Archive of Our Own

Sleep has never come easy to Ilya.

He has stared up at so many ceilings, watched the light fracture from liminal black to fuck it, may as well get up gold as it creeps in from between the curtains. 

He sleeps so well when Shane’s beside him. 

Shane, a marvel of metabolism and musculature, knocks off to sleep like someone hit the power switch the second he meets a good pillow. Ilya can curl his body around the steady metronome of Shane’s heartbeat, always a touch slower than Ilya’s. He can breathe in the powder-lisp scent of Shane’s sleepy neck, count the tide of his breath in and out of his nose, soak in the warmth that radiates from the tucked-in corners of his body, and just like that, Ilya will be lulled to a sleep so deep and restful it demonstrably changes the stats for his games.

Shane’s not asleep yet but he still has that good, somnolent smell to him, a plump softness like Ilya has fluffed the lumps out of him and flipped him to the cool side. He nuzzles in, greedy for it after two weeks apart.

“I should go clean up.” Shane glances down at the mess glossing his chest, the frown audible even if Ilya can’t see it where he’s kissing softly at the top of Shane’s spine.

“No.” He’s still inside Shane, and if he doesn’t move too much, he’ll stay that way until he’s hard again.

“I’m all sticky.” Shane likes to protest, but it’s perfunctory. A ritual, a request for permission. A toe dipped in the waters of how many decisions he’ll be making for the rest of the evening.

“Good.” Ilya shifts, pulls him in tighter. “You can stay like that until I fuck you again.”

When he was little, his eyes wide-awake and unwilling to accept the light-switch clicking off, Ilya’s mother used to read him a picture-book about baby animals going to sleep in their homes. She’d make different noises for each one – a deep growl for the bears in their cave, a lilting hop for the rabbits in their warren, an affected posh accent for the badgers in their set. Ilya burrows into the soft, dark earth of Shane’s body and closes his eyes, safe and shielded from anything clawing at the door.

~

“Did you wear it?”

Shane used to ask so many questions. You want me to do what? Where? Why? And sure, part of it had been his brickhouse charm, the density that had pulled Ilya under and kept him pinned there for years. There are no tricks with Shane, no double-meanings to unravel and analyze, a welcome respite from the vigilance so ingrained in Ilya’s consciousness that he doesn’t notice the endless whirring of it until he’s in the blessed clarity of Shane’s presence.

“Of course.”

Shane’s so pretty after a workout. All aglow, dripping sweat off the crisp tips of his hair, blood-blushed in places shared on jumbotrons and ones known to Ilya alone. Floor-to-celing glass floods him with afternoon light, dappled by the lake and leaves and precious privacy of this place.

Ilya tugs him in, until Shane’s socked toes nudge against Ilya’s feet and his sweat-soaked tank top presses into Ilya’s bare chest. Shane’s tense against him as Ilya presses his lips to Shane’s temple, salty and warm. “Show me.”

Shane shifts his weight, sighs out a breath. Slides down the elastic waist band of his loose over shorts, peels the top of his compression shorts down and there it is, framing the shelf-swell of Shane’s ass.

“Good boy.”

Ilya digs his finger into the elastic of Shane’s jockstrap and twists. It’s body-warm and skin-damp, tacky like the rest of Shane’s skin as Ilya slides his hands down to cup Shane’s bare ass. 

Shane’s a sweater, no doubt about it. Like a well-oiled machine, it pours out of him under exertion, drips from his nose when he runs and pools at the small of his back when Ilya fucks him from behind. Shane wilts in the southern climes, perpetually red and pouty at the hint of a Florida or Texas. Shane’s built for cozier environs. Fleece and blankets and crackling fires, things Ilya can wrap around him and tuck his nose into.

“I’m all gross.” But Shane doesn’t pull away when Ilya kisses down his neck, drags his lips against the beating pulse under Shane’s jaw. 

“You worked hard.” Ilya kneads at Shane’s ass, so much more than his hands could ever fit. It’s leg day and he knows where Shane is sore. He digs his thumb in search of Shane’s piriformis, gets rewarded with a good-hurt grunt that drips down between his legs. 

“Left knee is good?” Ilya catalogues every injury Shane accumulates, files them away under Pride and Envy in his library of sins. An ever-shifting constellation of places Shane Can and Cannot be touched, joints that need babying and bruises that he can overwrite with his mouth.

“Yeah, it’s better.” Shane nods, arms up before Ilya’s even touched the hem of his tank top. In the compressed space of their time together this is a luxury, when they have a few days together and he can take his time to peel Shane to bare skin. He loves the rush and rip of five-hour layovers and intersectional hotel rooms, too, the blood pounding in his ears when he pushes Shane’s pants down and fucks him with the waistband spread between his thighs, when his own spit pours from his chin and soaks the top of Shane’s boxers where they’re barely cradled under his balls.

He slides the sweat-heavy fabric over Shane’s head and lets it fall to the floor. The rush is good but the slow-pour is better, when Shane goes biddable in his hands and lets Ilya fold his elbow over his head, shudders when Ilya sucks down the flexed hollow of his triceps and noses into the wet hair curling beneath. Shane, distilled. Shane used to ask so many questions, but today he’d only nodded when Ilya had told him to wear his jock, but no deodorant. 

Shane’s gym has thick rubber flooring, shock-absorbent and stabilizing beneath his feet. Easy to clean, too. Shane had known Ilya inside him when he’d had this house built, when he’d met with designers and contractors and signed off on this modern, ergonomic surface. 

Tucked in the possessive soil of Ilya’s imagination is the moment Shane wondered if Ilya would ever make him lick his own come off these floors.

Shane groans again as Ilya gropes at his ass and takes a greedy breath against his armpit. Covetous, that’s what it makes him, clenched in his belly and thrumming down his cock. He wants blood on the ice for every teammate who has stood next to Shane when he’s sweat-soaked with victory and wrinkled their nose, go hit the showers, Holls, like they weren’t basking in a privilege Ilya will be forever denied. He will always be a little bit of a cunt to Pike because of this, no matter how hard he tries. 

He kisses Shane’s skin open-mouthed, huffs it unabashedly for a few stolen seconds. Shane will smell even better between his legs.

“Take your shorts off.” 

Shane’s fingers tuck into the waistband of his jockstrap before Ilya snatches tight around his wrist.

“Just your shorts.” He squeezes, a light shift of bone, until Shane nods and moves further down. He peels both layers off, tugs them down his thighs and steps out of them. Ilya licks his lips at the prim way Shane nudges them to the side, like he’d fold them with his toes if he could. 

There’s nothing prim about Shane when he straightens back up. Any bashful fidgeting dies in the fat press of his cock and balls tucked up into ribbed cotton, straining already. The rabbet edge of Shane’s abs vee down, daring Ilya to look. Skullcrusher thighs still churning away after his workout, muscle shredding and coalescing into greater strength beneath his skin.  

Shane is every sidelong locker room glance Ilya has ever stolen, every minute-finish tug of his upper school cock. Even his fucking socks, bulk-pack cotton hotter than any Agent Provocateur Ilya has ever unlaced with his teeth.

“Look at you.” He spins Shane around, because he can, because Shane had the foresight to put a huge mirror on the wall and who is he to deny Shane’s architectural vision. He looks down first, where Shane’s ass is framed by triangulated elastic and Ilya’s dick is tenting the front of his gray sweatpants. 

Shane likes these ones, likes to mouth Ilya’s cock through them until the fabric gets dark and clingy. He’d gotten Ilya off like that the last time they were together, sunk to his knees with his coat still on and Ilya backed up against the front door, stunned. Shane has a genius for these things.

He molds himself to Shane’s back, fits his body against the rise and fall of him until Ilya’s hands settle over Shane’s hard cock and the underswell of his pec muscle. Palm-perfect in Ilya’s grip, all of it. He grinds down over Shane’s cock and swears the cotton gets a little wetter.

Shane’s head knocks back against his shoulder, all that strength melting against him as Ilya noses into his hair and ferrets out the skin-smell underneath Shane’s crisp shampoo and conditioner. Shane’s hands reach back, pushing blindly at the ruched waist of Ilya’s sweats. 

“You need it?” Ilya watches their reflection, the way Shane’s toes curl in his socks when Ilya pinches at his nipple, the kickback of his hips when Ilya presses against him. Shane’s a mess and Ilya is so fucking hard, and they’re both technically still wearing pants. 

Shane bites his lip and nods, eyes closed. They snap open when Ilya snakes a hand under his jaw and squeezes.

“Hands and knees.”

Shane drops and his knee seems just fine as he arches his back up. Ilya slides down behind him, traces his finger down the T-bone flex of his back muscles, tracks it down to the white elastic framing his ass. Shane’s skin glistens around it, tan tracking down to the split-plum purple of his asshole, the bruised peachskin of his taint, the last-chance ray of violet sunset that ridges down to his tucked-in balls. Every inch of Shane is magnificently made.

Ilya can see the reflected flare on Shane’s face when he drags his tongue underneath the top of his jockstrap.

“I should shower, Ilya, I’m-” 

“Shh,” Ilya smacks at Shane’s hip, barely a swat but it still makes Shane’s eyes swim out of focus. “You will, later.”

He mouths down the fat curve of Shane’s ass, skates his teeth against skin. Closes his eyes and breathes in deep. Shane, heavy and concentrated here, juice-pressed and boiled down to syrup. An extrait de parfum, the musk and loam of him bottled up and displayed for Ilya’s pulse-points. He flicks his tongue down the stitched seam of Shane’s jockstrap where his balls are barely held. 

Shane’s breathing hard. Turned on, yes, but still tense where Ilya’s hand holds steady on his hip. The bulk muscle of Shane speaks for him, the way he flexes and fly-twitches like a thoroughbred, heaves his flanks and snorts until Ilya curries him down to compliance.

Shane is delicious when he’s boneless, surrendered with that wet-eyed trust that eight-balls Ilya’s nervous system into humming alignment. Addictive, the way Shane will eat from his flat palm. This tension has its own pull, though. A little push that makes the give that much better. 

He could tease Shane, make him squirm in his sweaty jockstrap until he says “Ilya, stop it,” and his cheeks burn like two burst cherries. Ilya noses against the plush mound of his taint, warm and soft and flecked with dark, smooth hair. 

This is one of the only places Ilya can claim as his own. In the shared geography of their bodies, stripped and showered in front of other men, thrust before cameras sweaty and shirtless, these square inches of Shane are precious. Ilya sucks hard, gets it between his teeth and doesn’t stop until there’s spit-soaked elastic chafing against his chin. 

Shane melts against him, tension sliding to liquid under Ilya’s hands as he arches back against Ilya’s mouth. Shane smells so fucking good. Animal-rich, so heavy it makes Ilya’s lip snarl up and his cock strain, runs his mouth so wet it drips down past Shane’s balls and pools on the floor. He could tease but it’s better to shock sometimes. He nips one last love-bite onto Shane’s swollen taint before he dog-licks up to the furl of his asshole. 

“Ilya,” but Shane doesn’t say stop it, just shreds down to his elbows and spreads his legs. 

Ilya takes a deep breath and lets himself drown. Earthy, salt-stripped, never enough as Ilya sinks his tongue deep. Shane is always so hot here and Ilya is always so greedy for it, pushes in until he gets the copper tang of Shane’s insides, coin-slick and smooth around him. 

Millions of people have seen Shane’s blood on the ice, but Ilya is the only one who knows that Shane can taste like a split lip on both ends if Ilya licks in just right.

Ilya can do this until Shane comes, passes out, or starts crying, sometimes in the same twenty-four hours. He will do this until his face goes numb and the webbing under his tongue blisters and chewing food is a penance he gladly bears. Sunk underground, everything blacked out in the repetition of flexing muscle and Shane moaning senselessly back on him, both of them slunk a few rungs down the ladder of evolution into scent and instinct. The pop of his lips when he sucks on Shane’s rim, the grunt Shane makes when Ilya darts his tongue in deep –  wet sounds that crawl down the spine and burrow in until Ilya just needs to breathe and eat and fuck and fall asleep, and not in that order. 

Shane’s no better. Any lingering hesitation has spilled out onto his easy-mop floors, joining the riled moans he makes as he grinds back against Ilya’s mouth. High puppy-whines, irresistible things that harry Ilya’s hips, nip at his heels until he pulls up, slick on the muzzle and panting. 

He shoves his sweats down and fishes out the bottle of lube he’d tucked into his pocket, drops it twice before he manages a perfunctory drizzle onto his cock. Just enough for Shane to be able to take it again later, not so much that he won’t be able to feel it when he does.

Ilya lines himself up, thumb-slicks his way in just enough to catch before he curls his fingers into the snug waistband of Shane’s jockstrap. Shane pools into a new shape before him, planes and angles curving into hungry arrangement, receptive with his back arching up and his head hanging down between his fist-braced forearms. Ilya stares past the waiting sweep of Shane’s back into shining glass.

It’s a common thing to mirror a gym. Ilya has been in so many of them, and it’s noteworthy when he doesn’t see his sweaty body reflected back at him. Shane’s is more elegant and modern than the fluorescent sweat-boxes of his youth, but it is familiar all the same. 

Shane knew the taste of Ilya in his mouth when he signed off on this gleaming wall, a tasteful complement to the lakeside tranquility Shane has carved out here. Did he request this feature, or just nod in trusting acquiescence to the well-vetted interior designer who unfurled blueprints and spent Shane’s money? 

While Ilya watched this place on his television, Shane stood here and lifted weights in silence, poured himself into the arching contortions of his yoga practice, watched his form and counted reps. Did he ever look at his own face and wonder if he’d see Ilya here beside him? Inside him? Ilya tries not to mourn lost time but surely he’s allowed to make up for it.

He sinks into Shane, eyes flicking back and forth between the twin delights of watching his cock disappear into Shane’s body and catching the need-more grimace Shane makes as he takes it, eyes rolled and lip curled and his nose scrunched up, another good-hurt grunt Ilya kneads out of him. He threads one hand into Shane’s hair and pulls, mean about it the way Shane likes when he’s being good.

“Watch.”

Shane meets his eyes first. A drowning surface, a Narcissus pool offering Ilya his most beloved self. He looks good in the mirror, he’s not fucking blind, but he likes himself best reflected back in Shane’s needy, half-mast gaze. He’s never wanted to punch that reflection in the face until his knuckles bleed. Not when he can slip into Shane and stay underwater until he’s washed clean. 

He starts slow, rolls his hips to let Shane feel it, keeps their eyes locked together. Shane’s hair is thick in his hand. This is one of Shane’s favorite ways to be led, gently into a lazy kiss or tear-sprung as he’s dragged off the bed. Shane moans in the back of his throat, mined deep from his chest, resonant down to the giving heat around Ilya’s cock.

It’s Shane’s smallest movements that make Ilya’s blood run to fever. The brace of his arms, always set to meet whatever Ilya gives him. The moan-gulp swallow when his mouth gets wet, where he barely remembers to close it before a precious line of spit spills out over his lower lip. Curling toes in clean white socks, the glacial spread of his thighs melting open, knees inching out as Ilya bears down on him.  The flexibility he has honed for sport and the illicit arch he curls into now, swaybacked where Ilya has worn a new joint into Shane’s spine. 

He gives Shane a final tug of the hair, stay, and Shane doesn’t need to be told twice, keeps his eyes rapt on his own face as Ilya digs his hands into the meat of Shane’s hips and holds him.

To say they have rules is too formal. Habits, maybe. A tacit understanding. A treasure chest of shiny self-slivers they can tuck away and open when they’re apart, admire when they’re together. Shane only comes when, where, and how Ilya says. Ilya comes whenever the fuck he wants, but he only thinks of Shane when he does it. 

Shane is going to come. He’s bristling with the near-there tells Ilya guards so jealously, the fast-twitch tics in his back and the slope of his neck, the crescendo of his breath begging for it. He’ll hold off if Ilya tells him, bite his cheek and nail-slice his palms and wince, rally that endless well of discipline in Ilya’s service. But not today. 

For all Ilya’s boasting, it’s not that hard a trick. Shane lines himself up, tongue and groove, custom built. The truth of it is Ilya just needs to fuck him hard and fast, drop the reins and let himself run. Is yet to find the limit on how hard he can gallop. 

He curls his hands into Shane’s jockstrap and twists, bridling it into Shane’s skin. Rides him roughshod until Shane clutches up tight around him, keeps going until Shane bucks against him. He can’t always see Shane’s face when he does this, knows the feel of him more than the sight of him. 

Shane is trying so hard to be good. He’s staring at his own blotchy face like it hurts, hands white-knuckled into fists against the dull black floor, elbows digging into skin-drag rubber. The sweat in his eyes has to sting. 

Ilya can’t see Shane’s cock but that must be killing him, too, fighting against his jockstrap and throbbing every time it bounces up against his stomach. Ilya fucks him faster to hear it slap Shane’s skin again. Needs to see it, see how he’s straining against it.

He wraps one arm around Shane’s broad chest and heaves him up, a shameless show of strength that earns him a grunt all its own. 

“Come for me, Shane.”

Ilya snugs his hand over Shane’s dick, gives him a surface to work against. Shane takes it. He ruts against Ilya’s hand, leans his weight on Ilya and brings his right hand up and over to grab at Ilya’s head. Everything smells like Shane, sylvan and secret, fit to burst on the vine of his arousal. 

Warmth blooms under Ilya’s hand, soaks into his palm as Shane arches sweat-slipped against him. Ilya’s quads strain as he holds them up, grapples to keep Shane’s heavy body upright so he can watch Shane fall apart for him. Shane’s abs ripple as he chokes up on Ilya’s dick, pulses under Ilya’s hand, seeps from his desecrated jockstrap out between the spread of Ilya’s fingers. 

Ilya floats, wax-dipped at the sight of them together. Shane blocks most of him out, all that muscle abandoned to Ilya’s steady grip. He has memorized all the ways Shane can harness this strength, bursts of speed and cunning passes, elegant checks and nasty hits so fast Ilya can scarcely blink. Shane puts it all on Ilya and lets it melt. 

“So good.” Ilya sucks it into Shane’s ear lobe, licks up the shell of it. “So fucking good.”

Shane gets tender after he comes. It’s one of the little injuries Ilya knows well, an inside-bruise he can nurse or nettle as he pleases. Pulls out quick when they’re all loved-up and thick with it. Stills himself to a heartbeat and softens inside Shane when they’re tangled in sheets and basking in the late morning light. Leans into it when his love for Shane goes snarling, fucks him into snot and sobs and keeps going. 

Ilya’s hunger has different teeth today. 

He bites his cheek and pulls out. Shane plummets back to the floor, graceful as a sack of potatoes and ten times as heavy. Ilya rolls him onto his back and clambers between his legs. Takes himself in hand and it’s two quick strokes before he’s adding his own mess to Shane’s jockstrap. 

He’s still jumpy under his skin as he slides down. Shane is, too, his thigh twitching as Ilya noses into the crease of it. He drags the tip of his tongue over Shane’s cock, traces the thick line of it root to stem, steams his breath over it and basks in the salt-wash ripple of come and sweat and Shane in his mouth.  Catches the briny aftermath and teases the soaked fabric into the slit of Shane’s cock until he hisses. 

“Jesus, fuck, Ilya.”

Ilya seals his lips over come-wet cotton and sucks. He gets all his best tricks from Shane.

~

Another book from his mother: The Wonders of Ancient Rome! How he’d loved this one. Lavish illustrations of Senators and Poets and Carthago Delenda Est! marched across the pages, martial and masculine, arresting in a way Ilya wouldn’t fully comprehend until he was much older. 

His mother liked the section about the poets, rose-wreathed pages with lovers hand-in-hand, walking through meadows or smiling their secrets under shaded fig trees. 

Ilya would close his eyes as she read the poems, so he could listen to the soft timbre of her secret voice without bearing witness to the look in her eyes. Wouldn’t be able to name this cloud that darkens her face until he’s much older and he knows what it is to be loved, knows what it is to stare at it from behind the glass and watch his breath fog the aching promise of it. 

Even as a colt-limbed eight year old, he’d recognized the dip in his stomach when he opened to his favorite chapter: The Gladiators. Huge men, their columnar thighs peeking out from slitted skirts, sandals laced up over dusty feet and straining calves, bare chested or strapped into armor. One of them had a breastplate with such large nipples that Ilya used to trace over them with his finger when he was alone. 

Yes, he’d loved the gladiators. Even bitter Alyosha could be nudged into an arena match for play, smacking Ilya with a wooden-spoon sword and crashing into his body in the closest thing Ilya would know to male affection for many years. 

Ilya sketched tridents and nets and shields in the margins of his schoolbooks, daydreamed about a crested helmet to hide his mop of girlish curls. He’d be a champion, he knew it, wreaking bloody havoc and stepping out of the blazing sunlight to a waiting pool of beautiful women. They would cull the sweat from his body and fight each other for little vials of it. 

Of all the things he has forgotten, he still remembers this word, the strigil, the strange, curved instrument used to scrape the grime from gladiators after their games. How this mix of oil and sweat and dirt and blood was considered medicinal, magical in its uses, rubbed into the skin of wealthy women for beauty and swallowed by fading senators looking to reignite their “vigor.” 

This fascinated and appalled him, how gross, how dirty, how seeped in the decadent West it seemed. His mother’s whispered love poems fade from his memory once she’s stricken from the family history books, but he still holds this dull blade full of sweat and filth deep in his chest.

Only when he’d hit puberty had he understood. In the steam-heat miasma of locker rooms and packed buses it would hit him, the ball-sweat reek of a certain kind of boy that hooked into Ilya’s mouth and netted his stomach into freefall. Vigor. If someone stinks just right it gets his dick hard.

~

Shane is waiting for him with a smoothie. 

Ilya runs whenever he can in Boston. There’s a good trail near his house where he can jog loops and lose himself in his headphones. He hates to take the time away when Shane’s over, stolen for a three-day break, but Shane had shooed him out and sworn he needed to review some paperwork. 

An hour apart is worth it to come home and find Shane lording over his kitchen. He commands an army of plastic tubs and amber bottles, a battalion of organic berries and frozen spinach. This squadron had arrived piecemeal in his home and slowly conquered half his cabinet space. 

Shane’s smoothies hammer home the difference between good and good for him. Cigarettes are the former, Shane is both, and the protein-packed sludge Shane offers him is squarely the latter. The bastard offspring of pond scum and cement run-off, Shane has somehow alchemized fifty grams of protein into something if not appetizing, at least efficient. 

“I added maple syrup.” Shane smiles and shakes his tumbler for emphasis, clacking the agitator ball back and forth. Ilya had been so charmed the first time he’d pulled one out of his dishwasher. These shining bits of Shane that appear in his home, neatly-placed and precious when Ilya touches them in his absence. 

Ilya tugs his sweat-soaked t-shirt over his head, mops his face with it before plopping it over the back of a chair.

“You always give me treat when I suck your dick before I run.” Ilya winks and unlaces his running shoes. 

“I do not, that’s not,” Shane frowns, his eyes darting back and forth as he calculates. “Oh, shit.”

Ilya shrugs and leans into a lunge. If Ilya is good about stretching, Shane is militant. It’s the same with the protein. If Ilya has the temerity to rest after exercising without gulping down some lean protein and dry-humping a foam roller, Shane begins to vibrate at a pitch Ilya can sense under his fingernails. It’s an easy thing to give in to Shane, to shift himself around Shane’s habits. Not rules, exactly. 

Ilya changes legs and rolls his shoulder down, stretching across his chest as he reaches one hand up. He does recover faster when he stretches, and he does hold weight better when he eats his three hundred goddamned grams of protein. He sleeps better and plays better and takes deep breaths where everything lies still inside him. Every inch that Shane furrows into his life makes Ilya better. 

Shane hands him his smoothie and Ilya shakes it, clanking loudly while Shane leans in for a kiss. He teases Shane about it, rolls his eyes and rattles his smoothies, but there’s a spoon-fed part of Ilya that softens every time Shane mother-hens him. A tacit understanding that Shane wants what’s best for him. 

“It has a lot of B vitamins,” Shane says, justifying this spoonful of sweetness Ilya has tricked out of him. 

Strange, the things that can claw into Ilya’s sense memory and nest there. The gritty taste of whey protein has snuck up on him and arced a current of longing across his heart, zapped him into re-re-reading Shane’s last text messages and scrolling through the safe-cropped pictures on his phone. Bitter creatine churns up a yearning for places only present on the horizon, a hazy king-sized bed and a single blender holding court over countertops they have picked together.

“Thank you.” Ilya slides down into a straddle-stretch and takes a noisy glug of his smoothie. He needs no incentive to suck Shane off as often as possible, but he’s grateful for the maple syrup today.

Shane hums his “you’re welcome” and marches back to the kitchen while Ilya rocks back and forth, teasing out a needed burn in his adductors. Takes a deep breath and lets it out through pursed lips, watching the easy sway of Shane’s bare back as he makes his way to the sink. He’s wearing Ilya’s pants, dark heather sweats with asymmetrical pockets, outrageously expensive and tighter than anything Shane would buy for himself.

“Hate to see her go, but I love to watch her leave.” One of Marleau’s eyebrow-waggling idioms from years ago, coarse things he drops along the locker room floor like horse chestnuts. Ilya had mouthed the syllables to himself and looked it up in the privacy of his hotel room. Had understood it, crystal-clear, the next time Shane had hauled his pants back over his ass and hovered by the hotel room door, face turned over his shoulder for a mumbled “See you, Rozanov.” Ilya had leaned back against a lopsided tower of fuck-crumpled pillows and smiled. 

I don’t want you to leave, but at least I get to see your ass one more time. 

Ilya bends one leg and leans into a side stretch. He’ll miss Marleau and his big, stupid mouth, his gutter humor and dogged good mood. Ilya turns his head and sniffs at his armpit, smiling. Does Shane ever envy Ilya’s teammates? Ilya won’t miss the way Marleau stinks after a game, and the feeling will surely be mutual. Marleau would grimace in disgust at the rind on Ilya after his run.

The tap runs while Shane carefully cleans the blender. Appalled by Ilya’s swish-and-dump technique, he’d bought a special brush to clean around all the small parts. It glints in his hand as he scrubs, catches in the light. This easy domesticity wears well on Shane, smoothes his face out and drops his shoulders. He moves so deftly around Ilya’s space now, reaching for a dish towel without looking, slotting his blender brush back into its suction-cup home by the soap.

He has watched Shane do things in bed that would unman half the porn industry. Ilya has known desire for Shane for so many years, tasted so many flavors of it. This latest one sinks into his belly, slow as pitch, melts him to the floor as he watches Shane exercise his thoughtless possession over Ilya’s home. Makes it his own. No less carnal for all its mundane trappings, this rich warmth that seeps into Ilya as he unfurls from his stretch and leans back against the wall.

“Shane.”

Shane will walk out the door in seventy-two hours, and Ilya will stare at his ass as he walks down the driveway. 

“Come here.”

Shane passes a final swipe over the counter with his paper towel and looks up. “Do you need water?”

“Come here, Shane.”

If Shane is at ease cleaning up, he blinks into still attention when Ilya tightens the buckle of his voice another notch. Everything in Shane seems to slow, a re-centering of his gravity around Ilya. Shane carefully throws his paper towel in the garbage and takes a step toward Ilya.  

“Uh-uh,” Ilya hums, waiting for Shane to make eye contact before Ilya shakes his head. He points down at the floor.

Shane stops and frowns, his eyebrows drawing in, eyes flitting between the floor and Ilya. He’s so cute when he’s befuddled.

Ilya sucks his teeth, a rude noise his father would have knuckle-rapped out of him. Shane just blinks as Ilya points down again with his index finger, then adds his middle one to mime a slow crawl. 

Shane swallows, comprehension blank-slating his face. It’s the same face Shane had made a million years ago when Ilya had forced a water bottle on him, the face he has jerked off to a million times since. Obedient shock, like his expression can’t catch up with his factory settings fast enough. Ilya’s fingernail slotting into the reset button, click.

Shane sinks to the floor, takes to hands and knees and looks at Ilya. Ilya’s lips part, his breath rushing over his teeth. He flips his wrist and curls his index finger, come here. Shane drops his head down and moves. 

Ilya spreads himself out, occupies all the space he can to make room for the expansion in his chest. Shane crawls across the floor, bare hands pressing into sun-soaked hardwood, knees dragging Ilya’s sweats across the chevron pattern laid into the planks. 

Ilya extends one arm up and folds his hand behind his head. He can smell himself, full and familiar. He likes the honest stink of hard work, his body pouring out proof that he can push himself past his limits and make it home anyway. He hitches his leg up, adjusting his running shorts where they’ve bunched up his thighs. 

Shane’s back shifts as he stalks toward Ilya, muscles sliding in synchrony. Halved to hands and knees he’s still huge, a mountain range in motion. Ilya licks his lips, paces his breathing down. Steadies himself as he watches the sturdy ripple of Shane’s delts, his thick forearms, the figure-eight swerve of his hips as he crawls to Ilya’s feet. Ilya’s cock stirs.

Shane comes to rest before him, waiting in perfect stillness. He’d wait and wait if Ilya wanted him to, has kneeled on rougher surfaces until Ilya traces tear tracks with his tongue. That same tar-pit heat stretches out in his belly, pushes out against the limits of Ilya’s skin until he’s twice his size. Always greedy, Ilya takes a long breath, basks in the light of Shane’s obedience. It settles in his hands like it was custom-made, no less wondrous for the way it slots into the lines of his palms. 

Ilya presses his lips together, wills himself to softness and sunlight. He places his index finger under Shane’s chin and urges his face up, holds his gaze. Brow flattened out, lips gently parted, his back arched up – Shane will do anything when he’s like this. Ilya slouches back against the wall and smiles as Shane inches closer, his face still balanced on Ilya’s finger.

Shane will leave in three days, but it’s not three hours. It will take years to file the sharp edges off his appetite for Shane, to let himself savor it instead of the frantic glut he’s been used to. That he can be home with Shane, soft-landed and private, stripped of his pads and armor. He urges Shane closer, slots him down into the space Ilya has made between his spread legs.

Whatever vestigial aversion Shane has to his own sweaty body has never extended to Ilya. He nuzzles against Ilya’s crotch, nose-first, lips dragging over sweat-wicking fabric that has largely lost the battle. Shane’s breath against him ratchets up his spine, tickles into his scalp, jump-shudders back down to his toes. He slides his hand into Shane’s hair, curls his fingers against the good-boy spot at his nape.

Shane’s hair is soft and thick, perfect for pets and pulls alike. Ilya rolls his fingertips over the base of Shane’s skull, the knob of his spine shrouded in thick muscle. Shane feels so good in his hands. 

He’s had so many years of Shane on screens and glossy pages, flattened out to power-status-money-novelty, none of the things that he wants from Shane. Haunting to see this hollow thing when he knows the fullness of the inside spaces, the snatched bits of sound and scent and texture that weave into Ilya’s memory.

Shane’s nose shovels into his balls, tickling. Ilya tuts at him, clicks his tongue and slides his thumb into the damp space between them, guides Shane up. Shane blinks, dazed, his head listing back down to Ilya’s crotch. 

Ilya clicks his tongue again and cups Shane’s face in both hands.

“Open.” 

He’s fed so many parts of himself into this mouth. Another secret garden Ilya tends jealously, that even Shane’s biggest postgame smile won’t bely the bruises Ilya paints on the back of his throat. Mottled purple things, pinpoints of light and shade that Ilya has stared at in galled wonder when he’s pried Shane’s mouth open in bright-light bathrooms. Things that blossom in darkness, that bear the fruit of Ilya’s eclipsing adoration and make Shane wince when he swallows. 

Ilya slides his thumb along the smooth inside of Shane’s cheek. Warm and familiar, just like the grip he slides under Shane’s chin. He urges Shane open wider, an easy ask. Shane must be a dream at the dentist. Unhinges his jaw, a polite python with impeccable hygiene, Wow, Mr. Hollander you may be flossing too often, we didn’t even know that was possible! Sickens Ilya, thrills him to imagine some hunched old man shining a light on the night-blooms speckling Shane’s throat and realizing Shane isn’t a good boy. He’s the best.

Ilya sweeps his thumb down to the furrow of bone below Shane’s gums, drags it along the arch of his jaw. Skates his knuckles over the straight line of his teeth, the fortune that has been invested into orthodontia and undetectable repair. Shane has two bumps that protrude under his canines, massive even to the teeth. Ilya pets along the bony prominence, fierce possession flinting under his skin. 

He knows Shane so well here, has mapped the osseous topography of his mouth so many times. Ilya flips his wrist and presses two fingers to the intaglio of Shane’s hard palate, reads the ridged surface of it before he slides back to the crumbling remains of Shane’s gag reflex. 

Shane barely shudders when Ilya dances over the welcoming sentries of his tonsils, flicks at the dangling glimmer of his uvula. They’re old friends, now, a soft hug that gives way so readily to Ilya’s cock and his hands and the growing array of sex toys Ilya is determined to multiply into an army of his own. 

The back of Shane’s tongue has grippy dots on it, unique to this buried part of his body. Ilya pushes down on them, his own lips parting in hungry sympathy as Shane’s throat contracts and his eyes glass up. Shane’s breath skates over his hand, humid, shaky. Shane can take so much in these recesses that Ilya has clawed out for himself, unknown to sun and spotlight, smooth and soft and impossibly strong for all their thin tissue. 

Ilya has grown accustomed to nice things. His clothes and his cars, the slide of soft sheets and the stretch of buttery Italian leather around his feet. A material understanding of luxury, of things owned and envied. A childish one, held hollow in his hands when he swirls a Baccarat wineglass in an empty living room and crumples a Dries Van Noten jacket over his unoccupied Herman Miller sofa. Meaningless names without a Shane Hollander to breathe life into them.

Luxury is a space inside Shane, open-ended, wet and waiting where Ilya can prod his fingers and park himself as long as he likes. It whiskey-burns in Ilya’s stomach, smolders into his gut and spreads under his skin. Razes him down to coals, warm and banked in the overspilled morning light.

“Stick it out.” Ilya pets down the long sweep of Shane’s tongue, traces it to the darted tip and leaves it in empty air. Shane will stay there. Ilya fishes into his running shorts and pulls himself out balls-first, lets his cock hang half-hard over the under-tucked waistband. He bites his lip, douses himself to softness as a bead of saliva pearls on the tip of Shane’s tongue. He has time.

If fucking Shane is precious, the not-fucking is such a rarefied thing Ilya grabs at it like smoke, impossible to jewel-clasp and tuck against his heart when Shane is away. But Shane is here now, here to fold so readily as Ilya guides him to the floor, gets him belly-down and stretched out, his head pillowed on Ilya’s thigh. He feeds his soft dick into Shane’s mouth, snuggles Shane’s nose against his pubic hair, flicks his finger in censure against the curve of Shane’s jaw as he starts to suck.

“Just hold it.”

The softest noise from Shane, a muted vibrato that tugs at Ilya’s hair and puddles him back against the wall. Shane goes still, mouth slack and his eyes closed. Soon his spit will pool around Ilya’s balls and Shane won’t even notice. A stripe of sunlight falls across Shane’s back, dips to gold in the dimples above his borrowed waistband. Ilya’s fingers find the pad of Shane’s earlobe and rub it, lucky-charmed between thumb and forefinger. Shane’s so soft here.

With his eyes closed, it’s just Shane’s weight and warmth around him. A momentary warren, a present-tense cave that smells like Ilya’s work-wrung body and Shane’s nutritious berry sludge. Shane doesn’t even move when Ilya picks it up and shakes it, grinning at the obnoxious sound of the shaker. Shane is underground, and he can stay there until the sun sets and rises again. 

Ilya settles back, exhales until his chest empties and his heart fills, and drinks his smoothie.

~

Ilya has been in love with Shane for so many years. He wonders sometimes if he loved Shane before they met, if some seedling part of himself traced his grubby fingers over ancient heroes and knew he’d take the victor for himself. 

Had it taken root then? Had the tendrils in Ilya’s heart been laying in wait, ready to burst into bloom the first time he saw Shane take to the ice like a forged blade? A champion. Flowers Ilya never named unfurled in the floodlight of that martial prowess, and Ilya knew he would scrape the dirt off Shane Hollander with his teeth.

~

He cannot fit Shane’s balls in his mouth.

He has tried so many times. He has set himself to this task with Herculean determination and that good old Boston Raiders grit. And he has failed. 

He has tried it with Shane standing up, Shane on his back, Shane crouching crawling kneeling hovering above him. And technically, legally, he has gotten both of them in, but it’s such a tenuous thing he’s afraid a single swallow will maim Shane. In the bad way, not the fun one. 

They’re just so fucking big. 

“Fuck, Ilya.”

Ilya splits the difference and licks down the seam of Shane’s balls. He can’t get both in at once but he can give each one a turn, sucked into his mouth and released with a plop that makes Shane’s stomach stiffen.

Shane had stopped begging before Ilya even got to his balls. He’d been lodged in Ilya’s throat when “please” had left him, soaked with Ilya’s spit to the crack of his ass when “need to” disappeared, leaking onto the flick-tease of Ilya’s tongue in his slit when he’d swallowed his last “let me.” 

Shane’s fingers are white at the knuckle, clenched around the wrought iron of their hotel room headboard. Hands up is a good look on Shane, wings out his lats and spreads his chest wide for Ilya’s hands to roam greedy over. He drags his tongue up the underside of Shane’s dick and rolls a nipple between his fingers.

He has spent all week watching Shane jerk off to almost-there, so-close, another-second, hold-it-for-me, just to pull him back with a word. Cordoned off in his phone, Shane had still snapped to like Ilya’s hand was pinch-pointing his wrist, dropped himself and honey-dripped his desperation into whatever post-game hotel bed he’s calling home for the evening.

He’s played like it, too. Vicious. Relentless. So dialed-in Ilya can hear the white-noise hum of his concentration when he watches the replays. Shane en route to the sin bin, mouth frog-lipped out as he chews his precise fury into his mouth guard. A nasty move, the commentators say in that flat GenAm accent Ilya cannot master. Not used to seeing a mean streak in Hollander. 

A mean streak. Like Ilya has swirled himself into Shane’s vanilla ice cream and crystallized there.

He squeezes Shane’s nipple, mean-streaks his fingernail into it until Shane’s hips buck off the bed. His cock smears against his stomach, adds to the rainbow arching under his belly button. At least Shane doesn’t have to put his suit back on.

A gala, an auction, some function neither of them care about but can both plausibly attend, manageable flights away from upcoming games. Yuna, eagle-eyed, feels it’s time for them to start widening their circles. She is committed to this endeavor in a way that Ilya can only look at in his peripheral vision for fear of losing it. He just nods along when she mentions casting soft nets and playing to national feeling. Yuna plots these excursions, picks them out of Shane’s shared inbox and cross-references them with their season and some obscure calculus that Ilya takes on faith. They are bumping elbows. They are moving forward.

They are seeding the narrative.

The bed groans as Ilya knees himself up, knocks in between Shane’s easy-spread legs. It’s a big ask for Ilya’s hand to wrap around them both, knuckle-split from a glancing blow off Philly. Worth it for the noise Shane makes when he strokes them together.

“Ilya.” His hands roll around the headboard, straining. He won’t let go.

“No.” Ilya shakes his head, grins to the teeth as he moves faster. Shane’s wet with Ilya’s spit, an easy slip when Ilya’s foreskin glances over the ridge of Shane’s cockhead. 

Shane’s lip is already chewed to shit, puffed out red where Shane’s bleached-white canine digs into it. Shane’s been beating it up all week. Ilya plans to beat it up more before the night is done, but that’s for later. Shane is on the verge of tears.

“Maybe I will make you wait until next time we are together.” Ilya circles his thumb over Shane’s slit, considering.

They are flying in opposite directions at 6:05 and 7:10 AM, splitting the continent in half for the next twenty days. A bead of precome weeps from Shane’s cock and his lip starts to tremble. Pavlovian at this point, the way that fat-swell shudder zings down Ilya’s spine and sharpens him.

He could fuck Shane, but that would be cruel. He’s not sure Shane could control himself at this point, a delicious notion he files away. How long would he need to throttle Shane from release before he couldn’t hold it, before the first press of Ilya’s cock burst him like a grape between Ilya’s teeth and left him soaked in shame? 

Ilya magpies this pretty thing away to line the nest of another night, this shining horizon he has finally granted object permanence. A future perfect tense. Such a different hunger than the gluttony of early days, each time the last until proven otherwise. An appetite for destruction, always, but one he can tamp to stillness until the time is right. 

Shane’s chest judders uneven as Ilya works his hand. Squeezes Shane’s thick, miserable cock until his eyes squeeze shut and his breath hitches, jaw strained up so hard Ilya can see the pulse pound in his neck. So close. Glints Ilya to a knife-edge, this disruption of Shane’s mechanics, the record-lows of his heart rate skyrocketing, his breaths per minute climbing the walls as he snuffs through flared nostrils. 

“Would you do that? Wait for me?” Ilya rocks himself forward, presses into the overfull swell of Shane’s balls. 

Shane’s face crumples. The tendons in his wrists flex and his toes spread apart, all of him strung to a plucked note. And still, he nods, answers back Ilya’s whispered “Yes?” with his own. 

Ilya surges up, clasps his hands over Shane’s and molds himself against Shane’s stomach to rut them together. 

“Does it hurt?” Ilya crushes Shane’s hands, grinds him down against the metal and presses his weight onto Shane.

“Yes.” Shane mumbles it, sniffles, his calloused hands coiling under Ilya’s. “So much.”

Wildfire, the rush over Ilya’s skin when a tear breaks the dam of Shane’s eyes. The first one, brave and solitary, then the flood after. The high-whine in Shane’s throat like a bump of coke, the wet snort of Shane’s nose a rubber-band snap to the teeth. Shaky alert, molecularly aware of his body vibrating out of its borders and fizzing into Shane’s. Ilya’s mouth falls open. 

“Ilya,” Shane pleads, swan-dives the last syllable when Ilya rolls his hips.

“Not yet.”

He could do this until Shane cries and cries, wet to the neck and strung out. Ilya bends down, snuffles into the hollow of Shane’s throat, grazes the empty threat of his teeth up until he tastes salt. Rolls his tongue, seeks out the edges of his appetite. Shane shakes, his breath gathering on the brink of full sobs. Ilya kisses him.

“Poor Shane.”

Shane will take it, swallow his need and choke on it for their weeks apart, but it is borne, not sought. He can pin that to the board of a darker night, when the stars of Shane’s sky align to an uglier constellation. Another point on their horizon will have Shane knee-walking to Ilya for absolution, penitent for his disobedience. When it will be Ilya’s job to force-feed Shane the bad things they need to feel good inside.

“Do you want to come, Shane?”

Shane stares like a kicked dog. It’s not unfair, this baleful suspicion. Ilya has dangled this in front of Shane a few times, a carrot switched for a stick when Shane gets close, when he follows Ilya’s “spit on it, faster, good boy” into dizzy-eyed sight of the finish line just to have it snatched away. 

“No?” Ilya frowns, tilts his head.

“Please.” Shane is leaking. “Please. I’ll do anything.”

Anything, Ilya mouths back in wide-eyed delight. Shane nods, please over and over from his mouth. Wriggles under him, winces when Ilya slides his cock along Shane’s. He leans in, lips brushed to Shane’s ear. 

“You want my mouth?”

“Fuck.” Shane bucks up, cattle-prodded. Ilya licks his lips, tracks Shane’s wet-wrung eyes across them. Pins him down harder.

“I think it will be a lot.” Ilya clicks his tongue, frowns with a pfft on his left side.

“Might give me tummy ache if I swallow it all.” Another Marleau-ism, sore after a losing game to Montreal, Gonna get a tummy ache if you swallow any more Metros dick. Ilya’s soul had alighted from his body until he’d turned to find Marleau back-slapping Connors in grizzled reproach. 

“No, no, please.” Shane’s head strains up, chasing Ilya’s pouted lips. “I’ll do it, I’ll be good.”

The best. Ilya gives Shane’s hands a final squeeze before he leans up. 

“Promise?”

“I’ll be good.” With tears streaking down his face, Shane opens his mouth and sticks his tongue out.

“Fuck.” Ilya’s cock jerks, makes a small offering of his own on the dewy altar of Shane’s stomach. He kisses the corner of Shane’s open mouth. “Stay like that. Come when I touch you here.” He squeezes Shane’s nipple until Shane hums his understanding.

He inches down, breathes hot over the tip of Shane’s cock, just to nose back into Shane’s balls. A mean feint, one last bit of caramel in Shane’s vanilla. Makes him taste better. He gropes up Shane’s chest and splays over the wide cage of his ribs, dips his fingers over the intercostals. Shane is a wave, his stomach tensing and his hips roiling, fever-flushed as he shakes. 

Ilya has been sucking Shane off, and on, and then off again for an hour. It hurts when he swallows Shane to the base, hurts when Shane’s entire torso bucks off the bed and drives his cock deeper. Ilya gets bruised, too. He gives it back, digs his fingertips in under the swell of Shane’s pec, just below his nipple. 

He lets Shane’s cock smack wet against his stomach when he pulls off. Shane’s mouth is still open. His hands are right where Ilya left them, right where they’ll stay until Ilya pries them off with a word. Shane is shaking with pain, sweat beading on his forehead, his eyes barely focused as he stares down at Ilya. His champion. Shane could do this until the sun sneaks in and catches them. 

“So good.” Ilya closes his fingers over Shane’s nipple and squeezes, takes Shane’s cock back in his mouth and hollows his cheeks. He barely makes it half way down before Shane is screaming.

Shane is built for pleasure. He’d meant it as mere fact the first time he’d told Shane he comes like a girl - often, repeatedly, in staggering gushes that make Ilya’s skin too tight. Shane is honed for sport but some of that healthy living has given him the refractory period of a teenager and the payload of a man who could beat Pike’s ass in Olympic babymaking.

“Ilya, Ilya.”

Shane comes the way he cries. A drop, and then the ocean crashes over him.

An undertow, briny salty sticky Shane. Floods into his mouth, whorls to the back of his throat and sings a siren’s tune. Come live in my world, come split your tail in half and walk on knives to dance with me. Ilya swallows enough to keep himself from drowning and holds the rest.

Shane awaits, a safe shore Ilya can swim to. He stalks up Shane’s body, lips sealed tight, his own cock forgotten as it drags against Shane’s skin. Pinned for later. He will fuck Shane’s face and knife-walk back into their narrative when he’s done. Right now, he just needs to do one thing.

Ilya spits.

~

“My seed?” Shane had balked the first time Ilya said this word. 

“No one says that,” he’d laughed, fond but happy to make fun of Ilya’s perfectly-sensible translation. Shane folds in his hands like tissue but he’ll also drag Ilya over the coals when he fumbles his stupid tenses or reaches for the wrong word.

“But you can say jizz? This makes more sense to you?”

Ilya loves this word. It’s effervescent in his mouth, like champagne bubbles and celebration. Tickles the nose, floats on the tongue. Festive.

Still, in his head, it’s Shane’s semya Ilya swallows, his seed that spills so generously into Ilya’s mouth and coats his chest and accidentally went up his nose that one time in Los Angeles. 

His book surely never shared this, but Ilya knows in his bones that the fine ladies and flagging gentlemen of Ancient Rome wanted more than sweat. If there’s power in Shane’s sweat, there must be magic in his seed. 

“I’m gonna, can I, Ilya,” Shane babbles, like Ilya doesn’t know. He just slaps Shane’s ass in answer and takes him deeper. Shane hasn’t come in ten days. He’ll be gone in two. Ilya digs his fingers in and swallows it all. Bitter that drips down into burnt sugar, coats the jagged edges inside him. Settles him. Ilya wonders how much of Shane he will swallow before it takes root and changes the very firmament of him. 

~

“Fuck, Ilya, that hurts.”

“One more.”

“You can’t just, ow.” Shane’s back jumps, his fingers gripping onto the bathroom counter.

“Stop being big baby. Is just pimple.”

Ilya narrows his eyes at his final quarry, a big whitehead riding astride Shane’s rhomboid. Shane’s back is perfect, warm and softened from a long shower, all of his pores open. Prime time for Ilya to sneak up behind him and weed the lawn.

“You’re not supposed to pop them.”

“Shane. Of course you are.” He lines his cotton-clad thumbs up. “Why would it feel so good if we are not supposed to do it?”

Irrefutable logic. Ilya’s eyes widen as he presses his thumbs together. A pistol shot of pus bursts out, yellow-white and thick. Ilya squeezes, ignoring Shane’s indignant huff. A trickle of bright-red blood follows, drips between his fingers.

“Was it big?” Shane likes to protest, but he’s always captivated by the time Ilya’s done.

“Medium.” Ilya presses again, ekes out another red bead of Shane’s blood. Licks his lips and presses his tongue over the backs of his teeth.

The Shane of Reebok and Rolex doesn’t have back zits or stretch marks or ingrown hairs. The Shane of Ilya’s bathroom is so human, fleshed out in every dimension with flaws and scars and weird idiosyncrasies that makes Ilya’s heart clutch in his chest. 

When they were little, Sveta had a purple pony toy with sparkling rainbow hair and a matching brush covered in crystals. She’d let Ilya play with it, let him stroke through her glinting plastic mane and wrap her curls around his finger. He’d stopped once his brother had found them and told Ilya to stop being a little faggot for the first of a hundred thousand times. 

He’s never brushed Shane’s hair. Ilya staunches the blood on Shane’s back and pats at the raw spot. He metes out this tending of Shane, this endless urge to pick at him and dig, to lance himself under the skin until he becomes scar tissue. He will never tell Shane some of the weird shit he’s done at Shane’s apartment. How he’s smelled Shane’s toothbrush, run his fingers over the bristles of Shane’s hairbrush, pulled the drain catch out of his shower and turned it over in his hands. 

Ilya stares at the dots of blood on his gauze. “Ok. Give me salicylic acid.”

Shane’s already holding the tube over his shoulder, ready for him.

~

He has loved Shane for so long, but they have been In Love, capital letters, words on lips, translated and soaked in sunshine for less than a year. Barely enough for Ilya to believe it. Just enough for him to wonder if Shane will finally glimpse the open maw of his desire and recoil. If there is in fact a limit to how far he can push. Just enough to hope that Shane will keep pushing back.

~

There’s a crate of fruit on Shane’s kitchen counter.

This had baffled Ilya when he’d started making real money. The bigger his paycheck, the more lavish the gifts from sponsorships and corporations courting his favor. Rich people welfare, like some old Soviet joke. 

The pears sitting on Shane’s counter could pay a month’s rent in any number of cities around the world. Each one is wrapped in a sleeve of gold, twisted elegantly shut in a modest chignon. An embossed card declares them Doyenné du Comice and wishes Shane All The Best.

Shane is better than usual. Tucked into the corner of the couch, he’s slouched into one of his oversized hoodies while he zones out on his phone. The light reflects on his face, catching the dark pools of his irises as he scrolls through Youtube. Ilya has to leave tomorrow, and he will try to remember this when he closes his eyes – Shane soft and snuggled, still hazy from the orgasm Ilya had finally allowed him after making him chase it for the better part of a week.

Ilya grabs a pear and divests it of its garment before tossing it in the air, just for fun. He rinses it and wipes it dry against the front of his sweatshirt, a match to Shane’s. 

Ilya hates the traverse and the subterfuge of their back and forth, the hours driving and flying and missing and staring at Shane on a meager screen. He takes small comfort in raiding Shane’s closet, pawing through his inordinately expensive loungewear to pull out the biggest, most outrageously soft thing he can find to puddle around his body until Shane pulls it off him again.

He takes a bite of pear and blinks. It’s delicious. Unblemished and perfectly juicy, just firm enough to melt against his teeth without being mushy. Sweet but not cloying, the gossamer skin adding the barest hint of bitter flavor to round it out. Shane-like, this ripe give in his mouth.

“This is so good,” Ilya moans, sucking noisily enough to get Shane to look up from his phone.

“Oh, yeah. I was gonna give them to my cleaning lady.” Of course he is.

Ilya has spent his entire life around athletes. He’s seen the whole spectrum, from the guys who eat nothing but crap to the ones who only drink one brand of alkaline water. Ilya’s somewhere in the middle, and if Shane is on one extreme he’s not a singularity. He’s just committed. Disciplined. Ilya has watched him plow through joyless tupperware containers of chicken breast with the grim persistence of a man determined to gain exactly eight pounds of muscle, and he’s watched him cut down to nine percent body fat. Shane is in maintenance now, making the discipline of his meals a habit rather than a necessity. 

Shane can have a treat. 

Ilya slides over him, spreading his legs to land on either side of Shane’s waist. Shane tosses his phone to the other end of the couch and leans back, resting his head on the overstuffed arm and his hands on Ilya’s thighs as he looks up expectantly. 

“Try it.”

Shane’s lips part and his eyebrows draw together in confusion as Ilya brings the pear to his own mouth. He slides his lower incisors into it, cutting a clean slice that he holds between his teeth. Shane’s eyes widen as Ilya leans down to delicately feed it to him. 

Shane is so disciplined until he has pleasure forced upon him. He chews, eyes locked on Ilya as he hums in surprise. His eyes slide closed for a moment and his pupils are dilated when he opens them again. This is probably the biggest glucose spike he’s had in weeks. 

Ilya licks a bead of juice from the pear and stares down at Shane, head tilted in consideration as Shane swallows. 

“Good, yes?”

“Yes.” Shane licks his lips, neatly catching any sticky residue Ilya’s left behind. So tidy. 

Ilya takes another bite, a real one this time, lets it slide around in his mouth as he rips it in half. He leans down, close enough to hear the diminutive click of Shane’s tongue peeling down from the roof of his mouth as he opens. Ilya chews once, open-mouthed, before he parts his lips for Shane.

If he closed his eyes it would sound like sex. He lets it slide from his mouth, wet and sweet, to land on Shane’s waiting tongue. 

Ilya’s the one who talks during sex, who has parsed and diagrammed the verses of their arousal. The hagiography of what a Good Boy Shane can be, how sweet and slutty and perfect he is, how he lights up under praise when he’s soft and biddable, rag-dolled in Ilya’s arms. The gnostic underbelly Shane offers up when he’s stressed out and stretched thin, when he needs Ilya to summon locker room insults and make it hurt, pry the tears from his eyes and close his fist. Bitter and sweet, twin tastes that have haunted Ilya’s tongue for years.

Shane keeps his mouth open as Ilya pushes out a line of sugar-sweet spit. If Ilya talks, Shane drowns them both in noise. Another language, one Ilya steals and covets just like the smell of Shane’s body. He makes the same grunts and huffs on the ice, but there are other things that are just for Ilya. The wet sounds, the smack of his lips and the gulp of his throat, the glick he makes when he’s trying not to choke and the gluck when he does. 

This exegesis occupies so much of Ilya’s private thoughts. It springs unbidden to him when he hears Shane spit on the ice, or skates past Marleau screaming “cocksucker” at the top of his lungs. Shane moans as he swallows his bite, licks his lips until they’re shining. His fingers curl into the hard line of Ilya’s quads.

“More.” Ilya punctuates it, no question mark, flexes his thighs against the press of Shane’s hand before he grabs it.

He peels Shane’s hand off his leg and tucks it down next to Shane’s thigh, repeats it for the other side. Pushes, just enough to let Shane feel his weight, feel the press of his arms trapped against his sides. Shane pushes back, testing until Ilya squeezes tight enough to make the air rush out of his open mouth. Ilya takes a big bite and pins Shane in place.

How long could he keep Shane here? He dreams of it, days on end where Shane’s every waking second is his to direct, when to brush his teeth and go for his run and take a piss and wash his hands, where Ilya keeps him fucked and fed and happy and Shane’s face never loses that taffy-pull bliss, every inch of his body Ilya’s to use as he pleases. On tap.

Ilya chews, noisy, mouth open, dinner-table behavior that would have gotten him cuffed upside the head. Rakes his eyes over Shane’s bundled-up body and pictures him naked, painted all over by Ilya’s teeth and his hands, bitten and bruised in places that can’t be plausibly denied as professional injury. Marked as Ilya’s own, branded like the singed flesh of his ancient, captive heroes.

There’s mush in his mouth now, more spit than substance, still delicious. He grabs Shane’s jaw and he knows exactly how hard he can press before it bruises. Shane doesn’t need any inducement to open but Ilya digs in anyway, gathers spit and ruined fruit in his mouth as he breathes against the mean-red band circling his ribs. 

He feeds it all into Shane’s mouth, sloppy, makes sure some of it runs into the corner of Shane’s lips and drips down to the webbing of Ilya’s thumb forcing him open. Needs him messy, the kind he can’t scrub off, a stain that will stay with him long after Ilya is a thousand miles away and wearing his own clothes again.

Shane’s mouth works under his hand, swallowing as best he can. Ilya breathes against him, panting, his heart battering against his ribs. His lips are sticky and his mouth is wet and his dick is an aching line against his thigh. Shane is so fucking beautiful. 

Ilya tosses the core of his pear onto the coffee table and pushes Shane’s bottom lip down with his thumb, catches his nail over the straight line of Shane’s lower incisors. Shane’s tongue rolls around, chasing sweetness, swallowing open-mouthed the way he does when Ilya’s in his throat. 

Ilya squeezes his legs tighter, steals another underground noise out of Shane, soft and high and huffed over his thumb. Ilya rolls his tongue, sucks his cheeks in, all the sugar gone from him and Shane knows this, but he still opens wider and nods his head, yes, firm and sure in Ilya’s grip. 

Ilya spits. 

“Fuck, Shane.” He presses his forehead to Shane’s, wants him close, wrapped up and hidden from the light, so close he can smell Shane’s breath and name every freckle on his nose. He kisses into Shane’s overwet mouth, licks him sloppy until they’re both too-sweet and tacky.

He’s winded, nursing a stitch in his side that never got to needle its way out. He frames Shane’s face in his hand, gorgeous sweet good Shane who just opens and opens and blinks up at him for more.

Ilya dives into the space between Shane’s neck and his bunched-up hoodie, soft warm safety for Ilya to catch his breath. Pull his teeth in before he bites too hard. Shane’s expensive laundry detergent purportedly smells like “clean air and driftwood”, which is bullshit, but Ilya can moor himself on the log-weight of Shane captive beneath him. 

“I love you.”

Thick cotton. Warm skin. The best pear money can force to fruition. Clean air and fucking driftwood. Ilya gulps it all down as he kisses along Shane’s neck. 

“I love you so much.”

He will pare Shane down to suds in the shower later, scrub him until he shines. Wash away the sticky trail Ilya has smeared onto Shane’s skin until all that is left is the core of Shane, unsullied by Ilya’s most wayward efforts. 

Shane always keeps his lights low. Ilya pulls himself up and stares down at Shane, follows the runnel of pear juice that disappears down his chin. A soft gleam around his mouth, the highlights of his eyes as he smiles back at Ilya. Ilya’s jaw ticks.

Shane is glistening. 

“That was.” Shane’s tongue slips out between his lips. 

Gross. A mess. Too much. The pear is starting to turn brown where Ilya has bitten it. Ilya swallows. 

“Really good. Thank you.”

Shane’s loopy smile cracks a kaleidoscope inside him. He loves Shane, loves him too much, loves him ugly and dirty and bursting with sweetness. There’s so much inside Ilya that’s fractured but Shane lines it all up until it shines.

Shane shifts underneath him, the furrow sneaking back between his brow. Ilya frees Shane’s hands, rubs at his wrists, kisses the soft underside of each one. “You’re ok?”

“Yeah, it’s just,” Shane’s lips thin. “The fiber.” 

Ilya frowns. “This is good for you.”

“No, I know, I just, timing stuff,” Shane looks away, and Ilya recognizes the nervous bounce of Shane’s knee underneath him.

“I might not be clean later.”

Like Ilya wouldn’t fuck him filthy. He drags his tongue over the curve of Shane’s jaw, catches the sticky trail of juice clinging to his skin. 

“Shane. My love.” He licks the sweetness from Shane’s lips, sucks them between his teeth until there’s nothing but the taste of himself. He presses a feather kiss to Shane’s nose and shakes his head, smiling softly. “Stop worrying.”

Ilya slides three sticky fingers into Shane’s mouth.

“You have two holes.”

~

The Myths of Ancient Rome was a chapter he would request when his stomach felt too tight looking at the gladiators. How curious, to glimpse the difference between God and gods, things imaginary and things he’s meant to accept as true. His mother touched her cross every time she read this chapter.

Pluto and Proserpina. This one chilled him and captivated him in equal measure. He only asked for this story on good days, when her hair was shiny and smooth, when her lipstick was crisp on her lips and her eyes weren’t smudged dark underneath. Years later, in a moment of post-nut clarity so staggering he’d tasted bile, he’d looked down at some hopeful girl who’d just given him an exceptionally filthy blowjob and realized this is what mascara looks like when it runs down a tear-streaked face. 

“Why did she eat the seeds?” he’d asked, once and once only.

“Because he tricked her. That’s what they do.” He hated the thin line of her mouth, the way her shoulders curled in and the light left her eyes. Prosperpina had the same golden curls as his mother, tumbling past her shoulders as she reached her hands up toward the world above.

Alone, when he was too big for books with pictures, Ilya ignored the words and stared at this picture, turned the book upside down so she was pointing toward his feet. The Abduction of Proserpina, they called it. Pulling her from her home. Taking her away.

What if she hated the sunshine and the heat of the world above? What if her father was cruel and her brother an endless gauntlet, what if the very walls of her house closed in on her and made the air inside her scalding? What if she’d arrived at this cool, quiet place and gorged herself, eaten down to the bitter pith until they couldn’t make her leave?

~

New York, concrete jungle where the hotel rooms are smaller and there are multiple crowd chants wishing death upon him. It’s a good city.

“Another.” Ilya’s tongue forks around his gold chain, distracted as he balances his phone in one hand and palms himself in the other.

Shane makes a sticky noise and slips a third finger into his mouth. He’s backlit in blue, a harsh tone that washes out the ruddy warmth Ilya knows is seeping into his cheeks. 

“Wet.”

Shane has a better set up at his house. They’ve certainly had enough practice. Ilya can see everything where Shane’s spread out on his bed, legs open and his mouth leaking spit over his knuckles. He’s got a big bruise splashed across his right hip, a nasty hit from Detroit.

“In your ass.”

Shane likes it when Ilya bears down on the bruises, makes noises Ilya only hears when he’s got his cock buried inside Shane and he knuckles into some ugly mark another man left on his body.

Shane writhes on his tiny screen, distant and desperate as a pressed bruise. It gets him hot and it gets him hard but it hurts all the same. His eyes are the least of the things he needs on Shane. His fingers curl as he watches Shane sink three fingers into himself, with nothing but spit and the dog-curl of his upper lip to help him. It’ll burn. 

It would burn more if Ilya were doing it.

Shane’s cock sits heavy on his stomach, the light of his phone screen blurring another detail Ilya knows is present. He’d drag his tongue right through that puddle of precome, down it in one go like a good oyster. 

“Stroke your dick.”

“Do you want me to come?”

Ilya bites his chain. Not Can I. Not I need to. Do you want me to. Ilya’s cock twitches under his hand, bruise-ached. 

“Yes.” Ilya smiles, wolfish. “Not too fast, though. Want to watch you.”

Shane makes it count, hikes his knees up and does all the just-them sounds Ilya likes. Waits, trembling, sweat on his brow, until Ilya says “Now.” Makes a pretty mess and watches, rapt, while Ilya does the same.

“Lick it up.”

Ilya sucks his cross into his mouth, wills the metallic zing into salty memory. His tongue should be on Shane’s, should share this, swap it between them. Should taste like a single tube of toothpaste when they fall asleep. He’s so sick of having everything in doubles.

“Good boy.”

Shane’s eyes slide shut, smiling as he sucks his dripping fingers. Ilya’s twitch in sympathy, a phantom ache where they should be petting through Shane’s hair, scratching the good spot at the base of his neck.

“I miss you.” It slips out of him. He has tried not to say it too much, to save it up like an allowance for necessary misery. It still makes him feel hang-dog, belly low to the ground. Do you want me to. Ilya loves him so fucking much, should be grateful for any time he gets with Shane.

“I miss you, too.” Shane telegraphs a kiss from his lips to the phone, three fingers pressed together. “Just a few more weeks.”

He kisses back and smiles, makes sure he’s still doing it until Shane ends the call. Stares at the screen until it goes black and reflects his face back at him.

Ilya tosses his phone and lays there, watching the ceiling change colors until his jizz starts to itch on his stomach.

~

“The same book. Every night. For over a year.” Yuna’s wine glass is perched in her palm, Pinot Noir legging down the sides as she laughs. “I will be one hundred years old and I will remember that fucking book.”

Yuna swears even more than her son, an impressive feat. She salts every other sentence with fuck this, fuck him, fuck that. It delights Ilya to imagine his father swallowing his tongue whole if he’d conversed with her, rendered insensate at her coarse humor and easy assertion in any room. Ilya cannot remember worse than an “ah, blin,” out of his mother, a humble pancake bearing the weight of her cowed frustration. 

“Do you remember, sweetheart?” Yuna tilts her glass at David.

“‘Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away’,” David begins, tearing off a heel of baguette. “‘So he said to his mother, I am running away.’”

Yuna wags her finger, joining the recitation. “‘If you run away, said his mother, I will run after you.’” 

David and Yuna smile at each other and finish in unison. “‘For you are my little bunny.’” Their glasses clink.

Shane rolls his eyes. These childhood anecdotes annoy him, get him sarcastic and repeating back punchlines and catchphrases with canned timing. These are well-worn stories.

Shane remembers all of his childhood, as far as Ilya can tell. He has never caught Shane casting back in blank desperation to find that no, he doesn’t know how they celebrated his birthday, is that a thing he’s supposed to know? This realization had mortified Ilya, that Shane is walking around with technicolor broadcasts of his youth while Ilya has to squint at the penumbra of his grade school years to answer so many of Yuna’s well-meaning questions. He has failed a class he never enrolled in.

“And God help you if you changed a line. I tried to invent new places for the bunny and that,” David shakes his head, haunted. “That did not go over well.”

“Where does this bunny go?” Ilya grabs a hunk of bread for himself, copying David to sop up his excellent braised short rib remnants. This, at least, is familiar.

Yuna beams. “He turns into all kinds of things, and the illustrations are so adorable. There’s one where he’s a flower and the mama bunny is a gardener, oh, and the one where he’s a sailboat! She turns into the wind and guides him back home.”

“His ears are the sails, it’s very cute,” David agrees. Even Shane smiles a little.

Ilya mines these glittering shards of Shane’s boyhood and pouches them in his cheeks for later. He chews his bread, soft where the grease has soaked into the crust.

“Do you remember your favorite one, Shane?” David asks.

“Yeah.” Shane puts his wineglass down. “He turns into a bird and flies away. And then his mom says,” Shanes looks across the table at Ilya, his eyes soft in the candlelight. “‘I will be a tree that you come home to.’”

An ice-cream scoop to the chest, peels off his top layer and curls it frozen into Ilya’s stomach. Ilya manages an “Oh,” before he dives back into his wine. He is grateful when Shane just smiles and prompts another recounting of The Year Shane Would Only Wear That One Blue Shirt, and dinner proceeds with the natural rhythm he has come to love.

How easily he has fallen into this ritual. He and Shane clear the plates, Yuna and David shoo them out of the kitchen so they can clean up, they go outside and light something on fire.

“Your mom? Did she read to you?” Shane’s head is heavy in his lap.

“Yes.” Ilya twists a lock of Shane’s hair around his finger. “At night. I was bad at sleeping.”

A log pops. The fire flares. Something screams its eternal soul out in the woods beyond. These things are all normal now, a new thread in the tapestry of night-time. Easier to speak to than ceilings and city sirens.

“We had a book like yours, with animals. But it was all kinds. They go to sleep with their mama, and they are all in their place. Like, baby bear is in his cave with mama bear,” Ilya sing-songs, finding the rhythm, “puppy dog is in his dog house with mama dog, piglet is in his … svinárnik, I do not know this word, like where the farmer puts the pigs?”

“Sty? Pigsty?” Shane offers.

“Sty? This is thing I had in my eye, no?” An absolute pain in his ass. Shane had finally threatened to withhold sex until he got some cream for it. 

“Same word. I think.”

This fucking language. Ilya rolls his eyes. 

“My mother did voices for them. It was silly, but I liked it. I still remember them.” Ilya smiles, grateful that this, at least, isn’t shrouded from his recollection. He pets behind Shane’s ear, lets the memory sit soft and furry in his hand. 

“I think I was kind of a weird kid,” Shane says, rubbing his cheek against Ilya’s thigh. Shane, who had weighed David’s polenta on a food scale. Shane, who had turned the car around because his socks didn’t feel right.

“I think you are just Canadian.”

Shane shoulders into him. “Yeah, well, you’ll be one of us before you know it.” 

A quiet displacement inside him, something small-boned scratching around before it curls up and tucks its head under its tail.

“Makes sense. I think I was weird kid, too.” Ilya rakes his hand through Shane’s hair, brushing it out in the soft light of the fire.

~

The flash makes it look small.

Ilya angles himself around and tries to get a better picture with his phone in the full-length mirror. He takes two, erases them both because he’s making an ugly face. It hurts when he twists.

Finally, with his arm held up and his phone at a diagonal, he gets a clear picture of the nascent bruise splayed across his ribs. 

Told you mine is worse

His text slots up under Shane’s and pushes Shane’s picture out of view. Ilya drags back up to it, licks his lips. Shane’s got a banger on his inner thigh. Ilya wants to mangle any man who lays a hand on Shane, but he also wants to thank him. Ilya will lean into that spot until it sings.

J: Poor baby

Three days until he sees Shane. It’ll still be there. 

J: Heal up

J: Need you in fighting shape

“Fighting shape,” Ilya mouths to himself, grinning.

Call me after dinner

Shane knocks a little heart onto his message. He’ll make Shane dig his thumb into it while he jerks off.

Ilya prods at his ribs, wincing. Fucking New Jersey. They all play like animals. Animal luck, too, that some fucknuts got him in the exact spot where Shane’s knees dig in when Ilya’s got him on his back. Not that it will stop either of them.

He should ice it one more time. 

The gladiators of Ilya’s book were rewarded for their valorous service with freedom. They retired to the countryside, or worked as honored guards for noble houses. There’d been a setting sun in the corner of the page, soft orange light silhouetting a small farm and a man standing next to a cow. The reward of small labor. The cash prize of tranquil domesticity.

Ilya lugs his ice bucket to the machine. He’s seen the old-timers. Seen the injuries that never heal right, seen the guys who have had their bell rung a few too many times. An emptiness behind the eyes. Maybe some of those gladiators got to see the sunset over a fat cow and a plump wife. But Ilya knows the truth. Most of them are fodder for the grist mill, fed through and ground up for scrap. 

Ilya wraps his ice-bag in a towel and presses it to his side. 

Marleau gets philosophical when he’s drunk. He’d clapped his big hand to Ilya’s face and sprayed him with skunky beer breath, earnest in his felled wobble. “D’you know that all your cells get replaced every seven years? That’s wild, right? You’re, like,” he’d shaken his head, that caveman brow rising in wonder. “Brand fucking new.”

Ilya knows this is not, in fact, true, but he wasn’t going to argue with a drunk guy who could throw Ilya over his shoulder. Besides. It’s a good story. Every bruise he heals, every scrape and nick and goose-egg he knits back together, every drop of Shane that effervesces on his tongue – he is brand fucking new. 

He inhales until he feels the ache against his ice pack, closes his eyes. In Marleau’s barstool philosophy, there is no part of Ilya that has ever known a life without Shane.

He hopes Marleau gets his cow.

~

Ilya’s ribs smart when Shane pushes him against the wall. Shane kisses like he’s going for the other side, all hands and teeth, his coat still hanging off his shoulders and his bag plunked at Ilya’s feet. 

“Need you.” Shane’s shoes are still on. 

“Hello, Shane. It is nice to see you, too.” Ilya slathers on the over-slow pronunciation of his upper school teacher as he pulls back, giddy from Shane’s hungry pawing.

“Shut up.” Shane’s coat slides to the ground.

Shane used to be so nervous when he crossed Ilya’s doorstep. Hands tucked in pockets, feet oddly close. That charming tension, like Shane didn’t quite know how his body worked when he wasn’t playing hockey or hanging off Ilya’s dick. It still floors Ilya to watch Shane collapse in on himself and rally the grace he denies the outside world. 

A few months with a key code and a few drawers to himself have left Shane emboldened, if not entirely graceful. Open-mouthed for a kiss, hands eager-beaver in Ilya’s hair, his hips rocking forward like Ilya hasn’t noticed his hard-on yet. Shane is so honest with his body when he feels safe. 

“What? You are not happy to see me?” Ilya teases, fighting the urge to roll his eyes back when Shane tugs at his hair. Cheater.

“Be happy when you’re inside me.” Shane’s hand slides down between them, grabbing hard enough at Ilya’s dick to make him jump. A current between them, a hum as Shane gathers his strength and nudges it against Ilya’s wires. When Shane starts to stomp for it, kisses Ilya like a dare, like a threat. Toothsome. Shane will crash his body into Ilya’s until he crashes back.

Ilya snatches at his jaw. Shane always turns to liquid in his hands, but sometimes it takes him longer to melt. Shane tosses his head, digs his hand up under Ilya’s shirt. A snack, a shower, a glass of water – Shane usually wants something before he starts tugging Ilya’s pants off, but not today.

Ilya bites his lip. Shane has missed him.

“Which hole?” Ilya digs in, lets his thumb lean dirty over Shane’s jugular. Finds the pound of it and presses harder. Shane’s eyes slide shut.

“I don’t care, just fuck me hard.”

He picks Shane up, shoes and all, and carries him to bed. Ilya will die before he lets himself stagger under Shane’s weight, but he is pulling to the deepest part of his core by the time he plops Shane on his bed. He strips them down, sends Shane’s sneakers flying and tangles his shirt over his head. Shane is blind-eager between kisses, grunts off his clothes until he’s down to socks and spit.

Needy had always been a bad word to Ilya. An accusation, a shameful thing for boys who run to mama and cry when they’re hurting. Weakness. Something to beat out of himself and sacrifice on the altar of manhood. Terrifying, to tuck himself into Shane in the small hours and let it wash over him. He kisses Shane, inches them onto the mattress, hovers as Shane slips under him.

“Fuck, Shane.”

Shane rolls, molten in Ilya’s bed as he pours himself face-down, ass-up, like there’d been a question which end he needs Ilya to fuck.

“Need you.” Shane reaches back and pulls himself apart, fearless, blistering with it. Ilya’s mouth drops open as Shane sinks a finger inside, spit-shined. 

“I like it when you are like this.” Ilya grabs the lube and slides up behind him. Drizzles some over Shane’s hole, watches him work it inside.

“Like what?” 

“Needy.” Praise, loud and clear. Shane owns it as his due, arches his back and spreads his legs, flashes a bulls-eye of the healing bruise on his inner thigh. Ilya strokes his cock, squeezes at the base until he can count his own heartbeat.

“Open yourself for me.” Ilya spans his palm over the flexed expanse of Shane’s thigh and squeezes. Digs his thumb into the bruise until Shane gasps, until Ilya’s itchy to the teeth and flaring his nose, tensed to bolt.

“M’ready.” Shane looks at him over his shoulder, nods. 

Ready is a shifting goal. It can stretch hours away, until Shane is sloppy and garbled, until Ilya’s fingers are pruny and his wrist is sore. It can sneak up so close that Ilya goes cross-eyed, until he barely has time to glob some lube on his dick and hope it sticks.

Shane is as ready as he needs to be.

Ilya sinks in, too tight too fast, pushes until the air leaves his lungs and Shane is shaking. Bottoms out and breathes, lets it settle in his chest and spread out hot under his skin.

“Fuck me.” Shane holds his need up like a prize. An old thing he has loved a long time, this surety of Shane’s, his steady pride. No tricks, no double meanings. Blessed clarity.

“Hard.” 

Ilya doesn’t have to parse anything. He needs to fuck Shane until everything else goes away. The easiest thing, to yoke his neck to this task. He works up quick, gets the gristle of it between his teeth and pulls, snaps his hips and gropes for the sore spots until Shane purrs.

“Fuck, Ilya.” Shane is starting to slur, his syllables pooling onto Ilya’s nice sheets. There’s another pool between his legs, growing every time Ilya slams into him.

“You need that dick?”

Ilya knows his lines. With everyone else he has bent his body to, in any language, some iteration of like-need-want that dick-cock-prick sticks the landing each time. Always that, a step removed, Ilya’s but not quite Ilya. Ilya’s dick is a worthwhile thing, oft-praised, noteworthy. Sex has always been a chance to forget the rest of himself. 

Shane pushes back against him. “You feel so good.”

Shane is a fucking mess – barely keeping himself upright, leaking from his exiled dick and his barely-focused eyes, mouth a slack mush against the mattress. Even here, rendered down to the primal sap of him, Shane summons the words to rebuff Ilya’s armored synecdoche, chews it up and spits it back into Ilya’s mouth. 

“You fuck me so good.”

Always you, always Ilya, always the whole of him. Shane loves that cock, entire floors of hotels and aggregate nouns of Canadian wildlife know how much he loves that cock. Shane will gladly take the fruits of Ilya’s talents, but he’ll keep eating through to the bark and marrow and twisted roots until he can taste the dirt. Ilya swallows, thick in his throat. 

“Ilya. You’re so good.”

A stubborn disambiguation that strips Ilya to live wire. Raw. Powerful, dangerous to the bare touch. 

“Need you.”

Ilya fucks him harder. Digs his claws into the safe surrender of Shane’s body and rends, curls over him until the sweat drips from his forehead onto the top of Shane’s spine. He clads himself to Shane’s back and closes his mouth over the warm nape of his neck, sucks at his skin until it blooms. Shane’s bearing most of his weight, braced across his chest and grunting into each thrust of Ilya’s hips. Shane’s strong enough to carry both of them. 

He drags his tongue over the base of Shane’s neck, nuzzles into his hair. Shane is delicious here, noisy and redolent, all throat-borne huffs and the hot rise off his skin. Woody, a fresh curl planed off each time Ilya fucks into him. 

Ilya’s realtor had been so excited about his floors. “Heritage white oak, hand-milled!” Like this should mean anything to Ilya besides “very expensive.” She’ll give someone new the same practiced tour soon. Maybe someone else will drag scratches into the fancy floors and carve out a home here. His house will sell for a lovely profit in record time. He takes good care of his things. 

“Ilya, please, please.” Shane’s voice is so thick and needy Ilya could rub it into his gums. 

“Not yet.” Ilya snakes a hand around the flexed curve of Shane’s hip, darts over sweat-slick skin to give Shane’s balls a clear tug. Savors the hurt noise Shane lets out, chases another one with his teeth along the wing of Shane’s shoulder blade. Blacks the world out with his face pressed to Shane’s back and the hale, hand-milled smell of him everywhere. 

He clutches up on Shane’s hips and pulls him back hard, as deep inside as he can get. They’re both shaking. Ilya’s head buzzes, swarmed to his teeth as he comes. He drags the dull blade of his mouth along Shane’s sweaty back before he straightens himself up, dizzy with it and hungry for more. 

Ilya braces his hands across the wide span of Shane’s ass and digs his thumbs in, pushes in as he pulls his cock out of Shane’s shuddering body. Ilya’s teeth grind together in lock-jawed awe. Shane gapes open, gorgeous, purpled and slick at the rim. Ilya presses his thumbs, keeps pressing until he sees the first white streak of his come slip out. 

“Push.” Ilya’s nostrils flare, bit-chomped. 

“Ilya.” Shane grinds his name down, razors it between appalled and t-minus one second to coming without a hand on his dick.

“Show me how good I fuck you.”

Another fat rope of white leaks out of him. Ilya stares, his mouth running wet and pawing hungry at the ground as it leaks down Shane’s sac. 

“Here. I will help you.” 

Ilya splits Shane to the glisten and seals his lips around it. 

“Jesus Christ, Ilya.”

Animal pride surges in his chest. Shane should always be like this, full-up and leaking Ilya from the raw spots. Ilya’s tongue slides in easily, takes what he wants, fever warm and salt slicked. Digs his hand into Shane’s thigh and jumps the purple of his bruise back to life. An erasure, a graft of himself onto the forced blooms other men leave so carelessly on Shane’s body. When Shane aches here, he won’t think of some second-rate winger. He’ll think of Ilya’s mouth on his rawhide ass and smile.

Ilya knows the taste of himself, he’s no stranger to that. He gathers it on his tongue, moans and sucks and makes a mess of it, because that’s what makes Shane whisper-rasp his name in horrified adulation and leak a mess of his own from his heavy cock. It’s the same color as his bruise. Ilya drags his fingernail up the base of it, earns another pushed-back grunt of good boy frustration. Shane won’t be fit to push anyone against the wall by the time Ilya lets him come.

Shane’s already low on push-back when Ilya shoves him flat on the bed. A twitching collapse, soft through the back as his hips itch against the bed. Ilya presses his lips together and steals a dip between Shane’s legs with his finger, pushes at him where he’s wet and open. Curls it just enough to make Shane’s ass hitch up, sloppy, until Ilya’s wet to the knuckle. Drags it up Shane’s back, follows the goosebumps in its wake as he closes his hand over the back of Shane’s neck. Shane goes still. Ilya’s hard again, too-full in his mouth as his spit gathers around his prize. 

The first time he’d put his tongue up Shane’s ass after they’d fucked, Shane’s knee-jerk objection had been whether the lube was safe to eat. Like Ilya hasn’t snorted some god-forsaken things off some truly god-forsaken people. But Shane hasn’t, so Shane had done his research and now their respective houses are stocked with lots of lube, but no phthalates, PEG, or stearate. This string of words means nothing to him beyond “very expensive,” but Ilya’s happy to pay for it. To Shane’s credit, it does taste better.

Ilya nudges Shane to his back from his tummy-down sprawl. Half succeeds, gets him S-curved onto his side, knees bent to one side and his back twisting toward Ilya. A thing for marble. It flexes the pronounced band of Shane’s obliques, ridges his serratus anterior as Shane lifts his arm in dazed welcome. He’s staring at Ilya’s mouth. 

Ilya slides behind him, tucks himself against the familiar statuary of Shane’s offered body and slots himself in. Barely has to push. He brushes his nose against the irresistible thatch of hair under Shane’s arm, always greedy for a quick line. Ilya’s mouth is going to burst if he tarries longer. He arches over Shane, twines them together nose to nose, roots his hands to the carved planes of Shane’s body and digs.

Shane is the only person he has ever done this with. Shane is the only person he will ever do this with. 

“Need you.” Shane opens his mouth, unfurls his tongue, and curls his fingers into Ilya’s thigh. Ilya’s chest pulses, warm-rush affection spilling over him. Shane wants all of it. The whole of him, stem to seed.

Ilya spits. 

~

Shane is breaking.

“One more,” Ilya whispers, holding up one finger in helpful demonstration.

A mean trick, making Shane do all the work. He’s shaking all over, but his hand is especially jerky as he works it over his cock. 

“I can’t.” Shane’s wet on the upper lip, sweat dotting the hollow of his philtrum. This shakes as well, fawn-legged when Shane rides past the oversensitive head of his dick. Ilya kisses it.

“Yes, you can.” Ilya slides his tongue through the dew, flicks it over the wet tip of Shane’s nose.

He thinks Shane can. 

Shane is jizzed to the tits, a popped champagne bottle of Ilya’s making. Festive. The first load has to be itching him, curling at the edges like spilled glue where it’s drying on his skin. 

Shane can hit his own face when the stars align correctly. He’d reached the base of his throat on the first go, begging and bucking while Ilya bit deep into the blooming mark on Shane’s leg. The second is still cooling on his stomach, gleaming in his navel as Shane grits his teeth and forces his hand to move.

Ilya dives back to his gem, this garden he is cultivating on Shane’s thigh. A nasty bruise, now, doubled in size and scope. Eclipsed by Ilya’s mouth. Fruited to new reds at the edges, nudged to aubergine at the beating center. Bleeding from the heart of it. Just a few drops, fresh salt to mine from Shane’s body, a new coin minted for his reserve.

“We are going to empty these,” Ilya had kissed against Shane’s balls. Only fair, when Shane had barrelled in brimming with need. Shane can stop when he comes dry.

“Go faster.” Ilya cups at Shane’s balls, teases behind them where Shane’s leaking hot. Shane’s worn out all over. Almost wrung out, dredged to the silt where he can disappear and crawl back out smoother around the edges. Ilya just needs to force one more jagged spike out of him.

He’d promised.

“Faster. You forgot how to do this?” He slaps his hand over Shane’s, pumps it until Shane starts to blubber. Boiling over. Ilya’s stomach twists, old hunger pangs flooding him as he tightens his grip. Sucks over Shane’s blistering bruise and works his overwrought cock, needles until he’s under Shane’s skin. Needy. Pours Ilya to a point, glinting, so bright inside him it almost feels clean.

“I can’t, I can’t, Ilya, please.”

But he can. And he does. The barest drop, a barren tear that can’t even make it past the slit of his cock. It sits, forlorn, staring Ilya in the face. Shane is all shudders, teeth-clacked and wrapping his arms over his chest. 

Shane is going murky, sinking into the muck Ilya’s made of him. Ilya grabs an abused towel and asks a final sacrifice of it, mopping what he can off Shane’s stomach. Shane is in no shape for moving, let alone a shower. He rolls over, squeezes his eyes shut, moans out each exhalation through his nose. 

Squishy. Hard syllables to string together, awkward aloud but just right in his head. Shane is squishy, like he has sublimated all of his muscle into foam. He rolls up, packs himself in like the little hedgehog who trundled after his mama in Ilya’s bedtime stories. Seeks out the underground of blankets and closed eyes and above all, Ilya on top of him. 

Shane doesn’t always speak when he’s squished under Ilya. If he does it’s clipped, even for Shane. 

“Tell me stuff,” is a regular one, or just, “story.” 

Illuminating, this precious bid for campfire connection. A lighter-flick to his sense memory. The comfort of half-hearing, half-feeling the familiar cadence of his mother’s voice resonate through her chest as he lay against it. The rhythm that danced from his ears to the base of his spine before it curled up and went to sleep, safe and sound. Shane needs to rest.

Ilya slings himself over Shane’s back and kisses everything he can reach, murmurs Shane’s name, loves him in tongues mother and other. 

“Do the animals.” Shane’s voice is pillowed against the mattress, the softest mumble. 

Loving Shane is as easy as it is terrifying. Shane accepts the slings and arrows of Ilya’s brute affection with such radiant ease. Trusts Ilya to make it hurt, bares his neck and arches his back and offers Ilya an underbelly so soft Ilya could split it in half with the wrong word. Everyone trusts Ilya to be hard. Only Shane trusts him to be soft.

“In Russian.”

Ilya’s cross nestles between Shane’s sweaty shoulderblades. Sometimes, Ilya cheats. A white lie, more of an obfuscation. Shane will ask for something soothing and benign, and Ilya will steal the cadence of fairy tales to tell Shane the truth. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want to sleep without you ever again. 

Ilya kisses Shane’s back, closes his eyes, and summons what Shane has asked for.

“The hedgehog curls up in his nest of leaves, while mama hog says, it’s time to sleep.”

Shane settles under him. Ilya slides his hand down, twines his fingers into Shane’s. 

“The baby wolf crawls into his den; roll over, says mama, it’s time for bed.”

An ugly thought that Ilya can’t keep at bay. Worries it between his teeth like a bad hangnail. Will Shane roll over so easily when Ilya’s playing for a dog-shit team that no one cares about? 

~

Shane would wash his sheets every day if he could. But this is still Ilya’s house, his alone for far too long and only a few months more. He presses Shane’s fucked-open body into the mattress and squeezes, rolls every sweaty inch of him around until his bed stinks like sex and the mongrel tang of his own come leaking out of Shane’s ass for days.

Boston was never truly home but it was his place, for a while. He made something here. Trophies hoisted in the air, a cheering arena, his face proclaiming America Runs on Dunkin’! Their champion. 

He grabs a pillow, noses into it until he can smell Shane’s hair. 

His mother would do a whistling tune for the beavers in their lodge, and a soft chirp for the scrunch-faced bats in their roost. The squirrels gave an affronted squeak from their drey before she’d puff the loose end of her braid against his nose, tail-soft and laughing.

It sounds so easy, to trade one foreign place for another. To slink himself closer to Shane and bolt down as many nights together as they can steal. Still that hangdog feeling, pulling him low when he looks at real estate and smiles at Yuna’s gentle suggestions for contract negotiations. Shane doesn’t need to know how much it hurts to pull things out from the roots. Even if it’s for the best. Even if it’s part of the plan. Growing pains. Ilya will uproot himself once more, to stagger into a new life that is pinned on the one person who has ever made him feel at home. 

A den. A burrow. A drey, a set. A place-noun of their own, one structure to hold and house them, carved out for their bodies intertwined and singular of purpose. This is the game plan. The narrative they are building. A pile of borrowed seeds he will swallow and swallow until something new grows around them.

As the night shifts over Ilya’s soaring ceilings, it feels as far away as a child’s story. Fantastic. The stuff of myth and legend. 

Face-down, Ilya rolls himself in his filthy sheets and ruts against the fading memory of Shane’s warm weight beneath him.

-

Ilya’s beat up. 

He hurts in so many places they have blended into a rainbow, shimmering at the edges and melding to blinding white when Shane knocks against his mouth too hard. They’re bleeding.

In the low-light simmer of Shane’s apartment, their post-game war wounds blur to shadow, lurking under skin and ready to bite. Ilya’s ribs kick back when Shane gropes up under his shirt. His knee protests too much up Shane’s stairs. His left forearm barks as he grapples at Shane’s jaw and turns him into the light.

Shane’s worse. A ruby slash peeks through the steri-strips across his cheek, highlights the swell of his cheekbone, glitters in the sconce light of Shane’s hallway. Shane’s favoring one ankle and he keeps winging his left elbow in. 

It’s worse when their clothes come off. Ilya winces when he bends down to pull his socks off, and Shane lets out an audible hiss when he gets his shirt over his head.

“We look like shit.” Ilya snorts, drags the split of his own lip over Shane’s as he eases him onto the bed.

“Gonna kiss it better?” Shane’s bearing his weight on one elbow as he leans up, but he’s still smiling. This is the price of victory.

Ilya pays it, ignores the hitch in his side as he pushes Shane’s legs up to his chest and dives in. 

This is usually enough to silence the barks and howls of Ilya’s injuries, to muzzle the darkness that inks its way into his thoughts. He licks into Shane, stretches his aching mouth and works Shane open. Gets his fingers in and twists until Shane digs his heel into Ilya’s shoulder, “c’mon, c’mon.”

“This is ok?” Ilya pats at the bruise on Shane’s right hip, pushes to see if Shane’s sore to the joint or just banged up. 

“Yeah. Just my ankle.”

Theirs is a body commercial. They are bought and sold at higher prices than Ilya’s ancient warriors, but they are still commodities. Ilya is one hit to the spine away from obsolescence, one stick to the neck away from being put out to pasture.

Ilya ignores his knee and crawls in between Shane’s open legs. Everything hurts less when he’s inside Shane. 

He has seen Shane more in the past months than he has in years. It should sate him, fill him to the brim to get so much more of the one thing he’s wanted. 

His hand finds the big bruise splayed over Shane’s hip and digs in. Kisses the “ah, fuck,” out of Shane’s mouth and drags another one out of Shane’s swollen cheekbone. It’s hot to the touch, an angry red as Shane’s body tries to boil out the bad stuff and keep him safe. Ilya darts his tongue along the edge. 

There is some vast flaw in Ilya’s programming, a void unaccounted for in Shane’s tidy garden path toward their future. Ilya’s love will sprout thorns and grow into the empty spaces, push against the borders and crack the cement. Needy. 

He brackets Shane’s knees around his ribcage, urges them into the sore spots until Ilya’s aching from the inside. Pain, love, dick — all things best taken with a bent knee. Ilya dives into Shane’s neck, shrouds himself in the salt-spun sacrament of Shane’s skin. Fucks him deep, dredges up every impact they’ve endured and pays it forward. Scar tissue, the dull green memory of month-old bruises, fresh marks and plastered gashes. All of it brand fucking new. 

“You feel so good.” Shane digs his heels into Ilya’s ass, goads him on. “So fucking big.”

Ilya’s hardly immune to flattery. Shane’s own big dick is leaking between their stomachs, sliding against Ilya’s skin as he gets Shane’s ear in his mouth. 

“You want me deep?”

“Jesus, yes.” Shane ups his legs in answer, slings them over Ilya’s shoulders and folds himself in half. 

Shane’s sweat sticks to his skin to mingle with his own. Is there a doubling of the magic here? Something too strong to scrape and bottle. Something they would have to tear off his dead hide before he sold it willingly. Vigor. It seeps into Ilya, beads its way into the interstitial spaces, fills the cisterns of his wounded body. 

He bends himself with the simplicity of single purpose. “Fuck, Shane.” Says it, does it, thinks it, snaps his jaws around it and soaks it up with all his senses. Pounds and prods until Shane slackens out, pools to the moldable amalgamation that can only say Ilya’s name. 

He knows this brow-bent look on Shane. A moue of the lips, will bearing down on pleasure. It’s easy for Shane to come like this, friction and fullness spurring him on. 

“Don’t,” Ilya warns, shaking his head as he fucks Shane faster. Grabs at solid muscle, sliding between the bulked parentheses of Shane’s knees by his ears. Shane’s nails drag a blunt line down his back, soft-shredding an anchor into his skin. 

Ilya is praised for his lightness on the ice. Nimble, deft. A lightning strike, a loosed arrow. Weightless. This deadly buoyancy threatens to carry him away on the worst nights. There is no bench press goal that can erase this storybook fear, this wingspread dread. That he will float away on a current he cannot grasp in his hands, cast out from the solid earth beneath his feet.

“Ilya, fuck.”

Shane’s kissing sloppy, all gnashed teeth and blind lips. He sucks a starburst of sharp pain at Ilya’s fat lip, better than a slap to the face. Wakes him up, his grin tinged pink. Shane is heavy enough for the both of them. 

“I want you on top of me.”

Ilya pulls out and slides up to the head of the bed, takes the sheets with him in a tangled mess. He drags Shane along, hair-held, tugs him up until Shane’s straddling Ilya’s legs, bracing his hands over Ilya’s aching knees and presenting him with the magnificent spread of his back. Goes in easy when Ilya thumbs his cock back inside. 

Shane will do all the work if Ilya leans back against the headboard and lets him run. A lovely way to watch Shane in motion, seared in the spotlights of Shane’s hellbent straddle. Better when Ilya’s lazy-soft, melted into the syrup of a second day together or the rarefied luxury of a cancelled flight. 

Ilya snatches Shane’s hair and arches him back, contorts him until Shane goes still. Ilya’s one-night hungry and itching for work.

“Not like that.”

Ilya hauls him back until Shane’s on his lap, bent awkward to get Ilya’s hands behind his knees to pull up. Ilya braces his feet against the bed and fights the slip of the sheets. Shane’s big body piles onto him, hands limp at his sides, head knocked back against Ilya’s shoulder. It’s cramped and sweaty and it hurts just right. 

“Hold still.”

The use of Shane’s body is a rainbow all its own. Active reds, passive blues, up on tiptoes yellows and down on knees greens. Tensed into knots or slumped loose against him like now. Ilya loves them all, these shades of Shane that bend the light into something brighter. Ilya has to sweat and strain to move Shane’s deadweight around but he loves that, too. Loves to nose his strength against Shane’s and find it matched. 

“Deep enough?”

Ilya’s ribs give a furious start as he rocks Shane up and down, echoed by the heave-huff Shane gives when Ilya presses his legs back. Splays them both into a sore spot and fucks up into Shane’s warm, open body. They’re both purpose-built for violence.

“OhmygodIlyafuck.” Shane’s head lolls against him, teeth grit together and his words barely trying.

He guides Shane’s hands to hold his own legs up. Exposed, vulnerable, soft in the belly — Shane falls to prey with such ease. Ilya splits his grip, sending one hand up to Shane’s neck and one down to the half-bent fold of Shane’s stomach. He grinds his palm down, pressing beneath Shane’s belly button. 

“My cock is there.”

Shane’s throat jumps against his hand, emitting noises more felt than heard. Underground tremors, pulsing like a heartbeat, like the drip-drip-throb of Shane’s cock at ultraviolet attention in the empty air. Shane is a boulder on top of him, marble that Ilya will gladly push up a mountain every night for the rest of his life. Ilya’s breath comes in shaky, working against Shane’s body weighing him down.

“Like I am jerking off inside you.”

He can’t actually feel anything through the thick wall of Shane’s abs. That would take an entirely different kind of animal than Ilya. He drags his lips over the sweat on Shane’s back, sucking open-mouthed as he moves his hand up and down in familiar parody. Shane’s watched him do this plenty of times on the outside.

“I like using you like this.” Ilya closes his hand over Shane’s throat, just long enough to feel the shudder run down and squeeze his cock. Ilya smiles into the slope of Shane’s shoulder, easy as animal urge takes over. His body moves against the close confines of Shane above him, claws out the space he needs and glints in the darkness. 

Ilya’s hand snakes blindly up the curve of Shane’s jaw, drags its scales against the soft rasp of stubble and strong bone. He finds the throbbing edge of Shane’s cut and presses, teases the edge of the raw part. Another set of lips for Ilya to love on. 

It’s the closest thing to a snarl he’s ever heard out of Shane, ever heard out of another human being. A pained noise, brutal, painted into the watercolor blur of pleasures incomprehensible to the outside world. 

That’s the gift of pain. Taken, received, offered, accepted – it just exists. For one starburst moment everything slides into present tense.

“Make me come.” Ilya digs. Pushes down against the phantom bulge of his cock inside Shane, pushes at the boundary of bandage and blood pulsing on Shane’s face. 

Shane can barely move. He has no leverage, no grip on himself where he’s sweatboxed against Ilya. His stomach flexes under Ilya’s hand, muscle rolling as his cock bobs in front of him. He’s still holding his legs up, his feet en pointe as he struggles to muster any rhythm. Ilya pushes harder.

“Fuck,” Shane barks, squirming in Ilya’s grip before he goes perfectly still. Breathes through his mouth in hitchy bursts that nudge his ribs out. Desperate frustration, a cord twisted just tight enough to show some fray.

“I’ll clean it off.”

Shane gives a tight roll of his hips, leans into the bastard dig of Ilya’s hands. “When you’re done. I’ll clean your dick off.”

Ilya’s toes curl into the bed, pushing at the duvet mounded by his foot. He turns his head, where Shane won’t be able to see him bite his cheek and smooth the giddy smile out of his mouth. 

“Like this is treat? Wipe my balls with your dirty underwear?” Ilya teases, tracing softly down the edge of a bandage. His balls are pulling tight beneath them. He presses his lips together, drags the tip of his nose over Shane’s skin.

“No.” Shane shakes his head, hisses when Ilya’s hand grazes split skin. “My mouth.”

“Fuck,” Ilya groans into the smattering of freckles on Shane’s shoulder. Shane always finds a way to win.

“I’ll be good, I’ll,” Shane snuffles, dripping from both ends. “I’ll get everything. Promise.”

Shane grinds down, mortar and pestle against Ilya’s cock inside him. Every fraction of an inch pushes Ilya closer, threads up his spine and curls his lip back. He spreads his fingers down to curl into the dark thatch of Shane’s pubic hair, twists until Shane shudders against him.

“Everything?” Ilya whispers. It’s what Ilya always wants. He sucks at Shane’s skin, vees his fingers over the base of Shane’s heavy cock and digs into Shane’s injured face. Wonders if he’ll find a stripe of blood under his fingernail later, if he’ll slide the edge of his tooth under it when Shane isn’t looking.

“Please, I’ll be good, let me.” Shane writhes against Ilya’s fraying edges and tugs, squeezes around him like he can milk Ilya from the inside. “Please, Ilya.”

Shane didn’t even know he was strong here until Ilya showed him. Ilya reaches down to throttle his grip around Shane’s balls, pins him from both ends and fucks into the everything Shane offers. Welcomes obliteration with his eyes closed and Shane’s sweat soaking onto his lips. 

His head swims, Shane’s weight the only thing keeping him rooted to the earth as he comes, weightless and buried all at once. Shane shakes, straining as he holds his legs open and works the strength only Ilya knows. 

“Good boy.” Ilya’s vision limns to white as he makes his body move, still pulsing as he snatches Shane’s hands away from his dutiful position and pushes him down. Tilts Shane forward with the brute satisfaction that he can fuck the orgasm right out of him, love this end of him just as red and raw. Knows where the magic lives, how to bend and scrape and steal every drop. There is so little of Shane to call his own, but he can claim this greatest height for himself.

“Ilya,” Shane pleads, a hiccup, barely managing the last vowel.

“I know.” Ilya knows this frantic clutch of Shane’s body around him so well, knows it like a phantom limb when he’s alone in Shane-drenched bedsheets. “Do it.”

Ilya drops the reins and races past the rending pain in his knee and his ribs and the phantom aches on the horizon, leans into now and stays there until Shane gasps his name and goes gooey in his grip. Shane falls to forearms and Ilya pulls out, too fast to feel good for either of them. At least the view is good.

“You promised,” Ilya tuts as Shane tries to fall forward into a heap. Ilya shifts and spreads himself out wider, hazy at the edges as he sinks into his body and stares at the meditative sight of Shane’s used hole. 

Marleau picks up self-help tips the way he picks up women – at a constant rotation and with increasingly dubious peer review. He’d found Marleau stock still with his eyes closed after practice once, even when Ilya had flicked a towel at him. “Why are you taking nap standing up like fucking horse, Marly?” Turns out a bartender with two kids and a butterfly tattoo on her lower back had put him on to “positive visualization,” “it’s great, Roz, just close your eyes and picture something that makes you feel safe and centered.”

It’s nobody’s fucking business if the thing that makes Ilya feel safe and centered is Shane’s asshole looking like it just lost a fight.

“Come here.” Ilya slaps at Shane’s mottled hip, a lazy effort that Shane still obeys.

Shane’s shaky, wavering on sea-legs as he turns himself around. Captivating inelegance, this disruption to Shane’s muscular grace. He clambers over to face Ilya, steely in the eyes and flushed to his ears. His mouth is open, breathy. The slash across his face blazes, angry from Ilya’s devotion.

He stares down at Ilya’s cock, softening against his thigh and love-light gleaming with the shine of good sex. He can’t outstrip Shane here, but there’s a respectable blob of come roped down the side, mingling with top-shelf lube and Ilya’s sweat. Shane blinks, flat-mouthed with a flicker of disgust he quickly swallows. Shane keeps his promises.

Ilya’s dick is oversensitive, makes him hiss when Shane licks him to the tip. Makes his heart skip to watch Shane do it again, commit to the slippery mess of it all and dive back in. Love that gets under the fingernails, love that digs into the dirt and grows roots. 

“Get it.” Ilya’s breath hitches as Shane seals his lips around his cock and drags up, takes everything and pulls off with a wet plop. The sound hits Ilya in the throat, a penalty move. Shane stares at him, lips puffed together and gleaming, waiting for Ilya. Stills himself to the narcotic obedience that tastes so sweet in Ilya’s mouth.

Ilya has known fear in the face of this certainty. One day Shane will go to wipe the grime away and realize that’s all there is. Nothing magic, just sweat and need and a body that won’t be able to fight forever. 

Ilya runs a hand through his own hair, lets out a long exhale as he locks eyes with Shane. He doesn’t need to visualize anything. He can flip his hand, curl two fingers toward himself, come here, and Shane will follow. Safe and centered as Shane’s shoulders rise and fall, crawling up until he’s straddled over Ilya. 

Shane hovers over him, his mouth full and his face as soft and sweet as the mama bird Ilya knew before bedtime. Comes down close to Ilya, where he can smell the animal love on Shane’s face, blood and sweat and tears and all the bottled-up things that sweep Ilya’s pulse-points down to a simmer. He gets his hands on Shane, curved over a hip and tucked over his spot at the back of Shane’s neck. Ilya nods, once, gives permission with his open mouth as Shane parts his lips and spits.

Ilya swallows.

~

A lazy dog. That’s what Shane calls it, when Ilya’s spooned up behind him like this, snuggled inside and unwilling to move.

“We should go to sleep. Your flight’s early.” Shane seems equally reluctant to move. Ilya pushes his face into Shane’s back, blows a raspberry between his shoulderblades.

There are dreadful things lurking outside this warm-bodied oasis. Realtors and paperwork and emails from Yuna that open with “Hey, sweetie!” and then fire off point-blank bullet points right between the eyes. Contracts, endless letters that blur together to stipulate the precise value of his body in motion. 

“What if I just eat your ass?” Ilya slides his hands down, squeezes at the fat swell of Shane’s well-honed side glute. 

“You’re still inside my ass.” Shane shuffles back closer, which makes both of them hum. “And I need to shower. I’m disgusting.”

“No.” Ilya pushes under Shane’s arm, nose-knocks him until Shane lifts it up. “You are delicious.”

Ilya snorts, porcine, buries his face in Shane’s armpit and licks it, swirls his tongue over wet hair. “Mmm, my sty.”

“You are so gross,” Shane snorts with laughter, bubbly.

“You love it.” Ilya dives back in, rougher, slobbers at Shane until he laughs a little too hard. Ilya cries a cinema-worthy “Noooo!” as he’s pushed out of Shane’s body, a tragedy. Rolls Shane’s lazy weight over and pins his arms above his head. Shane puts up a wet noodle of a fight as Ilya licks at him, makes another high-pitched noise that Ilya secretly savors. Shane doesn’t do much giggling outside of Ilya’s arms.

This had been such a pleasant surprise. He’d wanted to fuck Shane the second he saw him, had admired him just as quickly. He likes the projection of Shane as much as anyone who likes hot guys and hockey, but that glossed exterior isn’t the part that wraps itself around Ilya’s insides and squeezes. Shane is fun. He can burp half the alphabet and he throws his controller across the room when he loses a video game. He’s silly and crass and he’ll throw his body against Ilya’s and laugh until he has tears in his eyes. 

Ilya squeezes his hands around Shane’s wrists, rubs his face in Shane’s armpit. He stinks just right. He leans up to hover his face over Shane’s, smiling as Shane leans up for a kiss.

“I do.” Shane grazes his lips over Ilya’s. “Love it.”

“What do you love?” Ilya kisses him back, tongue-first, fishing for it.

“You. When you smell like me. When we smell like each other.” Shane can slide back to earnest so quickly. Bright pools in his eyes, freshly-squeezed and lucid. Too sweet sometimes, juiced into Ilya’s brain too quickly for him to metabolize it. 

“Is that weird?” 

Shane stares up at him, limpid. Shane can crack him to brilliance, light him up so bright he’s cauterized. Love and pain on the same spectrum, a hedgehog between his ribs bristling and sharp. Fells him at the knee. 

Ilya opens his mouth and finds something has crawled into his throat, bullfrogged around him and stolen his words. No, it’s not weird. Yes, it’s so fucking weird but so am I. Maybe we never stopped being weird kids.

He has soaked so much of Shane into his body. Things that seemed weird and gross to his childhood imagination have brought him glimpses of peace, moments of white-out bliss that he never thought he’d find in the land of the living. He should be full all the time, not shrouded in this endless hunger that nibbles away at his precious time with Shane.

He kisses down Shane’s neck, butts into all the cells that have only ever known a life with Ilya. Shane has soaked him up, too.

What is love if not transubstantiation? Home if not some cool, quiet place that smells like the salt of their bodies hewn into the earth, sprouted up and soaked to the bone with each other? Some nights he wishes he could fall asleep in the soft cradle of Shane’s body and never wake up.

“Hey, Ilya, hey.”

Shit. Shane has pulled his thumb out of the dam in Ilya’s chest. Ilya blinks, finds his face wet. 

He has cried in front of Sveta. Drunk, ashamed, coked into a rictus he can no longer fight. “No, Ilyushenka, no, no, don’t cry, you’re alright, it’s ok.” An immediate abatement, plugging the holes and bailing the decks as fast as possible. Even his mother was quick to distract him from his grade school woes, shooing his brother away and scooping him up for sweets and songs.

Shane never stops him. He just pulls Ilya close to his chest and soaks it up. Makes a watershed of his body, accepts these tides that overflow from Ilya. Waits while Ilya’s tears sink through the topsoil and find their way back to the ocean. 

“I’m sorry.”

That old buoyancy, pooling at his feet to bring him back out to sea. One day, everyone will notice that he doesn’t really belong here, that he has smiled so hard at the knives in his feet that he has forgotten this isn’t his place, like he has forgotten his birthdays and the wounded cadence of ancient love poems.

His gladiators were marched in from all corners of the Empire. Had he recognized his future in those borrowed swords and shields? He is a thing of muscle and blood, bought and sold, skated out and scraped down when he’s done. He is moving closer to Shane but he will still be stuck in this forced march, this endless abduction from the only thing that’s ever felt like home.

“I don’t want to leave.” This bald acknowledgment of the truth always leaves him bare. Needy and foolish and aching for love poems and happy endings. Ilya knows better than this, that he is lucky to have a shadow of a life with Shane. He barely owns his own body. Gluttonous, to wish he could own Shane’s as well.

“I know.” Shane’s big arms wrap around him, squeezing until the air leaves Ilya’s lungs. “I don’t want you to, either.”

Shane smells so good. Ilya nuzzles in, ferrets out all the warmth and strength and goodness that seeps from Shane’s body. Accepts Shane’s kisses and doesn’t let himself look away when Shane wipes a tear from his cheek. Shane wants what’s best for him.

“It’ll be so much easier when you’re in Ottawa.”

There is such faith in Shane’s smile. Ilya tucks this seed between his teeth and cracks it in half. It will be easier. It will be better. Ilya summons this vast horizon, this future perfect with Shane curled up beside him, nested into his life for good. 

“I know,” Ilya nods, trying to mirror Shane’s smile. 

“Do you want me to tell you a story?” Shane’s finger slides down the side of Ilya’s ear as unexpected sweetness rushes into his mouth. This is Shane’s tether when he’s floating unbounded in his head. 

Ilya sniffs and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “With the running away bunny?”

“No.” Shane shakes his head and pulls Ilya in closer. “I’ll never run away from you.”

Do all children’s stories have this kernel of melancholy? An inoculation against the bitter fruit life will sow in among the sweet. 

“I know. I would catch you,” Ilya whispers. 

“Of course you would. Because I’d let you.”

Shane wraps him up tight and paws at his hair, gets Ilya settled across his chest. They carry a few moments in wordless comfort, with Ilya’s ear pressed to the lub-dub of Shane’s heart. He matches his breath to Shane’s, slows everything down, lets the lights dim and the earth settle around him.

“Ok. The baby beavers go to sleep in their lodge.” Shane’s chest rises and falls beneath them. “The little puffins go into their burrow. Am I doing it right?”

“Yes. What is puffing?” Ilya curls in closer and slides his hand over the warm swell of Shane’s pec.

“It’s a bird.”

“Fucking birds. It makes weird noise?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?” Shane shrugs. “The seals go to sleep in their … I think it’s a pod? No. Rookery! The baby seals go to sleep in their rookery. The little lynx goes to sleep in his den.”

“What is lynx?”

“It’s like a cat. With funny ears.”

“You are making these up,” Ilya grouses into Shane’s skin. 

“Shush. I’m doing Canadian animals.” Shane kisses his forehead, and for a moment Ilya is half his size, a smaller, safer iteration of himself that tucks its nose under Shane’s arm and breathes him in.

“The baby bear goes to sleep in his cave. The baby moose goes to sleep in his … moose hole.”

“Shane. This is not where moose lives.”

“How do you know?”

“I am Russian. Not stupid.” Ilya slings his leg up higher, stretches himself as wide across Shane as he can.

“Well you’ll be a boring Canadian soon. And then you’ll see.”

Soon can be so far away. An ever-shifting goal. Shane’s fingers tangle in his hair.

“I will see moose?” Are there moose in Ottawa? Ilya kneads his hand over Shane’s chest, closes his eyes as Shane laughs.

“Yep. You’ll call me from the car and be like, hey babe, just saw another moose hole, can’t believe it.” 

“Will I get out and take moose selfie?”

“Absolutely not. They’re super aggressive, like they will fuck up your car. One of them ruined my uncle’s Volvo.”

“Oh, shit.” How big is a moose? He will look this up later.

“The baby elk go to sleep with their herd.” Shane’s voice rumbles softly under him, a motor that shakes Ilya down to his bones and settles him. 

Shane is terrible at telling stories but he’s good at humming Ilya back to himself. Ilya smiles and sniffles until his nose clears. Everything smells like Shane. Warm and soft and dark, banked by the shoals of Shane’s arms around him. Ilya is safe in the soil and one day, in a future he will take on faith, all of these burrowed nights and borrowed days will burst into fruition.

Ilya closes his eyes and lets Shane’s voice lull him back underground, to this small place they can call their own. Shane’s hands are in his hair and he will sleep well tonight. 

“And the baby loons go to sleep in their nest.”

Everything will be better when he’s in Ottawa.