Archive of Our Own

“New Italian fusion place opened in Mile End,” Ilya says, swiping at his phone to scroll through the photos. “Good reviews on Google. Looks nice, even though I am not very sure what it is supposed to be fusing with...”

Shane’s fighting with a basket of laundry on his hip, but he sets it down for a second to glance at the screen over Ilya’s shoulder. “Yeah, sounds good.” He presses a quick kiss to the curve of Ilya’s jaw before heading back to his laundry. “What time should we put in the order?”

Ilya taps through more of the photos. Pasta dishes, smiling couples, smiling couples eating pasta dishes. As casually as he can, he says, “Was thinking maybe we could go there to eat.”

Shane’s got a fitted sheet in his hands, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment as he lines up the corners and folds it into a neat square. He really should have people to do that for him—at his level of wealth almost everyone does, Ilya certainly does—but Shane’s always been too paranoid to let anyone into his apartment. Even when he stays over at Ilya’s place in Ottawa, he always washes the bedding himself, as if Ilya’s housekeepers might be running secret DNA tests on their cum stains and selling the info to the tabloids.

It was a little funny at first, that level of paranoia. After over a decade Ilya can’t find it anything but sad.

 “Ilya,” Shane says finally, setting the sheet back in the basket and picking up another. “Come on.”

Against his will, an old stirring of frustration sharpens Ilya’s tongue. “What? Is just dinner, is not like marching in a parade—“

“And we were already seen together last weekend,” Shane reminds him. “Two weeks in a row is too risky. You know this. I know you know this, so don’t make me into the villain here.” 

Shane sounds tired enough that Ilya swallows his protest. Don’t be the reason he sounds tired, Ilya reminds himself. Don’t let him realize he’s tired of you.

“Okay,” Ilya says, forcing a brightness into his voice that he doesn’t feel. “No problem. You are right.”

He busies himself with his phone, swiping blindly between apps and swaying a little bit against the kitchen counter. Shane sighs softly from behind him, and then there’s the gentle press of his chin on Ilya’s shoulder, arms snaking around to circle Ilya’s waist. 

“I’m sorry,” Shane murmurs. “It’s just another few years, I promise.”  His arms shift a little, an abortive attempt to stretch all the way around. Ilya wishes he wouldn’t try. It’s been a long time since Ilya’s middle was thin enough that Shane’s hands could touch, even if Shane always seems to forget. 

“I hate it as much as you do,” Shane continues. 

For a second Ilya thinks Shane’s talking about the girth of Ilya’s waist, and every drop of his blood turns to ice. But no. Of course not. The closet situation, he reminds himself. Right. 

Ilya makes himself give a stiff nod, even though he knows what Shane’s saying isn’t even true. There’s no way Shane hates hiding their relationship as much as Ilya does, because Ilya hates it so much that he’d pick up his phone right goddamn now and tell the world about them immediately. And Shane— 

Well. Shane’s been using the same ‘just a little longer’ line for almost as long as they’ve been together. 

No, that’s not fair. It’s not Shane’s fault that he has so much more to lose. It’s not Shane’s fault that his star has just continued to rise, that he’s thirty-six and still hasn’t hit the ceiling of his career; Montreal’s hero of a captain with the most Cup wins in history, 200 pounds of lean Canadian hockey machine. 

Ilya, on the other hand, is the washed-up, overweight, has-been captain of the worst team in the league. The only thing he possibly has left to lose is belly fat, and Christ knows that’s not happening any time soon.

There’d been a time when it seemed like things might go differently. 2019, only Ilya’s second year on the Centaurs and he’d already managed to lead them to the team’s first playoffs appearance in two decades. The whole city had been alight with hope. Ilya had been incandescent with it. 

And then a stupid twist of his knee during a routine practice skate had torn the tissue of Ilya’s anterior cruciate ligament clean apart. 

Everything snowballed from there. The surgery that repaired the ligament but couldn’t touch the chronic inflammation. The nights of insomnia and agony so intense he couldn’t even start physical therapy. Then the last-ditch effort with a course of heavy-dose steroids; the ensuing sixty-pound weight gain that piled on so quickly that Ilya’s skin had erupted in dark red marks as it struggled to accommodate the sheer amount of fat packing onto his belly.

Ilya had hardly recognized himself in the mirror. Had hardly been able to drag himself out of bed. He probably wouldn’t have at all, would’ve just crawled under the covers to rot until he died, if it hadn’t been for Shane.

Shane, his beautiful Shane, Shane who’d been so unfailingly patient and encouraging. Shane who’d never taken it personally when Ilya couldn’t muster more than a few words of greeting, who’d never complained when he had to lift up the bottom of Ilya’s drooping gut in order to suck his dick. Shane who’d held Ilya in his arms when the pain and self-hatred drove him to ugly, snotty tears, who’d traced light fingers over the ample mass of Ilya’s tummy and said, Don’t worry. We’ll get you back in shape and you’ll be back in those playoffs in no time. 

And Ilya had no choice but to agree. Because he knew Shane had only fallen in love with him because Ilya had been the best—the only player who could match Shane on the ice, shot for shot and speed for speed. Shane might’ve been patient with him now, but everyone’s patience had a limit. Ilya didn’t want to find where Shane’s ended.

He’d lifted Shane’s fingers from his stomach and brought them to his lips. “Whatever it takes,” he’d vowed, and kissed each of Shane’s knuckles in turn.

Whatever it takes somehow ended up including a Sportscenter documentary about his comeback story. He’s still not entirely sure whose idea it had been— maybe Yuna’s, maybe someone’s from the Centaurs marketing team, maybe even Ilya’s himself, a sarcastic suggestion that everyone had ran with—but the end result was a glossy, well-produced hour-long TV special that earned an Emmy nomination for its directing. 

The film had clips from all the juiciest bits of the story. The moment of his injury, the horrible elastic snap that Harris had picked up in the background of a routine promo video. Interviews with the surgeons. Shots of his rounds and rounds of physical therapy. And a particularly humiliating scene of the team doctor wrapping a tape measure around the round girth of Ilya’s belly, the solemn explanation to the camera that Ilya’s waist circumference had grown wide enough to earn him the diagnosis of abdominal obesity. 

And cue the inspirational montage found in every sports movie since the dawn of time. Upbeat rock songs paired with shots of Ilya sweating it out in the gym, forking down dry salads under a nutritionist’s watchful eye. Physical therapy with the top experts in the world. Weekly weigh-ins at the clinic, calipers biting into the rolls on his belly as his body fat percentage was reported aloud; approving pats to his tummy as it slowly began to shrink.

And behind the scenes, Shane’s steady, hopeful encouragement. You’re doing so good, baby. I’m so proud of you. 

Ilya needed to keep making him proud. 

He worked even harder.

In the end, he managed to get back in shape by the season opener. Well, almost. His lower belly still clung stubbornly to a pouch of fat that no amount of dieting seemed to touch. The producers fussed over it for a while before finally deciding to film the final shirtless “After” shot with Ilya wearing high-waisted pants that hid the pair of “tummy control” briefs that he’s pretty sure were ladies’ Spanx.

But Ilya didn’t really care. Shane was proud of him, and Shane loved him, and his team was ecstatic to have him back. The whole city was. They were ready for their comeback season and they had an Emmy-nominated documentary to prove it. Yes. It was all set up to be the best underdog story in MLH history.

The only problem was it never happened. 

Ilya got back on the ice, and he played—good. And that was it. Just good. Not spectacular, not outstanding. Decent. And his team was decent, but decent teams don’t win cups. 

The buzz about Ottawa’s comeback slowly died down as it became clear they weren’t heading to the playoffs anytime soon. A few think pieces circulated about what went wrong, but Ilya didn’t need to read them to know the truth. 

The team wasn’t good enough because Ilya wasn’t good enough. The supply of luck he’d gotten by on all this time had run out, and now everyone could see that his true nature was that of a fucking loser. Sure, okay, his knee had residual stiffness that the physios warned him might never fully heal, but if Ilya were less of a failure he’d be able to overcome that. Instead, everything his father had ever said about him was proven true. He was lazy. Stupid. Couldn’t work hard enough to make anyone proud. 

When he got home from particularly rough games, he’d call Shane. But Shane didn’t know what to say about bad hockey. He’d demur awkwardly and repeat platitudes about Ilya’s knee healing with time, and Ilya would grimace and change the subject.

The only thing that really made him feel better was food. It started with a pizza ordered on a whim after a loss to Toronto, rich-charboiled mozzarella hot enough to thaw out the ice left behind by Shane’s ‘helpful’ suggestion that maybe ‘cleaning up’ some of his techniques would help compensate for the deficit in his knee. As if Ilya hadn’t already tried every fucking thing. He thinks you’re lazy, the voice in his head whispered, until Ilya shut it up by inhaling slice after slice until his body was too swollen to single out any individual threads of hurt.

After that, the treats Ilya used to indulge in only occasionally now became daily staples. Ice cream topped with rich hot fudge. Fried chicken smothered in ranch and bacon. Huge bowls of rice with tangy-sweet sauces. He’d park himself on the sofa and lose himself for an hour or two in the only pleasure he seemed capable of experiencing, these days.

When his weight began to creep upward again, it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was.

Pre-injury, Ilya had never given a single thought to what he ate. He’d enjoyed good food, sure, but his body had seemed to know instinctively how much he needed, and he’d never felt tempted to overeat. But after his rounds of medication and crash dieting, it’s like something in his metabolism had permanently broken, and now he was just so fucking hungry all the time, a bottomless pit that nothing could fill. He kept telling himself to just eat less—just eat less, you fat fuck—but once something was in front of him, he couldn’t stop. 

Oh, he still tried so hard, that first year. Forced himself back on restrictive diets, or at least attempted to follow up his over-indulgences with extra treadmill time that only left his knee even stiffer. Whenever he felt like giving up, he replayed clips from his documentary over and over for motivation. Watched the doctors poke and prod at his tubby middle, felt the sharp pinch of the calipers biting into his thick rolls of fat. Tried to remember how humiliating it had all been. How hard he’d worked to fix himself.

Towards the end of the season, he’d managed to lose a few pounds and was feeling pretty good. He could reward himself a little bit, he decided. McDonalds, but only one Big Mac, not three. A medium fry, not large. Diet Coke instead of a chocolate milkshake. He went to bed still hungry that night, but he was proud of himself. He could eat normally. He could do this.

Then he’d seen the article the next day. Roly-Poly Rozanov: Hockey’s Hefty Has-been, accompanied by an unfortunate shot of Ilya holding the McDonald’s bag, t-shirt riding up as he scratched his soft, pale belly. Ottawa captain’s flabby frame leaves fans wondering if Rotund Rozanov has given up.

Ilya’s stomach had plummeted so fast he’d felt like he might throw up. Jesus christ. He was trying so hard, torturing himself daily to keep his weight down, and the leanest he could manage was still too fat for these people. So what fucking hope did he have?

Ottawa captain’s flabby frame leaves fans wondering if Rotund Rozanov has given up.

Ilya hadn’t given up, but maybe he should. If everyone already thought he was a lazy fatass, then what was the point of fighting it.

He was so tired. 

Slowly, he gave up trying to suppress his appetite. He gave up trying to burn off his overeating with extra cardio. And he gave himself over completely to the warm, heavy comfort of a belly filled with food; let the pleasure of eating cradle him when nothing else could. 

He got fat. Of course he did. Properly fat, not just the pudgy softness the tabloids had sensationalized. No, all the weight he’d worked so hard to lose came back, and then more beyond that. But no one was pointing a camera at him anymore, even as his body fattened enough that it was hard to find a uniform that fit. He was so irrelevant now that no one even fucking cared.

Well. Except for Shane. 

Shane had clearly been at a loss, that first time he’d come back from playoffs and found Ilya’s already-soft midsection carrying about twenty-five more pounds of fat than it had the last time they’d seen each other. And Ilya knew why he couldn’t understand it. Shane lived in a world of black and white, sometimes, tidy shapes that fit in perfect boxes. And in Shane’s mind, they’d already solved the issue. Ilya’s injury and medicine had made him fat, but then he’d healed, worked hard, and lost the weight. Problem solved. Story complete.

The idea that Ilya might get fat again, and on his own this time, with nothing to blame except for his own failure to control his appetite, clearly did not compute. 

“Do you…do you want my help with a meal plan again?” Shane had asked tentatively, taking a handful of Ilya’s belly fat and looking at it with so much tender concern that Ilya’s insides had shriveled. 

Then the humiliation made him cold, like it always did. Just like his brother that way, wasn’t he.  “No,” Ilya snapped as sharply as he could, but Shane had persisted anyway.

“If you’re having— you know, weight problems again, we can—”

Weight problems. Ilya was a tundra of shame. “Did I fucking ask for your help?” he’d spat, and then answered his own question by pushing Shane away from him. “No. I asked you to get on your fucking knees.” 

And Shane had just stared at him for a long, silent moment before complying. 

That time, Ilya was rougher with Shane than he’d meant to be, lost somewhere in his head and disconnected from the bulky apparatus that was his body. But when he heard one of Shane’s moans turn into a genuine cry of pain, he stopped immediately. 

“Fuck—Shane,” he swore, breath coming in shallow gasps as he searched frantically for evidence of hurt on Shane’s face. “Are you okay, malysh? Did I—”

“No, I’m fine,” Shane tried to assure him, though his own breathing was a little ragged. “It’s not your fault, I was just a little tense—”

“Tense because I’d fucking yelled at you,” Ilya said, rolling over onto his back and staring at the ceiling. “I am so fucking sorry. Am worse than my father, I—”

“No,” Shane said firmly, fitting himself against Ilya’s side and taking one of Ilya’s shaking hands in his own. “Stop that. And.. I’m sorry too. When I brought up your—uh, body, I didn’t…I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about yourself. I was just—” his free hand settled on the cushion of Ilya’s tummy, a round curve that no longer flattened when he lay down. “Just worried about you,” Shane finished softly.

Ilya’s eyes stung, but he forced his voice to remain steady as he removed Shane’s hand from his gut. “How about this. Do not worry about me unless I tell you to worry, okay? And I will tell you, malysh. This I promise you.” He kissed the back of Shane’s palm, then the front. Rough calluses and taste of salt. His own tears or Shane’s sweat; hard to say. “But until then, leave the worrying to me.” Both, maybe.

“Yeah,” Shane said after a moment. “Okay.”

They were gentle with each other the rest of the night. Soft touches, slow strokes. Shane didn’t try to touch Ilya’s stomach again—except for once, on the insensate brink of orgasm, when his fingers had sought Ilya’s belly and clung to it tightly as he came.

Ilya hadn’t really known what to make of that.

Afterwards, Shane kept his word, and he didn’t make any more comments about Ilya’s weight. Even when Ilya grew fat enough that even his clothes from his heaviest post-injury weight started getting tight, fat enough to be the butt of 90% of the league’s jokes, fat enough that he would’ve been fired long ago if he were playing for any team besides the fucking Centaurs—even then, Shane still called him handsome. Still begged for Ilya’s cock and took it beautifully. Still loved him.

At least Ilya thought he did.

But one thing had changed. Shane’s promises about the timeline of their coming out began to grow more and more distant, ‘a few months’ becoming ‘a few years’ becoming baby, do we have to talk about that right now? And Ilya went along with it, because Shane was his everything and he’d do anything to keep him happy. But deep down, he couldn’t shake the sense that his own failures were the reason Shane refused to come out. Because if Ilya were still the dashing, ultra-fit hockey superstar, he knows for a fact that Shane would be a lot less ashamed to show him off in public. 

But Ilya hasn’t been that man in a long time. 

So Ilya can’t really blame Shane, if he’s being honest. Ilya wouldn’t want to be seen in public with himself either.

“I will order the takeout now,” Ilya says. But Shane doesn’t hear him. He’s already in another room.

*

“Ilya, you… you know you can put leftovers in the fridge if you get full, right?”

Ilya swallows thickly on a forkful of pasta before spearing another. “Fridge, what is this. Have never heard of it.”

Shane sighs, pushing an olive around his plate. “Oh-kay, just trying to save you from a stomachache, but whatever.” 

Ilya’s gut twists. Shane sounds tired again. Probably he is. Probably it is very tiring to watch your boyfriend shovel down three full-size entrees into his already overfed belly, tiring to wonder if your boyfriend will eat himself into his grave if you’re not there to constantly watch out for him. Fuck. Ilya hiccups, taste of vodka and bolognese. Unsteady sip from his beer. He’s maybe a little bit drunk. He’s maybe a little bit desperate to make Shane not tired of him. How can he do that? Jokes, maybe. Shane always found him very funny. 

“You forget my stomach is very big,” Ilya says, patting his belly enough to make it jiggle. “Will take more than this to make it ache.”

Shane glances at him and away with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. Fuck. Okay. Wrong tactic. Ilya had forgotten that Shane always gets awkward when Ilya references his fatness directly. Something else, then—? Another swig from his bottle that a hiccup interrupts, beer slopping messily down his front. He catches Shane’s wince from the corner of his eye.

Ilya turns back to his dinner. Maybe it’ll be easier to focus on making it up to Shane after he’s done eating.

At least the food is really fucking good. Cavatappi in creamy Alfredo sauce, slow-cooked short-rib and roasted portobello mushrooms. Fennel-sausage ragu over creste di galli filled with parmesan cream. Ilya plows through it all with a desperation that only grows as it starts to become clear that Shane was right. It is too much for him, even with how stretched his stomach has become over the years, even with how terribly he needs the comfort that only food like this can provide. 

He puts a palm on his stomach and tries to catch his breath. His belly is rounded out far into his lap, bumping into the table in front of him, the skin stretched taut like an overstuffed balloon. There’s so much pressure inside him that he can feel the compression of his diaphragm against his lungs, shortening his breathing to a wheeze. 

He dips his fork into the pasta and takes another labored bite.

“Ilya,” Shane says, and he doesn’t sound tired this time, he sounds concerned, and god how Ilya hates that fucking concern. “You said you’d tell me if something was wrong.”

“Yes,” Ilya says. “And nothing is wrong. Am just enjoying delicious dinner with my boyfriend. What? Is that a problem, now? Don’t worry. We are not in public. You do not have to be embarrassed to be seen with the fat slob. No one will know—”

“Ilya—fuck you, that’s not why we stayed in and you know it.”

“Do I?”

“What?”

But Ilya can’t elaborate. His mouth is still full as his stomach gives a deep, nauseating gurgle, and it takes every bit of concentration he has left in order to swallow.

Shane lets the matter drop. Ilya finishes his meals. When he’s done, he can barely rise from the chair, his belly so heavy and dense it’s like a lead vest dragging him down. Shane’s by his side to help him to the bedroom, but he pushes Ilya’s hand away when Ilya tries to paw at Shane’s pants.

“Hollander, I want to suck you,” Ilya pouts, food-drunk and queasy but still somehow horny, always fucking horny, aren’t you ever sick of being such a goddamn man-whore, Rozanov, Jesus fucking Christ.

But Shane just shakes his head. “Not tonight. Not when you’re—” Shane’s gaze rests again on the stuffed mass of Ilya’s gut, and his jaw tightens.  “I’m tired,” he says instead.

Yes, Ilya thinks. I know you are, I know why you are, but I can fix it. I can be good for you, I promise. Please let me be good for you.

He crawls forward, belly dragging on the bed below him until he’s nosing into Shane’s crotch. “Please, Shane,” he whines. “I miss your cock. Is the most beautiful in the world, and yet is not getting sucked nearly enough, what terrible crime…” He palms Shane’s tight ass as he speaks, dragging his nose and chin across the soft length of Shane’s shaft through his sweatpants and smiling a victor’s smile when he feels it twitch. 

“Fine,” Shane says, and now his own lips are twitching upward, because he can never resist Ilya’s blowjobs either; because this is the one game Ilya can still always win.

“Oh, fine?” Ilya repeats, glancing around himself and hamming it up for the invisible audience. “You hear this guy? Beautiful man offers to suck his cock and all he says is fine. So ungrateful. Maybe I should—“

“C’mere,” Shane laughs, pulling Ilya by the hair to bring him back to his groin. The movement sends another queasy rumble through the distension of Ilya’s stomach—for the millionth time in his life, Ilya asks himself why he’d had to go and eat so fucking much—but luckily Shane doesn’t seem to hear it. 

A few tugs at Shane’s waistband reveal his beautiful cock, long and perfect and neat, framed by his tidy thatch of dark hair that’s just starting to go a little bit gray. Ilya cradles the balls, blunt fingernails running across the seam in that way that always makes Shane shiver, and then he widens his mouth and takes him on his tongue.

It’s perfect, the way it always is. That taste he loves so well, clean skin and a bit of sweat; the groan from Shane that’s never gotten less sweet over the many years he’s heard it. All of it filling Ilya’s mouth, his throat, so good, so full, so full of Shane, his beloved Shane, but—

The problem is he’s already really, really fucking full. 

His stomach roils as Shane’s fingers grasp Ilya’s sweaty roots and push him deeper. You can do this, Ilya tells himself, fighting down another wave of nausea. Make it good for him. If your only skill is stuffing things in your mouth then what good are you if you can’t use it to make him come.

The pressure in his gut builds like a gasket ready to blow, but Ilya still doesn’t stop. Just a little bit longer. Just—

Acid shoots up his esophagus so swiftly that he doesn’t even have time to pull off Shane’s cock before he’s throwing up.

For a horrible moment, Shane doesn’t notice, and his hand on the back of Ilya’s head is too strong for Ilya to fight. Ilya has to pound a fist at Shane’s chest before he can manage to get himself away and heave the rest of his dinner into the blankets.

“Oh, fuck—Holy shit, Ilya, are you okay—“

There’s a hand trying to smooth back Ilya’s hair, but he pushes it away as he hears himself make another hideous animal retching sound. More of his stomach erupts onto the bed. Ugly yellowish stains cloud the sky-blue sheets. Shane’s footsteps pound out of the room. 

Good, Ilya thinks, a little delirious with pain and humiliation. Finally he leaves. If I were better I would have told him to go years ago. 

Sweat beads down his forehead and stings his eyes. The sheets are too hot, his skin is too hot. He slides himself down from the bed to the floor and presses his cheek to the cold hardwood.

Before he can close his eyes, arms hook under Ilya’s sweaty pits and haul him up to lean against the bedframe. “Hey, hey,” Shane’s saying, a little out of breath, either from running back into the room or the effort of trying to move Ilya’s weight. “No laying down yet, I don’t want you to choke. Here.” He hands Ilya a plastic bowl, which Ilya dutifully accepts as Shane squats in front of him and dabs Ilya’s forehead with a damp washcloth. “How are you feeling? Do you need me to get any—oh, no. No, baby, don’t cry, Ilya it’s okay, it’s really fine—”

“It’s not,” Ilya chokes. “I am so fucking sorry, my god Shane—” He searches desperately for Shane’s eyes, wills him to see the pain in his own that he can’t articulate, but Shane won’t meet his gaze.

“Being sick is nothing to apologize for,” Shane says, still swiping firmly at Ilya’s forehead like whatever’s wrong with him could be fixed as easily as clearing away a stain.

Ilya opens his mouth, but then his stomach gives another twist and all he can do is bury his head in the plastic bowl.

*

The rest of the night passes in a febrile haze. Ilya spends most of it with his cheek pressed to the cool rim of the toilet seat. Sometimes Shane is with him, rubbing soothing circles into his broad back and murmuring reassurances. Sometimes Ilya is alone, and he watches through the open door as Shane methodically scrubs the floor and strips the bed.

Eventually there’s nothing left to expel from his stomach but his shame. Ilya clings to the toilet bowl and tries anyway. 

*

“You can say it. I know you want to.”

Gray dawn light filters through the curtains. The bowl beside Ilya’s hip is empty, but he’d refused to re-join Shane on the bed unless he brought it with him, so there it sits. The same set of sky-blue sheets lies softly under their bodies, a lingering bit of dryer-warmth the only sign something had happened. Ilya knows he should be grateful, but it only makes his guilt sour further into anger. Shane should’ve just fucking thrown them out. No point trying to save ruined things when you can so easily afford to replace them.

Shane’s arm is slung around Ilya’s waist, his hand resting at the top of Ilya’s thigh, just below his belly. “What?” he asks, as if he doesn’t already fucking know.  

“The ‘I told you so.’ I know you must be dying to say it, so go on. Tell me.” 

But Shane just strokes his thumb softly in the crease of Ilya’s hip and says nothing. Right. Of course he wouldn’t. Good nurse with that fucking martyr complex. Ilya can’t take it anymore.

Curling his lip, Ilya adopts a high, cruel voice that sounds nothing like Shane and only a little bit like his father. “I know my lazy fuck of a boyfriend could not stop eating until he made himself too fat to be seen with me, but maybe this time he will listen, maybe this time if I ask him to please stop eating before he vomits on my dick—oh no, fat pig could not even manage that—“ 

“Stop it,” Shane hisses. 

“Why?” Ilya demands. “Is what you are thinking, I know it is.”

“It’s not, you asshole. Is this still all because I didn’t want to go out to dinner? Because how many times do I have to—“

“Enough fucking lies,” Ilya says, grabbing Shane’s wrist and pulling him around to finally fucking look him in the eye. “Just tell me. Can you honestly tell me that if I had not become—like this. You would not have come out already?”

Shane is silent for a terrible damning moment, and then he says, “Ilya, I…”

“Wow.” Ilya’s laugh catches in the burned-out ring of his throat. He’d known, of course he’d known, but the pain of confirmation is still sharp enough to catch him off-guard. He lets go of Shane’s hand and hunches forward over his knees.

“Ilya, no, I’m trying to say that it’s—complicated. It’s not like how you’re thinking.”

“Then tell me how it’s like.”

“It’s—“ Shane struggles for a moment, a hard swallow and an audible increase in the rate of his breathing. “It’s that I’m a fucking coward, okay, don’t you get it?”

Then Shane’s pushing himself off the bed, a hand thrust wildly in his hair as he paces across the room, voice rising into something high and panicked. “I’m a goddamn coward and I’m scared. Because once everyone knows we’re together, it won’t take a fucking genius to put two-and-two together about why you left Boston at the peak of your career. And then everyone will know what a terrible partner I am, how I ruined your life. That it’s my fault you ended up like—” 

Ilya raises an eyebrow, voice hard. “Like what? Fat?”

Shane’s pacing slows. He rubs a hand on the back of his neck and looks at the space above Ilya’s shoulder. “Well…yeah,” he says softly. “That’s part of it, but I mean the team, and your record…”

Ilya nods. “Right. Not only the worst captain in the league but the fattest one too. What do they say—‘pick a struggle,’ yes?” 

“You deserved to win more Cups,” Shane continues like Ilya hadn’t spoken. “You deserved to have your name among the greats, not tossed around like some joke. You were better than even me and now you’re—you’re—” he chokes off, words garbled in the wake of his sudden sob, “—and it’s all my fault.” 

Part of Ilya thinks: yes. Yes, I did fucking deserve more, finally someone says it.

The other part of him watches the man he loves cry harder than he has in years, and whatever’s left of his anger breaks down.

“Was never better than you,” Ilya says gruffly. “As good as, yes. But never better.”

Shane hiccups, tries for a smile that looks like it hurts. Ilya pats the space beside him on the bed. When Shane climbs in next to him, Ilya wraps his arms around him and breathes him in. The warm clean laundry smell of Shane’s skin, the stubble on the back of his neck. Shane, his Shane. Ilya loves him with every broken bit of his heart.

“I could have signed again with Boston and gotten an injury like that the next day,” Ilya says, stroking the ridge of Shane’s spine. “I know you like to think that we can control everything in this sport, but we cannot. It’s all luck, Shane, and mine ran out.” His shoulders rise in a shrug. “Not your fault.”

Shane’s fingers twist into the back of Ilya’s t-shirt, his heartbeat pounding through the embrace of their chests. Ilya takes a deep breath. This next part will hurt the most, but he knows they need to get it out there if they’re going to forward. 

“And I know that… you do not much like how I look at this size. And I am sorry for that, I am. But I have tried, tried very hard to change it, and I could not, cannot, so if—“

“What—? No, Ilya, no—” Shane pulls back enough to let Ilya see the horror spreading over his face. “It’s never been about how you look, is that what you—no, Jesus christ. You’re fucking gorgeous like this, I…” Shane blushes a deep crimson as his hands fall to the curve of Ilya’s belly. Empty now, it sits in his lap as a soft, cushiony weight. Shane’s fingers skim the plump sides of it until Ilya starts feeling a little short of breath. 

Gorgeous, he thinks, the word washing over him like a balm. Gorgeous. 

For once, Ilya lets Shane’s hands stay right where they are. 

“But— it’s not…not healthy, Ilya,” Shane’s voice drops to a whisper, even as his hands still massage into Ilya’s stomach like they’re trying to make up for lost time. “Having this much belly fat… the stress it puts on your heart, and your liver function, and you’re already borderline pre-diabetic—“

This is the kind of thing that would normally make Ilya retreat into himself, shame closing down all his walls like a fortress. But now he feels oddly calm. Gorgeous. His hands join Shane’s on his belly. 

“You know what else is not healthy, is taking a gun off the wall and putting a bullet in my fucking brain,” Ilya says bluntly. “Or driving my car into a tree. Or swallowing whole bottle of pills, yes. Know on good authority that one does the trick.”

“Ilya…”

“But I have not done these things. I got fat, yes, but I stayed alive.” Ilya takes another deep breath. “So I do not know, Shane. Maybe I will end up with diabetes and will have to learn to manage it. Maybe I will get hit by a truck tomorrow. Maybe new pandemic will kill half the population or I will get lung cancer or ALS or Alzheimer’s. I do not know. None of us know. Is luck, all of it. But I do know that I am here, now, in a body that has changed but always kept me alive. And—I am grateful for it.” 

The more he talks it out, the more he realizes it’s true. Lazy, lazy, he’s always told himself, but it takes a hell of a lot of dedication to stay alive this long when you’ve spent half your life wishing you weren’t. That has to count for something. 

Shane kisses him.

“No more guilt,” Ilya says into his lips. “From either of us.”

“Okay.” Soft tears glisten on Shane’s cheek. 

Ilya brushes them away with his thumb. He lets their foreheads rest together for another quiet moment before declaring, “Now I would like to hear more about how gorgeous I am.”

Shane laughs a little wetly. “Not if you’re going to get a big head about it.”

“Mmm, but I am big man. Need big head to be proportional, yes?” 

“Well, when you put it like that…” Shane’s hands slide back around Ilya’s belly as he kisses his neck. Ilya’s never had a request so thoroughly fulfilled as he does that morning.