Archive of Our Own

There were consequences to having a reputation like Ilya’s. Ilya had always known that. It was just that for a long time, those consequences were largely desirable. Girls throwing themselves at him in sports bars; hookups easing themselves out of his bed a scant few moments after they came; always someone telling Ilya about the coolest new club, always someone willing to tag along, and if they couldn’t pull because they looked like scrawny little rat-men next to Ilya’s rich-bitch aura, they would just roll their eyes and laugh and say that lucky fucking bastard, doesn’t even know what he has going for him.

But Ilya did know, of course. He couldn’t buy the sort of protection his reputation provided him. Who would ever suspect Ilya Rozanov of being a secret queer? When there were pictures of him with girls all over the place, models dripping off his muscled shoulders like sweat.

He had never really considered the problems his public image would pose to a long-term relationship, because for a long time, he couldn’t imagine himself with anyone like that. Well, maybe Svetlana, when they were both old and grey and forced into paper-thin matrimony by the American visa system. But Svetlana had her own slutty past, filled with enough chiseled men to balance out Ilya’s parade of whores, and anyway, it wouldn't be real love.

You’ll settle down some day, people would say to Ilya—beaten-up bruisers, usually, limping home from a rough game to the comforting arms of their much prettier, much smarter wives—and sometimes Ilya would snort, and sometimes he would think of freckles splayed across the bridge of a broad nose, deep brown eyes, the heft of Shane’s thighs around Ilya’s waist—

But that wasn’t possible, so he tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about it, so he failed to plan for it, and what was it that Yuna had said, while Ilya shoveled down pasta at the Hollanders’ ultra-Canadian dinner table? A failure to plan is a plan to fail, she had said, frowning down at some webpage about Canadian immigration law. You got to think ahead sometimes, honey.

Ilya—well. Ilya was not known for thinking ahead.

—

“They like you,” Shane says, after Yuna and David have packed up the carrying container for the rotisserie chicken, after Shane and Ilya have stood in the doorway like proud parents and waved their car off down the driveway. A Jeep, of course. “They really like you.”

Ilya isn’t so sure. Both David and Yuna did a good job of smiling at him when Shane was nearby, and David had spent a good ten minutes quizzing Ilya about Russian cuisine. But at one point, Yuna had asked, “So, Ilya, do you have any family in the States? Anyone near Boston?”

“Ah, not really,” Ilya had said, knowing it made him sound pathetic, but also knowing it would be worse to lie. “Just my best friend, Svetlana. We have known each other since we were very little. She is daughter of goalie, Sergei Vetrov.”

Shane had stiffened at the mention of Svetlana, and Ilya knows Yuna caught it. She had darted her gaze between the two of them, assessing. “I see,” she said, and she sounded like she really did see, saw more than Ilya wanted her to see. Ilya wondered if she would look Svetlana up later, maybe lying in bed while David flossed his teeth, wondered if she would show David the most recent photo on Svetlana’s Instagram. Svetlana laid out in a bikini on a beach in Fiji; Svetlana leaning against a sleek Bugatti. What would she say? I think our son’s boyfriend is fucking this girl? I think our son’s boyfriend is bad for him?

Later in the night, once everyone was a few drinks in, Shane had disappeared to the kitchen to get the fruit salad he had made for dessert, and David had leaned in and said to Ilya, “You know, I used to worry about Shane, when it came to love. I thought maybe he was too particular. He always seemed to be holding out for someone perfect. That’s how he is with everything, you know. But it looks like he’s finally decided something’s worth being bold.”

Which is the kind of veiled-in-seven-layers-of-metaphor-and-politeness kinda Canadian talk that makes Ilya want to pull his hair out. Luckily, Shane had returned with dessert before Ilya could respond, and as Ilya chewed his pineapple he tried to sort through what David said. Eventually, he decided it was a sort of thinly veiled warning. A don’t make him regret this. A you are not perfect and we know that even if Shane doesn’t. That’s all that makes sense, to Ilya. David and Yuna get along too well to clash on something like this, so if Yuna is wary, it stands to reason...

“I want to fuck you,” Ilya says, now, as Yuna and David’s taillights disappear down the driveway. “It’s been too long.”

Shane flushes. “Oh my god, it’s been, like, five hours.”

Ilya groans dramatically, clutching at Shane’s hips. “Five hours? Is worse than I thought. Might be too late. My balls might be so blue they have fallen off.”

“And how terrible that would be,” Shane says, probably aiming for dry but instead landing somewhere between flirty and horny. It’s one of the best revelations of this trip for Ilya, the way that it turns out Shane gets hard at the drop of a hat. Ilya could probably turn Shane on only by touching his ankles. Just by licking his forearms.

“Would be very terrible,” Ilya agrees, and in a trump move, simultaneously presses his lips to Shane’s neck and lets one hand drift from Shane’s hip to squeeze his ass. Shane gives a throaty little sigh and melts into Ilya’s touch.

“I want to fuck you,” Ilya says again, and this time Shane says, “Yes, please, yes, yes, Ilya.” And so Ilya carries him to bed and fucks him on all fours so he can watch the twist and splay of the muscles in his back, the way he flushes all over his body, the way he rocks back into Ilya’s hold. 

It’s good, it’s so good, it’s fucking incredible the way only fucking Shane can be. Why had Ilya ever fucked anyone else? Who did he think could compare? There was nothing like this, nothing like the tight grip of Shane around him, the pornographic humming moans that vibrate through his throat to his chest to his ass and right through Ilya’s dick. O Canada. Home and native land to the world’s best fucking lay. Thank God for Canada. Thank God for hockey, and interracial marriage, and whatever chance events led Shane’s ancestors to meet and fuck three hundred years ago, and four hundred years ago, and five hundred years ago. For a moment, Ilya is even at glad for every moment of his own pathetic life, because it led him here, to this bed, where he could bury himself in the beauty that is Shane Hollander.

Ilya bites Shane’s shoulder as he comes, and Shane yowls like a cat. He paints the bed white in his own come a few moments later, and Ilya, struck by sudden impulse, reaches forward to drag his fingers through the puddle. He feeds Shane's come into Shane’s own open mouth.

“Oh, gross,” Shane says, even as he obediently laps at Ilya’s thumb. “You’re into the weirdest shit. Where do you learn this stuff?”

And reality settles back into Ilya’s stomach. “I am just genius,” Ilya says, and slaps Shane’s chest, lightly. “You should try, sometime.” Shane immediately starts to grumble. Ilya pulls out.

—

Three seconds into preseason, Hernesniemi catches the clap from some college girl on the Raiders’ social media team, who tells Hernesniemi that she’s only slept with two men in her life and the other man was also a Raider, name redacted for her own personal privacy, so of course Hernesiemi turns the whole thing into a team-wide guessing game at the end of which all of Ilya’s teammates are convinced he’s got gonorrhea. 

“Come on, man, just admit it, who else is out here popping cherries left and right,” Wheezy laughs as he laces up his skate wrong for the second time in a row.

“Not Wheezy, that’s for sure,” Marly says. “Look at that ugly mug.”

Wheezy kicks out at him, still grinning. “And yet I have a fiance and you don’t,” he says. “What does that say about your mug, huh?”

“I don’t think ugliness is ruling anyone out,” Carmichael says. “She already fucked Hershey.”

That earns a round of jeers and a whistled, “Shots fired!” from a second-year rook. Hershey, faintly red-cheeked, shoves at the guy next to him.

“Does not matter what the face looks like when the face is buried in pussy,” he says, which earns its own tenor of catcalls.

“Seriously, though,” someone says, after the fervor has died down. “It was you, right, Roz?”

Ilya presses the last edges of his stick tape down and, satisfied, pushes himself to his feet. “There is good English phrase for this,” he says. “You should not shit where you eat.”

Hershey tilts his head, processing the idiom. “Okay,” one of the rookies says. “That’s not a no, though.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. It’s hardly the first time he’s been accused of fucking some rando. Last year, some Instagram influencer came to a home game wearing a Rozanov jersey and everyone on the Raiders became convinced Ilya had fucked her, even though she was there with her fucking dad. It was so stupid: Ilya had never seen her before in his life. Ilya had played into it anyway, because it was the easiest thing to do, and because it gave him a sort of double-O mystery persona. What has Ilya done? What is Ilya going to do? Who can say? You just know you can’t trust him, can’t trust what he says, certainly can’t trust him with your sisters or your wives. Tips on eating pussy and shooting pucks, that’s what Ilya is good for.

“Come on, come on, let’s stop harassing Roz here,” Marly says, coming up from behind Ilya to clap him on the shoulder. Ilya’s grateful for three-tenths of a second, before Marly continues, “Clearly, he’s embarrassed about having gotten the clap. It’s fine, we’ve all been there. Just make sure to go to the doctor to get it cleared up, eh, Roz? Would hate to lose our captain during the playoffs this year because his dick fell off.”

Ilya elbows Marly away with more force than perhaps is warranted. He’s fine. It’s fine. The guys are saying the same shit they’ve always said, and Ilya’s best bet is to laugh and make a joke about how Russians are immune to STDs, or something, because otherwise they’ll never drop this.

Instead, he says, “Bag skates for next person who mentions my dick,” and stomps out of the locker room to the whispered laughter of his teammates.

It’s a good thing Shane’s not on the team, Ilya finds himself thinking. He would hate for Shane to hear this. Shane, who is so sweet and trusting that, when Ilya suggested they go bare for the first time at the cottage, he agreed blindly, immediately, without even asking to see the test results Ilya had saved to his phone. I trust you, Shane had said, wriggling on the pillows, his cheeks dark and sweet, mouth wet with Ilya’s spit. Ilya had kiss him until he thought he was going to pass out from oxygen deprivation, and then he fucked him without a condom, and then, afterwards, while Ilya’s come was still leaking out of Shane’s ass, Ilya had gotten his phone and showed Shane the test. See, all clear, Ilya had said, and Shane had sighed and tucked his face into Ilya’s neck and said, you didn’t need to show me that, you know. I said I believed you.

Shane would probably get offended on Ilya’s behalf, if he heard the gonorrhea allegations. If one of Ilya’s teammates chirped him about it during warm-ups during the next Montreal-Boston game. Ilya can only hope the chatter has died down by then. If he has to see the look on Shane’s face when he hears something like this, Ilya really will run bag skates.

—

Halfway through October, Ilya wakes up late on his day off and finds a text from Shane waiting for him.

Happy Anniversary 💕 Call me when you wake up. I love you.

For a long, bleary moment, Ilya wonders if Shane is confusing him with some other boyfriend. Last time he looked, they started dating in July, not—he checks the date—October 14th. He considers that it might be some Canadian thing, a weird three-month anniversary that started as a way to pass the long, boring Canadian winters. But when Ilya looks back on his flight receipts, he sees that he arrived at the cottage on July 2nd. Their anniversary could, arguably, be that day; or it could be the 5th, when they said I love you. But it certainly wouldn’t have been three months ago, July 14th.

Ilya calls Shane. Shane picks up the phone after two rings, breathing hard. “Hey,” he says. “I was just working out.”

“This early?” Ilya says. “You are fucking maniac. I can call back later.”

“No, no, don’t, I’m basically done anyway. Hey. How are you? Happy anniversary.”

There it is again. Okay, so, definitely not an accident. “I am good,” Ilya says. “I just woke up. I am very sleepy, and it turns out I am also horrible boyfriend.”

A brief pause. “Oh? Why?”

“I don’t know what anniversary it is,” Ilya admits.

A gusting sigh over the line. “Shit, don’t freak me out, Ilya. Of course you’re not a horrible boyfriend, it’s just a silly thing.”

Ilya thinks that must not be true, because if he was a good boyfriend, Shane wouldn’t be worried about—whatever Shane was worried about, for a second there. Ilya can tell when Shane is worried. There’s a tenor to his voice, where it goes high and a little too thin, like a violin with its strings tied a little too tight.

“Okay, tell me,” Ilya says, flopping over onto his back to stare up at the ceiling fan lazily spinning above him. “What is silly anniversary?”

“Well.” Ilya can just imagine the bashful look on Shane’s face, the downward tilt of his eyelashes. Fuck, Ilya wants to suck his cock so bad. “It’s the anniversary of the day—the time—when you fucked me. For the first time. For real.”

Ilya’s throat goes dry. Of course. October, Montreal, Ilya’s hands shoved in the pockets of his dark overcoat, red leaves crinkling under his feet, squinting up at a big brick building—and then Shane appeared from the shadows, hemmed in light, glaring at Ilya like an angry kitten.

“Oh,” he says.

“It’s not a big deal, or anything,” Shane says. “Like, I’m not—I wasn’t expecting you to remember. Or whatever. And I know it’s probably not that big of a deal to you. Like. I know you’d done that a lot before, and obviously we had—been together, before. It’s just, you know. It was kind of—special, to me, I guess, and—“

“It was special to me, too,” Ilya interrupts, before Shane can blabber himself to any bigger of a hole.

Shane pauses. “Really?”

Ilya closes his eyes. His heart feels sick and grey in his chest. What kind of boyfriend is he, that Shane doesn’t know this? That Shane thinks, what—he’s just one more in a long list of partners, no more special than the girl Ilya fucked once in Dallas, who turned out to have a grandpa kink and started calling Ilya Pappy halfway through the act?

“The best sex I have ever had,” Ilya says now.

“Really?” Shane asks again, voice faintly disbelieving.

“Really,” Ilya says firmly. He’s not sure how he thinks Shane will react—maybe he’ll get emotional, or maybe he’ll say something romantic, or maybe he’ll reminisce abut the night from his perspective.

He doesn’t expect Shane’s faintly displeased hum, a pout evident in his voice. “Well, we can change that.”

Ilya blinks. “What?”

Shane huffs. “Well, I just mean, we didn’t know what we were doing, then,” he says. “I know there’s beginners luck, and whatever, but we should definitely be having better sex now than we were five years ago. Our skills have developed, if nothing else, and—are you laughing at me?”

Ilya can’t stop giggling long enough to answer him. It’s just so Shane. Sometimes, Shane and Ilya will be having a conversation, and it’s something normal, the sort of thing Ilya could talk about with other people, like discussing which meal preps are the most boring, or complaining about unexpected rain showers during a run, or whatever. And then Shane will say something and it’ll be so sharp, so unique, so him that it reminds Ilya that, no, he isn’t just talking to a good friend or a teammate. He’s talking to Shane. He’s talking to the love of his life. And every bit of the world gets a little warmer, yellow light peaks out from behind the clouds, angels sing, etc. etc. etc., and Ilya’s heart does a little samba in his chest, swelling outward with irrepressible love.

“Whatever,” Shane says, as Ilya keeps laughing. There’s a smile in Shane’s voice, now, too, so Ilya doesn’t even bother to try to reign himself in. “Keep laughing, dickwad. You’re not gonna think it’s funny the next time we see each other.”

“No?” Ilya finally manages. He’s beaming so wide his cheeks hurt. “Why, what are you going to do to me, Hollander? How are you going to make it the best sex ever?”

Shane hums. “I have my ways,” he says. 

“So you’re going to research something,” Ilya guesses.

Shane huffs. “Yeah, asshole,” he says, and Ilya’s heart sings, this is Shane. Shane, Shane, Shane. “I’m gonna fucking research something.”

—

Shane introduces Ilya to Rose in a private room at a Montreal Chinese restaurant he promises is discreet. No sooner have they arrived than Shane disappears into the bathroom under the thin pretext of needing to call his agent, and Ilya is left stiff-shouldered across from Rose’s falsely benign gaze.

“So,” Rose says, after they’ve sat in silence for a few awkward moments. She twirls her cocktail umbrella around the rim of her glass. She’s like a character in a movie. Seductress On the Beach, Heroine Picking Up Man In Bar, Effortlessly Enticing HomeTown Girl. “You’ve been with a lot of women, over the years.”

Not really, Ilya wants to say. I’ve never been with anybody the way Shane was with you. He wants to be a catty bitch with Rose. He wants to make it clear to her that she needs to get her expensive, French-tipped fingers off of his man. But when he had said as much to Svetlana, she had laughed in his face and said, are you trying to get Hollander to break up with you?

Ilya has already lost his chance with Shane’s parents, and God knows Hayden Pike will never take to Ilya, if he ever finds out about him. Rose is just about the only person in Shane’s camp that he has a reasonable shot at winning over. Someone who might call Shane after this night out and say something like, he’s good for you, or you seem happy with him, or even something like he’s hot, the sex must be great. At least that’d be a compliment. And isn’t that supposed to be the benefit of sleeping with a reformed slut? All that sexual experience, laved on you.

So instead of biting back something snippy, Ilya sucks in a breath through his nose and says, “Ah, yes, I used to be a whore. But is different, now. I have never been with anyone like Shane.”

By which, of course, he means he has never loved another person like he loves Shane, never will love another person like this again, doesn’t think it’s actually physically possible to do so, even if he wanted to.

But Rose Landry just hums, expression impenetrable. Ilya is used to being able to read people. Fuck, why did Shane have to befriend an Oscar-winning fucking actress?

A waiter rushes in, places a tower of steaming bamboo baskets on the table, rushes out again. Rose waits until the door has shut behind him to say, “And what would you do if that changed?”

Ilya blinks at her over the plume of steam. “If what changed?”

Rose reaches forward, primly removes the top of a bamboo basket, revealing a trio of perfect pork buns, each decorated with a single tiny pig decal. With elegant form, she uses her chopsticks to pull a bun from the stack. Ilya is completely incapable of using chopsticks. So much for soft hands. Mostly he has to stab things, like some sort of brute, if he wants to avoid using his fingers.

Shane finds it funny, Ilya’s pretty sure. In an endeared, that’s cute kind of way. Not irritated. Not yet. “If you found somebody else like Shane,” Rose continues.

To which Ilya says the only thing he can think to say: “There is nobody else like Shane.”

—

At All-Stars, Shane and Ilya put on a carefully choreographed performance of burgeoning friendship: they get drinks together on the first night, organize a night out with both East Coast teams on the second, and are seen grudgingly shaking hands after their match. Hockey journalists respond in precisely the way they had hoped, putting out lighthearted pieces titled Putting the Rivalry to Bed? and Rozanov and Hollander Warm Up The Ice With Friendship.

It’s heinous stuff, truly embarrassing, full of cliches, but Yuna nods over it all approvingly and says, “This is really helpful. Really sets the stage for where we want to go with this. Diana, what do you think?”

They’re on a conference call with the public relations firm they’ve hired to help launch the Foundation this summer: Diana, head liaison; Steven, tech guru; and a third person, possibly an early-career intern, whose name Ilya thinks starts with a G sound. Ilya has heard him introduce himself several times by this point, but he mumbles so terribly during these calls that Ilya can barely understand anything he has to say.

“It’s definitely better than where we were at,” Diana says, which is not exactly the ringing endorsement Ilya had hoped for. On the video screen, Shane’s mouth twitches, a barely-visible tell of his displeasure. “We’re still going to want to do a public meet-up of the two, maybe some time in March or April, to really sell the friendship before the release.”

“Well, that’s easy,” Yuna says. “It sounds like you have more concerns, though.”

“Well—yes,” Diana says. This is the first video call Ilya’s been on with her, and she looks nothing like he had expected. On the phone, she sounds buttoned-up, professional, the kind of woman who probably keeps her hair slicked back with gel to make sure not a single hair ever pops out of place. On video, though, she looks almost mousy. Aggressively unintimidating. She’s wearing what looks like a hand-knitted cardigan, and Ilya suspects she stands, at most, five feet tall. 

“I’ll be transparent,” Diana says. “I think the friendship narrative is on the right track, and Shane’s image is certainly consistent with what we’re looking for. My bigger issue is Ilya.”

“Me,” Ilya echoes.

“Not with you as a person, of course!” Diana rushes to say. “But your image—well, it’s not ideal. You’ve got a sort of cocky, playboy, bad boy persona going on, which certainly has its time and place—and would be effective for many brands looking for ambassadors. It just doesn’t line up very well with a mental health charity.”

“Rozanov actually cares very deeply about this issue,” Shane pipes up, before Ilya can say anything. “He has a deep personal investment in it. And, although he and I aren’t exactly best friends, I can say that he’s certainly not the person the press makes him out to be.”

Diana nods quickly. “Of course,” she says. “Again, Mr. Rozanov—I don’t mean to imply that this persona of you is true. But it is quite pervasive in the media.” Ilya makes a note to look up the word pervasive after this meeting. “It’s not a dealbreaker, it’s just something we’ll want to work on softening. Especially because having such a strong public connection with Shane means that your reputation is going to affect his reputation. And, ideally, we wouldn’t want to do anything that would damage Shane’s existing sponsorships.”

“Definitely not,” Yuna says firmly, writing quickly in her notebook.

Ilya just nods. “Whatever you think is best.”

An hour later, Ilya snaps his laptop shut as Shane trots into the living room. “Well, that could have been worse,” Shane says, dropping down onto the couch beside Ilya.

It had felt stupid, taking the call from different rooms when they were in the same house, but the alternative—sitting next to each other in front of one laptop camera, like a married couple calling their college-aged kid to check they were eating their vegetables—wasn’t workable. 

Ilya shoves his laptop away and drags Shane down until he’s laying half on top of Ilya, their bodies smashed together like clumps of clay. He twists his fingers in the hair at the nape of Shane’s neck and tugs lightly. The tension seeps out of Shane’s body like water.

They lay there for a while in the quiet, so long that Ilya is fairly certain Shane has started nodding off against his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Ilya says, when he thinks Shane is mostly asleep. “Is my fault this is so difficult. If I could—I wish I could change it.”

But Shane’s arm only tightens around Ilya’s back. His voice, when it comes, is surprisingly awake. “It’s not a big deal,” he says. “We’ll manage it. The people we hired, they’re good at their jobs. They’ve managed much worse.”

But Ilya is tired of being managed. Tired of having to be managed. He wishes he could just be easier for people. He wishes it could be effortless to like him, to be friends with him, to invite him into your life. Maybe, if it was easier, Ilya would have more people around him. Friends from childhood, family members, old teammates—not his sad little circle, Svetlana and the guys who are contractually obligated to get along with Ilya for the sake of locker room cohesion. A boyfriend who maybe doesn’t realize, really, what he’s getting into for the long term.

Ilya knows how hard it is to love someone who needs to be managed. It can be exhausting. He doesn’t want to exhaust Shane. He wants good things for him, always.

But he doesn’t know how to say any of this, so in the end, he says nothing, focuses instead on listening to Shane’s heartbeat as he drifts off to sleep.

—

In March, everything blows up in Ilya’s face.

It’s not hard math. Seven months pregnant, the tabloid says. Seven months ago, Ilya was charging through his final preseason on the Boston Raiders, texting Jane about the stupid shit the defenders were saying at team dinner, ducking out of the club early to go home and tell Shane, over FaceTime, exactly how he wanted Shane to stretch his asshole around his new vibrating buttplug.

It’s pretty clear that Ilya should not have been doing anything that would result in the creation of a child, seven months ago.

BOMBSHELL! reads the title. FORMER YSL MODEL SARA ROBERTSON CONFIRMS RAIDERS’ CAPTAIN ILYA ROZANOV IS FATHER OF HER SOON-TO-BE-BORN BABY!

Ilya’s first instinct, of course, is to call Shane. He calls even before he can figure out what to say. With the phone is ringing in his ear, he fumbles to think of something that doesn’t make him sound like a complete fucking idiot. It’s not true, he should probably lead with, just to make it clear that this is not some sort of fucked-up apology call where Ilya gets on his metaphorical knees and begs Shane to take him back despite his gross infidelity. Of course, Ilya could still be lying about the baby being his, and he wouldn’t blame Shane for doubting him, really, so he’ll have to make sure to provide clear evidence—not that he has any, yet, but the assurance that he’s willing to take a paternity test, maybe the offer to get the results sent straight to Shane so he can know for sure that there is no tampering—

Shane doesn’t pick up the phone.

Hello, you have reached Shane Hollander, says Shane in his carefully polished media voice. I’m not able to pick up the phone right now. If you’re reaching out for a business opportunity, please reach out to my manager, Yuna Hollander, at XXX-XXX-XXXX. Otherwise, please leave a message after the beep, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you for calling.

Ilya has always thought it’s an adorable message. Thank you for calling, like Shane is the receptionist in some brightly-lit, mid-level office building, trying to make prospective customers feel important.

Right now, though, Ilya can’t find much enjoyment in it. Heart pounding, he dials Shane again. And again. And again.

After five missed calls, he gives up and turns to texts. please pick up the phone, he writes. I swear I can explain. girl is liar. I love you

He wants to text more than that, but he forces himself to hold back. He doesn’t think Shane will appreciate it, being bombarded with texts from Ilya when he’s probably trying to objectively evaluate the likelihood that Ilya cheated on him. Ilya’s not sure if calling a million times would be a mark in the probable cheater column or not.

Instead, he grabs the keys for his Porsche.

Maybe this is also not innocent behavior, driving five hours to assure your boyfriend you’re not facing impending fatherhood with another woman, but fuck it. If Ilya has to sit here, he’ll die. If nothing else, the drive will help him feel better. 

The whole time he’s trying to get out of the city, his phone keeps buzzing, and he keeps snatching it up, hoping that it’s Shane, but it’s always just his agent. Eventually, not long after Ilya crosses the border into Vermont, he gets sick of the hope and just calls his agent back. It’s probably the best move, anyway. Ilya can imagine a tiny little Shane angel on one shoulder, his arms crossed over his tiny chest, saying, you should really let you agent help manage this, Ilya, that furrowed brow and cute little displeased face.

That takes a good two hours, which Ilya mostly spends telling his agent repeatedly that, no, really, the kid is not his, no, the kid is definitely not his, there is a zero percent chance the kid is his, really, really, really. He’s in a committed relationship now. No, he really is. No, he wouldn’t lie to his agent, he didn’t cheat. He didn’t even get drunk and cheat. He doesn’t drink any more. No, there is no way that he blacked out and forgot cheating. No, the child really, honestly, truly is not his.

In the end, his agent says he’ll handle requesting a paternity test. In the meantime, Ilya is better off not making a statement, not commenting unless he’s asked directly. The agent says he’ll write up copy for Ilya to memorize on the off chance he is asked, but, really, he won’t be, paternity suits are a dime a dozen in this sport, nobody cares until anything is confirmed.

Then Ilya’s at the border, and then he’s through the border, and then he’s got an hour and a half left to drive with his heart jumping out of his ass with terror.

He kind of blacks out, for most of the drive. He doesn’t remember paying attention to road signs or obeying speed limits, and probably he could have driven over a pedestrian in the road and not noticed that either. Hopefully, he’s not a murderer. His heart rate ratchets up the closer he gets to Shane’s apartment, until it’s practically thudding out of his fucking carotid, and then of course he ends up circling around the neighborhood looking for parking for twelve fucking years while Shane is, like, two hundred feet away from him, probably hating his guts.

Eventually, he finds street parking a million blocks away from Shane’s condo, and he whips into the spot so quickly he nearly dings the car behind him. He doesn’t bother to pay the meter—he’s rich, he can pay a parking ticket—just throws his wallet in his pocket, grabs his keys, and takes off towards Shane’s.

At first, he walks. Then he speed-walks. Then he figures, fuck it, he’s got places to be, and starts jogging. Somewhere around the halfway mark, the jog has turned into a sprint and Ilya is heaving around the tightness in his chest, his leather jacket flapping behind him like some terribly ugly supervillain cape.

If these are the last moments he has to look back on of his relationship with Shane Hollander, it’s going to be pretty fucking humiliating.

He has a key to Shane’s apartment building. Shane had given it to him the last time Boston played in Montreal, in November. He’d pressed it into Ilya’s hand casually, alongside a protein bar, but it was a terrible attempt at nonchalance: he was red as a tomato. Just in case you need to get in sometime when I’m not here, Shane had said, and then Ilya had been late leaving to go to the rink because he couldn’t help but sink to his knees and blow Shane right there in the entryway. Shane had given him a second protein bar on the way out the door, to make up for the extra caloric output from the blowjob.

The staircase requires a key code, and for a terrifying moment, Ilya thinks Shane will have changed it up, anticipating just this moment. But Ilya enters 1919 and the keypad beeps green, and up the stairs he goes. Panting, sprinting into the sky like Ilya’s hopes. Please, please, please, he thinks. He should have been doing more stuff for God, to show how grateful he was, to earn some brownie points. What if this whole thing is falling apart just because Ilya failed to show appropriate gratitude for the gift he had been given in the form of Shane fucking Hollander? Stupid, fucking stupid of him, he was so fucking stupid.

He knocks on Shane’s door.

“Coming!” Shane calls from inside the apartment. Ilya has the thought, just before the door opens, that he should hide himself in case Shane looks through the peephole, sees it’s him, and runs away. But before he can, the door is swinging open, and there is Shane—Shane in a pair of old, loose joggers, a soft Metros t-shirt, thick white athletic socks. He blinks.

“Ilya?”

“Shane,” Ilya heaves, and then suddenly he thinks he’s going to pass out, so he bends over, pressing his hands to his knees, gasping at the air.

“What the fuck,” Shane says, from somewhere above him. “What’s happening? Did you run here all the way from Boston? What the fuck?”

“Please,” Ilya manages, which is meant to be the start of a please just hear me out, but his body isn’t oxygenated enough to manage that yet. Maybe Shane gets the gist of it, or maybe Shane is just a much more generous and benevolent person that Ilya had imagined, because instead of kicking Ilya to the curb and calling him lots of terrible names, Shane settles a hand on Ilya’s back.

“Breathe, baby,” he says, which makes Ilya’s heart skip a beat and sets back his mission to regulate his heartbeat and breathing by at least thirty seconds. “It’s all right. Jeez, okay, come in.”

Shane sets Ilya on the couch, tells him to stay put, and disappears into the kitchen. It could be a ruse to escape the house while Ilya is distracted, but it doesn’t really seem like Shane’s style—well, not his style lately, anyway—and besides, Ilya can hear him puttering around in there. Shane comes back with an ice-cold glass of water and a slightly damp kitchen towel which he uses to blot sweat from Ilya’s forehead before slinging it around the back of his neck.

“Okay,” Shane says, after Ilya has drained the glass and he is breathing at a mostly normal pace again. “What’s going on?”

Ilya squeezes Shane’s thigh in one hand. “It’s not true,” he says. “You weren’t answering my calls or texts, and I know—I know how it looks. But I swear. Is not true.”

Shane frowns at him. Ilya prepares himself to argue, to provide the evidence, but he just says, “What’s not true?”‘

Of course. Shane the Canadian Mennonite, who deleted social media off his phone three years ago in pursuit of better mental focus. “You didn’t see the news.”

“What news?” Shane asks. “I don’t—wait, hold on, I don’t know where my phone is.”

But Ilya grabs Shane’s wrist before he can get up. “Actually, I think you should never go on internet again.” At Shane’s expression: “Okay, not realistic, fine. No internet for one year.”

“Ilya.”

Ilya sighs, releasing Shane’s wrist. For a split-second, his handprint remains, white against Shane’s summer-tanned skin. “Okay,” he says. “But remember you have to let me explain, yes?”

“Did you fucking kill someone or something?” Shane wonders as Ilya passes him his phone. “You’re kind of freaking me out.”

Ilya waves a hand at the phone. “Just look. You will understand.”

The first article is still pulled up in Ilya’s browser window. Ilya watches as Shane’s eyebrows creep up and the corners of his mouth creep down. Ilya picks at the seams of his sweatpants, watching the way Shane’s eyes twitch back and forth as he reads.

“Well,” Shane says, when he’s finally finished. “This is obviously bullshit.”

He locks the phone and sets it down in his lap. Ilya blinks at him. “What?”

“The article,” Shane says. His jaw is set and his brow is furrowed in anger. “I can’t believe that people can make articles like this and call themselves journalists. Have you contacted your lawyer yet?”

Ilya has lost the thread of this conversation impressively quickly. “About…paternity?” he guesses.

Shane makes a face. “No,” he says. “About suing the publication for libel. Or suing the girl, actually. You can’t just accuse random guys of fathering your baby and get away with it. Not unless you have a reasonable assumption that someone is the father, which she obviously doesn’t.”

Obviously, Shane says. Like it’s so clear to him. Like he never considered otherwise. Which—Ilya is rapidly reevaluating how Shane’s brain works—maybe he didn’t.

“How do you know so much about this?” Ilya asks, because it’s easier than the other question he has, which is how can you trust me so much?

“Oh, Comeau has had like three separate paternity suits,” Shane says. “Also, my mom looked into it, a long time ago, when I started to get really famous. You know, crazy people make claims about celebrities all the time.” He shrugs. “It seemed like it was good to be prepared.”

Ilya has, admittedly, never considered this. He has considered actual paternity problems stemming from his sleeping around, but he was relentless with his use of condoms, and he like to think he was a pretty good judge of character, too. He’d never really thought about someone lying.

It was shortsighted of him, obviously.

“Well, I have never slept with this girl,” Ilya says, because he figures it’s best to be abundantly clear. “Baby is not mine.”

Shane frowns at him. “I know that,” he says.

Ilya thumbs his nose. “Okay, good. Just wanted to be sure.”

But Shane’s frown deepens. “Did you—is that why you came here?” he says. “You thought that I would believe it?” He eyes the hems of Ilya’s jeans, wet from where he sloshed through the puddles outside. “Where the fuck did you run from that you’re so out of breath, anyway?”

Ilya twists his mouth. “Would you believe I was just doing cardio?”

Shane’s lips turned down at the corners. “Ilya.”

“Okay, fine, I drive here. But there is no decent fucking parking. So I park far away, say, okay, I will walk. But walking was going too slow. So maybe I run.”

“How far did you run?”

Ilya shrugs. “One mile, maybe?”

Shane’s eyebrow shoots up. “One mile, and you’re this out of breath? This is why you need to stop smoking.”

Ilya pinches Shane’s thigh, hard, ignoring the way Shane immediately tries to squirm away. “I was running very fast,” he says. “To get to my lover to throw myself at his feet and ask for forgiveness! Is not so romantic if you are not sweaty and out of breath.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Shane says dryly, but there’s a furrow between his brows, still. “You really thought I believed it.”

It’s more an observation than a question, but still Ilya finds himself nervously averting his eyes. Shane palms Ilya’s chin and twists his face so he’s forced to look at him. “Ilya,” Shane says.

“Shane,” Ilya parrots.

“What the fuck?” Shane says. “Do you think I don’t trust you?”

“No,” Ilya says, automatic, and then tilts his head. “Well, maybe. Yes? I don’t know. I would not blame you, if you did not. My past, is not pretty.”

But Shane’s frown only deepens. “What’s wrong with your past?” he says.

“Shane,” Ilya says, but Shane just keeps looking at him like that, a genuine sort of bafflement. “I am big fat slut.”

Shane huffs, but finally releases Ilya’s face from his grip. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

“Is true,” Ilya says. “Is not—I am not slut anymore, yes? I am reformed. But I know is hard to believe. I understand.”

Shane crosses his arms across his chest. “Well, it’s not hard for me to believe,” he says. “I know you’re not sleeping with anyone else, Ilya. I trust you.”

Ilya’s breath catches in his throat. He coughs once, to cover it up. Fuck, his lungs really hurt. Shane is right; he does need to stop smoking. “Yes,” he says faintly, unsure of what else to say. “Well.”

Still frowning, in one smooth movement, Shane drops down and straddles Ilya’s lap, slinging his arms around Ilya’s shoulders. It’s crazy, how well they fit together: how much it feels like they belong here, Shane’s thighs bracketing Ilya’s, Shane’s forearms resting perfectly on the grooves of Ilya’s shoulders, and, when Shane leans down, their foreheads pressed together, noses brUshing.

“You’re stupid,” Shane says, firmly. “I trust you. More than I trust anyone else. Okay? I know you wouldn’t cheat on me.”

It’s embarrassing, really, the way that makes Ilya tear up. “Hey,” Shane says, voice softening all at once, twisting sweetly like pulled candy. “Come here. Come here.”

Ilya buries his face in Shane’s shoulder. The best place on earth. His shirt smells like sandalwood, because Shane has some weird, fancy scented detergent that he uses so he doesn’t have to bother with cologne. Cologne takes two seconds, Ilya had said, the first time Shane had told him.

Yeah, but that adds up over time, Shane had said. Anyway, cologne is expensive and I have to buy laundry detergent anyway, so. Why not hit two birds with one stone?

Ilya, of course, had been arguing just for show. He loved this quirk of Shane’s immediately, just like he loves all of his other strange quirks. The way that, after Ilya spends a long time at Shane’s house, he comes home with a suitcase of sandalwood-scented clothes. Stuff he can press to his nose and pretend is Shane’s; stuff he can take into bed with him, when he is feeling truly, honestly pathetic, and put around a pillow to hold.

It’s got nothing on the real thing, of course. But it’s so much better than nothing. So much better than what Ilya would get if Shane were a boring normal person who used something stupid and generic, like Tide.

“Other people will believe it,” Ilya says. “Your parents—“

“Fuck ‘em,” Shane interrupts. Ilya is surprised enough that he pulls back to look at Shane’s face; Shane is dead serious. “I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks,” Shane says. “I know you, okay? I know you.”

Reserved in so many ways, and then not reserved at all. Such a fucking weirdo.

“Do you?” Ilya asks, and immediately hates the way he makes him sound so small, like a mouse in the floorboards, hunting for crumbs.

But Shane just knocks their foreheads together like a pair of hockey helmets. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.” And then, because he’s Shane: “You asshole.”

—

They mostly waste the day making phone calls—to a paternity lawyer, Shane’s mom, Shane’s agent, the PR firm managing the Irina Foundation launch, Svetlana, Shane’s mom again—and by the time there’s nobody left to talk to, it’s well past sunset.

“It’s not a great idea, to drive in the dark,” Shane says, worrying his bottom lip.

“Morning skate is optional tomorrow,” Ilya says. “I don’t need to be back until two.”

So they go to bed together. Shane rides Ilya for round one, and then they blow each other in the shower for round two. In bed, they slump together, Ilya’s hand down Shane’s pajama pants, Shane’s hand splaying on Ilya’s belly, talking about nothing.

At some point, the subject of fantasies comes up. Ilya asks Shane what his biggest fantasy is, and from the way Shane blushes, Ilya thinks he’s going to hear something truly filthy. Instead, Shane says, “Um—have you seen that movie, 127 Hours?”

Ilya furrows his brow. “The one where guy chews his own arm off?” Amputation kink for 500, Alex.

But Shane shakes his head. “He cuts it off, he doesn’t chew it off, it—anyway. I guess. Oh, god, it’s stupid.”

Ilya puts his fingers below Shane’s chin and tilts it up to look him in the eye. “Tell me,” he commands.

“Well, I guess—sometimes I have the fantasy that we’ll have gone hiking, or whatever, and something like that happens. And we’re both trapped. And I have to—I have to cut off my arm, or whatever, so I can go get help. And I do, and I bring them back, and they save you. And so, you know, in a way, I saved you.” Shane shrugs, eyes darting away. “Like I said, it’s stupid.”

There it is: that yellow light. The world warms. Ilya’s heart expands. Shane, Shane, Shane. “It’s not stupid,” Ilya says, when he’s sure he can speak without crying. “I think you’re right. If we got stuck in the wilderness, that’s exactly what would happen.”

“Okay, don’t make fun of me, asshole.”

“I’m not,” Ilya says. “I’m not, I swear.”

Shane stares at him for a moment, before he sniffs. He looks like he’s trying not to smile. “Okay,” he says. “Whatever. What’s your fantasy?”

Ilya skates his fingers down Shane’s back, the dip of his spine. What is his fantasy? A ring on his finger. Walking down the street hand-in-hand with Shane. Sitting on Shane’s lap at parties filled with faceless teammates. A house with both their names on the deed. On his Wikipedia page, in the summary, a line that says Partner: Shane Hollander.

“Donating my hand to you so you can play hockey again after heroic rescue,” Ilya says. “Maybe this way you will finally fix your terrible backhand.”

“All right, you fucking—“

Shane digs his fingers into Ilya’s sides, right where he’s most ticklish. Ilya laughs like a deep, ringing bell.