Chapter Text
100. the left ankle
Ilya Rozanov is not a foot guy. This is something he feels the need to clarify, even though this is a mental list that will never see the light of day, because he cannot be a foot guy if he is an everything guy, which is to say he’s never loved anyone as much as he’s loved Shane, even down to the fucking pore. If he had to start anywhere though, he’d go with the left ankle, because it’s his second favorite one to gnaw at, right at the bulb of the bone, en route to kissing up a calf, and then a thigh, and then the places in between.
Mostly, though, Ilya loves sitting on the couch with Shane laid up on the opposite end, feet in Ilya’s lap. He loves the lazy orbit he can trace with his finger on this left ankle, loves that this is not an ankle belonging to a foot that is shuffling out the door, in escape. This left ankle is Ilya’s as much as it's Shane’s now, by matrimony, by law, so he will love it to the degree that it is part of him now, too.
“Moy lyubimiy,” Ilya says to the ankle on one summer afternoon at the cottage, extra attentive because it is fresh off a sprain. He kisses it for good measure, better than any aspirin, while Shane just frowns into a smile from the opposite end of the sofa.
“You’re whispering sweet nothings to my foot?”
“Your ankle,” Ilya specifies. “It is very precious.”
“Oh?” Shane asks, sprawling out more on the couch cushions. “And what about the rest of me?”
Ilya knows how to answer this. Ilya is also, simultaneously, at a loss. Deciding that it is all unknowable, he crawls over Shane on the couch anyway, thankful for all of the mysteries of the universe.
And never not to be outdone, Shane tips his head up, gushing. He kneads a foot softly into Ilya’s crotch, his lovely left ankle healed enough to maneuver, and turn, and incite.
99. those swim trunks (the red ones)
For a long while, Ilya made certain associations whenever he thought of Shane, like, if he had to be any animal, he’d be a cat over a dog; the moon, over sun; winter, over any other season (but the late end of it, like weather erring on spring—a little bit balmy, the snow already melting). For the first decade of their arrangement, Ilya thought of Shane as a certain color too, which is to say that his love for him had coursed blue, like blood in the veins without exposure to the open air. He’d watch Shane on the ice, always in that same loyal color, that eternal Voyageur darting in and out of his periphery, and wonder if he’d ever turn any other hue.
Ever since signing with Ottawa, Shane has experimented more with slipping in more red into his more muted everyday ensembles. Sometimes, it’s a baseball cap while grocery shopping; another time, a casual Centaurs-branded t-shirt. Today, Shane is on the dock of their cottage, wearing swim trunks the color of fire; they’re tight on the thighs, yet barely clinging onto his hip bones, which makes Ilya wonder, on the verge of death, if the tenth circle of hell is a gorgeous man in very small pants.
It warms Ilya two-fold: one, in his heart, to know that he’s donning more of that Centaur flair, and two, in his cock, because there must be something about color theory, and the way bulls react to matadors in the arena.
Only: this isn’t a battleground. The contact doesn’t have to a quick check into the boards, some high-speed spin around the ice. Ilya gets up from where he’s sitting on the dock, hovering near Shane with the slow build of a story that had long been waiting to be told.
With fingers hooked inside a very red-hot waistband, Ilya pulls the trunks down with all the time in the world.
98. a beauty mark on the crevice of an inner thigh, somewhat bolder than a freckle
Still on the dock, with Shane on his back now, Ilya lays a kiss there like it’s a target, wondering if he’s the only one in the world who knows it.
He remembers, then, some old wives’ tale about the matter of moles and beauty marks. The existence of them denotes where a lover was kissed the most in a past life, and he cannot help but think, was that me for you, every time? Or is this the first time we’re meeting? He shudders at the thought of anyone else making these marks, though, even if they were whole other lifetimes ago.
Shane as a prince, a pirate. Shane as an astronaut, an acrobat. Did you love someone with a thrill before, more than me, more than this—
97. a spot of clean skin under said beauty mark
So Ilya sucks a new kiss this new spot instead, claiming territory in this life right now. He’ll let everyone know what’s his, lifetimes and lifetimes ahead.
96. the danger zone under a raised sweatshirt
One day, Shane is sorting out their new joint trophy room, considering the empty shelves of built-in bookcases. There’s no music on, but the fervent energy of organization crackles anyway, like this kind of quiet—the shuffling, the dusting, the padding of feet—could be a percussion in itself.
Ilya watches Shane from the doorway, marvels at him in their shared home, this shared life. When Shane reaches up for the next shelf, placing one of their many plaques on the top, the cotton of his sweatshirt rides up, revealing a tiny swath of a waist.
Stupefied, Ilya’s eyes widen like he’s a fucking Victorian. It’s such a meager display, he decides, but enough for him to chew the inside of his mouth, because Shane had said no sex unless they unpacked one room a day. He groans, and soon Shane is looking back at him too, gnawing on his bottom lip like he might be regretting this rule the most.
“Ilya,” Shane says, the downward inflection of it like a command. A challenge, to either back down or break him. Do me, or don’t. And he could, Ilya thinks. He knows he could kiss Shane silly and take him right there on the floor amongst the moving boxes, to re-christen another trophy room even before they had a chance to move in the leather chair.
But he doesn’t. Ilya picks up a trophy, letting his arm brush Shane on the way to the highest shelf.
They share a long look, everything thrumming all around them, and Ilya considers this a new form of foreplay.
95. those hands all over (ft. skincare)
Shane squeezes a big dollop of sunscreen on his fingers, painting careful white streaks all over Ilya’s face like it’s war paint with no cause. Ilya is leans against their en suite bathroom counter anyway, eyes closed, because his husband is good at this sort of stuff, and who is Ilya, to deny this attention? He sneaks a huffing smile, listening to the rattle of the downpour outside, and the fact there won’t be any sun for days.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Shane deadpans.
“Like what?” Ilya asks, eyes still closed.
“Like this is stupid. You still have to think of the UV rays.”
“We’re going straight from the car to the rink.”
“So? I’m not losing you to skin cancer.”
The heel of Shane’s palm meets a corner of his mouth, dragging up Ilya’s jaw, firm because he knows what pressure to apply. Because sometimes marriage is not having to tread so lightly. It means making an honest impression.
He’s soothed by this, more than being inside during a rain storm. The motions make Ilya lean in, turning his cheek into the open palm of a cradling hand.
94. a face buried in flowers
Ilya buys him a supermarket bouquet, just because.
Shane dips his head into the tulip bulbs, a smile only apparent by the rising of cheekbones. He says thank you, all shy, maybe to Ilya or this very gentle Sunday. To all these unhurried hours, even, because they have been so generous with love. Anya nips at Shane’s feet in the meanwhile, probably wondering what’s gotten Shane so besotted.
Ilya watches this all unfold from the sink. A vase overfills with tap water, spilling over the edge, but it takes both of them too long to notice.
93. the way he says husband, this strange and miraculous word
It happens two weeks before their season opener, in the kitchen of their Ottawa house. Ilya had dropped a wine glass in the midst of some evening pour, and stepped on one of the pieces in the middle of cleanup. The gash wasn’t anything too bad, Ilya insisted, but there was no denying the amount of blood; how it didn’t seem to stop. It was a certifiable deep cut, Shane decided, which earned them a trip to the emergency room.
“But your sleep schedule,” Ilya had even protested on the way there, because now was about time that Shane really kicked it into high-gear now, preparing for the upcoming season.
“Well, we’re married now,” Shane answered, drumming the steering wheel. “Who else would you go with? And I don’t think you should be pressing down on the gas pedal with your foot anyway.”
“I could’ve ubered.”
“Why uber when you have me?”
It was stupid, but Ilya felt his face twist in some attempt not to cry. He sat back, clearing his throat, and stared out the window as his tears pricked at the corners anyway.
At the hospital, a night shift doctor takes a look at Ilya and Shane, not having a single clue who they are. Or maybe she knows and doesn’t care. Ilya is always surprised by this, given all the fanfare around their coming out, but Shane’s shoulders slope with a bit of ease, like this is some chance to exist without context.
“And how are you two related?” the doctor asks, before languidly eyeing her chart.
Amused, Ilya watches Shane sound out the word, not out of some nervous stuttering, but habit. The small muffle of lips starts with the formation of a B, for boyfriend, before he resets with the word, “husband,” small at first, before blooming. “I’m his husband.”
Ilya is too enraptured at the word to feel the antiseptic pressed to his foot, the wrapping of gauze. When the doctor tells them both how to treat this minor wound, Ilya drifts off, wondering if he has become impervious to death.
92. a linked pinky (ft. a minor heart attack)
But then Ilya is scared nearly to death—possibly to the precipice—two days out from their first game together. He rushes out from the tunnel when he spots Shane lying on the ice one morning, arms sprawled out and seemingly motionless. What fucking luck, like some god hates him and will smite him for happiness. Shane had said he just wanted to get some skating in before everyone else, while Ilya lagged behind him in the locker room, and then what? Had a Zamboni flattened him? Had he tripped and decided to stay down this time?
“Fuck, Hollander! You can’t scare me like that!”
Because Shane is smiling, beaming up at empty space in the rafters where they’ll hang a championship flag in no time. With no one watching, he’s spread out like a snow angel on center ice, because sometimes he isn’t a star or a man—just a boy who found a home in hockey.
“We’ve never played together before, so you don’t know this,” Shane says. “Honestly, no one really does. But sometimes before my first game of the season, I’ll come earlier than anyone else and just lay here for a second. Take it all in.”
“And now you’re letting me in this secret, too?”
“Hm, well, you drove us here,” Shane grins, mischievous like it’s a treat for himself as much as it is for Ilya. “I don’t think I had a choice in the matter.”
Rolling his eyes, Ilya plops down next to him, too. They let their hands find each other, lacing some unspoken promise together by their pinkies.
91. his first game of the season
Shane Hollander is a menace. Ilya is reminded of this when Shane terrorizes Toronto from the second line, acting like some silent reaper against surefire plays drawn up to destroy a golden boy. When he skates, the world moves apart for him. When he scores, he ends everyone else’s. Out of the gate, and giving the first line a run for its money, he puts the Centaurs up 1-0, off an assist from Luca Haas.
Ilya watches from the bench, relieved in some way. He imagined it’d been an adjustment for Shane, going from first line to second, changing out of that blue jersey into the black-and-red. Even the roar of this Ottawa crowd must sound like a different language to him, this re-adjustment to the noise and the music and this particular crowd remembering they’re allowed to expect wins and wins and more fucking wins. But this is Shane Hollander, and this is a game he loves. This is Shane Hollander, who will always find a way back onto the ice.
In the second period, a defenseman checks Shane hard into the boards with the clean swing of a much bigger body. Shane goes down, if only for a moment, but soon he is up again, rushing up the rink like he has never known damage.
Ilya watches, at first concerned, then enthralled. Watches Shane, whose center of gravity has held despite everything.
They win the game 3-1, off two of Shane’s goals. When the buzzer sounds, so clear and blaring, he looks for Ilya first.
90. the right ankle
But back on the subject of ankles. Ilya prefers the right one just a little bit more, because it’s a pinker in the skin, even without having to bite it. He notices this when he folds Shane in half in bed after their first win together, gathering his legs and trapping them around wrapped arms.
Ravenous and love-drunk and proud of every part of him, Ilya hardly sees it as fucking and more like some revelatory act; a miracle; perhaps some judgement day where some cosmic entity has declared, if you die right now in this moment, you will have needed nothing more, because—god, you doomed man, you are such a dog, such a fucking good dog, we might as well conscript you to guard the gates of hell, or some nonsense like that. But Ilya suspects he’s really gone and fucked Shane brainless this time, that they’ll no longer have the minds for anything else but this kind of worship.
With his last good neuron, Ilya turns his attention to Shane’s ankle hooked over his shoulder, sucking a kiss mindlessly against the knot of it. He laughs, breathless and grateful. He really could die happy, like this, right here.
89. that one early 2000’s easy listening playlist
Though Shane doesn’t know the names of any of the songs, or the lyrics. He just likes it because the sounds are mellow enough to clean the house to, to get lost in without the texture of hectic productions. And they don’t really have sex much to music in the first place, and it’s usually Ilya’s choice when they do, but sometimes it happens spontaneously, like with White Flag by Dido, or Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, or Hey, Soul Sister by Train. What might be music to put on while scrubbing the kitchen, or tidying up the living room, becomes some of the dirtiest songs known to man, because sometimes love like this is spontaneous, and if Ilya can help it, a little bit funny.
Such is the case one lazy off-day, when Ilya is sitting at the floor in front of the couch, on his knees giving Shane a blowjob. Shane still has a feather duster in his hand, and A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton is playing from the stereo. He has a whole mantle to dust off, Shane insists—a whole fucking mantle!—but Ilya just cages his hips with strong arms and bears down, relentless in serving up pleasure.
When Ilya takes him all the way to the root , Shane drops said feather duster behind the couch, cursing faintly as he throws his head back over the cushions. The violins in the instrumental swell into something dramatic, something homebound, and Ilya has to keep from laughing with Shane still in his mouth.
88. that one faded freckle to the side of the left nostril
Ilya can’t even begin with the freckles. He’d need a whole other list, he thinks, an encyclopedia, a library akin to some lost world wonder, so he settles on the one for now.
They’re naked and languid on the couch later that afternoon, music humming on low. Ilya traces the freckle while Shane is napping against his chest, watching as he wrinkles his nose in some dreamless, sated sleep.
87. tentative words spoken on laundry day
“I want us to have a secret signal,” Shane says one day, when he’s on the floor packing for their first road trip as teammates. He is so apparently resolute on the matter that he hasn’t even noticed that Ilya’s fucked up on matching their socks (something that Shane usually takes with great seriousness).
“Secret signal?” Ilya asks, sitting down on the side of the bed, doing his best not to topple over a tower of folded pants. “What, like Batman?”
“No, none of those lights in the sky. Something smaller.”
“For what?”
“For—you know.” Shane takes a deep breath before accelerating into his explanation: “for when we’re on the road, and the whole team is out at the bar, but we’ve just won a game, and my adrenaline is still high, and…” he slows for the last part, “all I want to do is be alone with you.”
It takes a moment for Ilya to register the wallop of this sweetness. He feels his heart maroon on some very tender island, like he could settle in it, like it couldn’t be so bad for them to live alone in this love again.
“Who cares?” he asks instead, at first all easy, that shrug of his shoulders like some accomplice. “Tap me on the shoulder and say, Ilya, number one hockey player in the world. I want us to go back to the hotel room and fuck our brains out.”
“Fuck off,” Shane says, though without much conviction, soft like a huff of breath. “I’m serious.”
“What? So am I,” Ilya says, grin waning a little, when he realizes he means it. “We are married. I think the team knows we do married things.”
Shane says nothing, and Ilya lets the quiet hang for a moment, weighing its seriousness. In the end, he decides it feels like a worn sweatshirt in late spring: a little warm and strange under the collar, but nothing like a full blaze of heat.
He looks to Shane, and then back to his awful sock-job, before deciding to re-match each pair properly.
“I’m not ashamed of us,” Shane says after a bit. “You know I’m not.”
Ilya finds a red sock to go with red sock. Striped with striped. “I know.”
“And obviously, people know we’re together, but,” Shane swallows, picks up one of Ilya’s shirts, which have become one of their shirts. “But we’re more a concept to them, you know? I don’t need them to picture us taking each other’s clothes off. Because it feels like…” he pauses, folding said shirt against himself, like he’s embracing it. “Something I want to keep close to the chest.”
Ilya takes a moment to parse out this idiom, before settling on that first word, close. He crosses the room like this, seeking this proximity, and settles right next to Shane on the floor before laying a kiss on his shoulder.
“You done with sock duty?” Shane asks with a little bit of a smile. His eyes search Ilya, dark and lidded, but don’t strain in his finding him anymore.
They could just leave the issue like this, hanging in the air until the air morphed into the pressurized system of a storm. But Ilya breathes out, considers where they’ve come from, and meets him somewhere where the conditions aren’t so stifling.
“Socks can wait,” Ilya says. “Tell me, what signal were you thinking of?”
86. reddened ear lobes (ft. wyatt hayes)
For their first attempt at a secret signal, Shane suggests the tugging of the earlobes. Left, for I want to blow you in the shower ASAP, and right for it’s imperative that you drill me senseless into the mattress. Ilya rolls his eyes at this, but ultimately doesn’t disagree; he bobs his head with something nearly imperceptible, side-to-side, and relishes in the ear that Shane will pull at later.
Later, in a bar in Buffalo, Shane tugs at the right earlobe shyly as he’s drinking his ginger ale, supposedly in the depths of some conversation with Wyatt Hayes.
Leaning over the bar counter from across the room, Ilya looks fondly at him, thinks about said earlobe. Killing the last of his old fashioned, he decides that he’ll suck on that earlobe later in bed, letting the tip of his tongue trace its perfect curve. He looks away, tugging his left ear in response, because he’s never been one to pass up on a shower blow job.
After settling up the tab, Ilya saunters over to Shane, saying nothing. In turn, Wyatt flicks at his own ear, and says, “you know, I think you need a more subtle signal than that.”
Ilya bursts out laughing, while Shane’s mouth hangs open, absolutely aghast. Even under the low light of the bar, Ilya can see how red his ears have gotten, which will make them all the more tantalizing to gnaw at later. Wyatt pats them both on the back like they’ve just lost a good and close game; you’ll get ‘em next time. He disappears into the crowd a moment after, perking up when someone starts talking about some new Marvel trailer they saw the other day.
Shane settles into himself, finally, when he realizes that the rest of the team hasn’t really noticed them at all. They’re all drinking, and laughing, lost in their own circumstances.
“Married people and married things,” Ilya whispers, close to an earlobe.
At this, Ilya feels a hand nestle into his, and the slow turn of dark eyes in the periphery. Shane practically drags Ilya out the bar himself, secret signals be damned.
85. reddened earlobes (the remix)
They fuck not even twenty minutes later, spooned together in a hotel bed, with Ilya’s boxers gathered halfway down his thighs, and Shane’s shirt lifted above his chest. It’s not frantic, Ilya would say, but definitely spirited, because hotel rooms like this will always have an effect on them.
Ilya even raises a leg over Shane’s hip, fucks into him harder. He hears Shane crumble under him, voice already ragged with pleasure, and pries his jaw open, open, to hear a song he no longer needs to hide.
“So good for me,” he moans back into Shane’s ear. “So good,” he can’t help, when he feels just as loud with it; just as pulled apart and gaping on the verge of death.
84. reddened earlobes (ft. the morning after)
Bood comes out of his hotel room the next morning, just as Ilya and Shane have tidied up and rolled their suitcases into the hallway.
“I would tell you guys to get a room,” he says, half in teasing, maybe half in admonishment. “But you were already in one.”
“Birds and the beetles,” Ilya tells him. “Birds and the beetles.”
“It’s bees,” Shane mutters the correction. He stands there for a moment, looking pleadingly at Bood, and then Ilya, with his big brown eyes like he’s saying absolve me, anyone absolve me.
Ilya takes this as a signal that he needs to place a hand on the small of Shane’s back, or tug on his shirt sleeve, to calm him. But Bood just pats the both of them on the shoulder, suddenly a little smug looking, like his face is charging up for a good old fashioned wink. Leaning in, he even says, “newlyweds. I get it, I do. But maybe keep it down next time.”
“Or,” Shane suddenly says, “I’ll front you a new pair of ear plugs myself.”
“Noise canceling headphones.”
“Sure.”
“And a nice pair, yeah? Like I’m talking Bose.”
Shane holds his hand out to shake for the agreement, and Bood yanks him in for a bit of a hug instead. He does the same with Ilya, before setting off down the hallway, with nothing more to be said except some grumbling about the hotel’s awful continental breakfast.
“Hollander,” Ilya can’t help but call with a little bit of adoration. He pinches Shane’s very-red ear, laughing softly. “Very brave.”
“Was it?”
“I don’t know. Thought you might apologize.”
“It was my first impulse, actually.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
Shane smiles, letting his hand crawl back into Ilya’s.
“What is there to say sorry about?”
83. a hand gripping a 0.3mm pen
Shane is particular about pens. What people don’t know about him is that he has a minor fascination with stationery, as evidenced by his neatly arranged desk in their shared home office, complete with the ergonomic mousepad; a stack of River Tomoe bleed-proof notebooks; and an abundance of 0.3mm Pilot Juice Up Gel Pens. Shane is happily unloading his newest shipment of them one afternoon, mumbling something about how exciting it is to add blue ones—blue!—into the rotation. He sets out on writing something on a piece of fancy cardstock, which Ilya just watches from behind his shoulder.
Ilya doesn’t quite understand it. His pen collection ranges from the too-expensive ones (Montblanc, usually, bought impulsively when he was younger, to feel very cool and adult while signing some very serious contracts), to free (his favorite is the one he stole from the dentist’s office, with a cartoon tooth wearing a g-string made of floss). But he’s happy to watch Shane write regardless, because he loves the look of his hands, scribbling furiously with agile strokes; it reminds Ilya of how Shane plays hockey—smooth, like gliding, as if all that ice was nothing but the blank frontier of paper, all for him to mark up.
But then there’s also the fact that it’s Shane Hollander writing. The endless paperwork, thank you cards, entries in analog planners. Handwriting on the small side. All this beautiful marginalia he never thought he’d get to see, up close. Things he’d filed away in his imagination, like Shane Hollander washing the dishes, and Shane Hollander re-grouting the bathroom. This all makes Ilya crouch at the foot of Shane’s desk, suddenly devout and overwhelmed, as if all his life’s purpose has amounted to kissing the rosy bumps of his knuckles. He manages to suck one of them, even, insatiable, which makes Shane mess up the word he’s in the middle of writing.
“Hey, cut it out,” Shane says, pinching Ilya’s cheek. “I’m going to get ink on your face. Or worse, poke your eye out.”
Ilya doesn’t listen anyway. He just tries to make out the blank card that Shane is writing, alongside the wrapped present on the other side of the desk. “What’s all this for?” he asks, while Shane signs the note off with, Shane + Ilya.
“The headphones I owe Bood,” he says, and Ilya just sputters out a cackle.
(In the end, Shane ends up writing five more of these notes to various teammates during the course of the season, all with his signature 0.3mm pen in various colors.)
82. those annoying, maddening, life-altering blue shorts in the middle of a very taunting pigeon pose
And sue him, maybe Things I Love About Shane Hollander is all worthy of an actual list now.
Ilya’s taken to writing his entries in a small journal, mostly in Russian, because he hears writing and the like is good to stave off cognitive decline. Shane encourages it, but he has no idea that Ilya’s writing the world’s crudest odes, because what better is there to write about, other than his beloved husband? He can’t help how love he is, and if it turns him into the next Dostoevsky, then so be it.
Today, he is in a bit of a rush. They had been in the middle of a workout, when Shane, feeling tight in the hips, had broken out his yoga mat and broken out into an impromptu pigeon pose. What a stupid name for a move, Ilya had always thought, but it was also helpful, because he could at least chant IMAGINE A PIGEON IMAGINE A PIGEON IMAGINE A PIGEON like a mantra to himself, just so he wouldn’t get too hard during bicep curls. Because—fuck, what a move. It was one thing for Shane to have to wear those tiny blue shorts of his, the ones that cut off mid-thigh; but there he was now, sitting with one leg curled in front of him, the cloth of those shorts riding up and up and up as he leaned over to stretch. Shane had sighed, like it was a taunt, innocently saying something feeling so much looser now.
Which is why Ilya had promptly announced that he needed to take a leak. Shane didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
He turns to a fresh page, his Cyrillic shaky and on the verge of incoherency.
Shane Hollander is going to kill me one day, I think. But these are many such cases.
81. those quiet footfalls
And maybe Shane really is a trained assassin, a sleeper agent. Lost in the middle of his writing, Ilya doesn’t even hear Shane come up behind him, still sweaty from his workout. He wraps his arms around Ilya’s waist, digging his face between the blades of Ilya’s back, so committed to this loving kill.
“What are you writing?” Shane asks in a huff, in some exhausted way that doesn’t feel at all prying, just gently cloying and barely conscious, which Ilya finds too close to how Shane sounds when he’s fucked out. His body against Ilya is humid but so very warm, and Ilya is tempted to lick him right up, just like this.
“A list,” Ilya says.
“Of?”
Ilya could lie, or retort that it was none of Shane’s beetle-wax, or however the saying went. He could make it all a big joke about places where they haven’t had sex yet, or positions they haven’t tried. Sometimes it’s his most natural inclination, to fill the room with laughing gas; but he’s getting better at letting the air hang heavy, if only because this is sometimes the weight of tenderness.
He turns around like this, to face his killer head on. Ilya cards away a damp tuft of hair away from Shane’s forehead, and lets himself be honest.
“A list for you to read, when you are finally fluent in Russian. We will be very old and very grey by then, and maybe a little forgetful about how we were when we were young.”
“I don’t think I could ever forget any of that,” Shane says, letting an index finger trace at the margins.
“Well, just in case,” Ilya says, with a bit of sheepishness. “You never know, with…” he trails off, remembering his own father’s struggles with dementia.
Shane palms Ilya’s chin and makes them meet each other in the gaze. “Hey,” he tells him, his smile gentle like he’s decided not to kill Ilya after all. “No need to think about that right now. We’re here, aren’t we?”
And yes, Ilya thinks: they are. They really are. They linger like this, and Ilya lets himself kiss Shane all over, right on the mouth, tangy with sweat-salt.
“Pants,” Shane says out of nowhere.
“What?”
Shane looks down at Ilya’s entry, mouthing the Russian he’s dutifully studied. “What is this about annoying blue pants?”
At this, Ilya decides this is enough honesty for the day. He lifts a laughing Shane by the waist and carries him, heavy-footed and thrashing into the bathroom, where they’ll go make a mess of each other in the shower.
80. a fake tooth that’s just a little too white
Shane stares at it in the bathroom mirror, this uncanny bottom incisor so foreign in his mouth. After a collision with winger from Chicago, he’d needed emergency dental work, which was all well and good and protocol until—well, he takes a closer look at the color. It drives Shane crazy that the tooth is just an iota of a shade off from the rest of his teeth, though Ilya doesn’t notice the difference.
But what he does love, secretly, is this view of Shane, eyebrows furrowed, teeth beared like a tiger cub in the mirror. He would call him a kitten, his usual moy kotik, but he has the sense that Shane will strangle him with dental floss, if he tries it.
Ilya decides, then, that they will go pay a visit to the dentist tomorrow. Fix what they need to fix. But for now, he’s content to perch at his usual place behind him, hook his chin on Shane’s shoulder, and linger.
“Have you brushed your teeth yet?” Ilya asks, because it is the morning, and Shane won’t kiss him unless they’re both minty fresh.
“Of course,” and Shane cannot help but look offended. An angry kitten for the ages.
Ilya cups a hand to Shane’s face, but doesn’t ask him to smile. He turns his mouth towards his own, laying the kind of kiss that makes Shane slacken, relaxed, against him.
79. the tiny mole nested, all holy, in the middle of his shoulder blades
Picture this. Shane on hockey pants with his arms hoisted over him, hockey stick in his hands. He has his bare back to the camera, scapulae crunched together in the pose. He looks beautiful, of course he does, and the internet agrees in the usual way; “your metrics are where they should be,” Farah even tells him over the phone, “except.”
“Except?” Shane asks, always curious, worried, while Ilya is scarfing down an omelette next to him, only half-listening.
“Well, it appears you’re going kind of viral.”
“Oh god.” Shane shoots a look over at Ilya. “For what this time?”
“Nothing terrible.” Farah pauses for a moment. “Well, are you aware you have a small mole between your shoulder blades?”
“No,” Shane says, at the same time Ilya says, of course.
“It appears someone has started a fan account devoted to it, on Twitter. Shane Hollander’s Back Mole. They claim it is a portal to another dimension.”
“What the fuck?”
“I quote, this is how holy it is to me. It has healing properties. It could take me anywhere. Unquote. The tweet currently has fifty-seven thousand likes.”
Shane thanks Farah for the update before hanging up, and Ilya has some egg fall out of his mouth, he’s laughing so hard.
78. a cowlick (whatever the fuck that is)
Troy Barrett is the one to point it out. It happens one day in the visitors’ dressing room, just before the game, when Ilya finds him staring intensely at the back of Shane’s head. He sighs, because he thinks he knows what this all is. Patting Troy on the shoulder, he says, “you know, I’m also obsessed with how round it is.”
“What?”
Ilya looks lovingly at Shane, who’s ducked down to adjust his shin guards. He had his hair done recently by a new stylist (brave!) who really seemed to know how to accentuate the shape of his dome, as if he were a master groundskeeper trimming a very precious shrub. Ilya had been obsessed with it lately, more so than usual, which left him possibly more distracted than he liked to admit.
“No man,” Troy says. “Look at that hair sticking up. I never really noticed it before, because we were always wearing helmets, but look at that cowlick on him.”
“A what-lick?”
Troy tries to explain. “It’s like this tiny bald spot,” to which Ilya looks aghast. “And no, it doesn’t mean he’s going bald, cap, relax. It just makes your hair grow at a weird angle, wherever it’s growing near that spot. You don’t see how his hair sticks out in some places?”
“That tiny little swirl, like the eye of a trichological hurricane,” Wyatt chimes in, because apparently he’s been eavesdropping.
“You just made that word up!” Troy insists.
“Right, yes, sure,” Ilya tries to play off regardless, because he is Shane’s husband and he should notice these things. “I know his cowlick,” he repeats, but it also sounds like something dirty, and this, combined with the view of such a precious head, makes him stiffer in his cup than he’d like to admit. He tamps the heat down with a cool drink of water, a deep inhale, and passes an unaware Shane on the way out of the locker room with a quick kiss to the temple.
77. that pretty little head (full of worry)
Their most recent loss marks their third, which Ilya takes with a flurry of different emotions: mild embarrassment, because it’s Buffalo, and Seattle, and St. Louis, and they should be better than all those teams combined; mild irritation, because he knows they’ve missed some good looks, and let their defenses down on power-plays; and worry, because it makes him wonder if he could’ve been a better captain, equipped with awe-inspiring speeches and better drills and some keen, psychic awareness of the things they needed to fix.
And when he palms the back of Shane’s head into the couch cushions, the both of them looking to fuck their way to relief, Ilya wonders if running a hand through his hair will shake out some much-needed answers. Tell me, he means to ask without the words. Tell me I’m doing okay. Tell me I’m doing right by this team. Tell me we’re still going to win and win and win and that this familiar, empty, out-of-body feeling will pass again, like it always does.
Shane reaches back, grasping onto one of Ilya’s wrists, and peers at him from over a shoulder. Ilya can tell Shane is smiling, not by the mouth, but because there is a shine and a crinkle in his eyes that feels anything but mild. “Baby,” he even gasps out, “come back to me,” because Shane knows. Always. Shane knows when Ilya is slipping into a dark and unlit room, and how to call him back into the hallway.
And they both know: that sometimes Ilya will enter this room regardless. For now, though, Ilya breathes in the back of Shane’s head, ever-thankful for it, and kisses it while swallowing down something thick in his throat.
76. the blanket of him
And the losses don’t last. Of course they don’t. But after a particularly tough session with Galina a week later, Ilya lays down on his side of the bed, outside clothes still on, and digs his face into the pillow. There are no tears today, but he feels evacuated, everything devoid except where the plane of his body meets the plane of the bed. He tells himself he will only need a moment, just a moment before he’ll go and make dinner with Shane, and then watch a movie with Shane, and then please Shane with said body even though he can’t even be sure he has a corporal form at the moment. He considers this paradox: the weightlessness and the weight, the helium of so many rapid thoughts and yet the heaviness in which they crash and burn. He tells himself he will only allow himself another minute or so, thinking of his father, and his brother; of his mother, buried in Moscow; of he feels almost amnesiac with fatigue, that is until, until—
Ilya feels the sinking of the mattress next to him, where Shane sleeps. He spots a familiar knee pressing down upon the plush, like Shane will lay down next to him, until he catches the shadow blocking out the light above and the familiar dead weight of a body on top of his. He closes his eyes, the breath squeezed out of him. A much-needed suffocation. Shane wraps his arms around Ilya’s waist and nuzzles his face to the back of his neck, the line of his smile tiny and the gentlest touch.
At this, Ilya comes back to the edge of awareness. His car keys are still in his front pocket, digging into his hip. The window is open, and it’s raining outside, smelling like the dirt of rotting leaves. Ilya even remembers Shane’s explanation about percale sheets, and the difference in the weave, and how they’re cooler on the skin and better for sleep. We’ll have to change them out for the flannel ones the fall, he’d said. You have to consider the seasons.
They lay here like this anyway, and then a moment more, as Ilya lets the percale go a little damp with tears.