Work Text:
Svetlana Vetrova is cursed. She is a folk tale. A myth. A wretched creature doomed to wander the earth alone, learning and re-learning the same invaluable lesson, the one she refuses to take to heart.
The lesson is this: what a treacherous thing it is to be a man’s soft place to land.
This is the singular slice of knowledge that feels most familiar to her. More than anything else, more than the Boston Raiders legendary 1987-1988 roster, more than the luxury features of the Porsche Cayman, more than her own body, her own mind - this is what she knows.
She knows, even before it happens, that she will learn it again today.
Ilya picks her up from the airport in a fucking Subaru Outback.
“Woooow—”
“I do not want to hear it from you,” Ilya’s words are barely decipherable around his laughter. “This is hard enough for me as it is!”
“No, I love it!” Svetlana allows him to take her bags from her, toss them into the empty area behind the rear seats. “So spacious! Fuel efficient!”
The mischievous spark in Ilya’s eyes only gives her a moment of warning before his arms are wrapped around her, lifting her easily off the ground, swinging her around so fast that her heel catches on someone’s suitcase and knocks it over. They both say “sorry” in English, but they are cackling too much, short of breath at the thrill of each other, and the woman picking up the suitcase looks even more annoyed because she can tell they don’t really care. They are already having too much fun.
Ilya opens her door for her, and Svetlana climbs in, taking stock of the car’s roomy five-seat interior, the cruise control, the little screen that tells you what song is playing on the radio. When Ilya comes back around to the driver’s side, Svetlana asks, “So, who are we dropping off at Little League?”
His head drops dramatically to the steering wheel with a small thud. “Don’t blame me,” he says defensively. “It belongs to Shane.”
Svetlana smiles at the easy way he says the name now. “Ah. Like you. Yes?”
She watches his lips close stubbornly over a grin that can’t be contained.
***
They’re speaking Russian in another room while Shane Hollander prepares a Caesar salad for them in the kitchen. Shane Hollander. The one from TV. From the best team in the league. From Ilya’s phone contacts. He wasn’t living on another planet or existing like a shiver or a song in the ether. He was here. Chopping Romaine for her. She can see him from here, hunched over the counter, eyes too close to the knife because he should be wearing glasses and isn’t.
It’s still strange, even though she knew with some degree of certainty for months before she was officially told. Her suspicions began when Ilya started to avoid the topic of Shane Hollander. Any time Scott Hunter came up in conversation, his eyes lit up with new ways to call him old, and lame, and bad at hockey. But he never hesitated to add how good he looked. “Geriatric, but hot,” he’d say, proud of the new English word he learned specifically to dog on Hunter.
If Svetlana brought up Shane Hollander, Ilya blatantly refused to acknowledge how attractive he was, and that was a million times more suspicious than just admitting he’s sexy. Why would Ilya be so cagey about it? Once she made the connection with “Jane”, it was over. These fucking athletes. Such idiots, and no one catches them because they’re only around each other.
Svetlana has a bit of experience with athletes. Hockey players, sure. But once she moved to America, she met her share of NBA players, second-string football guys, a shortstop for the Mets once. They were always at the good clubs, looking for someone to be impressed with their big manly apartments and their big manly jobs and their big manly lives. Svetlana was bad at this. She regularly forgot to put on the doe eyes when the elevator opened on the penthouse. She didn’t ask questions when other women texted their phones. She confused them. They love to say that they can’t commit right now, that their lives are just so hectic. They hope she didn’t misunderstand when they plucked her from the dance floor, when they brought her home and asked her not to leave, when they said things that were too intimate, like she coaxed it out of them, like the way she moved on top of them was a ritual spell, enchanting their mouths to speak falsehoods.
But when Svetlana doesn’t argue, when she says, “great, no problem,” and puts on her coat and doesn’t bring up two nights ago when they pressed their fingers into her back and whispered that she was perfect, that they’ve never felt this before, that they could fall in love like this they swear to God, when she tips the doorman on the way out and never travels down their street again - suddenly, they don’t like that. Suddenly, it’s a problem.
No one thanks her for understanding. For knowing enough to not get attached. For protecting herself from whatever they thought they had the power to do to her.
And certainly, no one invites her into his home for as long as she wants to stay, greeting her warmly, pouring her a glass of wine, whisking together a homemade dressing that he can’t even eat himself on his performance diet, just for her. But it must be true, what they all say. What she has known from the beginning. Shane Hollander is different.
“Be nice to him, okay?” Ilya lowers his voice, like Shane is in danger of overhearing, of understanding their fast conversational Russian.
“I am being nice! Am I not being nice?” She backtracks in her head. What did she do?
Ilya shakes his head, a reassuring hand finding her shoulder. “No, you are. But he is nervous.”
“Why would he be nervous?”
“He’s a sensitive boy. And you are intimidating.”
“Sounds like my love life.”
Ilya grins, and leans in conspiratorially. “I think he is jealous. A little.”
Svetlana brings a throw pillow down onto his head, and Ilya tackles her back onto the cushions. Through the flurry of half-hearted blows she thrusts in his direction, she sees Shane glance over at them, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards for just a second at the sight, before he turns back to the salad. “I’m serious!” Ilya laughs into her ear in Russian. “Just…he wants your approval.”
Svetlana finally shoves him off her, onto the floor at her feet. “Of course I will be nice. I am a nice girl.”
Ten minutes later, when they are eating at the massive wooden slab that counts as his kitchen table, Shane Hollander won’t stop smiling at her. He refills her glass and offers her more parmesan, and he asks her such lovely, polite, kind questions, because he wants to know her. “So, I know you sell cars, how did you get into that?”
Ilya interrupts before she can even respond, mouth full of lettuce. “She should be working in hockey.”
“Ilyusha. Please. We have discussed this.”
“She’s so smart, Shane!” He taps Shane’s thigh under the table, bidding for attention that he already has. “She predicted the year I would win the Stanley Cup. It happened exactly like she said it would.”
Shane’s nose scrunches up when he smiles. “That sounds like my mom. She always knows.” For Svetlana’s benefit, he adds. “She’s my agent, or manager. Whatever. She’s the person I give ten percent to.”
Ilya points his fork at her, his other hand extending towards Shane in agreement. “This is exactly what I have been saying. You would make an amazing agent.”
Svetlana rolls her eyes in Shane’s direction, and she can tell already that this will one day become a familiar exchange, the both of them raising exasperated eyebrows at each other just past Ilya’s head. Their first inside joke. “He exaggerates. I am wrong lots of times. But when I am right in a way that flatters him, he remembers.”
“Well, still,” Shane offers, taking another helping of undressed salad, “if you were ever interested, I could connect you with my mom?”
Ilya’s eyes go wide, and he slaps Shane’s shoulder out of excitement. “Yes, that would be perfect! You would love Yuna!”
“I mean, I don’t know if she would be able to give you any advice on how to get clients, considering she gave birth to hers. But you could meet up and she could answer your questions, or whatever?”
Shane’s face is so open and unguarded, like a child’s, and she doesn’t know if he is trying to curry favor with her or if he is just a genuinely lovely guy who wants to help her because he wants to help everyone, but either way she finds it impossible to give the unequivocal, vehement refusal that she wants to give. She doesn’t know how to look at this baby face and explain that she knows so much about hockey because the knowing made her valuable, that since she was small she understood it as a tool to bring her father towards her.
She can’t, on their first meeting, explain to all-Canadian golden boy Shane Hollander that she has let go of everything she ever loved for herself, watched it fall away from her like rotten bark. The ballet lessons she took as a child, the piano scales she devoted herself to, the thrill she once felt at the successful execution of a difficult mathematical equation. They have all been destroyed, a controlled burn, leaving charred space inside of her for more of everyone else. All that’s left of her is that which she cultivated to be close to men. The needlessly confusing point-scoring system of American football. The discography of The Eagles. The ways her exes liked to be touched, the things they liked for her to do to them. She’s made space for that, and she doesn’t know how to stop.
She loves hockey because her father loves hockey, and then, later, because Ilya loves hockey. She doesn’t know if she can love it on her own, for her own reasons, and not as an act of supplication, as a way to be indispensable to them.
But Shane Hollander (which she still thinks of him as, first-name-last-name like she’s watching him on ESPN and not across the table), he just wants to help. So instead, she shrugs, like she doesn’t care that much about it, and says, “Okay, maybe.”
Ilya’s mouth, still full of chicken, nearly drops open, and he looks at Shane in awe. “How did you do this?” Shane laughs, but Ilya still doesn’t believe it. “I have been bugging this woman for years!” He turns back to Svetlana, kicking her foot under the table. “You will not wriggle out of this one, Sveta.”
Later, she’s on the couch again, lying down, recovering, head spinning from the Chardonnay because wine-drunk is different from vodka-drunk and she understands that now. Shane and Ilya are in the kitchen, and she can’t really see them but she can hear them, speaking over the clinking of dishes.
“You have to hand-wash that one.”
“Hollander, is fine.”
“No, because the design will come off—”
“I put this in the dishwasher all the time.”
“Fine, I’ll do it—”
“No, is okay. Give.” The rush of water, the squeaking sound of a nearly empty dish soap bottle.
Softly, she hears Shane say, “Thank you.”
Svetlana leans past the edge of the couch, because she wants to see this man wash a dish. Instead, she catches Shane sliding his arms around Ilya, gently kissing his neck from behind. Ilya’s hands still under the water, and his head tilts towards Shane’s, like a plant finding the sun.
She has watched this man vomit in her shower. She has used her own Hermes scarf to stem his coke nosebleed. She has opened her door to him and brought him inside, pulled shards of glass out of his fist. She has watched him face his father, his brother, seen the way he changes, the way he turns to ice.
Now, he hand washes the dishes. He takes his shoes off at the door and hangs his jacket on a hook. He notices when his lover’s collar is wrinkled, and he fixes it, smoothes it out mid-conversation. He drives a Subaru Outback. He loses fights on purpose. He calls when he’s on his way home.
Svetlana doubts that Shane Hollander is jealous of her. She anticipated that she might, upon meeting, be jealous of him.
She didn’t expect to be jealous of Ilya. How easy he makes it look. How beautiful it is, to begin as something tough and hard and unforgiving, and then learn how to be soft. To become gentle, to open to the world, to the person in front of you. To grow in the direction of the light.
Much better, she thinks.
Better than starting out so, unbelievably soft, and, slowly but inescapably, over time, being forced to become hard.
That’s a much better life.
***
Irina’s funeral was the first Svetlana had ever been to. She hadn’t been allowed to sit next to Ilya, because she wasn’t family, technically. He sat between Grigori and Alexei and suffered, and three rows back Svetlana held her own mother’s hand, suddenly desperately aware of its impermanence. She stared at the back of his head and tried to communicate telepathically, thinking at him over and over: this will be the very last time you will ever look next to you and not find me there.
This is how Svetlana came to be mother-sister-lover: she made a silent promise to fill every lack, to alchemize the love inside her into every kind he needed, for as long as he needed it. She had so much love inside her: she could feel it in her veins, in the marrow of her bones, in the whites of her eyes, underneath her fingernails. She had so much, and he had so little. And he needed it so badly. How could she refuse a starving boy, when she sat at such a luxurious banquet?
Shane goes to bed at midnight, leaving them outside, warming their feet on the edge of the fire pit. “I’ll be in soon,” Ilya says, when he bends down to kiss him goodnight.
“No, it’s okay. Stay up as long as you want.”
Ilya’s mouth drops open in a mockery of childlike excitement. “As long as we want? Really, dad?!”
“Shut up,” Shane laughs through his smile. “I just mean don’t rush, you know. Catch up.”
“I know what you mean.” He squeezes Shane’s hand one last time before he heads inside, then attacks Svetlana, pulling her into his chest. “Slumber party, yes? First one to fall asleep loses.”
“Don’t do that—”
“What?”
“Don’t make it into a competition, because then you’ll lose and you’ll be mad.”
“I don’t lose.”
“Tell that to Toronto in the fifth game of the playoffs—”
He claps a playful hand over her mouth, and she fights his grip. “I can’t hear you!”
“—missing an assist ON A POWER PLAY—!”
“LA LA LA LA!”
Svetlana cackles into the fire and curls into him like a child. She drinks the last of the Chardonnay out of the bottle and fixes her eyes on the stars. There are so fucking many of them out here. She never knew how many.
She feels Ilya snuggle into the top of her head. “Fuck. I am so glad you are here.”
“Me too.” And she was.
Simple proximity. This is all she really wants. She never expected anything from Ilya, and she was aware that she was the only one who didn’t. She was proud of it, protective over it. And in truth, she wouldn’t have asked for more, even if he could have given it. There were times in her youth, sure, when she had thought about what it would be like to belong to each other in any real way, in a way that lasts. But by the time she was old enough for it to be a possibility, she already knew too much.
She thought often of the time she caught her mother writing a card on behalf of her father, wishing his mistress a happy birthday. She hadn’t even seemed bothered by it. She signed Sergei’s name. And Svetlana knew, instinctively, that this was an heirloom trait. This impulse to let a person infect you so completely that you can’t even feel the boundaries anymore, until someone else is driving your body around, until the control feels like home. This will be me, she thought. If I am not careful.
So she tried to be careful. She put up walls. Gossamer walls, at first. Porous. Breathable. But still present. A handful of times, early on, Ilya had tried to tell her what to do in bed, and she had laughed in his face until he remembered who he was dealing with. She set him up with friends. Listened with the astonished laughter of a schoolgirl when he described his encounters with Sasha. It is nearly impossible to hold someone at arm’s length and still keep them close. But she did a good job of it, up until now.
It occurs to her now that it only worked because Ilya has no desire to infiltrate her. It’s true, what her mother told her once, that all men only want one thing. But the thing isn’t sex, because even when they get it, they still want more. They take you to dinner, or to drinks, or to bed, and they look for cracks. Ways to seep into you, to take you over. Ilya may be the only man she’s ever met who isn’t interested in flooding the empty spaces inside her. This is why it’s so easy to give to him; because he never takes more than she offers.
“Did you lose?”
“No.” Ilya shifts under her to take a swig of his beer. “Today meant a lot to me.”
“I know. You don’t have to say.”
“I want to.”
Svetlana finds herself grinning at the sky. “Ah, yes. You are a big softie now.”
“I am not.”
“Yes, you are. You’ve changed.” She shifts to make eye contact with him, show she means it. “It’s good, Ilya. You needed him.”
It’s so clear to her, after just half a day with them. The purity of Shane’s safekeeping, the river of earnest affection that flows freely through his touch. Even she felt it, when she shook his hand. The photo of his parents on the wall, the sharp corners of the guest room bedsheets, the shopping list on the fridge with all of Ilya’s favorites listed first. His heart lives on his skin.
She could never be so vulnerable. Not with any man. Not with herself, even.
Once, it was the same for Ilya. And now, it’s different.
Maybe that means they don’t make sense to each other anymore. Maybe he’s progressed beyond her, to a plane of contentment where she can never reach him. Where you can be held without being owned. Where the risk of letting the cold in doesn’t stop you from opening the door.
Maybe this is the end of what they are to each other.
If so, she thinks, then sayonara. До свидания. Good riddance.
He deserves to be there.
***
Shane is in the shower when Ilya decides it’s absolutely imperative he go pick up donuts. She offers to come along, but he says it will be quick, and is out the door a half second later. By the time Shane gets dressed, his Subaru is gone, and the only person in his house is a virtual stranger in flannel pajamas, drinking coffee from his Metros mug.
Svetlana waves awkwardly from the couch. “Hi.”
Shane points to the door. “Donuts?” She nods, and he shakes his head, chuckling. “He bought a full dozen last week. And he ate them all by himself.”
Sounds about right. “At least he will have help this time,” she laughs.
This is the first time Svetlana and Shane have been alone together, without the buffer of Ilya’s ridiculous chaos. She didn’t think it would feel so bizarre, but it does. Shane brings his own coffee to the opposite side of the couch, and perches on the edge of it, like he isn’t totally committed to staying in the room. Svetlana tamps down the absurd impulse to flirt with him, to perform some kind of feminine ideal, just to put her back in her comfort zone. How is she even supposed to interact with a man who doesn’t want anything from her?
Shane opens his mouth a couple of times before any words come out. “Ilya told you about the Irina Foundation, right?”
The sound of her name clenches around Svetlana’s heart as she nods. He said it wrong, with his Western accent, but with an unnatural trill to the “r” that showed how hard he was trying, that made an effort.
She hasn’t heard Irina’s name spoken aloud in years. Maybe since the funeral. Even on the rare occasions when Ilya talks about her, he, of course, calls her mama. “It was your idea. The name. Yes?”
Shane shrugs. “I suggested it, yeah.” He turns away from her gaze, taps his mug with his fingertips before he asks, “Is that…a bad idea?”
She nearly jumps out of her skin in her rush to reassure him. “No. No, not at all.” He nods, the tension evaporating from his body, and he finally settles back on the couch. “He never gets to hear her name. Now he will hear it all the time.”
A private, internal smile lights up his face from the inside, and Svetlana is proud of herself for putting it there. She is doing a good job. She’s being nice. She wasn’t sure it would be so easy, being nice to the person responsible for this, the one who caused this tectonic shift, the potential ending of the most important relationship of her life.
But he’s so genuine. And likable. And easy to relate to.
Still, she watches his eyes start to triangulate between her and the rest of the room, and she knows he’s gearing up for something. She waits, until he is ready to say it. “Um, can we…can we talk?”
She grins into her coffee. “We are talking”
“I know, but. Really talk.”
A sigh escapes Svetlana’s lungs, and she sits up, ready to take the heat. She had been expecting something like this to happen today.
That morning she had woken up to a gentle hand on her shoulder, and the violet light of dawn. It took her a second to realize she was still outside, that she and Ilya had both lost their game and fallen asleep together on the patio sofa. His arms were still slung around her torso, his face nestled into her hair.
Her bleary eyes followed the hand on her shoulder to the rest of Shane, dressed for a morning run, earpods already in, phone strapped to his arm. He smiled softly, maybe sadly, at the both of them, as he moved his hand from her shoulder to Ilya’s hair. Scratching his scalp, he whispered, “You guys should go inside and get some sleep.”
Ilya nodded, his eyes still closed as he reached for Shane’s face. Shane bent to kiss him, and then sent a grin towards Svetlana before jogging away.
She hadn’t been able to get back to sleep inside, and had spent the next few hours watching the light spread into the room and going over what she would say when she would be asked to answer for her crimes. Because when you’re visiting your former lover and his very serious boyfriend, there is only one acceptable sleeping arrangement. Even she knows this. It doesn’t matter how close you are, or what kind of fucked-up codependent friendship you have. Certain things are out of the question.
It’s possible that this was Ilya’s doing, in fact. That they had discussed it earlier that morning, texting each other, conspiring, engineering a way to get Ilya out of the house so that Shane could establish some boundaries on his behalf. It would be just like Ilya, to desperately avoid being the bad guy. It would be just like Shane, it seemed, to make that sacrifice for him.
Whichever way it went, she was ready. She would apologize. She would agree. She would accept their terms, because that was the right thing to do, and because what other choice did she have? “Of course, yes. We can talk.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Shane nods, running his hand through is still-wet hair like he’ll find the right words there. “I know you and Ilya have this…history together. And you guys have a connection…”
He trails off, goes silent, and Svetlana doesn’t want to watch his face grow pained thinking about it. She knows what he’s getting at, and she wants to end his suffering, so she tries to help. “I understand.”
Shane’s eyes meet hers again. “You…?”
“I mean, yes, we do. But things are different now. And I’m sorry.” When his eyebrows come together in confusion, she elaborates. “About this morning.”
“Oh. You…you don’t have to be sorry about that, Svetlana.”
“Thank you, but I do.”
“No, you don’t. I know you guys are…close. It doesn’t bother me. I swear.” Shane moves forward, imperceptibly closer to her. He’s not avoiding her gaze anymore, which seems like progress. “I thought it would, actually. But…” He gives a cute shrug of his shoulders, and Svetlana doesn’t know if she would believe him, except that this is Shane Hollander, he of the homemade salad dressing, of the hand washed mugs, of the Subaru, he of the face that opens like a door and invites you in.
Svetlana believes him, and in that belief, she finds herself thinking of him, for the first time, as a friend.
So, she says, “Well, some things have changed,” and winks at him, delighting in the flush that creeps to his smiling cheeks. Because this is how she is with her friends. “Yes to slumber parties, no to sleepovers. Yes?”
He reddens further, but he also laughs, so she knows he’s okay. “Yeah, well. There’s that.”
“Change is good.” She drains the rest of her coffee, but keeps ahold of the mug with both hands. Just for something to ground her. To tether her to this place when she asks the next question. “So, what did you want to talk about then? If not this?”
It takes him a minute to figure out how to begin, but he looks her in the eye, like he’s aiming the words before he says them. “You have been there for him,” he begins. “The whole time.”
Svetlana’s heart constricts. She nods. “Yes.”
“I just…” and the sun from the window is suddenly reflecting out of Shane Hollander’s eyes, off the tears that are collecting there. “I don’t know. Thank you.”
If it wouldn’t be totally inappropriate and disrespectful to the obvious depth of Shane’s emotions right now, Svetlana would laugh. “For what?”
“For being there when I couldn’t be. Before I knew him.” Shane tilts his head back, just for a second, to regain control of his face. But then he looks back at her. “He’s been through so much, and you…you took care of him. Before he got to me. He wouldn’t…he wouldn’t be him without you.”
Svetlana doesn’t respond, because she can’t, because she is holding her breath, because the alternative is openly weeping in front of Shane Hollander. Her silence seems to make Shane skittish again, so he adds, “I mean, I’ve just been thinking about it a lot since you’ve been here, and. Yeah. I’m just grateful he had you. Has you.”
In the days preceding this trip, Svetlana had been reflecting on what it means to be the world’s foremost expert in Ilya Rozanov. There are things about him that everybody knows: his scoring record, his signature move on the ice, his preference for CCM over Bauer. And then there are things that belong to her only. His shaving strategy, which regularly involves leaving a stupid little mustache and contemplating keeping it for half an hour before he lops it off. His top three cigarette brands, in order, in case they’re out of one of them. The way he would look back at his mom, wherever she was, every time he got the puck, instantly risking a steal but unable to help himself. The pattern of his curls. The sound of his feet on a hardwood floor. The color of the inside of his mouth. The precise meaning of every expression, the movements on his face an alphabet, spelling out a message only she could decipher. She knows before his stick even connects if the puck is going into the goal, because she knows what he can do, what his body is capable of. She knows, on sight, how hard the day has been for him, how close he is to the darkness that he’s been running away from his whole life, scrambling frantically on hands and knees, grasping at money and sex and hockey even when he knows they can’t save him, just to give himself a break. Just to rest for a little while.
She has spent a lifetime in careful research, learning, developing lexicons, writing dissertations in her head, and now her field of study is becoming obsolete. She is redundant. Where does it all go? Does it stay in her forever, atrophying like an unused limb? How will she ever be qualified for anything else?
She didn’t want to give it up. But now, her successor is before her, and she trusts him. She will lay down the mantle, surrender the title, because Shane and Svetlana were never rivals. They could never be in competition, because they have always been on the same team. They want all the same things. They love all the same things.
There are already things he knows that she never will, and there will be many more. He will protect them, make them a home inside himself, and it will not look like the scorched, barren forest inside her. It will look like this house, filled with light, warm from the sun, with plenty of space for both of them.
In an act of rebellion against the person she has become, she shuffles across the expanse of the couch towards Shane, and reaches out to him. He doesn’t hesitate. His arms fold around her, and she clutches his shower-damp shirt, and she wills herself to stay there.
She initiates a mental transfer, from her heart to his, of all the things she knows about Ilya after a lifetime of study. She lets them out of herself, and the space left behind feels terrifyingly empty. And she imagines what she might want to fill it up with. A secondhand Yamaha keyboard. A community college physics course. A dance class, for beginners.
Maybe hockey will be there, too. Maybe she will take the call with Shane’s mother, if only to meet the person who created him.
And maybe there will be someone, one day, at a club or a game or a friend’s party, who makes her want to hand wash the dishes. Who wakes her with a gentle hand, and keeps his shoes by the door. Who makes her feel safe enough to be soft.
He will rearrange the furniture, and he will never be satisfied until she is comfortable in his home.
He will make space inside himself for her. So she can live there.