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Rule four is Ask, then wait for the answer. Rule seven is Nobody here is a name. Rule eleven is about towels.
Shane knows them in order. He read the house rules the night he booked, and again at breakfast, and once more in the parking garage while Ilya paid for the parking, which was twenty-two dollars, which Ilya said out loud twice like someone had reached into his chest and taken it.
"Quiz me," Shane says in the elevator.
"No."
"Rule seven."
"Nobody can touch my husband." Ilya is fixing his hair in the brass panel by the buttons, two fingers, very serious. "Is good rule."
"That's not rule seven."
"Should be rule one. I will email the lady."
It was Ilya's idea. Shane keeps coming back to that, like checking that the stove is off. In June Ilya was at the kitchen island reading something on his phone, and he laughed and said, "Shane. In Montreal there is a party where rich people have sex in a big house. We should go. We would be the most famous people there," and then he put an entire slice of cheese in his mouth, folded, and went back to his phone.
Shane said, "Ha," and three days later he had found the real one. Vetted. An application, a couples interview over Zoom, an NDA, a phone policy, an FAQ with eleven questions in it, a page called First Time? that he read standing up in the hallway of their house with his shoes still on. He sent Ilya the link with no message. Ilya sent back a thumbs up and then fourteen eggplants, one at a time, so Shane's phone buzzed fourteen times in his pocket during a sponsor lunch.
For the Zoom Shane wore a collared shirt. Ilya wore no shirt at all and ate cereal and answered every question honestly, which was worse. The woman running it, Odile, asked what they were hoping to get out of the evening, and Shane said, "We're just curious, it's really more of an exploratory thing for us, we're very respectful of boundaries," and Ilya said, with his mouth full, "He wants to be good at it."
Odile wrote something down.
So Shane is doing this for Ilya. That's the model and it's a reasonable one. Ilya likes new things and loud things and things he can tell a story about later at a bar with his hands. They have been married two years, and Shane has read about what happens to people around two years, he read a whole thread about it once at three in the morning, about couples who stop surprising each other and then one of them buys a motorcycle.
Shane would rather book a party than watch Ilya buy a motorcycle. Shane has booked the party. He has done the reading. He brought his own lube because the FAQ said bring your preferred products and he isn't going to stand in a stranger's loft in the Old Port using a lube he hasn't vetted.
The elevator opens on the wrong floor. It's the parking garage again. Ilya laughs so hard he has to hold the rail.
*
The loft is the whole top floor. Odile is at the door in a black slip dress, younger than she was on Zoom, and she takes their phones and puts them in grey fabric pouches that close with a magnet, clack, and hands the pouches back. Shane holds his like it's warm.
There's a basket of masks on the table by the coats, black satin, the kind you'd buy at a pharmacy in October. Shane brought his own. It's nicer, it has a little structure to it, he ordered it in July and tried it on in the bathroom with the door locked even though Ilya wasn't home. He puts it on now. Ilya looks at it and says nothing, which is suspicious, because Ilya always says something.
"Bracelets," Odile says, and holds out a tray. Green for open. Yellow for ask me first. Black for here together, not playing with others, watching is fine. It was on the FAQ. Shane takes two black ones before Ilya's hand is even out of his pocket and puts one on Ilya's wrist himself, the snap kind, like at a hospital or a water park, and he runs a finger under it to check it isn't too tight.
"Unless you want," he says. "I mean. It's your night."
Ilya looks at the bracelet. He looks at Shane, at the mask. Then he puts his thumb under the black band on Shane's wrist and runs it around once, slowly, all the way.
"Very nice color for you," he says, and goes to find the food.
*
The first room is like any party in any expensive apartment, if every party had a man in a leather harness at the bar asking very politely for a Perrier with lime. People in robes. People in underwear. One woman in only a cardigan, buttoned. The music is low and French. There are lamps everywhere and no overhead light, which Shane notices because he would have done the same thing.
The house robes are grey waffle cotton and very soft and Shane gets changed in a little room off the hall with cubbies, folds his jeans, puts his shoes side by side under the bench. When he comes out Ilya is already at the snack table in his robe with it open to the waist, eating green grapes one after another off the stem, and a few of the little cheeses, and a cracker, and then more grapes.
"Rule nine," Shane says. "No food in the play areas."
"This is not play area. This is buffet." Ilya holds up a grape. Shane eats it from his fingers because it's faster than arguing.
A woman with short silver hair is looking at Ilya's back from the couch. At his shoulders, the tattoos where the robe has slid. She looks for a while. She has a green bracelet. Shane steps in close on Ilya's other side until their arms touch, and picks up a cracker he doesn't want, and stands there holding it.
"You can eat it," Ilya says. "Is free."
Shane eats the cracker.
*
The big room has a bed in it that's really four mattresses pushed together on a low platform, white sheets, and on the bed there are six people, maybe seven, it's hard to count because they keep changing shape. A man on his back with a farmer's tan. A woman riding him slow with her hand flat on his chest, and another man behind her kissing the side of her neck and holding her breasts up in both hands like he's showing them to someone. Someone's foot. A second woman lying across the bottom of the bed with her head on the farmer's-tan man's thigh, jerking off a guy who's kneeling next to her and talking to her the whole time in a normal voice, like he's telling her about his week. There's the wet sound, a lot of it, and somebody laughs, and the woman riding says attends, attends and everyone stops and waits while she fixes her hair, and then they start again.
Shane stands in the doorway and watches it the way he watches tape. Who's moving where. Who's open. He knows he's doing it and he can't stop doing it. The woman still has her earrings in. The guy kneeling has a watch on, are you allowed to wear a watch, what if it scratches someone, there was nothing about watches on the FAQ, he would have remembered. Rule five is Watching is participating. He found that reassuring at breakfast. He was ready to be good at watching. He'd sort of planned on it, if he's honest, on being the kind of person who comes to one of these and watches respectfully and goes home and is a good story for Ilya. There's a long couch against the far wall with a couple on it, both in robes, both watching the bed, the man's hand moving inside the woman's robe, and the woman turns her head and looks at Shane. Then past him at Ilya. Then at Shane again, and down at the black band on his wrist, and up. It isn't the look he gets in airports.
Shane steps back without deciding to, until his shoulders are against Ilya's chest. Ilya puts one hand flat on his stomach, through the robe. The woman on the couch smiles a little and goes back to the bed.
It's hot in here. Shane pushes the mask up into his hair.
"You want to go home?" Ilya says, low, by his ear.
"No. Why."
"You have the face like at your mother's dinner party. With the neighbor who sells boats."
"I'm fine. I'm watching." He swallows. "Watching counts."
"Okay."
They watch. The farmer's-tan man comes, loud, saying oh my God in English, and the woman riding him laughs and climbs off and lies down next to him, and the man who was holding her lies down on her other side and puts his hand between her legs, and she opens them without looking at him. Ilya's thumb moves once on Shane's stomach. Then it stops, and it doesn't move again, and Shane can feel himself waiting for it to move again, and it doesn't.
Shane watches the hand. Then he tries to watch whose hand it is, and loses it, and finds it again a minute later on somebody else, on the guy with the watch, and loses it again. Nobody on the bed is keeping track. Nobody on that bed is going to know at the end of the night who touched who, and they don't care, they look happy about it, the farmer's-tan man is lying there laughing at the ceiling with somebody's foot on his chest. Shane would know. He'd know every single one. He'd lie awake with it in the car. He finds Ilya's wrist on his stomach with his own hand and gets two fingers under the black band and holds onto it.
"There are rooms down the hall," Ilya says. "With curtain. Private." He says it the way he'd say there's a washroom down the hall.
"Yeah," Shane says.
He doesn't move. Ilya doesn't move either. Ilya's hand is very warm and very still, and Shane knows that Ilya knows something, because Ilya gets still like this on the ice before a faceoff when he's already decided where the puck is going and is letting the other guy think about it. He's waiting. He's going to wait all night. He'll wait until the lamps go off and Odile comes around with the phones and he'll say okay, home, and in the car he'll talk about the man with the farmer's tan for a full hour, and he won't say one word about this.
Against the wall under a lamp, between the bed and the couch, there's a long leather bench. Wide, like a massage table without the face hole. Nobody's on it. Anybody in this room would see anybody on it.
Rule seven. Nobody here is a name. He read it standing up in the hallway with his shoes on. Whatever happens in this room happens to two guys in grey robes, the phones are in the pouches, everybody signed the NDA, Odile has a lawyer, he checked, it was question six on the FAQ. Nobody on that couch can ever tell anybody. Nobody on the bed can ever say I saw Shane Hollander, because he isn't, in here, he's nobody, it's in the rules, it's allowed, it doesn't count. He looks at the bench and his face goes hot all the way down his chest.
"There," Shane says.
Ilya takes the mask out of Shane's hair, carefully, so it doesn't pull, and puts it in the pocket of his own robe.
*
The leather is cool and slightly tacky against the backs of his thighs. Ilya undoes Shane's robe like it's a present he already knows the contents of, not rushing, and opens it, and Shane is hard already, has been hard since the couch woman looked at his wrist, and now everybody on the couch can see that. Ilya kneels on the floor between his knees and kisses the inside of one, then the other, then pushes them apart with both hands, wide, and Shane's face goes so hot he thinks the lamp is on it.
"Bag," Ilya says, holding out his hand, and Shane gives him the lube from the robe pocket, the one from home, and Ilya looks at it and snorts and doesn't say anything about it.
Two fingers, slick and cold and then not cold. Shane's hips come up off the bench. The sound it makes is obscene, it's the wettest sound in the room and the room has a lot of competition, and he puts his hand over his own mouth and keeps it there. Ilya crooks his fingers and Shane says something into his palm that isn't a word. Ilya reaches up with his free hand and takes Shane's wrist, the one with the bracelet, and moves the hand off his mouth and puts it down on the bench, flat. He doesn't say anything. He goes back to what he was doing.
Shane leaves the hand where it is.
"Rule twelve," Shane says, when Ilya stands up, and his voice cracks on twelve.
"We are married."
"There's a bowl. By the door. Rule twelve."
Ilya rolls his eyes all the way up to the ceiling and goes and gets one from the bowl, and the man from the couch says something to him in French on the way back that makes Ilya laugh, and Ilya says, "Merci, merci," in his terrible accent, and rolls the condom on standing at the end of the bench with Shane spread out under the lamp waiting for him. Shane doesn't close his legs. He thinks about it and doesn't.
Then Ilya's in him. Slow, then all of it, his hand on Shane's chest holding him flat, and Shane makes a noise that's very loud. Not in his head loud. In the room loud. Three people on the bed look over, and the guy with the watch, and the couch.
"Okay?" Ilya says. Normal. Like Shane rolled his ankle.
"Yes. God. Yes."
"Your back is okay on this?"
"It's sticky."
"Is very expensive. Be grateful." Ilya pulls out almost all the way and pushes back in and Shane's whole body goes up the leather an inch with a squeak, and he laughs, and then he isn't laughing.
Ilya fucks him like that for a while, long and even, watching his face, and Shane can see the couch woman past Ilya's shoulder with her hand between her own legs now under her robe, watching, and every time Shane looks at her he clenches and Ilya swears in Russian. Shane doesn't know if Ilya knows why. He thinks Ilya probably knows why.
Then Ilya stops. All the way in, and still, breathing hard, his hand on Shane's chest.
"Don't stop."
"I'm not stopping. I am resting. I am thirty-something years old."
He doesn't move. He's looking at Shane like he's waiting for the end of a sentence.
"Switch," Shane says. "I want. My back. The bench is sticky, I want to be on top."
Ilya pulls out and lies down on the bench on his back, which takes some negotiating, it's not quite long enough for him, his feet hang off. Shane climbs over him. He starts to face Ilya and then he turns around. He tells himself it's his knee, it's a better angle for his knee. He reaches back and holds Ilya's cock and sinks down on it with his back to Ilya and his face to the room, the bed and the couch and the doorway and everybody in them, and his robe is gone somewhere, and he has never in his life been this naked in front of anybody who wasn't one person.
Ilya's hands come up onto his hips. Just holding. Shane does the moving. He rides it hard and sloppy with his own cock slapping his stomach and the sounds coming out of him in pieces, and someone on the bed says c'est beau, ça, quietly, to someone else, and the woman on the couch is coming with her mouth open, and behind him Ilya says, "Shane. Shane. You are so loud. Everyone knows now you are," and doesn't finish it. Shane looks back over his shoulder. Ilya isn't looking at him. He's looking past him at the room, at the couch, then the bed, then the people in the doorway, one after the other, slow, like he's making sure of each one. His jaw is tight. Then his eyes come back to Shane and he doesn't make a face, he doesn't say anything funny, he just looks at him, and Shane takes himself in his hand and comes in about four strokes, all over his own stomach and Ilya's thigh and the bench, shaking, with his eyes open.
Ilya grips his hips and pushes up into him three, four more times and comes with his forehead against Shane's back, saying something in Russian, quiet, the same few words over and over.
They stay there. Shane's thighs are shaking. There's come on the bench.
"Towels," he says. "Rule eleven."
"Okay. Okay. Get off me first, I am dying."
There's a stack of towels on a shelf by the bench, and a spray bottle. Shane cleans the bench. He does it thoroughly, all the way to the edges, the little seam where the leather is stitched, naked, with the room watching, and then he folds the towel and puts it in the bin for used towels.
*
There's a kitchen off the hall where nobody's having sex, just a fridge full of water bottles and a bowl of clementines. Ilya gets a bottle, opens it, and hands it to him.
"Drink it."
Shane drinks it all, standing at the counter in his robe, and Ilya takes the empty bottle and gets him another and opens that one too and stands there until Shane drinks half. He peels a clementine and eats it in two bites and peels another one and gives Shane the sections one at a time, and Shane eats them, and his legs are still not totally working.
Odile comes through on her way somewhere with an armful of clean towels. She looks at the bracelet on Shane's wrist and then at his face, and her face doesn't do anything, and she says, "Bonne soirée," and keeps walking.
"She is going to write something down," Ilya says.
At the door they get their phones back and the magnets go clack in reverse. Shane has six notifications, all from his mother, all photos of a heron. In the car Ilya talks about the farmer's tan for eleven minutes, and then about the cheese for a while, and then he's asleep against the window with his mouth open before they're out of the city, his black bracelet still on, his hand turned up in his lap.
Shane drives them home.
In their bathroom at two in the morning he tries to take his bracelet off and can't, it's the snap kind, it doesn't come undone. He gets the little nail scissors out of the drawer and cuts it at the clasp, carefully, right at the plastic tab, so the band stays in one piece. He holds it for a second. Then he opens his toiletry bag, the one that goes on every road trip, and puts it in the zip pocket on the side, next to the spare floss.