over the guardrail

a few things
- i have been working on this for MONTHS, both because i am a glacially slow writer and also i am unreasonably insane about them. this fic has haunted me. it ended up being mostly nonsense with no plot and a thinly veiled progression of psychosis. oh well! i hope you like it!
- during scenes where only russian is spoken, i used italics
- i know the scene of them having sex from the first time is different from the show. idk. it’s fine. fanfic is made up
- this might be ooc, i don’t know, i didn’t want to overthink my writing too much… i just think ilya has always had a lot of feelings that he doesn’t quite know how to navigate

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

2009

Ilya tastes the blood in his mouth again. He tries to swallow it, chews around the mouth guard. His skates cut into the ice and he keeps his eyes on the puck. Keeps his head clean.

His coach notices, how he’s trying to work around the taste of iron. “Rozanov,” he says. It’s laced with disappointment.

Ilya slows to a stop, forces himself back from saying something stupid under his breath, муда́к, even something slipped into the air and gone. Play nice. “It’s okay. Doesn’t hurt.” His jaw throbs where it was checked into the board, an ache tunneling into his cheek. But his teeth are in place, every bone still rooted solid, and his fingers are itching to play. What else is there?

His teammates watch the interaction. One of them clears their throat. Ilya can’t remember his name. He supposes he should start on that. “Come on, I really think you should take a break,” he says, “Feller hit you pretty hard back there.”

Feller shrugs his shoulders, up and down, like he’s embarrassed or guilty. It makes annoyance prickle at the back of Ilya’s neck. He shouldn’t be sorry, it’s part of the game, bodies ramming into each other. It’s skin and bite. The hit was Feller’s best play yet, and now his tail is tucked between his legs.

Ilya inhales through his nose. “So now draft is over, we sit back, do nothing?”

“Dude. Just don’t run yourself into the ground.”

Ilya looks at him with grim amazement. He knows what they’re already saying about him. Brutal, vicious, his stick against the puck like a fist to the face. He’ll own up to it, take anything if it means he can crawl his way up. And he’ll make it up to his teammates when they win. “This is game,” he says, and sweeps towards the net. “Again.”

It’s like everywhere he goes, Hollander’s face follows. Brand deals are swarming to him like flies, and suddenly he’s the ambassador of the sports drink in Ilya’s hand, he’s on the cover of The Hockey News, he’s telling Ilya which tape to buy. It gets worse the further north he goes. Canada’s golden boy, rising star, good and honest. He earns it again and again, Ilya knows this, but it still itches under his skin. He had been drafted first, he had won in Regina. When someone asks him about Hollander, he puts on the show, rolling his eyes, waiting for the next chance to strike. It’s a half truth. More often than not, someone says Hollander and Ilya’s mind stumbles, not with anger but something more dangerous. The inside of Hollander’s thighs tucked away in his shorts, sweat in his hair. Ilya had pushed the water bottle towards him to test a theory. When their hands touched, it had proved him horribly right.

More. More, more, more. He’s tired of the word, but like a cruel joke from God, it’s all he thinks about when he thinks about Hollander. All he’s reduced to.

2010

Hollander says it while they’re standing on the ice, the crew adjusting the lights. “What, you couldn’t wait to see me?”

Ilya jerks from where he was pretending not to look at him. “Of course not,” he says.

Hollander’s mouth curls into a small smile. Ilya feels raw hunger in his chest. He’s already exhausted with the way it keeps growing.

“So you requested me for fun, or…” Hollander stretches the last word out, into multiple syllables dying on his tongue. He says it with a playful tone, but with something skittish underneath. Like he’s shy. The thought of it makes heat run through Ilya’s spine.

“Good for publicity, yes?” Ilya asks. “Ad will make us money.” He’s lying through his teeth. Of course he wanted to see Hollander. He needed to see if what they experienced in the gym was a fluke, if the tension and buzz in Ilya’s blood could be chalked up to adrenaline. The thought of waiting for the next game, a quick glance during a faceoff, was unthinkable.

Hollander nods, short and stiff, and his face shutters over before he looks down at his skates. Ilya immediately feels like he’s done something wrong.

Fluorescent light flickers and explodes into the air at full brightness, burning Ilya’s eyes. Hollander’s whole body lights up like a beacon.

“Fuck, sorry!” The director shouts. The light dims to a respectable spotlight. “Sorry. We’re ready for you guys now.”

Hollander picks up his stick where it was leaning against the board, his gaze fixed at where the camera is waiting for them.

Ilya’s skin crawls. “Or,” he blurts out.

Hollander looks at him, his brows furrowed. “What?”

Ilya shrugs. “Or maybe I want to see your pretty face.”

Hollander blinks and flushes. It’s the best thing Ilya’s seen all year. “Be professional, Rozanov,” he says once he’s gained his voice back, but it’s shaky.

Ilya grins. “I will try.”

Hollander makes a noise, abruptly whirls and goes to where the director is waiting for them. Ilya tries to school his face into something neutral, but he doesn’t think he succeeds.

Ilya knocks. Hollander opens.

He thought it would be like flushing his system, something to be solved and wrapped up and sent away. Quick and good and over. One night stand, is what his teammates call it.

It’s what he’s been doing for years, with girls he meets under strobe lights, swapping the taste of alcohol. Desire, or just looking for fun, is what tugged him into the clubs, and the next morning he had gotten his fix, had his fill until the next weekend, a different city, a different face. Even with Sasha, it was born from curiosity, and how sneaking around made Ilya hot under the collar.

But as soon as Ilya closes the door and his mouth meets Hollander’s, he knows he’s signed his own death sentence. Hollander goes pliant under Ilya’s hands, so easy, so trusting, and he knows he’s started something he can’t stop. He will spend the rest of his life wanting this.

2011

Nashville means waiting for the other shoe to drop. The space between him and Hollander is drawn tight, a fizzling electric fence.

Ilya’s hands are sweating after the press conference. He cuts a straight line to a side door, where caterers and staff come in from the back. As soon as he heaves it open he sucks in lungfuls of cold air.

The sky is damp and gray, the streets slick with old rain, and Ilya rips through a third of a pack without even thinking about it. The smell of smoke is burning into his suit, he knows it, and reeking of cigarettes probably isn’t good for the Raiders brand. But what’s worse is the embarrassment lodged in his throat. And the ghost tap of Hollander’s shoe against his.

The door swings open. Ilya immediately knows, without looking, who it is.

Hollander frowns when he sees him. “Is everything okay?”

His eyes flit down to the cigarette in Ilya’s hand, but he doesn’t comment on it, a sure sign that he’s unsure of their rhythm, testing the waters. Ilya puts it out, black ash smearing on the wall: an olive branch. “Yes,” he says. He doesn’t mean for it to come out as clipped as it does.

Hollander keeps looking at him. It’s unnerving, but Ilya doesn’t want him to stop. It’s the way he moves across the ice, eyes hard and calculating. The way the world narrowed down to Hollander on his knees, hair thick in Ilya’s hand. His mouth hot and wet. Ilya’s traitorous body shivers at the memory.

He relents. “I look stupid when they ask things. Because of this stupid language.”

Hollander blinks. “What?”

“You had to help me.” He had known the right words, somewhere deep down, and had thought of them all as soon as the mic turned off. And still he couldn’t grasp them when it mattered most, and he had looked like an idiot, weak, incapable of being their national champion. It had been worse when he was younger, in a sea of unknown sounds, words swimming to him here and there like flashes of silver fish. It’s an ugly language. He eats and lives and breathes it every day, and it’s still a heavy stone sitting wrong on his tongue.

“So? You play hockey. You’re not putting on a one man show.”

Ilya shakes his head. “Yes, but I play for Boston. Not Russia.”

“I know,” Hollander says, “but your English is good, Rozanov. Who told you it wasn’t?”

The clouds above them roll into themselves. The air gathers itself into a windchill that worms its way under Ilya’s shirt. Ilya thinks of his father telling him not to say anything, to keep his mouth shut and nod. Pretend like he doesn’t know the weight of lazy, what it brands him as.

And so he grins instead. “My English is good enough to know when you say — more, please, harder.”

Hollander rolls his eyes. “Shut up.”

“And — Rozanov, I’m gonna come.”

“You fucking asshole,” Hollander hisses, but his shoulders are folding inwards; Ilya is rapidly learning it means he’s flustered. “You’re — not here.”

“Hm, so tonight instead?” Ilya is entranced by how quickly Hollander is riled up, how a few words start to chip at his defenses. He wants to spend hours peeling back his layers, seeing the stiffness give way to desperation.

Hollander looks away. “Maybe.” He says it like he hasn’t made up his mind yet. But then he throws back a sideway glance, and Ilya sees the beginning of a smile.

The rain begins again around them, soft and light then harder: a whisper of a touch that becomes a battering ram.

“Whoever she is, she’ll get over it,” Marleau says. And Ilya has to scoff, and act like disappointment isn’t eating through his stomach like acid.

“I am sad about the game,” Ilya says, which isn’t untrue, “because I am good hockey player.”

Marleau laughs. “Sure. Just give your girl a ticket to the next one.”

Ilya stands up and pulls at the handle of his suitcase. Leaving his seat feels wrong. Everything was supposed to go differently: he’s supposed to be on a plane right now, crossing the threshold to a place where not just the ice and the fans are waiting, but Hollander too, his quick calculated goals that make Ilya run hot with irritation and his skin and —

I’m trying to say I have a thing, okay? Ilya’s fingers slipping down, where Hollander is burning up and secret and waiting for him, something Ilya can’t think too much about or he feels like he might die. He’s never been angrier at the weather in his life.

They leave the gate, where the screens miserably blink the word cancelled under their flight number, and the line at the desk is already clogged with people demanding their money back or hotel reservations. Outside the window, the snow is frothing and wild, a suffocating blanket of silence. Ilya admits to himself it’s for the best — he can’t fuck Hollander if he’s dead.

Marleau claps Ilya’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s enjoy the night off. I’ll buy you a burger.”

“So American,” Ilya grumbles. He puts his phone in his pocket.

Later, when Ilya is in his hotel, his stomach hurting from processed meat and cheese, he gathers his courage and taps into the text chain with Hollander. The newness of it means the chat is still bare and skeletal. He shifts under the smooth white sheets and types: Sucks about the game. He sends it before he does something stupid like throw his phone against the wall, and turns on the TV.

He lets the mind-numbing banality of hotel television wash over him, his ears straining, and scrambles when he hears his phone buzz a few minutes later.

Jane: Yeah, I know how much you were looking forward to losing.

Ilya chews at the inside of his cheek. He hates to admit it, but this is unknown territory. He doesn’t know how to walk this line.

Lily: Ha ha

Lily: No, wanted something else

Jane: Oh

This makes something too close to anxiety flare in his chest when Hollander doesn’t follow up immediately. Did he not make himself clear? Or is Hollander glad to not see him? He thinks of Hollander changing his mind on if he wanted to see Ilya again, drafting a text to send or a comment to make on the bench before the weather did it for him. The idea of it makes Ilya feel sick, and the fact that he’s worrying at all makes him feel even worse. This isn’t like him. This isn’t the cleaving of emotions he’s drilled into himself. Clean cut, simple; no, this is risk.

Jane: Me too.

And with these words breath rushes back into Ilya’s throat.

Lily: More specific please

He’s pleased to use the word, specific, sputtering in his mouth and even worse to spell, but he likes to have it hoarded in his mind. (He had used it on a teammate recently, and he had whistled in response: “That’s a ten dollar word, Rozanov.” Ilya didn’t know what the fuck that meant, but he assumed it wasn’t something to shove him in the lockers for.)

Jane: Asshole

Jane: Fine.

Jane: I was looking forward to you fucking me. Happy?

Like clockwork, Ilya’s gut twists with heat, and he holds himself back from groaning into the silence of the room. Hollander isn’t innocent, exactly — Ilya knows this much, the phantom memory of Hollander’s tight grip around his dick, the clenching of the soft back of his throat — but he seems almost embarrassed to reveal his desire, to show that he wants it. It makes Ilya feel like he’s coming apart when he coaxes it out of him. To hear his hot breath against his ear.

Lily: fuck

Lily: what else

He feels himself already getting hard, his heart starting to pound. Calm down, he tells himself, but his body doesn’t seem to get the idea. Something wild and hungry inside of him is breaking open again.

Jane: Your fingers

Jane: I wanted them to spread me open. I never get it right when I try.

And this is when Ilya’s brain goes blank and flat. His thoughts helplessly try to gather themselves, and what his lagging brain comes up with is the image of Hollander trying. He had thought about it before, of course, but now with the words in front of him he really thinks about it, of Hollander face-down onto a pillow, his back arched, thighs spread, fingers scissoring in and out, and maybe he’s panting into the fabric because he can’t get it right, and he wants it so bad,

Jane: I think you could, though.

but maybe Ilya could do it for him, could get it right. He’d give anything to try.

He realizes it’s been minutes since he last responded, and from what he’s learning about Hollander, he probably doesn’t like it much.

Lily: You try a lot?

Jane: Uh

Jane: More since meeting you.

Jane: I pretend it’s you sometimes

Ilya can feel his pulse in his throat. He shifts and the small friction of cotton against his dick — which he realizes, his mind cotton and slow, is aching and tenting his boxers.

Lily: Fuck

Lily: I want it so much. I think about you also

Jane: Really?

Lily: you are surprised?

Jane: I guess so. I don’t know.

The concept is absurd. As if Ilya hadn’t replayed Toronto, then Nashville, over and over in his head, trying to pinpoint what about them had been so electric, satisfying in a way that left him emptier and needy when it was done with.

Lily: Very silly

Lily: I am hot and you are hot. It is science

Lily: Magnets

Jane: Wow. You’re so enlightened.

Lily: Stop using big stupid words. You are touching yourself?

Jane: No.

Ilya smiles. He can almost hear Hollander say it, stubborn and pretending like he isn’t turned on.

Lily: Do it.

Jane: Fuck. Okay.

And there it is, isn’t it? Ilya suggests — no, tells — Hollander to do something, and he trips over himself to follow, even if he says differently. Ilya thinks of the first time, how Hollander had taken Ilya’s fingers into his mouth so quickly, eyes fluttering, like even just that was everything he had been needing.

Lily: You like when I tell you what to do?

Lily: Don’t lie.

Jane: Yeah. I do

Lily: You are touching yourself now?

Jane: Jesus Christ. Yes I am

Ilya’s lungs contract, and now that he knows Hollander is doing the same, he allows himself to free his dick from his boxers. The friction of his skin is just shy of too much – he thinks of how wet Hollander gets, leaking against his hand. He swears out loud at the thought and can already feel his gut drawing tight.

Lily: Is it as good as my hand? My mouth?

Jane: You know it’s not

Jane: I wish your flight wasn’t cancelled

Something desperate and pitching twists in Ilya’s throat. He wishes too, probably more than Hollander does, and he’s about to tip over the edge much too fast. He spits in his hand and the slide is smoother, he flicks his wrist, his thighs clench and he groans. It’s awkward to hold his phone at the same time, type clumsy and one-handed, but he won’t put it down for anything.

Lily: Yes you should be around my dick right now

Lily: So good Hollander

Lily: Can make you feel so good

Jane: Oh my god what is happening right now

Jane: I’m close

Lily: Already?

It’s hypocritical, because he’s holding himself back, so much, but Hollander needs to come first. He needs to make Hollander come first.

Jane: Shut the fuck up

Lily: You are trying not to make noise? Hiding your face in your arm?

Lily: I will not let you do this. I like to hear how much you need it.

Jane: I’m so fucking close

Jane: Please

Ilya can’t hold off anymore, and he knows Hollander can’t either. He lets them both go.

Lily: Okay

Lily: I will let you come

And he doesn’t get an immediate response, so he turns his face into his pillow and chases his own release. The fact that Hollander is doing the same far away is what makes him come, hard, all over his hand.

Jane: Fuck

Jane: Did you come?

Lily: Yes, impossible not to

Jane: That was so hot

Lily: You are so good when you do what I say.

Lily: Maybe next time I am not so nice

Jane: God

Jane: I have to go to bed

Lily: Yes

Lily: Goodnight

Jane: Goodnight.

Ilya turns his phone off and tries not to smile. The inside of his thighs are sticky, and he wrinkles his nose, rolling out of bed to take a shower. The window catches his eye before he reaches the bathroom, the settling snowfall.

He peels the curtains back an inch, just to look at the endless black outside. The glass is cold to the touch. Occasionally, flurries drift into view, soft around the edges. They spin, fleeting, and then gone.

Ilya is floating, detached from his body: he can feel every inch of the bass pulsing in the air. He’s the perfect amount of drunk: his head is quiet, the edges of his body are bleeding into those around him, hips and shoulders and stained mouths. When the strobe lights slash into their faces, the darkness falls away like silk.

He prefers not seeing the entirety of the people around, and to instead be a part of the one body they all fall into. He lets the heartbeat of the club envelop him. Every movement means a ripple effect and he doesn’t have to think, only copy.

Someone tugs at his wrist. She has silver glitter on her eyelids, iridescent scales, and her smile bares a chipped canine. “Hi,” he says.

When she kisses him, it tastes like tequila and salt. Ilya closes his eyes and thinks, okay.

He lets her lead him into the street, into a bed, between her legs. He doesn’t ask her name, and he’s not sure she knows his. Neither of them offer it up; they don’t talk at all.

When it’s over, they share a cigarette over tangled sheets. Her room is thick with the smell of it.

“I have to go,” he tells her.

She nods and drops the cigarette butt into the ashtray on her bedside table. “Okay. See you around?”

“Maybe.” He considers walking the short distance to his hotel, but as soon as he steps out of her door, the night chill and alcohol catch up to him, and he sways on his feet. He calls a car instead, and doesn’t remember the drive, just streetlights blurring past him. He barely has the energy to strip his clothes off, the lines of the walls dancing. When he crawls into his bed it’s with a dry stale mouth and a knotting swell of nausea.

Ilya wakes up to his phone buzzing itself into the plaster of the wall. He’s still swimming himself out of sleep, half-hoping he can find his way back, and the sound stops for a few glorious seconds before starting up again.

He doesn’t know what time it is until he flips his phone to face him and sees it’s five in the morning. He gives himself a second to mourn the sleep he’s losing before looking at the caller ID, and his heart sinks.

As soon as he accepts the call, Alexei’s voice is harsh and angry through the speaker. “I’ve been calling you for an hour. Where the fuck were you?”

Ilya sits up; he can tell by the tone that this will not be an easy talk. “Sleeping,” he says, though he knows it was more of a rhetorical question. “It’s late. What do you want.”

“Dad’s off the rails again.”

Ilya’s whole body goes cold. “What?”

“He’s fine now. Not that you give a shit.” Alexei’s breathing is tight and short, like how it’s been the last eight years, after they put her in the ground. Like their mother died and Alexei pulled the plug on himself, too, let someone else grow over him — who he once was and was maybe becoming — someone stubborn and fist-heavy. Always angry like a mean dog tied down.

Ilya fights off the aggression that always rises in him when he’s with his brother. “Alexei. Tell me what happened.”

“He called me, said he needed to go, he forgot to tell Mom something,” Alexei says. “Or give her something, I don’t know. Either way, he sounded crazy. I told him to stay put, I get home, he’s gone. Then I spent an hour driving around and find him looking at the Moskva.”

Their father, skin going soft and thin, somehow still bitter in his forgetfulness. He’s frail compared to how he was before, but he still puts the fear of God in Ilya. He hates it. But he thinks it’s maybe what it is to have a father, in the end. Or just what it is to have his father. A river mouth, a riptide. Something that will take him and cover him up if he doesn’t anchor himself into the sand first.

But he is still Ilya’s father. So he asks, “Where is he now?”

“In bed,” Alexei snaps. “He’s more normal now, but I’m telling you, I can’t fucking deal with this much longer.”

Ilya can’t stop it: his voice becomes iron. “If you leave him I’ll kill you. Stay. This is serious, Alexei.”

“You think I don’t know? You haven’t been home in months. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“What do you want?”

“Two thousand. The doctors are telling me he needs a night nurse.”

Ilya laughs, his chest hollow and scraped out. He knows damn well where most of that money will go. But the alternative is the possibility of Alexei leaving that house, maybe never coming back. He doesn’t know what could happen. He just doesn’t know.

“Fine,” Ilya says. “Fine.”

“How generous.”

Ilya goes woozy with anger. He hates him, and he hates that he does. “Go fuck yourself,” he says, and hangs up.

It’s obvious who the nominees will be, almost laughable to have the PHWA dangle the suspense over their heads. It’s still satisfying to have his name announced. It’s followed by Hollander’s immediately after, as it almost always is. Both of their names are constantly said in the same breath, coupled together. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Like one doesn’t quite wholly exist unless the other one is there.

He loses, and Hollander is named Rookie of the Year. It stings, but he knows there’ll be other chances and other awards. He already has his eyes fixed on the next one, the next game. He’s only just beginning.

“They give it to Hollander because they feel bad,” he says to the press, “They know I am better. Don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

He hovers by the bar. He catches Hollander’s eye across the room and winks. Hollander flushes and turns away quickly, and Ilya’s fingers itch with how badly he wants to trace how far down that blush goes.

No, it’s not the loss that cracks him open.

It’s the tap on the shoulder when he’s waiting for his drink. He turns and it’s a man he doesn’t know, loping and long like a greyhound. He doesn’t have a typical player’s build, and Ilya doesn’t recognize him, but his neck is lean and corded. Ilya assumes it’s the same strong foundation under the suit.

“Sorry to disturb,” the man says, “but I wanted to say hello. I’m a big fan.”

It’s light, but it’s there: the edge of a familiar accent. It makes Ilya’s face break out into a grin before he can stop it. “Вы русский?”

The stranger smiles. “Da.” He seems to grapple with himself for a moment, then says in English, half-heartedly, “It’s been a long time since I spoke it. But I lived in Novosibirsk as a child.”

“Ah.” Ilya tries not to let his disappointment bleed into his face. He misses speaking his language, the way the words come unfiltered and easy, no pauses between breaths. Something so quickly snatched away.

“My name is Alex Petrov, I’ve been a scout for ten years now. Been practically begging the league to let me look at some of the kids in Russia.”

Ilya nods. He’s not sure what else to say. Sometimes people do this, they come up to him just to talk, introduce themselves like Ilya is supposed to know who they are. He likes meeting the fans. He does not like as much meeting those who eye him like he’s a piece of meat.

“You’ve been a huge game changer for us,” Petrov continues. “We need more people like you.”

“Like me.”

He shrugs. “Strong and sure. Fucking smashing through every wall they put in front of you. Not soft and sensitive like some of these boys,” and he smiles, like he’s sharing a private joke. “If you’ll pardon me. You’ve got a whole country rooting for you and your dominance in this sport.”

Petrov finishes like he’s landed a compliment, white and arrow-straight, but the words grow barbs. Petrov looks at him and only sees his heavy hands on the stick. Like that’s all Ilya is. Shipped straight from Russia, honed and waiting for the green light, not gentle, not good. If they could all see him now, glancing at Hollander like he’ll disappear if he looks away too long, waiting and waiting for the moment where they can finally hide themselves away. In secret: this means what they are doing is wrong. It’s like the hinges have come undone and the door is flapping loosely in the wind, and everything is just the bite of cold.

“Thank you,” Ilya manages. He doesn’t say anything else. It’s clearly not as much Petrov wants out of him, but he can’t push for any more.

Petrov nods and shakes his hand. His grip is cut from stone.

“If you need anything at all, just let me know,” he says. Ilya doesn’t know what on earth he would ever need from this man who can’t string together a sentence in Russian. He nods anyway.

When Petrov is gone, Ilya chokes down the rest of the drink. It’s surprisingly easy to slip away, out of the noise and the light, and he goes to the roof. The party has only just really begun, and he should be in the center of it, buying rounds of shots, taking them, maybe even with Hollander. But the thought of it feels very far away. He’s not sure he can force a smile right now.

The air is hot and thick, and it doesn’t make it any easier to breathe, but at least it’s silent and doesn’t ask anything of him.

He doesn’t expect Hollander to come to the same place, but maybe he should have. The two of them seem doomed to follow each other. It doesn’t make Ilya feel better. Instead it’s another suffocating weight, a briar tearing into his throat. Like a dog and a ringing bell, the sight of Hollander flips his stomach over. It’s the last thing he needs right now, but God he can’t help it, he wants he wants, to press their lips together and touch his skin and hear him moan his name.

He bares his teeth instead. He tries to resist everything his body is asking for. It doesn’t last long. He is an animal, and he is only so strong.

Hollander’s mouth falls open under his, and a rumbling starts in Ilya’s chest, tectonic plates shifting, opening into a gap that is endless and black and wide. He tastes Hollander’s spit and he wants to lick it from his mouth, wants to swallow it and carry it with him. He feels crazed, stitches coming loose at the seams.

But Hollander’s muscles are tight with anger, and the rational part of Ilya knows it’s for the best when he shoves him away. It’s still a loss.

(Rationality seems small and pale when he’s with Hollander. It makes pushing Hollander into a wall at one of the biggest MLH events of the year seem like a good idea, only because it means kissing him.)

“What are you doing?” Hollander asks. His eyes are hard, but they flick to Ilya’s mouth, like it’s something he doesn’t even realize is happening.

I don’t know, Ilya thinks, I don’t know, what are you doing to me?

Ilya hates summer, and always has. It’s a waiting game. He falls into a routine, but he hates that too, because he still feels stuck in this city. Sometimes he looks at the scraping skyline and he thinks he might understand, until he is pulled back down by his body. Not even the rivers are enough to carve through it.

He runs the same route everyday, and does his best to not think too hard. He reluctantly watches clips of his plays that his coach sends him. He eats lunch with his father and keeps his mouth shut.

He only sees Alexei a few times, avoids him and the poison he spreads, and when he does it’s to see his niece. Every time he comes back she’s bigger, and it scares him, how this human can grow up in the shadow of her father and his greed.

He goes out, but mainly because it’s an escape — it gives him a reason to be unreachable for hours at a time. He fucks girls, and sometimes he thinks about Hollander and his face pinched with anger when he does. He drinks more than he should to forget that fact.

Summer means today will be like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today.

Except —

Lily: So what does Shane Hollander do off season?

Jane: Not a lot. I workout. I read a bit. I’m going to my parents’ this weekend.

Lily: Wow.

Jane: What, too boring for you?

Lily: I always think you will hit limit

Lily: Like, OK, cannot get more boring than this

Lily: Somehow you keep going

Jane: Ha ha.

Lily: You should win awards for this

Jane: At least I’m winning them.

Jane: Sorry. That was mean.

Lily: It’s ok

Lily: Was kind of hot

Lily: If you want to be mean next time we fuck I will not say no

Jane: What is wrong with you.

Lily: Would let you do it

Lily: Or is my job? You like when I am mean?

Jane: I’m not answering that

Lily: It is because answer is yes

Jane: I have to go. I’m at the gym.

Lily: Chicken

Lily: Have nice boring workout

Jane: I will.

— except, he thinks maybe this time he can bear it. He can hold on for a little longer.

2012

It’s not rare, to hear the jokes; this is hockey after all. They still throw words around, in every language, and even when Ilya doesn’t recognize them he still hears the laced venom hiding behind.

He’s kneeled over pulling his socks on by his locker, silently crafting some semblance of a speech. Instead his ears turn to the conversations around him.

Kane is turned away from him but talking loud: “Last time, Simmons gave me the nastiest look when I blocked his goal.”

Johansson scoffs. “He’s such an asshole,” he responds. “Always trying to play dirty.”

“Fucking faggot,” Kane says, and pats Johansson on the shoulder, “We’ll get him tonight.”

And Ilya knows this word, and he thinks he knows the hatred behind it. The sound of it makes his skin flinch, stirring nausea — he thinks of someone pointing this word, at him, at Hollander, and it spears his chest, serrated and cold.

He’s their captain, it’s his job to correct their behavior. To keep them streamlined and focused on what actually matters. But what overpowers that is the fear of showing himself.

He glances at them, their faces turned away, underwater, pressure in his ears. He has the strangest sense, all of a sudden, that he’s looking at them through a fog. His body has been pressed very far away from them, paralyzed and on the other side of the wall.

He thinks he should say something, anything. But by the time he manages to unstick the back of his throat his teammates have dispersed and dropped the conversation.

Secretly he is glad of it, secretly he wants to put his head under the sand and hide as long as he can.

In their uphill climb that is the playoffs, they beat Chicago. It isn’t even close. Ilya scores a hat trick, he is connected to the stick like it is an extension of his body, and his teammates play like they’re waking up from a dream.

It’s in TD Garden, so when he unlocks his front door Svetlana is waiting for him inside. At least this time he was expecting her. Coming over after the game, she had texted him, celebration of your win. It had been hours before he had even stepped foot on the ice. He thinks she might be psychic.

“Hello,” she says, and watches him dump his bags on the floor. “Good game.”

He grins. “I know.” He walks to her and she presses a kiss to his cheek, light and sweet, and he gets the sense that she is proud of him.

“Do you want a drink?” He asks.

She nods. “Whiskey.”

He wrinkles his nose. “You get more American everyday.”

Her mouth falls open like it’s the most offensive thing he could say to her, which it probably is. It makes him laugh. He pours her drink anyway, and she sits on the bar stool and watches him perform his ritual of vodka on ice.

She’s definitely still annoyed at his comment, because she says, “you could’ve scored a fourth. You let Brown take the puck away from you in the third period.” She sips her whiskey. “You’re definitely not getting the Cup this year with plays like that.”

He groans as he takes the chair next to her. His body is battered and bruised and he wants to get drunk and put hockey behind him tonight, just for a few hours. “Are you my coach now?” He flicks her on the shoulder. “I don’t remember asking for your criticism.”

She shoves him back. “I should be. Maybe you would beat Hollander more if I was.”

The mention of his name is like a slap to the face, but Ilya should be used to it at this point. He holds onto the edge of the countertop a little tighter. “Very funny.”

She smiles, but she knows him mortifyingly well and can see the tension in his jaw. “How’s your dad?” she asks.

“You haven’t seen him?” She had spent a week back home for a funeral of her father’s friend. Ilya had been invited, but half-heartedly, out of respect more than anything. They all knew he wouldn’t abandon the playoffs even for a minute.

She shakes her head.

He rolls the taste of vodka in his mouth and tries to soothe the calcifying tightness in his chest. “He’s okay. Not really. But it’s — it is what it is.”

His father hasn’t had another episode since the phone call, but it’s clear he’s not getting any better. His moments of confusion are getting more frequent, longer. Ilya remembers looking at him and sometimes seeing a ghost, a shadow already starting to disappear into the veil. Where’s your mother, he had asked once, she’s late, always late, and Ilya had wanted to sink into nothing.

Svetlana nods. “Well. Alexei is the same. We can always count on him to be a piece of shit.”

Ilya smiles at that, but it’s forced. She doesn’t push him further.

When they finish their drinks, she goes to sit on the couch and smiles. It’s muscle memory for him: his mind breaks away from his body and lets it do all the work.

He puts his head on her lap as the sweat dries on their skin. Her fingers card through his hair, and it makes a lump rise in his throat. It’s what his mother used to do when he was sick. Ilyushenka, and her voice was gentle, something to burrow under, her hands cupping his fever. зайчик, little rabbit, and he would let the sweetness of sleep take him.

He realizes Svetlana is probably his best friend. He realizes he feels so alone it might swallow him whole.

2013

When he pushes into Hollander for the first time, it takes everything in him to not come right then and there.

“Fuck,” he says, “I’m—”

Hollander kind of laughs, short and gasping. “Me too. Oh my God. Oh my God, Rozanov.”

Ilya closes his eyes and counts to ten. Everything in the world is shaved down to the point of this moment, the sensations coursing through his body. He’s trembling. Sweat down his back.

When he claws himself out of the deep: “Okay. Good?”

“Good.” Hollander nods. “That’s — yeah. Go slow.”

He grits his teeth so hard it hurts and pulls back, just so, before sliding back in. He gets a punched-out moan from Hollander in return. So he does it again, and again, until Hollander’s face gets softer and the tension turns to raw pleasure. It’s unlike anything Ilya’s ever felt.

“Fuck me now. Please.”

Ilya kind of wants to make him beg for it, but he’s so desperate himself he files the idea away for another time. Instead he does what Hollander asks: he wants to make him feel good, better than he’s ever felt, wants to give that to him over and over.

He presses Hollander down into the mattress, sees the muscles of his back shifting, the dimple right before the swell of his ass. Hollander yields to his touch.

“Fuck,” Ilya says, because it feels like it’s all he can say.

Hollander whines into the pillow. His back is slick with sweat, the nape of his neck is flushed. Ilya wants to eat him.

He spreads Hollander’s cheeks and watches, fascinated, as his dick slides in and out of Hollander’s hole. He’s not going to last. Here is the tugging in his gut already, on the precipice, but only after Hollander comes; this is the rule.

“Tell me how it feels,” he says. He wants it to sound sharp, commanding, but it comes out more like a plea than he’d like.

Hollander seems like words are beyond him, and all he can do is make noises, moans and gasps each time Ilya hits home, hands scrabbling for purchase.

Ilya grabs them and holds them behind Hollander’s back, to give him something to ground him, root him into the moment. Hollander looks like he’s in another space entirely, fucked out and ruined. “Hollander,” and he grinds into his prostate, holds onto his wrists tighter, “tell me.”

Hollander blinks. His mouth is wet and bitten. “It’s like—” and he whimpers, fucking whimpers, and Ilya knows both of them are about to lose it, “I feel you everywhere. Jesus. You’re in my fucking throat.”

And that makes something hot and electric and possessive scream in Ilya’s stomach. He presses his thumbs into Hollander’s pulse points, and he thrashes beneath him, tries to push Ilya deeper inside him, and there’s an endless keening coming out of his throat, his breaths coming short and hitched, and Ilya knows —

“I’m close. I’m gonna —”

Ilya leans over and mouths at Hollander’s jaw, licks up his neck, careful not to leave a mark, but he wants to bite down, wants to leave the imprint of his teeth where everyone can see, can know that he was here, fucking Hollander into the mattress, making him wild with it.

“Come,” Ilya says, “right now, Hollander,” and — oh God — he does, as if on command, spilling into the sheets. Ilya follows him over, helplessly, a roaring tide in his ears, his face pressed into Hollander’s cheek.

He fucks him through it until Hollander is oversensitive and squirming, and pulls out, Hollander whining as he does, like he wants him back.

“Holy shit,” Hollander breathes.

Ilya grins, a lightness in his chest that he’s not used to. “Yes,” he agrees, “holy shit.”

(When Ilya comes back to curl into Hollander’s side, hair wet from the shower: “Better than dildo, yes?”

Hollander turns his face away from him, his ears pink. “Shut up.”

Ilya holds onto his chin, traces his fingers over his jaw. “Not very nice.”

Hollander sighs. “Fine,” he says, but he’s grinning, and his shoulder is pressed against Ilya’s, and it’s the most relaxed he’s ever seen him. “You’ve ruined me. Happy?”

Ilya drags him into a kiss, drinking in his warmth. Their lips curve against each other, twin smiles. He tells the truth, he says, “yes.”)

2014

Jane: Hey! U doing ok?

It burns a hole in his pocket. He knows he’s doing the wrong thing. He saw it with the hurt in Hollander’s eyes, the screen of anger and self-protection slamming down. Ilya is angry, and he is angry at himself: he knows it was wrong, but he couldn’t help it. He shrunk himself and locked himself up tight and let the rest of his body do whatever it wanted, snarl and glare and speak bitterness. He is so far away from it now. He can’t see the cracks through the wall.

Sometimes he opens the phone and looks at the text and he wants to say something back. I’m sorry. How are you, no I’m not doing ok, my father is sick and meaner every day. I hate this place. I hate who it makes me become.

His ribs are growing a cage, a skeletal armor that grinds everything inside to dust. Digs it six feet under and keeps it away from the light. He thinks he wants to break open the seal but the thought makes him sick, sweat and bile. He thinks of a documentary that had come on the TV once, of divers doing stupid things like swimming into the dark of the deep sea. It comes back to him now: decompression sickness, nitrogen blooming, death for the crime of coming up too fast.

His niece is one of the only things tethering him to home. Stepping anywhere near Alexei’s apartment gives him revulsion, like a salt circle keeping him out. It would be unfathomable if Anya wasn’t inside. Every summer she gets so much bigger, blink and you’ll miss it, and it’s cold water to the head every time. He is missing so many things. So many gaps. One summer she had lost a front tooth, a jagged smile, and the next it had grown back in again.

Anya is shy and quiet but she shows Ilya the butterflies that land on her hand if she is very, very still. She closes her eyes when her father raises his voice. She always takes a day or two to warm up to Ilya when she does see him again, like she’s partially forgotten who he is. Sometimes when she hugs him, her hands are dirty from playing and he makes a big show of getting her to wash her hands. She laughs like it’s a relief to do so.

Ilya wonders how something so good and pure could have come from here, from his brother. He prays she will stay this way. A dandelion hiding in concrete.

In Vegas, he watches Hollander over the rim of his glass, and he thinks this might be the moment where he’s gathered everything good in his hands. The feeling of the cup still lingers, the way it was heavy and lined with the names of everyone who came before him. He felt wild with it. He carries it with him, a trail of winding snake.

With who, Hollander had asked him, seconds before they walked out into the lights. Ilya hadn’t answered, because it had amused him, Hollander’s retort, laced with something like jealousy, but also because really he had been taking breaths with his forehead pressed to the wall. He knew he had to set rules before being close to Hollander again. They would fuck tonight, this was inevitable, because no matter how angry Hollander will be at him, the two of them slip out of reality when they breath the same air. He had to contain himself. Not many things were keeping him from dragging Hollander into a coat closet and bending him over.

He still couldn’t help himself from dragging his palm over Hollander’s back longer than necessary, where no one could see. Couldn’t help himself from keeping the photos, even though he knows he will look at them later. Or watching Hollander’s shoulders go tight as he flees from the stage. Or following him, holding his chin, his eyes going watery and feeling something snap. A limb weak with rot finally giving up and plummeting. With Hollander, restraint is a fish out of water.

He had sent himself and Hollander back to their seats, because he couldn’t help himself, and because Hollander listened. Hollander did what he asked. Sitting in the chair was torture, anticipation itching under his collar, staving off memories of Hollander’s mouth and his throat and how it feels to push inside him.

He knows now it was worth it, because he has Hollander stroking himself in a bed, shivering with his own need and the weight of Ilya’s gaze. All lit up with the cityscape, and when his fingers slip further down to his perineum, Ilya can’t stay in the chair any longer.

And Hollander crawls to him, like he’s helpless to what his body wants. He presses his face to Ilya’s dick and breathes it in and mouths through the fabric like he’s trying to make a home there and Ilya has to keep his knees from buckling.

Control, he reminds himself, and grasps for it and manages to hold himself afloat. It’s slipping away by the time he’s lighting his cigarette next to Hollander and a kind of panic grows teeth. It’s what makes him send Hollander away, because its roots are spreading and they are turning sharp and deep. He cannot get out of the sheets to say goodbye. He hears the rustle of fabric and wavering silence and then the click of the door. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, only that it is coming hard and fast and even he doesn’t know what will happen when it breaches.

His mouth feels numb and cold even around the smoke. He presses his fingers to his mouth absently. It comes to him minutes later: they didn’t kiss. They always do, it’s the wind that pushes them over the edge, and it’s what closes the loop, what makes the leaving more bearable. It’s maybe his fault. It’s a dangerous place in his head, absorbing into the swirling black hole of things he can only think about sideways.

2015

Ilya checks his phone in the locker room, his shoulder flaring with pain at the movement. Bone in socket against pulling muscle. He had pushed, and been pushed back, sparks of pain echoing to the back of his teeth. It’s been a while since he’s been checked like that. For just a moment, crushed against the board, head spinning.

Jane: Holy shit.

Jane: Are you okay?

Jane: That looked like a painful hit.

Jane: I know you’re done with the game.

Ilya bites back a grin, and looks around the room to see if anyone’s paying attention to him. After the first few minutes of unneeded worry, his teammates had given up on hunting down the player who checked him. The most Ilya allowed was a Tylenol pressed in his palm.

Lily: Wow. You are worried?

Jane: Shut up. Are you okay?

Lily: Yes. Probably nothing

Jane: You should go to the doctor anyway.

Jane: It could be a joint separation. Or something with your rotator cuff.

He wants to ask it: why do you care? It’s not the type of question they ask. Especially now that their balance has been regained after Vegas, which left a month of strained, sparse texts in its wake, for reasons Ilya — and probably Hollander — couldn’t quite understand.

(I watched Friends, he texted one morning. Hollander had responded, What?

Ilya followed up with Why my English is better. I watched all of this stupid tv show. It is not funny but it helps.

Hollander had said, You should've actually gone with the New Yorker. And everything between them had felt a little more okay.)

Instead he types: It will be fine after three days.

Jane: Fine. Just don’t complain when your arm falls off.

Jane: Put ice on it at least.

Lily: Ok.

Lily: But admit you are worried first.

Jane: Fine. If it stops your stupid arm from falling off.

Jane: I was worried when I saw you take a hit that would’ve freaked any of us out.

Lily: So nice. Thank you.

Jane: Asshole

Lily: :)

The thing is, Ilya doesn’t feel as he should when Hollander wins the Cup. He is frustrated, yes, angry when they don’t make it past New Jersey, and he feels his father’s anger across the ocean. They could have done better, scraped by a little longer, and he watches clips of their plays to lock down their weak links.

But what comes over him — watching Hollander’s face light up as he holds the Cup in the air, the shaky close up shot of his smile and the sweat at his temples and his freckles — is something else entirely. It’s heavy rain, erosion, it wipes him clean and raw and vulnerable. He smiles at the screen, because he has to, because he sees the flood coming in the distance.

He doesn’t have sex with the girls he meets at the club anymore. They come up to him, beautiful, grinning, floral perfume — and he feels nothing. A stab of annoyance if anything, because he’s either texting Hollander, or dancing and trying not to think about Hollander. His limbs are heavy with it.

When they put their hands on his waist and tilt their heads up, he still kisses them. Gives them what they ask for. He lets his eyes close, tries to go into that space of touch and heat but he comes up empty. So he backs off as soon as their hips meet. Gives them a shrug. Ilya Rozanov, asshole, uncaring, lazy.

One night he turns on his TV and a sitcom jumps to a commercial break, and he almost drops his remote at the visual he gets: Hollander in his underwear. Sharing down the barrel of the camera with an unsure expression — the one he gets when someone asks him to smile. It’s stiff and unnatural, and Ilya feels a choked fondness when he sees it, because he knows what Hollander’s real smile looks like, he’s pulled it out of him, coaxed it out with careful hands and shallow words. It was the fog clearing. An inside sound he had never heard before, church bells.

He looks at Hollander’s smooth skin and the waistband of his briefs and his stomach twists with desire and the memory of pressing his mouth there, of pulling his boxers down with his teeth.

(And — even worse — it makes an ache inside of him grow, an exit wound ragged and untreated. It’s how he wonders if Hollander snores, what sounds he makes when he sleeps, if he moves or stays still, he wonders if he will ever find out. It’s the tearing fact that he is a human, and he is reminded of it, and it might be killing him.)

2016

He is pretending to relax when Hollander texts him here. The text chime sends a jolt up his body, liquid hot, and he rushes to open the door where Hollander is waiting. The hallways are dark and empty and endless around them.

“Hi.” He can’t keep the grin off his face. He’s still riding the high of the Raiders’ win, even though the Metros fought tooth and nail. It was a close call all the way through, just how Ilya likes it. Tension high and Hollander eyeing him at the face-off. He’s lit up all over.

Hollander hooks his thumb into his pocket and glances around the room. Cookie cutter hotel, blinds closed, copy paste. “Hi.”

Ilya laughs. “No congrats for my win?”

To his delight, Hollander rolls his eyes. The hair around his forehead is still damp from his post-game shower, and his black hoodie is just slightly too large on his frame. Ears already pink. Ilya is going to ruin him.

“Congratulations,” Hollander mumbles.

Ilya steps forward into his space. “Good,” he says, and Hollander's eyes fly up to his. A switch flipped. Ilya sighs with it: it’s beginning now.

He reaches out to hold Hollander's jaw in his palm, feels his pulse fluttering. His own heartbeat lopes in tandem. “Do I get a reward?”

“Fuck you,” Hollander says, but his eyes are going half-lidded, and his body is swaying into Ilya’s.

Ilya is so turned on he doesn’t think he can draw it out anymore: can’t help but pull their hips together, groaning at the feeling of Hollander's hardening length against his. He can never resist very long. He ruts up against Hollander, a slow filthy grind, and feels the muscle of his thigh flexing, their zippers catching. He shows teeth and says, “Yes. This is the plan.”

Hollander’s knees are already buckling beneath him, his back sliding down the wall and fingers skimming Ilya’s waistband. Ilya’s dick jumps when Hollander palms him through the cloth, but he’s so pent up he’s scared he’ll come as soon as he fucks into Hollander’s mouth. So he shakes his head and hoists Hollander back up. He gets a whine in return, pitiful and questioning, half of Hollander’s weight leaning into him.

“Let me blow you,” Hollander says, small and pleading, and Ilya’s not sure he can survive this.

“On the bed,” he responds, and Hollander sighs but moves towards it anyway. Ilya grabs him by the bicep before he gets too far. “Clothes off.”

Hollander flushes. “You too.”

“No. Not yet. My reward, remember?”

Hollander looks away as he undresses, folds his clothes neatly. It sends such a stupid wave of fondness rocking through Ilya’s body. As it did the last time, as it did the first.

Hollander crosses his arms and frowns. “Happy now?” His dick is curved and red and desperate towards his stomach. Ilya can’t stop looking at it.

Ilya answers by taking his face between his hands and kissing him. Hollander sighs into his mouth and pulls at Ilya’s neck, trying to get closer. He scratches his fingers behind Ilya’s ears and exhales long and slow. Ilya wants him to dig his nails in deeper. Wants Hollander to leave long scratches down his back, for them to sting during the day, for everyone to see in the showers.

“On the bed now,” Ilya says.

Hollander gets on the bed. Ilya does too, crawling between his thighs, nudging them apart with his shoulders. Hollander is getting increasingly worked up; his chest is starting to rise and fall quickly. Ilya kisses the soft skin on the inside of his knee, hears the hitch in his breath.

“Rozanov,” Hollander begins, but Ilya quiets him by scraping his teeth through a northbound path, holds himself taut to not bite down. “Wish I could mark you,” he says, “Everyone will know how good you have been fucked.”

Hollander’s knee twitches. “If you even fuck me.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “Be patient.”

He skims his way up to Hollander’s hipbone. Props his chin there to look up at Hollander and grins. He’s very purposefully avoiding Hollander’s weeping dick.

Hollander glares at him. “You’re such an asshole.”

Ilya raises his eyebrows. “What? You want something?”

Hollander stubbornly says nothing, but he’s clearly at the end of his rope, his lips parted, eyes travelling over Ilya’s face.

So Ilya takes pity on him. “Okay,” he says. “Hands above head. Do not move.”

Hollander does what he’s asked, his arms reaching back to grasp the headboard behind him. Ilya rewards his good behavior by pressing Hollander’s abdomen down, into the mattress, nosing his way up his shaft and, as Hollander gasps above him, licks his tip, but stays there, not going any further or giving Hollander what he wants.

“Oh my God,” Hollander groans, half-pleasure, half-frustration. “Just—”

“Have to earn it,” Ilya says. “Not so easy.”

“Rozanov,” and Hollander’s hands twitch and start to come down, to grab him and push him down, maybe, so Ilya takes both of Hollander’s wrists in his hand and shoves them back into place.

Hollander gasps and his back arches, instinct and urgent desire. Ilya uses it to mouth over his nipple, rasp his tongue in slow circles — Hollander would never admit it but attention to his chest unravels him very, very quickly. He whines when Ilya reaches up to cup the other one and kneads into it with his thumb.

When Hollander’s chest is flushed and heaving, Ilya returns to hovering over Hollander’s face. Hollander’s gaze is latched onto Ilya’s mouth.

Ilya cards his fingers through Hollander’s hair, slightly damp with sweat. “You do not let anyone touch you like this, no? Only me.”

Hollander has reached past his ability to argue; he is reduced to honest vulnerability. He nods. “Only you,” he says, quiet but firm.

Ilya smiles. “Good.” He taps Hollander’s mouth. “Open.”

Hollander obeys. And without being asked, he sucks Ilya’s fingers into the heat of his mouth. Groans around them. Ilya presses into the velvet of his tongue and Hollander’s lips stretch around his fingers and he wants to live here forever.

“Fuck, Hollander.” He draws his fingers in and out. “Always take me so good.”

Hollander moans. Spit is collecting at the corner of his mouth and Ilya watches, crazed and hungry. He leans in to suck some of it off, licking around where his fingers disappear into Hollander’s mouth. Hollander runs his tongue over the pads of his fingers, and it’s a strange intimacy that makes him shiver.

Ilya pulls away from Hollander’s mouth, growing wet with spit, and Hollander reacts like it’s the worst thing he could’ve done, struggling to chase it back.
“You want it?”

Hollander immediately understands and nods, desperate and jerking — Ilya hooks his thumb behind Hollander’s teeth, pulls his mouth open, and Ilya leans in and spits, directly onto his waiting tongue. Hollander’s hips jerk upwards and he moans long and broken.

Ilya watches, so hard it hurts, as Hollander works his jaw, feeling the wetness of Ilya’s saliva mix with his own. He swallows it down.

Part of his body inside Hollander’s; Ilya wants to give him all of it until he does not exist outside of him. Hollander looks up at him and says, “please fuck me,” and Ilya has never been more alive.

The lube and condom are tucked into his jacket pocket, and when Hollander sees Ilya fish them out he smiles, small and hidden. His legs falling open unconsciously. Ilya coats his fingers with too much lube. He stretches Hollander open with his fingers, two, then three, four, when he’s demanded to. He does it until Hollander’s moans become one and endless. He turns Hollander on his stomach, kisses between his shoulder blades, presses the head of his dick flush to Hollander’s entrance.

The searing heat of it. “Okay?”

Hollander grits his teeth so hard Ilya sees the muscle twitch. “If you don’t fuck me right now I’m going to kill you.”

Ilya laughs, presses in slowly, their groans aligning when he bottoms out. He starts to move, slow, apparently too slow because Hollander starts pushing back, impatient, and Ilya is forced to meet his rhythm.

It’s his favorite place in the world, he’s learning, to be buried inside Hollander. To feel their pleasure bleeding into each other, become one thing, a feedback loop never ending.

He watches everything carefully, catalogues exactly how Hollander reacts. He likes to take it like this, Ilya guiding his face down and his ass up, because it gets the angle right that has him drooling, but then sometimes —

“On my back,” Hollander says, sudden and desperate. Ilya is quick to flip him over. He understands the request when Hollander pulls his face down, kisses him open mouthed and panting. Ilya groans into it, feels Hollander clench around him in response, and the overwhelming tightness around his dick makes him dizzy. Hollander takes him like he was made for it. Ilya bends his legs back to his chest, so flexible, to fuck him deeper.

He draws Hollander’s tongue into his mouth and thinks more, more, more. Hollander’s hands find their way into Ilya’s hair, as they often do.

“Rozanov.” He says it in a whimper, a plea, asking for something only Ilya knows how to give.

Ilya mouths along his neck. “I have you,” and Hollander shudders underneath him. He loves it like this, Ilya knows, when he feels pinned down and contained. He always responds to Ilya so beautifully, he is so sensitive, lighting up at every touch. Ilya wants to drink him in forever.

Hollander scrapes his nails down Ilya’s back and he’s biting his lip and his eyes are glassy, how he gets when all he is are his overwhelming senses. He’s gasping into Ilya’s mouth. Ilya cups his face with his palm. “What do you need, милый?"

Hollander’s eyes are unfocused. “Your hands,” and he clutches onto them, trying to push them down to where his dick is leaking onto his abdomen.

Ilya hums. “No. I don’t think so.”

“What?” Hollander says it thinly, on the edge of panic. Ilya shushes him and presses their lips together. “You will come just like this,” he says, and to make his point he thrusts in sharply, watching as Hollander’s eyes roll back into his head. “You will be good, yes?”

Hollander whimpers, and wetness is building in his eyes now, tears glistening, and Ilya kind of wants to lick them off, he kind of wants to live here forever, wants his only job in the world to make Hollander cry with how bad he wants it. Hollander is so tight around his dick and it feels so good it almost hurts.

“Say it, Hollander.”

“Fuck,” the word is scraped out of him, “I’ll be good.”

“Yes? For who?”

Hollander turns his face into his bicep, embarrassed, and Ilya can’t have that, can’t have him thinking. He needs to help Hollander stop thinking for once, to just feel all over, so Ilya grabs his face and yanks it towards him again. At his grip, Hollander’s dick blurts precome onto his heaving stomach.

“Say it.” He pushes in shallowly, slowly, withdraws, then stops altogether, leaving Hollander empty. The result is instantaneous: Hollander whines, bears down, reaches for Ilya’s shoulders to get him moving again. Ilya is stone under his touch, even when Hollander scratches his nails over his shoulder blades and he shivers.

“Rozy,” he says weakly, “please, I-”

Ilya smiles pleasantly. “Yes?”

Hollander is really crying now, and he can’t stop making noises, unintelligible and stringing together. “I’ll be good. I’ll be so good, just please fuck me-” and he kisses him, less of a kiss than open mouth and sliding tongue. “I’ll be good for you, just for you—”

“Fuck,” Ilya hisses, and he fucks into Hollander again, couldn’t hold back if he tried, hard and fast, just as Hollander wants, because he can never really stop giving Hollander what he wants. Leaning down to kiss his jaw, his neck, his shoulder. “So good, идеальный, fuck, Hollander.”

Hollander’s face is twisted with how much he needs this, and it always makes something break loose within Ilya, seeing his stiff logic shattered.

Hollander says something under his breath, too quiet for Ilya to hear. Ilya pinches his thigh to coax it out from him: “what?”

Hollander bites the inside of his cheek, tear-stained and gasping. “I need to come.”

Ilya had known, but had wanted to hear him say it. He nips at his jaw, ghosts his fingers over Hollander’s stomach, watches the muscles jump, how he draws tight and poised the closer he is to the edge. All of it, every inch of bringing Hollander to this point, of being the one to have done this, only him — he watches every one of his movements inside Hollander spark throughout their bodies, growing against the boundaries of their skin. He doesn’t let up the relentless pace, instead keeps it there, holds holds, both of them at this brutal peak, before Hollander falls apart at his doing. Ilya can’t look away from how Hollander’s come streaks along his stomach. He swipes his thumb through it and asks Hollander to lick his own bitterness away from Ilya’s skin — at the sight he comes fast and brutal. He’s surprised, as always, either of them even lasted this long.

Hollander will have to go soon, very soon, after they come down from their shaking thighs and puffing breaths. It’s always sooner than Ilya remembers. Hollander’s neck, the short strand of hair behind his ears, the sweet smell of him in this moment, of being only here and now.

Eventually, the water is up to his ears. He realizes how fucked he is under the fluorescents of the grocery store, in between aisles twelve and thirteen. Rows of cans bound together, in a plastic net. He’s trying to remember what brand of ginger ale Hollander likes best. If he’s the kind of person to have a favorite brand, which — Ilya immediately knows — of course he is. He smiles at the idea, of Hollander having preferences for something so small. He wonders how many he should buy. If he should put them all in the fridge. If Hollander will be hungry, if he will really want to stay the night, what he would want to eat in the morning. Ilya thinks of waking up next to him and feeling his breath against his skin, first thing, and then eating breakfast together in his kitchen.

All of these things flutter through his head in quick succession, while he is looking at the shelves of soda, an hour to close, and he realizes he is so, so fucked.

He traces the lines of Hollander’s mouth with his tongue, the ridges of his teeth. It’s not close enough: he feels like he can’t get close enough. He wants to sink into his bones. Wants his brain to shut off. It’s terrifying, it’s inevitable.

Shane, he thinks, and the cave of his chest collapses. Shane. Not Hollander, not something impersonal to flip through and file as another statistic, but Shane, living and breathing and under his hands, his Shane, here, now, for as long as he can get.

He knows he shouldn’t say it. He does anyway.

Svetlana calls him after. The after meaning the stinging silence, the way he had sat on the couch looking at nothing for an hour. It had built in his chest, Shane, too much and too stripped and they both knew it. But Hollander was gone. And Ilya’s house suddenly felt frigid and unknown and empty.

“I just closed a deal and I’m coming back tonight,” Svetlana says. “Let’s go to a club.”

Ilya realizes his hands are holding the phone, they pressed the answer button, but they don’t feel like they are his hands. He is six feet under. “Okay.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

The mouth that is not his mouth speaks for him and the hands that are not his hands hang up. He watches the sky go dark and thinks he should probably get dressed. He is not really there for that either; he blinks and then he is looking back at himself in the mirror, his hair styled, perfume on the insides of his wrists.

When he meets her in the car outside, he feels like his thoughts come after his movements. His body drags him around without asking for permission. Svetlana blinks at him when he slides into the seat. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

He shakes his head. More than anything he needs to pretend everything is normal. “Nothing is wrong.”

“Ilya,” she says, but Ilya pointedly looks out the window. Turning his head like a child. He can hear Svetlana’s simmering frustration but he knows if he breaks he won’t be able to come back from it.

He’s not aware of the club they go to, doesn’t read the neon sign, he just looks at Svetlana’s footsteps and follows. Entering feels like being spit out of a tunnel: first black then the dizzying lights.

“Come get a drink,” Svetlana says in his ear, and this is something Ilya can do. He orders three shots and the vodka is terrible. It’s a sluggish burn going down, and sits heavy in his stomach.

Shane. It’s the stupidest thing he’s ever done. He could feel his limbs go stiff, lockjaw, but first he had heard his own name said back. Like it was something precious and worth holding onto. Ilya shouldn’t have let him go. He could have explained himself, if he’d had more time, taken it away and brought them back to a place where words were unimportant.

Instead he had watched Hollander retreat into himself and flee and he had gotten I can’t do this. Ilya had wanted to ask what this is, if it meant their come drying on his stomach or the way his nose had fit perfectly into Hollander’s sleeping spine. Either way it means Hollander does not want Ilya anymore.

It’s for the best. This is what he tells himself. Someone was always going to break first. He knows how quickly things go, things that become too good to be true. He holds onto it with his teeth and clutches it to his chest and still, still, still. Bite marks and raw hands. It’s still gone. Hollander is still gone.

He doesn’t know where to put it down so he drinks to forget what’s wrong with him.

At one point Svetlana comes up to him and he has to blink hard before he can really see her, before blurred lines turn into a solid body. She touches his arm and everything else spins.

“You’re fucking wasted,” she says. Her eyebrows are creased together. “I’m taking you home.”

Ilya feels himself smile. “You’re no fun.” He hears the deep bass of a familiar song build and throws an arm around her. “Dance with me.”

She digs her heels into the floor and so his arm jerks back. He turns to look at her and she’s scrutinizing him in the way that only she knows how to do, the way that makes him feel peeled back and uncomfortable.

“Ilya,” and she cups his cheek. It’s a sweet gentle touch and this is what makes the alcohol turn into sickness in his throat. She repeats: “I’m taking you home.”

“Okay.” He knows there’s no point in arguing. He knows she’s probably right.

He knows this especially when he takes the first step into his house and everything starts coming back up. He all but runs into the bathroom. The scrubbed white glare is blinding, and he closes his eyes against the strain as he vomits a night’s worth of excess. His stomach clenches and heaves: he can’t even hold on to forgetfulness.

Svetlana knocks on the door and doesn’t even wait for a response before pushing it open. She huffs out a breath when she sees his hunched back and the way his hand grasps for the flush. He glances at her then looks away.

Ilya rests his cheek on the cool porcelain. “Don’t give me that look.”

“What the hell is going on with you? I’ve never seen you sick like this.”

He waves his hand dismissively. His mouth is acid. “I’m just tired. Too much fun,” he says, and flashes her a toothy grin, even though the rest of his face feels dull and empty, even though he thinks he might throw up again.

She’s not convinced. She crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“There’s nothing.”

And she says, “is it Jane?”

He doesn’t say no. They both know it’s enough of an answer.

He can’t avoid seeing pictures of the two of them together, Hollander and Rose, and so all he can do is push it from his thoughts as best he can. His teammates don’t make this easy. They put the TV on in the gym, and Ilya can’t mute it because they throw him strange looks. They call him over to show him their phones, Roz, take a look at this, and Ilya knows they mean well, but he wants to throw up every time it happens.

They want it to fuel his hate for Hollander — or what they think is his hate. His blood pumping, strength behind the stick. Really he’s playing worse than he has in years.

He fumbles his passes. His goals are sloppy. Marleau can’t stop scrutinizing him — he knows something is wrong. They all do. And Ilya can’t talk about it, so he doesn’t. He gives them shallow excuses. He didn’t sleep well last night, he’s coming down with something. He went home with a girl and didn’t get any sleep. They whistle and laugh and shove his shoulder.

He returns to his hotel room after just barely getting past Vancouver. His limbs are sinking stones. He crawls into bed and his thoughts keep leaving him, thin and stretched and flat.

He does what he isn’t supposed to do, which is open his browser and type in shane hollander rose landry. Streams of articles spit back at him, blurry paparazzi photos, Hollander’s name blazing across Rose’s back. It makes his stomach twist, but secretly in some fucked up way he wants it, to feel the hurt spread. Let the anger grow. Let the bitterness consume him.

An Instagram post of Hollander and Rose, leaving a restaurant, like they just had dinner. Rose is pushing her hair back, Hollander’s face is turned towards her.

He clicks on the comments and scrolls through: I just know shane treats her RIGHT and i’m never getting over this and this is the crossover we didn’t know we needed.

He goes back up to look at the picture. She’s wearing a leather jacket over silk, and he’s in a dark long sleeve that’s less wrinkled than usual.

They do look good together. She probably helps pick out his clothes. She probably calls him Shane, and he lets her.

He lies in bed and chews on his necklace. The metal of it tastes like blood. He could lie here for hours. Like his mother did, her face pale and gone from him forever. He could follow her into nothing.

He is stuck, head under quicksand. Everything in the world is hurtling on without him.

He goes home alone, after the club, because how could he not? He does it with a sinkhole in his stomach, because it was a game and he had still lost. Hollander with Landry, so it was only fair for him to hold up the mirror, to shoot blindly for checkmate. Watching Hollander’s hands go tighter around his drink, the parting of his mouth. He had been hurt and Ilya could see it in his eyes. Good, he thinks, and the drum of his chest is so hollow, so empty. He had wanted it to hurt. Like it had hurt him. He had held the girl’s hips and licked the shell of her ear but he was not there, not really, instead he was confined by Hollander’s gaze. The two of them had been perfectly still. The space around them warped and veered off trail.

Now you look at me, Ilya had thought, finally now I have your attention. Even for a moment, even if it’s shrouded in hate.

He had still lost, because Hollander had left with Rose, during some time unseen by Ilya. He knows what they must be doing now, a shadow of what he and Shane used to be, but now it’s her skin against his, her body smooth and curved where Ilya’s isn’t. His insides flinch away from the image, but he forces himself to keep it wavering at the forefront. He lets it split him apart. You did this, you did this.

2017

Everyone says the same thing: “I can’t believe you’re on the same team as Shane Hollander.” They can’t get enough of it, the idea of the two of them working together on the ice. For them it’s absurd, laughable, unstoppable force and immovable object.

He doesn’t know how to respond. He pretends he’s dreading it, or at least playfully reluctant. As if he’s not half-drunk with the thought of seeing Hollander again. He opens their message history and exits it just as quickly, like a nervous tic, swiping out as soon as he realizes what he’s doing.

Florida’s thick breath doesn’t let up. The heat and humidity is relentless, and Ilya’s spine grows sticky against his loudly garish shirts.

He sits at the bar. The beer is ice in his hands. He searches for Hollander without meaning to, but his head snaps when he hears his voice anyway. He’s not looking at Hollander’s throat flex, he’s not.

The jacket looks good on him, and the decade old want flickers, but then the coin flips: it’s something Rose Landry would have an eye for, and this makes Ilya’s shoulders go stiff. The familiarity between them stumbles. The thought of it upsets him more than he’d like to admit. He would look away if he could.

Then, then, Hollander says it, and with it comes the rolling danger of hope.

Compatible: (of two things) able to exist or occur together without conflict.

Without conflict. Does this mean there was conflict, between Landry and Hollander, a tension that was too heavy to ignore? Did it grow slowly or break all at once? He wants to ask, but he doesn’t want to be wrong. He wonders if they are compatible, him and Hollander. There is conflict: Hollander’s eyes shutting him out and closing the blinds, final and closed off. But maybe they could occur together, still. He tries to think of what it would look like. Existing together. If they only asked this of each other.

He can admit it to himself: he misses the crook of Hollander’s shoulder. He misses the warmth of his mouth.

“Goodnight, Ilya.”

“Goodnight, Shane.”

Saying it again is the ocean rising to meet him.

When Alexei says their father is dead, the first thing Ilya thinks of is – strangely – a bird in a shoebox.

He was ten. It was summer, which meant in between long stretches of hockey, he could still catch the remnants of daytime. Brushed by the fingers of a heatwave, trapped under its sleeping body. He would lay on the grass and felt its rough prickling. His mother often fought swells of migraines, a cool cloth on her forehead in the dark, but she would often sit with him and watch him look for snails.

She was the one who found the bird. Its soft yellow chest fluttered with a panicked heartbeat, wing bent wrong. She called him over, Ilya, in the way only she could say it, in the mother’s way.

It was still alive, so there was nothing to do but try to keep it that way. They carefully laid it into a cardboard box: he scattered seeds around its head and coaxed it to eat.

The next morning he rushed to check on the bird: to his relief it was still breathing, even when still broken. He sat there longer than he should’ve. His father had gotten angry that it had made him late to practice, and then had turned to his mother, and Ilya can’t remember what they had said now. He does know his mother’s face had taken the veil of exhaustion. The kind so deep every reminder of it consumes a little more.

When he had gotten back from practice, the bird was dead. His mother let him see it. She did not shy away from death even then.

He hears Alexei’s heavy breathing. We’re orphans, he almost says, but doesn’t. Comfort was never their language.

He still remembers how the bird looked. Its feathers went dull. Cold and stiff and no longer a thing of this earth. Like his mother, and now his father.

Over dinner, they look at him carefully, with more curiosity than concern. Police bodies, the faces of the law, cold and unmoving, and duplicated until you cannot distinguish one from the other. If only they knew who they were really sitting next to, what Ilya’s hands have done and what passes through his mind.

“I’m sorry he’s gone,” they tell him. I’m sorry, a phrase rapidly growing tired and empty the more he hears it. As if it was a transaction: they give him this apology and Ilya will owe them something in return.

It’s funny, Ilya thinks, he’s been gone a long time already.

Shane might be the only one he can bear hearing “I’m sorry” from. In his voice, sweet and earnest, the words sound like they mean something.

Because God loves to laugh, Ilya has to watch every second of Shane’s head hitting the ice. He can’t go to him like he wants to. Shane is silent and down and it’s all wrong and Ilya feels like he’s going to be sick, he wants to rush to him and make sure his pulse flutters under his thumb, check his beautiful mouth and nose and face. Get back on the bench, Rozanov, they shout at him, and he can feel anguish building in response. Fuck the bench, fuck this game, fuck everything that isn’t making sure Shane is okay. But others are watching and he already knows he’s walking the line. Somehow he makes it to the bench, his feet carry him even if he can’t feel them. His eyes stay fixed to where they load Shane onto the stretcher and carry him out, and then the hole they leave behind.

His team is looking at him, he can feel the heaviness of it. Hollander would be upset at him for not keeping up appearances. He doesn’t care. He knows they’ll talk about it outside of earshot, didn’t know Rozanov was so friendly with Hollander. He’ll come up with something for the press. Sportsmanship, respect built over many years. He rips off his gloves and Marleau says, “I didn’t mean to. Shit, I didn’t know he wasn’t looking.”

Shane wasn’t looking, because he was looking at Ilya. Going into their private bubble when they shouldn’t, the wrong time and wrong place, and now they have to pay for it. Ilya knows it’s not Marleau’s fault but at the same time he wants to scream.

This is the game. It hurts. He knows this: he has the bruised ribs and old aches to prove it. Strips of KT tape. You care about something so much it could kill you.

He tells himself he’ll stop this, the thing they’re both barreling towards. Shane had gotten hurt because of him, in a way, and that makes Ilya’s guilt set in stone. They can’t run from it, not anymore, just like Shane can’t run from sterile hospital walls and heart monitors and yellowing bruises. He’ll end it, he tells himself, as soon as Shane’s out.

Then Shane sighs with contentment as soon as Ilya’s hand weaves into his, and asks him, dopey and vulnerable, to stay with him, really stay, for days and days on end. And Ilya knows he never had a chance.

Scott Hunter looks like he’s going to have an aneurysm when Ilya approaches him. Ilya doesn’t blame him: he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing either. His legs had carried him without waiting for a command.

Ilya nods at him. “Good speech.”

Hunter raises an eyebrow. “Thanks.”

Ilya doesn’t know what to say, or how to tread carefully here. Suit and tie and off the ice; the trophy has only just left Hunter’s hand. He can’t show himself too much, or cause suspicion — but he’s still reeling from the shock of what he had seen on the television. How Hunter had taken a man’s face in his hands and kissed him like he wasn’t afraid anymore. Like nothing else mattered. I found the one thing that is more powerful.

Ilya chews at the inside of his cheek. “I want to say — What you did was —” He pauses. Impossible. Crazy. How did you do it? How did you find the strength? “Brave,” he lands on.

Hunter looks like it’s the last thing he expected Ilya to say. Maybe he had been bracing for hate or disgust, spitting betrayal. How many others had come up to him only to twist a knife in his chest?

“Thank you,” he says again, but he’s on his guard, poised and skittish, “but it was kind of the easiest thing in the world.”

Something is caught in Ilya’s throat. “Easy?”

Hunter lifts a shoulder. “I didn’t want to live a life without Kip in it. That makes everything else worth it.”

Ilya thinks of Shane in the hospital, of the mere possibility of his absence in his life, and it’s a hurting, inconceivable notion. He swallows it back. “You do not have,” he fishes for the word, “backlash?”

“I do,” Hunter says. “But I’m in love.”

He says it like it’s the breaking of the chain. His smile speaks joy, and freedom, and lightness. The envy Ilya feels for it hits him hard in the chest.

Ilya lets himself imagine it, just for a second. Pulling Shane’s body to his where everyone can see, cupping his jawline, sweat in their hair. Letting his heart finally scream. This is mine, this is ours. He wants their names to be said in the same breath forever.

The truth rushes back. The memories of looking both ways before leaving the elevator. Shane tucked into him in the dark.

Ilya says, “You are one million years old. You should be laughed at for this. But not for loving a man.”

Hunter laughs. “Not too old to kick your ass.”

“Hm. Was one time.”

A moment of unsure silence stretches between them, and then Hunter sticks out his hand. Against all odds, Ilya shakes it.

Let’s say how we really feel, Shane asks, so doesn’t Ilya have to give it to him? Just as he would give him everything else? Whatever he wants, anything, Ilya will stumble over himself for it. He wonders if Shane knows how much he could ask for. Anything, everything.

How he really feels. It’s unfathomable to think about putting it in the box of simple English words, noises unfit to say what he really wants them to say. He wonders if anyone has felt this before, or if his heart has torn a fresh bleeding wound into the skin of the world.

How he really feels:

I love you, Ilya thinks, every time he looks at him. I love you, I love you, я тебя люблю. He hoards it, his secret, wraps it tight in his chest in the morning, feels it loosen with every glance. Shane blinks against the morning sun, Shane’s ears turn red after hours on the ice, Shane pants Ilya’s name and asks, in a broken and keening voice, if he can come, and then gets embarrassed after.

Shane, his every line and curve memorized, his face the most familiar and precious in the world. Years and Ilya can’t get enough. He drinks him in like a dying man. He is hollowed out with loneliness when he sleeps alone. He thinks the happiness might tear him apart when he wakes up with their bodies curled around each other.

Shane hands him a can of Coke, cold and sweating from the fridge, like it wasn’t just an afterthought. He had stood in the grocery store like Ilya had – even if it was touch and go, he had bought it. Put it in the fridge so it would be cold. The intentionality of it, the why: maybe it’s the same as the ginger ale Ilya still has in the back of his shelves.

Ilya fucks him into the mattress of Shane’s bed and not a sterile hotel room. He fingers him until he’s loose and begging for it, and slides in slow, slow, makes him come once on his dick then again in the shower. He steps out into the grass to Shane over the grill, the smell of meat, so they can eat together, exist together.

He wants to ask if this is real. If it’s a trick. He wants to know what happened that has allowed him these moments, if it will go away before he can understand, once it realizes who Ilya is. He’s waiting for Shane to say, this is a mistake, I didn’t know who you are before. Now I know, and I can’t stand it. It doesn’t come, but a small part of Ilya waits for it. It gets smaller everyday, but still — waiting, waiting for Shane to wake up and see.

He watches Shane brush his teeth in the mirror. He has a practiced routine, back, front, molars. It’s the strangest thing — Ilya has seen him from every angle, but hasn’t seen him get ready for bed until two days ago. He likes to watch the way Shane does things. From the moment he saw him fold his clothes before joining Ilya in his bed. Shane likes order, neatness, and yet here he is with Ilya, and both of them have less control than ever.

Ilya knows he’s staring, but he is finally allowed to, and when Shane crawls under the sheets next to him Ilya’s already half hard. Since arriving at the cottage he feels more worked up than he’s ever felt; the more the hours pass the more Ilya can’t get enough. There will never be a limit, he knows, his desire chases an endless universe, but it is twofold, because he also feels the secret in his chest thrashing.

He leans over and kisses behind Shane’s ear. The vibration of his throat as he hums. “You should put your glasses on,” he whispers.

Shane snorts and puts his hand on the back of Ilya’s neck. “Come here,” he says, and Ilya goes, because Shane has asked it of him.

“I love you”: it’s a stone dropping into water, ripples extending, sinking and sinking. There is no turning back. It’s out now, and Shane can do whatever he wants with it.

How he really feels, there, there it is, exposed and keening and blistering. Shane can burn him with it and it would mean certain death, but at least he will know. He doesn’t think he can keep it in his body anymore. It is growing out of the boundaries of his flesh.

Shane holds his face and pins him under his gaze. Ilya can’t go anywhere.

Then – “I love you too.”

It’s a dam breaking open. Ilya’s chest crumbles.

The first time he’s taken a real breath in his life. He digs in the soil and his hands come away with the earth. He is planting something and tending to it and it will grow.

Oh god, oh god, Shane says against his hair. He is holding Ilya and Ilya is holding him.

The walls grow pale and fall away, he shrugs the cold fingers of night off, the unfeeling organ – the place where they touch becomes light.

Ilya wakes up with his eyes damp. It’s still dark through the window, but he knows dawn is coming soon, and has the strangest desire to see it. He had fallen asleep in Shane’s arms, now he carefully, silently, turns his head to hear Shane’s puffing breath.

Shane stirs beside him. “Ilya?”

“Sorry,” Ilya whispers, “did not mean to wake you.”

Shane smiles. It’s so sweet and open Ilya’s chest seizes. “It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

Ilya shakes his head. “No. Nothing is wrong. Is opposite. I —” and it’s all he can get out. His head is fogged with sleep and dizzying joy.

Thumbs brush against his cheekbones. “I know.”

Ilya lowers his head back to Shane’s chest. He can hear his heartbeat. “Say it again?” he asks.

Shane immediately knows what he needs, hand cupping the back of his neck. Safe. “I love you, Ilya. I love you so much.”

Ilya sighs and kisses Shane just below the collarbone. He can’t help but smile against his skin when Shane’s muffled heart kicks.

Shane tucks his face into Ilya’s curls. “I feel like I finally have you for the first time,” he says.

They sit by the lake. Body of water. It’s a term Ilya has never understood until now. How could water be a body when it is not alive? When it escapes so easily? But now he looks at Shane looking at it, and he maybe understands, how intangible and unexplainable things take up space, become bodies, even when they are not flesh and bone, moving and breathing with everything else on this earth.

Shane’s hand snakes out to hold onto Ilya’s. Ilya smiles, lifts it to his mouth, kisses his palm — Shane sighs and Ilya is in love, and the thought of it is no longer under the coat of pain.

Lily: shane

Jane: What? I’m in the kitchen.

Lily: bring me coke?

Lily: please

Jane: You could literally get up and get it yourself

Lily: yes but I am very tired. And bed is warm. And I will kiss you as thanks

Jane: Fine. Jesus Christ.

Lily: I love you ;)

Jane: Whatever

Jane: Love you too

The car pulls into the driveway, and Shane parks. He turns to Ilya, his face disbelieving. “That went well,” he says. Slowly, as if it’ll disappear when he brings it up. “That went really well.”

Ilya tightens his hold on his hand. “But this is a good thing, yes?”

Shane blinks. “Yeah. I just…” The slight tremor is only just now leaving him. “It feels like everything might be okay right now. I’m not used to it.”

“You must get used to it, then,” Ilya says, and turns Shane’s face towards him.

Does Ilya know? What lies in wait for him? He doesn’t. He hopes it’s something good and lasting, for once.

Ilya stirs from the couch when he hears the door open and close. Somehow during Shane’s absence he had been lulled into near sleep by the sun and the birds. Now he meets Shane in the kitchen doorway. “Good run?” he asks.

Shane nods and reaches for his water, takes a few large gulps before setting it down. “Yeah. I’ll get ready and then we can go, okay?”

Ilya smiles. “Okay.” But his arms wrap around Shane’s body and pull it to his own. It’s instinct to hook his chin into the crook of Shane’s shoulder. The back of his shirt is damp, his skin sticky, but Ilya doesn’t mind – if anything, the smell of him, flushed and heaving and distinctly, uniquely Shane, is addicting. He puts his lips to the strands of hair that cling to the nape of his neck and inhales.

“Ilya,” Shane says, “I need to take a shower.”

Ilya huffs and noses under Shane’s jaw, the beads of wetness there, clean sweat. “Mm. Do you?”

Shane laughs, thin and breathy. “Yes. Don’t be gross.”

Ilya smiles against his neck. “I think you like it.” And he presses the flat of his tongue to Shane’s skin, licks a long hot stripe up to the back of his ear. Shane’s hips twitch against Ilya’s palms, his breath hitching.

“No,” but Shane’s voice is weak and wobbly and his back is arching, so Ilya doesn’t quite believe him.

“Uh huh.” Ilya’s fingers swirl over Shane’s hipbones, slip under his shirt to skim his navel. His skin is warm and twitching at the brush of contact. Ilya presses his thumb into the sweat clinging along Shane’s abdomen.

“My parents are –” Shane cuts himself off with a groan when Ilya’s other hand winds its way down Shane’s shorts, teases at the waistband of his briefs, under and over again. “My parents are expecting us.”

“Five minutes,” Ilya says. He presses open-mouthed kisses to the column of Shane’s neck. Shane makes a keening noise, and grabs at Ilya’s hand to try and shove it further down. Ilya reconsiders: “two minutes.”

He reaches up to the swell of Shane’s chest, kneads at the muscle there, then latches onto a nipple and twists.

Shane responds like he’s been shocked, a strangled moan forced out of him, trying to simultaneously push into the hands above and below. He’s so sensitive, always, and Ilya loves him.

“Two minutes,” Shane says.

“Ilya, would you help me with dinner?”

His knee-jerk response is anxiety flaring in his chest, and so he turns to Shane. He likes Yuna, a lot, more than he expected, but he’s unsure how to be alone with her. She has the same determination as her son, and clearly loves him more than anything else on the earth. Ilya can’t help it — he wants her to approve of him. She’s too important to Shane, and vice versa, for Ilya to not be seen as something that is good for her son.

Shane sees all of this and smiles, reassuring and soft around the edges. It eases the tightening knot of tension, so Ilya nods and gets up, following Yuna’s beckoning hand. It’s hard to not look around the walls, the childhood photos of Shane that compress the aluminum of his chest. Young and sweet and laughing, clearly the center of his parents’ world. How much of Shane’s life Ilya has not been here for, yet he still feels like he was made for loving him, tied from his first breath. He knows, more than anything else, that all of his life and decisions have been leading to this moment.

The kitchen is warm and smells of spices and tomato, vegetables strewn over the countertop. Yuna removes a large knife from the wood block and asks, “are you okay with cutting carrots?”

Ilya smiles a little. All these questions. As if Yuna is just as nervous to overstep and ask too much. It helps him relax a little, to keep his grip steady as he peels the carrots carefully and slices them lengthwise. She fusses over the steaming stovetop while he does this; for a while it is quiet between them but not as uncomfortable as Ilya feared.

“I can see that he loves you,” Yuna says.

Ilya’s hands stutter. He glances at her, but she’s looking at him without accusation, without judgement, or anything that he’s scared of. He hears the birds outside, the water boiling in the pot behind her.

Ilya swallows and resumes chopping. “Sometimes it is hard to believe. Or…” he looks for the right word. “Accept.”

She nods. “It often is. But I’ve never seen him love anything as much as he loves you.”

Ilya’s heart is doing something funny and painful. “Maybe hockey.” He smiles to keep himself from doing something stupid, like crying. “I think it is a tie.”

Her laugh is beautiful. Like his mother’s was. He blinks and looks at the pile of carrot skins, thin and curled.

“Maybe,” she says. “Are you all done?”

He looks down and realizes he’s been cutting the carrots into small cubes, over and over in an irregular pattern. “Oh. Yes.”

“Perfect.” She gently takes the board and smiles at him. “Thank you so much.”

A lump in his throat he just can’t choke down. He can’t even think of one time his father had said thank you, or his brother. Anything a family should say and give to each other. He watches her sweep the carrots into the pot and turn down the heat. He wants to ask her what she’s doing now, how she learned to cook, if she packed Shane’s lunches when he was a child. He wants to hack a path through the forest he always puts around himself. He wants to show her he is not just the shark smelling blood.

He clenches his fist until he feels his nails dig into his palm, crescent indents. “I love him too,” he says, “very much.” Love feels too small. A word insufficient, English and Russian, for what he feels for Shane. It’s the size of a planet. It tears him apart and stitches him back together.

Her eyes are soft, crow’s feet rooted in the corners. “I know. I’m very happy you’re here, Ilya.”

He feels his heart swell and for once tries not to fight it. “Me too.”

The soup is good. Yuna keeps mentioning how well the carrots are cut, like she’s trying to make Ilya laugh, like he’s part of the family. He eats three bowls. David asks Ilya if he wants vodka, and brings out the same bottle as before, but unopened and new. Ilya wonders if David bought it again, just because Ilya said he liked it.

Every time Ilya looks at Shane, which is a lot, his heart beats with wild abandon. Every time Shane looks at Ilya, which is a lot, his face opens up like the sun. Shane kisses Ilya on the cheek at the table. Their knees and elbows press together. Their hands find each other, interlocking.

Notes:

thank you for reading. i feel like i have run 6 miles. tumblr is @leftwound

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