Archive of Our Own

On the day the junior league had inaugurated Shane, he was greeted with fists in his hair. At fifteen he felt the glory of it, like winning again his first award at school—smiling with his wet teeth and bringing the ring of his name.

On the day when Shane was given his first jersey, it came with new clothespins. Sensation whirred awake when the team pierced his inner thighs with them, hands still dirty from picking up their used pucks. The locker room had a musty air, flaunted the humidity of men’s sweat, the iron tang of blood and the raspy streaks of spit-breath. With fierce fingers on him, Shane’s heartrate spiked. His cock throbbed in his pants.

The first time his captain had looked at him, Shane had almost cried. This is what will make me, he’d thought. Power in the refrain and his breath sweet chanting it. His captain was a strong man with stubble and a sharp jaw, back all skin and corded muscle. Shane was curious. His captain had a body to make him sick with envy.

*

Rozanov looks at Shane too.

Often, Rozanov’s presence feels an exaggeration—overdone—like a sun used to boil fish. When he looks at Shane, it is with sharp glinting teeth, and an interest so wide it seems implausible for Shane to be its subject.

Their tiny hotel door clicks shut behind them. Shane stares into Rozanov’s blue-ringed eyes as Rozanov backs him against the wall.

Shane’s heart is thumping in his chest. Since their first meeting, he has been deeply aware of Rozanov’s solid body, as though he could fill a room simply by strolling into it, with keen confidence in his size and the impermeable proof of his strength. A tough game could not weaken Shane’s legs like this. Sweat coagulates on his skin, close-knit with its hum as Rozanov runs a thumb over Shane’s lower lip, seeming to loom above him.

He undresses Shane easily. Like a summer storm, hands flowing over Shane’s body and hot everywhere. He maneuveurs Shane’s arms upward to loop his T-shirt overhead. He undoes Shane’s belt, then his buttons, and his zipper’s teeth. For a moment Shane is again in the locker room of the junior championships, with only the thinness of his underwear separating him from the truth. Face-flushed, large hands driving apart his underripe legs. He blinks the image out of his eyes, and realizes he is shaking.

Rozanov looks at him, seriously.

“You want?”

*

In the aftermath, Shane wishes, desperately, that Rozanov had just cracked him open and taken him. Like a sack of frog eggs, split apart at the center, clear stream spilling out. Stride in, head out; let’s fuck, aren’t you cold? At least Shane could have blamed the body’s weakness. At least he would not have had to say yes.

*

It takes Shane a surprisingly long time to notice Rozanov’s seen through him. Every fragile word in his mouth.

Now, their hotel is a twelve-level cascade of golden floors, decorative statues mounted over the front entrance. In it, Rozanov’s room rests on the very top. Shane takes a trip up the elevator and finds a place of mimed perfection, where hollow wine bottles garnish the table edge, and casino-ready cards tuck beneath the stony coasters.

“You want me to touch you?” Rozanov asks, his voice butter-cold. Not long after Shane is through the door, he’s gotten Shane on his knees, fastened to the ground by his stare.

Shane nods.

“Why?”

It is routine. “You texted me and said—”

“You sprain my hand from earlier game.” Rozanov’s reply is quick. Shane has to stop himself from wincing at Rozanov’s compression glove, black and tight around his fingers, now raised to Shane’s face. “Now you go all the way to my hotel room because you said you want me to fuck you. With what hand, Hollander?” He lets out a dark laugh. He smells of sweat and hard-boiled desire. “Doctor told me not to use force for a week. That means no practice.”

“I didn’t realize—”

“Did not realize it was serious?”

“You texted me beforehand, telling me to ask you afterwards if I still wanted to—”

“You know, I am already mad at you for injury.” Rozanov’s eyes are ice-sharp. “But you are so, so needy that you expect me to worsen it.” His gaze, pointed to the tent in Shane’s pants, is proudly deliberate. “For you. So you can get off.”

Shane ignores the salt piercing through his eyes. Shame finds him as a wall, crushed against the front of his body. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” He tries to cover himself. Rozanov pins his arms back. Against comprehension of the words, and with his head bowed, “Fine. I—I can suck your cock. I can use your leg. I… I just need you. I can do anything you need me to do if you just let me—”

Shane cuts himself off. He hasn’t meant to say that. There is a long stretch of silence.

Once piqued, Rozanov’s curiosity is unassailable. The gleam in his eyes is a stronger promise than any one from his mouth. “Do you like my leg that much?”

Shane shakes his head.

“I don’t care.” Rozanov says. “Lie down. On the floor.”

Shane blinks. “I don’t want—”

Rozanov swings his foot. The kick lands on Shane’s cock. “I think you do.”

Shane gulps. He has no passion for rebuking Rozanov’s assumptions. He echoes, “On the floor?”

“Where else?” Rozanov asks. “On sofa, or on the bed? Fancy hotel will be dirty.” His mouth is ruby-red. “Hands behind your back.”

From Rozanov, Shane learns a unique humiliation. It floods through him, dark and wet. When his gaze drifts low, it occurs to him that Rozanov is still wearing his shoes.

Despite himself, Shane obeys. The tiles should be cold under his spine. He does not feel it, with his shirt glued to his back, and his hot breath coming viscous to his throat. Through the window, the wind rasps and laves at his neck. Rozanov lifts his shoe.

Through squinted eyes, Shane studies its leather shine. His pulse is racing so fast he wonders if he might die from it.

The pressure, at first, skims the bare surface of his perception. As Rozanov shifts more weight onto his foot, it swells, heat hanging heavy like a fruit. It grows intolerable when he digs his heel into the base of Shane’s clothed cock, drawing from Shane’s mouth a moan he can’t explain away, to which Rozanov starts rocking his shoe until the pain is a spark in Shane’s stomach, ameliorated by pleasure.

“Fucking—” Shane whimpers. “Hurts, I need—” He writhes. But with his hands pressed under his spine, he has no escape; he ends up buckling into Rozanov’s foot, white-hot tremor through his head. “Hurts, hurts, I need to—”

“Hurts,” Rozanov scoffs. His voice takes on a sharp edge. “Did you hurt my hand on purpose? You must have seen me coming. I saw in your eyes. 20/20 vision. Fake fucking glasses.”

“Of course not.” Shane bites his tongue. “Why would I—”

“Because you want me to touch you like this,” Rozanov says. “No hands. Just my boot.” He chokes out a laugh. “You know, if you want something, you could have just asked.”

Shane stifles a whine. He had not, at least he hopes, injured Rozanov on purpose, but he would not lie and say the opportunity did not cross his mind—when his stick had connected, when he’d heard Rozanov’s wrist pop. There, he’s already dragged his pride along asphalt for it. But he’s also had a bad week. When over-the-counter pills cease to work for his headache, he tends to seek something smoky and caustic. Like alcohol, but stronger. Rozanov had used that phrase once.

“Technically, you still have your left hand,” Shane says. “Your argument doesn’t make sense. It’s only an excuse.”

“Who is making excuses?” Rozanov pivots over to climb over him, planting both hands on Shane’s shoulders. He bends his knees to accommodate the new angle, but his shoe doesn’t relent. Leaning in, he speaks against Shane’s tender ear, “If you like my boot, next time you will be licking it.”

“I’m—I don’t—” Shane trails off. He understands defeat from Rozanov’s smile. Rozanov presses deep into the head of Shane’s cock, tilting against the slit. “Fuck, fuck—Rozanov, you need to get off. It’s too much—”

“What did you say?” Rozanov demands. “Earlier, when begging me to touch you. You can do anything I need you to do?”

Shane avoids his gaze. “No. I just meant—”

“No?” Rozanov says, coolly. “I know exactly what you meant.” Of course, he remembers. “Even if you did not even finish your sentence, back then.”

The expectation is clear. “You’re such an asshole.” Shane had only said the words out of need. Should have known Rozanov wouldn’t listen. Should have just shoved a fist into his mouth and kept himself from spilling out. He tries for a violent twist, to little effect. “Seriously, you are so—”

Rozanov shifts his foot, the new slant of it torturous.

“Okay, I am asshole,” Rozanov says, with so much cheer Shane regrets finding any use in the insult. “Fact-checked. What is next? My name is Ilya Rozanov. I am from Russia. I play for the Raiders. I like to make Shane Hollander desperate. Shane Hollander is desperate for me. I—”

“Fuck you,” Shane spits. Rozanov’s eyes gleam. “What are you—fuck, don’t put your whole weight on it.” Shane screws his eyes shut. The coil in his stomach builds. All the world’s sensation is balanced on the diamond-points of his nerves. “Don’t! I’m going—” He thrashes. Abruptly, shaking all over, hot with the recognition of Rozanov’s physicality—the generosity of his flesh. “I’m—I can’t—can’t, okay?—You’re heavy, don’t—”

A flash of teeth, camera-quick. “Say please.”

“Please,” Shane grinds out, the word volatile through his teeth. It sparks through the air. “Please don’t put your whole weight on my cock. Please. Please.”

“Okay,” says Rozanov. He goes motionless, but offers no other mercy. His mouth is remorseless. “What was the sentence you wanted to say?”

“I—I—” Shane stammers, nausea intimate with his chest. “I can do anything you need me to do as long as you let me come.” His hips jerk, mind whiting out. There goes his pride. The mistake registers when Rozanov twists his shoe with doubled intensity. “Wait—” All orders damned, Shane frees his hands. But Rozanov’s shoulders are boulders under his punches, and Shane ends again with his wrists to the tiles, like dead feathers on a tray, lain out for picking. He looks straight into Rozanov’s eyes. “Not like this.” Voice a garbled sob, “I didn’t—didn’t mean like this. Rozanov—”

“Rozanov, what?” Rozanov snarls. “Come. You wanted to.” He adds, when Shane gives him a betrayed look, “Exactly like this.”

There is nothing to do, then, but to lie there and take it. Shane can feel his animal faith crumbling in his chest, dignity sawed off like a tongue. He wants it back, but it is rutting into Rozanov’s heel that takes him to completion. He dreads the thought of heading back to his hotel in soiled pants, but he’d rather do that than accept Rozanov’s offer to wear his instead.

Two months later, Shane returns. Some vultures have iron stomachs. Shane is one of those birds, trained to careen to one magnet.

*

The other junior rookies had been tall, taller than Shane. That did not spare their bodies from performance. Hands hiked up their jerseys and pressed cigarettes to their stomachs. Many cried, kicked the older players, and pummeled the air. By his turn, Shane well-understood his options: stand there and stomach it, or lie down and take it. If he’d been a smarter child, he would’ve chosen one.

Later that night Shane saw again the flame’s tip, as round as a bead of saliva from the lip. He couldn’t help but dig a fingernail in his belly, chasing that peculiar sear. He imagined again that firefly in the dark, that spreading tiger pelt in his vein-forest, and frowned when he couldn’t replicate the same ache.

The next day, in the shower, he touched the burn wound’s red crater. Worth married to that brave little ring.

In photos, as in wounds, saturation fades over years. The scar remains on Shane’s stomach only as a white larva of tissue, never a big deal. But when Rozanov holds Shane by the neck and comes over it, Shane knows he can tell what it is.

*

Over his years his days had been a blur—perfecting his backhand, sipping vinegar with milk, scraping his shins upon salt sprinkled on ice. He had seen the strongest players skate on blades and painkillers, sniffing ammonia gas on the benches. Miracles and their drugs. Everybody wanted to play for the NHL. A shy longing rose in Shane’s chest when they spoke of it. It hurt to hide that, like getting motion sick in the backseat of a very fast car, trying not to pitch forward with bile in your throat.

During his third year playing for the juniors, the night the city brought Christmas lights to the street outside his backyard, the snow was falling like gauze from the sky. He was visiting home for the weekend and his parents put a game on. Shots unfolded on TV at breakneck pace. Huddled on the tiles with his legs to his chest, Shane glued his eyes to the screen. Tried not to pick at the scab on his shoulder. When a reporter thrust his microphone towards the captain of the winning team and asked if he would score more goals than his rival this season, Shane asked himself when he’d be granted that honour.

He started dreaming then. He saw himself, in the news, side-by-side with a face unlike his own. He thought, like a knight that would soon face-off his enemy, that he would die to attain it.

*

“Don’t forget, Rozanov’s just won two games in a row,” J.J. says, amid changing into his skates. “With a half-healing knee.”

“Okay,” says Schneider. “We know. What’s the newest news?”

“His knee has healed completely.”

Schneider snorts. “So, what. You think he has a chance on us?”

“Well,” Hayden says. “No. But we might want extra drills.”

“Or,” Schneider drawls. “I could put a giant knife up his ass if he tries anything funny.”

A jingle of wooden hangers erupts in the background. “You’re such a fucking dick.” Taylor whacks Schneider’s head with his stick, grinning. “Don’t put ideas into his head. Fucking faggot probably likes it.”

A resounding bell. Someone plops their bag down onto the ground with a thump. Shane whips his head around alarmingly quick.

“What’s wrong?” Hayden asks.

Shane knows that some jokes matter more than others. He’d had to memorize their patterns.

“No girlfriend yet, Hollander?” His teammates had asked.

“Busy,” Shane said flatly.

“You know,” a wry snort, “if you ever need help getting one—”

Shane did, in fact, get a girlfriend in a few years. He’d wondered if it was wrong for him to be disappointed that he was no longer a rookie. There was no one by his side to stop calling him a fag. It was such a waste.

In the present, Shane fakes a smile.

“Nothing,” he says, as lightly as he can. Then, because Rozanov had told him to make his lies sound authentic, he adds, “Doesn’t Rozanov sleep with a girl every other night? I don’t think he’s…”

Another laugh. “Cap’s right,” says Taylor. He shrugs. “More reason for him to stay in his lane. I don’t think he wants to be bleeding all over his girl when he—”

Shane tries not to scrunch his nose. He doesn’t think Rozanov would be bleeding over a girl first. He’d be bleeding over Shane.

The tardiness of self-disgust is a reason for its accretion. Shane cannot gather the energy inside him to laugh. WIth a straight face, he orders the team out of the locker room and keeps his head high on the way to the ice.

Boston hates Montreal. The crowds jeer. Rozanov spraypaints the rink with his chirps. His confidence makes a reckless smear of his mouth, which he crooks into a blood-coloured smile. Shane catches it like the sun on its harshest day—warned against incandescence. His heart does not beat—he looks away.

Shane wins the face-off. He would not forgive himself otherwise.

*

When Shane tries to retrace the point that had wrenched him down this path, he thinks of Rozanov’s water bottle. He thinks of Rozanov grabbing his face for a kiss before Shane’s found the right place for his hands. Maybe he thinks of the time Rozanov had shoved him into the boards during their first game, his hot breath licking against Shane’s sweaty cheek, the thunderous shape of his shoulder slamming up against Shane, an infusion of dead daylight in his smile. He could hold me down right now, Shane had thought, all the world a technicolor streak in his eyes. He could hold me down and I wouldn’t fight back. I wouldn’t move. I could as well have told him to fuck me like I’m dead.

The referee sent Rozanov to the penalty box after that, leaving Shane alone with his honesty and his tuning-fork breath. But if there was one reprise in Shane’s head for that day it was those meager five seconds, Rozanov’s hands and his strength and the salt-scent of his skin. And then in the evening when Rozanov came knocking, Shane pinned a thumbtack to his thigh to keep his head clear. To stop himself from collapsing at Rozanov’s feet and saying please use me as your toy.

By that point, Shane had little strength to care for the broken conscience inside him. He can count how many times he’d been touched unapologetically in his life. Kids learn to fear adults when they learn their timestables. Even when grubby hands had touched him at school, their owners’ faces would falter when a teacher strode by. At least they had known they were guilty of something. Rozanov walks like he thinks himself a saint.

Shane loves it. The clarity of pain makes him a newborn, ringing without end. The teetering landscape of the world re-saturates when Rozanov’s looking at him.

*

Thirteen, with a late-blooming mouth, the last of his milk teeth falling like petals into his palm. School in Ottawa and growing larynxes in musky June heat. Shane’s voice was still melodic and sweet, like a little bird’s. He couldn’t tell how he must’ve looked to his peers; he hardly had a mirror.

“You don’t want us to fuck up your face?” The kids used to say, holding a paper knife against his cheek. Sunlight streamed through the classroom windows, bright as a goldfinch. It played with Shane’s hair like a wind-up doll’s clothes. “But it’s so cute.”

“Like a girl.”

“Prettier than Lia.”

Lia was the popular girl in class, with stellar report cards and handbags.

“Nicer, too.”

“Very nice.” The warm wet air was incandescent on their skins. Shane almost rolled his eyes. He didn’t tell them he played hockey—tried, once; they wouldn’t believe him. The tallest boy of the bunch took the knife and said, “You know, this could go right up your butt and you wouldn’t complain.”

“Don’t be like that,” another voice sing-songed. “He’s just a late bloomer.”

“We can teach him to speed up.”

“We’re joking,” the beautiful boy said, by the lobe of Shane’s ear. “You know that, right?”

For fuck’s sake, Shane thought. A paper knife. He’d seen cautionary tales of girls with curling irons on their arms. He wondered if someone might put him in a skirt and press a lighter to his thigh. Shane wasn’t learning the WHL rules for nothing. He liked to prepare.

An elbow nudged him, breaking him out of his reverie. “Eat your food.” Shane looked down at his untouched tray. “Aren’t you hungry?”

They ate. Hunger often cranked his classmates up; children were taught so few alibis for their meanness. Illicit pride bubbled through Shane when they transferred vegetables to his plate. Funny how they could always find an excess.

This ensued. Variations spun like looms across lunchtimes. They continued until Shane joined the junior league, when his physical aptitude grew to encapasulate more than his voice. He grew biceps and abs, cut his hair short, like heroes in movies when they left for a long journey. His face began to show up in the news.

*

Shane has a letter knife in his fist when Rozanov knocks on his door. He plants it delicately into Rozanov’s hand. Frowns when Rozanov’s fingers don’t curl up for it.

Rozanov’s eyes narrow. “What’s this?”

“What does it look like?”

“I don’t know,” Rozanov says. He throws a wary glare. “You tell me.”

Shane looks away. The game is a familiar one. He does not know whether to be disappointed that Rozanov isn’t obliging. Eagerness would have helped. Even if Rozanov’s condescending about it.

Shane tries, “Don’t you know what to do with it?”

Rozanov’s throat is pale in the moonlight. Where it cuts into shadow is the line of a horizon. To avoid his gaze, Shane stares at Rozanov’s hands, the dark veins under his skin and the rippling tension in his arms. Rozanov runs a finger under the blade’s glinting edge.

Rozanov asks, “Is what you want?”

Shane hesitates. His cheeks are warm. He rocks back and forth between the options in his head, like a small wooden horse.

“No,” he says. “Nevermind.”

Rozanov lifts an eyebrow and tosses Shane a knowing look, which finds its end as a blistering heat between Shane’s game-sore legs—but he doesn’t press. Doesn’t push. If not for the promise of an aftermath in his eyes, Shane would not have cared.

Rozanov always knows.

Shane doesn’t think mind-reading is a very polite hobby. Even worse, Rozanov likes to delay the reveal of his knowledge. Shane has to guess the day on which Rozanov would finally fish it out from his pockets—Shane’s made-up crime, a receipt of a year’s age. Shane would pay, then. Languid leisure blooming on Rozanov’s smile. He wishes Rozanov would just rip the band-aid right off.

At home, the knife hilt is a throbbing coolness in Shane’s hand. He doesn’t stop thinking about it.

*

The first time Shane had learned embarrassment, it was on the ice.

Shane doesn’t count all the times he’d wet himself or screamed in kindergarten or cried in front of his mom’s friends. Everyone does that, his parents said. He was instructed not to worry. But this moment—when he was four and tripping every other minute on his skates, chewing on his wobbly lip with his ruddy cheeks wet, nose pink from the cold as the coach drags him out to the center, circumferenced by the grubby hands of his peers—

Shane remembers it clearly. The sensation had never changed. The illusion of his skin turning inside out, wrinkled up. Limbs split apart, one skewer in each leg, pores torn open with his fat poured out for viewing—Yakizakana, thrown on a rack with a bed of flames on his back. Grilled fish seared until crispy on the outside. It was the first dish he’d been taught the name of at home, a name he seldom hears around him these days. Not even Mom uses it anymore.

It’s Shane’s favourite dish.

*

Rozanov is in Shane's face again two months into winter, when the city is crawling with blocked roads and dirty snow. Shane injures his finger and wins through the ache.

At night, Rozanov drags Shane up by the hair and hauls him towards his hotel bed. Shane ends up with his hands tied against the headboard and his briefs in his mouth, his tongue nursing the taste of desire. Rozanov has Shane’s back pinned to the mattress, and beneath that a slick hand reaching deep into his hole. When Shane’s body jerks, he brings his teeth to Shane’s nipples and mauls the expanse of his chest. Shane cannot fault Rozanov for knowing how to find him at his most vulnerable, wherein lies the fuse to detonate his last bits of control—he’d been asking for it. He bites onto his underwear to stifle his whimpers.

Rozanov quickly understands the gag is useless. Shane is loud either way. Shane almost flinches when Rozanov yanks the fabric out of his mouth, dragging with it a moan out of Shane’s throat. When Rozanov jabs three fingers into Shane’s prostate, Shane’s back lifts off the bed in a painful arch, the curve of a cracked whip sparking to its peak.

“I want—”

Rozanov narrows his eyes. “What.”

Shane writhes against his binds. “I want you.”

Rozanov snorts. “I am me.”

“That’s not—” The headboard rattles. “You know what I mean.”

Rozanov pulls his hand out with an obscene sound. He shoves it into Shane’s mouth. “Like this?”

Shane moans from the stretch. He shakes his head, blinks back the sting in his eyes.

Rozanov makes an irritated sound.

“I didn’t mean that,” Shane rushes to say, when Rozanov permits it.

Rozanov clicks his tongue. “I don’t know, then.” He wipes his fingers dry on the sheets, with his nose scrunched. Shane tries not to let his face fall. “Tell me.”

Words have never felt so large in Shane’s throat.

“I—I want—”

Rozanov swears first in Russian, and then in English.

“Stupid fucking slut,” he says, slapping Shane’s cock. He keeps it in a steady grip, pressing his thumb into the head. Shane whimpers. “All those years of school and can’t even finish a sentence.”

“I’m not,” Shane blurts, which earns him a hard stare. “I mean, I’m sorry—” He tosses his head to the side, eyes focused on the wall. “I can talk.” He’s doing nothing, now, to prevent the hot flow of tears down his cheeks. “I—”

Rozanov slaps him again. “Look at me when you talk.”

Shane does. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I want you to—fuck!” Rozanov’s nail sinks deeper into the slit of his cock, sending a pulse of sharp pain through him, a spiked drink searing its way up his nerves, burning through the flesh. Sobs pour from his mouth. “No, stop, stop, stop, that’s not what I meant—you know it, please—”

Rozanov sighs. “You want me to fuck you?”

Shane nods. He can’t think.

“Ask.”

Shane swallows. His heart hammers through his chest. The room swims in his vision. “Please.”

A long stretch of silence. Rozanov tips Shane’s chin back to center, forcing Shane to look into his eyes. His smile is a crescent, a frightening moon.

“Ask me.”

Shane feels his face pinch up.

“Please, Rozanov,” he whispers, giving in. “Please, please fuck me.” And then because Rozanov won’t budge, he adds, louder, “I need you, Rozanov. I’ll do anything. I’d let you hurt me. Please, please, please—”

The relief he feels when Rozanov’s expression dissolves, flushing dark, is short-lived. Strong hands grab onto his hips and flip him around without warning. Shane has no time to steady himself on his knees.

Rozanov sinks into him in one hard thrust. Shane clutches onto the sheets under him and buries his head into his elbows, too far gone to care for the knocking of the bed, the screech of the floorboard and the panting on his neck. He comes once, twice. Rozanov doesn’t stop pounding into him, his hands like coal on Shane’s hips when he tries to crawl away, breath a wild torch. A voice tells Shane to take it take it keep taking it because he is Rozanov’s dirty little slut, it’s what he had asked for, it’s what he needs. He made his choice when he’d begged so desperately to be fucked. It is what he needs, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Shane sobs into the pillow, helpless to respond. By the time Rozanov comes, Shane is wrung out and dry, the ache in his cheeks bright and consuming.

The films of heat on the walls peel graciously back. Shane’s skin dwindles into a warm sizzle as Rozanov cleans him up, wordless, wiping his tears away with a towel. He brushes his thumbs over Shane’s eyes. He does not kick Shane out until beyond midnight.

The sensation never changes, Shane remembers, belatedly. What changes is who handles the skewers.

*

Rozanov wins all his next games. Shane watches him on the TV at a sports bar, lips pressed thin into a ruler-straight line. Rozanov skates fast, shoots brutal, terrorizes his opponents. Shane remembers he’s not special for getting slammed into boards by those hands.

People say Rozanov delivers great speeches. Shane’s never doubted that truth. Boston’s team spirit as impregnable as a fortress, thirsty for victory, and their collective joy is thunderous though heard through a speaker. The shot cuts to a clip of Rozanov stripping his shirt off as his teammates pour champagne over his body. Rozanov wipes his face, but pays no attention to the droplets rolling down his chest, running along his abs and disappearing into the V at his hips. He gives the camera a sultry smile and winks on the flash.

Shane looks away, at the end. He’s certain Rozanov knows what he is doing. Calling the attention of every girl who’s blushing at their screens. By midnight, he will probably have a fan mouthing at his belt—Shane wonders how many people he will make come in a weekend.

Rozanov also knows that Shane watches his games.

Shane makes himself join in when the rest of his team calls Rozanov an asshole. He does not let them know that he thinks Rozanov shouldn’t be called that by anyone but Shane.

“I think you need to loosen up,” Hayden tells Shane, later. He stares pointedly at Shane’s clenched fist around his drink. Among the Metros, who are hollering, laughing, clapping each other’s backs, Shane knows he’s the only one as stiff as a statue.

Shane blinks a few times. He makes an effort to recline back into his seat. “I’m fine.”

“Pike has a point,” Wilson chirps up. He’s leaning against the table, one hand curled around his third beer of the night. “You’ve been off lately. Could use a lay.”

“Not interested,” Shane says.

Wilson shrugs. He points at a brunette in a booth not so far away. “Many for you to choose from tonight. It’s a rare chance.”

“Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you get it,” Schneider quips. He swings an arm over Shane’s shoulders. Shane tries not to shift. “What’s the chemical called? Endorphins?”

Shane’s throat feels tight. “That, and dopamine.”

“Jackie has a single friend,” Hayden supplies. “If you want.”

Shane’s head hurts.

“No,” he says, grimly. “I was hoping you’d spend more time finding Boston bones to break than time finding me new girls to fuck.”

*

In the class where Shane had no failing grades and no seatmate, a schoolbag plopped down on the chair next to him.

“Pretty,” the bag’s owner’s mouth said. It had sounded sincere.

Shane was surprised to have a new friend. He was fifteen, now, nowhere near lithe. His teammates gifted him red heels as an honor and he felt like Cinderella, searching and winning a missing stiletto for his foot.

Later, he learned the mouth at school had approached him as a bet.

From his parents, Shane got a new pair of skates. Didn’t have to chop off his feet to find a perfect fit. He smiled when he slid onto the ice with them for the first time, riding the thrill of wearing the sharpest blades he had owned. He had caught up with the facts over the years: hockey was the only intrinsic part of his body, the sliver of himself he must keep clean. An arena was the place blending his limbs into coherence. Polishing the skates slotted into Shane’s routine, easy as breathing.

Playing well in games saved him. He clung onto it. Over the years he spent graduating from pretty girl to captain, he’d sharpened his fangs and learned how to dodge knives. Carved a space for himself at the top and never backed down.

He didn’t stop dreaming about the little red heels.

Shane knows of his kind. His first love is the ice. And then the insect in his backyard for struggling among the weeds. And then, a boy. Except the last in that litany of things is not love, not really; unless the boy is faceless, a mind, a shape-shifting figure, and unless touching him is like catching a ghost in flight. One moment dark-haired—the next second blond. A clean jaw at times and other times stubbled.

Only in Shane’s sleep are there landscapes of him rolling around with a body: the body not like his own in manure-smelling meadows; the body with hands holding his head in seawater; the body with boots kicking his light-leaking mouth; the body with a mouth kissing spindrift to his neck. Futile abstractions. None of the dreams he regrets grow into fruition.

Shane grows out of deviance by the time his voice is halfway between his mom and his dad’s. A year finds him with a bank account. It surprises him to be chased after for the first time in his life, the way he’d once trailed his seniors like a shy dog. One day in midsummer—that’s when he gets his girlfriend.

He wonders why he tastes metal when she kneels for him for the first time.

*

On the ice, they fight. On camera, the interviewers ask Shane if he’d overtake Rozanov’s record in the next month. Shane doesn’t tell them that if getting him to say Rozanov’s name for clickbait is the goal, encouragement is redundant. As is, he doesn’t think he can keep Rozanov’s name out of his mouth if he tried. Sodium peroxide is an inorganic compound with disinfecting properties. Perhaps Shane should try rinsing out his mouth.

Somtimes, Rozanov is in a bad mood when he loses. His gaze is the shake of air under a drumhead. They fuck stupid about it, and Shane finds himself as a stool, enduring Rozanov’s shoe on his back. They end with their bodies hollow. A clarinet and a flute.

Sometimes, because he does not apologize, Rozanov showers Shane with erratic trinkets. When it is Shane’s birthday, Rozanov gives him a pair of small clamps attached by a chain.

“What’s this for?” Shane asks.

“Your tits,” Rozanov says. He holds the clamps up to Shane’s bare chest.

Shane blinks. The air feels choked.

He wonders if Rozanov sees in him a girl. Even Rozanov, who has seen the proof of Shane’s plays on the ice, and does not pardon him for it. It crosses him also to think, perhaps, that Rozanov is joking. Shane knows himself as a self-service counter—for the purchase of laughs.

Those don’t tend to light themselves on fire. Shane should not feel like he’s been chucked into the sun.

When the gold pinches around his nipples, hard and flushed dark, he feels beautiful. Flushing, his eyes drift.

“How did you know it was my birthday?” he whispers.

Rozanov pauses. For a second, the light is in his eyes, blue flame in blue bottle.

“You have Wikipedia,” Rozanov says.

“Oh,” Shane says. The publicity of his personal life tends to make him tense up, a pervasive threat. His avid fans love it. When it occurs to him that Rozanov might look him up too, he wonders if a spider feels warm upon being caught in a showcase, or if influence by sight is Rozanov’s privilege alone. He makes himself say, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” says Rozanov.

Shane had once searched Rozanov up too. His birthday is in one month—Shane only remembered because the dates were so close. He hadn’t thought to get Rozanov anything.

He expels the thought. They wouldn’t see each other for another few months. Rozanov gets Shane on his back and hovers over him, tugging at the clamps before spitting on them. He brings Shane to the peak hands-free and then he helps Shane remove his bedsheets for the laundry. The latter makes Shane shudder. Being Rozanov’s observational subject seems a precarious choice. Shane shouldn’t be so arrested by that.

*

In the time they don’t see each other, they exchange texts. Rozanov mostly sends thirst traps and teases. Other than that, scaffolds for their clandestine meetings. Shane deletes the pictures whenever he can. Never before shoving a hand down the front of his shorts and making muffled sounds into his pillow. Trying not to tear his face off.

Shane keeps the secret to himself because it is pathetic. Rozanov would never let Shane hear the end of it if he finds out. The extent of Shane’s success is cut short when Rozanov calls him while he has a toy inside him.

Rozanov has never called Shane before. They’re not close like that. Shane doesn’t think he wants Rozanov’s voice to haunt his house. Once every few months is humiliating enough.

The ringtone is a loud trill through the room.

“Shut up,” Shane hisses, slapping at his phone with his free hand. The remote of his vibrator falls to the carpet. He climbs off his bed and scrambles to his knees on his search—no avail. “Shut up, shut up!” He turns the phone over. Prays Rozanov would take the hint. He can hear the ludicrousness of his own cries, directed at nothing. “Stop calling me—oh god—fuck—”

The ringing doesn’t stop. Shane thinks of silencing his phone, imagines Rozanov scolding him for that the next time they meet. Shane wouldn’t even know what cards he’d have up his sleeve then, given he’d have months to plan. Even now, he’s sure Rozanov would chastise him for answering late.

When offered the chance, Shane would rather select his abjection. He grabs his phone weakly and holds it to his ear.

“Hey, Hollander, I will be—”

Shane lets out a breathy sigh.

The line goes quiet.

Rozanov’s voice is low and cool. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Shane says.

“Are you touching yourself?”

There is no excuse. Shane doesn’t answer.

He can hear Rozanov’s cruel smile through the phone. “To what?”

“The picture you sent,” Shane manages.

“Oh,” says Rozanov. The line ticks. “How many times have you done this before? One or two? Three?”

Shane’s ears flare up. The coil in his stomach tips into intolerable heat. “No, I—”

“No?” Rozanov says, amused. “Once a month?”

Shane goes silent.

“Once a week, then,” Rozanov says. “How cute.”

Shane’s never been harder. “That’s not it,” he says, quietly.

“Oh,” Rozanov says. The line’s stuttering static distorts his laugh, but Shane can imagine it next to him—a breath by his ear, death-gentle, not disbelieved in the slightest. He enunciates, softly, “Every time I sent photo? You miss me that much?”

“No!”

“Liar,” Rozanov murmurs.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Shane spits. “You are depraved.”

“I am the depraved one?” Rozanov says, solicitously. “Good job. You are getting funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

“I know,” Rozanov says, noncommitally. Something ruffles in the background. He clears his throat. “This is interesting. Should I let everyone know? Montreal’s Shane Hollander spreads his own legs thinking of me every night?”

Shane freezes. He chokes back on his tears.

Rozanov switches tactics. “Montreal’s Jane Hollander?”

Humiliation flares. “Shut up!”

“You are scared?” Rozanov asks, with merry. “It’s okay. I will not do that if you just tell me truth. How many times have you done this?”

“Anytime you send a photo,” Shane says, his chest crumpling up. “I touch myself. I’m—I’m sorry I didn’t let you know earlier.” Slumped on the ground, he pulls his knees close. “Will you help me? Please?”

*

Shane’s flush is deeper than he would like when Rozanov tells him he’s done well, in a quiet voice. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised when Rozanov tells him goodnight. He replays Rozanov’s other texts in his mind—Drink water, eat fruit, stop sleeping on the floor it’s bad for your back. And when Shane asks why, he says, Next time I want to make you cry when I fuck your throat. Cannot cry if you are dehydrated.

Rozanov only tells him a few months later that he’d called Shane, that day, to ask if he’d lost a charm. Says he’d found it at the bottom of his suitcase, weeks after they’d hooked up, and did not know where it came from. When he presses it to Shane’s palm and forces Shane’s clammy fingers around it, Shane recognizes it as the badge he must touch before every game. Cold and bright on his skin.

Stupid superstition. Shane thanks Rozanov for the favour. Feels guilty for reducing kindness to sex. When he asks why Rozanov hadn’t communicated his question through text, Rozanov does not reply.

Being with Rozanov is an exercise in navigation. Running along an inversion of parts. Reaching to touch his chest and landing in the private space between his teeth.

*

Rozanov wears expressions Shane has no blueprint for. Sometimes, he presses a tender palm to Shane’s cheek when he expects a slap.

Rozanov is nice to his teammates too. He tells them he loves them after every game. Shane refrains from imagining himself as Boston’s rookie. Wouldn’t be a good look. Even Mom would chide him.

It was okay? Rozanov asks, once. And when Shane doesn’t reply, he gathers Shane into his arms and mutters to himself, Maybe gone too far. He rubs at his temples and then his eyes. Shane doesn’t know how to tell him this isn’t true. Rozanov has done little to freak him out. But when Shane opens his mouth, no sound comes out. His mind is a wet haze.

Rozanov tells him later that he’d gone somewhere distant. He lets Shane shower with his shampoo. Shane’s thankful for it even if he knows exactly how he’d smell afterward, like raindrops on wood, and a spiced apple. It’s a small price to pay. His vision glimmers.

Shane wishes he had a chart of Rozanov’s mood. At least he would know when to expect a kiss. When Rozanov would shoo him away and leave him defenceless, a small drunk animal spooked by the sun. Shane would be smart enough to avoid Rozanov on his bad days.

Wouldn’t he?

Shane hunts his apartment for a better answer, not liking the one that he finds inside his body. He paces around the space and fidgets with his trinkets. Stares at the monotone queue of his trophies. He needs to head to the gym first thing tomorrow, he thinks, and then call his mother. Make coffee. Stop making lists for duties he’s memorized by heart. When he swings his fridge open to let the cold sensation appease him, he realizes he’s used up the ingredients he needs for breakfast tomorrow.

*

They are on the sofa, limbs liquid and loose. He throws an arm around Shane’s shoulder and pulls him close. Shane finds his ear pressed up against Rozanov’s chest, the thrum of his skin steady and warm under it. Rozanov ruffles Shane’s hair, powder-light. A gentle ferocity in the flesh.

Rozanov’s breath tastes of chocolate when he kisses Shane. The taste of hazelnuts is sharp on Shane’s tongue, roasted and rich.

“What were you eating?” Shane asks Rozanov.

Rozanov gives him an odd look. “It’s not obvious?”

Shane remembers the date. February the thirteenth. Ever so close.

“Who gave that to you?”

“Don’t remember,” says Rozanov. “Are you hungry?”

*

Shane begins to think of Rozanov with strange carelessness. He sits on his bed with his book in hand, glasses sliding from his nose in the mellow nightlights. There is a scar on his shoulder, and he thinks of Rozanov’s wet finger on it. Warmth under his neck, and he thinks of cushioned falls, pillowed hands. A lizard creeping up his wall and there are pink scales everywhere—on his back, his knees. Condensation on his can of ginger ale. He thinks of it.

And then, as though impractical arts had been in need of practice, Shane thinks of their life if they had met as strangers. Nobodies with little legends to their names, converging cheaply at a bar, Rozanov sweeping Shane into his arms. No sniggers, without that breathless spotlight. At a club, Rozanov might have asked Shane to dance. Warm mouth to the playing card back of a hand.

Shane would have brought Rozanov flowers and flushed fiercely. He would have bought rings. And Rozanov would not have shoved him, or thrown a leg in his direction, or expected a dodge; he would not have lurched at Shane with a stick, kicked him, and kissed him afterward. Shane would not have dreamt of a hockey puck in his mouth. He would not have dreamt of saying a word. He would not have asked.

Shane rubs his eyes. Outside the window, a drizzle starts. He drops his book.

*

One time, after dusk, with Rozanov rolling over on his side to brush Shane’s fringe from his forehead:

“Was okay?” He says that so often, now.

“Fine,” Shane says. He lifts himself to his elbows. “Sticky.”

“My team is not fine,” Rozanov says absently. He drapes his forearm over his forehead, and groans dramatically. “Four-two. Terrible.”

“Oh woe is me,” Shane says, dryly.

“Do not worry. I will beat you next time.”

“You will have to try harder to beat me next time.”

“Oh, I will.”

Shane gives him a look. “The future tense is for foreseeable events, Rozanov. Are you sure you didn’t mean to say ‘I want to’ instead?”

Rozanov starts laughing. Shane doesn’t get it.

“What are you,” says Rozanov, “Google Search?”

*

If the world is a pantomime, it is challenging to interpret. Full of jokes Shane would lose sleep over trying to decode. But he shouldn’t be surprised when the digital tabloids slap a picture of Rozanov and a blonde onto their headlines. Dazzling centerpiece—thousands of views in an hour.

Shane is fourteen again, walking by magazines in convenience stores. Pages on pages of Hollywood gossip. Paparazzi gets actresses in pin-up style poses, hanging from men’s arms with their tiny waists bent. Shane wonders if they’re all wearing heels; the ones he’s seen do.

Presently, in the photo, Rozanov has a hand on the girl’s thigh, hiking up through the slit of her dress. Her neck’s thrown back to expose the snow-cap of her throat and her plump lips are parted.

It’s nothing. Most people don’t care. Even if an internet passerby did follow hockey, Rozanov’s museum of scandals is laden as is. One photo appends nothing to the mix.

Shane looks at the photo again. Rozanov doesn’t look at him with that smile. Shane identifies the girl as conventionally attractive—though his judgement is motivated by the context of Rozanov’s choosing her—high cheekbones and pearly white teeth. Her hair, cascading down her shoulders, is a glossy beach-blonde.

If Shane were to have any less respect for himself, he would’ve worn the same sort of dress. He doesn’t think it’d fit him well—not with his solid frame, his corded muscles. Even if he’d packaged himself up with makeup and lashes, he wouldn’t have the girl’s spark or her natural charm. He would’ve been an eternal body, waiting to be plucked from its crowd. Rozanov would hardly look his way.

But isn’t Shane special? His weapon is compliance. What he does not have in curves, he has in helplessness. Fuck me, please fuck me, I’ll be your good boy even if you prefer girls. Then he is done. Rozanov finds no shame in his addiction to that. Shane wonders if his other girls cry upon touch. Do they shatter? Do they make themselves small to make room for Rozanov’s pride?

Shane must be doing a very bad job at trying to decipher Rozanov if they don’t.

Shane has never enjoyed tabloids. He saves the article of Rozanov anyway, and prints it out as a bookmark. Every night, when he flips open to a page about hockey in the 1970s, he wants to confront a sign to wake up from his pipe dream. Rozanov’s the coloured smoke in his lungs and the powder haze in his eyes; he’d sent Shane soaring higher than he can conceive of and made him giddy on his tiptoes with a kiss.

Shane heads to the bathroom and splashes his face with water. He should’ve known better than to rely on sensation for judgement.

*

If Rozanov is aware that Shane’s seen his article, he doesn’t act like it. Shane tells Rozanov he could do whatever he likes to gratify his sexual appetite. Snarks at him, really. Maybe making Rozanov prove Shane’s worth as a spare toy would divorce Shane from his trangressions.

But Shane has no right to bitterness. They are rivals, coincidental mistakes, happening to extend their games beyond the ice. In ten years, Rozanov will leave Shane behind. And even though Shane would probably spend another ten trying to shake the memory of Rozanov’s taste from his next sexual encounter—with whomever that may be, and for whatever self-damning reason—it’s nothing next to his career. It’s only a small problem that Rozanov has memorized Shane’s body while leaving Shane in the dark, tugging at Rozanov’s calves, trying to get a glimpse on the periphery of his world.

It’s probably wise for Rozanov to be obsessed with girls. Shane’s been relying on that reputation to keep his secret intact. If Rozanov makes public the time he’s spent knocking up girls and their love, nobody would suspect he’s knocking Shane’s ego up too.

Rozanov brushes Shane’s indignation off his shoulders like lint. There is no flourish. Shane should meet this offering with grace. Gratitude, even.

*

Shane has nobody but himself to blame when he next meets Rozanov to a smear of red lipstick on the sofa.

“You had a girl over,” Shane says.

Rozanov has the audacity to look surprised.

“Ah,” he says, after a beat, recovering quickly. He looks at the stain. “I understand you have eyes.”

Shane grips the fabric of his shorts. “Did you tell her that I’d be here afterwards?”

Rozanov looks at him like he’s asked if the world is a sphere. “Do you think I am asshole?”

Not with women, Shane supposes. Shane wonders why he hasn’t been spared.

“I don’t think my answer has changed since the last time you asked that.”

Rozanov has the audacity to laugh. “And it is still just as boring.”

“Right,” Shane says.

Rozanov doesn’t dignify that with a response. Shane tries not to frown—really tries.

He blinks the wobbly spots out of his eyes. The lipstick looks fresh, sticky like a wound. “How long ago was it?”

Rozanov lifts an eyebrow, this time. His face is inscrutable. “Do we have a problem?”

Shane can play his guess like a film reel in his mind. One hour ago, Rozanov’s head dipping between a pair of soft thighs, licking and teasing a girl to ecstasy within minutes. He sees long tumbling hair and a pretty face and plush lips, a smooth push-and-pull, round-and-round a smile and a tease, tossing laughs between windows without once pressing fists to the glass.

Shane should’ve known something was amiss when Rozanov texted him an invite hours later than usual. Failing that, he should’ve known it was illogical for Rozanov to stage their hookup at a hotel—being owner to a million-dollar home in his city. Shane chides himself for only catching on now, staring at the stain with a salty sheen in his eyes as he remembers the feeling of being a child at a seashore, searching for shingles to blame for the unknown cuts on his feet.

But Rozanov and him—they aren’t anything.

His hesitation, to his dismay, is a second too short for his liking. His socks are spidersilk on his skin.

“No,” he says.

*

That day, Rozanov takes Shane on his hands and knees. He makes Shane stare at the lipstick stain. Count how many times you get up to the edge. You wear red on your mouth if you don’t tighten up. You like knowing you are second toy? Shane counts from one to five, misses three, restarts. He is too quiet; he restarts again. He says thank you, thank you, thank you and thank you; I’m so fucking close and please let me come. He exhausts every modicum of faith, every earnest word he has learned. He leaves out the ones he thinks would freak Rozanov out.

Though Rozanov finally relents, he pulls out when Shane starts coming. Fat tears roll down Shane’s face as white shoots out of his cock. The heat in his body fizzles out like gas from a canister. How ordinary.

Rozanov does not ask Shane if he is okay. He does not ask if he’s gone too far like he normally deigns to. He only looks at Shane with the eyes of a driver who has hit a deer on the road. Rozanov’s face morphs quickly into stone as he looks away.

“I need to shower,” Shane says, because I want you to zip me back up and shove my heart back into my throat and seal my mouth shut so it can’t ever be found seems like a bother. He pauses, then adds, sounding as akin to normal as he can, “Feels gross.”

Rozanov doesn’t turn to face him. “On your left.”

He’s in a bad mood. But Rozanov had won their earlier game. Shane is a leftover reservoir for his pleasure. By all logic Rozanov should be riding this high, basking in his resplendence. Tomorrow he will take off on another flight, 40000 feet up in altitude, waiting for a fan to recognize him on the plane. They’d arrange to meet up if she’s up to Rozanov’s standards, spend another night with an orgasm and a kiss.

Rozanov should be happy.

After Shane showers and traipses back to his hotel—just a few lame hours before dawn—he counts the tracks of rain on his room windows. Enumerates the insect wings trapped on their surface, pressed to the glass by droplets ten times their size. He wonders how many flies had feared a summer storm. If any had lain willingly for the transmutation of its body, from struggle to stillness and flesh into filth.

Shane switches off the lamps and sits on the floor by his bed. The lipstick smear is a brand on the backs of his eyelids.

*

The next day, Shane orders a skirt online.

Impulse purchase. He’s allowed himself so few of those.

It’s a simple, black pleated skirt with no ornaments nor lace. He is not familiar with fashion, but he makes sure it’s a unisex store with nondescript packaging before sending it to the post office. He does not risk ordering it to his address. Even then, on the day he shows up to collect, he cannot help but think the clerk has seen right through him. They probably think he’s rude because he can’t look them in the eye.

Even the time he’d ordered his dildo had been less embarrassing than this. When he arrives home, he almost tears the skirt apart. He runs his fingers over the fabric and loathes its butter-plushness. He thinks about Rozanov forcing him to bend over when he is wearing it. Taking Rozanov’s cock like a girl because he has no other choice. But Rozanov wouldn’t do that. He’d make Shane ask.

Shane shoves the skirt like a monster to the bottom of his bed and sleeps above it every night. If he dreams about it, he is practicing endurance.

*

Boston wins their game in overtime. Shane’s eyes dart around throughout his interview.

In his room, Shane scrutinizes the game footage. He sees the crisp snap of his stick against the radiant ice, the flash-glory of scoring a goal to an uproar of cheers. He sees Rozanov score with equal precision. Rozanov checks him on the shoulder and makes him lose the puck, and in the same period Rozanov scores again! The commentator exclaims. Shane’s once made a promise never to blush on the ice. He tries to figure if he’d done through the camera anyway. He knows he’d done it before, with his face crushed to the plastic, a full-body shake, shame carving a path between his thighs. In the last period he sees the final shot that he’d missed—and cost the Metros their victory streak.

Shane can still feel the ache in his shoulder like a dead bird in a bag. He does not wince at the bruise when he showers twice, then sinks to sit by the side of his bed. The sun is a golden stain beyond the window, descending behind the mountains like a tipped hat. When Shane calls his parents to tell him he’s okay, he worries his lip between his teeth and fidgets with his nails. Lets them drone on about sponsorships to keep his mind empty.

Rozanov tells Shane he’s not visiting. Don’t have time, he says, over text. Social event.

Shane doesn’t remember Rozanov telling him he’d be going to the bar tonight. Neither does he think Rozanov would abandon the chance to rub Shane’s loss in his face. Last time, he’d slapped Shane’s mouth and fucked his throat till it tore. Shane managed speech with difficulty for a week. But Rozanov had also helped Shane to his feet, like Shane’s body was paper—tending to where he was desperately sharp-edged. Shane had studied his exit with a small smile, watching his silhouette share dominion with the closed door.

Shane wipes at his sore eyes. There is a knock now.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to come,” Shane blurts, far too honestly when he comes face to face with Rozanov, feeling like he’s got the past hour rushing out of his mouth in one go, distilled to the single crack in his voice. “You said you were busy, and I—” Overflowing, he thinks, I should stop. I should put a hand over my mouth before he—

It takes a moment for Shane to register Rozanov’s crisp shirt and his sleek dress pants.

“Going on a date?” he asks. He watches the gears behind Rozanov’s eyes tick. “Why are you here?”

“Pike fucking spat on me when he saw me leaving the arena,” Rozanov answers darkly. “Said I made you sick.” Shane stumbles back and finds his spine pressed to the wall. The door behind Rozanov slams shut. “Are you sick? Fever? Dying?”

He rests a hand on Shane’s wrist, two fingers for his pulse.

Guilt grips Shane’s chest. Hayden did ask him if he was okay; Shane had tossed Rozanov’s name up out of spite. Said the pain from his shoulder injury was worse than he thought.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Shane tries. Rozanov’s forwardness sends a tremor through him. “I’m not going to die.”

Rozanov lifts an eyebrow. “Fine,” His eyes drift to study the space on Shane’s left, even though Shane doesn’t think there’s anything cinematic on his window, nor the potted plants, nor the leather sofa he’d ordered, with more money than he should spend, really, but his designer had liked it. Rozanov lets go of Shane’s hand and turns away. “Tell me again in six months. Boston home ice.”

Shane resists the urge to grab Rozanov’s sleeve. He doesn’t manage his mouth.

“Are you in a hurry?”

Rozanov turns. “You need me for something.”

“No,” Shane says quickly. It does not feel right, making Rozanov do his bidding. He’s already traipsed his way here when he didn’t need to. “No, but—”

Rozanov interrupts. He checks his watch. Its design is peculiarly similar to the one from Shane’s commercial. “I have thirty minutes.”

Shane hesitates. Tries to think of something worthwhile. “Do you, um,” he says, before he can regret it, “want to use my mouth?”

Rozanov looks at him like he’s asked a child’s question. “Are you that needy?” Shane doesn’t give him the satisfaction of watching his shoulders droop. He shakes his head; he doesn’t think he’s been that worthy of pity. At least he’s not yet following Rozanov everywhere at his heel. He is not clinging onto Rozanov’s sleeve like a leech. Rozanov smacks Shane’s mouth, with little force. “I am not touching you today.”

“Sorry,” Shane blurts. “I just want—”

Rozanov rolls his eyes. “No sorries,” he snaps. “What is it?”

Shane looks down at his feet, deflating. It’s not often that Rozanov makes him decide. He’d rather Rozanov hold him down by the neck and leave after taking what he needs. If speed is the issue, Shane could sacrifice the time it takes to prep. Can’t be worse than tearing his ACL at fifteen. A body recalibrates to accomodate the currency of injury—that’s Shane’s favourite part. He only wants to earn Rozanov’s pride.

“Don’t laugh.” Shane has no template for what to do.

Rozanov laughs.

Shane gives him a weak glare. “Don’t.”

Rozanov softens. “Fine,” he says plainly. “I don’t laugh.”

Shane takes a deep breath. Frowns. “I don’t know how to—” He switches tracks. “I can show you.”

“Show me.”

Slowly, gracefully, Shane sinks to his knees. The ground is a soothing coldness under his skin. He peers up at Rozanov through his trembling gaze.

Rozanov lifts his eyebrows. “I said I will not do that.”

“No,” Shane rushes to say. “I just—I just wanted to—”

Shane does not want to explain how this familiarity is an anchor. He doesn’t think Rozanov would understand.

“I just want to stay here,” Shane says. “You could just watch. You wouldn’t have to do a thing. I wouldn’t make you.” He adds, with shockingly little difficulty, and with the gratifying realization that he’s figured out what Rozanov likes, “I’ll be good.”

Rozanov stares at Shane for a moment, then shuts his eyes, exhaling. He keeps a hand on Shane’s head. Shane thinks it’s ridiculous for him to be surprised.

“Shane Hollander.” Rozanov’s fingers, as they thread through Shane’s hair, are inexplicably soft. “What wouldn’t you do to win?”

Shane furrows his brows. “But you won. You were there.”

Rozanov doesn’t answer.

But he stays, and he tells Shane to sit before his shoes. They keep their clothes on, and don’t exchange a word. The fading yellow light runs by the windowsill, buttery on Shane’s arms as he twirls one of Rozanov’s shoelaces in his hand. On his fingers, they form circles. A tingling sensation spreads through his head. Rozanov is still playing with his hair.

Shane wonders how it would feel kneeling in the skirt shoved under his bed. Thin fabric pooling around his thighs. Would Rozanov touch him if he had worn that? Or maybe he’d be angry. Maybe then he’d finally deign to fuck Shane’s mouth into silence.

Rozanov leaves twenty minutes later. Only then does it cross Shane’s mind to wonder why he’s brought along a small suitcase; he doesn’t think suitcases are proper to dates.

The next day, Hayden tells him Rozanov is on a flight to Moscow. Rozanov does not answer Shane’s texts.

*

Rozanov’s absence is not felt for long. He acts as usual once he returns. Still gets with a girl every weekend. Gets with Shane every two or three months and invents new aches.

Whatever happened to him in Russia must have turned him white-knuckled. He tells Shane he’s not going to touch him when they’re both upset.

Pure comedy. Shane wonders from where Rozanov had learned to counterfeit mercy. Then he thinks again of the girls hanging from Rozanov’s arms, the flirtation with which he greets that training ring of gentleness. If Shane had been another damsel in distress, he would’ve been flattered. But they both know the plumbing in Shane’s mind is awfully cheap—isn’t he the only willing sink to Rozanov’s discharge of anger?

“What?” Shane blurts. “Don’t tell me you are afraid of touching me just because I’m a little annoyed. Do you think I am a virgin?” I can do better. Whatever it is you want to do to me, I can take it. Take me. “One of your girls? Do you think I can’t handle—”

“Shut up,” Rozanov snaps. He whips his head around, crowding Shane towards the wall. There’s a sky-dividing sharpness to his anger, his mineral blue gaze. It fizzles out. Quieter, he appends, “I did not say you are girl.”

Shane freezes. He should apologize—or at least swallow his temper.

His heart opens before he can stop it. “Do you want me to be one?”

Rozanov’s mouth falls apart. The light splits like a dancer’s legs on his lips. Shane swallows, blood hammering in his ears. On a different day he would’ve been proud for catching Rozanov off-guard. They don’t talk about it.

*

Shane’s first girlfriend was sweet. He met her in the last year of school, and showed her off to his teammates, since they wanted to see. He wasn’t surprised when she broke up with him, citing inattention. Turns out he can’t even kiss a girl right.

Given how long Shane is off his kilter after that, it is strange Shane remembers so little of her now. In another world Shane would’ve treated her better.

He scared his next exes away with his flat voice. It was difficult to have fun with him, with his strict diet and his abstinence from alcohol at the time; not everyone believed the lie that Shane’s meds ruined his libido. They did admit to liking his hands and his shoulders, the only intersection between them. Shane tries to remember all their names.

Rozanov praises Shane’s freckles sometimes. Bites Shane’s throat and his inner thighs. Rests weight on the smallest, most unvarnished parts of him. He’s the first one to do that.

*

Images, unbidden, congregating to the front of Shane’s head: a hand groping his chest, a mouth on soft skin, a cock sheathing into the core of his body without first wasting the effort to get him wet. Rozanov always seems happier with women. Shane’s seen the way they flock around him after a game and the easy smiles with which he graces their admiring stares. He hangs bells from their fondness and makes them jingle with music. Rozanov knows what Shane is. Would he like Shane better, too, if he’d worn a dress? Stop shooing Shane away in the aftermath of his shame? Would he finally stop viewing Shane a chore to kiss?

Shane pinches his arm. Hot guilt rolls through him.

He thinks of it during practice the next day. He thinks of it when he stares at himself naked in the shower, a war’s temperature in his face when he switches the lights off. He pinches his arms and digs nails into his thighs, convinces their coach to order longer practices, giving himself twice the punishment by the time his team is panting. He snarks at Coach and says they can keep going; he needs that cup.

He doesn’t stop thinking about it. It’s a ball of fire tucked behind his teeth, neon-bright on his tongue.

*

Montreal wins the cup the next season. Hayden tells Shane he’d been panicking over nothing. Summer comes, and Shane stays at his cottage. He hears a loon in the night and tries to mimic its call. He sees fireflies in the backyard and lets their tails flirt with his glinting knees.

Rozanov does not talk to Shane for two weeks. Shane can’t tell if he’s offended by Shane winning the cup or if he’s playing another game. Rozanov wouldn’t let him know. It occurs to Shane that if Rozanov hadn’t gone back to Russia, Shane might’ve gotten the urge to drive down to Boston and ask. If Rozanov refused to let him in, he would’ve stood at Rozanov’s porch in the swelter for hours.

How bizarre. Shane can kiss his career goodbye if someone catches him near Rozanov’s house. But the nerve that twists in Shane’s body is fierce as a toothache and he can’t pull it out if he tries.

One day, when Rozanov texts Shane a salacious emoji, Shane catches the chance like a child’s yoyo and they bicker again.

*

Shane should not be stumbling across his fans’ comments so often. Under Youtube videos and on shady forums, next to banners that say HOT! New Asian Singles In Your Area, they ask, Has Shane Hollander ever been with a girl? Has anyone succeeded in hooking up with him? Glamour Shane has heard back when he was a rookie, before he’d proven himself with a few trophies. Some give him shit when he’s on a losing streak. Do you think Shane Hollander is a fag?

Shane slams his laptop closed and rubs at his eyes.

Shane’s biggest difference, against Rozanov, is that Rozanov is confident and insouciant and full of himself. If he likes to fuck a few twinks or a rival from time to time, that’s part of his playboy deal, an afterthought to his jokes. Probably not the craziest thing he has pulled.

Shane isn’t like that. He’s not gay, no, only just fragile—soft and crushable with his waterlogged tongue. Nobody takes a look at him without wanting to crack his shell open. If even the boys in his class liked to pull his hair in school, throw sand in his food and drag him into cupboards, called him a fag just to kiss him senseless in the dark—what does that make him? CPR, they used to say, exchanging their whispers with spit. For the pretty girl who always looks like he’s choking on panic.

Shane is not a girl. He’s also not gay. He is fine as he is, if only a late bloomer. One of these days he’ll learn how to exist in his body without feeling like he has to give his mind up. How to live without feeling like he’s honeycomb balm, spreading himself thin to please someone’s skin. How to want without feeling like he’s being watched, his mouth a cave for flashlights to worm into, his belly a stepping stone, asking people to stick their hands in his gums and pull at his cock and twist his nipples until he has no more insults to cough out. How to stop asking one person for that. How to forget. It’s stupid. He can’t even kneel for a camera when he’s put in the front row of a group photo without feeling strange. 

*

The girl brings Shane flowers when she meets up with him. They’d met on a dating app—Hayden had helped Shane pick his pictures out.

Shane takes deep breaths. If Rozanov could be good, why is Shane not?

In the dark, by a candlelit bedpost, the girl tells Shane to call her a whore. Being unable to satisfy her is a different shame—the syllable falling awkward from Shane’s lips like a skater on a bad ankle. He does not say it with the flair with which Rozanov does. He does not walk out of the room and expect to be followed, ruling by breathing.

*

It is easy to joke about being a fag when you’re not one. Children stay away from boys who look like girls, boys with soft voices, boys with sticks for legs. Hockey boys are afraid to strip off their gear in front of flashy people. Shane is glad he’s matured into a nondescript body, calcified by training, untouched and unable to be impeached. It only took decades.

With age, language shifts. Here is a new rule: stay away from guys who look like they’d rather take it up the butt. Prove your innocence by finding ice girls to fuck. Addendum: words said in the locker room don’t make their way out. Nobody has to know how many strangers would wince at what you’ve said today.

Even now, sometimes, people gather around phones to watch men wrestle like dogs. The clips end with one pressing the other to the ground, sounds of slick fists sliding from holes. Shane steers clear of those. The light he drinks from Rozanov’s mouth makes his body translucent. He’s pretty sure that can be seen.

*

Shane tells Hayden he accepts Hayden’s offer. Jackie’s friend is a blonde girl named Helen who has two dogs and an ex of nine months. In his apartment, her lips are on Shane before his hands are on her.

When he doesn’t come, he uses the same medication excuse. She does not laugh at him, and she does not call him a bad liar. Shane wonders what’s amiss inside him this time.

*

Rozanov sends him a picture and an address. An hour’s panic finds Shane standing before where Rozanov is lounging back on his couch, caught between his spread legs.

An argument later, Rozanov maneuvers Shane over his knee, ignoring Shane’s yelp. The band of Shane’s underwear slips over his hips. Shame floods his face like a tide meeting a drought. He cannot speak.

Steady, steady breaths.

He’s still thinking of the girl in Rozanov’s picture when the sting blots through his thigh. The red would be purple in two days and then green in a few more. Nothing pretty in the metamorphosis of a bruise, but Shane would touch it every time he sees it in the mirror, remember the heat of Rozanov’s hand and then touch himself in the covers with a clammy palm on his mouth. If his teammates ask when they shower, he will say that he fell.

He’s tearing up by the third hit.

“What is this for?”

Rozanov speaks with easy grace. “You don’t know?”

Rules, sometimes, are arbitrary. Shane learns that early. He shakes his head.

Rozanov says, “Why did you knock on my door two times?”

And yet they hold the same weight. “You didn’t answer on the first.”

“Ever heard of a thing called patience?”

Indignation finds Shane first. “I did try to wait.”

“For five minutes,” Rozanov says. He reaches out, lazily, to twist Shane’s neck back, cradling his cheek. Then his palm lands harsh on Shane’s ass. Shane’s cock jerks, leaking into the fabric of Rozanov’s pants. “So addicted to cock you cannot even wait for five minutes?”

“That’s not—”

“Not true?” Rozanov laughs. He ponders for a moment. “You said something else too. Yes?”

Shane shakes his head. “Please,” he breathes out, the word automatic, blinking through his tears. “I—I didn’t—”

Rozanov stops. His voice is adamantine.

“I will give you chance,” he says. Shane whimpers, as Rozanov strikes him again, and again, makes Shane leak until the cotton under his stomach is soaked. It burns, knowing Rozanov will feel it as a damp patch on his knee. “Forget about door. You were very rude today. What do you say?”

Shane freezes. He manages, after a long beat, “I’m sorry.”

Rozanov lifts an eyebrow. “You are sorry.”

“Yes.”

Rozanov pauses.

“You say sorry when you step on someone’s feet,” he says, inordinately lightly. Three hits to the thigh. “Sorry when you are late to a team meeting. You probably say sorry when someone stubs their toe and it’s not your fault.” He spanks both sides of Shane’s ass in succession, without respite, making Shane cry, high and wanton, staining the sofa under him. Spit drips out of his mouth. “Anyone could say a word,” Rozanov says, finally. He flips Shane over, forces him down on his back and cages him in with his thighs. Their gazes touch. Rozanov’s is knife-sharp. “Something creative for me?”

Shane turns to the side. Though Rozanov’s already seen his face. “What. Please forgive me?”

“Kind of boring.” Rozanov clicks his tongue. He digs a nail into Shane’s nipple. “But it’s a start.”

“You—you aren’t special.”

“Am I not,” Rozanov says, unfazed. “What are you sorry for?”

Shane’s throat clogs up. Rozanov feels larger than the world.

“Hollander,” Rozanov warns. He flexes his fingers, and pinches, hard. Pain sparks through Shane’s chest, paints all the way up his neck, licks into his cheeks. Shane spasms in Rozanov’s grasp. “What are you asking forgiveness for?”

“Please,” Shane begs. “Please. I can’t—I can’t say it—You know I can’t—”

“If you don’t tell me, you are not coming today.”

Shane bites back his whine. “You already know I didn’t mean it,” he says. “Please. Don’t make me repeat it.”

“You are not coming until the next time we see each other.”

Shane goes very still.

“There’s… a next time?”

Rozanov gives him a look.

Shane looks away. The shivering part of his mind had thought Rozanov would want nothing to do with him after what he had said. The cheapest part of it had been hoping Rozanov would be clement. It’s funny how easily he gives in then. “I’m sorry for—” His skin falls, an unzipped gown. Rozanov’s eyes are everywhere, touching like air. “For calling you a f—”

“A what?”

“A fag,” Shane whispers.

Earlier, it had slithered out of his mouth. Death-quiet. He’d been thinking about the picture and the lipstick and the tabloid clippings. Thinking about heels and paper-knives and red-eyed boys. He had thought, I hate you. Through his watery vision, into the refraction of light, I hate you. And then, Just because you fuck girls doesn’t make you any less of a fag.

He had condensed the slaughterhouse of his mind into one man. And then it was out.

Rozanov hadn’t said anything then. Shane hadn’t thought he had heard. And Shane hadn’t wanted to repeat anything to admit its existence. That’s the whole, terrible truth.

“You think I am angry for that?” Rozanov says.

Shane’s lip trembles. He hates being unable to predict Rozanov’s emotions. “Aren’t you?”

“I am,” says Rozanov, cheerily. He takes Shane’s cock in hand, now, and begins to squeeze. Tears flow freely down Shane’s cheeks. “How many years have I been fucking you for, hm? Did you not know what this makes us,” he tucks his fingernail into the head, making Shane howl, “or is Shane Hollander so innocent he has just learned what he is?”

What else do you think I am? Shane doesn’t ask. He’d dreamed of it once: boy with tool-body; boy with power cables for hands. Boy running the whole world on skates and his whirring gun-heart. Only five years ago had he gotten close. Boy-hockey-prodigy, boy to be admired.

Shane touches himself to a guy because the guy is strong and bold. The guy knows exactly where to put his hands. Shane cries into the guy’s mouth because he weakens Shane’s tongue. And Shane gets on his knees for this guy because he ties bells to Shane’s legs, everywhere seen and at all times heard.

Shane wants. What constitutes him now?

He thrashes, subsides. “No, I knew.” Humiliation clings to his every nerve; his pulse is in his throat. He tries to push Rozanov off. Ends up clutching onto his chest, clawing at his shoulders. Rozanov doesn’t relent. “No. No, Rozanov, ple—please stop—”

“Hollander,” Rozanov says, slapping Shane’s cheek. “You cannot even stand when I don’t touch you for a few months. What are you? A slut? A whore?” He laughs. “I think no. Who should you really be calling a—”

“I’m not—fuck—please.” Rozanov gives Shane’s cock a harsh tug, scrapes his nails down the length. Shane’s body is hot, with too many coatings to strip, but he feels he could unplug his bones and still be left with the filth. “Please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” Wetness rolls down his cheeks. With no spirit to lie, “Please. Believe me. Please. I didn’t mean to call you—that—I was just—I was thinking about your—your girls, and I just wanted—”

What he was thinking about, really, was—

“I know,” says Rozanov, with strange tension. He lets go. “Look at me.”

Shane turns to face the opposite side. “No.”

Hands on his shoulders—gentle hands, fiercely warm. “Hollander.” Rozanov’s eyes flicker. “Look at me.”

Shane shakes his head frantically. He tries to shrink back, shielding his face with his palms. “Rozanov, please—”

“It’s simple instruction,” Rozanov says, his hand once more coming to wrap around Shane’s cock—doesn’t go further than that. “Cannot beg your way out of everything, yes? Even if you think you sound pretty doing it.”

Shane chokes on a sob. “Please,” he wails, distilling all his sincerity to that word. Has it gotten boring? It’s his only leverage. “Don’t—don’t say—”

“Look at me, Hollander, unless you are looking for second spank,” Rozanov’s voice hardens. “Fucking slut,” he adds, and that elicits a reaction. Shane doesn’t know why it pleases him to be treated like nothing. Like he isn’t the dignified golden player of the league, hugging with his awkward smile and his trophies all the time. He looks at Rozanov, finds something impermeable in his vision. Rozanov’s shoulders loosen. “Good.”

“‘m scared,” Shane mumbles.

Rozanov laughs, airy. “Yes, I know that.” He adds, like a death sentence, “Do you want me to keep touching you?”

Shane’s face burns hot. Rozanov’s body is heavy on him. He doesn’t sound like he’s joking.

“Yes,” Shane says.

Rozanov blinks. “Okay,” he says. He presses his thumbs into the bruises on the sides of Shane’s thighs. “I can forgive you.”

Shane heaves out a sigh of relief. He says, with bated breath, “On what condition?”

Rozanov smiles, ever-attuned to victory. “How smart,” he says. “I want you to call yourself a fag. Fair deal, no?”

Shane sucks in a shaky breath. “Rozanov.”

“Hollander.”

Shane goes still. He pushes his nails into his palms, thinks about the ache, about crescent-blood. Rozanov has a point. It is only retribution. Isn’t it?

It occurs to Shane, then, that he’s ready to do whatever Rozanov wants. The ocean does not boil overnight. He’d been ready from the start, maybe, when their fingers had met over a plastic bottle in a gym—when Shane had heard orders from a near-stranger, and decided they were worth burning his pride to earn the rekindling of.

The words cut through Shane’s throat like filaments of wire. “I’m—I’m a fag,” He’s crying, again, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m—I need you, please.”

“Please what?” Rozanov’s eyes dim. “What do you need?”

“Your—” Shane’s throat feels wet. “I’m a fucking cocksucker, okay, Rozanov, please.” He hates how his erection throbs painfully at the words, an intolerable wave of heat surging through him, “Please, please. I’m a fag. A whore. Please give me your cock. I need it. I need, I need it inside me. I’m so hard. I just wanted to be—be your girl. Please. Your cock, Rozanov. Will you please—”

Are you happy now? Are you punching your fists in mid-air the way you do after winning a game? Are you going to tell me you love me like you tell every one of your teammates? Are you thrilled to have corrupted me?

“Yes,” Rozanov says, whispering. He inhales deeply, cheeks dark. He presses his forehead to Shane’s, hand reaching low to give Shane a rough stroke. “Look at you. So desperate for it.” He kisses Shane, licks into his mouth, runs his tongue over Shane’s teeth and bites on his lower lip. “Who else could you be, Hollander? Who else is like you?”

Shane sobs. He doesn’t speak. Rozanov slides into him with little preparation, if at all, making Shane cry out. When he comes, it is with a loud sob: his vision coruscates, whites out; his limbs writhe as if those of a starved man, confined for a century. Hot, merciless tears stain the scarlet flesh of his cheeks.

There are warm hands massaging Shane’s shoulders in the aftermath. Somehow, he is alive. He wonders why he shouldn’t get a trophy for that. Nevermind that he can’t look Rozanov in the eye.

*

For productive purposes, Shane pushes the event out of his mind. Has to, or his team wouldn’t make it past the first playoff round. Eat. Practice. Hold team meetings. Go to sleep.

*

The funny thing about tardiness is that it translates to overcompensation. A child who arrives late at practice must work twice as hard to skate the same speed as their peers. When Shane misses a day at the gym, he squeezes in an extra workout as soon as he can. In theory, that rule would be balanced.

Shane had once wanted so little. Never had a reason to change that, he’s aware, having an uneventful childhood and all his possessions handed to him, clean clothes and fresh water and parents that don’t split. Mom tells him to keep his head down to stay out of trouble so he follows the rules, doesn’t butt heads with his coaches. He is rewarded for it with quietude and accolades. Shane’s happy when he scores a goal in a game—which is hardly vain, compared to luxury watches and suits, extravagances a player of his calibre could afford. When he basks in triumph after breaking a new record, he tells himself that he has earned it. He’s earned it all.

But you’re supposed to learn greed in adolescence. Spend your proverbial rebellion talking back at adults who tell you what you can’t have; kicking your feet when they forbid you from wine; screaming when they confiscate the pills that look like Skittles in your palm. And you’re supposed to learn how to expel the need from your system when you stomach a punishment for your indulgence: when you’re caught with a hand in your pants in the liminal hours of night, moon-soaked with your legs sticky in the sheets; when you’re caught rolling around in piss-yellow grass with a girl; when you’re in the wrong classroom with your zipper undone.

Shane has scarcely done any of that. That’s why a pinprick is crater-wide when it touches him. A famine tears holes into his membrane of restraint, flirts fiercely with his underbelly and tugs at his wet mouth. He wishes Rozanov had leashed him to a wall instead of arousal. Before him, Shane had been doing so well.

*

Hayden figures out that Shane has been seeing Lily. Shane tells him he’d met her at a Boston game. He buys it with no questions.

Shane remembers one of his earliest lies—hiding Mom’s broken plate in his room and refusing to confess until she’d scavenged the whole house for it. It’s a beautiful plate. Easy to notice when it’s missing.

The trouble is that Shane likes to hide. Great at pulling himself together even when he’s bursting at the seams. He’s sealed himself shut for two decades—nobody knows how favourably he responds to the right latchkey. Nobody knows he likes his hair pulled at. Nobody knows he’s in love with the sweet death of humiliation, that all it takes to wreath Shane in red is to tell him to crawl and to make him beg. And if the real secret is that there’s one guy who’s trespassed on all other secrets, if not been their genesis—then, well, Shane talks shit about him all the time. Truth’s out of question.

Not even Shane’s parents, to whom Shane had sworn honesty after the incident of the plate, can tell he’d once licked Rozanov’s shoe thirty minutes after cussing Rozanov out on their call. He wonders if Mom would be proud of him now. And he wonders if he’s really as awful of a liar as Rozanov says, or if Rozanov’s just very good at scouring his skin for the truth. How many rooms in Shane’s head hasn’t he broken into?

*

Shane doesn’t think he should be seeing Rozanov again. He still says yes when Rozanov asks him to visit. Because Rozanov usually doesn’t ask.

Rozanov’s shirt is comfortable on him. Wide sleeves and non-scratchy. His ginger ale is cold, yes, thank you, and he can eat anything, really—or at least, he’d try.

Rozanov won’t stop looking at him. His eyes crinkle when he smiles. Shane wonders if all this is foreplay for something else. Fatten your lamb before you tear into it.

It’s one thing to call yourself a dirty cocksucker and a fag. It’s another thing to eat Rozanov’s sandwiches and to eavesdrop on his phone call with his dad. What’s next? Will Shane be crying into Rozanov’s shoulder, telling him about Shane’s exes and his diet and the boys who had loved him back at school? Shane has never seen Rozanov cry.

Rozanov asks if Shane likes girls.

Shane could still say yes. Yes, I liked Helen, Pike’s wife’s friend. I liked it when she laughed at me and didn’t sound like you. I liked it when she kissed me and didn’t go for my neck. Shane liked it when she tossed her underwear to him, even though all he could think about was Rozanov pinning Shane down with his eyes when Shane had attempted that, once. He likes that Eloise, one of his past hook-ups, had snapped at him to stop eating less than her. That May had told him to stop trying to talk when they fucked. You always know what to do, and I don’t. I like it when you wipe my face when we are done, like you think I deserve it. I like it when you spare me.

They keep eating. Time leaks like a milk pail dripping through the ceiling. When Rozanov comes into Shane’s hand with Shane’s name on his mouth, Shane does not recognize the ripple through his chest. It hits him that he can’t rest blame on his body’s surface perversion. His hunger has taken root in his core.

Shane is the one who had grabbed Rozanov first, this time.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Shane says.

*

What’s left is ordinary.

Shane opens Rozanov’s chat and checks his last-seen timestamp. Brings up the keyboard and closes it.

He’d thought Rozanov’s assertiveness would’ve made him reach out. Even if his hand had come with an insult, Shane would have licked its bones clean.

*

Shane should thank J.J. for sending him to the bar with Rose Landry. She is beautiful, with red hair and blue eyes—wears earrings in perfect harmony with her dress. The buttercream lights wink off their dangling crystals. Their shadows are raindrops when she leans forward on the table, a cocktail in hand.

She hardly makes fun of Shane. Hockey is the only topic Shane can talk about without sounding flat, and she knows it. Shane wants her. The thought should set him alight.

“How long are you staying here for?” He asks.

Rose’s humour is kinder than Rozanov’s. Shane misses the sharpness. Afterward, he splashes his face with cold water for that, knowing he’s unfair.

“What happened to Lily?” Hayden asks. Shane tells him they had a bad breakup.

“Still the longest one you’ve had so far,” Hayden quips. “Good luck for this one.”

Shane wishes himself good luck too. Being with Rose Landry is what he needs. He’s willing to call the past six years a blip if he could turn the tyres back now.

He recalls being tempted to steal liquor at sixteen. Didn’t know from where that urge had arisen—only recognized the thrill in his veins and the need to find a sink for the shake of his hands. Only when he’d reached the storefront, fake ID and everything, had he felt cold fright seep through his bones. But plenty of people chicken out of crime at the last moment. You might be a coward, but it’s still court you’re evading.

Shane thinks about Rozanov seeing the headlines and wonders if he’d be as bothered as Shane had been by his rumours. Tries to imagine Rozanov’s furrowed brow and his sharp jaw. Gets disappointed when the thought brings him no passion. One month later, when the media latches onto a different actress’s scandal, Shane is glad to see the spotlight’s off him.

*

How many goals? Shane only cares about shooting as many as he can. The ref’s voices are muffled; the commentators’ are strong. Shane’s cheek is in plastic. And Rozanov scores! Rose is not coming. Hollander’s gonna want this one back. Why doesn’t he want him back? Oh, Hollander’s got it—pass to Pike—back to Hollander, and—Loud bang.

The club is sticky with bass-boosted music. Shane has his hands on Rose’s waist; that’s what boyfriends do, isn’t it, dancing with their girls. Her dress is shiny with sequins, a weird texture.

Shane spots Cliff Marleau. After that, familiar curls.

Rozanov turns. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. His shoulders appear broader in tension, his jaw sharp.

The brightness of him snaps Shane out of his haze.

Shane has never met another man with an ego so greedy. Under the flamingo lights Rozanov’s chin is held high, his smooth features ghastly; his angled jaw sharp as though made for dissection. Shane questions why his creator’s made him reproachless. There’s a streak of red next to his lips from where someone must’ve kissed him, and his stare’s with an angry salacity only known by its past subjects, for no third eye could walk away thinking they’d witnessed abasement. Some know the nausea of being Rozanov’s used toy. Few bless the intimate favour of it. How many could stand the humiliation of wanting him still?

Rozanov’s half a room’s length away. Hardly a task to catch Shane through the crowd. Drag him back to interrogate him. Nevermind Rose. Shane holds Rozanov’s gaze for as long as he can, feels the darkening coil in his stomach and the frission in his spine.

In Rozanov’s arms is a girl. He bites her ear.

Shane knows the patterns. Touch here. Kiss her throat. Watch as she squeezes her thighs together. Okay, now she’s holding onto you. Kiss her more, but not too harshly. She’s not like Hollander, you know. She doesn’t like it when you’re mean. She doesn’t cry or beg when you slap her, so just keep kissing her like you’re in love. Kiss her until she’s weak for you. There we go. Nice shooting, rook, that’s a perfect goal! When you lift her skirt you will find her wet.

It surprises Shane how much of this he knows. It seems illogical that he’s still so bad with girls.

Shane thinks of Rozanov boarding him in the arena earlier that day. He could take that now. Same violence, shoulder-to-shoulder. Shane would hardly mind. He should be the one pressed against a club’s filthy wall with hot sticky thighs and fingers in his mouth. I shouldn’t have left, he thinks of saying, when Rozanov makes him. And when Rozanov asks why, Shane would cite his hands, his mouth, his luscious voice. He would not say, Please kiss me. Shane’s long since graduated from being a fool.

Shane’s nose is made of acid. Tears prickle his eyes. When he flees, would Rozanov chase him? He gets his answer when he charges into red bathroom lights—the doorway is empty.

Shane finds himself a stall. Remember to slam the door shut and breathe deeply. Don’t—don’t die. Sink back against the wall, kneel. No, don’t do that, that’s not for you. Sit. Don’t sit. If you sit, the floor will be dirty. If you hold onto the toilet seat while you vomit, the toilet seat will be dirty. If you touch yourself through your clothes after that, you are dirty. He is dirty if you think about him when you shove a hand down your pants. If he’s panting into your ear when his name rots in your mouth, you are lovesick. And if he’s safeguarding your breath when you jerk yourself to completion, you are dreaming. Outside, the music is blaring. The crowd is incessant. Feet stumble in and out of the bathroom. From the neighbouring stall, Shane hears a moan.

He grabs his cock through his clothes. Gasping, he throws his head back into the bathroom wall and squeezes his eyes shut. The sight behind his eyelids is white and dazzling, like a whale’s belly. He does not come. Rose is waiting for him; he’s insulted her enough.

His cheeks are wet anyway. What a shame. Rozanov might’ve liked to watch this unfold and shelve the memory back for review. It’s Shane’s best work yet.

*

Shane is still thinking about Rozanov when he comes inside Rose.

*

Shane has seen hand-holding men. Rookies forced to jerk each other off at their welcome parties. Men on screens in a cramped locker room, moaning into each other’s mouths. One of Dad’s teammates at university was gay. Shane doesn’t hear about the man again after his wedding.

The first time Shane had whimpered with a guy’s name in his mouth, it was not, in fact, a Russian name. It was not sex, that was for adults, you see; there were no dicks, or balls, or anything at all. There was Shane’s fraudulent clit, of course, but that was clothed when the first strike hit his ass; besides, every other player had endured the same secret. Shane didn’t tell Rozanov because he didn’t want Rozanov to be jealous; didn’t want to risk newspapers of him hunting down the guys. Rozanov got weird whenever Shane got really hurt. He’d been silent for weeks, like a broken whistle, the time he’d broken Shane’s ankle. Except he did it again the next time it was play-offs—Shane had been glad.

The first time Shane had seen a man in a dress, he was a teen. The guy was a street performer, a singer with a guitar and a serene smile. His head had been raised high and his shoulders broad. People had pointed and stared. Shane remembers staring at him, fascinated, listening to his voice sift through the carnival storefronts. When the guy bowed and threw the audience a wink, Shane noticed his own flush. Clarity only struck him after three songs, like a bottle cracked open on his head, made him turn away with a squeak as though caught with stolen whiskey. Mom said it was not good to trespass. Shane thought he was trespassing something right now.

The first time Shane had looked at a boy, truly—truly looked at a boy, he was eight. It was like staring at the sun. Shane couldn’t look at him again for a whole year.

*

Rose asks, “Can I ask if you’ve ever been with another guy?”

On a day in Saskatchewan, Canada, in Winter 2008, Canada’s Shane Hollander meets Russia’s Ilya Rozanov with a golden throatful of courage and a smile. Rozanov mirrors that with a loose smirk and brings a lighter to his cigarette—what catches on fire holds in Shane’s mind.

Unable to speak, Shane nods.

“Have you ever told anyone that before?”

In the year 2009, a chance meeting of eyes sends Ilya Rozanov careening back into Shane, sitting wide-legged on the gym floor with his lungs short of breath. Shane Hollander does not look at either body because he is Ilya’s rival—by default, do not exchange glances further than glares. Henceforth, stalemate persists; it is not until the year 2010 that Shane Hollander ripens. He is fresh-faced with an unsettled leg, standing before the mirror with a tie and a crumpled suit jacket, tugging at his shirt and rolling his plan back to its initial state, opening his waiting lips for Ilya Rozanov to kiss.

On the same day, after taking from each other’s pleasure, Shane Hollander forces Ilya Rozanov to promise he would tell no one of their rendezvous. It is one of the only promises Ilya Rozanov has made, but he hides it like one hides a broken plate, with keen knowledge of where it had shattered.

Shane shakes his head.

“Was it different?” Rose continues. Her voice is a whisper, excruciatingly soft. “With a guy?”

Rozanov’s been sharp from the start. Shane laughs at most of his jokes. He can’t help but smile when Rozanov lights up on his screen. When Rozanov kisses Shane—rare, but often enough for Shane to remember—he tilts Shane’s head at a known angle so their noses don’t bump, sucks on his mouth, runs his hands over Shane’s paper-skin. Fireflies upon it—a relighting of nerves. An inversion of anatomies with his heart up his throat.

A good trick, Ilya says.

When Shane replies, his nose is sour.

“Of course.”

Rose lets a beat pass. Her face is a cheatsheet; Shane’s answer’s on it. It hadn’t occured to Shane he would meet two people like that. He must be lucky.

Rose asks, “Was it better?”

Shane’s stomach plummets. Nobody looks at him like Rozanov does—like his every act is worth watching, even his mistakes.

Rozanov is inevitable. The answer’s out before Shane can stop it.

He doesn’t know if he deserves the relief when Rose asks to be friends.

*

It’s strange, after so many months, for Shane to miss Rozanov still.

He misses Rozanov’s voice, the corpse-quiet kiss of his hands. Shane misses the red that broken pride brings to his face. He can’t recreate that alone, but he needs that vibrancy, colouring the dead parts of his body a violation repurposed. Until then, he is bottle-necked, with hungry hands of burnt umber and a quiet flush.

He misses Rozanov’s laugh too. His earnest soft mouth, Shane sitting on the bottom of his stairwell with his back to the railing.

Rose keeps him sane. She calls him often enough for him to have at least one person to rant to after each game. She humours him when he dissects a play on the TV. She tells him she can introduce him to Miles—says it might help, even if not for a fling.

Aside from the occasional mid-conversation freeze, when someone blurts out a phrase Rozanov had once used too often, casual in the bar with sticky floors and a notoriously bad beer, Shane remains functional. He has his routine. Sleep still unnerves him—he’d much rather be doing something productive—but his condition had mellowed, better than it had been. He remembers how distressed he’d been at the start, rice growing sly with soil in his mouth. He had gone silent for days, talking only to his coach and his team during practice. And that survives him because he knows the merit of quietude; he wouldn’t have survived the WHL otherwise.

Back then, Hayden had asked Shane if he was okay. Before a game, in the locker room, where the air was dusty and redolent with sweat.

“Fuck off,” Shane had said, when Hayden chided him for looking so tense. “This is how I always look before a game.”

“Whatever you say, man.” Hayden threw an arm over Shane’s shoulder. He lowered his voice, and said more quietly, “Something the team can do? Something else you need?”

The last question was uttered in the wrong accent. “I need,” Shane said, each word precise, raising his voice to guarantee its travel, “you all to get off your asses and go fuck up Rozanov’s knees on the ice.” He gripped his helmet so tightly it hurt. “We’re winning playoffs.”

*

At the bar, nursing an iced beer in his hands, Rozanov asks about Shane and Rose Landry.

“We were not compatible,” Shane tells him. The Tampa sun is hot and glutinous on his back. It is liquid gold in Rozanov’s disheveled hair. Shane’s breath is briefly shallow for Rozanov’s gleaming smile—dawn under his cheeks and alcohol fizz in his teeth.

On the table, Rozanov drums his fingers in a diffused rhythm. This makes Shane more giddy than he should be. Given experience, he had thought the start of a circle should be isomorphic to its end. But Rozanov seldom cares for rules.

*

On the side of the pool, Rozanov looks at Shane with his hands on his hips. He sprays water at Shane before diving back to the kids he was playing with.

With irony, Shane has never taken the time to sit, over the years, to admire Rozanov in his richness. He has seen Rozanov in a thousand familiar states of undress, of course, and he’s seen Rozanov on the ice, in articles, shirtless by his taglines. But there were few contexts in which Rozanov was not there to agitate, or arouse, fewer still unbound by a lens of contrition. It hits Shane terribly late that Rozanov is only a man existing in his body, a body Shane may like feeling flush on his skin, but a body still.

He is a superimposition of surfaces, layers of muscle and skin, flesh and blood. He stands unabashed, attracts, with no reason to attract, and without the pornographic intrinsicality Shane has associated with him.

Shane tries, diligently, to look away. Habit kicks in. The light-leaking part of him that he still keeps sequestered resurfaces; blood fills his cheeks, makes his face heavy, makes his chin sag. If they had been strangers, he fears he would have behaved like a schoolgirl, blushing over a famous statue; he fears he would have run up again with his pointless courage, profusely confessed, and scampered away.

The guys hadn’t apologized when they’d studied Shane on a hockey bench. Now, Shane is looking at a man who, without expending effort, demands him to look, six years after that headlined moment in Saskatchewan.

Was it better?

Shane stares at Rozanov’s luminous grin. His hair, dark with water, clinging like weeds to his face. The boisterous ease with which he opens himself to children’s frolic. Shane wonders why he hadn’t noticed that about Rozanov before.

*

The beach is hushed. The sunset is red, a cauterized wound-streak in the sky. The sand in the space between their fingers does not sink as much as it does under them. I looked up that word, Rozanov says. Compatible. They are so close.

*

Shane says, “I think I’m gay.”

Rozanov just snorts.

Shane exhales. Seems fair. He would’ve laughed at himself too.

“You think you are gay?” Rozanov asks. Says it like: Don’t you know what else makes you gay? “What makes you think that? Because you suck my cock? Because you tell me you are a—”

Shane’s known him long enough to recognize his defenses.

“Yes,” he snarks back. “I’m a fag, okay?” Just to see Rozanov’s eyes go wide, he says the words, extricated from his chest, “A real, proper, fucking fag. Here.” He turns his hands over, both palms facing up. “In the flesh.”

He is trembling. Should he have felt less relieved?

Rozanov stops smiling. He plops down on the bed, next to Shane.

His jaw is taut, and his eyes unfocused. Shane hadn’t known prying into the base of Rozanov’s boulder-weight could be so chilling. Skimming the lower boundary of his nights.

Shane wrings his hands together. To discover a fault, someone has to trip over it first.

“I’m sorry about last time.” Shane turns his hands over again, folding them over together like birds. “I freaked out.” And then, later, he thinks of Rozanov, by the pool, with earnest cheer; Rozanov, so happy to see him again. Those blue eyes, for a moment pellucid, so free. He says, “I don’t think I can keep pretending that I don’t like you anymore.”

Outside the window, a plane’s shadow passes. The rain pitter-patters against the glass.

“You do not like me, Hollander,” says Ilya. The lukewarm light flits over him, dissects his skin into moon and shadow piecewise.

Shane’s heart plummets.

But then Ilya tells him about Russia, and his sick father.

“You know what I went to Moscow for?” he says. “Time I showed up to your room with a suitcase?”

Shane bites his lip. The hot silverskin of shame is a familiar nudge in his flesh. He weathers it through, and shakes his head.

“Hospital needed me to sign papers in person.” Against prediction, Ilya’s voice cracks. “He did not give my brother the legal right.” He turns away, and his shoulders shake. “I stayed there for one day. Also needed to set up a trust for my niece. Flew back when I was done.”

Shane’s face falls. “I’m so sorry,” he says.

A flicker passes over Ilya’s face. He deflates, and then loses his contours.

Shane registers the fear forming inside him. Often, Ilya’s sadness is regulated with anger, if not inertia—sitting stone-faced on the bed, smoke sifting through his lips. An exercise in quarantine from the organic. Shane has not once heard this sadness breathe, not once seen its thrash or its animal wail. Even now, it is restrained. But when Shane climbs over Ilya’s lap, Ilya’s body is shaking and warm in his arms.

It’s funny, Shane will come to realize later, late at night playing with the cotton hem of his sleeves, how easily instinct could fall into place. Little worry comes between him and the thought he should be everywhere connected with Ilya, pressed-up. Shane’s hands are on Ilya’s back and Ilya’s face in his neck, wetting his collar; the scant gap between their bodies permits nothing of the extrinsic. There is no liquid, no slippage of dust. Not even snark.

“Sorry,” Ilya says, into Shane’s shirt. Shane finds this absurd. Ilya used to make fun of Shane for his tears. It hadn’t crossed Shane he’d make fun of his own.

They remain until Ilya’s shoulders emit their tightness, and discard it. Shane touches the crucifix on Ilya’s neck. When they sleep, it is with their bodies curled up.

*

Shane barrels Ilya into the boards and makes him lose his puck. Montreal wins against Boston 4-3. When folding his clothes, Shane has made up an idiosyncratic order of creases and roll-ups, like a child inventing a knot nobody can untangle. Ilya knows it by heart anyway.

*

The evening is tender on Shane’s skin when he descends back into his body. Ilya wipes the spit away from Shane’s face. After Shane showers, he runs his soft fingers into the back of Shane’s neck, down his shoulders, and embroiders kisses down his nape. He knows the imperative of treating a wound early. Somehow, he is good at that.

Touches multiply, proliferate; turn into Ilya braiding Shane’s hair. Too short for the attempt to stick, too short to produce anything worthwhile, but the transient tug of Ilya’s fingers is warm and solacing on Shane’s scalp. Ilya laughs at Shane when he is done. The mess lasts, at least. Like a bird’s nest. Shane sees his craft in the bathroom mirror—disheveled and free. He closes his eyes.

They head back out. Ilya spends the next hour massaging the knots out of Shane’s back.

Feels okay? He asks.

Shane nods. Yes.

Ilya eventually fucks him again, there and then on the floor, both wrists pinned and fingers down his mouth. He is helpless, papier-mâché in the dark, lying by the open window with wind-ribbons in his hair. Ilya makes him stare into his eyes when he spills. White chalk crosses his vision out.

There’s a strange look on Ilya’s face when he has to leave. His eyebrows are pinched. Shane thinks of smoothing that out with his fingers. Thinks of Ilya’s bites on his skin—lasting longer, now, and sinking deeper. A pharmacy of lamplight winking off his canines. Shane doesn’t think he wants that to go away. He does not want that to go away.

*

“Did you hear about Rozanov?”

“He’s gone back to Russia.”

Again?

Shane’s stomach goes cold.

*

Ilya’s voice is not the same over a phone call. Shane heaves a sigh of relief anyway when Ilya’s face fills his screen. His lips are stripped of their usual colour. Blood in the whites of his eyes, tainting a glass-lake’s edge.

A twist cascades through Shane’s body to see him like this—a clawing, newborn animal in his chest. He does not know how to voice that without sounding like a psychiatrist’s textbook, or a helpless child, with words so unvarnished they make adults wince.

“I miss you,” he says, anyway.

Ilya does not laugh at him.

Ilya tells him his father only has a few days. Shane tries to comfort him. He does not know if he does a good job. He has so rarely soothed another with success in his life—he is not Rose, easy with her words and the quiet familiarity of her hands. And he is not Ilya. He does not know how to use jokes as a solvent for unease.

He hopes it’s enough that he tries his best not to feel ashamed, or hesitate, when Ilya asks to see the whole of him. With a strange, mysterious feeling of acceptance within him, like floating downstream in a river, Shane props his phone up, against his mug on the nightstand, and rises. Slowly, methodically, he undresses. Each finger precise, the way Ilya had undressed him the first time. All returned. Only glass between them. A thin boundary if he pretends. Ilya’s gaze shrouds him.

Shane lets Ilya look. Painting him with his eyes: the strong muscle of his thighs; the white scar on his belly; his naked shoulders. Just under his ribs, he sees in his reflection the bruise Ilya had left just a few nights ago, so tender that if Shane closed his eyes, he could believe Ilya was still touching it. He should get a tattoo there, one day. A bird with an iron stomach. Raw and fragile. It might exalt Ilya to see that.

*

On the stairwell, clammy-handed with his phone pressed like a seashell to his ear, Shane experiences Ilya’s voice with vertiginous closeness: an echo in every word, every jagged shift in inflection and every bloated vowel; he can hear Ilya’s shallow breaths as though infectious, feeling his lungs grow taut; he can imagine the vibration of Ilya’s palms, cleaving down to the gristle; and he can imagine Ilya’s thumping heart and his tight brow and the paralysis in his eyes. It must be cold in Russia. It shocks Shane to feel like he is choking. He cannot decipher it, but the flayed vulnerability in Ilya’s anger is so sharp Shane is flinching at the thought of Ilya’s family too. It’s so sharp Shane has the courage to wonder if he’s always been spared.

The voyeuristic screech of a siren prevails, and Ilya breaks.

Now, his voice is even closer. It dwindles into a sob. Shane feels as though climbing upstream in the dark.

*

Shane borrows courage from pain and asks Ilya to come to his cottage. The silvery high of the drug is a stream in his mouth.

*

“Do you want that problem to go away?” Shane asks.

He wants. But he is cowardly, always ready to shrink back into the shy beast inside him, muscle flush against fur. He has spent seven years trying to learn Ilya’s preferences with women, stalking his social media to see if he likes blondes or brunettes. He has seldom asked about family. How could he expect Ilya to offer him any more?

His question is sewn together by flame. Shane can smell the burn of his flesh.

The answer in Ilya’s mouth is better than he’d hoped for.

*

On their third night at the cottage, Ilya says, “What are you wearing?”

Shane halts in his steps.

He hadn’t expected Ilya to return so early from his evening walk. Here Shane is, standing at the doorway to see Ilya already inside the bedroom, wringing his hair dry with a towel, in nothing but his sweats. Drops of water roll down his chest, crystalline on his moonlit skin.

And Shane—

Shane is stupid. He had shooed Ilya out, wanting to give him a surprise. A black skirt, pleated, hugs him at the waist, reaching the middle of his thighs. He wears a regular plain T-shirt on the top.

It’s the skirt he’d gotten years ago. Before tuna melts, and before Rose. The monster he had kept under his bed.

While Ilya had been gone, Shane had spent an hour crouching by the side of his suitcase, staring at the skirt like it were a dead fish. Before he could regret it, he’d yanked it onto himself, wincing when the zipper barely went over his muscles. And then he had tried kneeling on the floor; moved to kneeling on the bed; back to the floor, stood up; back out of the bedroom to pace around the living area, back in, and now—

When Shane doesn’t reply, Ilya tosses his towel to the bed and fixes a stare on him. “Shane?”

He strides forward, planting a possessive grip on Shane’s hips to guide him back towards the nearest wall.

Shane’s heart thumps. Regret could not have come later.

“I asked a question,” Ilya says. His presses a palm to Shane’s chest.

Maybe it is a product of old habits. Shane had spent years worrying about Ilya’s proclivities with women, and he can’t shake that away, even if Ilya had told him he’d touched no one since their last time. Only two days ago had he spoke about Svetlana.

“I’m sorry,” Shane says, “I…” He restarts, “I thought, since we were going to have the week together, there was a lot we could…” He had thought Ilya would be the last person to be surprised. “I wanted to do something—fuck. I wanted to do something for you, so—”

“Get to the point.”

“I am wearing a skirt,” Shane says, quietly. “I thought—” He pushes the words out, “I thought you might want to fuck me in it.”

Ilya looks at him sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Shane says, shrinking back. “I should have asked. I thought you might want—or, well, miss—”

Ilya’s eyes dim. “Miss what?” He demands. “Girls?”

A chill runs through Shane. “Listen.” He tries not to let his shoulders slump. They’d only just began to live in their own skins; he’d been foolish to expect any reaction from Ilya but aversion. “Just forget this happened at all, okay? I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I can go. If you think it’s an insult.”

Ilya cuts him off. “It is your cottage, Shane. Go. Where?”

There is a long pause.

Ilya says, “Do you think I would be nicer to you if you were a girl?”

Shane frowns. “What?”

“You want me to fuck you in this.” Ilya snorts. He pinches the edge of Shane’s skirt between thumb and forefinger, gives it an experimental tug. “You think I will be soft?”

“Well—”

Ilya stares at the bob of Shane’s throat as he swallows. “You think I will forget what you are? That I will be polite, and maybe very forgiving?”

“I don’t—”

“What?” Ilya throws him a crooked smile. “Are you scared to say it?”

“You’ve always known what I am,” Shane says, quietly.

“I will keep talking, then.” Ilya says. He brings a hand to Shane’s chin. Without waiting for Shane’s response, “You think I will kiss you. Make love to you. Praise you, do whatever you want. You think I was not picky with them like I am with you.”

Shane flushes. He can’t help it. He has learned the addiction of having a weakness exposed—like having an open wound, begging to be noticed and cleaned. But half of him still expects to be hurt, like he could wake up one day to find Ilya striking like a knife, or the punchline to a bad joke.

“Do you think I will find you more fuckable with a cunt?”

The words sear. Shane makes himself answer. “That’s—not what I said.”

Ilya fastens a long look on him.

“Fine,” he says eventually. “You say no, don’t talk, and expect me to do all the talking. Like always.” His hand comes up, a ghost on Shane’s throat. “You want to pretend to be a girl?”

“I only brought a skirt,” Shane whispers. “Is that not a step too far?”

“I don’t care,” Ilya says. “I like it. Not because I like to fuck tits more than you. But because this—” He grabs Shane’s chest through his shirt, squeezing his pec, “Makes you embarrassed.”

The breath in Shane’s throat dies. Ilya is staring at him with that ever-present, wild look of interest, hunger bleeding out through the seams. Shane can hear the bitter pound of his heart, the cradle of push-pins pressing down on his burning skin.

“No,” Shane begins.

“No,” Ilya echoes. “Isn’t that what you like? To be embarrassed?” He squeezes again. “Is that not why you were so mean, all these years? Wanted me to fuck manners back into you?” He laughs. “But it worked.”

Shane’s hand shoots up. He grabs Ilya’s wrist—shakes it, tries to yank it away. It does not budge. “No,” he says, desperately. His thigh throbs. “No. I don’t think that’s—”

“I should tell you how I’d really treat you if you were one of my girls,” Ilya says. Shane holds his breath for the next sentence. “You are in a skirt already. But I could bite your tits.” He is using two hands, now, thumbing both of Shane’s nipples, only the thinness of fabric separating his fingers from feeling the rawness of skin. He pinches, simultaneously, “I can spank your pussy until you beg me to stop. Until you are loose and soft, like a doll.”

Shane makes a choked sound. The room shrinks. Draws in with a wet stream of light; all its colours come to frame the bright edge of Shane’s vision.

“I am not,” he tries, through strangled breaths, “A doll—”

“I don’t even have to get you wet first,” Ilya continues, “You’d be ready for me just from listening to me talk. And then I will bring you to the edge, only on my fingers.”

Ilya releases Shane with a rough shove backward. Shane’s hands fly to his chest. The air rushes in his throat as a lightning punch. He shuts his eyes, tries to will his imagination away; knows it is futile.

Shane’s cock aches. “Ilya.”

“Yes, it’s me. Did you know it is easy to make a girl come many times in a row?”

“I think,” Shane breathes out, “you are missing a crucial point—”

“I will not even need to let you wait in between.”

Ilya’s breath is a wash of sun on Shane’s cheeks. Shane doesn’t dare touch his own face, for fear of his hands catching fire. He doesn’t even dare brush away the hair falling in his eyes. Sweat congeals on his temples as he scrambles for words.

“I don’t have a pussy,” Shane snarls, giving up on pleasantries. “And you’re not doing any of that.”

Ilya lifts an eyebrow at his outburst. “No,” Ilya agrees. “Not until you ask for it.”

Then he slaps Shane across the face.

Shane bites his tongue as hard as he can. Ilya never holds back. Even now, even still. When he strikes, it’s with his full strength. The sting sears through Shane’s cheek like a splash of acid. Shane wants to hide. Instinct only chases. Stripped of pride, he has no dam to keep the whimper from pouring out through his mouth.

“You are so difficult, sometimes,” says Ilya. The heel of his palm, meandering low, finds the growing tent in Shane’s pants. Shane gasps, almost losing his balance, liquid heat shooting up his spine. “Making me guess what you need by saying the opposite more than the truth.”

Shane shakes his head.

“You don’t agree?” Ilya asks.

Shane shakes his head again.

Ilya presses further into Shane’s cock. “But you are wet here.”

Shane’s head shoots up with a glare. The cord in his throat snaps.

“I’m—” I’m not, he tries to say. Lets go of a helpless whine when Ilya rocks his hand—slow, steady, restrained. And then with his free hand Ilya slaps him again, bringing a blur to his eyes. Shane grabs onto Ilya’s shoulders before he can stop himself. “I’m—You’re still such an asshole.”

Ilya laughs. He releases Shane and points at the bed. “Go. Hands and knees.”

Shane goes. Against the sheets, the knuckles of his fists are pale. He spreads his knees wide apart, as invitingly as he can. He can hear the sound of Ilya’s footsteps behind him, each one slow, nonetheless crisp and clear. A ruffle of sheets as the mattress sinks. He can feel Ilya’s body warmth behind him, a hand coming to rest on Shane’s thigh.

“Interesting.” Ilya’s hands and voice are defeatingly soft. He hikes up Shane’s skirt and huffs a disbelieved laugh. When Shane whimpers, Ilya spreads his legs wider. An ache spreads through them. “What are these?”

“I,” Shane whimpers.

Before he can finish, Ilya yanks at the laced strip of underwear, twists it to the side, exposing Shane’s cock.

“So wet.” He slaps Shane’s entrance, coaxing a moan. “And you tell me you have no pussy?”

“I don’t—Ilya.” Shane jerks back when Ilya’s hand collides with him once more. Shane is well acquainted with cruelty; he doesn’t know why he’d expected kindness. It horrifies him to think it is as Ilya had said—had he expected Ilya to forget who he is? “Oh, god.”

Ilya hikes up Shane’s shirt, finds his nipples with impossible ease. The twist sends a bolt of electricity through Shane’s chest. “You have such tiny tits,” he says. “That is too bad. Did you think being my puck bunny was that easy?”

“I was not trying to be—”

A loud crack splits through the air. Shane’s hole clenches. Pain sparks up his spine, snaking through his nerves. “Think I will fuck you good just because you can blush and wear a skirt.” Shane doesn’t dare look back. He doesn’t let himself collapse on his forearms. “You should thank me for letting you talk back.”

“Th—thank you.” The words slip out before Shane can stop them, which he doesn’t understand. He used to vomit after the boys told him to wear a dress; he’d learned to keep quiet but never to enjoy the silence. Now, he should not be finding abjection so sweet. Pleasure wreathes him. “Thank you.”

“I have never had a girl like this,” Ilya says. His attention has shifted to Shane’s inner thighs, bending to tear into them with his teeth. “Most of them were so nice.” His voice takes on a mocking tone. “Oh, Rozanov, please fuck me. Your cock is so big. I want it in my—”

Shane’s face flushes scarlet. He doesn’t know how he’d manage an imitation if asked. “Did girls really say that?”

“Does it matter?” Ilya asks, with a dry laugh. “I used to wonder when I would find something different. Someone like you.” He swats Shane’s thighs and then his hole again. “I wouldn’t even have to feel bad for hurting you.”

Shane whines loudly. He shouldn’t feel special, but he can feel the glory in his veins. And yet if it is victory, why is he so scared? “Is that what you like about me?”

“Yes.” Ilya gathers the precome from Shane’s cock and shoves it into his ass. “You’d do anything for me.” He bends down and speaks into Shane’s ear. “So fucking cock-drunk.”

There is nothing to say after that. Shane is the one who’s sick enough to make private flirtation with the pain. It unnerves him to feel defeat so early on—his mind transmuting into a sandbox of raw nerves, ready to be broken into, and relentlessly toyed with. Every moment hurts. Ilya pinches Shane’s thighs, spanks his hole, occasionally dipping his dry finger past that tight ring of muscle, making Shane cry. Wetness drips out of him, making patches on the sheets. He whimpers and he wails and he is not reprieved. The heat in his stomach is an unquenchable thirst.

“More,” he finds himself saying. His skirt chafes his skin as he clenches at the sheets, pushing his ass high. “More, please, I want—”

Ilya snorts, mildly breathless. “I hold back with my girls. Difficult to find someone who can take me,” He yanks Shane’s skull back by his hair, and with his other hand twists Shane’s neck around. He slaps Shane’s cheek and twists his nose and pulls at his bottom lip. Then he lets Shane fall, head rolling like a doll’s. “But you are easy. I could fuck you in my sleep.”

Shane wants to crawl into his skin. He wants to undo the threads keeping it intact and resew it afresh—a puppet turned inside-out, a stupid homunculus in need of repair every week. He thought he’d learned to be silent but he still has his open-mouthed hunger, and Ilya’s brought bait.

“Stop,” he whimpers, when the heat overwhelms. “I’m—I’m ready.”

“Ready?” Ilya presses two fingers into him. “I don’t think you are.”

“I am.” Shane grits out, “Fuck me.”

“But why? Why do you want me to fuck you?”

Shane exhales. His thighs are trembling. “What do you mean why?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ilya says, sardonically. “You tell me. Why should I fuck your pussy? Why should I do what you say when you did not ask if you could wear this?” He yanks at Shane’s skirt; the fabric rips. Pulls it off and throws it to the ground. “No more playing.” Shane wails into the pillows. “Why do you deserve my cock if you cannot even be honest?”

Shane does not understand his audacity’s lack of bounds. “I’m not answering that,” he snaps. “I don’t have a pussy.”

“Then you will not get what you want.”

Ilya returns to his task. The sound of skin rings through the room on each strike. Ilya squeezes Shane’s cock, drags fingers along his walls, making heat burst through his body, seep through his fingertips. Every touch eviscerates him of restraint. Each fingernail, each twist, a dissection in parts. When Shane bites his lip, the skin breaks. There is blood in my mouth.

Shane says, very quietly, “Fine.”

“Fine what?”

“You’re so—”

Crack. “Fine what?”

“Fine! I’ll—I’ll answer.” Shane blinks through his tears. “I’ll tell you why you should fuck me.”

Ilya smiles. He flips Shane over roughly, pressing Shane down onto his back. Looking at him is devastating. “You will?”

It does not sound like a question. “Y—yes. I’ll beg you, okay? I—I’ll say whatever you want. Just—”

“Okay. Beg.”

Then Ilya moves off him, pivots off the bed. Shane blinks the haze out of his eyes, inhaling sharply.

His chest closes shut. “Where are you—”

Before he can finish that sentence, Ilya has returned, making him breathe out a sigh. It is with his watch in hand that Ilya cages Shane in with his thighs. He turns the face towards Shane before turning it back to himself.

“Talk,” he says, sternly. “Two minutes. No stopping. I will keep track. Beg me to fuck you.”

Shane stares at him. “What?”

“Am I not clear? Two minutes.”

The length of a minor penalty. Shane shrinks back. “It’s embarrassing.”

“We have figured out that you like it,” Ilya says.

“Ilya,” Shane says. This earns him another pinch to his thigh, hard. “I—”

“Well?” Ilya lifts an eyebrow. “You have one hundred twenty seconds.”

Shane has no choice. “Ilya, please,” he manages. “You should fuck my cunt. Please.” He has no excuse for the arousal in his stomach, but he has been dreaming of this since the red heels from his childhood. The cigarette burns on his stomach, the hands on his thighs. But nobody had ever laughed and not discarded him after it. Is Shane stupid for trusting Ilya to put him back together afterward? “I’m—I’m—so wet for you.” Humiliation scorches him. He’s never felt so aflame. Not in all their the times they’d spent together in hotels, not when they’d been cruel. “Please, I—”

“Your voice should be higher,” Ilya says. He lifts his voice—a demonstration. “Like this, hm?” He taps Shane’s cheek. “Restart. One hundred twenty seconds.”

“You—” Despite himself, Shane obeys. He repeats what he has said, in an airy voice. Then, he adds, “I—want to feel your cock inside me.” Ilya flilts his gaze between him and the watch, expressionless. Shane tries not to frown. “I—I’m so desperate for it.” Breathlessly, “Please, Ilya, I want to be your girl. When—” He shivers, tears springing out of his eyes. “When you gave me those… clamps on my birthday that year, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Fuck me. Please. Please fuck me.”

“When did you get the skirt? Why did I not know this?”

“2015,” Shane says, wet and honest. “You kept going out with people, and—I’m sorry—I was so jealous. I wanted to be your only girl.”

“Forty seconds left,” Ilya says, with still a stoic voice. “Why did you wear it now if you bought it so long ago? Why did you not ask me if you could wear it?”

“I just—” Shane sniffs. “I didn’t know how this summer would have turned out. I didn’t know if you’d reject me. I thought, if I was a girl, you might want me more. And I brought the skirt along, in case—” His voice goes quiet. It’s his own voice. “In case you didn’t want me.” He takes a shuddering breath. “I wanted to convince you.”

Ilya’s eyes dim.

Shane realizes what he’s said. “Sorry.” He turns his face to the side, squeezing his legs back together. “I didn’t mean to break character. And I’m not saying that to—” He hadn’t meant to ruin the mood, accusing Ilya of crimes he isn’t guilty of. “I’m not trying to suggest that—you weren’t—”

But when Ilya opens his mouth, it is not derision that greets him. “Shane.” He groans. The metallic sound of his zipper permeates the air. Shane doesn’t dare look. Even now, relief seems a dangerous act. “I need to fuck you.” Ilya rips Shane’s shirt overhead and hooks his panties off his legs. “If I cannot fuck you right now, I will kill you. I—” He exhales. “Shane. Look at me.”

“I can’t,” Shane says, on instinct.

“Still scared?”

Shane looks. Ilya’s face is dark, saturated with blood. A sheen of sweat rests on his temple and his jaw is slack.

This is the face of a man who wants me.

“You can’t fuck me if I’m dead,” Shane says, weakly.

“Probably still would,” Ilya says, sounding drunk. “Spread your legs.” He lifts a hand to Shane’s mouth. “Spit.”

Shane does. He watches Ilya stroke his flushed cock with the wetted hand. It’s hardly enough. Shane wonders if it would bleed.

Shane grabs onto Ilya’s shoulders as Ilya hikes his legs up. He cries out when Ilya fucks into him, relentlessly, driving the head of his cock into Shane’s prostate at every thrust, every agonizing roll of his hips. The air cracks like a draw-bridge breaking open. Shane runs his hands over Ilya’s back and his arms, trails the lines of his biceps and the hard-earned scars on his skin. His vision whites out with sunspots in his eyes.

“You are still so fucking desperate,” Ilya says, inclemently. His hair sticks to his forehead, drenched in sweat. He spits into Shane’s mouth and slaps his aching cheeks. Then he flips Shane over, making the room shake. Shane scrambles onto his knees and clutches onto the pillows. “You should have told me from the start you wanted to be my girl. I could have been eating your pussy in 1410 and 1221.”

A sob, earnest, helpless. “How do you remember—”

“How do I remember?” Ilya laughs darkly. “Don’t you remember?” He shoves a fist in Shane’s hair, without once stopping to let Shane breathe. “I bet you remember what the first thing I said to you in that room was. I bet you think about that water bottle in the gym. Do you touch yourself thinking of it?”

“Ilya—”

A sharp sting on Shane’s head. “Even now?”

“Y—yes—”

“And you have been hiding this skirt for years, yes?” Ilya says. “Seven years I have fucked you and this is how you fucking repay me. Keeping your pervert little secret until you cannot stand lying anymore.”

“I’m not—I’m sorry,” Shane begs, earnestly, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—Slo—slow down, please, I shouldn’t have—”

Ilya only slams in harder.

“No, please—”

Shane writhes. He can summon no words to his throat. A ripping sensation tears through his hole. He can feel the warm trickle of iron down his thighs and the cauterizing heat through his spine. But the pain succeeds him; his head is blissed out. He sees floating streaks and an endless white horizon.

“Ilya, I’m gonna—”

“Didn’t even need to touch your clit for that to happen.” Ilya snaps. He flips Shane back around for one last time. Pins his wrists to the mattress and folds his body over. “Don’t come until I do.” Shake shakes his head; sobs. Hot tears leave firework streaks on his face. “I will tell you when.”

There is no going back. When Ilya finally comes, Shane is not thinking at all. He leaks out of himself, like a running tap—the entirety of him.

*

Someone is calling his name. A towel on his skin. Lukewarm water in his ears and sloshing on his cotton-limbs.

Hands in his hair, massaging his scalp.

“That was not the only reason why I like you.” Someone is whispering into the damp crook of his neck. “You know this. Yes?”

Shane nods his head in delirium.

“Солнышко.” A kiss to his neck. The back of his ear. Sunight between breaths. “я тебя люблю.”

*

It is a long while before Shane speaks.

When he does, it is sudden, springing up to sit with his back to the headboard, on the covers—

“Do you think I am a girl?”

He almost regrets the question. Hears the inanity of it. Ilya snorts as he throws Shane an oblique glance. “Are you really asking me that now?”

“I mean—” Shane looks away. “We just—”

“Yes, I just fucked your cunt and slapped your clit. Now what.”

“Shut up,” Shane says. Then, quieter, “People used to call me one.”

Ilya lifts an eyebrow.

Shane whacks his shoulder. “Not in that way. Get your head out of the gutter.” He bites his lip.

Ilya rolls over onto his side, reaches out, gently cupping his cheeks. “Is something wrong?”

“I just meant,” Shane takes a deep breath. His eyes dart away. “My teammates used to say I was one. So, you know, just to be clear. I’m not saying it was bad, or anything, but at the end of the day, I’m not a girl—”

Ilya is quiet for a long moment. “Is it so bad to be one?”

Shane glares. “If you think—”

“Okay, okay,” Ilya says, in mock surrender. “I know you are not a girl, Shane.” He pauses, then, appends, “But—this.” He gestures at the bed. “Did you like it?”

“I don’t—”

Ilya holds Shane’s wrist, passes his thumb over its veins, seeking Shane’s pulse. “Shane.”

There is a long silence.

Shane brings his gaze away. Then, back again. And with it, warm cheeks. “Well—”

Ilya flicks his forehead. He smiles, like he has scored a goal. “If you did, then it doesn’t matter.”

Shane wrings his wrist out of Ilya’s grasp. He flops back onto the pillows and stares at the ceiling.

Ilya looks at him.

He climbs over, taking both of Shane’s shoulders in his hands.

“You are you,” he says, like Shane is a stubborn child. “Shane Hollander. Okay? If you like something, then you like it. That does not change you. Simple to me.”

Shane opens his mouth. Closes it.

“You don’t have to be my girl,” says Ilya, with unnecessary gravitas, “if you don’t want to be.”

Shane blinks up at him. His voice is small. “Okay.”

Ilya presses their foreheads together. His body is warm.

After a long moment, Shane presses his face into Ilya’s neck.

“We could still do that again,” he mumbles, into the soft skin. “Not—like—God. Sorry. I sound contradictory. But I liked it.” He pauses, pondering. “More than I should.”

Ilya shakes his head. Fondly, exasperated. “Then you can be my Shane, my beautiful boy,” he says, taking one of Shane’s wrists in hand. And then the other. He brings them together in a cross over Shane’s head, a solar flare in his fingertips. “And my girl. Problem?”

There is no argument Shane can offer to appease him. It is a relief.

*

Ilya accompanies him to his parents and then back. He does not complain when Shane kneels and holds his shins. He does not laugh. In the morning, his face is warm and his eyes clear. The sun is a sliced apple in a glass bowl.

*

By the time it is midnight, exhaustion does not hit Shane’s eyes like a slap. Moonlight flows through the windows as a feathery haze, where it hits the ground and runs. He is standing there at the doorway, just a room’s length from wonder when Ilya pats the seat next to him on the couch.

“Come here,” he says.

Shane goes. Ilya does not move his eyes off him. Shane gets on Ilya’s lap so they are facing each other, the closeness of their bodies sending a ripple of warmth through Shane’s spine. Ilya’s lips are a seashore, the smile a curling wave.

“I have something for you,” he says. His arms wrap around Shane’s waist.

Shane gives him a suspicious look. “Do I want to know?”

“That is a question for you to answer,” Ilya says. “Do you want it now?” He kisses the side of Shane’s ear.

It surprises Shane how quickly his answer comes to him.

“Yes,” he says. “Show me.”

Ilya seems satisfied by this. He taps Shane’s cheek. “Give me your neck.”

“My neck? Are you are going to murder me?”

Ilya looks at him. “I promise I will be holding a knife when I am next going to,” he says. Shane tenses, thinking again of the time he’d pressed one into Ilya’s hand, years ago. Ilya continues, “No. You will see.” He makes a beckoning motion with his hand. Shane follows it; drawing closer.

In the periphery of his vision, he sees Ilya fish something glimmering out of his pocket. It’s under his nose when Ilya unfurls his palm, revealing a ribbon of dark velvet.

A necklace? Choker?

Shane realizes belatedly, as Ilya holds it before him with its full length extended, that it is a collar. It has a small, diamond gem dangling from the side, the size of a raindrop. The glimmer had been its clasp, gold at the back.

Shane holds his breath. He knows Ilya can see that too.

Ilya is quiet when he brings the collar around Shane’s neck. Shane feels gooseflesh on his skin as it clicks shut, Ilya’s hands warm on his nape. The room seems to glow in his vision the more Ilya’s touch stays, a present tingle.

“There,” Ilya says. A skylight in his eyes, letting through the night. He makes another gesture with his hands. “Let me see.”

Shane moves back to plant more space between them. He lifts his throat up, touches the skin there. The material is soft; it does not scratch him. He can feel his Adam’s apple under his fingertips, the performing arch of it.

 “Ilya,” he says, his face warm.

Tenderly, Ilya brushes a thumb over Shane’s jugular.

Once, Shane had wondered how much of himself he’d have to give up to sate Ilya’s desire. He’d never asked what Ilya would do once he was done. He only knows, now, sitting pressed together, belonging to a man who does not discard him for his surrender. What he gives up, Ilya safekeeps.

Ilya says a phrase in Russian, kissing Shane’s neck. He wraps his tongue around the gemstone, presses his teeth to the skin there. “I want you,” he says. It is strange to hear him admit that. “You are beautiful. I want you.” A finger runs under the velvet, tight against skin, “We might need another.”

Shane snorts. He can’t help it. “You are so greedy.”

“Always,” Ilya says, rather lightly. “You know what I am.”

Shane quietens. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I like to,” Ilya says, brazenly. “And because why not?” He tugs at the collar. It catches Shane off-guard, drawing a gasp. “You look pretty.”

“I—” There is a thick moment of silence. He whispers, “You look like you own me.”

Ilya offers him a long stare.

“Did you not want that?”

Shane hesitates. He can feel again in him the canine teeth of his want. Flushes. He does not know how to explain that he had wanted Ilya inside him and pressed everywhere outside him, wanted their bodies to melt into each other, with a proximity so great you could not tell where their surfaces ended and began. He wants that ever-tethered bind, pulling them close. He wants them inextricable from each other.

This is where I belong.

“Yes,” he says, so quietly he has to strain his ears for his voice. Ilya puts a proprietary hand to his face, thumb brushing the high of his cheeks. “Yes, I wanted it.”

“Again,” Ilya says, low. He tugs again, his grip tight—Shane imagines a heavier weight, leather, thicker around the edges and with a ring at the front. “Say it again.”

“I want it.”

“In full,” Ilya says. He is so close. He presses his palm to Shane’s chest. “What do you want?”

“I—I wanted you to put your collar on me,” Shane says, unvarnished. The words are not as daunting as they should be. “Take me. You can have anything you want from me. I—I’ve always thought of it. I want you to—” He restarts, barely a whisper, “I want you to own me.”

Ilya seals his voice with a kiss. The immediacy of it startles Shane, catches him midway through a hitched breath. It shatters into Ilya’s mouth.

“You would wear a leash for me?” Ilya loops a finger through the front of the velvet. “Here?”

“Yes,” Shane whispers. “Yes. I want.” He closes his eyes. “Please.” The afterimage of Ilya’s smile is sun-bleached white. “I want you to make me.”

For his private viewing, Shane would.

This is what will make me. The fact sings through him. He does not have to be alone with his mind. It fills him with so much joy he dares to run up the cottage stairs and then down again, out through the double doors into the mid-summer breeze, into the woods and around the lush trees and then back again, breathless at the front yard where Ilya catches him like a sun, pulling birds of prey into orbit. Under ultraviolet light, the collar is a warm presence on his throat. It should not feel like absolution. He had not thought his head could feel so light.

They have held fast for so long. Ilya touching Shane’s mouth and finding him breathing. Shane touching Ilya’s chest and finding only flesh.