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“What do you think you would do, if we didn’t play hockey?”
Shane pauses, thinking for a moment. “Now, or if we hadn’t played at all?”
“Mm, I meant at all, but tell me both ways.”
“Greedy.”
“Well, you know.”
“If we retired now, I think we’d just… stay home.” He hesitates only slightly before calling it home. “And break some kind of sex record–”
“Yes.”
“–and maybe after a few years of that I might take up a hobby,” Shane finishes, mouth twisting up at the corner.
“You think I would become boring after only a few years?”
Shane reaches out and hits him in the stomach. Lightly. Lovingly.
They’re lying in the tall grass of a summer afternoon that is all blues and yellows and softened edges. The blades of grass surrounding Shane, the ones that haven’t been tamped down by the weight of his body, crushed beneath the shape of him, dance along in the breeze. It’s late June, in this little bubble of time and space they’ve just discovered where they don’t have to pretend to be anything other than what they are.
“And if I had never played at all… I don’t know. I don’t think I’d be very good at anything.”
Ilya tuts. “You are very good at everything you try, Shane. Of course you would be good at something other than hockey.”
Shane thinks on it. “No, I don’t think I would be. If I didn’t have that one thing to ground me, the pace of the season, the fight of it… I mean, can you imagine me having a normal job?” He imagines himself in an office, in perpetual business casual, doing some made up job with some made up corporate language he has to learn. He suppresses a shudder.
“Of course,” Ilya lies, lifting a hand from where it rests on his stomach to wave it dismissively in the air. “You are very boring, is easy to imagine.”
Shane laughs, a besotted sort of sound.
In truth, Ilya can’t imagine Shane being anything less than exceptional. He doesn’t agree that Shane’s only options would be hockey or normalcy.
“I would have a sexy job.”
Shane snorts. “Of course you would. What the fuck is a sexy job?”
“Anywhere I am is sexy place. So really, any job is sexy job. But, I don’t know. Exotic dancer. DJ.”
“Fucking DJ, Ilya? DJing is not sexy.”
“Firefighter,” Ilya continues on as if Shane hadn’t spoken at all, “Boxer.”
“Hm,” Shane grunts.
“Ah, I got you there, yes?”
“You should quit hockey and be a boxer now,” Shane muses, not caring at all that he’ll feed into Ilya’s ego. He kind of likes to, anyway. “I don’t know why you ever picked a sport that makes you wear so many clothes. Retire now, so I can come to your fights and sit in the front row and watch you punch people with your shirt off.”
Ilya snorts. “You already have front row seat to me with my shirt off anytime you want, Shane.”
“Promise?”
Ilya laughs, boyish and unhindered, and Shane feels a warmth spread through him that has nothing to do with the sun.
Quiet settles over them, warm and welcome. Both boys close their eyes, chins tilted to the open blue of the sky above their heads. A few lazy, wispy clouds travel past. Soft and unhurried, as everything is.
Shane hasn’t said the words, not yet. He’s not exactly planning on saying them, still so unsure of this delicate peace they’ve found over the last few days. He doesn’t want to push too far. But they’re rattling around inside him, those three words, always threatening at the back of his throat, and he’s sure he won’t make it through the summer.
For now, he shoves them down a little bit, and it feels sort of like when he was a kid and he’d tried catching lightning bugs in a jar with only a piece of paper towel for a lid. He can feel the wingbeats thrumming through his resolve.
“I wish I knew you before.”
“Before what?”
Shane shrugs. “Before hockey. Before the rivalry.”
“Before hockey, Shane, you were like three years old when you first got on the ice.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I wish we could’ve been, like. Kids together.” He blushes. “Or something.”
“Or something.”
“You would’ve made fun of me,” Shane squints one eye open to look at Ilya, see if he’s offended him.
“Yes, well. I make fun of you now. Stands to reason.”
“Asshole,” Shane smiles with his whole face.
“I think we would have been best friends,” Ilya says seriously. “I think I would have followed you around everywhere. And then, one day, I would have kissed you.”
“I would have kissed you back.”
“No, you would have panicked. Eyes so wide like bambi. And you get mad at me for a second. And then maybe you kiss me back.”
Shane sees it play out in his mind like an old memory, the fear and anger he would’ve felt at being made to acknowledge the truth of his desires. But he does desire, and when it comes to Ilya, it eclipses everything else. There’s no world where he doesn’t kiss Ilya back.
“Definitely.”
“Do you think we would have gotten tired of it? Spending all our time together? Do you think it would have… worn off?”
Shane knows what he means. This feeling, the spark between them, if it could ever simmer into something less… devastating.
“No. And I don’t think it ever will, either.”
“Hm,” Ilya agrees. He reaches his hand out, almost reflexively, his palm up in the grass in the space between them just to feel it again.
Shane meets him there, fingertips grazing over his palm, the inside of his wrist. It’s electric, skittering up his arm and warming his whole being.
A breeze runs through the valley then, rippling the tall grass, ruffling Ilya’s curls. As if he’s been called to it, Shane’s eyes open to watch his ringlets shift with the breeze, tumbling over his forehead.
He traces his fingertips down again, and Ilya captures his hand, curls his fingers through the spaces between.
Soon enough, the shadows will start to lengthen. They’ll have to make their way back to the cottage, to outrun the evening so they can watch the sunset together from their spot by the lake.
But not yet, not now.
Ilya breathes deep. He turns to watch Shane, who has his eyes closed to the sky, admiring the beautifully sculpted bridge of his nose, the curved edge of his jawline. Part of him wants to reach over and pull him in, to feel Shane pressed against every line of his body. But then this moment would end, and it can’t end yet.
Ilya wonders if a moment can last forever. It feels like maybe this sun will never stop shining. Like evening won’t come, not this time. It will just be them and the shape their bodies leave in the grass and the scent of wildflowers on the wind.
He wonders if they can outrun their destiny. Wonders if he’d like to. If there was no hockey to return to, and no Moscow, and no ghosts.
If they could just stay here, forever. In this perfect meadow in fucking Ottawa. Of all places.
He doesn’t think he would ever feel homesick. No, the thing that makes him ache is just the opposite. He’s never felt his home was anywhere. He wouldn’t care if it was all falling apart, right now, just beyond their reach.
“What kind of games did you play, when you were a kid?”
“Hockey.”
Ilya sighs. “No, Shane. Like, in school. Childhood games.”
“Oh.” Shane tries to think back, that little line appearing between his brows as he does, his nose scrunching in that way that makes his top lip pull up a little. “I don’t know.” And then he smiles, the scrunch disappearing. “I bet you were the worst kid.”
Ilya chuckles, remembering skinned knees and practical jokes and running, heart pounding, back to his mother. “I was very bad. But cute. I usually got out of trouble. When I was very small, anyway.”
“You still get away with things by being cute,” Shane says, squeezing his hand.
“The way it should be, no? Imagine, I am cute and I don’t even get special treatment for it. No, this would not be right.”
“Fair point, I guess.”
“I think you would have hated how much you loved it, if you were there. You would have been like, ‘no, Ilya, we will get caught, we have to go back,’ but you would not want to go back, and you would help me make bottle rockets or whatever, and you would make them better than I could.”
Shane imagines it, and he imagines them getting caught and him taking the fall. He’d get less punishment because he’s ‘the good kid’, and his mom would lecture him in the car on the way home and say she doesn’t know what’s gotten into him, he’s never behaved like this, but secretly she’s kind of happy for it.
“I would’ve made sure you did your homework, first. Before we set off the bottle rockets.”
Ilya laughs. “Yes.”
We should’ve had that, Shane wants to say, but it’s something akin to anger, and he feels so far from angry right now. “Do you… do you have any pictures? Of when you were a kid?”
Ilya frowns. “I… yes, somewhere.” There is a box, buried deep in his closet in Boston. The only things he took from his old house. “Do you?”
“At my parents’. My mom has albums on albums, it’s horrible,” he smiles. “I’ll sneak some pictures with my phone camera next time I’m there.”
“Only the embarrassing ones.”
“Of course.”
“I will find some of mine for you.”
“Thank you,” Shane says, rubbing the back of Ilya’s hand with his thumb.
Ilya opens his eyes again, not sure when exactly he’d closed them, to find Shane already watching him. His head is turned slightly in Ilya’s direction, that stupid pretty little smile on his mouth.
“What?”
“You’re pissing me off,” Shane answers, still smiling.
“How? I have done nothing.”
The sun’s rays shine through Ilya’s curls, turning them gold, lighting the blond of his eyelashes, resting gently on the slope of his nose.
“Look at you. You’re so beautiful. It’s fucking irritating.”
Ilya shifts his weight in the grass, rolling onto his side and ever so slightly closer to Shane. “Stop looking at me then.”
“No.” Shane’s smile cracks, showing teeth. His freckles pop in the sunlight, brought out more than Ilya’s ever seen them, from the hours spent outside.
“Are you going to come here, or will I have to do it?”
Shane rolls his eyes, but he goes, laying his body over Ilya’s and flattening him back down to the ground. He settles one leg over Ilya’s hips, an arm across his chest, a hand cradling his face. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Ilya says back, one corner of his mouth pulling up, and then he leans in.
The kiss is slow and warm, leading nowhere, just kissing for the sake of it. Ilya rests one hand on Shane’s waist, right at the curve of it, and Shane is enthralled with the span of his fingers, the width of his palm, the way Ilya manages to make him feel small and held.
He pulls back finally, pressing quick, soft kisses to Ilya’s cheek, his jaw, his throat.
“Can we come back here next summer?” Ilya asks, soft, like he might break something.
“Yes,” Shane laughs. Fucking giggles. “Yes.”
Ilya rolls them over, pinning Shane beneath him in the grass. “And the one after that?”
“Yes.”
And he thinks that Ilya might keep going, keep asking, but it doesn’t matter because there’s a giddiness winding up inside Shane now, rising higher in a way that feels almost unbearable until he crushes his lips to Ilya’s again.
And the one after that. And I love you, I love you, I love you.