments, no dramatic statements about Ilya’s supposed wish to shorten his life expectancy. Nothing beyond a wrinkled nose that he’d tried to smooth out – the same as it had always been since his first comment in Regina.

“You worry that my lungs will get shit.”

“Yes. I worry about you,” Shane said, frustrated. “Okay?”

“Okay. Then I won’t finish it.”

Shane looked like the fight had been sucked out of him, like he’d already been brewing up the next five minutes of the argument and now had nowhere to send the energy. “Oh, okay. Thank you.”

Ilya smiled softly. “You’re welcome.”

Shane nodded once, like yes okay, now that’s sorted, before he turned around and trudged back to the cottage, pausing to pick up Ilya’s empty mug from the table on the deck.

I worry about you, he’d said. Something he’d never said to Ilya before – but hadn’t these past few days been filled with those? With new, scary words that they’d never dared speak out loud? And if they’d finally broken the dam between the two of them, weren’t all of these things the stagnant flood that came afterwards? I worry about you, your lungs will be shit, it’ll take you out like a fucking nuke. Run them through a translator and back again, they all came out meaning the same thing.

I love you.

Ilya took one more look at his cigarette. It had gone out, would need to be relit by the lighter in his pocket. He pulled the pack out and placed it back instead, before pulling his legs back from where they hung, not quite grazing the lake’s surface. One more look at the lake, and he turned to follow inside. Maybe he’d be able to taste the I love you in the next lot of coffee Shane made, too.

̶

After Shane had bid a hasty goodbye as he climbed into his boring car to head to the grocery store, Ilya allowed himself the luxury of five-minute spiral before he set about tidying the cottage for Yuna and David’s arrival later. Somewhere in his caveman brain, he wasn’t thrilled about his and Shane’s fuck-cation being gatecrashed by two people in their fifties who he did not yet know well enough to make decent conversation with. But in another part, the larger part that had been slowly activating since All-Stars and was now operating at maximum capacity, he was desperate to prove himself worthy of Shane.

He’d felt Yuna’s eyes on him at the weekend, had seen her recalling the years of tabloid headlines about him as though they were written across his forehead. Who is Rozanov’s latest fling? and Boston Captain spotted in notorious nightclub! and EXCLUSIVE: Rozanov’s hookup reveals all! Look at his face too long, and there they were.

The last one had been fucking shitty – a girl he’d never called back selling out the fact that he ‘ate pussy like it was going out of style’ and ‘didn’t even stay the night’ for a couple hundred dollars. The guys in the locker room had clapped on the back and called him Captain Fuckboy for a week or so, but the truth was that it had stung to know that he didn’t have control over what people thought of him. And now he was confronted by the knowledge that Shane’s parents knew that he was not the type of boy that they so clearly wanted for their son.

They’d been nice to him, definitely, and what little he knew of them, he liked. David was easygoing and kind, and while Yuna was certifiably scary, she clearly meant well. But the only thing the three of them had in common was loving Shane, and there was a not non-zero percent chance that this wouldn’t be enough to convince them of him. Convince them that he was worth the threat he posed to Shane’s livelihood.

“Jesus Christ, Ilya,” called a voice loudly from behind him. “Have you been vacuuming for an hour?”

Ilya paused and turned where he stood in the living room, nozzle of the vacuum currently trying to suck non-existent crumbs from between the couch cushions.

“Um,” he began. “Probably?”

Shane dumped the grocery bags onto the kitchen island before heading over to Ilya, brow creased. Ilya tried to give him a smile that said this is all fine! but it clearly didn’t work, because Shane stopped in front of him and put a hand softly on one cheek.

“Are you okay?” Shane asked.

Ilya turned off the vacuum and turned back to him. “Of course,” he said quickly.

Shane’s brow told him that he had not been convincing. “Is this too much? I can tell them not to come if it’s-”

“-No!” Ilya interrupted, almost a half-yell with how frantic he felt. “No, I want them to come over. It is fine, I am fine.”

“Ilya, you look really pale,” Shane said worriedly.

“I am fine.”

“Cottage honesty, please.”

Ilya sucked on his teeth for a moment, hands twisting around the nozzle of the vacuum. “Nervous,” he managed to squeeze out.

Shane’s face softened, but the look of concern hadn’t quite left. “They already met you, Ilya. They liked you.”

Ilya blinked furiously, counting the grocery bags on the counter behind Shane until the palm on his cheek moved to cup his chin and drag his face back to Shane’s.

“You don’t know that,” he said quietly.

“Yes, I do,” Shane replied, nodding fast.

“They barely met me.”

“Mom joked with you, and Dad gave you the number for his vodka supplier. They made you pasta.”

“They were being nice.”

“Yes, because they’re nice people. And because they liked you.”

Shane’s hand softened on his chin and moved around to scruff the back of Ilya’s neck, in the same way as Ilya so often did to him. The pressure of it grounded him, and he tried to swallow the lump in his throat to clear space for the next words. He’d promised Shane he’d try, after all.

“I am not a nice man in Montreal,” he said thickly.

The worried look on Shane’s face fell, replaced by something sadder that had Ilya immediately regretting his decision to speak.

“I don’t like that he said that. I’m sorry,” Shane said with a sigh.

Ilya tried to give him a nonchalant shrug. “Is okay. I’m not.”

“In Montreal, or nice? Because one of those things isn’t true, but the other definitely is.”

On the kitchen island, one of the grocery bags toppled over, and the sound of a grapefruit hitting the ground startled them both. They turned back and huffed a laugh at their jumpiness. Shane’s hand squeezed at his nape again.

“I am not so nice,” Ilya admitted.

“You are to me. And to most people. You’re always cool with anyone who stops you for a photo, you tip Uber drivers and wait staff really well, and you hold the elevator for people even when they’re like, miles away.”

“Shane,” Ilya tried to interject, but he was in full flow now.

“I’m serious. You’re a dick on the ice but you’re great with your rookies, and you’ve made friends with all the Boston WAGs. Plus, that lady on the plane trusted you enough within, like, five minutes to look after her kid, and then you sat there and waved out the window with it. Her, sorry.”

“I think she just had to pee really bad,” Ilya muttered, but there was a reluctant smile begin to twitch at the corner of his mouth in time with the thump in his chest.

“Doesn’t matter,” Shane said firmly. “She trusted you because you were good to her. Because you were nice.”

“We need to stop saying nice. Is not a real word anymore.”

“You started it,” said Shane with a smile. He slid his other arm around Ilya’s waist, pulling them tightly together. “Hey, you’re a good person, okay? My parents like you already, and they will keep liking you more and more.”

Ilya let out a whoosh of breath, and let his arms come up to loosely circle around Shane’s hips. Shane was waiting for him to speak with his eyebrows raised.

“Okay, sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Shane said. “I freaked out last time. It’s only fair you get to do it this time.”

Ilya rolled his eyes. “Oh yes, another great impression for me. Hello Shane’s parents, sorry, I have been freaking out because I think you probably hate me for being biggest slut in America. Please come in.”

“Hey now,” Shane retorted. “You’re the former biggest slut in America, thank you very much.”

It was a stupid gag, but it worked to break the tension in Ilya’s chest and shoulders, and he dropped his forehead to tap Shane’s with a strangled giggle.

“Yes, former. I am a monk now, only getting one dick-”

“-I don’t think monks get any dick, Ilya.”

“Nerds,” Ilya murmured, and Shane laughed his lake laugh in response, straight into Ilya’s face. Ilya watched the way it lit up everything from his teeth to his irises, and felt something settle. Shane’s certainty, the ease with which he’d told him that he was good. That had to count for something, right?

̶

If Ilya had been worried about making conversation with Shane’s parents, so, clearly, had they. David had evidently taken it upon himself to Google ‘things in Moscow’, and spent the night endlessly asking questions on local landmarks, about which Ilya had absolutely no clue. He’d been embarrassed around question number eleven, before Shane had interjected.

“Dad, would you expect someone from London to know who designed, I don’t know, Parliament?”

David had looked suitably chastised, before Ilya had taken mercy on him and dutifully recited the only facts he knew about St. Basil’s Cathedral, much to David’s delight. He had a vague memory of visiting with his mother, and if he focused hard enough, he could feel her whispered breath in his ear as she crouched and pointed up at the domes. David pulled up a few photos on his phone, and Ilya nodded politely and bit back the urge to tell him that yes, he did already know what it looked like.

Yuna had been the quieter of the two, but when she asked questions to him this time, they felt less of an attempt to catch him out and more like a slightly awkward, hyper-focused game of twenty-one questions. She was incisive, Ilya was beginning to understand, and asked things with an exactness that told him she knew precisely what she wanted to learn.

“Was it always hockey for you, Ilya?”

Ilya nodded, swallowing around a frankly grotesque mouthful of Shane’s prawn curry. “Yes,” he replied when his mouth was clear. “I started skating when I was very young, and my father put me in classes as soon as I was old enough.”

“How old was that?”

“Six, maybe?” Ilya hummed. “Something like that. My brother had only just moved to the older school, so I must have been young.”

Her wine glass lowered as she considered him, and Ilya wanted to punch himself.

“You have a brother?” she asked. Shane looked faintly nervous, but also ready to step in, mouth already half-open in protest. Ilya shot him a look that said it’s fine.

“Yes, one. He is a few years older than me.”

“Is he back in Russia?” David asked.

“Yes. He lives in Moscow still.”

“Are you close?”

Ilya pushed around the rice on his plate, appetite beginning to wane. “No, we are not.”

“That’s a shame,” David said mildly, and Ilya shrugged in reply.

“Why not?” Yuna pressed, and Shane’s head snapped round.

“Mom,” he warned gently. He turned to Ilya. “You don’t have to.”

But Ilya was already the womanizer, the rival. He wouldn’t be the scary guy with the mysterious, scary family too. He shook his head quickly.

“Is okay. He, ah, is not a very nice man. A little too much like my father.”

The table was quiet save for David’s cutlery and the tap of one of Yuna’s painted nails on the wood. Ilya felt his heart beginning to sink, and wondered how much of the conversation he would have had to erase to un-fuck it up. He shouldn’t have mentioned Alexei, probably. On the tabletop, Shane’s hand came to rest by his, pinky finger overlapping his own.

“Was it him with you at the draft? Your father?” Yuna asked after a moment. Ilya nodded, and she pursed her lips. “He seemed stern.”

Ilya smiled weakly, and made eye contact with David. He’d not forgotten David’s insinuation about his own family, and found that same steady understanding in his attention now, before he looked back down at his plate.

“He was. He was in the police, back in Russia. Same as my brother.”

“He didn’t seem happy to be there.”

Ilya swallowed. “He did not like that I came to America. He thought I should have stayed in Russia and played there.”

“And what did you think of that?”

“I wanted to leave as soon as I could,” Ilya replied quietly. Shane’s hand inched further over, now resting fully on top of his and squeezing lightly.

Yuna nodded. “Well,” she started. “I think you made the right move in coming here.”

Ilya lifted his gaze to Yuna, and found a small smile playing on her face. Without thinking, he turned the hand underneath Shane’s over, and Shane immediately laced their fingers together. He watched as Yuna looked at their joined hands, smile growing slightly, before looking back at him.

“Agreed,” David echoed.

Ilya pressed his lips together and stared at the remnants of his curry, trying to ease the sting at the corner of his eyes. He wasn’t the nice man from Montreal, but Shane’s parents were happy that he was there, around Shane’s table, eating dinner with them. He could work with that.

Tuesday

It was still mostly dark in the bedroom when Ilya felt Shane poking him awake. A stroke to his hairline escalated to a quick double-tap on his shoulder, which then became a swift jab to the side when Ilya made it clear he wasn’t keen on being woken up.

“Ilya,” said Shane quietly next to him.

“No,” he replied, smushing his face into the pillow.

“Come on,” Shane whined. “You said you wanted to do the sunrise hike yesterday.”

“That was before I remembered when sunrise was.”

“It’ll be really nice.” Ilya turned his face to Shane’s, eyes still closed, and the muscles in his cheek twitched when Shane ran a gentle index finger from his temple to his jaw. “Please, baby.”

There was a shock in Ilya’s sleep-addled brain like he’d been electrocuted, a power surge somewhere that had his eyes snapping wide to meet Shane’s. Shane’s jaw was half-hanging open, looking a little like he’d been clubbed over the head himself. He’d clearly not meant to say it, but he had.

“Baby,” Ilya repeated, voice cracking.

Shane stuttered ineloquently, and Ilya repeated it again. A question this time. “Baby?”

Shane licked his lips, and took a breath. “Only if you want it.”

They stared at each other for a moment in the dim light, and Ilya could see Shane’s lips working around the name again, silently.

“I want,” Ilya whispered. He’d not quite realized how much until right now, until it was laid out in front of him at a time that no respectable human should be awake at, spoken by mistake in a warm bed in a dark room. “I want it.”

Shane nodded, blinking quickly. “Okay, okay. Then yeah. Baby.”

Jesus fucking Christ. How was this Ilya’s life now? How had they been able to dance around this for so long, been able to be so stupid with their own hearts when this existed between them? When Ilya was baby and Shane would bring him coffee in bed and Ilya was becoming steadily more convinced that the future he’d barely let himself think about before was not only in reach, but even more beautiful than he could have imagined?

“Will I still be your baby back in Boston?” Ilya asked, the question slipping through his lips before he had the chance to hold it back.

Shane looked alarmed for a second, like he’d forgotten Boston even existed, before his brow creased and the finger on Ilya’s jaw became a hand, sliding to cup Ilya’s ear and scratch behind it.

“Yes,” he stated plainly. “Yes. Anywhere. Everywhere. If you want it.”

Ilya nodded back at him, hand coming out from underneath his pillow to lay flat against Shane’s chest. His heart was hammering under Ilya’s palm.

“I love you,” Ilya whispered. There was nothing else to say.

Shane repeated it back to him, before the hand on Ilya’s head went taught and pulled him close, smashing their lips together. Ilya’s mouth opened on reflex and their tongues tangled, his fingertips digging in around Shane’s nipple before moving to pull their hips flush. Shane tasted like fucking godawful morning breath, and Ilya was sure he tasted the same. They were too hot under the covers, and Ilya could smell the faint tang of sweat on Shane from where he’d overheated during the night. It was fucking perfect, and Ilya could have died right there and never asked for anything more.

“Jesus, fuck,” Shane moaned between kisses. “Oh my god, I love you.” He sounded as desperate as Ilya felt, and it made his heart clench. He wanted to live in Shane’s mouth, underneath his skin, get closer and closer and closer-

“Shane, please,” Ilya gasped, not sure where his sentence was ending.

“I’ve got you, baby,” Shane whispered into Ilya’s mouth, rolling backwards so that Ilya was dragged on top of him, their legs tangling and hips grinding into one another. Ilya slipped one forearm underneath Shane’s neck, bracketing his head as he forced his tongue deeper, behind Shane’s teeth, under Shane’s own tongue, up to the roof of his mouth. He felt Shane’s other hand land on the small of his back, fingers digging in hard like he was trying to grasp the back of Ilya’s pelvis. He could feel his chest vibrating against Shane’s, and he realized it was because he was chanting his name quietly.

“I know, I know,” Shane soothed, hand in his hair slipping further back until he was holding the back of Ilya’s head. “God, fuck me, please.”

In the few days he’d been here, Ilya had started leaving his nightstand drawer open. He’d joked with Shane that it was so he could have easy access to the lube and condoms, but he now took half a second to thank his past self seriously, and his hand shot out blindly to the side, face not detaching from Shane’s for a moment as he fumbled.

He grabbed the bottle of lube first, dropping it on the mattress first where it rolled into the crevice that Shane had created, bumping up against his hip. His hand went back to the drawer, but Shane’s own left his hair to pull it back when he heard the crinkle of a wrapper.

“No,” he breathed into Ilya’s mouth. “Just you.”

Ilya put his hand on the pillow next to Shane’s head to push himself back a few inches and search Shane’s gaze. It wasn’t far off sunrise now, and the darkness of the room was giving way to an inky blue. Shane’s pupils were blown, eyes almost black.

“Sure?” Ilya asked once.

Shane nodded. “Yeah. Just you.”

“Okay, okay. Yes, fuck. Anything.”

Underneath him, Ilya felt Shane’s legs spread wider, felt his own knees in between drop to the mattress, and he scrabbled at Shane’s hip to find the bottle again. Shane’s hand left his back to shove the duvet down from their torsos until it caught around Ilya’s shins, manoeuvring easily until his feet were planted by Ilya’s thighs.

“Shane, Shane, my arm,” Ilya whispered urgently, forearm tugging underneath Shane’s neck. “I need my hand. Get you open for me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shane replied, nodding furiously and lifting his head so that Ilya could slide it out and down to meet his other, popping the cap on the lube and squirting one hand liberally, rubbing it between his fingers to warm it. His arm went down between them, hips lifting up and out of the way as he gave Shane’s cock a quick stroke before moving backwards, fingers dancing along his perineum to find his hole.

He was still slightly loose from the evening before, barely a few hours ago given their early start, and Ilya’s first finger went in easily. He watched Shane’s face as his eyes squeezed shut, head thrown to one side and exposing the long line of his neck. Ilya’s mouth went to his jugular, sucking down hard on the rapid thump of Shane’s pulse.

“Fuck, god Ilya. Baby, please,” Shane whined. Ilya let out a string of yes, uh-huh, I have yous against the column of his throat as his finger worked faster into Shane, a second joining it slowly and beginning to scissor.

Shane gasped, and Ilya groaned as it sent a jolt through his own cock, jumping hard against Shane’s thigh. He could have come like this, he thought distantly, watching Shane pant underneath him, but that thought was quickly abandoned when Shane snuck a hand between them to grab Ilya’s cock, pumping hard and twisting his wrist on the upstroke in a way that had Ilya’s abdominals clenching.

“Fuck,” he growled into Shane’s neck. “You need to stop.”

“Hurry up, god, please,” Shane moaned. “Please, Ilya.”

“One more,” Ilya promised quietly. “One more.”

A third finger joined the two, and when Ilya hooked them upwards, Shane let out a sob that felt too loud in the near-sacred quiet of the bedroom. He did it a couple of times more, and then Shane was slapping a palm across Ilya’s sweaty back, crying out a final please before Ilya slid his fingers out.

The arm with his clean hand went to catch the underside of Shane’s knee, draping it over so that when he planted his forearm back on the mattress, parallel to Shane’s chest, his legs went even wider, pulling up and back and exposing him to Ilya. Ilya lined himself up, catching the head of his cock on Shane’s rim, before his other arm went to the pillow behind Shane’s head as he pushed in.

They both moaned simultaneously, and Ilya had to pause when he was fully seated to catch his breath and clench his jaw, pressing his forehead to Shane’s. Without the barrier of the condom, Shane was even fucking hotter, felt even tighter when Shane’s hips twitched upwards, begging him to move.

“Give me a second,” Ilya managed to get out. “Just one.”

Shane groaned again, head tipping to mouth messily at Ilya’s lips. “S’good?” he mumbled.

“So fucking good,” Ilya confirmed through heaving breaths. “You are so fucking good to me, Shane. So good, so beautiful. My fucking beautiful boy. Want to make you feel good, always want to make you feel good. I love you, oh my god, I love you. Shane, fuck, Shane.”

There was no stopping it now, the tidal wave in Ilya’s chest. There were no words he could ever unspeak, nothing he would not say to Shane, nothing he would not tell him. From the way Shane was almost crying under Ilya’s praise, he knew he didn’t need to.

“Fuck, Ilya. Move baby, move, please.”

Ilya pulled back and started up a slow grind in, the sweat between their bodies easing the slide of their chests against each other. Ilya needed to have as many parts of their bodies pressed together as he could. Their foreheads, sternums, hips, his arm next to Shane’s torso. He couldn’t look at him across the ice now, couldn’t hold himself at a respectable distance and pretend not to care – not when he knew what the slip-slide of their sweat and the panted I love yous into one another’s mouths felt like.

He pulled back again, barely a couple of inches, and angled his hips so that his pelvis dragged along Shane’s cock where it was caught between them. He was leaking onto his stomach now, the precum catching and sticking on the hair under Ilya’s navel when Shane wrapped an arm around his waist to pull him in tighter.

“Fuck,” Shane sobbed out, tears leaking out the corner of his eyes and tracking their way towards his earlobes. “Fuck, Ilya. Like that.”

Ilya uh-huhed into a kiss, feeling almost too drunk to speak now. He couldn’t speed up, couldn’t bear to separate himself from Shane for long enough to thrust in, so he hitched Shane’s leg up as high as it would go and ground down harder, twisting his hips to hit Shane’s prostate every few times before dipping his stomach back to rub Shane’s cock.

The light in the room was turning a watery yellow with the sunrise, the first beams of sun casting across the bed and turning what little of the brown was left in Shane’s eyes a vibrant caramel. Ilya didn’t blink, wouldn’t accept the millisecond of darkness that would take Shane’s open mouth and sweaty forehead away from him. He could cry, he thought, looking at this man below him. A splash landed on the bridge of Shane’s nose, then another, and he realized that he already was.

Shane’s eyes locked onto his desperately, gasping when he saw the red-rim around them. When a particularly deep grind hit him, Shane’s hand flew up to grab Ilya’s chin and he pushed his head back into the pillow hard, gritting his teeth around a god as Ilya felt his cock pulse between them, flooding the space between their stomachs as he came.

He clamped, vice-like, around Ilya’s cock, but it was when Shane’s hand went soft on his face, when he tilted his head just so, that Ilya felt like he was going to lose control.

“My baby,” Shane whispered, and Ilya whited out as he came, hips twitching and rocking, nose starting to run from the tears. “You’re my baby.”

Wednesday

“You won’t distract me this morning, Rozanov.”

“Hrmmph,” Ilya muttered inelegantly into his pillow.

“Up,” came Shane’s voice, further away this time, before a blast of cold air hit his back as Shane whipped the covers off him. “We’re hiking.”

“Fucking crazy person,” Ilya mumbled. “Is the fucking sun.”

“And it’s very pretty. So get up.”

“You’re pretty. I will just look at you.”

“Poor effort,” Shane said, on the other side of the room now and smile tinging his voice. “Get up.”

Ilya flopped over onto his back, muttering in Russian to the dark ceiling. Motherfucker, too fucking early, why am I in love with a fucking owl, fucking forest is not better than this.

“I don’t know what you said,” Shane said lightly. “But it did not sound like ‘yes Shane, I’m getting up’, so I don’t care.”

One final groan like a spoiled teenager, and Ilya forced himself upright. “Yes Shane, I am getting up.”

̶

Annoyingly, Shane was right. The sunrise really was very fucking pretty, and from their position on top of the hill on the other side of the lake, they could see it cast orange flecks across the surface of the water, glittering as the morning breeze rippled it.

“Say it,” Shane said from his left. “Go on.”

Ilya turned to him. “Say what?”

Shane smirked. “That I was right.”

“Are you always this much of an asshole?”

Shane laughed, reaching a hand out to take Ilya’s and bringing into his lap, thumb rubbing across his knuckles. “Yep, always.”

Ilya twisted his foot back and forth, pushing his borrowed hiking boots into the dip he was wearing into the dirt beneath him. It smelled fresh up here, like the air was somehow different – like a lungful here was purer, went deeper down his throat and into his chest. He could feel his ass growing cold from the dew on the grass they’d sat on, and he pulled Shane’s windbreaker tighter around him.

“Thank you for inviting me here,” Ilya said quietly.

“Thank you for saying yes,” Shane replied, words soft between them.

“I almost didn’t. I do not know how I could have done that, now.”

Shane smiled. “I think we’ve been dumbasses for a while.”

Ilya made a face like yeah, you’re telling me. The trees around them shivered in the wind, and in the distance, on the far shore of the lake, Ilya could see the faint light of the lamp that Shane had left on in the living room of the cottage.

“How do we do it, Shane?” Ilya asked through a heavy sigh. “How do we go back after this?”

Shane’s head tipped from side to side as he thought, wobbling on its axis. “Well, I don’t think I can think of it as going back.”

It was still a little too early for Ilya’s brain to be able to decipher that one. “What?”

“Do you plan on not messaging me for months?” Shane asked. “Do we plan on meeting up five times a year for a three-hour fuck and run? Never talking about anything important?”

“No,” Ilya said, almost panicked by the suggestion. “God no, please. I can’t do that.”

Shane smiled at him again. “Me neither. So it can’t be going back.”

Ilya’s eyes closed as he focused on the feeling of Shane’s hand on his, the warmth of his palm. The long line of his body, pushed tight against Ilya’s side as they sat. In the early years, he’d thought that his need to have his hands on Shane was lust alone, fingertips stretching out for the next source of pleasure. He’d tuck his hands around Shane’s hipbones, trace the hair at the base of his head and tell himself it was purely in search of the next thing that would make him feel good, get him off, and maybe get the prickling sensation in his gut to finally stop. But it was more than that, he knew. His body reached out for Shane’s because it knew no other way to feel whole.

“I will miss it here, I think,” Ilya said. “We feel easy here.”

Shane was quiet. “I don’t think it’s us that’s the difficult bit. I think, from now on, that will always be easy for me. It’s everything else that’s going to fucking suck.”

Ilya chewed on his lip. “Yes, probably.”

“Can I be honest with you?” Shane asked after a moment.

Ilya raised his eyebrows. “That is the rule, yes?”

Shane nodded. “I’m fucking terrified of it all. I’m so fucking scared that people find out, and that everything we’ve worked for is just, gone. That I become some fucking laughing stock and get everything taken away from me. That something happens and you go back to Russia and I never see you again. That everyone looks at me differently, that everyone fucking hates me. That you end up hating me because we have to live this miserable fucking half-life, just because we’re in love. I’m trying to plan, and I’m trying to be positive because I want to make this work, I really, really do – but I’m so scared, Ilya.”

Ilya blew out a breath. “Me too. To all of it.”

“I’m sorry, I’m trying to find a way to fix this-”

“-Shane,” Ilya interrupted firmly. “I do not think you have a way of fixing this. I do not think either of us do. I think you are right, it is going to fucking suck. But we are making a plan, yes?”

He dipped his head to meet Shane’s worried gaze before continuing. “I need to be very clear, I think. There is no way I could ever hate you. I love you too much for that, okay? The lying, and the secrets – yes, I will hate that. But if the other option is to not have you at all? Then I will do it, and I will hate it, but I will do it anyway because I do not see any other way. I have to have you, Shane. I have to. There is no other way for me.”

“It’s gonna suck,” Shane repeated thickly.

“Yes. But one day it won’t, right?” Ilya asked, forcing himself to believe it and finding that distantly, he did.

“Right. One day it won’t.”

̶

Ilya had to begrudgingly admit that even though it was the off-season, yes, he could probably do with a workout. He’d considered fucking Shane to be his cardio for the past week, but as he eyed the weights rack in the corner of Shane’s gym, he decided that it would probably be good for him to diversify his routine.

“Ah,” came a drawl from the doorway. “So he does remember how to pick up a dumbbell.”

“If you are going to be a pervert and watch me, at least come in and take your shirt off so that I can watch you back.”

“Idiot,” Shane said fondly, but he wandered in anyway, taking a seat on the motionless belt of the treadmill as Ilya racked up a bar and settled himself on the bench underneath it. If he’d added an extra ten kilos because Shane was there? Well, that was his business.

He started pressing the bar to his chest and back up again, keeping his form clean and blowing out a breath with the straightening of his arms. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. Bar back on the rack, shake out his arms. He managed four clean sets but started to struggle on the fifth, arms shaking halfway through and making the weights on the ends rattle.

“Five more,” Shane murmured from across the room. “Don’t slip now.”

Ilya steeled himself in the way he always did at this point, forcing himself to relish in the burn of his muscles as they did what they were supposed to do. The clearness of the connection between mind and body, the way he could manifest his thought into action. He was good at this, he knew – he was good at pushing his body past what it wanted to do, thrived in the discomfort of the tear and repair.

“Four,” Shane counted down with each rep. “Three.”

“Fuck,” Ilya gasped on his second-to-last press.

“One more,” Shane countered.

Ilya cleared his final rep, and had just enough to energy left to push the bar back onto the rack, flopping back onto the bench.

“Good form,” Shane said flippantly. Ilya rolled his head to one side to make a snarky retort, but it died on his tongue when he saw the dilation of Shane’s pupils. Because of course, a clean set of bench presses would turn him on.

“Oh, Hollander,” Ilya cooed. “If I start squatting, will you start stroking it?”

Shane smirked, but spread his legs wider. The crotch of his shorts was looking tight already.

“Depends,” he started. “You’ll have to show me your form and we’ll find out. Finish your arms first.”

Ilya wiped his brow with the hem of his tee, making sure to clench his stomach muscles as he did so. Shane’s head tipped to one side, considering, as his eyes tracked up and down Ilya’s body. Then he nodded to the free weights.

“Go on. Bicep curls.”

Thursday

“Mom wants your number,” Shane called through to the kitchen. Ilya paused where he was slicing tomatoes for their lunch, checking quickly that yes, he had heard him right.

“My number?”

“Yeah,” Shane replied from his place on the couch. He was sitting with his laptop, phone face up and open next to him, and Ilya could see the legs of his glasses tucked behind his ears. It was probably a good thing he was facing away from him, Ilya thought. They really did need to eat.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said easily. “Because you’re my boyfriend?”

“That does not explain anything at all.”

Ilya went back to the tomatoes on the chopping board, slicing them as he thought. Why would Yuna need his number? She barely knew him.

“Charity things?” he wondered aloud.

“Potentially?” Shane replied. “She said she’d help out.”

Ilya thought about it again. Yuna was a force to be reckoned with, he could already see that. With the way Shane talked about her, and the cogs he’d seen turning in her head both times they’d met, she’d likely be on a constant warpath until their thus far half-baked charity idea was up and running.

“Give it to her,” he decided.

Shane made a noise in the affirmative and picked up his phone from next to him on the couch, tapping away quickly before throwing it back down and refocusing on his laptop. Though he couldn’t properly see the screen, Ilya could just make out the coloured key of ‘The Plan’.

The tomatoes went into the serving bowl, and Ilya turned to the fridge to pull the lettuce out of the crisper drawer. Just as he was lining up the leaves to chop, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw he’d been added to a group chat by an unfamiliar number. A group chat that had the title ‘Family’.

Family

Thursday July 24^th, 1.30pm

 

Unknown Number

Hi, boys.
Thought it might be easier to talk family stuff in here?
Ilya, thanks for passing on your number!
It’s Yuna. Dave is in here too.
Say hi, David!

Ilya briefly wondered if he’d died at some point over the last week, and this was all an extravagant heaven that he never thought he’d see. She liked him. Holy shit, she liked him? Enough to put him into a group chat and to call that group chat Family. Like he was becoming a part of theirs now. A second number popped up on the thread.

Unknown Number

Hi, David!

 

Unknown Number

Good lord.

 

Jane

Already, Dad??

Ilya hadn’t even noticed Shane pick up his own phone again, too distracted by the screen in front of him. When he looked back at the sofa, Shane had twisted around to face him again, arched eyebrows betrayed by the small grin forming.

“Y’see? Told you they liked you,” he teased. “Stop staring at it and reply.”

Ilya

Hello Yuna, hello David
This is a surprise

The second he sent it, he winced. He sounded sarcastic, like he wasn’t so grateful that he felt like he was going to scream and like the idea of being included in ‘family stuff’ wasn’t the most fucking unbelievable thing he’d ever heard. But of course, he’d sound insane if he wrote that. What else did someone say to their probably potential in-laws?

“Don’t overthink it,” Shane said, as if he was watching Ilya’s thoughts play out in real time. Ilya quickly saved both their numbers to his phone before he replied again.

Ilya

Thank you for this

 

Yuna H

Don’t be silly!
We figured it makes sense for us to all have a chat together.

 

David H

That way I can warn you both when I’m coming over ;-)

Shane groaned from the sofa. “Oh my god. He’s too comfortable with this already.”

Jane

Too soon

 

Yuna H

David!
Did you boys want to come over for dinner on Saturday night?
Ilya, it would be nice to see you again before you head back to Boston!

Nope, this was it. This was heaven. Yuna and David voluntarily wanted to invite him for dinner at their place, because he was Shane’s boyfriend and Shane loved him, and they liked him enough to want to see him again.

Shane put his laptop to one side and stood, walking over to where Ilya was still motionless in the kitchen, knife abandoned on the kitchen island.

“You wanna go?” he asked quietly. Ilya nodded mutely. Shane picked up his phone to reply, but Ilya’s hand shot out to grab his wrist, pausing him.

“Let me?” Ilya pleaded.

Shane smiled, clearly pleased. “Go for it.”

Ilya

That would be lovely, thank you

“Damn, you’re so formal with them,” Shane said, smug smirk firmly back in place. “You’re gonna have to let them down gently that you actually text like either a toddler, a horny freak, or two Golden Retrievers in a trench coat.”

Ilya shook his head. “No way. I will be on my best behaviour for them. Besides, I do not think horny freak is the best way to impress your parents, yes?”

Yuna H

Great! 5PM?
And Ilya, is there anything you don’t like to eat? Or any allergies?

 

Ilya

No allergies
And I will like anything

 

Jane

He’s being polite
He doesn’t like lamb, olives, or BBQ sauce

“Shane!” Ilya chastised. “Now they think I am fussy idiot.”

“You don’t like them,” Shane protested. “And she asked what you don’t like to eat. If she’d put down a lamb and olive BBQ pasta on the table, you’d have been fucked-”

“-That is literally not a meal-”

“-And now it never will be, because she knows-”

“-I would have eaten it anyway.”

“I know you would,” Shane finished. “But now you don’t have to, because she asked. Because she wants to make sure she makes something you want to eat. Because she likes you.”

Yuna H

Well, that would be a gross combo.
But noted.
See you on Saturday!

Ilya snatched up his phone again.

Ilya

Can we bring anything?

 

David H

Nothing needed. See you then!

Ilya turned to Shane, who already had an exasperated look on his face. “You want me to go to the grocery store and buy wine, don’t you?”

“Yes please,” he replied with a nod, grabbing Shane by the hips and pulling him bodily towards him to line their fronts up.

Shane leaned in and placed a kiss on his lips, short and tender. “Alright. I’ll go tomorrow.”

̶

If Ilya wasn’t at a restaurant or a gala, dinner was usually a plate-on-a-lap-on-the-couch affair. But in the last week, they’d eaten at the table every single night – on the deck if it was warm enough. He liked the routine of it, the way Shane would adjust the position of the forks he laid out, and how he’d fill a jug with ice water while Ilya served up. They’d sit at one corner of the table, feet locked together while they chatted. They still hadn’t fucking run out of things to say.

“Do you think we would have been friends at school?” Shane asked through a mouthful of salmon. Ilya had cooked it knowing that it probably wouldn’t be as good as David’s, but it wasn’t half bad.

Ilya chewed, thinking. “Maybe. Were you as boring then?”

“I mean, probably. I wasn’t a great student though.”

That surprised Ilya, who put his fork down. “You weren’t?”

“Mm-mm. Too much time on the extracurriculars, and then I was out most afternoons when hockey took off. Dragged myself to the end of high school.”

“I always imagined you would be good at science,” Ilya commented.

“That was probably my best subject, but I just missed too many classes by the end of it. Were you a good student?”

Ilya shrugged nondescriptly, heading back to his fish. “I was fine. Passed everything I needed to. My father made me get a tutor when I started playing at a higher level, said I needed to keep my grades up in case I wasn’t good enough to go pro.”

“Well that was fucking stupid of him,” Shane muttered, before realizing what he’d said and slamming his lips together, eyes wide. Ilya stared at him, mouth ajar with a piece of salmon hanging off his fork. He started laughing incredulously.

“Did you just call my dead father stupid?”

“Oh my god,” Shane started, turning bright red as his blush crawled upwards from his neck. “I am so sorry.”

“He has not been in the ground six months-”

“-Oh my god, I’m going to die-”

“-And now mouthy Canadian is calling him stupid,” Ilya wheezed.

“I’m sorry,” Shane groaned, dropping his head into his hands. “I cannot believe I said that.”

Ilya laughed a little longer, before taking mercy on Shane and trying to prise his hands away from his eyes. Shane resolutely did not let him pull them away. “Shane, is fine. I did not like him and he did not like me.”

“I am the worst,” Shane mumbled.

“Shane,” Ilya repeated, voice softer. “I don’t care.”

Shane looked up at from his hands, eyes pained. “You’re not mad?”

“No,” Ilya replied. “Not mad. I told you, I think I barely knew him, really. And he did not know me.”

Shane’s salmon was forgotten now, brow furrowed as he dropped his hands back to the table. “When did you tell me that?”

Ah, fuck.

“On the phone, when I was in Moscow.”

“In Russian? That’s what you were saying?”

“Part of it, yes.”

“And what were the other parts?” Shane asked. “Will you tell me?”

Ilya bought himself a moment by shoving another piece of fish into his mouth.

“A bit about my brother, not liking me. I said I hated Russia, did not want to go back. That I was happy Svetlana was there with me.” He hesitated for a second.

“And?” Shane prompted.

“And I told you that I loved you.”

Shane sat back in his chair, mouth dropped open. “You said it then?”

“Yes,” Ilya sighed. “I told you that I love Svetlana, but not like I love you.”

“Holy shit,” Shane said quietly.

“Please stop saying ‘holy shit’ when I tell you that I love you. Is very stressful.”

Shane honest-to-God giggled, reaching out to grab Ilya’s hand and pull it towards him, pushing his plate away with the other. “Sorry. I just can’t believe you knew then.”

“I knew before that, Shane,” Ilya replied. “A long time before that.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. If I am being truthful, probably years ago. But definitely after you left my house that time.”

Shane winced, and Ilya reached up his other hand to smooth out the crease in his forehead. They sat there in silence for a moment, Shane’s mouth working around a silent wow.

“That’s really fucking annoying, you know,” he said after they’d been silent for a minute.

“What is?”

Shane pursed his lips. “You beat me to it. Twice.”

Ilya laughed again, longer and louder than he thought he was capable of. Maybe he had his own lake laugh now.

“What can I say? Number one hockey player, number one at telling Shane Hollander I love him. Is a burden, really.”

Ilya picked up his fork, still laughing, as Shane smacked him on the arm.

Friday

Ilya’s phone rang as he stepped out of the shower, buzzing on the tiled shelf next to the sink. He grabbed it and answered, wedging it between damp shoulder and damper ear as he wrapped a towel around his waist.

“Did you miss me already?” he sang.

Fuck off, came Shane’s voice down the line. If I’m picking this stuff up for you, you can choose what we’re getting.

Wandering into the bedroom, Ilya stopped to stoop and pick up his dirty clothes, throwing them into the hamper by the bathroom door. “What do your parents like?”

Mom drinks white, Shane replied. Dad will usually drink red, but he prefers beer anyway.

“Should we get both, then? White wine and beer?”

You’re really hamming it up, bro, Shane laughed.

“Do not call me bro when I have had my dick in your ass.”

You’re on loudspeaker, Shane said quickly. Ilya almost dropped his phone in horror.

“Shit,” he hissed. “Sorry.”

Only kidding, Shane said lightly, and Ilya swore under his breath. Just wanted to make you sweat.

“Evil bitch,” Ilya grumbled, and Shane cackled down the line.

A bottle of white and some IPA, coming right up. Need anything else?

“A new boyfriend?” Ilya asked, chucking his phone on the bed so he could step into a clean pair of boxers.

Shoot, they’re all out. Told me to come back next week and they might have more in stock.

Ilya rolled his eyes, even though he knew Shane couldn’t see it. “You need more Greek yoghurt for your disgusting breakfasts. You ran out this morning.”

Thanks. Anything else?

“Hold on,” Ilya started, wedging his phone under his chin again and heading out to the kitchen. “Let me check the fridge.”

He pulled open the fridge door, scanning it quickly. “Good for vegetables. We might need some more bananas. Oh, and your protein bars.”

Do you want your flavour as well?

Ilya didn’t fight the shiver that ran through him at the domesticity of their situation. Him, pottering around in the kitchen while Shane added things he wanted to his cart. Shane wanting to make sure that he had the flavour he liked.

“Yes please,” he replied.

Done. That it?

“I think so,” he said. “Unless you think of anything else your parents would like.”

Stop being desperate, Shane said.

“I am desperate,” Ilya retorted. “I am hoping to be around for a while.”

Shane hummed down the line in reply. We’re good. I’ll be home in twenty.

“See you soon,” Ilya replied. He hung up and took a moment to stare around the cottage, with its high ceilings and big windows, the warm woods and the soft blankets on the backs of chairs. Home.

If Ilya was looking at Ottawa, he’d need to start thinking about buying a house when the season started. These things took time, he knew. He’d been in a soulless rental apartment for months before moving into his house in Boston, and he’d be selling and buying this time. Fuck, he needed a real estate agent.

What would he want in his house? He liked his place in Boston, liked the openness and the airiness, the light rooms and the privacy. He’d want that. But he liked the softness of the cottage, the textures and the wildlife. Could he find all of that in one house in Ottawa? Shane would help. Mr. Real Estate would have a field day searching online, commenting on the ‘aspect’ and the ‘bones’ of the place. He couldn’t visit them with him, but maybe he could video it for Shane. He wanted Shane to like it. He wanted him to suggest rugs and countertops, to find him the number of a local gardener because God knows Ilya wouldn’t keep up with the lawn.

He wanted a place that suited them both, so that Shane would come by and feel like it was his home too. He’d have two keys cut from the off. Maybe he’d get a second cut for his house in Boston as it was. They were too far apart for Shane to use it with any real regularity, but it was the principle of the thing.

What’s yours is mine, Shane had said.

̶

“Would you get a pet?” Ilya asked, shivering as the cold water of the lake hit his bare waist. Shane shrugged from the shore, foot kicking a rock in the shallows.

“Maybe,” he said. “I’ve never really thought about it. I’d have to be around more than I am.”

Ilya nodded. “I would get a dog.”

Shane smiled. “I can see that for you.”

Ilya waded in further, until the water was around his chest, and took a deep breath before he sunk in up to his neck. Shane hissed in sympathy from his position, arms wrapped around his own waist.

“Would you like a dog? If I got one?”

“I think we’d be getting a dog, right?”

Ilya nodded, breath coming out sharply as his body adjusted to the temperature.

“Yes, our dog.”

“Then yeah,” Shane said mildly. “I think I’d be cool with it. Dogs are nice.”

“I have a neighbour, back in Boston. I don’t really know him, but I think he is a lawyer. He has a dog. Big fluffy thing. They go for runs together in the morning. I think I would like that.”

Ilya kicked off the bottom of the lake, pushing himself backwards until he was starfished on the surface, staring at the blue of the sky and the smudges of cloud dotted across it.

He’d never been allowed a pet growing up, but one of the boys on his junior team had an Alsatian. The boy’s father had brought it when he was picked up from practice sometimes, and Ilya used to sit on the ground and sink his fingers into the soft fur around the dog’s neck while it panted happily into his face. If his mother had brought him, she’d give the dog a scratch and a pat. If his father arrived to pick him up after work, he’d hear a sharp get up off the ground, Ilya, and the dog would go ignored.

“You’re in charge of walking it,” Shane said.

“You would be good for all the paperwork. Vet bills, pet insurance. My little planner.”

“God,” Shane whinged. “You really do think I’m fucking boring.”

Ilya moved back upright, feet touching the lake floor again. He looked at Shane and raised an eyebrow, smiling at the sigh he got back in response.

“Fine. I’ll do the paperwork. But if it shits in the house, you’re on your own.”

“Deal.”

̶

Shane had taught him how to set the fire, how to adjust the logs and where to place the lighter fluid to get the best catch. As the flames licked up the wood, he settled back, smug.

“Congrats,” Shane deadpanned. “You can do the thing every single human has been able to do since the dawn of time.”

Ilya moved back to Shane’s side, lifting his arm up to drape around his own shoulder while he cuddled in tight. Shane’s hand landed on his bicep and squeezed firmly.

“Knew you’d like the fire,” Shane joked quietly.

The heat of the day had left as quickly as evening fell, and Ilya sat there in one of Shane’s sweaters, no longer too proud to subject himself to the cold. In the distance, a bunch of fucking loons called to one another.

“I still haven’t seen one,” Ilya said, gesturing vaguely at the wilderness around them.

“A loon?” Shane asked. “Yes, you have. They’re literally all over the lake.”

“The ducks?”

Shane laughed. “The ones with the black on them aren’t ducks. They’re loons.”

“They’re fucking tiny!” Ilya exclaimed. “How do they make a noise that big?”

“I don’t know. Napoleon complex, maybe.”

Ilya whipped his head around. “A fucking what?”

“Napoleon complex, y’know? Because he was short, everyone said that was the reason he was so angry all the time.”

“I do not think you can blame Napoleonic Wars on his trousers being too long.”

“You don’t know that you can’t,” Shane retorted.

And well, Ilya had to give him that one. He settled back into the divot of Shane’s shoulder, looking at the fire he’d built himself, and felt the strange evolutionary kick of pride in his stomach again. Here he was, keeping his man warm in the cold of the night. A provider, maybe.

“When we were playing soccer,” Shane started quietly. Ilya turned his head, keeping his chin by Shane’s armpit but looking to his face. Shane gave him a brief glimpse of his eyes before they went back to the fire. It was protective, the way he’d look away whenever things were getting serious. It was like Shane was scared of what he’d see in Ilya – whether he’d watch Ilya balk at whatever he found or whether he would see nothing at all reflected back. For years, Ilya had been too good at giving nothing away, of hiding the cracks in his chest and the whir of his mind behind a blank canvas. Shane had his tells if you knew where to look for them, if you got to them before he could bury them.

He was biting his lip now.

“Yes?” Ilya prompted.

“Did you mean it?”

“Did I mean what?”

Shane took a breath. “I said it as like – I don’t know, maybe I was kidding a little. That you liked all the stuff that people find weird about me – but then you said that you actually did like it. So I guess I just want to know if, like, you were being serious or not.”

He’d tried to keep his voice light, but Ilya could hear the waver behind it. The minute emphasis on ‘serious’. It sent a sting through him, that Shane thought he might be joking, or exaggerating. That Shane thought he might be one of those people who scoffed sardonically at his pre-game rituals, instead of being the man who’d started keeping a note on his phone whenever Shane mentioned a like or dislike. Like he wasn’t the man who would source one random brand of ginger ale to keep it in the fridge, just for him – and the fact it stayed there even when Shane wasn’t due for weeks. Like watching him fold his clothes so neatly and organize his cutlery drawer didn’t make him feel so much affection that he didn’t know what to do with it.

“Have you been worrying about this since then?” he asked instead.

Another flick of Shane’s eyes – to him, then back to the fire – and a short nod. “It’s stupid.”

“No,” Ilya said firmly, sitting upright now and turning to face Shane. “It is not. If it bothers you, it is not stupid. Will you look at me, please?”

Ilya watched Shane’s jaw work before he turned to look at him. His eyes flitted around for a moment, before he steeled himself to meet Ilya’s gaze.

“I think there is nothing,” Ilya said slowly. “Nothing, that I do not love about you. So what, you have, ah, quirks? Who cares? I love them. These are not things that I put up with, just so I can fuck you. They are things I love about you.”

“Really?” Shane asked.

“Yes. The first time we met in that hotel room, you were so nervous. I sat on the bed and watched you fold your clothes before sex, and it was the best thing I had ever seen. I wanted to-” Ilya grabbed Shane’s jaw, smashing his cheeks in to make his mouth pout, “-scream, I think. Every time I think I have a learned my favourite new thing about you, you show me how use your washer-dryer, or tell me what sauce goes with tuna but not seabass, or text me seven-hundred times to talk very specific shit about my games, and then that becomes my favourite.”

“And it really doesn’t bother you?” Shane insisted, the worry in his eyes slowly begin to alleviate with the small smile creeping onto on his face.

“It really does not bother me,” Ilya confirmed. “I think it will bother me the day I realize that I have nothing new left to learn about you, but then I will be happy because it means I know you completely.”

Shane’s eyes shut briefly, and he pushed his forehead against Ilya’s.

“You don’t worry about this, okay? You don’t worry with me that you are too much, or that you are too weird or too boring. You are weird and boring, and I love you because of it. I am weird, and you love me, and I want to be boring with you. Yes?”

“Yes,” Shane parroted. They sat quietly for a second, looking at each other, and Ilya watched as a little bit of mischief crept up behind Shane’s eyes. “Y’know, you’re really getting confident with the ‘L word’, Rozanov.”

Ilya pretended to huff, flicking a hand behind him.

“Sue me. I have a lot of time to make up for.”

“I love you too, for the record. Even though you’re really fucking weird about what order you vacuum in. And horrifically overcook your chicken.”

“So I don’t want to poison my boyfriend with salmonella and I think that you should get crumbs off the sofa first because then if any drop off, you can vacuum them off of the floor. Big deal.”

“Weirdo,” Shane said. It sounded distinctly like he’d said I love you again.

Saturday

It was the third time Ilya had done laundry since he’d been at the cottage. Shane had joked about him underpacking, and he’d joked along – but the truth was, it was deliberate. Shane had worried that Ilya wouldn’t want him outside of the fragments that they’d had before, but the same had been true of him. Wasn’t his entire life made of fragments? Hours with Shane, only some of a childhood with his mother, a few weeks here and there since with his father and Alexei, a night every few weeks with Svetlana, and a couple of hours every day with his team. He couldn’t remember, before this, the last time his eyes had looked at the same person in the morning and at night.

He’d arrived at the cottage with no assurance that Shane wouldn’t realize it had all been a huge mistake, that there was an unspoken quota for ‘time with Ilya’ that they’d far surpassed. People came and they went, and Ilya couldn’t have been sure that Shane would have been happy with any more than that from him.

But fuck, he wanted it – especially now he’d had a taste of it. The simple pleasure of waking up in the morning to Shane’s face and his hot fucking breath, the way he’d leech and limpet himself to whatever extremity or limb of Ilya’s was going spare. The simple pleasure of tucking his nose into the soft hair at the back of Shane’s head in the evening, when Shane would bully a foot between his shins so that he was forced even closer. The simple pleasure of the all the hours in between, where they never tired of one another’s company.

It was his third time doing laundry at the cottage. Neither of them had mentioned it, but they both felt the presence of his upcoming flight like a spectre, haunting the space between them on the couch. He’d not checked his emails in days, oscillating between praying for a cancellation message or dreading the final confirmation. He wasn’t sure which would be waiting for him, and while he didn’t look, it was an amorphous thing on a horizon that he could pretend was not moving steadily closer.

“You should do those on a cooler wash,” Shane said behind him.

Ilya turned around from where he was holding a few pairs of shorts. He held them up, raising an eyebrow, and Shane leaned past him to turn the dial down.

“They’ll shrink.”

“Better view for you then, yes?” Ilya replied, throwing in a little shoulder shimmy for good measure.

Shane rolled his eyes. “Your ass isn’t all that.”

“Cottage honesty, please.”

Shane heaved a sigh. “Fine. I’m obsessed with your ass.”

“And what is attached?” Ilya replied, desperate and unbothered about it as he leaned in for a quick kiss. Shane granted it with another roll of his eyes. He’d get stuck like that one day.

“And everything that’s attached, yes.”

Ilya turned back to his laundry, considering what was in his hands.

“Do you have anything nicer I can wear to your parents’ house later?”

“Metros sweatshirt?” Shane replied, smirking.

“I will kill us both if you bring that near me.”

Shane snorted. “You’re a drama queen. Yeah, I’ve probably got something that’ll fit. Might be a bit tight on the ass though.”

“Then you will just have to keep your eyes above my waist,” Ilya preened.

̶

For what they lacked in firepit, David and Yuna’s house made up in living room. Where Shane’s was a smallish (relative) sunken crevice, Shane’s parents’ lounge took up half the space of their downstairs, plush cushion stacked on top of plush sofa stacked on top of plush armchair. Their living room was an assault course where the aim was to not to fall back into the couch, to not fall asleep under one of the many blankets.

When Ilya and Shane arrived, David was finishing up an episode of some documentary, turtles floating around lazily in an ocean that was God knows where in the world. Yuna was busy squeezing Shane under the guise of regular, gushing motherhood – but realistically, Ilya and Shane knew that she was still soothing the bit of her mind that was thinking my son couldn’t tell me about this. Ilya made his way towards the TV so that he was out of the line of fire, still not quite comfortable enough with mothers in general to be able to stick an elbow in like that.

“Sea turtles?” Ilya asked to the back of David’s head. Shane’s father startled, but didn’t turn the whole way around.

“Yup,” he said. “Magnificent creatures.”

“They have them in Boston.”

“You’ve been to the aquarium?” David questioned, fully turning around now.

“A few times,” Ilya replied with a smile. “Is relaxing, sometimes.”

“They look like they’ve got nowhere to be,” David said. “Like they’re just hanging out.”

They both watched the turtles for a moment longer. “I think they probably are,” Ilya murmured.

The credits began to roll on the documentary, and David turned the TV off before gesturing to the armchair opposite him. Dutifully, Ilya took his spot.

“How’re you doing?” David asked kindly.

“Good,” Ilya replied automatically. David lifted one eyebrow. “It has been, ah, a big couple of weeks.”

David chuckled to himself, settling back into the cushions. “I bet. But are you really alright?”

The question might have felt intrusive, were it not for the soft look on David’s face and the gentle timbre of his voice. Ilya couldn’t recall a time where his father had ever asked him how he was, and he found the concept almost befuddling. But his confusion was at war with the gnawing panic at the back of his head, the fear that pre-empted a perfect time that was ending too soon.

“I think I am a little… afraid,” Ilya confessed.

David nodded. “When do you head back?”

“Tuesday,” Ilya replied, swallowing down the bit of him that was yelling no no no no.

Another nod from David, another small smile.

“Y’know, Yuna and I lived apart from each other for a while. Only a few months, and not quite Montreal to Boston, but we had to split the time for a bit.”

“How was it?” Ilya asked, voice hoarse.

“Hard,” David said, blunt and unadorned. “But worth it.”

“I worry,” Ilya started. “I worry that it will be too much.”

“For you?”

Ilya’s eyes found the back of Shane’s head, almost tucked around the corner out of view where the living room met the kitchen, huddled up into his mother while she stirred dinner.

“For both of us, I think.”

David let the silence sit between them, dragging out the space in a way that felt pointed but not uncomfortable.

“Do you love him?” David asked. Ilya’s eyes shot back to him, ready to defend his station, but he found no judgement. Just that same steady gaze, asking nothing of him but the truth.

“Yes,” Ilya replied. “I really do.”

“Then you’ll make it work. It will be shitty, but you’ll do it to spite the shittiness.”

Yuna called David’s name from the kitchen, and with a final smile, he rose and started laying the table, not even needing Yuna to finish her instruction.

̶

David had lured Shane into the garage under the guise of showing him a new car recovery kit he’d bought. Shane had looked at Ilya, and he’d known that he wasn’t thinking about his practical, good-in-the-snow Land Rover, but of the Porsche and the Maserati that Ilya kept in his own garage. Ilya didn’t need to bet money on that same kit awaiting him on his doorstep when he arrived back in Boston, of having his mettle tested by a wheedling just keep it in the trunk for me, please on the phone when he rang Shane. He’d put on a world-weary sigh and protest as was expected of him, but in the back of his head something would be quietly settling at the thought of Shane needing him safe.

He’d helped Yuna clear the plates and managed to strong-arm his way into washing up, needing to be useful somehow. He was taking his time to clean the crevices and the undersides of each plate diligently, before passing it to Yuna to dry and put away.

“Thank you for dinner,” he said carefully. “It was delicious.”

Yuna smiled. “Well, that’s alright. It’s a good job Shane told me about the lamb – my first thought was a kebab dish that David hasn’t made in years.”

A small shot of alarm, a brief moment of you made it difficult. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’re allowed to not like lamb.” Yuna paused for a moment. “Would you have told us, otherwise? If I’d had David make the lamb, would you have sat here and eaten it?”

Ilya paid specific attention to the dried food on a spatula before responding. “Probably,” he admitted.

Yuna nodded. “Don’t do that, okay? Don’t hide things because you think it makes you easier to deal with.”

And fuck, if that wasn’t the Yuna Hollander that made sponsors and brands and league donors tremble.

“Sorry,” Ilya said again, focus firmly back on the sink as he tried to force back the twist in his chest that was tightening his lungs.

“Hey,” Yuna said, nudging him with an elbow until he looked at her. “You’re good. We just want you to be comfortable here. If you’re going to be moving to Ottawa, you’re gonna be expected to put the time in with us.”

She threw in a wink to undercut the tension, and Ilya let out a shaky exhale he wasn’t aware he’d been holding in.

“By Shane?” he asked, breath still slightly weak around the question.

“Oh, absolutely. But also by us. You can’t expect to live in the same city as the in-laws and not show up for dinner once a week, right?”

Ilya could have laughed out loud with relief. “The in-laws, mm?” he replied with a pump of his eyebrows.

Yuna smirked back at him. “Oh come on, Ilya. My boy doesn’t do anything by halves, we both know that. Call me presumptuous, but if he’s in, he’s in.”

It was funny, that this was what acceptance looked like. He’d spent a long time imagining it would be this dramatic, declarative thing, where David (or more likely, Yuna) finally lowered a shotgun that had been pointed between his eyes and gave him the don’t hurt our son speech. Instead, it was sea turtles in a quiet living room and a conversation about marriage over dirty dishes.

“I think I should apologize for all the questions, though,” she continued.

“Why would you apologize for that?” Ilya asked, genuinely confused.

“Shane thinks I’ve been prying, and I probably have,” Yuna said. “I hope you can understand that it’s been an adjustment for me, and forgive me for being a little awkward about things at first.”

“I do not imagine that I was who you expected for Shane.”

Yuna scoffed, but not offensively so. “You could say that. But I think-” she sobered a touch, “-it was less about you, and more about me. Well, it was a little about you, because I cannot believe I’m going to have start caring about the Raiders now. But more that there was this huge thing about my son that I didn’t know about, because I wasn’t safe for him. That he was alone with it for so long. I’m not good at dealing with not knowing things.”

“Neither is Shane. But if it is worth anything, he wasn’t alone,” Ilya offered. “Not always.”

“No,” Yuna said with a smile. “I guess he wasn’t.”

They finished the dishes, and Ilya drained the sink, wiping it down with the sponge for good measure. He turned back, and Yuna was waiting with a fresh dishcloth for him to dry his hands with. He saw weekly dinners ahead of him, where he would constantly battle Shane’s parents for the right to clean up afterwards, or sometimes, maybe, insist that he cook instead. David might show him the things in his garage, and Yuna, despite apologizing, would continue asking questions.

“I can get you a Raiders jersey, if you want,” Ilya said cheekily.

Yuna rolled her eyes good-naturedly, and looked so much like Shane that it threw him for a moment.

“Alright, Rozanov. Don’t push your luck just yet.”

Sunday

“It’s raining.”

“Sunday is the only day when it is allowed to rain.”

“Why’s that?”

“Means you can have slow day. Quiet.”

The thing with Shane’s cottage being ninety-percent window was that there was no escaping the rain. If you were Shane, that meant that the reminders of the inability to do something were a barrage of torment that smacked against the glass and fogged the view. If you were Ilya, it meant that the slap of the rain against the windows made inside feel like a cocoon, a hideaway where you might bury yourself away from the elements.

“It feels like a waste,” Shane moaned.

Ilya tutted from his position behind Shane on the sofa, cushions slowly eating him while he fed limb after limb between Shane’s. He was, potentially, overwarm – the rain hadn’t broken the heat of summer, and until they’d shut the back door, it had given the air that seeped into the cottage the texture of smoke, clinging to skin and surface.

“You are being dramatic,” Ilya mumbled.

“I wanted to show you this cool waterfall.”

“We can go tomorrow.”

Shane was silent for a moment. “It’s, like, a full day hiking there and back.”

What went unspoken was this: tomorrow was their last full day together, and neither of them knew quite how to rationalize it. All they knew was that there was no defined plan for tomorrow that would not be at the expense of something else. A lazy morning would sacrifice an early start, a hike would sacrifice a day in bed, a microwave dinner would sacrifice the chance to cook together – but cooking might sacrifice two precious hours. There was no right answer for how they would spend Monday, and so to Shane, not being able to hike today represented some unforgivable loss of time well spent on the day before their last day.

“The waterfall will stay where it is, yes?” Ilya asked, trying to keep the grit from his throat.

“It will,” Shane grumbled, agreeing reluctantly.

“So if we don’t go tomorrow, we will go next time.”

“Next time,” Shane repeated.

There was something playing on the TV but neither of them cared enough to watch. Shane fidgeted and twisted until he was facing Ilya, until he could run the very tips of his fingers across the top of his forehead, down towards the lobes of his ears. Light touches that skittered across the planes of his skin, like Shane couldn’t figure out what part of Ilya he wanted to touch next.

“You have to go,” Shane said. It wasn’t a question. They’d both looked at Ilya’s diary, at the meetings with his manager and his coach and his physio and the team, all of which had been in there before he even stepped onto the tarmac in Boston. At the time, they were a failsafe. If Shane didn’t want this, at least Ilya had something to head back towards. But now they were a sealed jail cell, too many responsibilities for Ilya to move and too many sensible appointments for Shane to ever request him to move.

“I have to go,” Ilya replied. “For now.”

Shane nodded, eyes somewhere around Ilya’s cheekbone. “And when do you get your schedule?”

He knew this – they both did – but there was solace in the understanding, a resigned resolution to the reality that grounded them both.

“Next week, I think.”

Shane’s head bobbed again. “Yeah. It’s been fun though, right?”

Ilya smiled. “Yes,” he replied, because there weren’t words enough in English or Russian to say that the past fortnight had been everything he’d never let himself believe he could deserve, let alone have. That there was an ache in his chest that sat alongside the happiness which told him that until he could devise some kind of psychotic human experiment, it didn’t matter if he was here on the sofa or stranded on a desert island off the coast of Fiji, because there was no realistic way in which he could ever be close enough to Shane to satisfy the craving that had embedded itself into the very fibres of his being.

“Yes,” Ilya said again. “It has been very fun.”

̶

The rain broke in the afternoon, and four legs dangled over the very end of the dock, thighs plastered against damp wood as Shane and Ilya laid back and looked at the sky, feet skimming the surface of the lake.

“Do you want to do anything tomorrow?” Ilya asked. “We could go to that waterfall, you know.”

Shane hummed thoughtfully. “We could.”

“But you don’t want to.”

“I do! I just-” Shane broke off with an ugh, “-you’re going to laugh.”

“Probably,” Ilya agreed. “But that definitely means I want to hear it.”

“I don’t want to fucking share you,” Shane said around a groan, barely stomaching the sentence himself.

“Share me with what, Hollander? The trees?”

Shane whined again. “I mean, kinda?”

“We need to find you a therapist,” Ilya said seriously. “You are mad at trees now.”

“I’m not mad at trees.” Shane’s petulance sent a shot through Ilya which had him mentally biting down on a knuckle. “I’m mad at everything. So, I mean, I guess trees are included in that.”

“Why are you mad at everything?”

“I don’t know,” Shane sighed. “I just feel like – ugh, I don’t know. I feel like all I want to do tomorrow is stare at your face, but I know that’s stupid. We’ll be hiking and I’ll be up ahead-”

“-Ah, no. I will be up ahead-”

“-No! You don’t even know where you’re fucking going. I’ll be up ahead and I’ll just, like, want to be back there with you. Or not moving with you. But then if we’re not doing anything, I’ll feel bad that I’m forcing you to spend your last day here just, like, wasting it.”

“That would be a terrible tragedy,” Ilya deadpanned. “I don’t know what I would do with you for a whole day.”

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously. I mean, how could I possibly find a way to spend my day with you there-”

“-You’re so fucking annoying, I knew I shouldn’t have said anything-”

“-It will be terrible, but I guess I will find a way to get through it.”

Shane bopped him about the head, a bitchy tap that Ilya caught on the rebound between his hands, pulling Shane’s palm back against his chest.

“I know it’s stupid,” Shane began quietly. “But I feel like I kind of can’t let you out of my sight tomorrow, or I’ll panic.”

Ilya rolled his head to look at Shane, but determined after a moment that Shane would resolutely not look at him back yet.

“We will have to get used to not looking at each other a lot. For now, at least?”

“Yeah, but,” Shane muttered to the sky. “Not yet.”

“Is not so far away anymore.”

The clouds above them were still thick with rain left unshed, but they moved quickly now. Whizzing across the sky like time itself was fast-forwarding, like they were running down a clock that neither of them wanted to hit zero.

“This is the first time that I haven’t wanted to go back,” Shane admitted. “Pre-season has always been this good time for me. This time where I get my head on straight and remember how much I love it all again. But I can’t think of anything worse right now.”

“Me too,” Ilya replied, because there was nothing else left to say.

Shane’s head finally swivelled to meet Ilya’s, eyes locking as their temples pressed against the soggy slats of the dock.

“It’s going to be fine, right?” Shane whispered.

“I think we will have to make it fine.”

The palm that Ilya had pressed against his chest turned and laced itself through the fingers of one hand. Shane’s big brown eyes searched his, not looking for anything in particular.

“I love you,” Ilya said.

“And I love you,” Shane replied, quiet enough that not even the boards under his head would have registered it.

Monday

“I need to teach you how to sext,” Ilya announced as he walked into the living room. Shane looked up from his place tucked in the corner of the sofa, book propped open on one folded-up thigh. He sipped his coffee.

“At eight-thirty in the morning? When we’re in the same house?”

“Yes,” Ilya replied with a nod, plucking the coffee out Shane’s grip to swig it and sitting down on the coffee table to face him. “It will be harder to teach you over the phone, and if we are doing long-distance relationship then you need to know how to sext.”

Shane had perfected the face of the long-suffering boyfriend in the nine days that they’d been official. He closed his book and leaned forward to snatch back his mug.

“I can sext.”

“No,” Ilya corrected. “You can send a text message, and I think you are the most attractive man in the world. Two unrelated things. Does not make you good at sexting.”

“I can sext!” Shane said again, defensive now.

“You don’t tease.”

“I do so fucking tease!”

“If I said ‘what are you wearing?’ what would you say? Right now.”

Shane looked down at himself, gesturing like well, this.

“Shorts and a sweatshirt.”

Ilya groaned. “Wrong. You are wearing your tightest shorts, you know? The ones that you know I like, the ones that hug your ass so that I can tell when you have no underwear on.”

“That feels like a really long sext.”

“It’s about the detail, Shane. Okay, we try again. ‘What would you want me to do to you if I was with you right now?’”

Shane smiled, a little baffled. “Fuck me, probably,” he said slowly.

“Probably, Shane? You would probably want me to fuck you?”

“I mean, I’d definitely want you to fuck me. I always want you to fuck me.”

“Good,” Ilya said, leaning in slightly. “We can work with that. When do you want me to fuck you?”

“I just said. Always.”

“Shane-”

“-Fuck, wait, okay – let me try again. Set the scene.”

Ever the competitor, Shane shook himself off and sat forwards, hands clasped, legs dropping over the side of the couch to mirror Ilya’s stance.

“Okay. Remember, it is about the tease. So, two months from now, I text you after practice and I say that I miss you.”

“Oh,” Shane said with a frown. “Well, I miss you too.”

Jesus Christ, Ilya wanted to eat this man alive.

“Stop distracting me by being adorable. I mean ‘I miss you’ in the sexy way, this time.”

“Really?” Shane asked with a smirk, head tilted cockily to one side. “And how would you miss me in the sexy way?”

Ilya scooted to the edge of the coffee table until his knees were knocking Shane’s, and planted both of his hands firmly on the meat of Shane’s thighs.

“Well,” he started. “I would say that I miss touching you, miss kissing you, miss listening to the way you moan. I would say that I miss the feeling of having you down my throat, as deep as you can go. I miss being inside you, feeling you clench up around me as you come.”

Somewhere around the word ‘throat’, Shane’s breath had sped up. He slipped his thighs apart, until they bracketed either side of Ilya’s, his face tipping towards Ilya’s like he was falling into orbit.

“Oh yeah?” he murmured. “And how does it feel when I come while you’re inside me?”

“So good, Shane,” Ilya said, his voice catching on the end. “It feels hot, and tight, and so fucking good.”

“Tight, hmm? You like it when I’m tight for you, Rozanov?”

Their lips were almost touching now, Ilya’s breath falling across Shane’s cheek.

“Uh-huh,” Ilya replied. “Love it when you’re tight. When it feels like I can barely get my cock inside you.”

“You want me to work for it, yeah? Want me to feel you for days?”

Ilya let out a pained moan, forehead dropping to Shane’s. “Fuck. Yes.”

“You want me to walk out onto the ice and remember that you had me over the couch, or in the shower?”

There wasn’t enough air in the room, or in the house, or on the entire fucking planet. Ilya could faintly hear his own pulse in his ears, and he felt the uncontrollable urge to push a hand down on his crotch, just to relieve any of the pressure building there. Shane’s nose bumped his as his lips ghosted across Ilya’s, a barely-there kiss that was almost too dry.

“Yes, Hollander, fuck. I want you to feel empty when I’m not there.”

“But when are you gonna come fill me up, baby?” Shane whined.

“God,” Ilya bit out. “Whenever you want. I would keep you full every day if I could, would not let you leave my bed.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Keep me in your house so that you can fuck me any time of day, wake me up at night just to fuck me again?”

“Fuck yes, Shane. Want me to wake you up in the morning with my face between your legs, getting you ready for me?”

Shane moaned, mouth open against Ilya’s panting one-

“-Ilya, please-”

“-Go on, fuck, tell me. I’m so hard for you-”

-and pulled back, with a shit-eating grin on his face that Ilya had come to realize meant that he’d been played. He peeled his thighs away from Ilya’s, only to stand up so that the hem of his tiny fucking shorts filled his field of vision.

“Yeah,” Shane said lightly, leaning down to press a quick kiss to Ilya’s gaping jaw. “That’s what I thought.”

He carefully picked his way out from the cage of Ilya’s legs and retrieved his coffee from where he’d placed it on the floor, stalking towards the bedroom. Ilya sat stock-still on the table, ears ringing and lap throbbing as he watched the ripple of Shane’s quads as he walked away.

“Don’t tell me I can’t fucking tease,” Shane called over his shoulder.

̶

Ilya was distracted from glaring at his carry-on by the thump of the laundry basket onto the bed next to him. It felt like there was less space in there than before, with his toiletries already filling a sizeable gap in the holdall, and he heaved out a groan as he pulled a couple of remaining shirts out to try and find another place to wedge them.

“Roll them instead,” Shane offered, pulling a shirt out of Ilya’s hands and laying it down on the bed in front of him. Sleeves folded into the centre, in half lengthways, and then tightly rolled like a burrito until the whole thing was no bigger than a pair of socks. He repeated the same thing with the other shirt, and then the two slotted in neatly next to Ilya’s skincare.

“You know, it is very annoying that you are even perfect at packing. Please be shit at something.”

“Nah,” said Shane with a cocky look. “Pissing you off is too much fun.”

Ilya let his snarky reply die on his tongue in favour of pulling Shane in with a forearm hooked across his lower back, pressing a long kiss to his lips. Shane was smiling, a little bit of his teeth poking through his pout, and he laughed as he brought one hand to Ilya’s cheek.

“Horny for folding. Noted.”

Ilya tsked against Shane’s mouth. “I told you the other day, your folding is my favourite. You did it on the first night and I sucked your soul out through your dick, didn’t I?”

“Didn’t know there was a correlation between those two events, but I’ll bear it in mind.”

Shane’s put both of his hands on Ilya’s chest, pushing himself back and weaving to avoid Ilya when he chased his mouth again.

“You need to finish packing, and then I’m all yours for the evening.”

“Ugh, fine,” Ilya whinged. “But I appear to have lost all my boxers.”

Shane detached himself from Ilya fully and leaned to pull the laundry basket closer.

“I washed everything again. See?” he said, gesturing inside. Ilya’s shorts, folded. His boxers, folded and stacked. Socks, balled together. Ilya stared at it all, feeling a little dumbfounded and not really sure why.

“You washed everything again?”

“Yeah,” Shane said mildly. “It’ll just save you having to do it all when you get home. I know you have a busy morning on Wednesday, and your cleaner doesn’t come until Thursday. This way, it doesn’t have to just sit in your bag getting all gross for days.”

Ilya remembered a night with Svetlana, months ago, when they’d been sat scrolling in comfortable silence while the TV played something softly. He’d heard her make a considered hmm and looked over, and when she’d pointed her phone at him, he’d seen the results for the ‘Love Languages’ quiz she’d just taken. He’d taken the phone from her, vaguely interested, and scrolled through all of the so-called languages.

Acts of service, one of them had said. He’d not paid that one much mind at the time, keenly aware that many people didn’t just do things for him because they wanted to. Things with Ilya were often an exchange, services rendered for money, sex, or for the simple pleasure of having something to hold over his head at a later date.

Shane could be an insular man, preoccupied with perception and correctness to the point of distraction. He wasn’t always vocal with his feelings, and the rational part of his brain that protected the soft underbelly found solace in routine, or an absolute that left no room for interpretation. A pragmatic, logic-driven mind – certainly not unemotional, but sometimes uncomfortable with the self-examination that accompanied being too aware of your feelings. Shane was motion, planning, the avoidance of rumination. He was, for all intents and purposes, a doer.

And now, here, Shane had washed, dried, and folded all of his clothes solely so he didn’t have to. A protein bar purchase, a hoodie in the evening, and a spreadsheet calendar. A coffee delivered to Ilya every morning, even if he took a long drink of it himself first. Acts of service.

Ilya thought back. An interjection into an uncomfortable media scrum to save him from the humiliation ritual of failing to translate a too-long question, and a tap of his shoe underneath the table. A six-pack of Coke Zero, always kept cold in a fridge whose owner never drank it. Maybe Shane’s olive branch had been there the whole time, his body performing the words his mind hadn’t yet learned to shape.

“Thank you,” Ilya replied quietly, leaning in quickly to push a kiss to Shane’s forehead. When he pulled back, a flush was creeping its way in from Shane’s temples, and he was biting down on his lip in a fruitless attempt to avoid looking too pleased.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said with a shrug.

Ilya smiled. “It is to me.”

̶

The bedroom was slightly too chilly, but Ilya had demanded that they leave one of the sliding doors ajar so that he could hear the gentle lap of the lake and the rustle of the trees. Boston would be cars honking and music coming from God knows where, the distant rumble of the metro line and people talking too loudly on phones, wherever he went.

“You were right about this place,” Ilya said, hands tracing idle patterns into Shane’s crown. Without realising it, Shane was copying the same motion on the side of Ilya’s ribcage, fingers just shy of tickling from where his arm was thrown over Ilya’s torso.

“Right about what?”

“It feels like you can breathe here.”

Shane nodded against his chest. Under the duvet, one of his feet hooked over Ilya’s leg, pushing the warm sole into the meat of his calf.

“Yeah, it’s nice. Just… still.”

They lay there in the quiet for a moment. “Can I come back next summer?” Ilya asked.

“I want us to come back every year,” Shane replied, not an ounce of hesitation in his voice.

“You are sure?”

“Yeah. I thought we’d been over this. You’re stuck with me now,” Shane said. “Like, done deal. No return warranty.”

Ilya pretended to sigh dramatically. “Not even if I have the receipt?”

“Nope,” Shane replied cheerfully. “No take-backs.”

They smiled at each other, and Ilya tapped him lightly on the nose. “Good. I don’t need one.”

Shane copied him again, reaching up to place a finger to Ilya’s nose before running it along one cheek, following the curve of his eye socket.

“You’ve caught the sun,” he whispered. “You’re all freckly now.”

“Like you,” Ilya whispered back.

“Sure,” said Shane, humouring him with fond amusement. “Like me.”

Sometimes, Ilya wondered about the boy Shane had found standing outside the rink in Saskatchewan. He felt so distant from him now, uncertain as he was then of his future. The boy that got on a plane, missing his mama as much five years later as he did the day after her funeral, with no other fixed goal than to make her proud and to get the fuck out of Russia.

The things he would tell that boy about. A Cup that he dedicated to her, a trophy room still growing steadily, a house with the biggest television he’d ever seen. A garage full of expensive cars, wild parties with eyewateringly-priced champagne. A summer in a quiet cottage, and a text message asking him what he liked to eat. Shane.

Did you know then? he wanted to ask himself. Was there something in Ilya on that first day that had said yes, this is it? He wanted to tell himself to look at the freckles on that boy more closely, to map them, because one day he’d be staring down at that man as he lay on his chest, and he’d wonder whether there were more than there used to be. Commit it all to memory, he wanted to plead, because many years from now, the boy who shakes your hand twice will sit on a dock and tell you that he doesn’t want you to smoke anymore, which really means that he loves you. You will meet his mother and talk about marriage, you will tell him that you want children, and you will plan to move countries because the thought of being apart from him is too catastrophic to bear.

Look at him, Ilya. Really look at him. Forget Russia, forget America, forget fame and fortune – fuck it all, forget hockey for a second. Put the cigarette out, and kick the small rock out from under the fire exit door so that it can close behind you.

Just look at him.

Tuesday

The engine of the car idled quietly in the parking lot, like it didn’t want to break the silence that sat between them. Shane grabbed his hand over the console and stared at it, one finger running up and down the prominent vein on the back that led up into Ilya’s wrist.

“Two weeks, five hours.”

Ilya twisted his head on the headrest to face Shane.

“What?”

“That’s how long we had here,” Shane replied. “Two weeks, five hours.”

Ilya smiled weakly, trying in vain to make it reassuring but knowing that, in reality, it was likely as desperate and completely fucking bereft as the expression on Shane’s face.

“New record for us to beat then, yes?”

Shane nodded furiously, eyes darting and jaw working. “New record. Easy one to beat.”

“Yes,” Ilya said. “Easy.”

They sat in the stillness for another moment longer, and the car shuddered slightly as a jumbo jet passed just above them. Ilya wrapped his own hand on top of Shane’s, squeezing hard to make him look at his face. With a deep breath in, Shane raised his eyes to meet Ilya’s, and Ilya felt a thud of distant delight in the way he saw a thought occur to Shane, embarrass him enough to make him blush, and then steel himself to say it regardless.

“Bet I can guess the longest we’ll ever go being together.”

Ilya nodded at him, egging him on. “Go for it.”

Shane swallowed, holding the eye contact and squeezing again.

“Forever.”

Ilya’s phone pinged in his pocket with the notification that his check-in desk was now open. In the parking lot behind them, drivers scrabbled for spots and honked at other people holding up the traffic. Ilya looked at Shane’s big, watery eyes, and tried not to choke on the sob he felt clawing its way up his throat.

“I think that is a very safe bet.”

̶

By the time Ilya had made it through to departures after some truly fucking horrid queuing at security – and honestly, why did he even pay for fast track at this point – he worked out that Shane would be almost halfway home.

He had just under an hour to kill until his flight took off, so he occupied himself by wandering around the gift shops that lined the concourse, eyes hidden under the brim of his cap. He spied a tacky ‘I <3 OTTAWA’ t-shirt and bought it immediately, and only hesitated for a couple of minutes before he fired a photo off to the group chat. His new group chat, with his new family in it.

Family

Tuesday July 29^th, 4.12pm

 

Ilya

[image attached]
You like? I will wear this to next dinner

Yuna responded almost instantly.

Yuna H

VERY chic.
Get some Gucci shoes to finish the look off.

 

David H

We’ll make a Canadian of you yet!
How was security?

 

Ilya

Terrible
Is it always this bad?

 

David H

Afraid so.
You’ll have to get used to it!

 

Yuna H

Fly safe!

Tucking his phone away with a smile, Ilya cast his eyes up to the gate information board and caught the first flash of Gate 19 popping up next to flight UTD736 to Boston. He shouldered his bag and slipped into the throng of people heading through the lounge, weaving between an old couple buying a coffee, moaning why do all these kids need so many milks these days? and a group of teenage girls filming an ill-timed TikTok dance.

His gate was quiet when he got there, the attendant behind the counter only just sitting herself down. She gave him a smile and a quizzical look that he’d come to recognize over the years as meaning where do I know you from? before turning back to her computer screen. Ilya settled himself in a chair at the far side of the gate, pulling out his headphones and slumping backwards to wait for boarding to be called.

“Wow, it’s you again!” came a voice from his right.

Cracking an eye, Ilya found the mother from his flight out stood next to him. The baby was hitched on her hip, and she looked distinctly less frazzled than she had done two weeks ago. Maybe he did as well.

“Ah, what are the chances?” he replied, giving the baby a wave.

The mother gently grabbed the baby’s hand, puppeting it to wave back.

“Do you remember your friend, Gracie?” she cooed to her daughter.

“Hello again,” he said to the baby – Gracie – politely. The baby babbled, clearly in a better mood than it had been before. “Did everything go okay?” he asked, turning his attention back to the mother and giving her a knowing look.

She laughed lightly. “Yes, all fine. Thanks.”

They chatted idly for a moment longer, before Gracie shifted restlessly on her hip and the mother started quickly. “Alright, okay – yes. Sorry, I’m just gonna-” she gestured vaguely behind her, “-get her all changed before we board.”

Ilya nodded and waved her off. “Yes, of course. Safe flight,” he said with a smile as she turned to find the women’s bathroom across the concourse.

“You too. Oh, wait!” she called, turning back for moment. “Your trip! You were visiting a friend, right?”

“Right,” Ilya said.

“Did you have a nice time?” the mother asked.

“Yes,” Ilya replied, smile growing. “It was the best.”