Archive of Our Own

September, 2024. Ottawa.

Shane Hollander, this level-headed and rather introverted but very good at his job Head of the Finance Department, was… aware of Ilya Rozanov. 

Not that they were acquainted much beyond the formal greetings after his boarding, but it was hard to miss the new guy in the office when he tended to run around with his hands full of some machinery parts that came from Hollander had no idea which equipment, or spoke so loudly in the communal area it was impossible not to overhear from the other end of their office that stretched along a two-hundred-feet-long corridor, or always, without a miss, used the most obnoxious emojis in his texts in their corporate Slack.

Hollander did not particularly like Ilya Rozanov and his obsession with those cottage-cheese pancakes that heard the word “sir” from him more than people that he should’ve actually been addressing properly. It was called “syrniki”, the dish, Shane had googled, because he really had thought Ilya respected his pancakes more than, well, him. Mr. Hollander, the very Head of Department. Gladly, it was just a first syllable of the word, and, Hollander had realized to his shame, he just had to explain the contents of his tupperware every time someone asked. Many people asked. Not one of them had ever heard of syrniki before.

The thing was Ilya Rozanov did not give a shit about the proper chain of authority. To be fair, he was an IT guy, replacing their old prick of a technician Theriault who’d gone mad and compromised their entire network because the General Manager’s daughter rejected him, so they weren’t exactly working in one branch and Rozanov did not truly answer to him, but still. 

He shouldn’t’ve called Mr. Hollander, the very Head of the very Finance Department, with the golden plaque on the door of his very own office, a collection of designer cravats and a bunch of prestigious certificates along with the letters of gratification from the company, Shane the first time they interacted.

That was precisely the way Hollander had learned about the aforementioned lack of shit Ilya Rozanov gave about subordination.

“Hey, Shane, care if I come in?” he had asked, the lump of his curly hair and about half of his face peeking through the ajar door. He hadn’t even knocked. “I need to change some cords in your router”.

“I haven’t sent you any tickets, Mr. Rozanov”.

“I took, um, initiative?” he had totally butchered the pronunciation and ignored the pointed proper way of addressing a colleague, but it hadn’t stopped him one bit. “I mean, to update everything the guy before me hasn't touched since, dunno, dinosaurs. It won’t be long. You can pretend I’m not even here”.

Hollander had nodded then, but no, he could not in his right mind have pretended Rozanov wasn’t there. First things first, Hollander had been mesmerized by his accented English. He spoke with the confidence of a cabin boy who would have thrown himself into the battle head-first for his captain without a single thought, specifically so that he made mistakes, sure, and misused some words, but his tone didn’t waiver and his unnerving presence made you overthink if it was actually you who spoke English wrong.

His accent was also hot, but that was a thought that Hollander would never voice even in the privacy of his own head.

Second things second, Ilya Rozanov had stood right there, in his office, on tiptoes and hands outstretched to reach the router on the top of his expensive chiffonier, and Shane had had a perfect unrestricted view on his happy trail and a sliver of pale skin on a lean stomach under his untucked, slightly raised and very not dress-code friendly T-Shirt. Hollander had felt like a Victorian creep who just got his first sight of a woman’s ankle, and the way it had got hot in his office made him loosen the knot on his tie.

Shane Hollander was a respected man and could not afford such thoughts about ill-mannered new hires, and not that these kinds of thoughts had ever even occurred to him, so he had been, without a better word for it, gobsmacked by his own brain. And maybe dick.

He had only noticed that he was staring and Ilya Rozanov had been perfectly aware of that when his stupid useless brain registered how he had said, “Is okay if I sit on here?” gesturing on his damn taboret, not even a guest chair. Now Rozanov had been staring back, a looming, devious smirk on his pretty face, and Hollander had wanted nothing less ever in his life than to know what that expression had meant.

He had finished fiddling with Hollander’s router in silence, not saying much of anything, which was extremely uncharacteristic of him as much as Hollander could’ve disserted about him, and only addressed the owner of the room his presence so vividly had haunted for fifteen minutes when the router had been put back into its place.

“Close your mouth or a bug will fly in,” he had said cheekily, winked, and left the room without waiting for an answer.

The interaction left a bitter taste in his mouth and highlighted a striking hole in a place where people usually carried their hearts. Oh, bullcrap.

So that’s why the second time they were alone in a secluded space of Hollander’s office he had to choose the attack instead of defence.

“Are you Russian?” His choice of the opening blow was questionable, though, to be honest. He cringed at himself openly. He also chose the worst time to start the conversation as Rozanov was leaning across his table to type something into his keyboard. His damn ass was right in Hollander’s face.

“What?” Rozanov asked, turning his head over his shoulder, and he had full right to be slightly upended, if not offended, by the question. He did come here to fix the problem with an interrupting Wi-Fi signal after all. Hollander even wrote the damn request.

“I mean, I didn’t want to assume. But your name, and your…” he trailed off not to come off even more rude and close-minded as he already had.

“Accent?” Rozanov still easily guessed the remainder of the phrase. He did not really look that offended, if Hollander could assert anything from his partially obstructed and complicated face that always showed quite too much. “Yup. I’m Russian”.

And, secretively, Hollander had already known that. He had looked up Rozanov’s file back around a half of the time he was employed there, which counted for about five weeks at that point. He’d learned his father’s name (goddamn this strange tradition of Russian patronyms), his age (twenty-eight, three months younger than Hollander himself), and allergies (pollen and dust which colloquially in his frequent loud conversations Rozanov himself just called “the spring, you know”, no dietary restrictions), but nothing of much importance. So, Ilya Rozanov was a mysterious twenty-eight year old Russian IT guy with an allergy to the spring and polite conversations. Got it.

Hollander, rather unreasonably, strived to know more.

“What are you doing here?” he followed and then cringed again. He wasn’t prone to be that rude, what was it with him? “Wait. That came out wrong. I meant to ask what brings you here?”

“Here in this company or here in Canada?” Rozanov smiled.

“I guess both”.

“So now you want a dossier on me?” Rozanov’s smile turned into his trademark smirk Hollander admittedly hated. He also hated that Rozanov wasn’t that far off, as in he already had it. The dossier. “I’m joking. The war brings me here”.

Hollander blinked from the unexpected face-forwardness. Rozanov’s own face turned somewhat stoic and emotionless, like he found this topic a bit personal. Or, maybe, just beared for an accusation he probably had heard enough times.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about it”.

“Of course I have”.

“So, yeah,” Rozanov simply shrugged, the cold expression not quite leaving his face. He straightened up a bit from Hollander’s table, clearly to say more than a few words in response. “Your country starts doing shit, you protest or you emigrate. Protest was not an option in Russia. So I emigrated. To Armenia, then to Spain, then here. How is called, conscience? I couldn’t in good conscience stay there and pay taxes into the war machine, you know. Or mostly listen to my father saying shit”.

Hollander quietly admired his ability to talk about it without having his back turned to the listener. If he was Rozanov, he would stay in that awkward position that was surely not comfortable nor polite but still gave some sort of protection.

He tried to turn this into a lighter tone. He was a colleague, not a patrol officer on a border, after all.

“Do you like it here? In Canada?” he asked.

“I guess so, yes. No scary police, no prison for tweeting,” Rozanov smiled to himself, and Hollander knew the next words would be obnoxious just from the look of it. “Gay rights and legal cannabis”.

Hollander choked on his spit. Yeah. What a way to deliver your point.

“Joking,” Rozanov deflected. “And about the company, well, you need visa to stay here, you need job to get good visa. IT is the easiest option to get hired from abroad. So I studied some, online, left my side hustle in Spain, and somehow passed your interviews and background checks only by the power of my bare ass and hunger, which is surprising, because I’m kind of rawdogging this whole IT shit”.

Hollander, despite being sort of flabbergasted by the sincerity of the speech, wanted to console this guy. Make him feel welcomed, maybe. Or at least more at ease.

“I haven’t noticed. I guess you’re good at it,” he offered.

“Maybe. I’m actually a musician. Beatmaker. Here,” he snatched a piece of paper and an expensive pen from the table shamelessly and scribbled something. “You can check it out. Better in headphones”.

“What, are there profanities?”

Rozanov pointedly remained silent, only that devious smirk dragged out his lips.

Hollander would later learn that Rozanov used all sorts of sounds in his beats, which included moans and very graphic heavy breathing, so the remark about the headphones was really fitting. He’d maybe wank over it in the solitude of his dark apartment, too. Not a soul would ever know about it.

He would just hope that it wasn’t actually Rozanov emitting those sounds. Or, to be honest, maybe he hoped it was.

“And how did you learn English?" Hollander asked then, not knowing it yet.

“What, am I good?” Rozanov peacocked.

“Yes, kind of. So how?”

“Memes and Eminem”.

At that, Hollander let out a sincere bright laugh, and Rozanov smiled so wide it blinded the sun. Like he was proud he made a stoic serious office plankton laugh at his joke. God, he was endearing under the layers of his feigned fuckery.

Shane wanted to rent a place in his cupid bow. Or touch it at least. It seemed like he would bleed from the sharpness of it.

Probably, he stared at it too much. At Rozanov’s weird-shaped lips as a whole. He surely noticed it but, again, said nothing of sorts to indicate if he actually did. Hollander wondered if what he was doing crossed the line of flirting, and he’d hate if it did, so he cleared his throat, wiping the struck expression off his face, and tried to fit back into his weary image of a professional.

“So, um, the Wi-Fi?” he asked, voice tight and leveled.

Rozanov gave him an unimpressed look-over, sighed to himself, and pushed himself off the edge of Hollander’s table he’d been occupying.

“I fixed it ten minutes ago. Reset the computer,” he offered, leaving. Then, he turned back as if to say something, but opted out of it.

Hollander did catch the unsaid. What was it Rozanov had been doing with his computer after he fixed the problem? He had at least five minutes to mess with it while Hollander, which Rozanov probably anticipated, was fixed at watching his ass packed into tight black jeans.

The answer came shortly after when Hollander closed the window of some program unknown to him to reveal that the wallpaper had been changed. Rozanov set it to a plain white image with two lines of text, which he probably had created here at the spot.

“Liked the view?)

@roz.ebisonovsekonem”

It took Hollander quite a few days and a deep dive on Google to realize what the bracket meant (those Russians, too lazy to type the whole normal winky face) and decipher the second line. He tried it as an email, then as Insta, and only after consulting the Georgian manager from their business partner that led one of their merged projects he knew it was an account in Telegram. So, Rozanov sold gore imagery and probably worked as a part-time assassin, then.

Yes, Hollander had some opinions on that particular social media app, but it didn’t stop him from creating an account after two days of thorough contemplating.

Rozanov hit him with a message about three minutes after.

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

having lunch late? 14:29

Hollander frowned. Probably at the lack of the greeting, but, hey, it was Ilya Rozanov. Of course Ilya Rozanov also rejected greetings, embraced the chaos.

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

oh no way 14:30

you are actually here on working time?????? 14:30

insane what hormones do to you right Shane 14:31

The fact is, Hollander was doing it clocked in. He hated how perfectly Rozanov deduced everything about him, not that he was a particularly complex person but he preferred not to be as predictable. He also hated how Rozanov was slowly corrupting him, changing him for the worse, tainting everything he’d ever known with a looming doubt.

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

How do you know I’ve registered here? I really did it like a second ago. 14:31

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem

it sends you a notification when someone from your contacts makes a profile 14:31

it is spooky when is number of your dead grandma or smth. like if they sold the number again and the person made a profile in tg. boohoo a ghost of grandma 14:32

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

How do you know my number? 14:32

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

i have my ways) 14:32

also your user name is boring 14:32

why 24? 14:32

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

It’s 2024?.. 14:32

It’s not boring! 14:33

What does yours even mean? 14:33

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

oh and here i though you’re 24 like a baby 14:33

don’t ask if you’re not ready to hear my answer) 14:33

Hollander tried googling. Hadn’t really failed him that much before. Still, the address gave him just mostly gibberish through double translating into Russian and back to English. Something-something horse. Definitely not something a person puts as their name.

But, transcribing the account name into latin script is a thing Google Translate can do, so Hollander did exactly this.

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

Is Ilyushka your full name? Like, I’ve heard Prakash from sales uses a short form of his full name. 14:35

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

oh yeah 14:37

yes it’s my full name ) 14:37

also you know in russia we use full names when trying to be respectful. not last names. last names is kind of rude actually 14:37

Hollander had no time to formulate an apology or a promise to use it going forward — their General Manager came up to his office and, apparently, he had called twice on their corporate network. Shit. Hollander apologized profusely, half-assed an explanation about an ill cat — he did not own a cat — and promptly strode after Mr. Hunter to his office in the other end of the hall. They passed Rozanov’s little technician room — a little cube covered in glass walls, only one of them made of stone, counterintuitively, the one with the window. This side of their building did not have full-wall glass windows. The whole thing was the exact opposite of Hollander’s office, which was bright, spacious, and prestigious, and this little room was obviously put there as an afterthought, when the building was finished and someone had realized they lacked some secluded one-man spaces. Rozanov’s was not the worst one — Hayden sat in a glass box fully in the middle of the office, no window at all, and he was promoted into one.

Back on track, Ilya Rozanov looked up from his phone (not even fearing the Big Bad Guy GM would see him on his phone during worktime because this lucky bastard had a job that sometimes required it) with such a devious, such a suspicious grin that Hollander should have known better. He really did.

In retrospect, it was really easy to guess that Rozanov just messed with him. In the end, his whole file was under the name Ilya, but who in their right mind would’ve guessed that Russian damn names had short forms of endearment that were twice as long as their full forms. What kind of language even does? Does the word short even mean something anymore?

But, Hollander, against his best judgement, proceeded to be polite as Rozanov asked him to and call him Ilyushka for at least two more months.

Still, it happened later. Then, Hollander was summoned to discuss numbers, strategies, sales, whatever, and he had to be his best self, the most professional, most competent, most capable of them all, he was wearing a damn expensive cravat after all. And yet, he just could not for the rest of the whole discussion, in front of ten people on the video call, forget the glistening happy eyes that followed him along the corridor.

Ilya damn Rozanov.

What was so damn attractive about you?

__________________________

November, 2024. Still Ottawa.

Ilya Rozanov had never considered he had a thing for freckles.

Maybe it wasn’t just freckles. Probably, most definitely, some part was indeed played by an uptight unnerving Canadian corporate head that came with them. Not as a fact, but as a contrast. Uptight corporate heads who only spoke numbers and last had sex in their high school, which was also a complete disaster, should not have had freckles. It came against every possible belief Ilya had ever had.

Closeted emotionless managers were never his thing. Notably, it was the exact opposite of his thing. And yet, right? And yet.

Sveta called him out on it, once. He was employed for almost five months already, and for probably four and a half of them the only thing he talked about with her on his phone was Shane. Not that he ever noticed it, no, but she did, and then she had no mercy when showing him head-first into this information like he was a birthday boy and his humongous crush on a boring guy from his work was a birthday cake. Continuing the metaphor, she didn’t even bother putting off the candles first.

“And then he told me his stupid tie cost like half a thousand dollars! Svet, it’s just a fucking tie, how—” he was ranting to her in Russian at one rainy November evening when she dropped the bomb.

“When are you going to tell him you want to fuck him nasty?”

Ilya Rozanov was rarely left speechless, but this was the exact moment it was the most suitable thing to do. So he opened his mouth, then closed it, a couple of times, like a fish stranded onto a shore, and pretended he hadn’t heard it.

“Anyway, when are you coming up here, again?” Ilya backtracked to the beginning of their — he looked at the screen briefly — forty-three minutes long conversation. “Fourteenth, right?”

“Ilyushka, oh, Ilyushka, so inconspicuous, as always,” she sighed, as the screeching sound from the dynamic indicated, and thankfully dropped it. “Yes, and we’re having lunch next to yours. And then go clubbing the next night. And hopefully between the two of these events you tell him you want to fuck him nasty”.

Well, no, she did not drop it. Asshole.

At his lunch break on fourteenth, Ilya met Svetlana at the cafeteria about a block down Albert Street, the closest decent one to their building. He hadn’t seen her in two years, so he was almost giddy in a sense, and she didn’t ruin their hug and a long-awaited reunion by asking if he told his new crush about fucking him nasty, thank God.

They talked about really mundane shit. Spartak’s stance in Russian national football championship, how they both hated the latest releases in movies (which included Dune Part Two for Svetlana’s disappointment) and rooted for Anora at the next Oscars (and that had nothing to do with the fact they’ve watched the Russian actors from it since their starts, no, what are you talking about), the unfamiliar taste of the local bread, even plans for their discarded futures — they talked, and talked, and talked, and Ilya fell into the familiar rhythm of a year-long friendship and stopped thinking about how strangers would react to two people speaking Russian in the middle of Ottawa.

He missed home sometimes. The little things: the smell of his old cookware, the familiar well-trodden paths around his native little town ten kilometers into Moscow suburbs he walked when he was ten with the friends he never forgot the names of, the earnest smile of his maths teacher when he visited his high school those two times years after graduation, the pen marks on the wall, following his and his brother’s heights since being a toddler that even his dad had never came around to paint over. 

Ilya loved Canada, but he sometimes wished nothing would make him leave Moscow. Mostly because he hated the country his home became that made him to. He would gladly exchange his high salary, bright future, and broaden horizons for the fact none of it had ever happened.

And yet, it had. His home was still there, somewhere, waiting for him to return to, maybe someday, and his country made sure millions of people’s homes were destroyed to the point of no return. It was a hard feeling to wrap his mind around.

So, Ilya just proceeded living and made sure it would somehow matter. He donated a lot, and he knew Sveta did too. But, after a year, they stopped talking about it, because it was hard enough without being said out loud. It was a great part of them, as people, but it wasn’t everything, so he invested a lot of time and effort in himself as a person, too: he still made music sometimes, he never stopped smiling, and he never betrayed himself. It meant being an asshole from time to time, a fun one, but still, and Ilya insisted on never denying his life as a story and his feelings as a whole.

Which now included Shane Hollander, and Ilya didn’t really know what to do with all that.

The worst part was that Shane apparently decided to eat out as well, seeing as they were in the middle of a chat with Svetlana and his raven-haired pretty-faced head appeared in the doors. Ilya even attempted ignoring him at first, shoving a mouthful of fries down his throat, but to no avail — Shane met his gaze and beelined to their table instead of taking his place in the line as any sane person would do.

“Oh, hello! Wasn’t expecting you here, Ilyushka,” Shane smiled at him, taking off his scarf, and Ilya almost died choking on his diet coke.

Fuck.

Sveta was never going to let him live this down. It was so obvious from the way her lips had drawn out in a smile no less devious than his own could. She hid her initial shock, turned around and waved at the very confused, kind of worried Hollander who was either on the verge of jumping in and doing a Heimlich maneuver or just turning on his heels and leaving the next second. Yeah. Svetlana really did have a presence that would do something like that to you.

“Are you Shane?” she asked, trying to look innocent. She even batted her eyelashes!  

Ilya tried interfering, but his coughing did not help a lot.

“Yeah?” Shane answered, more confused than he ever looked.

“I knew it,” she turned to Ilya. “What did he call you?” Then, she turned back to Shane. “What did you just call him?”

“Is it not his full name?” No, no, that was the face Shane made when he was the most confused. Fuck. Just fuck.

Svetlana turned to Ilya again. “You did it, didn’t you? Of course you did, you little shit!”

Shane moved his eyes between them two, properly dumbfounded. Ilya must’ve looked crimson, but he hoped the diet coke was to blame, not the fact his little prank was just made public.

He hadn’t even meant it maliciously! Opportunity had presented itself and he’d taken it, without thinking, really, because what harm would it do to hear your doomed crush calling you a nice, sweet version of your name. No harm! Especially if the crush would never know, and there still could be a way to keep his shameful prank secret, but Svetlana was ruthless.

“Shane, sweetheart, his full name is just Ilya,” she carefully explained, having, again, turned back at Hollander. “This little fuck lied to you, whatever he told you. Ilyushka is what I call him, because it’s a term of endearment. Or maybe I’ve missed something and you two are already at this page? Then sorry, babes, mom was just out of the loop”.

Shane gave him a look full of not disappointment, but maybe despair. Like he’d just been put in a very precarious, awkward position, which he admittedly had. Like he didn’t expect this level of deceit, even after months of mocking and quippy remarks from Ilya. Like he was desperately asking for a way out from the only person in the room he knew who happened to be Ilya himself, even though he orchestrated the whole ordeal.

“I, um…” Shane trailed off, nervously touching his damp hair. “But it’s longer?” He finally stopped on something worth saying that wasn’t just an intelligible string of profanities. Ilya groaned into his own hands while Sveta just laughed.

“That’s Russian to you, baby,” she said and nudged Ilya’s shoulder. He only groaned again. “I think this one will only be happy if you proceed calling him Ilyushka, though. Or better, Ilyusha. Right, Rozanov?”

Shane frowned deeper. “It’s Rozánov, not Rózanov?”

Ilya thought that if he ever heard Shane saying his name right, or worse, calling him Ilyusha, he’ll just burst into flames, so he raised his eyes to the sky (ceiling, actually, but who cared), asked God to make him disappear right this second, and tried standing up.

“Yes, and I’m gonna go, ok? You two have a good chemistry. Talk it out,” he waved, but Sveta stomped his foot and tugged him back down.

“Sit down, Ilyushka, you’re not going anywhere,” she switched to Russian.

“Watch me”.

“Sit down, or I’ll show him your childhood pictures!”

“Blyat, Sveta!”

“I know this word,” Shane commented, mortified. “Please, don’t swear at wor— Oh,” he chuckled at himself and diverted his gaze. He looked just as much on the verge of laughing as Ilya felt like.

Yes, they weren’t at work. They just happened to be in the same establishment, but they both felt like they were still in their building, constrained by the norms of the workplace they both cared too little about. Ilya dropped his head, hiding a loopy smile, and could not believe in this endearing creature that asked him time and time again not to swear like his life depended on it.

“Do you want to accompany us?” Sveta asked at the same time as Shane muttered:

“I’m gonna…” gesturing vaguely in the direction of the entrance. He then hesitated, made a step back then a step forth, then shook his head, sent Ilya a tight smile, turned around and left, his scarf still in his hand. Ilya could swear he saw his cheeks go red.

He followed Shane out with his eyes and sighed, hitting his forehead on the table. The only thing that could make it worse was Sveta genuinely cackling at him, which she gladly did. Swear to God, if she ever had a crush, Ilya would tell him everything about it, starting with the way she’d try to flirt however pathetic it might be. Ilya’s flirting was ragebait and pranks, so what? Did he deserve a walk of shame like that? No, he didn’t think so.

“So, your boy likes you back. What are we doing about it?” Sveta asked when she finally stopped laughing at his miserable ass.

“What makes you think that?” Ilya said mostly to the table than her, never raising his head back up.

“He wants to know how to say your name properly, and he didn’t say no when I joked about you together. So?”

“I think he just generally wants to know more,” Ilya speculated. “Google is his second name”.

“And what makes you think that?”

“He tells me. From time to time. When we text and I use our proverbs, he comes back three minutes later and clarifies if the results of his wiki search were correct and he understands what I meant. Or he would hear something somewhere, or read, or see, and tell me, like, ‘Hi, Ilyus— Ilya, I spent twenty minutes researching it, did you know the bridges on the euro banknotes were not real but resembled different styles and ages of Europe history, until one town in the Netherlands built them all?’, like that,” Ilya didn’t notice when he started smiling like an idiot, but Sveta watched him with an amused expression, because she did clearly notice. “He knows so much. Like, really, so much”.

Instead of beating his ass further into oblivion, like he knew she could, Sveta reached out and placed a hand on his wrist, squeezing. Well, it suddenly had stopped being fun. She knew it had, he knew it had, the whole damn world did, and she simply consoled him wordlessly because she knew Ilya needed just that. To feel grounded in this overbearing feeling that he’d never experienced, that wasn’t a crush, per se, that meant something, truly meant, and he drowned in it for a good minute, admitting to himself he had no palpable idea what to even do with all that.

Then she let go, of his hand and the topic. They talked for about an hour, completely obliterating Ilya’s lunch break allotted time, he went back to work and thought about Shane for the whole two days. Then, they went out to the club as they planned, and he danced, and he drank, and he had fun, but the red thread through all of this, just like through his life these past five months, was a looming presence of one particular person in the back of his cranium.

Ilya Rozanov hated Shane Hollander, him and his freckles, and his spacious office, and his expensive ties, for how much he wanted it all.

_________________

December, 2024. Again, still Ottawa.

“Mr. Rozanov—” Hollander started from the door, and only then noticed he hadn’t knocked. Rozanov had a bad influence on him.

“Oh, Hollzy, it’s you,” he perked up from his desk and breathed out so audibly. Hollander interpreted it as a sigh of relief that he just returned to the old way of referring and did not comment on the awkward meet-up they had a couple of weeks ago.

“Gosh, even Shane was better,” he groaned in frustration, watching Rozanov chuckle into his fist.

They hadn’t spoken to each other in those two weeks. Texted, occasionally, but nothing of substance, just exchanged movie suggestions and discussed one of the HR girls that quit the company in those three weeks. Rozanov had said good riddance. Hollander had argued he was happy for her.

Damn the stupid pranks, ludicrous jokes, unexpected insults — Hollander was rather happy to see Rozanov’s unabashedly glorious grin, especially directed right at him. Genuinely, he missed those, and the fact that he cared enough to miss someone’s smiles made him nervous already. He wasn’t supposed to. He built this career on the bones and ashes of his mistakenly stupid past self, he was perfectly respected, he was important, and he was not supposed to have any sort of feelings towards rude, weird Russian new hires.

“What did you want?” the rude, weird Russian new hire asked.

“Um. Hayden has skipped some work hours due to his kids’ emergencies, and the higher-ups had just ordered the full detailed list of our clock-ins and -outs, so… Ugh. Could you please change some of the times, maybe?” Hollander knew Hayden would never ask anyone to help him out, but he’d complained about it the day before, and Shane wanted to be a good friend.

Rozanov looked at him unimpressed.

“Some work hours? I think Pike will be just fine”.

“It was a lot of work hours”.

“So your idea is?..” Rozanov raised a brow at him. Then, he dramatically inhaled in faux shock. “Oh my God, forging? Decent people don’t do that”.

“Decent people help out their colleagues once in a while,” Hollander rolled his eyes.

“Maybe I like pissing you off”.

Yeah, that one sounded exactly like reality. Rozanov hadn’t been flirting, no, just pissing him off. No sparks, no unprofessional thoughts, no workplace harassment. Just friendly bickering. This was safe. This was nothing that could ruin his years of hard work. This was all good.

“Do you have kids?” Hollander asked, exasperated.

“I’m avid bachelor and haven’t got to plant the flowers of life yet. Well, I got to plant a tree. And built a house, once. A part of it. Why?” Rozanov answered, and Hollander had exactly zero patience or will to decipher half of his sentences. He only shrugged, turned away, and muttered:

“You won’t get it then”.

He knew perfectly that Ilya Rozanov wasn’t an idiot. Nobody needed to be a genius to know that. He’d learnt an entire new set of skills in a couple of months and successfully pretended to be a pro in it. He was a great person to talk to, he joked in his second language, he understood nearly all the references, whether it was movies or history, and he never made anyone feel like they were excluded from the conversation. He also clocked Shane in around one point three seconds, you ought to give him that.

Hollander fiddled out his phone to google the expression Rozanov used, but mostly not to meet his attentive eyes. Rozanov stared at him, not even blinking, decoding the situation and probably mastering another douchebag joke around this stupid idea Hollander came to him with. It was a stupid idea, after all. It’s just that Rozanov was the only person wild enough and with a necessary access that could help with it.

“Ok. You want to be a hero?” Rozanov spoke, finally, in the middle of Hollander’s read into the article about the specific phrase he used. So, no children then, Hollander got it right. He just had to be a dick about it and speak in riddles.

“Something like that,” Shane shrugged, admitting that part of this idea was in fact him wanting to be a good person. Not a hero, per se, but maybe earning himself some credit in their friendship with Hayden.

“What do I get from it?” Rozanov said blankly.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, from your cunning plan where you get all the credit and I backdate the logs. I need win-win. Bribe. Whatever”.

What a proper asshole.

Hollander only stalled, shaking his head in an indication of having no idea what to offer. He turned away, too, knowing perfectly his cheeks were turning red.

“You drink, Hollzy?” Rozanov asked after a minute of thinking.

“What? No”. It was not exactly a lie. Hollander did drink, occasionally, but it was rare enough not to ever count, and, of course, he didn’t drink as a damn consolation prize.

“Okay, so, I take the walk of shame and follow your tastes for your bestie, and you agree to drink with me,” Rozanov clapped, elated, and turned back to his computer as if the deal was set.

Nothing was set yet!

“Are you… inviting me on a date?” Hollander guessed, blushing harder. Rozanov only rolled his eyes.

“I invite you to drink”.

“I don’t drink”.

Rozanov clicked his tongue like Hollander was a generational moron.

“Then go fuck yourself with your plans”.

“Okay, Okay… Deal,” Hollander rushed to backtrack. He needed Rozanov’s help after all. “But not here. It’s not professional”.

“God, come on. Whatever,” he rolled his eyes again, but this time the feature had no animosity behind it. “The drinks are on you, by the way”.

Hollander nodded and watched Rozanov open a log he recognized as the data of their work schedule. That was fast, really fast, and he wondered if the thing he thought about for two nights was a matter of five minutes or so. Was it really worth such an unprofessional payback, then?

“Why exactly the bribe is… like that?” Hollander inquired with no actual interest. Well, maybe no. Maybe there was some interest, after all, because he held his breath waiting for Rozanov to raise his eyes from the monitor and answer.

“I’m kinda interested in who you are without all that… show”. He gestured vaguely around Hollander’s approximate frame and turned back to the program.

Hollander suspected that it wasn’t as vague and uninteresting to Rozanov as he made it look. He even spent a week wondering when Rozanov would ask for this payback, seeing as Hayden came to him with a champagne bottle the day after, thanking him for whatever he did to save the guy’s ass. Hollander only laughed and drank exactly half a flute glass with him, fearing that Rozanov would come with even a worse idea that he already had.

And then, being a total liar he totally is, Rozanov decided to show up to work with a kid.

No, not like that. Well, definitely like that, but more dramatically. Like he lived in a spy movie of sorts.

Shane came in a bit late that day, as per Hunter’s agreement, because he had a dentist appointment that he moved to 8 in the morning not to be that late. And still, he expected anything, from an office party to celebrate someone’s birthday to the fire drill, when he came in, but not that Scott Hunter himself would catch him by the elbow and lead exactly the opposite way from his office with a suspicious grin.

“C’mon, you’re working from mine today. Good thing we have this call with Crowell anyway, right?” And they did have a call scheduled at 12, with the COO of their parent company, but what did it have to do with the urgency? “Ilya brought a kid today and tries to be secretive about it. I heard Marlow told him you’re not here, so he kind of occupied your office. Just let him believe he got away with it, okay?”

Simultaneously, Shane’s heart twinged with both apprehension for Rozanov once again upending his entire routine and appreciation for Scott Hunter clearly overstepping every internal protocol for a new guy. Not really new, not anymore, he’d already spent almost half a year with them, but he was the newest guy of all the people in the office, and Mr. Hunter went out of his way ensuring his shenanigans were not punished at all. He even played along. Sometimes, Hollander could not stop loving his boss for the way he ruled this company, and it was one of the days.

“Why are you doing this?” Shane still asked, closing Hunter’s door after himself.

“So I can blackmail him later, of course,” Hunter laughed and sat down. “I like the guy, but really hate him, too, you know? He’s insufferable, but brilliant”.

“Yeah. Yeah, he is”.

Shane got tired of giving a wide berth to Rozanov, his crazy ideas, and his own damn office, somewhere around four in the evening.

“I thought you told me you’re an avid bachelor. Childless, too,” he declared from the door in lieu of greetings.

“God, Hollander!” Rozanov jumped up and cursed under his breath. “Cliff told me you’re not coming today?”

“He lied. So,” Shane pointed at the kid occupying his chair, “the child”.

The scene was honestly rather wholesome. A girl, swinging her legs in his big grown-up chair, toy ponies scattered all over his work desk, unknown to Shane but still obviously children’s music playing from Rozanov’s phone. Rozanov himself, quite flushed, pink hair ties and glittery clips in his curls, blue marker stain on his cheek, folding a paper plane from something Hollander hoped was not a document from his desk.

“If I tell you I stole her from the orphanage, would you believe me?”

“No”.

“Yeah, that’s my niece”. Sighing, Rozanov took her hand in his own hand and waved it. “Say hi to Renata. She doesn’t speak English so I’ll tell her you’re happy to see her, okay?”

Shane swallowed a thick lump in his throat and absentmindedly waved back. “Hi,” he said, and Renata answered with a shy smile. God, was she a wonderful sweet child.

She looked around eight, was dressed into some modern cartoon T-shirt, plaid skirt and thick white tights. Her ashy blond hair in two thin braids with different colored hair ties, eyes blue and smile lopsided, she kind of resembled the spirit and looks of Rozanov himself, and Shane could not look away while Rozanov talked with her in Russian. He booped her nose once, Jesus.

Then, he scooped her in his giant hands and walked around the table to stand in front of Shane, his smile steady and certain as always. He said something to Renata, and she turned around, sitting comfortably on Rozanov’s shoulder, and extended her little hand to Hollander.

“Hi, Shane,” she said quietly, Rozanov’s grin getting wider upon hearing her.

“Hi, Renata,” Shane shook her hand with his index finger and a thumb and sent Rozanov a questioning look.

“Her mom is my brother’s wife. They got separated, thank God, this summer, and I invited them to visit me here. Inna is browsing the city, I offered to look for Natochka, so, um… We’re leaving, I guess,” Rozanov explained. And, goodness, he looked sheepish? What a surprise.

Shane inhaled deeply, looked into Renata’s innocent eyes and deflated. All the readiness for argument he entered his own office with evaporated in an instant.

“Stay, if you want,” he said reluctantly, but still offered a tight smile.

Rozanov answered with a blooming grin.

“Can you, um, sit with her? For maybe fifteen minutes. I really need to go check Pike’s outlets. He sent ticket, like, three hours ago,” he asked without batting an eye and simply held out his niece to Hollander. The hell?

Shane blinked, stunned, but felt no urge to argue under Rozanov’s hopeful blue eyes. Shane blinked again.

“Pretty please?” Rozanov added and shook his laughing niece like it would make Shane agree faster.

Well, it worked, seemingly, as Shane breathed out and took Renata into his own arms, defeated. He didn’t speak Russian, she didn’t speak English, what was he going to do with her?! And yet, all of these thoughts caught up to him after Rozanov threw his hands up in celebration, went to gather some of his things from his bag hidden under Shane’s table, and ran off.

Before disappearing, he said, “thank you, sweetheart,” and kissed his cheek.

_______________________

December, 2024. Yee-haw, Ottawa once again!

“What are you doing these holidays?” Ilya was in the middle of checking the connection in the conference room and jumped from the sudden voice behind him.

“M-m?” He turned around and saw, of course, Shane fucking Hollander, in the flesh, standing almost awkwardly in the doorway. He did not offer any more clarification.

“Have a party to crash? I know you’re new to the country, so…” Shane trailed off, clearly overwhelmed under Ilya’s silence and unwavering stare.

“You think I have no friends?” Ilya deadpanned. Then, looking at Shane’s spooked face, he chuckled. “Shane. Stop. I’m kidding”.

“Okay”.

They were still on speaking terms, which sort of surprised Ilya after the stunt he pulled. Well, he was not about to lose the only precious thing about this job, so he softened and decided to answer like a sane man.

“No, I have no plans. Probably will watch the Sopranos and eat horrendous amounts of junk food or something. Why?”

“Maybe, um… Me and Hayden, and his family, we throw a little celebration every year. This year at my place, because their number of kids grew kind of concerning. It’s just for our friends,” Shane explained.

“Hayden’s friends, you mean”.

“Well, it’s mostly colleagues,” Shane was so obviously stifling his desire to roll his eyes. “Some of them left the firm, some not. So, you’ll know a decent amount of people there”.

Ilya grinned. “Are you inviting me to the Christmas party?”

Shane, uncharacteristically, smirked, like he came up with the greatest quip of all time. “Only because I think you’re lonely and too proud to ask about it yourself”.

Rozanov smirked back.

Shane knew him. It was not a brand new installment, but still surprised him from time to time. The subtle ways he showed it, like informing him on the absence of milk in their coffee machine drawer if they crossed each other’s paths in the hallway, or texting him personally without Ilya even asking when something in the general channel of the Slack was genuinely confusing or above Ilya’s English level (like when he explained what the hell is ‘dead cat bounce’ in the discussion about the new possible partner), or him commenting on Ilya’s impressive collection of tacky rock-band T-shirts, like Ilya comments on his neckties one.

They created their own personal language of chirps and nods, and it was already great to have a person to help you out and support you through the traumatic process of integrating in the new country, but on top of that, Ilya grew to genuinely like Shane. His convoluted sense of humor, his mannerisms, his unmistakable polite style of texting, everything about him, from the sense of fashion (he wore suits, like everyone else, but his were beautiful, so well-fitted, like he cared) to the weird ways he pronounced some words.

Ilya cherished it. Utterly, sincerely cherished, but he was also aroused to a point of no return, and that part of their interactions drove him mad.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll go. Thank you,” he smiled at Shane when the pause grew too stretched and Shane started to look worried. 

“It’s actually a New Year party. Christmas is more for families,” Shane clarified and cringed to himself, probably realizing it was too much detail. “I’ll send you the address”.

Ilya felt such an all-consuming wave of adoration his stomach almost hurt. Oh, this little beautiful thing, Shane Hollander, so awkward, so overtly polite, Ilya was so damn enamoured he’d even looked up this word. He suddenly remembered he was not supposed to look at the Heads of Departments with such a lovesick expression, so he put on his usual devilish smirk and retorted to the only way he knew how to exist without bearing too much of himself. Lewd jokes, it was.

“Shall I come in a housemaid dress? Is it that kind of party?” he asked and savoured the blush that appeared on Shane’s cheeks.

“Get lost, Rozanov,” he shook his head, bemused, but Ilya could see his smile, too.

“Will we kiss under that plant of yours? Pamela?”

“Ugh?”

“Omela. Oh, mistletoe! I remember. I thought, why is it named after feet fingers, yes?”

“Gosh, Rozanov, you’re impossible”.

“I think it has something to do with foot fetish”.

Shane ignored him this time, leaving in the middle of Ilya’s sentence to laugh his guts out, which Ilya gladly did. What a wonderful guy. Ilya admired everything about him.

To be fair, what did they even have in common? The alienation from the society that drove them together, mostly, and Ilya used to never try it with the people who had problems with society. Or sex. Or even connection, which Shane evidently had, and yet Ilya jumped into this head-first like a cliche movie girl screaming ‘I can fix him!’. He couldn’t. But he yearned, somewhat pathetically, and he could do nada about it.

Sometimes he thought he would do anything for this man. So, instead of ignoring the world and missing home, he went to the party, mostly because he wanted to see Shane’s apartment. And Shane. Just see Shane, it would be enough of a reason.

His apartment was unmistakably Shane. A big place, a condominium with a glass staircase in the middle of the great hall, dimly lit by a thousand lamps and with huge glass windows, just like in his office. Shane definitely had a style. Ilya admired his neatly furnished wooden floors, every space organized in a small separate living place with enough to survive, all the furniture pieces complementing each other, and the fact he had a shoe rack next to the entrance. The unspoken rule of always taking off one's shoes was probably the best thing about this household, at least in Ilya’s slavic opinion.

The party had already started when Ilya arrived, a dozen or so people evenly spread around the place. He noticed Marlow with a beer bottle in his hand, and Pike with his arm around the shoulders of some woman, probably his wife, talking to Shane. That was great. Shane was here.

Not that he wouldn’t be, it was his apartment after all, but Ilya was a moron like that.

Shane had a fake fireplace that still emitted heat all over the living room, garlands tucked into the curtain rod in neat waves, and a small christmas tree in the corner. Ilya smiled all the way while he strode across the hall right to Shane to unceremoniously shove a present bag into his hands. It was stupid, just a little thing, a cheap necktie with scattered yellow ducks all over the blue cloth and noise-cancelling earbuds, but he had felt like coming with nothing would be rude even for him. While Shane was overcoming his initial shock, Ilya snatched a full champagne glass from the table with dozens of them arranged, winked, and dissolved into the space of the apartment as fast as he came.

Ilya later learned that mostly no one brought any presents, so he ignored the nagging feeling of being so out-of-place for the rest of the evening, drowning it in the champagne and later whiskey-coke. He chatted with everyone, Wyatt being his favourite, the guy resigned about two years ago and still kept a friendly relationship with all his ex-colleagues. He met Jackie, Pike’s wife, and consoled her about a life with too many Pikes for half an hour. He gradually became more and more tipsy and promptly avoided Shane simply because he was afraid what he would do if they talked in a scenario like this. No formal constraints, no rulebooks, a friendly atmosphere and candlelit warm light dancing on Shane’s cheeks.

Ilya danced a bit to Christmas music with Marlow, who was an awful dancer, ate about three quarters of the cheese plate, because it was a damn good cheese, and got himself really comfortable. It was fun. He never knew Canadian home parties could be fun.

Closer to eleven, he bumped into Shane on the way to the bathroom. He noticed a glass in his hand and a glassy look of his eyes, accompanied by the redness of his face, and leaned in to whisper:

“It doesn’t count”.

“What?” Shane perked up to look at him, confused.

“For my bribe. We both drink, but it doesn’t count”.

Shane scoffed. “Will you let it go?”

“Never”.

Ilya saluted with two fingers and retreated to the bathroom he was heading to anyway. He noticed a spacious bathtub instead of the shower and a good lock on the door. He knew they discussed it with Shane: he’d stay for the night in the guest room, simply because travelling was expensive in the night and useless as they lived on one metro line. Ilya would just leave in the morning, the same as half the guests, as Shane’s huge and expensive place he earned by being a boring corporate head could accommodate it.

He knew it, yes. The thought of being a rebel and falling asleep drunk in a bathtub still crossed his mind.

It wasn’t sleeping he did in the bathroom, though, in the end.

All around people were tipsy, a group in the living room played that stupid game with the stickers on their foreheads and refused to disperse even as it was heading to the midnight and it was time to celebrate, and Ilya found himself high on the emotions and tobacco after a quick cig he caught a minute before. He was hanging his winter coat in the hallway when Shane appeared from the restroom, the door a meter away down the corridor. Their eyes met. The chatter down the apartment faded to the background, numb and intelligible. Something in Ilya’s head simply clicked, standing there, one shoe half-off, staring at Shane and seeing his eyes fill with something undeniable in slow motion.

He exhaled, tugged his shoe off with another foot, and unceremoniously pushed Shane back in the dark room with an unwavering hand on his chest.

“You drank too much,” Shane said, not resisting, not even a little bit.

“You did, too,” Ilya countered and flew ten stories high on a feeling of Shane stepping back, obeying.

“What are you doing, Rozanov?”

“Nothing. Nothing”.

The bathroom door closed behind them. Ilya pulled him closer.

“Your hand is on my ass,” Shane muttered in the darkness. He never even buckled.

“The HR girl is somewhere there, wanna file for harassment?” Ilya scoffed and pushed Shane again.

Shane understood him right. He landed on the edge of the bathtub and, as Ilya could see with his eyes slightly adjusting to the darkness, gripped it with both his hands. He waited. Fuck, he waited for Ilya to do something.

So, Ilya delivered.

He lowered on his knees, not even a painful feeling of his old bones pressing into the tiles sobering him, stroked his palms down Shane’s shoulders, and fully demolished Shane’s personal space as he pressed his whole torso into his. Then, he brought one hand to Shane’s face, caressed it like the fairest thing his miserable palms got to touch, and leaned it.

“Stop,” Shane suddenly shuddered and put his own palm over Ilya’s mouth. “Stop, no kissing”.

“God, you’re that righteous?” Ilya asked right into his skin. Shane jerked his hand away like Ilya’s voice burned a mark on it.

“Please don’t kiss me,” he pleaded.

It sounded so painful Ilya had nothing in him to argue.

“Whatever. Can I do something with you boner, at least?” he asked instead, as it was the only thing he could think of. Shane’s bulge, pressing into his flesh, so traceable, so vivid, so painstakingly obvious.

Shane hissed some air into his lungs, shook his head (didn’t help), and breathed out, so quiet it would be missed if Ilya’s whole existence was not focused on his answer:

“Okay”.

“Okay,” Ilya parroted and unbuckled his belt.

It took his drunk body around fifteen seconds to unzip Shane’s pants. Shane was panting, impatient, over his head, and gripped his shoulder for balance. They both said nothing, scared of spooking off the moment. Ilya finally tugged the fly down and stuck his hand up Shane’s briefs, heard an undeniable little moan, and then his brain finally caught up.

Shane’s dick was in his hand. Fucking hell. Shane whimpered into his ear and his dick was in his hand.

Ilya licked his dry lips and whispered:

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Jesus. Yeah, good”. Shane squinted his eyes shut as if it wasn’t pitch black dark in the bathroom already. Ilya loved watching his all-squshed face, the grimace of the pure elation he tried to but couldn’t quite cover.

Ilya had no fucking idea what made him like that, what sorts of bad experiences and what kind dark past, but it didn’t matter. He just wanted this, this man, broken and imperfect, as drunk as he was, wanted to show him how it feels to be cared for, how good another man can make him feel, how right it was what they were doing and feeling. 

They wouldn’t even need a lube, Shane’s head was leaking already, and Ilya was probably too aroused by this fact. 

He moved his hand, once, twice, still in Shane’s pants, and got a string of slurred moans, a sound he never heard before and so damning he would never forget it. A little bit too high for such a respected man with such a perfected reputation, a little too needy, a little too full of want.

“You’re loud,” Ilya laughed and jerked again. Shane groaned into the slither of air between their lips.

“It was your stupid fucking idea—” he started, almost offended by the accusation, but little did he know Ilya already had another brilliant fucking idea.

He crumpled this expensive, ironed, perfect cloth of his necktie into a ball with his fist and promptly stuffed it into his mouth. Shane’s eyes momentarily flew open, and he looked at Ilya incrediously, but it was also visible in a present time how his face fell in the realization he liked it, probably, most definitely, a little too much.

Ilya felt his grin grow from ear to ear.

“We don’t want them to hear you, yes?” he murmured, swiftly tugging off Shane’s pants. “We don’t want them to know how much you like it,” he brought his hand back to Shane’s leaking cock and stroked it again, twice, thrice, and again, and again. Shane’s eyes rolled up as he moaned stiffly into the cloth. “We don’t want them to realize you just came under my hands. Under this stupid, rude, weird new guy. We don’t want it, do we?”

Shane trembled and clenched the edge of the bathtub. His legs involuntarily spread wider. His teeth etched into his own necktie. Shane looked utterly, irrevocably ruined, his muffled groans filled the stiff room, and Ilya savoured every moment, every little whimper that came with every motion of his hand, every last breath they shared. Ilya drove him to the edge knowing perfectly he was losing his mind, and he would also be irrevocably, irreparably destroyed by this moment, till the end of his pathetic life, because nothing ever compared to this.

They were drunk, but maybe not only on alcohol — they were drunk on each other, on this senseless feud, on the tension and insults, and they leaped into the abyss tonight, knowing that tomorrow, when the sun rises, they will be left with themselves, guilty of this sin of caring, vivid memories, and an unbearable desire for more.

Ilya knew, when he came into this room after Shane, that he would ruin something, that it would never be the same, this tiptoeing around each other, that the pendulum would swing in one outcome or another, but he was ready to take this risk even for just once in his life having this moment and riding the high of it forever. He knew he would leave this room first, leaving Shane to gather his thoughts, feelings, and clothes, scattered on the tiles, and he would have no idea what he would walk into the next day. But he needed it. He just could not bear one more day waiting, thinking, hoping for one outcome of the two. Ilya needed a resolution, and it was his only one this upcoming New Year.

Shane came into his hand with the sound of the first fireworks.

______________________

January, 2025. It will be Ottawa every time.

Behind the window, a harsh Ottawa night started flickering lit with yellowish dots of lampposts. Dots flashed before Shane’s tired eyes, dots mixed letters on the sheets into complete illegibility, dots reflected in the glass doors of pretentious furniture. It was so quiet that it seemed as if the only person left, not in this building, but in the whole city, in the entire universe, even, was poor Hollander and his seventeen weekly reports, three of which for some reason were for the year before last, also written unintelligibly.

He should have thought about it earlier, at a time when he had actually decided that the reports should be weekly and not monthly, but he couldn’t reverse time, could he, and there were only two days until the next report due date, and he was insanely close to retching onto the red wood of his expensive table. Retching with the taste of letters, numbers, and negative balances; Hollander put away the red pen he used to cross out the mistakes or discrepancies, wiped his dry eyes and looked at the lower right-hand corner of an obscenely bright monitor. Almost ten o'clock in the evening. At this rate, he wouldn’t be sent to use his piled up sick days — no, they would need to put him in the grave. And dad will be upset.

He really had to call dad and cancel the plans. Or else, to be there before the closing of the McDonald’s he had to somehow travel the distance within an hour that suddenly felt more like five minutes. To atone for the sins of hard work for his family by fries and nuggets with cheese sauce was a habit for Shane, but this habit he liked even less than rare cigarettes he allowed himself when nerves were lacking.

And to think that his dad knew it would happen and specifically asked him not to work overtime. If only he knew that the “over” part has surpassed the “time” part, like, two years ago. 

Quit. He really had to quit. And there would be no shovels of overflowing binders, no three-hour meetings, whole days with his parents that were not getting any younger; and no Rozanov, oh my God, no Ilya Rozanov.

Hollander squinted his eyes and pressed the button to turn off the power unit a bit too hard. The lump in his throat suddenly felt like a painful, bright as fireworks, with a taste of eggnog, gingerbread and whiskey, pathetic «I need more». Not that he wanted more — he just couldn’t bear living without it.

He met the New Year in the company of thoughts about Ilya Rozanov, how beautifully he slept on Hollander’s sheets and then swiftly disappeared had Shane succumbed to sleep in the chair next to it, how desperately he grasped the air around Hollander’s lips with his own lips, how pitifully right felt his hand, wrapped around Hollander’s treacherously hard as a rock cock, and how long before he hadn’t come so fast, hard and necessarily. If he had to spend the next year like this, Hollander was ready to hang himself by the end of January.

His determined refusal to remember that night felt like annoyingly frequent erotic dreams and desperate wanking in the morning, so fervent that the tiles in his bathroom had already reeked of his arousal; Hollander was not sure that he refused to remember it at all.

He stood up, mechanically moved in the chair, flopped the folder on top of the pile of other folders he already browsed and checked, hid his fatigue-ridden — and broken in halves from the need to strangle Rozanov — arms in the sleeves of a wool coat, tied a scarf around his neck and breathed out. From the cover of a book on the top shelf of the chiffonier, Napoleon stared at him as if he knew that the French had lost countless battles to the Russians, and some French-speaking man named Hollander was also seven steps away from a tragic loss. Oh, fuck this.

A staircase of three floors and six flights suddenly seemed unjustifiably long, as if he, such a fool, decided to walk down the skyscraper. The stairs, wet after the attempts of the cleaning lady named Kati to give this place at least some kind of a blessed look, slipped out from under his feet, and Hollander walked down like a man of a hundred years old, grasping for a railing and looking at the soles of his way too thin for winter shoes.

“See you tomorrow,” he said evenly to the guard from the other end of the lobby as if to show that he had no intention of discussing anything with him, either his vacation in Michigan, or the Lakers game, or his late presence in a building for which he really should have apologized.

“Bye, Hollster!” The guard named Kip (who changed for the receptionist Kyle for the night) respected authority even less than Rozanov did, but, to his credit, he did understand Hollander’s unsaid unwillingness to talk, but it was written all over his face that he wanted to speak to somebody before the long night shift. “Say hi to Rose for me!”

Meticulously calibrated grin, which was his last weak attempt to uphold the image of unperturbed soulless phlegmatic, came out exactly like an uncanny epitome of a death rattle of a strangled dog. Shane looked miserable. Felt just the same.

The sparkly lamppost dots met him with a brief blindness. Asphalt, soiled in mud, buzzed under the tires of passing cars. The street emitted a glazing chill, and this glass-granite cold of Ottawa felt crunchy on his teeth with an unobtrusive emptiness. Shane wanted to sleep. And, probably, lose it.

Having found the keys of his good old Rover in his pocket, Hollander was about to forget the company for this evening like the most terrible dream, the alarm blinged turning off, the thick snow crumbled plainly under his feet. Through the cloud of his hot breath in the cold air he could see a bright yellow square, brighter than any fucking dot, in the shape of the only still lit window on their floor.

Hollander hated to know exactly whose office the window belonged to.

He knew. No need to count windows, no need to reconstruct the corridor so far from where he worked himself in his memory; knew even before the cloud dissipated and his gaze caught on the figure, humped above the work table, with a characteristically disheveled chaff of light curls on his head.

Ilya Rozanov was diligently checking something in the documents before him and on the screen, making rare notes with a pen and looking as if he couldn’t care less about this job. His fingers were scratching a little wound from a bad shave on his chin to distract himself, and he didn’t notice at all that in fifty feet, in the cold of the street, as if the maverick who had seen the first light in forty years, stood Hollander, tucked into his unimpressive coat, who knew exactly how these fingers tasted like.

On his nose sat rectangular tasteless glasses.

Hollander didn’t have a taste either, because he totally forgot how to breathe because of these stupid glasses, so ugly as if they were taken from a fifty-year-old avid reader.

The keychain on the car keys embedded into the skin of his palm, his nerves tied into a knot, and something like a scream or a tired groan rolled up to his throat. Emotions flared in his brain hemispheres. Over again, Hollander felt like he was desperately breaking the ceramic edge of the bath, trying not to fall and not to touch, and over again he was swallowing viscous saliva and moans, over again he was staring at the ceiling, so as not to meet Rozanov’s hungry, greedy, crazy eyes. The cold ran down his back.

If this is how people go crazy, then Hollander’s room is already booked.

There was nothing to fight it in him anymore, and his feet carried him away from the car to the metal door under the flickering sign. The emptiness in his head was darker than the night boulevard, and the sky — it would have better been Austerlitz than Ottawa; Hollander would have only been happier to die a brave death, not to give up shamefully — pressed onto his weary shoulders. The ice in his chest pressed on his ribs. His finger pressed on the bell button.

“I— I forgot,” Hollander said from the doors before any question could have been asked, gesturing to the stairs. He never thought what it was that he could forget, but Kip didn’t ask.

At some point, someone should have erected a monument in the name of this thoughtful man.

At least because he did not ask anything even when Hollander shamelessly turned in the completely wrong direction. His office was in the other wing. His heart was straight ahead.

Cheap tile underneath the feet echoed under every damn step. His wet soles slipped on it, and Hollander prayed to fall right there, break his arm, or leg, or probably his useless head apparently forgotten somewhere else, lay in the hospital for eternity and get amnesia. And he prayed that it hurt, that it hurt badly, excruciatingly, like hell, anything, just anything else but something in his chest.

There, inside his chest, something was scratching and crying, and it would have been better if it had been a heart attack, but Hollander for some reason hadn’t dropped dead yet.

«3-8.1».

Hollander didn’t even have the guts to knock. He stood unmoving, gazing at the cracked beige paint of the corridor, and could not understand why he felt exactly like this hospital-colored paint. He picked on it. A chip, together with the plaster, fell and broke on the tile of the floor. Hollander’s jaw was shattered with a grin — it seemed to him that behind the door someone especially unbearable breathed out at the same time as this chip of paint fell.

He should’ve left. Get himself together, remember at least one of the promises he’s given to himself, shut his disgruntled inner voice up and do not put himself in a deliberately awkward position. He was the only king on the board, and his grandmaster seemed to have forgotten all the rules.

He should’ve left. Call the nearest brothel, even though he never had done it before and hadn’t got the foggiest about how to get the number, order some Annie-Lisa-Diana, let out his steam and not think about how much he lacked men’s hands in his astonishingly tragic life. He would ask for forgiveness of his sins after. All of them.

He should’ve left. Meet with his parents, behave like a good son, tighten the bonds of commitment so strong that even his muscles would become the ropes, those traitorous muscles that had been spasmed straight in a direction to him only for months, and end this ungrateful role of the greatest idiot on Earth. He should’ve just left.

“Can I go in?” he asked, without raising his eyes from the streak of yellow light that was slowly spreading across the floor. Maybe he was talking to the light of the opening door. Or maybe he was talking to the old door itself, the base made of cardboard and a cold aluminium handle, into which his fingers clung like into a life vest. “I’m not interrupting something, am I?”

It was time for him to learn how to manage with his own hands, oh goodness.

Ilya Rozanov turned around to look at him so sharply that Hollander almost heard his neck crack. Thanks to the lenses in with some good amount of diopters, the sharp pierce of his gaze did not burn Hollander’s skin nor retinas — Rozanov was absolutely not embarrassed by how instantly and tantalizingly the fire lit in the depth of his eyes.

“If only boring bureaucratic paperwork. But, to be fair, here I can only thank you for interrupting,” Rozanov took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You want something?”

Yeah, Hollander, what is it exactly that you wanted from him?

The lingering silence answered Rozanov’s question much more eloquently than any implausible lie that came to Hollander’s mind.

Having understood everything very damn well, he turned away — finally, oh Lord, Hollander had begun to melt —but instead of going back to work, he slammed the folder in front of him shut and threw the pen on the table. The room smelled of something gatvol.

“Fuck these end of the year catalogs,” he threw into this gatvol in such a tone, as if he wanted to fuck Hollander rather than anything else. At least he had some holes to perform such an act, a report had nothing of the sort. “Why didn’t they tell me earlier that we have to log all the log-ins into the encrypted register? This place don’t fucking have encrypted register. Not even encryption protocol”.

“Well, in my plan there is a clause to exclude the office consumables from your salaries, proportionally,” Hollander somewhat tried to maintain the conversation in his own convoluted manner.

“Yeah, let’s go rob the guys next door for their consumables, hide them around and shove the encrypted quest to get it all in the middle of the boss’ stack of shit he signs every day. And maybe set his office on fire. Let’s go?”

“I think this is not the most appropriate allocation of time and resources”.

Rozanov laughed out loud, but to his credit he did try to cover it with his hand, and rubbed his head as if he was talking to the most battered mutt of the city. However, Hollander began to think that this was close to the truth.

“Agreed, better set you on fire”.

“Mr. Rozanov—”

“God, where do they make people like you, tell me please?” Rozanov asked abruptly, staring at his bewildered face, and, just as abruptly, stopped smiling. “Did you want something from me, shanovny?”

“Um. I thought maybe something happened that you stayed so late. I mean, I thought that maybe I could help you with it”.

“So you came back because of it? So noble of you,” Rozanov scoffed, inciting Hollander’s indomitable desire to beat his forehead on the nearest glass shelf with the company laptops. Or maybe better to break it, get the biggest one and throw at him just so he never dared to scoff like that anymore. “I’ll take this as admission that you liked it”.

“I did not—”

“You liked it. Want to do it again?”

Hollander’s bursting desire to scream dimmed as fast as it burned up, as soon as Rozanov raised his eyebrow. His hand stretched to open the door to give way for Hollander to throw himself into the corridor as if from the twelfth floor, but instead pulled a scarf from his neck and threw it somewhere on a chair. It should have looked, perhaps, threatening and confident, but ended up rather ambiguous.

His glistening eyes ran along the floor-ceiling-walls, Hollander breathed in sharply, trying to calm down the raging pulse, and could not fully understand what it was that he wanted. He was already standing here, in the place where everything was soaked in Rozanov, he came there himself, he did not go away yet, and in his head every thought he ever had went: I did. I really liked it.

I need more.

“I’m not like that, Mr. Rozanov,” Hollander choked out, falling onto the chair to accompany his scarf. The low ceiling of the IT room, proudly named the office even though it looked nothing like one, stopped tickling his slightly ragged hair, and he wanted to stand back up — sitting he felt too much of Rozanov’s superiority. Rozanov should’ve never had one over him in the first place. “I don’t... I’m not prone to have feelings for men. I’m a decent man, I have a respected family, as you know, and it was all just so foolish of me. I’ve already allowed you too much, and you’re also allowing yourself too much. Let’s maybe just forget it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I missed it, caught up in the way you blush. What did you say?”

“Gosh, you’re kidding me!” Hollander angered up, knowing full well that he couldn’t say it again even if he tried. “I want you to stop… stalking me”.

“I mean, it was you who came to me today”.

He had no tramp card over it. Hollander dropped his face into the palms of his hands and did not move, although his conscience urged him to leave. Put a stop to it. Capitulate, surrender Ottawa, whatever, but not to stay here, not to give Rozanov the most justified reasons to believe that Hollander needed anything from him in this life.

The worst thing was not that he knew where it would all go, no, it was that Rozanov’s workplace was a glass cubicle in the middle of the long stretching corridor, and anyone, anyone, could happen to walk by and see them from a hundred feet away. Hollander thought about it, was concerned about it, maybe even anxious, maybe even too much, but he had no chance to voice these thoughts before he heard Rozanov’s chair squeak as he stood up.

Here we go again.

Hollander lowered his hands and raised his head just at the right time to catch Rozanov looming at him like a whole cavalry.

“You do blush. It’s pretty,” he said, hands in his pockets, smirk on his lips.

“Suck my dick,” Hollander slurred, tired of his spectacle already, but he never accounted for the way Rozanov would grin in response. That grin would haunt him till the day he died, surely, as a sign of his unbearable defeat. Hollander didn’t mean it like that but he would lie if he said his insides did not burn in anticipation.

“As you wish”.

Rozanov stopped his advance right in front of him, caught the end of his stupid tie in his graceful fingers and hauled Hollander up to his feet with it. Then, he carefully, ever so slowly, untied the knot, pulled the cloth from under the collar, and pushed him back, just a little, just enough for Hollander to obey.

He made as many steps back as Rozanov wanted him to, and exactly as his shoulders met the cold glass of the walls, Rozanov appeared ready, imprisoned his wrists into his calculated grip and raised them up, over his head, and Hollander let him.

“Don’t. Move,” Rozanov ordered, and the low bristle of his voice sent shivers down Hollander’s spine. He proceeded, wrapped the tie around Hollander’s wrists twice, looped its end around the plastic hook next to the same one that his jacket hung at, and secured it with a tight knot. Against the order, Hollander tried and pulled on it — his hands were firmly confined, and against his best judgement, he liked it a little bit too much.

He exhaled, raised his head to look at the ceiling and accepted his unenviable fate.

Rozanov, and Hollander could bet he was smirking while doing it, sank to his knees and brought his hands to the buckle on the belt. He sure loved it too much for his own good. Maybe it was about power, but kneeling was not exactly the most empowering of positions, so Hollander could only guess what attracted him that much in their little circumstance. Maybe he was just an exhibitionist, and it brought a reasonable concern to Shane’s mind that has already drifted off to somewhere incomprehensible.

“CCTV. Does it cover this place?” He asked, shameful, as he followed the whole ceiling with his eyes just to make sure and saw nothing. It was degrading to admit Rozanov would know better about these things and plainly ask.

“Dunno. I guess”.

Well, maybe he did not know any damn better.

“Jesus Christ…”

“Imagine how Kip is going insane there right now. He’s looking. He’s looking at you. How you just can’t resist me. How you’re ready to beg me. Imagine. Cool, isn’t it?”

“Go to hell”.

“Yes-s-s, here we go”.

Rozanov pulled his pants down to his ankles, again so slowly, invigoratingly, then his boxers, and then he audibly laughed.

“You’re hard, Mr. Hollander,” Rozanov mocked him, oblivious to the fireworks ignited in Shane’s gut by the way he said his last name with that accented rolled R. Or, maybe, it was the way Rozanov decided to finally give in to the proper chain of authority exactly the moment he held all the control in the world. It was exhilarating. It was so, so fucking hot.

“Just do it already,” Shane, admittedly, just gave up. “Just get it over with if you want it so much. You’re so damn unbearable, how did they even hire you, goddamit”.

“Shh. We call it, um, breadcutter. The mouth, when you talk too much. We say “shut your breadcutter”, in Russia,” Rozanov said in a sing-song tone. “So shut. Your. Breadcutter. And let me suck your dick. I only want to hear you beg”.

And maybe it was humiliating, or worse, so arousing, when Shane swallowed a hard lump in his throat, spread his legs as far as his pants still crumpled around his ankles allowed, and whispered, as lowly and quietly as a prayer:

“Please”.

Rozanov licked his lips, moved Shane’s shirt up a bit with one of his hands, and winked. “Your wish is my command”.

The very next second he took Shane halfway into his mouth, and, oh, Shane was a goner.

Rozanov didn’t look away even once, and the view is efficiently the hottest thing Shane had ever beholden. His eyes, darken with lust, his devious face now reddened and slashed with a tight smirk, his brows furrowing and — of course — mouth opening. He must’ve known exactly how he looked, because people never do this unintentionally. 

“Have you ever had a blowjob?” Rozanov asked conversationally, letting Shane’s cock out of his mouth with an obscene wet sound and changing it for a hand.

“What?”

“Have you? I mean, you look like you haven’t,” he laughed shortly and followed Shane’s entire length with his tongue, and the effort it took him not to smirk was so visible on his flushed face. He most probably noticed the white color Shane’s knuckles turned from the tightness of the grip he had on his own fucking tie.

Who the fuck holds a converstaion in the middle of a blowjob?!

“I have”.

“Was he any good?”

“It was a she,” Shane squinted his eyes and stifled a whimper that came when Rozanov gave him another lengthy lick in exchange for the truth. That was how it was going to go? Oh, goodness. “Rose. Her name is Rose”.

“Your girlfriend?” Rozanov asked, his words muffled as he kept his lips just around the tip of Shane’s cock. In a weird, unsexy way, it looked like he was talking into a microphone.

And Ilya Rozanov still gracefully pulled off being so unsexy and talking about exes in the middle of the act, what a fucking guy.

“What the hell, Rozanov, I—” Shane was cut off with a moan when Rozanov strategically took the head of his cock into his mouth and sucked on it, knowing perfectly it would shut Shane’s unwarranted outrage.

“I asked you, is she your girlfriend?” he repeated, more sternly this time.

Shane beat his head on the glass wall of the room and breathed out. He ached for the warmth and slickness of Rozanov’s mouth so desperately it made him nauseous. So, to get it back, he answered truthfully:

“No. My ex”.

“Didn’t work out, huh?” Rozanov commented, but still gave Shane what he earned: went deeper, his eyes involuntarily fluttering shut for a moment, pulled out, then sucked again, then pulled out again, threading the vein along the shaft with the tip of his tongue. 

Shane didn’t appreciate his comment, but, seeing the circumstance, maybe what Rozanov implied was completely damn right. His first and only blowjob was… good. Nice, even. But not to this extent, no, he had never been swiped off his feet as fervently and powerlessly, and maybe it was time to reconsider his discomfiting conclusion that he just wasn’t made for sex. No. Definitely no. Maybe, as Rozanov hinted, he was just completely and utterly gay.

The thing is, having tried Ilya Rozanov once, Shane lost the sense of ever stopping being so eager for it.

“We’re still friends,” he murmured, pathetically, just to distract himself from the graphic soundtrack of Rozanov’s mouth vigorously polishing his cock. Hadn’t helped. Rozanov simply scoffed, and the sound vibrated on his dick, sending shockwaves up his body. Shane couldn’t hold his loud moan that came with it. “We— we hang out. Her new guy is great. She’s kinda the only friend I have outside this place. She’s great. I just wasn’t—”

“Heterosexual enough for her?” Rozanov quipped, and Shane just didn’t have it in him to lie.

“I guess so, yeah”.

Rozanov whistled. “That was fast enough,” he muttered and went right back to what he was doing. He was so, so incredibly beautiful.

He licked diligently, following the tight agreeing nods and swollen veins on Shane’s forehead with his attentive gaze; Shane trembled and barely stood on his feet; his knees buckled so that Rozanov should have been prepared to catch him, because the hook would hardly stay at its place after that. Shane could not quite believe that he was that one confident, respected leader, able to manage hundreds of people for hours. Under a sincere desire to give him pleasure, he broke into small pieces and blushed like a proper schoolboy.

Shane felt so small. So inexperienced. He had his fair share of sex, he really did, five times at twenty-eight was a perfectly respectable number, but he had never felt so… cared for. It wasn’t a drunk accident that left an impenetrable mark on his psyche anymore, it was real, it was overbearing, it burned at the depths of his stomach and finally showed him a satisfaction of not being the one who gives, but the one who receives it. And it was not a show, albeit in a plain sight, it was for two of them, and however hard Rozanov tried to play it as quick blowie with no strings attached, they both knew that Shane’s necktie wasn’t wrapped only around the hanger, but around them both, their fucking souls, connecting their miserable lives into something meaningful.

And Shane wanted nothing more than this, because depending on Ilya Rozanov was not a part of his New Year resolutions.

“I’m so tired of you,” he repeated, much more heated now, his cheeks red, his eyes blurry. “I’m so tired of seeing you, of hearing you, of feeling you here, like you’re always behind my back. I’m so tired of falling asleep with you in the back of my mind and waking up with your name on my lips,” he ranted, and ranted, and ranted, so fast, barely breathing, and his chest heaved so hard it seemed his ribs would pierce his skin on the next inhale. The inhale itself turned out more like a groan, or a sob, so rattled, like a moment more and he would break, he would scream, he would fucking wail. “You’re everywhere, you’re so much, you just… You’re just too much, Rozanov, too much, gosh, I can’t, I can’t anymore”.

Not afraid of anything that Shane’s mouth would give out on a silver plate, Rozanov kept taking it deep, his nose almost pressing into the low of Shane’s stomach; it didn’t electrify, only Shane still screamed and shook heavily. It had no grace and aesthetics, he groaned as if in pain, entering the wet captivity of someone else’s mouth that squeezed the whole of his existence into one undetectable point. He was hard as a stone, and Rozanov still did not hesitate to suck in his cheeks in an explicitly dirty way, he caressed the milk-white skin of Shane’s thighs, he groaned himself in an apparent delight.

Shane dared one glance at their reflection in the glass walls on the opposite side of the room and instantly looked away. Even partially restricted by furniture and scattered electronics, the view was unbearable: his own cheekbones, so pointy somehow and reddened, his own lips, shaped over a moan, his own spine arched in a way it looked like he could be bent in half, ready to break free and either fall into Rozanov’s steady arms or flee, again. So, so red, on the verge of coming.

“Fuck, Hollander, do you hear yourself?” Rozanov was not smiling anymore as he as little as kissed his slit. “That’s fucked up”.

“I don’t need your assertion of it”.

“I’d say you’re… how is it? Enamoured”.

“Shit, you and your thesaurus of unexpected eloquence,” Shane hissed and pointedly ignored the way Rozanov just stood up, his knees clicking, without even getting him to finish.

He smirked again, too much emotion behind it this time, but Shane had no brainpower to analyze any of it.

“Don’t overestimate my English,” he whispered jokingly, leaned in, and instead of a kiss Shane half-heartedly expected and maybe desired Rozanov carefully wrapped his fingers around his tied wrists.

His face was too close. Shane had no idea where to go, where to hide from him and from the horrifying realisation that he was drawn to Rozanov, drawn so inhumanly, so fervently there was nothing to prevent it, and yet Shane tried. He held his head high, he pretended he wasn’t swaying his hips to follow any movement of Rozanov’s mouth, he cemented his hands to one place praying for them not to stray into the direction of Rozanov’s face, or worse, pants, the second he would untie his wrists.

And then, Rozanov freed one of his hands, leaving the other still tied (Shane would learn a second later about Rozanov’s thoughtfulness, because it would be the only thing preventing him from falling onto his own knees). And then, he left just an ethereal, evanescent, featherlight stroke along the edge of his palm, and Shane’s hand followed the movement on command. And then, sinking back onto the floor, he guided it down along and put Shane’s hand onto his hair with his own, made it squeeze the strands, curly and a little too long, whispered barely coherent:

“Do anything you want”.

And he waited almost humbly for Shane to come to his senses, to dig into his hair with his fingers, to pull harder. He waited until Shane’s internal dispute was resolved, until he decided something for himself — and then dutifully accepted as much as Shane wanted. Rozanov moved under his hand, allowed him to enter his mouth as much as he’d like, wrapped a tongue around the head; it was so messy, so wet that it spilled down his chin.

Nothing muffled the loud, almost broken moans of Shane’s lost control; he no longer tried to hold back himself: he thrusted aggressively, enthusiastically, unscrupulously, pulled on Rozanov’s hair so much it probably really hurt, growled with pleasure like a wounded animal. Writhing, as if in a trap, breaking his own spine, he hissed, he whimpered, he screamed.

He did not last long. Shane was so pent-up and broken with his own mind, he brought himself to the point of exhaustion — he spilled out in a storm, with a curse on his dry lips, inside Rozanov’s mouth and a little on his chin. For a few more moments, he stilled, refusing to open his eyes; then his whole body was smothered by the inflated decompression. In some sort of delirium, he untied his left hand with his own shaking fingers, and then Shane fell, unlinked, like a doll, on his knees right in front of Rozanov, face-to-face. And watched, with a wide-eyed gaze, as he swallowed, wiped his face with his hand, and smiled.

Jesus, was it pretty — his smile.

His lips were so incredibly red it looked crimson, swollen, slightly chapped. In his eyes there was a gleam of either satisfaction or moisture. Shane wanted to touch them so much, these lips. He didn’t quite know where he was and what he was. He trembled with his whole body, as if he had just come back from the freezing cold, red-faced, soaking wet.

Rozanov looked him eye-to-eye. Deep in the dilated pupils, Shane saw a whole Universe, he saw panic, despair, and something he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, quite place. Rozanov looked as if he did not believe in anything anymore, looked attentively as if he was looking for a trick. Rozanov looked at him like a faithful dog or a hunted deer would, as if he would give up his whole life for this, as if he was universally sorry and at the same time felt better than ever. Rozanov looked at him as if for the last time ever, looked into the very soul and as if in every one of the smallest mistakes he repented and in every little feeling he confessed.

Shane was a weak man. Weak and cowardly.

Instead of doing anything of a thousand things his mind screamed at him for, like kissing Rozanov, like touching Rozanov’s broken smile, like hiding his face in the crook of Rozanov’s neck and sobbing his heart out, he scrambled his numb limbs off of the floor, zipped up his pants, and fled. Just fled.

He took his coat, but left his tie on the hook, next to Rozanov’s jacket. He took his car keys, but left his dignity there on the floor. He took his body, but not fully, because he left his heart there, fully and undoably, in the hands of a man who watched him leave like it physically tortured him to shreds and never said a damn word.

Shane never wanted to see Rozanov like that again.

Shane never wanted to see Rozanov again, full stop.

Shane just wanted to know, for just a while, for once, just a little, how his pretty lips tasted like. Just so he died a happy man. Just so he knew if they were as soft as they looked. Just so he proved to himself it indeed felt like a eucharist — to kiss Ilya Rozanov.

_________________________

April, 2025. What did you think, it wouldn’t be Ottawa?

Ilya didn’t call after him.

For months, he thought, maybe, if he had, it would be different. Maybe Shane would have come back. Maybe the omnipresent darkness would release his throat from its hold. Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t feel like walking up the gallows every time he ascended the stairs to their office.

Ilya had called in sick the first day after. When they’d asked about his illness, he’d come up with some bullshit, because English didn’t have a proper word to describe the hole Shane had left in his chest. Russian did. But Ilya’s vocabulary was not even remotely good to define toska to the HR girl. So, food poisoning had to do, more so that the symptoms rather match in a sense that nothing was left in you after it. One was an emotion, another was a disease, and both left you drained like that lost sock after ten cycles of the dryer machine.

Then, for the entire run of the remainder of winter, Ilya dedicated himself to listening to Russian mumble rock on repeat. He was mostly a rap guy, but something in the new wave of those rap-rock artists who were indistinguishable one from another just resonated with his pent-up soul. He drowned in messy drums and overly dramatic lyrics, and he somehow (or maybe pretty much reasonably) related to those young men who had their hearts freshly broken, and he cried for the stupid lyrics countless times. “God, just let me go blind, rip out all of my feelings, my hearing, my heartbeat, just take it all it has no place in me” got him the most even though he’d used to cringe at songs like this not more than a year ago. 

Jesus Christ, Shane Hollander made him into a sap machine, it was humiliating.

Sveta, having sensed his brooding mood somehow, probably from the lack of him answering her texts, had called him that night and insisted a life doesn’t end on one dick, however tasty it was. She’d also sent him a ton of memes about men being trash and offered cutting his hair or having a wine party via Zoom, but Ilya’d just opted to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary with her on the other end of the line and wondered the whole five hours of their call how she’d been always able to read him like such an open book.

For months after she would call him randomly and tell the juiciest tea about her coworkers there in Boston. They would laugh at stupid Americans, discuss the best meals at their local fast food chains (she voted Culver’s kids meal, Ilya parred with KFC basket of spicy chicken), and never talk about home.

Ilya would always shake his hands erratically before leaving for work, throwing off the overbearing need to touch that one person in a needlessly close proximity for the next eight hours, and ignore the whole half of the office where that golden plaque at the door said Shane’s name. He mostly missed counting the different ties. And freckles. And, probably, their texting, but he still scrolled through their chat sometimes and it was, albeit brief, the biggest and the most sincere testament of his unbearable feelings.

He promised himself not to ever bare his heart like that ever again.

Not that he had planned on it that night. It had just happened: late work, Hollander, and this overwhelming need to just turn into a tightened nerve and let Shane disassemble his body piece by piece. Shane had taken him apart meticulously, then taken a look at what had been left and decided it was not enough. Ilya tried respecting it.

Ilya also hated this nagging thought at the back of his head that Shane didn’t run from him. Just himself and the similar intensity of feelings they exposed that night.

The thought spoke in Sveta’s voice and took him apart worse than Shane ever had.

It’s just that even the trace of a possibility drove Ilya mad. Mad and devoted. And with each and every new day he had to try harder and harder not to just go to Shane’s office, lock the door and fuck the shit out of him. Or maybe let him fuck the shit out of Ilya. Anything, just so this upended knot of confused feelings, wet dreams, and lingering stares would fucking stop. Untie for final. Resolve.

He hated having taken the leap and still seeing the pendulum swinging.

The pendulum came to a stop in the evening of the 18th of April. The stop was crushing, as if it was a wrecking ball, loud and effervescent. Like fireworks. 

It was a routine conference they both attended and Ilya endured like his own sort of purgatory. Another branch to open, another numbers to discuss, another network to expand. Nothing of importance, really, only that to the men in suits and expensive neckties everything was of importance. Ilya so hated the corporate world and the fact he became a part of it.

What wasn’t routine came in the shape of Ilya’s own face.

He gathered the documents left on the conference table after to analyze and prepare a protocol, another thing he had to do because of the departure of one more employee whose whole job was being a secretary for this kind of things. Ilya wasn’t bothered by the workload, he was compensated for it, but it was until then — no amount of compensation could ever cover the emotional turmoil his heart swung into the moment he opened Hollander’s binder.

Someone should’ve told him that the corporate reports were not a canvas on an easel, and their corporate ballpens were not a paintbrush. And the whole thing was not an appropriate place to outpour his unresolved desires onto.

Ilya would’ve preferred a love letter on the fogged up bus window. It would go to the depot and never reach an intended destination, like Hollander wanted, because Ilya hadn’t got a foggiest of what to do with the most incriminating evidence of Hollander’s intrusive thoughts about him presented in his own blue pen portraits, scattered all over the pages.

Like, who can even deny that?

Shane wasn’t the greatest of artists, by no means he was, but the features of Ilya Rozanov, one and only, were prominent in every little doodle. They pictured him sitting, bored, hand supporting his heavy head, probably listening to one more boring presentation; standing, probably giving a presentation himself; neutral, yawning discreetly, zoned out, and smiling at something that only he knew.

Mostly, Ilya wondered if Shane really saw him like this.

“Hey, Pike!” he called after the man, catching up with him in the hall.

“Yeah?” Hayden perked up from his phone and looked confused at the papers Ilya handed out to him.

“Give it to Hollander. And, um, tell him that he makes the spies’ work too easy”.

“What?”

“Also tell him, please, that Picasso would be impressed. He got all of my moles right”.

And before Pike could answer, or unfold the papers and see, or before he himself changed his mind, snatched those and kept them forever hidden somewhere inbetween his workload, Ilya turned away and left.

Hollander’s pathetic excuse for an explanation came exactly fourteen minutes later.

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

It was nothing. 17:12

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

yes, probably 17:14

honestly go fuck yourself hollander 17:15

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

What, no innuendos? No jokes? No mocking or witch trials? 17:16

You’re losing grip, Mr. Rozanov 17:16

Ilya typed in and deleted about half a dozen replies. “I hate you,” was his first, but it wasn’t entirely true. “Just be cool once in your life and kiss me like i know you want to,” was his least favourite for obvious reasons. He’d never wanted to be so desperate, let alone let someone know about it. “Jokes are for those who deserved it,” was the favourite. Playful. Flirty. Like before, right, just like nothing had happened, just like Hollander evidently wanted him to reply.

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

перестань мне душу травить я прошу тебя 17:21

“Stop eating my soul I beg you”. So much for not being desperate. Ilya banged his head on the table.

But, really, what did Hollander expect from him? To just do a whole one-eighty and get back to their usual bickering? It seemed so, this time Hollander provoking him with thoughtless nonsense, but Ilya just wasn’t made for it anymore. He, maybe, was a guy with a hard shell, he could endure abusive fathers and autocratic motherlands, he never even looked back on his decisions, only moving forward and grinding, grinding, grinding, but Shane fucking Hollander somehow had stripped him of his layers of the past and just let him be, just for a moment, and it was enough to make him a hot mess.

Ilya vaguely remembered promising himself never to fall in love. Yeah, for this exact fucking reason. A broken glass is not a puzzle, you cannot solve it once you broke it, and Ilya swung himself down a cliff eagerly and now wondered, how the hell did he get himself so wounded. Idiot.

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

You know I can translate it, right? 17:22

илюшка @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

yes. 17:22

you draw well. didn’t know you could. 17:23

Shane had obviously translated Ilya’s text before his next reply came. Ilya didn’t open it in the app, just read the notification, because he was afraid of what his thumbs would type if he had a keyboard in front of him. 

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

I’m sorry. 17:26

Right. Sorries also never glued the broken glasses back together, Ilya had heard the proverb. So he only scoffed, somewhat wetly, locked his phone and snatched his bag from the chair. Time to go home.

What was Shane fucking Hollander sorry for, exactly? Baring his feelings out in such a stupid, such a reckless, such a public way? Taking Ilya’s hopes and smashing it greatly on their office floor? Being such an obtuse motherfucker?

Whatever it was, Ilya was sick of hearing it.

________________________

May, 2025. Yes, still fucking Ottawa.

Hayden was resigning.

Shane kind of had been expecting it for a couple of months, but it still felt twinging somewhere in his heart. Hayden had found a better offer, with a bigger paycheck and closer to his home, and without his workplace being a stupid glass box, and Hollander was happy for him, truly, he was, but having no one close in the office left was… almost heartbreaking.

Well, there was Rozanov, but it was another thing entirely.

Shane had been trying to ignore the immense pull, like a black hole, from his side of the office, for months, praying for no problems with his electronics, and he held up pretty well all things considered. They nodded at each other in the mornings and waved in the evenings, they sometimes replied to each other in Slack and even attended the same conferences. Once or twice they had lunch at the same time in their communal space, and after that Shane stopped leaving his office to eat whatsoever. His work desk was also a table, right? There was no law against having lunch at it.

Ilya Rozanov was a bane of his existence, and Shane was doing a pretty awful job at hiding it. Even now, at Hayden’s farewell party, they orbited around the room, never acknowledging the other’s presence for more than a stolen glance. Rozanov looked pretty. He even wore a grey loose-fitted suit Shane didn’t know the guy owned. 

Hayden’s speech was incredible. He joked, he sent his gratitudes to almost every colleague who happened to be there and not, knowing everyone’s name, he wished them happy years for how many there may come. Hayden was really loved in their company, and if someone somehow missed it, there was no doubt left. Even stoic Marlow was tearing up.

“Who’s left? Oh, Rozanov! Thank you for always being there for my shitty outlets and even shittier cable cords, I guess,” he saluted with a shot glass, grinning.

“It’s good you’re leaving. There will be twice less work for me now,” Rozanov clapped back and nodded, not drinking himself for some reason. Shane suspected it was him in the close proximity, because it was exactly the reason Shane opted for tea himself.

“And for my best friend in the whole world, even though you all think he’s unable to make friends, Shane Hollander,” Hayden smiled, rather tipsy, at him and raised a shot, “I am forever grateful to you for teaching me to always choose what’s best for me. You helped me through everything, dark times and hard times, guys, he was always there, and he once told me that nothing defines you better than what you do next. Not the past, not the present. But your desires and what matters to you the most. So, I hope you all will be happy in the next year, the year after, and your whole lives, every day choosing what’s the most important in your life. Now, bye, guys, I will miss you so much”.

Hayden left, and the party started to disperse, but Shane stood grounded and unmoving, only one thing on his mind.

How good of an advice could he give if he wasn’t even following it himself?

The people were leaving, slowly, one by one. This company was not the only constant in his life or even the only entity to accept him after the grandiose fuck-up at his last place he so desperately covered up and pretended to move on from. Yes, there wouldn’t be leaked sex-tapes if he never had sex or even trusted people enough to let them in his heart, but what good would it give to be a lonely career-head with one friend outside of work who was his ex-girlfriend he let down?

He buried himself in this job and the sorrows about his traumatic past, and it was understandable, but standing there, seeing that people moved on, lived their lives, and chose themselves, Shane could not come up with a single reason to deny the obvious anymore.

He went to his office, took out a pack of cookies, two teacups, and a bottle of cognac someone gave him four years ago for closing only God remembered what project. Maybe the Georgian guy. Other people never bothered knowing him better to celebrate big corporate wins with him.

He boiled some water in his kettle, steeped a teabag, sat, nervously munching on a cookie, and didn’t let himself hesitate while typing out:

Shane Hollander @shanehollander24 

Come to mine before you leave, please. We need to talk. 19:08

Rozanov did exactly that, half an hour damn later, changed into a hoodie instead of a jacket and in a mask of an unbothered asshole, the role he perfected, but Hollander saw right through it. He wanted for it to be easy, like at the beginning, but they’ve changed, irreversibly, by the ruthless fact of knowing each other. And yet, Shane was secretly grateful to him for offering something so familiar when they both knew they entered an uncharted territory, deep, dark, and dangerous.

“What, are we gonna play chess or something?” Rozanov laughed, taking a cognac shot from the desk and sitting down on the top of the taboret. Of course. Of course he ignored the guest chairs, again.

Shane wanted to talk? Well, Shane could not utter a single sound for the love of life.

Shane, it seems, had a bunch of unwarranted holes in his head, because somewhere, so unfortunately timed, his praised composure was quickly leaking out. There were so many holes, and in the heart there were holes, and everywhere there were holes, and he himself was like one big hole; and he wanted something to shut it all up so as not to leak out fully under Rozanov’s unwavering gaze, but everything that came to his mind was not even by a small amount near bounds of decency. And he did sort of leak. So unconscionably, so mistakenly, into the formless slurry kept solely by the frame of a suddenly and inconveniently uncomfortable leather office chair.

Throat cleared, Shane adjusted the cuffs, shook off the cookie crumb, and tried to give himself at least a somewhat confident appearance. Cast a glance at the poached Armenian, of year 2015, the half-empty pack of kourabiedes, the label of the tea bag mercilessly oversteeped in boiling water and teased yellowish, floating from side to side and lowering to the bottom of the cup. The situation began to look comical, but the last thing Shane wanted was to laugh.

Well, Rozanov watched and watched him, exclusively, and certainly not blinking — a cyborg, motherfucker, — slowly sipped his cognac out of the shot and clearly enjoyed the moment. What he liked more, the humiliating silence of Shane or a feeling of superiority, had to be asked, but Shane latently guessed that both. He had to bite another cookie to cope with the desire to bite off his own fingers — the lust in Shane pulled them somewhere absolutely not to a right place, in a clear direction of the fly on the hoodie, so strategically hiding the whole rangy essence of Rozanov from the unallowably curious Shane’s ogling.

The cookie tasted like World War III.

“Is kinda hot in here,” Rozanov breathed out and with an unflinching gesture of one mighty hand he unzipped the fly. “Haven’t they fucked you in the head with a ventilation schedule yet? Like gas chamber, your office”.

Shane, perhaps, would even like to say something, like ask who taught him to read minds and be so disgustingly on time, or like point at the door and chase him away with a shout, or like curse Rozanov with all the words available to him in all known dialects for shameless vulgarity of his intentions, which could be read in everything, from his posture to the tone of his voice; Shane was able only to gawk at the surface of the table and grasp it with his fingers.

Fucking wimp.

“You took a vow of silence about Pike leaving?” Rozanov smirked, putting almost the full shot on the desk next to him. Sober, then.

He’d better be drunk, so that Shane could find an excuse for the acid of purest desire into which his eyes had turned.

“No”.

“But you’re saying nothing”.

“Because what can I say to you?” Shane, so suddenly angry, perked up at Rozanov and tried to sever him with the scalding cold of an icy look, but immediately he regretted it, because this scalding ice reflected in the eyes of Rozanov with an equally scalding flame. All of the fuses in Shane’s leaky head burned out so very dangerously at the same time. “Mr. Rozanov—”

“Oh, you’re such a show-off. Stop with all that formal crap,” Rozanov rolled his eyes with a smirk, leaning forward. “Ilya. For you — just Ilya. Or you have submission kink?”

The ferocity of how eloquently Shane choked and started coughing in response did not leave him any chance. Here goes his gold plaque on an office door. Here goes his whole fucking name and respected seniority.

Ilya understood everything at once and completely. As an IT guy, he was unusually good at understanding. Shane, as a head of the department, was unusually bad at self-determination. Economists should understand that everything is cyclical, right?

This meant that their story with Ilya would not end well, but Shane did not feel the burden of a bleak future. An even darker past — it flew to the same place where the meager, proverbial chain of command broke off at the moment when he let Rozanov into his office. Everything that weighed heavily on him summed up exclusively in the present, where Rozanov slowly rose from the taboret, ever so obviously having clear-cut intentions around the table, and the intentions were called by an abruptly fading from being meaningful name.

Ilya’s steps were noisy, wide, and he circled his ten feet around the table to Hollander like a funeral march, exactly seven steps taken, each one echoing on Shane’s cranial chest as a reminder of how unacceptably sinful he is. How sinful are his thoughts, spread on the floor between their shoes, how sinful are his hands, which have not yet touched or done anything wrong, but it seemed that by God’s wish they would be cut off for what he did not do and did not touch.

Shane wasn’t particularly religious, but it dawned on him that the moment felt like divine revelation.

After nearly four thousand milliseconds, Rozanov unscrupulously invaded his rather vague private space, laid his hand on the table and leaned down. And even if he had no position to bend over Hollander, so critically great was their difference in status and yet small in size, Shane forgot about it thoroughly, and Ilya looked and felt like a boulder about to fall and crush his tiny little body. Shane did not look at Ilya. Shane purposefully and demonstratively did not look at Ilya.

The breath smeared on Shane’s cheek. A strong palm pressed down his shoulder, although the touch was almost featherlight. The commotion of their colleagues leaving the building three stories under, the screeching of the tires and the echoes of the street noise as a whole came to a halt — and silence. Silence and Ilya’s breath, and only Ilya’s, because Shane did not breathe at all.

His heart froze. His knees turned weak. A drop of sweat ran down his back.

He kept staring at his own blurred, barely visible reflection in the glass cabinets at the other end of the office and begged his body not to betray him, not to turn his head, and not to see Rozanov transgress any conceivable and unconceivable boundaries. And Shane never had even thought of ever forbidding him anything. Shane should have forbidden him at least something. Should have cursed, should have snitched, should have done anything to get him fired, or to get himself fired, or jump off a roof, or whatever — but not that, not ever that, not get himself surrounded by Ilya’s everything or nothing, fire-breathing into his ear, from which the insides melt and his psyche went nuts, and then bananas, and then collected those nuts and those bananas and baked a fucking Shane-shaped cookie to feed Rozanov on a silver plate.

Ilya should have been banned. Locked in a cell. Expelled from the country.

If Ilya had suddenly disappeared, at all or at this particular moment, Shane would have hung himself up, because the only thing that kept him operating was the determination with which Ilya sniffed his hair, as if he tried to smell even the slightest resistance.

Hollander smelled, probably, only as an extraterrestrial passion, doubts, willingness, madness for Ilya, and agreement to everything that he could have wanted to do to him.

“I’m so tired of you. Fed up. Like, get out of here,” Rozanov croaked into his ear, but Shane didn’t see even in his peripheral where he pointed at, his head or his heart, because he shamefully squeezed his eyes shut. “Maybe, I should banged the translator girl, or the office manager, or the HR, your fucking assistant, don’t know, so it’s the same as everyone, yes? A fucking cliche. Like in movies, like always. So it’s fucking easier.

“But it’s you, capisce? It’s just you. My head, like, clicks only on you. You’re, fuck, you’re so… so you. That damn tie thing of yours, Jesus Christ. My fucking dick only knows your fucking name, don’t you get it? I got blisters on my hands, jerking off to you, you beautiful fucking thing. And if it was only my dick, God, no, you’re in my head, living rent fucking free, you’re in my brain, my heart, everywhere in me — I can’t, Shane, I can’t do it without you anymore, I never will, I sleep and see you, I wake and think about you, I want you, I love you, I hate you,” his voice broke off, and it certainly could mean something, but Hollander stopped thinking as though a short word starting with the letter L disconnected him from his own power block and threw him into the infinite spaces of cosmos, looking for a way back, into an electrified, tense, suddenly alien body. Ilya also used his own words. Ilya understood him completely. Ilya just told him “I love you, too” through the months of silence. “That your righteousness... Fuck you with your righteousness, let everything just be, just once in a lifetime, you and me, me and you, here, without all of your «don’t kiss» and «stop», because you also want me, you told me.

“And I’m already sick of your principles, I’m ready to nail you to the wall and fuck you sensless to fuck all this sensless shit out of you, you know? Goddamit, just look at me already!”

And, breaking along his voice, Rozanov snatched the handles of Shane’s chair and turned it with him face-to-face. His heart popped, struck the palate of his mouth and fell far into the abyss; Shane raised his eyes and finally fully understood that to let Ilya in here was the most disgusting, stupid, brainless idea he’s ever had.

This had been the last stronghold of his resistance, but Ilya was already here, already inside, and it’s a diversion, a planned attack, a revolution; and there was no longer a trace of Mr. Hollander, only Shane, who was loved, wanted and hated, and who felt the same.

“Fu-uck, your eyes, Shane. So beautiful,” whispered Rozanov, and everything was immediately clear to Shane, too.

He wasn’t the only one with a leaking head, they both were occupying each other’s on a constant basis.

In his head there ran a creeping line of realization that, right now, they would kiss like in the movies, in novels, in porn, kiss as if everything were simple; Ilya would take Shane’s face into his palms and bite into his lips like into a forbidden fruit, forbidden not by God, but Hollander himself, in whom there was no power left to forbid anything anymore. Not that the power had ever been there. And Ilya was close, so close, and the taste of his tongue could almost be felt on the palate of Shane’s mouth.

“Ilya…” he breathed out in the same whisper, and it turned out to be a thousand times nicer than he thought. Such a beautiful name he had, Ilya, flowing, not like a spring, but a red thread between them two. “The door, Ilya”.

Ilya Rozanov was a really perceptive man, because it took him exactly one second to realize that the key lay on the edge of the table, take it and jog to the door. A click of the lock made the goosebumps run down Shane’s back, and Ilya turning around made him freeze as an ice-carved effigy, so pitch-black Rozanov eyes seemed. He flicked the lights off. Did not help: the megapolis was just as bright behind the big glass walls.

The clock’s ticking. Three, two, one.

Holes in the head turned into bullet wounds. Shane wanted to howl, scream, laugh, moan, but at first — at least inhale; Hollander could only sit, straightening his back, and watch as Rozanov slowly but surely reduced the distance between them. At one moment Shane dreamt that the distance was a hundred light-years, at another — that Ilya had already been close to him, right in front of him, so close as if under his skin.

“You look like greenie called on the carpet to terrible, scary supervisor,” a smirk stretched slightly trembling Ilya’s lips. This tremor was the only thing that gave out an insane desire in him, no less than in Shane himself.

Insane not in ferocity, but solely because they have gone completely crazy about each other.

In lieu of an answer he only stayed silent. His hands were sweating like the real stereotypical greenie, and the chair seemed pretentiously inappropriate, and, it felt like, completely stopped supporting his weight — his body was flying somewhere in the unknown depths of Hell with more acceleration than a free fall.

“You’re so beautiful, Shane”. Rozanov’s voice lowered to the barely discernible hush. He came up close and looked down as the soldiers were being looked at before being knighted; and Shane really wanted to kneel in front of Ilya.

No one intended to make him no knight — he was being prepared to be burned at the stake as a heretic or a sinner, he was led to the gallows as a never cracked partisan, his guards staged a palace coup and sent him for execution to the most cruel of executioners. And Ilya has already bared his sword. No knights — just flying heads, happily hopping in the direction of a nearest crack house.

It was so much like death, and Shane did feel really dead, but only because he had never been so alive as he was now — sitting before Rozanov, whom he wanted and saw in his dreams, perhaps, loved, like nobody, no one else, and never again, never a Mr. Hollander, but simply a Shane, who knows, what will happen next.

“What, you have nothing to say? Swallowed your tongue?” Shane had no ounce of will in him to correct the idiom about the cat. And it was anything but clear if Ilya was mocking him or just didn’t know if Shane was still there, alive and with him.

Shane was alive. Shane was ready to die at that moment if Rozanov kissed him. Shane could only stare like a madman, and the thoughts in his leaking head sounded like gibberish, as if he had forgotten what it was like to talk, and in these thoughts there were so much of Ilya — Ilya, please, Ilya, I’m begging you, Ilya, take me, Ilya, kiss me, for God’s sake, Ilya, Ilya-Ilya-Ilya-Ilyailyailyailya — that it felt like his subconscious had suddenly started speaking tongues.

Rozanov’s hot fingers touched his neck, outlined the sharp line of his jaw, chin, right cheek — Shane was ready to offer the left one, — his cheekbone and, as if it was not enough, his lips. Pressed. Shane did not realize that he opened his mouth obediently, like a cheap toy, until he felt the roughness of Ilya’s fingers on his tongue. He wanted to clench his jaws shut and break apart Ilya’s middle phalanges. He wanted to cease to exist.

“Well, no. Not swallowed,” Ilya commented, fingers still on Shane’s tongue. So, it was a mocking. Pejorative, in his own perverted fashion. “So you can tell me what you want”.

And, giving Shane an opportunity to squeeze out even something coherent, pulled out the fingers, leaving two parallel wet marks on his cheek with his own saliva. How disgusting. How fucking arousing.

Shane never closed his lips. Shane only watched. Shane felt as the ice sculptures, erected in memory of his past, were devoured by Ilya’s fire, dangerously reaching his ribs. Shane sat, his knees pressed closed, with trembling palms between them, and could not understand what he wanted more, to wake up or never wake up again, because it was too much like a dream.

Rozanov’s heavy hand fell sharply on his knee, he himself leaned further, closer, wrapped the second fist around Shane’s tie and pulled him closer, too, strangling and opening his second wind all at once, and it was too much, and Shane just stared into his eyes, like a beaten puppy and like the most excited dog in the whole universe.

“Tell me,” Ilya whispered so quietly that Shane imagined it rather than heard. Or they were just so close that Rozanov was already speaking with Shane’s lips. Pulling his thigh to the side, like a cavalry in attack, Ilya slipped his own between his knees. The radar of Shane’s lateral vision was hit by a striking boner protruding through the light tissue of Ilya’s pants; Shane hoped that he was just imagining it. “I can see you want. So what it is that you want?” 

The fire savoured Shane’s ribs. The holes in his head collapsed. Shane, desperately reddened by excitement and awkwardness, spread his legs, threw his head back and, like a virtuoso pianist, touched Ilya’s hand on his thigh with just the tips of his fingers. Everything started to feel like a performance.

He had never wanted anyone before like this.

“You,” Shane squeezed out through a tie closing around his neck. 

This was enough for the black to fill all of Ilya’s gaze, and his tongue to fill all of Shane’s mouth. He kissed wet, desperate, and demanding, he tasted like cognac and candy, and a little like electricity, he remained a boulder, unyielding and forcing everything that Hollander had only thought to set up as a defense. Hollander didn’t care about the defense anymore.

He closed his eyes and plunged into Ilya’s surprisingly dense lips, he hugged Ilya’s tongue with his own, he breathed in Ilya’s breath, he kissed like never before, and since there was no one to learn from, apparently Ilya’s mouth was carved perfect for his kisses.

Having released himself and his demons, Shane took hold of Rozanov’s shoulders with his fingers and pulled him onto himself like a blanket. Ilya, never releasing a hold on his cravat, trailed his other hand up, along the thigh, squeezing malleable flesh, until he sensed that the classic trousers concealed beneath them exactly the same treacherously and obviously firm cock as his own. His contented smile in a kiss tasted like burnt sugar.

“Legs still working?” Ilya asked but never waited for an answer — pulled the tie, forcing him to stand up, and Shane stood up, and it would be shameful, but it simply wasn’t and could not have been.

Never getting a chance to catch up with Ilya in their similar height, Shane at the same moment was crammed with his ass to the table, Ilya between his hideously spaced legs. He felt dizzy, but it was okay.

Ilya’s hands were everywhere: on his neck, in his hair, on his buttocks, they squeezed, touched and caressed, they sneaked under an untucked shirt and ruined his hairdo, they choked and caused explosions in his brain when Ilya imprudently touched up his blood-soaked cock, while looking for somewhere to grab. Ilya’s lips were where they were supposed to be — in the captivity of Shane’s lips. Sometimes, inadvertently, teeth.

Spreading all over the table, Shane just couldn’t anymore, and hardly would ever can. It was as if he saw with his fingertips, when he stroked Ilya’s abs under the T-shirt, it was as if he heard with his lips, when Ilya barely audibly moaned into his mouth and lost the rhythm of breathing, it was as if he breathed through his skin, stifled by Ilya’s tongue, he was a tense nerve, full of mixed sensations, like an epitome of debauchery falling into open hell. He was all, whole and complete, one large erogenous zone for Ilya’s hands.

And judging by the fact that Rozanov could not find a place for these hands, Shane did even worse things to him than he did to Shane.

The whole office seemed to be fogged up. Ilya, forgetting his lips, bit and licked his neck, turning the skin into an impressionist masterpiece or a battlefield — it depends on who’s watching. Shane was afraid to open his eyes, so as not to see the quarterly report, contemptuously looking at him from the desk, and remember how not more than 24 hours ago he had been here berating financiers for inattentiveness. Now it was him at this table, debauched ruthlessly, but, goddamn, did it feel inhumanly good.

“I want you, Ilya,” something utterly stupid fell from his tortured lips. Shane started to pray so that Rozanov hadn’t heard it, but he had, and the blush on his cheeks caught fire again.

“I got it the first time,” Ilya croaked into his neck, leaving another bite mark and nervously trying to pull the knot on the tie. Did they start undressing? Shane wasn’t ready for them to start undressing.

In fact, he was, judging by his hands, that on their own accord began to pull Ilya’s stupid hoodie from his shoulders.

“No, Ilya, I want— ”

“I got it, blyat, got it!”

“No, stop”.

If the effort that it took Hollander to push Ilya off his neck could be estimated, Shane would have been bankrupt already. Ilya looked at him with either much judgment, or much delight, and it cost Shane a great deal — certainly bankrupt — not to go crazy at the sight of his deep-soaked face, so delirious, full of primordial arousal.

Shane breathed out. Grabbed a forgotten shot of cognac and poured it into his mouth, dripping some at the collar of his shirt. Grimaced, but did not cough, then looked into Ilya’s eyes and sharply — a little too much so — stuck his hand up his pants. Wet precum and sweat smudged his fingers. One could have blamed the cognac, but it was only seconds ago, and Shane had never felt more sober.

Having almost fallen, Rozanov perked himself up with his hands on the table on either side of Shane and breathed sharply. His breath was heaved. Pupils shone, eyelashes trembled. Shane was irrationally pleased with the way Ilya went insane only because of him.

“You want to jerk me off?” Ilya clarified in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. “Or what do you want?”

His gaze felt like a rifle scope. He waited like both a hunter and a hidden tiger, but they both understood — he knew that Shane would answer him.

Squeezing his cock harder, Hollander decided to forget that he had promised himself never to curse in life, remembered what Ilya had said and whispered as confidently as he could, knowing that Ilya would understand what he meant —  his principles, and Shane himself, and all this fucking life:

“I want you to fuck me. Just fuck me”. There was nothing “just” nor simple, neither before nor after there was and will be, but now Shane just wanted to leave the world behind the locked door of the cabinet and Ilya’s cock inside him. He wanted it rough, shameless, in the most direct of meanings, so that in his head truly would not remain any of the stupidity, of his past, of his doubts and fears, so that in his head there would be only Ilya, and inside him — only Ilya, and everywhere — Ilya. He also wanted love. All at the same time. “How you said? Fuck me senseless, Ilya”.

Shane stopped them just because he wanted Ilya to know that he heard him, thought about it and agreed.

One could read just in Ilya’s numb posture and glazed-over eyes how vividly he imagined this. Specifically this, all or this that Shane asked for and agreed to. Here, on this table, shouting, cursing, as if he were taking not his body but his soul, ghastly color of the office walls and the sounds of the city behind the windows be damned.

And while it all could be read, Ilya stayed silent. Standing immobile, barely breathing, hardly thinking about anything, as though it wasn’t him who had spoken of it a few minutes ago, as if he did not think that Shane was just as crazy.

Maybe, Shane said something wrong. Maybe, he needed to apologize and leave. Maybe, he had to pull Ilya closer and stop him from leaving. Maybe, it all wasn’t necessary, maybe they made a mistake when they wanted to go this far, or maybe it was Shane who made a mistake when he decided that Ilya was serious. Maybe it’s time to go back to his empty apartment smelling of despair, to his loneliness, to being drunk without alcohol, to his piles of notebooks and meaningless reports, it’s time to put the tempted train back on track, delete phone numbers, throw away this damn tie, go to Siberia — sure, to Siberia, where no one will know how stupidly and spectacularly he fucked up everything he could have had.

He just had to say something so ludicrous. Yeah, he should’ve thought first.

No, it wasn’t the cognac. It was Shane, finally hitting his lowest.

“Blyat,” Ilya roared suddenly and clenched the clinging belt buckle on the Hollander’s pants. “Goddamnit, you—”

“Ilya,” Shane called and burst out laughing for no reason.

“What the fuck are you doing to me, suka, what the actual fuck,” Ilya pulled out both the belt from his pants and the button from the loop, and almost tore the zipper; Ilya finally untied his fucking cravat and clenched it in his fist, opened Shane’s shirt so haphazardly the buttons almost fell off, and sank his teeth into the wet sweat of his Adam’s apple. Ilya had just hit his lowest just at the same speed, too. “You’re so, Jesus, you’re so—”

“Ilya—”

“Fuck, Shane, I love you”.

“Ilya!”

It was too close to a moan.

It was a moan.

He must have been heard by the whole building, heard by the Devil, heard by the God, heard by everyone — so let them hear. With his fingers wrapped around Shane’s naked thigh, Ilya bent his leg up so hard that his pants almost ripped and started to tug them off together with the boots. And Shane would try to help, truly he would, but he was too busy trying to keep himself standing, leaving bruises on Ilya’s back with the ferocity he clenched onto it with.

His trousers slammed against the wall and fell pathetically on the floor. His underwear, which had been badly smeared with precum, flew there as well. Shane was left in a lonely, shriveled, thrown open shirt, and he liked, so much his head went round, to stand almost naked in front of still-dressed Ilya. He was probably right. Perhaps Shane had kinks that he didn’t know about.

He made noises, hoarse and moaning, which he had never heard from himself. He stumbled over thoughts that had never occurred to him before. He wanted things he was ashamed of half an hour ago.

“Tell me if it hurts,” Ilya ordered, stroking Shane's painstakingly hard cock and spreading the precum all over his fingers, then spat on them for a good measure, and entered Shane just for half a knucklebone.

Was it too much? No. Was it not enough? No, neither. It was just the right amount for Shane to suffocate — he suddenly was lacking oxygen. And Ilya moved his finger deeper, deeper, until his knuckles touched Shane’s skin, and there was pain, sure, but the desire was greater.

They should’ve drawn the curtains, and not because an unknown monster could have peeped, but because the artificial light of the city, falling on Ilya’s face and side, did not help it to look as if there was nothing to watch. Everything was in full view, from a little sweat drop on Ilya’s forehead to his snagged lips that still trembled, so vulgarly open towards another’s lips and fingertips. The whole Ilya was in full view, expressively firm, bayoneting Shane onto his fingers like a glove doll, as if he knew everything and could do it all, too. Shane knew nothing and could not do shit, but for reasons unknown to him understood that everything was happening as it should’ve been.

The noisy gasps were slowly tinged with quiet grunts, and Shane’s mouth was dry, and his eyes were frazzled, but in synchrony with Ilya’s hand movements the warmth covered all of his body, sweet sirup-like warmth, and it stuck to all surfaces, making him forget that not earlier than yesterday he felt unbearably cold.

Ilya was emitting heat like a stove, his tongue tickled the skin over Shane’s chest, his thighs pressed Shane’s thighs deeper into the table, leaving no chance to escape, break out, change his mind, but Rozanov’s boner, pressed into his right leg that was enveloped across Rozanov’s back, left no doubts to begin with. There was nothing to change one’s mind over. There was nothing to think about.

A second finger — and there was an electric current running through Shane’s veins.

A third one — and Shane began to contemplate if he was ever a man at all, and not a lump of an endless Ilya’s name, not one loud unquenchable moan.

Whether the cognac hit him in the head or there was absolutely no air, Shane ceased to understand where he was, who he was and why he was, and Ilya seemed to kiss him everywhere all at once. Just the thought of «Ilya Rozanov fucks me with his fingers» and a caught-up «on my desk» took all his breath away, and it all became so good that the name came out uncalled for, broken, pitiful:

“Ilya-a”.

“Da, rodnoy?” Ilya’s voice answered from somewhere around his chest. He cursed and translated, “yes, sweetheart?”

Shane was close to needing an ambulance.

“Ilya”.

“You’re asking for me or just moaning?”

And he, the smartest fucking man on the planet, paused for a couple of seconds, pulled his damn tongue away from Shane’s skin to let him breathe just a little bit and formulate a thought. The next moment he must have regretted it, because Shane, whose mind had gone to a deeply wrong place, whispered, like a prayer:

“Can you call me by my full name? No. I mean, formally. Like you should”.

“W-what?” Ilya was visibly taken aback like it was the last thing he expected.

“Mr. Hollander. I’m Mr. Hollander. Can you? Please”.

“I remember”.

“Please”.

Ilya’s face screamed an uncomplicated «fuck», and Shane had never agreed with him more.

Rozanov was an asshole. Rozanov had never called him that, except that one time Shane was never able to wipe from his memory. Rozanov in no conceivable way cared about authority and, for a moment definitely, was close to cursing him out and leaving for good, but he didn’t. Instead, he rolled this name, new to both of them, on his tongue. Back and forth, a couple of times, silently, with only his lips, but that was enough for both of them to understand:

Right now.

“I underestimated your kinks, Mr. Hollander,” Ilya said with a demonic smirk, in murderously sinister chatter, just before abruptly pulling out his fingers and in one movement, as if without any effort, turning Shane face-first to the table. “Open for me, please, sir”.

He looked in his pockets and threw a condom on the table, then sank his teeth into the spine of Shane’s neck. Shane didn’t have enough arms, not at all; he could hardly hold on to the table, like a formless jelly, clinging to the edge of it with both hands, and those trembled so vigorously that he knew: sooner or later he would be pressed to this fucking table and be just fucked senseless, and he’d like it, and he’d want more.

It was even funny how quickly he turned into an unsatisfied sixteen-year-old who only dreamed of orgasm.

Suddenly there was a soft cloth on his neck, unmistakably interpreted as a tie but more like a noose; Ilya clenched the ends of his fist, wrapped it around his palm a couple of times and pulled so hard that Shane barely stopped himself from hitting the floor. His legs didn’t hold him anymore, and it wasn’t necessary — Rozanov handled it perfectly.

“I asked you to open it for me, Mr. Hollander,” Ilya said into his ear, unacceptably strictly, pulling his neck back more and more with a tie, until Shane’s head practically fell on his shoulder. His opened and worked-up inside felt cold and insultingly empty, and his hard cock seemed to drip even more, showing how damn much Shane liked it, and there was a lot of it, and it was so contrasting, and Shane was in the middle of it all, naked and helpless, and that was just right. “I’m still waiting”.

“Hug me right now, or I’ll fall, I’ll fucking fall and won’t stand up,” he muttered so sincerely that it could count for confession, but sin was only ahead.

And Ilya did, he hugged him, across his chest, firmly, immovably, and the confidence of his hands would sweep Shane from his feet if he could stand. Shane lifted his hands off the table for a try and fell forward, but Ilya had a steel grip on his body, even with all his weight. Ilya held him like a feather.

The package gave way to his shaking hands only the third time, the legs gave out completely and so abruptly Shane only got to slap the rubber into Ilya’s palm and would have surely fallen and hit the table, but Rozanov did not let him. Like a sacred scripture — Ilya would never let him fall in this life.

“Does it really turn you on so much?” he asked from behind his back, somewhat untrustingly, tugging his pants with his underwear in one move down to his ankles and stretching the condom along the shaft. There was no trace of rigor, but for Shane, honestly, it had already been enough.

One more order of his and Shane would come right that instant.

“More than you can imagine”.

“When you said to fuck you, you mean, like, fuck you?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Ilya tarried, and it was too unforgivable, so Shane turned over his shoulder and looked him straight in the eye, saying:

“Rough. Brutal. I want it hard and messy. Yes, it turns me the fuck on. No, it won't hurt. Ilya, I want you to pin me onto this table and fuck me senseless like—”

Rozanov did not let him finish, having pulled his necktie again to an involuntary groan. With a single movement of his hand he brushed the papers off the table, a shot of cognac crushed on the floor, and with the same hand he sharply, almost in a punch, pressed Shane’s chest against the varnished wood. He leaned down, bit his ear and whispered, hoarsely and low:

“Yes, sir. And I also love it rough, brutal, and messy, Mr. Hollander”.

And, contrary to his own words, he entered Shane slowly, deliberately, and fully.

Shane moaned, so strangled and loud, so openly, and so sincerely, that it was possible to found a new religion over his moan. Inside his skull box, a supernova has exploded.

He stopped being a manager in an instant, he stopped being Mr. Hollander, he stopped being Shane, too, he completely stopped being a person as a whole. He was only a man in the hands of another man, christed on a table, protected from the world only by a shirt and the other man’s mighty back, and in this man concentrated all the pleasure, all the pain and all the love that the universe had ever created.

It burned and pulled on Shane’s insides, and they really should’ve waited, with everything in the world — just waited, with life, with dreams, with sex, but Ilya pulled out a little and pushed back again, and again, strongly, particularly, with each time going further, with each time thrusting deeper, even though it felt like there was no deeper anymore. Shane closed his eyes, and only these frictions remained, really rough, but necessary. Frictions and deep breathing. And the voice. Seemed like it was calling Shane by his name.

Shane called for him too. Once, twice. He broke out in a moan — called again. Louder and louder, without realizing that it was not his heart that was rattling, but his elbows on the table and legs of the table on the floor. He was lost in space and time, having lost the meaning of Ilya’s name, too.

It wasn’t that fast, but it was rough, so much so that the pencil box flipped over and the pens rolled all over the floor, so that the table squealed pitifully, so that his cock banged on the inside of the countertop. Rozanov held him by the waist and pulled onto himself, struck straight on the prostate, every fucking time, and Shane was simply not able to breathe between the moans, which were steadily becoming more that of a scream.

There were tears threatening to spill over his eyes, but his hair falling onto his face hid them from the whole world, leaving only Shane with the sensation, and that was just a little bit too much.

“Faster, c’mon, faster,” he whimpered, tightly, too close to losing his voice, and this voice did really betray the way he was on the verge of crying.

Ilya either did not notice, or understood that these tears did not mean pain but only that emotions were so high they left no place in Shane for the tears to stay in. And Ilya, sliding one hand under his shirt, squeezed his shoulder and really began to push faster, even more energetically, drilling Shane into the wretched table, drilling into there all his own and Shane’s moans, too, together with all the months lost, all the unnecessary words said to each other, all the important ones that were left unsaid.

Shaking his hair off his face, Hollander threw his head back and barely managed to focus. Thought it would be better if the whole office was really fogged up, because, although very inconspicuous, indistinct, vague, he still reflected in the glass doors of the cabinet: his chest on the table, face all wet, moaning a foreign name, and behind him — Ilya, unscrupulously invading his body, with the audacity and brutality of the king. Disgusting.

A fucking art.

“Ilya— Ilya, I’m gonna—” the words barely came out of him.

“Yes, yes, moy horoshiy, yes, me too,” Rozanov could barely speak himself. The sex erased all requests for rudeness, for such treatment from his memory, and he leaned down to touch a vertebrae, bared from under Shane’s ragged shirt, with his lips. Then he stroked his arm from Shane’s shoulder down under the table, found his leaking dick and wrapped his fingers around it — ohjesusfuckingchrist. “Me too, yes, c’mon”.

Ilya jerked him off in the rhythm of his own trusts, Ilya accelerated to the point where the slaps of thighs on thighs seemed to merge into one, Ilya groaned something between «Shane, oh, Shane», «davai» and «fucking hell», Ilya drove him to exhaustion and did not restrain himself for a bit. Ilya was everywhere, Ilya looked at him through the windows, Ilya filled Shane’s entire mouth with his name, Ilya was the hot air around them and the table under his chest, Ilya brushed his sides and unceremoniously fucked him as brazenly as he was asked to do so; Ilya was everyhing and everything was Ilya, Ilya was a disease that poisoned his already sick brain, Ilya was the name of the new update of Shane’s entire new operating-nervous system, Ilya, Ilya-Ilya-Ilya.

Shane lasted another ten seconds — he really thought it was closer to five years — and, yelling this fucking «Ilya!» for the entire visible universe to hear, came into Ilya’s fist, a little bit onto the floor and the computer tower. He shook so hard his chin hit the counter, his toes spasmed, and the orgasm was no less than a continuous pain, so long it was, so bright and dazzling. For a moment, it felt as though he had stopped seeing and hearing, and for the near eternity — stopped speaking altogether.

Having not yet learned how to breathe again, Hollander realized, with a distant part of consciousness that hadn’t descended in the astral to conquer the peaks of bliss, that Ilya thrusted twice again into an unwittingly clenched hole, then fell on him with all his body and roared another curse into the skin of his back. Ilya twitched, twitched a lot, and Shane couldn’t believe he was probably twitching the same way.

What a fucking platitude to finish together.

Shane laughed, realizing that he had neither the strength nor the desire to stand up, and that he would not have been able to do so anyway because Rozanov pressed him to the table with all his weight.

“Come here”, Shane heard a second before Ilya collected him into his arms and crawled down to the floor with him.

The floor was cold to sit on it, especially naked with his skin so hot, but Shane kept silent, put his head on Rozanov’s chest and let him sink his fingers into Shane’s already sprawled hair — not to grab it and pull, but just to softly brush through, breathing into his temple. So gently. Hollander did not know that Ilya could be gentle.

“Gimme your paw, kitten,” he asked and, as Shane barely raised his hand, instantaneously intertwined their fingers into one awkward but correct hold. “You alive in there?”

“Fucking hell,” was the only thing Shane could mutter as his eyes fluttered shut.

“Yeah, I agree, fucking hell. If I throw the condom out into your bin, what will the janitor lady think?”

“That I had an exhilarating intercourse with the quartal report or something. I guess”.

Ilya laughed loudly and so, so unexpectedly brightly. He hugged Shane tighter and slapped his lips onto Shane’s temple, and Shane thought that he probably wanted to go out for a smoke. He wouldn’t let him. He decided not to.

“You joke, then you’re definitely alive. And fuck the janitor lady, you were yelling so loud that probably even pigeons know we’re fucking”.

“Are we fucking?”

“Well, fucked. And I hope we’ll fuck again. And, shit, you’re contagious, I feel bad cursing in your temple of money and, what, graphs and tables in Chinese or whatever. Ugh, damn, sacred place,” Ilya, never stopping laughing, tried to get out of Shane’s arms and take off the condom, all at the same time, but it seemed he fucked the coordination out of himself completely. “C’mon, get up, your ass will freeze”.

“It’s not Chinese, it’s maths,” Shane mumbled instead of an intelligible answer, ignored Ilya’s whatever gesture and allowed him to lift him on his feet, sit him down on the chair that had fallen over at some point, and put a couple of napkins in his hands. Shane wasn’t feeling sleepy, he simply forgot how it is to perform some basic existence. His body felt empty, his heart was beating in the ribs even faster than Ilya had beaten himself onto his prostate, and it seemed that from the just tips of his fingers one could provide electricity to the whole building. Probably, the whole city.

“Here, put it on”, Ilya handed him his own hoodie, and when Shane did not even try to lift his hand to retrieve it, just wrapped him in the hoodie himself, ever so tenderly and carefully. “I don’t know where you learned all that, but you fuck like damn God,” he muttered under his breath while he walked towards the bin to throw out the used rubber and simultaneously pulled the pants back up from where he left them on his ankles, and all that, most likely, to prevent the situation from turning into a huge embarrassment. Shane was silent. Ilya had a bunch of nonsense spilling out. Perhaps there was nothing to save anymore. “Don’t get me wrong, I mean, looking at your convoluted fucking face, I though that sex with you would feel like fucking a lamp. But honestly, I thought I’d be done in a minute. Maybe it’s just that I’m so into you, I don’t know,” Ilya wandered to the cupboard and opened the doors, looking at the assortment of cookies, neatly labeled binders and tupperware he kept forgetting to bring home. “Want some tea?”

Shane had his heart taken out and got Ilya put in there instead, otherwise he could not explain why one look at Rozanov made him so warm and cozy inside, as if he was nine again and his mother gave him a blanket before sleeping.

“I love you, too,” Shane blurted out into the moonlit space of the office, hadn’t thought that the offer of some tea doesn’t ask for such a reply. Even a marriage proposal couldn’t be answered like this. What would even be answered like this?

Ilya turned around so sharply that in ten years he would surely need chiropractic help. It is good that Shane had a vision of minus two, because such a sincere expression of the purest original love on Ilya’s face would not be something his pathetic little heart, swapped for Ilya in his chest, could’ve ever withstood.

“Put on your pants, gore moyo lukovoye”, Rozanov chuckled at him, pulling out the sugar bowl. “Green or black?”

“Green. And kiss me again”.

And Ilya kissed him, and even more than once, and only laughed when Shane dared to be angry that there was no button on his pants.

_________________

August, 2025. Ottawa. Epilogue.

It was a sunny afternoon, the day Shane allotted to meet Hayden after months of not seeing him. Hayden hugged him tight and handed him a coffee mug with the exact order Shane loved.

“Hey, Hollander, you look…” he started, but Shane didn’t let him finish. He knew exactly how he looked, this end of the quarter.

“What, half-dead?” Shane scoffed, but Hayden shook his head and surprised him with a reply.

“Happy”.

It wasn’t something new. A lot of people told Shane he looked different. Some said inspired, some speculated about him being promoted in the near future. Ilya mostly said he looked like a satisfied penguin, whatever it meant.

Shane only smiled to himself, shrugged, and asked Hayden about his life. The kids, the new job, Jackie. They laughed, mostly, annoying the other guests of the cafe, and the whole time Shane’s phone lit up with notification after notification. Hayden glanced on the screen once or twice, exasperated.

“What does this guy want?” he asked when the phone dinged with the twentieth message.

“Who?”

“Rozanov,” apparently, Hayden could read Cyrillic script. Or, Shane realised belatedly, he recognized the profile picture, of course, Ilya used the same smiley one in their Slack, too. “Something at work?”

Shane glanced at the text.

илюшенька @roz.ebisonovsekonem 

hey i found a cat 13:19

we have a cat 13:19

his name is Gav 13:20

i mean Woof 13:20

if you throw him away im leaving with him 13:20

“Yeah, we’re bringing a new colleague in,” Shane hid a smile in the rim of the cup.

“Really?”

“M-hm, hopefully he’s not bald”.

It was a Thursday. He and Ilya had their own little rituals, and on Thursdays they cooked an elaborate meal together and had a romantic dinner. Also, sex, but that one they had not only on Thursdays.

They lived together. Ilya had moved in a month ago, Shane had proposed an idea when one morning he realized he didn’t want to ever wake up alone again. He’d made Ilya stay, then walked him through the convoluted way the bedroom and bathroom drawers were organized, and had a good-natured laugh every day when Ilya purposefully messed up the order of his skincare bottles or put sauces in the egg container in their fridge. They still annoyed each other in any way they could, Ilya kissing him in the middle of the movie and Shane hiding his socks in all the wrong places, but mostly just loved. Ilya still smiled, but a lot more, and talked about home a little. Shane talked about his fuck-up, too.

Ilya insisted it was not his fault and he shouldn’t’ve been forced to try so hard to cover up the awful thing someone else had done. Shane mostly let it go and told him once that he was grateful for it, as it brought him Ilya in the first place.

Shane had introduced Ilya to his parents, too. The velocity Ilya had bonded with his dad should’ve been concerning, but he and Yuna had a good laugh at their partners every time they had a family dinner. That was a Friday ritual, and Shane never ever missed those anymore.

It was a Thursday, and Shane sneezed twice. He also spilled his coffee a little. Those weren’t the things that gave him away, when Hayden caught up, finally.

“Oh, God, are you in love?” he asked when their coffees were drunk and lunches almost finished.

“Maybe,” Shane smiled secretively.

“It’s Rozanov, isn’t it?”

“Wha— How?!”

Not so secretive, he was, right?

“Probably because he has been blowing off your phone for the last half-hour and you only smiled at that”. Hayden nudged his shin with his foot and shook his head, amused.

“Oh. Well. Yeah”.

Then Hayden asked just the right question upon leaving.

“So he makes you happy?”

And Shane did not want to be secretive about it at all.

“Yes. The happiest”.