Archive of Our Own

2011

Ilya’s first threesome happens because of a translation error.

Mel is a cute college student in a little lace crop top and tiny denim shorts. She looks like a cowgirl fetish on steroids. After Ilya buys her two cocktails, she makes out with her friend—mostly for Ilya’s sake, he thinks, watching them.

In the bar it’s hard to hear her, and his English is not so good yet. He hears boyfriend and discreet and home, and puts together his own narrative, another English word he won’t learn until six years later. Ilya thinks: Mel plans to cheat on her boyfriend with Ilya.

No problem, he murmurs into her ear, licking sweat off her throat. Ilya is discreet. He is looking for a one-time thing. It’s no problem at all.

So they go to her house, which is a ten-minute walk away from the bar. Ilya shivers a little under his tank top and jeans. May in Boston is not so warm that he can comfortably wear a tiny little lace crop top and little denim shorts like Mel. Maybe girls are stronger than boys in this regard. When they open the door to Mel’s house, there’s a man.

Ilya genuinely thinks he is about to die.

He looks him over. The man—Mel’s boyfriend, presumably—is lean but not skinny. A little shorter than Ilya but not so much that Ilya will have an inherent advantage. Ilya could probably beat him in a fight, but this leaves the question of Mel. Is it ethical to leave her there? Should he take her and run?

But then the man looks him up and down, openly. This, Ilya understands.

“Cute, right?” Mel says, not to Ilya, sliding her hand down Ilya’s back. Ilya is still reorienting to the current situation, but through sheer power of will, he does not flinch.

“Yeah,” the man says. He smiles. He’s good-looking, which Ilya hadn’t had time to recognize before. “I’m Nathan.”

“Ilya,” Ilya says, swallowing. And then he turns to Mel and says, “He’s handsome,” and kisses her, leaving the next step up to Nathan. He is in a new country now.

The two of them are very good to him. The sex is electric, because they’re hot and because Ilya is still riding the high of fearing Mel’s dangerous boyfriend. He isn’t sure the peace will last after the sex is over. The boyfriend kisses him and touches him, doesn’t just watch Ilya and Mel like they’re a custom porno or look at only Mel as if Ilya isn’t even there, which raises Nathan’s esteem in Ilya’s eyes.

At the end of the night, the couple walks him to the door after plying him with water and offering the use of their shower, which Ilya declines. “I had a great night,” Nathan says, and kisses him again.

Ilya doesn’t know what to do. He feels fucked out and grateful. Nothing bad happened. Nothing went wrong. “Get home safe,” Mel says sweetly.

He wants to ask if he can stay. He could sleep in their bed, or on the couch even, overnight. He’s so thankful it’s almost pathetic. He had so much fun. They were so unfathomably nice to him. He wants to do this a second time.

But, of course, that is not the script. “Good night,” he says, not experienced enough in English to say anything smooth or intelligent. He walks two blocks, boxers cold against his skin, back to the club strip to hail a taxi. He doesn’t have the phone number of any car company.

In the locker room the next day, Peterson asks what he got up to. “Threesome,” Ilya volunteers, grin already on. “Women love me.”

“You fuckin’ dog,” Peterson laughs, slapping his naked shoulder.

Marly nudges him. “You have a good time?” he asks sincerely.

“Of course,” Ilya says.

“Fuckin’ right, bud.”

Thus begins the legend of Ilya Rozanov’s Boston club circuit.

2014

Ilya flies home in time for Christmas, just at the start of January. He will be in Russia for two months, to get to know his team and train and win gold for Russia at the Olympics.

He bought an apartment the moment he turned 18. Ilya’s not even sure why. He only sleeps or fucks there. He spends his days with his father, making sure he has not done something unforgivable to Polina or signed away half his assets, the way Ilya has worried about for the last two years. When Ilya is home, Alexei hides with his family in the house Ilya pays for.

When he lands at 3pm on January 6th, Svetlana picks him up from the airport. His father, fortunately, has other plans until dinner.

“Does the Minister’s daughter have time for a drink?” Ilya asks, while Svetlana of course is already on her way up the stairs.

“Has America changed you?” she asks, while Ilya opens the bottle of wine she must have bought and left at his house last time. White, crisp and dry, heady.

“I don’t know,” Ilya says, honestly enough. She drinks her wine fast, and Ilya follows her. “Would you like to find out?”

So then he sits on the couch and kisses her as she settles into his lap. He tickles up her sides, laughs at the way she laughs. “You are a little beast,” she scolds as he bites her stomach, leaving a hickey under her ribcage. “What if I wanted to find another man? Who will have me with your bruises all over me?”

“Another man?” Ilya gasps, mock outraged. He looks at her above him, mouth slick already with kissing, the taut planes of her body, her arms. He licks the underside of her breast, bites at the skin below her armpit. She smells like deodorant, but a little like herself, too. “You would have another man while I am here for two months only? I cannot satisfy you anymore, Sveta?”

“You’ll have to show me,” she says, gasping as his tongue finds her nipple, grasping under her shirt. “Shit, Ilya—”

“You missed me,” Ilya grins, rocking his hips up into hers. She’s so fucking pretty. “Are you going to come just from your nipples again?”

“You wish,” Svetlana laughs, and then Ilya sets himself to her body. Soft under his hands, except for the scar on her hip and the dry backs of her hands, of course. She rolls her hips down and Ilya groans against her skin, hard and twitching already. Fuck. “Don’t make me come like this,” she says, running her fingers through his hair. “I want you to fuck me.” 

“Yes,” Ilya hisses, “me too.”

Svetlana gets up to take her clothes off and bends to get a condom out of her purse while Ilya watches, hard and skin prickling from her touch. “Hello, stupid,” she says, smacking him in the face with the condom, “are you going to take your pants off?”

Ilya scrambles to take his pants off, and she jerks him, licks under his head and down to his balls. Different from Hollander, but still good, so good. Fuck, he shouldn’t even be thinking of Hollander. Sveta knows him so well. They know each other better than anyone. She rolls the condom on him and then straddles him. “Ready?” she asks, as if he is the one getting fucked.

Ilya holds his dick and watches, feels the head inside her— Jesus, she’s tight, like always, so fucking good. “Fuck,” he hisses as she sinks down onto him, slow, because he has not even fingered her or eaten her out, because she’s hungry for it like he is. “Oh, Jesus, Sveta—”

“Shit,” she hisses when she takes it all. He loves fucking her so much, tight and wet even with the condom. He fucks up into her, gripping her ass just to hold it. He got fucking lucky. Gorgeous woman who decides she wants to sleep with him—

“Are you getting sentimental?” she asks.

“No, no—”

He grips her, muscles in his forearms flexing as she rides him, small movements that do more for her than for him, grinding her clit against him. “Oh,” she gasps, and Ilya presses deeper into her, somehow, fuck—

He fucks her like that until she comes, touching herself until she clenches around him, tight, dripping all over his cock— and then he eats her out until she comes again, moaning so loud they can probably hear her from the street.

“Jesus Christ,” she groans, breathy and fucked-out, chest heaving on his couch. Ilya kneels over her and jerks himself off, twitching into his own hand until he comes on her stomach. “So disgusting,” she sighs happily, and Ilya grins.

“We’ll have drinks tomorrow night?” she asks, wiping herself with a tissue from the box on Ilya’s coffee table.

“No shower?”

“No, no, I need to go home.” Svetlana goes to the bathroom to piss and change into the dress for whatever function she has tonight. “I’m meeting one of mama’s friends, the car dealer.”

“Ah. Your new career.” Ilya kisses her on the cheek, still naked, and walks her to the door. “Get me a Lamborghini. The fastest one they have.”

“You have no taste,” Svetlana scolds him, but she kisses him back anyway. “I will see you tomorrow, yes?” In a fit of seriousness, the kind that usually only comes before she has to leave him, she says, “I have to make sure you’re taken care of.”

Ilya meets her eyes. Yes, yes. Always she took care of him, always they took care of each other and everyone around them until they couldn’t anymore. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you all the horrible things my father says,” he says wryly, and she pats him on the chest. “But only for a Lamborghini.”

“I will buy you the biggest, ugliest car they have,” she promises. She leaves him there, naked in his apartment, steeling himself for dinner at his father’s house.

“Your flight was good?” Grigori asks. Polina is there to make them dinner. Most days, Ilya knows, she stays in a penthouse downtown which Grigori bought for her so that she would not have to travel so far if she went to the clubs or out shopping with her friends. Ilya wonders if, when he first bought it, Grigori knew how much time Polina would spend there, or if he even notices how long she stays away.

Ilya chews his potatoes mechanically. “Yes, father.”

Polina stays silent. She is gorgeous, objectively. Only eight years older than Ilya. Polina has platinum blonde hair and waterproof mascara. She wears earrings to dinner but, as a concession to informality, no necklace. Her brown sweater is stylishly oversized and her skinny jeans are bedazzled along the waistband.

“It is an honour to represent your country in the Olympics,” Grigori remarks. “And as captain!”

“Yes, father,” Ilya says. As if he has no idea. 

“Take your responsibility seriously.” Grigori drinks from his beer glass, emptying it. His hand shakes only a little as he sets it down.

Ilya looks away. “Yes, father.”

Polina unobtrusively takes his glass to refill it. Ilya gives her another two, maybe three years before she becomes so resentful that she will either kill his father or slip out from his life entirely, except to take his money and his penthouse.

“You know I worry about you,” Grigori says, settling into the rhythm of his usual rants. Often Ilya pities him. He only rants to fill the silence. If Ilya had things to say to his father, then his father would not need to spend his breath rambling just to feel less alone. But Ilya doesn’t trust his father enough to give him even glimpses into his daily life. Sometimes, Ilya thinks it is not only trust, but responsibility, that has gone away between them. A family that owes each other nothing.

Grigori continues, “You are so far away. It is a different country. They are undisciplined and soft. You are better than this American league, yes? Remember that, my son. I always knew you had such potential. And now, captain of the Russian team!”

Ilya nods. Polina brings him a beer and sets it down as he finishes speaking.

“You never call me,” Grigori says. Ilya answers perhaps one out of every five calls from his father, mostly because his father calls while Ilya is asleep. He can never keep track of time zones. Still, Ilya prickles. They call almost every other week, because Ilya loses at least one game almost other every week. “Sometimes I think I did not teach you how to defend yourself. Too weak, too slow. And your hair is always too long! Do they not give you enough money for a haircut?”

Grigori leans over to touch Ilya’s hair, and Ilya flinches, anticipating the slap that does not come.

His father leans back. Frowns. “Am I cruel to you, Ilya?”

Ilya’s stomach turns. He drinks more beer and does not eat anything. “No, father.”

“So why do you act like this? Beaten dog.” Grigori shakes his head, disappointed. “You are so meek, until you decide you want to snap like a bitch. A man is consistent. You are only predictable on the ice.”

Ilya nods. Grigori continues eating, quiet now, satisfied with how he has filled the silence.

Sometimes—like with the hair, or when he talks about Ilya’s potential—Ilya sees flashes of his father’s past. He knows very little about it. Both of his paternal grandparents had already died by the time Ilya was born. But he can see that Grigori speaks, sometimes, the way he was spoken to by his own father. The worst part of any conversation with his father is the way Ilya sees his love packaged in criticism.

He is trying. Grigori is trying very hard. Ilya is ungenerous, has high expectations from his years in America where people laugh and hug each other and high-five when they make good plays. Grigori has paid countless rubles for his son’s career. In response, Ilya flinches from his hands, those hands that have fixed his tie for him, tugged at his hair before scheduling and paying for an appointment at the barber, those hands that gave Ilya a framed photograph of his mother for him to keep in the hollow days after Mama died but before the funeral. Always silent, unless there was something to improve upon.

Only once did his father hit him. In all the years, only once, and still Ilya remembers it. He embarrasses himself. 

It was the wake after his mother’s funeral. He was so young, and Grigori so drunk. Ilya had been crying about his mother’s death, crying that it was not an accident, crying that everyone was lying; everyone knew it was a lie, and so there was no point in saying the truth, of course. When his father backhanded him, Ilya was only minutes away from slapping himself, ashamed and full of grief and humiliating the family in front of Father’s associates.

Ilya has a second beer and eats just enough to say he has finished supper. Polina takes his plate away when he is done. Ilya and his father sit in the living room and watch a figure skating competition that Ilya can barely pay attention to. Polina murmurs quietly that she is going out, and then she leaves. Ilya stares hard at the screen and resists the urge to retreat to his own apartment. He knows: Just like his stepmother, he is ungrateful.

2014 

Gay sex is not dangerous in Boston, not like he’s used to. Ilya goes on the Internet using the iPhone 4 his manager bought for him, mostly in an effort to force him to check his email more frequently than once every quarter. He looks up “gay club boston” and gets results. Legal results, too, places that have profiles on Google Maps. If he went to one it would be a scandal, but not a crime.

This being the case, it’s barely worth it. No one else at the club will be motivated to keep his secret for him, especially now that everyone has a phone with a camera. Men who go to places like Twisted and HeartBeat probably post pictures of their boyfriends on Facebook. And anyway, Ilya’s most dangerous, most precious prize is waiting for him in Montreal. Waiting to play for him, to put on a show for him, passing pucks to Pike like Mel kissing her friend at the bar. All for Ilya.

When Ilya comes back from Russia after the summer break, his first task is training. It’s his second season as captain. He was MVP last season, got the award in Vegas and everything. That does not mean another victory is a given. He watches his boys skate laps with his eyes narrowed, discusses plays with his coach and runs drills until he finally gets tired of the ice. Marleau lights up when Ilya fist bumps him, the rookies watching, their eyes cutting away when Ilya says Good job, I love you, which he gets away with because he’s the captain, and because when he says I love you it is not a man who says it. When Ilya says I love you he is a thing that belongs, like the rest of them, to the Boston Raiders.

His second task is memorizing their game schedule. Montreal here in one month. He remembers the first time—Hollander meeting his gaze, wide-eyed, eyebrows furrowed, like it was too much pleasure to take at once. Hollander almost in tears from coming without a hand on his cock. Unbelievably, shockingly beautiful. Ilya had never felt anything like that before. And the second time, in Vegas. Ilya had not made a good showing at the end of that night.

He maps it out. He will book a hotel room in Boston and invite Hollander there. He will take him apart, slowly, until Hollander is shaking for it, and then Ilya will give him exactly what he wants and ride the high of being the only man who could, just like the first time.

One month comes and goes. The ice is almost as erotic as the hotel room confirmation in Ilya’s email inbox. Hollander spits while he waits for the puck drop and Ilya gets half hard, and then Ilya checks him into the boards and imagines the bruise he will wear later.

“Shit, Rozanov,” Hollander gasps later, in bed. He’s sweating, wet behind the back of his knees. Ilya leans over him, knee planted on the bed. Christ, he’s so tight, so good. “Fuck, fuck—”

“Good,” Ilya hisses. He presses forward, bends Hollander—fuck, how does he bend that way—until his thighs meet Ilya’s pecs. Holy God. Ilya reaches up to his face, watches the way his mouth opens and drools when Ilya fucks him harder, all focus narrowed to this, to the expression on that face. He feels an overwhelming sense of duty. He tightens his grip on Hollander’s waist and watches a tear leak out. God.

Then Hollander’s focus starts to wander—eyes zoning out, sinking deep—and Ilya isn’t ready for him to come just yet. Ilya isn’t done. He slaps Hollander on the cheek gently, and snarls, teeth clenched, when Hollander’s focus snaps back to him. “Look at me,” he grits out, all the blood rushing. Fuck, fuck. “Just me.”

“Yeah,” Hollander says, voice small. Ilya slaps him again, harder, and Hollander gasps, “Fuck, yes— yeah—” and devolves into little whines, little noises Ilya fucks out of him. All for Ilya.

“Do you like it when I hit you?” Ilya asks, close to coming. He wants Hollander to come first. He wants Hollander to come hands-free again.

“Yes,” Hollander admits. Ilya grins, sweat pouring down his chest onto Hollander’s stomach. And then he says, “Backhand me.”

Ilya swallows. He freezes for a moment, and then restarts the rhythm before Hollander can call him on it.

In general, this is something he does not do. Ilya has been backhanded before. Once by his father. A few times by Alexei. It is humiliating. It feels more degrading than using the palm of his hand, somehow.

But Shane— Hollander’s eyes are wet and desperate, and gorgeous, and vulnerable. Ilya is still on the verge of coming just looking at him. Someone else could slap him and really hurt him. Someone else could give him what he wants.

Ilya stretches forward enough to reach him, and hits him across the face with the back of his hand, watching his eyes. Hollander meets his gaze until he can’t, eyes rolling into the back of his head as he comes, hands-free. Ilya feels a little sick.

He puts his head down and watches the twitch of Hollander’s cock against his abdomen, the smear of come in his pubic hair, and comes, pressing his mouth against Hollander’s ankle bone as if that will make up for the slap. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, he says in that kiss, since he cannot say it aloud. 

Finally, he pulls out, awkwardly holding the condom tight around his dick until he reaches the trash can. Then he kneels at the foot of the bed and kisses Hollander’s shins, the insides of his knees.

“What are you doing?” Hollander slurs, fucked out. He sounds so happy.

“Appreciating,” Ilya says. He reaches Hollander’s dick and licks him until Hollander shoves him away. Ilya laughs at Hollander’s little sensitive whines. Hollander grins at him and Ilya settles down next to him, hand resting on Hollander’s stomach. It’s okay. It’s good, even.

Just as the time comes for Ilya to take his shower and leave, Hollander says, quietly, “Do the guys ever…”

Ilya blinks. “What?”

Hollander shrugs and looks away. “Nothing. Never mind.”

Last week Fortin hid Ilya’s underwear. He walked around naked for fifteen minutes until finally Fortin pulled Ilya’s boxers out of his own bag and snapped them against his ass while Ilya was facing the other way. Everyone laughed, and the rookies laughed the hardest.

Ilya replies, an admission wrapped in a joke, which is only a joke because of the absurdity of its premise, “No, you are the only hockey player for me.”

“Fuck you,” Hollander says, angry.

Ilya knows why Hollander is angry. Maybe the locker room was even worse for him than it was for Ilya as a teenager. Or maybe it is worse for him even today, since Ilya suspects Shane Hollander does not like women enough to fake it.

He doesn’t touch that. He presses his mouth against Hollander’s armpit, licking at his sweat for long enough that Hollander laughs and seems comfortable again. “Fuck off,” Hollander says in the easy way he usually does, and Ilya smiles back at him, duty fulfilled. He goes to take his shower, satisfied like he always is after good things.

Ilya loves having sex. He loves meeting new people. “I am learning to socialize. Like new student in school,” he tells the boys in the locker room, while they laugh at his hickeys and wolf whistle at the scratches on his back. “Lesson in American culture.”

Really, he has spent the last five years studying the norms in American locker rooms. Women in clubs he understood already. The line between buddies and gay he is still learning, even now. But he strips down and showers after every practice like a man who has nothing to hide, and enjoys the attention paid to his body.

Off the ice, he enjoys the friendly nature of the hookup world. He finds sex to be the same kind of puzzle as a power play. He likes surprising women with how much he loves going down on them, how much attention he pays to their responses, their sounds. He likes kneeling in bathroom stalls and fucking in the back of their cars. 

And fuck, it’s hot. It’s hot that he can get pussy anywhere he wants. It’s hot that girls will do anything for a chance to bounce on his dick and suck his cock. He’s having the time of his fucking life.

2015

“Get a load of this, fuck, boys,” Fortin says. He passes around his phone, which has a picture of a woman’s ass wearing a black lace thong.

Marleau ignores it. He’s not really a gentleman, but Ilya knows he is close to his sisters. Apparently he has recently been liking tweets from Autostraddle, which Ilya only knows about because it is frequently mentioned in the twitter replies on the official Boston Raiders account. Marleau is the most enlightened man in the MLH because he thinks it’s bad that society teaches girls to throw up until they get skinny or something. No one has made fun of him to his face about it, because Marly is built like a fucking ox.

Anyway, Marly’s the closest thing the Raiders have to a feminist, so if he won’t say anything, it’s up to Captain Rozanov. He looks at the picture on his screen. It’s not really sexy at all. “So rare for you to meet hot girls you need a picture?” Ilya says, and Fortin flushes while the rest of the room laughs. “She is bored with you so she says please show entire locker room of twenty men a picture of my ass?”

That cools the place down fast. “Shut up,” Fortin mutters, taking his phone back.

“Does she say, please take my picture, I want ugly teenage hockey players to look at my panties?” Ilya presses. Fortin looks away, mouth pressed into a line. “Or are you just a creep?”

“It’s not a big fuckin’ deal, Jesus.”

“We are not Toronto, ah?” Ilya says to the room, which makes some of the other guys laugh uncomfortably. The Dallas Kent rumours are quiet, only whispers, but this makes them more powerful than any kind of public statement. Hockey players only shut up about true things. “No need to be gross. We are very famous and sexy hockey players, many women will say yes if we ask. So no more of this.” 

He looks each one of them in the eye. They nod, cowed. This is Ilya’s third season as captain. Ilya Rozanov might take them to another Cup. What he says goes.

The rookies put on their pads quickly, desperate to escape the awkwardness of a talking-to about sex and girls. Marly nudges Ilya’s shoulder gratefully, but Ilya cannot stop thinking about those rookies, eighteen or nineteen, sometimes twenty. Every year they seem younger and younger. Shane Hollander might have been this young once. Ilya puts it out of his mind.

He doesn’t know this girl’s name, but she’s gorgeous, tits the perfect size for Ilya’s palm, tight muscular body the way Ilya likes. She whines beautifully in his ear when he presses into her for the first time, slow, and then moans as he fucks her over the sink of a single-stall bathroom.

“Fuck,” she gasps, as Ilya pulls her hips up, “shit, fuck—”

She’s so wet, dripping with it, tight pussy around his cock. Fuck. And then the door opens, and a man walks in.

Ilya pauses, but he just closes the door behind him and leans against the wall, watching. It’s just another threesome, Ilya tells himself, never mind that he doesn’t sleep with men anymore except for Shane. Too risky, too close to the real thing.

“He’s cute, right?” this girl says, gasps, like Mel did many years ago. Ilya’s first and only threesome. And now this.

So it seems like they know each other. Ilya feels cold with shame. But it’s no problem. No problem at all. Ilya makes himself come, closes his eyes, and grits his teeth against the feeling of exposure.

The man speaks. “You want—”

“No,” Ilya says sharply. As if he is one of those men who only likes women, who cannot bear another man in the room. Cruel and safe. He pulls up his pants, which takes too long.

As he walks past the man to the door, he hears, “Jeez, what kind of stick does he have up his ass?”

Ilya’s eyes burn. He feels like an idiot. He thinks about texting Svetlana. She will tell him he should not let crazy North American women bother him.

He could text Shane. Fucked a girl in the bathroom, thought of you. Like the awards show in Vegas. You would have let me do anything to you in that bathroom. Do you remember that? Do you still like me like that?

This is what he gets for trying to diversify his interests. He can barely work up the urge to sleep with anyone other than Hollander these days, unless he’s four drinks in and two months out from the last time. He does it anyway, just to stay in the habit. Usually it’s fun. 

In the end, he texts Sasha, who said hello to him via Svetlana over the summer. In Russian he writes: fucked a girl in the bathroom. a man walked in and watched. the people of Boston cannot get enough of me.

Sasha takes very long to reply, so long that Ilya is back home, debating whether it will be better to make himself puke now or in the morning. He is so cold, shivering, but every time he’s about to get up to put a blanket over his shoulders, he forgets what he planned to do. So he just sits on his couch watching his phone.

In the end the text comes: we are too appealing for our own good.

Yes. That is probably true. A minute later, another text from Sasha: do I need to come defend your honour?

Too close to pity. There is nothing to pity anyway. It’s true: Who can blame a man for finding Ilya Rozanov sexy? Ilya does it on purpose.

No need, he texts back. It would be an unfair exchange anyway, since Ilya never defended Sasha’s honour. He let Alexei shove Sasha into walls, let Sasha get prodded and stripped in the locker room, let Sasha’s father berate him in front of the team for his weak passes and call him a faggot for the way he skated. Better off with the figure skaters, Coach had said, as if it was not just as impossible to be gay in the figure skating locker rooms. Always it was Sasha falling short of Ilya, the man of the house, at least on the rink.

Sasha has not held this against him; a kindness. Sasha appreciated that Ilya still let Sasha kiss him even though Ilya was purpose-built for masculine, violent hockey.

Many years ago Sasha did him another kindness by looking at him in the bathroom, eyes hot, moving with purpose. Ilya would not have known how to do this otherwise. He would not have learned that look, which he later applied to Shane Hollander.

Why was it a kindness then and not now? He doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know the difference. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe nothing bad has happened tonight. As Alexei says: Ilya has always been dramatic, self-obsessed, needlessly emotional, just like their mother.

He falls asleep there, sitting upright on the couch, and pukes in the morning.

2016

Ilya thumbs over his water bottle while he waits through his rest period. Mostly he focuses on cardio, but he enjoys lifting weights. Today he is doing squats and thinking about Hollander.

Hollander, undoubtedly, does squats. Hollander has an ass so round and taut you could use it to teach spherical geometry in school. Ilya wants to know everything else about Hollander—wants to exercise with him again like that summer before their rookie year, wants to power through on the cycling machine next to him while watching him gasp for air, wants to fuck him on the bench, wants to know what he puts in his smoothies and what he reads before bed—but he won’t ever get that. Ilya gets five or six hours accumulated over the season. Well, he used to. 

Ilya knows what he is. He is good at two things: sex and hockey.

Fortunately for him, Hollander likes sex and hockey. So Hollander likes Ilya, even if he won’t admit it.

Ilya’s timer rings. He moves precisely from the squat rack to the locker room. Sometimes, to help sharpen his spatial awareness, he divides rooms into metre by metre quadrants. When he is alone he steps to the invisible line at the edge of one quadrant, lines his toes up, and then moves through the next. At home it pissed his father off until he became too sick to recognize Ilya’s habits.

He likes to know the distance to a thing just by looking. He likes to know his body can stop if he wants it to. He likes to know the boundaries of what he can control.

Hollander, of course, is beyond control. Beyond anything. Ilya fucks women and snarls nasty things into their shoulders and comes hard, and always knows what happens next. He can chart the pinging radar-line from kissing to shirtlessness to fucking to exit, custom-designed for each bed partner. Never artificial, but always managed.

With Shane, Ilya never knows what the next thing will be out of his mouth. At any time, he might say Shane’s first name. Ah, so he might. So he did.

2017

Two months into TMZ’s hard launch of Rose and Hollander’s relationship, Ilya catches Hollander in the crowded hotel bar after a press conference, one of the league circuits nobody really watches where they talk about the status of the game and what to expect in the back half of the season and so on and so forth.

“No girlfriend today,” Ilya says as a greeting from behind Hollander. He relishes in his flinch, the way he can’t help the goosebumps on his neck.

Hollander turns around, already angry. Already red and gorgeous with it. “She’s on a shoot.”

“I see.” Ilya looks around at the other players socializing, some of the execs comparing notes. Hollander is by himself, somehow. Sometimes Ilya wonders how no one else sees what he sees. Maybe they do. Maybe every other person in this room is holding themselves back by force of will. Maybe every person in this room wants to mouth down Hollander’s throat, wants to press their palm against Hollander’s stomach with their fingers around his flank and grip hard. Maybe Ilya is not so special.

He swallows. “Rose is a beautiful woman,” Ilya says. Hollander frowns, but doesn’t walk away. It’s enough for Ilya.

And besides, it’s true. Ilya knows Rose is a beautiful woman, and he knows Hollander doesn’t like women. He doesn’t appreciate Rose the way Ilya would. Ilya would fuck her so well she’d forget Hollander’s name.

But, on the other hand, it’s Hollander. Everyone knows that Hollander is long-term material. He imagines Hollander kisses her in the morning. He stays overnight and kisses her, and he buys her flowers, probably. She can touch Hollander in the daytime. Only Ilya can ruin him. Only Ilya can make him beg, and bite, and scream. Ilya makes him worse.

So Ilya leans in, while Hollander is still trying to come up with a rebuttal. “You must be desperate for her,” he murmurs, and Hollander shivers. Ilya’s mouth tips up into a smile. “You must want her so badly. Do you, Hollander?”

Shane swallows. Ilya can almost hear the click of his dry throat. He wants to fuck into that mouth so badly. “Do I what?”

“Do you think of her every minute of every day?” Ilya leans on the table, centimetres away from touching Shane’s forearm with his own. They’re too close for a public scene, but he can’t resist. “Do you fuck her, Hollander? Do you bend her over the couch because you can’t wait long enough to make it to the bed?”

“Jesus, Rozanov, fuck off,” Hollander says, voice shaky. 

Ilya knows what Shane is. Ilya knows what he wants. “Do you ask her to touch your hole? Do you moan for her the way you moan for—”

“Not here,” Shane spits out. “Fuck you. Keep her name out of your mouth.”

“Why, do you want something else in my mouth?”

“Fuck off.” Hollander chugs the rest of his ginger ale and leaves Ilya standing there, the way he always does. Ilya can’t help the grin.

A few minutes later, while Ilya settles against the bar a polite distance away from everyone else, Scott Hunter sets up next to him. He clears his throat. Ilya doesn’t greet him.

“You really get under his skin,” Hunter comments mildly.

“Hm.”

“I think we’re hotel neighbours again. In case you were wondering.”

Ilya scoffs to hide the fear. This is it. It’s over. But, aloud, he says, “I wasn’t.” 

“All right.” Hunter takes a sip from his pint, teeth catching on the glass. He says, “This is a nicer place than the 2011 All-Stars, huh.”

Ilya breathes. Breathe in, breathe out. Hunter cannot do anything to him. Hunter has no evidence. Ilya says, “Yes, I suppose.”

Hunter says, “Thicker walls.”

Now Ilya swallows. He cannot look at Hunter. He cannot speak.

After a brief, tense moment, Hunter says, “I’m going to be out pretty much all night. I usually like to see the nightlife after shit like this, cool down without having to be alone in my room. I’ll probably be back around 3, to be honest. So you probably won’t see me. You won’t bother me if you throw a rager in there.”

“Fantastic. Party night for me.”

“If you and Hollander are gonna get into something, you should keep it private. You two are under a lot of scrutiny. Maybe more than you realize.” Hunter nudges his shoulder, and then his free hand flexes. Ilya can see it, from where he’s been staring at the floor to avoid looking Hunter in the face.

Hunter takes a deep breath, and says to Ilya, “I understand what it’s like. Maybe more than you realize in that way, too.”

Ilya exhales. He looks at Hunter, whose jaw is set. Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, Ilya has gained a newfound respect for Scott Hunter. “Thank you,” Ilya says quietly.

“Us hockey boys gotta stick together, right?” Hunter nudges his shoulder against Ilya’s, and then leaves him there to go talk to one of his nice-boy Admirals.

Fuck. Fuck. Hollander will lose it when he finds out that Hunter knows. Maybe Ilya doesn’t have to tell him. It will just be between him and Hunter. If Hunter says anything, Ilya will take the fall. He already knows how it will go. He has a reputation already. It will be easy to make Ilya out into someone who tempted Hollander into a big mistake. Ilya will lose everything, but he will not lose Hollander his career.

His stomach hurts. He quietly slips back to his room, where no one will see what he doesn’t want them to see.

Hollander comes to his room at midnight, already upset. But he’s here, at least. 

Ilya wastes no time. He kisses Hollander before he can regret it, mouths down his throat to bite there, sharply. Hollander is trembling. “You came,” he says, before he can hold it in.

Hollander looks away. He is ashamed. So is Ilya, so that’s fine. Ilya breathes him in, the smell of him. Hollander hates to wear cologne because he is, apparently, “scent-sensitive.” This is why he is in Rolex commercials, and not Chanel ones.

Ilya loves it. He doesn’t have to settle for approximations. Here, he can breathe in, and smell Hollander’s sweat, his spit, with nothing in between. He tongues at his jaw and enjoys the sound of him, the way he’s close enough to see Hollander’s throat moving.

“Let me fuck you.”

“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”

They haven’t talked about Rose. If Ilya has his way, they never will. She doesn’t get this. Whatever she has, it can’t be as good as this, the arch of Hollander’s back, the way his toes curl in his socks.

In the lamplight of his hotel room, Hollander looks so, so beautiful. Ilya bites his thighs, inhales the smell between them, and then rolls him over to look at his ass, reaching for the lube.

“Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya groans, looking down. The dimples in his back, the stretch marks across his ass, his shoulders. Ilya leans down, covers his body, just to feel Hollander’s body against his. “You want it?”

“Yeah,” Hollander breathes, face buried in the pillow. Pillow princess, Ilya thinks fondly. He presses one finger into Hollander’s hole, feels him clench, Christ, it’s good. Ilya presses a kiss against his shoulder, bites. “Fu—uck, Rozanov—”

“Yes,” Ilya hisses, pressing another finger in. Hollander presses back, hungry for it. “You want it so much, pretty boy.” 

Hollander moans. It’s too loud, but Rozanov doesn’t give a fuck. Hunter can say what he wants. Right now, he has Hollander pressing back against his fingers, asking for more. Begging. Jesus Christ. Ilya gives him a third finger and watches him take it.

“You want my cock,” Ilya says.

“Yes,” Hollander hisses. He sounds— a little off. Ilya tries to look at his face but Hollander pushes him away, rolls his ass backwards into Ilya, says, “I want— Ilya, give me your cock, please.”

“Fuck.” Ilya watches him, chest heaving. His hole is empty, clenching around nothing. Ilya’s job is not to ask questions. Ilya’s job is to give Shane Hollander what he wants, especially when he says his first name. “That what you want? You want my dick? Will you ask me nicely?”

“Please,” Hollander moans, and he whimpers, beautifully, when Ilya presses the head of his dick against his hole. “Oh, God, Rozanov, please—”

He sounds broken already, voice cracking, and Ilya can’t resist. He wants to hear him say Ilya again, even if he leaves after. He presses in, feels the heat of him, so fucking tight. After two months of Rose Landry he is probably desperate for it, desperate to be split open, to take it the way he was made to. To take Ilya. Fuck. 

Hollander buries his head in his arms and shakes. Fuck, it feels so good, so fucking tight. He hasn’t been fucked in a long time. Ilya thrusts once, watches his ass jiggle from the impact of Ilya’s thighs. Jesus. 

Ilya bends over so his forehead is pressed to the back of Hollander’s head. He wants to tempt him. To push him. He says, already knowing it is a mistake, “Fuck, Shane.”

“Don’t—” Hollander gasps wetly, presses his face deeper into the pillow.

Something is wrong. Ilya swallows. “Hollander—”

“I’m fine, just keep— it’s good, it’s good—”

“No, I—” Ilya pulls out and Hollander sobs, shoulders shaking with it. Oh, God. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing—” he chokes out, through the tears.

Ilya feels sick. He did this. The sight is… horrific, suddenly, turned on its side, sharpened into a different focus. Hollander sobbing, wretched, in his bed. He looks ruined. Ilya’s stomach churns. He didn’t ask. He didn’t make Hollander look at him.

“Okay,” Ilya says, amazed his throat still works. He hates himself, more than he has ever hated himself before. “I… I give you blanket.”

He doesn’t want to risk cleaning Hollander up, touching him when he has clearly hurt him in some way. So he pulls the duvet out from under Hollander and then spreads it over him, all the way up to his shoulders, avoiding contact as much as possible. Hollander flinches, but seems to settle once he’s covered. “Please. Tell me.”

Hollander’s hand reaches out from the blanket. It lies there, twitching, naked on the sheets. Hollander’s face is turned a little, and the sobs have lessened, even if his lip is still trembling.

Maybe… but maybe it will make things worse. Ilya looks at that hand. He reaches for it, and Hollander grips it tight.

“What have I done to you?” Ilya asks quietly. Hollander shakes his head, bites his lip. Ilya lies down next to him, on top of the duvet, clutching his hand. He looks him in the eyes. “Shane.”

Hollander chuckles through his tears. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I thought… I thought I could do this.”

“But you do not want to,” Ilya realizes. He pulls his hand back, but Shane grips it tighter, holds it to him. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

Ilya watches him. His beautiful face. His freckles, the soft curve of his mouth. He will do anything, he realizes. “Tell me what you want. I can take it.”

He imagines what he will say. I’m done with this, Rozanov. Lose my number. Or maybe, You fucked me and I didn’t want it. What the fuck could I want from you, asshole? Or maybe, I will let you look at me if you crawl on your hands and knees, if you skin your palms against gravel, if you slice your thighs open with your skates.

Ilya would do it. That’s the worst part. For the chance to watch Shane Hollander for another minute, and another minute more, he would do any of it.

“I want…” Shane licks his lips. He looks at Ilya, and then looks at Ilya’s chest. Quietly, Shane says, “I want you to kiss me.”

Ilya swallows. He kisses him at once, and pulls back long enough to say, “Okay, okay,” and kisses him again, sick to his stomach.

Kissing, though— Shane’s mouth is just the same as always. Reassuring. Ilya presses his lips to Shane’s, mouths across his chin, his cheek. Eventually, he rolls Shane over to rest his head on Ilya’s chest, clutching him. Ilya looks at the ceiling and breathes.

Into the quiet, Shane says, “I think Rose knows I’m not… y’know.” He pauses. “I don’t think we’re gonna last.” 

Ilya can’t speak. He pets through Shane’s hair. He might cry, for some reason he can’t figure out.

“I’m sorry,” Shane says, laughing at himself. Ilya’s hand tightens around the back of his neck. “That was so embarrassing.”

“No,” Ilya says, kissing his forehead. Too intimate for what they are, but necessary anyway. His responsibility. “No problem, of course not. Not embarrassing.” He tilts Shane’s chin up, looks him in the eyes. He has to be sure. Shane looks back with clear eyes. Ilya kisses him, and then asks, “I did not hurt you?”

“No, I was just— I don’t know. Confused, I guess.”

“Okay.” Ilya sets his palm against Shane’s shoulder, thumbs over his collarbone. “But you are not…” 

Shane rolls his eyes. “I’m not traumatized. You’re fine, Ilya.”

Traumatized. This is not a word Ilya knows. He pulls Shane back into his chest, angles his head down so the light won’t bother his eyes when Ilya looks it up on his phone. He misspells it at first—tromatized—and then finds the definition.

Transitive verb: To wound or injure (a tissue), as in a surgical operation. To subject to psychological trauma. He looks up the word “trauma.” Noun: Serious injury. Severe emotional or mental distress, or an experience that causes severe anxiety or emotional distress such as rape or combat.

“Okay,” Ilya says, mouth dry. He’s not sure why. There is no problem. After all, Shane said he was not traumatized. “Good.”

Shane says, “If she doesn’t end it, I’m going to, obviously. This isn’t— she deserves better than this.”

Yes. Of course. Rose Landry should not suffer Shane Hollander’s diverted attentions. Still Ilya hates her. Here he is, scratching at Shane’s door like a stray dog every other month, a dog so sick Shane is embarrassed to be seen with him, and Rose Landry is too good for weekly dinner dates and public photographs. If it was reversed, wouldn’t Ilya settle for dinner and photos and jumbotron shoutouts and regular sex? Wouldn’t he let Shane fuck someone else every couple of months to have him the rest of the time?

His stomach twists. No, he would not settle for that. Ilya is so greedy that even winning is not enough. Only a shutout will do.

Ilya presses his fingertips deep into the skin across Shane’s shoulderblades. When he releases, he watches the pressure marks fade back to normal in seconds, as if Ilya had never been there at all.

“You comin’ out with us, bud?”

Marleau has some god-awful cologne on, something that pounds in the back of Ilya’s nostrils. Hopefully a club will cover it up. Otherwise, Ilya fears for his prospects.

“No,” Ilya says shortly. The last time they went out as a team was that disastrous night at Ciel in Montreal.

He’s unbalanced. Too introspective, thinking too much of Hollander. Reconsidering the shape of his life a little. Wondering if he will see Shane at the All-Star Games next month. Marly looks at him, and knows.

“No prob,” Marly says. He puts on a leather jacket that has a decent cut, at least. “Don’t wait up, Roz.”

Ilya has made, by brute force, a culture in the Raiders where “no” is respected and never questioned. He cracks down on hazing. He uses his foreignness as an excuse to be blunt and to question things taken for granted.

In truth it is not a selfless gesture. He will never forget the fear in Hollander’s voice when he’d said fuck off that first time in the showers so many years ago. He imagines each rookie as a little Shane Hollander. He makes sure their underwear is never stolen.

And thus, like a magnet, like a spinning toy, here he is lurching back to Hollander. He wonders if Shane makes a culture like this in his own locker room for memory of Rozanov. Probably not. Ilya was never young like that, and besides, there is nothing Ilya needs protection from.

2008

Sasha and Svetlana take him to a club in the spring, one week before his flight to a city he knows only by its airport code: YQR, with a layover in YUL.

Ilya loves extremely loud music, sexy people, and drinking, which is fortunate, given Sasha’s regularity in the underground circuit. This is his fifth time in a club. By the time he comes back from Canada, it’ll be legal for him to go to one; he turns eighteen in June.

Sasha and Ilya stand guard while Svetlana uses her tits to get them shots. Ilya settles into the place, sipping at the next drink. He likes the DJ, likes the smoke in the air. Nobody knows him or cares who he is. He’s just another stupid kid who wants to get fucked up. It’s awesome.

“Dance?” Sveta asks, and so they dance. Mostly Sasha and Ilya spend their time bracketing Svetlana’s body so men don’t try to get too close. Ilya inhales her perfume, shivers at the brush of her hair. So pretty.

Sasha leaves and brings back another drink, two drinks. “Our star player,” Sasha murmurs, tipping a glass back into Ilya’s mouth. Ilya grins at him when he’s done, heady. He wants to kiss him, wants to grip his wrists so tight it leaves bruises. Sasha leans in close, glass pressed between their stomachs. “You better miss me when you’re gone.”

“Boys,” Sveta whines, and Sasha pulls away, disappears with their empty glasses, leaves Ilya blinking on the dance floor. Svetlana kisses his cheek, pulls him close. “If you want to fuck a man, go to the bathroom,” she tells him, sounding more serious. “Not here. Sorry, Ilyusha. You still have to be careful.”

“Of course,” Ilya says, feeling stupid. And with the bathroom mention, he realizes he really does have to go. “I have to— piss.” 

Svetlana raises her eyebrow at him, and Ilya shrugs. Who knows? Maybe he will find a man. It would be just the kind of insane thing he’d enjoy bragging about later.

The bathroom is almost as dimly lit as the club. Figures. Ilya pisses in the urinal. Fuck, he’s actually drunk. He leans forward, presses his hand against the wall for balance.

He looks around and catches the eye of a man who is looking at him. He can feel his gaze, hot and appreciative, running from his shoulders to the line of his hip that he knows is just barely exposed. Ilya swallows. It’s too dark to see him really, but he’s not unattractive, from what Ilya can tell. His dick twitches. This man can see that too.

The man brushes past him, shoulder against Ilya’s back, into the closest stall. Ilya looks down at himself. He zips up, and follows him in.

“Turn around,” the man says immediately, pressing Ilya against the wall.

Ilya tenses. He can feel him pulling at his jeans, grinding up against his ass. He doesn’t do that. That’s not— “Wait,” Ilya says, dizzy, “wait—”

The man shoves his forearm against the back of Ilya’s neck, forcing his cheek against the wall. “Why did you follow me, ah?” he asks, mouth pressed against the skin behind Ilya’s ear. “Do you want a man to fuck you or not?”

He supposes he did. “Not anymore. Fuck off.”

“You got me so hard,” the man says, still pressed against him. Arm pressing his neck in, hot all over him. Ilya can’t breathe. “I should just fuck you anyway. Fucking tease.”

Ilya could fight him off. Probably quite easily he could. He might get injured, though, and then where would he be? Not on a flight to the International Prospect Cup. Worse if it becomes a serious fight, something that makes it to the news. Hockey Prodigy Caught In Compromising Encounter With Anonymous Man, the headline would read. Russian Team To Find Alternate Captain.

“Fuck my mouth instead,” Ilya tries. The man lets up, backs up just enough, and Ilya— it’s his moment, he could run, but the headline— and so Ilya drops to his knees.

He fucks his mouth like that. Ilya holds his breath, inhales through his nose when he can. He’s used to sweat and used to pushing himself, used to stripping in front of other men and being touched by trainers and physical therapists. This is not hockey, but Ilya knows how to breathe through discomfort. It’s his gift.

In the end, he comes all over Ilya’s face, and leaves him in the stall. Ilya breathes once, twice. He wipes his face with toilet paper and throws up in the toilet.

He inhales. He feels nauseous again, but less drunk. He pukes once more. He can still smell it, the come, the sweat. He throws up again.

He flushes the toilet and staggers out to the sinks. There is no one else in the bathroom, so he runs the water over his hands and scrubs his face, hard, rubbing until the skin is pink. He rinses his mouth out with tap water. Sasha never made him feel like this. His first time having sex was a little impersonal but fun, hot and thrilling and totally new to the boy he was. When he has sex with his friends, Sasha and Svetlana kiss him and pet his hair and rub circles into his stomach. He feels like a child again. Did they baby him? Is this what sex is really like?

He looks at himself in the mirror, eyes wild, breathing heavy, eyelashes dripping. Someone walks into the bathroom and Ilya blinks at himself.

The body can be controlled. He swallows. His head twitches, once, like a dog shaking off water. He curls his fingers into his palms and then shakes them out sharply, like releasing an arrow. He clenches his jaw and then relaxes deliberately. He exhales, and leaves the bathroom.

When he finds Svetlana, she presses another drink into his hand. The vodka cures him of his sickness. “Did you have fun?” she asks.

Ilya shakes his head. She frowns, worriedly, but he says, “No, no, it was all right.” He controls himself. He kisses her throat, her collarbone. “Just not as hot as you, of course.”

She laughs and lets it go. Ilya holds her waist, precisely as tight as he would have before. Sasha comes back with more drinks, blinking at him in a way that means he has probably gotten his hands on cocaine. Ilya can’t have any coke because he will be drug tested in two days, but fuck, he wishes he could be drugged out of his mind right now.

While Svetlana looks away Sasha bites his throat, just a little nip, and Ilya holds him by his neck, thumb brushing his jaw. Svetlana looks back and Sasha takes his distance, very well-behaved. Ilya makes his way to the edge of the dance floor where he will not accidentally burn someone by lighting up a cigarette.

He inhales his smoke. The vodka and the tobacco erase what has transpired. Nothing has happened. Ilya forgets all about it. He tells himself this club is nothing compared to the glory waiting for him in Canada.

2017

“Do you remember,” Ilya says carefully, holding Shane’s hip. There is so much light in the cottage. He can see so much of Shane’s body, so much he couldn’t see before, little moles and stretch marks and scars, almost enough for a glutton like Ilya.

He knows now what Shane likes after sex—not his fingers running too-light over Shane’s skin, but one hold, stable and solid. Grounding. Ilya swallows, and continues, “When we saw each other, while you were dating Rose Landry.”

He feels Shane’s muscles twitch and stiffen under his palm. “Yeah,” Shane says. He turns his head to look away from Ilya. “I remember.”

Ilya kisses his shoulder, his jaw. He turns Shane’s face back towards him. Even if Shane cannot look at him, Ilya will see the shape of his mouth, his eyes. Ilya will know if he is upset. Fortunately, Shane is not upset, only embarrassed.

“You cannot do that to me again,” Ilya murmurs, and Shane nods guiltily. Ilya wishes he could say there was no need to be guilty. They hadn’t known then what they know now. But he only says, “You cannot say yes to me when you aren’t sure.”

“Okay,” Shane says, like it’s easy. “‘Course.”

“Say no when you feel no,” Ilya insists. “Don’t let me hurt you.”

Shane—his Shane, his wonder, his miracle—places his hand on Ilya’s face. Turns him like a farmer gently nudging a plant to the sun. “Same for you,” Shane says, thumbing over Ilya’s cheek. “Don’t ever say yes unless you mean it. Don’t do that to me.”

Ilya looks at him. “When would I ever say no?” he asks, all honesty. “I always want you. I will never say no.” Ilya crawls over him, kisses his chest, his throat. “If you let me touch you… I will say no? You think I will waste it?”

“I’m just saying,” Shane says, breathes, voice cracking the way it does when Ilya gives him goosebumps, “you don’t have to say yes to everything, it’s—”

“Yes, yes, but don’t you worry, Hollander,” Ilya says. His voice curling awkwardly around the English idiom, he says, “I am always up for it.”

This, it turns out, is exactly the wrong thing to say. Shane stops them. He holds Ilya’s face at a distance, peers into his eyes. He says, “I need to know I can trust a yes from you. Maybe we should pause for a sec.”

Ilya blinks. Pause? “What?”

“You wouldn’t say yes to every possible thing,” Shane says, even though Ilya thinks, I would, I would. Not because he hates himself or some other sad idea Shane’s North American mind is probably concocting. Just for love. Just simply for love. “So I just have to know you’d say no to me, if it came down to it.”

Ilya’s voice cracks. “I—”

“Think about it,” Shane says, all comfort. Somehow, Ilya ruined it. He doesn’t even understand what is happening here. Shane kisses him, and slides out of bed. He’s half-hard. Ilya could have made him come tonight. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. I’ll make dinner.”

Ilya watches him leave. To make dinner. Instead of letting Ilya suck his dick the way Ilya knows he would enjoy, slow and sweet. Always slow and sweet the second time because Shane is so sensitive. Ilya knows him so well. Ilya wants him so bad, like a sickness.

Shane makes fish, green beans, and roasted potatoes for dinner. “Tilapia,” he says the fish is called in English.

Ilya tries it out. “Tilapia.” He likes the feeling of the vowels, the way the last ones trip into each other, like his own name.

Over dinner, Shane tells him about his mother’s plans for Speedo—a casually gay-friendly campaign, something subtle that will apparently lay the groundwork for Shane’s eventual coming out—and the movie David recommended for them to watch. His nice Canadian father has decided they need a list of Canadian films to watch. “Bon Cop Bad Cop” is supposedly required watching as part of the “Canadian film canon.” And, of course, it’s about hockey. 

Ilya slides his toe up Shane’s shin and, worse than being slapped away, is ignored. When he reaches Shane’s thigh, though, Shane takes his foot and massages it, which feels nice enough that Ilya can’t complain.

After dinner, Shane settles on the couch and puts on his reading glasses. Ilya’s mouth actually waters, like a starving dog. “My Shane,” he says, voice cracking, “look at me.”

Shane looks up, and Ilya swallows. “What?”

“You are so handsome,” he says, and crawls over the couch to mouth at his shoulder. “Leave the glasses on?”

Shane peers down at him over his nose. He looks like such a disciplinarian that Ilya’s dick twitches in his pants. “Have you thought more about what we talked about before dinner?”

Ilya blinks. Before dinner they talked about… ah. Saying no, and the situation with Rose, and Shane’s “pause.” “Yes,” he says. “No need to think about it. I always like it with you.”

Shane pushes him away with a palm to his chest. The power in his forearms makes Ilya a little dizzy. “That’s not what I asked.” 

“I’m sorry,” Ilya murmurs, reaching down to hold his hand and kiss his palm. Shane lets him, thank God and all the angels, lets him mouth across his wrist, nip at the inside of his forearms, lick into his elbow. “Don’t worry so much. Let me take care of you. Pretty boy.”

“Hey,” Shane says, but his voice cracks as Ilya slides over to sit on his lap. He’s half-hard. Shane looks up at him and Ilya holds his chin, presses his thumb against his lower lip. Shane rests his hands against Ilya’s waist comfortably, like he belongs there. Like Ilya was made to be held by him. “How would you feel if I just went along with something I didn’t like to make you feel good?”

Ilya goes white-hot with something adjacent to rage. He grips Shane harder. As if he wouldn’t know. As if he wouldn’t be able to tell. “You fake it with me?” he asks.

“No, never—”

“You couldn’t,” he tries, suddenly terrified. His emotions are all over the place. He’s hard from watching Shane and feeling him under him, but there’s a coldness in him, too. He’s not sure what it is. “You would be too embarrassed to make such noises unless it was true. You would not let me mistreat you like this. I work for it, yes?”

“Yeah, but— Jesus, Ilya—”

“Explain it to me,” Ilya says, bites into the skin under his jaw. “Explain this to me, your worry. I don’t understand it.”

“I want to know I can trust you,” Shane says. Trust is the only thing they have, the thing they had between them even before they had love. Ilya stops biting him and listens. “I want to trust that when you say yes you mean it.”

Ilya kisses behind his ear. Shane’s hands are warm on him, palms hot even through his shirt. “You think I cannot stop you if I am not in the mood, which will never happen anyway? So North American, always talking talking talking—”

“Okay,” Shane says, firm and determined. He sounds the way he does when he’s talking strategy to media, outlining the shape of the season to come. “Maybe it’s a cultural thing. I don’t care. Can you accommodate me on this? Can you tell me, outright, you’ll say no if you don’t want to do something?”

Face hidden in Shane’s throat, he asks, “But what if you want very much to do it?”

“Well I won’t want to do it anymore if I think I’m forcing you into it! What the hell kind of boyfriend do you think I am?” His voice only stutters a little over the word boyfriend, so Ilya knows it’s serious. Shane forces Ilya’s face back up to look him in the eyes. Ilya’s jaw twitches and his teeth click together.

Softly, Shane asks, “Why is this so hard for you?”

Ilya freezes.

Shane pulls his hands away from Ilya’s body. Ilya stays quiet and still. Something has happened— Ilya has done something to him, to ruin this.

“I’m assuming things,” Shane says quietly. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, so I’m making things up in my head. So you have to tell me the truth. I can’t read your mind.”

Ilya breathes in. He thinks of Shane, his quiet, solid desire to be there, to ask questions about Ilya’s horrible family and his childhood and his friends and his life. To be with each other in life. Ilya slides down to the ground to kneel and grips Shane around his waist and kisses his stomach, and then rests his head on his knee. His man, his man. Shane thumbs over his forehead as if Ilya is a precious thing.

“Once,” Ilya starts. He swallows. This, he had forgotten. He had genuinely, sincerely forgotten it. It was such a small thing among so many dozens, maybe even hundreds of times in his life when he’d done something uncomfortable. But he remembers it now because Shane has asked him to tell the truth. Ilya doesn’t know what the truth is, but he can say what has come to his mind. He can swallow his pride and say it.

Ilya continues, “You asked me to slap you. I’d already slapped you and you liked it.” Shane looks down at him with heat in his eyes and Ilya’s dick twitches at the memory. Voice rough, lower, he says, “I liked it, too. And then you asked me to hit you with the back of my hand instead of my palm.”

“Yeah, I remember.” Shane’s eyes are so hot on him. “I remember every time.”

Ilya nods. He knew this. He knew, at least, that it had been memorable, had been the kind of fuck that would keep Shane coming back to him, like Ilya intended. In the warmth of that he admits, “I didn’t want to. Not with the back of my hand.” His gaze stutters down to Shane’s hips, his knees. Even now, if Shane asked him to, he would. What is a preference to a need? “But someone else might do it for you. So it was better that it was me.” And Ilya smiles with the weight of it off his chest, the unburdened truth between them. “And it led us here. How could I regret it?”

He looks up. Shane is frowning, eyes wet. Trembling.

“Moy lyubimyy,” Ilya murmurs, crawling up Shane’s body to rest back in his lap. “Why are you upset?”

“I keep hurting you,” Shane says, voice cracking, “and you keep letting me.”

“And I hurt you,” Ilya replies, as if the truth of it doesn’t kill him. “Love is this way sometimes, yes? You take care of me. That’s all I need.”

“So let me take care of you,” Shane insists, his beauty. Ilya holds him to his chest and Shane mouths at him, the softening in his shoulders signalling that gorgeous thing in him that submits to Ilya. Ilya takes his shirt off and Shane runs his hands all over Ilya’s skin, kisses him, and Ilya grips him tight.

He looks down at the top of Shane’s head. He’s lucky. He’s so lucky. Ilya might cry watching his beautiful man kiss the skin over his sternum, feeling the heat of him. Shane would give him everything, he knows. Ilya can only hope to earn it.

“Do you know,” Ilya says, scratching idly at the back of Shane’s neck, “I imagine your little face on all the rookies.”

Shane pulls back to look at him. He is, hilariously, offended. “You think of me when you look at Paddy?” he says, appalled. “He barely knows where the goal is!”

“Oh my God, Hollander.” Ilya rolls his eyes. “Obviously you are much better than the rookies at hockey.”

“Good,” Shane huffs.

“I mean that they are so young.” Ilya thumbs over Shane’s cheek. “You were so young.”

Shane swallows. “Oh.”

“Did I take good care of you, the first time?” This is what Ilya has wanted to know all along. He could never have asked before, not like this, not clear-cut. “Were you very safe and pampered, spoiled like little lap dog?”

He says it like a joke, but Shane, who knows him very well by now, doesn’t joke back. “Yeah,” Shane says, gently. “You took good care of me. Really, really good care.”

Shane pulls him down by his neck to kiss him and Ilya sinks into it, kissing him back for the joy of tasting him, of feeling him. He presses in hard, so hard his nose crushes against Shane’s cheek, just to get more of him, more skin, more touch, more pressure. Shane kisses him back until eventually, finally, they pull back for air.

“I want to take care of you like that,” Shane says.

Ah. Put like this, Ilya has no choice. If it is his honour and duty to take care of Shane—and it is, it is—then he owes this to Shane, too. “Yes,” he says, voice low, kissing Shane’s cheek, his earlobe. “I will let you.” 

2019

Svetlana hits him with a real question halfway through their phone call, the biweekly one that Sveta instated last year when she had to learn about the Irina Foundation from Instagram. Ilya’s happy to have a time to speak Russian that is not one-off conversations at the supermarket or therapy, and happier to have time to talk to his Sveta.

Most of the time she tells him about the absurd opulence of her latest client’s house—the record for stupidest expense is still held by the butter sculpture/champagne fountain shaped like Weird Al Yankovic—and asks how he intends to get past San Francisco’s goalie, but sometimes she asks him real things. He always tries to answer true.

“Do you remember the club, before you flew to Canada for the draft?” Svetlana asks carefully.

Ilya’s nose twitches. He tilts his head to feel the stretch in his neck muscles as he considers. Yes, he remembers that club in 2008. “Yes,” he says.

“You didn’t come back with us ever again,” Svetlana says. “You only came to other places.”

“It’s true.”

Svetlana is quiet for a long moment. And then she says, “I only remembered it a few years ago. You know why I thought of it?”

Ilya says hm, staring at the wall across from him. In 2008 he was very young, and not confident in his own body, his own life. Even the way Svetlana tells it shows how young he was: he thought if he never saw that bathroom stall again he might somehow never be afraid again. And it is only now, thinking on it eleven years later, that Ilya realizes he was afraid.

“I dropped a very high-paying client,” Svetlana tells him. Ilya doesn’t interrupt. “He cornered me in his family room while his wife was in the kitchen. Until she came back, I wasn’t sure… I didn’t know if I would stop him.”

Ilya exhales, one long, violent stretch. “Sveta,” he says, closing his eyes. He was so careful. Him and Sasha both, so careful, watching her drinks and standing at her shoulders like her guards, and in the end the danger was somewhere else.

“It made me think of you in that club,” she says quietly. “I never asked you if you were all right. Your face was different when you came back from the bathroom, but I never asked.”

“Are you all right?” Ilya asks, instead of replying.

“Yes,” Svetlana says. She laughs, all brightness, and Ilya smiles helplessly in response. “You would not believe how well-adjusted I am now that I mostly fuck women and don’t live with my father anymore. Maybe you can relate.”

“Something like that,” Ilya admits, pressing his palm into the cold marble countertop.

“I’m sorry I never asked,” Svetlana says. “I knew something was wrong, but I never asked.”

“No,” Ilya says, thinking about them at seventeen. “Can you imagine? Teenagers don’t do this. Well, maybe they do in Canada, but not us. It wasn’t possible. Don’t apologize to me.”

Svetlana sighs. “I feel better for apologizing anyway, if you can accept it. Anyway. I only brought it up now because I was thinking about it for so long.”

“Really?”

“I know. I was nervous. I was working up the courage to say sorry to you for months and months. Can you believe it? Do you think we could’ve imagined such a thing ten years ago?”

“Impossible,” Ilya says, and then, because he has to, he adds, “If we’re apologizing then I have to say sorry for all those years I ignored you for Jane and never told you the truth.”

“Ah, okay, I see how silly it is,” Sveta says, and Ilya laughs. “Never mind. No apologies between us. And you are very happy now, yes?”

Ilya thinks on it. All those years that he belonged to the Raiders, he borrowed himself away for long enough to enjoy sex, enjoy his body and the shape and the feel of it against other bodies. He was happy, generally, even if he was also sad and angry and scared sometimes too. And now… it seems almost sacrilegious to think about Shane in the same breath as those long years of fucking and drinking, but fucking and drinking was where he found Shane, his star, his sun.

“Yes,” Ilya chokes out.

“He treats you very well?”

Ilya is mean, sometimes talks trash at Shane until he gets red in the face, presses his face into the mattress when they fuck to enjoy the way he gets tighter when he can’t breathe. Absurd to think such a man would deserve to be treated well, and yet here he is. Treated well. “Yes,” Ilya says, swallowing down his laughter at the absurdity of the question. When he looks at it head-on, it seems too lucky to be real. “He does. He says he’ll take care of me.”

“Ahhh, so he will spoil you.”

Ilya snorts. “Yes, rotten like a dog.”

“Well, good.” And then Svetlana says, sounding alarmingly like Yuna Hollander, “Okay, too many feelings, enough. Did I tell you about the Alfa Romeo I saw last week?”

“No, no, tell me.”

“They had the seats upholstered in leopard print fake fur. A Spider! In leopard print fake fur, Ilya!”

Ilya bites down his laughter. “Sounds fun,” he says, grinning, “maybe I will do this with my Porsche.”

“Oh my fucking God,” Svetlana says, and Ilya laughs and laughs, skin prickling from the sun coming through the window onto him, his skin, his body that belongs to Ottawa and to Shane Hollander and, finally, to himself.