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Ilya gets married at the end of 2017. It has been four months since he last spoke to Svetlana Sergeevna. It has been nine months since his father died. Least important of all, it has been over a year since he last fucked Shane Hollander.
He had actually asked Sveta first. About getting married. It had been a painful surprise that she had said no, a splinter working its way under the keratin shield of his fingernail and throbbing, insistently, whenever he had to use his hand.
Ilya came back from Moscow after burying his father and thought, they will not make me go back there. His talent, his contract, and his career had never felt like a looser tether to his adopted country. He wanted something strong, notarized and signed, preferably in blood. Permanent enough to sink into the soil of this continent and grow roots.
So of course he asked Sveta if she would help him, already anticipating her yes before waiting to hear her answer. He had been ready with a ring from his mother, the only thing he’d brought back with him. But instead of yes, Ilyushenka, of course I will help you, she looked at him with pity in her eyes and said only, Ilya, which he knew meant no. Which, fine, okay. He thought she would offer her help if he asked her for it, but she had refused. No problem. No big deal. He could solve this problem on his own. Why should this be any different from anything else in his life.
The instinct to ask her why she had said no was as insistent as the itch for a cigarette, crawling up his throat like sickness, but he swallowed it down. He knew why. He should have known better than to ask her to tie herself to him in perpetuity; it had been a stupid idea, born from two too-long flights and too much to drink and too-little sleep for weeks. The answer was obvious: Sveta knew him too well to want him forever.
And he had been right. In the end he did not need her. Six months after she refused to help him, he married Asya.
Asya had almost five million followers on Instagram, which told you nothing about who she was or what she was like but was the most important thing to Asya about herself. This empty metric by which Asya evaluated her own existence made Ilya like her more. If all you knew about Ilya was that he was the number one draft pick in 2009, that he led the division in scoring, that he was the youngest captain in Raiders history, what did you really know about Ilya? Nothing. Just a sheet of meaningless numbers. But it was the only thing anyone actually cared about, anyway, and that meant that it was the only thing about Ilya that mattered.
Looking into the reflection you cast and seeing it was empty: this was something Ilya understood very well.
He and Asya met at a Fashion Week party years before, and Ilya had seen her often when he’d gone to New York, up until he stopped reaching out so much in that year of madness before his father died. But she did not hold a grudge and it was no struggle to reconnect during an away game at the Garden. Ilya sent an Instagram DM, then a text, and then they were fucking again. In the Spring, it was very easy to escalate their relationship. To make things serious between them.
After a few months, it became clear that Asya liked the idea of getting married. She thought being ‘Mrs. Rozanov’ would increase her opportunities for branded partnerships. The most-liked photo of the year on Instagram was a pop star announcing she was pregnant, she explained to him. Also, she liked the idea of a November wedding: right before holiday shopping kicked off, whatever that meant.
Ilya didn’t care about the American fixation on commercial holidays, or know what the fuck a Q4 was, or give a shit if Asya wanted to get married on top of the Empire State Building or in the back of a taxi cab. He just wanted it done.
But he did care about Asya. He liked her very much. He liked that she spoke Russian but had very few ties to Russia; he liked that she was one of those women who loved sucking dick; he liked that she had her own attorneys who took care of the pre-nup with Ilya’s lawyers and that she did not make any emotional overtures about the necessity for one. They were both rich and famous, in their own different ways. They understood each other in the absence of one another’s understanding.
And they both agreed: it was business, but it was also marriage. It was something very close to love. It was not pretend, and Ilya would not humiliate her by cheating, and she would respect him in the same way. No one would be getting caught on Twitter with his ass showing. Her lawyers had put that in the pre-nup; Ilya’s lawyers hadn’t liked it, but he’d waved them away. Public embarrassment would lead to financial penalties. Not insignificant ones.
“Mr. Rozanov,” all the lawyers said. “You have a… reputation.”
Ilya was not worried about his reputation, or any temptation that came with it. Asya liked threesomes, she liked to watch. If he wanted something else, Asya would be fine with him getting it, so long as he did not do so disrespectfully. The price for citizenship was being married to a beautiful, smart woman who spoke his language and not sticking his dick in anything she didn’t want him to. That felt fair enough to Ilya.
Anyway. Ilya had tried the secret fucking thing, and that had ended in the stupidest way possible. He was not sentimental about missing the opportunity to sleep with anyone who would present a problem to his marriage. Mostly, he just felt tired. He had fucked so many people, and so few of them even registered as a memory; the only ones that did were scorched earth. Ilya was never going to fuck Sveta again. He was never going to—well, nevermind.
--
If there was a sum of money Ilya could pay to never have to attend the MLH awards again, he would have paid it several times over. But June arrives, and Ilya cannot have what he wants, so he finds himself once again in Las Vegas, that horrible dry, sprawling city, sweating under dim lighting and smarting under the scratch of his dress shirt.
At least they weren’t making him present an award with Hollander this year. The rivalry had become somewhat less interesting to the media over the last season. Maybe everyone could tell their heart wasn’t in it anymore. It should have been funny: that they were much more convincing about hating each other when they were sucking each other’s dicks. Apathy, apparently, was much less potent for their brand than anger.
Asya would have appreciated that, if Ilya could have told her.
Unfortunately, there was to be no escaping Hollander, even without the pageantry of the ceremony. When Ilya walks to the bar, he’s unsurprised to find Hollander walking towards him with that puppy dog determination that makes Ilya’s skin feel like it’s squeezing the blood out of his veins. He feels pushed-in, collapsed. Like an old tube of toothpaste, mangled and forgotten at the back of the medicine chest.
“Hi,” Hollander says when he reaches Ilya. Ilya has stood his ground. He has let Hollander come to him.
“Hollander,” he says, because it would be worse to say nothing. The memory of the last time he had stood this close to Hollander without protective gear scrapes along Ilya’s bare skin like the teeth of a drooling animal. Hungry.
“Congratulations,” Hollander says, in a single rushed exhale. The word doesn’t sound fluent, it trips on the way past his teeth like he’s just learned it.
“On…?” Ilya asks, bitchily. In his defense, Hollander’s awkward congratulations could be for any number of things. Ilya was the top scorer in the regular season. His team won the President’s Trophy. Ilya is doing very well in their sport. In his life.
Hollander’s throat moves very obviously when he swallows. Everything about Hollander is so obvious. Ilya clenches his fists. “On. Getting married?”
Ilya stares at him. “What? Was that question?”
Hollander swallows again. He looks almost apologetic, and Ilya almost feels bad, before he remembers that he does not feel bad at all.
“No. Not a question. I just—congratulations.” Hollander’s eyes are so sad, jaw set like he is doing something very brave. I hate you, Ilya thinks, for the first time in his life, and means it for a glorious second before the thought melts back into the pool of magma in his stomach where all his formless feelings about Hollander lie. Sludgy and boiling, always poised to erupt and make a ruin of Ilya’s entire existence.
Ilya’s resolve to grab the last word is failing him in the face of Hollander’s damp, pretty stare. All he can do is nod.
“I saw—is your wife here?” Hollander asks, which gives Ilya enough motivation to raise a sarcastic eyebrow.
“No, I brought mistress,” he responds, deadpan.
Of course Asya is here, talking to one of the player’s girlfriends where Ilya left her at their table. Not a player from Ilya’s team, though. The tribal, terrifying Raiders wives do not like her—because she’s too new, because she doesn’t pretend that hard to care about hockey, because she really doesn’t care about Boston. She came to almost every home game this season, but she has not moved out of her loft in TriBeCa. Ilya, personally, does not see the point of her leaving her home. He would be away as much as they would be together with all the games on the road. There are no children yet. Why should either of them disrupt their lives for a perpetually half-empty bed?
Asya catches him looking and gives him half a smile. Turning her head so the girlfriend (Kayla? Kendra?) won’t see, she rolls her eyes, glazed over with badly-concealed boredom, and Ilya feels a squeeze of affection in his heart.
Hollander is staring at her too. Only he is looking at Ilya’s small, pretty wife like she has punched him in his very muscled stomach from across the room with her tiny manicured fists. Asya would be lucky to get in a few scratches in a fight with Hollander, but Hollander’s simpering stare looks almost afraid, like she could lay him out with a single blow. It makes Ilya smile.
Smiling at Hollander is very dangerous. The sensation is not unlike waiting at a traffic light and knowing it’s about to turn green.
“Are you here with someone?” Ilya asks. Oops.
“Uh, yeah.” Hollander blinks at him, eyes very bright, like an animal snared by the bright beam of a headlight. It makes Ilya want to slam his foot against the pedal. Hollander blinks again, shaking his head a little and turning his face to the left. “Her name is–”
“I didn’t ask what her name was,” Ilya says, flat.
“Okay?” Hollander gives him a new look—he’s annoyed. He’s so easy.
Ilya presses harder on the gas. “Is your date upset?”
“Why would she be–”
“That she came with loser. You did not win any awards, Hollander.”
Hollander’s mouth quirks; Ilya knows that twitch of the lips. He’s trying not to smile. “The ceremony isn't even done.”
“Your season was done in May. Maybe before. Your team did not play well. I think we know awards are done. For you.”
“At least my team didn’t lose to fucking Colorado in the playoffs.”
“And my second line did not roll over for Florida's pussy defense in regular season.”
Hollander’s smile has broken out from behind the sad, frozen shield he’d been wearing. With it, his whole face looks young and bright. Ilya thinks, I don’t hate you at all, and then he thinks, fuck. “You’re getting old, Rozanov. You were too slow on game two, you need to train speed again. Flashy plays named after you will get you nowhere if the fucking Avs can outskate you.”
“Ah,” Ilya says, and can’t stop himself from smiling, too. “So you were watching my games?”
“I–” Hollander’s grin slips off his face. Ilya waits to see if he’ll recover, if they can keep going, but Hollander stays mute. Shifts his weight. Looks sad again.
“Well,” Hollander says. “I just wanted to. You know. Say hi. And um—”
“Congratulate me.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Ilya says expectantly. “Something else you need?”
They’re not standing all that close to each other, but then Hollander is moving just an inch closer. Grabbing a drink he definitely didn’t order off the bar. It’s transparent, Hollander is always so transparent, and it brings him near enough to Ilya that Ilya can smell the sponsored cologne he’s wearing, see the small, damp patch of sweat that’s collecting at the collar of his nice shirt. He can’t smell Hollander’s sweat underneath the cologne, quite, but Ilya remembers very suddenly that not too long ago he would have been licking it off Hollander’s skin at the end of the night. His dick remembers that, too.
Ilya does not think he’s going to do it, because he’s stronger than this, and he’s in control of this. But then his gaze is following the little dance of Hollander’s twitching lip, staying there, and when he finally drags it up Hollander’s face to meet his eyes, he finds them once again wide and wet. And staring so very hard at Ilya.
“I need…” Hollander is looking at Ilya’s mouth now. “I need to go.”
Ilya straightens. There it is: Hollander’s classic line. Maybe his mother should look into a copyright.
“Okay. Bye,” Ilya says, and watches Hollander retreat into the crowd.
Asya is sitting at the table, Kendra or Kayla mercifully gone, when he returns with two drinks and hands her one.
“Great show,” she says to him in sarcastic Russian. “Such hilarious speeches. And such a good job all those hockey players did, reading jokes off the teleprompters.”
"Ah, lisichka, are you surprised that we are a funny bunch?” He pretends to be wounded. “Your husband is a skilled comedian, and he is a hockey player."
"He is both those things, yes," she says, voice like hot honey. She runs her foot up the inside of his pant leg, hooking her ankle around his calf. "I only meant—I was surprised that so many hockey players can read."
Ilya smiles into his champagne and leans forward to kiss the bare peak of her shoulder. It is warm, too. This whole horrible room is too fucking hot.
When he raises his face from the far more pleasant heat of her skin, Hollander is staring at him from across the room. All his talk about leaving, and he is still circling Ilya like a stray dog who wants to be let in and fed scraps.
Scraps, Ilya has. Got you, he thinks. And knows, then, that whatever happens the rest of the night is not remotely in the realm of his control.
--
Two o’clock in the morning finds Ilya slipping out from between the hotel sheets. He pulls on the clothes he brought to sleep in but had not worn. After he and Asya left the party, they had very good sex in the comically large Ritz-Carlton shower, and there was no reason for Ilya to put on clothes after that.
Asya does not wake up when he goes.
He takes the elevator down to the hotel gym, fingers drumming against the railing. Admires the way his arms look in the mirror. It is a good shirt. Ilya looks good. There’s something battering at the insides of his ribcage that Ilya thinks must be adrenaline. From drinking, and fucking, and being on his way to do something he should not do.
Hollander is in the hotel gym, of course, when Ilya gets there. He is sweating, like he made an effort to pretend he was actually here to work out. He ran on the treadmill for two miles, Ilya thinks, before doing a few sets of weights. Why does Ilya feel so sure that he knows the boring choreography of Hollander’s exercise routine? They never worked out together. They never did anything together.
“Fuck,” Hollander yelps when he sees Ilya. Ilya raises an eyebrow. Surely this is not a surprise. Hollander had been the one to propose this, to ask for it with his big, screaming, sad, dark eyes from across the hotel ballroom.
Ilya is only doing the same thing he always does: giving Hollander exactly what he wants.
“Fuck,” Ilya repeats mockingly. “Trouble sleeping?”
Hollander glares at him. “Obviously.”
“Too bad.” Ilya walks over to the short rack of dumbbells where Hollander is standing. Hollander is holding the fifty pound weights in his hands. “I need those.”
“Oh my god.” Hollander lowers the weights to the ground—perfect form, perfect deadlift, perfect Hollander. “You’re really going to do this? It wasn’t hard enough, what happened up there?”
Hollander has maybe grown some balls in the year that Ilya has been denied access to them. He has only ever surprised Ilya with the extent of his sluttiness during sex; Hollander has never actually challenged Ilya like this when Ilya was not already well on his way to being inside him.
Ilya steps deliberately into the orbit of his angry, pillowy mouth.
“What happened up there?” Ilya asks, voice as light and unserious as he can make it.
“You—you know how I feel, and you had to flirt with me, and remind me—anyway, I just came down here to clear my head, but of course I can’t get away from you, because you have this weird stalker thing and you always find me—”
“I think you want to be found,” Ilya says. His heart is so stupid and noisy, Hollander must be able to hear it. Another half step closer. There is maybe two inches of air between their faces.
“Rozanov,” Hollander breathes helplessly. For all his whining, he hasn’t retreated a single centimeter. Frozen, waiting. Hypnotized by Ilya in all the ways that don’t matter and the only ways Ilya can have.
“I can’t touch you,” Ilya says, just to be an asshole.
“I know.” Hollander sounds so devastated.
“I’m married,” Ilya reminds him.
“I. Know.”
“But maybe,” Ilya says suggestively, then trails off. Hollander is hanging on the words; expression half-fury, half-hope.
“Maybe?” he repeats, when Ilya says nothing, and Ilya feels it again: the thrilling anticipation of the traffic light about to change and not a single fucking thing on the empty road to stop him from accelerating.
It has always been like this between them. Ilya only has to gesture at a door for Hollander to throw it open; Ilya always marveling at the things Shane will do for him. He’d let Ilya lay him out fully naked the first time they’d been together, even though he had no idea what he was doing, even though he must have felt so nervous and small. No matter: the thing he feels for Ilya is always bigger. It will always win. Ilya shoulders the weight of it like Atlas: it’s too much to bear and he cannot put it down.
Ilya leans over him. Their hips are touching, just barely. A little more when they both inhale. He can feel Hollander’s eager cock filling out against his thigh. He hasn’t changed. Ilya still knows him.
“Did you bring your date back to your room?” Ilya asks.
“No.” Shane is looking at Ilya’s chin instead of his eyes. “She—Rose—” Ilya’s stomach turns over “—we don’t stay in the same room. It’s not like that with us.”
“So your room is empty,” Ilya says. He does not dwell on what Hollander is saying about Rose Landry. He does not care about what Hollander does or does not do with Rose Landry.
Shane stares up at him, finally at his eyes. “Yes.”
“Good,” Ilya says. “Tell me your room number. You will go there first.”
--
Ilya does not rush on his way to Hollander’s room. Does not think about anything besides the act of putting one foot in front of the other. He has not been with a man since things got serious with Asya; he has told her that maybe he would like to, with her, and she had not objected to the idea. He is not even certain she would object to this idea, this man, if he presented it to her in the right way.
The only thing he can be sure of is that this specific scenario is something to which she would object: a very newsworthy liaison, in a hotel filled with other players and reporters and fans with cameras who are guaranteed to recognize hockey players. This, he is certain, is the sort of embarrassing incident that his pre-nup took special pains to prohibit. That he promised would not happen.
He gets off the elevator six floors sooner than his own room, on a hallway that looks exactly the same. Hollander’s door is propped open with the deadbolt. Shane has made it seamless; Ilya does not need to linger in the hallway for a second. The battering feeling returns to his chest.
He closes the door behind him.
Hollander is sitting on the bed, sweaty shirt discarded, but shorts still on. They stop in the middle of his thighs. The sight of all this skin arrests Ilya in the doorframe and locks the joints in his knees.
“So,” Hollander says. “I’m not really sure how you want this to work.”
Ilya leans back against the door. Looks casually, he hopes, at the ceiling. “I think you are.”
That is a lie. But Hollander is good at playing games. Ilya trusts that he will figure something out.
“Is this some sort of—” Hollander cuts himself off with a cute, angry huff. “Fuck. Do you think I’m going to put on a show, or something? This is fucked up, Rozanov–”
“So you want me to leave?” Ilya interrupts. Watches Hollander’s forehead crumple. So easy.
“No,” Hollander says, like it wasn’t written all over his sweet face, like he has to say words to Ilya for Ilya to know what he means.
Ilya gives him a second to sulk. “Maybe you tell me what you do want. Remember, I cannot touch. But you… well, you can do whatever you like. You are Shane Hollander, right? What does Shane Hollander want?”
“I want—” The words seem to choke him, halt his speech. Ilya thinks he can see Hollander discard an idea, and then pick another one. That Hollander, they all say, what an improviser. What an intuitive player.
Hollander settles on, “I want to suck your dick.”
“Okay,” Ilya says immediately, like it costs him nothing, like it means nothing, like he is agreeing to split an appetizer at a restaurant. Watches the shock and hunger grow on Hollander’s face. He expected Ilya to deny him; he was daring Ilya to say no.
But Ilya knows him. He knows Shane likes to prove himself in the face of big challenges.
“Come over here, then,” Ilya says. “Long time, but I think you know my cock is not quite big enough for you to suck from all the way over there.”
At Ilya’s beckoning, Shane scrambles off the bed and goes on his fucking knees. Crawls. Ilya can feel his blood get thicker and warmer with the sight of it, Hollander’s bare knees scraping against hotel carpet in his eager scramble to shove his face in Ilya's crotch.
Shane is on him quickly. Ilya’s cock is free in seconds, and Shane stares at it for a second with his big, stupid, beautiful eyes like empty pools, and then his mouth is open and he’s putting Ilya inside of it.
Ilya thought maybe it wouldn’t be like he remembered. Had not really believed this, but had hoped and feared that, maybe, it would not be the same. That Hollander’s mouth, the hot inside of him, would have lost whatever ability it had to transform the terrain of Ilya’s mind; to melt him down and leave him dissolving all over the floor.
No such luck. Ilya touches him, grabs at him. He needs to feel the soft buttress of Shane’s throat, where he’s attempting to swallow Ilya whole. He needs to touch Hollander’s hair, squeeze the tears out of his bright, spilling eyes with the ram of his cock, learn the shape of his skull again with his hands.
Shane leans into every touch without loosening the tight seal of his lips around Ilya’s dick. He is so much the same. Spreading open for every touch, wanting every part of him filled and petted and pinched and adored. If Ilya had twenty hands he could not satisfy all the ways Hollander wants to be stroked.
“You are still a greedy slut, aren’t you?” Ilya croons. In Russian he says, “I still make you like this, you’re still here with me, even though you left. You'll always be here.”
It takes not long at all for Ilya to reach the edge. He pulls Shane off and says, before he can think, “Do you want me to–”
Shane’s mouth is still hanging open, frozen. In the shape, probably, of Ilya’s cock. Ilya puts two fingers into the gap, and Shane, gratefully, sucks on them.
When Ilya lets him speak, Shane closes his eyes. “No, fuck, I’m too close.”
Shane shoves his hand into his shorts, and Ilya realizes that Hollander hadn’t understood—Ilya was going to ask to fuck him—but it’s best this way, it’s best if they don’t, it’s best—
“Fuck,” Ilya hisses when Shane wraps his mouth back around his dick and messily sucks him down. It is so good, always, but as Ilya comes in Shane’s working throat he thinks: Hollander had been as eager as he ever was, but he hadn’t seemed out of practice.
He has done this for someone else, Ilya knows suddenly, and his whole body feels cold.
He wanted to watch Hollander come, wanted to spread him out on the floor and lick it off him, but now he just feels tired. He doesn’t look. Hollander finishes with a long, pretty moan. Every syllable of it sinks inside Ilya’s skin; hot and melting down into the deepest part of him. Churning.
He’s barely taken off any of his clothes, so there’s not much reason to linger, dressing, the way he sometimes used to when they were so much younger.
Hollander isn’t dressing, though. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, returns to his seat on the bed. Exactly where he had been when Ilya walked in. Ten minutes ago, maybe. How much changes with time. How little. Ilya wishes suddenly that he could wind back those ten minutes, stop himself from opening this wound. From spreading this infection. Again.
Hollander is going to say he regrets it, Ilya knows. Maybe he will meet Ilya with rage.
“You never—” Hollander starts. Stops. Looks at Ilya, something so hurt in his expression that Ilya makes himself keep looking. “I texted you, like, a million times. I called you.”
It is not rage. It is something much worse.
“There was nothing to say.” Something is wrong with Ilya’s throat. Tired, probably, from watching Hollander take Ilya apart on his knees, from having to swallow all the spit that gathered in his mouth at the way Hollander gave himself over to Ilya without stopping to pretend even a little he did not want to.
“Well, yeah, there fucking was.” Now Hollander sounds angry. Ilya relaxes. “I thought—you were done, that you were over it. But you obviously didn’t stop wanting—why couldn’t you have picked up your fucking phone, Rozanov?”
“Stopped wanting?” Ilya does not let his voice rise. He is very calm. He lets the foreign sentences come out sloppier than he actually speaks. “Maybe my English is bad after all. I thought ‘stopped wanting’ is when someone leaves house. Tells person who just fucked them very nicely, ‘I'm sorry, I can’t do this.’ Starts dating movie star?”
“Ilya–”
“Is wrong? Is not what this means?”
“Oh my god.” Hollander grabs a pillow from the bedspread to hug tight against his chest. Like pads on the ice. Like Ilya is a threat.
Ilya is. Hollander, at least, knows that now.
“I will go now,” Ilya declares. Grasping the second time that night for the last word.
Of course Hollander ruins it right away by calling out, “Wait.”
Ilya stops. Looks back at him, sitting so small and so sad on the bed.
“Yes?” he asks impatiently.
“This can’t happen again.” Hollander’s eyes are not bright. They are as flat and dull as iron. The tears that had slipped down his cheek when he was choking on Ilya’s cock have dried. Hollander sounds older than Ilya has ever known him. “We—no, I can’t do this anymore.”
“There is no this,” Ilya spits back at him. The hot roiling in his gut is cooling. Hardening. It is happening again, like Ilya knew it would. Hollander has remembered who Ilya is, and now that he has remembered, he is running away. Again.
“No,” Hollander says, looking at him with those cold, hard, unrecognizable eyes. “I guess there isn’t.”
“Goodbye, Hollander,” Ilya says.
“Bye,” Hollander grits out, but Ilya has already left.
In the hallway, he hears movement from the room, a body coming to the door. Ilya stops on the threshold, wondering, with a vague peal of nausea, if Hollander is going to open the door. To stop him.
But Hollander does not. Of course he does not. Ilya hears the metal thunk of the deadbolt sliding into place, and then he hears only the silence of a huge, lonely hotel in the worst hours of the night.
It is not an hour that any human should be awake.
A very good woman is sleeping a few floors up, with Irina Rozanova’s ring on her finger and Ilya’s cum still inside her. In the elevator, Ilya reflects that in one thing at least, he is hardworking: it took him forty minutes of efficiency and effort to betray his wife, and risk his career, and make himself a fool. All to bring Shane Hollander down, for a few stolen moments, into the hell where Ilya lives and will never, ever, escape.
Ilya does not look at his reflection in the mirrors that line the elevator like the walls of a coffin. He makes his way back to his room, and his wife, and he does not sleep.