Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The hallway smelled like stale carpet and was filled with the dull quiet of a hotel at 2 am, the kind of quiet that had absorbed too many other people's nights and was dense with them. Inside the penthouse, it was different, cold leather, alcohol, and the city coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long strips of neon that made everything look like it was underwater.

Shane was heavy against his side.

Heavier than he seemed, which was always the way with him— he presented as slight, as careful, as contained, and then you put your arm around his waist and found he was as heavy as he looked, the muscle under it, the density of him, the inconvenient physical reality of Shane Hollander up close. Ilya adjusted his grip and kicked the door shut with his heel and listened to the lock engage, that sharp final click that the dark foyer threw back at him.

"Ilya—"

His name in Shane's mouth, stretched out, the consonants going soft and the vowel lasting longer than it should. Ilya's jaw tightened. He kept moving.

"Yes," he said. "I am here."

"Mm." Shane's head dropped against his shoulder, the full dead weight of it, no attempt to hold it up. His breath came warm and uneven through Ilya's shirt, soaking into the fabric at the collar. He smelled like champagne and his own sweat, and underneath both of those, underneath the event and the evening and the performance of Shane Hollander at an awards ceremony, something that was just him. Ilya had not meant to know that smell as well as he did now.

He got him to the couch.

He didn't so much set him down as stop holding him up, Shane's weight redistributing toward the leather cushions, Ilya stepping back, watching him go. The slow, uncontrolled collapse of him, limbs finding their own arrangement. His legs slid apart. His head tipped back against the cushion. In the neon coming through the glass, his face was half blue, half dark, and his eyes, when they cracked open, were very wide and very black, the pupils blown so large the irises had almost disappeared.

His mouth was slack. Lifted at one corner into something that was trying to be a smile and mostly succeeded.

Ilya looked at him.

He looked for what was probably too long, standing over the couch with his jacket still on and his hands at his sides. Shane with nobody watching. Shane with the mask completely off, not taken off, just gone, dissolved, and what was underneath it was this. Open, unguarded, the face he never showed anyone on purpose.

Then Shane's hand moved.

A clumsy, uncoordinated drift downward, fingers curling against the ridge in his trousers, adjusting, the motion dreamlike and entirely automatic, the body tending to itself with the brain no longer supervising. 

Fuck.

Ilya raised both eyebrows slowly. A low whistle left him, barely sound at all, more breath than anything.

Hello, he thought. Someone is awake.

Shane didn't register it. His eyes had fallen shut again, lashes dark against his flushed cheeks, lips parted, breath evening out toward sleep. Then his body lurched forward, gravity and alcohol conspiring, and his forehead dropped and landed squarely against Ilya's stomach, just above his belt buckle.

Ilya went completely still.

Shane's breath soaked through the dress shirt, hot and damp against his skin. His hands came up blind, pawing at Ilya's thighs, anchoring himself. His lips moved against the fabric, the approximate shape of words. "Tired," he said. "Training soon. Don't—"

"I know," Ilya said, very quietly.

He reached down and pressed Shane back by the shoulders, pushing him into the cushions, and straightened. He stood there for a moment. Then he turned and walked to the kitchen.

The linoleum was cool under his shoes. The city light didn't reach here, the kitchen was dark except for the green glow of the microwave clock. He stood at the sink and turned the cold tap on and held both hands under it and kept them there, feeling the water run over his knuckles, down into his cuffs, soaking the fabric.

He was drunk. Not incapacitated— his thoughts were arriving in the right order, the room was staying where it was supposed to be. But the edges of things had gone soft. The part of him that ran a tight quality check on what he was about to do was running slower than usual. Coming up with different answers.

Shane was floating somewhere far above the stratosphere. His brain had been chemically scrubbed clean.

Give him water, Ilya told himself. Put him in the spare room. Go to bed.

He filled the glass. He held it.

He thought about Shane's face during the ceremony. The composure arranged into something public and gracious and completely correct, every muscle doing its assigned job, and underneath it, Ilya had been watching from across the room, drink in hand, underneath the performance, someone who had gone somewhere private and sent the surface of themselves out to receive the award. Like the real one wasn't available. Like he had packed the real one away somewhere and locked it.

He had wanted, watching that, to grab him by the face. 

Water, he thought again. Spare room.

He crossed back to the living room.

Shane had moved.

He had gotten his dress shirt half off somehow, it hung from one shoulder, buttons scattered across the carpet, the fabric gaping at the chest. His skin was flushed in the neon light, an uneven red that moved up his throat. His head had dropped back against the cushion. And his hand was still moving, that same slow automatic rhythm, his hips tilting up fractionally into it, lips parted on a breath that was almost a sound.

"Ilya," Shane mumbled, from somewhere that had nothing to do with the room. The name arriving loose and unguarded, not directed at anyone or aimed with total devastating precision at Ilya specifically, impossible to tell. "Ow— don't bite me there—"

The glass was still in Ilya's hand.

He stood in the doorway and felt the alcohol running its slow, unhelpful current through him, and looked at Shane Hollander half-undressed on his couch, and felt guilt, maybe hesitation. No, it was simpler than any of those. It was want, and it was more than physical, and it was old, and it had been waiting a long time in the dark of him.

He won't remember. But you will. 

He set the glass on the side table.

He reached for his belt. The leather pulled through the loops with a sound that was very loud in the quiet room, and Shane didn't stir, and Ilya walked to the couch.

He took Shane's chin between his fingers, not roughly, not gently either, and tipped his head back. Shane's face turned into the touch the way it always did, seeking warmth in the dark without knowing what the warmth was attached to.

"Hollander," Ilya said. "Open your mouth."

Shane opened his mouth. Without pause, without question, his tongue sliding out pink and wet in the neon light, completely trusting the voice giving the order. The corners of his lips were still trying to smile. He still didn't know whose hands were on him.

Look at you. Look at what you do, even like this. Even here.

He stepped between Shane's spread knees and guided himself forward to that waiting mouth, resting against the flat of his tongue. A drop of precome smeared across the surface. Shane's brows pulled together faintly, confused, the taste arriving somewhere below where his consciousness was, and Ilya withdrew just an inch and brought the flat of his cock against Shane's cheek twice.

"Not a homeless shelter, mm." he said quietly, to the dark, to Shane's unseeing face. "You pay for your stay."

Shane leaned forward. Chased the heat, blind and unthinking, his lips parting further, his breath coming hot and ragged against the skin. His body wanted it. Ilya watched it want, watched the wanting move through Shane's face and throat and hips, and pushed back in, past the lips, past the teeth, to the back of his throat.

Shane made a small surprised sound around him, the vibration traveling straight up Ilya's spine. His hands came up and gripped Ilya's thighs, not pushing, holding on. Anchoring himself to the only solid thing in a spinning world, which happened to be Ilya.

That's it. There you are.

He started to move. Slow at first, a rhythmic drag, the heat of it extraordinary, the sounds in the quiet room obscene and private— wet, rhythmic, Shane's choked breathing through his nose. Shane's throat bobbed on each press. He coughed, once, tears tracking from the sealed corners of his eyes in silver lines down his flushed cheeks. His hips kept rolling upward against the cushion, his body going through its own autonomous calculations, responding to Ilya's hands in his hair, to the voice praising him, da, good, so good, not knowing why he was saying it, only that it was being said.

Ilya watched him. Kept his eyes open through all of it and watched Shane's face, the wet lashes and the parted lips and the blind trust in his expression, and felt the possessiveness move through him like something tectonic, something that he didn't need to justify.

Mine, he thought, hips snapping forward. You have been mine for a long time, and you don't know it yet.

Shane tried to say something, a sound forming around him, a plea or a name or a protest lost before it reached language, and the vibration broke whatever control remained. Ilya's hand pressed Shane's head back against the cushions and he came, pulsing, and held him there through the whole of it, watching.

Shane gagged. Swallowed reflexively. Coughed violently as Ilya withdrew, his body folding forward, head dropping, a string of fluid and saliva at his lip. He looked wrecked. Half-asleep and completely broken and entirely unaware of what he looked like, which was the thing Ilya found he could not stop looking at.

He reached down and rubbed the back of his neck. "Spit," he said quietly.

Shane couldn't. He turned his head, gasping.

Ilya cleaned him up. He stripped the ruined shirt, worked Shane's unresisting arms into one of his own t-shirts, and carried him down the hallway to the secondary bedroom. Shane's head knocked gently against his collarbone with each step, and Ilya walked carefully, not rushing. He lowered him onto the bed, pulled the duvet over him, and stood in the doorway.

He watched the rise and fall of Shane's chest, slow, steady. Like nothing had interrupted it.

Tomorrow, Ilya thought, I will hate myself. Maybe.

He reached for the light switch. His expression in the dark doorway was completely still, looking in at Shane's sleeping face, and what was in it was not guilt exactly. It was closer to ownership. The cold, settled weight of a thing claimed.

Tonight, he thought, we had fun.

He turned off the light.

The light came through the gap in the curtains like it had it out for him specifically.

Shane flinched before he was fully awake, the brightness finding his eyes through closed lids, and he curled inward, knees to his chest, pulling the duvet over his face. His head throbbed in a slow rhythmic pound directly behind his eyes, pressure building until it felt like his skull might split, and his throat felt sandpapered raw, and his mouth—

He swallowed.

The taste sat at the back of it. Thick and biological, layered underneath the sour of the hangover like it had been there longer, settled in, coating the soft tissue in a way that was distinct from the alcohol and distinct from anything else he could account for. His tongue moved against the roof of his mouth without him telling it to, and his jaw protested the movement— a dull, deep ache at both hinges, radiating up into his temples when he pressed his teeth together.

He lay still and thought about that. Or started to, and then stopped.

Don't.

He opened his eyes.

Not his room. He knew his room, he'd requested blackout curtains at check-in, he always requested blackout curtains, he had requested them at every hotel because he needed the dark to sleep, and he was not embarrassed about it. This room had a two-inch gap in the middle that was currently taking a scalpel to his left eye, and the walls were beige, and the art was gold-framed and generic, and through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Vegas Strip blazed at full volume.

He looked down at himself.

Black cotton, not his. Worn soft from too many washes, the shoulders sitting wide, the hem brushing his mid-thigh. He didn't follow the smell through to its destination. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat there with both hands gripping the mattress edge, breathing, and looking at the floor.

His dress shirt was by the bathroom door.

Destroyed. The shoulder seam gaped open, threads trailing from the torn edge. Buttons scattered across the beige carpet, small and white and very far from the shirt.

Shane stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again.

Took three steps to the window, the glass cold under his fingertips, the city going about its morning thirty floors below, three steps back. His bare feet sank into the carpet and muted his steps, and his face had gone slack, jaw slightly open, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. He was still in the room but not quite in it.

Ilya's shirt, his brain offered. That's— okay, that's explainable, maybe we had- I just forgot. Fuck that's—

He closed his eyes, strained, and tried to remember the details of last night.

There was rain beating down against the car window. Neon bleeding into smears through the wet glass. A hand at his back, large and warm, rubbing slow firm circles between his shoulder blades while his forehead pressed into something cold and his stomach lurched.

What is your room number, Hollander.

He'd shaken his head. The motion had sloshed everything sideways. Not tonight, he'd managed, his hand pressing uselessly against wool. Feeling too sick.

Not for— Ilya's voice, dry, a short huff against his temple. To put you in bed. Would you prefer the bathtub?

The rest slipped past him.

Shane stopped pacing, instead. stared at his bare feet in the carpet.

Okay. So, Ilya had brought him here because he was a mess. Because he didn't know his room number. Because he would have vomited on the paparazzi and made them both a headline. They were both drunk, they didn't have sex. That was it, that was the complete explanation, it accounted for everything, Ilya was an asshole and Shane's least favourite person on earth on a good day, but he—

Shane pressed two fingers into his jaw.

The pain flared immediately, deep, radiating upward into his temples. Both hinges. The particular soreness of extended fatigue, of muscle held at an unnatural angle for too long, something he knew all too well. He pressed harder, feeling the exact location of it, and his tongue moved across the roof of his mouth before he could stop it, and the taste came back up to meet him, and his mind went to the bar, to a bathroom floor somewhere, to cameras—

No. No, he would remember that. He was paranoid about cameras, he had been paranoid about cameras since the draft, he would not. Not in public. So whatever happened, whatever he did or tried to do, it was here. Shane sloppy and handsy and chasing something he wanted and couldn't have. Shane making it weird. 

Two knocks.

"You are alive in there?" Ilya's voice through the door was rough at the edges from sleep. Completely, infuriatingly normal. "Or did the hangover kill you."

Shane's whole body jerked tight.

He looked at the floor. The buttons were still there. The shirt was still there, the seam still hanging open. He had to know, no more circling it, no more half-guesses, just...

His shaking fingers hooked under the hem of the t-shirt, lifting it. His thumb slid under the waistband of the boxers and pulled them away from his skin. He looked at his hips and stomach. He didn't know what he was looking for. He wasn't sure if he was hoping to find something or not find it.

"God, Hollander. You really don't waste time."

He dropped the shirt and spun on his heel.

Ilya stood in the doorway— arms crossed loosely, joggers slung low on his hips, in a grey t-shirt, barefoot. He looked like he'd slept eight hours and woken up without any evidence of last night on him whatsoever. His eyes were clear and sharp, and moving over Shane like he was pathetic.

His gaze dropped to the waistband Shane had just released, then came back up.

"Do they not fucking knock in Russia," Shane said. His heart was slamming against his ribs.

"I knocked." Ilya held up two fingers. "Twice." A beat, the corner of his mouth moving. "You were busy. Playing with your dick. Or your asshole. Maybe both."

The heat flooded up Shane's neck to his ears instantly. And underneath the humiliation, underneath the nausea churning steadily at the base of his throat, his body registered the crudeness of it, and sent warmth pooling between his legs. He stood there burning with both things at once and thought: look at him in those joggers. Drinking coffee. Chirping about me fingering myself like it's any other morning. Just Ilya being Ilya, stuck babysitting his messy rival through a hangover. If something happened— if it did— it was Shane. It was me. I was the one who was sloppy and handsy.

"Uh? Hello, Hollander?"

Ilya crossed the room in two long strides. His thumb pressed into Shane's cheekbone, and Shane flinched. His whole body pulled back a fraction before he caught it, and Ilya's thumb moved, pressing into the jaw hinge, finding the exact point of the ache with no particular effort, and Shane's breath went thin.

"Hey. Are you on earth, Hollander?" Ilya said.

"Earth to Hollander," Shane managed. "I think that's— that's the phrase."

"Stupid phrase English phrase," Ilya's palm cupped his face fully, fingers splaying into his hairline. He tilted Shane's head up, and his eyes moved over him. the dilated pupils, the sweat at his temples, the pulse going too fast in the hollow of his throat. . "So what is this," he said quietly. "This shivering. Like a scared cat. Ty menya napryagáyesh, you are stressing me out.

Then he let go.

Both hands dropped away. The cold of it was immediate, Shane's face still holding the shape of the grip. He swallowed. His throat clicked dry, the film still there at the back of it, and Ilya had already turned away, was already carrying both mugs through to the living room, the conversation apparently concluded.

"Sorry—fuck, I’m fine." Shane stepped back. His tongue darted to wet cracked lips. "I'm just... trying to figure out what the hell is going on."

"Figure out what?" 

Shane followed him. He didn't decide to, his legs just did it.

"You got drunk after the award." Ilya dropped onto the sofa, one arm over the back, completely at home. "You were sloppy. I brought you here so you didn't vomit on the paparazzi." He took a slow sip of coffee. His eyes creased faintly at the corners. "You're welcome."

The explanation sat in front of Shane, tidy, complete, the right shape. He stood in the doorway and looked at it and knew it was the right shape and felt it snag anyway, drag against the ache in his jaw, against the taste that three swallows hadn't dissolved, against the shirt scattered across the bedroom floor.

"And the rest?" Shane said. "The other stuff."

Ilya held his gaze for a long moment. Then he patted the cushion beside him, his palm flat on the leather.

"Coffee is good," he said. "I put your soy stuff in it."

Shane crossed the room and sat. He left six inches of space between them, his bare knees pale and exposed under the hem of the t-shirt. He stared at the carpet. "I'm serious," he said. "The other stuff."

Ilya turned toward him. His knee closed the gap between them, not quite accidentally. His eyes sharpened.

"What other stuff." The voice dropped. "You mean when you tried to suck my dick?"

The cold flooded Shane from the inside, filling his limbs. "So I—" The words came out barely there. "Where. In the bar? Ilya, the cameras—" He pressed his palms into his eyes, trying to push the memories forward, trying to find the moment he'd dropped to the floor somewhere public, the moment he'd wrecked everything. Where, when, how many people —

Ilya let him spiral for three full seconds. Then he made a short, dismissive sound and thumped Shane once between the shoulder blades.

"Relax."

Shane went still.

"It's not a big deal," Ilya said flatly.

"What?"

"You tried. When we got out of the Uber." He rolled his wrist in a vague gesture. "Tried to take the shirt off, failed. Buttons went everywhere." He settled deeper into the cushions, entirely unbothered. "But I fought you."

The relief hit first, and it hit hard— a hot dizzy wave of it, Shane's gut unclenching so fast it sent nausea rolling through him. Then the humiliation came crashing in behind it, thick and choking, because he'd lunged at Ilya apparently, he'd begged without memory or coordination or any dignity whatsoever, and that was his fault, that was Shane drunk and sloppy and wanting something he had no business wanting and making it everyone's problem—

"So nothing happened," Shane said slowly. Testing the shape of it. "Nothing happened."

"Sure," Ilya murmured.

He stood. Crossed to the dining table, picked up a slice of toast and waved it. Crumbs scattered across the carpet. "I got room service. Eggs. Fruit." He glanced back at Shane. "I know. Not green enough for you."

Shane moved to the table on autopilot, sat in the adjacent chair, looked at the plate. Scrambled egg, fruit, glossy under the light. His stomach clenched. His hands found his own knees under the table, nails pressing crescents into skin.

"Is like you're having panic attack. Jesus. What does it matter?" Ilya said, from the counter. He was looking at the ceiling. "We were both drunk."

"I need to know what happened." The words came out cracked straight down the middle, splitting on the last syllable, and Shane hated the sound of it, the nakedness. "I just— I need to know what I actually did, okay? So stop, stop, playing around."

Ilya looked at him. Something moved briefly behind his eyes and then didn't. He pushed off the counter and came back to the table and stopped close, closer than he needed to, and his scent arrived first, coffee and soap and underneath both of them something Shane's tongue recognised before his brain did, something that made both jaw hinges ache.

"You were handsy." Ilya's finger came up and tapped Shane's chin, once, twice, tilting his jaw up. "Thought I was a stripper pole. Kept saying my name. Over and over." His thumb pressed into the hinge point, right over the deep-set ache, and his eyes glinted faintly. "Was annoying." The thumb moved, tracing the jawline. "But you have a nice mouth, Hollander. Even when it's talking nonsense."

He leaned in. His lips grazed the curve of Shane's ear, breath feathering slow and warm against the skin.

"Next time," he said quietly, "you should be awake for it. More fun when you beg in proper English. Da?"

He straightened. Clapped his hands once, sharply, and turned back toward the kitchen. "Go shower. You look like a homeless person, and your dick is leaking on the nice hotel floor."

Shane sat there.

The kitchen sounds started up, water running, plates stacking, the low hum of the fridge cycling, all of it performing normalcy, all of it sounding like a regular morning. His body was doing what his body had been doing since he woke up, his bulge tenting the grey cotton. The nausea ran alongside it. The taste was still in his mouth. He looked down at the table and thought about the shirt on the floor, and thought about the jaw, and thought about the taste, and thought: okay. Okay. You tried to kiss him, and he put you to bed, and in the morning, you woke up wanting him. 

He looked down at his hips.

The boxers were Ilya's.

Of course, he knew this; the waistband was sitting wrong, too loose, the elastic a different weight, the cut not his. He had known it since he woke up. Some part of him had known it continuously, quietly, the whole time, and he had been very carefully trying not to know it. 

The shirt, fine— he had ripped it, Ilya wanted him comfortable, easy enough. But the boxers. His boxers had been fine. There was no reason to change his boxers unless—

"You're lying."

The words came out without volume. Just air, barely shaped into sound.

The water cut off.

Ilya didn't turn around immediately. 

"What?" he said.

"In the car." Shane's spine locked rigid, his whole body shaking finely now, the tremors running from his shoulders down through his hands. "In the lobby, too, I said no. I told you I couldn't, I told you to take me to my hotel." A breath. "These aren't my boxers."

Ilya turned around.

He leaned back against the counter and looked at Shane across the kitchen. There was no confusion crossing his brow. Just a mild, slightly bored furrow to his brow.

"Okay," he said, with a small shrug.

Shane flinched like he'd been hit. "Okay?" His voice broke into a register he didn't recognise. "You— you did it anyway. And then you lied, you told me nothing happened, you said—"

"I brought you here because you didn't know your room number." Ilya's voice was flat. 

"I said no." The word fractured in the middle, all its weight splitting through the single syllable. "I said no, you said you wouldn't touch me, I said don't want, I said take me home, you said—" The memory came in blunt, wet pieces.

The car door opening onto garage-cold air. Ilya's arm iron-locked around his shoulders. Can't tonight, don't want it. Ilya's laugh, low and warm at his temple. I know, I won't touch you. Maybe just to change clothes, mm. He had believed it. He had believed it and gone boneless into it and surrendered entirely because he was drunk and he trusted him like an idiot.

"You said you wouldn't."

Ilya pushed off the counter.

He crossed the kitchen slowly, until he was standing directly in front of Shane, close enough that Shane had to tilt his head back— and lifted one hand and hovered his palm over Shane's hip without touching, the heat of it radiating through the thin cotton.

"You said a lot of things, Hollander." His voice had dropped. "You said too drunk. You said don't want. You said take me home." His pale eyes moved over Shane's face without hurry. "But you opened your mouth when I asked you to."

Shane's eyes stung. He pressed his teeth together and felt the ache run deep through both hinges and didn't look away.

"You even swallowed." Ilya's hand made contact, fingers spreading wide across Shane's hip, hooking into the jut of bone, a grip that was ownership without apology. His thumb pressed once, deliberate. "I didn't fucking touch you. You sucked my dick, you came in your boxers. No hands." The thumb moved. "Good trick."

He leaned in. His lips found the curve of Shane's ear, his breath arriving slow and warm.

"And look at you now," Ilya murmured. "Remembering it. Wanting it."

His thumb moved again, a single slow drag across the hipbone.

"Hard as a rock."

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

He hit send. Then he waited, staring at the screen, his heart beating a little faster than it should.

The grey arrows turned blue. Ilya watched the ellipsis bubble appear, pulse, and disappear. Shane typed, then deleted. Typed, then deleted. He did this three times over the course of twenty minutes.

Ilya nibbled his thumbnail, smiling around it as he imagined Shane all confused in his apartment, pacing around his kitchen island, scrambling for some sort of response that wouldn't give away how flustered he was.

Ilya snorted. Just a question mark, coward. He raised his phone to the TV screen and paused the ad at a very specific timestamp—0:14. Shane was facing the camera head-on, hip cocked to the side just a little, the studio lighting hitting him perfectly. The pose stretched the fabric of the boxers tight, revealing the full print of his dick in high definition.
Ilya snapped the photo.

He saved it immediately to the hidden album in his camera roll, then he sent it to Shane.

Ilya scoffed, the sound echoing in the empty apartment.

Ilya’s hand went straight to his keyboard to fire back a witty response, his thumbs hovering eagerly over the glass. He sat up on the couch. The heaviness in his limbs was gone, evaporated by the banter. The room didn't feel so oppressive anymore.

Maybe I should order dinner, he thought. No. I could make something.

Yes, that was a good idea. He should cook. Some pelmeni, maybe. And he should do his laundry—the pile of clothes in the corner was getting ridiculous. And he should keep talking to Shane. As long as Shane was answering, Ilya had a reason to get off the couch.

July 2012, Moscow

The bass in the club was vibrating through the floorboards, shaking the ice in Ilya’s glass until it chattered like teeth.

Svetlana was leaning against his shoulder, whispering something he had to crane his neck and squint his eyes to hear. His hand rested idly at the curve of her waist—warm, familiar. She leaned close, her lips pressing wet and hot against his ear.

"I see a really beautiful girl over there, with her boyfriend," she yelled above the thumping music, raising her sculpted eyebrows. Her full lips twisted into a pouty, knowing smile.

Ilya raised his eyebrows back and took a sip from his vodka, the burn settling comfortably in his stomach. He glanced over the rim of the glass to the pair she had indicated. They were attractive. More than that—they were beautiful. Ilya could imagine both of them naked, crawling over him. He could imagine Svetlana, all caramel skin and glowing in the dark light of his bedroom, strutting across the room to meet the three of them in the bed.

He shrugged. "Mm. Is true, they are sexy."

Svetlana's brow furrowed slightly, and her lip curled as she looked Ilya up and down. Her eyes twinkled with something knowing, almost pitiful, and she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek, a lingering press of lipstick.

"Okay, mishka, going to go work my magic." She wiped the side of her lip, fixing her liner with a practiced finger. "Text me if you're leaving?"

Ilya nodded, looking back down at his glass. He watched the whirlwind he created as he swirled it—watched the condensation slide down the side, slow, wet, and heavy. He sniffed and checked his watch. 3:14 AM.

Then his pocket started vibrating.

Ilya didn't even glance down at it. He just leaned further against the bar, letting the wood dig into his spine, his eyes searching across the crowd for a warm body to take with him—someone to fill the silence of his apartment.

But then it buzzed again. Long and urgent, pressing too deeply against his thigh. Ilya slipped his hand into his pocket and glanced at it, barely. The screen was hardly visible through the strobe lights flashing red and blue.

<

Ilya felt his stomach drop—a sudden, sharp freefall that had nothing to do with the alcohol. He felt his mouth go dry as ash, and an overwhelming feeling of dread crept up his body like a cold sweat. The noise of the club instantly receded, turned down to a dull roar. The world narrowed to the glowing rectangle in his hand.

Shane.

Ilya shoved off the bar. He started to plow through the crowds, pressing past models and puck bunnies and friends of friends who wanted to be seen with an NHL star. They were laughing, shouting over the music, draped over the velvet booths like expensive decorations. And in between them, Ilya was storming through the crowd, moving with a singular, violent focus on the only thing he cared about.

He shouldered the fire exit door open and stepped out into the alley, gasping at the sudden rush of fresh, humid air.

Ilya glanced around wildly, adrenaline spiking his blood, but the alleyway was completely empty. It was quiet here, except for the distant hum of traffic and the idle noises streaming in from the street.

Ilya stared at the texts again.

Please. Shane never said please. He was too proud, too stubborn. If Shane was saying please, he was on his knees, begging Ilya for air, or release, or friction.

A warmth that wasn't caused by the alcohol started blooming in Ilya's chest. He was worried, yes, his heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs, but underneath the fear was something else. Something dark and possessive.

He came to me.

He waited. One second. Two seconds.

Then the phone lit up. Jane Calling...

Ilya answered before the first ring finished. He pressed the phone hard to his ear, shielding the microphone from the wind with his cupped hand, and headed deeper into the shadows of the alleyway.

"Hollander?"

"Ilya."

The voice was a wreck. It was a wet, gasping sound—shattered, high-pitched, hyperventilating. It sounded like Shane was drowning around his words, gulping for air that refused to enter his lungs. He said Ilya's name like he was an angel—his savior—and the sound caused Ilya to hum a low, satisfied note under his breath.

"'Lya, I can't—I don't know why—'so fucking loud."

"Shh," Ilya cut in. He allowed his voice to lower, dropping automatically into that commanding, soothing register he had used in the hotel room whenever Shane was triggered into a fit. "No, stop talking. Listen to me."

"I think... I'm dying," Shane sobbed. The sound was raw. His cheek must have been pressed hard against the phone because Ilya could hear every wet gasp; he felt like he could hear the tears brushing from Shane's lashes onto the screen. "Can't even feel my hands."

"This is not dying," Ilya said slowly, enunciating every syllable. He leaned his head back against the rough brick wall of the alley, closing his eyes. He could picture Shane perfectly: pacing somewhere frantic, shaking, tears snotty on his face, probably leaning over a sink and hiding out in a bathroom stall. "You are having panic attack. Where are you?"

"At some stupid fucking brand gala, stupid, dumb—someone uh—they wanted to, I don't know, but they touched my back and I just—I couldn't,"

Ilya froze.

He knew Shane wasn't one for physical affection. He had noticed the way he shrank away from hugs and smacks on the back from his teammates—face wincing a little, nose twitching like a little rabbit scenting a predator. But the guilt still hit him like a physical blow to the gut. Of course. Even if Shane's mind had tried to forget, his body still remembered. His skin remembered the touch Ilya had forced on him.

He gripped the phone so hard the plastic creaked in his hand.

"Did you push them away?" Ilya asked, his voice sharp.

"What? No. No, I just froze and my eyes started watering. Everyone was asking me if I was okay, like allergies—something, I think. I just ran. I ran. I'm in toilet." Shane was wheezing now, whimpering out each word like it hurt physically to speak. "Il—Roz, tell me what to do. Please. Just tell me."

The surrender was absolute. It was intoxicating.

"Okay," Ilya murmured. "Okay, moya lyubov. I have you."

He took a breath.

"First. Put the phone on speaker. Put it on the floor next to you. Do it."

A fumble. A clatter against tile.

"Okay," Shane whispered. He sounded smaller now, closer to the floor.

"Good boy," Ilya said, the praise rolling off his tongue thick and syrupy. He felt his own pulse slow down, syncing with the rhythm of the slow pace of his voice. "Now. Close your eyes."

"Th-they're closed."

"Good. Now stop thinking. You are thinking too loud, I can hear it from here. Empty your head." Ilya lowered his voice, dropping it into a hushed, intimate rasp. "Remember the hotel room? Remember how quiet it was?"

A hitch of breath on the other end. "Rozanov..."

"Shh. Just listen. Remember the dark? Remember how heavy the blanket was on you?" Ilya pressed the phone closer, as if he could physically push his presence through the speaker. "You didn't have to do anything there, all this smiling and talking. You just lay there and let me take care of you. Remember this?"

"Yes," Shane whimpered. It was a broken sound, half-sob, half-relief.

"Go back there," Ilya commanded softly. "You are no longer at party, you are in that room. And I am right there. I am sitting on the edge of the bed, and my hand is on your chest. Can you feel it?"

Silence. Then, a shaky exhale.

"Yeah."

"Is it heavy?"

"Yeah."

"Good, focus on the weight. I am holding you down, so you cannot move. You do not need to, I have you pinned."

Ilya closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the brick wall. He could feel it too—the phantom sensation of Shane’s heart beating under his palm, the heat of his skin.

"Breathe against my hand, Shane. Push my hand up."

He heard Shane inhale—shaky, but deeper this time.

"Now let it fall. Let me crush the air out."

Shane exhaled, a long, shuddering release that sounded like a surrender.

"Again. Push against me."

For ten minutes, Ilya stood in a dirty alleyway in Moscow, guiding Shane through a visualization that bordered on hypnosis. He didn't check the time; instead, just stood there, head tipped back against the brick, holding the phone like it was a lifeline, anchoring Shane to the floor four thousand miles away.

"Better?" Ilya asked softly, when the breathing had finally evened out into a rhythmic, exhausted cadence.

"Yeah," Shane croaked. The terror was gone, replaced by a slurred, sleepy haze. "Yeah. I'm... I'm okay. Thanks."

"Good." Ilya didn't hang up. He didn't want to let him go. "Stay there. Do not go back out until I say so."

"Okay," Shane whispered. "Rozanov?"

"What?"

"Don't hang up yet."

Ilya closed his eyes.

"I'm not going anywhere."

April 2013, Montreal

He yanked down his boxers, almost ripping them with the force, and grabbed at himself with a frantic, bruising grip. He watched the timer on the screen—59, 58—and the pressure of it all went straight to his dick. He let his thumb hover over his slit, and he whined at the relief.

57.

"Fuckkk—fuck, fuck, Rozanov." Shane moaned and moved his hand faster, head thrown back, mouth open in a silent scream.

56.

It felt so good to beat the clock. To be good. To be the best.

He came at 42.

It hit him like a physical blow, a white-hot release that curled his toes and left him slumping forward, forehead resting against the cold porcelain of the tub. He panted, drool pooling on the mat, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

So clean. So empty. So fucking quiet and clean and empty.

Shane slumped forward, grabbed a tissue to wipe his hand, before stopping the video and sending it to Ilya.

A minute later, the phone buzzed.

Shane shakily stood up, using the bathtub to support himself. He glanced at where the plug was resting on his counter, and his cheeks immediately went bright red, flushed with his freckles spread across them. He looked like a little strawberry.

He washed the plug, then set it on a towel in the drawer to dry. His morning skate was in 57 minutes, so he should make his smoothie in 15. With spinach. No fruit.

Chapter Text

December 2013

Shane pulled the roll of black friction tape taut, overlapping the edges exactly halfway down the blade of his stick. The coarse fabric rasped against the composite carbon in a sharp, rhythmic scrape that cut through the heavy, suffocating noise of the Voyageurs’ locker room. The air was thick with pre-game adrenaline and the sour, damp tang of gear that never fully dried.

A bass line thumped in a steady, aggressive vibration from a portable speaker two stalls down. J.J. was shouting something across the room in an accented drawl, too loud and too confident, like every word deserved to be heard. Shane didn’t hear him approaching.

“If Rozanov fucks you tonight? I’m gunna fuck him back.” J.J. pointed at himself for extra emphasis.

Jesus Christ—what the hell? How does he know?

Something rose in Shane’s throat, sharp and immediate. Panic. No. No, he doesn’t. Of course, he doesn’t. It was a joke, Shane. Do you remember what a joke is?

Shane’s eyes flicked rapidly between J.J.’s, searching for clarity, for any sign that this was more than it sounded like. He jolted when Hayden spoke from behind him.

“I think you mean ‘fucks with,’ buddy.” Pike scoffed with a smile, then raised his eyebrows quickly at Shane in a knowing apology. Hayden Pike, being his savior again. Shane wasn’t sure how many times it had happened by now. J.J. was great. Everyone loved J.J. But sometimes his bravado was the last thing Shane wanted, especially right before seeing—

“They’re burning a fake Rozanov outside right now.”

Shane shook his head and turned back into his stall, forcing his attention onto what mattered. The game. Changing into his gear for the game. Taping up his stick for the game. He could not afford to give his brain anything else to chew on. The only thing messing up his routine was that damn music. Fuck the music.

“Whoever’s playing that shit, turn it off,” Shane mumbled, not bothering to look up.

“You heard capitain,” someone called back. “Keep that SHIT in your headphones.”

Shane kept his eyes fixed strictly on the toe of his stick, his thumb smoothing down a ridge in the tape until the friction burned his skin. Rip. Stretch. Press.

The repeated motion smoothed out the tension in his hands. The tape was perfectly even, which meant his shot would be perfect. A perfect shot—a clean one, a good one—was waiting for him right outside those doors. Still, his stomach felt hollowed out, scraped clean and filled with cold air. His phone, buried deep in the pocket of his trousers hanging in his stall, was mocking him. It was like it was possessed by the spirit of Ilya Rozanov itself, considering that, on and off, for the past three months, it had told Shane when to eat, what to eat, when to sleep, and whether he could cum with two fingers or none. At least it was a safe distance; pixels didn't have a pulse, a text message couldn't physically pin his hips to a mattress. It compressed the overwhelming gravity of him into black text on a glowing screen. 

But tonight, Ilya wasn’t trapped in the phone. He was in Montreal. He was in Shane’s building. He was breathing the same recirculated arena air and walking the same rubber-matted tunnels on the other side of the ice. The physical reality of it made the skin on the back of Shane’s neck prickle, hot and hypersensitive, like he was already being watched.

“Hey, Hollander.”

Toby, the team’s PR manager, was leaning into the locker room, holding a clipboard against his side. He pointed a pen at Shane.

“Need you in the hall for, like, two minutes for NBC and some other news outlets. Don’t bother with the gear; it’ll only take a second.”

Shane’s grip tightened on his stick, the carbon fiber digging hard into his palms. “Now? I’m not—I’m not done with my tape.”

“It’ll take sixty seconds, Shane. Just a quick soundbite.” Toby waved him over, impatient.

Hayden slumped down on the bench next to Shane, cleared his throat, and pushed an invisible microphone into Shane’s face. “Now, Mr. Hollander, what does Montreal have to do to win tonight?” he drawled.

Shane set the stick down carefully between his knees. His fingers were trembling so finely it was almost a vibration. He scoffed, shaking his head. “Well, hockey is a very complicated and nuanced game.” He turned around, walking backward so he could face the whole team. “But it would be helpful if we scored more fucking goals than the other team.”

The room erupted in cheers and laughter, and probably the beginning of some badly worded chirps.

“And how about that other team—” Pike continued.

“Yeah,” Shane muttered.

He forced himself to straighten and walk toward the door. “Not sweating it.”

Chapter Text

February 2014 

The elevator still didn't work. It hadn't worked when Ilya left at seventeen, and apparently, the building had decided that was fine, that this was simply how things were and would continue to be. He took the stairs with his suitcase in hand, his footsteps landing loud on the concrete, each one announcing him a little further ahead of himself.

He didn't knock. Knocking would imply a distance that his father would find insulting, would transform into an accusation before the door was even open—you knock now, like a stranger? He pressed the handle and let himself in.

The door opened, and the smell hit him so fast it felt physical.

Not bad, exactly, and not one thing; it had layers. Damp wool, dust caught in the radiator heat, the faint medicinal sting of old detergent. And under all of it, deep as a bruise, the sweet rotten ghost of spilled vodka living in the couch cushions where no sobriety could ever reach. His father had supposedly been sober for five years. The apartment had not.

Ilya stood in the entryway with his bag hanging from one hand and let the air settle on his skin. It was too warm inside, stuffy; he didn’t miss it. The buildings he frequented were not warm like this in America. This was the kind of heat that sat on the walls and made the windows sweat in winter. He could feel it gathering under the collar of his coat already, thick and stale against the back of his neck.

His eyes caught on the hallway wall before he could stop them.

The wallpaper was more yellow than he remembered, or maybe everything else had just faded harder around it. A rectangle sat on the wall like exposed bone. Slightly cleaner, slightly less dead, maybe. There was a nail hole above it and the faint shape of old adhesive underneath, like something taken down carefully and never replaced.

His mother had been there.

No, it wasn’t her. It was paper and glass. Four people arranged into a family because someone had barked at them to stand close together and smile. Still, his chest pulled tight anyway, that stupid old reflex, quick and mean. He saw the curls first, always, the bright shape of them, then melting into the cold bathroom tile under his knees. The vomit seeping through his fingers, the wet drag of her hair against his wrist, peace on her face so complete.

He looked away too hard, like the wall had burned him.

From the kitchen came the sound of water running, and beneath it, low and tuneless, a woman humming something he didn't recognize. The new wife moved around in there quietly, with the confidence that only came with being young and stupid and quite happy about it. Polina. He knew almost nothing about her except the little humiliations of repetition: her short dresses, her weak tea, her dish towels folded into thirds. She had placed a ceramic cow in the sitting room windowsill, and every time he looked at it, he wanted to crush it in his fist.

The apartment smelled exactly the same as when he was fifteen and coming home from the rink, all sweat and bruises and hunger, praying his father was in a good mood. The same trapped air, same stupid fucking damp carpet. The same feeling that the walls had been breathing the same breath for thirty years, and now wanted to push it into him.

You came straight from Boston, he reminded himself. Fourteen hours of airports and recycled airplane air and a taxi from Sheremetyevo with a driver who talked too much. Your bag is still in your hand. You are twenty-two years old. You do not live here.

His body did not care.

A chair scraped in the next room.

His spine lengthened, his jaw set, his shoulders drew back into a posture he had not consciously chosen, some ancient choreography of boyhood: be still, be agreeable, do not come in hot, do not let him smell resistance on you. That sound could still do it to him; it was humiliating. He was being humiliated.

"You are finally here."

Grigori Rozanov appeared in the doorway to the sitting room and, as always, was smaller than the version memory made of him. Short. Thick through the middle now. Bald scalp shining under the overhead light. His knees bothered him; Ilya could see it in the careful way he planted his feet, though his father would rather bite off his own tongue than admit weakness. Age had rounded the shoulders slightly, had thinned the hair to nothing across the crown. But the eyes were unchanged. Pale and flat and measuring, moving over Ilya’s face.

He looked at Ilya once, from boots to face, and managed to make it feel like an indictment.

"Papa," Ilya said.

“You have been in Russia for a week,” Grigori said. “And you do not come see your father.”

The words slid under Ilya’s skin exactly where they were meant to.

He almost said I came as fast as I could. Almost said I had press, training, federation obligations, flights, fucking protocols, Papa, Jesus Christ. I didn’t have to come at all; I could have gone straight to Sochi. The defense rose hot and quick and childish in his throat. He swallowed it before it could disgrace him.

“No, sir,” he said, keeping his voice level. “I came here straight from Boston.”

Grigori made a low sound in his throat.

Behind him, in the kitchen doorway, the wife hovered for half a second with a dish towel in her hands. She gave Ilya a small polite smile, uncertain around the edges. He nodded back because he was not an animal; it was not her fault she married an idiot. Or maybe it was, and Ilya couldn’t blame her for it, because his mama had also chosen that idiot once.

Then she disappeared again, and it was just the two of them, which was somehow always lonelier than being alone.

Grigori turned and went back into the sitting room without inviting him in, because he never had to. Ilya followed, leaving his suitcase in the hallway, heat collecting between his shoulder blades.

The room had not changed. It almost offended him how little it had changed. It was kind of insinuating he didn’t matter at all. His presence didn’t make this place better or worse. Fuck this.

The same dark red carpet. The same cabinet with the crystal glasses that no one used. The same television stand with the veneer lifting in one corner. His father’s chair was by the window, because of course it was by the window. The whole room was preserved under amber, every object exactly where it had been when Ilya was young enough to sit on that couch and have his feet miss the floor.

He sat there now because there was nowhere else to sit.

The cushions gave under his weight at once, too soft in the middle, the tired springs shifting under him with a groan that went straight into his teeth. His body remembered that, too.

He needed to get out of here fast.

Not because anything had happened yet. Because it would. It always did, even when nobody raised a hand. This apartment could do it without help. Ten minutes here and he was already back in the old weather of himself; he wanted to drink, he wanted a line or two, he wanted sex, he wanted to wait for tone, for pressure, for the small atmospheric shift before a storm.

Outside, Moscow had already gone dark in that winter way, sudden and complete, the window reflecting the room back at them. A streetlight glowed through the glass, dirty gold.

"How are you?" Ilya asked.

"I am fine." His father waved his hand absently. "We are not here to discuss me. The minister is watching the tournament carefully."

Ilya said nothing. He knew better; this wasn’t the end of his ramblings. The whole of Russia was watching, everybody was watching, the whole world, obviously, and it was on him not to be an embarrassment.

“The whole of Russia is watching, in fact, everybody is watching,” his father continued. “Not only him.”

Bingo, there it was. Not pride, or at least, not for Russia. Not only have you made it this far, but your mother would have wanted to see this, or even the country is proud of you. Just the tribunal, always the tribunal. Always the invisible room full of men in dark wool coats still sitting somewhere just offstage, observing, taking notes, deciding what a son’s body was worth if properly used.

Grigori folded his hands over one knee. Ilya hated that too, the resemblance there. The broad knuckles. The thick wrists. His own hands lying at the ends of his arms, carrying his father’s dying legacy.

"Vetrov will be at the opening ceremony." His father's pale eyes held his, assessing the appropriate degree of comprehension registering behind them. "He has spoken about this team personally. About you, specifically." A pause. "He has expectations."

Sergei Vetrov, Minister of Interior, former Soviet goaltender, Svetlana's father, King of all Kings, everything his father wasn’t, and his fucking prison warden, seemingly.

“And Vetrov’s daughter, when was the last time you spoke to her?” Grigori interrupted his thoughts, rudely. “Is she not in Boston?”

“Yes, Papa. We have spoken recently, of course.”

“She is her father’s eyes and ears, whether she means to be or not.”

That almost made him smile. Svetlana is her own eyes and ears, he wanted to say. And her own mouth, unfortunately for everyone. But his father was not entirely wrong.

Grigori kept talking, fumbling over his words, repeating himself. Scheduling, appearances, which outlets mattered, which interviews could not be slighted. The significance of home ice, home cameras, home humiliation if they failed. For great Russia, for beautiful Russia, for his empty wallet, but not for his mother, no. His voice went on and on, steady as dripping water, and Ilya let it cover him.

He nodded where needed. He said, “Da.” He said, “Of course.”

Under the table, out of his father's line of sight, Ilya slipped his hand into his pocket to thumb at his phone.

It was a useless gesture; the screen was black, and there was no new message. The last thing sitting in that thread was 62 days old and was short and flat, with no room in it for softness to crawl inside and twist: “Don’t text me again.”

He ran his thumb over the hard edge of the case anyway. It burned like a live coal against his thigh; no, it haunted him.

He hated that it had followed him here. Hated even more that this apartment made him want it worse.

Shane, Shane, Shane.

The name didn’t even feel like language anymore. It was a heavy, frantic rhythm rattling against his own ribs, demanding blood. The apartment was so dead, the air trapped and sediment-thick, but Shane was so warm. Ilya’s jaw clenched. He thought of that frantic heat. Prying Shane open—breaking through that rigid, terrified shell to get to the desperate, yielding center of him—it felt like a proof of life.

Somehow, it was proof that Ilya wasn’t dead here. Not yet.

It was proof that the suffocating machinery of Russia hadn’t dragged him all the way down into the dirt yet. As long as Shane was bleeding for him, as long as Shane was ruined for anyone else, as long as he could tower over him and shove him on the ice and spit on him and be in him.

His father was still speaking. Russia needs this. Russia expects this. A captain carries this. A man does not embarrass—

Yes, yes. Fine, alright.

Ilya dug his thumb into the phone so hard the plastic creaked. If he could just get his hands on him. Just for a minute. If he could drag him into a dark room and press his mouth to the frantic, hammering pulse at Shane's neck. Pin him down until the thrashing stopped and the surrender started. He needed to breathe in that clean, annoying, painfully basic cologne mixed with the sharp, honest tang of his sweat. He needed to press his teeth into the soft flesh there, rip open his jugular; he needed the clean red dripping from his lips. Needed it, needed it to run over his gold medal. 

"Are you listening?" Grigori’s voice cracked across the room like a stick breaking.

Ilya blinked, the white-hot vision of Shane's throat vanishing back into the dark red carpet. He slowly pulled his hand out of his pocket and placed it flat on his knee.

"Yes, Papa," Ilya said, his voice perfectly smooth. "I am listening."

The taxi smelled like pine air freshener and someone else's cigarettes, the cardboard tree swinging from the rearview in slow arcs as the driver took the coastal road too fast. Outside, the Black Sea slid past, flat and pewter-grey under February cloud, the Caucasus rising dark behind it. Palm trees. Ilya hated the palm trees. Sochi had them, absurdly, lining the road in from Adler like a joke someone had forgotten to finish. The Olympics in the subtropics. Great Russia, beautiful Russia. He watched one lean in the salt wind and looked away.

His bag was wedged between his feet, the cab too small for his legs, knees angled awkward into the back of the seat. The driver had tried conversation twice. He had not tried a third time.

Ilya's phone buzzed against his thigh.

Svetlana Vetrova calling…

He let it ring once. Then pressed accept, because the alternative was silence, and the cycling of the voices in his head. 

“Sveta.”

“You’re alive, I wasn’t sure.” Her voice hummed through the earpiece– warm, sarcastic, and laced with this sultry energy she had at all hours of the day, which was somehow always the energy of someone after one glass of wine. He could hear Moscow in the background, the low hum of it. “I’ve been calling since yesterday. How are you? How is he? Did you walk out with all your limbs still intact?”

“So many questions.” The corner of his mouth pulled, involuntarily. “Papa is fine. The wife is fine. She hummed something stupid in the kitchen,” he said. “For forty minutes.”

Svetlana's laugh was quick and delighted. God, she was such an asshole. She was perfect. “Beautiful. Perfect. God, she's hopeless. You should have called me, I would have talked you through it. Did Grigori do the whole—" she dropped her voice into a bass register that wasn't even close to accurate, "—'Russia is watching, the minister is watching, the ghost of the Soviet Union is watching'—"

“He was drooling over your handsome Papa, yes.”

“Of course he was. Papa sends his regards, which you know means: don't embarrass him in front of the cameras and try to smile like a human person and not a taxidermied wolf."

“Great,” Ilya said. “Tell him thank you. Tell him I want a 20ft statue erected in the Red Square of me fucking his wife whilst biting my gold medal.” 

“Yes, yes, I'll tell him you're focused and professional and not a disaster waiting to happen." A beat. "Are you in Sochi yet? What's it like? The biathlon girls are saying the village food is—"

"Still in taxi," he said. "Twenty minutes maybe."

The driver took a curve, palm trees flicking past in the periphery, the sea grey and wide. Ilya shifted his knee against the seat and let his hand drift to his pocket. The thread was still there. 62 days. 62, very funny. It seemed like he was always 62 seconds away from smashing the damn thing. 

He opened it.

The number of days had stopped meaning anything— it was past the threshold of meaning, had become purely physical, a weight in his chest like swallowed lead that he'd gotten so used to he only noticed it when he breathed. 

Wow, you are boring, so boring.

Delete.

Svetlana was saying something about the opening ceremony, logistics, where she'd be sitting, and whether Ilya could get her into the athletes' lounge. He probably could, and it would probably be nice, having Svetlana on his arm, catching even more attention than he usually did. Which was a lot, of course.

I know you miss me. 

Delete. He pressed his thumb into the phone case hard enough to whiten the pad.

"—and Lena's asking about you, by the way, she’s how I know the rest of the  biathlon—"

I know you need me. Delete.

"I don't know a Lena, what kind of name is that anyway?" Ilya said, not listening.

“You’d like her. She has these big brown eyes. A little feral.”

Aw, are you still throwing tantrum?

He stared at it. Deleted it. Outside, the road tightened, the mountains shouldering in closer on the left, the sea opening wider on the right.

“Ilyashu.”

“Da.”

How many times have you thought about me? Delete.

"You've gone somewhere, what are you doing on your phone?"

How many times have you thought about me holding you down?

“I’m not on my phone, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His eyes dashed across the screen, his jaw tightened.

"Are you texting your Jane?" Her voice had shifted, not sharp, just quieter, the teasing edge sanded down to something more like attention. He knew that tone. Svetlana had approximately four voices: performing, laughing, furious, and this one. This one meant she was actually looking at him, even from eight hundred kilometers away.

His thumb went still on the screen. Kotenok, where are you? Half-formed, already dead.

"What Jane? I don’t know Jane. You keep bringing up these random women. I don’t know any of them. Maybe I have fucked a Jane once, who cares?" he said.

"Don't," she said pleasantly. "You have a Jane. You've had a Jane for—I don't know, two years? More? You think I don’t notice when you huff and puff like this, when you don’t get your way, versus when you do— anyway. Is she in Sochi?"

“Sveta, stop with your conspir–” 

"You're such a bad liar." Fond. Exasperated. Filled with the affection of someone who has decided to find his lying more amusing than exhausting, at least today. "I'm not even upset, I just want to know. What's her name? What does she play? Is she Russian? I doubt that, because you were texting her in Boston too—"

"She's not—" he stopped himself. Jaw shut. "Who even cares about Jane."

Who even cares about Jane. 

Silence on her end. Then: "Okay."

The taxi rounded a bend, and the Olympic complex came into view, a cluster of shining blocks on the hillside, flags whipping stiff in the coastal wind. Russia's was enormous, naturally. He stared at it.

Are you ready to go home with bronze?

He hit send before he could think about it. It was safe territory. The one language that had never cost him anything, that could carry want and rage and the desperate howl of missing someone (he didn’t miss him) and make it look like competitive trash. He watched the blue ticks appear immediately. Read. No reply.

"I'm going to find out who she is eventually," Svetlana said conversationally.

“Yes, maybe. But first, you are going to find out how Russia wins gold, and how I managed to use up all the condoms in the Olympic village,” Ilya scoffed, running his tongue along his bottom teeth. On read, really? “That’s what you’re going to find out.”

"Very smooth, very deflecting. Are you—"

“Svetlana.” His voice came out sharper than he intended. The no-reply sat on the screen like a crack. He locked the phone and shoved it back in his pocket and stared out the window at the flags snapping in the wind, the palm trees leaning, the sea. "I have to go. Taxi is arriving."

He could feel her recalibrating on the other end, she'd noticed the snap and was deciding whether to call him on it or let it go. She let it go. Because, although she was Svetlana, he was her favourite, so she was occasionally merciful.

"Fine, fine. Call me tonight. Don't let Papa's people put you next to the hockey federation guy at the gala; he breathes through his mouth."

"Yes, yes, get out," he said, and ended the call.

The taxi slowed at the checkpoint. A volunteer in a too-large puffer jacket bent to the window, checked his credentials, waved them through. Ilya picked up his bag. He did not pick up his phone. He stared out at the complex, the flags, the mountains going white in the distance.

No reply.

No reply, but an instant read, because Shane was stupid and very bad at pretending not to care. So Shane wasn’t fine, whatever, he was fine. He was twenty-two years old, and he was captain, and Russia was watching, and the gold was fourteen days away, and he was completely absolutely fine.

He got out of the car.

The team lounge was in the basement of the Russian block, a long, aggressively lit room that smelled of new carpet glue and whatever meat the cafeteria had boiled for lunch. It was supposed to be a place for cohesion, a sanctuary; instead, it felt like a waiting room for strangers.

Ilya walked in, his heavy winter coat swapped for the federation track jacket, the 'C' stitched thick over his heart. 

There were twenty-four men in the room, and none of them were looking at each other. The KHL guys were clustered by the televisions, talking in low, rapid bursts. The NHL guys were scattered on the couches, mostly looking at their phones. A few of the younger kids, the ones who had barely scraped the roster, were hovering near the snack table, trying to take up as little space as possible.

In Boston, a room like this would have a center of gravity. Ilya would walk in, and the room would instantly tilt toward him. He would chirp, slap a shoulder, read the temperature of the room in three seconds flat, and dial it exactly where it needed to be. He was a fucking anchor. He commanded the weather. 

But when he walked in, the room didn’t even ripple. 

He moved toward the large circular table in the center of the room. He didn’t hesitate. He pulled out the middle chair—the one facing the door, the one that meant attention—and dropped into it. The scrape of the metal legs against the tile was loud.

A few heads turned. Most didn’t.

"Alright," Ilya said. His voice was pitched perfectly. Not a yell, but heavy enough to carry. "Everyone. Over here."

It wasn't instant. In Boston, it would have been instant. There was a drag of three, four, five seconds while the KHL guys finished their sentence, while the NHL guys locked their phones and slid them into their pockets with deliberate slowness. The younger guys moved first, practically sprinting to the table, which only made the older guys look even slower by comparison.

Eventually, they gathered. Some sat. Some leaned against the walls. The air in the room was fractured, sharp with fifty different anxieties, egos, and jet lags grinding against each other.

And then there was Vadim.

Vadim Vadilevich was thirty-four years old. He had been the starting goaltender for the national team since Ilya was a teenager. He was built like a brick wall and had the emotional affect of one, too. He had played in two Olympics before this. 

Vadim didn't come to the table. He stayed seated on the leather couch, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, idly picking at a loose thread on his federation sweatpants.

Ilya watched him for a second. The silence in the room stretched, thin and brittle.

Don't snap, Ilya told himself, his jaw locking. Don't show them you care.

“I heard the ice is soft, like skating on wet napkin,” one of the KHL guys said, interrupting the silence.

“They said that yesterday.”

“So they’ll fix it before the second game.”

A few people laughed, and Ilya scoffed and cleared his throat. 

"First practice is at four," Ilya started, looking around the table, projecting the easy, unshakable authority he was supposed to have. “And yes, the ice is soft like a wet napkin in the corners at the Bolshoy, so we need to—"

"Coach said four-thirty," a voice interrupted. Ilya stopped, and he looked over. It was Vadim.

The goalie hadn't looked up. He was still picking at his sweatpants, his voice casual. Bored. The kind of tone you use to correct a waiter who brought you the wrong drink.

"Schedule says four," Ilya said, keeping his voice dangerously level.

“Coach told me four-thirty," Vadim repeated, finally flicking his eyes up. They were dark, flat, entirely unbothered. "Maybe they didn't copy you on the email, Rozanov."

Rozanov. Not captain. Just the surname, tossed across the room like a scrap of trash. The room went entirely still. The younger guys stared at the table. The older guys watched Vadim, then watched Ilya, waiting to see how the kid with the 'C' would handle the veteran.

It wasn't an open challenge. If Vadim had yelled, Ilya could have yelled back. If Vadim had insulted him, Ilya could have crushed him. But this? This was like a thousand tiny cuts. It was Vadim letting the entire room know that the 'C' was a political stunt, that Ilya was a kid playing dress-up, and that the real authority in the room hadn't shifted an inch. 

The heat rushed to Ilya’s face, a sudden, violent spike of adrenaline. He wanted to stand up. He wanted to cross the room, grab Vadim by the collar of his stupid track jacket, and slam him against the drywall until his teeth rattled. He wanted to make him bleed. He wanted to dig into his brain and find the respect inside. He wanted to pull his dick out and piss all over Vadim’s bloated corpse.

He needs to be fucked, you need to stick your dick in his mouth and fuck it, a dark, familiar voice whispered in his head, entirely unbidden, the wires crossing violently. He would respect you then, would also knock him out. Real good. 

Ilya swallowed hard, his throat dry as chalk. His hand, resting on the table, twitched. He curled it into a fist, pressing the knuckles hard into the laminate to hide the tremor.

"Four," Ilya said, his voice dropping into a register that was quiet, cold, and entirely dead. "We are on the ice at four. If you want to stretch by yourself for thirty minutes, Vadilevich, you can do it in the hallway."

Vadim stared at him for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he let out a short, breathy chuckle. "Sure," Vadim said, looking back down at his sweatpants. "Whatever you say."

Ilya’s stomach turned over. He looked around the table. The fractured room had not coalesced. They weren't looking at him with respect or fear or even anger. It was like he was nothing, like he was just another piece of old furniture in the room. Like he was being ignored.

No reply, but an instant read.

He was twenty-two. He was the captain of the Russian Olympic team. And he had absolutely nothing under his control.

The Latvian bench exploded. Players crushed together in hugs, sticks banged against the glass, their captain hoisted the goalie onto his shoulders like a conquering hero. On the Russian side, there was only silence. Vadim ripped off his mask, his face flushed red, eyes flat and empty. No one looked at Ilya.

Latvia.

Latvia.

The word kept arriving and kept not making sense, like a number that wouldn't divide cleanly no matter how many times he ran it. Latvia. He turned it over. He turned it over again. The ice was a white scream under the arena lights, the final buzzer a guillotine blade severing Russia's throat.  The puck had slithered past Vadim's glove like wet soap, a nothing shot from the slot, the kind Ilya would have blocked blindfolded in Boston. The kind that wouldn't have happened if the passes had connected, if the team had been a team. Latvia. Ilya repeated it until it was just air moving through his teeth, just nothing. 

Ilya skated off last, his legs burning concrete-heavy, the rubber mats of the tunnel sucking at his skates like tar. The corridor stretched infinitely— fluorescents buzzing viciously overhead.  Ilya was walking through it, and his skates were still on, and the sound of the crowd above was a pressure rather than a noise now, a low structural hum that he could feel in his back teeth and his sternum and the base of his skull. 

The walls were scuffed grey-blue, lockers lining one side like silent witnesses. His breath came in short, ragged pulls, fogging his visor until he could barely see. Sweat trickled cold down his spine, pads chafing raw at his shoulders and groin, but he couldn't feel it. The world funneled narrow, edges greying, sounds muffling like he was underwater.

Someone said his name.

He kept walking.

Someone said it again, closer, a hand finding his shoulder, and Ilya looked down at the hand as it appeared on his skin without explanation, curious, briefly, before looking away. The hand dropped. He kept walking.

The locker room door. Not the locker room. He didn't want the locker room, didn't want the faces, didn't want to perform whatever expression was expected of a captain who had just lost to Latvia on home soil in front of the entire watching world, in front of Vetrov, in front of his father somewhere in that building, in front of Russia, great beautiful Russia, so proud, so watching, so utterly and completely—

Players Only - Bathrooms. The steel door loomed ahead. The handle was ice-cold under his glove. He shoved it open, hinges groaning low and heavy. 

The air inside hit him—sharp bleach undercut with old urine and rubber.

He lurched to the right. His skates on the tile were enormously loud, each step a flat metallic crack that came back at him from the walls. The stall doors blurred past, and he took the farthest one, number 7, paint chipped at knee height. He shouldered the door open. It banged against the frame, and he turned the lock.

The lock clicked, and something in his chest clicked with it, some last tether pulling free, and Ilya put his back against the cold metal door and let himself slide down it until he hit the floor.

The tile was freezing through his uniform. He could feel it through his pads, through the layers, this deep cold coming up through the floor and into his tailbone, and he focused on it, tried to stay inside it, tried to let it be the only thing. The fluorescent light buzzed. Someone had written something on the inside of the stall door in black marker, but he couldn't make out what. The letters kept sliding sideways when he tried to read them.

Latvia. Ha! Latvia. The puck had gone in, and the sound had been—

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. Static bloomed, red and orange and violent behind his eyelids, the pressure almost good, almost enough. His breathing was wrong. He could hear it from a distance, too fast, too shallow, the sound of a man running in place, going nowhere, burning everything.

Grigori was in that building. Somewhere above him right now, in the stands or in some federation box with good seats, and had been watching, watching, watching, watching.

Ilya's jaw locked. He dragged his glove across the visor, smearing streaks in the fog. He ripped it off, tossing it aside next to the stained porcelain. 

Shane was sixty-two days gone.

The thought arrived without him inviting it, the way it always arrived, sideways, through a door he kept thinking he'd locked. Sixty-two days since the condo, since the stairs, since Shane had sat with his hood up and said this can never happen again, like he was already doing the math. Sixty-two days of nothing. The thread sitting open and read, and the last thing in it his own message— Are you ready to go home with bronze— sitting there unanswered for a week now, a chirp thrown into a void, bouncing back at him off the walls of the absence.

No reply, but an instant read. 

His phone was in his hand. He didn't remember going to get it. He looked at it the way he'd looked at the hand on his shoulder— briefly, from a distance. His thumb was already moving, already navigating somewhere, the muscle memory of sixty-two days of opening and closing the same thread without sending anything, except his thumb wasn't stopping this time. It was going somewhere else. His photos. The hidden album. The folder he had never named, had never needed to name.

He watched himself open it.

The first one Shane had sent himself, not from Ilya asking, not from Ilya pushing. Shane, alone in his bathroom at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, arranging his own phone against the cabinet and getting on his knees and taking it for him. Face tipped up toward the lens, mouth soft and open, eyes wet at the corners. Cracked open and present in a way Ilya had never once managed to get from him in public, in daylight, in any room with another person in it. Delete that, Shane had said, immediately, the message arriving before Ilya had even finished looking. Already gone, Ilya had said.

Sent.

The white sheets one. Montreal, Shane's own bed, the lamp throwing everything gold. His hand wrapped around himself, grip tight enough to show knuckle, his cock flushed and leaking against his stomach, his face carefully out of frame because Shane had thought that made it safe, had thought that not showing his face meant it wasn't really him, wasn't really this, wasn't really something that could be used. 

Sent.

A video. Forty-three seconds of Shane from the nose down, freckles, soft mouth, the working of his jaw, fucking his own throat with the purple dildo, the sound of his breathing filling the whole forty-three seconds, and at 0:31 that small, helpless noise from the back of his throat that Shane definitely hadn't meant to make and definitely hadn't meant to send and had immediately followed with okay you need to delete that one RIGHT NOW in all caps, which Ilya had found very funny.

Sent.

The bathroom at the condo. Shane on his knees, the timer on his phone screen counting down behind him, his face a mess of concentration and want and that color, that crawling flush that started somewhere below his collarbone and climbed all the way to the tips of his ears, and he'd been so focused on beating the clock that he left it in the chat long enough for Ilya to download it. 

Sent.

Sent, sent, sent, sent. Fifteen files. The gallery scrolled endlessly: the October phone sex audio with Shane's unmistakable gasp, the one mid-arch, eyes rolled back. 

The last one.

Ilya's thumb stopped.

He'd taken this one himself. One-handed, in the dark. Shane face-down on the bed with his wrists locked behind his back, the cuffs catching what little light came through from the hall, his face turned sideways into the sheets with his lips parted, and his cheek flushed and his eyes already somewhere soft and distant and gone. The long pale line of his spine. The back of his neck, exposed, defenceless, the fine dark hair curling slightly at the nape with the heat of the room. Shane had heard the shutter; his displeasure was muffled into the mattress, that soft wrecked sound, and Ilya had pressed his mouth to the back of his neck and said tikhо, kotenok, and Shane had gone still and melted and had probably, afterward, decided it was deleted. Had needed it to be deleted. Had built something on the assumption that it was deleted.

Ilya looked at it. The fluorescent light buzzed, the tile bit cold through his uniform. He sent it. He put the phone face down on his thigh.

The silence in the stall was absolute. He could hear his own breathing, still too fast, still wrong, but slowing now, incrementally, the way a spinning top slowed— not stopping, just finding a new, lower register of chaos. He stared at the marker writing on the stall door, the letters still sliding but slower now.

His phone buzzed. Once. Twice. Then a longer vibration — a call, two rings, cutting off. Shane picking up the phone and putting it back down. Shane's brain doing that thing it did, that frantic, looping recalculation, running the numbers, finding no safe exit.

Then the screen lit up against his thigh.

He sat on the floor of a Sochi bathroom stall with his skates still on and Latvia still fresh and his father still somewhere in the building, and he read Shane Hollander's message and felt something in his chest go very, very quiet. It wasn’t better; he wasn’t fixed, not even close to either of those things. It was like a small light at the end of his tunnel, like a signal cutting through static. His hand fumbled and found a wall in the dark.

A laugh hacked out of him—short and jagged, bouncing off the porcelain. His helmet clattered to the tile. The pads thudded as his knees folded, curling chest-to-knees in the filth. His forehead pressed to the cold tile. The world narrowed to his pulse, his phone on the floor, and Shane.

He could work with what the fuck is wrong with you.

He could work with anything, as long as Shane was there to give it. 

The treadmill had been at maximum incline for forty minutes.

Ilya knew this because the display said so, the red numbers ticking upward in the corner of the screen, and because his quads were on fire in that clean way that meant he had gone past the point of comfort and through it and out the other side into something that felt almost religious. His lungs were burning. His shins were still bruised from the ice– no. From the check– From the– 

He ran faster. 

The gym was empty at this hour. 3 AM, 5 AM, whatever the clock said when his eyes opened, and the ceiling of his room became unbearable. He had lived here since his loss to Latvia. He had slept for 30 minutes, but it felt less like sleep and more like his body staging a brief, ungrateful revolt before he dragged it back upright. He had not gone out, he had not called Svetlana back. He had not found a girl or a boy or a line that would have taken the edge off for forty minutes before depositing him back exactly where he started, emptier and colder and further from himself than before.

He used to do that. After a bad loss, after a bad game, after one of Grigori's phone calls that left him feeling like something scraped off the bottom of a boot— he would find the nearest exit from his own skull and take it. Fast. Efficient. No pride in the method, just the result: thirty minutes of not being Ilya Rozanov, of being nobody, of the noise going flat and the weight lifting and merciful blankness in his mind. 

He hadn't done that this time.

He ran harder, the belt screaming under his feet, the incline tilting the world forward until his body was at an angle that felt like argument, like insistence, like I am still here, I am still here, I am still— His phone was in his left hand.

He had been holding it for forty minutes. His grip had gone white at the knuckles somewhere around the thirty-minute mark, and he hadn't loosened it. The screen kept lighting up. He kept reading.

The ellipsis had appeared and disappeared four times on that last one before Shane had apparently decided he didn't know how to finish the sentence. Because there was nothing to finish it with. Because they both knew there was nothing Shane could do, no lever he could pull, no threat he could make that had any teeth, and Shane knew that Ilya knew that, and the knowledge of it was eating him alive somewhere in whatever room he was sitting in right now, Canada's golden boy with his phone in both hands and his Olympics still pending and his whole carefully constructed life sitting one leaked photo away from a very different kind of headline.

Ilya read it again.

Then the silence. Two hours and fourteen minutes of it, the thread going dark, Shane presumably putting the phone face-down and staring at the ceiling and trying to talk himself back from the edge. Ilya had watched the silence in real time, running, the absence of the ellipsis somehow louder than the messages had been.

And then:

A wall of text. Ilya had read it six times now, maybe seven, the words blurring slightly at the edges from the sweat dripping off his forehead onto the screen, and every time he read it he found something new in it, some new layer of Shane Hollander trying to be reasonable, trying to be measured, trying to appeal to the part of Ilya that was rational.

Ilya's pace didn't change. His face didn't change. He read it.

The incline ticked up another degree. Ilya hadn't touched the controls.

Pls just pick upmpls

Ilya read it an eighth time.

The burning in his legs had gone somewhere else, somewhere deeper, had become less pain and more a vibration that ran from the soles of his feet up through his spine and into the base of his skull. His breathing had found a rhythm that had nothing to do with the treadmill pace and everything to do with the clean clarity that arrived sometimes in the middle of a very hard skate, when the body had burned through every available complaint and what was left was just motion. Just forward. Just the next stride and the one after that.

He thought about the bathroom floor in Sochi. The tile cold through his uniform, the fluorescent buzz, the letters sliding on the stall door. He thought about Chesnokov's flat eyes, saying Rozanov like it was a weather report. He thought about the pale rectangle on his father's wall, the nail hole filled with wrong-colored putty, and Grigori in his armchair saying gold with no inflection, no warmth, as if Ilya's body and talent were a resource to be managed and a ledger to be settled and nothing more, had never been more, would never—

He ran.

He ran because his mother– No, he ran because he had spent the next ten years learning to be hard enough to survive in the space she'd vacated, and his father had looked at that hardness and seen something useful and started grinding it into a shape that fit the holes in Grigori's own life, and Russia had taken that shape and put a 'C' on it and pointed it at a scoreboard and said perform.

And he had performed. He had been performing for years, in rinks and locker rooms and federation banquet halls and his father's living room, had been performing Ilya Rozanov— loud, magnetic, unassailable, the best in every room— had been performing it so long and so completely that sometimes he couldn't find the seam between the performance and the person underneath. But Shane found it.

The treadmill screamed under his feet.

Ilya ran.

He ran up the mountain that Grigori had been trying to push him down since he was old enough to disappoint him. He ran out of the bathroom floor, out of the stall, out of the tunnel, out of Latvia. He ran through the grinding machinery of Russia's expectations and Vetrov's eyes and Chesnokov's flat, dismissive Rozanov like a man plowing through a wall he'd been told was load-bearing and finding out it was plaster. He ran because his legs remembered how to do this even when the rest of him forgot. He ran because Shane had texted back.

He was going to win the Cup.

He was going to win it, and he was going to do it for Boston, not Russia, with his team, in front of every camera pointed at him, and it was going to have nothing to do with Latvia or Grigori or Vetrov or the ghost of– He was going to win it because he was Ilya Rozanov and he was twenty-two years old and he had never once in his life met a locked door he couldn't open.

His reflection materialized in the dark glass of the gym window.

He looked terrible. Soaked through, chest heaving, hair plastered flat, the purple bruising still faint on his shins from the— from the check. He was smiling despite that.

Not a performance smile, not the one he gave cameras and reporters and pretty girls at galas. Something else. Something that had come up from somewhere without his permission, wide and a little unhinged and entirely genuine, shaking at the corners. He looked at it for a long moment.

Then he looked back down at his phone, at Shane's essay still glowing on the screen, at please just pick up sitting there, patient, sweet, and desperate. 

He kept running.

The upper tier was a shadowed aerie, one of those dead zones that existed in every large venue, the section too high and too peripheral to be worth filling, left dark and echoing while the actual crowd clustered below around the light and the ice. 

The arena bowl plunged dark below him, where figure skaters carved silk arcs under spotlights that bled gold onto the ice. The distant roar of the crowd hummed up through the concrete under his boots. 

His phone buzzed in his thigh pocket. He looked at it. 

Alexei: Where the hell are you? Dad is furious.

Ilya read it, his thumb hovered over delete, then he pocketed it. Below, a figure in blue was building into a combination spin, the rotation accelerating until the shape of the person dissolved into pure motion. The crowd noise swelled and faded. He leaned his elbows on the railing and fixed his gaze rinkward. 

"Rozanov. Hey."

He knew the voice before the first word was finished. He had been reading that voice off a screen for sixty-two days, and he would have known it in a burning building, in a blizzard, at the bottom of the ocean. He probably recognised the footsteps scraping against the aisle concrete, too.

Ilya glanced, and Shane stood there in a fuzzy Canadian team teddy, his hands jammed into his pockets. Ilya looked back to the ice. "Not here."

Shane shifted; his sneakers squeaked on the metal bleacher strip. "No, I'm not— Ilya." Exasperation cracked the word. Shane swallowed as if fighting off nausea; his Adam’s apple bobbed sharply along his neck. His pupils were blown wide in the low light,  concern flickered desperately underneath them. “I saw you up here. I wanted to see how you're doing."

Yes, surely, this had nothing to do with the photos; it was just concern. Right. Ilya said nothing. His hands were loose on the railing. Below, the skater landed something clean, and the crowd responded, a warm swell of sound that rose and dissipated. He stole another glance. Shane's brows were knitted in a deep furrow, his mouth twisted down like he had swallowed acid. Good, deserved. 

"Fine," Ilya said, his voice came out arctic and flat. "Go sit down."

Another pause. Longer. Shane was processing, deciding, running whatever math he was running. Ilya could feel him standing there, six feet back, close enough that his presence was registering in Ilya's peripheral nervous system, whether he wanted it to or not. 

Shane, who had written him an essay at five in the morning with his fingers shaking so badly that the autocorrect had given up. Shane, standing six feet away, being oh so diplomatic. Bless. 

Shane faltered; his step forward aborted halfway. His eyes darted from railing to ice to audience to sea of empty seats. The dark brown in his eyes fractured desperately till their irises were ringed with black. His straight lashes were clumped with sweat, maybe unshed tears. His cheeks flushed unevenly, freckles stood stark against the pallor."I wanted to know if we are ok—"

"We are not anything." He paused, let the pressurized air fill between the words. "Go away, Hollander."

Shane’s gaze dropped to the floor, then out onto the eyes, then back at Ilya, as if he were pleading with him, the ice and the rest of the world too. So it was tears, they prickled in the corners of his eyes now. Frustration carved lines around his mouth. He was beautiful. Ilya’s pulse steadied on it.

 “Are you okay?” Shane bit out sharply. 

"Please," Ilya said. "Go."

"You didn't answer my texts. Not the—the other ones don't matter, but the long one."

"No. I did not answer your boring text. Now will you go.” 

Shane’s brows dipped in a deep furrow; he stepped forward; six feet of electric space separated them now. It felt like the whole stadium went silent, amplifying it. The cameras lurked below, but Shane’s eyes locked on Ilya’s anyway. "Please, I just want to—"

"Go." A pause. "Hollander."

Each word was its own sentence. Each word was placed deliberately, to press against Shane’s anxiety like a bruise. 

Shane scoffed, his voice broken raw. He shook his head. "Fine. Fuck."

The room announced itself before Ilya fully entered it.

High ceilings, heavy drapes pooling on the parquet, furniture that had been expensive in another century and had spent the intervening decades making sure you knew it. The wallpaper was dark burgundy, a repeating pattern that seemed to absorb the chandelier light rather than reflect it, turning the whole room yellow and close. 

Grigori was standing at the dresser in full dress uniform.

The medals sat in their arranged rows across his chest, each one catching the light at a slightly different angle, a curated argument pinned to fabric. His father had always been a compact man, shorter than Ilya by several centimetres, broad through the chest, built low to the ground like something that didn't need height to be immovable — and the uniform compressed him further. He met Ilya's reflection in the mirror and looked at him for a long, flat moment before turning.

"You need a haircut," his father said.

Ilya's jaw tightened as he crossed the room to meet him. "Yes, sir."

Grigori turned to the decanter on the side table, unhurried, and poured two glasses; the amber liquid caught the chandelier light. He held one out without looking. "The minister still wants to meet you tonight," Grigori said. "Despite everything."

Ilya took the glass; he needed it, and frankly, the liquor was good, smooth, expensive. "It will be my honour."

It would not be his honour.

His father scoffed — not a laugh, something shorter and colder, expelled through the nose. He looked at Ilya over the rim of his own glass with that expression he had been decoding since childhood, the one that meant the assessment was already complete, and the verdict was already in. What followed was simply his sentencing.

"You should be honoured," his father said. "After yesterday. You lose to—" The word stopped. His eyes moved slightly left, sliding off the present moment toward something that wasn't in the room with them. A small crease appeared between his brows. He looked to the side, his glass held still halfway to his mouth, his sentence hanging open.

The silence stretched four seconds. Five.

"Latvia," Ilya said, looking down at his drink.

His father's eyes snapped back. He looked at Ilya as if he had been interrupted mid-thought, and not saved. "And yet he drinks." His voice had energy in it now, a high, tight pressing quality that stopped just short of raised and was worse for the restraint, his head moving in that small forward-back motion that had been appearing more frequently in the last year. "How could you let this happen. How are you not ashamed?"

Ilya met his father's gaze. "I am ashamed, Papa."

"Not nearly enough. They teach you no discipline in the American League. Your play is sloppy." He paused, letting the word sit. "The real shame is squandering the promise you showed when you were young."

Something flickered behind Ilya's brow. He shook his head, a small fractional motion, and tilted it slightly to the side. "I am a better player now than I have ever been." Factual. A thing he was prepared to stand behind. "Our goalie was struggling. The team didn't click."

"Click." His father's chin lifted. "What is this American nonsense, what is clicking." One thick finger pressed to the center of Ilya's chest. "You are the captain. You make them click." The finger dropped. His father's eyes moved down, finding something wrong, and landed on the bow tie. "Always looking for someone to blame." A beat. "Since you were a boy."

He stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and Ilya went still. Not stepped back, still. He wanted to, but his body had learned young that movement read as flinching and flinching read as weakness and weakness was the one thing in this room he could not afford. Ilya took the glass from him before it fell, and Grigori’s thick fingers found the bow tie to work at. 

Ilya looked at his father's eyes.

Up close, this close, with the chandelier throwing everything gold and the room pressing in warm and close around them, there was something in them he had been watching accumulate for months. A lag. A slight imprecision in the focus, a quality of the gaze that moved a half-second behind the moment. It came and went. His father would not acknowledge it. Alexei would not acknowledge it. Polina, in Moscow, was presumably humming something tuneless in a kitchen and not acknowledging it either.

"Who tied this for you?" Grigori muttered, his fingers still moving against the silk, pulling the knot apart and rebuilding it with small, precise tugs. "Your mama. She doesn’t know how to do this properly."

"No, father." He kept his voice even, kept his eyes on his father's face. He nodded once, barely. "Mama is dead. Do you remember this."

His father's hands went still against the bow tie. Just for a moment— a single held breath of stillness— and then continued.

"I meant your stepmother," Grigori said, his brow lifting slightly, the confusion smoothing itself over with the reflexive dignity of a man who had spent a lifetime refusing to be caught wrong-footed. 

"Where is Polina Papa. Moscow?"

“Yes, of course.” His father's fingers gave the bow tie a final precise tug and then withdrew, and he stepped back to assess his completed work. 

Ilya looked at his father's face. At the slight residue of confusion still sitting in the eyes, not yet cleared, not quite back. He thought about Alexei's text arriving while he watched the skating, furious, it had said, dad is furious— and thought about Alexei in Moscow deciding what his father's decline was worth in practical terms, thought about Polina's pleasant face and her ceramic cow on the windowsill, thought about the rectangle on the hallway wall where four people had once stood close enough together to look like a family.

Nobody was going to say it. Nobody was going to say any of it. The room would stay close and the medals would keep catching the light and they would go to the gala and meet the minister and perform the required performances and come back and go to sleep and wake up and do it again, and the rot moving through his father's mind would keep moving, quiet and steady and unacknowledged, until it couldn't be anymore.

Ilya exhaled, almost softly.

"We should go," he said. “To the gala."

His father blinked. Came back to the surface of the room. "Yes."

 "So that I can meet the minister."

The gala hall was a cathedral of excess,  crystal, and marble where the air shimmered with unrestrained wealth. The central chandelier commanded the ceiling, a magnificent cascade of faceted prisms that fractured the light into a thousand dancing shards. Those shards reflected endlessly across polished floors veined with gold, across the delicate rims of crystal flutes brimming with vodka, across the tailored shoulders of dignitaries and the exposed collarbones of women in gowns worth fortunes.

Sergei Vetrov stood at Ilya's left flank. Grigori occupied the right. Together they formed a perfect vise around him, positioning him squarely beneath the chandelier's unrelenting blaze. Ilya had been staring at the shadow it reflected on the wall for four minutes or possibly forty, time having lost its normal properties somewhere around the point where Vetrov had begun his third analysis of the Latvian defensive structure. 

"It always comes down to goaltending," Vetrov said, swirling his glass. "And Vadilevich, well—" he lifted a brow. 

Grigori inclined his head in solemn agreement. His eyes remained as flat and unyielding as weathered concrete. "Not sharp enough. But that is only part of the equation."

"And Kitchov stays home to rest for his American prizes," Sergei continued. He swirled the clear liquid idly in his glass. He watched it coat the sides before settling once more.

Ilya stood utterly still between them, a statue hewn from pale granite. He nodded at measured intervals, the motion mechanical and devoid of inflection. Their words flowed over him like rain across an indifferent pane of glass. Present, maybe, yet utterly impenetrable, present, yes, but invisible. He was not truly listening. He was not truly there. 

One more second. He drew breath in. He released it. One more minute. He tallied the moments in silence, a private countdown to the moment he could extricate himself from this gilded inferno and return to Boston's relative sanctuary. 

He counted because if he stopped counting, he would kill them both. He would clamp his hands around Vetrov's throat right here between the champagne flutes and the chandelier light, thumbs finding the soft give of the cartilage, pressing until he silenced the mouth that had been dissecting his failure. Until his dark eyes bulged out of his skull, his face going the shade of the burgundy wallpaper upstairs. Until urine pooled, warm and spreading across the marble. 

His father made a sound of agreement. His father, in his medals. Would they cling to his jacket, Ilya wondered, when he dashed his skull against the vein in the floor. Would the pins pull free from the fabric as the crack resonated through the hall, sharp and final, blood blooming in a symmetrical dark pool beneath the chandelier’s blaze? 

"Terrible, yes. Terrible. But there was no leadership.” His father turned. 

He nodded once.

The turn landed on Ilya's skin like a change in air pressure. The full redirected weight of Grigori Rozanov's attention, finding its target. "That is always the problem—" the pause, the word dropping through the gilded air like a stone finding the bottom of something, "—leadership."

Terrible, yes, it was terrible, and it was Ilya’s fault, all of it; it was always his fault. Maybe he would choke Grigori instead, until his legs thrashed in feeble, undignified spasms, until the medals Ilya had spent his entire childhood being measured against scattered across the marble in the spreading warmth of his father's final humiliation.

He nodded twice. 

"Ilya." Vetrov's voice, pivoting toward him, expectant. "Too much confidence, maybe? Or too much pressure?"

Latvia had split him open. The rage lived raw in the wound, dressed now in silk and cufflinks and the bow tie his father had straightened with those same thick hands, a blade wearing the costume of a man. One more second. 

Ilya let his mind totally evacuate the premise, seek refuge elsewhere. Like a flare burning, sudden and total, there was darkness before it made the light more violent. Shane’s essay materialized, the desperate words he typed with trembling fingers, please pick up. Shane in the upper tier of the skating palace, his lashes clumped, his freckles standing stark, the fracture in his voice when the diplomacy finally gave way. 

Shane was standing here now, against the marble pillar six feet to his left, and Ilya could feel the heat of him through the dress shirt. Ilya was taking him apart here, in front of everyone. His hand secured Shane’s wrists overhead, fingers digging crescents into the pale flesh. The other hand fisted his dark hair, yanking at it with scalp-searing force. Shane gasped a fractured plea, "Ilya—fuck— please, no, not in front of everyone, please don’t force me to–" His hips bucked frantically against the pressure of Ilya's thigh between his. His pretty cock wept, leaking damp through the fabric of his expensive pants. “No, please, please stop, please don’t, Ilya—”

"Too much talking, Mr. Minister, probably." 

Ilya blinked hard. Svetlana had materialized at her father's elbow in a black dress with a halter neck of thin gold chains that caught the light with every breath, her red curls swept up with effortless precision. Shame pooled hot in Ilya’s gut. 

She had a fresh glass lifted from a passing tray before she had fully stopped moving, her other hand still closed around Ilya's fingers, and she looked at her father with the fond, faintly exhausted expression. Like she loved him, but also found him professionally trying. 

Vetrov's whole bearing softened. "But you love talking about hockey, my angel."

"Only when we're winning, Papa." She leaned briefly against his arm, a daughter's gesture, and then straightened and looked at Ilya. Her eyes moved across his face with a swift, comprehensive assessment. Whatever she found there, she did not comment on. "I'm taking him to the bar. He clearly needs another drink."

Oh, his sweetheart. His dearest love. Svetlana, who had been pulling him out of rooms like this since they were nine years old. Svetlana, who knew the dark, wanting, needing part of him. Who understood him, but not quite like Shane. A different kind of angel. A different kind of love, quieter and older and without the terror that came with the other kind.

She squeezed his hand once.

He let her lead him away.

Their footsteps crossed the marble together, her heels clicking clean and even, his falling quiet beside them. The gala noise receded behind them, the murmur of important people being important at each other softening as they moved toward the double staircase, the hall spreading out below in all its chandelier light and good suits and careful performances.

"Thank you," Ilya said. His voice came out low, scraped a little at the edges.

"I'm an angel," Svetlana said, without looking at him. "It would be wonderful if you could remember that the next time I call you and you send me to voicemail."

He exhaled. Long. The last of the tension leaving his chest in a slow, controlled release. "I want a drink."

"Mm." She glanced at him sideways, her mouth curving into something that knew more than it was saying. "I have something more fun in mind."

They reached the bottom of the staircase. Above them, gala continued its gilded machinery, unbothered, unaware.

Svetlana pushed open a set of heavy double doors, and the bathroom was enormous— marble floors, gold fixtures, a freestanding bath in the center. The chandelier in here was smaller but no less serious about itself.

Sasha stood by the sprawling vanity, all long, languid limbs and strong jawline, draped in a half-unbottuned silk shirt patterned with dark roses, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He was taller than Ilya, had always been. He was hunched over the marble countertop, elegantly snorting a line of coke, before he lifted his head and caught Ilya’s reflection in the mirror. Honestly, he was as beautiful as ever.

"Long time no see, Ilya."

He straightened with a fluid, unhurried grace and leaned back against the sink to look at Ilya with a slow, winding smile, the tip of his tongue running once over his bottom lip. People said Ilya smiled like a snake. Those people had obviously never met Sasha. 

Ilya stepped fully into the room, the heavy doors closing behind them, sealing out the gala's hum. He settled against the sink on the opposite wall, arms folding, looking back at him. "Long time, Sasha."

Sasha scoffed softly through his nose—fond, almost and unfolded himself from the sink and flopped into the freestanding bath with boneless ease. His long legs draped over the edge, ankles crossing, his head tipping back against the rim. Svetlana moved to the vanity, claiming a crystal glass and an open bottle of vodka someone had abandoned there. She perched gracefully on the rim of the tub. Sasha obligingly took the bottle from her and poured her a generous measure.

"I don't think you played that badly," Sasha started, his voice a languid drawl.

"I'd say thank you," Ilya replied, his tone flat, "but I know you didn't watch a single fucking game."

Sasha tilted his head, the smile not moving. "For someone whose father has been a hockey coach your whole life," Svetlana cooed, crossing her legs on the tub's edge, "you have managed to avoid it remarkably well."

Sasha tilted his head, letting out a soft laugh as he sank deeper in the tub. "I pay attention sometimes." He glanced at his gold watch, the motion unhurried, almost theatrical. "When there's something worth paying attention to."

Svetlana rolled her eyes, returning to her perch at the edge of the vanity. “Anyways. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.” 

“It doesn’t?” Ilya asked, he hadn’t moved from the sink. “And how did you come to that conclusion. My father—”

“Your father is an asshole who would have punished you either way,” Svetlana interrupted with a heavy sigh. She shrugged her shoulders, the gold chains of her halter shifting against her collarbones. “You need to stop giving a fuck what he thinks. And fuck these stupid national games, you have a real shot at the cup this year.”

“I never said I disagreed with you.”

“Good, sweetie. Listen, Hunter and the Admirals won’t get past New Jersey.”

“And New Jersey won’t get past Hollander and Montreal,” Ilya continued, tipping his head back slightly, his eyes finding the ceiling. In the tub, Sasha leaned over the side and took another bump of powder off a small mirror he'd dragged down with him.

“I think this year you can take Montreal,” Svetlana declared. Smart girl, at least someone was on the same page as him.

“Of course I can, every year, but why this year specifically?” 

"This year, because I think Miitka is hurt." She hummed, taking a slow sip.

“Wow," Sasha cooed from the bath, his voice warm with admiration. "She's psychic." 

"And with a shitty, hurt goalie, you can only go so far," Svetlana said, her smile sharpening. "As you and your team proved rather well here." She laughed into her glass, the sound bright and cruel.

"Touché." Ilya raised his brows, accepting the hit. He reached for the bottle and drank straight from the neck.

"And that's the East," Svetlana continued, waving her free hand. "Then you can take anyone in the West. Chicago ain't what they used to be. It'll probably end up being San Francisco, but they are too young. That's how you end up winning the Cup one year earlier than I bet my father you would."

Ilya looked at her for a moment. He clapped, slowly, three times.

Sasha sat up, lifting a small, celebratory plastic baggie between two fingers and shaking it at Svetlana. She made a face, wrinkling her nose. "No thanks. It's bedtime for me. I have to look perfect tomorrow."

"You always look perfect," Sasha murmured, flashing her another winding smile.

"True." She uncrossed her legs and stood, smoothing her dress in one practiced motion. She walked behind the bath and bent to ruffle Sasha's hair gently, briefly, her fingers dragging through the dark curls before she withdrew and moved toward Ilya. Her heels clicked across the marble. She stopped in front of him and pressed a kiss to his cheek, her lips warm and certain, her perfume catching in the air between them.

"See you in Boston, Ilyashu."

"Bye bye," Ilya said.

She clattered off in her heels, the double doors swinging shut behind her with a soft, definitive click. The bathroom went quiet.

Sasha did not move from the bathtub immediately. He reclined there with his long legs dangling carelessly over the edge, his head tipped back to stare at the ornate ceiling as if waiting for the room itself to rearrange itself to his satisfaction. Then, with the unhurried efficiency of long practice, he sat up, reached over the porcelain rim for his small hand mirror, and snorted another line of powder. The motion was graceful, almost delicate, the powder disappearing in a single fluid inhale.

Ilya leaned against the sink on the opposite wall. He watched in silence, arms crossed loosely, the wine bottle dangling from one hand.

Sasha sniffed once, tipped his head back to let the substance settle, and fixed Ilya with eyes suddenly brightened to feverish clarity. Then he looked away—first to the ceiling, then to his own long hands, then to the gleaming gold fixtures of the vanity. He cleared his throat with a small, affected sound

"So," he said conversationally, addressing the air as much as Ilya. "How's Paris, Sasha?" He tilted his head, answering himself, "Oh, it's great, thanks. I fucking love it there. The clubs are insane." He paused, letting the words hang. "The girls are hot." The pause lengthened, grew loaded with implication. "And the boys." He turned his head then and met Ilya's gaze directly. His smile unfolded slowly and sinuously, winding like smoke. "Well. You've seen French boys, haven't you, Ilya?"

Ilya took a long swig from the bottle. He swallowed without expression; there was no world where he was blessing Sasha with an answer to that.

Sasha watched him for a measured moment, waiting for the response that did not come. Then he laughed, the sound soft and low and edged with genuine amusement. He flopped back against the tub rim with theatrical despair. "God. You don't do coke. You don't make jokes." His hands spread wide in a gesture of mock exasperation. "You don't even flirt back anymore."

Again, nothing. Sasha could embarrass himself if he wanted. Ilya didn’t care, not now, anyway. 

Sasha sighed, theatrical once more, and unfolded his long limbs from the tub with that fluid, boneless grace that had always been his signature. He crossed the cool marble floor in three lazy strides. He stopped close—too close—using his height the way Ilya used his presence, leaning one hand against the counter behind Ilya's shoulder so he had to bend slightly, bringing his face down to Ilya's level.

His dark eyes were warm and amused and very certain of themselves.

"You used to be so fun, Ilya," he murmured, his mouth close to Ilya's ear. His other hand dropped, finding Ilya through the expensive fabric of his trousers, fingers curling with a familiar, unhurried confidence. "Remember?"

He pulled back just enough to hold eye contact. Then he bit Ilya's lower lip—not hard, not soft, just pulling. He held it for one lingering second before releasing. He pressed Ilya back against the sink edge with his body.

"Here? Really?" Ilya's voice came out flat, devoid of inflection.

"Danger used to get you going," Sasha murmured low. "If memory serves."

Ilya leaned forward; their lips nearly brushed. "We're not kids anymore, Sasha."

"No," Sasha agreed, his smile curving. "We're not."

Ilya moved first. 

His hands clamped Sasha's hips with sudden, bruising force. Ilya spun him roughly, until his back was against Ilya's chest and they were both facing the mirror— Sasha's hands catching the counter's edge. It was kind of cute how he hesitated there, unsure what to do with himself. 

Ilya kissed the side of Sasha's neck. His teeth grazed the skin with calculated lightness. "Has anyone," he murmured against the pulse point, the throb quickening under his lips, "ever told you," he pressed his mouth lower, tracing the tendon, "how boring you are, Sasha?" He bit gently, not enough to mark, just enough to sting. "How completely," his lips dragged slowly across the heated skin, "fucking dull."

He lifted his eyes to the mirror. His own reflection stared back at him over Sasha's shoulder. The man in the glass was composed, his bright eyes shadowed beneath his brow, steady and unreadable, his jaw set in a line of controlled power, the faint sheen of gala perspiration catching the light at his temples.

 There was no hunger in that face. No real interest. Just the calm assessment of a surgeon regarding a body that no longer had value to him. Sasha had become scenery, a prop in his frame, his reflection pale and incidental beside the central figure. Ilya saw himself clearly then—not the fractured captain from the stall floor, not the man still running on the treadmill—but he really was, who he was becoming. 

"Look at the bigger picture," he continued, voice even against Sasha's ear. "You're snorting coke in a federation bathroom. You're telling me about French boys." A deliberate pause. His hands remained loose on Sasha's hips, holding without claiming. "It's not 2009 anymore, durachok."

Sasha's reflection flinched, the eyes tightening fractionally, the smile flickering at the edges. "Excuse me?"

“Mm.” Ilya held his own gaze in the mirror. His phone lit up in his pocket. The glow flared against Sasha's hip. He pulled back, Sasha evaporated from consideration, Ilya’s eyes stayed locked on his reflection as he reached into his pocket.

Sasha turned, confusion creasing his brow. "Are you—"

After the essay. After sixty-two days. After the photos sent from a bathroom floor in the dark. After what the fuck is wrong with you, and then the silence, and then this — Shane Hollander, who could not help himself, who would never be able to help himself, sending the most Shane Hollander message it was possible to send.

Hey. Are you doing okay.

Something moved through Ilya's chest, slow and warm and enormous, the feeling of a locked door opening from the inside.

"Okay, fine." Sasha said, behind him, lightly. "I'm going to find a party."

"Okay," Ilya said.

He was already dialing.

Chapter Text

The Montreal streets were doing what they always did in late February, which was to say they were ugly and grey and unrepentant about it. The snowbanks had compacted to ice-grey slush along the curbs. The bare maple trees lining Rue Sherbrooke stood skeletal against an overcast sky the color of old dishwater. Shane ran anyway.

He had been running for forty-two minutes. His calves burned pleasantly. His breath came in controlled clouds that dissipated in the damp air. He knew this route the way he knew his own apartment, instinctively, without consulting it consciously, every crack in the pavement, every dog-walker who appeared at predictable intervals, the smell of the bakery on the corner of Mackay that wafted warm and yeasty even in winter.

Shane kept looking at his phone.

He was holding it in his left hand while he ran, which he never did, which was bad form, which threw off his gait fractionally, and he knew it and kept doing it anyway. The screen was open to the thread. He had sent eleven messages in the six days since Sochi. He had counted them. He was not going to count them again.

He scrolled up. The read receipt sat on his message from four days ago like a thumbtack through the chest — Ilya. seriously. Just let me know you're okay — read, acknowledged, declined. He scrolled further. More delivered. One read from six days ago, the one where he'd asked about the photos again, which Ilya had apparently opened and then set down like a piece of mail that didn't require a response.

Delivered. Delivered. Read. Delivered. Delivered. Read. Delivered. Read. Read. Read. Delivered.

Okay, okay. Cool. Fine

Shane shoved the phone back in his pocket and ran faster.

The thing was, he told himself, breathing out through his nose the way his trainer had taught him, the thing was that he understood what was happening here.

He was not an idiot. He had a silver medal; he was an Olympian; he had the highest points-per-game average in the Eastern Conference, and he had achieved all of it while managing the ongoing chaos of whatever this was. 

He ran faster.

He understood manipulation when he saw it. He was looking directly at the manipulation. Ilya came home with nothing. He had flopped spectacularly on home ice while Shane had stood on a podium and had a medal lowered around his neck, was doing what Ilya Rozanov did when he lost control of a situation: he was reaching for the nearest lever and yanking it.

Shane had come home an olympian, and Ilya had come home with a loss to fucking Latvia, ha, Latvia. 

The mean, private satisfaction of this sat in Shane's chest like a warm coal.

He knew it was childish. He knew it was the kind of satisfaction that, if Hayden could see it, would earn him a pair of raised eyebrows and an expression that he deployed when Shane was being competitive in a way that had gone slightly feral. He knew that taking pleasure in someone else's public humiliation was not the behavior of a well-adjusted adult human being.

He took enormous pleasure in it anyway.

That was all this was. That was all the photos had been. Not a genuine threat—Ilya wasn't stupid enough to actually leak them, wasn't that self-destructive, knew perfectly well that Shane could point a finger in his direction, and Ilya's career would absorb the impact too. It was Ilya, sitting alone somewhere in Sochi with Latvia still raw in his mouth, sending those files the same way a child knocked over a glass, not because it accomplished anything, but because he was a sore fucking loser. 

It is going to feel so good, he thought, turning onto Rue de la Montagne with the slight downhill incline carrying him forward, to beat him this season. To beat him in the playoffs and look him directly in the face when I do it.

He was already thinking about Ilya's face. He was already cataloguing it, the jaw, the cold eyes, the moment that cold slipped just barely when Shane did something that caught him off guard.

Shane pulled out his phone.

He typed it before he had finished deciding to: Hey, are you doing okay? Are we okay? Please call me. Sent.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered, to the empty street, to himself, to nobody.

He shoved the phone deep into his pocket and pushed through the lobby door. The concierge looked up and smiled, the warmth of someone who had been paid to be pleasant, and Shane smiled back with the warmth of someone who had been performing pleasantness for so long it had become neurological. Too wide, because he'd been caught off guard, the smile arriving before he'd calibrated the wattage. It was too late to correct it, so he dipped his head and crossed the lobby. He pressed the elevator button.

His phone buzzed against his thigh.

Lily.

His hand was already in his pocket. Already pulling it out. Already— 

He pressed accept and got the phone to his ear in one motion, which he would have found embarrassing if he'd had the processing capacity to observe himself from the outside, which he did not, because Ilya was calling and his brain had vacated the premises.

"—llo?" he said, stepping into the elevator.

The doors slid shut.The call cut. Shane pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. Zero bars. He blinked.

Oh, he thought. Right. The elevator. Shit. 

The elevator humming around him, the numbers above the door ticking upward with a patience he did not share, and he stood there with his phone useless in his hand and his heart doing something deeply unprofessional against his ribs, and he thought, very clearly: of course. of course.

He pressed the button for his floor. Then he pressed it again. Then once more, with feeling, because he was aware on some level that pressing it multiple times did nothing and could not stop himself.

When the doors opened he was already moving, phone up and calling back before he'd fully cleared the threshold, walking fast down the hall, key out, door open, and he was inside and the call was ringing and he was not taking his shoes off or setting down his keys, just standing in the entry hall of his own apartment still in his running clothes pressing the phone to his ear and—

"What," Ilya said, on the second ring.

The word landed in Shane's chest like something dropping into still water. What, like he'd been sitting somewhere comfortable and had decided to answer on his own timeline and was mildly curious what the occasion was.

"What do you mean, what?" Shane hissed. He was trying to bend down to manage his remaining shoe and keep the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder simultaneously, and it was not going well. "You called me."

"No," Ilya said, and Shane could hear it, the shape of his mouth moving around the smile he wasn't admitting to, "technically you called me."

"You called me first." The lace had somehow tightened on the run into a knot that required actual attention, and Shane's fingers were not giving it actual attention because his attention was entirely elsewhere. He tugged. The knot tightened. He tugged harder.

"Ahh," Ilya said, the syllable long and warm and insufferable. "Well. I only called because you begged so nicely."

The phone slipped from between his ear and shoulder and hit the hardwood floor with a sound that stopped Shane's heart entirely. He grabbed it, and it wasn't cracked, thank God it wasn't cracked, and he swore— loud, the word bouncing off the entry hall wall — and switched to speaker and set it on the entry table because clearly his body could not be trusted with fine motor tasks right now.

"Fucking—" he said to the shoe. Then, to the phone: "Sorry. I dropped it."

"It is sounding like a bad time for you," Ilya said from the table. "You are so distracted. I can hang up."

Shane's hand shot out toward the phone before he'd finished the sentence. "No." He caught himself. Straightened. Picked the phone up and carried it into the living room because standing in the entry hall in his running shoes felt too exposed, too much like he'd run straight here from wherever Ilya's voice lived and arrived breathless at the door. 

He set it on the couch cushion beside him when he sat, leaving a foot of fabric between himself and the speaker, like the distance would do anything, like his nervous system hadn't already closed the gap. "I mean— now is a good time. We need to talk."

"I don't need to do anything," Ilya said. A pause. "And I don't think we have anything to talk about."

Okay. Shane pressed his chin to his knee. Okay, think. He has those photos. He has those videos. He has three years of your worst moments saved to a hidden album on his phone and he is currently on the other end of this call being so unbothered about it and you need to be strategic, you need to be calm, you need to not say anything stupid.

"Photos," Shane said, blinking. 

Wow, beautiful, that was perfect, Shane.

"Photos?" Ilya repeated.

"The fucking—" Shane pressed two fingers to his forehead, hard enough to feel. "Rozanov, don't. The videos, the photos, the ones you sent me. That I explicitly asked you to delete."

"Ahh," Ilya said, drawing it out the way he drew everything out, the way he slowed time down when he wanted to make Shane feel the length of it. "The photos. The ones you sent me. The ones of you jerking off, and fingering yourself, and—"

"Stop." Shane's jaw locked. "Stop acting like that. This is serious." He shifted on the couch, pulling his other knee up. "I don't know what you were trying to gain from sending them back like some kind of power move, but it's not okay to have them on your phone. You could get hacked."

Ilya laughed.

A real one, sudden and genuine, the kind that didn't ask permission, and Shane's eyes went wide before the indignation caught up.

"Fuck, Hollander." Ilya sniffed, the laughter settling. "You are thinking of internet safety now?" A pause. "You were not thinking this when you were begging to cum on my cock."

He was right. They were boring. They were boring because Shane didn't know what he was actually trying to say, because what he wanted to say was I need to know you're not going to destroy me and what he had was a vocabulary built for post-game interviews and drills. How do you even negotiate with someone who held all the cards and knew it and found the situation mildly interesting at best?

Okay. Shane exhaled. Try something else.

"Fine." He pressed his chin to his knee. "Fine. Are we good?"

The silence that followed was its own texture—dense, pressurized, the kind that arrived right before something important or something terrible, or both.

"What we." Ilya said, finally. Quiet. Almost gentle, which was worse. "You are always saying we as if we are something. There is nothing between us."

Something squeezed in Shane's chest. Quick and mean, the feeling arriving before he could intercept it. "I didn't fucking say there was." It came out sharper than he'd intended, the defensiveness spiking before he could moderate it. He hated that. Hated that Ilya could still do that, could still find the tender spot without seeming to try. "Don't put words in my mouth. I just—" He exhaled. "There's no bad blood. Right? Since we stopped. Since we—you know."

"You think I give a shit," Ilya said, "that Shane Hollander has decided to be a holy virgin again?"

"No." Shane swallowed. "But maybe— whatever. Fuck. Why did you threaten me then?"

Ilya scoffed. The Russian came first, low and dismissive—da ladno, blyad'—followed by the rustle of fabric, the small sounds of a body adjusting, crossing its arms. "I did not threaten you. You sent them to me first, I sent them back. Doing you a favour." A pause. The smile returned to his voice. "I thought you would need something to jerk off to. Alone. In your sad, boring little room."

Shane stared at the ceiling. His apartment, which was not small nor boring, looked back at him. "Why would I jerk off to that."

"Because it's sexy." Ilya's voice dropped— barely, just a degree, just enough to change the temperature of the room. "Those photos. You touching yourself because I asked you to, whining my name. Getting yourself all soft and ready for me." A pause that lasted exactly as long as it needed to. "Fuck. Remember when you called me and got off to just the sound of my voice?"

Shane's thumbnail found his lower lip. He nodded, and then remembered that nodding was meaningless, and pulled the phone onto his knee. "Uh," he said. "Yeah."

"You used to be so good," Ilya murmured.

Shane blinked. Used to be?

Two words. Sitting there in the air of his apartment, like they were waiting to be examined. Shane turned them over. Used to be. Past tense. As if there was a version of Shane that had existed, that had been good at something, the best, even. 

"Yes," Ilya continued, as if hearing the thought. "Used to be. Such a good boy. So good at hockey. So good at being a captain. So good at following instructions." He sighed, the sound almost fond. "And now look at you."

The sound Shane made was soft and involuntary, dragged out of him without permission, something between a breath and a whine. He felt himself slump backwards against the armrest, the tension in his spine surrendering one vertebra at a time.

"What?" Ilya said. "You are whining." A soft laugh. "You don't agree?"

"I can," Shane whispered.

"Hm? Kotenok. I can't hear you."

"Fuck you."

"And you say you are a good boy." A pause that pressed like a thumb into a bruise. "Kakaya shlyukha. I'm hanging up.”

"No." Shane's voice came out fractured, too quick, scraping past every rational instinct he had. "Wait. Please. Fuck. I can be." He swallowed. "I can be good."

The silence on the other end lasted exactly long enough to make him feel it.

"Yeah?" The word was soft and warm and bottomless. "And how will you do that?"

The moan that came out of Shane's throat was quiet and wretched and entirely his own. He felt himself go warm all over, the blood moving south, and he registered, distantly and without surprise, that he was already hard. Had probably been hard for most of the conversation. His hand dropped between his legs without him directing it there, palm pressing against the heat of his own want through the damp fabric of his running shorts, and he let out a long, slow breath that shook at the edges.

"Um," Shane said. His voice had changed registers. "I'll do whatever you want."

"Whatever I want," Ilya repeated slowly. "Da?"

"Yeah."

"If I asked you to send me a video of you jerking off in the mirror, you would send it?"

"Yes."

"What about fucking yourself on the balcony?"

The thought of it—Montreal spread out below, the cold march air, his own voice bouncing off the glass—sent a spike of heat through him that he felt in his teeth. "Fuck— yes. Please."

"Okay," Ilya said. A beat of silence. Then: "And if I told you not to come at all this season. Not unless I said you could."

Shane was rocking against his own palm now, slow and helpless, the friction of the damp fabric both too much and nowhere near enough. The rational part of his brain, the part that had been running affirmations about silver medals and playoffs and being in control of his own life, had gone very quiet. Not gone. Just. Quiet. Eclipsed by the overwhelming relief of having been given something to do, something clear and direct and requiring nothing from him except compliance.

"Please," he breathed. "Yes. Anything you want."

A hum of approval moved through the speaker, low and warm, and Shane's eyes fell shut. The silence that followed was the longest one yet. Shane lay with his knees falling open, his hand moving slow against the front of his shorts, his hips lifting fractionally to meet the pressure. He waited. The waiting was its own sensation, warm and intolerable and addictive. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat. Ilya's silence was enormous, filling the apartment, filling Shane's whole chest.

He was fully rocking up into his hand, chasing the friction, his hips moving in small, desperate arcs against the couch cushion, his breath coming in shallow pulls. He thought about the weight of Ilya's eyes— of being the sole object of attention, of being owned,  and the sounds coming out of Shane's mouth were embarrassing and real, and he couldn't locate the will to stop them.

"Fuck," he gasped. "Please— please, Rozanov—"

He came with a broken sound that he muffled against his own forearm, hips stuttering forward, free hand gripping the couch cushion hard enough to whiten the knuckles. The warmth spread. The room went white at the edges. His breath scraped and shuddered and slowly, incrementally, found its way back to something resembling rhythm.

There was silence, the kind of silence that didn’t hurt. Shane lay on his back on the couch with his hand still between his legs and his running clothes damp in two places now.

He grabbed his phone.

Ilya had hung up six minutes ago.

He stared at the screen. Six minutes. He had been lying here talking to nobody, working himself up against his own hand in an empty apartment at five in the afternoon while Ilya had already ended the call and was probably fucking someone else. Six minutes of the silence that wasn't silence at all, just the absence of a voice he'd been listening for so hard he'd manufactured its presence.

Shane set the phone face down on his chest.

Outside, Montreal continued. The thaw, the grey rivers of snowmelt, the trees beginning to think about spring. The city watching and disgusted at what had happened on the third floor of a glass-fronted building on a perfectly ordinary street, where a silver medalist had just come in his running shorts alone on his couch while his rival laughed at him several thousand miles away.

He didn't move for a long time.

When he did, it was to get up and go to the fridge, where his meal prep sat in its labeled containers, and look at it for a while, and close the fridge, and go to bed without eating.

The alarm went off at 6:00 AM, and Shane's hand found it before his eyes opened.

Shane was already half-awake. He had been cycling in and out of sleep since around four, which was normal on game days, and he had accepted it as such; he did not stress about it because stressing about sleep quality affected it more than anything. His quads: sore, the good kind, yesterday's skating still in the muscle. Shoulders: tight on the left side, which meant he'd slept wrong again, which meant the yoga needed to be longer this morning, which meant he needed to adjust the schedule. 

That’s fine. He breathed in. He breathed out. 

He had this habit where one variable cascaded into seventeen problems before he'd even sat up, and he was not doing that today. Today was a game day. Today required a focus that did not have room for cascading.

He padded to the kitchen in his socks. The apartment was cold in that specific March way that felt personal, like the season had decided to make a point. The city outside his windows was still dark, just beginning to give up the night at the edges, the horizon going from black to a deep, bruised charcoal. 

He filled a glass with warm water from the tap, and added the elemental magnesium and electrolyte powder in the precise quantities the nutritionist had specified. He drank it standing at the counter, watching the city through the floor-to-ceiling glass, and thought about nothing, or tried to.

The balcony was cold enough that his breath came in small, visible clouds when he unrolled the mat. He had been doing this since October, rain or snow or shine, because the cold air during morning mobility work had measurable effects on alertness and thermoregulation. The city spread out below him in its grey, pre-dawn quiet—the rooftops, the church spires, the distant orange threads of the first commuter traffic on the highway interchange. 

He liked Montreal best like this, before it had woken up properly and started demanding things from him.

He sank into pigeon pose on the right side and held it, the stretch pulling through his glute and hip flexor, and focused on the sensation, the way his body communicated with him in this language of tension and release. 

In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for eight.

I am Shane Hollander, he thought, moving into warrior two, eyes on the horizon. Captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. Highest hockey IQ in the league.

He held it. He felt the burn in his front quad, the stretch across his chest, the full-body commitment of the pose. He was here. He was present. He is good.

Shane moved into warrior three.

I am in control of my life, he thought, harder this time, pressing the words into the space behind his sternum like he was trying to get them to stick. I am in control of my body.

He was in control. He had a plan for today— written out the night before in the small notebook he kept on his nightstand, the one Hayden had once made the mistake of picking up once. In for four. Hold for four. Out for eight. 

Every block of game day was already planned. Every meal is weighed and portioned. Every variable reduced to something manageable, something knowable, something that could be predicted and therefore survived. There was no room for panic here. 

Out for eight.

The bathroom mirror was fully lit, the way he kept it on game days. He stood in front of it in his t-shirt and sweats and met his own eyes without flinching. This was important. The meeting of his own eyes without flinching. He had read about this too—the neurological basis of self-directed attention, the way the brain processed affirmations differently when delivered in direct eye contact with one's own reflection, the mirror neurons firing in a pattern indistinguishable from receiving validation from an external source.

He looked fine. He looked like Shane Hollander, the jaw, the freckles, the dark eyes that the Montreal Gazette had once described as beautifully focused to the point of unsettling. 

"I am Shane Hollander," he said to his reflection. "Captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. Highest hockey IQ in the league."

His reflection agreed, neutrally.

"I am in control of my life. I am in control of my body. I am in control of my training. I am in control of my diet. I am in control."

He held his own gaze. His reflection held it back. There was a moment, brief, quickly suppressed, where he had the vertiginous sensation of looking at someone he didn’t recognise, and then it passed, and he was just Shane Hollander in a bathroom mirror at 6:45 in the morning, which was normal, which was exactly as it should be.

He believed what he was saying. He was working, with genuine commitment and considerable effort, on believing what he was saying.

"Tonight," he said, "I will beat Buffalo on home ice."

He believed that one without any effort at all.

Breakfast was 430 calories, prepared the night before and refrigerated in a glass container that he reheated. Fermented beets, still faintly purple-bleeding at their edges. Cooked carrots and butternut squash, cut to identical sizes because inconsistent sizing meant uneven cooking and uneven cooking meant some pieces were better than others, and he found the inconsistency distracting. Kale wilted with a minimal amount of garlic. Two boiled eggs, peeled cleanly, nestled in the corner of the bowl.

He ate standing at the counter with his phone face down beside him. No passive media consumption during meals. The body deserved to know it was being fed. This was not a rule he'd made arbitrarily; it was a rule with a rationale, which was the only kind of rule that survived long enough to become a habit.

He thought about the nutritional density of the bowl while he ate. Beta carotene from the carrots and squash, laying the groundwork for immune function under the stress load of tonight's game. Folate from the beets and kale, supporting methylation. The potassium from the beets cross-referencing with the morning electrolytes, very good stuff.

He ate every bite. He washed the bowl and dried it and put it away. He stood in the kitchen for a moment with his hands flat on the counter.

He was going to beat Buffalo.

He rinsed the bowl, dried it, put it away. He stood at the counter for a moment with his hands flat on the marble, feeling the cold of it under his palms. The morning was already mapped out— the jog, back to shower, the nap, the drive to the rink. All he had to do was follow it. One thing, then the next thing, then the next. That was all a game day ever was. That was the whole design of it. He didn't have to decide anything. He just had to execute.

He slid off the barstool, laced up his shoes in the hallway, the familiar double-knot, left then right. Grabbed his keys out of habit even though he wasn't driving anywhere. Put them back. Pulled his hood up, checked his watch, and stepped out into the cold.

The March air hit him immediately, sharp and clean across his face, and he exhaled a long, slow breath that misted white in front of him, and started down the street at an easy pace.

The jog started well.

He left the building at 8:17 AM—two minutes late, the kale rinsing—with his headphones in and his hood up. He had a route: thirty minutes, easy pace, RPE four or five at most. He knew the route. He had run it hundreds of times. It was mapped to his spotify playlist with a lower BPM, nothing with a driving beat, nothing that made his legs want to go faster than they were supposed to. The plan was maintenance. Circulation, light nervous system activation, nothing taxing, nothing that would require caloric compensation he hadn't budgeted for. 

He was running at a seven-minute mile pace by the fifteen-minute mark. He knew he was doing it. He kept doing it anyway.

The city moved past him—grey pavement, bare trees, the dull light of a Montreal morning in late March that was trying and failing to become spring. His breath came hard in the cold air. Bahamas mused about Montreal in his headphones. His legs felt good; they always felt good when he pushed them, the body rewarding the bad decision in real time, the dopamine arriving before the consequences.

Shane knew math, running versus jogging, thirty minutes versus forty, the caloric difference between the two, the way that difference would sit against his meal plan. He knew what the answer was going to be before he finished calculating it, which meant he had approximately twenty minutes of running left during which he could choose not to think about it.

He ran along Rue Sherbrooke with the bare trees beginning to think about spring overhead and the grey-brown rivers of snowmelt in the gutters and the city going about its morning indifferent to him, and he felt, for forty minutes, like he was successfully running away from something. 

The city slid past him at a pace that felt, for the first time this week, like something he could control. In motion like this, nothing else mattered; there was only the next stride, and the one after, and the one after that. 

He knew, coming home, that he'd made a mistake.

He stood in the elevator with his hands on his knees, doing the math that he had known he would have to do before he'd started running. He had burned approximately 300 more calories than his morning jog protocol accounted for. His meal plan for today was adjusted to his morning jog. The 300-calorie gap sat in the balance of the day like a small accusation.

He opened the fridge. The glass containers were stacked in their correct order—lunch in its column, afternoon snack in its column, pre-nap snack in its column, post-nap snack, game snack. Everything portioned and labeled and planned. He stood in the cold air the fridge exhaled and looked at it.

He closed the fridge.

He sat on the couch and opened his laptop to the game tape, his own footage from the last three games, looking for the half second he kept losing somewhere— in his reads, in his positioning, in the gap between what he intended and what his body executed. He watched himself move across the ice, efficient and precise and completely in control, and thought: there, no, maybe there. He watched himself win a faceoff in the offensive zone and thought about the defensive coverage Buffalo was going to run tonight and thought about his left winger's tendency to cheat toward the boards and thought about—

He got up, walked to the kitchen, opened the fridge. Took out the small container of blueberries that lived in the door shelf, which was not part of the day's planned intake, and counted out a careful handful—twenty-eight berries, he counted them without deciding to count them—and ate them one by one, standing at the counter, each one cold and faintly tart on his tongue.

He closed the container. He put it back. He closed the fridge.

"Shit," he said, quietly, to the kitchen.

His mother called at twelve-forty, three minutes into his lunch.

The zucchini soup was good. He knew it was good, the chicken baked to the right temperature, the quinoa rinsed properly, the soy milk stirred in at the end for the fat content.  The quinoa measured on the side. The brown rice in its container, three servings, which was a lot of brown rice, which was also by design. He answered the call and tucked the phone against his shoulder and kept eating.

"Hi honey." Her voice was warm and slightly angled, the way it got when the warmth was load-bearing. "How are you feeling?”

"Good," Shane said. He moved a piece of chicken through the soup. "Feeling good. Ready."

"Pefect. Your father and I watched the tape from the Ottawa game, great power play hun." A slight pause, the gear-shift he had been expecting. "Listen. I spoke to Greg about the Adidas situation."

Shane said "Mm" and took another bite of rice.

"He said the shoot window is looking like July, which obviously gives you a lot of room to work with, and Shane, the figures are strong. This is worth a conversation before the off-season starts, because if we wait until June to decide—"

July. He tried to locate July in his mental landscape and found nothing there. Not blankness exactly, more like fog, the way the city looked from his balcony sometimes in early morning, before the light arrived, when the buildings dissolved at the edges and there was no reliable horizon. He could not see July from here. He could not see the end of April from here. He was managing approximately one period at a time, one day at a time, on a good day one week at a time, and July might as well have been a country he'd never visited.

"—and the exclusivity clauses are something Greg has been vague about, which concerns me, because the Under Armour thing technically runs through—"

"Yeah," Shane said.

He was looking at the brown rice. He had eaten maybe a third of it. He was supposed to eat all three servings. The chicken was good—he'd made it Sunday and the flavors had deepened by today—but the appetite had done the thing it sometimes did mid-meal, the way a signal could lose its frequency, the hunger information simply ceasing to transmit.

"—so I think at minimum a call with Greg and their team, just to align on the timeline, before you disappear into playoffs mode—"

"Yes," Shane said. "That sounds good Mom. Let's do that."

"You think? Because I wanted to make sure you were comfortable with the format, because last time with the Under Armour thing you felt like they—"

"No, it's fine." He pushed a piece of chicken to the side of the bowl. "July works."

"Have you eaten today? You sound distracted, sweetheart."

He looked at the bowl. "I'm eating right now."

"What did you have this morning? Are you still doing the beets? I read something about oxalates in beets that was a little—"

"Mom." He set his spoon down. The soup was still mostly in the bowl. "I need to get into my nap. Game day."

A beat. "Of course." Her voice softened slightly. "You'll be great tonight. You always are.”

"Thanks, Mom."

"Call me after if it's not too late."

"I will."

He set the phone face-down on the table. He sat with the bowl in front of him for a moment, looking at what remained—most of the rice, half the quinoa, most of the soup. He thought about the macro targets for the day, the number he was supposed to hit, the distance between where he currently was and where the plan said he should be. He thought about the blueberries this morning. He thought about the run.

He put the bowl in the fridge.

He stood in the kitchen for a moment afterward, the refrigerator door already closed, his hand still resting on the handle. The numbers ran themselves without his permission, the way they always did, the gap between what he'd eaten and what the plan required, but then he did have the additional blueberries this morning. He pressed his thumb into the handle once, then let go.

It was fine. The plan was still intact, just slightly rearranged, and a slightly rearranged plan was still a plan. He had the nap to get through, and the pre-game snack, and then the drive, and then the game, and all he had to do was follow the sequence. One block into the next.

He pushed off the counter and went to the bedroom to set up for the nap.

He had a system for the pre-game nap. Blackout sleep mask, white noise machine set to the brown noise frequency at forty-five decibels, five minutes of progressive muscle relaxation beginning at the feet and moving upward in a sequence his sports psychologist had taught him. Ninety minutes of sleep, finishing at the tail end of a complete cycle so he woke in light sleep, alert, ready, the body landing on the right side of the consciousness threshold. He had done this before every home game for two seasons. It worked every time, no more pre-game panic. 

He lay face-down on the bed and started with his feet.

Toes, relax. Arches, relax. The sequence moved upward methodically, each muscle group tensing on the inhale and releasing on the exhale, and he followed it with his attention the way you followed a path through familiar woods—without thinking, from memory, trusting the route.

He thought about the way Ilya had said whatever I want, da?

He turned onto his side. He pulled the sleep mask down. He thought about Buffalo's right defensive gap. 

He thought about the shift structure he'd drawn up in the taxi to the rink last Tuesday, the play he wanted to run in the opening three minutes before Buffalo's penalty killers had settled. 

He thought about nothing. 

He thought about Ilya's silences, the way being on the wrong end of one felt like standing in a room where the air pressure had changed without explanation. 

You used to be so good. The register drop in his voice when he said it. The way the praise operated retroactively, recontextualizing everything—not you are good, not you were good, but used to be, which implied a before and an after, which implied that Shane had been something and had become less of it, which implied that Ilya had noticed the difference that Shane had been hiding, and was reporting it back to him.

He turned face down again. He pressed his forehead into the pillow. He tucked one hand under the weight of his own body, the pressure grounding, a thing he'd been doing since childhood.

The alarm was beeping.

Shane came up through sleep in pieces, limb by limb, consciousness arriving late and disoriented. The room was too bright around the edges of the blackout mask. He pulled it off. The clock on the nightstand said 3:14 PM.

He stared at it for a full four seconds.

He had slept fifteen minutes past his alarm. He was already behind. He had a pre-game routine that accounted for exactly zero minutes of being behind.

He sat up.

His stomach was warm and wet.

He looked down.

He did not remember this happening. He had no memory of a dream, no residual sense of arousal, nothing except the evidence of it cooling against his skin and smeared across the sheets below him. His body had simply, without his knowledge or consent or participation, handled something that apparently needed handling, six days after the phone call, while he was trying to nap before a Buffalo game.

He dragged the sheets off the bed in one motion and balled them in the corner. He had three sets. He would deal with it when he got home tonight. He stepped into the shower and stood under the water as hot as he could tolerate for exactly four minutes.

He dressed in the pre-game outfit that had been hanging on the back of the bathroom door since last night because he always laid it out the night before. He grabbed his pre-prepared bag. He went to the kitchen, picked up the container he had packed at nine o'clock this morning: three medium sweet potatoes wrapped in foil, still faintly warm from this morning, and a whole ripe avocado.

He was downstairs in the car in eleven minutes. 

He was downstairs in eleven minutes. He reversed out of the parking space and ate the avocado with his thumbnail over the center console, both halves, without ceremony or particular enjoyment, the flesh dense and faintly grassy. He unwrapped the first sweet potato—three medium ones, foiled and sweet from the honey packet he kept in the console—as he pulled out of the garage and onto the street.

The city moved past the windows in its grey, unhurried way, entirely indifferent to his schedule. He ate the first sweet potato. He thought about Buffalo's defensive gap. He ate the second. He did not think about the sheets in the corner of his bedroom, or the lunch he had not finished, or the phone call with his mother, or Ilya's voice through a phone speaker in an empty apartment six days ago, while the city went dark outside the windows. He ate the third sweet potato as he pulled into the Voyagers facility lot.

He was eleven minutes behind schedule. He was fine. He was going to beat Buffalo.

Fuck.

The place Comeau had found was called something in French that Shane had immediately forgotten. It occupied the ground floor of a narrow building on Rue Saint-Denis, all dark wood and low lighting, and a bartender who moved like someone who had never once been in a hurry. There was a hockey game on the screen above the bar with the sound off. The booths along the wall were deep enough to swallow a conversation whole. It was, by the standards of a post-win night out, almost aggressively civilized.

"Capitaine's an old soul," J.J had announced in the car. "Practically fifty. I'm surprised he doesn't want to go to a library."

"I heard that," Shane said from the driver's seat.

"You were supposed to." J.J leaned forward between the seats and patted Shane's shoulder with genuine affection. "We love you anyway, old man."

They pushed in through the door in a loose, loud cluster—Comeau first, because Comeau was always first. Drapeau and Mitty were behind him, still in the middle of an argument about the third-period power play that had been ongoing since the locker room and showed no signs of resolution. J.J and two of the younger wingers are following behind.

They took over the cluster of barstools and the booth behind them. The bartender materialized with a patience that suggested he had seen hockey teams before and made his peace with it.

"Whiskey sour," Comeau said immediately, leaning his elbows on the bar. He looked sideways at Shane. "Cap? Let me guess. Sparkling water? Kale juice?"

"Ginger ale," Shane said.

Comeau turned back to the bartender with an expression of exaggerated sorrow. "He'll have a ginger ale," he confirmed, as if reporting a small tragedy. "And see if you can make it look like something fun."

"Nothing fun, please," Shane said.

The orders went down the line, beer for Drapeau and Hayden, a round of whatever was on draft for the younger guys who had stopped reading menus three bars ago. Mitty ordered water with the solemn self-discipline of a man who had let in one goal tonight and had complicated feelings about it, and Comeau clapped him on the back with excessive sympathy.

"You're fine, Mitty. One goal. Against Buffalo. They got lucky."

"They got a rebound off a point shot that I should have covered," Mitty said, with the misery of someone who had been replaying it for four hours.

"You should have," Comeau agreed cheerfully. "But you didn't, and we still won by two, so."

"Thank you," Mitty said flatly. "That's incredibly helpful."

J.J leaned around Drapeau to address the group at large. "We're buying Mitty a beer."

"I said water," Mitty said.

"We're buying Mitty a water," J.J revised, without missing a beat.

The bartender slid Shane's ginger ale across the bar. Shane caught it and took a sip, leaning forward onto one elbow, and let the low current of team conversation move around him. This was the part he wasn’t very good at, the after, the low-stakes social unwinding, but he was better at this than people assumed. He was not, despite what the media occasionally implied, someone who functioned poorly in all groups; he functioned very well in groups when the group was his team and the expectations were uncomplicated.

Comeau had swiveled on his barstool. "Two goals tonight, cap," he said.

"I know," Shane said.

"I'm just saying." Comeau waved his hand; the wave was too casual. "You’re usually tightly strung, man. But did anyone else think he was a little—" He glanced around the bar for support and found everyone pointedly examining the reruns of their game on the TV. "Robotic? On the ice. Not bad, two goals, clearly. But soo…”

Shane set down his ginger ale. "What."

Comeau raised his eyebrows. "You tell me."

Something moved through Shane's chest. Not quite anger, something more like pressure, something that wanted to be examined and which he was not going to examine here, not in this pub, not in front of his team. He sat up straighter. 

"What does that even mean?" Shane said. "I scored two goals. I had four shot attempts."

"Whoa." Comeau put his hands up. "I never said you weren't playing well."

"Then what did you mean?" Shane said. "Specifically. What does robotic mean."

The bar had gone slightly quieter in the immediate vicinity. Mitty was studying his water with intense focus. Drapeau had found something very interesting on the far side of the room.

"Cap, I was literally just—"

“Whoa, woah, woahh.”

J.J appeared from nowhere as if he had been monitoring the situation for exactly this moment. He smacked Comeau across the shoulder with the flat of his hand, loud enough to punctuate. "Capitaine," J.J. announced, to the table, to the pub, to anyone within earshot, "is a robot. D’accord? He is a beautiful, scary robot, sent from the future to save us from national shame of losing gold to the U S of A.” 

J.J tugged on his ear with affectionate firmness, Comeau whined.  "Tabarnak. He’s going to win us the playoffs, don't make him malfunction." He dragged Comeau sideways by the ear, Comeau half-laughing and half-genuinely wincing, and steered him away toward the far end of the table where Mitty and Drapeau were now arguing.

Shane picked up the glass and took a long pull from it, waiting for the thing in his chest to settle.

It mostly did.

The barstool to his left scraped. Hayden settled onto it, and Shane did his best to avoid his gaze for as long as possible. 

"What was that?" He gestured with his chin toward where Comeau and J.J had arrived at the booth and were now apparently chatting about something else entirely, Comeau gesturing largely and J.J responding with a series of expressions that required no translation.

"Nothing." Shane glanced over. "Comeau was being an idiot."

"Yeah, that tracks." Hayden lifted his beer. "But you baring your teeth at him like a stray dog doesn't. I swear he pissed his pants a little. I was watching."

"Oh, fuck off." Shane laughed despite himself, looking down at the bar.

Hayden let the laugh run its course. Then he set his glass down and said, without changing his tone: "He did have one thing right, though. You've been tense."

Shane felt his brow furrow, and he opened his mouth. 

Hayden raised his hand. "I know," he said. "I know you're going to tell me you're fine, so I'm just asking you to hold that for a second while I finish." He kept his voice low, "Sochi was a lot. The playoffs are coming up, you're working incredibly hard, you're carrying this whole team on your back, you've been doing it all season. I know." He dropped the hand. "I'm not saying there's anything wrong with you." He nudged Shane's side with his elbow, his eyes softening. "But you need to blow off some steam. I know you've been doing better, but maybe the anxiety is still—" 

Shane pinched the bridge of his nose.

"When was the last time," Hayden continued, "you got your dick wet?"

Shane rolled his eyes, but the smile that came with it was genuine, widening before he could stop it. He looked down at his ginger ale. "Don't say it like that."

"Why? That's what it is, that's the clinical term, dude."

"That is absolutely not the clinical term."

"I'm just saying, a little blowjob, a little release of tension, maybe you stop chewing Comeau's head off in a pub—"

"I didn't chew his—"

"—and maybe you sleep better, and maybe the bags under your eyes aren't quite so—" Hayden made a gesture in the general direction of Shane's face.

Shane looked down at his drink. He could feel the tips of his ears going warm, which was annoying. He has been releasing steam, maybe less than he did before. The past three years, where he was getting off once a week, once a day, multiple times a day, under instruction– shit. 

It wasn’t an issue; he was not backed up. Sex was the least of his concerns. 

"I'm fine," he said.

"No, your balls are bright blue," Hayden said pleasantly. "Unless the Boston Lily sitch’ is ongoing, but we haven’t been to Bos-” 

"Jesus, Hayden." Shane looked up. "Why are you so obsessed with who I'm sleeping with?"

Hayden's smile widened incrementally.

"Or who I’m not sleeping with." He tilted his head. "Should Jackie be worried? I feel like there's something you want to tell me."

"The only thing Jackie should be worried about is the third trimester. Thanks for asking, it’s going well, by the way.” He turned his glass. "Speaking of Jackie, she has this friend,"

"Hayden."

"She's fucking hot—"

"Hayden."

"—smart, funny, not—she's not into hockey, but I could get you guys together, we could do couple stuff.”

"I'm not—" Shane stopped. He pressed his palm flat against the smooth wood of the bar and felt the grain of it under his skin, a texture to hold onto. He made himself look back at Hayden's face, at the worry there, the kind that had been present since a hotel room in 2011, when Shane had stumbled in with a ripped shirt and shaking hands and eyes that couldn't track properly, and Hayden had not asked a single question that Shane wasn't ready to answer. 

He did not want to put that look on Hayden's face again. He was not going to put that look on Hayden's face again. There was nothing to put it there for, things were fine.

He plastered a sideways smile and shook his head. "I'll let you know," he said, "if I need to blow off steam." He paused. "Weirdo."

Hayden's eyes went wide with theatrical offense. "Hey. Don't be an asshole. I'm offering you a service."

"I'm deeply grateful."

"You should be. Jackie's very selective about who her friends are."

Shane looked down at his phone. It was 10:04 PM.

He needed to get home. He had an 8 AM session with the trainers tomorrow and his sheets were balled up in the corner of his bedroom and he hadn't finished lunch and he needed to hit his before-bed protein target and Hayden had said blow off some steam and now he was thinking about Ilya, which was Hayden's fault, which was Comeau's fault for starting the whole thing.

Fuck, Ilya's voice through his phone speaker had landed in his chest like a key turning in a lock he hadn't known was there, and he wanted to go home. He needed to go home right now. He needed to go home, slip his hand into his boxers, and watch the videos that he promised himself he would delete.

He opened the text thread.

He looked at it for a moment. The last delivered message sat at the bottom of the screen, patient and unanswered. Below it, nothing. The white space where a response would have been.

He pocketed the phone. He stood up, dropping some cash on the bar. "I'm heading out," he said.

"Already?" J.J. called from down the table.

"Yes."

"We just got here, man."

"I've been here two hours," Shane said, which was true and which nobody successfully argued with. He looked at Hayden.

Hayden looked back at him carefully, "Text me when you're home."

"Yeah." Shane pulled his collar up. "Night."

Today had been bad. 

He had gone to the gym at nine. He had completed the recovery session with grim thoroughness: light resistance, the mobility sequence, twenty minutes on the foam roller that he hated. But hating something had never once been a valid reason to stop.

He had come home and spent two hours on meal prep, working through the week's containers. It was genuinely grounding, the snap of each lid sealing something into place. He had tried to read. He held the book open and moved his eyes across the pages at a plausible pace for forty minutes while his brain was elsewhere. Eventually, he closed it, set it face-down on the coffee table, and sat in the silence of a Sunday afternoon with nowhere left to be.

No, today had been fine. He was fine. He had the evidence for this catalogued and cross-referenced and available for immediate review: two seasons of measurably improved performance metrics, a therapist he saw once a month, a silver medal sitting in a velvet box in his closet that he took out occasionally just to hold.

He had jerked off twice.

The first time was in the shower that morning. He felt better for approximately four minutes and then felt worse. The second time was in the afternoon, with the blackout curtains drawn against the middle of the day and his face pressed sideways into the pillow. When it was over, he lay there and felt the city sitting on his chest. All of Montreal was pressing down through the ceiling and through the floor of his apartment to find him there, his hand still loosely wrapped around himself. He felt watched in a way that made his skin prickle.

He had been fine for years. He had clawed out of a very deep hole with his bare fingernails. He had done it himself, and his body was supposed to know that. His body was supposed to listen. Instead, it had been doing this—this adolescent, humiliating, uncontrollable this—for the better part of a month. Each time left him with the same residue: a shame that was less about the act itself and more about who his brain had been visiting while it happened. Whose voice had narrated it.

Deep breaths. He was good. He was healed. The crawling out had happened and was real and he was okay.

No. He was fine, but he used to be good.

Oh, fuck off.

Shane bit down on the carrot stick with too much force. 

He had wanted cheesecake. The want had arrived mid-afternoon, strong and unwavering. He had stood in front of his open fridge for long enough that the cold air raised the hair on his arms, turning the want over, examining it, before he remembered that he wanted to win the playoffs more than he wanted cheesecake. He had closed the fridge. He had made chia seed pudding, eaten half of it, and waited for it to help, and it had not helped.

Now he was halfway through half a pound of carrots and cucumber cut into precise, even sticks, and three konjac jelly pouches he'd bought from the Asian grocery store that were twelve calories each and gave his hands something to do.

He sighed, sank deeper into the couch, and reached for the remote. Shane really wasn’t in the mood for hockey, but anything else sounded too taxing. TSN it was.

Ilya Rozanov's face filled the screen.

He was post-game, shirtless, a towel slung low around his neck, the kind of careless that was also entirely deliberate. The overhead interview lights caught the sweat still on his chest, the gleam of it across his collarbones, the hollow of his throat, the broad plane of his shoulders still carrying two hours of play in the set of the muscles there. His brows were pulled together in that deep habitual furrow–two pronounced lines between them that lived there permanently whether he was concentrating or displeased or simply being asked something he found beneath him, which was most things

The interviewer said something. The left corner of his mouth moved, a sinuous curl pulled at his lips, a large hand coming up to sweep across his jaw in a slow drag.

"—I think tonight we played very well." Ilya said. His voice through the speakers was flat, the accent sitting on every syllable with immovable weight. “I mean, yes, they have strong defence, but we find the gaps. This is what we practise for, you know? Find the gaps." The curl deepened a fraction. "Boston is a good team. We know this."

Shane sat up straight. He pointed at the television with the carrot.

"Oh, you know this," he mocked, in a voice three registers higher. "We know this." He dropped the accent halfway through and it didn't matter. He ate the carrot stick aggressively. "Incredible, revolutionary analysis. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. God, just kill yourself."

He kept watching.

Ilya turned his head to address a follow-up, the movement drawing the line of his jaw, the tendon running down the side of his neck. Shane noticed his palms going warm. The awareness spread downward and he was half hard on his own couch with a konjac jelly in one hand and a carrot stick in the other.

He grabbed his phone.

The thread opened the way it always did, with that lurch in his chest, the door swinging wide into the room he was always trying not to enter. His own messages at the bottom. Delivered. Read. Delivered. The last message—Hey, are you doing okay? Are we okay? Please call me.— sitting at the bottom with its read receipt

A month of nothing after that. He looked between the screen and the television, Ilya talking to the interviewer, those pale eyes and that jaw and the infuriating ease of him occupying every space he was in like he owned the deed to it.

What the fuck even was that?

The phone call. What did it mean?

What did any of it mean? Shane had been shoving the questions as deep as he could fit them for a month, filling every available space with practice and tape and meal prep and recovery sessions, and now it was pressing against the seams of him.

Maybe Shane had it wrong. Maybe Ilya didn't care at all. Maybe this whole thing—the photos, the call, the sex—it was a game. A way to pass the time. A way to torture someone who had been stupid enough to let himself be torturable.

He looked at the television and Ilya looked back at him through the pixels—not at the interviewer, not at the camera, but directly at Shane. Those pale eyes were steady and dissecting and utterly without mercy, peeling him back layer by layer. His positioning. His tells. The gap in his defensive structure that he'd been correcting for weeks. Not enough, never enough.

But he used to be so good.

The room got loud without making any sound. The air thickened, became something with texture, something that required effort to pull in, his lungs working harder for less, his chest tightening by increments he couldn't track until it was already too tight.

His pulse had stopped being a single thing in his chest, now in his throat and his wrists and behind his eyes, percussive and accelerating, each beat a small detonation. The television was too bright. The couch cushion was the wrong texture under his palms. The city outside was too loud through glass that wasn't thick enough, had never been thick enough, every siren and horn and distant shout finding the cracks and getting in.

He threw himself off the couch.

His legs didn't feel entirely like his legs. He crossed the room on them anyway, three lurching strides, and grabbed the curtains and yanked them shut—both windows, all of it, the city vanishing behind heavy linen, the light dying. He stood with his fists twisted in the fabric and his forehead nearly against the wall and breathed through his nose, in, in, in, until the tilting slowed. His knuckles ached, he hadn't noticed how hard he was gripping until he let go.

Shanee went back to the couch. He pulled the laptop from the coffee table and opened it and his fingers were moving before he had consciously decided anything, the way his body had been making decisions without him all day, all week, all month.

Shane Hollander. Enter. 

His own face stared back at him from seventeen different angles.

Shane Hollander leaked.

Nothing useful, his Wikipedia page, a press release from 2022.

Shane Hollander leaked videos. Shane Hollander revenge porn.

His glasses had slid down his nose. He pushed them up without looking away, his lower lip caught between his teeth, scrolling and looking for nothing. The absence of results was its own horror. Either Ilya had deleted them, which felt unlikely, or they were buried so deep in some private, encrypted corner of his life that no surface search was ever going to reach them, held there patient and potential, a card not yet played.

Asian male hockey player porn.

He scrolled. None of them looked like him. None of them were anywhere close.

Asian male freckles.

Freckles jerking off

He shoved the laptop away from him.

It skidded across the coffee table and stopped at the edge. The screen sat open, the half-typed query still in the search bar, the pale light of it falling upward into the dim room.

Shane sat with his hands on his thighs and looked at it. His breathing was too fast and too loud in the silence. His chest felt cracked open, the cold air of the room getting into places it shouldn't reach. The frantic bird-wing thudding in it had not slowed—if anything it had quickened, the walls pressing fractionally closer with each breath he failed to get deep enough, the room rearranging itself around him.

He slid off the couch onto the floor.

The carpet was cool under his palms. He sat with his back against the front of the couch, brought his knees up to his chest, and pressed his forehead down between them. His hands came up to grip the back of his skull. He held himself like that—the way he'd been holding himself since he was a child. He focused on the carpet. Its texture. It was solid. Not moving. Present.

Fuck, he thought. What the fuck am I even doing.

Ilya Rozanov did not care about him. Ilya Rozanov was giving a post-game interview, thinking about the playoffs, and was not, at any point in the last month, thinking about Shane.

Ilya had sent those photos because it was funny to him. Because everything was a game. Because Shane had been stupid enough to react and so he poked again. That was it. That was all of it. There was no surveillance. There were no leaked videos. There was just Shane Hollander, twenty-two years old, silver medalist, captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, sitting on his own floor on an off day with his laptop upside down on the couch and a bowl of carrot sticks going soft on the table.

He needed to eat.

That was it. He'd skipped breakfast and gone to the gym, which he knew was wrong, which he'd told himself he'd fix at lunch, and then lunch had been light too.

And he hadn't been sleeping. The sleep deprivation and the under-eating were compounding each other, driving his brain into a feedback loop that looked like paranoia but was actually just chemistry, just biology. Just his body running low on resources and driving him crazy.

He needed to eat. He needed to sleep. He needed to hit 2,700 calories tomorrow, at minimum, and get eight hours, and then he would feel like himself again.

He would be fine.

He pressed his forehead harder into his knees.

Fuck, he thought, one more time, very quietly, into the space between his body and the floor. 

Shane picked up his phone, he looked at Hayden's contact. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at Hayden's contact again.

The response came back in under thirty seconds.

And maybe it would be nice, maybe he just needed sex, or some sort of simple low-steaks relationship. 

The restaurant was trying to be cozy and ended up feeling like a cave. Low lights, dark wood, candles on every table, bleeding little circles of soft yellow onto white plates. The air was warm and heavy with roasted garlic and red wine, all of it sitting on his skin like an extra layer.

He had the outside seat at the booth, back to the room, eyes on the door. His shoulders felt wrong against the leather, too squared, too stiff, like he’d forgotten how to sit like a normal person.

Jackie’s friend was called Maya. She really was pretty, Hayden had been right—smooth caramel skin, dark eyes that tracked conversations easily, braids hanging over one shoulder in thick, neat ropes. He could see all of that, admire the pattern of the braids where the candlelight caught the curve, but it didn’t land anywhere in his body.

“Thanks for doing tonight,” Maya said, fingers circling the stem of her wine glass. “Even though it’s after a game. My schedule’s been so fucking packed lately.”

Hayden’s knee knocked into his under the table. Not hard. Just enough to find him.

Shane blinked like someone had turned a light on in his face. He uncrossed and re-crossed his ankles under the table, and forced the muscles in his face into something resembling charm. “Yeah, it’s no problem. You’re a personal trainer, right?”

“Yeah.” She tilted her head slightly, watching him. “Yeah, I am.”

Across from them, Jackie raised her eyebrows at Hayden over her straw, then looked at Shane with bright, nosy interest. “So,” she said, “the game. How was it? Boston’s been coming down hard this season.”

Hayden groaned and dropped his slice of pizza back onto the plate like it had personally offended him. “Don’t even get me started. They’re fucking demons, and Rozanov is the devil. He’s gotta be indoctrinating them with sin in the locker room or something.”

Shane’s jaw tightened. The muscle jumped once, sharp, under his skin. He pushed a piece of cucumber around his plate with his fork until it left a little wet track in the dressing.

“He’s insane,” Hayden went on. “It’s like he was trying to paralyze Shane tonight. Right, buddy?”

“Yeah,” Shane said. The word barely had any tone to it. “He’s a fucking asshole.”

Jackie laughed, leaning her chin into her hand, elbow on the table. “I wonder what he does with all that aggression off the ice,” she said. “He seems like the type to get into bar fights for fun.”

“Serial killer,” Hayden said. “One of those butcher guys in thriller movies. Apron, knives on a wall. Definitely keeps trophies.”

Maya tore a piece of sourdough in half. The crust split with a quiet crackle, soft crumb stretching before it gave. “Or,” she said, “he’s just a weird sex freak.”

Shane's face did something complicated that he hoped read as a smile. The cucumber slid off his fork and flopped back into the salad.

Weird sex freak, huh?

He prodded his salad. That was one way to put it. That was the most conservative possible framing of it. Ilya’s voice could drop to a register that would have a person’s whole body responding before their brain had finished the sentence. 

When they’d had sex, Ilya had brought out handcuffs like it was nothing, like that was standard equipment. Shane hadn’t asked what else he had. He hadn’t wanted to know. Now his brain started filling in the blanks without asking permission.

What else would Ilya do, given the chance? Use rope? Something tighter. Something that left marks you could still see in the mirror three days later. Would he want to tie Shane up so completely he couldn’t move at all, just lie there and take whatever came next, all that control stripped off him the way you strip gear after a game. Would he hit him? Put a hand around his throat and squeeze until his eyes went soft and pleased and—

His breath snagged. He fixed his eyes on a cherry tomato and kept going.

Maybe he’d push Shane down onto his knees on the hotel carpet, hands tied behind his back so he couldn’t even steady himself, just kneel there between Ilya’s legs with his mouth open. Maybe he’d keep his foot pressed between Shane’s thighs, the hard arch grinding up against him while he talked in that slow, bored voice, telling him exactly what to do, what to take, when to swallow. Russian slurs like little knives, every word a cut, and Shane saying yes to each one just by staying there.

Heat pulsed low in his stomach, ugly and bright. He shifted in his seat. The denim dragged against him in a way that was not helpful.

“Okay, okay, I’m literally going to puke,” Hayden said loudly, cutting across the girls’ giggles. “Can we not dissect Rozanov’s sex life at dinner? I’m traumatized enough.”

Shane exhaled a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. His lungs burned a little on the way out. “Yes,” he said. “Please. Change the topic.”

“Fine,” Maya said, tapping a fingertip against the table as if scrolling for a new idea. “What do you like to do when you’re not being a famous hockey player, Shane?”

He let out a small laugh that sounded normal enough to his own ears, even though it scraped his chest on the way up. “Uh. I’m really into health and wellness.” His voice slotted into the familiar script automatically. “I do yoga.”

Her face brightened immediately. “Shut up, really? I'm a certified instructor.”

Yeah?"

"Five years. I trained in Bali originally, then did a second certification in Mysore." She leaned forward slightly, her braids falling over one shoulder. "What kind of practice do you do?"

"Mostly vinyasa. Some yin before games." He picked up his water glass. "My sports psychologist got me into it, actually. About three years ago."

"It changes everything, right? The breath work especially." She tilted her head. "Do you meditate?"

"Yeah. Morning, usually. On the balcony."

"In March?"

"In March."

She laughed, surprised. It was a good laugh, open and unguarded. "Okay, that's dedicated."

Shane smiled back at her. She was easy to talk to. She was warm and genuinely interested and her braids were pretty and she was looking at him like he was someone worth looking at, and he was aware of all of this from a clean, airless distance, the way you were aware of a rainbow through a window.

His brain was not in this restaurant.

His brain was still on its knees. 

Specifically, his brain was on its knees on the floor of Ilya's hotel room. Ilya is huge. How would it feel to be completely held down? His whole nervous system would go quiet, and the only available option would be to stop fighting. Fuck, and Ilya's thumb would pull on his jaw, keeping his mouth open. 

"—so I've been thinking about opening my own studio," Maya was saying. "Probably next year, if the financing works out. Jackie says I've been talking about it for five years so I should probably just do it."

"You should," Shane said. "If you want it."

"Do you always just do things you want?"

He thought about the thread sitting open on his phone. "No," he said. "I'm pretty bad at it, actually."

She smiled at him like that was an honest answer and she appreciated it. Across the table Hayden was telling Jackie something that was making her laugh, her hand on his forearm. Shane watched them for a second. An easy, unguarded shorthand of two people who belonged to each other. 

He looked back at Maya. 

She was pretty. She was smart. She had trained in Bali and Mysore and she wanted to open a studio. They had things in common, maybe. Under almost any other circumstances… 

The front door opened.

Shane didn’t even mean to look. His eyes jerked up anyway, like someone had tugged a string in the back of his neck.

Ilya stepped in.

The rest of the room went out of focus. The candle between them, Maya’s hand moving as she talked, the condensation sliding down Hayden’s beer glass—it all blurred at the edges like the camera had picked the wrong subject. The only thing in hard focus was black wool and broad shoulders and the familiar angle of a jaw he knew better than his own.

There was a girl with him. Asian, with long black curls falling past her shoulders and the tiniest waist Shane had probably ever seen, his hand resting easily at the small of her back.

Something in Shane’s chest hiccuped and then started hitting the inside of his ribs too fast, too hard, like it had skipped the step where it was supposed to ask his permission. His fork slipped in his fingers; the tines scraped the plate with a high, thin sound. Maya flinched. Shane didn’t even look at her.

The hostess led them to a booth in his direct line of sight. Of course she did. Shane watched Ilya sit—next to her, not across—and spread his arm along the back of the seat like a bracket around her body. When she laughed at something he said, she folded in toward him automatically, muscle memory from a life where men like him were safe.

Ilya lifted his hand and touched her face with one knuckle, a soft little stroke along her cheekbone as she shyly dropped her head. 

What is he saying to her. What is he calling her. Does he say good girl. Does he say baby. Does he touch her face like that and tell her she’s being so good for him, the same way he tells me I’m a good boy when he has his hand around my throat—

Heat crawled up the back of Shane’s neck so sharply it felt like a sunburn coming on in real time. His fingers went numb around his fork. For a second, he wasn’t sure if he was going to throw up or come in his jeans.

“—right, Shane?” Hayden said.

Shane realized there was silence at the table. Three people were looking at him. His mouth was open. Nothing was coming out.

He pushed his chair back too hard. The legs caught on the floor and the glasses jumped, water slapping the sides.

“Sorry,” he said. His voice came out wrong—thin and breathless, like someone else had used it first. “Sorry, I—uh. Bathroom.”

“Ah, shit, okay,” Hayden said, already leaning back to give him space. Then his gaze flicked past Shane’s shoulder toward the booth across the room, and his whole face changed. “Wait. Is that fucking Ilya Rozanov?”

Shane didn’t look to check. He was already moving, squeezing out of the booth, his shoulders knocking the hanging lamp overhead. The heat of the room hit his face, then the cooler air of the hallway as he turned down it, the noise of the restaurant dropping off like someone had closed a door behind his ears.

The corridor to the bathrooms was narrow, walls close, the wallpaper dark and busy. It smelled like citrus hand soap over old plumbing. He pressed his back against the wall halfway down, palms flat on his thighs, and pulled air into his lungs in short, shallow bursts that didn’t feel like they were going anywhere useful.

He stared at the floor, at the thin line where tile met baseboard, and tried to pin his eyes there. His hands were buzzing. The tips of his fingers had gone that numb-tingly way they did when he’d gripped his stick too hard all game.

Footsteps came down the hall, unhurried. The sound bounced off the walls and got bigger in the tight space.

Ilya turned the corner.

Up close, the details snapped back in: the open collar of his shirt, the line of his throat, the faint shadow of stubble. The smell hit a second later, clean cologne, salt, a trace of rink in the fabric.

Shane moved before his brain formed anything like a plan. He stepped off the wall and grabbed the front of Ilya’s shirt in both hands, knuckles colliding with buttons, and yanked him sideways into the strip of shadow between the bathroom doors.

“What the fuck are you doing here,” he hissed. The words shook in his mouth.

The pull barely rocked Ilya. He let the momentum take him the half-step, shoulder hitting the wallpaper with a soft thud, then just…looked down. At Shane’s hands in his shirt, pale fingers crushed into the black cotton, tendons standing out along the back of them. His gaze climbed up, slow, like it was boring, but he was willing to indulge it.

“I am on a date,” he said. His voice stayed level, almost flat. The vowels slid lazily.

“Yeah, well, I’m on a fucking date,” Shane snapped. His heart was everywhere, throat and temples and wrists, battering so hard he could feel it in his gums. He was too close; he could see the texture of Ilya’s skin, every pore. “Did you really follow me here?”

Ilya blinked once.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Shane’s grip tightened. He could feel the heat of Ilya’s body under the shirt, the solid thickness of his chest. His head flooded with images faster than he could sort them: being shoved into the bathroom, shoved face-first against the cold tile, the lock clicking, a hand between his shoulder blades, his cheek scraped by cheap metal. 

The ridiculous, humiliating weight of the want hit him so hard he almost swayed with it. He took the tiniest step closer without meaning to, lining his body up with Ilya’s, their shoes almost touching.

He waited for Ilya to move. To grab him back, to push, to hurt, to do anything.

Ilya’s gaze dropped briefly to Shane’s mouth, then to the frantic stutter of his pulse in his throat. Something unreadable flickered across his face and was gone.

He exhaled slowly through his nose and pinched his nose, like he had a headache. “Ah, you are insane, Hollander,” he said quietly. The words came out almost fond, ruined by the tired edge in them. His eyes lifted again, looking at Shane from under his lashes. “Focus on your date,” he murmured. “Instead of asking me to fuck you from across the restaurant.”

Heat flared under Shane’s skin, not arousal this time but a sharp, brittle humiliation that made his eyes sting. He opened his mouth, some denial already scrambling to the front, but Ilya was already moving.

He took Shane’s wrist in his hand. Just firm enough to feel the shape of the bone under the skin. He peeled Shane’s fingers off his shirt one by one, thumb pressing into each tense joint until they let go.

Then he let go of him completely, stepped sideways, and pushed the bathroom door open with his shoulder.

He didn’t look back as it swung shut behind him.

Shane stayed there in the narrow hall, hand hanging stupidly in the air for a second before he dropped it to his side. The blood that had been roaring in his ears left so fast the silence rang. The place where Ilya’s palm had circled his wrist burned; the rest of him felt weirdly hollow, like someone had scooped something important out of his chest and forgotten to put anything back.

He blinked hard until his vision cleared, swallowed down whatever was gathering in his throat, and walked back toward the restaurant.

The booth looked too bright when he reached it. He didn’t sit. He readjusted his coat on his shoulders like maybe that would keep his insides from spilling out.

“Hey.” His voice wasn’t steady. He cleared his throat. “I’m…sorry. I’m feeling really bad. I think I need to go.”

Maya’s expression folded into instant concern. “Oh no. Migraine?”

“Yeah,” he lied. It was easier than explaining that his nervous system had just taken a bat to the knees. “Something like that.”

“Aww,” Jackie said. “Go home, sleep. Text us if you need anything, okay?”

“Yeah, bud,” Hayden added, eyes flicking pointedly past Shane toward the other booth for a beat and then back. “Feel better.”

“I hope you feel better soon,” Maya said softly. “Jackie’ll send you my number.”

“Okay.” Shane nodded, once, too fast. “Thanks.”

He didn’t look across the room. He could feel that booth like a second gravity pull on his skin, but he kept his eyes on the door and walked straight out into the cold.

Chapter Text

June 2014 

The bathroom in the venue was the size of his first Moscow apartment.

Old floors, old walls, the lighting recessed and warm so that everything had the look of piss poured over stone. It smelled like dust and something synthetic beneath that, the aggressive cleanliness of a place where every surface had been wiped down to erase the evidence of whoever came before. Ilya stood at the sink with both hands braced on the edge of the counter and looked at himself.

The suit was black with velvet trim along the lapels. He had let the stylist talk him into the bow tie because Shane was wearing one too; it sat at the base of his throat, perfectly centered, the silk lying flat. His hair was longer than he usually kept it—long enough that it had required product, that it had required a comb and a side part, the curls pressed into a shape that was not their natural one. He looked expensive. He looked the part. Maybe he was the part.

His jaw twitched. The muscle just below his right cheekbone, a small involuntary knocking, like something behind the bone that had been pressing its case for hours and had not yet been heard.

He had barely noticed it until now, the way the tendon pulled tight for a half second and released, pulled tight and released, keeping its own quiet time. He lifted one hand from the counter and pressed his knuckles against the hinge of his jaw, felt it push back against him, insistent, his own body in quiet argument with itself. He held the pressure there, knuckle to bone, until the knocking slowed. He took his hand away. It started again.

He breathed through his nose.

The Cup. He had his hands on it, actual flesh touching metal, his name already at the engravers. He had done every single thing that had been asked of him on a sheet of ice since he was four years old, and then he had done more, and then he had done more than that. 

Grigori could take all of that and do whatever he liked with it. Preferably choke on it, die with it being the last thought he had. And the federation officials, and the men who had told him at seventeen with their eyes that his English was too rough, his attitude too difficult, that he was not a good candidate for the North American game. All of them. Every single one of them. They could all go fuck themselves. 

He had done it,  it was done, and the Cup was real, and it had happened, and no one could reach back in time and take it away.

He moved his hand from his jaw up his neck, slowly. Watched himself do it in the mirror. His palm was warm against his own skin, the stubble catching slightly on the heel of his hand, the pulse there jumping once against his fingers before he settled his grip. His own fingers around his own throat. He watched his eyes in the mirror and tightened, incrementally, until he could feel the curves of his own airway.

In the mirror, his forearm tensed, the tendons rising to the surface in clean parallel lines, and above his own hand, his eyes looked back at him.

Blue.

His Mama's blue. It had looked like life in her face, in her wide copper-curled brightness, like the colour was part of how she moved through the world, openly, warmly. Pale, speckled, the sort of colour that in different light looked like different things— but in the warm amber of this bathroom, they looked grey. Flat. Like water you wouldn't wade into because you couldn't see the bottom. Maybe his Mama’s eyes were not warm. Maybe they also looked like a painter-over-wall, a window with the shutters nailed shut from the inside. 

Probably, somewhere in his lineage, someone had stood in front of a mirror with these same cold coins for eyes and thought the same useless thoughts. Chronically cold, these eyes. He had been told this his whole life in different configurations—by coaches, by journalists, by women who initially found it attractive and later found it alarming. Your eyes, they said, give nothing away. As though that were an accident.

He squeezed.

His pulse pushed back against his fingers, steady and indifferent, going about its business regardless of what his hands were doing, and in the mirror, his face did not change. The jaw stayed tight, the mouth stayed flat, the eyes stayed exactly as they were—nothing moving behind them.

He wanted to see it happen. Whatever it was, warmth, some photochemical reaction in the iris, the thing that happened to other people's eyes when they were present in their own bodies. He had watched Shane's eyes fill at their corners with almost nothing. A piece of music coming through a speaker he hadn't prepared himself for. A bad call in the third period. 

Two dark moons in his face. 

He had watched Shane try to shut it off and fail. He had watched the tears gather at the inner corners, diamond-bright, involuntary, the body insisting on its own evidence.

He wondered what it would take to make his own eyes do that.

He let go.

His fingers trailed upward, dragging slowly across his cheekbone, the bridge of his nose. He ran one fingertip along it—the ridge of cartilage and calcified bone, the slight deviation where it had been broken and reset. Broken and reset. The first time it broke was not on the ice. His finger pressed into the slight imperfection at the bridge where the bone had knitted back imperfectly. He pinched it.

The body standing in this dark bathroom was not the same bundle of cells that had been conceived in Moscow twenty-two years ago. His body had rebuilt itself. Not just the muscle mass, not just the scar tissue layered over old damage in practiced rings—shoulder, knee, ribs—but deeper. Under the skin, under the fat, under the dense fibres of muscle that had been broken down and rebuilt and broken down again through ten thousand practice sessions, the bone itself had reorganised. Every cell had replaced itself. He had read somewhere that the human body replaced all of its cells over seven years. He had been in Boston for five. Soon, there would not be a single original particle of the boy who had left.

His thumb moved before he was aware of it. Went to swipe across the left corner of his own mouth to catch the foam there, white and faintly iridescent, catching the bad fluorescent light.  He could taste the bitterness of it on his tongue, could feel the burn of bile rising in his throat.

What foam. There is no foam there. 

His fingers hung in the air beside his cheek, arrested mid-motion. The heat of his own palm against his skin without touching it, a centimeter of air between them.

He lifted his hand and slapped himself across the cheek.

“Blyat.” 

His palms came down on the counter hard, the crack of it shooting up through his wrists, the chrome fixtures rattling with the impact. The sound bounced off every tiled surface and came back at him from all directions at once, filling the room, and he stood in it with his teeth together and his breath coming fast and ragged through his nose.  He had everything he'd ever wanted within his grasp, and his body was still begging for more, letting demons of his past crawl out from the mirror and sink their claws into him.

Ilya dragged both hands up over his face. Palms scraping up over his jaw, his cheeks, the bridge of his broken nose, his temples, fingers raking back through the gelled curls they had spent twenty minutes on, not caring, pulling the skin of his face upward and back until his features stretched into something almost unrecognisable and then letting go, letting everything fall back into place, and standing there with his hands still pressed against his temples and his breath still ragged and the sting still fading from his cheek.

Yes, what was he doing? What was he doing standing in a bathroom in Las Vegas, dissociating over— over what? 

He shook his head once, let out a deep breath, and reassembled his face, smoothed the stray curls back into place.

Whatever it was didn’t matter, anyway. He had won the cup. He will win MVP. And somewhere in this building, right now, his was existing. Breathing. Adjusting his bow tie with hands that probably weren't entirely steady. Soon he would see him, and the whole 200 days of waiting would collapse into nothing, the months of distance folding up as they had never been.

Shane. The name was like a prayer on his lips, a talisman against the darkness that threatened to consume him. Shane, who had ignored him for 62 agonizing days, who had left him hanging in a void of silence and uncertainty. Shane, who Ilya had punished with a 124 days of his own coldness.

He had been patient. He had been, by any reasonable measure of the word, extraordinarily patient. He had felt the thread between them pulled taut and had held it without cutting it and without closing it, simply held it, taut, two hundred days of tension stored in a single thread.

But that was all in the past now. The waiting, the watching, the endless reserves of patience that Ilya had never known he possessed - it had all led to this moment. 

Shane had come to him.

And Shane would come to him again tonight, in one form or another, because Shane did not have a choice about this, and they both knew it, and the knowing of it was the only thing that had made the 124 days survivable.

He reached for his watch on the edge of the sink, slid it over his wrist, and clicked the clasp into place. He checked the face of it. He was, as he had intended to be, running seven minutes late.

Three minutes till he sees his favourite person. 

His jaw had stopped twitching. His cheek still held the heat of the slap, a fading warmth pressed into the bone that would be gone in another thirty seconds. He adjusted his bow tie in the mirror, and his expression was exactly what it always was—guarded, still, the pale eyes giving away nothing.

Shane was his favourite person in the entire world.

Ilya turned on his heel, the soles of his dress shoes clicking against the tile floor as he strode towards the door. He paused with his hand on the knob, taking one final deep breath to center himself.

The backstage was all exposed pipes and black cable runs and the sensory hell of a venue from the wrong side, the music from the main stage bleeding through the walls as a vibration rather than a sound, felt in the sternum rather than heard, and the lighting back here was the harsh fluorescent kind that left no softness anywhere.

The kind of space that existed purely to be moved through quickly and wasn't designed for standing in for fifteen minutes while your heart tried to exit your body through your sternum.

Shane was standing in it. He had been standing in it for fifteen minutes.

He checked his watch. Seven minutes past their call time. Then checked it again thirty seconds later because checking it the first time had not made time move any differently

Seven minutes. Ilya was seven minutes late, which was technically within the realm of things that happened to people who were not trying to make a point, except that everything Ilya did was trying to make a point, and the point right now was unmistakable: you are not worth being on time for. You are something to arrive at casually, incidentally, whenever it suited. You are a pitstop, not a destination.

He pressed a palm flat against one of the overhead pipes and held it there. The metal was scalding, some ventilation system running hot somewhere above him, and the burn spread immediately across his palm, red and immediate and entirely grounding. He held it. Breathed through it.

Okay. What if Ilya didn't show? What if he had to walk out there and present the Lord Talon Award alone, standing at a podium in front of every person in professional hockey, and explain the conspicuous gap beside him? Hi, yes, Rozanov isn't here, probably because he has correctly identified me as a pathetic, cock-drunk fool who grabbed him by the collar in a restaurant hallway and shook him like a—

He pulled his hand off the pipe.

The skin of his palm throbbed. He pressed his fingers into it and breathed out through his nose.

What if Ilya did show?

That was arguably worse. Because then he would have to stand next to him. In front of cameras. With a microphone. And he would have to look normal doing it—relaxed, easy, the good-natured rivals bit—while standing two feet from the person he had been jerking off to for the better part of four months. Not even to anything real. To the memory of a text. To the angle of a jaw in a post-game interview. To the weight of a hand closing around his wrist in a narrow hallway and peeling his fingers off a shirt, one by one, like that was nothing.

Would Ilya be able to tell?

No, he told himself firmly. No. Obviously not. He was a professional. He had been performing for cameras since he was seventeen years old. He could stand next to Ilya Rozanov for four minutes and present an award without broadcasting the entire interior of his skull to the TSN broadcast team.

He was fine.

He was fine, he was safe, and this? Well, nothing was happening. He shook his head once, sharp, and straightened up, and rolled his shoulders back inside the suit jacket and checked his watch again.

"Wow, nice watch." The drawl came from directly behind him. "They give this to you for free, or what?"

The strings pulled. His spine went straight before he had consciously decided anything, his chin lifting, his whole body snapping into alignment. He felt it happening and hated it, the involuntary, humiliating betrayal of his body, like he was coded for it, and forced his jaw to clench down hard over whatever his face had been about to do.

He exhaled slowly. Shoved his hands into his pockets. Smooth.

"Where the fuck were you?" he said to the air in front of him, to the dark curtain six feet away, to literally anything that was not Ilya. His voice came out flat and clipped, and he could not tell from the inside whether it read as indignation or barely-managed terror. He hoped it was indignation. "We're on in five seconds."

"More like twenty-five seconds." He could hear the eyebrows in it,  the shrug audible in every syllable. The bravado landed in Shane's ribs like a blade slipped neatly between them. Still doing this. Still doing the whole effortless, unbothered thing, still existing inside that impenetrable climate of nothing-touches-me, still making Shane feel like he was the only person in any room who was visibly affected by anything.

"What were you even doing?" Shane said, his throat tightening around the end of it.

A step. Ilya moved up beside him, and their shoulders connected—a brief, glancing pressure through layers of expensive fabric, there and then gone as Ilya settled into the space—and Shane's nervous system registered it the way it registered a hard check into the boards: total, instantaneous, all-consuming. His palm was still throbbing. The intro music started somewhere beyond the curtain, muffled and bass-heavy, and he could hear a presenter's voice rising over it, the cadence of someone building to an introduction, their names forming somewhere in the middle distance.

He didn't care. It felt very far away.

"I was busy," Ilya said.

Shane turned his head. He didn't mean to; it was the same involuntary physics as the spine-straightening, the same puppet strings, and for a second, he just looked.

The suit fit him like a second skin, lying flat across the broad shelf of his shoulders without pulling, the lapels lying clean, the velvet trim catching the blue-purple backstage lights in a thin, dark line. The mole on the side of his face stood out starkly in that light, the angle of his jaw below it tight and still. His curls were pressed into a slightly imperfect side part—a single curl had escaped somewhere above his right ear. He looked nonchalant. He looked fucking hot.

Shane did not know why he said it. He did not decide to say it. It came up out of him without permission, bypassing whatever mechanism was supposed to screen these things before they reached his mouth.

"With who?"

Ilya's jaw twitched. Just once, a small knock beneath the skin, there and gone. His eyes moved to Shane's face, a half-second of something that Shane couldn't read because he wasn't given enough time to read it, and then Ilya turned away.

He stepped forward and pushed through the curtain.

The music swelled. The light on the other side was blinding white, the crowd noise crashing in through the gap before the fabric swung shut again.

Shane stood in the dark and felt the question hanging in the air where Ilya had been, unanswered, already irretrievable.

He pressed his throbbing palm flat against his thigh.

Then he followed him through.

The light hit Ilya the moment he cleared the curtain, eight thousand watts of it, white and total, the kind of light that turned the audience into a single breathing darkness and left you standing alone in the center of everything with nowhere to hide. Ilya walked into it and felt, immediately, and despite himself, the smile began.

He bit his lip to hold it. It didn't work.

He could feel Shane two steps to his left, reading from the teleprompter with the careful precision of a man who had rehearsed this, who had stood in front of a mirror this morning and practiced the cadence of it, who had shown up twelve minutes early and was now going to get through this with every muscle in his body locked down if it killed him.

The faintest crease between his brows as he tracked the scrolling text. The shake in the breath between sentences, so small it was barely a shake at all, more like the ghost of one. Ilya watched him in his peripheral vision and felt the laugh building in his chest and pressed his clasped hands harder together in front of him to keep it from coming out.

With who.

He dragged his tongue slowly along the back of his top teeth and looked at Shane over the podium. Shane's eyes caught his for a half-second, then went back to the teleprompter. Ilya let his gaze stay.

With who indeed, solnyshko.

The question had come out of him without preparation, without the usual armour, stripped completely bare by whatever was happening in Shane's chest that he couldn't close back up. His heart on his sleeve, people would say. But that wasn't right—it wasn't anywhere near the surface voluntarily. Shane kept his heart behind four inches of reinforced bone and every professional habit he had ever cultivated and even then, it wasn't enough, even then it leaked through the seams when Ilya was looking. Because Ilya had been the one looking for long enough to learn the seams. He had gone through the ribcage, through all of it, the cage Shane had built over years of being told his reactions were too large, his feelings too much, the cage that kept the soft muscle of his heart so perfectly hidden that most people never knew it was there at all—

He had gone through all of it. Had brought that thing out into the light, that red and beating and bloodied thing, and held it carefully in both hands and shown it back to him. This is what you are. This is who you are.

And it only beat for Ilya. Surely Shane knew that by now.

He turned back to the teleprompter, and the smile was still there, and he let it stay.

Maybe this was what his eyes looked like when they were alive. He had stood in a bathroom fifteen minutes ago and wondered what it would take—what force would be required to make those dead fish eyes do something, feel something, register the fact of being inside a living body. And now here, under a thousand watts of stage lighting with Shane Hollander's shoulder three inches from his own, he could feel every capillary beneath his skin lit up and pounding, his blood moving with a clarity and urgency that the last four months had not contained. His heart was hitting his sternum with something that felt almost like enthusiasm. His lungs were working with actual investment in the outcome.

Maybe this was it, maybe this was what living feels like. 

Maybe this was just what Shane did to him, and maybe that was fine. Maybe he didn't need to understand it beyond the fact of it, that he was only alive in proximity to him.

He leaned forward toward the microphone. "Is the friends we made along the way." He clasped his hands in front of him. Raised his eyebrows at the room.

The laughter came back at him from the dark in a warm wave, rolling across the floor and washing over the stage, and Ilya stood in it with his face straight and thought about how much funnier it would be if he leaned back toward the mic right now and said, completely conversationally: You know this guy likes to be choked during sex? Just to see what Shane's face did. Just to watch the careful composure disintegrate in real time in front of four hundred hockey professionals and the TSN broadcast team.

He decided against it. Marginally.

"Hey." He glanced sideways at Shane, then back at the teleprompter, keeping his voice in that register—the one where he pushed the accent a little thicker, let the English go a little choppier, worked slightly harder than necessary to find the words. "Before we give out next award—" he slipped his phone from his jacket pocket— "can I get selfie with you?"

He watched it happen. The almost-imperceptible release of tension in Shane's jaw, the corner of his mouth lifting a fraction, the slight softening around his eyes. For the cameras? Maybe. For Ilya? Also maybe. Probably both, and the fact that Shane couldn't always tell the difference anymore was one of Ilya's quieter achievements.

Shane looked at the phone, then back at him, the soft scoff moving through his nose. "Okay, fine." He nodded toward the screen. "But hurry up."

The audience laughed again. The crowd loved them. Of course, they did—the Russian and the Canadian, the rivals who could barely stand each other, doing a bit together at the most-watched awards ceremony in the league. If they only knew.

Ilya brought his arm around Shane's back. He let his hand settle at the nape of his neck, fingers curling into the short hair there, the heel of his palm pressing into the knob of the top vertebra, and he gripped with more force than the moment required—more than a casual arm around a colleague's shoulders, more than the cameras needed, more than anyone observing them would consciously clock but enough that Shane would feel it, that Shane would feel Ilya's hand owning the back of his neck in front of four hundred people who had no idea what they were seeing.

Five photos.

Shane counted them. The shutter sound went off once, twice, the pause where a normal person would check the screen and pocket the phone, and then three, four, five.

The grip at the back of his neck was not a casual thing. It was not the loose, performative arm-around-the-shoulder of two colleagues doing a bit for the cameras. It was fingers, and pressure, and a large hand that knew what it was doing—the heel of his palm settled into the top of Shane's spine with an almost medicinal weight, the kind of pressure that went straight down through the nervous system and said stay, stay, stay. Shane could feel every individual point of contact. He could feel the warmth of it radiating through his collar. Little goosebumps chased each other up the back of his neck and down between his shoulder blades, and he leaned fractionally forward—toward the camera, ostensibly, plausibly, toward the camera—and his skin pulled toward Ilya's hand the way a compass needle pulls north, the orientation not chosen, just true.

He thought about what it would feel like if the hand moved. If Ilya slid it around to the front, to the hollow of his throat, to where his pulse was going completely haywire beneath the tie, and squeezed the way he had in the hotel room last year. The thought sent a wave of heat rolling down his body all the way to his crotch.

He was going to die. He was going to die on stage at the League Awards in front of four hundred people and the entire hockey-watching public and the cause of death was going to be listed as Ilya Rozanov's hand.

Then the hand moved.

Not away—mercy did not care for Shane Hollander—but down, drifting with a slowness that could not have been accidental, from the back of his neck, across the plane of his shoulder, and then along the line of his spine, tracing the curve of his back through expensive fabric until it reached the top of his ass and rested there. Shane's fingers tightened around the envelope in his hands. He could feel the paper crumpling at the edges where he was gripping it.

"Great." Ilya smiled out into the blinding yellow dark of the audience, white teeth catching the stage lights, every inch of him the picture of relaxed amusement. Then he squeezed.

Shane jolted. It moved through him like a current, a full-body flinch he managed to compress into something that probably just looked like a shift of his weight, a slight adjustment of his stance, nothing anyone in the audience would clock, nothing the cameras would catch. The envelope crinkled audibly in his fists.

"Give me your number," Ilya said, sliding his phone into his pocket with his free hand, gaze fixed serenely forward. "I'll text them to you."

Shane stared at the side of his face. The mole. The jaw. The impassive blankness that said he found what he was doing to Shane in front of every important person in North American professional hockey slightly funny. 

"No chance," he heard himself say. The audience went up—a warm, rolling burst of laughter, genuine, delighted, exactly what the moment called for. 

Shane looked down at the envelope in his hands. His palms had gone hot and damp inside the paper. He couldn't feel his legs with any particular reliability. Somewhere behind the wall of stage lights, hockey professionals were laughing at the charming spectacle of two men who apparently couldn't stand each other, and Shane was standing here, shrivelling quietly inside his own skin, watching the whole thing happen through two holes in his skull, a body going through correct motions while the person inside observed from a great and airless distance.

His voice, when it came out, was steady, professional.  He did not know how that was possible. He saved it under things to examine later, in private, when he had the resources.

He worked his thumb under the seal of the envelope and started to open it. "And the Lord Talon Award for the most sportsmanlike player goes to—"

He got through the curtain and the air changed.

Not because it was different, not really, but because his body had crossed some invisible line and the whole world went with it. The applause was still behind him, the lights still hot on the stage, but here in the backstage corridor, everything thinned out and sharpened at the same time. The black tape on the floor. The matte metal of the pipes. The stale breath of the ventilation system pushing warm air down the back of his neck. He took one step, and the floor seemed to tilt under him, not enough to make him fall, just enough to make him aware of every muscle in his calves trying to keep him upright.

The corridor swallowed him. Dark and narrow, the ribcage of the building, all exposed pipe and black cable and the distant muffled sound of the ceremony continuing without them, some other presenter's voice rising and falling behind the curtain like something heard through water. 

His pulse had become a separate animal. It beat in the hollow under his sternum, then his throat, then behind his eyes, each thud arriving hard enough to make him feel it in his teeth. The grip from the stage was still on him. Not literally—he knew that. But his skin hadn’t caught up yet. The back of his neck still burned where Ilya’s fingers had been, and the warmth had spread, somehow, to his shoulders and down the ridge of his spine, like the touch had left a stain he couldn’t scrub off.

He kept moving because stopping would mean standing still with all that blood in his head, and he didn’t want to know what would happen if he did.

The corridor narrowed, then narrowed again, the kind of backstage passage that always smelled like dust and hot wiring and old carpet that had absorbed too many spills to ever smell clean again. Shane could hear the ceremony through the curtain behind him, a wave of applause rising and falling in a room that had become impossibly far away. The sound pressed from the inside of his skull, a low white roar. Each breath scraped. The air had weight. It took effort to pull in, and then it seemed to stop halfway down, like there wasn’t enough room left in him for it to go.

He wanted to be angry. That would have been easier. Anger had somewhere to go. But what kept leaking through was something softer and worse, something that made his stomach twist and his skin go loose and cold at the same time. 

He reached the bathroom and shoved through the door.

The room was small and bright in the worst possible way, fluorescent light flattening everything into cheap colour. The soap dispenser was half empty. There was a smell under the bleach, old plumbing, and something sour trapped in the grout. Shane put both hands on the sink hard enough that the porcelain bit back into his palms and bent over it, head hanging, shoulders rigid.

His fingers shook against the edge. Not enough that someone standing behind him would have seen it, maybe, but enough that he saw it. He saw every tiny vibration. He saw the tendons in the backs of his hands jump under the skin. He saw the muscles in his forearms stand hard and white where he was gripping too tightly. He felt the whole of his body trying to decide whether to bolt or vomit or fold in half.

His breathing was too fast. Too shallow. Each inhale came in thin and sharp, as if his chest had forgotten how to widen all the way. He forced one in through his nose and it came out again before it had settled anywhere useful. Another. Another. His throat tightened around the next one and he swallowed air instead of taking it in, which made the pressure in his head worse, made the buzzing behind his eyes sharpen to a bright, miserable line.

He could still feel Ilya’s hand. The skin still warm in the exact shape of each finger, the impression of the grip still there, the way a handprint stays in cold clay. And the trail of it, the drag down the curve of his spine, the weight settling at the small of his back, and then lower. He was probably imagining the finger between the crease. He was probably constructing that from the raw material of anticipation, his body filling in what it had been braced to receive.

His eyes stung.

He bent lower, almost touching his forehead to the sink, and for one horrible second, he thought he might actually slide down it and end up on the floor with his cheek against the tile and his knees tucked tight to his chest, some broken thing folded under a sink where the crew would have to step around him. Like a doormat, because that’s what he was. His arms shook harder at the thought. His heart hammered against the inside of his ribs so hard it seemed to move his whole torso with it. He could feel heat blooming under his collar, then a rush of cold across his scalp, then the prickling flood of sweat at the base of his spine.

The door opened behind him.

He straightened too fast. The movement caught in his chest, painful and abrupt, and his hands tightened on the sink as if that could keep him from tipping over. 

Ilya’s body.  The room seemed to shift it, around the indecent ease of him crossing the tile and settling against the wall beside the hand dryer. His body looked composed in a way that made Shane’s feel twice as loud by comparison. Shoulder to the wall. One arm hooked over the machine. Head tipped just slightly. He let out a breath, a soft sigh. 

Then he raised his eyes.

They came up slowly, pale and careful, and found Shane's face, and stayed there.

Shane didn't look in the mirror. He couldn't. He didn't have the courage right now to see whatever was happening in his own expression. He could feel it, though. And it felt pathetic.

Shane tilted his head up.

Brown. The word was useless for what was actually there. Brown the way a forest floor in October was brown, not a colour but a whole system of colour, built up in layers over a long time, everything underneath still present and contributing. The iris was dark at its outer rim, a clean border like the tree line at dusk, where the sky ended, and the wood began, and then inward it fractured. Warm amber threading through deeper walnut, and within that, flecks of something almost green—not green, but the suggestion of green, the light filtered through canopy, that gold-green that happened in the Losiny Ostrov in the first week of May when the leaves had just opened and weren't quite opaque yet and the sun came through them sideways in the late afternoon and turned everything it touched briefly precious.

Ilya had been in that forest once, when he was seven. The birch trunks were white and close, the ground soft with old leaves going back to earth, the light doing exactly that—fractured, warm, unreliable, falling through the branches in broken columns and catching the disturbed air wherever something had moved through it.

Within the warmth, if you were close enough—and Ilya was close enough now, four feet across a small, dim bathroom, nothing between them—there were darker flecks, deep brown going almost black at their centres, like the shadows under the oak roots where the frost stayed longest, where the light never quite reached. And at the very inner rim, circling the pupil, a ring of something richer, almost copper, the colour of the leaf litter in late autumn when it was still wet from the night before and hadn't yet dried into something dull.

A snowflake had fallen once in that forest, in his memory, a single one, and he had held out his palm, and it had landed there, and he had looked at it before it went to water, the wet brightness of held tears thickening the light at the inner corners, turning it glassy and sharp. The oak trees bending in wind they hadn't predicted. The birds going quiet all at once before a storm.

A sound escaped him.

Ilya laughed.

Not the real one, but that smaller version, the one that lived in the back of his throat and came out quiet and a little mean. He lifted the hand resting on the dryer with a small shrug, his mouth pulling into that crooked half-smile, and shook his head once, gently, like Shane was something he found both predictable and privately delightful.

"Well?" he said.

The panic in Shane's chest coiled and converted, fast and clean, the way gas ignited. Something yanked him up out of that soft, broken place and deposited him here, in a fluorescent-lit bathroom, with his blood running hot and his hands wanting to break Rozanov’s jaw.

"What?" The word came out with a scoff attached to it, his eyebrows going wide, his voice already too loud for the room. "What do you want, Rozanov?" The words were flooding now, unstoppable, falling out of him in the desperate, graceless way of things that had been held too long. "You haven't answered a text from me in like five months." He gestured with both hands, the movement sharp and helpless at once. Ilya stayed still against the wall, his mouth tight now, the half-smile still there but hesitating, something underneath it going quiet. "You'll barely even acknowledge I exist unless there's a fucking camera pointed at us, and then it's for a—" Shane stopped, his jaw worked. "For a fucking clown show."

The smile disappeared completely.

Shane watched it go and didn't stop. "So yeah." His voice climbed. "What the fuck do you actually want from me?" He stared at him. "Well?"

Ilya let his head fall back against the wall, fully, the long column of his throat exposed to the fluorescent light, and stayed there for a moment, head back, eyes on the ceiling, and then came forward again, slow, dipping his chin and unbuttoning his blazer with one hand.

"I want you to suck my dick," he said. His voice was completely flat.

Shane turned away. Both hands went to the front of his own head, fingers pressing into his skull. "Oh, fuck you," he gasped, the sound torn out of him, and turned back. His eyebrows pulled tight. "You are unbelievable." The last word shook at the end, making him sound younger than he was, and he knew it, and couldn't stop it. "You suck my dick."

He shook his head. The anger was still there, but underneath it, something else was moving, something that had no name he was willing to use right now, something that had been building since a backstage corridor and a selfie and a hand at the back of his neck in front of four hundred people.

He turned to the mirror.

His own face looked back at him. The flush climbing his neck, the brightness in his eyes, the bow tie still straight because the night had been designed to humiliate him in every possible detail. His chest was heaving slightly. He looked completely unhinged and completely alive and absolutely, catastrophically done for.

Shane's reflection arrived in the mirror before Ilya looked for it. He hadn't meant to look. But there it was—the mirror above the sink catching Shane's face and holding it, and Ilya standing behind him with the wall at his back, watching.

A shudder moved through Shane's mouth. Not a sound exactly, not quite, more the shape of one, the ghost of something that wanted to be a word and didn't make it that far, just left his lips as a low, soft decimal, barely a breath, barely anything. Shane himself probably hadn't heard it.

His brows had collapsed inward, the two lines between them deeper than usual, pulled down by something that wasn't anger, the opposite of anger, a feeling that came when you'd been carrying something too long and too alone, and your body had finally run out of the resources required to keep it upright. His hands hung at his sides, drifting slightly, shifting, as if they kept reaching for something to hold onto and finding nothing. 

Every cell of his was making the same sound. Ilya could hear it—please, I don't know what to do, tell me, please.

Ilya pushed off the wall.

He crossed the tile slowly, his shoes quiet on it, head tilted, looking for Shane's eyes in the mirror. They weren't available. They were somewhere else, sliding inward, turned toward a dark interior that wasn't this room, wasn't this moment—Shane falling into himself the way he did when the ground went soft under him, retreating to whatever small, dim place he went when things got too large and too close.

That was fine. Ilya could be patient for another few seconds.

He reached him. He stood close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off the back of Shane's neck, the strip of skin above the collar still hot where his hand had been on stage, still holding the heat of it. He reached out and took Shane's chin between his thumb and fingers, the grip firm and deliberate, and turned his face.

Shane's eyes stayed down. Eyelashes against his cheek, dark and still.

Ilya tilted his chin up.

The eyes stayed down.

He applied the smallest additional pressure, and Shane's lashes fluttered, and his throat moved on a swallow, and his eyes came up, finally, reluctantly, like something surfacing. They were devastating.

Red at the rims, the skin there bruised-looking, tender. The irises so full of light and liquid that Ilya could see his own reflection in them—the shadow of his own face, reduced and dark, floating in all that brown. The tears hadn't fallen. They were simply there, brimming, sitting at the inner corners and making everything brighter and more unbearable by proximity, the way frost made things vivid before it destroyed them.

Ilya leaned in, not all the way, just enough. "Maybe," he said quietly, "ask nicely."

Shane shook his head, a tiny, helpless motion, and tried to drop his chin, tried to find the floor again, tried to disappear back into himself. Ilya kept his face exactly where it was. Held him there in his hand. 

"Hm?"

Shane blinked.

The tear at his left inner corner let go. Just the one, it tracked down the side of his nose in a clean, thin line, and Ilya watched it go. Shane's mouth had been pushed into a slight pout by Ilya's grip on his jaw, lips parted, his breath coming in shallow pulls that moved his chest visibly. "Please," Shane said.

It came out small. Pressed soft against his lower lip by the way Ilya was holding his face, the word barely more than an exhalation, but it was there, it was whole, it was entirely meant.

Something moved through Ilya from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet,  the way good vodka moved, the way sunlight moved through a window you'd forgotten was there. He felt himself smile. Not on his face, or not only there, in his chest, in the backs of his hands, in the place behind his sternum that usually held nothing but pressure.

He leaned forward until their foreheads almost touched. A centimetre of charged air between them.

"If you want me to get on my knees," Ilya said, low, close enough that the words landed against Shane's mouth, "on this filthy bathroom floor—" he paused, watching Shane's eyes flutter, watching the slight catch in his breathing— "and suck your dick." Another pause, long enough to feel. "You will have to ask nicer than that."

Shane's throat worked. His eyes dropped to somewhere around Ilya's mouth, then came back up. Ilya felt his thumb move along the line of Shane's jaw almost before he'd decided to move it, dragging slowly, the stubble catching on the pad of his thumb, and then he released the grip.

Shane's head dipped. The shyness of it was extraordinary—a man who had captained a professional hockey team since he was twenty years old, a man who had been interviewed by a thousand cameras, dropping his head like he didn't know what to do with his own face. His voice came from somewhere lower than his usual register, the vibration gone out of it, thin and quiet and terribly sincere.

"Please get on your knees." A soft exhale, almost a sigh, "On this filthy bathroom floor." He swallowed. "And suck my dick. Please.”

Shane leaned forward. His forehead found the curve of Ilya's neck and pressed there, settling into the hollow between his collar and his jaw, and the exhale that followed was the longest exhale Ilya had ever heard from him—something that had been held since Montreal, since the hallway, since the restaurant, since 124 days ago, finally and completely released into the warm space between Ilya's throat and his shoulder. His nose pressed into the collar of Ilya's jacket. He breathed in. Then again. The way something deprived breathed when it finally reached what it needed—carefully, like he was trying to make it last.

Ilya stood very still and felt Shane breathe him in and wanted to give him everything.

He could do it right now. Press him gently back against the wall, sink down onto this disgusting floor without caring about the floor, give Shane his mouth and his hands, and watch those eyes go liquid and dark and finally, finally stop carrying whatever it was they'd been carrying.

He wanted to.

He was not going to.

"No," Ilya said.

"What?" The word was muffled against his jacket.

"No," Ilya said it again the same way, flat and certain, and felt Shane's breath change against his collar, felt the small sound he made, somewhere between a whimper and a sigh. Ilya brought one hand up and rested it briefly at the back of Shane's head, and then stepped back. 

"We will go back to our seats," Ilya said. "Watch the rest of this boring show." He watched Shane's face. "And then go to boring party after."

Shane made a soft, ruined sound.

"And then," Ilya continued, tilting his head slightly, "when you have been waiting all night—" he paused long enough to let that settle— "you will come to my hotel room. And then I will maybe—" he closed one eye— "maybe do more than just suck your dick."

For a moment, nothing.

Then the corner of Shane's mouth moved. A smile, but smaller than a smile, softer. His eyes creased at the outer corners, damp and bright. He looked, in this terrible fluorescent light, in this bathroom that smelled of bleach and old pipes, like the most beautiful thing in the world.

"When did your English get so good?" Shane said.

Ilya leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms. "I, uh." He considered. "I read the New Yorker now."

Shane's head came up properly for the first time. "Really?"

Ilya watched him. That grin, cautious and warm and beginning to arrive despite everything, Ilya felt his heart lurch, like a skate catching an edge. He kept his face composed. "No," he said. "The New Yorker is boring."

Shane nodded, the grin still there, soft at its edges, his eyes still wet. He looked down. "My dad loves it."

"Ah." Ilya tilted his head. "So the being boring is—is genetic."

"Wow," Shane said quietly. "Genetic."

Ilya looked at him for a moment. Then: "Let's make a deal." He straightened slightly. "If you win MVP tonight, I will blow you, choke you, kiss you. Whatever you want."

Shane's eyes went glassy again immediately, the brief warmth of the last thirty seconds pulling at the seams of him. "And if you win?"

Ilya's hands went still against his sides. He felt them. He felt the slight tremor moving through his fingers, felt the want pushing up against the inside of his chest, felt every instinct he possessed straining forward toward the four inches of bathroom air between Shane's mouth and his own. If he were less patient. If he let himself collapse forward into the brown of those eyes, the oak and the amber and the wet bright edge of the unshed tears. If he were any other version of himself—

He leaned forward.

Shane's eyes closed. His chin tipped up, the line of his throat going long, expectant. He went completely still, lips just parted, waiting with his whole body.

Ilya felt the warmth of his breath.

He stepped back.

"Good luck tonight," he said.

He turned, and crossed the tile, and pushed through the bathroom door, and let it swing shut behind him without looking back.

The elevator was mirrored on three sides.

Shane stood in the centre of it and looked at himself once, the undone bow tie hanging loose against his chest, the top button open, the jacket folded over his arm, and then looked at the floor instead, at the dark carpet with its repeating geometric pattern, and counted the seconds.

Ilya had won MVP.

Of course he had. Shane had sat in the dark of the party with a drink in his hand, one drink, then somehow a second, the glass appearing in his hand at some point during the awards without him fully accounting for how it had gotten there, and watched Ilya be congratulated with a strange look on his face, the one that looked like indifference from a distance, but also, if you were watching from across a dark room with two drinks in you, like something else entirely. 

Shane had drunk the second drink. He knew that this was a mistake. He set aside the thought, because earlier he already decided he didn’t need the complication of second thoughts tonight. But still, the last time he had been drinking with Ilya—

He gritted his teeth.

He pressed the heel of his palm against his sternum where the anxiety lived, where it had been living all evening, and breathed through his nose. The elevator climbed. The floor numbers changed above the door.

His phone was in his jacket pocket. In it, a text that had arrived forty minutes ago, Lily: Penthouse 1, door code 3709.

That was all. No preamble. The assumption sitting in the blankness of the unsaid: you're coming. Not are you coming. Not if you want. Just the number and the code and the certainty, and Shane had stood at the edge of the party with the phone in his hand and felt the pull of it move through him like gravity, like something tilting at its axis, and had known—the same way he knew when a play was already decided, when the outcome was already written and the next thirty seconds were just the body catching up to the fact—that he was going.

He had thought about going to his own room first. Had stood at the elevator bank in the lobby for a full minute, jacket over his arm, weighing it. If he went to his room he could take off the suit and wash his face and sit on the edge of the bed and think it through properly, run the actual numbers on what he was about to do and whether it was something a person with any self-preservation instinct would do. He could talk himself out of it. He would talk himself out of it, methodically, thoroughly, the same way he talked himself through every other thing that was bad for him. He would be proud of himself tomorrow. He would be safe.

So he had come straight here instead. And who was he kidding. He would have taken the stairs if he had to, he would have climbed the outside of the building if the doors had been locked, all to reach Ilya Rozanov. 

He gritted his teeth.

He shook his head. The elevator climbed.

His thumb found the button for his own floor. He went to press it, felt the cool resistance of it under the pad of his thumb, felt himself meaning it—

The doors to the top floor opened. He stood there. The hallway stretched ahead of him, long and warm and quiet. He stood in the open elevator for one second, two, the doors trying to close and bumping gently against his shoulder.

The carpet absorbed his footsteps. The lighting was low and amber along the walls, and Shane walked. One step, then another, and the thought arrived between one foot and the next.

This is the anniversary.

He stopped.

Two years ago. This city. A hotel not entirely unlike this one. He took another step and felt the thought move through him the way cold water moved, finding every gap, getting into every place that wasn't sealed. And on the anniversary of his—of what—

He couldn't finish it. He shook his head, pressing his hand flat against his mouth.

Fuck. He was really doing this. He was walking down a hallway in Las Vegas toward Ilya Rozanov's penthouse on the anniversary of— He was really throwing himself into his arms? Again? Had he not learned his lesson once, had the lesson not been thorough enough, did some part of his brain require a second demonstration before it understood?

He stopped again. Leaned his shoulder into the wall, the plaster cool through his shirt.

Was this self-harm? Some drawn-out, complicated, finely crafted mechanism of self-punishment for the playoffs. For playing fine. For playing okay. For playing not-good-enough, which was fine dressed up in acceptable language, which was his failure regardless of what anyone else's metrics said. Was this the consequence of that—walking himself toward Ilya's hands, arranging to be hurt so he could set down the responsibility for the pain. I did not cause this. This was done to me.

Shane wiped the back of his hand slowly across his mouth.

The relief of that sentence. He couldn't pretend he didn't know that relief. The luxury of giving someone else the controls, of letting someone else make the mistakes, of being able to sit with the damage afterward and knowing its cause was outside himself. It was the same relief as the kneeling, as the following of instructions.

And also…

He nibbled at the edge of his thumbnail.

Ilya was so good. He was catastrophically, unreasonably, almost offensively good. Shane turned to liquid in his hands, every time, without exception. Like his body had been waiting since birth to be touched like that and had no defence against it whatsoever.

He stared at the carpet.

Who cares, he thought. Who cares, genuinely, at this point. He was already in this hallway. He was already slightly drunk and already looking like exactly what he was, which was a pathetic mess. He was already exactly as damaged as he was going to be. One night wouldn't make anything better. It wouldn't make anything worse. He had come this far, had crossed this much distance, had already made this decision in the elevator.

He sighed.

He walked to the door.

The keypad was small and silver. He put the code in—3-7-0-9, each digit already memorised, already permanent, and felt the lock release. That soft, heavy click. The door swinging inward.

He pushed it open. He stepped through.

The penthouse opened up like a held breath finally released. One entire wall was windows.

Shane stopped just inside the door and looked at them—floor to ceiling, wall to wall, Las Vegas spread out beyond the glass in every direction, blazing and enormous and entirely indifferent to what was happening in this room. The Strip below was a river of light, neon bleeding upward into the dark sky, oranges and pinks and the hard white pulse of marquee signs, the whole city burning at maximum capacity the way it always did, the way it had been built to do, so that no one standing in it ever had to be alone with the dark. From up here it looked almost beautiful. From up here you couldn't smell the exhaust or hear the slot machines or feel the texture of pavement that had absorbed ten thousand spilled drinks. From up here it was just light.

Shane let the door fall shut behind him.

The rest of the room was dark and expensive and sleek in a way that reminded him, immediately and uncomfortably, of the man standing at the far end of it. Modern art on the walls, gold, bronze, a large black and white photograph of something architectural, clean geometric shapes in frames that probably cost more than Shane's first car. The furniture was dark leather and clean lines, nothing soft about it, nothing that invited you to sink in and get comfortable. The kind of room that looked like it had been designed by someone who understood that comfort was not the point, the point was to look like you didn't need to be comfortable.

Ilya was standing at the windows.

His dress shirt was open. Fully unbuttoned, hanging loose from his shoulders, the fabric falling away from the centre of his chest in a clean V that the light from the city caught at its edges. The trail of dark hair ran from the base of his sternum down his stomach, narrowing, disappearing into his waistband. Shane's eyes followed it before he told them to. He pulled them back up.

Ilya had a glass in his hand. He took a sip from it and then let his arm drop to his side, the glass hanging loosely from two fingers.

He looked at Shane for a moment across the dark length of the room. Then he raised both arms, wide, a gesture of open, lazy magnanimity. His face was still, unreadable. But the arms said everything: here I am. Look at what I've done. Look at what I am.

Praise me, Shane. I'm the MVP. I'm practically a God compared to you.

Shane stood at the edge of the couch with his jacket over his arm and his bow tie hanging loose against his chest. He dipped his head. Gestured toward him with one hand, a small, conceding motion. "Congratulations."

Ilya dropped his arms. He raised the glass to his mouth, took another sip, and said, around the rim of it: "Thank you." A pause, barely a breath. "Now take off your clothes."

Shane let out a short sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a scoff, maybe surprise. He felt the heat move up his throat and into his face. He shook his head slightly. "You're such an asshole."

Ilya said nothing. He turned back to the window, glass at his side.

Shane stood there for a moment with the heat in his cheeks and the bow tie hanging loose and the city blazing behind sixty feet of glass. Then he stepped forward and laid his jacket carefully over the back of the couch. He glanced at Ilya. Ilya's eyes found him in the glass's reflection and he gave a single, small nod.

Shane bit the inside of his lip. His fingers went to his shirt buttons. He worked them from the top down, his eyes moving around the room, at the art on the walls, at the floor, at the enormous burning panorama of Las Vegas beyond the glass, anywhere that wasn't Ilya's reflection, because if he looked at Ilya's reflection he would lose the thread of what his fingers were doing entirely.

He wondered what Ilya had planned. The thought arrived in fragments, overlapping, none of them completing before the next one started. Would he—the buttons gave way one by one beneath his hands—would he be pressed against something, face against a surface, hips pulled back—would Ilya use his hands first or not use his hands at all—would he be held down or tied or—Shane's brain skipped ahead, helplessly, to a dozen different configurations, each one sending heat through his body before dissolving into the next. Maybe used as a footstool. Maybe made to kneel for an hour with no payoff whatsoever while Ilya talked at him in that measured, patient voice. Maybe—

He slid the shirt off his shoulders. Folded it, set it on top of the jacket. The air in the room touched his chest and stomach and he resisted the urge to cross his arms over himself.

He could feel Ilya's eyes on him now. Not see them, Ilya hadn't moved, was still standing at the window, but feel them. The feeling moved across Shane's skin in patches, his neck, his collarbone, the centre of his chest, the soft skin of his stomach. Patches of heat, each one burning.

He reached for his belt. His fingers were slightly unsteady on the buckle, he pressed them flat against the leather and made them still, slid the tongue free and unclasped it and let the belt drop through the loops. His trousers followed, pooling at his feet, and he stepped out of them and straightened. Stood in his boxers in the dark expensive room with Las Vegas blazing behind the glass.

The windows were enormous.

From this height, from this angle, the whole city could see him. He knew this wasn't true, he was thirty floors up and the glass would be reflective from outside, the room too dark, but the feeling of it didn't care about the physics. All of Las Vegas in all its blazing light, watching him strip here, in Ilya's penthouse, in Ilya's room, for Ilya. Soon they would watch—his mind supplied the image before he could stop it, his face pressed to the cold glass, Ilya behind him, the city below—

He adjusted his boxers. Pulled the legs down, tugged the waistband up. Smoothed the fabric flat with both palms.

"What?"

Ilya's voice arrived across the room without inflection. 

Shane shrugged. One shoulder, minimal. "Just a lot of windows."

Ilya looked at them. A brief, cursory glance, then he nodded, once, toward the archway at the far end of the room.

He reached down and picked up a chair from the table beside him. A clean motion, the chair lifted and carried without effort, and he walked it through the archway into the bedroom.

Shane followed.

The bedroom window was smaller than the one in the living room.

It was still huge. Still there. Still the city, still blazing, a wide rectangle of light set into the dark wall, and the bed was enormous in front of it, white duvet, four pillows stacked at the head, and the chair—Ilya had set it at the foot of the bed, angled, and now he stood behind it with one hand resting on its back, his open shirt hanging from his shoulders, the city glowing at the edges of him.

Shane's stomach went sideways. He pressed his hands flat against his thighs.

"Good." Ilya patted the back of the chair once. "Now get on the bed."

Shane's body moved before his brain had finished processing the instruction. He was aware of this happening, the delay between the command and the compliance, the fraction of a second in which he observed himself already moving, and then he was gone. Climbing onto the mattress, the duvet soft and deep beneath his knees, and settling in the middle of it, against the pillows, his legs stretched out in front of him.

The duvet was very white. Very clean. He almost felt bad in advance, almost. It smelled faintly of expensive laundry, something crisp and neutral, beneath which was the fainter smell of Ilya– his recycled air, the ghost of cologne, the particular living-in smell of a space that had held a person for several hours.

Ilya settled into the chair. The weight distributed with an ease that suggested his body had never been uncomfortable anywhere. Which was likely. His thighs fell open. He rested the vodka glass on his knee, fingers loose around it. The city burned behind him through the window.

"This is a good hotel," he said, conversationally, his eyes on Shane's face. "Very nice vodka." He tilted the glass slightly, considering its contents. "Hard to find in America." He sighed, as though this were a mild but genuine grievance.

Shane stared at him. "Er. Okay."

"Touch yourself."

"What?"

"Show off for me." Ilya settled deeper into the chair. "I want to watch you."

"You what?" Shane heard the scoff in his own voice, felt his eyebrows pull together.

Ilya looked at him with disappointment, and Shane felt himself go red with embarrassment, shame, even. "I will not say it again."

Shane opened his mouth.

"I've—" He stopped. Swallowed. His tongue pressed against the back of his teeth. "I've never—" He could feel the heat spreading up from his collarbones, across his chest, up his neck, the blush moving through him like something poured.

"No shit," Ilya said.

"Fuck you." The laugh that came out wasn't really a laugh—it was the nervous cousin of one, too thin, too airless. Shane shook his head. "Give me some vodka at least."

Ilya lifted his glass. Took a long, slow, pointed sip, his eyes on Shane over the rim.

"Mmm." He lowered it. "No, no, no." He resettled the glass on his knee. "Vodka is for good boys."

He looked at Shane. He drank again, slowly. His eyes dark and fixed and patient, the blue of them swallowed almost entirely by shadow and blown pupil, what remained the colour of deep water in low light. An ocean in a small room.

Shane inhaled through his nose.

Okay. Okay.

He let his legs fall open, the mattress shifting under the redistribution of weight, the duvet bunching slightly at his hips. He brought one hand up from his side and laid it flat against his stomach, felt the warmth of his own skin against his palm, his own pulse jumping under the surface. He dragged it upward slowly—across the ridges of his stomach, the centre of his chest, his sternum, his throat—and let it rest there, fingers spread against the side of his neck.

He thought about what it would feel like if it were Ilya's hand. Wide, calloused, the weight of it, warm in a way that his own hand wasn't, Ilya's hands ran hot, he knew this, had felt it in the back of his neck and at the hinge of his jaw and against his wrist in a restaurant hallway, always a few degrees warmer than expected. He thought about those hands at his throat. Tracing down his chest, the callus catching on the skin, finding his nipples without hesitating, without being tentative about it.

He curved up into his own palm.

A groan came out of him. Low, ragged, slightly embarrassing in the quiet of the room. He dragged the hand slowly down his sternum, his stomach, and let it rest against the front of his boxers, the heel of his palm pressing against the shape of his erection through the cotton.

He rubbed, once, slow.

His head fell back into the pillows.

The wetness at the tip of him had already spread through the fabric—he could feel the specific coolness of it, the damp against his palm as he pressed. He kept his eyes on Ilya through the dark. Waited.

"Do you want to know how it feels?" Ilya said, his accent was thicker at the edges.

Shane's breath caught. His hand pressed harder through the fabric. "How what feels?"

Ilya paused. Then, with great deliberateness, enunciating each word: "Holding. The Cup."

He hit the p hard. Stopped at the end of it. Shane stared at him. The heat that went through him was disproportionate and infuriating, directly to his dick, and he could feel himself hardening fully under his own palm, the cotton stretched thin. "You fucking asshole."

Ilya threw his head back. "Oh," he said to the ceiling, with the theatrical despair like a man deeply moved, "I can barely describe it—oh my God, Hollander—"

Shane grabbed the waistband of his boxers and yanked them down his legs. He balled them up in one fist and launched them across the room.

They landed directly in Ilya's glass.

Ilya looked down at the glass. At the boxers, half-submerged in vodka, the fabric already darkening. He looked at them for a long moment with no particular expression. Then he picked the glass up carefully, took the boxers between his thumb and finger, and submerged the rest of them—slowly, completely—until the fabric was entirely saturated, the vodka soaking through in a spreading dark stain.

Shane watched him.

His hand had found his cock while he wasn't paying attention, was already wrapped around the base of it, the skin warm under his fingers, the weight of himself familiar and strange simultaneously in this room, in this context. He stroked once, upward, his thumb catching the wet at his tip and dragging it back down.

Ilya lifted the soaking boxers from the glass. He held them up briefly, examining them, the vodka dripping from the fabric in a thin, clear stream. Then he opened his mouth and wrapped his teeth around the fabric and sucked.

Shane made a sound he hadn't planned on making, because what the fuck. 

His hand squeezed at the base of his cock, too tight, the pressure catching the sound before it could become something worse. He could see Ilya's throat working as he sucked the vodka from the cotton, his eyes half-closed, his jaw moving. The wet sound of it in the quiet room. Then Ilya's nostrils flared. He pressed the fabric against his face and inhaled—deep, slow, his eyes falling fully closed for a moment, his chest expanding with it.

Shane's hand began to move. Slow strokes, base to tip, the precome already slicking his palm, his cock flushed and aching, the head dark with blood. He dragged his thumb over the slit and had to press his free hand flat against the mattress to keep his hips from rutting upward. The room smelled, now, of vodka and of him, the heat of his own arousal filling the space between his ears along with the sound of his own breathing, which was already too loud, already too honest.

Ilya dropped the boxers onto the floor beside him.

"Are you going to fuck me?" Shane whispered.

He heard it come out of his own mouth. The words arrived barely above breath, his thumb tracing a vein from base to tip, dragging the wetness back through the length of him.

Ilya considered this. "Hm." A shrug, almost imperceptible.

Shane's head fell sideways on the pillows. He stroked again, wrist rolling slightly at the top, the way he'd learned, the way his body had worked out on its own over years of late nights and locked doors. "I need—"

"What."

"You know."

"Tell me."

The corner of his mouth lifted. Just the left side, barely a millimetre, the reluctant arrival of truth. "You." His voice had dropped to somewhere soft and raw. "I need you."

Ilya hummed.

He reached down and set the glass on the floor beside the boxers. Shane heard the quiet clink of it settling on the marble.

"How much?" Ilya said.

Shane whimpered. The sound came out before he could catch it—his hand had sped up without his permission, his hips tipping upward, precome dropping in thick, slow beads onto his stomach, onto the white duvet in small translucent stains. "Please," he said. Then again, softer: "please." And then the third time, even more pathetic: "please."

"Other hand," Ilya said quietly. "Both. How you do it when you're thinking of me."

Shane brought his other hand down and cupped the weight of his balls, his breath shattering at the contact, his legs shifting wider on the mattress, his toes curling against the duvet. He let out a low, groaning sound through his nose, his head turning from side to side against the pillow in small, helpless movements, overstimulated and trembling, his cock weeping onto his stomach.

He had been doing this every day. Multiple times. In his bed in Montreal at three in the morning, in the shower, once in the locker room with his forehead against the tile and the water running cold, his hand moving in a rhythm, the one that worked fastest and worked best. He knew exactly how his own body worked. He knew exactly what was coming, how close he was, what that tightening at the base of his spine meant—

It felt different. Ilya sitting in that chair with the open shirt and the city burning behind him, watching Shane's hand move on his cock, taking in every detail and storing all of it—Shane could feel the weight of that gaze like a hand that wasn't touching him, everywhere and nowhere. He looked up through his lashes and found Ilya's eyes and kept them.

The blush had spread from his cock to his chest to his ears, he could feel it, the heat of it across his freckles. His breathing was ragged and audible. His mouth was open, lips wet from where he'd been pressing his tongue against them.

"Bozhe moi," Ilya whispered.

His hand had come up. He pressed it against his own jaw, fingers spread, covering the lower half of his face, but Shane could see his eyes above the hand, the pupils enormous, the blue around them barely a rim, his gaze fixed on the wet, flushed head of Shane's cock, the slick of precome on his palm, the tremble in his thighs.

Shane's hips were rocking now. Small, movements, his whole body pulling toward release, the heat coiling at the base of him pulling tight—

"Stop."

His hands fell away. He almost yelped at the sharp, total absence that ripped through him from the inside, his cock dropping against his stomach and twitching there, trailing a thin thread of precome that connected the tip to his navel before it broke. His hips rose off the mattress into air that gave him nothing. He made a sound, something between a whine and a sob, and grabbed the headboard with both hands because his hands needed somewhere to go, somewhere that wasn't his own cock.

"Please." His voice was wrecked. "Rozanov, please, why—why—why—"

He was kicking his heels against the mattress, the duvet twisting under him, his whole body in rebellion. His cock was so hard it hurt, the weight of it where it rested against his stomach almost unbearable, each small movement sending another pulse of need through him.

"Fuck." He slammed one palm against the headboard. "Fuck you, FUCK—"

"You do not sound," Ilya said, from the chair, unruffled, "like someone who wants to cum.”

"Please." Shane turned his face into the pillow, breathing hard against the cotton. "I'm sorry. Please. I need it." He lifted his head back up, his eyes wet, his chest heaving. "I need you. I need your fucking—I'll do it so good. I'll be so good, just please—"

"Come," Ilya said, "and prove it."

His hand moved to his thigh. He rubbed it there. 

Shane moaned. The sound went straight from his throat to the room and his whole body shuddered with it. He released the headboard. His legs were shaking as he pushed himself upright, as he moved toward the edge of the bed, his cock flushed dark and twitching where it jutted between his thighs, leaving a smear of precome on the duvet as he shifted.

He went to stand.

Ilya shook his head; his gaze dropped from Shane's face to the floor. To Shane's feet.

Shane stared at him. His brows pulled together.

Ilya shrugged. One shoulder, lazy, final. "Okay. Is fine." He reached for the glass he'd set on the floor, closing his fingers around it. "If you don't want to come, then—"

"No, no, please—"

He slid off the bed. His knees hit the marble and the impact cracked through both his kneecaps at once, sharp and hard, a pain that went up through his thighs and into his hips, and he barely registered it—he was already moving, already going forward. Crawling. He was crawling across the marble floor on his hands and knees toward Ilya's chair, and he could feel how he must look, naked, shaking, his cock heavy between his thighs, his knees cold against the floor—

Ilya's eyes were on him.

They were so dark. The blue had gone almost entirely; what remained of it pooled at the very edge, and his hand had dropped from his jaw, and both hands now rested on his thighs, and he was watching Shane crawl to him.

"Chyort," he said softly, against the back of his hand. "Ty takaya malen'kaya shlyushka."

The Russian moved through Shane's chest and settled low and hot in his gut. He reached Ilya's legs and let himself come to rest between his knees, his head dropping forward until his cheek pressed against the inside of Ilya's thigh, the fabric of his trousers warm against Shane's skin, and he turned his face into the heat of him.

He pressed his nose against Ilya's crotch.

He inhaled.

The smell of him, warm and dark and overwhelmingly Ilya, sweat and skin and beneath that the clean base of his expensive cologne, all of it intensified by the heat of the evening and the warmth radiating from his thighs—hit Shane somewhere behind his sternum and spread outward immediately. He could feel Ilya hard through the fabric. He pressed closer. He inhaled again, deeper, his fingers going to the waistband.

Ilya's hands closed around his wrists. Lifting his hands away from the waistband and holding them. Then his other hand came to the back of Shane's head, fingers threading into his hair, and pulled, drawing Shane's face back from his crotch until there were a few inches of air between them.

"No touching," he said. "I think."

"Fuck," Shane breathed, "why, please—"

"You haven't earned it." His thumb moved at the back of Shane's skull, a small, slow stroke. "Solnyshko."

 "How," Shane said, "tell me how—I'll do anything, please, just tell me—"

Ilya hummed. He released Shane's wrists. He placed one hand on Shane's shoulder and guided him until Shane's thighs bracketed Ilya's left foot. The chair shifted slightly with the rearrangement. Ilya's other hand rested on his own thigh, fingers loose, watching Shane figure it out.

"What?" Shane said. He looked down at the foot between his legs, then up at Ilya's face.

Ilya lifted his foot and dropped it. He reached out and took Shane's head between both hands, shaking him.

"Don't 'what' me." His voice had dropped to something lower, the patience at the edges of it thinning. He shook him once more, slightly harder. "Are you blind, deaf, or maybe just stupid ?" He tilted his head, fixed Shane with the full weight of those almost-black eyes. "You want to come, yes?"

Shane nodded. His throat had closed around any words that might have been there.

"So come like a slut, mm?" His teeth shone in the light as he smiled. Ilya patted the back of Shane's head, a flat palm, the sound of it sharp in the quiet room. "Hump my leg, shchenochek."

The humiliation was insane. 

Shane knew this. After all, he was naked, and kneeling, and about to grind against this man's ankle. His cock throbbed between his thighs. The precome was cooling against his stomach. He was shaking. 

He settled himself against Ilya's ankle and began to move.

The friction was, well, not enough. Barely anything, the fabric of Ilya's trouser leg against the underside of his cock, not nearly enough pressure, not nearly the right angle, he had to work for every fragment of sensation—and this was clearly on purpose, because Ilya watched him do it from above with those half-lidded eyes. 

He buried his face against Ilya's knee. He moved his hips in small, shallow rolls, his cock dragging against the fabric, his thighs trembling with the effort of holding himself up, of keeping his rhythm steady. The cold of the marble against his knees had spread upward through his shins. His arms were braced against Ilya's leg for balance. 

"You know," Ilya said, from somewhere above him, conversationally, "I always thought you would end up like this."

Shane's rhythm stuttered.

"Da, begging like this." Ilya shifted in the chair, his leg moving slightly under Shane's grip, just enough to change the angle. "I thought about it many times. You, on your knees." He considered. "As always, I am correct."

"Fuck you," Shane managed, against his knee. His hips didn't stop.

"You are embarrassing yourself," Ilya said. Pleasantly. "You know this, yes?"

Shane pressed his face harder into Ilya's knee and kept moving because the alternative was stopping, and he couldn’t stop. Not when he was so close. He could feel it building, the friction barely enough but accumulating, the heat pooling at the base of his spine, his balls drawing up for the second time.

"Stop."

He stopped.

He sat there with his hips arrested mid-motion, his cock aching, his chest heaving, his face pressed into the fabric of Ilya's trousers. The whine that came out of him was so desperate, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the back of Ilya's knee.

"Look at me."

He looked up. His eyes were wet at the corners. His lips were parted.

Ilya looked down at him.

"You're a shlyukha, a whore," he said. "Say it."

Shane's mouth went dry. His cock pulsed between his thighs. He felt the tear that had been sitting at the inner corner of his left eye let go and track down his face, and he didn't lift a hand to it.

"I'm—" His voice was almost nothing. "I'm a shalookah."

Ilya's expression didn't change. "All you want," he said, "more than anything, is to wrap your little lips around my cock." He tilted his head. "Tell me."

Shane swallowed. His hands gripped Ilya's leg harder. "All I want," he said, "more than anything, is to—" his voice broke slightly at the seam of it, "wrap my lips around your cock."

"Good," Ilya said softly. He reached down and ran his thumb under Shane's eye, collecting the tear there, and examined it briefly before dropping his hand. "Again. You need my dick. You'll die without it."

The words landed somewhere specific in Shane's chest. A place that was already bruised. He pressed his teeth together for a moment before: "I need you." The words came out shaking slightly. "I'll die without your dick."

"Yes." Ilya settled back. "Now show me."

Shane buried his face and started moving again.

Ilya made him stop four more times.

Each time the orgasm built, higher, closer, more inevitable, the sensation sharpening from insufficient to almost-enough as Shane's body adapted its demands to what it was being given, and each time Ilya's quiet word cut through the room and Shane's hands went to Ilya's thighs and gripped and did not move and the arousal crested and crashed without breaking and the tears came faster and more freely.

By the fifth time, Ilya had to grip both of Shane's wrists and pin them against his own thighs to stop him. Shane had reached for himself without meaning to, and Ilya caught them both and held them flat, and Shane sobbed into his knee.

"Please," he said. His voice was barely there. "Please, Rozanov, please—"

"You do not sound," Ilya said, still holding his wrists, "like someone who has learned anything yet."

"I have," Shane said, the desperation coming out rough and wet, his face tracking tears he couldn't account for, the marble cold under his knees, his cock flushed so dark it was almost painful. "I have, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please—"

Ilya looked down at him for a long moment.

Then he reached down and took Shane's face between both hands, tilted it up, and unzipped himself.

He was already hard. Fully, completely, the length of him heavy in his own hand when he drew himself out, and Shane watched from below with his mouth open and his eyes wet and something in him that was beyond want, that was on the other side of want in a territory that didn't have a name.

Ilya stroked himself once, slowly. His jaw had gone tight. His eyes stayed on Shane's face.

He brought the head of his cock forward and pressed it against Shane's cheek.

Shane's breath stuttered to a stop.

The heat of him as it dragged against Shane's skin caused Shane's eyes to fall half closed. His mouth fell further open. Ilya dragged himself forward, across Shane's cheekbone, along the bridge of his nose, leaving a thin, wet smear of precome across his face. His lips. The corner of his mouth.

Ilya groaned, his hips moved, a small forward thrust, his cock sliding against Shane's lips, and Shane opened his mouth further—could taste him, the salt and the heat of him—and Ilya's hand fisted in Shane's hair and held his head still.

He groaned again, his head dropping back for a moment, his throat exposed, the tendons in his neck standing. He was holding himself at the base with one hand, and Shane's hair with the other, and his hips moved in small rolls, his cock dragging against Shane's nose, his lips, the wet smear spreading, the precome mixing with Shane's own tears on his flushed and ruined face.

"Fuck," Ilya said, roughly, in a voice that had lost some of its architecture. "You are making such a mess." He looked down, his pupils enormous, taking in Shane's face—the tears, the spit, the precome glistening on his freckles. He reached down with his thumb and pressed it against Shane's lower lip. "Look at your face." He pressed his thumb against Shane's cheek and dragged it downward. "Leaking all over my floors too." He looked down at Shane's cock where it jutted hard between his thighs, a thin thread of precome dropping from the tip to the marble below. "Such a pretty little mess."

Shane felt his cock pulse and had to slam both hands flat against the marble floor to keep from touching himself.

"Say it," Ilya said softly, watching him. "Tell me what you are. Say it again."

"I'm a whore," Shane breathed. His voice was wrecked, barely consonants anymore, just warm air shaped roughly like words. "I'm your whore."

"Fuck. Fuck." Ilya was stroking himself faster now, his composure fraying at the edges in ways Shane had never seen before—his jaw working, his chest heaving, the open shirt sliding off one shoulder. "You'd do anything for me."

"Anything," Shane said, without hesitation. "Anything. Please. Please."

"Say you'd do anything."

"I'd do anything. Please let me—please let me come—please just touch me, please—"

He pressed his foot against Shane's cock.

Shane yelped like a hurt animal.

Not loudly—or loudly, he couldn't tell, his hands scrabbling against the marble, his hips trying to rock forward into the pressure and then away from it simultaneously, his whole body caught between more and stop, between yes and too much, tears streaming freely, his breath coming in helpless staggered bursts.

"Please," he sobbed. "Please, please, please—"

"Fuck you're beautiful," Ilya said, through his teeth.

Then he bent down and hauled Shane up.

The mattress hit Shane's knees, and then his palms, and he was on the bed, face down, barely able to hold himself up on his forearms, his legs shaking too hard to fully cooperate. He could hear Ilya behind him—the sound of a drawer, the click of a cap—and then both of Ilya's hands on his hips, and finally, finally, actually there, actually on him.

He made a sound into the duvet.

One finger first. Ilya worked slowly, and Shane pressed his face sideways into the pillow and felt the stretch of it and groaned through his nose, his fingers clawing into the duvet. The lube was cold and then warm, and Ilya moved in small circles scissoring him open, and Shane's hips rolled back against him instinctively.

Two fingers.

"Ah—"  Shane gasped. And Ilya laughed softly behind him.

"Look at you," Ilya said, still laughing. His other hand came down on Shane's ass, a flat crack of sound that spread. Shane's hips jerked forward. "Desperate. Greedy."

"Please," Shane said into the pillow. "Please, please, just—"

Three fingers, and his back arched entirely off the mattress.

Then Ilya's hands settled on his hips and held, the grip absolute, no room for movement, Shane's pelvis pinned exactly where Ilya wanted it, and Shane tilted back in need.

And then.

There were no words for the first thrust. There was only the total fullness of it, Ilya burying himself completely in one long, hard push that drove Shane forward into the pillows and stole the air from his lungs entirely. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out, just silence, just his hands fisting in the duvet, his toes curling against the bed.

Then Ilya moved.

Ilya fucked him the way he'd promised, the rhythm immediate and relentless, each thrust driving Shane forward so that he had to brace his palms flat against the headboard to keep himself from being pushed into it. 

The slap of Ilya's hips against him filled the room, obscenely loud, the wet sound of it, the squeak of the mattress, the headboard knocking once against the wall. Ilya seated completely inside him and then almost entirely gone and then back, and Shane's breath knocked out of him over and over.

"Blyat," Ilya hissed above him. His grip on Shane's hips would bruise. He was speaking Russian, fragments of it, through his teeth, through each punishing thrust—Shane couldn't parse words from it anymore, just growling "Moya malen'kaya shlyukha—"

Shane pressed his forehead to the headboard.

He was crying properly now. The tears soaked into the pillow beneath him. His cock dragged against the duvet with each thrust, the friction building something inevitable.

"Gonna—" he managed. His voice was gone, just breath shaped into syllables. "Gonna come, I need to—need to come, please—"

Ilya's hand snaked around his hip.

Closed around his cock.

And squeezed.

Shane's whole body seized.

He thrashed. He couldn't help it; his hips drove forward into the fist and backward onto Ilya simultaneously, finding no relief in either direction, the orgasm cresting and cresting and cresting and going nowhere, dammed behind Ilya's grip. 

He sobbed into the pillow. Full, wrecked, open-throated sobs, his hands scrabbling at the headboard, his knees sliding on the sweat-damp duvet, his own precome and his own tears and the sounds he was making filling the room.

"Please," he begged, "please, please, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please, Ilya, I need your cum, I need to cum, please—"

The thrusts slowed. Ilya pushed to the hilt and stopped there and moved in slow, grinding circles, deep in Shane's body, and the sensation was enormous and relentless and went nowhere because his hand was still there, still closed, still holding.

"Yeah?" Ilya's voice was rough, the composure entirely gone from it, raw at every edge. His chest was against Shane's back, the heat of him along Shane's spine. "You want to cum?"

"Yes—yes please—I'll do anything—"

"Say you're sorry."

Shane pressed his face into the sheets. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Ilya's hips moved once, hard. Shane choked on a sob. "For what."

"For—" Shane's breath stuttered. "For—"

"Say you're sorry," Ilya said, low and precise against the back of his neck, "for ghosting me."

The room went quiet under all the noise of Shane's breathing. He felt it, the words, felt the shape of them pressing against the inside of his teeth. His whole body went still in the way it sometimes went during a crisis, when the nervous system ran out of responses and simply halted everything and waited.

Ilya's hand tightened.

Then his other hand found the back of Shane's neck."Use your words," he said.

Shane pressed his face into the soaked sheets. Into the smell of himself, his own precome, the mess he'd made—and his mouth opened.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for ghosting you."

"If you want to come," Ilya said, his voice close against Shane's ear, "you'll have to do better than that."

Shane's fingers dug into the headboard.

"I'm sorry—" his voice broke open on the word, cracked clean through the middle— "sorry for ghosting, I'm stupid, I'm fucking stupid, I don't—I don't know what I want, I'm a mess without you, I need you, I need you—" his hips were rolling backward now, seeking, despite the grip, despite everything— "I'm nothing without you, useless, fucking—useless—I'm not good, I'm not—please, please—"

Ilya groaned.

It came from deep in his chest, and his thrusts slowed further, deeper. His grip on Shane's neck loosened fractionally. His voice arrived as a whisper against Shane’s ear.

"Tell me," he said. "You wanted it. You always wanted it." A breath. "You wanted me to take you. You wanted me to use you." A pause. "Your throat. You begged for it."

Shane's face was against the sheets. His own spit was mixing with the precome that had soaked into the duvet from earlier. "Fine. I wanted it," he said. His voice was barely there. "You're right. I wanted it." He swallowed. "Please don't stop. Please let me cum."

Ilya groaned.  The pace built again. Fast this time, the rabbit urgency returning, his hips snapping in short hard strokes.

"Good boy," Ilya said, rough and low. "My good boy. You did so good."

He released his hand.

The orgasm detonated, a total collapse, his back arching clean off the mattress, his mouth open wide around a sound that was too large for the room, his cock jerking in the fist Ilya had wrapped around him, the release coming in long, hard, wracking waves. 

Ilya fucked him through it, each thrust extending the wave before it could crest fully, and Shane heard Ilya's breath go ragged and then the deep, shuddering groan above him—felt the heat of him spilling inside, felt the whole body behind him shaking with it.

Ilya kept fucking him. Kept his hand on Shane's cock, working him through the final pulses. His forehead dropped to the back of Shane's shoulder. 

They stayed like that for a moment, both of them still, both of them breathing. Then Ilya lifted his hand and pressed it gently to the back of Shane's hair.

Shane shoved it away, his shoulder jerking backward, his whole body pulling away from the touch as if it had burned him. Ilya's hand stopped in the air.

"Get off of me," Shane said. His voice was quiet, harsh. Something else entirely from anything that had been in it a moment ago. "Get your fucking dick out of me."

 Ilya's hand was still in the air, hesitating. 

"Shane—" he started.

Shane pushed himself up.

The motion threw Ilya backward, and Shane scrambled off the bed, his legs not entirely cooperating, his knees hitting the floor, and then his feet finding purchase, and then he was standing—barely, trembling, Ilya's cum leaking out of him and tracking warm down the inside of his thigh.

His face was something Ilya had not seen before.

Tears. Still. His eyes were red and swollen and streaming, the same tears from before, but the expression underneath had changed entirely. His lips were shaking. His jaw was set in something hard and white-edged and terrible.

"What the fuck," Shane said.

"Is that what this whole thing was?" He wiped the back of his hand across his face, a rough, graceless motion. "You fucking—you spent months. You spent months torturing me for this?" His voice climbed slightly on the last word and then came back down. "You fucked me so you can get me to say that shit?" He stared at him. "Are you fucking insane?"

He shoved him. Both hands, flat against Ilya's chest. Ilya stepped back.

"No." His voice broke on it. His hands came up between them, keeping the distance, shaking slightly. "Don't. Don't say my fucking name. Don't touch me. Just—" he shook his head, hard, and turned away.

Ilya watched him.

Watched him pick up the boxers from the floor, still damp, and pull them on, his movements jerky. Watched him find his trousers and step into them, his hands fumbling with the button. The shirt. The jacket, grabbed from the couch. Ilya's cum still on him, still inside him, and Shane was putting clothes on over it. 

Ilya thought,  I planned this correctly. I was patient. I waited. This is not—this cannot be—

He crossed the room.

His hands closed around Shane's arms from behind.

Shane turned first.

The punch landed square on the bridge and the world went white.

A total bleaching of everything, sound and sight and thought all flattened simultaneously into a single bright nothing that lasted less than a second and felt much longer. Then it came back—the room, the light from the city, Shane's face—and with it the pain, blooming outward from the centre of his face.

"Blyat."

His eyes filled with water. He could taste the blood before he felt it, the copper arriving at the back of his throat first, and then the wet warmth of it against his upper lip, his fingers coming up automatically, pressing against the damage before he had decided to press them there.

"What the fuck," Ilya said, muffled behind his hand.

"What the fuck?" Shane repeated. 

His voice cracked straight down the middle of it. He had his shoes in one hand, not on his feet. He was already at the door, back hitting the wall beside the doorframe, and he flinched at the contact, his shoulders coming up around his ears. His eyes were wide, his whites showing at the edges, tracking every small movement with short, shallow inhalations. His lips were shaking. He pressed them together, and they shook anyway.

"Don't—" His voice broke again, fully this time, a sob pushing up through the word and splitting it apart. He shook his head. "Don't text me. Don't come near me. Don't—just—fuck—"

 His hand found the knob behind him without looking, fumbling, the metal cold against his palm. He turned it. He pulled it open. The hallway light fell across him for a single second—his untucked shirt, his bare feet, the tear tracks dried to salt on his face—

He looked at Ilya once more. Ilya stood in the middle of the room with blood beginning to track from his nose over the back of his hand, his open shirt hanging off one shoulder, and looked back.

Shane slammed the door.

The sound of it filled the penthouse and then was gone, and the room was completely silent. The city burned on through the windows, indifferent, blazing at maximum capacity the way it always did, the way it had been built to do. The white duvet was twisted and wrinkled at the centre of the bed. The chair sat at its angle at the foot of it, the empty vodka glass on the floor beside it. On the marble, one wet footprint where Shane's knee had been.

Ilya stood, pressed his fingers to his nose, and listened to the silence.

He had waited one hundred and twenty-four days to hold his favourite person. He had watched and waited and held the thread without cutting it and without crossing it, and tonight he had drawn it taut the way he had planned to.

He looked at his fingers, the blood there.

Chapter Text

He didn't know what time it was.

He'd stopped checking around the second day. The clock on his phone required unlocking the screen, which meant looking at the notifications stacked there, God forbid that. He knew roughly what they contained; his mother, at least four times. His Dad, twice. Hayden. JJ. Jackie, probably, forwarded from Hayden. The Voyagers group chat, which had been going off since the final buzzer, which he wanted to leave, but muted instead. His agent. His publicist. Three separate people from the league office. And sitting at the very top of all of it, pinned there by timestamp, the one message he'd actually read.

Shane had saved Ilya's contact under different names every time, cycling through variations as if renaming the contact would change what happened when the number appeared on his screen. It didn't. He could block it—had done it before, four times—and without fail, the following week, sometimes the week after, a message would arrive from a new unknown number. There was no wall you could build that Ilya wouldn't simply route around, patient as water finding the lowest point.

He should block him again. He reached for the phone, and paused, his hand dying in the air halfway between the mattress and his hip, and then flicked his eyes back to the screen.

The laptop was propped against his knees, the duvet bunched up around it, creating a small warm tent of light in the dark room. The sound was low, just audible over the AC unit running in the wall, and he had the closed captions on out of habit from late nights with the volume down—they kept auto-correcting at the wrong moments, turning breathless groans and smacks into nonsensical text that scrolled across the bottom of the screen. He wasn't paying attention to the text. He wasn't entirely paying attention to the video either. He was watching the light of the screen and letting the sounds fill the inside of his skull like white noise.

The sub on the screen whined against his partner’s knee. 

The mallet came down again, and Shane bit through the Kitkat.

The chocolate layer gave, and then the wafer layer gave, and his tooth hit the edge of his thumbnail through the bar. Pain shot up straight through the nail bed and into the knuckle, and he let out a short, startled yelp that embarrassed him, even alone. 

His lip trembled. The corner went soft before he could stop it, the sting of it still pulsing in the pad of his thumb, radiating upward.

Ow. It hurt. It hurt, it really hurt, a single bead forming at the deepest point of the cut, building surface tension until the weight of it won and it spilled over, tracking sideways down the edge of his thumb in a thin warm line.

Pain had been doing this lately. Grounding him. Not in a—he wasn't—it wasn't like that. He just. When there was pain, there was something kind of real to locate himself inside of, something that had a cause and a site, a thing his body could point to and say there, that is why you feel something. Everything else was so diffuse, everything else spread through him aimlessly.

He dragged his thumb across his index finger and watched the blood smear pink.

The edge of his fingernail slipped into the little fold of skin at the side of the nick, where the cut had peeled the skin back slightly, and he peeled it further. The sting sharpened. He looked at it, the layers of it, the thin outer membrane going white at the edge where it had separated from the wet pink tissue below. You could see the edges of each cell of it if you looked. Skin was such a convincing surface. Such an efficient performance, smooth, intact, presenting an unbroken exterior to everyone who looked. He had gotten very good at that. He'd been good at it since he was small, since the first rinks and dressing rooms and hotel hallways where he learned what it meant to be the only person that looked like him, was naked like him. Being watched before he even opened his mouth, being read for something before he had a chance to explain himself. 

Always too much or not enough, not made for the room he was in—looking left and right at faces that processed the world without visible effort and understanding, at some cellular level, that he did not work the same way.

He had tried his best to make the surface convincing.

Shane Hollander. Hockey player. Captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. Good son. Smile for the camera, lean into the boards, here is the charm, here it is—

The blood was dripping now. A slow, thin track running down the side of his thumb and dropping onto the sheet, a small dark spot spreading into the grey cotton.

He pressed his thumb hard into the cut.

The pain went white for a second.

He held it there.

Before he could—before this could become something else, some new form of coping he wasn’t ready for, he pressed his thumb flat against his palm and closed his fingers over it and looked at the laptop screen instead, where the sub was still whining, still loud, the closed captions still scrolling their nonsense, and he reached with his other hand for the pile of wrappers beside him.

His bed was a landfill. Kitkat wrappers by the handful, the foil catching the light, at least five of them, seven, the individual ones and one of the family-sized bars he'd broken into pieces and eaten faster than he'd meant to. An empty sleeve of instant oatmeal packets, the inside foil licked clean. Two granola bars, both half-eaten, the other halves somewhere in the duvet. The orange packaging of a Reese's two-pack, the two cups long gone. A sleeve of those peanut butter cracker sandwiches with the orange filling, six missing from the middle where he'd pulled them out in the night and eaten them without sitting up.

God what was he doing. 

There was no question about it, he knew full well what he was doing. He wasn’t that stupid. 

He was failing himself, failing everyone else, failing every single day for a full year. 

The bad days were getting worse and longer, the gaps between starting one of these binges and realising what he was doing getting wider. He used to control it. An hour. An evening. This is the allotted window for falling apart, after this we resume normal function, an hour of binging and hardcore porn and then we’re back to regular scheduled programming! But the window kept expanding, sprawling, taking up more and more space in his life, and the periods of normal function were getting thinner and thinner and held in place by flimsier and flimsier rules.

I’ll pretend during the weekdays. Then, I’ll pretend during game days. And his recent one, I’ll pretend during game nights.

He didn't even remember Game Six.

His first Cup. He couldn't close his eyes and see the final buzzer, couldn't replay the moment, couldn't locate himself in the memory with any specificity. He knew he'd been there because of the bruise on his shin, the torn muscle in his rotator cuff that he was supposed to be resting. But the game itself had been piloted by whoever lived in the outer shell of him. Shane Hollander had won the Cup. The thing inside him that watched Shane Hollander move through the world had watched him hoist it with everyone else and had wanted to go home and jerk off. 

He grabbed the last Kitkat from the pile. Unwrapped it. Ate it in two bites, tasting nothing. Reached into the granola bar half buried in the duvet. Ate it. Reached for the peanut butter crackers and worked through three more.

His stomach felt like a hard, hot ball just below his sternum.

The nausea hit the back of his throat without warning, a rush of saliva flooding his mouth all at once. The feeling that he came to understand (from too much trial and error) meant seconds, not minutes—and his body was already moving before he'd made a decision, the duvet falling away, his feet hitting the floor, the cold of it registering briefly against his soles as he crossed the room.

He dropped to his knees in front of the toilet and gripped the rim, and his stomach contracted, a full-body clench that started below his ribs and drove upward with a force that had nothing voluntary in it, his back bowing with the effort of it, his knuckles going white on the porcelain. Everything came up in a single violent heave—the Kitkat, the crackers, the granola, all of it stripped of any form it had arrived in, his throat burning with the acid of it, his eyes streaming from the reflex, his nose running. He gagged through the second contraction, smaller but complete, his whole torso shaking with it, and then a third that brought up nothing but bile, thin and sour, coating the back of his teeth.

He hung over the bowl. His breathing was ragged and loud in the small marble room, his own breath coming back at him off the water in the bowl, warm and sour. The muscles between his ribs ached. His throat felt stripped.

Shane thought he would be used to this by now. He was not.

His phone rang from the bedroom.

He didn't move for a second. The ringing continued, not a single call, someone who had been going to voicemail and had called back immediately, who would call back again the moment the voicemail cut in. Ah fuck, his Mom.

He pushed himself up from the floor, stepped over the duvet that had landed half off the bed, and picked up the phone.

"Hello?" His voice came out rougher than expected, compressed and raw.

"Shane." His mother's voice arrived with a worried undertone audible underneath it to anyone who had spent twenty-three years learning her moods. "Honey. We've been calling for two days. Are you okay?"

He cleared his throat. Twice. "Sorry." He ran his tongue across his back teeth. "The playoffs were a lot. I've just been—I needed some alone time. To decompress."

He crossed to the window and pressed the button for the blinds.

They opened.

The afternoon light came in like a wall, white, June-bright, the Montreal skyline hard-edged through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the city going about its business thirty floors below normal and unaffected as Shane’s life fell apart. He blinked against it, his eyes adjusting painfully, the room revealing itself around him.

"Oh, sweetheart. It's not good to be cooped up inside too long,"

He looked at the bed.

He moved quickly, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder and grabbing wrappers with both hands, bunching them together, turning toward the trash can beside the bed and stuffing them in. There were more than he'd estimated from inside the cocoon of the duvet. He kept grabbing, the Kitkat foils, the granola bar wrappers, the Reese's packaging, the empty oatmeal sleeves, the scrunched up tissues, compressing them down to make room, crumbs flying everywhere, the trash can overfilling and him pressing them flat anyway.

His eyes found the grey sheet, the brown-red stain at the centre, small but visible.

He pulled the duvet over it.

"Shane?" Yuna repeated.

"Huh? Sorry. Cleaning, doing a deep clean, distracted.” He straightened. Looked around the room. The cracker sleeve was still on the mattress. He grabbed it. "I know. It’s just been a day, or two, like I said, to decompress."

He could hear Yuna raise an eyebrow, and his dad’s voice in the background, indistinct. "Your dad and I just got into the city. Are you—are you still okay for linner?"

"Linner? Really, Mom?" 

"Late lunch. What? I thought that was millennial slang." she said, dry. "Like we planned."

He looked at the time on his phone.

12:04pm.

He stared at it. Jesus, he hadn’t even slept. He didn’t even remember two days passing. He did remember the Reese's two-pack existing and then not existing, and approximately nothing in between.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm fine, I just need to—I was meditating."

He glanced at the bin bag. At the overstuffed trash can, the wrapper of one Kitkat still sticking out from the top, catching the light.

"Meditating." His mother repeated, he could hear the raise to her brow.

"Yeah."

"Okay." A pause. "Three o'clock, then?"

"Three o'clock," he said. "I'll see you there."

He had two hours and fifty-six minutes to become Shane Hollander again.

The blazer was a mistake and he'd known it the moment he'd put it on.

Not because it didn't fit—it fit fine, which kind of shocked him, fitted charcoal wool, that cost him something obscene—but because he'd worn it trying to communicate something. I'm fine. I'm put-together. I didn't spend the last three days inhaling sodium and eating handfuls of trail mix over the sink at two in the morning. The hoodie underneath was supposed to do some kind of damage control for the bloat, but that was also a mistake, because now he was sitting in a booth at a restaurant that was too warm, and his body, already running hot from the cortisol and the humiliation of still being alive and having to attend lunch, was slowly cooking inside wool-and-cotton. He could feel the sweat starting at the base of his spine.

He pulled out his chair.

The legs scraped against the floor and it was too loud, somehow. He winced inward. Sat down. His arms came up without asking, wrapping around his own torso, hands gripping his opposite elbows, and he settled into the booth the way you'd lower yourself into water you weren't sure about.

His parents were already watching him.

Not watching watching, his mother was looking at him with the three-second assessment she'd been doing since he was twelve and she first started noticing things. Eyes at his forehead, slide down to the bags, another half-second on his face. His father was looking at the menu with a kind of manufactured interest that said I've already done the same assessment and I'm giving you a moment to collect yourself before harassing you.

Shane opened his menu.

The chandeliers in this place were warm-toned, gold, flattering, and the restaurant was quiet, only the low-grade murmur of other conversations, the soft clatter of cutlery, someone laughing two tables over. Comfortable sounds. Normal sounds. His skin didn't agree. His skin was registering all of it as a faint, buzzing layer of more over everything.

"So," his mother started.

He could feel the compliment coming. He locked his eyes on grilled salmon, 8oz, lemon beurre blanc—

"Congratulations." She paused, a warm pause. "I feel like I've said it ten times already, but it's different in person."

She hummed. Leaned back against the booth cushion. Shane turned a page.

"We're so proud of you." His dad, now, not looking up from the menu either, like they'd choreographed this tag-team, you go, I'll go, we'll make him feel surrounded. "Your first Cup. Definitely not your last."

The Cup.

Right.

Shane's thumb found the edge of the menu and rubbed it, the laminated corner, slightly sharp, something he could press his thumbnail against without it looking weird. He kept his eyes moving over the page. Baked cod. Market fish. Their salad section was offensive. Iceberg with croutons, like it was 2003, like a man couldn't just have arugula without wanting croutons on it.

The Cup.

He was going to be talking about the Cup until— when? Until next season started, until he either won again or lost again, at which point there would be a new thing to talk about. His whole life had been segmented this way for so long he'd stopped noticing it until just now, staring at the laminated description of a Dover sole, the cold weight of realisation: there was nothing in him to offer this conversation. He had no feelings about the Cup that were available for public consumption. He'd felt something, he thought, in the locker room when they'd won, a release, like a fist unclenching in his sternum, but that feeling had already dissolved and been replaced by the grinding exhaustion of knowing everything that came after it.

How are you? not congratulations. That was what he wanted. A question that was about him rather than about the thing he'd done with his body for six months.

Not that he had an answer.

"Yeah, well," he said. The words came out mumbled, quieter than he intended. He cleared his throat slightly but didn't try again. "It was pretty close."

He didn't know why he said that. He actually didn't know if it was close. He genuinely could not remember the final score, couldn't remember if he'd scored, couldn't remember the last two minutes of play with any clarity beyond the crowd, which had been so loud it had felt like a physical pressure on the top of his skull, and the way his vision had gone strange at the edges. He'd have to watch the game tape. He'd been meaning to watch the game tape.

"What? No, it wasn't." His mother pulled her glasses off the top of her head and down onto her nose, lifting her phone from the table at arm's length, because she'd turned fifty-three and refused to acknowledge it required better reading glasses, required any adjustment. "Don't give Tampa that much credit."

She was squinting at the screen. Scrolling something. Looking for a stat to deploy.

Shane looked back down at the menu.

Salmon. Probably farm-raised. Full of omega-6, regardless, they never specified. Chicken. Fine. Guaranteed to be underflavored and overcooked in this kind of place, with rosemary and a sugary wine reduction that cost them eleven cents to produce and tasted like it. He wasn't hungry. He'd been not-hungry for two days, which was a relief, because in truth he'd consumed approximately the caloric equivalent of a famine relief package in oatmeal and dark chocolate and a gas station peanut butter cup addiction that had escalated beyond the point where he could look at it without feeling shame.

He probably didn't need to eat. Probably stored enough in the bloating alone to coast for —

Stop it.

He refocused on the menu. The words swam a little. He blinked once, slow.

"Honey, have you decided about Wimbledon?" His mother's voice again. She was still holding the phone at arm's length, glancing down at it, the glasses slightly tilted on her face. "Rolex really wants you there. I think they're worried their box is too tennis-y." A brief pause. "I think."

Shane squinted at the appetisers. Pressed his thumbnail harder into the laminated corner of the menu.

"Does that mean too white?"

A short silence.

He didn't need to look up to know what was happening. His parents were exchanging the glance. He knew this by the sound alone, the slight shift of fabric as one of them turned to the other, the held breath of it.

"I thought you liked your deal with Rolex," his mother said.

"I do."

"Well, you certainly love the money, and they have great seats. You're sitting next to a prince, or—" she paused to look down at her phone, "—no, actually, a Swedish princess—"

Her voice went up a pitch.

Just a fraction. Barely anything. She didn't even know she did it, probably, and that was the thing that made it worse, the good intention sitting right inside the inference, layered, like she was trying to hand him something wrapped very carefully so he wouldn't notice what it was.

Because why would she assume he'd be more interested in a prince. His proclivities were not that obvious. They'd better not be that obvious. And regardless, prince, princess, pauper, it didn't matter, the idea of sitting next to anyone and being looked at and smiled at and expected to return the smile for an entire afternoon—

Yes, his body wanted to be touched so badly it was a constant, low-grade noise in his nervous system, like tinnitus. But simultaneously, the idea of another human being close enough to do that made his skin crawl.

He shut that down before it could go anywhere.

"I don't have time for that right now, Mom. All my time is—"

"I know, I just—"

"—scheduled." He finished over her. "I get like two weeks off a year. I don't want to spend them next to someone I don't know, trying to make conversation about—"

He needed to stop. He could hear it happening in his own voice, the compression, the way his cadence had gone clipped and hard-edged, and he could not stop it, which was horrific, feeling himself go too sharp while having zero ability to correct course in real time.

"—Swedish politics?" He finished anyway. Because he'd started the sentence and his brain did not know how to leave things unfinished.

"Okay," his mother said. She took her glasses off, set her phone down. Both hands flat on the table, the universal signal for I'm surrendering this particular hill.

The waiter materialised, young, dark-haired, handsome, maybe, probably moving efficiently through a Saturday lunch service. "Can I get anyone started with a drink?"

His father reached for the drinks menu. He'd been coming to restaurants like this his entire life, Shane's father, and the mechanics of it came easy to him. Why didn’t Shane inherit that? "We'll take this Chablis, please."

"Three glasses?"

His father nodded.

"Uh—" Shane said, "—I'll have a ginger ale, please."

The waiter's expression did something almost apologetic. A soft exhale through the nose. "Oh, we don't actually carry that. Sparkling water?"

Shane furrowed his brows. Exhaled through his own nose at the same low frequency. "Yeah. Sure. Thanks."

The waiter left.

His mother unclasped her hands on the table. Tilted her head the way she does when she was deciding whether to say something. "I'm sure you could have a glass of wine, if that's—"

"No." Shane interrupted with emphasis. "I can't." Then, because the word had come out with more weight than was necessary, "Not right now."

He looked down at the water glass in front of him. Half-empty. The ice had started to melt at the edges, turning the water slightly cold and slightly not, the temperature of neglect.

Beautiful, Shane. Won't have a single glass of wine with your parents, very dignified. Won't have a glass of wine, but you'll have four peanut butter cups at eleven at night, in bed over BDSM porn. What a picture of restraint. What a great captain.

He swallowed. Kept his face still. He'd been doing that his whole life, keeping his face still while his brain did this, how did he never notice that, acknowledge that? It was his voice that always gave him away, the pitch, the pace, the way it went clipped when he was three seconds from the edge, and he knew it and couldn't fix it.

"Shane."

His dad's voice, all gentle. 

He made himself look up. Met his dad's eyes for a second and then let his gaze drop to the same line of the menu he'd been staring at for the last several minutes.

"Yeah?"

"Is everything alright?"

Shane's jaw tightened. He produced a small, flat smile. "'Cause I don't want wine? You guys want me to win another Cup, right?"

His father shook his head, lips pressed together. "Well, you just seem—" he searched for the word "—tense."

"I'm fine." Shane looked at his mother. Her eyes dipped at the corners in a way that was worse than anything she could have said. A familiar silence. The sort that meant we both know that's not true and we're deciding whether to press it.

"I think," his father started, leaning forward slightly, his hands moved in small, circular gestures while he talked, like he was laying out a plan on a whiteboard, "a trip to London this summer for Wimbledon would be fun. Just the three of us." His mother hummed. Agreement, encouragement, the two of them moving in the same direction like they always did. "And I think you should think about it. We could make a week of it. Go to a play—"

His life was already a tragedy.

"—see Big Ben. You loved it when you were a kid."

Shane nodded once. "Then you guys should go." He let the air out through his nose. "You'd have a great time. You're the tennis fan, Dad."

His mother's mouth opened, like she had just witnessed mild blasphemy and couldn't decide between laughter and concern. She landed on laughter, a short, startled burst of it. "They're not going to send us the tickets. It's you they want. We're just the parents." She shook her head. "You're the main attraction."

The main attraction.

Shane Hollander.

His eyes fell to the butter knife resting against the folded napkin by his right hand. Flat silver, rounded tip, no serration. The handle was warm from the ambient heat of the room, the blade catching the chandelier's glow in a dull, oblong smear that made it look almost soft.

He looked at his wrist. The inside of it, the pale skin stretched thin over the faint blue ladder of veins, the tendon standing out like a bowstring when he flexed his fingers.

What if he picked it up. Right here. Right now. Dragged it across, slow enough to feel the drag, the give. Would blood come? Would it well up neat, like in movies, or spray? Would it soak the tablecloth, this clean, starched white, bloom dark and ruin it completely?

And then—

Would they finally see him?

Not the idol. Not the smiling captain lifting the Cup for the cameras, the one who'd diversified the league, the good Canadian boy with the perfect face and the perfect stats. Not the main attraction, hollow inside, plastic, and posed.

Just Shane.

Their son.

Bleeding out on the tablecloth because he'd finally cracked open and there was nothing real inside, nothing worth the fanfare, nothing but shame and want and a body that wouldn't obey the simplest fucking command: be normal.

Comeau had called him a robot once, very accurate, and robots didn't bleed. But if he did this, if he pressed hard enough, sawed if he had to, would circuits spill out? Wires? Or just more nothing? Proof that he'd been a fraud his entire life, snuck into this position nobody had earned, holding the shape with both hands until his arms gave out.

They'd look at me then. Finally. See the imposter. Would they cry? Scream? Grab him? Or just sit there, staring at the mess I’ve made, realising they'd built their pride on nothing?

His thumb twitched toward it. Just a fraction, the air between his hand and the handle felt thick.

Do it. End it. Be seen.

He blinked.

The knife stayed where it was. His hand didn't move.

"Yeah, well." he said instead, setting the menu down harder than necessary, the laminated edge slapping the wood. "If you want your main attraction to be good enough to win another Cup—" he swallowed, jaw flexing, "—I'll have to actually work. I don't just—" he shook his head, a slight jerk of it, "—I don't just wake up like this, you know? I have to work." He tilted his head, let out a sound that was trying to be a laugh and wasn't quite. "Pretty fucking hard, actually."

Both of them went still.

His mother's hand, which had been relaxed on the table, curled slightly inward. His father's face twisted, shock landing first, faster than the concern, concern settling in a second behind it, and then outlasting it.

"Shane," Yuna said softly, half a gasp, her hands folding in her lap. "We know how hard you work. We know how stressed you've been lately. Why do you think we're being so adamant about the trip?"

Shane felt his jaw go wrong, a small tremor, there and gone in less than a second. His vision blurred at the very outer edges, not tears.

"Stressed?" He looked between them. He could not meet their eyes directly, kept landing somewhere in the vicinity of their faces, a few inches off. "What are you talking about. I'm fine. I'm no different from how I've always—"

He stopped.

He finished the sentence in his head instead.

No different to how I've always been. That's what you don't know. I've always been like this and you didn't notice, so either I was doing a very good job or you weren't looking.

I'm not stressed. I'm a fraud. I snuck into this life and nobody noticed and I have been holding the shape of a person together with both hands for years and all it took to break the whole thing open was being assaulted. And of course, you don’t know about that either, because I-

He blinked.

The restaurant reassembled itself around him. His father's face, his mother's face , they were both watching him with the same expression, just displayed differently, his father quieter, his mother's eyes darker and more pointed. They looked like people who had been doing this watch-and-worry thing for a while and had gotten good at concealing how much they were doing it. Which meant they'd been watching him for a while. Probably since 2011. Jesus, fuck.

"Sorry." He ran a hand over his face, pressing his fingers into his eyes briefly, then back through his hair, gripping the short ends at the front. "Sorry. I'm in a weird mood or something." He let out a breath. "I think I'm sick, probably. I've been—yeah. I think I'm sick."

He pushed his chair back from the table. The legs caught on the floor again, that too-loud scrape.

"Shane, please—" his mother started, "sit down, it's okay, honey, we just—"

"No, I—" he stood, hands both going to his hair, gripping it, "—I need to—I've got to go. I feel like I'm going to be sick. I feel—"

He was pressing his chair back in before she'd finished the sentence. Already moving, already calculating the exit, the most direct line to the door that would take him past the fewest tables, the fewest people to notice how his vision went soft at the edges and his body made it absolutely clear that it was not going to hold this position much longer.

He didn't look back.

The heat hit him before the door had fully opened, Montreal in the shoulder of summer, a warm gust that went straight through the wool of the blazer and found the damp at the base of his spine. He pushed through and stopped two steps out, back against the brick facade of the building, and closed his eyes.

He took three breaths against the brick, counted them, lost count at two, started again.

Then he peeled himself off the wall and moved, fast, head down, rounding the back of the restaurant where the kitchen exhaust vents pumped hot grease-smell into the alley, past the dumpsters, across the service entrance, into the parking lot. His car was where he'd left it. Of course it was. He yanked the door open and dropped into the seat and the door swung shut behind him and he sat there and put his head between his knees.

What the fuck had he just done.

His hands gripped the back of his skull, fingers pressing in, feeling his own pulse in his palms. The leather of the seat was warm from sitting in the afternoon sun. The car smelled like him, his gym bag somewhere in the back, the cedarwood thing he clipped to the vent because he'd read somewhere that scent affected mood and he'd wanted every possible advantage, and for a second it was okay. 

Then the thought came back, what the fuck had he just done.

He'd walked out of a restaurant. In the middle of a meal. On his parents. He'd sworn at them, at his mother, who'd clasped her hands in her lap and called him honey, and he'd said pretty fucking hard actually, like they were opponents, like they'd done something wrong, like they weren't just two people who'd flown out to spend time with their son because they were proud of him.

Trying to be normal. Just trying to hold himself together through a single lunch and he'd lasted— what. Twenty minutes? Thirty?

He rocked, forward and back, the back of his head moving against the headrest in short increments. He used to do it when he was a kid, eight or nine, sitting on the floor of his bedroom with his knees pulled up, when the noise got too big or the day had gone wrong in a way he couldn't fix, and he didn't know what to do with himself. His mother had asked about it once, and he'd stopped doing it in front of people. The habit itself had never stopped.

He let it go. Let it keep going. Nobody was watching him.

His hands tightened around the back of his head, and he pressed hard, feeling the pressure of his own fingers against his skull, the resistance of bone, until he could feel his pulse beating in his palms. Something about it grounded him. Made the boundary of himself legible. He groaned, low and private, and knocked his fist once against the back of his head.

He needed— he needed something. He didn't know what. He needed someone, maybe, but he had no idea who. Hayden, maybe, but not like that, and anyway, Shane would have to perform enough coherence to receive the comfort, and he couldn't, not right now. His parents were twenty metres away, presumably still sitting in that booth, and the thought of going back in made his throat close up entirely.

Rozanov.

He shoved it back. No. That was not a solution, that was a symptom, that was exactly the kind of broken-compass thinking that had gotten him here in the first place.

He sat up. Breathed. Looked at his hands on his thighs.

 How could he be expected to do this by himself, to just hold it together? Just hold the shape? Be Shane Hollander, or some sort of amalgamation of Shane Hollander— the strong one, the quiet one, the one who made it look effortless, the one who didn't need accommodating. Be the good representation for Asian kids everywhere, the right kind of visible, the kind that doesn't make people uncomfortable. Be Canadian before anything else, be bilingual, be accessible, be diverse without making an issue of it, as someone had actually said to him once in a meeting about his public image. Smile at the camera. Thank the fans. Go on dates with girls, be photographed with girls, let the tabloids run the pictures, just let the inference sit there and do its work. Be straight. Be simple. Be comprehensible. Hold the Cup up with both hands so the cameras get a clean shot.

And now also, apparently: don't have a breakdown at a restaurant. Don't swear at your parents. Don't look at the butter knife.

He looked at his hands again. The thumbnail had left a red crescent on his palm from where he'd been pressing it in, from where he had peeled at it earlier.

He was not going to be able to do this by himself.

The thought circled, looped, wouldn't land. Wouldn't let him say it fully out loud inside his own head because admitting it meant admitting what had already happened, that he'd already needed help, already gone looking for it, already let someone—

No.

He couldn't let this bleed into his life. Couldn't let it actually touch the edges of the shape he'd spent a decade holding together. Because it wasn't sustainable, was it? Walking out on his parents. Swearing at them. This was not sustainable, and he could not do it by himself; he was not equipped to do it by himself, but he had to, because there was no one else. No one to call. No one who could fix this without requiring him to explain it first, and he couldn't explain it because there were no words for it that don’t include and it all started four years ago.

He groaned, low and private, and knocked his fist once against the back of his head. Rocked forward once, back once. The leather seat creaked under him.

He started the engine.

The dashboard clicked from 3:47 to 3:58 while he sat there with the engine running and no direction.

He took a left out of the parking lot because left was easier. Less traffic. Fewer decisions. And then he was on Sherbrooke and the city spread out in front of him and he kept going, thirty kilometres an hour, no destination, just the city passing the windows like scenery from a production he wasn't in.

He needed to do something normal.

A thing. The kind of thing a normal person did on a free afternoon, the kind of person who went outside for reasons other than training, who had a city they lived in rather than a city they stayed in. He had a vague and shapeless blueprint of what this looked like; he'd observed it. People doing it. The whole city full of people who knew how to be themselves without a manual, who didn't have to calculate the correct response to how are you? before delivering it, who could sit in a restaurant with their parents and just be present, not perform being there. Just actually be there.

He drove past a dog park. A golden retriever was sprinting across the grass in a wide, joyful, completely purposeless arc, ears flat, tongue sideways, running just to run. Someone was throwing a ball underhand and laughing, and the dog wasn't even looking at the ball anymore, just running the curve of the arc because it felt good.

Something in his chest pulled sideways. He kept driving.

The park at the end of Parc Avenue had a fountain.

He parked, fed the meter, and walked in.

The afternoon light had gone golden and long-shadowed, everything looked like it was in soft focus, like the world was being depicted rather than inhabited. There were families with strollers moving along the path, and a man on a bench with his shoes off, reading, legs extended, existing without apology. Two teenage girls in front of the fountain, phones up, adjusting angles, tilting their heads, laughing at results, adjusting again. Completely absorbed in themselves, in each other, in the project of the photo, not aware of him at all.

Normal. Normal. Normal.

Shane walked the path, the gravel loud under his shoes. His hands had nowhere to go so he put them in the blazer pockets and kept them there despite the heat and walked and looked at the fountain and didn't think about the knife, mostly.

He walked the path again.

On the third circuit he became aware that he was walking in circles, which was not what normal people did in parks on free afternoons, or maybe it was, he actually didn't know, he had no reliable data on what normal people did. Maybe everyone was secretly walking in small desperate circles. Maybe the whole city was. Maybe the man with his shoes off wasn't reading at all, just holding the book and performing reading for the same reason Shane was walking, which was that you needed to look like you were doing something or the emptiness became too visible.

He left at twelve minutes, the meter had three hours left on it, he pulled out anyway and got back on the road.

So the park is a no-go, okay, there were other things to do. Like the café on Bernard, he’d been meaning to go to. It was a recommendation, but he couldn't remember who it was from, one of those passing things that stuck because it came attached to a specific detail. The croissants, someone had said. They do this thing with the croissants, butter, and sea salt, you have to try them. He had stuffed it in the internal box he rarely opened, the one marked things he'd like to do at some point.

He opened the door. The smell hit him first: butter, dark roast, something sweet and yeasty from deep in the back. The space was small and warm, walls lined in mismatched tile, a chalkboard menu in two languages, three small tables, and a long window bar that caught the afternoon light in a wide, warm stripe across the counter.

He got in line. The woman ahead of him ordered in rapid, comfortable French. He looked at the pastry case while he waited. The croissants were there, plain and almond. Beside them, a kouign-amann gleamed under the case light, its caramelised crust catching the angle, deep amber at the edges where the butter and sugar had burned together. He hadn't eaten since he threw up this morning.

And bloat be damned, he was getting that kouign-amann, just the one thing. One last treat before he really locked-in. 

"Bonjour."

The barista smiled at him. Young, dark-haired, a small tattoo at the inside of her wrist. “Bonjour,” Shane said. "Puis-je en avoir un, s'il vous plaît?" He pointed at the kouign-amann. "Et un café noir."

She reached for the tongs. He paid. Found the stool at the end of the window bar, set the plate down, and looked at it. The crust gave slightly when he pressed his fork against it, the resistance before it yielded, flaking caramel at the edges, the inside soft and layered and butter-soaked through every fold. He cut a piece. Lifted it.

"Oh my god— excuse me—"

He set the fork down.

The woman at the table behind him was already holding her phone. Late thirties, coat folded over her chair, her companion leaning in at the same angle. The camera orientation was facing him, facing him and his kouign-amann. Oh God.

"I'm so sorry, I know this is so rude—" She pressed her free hand to her chest. "Are you Shane Hollander? The Voyageurs' Shane Hollander?"

He turned.

He plastered a smile on his face, the good one, the real-looking one, the one he'd practised until it came from the outside in. "Yeah, that's me."

"Oh mon Dieu." Both hands now. "I'm so sorry, I know you're just trying to eat, but my son is going to lose his mind — he's twelve and he's obsessed, he keeps talking about you and the Cup, how you did the—" she glanced at her companion, "—qu'est-ce qu'il y a avec le chapeau—"

"A hat trick?" Shane said.

"Yes. Three goals in one game, he showed me the video—"

"That's great." He was already moving, standing, pushing the stool back. He took the phone when she offered it, checked the angle, gave it back. Crouched slightly between the two of them. Smiled. Flash.

"One more?"

"Of course." Flash.

He said something warm, said he hoped her son kept playing, that the sport needed it, that twelve was a great age to really commit to it. He heard himself say these things from a short distance, from the passenger seat of his own body, watching his hands shake hers, watching his mouth produce the sounds. The woman's face was lit up with reflected happiness; her son was going to lose his mind.

The main attraction.

Shane Hollander.

Smiling at strangers in a café, the plate behind him was getting cool.

He went back to the stool. Stood in front of the kouign-amann. The piece he'd cut was still on the fork, the caramelised edge slightly less glossy than it had been, cooling where the crust had cracked. He looked at it. Felt the math start up behind his sternum, the grinding arithmetic of what he'd already consumed versus what he was owed versus what he deserved versus what would happen if he— and underneath all of it the voice that had been running since the Kitkats, since the peanut butter cups, since the game, long before any of that: you don't get to just eat things. 

You don't get to just want things and take them. You're already disgusting. You're already too much. You are Shane Hollander, and Shane Hollander does not sit in a café and eat a disgustingly sweet, caramelised pastry alone because it wandered in off the street after walking out on its parents.

He put his blazer on properly. Picked up his coffee. Left the kouign-amann on the plate, fork balanced against the edge, the piece still cut and waiting.

He pushed the door open.

The afternoon swallowed him again, warm, bright, indifferent. Families with strollers. Someone's dog on a lead. The city moving around him the way it always did, continuous and unaware, full of people who knew exactly who they were and how to feed themselves without it meaning anything.

He walked back to his car, and sat there with the coffee he no longer wanted going cold in his hand. 

He was going to sort this out. He just needed to find something he could control and hold onto it, as tight as possible, until everything else stopped moving. That was the plan. 

He'd gone home and ordered pho from his favourite Vietnamese place, the one he'd been going to since his first season with Montreal, the one that knew his order without asking. Large, beef broth, extra tendon, bean sprouts on the side because he liked to add them himself so they didn't go soft. He balanced the bowl on his knee, cross-legged on the couch, remote in one hand and the film queued up on X Squad on his TV for the sixth time. 

The sunset came through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long orange strips, moving across the floor as the hour changed, and Shane watched the film and ate his soup and did not think about his parents or hockey or Ilya Rozanov, which was, genuinely, the best he had felt all day.

The film was an hour and fifty-three minutes long.

It took him approximately four hours to watch it.

He kept going somewhere else. Not anywhere specific, drifting, no destination, just losing contact. He'd be watching, actually watching, following the plot, and then he'd surface twenty minutes later with the bowl cooling on his knee and no memory of the last scene and have to rewind. He rewound the same sequence three times. He reheated the soup twice, and then a third time because he'd let it go cold again sitting in the microwave, and the third time he ate half of it standing at the counter just in case.

When the credits finally rolled, he stood with a quiet hum, carried the bowl to the sink, rinsed it, loaded it into the dishwasher. Wiped the counter. Stood in the kitchen in the hoodie in the dark and looked out at Montreal going electric in the last of the evening light, all of it blazing at maximum capacity the way it always did.

His phone went off.

A call, the screen lighting up and vibrating against the counter.

He picked it up, J.J

Nope. That wasn’t happening. Not now.

He sighed, set it back down, but it just kept ringing. He sighed again, longer this time, into the collar of his hoodie, and picked it up.

"Hey man," he said.

"HOLLANDER." JJ's voice arrived at a volume that suggested he was standing inside the noise rather than next to it, the clatter and murmur of a restaurant in full evening swing audible behind him. "What the fuck are you doing right now.

"I was about to—"

"Bullshit. Get your ass to the Mile End, baby." The baby landed like it was the most natural thing in the world, like everyone said it like that. "My buddy François— you remember François, the chef, yeah? He's having an after-hours thing at the restaurant. Djon-Djon, you remember it?"

Shane's mouth curved slightly, despite itself. He dipped his head. "Oh yeah?"

"And listen—listen, get this—"

"J.J.” Shane warned.

"The cast of the X Squad film. The one they're shooting in town. They're here."

Shane's eyes went to the TV, the credits still scrolling across the dimmed screen. "All of them?"

"I don't fucking know! Some of them! Get down here!"

"I don't know man, I'm feeling kind of—"

"I think Rose Landry is here."

Shane closed his mouth, opened it, closed it again. "Alright." He pushed off the counter. "Alright, stop hounding me. I'll think about it. Bye."

He hung up and set the phone down and stood there in the kitchen in the dark with the Montreal skyline going orange and pink through the glass.

Rose Landry.

He had been, well. He'd had a very sustained appreciation for Rose Landry since she took the role of Allure in the fifth X Squad film and proceeded to make every single scene she was in better by approximately eighty percent. She was a great actress. She was objectively, unambiguously pretty. She seemed decent in interviews, grounded, funny, not performing it. He'd watched her press tour for the sixth film three times, which he had not admitted to anyone.

He pushed off the counter and went toward the bedroom, picked up the white t-shirt and the black hoodie from where he'd left them on the chair.

It would be— practically speaking, it would look good, they would look good. He pulled the t-shirt on, then the hoodie. Something like that, a relationship, a normal one, with someone he genuinely liked, someone who moved through the world with ease and warmth without the intention of mischief and trickery, who didn’t lie, who might—who could—remind him what normal felt like, what normal intimacy felt like. A full system reset. Something that pulled him back into the correct shape of himself.

Shane liked her. Shane thought she was pretty. Shane could date her.

Obviously he could date her, just look at her. He grabbed his keys, walked to the door, and slipped his feet into his reeboks. 

Obviously this was a good idea; obviously, it had nothing to do with needing something to hold onto while everything else kept moving, obviously it wasn't the same impulse as everything else he'd tried, the routine and the training and the restriction, just a newer and more human-shaped version of the same frantic search for something solid.

He paused with his hand on the door.

There it is, he thought, this is his thing to hold onto. 

The Bell Centre was overwhelmingly loud, eighteen thousand people compressed into one vibrating pressure system, the air thick with body heat and the smell of ice and rubber. The score was 2-1, third period, four minutes left on the clock.

Shane skated into the face-off circle at centre ice. His edges carved a short arc as he slowed, shoulders dropping into the familiar pre-draw crouch, stick angled across the dot.

Rozanov materialized opposite him.

He was already looking at Shane when Shane looked up, not at the puck, not at the linesman, at Shane. The visor threw a stripe of shadow across his eyes but didn't hide them. The bags beneath them were deep, the lines around his mouth cut sharper than usual. He leaned forward over his stick. Studied Shane with an unhurried glance.

"You are looking different." His voice came low, undercut by the crowd noise, meant only for the distance between them. His brows pulled together, in something clinical. "Small, maybe."

Shane glanced up at him once. Then fixed his gaze on the bridge of Rozanov's nose.

Rozanov straightened slightly, rolled one shoulder in a shrug. "I think there is still time for a hat trick." His tone hadn't changed, flat, conversational, as if they were standing in a hallway somewhere. "Should I do it now or wait till last second?" A small pause. His head tilted a degree. "Last second is more fun, but."

Shane said nothing. His grip tightened on the shaft of his stick.

"Ok. Mr. Model."

Both sticks came up. Came down to the dot, blades parallel, two inches apart, the linesman's hand already falling.

The puck dropped.

The studio lights ran at about a thousand degrees and smelled faintly of scorched dust.

Two hours in, Shane had stopped counting outfit changes. The stylist moved around him with briskly—  his collar adjusted, cuffs straightened, tie knotted once, then again tighter. The matching set was these blue-striped dress shirts, brown slacks, stiff at the seams, expensive.

Rose had already figured out how to move in hers.

She came around his side, one arm looping behind his neck, her cheek finding his, her body turned into him with casual confidence. Her hand was warm against the back of his collar. Shane's palm settled at her waist.

“Chin down, shift left, give me something warmer, you two love each other.”

The shutter ran off a burst. Rose adjusted her grip on his lapel, tilted her head so her temple rested against his jaw, and the director stepped out from behind the monitor.

"Shane, lose the tie, please, give it to Rose. We’re going to do something kind of sexy, kind of fun, wrap it around his hands."

Shane's fingers went still at her waist, his brow twitched, then he reached up, worked the knot loose, slid it free. Held it out. Rose took it without a word, looped the silk twice around his wrists in a figure that wasn't tight, and her eyes moved up to his face while she worked, calm, assessing.

The shutter went again.

She adjusted her grip on his lapel and her hand came around to his back, slow, a wide flat circle between his shoulder blades, and she dropped her mouth close to his ear.

"Hey." A pause. "Hey, Shane."

He turned his head a fraction.

"You're doing good." Her thumb pressed once into his spine. "We're doing so good." The laugh that followed was almost nothing, warm air, mostly. "We look fucking hot."

His eyebrow went up. "Yeah?"

She held his gaze. Bit the inside of her bottom lip, teeth catching the skin, holding it a second, then releasing. Her eyes stayed steady on his.

"I don't know about me—" He locked his arms around her back and tipped his weight backward, pulling her clean off her feet so her back fell across his lap in one long arc. “But you look very pretty.”

Her laugh came out cracked open and totally unplanned, head going back, eyes screwing shut, one hand scrabbling at his sleeve. The stylist let out a soft "aww." The director clapped once, sharp. The photographer's shutter ran nonstop. 

"Yes, that's the one. Playful. Keep going—"

The music had been loud for so long it had stopped being sound and become just a constant, vibrating heaviness behind his eyes, the bass of I Think I'm Paranoid by Garbage drilling into the base of his skull like it was trying to find the soft part.

If I should fail, if I should fall.

His legs drove down. The resistance was set three clicks past where it should have been, and every downstroke required the full drop of his bodyweight through his heel, the tendons in his ankles screaming under the load. His quads had stopped burning an hour ago. Now they just existed, a thick, dull heat, something like the muscle had been running on its own emergency reserves for so long it had forgotten how to signal distress.

I nailed my faith to the sticking pole.

Sweat dropped off his jaw in a steady, metronomic drip. His shirt had long since stopped being a shirt and become a second skin, soaked flat across his chest, clinging to the knobs of his spine, peeling away with each forward lean and re-adhering with a wet slap. His hair was plastered across his forehead in dark, flat strips. His boner was long gone now, and when he exhaled, the air that came out was hot and sour.

Down. Up. Down.

Montreal outside the window was nothing. Completely quiet, to the extent of being absent. The streetlights threw shallow orange pools onto the empty intersection below and then gave up. No cars. No movement. The traffic light at the corner cycled through green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red, for nobody.

Bend me, break me anyway you need me.

His hands had gone numb around the handles thirty minutes ago. The rubber grip pattern had embossed itself into his palms like a brand and then stopped registering as anything. He was aware of his fingers only because he could see them.

All I want is you–

The nausea arrived all at once, a violent uprising from somewhere low and central. His stomach clenched in one hard contraction, and his mouth flooded instantly with hot saliva, his throat sealing shut around it.

His foot missed the downstroke.

He threw himself off the bike.

Both knees hit the floor and the impact detonated up through his kneecaps, jarring his teeth. His right hand came down hard on one knee, fingers curling over the cap, gripping it. The other hand slammed flat over his mouth, palm pressed so hard against his lips that his teeth cut into the soft inner skin. His shoulders heaved forward. He stayed there, bent double over himself, forehead nearly touching the floor, everything in his body suspended in the single, consuming question of whether he was about to vomit.

I think I’m paranoid. And complicated. 

His vision had gone dark and patchy at the edges, thick, black blooms crowding in from the periphery and slowly receding, crowding in and receding. He stayed there. Thirty seconds. A minute. Two.

He dropped his hand from his mouth. A thin string of saliva stretched from his lower lip and he dragged the back of his wrist across it, the cotton leaving a wet smear across his jaw.

He looked down at his watch.

2:15:43.

4:02 AM.

The traffic light outside turned green.

The boardroom was on the fourteenth floor and had floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. Yuna had her notebook open and her pen uncapped and had not looked up from it since they sat down.

"You do understand," she said, cutting cleanly across whatever the exec had been building toward, "that hockey is his priority. Always. This arrangement would be exclusively off-season. Any shoots, any campaigns, any public appearances tied to the agency, off-season only. That's non-negotiable, and it needs to be written explicitly into the contract, not just,” She paused, waved a hand around, “Implied."

The exec, mid-forties, in a loosely fitted suit, nodded with his whole upper body. "Absolutely. We can build in as many protective clauses as you need. Scheduling approval, right of refusal, blackout windows around training camp and playoffs—"

"He also has existing contractual obligations," Yuna continued, flipping a page. "Branding agreements already in place. There are exclusivity considerations that will affect what categories you can even approach him for. Apparel, grooming, lifestyle— some of those lanes are already occupied. Before we get anywhere near a number, we need a full breakdown of what you're actually pitching him for, category by category."

"Of course. And for what it's worth, we're not looking to compete with anything he has. We want to build around what's already there. Frankly, the existing profile is—" the exec paused, choosing the word carefully "—well. We've had a lot of interest, a lot. We just need him."

"You need him," Yuna repeated, and wrote something down.

"Genuinely. The response to the Hugo Boss campaign alone—"

"He has other offers."

"I'm sure he does."

"Several. Some of them from agencies considerably larger than yours."

The exec absorbed this without visible damage. "Then I'd like the opportunity to explain why we think we're the right fit regardless. And when it comes to payment—"

Shane turned his head.

One of the assistants sat two seats down from the exec, an iPad propped flat against the table in front of her, a stylus idle in one hand. She was looking at him. Not the way people looked at someone in a meeting, she was practically oggling, openly, her mouth soft and slightly parted, the stylus tapping a slow, absent rhythm against the corner of the screen. When his eyes met hers, she dropped her gaze immediately, the tips of her ears going pink, suddenly very focused on the iPad.

Shane reached up and scratched the back of his head. His hair had grown out over the past few months, from Rose’s suggestion, the bangs falling forward past where they used to sit, hovering at the edge of his glasses frames. He pushed them back with two fingers, and they fell forward again. He left them.

He ran his thumb along his cheekbone. Down into the hollow beneath it, the pad of his thumb tracing the line of bone. He leaned forward over the table, both hands clasped in front of him, the black cashmere of the sweater pulling softly across his shoulders, and looked back down at the notes spread in front of him. His eyes moved across the page, tracking something, his brow pulled in by a fraction.

He tapped one finger against a line near the bottom.

"Ok." His starts, "I just had a question about—"

The kitchen smelled like sautéed garlic and rice. Shane had been home from his evening cardio session for forty minutes, an hour on the bike, resistance at level eighteen, 1,200 calories burned according to the display, which he had photographed on his phone before stepping off.

He laid everything out on the counter first. Three avocados. Wild rice, already rinsed and simmering. Four purple sweet potatoes in the oven, purple specifically for their anthocyanin content, anti-inflammatory, higher in antioxidants than standard sweet potato, baked rather than roasted to keep the glycemic load lower. Sauerkraut and pickled beets from Rose, fermented, for gut flora support. Kale, which he massaged with exactly one tablespoon of cold-pressed olive oil, the massage breaking down the cellular structure to improve digestibility, the oil providing monounsaturated fat for hormonal function and fat-soluble vitamin absorption. Sautéed spinach and broccoli, the broccoli a source of sulforaphane, a compound that supported liver detoxification and reduced systemic inflammation after high training loads. Mashed kabocha squash, prepared in a batch on Sunday. Wakame salad from his Mother for iodine and thyroid support. Sprouts. Cucumber. Baked tofu for complete plant protein to supplement the animal sources.

And the egg whites. 600 grams, poured from the carton. The load-bearing column. 72 grams of protein in one ingredient, zero fat, zero carbohydrate, complete amino acid profile, fast-absorbing in the post-exercise window. The egg whites went into a dry wide pan, folded until they set. The kale went onto the plate first, the beets beside it, the sauerkraut in its own small section so it didn't bleed into the rice. The squash, the tofu, the wakame, the sprouts, the cucumber fanned on the diagonal. The broccoli and spinach. The rice, measured, portioned, placed.

Then the avocados.

He halved them, removed the pits, laid them on the plate. Stood back. Looked at the plate.

His brow pulled together, barely. One avocado, 230 calories, 21 grams of fat, monounsaturated primarily. Three avocados.

He picked up two of them. Found a container in the drawer, pressed the lid on, slid them into the refrigerator.

The front door clicked shut behind him and he stood in the entryway for a moment, chest still working, sweat tracking down the column of his throat and pooling at his collarbone. Seven miles. His calves were tight, the familiar deep pull at the achilles that meant he'd pushed the last kilometer.

He pulled his shirt off with one hand, the fabric peeling away from his skin in a single damp strip. Folded it in thirds—force of habit—and set it over the back of the chair by the hall table.

Rose came down the stairs with her coffee mug held in both hands, barefoot, her light hair loose and still half-undone from sleep. The t-shirt she was wearing was his, the grey one, three sizes too big, hem grazing the tops of her thighs with every step. She looked at him.

She let out a long, low wolf whistle.

Her hands were warm when they landed on his stomach, fingers tracing the harsh ridges of his abs like she was reading something in braille. She slid them up, slow, and settled them over his biceps, squeezing once.

Shane's mouth moved into a small, crooked smile. He looked somewhere over her shoulder, a flush crawling up from the base of his neck and spreading across his cheekbones, into the freckles.

"Sexy boy," Rose sang, the words lilting and delighted. She rose onto her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his cheek ."Your body is insane, you know? Like every time I come back from shooting, it's like." She exhaled, set her mug down on the counter. "It's like you somehow get ten times more attractive." She spun on her heel, leaning back against the edge of the counter, mug abandoned, and pulled her mouth into a pout. "Maybe I should go on your bird food diet."

Shane huffed through his nose. Shook his head once.

"Yeah?" He reached for a dish towel and wiped his hands with it. "I've just switched up my training a bit. I thought it would be good to—" A pause. He folded the towel in half. "Uh, make more of an effort, I guess. If I want to continue with the whole public figure thing."

Rose's mouth dropped open. "More of an effort."

"Well." He set the towel down. "I have to keep up with you." He raised his eyebrows. "You're perfect already. You don't need to go on a diet."

She stared at him for a second. Then she pushed off the counter and rounded it, sliding her mug into the sink. "Whatever." She waved one hand behind her. "Did you try the new serum I got you? The niacinamide one. Oh, and we’re going out tonight instead of tomorrow, to the premiere thing. You can wear the suit Saint Laurent gifted to you, looks so cutie."

Shane nodded, a low hum in his throat, and reached back for his shirt.

"Wait—" Rose's hand shot out. "Wait, don't go yet." 

Shane instantly stilled mid movement.

She grabbed her phone off the counter, already unlocking it, already flipping to the camera. "I need to get some pictures of you." She pointed the lens at him with the focused energy of someone who had done this professionally. "The whole world needs to see that their perfect Ken doll, Shane Hollander, is my Shanebug, and he's in my kitchen—" She tilted her head. "Well. I guess I'm in your kitchen." A beat. "And you're probably in their kitchens too, on the cover of a magazine."

The corner of Shane's mouth pulled up. He exhaled through his nose, the sound landing somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.

"Really."

"Yes, really, your fans are gonna love this." She raised the phone higher. "Go. Pose."

The gym was dark except for the row of lights over the mirrors and the single bulb above the rower.

It was 5:07 AM.

He'd been on the machine for twenty-eight minutes. Stroke rate 32. The monitor read 4,200 meters, split 1:52 per 500, calories climbing past 450. His grip on the handle was slick, sweat had pooled in the creases of his palms and turned the rubber tacky. Each pull dragged his shoulder blades together, the chain rattling in a steady, mechanical clack.

His legs extended full, heels locked into the footbeds, calves knotted tight on the drive. Back straight until the catch, then the lean, then the finish, arms in first, elbows scraping past his ribs. Exhale on the recovery. Inhale on the drive.

The fan blades hummed overhead, pushing cool air across his skin, but it didn't reach. His tank top was soaked through, clinging to the serrations of his obliques, the fabric dark and heavy. Sweat beaded at his temples, traced the line of his jaw, dropped off his chin in a rhythm synced to the strokes.

Everything narrowed. The glow of the monitor, the sound of the chain clacking, the burn in his lats had gone past fire into something white-hot, like the muscle was fusing to the bone.

Stroke 612. 4,450 meters.

His vision tunneled. The edges went soft, then black, then nothing.

He opened his eyes.

The handle was still coming toward him. Arms bending at the elbows, his back straight, legs compressing against the footbeds.

Stroke 623. 4,520 meters.

He blinked. The monitor numbers swam back into focus. His chest heaved once, deep and ragged, but his body didn't stop. Drive. Finish. Recovery. Drive.

The scale read 185.2 lbs.

He stepped back. The body analysis display cycled through its sequence, impedance measurement, hydration percentage, visceral fat rating, muscle mass distribution, the numbers ticking through their calculations. He waited. The display settled.

8.0% body fat.

Thirteen percent, this time last year. He ran both hands over his face, top to bottom, the heels of his palms dragging across his eyes. He dropped them. Exhaled. Looked up.

The man in the mirror had big brown eyes.

Dark enough that in low light the irises disappeared entirely and left only the pupil. Eyes that sat a fraction deeper in their socket than they had in December, not in any way that would read on camera. Just enough that the shadow under each brow bone had become more prominent, more a feature of the face than an incidental. The eye serum Rose had ordered him, the one that arrived in a matte black box with a dropper applicator and instructions in four languages, had managed the bags. The skin under his eyes was smooth now, no longer the purple-grey bruise it had been in January.

His freckles were still there. Scattered across the bridge of his nose and both cheeks in a haphazard, uneven pattern. They sat against his skin differently now, though, the skin around them lighter, somehow thinner, pulled closer to what was underneath it, so that the faint tracery of his veins showed through at his temples and at the soft inner skin of his forearms, a blue-green suggestion, like rivers on a map through pale terrain. He looked, in bad light, like someone you could see through. 

His shoulders read wider. 

They had always been broad enough, but the trap development from six months of weighted pull-ups and barbell shrugs had added a new layer to the base of his neck, muscle stacking against muscle, so that the line from his ear to his shoulder now dropped in a more aggressive slope. Or maybe they only seemed wider because everything else had contracted. His torso. His abdomen, specifically.

He had always had a belly, even at his leanest; there had been a softness to it. A rounding at the lower abdomen that sat just below his navel, a gentle convexity that persisted regardless of how many miles or how many core circuits or how little he let himself eat. 

It was gone now.

He turned sideways.

Really gone. The line from his ribcage to his hip ran straight. Then it caved inward, a shallow but definite concavity, the obliques cutting in hard diagonally across the plane of his stomach, the whole length of the torso narrowing toward the hip in a way that it hadn't before. He could see the iliac crest, the jut of the hip bone pressing through the skin when he shifted his weight to one side, the ridge of it visible, an edge where before there had been softness. Two shirt sizes down. One pant size. He'd had to buy new training gear in March, standing in the SportChek on Sainte-Catherine with three pairs of shorts that no longer fit.

It had taken half of his ass with it.

He turned back. Faced himself.

His jaw had sharpened, or the muscle had receded enough from his face to let the structure show more clearly, the cheekbones higher-seeming, the hollow below them so there now. He ran his thumb along the line of the left cheekbone and down into that hollow, pressing the pad of his thumb into the soft depression there, feeling the bone beneath it. It pressed back. Everything was closer to the surface than it used to be. 

He looked at his eyes again. 

The irises were very dark. Brown that went black at the outer rim, a clean tonal border, and then inward, it fractured, warm amber threaded through deeper walnut. He went in further. There were darker flecks near the center, brown going almost black. A ring at the inner rim, close to the pupil, richer, almost copper.

He kept looking.

It was dark in there, the dark of deep water, of going under and losing track of which direction the surface was. Something was sinking at the bottom of it, or someone, going down through cold and black with both arms reaching upward, ten fingers spread and grasping at the boundary between what they were and what the water was, what they'd been and what they were becoming, the self and the image of the self and the space between the two which was supposed to be nothing, was supposed to be zero distance, but wasn't. Hands at the threshold. Fingers scrabbling at the glass. Shane— who he'd been, who he knew himself to be, who'd learned himself over twenty-three years, who'd made a body and a career and a name and a face— reaching up through the pupils toward the surface and finding the surface moving upward faster than he was rising, the gap between his hands and the light growing rather than closing, the warmth of everything recognizable receding, the silt of what he was becoming rising up around him as he sank—

Where had he been the past year? When was the last time he saw himself? When was the last time he actually heard himself think? Where was his internal voice? Who the fuck was this man?

Shane blinked.

The mirror held a man. Brown eyes, straight nose, freckles across both cheeks. Almost six feet of muscle in a white bathroom at 10:00 AM. The display on the scale had gone dark behind him; the session timed out. The ventilation unit hummed in the wall.

He reached for his shirt.

Shane sat in the chair they'd positioned. Blue linen button-down, untucked, the collar open at the throat. Dark jeans. No shoes. His hair was the longest it had been in years, not long by any normal measure, but long for him, the dark waves falling across his forehead in a way that required nothing, no product, no effort.

The interviewer was in the chair opposite him, mid-thirties, recorder on the table between them, a production assistant with a ring light crouched to her left.

"So." She smiled, leaning forward, pen uncapped and resting against her notepad for form. "Shane Hollander. One Stanley Cup. Calder Memorial Winner. And now— Cosmopolitan's Hottest Man in the NHL." A pause, slightly amused. "How are you taking that?"

Shane's mouth moved into a small, restrained smile. He looked briefly at the middle distance, the eucalyptus on the shelf, and then back at her. He shook his head, a slight, contained motion.

"I appreciate it. Genuinely, I do." He laced his hands together over his knee. "It's — yeah. It's very kind." He paused. "I don't think I'm the right person to weigh in on that particular question."

"You're being modest."

"I'm being honest." The smile stayed, held at one corner. "The people who actually deserve credit for any of this, the modeling stuff, the press, all of it, is my mom, first of all. She handles everything on that side; she's been doing it since I was sixteen, and she's exceptional at her job. She deserves everything." He unclasped his hands, resettled them. "And Rose, obviously. Rose has, uh, she's introduced me to a world I didn't know very much about. She's taught me a lot. I think she probably saw something I wasn't seeing in myself and pushed me toward it." He raised his eyebrows once. "So. Credit where it's due."

"That's very sweet." The interviewer tilted her head, her pen tapping once against the notepad. "But Shane, you're in the running for People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. For 2016." She let that sit a moment. "At some point, you must know, on some level, how handsome you are." She turned her palms up. "Our readers want to know. Any tips? What are you doing?"

Shane looked at her. Then he shrugged.

"Take care of your body." He said it simply, no framing, no preamble. "Stay active. Build some kind of wellness routine that's actually sustainable, not just something you do for two weeks in January." A beat. "And eat well. That's probably— honestly, that's the biggest one. Eating well. Eating enough." He said the last word with a slight emphasis, leaned back in the chair. "I think a lot of people get that part wrong. They cut everything and wonder why they feel terrible." He shook his head. "Your body needs fuel. That's not complicated."

The heavy fire doors of the Voyageurs locker room swung shut behind Shane, sealing out the damp arena hallway. He dropped onto the wooden bench of his stall, his knees spreading wide as he reached for the hem of his sweaty practice jersey. He pulled it over his head, the fabric clinging to his skin before snapping free.

He didn’t immediately reach for his new compression gear. He just sat there, breathing in the smell of sweat and tape adhesive.

"Captain, oh Captain," Comeau whistled from two stalls down, already slipping his own shirt over his head.

Shane froze. He furrowed his eyebrows, the line between them deepening, and tilted his head up. He grabbed his water bottle from the shelf above his cubby and took a deliberate swig. He swallowed, his throat working visibly, before he spoke.

"What." He said it flatly, bluntly, no upward inflection.

Comeau paused, his arms half-tangled in his sleeves. He looked taken aback, his eyes darting quickly to Drapeau across the room. He raised his eyebrows. Drapeau, peeling tape off his shin guards, raised his eyebrows back in a silent, shared communication that Shane hated.

Shane’s bottom lip twitched. The plastic of the water bottle crinkled slightly under his grip. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Comeau sighed, dragging a hand through his hair and scratching at his scalp. He looked away, muttering toward his own locker. "Man, I didn't even say anything."

Down the bench, Hayden was already unlacing his skates, his head swiveling toward the rising tension. But Shane was already moving. He stood up abruptly, the bench groaning slightly under the shift in weight. He folded his arms tightly across his bare chest, his face pulling into a hard, serious line.

"No, what's it supposed to mean. Stop being so vague about everything." Shane demanded, his voice dropping into that quiet, dangerous register. "You can look over at him and say it, but not me? What, are you a—" Shane paused. His dark eyes flicked rapidly across the room, tracking the sudden stillness of his teammates. "Um– a pussy?"

A chorus of low whistles and groans rippled through the locker room. Someone—probably J.J.—let out a sharp, amused hiss.

"Jesus." Comeau smacked his kit down hard into his cubby, the plastic cracking against the wood. "This is what I'm talking about. You're such a buzzkill these days. It's like you want to fight everybody. I don't know what kind of bitches you're surrounding yourself with lately that are making you act up like this, but we're your—"

Shane gasped. The sound was sharp and visceral, cutting Comeau off entirely.

"Bitches? What the fuck—" Shane took a hard, aggressive step forward, the rubber mat squeaking under his bare feet. The muscles in his neck jumped. "Did you just fucking call my girlfriend a bitch?"

Comeau’s eyes went wide. He threw his hands up, palms out in sudden surrender, leaning back against the wood of his stall. "Whoa! Calm down, fuck, Hollander. I didn't say—why would I ever?"

The heel of Shane’s hand caught Comeau high on the shoulder, knocking him back so his spine hit the lockers with a loud thud. The room exploded. Groans and swears echoed off the tile walls. Someone in the back shouted for Comeau to "take it like a pussy," and the comment ignited whatever restraint Comeau had left.

Comeau lunged, his hand twisting into the collar of Shane’s fresh compression shirt before Shane could even put it on. He yanked Shane forward, turning his head to shout over his shoulder at J.J. "Viens chercher ton putain de garçon, mec."

Come get your fucking boy, man.

He turned back, his face inches from Shane’s, hissing through his teeth. "Captain, I don't want to put my hands on you." Comeau tilted his head, pulling Shane in tighter, the fabric digging into Shane’s skin. "But you've got to get in line. The hairspray is getting to your fucking head."

Shane lurched forward, abandoning any pretense of control. He grabbed Comeau by the shoulders, shoving him back against the cubby, and suddenly they were grappling, screaming over each other in a messy, furious tangle of limbs and bruised egos.

"Fuck you! Fuck you! You’re an asshole." Shane yelled, his voice cracking, tearing out of his throat. "Fucking talk about my girlfriend again and I'll beat the shit out of you!"

Hands were suddenly on him. Hayden and J.J. grabbed Shane by the shoulders, their grips bruising as they yanked him backward with a violent pull. Across from them, Berkes and Drapeau hauled Comeau away, pinning him against the opposite wall.

"Hey! Hey!" Hayden roared, dragging Shane backward by the armpits, out of the locker room and into the concrete hallway. He slammed Shane back against the cinderblock wall. The impact knocked the breath out of Shane’s lungs in a hard huff. Hayden gripped both of Shane’s shoulders, pinning him there.

Shane was panting, his chest heaving unevenly. His eyes darted around the empty corridor, blinking rapidly against the harsh fluorescent lights.

Hayden shook him once, hard enough to rattle Shane’s teeth.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Hayden hissed, his face pulled into a tight, furious mask. "What is wrong with you? Hey. Hey, buddy." Hayden let go with one hand to snap his fingers directly in front of Shane’s face. "Look at me."

Shane groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. He dragged both hands up, burying his fingers into his own hair and pulling at the roots. "God, stop yelling at me," he gritted out, shaking his head side to side against the wall.

Hayden scoffed. He actually gasped, a short, disbelieving sound. "Me? Stop yelling? You were about to get in a fistfight in the locker room! You, Shane."

Shane’s eyes snapped open. His bottom lip jutted out defensively, his breathing still erratic. "What the fuck do you mean me? You think I'm incapable of fighting or something? That I'm weak?"

"No, buddy, what?" Hayden’s anger fractured into genuine confusion. He stared at Shane, searching his face. He paused, his expression shifting as he tracked the erratic movement of Shane’s eyes and the pale, sweaty sheen on his forehead. Something flickered in Hayden's gaze. "Did you eat today?"

Shane froze. The question hit him like a physical blow. His hands slowly lowered from his head, his fingers trembling slightly as he dropped them to his sides. He dragged his dark, fractured gaze up to meet Hayden's steady one.

"Why are you asking me that." He whispered. 

"Because your pupils are dilated, you're grabbing at your head, and you make no damn sense."

"Yeah, well," Shane snapped, lifting his chin, "if J.J. got in a fight, would you be asking him whether he ate today?"

"The fact that you aren't answering kinda proves my point," Hayden sighed. He reached out, his hand moving slowly, and gripped Shane’s chin. His thumb pressed lightly against the bone, steadying Shane’s erratic movements, and he scanned his eyes of Shane’s face. “You’re drenched in sweat, you've got to go to the medic, buddy. The final is tonight.” His eyes widened, the frustration melting entirely into deep, uncomfortable concern.

Shane batted the hand away and rolled his eyes, the motion aggressive and dismissive. He pushed off the wall, turning on his heel, and started marching down the corridor back toward the locker room.

"Shane," Hayden called after him, his voice echoing off the concrete. "Where are you going?"

"To fix it, and then to practice," Shane barked, not breaking his stride, not looking back. "Because I'm captain. That's what I do."

Comeau caught him at the tunnel mouth.

He'd been waiting there, Shane realized, standing just inside the rubber matting where it met the ice, his helmet already on, his stick held loose in both hands. Not blocking the way. Just there. The rest of the team had already filed through, the sound of blades already filling the arena above the low thrum of the overhead rigs, and Comeau had stayed back, which for Comeau was the equivalent of writing a formal letter of apology on embossed stationery.

"Hey," Comeau said.

Shane stopped. He looked at him.

"I wasn't talking about your girl." Comeau's jaw worked once, like the sentence had cost him something. "I want you to know that. I would never. I was talking about—" He made a vague, frustrated gesture with his stick that seemed to encompass the general shape of whatever is happening with you lately. "I was talking about whoever's got your head fucked up. That's all I was saying."

Shane looked at him for a long moment. The tunnel was cold, the arena colder beyond it, the clean bite of fresh ice coming in off the rink and settling against his face.

"Okay," Shane said.

Comeau nodded. "Okay."

They stepped onto the ice.

Morning skate was supposed to be easy.

Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Loosen up, run through some basic zone entries, let the legs remember what they were for before tonight. Coach had been explicit about it in the morning meeting, his voice carrying that measured cadence he reserved for things he really needed them to hear: light. No contact. Nobody does anything heroic at morning skate the day of a Cup final. You show up, you move around, you go home and sleep.

Simple. Shane could do simple.

He took a lap.

The ice was fresh— the Zamboni had been on maybe forty minutes before they'd taken the ice, and the surface had that silence underfoot, tight and fast and cooperative. The arena was empty except for the team, the thirty thousand seats all hollow and dark above them, and the sound that bounced off all that vacancy was clean and sharp. Blades cutting. The rhythmic slap of pucks. The occasional bark of a coach's instruction, then the silence swallowing it back up. Shane skated the perimeter at half-pace, stick loose in his gloves, and the cold air came off the surface in a low, even wave that hit the tops of his cheekbones first, the way it always did.

He noticed, in a distant way, that something was slightly wrong with the light.

Not wrong wrong. Just slightly off, the overhead rigs, which were normally harsh and white and flat, seemed to have a lag to them. Like the photons were taking a fraction longer to arrive than physics strictly required. He blinked, and the rink returned to its normal state, and it made sense, after all, he'd slept four hours. 

He shook it off and took another lap.

And that one was much harder than the first. His legs felt fine, or felt like they usually felt. His legs sent signals, he received the signals, the signals said fine, so he read them as fine and kept going. 

It was more that the ice seemed further away than usual. A slight, inexplicable increase in the gap between his skate blades and the surface. He watched them cut from somewhere approximately twelve inches above his own skull. He took the turn at the near end, digging the outside edge in, the cold spray catching his shin.

Shane.

He blinked.

He was already turning to check that, and nobody was looking at him. Comeau was running a figure eight at the far blue line, his head down. Two of the younger guys were alternating shots on the backup goalie, the crack of each one landing a clean beat in the arena's quiet. Hayden was talking to one of the defensive coaches near the bench, his head bent.

Nobody had said anything.

That was your thought, something clarified, from a distant place somewhere in the middle region of his own skull. That was you.

He coasted, slowing slightly. His stick dragged against the ice.

He hadn't— the voice in his head. His actual voice, the one that usually ran the play-by-play of his own internal experience, had been so quiet for so long, had dropped so far below audible frequency that hearing it arrive with that urgency felt startling. Like running into someone in a grocery store that you used to know very well, and for a second you almost don't recognize them out of context, and then you do, and there's this whole strange thing of oh, hi, it's been a while, and you don't know what to do with the fact that they look slightly different now.

Oh, he thought back at it, distantly. Hi.

You need to get off the ice, it said.

I'm fine, he told it.

You're not, it said, and then it said the rest of the sentence, rapid-fire, the words tripping over each other, you're going to fall and crack your head open on this ice and it's going to happen in front of everyone and you'll miss the game and the Cup and your dad's going to be in the stands and the camera will be on your face when you go down and everyone will see, everyone will know something is wrong with you, the whole world will know—

His vision went sideways, the arena tilting approximately fifteen degrees on an axis that had no physical basis, the overhead lights smearing slightly at their edges, their clean white going soft and yellow and uncertain. The sound of blades on ice arrived suddenly muffled and slow, like it was coming through several feet of water instead of air. His peripheral vision did something strange, contracted slightly, the seats pulling toward the center of his field of vision in a way that seats weren't supposed to do.

He understood, with a sudden remote clarity, that he was about to fall. Interesting. His legs had begun a conversation with the ice about the logistics of sitting down, a negotiation that was clearly well underway and from which he had been pointedly excluded. He reached for the boards.

They weren't there yet, oops.

"Whoa—"

Hayden was there instead.

He didn't know how. He'd been at the bench, he was fifty feet away, Shane had looked, except that was apparently not true because Hayden's arm was across his chest and his shoulder was under Shane's arm and the ice was still where it was supposed to be, when it would have been at his head in another half second. He could feel that, could feel the half-second of grace that had just expired, his legs the weight of concrete below his hips.

"I got you." Hayden's voice landed close, low, not for anyone skating nearby who might look over. "I got you, hey. Look at me."

Shane looked at him.

Hayden was managing, the thing flickering behind his eyes, fear, and Shane thought that he should probably say something reassuring. Something to bring Hayden's face back to normal. He was good at that. He had always been good at producing the correct response to smooth over other people's alarm.

He opened his mouth.

"Huh," he said.

"Yeah," Hayden said, and his jaw was very tight. "Okay. We're going to the bench."

Shane's skates moved. He wasn't entirely sure who was piloting them, probably who had been piloting his body the past year. The bench came toward him in increments, the boards solid under his glove when he finally reached them, the rubber of the gate cold through his glove, and he sat because Hayden's hand came down on his shoulder and he sat, and the ice was below him and above him was the dead fluorescent overhead, and his lungs were moving air in and out in a ragged pattern.

Somebody had already turned away down the bench. Playing it off. Hayden had shifted his body, communicated nothing to see here to everyone in the vicinity. Bless. Hayden crouched in front of him. The movement was casual. Just two guys at the bench, one of them checking his laces. 

"Don't talk yet," Hayden said, very quietly, his hand still on Shane's knee. He was looking at Shane's face with that expression again. "Just breathe."

Shane breathed.

The arena resolved itself. The lights returned to normal. The sounds un-muffled. The ice went back to being nine-sixteenths of an inch thick and twelve inches below his feet, the reliable distance it had always been.

He needed to tell Hayden he was fine. That it was just the lights, the fatigue, the two nights of four hours. That he'd eaten this morning—except that wasn't—well, he'd had the protein shake, he'd made it, the blender had run, he remembered the sound of it. He'd stood over the counter and watched it run, and then he'd poured it and put the glass in the sink.

Then he’d poured that glass down the sink, too. On game day. Seriously, Shane? Have you lost your fucking mind?

"Shane," Hayden said.

"I'm fine," Shane said.

Hayden's hand pressed slightly harder against his knee. "I know you think that," he said, and his voice was careful and even and devastating, "but I need you to think about what you just ate today before you tell me that again."

Shane's mouth went dry.

"Because tonight matters," Hayden continued, his voice staying quiet and level, the whole thing still performing as a casual conversation about laces. "I know it matters to you. I know what it means." He paused. "Which is exactly why you need to eat something. Right now, before we go back out, and then you’re going to talk to coach."

Shane opened his mouth.

Closed it. His heart was beating irregularly in his chest, a slightly syncopated beat, nothing dramatic, just off, the way the lights had been off, the way the ice had been off, the way his own voice had arrived in his head like a stranger he used to know.

Hi, he thought at it again. I'm not sure I've been taking great care of you.

It didn't answer. That was, probably, an answer.

Shane stood outside Coach Thériault's office for forty-three seconds.

The protein bar was in his right hand. A trainer had thrust it at him in the corridor the moment his skates hit the rubber matting, eat this before you talk to Coach. The wrapper was orange and white, very bright under the fluorescent lights, and Shane had been reading the ingredient list for approximately half the walk from the bench.

Canola oil. There it was, third from the bottom, sitting between the cane sugar and the soy lecithin like it wasn't a known inflammatory agent, like his body wasn't already running on fumes and whatever residual cortisol the morning skate had squeezed out of him. Canola oil is a seed oil. Seed oils drove up omega-6 fatty acids, drove up systemic inflammation, and inflammation drove every chronic disease marker his nutritionist had shown him on a chart eighteen months ago.

His fingers tightened on the wrapper.

Eat the canola oil, Shane. The voice in his head, his own voice, which had been making these unwelcome editorial appearances all morning, sounded tired of him. Eat the seed oils. There is a Cup game in eight and a half hours, and you nearly collapsed on the ice in front of your entire team because your blood sugar crashed through the floor. Eat the protein bar.

He glanced at the door, then back at the bar.

You are going to miss the game, the voice continued, shifting registers. You are going to miss the Cup final because you won't eat a protein bar with canola oil in it. You are going to let down twenty-two people, your parents, your city, the entire country, because of linoleic acid, Shane. That is what is happening right now.

He knew that, he knew that, and he wished it would stop fucking yelling at him.

Eat it.

He stared at the wrapper.

He thought about his mom's voice from this morning. Five-fifty AM, still dark outside, her number on his screen while he stood over the sink with the protein shake draining down the sink. She'd called to wish him luck, which she did before every important game, which she had done his entire career, and he'd stood there and listened to her talk about how proud she was, how his dad had barely slept, how half of Ottawa was wearing number twenty-four today, and his dad had gotten on the line at the end to say son, that single syllable that carried about forty years of everything he didn't know how to say out loud, and Shane had said I know, Dad and I love you and I'll call you after, and when he'd hung up, and his hand gripping the counter was shaking.

You should have eaten then.

He knows.

But you didn't.

He knows.

So eat the bar.

Shane looked at the ingredient list one more time. Then he crumpled the wrapper, bar still inside it, and dropped it in the recycling bin beside the office door.

That was a waste.

I'll eat when I get home.

The voice didn't answer. It had the decency, at least, to know when it had lost. He knocked twice and pushed the door open.

Coach Thériault's office was narrow and functional, a desk covered in zone coverage printouts and a whiteboard he'd wiped halfway through from the morning meeting, the ghost of red marker still visible in the ghost of a forecheck trap. He was leaning forward in his chair when Shane came in, elbow on the desk, one hand idly clicking a pen against the wood. His other arm lay across his lower stomach, relaxed. He was looking at something on his laptop. He looked up when Shane stepped through the door. His nose twitched like a rodent, and he straightened in his chair. He gestured at the chair across from his desk without saying anything. Shane sat down in it. His spine went straight, automatic, his hands settled on his knees. He looked approximately two inches above Thériault's left shoulder, which was close enough to eye contact to pass as it.

Thériault set the pen down.

"How are you doing?" he said. Not how are you feeling after this morning, or Pike told me what happened. Just: how are you doing? And thank God for it.

"Good," Shane said. "I'm okay."

Thériault squinted at him. "Right," he said. He exhaled through his nose, a slow, measured sound, and pressed two fingers flat against the desk.

"I understand you've been busy," he said. "The charity work, the media, the sponsorships, modeling. The whole machine." He flicked two fingers, once. "Fine. You handle it. You've always handled it."

Shane nodded. His thumbnail found the seam of his compression pants and pressed into it.

​​"The press loves you," Thériault continued. "Your jerseys outsell everyone else on the roster by three to one. Half the country wants to kiss you, the other half wants to be you." He paused. "Great. That's great for us. Good press is good for the whole organization. I'm not here to tell you to stop."

His finger pressed harder against the desk.

"But Shane." The use of his first name caused Shane to flinch. Thériault didn't use first names when he was in a good mood about something. "You are our most valuable player. You are the captain of this team." He looked at him directly now, and Shane felt the weight of it. "You understand what that means tonight? What tonight is?"

A stupid question, he understands the significance of tonight more than anyone else in the building.

"Yes," Shane said.

"You understand every man in that room is relying on you."

What’s new?

"Yes." Shane's thumbnail pressed harder into the seam. He was going to leave a mark.

"Because what's good press," Thériault said, his voice dropping slightly, "if we're losing? What is Canada's sweetheart worth if we don't win the Cup? What is any of it worth if you're not performing at the level I know you can perform at?"

Shane nodded once. His gaze had slid somewhere past Thériault's shoulder, past the half-erased whiteboard. His head was repeating his dad's voice on the phone this morning. Son. Is that what he was, someone’s Son?

Hockey has and always will be your priority, he heard himself say. His own voice, delivered correctly, through the right mouth. He blinked.

Had he said that out loud?

Thériault was looking at him. "I know it is," he said, but his voice had shifted. "Which is why I need more than that from you tonight. I need more than hockey is my priority. I need—" He paused, and pressed his lips together briefly. "I need you to be where you were in game five. On the ice. Not somewhere else."

Shane's thumbnail had found skin. He felt the small, sharp sting of it.

Somewhere else.  

"I need you sharp," Thériault said. "I need you present. The whole team needs that from you today." He sat back. His expression leveled out into something final, the subject officially closed, the message officially delivered. "Whatever else is going on in your life— deal with it on your own time. Tonight, you're a hockey player. That's what you're here to be."

Somewhere else. 

"I know," Shane said.

Somewhere else. 

"Good," Thériault said.

Shane stood. His spine was still straight. His face was still correct.

He was most of the way to the door when Thériault said, quietly, to his back, "Eat something before warmups."

Shane's hand found the door handle. His grip tightened on the cold metal.

"Yeah," he said. "I will."

He pulled the door shut behind him. The corridor offered him nothing. Just the hum of the HVAC and the flat, indifferent fluorescent light that these hallways always ran on, the kind that didn't flatter anything, that showed every room for exactly what it was, a utilitarian passage between one place and another. He stood in it.

Somewhere else, Thériault had said.

Shane pressed the back of his head against the wall.

Not a place. No, not a decision he'd made on any particular morning, hadn't been one bad week or one wrong turn. It was more like the way you find something you've been looking at without seeing it— it was like the ice on the morning skate. The slow, incremental increase in distance between his blades and the surface. The gap that widened so gradually you didn't feel yourself leaving. You just looked down one day, and the ground was further than it used to be.

He'd been leaving for months.

The food first, that was always the first thing to go, the canary in the coalmine of his own psychology, and he'd watched it happen and didn’t stop it. Didn’t care that the protein shakes were getting easier to skip. The meal prep containers in the freezer— weighed, measured, identical— multiplying because he kept making them and not eating them, kept standing over the counter in the morning with the blender running and then setting the glass down and walking away. His body getting quieter about it, the hunger signals going faint and then going further, until checking in with his own stomach felt like trying to pick up a signal from a station that had gone off-air. He'd step on the scale before practice and feel nothing, and he'd step off it and feel nothing, and somewhere in there the number had started to matter, and he'd known it was wrong the way you know a load-bearing wall is wrong to take out, while also already reaching for the sledgehammer.

And the mirror too. The mirror had started doing something strange, had started showing him something that didn't quite line up with what he'd expected to find there. Like looking at a photograph of yourself from someone else's camera angle. The person in it was recognisably him, wore his face, had his body, but the relationship between that person and the one looking at it had vanished. He'd stand in his bathroom before morning skate, dressed, hair done, completely prepared to be Shane Hollander in public for another eleven hours, and he'd look at the mirror and think: right, okay. You. Yes. That's the one.

And he'd go be that one. For however long it was required. And then he'd come home and sit on his kitchen floor sometimes, and he'd sit there in the dark with his back against the cabinets and try to feel the cold of the tile through his sweatpants, try to use the sensation to locate himself, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

Do more, work harder, whatever it takes.

Shane pushed off the wall.

You're a hockey player above all else.

He walked.

We're all relying on you.

Rookie of the year, 2015 Stanley Cup winner, Cosmopolitan's Hottest Man in the NHL, Smartest Hockey IQ in the NHL, Model, Ambassador, Philanthropist, Role Model, Son, Boyfriend, Hockey Player, Captain, Ken Doll, Robot, God, God, God. 

The corridor bent left past the training room, past the equipment bay with its smell of rubber and old sweat, and he walked until the hallway widened into the small alcove near the players' exit, where the vending machines sat, two of them, humming against the concrete, their lit-up faces stacked with things his nutritionist had opinions about. He stopped in front of the one on the left. He looked at his own reflection in the glass— the distorted, bluish version of himself that the front panel threw back, his face stretched slightly wrong, his eyes too dark in the overhead lighting, a version of him that looked like a bad copy of the original.

Which was the original? Shane couldn’t say.

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the glass.

Then he lifted his head and knocked it back twice. Two dull impacts, forehead against glass, the vibration of it going through his skull and down into his teeth and into the back of his neck.

Come back, he thought. Wherever you went, come back, please.

He gripped the edge of the machine with both hands.

He squeezed.

The metal corners pressed into the meat of his palms first, and then into the pads of his fingers, and then into the place just below the knuckles where the tendons ran close to the surface. He squeezed harder. The burn started at the pressure points and radiated outward, climbing his fingers, his palms going hot and then numb and then hot again, the specific, insistent language of a body saying I am here, you are here, this is the location of us, you, right now, in this exact moment. He held it until his hands shook slightly with the effort.

He breathed; the other machines hummed back.

You are the captain, he thought, and it arrived without the usual hollow echo it had been carrying for months, arrived with a little more weight to it, a little more actual ground underneath. You are Canada's hockey player. You have been Canada's hockey player since you were two years old, and your parents took you to your first game, and you watched the ice and thought— there. That's where I live.

His grip loosened, fractionally.

You are a son.

He was made of both of them. He had his father's jaw and his mother's stubbornness and both of their specific, exhausting conviction that the right thing was worth doing even when it cost you something. He was a son. He was a fucking son. Someone had made him, deliberately, on purpose, had stood in arenas and driven to practices in the dark and believed in something that didn't exist yet, and he was the proof that it had existed all along. That wasn't nothing. That wasn't the kind of thing you got to be absent for, so come back.

Shane uncurled his hands from the machine. He looked at his palms, red at the pressure points, the lines of his grip flushed and raw, sensation coming back in the prickling wave of a limb returning to itself.

The puck dropped.

Shane won it clean, his stick moving before his brain had finished forming the instruction, the black disc snapping back to Hayden’s skates with a sound like a whipcrack swallowed by the crowd. Twenty thousand people were already so loud the noise had become a single atmospheric buzz, a wall of sound that sat on your chest and pushed. He didn't hear it anymore. He hadn't heard it since the second period. At some point, the noise had become the baseline hum of everything, and the only sounds that got through now were the ones close enough— the scrape of an edge changing direction, the heavy knock of a body check absorbed by the boards, the referee's whistle cutting through everything else like a blade.

He took the puck up the right wing.

His legs were on fire from the thighs down. His lungs pulled at the cold arena air, and it arrived thin, not enough of it. He could feel his own heartbeat in his jaw. In his fingertips inside the gloves. In the bridge of his nose, for reasons he couldn't explain and didn't have time to consider.

He crossed the blue line.

The defenseman came at him from the left—big, fast— and Shane shifted his weight onto his outside edge a fraction of a second before contact, the puck going to his backhand, his shoulder taking the blow and dispersing it through his body in a shockwave he felt in his teeth. He didn't go down. He kept his feet, which was the only thing that mattered, and the puck was still on his stick, which was the only other thing.

He drove to the net.

The crease was chaos, three bodies minimum, sticks everywhere, the goalie dropping into his butterfly and cutting the angle, the ice in front of the crease carved down to the raw, rutted surface of a game that had been going this long. Shane's skate caught a groove in the ice, his balance shifting by a centimetre, and he adjusted without thinking, the adjustment coming from somewhere below conscious thought, from the part of his body that had been doing this since he was nine years old and didn't need to be told anymore.

He shot.

The sound the arena made was not a cheer. It was not a roar, something that started in the chest and bypassed the throat, that came out of twenty thousand people at the same pitch at the same moment and became a crashing wave, a physical thing, something that hit Shane in the face and the chest and the stomach simultaneously.

He raised his arms.

His legs gave out and he didn't care, his knees hitting the ice, the impact barely registering against everything else, and then J.J. was on him and Comeau was on him and the pile was building and someone's elbow was in his ear and he couldn't breathe and he didn't need to, he could survive without breathing for this specific amount of time.

Above them, the arena was a single, sustained, enormous note.

And somewhere in the building—an absolutely unprecedented performance from Montreal's captain, Shane Hollander, who finishes tonight with four goals, one assist, and a plus-four rating, as the Voyageurs take the Stanley Cup in game seven by a final score of six to one—

Shane yanked himself out of the pile.

It took effort, J.J. had both arms locked around his chest and Comeau was somewhere on his back and somebody's cage was pressing into his cheek, somebody's knee was in his thigh, and he had to pull against the collective weight of it, wriggling until he got one arm free and then the other, and then he was out, stumbling two steps forward on the ice as the pile reformed behind him without him.

He stood there.

His chest was heaving. The red light was still on above the net, and the horn had sounded, and the clock on the scoreboard read 00:00, and the ice beneath his skates had the torn, rutted quality of ice that had been fought over for sixty-three minutes and had the evidence of it carved into every inch.

He smiled.

He felt it happen. The way something in his face that had been held very tightly for a very long time simply released, all at once, the muscles around his mouth and eyes doing something they apparently hadn't done properly in months. His eyes went hot. The rims of them, then the whole surface, a sudden wet sting that he didn't have time to be embarrassed about because it was already happening and he couldn't stop it and there was no one reason for it— not the game specifically, not the goal specifically, not the four goals or the Cup final or the six to one— but the relief. That was the word. Relief. Not joy exactly, though there was joy in it. Relief, like the release of a pressure that had been building for so long, he'd forgotten what his chest felt like without it. His whole ribcage felt light and expanded.

Then the smile dropped.

Not because the feeling left—the feeling was still there, huge and disorienting, still filling his chest up past the point of capacity, but because performing it was suddenly, immediately, entirely beyond him. The face that knew how to show things correctly, the face that had been working at full capacity in press corridors and locker rooms and charity events and pre-game interviews for the past eight months, had quietly shut down. There was nothing left to run it on. He just couldn't put it on his face anymore.

His eyes were still wet. His chest was still full.

He stood in the middle of the ice, and he breathed.

He should go back, he knew that. He could see his team— the pile still moving, still chaotic, someone had hoisted Mitty off the ice entirely and was carrying him, J.J. was flat on his back making a snow angel in the crease, and he should go back and he should be there, and he should say something, be the captain, give the speech—

He wiped his hand over his mouth.

He skated to the other end of the ice.

Hunter Scott was bent over at the far blue line. His stick rested across his knees, both hands gripping it, his head dropped, breathing in long and audible pulls. His jersey was soaked through at the back and the sides. His helmet was slightly askew where it had taken a hit in the second period, and he hadn't straightened it.

Shane coasted to a stop three feet away from him.

He could hear his own breathing. He could feel the sweat cooling on the back of his neck, beneath his helmet, at the collar of his jersey. His left side was a sustained noise, that bruise that had been developing since the second shift of the third period fully committed now, a deep pulsing heat that ran from his ribcage to his hip.

He watched Hunter breathe. He felt something quiet and almost warm, in a strange way. An uncomplicated feeling of shared extremity, two men at the same physical end, on opposite sides of the same game, both of them having spent everything they had on the same sixty-three minutes of ice.

Shane smiled. It was smaller this time, more private. "Hope next time we play," he said, "you decide to show up." 

Hunter lifted his head slowly. His face, what Shane could see of it through the cage, was flushed and expressionless with exhaustion. He looked at Shane for a moment.

Then he turned his head and spat onto the ice beside Shane's skate. "Cheap," he said.

Shane looked at the spot, he looked back up at Hunter, and he turned his head and spat at the same spot. "True," he said.

Hunter's expression shifted. He ran his tongue over his bottom teeth, turned his head slightly, looking out at the ice, at the far end where the ceremony was beginning, the Cup being carried to the boards, the officials moving toward the gate, the crowd noise changing shape into something ceremonial.

"You're starting to sound like him," Hunter said.

What?

He stepped forward. "I'm sorry," he said. "What?"

Hunter straightened. All the way up, spine going long, the bent-over exhaustion dropping away. He looked at Shane directly, no smile, no hedge. He tilted his head back slightly, the cage throwing a bar of shadow across the bridge of his nose.

"You fucking heard me, Hollander."

Shane's jaw tightened. The heat in his left side flickered and spread. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Hunter tilted his head the other way, a fractional movement; his shoulders went slightly back. "Has he been giving you chirping tips?"

Shane lurched.

He saw it. He was somewhere approximately eight feet above and behind his own body, watching his hands come up and watching them find the front of Hunter's jersey, and Hunter's hands were coming up too, grabbing back, but Shane's momentum was already committed, full-body and violent, and Hunter's skates went out from under him on the ice.

Hunter went down hard. The back of his helmet hit the ice with a sound like a bag dropped on concrete, the impact resonating up through the surface, and Shane was already on top of him, his knees coming down on either side of Hunter's chest, the ice cold through his pants, the cold not registering, his right fist already moving.

The first punch landed on the cage and rattled through his knuckles up into his wrist. The second one found the gap between the cage and the helmet and connected with the cheekbone, a solid, dense impact that he felt all the way to his shoulder. Hunter's head snapped sideways and snapped back. His hands came up, gripping Shane's jersey at the chest, the fingers twisting into the fabric.

"You fucking pussy," Shane heard himself say, and his voice came from, very far away, from the bird's-eye version of himself that was watching this happen, and the voice was not his— not the one he used for anything, not the captain's voice or the press voice or the voice on the phone with his parents at five-fifty this morning— it was something underneath those voices, something that had been under all of them, raw and ragged and humiliatingly afraid.

He kept punching.

The visor on Hunter's helmet cracked on the fourth hit, a white fracture line running diagonally from the lower right corner, the plastic going opaque where the split ran, and Shane saw it and kept going. The ice around them was red. He could see it in his peripheral vision, the bright arterial colour spreading in the ruts and grooves of the ice surface.

His hands were bloody. He could feel how wet they were, warm against the cold air, his knuckles split and stinging.

Hunter's hands, which had been gripping and twisting at his jersey, began to shake.

The grip loosened.

Shane—

He was being pulled. Both shoulders, simultaneously, two separate sets of hands grabbing with full-body force, and his weight went backward so suddenly the ice came up fast, and he scrambled to keep his skates under him, his legs cycling, one skate catching nothing before finding the surface. Someone was in front of him, coming in fast, both arms up, bracing, and Hayden was behind him, one arm going across his chest, the other hand pressing flat against the small of his back with a pressure that was firm and unmistakably him.

"Hey," Hayden said, directly into his ear. "Hey, hey, hey—"

Shane was still screaming.

He didn't know when he'd started. His throat was raw with it. He could hear himself, could hear the sound coming out of his own mouth at high volume with no specific content, not words, not even the approximate shape of words, just the sound itself,, and his legs were still kicking forward, skates scrabbling against the ice for purchase he wasn't going to get, the referee taking his weight and leaning into it, Hayden leaning back.

The arena. Twenty-three minutes ago it had been a wave; now it was something else. He could hear it layering, could hear the confusion in it, the excitement turned wrong, the undertone of something collective and horrified.

He was still kicking. Hayden's arm tightened across his chest.

And through everything, through the hands on him and the noise and the red on the ice and the rawness of his own throat and the referee's weight and Hayden's voice still going in his ear, a steady, urgent plea of hey, hey, I've got you, look at me, look at me—

Through all of it.

He saw the Cup.

It was at the far end of the ice. They'd carried it out through the gate and it was standing there under the arena lights, and the lights hit the silver of it and the silver threw the light back in every direction, and it was standing on a white-skirted table with the ceremony officials arranged around it, and it was enormous, it was always more enormous in person than any photograph prepared you for, the size of it, the physical reality of a thing you had been chasing for your entire conscious life suddenly occupying actual space in actual air in front of you.

His legs stopped kicking.

His eyes moved from the silver to the red ice and back to the silver, and the two images sat next to each other behind his eyes without integrating.

The Cup. His Cup. The one. The singular thing he had been every version of himself in service of, the nine-year-old at the arena with his father, the junior player, the rookie, the captain, the person on the phone at five-fifty this morning, the person on the vending machine floor, every iteration of Shane Hollander had been pointed at this moment on this ice and the moment was here and he was standing in it with blood on his hands and a man down behind him and the referee's weight against his chest and Hayden's arm across his body and twenty thousand people watching the wrong thing.

I think I regret this.

Chapter Text

June 2014 

The key missed the lock the first time.

Ilya pulled it back, steadied his hand against the doorframe, and tried again. It scraped across the plate, finding nothing. His hand was shaking. Not violently, not the full-body shaking of fever or fear, nothing so legible as that. Just a fine, involuntary tremor at the terminal end of his fingers, a millimetre of deviation, maybe two, enough to send the key scraping across the faceplate and catching nothing.

He pulled it back. Looked at his hand.

The tremor was still there. He could see it if he held his fingers still, the small, rapid oscillation, like a compass needle near a magnet, his body trying to orient toward something and not finding it. He pressed his thumb and forefinger together until his knuckles went white, felt the bones compress against each other, held the pressure until the shaking either stopped or became too small to see. The third attempt he just jammed it in, felt the resistance, forced it through, the tumblers turning with a heavy, reluctant click. He shoved the door open with his shoulder and it swung wide into the dark, the Boston skyline throwing a long, grey rectangle of ambient light across his hallway floor.

The apartment was dark. But he knew the shape of it well enough, the hallway, the kitchen beyond, the wall to ceiling windows at the far end throwing the Boston skyline in through the glass in long grey-orange strips, but he reached for the light switch anyway, found only wall, more wall, the corner of a frame that had been slightly crooked since he moved in and that he had never straightened because there were certain things you let stay wrong on purpose, as a reminder that the world was not obligated to be level. His fingers moved along the plaster and found nothing useful and he gave up, let his hand drop, and walked into the dark using the harbour light through the window to navigate by.

He stood in the doorway for a moment. His duffel bag hung from his right hand, the strap biting into his palm. He had meant to go to the house—the one in the suburbs with the sexy kitchen, the one that took thirty minutes by cab—but thirty minutes in the back of that taxi with his own skull had been an impossibility. Eleven minutes had been enough. He had counted them. He had counted everything.

His duffel bag knocked against the doorframe as he dragged it inside. And God for some reason, his legs were not doing what he was telling them to do. They were taking weight incorrectly, distributing it wrong, his knees buckled as if they threatened to simply opt out of his decisions. He pulled a breath in through his nose and it came out ragged and wet.

He pressed his hand against his chest, just to check. 

Ilya had been doing this since he left. The heel of his hand was digging into bone, feeling for the beat of it, and it was there, it was beating, the instinctive confirming pressure, like checking for a wallet, a phone, some vital organ that might have gone missing. The heartbeat was there, it was beating, the mechanical thump of it, transmitted faithfully through the bone. Like a pendulum that had been cut loose, still swinging, still marking time, but no longer connected to anything that required knowing the hour. He pressed harder. The beating continued, indifferent to the fact that his heart was no longer there.

When you lose your heart, you do not feel the absence immediately. The body was good at improvisation. It could run on the residual pressure in the arteries for a while, on the stubbornness of muscle memory. It was only when you stopped, when you stood alone in the dark of your own apartment, palm grinding against your own ribcage, that you noticed the shape of what was gone.

His heart had left him. 

Like how blood left a wound through a small cut, continuously, until the colour drained out of the skin.The whole apparatus, the capillaries, the freckles, the smooth muscle, the smile, the electrical charge it had been generating, specifically and exclusively, for the last three years. It was in Montreal now, of all places, pumping for someone who would be horrified by the imposition, who would hand it back with apologies if he knew he had it. Ilya was standing here running on the ghost of circulation, the faint echo of what his body had been doing before the thing that made it worth doing left.

His legs gave out.

He went to his knees hard, the hardwood slamming up against his kneecaps with a crack that rang through the floorboards. He stayed there. His hands went flat to the wood, palms down, fingers splayed. The grain pressed into his skin. The cold seeped upward, through his fingertips first, then his wrists, then the inside of his forearms to the soft hollow of his elbows. He looked at his hands on the floor. He had been around these knuckles once, in the dark of a hotel room whose city he couldn't now recall. Had looked up at him afterward with those enormous, ruined eyes and said nothing, had just looked. As though the scars required a witness, as though the damage deserved to be seen. And Ilya saw, how couldn’t he? 

How does a person live without their heart.

He asked the floor, because the floor had been here longer than he had, had borne the weight of whatever had happened in this apartment before him, and presumably knew something about survival. No response, instead, the harbour light shifted slightly across the boards as something passed a streetlamp outside.

“Blyat.”

He came up fast, wrong, one knee then the other, his balance making abrupt, unauthorised corrections. He grabbed his own curls, both fists, drove his fingers into the roots until the pull registered against his scalp like a line drawn in fire. He let go. Shook his head. Grabbed them again, tighter, the pain a small anchor in the storm that was happening behind his eyes.

How the fuck could he do this to him.

The kitchen was eleven feet end to end. He covered it in four strides, too short, insufficient, the walls coming too soon, turned at the counter, covered it back. Four strides. Turn. Four strides. His sock caught a seam in the floor on the second pass, and he compensated without breaking stride because stopping was not an option, because stopping meant standing still with this feeling, and this feeling right now was a thing with teeth, a thing that would chew through bone if he let it.

How could he drop to his knees like that. Let Ilya through every door, every seam. Let himself be taken apart piece by piece, stick out his tongue like that, look at him like that, be so soft, slip into the  form Ilya had spent months learning to make him— and then stand up. Walk away. Reassemble himself, piece by piece, into something sealed again. Step out into the hallway like the tide had turned over everything on the shore and gone back out, leaving the rocks unmoved.

His hand shot out and caught the drawer handle. 

The contents shifted. Forks, spoons, a spatula. His eyes moved across them without focus. His hand found the knife handle, his Santoku, eight inches, the one he used for onions because the edge held so good, and closed around it. The weight in his hands was perfect. Cool and honest. A thing that did exactly what it was asked.

He hated him.

He turned the knife in his palm and looked at his left wrist. The skin there was pale under the skyline light, the veins tracing their familiar paths toward his fingers, pushing blood without being asked, without thanks. He pressed the flat of the blade against it. Felt the cold of the steel against the thin skin, felt the false pulse knock up against it from underneath.

He hated him with every capillary that was still working. He hated him with the marrow of his bones, the ones his father had said at sixteen were too light, too fragile for a real centreman. He hated him with the hollow in his chest where the heartbeat was still going through the motions. He hated him the way you hated something that had sneaked its way inside you and made itself necessary, that had fitted itself into a gap so perfectly there was no longer a gap, just the shape of it, the negative space.

He drew the blade across.

The pain was immediate and brilliant, a clean line of fire, the skin parting with the neatness of something that had been waiting to be asked, and he hated him. Blood welled up along the seam, dark red in the dim light, following gravity with the slow, deliberate patience of water finding its level, and he fucking hated him. He watched it. He hated him. Noted the volume of it. Noted how much he hated him. Noted the way it beaded at the edges before merging. Noted that he wanted to die, that he needed to die, that he was dying.

He raised the knife.

The arms came from behind.

Mama?

Both of them, locking across his chest in one total motion, and then her weight was against his back, her small, disproportionate strength, the thing about Svetlana that had always been slightly alarming, and she was screaming. He could not parse the content immediately, only the register of it, the pitch. His name in her mouth, the diminutive of it, the shape his mother used to make. Ilyashu. Mama?  The knife was being pried from his fingers with a determination that had no interest in negotiating. Her hand wrapped over his hand, working each finger back individually, and his grip gave way not because he chose it but because she simply would not stop until it did.

He heard it hit the floor somewhere to his left, heard it skid across the boards, heard it come to rest against something. Then there was kitchen roll against his forearm— she had grabbed it from the counter in the same motion, one seamless reach, she had always been fast in ways that you forgot until you needed to remember, and she was pressing it down against the cut with the flat of her palm, her weight behind it.

Her hands were shaking. Just like his had before. She was his brother in arms, even here, with the fine tremor in her palms where they pressed the paper to his skin, he knew that she was not judging him. 

Still, he tried to shove her off, his elbow went back, finding her ribs.

"Come here," she said, and the crack in her voice on those two words was the first real thing he had heard since Vegas.

She pulled him around bodily, her arms going around his front, and hauled him into her. He went, usually he did not go easily, he was six feet and built for resistance, his whole body a practised argument against yielding— and he yet went, because this was Sveta, and his face went into the crook of her neck, and that was that.

Her perfume hit him first. The same one, always the same one, ordered from the same shop in Saint Petersburg since she was seventeen, and they were both pretending to be adults in rooms that required it. He had told her once that it smelled like a rose had vomited. She had told him that he was too musty for his opinions on fragrance to be solicited and had never worn anything else, not once, in eight years. The scent of it now was simply the scent of her— of the safety she had always represented, not the absence of danger but the presence of someone who would stand in the danger of him and not require him to explain it.

The tears came out of him like rain, as a condition that had already been in effect, that the clouds had already decided to leak, and you had just simply not registered it until this moment. The front of her shirt was wet against his cheek. His ribcage was shaking, the shaking of something that had been holding too long under too much load, failing now not violently but completely, each breath arriving and leaving in pieces, the exhale breaking in the middle.

Svetlana did not speak. She pressed her hand flat against the back of his neck, her palm warm against his hairline, and her thumb moved in one slow arc. Back and forth. She hummed, and it travelled through skin and bone directly into whatever was breaking. Did not fix it. Did not try because Ilyashu cannot be fixed, does not need to be fixed.

He kept his face in the crook of her neck and breathed her perfume and shook.

After a while, he could not have said how long, time having made itself irrelevant some minutes ago, the shaking slowed. Only because the body had a finite reserve for this kind of thing, a capacity it reached the bottom of and then stopped, not healed but empty. He lifted his head. His face felt tight and strange, the salt of it drying on his cheeks.

Svetlana pulled back. She took his face in both hands.

In the dark, he could barely see her. The Boston skyline lit the back of her head, the copper of her curls catching the orange of the streetlamps and holding it, so that she appeared faintly illuminated, faintly on fire, St Catherine of Siena, the glow of the city sitting in her hair like something she'd caught and was carrying. He could see the whites of her eyes. The furrow between her brows, deep, carved, the groove that appeared only when she was a little frightened and refusing to perform it.

Her thumbs pressed against his cheekbones.

"Wait," she said, the scaffolding of her voice rebuilt in real time. She closed her eyes, opened them."Your first aid kit, I got you one." She glanced past him, over his shoulder, toward the floor where the knife had come to rest. "I'll be right back, Ilya." Her eyes returned to his. "Don't."

Her hands left his face.

The absence of them was felt instantly, the loss of that support against his cheekbones. He heard her moving down the hallway— her footsteps quick and certain.

He dipped his head.

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist—the clean one, the right one, instinct or luck—and then turned his left arm over and looked at it in the skyline light. The cut sat clean and dark against his inner forearm, the line of it straight, the blood already going tacky at the edges, the body having begun to close what he had opened. He studied it the way he studied an injury after a game, no drama. Not deep. It really wasn’t that deep. 

His jaw tightened. The muscle jumped once in his cheek.

He’s acting like a child. This is a childish thing to do.

It was accurate, as far as it went; only children did this, only people who had not yet built the walls to the required height, only people who still let the feelings get their hands on the wheel. He had built those walls. He had been building them since before he knew what he was building them for, had laid the first stones at age twelve in his childhood bedroom and had added to them, year by year, until they were by any reasonable assessment impenetrable.

And then Shane Hollander had told him to stop smoking.

Ilya crossed the kitchen and sat down at the dining table. He pulled out the chair, sat heavily, legs wide, one elbow finding the table, his head settling into his hand. He looked at the window. The harbour. The flat black water and the orange lights strung above it and the sky beginning, somewhere at its lowest edge, to consider the eventual possibility of dawn.

Since when did he allow this.

He pressed his thumb against his nose, felt at the bandage there, taut, the sore skin running tight from bone to bone. He thought about Shane in the doorway. He thought about the expression on Shane's face just before he punched him, the raw openness of it, the fraction of a second where every wall came down simultaneously, and something real and undefended looked out. He had spent three years engineering moments that would produce exactly that expression. He had saved it, memorised it, returned to it in the private hours of early morning when the apartment was dark.

He thought about Shane walking away. 

If I see him again, Ilya thought, I am quite certain that I will kill him.

It seemed realistic. Sure, there were several possible outcomes, ranging from strangling to confession, but he was not currently in a position to predict which end of that range the encounter would resolve itself at.

Svetlana returned.

She came through from the hallway with a first aid kit Ilya has never seen under one arm and a towel draped over her wrist and the bottle of Beluga from the bar cart in her hand, and she set all of it on the table with a soft bang.

Ilya looked at the vodka. Then at her. "You are trying to kill me," he said, into his hand. The words came out worn at the edges, scraped thin.

Svetlana looked at him with the full exhaustion of twenty years of friendship with him, every single one of them accounted for in her expression. Okay, now she does want to kill him. "You are trying to kill yourself," she said, pleasantly.

She sat beside him, her knee found his. She poured vodka onto the towel without ceremony, the liquid darkening the fabric in a spreading circle, and when she pressed it to his forearm, the burn arrived beautifully— the honest fire of antiseptic, arriving from outside him, nothing to do with feeling. He closed his eyes. Let it.

She worked quietly. The small sounds of it filled the kitchen, the soft press of cotton, the clinical tear of gauze, the cool edge of tape against skin. Outside, something moved on the harbour. A boat, maybe, a nuke, could be either; Ilya didn’t care. To him, it was just a light crossing the water and disappearing.

"So, Ilya." Her voice was doing a weird attempt at conversational, the register she used when she had decided that practical was more useful than emotional, when she had assessed the room and concluded that softness would not serve him right now. "America has been so good for you, I thought—" She stopped. Her hand stilled briefly on his arm. She shook her head once and did not finish the sentence. "Never mind that. What happened to you, what happened to your nose?"

Ilya looked at the living room. The empty sofa, the unlit lamp, the window with the skyline doing its indifferent business behind it.

He said nothing.

Svetlana nodded, like that was a complete answer. She smoothed a bandage along the cut, pressed the edges flat with her thumb, and held them down until they adhered. "Okay," she said. "I think I understand." A pause, the length of a breath. "What did they say to you?"

"Who."

She looked up at him. Her blue eyes moved across his face, like reading a text she had already memorized and was checking for new annotations.

"I don't know who." She reached across the table and took his hand from his lap. Simply took it, turned it over in both of hers. Her finger moved along one knuckle, tracing the ridge of the bone, following it from one end to the other and back. "I can guess, if you like. You know I'm good at it." She shuffled her chair fractionally closer, closing the last few inches between them.

"But I know my Ilyashu, mm? I know how sensitive his heart is. How much things hurt him, even the things he has decided should not hurt him anymore, even the things he has tried very hard to protect himself from." Her finger stilled in the valley between two knuckles. She did not look up. "How gentle people need to be with him. How rarely they are. How much you care." She tilted her head, rose one brow. "Want me to guess?"

Ilya shook his head. He turned it into his hand and pressed his mouth against his own palm and breathed there, in the small warm cave of it.

"Are you going to tell me who, at least?” 

A light moved across the water.

"Hm?"

"A special person," Ilya said.

He said it quietly, without inflection, into his palm. The words left his mouth and took on a weight he had not placed there, gathered it from the table, from the first aid kit, from the bandage on his arm and the knife on the floor by the door, and the wet patch on Svetlana's collar where he had pressed his face.

No other word was enough. His own name was not enough. Special was perfect. 

Svetlana's mouth moved. He watched her catch something, a laugh, a sound, something that rose and was contained, press her lips together, hold it. She furrowed her brows instead, the furrow deepening until it was the only expression on her face.

"A special person, of course, my dear," she said, slowly. Letting it settle, then, "Tell me about them, who they are, and the fight. And—" She stopped. She wrinkled her nose, the expression cutting directly through everything else in her face. "Jesus, Ilya. You stink."

Ilya looked at her.

She was already standing, already reaching for his good arm, because she had carried him through rooms worse than this and was not accepting any argument about it. "You can tell me," she said, pulling him up, "when you get in the bath."

June 2016

The bathroom mirror was fogged at the edges.

Ilya had run the shower hot enough to steam the glass, the condensation gathering in beads that traced slow, erratic paths down the surface. He stood naked in front of it, water still dripping from his skin, pooling on the tile beneath his feet. The room smelled of cedar and mint, the expensive gel he bought because it didn't irritate his skin, because it left no residue— and the air was thick with heat, pressing against his chest like a hand.

He looked at himself.

His reflection was not entirely sharp. The centre of his face was clear, but the periphery blurred into the fog, so that he appeared to be emerging from it, his shoulders dissolving into the mist behind him. He tightened his grip around his cock, his erection heavy and insistent between his legs, the skin flushed darker than the rest of him. 

His eyes moved up, as they often did, to the place he had taped the photograph.

It was not inherently sexual, but it was sexy. That was the point of it, or part of the point. Shane Hollander sat on the bench, mid-game, his helmet off, his mouthguard dangling from between his teeth. The expression on his face was inward, just thinking, the faint crease between his brows, the mouthguard working against his bottom lip like he was chewing on a thought he couldn't quite place. It was a moment no one else had been paying attention to. A moment between shifts, between plays. A moment where Shane Hollander was alone inside his own head.

Ilya tightened his grip. Stroked once, slow.

Whoever took it had done a good job; the camera had caught it perfectly, the way Shane's jersey hung open at the collar, the freckles visible on his collarbone. The way his hands rested on his knees, loose, the tape on his stick glinting under the arena lights.

“Fuck, fuck, yes.”

His thumb pressed into the head of his cock on the upstroke, spreading the bead of precome there. He watched himself do it in the mirror, watched the flex of his forearm, the veins standing against his skin, the way his bicep shifted with the motion. He watched his own face. His eyes stayed on the photograph.

Shane chewing his mouthguard. Shane thinking. Shane alone.

The spit would be gathering at the corner of his mouth by now, it always did, when he was deep in something, when his brain had pulled away from his body and gone wherever it went during the intermission. The mouthguard was probably filled with it, translucent, the plastic slick with saliva. Shane's tongue would be wet and pink behind it. Ilya had seen it, had bitten down on the memory for months, the soft pink of it, the way it moved against the inside of his cheek when he was thinking. Like a rabbit, Ilya thought. Something small and living and completely unaware of being watched.

His fist tightened.

He thought about slipping his fingers into Shane's mouth. Not his cock— not yet, not first, just his fingers, two of them, pressing against that tongue, feeling the resistance of it. The way Shane would make a sound, muffled, startled, and then, fuck, and then would chew. Would bite down, hard, with the full force of his jaw, in the half-deliberate way of someone who could not quite help themselves, the habit translating to skin and bone, his teeth pressing slowly into the meat of Ilya's fingers the way they pressed into the plastic. The grind of it. The give of Ilya's flesh under his teeth. Shane looking up at him through his lashes while he did it, with the faint quirk at the inner corner of his brow, totally concentrated, like Ilya was a problem he was working through.

Would he even know he was doing it? How sexy he was? How fucking sexy he was, chewing that mouth guard like a little bunny? Rubbing it against his little five o’clock shadow, brow all furrowed and–

His hips rocked forward into his fist, and he groaned. His breath came out ragged against the glass.

He wanted to; he needed to come on that face. On the photograph, on the real thing, on the crease between those brows and the dark of his lashes and the freckles scattered across his nose like someone had been careless with paint. Drag his bloody, chewed-up, bunny-nibbled fingers across it afterward. Watch the red smear into the freckles, into the soft skin below his eye. Write something there. Press his thumb against Shane's forehead and write something delicately, the way you signed a thing you owned.

What would he write?

Rozanov's. Simple, speaks for itself. The possessive standing alone, because the noun was implied, was obvious, was everything— Rozanov's and let Shane figure out the rest of it, let him read it in the mirror if he could bear to look. Rozanov's heart. Rozanov's heart, pressed against Shane's forehead in red. Ilya's heart, which had been walking around in someone else's chest for three years, written in blood on the face of the person carrying it.

He stroked faster.

Or maybe, his thumb pressed hard into the head of his cock, and he bit down on the sound that came out, maybe something Shane would hate. Something that would make his face twitch, cause the blush that ran up through his neck when he was outraged and embarrassed in equal measure. Roz's cum sock, dragged across his forehead in Ilya's come. Rozanov's baby boy, and then watch Shane try to formulate a coherent objection while Ilya was still holding his face.

“Oh fuck, da, Hollander– look so perfect like that, with my come all over your face– blyat.”

The release went through him in a long, contracting wave, his whole body tightening from the base of his spine outward, his knuckles white against the glass, his eyes still on the photograph— Shane on the bench, Shane chewing, Shane completely unaware that Ilya Rozanov was in a steamed bathroom jerking off to his bunny teeth. 

Rozanov’s heart.

Out of all of them, that was the only one that was true.

His phone buzzed.

Ilya grabbed a piece of toilet paper and dragged it over his palm, thumbing at his phone with the other one. 

Ha.

Ilya glanced down at his phone and scoffed softly through his nose. He shook his head once—a small, reflexive motion, fond almost— and swiped off the messages and into the VoIP app. He had bought new SIM cards originally. Six of them, across three different carriers, cycling through them. After the sixth block, he had reassessed and downloaded the app instead. Cheaper, more elegant, even, it does the same job with much less work needed. Shane could block the number, but the number would simply change, and Shane would know the number had changed and open the message anyway because Shane always opened the messages.

He walked out of the bathroom with the towel loose at his waist and set the phone face down on the bed.

Boston was dark through the large windows. The city sat out there, nocturnal as ever, the lights of it, the harbour a flat black plane below the navy smear of the sky— and he crossed the room without turning on any lamps, navigating by the ambient glow of it the way he navigated life, by whatever light was closest and most available. The half-smoked cigarette on the bedside ashtray had been burning quietly to nothing while he was in the bathroom, the ash extending in a long, perfect cylinder that had not yet collapsed. He slipped it between his lips.

He pulled the black tank from the chair where he'd left it. Shook it out once, pulled it over his head. It fit close, unforgiving, the cotton stretching tight across his chest and shoulders, the hem hitting just above the waistband of whatever he was putting on next. He had bought it one size too small deliberately, because there was no point in owning shoulders like this and putting a tent over them. He took the cigarette between two fingers and looked down at his phone on the bed.

He picked it up. Swiped up the conversation history while he worked his black jeans up his legs with his free hand, one-handed, a manoeuvre he had perfected through years of texting while dressing.

The wall of text was there, as he had left it three weeks ago.  The timestamps a damning vertical record of two in the morning, three in the morning, three-seventeen, four. 

I never meant to hurt you sorry about what I said bout your body 2 so drunk and pissed off sorry. Your beautiful.

He raised his eyebrows. Wow, very good English.

Your beautiful. Not you're. The autocorrect had either failed him or he had been in no condition to notice it, which tracked— what had that night been? He took a slow drag of the cigarette and thought back. Half a pill. No— he had started with half and reconsidered somewhere around midnight, taken the other half anyway. MDMA and alcohol, the combination designed to make you feel profoundly and completely in love with whatever your brain had decided to fixate on, to strip out every filter between the feeling and the expression of it and leave you texting your baby at four in the morning about how beautiful he was, with incorrect grammar.

He exhaled smoke at the ceiling.

The message sat there unread. Shane hadn't opened it— or he had read the notification, that pale rectangle of preview text appearing on his lock screen, and had made the very Shane Hollander decision to not open the message itself, to let it sit there unread, a small dignified protest. Ilya could picture it with complete accuracy. Shane sat on whatever couch he sat on, in whatever room he retreated to, his phone face-up on the cushion beside him. The notification arriving. Shane's eyes going to it. The pause, like he was conducting an internal negotiation with himself, his thumb hovering over the screen with the rigid self-restraint of someone who had decided, probably out loud, probably in the mirror that morning, that he was not going to do this. That he had made a decision, and the decision was final.

And then not opening it, just barely, using everything he had to not open it.

Bless, Ilya thought.

What a sweetheart. Sitting there with his jaw set and his big brown eyes fixed on the unread notification, pouting at his own willpower, cataloguing the days by the messages. Ilya was sure of it— sure that Shane felt each message arrive the way you felt a storm coming, with your whole body before you knew what it was. That the messages were the closest thing Shane had to a clock right now, some regular ticking in the fuzz of his life.

He had to keep them coming. Regular, reliable, it was, if nothing else, a kindness. He took a final drag, pinched the cigarette out against the ashtray, and grabbed his phone from the bed as he started toward the hallway.

The club hit him the moment the door opened.

The heat first, that humid heat of two hundred bodies occupying the same space, the air thick with it, with perfume and sweat and alcohol, and the charged heat of too many people that decided to be too close to each other. Then the music, the bass arriving through the soles of his shoes before it reached his ears, a low and insistent thrum that settled into his sternum and stayed there.

He felt it move through the room like a current, the moment people registered him, the information passing from one body to the next in a ripple, heads swiveling by degrees. He felt it on his skin like the sun coming out from behind a cloud— a warmth, sudden and total, the room reorienting toward him the way plants reoriented toward light. He stood in the doorway and let it happen, because it always happened, and because the warmth of it, shallow and borrowed as it was, felt like something.

His team was arranged along the bar at various angles of relaxation, the tall stools colonised, the space around them claimed by proximity and noise. All of them already scanning the room with bright-eyed desire. Even the married ones. Especially the married ones, because marriage, in Ilya's experience, did not diminish appetite so much as redirect it into something furtive and therefore more urgent.

He exhaled through his nose, and it drew out into a hum.

Marleau materialised from his left, approaching all loose, with a briskness to his step that meant he already had three drinks, at least two. His face was arranged into theatrical outrage, brows furrowed, dark eyes narrowed, and he came to a stop directly in front of Ilya and raised one finger and pressed it to the centre of his chest.

"What the fuck," Marleau said, "did I say would happen if you showed up here?"

Ilya side-eyed him. "You miss me this much?" He let one corner of his mouth lift, just slightly. "Is been what. Two weeks?"

Marleau shoved him.

Ilya's face broke open into a full smile, and he grabbed Marleau by the shoulder and steered him toward the bar. "Where can I get a drink?"

"Rozzy." Marleau turned to look at him with magnificent contempt. "Are you fucking blind? The uppers are fucking with your memory, baby." He turned back to the bar and brought both palms down flat on it with a crack that cut briefly through the music, his head going back.

 "Vodka shots, all round!" he shouted, to the room, to no one, to everyone. "Our Russian prince is here!"

There was a loud whooping from the crowd, and the team started drumming their hands on the bar, the rhythm building, the sound of it carrying. Connors wolf-whistled from across the group, cupping his hands around his mouth, "Our fucking princess!"

Ilya raised his hand, the drumming subsided.

"Okay," he said. He let his eyes move across them slowly, taking each face in. "I understand times are tough." He paused. "Two years. No Cup. Very sad." Another pause, his gaze arriving at Carmichael, moving down his body, arriving at his shirt. "I mean." He gestured. "Look at Carmichael. He is even wearing his daughter's shirt."

The laughter came in a wave. Carmichael looked down at himself, baffled.

Ilya raised his hand again. "So. Put away your empty wallets." He unfolded his arms from across his chest and turned to the bar, leaning forward, folding his forearms against the edge. "Papa Rozanov will pay."

The bartender was watching him from across the bar with narrowed eyes. Handsome, yes, but not anything spectacular, not enough. Ilya ran his tongue along the back of his top teeth.

"Sorry for them," he said.

The bartender's eyes didn't shift. "You mean sorry for you."

Ilya hummed. He leaned forward further, his elbows crossing the invisible line between customer and bar, the boundary moving because he had decided it was moving. His forearms came to rest alongside where the man's hands were braced on the wood.  

"We are loud, yes," he said. Not a question. "I'll make it up to you."

"Okay." The bartender's expression didn't change, but his eyes did something. The flicker that happened when people decided they were going to let Rozanov do what he was going to do anyway. "How?"

Ilya fully grinned. He slipped his hand into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, counted out nine hundred dollars in clean bills, and set them on the bar. He slid them across in one motion and straightened.

"Two rounds for the team. For the girls, please." He tilted his head. "Sorry, again."

He turned to leave. The bartender called after him, his voice carrying a note of genuine bafflement. "That's like six-fifty, sir. There's almost a band here, you've got— you've got a lot of change."

Ilya turned over his shoulder. He shrugged, loose and easy. "Is your tip." He let the grin go fractionally wider. "I said I would make it up to you, hm?"

He didn't give himself time to see the man's expression. But he felt it.

Felt it always, that burning, crawling up his sternum, settling in the hollow of his chest, and trying so hard to fill the space. He walked through the crowd and tried not to notice how it failed to slot into the empty ribcage in his chest. He found the VIP section and folded himself into the low couch, his legs settling open, and looked out at the room. He noticed anyway, of course.

Blyat.

He had been asked to pay. He had paid, had thrown the money across the bar with ease. Everyone in this room was a mouth, was an appetite, was something that needed filling from somewhere outside itself. His team at the bar, the women orbiting them, the bartender with his tilted head and his pleased eyes. If Ilya had come with nothing, if he'd walked through this door with the shirt off his back and not a dollar to his name, they'd have taken the shirt too. Would have sucked the last of whatever he had left directly from his skin and gone looking for more.

Little vampires. Little beautiful bloodless vampires, moving through the fog of the club, rubbing themselves against each other like they were trying to generate heat from the friction. Like they were cold. Like they had always been cold, always been wanting, and had simply learned to call it dancing.

Ilya pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth and looked at the ceiling.

What are you doing here. What are you doing here, Ilya.

His smile was gone; he had not decided to drop it. It had simply departed, taken itself elsewhere, left his face arranged in its resting configuration— the flatness of it, the brow, the set of his mouth. He leaned his head back against the couch and looked at the lights moving across the ceiling, felt the nothingness arrive on its usual schedule.

Not announcing itself,  but seeped through the gaps as cold coming through a window that had been left open by a crack. The music was loud enough. The crowd was dense enough. By all metrics, he was surrounded, he was here, he was among people. And yet the glass had come down between him and all of it, clear, clean, impeccable, and he was watching the club move through it like something in a tank.

Connor materialised. He dropped two shots onto the table and slid them across, as he had decided that shots were the solution to whatever was happening with Rozanov and was not entertaining alternatives, like talking, for example. "I've got a gift for you." He flopped down on the couch beside Ilya.

Ilya leaned forward, folded his hands between his knees, and glanced at him sideways. He picked up both shots in sequence. Drank the first, set it down. Drank the second without pause, without flinching, set that down too.

Connor flinched on his behalf, running a hand through his hair. "What's up with you?"

Ilya's eye twitched.

"What the fuck," he said, and his voice came out flat, quiet over the music, which was worse than if it had been loud, "are you doing on my dick."

He looked back out at the crowd. At the people moving against each other. At the sluggish, boneless, continuous rubbing of bodies against bodies, mouths against ears, hands against hips. Corpses. A room full of beautifully dressed corpses going through the motions, never really living, but this was the closest available approximation.

"Sorry—" Connor started.

"Fuck." The word came out through his teeth, soft. "I need to get laid."

A pause. He felt Connor adjust his technique beside him— felt the moment of assessment, the hand that lifted toward his shoulder and then stopped a few inches short, thinking better of it. "You'll get some, Rozy. Look at that crowd, beautiful ladies all over."

Ilya's leg was bouncing. He hadn't noticed until now, the rapid up-down of his knee, the heel tapping the floor in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the music. He put his hand on it, flat, and pressed down until it stopped.

"Jesus fucking Christ." He hissed, "Get off my fucking dick."

Connors stood, fully, both hands raised, eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. "I'm off, I'm off." He pointed toward the bar with one finger, walking backwards. "I'll be by the bar."

He disappeared into the crowd.

Ilya let the breath out through his nose. He put his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled it out again, and set it on his knee. He looked at his phone, opened the location app.

The green dot blinked on the map. Still. Settled. The coordinates of it, he had memorised them months ago, could have placed them without the app, could have told you exactly where that dot sat relative to everything else in Montreal with his eyes closed. It was not moving. It was, in all likelihood, in bed. It was, in all likelihood, on his side, the left side, Ilya was certain, though he had never been told this— with the lights off, and the phone on the nightstand either face-up or face-down.

Ilya tapped the side of the phone with his thumb, once, twice.

He swiped to the texting app, opened the conversation. 

I fucking hate you.

He looked at it, deleted it.

I need you.

Deleted.

You don’t deserve me.

Deleted.

10 minutes can’t go past without me thinking of you.

Deleted.

I

He stopped. His thumb rested against the keyboard, the cursor blinked after the single character, patient and empty. He didn't finish it. He didn't know how. Didn’t know what the rest of the sentence meant to him.

The darkness in his chest had gone from a seep to a flood now, and he was aware that he was sinking. That the couch had risen imperceptibly around him, that the room had tilted some fraction of a degree, that the glass between him and everything else had thickened by a millimetre.

He scanned the crowd.

He did not know why he was scanning it. He knew what he was looking for was not here; he was certain of this. And yet his eyes moved through the bodies, systematic, like reading a penalty kill— looking for the opening, the gap in the pattern, the thing that didn't fit.

He found it.

The dark hair first. Short, black, the bangs cut straight across her forehead and then disrupted—slightly, just slightly—into small points that fell forward over her brow. And beneath them, looking down at her straw, eyes that were bored and shiny and very brown. The freckles gathered across the bridge of her nose, two, maybe three, clustered there.

She dragged her tongue out and swept it slowly across her bottom lip as she bit down on her straw.

Ilya stood up.

He felt his whole body surge before he'd processed the decision, hands going slightly unsteady at his sides, eyes widening a fraction, and he registered this and forced himself to sit back down. He breathed once through his nose, tapped his finger against his thigh, and reached into his back pocket, pulled out the small, clear bag, and tapped a line onto the back of his phone. Bent his head. Inhaled.

He sat back.

The coke moved through his skull in a cold wave, sharpening the edges of things, returning the room to definition. His heartbeat quickened and then settled into a new, higher-frequency rhythm, the nothingness cutting back like fog burning off in morning heat. He blinked. Breathed. Felt himself slowly reconstitute into the shape of a living, breathing person.

He stood up again.

The crowd parted for him without being asked, like the Red Sea. It always did. He moved through it, and it rearranged itself around his trajectory, the bodies shifting without looking, operating on some collective instinct that allocated space according to gravity, and Ilya had always had more gravity than he required.

She was at the bar, her shoulders almost at her ears, in a fitted grey t-shirt, dark jeans, sucking at the empty glass in front of her. Small. Like a mouse. He slotted himself next to her at the bar and raised his hand at the bartender.

"Hey." He pointed toward her empty glass. "Can I get one more of those?"

She looked at him. The look moved up and then down, assessing, not rude exactly, but not yet anything else either. Then her brows furrowed. A small, confused flinch. She turned back to the bar, leaned forward, not quite acknowledging him. 

"No, that's okay, thanks."

Ilya paused. He turned to face her, his knee extended forward until it hovered just in front of hers, not quite touching. "Do I know you?" he asked, tilting his head. The corner of his mouth moved.

She side-eyed him. The straw was still in her mouth, resting against her bottom lip. "Uh, no. And I don't know you." A brief pause. "So I don't want a drink from you."

Ilya's face broke into a smile. Not a full one, settling instead on the quiet one, the one that lived just below the surface of the full one.

"And who says is for you?"

She stopped, blinked, flush moved up her face, fast and complete, from the collar of her shirt to the roots of her hair. "Oh— oh, sorry, I thought—"

Ilya waved her off. He turned back to the bar, settled both arms against the edge, and tapped once. "Make it two, please." He turned back to her and gave her his full attention because she was deserving of it. "No, no. I'm sorry."

"For what?" She pulled her mouth off the straw, her lips parted, and Ilya watched them.

"For interrupting your alone time." He swallowed, watched her nibble her bottom lip. "You look like you are thinking very hard."

"I guess."

He nodded slowly. "In places like this, where the noise is so loud it suppresses all the thoughts you don't want to have — it makes thinking easier. Things outside are so loud that inside it becomes clear. Yes?"

 She dipped her head. A small smile appeared, soft, slightly surprised, a smile that hadn't expected to happen. Aha, bingo. "How did you know."

He gestured toward himself. "I am the same."

The bartender set down two mojitos. Ilya slid cash across without looking at it. She glanced at the amount, caught herself glancing, looked away, and wrapped her lips around the straw again. 

Oh, fuck. 

"You're here alone?" He leaned into his fist.

She shrugged. "No. I mean— yes? I came with my friends." She raised her eyes, scanning, and gestured with them toward a group across the room— three women, three men, a constellation that had clearly rearranged itself into pairs and was no longer a group in any meaningful sense. It was odd because she was much more beautiful than all of them combined. Ilya is sure she doesn’t know this. "But they met these guys." Her face shifted. He could read the planes of her face clearly— could see through the hardened mask to what was underneath it. "I don't want to third wheel or anything."

"That's not very nice," Ilya said, he leaned closer. "They shouldn't leave you alone like that."

"I don't mind being alone." She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it. "I don't know. Sometimes it's less lonely than being with other people."

Her eyes closed for a moment. The lashes lay flat against her cheek. Ilya wanted to press his thumb against the soft skin of her upper eyelid. Too soon. He kept his hands on the bar.

"I can keep you company," he said. Easy, casually, offering without a stake in the answer. "If you want."

She nodded. "I'd like that." She turned to face him fully, setting her hands in her lap, and from here he could see her more clearly, the straight line of her collarbone, the soft curve of her waist, the way her tummy pushed the tiniest bit above the waistband of her jeans. He thought it was adorable. Oh, she was trouble.

She held out her hand. "I'm Yea-ji."

He slipped his hand into hers.

"Rozanov," he said.

Yea-ji was doing well, truly.

Her arm kept flying back, her hand scrabbling blindly behind her, reaching for him, unable to close the distance. Ilya had his foot pressed flat against the back of her neck, keeping her cheek down against the pillow, his knee wedged between her spread thighs, one hand locked on her hip, holding her ass half-lifted off the mattress. He pistoned into her, and she let out another continuous, climbing whine that she couldn't do anything about. Three times already. Still taking it, bless.

Her whines pitched higher as his tip pushed against her cervix, the sound going thin and desperate at the edges, almost a scream, and Ilya brought his palm down hard against the side of her ass. 

"Fuck." He groaned through his teeth, rocking his hips forward into the tight, wet clench of her. "Being a good girl for Papa, da?" He smacked her again, slower this time, letting his palm linger against the sting of it. "Mm?"

"Mhm, mhm—" Her voice was wrecked, muffled against the pillow, barely coherent. "Yes, please, close, so close—" She tightened around him. 

He grunted, pressed his foot harder against the back of her neck, felt her sob into the sheets, her whole torso shaking with it. Then she went still. The shudder moved through her from her hips upward and dissolved.

Ilya laughed softly. God, so sweet. He lifted his foot from her neck and settled back onto his knees, both hands finding her hips. He had done too much coke tonight to come—not impossible, just a matter of time, a longer road to the same destination— but the warmth was extraordinary. The kind of warmth that started in the soles of his feet and moved all the way up through his chest and settled behind his cheekbones. The sweat running down the side of his face was cooling in the air conditioning, and his heart was going at a steady, elevated clip, and he felt genuinely good.

Her ass was bright red from his palm, the skin flushed in the pattern of his hand. He tilted his head. Moved her back and forth along his cock, slow, a long drag. He looked at her hips in his hands, the width of them. He pressed his thumbs into the groove of them. Too small. He squeezed gently, comparing. and concluded: Shane had more fat on his. Not much, he was an athlete, they were both athletes, but enough. Enough that Ilya's grip had never quite closed the same way. 

He dragged his hands down the curve of Yea-ji's thighs.

Too small. He wrapped his hand around one, fingers curling all the way around until they touched his thumb on the other side, and he held it there for a moment. It was sweet. She was small and warm and responsive, and he had nothing against any of this.

But Shane's thighs, he always grabbed them with both hands, the muscle packed into them from twenty-six years of driving off ice, the thickness of the adductor running up the inner surface. His fingers had never once met his thumb on Shane's thigh. He had tried, had made a project of it.

He pulled Yea-ji up, bent over her fully, and pressed his lips to the back of her neck. Ran his tongue slowly along the hairline there, where the short dark hairs were damp with sweat. She had no freckles on her back. It was smooth and unmarked and entirely itself, and he stared at the blank canvas of her shoulder blade and thought about a cluster of marks on a left shoulder blade that didn't correspond to any constellation, that he had pressed his thumb into once while Shane groaned into the pillow. 

He exhaled through his nose.

He slid out of her with a low groan, the loss of warmth immediate. He pulled the condom off, tied it, tossed it toward the bin. He reached down and pulled the covers up over her, tucking them to her shoulder, and then stood there for a moment looking at her face against the pillow. Her lips were pressed into a soft pout. Her lashes made small shadows on her cheeks, fluttering once in her sleep. Her hair was a mess across the pillow, the bangs she'd spent time on earlier gone completely. She looked entirely peaceful, entirely lovely, probably, entirely complicated, too.

He bent down and pressed a kiss to the side of her nose. He should get her number in the morning. Take her to dinner, maybe. She was an interesting person, with a pretty face, and she had been a treat to fuck, she deserved dinner at the very least.

He straightened. Reached for the cigarettes on the nightstand, shook one out, lit it, set it between his lips in one continuous motion. 

The sun was coming up.

Just the suggestion of it, the sky outside the window going from black to a deep, bruised blue at the horizon, the city below still mostly dark, still running on its nighttime logic. His cock was still hard in his hand. The coke made this predictable — made everything protracted, stretched the whole business out past the point of urgency into something more methodical, more about the sensation than the destination. He didn't mind; he slipped into the bathroom. 

The bathroom was dark except for the city light coming in, the blue-grey of pre-dawn turning everything the colour of old photographs. He could see himself partially in the mirror to his left, the line of his shoulder, the cigarette between his lips, the slow movement of his forearm. 

The warmth was still there. That good, low, all-over warmth— the coke and the sex and the three hours of human contact spreading through him from his toes to the back of his jaw, every capillary lit gently from within. Yea-ji had been really good. She had been more than good, sexy, yes. Her body was responsive, and her sounds honest, none of the performance some women defaulted to when they understood who they were in bed with. She'd come four times and enjoyed each one. He had enjoyed that. He had enjoyed her better than the other girls he had fucked recently. 

He took a drag. Exhaled through his nose.

His hand moved. The smoke curled up and flattened against the ceiling, and the city went incrementally lighter outside the window.

Her little hips in his hands.

Yes, they'd fit in his palms, perfectly. Small, light, the bones are close to the surface. He had squeezed and felt the wholeness of it immediately, no give, just the thin padding of her, and then the bone underneath. He had moved her where he wanted her with very little effort. No, Shane's hips were a different proposition entirely, but not much wider, probably,

His grip tightened.

Her back had been smooth; girls would kill for that. And it looked tasty, so he had run his tongue along the hairline at the nape of her neck and found nothing but skin — no freckles. He wanted to lick Shane too, to press his thumb into the centre of the cluster, and make him groan against the pillow. 

He tightened his grip and worked faster, his eyes closing.

He could feel it building now, fuck, the insistent gathering of it, the base of his spine warming, his thighs tightening. He pressed his free hand flat against the window glass, the cold of it against his palm, the city lights blurring through the condensation his breath was making.

Shane on his knees.

Shane, with the Captain armature coming offline, and something else replacing it. The sharp angle of his neck. His hands coming to Ilya's hips, not to direct but to hold on, like something he needed to anchor himself to.

Those enormous dark eyes looking up.

Ilya's breath came out ragged. His hips rocked forward into his own fist.

Shane.

He said it out loud, barely voiced, more breath than sound, pushed out against the glass of the window where it fogged briefly and disappeared. But out loud. With his hand on himself in his bathroom at five in the morning with another woman asleep in his bed, with the sky going blue outside and the city still and quiet below.

Shane.

He came.

It moved through him in long, deep contractions, his fist working through it, his forehead dropping forward to rest against the cold glass. Right there, and yet the city below didn't notice. The sky continued its slow process of becoming morning.

He stood there for a moment with his forehead against the window, breathing. His own breath fogging the glass and clearing, fogging and clearing. Then he straightened. He cleaned his hand, he looked at the window for another moment, at the city, at the light accumulating at the horizon, at his own ghost-reflection in the glass, see-through, the buildings showing through his own chest.

Went back to the bedroom for another cigarette. He lit it standing at the door, looking at Yea-ji's sleeping form in the grey light, the pink of her lips against the pillow, her lashes making small shadows on her cheek, the slow rise and fall of the covers. Pretty. He felt something uncomplicated toward her, something almost gentle.

He padded back to the window. Stood in the blue pre-dawn light, put the cigarette in his mouth, and pulled out his phone.

He opened the location app.

The green dot blinked. Still, settled, no change. Shane's dot, Shane's still and sleeping location, the small green pulse of him existing somewhere he wasn't.  Ilya stood at the window with his cigarette burning down and watched the dot blink. Watched it not move, counted the pulses of it without meaning to.

He tapped the dot once with his thumb, gently, to see if it would blink back.

It did.

The TV was too loud.

Ilya had turned it up incrementally over the last twenty minutes without noticing, the remote sitting in his lap, his thumb making small unconscious adjustments to the volume until the room was vibrating faintly with it, the documentary filling his dark apartment with the sound of birdsong and running water and a narrator's voice so smooth it felt like being sedated.

The lake dissolved, and the screen settled on Shane.

He was sitting in a chair outside a large glass cabin, faux modesty, all clean lines and forest. He was in a hoodie and shorts, ankles crossed, both hands wrapped around a mug. He said something, it's my favourite place on earth, so casually that Ilya felt it like a finger pressed on a bruise.

He looked at Shane's jaw.

The sharpness of it. That was new, or newly visible, the fat in the soft curve of his cheeks hollowed out enough that the jawline was doing more work than it used to, clenching as he wrapped his lips around the words. Those lips. Puffy and pink in the violet and yellow of the sunrise, the colour of them almost unfair, almost gratuitous. Shane tilted his head, and the straight slope of his nose tilted with it, and the scatter of freckles across the bridge caught the light, and Ilya felt it—the freckles, specifically —stab him cleanly in the hollow of his chest. 

Shane squinted against the sun. The small humps of fat beneath his eyes crinkled, that squishy, particular softness of the skin there, the place Ilya had pressed his thumb once and felt give. It looked slightly grey now, under whatever makeup they'd put on his pretty face. 

The clip cut. Shane was on a yoga mat in the grass now.

Shirtless.

Ilya's eyes went flat.

Why was he shirtless? You didn’t need to be fucking shirtless to do yoga.. He stared at the screen and watched a camera operator who did not deserve their job pan slowly across Shane Hollander's bare torso in the early morning light, Shane's skin catching it and holding it, and reflecting it.

Shane curved into a cobra pose, his upper back arching, his spine a long, clean line from his tailbone to the base of his skull— and Ilya's eyes moved over it, trailed it down to the hump of his ass visible in the shorts. 

Shane’s ass, well packaged and perky for millions of people to view.

He squinted. 

It was smaller. Not dramatically, not in a way the camera was acknowledging, not in a way the production had apparently noticed or cared about, and his waist had narrowed proportionally so that on screen it presented as simply Shane Hollander, God among men, sexiest man to walk the earth— but Ilya noticed. Of course, he noticed. He had put both hands on that curve, seen it enough times to know its exact weight and give and temperature, and what was on the screen was a revised edition, leaner than the original in a way that no one who hadn't held the original would clock.

Shane started to lower into child's pose, driving his hips back and up—

"Should I start getting ready?"

Svetlana stepped in front of the TV.

She was wearing his jersey, dark, hanging off one shoulder, the hem hitting her mid-thigh, her copper hair loose around it. It was much too large for her. It had always been much too large on her, and she wore it anyway, specifically because it was too large, and Ilya had to watch the mid of her thigh as it brushed against it. She stood directly in front of the screen with one hand on her hip and looked at Shane in downward dog, and then looked at Ilya with an expression of composed, loving contempt.

She paused, raised one eyebrow, even grimaced slightly. "Or have you decided we're staying in to watch..." She tilted her head at the screen. "Your malysh.”

Ilya raised his eyebrows, dropped them, his face was completely flat. "Sorry." He shrugged. "It's so fucking boring I almost fell into a coma."

"Mm." Svetlana bit her lip. She turned around, considered the couch, and flopped her head onto his shoulder. He lifted his arm and let it settle around her, his hand finding the small curve of her neck, his thumb resting against the tendon there.

On the screen, Shane stretched his hands out to either side. The sunlight moved across his back.

"What would you rather they had him do?" Svetlana tilted her head, her hair tickling his jaw. Her voice had taken on the teasing lilt she deployed when she had decided to enjoy something at his expense. "More underwear modelling?"

Ilya's jaw went tight; he dropped the remote into his lap. "No." He turned his face toward her, their noses almost brushing. "Never."

"Ugh, Ilyashu." She sighed because Ilya had made her have some version of this exact conversation for longer than she cared to calculate. She settled deeper into his neck and looked at the screen. "Are you still letting him leave you on read? Stop with the desperate drunk texting." A pause. "I can't believe he's still not speaking to you."

"He's too busy." Ilya waved his hand, frowning at the ceiling. "With his new shiny friends." He sat up slightly, his voice climbing, the gestures becoming more emphatic. "And what is Landry even doing, look at him." He pointed at the screen. "Look at him. He is wasting away, like— I don’t even know what. What is the point of all this, the yoga, the cottage, the—" his hand described something vague and frustrated in the air— "what is any of it doing for him. "

Svetlana reached up, took the back of his head gently in her hand, and pulled him down into her lap. He went, his head settled against her thigh, her fingers moving into his curls, and he looked up at the ceiling and breathed.

"I think he looks pretty hot, actually," she said.

Ilya closed his eyes. Ran his hand slowly over his face, dragging the skin of it. "And that's the issue, yes?" His voice came out lower now, the heat going out of it. "Everyone thinks he looks nice. Wow, wow, wow, Shane's the hottest man in the NHL, Shane's taken Montreal to the playoffs twice. Nice." He let his hand drop. "And they don't care."

Not like I do.

"Oh, Ilyashu." Her voice had gone soft, the teasing dissolving into something warmer. She bent over him, her curls falling forward and tickling his face, and started performing a theatrical reading of him. "He's your heart beating out of your chest. You like him so much you can't breathe." She clutched the jersey at her chest with one fist. "Shanya, oh Shanya—"

Ilya grabbed her.

They went sideways along the couch, a brief, graceless tangle of arms, her laughter high and bright, his hands finding her waist— and then he had her pinned, his weight bracketing her shoulders, his arms on either side of her. He was breathing hard. Mostly from the wrestling.

He looked down at her.

Her face, upturned. Her eyes, the blue of them catching the light from the screen. Her curls spread out around her on the cushions. Her mouth still open from the laughing, the brightness of it, the aliveness of it.

God. What would he do without her. The one person, the only one who was allowed inside the room where this lived, who could walk through it, touch the walls of it. One person in the world who understood him well enough to mock it and hold it in the same breath. He bent down and pressed his mouth to hers. It was brief, soft, and not desire-driven, or not only that.

Svetlana wrapped both arms around the back of his neck and pulled him down against her chest. Her hand found his head and pressed him there, against the soft of her, and he let her, his whole body going heavy and still. Her fingers moved through his curls, slow.

He burrowed against her like he wanted to crawl inside.

"It's hard," he said, into the jersey. 

Svetlana nodded. "I know." Her hand continued its slow movement through his hair. "You and your big stupid heart."

The TV murmured. Shane said something about the lake, it wasn’t scripted; it was the most relaxed Ilya had heard him sound in months.

"I'm going to watch him play at the final tomorrow," Ilya said.

"Yeah." Svetlana's voice was easy. "Duh, I’d hope so. Should we make it a party? I can call—"

"I'm going to Montreal."

The hand in his hair stopped. Svetlana gripped him by both shoulders and hauled him up. She held him there, at arm's length, and looked at him with her big eyes, completely unblinking.

"Are you fucking stupid?"

Her hands moved from his shoulders to his curls, and she gripped them, both fists, and shook his head once. He made a small whine in protest.

"No," he said, when she released him. He settled his hands in his lap, folded them. "I'm not. I have to go."

"And what?" She spread her hands, her voice climbing. "Sit in the stadium and watch? You'll make him lose. You'll— oh my God, Ilya." She brought two fingers to his temple and flicked, hard. "No. Absolutely not. You're not doing that."

She was right. He would last approximately six minutes in the stands before Shane came at him with his gloves flying, and they would be on every sports broadcast in North America by morning. 

"Fine." He closed his eyes. "I'll go to Montreal and watch it from a hotel room."

"Then what's the point?" Her voice had gone incredulous, genuinely baffled. "He's not going to see you. He won't even know you're there."

Ilya turned his face back into the crook of her neck.

"He'll know," Ilya said.

The taxi from Trudeau pulled up to Shane's building at 10:30.

Ilya got out, paid in cash, stood on the pavement outside the building with his carry-on beside him and his cap pulled low over his forehead, the peak of it cutting off his eyeline at the first floor windows, and he looked at the building's entrance— the revolving glass door, the doorman visible through it at his station to the right, the afternoon foot traffic moving in and out.

He had made a copy of the key two Octobers ago.

A Tuesday, a home game against Montreal at the Garden, the kind of game where Shane arrived early and left late, and the gear bag sat unattended in the visitors' corridor for exactly the window Ilya needed. The original was back in the bag before warmups. The copy had lived on Ilya's keychain since then, on a separate ring, no label, sitting quietly between his car key and the key to his Boston apartment.

He had used it twelve times before today.

The building's side entrance was the easy part; he had learned the code that February, standing close enough behind a resident in the stairwell to read the keypad over their shoulder. The elevator he avoided on principle. The stairs brought him to the twentieth floor in under fifteen minutes.

The corridor was carpeted in the neutral grey that these buildings always used, the lighting warm and indirect, three apartment doors visible from the stairwell exit. He let the door close behind him and stood for a moment, listening. Nothing. The floor was quiet, the afternoon settling into it, someone's television audible through a wall somewhere down the hall.

He knew which door.

He put his carry-on against the wall, reached into his jacket pocket and took out the keys. 

Every time, he worried that this was the one time it wouldn’t work, that Shane would notice, that he would’ve changed the lock because of Ilya or some other nondescript thing.

Of course, it wasn’t; he was too good. 

The door swung inward, and the smell of the apartment came out to meet him immediately, warm and clean, like fresh laundry. Ilya stood in the doorway for one second and breathed it in, then stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

The morning light was everywhere.

That was different from his previous visits, which had been evening, or night, or the grey early morning of a game day, this was full Montreal morning sun coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end of the living room and laying itself across everything, the floor, the furniture, the bookshelves along the east wall, the throw blanket folded in thirds on the arm of the couch. Everything lit up and legible and slightly merciless, showing things as exactly what they were with no atmospheric assistance.

The stairs were glass. He took them slowly, one hand on the rail, not because he needed it but because the pressure of it was grounding, something solid under his palm.

The bedroom door was open.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at the room. The bed was made, military corners, the grey duvet pulled taut and smooth, four pillows arranged with a precision that was somehow both depressing and completely unsurprising. The curtains were open, and the room was like a photograph of itself, everything exactly where it was supposed to be, everything in its assigned place.

Performing.

Ilya crossed to the bedside table.

He opened the drawer. He looked at the contents for a moment without touching anything— chapstick, a blister pack of melatonin, a phone charger coiled with aggressive neatness, a pen, a notepad. He moved the notepad aside with one finger. Underneath it, the silicone was matte black and modest in size, not what he would have chosen, boring, annoying. That’s nothing new. Whatever.

He set the notepad back, closed the drawer, and padded back downstairs.

He moved through the living room, past the clean counters, the dish rack empty and upended beside the sink, and stood in front of the refrigerator. 

The interior light came on and he blinked against it.

The contents were organised with the same logic as everything else in the apartment — produce drawer at the bottom, protein sources on the middle shelf, condiments in the door rack, everything labelled where labelling was possible. Meal prep containers stacked in a column on the right, identical, black lids, each one with a strip of masking tape and a date written in Shane's handwriting. The rows of them had a quality almost monastic, identical and precisely arranged, and Ilya had seen them before, on every previous visit. Watched as the fridge became emptier and emptier each time.

His eyes moved to the door rack.

The bottles were lined up there, the usual things— a jar of sauerkraut, a dark bottle of something fermented, soy milk— and then, at the end, standing slightly taller than the rest, a carton of whole milk.

Cow’s milk? 

Shane did not drink cow's milk; he hadn’t drunk it in ten years. Shane's protein shakes consisted of soy milk and a specific pea-and-hemp blend that he received monthly. 

He reached in and took the carton out.

He turned it on its side, reading the label from habit, and there, along the upper edge of the back panel, in handwriting that was not Shane's, looping and slightly tilted, written in what appeared to be blue felt-tip pen:

Cow titty milk for ur meal supplement protein shakes :)

Ilya stared at it.

He read it again. He turned the carton back to face forward and looked at it, the red lid, the cartoon of pastoral farmland on the front, the cheerful typography. He set it on the counter and looked at it some more. The feeling that moved through him began somewhere low and hot and climbed steadily, taking its time, filling the available space in his chest and throat and behind his eyes.

Landry.

He opened the carton.

He brought it to his mouth, took a slow mouthful. Swirled it against his teeth, tasting the sweetness of it, the fat of it coating his tongue. He held it there for a moment. Then, he leaned over the sink and spat it back into the carton in a thin stream. 

He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

He looked at the carton. He looked at the sink. He looked at the carton again.

Ah, fuck it.

Ilya undid his belt with one hand, the buckle coming loose, his trousers dropping an inch.

There was a click.

An unmistakable click of the deadbolt disengaging.

Shane’s morning skate ended around 11:30; it takes him 30 minutes to drive home, so Ilya should have had at least an hour and a half. 

It was barely 11.

The carton went back on the shelf, the refrigerator door swung shut, and his belt was buckled in the same motion as he crossed the kitchen and made it to the living room doorway in three silent strides. He went flat on his stomach and rolled under the couch in one movement, the carpet coming up to meet his face, dusty and close, the underside of the frame a few inches above his head. He pulled his arms in. He went still.

The front door opened.

Shane's feet appeared in the entryway. White socks, the thick athletic ones, slightly compressed at the heel from being inside shoes all day. He stood in the entryway for a moment doing whatever he did when he came home, the decompression ritual, the pause at the threshold. He let out a shaky sigh and moved toward the living room.

Ilya’s heart was hammering catastrophically loud. The organ suddenly appeared there and was knocking against the inside of his ribs with unbridled enthusiasm. It was as if it had been demoted to maintenance mode for three months, had been going through the motions in the hollow of his chest like a clock that had lost its hands, and had now detected the only thing it had been born to respond to.

It was not stopping.

He pressed his hand flat against his sternum and felt the full force of it— the deep, uneven thump of it, each beat arriving like a fist against the bone, radiating outward through his chest and into his shoulders and the back of his jaw. A heart that had been waiting, that had been dormant, that had been running on the ghost of circulation until this exact moment, this exact proximity, and was now announcing itself, finally clawing its way back to the surface.

Ilya was genuinely astonished that Shane couldn't hear it.

The sound of it was enormous—it filled his own ears, it vibrated in his teeth, it was the loudest thing in the apartment by a significant margin—and Shane was ten feet away in the kitchen, moving through the space whilst Ilya lay here under his couch, suddenly resurrected.

Ilya tracked the socks across the floor, and then tracked Shane’s feet when he slipped them off, the morning light falling across them in long bars from the windows, and Shane stopped two feet from the couch.

“Ugh– fuck.”

Something dropped from his hand, the balled-up pair of socks, landing directly in front of the frame, touching it, close enough that Ilya could have reached out through the gap and put his hand on them.

His heart screamed.

Shane crouched.

His weight shifted forward, knees bending, one hand coming out for balance, descending toward the carpet, toward the socks, the fingers getting close, and Ilya lay six inches away and watched them come down. Ah, well. 

Shane made a sound, a low compressed groan, a sudden sharp inhale, his hand going to his left side instead of the socks, pressing flat against his ribs through his shirt. He straightened back up without picking them up. He's hurt. Shane stood there with his hand against his ribs, his breathing slightly audible in the quiet of the apartment.

He's hurt, and he's home alone, and there is no one here who knows about it. 

You can’t let him play tonight, if he’s hurt.

Ilya took in a deep, shaky inhale. 

The refrigerator opened. Ilya heard the door rack shift, the soft knock of bottles rearranging. He heard Shane moving at the counter, the canister opening, the measuring and–

The noise of it detonated through the apartment, and Ilya exhaled against the carpet in one long, silent stream. The blender ran. It ran for forty seconds, the aggressive mechanical grind of it filling every room.

Is he drinking it.

Is he drinking my spit? 

Ilya pressed his palm flat against his mouth and held it there, and his shoulders started shaking from the laughter running through him, silent and helpless and completely inappropriate. Fuck, my spit, he thought, at the ceiling above the couch. He has no idea. He’s probably enjoying it too, dirty slut. 

He stared at the underside of the couch cushions, trying to settle his heartbeat. He thinks about Shane's face. The way Shane would look if he knew— the initial blankness, then the processing, then the colour climbing his neck in that particular way, then the expression that lived between horror and wanting. He was losing his mind. The green dot on the map was no longer just a green dot. No, it was a pair of pretty white socks, it was the sound of a blender, it was Shane’s throat shifting as he gulped down Ilya’s spit. How long had it been? Since they had been like this? So close, outside of the rink.

Shane's feet came back across the floor. They paused at the foot of the stairs, weight shifting, and then moved upward, one step at a time, until there was nothing left but the faint compression of the floor overhead and then silence.

Ilya counted to sixty.

At forty-one, the bathroom tap came on. He waited for it to stop and counted another thirty after that and then moved, coming out from under the couch in one long controlled motion. 

The socks were still on the carpet in front of the couch. He reached down and picked them up, the balled cotton warm in his palm, barely any weight to them at all. Smell them, fucking smell them, stuff them in your mouth. Now. He held them for a moment and then put them in his jacket pocket.

The game had been on for forty minutes before Ilya actually started watching it.

He had turned it on when he got back to the room, the remote still in his hand when he sat down on the edge of the bed, and then he had stayed there, on the edge of it, jacket still on, not watching. The television ran the pre-game coverage and then the warmups, and then the anthem, and he had been looking at the screen but not at it, looking through it at the distance where nothing was, where the wall was, where the city was beyond the wall, Montreal going about its evening outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The air conditioner hummed at a low, relentless pitch, pumping chilled air across his skin through the thin fabric of his shirt. It raised gooseflesh along his forearms. He could smell the faint chemical tang of the cleaning products clinging to the carpet and the sheets, overlaid with the stale sharpness of his own unwashed body after the flight and the stairs and the couch. His carry-on sat unzipped on the floor beside the bed, spilling clean socks and a spare charger onto the beige carpet. He had not unpacked.

He ordered room service at some point. The tray was on the desk behind him. He hadn't eaten from it. The covered plate sat heavy and congealing under its metal dome. Steam had long since escaped, leaving a ring of condensation on the wood surface. Beside it, a glass of water had gone warm and flat, untouched. The fork lay parallel to the knife, aligned with mechanical precision. He had ordered the steak because it was the most expensive option on the menu. It had arrived too quickly.

He watched the first period.

He watched only Shane.

He was watching the game the way he always watched games that Shane was in, which was to say he was watching one player with occasional awareness of the others, tracking number 24 at a level below conscious thought, below choice, below anything he could have modified even if he'd wanted to. Shane took the puck up the right wing in the second minute, and Ilya leaned forward fractionally without noticing, his elbows pressing into his knees, the mattress dipping under the shift of his weight. Shane won a faceoff at centre, and Ilya's jaw unclenched by a degree, the tension bleeding out through his shoulders in a slow release. Shane took a hit at the boards in the third minute of the second period, a big defenseman catching him on the left side, and Ilya's hand closed around the remote hard enough that the plastic creaked under his grip, the edges biting into his palm.

He was fine. He stayed on his feet. He kept the puck.

Ilya's hand loosened. His fingers uncurled one by one, leaving faint red imprints on his skin.

By the third period, he was fully on the bed, jacket off, back against the headboard, legs stretched out in front of him. The minibar had contributed something to this— two small bottles of vodka, a third open in his hand, the room warm and close with the heating running despite the air conditioner’s protest. The vodka burned sharp and clean going down, pooling hot in his stomach. The score was 4-1 Montreal, and the result was already decided, and Ilya watched Shane move across the ice with the remote balanced on his knee.

Shane scored.

The sixth goal, his fourth of the night, driving to the net and putting it through the crease in a single decisive movement, and the arena became a single sustained note, a deafening wall of sound that punched through the television speakers, and Shane's knees went out and he hit the ice and J.J. Dagenais landed on him and the pile built and Ilya sat in his hotel room with the vodka bottle balanced on his knee and watched the broadcast cut to Shane's face emerging from the pile, and the face was—

He looked away, reached for his phone without thinking, then tossed it back into his bag.

He looked at the desk. The room service tray, the cover still on the plate, a glass of water gone warm and flat beside it. The window, Montreal blazing through it at maximum capacity, the way it always did. He looked at these things and breathed, chest rising and falling in heavy pulls, and then looked back at the screen.

Something is wrong.

The ceremony was beginning. The Cup being carried to the boards. Officials moving through the gate. The broadcast cutting between players and crowd and the silver of the trophy under the arena lights, and Ilya tracked the camera across the ice, looking for number 24, finding him at the far end of the rink standing apart from his team, and—

The camera caught it late.

It had already started by the time the broadcast cut to it, the angle coming in from the side, and Ilya saw Shane moving toward another player, saw the grab, saw the momentum already committed, and his body went rigid on the bed before his brain had finished processing what was happening. His hand tightened on the remote. Hunter went down hard, the back of his helmet hitting the ice with a dull, reverberating thud that traveled through the broadcast microphones— and Shane was already on top of him, and the broadcast cut to the wide angle and then back to the close one and in the close one Ilya could see Shane's face.

He knew that face.

He knew that face. The one underneath all the others, underneath the captain's face and the press face and the good-son face, the one that lived below all the performances and only came out when Shane had run out of everything else to put in front of it. Raw. Afraid. Humiliatingly, completely afraid, and disguising it as fury because fury was the only thing available.

He knew that face because Shane had shown it to him once, in a hotel room in Vegas, five years ago, the morning after.

Hunter's fist connected once. The camera caught it, the angle from the right side, a single punch finding the gap between cage and helmet, landing on Shane's cheekbone, the head snapping sideways. Ilya watched it happen in real time and watched the replay and watched it again when the broadcast cut back to it, the same three seconds, Shane's head snapping sideways and back, the skin splitting open under the impact, a thin line of red blooming vivid against the flush of his cheek. The broadcast commentators' voices overlaid the footage in rapid, urgent bursts, "That's a big shot from Hunter!" "Hollander's faltering, no, he's up, he's swinging again!" "Linesmen all over this one!"

The pressure built without outlet, a vise clamping inward from all directions, compressing his ribs until each breath scraped raw against the back of his throat. His pulse hammered heavy and erratic in his temples, drowning the television audio into a muffled roar.

He put the vodka bottle on the nightstand. The glass clinked hard against the wood, vodka sloshing over the rim in a cold spill that soaked into his thumb.

The officials were pulling Shane off. The broadcast was cutting between angles — Shane still screaming, his legs still kicking, Pike's arm across his chest like a restraint strap, the red on the ice smeared in dark streaks under skates, Hunter still down, helmet askew, blood pooling beneath his ear, and Ilya sat the hotel bed with his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands open in his lap and watched it, and the thing in his chest kept going, kept building, a pressure without a site, without a cause he could point to and say there, that is why.

His eyes were hot. The heat gathered at the corners first, a stinging prickle that spread inward.

He pressed the heels of his palms against them. The pressure was firm, unyielding, grinding the heels into the sockets until white sparks burst behind his eyelids.

Solnyshko.

The tears continued to run, at the rims of his eyes, hot, and then the surface of them, tracking sideways into his hairline, warm and viscous against his skin. He kept his palms pressed hard against his face and felt them slide, heavy trails marking paths down his cheeks, pooling at the edges of his nostrils where the salt stung sharp and immediate. He did not move. Did not wipe them. Did not do anything with them except sit with them in the sealed pressure of the hotel room while Montreal hummed through the windows behind him, the city lights fracturing into smeared halos through the unwashed glass.

He thought about her hands.

Her hands, when he was small. The way she held his face when she looked at him, both palms cupping his jaw, her thumbs at his cheekbones, making him stay still and look at her. She had done it when he was upset, when the feelings got too big and he couldn't manage them, and the pressure of her palms had been– And the faint calluses on her thumbs from scrubbing dishes, the dry patches on her knuckles from winter cold, the steady heat of her skin seeping into his. 

He tried to pinpoint, tried to see her, and it came out only as a collection of textures, of light, of the smell of that apartment, cigarette smoke and boiled cabbage and the metallic bite of snow tracked in on boots, until, until.

He had come out of his room, and she was in the hallway, and she was not herself. Her eyes were wrong, pupils blown wide and unfocused. She was talking, but the words weren't connecting to anything, weren't landing in any order that made sense, fragments tumbling out in wet, slurred bursts, and she had looked at him standing in the hallway in his socks, and she too had started to cry.

He had been eleven years old, and he had stood in the hallway of their Moscow apartment in his socks and watched his mother cry and the feeling that had moved through him, he recognised it now, sitting in a hotel room in Montreal with his palms pressed against his own face, he recognised it in his body before he recognised it in his mind. The helplessness of it all. The watching and not being able to touch. The wanting to hold her face the way she held his, wanting to press his palms to her cheeks and make her stay still and look at him, wanting to say I am here, I am here, look at me, I am right here— and not being able to. Not knowing how. Being eleven years old and not knowing how. Her sobs had come in ragged hitches, shoulders heaving under the thin housecoat, snot bubbling at her nostrils, and he had stood frozen, fists clenched at his sides, the hallway carpet rough under his socks, the overhead bulb buzzing faintly overhead.

He had not known how.

He pressed his palms harder against his face. The skin beneath his thumbs grew tender, abraded raw.

I would hold your face, he thought, and did not know if he was thinking it at him or at her or at both of them, the two of them superimposed, the two people in his life whose pain had ever done this to him, opened this room in his chest without asking. I would hold your face. I would find the place where Hunter hit you, the cheekbone, the left side, I could see from the angle it was the left side, and I would put my mouth there. I would kiss it. I would keep my mouth there until you stopped moving. Until the split skin closed under my tongue. Until you let me press you down and cover you completely.

The broadcast was still running.

The post-game coverage, the ceremony, the Cup being lifted, the crowd. Ilya could hear it through his palms, the noise of it, of twenty thousand people at the same pitch, a crushing wave of cheers and chants and synthetic arena music, of not caring anymore, unflinching to the violence now. And he sat on the hotel bed and did not move and let the tears go where they went, into his palms, into his hairline, drying sticky on his face in the hotel air thick with the scent of vodka and uneaten steak. His breath came in slow, controlled drags, nostrils flaring against the salt crusting his upper lip.

When he woke, the room was the same. The television still running, quieter now, the replays upon replays, post-game analysis, two commentators talking over footage in measured tones, their voices muffled through the barrier of his hands. The minibar door still open, bottles glinting dully in the screen's reflected glow. The room service tray on the desk, untouched, the metal dome fogged faintly from residual heat. The window, Montreal outside it had completely dimmed to nothing, skyscrapers winking out floor by floor.

He was still sitting in the same position. Legs stretched out. Palms pressed to his face. Nothing had moved. He had just been here, in this room, while something moved through him, like a man possessed, and now it had passed, and he was still here, and his face was dry, and his hands, when he lowered them from his face and looked at them open in his lap, were completely steady. The tear tracks had cooled against his skin, leaving tight, invisible films.

His phone went off and his thumb pressed heavily against the screen, he pulled it up to his ear. 

"Ilya. Blyat. I have been calling since nine, for like—" the voice on the other end checked something, "—three hours, man. You are in Montreal, right?"

His brain snagged on the Russian. It took a second, the syllables arriving in the wrong order before they assembled into sense, and he pressed his palm flat against his forehead and held it there.

"Dimitri." He swallowed. "I was sleeping. You woke me up."

A pause on the other end, then, "Sleeping." Like it was a language he didn't speak. "Oh, fuck— who is this, give Ilya back his phone."

Ilya didn't say anything. He pulled his palm down from his forehead and looked at it in the dark of the room, the lines of it, the crease across the centre. 

"Yeah, so—" Dimitri, moving on, the sounds of a club audible behind him, bass and crowd noise bleeding through, "—Svetlana told me you were in Montreal, sick coincidence, I didn't see you at the stadium but a bunch of us are at this place right now, it's been forever, man, seriously—" he burped on the other end, loud and completely unself-conscious, "—come out."

Ilya stared at his palm.

"Ok," he said.

He didn't wait for a response before he disconnected.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with the phone in his hand and looked at the window. Montreal outside it, the city at nearly 2 am still going, in it’s own way. He wanted to check, check the dot on the map, check if it was stationary on the twentieth floor of a building twelve minutes from this hotel– not moving. 

He didn’t need to check to know this.

Shane was sleeping, probably.

Ilya closed his phone instead.

Then he got up, went to the bathroom, ran the cold tap, and put his face under it until he felt the temperature of it in his back teeth, the water running into his eyes and across his forehead and down his neck into the collar of his shirt. He straightened. He looked at himself in the mirror, the water dripping from his jaw, his eyes red at the rims, his face still carrying the slight puffiness of having cried himself unconscious on a hotel bed.

He dried his face with the hand towel. He put his jacket on.

He went out.

It was not a good idea to come out.

Ilya leaned against the bar with his shoulder blades flat against the padded edge, head pounding in time with the bass that moved through the floor and up his legs and into his teeth. He wasn't drunk—though he had lost count of the drinks, had stopped counting somewhere around the third when counting stopped mattering—but the alcohol sat wrong in his gut, heavy and sour on top of nothing. Someone jostled his arm. A friend, maybe Dimitri, mumbling something indistinct under the music. Ilya didn't bother to register it. He looked at the clean, cold transparency of the liquid in his glass instead, the ice cubes sweating, a ring of condensation spreading dark on the bar surface beneath it.

He lifted his eyes from the drink slowly. They were furrowed so deeply he saw the world through two narrow slits, the strobing lights dissolving into smeared red and blue streaks across the dark. But what was there to see, even? Why was he here. He let his gaze drag along the bar from left to right, over the bottles on display—Belvedere, Grey Goose, a row of unlabeled locals catching the neon in amber—until he caught it.

Not in the corner of his eye. Right in front of him.

He was sure he recognised the man from somewhere. Dark brown skin gleaming under the lights, a snake-like quality to the glint of his eye, his smile widening at Ilya, slowly, like something being unrolled. He was hot, sure, whatever. And that was when it registered. He had seen that smile before, on Shane's Instagram, in photos with Rose.

Surely not.

He told himself the things he knew. Shane, of all people, would not go out after the stress of that game. He wouldn't be celebrating with his team. He would be curled somewhere small and dark, rocking back and forth through a loop of every possible way his career, his reputation, his entire life would collapse from what happened on that ice tonight. And even if he had gone out, why would he bring Rose? Why would he come here, of all the clubs in Montreal, on this of all nights?

Ilya knew all these things, and yet his head was already turning.

His eyes scanned the room, slow and scrutinising. He was flexing his jaw so hard he felt his back molars grinding, grit against grit. 

There, lit up strobing red and blue: Shane sandwiched between Rose and the man, all three of them pressed together in the shifting crush of the dance floor.

Shane had his lips against Rose's. Those soft pink lips parted over hers, and Rose had her arms draped around his neck, her hands sliding down his back, tracing the flex of his shoulder blades through his shirt. Behind Shane, the man had his mouth pressed against his neck—against the thick cord of his trapezius—planting open-mouthed kisses upward in a slow, unhurried chain, his tongue dragging between each one. He kissed the hinge of Shane's jaw. Shane's throat. The curve of his ear, lips closing around the lobe, teeth scraping gently at the soft flesh until Shane's shoulders drew up toward his ears in a full-body shiver. Rose trailed her mouth sideways along Shane's jaw, pulling him back into her, and he went, kissing her deeper, his tongue pressing slowly past her lips, one hand curling into the hair at the back of her head.

And he was looking at Ilya.

Over Rose's shoulder, with those big brown eyes gone black in this light, lidded pupils, swallowing the iris whole. Looking directly at him, knowing exactly what it's doing and deciding to do it anyway, like the little piece of shit he is. Rose's lips found his pulse point and sucked, hollowing her cheeks, and Shane's eyes stayed on Ilya. The man behind him pressed his open mouth against the crook of Shane's neck, and Shane's eyes finally shut, slowly, reluctantly, like a concession, and he let his neck fall back into it. He groaned, audible even under the music.

Ilya felt the glass crack before he registered his own grip on it. He looked down at his hand, where a thin split had opened in the glass and blood was tracking in clean rivulets across his palm, dripping onto the bar. He stared at it for a moment.

"Blyat."

He shoved himself away from the bar and pushed through the crowd, shoulder-first, bodies parting and protesting around him until he reached the VIP men's bathroom and the door swung shut behind him, cutting the music down to a muffled throb.

Empty. He crossed the marble in a few long strides, the room dim, the lighting recessed. He didn't bother with the main switch. He ripped paper towels from the dispenser with his uninjured hand, pressing them hard against the cut, watching the white paper bloom red. He folded another layer over it and pressed harder, his reflection appearing across the mirror above the sinks in pieces— jaw set, brow furrowed so deep it cast shadows, eyes two dark points under it.

He already knew who had stepped into the bathroom when the door slammed.

The lock clicked heavily in the frame.

Ilya leaned against the mirror, both arms out straight, palms flat on the cold marble ledge. Shane came fast, his shirt slightly disheveled, his face flushed and furious. He grabbed Ilya's shirt with both hands and spun him around, slamming him hard against the sink, the marble edge cutting into Ilya's lower back.

"What are you doing here?" Shane hissed, his voice stripped of everything but the raw top layer of rage. He shoved Ilya again, fists twisting in the fabric. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Ilya tilted his head back, his mouth stayed sealed. He looked past Shane, toward the far wall, when Shane grabbed him by the collar and shook him.

"Look at me." Shane grabbed his jaw with one hand, fingers digging into the hinge hard enough that Ilya felt the pressure against his back teeth, and forced his head down until their eyes met. Shane's lip trembled, barely, before he got it under control. "Fuck, I'm not doing this with you again."

"I am not in the mood," Ilya said, his jaw working slowly under the grip. He reached up and wrenched Shane's hand off his face.

"Yeah? You’re not in the mood?" Shane stepped back. He let out a short, incredulous sound, mouth pulling wide in a faux smile that didn't touch anything above it. He wiped his hand over his face, pressing hard into his eyes for a second, then looked back. "The fucking day that I have had." He stepped back in, shoved Ilya again, the small of Ilya's back cracking against the counter edge. "And you just have to come here." He shoved him again, and his eyes were wet now, reddening at the rims, the anger dissolving at the bottom into something rawer. "And make it." He shoved him again. "Fucking worse." His fist hit Ilya's chest, not hard, not a real punch, the kind of impact that is mostly just the need to make contact with something. "You fucking asshole."

"Gospodi," Ilya said. He shook his head once.

"What was that?"

"Not everything is about you." It came out sharp, louder than he'd meant, and Ilya stepped into Shane's space as he said it, closing the distance fast enough that Shane flinched backward—just for a second, weight rocking onto his back foot—before he caught himself and stepped forward again. Their faces were close enough now that Ilya could see the individual wet lines at the corners of Shane's eyes, the raw red rim of each one.

"Oh, yeah? Because it fucking seems like it is for you." Shane's voice cracked on the consonants. "You're obsessed with me, and I hate you,  fuck you,  you're a piece of shit and I—" He stepped back. He pressed both hands hard into his eyes, heels grinding in. "Shit," he whispered to himself, to no one.

Then he lunged forward. He grabbed Ilya by the collar, both hands, the fabric bunching so tight under his fists that the collar seam split at the shoulder with a sharp tear— and slammed his back against the far wall. Ilya's skull grazed the tile, and he groaned. Before he had finished groaning, Shane was dropping to his knees, fingers already working at Ilya's zipper, fumbling the metal pull.

"Shane—"

"Don't call me that," Shane hissed, yanking the zipper down.

Ilya reached for his hands. Shane grabbed both of his wrists and pressed them flat against the wall at either side of Ilya's hips, pinning them there with the full weight of his grip. 

He looked up.

He was panting, chest heaving, his dark brown eyes wide and glassy, lit from beneath with something feral, baring his teeth on a sharp exhale. "Don't fucking touch me." He leaned forward, pressing his face into Ilya’s bulge through his boxers. Ilya's head cracked back against the wall, a deep groan tearing out of his chest at the hot press of Shane's mouth through the cotton.

"Fuck—Hollander—stop, stop, stop—" His wrists flexed against Shane's grip, tendons straining.

Shane grabbed the waistband of Ilya's boxers between his teeth and started to pull.

"I said stop."

Shane stilled instantly, completely, his mouth went slack around the waistband. 

Ilya pulled his wrists free from Shane's loosened grip. 

He hooked one hand under Shane's shoulder and hauled him upright, spinning them in a single controlled movement until Shane's back hit the wall and Ilya's forearm was braced on the tile beside his head, caging him in. They were both panting, enough that their breath met in the thin space between them. 

Ilya looked at Shane's face, the bitten-red mouth, his eyes darting between his lips and his eyes, his chest rising and falling in shallow, rapid pulls. "When I say stop," Ilya said. He watched Shane's gaze drop to his mouth again, then drag back up. "You stop."

Shane licked his bottom lip. 

"Mm?"

He nodded, swallowing.

Ilya leaned forward until their lips were almost touching, and Shane pressed forward immediately, hungry, managing to lick a hot, desperate stripe across Ilya's lips before Ilya pulled back.

"No," Ilya said, and Shane let out a low, frustrated groan, the sound vibrating against Ilya's lips. "Slow. Like this."

His hand came up to Shane's face, thumb and fingers curling around his chin, holding it still. His thumb stroked once along the underside of Shane's jaw, feeling the muscle twitch under the pad of his skin. He held him there, made him wait. And then leaned in, so slow that Shane's breath hitched in anticipation, the space between their mouths shrinking millimeter by millimeter until Ilya's lips finally met his.

Shane exhaled, and his whole body sagged into the contact, shoulders dropping, the tension bleeding out of him like air from a punctured tire. His lips parted slightly on instinct, and Ilya took the invitation, pressing forward, parting his own mouth to draw Shane's lower lip between them, sucking gently. Shane's eyes fluttered shut, his lashes dark against his flushed cheeks. A soft, needy sigh escaped him, warm breath ghosting over Ilya's mouth.

Ilya kissed him again. Firmer this time, tilting Shane's head back with the hand at his chin, opening him up. His tongue slid past Shane's lips, and Shane met it halfway, tentative at first, then bolder, curling around Ilya's in a slick, rolling drag that pulled a deep groan from Ilya's chest. Shane's brows pinched together in pleasure, his mouth working hungrily now, chasing the taste of him.

His hand slid from Shane's chin to the back of his neck, fingers threading into the short, damp hairs there, gripping just hard enough to anchor him. He pressed his thigh between Shane's legs, feeling the thick, rigid heat of Shane's cock through the denim, and Shane's hips jerked forward, grinding down with a gasp that broke the kiss for a split second. His eyes cracked open, pupils blown wide, staring up at Ilya with raw, unguarded want, lips parted and glistening.

Ilya didn't give him time to recover. He wrapped his arm around Shane's throat and dove back in, kissing him hungrier, tongue thrusting deep and thoroughly, claiming every corner of Shane's mouth. 

Shane moaned into it, his hands flying up to fist Ilya's curls, pulling hard enough to sting his scalp. He bit Ilya's lower lip with a teasing drag of teeth, then sucked it between his own, soothing the bite with his tongue.

Ilya stepped back, and Shane followed, his lips chasing, unwilling to break the seal, and they both moaned into the thin space between their mouths. His hands found Shane's hips, fingers pressing into the sharp jut of bone through denim, and he walked them backward, his body pressing Shane's, steps small and shuffling until Ilya's back met the opposite wall and Shane was against him fully, chest to chest, hip to hip.

His hands moved up Shane's sides, palms dragging over the thin white cotton, feeling the feverish heat of skin underneath, the rapid flutter of his abs contracting with each breath. 

Shane's hands found the back of Ilya's head, both of them, threading through his curls and gripping,  knuckles pressing into his scalp. He kissed like something starving. Like each press of his lips was both taking and begging, so desperate for it, like he would die without it.

A sound broke from Shane's throat. A sob, spilling directly into Ilya's mouth mid-kiss.

Shane's face was inches from his, close enough to map every detail in the dim light: cheeks streaked with the remnants of earlier tears, now fresh ones welling at the inner corners of his eyes, spilling over in slow, fat tracks that caught the faint bathroom glow. His brows were pinched tight, mouth open and trembling around the sob, lips slick and quivering where they pressed against Ilya's. The sob hitched in his chest, like something lodged there was trying to dislodge.

Ilya pulled back a fraction, just enough to break the seal, and his thumb swiped instinctively across Shane's cheekbone, smearing the tear into the flushed skin.

He paused, watching Shane's brows furrow in frustration, his tongue darting out to wet his lips again. Then Shane pressed their noses together, eyes squeezing shut, grip desperate. "Please don't stop," he whispered, voice hoarse and cracking.

Ilya surged forward.

The kiss turned ravenous. Shane met him with equal force, tongues tangling in a wet, messy fight for dominance. Shane sucking Ilya's tongue deep, Ilya retaliating by pinning Shane's against the roof of his mouth. Ilya's hands hooked under Shane's ass, hauling one thigh up high around his waist, and Shane hooked his ankle behind Ilya's knee, slotting them perfectly. The grind of their cocks through fabric ripped twin groans from them, Shane's head snapping back on a whine, throat bared, eyes rolling half-shut in ecstasy. 

Shane rolled his hips. Ilya's grip tightened on his thigh hard enough to leave marks. 

Shane did it again, and again, finding a rhythm, his forehead dropping forward to rest against Ilya's as the kissing broke into something less coordinated, mouths catching and missing and catching again, breath coming too hard for sustained contact. Ilya pushed back into each roll of Shane's hips with his own, the friction building to a sustained, merciless burn, and Shane's head tipped back, a long, ragged moan spilling out of his throat.

Ilya's hand released his thigh and came up to cup the back of his neck, pulling him back down into his mouth, swallowing the sound.

It went on like that, both of them grinding slow and then faster, the rhythm losing its edges, Shane's nails raking over Ilya's scalp and Ilya's free hand fisted in the back of Shane's shirt, their mouths dragging and pressing in the spaces between gasps. Shane's thighs were shaking. Ilya could feel it where his hands gripped him.

"Fuck," Shane breathed, barely a sound at all.

Ilya dragged his mouth to Shane's cheek, lips against the flushed skin, his breath heaving hot. He pressed his knuckle gently against Shane's cheekbone, the left one, the bruised one, the one Hunter had hit, not hard, not hurting, just the barest contact.

"Are you close?" he rasped, lips moving against the bruise.

Shane nodded wildly, and they rutted harder, Ilya's hips snapping forward and Shane rolling to meet him. Until Shane shattered first, body convulsing, a strangled cry muffled into Ilya's shoulder as he spilled into his pants. Ilya followed, with a barked curse. They kept kissing through it. Messy, unfocused, more breath than movement, until it faded.

Ilya let go of him slowly. He turned and set his back against the wall beside Shane, and they both slid down it, backs dragging along tile until they were sitting on the cold bathroom floor. They stared straight ahead at nothing, dazed, not looking at each other. The wet fabric clung cold and uncomfortably, and neither of them moved to address it.

Shane dropped his head onto his knees. His shoulders rose and fell in hard, uneven gasps. Ilya's head went back against the wall, throat long and bare, jaw loose. He let out one laugh through his panting, then another, then he was chuckling. 

"Fuuuck."

Shane raised his head. He squinted over at Ilya, jaw clenching, gritting his teeth. "Don't fucking do that."

"Do what?" Ilya tilted his head, half-facing him. 

Shane didn't answer. He picked a piece of lint off his knee, flicked it away. "I can't do this."

"What, have fun?" He looked straight ahead and wiped his thumb across his nose. 

"No." Shane's jaw worked. "Not like—" He tapped his knee once. "Not like this."

"Why not?" Ilya asked, and it was a ridiculous question, and both of them knew it.

Shane turned and looked at him, lips half-parted, brows furrowed, face pulling into a grimace of disgust. Ilya reached out and touched his neck, fingertips only, light as testing a surface temperature. Shane smacked his hand away without looking down. “Fuck, get off me.”

They stared at each other.

Shane leaned forward and kissed him, hard, one hand gripping the back of Ilya's head, and when Ilya pressed forward into it, he pulled away. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and stood up, the motion sharp and decided.

He raked a hand through his hair, pulling it into some order. Smoothed his shirt down flat, tugged the hem straight.

"So it's just like that," Ilya said, watching him from the floor. He tilted his head back against the wall. "You are leaving, and you will never speak to me again."

"Maybe." Shane squinted at him. He turned and walked to the door and unlocked it. He paused there, hand still on the lock, and swore under his breath, and turned around.

"Stop texting me," he said. "Don't text me unless I text you first."

He pulled the door open, and it slammed shut behind him, the sound cutting clean through the ambient noise.

Ilya stayed on the floor. He felt the cold bleed through the seat of his jeans, seeping up his spine. The bass thumped distantly in his chest, a steady vibration syncing with his slowing pulse. Shane's mouth lingered on his skin; his lips were swollen, still wet with spit when the door slammed shut.

His breathing evened, he took in a slow inhale that expanded his ribs, filling the hollow ache behind them. He couldn’t help it; his mouth curved, unbidden, the corners pulling up in a quiet, private chuckle

Fuck, how could he try to replace him. Shane was better than anything.

Chapter Text

June 2016

Shane didn’t think the idea was stupid on the plane over. No, no, he definitely did, his brain had just refused to register this until he was already standing on the doorstep.

Shane pressed the doorbell a second time and stepped back.

His eyes went to his sleeves. The brown leather, the soft grain of it, the way it sat across his shoulders— Rose had found it on a rack in the Plateau and pressed it into his arms with her chin tucked and her eyes bright. A new addition to your growing collection of real clothes, something that screams, “Look at me, I’m young, sexy, and wear vintage”. He'd kissed her on the forehead and worn it home.

It was disrespectful to wear it here, to a hook-up.

This isn't just a hook up, he told himself. Not for the first time. You are here to talk. You both said: we need to talk, we can’t keep doing this. That's what this is.

He is here to talk and then hook up.

Shane shook his head, sniffed, and knocked.

The wood was thick and solid under his knuckles. The house itself was— good. Genuinely good. Mid-century, probably built in the sixties and renovated once since, smart enough to keep the bones instead of burying them. The proportions were right, the overhang was right. The landscaping was sparse in an intentional way, not neglected, and the stone on the exterior was original, or close to it. Shane's eyes moved over, automatic and assessing, running the numbers before he could stop himself.

Good bones, he thought. Somebody knew what they had.

The door opened.

Shane swallowed.

Ilya was shirtless, just standing there in his own doorway in black sweatpants, barefoot, like Shane had interrupted him mid-Sunday, like he had nowhere to be and no particular opinion about that. The tan had already started. It sat across his torso in a warm gradient, darker at the shoulders, and there was the chest hair running up his sternum and disappearing under the sweatpants waistband in a direction Shane's eyes started to follow before he made a hard redirect downward.

The plant pot beside the door, a fine-looking plant, some kind of fern maybe. The plant pot was a safe, neutral object with no strong opinions about anything.

"Should I take my shoes off?" Shane said, to the plant pot.

"No." Ilya's voice came from slightly above him. "You're good."

He stepped inside.

The house earned its bones. Floor-to-ceiling glass at the back, the garden sitting green and soft in the early afternoon light, and a fireplace running the full height of the east wall, modern with a gas insert and a tasteful arrangement of ceramic logs. The wooden floors were pale and wide-planked and warm under the light coming through the glass, and Shane's eyes moved across all of it in one slow sweep, and he thought, split the lot, you'd have two plots with decent frontage, and then, keep the structure, strip and refresh, the fireplace alone would add—

He could feel Ilya behind him. Just the atmospheric shift of him, the way a room changed when Ilya Rozanov decided to close the distance between himself and something he wanted.

Shane ignored it, moved further into the kitchen, and leaned back against the counter, like that was a casual choice, like he always walked into rooms and immediately located the nearest surface to brace himself against.

"This place is great." He gestured with one hand, not looking at him. "I didn't know you had good taste." He cleared his throat. "I guess I'm proven wrong, at least in this respect. I'm assuming you didn't get it built, though,” He smirked to himself, “Imagine. You uh—" He waved vaguely toward the fireplace. "Cool fireplace."

"Wow, Mr. Real Estate."

Shane made himself look up.

Ilya was just standing there. Hands in his pockets now, which was somehow worse than not, with an ease to his stance, the complete absence of self-consciousness, those lidded eyes, and the not-quite smile at the corner of his mouth. The afternoon light came through the glass behind him and found the green in his eyes, the kind of green that only showed up in good light, that Shane had no business noticing. That Shane had noticed anyway. Months ago. Against his will.

"That's not what I meant," Shane said curtly.

Ilya raised both eyebrows and easily pulled his hands out of his pockets.

And started walking.

Shane felt his shoulders go back, looking for something to rest against. His knuckles found the counter edge behind him. "We need to talk," he said, and he meant it—he did mean it, it was true, and it reflected his genuine intentions for this visit. "that's why I'm— that's what we said. That we needed to—"

Ilya stepped between his legs, closed the remaining distance like it was a foregone conclusion, like the kitchen was always going to end like this, and Shane had maybe one full second to register how thoroughly his body had already stopped arguing before the hands came, both palms flat on the underside of his thighs,  and then he was up on the counter.

The leather jacket creaked with the movement.

Rose got you that jacket, some thin, still-functional part of his brain reported. Remember, Rose? Your girlfriend? 

He told it to shut up.

"Fuck." The word came out soft. His hands had landed on Ilya's shoulders without his permission. "This isn't talking."

Ilya pressed his mouth to the hinge of his jaw. Lips first, then the slow drag of stubble along the underside, and Shane's chin tipped up. "We talk after," Ilya murmured, against the pulse point.

Shane got both hands into the back of Ilya’s curled and pulled. Hard enough to mean something. Hard enough to sting a little, the soft curls caught between his fingers. Ilya came back and blinked at him, patient, eyes half-lidded, waiting— like Shane was in control here. 

Shane, in control. Fuck. 

"Fine," he said. "Fuck you."

Ilya's mouth curved, and he kissed him, and Shane's hands stayed right where they were, holding him there, not pushing.

He got an arm around Shane's back, hauled him off the surface like it was nothing, and it was, apparently, nothing, because Ilya barely shifted his weight doing it, just stood up and took Shane with him.

"This is—" Shane started.

"Bedroom," Ilya said.

"I want you to understand, get it in your head, put it on the record, okay?" Shane said, to the side of his neck, to the warm skin just below his ear, "I came here to talk."

"Record noted." Ilya was already moving.

"We had a plan." Shane's arms were around his neck. "We said we were going to talk."

"We will talk." Ilya nuzzled the top of Shane’s head with his nose. "After."

"You already used 'after.' "

"Is still true." He turned down the hallway. The afternoon light fell across the pale floorboards in long bars, the garden blurring past through the windows. Shane's leather jacket was still on the kitchen floor somewhere, and he was being carried away, like a damsel in distress. Offensive, yet his hands were around Ilya's neck, and he couldn't locate a single objection that his body was willing to sign off on.

"Hurry up," Shane said, quieter now.

Ilya didn't answer. He pressed a kiss to his temple, barely there, and pushed the bedroom door open with his shoulder.

Shane looked at the ceiling.

Yeah, he thought. Okay.

Shane woke up with the weight of a body on his back and a grip wrapped tight around his waist. Wide, warm, much too heavy to be Rose's. That was the difference between them. Rose settled into his body soft, smaller, long-limbed in her own way but yielding. Ilya, on the other hand, encapsulated him. Shane lay there a moment, still mostly asleep, and let himself wonder distantly what it would feel like to hold Ilya the way he held Rose— arms around his waist, chin against the back of his neck. Would it be nice? Would it feel the same? Surely not. The appeal of Ilya was the letting go. Not having to hold, not having to be the one who held. He felt his thoughts circling each other at a distance, slow and barely formed, stripped of everything sharp by the fact of having been fucked, hard, twice— pistoned into Ilya's dark sheets in a way that had turned the dial in his head all the way to zero. He hummed, not wanting to move.

He turned over anyway.

Ilya blinked back at him, slow and groggy, a low groan in his chest. The afternoon had gone golden outside, the sun dropping behind the garden trees and coming through the windows at an angle that caught in his curls, lit the ends of them warm gold. He looked almost peaceful. Soft in a way he never looked when he was awake and paying attention.

"I'm hungry," Ilya mumbled, and pressed his face against the back of Shane's neck.

Oh, I could go again. Shane arched his back gently and pressed into him. "For what."

"For food, pervert." Ilya snorted against his skin and reached up and squeezed his pec, pinching the nipple in a quick, careless jest that sent a jolt of arousal shooting straight down Shane's spine anyway. Shane elbowed him, shoved himself upright, and sat blinking in the middle of the bed with his hair probably doing something humiliating. He stretched his arms above his head and squinted against the light. 

Ilya's sweatpants landed on his face. Shane yanked them from his face and held them at arm's length.

"What are you doing," he said flatly.

He lowered them and peered over the top. Ilya was already rounding the corner to his closet. "If you want to walk around naked, feel free," Ilya called from the other room.

"Um, obviously no—"

"The fences are high, and I have security, but no guarantee that reporter will not take creep shots." He reappeared in the doorway, already in a fresh pair of black sweatpants slung low on his hips, a t-shirt in his hand. "How much does a photo of your ass go for now? A hundred thousand?" He threw the shirt.

Shane caught it, which felt like a small victory, and pulled it over his head. He lifted his hips and shimmied the sweatpants on over his boxers, because there was no way he was putting his jeans back on, and tightened the drawstring. "You're being generous. If a reporter caught us, my ass being leaked would be the least of our concerns." He knotted it. "And no. I don't want to walk around naked. But I also don't want to wear your gross sweatpants."

"Beggars cannot choose," Ilya said, and leaned over the mattress, grabbed Shane's wrists, and yanked him off the bed with absolutely zero ceremony.

Shane stumbled to his feet and followed him out of the bedroom, still rubbing at the corners of his eyes with his fists. Ilya moved ahead of him down the hallway at a lazy, unhurried stroll, one hand trailing briefly along the wall as he turned into the kitchen. It was warm. It smelled like the house had been sitting in the sun all day with all the windows closed.

Shane slowed, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

It all felt so… domestic. Padding around Ilya Rozanov's house on a Sunday afternoon after— well, after all that.

He balled his hands at his sides. 

His brain was flooded, that was all. Relief chemicals and endorphins, and the lobotomized softness of not having slept in three days—the flight and the days between the club and now, all of it stacked up until he'd arrived here, running on fumes, dazed —and now the daze had been discharged. His brain was misfiring, producing domestic where there was nothing domestic about any of this. What he actually felt was confused, because he liked his girlfriend, and he hated Rozanov. The sex was necessary, a pressure valve. A thing he needed in order to function, the way some people needed ice baths or blackout curtains or the weight of a particular blanket. It wasn't feeling per se, it was more like–

Regulation.

"Shane."

He blinked. Ilya was leaning against the counter, forearms flat on the surface, one pec jumping as he slid a can of ginger ale across the wood with two fingers. He cocked his head slightly, watching him, one eyebrow raised. Even at rest, something was dominating about the way Ilya occupied a space— the width of his shoulders, the low hang of the sweatpants, the depth of his attention when it landed on you.

"Are you frozen? Do you need me to get a hair dryer, melt you?"

Shane clenched his jaw and pushed off the doorframe. "Funny." He crossed the kitchen and slid onto the barstool, leaning his elbows on the counter. He stared down at the can. "So, did you figure out I like ginger ale the same way you found out I was at the club?" He dragged his eyes up to Ilya's. "The same way you found out I was on a date?"

Ilya's nostrils flared. Something moved through his eyes, a flash of it, quick and light, something that looked almost like interest, before he snorted and looked away. "Have you heard of coincidence."

"Yeah, I've heard of coincidences. They happen when there isn't a causal connection between the events." Shane kept his gaze fixed on it and lifted the can, finger under the tab. "But there is one here." He popped it; the snap was loud in the quiet kitchen. "Me having a good time, and you showing up out of nowhere to–"

"You did not look like you were having a good time last week," Ilya said, scratching his jaw, eyes dropping to the counter between them. "With, ah—" He folded his arms over his chest, shrugged. "The fight with—"

"Don’t." Shane said it too sharply, and he knew it the second it left his mouth, so he closed his eyes and made himself breathe. "I mean, that’s not relevant, not at all. I didn't come here to talk about me."

"No?"

"No, I mean yes, I mean—" Shane groaned and pressed the heel of his hand to the bridge of his nose. "Jesus. Boundaries. I came to talk about boundaries. My boundaries, specifically, because obviously I'm not just going to sleep with you on your terms wherever you want, whenever you decide it's happening." He dropped his hand. "I made a list on my phone. To make it easier. For both of us."

Ilya whistled low. "Sounds serious."

Shane looked at him through lidded eyes. "I know you're being sarcastic right now. But it actually is."

Ilya held his gaze for a moment, something shifting in the set of his jaw, something that wasn't quite acknowledgment but was adjacent to it. Then he pushed off the counter and opened the fridge. "You like tuna melt?"

Shane felt his eyebrows move before he could stop them. "What?"

"It is simple question, Hollander."

"You want to—" He stopped. "Make me a tuna melt."

"I cannot do serious conversation on an empty stomach." Ilya emerged from the fridge with a stack of tupperware and set it on the counter without looking at him. "I was going to make one for me. I can make two."

Shane's mouth hovered open for a second. He looked at the tupperware, then back at Ilya, who had already turned to find a pan, like this was a completely normal thing—like this whole afternoon was a completely normal thing pulling a pan from a drawer with a clean clang and setting it on the burner.

"You don't have to," Shane said. "I'm fine."

He said it automatically, instantly, before he'd even processed the question. And he didn't— he didn't want it, he just wasn't hungry, that was all. His stomach was already in knots, had been since the airport, that low churning pressure that sat just under his ribs and never quite resolved, even after the sex, and the thought of putting food on top of that, of chewing and swallowing with the conversation still sitting there between them like a live wire. 

He could feel his throat doing that thing, that pre-emptive closing, the body deciding on his behalf. 

Shane could have the tuna melt if he wanted it. Full-fat cheese, mayonnaise, white bread— he could easily; that wasn't even a question. The season was over, and he had been told at his last physical that he needed to come back in September at least two or three pounds heavier, that his body composition numbers were trending in a direction the training staff didn't love, and so technically he was supposed to be eating like this anyway. So yes, he could eat the tuna melt, he would just have to consult his meal plan first, of course, and read the ingredients on the back of the cheese, the bread, and probably the mayonnaise too. 

He lifted the can and took a long sip and focused on the cold of it going down, the ginger hitting the back of his throat, something simple and known and uncomplicated.

"You going to your cottage after this?" Ilya said, back still turned, stacking something out of the tupperware.

Shane almost choked. The ginger ale hit the back of his throat wrong, and he spluttered, got his hand up, and wiped the corner of his mouth. He could feel his nose wrinkling into a grimace.

Ilya turned around. He raised both eyebrows and looked at Shane in genuine surprise, slow and assessing, taking in the reaction. "Whoa." He shook his head once. "I just saw that documentary about it, don't give yourself a heart attack." He tilted his head. "You are always so jumpy and ah– anxious. Is like someone is chasing you."

Yes, Shane thought, because it did feel like someone was chasing him, constantly— the league, the press, his parents, the fans, all of them pressing in from every direction, all those expectations following him around like shadows, watching his every move. He glanced out the window again. All of Montreal might as well be pressed against the glass. All of the world, even.

 "Whatever," he said and pushed himself off the stool.

Ilya glanced up. The small smirk at the corner of his mouth was not hidden very well. He watched Shane stand up and move, tracked him like they were on the ice, like Shane was a player he was eyeing in his periphery without making it obvious he was watching. "The ginger ale cold enough?"

Shane nodded.

"Okay. Food will be ready soon." Ilya turned back to the pan, the burner clicking on, the low blue flame catching. "You go sit."

Shane sank back into the couch cushions with his arms folded over his chest, the t-shirt — Ilya's t-shirt — bunching at his elbows. The living room was quieter than he expected a house this size to be. Just the ambient hum of the neighbourhood outside, the distant click of the pan cooling in the kitchen.

Ilya dropped onto the couch a few feet away, the cushions shifting under his weight, remote held loose and low against his hip as he cycled through channels with the unhurried patience of someone with nowhere to be. He passed through a cooking show, a nature documentary, something in French, a golf highlight reel he lingered on for half a second before moving on, and then stopped.

Sports channel.

Shane felt his stomach drop before he'd even fully processed what he was looking at.

The graphic was mid-screen, a still image, Scott Hunter in a hospital bed, face a spectacular mess of bruising, both eyes swollen nearly shut and purpled at the edges, a cast on his left wrist and what looked like another on his right forearm, grinning at the camera with two thumbs up and the dazed serenity of a man on a very generous amount of painkillers. Underneath it, the chyron read: HOLLANDER FALLOUT: MONTREAL CELEBRATES, NEW YORK FUMES.

"—and look, I'm just saying what everyone's thinking," the first analyst was saying, leaning forward over the desk with his pen tapping against the surface in a quick rhythm, "this is Scott Hunter, who by all accounts had a rough finals, and Shane Hollander— Mr. Sportsmanship, face of the franchise, face of the league arguably,  decides the right moment to do this is as the Stanley Cup is coming out. The man is in a cast. Two casts." He laughed, short and incredulous. "New York is furious, and honestly? Some of Montreal isn't thrilled either. This isn't the image—"

"Okay, but—" The second analyst cut in, holding up a hand, "but this is hockey. Right? This is hockey. And Montreal loves Shane Hollander. The whole continent loves Shane Hollander. People appreciate a bit of fire, a bit of—"

"During the games," the first one said, pointing his pen. "During the games, yes, absolutely, we love it, we eat it up, the rivalry, regardless of how random it is, great television. But right as the Stanley Cup is coming out? He already won." He spread his hands. "It seems like—"

"It seems fine, it seems like he's passionate, and this kind of passion is new to Hollander."

"It seems like he put a guy in a hospital bed—"

"Hunter was running his mouth all series, everyone knows that—"

"That's not—"

"And honestly, if you watch the full clip, if you watch the full—"

"I've watched the full clip—"

"Then you know Hunter went for him first—"

"Oh, now you’re just lying—"

Shane was staring at the screen with his jaw set, arms still folded, fingers pressing into his own forearms. His thoughts were moving too fast and too loud, overlapping at a pace that he couldn’t catch, and underneath them, more insistent, the image of Hunter’s face. 

He'd looked at that photo for a long time when it came out. He still didn't know exactly what he'd felt looking at it. Something bad, yes, some version of bad— Hunter wasn't a bad guy, not really, just a guy doing his job in the way all of them did their jobs, which was to get under each other's skin by whatever means available. And he noticed something, barely, so poked and poked. Shane knew that, he'd been doing it his whole career, and yet.

Passionate. 

He hadn't felt passionate. He'd felt— he pressed his thumbnail into the inside of his forearm and held the pressure there— he'd felt the two years of it. That was what it was. Two years of carrying something, a weight he'd measured himself around so carefully that he'd stopped noticing it was there, the way you stopped noticing a sound after long enough. A bucket filled so slowly and so steadily that he'd convinced himself it wasn't full, that he had it, that he was fine, and then on that ice, in that one second, it had just dropped. All of it. The whole bucket, cold, right over his head, and he'd stood there dripping and shivering, and Hunter was bleeding on the ice, and Shane's knuckles were split.

Who was he kidding? He knew exactly why.

Scott Hunter had brought up Ilya. That was it. That was the whole thing, in full. All Shane had been trying to do for two years was not look in that direction, not let a single drop spill, and Hunter had referred to him on the ice in front of fifty thousand people like it was nothing, like it was a chirp, like it was just words, and something in Shane had come completely undone. He ground his teeth together. Fuck, Ilya was chasing him. And it wasn't just physically. It was this omnipresent weight that lived just over his shoulder, that peeked around every corner he turned, that had apparently followed him all the way to the Stanley Cup finals and waited there patiently for its moment. Pulling him. Pushing him. Reaching into situations he'd specifically constructed to be Ilya-free and leaving fingerprints all over them anyway.

A fishing rod. That was what it was. Ilya had sunk the hook deep into his flesh, God knows when, God knows how, five years ago, maybe, or the first time they'd ever been on the same ice— and he could reel the line in whenever he wanted, from however far away, and Shane would go, every time, and the worst part was that he was here, sitting on Ilya's couch in Ilya's t-shirt, proving it.

Not anymore. 

If they were going to do this, and apparently they were, apparently that decision had been made somewhere on the flight between Montreal and Boston, then Shane was going to be the one holding the terms. His terms, his list. He was going to take the reins back.

He almost laughed. He had to be in control of his own letting go. What the fuck was wrong with him?

"Mm." Ilya turned his head on the couch to look at Shane, one arm folded behind his curls, thumb absently stroking the shell of his own ear. He stared at him with both eyebrows raised. "You are not special, Hollander. I like New York." He gestured at the screen with the remote and turned the volume down a notch. "But they fucking hate me there too."

Shane snorted. "Doesn't count. They hate you everywhere."

"No, not Florida." Ilya shrugged, looking back at the TV. "Is full of Boston people. Florida is nice, nice place to go on the road." He paused. "Where is your favourite?"

Shane shifted, tucked one leg underneath him on the cushion. "Uh. Ottawa, because it's my hometown. Toronto, Winnipeg—" he nodded, "I'm happy they have a—"

Ilya closed his eyes. The smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth, and he let a small breath out through his nose.

"—team again." Shane continued. "What, are those boring answers? I like the hot places too."

Ilya's eyebrows shot up, and he looked over at him.

"I’m talking about the weather," Shane said. "Don't be gross."

"Ah. Okay." The tone was entirely unconvinced, an easy little provocation, not even bothering to fully commit to it. Shane was not getting riled up. "LA is hot," Ilya continued, looking back at the screen. "Hot women."

"Yeah, sure. I mean. There are hot women everywhere."

"Mm, especially in Boston. There is a girl I like here, very much. Svetlana." He said the name the Russian way, naturally, like it lived comfortably in his mouth, like he had said it many times before.

"Oh?" Shane kept his eyes on the TV.

"She's old friend, from Russia. Her father was famous goaltender of Soviet team. She knows everything about hockey."

Old friend. Shane processed this in his peripheral vision, not looking at him. Girlfriend? Probably a girlfriend. "Cool," he said.

"And she likes you very much," Ilya hummed.

"Oh." Shane's voice came out completely flat. "That's nice."

He should ask. He was not going to ask. Why would he ask that? Why would he care? He looked down at himself, Ilya's t-shirt, Ilya's sweatpants, Rose’s– he glanced toward the kitchen, found the jacket where it had ended up, draped precariously over the counter edge, one sleeve hanging. Right. He was sitting here, a walking billboard for Landry, and he wanted to ask about Svetlana. As if he had any audacity to ask about girlfriends. Shut your mouth, Hollander. Shut your—

"So she's like your girlfriend," he said, staring at the jacket.

Ilya chuckled, low, and shook his head. "No, no. Nothing like that." A beat. "I would never cheat on her."

Shane almost grabbed the throw pillow beside him. He whipped his head around instead, eyes settling into the full warning squint, mouth pulled flat, and Ilya turned his body to face him, shifting his weight onto his elbow, tongue resting light against his upper lip, watching Shane's face with an expression of open, comfortable amusement.

"She's good friend," Ilya said. "Sometimes we fuck. But she's busy these days, new business, selling fancy cars."

Shane's nostrils flared. He thought of the garage he hadn't seen but could extrapolate from the rest of the house, the garish sports cars Ilya inevitably owned. "Sounds perfect for you," he said, half mumbled, half hissed.

"Yes." Ilya shuffled closer along the cushion, unhurried. "Is close to that, but—"

"But what."

Ilya inhaled slowly. He looked down at the couch between them, then dragged his eyes up, all the way up, those pale blue eyes catching the afternoon light from the window and turning, more than blue, really, green at the edges and flecked dark, the pupils blown too wide for the amount of light in the room, and it sent something cold down Shane's spine, a slow shiver he didn't invite. "But it's nothing more than that," Ilya said. "For either of us. It's nice to have a regular person around."

Shane scoffed. "What. Is she the only person in Boston that would sleep with you on a regular basis? Does everyone else dine and dash?"

"I could find someone else." Ilya paused, sat up properly, the easy sprawl of him pulling upright, and looked at Shane with those too-wide pupils, dark and serious."But you know me." Another pause. "I get tunnel vision."

Shane blinked at him. He opened his mouth. He closed it again.

The kitchen alarm beeped.

Thank fuck.

Shane stood up.

"No, stay, stay." Ilya's hand came down on his thigh, a flat smack, easy and proprietorial. He was already standing, unfolding to his full height. "I'll get it."

Tunnel vision.

Shane's jaw clenched. He repeated it to himself in the silence of his own skull, mocking, mimicking the cadence of it—tunnel vision—and stared at the screen without seeing it. Tunnelled vision about what, exactly. Terrorising him? Fucking him? Was he supposed to believe that Ilya Rozanov, who had spent the better part of a decade making Shane's life miserable, had gone and put a pause on his apparent dedication to sleeping with half the eastern seaboard to—he flinched at his own phrasing, tried to soften it, and couldn't—sneak around with him. Shane pressed the back of his hand to his cheek and felt the warmth there. 

Wow.

Was Shane that, the top of the roster, the priority? He looked that good? Of course, he knew he was handsome. He was, objectively, you didn't model for the brands he did without being at least symmetrical. But handsome enough for Ilya Rozanov to offer to pay for his flight. To, hypothetically, travel all the way to Montreal just to watch him in the playoffs. 

He nibbled his thumbnail and sat with that for exactly as long as it took Ilya to get to the kitchen and come back, which was not very long at all, Ilya moving so quickly that Shane had barely finished the thought before he was back, sinking onto the couch beside him with the plate, close enough that their elbows almost touched.

"I said I didn't want any," Shane mumbled.

"Who said I made you one." Ilya leaned forward onto his knees and picked up a half, took a bite. He chewed slowly, unbothered.

Shane flopped back against the couch cushions and crossed his arms over his chest. "Fine. Hurry up. I have to leave soon, and we haven't even talked."

Ilya wiped his thumb across his upper lip, sweeping crumbs, and swallowed. "Mm." He inhaled slowly. "You know what would make it quicker."

Shane huffed. "What."

Ilya picked up another half and held it in the air between them, a lazy wave of the wrist.

"No." Shane let the word land flat.

"Yes."

"I told you, I'm not eating it."

"It's just a sandwich, you're not going to ga—" Ilya stopped, pulled back, started again. "This one has vegan cheese. Is made from cashew, tofu, some nasty healthy stuff." He tilted his head toward the kitchen. "I can bring you the bag."

Shane nibbled the inside of his lip. Okay. That was— that wasn't awful. He wasn't going to think about why Ilya had vegan cheese in his house. Maybe Svetlana was vegan, or maybe he got it for the same reason he got the ginger ale. It didn't matter; what mattered was that his stomach was making a low, insistent sound that he had been successfully ignoring for the last hour, and the sandwich smelled like butter and the sea, and he was looking at it, and he was hungry, and he reached forward to take it from Ilya's hand.

Ilya leaned back and took the sandwich with him.

What a child.

Shane furrowed his brow, leaned further. Ilya raised it above his head, and crumbs scattered down onto his own lap. Then his eyes went lidded, slowly, and his tongue ran across his top teeth in one slow arc, and he brought the sandwich back down to rest between them, wrist cocked forward so it pointed at Shane, and nodded down at it.

Surely not.

Shane sat back on his heels, swallowed. "Rozanov."

"Hollander."

"Give me the sandwich."

"You can have the sandwich."

"I want it," he whispered.

"I know," Ilya said. "It's here."

Shane rocked backward, hissed under his breath, "Jesus."

Ilya clicked his fingers once in front of Shane's face. Shane blinked, came back, and found Ilya's eyes on him. Then Ilya clicked his tongue—the sound you made to call a disobedient animal toward you—and patted his knee once, lightly, with two fingers.

Shane's mouth went slack. He felt the saliva pooling at the corners of his mouth before he even registered moving, his body rerouting without consulting him, hands finding the cushion, knees following, until he was on all fours and his nose brushed the side of Ilya's thumb, and the sandwich touched his forehead. He looked up at Ilya through the narrow gap between them.

Ilya let out a sound low in his chest, pleased and approving, and pressed the sandwich gently against Shane's lips.

Shane took a bite. Then another. Then another, working forward until his lips met the web of skin between Ilya's thumb and forefinger. He closed his eyes, nibbled at the soft skin there, felt his own lashes brush his cheekbones, felt the weight of Ilya's gaze like something physical, like a weight, like a hand resting at the back of his neck without touching.

He pulled back, wiped his lip roughly with his thumb, and slumped forward until his elbows met his knees.

"Fuck, Hollander," Ilya said, very quietly.

Shane shrugged. "I ate your sandwich." He pushed himself back upright, settled against the cushions, and looked at the TV without seeing it. "Let's talk now."

"Okay." Ilya picked up a pickle from the plate and bit the end of it. "Do you like them?"

"Yes, the sandwich was fine. I said let's talk about—"

"Girls. I mean."

Shane blinked. "Oh." He wiped his hands on the kitchen towel from the table. "Yeah, sure. Of course I do."

Ilya nodded. He leaned forward further on his knees, into Shane's space, not enough to be aggressive."I never heard about you and girls before Landry." He gestured loosely with one hand.

Shane squeezed the ginger ale, felt the cold of it against his palm. His eyes drifted toward the kitchen, found the jacket. "I mean." He looked back at the TV. "It's private."

"Right. Private."

"Yeah. I keep a lot of things private." He clenched his jaw. "And I don't see how that's relevant."

Ilya opened both his hands and tilted his head. "Don't see how you having a girlfriend is relevant to this?"

Shane opened his mouth, but Ilya cut across him, easy as anything. "I like girls."

"Yeah," Shane hissed, rubbing his palms on his knees. "No shit."

Ilya was trying to find his eyes. Shane could feel it, the patient searching for contact. He didn't give it to him. "But I also like you," Ilya admitted. "Is the same for you? You like girls, but you like me too."

Shane made himself look at him. Forced his face sideways, found Ilya's expression open and still, waiting. "Not as a person," Shane said. "Obviously."

"Of course not, I am asshole." Ilya shrugged.

Shane scoffed. "Yeah."

"But I have a good dick." He paused and looked down at his own open palms, turning them slightly in the light. "And good hands." His eyes closed, briefly, and a smile moved onto his face like it had been waiting just offstage. "To throw you around." He opened them again. "It's like that, yes?"

Shane's tongue rested between his teeth. He looked at Ilya's hands. The lines of them, the veins tracing from knuckle to wrist, the breadth of his palms. He was right. He was, annoyingly, completely right. Shane scratched the back of his head. "Yeah, I think." He paused. "It's just— I have all these responsibilities and stuff. Obviously. These are important, I do important things, and I'm grateful that I'm the person I am, and I'm able to—" He caught Ilya's smile in his periphery and stopped. "Whatever. It can be a lot. And I'm under a lot of stress, and doing this—" He gestured between them.

"Fucking," Ilya supplied.

"Yes, sex, but it's not just that, it's more than that, it's like—" Shane groaned at himself and stood up abruptly. Ilya tracked him with his eyes, curious, head tilting as Shane padded into the kitchen, unzipped his bag, and came back with his phone.

Ilya's eyes went wide, and then he laughed, a real one, surprised out of him. "Really. You brought notes. Like this is a meeting."

"Fuck you." Shane sat back down and opened his notes app, scrolling to the document. He cleared his throat. "You know what BDSM is, right?"

"Jesus, Hollander," Ilya chuckled, rubbing a hand over his eyes.

"Answer the question."

"Of course I do."

"So I think I um, well—"

"God, Hollander, please, stop." Ilya groaned into his palm. "Don't give yourself a panic attack. I know. I understand." He dropped his hand and leaned back against the cushions, looking at Shane with a directness that didn't feel like an attack. "You want to control everything. You don't know how to let go. Your whole life, you are—" he paused, chose the words carefully, "—so busy being what everybody wants you to be. Being Shane Hollander." He shifted his knee until it pressed against Shane's, a point of contact, grounding. Shane stared at the can in his hand. "Is impossible to be perfect. Is impossible to pretend to be something that simple when you are so complicated." His voice was even, but not unkind. "So submission, you like this. Because you can never relax. Never stop controlling everything."

Shane's brain stuttered. He felt the pressure of Ilya's knee against his, steady and warm.

"You like me being in charge."

Shane exhaled. "Fine," he whispered, then, louder: "Fine. You're right. For once." He shifted his leg away from Ilya's and picked the can back up. "You're right. I need to relieve stress, and you are good stress relief. It's convenient." He swallowed. "It's not like I can just—" his voice climbed, his knee bouncing, "—just go out, just go looking for someone to do this, to fuck me, and it's not like I could ask—" the sentence closed over itself, the end of it lodging in his throat.

Ask Rose. No. She would— he didn't even know what she would do if he asked, he couldn't picture her face, he couldn't put that into any shape he recognised. It would change something, and he couldn't afford for it to change right now.

"Rose," Ilya said quietly, finishing it.

Shane looked at him hard. "Don't. Stop." He set the can down again, for the second time. "If we're going to do this, it's going to be done properly. Safely."

Ilya chuckled, leaning back. "You are really turning a plan to fuck into business proposal, Hollander, is not se—"

"It is serious." Shane hissed. "Because this is dangerous, and you're—" he stopped, restarted, "—I don't know what the fuck is wrong with you. You're unstable. Obviously."

"Unstable."

"Yeah, unhinged. I think so."

Ilya furrowed his brows. Leaned his cheek against his fist and watched Shane with this soft, patient smile. "Ah. You think so. Okay, yes, serious business proposal. Tell me what you are proposing."

Shane blinked. That was— easier than he'd expected. He looked down at his phone. "We can meet." He flicked his eyes up briefly. "Whenever we are in each other's cities. During the season. Only if I want to."

Ilya nodded.

"And outside of that, we can sext." Shane continued, paraphrasing now, because looking at the actual list made him feel insane, the depth of preparation embarrassingly visible in the cold light of actually saying it aloud. He scratched the side of his jaw. "And you can text me first— that rule was a little—" he shook his head, "—it doesn't matter. But you have to get a new phone. A burner, preferably. And not keep switching the numbers. I’ll call you Lily, and Lily only. If you talk about your dick… or something, or we send any photos, they get deleted, instantly."

"I texted you with new numbers because you kept blocking me," Ilya said, with the tone of someone presenting a reasonable counterpoint. Or at least, it would be reasonable if Ilya hadn’t been spamming his phone with all manner of curses fortnightly.

"Yeah." Shane put the can down on the coffee table, hard. "Because you were harassing me. And by the way, if you send me a drunk text again. If you insult me again. Ever." He pointed at him. "I'm blocking you, seriously, and this whole thing is done. I don't have to do this." He watched something flicker at the edges of Ilya's expression, the smile pulling tight for just a second, the brow moving. "If I really wanted to, I could—"

Ilya's face closed. Quietly, the way a door closed— not slammed, just shut, the latch catching, everything behind it suddenly inaccessible. Faux boredom, completely unreachable. "Ok," he said. "Fine." He shrugged. "But I'm surprised, why do I get a new phone? Isn't it more dangerous for you, with your—" he raised both eyebrows.

Shane shifted on the cushion. "I thought of that. I could call it my work phone. But it would be suspicious— like, imagine if she caught me texting on my work phone in the middle of the night."

Ilya wolf-whistled. "That would be—"

"I don't even want to think about it."

They sat in the silence of it. Shane closed his phone and set it on the table, and didn't look at Ilya, and Ilya didn't look at him, and the sports channel murmured on at low volume. Shane had expected laying it out to feel like relief— and it did, sort of, underneath the strange, tight feeling that had replaced it, the buzzing thing running through his blood that he didn't quite have a name for. Anticipation, maybe. The odd clean feeling of a decision made.

Was he really doing this?

"Your flight is at six, yes?" Ilya said.

Shane looked up. "Uh. Yeah."

"So we have an hour and a half before you have to leave."

"Sure."

Ilya looked at him, his voice dropped. "Come here."

"Shane."

"Shane."

He flinched as Rose's hands found his hips and pushed, gently but with intention, and he slipped out of her and fell back onto his heels. The room reassembled itself around him— the lamp on her nightstand casting everything amber, the curtain letting in one thin seam of city light, the sheets twisted around Rose's ankles as she turned over to face him. His hands slid away from her waist and settled in his lap. He didn't know where to look. Her nakedness felt different now, too immediate, the small swell of her breast shifting as she moved, her skin warm and flushed in the lamplight, and he was aware of himself. Too aware.

"You stopped moving," she said softly. Her eyes were big, shining, not accusatory. Just watching him.

"I—" Shane stopped. He actually didn't know when he had stopped. Didn't know when he had slipped the autopilot on and sunk somewhere inside himself, retreated to that dim, pressureless back room of his own skull. He didn't know how long he'd been gone. 

He looked at her face— open, patient, offering him something, always holding her hands out, always ready to take whatever he needed to put down— and felt the words curdle before they reached his mouth. He couldn't. He didn't know why he couldn't. He didn't even know what he'd been thinking about. He knew, he knew the shape of it, the warm weight of it, knew which hands and which ceiling and which low rough voice he'd been somewhere inside of, but he wasn't going to finish that sentence, not even to himself. 

What was wrong with him. The more Ilya touched him, the more he felt everything with an almost violent clarity; the more this felt blurred and wrong in comparison.

"Sorry," he said. "I think the season was more stressful than usual."

Rose nodded. She exhaled through her nose, not quite a sigh. "The season is over, Shane."

Right. It was. It had been over for three weeks. She held one arm out and he hesitated, then shuffled up beside her, and Rose nudged his head down onto her shoulder and wrapped her arm around him, and it was wrong— it was the wrong arrangement, he should be the one holding her, he should be the one with his arm around her, comforting her, and instead he was folded into her side like some sad little thing that had been left in the rain.

"Are you feeling okay?" She pressed her lips to the top of his head. Her nails started their slow drag along the back of his hand, following the same path they always followed, the thing she did when he went quiet like this, and he felt his jaw begin to shake.

He didn't answer.

"You've eaten today, right?" she said. "Three meals, two snacks?"

Shane nodded.

Had he, really? 

He nodded again.

"Okay." Rose shifted, her shoulder moving under his cheek. "Shane, I'm going to say something, and I don't want you to get upset. I'm not upset. I promise— no matter what you say, I won't be." She paused. He felt her looking down at him, and he couldn't look up. He tried and couldn't because he knew where this was going, and he didn't like it. Because it wasn't true. Whatever she was about to say wasn't true— he liked Rose. He liked talking to her, liked how she just chose the restaurant without asking him to weigh in, liked her jokes, her hugs, the way her hair fell against his cheek when she fell asleep on his shoulder during movies. He liked carrying her purse, liked the bright, surprised look she got when he did it, because apparently that was something her ex-boyfriends had needed to be specifically petitioned for every single time. He liked all of it. 

"It really is fine," she continued, "if the answer is what I think it is. It's been a year, and things are getting— I just don't think we should keep trying."

She nibbled her lip. Her smile, the one she did when she was trying not to cry, the one that showed all her teeth and made her eyes go bright, was sitting right at the edges of her mouth. Shane felt something in his chest go to powder.

"Do you even like me?"

He pulled away and sat up. The corners of his eyes burned. The lamp blurred at the edges of his vision, the room going soft and indistinct. No. No, please. He cleared his throat— tried to, but it stuck. His hands found hers, both of them, and he held on. Please don't go.

"Shane," she said, the word full of something he didn't deserve.

"I do like you." He looked at her face, or tried to, through the water threatening at his lashes. "I really do. I like talking to you. I like being with you. I like— all of it."

Rose smiled, gently, her mouth lifting at the corners, eyebrows still arched in that soft, unconvinced tilt. Really?

"I like kissing you," Shane continued. "It's nice. And I know the sex stuff is a problem—"

"It's not a problem," Rose said. "A problem is something you can fix." She rolled her eyes softly at herself and lifted both hands from his shoulders, gesturing. "We're more like— a square peg in a round hole."

They both went still.

Rose's face collapsed into pure horror at herself, and Shane scoffed, a small broken sound, and dropped his eyes to the sheets between them. "Ew," she said, covering her face. "No. I'm sorry. God, this is hard. Forget I said that."

It was hard. And Shane didn't like it. It wasn't wrong, either— he was the square peg, he was always the square peg, born slightly mismatched, assembled with one component either missing or wrong, a puzzle piece with a notch in the wrong place that meant he never quite clicked into anyone. But he wanted to. God, he wanted to fit with Rose. He needed to. It had never felt like this with any girl before, this intense urge to brute-force the thing into working, to grip both sides of it and press until something gave. He had brute-forced every other thing in his life. Why not this.

He looked up at her face. She was crying quietly, still lightly flushed, and he reached up and cupped her cheek with one hand, brushing the tear from the corner of her eye with his thumb. "I want to fit with you," he said. "I want to so bad. I uh—" He winced at himself. "I like your round… hole?"

Rose's laugh came out half sob, wet and startled, and she shook her head, and he leaned his forehead briefly toward hers. "Sorry. I mean— I like what comes with it. I like you." He inhaled. "And you're beautiful. I think you are. I just have this—" He pulled back against the headboard, let his hands fall, drew the sheet up over his lap. 

Was he going to say this? 

He was going to say this. 

He looked up at the ceiling, jaw working, and thought about Ilya's hands on his hips last week. The weight of him, the way he thrust up into Shane and held, kept him there, wouldn't let him move, and Shane had been completely and entirely unable to think about a single thing on earth except the place where their bodies connected. Fuck. Like that. Take it, be a good boy, and take it. The words had landed somewhere deep and cellular and hadn't moved since.

"I think I kind of—" Shane started, his own hand coming up to cover the lower half of his face. He stared at the wall. "It's not that I don't like you. I do want you, to have sex with you. It's just— I kind of want you in a—" he paused, removed his hand, said it slowly, "—different way."

Rose went still. He watched understanding move across her face, the brow creasing, then something clearing, something clicking into place, and she let out a small noise, a gasp, a scoff, and a laugh compressed into one. "Wait." She shook her head. "I thought—" She turned to face him fully, took his hand in both of hers, and nibbled the corner of her lip. "Okay. So. I found something in your drawer."

Shane felt his face pull downward. "Rose."

"It was reasonably sized," she continued, wincing slightly but smiling anyway.

"Rose."

"And like— black, which, wow, Shane."

He put his hand over his face. "Stop, please. I get it." He exhaled into his palm. "My dildo."

"And I assumed it meant you'd prefer to be lying here with Miles instead of me." She tilted her head. "I've played these games before."

He peeked over the edge of his hand. "You've found your boyfriend's— dildo, before?"

Rose snorted. "Oh, I was in theater school. Seventy percent of my boyfriends have left me for other guys."

Shane blinked. "Seventy percent?"

"Actually, eighty percent."

He scoffed and let his head fall back, dropping his hands to the sheets. 

"Yeah." Rose tilted her head at him, soft, waiting. "So I've had this conversation before. Or what I thought this conversation was." She paused. "But it's not?"

Shane shook his head.

Rose nodded, like that settled something. She slipped out of bed with an easy, unselfconscious movement and grabbed her hair tie from the nightstand, twisted her hair up into a loose ponytail at the top of her head. She padded toward the window, gave the curtain a firm yank, cut off the last seam of city light, and disappeared through the gap of the bathroom door.

Shane stared at the ceiling. He scratched at a loose thread on her silk sheet.

"So, um." He cleared his throat. "You're not breaking up with me?"

"Why would I be breaking up with you?" Rose called from behind the door, her voice accompanied by the soft sound of cabinet doors opening and closing.

Shane opened his mouth, closed it. Shouldn't the answer to that be self-evident? He was a man, she was a woman, she had found his dildo, he had just told her he wanted her in a different way, which was not a sentence that required a decoder ring. They were two pieces that didn't fit. She knew that now, and she was still—

"Because it's weird, right?" he said, toward the lamp. "Don't you want your boyfriend to be like—" He felt himself pouting slightly, trying to wrestle against the warm, stupid tide of relief rising in his throat. "A man."

"You are a man," Rose laughed. "You're very manly. You're strong and sexy and cool." A pause. "But you're also sweet, and adorable, and my little Shanebug."

He swallowed.

"But the sex stuff."

"What about the sex stuff."

"I'm still— you know."

"Shane," Rose sighed, and he could hear the smile in it, the warm certainty of her, "just trust me, it’s easier if I show you."

A drawer opened. Rose made a small, delighted sound. "There it is. It's like everything in this house is hiding from me. I need your organisational skills more than ever right now."

Shane looked down at his palms in the dim light. He couldn't— what was even happening? He couldn't believe his luck. 

Of course, Rose would react this way. Of course, she would. She knew him, at least, knew him better than most. And still, he exhaled shakily, still. Still, there was what happened in the club, in Boston, there was everything he was carrying around behind her back like a stone in his chest that he had gotten so used to, he only noticed it when he lay still. It was fucked. No amount of compartmentalising made it not fucked. But wasn't that the point of white lies? Better for him, better for her, better for the thing between them that he was trying so hard to make fit. They were figuring it out. Together, not just him alone in the dark with all of it. Whatever this was, whatever she had found in that cabinet that was currently making her rummage around with that much enthusiasm, they were going to— his eyes moved to the bathroom door as it slid open.

Rose leaned in the doorway. Still naked, one leg crossed over the other, strawberry-blonde hair loose in its ponytail, mouth pulled into a sideways smile. Her right hand was swinging something around one finger by its strap, black, a harness, the hardware catching a glint of lamp light as it turned. His eyes moved to her other hand.

Purple, thick, the kind of thick that made his brain momentarily go completely offline.

His eyebrows pulled together, very slowly.

Rose raised both eyebrows back at him.

The video opened on a race track baked white under studio lighting, and Shane watched himself on the screen from across the room with his arms folded.

On the monitor, the two of them stood side by side on a race track— Shane in white, Ilya in black, the Nike logos identical, the sweat along Shane's neck catching the light in a way the director had apparently been very pleased with. The camera had found Ilya's bicep at the exact moment it tightened, that involuntary flex of preparedness. Demi Lovato's voice came through the speakers, I just want to play with you, and on screen, Ilya cocked his head to the side and mouthed, too, and Shane watched twelve people in the screening room visibly react.

The clip cut. Both of them shirtless now, drenched, the battle ropes in their hands moving in perfect synchronisation, the slow-motion footage catching the droplets flying from Ilya's hair as he shook his head and pulled into a wide white grin. Shane, on the other side of him, jaw sharp and set, focused, the rope arcing up and down in time with Ilya's. They were exactly in sync. Shane had not noticed that during the actual filming, he had been too aware of the sweat running down his spine and the proximity of Ilya's arm to think about whether their ropes were matching.

A cut to the bar. Both of them in matching half-unbuttoned shirts, loose, the lighting low like it was sunset. Ilya's hand on the bar, two glasses sliding across it, and then the glasses going into their hands, and Ilya adjusted his Adidas frames, and the lyrics sang, I just want to have some fun with you.

Got my mind on your body— the camera dragging down the curve of Ilya's abs in a spotlight. Shane's face in a white room, the smolder he'd done approximately forty takes of, the almost-frown, his hand moving through his hair, the Adidas strap at his wrist catching the light as his arm came down— and your body on my mind.

They circled each other on the track. Shane is serious, his jaw working. Ilya is smirking at him.

Don't tell your mother.

They are on the ice. Shane, in white gear, crouched low, head down, the full weight of his body coiled.

Kiss one another.

Ilya is in black across from him, helmet tilted, his stick down.

Die for each other.

The camera pulled back and showed both of them, the gap between their helmets less than an inch, sticks pressed together on the ice over the puck, close enough that Shane had been able to hear Ilya breathing. Had been aware of nothing else in the building except that sound.

We're cool for the summer.

Shane pulled his eyes away from the screen.

The producer was nodding, the bright commercial smile of a man whose campaign had just delivered exactly what he needed. He clapped both hands on their shoulders simultaneously, one on Shane, one on Ilya, and gave a satisfied squeeze. "This is great. This is really good, guys. Thank you— this is perfect."

"You're welcome," Shane said, and returned the smile, the easy, automatic version."Thank you for having us."

Ilya raised his brows and patted the producer's shoulder in return, "Yes, thanks. I like the shoes."

"Ha! Of course— custom for our boys, Mr. Rozanov, it's such a—"

Shane turned on his heels.

The dressing rooms were down the hall, forty feet, maybe fifty, and every one of those feet was currently occupied. Someone with an iPad materialised in front of him, pivoted, and walked alongside him. Then someone else appeared from the left and shoved a towel and a bottle of ice-cold mineral water into his hands.

"Mr. Hollander, we just wanted to say again how much we appreciate you working on this campaign—"

"Of course." Shane nodded and kept moving.

"—we'd love to shoot some extra content, a behind-the-scenes with you and Mr. Rozanov, for Instagram, YouTube—" She stepped slightly in front of him, tilting her head, and her eyes moved along him, his waist, his arms, back up to his face, and she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Even just twenty minutes, it would be so—"

Shane shifted his weight and immediately regretted it. The white shorts were not built for this. He could feel it, had been able to feel it since approximately the third take of the track sequence, since Ilya had circled him for the fourteenth time, and the slow-motion director had shouted again, and Shane had compiled his entire functioning brain into the task of not visibly reacting. He cleared his throat. "Later." He nodded, manoeuvred around her, and covered the last ten feet to his dressing room at a pace that was not quite running, pulled the door shut behind him, and leaned against it.

He pressed the cold water bottle to the back of his neck. Closed his eyes.

Okay.

The door creaked.

Shane opened his eyes and looked up into the mirror. Ilya was walking in, unhurried, hands in his pockets, whistling something soft under his breath. His gaze found Shane's reflection immediately, and the corner of his mouth lifted.

"It was a sexy commercial, mm?" He let the door fall shut behind him and leaned against the frame. "I'm surprised you can flirt with me on camera like this."

"Yeah, well." Shane turned the water bottle in his hands. "I'm used to it."

He watched Ilya's mouth curve further and stopped. "Not flirting with you. Being on camera." He cracked the bottle open and took a long drink. "Can you imagine, they wanted me to do that with Scott Hunter."

Ilya snorted. "What? Is that not—what do they call it—necrophilia?"

"Ha. Funny." Shane lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth with the hem of his shirt, then set the water down on the vanity. "It was supposed to squash the whole—" he grimaced, gestured vaguely, "—thing. But my mom decided against it. Felt weird. The fans wouldn't like it."

Ilya nodded slowly, exhaling through his nose. He pushed off the doorframe and moved further into the room, drifting toward the vanity, and Shane tracked him in the mirror without turning around. "It was a good idea," Ilya said, studying him. "Asking me to replace him." His knee found Shane's beneath the vanity table, pressing in. "Even though I know it was just an excuse to see me."

Shane looked up through his lashes. He felt the lift at the corner of his own mouth before he could decide against it. "Yeah?"

"Yes."

"Did you lock the door?"

"Of course."

Ilya leaned forward, slow, the space between them collapsing by inches, his nose almost brushing Shane's— and Shane held his ground for exactly one second before his spine met the mirror behind him, the cool glass pressing flat against his shoulder blades. Ilya's knee slid between his, and then the chair shifted as Ilya's weight came forward, climbing over him.

Shane turned his head so his lips were at Ilya's ear. He felt more than heard the breath Ilya drew in at the contact.

"Show me," Shane said quietly, "how good of an idea it is."

The controller clicked in a steady rhythm from the other end of the couch, J.J's thumbs working with focused aggression, taking FIFA very seriously despite being, objectively, not very good at it.

"She texted me back though," J.J said, eyes fixed on the screen. "Finally. Two days later, but still, maudit, that counts, right?"

"Depends what she said."

"She said she was busy."

Shane looked up from his phone. "With what."

"I don't know, like, work, bro."

"Did you ask?"

J.J's jaw worked. "I was going to."

"J.J."

"I know, I know." He groaned and dropped back into the cushions, the controller falling to his chest. "I just don't want to seem too—" he waggled his free hand.

"Interested?"

"Yeah, that.” 

“Well, you like her, so you are interested.” Shane kicked him in the shin with his socked foot. "Ask her what she was busy with. That's a normal question, it’s just conversation."

"Yeah." J.J kicked him back, lazy, without looking away from the screen. "Easy for you to say, you Casanova, you dog, you beautiful, sexy, genius. Never been rejected in your life." He threw a sideways look, controller resuming its clicking. "How's Rose, by the way? She still obsessed?"

Shane looked back down at his phone. "Things are good."

"Bien? Good, good or like, good?"

"Good good."

"Tu m'en dois une, gars." J.J pointed the controller at him without looking. "I’m the one who told you to come, I begged you, and look at you now, oh Mr Landry."

"Doesn’t count. A broken clock is right twice a day."

"I was right about this."

Shane chewed the drawstring of his hoodie and didn't answer. His thumb moved across his screen.

J.J invited him to some party, Shane made a sound that could be interpreted as engagement, and crossed his ankles on J.J's thigh. Outside the apartment windows, the sky was still pale at nine PM, the kind of long northern evening that made it feel like the day refused to commit to ending.

Shane's jaw tightened very slightly. He kept his eyes on the screen.

"She sent me a voice note," J.J said. "Two minutes long, and I haven't listened to it yet."

Shane looked up. "Why not?"

"Because what if it's bad?"

"What if it's good."

J.J considered this with the gravity it apparently deserved. "What if it's medium?"

"Then you're no worse off than you are now." Shane exhaled through his nose. "Listen to the voice note, man. Stop speculating until you know what she said in the first place."

Shane shifted against the cushion. He pulled the hoodie string between his teeth and bit down. The heat had been building for the last few minutes, pooling in his gut in a way that had nothing to do with J.J's living room or the FIFA crowd noise or anything in this room at all. He crossed one leg over the other.

His phone buzzed with a new notification.

"You think I should call her?" J.J said.

"I think you should listen to the voice note first and then decide, like I said five minutes ago."

"Right. Yeah." J.J nodded, like this was a revelation. "That's smart. You're smart." He pointed the controller at Shane briefly. "That's why I love you, I’d give you a big kiss, but I’m too focused on losing, and you’re too focused on making kissy kissy faces at your phone."

Shane huffed. "Yeah, yeah, love you too."

He was half hard. He was sitting on J.J's couch, ankles crossed on J.J's thighs, and he was half hard, and the knowledge of it was making his jaw tighten. The worst part was that he couldn't have told anyone which thread had done it— whether it was Ilya's or Rose's or whether it was both of them simultaneously pressing in from opposite directions until his body had simply responded to the combined pressure of it like it was one thing and not two completely separate, completely incompatible things. He shifted his weight, uncrossed his legs, and recrossed them.

He read it twice. His throat moved.

Shane flicked through both threads, rapidly, trying to stare at both of them at the same time, the timestamps thirty seconds apart. The same instruction, arrived at independently, from two different people, two different cities, two completely separate conversations that he had been running simultaneously on the same couch, in the same room, with J.J's knee two feet from his hip. He read them both again just to confirm he was seeing what he was seeing.

Go to the bathroom.

go to the bathroom

He closed his eyes for one second. The FIFA crowd roared from the television and J.J made a sound of genuine anguish at whatever had just happened on screen.

Shane swung his legs off J.J's thighs and pushed himself upright.

"Capitaine." J.J didn't look up. "You hungry? I'm starving, should we order something?"

His voice came out completely even. "Uh— I had my snack like thirty minutes ago, but I could eat. I don't mind, just order whatever." He was already moving toward the hall, phone in his hoodie pocket, both threads still open. "I'm going to the bathroom."

"Okay, cool." J.J was already reaching for his own phone, FIFA paused mid-match. "I'm thinking sushi. "

"Sure," Shane said, and pulled the bathroom door shut behind him, and clicked the lock, and stood in the dark with his back against the door and his heart rate screaming in a way the team cardiologist would not have approved of.

He turned the tap on, cold water, just for noise. Then he sat back against the edge of the vanity, looked at himself once in the mirror, his hoodie strings uneven, mouth open, and visibly hard in his grey sweats, and opened both threads.

Shane ran the knife through the chives in clean parallel passes, the blade rocking against the board, and tried to think about the fish.

Branzino was a good choice. Lean protein, the omega-3 profile was solid— better than salmon for his purposes right now because the fat content was lower and he could control the rest of the plate around it, the salsa verde was olive oil based which meant monounsaturated, the capers added sodium which would deepen the flavour profile, the arugula was basically just fibre and iron and a way to make the plate look like he'd tried. He'd been doing this lately, the nutritional calculus, running the numbers in his head the way he used to run them before deciding how long he spent on his cardio that night, except now he was doing it over an actual stove with actual ingredients that smelled like garlic and lemon and the sea, and his new nutritionist had said that was the point. Make it real food, Shane, not a macros delivery system. He was trying. He was standing in his kitchen at 6 PM on a Tuesday, slicing chives, and it smelled good, and he was trying. Three days in a row of good meals and not a single training session. 

He scraped the chives to the side and dropped the anchovies into the food processor with the olive oil and the garlic, hit pulse, and watched it become a paste. He hummed to himself without noticing he was doing it.

The front door opened.

He glanced around the counter into the entryway. Rose stepped inside, flats scuffing against the mat, and she had a package tucked under one arm and her tote over the other shoulder, and her jeans were very tight around her hips— those were nice jeans. Straight-legged, not too loose, a good medium wash. Did he have a pair like that? He thought he might have something similar, but his was probably a slightly different cut; he should check. Maybe they would look good on him, too.

"Hi," he said, and turned back to the hob.

"Hey." Rose dropped her bag on the nearest barstool and rounded the counter, rising onto her toes to press a kiss to his cheek and peer into the pan. "Oh, that looks good." She nuzzled into the side of his face. "And what's this." Her finger dipped into the smaller bowl beside the hob before he could say anything, a pinch of the salsa verde lifted and gone. Her eyes went wide. "Mm." She turned to face him fully, mouth pulling into a wide, delighted smile. "It's really good."

"Hey." Shane drew the word out and nudged her firmly with his elbow. "Too many cooks. And wash your hands, at least." He glanced at her sideways. "It's uh— salsa verde."

Rose blinked. "It's verde, Shane. Salsa verde."

"So you knew." He huffed, turning back to the fish. "Leave me alone."

Rose snickered, the sound bright and unguarded, and stepped back toward the counter. The package landed beside the bowl with a soft thud.

"What's that?" Shane gestured behind him with the spatula without turning around.

"I'm not sure, it's yours— it was at the concierge." She was already reaching for it, turning it in her hands. "Can I open it?"

"Yeah, if you want," Shane said, eyes on the hob. "Probably from a brand."

Rose made a happy sound, the delighted little noise she made whenever they went shopping, and Shane smiled at the pan. The brand packages had been stacking up lately — his mom kept telling him to accept them, it was good for the relationships, so he routed them to his parents and his teammates and occasionally Rose, which meant Rose now had an extensive collection of water bottles she'd never use and a new treadmill she used every day and at least four pairs of sweatpants that were way to big for her. He heard the crinkle of tissue paper and the scrape of a knife finding the tape seam, and Rose singing to herself.

"Oh, it says it's from a— Lily?" A pause. "No last name." Her voice lifted. "Oou, mysterious."

Shane's spatula stopped.

Lily.

He stood completely still at the hob with the fish going slightly too crispy on its left edge and did not move. Lily. He ran back through the conversation from ten days ago— Ilya's message arriving while he'd been in the middle of replying to his agent, the brief exchange about the package, Shane's immediate concern about Ilya having his address saved, Ilya's response which had been some variation of stop being boring and watch for the delivery with a wink face, delivered with the breezy certainty of a man who found Shane's security concerns quaint and charming in the way one found a child's fear of the dark charming. Shane had meant to, he'd thought about, he'd been going to make sure to be home when it arrived, to intercept it, he had planned—

The knife scraped against the tape seam again.

Shane turned off the hob. Set the spatula down in the pan. His brain was producing a very clear and simple instruction—do something—and his body was currently frozen, a cold bead of sweat tracing a slow line down the back of his neck, and those were two conditions that needed to resolve into the same action immediately. Think. Act. Move, Hollander, what the fuck are you—

He turned around.

Rose had the knife under the tape, just barely, the cardboard starting to give at the corner, and Shane crossed the kitchen in four steps and pressed himself flush against her back.

Rose yelped. Both hands flew up, the knife clanging off the marble and skidding an inch, and she went rigid in his arms for one startled second. "Shane—" She turned her head, one eyebrow climbing slowly as she clocked his face over her shoulder. "You scared me."

Shane pressed his nose to the side of her neck. Said nothing, because there was nothing to say, his brain was still running the calculus of whatever is in that box cannot be opened in this kitchen tonight or possibly ever, and his body was covering for him on autopilot, lips finding the warm skin below her ear.

Rose's eyes rolled affectionately. "Down, boy." She wriggled in his arms, an easy, half-hearted attempt at extraction. "Not before dinner." She turned slightly toward the counter. "Get back to your station, chef, let me open—"

Shane dropped to his knees.

The stone was hard under them, and he barely registered it, his hands finding the backs of Rose's thighs through the denim as his pulse hammered in his ears. Rose looked down at him. She'd turned fully now, her hands gripping the counter edge behind her, and the expression on her face moved through startled, amused, and arrived somewhere considering. He shuffled forward until his nose brushed against her hip, the denim warm from her body, and felt the knot in his chest loosen a fraction, almost there, almost, one more push— and looked up at her.

"Shane, we’ll have time for all of this next week, at the cottage." She tilted her head. Her hand found his hair, tucked it back from his forehead with one finger."The food's going to get cold."

His teeth found the pull-tab of her zipper.

He dragged it down slowly, watching her face, and felt the change in her breathing. Her grip on the counter tightened. Good. Good. He pressed his mouth to the strip of skin the zip had exposed, felt her stomach muscles contract under his lips, and looked up again from beneath his lashes.

"This is the uh—" He let the zipper go and spoke against her hip. "Appetiser."

The trail cut through the park in a long straight line and then curved left into the trees, and Shane had been watching the curve approach for the last four minutes, using it as a focal point, the way he used the far boards during a skate— pick a point, drive toward it, don't think about anything except the point.

It wasn't working.

Hayden ran beside him in companionable silence, their footfalls landing slightly out of sync, Hayden's breathing even and controlled, where Shane's was coming a little faster than the pace they were supposed to be running warranted. It was a good summer morning, the air still cool enough to feel good in his lungs, the sky going pale blue above the tree line, dew still on the grass in the parts the sun hadn't reached yet. It was a great morning. Shane focused on his breathing and thought about Rose.

Specifically, he thought about the semantics of it. Rose Landry, he turned the name over in his head the way he turned a puck on his stick, testing its weight, Rose Landry, who had over a million Instagram followers the last time he'd checked, which had been this morning, who had been on the cover of five magazines this year alone, including one that his mother had left on his coffee table and said nothing about but had positioned very specifically in his eyeline. 

Rose Landry, who was objectively, by any reasonable metric, insanely successful. 

He pushed harder, felt the burn climbing from his calves into his quads 

Who had a face that made people’s mouths curve when they described her, and caused that helpless cadence people got when they said your girlfriend to Shane and meant how, how did you, what.

He'd heard his teammates talking once whilst he was in the shower, filled with all the reverence and crudeness that men used when they were trying to contain the fact that they found someone genuinely beautiful, and it had made his chest hurt. Not jealousy, not quite, (he should probably feel more jealous, probably) but something adjacent to it. Something that felt, underneath the irritation, like confirmation. Like a number on a scoreboard.

Everybody wants her, but she's looking at me. She chose me. 

He pushed harder. The curve in the trail came and went.

And then there was Rozanov.

Shane's jaw tightened. He exhaled through his nose and let Rozanov unfurl in his head the way he always did, taking up more space than invited. The Playboy reputation that followed his coattails, the women across four time zones, the singular force of him moving through the world without stopping, without being slowed by any of it. Rozanov, who had never been tied down by anyone or anything. Rozanov, who had said he had tunnel vision, said it to Shane like it was a simple fact, like it cost him nothing to say it, and then had looked at Shane with those blown-out pupils.

Shane had him, basically, eating from his hand.

He cringed at his own phrasing. Ew, Shane, that was disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourself. Imagine if your Mother could hear you right now?

Okay, but it was kind of true. And maybe it was wrong to like it, maybe that said something deeply unflattering about who he was becoming.

His feet hit the dirt harder, his stride lengthening without his permission.

Maybe it was wrong that every time a notification from either of them arrived, he felt something surge through him that he didn't have a clean word for, something that started in his sternum and radiated outward. Maybe it was wrong that he bit his nails waiting for Rose's goodnight text and then stayed up for two more hours with his phone screen lighting his face in the dark, running through hundreds of messages with Rozanov, watching the timestamps tick past midnight and into the early morning. Maybe all of that was wrong.

But it was confirmation, underneath all the preamble. All the work. The years of it, the grinding accumulation of years. Getting up before his body wanted to, putting food in and pushing everything back out in the toilet or the ice, making himself into the kind of person who got asked to stand in front of cameras, who got to carry a Stanley Cup, who got to stand at a podium in a suit his stylist had chosen and say things that thousands of people wrote down. Making his parents proud, making the city proud, making himself into something that justified the boulder he'd been pushing up the hill since he was conscious enough to understand there was a hill. He had done all of that. He had done all of that and more, and he hadn’t just let the boulder roll all the way back down when he was— when he was— just because of— because— because—

A hand grabbed his arm.

Shane's stride broke wrong, his weight going forward, and then his shoulder was being gripped, and he was in the sky. And the sky was very blue. There were clouds, very beautiful, very white at the edges, and leaves overlapping across them like a pattern, like something decorative, and he was looking at them from a strange angle, flat, and he thought distantly, I'm not standing, and then felt the bench behind his neck and the ground under him and Hayden's hands on his face.

"Hey." Hayden's thumbs pressed into his cheekbones, rubbing short, firm strokes. "Hey, buddy, wake up. Look at me. There you are."

Shane blinked. Hayden assembled himself out of the blur, the worried crease between his brows, the sheen of sweat on his forehead, his mouth pressed flat. Shane blinked again, and the leaves above him sharpened, the edges of things coming back.

Hayden already had his hand in Shane's pocket. He found the packet, ripped it with his teeth, and pressed it to Shane's lips. Shane sucked, the glucose hitting the back of his tongue, too sweet, chemical, and lay there on the dirt and the dry grass and watched his own vision unblur slowly, Hayden's outline going from soft to clear.

"I told you, how many times do I have to tell you," Hayden said, not loudly, which was worse than if he'd shouted, "not to push like that. Not now." He grabbed Shane's eyelid and pried it open.

"Fuck." Shane batted his hand away. "Stop."

"Fuckkk, stop," Hayden mimicked, and flicked him in the center of his forehead with one finger. The sting was insulting. "What the hell was that? You just went full sprint, out of nowhere, I could barely—" He exhaled hard through his nose. "Did you eat before?"

"Yes, Dad." Shane pushed himself upright, slowly, testing. His motor functions were coming back online. "I ate. Sorry. I wasn’t focusing, and I guess my legs just have a mind of their own."

"Yeah, they fucking do." Hayden pointed at the ground where Shane had been lying. "And their collective IQ? Underground, below sea level, in a trench." He stood and held a hand out.

Shane grabbed it and hauled himself up. He looked down at himself, at the dirt on the back of his shorts, on his calves. He opened his mouth, looked at Hayden, and closed it. It wasn't Hayden's job to move his dead weight off the running trail to the nearest bench on a Saturday morning, and he'd done it anyway without apparently stopping to consider whether it was his job, because that was just Hayden, and he had no right to complain about having dirt in his boxers.

Hayden was looking at him. The worried expression was still there, the configuration of his face that Shane had been seeing with increasing frequency and hated, hated what it implied, hated that he was the person producing it in someone he actually liked.

"Walk the rest?" Shane offered. A peace offering, olive branch, here you go. "We can get some coffee."

Hayden stared at him for a moment, the frown not entirely retreating. Then he nodded. "Yeah. Coffee.”

There. Appeased, or at least manageable, no longer actively worried, which was the version of fine that was available right now. Shane just had to drink the coffee, eat at least half of something, and keep his blood sugar where it needed to be until he could have his snack. He glanced down at his shirt, soaked through, and slipped one hand under the hem out of habit, fingers trailing up his stomach. The indentations of his abs were there, present, familiar under his fingertips. He did the quick mental arithmetic. Coffee was fine. A pastry, full of refined sugar, the water retention would kick in within a day or two, his face first and then everywhere else, the softness that crept in around the edges, his face in the mirror going slightly less angular, slightly less–

That was fine, but…

What would he send Rose then? What would he send Rozanov?

He flicked his eyes sideways to where Hayden was walking half a step ahead.

"Uh— could you get some photos of me before we go?"

Hayden's stride broke. He turned his head slowly, the side-eye thoroughgoing and deeply unimpressed. "Dude. What."

"Like—" Shane scratched the back of his head. "You know. Photos."

"You basically fainted." Hayden had stopped walking entirely, pivoting on his heel to face the trail ahead like he was addressing a higher power. "And you're thinking about thirst traps." He started walking again, shaking his head. "Fuck out of here, man."

Shane hurried after him. "No— you don't get it— it's for Rose, she likes when I—"

"I don't care who it's for, you're actually—" Hayden stopped. He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and breathed in through it, trying to select his words more carefully than their first instinct was suggesting. Shane felt his eyes go slightly wide. He closed his jaw and pressed his lips together and said nothing, because Hayden had that face, the face that meant Shane had wandered into territory that warranted more than chirping.

"Sorry," Shane said, quieter. He let his pace fall back half a step behind Hayden's.

Hayden looked at him. Shane held still for it, blinking slowly. After a moment, Hayden exhaled, and the crease between his brows relaxed into something closer to tired than angry. "Okay." He stopped, turned. "Three photos. And if you post them—" he pointed, "—you tag me."

The cabin was quiet in the way only places far from cities could be quiet, emptied of everything human, just the lake moving against its own shore somewhere below the window and the occasional shift of the trees. The blinds were up, and the moonlight came through the floor-to-ceiling glass in one long pale rectangle, lying flat across the foot of the bed. Shane sat in the middle of it and rocked himself, very slightly, side to side, his palms running up and down his ribs. The lights were dimmed to almost nothing.

This is a bad idea, he thought, for the fourth time since Rose had disappeared into the bathroom. This is a genuinely bad idea, and you should say something, ask at least before—

He adjusted the front of his boxers and the groan that came out of him was mostly surprise, mostly the specific shock of how badly his body had already committed to this before his brain had finished its objections. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth and stared at the lake.

"Are you almost done?" His voice came out wrong, rougher than he meant, and he cleared his throat.

"Be patient." Rose's voice came through the door, easy, unbothered. "Good things come to those who wait."

Shane swallowed.

The bathroom door opened.

Rose stood in the frame for a moment with one hand on her hip, and Shane's brain processed what it was looking at in pieces, because all of it at once was too much information. The jersey first, his jersey, the Voyageurs home blue, number twenty-four on both sleeves in white block numbers, the crest on the chest with its fleur-de-lis, and the MLH crest at the collar, the laces hanging loose at the neck. It fell to mid-thigh on her, which on Rose meant it sat at a place on her legs that made the stockings very visible— sheer blue, a deep periwinkle that caught the moonlight through the glass and turned slightly iridescent where it stretched over her thighs, the wide matte band at the top sitting just above mid-thigh and holding everything in place. Below the band, the sheer ran all the way down to her feet. 

Shane blinked.

She bent forward from the waist and dragged both hands up from her knees, palms pressing the jersey inward as they rose, cinching it against the curves of her hips, pulling the fabric tight enough to show where her tiny waist narrowed, the flare of her hips, and then she turned around. His name across her shoulders. HOLLANDER in white block capitals and the twenty-four beneath it, stretched across Rose Landry's back in the blue of his team, and something happened in Shane's chest and his groin simultaneously, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.

She raised both arms above her head, fingers running up through her hair, and the hem of the jersey rode up. The bottom curve of her ass appeared, and then the black lace of the thong, thin as shadow, barely there, the satin ribbon ties at each hip falling loose against her skin, and Shane found himself gazing at a particularly interesting tree just above the top of her head.

Rose turned back around. She gripped the jersey hem and pulled it up slowly, the way you unwrapped something you wanted to last, revealing the flat plane of her stomach first, the slight parentheses of her lower ribs, and then the bra. Black lace, underwired, the cups barely more than a framework of thin tulle over her skin, the wiring pressing her breasts up and together so the cleavage sat high and the nipples were visible through the fabric— the flushed pink of them showing through the near-transparent lace like something barely concealed. She tilted her head, bottom lip pushing to the side in a pout, and blinked up at him from beneath her lashes.

"Ta-da," she said, dragging the second syllable out.

Shane opened his mouth, closed it. "Thank you," he said, and immediately felt the wrongness of it, watched Rose's brow cock, and tried again. "I mean— you look—" He exhaled slowly through his nose, tried again. "Uh– Wow. You look beautiful. The stockings. They're blue— blue like the jersey." His brain added, privately and without his permission: and Rozanov's eyes. He swallowed that and kept his face still.

Rose's mouth curved. She crossed to the bed and climbed onto it on her hands and knees, her eyes holding his the entire way across the mattress. Shane kept glancing away from her body like it might burn him if he didn’t. Not because Rose wasn’t beautiful— she was, obviously, devastatingly so, all clean lines and blue stockings and the jersey turned into something deliberately unfair on her,  but because looking felt rude in a way his skin couldn’t tolerate. The more she moved, the more his eyes jerked off-target, landing on the moonlit window, the lake, the stitched seam of the pillow, his number on the jersey, instead of the swell of her chest beneath the lace. 

The pressure hit him before anything else, her full weight settling over his cock through two thin layers of fabric, and he groaned without managing to stop it, his hands going automatically to her hips. She dragged her nails up his bare stomach, a slow rake from his navel to his sternum, the scratch of them lighting up every nerve ending on the way — and his nipples hardened before she'd even reached them. Up over his chest, the flat of her palm pressing briefly against his skin, up his throat, and then her fingers closed around his chin.

"Aw." She tilted his face up, brushing her nose across his cheekbone, her lips just barely not touching his skin. "Already hard? I haven't even touched you, Shanebug."

Shane opened his mouth.

Rose's other hand came around and caught him across the cheek, hard enough that his head turned, hard enough that his ear rang for a second, the sting blooming across his face.

"Did I say you could speak?"

Shane shook his head, lips pressed together, the inside of his cheek stinging where his teeth had caught it.

Her eyes went heavy-lidded. She scratched slowly through his hair, nails against his scalp, and his whole body went loose with it, the tension dropping out of his shoulders, his jaw unclenching, his spine softening. He leaned into her hand before he could stop himself.

"Good puppy," Rose murmured. Her thumb traced the red mark on his cheek. "You begged for permission to use your surprise tonight." She pulled back slightly, looking at him in a way that made his stomach drop. "So go get it. Don't keep me waiting."

He got off the bed with that stiff, careful motion, grabbed his phone from the side table, and crossed to the bathroom with the phone hidden in front of him. The click of the latch sounded absurdly loud. 

Shane stood at the bathroom sink with both hands gripping the edge of the counter and his heart trying to exit his body through his sternum.

He looked at himself in the dim mirror. His cheeks were flushed dark, freckles standing out stark on the red, his pupils so wide his irises had almost disappeared. His bottom lip was trembling slightly, and he bit down on it to make it stop, then pressed his fingers to the mark Rose had left, touching it carefully, feeling the heat still in the skin there.

Okay, he thought. Okay.

He picked up his phone.

Shane ran a hand through his hair and gripped the ends, staring at what he'd just typed. He could feel his own pulse in his throat. He typed the next part quickly, before he could think about it too hard.

A pause. Shane held his breath.

Shane's stomach dropped.

Shane exhaled so hard his shoulders dropped two inches. He opened the drawer, dug into the bottom of his toiletry bag, and pulled it out. Pink bright, aggressively, deliberately pink—Rozanov's idea of a joke, clearly, and a successful one—and longer than strictly necessary, which was also Rozanov's idea of something. He turned it in his hands.

It went off immediately, the vibration so intense and so sudden that Shane fumbled it, nearly lost it to the tile floor, caught it with both hands, and stood there gripping it with his eyes wide, his entire chest cavity vibrating in sympathy.

Shane silenced his notifications, dropped the phone into his toiletry bag, and stood very still for a moment, staring at himself in the mirror. His reflection stared back. Flushed, pupils completely blown, chest rising and falling too fast, the mark on his cheek still pink from Rose's hand.

He picked up the lube. Opened the bathroom door.

Rose was exactly where he'd left her, lying back against the headboard with her legs crossed at the ankle, the moonlight from the window catching in the blue stockings and turning them silver at the knee. She looked up at him when he came back in, her gaze moving from his face to his hands, and one eyebrow lifted.

"Okay," she said. "What is it."

Shane crossed to the bed and held it out. "It's uh— a butt plug." He sat down on the edge of the mattress. "It's pressure sensitive. Like. It responds to—" he waved his hand vaguely, "—pressure. And movement."

Rose took it from him and turned it over in her hands, examining it. "A pressure sensitive… butt plug?" she repeated.

"Yeah."

She looked up at him, the corner of her mouth pulled. "Shane Hollander." She handed it back. "You are the most interesting person I have ever met." She uncrossed her legs and sat forward, reaching for him. "Lie down, babe, on your stomach."

Shane lay down.

The sheets were cool against his chest, the moonlight a wide pale bar across the backs of his thighs. He heard Rose open the lube, heard the quiet sounds of her warming it, and then her hands were on him, the backs of his thighs first, thumbs pressing into the muscle, working upward. He turned his cheek against the pillow and closed his eyes.

Her fingers found him slowly, patiently, one at a time, and Shane's breath stuttered on the first press of entry, his hands fisting the sheets. She worked him open with the in no rush, her free hand pressing flat between his shoulder blades, keeping him down, keeping him still, and the dual sensation of it, the restraint and the stretch, made something behind his sternum pull loose.

He let his eyes close completely.

Da, solnyshko. The voice arrived without invitation,  settling into the space behind his eyes. Doing so good for me. Look at you. Shane's hips pushed back involuntarily, chasing the pressure, and a sound came out of him that he muffled against the pillow. Good boy. Stay still. He felt a second finger, and his jaw dropped open, a ragged exhale through his teeth. There. Give it to me.

"You okay?" Rose murmured, above him.

"Yes, please." Shane breathed, and it came out wrecked, barely recognisable.

She added a third. Shane whined against the pillow and gripped the sheets hard enough to pull them loose from the corner of the mattress. His cock was pressed flat against the bed, and the friction of it, with every small movement of his hips, was making it very difficult to breathe correctly.

That's it. All of it. You can take it. The voice was so clear. You always take it so well for me.

"Shane." Rose's hand pressed firmer between his shoulder blades. "Stop squirming."

He went still. Panting into the pillow, fingers white in the sheets, the stretch of her fingers inside him constant and deep, and making his vision blur at the edges. Then he felt her pulling back, and he groaned at the loss, hips tipping back, chasing—

And then the plug. The pressure of it going in was different, broader, more insistent, the widest point of it making Shane's whole body tense before it seated fully, and then it was in, and Rose's hand was smoothing up his back, and Shane was just lying there breathing.

The vibration hit him in a full-body wave, deep and absolutely relentless, and Shane's spine arched off the mattress, a yelp tearing out of him that he had no control over whatsoever. His hips drove down into the bed, seeking friction, finding it, and Rose's hand came around his hip and gripped hard.

"No." Her voice was sharp, delighted. "Don't you dare."

Shane whimpered.

She flipped him. One firm pull on his hip rolling him over onto his back, the plug shifting with the movement and making his eyes roll, and then Rose's hand was around his throat, and she was leaning over him, her hair falling forward, the jersey still on. His number on her chest. The lace bra visible through the open neck of it. Her blue eyes were very dark.

"You better not cum," she said quietly, "until I do."

Shane nodded, fast, barely coherent.

Rose reached for the nightstand drawer. The condom wrapper crinkled and she rolled it onto him, and he had to look at the ceiling and think about drills, about practice tape, about literally anything except the sensation still rolling through him in steady waves from the plug, Rozanov somewhere across the country with his phone open doing God knows what with the controls and Shane was here on his back in a moonlit cabin absolutely losing his mind about it.

Rose swung her leg over him and sank down.

“Fuck—fuck fuck, Jesus fucking christ.”

The combined pressure of her around him, the plug, the vibration still going, the relentless depth of all of it at once— hit him like a truck, and he gripped her thighs through the stockings and tried to breathe. The lace of the thong was pushed to the side, the satin ribbon of it trailing against his hip, and Rose rolled her hips forward once, experimental, and Shane's head went back into the pillow.

"Eyes on me," Rose said.

He dragged them back. She was looking down at him with her lower lip caught between her teeth, the jersey open at the collar, and she rolled her hips again, and this time she let out a small, soft moan of her own. 

She started to move.

Shane's hands stayed on her thighs, the sheer silk of the stockings under his palms, and he watched her and tried to keep watching her, tried to stay present in this room with his girlfriend, but the vibration had shifted. Rozanov had changed the setting, slower now, deeper, a long rolling pulse that was so precisely calibrated to unravel him that his eyes were threatening to close again. He kept them open through sheer willpower and watched Rose move above him and let his mind drift, just slightly, just at the edges.

Ilya is behind her. His hands are on her hips, over Shane's hands, moving her. Shane's fingers pressed harder into the stockings. He's watching Shane over her shoulder, his chin almost resting on her hair, his eyes dark and half-lidded and aimed directly at Shane's face like Shane is the only thing in the room worth looking at. Rose's palm came down on Shane's chest with a sharp crack, and he gasped.

"There you are." She rolled her hips forward and held it there. "Stay."

Shane nodded, jaw shaking. The vibration shifted again, faster now, punishing, and he bucked up into her involuntarily, and Rose smacked his chest again, harder this time, and the sting of it shot through him like voltage.

"Stay still," she said. "You move when I say."

He whimpered, nodded. His fingers were going white on her thighs.

She leaned forward and kissed him hard, her hair falling around both their faces, and Shane kissed her back desperately, one hand coming up to the back of her neck, and behind his closed eyes Ilya's mouth was on her throat, teeth pressing in just below her jaw, and his free hand was sliding down the back of Shane's thigh, and Shane groaned into Rose's mouth so hard she pulled back to look at him.

"God, what's with you today?" she breathed, and started moving again, properly, a real rhythm, and her head dropped back.

The plug was relentless. Rozanov was, apparently, done with subtlety, because the vibration had gone deep and rolling and constant in a way that made Shane's whole lower body feel like it was dissolving, and he was making pathetic sounds he couldn't help and his hips were snapping up to meet Rose despite his instructions and every time he did she made a sharp, pleased sound and dug her nails into his chest and he thought he might actually die here in this cabin and that would be fine, that would be completely acceptable.

Rose came the first time quietly, a sharp exhale and her thighs locking around his hips, her nails dragging down his sternum, and Shane felt it and held on. She stilled for a moment, breathing, and then, to his genuine awe, rolled her hips again and kept going.

"Don't," she said, not looking at him. "Yet."

Shane pressed the back of his head into the pillow and stared at the ceiling, and thought about nothing, made his mind completely white, emptied it like a room before furniture, and it worked for eleven seconds before she turned around.

The slow pivot, rising just enough to turn on his lap, resettling facing away from him, gave him a full view of his own name across her shoulders and the curve of her lower back and the satin ribbons at her hips, and Shane's hands went to her waist automatically, and behind his closed eyes—

Ilya was facing him.

Directly in front of him, close enough that Shane could see the dark of his blown-out pupils, could see the curl of his hair stuck to his temple with sweat, could see the way his mouth was parted slightly, his chest rising and falling. Rose was between them, and Ilya's hands were moving, one splayed across her ribs, her breast, pulling her back against his chest, and his other hand was sliding down, and Shane felt it, felt the fingers pressing in around the plug, moving it, and Shane groaned. 

Look at you, Ilya said, and his voice was right there, right in Shane's ear, low and warm and certain of itself. Look at you, taking all of it, making her feel so good, giving Daddy a good show, da? 

Rose came down hard, and Shane choked on a breath. His hips drove up, both hands gripping her waist hard enough to bruise, and she cried out and smacked his thigh, and he couldn't stop, couldn't be still, the vibration had gone absolutely insane, and Ilya's fingers were—

Ilya's eyes were on his face.

Watching him. Only him. Rose riding him and Ilya watching Shane come apart underneath her, storing it, keeping it. Shane's mouth fell open. His vision was going white at the edges. He was so close, he was right there, teetering on the absolute edge of it, and he needed—

He needed—

A name was assembling itself in his throat, and he bit his tongue, hard, the copper taste of it flooding his mouth, and the pain of it only made everything worse, made the edge sharper, and he was shaking, actively shaking, his whole body wound so tight it was going to–

Rose came again, her whole body clenching, and Shane felt it and still held on, somehow, his fingers cramping from gripping her hips, his jaw locked, and fuck he could do this.

A hand on his face.

Fingers, closing around his jaw. Tilting it up.

Shane opened his eyes.

Ilya was right there. Forehead pressed to Shane's, close enough that his breath was warm on Shane's mouth, his eyes open and dark and completely steady, one arm braced against the mattress beside Shane's head. Shane could feel him everywhere, the weight of him, the heat of his hand around his cock, the pressure of nine hard inches sliding home one final time and holding, and those eyes did not look away.

"Come for me, Hollander," Ilya said.

Shane came so hard his back left the mattress.

Chapter Text

August 2016

The first-class seat was too soft. It always was, the way the cushion swallowed him whole and held him there with a kind of insistence that Ilya had never particularly liked. He had grown up sleeping on a couch that had springs in the wrong places, a couch that asked you to earn your sleep, and all this careful upholstery still felt wrong on him, like wearing someone else's coat.

He pressed his head back against the rest and tipped it sideways, until his forehead met the window.

Cold. The cold of triple-glazed aircraft glass, the cold of thirty thousand feet, and the Atlantic pressing against the outside of the pane. He let it sit against his skin and stayed there, not quite looking at anything.

Below, the cloud cover stretched from horizon to horizon, white and enormous, interrupted only by the pale wash of sky above it. He had always liked this. The flying part. The clean nothing of altitude, the way the world became theoretical beneath a ceiling of cloud, the way his phone was in his pocket with no signal. When he was sixteen, he had taken a red-eye from Moscow and watched the sunrise from the window of a middle-economy seat with his knees folded to his chest, and decided that flying was the only place he had ever been that felt genuinely free. That had been before the NHL. Before he understood that the thing he had thought was freedom had just been the temporary mercy of being unreachable.

I miss the cold, he thought, and it surprised him slightly. He had not been to Moscow during winter in seven years now. Something about the schedule, and then something about the calibre of what the schedule had become an excuse for. The cold he missed was not the weather alone. It was a specific cold, the biting-wet cold of a Moscow night when it dropped below minus fifteen, and the air felt solid in his lungs, and the breath came out as real steam, thick and slow.

He missed lying in the snow with Svetlana on one side, Sasha on the other, a bottle of stolen vodka cooling in a drift between them, the condensation freezing on the glass—Coach Novikov's vodka. Sasha's father's vodka, which Sasha had explained could absolutely be stolen, as it was practically a public service. The sky above them had been the bruised purple-black of deep winter, no stars, the light pollution from the city pressing up into the cloud layer from below and bleeding back down onto them in gold and orange, washing their upturned faces. Ilya had felt the vodka sitting warm and hazy in his chest while his back grew cold in the snow, and thought that these two things together—the warmth inside and the cold outside pressing in around the edges— were the only real peace he knew.

He had known, every one of those nights, that there was a good chance his father would be drunk when he got home.

His fingers found the side of his jaw, moved along the line of it. The stubble rasped under his thumb, the friction a small, present thing. He pressed a little harder.

His father drunk was a variable equation. Sometimes Grigori Rozanov was horizontal when Ilya came in, folded and heavy on the couch with his mouth slack and the television throwing its blue light across the carpet, and Ilya could simply step over him and go to bed. Sometimes he was vertical, which was a different problem entirely. Vertical meant the fists were available. Vertical meant that his father had drunk to the register where every unspoken grievance, every inadequacy, every humiliation, every sting from being a man who had decided the world owed him and kept receiving evidence to the contrary, had risen to the surface and needed a face to land on.

When Alexei was there, they had a system. Ilya had always appreciated the elegance of it, looking back: his brother took the hands, Ilya took the legs, and they would manoeuvre the old man toward the couch. His father would flop and swear and swing at nothing, increasingly helpless, increasingly baffled. Ilya's strongest memory of those nights was not the fear; most of the fear had gone by thirteen, replaced by something more useful, but the absurdity of watching the man, this spiritually enormous, terrifying man who had broken Ilya's nose twice before he turned sixteen, thrashing around uselessly while two teenagers pushed him onto the cushions. It had been funny. It had been genuinely funny, and sometimes at night, now Ilya would revisit the memory to laugh.

He exhaled through his nose.

After Alexei's girlfriend, there was less teamwork. He had been seventeen, and Oksana had been twenty, and she had walked into his room one afternoon, and the rest of it was– well. What he had understood, afterward, was that Alexei's forgiveness had a ceiling he had not known existed until he hit it. He had not needed the teamwork after that. His father's fists hadn’t become his only problem, and by then, Ilya had been large enough that absorbing them felt like almost nothing. The flight attendant appeared at his elbow, and he kept his face turned toward the window until her shadow reached him, because she had been watching him from the galley for twenty minutes and he saw no reason to reward that with immediacy.

"Excuse, sir. Would you like orange juice, water, or champagne?"

Her English was not very good. The phonetics landed half a beat to the left of where they were supposed to. Ilya had sounded exactly like that in his first two seasons in Boston, and he had hated the way it made him visible, the way his accent had functioned as a sign around his neck that said not from here, still learning, give me less.

He reached for the tray without looking at her and took the champagne. "Spasibo."

The glass caught the light coming through the window, a brief bright flash of refracted sun. He looked straight at the dark TV screen across the aisle and felt her not moving.

She was pretty, okay? Dark hair, neat uniform, the tilt of her head doing a very competent job of suggesting she was attentive rather than curious. She wanted him to ask for her name. She had identified him, probably from the upgrade list, probably from the locker room photographs that circulated on certain sports accounts she may or may not have followed, and she had workshopped the angle of her approach for the last twenty minutes over a tray of drink glasses.

He was not interested. These days, the idea of adding anything new, anyone new, to his roster felt like being handed a project while already drowning in the one he had.

He set the glass down on the side table. Not quietly.

She was gone before the sound finished.

He turned back to the window. The clouds had thickened below, the white more solid now, and somewhere under that ceiling was Russia receding behind him, his father's apartment, Alexei's thinned face at the airport, the exhaustion of a thirty-day trip that had taken two years off Ilya's life. He could still see the apartment when he closed his eyes. The way it had looked exactly as he had left it, which had seemed at first like a mercy, until he understood it was not that the apartment had been preserved but that nothing in it had been touched or changed or cleaned in the intervening years. His childhood bedroom had smelled closed in a way that rooms smell when they have been shut off from the oxygen exchange of living people and simply sat, accumulating.

His father was so weak now, he could have grabbed him by the back of that bald, trembling head and forced his face into the dirty carpet, could have gotten a boot into that hunched spine for every night he could still locate by feel somewhere deep in the muscle of him. He had imagined it, at fifteen. At seventeen. At nineteen, he had stood in his father's doorway with both palms pressed flat to the frame, keeping his hands there, and imagined it in enough detail that his pulse had gone loud in his ears. At twenty, every year of twenty thus far.

But then he had sat down across from him.

Four minutes. Ilya had counted. Four full minutes of his father's eyes moving across his face with the bewildered, groping blankness. His lips trembling slightly with the effort of it. His hands, folded in his lap, were shaking with their own tremor.

What was the point of sending a man to the floor if he would not know whose hands put him there? What did justice mean if the person receiving it didn’t know what it was for? Grigori Rozanov had been robbed of even that, in the end. The only revenge available to Ilya was one his father would have forgotten by the time Ilya reached the airport.

When it had finally arrived, the recognition, four minutes in, four full minutes of his father's fish-pale eyes moving over his face, when it had landed, Grigori had looked at Ilya with something that might have been relief, and then said immediately that he should be at training, the draft was coming, had he spoken to the scouts?

I have been in the NHL for seven years, Papa. 

His father had waved a hand at that. The tremor in it was visible even in that casual dismissal.

There were bills now. Caretaking, support, paperwork that had to be filed and signed and chased and paid on time, all of it landing on Ilya by degrees because Alexei had pulled back from his own work to spend what time he could trying to keep their father from sliding any further through his own life. Ilya had not objected; he had no choice in the matter. He would pay Alexei, of course, he would. Alexei was the one who had become the body in the room, the one who had to answer the phone and open the door and stand there while their father forgot what year it was. Even though one of his feet was halfway out the door, at least he was technically there. Ilya could wire money and answer questions and keep the machine running from a distance, even if it made him feel like a coward and a bad brother and an even worse son in alternating waves. 

So when Ilya had looked at him, he felt nothing triumphant. Instead, he felt the leaden weight of seeing something that had been the central terror of your life diminished. Now, just a small old man with a tremor and a bald head and eyes that kept losing the thread of the room they were sitting in. The rot had started, he thought, when his mother died. Something wet and dark spreading outward from the centre of Grigori's chest on the day of her funeral, moving slowly, over years, through the muscle and the cartilage and the dense matter of him, until it had laid itself to rest in his brain and turned it thick and useless.

Karma, maybe, or just genetics. Either way, it was God's work, and Ilya was not going to interfere; he had to let go of this feeling. Or try to, at least.

He thumbed at the cross on his chest. It was burning there, the gold catching the sun through the window, the sun pressing its mouth against it again and again, and the gold kissing back— the way it always did, warm against the hollow of Ilya's sternum. But somehow, this morning, the kiss felt like a bite. The gold digging its edge into the hollow there, finding the soft place beneath the bone.

He gripped it. His fist closed around it until the chain links pressed their small ridges into his palm.

I'm sorry, Mama. He thought it in Russian. I'm not going to bind him to hell myself again. I already tried that, and look how it left me. I'll just let God get on with it.

The cross winked at him. A pulse of light as the cloud broke outside, brief and bright, and then gone.

The locker room smelled the way it always did before a home opener, sweat and fresh tape, the smell of twenty men working themselves into the correct state of mind. Ilya stood in the centre of it and felt the room orient toward him, one head and then another lifting from skate laces and phone screens and private pre-game rituals until every pair of eyes in the room had found his face.

He raised both arms.

"Okay. Listen, the fuck up."

Full attention. Complete and immediate and total, every man in the room with his eyes up and his body turned, trusting. That was the word for it. Trust had been, in his experience, a thing people extended and then withdrew and then extended again with diminishing returns until eventually they stopped— but in a locker room, on a game night, it arrived total. These men looked at him and trusted him with their bodies. With this season, with the intensity of everything they had to give. He felt the electricity of it move through him.

"I don't give a fuck," he said, and turned to face the other half of the room, "about how I played last season."

A few nods. He kept moving.

"I don't give a fuck about how you played last season. I don't need to think about that." He shook his head, one sharp motion, and gestured behind him with a dismissive sweep of his arm, behind him, back there, last year, done, gone, irrelevant. "That was before." He brought his hand forward and pointed down at the floor beneath their feet. "Now." His finger came up, one finger. "I only need one thing."

He breathed in through his nose.

"I need to win."

The word came out more like vin and he did not care, could feel the vein in his throat straining with the force of it, could feel the room leaning toward him with their whole chests. "Here. At home. Tonight." He dropped his hand. "As much fun as it is to be thinking about next week, next month, the playoffs— I want to focus on our fans. Right now, out there." He turned slowly, making eye contact, taking his time. "I want to hear them scream. I want to—"

He paused, let the room go quiet.

Then he dragged his thumb slowly across his throat, and his voice went guttural and loud and came from somewhere below his ribs.

"I want to FUCK Montreal."

The room erupted. Ilya stood in the centre of it with the noise crashing around him and his eyes stinging, the hot pressure building at the inner corners— because he loved this, God, he loved this so completely that it ambushed him, the love of it. These were his people. This was his game. He had been so deep inside his own head for so long, so buried under everything that was not this, that he had almost forgotten this; the locker room noise and the crowd audible through the walls and his own blood going fast and certain in his veins.

Cliff appeared at his back and hit him square between the shoulder blades, one hard, flat crack of a hand, and Ilya turned into it still smiling. Cliff grabbed the back of his head and pressed their foreheads together.

"Great fucking speech, brother."

Ilya's smile pulled wider. His heart lurched once in his chest, hard. "Go fuck yourself," he said, warmly, and pushed Marleau in the direction of his cubby with one hand.

He turned back toward his stall.

The kid was standing there.

Ilya had noticed him in the first week of camp. Gene Mitchell. Nineteen years old, called up from the AHL two weeks into pre-season on the strength of a training camp that had been, by any objective metric, excellent. Ilya had watched him on the ice and clocked the talent immediately, the kind of spatial intelligence you could not coach into a person. He had also watched him in the locker room, and clocked something else.

The kid was standing slightly apart from the celebration. Not obviously, he was clapping, his face was doing the right things, but his shoulders were up around his ears, and his eyes were doing a fast, systematic scan of the room.

Ilya knew that scan. 

He picked up his helmet and waited.

Mitchell approached like he was hoping Ilya would look away before he got there. He didn't. He held eye contact until the rookie stopped in front of him, close enough that the noise of the room became slightly abstract around them.

"Captain. I just—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I wanted to say. Good speech."

He was not here to compliment the speech.

Ilya looked at him. Looked at the set of his jaw and the fine tension running through his shoulders and the way his hands had found each other in front of him.

"What is going on," Ilya said. 

Mitchell blinked. "Nothing, I—"

"Mitchell."

He exhaled.

"My girlfriend," he started, and then stopped, and then pressed his lips together, and started again. "She is— it's a lot, right now, at home. I’m real worried. And I can't—" His eyes moved briefly away from Ilya's face, to the middle distance, then back. "I can't get my head to shut up. I've been trying, I've been—" He shook his head. "Sorry. This is stupid. You don't—"

"Stop."

Mitchell stopped.

Ilya set his helmet down, turned to face him fully, and put both hands on the kid's shoulders. He felt the tension in them immediately, the whole trapezius group locked up and braced, and he held on and waited until he felt some fraction of it release under his palms.

"Listen to me." He kept his voice low. Not gentle exactly, that wasn't the right word for it, but levelled and calm. "Right now, nothing else matters. Whatever is happening at home, whatever is going on in your head— leave it here." He tipped his chin toward the bench. "Leave it on this bench. Your body knows what to do. Your body has known what to do since you were a kid on the ice in—" He paused. "Where are you from."

"Uh, Tennessee."

"Since you were a kid on the ice in… Tennessee." He squeezed once. "Stop thinking. Breathe, let your body go, and leave the brain on the bench where it can't destroy you." He held eye contact. "You understand me?"

Mitchell looked at him for a moment. Something in the set of his face changed; the scan had stopped. His eyes had gone still.

"Yes," he said.

"Good." Ilya released him and picked his helmet back up. "Make me proud, I love you. Now get the fuck out of my face."

Mitchell almost smiled. He turned and went back toward his stall, his shoulders a fraction lower than they'd been, his stride carrying slightly more of his own weight.

Ilya watched him go.

He pressed his palm flat against the cool of his locker door, feeling the metal. The crowd noise outside had grown, a steady rhythmic build, the bass register of twenty thousand people who had come here tonight for one thing.

He put his helmet on.

It should be illegal, the noise Shane makes when Ilya gets the angle right.

He has the angle right, driving into it until Shane stops being able to manage his own face, stops being able to perform anything, stops being anything except this— flushed and cuffed and completely open, his head knocking back against the headboard with each thrust in a way that will leave a bruise that Ilya will think about on the plane home.

Adding it to the collection. The ones blooming across Shane's abdomen and shoulder from where Ilya had put him into the boards three times tonight.

He keeps his hips moving and watches Shane's face.

The tears have been going on for a while now. They track from the outer corners of his eyes in steady lines down those pink, flushed cheeks, his whole face gone blotchy and bright with the effort of existing inside what Ilya is doing to him, his lips parted and wet, a thin thread of snot on his upper lip. His moans are punched out of him with each thrust, Ilya can barely hear his own breathing over them.

And praise be, that Ilya has locked his hands away, that he cannot reach up and wipe those tears away. 

He grips Shane's chin. Holds his face forward when it tries to turn away, the shame reflex, the I cannot let you see me like this reflex, the when I’m honest, I’m too holy for mere man to lay their eyes on reflex. 

The sounds Shane makes have lived in the back of Ilya's skull since the first time he heard them, and they live there still, and he thinks sometimes that they will live there when everything else has gone. Like the choir at the Church of the Transfiguration on Preobrazhensky Val. The way the voices of the choir had filled the nave from every direction simultaneously, bouncing off the gold and the stone until the sound had no single source, until it simply existed in the air around you and inside your chest at the same time. He had been six years old the first time it had made him cry, standing beside his mother with his hand in hers, the incense thick and sweet in the back of his throat, the chanting moving through his chest like something with its own pulse. His mother had looked down at him and not laughed, which he had loved her for. She had simply squeezed his hand and looked back at the altar.

Shane's next exhale drives itself between Ilya's ribs and stabs him there; he feels the blade sinking deep into flesh, and his head falls back.

No.

Ilya forces himself to look at the angel there, at the pale skin and dark hair and wet lashes. 

An angel, pinned to the bed, and what else could Ilya do but worship? Purely, in his own way, with the full force of that strange devotion that had nowhere healthy to go. He could take each of those wishes that Shane never voiced aloud and fulfil them one by one. He could take the pain reflected in the slight green bruise beneath those shining eyes, the one still smudged there from too little sleep and too much strain, and hold it in his hands as if that were what his hands were for. Even if the holding meant stuffing his beautiful cock into a cage and making his body obey a holiness it had not earned.

The metal presses its edges into Shane's flesh with each thrust, and the precome has been leaking through the gaps long enough to have soaked into the sheet beneath him, Shane's body doing everything it was built to do and falling short, held at that agonising threshold. This is what Shane is. An angel of withholding. A saint who gains his grace through the deferral of gratification, who holds and holds and holds himself at the edge as if pleasure ungiven is pleasure purified, as if the cage is not Ilya's doing but his own choosing— and is it not, in the end? Did he not kneel for it? Did he not tilt his hips forward and wait? Of course. Of course he did. A saint counting his suffering like currency, spending it carefully, certain that what comes at the end will be proportional to what was endured to reach it.

Shane tries to turn his face again. Ilya lets him go only far enough to make him work, and then brings him back. He drags his hand up Shane's throat, along his jaw, and pushes his thumb past his lips.

Shane's eyes flutter shut.

His tongue moves along the pad of Ilya's thumb, his lips close around it. The wet heat of his mouth is an unreasonable thing, and Ilya's hips stutter once before he finds the rhythm again.

He looks at the gums showing where his thumb has pulled the lip away, the soft pink of the inside of his mouth, and something climbs in his chest that is not desire exactly, or not only desire, it is burning him on its way up, like bile. He stares at the softness of Shane’s mouth around his thumb and thinks, what is that.

What is underneath all that skin. What is that glow that sits deep behind his bone, like something is lit there. Something that radiates even now, even like this, even cuffed and caged and completely wrecked, even with his face wet and his eyes swollen and every wall he owns reduced to rubble, it is still there. Still going.