Archive of Our Own

Perhaps this is memory already forming. He feels sweat on his chest where his t-shirt rubs against his skin. Sweat beneath his hands where they rest on the mattress. Sweat on his back, trapped between his skin and his brother’s body on top of him. Sweat on his ass where his brother’s hips are slapping into him. Sweat against his cheek where it chafes against the pillow. Every drop is very clear and he follows each of them - all of them at once. He is in every one of them, looking out. The world is glassy. Time is glassy. It might have been going on for a while. He’s in pain. He’s bored.

He doesn’t know what happens. Suddenly something is rising inside of him that he can immediately feel is bigger than him. He can’t stop it. White, blinding pressure inside every cell of his body and he won’t stretch. Panic returns. He can’t use it. He swallows what builds up in his mouth, he closes his eyes. Something will happen or it won’t.

The rubber band snaps. For a second he doesn’t know he’s not dead.

“Did you cum? Ilya?”

A memory - “did you piss the bed again?” He feels his brother’s hand snaking between him and the mattress, checking his belly, checking his thighs. It’s clear to Ilya what he's looking for and he won't find it because it hasn't happened because his body can't do it. He squirms under his brother’s touch as Alexei rubs his dick - clinical, testing for wetness.

“You get off on it,” Alexei says.

He grabs Ilya’s t-shirt between the shoulders in great handfuls, shaking him aimlessly - uselessly, he can’t lift Ilya completely off the bed. He’s tossing him about. It’s not effective but it’s angry, it’s real. He pulls Ilya’s hair, his head back all the way and lets go and pulls it again and pulls hard, one knee in the small of Ilya’s back.

"You fucking get off on it. You fucking faggot. You piece of shit fucking faggot, you fucking cocksucker shit -”

The blows hurt where they land, shoulders, back, ribs, sides. Alexei's face is red and scrunched up like he's going to cry.

"Fuck you," he says, slamming Ilya's head into the bedpost - he is crying, voice thick with snot. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you."

Alexei is stronger than him but he's not strong. He tires himself out. Still, it takes some time - not a long time, but some. He rolls off him. Ilya slips out of the imprint of their bodies. He's dizzy, which is nothing new. He's drooling blood and he wipes it all up on his t-shirt. He wants to sit; he can't, because his brother's cum is leaking out of him and he doesn't want to make a stain on the carpet. He crouches against the wall, staring. His brother's body, flat on the bed - his chest heaving, his soft cock hanging between his legs. He's got more hair, thicker, darker. A fleck of - something is drying up on his thigh. If it's not shit, it's blood. Ilya carefully presses the pad of his finger against his hole and stares at the wetness. Inconclusive.

"You like it," Alexei says - wiping his nose on the back of his hand.

"You like it," Ilya replies.

Alexei raises himself on his elbows to stare at him. The bed is high. His toes are barely brushing against the carpet.

"There's something wrong with you," he says. "Do you know that?"

Ilya shrugs. He tries not to move his head too much because every time he does his entire world flips around him. Little dots of colour sing across his vision. He doesn't want to close his eyes.

"Ilya," Alexei says.

He hops off the bed. He comes to Ilya on his hands and knees: quick and childlike, a quick, conspiratorial scamper.

"I'm talking to you," he says - close enough for his breath to catch in Ilya's eyelashes, and it's close and warm and damp, close like a blanket nest, almost nose-to-nose in the shared heat of their bodies. "Can you…”

His voice trails off. He reaches out to touch the blood on Ilya's face, his brow furroughed - vague worry, vague concern, vague fear. Vague -

"Does it hurt?" he asks.

"It's okay," Ilya says.

Alexei licks his thumb and swipes it across Ilya's chin. It's a sticky, gritty slide, and suddenly Ilya's body is too tight, his skin is too prickly, too narrow, too pierced with millions of tiny holes. Light comes in, blinding, the pain in his head flares, his asshole is bright with raw burning wetness, his mouth is thick and huge and drilled open and he screams, suddenly splattered all over the room, suddenly one enormous explosion and absent except for the scream which must, and must and must and must.

"Shhhh," Alexei whispers, roughly gathering him into his arms, pressing his brother's sobs to his chest until they sound very far away, like they're coming from under water. "Shhh, shhhh, it's okay, it's okay, quiet now, be quiet, come on -"

Two black eyes, a split lip. Alexei tells their parents that they fought over whose turn it was to play Chip in Rescue Rangers 2 and that he won. He takes his punishment like a man while Ilya's mother ices his face and kisses his hair, pushing one finger into his mouth to look for loose teeth.

Their mother dies. Every night for six months Alexei crawls into Ilya's bed - pours himself across the floor of their shared bedroom and appears. He holds Ilya to him and sniffs him everywhere: the hair, the neck, the armpits, the creases of his thighs, his feet, and then his asscrack, the space behind his balls. Their smells mingle as their skins warm against each other, as they sweat lightly in the overheated room. Always naked, always slippery. Alexei touches and Ilya doesn't. Sometimes he falls asleep, his brother hovering over him. He feels the breath moving on his skin, and this scent he's always known - a squeezing pressure behind his forehead. His eyes close. The smallest fibers, the tiniest clumps of cells: dissolved.

He gets scouted, and then scouted, and then scouted for real. The road begins. He shares bedrooms, showers, locker rooms with armies of strangers. Sometimes, late at night, he listens to the breathing of a young boy, an arm’s length away, nasty hotel carpet between them, and he wonders.

Sex is fine - it’s better than fine. It’s good, it’s easy, it’s fun. It’s really hard to get, at least at first, but not impossible. He gets better at it. Svetlana is where it starts, and why shouldn’t it be? He’s known her forever. They grew up pushing each other around on the ice. He broke her nose, she chipped one of his teeth. They shared their first cigarette. He’d recognise her just by the smell of her hair, and so, it’s right. He wants it to be good for her, because it’s her first time; he thinks he does just okay. His fingers feel huge as he slides them down into the folds of her pussy and that worries him. She’s near the edge of the bed: he kneels on the floor between her legs so he can see what he’s doing, because her hole seems really small, and even one knuckle feels like overkill. Her clit is beautiful, wet, glistening, all that blood rushing under the surface. She smells good in a way he feels like he could have predicted - like herself, and different. It’s all different, but then, not so much. He strokes the hair on her mound and then the hair on her lips and then the hair spreading on the insides of her thighs, just watching. He didn’t realise clits got hard, which he supposes is stupid of him; he looks at it swelling, the rich, silky shine of the head peeking out from under the hood. He pulls it back slightly further to see what will happen and she hisses, her stomach tightening, her knees falling open around his hand. She doesn’t close her eyes and he meets her gaze over the stretch of her body. He strokes her a little randomly - not quite randomly, he’s watching her and he’s learning - until she digs the back of her heels into his shoulders, leverage to tilt her hips towards him, tense, close, asking. He’s hard and he wants her and he wants to cum and he wants to watch her cum and so he says “What do you need?” She rolls her eyes and - somehow - flutters her entire cunt at him, quick rhythmic contractions, her hole opening and closing. She says “What do you think?” When he pauses, looking at his hand on her belly, looking at her open, wet, blooming cunt, she rolls her eyes again. “Have you seen how big a baby’s head is, Ilya?” she asks. “Are you stupid?” And she sucks his fingers into her mouth, licks him clean, and she returns his hand to her cunt and says “Try again.” This time it’s a little better. He figures out he can finger her and roll her clit under his thumb at the same time, and she likes that. He knows she does because she whispers “Ilya, kiss me, please kiss me”, tiny breathless voice, eyes closed, a new Cherry Coke shade in her cheeks. He does. He feels her clench, her hips rolling, seeking. He comes up to kiss her, that way of doing it they’ve practiced together, and he doesn’t know what it is suddenly like pressure in his chest. He wants it to be good. When he feels her muscles rippling he follows the pull, moves deeper. He kisses her neck, he kisses her breasts, he kisses her cheeks and her hair and her nose and her shoulders and everywhere he can reach. He hopes she feels pretty. He hopes she knows he likes her. She feels so good around his fingers in a way he didn’t know was possible - not in terms of intensity, but in terms of what it touches in him, where it goes. These are places he didn’t know existed and she’s in them now. He rocks his hips in time with his hand, with her hips rising to meet him, just a need, for motion and for moving together. He doesn’t want her to be alone. He presses up against her, he’s so, so hard, kissing her, the hot, slick slide of her tongue. She moans into his mouth. He moans into hers. It’s going to be fast now, for him, the climb and the inevitable tipping point, he feels the momentum, he really hopes she’s close too because he can’t hold it, rising, filling pressure, her thighs clench around him, both her hands grip his face, “kiss me,” she whispers, eyes closed, “kiss me, kiss me, kiss me -”

He doesn’t know how to tell if they’re done and she has to bat his hand away to make him stop.

He pulls her on top of him completely unwilling to contain the stupid grin he can feel forming on his face. He squeezes her against him to feel her - gently, but to feel her, the soft weight of her breasts, her hair across his face, the up-down swell of their bellies pressing into each other. So good, what bodies can do, what they’ve just done together. When he lets her go she sits back on his hips, seemingly unbothered by the way his soft cock brushes against her ass. She’s not smiling but her eyes sparkle, her lip gloss smudged across her teeth.

“Cigarette?” she deadpans.

He kisses her hand, laughing. When she rolls over, reaching for her bag and offering him her pack, he accepts gratefully.

She smokes menthols now, which is a new development. He doesn’t ask about it. He cracks the capsule mostly to feel it crack, surprised as he always is by how much he likes the taste. He forgets. He’s going to forget again. He lifts his arm so she can wiggle herself under it, resting her head on his stomach - her arm extended across his hips, over the edge of the bed, careful to drop the ash before she moves over his body to bring the cigarette back to her mouth.

They smoke in silence. It’s companionable, her breathing tightening his nipple when it brushes over his skin. His fingers smell of her; the scent is changed now that it’s cooling, separated from her body. He’s surprised by how tired he feels: grasping, nauseous exhaustion. He’s underwater, weighted by tons of sea. He briefly covers his face with his hand just to feel the darkness. When it comes down, Svetlana is watching him, her eyes hooded, her mouth soft and thoughtful.

“Was that your first time?” she says. “I should’ve asked.”

“Uh, no,” Ilya says. “It’s - no.”

“Huh,” Svetlana says. “Okay. Who?”

“My, uh. My brother.”

She nods. It’s a slow gesture, but there’s no shock in it - no horror.

“Well, that’s fucked up,” she says.

“I know that,” Ilya replies.

She turns her mood ring around her middle finger. Orange, whatever that means.

“My dad sniffs my panties,” she says. “He’s never - you know, touched me. But he walks in on me in the bathroom all the time. When he’s drunk he tries to crawl into my bed. You know.”

“He sniffs your panties?” Ilya asks.

“Yeah. He steals them from the laundry basket. I think he jerks off with them.”

“Oh, really?” Ilya says.

She laughs as he reaches for her discarded underwear by the pillow and wipes himself up on it: not his cum, which seems dangerous, but his sweat, everything that’s cooled at his taint and behind his balls. She laughs harder as he buries the tiny handful of fabric between his asscheeks, theatrically dragging it back and forth over his hole.

“There,” he says finally, dropping the crumpled panties on the bed between them. “Leave that for him.”

“I don’t have anything else to wear,” she points out.

“Go home, drop those in the wash, get some new stuff, and come back,” Ilya says. “Sleep here for a few days. My father’s away, Alexei is doing some kind of deal in Chelyabinsk. We’ll have fun.”

“Chelyabinsk?” she asks - she’s laughing again, incredulously, a little mean in that way which is so warm because it’s shared, they’re being mean together. “What’s that loser doing in Chelyabinsk?”

“Seeing a guy about zinc,” he says. “He’s gonna be rich.”

“Doesn’t he have a job?” she asks. “Like, an actual job?”

“Fucking random women, stealing coke from the evidence locker, and waiting for hockey money,” he says. “Shouldn’t be long now. Just a year or two and it’ll start rolling in.”

“Are you going to give him anything?” Svetlana asks.

She’s on her side, looking up at him, her cheek resting against his arm. He strokes the shell of her ear, the tiny pinprick hole in the lobe.

“Yes,” he says after a few seconds.

Again, she nods. She takes his hand in hers and kisses his fingernails - her breath warm through the hard shell.

“Get an accountant,” she says. “Two accountants. One in Russia, one in the US. And a wealth manager.”

“I will,” he says.

He brushes his fingers along her naked shoulder and along her side, watching the trails of goosebumps he stirs up.

“I’m gonna be rich,” he says.

“Yes,” she tells him, looking steadily at him. “You will.”

“I’m glad,” he says.

She squashes her cigarette against the wood of the headboard, tossing the butt somewhere in his mess on the carpet. She resettles against him, pulling his arm over her shoulders. She’s small - delicate, maybe, fine-boned. He rests his hand on her hair, feeling the sinking, elastic give; the welcome.

“He’s going to hate it,” she says. “He’ll ask for money - it won’t be for the money. You’ll be rich and he’ll be poor and he won’t be able to stand it.”

“I know,” he says.

She rubs her face against him, seemingly content. Her eyes are closing.

“He’s a bastard,” she says, a little sleepily. “Fuck him.”

“And fuck your dad,” Ilya says - his thumb slotted behind her ear, stroking the warm, naked skin there.

“And fuck my dad,” she says. “But this was nice.”

It was. Ilya feels his cock twitch at the memory - at the knowledge, so new, not settled yet, not part of him yet. He kisses her hair.

“We’ll do it again,” he says. “If you want.”

“Sure,” she says. “Do you do ass stuff? I want to finger you too.”

“I do ass stuff,” Ilya says.

“Okay,” she yawns. “Then next time.”

She falls asleep in his arms. Hockey is a painful sport - you learn to breathe through things.

Sasha is strange because of how they stumble into it. Perhaps they don’t - Ilya thinks about this later, when it’s his turn to carefully stand just so, and smile just so, and wait. But at the time, it’s not something he thinks about until suddenly it is, and when the idea comes to him it’s urgent. They’re in the back of Sasha’s father’s car, squeezed together by Ilya’s suitcase and the kind of flotsam that always seems to aggregate in the general vicinity of any sports coach (boots, gloves, umbrellas, mesh pinnies, hi-vis jacket, cones and markers in a dizzying array of mismatched colours, folded netting, some kind of collapsible pole, a few whistles, towels, blade guards, buckets of pucks, a black plastic stopwatch). Sasha’s thigh is pressed into his and this becomes something llya knows: the weight, the warmth, he knows it until he can’t know anything else. Another body. He looks at Sasha’s face in profile in the bright grey autumn light and he wants to say something. Sasha’s eyes slide over him, stop. He smiles.

They kiss waiting in the idling car as Sasha’s father pisses by the side of the road. It’s furtive, a kind of confirmation, but wet, hard, deep. Neither of them take their eyes off the silhouette in its grimy orange puffy jacket and loose black beanie, head tilted to the sky as the last drops of urine squeeze out. They laugh together watching him wiggle himself clean before he zips himself up.

“When?” Sasha asks under his breath, a last squeeze of his hand on Ilya’s knee as his father walks back to the car with a satisfied, slightly dopey smile.

“I’ll text you,” Ilya says.

He doesn’t for a while. It feels like he’s waiting for something - some impalpable alignment, the end of tectonic processes. He needs dental work, anyway, he needs PT, he needs septum surgery, he needs PT again; he needs a new meal plan, he needs to try kinesiology tape, he needs to weigh himself more often, he needs to start jumping rope, he needs to be more strategic with energy gels, he needs magnesium supplements, he needs to be fucking careful on the ice after three concussions in a row. Now, not later. Doors are locking left and right, they’re all running forward, out, out, towards that tiny, moving target, contracting like a pupil in the light. Not everyone will go through. It will close. Now, not later.

He’s in his hotel room - naked - his head in Svetlana’s lap - naked - watching some random Torpedo vs Severstal replay they found by bouncing through channels when someone knocks at the door. Svetlana’s legs stiffen under his face. He reaches for his sweater and tosses it to her, waving her into the bathroom as she frantically picks up her clothes scattered across the floor. Her panties he just sticks under his pillow.

“Maskeyev, you moron, did you lose the fucking key?” he calls out.

It’s early. Either he got kicked out of the club or he got into a fight or both. He’ll want a shower no matter what. Serenely, Ilya looks up at the ceiling, his hand on his cross, wishing very sincerely for the immediate, bloody eradication of Maskeyevs, hotels, and hockey as a sport.

Maybe there’s an answer, maybe not - impossible to tell through the door and over the TV. Feeling vindictive, Ilya swings himself off the bed, ignoring his underwear on the bedside table. He doesn’t look through the peephole before he opens the door. He’s got a pounding headache, he’s bruised black from left shoulder to left hip. Who cares.

The mismatch between expectation and reality makes him temporarily blind - incapable of seeing as his brain does its best to catch up with what’s actually in front of him. When he gets there, Sasha is smiling at him. He’s got his hands in his pockets, his sweatshirt hanging loose on his shoulders. His hair is damp. He smells just showered.

“I’m here with my dad,” he says. “So -”

His eyes move down Ilya’s body. Ilya watches his face change, the new, private smile, the mobile gleam of his eyes.

“Sure,” Ilya says. “Come in.”

There’s nowhere to sit except the bed and so they perch themselves on it, side by side. Sasha reaches out, stroking the outline of the bruise on the flat of Ilya’s shoulder blade, following its pour down below the skin.

“What happened?” he asks around Ilya’s ribs.

“Hämäläinen needs to fucking cool it with the roids,” Ilya says.

Sasha nods. He’s still smiling - a small, expressive wedge, like a tear into his face.

“You’re all crazy,” he says.

“Yeah,” Ilya shrugs.

His right ear has been ringing for months and might ring forever. He couldn’t argue the point if he wanted to. When Sasha’s hand comes to rest on his knee, Ilya leans in.

It’s a good kiss, hot, open, slick. The back of Sasha’s neck under his palm, his breath against his lips, their foreheads resting together - Ilya’s chest is thunderously full, ozonic tension. Under his thumb, Sasha’s pulse is racing.

“What do you wanna do?” Sasha asks.

“I don’t know,” Ilya says. “Can I -”

He’s stroking Sasha’s thigh, moving up towards his cock. Sasha takes Ilya’s hand between his, kissing his palm.

“You’re sharing the room, right?” he asks.

His tongue darts against the soft webbing between Ilya’s fingers. Ilya briefly closes his eyes.

“Give me a second,” Sasha whispers in his ear as he gets up.

He picks up the sole chair in the room - a little awkwardly, like it’s a child. Before Ilya has any time to react, Sasha has wedged it under the door handle with disconcerting efficiency.

“He might punch through it,” Ilya says - only half-joking.

Sasha shakes his head, walking-hopping back as he rids himself of his shoes.

“That’s a fire door,” he says. “Too thick. He’d break his hand.”

He crawls back onto the bed, over Ilya’s body, guiding him down. Slight arms, narrow chest, soft belly - it’s an odd moment of disconnection. You forget. Ilya strokes Sasha’s back through his sweater, the jumping nodes of his spine. Teenagers. Jesus Christ.

“You know what you should do?” Sasha asks, kissing his chest. “Get a tattoo. Right here. A huge one. Like, douchebag size. It'd look great on you.”

“Mmmh,” Ilya says. “Like what?”

The mattress is narrow, he can't roll them without dropping Sasha clean off the bed. It's a strange feeling, the lateral stretch in his hips, the room he needs to make for another body. Sasha's jeans rub against his skin, the folds of the denim, the hard lines of the seams.

“A dragon,” Sasha says, settling against him. “An eagle. A tiger. Whatever. Something like that, you know.”

“A dolphin,” Ilya says. “Five ants on top of each other.”

“Exactly,” Sasha says seriously.

He's businesslike: spits into his hand and works Ilya to full hardness in just a few strokes. Ilya's heels dig into the mattress, his hips lifting, straining under the weight.

“You're really strong,” Sasha remarks.

The tone is flirtatious, a little hollow. He repositions himself between Ilya’s thighs.

"Okay," he says. "Let's go."

It's good, it feels good - really good, Sasha on top of him, the quick staccato of his breath, the hard, steady motion of his hand. Lube would make it better. Ilya can't be bothered. It'll work, anyway, and he feels it building, this certainty, this inevitable, squirming pressure. His back arches, he lifts himself up on his elbows, the body seeking. It's hot and tight behind his eyes.

"You're gonna throw me off," Sasha says.

He's laughing a little, a steadying hand on Ilya’s thigh. He follows the muscle: digging his fingers into it, playground fascination.

“It’s just -” he starts.

Wherever the thought was going, he never gets there. He’s just looking down at Ilya’s body, exposed under him. His hand moves down Ilya’s folded leg, to the stomach, up his side, up his chest. It stops wedged under Ilya’s armpit, his thumb coming to rest nearly against the shoulder joint: assessing, a mysterious kind of measure.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“What?” Ilya asks.

Sasha’s gesture is vague, floatingly broad.

“You know,” he says.

He seems a little far away, suddenly. Again, he touches Ilya’s hip, very carefully, where bruising wraps around the curve.

“Aren’t you scared?” he asks. “Sometimes?”

“No,” Ilya says.

Sasha looks up into his face. He holds his gaze - searching, and then he nods.

“Makes sense,” he says.

He jerks Ilya off with intense efficiency, draped over him, his mouth against Ilya’s neck. Ilya’s hands are fisted in the pillow under his head, every muscle rigid, everything in him hard. Sasha’s breath is hot and fast on his skin, his tongue wet. Ilya’s skin is crystallising. He feels it layer after layer, thin, glossy coats, pulling, tight.

Sasha finishes him off with his mouth and swallows, his hands braced on either side of Ilya’s thighs. Ilya catches the face he makes just before he wipes his lips on the back of his hand and, smiling, comes up to lay a kiss on Ilya’s lips.

“I love your cock,” he whispers.

He sounds a little glassy. Ilya reaches up for his face, stroking his cheek.

“This was good,” he says quietly.

His chest is filled from edge to edge - no longer hollow, the dull, stiff thud of concrete. He can’t take a deep breath. Sasha’s eyes are wandering, wavering, moving unanchored.

“Thank you,” he says.

He’s not looking at Ilya’s face. He’s not looking at anything, not stopping on anything, passing over -

“What’s that?” he asks as he reaches out.

He’s holding Svetlana’s panties balled up in his fist: sky blue cotton, lace edgings. A tiny black heart at the back.

“That’s not mine,” Ilya says.

“It’s fine if it is,” Sasha says.

He looks honestly curious. He’s as careful touching the fabric as he was touching Ilya’s bruises.

“Do you even fit in this?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Ilya says honestly.

“It’s used,” Sasha says - he sounds more fascinated by the second. “It’s not yours. Did you steal it?”

“Sort of,” Ilya says.

Sasha nods. He brushes his thumb against Ilya’s lips before he sits back on his heels.

“Let’s see it,” he says.

It’s a really tight fit and obscene by the time they make it work: filled, straining, Ilya’s dick trapped by the waistband, smudging cum against his stomach. His balls spilling out the sides.

“That’s so hot,” Sasha says.

He traces the outline of Ilya’s cock through the fabric, completely, narrowly focused. Something is falling away from his face as he does this, peeling off without him noticing. Ilya closes his eyes.

“You look really good,” Sasha says.

His tone is gentle. He kisses Ilya’s stomach, just where the fabric ends.

“Hey,” Sasha says. “It’s okay.”

“I know,” Ilya says.

His hand comes up, stroking Sasha’s hair, the shell of his ear. He can’t touch him lighter. Something shivers - wind on water.

“I have to go,” Sasha says.

He’s disentangling himself from Ilya’s body, moving out of the space between his legs. He doesn’t touch him once.

“Text me,” he says - the smile is audible. “For real.”

He kisses Ilya’s knee, quick and careful, slips off the bed. In the darkness behind his eyelids, Ilya follows his footsteps, the quick shuffle, the open-and-shut whisper of the door.

He doesn’t move for a while: his hand on his stomach, his hand palm up over his head. The TV bursts out into cheers: someone scored, a few months ago. He gets up, a little heavy on his feet. He puts his own underwear back on before he knocks on the bathroom door.

Svetlana is sitting on the floor against the shower cubicle, her phone in hand, earbuds in, knees folded in front of her. She looks up at him.

“Sorry,” Ilya says.

He’s holding her panties at the very tip of his fingers. She refuses to take them with a quick, sharp gesture of the head.

“Thank you,” she says. “They’re yours, now, I think.”

“I tore them, anyway,” Ilya says.

He did. The fabric exploded along the seams, in multiple spots ripped to the tendons - the white, straining elastic fibers beneath.

“Sorry,” he says again.

She doesn’t reply. Instead, she reaches for his hand, strokes his thigh.

“Did you like it?” she asks. “Was it good?”

She doesn’t wait for his answer. She pulls him down, his head against her chest, one arm around his shoulders; she hits play on her random episode of Bandit Petersburg, stroking his hair until, breathing her in, he falls asleep.

He handles it badly the first time he gets hard in a locker room. It’s nothing, it happens, they’re all seventeen and horny and stupid and always grabbing each other’s asses playing a weird game of chicken he tries not to think about too much. People notice and people laugh and it’s nothing. He laughs - he slaps dicks with his towel along with the best of them. But then he’s standing in the shower, he’s hard, and Shkolnik grabs his hip and laughs and Ilya handles it badly. It gives him a reputation, which on balance is not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s very late, a long late Moscow night. All big cities sound the same after a certain hour: the open-water whisper of traffic, the collapsed echoes of voices and footsteps, bizarre digestive rumbles, somewhere always a siren. Moscow doesn’t. It’s unclear how, where the difference lies exactly - rhythm, perhaps, which is something Ilya can talk himself into. Every city has its shapes, orders its cars and its buildings and its people differently. If two coastlines can sound different - but then he doesn’t know if they ever do. This is something he often thinks about lying awake in Boston, still jet-lagged, staring at shadows on his ceiling, listening for something he wouldn’t be able to name. He thinks about it now.

He wants a cigarette, but his cigarettes are in his coat and his coat is on the other side of the flat. His lighter is on his bedside table. Congratulations. He flips it between his fingers a few times, the plastic scratched where it’s constantly bumping up against his keys. The wheel sticks. He stares into the flame for a while - into the contrast, that wild, uncontrollable heat in the middle of the flat-pack furniture. He wants to bring it up to his lips. He passes a finger through it instead, over and over, fast and painless as he can. Painful, then. The skin blisters, his ankles flexing between the folds of the sheets. Four, five, six, seven - He drops the lighter into his sheets.

Outside of his room, the air lies quietly heavy, thick as silt. Wading out into it, Ilya feels it curl up around him in translucent tendrils before settling again in his wake, stirred but ultimately not disturbed. No tracks. He feels it in the folds of his body, drying in sediment layers, grainy and light where skin rubs against skin.

His foot stutters before he understands why - a soft, sucking warmth, he sinks, instinctive panic. He stumbles, catching himself on he doesn’t know what - the idea flashes into his mind, professional hockey player and dead from eating shit in his own living-room - he hits a wall and bounces off, he spins, staggers, stops. A few hard breaths. A quiet whine is coming up from the floor, like a child disturbed in their sleep.

“Alexei!” Ilya whispers. “You stupid motherfucker, what the fuck.”

He kicks him for good measure. The small flare of pain as his toes connect with something hard makes him angry enough to stomp on the fingers brushing against his ankle.

“Ilya,” Alexei complains - flat on his back, still zipped up in his jacket, his gaze vaguely circling Ilya without managing to ever truly stop on him. “I fell down.”

He’s grasping at the darkness, his fingers combing through it like he’s hoping to find something solid in its depths. When it becomes clear he won’t be able to take the hand Ilya offers him, Ilya kneels next to him, wedging his shoulder into Alexei’s armpit. He’s heavy. They almost faceplant a few times. When they finally make it to their feet - Ilya’s chest tight and hot, his thighs stiff, the familiar hard burn of effort - Alexei remains standing, gently swaying in place. He reaches out, steadying himself on Ilya’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” he says.

His hand moves up onto the back of Ilya’s neck: stroking the soft skin, the fuzz of hair at the base of his skull. Ilya moves out of his grip, a quick duck of his head like he’s trying to dislodge a fly. His shoulder skids against the wall. Unimportant.

“You’re fucking drunk,” he says. “Did you piss yourself?”

“My brother,” Alexei murmurs.

He clings to him, a strange, sticky embrace. No obvious exits - no matter which way you go it's always barred. His jacket rustles, wet with rain.

“It’ll be good,” he whispers. “It’ll feel good. Come on.”

He’s dragging his mouth over Ilya’s cheek, wet, looking for his lips. Ilya grabs his brother’s face in one hand, ripping it off him, squeezing it between his fingers until Alexei lets out a small, wounded noise of protest.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Ilya hisses. “You think we’re lovers now? You want me to kiss you and tell you you’re pretty?”

“My brother,” Alexei repeats.

He sounds forlorn, almost begging. His hands are multiplying: ice cold, everywhere, two returning for every one that’s pushed away. He’s pawing ineffectively at Ilya’s clothes, trying to find a way past his zipper.

“Stop it,” Ilya says. “I’m serious, Alexei, you fucking pig.”

“Why not?” Alexei complains - he could be eight again, kicking pinecones and chestnuts in the park. “Just a few minutes. You’ve got a few minutes.”

He’s buried his face into Ilya’s chest, mouthing at the fabric of his t-shirt. Wetness spreads through it in strange disseminated spots.

“Are you crying?” Ilya asks.

Alexei sniffles, hiccups. It’s loud and ugly, a slap directly on exposed nerves.

“Are you kidding me with this shit?” Ilya asks.

He grabs a handful of his brother’s hair, tugging - he can’t haul him back but he can pull as hard as he can and he will and he does. Alexei’s face tilts up into his grip, trying to ease the pain of it. Ilya shakes him, back and forth, all the strength he’s got. A drop of snot swings free from the tip of Alexei’s nose.

“What?” Ilya asks. “What the fuck, Alexei?”

“You like it,” Alexei says.

“You’re so stupid,” Ilya says. “You’re a moron. Look at you.”

“You like it,” Alexei insists.

His hand, again, has escaped Ilya’s grip. It’s on his throat, there, heavy. Not squeezing. The weight is immense.

“You like it,” he repeats again.

He drops to his knees. His arm is flat across Ilya’s hips, pushing him hard into the wall. Ilya closes his eyes.

“Sure,” he says. “Whatever. Hurry up.”

He fucks his brother’s mouth, eventually. He cums - they haul it out of him, drag it out, bloody, out in the open together.

Yuliya is taller than him and hilarious. It’s so good speaking Russian with her, after months and months of difficult English, that he’d be happy to do nothing but that - entire nights, drinking, talking, and without the filter of language as language, without having to notice it. Luckily, she likes sex, and she likes it with him. Full house, or however that phrase goes.

She also likes music, as loud as she can have it. When he introduces her to the sound system in his penthouse she’s delighted. She rifles through her tiny clutch bag until she locates her iPod, the earphones tangled up in what looks like a small folding mirror. She handwaves him away as he moves to explain to her how the docking system works. Just a few seconds later he’s nearly rocked off his feet by a monumental hit of brass, and then, as he catches up, by a tight, rising crescendo of drums.

“What’s that?” he asks - half-yells over the de facto symphonic orchestra in his living-room.

“Sibelius,” she yells back. “Get cultured, bitch.”

She slips out of her heels, holding them flung over one shoulder as she allows herself a slow, leisurely tour of the room. She doesn’t pick anything up but her gaze slides over every available surface: total coverage. On the side table by the couch, a small pile of magazines finally stops her. She picks up the first one, smiling at him.

“The New Yorker?” she asks. “Really?”

“For my English practice,” Ilya answers.

She nods, rifling through the magazine - pausing slightly on a page he knows he’s annotated, Russian words crawling between the lines. She looks up. He’s surprised to notice he’s blushing.

“You could do worse,” she says.

She doesn’t set it down as she walks towards him. She wraps one arm around his neck, pulling him into a kiss. With her free hand she flips the magazine open, casting it a quick glance before she returns. Her tongue slips against his: a quick, focused touch, tip to tip.

“Okay,” she says against his lips. “Oпера.”

“Opera,” he says. “That’s easy.”

Her ass through her dress makes his fingers buzz with the need to squeeze. He pulls her close against him, feeling, already, how he’s hard, hoping she feels it too, glad when she obviously does. Their breaths quicken together as they sway on their feet, holding, scraping, skin looking for skin. Her face is glittery: stray eyeshadow, a few tiny metallic octagons on her nose and on her chin which must have come loose from her jacket. He goes to wipe them off and she catches his thumb between her teeth, sucking at it until he must bite a bruise into her neck just to have something to do with his mouth.

“Good,” she says. “Oркестр.”

“Orchester,” he says.

She nips at his ear.

“No, ‘orchestra’,” she says. “It rhymes, see? Opera/orchestra. That’s how you remember. Okay. Дирижёр.”

He sees it flash in front of his eyes - the exact line, two-thirds of the way down the page, to the right, pressed up against a black and white picture of a man’s face. He sees his own handwriting, how far the ballpoint pen has sunk into the paper. The image doesn’t resolve.

“I don’t know,” he says.

She makes the gesture - as well as she can between their bodies, her hand moving by his ear as he kisses her breasts.

“He’s directing them,” she says. “Controlling them. He’s -”

- a minor internal collision, syllables rearranging -

“Conductor,” Ilya says.

Her nipples are hard and obvious under the thin pink lace of her bra. When he slides a hand between skin and fabric, just rubbing his thumb against her, she gasps.

“Let’s see,” she says. “Виолончель.”

She tastes bitter first - fragrance, probably, he feels it surrounding him, peach and sweat like velvet. Then she tastes of her textures. Slight roughness, round, elastic weight, silky, melting.

“Fuck,” Ilya says breathlessly, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. “What’s playing right now, the, uh -”

She presses his head to her breasts. He moves into her grip, kissing the butterfly gap at the bottom of her ribcage, kissing her stomach, her sides, anywhere the cutouts in her dress will let him. He feels her breath under his lips, her pulse deep into her belly. When he licks the skin there - he doesn’t know what he needs, to cross it, perhaps, to reach that life he feels and hold it just for a moment into him - she buries her hand in his hair.

“Cello,” he says.

He’s nearly on his knees. He walks her back to the couch, following after her, crouching, on all fours, whatever. Down, and now up - her ankle, her shin, the inside of her knee. She’s not wearing any underwear. She’s really wet, slick all the way down her inner thighs. When he licks it up - full and hot, with the flat of his tongue - she moans, hooking her knees over his shoulders.

“Don’t make me cum,” she says, holding the magazine straight up above her face. “Just - for a while.”

She likes it wet, she likes it loud and sloppy. She likes his entire face between her legs and his tongue in her cunt, fucking her as deep as he can possibly manage to go. She likes it when he sucks her clit and she likes the sounds when he lets her slip out of his mouth, when she can hear how hard he’s working. She likes to feel him moan against her.

“Okay,” she says - her breath comes fast and uneven, her voice splintering. “Let’s have fun. Мастерство. You might need that.”

“I don’t know,” Ilya says hoarsely. “Context, maybe?”

“Потребовались мастерство, чтобы обмануть вратаря с такого угла,” she says. “That’s fine for hockey, right?”

“You need, I don’t know, you need to be really good -”

“Мастерство,” she repeats. “There’s a word for that in English.”

She laughs as he rips the magazine out of her grasp and tosses it to the side. She laughs again as he pulls her down against him, her hips sliding forward on the leather of the couch until the backs of her thighs are almost resting against his chest.

“I’m a bit busy for language practice,” he says, looking up at her. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Well, we won’t get anywhere like that,” she says, and then grips his head with both hands as he licks her open-mouthed, everything he's got, tongue and lips and breath and all the heat he can give.

He fucks her holding her in his lap, holding her tight against him, feeling the working strength of her back and of her thighs, the strength of her desire. She dances, she told him once, professionally. He feels it in her, the way all her body focuses and aims, how she moves, how she holds. It’s such a simple equation: she’s so beautiful; she’s so wet and hot inside; she feels so good. He kisses her cheek, breathing her in. She’s so close to him that it’s like he can’t see, internally, beyond the curve of her shoulder. Keen, keen pleasure, the kind he feels wrapping around him and squeezing.

“Call me,” she whispers against his neck, “call me your little boy. Your darling. Your sweet little boy.”

He’s so deep inside her. He does. She moans and hides her face against him. Her shoulders start to shake when his hand comes up to cup her head, stroking down as he pushes up, down, thrusting inside her, her beautiful braids, her beautiful, long black hair.

"I think you’ve got the hottest pussy in the world,” Ilya says.

They’re huddled tight together under the shower, that crazy ceiling shower that cost him a genuinely embarrassing amount of money - embarrassing in the sense that he would in fact be deeply embarrassed if anyone ever learned the final figure. He’s had some great sex in it. Right now, he’s holding Svetlana close against him, her back against his chest, her shower cap rubbing into his neck. His chin is resting on her shoulder and he’s staring down at her body: seeing it like she sees it, down into the pass of the sternum, over her navel, over the slight final curve of her belly. One of his hands is resting on her breasts; with the other he’s playing with her pubic hair, gently pulling on coils.

“The hottest,” he says again, tracing with his thumb the furrough where her crotch and thigh meet. “No contest.”

“Yeah,” she says contentedly - closer to a sigh, settling into his arms. “And you’ve seen a lot of pussies.”

“A few,” he says.

She reaches back appraisingly. Her grip on his dick is unhesitating, and warmth bubbles up bursting in his chest.

“You definitely don’t have the hottest cock in the world,” she says.

“I know that too,” Ilya says. “I’ve seen enough.”

She leans back against him, tilting her head up under the spray. She’s trying to look in his face; she has to squint, closing her eyes periodically as water drips into them.

“The hottest pussy I’ve ever seen,” she says. “That’s hard. Give me a second.”

“You liked that Dutch banker,” Ilya says.

She snaps her fingers.

“No, I know,” she says. “A few years ago, there was this woman in New York, and oh, Ilya, she was so fat.”

She says it with profound gusto. Her features, already relaxed, are blurring into soft, delighted dreaminess.

“It was so good,” she says. “So - ah, so plush, you know. You could just -”

Her fingers curl inwards. She’s squeezing: fresh dough, ripe fruit.

“So good,” she repeats. “I still think about it.”

“Yours is hotter,” Ilya says. “You just don’t know it because it’s yours.”

He nibbles at the skin of her shoulder, watching the imprint of his teeth and watching how they disappear. She laughs.

“It likes you already,” she says. “You don't have to butter it up.”

She strokes his wrist, his forearm, briefly closing her hand around it - just below the elbow, squeezing gently. He feels his muscles flex under her fingers, and he noses at the back of her ear, licking up the single bead of water hanging from the lobe like a pearl.

“The car dealership thing,” Ilya says. “Are you gonna go through with it?”

She nods, a slow, serene gesture.

“I think so,” she says. “I think I can do it.”

She carefully pulls at the hairs on Ilya’s forearms, stretching them out in strands between her index and her middle finger. They’re soft and limp against her skin, clinging to her, seaweed, jellyfish tendrils.

“It’s going to be interesting,” she says. “I just want to see what will happen, you know?”

“I know,” Ilya says.

“I need to decide where, though,” she says.

“America,” Ilya says, rubbing his face against her neck. “Come on, America. I’ll bring you all my stupid teammates. We’ll tag-team them. I’ll bring you any players you want. I’ll bring you Matheson, if you like. You’ll sell him twenty Lamborghinis and he’ll go bankrupt and then he’ll kill himself.”

She sighs, her head rolling against his chest. He kisses her temple, watching her eyelids flutter.

“It’s a nice thought,” she says - comfortable, warm. “I’ll think about it. Does this thing ever run out of hot water?”

“No,” Ilya says proudly, and she laughs, smooth and peaceful, and just a little more when he comes down to lay a kiss on the tip of her nose.

He doesn’t know what pulls him out of sleep. Suddenly he’s trying to sit up in bed, starts lifting himself up on one elbow. A silhouette standing over him, movement, heavy breathing.

“It’s nothing,” Alexei whispers - hoarse, the dry, rustling sound of skin rubbing skin. “Go back to sleep, Ilyusha, it’s nothing, sleep.”

Ilya does. From that point on he just pops a sleeping pill every night until he leaves Russia.

There's nothing more embarrassing than having a crush. When Ilya realises he’s started to pick his hookups based on whether or not they have freckles, he tells himself detachedly that he’s probably in big trouble, and then decides he doesn’t really give a shit.

He really likes Hayley. It feels like something that could go somewhere, if they both wanted it to. They don't, not really. She's dating some kind of Wall Street douchebag she tells him is actually surprisingly good in bed, and who is rich enough that if she eventually marries him - which she will, she informs him - it'll be private chefs and Hamptons mansions for the rest of her life. She loves being rich, and Ilya can't blame her: he really fucking loves being rich too.

“Wow,” she says as she opens the door. “Classy.”

“Slavic tuxedo,” Ilya says.

He's grinning, arms spread, her eyes slowly moving down his body: Adidas jacket, Adidas t-shirt, Adidas shorts, Adidas socks, Adidas sneakers. It is literally just what he wears to the gym most days, because he’s got a contract paying him an obscene amount of money so that he will, but he knows his angles. Hayley tugs at his collar - a slow, small, private smile.

“I'm not mad at it,” she says.

She pulls him inside. He closes the door behind him with his foot.

She loves Russian dirty talk, which is a good thing because he sucks at it in any language and so it's better if she can't understand what he's saying. He has by now reached the conclusion that it's mostly about tone and about either whispering in her ear or growling like a horny wolf. Conviction counts for a lot. He just has to make sure not to listen to himself.

“Перемешиваем тесто,” he groans as she reaches into his shorts. “Москва — столица России, блядь.”

She kisses his neck. He can feel her sighing against him, her breasts heaving. Suddenly he wants her with shining urgency. He strokes her back through her t-shirt, grabs her ass. He loves her ass. He loves the smell of her sweat - so early in the morning, still unshowered, the night clinging to her hair and to her armpits. He loves how good she feels in his arms.

“Гусары, молчать,” he whispers, sucking on her earlobe.

They’ve been pierced for as long as he’s known her but he doesn't remember ever seeing her with earrings. Her first one ever, she's told him, done when she was three months old with - so family folklore goes - a hot needle and an ice cube. Now she collects them. Her nipples are pierced, her clit, her navel, her taint, which he didn't even know was something you could do. And -

“That’s new,” he says against her lips.

She sticks her tongue out, letting him examine it. It’s really just a plain steel barbell - probably still surgical jewelry. His stomach tightens almost painfully.

“Hot,” he says, touching it gently with the pad of his finger.

“Brett hates it,” she says. “But I told him, you know, no social media posts where you can see it. And I promised I’d take it out once we’re married.”

“Brett is idiot,” Ilya says. “Are you sure you don’t want to marry me instead?”

He's leaning in for another kiss, following after the flash of silver disappearing behind her teeth. God, he loves it - she indulges him, letting him tease it with his tongue, the smooth, bright surface, this filled, plugged hole in her body. He’s holding her face in both hands, chasing it, feeling how she opens for him.

“Nah,” she says - a little hoarse - when they part. “No offense, but I couldn’t do the hockey wife thing. Seems boring as hell. Again, no offense.”

“Boring,” Ilya says. “Boring! Glorious sport of hockey is boring to you?”

He lifts her up, feeling the instinctive twist in her waist and in her hips as she goes along with it, laughing, the living flexibility of her muscles. She loves that too, and ever since he found out he tries to do it as much as he can. He thinks he could probably manage it one-handed, and the reaction he’d most likely get makes it a tempting notion, but he’s still lucid enough not to push it.

“Is boring to see grown men chase tiny rubber circle on ice?” he asks, throwing her over his shoulder. “Is boring to see them hit each other with sticks?”

She’s fairly tall, and heavier than she looks. He needs to be careful as he manoeuvres them around furniture, and then through the doorway of her bedroom. When he drops her on the mattress, it takes a bit of off-the-cuff flight path calculations to make sure no part of her ends up hitting something they wouldn't want it to.

“Boring,” he says, scowling menacingly. “Now Russian Ogre must eat you. Do you have last words?”

She looks up at him. She’s laughing. Her hair has slipped out of her ponytail, streaming down her face and her shoulders, her pyjama shorts riding so low on her hips he can see the beginning swell of her cunt.

“Please,” she says breathlessly, pushing her breasts up with both hands, “oh, please, Russian Ogre, may I suck your dick?”

He pretends to consider this, his fists on his hips. She bites her lip, gazing up at him through her eyelashes - near laughter again.

“Very well,” he allows as he kneels over her. “And then I eat you.”

She acquits herself magnificently. That fucking piercing might be the death of him. You can't feel it, really, except when suddenly you can, and when it taps cold and hard against his balls there's a genuine suffocated moment, like being dunked in ice water, oh, shit, oh, shit, fuck. She doesn't stop. He's blindly gripping the headboard with both hands, his hips lifting to meet her, pleasure a single irradiating point, burning through him at high speed.

“Отче наш, Иже еси на небесех,” he groans. “Да святится имя Твое - Hayley -”

She's moaning around him. She swallows, which is never mandatory but always appreciated.

Both his hands fall slowly on his face, dragged down by their own weight. His hips still twitch - random muscular contractions, dying frog, dying fish. He feels blank. He feels wet and soft, his cock magnified to skyscraper mass.

“Fuck,” he says breathlessly. “God.”

“I love sucking you off,” she whispers in his ear.

She grabs his dick - friendly, mostly - and he twists hard out of her grasp, completely uncontrolled, way too much strength for what he’s trying to avoid. He catches himself on the nightstand just in time: curled up on himself, gasping, his face pressed into the pillow.

“You okay?” Hayley asks - her tone hesitating between amusement and concern.

“Ten minutes,” he manages. “Ten minutes, Hayley.”

“Okay,” she says - settling on amusement. “Ten minutes and not one more. I have to go to work eventually.”

She curls up against him, her hand on his hip, her chin resting on his upper arm. From her vantage point, she’s looking down at his body, at his breathing - he knows with his eyes closed. He feels her gaze on his skin like fingers.

“Was that mat?” she asks. “I've read about mat. In the New Yorker.”

He has also read about mat in the New Yorker. He had to call Svetlana about it so she could almost fall out of her bed laughing while he did voices.

“Well, блядь is definitely мат,” he says.

She nods, seemingly satisfied. She shaves her pussy: against his ass, she’s deliciously slick, deliciously, obscenely exposed. He wants her to sit on his cock and he wants to fuck her until neither of them can walk.

“You’re so hot,” she says, reaching down for the cross hanging on his chest and turning it idly between her fingers. “You're really, really fucking hot.”

“Денег нет, но вы держитесь,” he tells her, and she grins, and, as she brushes a strand of hair out of his face, he does feel just a little bit bad.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than falling in love.

He wakes up choked - a dirty, scratchy sensation, his head pounding. He’s hot, he’s sweaty, hot and sweaty inside of his lungs, inside his eyelids where he sees his pulse in swirling geometric shapes. He has no idea where his body begins. He can’t move until he does.

Feeling comes back in layers, like someone is rebuilding his skin. He feels the inside of himself first, where organs rest together: a centre. Around it, awareness aggregates. He’s lying down. It’s dark. He itches - everywhere, back, chest, armpits, scalp. He’s sweated through his t-shirt. He -

He wants to swear and he doesn’t. He remains motionless for a while, curled up on his side, staring out at nothing: the floor which must be there, and beyond, emptiness, shadows, perhaps, pressing against the glass wall.

He lifts his weight off the mattress by increments, trying to control how it flexes. Tall order, unpleasant work, wetness clinging to his skin. Under the other half of the blanket, something stirs.

“Ilya?”

It comes in Russian first. English is a violent effort.

“I pissed the bed.”

“What?” Shane asks.

He’s drowsy, slow, doing his best and failing to surface - squinting like he’s trying to open his eyes underwater.

“I pissed - the bed,” Ilya repeats, punctuating each half of the sentence with a quick downward slice of his hand. “It’s fine, it’s nothing, go back to sleep.”

“Well, no,” Shane says reasonably. “Because I’m lying on the sheet.”

He rolls over, throwing his legs over the edge. He doesn't reach for the light. Even in this deep, remote darkness, forest night, he moves without hesitation. He might be the only person Ilya has ever met who’s genuinely not scared of the dark; the only person who genuinely believes that the world without light is the same as the world with light, nothing altered, nothing new.

“Everything okay?” Shane asks as he surveys the damage - tries to, in whatever weak sliver of moonlight makes it down through the clouds.

“Fine,” Ilya says. “It happens.”

The silence has a distinctly questioning quality. Ilya grits his teeth, pulling the fitted sheet off the mattress, and refuses to feel the tension.

It’s really a quick job, which as usual makes Ilya wonder what the fuck his father was always complaining about. Shane has removed the duvet cover, brings the pillows to safety as Ilya strips off his soaked underwear. And then it’s done. Shane leans over the mattress, probably trying to see the stain. As he runs a hand over it, he grimaces.

“I don’t know if we should sleep here,” he says. “It’s wet.”

“It will dry,” Ilya says.

“I can just make up the bed in the guest room,” Shane says. “It’ll take five minutes.”

“It will dry,” Ilya repeats. “Is no problem.”

“I’m not saying it’s a problem,” Shane replies. “I’m just saying -”

“If you want to sleep in guest room then sleep in guest room,” Ilya says, gathering up the mound of soiled cotton.

Shane is light on his feet. His steps are barely audible as he follows Ilya to the bathroom, just half an arm’s length behind him, warm in the dark, his gaze an unrelenting, itching weight.

“You should go back to sleep,” Ilya says, loading the washing machine.

“I’m okay,” Shane says.

The scent of his laundry soap is violently concentrated. Ilya watches it pour out in a thick white stream, its wet shine. His fingers are sticky from unscrewing the cap and he rubs them against his palm: a soapy slide, catching, skin to skin.

“Cotton?” Ilya asks.

“What?”

“Your sheets,” Ilya says. “Is cotton, yes? I can wash them hot?”

“I don’t know,” Shane says. “Probably. It’s what I always do.”

The machine’s screen lights up, a tiny corner of orange light. It's not powerful enough to cast any shadows. Meditative silence, for a while, and then a slow, hiccupy rumble, soon gaining speed. Water gushes in behind the porthole in the door, disappearing wet stains, soaking the whole fabric a dark, directionless grey.

“You want a shower?” Shane asks.

“No, I am going back to bed covered in piss,” Ilya says.

Shane’s fingers trail down his back, a light, barely-there touch.

“Yes,” Ilya says.

The shower is crazy in a different way than his own shower is crazy - massaging jets everywhere, a ribbon of warm light set in the wall just inches from the floor. It always feels a little bit like trying to land a space shuttle. Ilya watches as Shane adjusts the temperature, the pressure.

“Okay,” Shane says finally, stepping back.

“You should go back to sleep,” Ilya says again.

This time, Shane simply nods. He sits down on the shower mat, one leg folded against his chest.

It takes the better part of forever to finally feel done - not clean, but done, like outside would be preferable to inside. Mostly it’s the heat, the damp closeness, the hard pressure of the wall against his forehead. Water surrounds him, a rush in his ears, a constant low-level hum on his skin. He cannot differentiate between drops but he tries, anyway, following them where they roll down: folds of the body. Steam is wrapped tight around him, he’s swaddled. It’s a little hard to breathe. He listens to his own heart without his ears, with the rest of his flesh instead; listens, this beat, this hammer. He is so contained. He is so darkly inside of himself. He separated his shoulder months ago, stupid fucking decisions that get him fucking slammed into the boards. It aches. The tip of his finger, pressing down, splits the pain in two, opens it, sends it spilling out in estuary light.

He expects to find Shane asleep but he isn’t. He’s staring at the ceiling - his head tilts and he’s staring at Ilya naked in front of him, dripping water all over the floor.

“Did you, like - last night, did you hit your head?”

“No, I did not hit my head last night,” Ilya says. “You watched game. You know this.”

“I don’t know, they don’t show everything on TV,” Shane says.

“They don’t show Ilya Rozanov getting fucked,” Ilya says. “Sure.”

He catches the eyebrow raise and something starts hammering - hot, dirty pulse - in his neck.

“I know what this is,” Ilya says. “It happens.”

“A lot? Have you talked to a doctor about this?”

“Is not TBI, Hollander, fuck!”

“Okay,” Shane says - slowly, his gaze unmoving and intent. “Just asking.”

Without looking, he reaches out for the towel hanging on the rail next to him. It’s heated; the terrycloth is warm. As Ilya wraps it around his shoulders, Shane grabs his calf, rubs it up and down. Hair catches in the calluses of his palms.

“I love you,” he says, kissing Ilya’s knee.

His hair is very straight: it never stays messy for long, even right out of sleep. Strands fall back under their own weight, naturally, to where they’re meant to go. Ilya runs a hand through them all the same, to watch the process.

“Me too,” he says.

“Okay,” Shane says - looking up, his thumb resting against the crest of Ilya’s shin. “Okay.”

They share their workout playlist, though there’s a notable difference in the style of their contributions and there’s no telling what the random setting will spit out next. Ilya is coming to the conclusion that he can’t do both Tabata intervals and Limp Bizkit when he hears the door of the gym slide open behind him.

“Hey,” Shane says.

The mild flirtatiousness in his tone is all the warning Ilya gets before he feels Shane’s arms wrapping around him. He’s cold - his hands, his face, the flat, shiny fabric of his jacket, wet with melting snow. He smells of the city. Blindly, he reaches for the bike’s display screen past Ilya's arm, pressing buttons until everything powers down to his satisfaction. Ilya feels the way his t-shirt clings, soaked through, as Shane rests his forehead against his neck and inhales - one long, deep breath.

“Hey,” Ilya says. “Did the doctor give you prostate exam or what?”

“Mmmh,” Shane says.

His hand is flat on Ilya’s stomach, fingers digging into muscles, seeking - heat? pulse? Ilya feels it hammering under his skin, called up.

“You smell good,” Shane mutters.

He’s rubbing his face against Ilya’s back, butting up into it, burying his face in Ilya’s armpit, tender, seeking. The image is strange and brief: a lamb, maybe, a calf, a kid, the same demand and the same urgency. The same clumsiness. Ilya lifts his arm, resting it across Shane’s shoulders. Encouraging - yes. He wants this, it occurs to him suddenly: to pull Shane to him, into his open body, to watch him. That’s it, he doesn’t say, feeling Shane’s tongue against his skin. There you are. Good job.

He doesn’t register the distinct change in musical mood until - maybe thirty seconds in - “Саске Учиха” suddenly blind-side slams into him. He groans, briefly covering his face with his hand.

“I heard it,” Shane whispers - he’s laughing under his breath.

“Switch that off,” Ilya says, pointing accusingly at his phone where it’s docked into the sound system. “No. Horrible. I don’t know who added that.”

“It’s not so bad,” Shane says. “What’s it about?”

His nails scrape against Ilya’s sides. He’s just clipped them. Their edges aren’t quite blunted yet.

“It’s funny,” Ilya sighs. “Joke song about - feeling stupid, yeah? When you meet someone and they know things. All of it is pretty funny. Я ему про Мане, а он мне про минет - it’s a, what’s the word, pun. Мане is painter, French painter, and минет is -”

He gestures obscenely, his tongue poking into his cheek. Shane kisses his neck, bites it gently, sucks at the skin until Ilya closes his eyes.

“Meenyett,” Shane says in his ear.

It’s a terrible approximation. Ilya feels the hot swell, the sudden pull.

“Yes,” he says - leaning back into Shane’s chest, spreading his legs for those cool fingers working their way under his waistband. “And you are минетчик.”

Well, he uses that word. It’s not like he never uses it. It’s not like he’s never said anything way worse. Shane’s breath is hot and cool against his skin, fast, Shane’s arm tight, massive around his waist. Ilya watches his own hands upturned on his thighs; the fist moving fast and faster in his shorts; he cums, hard, and eyes closed it takes him a long time to catch his breath.

They disentangle themselves from each other slowly. Ilya’s mind is thick, swollen - struggling to grasp at the world. Shane has to steady him when he stumbles off the bike.

“You okay?” Shane asks, one hand on his shoulder.

“You pulled my brain out through my dick,” Ilya says.

He staggers a little more, for effect, grinning over his shoulder. Shane’s eyes track the movement of his feet. He’s frowning.

“You know,” he says, “I asked her about. About, uh. The incident. The other night.”

Ilya has reached for his water bottle. He drinks - two, three, four, five long pulls, the water tepid and bland, like blood at the edges.

“You tell your doctor about my problems now?” he says finally. “What, she’ll prescribe my Viagra when I’m old and can’t get hard?”

“I didn’t ask about you, Jesus,” Shane says. “I told her it was for me. I just needed to know, okay? Don’t be an asshole about this.”

Smart - now he can’t be an asshole without really being an asshole. Ilya wipes his mouth into the hollow of his hand, feeling a few cool droplets escaping, running down his neck in thin rivulets.

“She thinks it’s probably not a brain injury,” Shane says - his eyes, again, travel to Ilya’s feet, a quick doubtful movement. “And you know, we talked a bit, and she asked me -”

“What?” Ilya asks.

“If there was anything - traumatic - in my past?”

The question mark is like a sudden splinter under Ilya’s nails. The recoil is instinctive.

“Traumatic,” he says. “Like finding my mother’s corpse in her own vomit?”

The image forms. He sees Shane involuntarily look away - just one second, and it doesn’t stick.

“No. More like -”

He pauses. His gaze is straight now, focused, the chin slightly tucked in, the mouth set. It occurs to Rozanov that he’s seen this face before.

“Did someone ever - you know, touch you? When you were a kid? Like a coach or a doctor or or -”

“Touch me,” Ilya says. “Yeah, I was professional athlete. People touched me a lot. Coach and doctors.”

“Sexually,” Shane says.

He's determined. He's kind - he's trying to be gentle - he's beyond embarrassed and he's determined.

“If - you know, something like that happened to you - I know it happens, and -”

“I did not get fucked by my coach,” Ilya says. “He was twenty million years old. He would have died. Heart exploded or something.”

“Okay,” Shane says - the note of relief is unmistakable. “Well, if it happened, you can tell me, and I believe you, and it’s not your fault, and it won’t change anything -”

“You ask because you are pervert,” Ilya says. “It turns you on. Little Ilyusha, oh, he’s so small, he knows nothing, you must teach him…”

He expects laughter but Shane just stares at him blankly.

“No,” he says. “No, Ilya, no, that’s really fucked up.”

“It was joke,” Ilya says. “Relax.”

“It’s not funny,” Shane says - the voice that (Ilya assumes) can silence an entire locker room. “It’s a serious problem. Did you know that between ten and thirty percent of athletes are sexually abused over the course of their career? That’s between two and eight players on any active roster.”

“Okay, Mr. Mom,” Ilya says. “I know what a third is, they have schools in Russia.”

“Yeah, well, you can't say stuff like that,” Shane says. “It happens too much. It's not funny.”

He bends over to pick up his bag, discarded unceremoniously just a few inches from them. It's a quick gesture - more than a little brutal.

“Were you?” Ilya asks.

Something vacillates in Shane’s face. A silhouette moves behind long white curtains.

“No,” he says finally.

“Okay,” Ilya says. “Sorry.”

Shane nods. His hands hang by his sides, loose and heavy. The corners of his mouth look punched in - holes in the flesh.

"There was this thing, right?” Shane says.

He’s been staring at his phone for about an hour, his face unreadable. Light flickers, blue, white, blue again, in sharp little bursts along the planes of his face.

“You know, when I was a kid,” he says. “Well, not just a kid, I guess. When I was younger.”

He pauses. Ilya puts down his own phone, waiting.

“I was always the only uh, Asian kid in the locker room, I guess,” Shane says. “And it was weird because people were obsessed with…”

He rubs his eyes. It's a slow gesture, but powerful. His thumb is digging in the flesh.

“No, maybe not obsessed,” he says from behind his hand. “Curious? But like, bad curious. Creepy curious. About - me. My body.”

“What, your body?” Ilya asks.

“You know,” Shane says. “If I had hair, where I had hair, if I was, I don’t know, ‘normal’ down there. Or whatever.”

“Normal?” Ilya says. “They thought maybe you had third arm in your pants or what? Were they crazy?”

“No, it was racist,” Shane says - he speaks slowly, sounding mildly incredulous. “People are racist, Ilya.”

“I know that,” Ilya says.

The defensiveness makes them both flinch. Shane stretches his legs out under the cover; his ankle brushes against Ilya’s, does not stop.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Thinking about it, I guess.”

He swipes up on whatever it is he's watching. The light slows: flat silver-blue, a waver in it like breathing. He allows Ilya's hand on his, but doesn't move, and under Ilya's fingers he doesn't reach back.

“We never fucking talked about it, Shane, come on,” Ilya says.

“Okay, well, we’re talking about it now,” Shane replies, scraping the measuring spoon along the side of a container of BODYTECH CLEAR IMPACT.

He’s blending their horrible green morning concoction, not to be confused with their horrible green lunch concoction, not to be confused with their horrible green afternoon concoction. It works - protein powder always works. Whether the kitchen-sink approach to ingredients (spirulina, ginseng, marine collagen, zinc, magnesium, provitamins, goji berry, blueberry extract, and this is only what Ilya can decipher on the slice of label peeking out from under Shane’s hand) makes any difference remains to be determined. Just in case, they each buy it in bulk: a little bit of magical thinking has never hurt anyone.

“I’m not going to stop having sex with her,” Ilya says.

The fridge door rattles, overloaded with bottles. Shane pulls out a carton of almond milk.

“Other people, okay,” Ilya says. “I don’t care. But Svetlana, no.”

“Why?” Shane asks.

He sounds like he might be genuinely asking. He opens drawers, looking for a spoon - finds one, always in the same place that it always takes him a few tries to remember.

“Because,” Ilya says. “She’s my friend. I like her. She was here before you. After you, maybe.”

Shane turns around. Even during sex, even on the ice, he’s guarded; hard to catch showing more than he means to. The expression on his face is nakedly painful.

“Sorry,” Ilya says. “I don’t mean it like that.”

He reaches over the counter, leaning forward on his stool until he can touch the outer edge of Shane’s wrist. It’s where his watch rests whenever he remembers he’s got a contract saying he’s supposed to be wearing it when he's out in public. He’s been better about it recently. If he’s careful, Ilya can make out the faintest of tan lines, just where their skins are meeting.

“Sorry,” he says, one tone lower.

It lasts another few seconds - strange, tense equilibrium, all gathered in Ilya’s back and thighs, in the slight overextended ache of his shoulder. Then Shane nods.

“I don’t get it,” he says, resuming his stirring. “She’s your friend? Okay. I don’t have sex with my friends. If I do, they stop being my friends.”

“You had sex with me,” Ilya says.

“Yeah, and, well -” Shane replies.

He’s gesturing - quick back-and-forth - across the space between them. It pulls at an anchor inside of Ilya’s chest. A kick of warmth; the reflexive urge to lean in for a kiss.

“You don’t even have sex with most of your friends,” Shane continues. “I don’t think. Right?”

“A few,” Ilya says.

“Okay,” Shane replies. “But that’s what I mean. Most of the time you don't, you'll stop having sex with all the others -”

“I don’t know,” Ilya says.

He’s not thrilled with how sullen it comes out. Shane stabs the spoon down into the thickening mixture, perhaps harder than strictly necessary. He’s beginning to look honestly put out.

“I just want to know what’s so special about Svetlana that you can’t stop having sex with her,” he says. “I don’t know, I think I’m entitled.”

“She never asked me what’s so special about sex with you.”

“I mean, I’m your boyfriend, so,” Shane says.

“So what?” Ilya says. “It could be bad. Many people have bad sex with their boyfriends.”

It’s a general statement, meaningless in the way they usually are. He hears it too late. Before he can make an attempt to rescue the sentence, Shane looks up. Ilya can watch the crack forming in real time.

“Is it?” Shane asks, a little uncertainly. “Bad?”

“No,” Ilya says. “Is good. Is great. For real, okay?” he adds when Shane's face doesn't change. “I do not tolerate bad sex. I would complain.”

He would need to say it quite lightly to stick the landing and English makes this hard. Shane doesn’t seem convinced.

“I don’t know, are you in love with her or something?” he asks. “Is it some kind of - polyamorous situation?”

He’s scrambling. There’s a pleading slant to the way he asks.

“I do not know that word, ‘poly’-whatever,” Ilya says. “I am not in love with Svetlana. We’re friends. We fuck. It does not have to be this big fucking deal.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Shane agrees. “But you’re kind of the one making it a big deal right now.”

“Oh, I’m the one making a big deal?” Ilya asks.

Shane shrugs - not happy with where this took us, the gesture says, but bring it on.

“I mean, yeah,” he says. “If it’s not a big deal you can just stop, right?”

“I am not going to stop.”

“Exactly,” Shane says. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

All pretenses of breakfast assembly have been abandoned. He’s leaning against the counter, arms spread out, both his palms resting against the edge. His whole weight. Veins push up under the skin, slowly swelling, slowly teal.

“I know her since - forever, basically,” Ilya says. “We grew up together. We did everything together. She was always around. She showed me - everything. We travelled together, we went to school together, we played together, we went out together. We got in trouble together. She was always in my life. I was always in her life.”

He looks up. Shane’s eyes are strange, disbelieving.

“I don’t know,” Ilya says. “Fuck! English is fucking hard, Hollander, come on!”

Without a word, Shane pulls his phone out of his pocket. He slides it across the counter. Google Translate is open on the screen, the cursor blinking. Enter text.

“No,” Ilya says. “I am not writing you fucking novel about this.”

“Okay,” Shane says - a touch of incredulous laughter. “You see how you’re making this difficult, right?”

“I am not writing a whole thing to put in robot translator! You could just learn Russian!”

“Sure,” Shane says. “I’ve got enough free time, right?”

“I learned English,” Ilya says.

Shane’s forearms tighten; release; tighten; release. He’s looking out to the side, through the kitchen window, at the sky in which stretches of blue are slowly replacing the clouds. When Ilya covers his hand with his, Shane grips it for dear life.

“Okay,” he says finally. “Let’s try again. Is it because she’s a woman?”

“That’s stupid,” Ilya says.

“Stop fucking calling me stupid.”

He so rarely swears at other people that he overweights the word, stumbling over it as he says it too fast. He hears it - he pauses a little, slight suspended awkwardness. His face is unwavering.

“I’m not stupid,” he says. “I don’t need that shit from you of all people.”

“What shit?” Ilya asks.

“Racist shit,” Shane says steadily.

“I thought it was racist to think you’re all super smart or something,” Ilya says.

He hasn’t even finished his sentence that he feels it. It’s so rare in Shane, unchannelled rage: anger not in service of something else but anger because he’s angry. He is, right now. It’s a painful throb in the air.

“Don’t,” Shane says quietly. “You’re not allowed to say that. Never say that again.”

His hand is trembling in Ilya’s grasp.

“Okay,” Ilya says. “Okay, okay. That was fucked up. Not funny. I’m sorry.”

Silence stretches between them, a few hard beats. Then Shane exhales loudly. He’s staring down at his reflection in the granite of the counter.

“Do not,” he says again.

“Sorry,” Ilya says. “Really. I’m sorry.”

He kisses Shane’s knuckles. He has to pull - just a little - so Shane will follow the gesture, and his chest is suddenly scraped hollow.

“No other men,” Shane says after a few seconds. “Can that be a rule? Svetlana - okay. I can live with Svetlana. But no other men.”

“And other women?” Ilya asks.

He can’t help the way it comes out. Shane sighs. It’s so transparently put-upon that it sends up a tiny, suffocating pulse of anger into Ilya’s throat.

“I mean, I’d rather not,” Shane says. “But if you’re going to have sex with Svetlana -”

“What?” Ilya asks.

“Well, you know,” Shane says. “It’s a little - like, we’re already allowing one woman. So.”

“Allowing one woman,” Ilya repeats.

Shane slams his fist down on the granite. It seems to stupefy him: for perhaps ten seconds he stares at his own fingers where they’re curled tight into themselves, skin pulled pale and taut over the joints. Ilya’s hand has retreated to the other side of the counter.

“You’re calling me stupid,” Shane finally says. “Again.”

“I don’t know what it means!” Ilya says. “Allowing one woman! It means nothing, it’s -”

“Stupid,” Shane says flatly. “Yeah. Well. It doesn’t have to make sense to you.”

He leaves for practice shortly afterwards, maybe half an hour before Ilya does. He drinks his green breakfast shit, of course, because you don’t just skip it. Ilya doesn’t either.

Shane has taken his jar of Nivea cream with him, a clear sign he doesn’t intend to come back, at least not for a few weeks. Ilya jerks off in the shower, just because - it’s mildly spiteful in a way he can’t piece together. He wipes his cum on the wall and then washes it off, watching it disappear down the drain. Why the hell not.

When he comes back that evening the penthouse is empty. The Nivea jar has returned to its spot by the bathroom sink. GREEN SHIT READY IN FRIDGE, the Post-It note on the kitchen counter says - quick felt-tip scribble. DON’T FORGET.

The picture comes in from a random Russian number. Ilya stares at his brother’s cock for a while, so instantly familiar. It looks like his, which was not genetically mandatory but which is how it panned out. It’s hard, and clownish in its hardness, how it hangs swollen and squat like an overcooked sausage. Ilya’s hands buzz like he’s just come in from the cold. He very badly wants to sleep. He makes himself cum eyes tightly closed, his phone on his chest, two fingers inside of himself, Shane snoring quietly next to him.

"How’s your mum?” Ilya asks.

The hum of speech in the bedroom quieted down about fifteen minutes ago. Ilya has been circling it ever since, closer and tighter at every pass. When he knocked he did not get an immediate answer.

“Uh, she’s fine,” Shane says from the bed - one leg folded under him, the other extended, his foot stuck under a corner of the blanket. “It was a work call. About the ads.”

“Which ones?”

“The fragrance stuff.”

He sounds a little elsewhere. His hands are resting on the pillow he's dragged into his lap. He’s playing with his phone charger, rolling the cable absently between finger and thumb.

“She’s seen the first pictures and she thinks it’d be better if I didn’t, uh. Like, if I kept my happy trail, basically.”

“Okay,” Ilya says.

Shane doesn’t reply. He unplugs his phone, plugs it, unplugs it again. He taps the connector against the bottom of the screen.

“She really loves me,” he says. “It’s not bullshit either, you know, she really does. She’s a great mum. I’m glad I have her.”

“But,” Ilya says.

“And,” Shane corrects.

He leans back against the headboard, staring at the ceiling - staring at nothing.

“You remember that soda campaign?” he asks. “You know the one.”

He mimes the gesture - cracking the can, pouring liquid over his open mouth. Ilya does remember it. The exact reasons why are probably best left unspoken for now.

“I asked her why we had to do so many sexy ads,” Shane says. “Why it was always, you know, me shirtless, me in a wet t-shirt, me rolling around on a bed, me in my underwear, me like, oiled up or whatever. Why we couldn’t do something a little -”

“More clothed?” Ilya suggests.

Shane nods. His watch is casting a strange luminescent shadow on the wall: a bright arc, like a tiny, private moon.

“And we had a whole conversation about it and it was all right,” he says. “She refused a few things afterwards. And she made sense, it made sense what she said, that we can really only get the ads we get, right? If you’re a hockey player they’re going to want to have you at least shirtless. Bare minimum.”

“Not for everything,” Ilya says.

“Not for everything, no,” Shane says. “But for a lot of stuff. Right? And if you get that reputation that you’re not comfortable with nudity, that they can’t ask you to show a little bit of skin, you’re limited. And there was already a bunch of things we’d decided I wouldn’t do, you know, sports betting, alcohol, fast food, anything aimed at kids, anything, like, cheap, stuff you’d find in supermarkets…”

His eyes move to Ilya. He smiles, small, mildly apologetic.

“Anyway,” he says. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah,” Ilya says.

He does. There’s really nothing more to be said about it. Shane acknowledges it with a tilt of his head.

“But it was never not - freaky, I guess,” he says. “She was always on set and usually she was the one, like, oiling me up or rearranging the clothes and it was probably - better? than if someone else had done it? Because she’s my mum, you know, and so I knew she wouldn’t cross any lines, because people get weird -”

“So fucking weird,” Ilya says.

Shane laughs under his breath - a distinct, grateful note of relief.

“It wasn’t a bad thing,” he says. “It was a good thing, probably. And safer, for sure, I mean, 100% safer. But sometimes I wished she wouldn’t. You know?”

Ilya sits down on the bed - one foot on the mattress, one foot flat on the carpet. Shane shuffles himself to him, resting his head on Ilya’s shoulder. He pulls Ilya’s hand to his face - to his hair, guiding it until Ilya is gently scratching his scalp, gently, finger by finger, following the curve of his skull, gently tugging at strands. Shane’s phone has fallen between them, wedged in the small space between their thighs.

“Is it weird?” Shane asks after a while. “That it weirds me out?”

“You can change managers,” Ilya says. “You can get new one. I have phone numbers.”

Shane chuckles. On Ilya’s thigh, his fingers are moving in a slow, scratching rhythm, his fingernails rasping against the fabric of Ilya’s jeans.

“It’d kill her,” Shane says. “Plus she’s the best in the business.”

“Nothing but the best for you,” Ilya says, kissing his nose. “Nothing but the best for Shane Hollander.”

“Shut up,” Shane says gently.

He reaches for Ilya’s face, pulling them together. Ilya was ready for a kiss and it doesn’t happen. Instead, Shane holds them there: eyes closed, nearly mouth to mouth, sharing air.

"I’m not against it,” Svetlana says.

She’s stirring her smoothie with her giant novelty straw. Ilya is - as per his meal plan - not allowed smoothies, and caffeine makes him want to peel himself until there’s nothing left of him. He nurses a glass of what is ostensibly Perrier, but which is so full of ice cubes it’s basically eight-dollar tap water.

“But no threesome,” she says. “I mean, no actual threesome. I’m sure he’s nice but I don’t want to touch him.”

“No, well, he’s gay, so,” Ilya says.

She nods, seemingly satisfied.

“Okay,” she says. “And I want to meet him beforehand. At least once. Something chill - maybe drinks.”

“Sure,” Ilya says. “We can do that.”

She got her nails done - extraordinarily long, extraordinarily tapered, her usual wheelhouse. It looks like a Russian job: something about the pearlescent pink-beige shade doesn’t scream American to him. When she taps the side of her glass in thought, he winces, a strange sympathetic sensation travelling up the tips of his fingers.

“Are you sure he’s not going to freak out?” Svetlana asks.

“It was his idea,” Ilya says.

“Okay,” Svetlana says. “Well, what’s the plan if he freaks out?”

“I don’t know,” Ilya says. “We’ll just stop, I guess. I swear I won’t make it your problem.”

“That’s a big promise,” she says. “But okay. What happens if you freak out?”

“What happens if you freak out?” Ilya counters.

He doesn’t expect the way her lips thin, the pulse of emotion in her cheek. Her gaze is straight; it wavers, passing over Ilya’s face.

“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “But we have to do it, right?”

“No,” Ilya says.

He reaches for her hand. She lets him - lets him trace the lines of her palm inch by inch, second by second. It’s cold, wet with condensation where it was resting against her glass. Slowly, her fingers unfurl under his.

“I can just tell him you said no,” Ilya says quietly.

She nods. She seems relieved.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

"She doesn't want to," Ilya says.

He’s leaning out of his hotel room window, breathing in city air. He loves New York. Whenever he lands he’s always worried it’s no longer true, right before he’s reminded of just how much it is.

“Okay,” Shane says. “Well, you know, thanks for asking her anyway.”

“Sure,” Ilya says.

He taps his cigarette against the railing, watching the ash swirling down and then suddenly up, carried by mysterious currents. Far below, the street moves in pixels, in dots and clusters of colour. The late evening light casts long shadows on the sidewalks. Every passerby seems to be dragging theirs, a small, orbital ring of darkness.

“I am going to keep having sex with her,” he says. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Shane says.

“Yes?” Ilya asks.

Shane sighs. It sounds more physical than emotional, like he might be stretching.

“I don’t get it,” he says.

“This would not have helped,” Ilya says.

Shane laughs. It seems genuine enough - as far as Ilya can tell so far from his body, so far from his face.

“No,” he says. “Maybe not.”

Something rustles in the background - footsteps, perhaps, voices. A sense of movement.

“Well, just email Yuna about it,” Shane says.

“Someone in the room with you?” Ilya asks.

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Look, if there’s nothing else -”

“Я люблю тебя,” Ilya says.

“No problem,” Shane says. “Good night.”

He finishes his cigarette, watching the night descend. It comes fast in this season, spilling from gaps and cracks and empty spaces. Light concentrates in a narrow band along the horizon: never sharper, never brighter, even as the rest of the sky darkens. The first headlights come on.

Under his palm, his phone screen lights up. New message. He doesn’t need to unlock it to know; he unlocks it anyway, to see.

"You are allergic,” Ilya says critically.

He’s holding Shane’s free hand in his lap, stroking it with the tips of his fingers. Skin has purpled in blurry patches, dry and cracked enough to flake when Ilya touches them. The heel of his palm is covered in tiny, pinprick blisters.

“Hm?” Shane asks.

He’s distracted. The stupid backroads of Quebec demand a certain amount of concentration.

“To your gloves,” Ilya says. “You need to change brands. Or undergloves or something.”

“I don’t think I’m allergic,” Shane says. “I’ve kind of always had this.”

“No,” Ilya says. “When we started to fuck you didn’t.”

Shane looks over at him - brief glance, softly, privately delighted.

“You remember that?” he asks.

“You have mole here,” Ilya says, pointing at a spot on his own belly, maybe an inch over his navel. “And here” - the fold of the right armpit - “and here” - the top of the foot - “and here” -

Shane laughs. He’s trying not to take his eyes off the road, but he can’t stop himself from stealing a quick glance at the way Ilya is emphatically pointing at his crotch.

“I do not have a mole on my balls,” Shane says.

“How would you know?” Ilya asks. “You see reverse side of your balls often?”

“I have a mirror in my suitcase,” Shane says. “I’m checking tonight.”

“Okay!” Ilya says - playing at annoyance. “Check! You will see!”

He flips Shane’s hand over in his grasp, to run his nails along his joints, to follow the veins where they climb up into his arm. Shane’s fingers tighten briefly on his thigh, a quick, friendly caress.

“I thought it was more like, a sweat rash or something,” Shane says.

“Is not sweat rash,” Ilya says. “Here you have sweat rash -”

He’s gesturing on his own body, curving lines - the elbows, the shins, the shoulders, the sternum, where he’s got rashes too, on and off, for most of every season.

“This is different,” he says. “Change brands.”

“I don’t know,” Shane says - they’ve taken a sharp turn to the northwest and the sun which had been at their back is now pouring in through his window, he’s squinting, his head turned slightly right under this new pressure. “My mum got me those.”

“Okay,” Ilya says. “Well, they are making your skin fall off.”

“It’s fine,” Shane says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Ilya reaches over his lap, gently pulling on the sun visor until it unclips. He swivels it left, past Shane’s head, pushing it against the driver’s window. In the new shadow he’s made, Shane looks over at him: smiling, warm, and Ilya kisses his hand, keeps it between his, wrapped tight, for the rest of their trip.

He picks up fully aware of who’s calling. He knows exactly who has this phone number because he very carefully keeps track of who has this phone number. He can’t block every single fucking Russian on WhatsApp.

“Hey,” he says. “Whose phone is this? Your sugar mummy’s?”

“It’s Polina’s,” Alexei says. You dumb fuck remains unstated.

“Why do you have Polina’s phone?”

“Because,” Alexei says. “We fuck now.”

He sounds mildly proud of himself. In the background, music is playing - unclear what exactly, a woman’s voice.

“That’s so cool,” Ilya says. “Fucking your stepmum. You’ve really made it big.”

“Uh-huh,” Alexei says.

His breath is tight and short, distinctly hoarse. The rhythm seems familiar.

“Are you jerking off?” Ilya asks.

The sounds become unmistakeable. Friction, wetness, fabric rustling. Alexei groans.

“Go fuck yourself,” Ilya says.

Alexei’s laughter has a sharp, exhilarated edge.

“You gonna pay me for it?” he asks. “Send me money for it? Huh? You should. You should fucking send me money. Fucking faggot. Send me money! Send me money, faggot!”

He’s still laughing when Ilya hangs up. He calls back every half hour until Ilya’s phone dies on his pillow: bursts of pale light, asleep and then awake, awake and then asleep, awake, asleep, a knowledge like a beating heart.