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Ilya follows him to the bathroom.
Hollander does not notice he has a tail. He’s rushing, for some reason, shoving through the crowd with little of his usual grace. He jumps when Ilya wedges his shoe in the doorway before it can close.
“You—what the fuck?”
“I wanted to see where you were going.” The door thuds shut behind them, trapping them both in the boxy little room. Ilya leans back against it as he shrugs, crossing his legs casually at the ankle. “You were running. Was very… mysterious.”
Hollander stares at him, blank-faced. His chest is heaving.
“I needed some air,” he says, at last.
“So you come in here?”
The bathroom is black-tiled and filthy, subterranean. The party outside has dulled to a low roar. Hollander wraps his arms around himself. He backs away, or tries to, as though another two feet between them will make a difference.
“Fuck you,” he mutters. His chin is tucked down to his chest. “Fuck off and go back out, I’m sure that girl is missing you.”
“She’s pretty, yes?” Ilya says mildly. “Like your girlfriend.”
Hollander hangs his head and laughs, humorless.
“Uh huh.”
Slowly, Ilya pushes off the door.
“I saw you dancing,” he murmurs. “She wants you to fuck her.”
This lands well. Hollander shoots him a look that makes his skin burn.
“Yeah, well, maybe I want to,” he retorts. “Maybe I want—”
His throat works, swallowing. Eventually he looks away from Ilya and down at the dirty floor instead. Ilya does not stop looking. He wishes he could. The bathroom smells sweetly rancid, like recently expelled coke sweat or drunk vomit, and Hollander appears even more uncomfortable here than he did on the dance floor, with his sloped shoulders hunched inward, and his arms folded, and his dark head bowed.
“She could fuck you, if you can’t get it up,” Ilya offers. He says this with idle disinterest, purely to be a bitch. “Your dildo, you never told me what color.”
“What the fuck is your problem with me?” Hollander says hoarsely.
This statement is absurd enough to make Ilya laugh, startled.
“My problem?”
It would be such a relief, he thinks, to be pushed. If Shane would just shove him, hard and with both hands, into the chipped white sink or up against the tiled wall, everything unclear would make itself known. Ilya would know what he had done wrong and how to fix it. But Shane doesn’t try to touch him. He averts his eyes to the floor and drags one palm across his mouth, looking pale and drawn.
Probably he drank too much, Ilya thinks, watching him wipe his mouth again. Too much booze on an empty stomach has made him nauseous. Then he hears the unmistakable sound of breath hitching shallowly, wetly, amplified by the tiled walls. His feet begin moving of their own accord.
“Don’t.” Shane stumbles back towards the wall as though someone had pushed him into it, sinking to the floor. His voice cracks. “You—don’t, I’m serious, if another person touches me right now I’m gonna throw up.”
He drops his head between his knees, shoulders trembling, clutching and clawing at his own shirt. His breathing sounds terrible. His short lashes are tacking together, glistening under the overhead light. The guilt is strong enough to make Ilya feel ill.
“Hollander,” he says.
“Don’t make fun of me,” Hollander says thickly.
“I’m not,” Ilya says, and he isn’t. He watches a tear escape, finally, streaking quickly down Hollander’s cheek to his chin. If they were alone, in Shane’s apartment or the Boston house, he would’ve crouched down and smeared it with his thumb.
Shane coughs. It’s a throaty sort of cough, the way Ilya sometimes coughs after a cigarette. He scrubs his face with the back of his hand.
“Why did you even come here?”
“I came to get laid,” Ilya says honestly. “But my friend is not well, so.”
Shane jerks his chin towards the door.
“Still time,” he mutters.
Outside, the night is continuing. Someone shrieks with laughter near the door. A particular instinct has developed in Ilya since making captain, on and off the ice, a kind of unconscious awareness that makes him feel not unlike a hawk hovering in place. He can feel it stirring tonight. He has learned to track the people who are tired or tiring; when to sink his teeth in, and where. He knows how to carry one of his own.
“Can you walk?”
“Fuck you,” Shane says hoarsely. Ilya ignores this. He kneels down and offers out his hand.
“Come up. Yes? Come outside.”
“Why?”
“This room smells like piss. Fresh air is better for...”
He gestures vaguely towards Hollander, slumped on the floor. A glass smashes on the other side of the wall. Shane flinches. He tips his head back and blinks at the ceiling as though noticing it for the first time, with its ugly water stains and fluorescent strip light.
“Okay,” he mutters. He takes Ilya’s hand.
“Okay,” Ilya says, and pulls.
He has to let go again to open the door. It hurts to do this, like peeling off a scab. Ilya cuts a path through the churning crowd as the lights blink and scatter, purple and blue—and it occurs to him, as he’s shouldering through the fire exit and settling in to loiter against the wall beside it, that Hollander might not be following him at all. Either way he wants a cigarette.
“This is what you call fresh air?”
Ilya glances over his shoulder, lighter in hand, in time to see Hollander carefully push the fire door closed.
“Stay upwind,” Ilya tells him, waving his hand. “This side.”
Obediently, Hollander does as bid. He’s unsteady on his feet, swaying a little. He has shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans. There is a shell-shocked look on his face that Ilya does not know what to do with or how to approach; he wishes he could kiss it off him, or that he had a jacket to bully him into. Instead he sidles closer until their shoulders meet, the bare skin of their forearms not quite touching. They watch cars glide past in silence. A siren wails, streets away.
“I’m not supposed to drink ‘til the season’s over,” Hollander mumbles. Ilya ashes his cigarette, eyeing him speculatively. It’s hard to get a read on how far gone Hollander is. He’s too composed. It’s like watching a cat to see if it limps.
“Why did you?”
Hollander laughs. It trails to a groan.
“Dutch courage, I guess. To—”
He swallows, bowing his head. Then he turns to spit ropy bile on the sidewalk, stumbling a little on the gray snow.
“Shit,” Ilya mutters. He drops his cigarette to grab Shane’s wrist.
“Sorry,” Shane rasps.
Ilya doesn’t look at him. He digs his phone out his pocket with his free hand, typing rapidly.
“For what?”
“They’re expensive.” Shane coughs and wipes his mouth. “The, um. The brand you smoke. I looked it up.”
“I am rich man, Hollander, I can buy more.”
Shane exhales a breathy half-laugh. It puffs visibly in the air between them.
“Asshole.”
“Yes,” Ilya agrees. He slides his hand over Shane’s wrist, pressing his fingers down until he can feel the rabbit-kick of his pulse. “I called cab for you. Five minutes.”
The click of Shane’s throat is audible.
“You—”
“—Puke,” Ilya says, gesturing to it. “Panic attack.”
A bus rolls past them, spraying sleet, with fogged up windows that glow from within. The passengers are barely visible. Ilya lets go of Shane’s wrist.
“Will you come with me?”
When he turns, Shane is already staring at him. His eyes are glassy and marble-dark, black pupils blown wide. Looking into them makes something wrench internally. Like being gutted with a fish knife, or kicked in the chest.
“Please,” Shane says softly. “Please come with me. Please.”
Ilya steps away, or tries to. Shane latches onto his shirt cuff, clutching it in his fist.
“Go to sleep.” Ilya pries Shane’s fingers loose, squeezing them gently before letting go. “Rinse your mouth. You will feel better.”
“No,” Shane says, voice thick.
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
Approaching headlights arc across the road. Ilya moves into the building's shadow until it obscures him from view, still looking at Shane, despite himself. Shane stares back. He looks drunk and stricken.
Ask me again, Ilya thinks. He almost says it, even—the words are already there, clogging his throat. His chest is aching in a terrible way.
“My hotel,” he says, instead. And then the cab is pulling over, and Hollander is climbing clumsily into it. Ilya, as he has so many times, watches him go.
*
The door is unlocked. Alex is not there. Pavel, however, is sprawled facedown on Ilya’s bed in nothing but a dress shirt, snoring and stinking of cologne. Ilya kicks his ankle.
“Asshole,” he says in Russian. “Get up, wrong room.”
Pavel mumbles without waking. He rolls onto his side.
“Fucker,” Ilya mutters. He kicks him again for good measure on his way to the en suite.
The floor of the shower cubicle is already wet, littered with a single lonely beer can and the rest of Pavel’s clothes, so Ilya does not use it. He washes his face and brushes his teeth. He stares at himself for awhile in the mirror above the sink. There are little lights recessed around it, giving his cheekbones an eerie hollow glow. You do not eat enough, his father had admonished, back when Ilya was eight years old and rail-thin, the smallest by far in his rink’s junior classes; you eat too much, Papa says now, when he remembers to look Ilya in the eye. By this he means, you indulge too much. And by this he means, you embarrass me.
Ilya checks his phone. It’s close to 2am. He has an evening flight tomorrow at 7:45.
“Fuck it,” he mutters.
He doesn’t bother trying to evict Pavel from his bed. Ilya grabs a hoodie off the floor and drags the accent chair over to the window so he can sit, slouching, looking out at the snow, the street, the tall dark offices and sodium lights, as he scrolls listlessly through ESPN. Dawn is still far off when his phone buzzes. Montreal’s sky is bruised and dim.
Are you awake?
Ilya stares down at this question. His thumb hovers above it, wavering.
have you slept?
For a long minute, the text bubble appears and disappears.
Yes
Please
Ilya directs the cab to a 24-hour mini-mart opposite Hollander’s building. He digs around in his coat pocket for a toque (“you can’t call it a beanie when you’re this side of the border,” Shane had told him once, two or three years ago, with the kind of earnest self-seriousness that always made Ilya want to kiss him on the mouth), and pulls it low over his ears before heading in to buy a green apple, nicotine gum, ginger ale, and Coke—all of which he shoves, to varying degrees of success, into the front pouch of his hoodie. The man behind the counter watches him with a growing furrow between his brows.
“Do I know you?” he asks finally, when it becomes apparent that Ilya is, against all odds, going to succeed.
“Basketball,” Ilya advises him. “NBA.”
He waits in the grimy back alley for more than a minute. When the maintenance door creaks open, Shane is pink-cheeked and freshly showered. His hair is still wet.
“Sorry,” he says in a rush. His dark eyes are very wide. “Fuck. I didn’t think you’d…”
Ilya spreads his arms in a listless, grandiose gesture.
“Hi.”
“Hey,” Shane says quietly. He takes a half-step forward, then seems to think better of it, looking around for witnesses before stepping to one side instead. Their shoulders brush as Ilya walks in.
It’s comfortably warm inside Hollander’s apartment. Everything is familiar and unfamiliar, all at once: new sponsored sneakers on the shoe rack, same corporate art on the walls. Ilya leaves the apple and drinks on the kitchen counter and watches Shane lean against the sink with his arms folded around himself, tracing the tile grout with one socked foot.
“Thanks,” he says, glancing sideways at Ilya. “For—”
Ilya shrugs. He doesn’t mind the silence so much. It gives him a chance to study Shane’s posture, which is one of his favorite things to do. There is a lot to be discerned from the way he stands. Ilya can tell when he’s impatient for an interviewer to finish their question, or annoyed at Ilya for landing in the penalty box (the only thing Shane loves more than beating him, so far as Ilya can tell, is watching him play.) He can tell when Shane wants to be touched, or toyed with, or pushed to his knees.
He looks lonely tonight. This is an impressive feat, considering the company he’s been running with; but Ilya understands, a little. Parties can make you lonely.
“…Is that for me?”
Shane’s voice is stilted. His eyes are fixed on something on the counter. Ilya turns to see his spoils from the convenience store.
“Yes,” he says honestly. There is no way to lie. He watches Shane’s expression shift, the line of his mouth softening, barely noticeable, and abruptly can’t stand being near him anymore.
“Can I use your shower?”
Shane glances at him, startled.
“There was beer in mine,” Ilya clarifies. “And clothes.”
“Sure,” Shane says. He clears his throat, looking away. “Yeah, go ahead.”
Ilya showers. It is a very good shower, scalding and medicinal, with Shane’s expensive hypoallergenic soap and water pressure strong enough to block out his thoughts. He reemerges in his hoodie and boxers to find Shane sitting on the kitchen island and eating the apple, one slice at a time, off a makeshift paper towel plate. He looks over at Ilya—who waits stupidly on the stairs, bolted in place by unknown forces.
“Are you hungry?”
This, usually, is when Ilya would saunter over to stand between his legs. He would nuzzle Shane’s pretty throat, feeling the faintest rasp of stubble there. Shane always wants to be kissed. He would, and has, let Ilya kiss him until he’s breathless and half-hard, his open mouth flushed pink and slick with spit.
“No,” Ilya says. He jumps down the final step and pushes himself onto the countertop so they’re opposite each other. Shane tosses him an apple slice.
Ilya wants to ask about his girlfriend. He wants to ask about what happened in the club bathroom; if it’s happened before, and when. In Buffalo last month Shane scored an implausibly fast top-shelf goal, late in the 3rd period, and Ilya wants to ask him about that, too.
“…Are you okay?”
Ilya is annoyed, momentarily, to find that Shane has beaten him to the question-asking.
“Yes,” he says shortly. Shane kicks his ankle.
“You have to give me more than that, come on.”
“I have to?”
Shane kicks him again, a little gentler. His socked foot skates down the bare side of Ilya’s calf.
“Pavel wrecked my room and stole my bed.” Ilya tips his head back with a long-suffering sigh, choosing to indulge him. “He snores when he’s drunk. But I’m fine, Hollander. Is nothing serious.”
Shane frowns.
“I thought you were rooming with Alex?”
“So did I, but Pavel was in there.” Ilya’s brow furrows. “How do you know that?”
Shane’s face reddens slightly.
“Instagram.”
Relief and pleased satisfaction flood Ilya’s body in equal measure. He still wants you, too.
“You are stalking me now?”
“No,” Shane says, too fast. He really is so pretty, Ilya thinks, when he blushes. “No, I just… I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” Ilya repeats. He’s still feeling a little petty. “I’m not hiding in bathrooms, throwing up in the street.”
Shane withdraws his foot, curling in on himself. Guilt pricks the back of Ilya’s neck like sunburn.
“My mom…” Shane clears his throat, picking his bitten thumbnail. “She thinks it’s asthma. She’s always bugging me to get an inhaler.”
Ilya frowns.
“You don’t have asthma,” he says.
Shane just laughs, sounding tired. His head dips down.
“You won’t tell her?” Ilya asks slowly.
Shane shakes his head. There is a brutal efficiency to this logic, a kind of pragmatism which Ilya is intimately familiar with—the truth is frequently awkward, inconvenient, unyielding. A lie can be any shape you like. Certain lies, by necessity, become load-bearing.
Shane scrubs his face with the back of his hand. He leans over at an obscenely improbable angle to drop the apple core in the sink. When his shirt rides up, his bare stomach flexing, Ilya’s eyes dart down to watch. He wants to touch him, but that’s nothing new. He’s more concerned than anything else. Shane hates leaving a room untidy. Ilya has seen him fold dirty laundry before dropping it in the hamper.
“You did not sleep,” he says.
“Fuck off,” Shane mutters. “Like you did.”
“There is a drunkard in my bed,” Ilya points out. Shane laughs a little.
“What time’s your flight?”
“Seven-thirty,” Ilya says. “Evening.”
He tries not to read anything into the expression on Shane’s face.
“You can stay here,” Shane says, eventually. His voice is very quiet. “If you want to.”
Ilya wants a lot of things. None of them feel possible tonight. He wants Shane to break up with his pretty girlfriend, and say that he’s sorry, and say Ilya’s name again, the way he had before. He wants him on his knees. He wants him on his back, on the king-size bed in the other room. He wants to apologize for being cruel, and for cornering him, and for making him cry. And he does, Ilya realizes, want to sleep. He is very tired.
He pushes off the countertop before he has time to overthink it, closing the distance between them to cup Shane’s chin in his hand. He turns it to one side, studying his face. Shane’s eyelids flutter, exhausted. Ilya rubs the swell of his lower lip. His thumb slides over Shane’s pouting mouth.
“Are you tired?”
“Maybe,” Shane says, low and drowsy. “Are you tired?”
“Ah… maybe.”
Shane exhales, half a laugh.
“You smell nice,” he admits. Their noses brush.
“I stole soap from you,” Ilya murmurs. It feels good to touch him. Grounding, like finding a guide rope in the dark. Shane slides off the counter, tipping his head in the direction of the couch. Ilya follows him there and catches the remote when it’s thrown at him. The TV plays a muted highlight reel of the game they’d played the night before—Ilya half-watches it and half-watches Shane slide gradually down the couch cushions, slumping closer until their bodies are touching. There is a fresh pink bruise on his shoulder, visible only when his shirt gapes, from when Ilya crushed him into the boards.
“What’re you thinking about?” Shane mumbles. His voice is muffled by Ilya’s shirt.
“Hockey,” Ilya says honestly. Pressed close like this, he can feel Shane’s laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just… me, too.”
“I liked your goal in Buffalo,” Ilya tells him. It feels important to say this now, while he has Shane in front of him.
“You saw that?” Shane says sleepily.
“Mhm.”
Ilya waits for a reply. When one doesn’t come, he drops his hand to Shane’s bruised shoulder. His t-shirt is soft, worn thin.