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Shane doesn’t make it past the welcome mat, nevermind across the rest of his lunchbreak. Alyssa catches him with six minutes left. Not spare—precious second he’s already mentally spent. She’s half-bent over the plastic desk barrier, face blotchy between bland printouts and laminated insurance updates, hissing:
“Dr. Hollander—sorry,” and she really looks it, so much that Shane has to put actual effort in to stay irritated under every other discomfort. Bloat, mostly. “I’m so sorry. Mr. Rozanov is in your exam room. I know you said to have him wait—he just went right in.”
Under the greasy fist of his stomach: heat. Ugly warm churning that started in the parking lot, at the sight of his spotless neon audacity. Shane makes his face into the vague shape of a smile. He releases the blunt gold of the bathroom doorknob bright in his brain. An expectation rooted so deep in him that Shane can feel a vein in his wrist writhe as he lets the idea go.
He knew, though, should have known. His grip started slipping before he even saw the car. Drive-thru wrappers crumpled in his lap, fingers smearing, phone screen crowded with Alyssa’s texts. Emergency crown, cracked cuspid, do you want me to add him in before your 1:15??
With Ilya Rozanov, it really doesn’t matter what Shane wants. The buzz of machines and general office hum swallow his steps. Shane raises his fist to knock on the doorframe but Rozanov is already wheeling around to face him.
“Where were you?” Rozanov huffs. Both hands are full of shit he stole off the corkboard. “I’m waiting here forever.”
Shane waves a hand and doesn’t come further in until Rozanov sighs and opens his mouth to show him the tooth. The door closes and he stops a foot from him, leaning over the counter and pretending at a preliminary exam long enough that Rozanov licks the rest of the unbroken row of top teeth, grins all spitty. Shane’s fingers squeeze the laminate and he swallows back his own smile.
“Not where you’re supposed to. Wait, I mean.”
Rozanov looks very amused at the reminder.
Shane gestures again. “Get off of that.”
Rozanov doesn’t wait for Shane to move back. The saddle stool is released from the vice grip of his thighs and then he’s standing, full bulk, right in Shane’s personal space. A there-and-gone second almost fast enough to be an accident.
Shane’s stomach seizes while Rozanov takes his time. Push-pinning the collection he’d taken down back into cork. Careful to set a group photo from Ruby’s birthday last summer, the wilted kid’s drawing and a shot of Shane next to a tree old enough it had a year marker, each back in the right place.
“Don’t—touch anything,” Shane says, once he’s finished. “Sit down.”
Rozanov pours himself into the dental chair. His big grin glinting. "Sorry. Forgot how you wanted me.”
The door is closed. Shane is brimming with enough discomfort to consider giving Rozanov what he really came for: sticky maraschino cherry of an overprocessed voice. For Shane to pout and tell him he’s been such a bad boy. Greedy even for Shane to start stripping stethoscope-first despite the fact that he doesn’t wear one. That sort of lazy porn only gets as far as the white coat, sterile lighting, no consideration for details like the line between medical and dental. That's exactly how Rozanov is. No consideration.
“You forgot? Did you take a second knee to your short-term memory or is this from the same one that chipped your tooth?”
“Not short-term,” Rozanov argues. “Long-term. Very serious relationship, with each other many years.”
Two millimeters. Shane feels the corners of his lip tug toward his ears. He's a professional, has a doctorate in this exact specialty; it’s not a smile. “Do you talk like this to every part of your emergency team? The Bear’s triage dentist, too?”
“How could you say this? What we have is very special to me.” Rozanov wrinkles his nose. It must ache a lot under the bruising. Shane watched the accident last week, the morning after it happened, bent over a buggy video plug-in on some article, dripping onto his screen before he’d showered off the chlorine. Only a thirty-two second clip and more than half of it commentary. Worth looping once or twice. A few more times than that.
His upper lip is split. Pretty hideous but his mouth as a whole has endured much, much worse. This is nowhere close to the mangle it was in two years ago, twin flaps of skin cleaved into triplets, a perpendicular gash the only strip of solace in such tumid skin, blood-red relief and the rest of his jaw all the wrong shape. He’d bitten through buccal mucosa and a good quarter inch of his bottom lip. Stitched up before he came to Shane but he’d send pictures. They both like that kind of picture.
Shane ignores him to settle against the countertop, arms crossed. “I didn’t think we’d be seeing you again this soon. Don't they give you guys mouthguards?”
Rozanov shrugs again, slower this time. “I missed my beautiful Alanna too much to stay away.”
It takes Shane a second. “Alyssa? At the front desk?”
“Sure,” Rozanov nods.
Above the brimming knot of his stomach, something clean in Shane warms. Soon-to-be clean. The oven of an autoclave kicking on. He can feel it already: his ribs gleaming.
Sometimes the way Rozanov doesn’t make sense can be beneficial. When Shane feels like this, blind hunger but way too full, Rozanov can give him the ideal kind of glut, enough overwhelm to register only as oblivion. Full enough to be empty. But, all the bright gray day coming in through the window. He’s here too early.
“It would have been a lot easier to fit you in at the end of the day, like usual.”
“I wanted to come,” Rozanov doesn’t even try to make it sound like a real reason. “To see you.”
“This was supposed to be my lunch.” When Rozanov just stares, chlorine bottle blue eyes unblinking, Shane’s voice comes out normal again. “Have you thought any more about what we talked about the other month? Implant-supported dentures?”
“Ugh. I am twenty-nine, not ninety.”
“A lot of players wear them. And twenty-nine’s not exactly young.”
“Fuck you. How old are you? Fifty?”
Shane looks good. He knows he looks good; he’s a medical professional capable of that kind of assessment. Also, Rozanov says it, almost every time. “We’re the same age.”
Rozanov acts shocked, like this is new and not the same unfunny routine they’ve been rehearsing for years. “Then why do you wear such awful old man shoes? Is this kink?”
“Some people are on their feet working for a lot longer than forty-seven seconds.”
Rozanov’s face lights up. Busted lip stretched in the smile, the missing half of his canine better displayed than if it’d been in a jewelry case, especially next to the gold bicuspid. Even his bruises look bright. “You know how much time average is on ice. I thought you didn’t like hockey?”
“I don’t,” Shane says and then before the quiet has a chance to bloat between them, “My mom does.”
If he had stitches, they’d be in shreds. Rozanov is grinning ear to ear. “Liar.”
Shane puts the mask on, looking up to watch Rozanov watch. His mouth goes slack as Shane settles his glasses at the bridge of his nose and gloves up. Rozanov’s skull settles into the head rest, expression like they’re watching each other from opposite ends of the same counter at a bar, too late to keep trying to blur the intention.
The discomfort in his stomach has dissolved completely by the time he tilts the bright lamp into Rozanov’s eyes. Shane sinks a nitrile-numbed finger into the wet just past his lips, plunged in for a loud second between them before he mumurs, “Open up for me, please.”
–
Rozanov, Ilya Ins 1: Delta Dental, Co: $0.00, Additional notes: Allergy: LATEX is, considering, a quick and brief addition to the schedule. Shane’s five minutes behind for his next appointment but the fallen-behind feeling follows him for the rest of the day. The weight of his distended stomach congeals to slippery lead while he’s recementing a bridge, heavier in the delivery of a root implant then impression, impression, impression. He’s so hungry. His phone stays in his pocket, throbbing on and off, all day.
He needs the focus, commitment to make up for the glutton. Dinner, which he usually goes light on—that can be skipped entirely. He can wake up twice as early tomorrow and squeeze in two and a half times as many laps in the pool. He can get started right now.
The fridge is long overdue to be cleaned out anyway. After the last goodbye is given and the office is empty aside from him, after he’s finished every half-eaten yogurt and takeout chicken wrap from earlier in the week, cold wet onion rings, with that bludgeon of taste coating his tongue he sprays and scrubs down the shelves. Makes it convincing. Waits ten minutes, the cramp unfelt under the eagerness, mouth watering in anticipation, and only then grabs a fresh office-branded tooth brush from the stockpile. He’s sighing, sinking into the warm bath of being there by the time he’s scrubbing soap over the rubber, unbristled end of the toothbrush. Sun slants through the crack in the windowshade. The mouthwash in the vanity cabinet never empties below half-filled. A lot of people don’t realize you aren’t supposed to brush your teeth immediately after. Shane swishes twice, spits twice and checks his breath against his palm.
He spends the next ten minutes half-floating, warm. Checking the autoclave is set properly, that sinks are being kept separate and someone’s stocking the gloves. Swiffer and quick surface spot-check for the breakroom, the waiting room, the bathroom. They have cleaners. There are checklists hung on the backs of doors that are supposed to fall on other people long before Shane—he’s supposed to be the last resort but that seems less and less true, lately. If not the first choice, at least a primary back up.
At this hour the parking lot glows, the spotless body of Shane’s silver prius pinked virgin-cheek with sun. Light fawns over him the same way anyone would. They’re alone in the parking lot. Shane breathes out and asks anyway.
“Did anyone see you pulling back in?”
Rozanov shakes his head. Legs stretched out long, ass on the hood of his hideous negligent lawsuit of a convertible, sunglasses on. This much a vet but still spitting out his mouthguard any chance he gets. Shane had seen him less than a month ago because he thought something was wrong with his implant; it wasn’t. At least the primary backup.
Shane frowns. “You could have knocked, then. If you came up the door I would have let you back in.”
“Is your phone broken?”
“No.” But he pulls it out anyway. Nothing surprising in the greedy groping slew of texts, except for the address. Getting each other off doesn’t take that long, especially if they were to cut down on the chatter afterwards, but now that the idea’s been shoved down his throat he can’t swallow around it. Rozanov’s house.
“Why didn’t you come over? I texted you telling you to come.”
Shane means to frown, make his voice flat to seal away all the feeling. There’s too much ease in him. He smiles. “I’m not a dog.”
“Ah. But when I say roll over, go down on your belly, you—”
“Shut up.” He hates to feel his dick twitch in scrubs, outdoors. Really hates not being able to stop picturing it now that the idea’s been implanted: what Rozanov’s living room looks like, what overcompensating type of a sound system, what sheets. “Other people bother to make appointments with me.”
Rozanov makes a sound like a jammed engine. “You could say you had food poisoning or some shit and fuck off early. Now I had to come all this way twice today. Big waste of time.”
“It’s inconsiderate. You know I can only—at the end of the day. You’re the one that’s not making this easy.”
Rozanov shakes his head and pushes himself up. Suddenly there isn’t enough air to share between them; when Shane goes to take a step back, Rozanov catches him by the arm, pins him there without enough pressure. “No. You do not want easy at all. You want me to make it very, very hard.”
Shane makes a sound, half-snort, half the wheeze of prey’s squeezed throat. Between them Rozanov is the animal but Shane always feels like the one being trained. “Not here. Dirty talk is an indoor-only activity.”
“God,” Rozanov leans in, huffing the way someone clinically terrified to be in the chair gasps at the first hit of gas. Potent relief, his sticky black iris swelling. “You sound like flight safety instructions.”
“How would you know?” Shane asks. “Do they do those on private planes?”
Rozanov’s bottom lip is stuck hung open but the rest of him has already melted, spilling further towards Shane. He’s leaning in like he forgot, like they’re not in the middle of a business park’s communal lot and it isn’t inappropriate on multiple levels to have his mouth this many centimeters from Shane’s. When he breathes, Shane can feel it.
His fingers catch in Shane’s shirt before their mouths meet. “I took commercial to get back. Yesterday Toronto and tomorrow New York. Today is day off.”
Shane manages to take a step back but Rozanov is so quick to follow, he can’t tell if he did—if it was him or Rozanov moving them toward the back door he’d left unlocked. The moment squeezes, uncomfortable: this much sun, this hard. He threw his fleece around his waist but he’s only in scrubs underneath that, practically tissue, a vulgar tease. Rozanov’s breath smells like chemical fruit, the berry citrus nicotine gum Shane warned him, specifically, to take a break from. “Your tooth was bothering you that much?”
Rozanov shrugs. He's standing close enough the bottom of his wrecked face blurs into peach and pink; he has eyes Shane’s sure a lot of people have told him about before. Cheekbones, distinctive enough moles that they take the time to apply them to bobbleheads. His best feature by far is his mouth, and it’s best like this: wrecked. Tongue coveting a small hole that must make it impossible to think of anything other than filling, filling, full.
The tip of his nose brushes against Shane’s, a featherlight touch of wet metal over an open, buzzing outlet.
Shane’s eyes flutter and he pushes himself a full step back, out of reach. Again until his back settles against the door. Rozanov’s hand is already moving around him, fingers brushing over Shane’s side on his way to the doorknob.
“Well,” Shane says. “We’d better take a closer look at you.”
At the stripper-with-a-stethoscope tone, Rozanov’s smile almost cracks his face in half.
–
Shane is not an avid follower of professional hockey. Genuinely has little interest in the sport beyond the baseline: every red-blooded mammal is instilled with a capacity for enjoyment when it comes to seeing muscle slam into muscle.
He watches sometimes, still dripping with chlorine and bent over his phone to see Boston scrape by in New York, clinched in overtime. Pauses on the video to check that Rozanov’s cheeks are bulging with his mouthguard. Bit of a road trip after that, then back home for three games, almost a week and a half but no sign of him. Twenty one days, Shane advised, for the permanent. He may have mentioned his least reliable patients can get up to three months without much to worry about, but that’s the official recommendation with a crown. The month passes and Rozanov doesn’t show.
It’s good. It’s a routine, and the office and Shane are practically one synchronistic organism: operating well within routine. Rules.
Every rule comes with an exception. Shane would surgically remove his own tongue before telling Rozanov the truth: that he is, technically speaking, an exceptional patient. That he isn’t like anyone else Shane has ever met.
He can’t stay away even when he doesn’t bother to show up. Alyssa unpacks updated waiting room promotional traps onto their designated table. Shane sees Rozanov every morning on the pamphlet, blank blue eyes and empty software-whitened smile beneath a logo for whitening strips.
These are the things he should keep in mind. Something can simply stay an exception; a regular exception doesn’t make a habit. He shouldn’t be thinking about Rozanov’s sheets, which are probably impersonal even if they smell like him.
The things he says inside of Shane don’t survive the orgasm. In reality, he can have anything he wants. Anyone. The team has a freelancer, a chair down the hallway from the marketing offices and specialists from Seattle and Miami on speed-dial. Shane commits it to memory: he has a lot of other options; probably ones that don’t laugh in his face when he says he would look good with a gold tooth. That he looks good in gold in general, he does, hasn’t Shane seen? You don’t have to understand about hockey to understand what’s worth having. It suits him. Do you not think, doctor? Shane laughed every time.
It took two years to realize he wasn’t kidding. That he wanted a gold tooth; that if he said it, he meant it. Significance with all the weight of a buoyant lap pool dividing line, bouncing, the kind of thing that looks like a limit but actually only ever pushes you forward faster and faster. Five years of fooling around, him saying shit that sounds impossible to be true, smiling with an 18 karat incisor. He’s still the only person that makes Shane laugh.
–
On a Monday in February, he shows up again.
“I don’t know how much money Crest pays you for endorsement but it’s too much,” Shane tells him, closing the door behind him.
“What?” Rozanov asks. He has different voices the way birds change plumage given the harshness of winter; sometimes down, sometimes bristly and black.
“The white strips thing,” Shane reminds him.
Rozanov’s brow furrows, all of him a little off. Even in a bitter winter like this Shane expects him to parade in boasting and bright, be the smug source of significant heat in the room. “Ah. Forever ago. I forgot.”
“We just got the pamphlets,” Shane kept a few in the drawer, unplanned but waiting on this moment to pull out and tease him. the humiliation of having imagined an interaction with him, any interaction with him, drizzles down his spine and the drawer stays shut. “It hasn’t really touched sales here. The target demo seems a little off for you. I mean, it’s mostly popular with teenage girls.”
Shane expects: I’m very popular with teenage girls. Already eager to volley back: You’re disgusting.
Instead Rozanov shrugs and says nothing. Staring at the thin slats between the blinds and into the smother of gray beyond the glass.
“Well,” Shane says, seeping professionalism into the tone. “Could you call ahead first, next time? Have someone call? Alyssa’s getting sick of you just showing up.”
“Girls always fucking wanting you to call more.” Rozanov makes an ugly noise. “And I did.”
“What?” Shane’s eyebrows raise. “When?”
“I texted you.”
Shane digs his phone out, a process made clumsier by the necessary peeling off of his gloves first. The last text from Rozanov was two weeks ago, wordless, a photo of halved by hotel curtains, the glass of a window giving way to wintered beach. He knew how to respond to the fresh injury photos, the neat, clean expectation. On his back, spread and loose, right after, Shane finds it easy to talk. He knows it’s rude not to respond but in the distance Shane can’t figure out what he wants.
His phone goes facedown on the unsterile corner of the counter and Shane skips snapping on another pair of gloves, fingers itching toward the corkboard. He pulls out a pushpin that holds up nothing, runs his thumb along the tip, keeps his eyes on the thin shine. “How are you?”
“Fine.” Rozanov takes his time, always. He takes Shane’s time, almost a thick minute before really answering. “Are you asking for me or for tooth?”
It’s been three months not counting his face on the pamphlets, which Shane doesn’t count because Rozanov is nothing without his size, the big bounce of breath in his wide chest, the smell of his body. The heat. Here, now: Rozanov’s temporary is intact, his mouth is healed, he came right in the middle of lunch, again. Shane’s stomach is bloated and stiff; he’ll have to cut this off and get to the bathroom before they actually get started. He opens his mouth to excuse himself.
Shane hears himself say: “You.”
“Ah,” but in his accent it sounds like the whirr of a drill warming up. “Fine.”
Shane waits. “Really? Fine kept you away for three months?”
“I do not like winter.”
“You’re a hockey player,” Shane points out. “And a Russian.”
Rozanov huffs and Shane can’t find the misstep; it’s true. It’s also true that Rozanov doesn’t seem to like the truth. Hot and tight into Shane’s ear, already so deep inside of him Shane will feel it for the next week, he injects: I missed you. God, I missed you. Then—
“I get depressed,” Rozanov says. And before Shane can digest that, barely swallow it, “From being in too many boring shitty stupid cities. Have to go to fucking Buffalo in two days.”
Shane hums, asks, “For the sauce?”
Rozanov’s nose wrinkles and he gives Shane a look that he usually only doles out with both of them strewn and sweating and sideways. His voice lilts a little in a laugh. “All-stars.”
“Wow,” Shane says. “I knew you played, I didn’t know you were actually good.”
It doesn’t hit Shane that there wasn’t a smile until it arrives. Full-spread. His upper lip healed and back to its plush stretch. His bottom lip wet and wonderful, parted to reveal the full spectrum of shades, teeth earned at different points in his career depending on how good he could afford. Top left central incisor and half of the lateral are the most yellowed, the first to go. Not even hockey, Rozanov told him once, yawning with Shane spread out on his chest. Fourteen maybe, just a kid. He got with his brother's girlfriend. According to the brother, and Rozanov, a bitch move that deserved being eye for an eye’d, but he’d already gotten too big not to hit back when someone swung on him. A week later Rozanov woke up from a dead sleep when a fist, wrapped around a rock, slammed into his mouth.
A lot of history just past the lips. A whole other league ago, a stick to the chin smashed his jaw shut hard enough to crack two through four, fourteen and fifteen all in one go. Twenty three through twenty six have all been fully redone twice; his whole mouth is a medley of honesty in color. Gaudy gold next to nicotine, too much coffee and the chasmic decay of sucked-at, slow-to-dissolve sugar, all the stains leftover from getting whatever he wants. He's got a cavity rotting toward a root canal between eighteen and nineteen because he thinks floss is for poor people. For him, it’s all replaceable, and why wouldn’t he believe that, at this point? It isn’t that he’s an exception to Shane, it’s just a fact: he is exceptional.
Rozanov laughs, wide mouth wide open. “Such a liar.”
Shane smiles. Shrugs.
Rozanov shakes his head, leaning in. “No more pretend. I bet you watch replays of me while you are jerking off standing over toilet.”
“Ew,” Shane says, though he does.
The leather whines as Rozanov slumps back into it, voice sinking with him. “You do not have to act all prissy for me, you know. I do not need it to get going. For you, it is always going.”
“Shut up.” Shane fingers the pushpin in his hand, jams the tiny spear into the pad of his finger. Only a little, not enough. He gets distracted, sometimes, with Rozanov’s mouth but he’s too uncomfortable to stay. At the back of his throat, he can already taste the sour sheer relief. “I have to—”
“You like this, yes?”
Shane looks down at the pushpin, back up. “What?”
Rozanov points past him, thick finger aimed over Shane’s shoulder. “The water. Muskoka.”
“Oh,” Shane soothes the side of his finger along the plastic edge. “Have you been before?”
“No.” Rozanov’s hand flutters like a one-winged bird, crashes back into his lap. “But you have a lot of pictures.”
“Not that many,” Shane argues. “How do you know where it is, then?”
Rozanov just smirks and stands up. Takes a quiet step closer.
Shane doesn’t wear the white coat all the time, but he figures Rozanov must be used to it, probably prefers him in a uniform, fulfilling his role of sterility groped and stroked into fantasy. It was a mistake to have kept it on today. The fabric is an unbreathing glaze over every inch of skin; he’s starting to sweat. His tongue feels too big for his mouth. He scans the detritus stuck to the board and stops when he gets to the crazed crayon on printer paper. Jade had done the sunset from the hike in gnashing yellow and neon pinks, Ruby gave it the label.
“You looked up Huckleberry Rock?”
“Yes.” Rozanov’s voice scrapes against the shell of Shane’s ear. “Do you like this lake that much? Or do you not have enough else to like?”
Shane tries to laugh and the hand reaching around to squeeze him through his scrubs throttles it into a messy whine. He isn’t hard. Heat is just beginning to thicken between his legs, heavy but soft. Shane understands too late how much more inimate it is with Rozanov able to feel him, feel the greedy vulgar process of blood swelling, need filling him. His cock gets fat in the fake-patient curl of his palm.
Shane squeezes his eyes shut, a mistake that amplifies every slight sensation of him. Rozanov’s chest is spread against his back, the warmth of his hand, his breath. Shane looks to the fluorescent bleached wall, forces himself to remember the shut door, the strip of plaqued glass in it, the ordinary day just beyond them.
“I don’t know what you want,” Shane admits. Honesty leaking out, Rozanov squeezing it out of him. He hums his pleasure and traces the pad of his thumb up Shane’s length. Shane’s whole body jerks.
Rozanov makes a sound like a smile melted down, wet enough to swallow. “No more pretend.”
Shane could push him off. His hands work, objectively. He can feel nerves buzzing over every inch of skin, chattering and electric and erecting every thin hair on the back of his hands, his forearms. The soles of his feet are flooded with concrete but that’s just chemical. Dopamine fizzing under the firework of eager endorphins, adrenaline, guzzle of oxytocin responsible for the bodywide buzz. The tongue-smother of cologne and the underlying scent of his body—sometimes it seems like Rozanov really knows, that he notices, has an acute, particular, intentional way of pulling molten out of an otherwise mundane moment, that he sees Shane. That this is Shane’s reaction to being known, but in reality it’s just his body. Animal, muscle, blood-engorged and brainless.
Rozanov doesn’t give him the chance to shove him away. He drops Shane’s cock with the same irritable sigh he lets out when he pulls off from kissing, hauling in air and frowning down at Shane like he’s the one that invented lungs and need.
Shane reels, stumbling back with the sudden distance.
“Come home with me,” Rozanov says. “You are done for the day.”
“What?”
Rozanov makes a little sound like a dog dismissing a new brand of wet food. “I want you. Now.”
In the middle of the day, the middle of a workplace. Rozanov needs a crown. He knows all of these things. He can't know Shane needed to leave five minutes ago and heave up everything except for the lining in his stomach. He can’t know, but he moves like something under the marrow recognizes it anyway. Shane’s determination spread red in the water, a simple target for Rozanov and his way of rushing forward, saying shit he doesn’t mean with his jagged rows of teeth. Happy as ever to eat the steadiness out of Shane until the only thing left is folded in half, shaking to stay open, begging.
“Fuck off. And sit down,” Shane says.
“Come,” Rozanov insists. “I don't care about stupid tooth.”
Shane gets his back against the wall, palm out to put distance between them. too slow, or too much determination already corroded out of him. Rozanov’s fist is bright around his wrist. “I do.”
“Why do you think I am here? Drive all this way with dentist down the hallway from the fucking locker room?”
“Because you like getting your dick sucked,” Shane knows. Shane might not have a corkboard of Rozanov’s to look at when he’s bored, but he notices things, too. “And you probably get what you want so often you miss having to work for it. But you should anyway because Durisek’s a fucking butcher. He should have his license revoked, frankly.”
“That is—” Rozanov starts, bites off laughing. “Butcher?”
“Sit down.” Almost a plead.
“Buffalo is day after next. Day off, tomorrow. Come and stay. I want you in my house, in my bed where I can fuck you stupid enough to forget about mouth, can’t even remember what teeth are. Not tongue, only taste. Only a whiny mess for me to make. Only Shane.”
His voice is almost the velvet rough Shane can feel against his cheek, sometimes, thick enough that it spreads over the slope of his shoulder when Rozanov’s inside of him, sunk to the root. Almost. there’s something open-palmed underneath it though, the kind of naked interest Shane finds not vulgar but disgusting.
Too much in his stomach already. The idea of having that excess churns it further, a wider spread of want than they’ve had room for before with his legs open on sheets that lick like only silk can, wet and waiting in lavish light let in by careless, floor to ceiling windows, luxury and none of it earned. Most of all, him.
“I have—appointments. Other people need me, and they bother to make appointments. You should have come at the end of the day if you just wanted that. Sit down so we can get started or get out.”
Rozanov waits while several swollen seconds pass. “Fine.”
The door stays wide open when he leaves.
–
Not enough time for the bathroom before his next appointment and Shane takes it anyway. He's heard that before about meditation: if you don’t have ten minutes to do it, take twenty. His parents aren’t religious and he does not operate with a belief in any higher power aside from procedure and this is the core of it, the fisted pulse of control and won release. Rozanov squeezes a lot of gasped cries for god out of him, but if he’s being truly honest with himself, this is the only thing Shane believes in.
He knocks twice on the bathroom door, listens for the few seconds of silence on the other side and is still careful with the knob, considerate of the sticky lock. All at once the hum of the office is lost behind soft sturdy wood and then he’s alone in the cool dark, with the quiet flickering fake candle on the back of the toilet seat. Muscle memory succumbs to ingrained sacrament.
A small space but the mirror is easy to avoid with practice. He strips off the top of his scrubs, hangs his shirt on the door knob. Brain numb under the hand-washing, toilet bowl scrubbing, another round of washing his hands. The cardboard shell for the toothbrush is pried open and stowed in his back pocket; he’ll throw it out at home.
Shane kneels. Before he’s opened his mouth, the relief is already clawing up his throat.
His eyes water and he chokes, flushing the toilet to smother the sound. Bile on the back of his tongue. Headbent, reverent: everything comes up. Not the greasy fries or double cheeseburger or any other lingering contents of his stomach; he throws the whole organ up. Gasping in the simmer of raw satisfaction before more follows. Often forgotten fistfuls of meat, vein clumps and lungs. The empty spaces left between his ribs scrape his tongue as they pass over it. Trachea in chunks, aorta, somehow, finally, his still-beating heart.
The only explanation for such fervent emptying, this must be the swollen overwhelm—love leaving, splashing as it settles anywhere safer than the inside his chest.
The prayer that this is somehow something more always ends right here. He's an animal. He's a stack of simple needs, one unlimited ache kneeling in front of an ugly puddle of his own making. Everything is out and he needs more. He gives in to the impulse to press the butt of the toothbrush back in. Shane gags around the plastic as the door opens behind him.
It’s pointless to look. The taped sign says: please knock, and he’s the only exception. The only one to open any door Shane’s ever attempted to keep shut.
“Ah,” Rozanov says.
Shane is sweating, feverish from the throat up, kneeling over a toilet bowl full of vomit but Rozanov doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look anything other than whole, staring, filling the few inches of cracked open door before he reaches for the knob. The door closes without sound.
The buzz that’s replaced his brain drones on. Shane fumbles upright. He throws the toothbrush into the trash and flushes the toilet twice. He washes his mouth out, then his hands, stop-starting to pinch the thin skin on his wrist when he can’t feel the water. Halfmoons bit into pink, spread out. He washes everything again. Finally, there isn’t any other option than to open the door.
The tiny hallway that houses the bathroom isn’t enough to hold both of them. Shane stands still in the doorway the way some animals probably believe predators forget to notice them if they can hide their living pulse well enough.
“Are you sick?” Rozanov asks. Shane wishes he hadn’t expected, almost hoped, he’d still be standing right there. His voice is a different wing wrapping around Shane’s ear to hear. Viscerally gentle, down feather.
“No,” Shane replies.
“Ah,” Rozanov says again. Not a drill like Shane had thought. Instead, his voice is the hum of a satisfied throat, digestion just beginning, the singular warning before a swallowed body dissolves.
Rozanov says, “Come,” and Shane does.
–
He looks bigger in his house than he does in Shane’s office, which doesn’t make sense. Everything else here is already more. There shouldn’t be enough excess to amplify him, too.
Rozanov reaches for Shane’s insulated vest to hang up before Shane can figure out how to work his mouth again and ask where to put it. Their fingers brush. Shane doesn’t watch him shrug out of his own jacket, busies himself untying his shoes and trying to remember what excuse he’d given to Alyssa. He’s lucky. Too much of him still pristine and humming and empty for guilt to swell yet.
He swallows around the obedient relief a dog must feel at the end of a long day, collar finally unclasped by the hand that already holds everything. Still, there’s the whole mess. He made a mess. Shane keeps quiet; the quicker his nose can be crushed against the tile, the better. His stupid dick twitches.
Because Shane wants fast, of course, Rozanov goes slow. No hand on him in the entryway; Rozanov leads him past an ugly sofa Shane recognizes from an interior decor magazine they have, a stack of reading materials he regularly cleans dust off the surface of in the waiting room. He opens his mouth, hopeful for bobbing bait, instead lets out a limp catch stuck on the hook. “I like your couch.”
Rozanov smiles over his shoulder, devoid of any of the ingredients that are supposed to make up a smile, doesn’t stop or offer any other commentary on the brief tour of sunken living room into blaring bright kitchen. His house is warm and otherwise what Shane expects Rozanov hears often about his eyes. Nice, pretty. The smudged sort of beauty too conventionally groped to get a clean grip on.
“Nice fridge,” Shane tries. It comes out better, this time, almost steady.
“Are you hungry?” Rozanov asks. He is still wearing his shoes.
Shane is so empty it almost aches. If it was the same command as before, Rozanov in Shane’s exam room pressed all along his back and his low voice: come—if they start right now, Rozanov probably won’t even have to use his fingers to open him up.
“Do you always wear shoes in your house?” Shane asks.
“It’s February,” Rozanov says.
Shane relaxes a little. This is common ground. Sometimes they lay sprawled on top of each other for hours pretending Shane’s desk is a comfortable place to murmur and yawn into each other’s mouths. They’re both very capable of saying a lot without saying anything at all. “I didn’t think you would keep the heat so high. Aren’t Russians supposed to like the cold?”
“Used to cold. Like is not the same as used to.” Rozanov puts a hand on Shane’s ribs, strokes down, around to the front. He stretches his thumb out and rubs over his stomach. “But, sometimes same. With you, it is used to and like.”
Shane’s scrubs are lightweight. There isn’t a reason for the fabric to stick this much to his thighs, his ass, for this much sweat at the bottom of his spine. He pulls away.
“You don’t have to say stuff like that to get me going,” Shane tells him, managing a weak smile. “With you, it’s—like you said. Always going.”
Rozanov makes a noncommittal noise and looks at him. Shane didn’t move away far enough; Rozanov has one hand anchored at Shane’s side, stroke slowing into a loose hold. He’s so quiet it’s easy to mistake for something more. Rozanov is easily the most talkative sexual partner Shane has ever had and he doesn’t stop running his mouth in the chair until it’s completely numbed. Coming doesn’t even wring the need to add one more thing and then there’s the second pleasant drizzle similar and not at all to an orgasm: listening to him complain about plane rides and played-through injuries and rookies that don’t get his sense of humor.
The house could be anyone’s but it smells like only his. Rozanov kisses him.
The pressure is so foreign Shane almost thinks he missed before understanding it’s the lack of immediate heat and greed, that the delicate weight is just Rozanov holding back. Chaste. His grip stays loose at Shane’s hips, lips sealed even when Shane parts his lips and makes his tongue slack, lets out a humiliating whine. Maybe: “Please.” Rozanov’s hand moves almost acquiescing down between them, loose at the base of his cock.
“You want this?”
Shane nods. He can hear the flicker of Rozanov’s grin as his fingers sink past his dick, below his balls into the soft seam between his thighs, parting.
“Need it?”
No command, collarless, but Shane’s obedient. He spreads his legs. Between his thighs he’s sticky already. Rozanov mutters something more honey than word and crowds Shane up against the counter, catches him when he starts to melt. Kisses a messy line up his jawbone, into the hollow of his throat, dragging his teeth. Shane hisses as the canine catches skin, Rozanov licking the apology wet down his neck. He can never tell: the mouth that Shane made or if it’s his mouth that made Shane.
The drawstring on Shane’s pants falls open, waistband shoved down under a clumsy grunt. Rozanov takes everything off of him. His fingers trace over bare skin for a spoiled second, the meat at the top of one thigh but then he’s hauling Shane up. One hand on each bare asscheek, tossing him down like groceries except he coos over the crude bob of Shane’s cock. Shane pushes him off with a weak hand, settling back on the counter, legs spreading. He keeps his hands at his sides after Rozanov arranges them that way, palm to cool marble. His gaze gets lazy, stuck on his bare wide thighs, the back of his knuckles. Brightening to white with Rozanov’s big fist back on him. Stroking, squeezing the base of his cock, rolling his wrist when he works up to the crown. His palm brushes the head, pulls back shiny with precome on his way back up to pinch the skin of his stomach. Shane’s dick kicks, leaks a little onto the marble. Both their heads bend to watch.
Rozanov pushes his thumb into the puddle, watches Shane watch while he sucks it clean. Before Shane can worry about coming just from that: “Are you hungry?”
“What?” He actually can’t believe there’s blood left for his brain. The room is swimming at the edges. Shane stutters, “No. Or—for you?”
Rozanov smiles, shows the gold. Shane hasn’t put in the crown and this has the unnerving steadiness of one over the moment, permanence with precision. “I am a bad host, I think. I should have asked. Do you want something to eat?”
He talks during sex, but mostly it’s blunt, vulgar statements to stuff Shane’s full body fuller. Telling him how he looks when he can’t see, what he tastes like when he refuses, usually, to let Rozanov put anything of himself back on his own tongue.
“No,” Shane says. It comes out low, the same small sound he’d made standing in the bathroom door.
“Ah,” Rozanov nods once, pulling at the thin hair next to Shane’s navel. “Well, I'm a little bit hungry.”
Rozanov’s forehead knocks into Shane’s. He sets a hand on his shoulder to guide his spine flat, curving a palm over the back of his skull like he might risk cracking something without it. On his back, his dick is sticking straight up, painful pink and asking outright.
“Good,” Rozanov murmurs. Slow to look, to run his hand down the side of Shane’s neck and around his shoulder, the long stretch of his arm, stilled in the inner ditch of his elbow.
Shane pushes his palms to the marble and swallows. “I thought you were hungry.”
“Mhm.” Rozanov bends to kiss the tip of his cock.
Humiliating and so chaste. Shane shuts his eyes against the noise his own throat makes, red spreading through the thin protection of his eyelids. Rozanov’s steps are heavy on the tile, not going far, every inch a pull Shane can feel in his gut. It’s hard not to ask him to come back. Then, the sound of suction giving up, the inside of the fridge spilling out.
Several things get set down, wet containers that require wedging open, the organ-imitating sounds of that. Behind the seal of Shane’s lips, his tongue is swimming in saliva, the automatic reaction of being folded over a toilet, the just-before; he arches his feet, stretches out his calves. He keeps swallowing.
“Open up for me, please.”
Shane does, and Rozanov gives him nothing.
A crude snap and then peeling plastic. The loud sound of Rozanov chewing. Shane doesn’t let himself look, sunk into the sounds from somewhere above his head, most of him poured into the palms flush to the counter. For a second he’s terrified Rozanov is going to spit something out into his mouth, worse when he realizes he wants it. But he hears Rozanov swallow, and another wrinkled noise right before the fat nudge of Rozanov’s fingers dry at his lips, full of—Shane strains his lips further open, tongue overwhelmed with something oversalted and thick, maybe only that: salt and thick. Not a taste as much as a weight.
Shane opens his eyes, bright daze stubborn for a second before it yields to Rozanov’s face. Rozanov watching Shane’s throat work. His own mouth is full and his eyebrows raise. “Good, yes?”
The roof of Shane’s mouth, pink strips of gums, feel scrubbed raw, a wound that sodium not only creates but widens. He isn’t sure whatever he swallowed made it inside of him, that it isn’t stuck where his heart lives, impatient to come back up. One shoulder twitches, the agreeable nod coaxed out when Rozanov skims over the skin of his stomach and presses his palm down.
“Good. Good,” Rozanov repeats. “You look very nice.”
He sinks down to kiss the stretch of vulnerable belly between his thumb and forefinger. Trails up to the seam between his hand and Shane’s skin and licks into the separation. The dumb shock of it drips electric up Shane’s spine, makes him arch. Rozanov keeps one hand there and uses the other to feed Shane his fingers again, to feed him another piece of bitter slippery—meat.
“What is this? Is it pork?” Shane asks after he’s finished swallowing. The point is that Shane can wait. He lets Rozanov’s fingers dig into the wet between cheek and tooth, shows his tongue for him to check. The point is Shane not only has what Rozanov gives him but that he keeps it.
Rozanov smiles, a real one. Shrugs. “Yes. Sort of. You like?”
“Yeah,” Shane lies.
“Mhm,” Rozanov stretches the hum out. Needs the time to cut a thicker wedge and press another swallow of salt into Shane’s mouth. He lingers with the knife after, blunted against Shane’s bottom lip, prying the bottom of his jaw open. Shane’s legs are still spread, his cock hard, but Rozanov’s hand spreads on his stomach like he’ll feel whatever he puts inside of Shane swelling against his palm. “Really?”
“No.”
There aren’t wrong answers; what Shane says shouldn’t change Rozanov getting what he wants, but Shane feels the flicker on Rozanov’s face low and squirming in his own gut. Rozanov steps back, only staying near enough to keep his thumb in Shane’s mouth.
“You want something different?”
Shane shakes his head. Almost impossible to swallow around, this much salt. He still has his mouth open. Drool seeps down one cheek.
“You do not want?”
He shakes his head again, groaning when the hand on his stomach moves to grope him. Firm and not enough. Almost lonely not to have the full weight of Rozanov on top of him; he wants to change his answer.
Shane doesn’t say anything. Rozanov’s still wearing everything except his jacket. His face, at least, is a sticky pink.
“I think this is pretend. This is a lie.” Rozanov says. “Close your eyes.”
Shane listens, opens his mouth wide again. Nothing fills it. Only the sheer sound of Rozanov moving. Knife clattering onto the counter, wet jar pried open. Big mouth, big masticating jaw, thick audible swallow.
“Okay. Open.”
Shane does just as the first bright slight weight skids sideways against his bottom lip.
Rozanov smiles. Pulls back just enough to show off the cherry like Shane couldn’t tell from the taste. Juice dribbles down his fingers, the same pink mess he’s already made of his own mouth, a single streak down his throat. He’s careful to be so sloppy. Misses Shane’s tongue, crushes the fruit against his teeth, all clotted over his gums. He feels the sticky juice creeping out from the edge of his lips and over his slack jaw. Rozanov grinds the fruit to a pulp and pulls it back out, sets it wet on the counter, just next to Shane’s ear. Shane exhales, loud and shaking. The fresh, fat swallow of a new cherry is set between his teeth. Rozanov sinks down and seals his mouth over Shane’s.
The shape their mouths make must be similar to kissing, but the heat unfurling in Shane’s stomach says it’s the opposite. Not getting or giving but having, not swimming—a sustained drowning. Shane chokes on the stifle of sweet, pushes the piece of fruit out with his tongue before Rozanov forces it back in. He can’t swallow quickly enough. Rozanov’s tongue dips in. He sucks the cherry back out past Shane’s lips with a loud sound and eats it.
He hums, happy about the wreck he’s making of Shane’s face. Licks him spit-cleaned along the jaw, his shaking chin. He feeds Shane his fingers, sometimes fruit. He never swallows. Shane wants Rozanov’s cock to choke on, wants to come, wants to shower for hours on end. He didn’t think anything could turn his stomach quite like the strips of spitslick, dry salt, but the sight—his eyes squeeze shut and Rozanov thumbs one back open, somehow knows it's worse to have to see the look on his face, the way he looks at Shane gags, spits out pure syrup.
This isn’t eating and it can’t be sex. Categorization dissolves around him, every time. Rozanov ruins Shane’s chest with fruit, palms whole pieces to pulp over a hard nipple and swallows it off of him, mumbles things that feel more cloying and saccharine, further inside than his fingers. Shane arches up into nothing with Rozanov’s thumb stroking too low between Shane’s cheek and his gums, juice everywhere. Between his fingers, Rozanov licks into Shane’s mouth and pulls out to spit. Some must make it into his palm. The sticky mess of his hand works hot and quick around Shane’s cock.
Looking would mean the last gasping overwhelm; he doesn’t need to look to see it. Cherry chemical sap glossy all over his pubic hair, messy spread over neat. Gold sharp in the warm curl of his mouth. And Shane, too much of him, spilling everywhere. His cock stained red at the root and the juice dribbling out the cracks between Rozanov’s fingers, down his length in thick streaks. His curling toes, his hips stuttering up in the climax.
His own starving, straining mouth, the throbbing muscle of hunger wider than his ribcage, his heart. Shane chokes on the excess of himself and Ilya leans in to eat the living pulse out from between his teeth.
–
His body comes back to him in pieces. Impossible to tell how long they stay there, spilled and spoiled. Shane mostly knows that Rozanov climbs up on top of him at some point, still kissing, unminding the mess between their stomachs. The sticky half-dried syrup, starting-to-flake come. The discomfort does nothing to dissolve the satisfied lull they’re both tangled in.
Eventually, an hour or maybe the next morning, Rozanov taps at Shane’s cheek, drags one finger over the swell of Shane’s bottom lip. “Do you remember now?”
“What?” Shane cranes his stiff neck, trying to see him. He gets Rozanov’s face and the clock over the stove. About twenty six minutes since he stepped through the front door. He can’t tell if the thud of discomfort in his gut is the brick of sodium, or sugar, or the fact that he could go back to work if he wanted. The world’s only barely begun to feel real again.
“What you are. My mess.” Rozanov’s eyebrows go up.
Shane laughs. Airless, it’s more of a dry croak, and he winces. “You said you’d show me your bed. We didn't even make it past the kitchen.”
He doesn’t get embarrassed, generally, outside of the tight, curated situations Shane himself helps engineer where humiliation is a flavor he begs to be stuffed full with. The way Rozanov scrapes him off the counter and carries him into his bedroom, pours him out across the mattress, is almost innocent, a pure, radiant type of embarrassment.
“Your sheets,” Shane says, nose wrinkling. There is no part of his body that isn’t a ripe mess.
“But this is what they are for.” Rozanov smiles, stupid flash of fake teeth, gold, real. He splashes down beside him. Shane catches it then, a glint in the grin. He fits his finger over the seam of Rozanov’s lips, slipping in. The laugh finishes opening Rozanov’s mouth for him and Shane makes an annoyed sound.
“You fucking let Durisek put the permanent on?” Shane sits up so suddenly his head swims but his voice is smooth. “What the fuck?”
Rozanov holds up a defensive hand and it melts against Shane’s chest. “I said. I just wanted to see you.”
“Jesus.” He’s too empty, too full, can’t squeeze a feeling like this in. Shane feels his mouth sour further. “You should have let me.”
“Why?”
Shane opens his mouth. A ready barrage against that clown of a practitioner behind his teeth, but under that, snuck in the muscle: “Because I wanted to.”
“Sorry. Next time. Maybe we find some way you are around more, I can give you more what you want.” His fingers find Shane’s to thread them together. “And I did not know you thought so less of him. If he is such a butcher, we should get a new dentist, then. Do you know anyone like this? A dentist?”
Shane frowns. He’s bloated, surprised to find how little he wants to get what’s inside of him out. Comfortable in the overwhelm. “I like my practice.”
“Okay, prissy,” Rozanov says, laughing and undaunted. Shane isn’t comfortable, it just radiates off Ilya in too heavy a smog not to breathe in only ease. “Then you should invite me to your house in the summer. I want to see Huckleberry Rock.”
His tongue trips along the whole name and his gaze is so steady. Shane feels his face flush.
“If you want, we can start with dinner tonight, before you stay over,” Rozanov makes a face. “But, super expensive. Nice. You are not allowed to throw it up unless I am the one with fingers down your throat.”
The gut kick feels like something much worse until it crawls up his throat and comes out of Shane’s mouth a genuine laugh. “Jesus christ.”
Rozanov looks up at the ceiling, a separate one. The hazy-lit restaurant in a few hours. Shane has never wanted something so much while still being this full from it. “Private place where they will not mind if I still want to feel you eating out of my hand.”
“You want that?”
Rozanov wrinkles his nose. “Shane, please. I said: no pretend.”
Shane groans, laughs again, the last knot in his stomach dissolving with it. “You’re…”
“Yes.” He has such a beautiful smile. Ilya doesn’t wait for him to finish, yawns and pulls him closer, staring. “Relentless, announcers say. Talented. Very beautiful. You have seen me play.”
“That’s true,” Shane agrees. Thinking of the wreck of himself on the counter. “And you fight dirty.”
Rozanov is watching him. “Finish what you were saying. Before.”
“I was going to say, you’re really something.” Shane says. Exceptional. He'll tell him, eventually.
“Yes.” Rozanov grins. The whole thing feels gold. “Something.”