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By the second week in Lanaudiere, Ilya’s forgetting the days, forgetting, a little, what it’s like to live any other way but this. He’ll lose whole hours lying on the couch, hand in Shane’s hair, fingertips trailing along the planes of his bare back, listening to him breathe, feeling the rabbit-twitch of Shane’s heartbeat against his chest. He forgets they’re supposed to be doing things, supposed to eat and sleep and respond to their emails.
His life has narrowed to a fine point. To this, and only this.
He can feel Shane starting to chafe a little at their idleness, at the late mornings sleeping in, the lack of movement, but not enough to break the dreamlike bubble of their isolation. It’s a pure pleasure to work out with Shane, though they’re limited in what they can do without risking their privacy to go into town or go to a rink. They lie on the grass and Shane shows him all his silly yoga poses, which usually end with the two of them tangled together on the ground in entirely unproductive ways. But they can run the narrow trails, so long as they give each other their distance, and race each other to the nearest island, catching each other in the water, breaking their stroke for a wet, off-kilter kiss. But the thing Ilya likes best is when Shane rides the stationary bike in the basement while Ilya just listens to him breathe, watching him work.
There is talking, too, though Ilya feels most of what he’s had to say has already been said. His love has always lived more readily in his hands than his words. But at some point, Shane realizes it's now his prerogative to ask Ilya questions, and he discovers that he has a thousand of them. He keeps the ones about Russia generally safe, steering as best he can from the subject of his family. What was his schooling like, what was his favorite thing about Moscow? What was playing in the KHL like? When did Ilya realize he was going to be good enough to actually make it, that it was going to be his whole life? His whole future?
Eventually, shyly, he asks the question he’s apparently been working up to for a long time. About “your coach’s son.”
So Ilya is forced to think about Sasha, even though he doesn’t want to, even though those are the last memories he wants to drag wholesale into this place. He pushes himself to be honest, to tell the truth as best as he knows how. It had been fun, it had been entirely too intense, it had been reckless in the extreme but that had been most of the appeal, to Ilya, whose life was rapidly careening into something he didn’t know the shape or limits of, and over which he felt he had very little control. But he doesn’t regret it, because it meant he’d come to Shane in a position to know, at least, a little of what he was doing.
Shane indulges in more questions. Had it been good? Had Ilya gotten what he wanted from it? And Ilya hears the question underneath the question, the one he doesn’t yet feel able to ask. Had he been as good for you as me? Are there things you got from him that I haven’t given you?
It’s laughable. And Ilya nearly does laugh, until he realizes Shane will likely misinterpret his reaction as mockery, when that isn’t how he means it. So Ilya tries to explain. Sasha had touched him, always, as though there was someone in the corner with a camera, as though they were making porn together. At the time, Ilya hadn’t known there was another way, hadn’t known to mind but, but It wasn’t enough, not after he knew it could be different.
He holds Shane’s gaze to see if he understands. He does not. So Ilya sighs, a little, and spells it out. You showed me it could be different. You were so…he uses a word that, if he knew its translation in English, would probably mean “earnest.” Honest. Serious. Not hidden from me. But all he says is “different.”
Shane huffs a little, senses he’s pushed maybe a bit too far. “You don't think we could make porn together?”
Ilya does laugh at that, but the thought unsettles him more than it should. Obviously he’s thought about it, jerked off about it, even come so close as to ask Shane to record himself, just the sounds he makes, so Ilya can have him in his ear whenever he wants it. But the truth is, Ilya doesn’t want a camera in the corner. He doesn’t want Shane to have to think about anyone seeing him but Ilya.
He’s made his share of sex tapes. One or more was probably doomed to make an appearance at some point. But he doesn't want that for them. Maybe it would be nice, someday, when they’re old and addled and their bodies are truly falling apart, to remember themselves as they are now, beautiful and strong. But that’s a wild future for him to be envisioning now, and no chance is he going to dare to tell Shane about it. Besides, right now, he feels like he’ll never get old. He can’t even imagine it.
At some point Shane realizes their disclosures are lopsided. Ilya doesn’t ask about Shane’s past, his ambitions, his inner self with nearly the avidity Shane asks about his. It isn’t that he isn’t curious; he is, intensely so, but he doesn’t know how to phrase his questions properly. He doesnt want to ask Shane about the girls he’s fucked. It will make Shane sad to talk about it, and the thought of Shane squirming and gritting his teeth through sex he does not want to have cuts Ilya deep while leaving him, still, helplessly aroused. Like Shane was waiting for him, needing him, calling out to him, before either even knew the other existed.
(He’d already ground out an explanation about Rose that forced Ilya to consider that subject truly settled — he’d had Ilya inside him, late in the night, a third or fourth round, when he’d held Ilya’s gaze with the bright clarity he finds sometimes. When Ilya knows he’s about to say something that will leave a permanent mark carved on Ilya’s heart. His bones.
I couldn’t even stay hard for her. I couldn’t make myself want it. I couldn’t even stay hard.)
But that still leaves the question of the list. Ilya’s tormented himself much more than Shane by even mentioning it. The list of all the guys. All the guys. Other guys. The implication that there might have been more than one, more than himself, might be anyone else. Even here, with the sound of Shane’s breathing in his ear at night, his soft snuffling snores, Ilya stares at the ceiling and thinks about these others who may or may not exist, thinks of close calls, others who may have lured Shane away from him, those who might come in the future. He knows it’s wrong of him. Knows it's a sign of something wrong with him. He’s heard the phrase “well-adjusted” used before. He doesn’t entirely know what it means, but he knows it is a phrase which does not describe him.
There may be no one. He is almost certain there are not many. But that, in some ways, is worse than a crowd. Ilya can soar above a sea of mediocre fucks, the way Shane rises above Ilya’s own bodycount with utterly unconscious ease. Ilya’s told him, in detail, how much better he is than anything else he’s ever had, but he’s only ever said it in Russian, whispered between his shoulder blades or murmured into his hair or breathed into the middle distance when Shane has him in his throat. It wouldn’t be good to inflate his ego, Ilya tells himself, to justify his cowardice. But it's not that he doesn't want Shane to know how easily he’s vaulted to the front ranks of Ilya’s sexual experience. He doesn’t want to open the door to the subject. He doesn’t want to hear Shane tell him how much better he is than some hypothetical Other. He can’t stand to know.
He can’t stand not to know.
You’re such a miserable fuck, he tells himself. He’s embarrassed.
They have four days left, four days before life and their infinite labor pulls them back in again, and he’s going to squander it being sore over the very idea of Shane fucking someone else while Ilya has him at his fingertips for the the first time in his life.
“Ok, enough.”
Shane looks up. They’re sitting at the table, eating a late dinner outside in the last light of the westering sun. It gets dark so very late here. Ilya can’t remember summer days ever stretching so long.
“What was that?”
“I think….I need the list.”
Shane just stares at him, bemused. There’s a smear of steak sauce at the corner of his mouth. In a week, he won’t be able to believe Ilya drove him to agree to eat so much red meat. Ilya had been looking forward to chasing the iron tang of it out from behind his teeth, after.
“List?”
Ilya steels himself, pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Of guys.”
Shane pales, a little.
“Oh.”
It’s not, Ilya has to admit, the answer he’d hoped for. A nervous laugh, maybe, or a shy softening. The advance signals that what Shane had to say next would be some kind of confession that Ilya had been it for him, that no one else had ever had the same from him, and the relief would have so overwhelmed Ilya that he might have kept Shane in bed for the next twenty-four hours straight without a pause.
But this is not that. This first little evasion, this edge of embarrassment. This is not that.
“So there is a list.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“Tell me? Please?”
“No.”
“Hollander.”
“I’m not telling you shit, You’re so weird.”
“It’s making me crazy.”
“It’s obviously not a long list.”
Ilya’s skin is crawling. He wants to get up from the table and drown himself in the lake. He wants to howl at the moon.
“Please tell me.”
His voice cracks when he says it. Something about the way it breaks, the precise fracture pattern of the syllables, finally clues Shane into the fact that this is, unfortunately, serious.
“You’ll only make fun of me.”
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
“I won’t. I swear.”
But there’s a stubborn set to Shane’s jaw now.
“Fine.”
The stories that follow are so innocuous Ilya doesn’t understand why Shane had reacted the way he did. LA, Mexico, a scant handful of anonymous men who had served more to sate Shane’s curiosity than to satisfy any bone-deep need. There’s some embarrassment, but nothing that Shane says or even hints at is anything to feel especially ashamed of. And even if Ilya will never feel the warmth of human compassion for these strangers who’ve touched Shane, it’s hard to muster up much by way of hatred of them either.
He soothes Shane with a hand at the back of his neck, fingernails raking lightly over his scalp.
“Was that so bad?”
Shane shakes his head, the same set to his jaw. But he’s not quite done. Ilya can tell. His shoulders are riding high at his ears. His pulse is ticking a little too quick at the base of his throat; it catches the low light of the sun.
Whatever is left, Ilya should let it go. Let the unsaid remain unsaid. Get over himself. He lifts both hands, placating. Makes to apologize. Ilya knows he should never have asked.
He tries to twist the end of the admission into a tease, but all inspiration dies on his lips. He doesn’t want to start a fight over this, and he’ll swallow his jealousy down like a tooth knocked loose. He’s done that more than once. But the subject has reopened something in Shane — a picked scab — and he won’t be able to get free of the sting of it, now Ilya’s left it exposed.
Ilya drapes a soothing hand over the back of Shane’s neck, makes slow circles with the pad of his thumb. Maybe it will be easier if Shane doesn’t feel like he’s offering, so much as—
“Tell me. Right now. Get it over with.”
Shane sucks in a slow, centering breath. Then, an incongruous half-smile.
“You know what’s funny,” he begins, “before now, before this summer, it wouldn’t have been my secret to share. I couldn’t have told you.”
“What?”
Shane only shakes his head. Not quite ready.
“Do you want me to guess?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to forget about it?”
Shane draws himself up, and Ilya recognizes that look on his face, the one that says he’s about to engage in one of his little acts of courage which he’s lately made a habit of. As though he has to remind himself that being with Ilya is going to demand a continual effort to expose himself, to open himself up. That this would become as much a part of the routines that govern his life as everything else he does; moving his body, feeding it, disciplining it, holding it to his own exacting standards.
“No.”
Shane doesn’t want him to guess. Which means he could guess. Which means that one or all of the names he’s withholding are ones Ilya knows. And who would Ilya know, but fellow players, men in their own circle, men at their level? And really, who else could Shane want to go to bed with, but one of them? Who else could gain and hold his interest?
Was it a teammate? Ilya knows he wouldn’t dare, not while he wore the C. Another rival? He didn’t have any, not really — to be a rival, one had to first be a peer, and who else could claim that?
And that is when Ilya understands. Shane’s sharp evasion. Not my secret. I couldn’t have told you.
Not until this summer.
And Ilya is swept under a deep red wave.
Shane sees it dawn on him, and he’s already on the defensive; he always knows when to circle back to his own goal, how to sense the impending breakaway. And Ilya doesn’t really want to say it. As long as it goes unsaid, they can go on pretending at misunderstanding, miscommunication, one mistake of many. But they’ve come this far.
“Hunter? Really?”
“Don’t— don’t say anything. Don’t say anything for one second.”
But Ilya doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what he wants to know. When? How many times? The way Shane’s acting, he has to imagine it was more than once. If it had been awful, he wouldn’t be burning so red in light of the citronella lamps (Ilya, they’d discovered, drew mosquitoes like a strip club drew bachelor parties.)
What does he want, in this moment? Does he want Shane to tell him everything Hunter did to him? Reenact and unpick all of it?
No. Because Ilya knows Hunter. Has played against him too hard and for too long not to know him. And Ilya knows, at the core of him, he’s something Ilya may never quite be.
A good man.
And if Shane had been his own person, if he’d felt free to choose, if Ilya hadn’t gotten his poisoned claws in him so deep and so soon, Ilya knows who, of the two of them, would suit Shane better. Which one of them comes closest to deserving him.
He stands from the table.
“Are you done?”
Shane looks up, stricken, before Ilya gestures to their empty plates. Ilya doesn’t wait for an answer before gathering them up in his fingers, careful not to drop them, and hastening inside.
He’s washing them by hand, just to give his hands something to do, when Shane comes into the kitchen. Ilya wishes he would go away. He wishes he could be allowed to lick his wounds in peace. He has four more days, four more nights, and he’s spoiled it all with his insatiable greed. With his inability to be other than himself.
“Can I say something?” Shane asks.
Ilya shrugs. If he moves his body like he doesn’t care, then perhaps he will find that he cares less.
“I would have told you.”
Ilya grunts.
“And it wasn’t…that big of a deal. It was once, and it was…almost nothing.”
“Almost?”
“Shut up and let me finish, okay?”
Ilya dips his head, opens his palms, yields the floor. He’s being a bit of a bitch, he knows he is, but he doesn’t know how else to be.
“It was still…about you. It’s always about you, even with someone else. Your ego can rest easy.”
“Is that what you think this is about? My ego?”
Shane reddens, now with someone like anger.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t that why you care about this and not about…any of the other stuff I told you.”
Ilya considers this. Shane isn’t entirely wrong. He does care less about these anonymous others, who almost certainly had no idea what they had, what they were getting a taste of. Hunter wouldn’t have been like that. Hunter knew what it meant to have Shane Hollander under his hands. What a fucking gift it was.
But Ilya doesn’t know how to say that in English. So instead what he says is —
“Was he nice to you?”
Shane meets Ilya’s gaze, holds it for a long moment.
“Yeah, he was nice to me.”
Ilya isn’t quite sure why he asked, and he is even less sure what to do with that answer. Shane nudges him away from the sink, taking over the dishes.
“Can we not talk about it any more?”
And Ilya retreats, relents. He will bury his questions. He will accept Shane’s explanations. He knows better than to imagine Hunter any kind of a threat to himself — he is, after all, a man in love, just like Ilya is. At least he has to hope so, for the sake of that poor young man he dragged onto that ice, into that glaring spotlight.
—
It’s not until the next night that Ilya gets his answers.
They’re both feeling the press of time, now. It’s making Ilya ask for stupid things, like a dinner of pizza and beer and stupid action movies on Shane’s too-small TV (there’s no hockey to watch in the summer time, so he hadn’t seen the point in getting a bigger one.) It makes Shane agree, fond and easy and eager to agree with what Ilya wants. It feels a little like going backwards; Ilya demanding, Shane accommodating, neither of them really able to voice the dread they’re feeling. That soon, this little paradise will be lost to them.
Shane will never be a drinker, but it’s fun to watch him slip sidewise into tipsiness once in a while. It makes him frown and pout his lips and seek out Ilya’s warmth more than normal.
But Ilya suspects he’s playing it up, playing drunker than he really is. He’s curious to know why.
“Can I get you something?”
Shane pretends to think deeply on the question, but the answer he gives, when he gives it, is clearly something considered. Planned.
“A glass of water?”
Ilya cards a concerned hand through Shane’s hair before he stands from the couch. He hopes Shane isn’t getting sick. Three watery Canadian beers shouldn’t be nearly enough to get him buzzed, let alone put him in whatever state he’s in now. But Ilya’s in an obliging mood.
When he comes back to the living room, glass in hand, Shane has risen from the couch to stand in the center of the carpet, a familiar hangdog look in his eye. Ilya reaches out with the glass, and Shane takes it, trailing his fingertips first down the veins of Ilya’s wrist, then over the backs of his fingers. There’s a faint flush high in his cheeks, which Ilya had attributed to the booze at first, but which he now recognizes as the sign of one of Shane’s little schemes.
“This is…how it was. Exactly how it was. Only, what I really wanted wasn’t him at all.”
It doesn’t take Ilya more than a moment to realize what they’re talking about.
“What was it you wanted, pодной?”
(There are many terms of endearment he’d like to use, which he tries out one by one, seeing which ones stick.)
“I was so…I hoped you would ask me to your room. I was ready for you. Ready for it.”
“Were you?”
Shane nods, and the thought strikes Ilya like a thunderbolt; Shane, getting himself presentable to be photographed with his Calder, spending the extra time in the shower just on the threadbare chance that Ilya came to him. Doing his hair in the hotel mirror, fiddling with his bowtie, already prepped, eager, expecting Ilya to corner him in some private place, to tell Shane just what would happen next. Ilya still remembers kissing him in the open air, heedless and stupid — what would he have done differently if he’d known how much of that night Shane had spent distracted, hoping, expecting, ravenous to get fucked?
“I was.”
Shane kneels in front of him now, undoing Ilya’s fly, staring at the floor before plunging forward, graceless and sloppy and eyes screwed shut. And Ilya recognizes what this is; that this, too, is played up for his audience of one. Shane, playing himself, himself as he was, at the beginning, new and untried. The way he used to hesitate before letting his palms grip Ilya’s thighs, the way he recoiled when he tried to get Ilya all the way back in his throat. No longer.
This was how he did it. How he sucked Scott Hunter off because you wouldn’t let him get to you.
“Ah, I see. Should I pretend too? Not sure what I’m supposed to say to you, since I don’t think Hunter even knows any bad words.”
A low rumble in Shane’s throat. A warning.
And Ilya doesn’t feel like playing a part right now. Doesn’t want to pretend to be anything other than what he is. To pretend like he doesn’t love Shane, doesn’t love how much he loves this. To pretend like this isn’t one of the first things in his life worth living for.
He doesn’t want the camera in the corner. He wants them to be the only people left on planet Earth.
“Stand up.”
Shane hesitates before obeying; it's one of his perennial faults. Ilya has to sink a hand into his hair and tug to get him to pull off, to get him to his feet.
“Big night for you, is it?”
A moment of confusion. But Ilya will make sure Shane gets there in the end.
“I didn’t get the chance to say congratulations.”
He reaches out a hand. Shane takes it, a little reluctantly, and then licks his lips when Ilya refuses to release his grip once the handshake has run its normal course.
“Maybe there could be some kind consolation prize for me, ah?”
Shane smirks. Ilya loves the phrase, has only ever used it for this. After a loss (because of course one of them must always come off the loser) it’s often the first thing he texts Shane; his phone usually buzzes with it while Shane’s still doing post-game press, shirtless and pouring with sweat. So what’s my consolation prize? Ouch, tough loss Hollander. Want your consolation prize?
It wasn’t a phrase he knew back then, but probably Shane will forgive him the slight historical inaccuracy.
“Maybe there could.”
Ilya slides forward into Shane’s space, lips open against the shell of his ear.
“Your room, or mine?”
—
It’s a bit of a revisionist history. Shane was never this shy about it, never needed Ilya to coax and cajole him and take off his clothes for him, but they’re telling a nice little story to themselves.
“It’s okay. We’ll go slow.”
“Please.”
“You have what you need?”
And Shane points to the bedside drawer as though Ilya doesn’t know where the lube is, and Ilya thinks he must have had it on him that night. Slipped a few packets and some condoms into the inner pocket of his tux, just in case. That he had them on that balcony, when Ilya pushed him up against the wall. That Ilya could have slipped his hand up under Hollander’s shirt and heard the tell-tale crinkle of the wrappers, and known.
He does go slow. He goes sweet. He remembers his own ignorance; at that age, he’d seen men fuck in porn many, many more times than he’d done the thing himself. He imagines he doesn’t know precisely how Shane likes to get opened up. Imagines he has to learn his body fresh.
And Shane, too, looks away. Hides his face. Treats Ilya to a sharp little gasp of surprise when Ilya pulls on his rim with the pad of his hooked thumb, testing the give of him.
Ilya’s spent ten days taking his time with Shane, luxuriating in the hours and hours he has now. But this is the first time he’s forced himself to go even slower than he wants to, slower than he physically feels like he can. He holds himself poised at Shane’s hole for what feels like forever, counting his own heartbeats, pulse roaring in his ears.
“Would you have let him do this? Then?”
It’s the first break in Ilya’s facade. The closest he gets to saying “would you have let someone else have this first?”
And Shane shakes his head, arches back, changes the angle himself to what he likes best, and Ilya wants to save the sound of his punched-out moan so he can play it for himself, over and over, on surround sound, whenever he likes.
“No. No. This was yours. This was for you.”
And Ilya’s resolve fractures down its predetermined fault line; it was always going to go this way. He snaps forward, smothers Shane’s cry with an inadvertent palm, and fucks him like they’ve been fucking for days. No pretense, no filters, no lies.
—
Later, in the cool-down, Ilya’s got Shane on top of him, relishing his grounding weight, when another thought occurs to him.
“Jesus. Is this why you fought him?”
Shane plants his hands on the mattress, tries to push himself up before Ilya hooks an arm around his waist, holding him still.
“Can we not?”
“No. Tell me. Was this why?”
“I’m not telling you shit.”
“Shane.”
“What?”
“He call you a cocksucker? Was that it?”
“He didn’t. Please drop it.”
“Then what?”
Shane twists around in the circle of Ilya’s arms, glaring at him properly now.
“Ilya, please.”
Ilya’s smile blooms smooth over his face.
“He ask you for another round, maybe?”
“No.”
“I can’t really blame him, if he did.”
“He didn’t.”
Ilya’s eyebrows flare towards his hairline. A clear indication that he plans to keep this up all night, if Shane doesn’t want to talk.
“I think I’ve done enough to make you feel full of yourself for one night.”
“Hm. Full of myself? I thought it was you who was f—” Shane smothers the rest of that sentence with a palm over Ilya’s open mouth. Undeterred, Ilya pushes the wet mass of his tongue against Shane’s hand. Ilya lifts both of his own palms up, a silent gesture of supplication. I’ll be good, I promise. Shane lets him go.
“He made a crack about you, okay? And I thought— I don’t know what I thought.”
“About me?”
“Yes.”
“About me, and you?”
“Yes,” Shane admits, between gritted teeth this time.
Ilya whistles, long and low.
“That’s okay. I think he can keep a secret.”