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On the Monday before Valentine’s Day weekend, the refrigeration unit underneath the Centaurs’ practice rink stops working overnight. Tuesday afternoon practice is postponed, and then cancelled when it’s discovered that the part needed for the fix weighs four thousand pounds and will take most of the week to arrive from somewhere in Buttfuck, Saskatchewan.
Free week, boys, texts one of the rooks. GO TIME.
The younger guys immediately start making plans to bar hop around all of Ontario, or some shit, but everyone else seems to come to the opposite consensus. Their next game is Saturday, Valentines Day, and the WAGs are already as pissed about that as WAGs ever get. Apparently, the bitching in the group chat has been legendary. Best not to aggravate the situation. A surprise dinner, a night spent with the family—happy wife, happy life. Or so Ilya understands the saying goes.
So it is that Ilya finds himself with a rare three straight days of nothing to do, nowhere to be and nobody to see. Ilya is in his car and heading towards Montreal before the rookies have even agreed on an alley to have their communal puke and rally in. Oh to be nineteen again.
(Ilya would rather attempt to eat his shoulder pads than be nineteen again. Except for, perhaps, to go back to a certain exercise room and put his tongue on some freckles.)
Shane’s home in Montreal is a large two-story detatched townhouse situated in one of the more affluent residential areas. Close enough to the Metros’ practice rink and Bell Center that Shane can go from sitting on his couch to fully suited up in thirty minutes, far enough that it at least feels like there’s some separation there. It is, naturally, a gorgeous house—Shane’s real estate fetish is never on such full display as it is when he is choosing a home for himself.
Ilya, of course, has a key and the code to the alarm system and could easily just walk in. He also would really like to see Shane’s face when he opens the door, expecting Ilya to be in Ottawa at practice and for there to be a man on his doorstep trying to sell him a foundation inspection.
Ilya would then, quite willingly, inspect his foundation for him.
When he presses the button on the doorbell, he hears the digitally-produced ding-dong echo from inside the house. There is a tiny box halfway up the adjacent wall that immediately beeps and emits Shane’s voice.
“Hey, you can just leave it on the step, thanks.”
Ilya presses his nose into the digital doorbell, which he knows to also contain a camera, and says, “Shane.”
A pause.
“What the fuck.”
He doesn’t sound unexcited or even particularly unhappy, but it isn’t really the response Ilya was looking for. There’s another pause.
“Shane. Do you know it’s negative seven degrees outside?”
In response, there’s a brief cacophony of noise that Ilya can hear even from outside the house. The multiple successive thumps of something falling, Shane swearing loudly and the sound of what can only be a hockey game being paused on the television.
He opens the door to reveal that he is nap-rumpled, wearing two pairs of socks and carrying a child in his arms. The only really surprising part is that the socks don’t match, though the child is interesting.
“Which one is that?” Ilya asks, because it is clearly a Pike child, but they are doing their best job of trying to insert their whole body head-first into Shane’s ear canal and Ilya can’t see their face. The Pike children all have the same head of chestnut-colored hair, the same wavy bob haircut and the oldest three are mostly of a height these days. The pajamas are patterned with pizza, and don’t reveal anything of identity or even gender.
Shane turns himself slightly. Arthur Pike’s face is smashed against the side of his neck, looking flushed. His curly fringe is stuck to his forehead and his eyes are glassy, feverish. There are multiple different fluids covering his face.
“Artyusha,” Ilya says, pressing a hand over his back. Arthur is a slight child who just had this third birthday, and Ilya’s hand encompasses the majority of his entire spine. Through the thin material of the pizza pajamas, Ilya can feel the fever-warmth of his body. He steps fully into the foyer, closing the door on the cold weather behind him, and raises an eyebrow in Shane’s direction. “What is happening to my favorite boy-Pike?”
Shane smiles very slightly, rolls his eyes even gentler. Arthur is, of course, the only male Pike aside from Hayden himself, and Shane’s friend was never in the running for the great honor of Ilya’s favorite.
“Sick,” Shane murmurs.
Arthur turns his face towards Ilya, grumpy and miserable and looking blessedly like his mother. Ilya thinks he would like the Pike children even if they were all exact copies of Hayden fucking Pike, but they all seem to have favored Jackie. This is good for them, Ilya thinks, because Jackie is the vastly cuter of their parents. Hayden had even agreed when Ilya mentioned this after meeting Amber for the first time and praising her for choosing her mother’s nose in the womb.
This was after Pike had walked into the other room and accepted the idea of Ilya holding his youngest child by punching a pillow a few times, according to Shane, but Ilya’s presence tends to have that effect on subpar Metros players.
Arthur says, “Uncle Lily is here,” into Shane’s neck, and coughs wetly. Shane grimaces.
When Arthur was learning to speak, nothing on Earth could convince him to pronounce the name Ilya correctly. Lily, coincidentally, was the closest he ever got, and it had since stuck with the other Pike children as well. It has, quite honestly, been a saving grace; the children go to school, talk about Mommy and Daddy, Nanna and Papa, Uncle Shane, Uncle Lily. The teachers have perhaps come to an erroneous conclusion or two about Jackie Pike’s family dynamics, but none of them are likely to factor in the Ottawa Centaurs team captain.
“Where are the Pikes?” Ilya asks. He pushes Arthur’s hair away from his face, grimacing as he feels it unstick from the dried snot on those poor little cheeks.
“Today’s the twins’ big first grade field trip,” Shane says. He passes Ilya into the living room, where most of the far wall is dominated by a television frozen on last night’s Boston versus New York game. Shane, it seems, is keeping up with old ‘friends’. “Jackie and Hayden were signed up as chaperones. Arthur woke up with a fever, couldn’t go to school. I got tapped in.”
“Uncle Lily, I’m sick,” Arthur informs over Shane’s shoulder.
“I can see that, Artyusha.” Arthur releases Shane’s neck in favor of thrusting an arm towards Ilya, and Ilya steps forward to take him into his own arms instead. He is so hot to the touch that Ilya, still in his jacket, starts sweating from their combined body heat. “Shane, this child is burning. How high is the fever?”
“Uh, 100.8 last time I checked,” Shane says. He blinks oddly for a moment, pats his pockets, checks behind his ear, and then bends to fumble around on the coffee table, which is covered in anything and everything that could possibly keep a sick three-year-old entertained. When he surfaces, he’s clutching a thermometer, which he then approaches wielding like a knife. “Actually, I should take it again. He might need another dose of medicine. Arthur, open your mouth. Please, buddy.”
“No-o-o,” Arthur whines, burrowing closer to Ilya’s neck. “No, no!”
“Artyusha,” Ilya murmurs, sitting on the couch with Arthur still attached limpet-style to his side, “Open mouth for Uncle Shane. I promise it won’t hurt. We need to see how you are doing, hm?”
When Arthur resolutely keeps his mouth clamped shut, cheeks turning red and eyes brimming with frustrated tears, Shane murmurs, “Okay—just, uh, lift his arm? This is how I did it earlier. Yeah, and then pull his collar—”
“Uncle Shane,” Arthur whines, and then screams as Shane puts the thermometer under his armpit. “No! Mama! Maa-maa!”
“Shh,” Ilya whispers, kissing his forehead—which is an awkward endeavor, when he’s helping Shane to hold Arthur’s arm down against the thermometer and simultaneously preventing Arthur’s collar from choking him as his temperature is read. “Is okay, malysh. You are safe.”
For a moment, there is silence—or, rather, stillness that is filled with Arthur’s whining and Shane hissing unconsciously through his teeth as he watches the numbers on the thermometer tick up. When he raises his eyes to Ilya’s, they soften in a very recognizable way. He murmurs, “Hey.”
“Hello,” Ilya whispers, letting his eyes smile while his lips are still occupied against Arthur’s hot head.
“Why are you here?” Shane’s eyelids flutter rapidly. “Not that I’m not…y’know, it’s just…I thought you…?”
“Ice at practice rink is melting. Some…refrigeration issue. It can’t be fixed until Thursday at earliest, no game until Saturday…” Ilya shrugs a little, careful not to jostle. “Thought I would come visit. Was not expecting Artyusha.”
“Mm, sorry.” Shane flashes him a brief face of apology as the thermometer beeps. “I mean, he’s only here ‘til…five? I think that’s what Jackie said. 101.5—go ahead and lay him down, if he’ll let you.”
Arthur lets himself be deposited on the sofa amongst a large pile of pillows and blankets, though not without a great deal of pitiful whining. Ilya mollifies him in with a blanket that he knows to be Arthur’s favorite (‘HOCKEY BLANKIE,’ were two of the first words Arthur learned to string together, and he now uses them liberally to trigger mass hysteria at bedtime) and straightens back up to watch Shane dose out a red, viscous medicine into what looks to be a tiny syringe.
“Okay,” Shane says, biting his lip with concentration. “Uh, this is gonna…this is gonna suck. We’ve gotta get this in his mouth—”
Twenty minutes later, Ilya’s ears are still ringing from Arthur’s blood-curling shrieks, his shirt is stained with possibly more medicine than made it into Arthur’s caterwauling mouth, and Shane is sitting ass-to-table looking like the witness to a violent crime.
Arthur, however, has blessedly cried himself to sleep. He snores gently on the sofa, lulled by the sounds of the hockey game—which, apparently, is what passes for white noise in the Pike household, and the reason Shane had it on in the first place.
“Okay,” Shane sighs, heels of his hands going too far into his eye sockets. “That’s done. Oh my God, I didn’t know he was that strong. Sorry about your finger.”
Ilya bends his pinky finger, which he doesn’t think is broken, though the idea of having to explain such an injury is funny in an awful way. Bent backwards while restraining sick child. Whose child? Hayden Pike.
“Is fine,” Ilya says. “How are you? You look maybe stressed, like you got dressed in a panic.”
Shane looks down at himself, the mismatched socks and the medicine-splattered top—which is, Ilya couldn’t help but notice earlier, one of his own Boston sweatshirts. An older one, no longer worn often for obvious reasons, and slightly baggy around Shane’s narrower shoulders. It looks good on him despite the new candy-red stains, and makes Ilya feel that familiar hunger in a low, simmering area of his stomach.
Shane rolls his eyes. “Hayden called at, like, six in the morning. It was dark. I just grabbed the first thing I could.”
“You look good,” Ilya murmurs. “You always do. I like you in my clothes.”
“Shut up,” Shane murmurs.
“Moy zaychik.”
Shane kicks him. “I’m not your fucking puck bunny, Rozanov. I told you, I put it on by mistake.”
Ilya leans across the brief distance and kisses him—chaste, mindful of the nearby sleeping child, but this is what he came here to do. Shane smells like cherry medicine and sweat and the shower he might have taken this morning, and he tastes like absolutely nothing.
“Have you eaten?” he murmurs, and kisses Shane’s chin. “I think you haven’t.”
Shane, weirdly, pulls back from the kisses like he’s been burnt.
“Oh shit!” he hisses, thrusting himself to his feet. “The fucking—the food, I ordered food—”
Shane’s initial greeting when Ilya rang the bell suddenly makes sense.
“Ugh, it’s been sitting out there for half an hour,” Shane mutters after checking some app on his phone. He’s heading for the door, sliding on open-toed shoes, and Ilya realizes that he never took off his own boots or coat.
“I’ll get it,” Ilya says—and then, when Shane doesn’t react: “Shane. Sit down.”
Shane spins around and looks at him—glances at Arthur first, because Ilya had raised his voice just a little, but it was necessary. Shane can enter into a spiral at Mach speeds if not brought down quickly. Ilya waits for Shane to process the tone of voice he used, waits for his eyes to go just a little soft.
“You will work yourself into panic,” Ilya says, twirling a hand to indicate Shane’s energy. Round and round, up and down. “I’ll get it, you sit.”
He sighs, scoffs, but his eyelids flutter in a way that tells Ilya he’ll listen. “Okay.”
The delivery person has left the bag at the bottom of the front steps, of which there are seven. Ilya curses under his breath, vague threats about the boots he’s wearing and someone’s potential ability to father children, as he stalks down to retrieve the bag. Back in the house, Shane is sitting on the counter, staring at the hockey game on the television like every single person onscreen has disappointed him personally. It’s Boston and New York, so that’s probably true.
“I bought him some soup,” Shane sighs, when Ilya places the bag on the counter next to his thigh and begins to work open the knot. “Quickest delivery time when I searched for ‘soup’ was a Chinese place. It’s egg drop. I think he likes it. Or—wait, maybe that’s Ruby.”
“He’ll eat it,” Ilya says, pulling out the very full pint container of soup. It’s wrapped in cling film, leaking heavily and nearly ice cold. “When he wakes up, I’ll warm it. Did they forget something? This is only thing in the bag.”
“Uh, no. I just—I just got something for him.” Shane scratches the side of his neck, shrugs. “Not a whole lot at that place that I can eat, so.”
“Hmm.” Ilya turns around to deposit the soup in the fridge. While in there, he rummages until he finds some likely ingredients and lays them out on the adjacent counter.
As he’s crouching to find a pan, Shane nudges his shoulder with his foot and murmurs, “What’re you doing? Don’t cook for me.”
“I want to,” Ilya growls, smacking a kiss onto his ankle. He stands up, takes Shane’s jaw in a soft grip. “And you will eat it, yes? I make something you can eat, you eat a lot of it. Promise me this.”
Shane’s mouth curves into a very small smile, eyelids dipping, and he nods gamely. “Okay,” he says, perhaps just a little reluctant still. Ilya kisses a freckle or two before he turns to his task.
By the time five o’clock comes, Ilya is sitting propped in the corner of the sectional with Arthur’s face pressed to the side of his thigh, face leaking snot and drool as he sleeps. Shane is slumped against his other side, likewise dead to the world, hood pulled low over his eyes and hands shoved deep into the front pocket of the hoodie. They are on their third hockey rerun of the day, this time a taped airing of the Centaurs’ home game the previous Thursday. Ilya chose not to tease Shane about having it recorded.
Ilya hears the Pikes before he sees them. Their car is an electric minivan, makes that horrible spooky ghost sound when it pulls up in front of the house, and Ilya knows the sound of Jackie Pike’s rapid, bouncy footfalls as she walks up the front walk and climbs the stoop. He reaches over and presses the button on the security remote, disabling the alarm and unlocking the door.
“Is unlocked!” he calls, trying hard not to wake the bodies using him as a human mattress. Shane startles anyway, blinks and tilts his head back, brown eyes just barely appearing from underneath the hood. His cheeks are red, eyes bright.
“Oh, hey.” Jackie stomps snow off her boots in the entryway and rounds the end of the sofa to come into view. She is wearing a bright orange hat and an equally orange T-shirt over a thick sweatshirt. Chaperon du LaFontaine Académie, it says. There is a brown stain on the hem telling Ilya that Jackie’s day, too, may have come with its own source of minor struggles.
“Hi Jackie,” Shane mutters into Ilya’s shoulder. He makes to rise, flattening the heel of his hand against Ilya’s thigh in a way that hurts just enough to remind Ilya that he has legs, since he hasn’t moved them in about two hours.
“No, no, don’t get up,” Jackie says, waving him away as she bends over her sleeping son.
“Nope, I’m getting up,” Shane says. He rises to his feet, sways slightly. Ilya presses a hand to his hip to steady him. “He, um, he ate a bowl of soup and a tangerine at one o’clock. Ilya made salmon, I think he had a few bites of that. Fever went down. It was, uh—99.6? Point seven?”
“Point seven.” Ilya nods.
“Yeah, 99.7. He had his last dose of medicine about an hour ago.”
“Arthur,” Jackie is cooing at her son, pushing the sticky hair from his face. At some point, trying to keep the snot off of Arthur’s face had become Sisyphean in nature—every surface in the house had already become a tissue anyway, including each blanket, both arms of Arthur’s pajama top, and his uncles’ shoulders, knees and chests.
“Artyusha,” Ilya says, jostling his knee slowly. “Mama is here to take you home.”
“Maa-maa,” Arthur whines, immediately beckoned to wakefulness by one of the few phrases a child genuinely wants to hear while sick. He sniffles and extends his arms. “Mama, mama—”
“Aw, my sweet boy,” Jackie coos. She picks him up, settling him against her. She is much smaller than Shane or Ilya, and Arthur wraps himself around her much tighter, but she shows no sign of struggle or overwhelm. Ilya is struck, not for the first time, by now natural of a mother Jackie Pike is. He briefly thinks of his own mother, as he does so many times a day—her sweetness, her sadness. By the time Ilya was Arthur’s age, she was already taking to bed for days at a time.
“Did you have a good time with Uncle Shane and Uncle Lily?” Jackie asks Arthur, despite the rising din of discontent emanating from her shoulder. “They gave you soup, was it yummy? And you had fish! You don’t normally like fish!”
“Uncle Lily made sauce,” Arthur pauses his fussing to mutter. “I like sauce.”
“Was sour cream and pickle,” Ilya says, waving a hand.
“Arthur loves pickles,” Jackie says, mostly to Arthur. In a voice slightly more fit for the grown men in the room, she adds, “Thanks so much for this, guys. We really owe you one—dinner’s on us, next time.” To Ilya, she says, “Heard about the ice in Ottawa, thought you might be here.” She winks.
“How did you…?”
“Simone from the Montreal WAGs heard it from Heather in Toronto, whose sister-in-law is a Centaurs WAG—”
“Okay, oh my God, okay.” Shane traces his fingers down his face and says, mostly to Ilya, “See? See how everyone is in everyone else’s business?”
“Just the WAGs,” Ilya says, tossing a hand. “The WAGs always know everything. Is how hockey players learn fear.” Shane fixes him with what he calls the angry bunny look, which is what happens when Shane is trying very hard to frown but can’t quite keep his lips from curling, his nose from twitching.
“Your boys are taking bets on whether you broke the sound barrier getting to Montreal, Ilya,” Jackie says, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she eases a completely limp Arthur into his car seat-safe coat. “You should tell them Jane says hi.”
“I’m going to kill Cliff Marlow,” Shane mutters.
“Marlow is in Boston sucking his own—” Ilya glances at Arthur, clears his throat. “Eh, popsicle.”
“Yeah, but this is still his fault. Somehow.”
They say goodbye in the foyer, and then again on the porch. Ilya finds the Canadianness of it all quite cute, though that’s not something he chooses to say out loud. When the car door finally closes on Jackie, and Hayden acknowledges their waves with a chirp of the car horn, Ilya bundles Shane back inside the house.
“Alone, now,” Ilya whispers. He presses Shane to the wall immediately inside the foyer, hand braced over his head and other hand already wiggling underneath his shirt. “You’re very warm and very pretty and I would like for you to lay down on the bed."
“Yeah, yes,” Shane says, plastering his hands to the side of Ilya’s face, bringing him in.
They get to the bedroom, after pausing to make out against the couch, and the stairway, and the bedroom door. It’s there that Ilya shifts down, grabs Shane’s thighs and lifts him—which always gets enthusiastic approval from Shane, and Ilya can indeed sense the increasing desperation in his kisses, the need and heat between this thighs. He fumbles for the door knob, throws open the door and finds the bed through muscle memory alone.
“I need you,” Shane breathes into his mouth, as soon he has Ilya on the bed, between his thighs where they both like him best. They both fumble at the zipper of Shane’s jeans. “I—fuck, Ilya—I’m really happy you came—”
“Oh, we will both be coming,” Ilya growls against his cheek.
“Yeah,” Shane whimpers. “Oh, fuck, please.”
Ilya abandons the zipper as a bad job and braces his elbows next to Shane’s head, instead. Shane doesn’t, strictly speaking, like to come in his pants, but there are times like these when they haven’t seen each other in a while, when Shane is needy and Ilya feels like he’s going to burst if he doesn’t get on top of him. When Ilya wants nothing so much as the heat of Shane’s body and the sound of his voice.
It feels enough like fucking. Foreheads pressed together and Shane’s hands roaming frantically over Ilya’s body—his sides and back and ass. He feels Shane’s ankles lock together at the small of his back, feels the beautiful arch of his spine. He rolls their hips together, seeking pressure against his own aching cock and that same, filthy feeling of an erection pressed to his own.
“Close,” Shane says, muffled by Ilya’s lip between his teeth. “I’m gonna—yeah, yeah—”
“Oh fuck,” Ilya grunts as he comes, cock pulsing against his own hip, and Shane’s neck arches as he throws his head back in climax. Ilya presses kiss after kiss to that beautiful neck, those lovely ears.
They reluctantly rise, undress and clean off. Ilya is cognizant of the fact that he doesn’t go quite completely soft, even after his orgasm. The new presence of Shane’s nudity and his soft, bleary post-climax eyes keep him just slightly aroused. It’s only just past six o’clock, and there are things downstairs to clean up and put back in order, but it’s also winter. Night has completely fallen and the world outside is dark, snow-muffled. Shane looks at his book, quirks his mouth.
“I should—” he mutters, poking a thumb over his shoulder. His eyes are even glassier than they were earlier. “The living room’s a disaster.”
“Stay,” Ilya murmurs, nudging him towards the bed, kisses on his shoulders. “We’ll clean later. Nobody cares about toys on the table.”
It’s a signal of the long day and his exhaustion that Shane just nods. “Yeah, alright.”
He lays down, propped on a million pillows, and puts his glasses on to read. Ilya lays beside him and indulges himself with soft, whispery touches. His mouth on the apple of Shane’s shoulder, his hand wandering. It goes over his hip, over his stomach. He watches Shane’s face to see how his eyes flutter when he touches a nice spot—his nipples, of course, but also the skin above his navel, the crease of his thigh. They continue in that fashion for quite awhile.
Eventually, the long and lazy sweeps of his hand take him lower. The edge of his pinky finds Shane’s flaccid cock, where it slides along the soft length of him. Shane’s eyes flutter completely closed and don’t open again for several long moments, during which Ilya plays with him gently—caressing his silky cockhead, rolling his balls softly between his fingers. When he dips his fingers lower, between the heat of his thighs, Shane gasps and rolls. Lets the book fall onto the pillow and parts his legs.
“You are not tired?” Ilya murmurs, lips to chest now.
“No, I am,” Shane sighs. “But I want—”
“I’m afraid you will fall asleep,” Ilya chuckles, even as his fingers find what they are looking for and press lightly. Shane’s hole is tight, because Ilya has been trapped in Ottawa or traveling for nearly three fucking weeks. Ilya presses the pad of his thumb to the pucker, feels the thrilling give of Shane’s body. The anticipation of being inside of him never lessens and never gets any less heady. It floods in a rush towards Ilya’s head, towards his cock, towards his heart.
“Mmm, maybe,” Shane murmurs. “But I want you to fuck me anyway.”
Ilya hisses through his teeth and rolls onto his knees, easily maneuvering himself between Shane’s parted thighs. Shane welcomes him there with an open mouth and both hands wound around the back of his neck.
“You would want me to fuck you to sleep?” Ilya says into the kisses. “Will you dream of it? Me fucking you?”
“Like I don’t already,” Shane says, and he means it—he has one of those looks on his face, wide open honesty. He grins sleepily and flicks his gaze between Ilya’s mouth and eyes. “I really just—I want you inside me. I’ve missed you.”
“Me too,” Ilya whispers. Being on the road is getting harder and harder. Missing Shane, seeing him perhaps twice per month for a day or so is getting harder. Watching his boyfriend as nothing more than a moving dot on an ice rink in Montreal or Detroit or Philadelphia while Ilya sits in hotel rooms in Los Angeles or Tampa or fucking Winnipeg is getting harder.
Instead of saying any of this—because Shane is in that nice, floaty place he goes to when he knows he’s about to be well-fucked and isn’t in the mood to pretend he doesn’t want it—Ilya reaches a hand into the bedside table and pulls out lube and a condom. They don’t always use them anymore, but it keeps things a bit neater, and Shane loathes sleeping in a wet spot. If he’s planning on falling asleep on Ilya’s cock, which Ilya has no problem with, then—
Shane takes the condom and spins it across the room.
“Wanna feel you,” Shane tells him, and Ilya’s cock twitches against its home in the crease of Shane’s thigh.
“Yes, sir,” Ilya says, taking Shane’s nipple in his teeth, and Shane makes a sound that can only be called a giggle-moan while clutching Ilya’s head to his chest.
Shane’s body, after all these years, is receptive to Ilya’s touch in a beautiful way. He presses his fingers inside of him, where he is so hot. Ilya watches his face, how he bites his lip and closes his eyes. He puts an arm over his head to clutch the headboard and Ilya smooths a hand over his tit, through the dark hair under his arm and up to wrap around his wrist. Meanwhile, below, Shane’s cock twitches with every flick of Ilya’s wrist.
A switch flips eventually, as it always does, and Shane says, “That’s enough. Need you to fuck me.”
Ilya kisses him, slowly enough that he thinks the world might stop spinning. “Say it nicely.”
“Fuck me please. Put your dick in me please.”
“Moy zaychik,” Ilya murmurs as he shifts, pulling back to watch himself slide in. It’s a heady sight. One that never feels commonplace. The regularity with which Ilya is allowed to do this is something that he will always think of as a gift, especially after the tumultuous first years of their relationship. That version of Ilya Rozanov, hurting kid that he was, was also a stupid and reckless motherfucker who almost ruined this for both of them.
“Oh,” Shane sighs, arching as Ilya pushes in.
He is so hot inside.
“Shane,” Ilya murmurs, dragging his lips along his neck—where Ilya now realizes he also feels hot, and a flush is crawling across his face. Shane sighs and turns his face into Ilya’s affection, and Ilya says against his cheek, “Lyubimyy. You have fever.”
“Mm?” Shane hums. “You think so?”
“Yes, you are…” Ilya hisses, overwhelmed by the heat of him, and then huffs out a laugh. “You are always very hot, but right now you’re…”
“Too hot?” Shane mutters, mouth quirking. “Yeah. I figured I caught it. I started feeling it before Jackie got here. You, um—” His eyes, which Ilya recognizes now are glassy with the fever, and not just tiredness, drop to where they are joined. His leg hooks over Ilya’s ass, which almost completely contradicts when he says, “If you want to stop, we can.”
“Would you like to?”
“No,” Shane whispers. His fingers find the nape of Ilya’s neck, dig into his hair. “I told you. I want you so fucking bad right now.”
“Okay,” Ilya whispers. He pushes forward, sheathed fully now. Shane bites his lower lip, hard, and turns his face against the pillow. Ilya presses in forehead-to-temple and murmurs, “Fuck. Ohh, fuck. You’re hot.”
He begins to move, slowly and carefully, waiting for Shane to command him otherwise. He normally only has so much patience for the kind of achy, slow lovemaking that Ilya sometimes craves. At times, however—and it seems that this is one of those times, perhaps for obvious reasons—Shane lets it happen. He lays back, pulls Ilya’s hair and sighs sweetly as Ilya moves atop him like the flowing ocean.
“Fuck, that feels good,” Shane whispers, or something similar, very occasionally as they continue. He is otherwise quiet, though not silent. There are moans, whispered expletives that feel almost gentle despite their coarse definitions. The sounds of the sheets moving, of their skin sliding together, are heightened in their intimacy by being the sole sounds in the room for long stretches of time.
“Shane?” Ilya whispers, at a point where he thinks Shane might have actually fallen asleep.
“Yeah,” Shane sighs, “I’m here. I’m—uhn, I’m good. You’re fucking me so good, baby.”
Ilya pulls completely out, gasping, suddenly so close that the edges of his vision go fuzzy. Shane swears, arches and clings—Ilya murmurs in apology as he smooths a hand up the center of his body, sweat and what’s already leaked from Shane’s cock sliding underneath his hand. After he’s managed to wrestle himself back from the edge, he wraps a fist around the base of his cock, breathes deep and pushes back in. Licks up the center of Shane’s chest and says, “Say again.”
“Say—ah, fuck—say what?”
“Baby,” Ilya whispers. He pulls back just far enough to show Shane his eyes, to see Shane’s in return—half-lidded and so brown. The freckles are dark against his red cheeks. “You haven’t said it before. Say again.”
Shane has, in fact, never said something like that in bed before. During sex, Shane is all physicality—he shows what he wants with his body, with his eyes. He says fuck and yes, Ilya and sometimes I love you or you’re mine, you’re mine.
Even Ilya doesn’t know why this deviation has affected him the way it has.
Shane’s eyelids flutter, the blush going higher and darker. Ilya thinks—has always thought—that he is probably, genuinely one of the most beautiful people on the planet. With his black hair and warm skin, his shapely eyes—there’s almost no way he couldn’t be. And somehow, through an accident of fate, he is Ilya’s to love and touch and fuck.
“I…” Shane falters. “What should I—”
“How does my cock feel?” Ilya whispers. “Feel nice?”
“Yes,” Shane sighs, head tilting back.
“Am I going to make you come?” Ilya finds the back of his knee through touch, lifts it up and away to give himself more room, and hastens his pace. The thump-thump of the headboard against the wall is an almost sensual sound as it keeps time with his own thrusts and Shane’s hitching grunts.
“Yeah,” Shane says.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, baby, you’re gonna make me come,” Shane says, fingers in claws against Ilya’s shoulders. “Fuck yes, you’re gonna make me come!”
Ilya grins, braces himself on the headboard to give himself more leverage. Shane writhes on his cock, every thrust of Ilya’s hips hitting home with a thunderous slap of his balls that seems to harmonize with Shane’s voice.
“Unh, unh,” he pants. “Fuck, I’m so close. Fuck, I’m gonna come.”
“My sun,” Ilya says, in Russian because it drives Shane absolutely crazy. This night is no exception—Shane scratches a line down Ilya’s back with a sob, pulling him in like he wants to live inside the cavity of his chest. Ilya says, "Such a good slut for me. Such a pretty whore. What a nice, warm place to put my cock.”
“Ohh fuck,” Shane whimpers, as his orgasm rips calamitously through him. The moan he releases sounds utterly ruinous, as he strips his own stomach and chest in cum and convulses ecstatically. Then, like the punctuation mark on the whole display, he sneezes.
“Uh, fuck,” Ilya growls, forehead hitting Shane’s chest. He scrambles a hand to find Shane’s hip and bury himself as deep as possible before he comes hard enough to make his own toes go briefly numb. Afterwards, he slumps face-first onto Shane’s chest and groans wholeheartedly. “Fuck, Shane.”
“Sorry,” Shane pants. “I didn’t…didn’t mean—” he sneezes again, and then twice more in quick succession.
“Ow,” Ilya says, “Okay—ow—” He pulls himself somewhat unceremoniously from Shane’s body, which triggers him to flinch and sneeze again. Ilya waits for him to stop and catch his breath before bracing himself over Shane’s chest. “You okay? You will live?”
“Shut up,” Shane says, pushing him back, but the put-on disgruntlement quickly breaks into first a smirk, and then laughter. He follows Ilya’s roll to press his mouth against his shoulder, biting down and worrying the skin there between his teeth as he chuckles, “That was hot,” which is usually the phrase he utters to indicate that his brain is still attempting to resolidify from mush. Then he adds, “I love you,” which is the typical follow-up.
“And I love you,” Ilya tells him, pulling his shoulder away from Shane’s teeth before he leaves a mark he doesn’t mean to. He, Ilya, wouldn’t mind in the slightest—but in the morning, after he’s slept or perhaps after his fever breaks, Shane will look at the mark and catastrophize about a scenario in which someone on the Ottawa Centaurs can somehow recognize the shape of Shane Hollander’s teeth by imprint alone. It’s an eventuality best avoided.
Shane settles back against the pillows, glasses now wildly askew but too bone-limp to fix them. Ilya traces patterns on his stomach, little hearts and smiles, as Shane presumably drifts off to sleep.
“You’re probably gonna get sick too,” Shane mutters into his pillow. “Sorry.”
Ilya shrugs. “Would have gotten sick anyway. Artyusha leaked all over me.”
“True,” Shane murmurs. “Still, though.”
“What is the worst that can happen?” Ilya sighs, shuffling down on the bed to get more comfortable. In the morning, he will tidy downstairs and make sure that Shane has cold medication and Tylenol. He will call Yuna Hollander and ask what made a sick Shane feel better as a child, and then—though he doesn’t know it yet—he will go on an absolute odyssey looking for udon noodles and a particular brand of dashi.
For now, Shane has fallen asleep between one breath and the next, and Ilya never gets his answer. He wraps himself around Shane, too hot to the touch, and presses a kiss to his sweaty forehead.
--
The Centaurs-Metros 2019 Valentine’s Day Game
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Centaurs-Metros 2019 Valentine’s Day Game, also known as the 2019 Flu Invitational, The Valentine’s Day Flu Game, and simply the Flu Game, was a hockey game played between the Ottawa Centaurs and the Montreal Metros on 14th February of 2019. It was the 65th game of the 2018-19 regular season for the Centaurs, and the 63rd for the Metros. The game broke several obscure records for gameplay in MLH history, including number of consecutive minutes without a run on the goal and length of uninterrupted gameplay without a whistle. It is also, to date, the only Major League Hockey game to be forfeited by both teams.
The game took place on 14th February, 2019, at the Montreal Metros’ home arena of Bell Center in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Before the game, several players from both teams had complained of flu-like symptoms including chills, aches, coughs and low-to-mid-grade fevers. It is possible that officials were made aware of these issues and met to discuss the health of the teams prior to the start of gameplay that night, though this has never been confirmed by the league. There have also been various rumors that Captains Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov met to discuss the game-readiness of their respective teams, though as this would be extremely unusual and possibly considered collusion by the league, it is likely an urban legend.
The game was played until the 18:28 mark of the third period, at which time both teams were disqualified by medical officials. This was after several graphic demonstrations of the teams’ mutual level of ill health, including Centaurs goaltender Wyatt Hayes abandoning the goal multiple times to vomit, Metros winger Hayden Pike crashing into the boards due to an apparent coughing fit, and Rozanov fainting due to overheating underneath his gear. Hollander also suffered a seemingly unrelated and unidentified injury which removed him from play and the bench shortly after Rozanov’s loss of consciousness in the second period.
The game resulted in a mutual forfeit, although due to MLH regulations a win was awarded to the Centaurs. However, the Centaurs had already been mathematically eliminated from the running for the Stanley Cup and, therefore, the win was pyrrhic in nature. One player, believed to be Rozanov, was confirmed to be hospitalized for dehydration after the game, though it was subsequently stated that the player had been released later that evening and was resting with family.
Media coverage of the event primarily focused on speculation over how both teams could have been experiencing symptoms of the same illness (Later confirmed to be a strain of adenovirus, found in members of both teams) at the same time, despite there being no analogous outbreaks in the communities where the players lived and worked. Though Ottawa and Montreal are not geographically far, the teams had experienced very little overlap in their schedules, as Ottawa had played games in Michigan, California and Las Vegas in the preceding weeks, while Montreal had played a series of home games.
The outbreak amongst the Montreal team was eventually sourced to a sickness brought home by the young child of a player. The source of the outbreak amongst the Ottawa team has never been confirmed.