Chapter Text
Σώμα, θυμήσου όχι μόνο το πόσο αγαπήθηκες,
όχι μονάχα τα κρεββάτια όπου πλάγιασες,
— C. P. Cavafy
July, 2017
Five days ago, Ilya had said it first.
In the dark. In Russian, then in English, the words coming out of him desperate and wet and furious, like he had held them too long and they had finally begun to break him apart.
Я тебя люблю. I love you.
Shane had frozen.
For one stunned, unforgivable second, all he had managed was, holy shit.
Ilya had looked terrified. Not angry. Not proud. Terrified, before he could hide it.
Then Shane had said it back.
I love you.
And Shane had watched the words put him back together. Not all the way. Not neatly. But enough that Ilya could breathe again. Enough that the room changed around them.
Oh my god, I love you so much.
Shane had asked, “Does it kill you too?”
Ilya had looked at him and said, “Not anymore.”
That was the power of it, Shane thought now. Not that love stopped hurting. That being loved back made the hurt possible for Ilya to carry.
They had talked after that. Really talked, which was different from fighting and different from negotiating the terms of denial. They had talked about schedules, apartments, teams, Boston, Montreal, flights, summers, what could be said and when, what could not be taken back. They had talked for two days until the sky went dark and the bugs came out and Shane’s throat hurt from using words he had spent years skating around.
At twenty-six, Shane had a multimillion-dollar contract, an agent who spoke in clauses and guarantees, and long-term had seemed like a phrase for people with joint calendars, quiet summers, and a level of emotional stability Shane had only seen in retired equipment managers, golden retrievers, and his parents.
Then Ilya had said, “We have been doing long-term badly for eight years,” and Shane had laughed because there was nothing else to do with a truth that accurate.
Two days ago, because hiding had failed and lying had become impossible, Shane had said I love him in front of his parents.
Badly, probably. His voice had gone too flat, the way it did in interviews when the question mattered and he wanted badly to sound like it did not. His mouth had gone dry halfway through, and his father’s face had done three different things Shane had not wanted to catalogue, and his mother had looked at him with open shock.
But he had said it.
I love him.
The words had sat there, plain as cutlery.
Then later, Ilya had said he was the only one and his boyfriend.
Your boyfriend.
Shane had looked up at him in open amazement at the word and Ilya had kissed him so tenderly, right there in front of his parents at the table.
The lake house had been Shane’s idea because it was private.
That had been the point. Private road. Private dock. Trees thick enough. He called it a cottage because Americans said lake house and because calling it a lake house made him feel like an asshole, but it was a lake house. It sat between Montreal and Ottawa, remote enough to discourage visitors. Shane had convinced himself they could disappear there.
For once, he had let himself believe they could be unseen.
His father had seen them anyway.
He’d seen the kind of kiss that left them no usable lie. A kiss, plain as weather, on the path between the dock and the house then again against the sliding door leading into the kitchen. Ilya gripping Shane’s hip. Shane leaning into the pressure like someone starving.
Then Ilya had turned his head.
His father standing still enough that for one wild second Shane had thought if no one moved, none of it would become real.
Then David had looked at both of them.
Then hiding had ended.
By Sunday afternoon, the cottage had begun to feel like a life they were borrowing from people braver than themselves.
There were groceries in the fridge that implied two people and a meal plan Shane had not technically made, only approved, because his chef usually came three days a week and Shane believed in delegating things that could poison someone. That mostly meant two careful grocery deliveries in stacked and labelled containers. Greek yogurt Shane did not eat unless Ilya was watching him. Blueberries because Ilya ate them by the handful and then complained they were not as good as the ones from Boston. Eggs. A jar of pickles Ilya had bought because he claimed Shane’s taste in pickles was “depressing, like government office.” Three kinds of mustard. No normal person needed three kinds of mustard. But, apparently, they did.
There were coffee cups in the sink. Two of them. Ilya’s had a half inch of cold coffee gone grey at the bottom because he had poured it, forgotten it, reheated it, forgotten it again, and then decided at some point that drinking it would count as self-punishment. Shane’s was on the counter beside it, cleaner somehow, because even his abandoned coffee cups looked tidy.
Ilya’s socks were on the couch.
Not beside the couch. Not near the couch. On it. One draped over the arm like a flag of occupation, the other tucked half under the cushion where Shane had sat on it that morning and made a sound Ilya had described as “very delicate for hockey player.”
His sweatshirt was still on the chair by the window, where he had left it three days ago. Shane had moved it once, the first morning. Ilya had looked at the chair, then at Shane, then said nothing in a way that made Shane put it back before either of them had to become embarrassed.
Now Shane left it there.
It made the cottage look less like a place where Ilya came. More like a place where Ilya stayed.
Shane kept pressing on the word.Boyfriend.
It kept showing up in stupid places: coffee cups, unmade sheets, Ilya’s socks on the couch, Tuesday sitting in Shane’s phone. It was in the way Ilya looked at ease in Shane’s shirt.
This was the longest they had ever been together.
Two weeks.
Fourteen days of waking up in the same bed. Fourteen days of coffee and lake light. Fourteen days of eating breakfast too late and dinner too early and having sex in the afternoon because there was no plane to catch, no teammate to avoid, no city to leave.
Celebrating, Ilya had called it, with the smug generosity of a man who believed victory deserved repetition.
They had celebrated I love you. Celebrated boyfriend. Celebrated surviving the thing they had spent eight seasons arranging their lives around avoiding: being seen. But now they had been seen and somehow the world had kept going.
They had celebrated so thoroughly that Shane’s body had begun to complain.
He was sated. More than sated. Wrecked in the stupid, luxurious way. Parts of him were sore that suggested another round of celebration would be less romance than negligence. Usually, Ilya would have made that worse in exactly the way Shane liked. Today, Shane was fairly sure his body would assess a major for unnecessary roughness.
They had eight seasons. Hotel rooms. Road trips. Careful doors. Texts deleted because one of them was paranoid and the other was pretending not to be. Whole seasons Shane could not think about without remembering the smell of Ilya’s skin in a hotel bathroom and the way Ilya’s Russian mouth opened around the vowels in Hollander.
Eight seasons, and still two weeks felt like more.
Monday night, his parents would come back for dinner.
Tuesday, he and Ilya would drive to Montreal. They would spend one night at Shane’s apartment, which suddenly seemed too small and too public and too full of the old life. Then Ilya would fly to the States—back to Boston, back to his team.
A short absence, technically. A familiar one. But his body was treating it like exile. A flight, a team, obligations, the normal machinery of the season grinding back into motion.
The bed was unmade in a way that no longer looked temporary. The sheets twisted toward Ilya’s side. Ilya’s side, in Shane’s bed, which had somehow become their bed without either of them saying so.
Shane’s T-shirt was on the floor. Ilya’s phone charger was plugged into the good outlet nearest the bed; Shane’s was in the kitchen, because at some point in the last two weeks he had ceded that too, silently and completely.
His own phone lay facedown on the table.
He had turned it over after checking the calendar for the fourth time and discovering, again, that Tuesday still existed.
Across the room, Ilya was lying on the couch with one knee bent, bare foot planted on the cushion, a book open on his chest and no evidence whatsoever that he had read a word in the last ten minutes. He was wearing one of Shane’s old T-shirts, the hem riding up just enough to show a strip of skin at his waist. He looked lazy. He was not lazy. He looked careless. He was almost never careless. He looked like a man relaxing in a house where he belonged, and Shane hated how badly he wanted that to be true.
Ilya closed his book without marking the page.
“You’re making Tuesday face,” he said.
“I don’t have a Tuesday face.”
“You have many faces. Most are boring. This one is Tuesday.”
Shane looked at the phone. “You’re coming back.”
“I know this also.”
“Good.”
Shane rubbed both hands over his face. That probably did not help the face situation.
Ilya watched him for a moment.
“Come here,” he said.
Shane should have asked why. He did not. Some instructions his body accepted before his mind got involved, and Ilya’s voice in that register had always been one of them.
He approached.
Ilya sat up, set the book on the floor, and caught two fingers in the hem of Shane’s shirt. Holding, not pulling yet.
“You are very busy,” Ilya said.
“I was thinking.”
“Yes. Tragic.”
“About Tuesday.”
“I know.”
“About Monday.”
“I know.”
“About your flight.”
“Also lunch, probably.”
Shane looked away.
Ilya’s fingers tightened in his shirt.
“Do not make sandwich at me,” he said.
Shane looked back at him. “That is not a sentence.”
“It is when you do it.”
Shane registered too much at once: refrigerator hum, lake glare, Ilya’s fingers in his shirt, his own pulse too close to his ears.
“What do you want me to do?” Shane asked.
Ilya tugged once, and Shane let himself be pulled down until one knee was on the couch beside Ilya’s hip and one hand was braced on the back cushion.
“Better,” Ilya said.
“What is?”
“You. Here.”
Shane’s body forgot the rest of the joke.
That was another thing that had not changed. Ilya could still make him stupid with one square inch of contact. It was embarrassing. At twenty-six, this man on his couch could still touch his stomach and reduce him to blood pressure.
Before Ilya, Shane had been experienced enough to know experience did not solve much. And that mattered, though he couldn’t name why. There had been girls in Halifax and Toronto and Montreal: chipped nail polish, cold feet, borrowed sweatshirts, shampoo left on his clothes. Girls who laughed at his seriousness and still pulled him closer.
They hadn’t been mistakes. They had been young, and so had he, and sometimes bodies were generous before lives were honest.
With women, there had been rules, even when he was bad at them. Young hockey player. Locked door. Warm mouth. Enthusiasm mistaken for competence. Masculinity with enough moving parts that if one piece failed, another could usually cover for it. He could be shy until he was not. Serious until someone laughed. Clumsy until someone told him what to do.
There had been room, inside those rules, to pass. Pressure, too, but Shane was good with pressure.
With Ilya, there had been rules too. Rivalry. Secrecy. Need. Hotel rooms. Road trips. Texted room numbers. Quick knocks. Doors locked fast. Flights in the morning. No evidence. No softness unless it could be disguised as exhaustion or cruelty or a joke.
For eight seasons, the rule had almost always been: this does not mean anything.
Except Ilya knew the code to his Montreal apartment. Except Shane knew the difference between Ilya hungry and Ilya angry and Ilya pretending not to be hurt. Except there were entire seasons Shane could not think about without remembering the smell of Ilya’s skin in a hotel bathroom and the sound of him saying Shane’s name.
The rulebook had been a lie.
But it had told him where to stand, what to defend, when to fight.
Now even that had broken.
Boyfriend.
It sounded almost stupid. Too small for eight seasons of damage. Too clean for the mess they had made. A word from high school hallways and dinner introductions and people who took photos together at airports. History had bigger words for men who ruined cities for each other, Shane supposed. Companions. Beloved friends. Strategists. Generals. Words that sounded safer because everyone involved was dead and marble and no longer had to call anyone’s parents for dinner.
Your boyfriend.
Ilya had said it in front of Shane’s parents.
Now Ilya was on the couch, looking up at him as if the next move should be obvious.
Maybe it was.
Maybe Shane was the only person pretending not to know.
Ilya touched him under the shirt, at the centre of him. Warm. Waiting.
“You went away,” Ilya said.
“Thinking isn’t going away.”
“For you it is.”
No. That couldn’t be right.
Not then.
Ilya had not known that then. Not in 2017, not on that couch, not with Shane’s shirt under his fingers and Tuesday still sitting facedown on the table. Back then, Shane did not go away. He thought too much. He froze. He calculated. He lost the thread sometimes, yes, but only because wanting Ilya openly was still too new to survive without supervision.
The slipping came later.
The old man knew that.
Or thought he did.
Ilya’s thumb moved once against Shane’s stomach.
“You are doing it now,” Ilya said.
Shane blinked.
The cottage came back around him. Not the bathroom. Not the bath chair. Not the thin skin over Ilya’s hip. The couch. The lake glare. Ilya’s hand under his shirt. Ilya young and warm and watching him too closely, though maybe he had always watched him too closely. Maybe that was the part Shane kept confusing.
Shane looked at him. “That’s rude.”
He shrugged. “Is data.”
“You don’t get to use data against me.”
“I learned from very boring man with many clipboards.”
Shane should have laughed. He almost did.
Instead he kissed him, because if he talked any more, he was going to say something impossible like I don’t know how to be your boyfriend without touching you, like I’m afraid someone will take it away.
Ilya made a pleased sound against his mouth.
The kiss deepened too fast or exactly fast enough. Shane’s hand slid from the back of the couch to Ilya’s shoulder. Ilya shifted closer, his nose flattening soft against Shane’s cheek before he rubbed it there, careless, cartilage gone fleshy from too many breaks.
No. Not fleshy. Not yet.
Broken, yes. Crooked, yes. Softer than it should have been from all the damage it had already taken. But not old. Not yet.
Shane had known that nose. Known the crooked line of it under his mouth, the strange softness where it should have been firm, the way Ilya used it when he kissed like another point of contact, another small claim.
That shoulder.
This shoulder. He knew the scar near it. He knew the way Ilya liked pressure there after flights, and the way he would deny that it helped.
He knew too much to be this uncertain.
Ilya broke away just enough to speak.
“You keep touching me like the word boyfriend might bruise.”
Shane went still.
“I don’t.”
Ilya said nothing.
“I don’t mean to.”
That was worse. He knew it immediately.
“Shane,” Ilya said.
“I know.”
“No. You don’t.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know this also.”
Shane hated the gentleness in that. He wanted Ilya sharp. Sharp was easier. Sharp gave him something to push against. Gentleness made him feel like all his bones had been arranged wrong.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Shane said.
Ilya stared at him for one long second.
Then he laughed.
He only breathed once through his nose, amused in the most insulting possible way.
“That is very romantic,” Ilya said. “Also very boring.”
“Sorry?”
“There. Again.”
“That wasn’t an apology.”
“You’re always apologizing. With face. With hands. With lunch.”
“Lunch is lunch.”
“Today it is.”
Shane looked down at the pressure against his stomach. “What do you want me to do?”
Ilya’s gaze moved over him, and something in it stripped the question down to nothing.
“I want you to fuck me.”
Shane’s body answered so fast it was embarrassing.
Shane had never thought of himself that way. Not as the man who needed to be on top. Not as the man who needed to prove something by putting someone else under him. With Ilya, half the time what wrecked him most was being wanted into stillness — Ilya’s hands on him, Ilya’s weight, Ilya’s voice giving him one impossible instruction at a time until Shane stopped performing competence and became only body.
So it was not the idea of taking that hit him first.
It was Ilya asking.
Ilya, who did not ask because he was uncertain. Ilya, who had decided, come to Shane wearing his shirt, and then put the whole dangerous, ridiculous request in Shane’s hands.
Several other parts of him objected immediately:
His body was sated, sore, and still apparently stupid enough to want this.
His brain, which had been trying to decide whether they needed more eggs before Monday, dropped the entire subject and fled.“Now?” Shane asked.
Ilya stared at him. “Yes.”
“I just meant—”
“I know what you meant. Now? Here? After everything? Before lunch? With your parents coming tomorrow and my flight Tuesday and your brain making sad little checklist?”
Shane made a sound.
“Was this not accurate?”
“It was too accurate.”
Ilya flattened his palm against Shane’s stomach under the edge of his shirt.
“Ilya.”
“Yes.”
“You have done this before?”
Ilya’s eyes narrowed, but not with anger.
“Shane. I have a prostate.”
Heat went through him so sharply he almost looked away.
“I know.”
“Men talk, you know.”
Shane looked at him.
“Not well,” Ilya said. “But they talk. In locker room, a girl puts one finger in a man’s ass and suddenly she is mythological creature. Entire room pretends not to listen. Everyone listens.”
Shane made a sound that might have been a laugh if he had been less close to dying.
“You’re saying you heard stories.”
“I am saying men are stupid and bodies are bodies.”
“Right.”
“And yes,” Ilya said, slower now, eyes not leaving Shane’s face. “I like it.”
Shane went still.
“Women have pinkies and toys.”
Shane swallowed.
Ilya’s gaze moved down his body, unhurried and unfair.
“You have a dick.”
Shane opened his mouth, then closed it.
“These are different,” Ilya said. “Because it is yours.”
Shane had no answer for that.
Ilya’s mouth curved.
Shane swallowed. “Because it’s me.”
“Yes.” Ilya’s gaze dropped deliberately to Shane’s jeans, then came back up. “Because it is you. Because I want your hands. Your mouth. Your beautiful dick. Not some story. Not some toy. You.”
“Fuck off,” Shane said.
“No,” Ilya said. “I am being encouraging.”
Then his expression sharpened.
“You want to know if this is because of your father.”
Shane said nothing.
There it was.
David had seen them. Yuna knew. Boyfriend. Ilya was leaving Tuesday. Everything felt exposed and unfinished, and Shane did not trust himself to tell the difference between desire and damage.
“I want this because I want this,” Ilya said.
“I know.”
“No,” Ilya said. “You are trying to know. Different.”
Shane sat on the edge of the coffee table because his knees had become unreliable, which was absurd given the number of things his knees had survived.
Ilya leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, the shirt falling loose at his collar.
“I will tell you if something is wrong,” Ilya said. “I do not need you to ask me in three languages before you touch me.”
Shane nodded.
“You don’t have to do this for me,” he said, because apparently one emotional rake in the grass was not enough.
Shane heard the refrigerator. Then the lake. Then his own pulse.
Ilya stood.
“I know,” he said.
“Ilya.”
“I am not doing it because I have to.”
Shane shut his mouth.
Ilya came closer and caught Shane’s shirt in both hands.
“You said you loved me in front of them.”
“Because I do.”
“And I said boyfriend.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t touch me like you are sorry we said it.”
Shane’s chest hurt.
“No more,” Ilya said. “Not today.”
Shane nodded once.
Shane reached for him.
Then, unfortunately, his brain came back with supplies.
“Do you want to shower first?” Shane asked.
Ilya looked at him.
“Not as—” Shane stopped. “I mean, if you want. Or need to. Or—”
“Are you asking if I need to douche?”
“I asked about a shower.”
“Like coward.”
Shane rubbed both hands over his face. “I am trying not to make assumptions.”
Ilya’s amusement softened into something more precise. “Good. Do not make assumption. Ask like normal person.”
Shane looked at him.
“Do you want to clean up first?”
Ilya looked at him for a long moment.
“I did.”
Shane’s brain stopped.
“When?”
“Before I came to the couch.”
Shane heard the old floorboard settle under Ilya’s foot.
Ilya had planned this. Showered, prepared, put on Shane’s shirt, and waited while Shane stood in the kitchen seeking counsel from yogurt, pickles, and dietary yeast.
“Oh,” Shane said.
Ilya’s mouth curved. “Yes. Oh.”
Shane reached for him.
Then stopped.
Ilya looked down at Shane’s suspended hand.
“Really?”
Shane let out a rough laugh. “I’m trying not to—”
“Apologize with hands.”
“I know.”
“Then touch me.”
So Shane did.
“Very good. We are learning.”
“Don’t make it sound like obedience school.”
“You respond well to training.”
Shane kissed him before he could answer, because that was either the only reasonable response or the least reasonable one. Ilya kissed back — impatiently, desperately. He grabbed Shane’s hair and pulled him down and in. Shane made a sound into his mouth and felt Ilya smile against it.
The kiss was want, and the relief of wanting, and the fear still there under it but no longer driving. Ilya stepped back and pulled Shane with him by the shirt. One step, two. Shane followed until Ilya’s calves hit the couch and they both stopped because the couch was not the bed and, apparently, some parts of Shane’s brain still believed in planning.
Ilya broke away just enough to breathe.
“Bed,” he said.
Shane nodded because yes, good, bed, useful piece of furniture.
“Right,” he said.
Ilya’s mouth twitched.
“You are very handsome when stupid.”
“Fuck off.”
“I like it.”
“You like most of my worst qualities.”
“Not most.”
Shane huffed and let Ilya take his hand.
They moved down the short hallway toward the bedroom, past the framed print Shane had never liked and the linen closet that stuck in damp weather. The door was already half open. Sunlight came through the curtains in pale bars and landed across the twisted sheets.
Ilya stopped in the doorway.
For one second, he only looked at the room.
The bed was unmade in the middle of the afternoon, sheets twisted toward his side, one pillow on the floor because Ilya slept like a man fighting extradition. Shane’s T-shirt lay near the foot of the bed. Ilya’s sweatshirt was still on the chair by the window. Sunlight came through the curtains in pale bars and moved on the wall with the lake.
No drama. No shadows. No useful weather.
Just Sunday afternoon, Shane’s bedroom, Shane’s house, Shane’s parents coming tomorrow, Ilya leaving Tuesday, and Ilya standing there like the room had better learn quickly who belonged in it.
Shane stepped close behind him.
Not touching yet.
Waiting, but not apologizing for it.
Ilya turned his head.
“What?” Shane asked.
Ilya looked at him, eyes dark and amused and something else underneath.
“Spiraling?”
“No,” Shane said.
Ilya reached one arm up and back, slow as if he were only stretching, and caught the top of the doorframe. The movement pulled Shane’s shirt high on one side.
Shane forgot the rest of his denial.
“Less spiraling,” Ilya said.
“I am not spiraling.”
“You are standing very still in tragic Canadian way.”
“That isn’t a way.”
“For you, yes.”
Shane huffed a laugh, and Ilya’s mouth curved, satisfied with the small victory.
Then he reached back, took Shane’s hand, and put it on his hip.Not gently.
Not carefully.
Exactly where he wanted it.
Shane’s fingers closed before his mind gave permission.
Ilya’s body was warm under his hand. Solid. Young. Alive with muscle and arrogance and every terrible, impossible thing Shane wanted and still did not know how to hold without fear.
Ilya looked back at him.
“What?” he asked again, but softer now. Sharper.
Shane swallowed.
He wanted to say something useful. Something brave. Something that would make this easier for both of them. But there were no words in him that did not feel too small for the room, the afternoon, the hand Ilya had placed over his own body like an answer.
So Shane held him.
Ilya’s eyes lowered, just slightly.
“Better,” he said.
Outside, the lake moved light across the wall.
Inside, Ilya stood in the doorway of Shane’s bedroom, with Shane’s hand on his hip, and Shane did not know yet that his body would keep this exact place for the rest of his life.