Work Text:
Spring 2017
After tuna melts and Rose and the all star game, but before Ilya’s dad’s death and Shane’s injury
-
“Oh, I can’t, my buddy Joe is in a figure skating competition tonight and I’m going to support him, sorry.”
The words burned in Ilya’s brain.
It meant nothing.
And it didn’t matter if it did mean something.
Shane was allowed to sleep with other people just like Ilya was allowed to sleep with other people. They weren’t exclusive. Ilya could sleep with someone tonight if he wanted. He hadn’t gone out because he wasn’t in the mood, but he could. You know, if he wanted to.
Not that he even knew if Shane was sleeping with Joe. And it wouldn’t bother him if he was.
But was he?
He had Google searched the guy already, but he wasn’t obsessing.
Joe was Shane’s age, and had also grown up in Ottawa. They’d trained at the same rink. Which Ilya had learned when he’d searched Joe’s career history, because he’d remembered enough about Shane’s to match up the timeline.
Ilya already knew that Shane hadn’t hooked up with him when they were teenagers, but had he wanted to? Had he thought about it then? Was he thinking about it now?
Ugh.
He slammed his laptop closed and walked over to the window of his penthouse apartment, but he didn’t see the city lights in front of him.
He shouldn’t have asked Shane to video chat anyway. It wasn’t like they were boyfriends. Even if sometimes it felt-
But no, they weren’t. Ilya didn’t have to spend all of his time thinking about Shane.
He unlocked his phone. He would find someone to sleep with tonight.
But no, not Anna, and not Britney, and not Christie, and on and on down the list. Not even Svetlana.
He threw the phone on the bed and face planted next to it.
He wasn’t allowed to obsess over who Shane slept with.
He bitterly turned on the TV and flipped through the channels until he found the men’s figure skating program that this Joe was skating in.
Ilya watched the crowd.
Was Shane in the front row? Was his face painted with Joe’s- well, they didn’t have numbers like in hockey, but with whatever figure skating fans painted on their faces?
The skaters were good, sure, but he didn’t see them. He just watched the crowd.
A guy named Joe skated. Maybe it was Shane’s “buddy.” Maybe it wasn’t. It was a common name. Who even knew?
(It was. Ilya had seen his photos on Wikipedia. But he tried to pretend he wasn’t sure.)
Ilya kept the volume down, but after Joe’s performance was finished, they showed him grinning, pleased with his performance. And then there was Shane cheering in the crowd, applauding emphatically.
Of course they’d shown him, the TV producers must have made the same connections Ilya had, and they were telling the audience. He scrambled for the remote to hear what they were saying about Shane, but by the time he had turned the volume up, the announcers had returned their attention to Joe waiting on his results.
He turned the TV off without waiting for the results.
He needed a cigarette.
-
An hour and a half later, Shane texted.
Too late to call?
Not with Joe then.
But maybe he’d already seen him.
Maybe they’d already taken care of each other.
Ilya didn’t bother texting back and just video called him.
He was at home, looking cozy and happy in a hoodie with damp, post-shower hair.
“Hey,” Shane said with a smile.
Had he had Joe over to his apartment? Had he invited Joe to sleep with him at the home Ilya had never been invited to? The thought devastated Ilya so badly he couldn’t say hello back for a moment.
He wasn’t at the secret hookup building. Maybe Ilya could have handled that. But if he’d hooked up with Joe at his home? That he’d never let Ilya come to?
It was catastrophic.
Ilya tried very hard to convince himself he didn’t care.
“Hi,” he said, but he did such a bad job convincing himself, that he managed to upset Shane too.
“Ilya?” he asked, “Are you okay?”
Ilya nodded, shaking his head a little, shooting for cool indifference.
“Is okay. I’m home. Boring night.” Shane nodded, but looked unconvinced. “Fun night for you, eh? Figure skating program? With your buddy?”
Shane very animatedly talked for a long moment about how well Joe had skated. He’d come in first place, which was great for him. Had they celebrated together afterwards?
“And did you see him?” Ilya prodded, “After?”
“Just for a few minutes.”
“Oh, not long then,” Ilya said, prompting him for more.
Shane gave him a funny look.
“He was busy with-“ Shane began, and then his jaw dropped open. “Are you jealous?”
Ilya scoffed.
“Of course not.”
Shane laughed at him in disbelief, nose scrunching up a little, drawing his cheeks up below his freckles. They seemed to stand out in the phone’s light.
“I think you are!”
“I’m not.”
Shane rolled his eyes.
“Well I didn’t sleep with him, if that’s what you were asking.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
They stared each other down for a long time.
“I called you, didn’t I?” Shane asked.
Ilya bit down his “only after you saw your ‘buddy’ Joe, first” and let it go. He wanted to say it, of course he did. But he knew Shane would say he sounded jealous. Which was ridiculous.
Was he jealous?
He’d never been jealous before.
Was this what it felt like?
But what would he have to be jealous of? It’s not like they were anything to each other.
The last time they’d been together, Shane had said “it felt like we were something” and then they had agreed that they couldn’t be anything. That was what had happened, right?
Even if afterwards, it had felt just as nice, just as perfect, as before. Even if he’d desperately wished that life were different, and he could say “I wish we were something too.”
But they weren’t anything. They had agreed on that.
It didn’t matter what his heart wanted.
He wasn’t jealous, because he wasn’t allowed to be jealous. So of course he wasn’t.
“Yeah, you called me,” he said into the phone.
“I’m not hooking up with Joe,” Shane said in a placating tone.
“I didn’t know!” Ilya explained, “You trained together, I did not know if you were anything before.” He paused, and Shane just stared at him. Because maybe this was someone Shane could imagine a future with. A future where they could be something. A future with someone who wasn’t Russian, and didn’t have Russian cops as his only remaining living relatives. “Or if you wanted to be, you know, back then.”
“We weren’t-“ Shane began. He sighed in frustration and shook his head. “There was no one before you, Ilya.”
“I know,” Ilya said quickly, “But I mean maybe you wanted-“
“No, there was no one before you,” he said more firmly. “I didn’t even know that I was gay until I met you.”
Ilya froze. He hadn’t?
“It didn’t even occur to me that I could be gay until I was sitting on that hotel gym floor with you, and every single thought in my head from before that night that added up to the fact that I might be gay was thinking about you at the ice rink in Saskatchewan. Okay? Do you get it? You were my first. Not Joe. We’re friends. We were only ever friends. Okay?”
Ilya nodded.
“Okay.”
“I can be friends with a gay guy.”
“Yes. Of course. Obviously,” Ilya said quickly. He would never limit who Shane was friends with. Shane could be friends with anyone he wanted.
Ilya hadn’t realized that he was the first person to make Shane realize he was gay. He’d known that he was the first person to make Shane willing to act on it, but he hadn’t realized that he hadn’t been tempted before.
Ilya wished desperately, for just a moment, that he could say the same.
The fact that his first was Sasha, of all people, who was a friend, but nothing more, felt so much less than what Shane had just told him.
But it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t like they were dating or in love or anything.
-
Later, he allowed himself to acknowledge that it was jealousy. Later, he allowed himself to process just how much he’d needed the answer to be that no, Shane had not hooked up with Joe after the figure skating program.
He was still Russian.
It still couldn’t work.
But he was jealous, and he only wanted one person, and he wanted that one person to only want him.
And maybe he was in love.
Maybe he had been wrong about that part too.
There still wasn’t a future together, and he didn’t know what to do with any of it, but it was too hard to deny that it was true anymore.
He’d laid himself pretty bare tonight, at least to himself.
He was in love.
And he would just have to figure out how to fix it.